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Levenson had been introduced to swinging in 1976 by a housewife he'd met in a Brooklyn cocktail lounge. He was an unlikely candidate to push a free-love agenda. (Al Goldstein of Screw characterized him as "shallow intellectually," and when Al Goldstein tells you you're shallow intellectually, you know you're really swimming in the shallow end of the Jacuzzi.) But he was affable, and a terrific promoter. Celebrities such as Richard Dreyfuss popped in (though most kept their clothes on), Joe Thomas had a hit disco song named after the club, and the $2 Plato's-logo bags (so convenient for transporting your Quaaludes!) showed up in Vogue.
But if Plato's was ready for the world, the world was not quite ready for Plato's. In 1978, Time magazine painted a grim image of the goings-on at the Ansonia.
Plato's popularity represented two major social shifts. |
" . . . there are losers even at orgies," the reporter wrote. "An enormously fat woman has been sitting around in her underwear for hours, wanly looking for a man . . . Oddly enough, there is less sexual energy in the air than at a Rotary Club party. All the trappings of the normal sexual dance — talk, gestures and clothing — are stripped away as unessential, and emotions are under tight control. As a result, the proceedings are amicable, but flat . . . many patrons seem bored. A pleasant young woman with a distressing overbite is standing at the bar, staring aimlessly into middle distance. 'I don't know why I'm here,' she says. 'I'm only nude because there's nothing to do here with your clothes on.' "
In their defense, the Time editors were trying to publish a story suitable for Middle American coffee tables. What they didn't understand was that Middle America was Plato's core audience. To be sure, the club attracted its share of the unattached and professionally hip, such as Candy, who wore a nurse's uniform; a woman named Sparkles, who partied in nothing but glitter; and Ugly George, who presaged the internet by carrying an early camcorder around Manhattan and convincing women to undress for his public-access TV show. However, most of the clientele was the married bridge-and-tunnel crowd.
Plato's popularity in the tri-state area represented two major social shifts. The first was a changing attitude toward commitment: Baby Boomers, accustomed to questioning everything, had become dissatisfied with traditional ideas of matrimony. "Even though we are married, we are growing as people, and marriage should have to do with spiritual growth, not sexual exclusivity," John Lobell, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher at New York City's Pratt Institute, said of his open marriage in a May 10, 1971, New York Times story titled "Group Sex: Is It 'Life Art' or a Sign That Something Is Wrong?" (Somewhat incongruously, it appeared on the first page of the "Food Fashions Family Furnishings" section.) The other shift: in the wake of the Sexual Revolution, social ranking was turned on its head. Youth was equated with status, while married respectability was decidedly uncool. Many older adults who had married young began to wonder if they were missing out on something.
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