Amherst Reads Transcript

Chris Connolly: Welcome to Amherst Reads, I am Chris Connolly class of 1978 from Amherst College, and on the phone with me right now is a gentleman I went to school with for a number of years, David Friend. He was… what were you, David? Class of ’77, is that right?

David Friend: Yep. I was class of ’77, I was the boss of you.

CC: There ya go. As always, David was the boss of me. David’s had an exceptional career in journalism, he’s written books, he’s written for Life magazine, he works for Vanity Fair now and he is the author of The Naughty Nineties: the Triumph of the American Libido. David, congratulations on your book.

DF: Ah, that’s great of you. Thank you for doing this and thank you for saying that.

CC: My first question is, I was very surprised given the previous work such as “Presumed Innocent” and the other books that you’ve done… oh wait a minute, you’re not Scott Turow, are you?

DF: No, but my aunt was best friends with his mother, in fact.

CC: And he is quoted in your book if I’m not mistaken.

DF: Yeah, I edit him occasionally for Vanity Fair, he does pieces for us.

CC: What kind of work do you do for Vanity Fair on the whole?

DF: I’m the editor in chief—the title on the masthead is sort of different, but I’m the editor of the extra shit. So what I do is if they wanna do things outside the magazine, they come to me and then I do… I started us in doing books, in doing exhibitions, in doing television, I started the website…. And then I hand it off to younger, smarter, more energetic people than myself and go on to the next thing. So that’s what I do. Also do investigations and stuff about photography and news and different pieces, edited pieces. Last issue on Peter Thiel, who’s in fact just married… but he’s got his fingers in quite a bit in Silicon Valley, and he’s a big Trump backer so we did a big piece on that. We’re not big fans of Trump as you might have gathered from our coverage in Vanity Fair.

CC: Or from Graydon Carter’s work in the past.

DF: True true.

CC: When he was editor of Spy…

DF: That’s right! That’s right.

CC: Part of the fun of reading your book, the Naughty Nineties, is seeing how the interests you just outlined come into play as you attempt to put that decade under the microscope. Your investigative skills, your knowledge of photography, your sense of the cultural zeitgeist as it moved through that decade… they all seem to come into play as you move through 90’s myth. What was the genesis in writing this book for you?

DF: Thanks. Well, the genesis… I really do look at it as looking at the 1990’s through the prism of how Vanity Fair would look at it, because a lot of it is… the cultural moment. The genesis was… I had the idea that… in fact, I went out for dinner in 2004 with a friend of yours and mine, Mike Bendelson, who’s a cardiologist. And Mike was telling me the backstory of Viagra, which was really a heart drug when it began. And he said: “You know what really happened, David, the patients in the trials, it wasn’t helping their hearts. But the drug had this little side effect, and in fact, they decided to change… they got a lot of the patients were hoarding the pills after the taking this thing they thought… the medicine that became Viagra.” So at that point, I’m like that’s a really interesting… And Pfizer, the company that’s doing it, changed it at that point from a heart drug to a sexual health drug. And sure enough, I thought, y’know, this’d be interesting to do the backstories of Viagra, the backstories of… other people in the 90’s that were sort of pioneers but we didn’t know about them, because I was sort of seeing this sexual overlay on the culture in the 90’s, carrying through to the 2000’s and certainly we see it today. And I thought, y’know, that might… let me focus on that decade. Because I certainly felt… something had changed with the Boomers coming to power in Madison Avenue and Hollywood and then of course the White House.

CC: One of the joys of reading your book is seeing the set pieces that you stippled throughout it of what we might refer to as sex evangelists of some kind. Your take on how Viagra got into the marketplace is one, your discussion of the family that brought this Brazilian wax technique to America is fascinating as well… How did you find some of these people, and what was it about their particular stories that interested you and made them worthy of inclusion in your book?

DF: You know, it’s crazy, it just seemed logical to try and go after people who had not gotten much coverage but really had changed our lives. How the scientists involved with Viagra, they hadn’t talked in about ten, fifteen years, they’d worked for Pfizer--

CC: [inaudible] that movie that Ed Zwick directed with Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway that had like a whole side… a whole side car on the creation of Ziagra at some point, but your--

DF: Yes, they did--

CC: But I think, I think your history is definitive at this point.

DF: Yeah, well, thank you. It’s one of those things that… there’ve been dribs and drabs, but I was able to get a lot of these guys who had not come out, head of marketing who talked for the first time… hadn’t talked in 10 years, he told me, and a few people like that but… there will be a couple movies, I think, on the sisters who created the Brazilian bikini wax. But I thought, God, this is really… took over in the 90s, there was a sort of gentrification, “let’s clean up everything”, we’re cleaning up even the nether regions of many American women. And I wanna know where that came from. And same thing with Heidi… in other words, they were people who people knew, but had sort of forgotten. So I interviewed, I went to Death Valley and went out right to the edges in Nevada and interviewed Heidi Fleiss in her little hacienda, showed up and she had twenty macaws living all over this house in the middle of the desert--

CC: Birds. Macaw birds.

DF: Macaws, birds, yeah. You know, like toucans, you know. And there’s bird shit everywhere. And it was just… you know, sort of crazy. And she was just talking about her time as the madam of Hollywood in the 90s and her time in prison, and I spent a lot of time with Anita Hill who was talking… who really became – especially with what we’re hearing with Harvey Weinstein and his sexual predator behavior – she was really one of the first people to sort of go out and say, in the workplace I was sexually harassed by a very powerful man and here’s my story. And she really sort of… this was really early, 1991, there weren’t many guidelines for such… there were workplace strictures but everything hadn’t been established that much, so she spoke and Clarence Thomas became… was named anyways in the Supreme Court by fifty-two forty-eight vote, but she was quite brave about coming out and talking about this in the past and in fact, one of the people she confided in was Joe Paul who I think was my class, class of ’77 of Amherst.

CC: And I remember when Joe Paul… I remember going to school with him, of course, and I remember the role he played in those hearings as well.

DF: Yeah, I mean, he’s just delivered a great book that’s coming out in February on John Marshall, maybe he’ll be on Amherst Reads. But at the time, she had confided in him about these sort of obnoxious sexual comments and offensive comments to her in the late 80’s, or mid 80’s, and now it was early ’91 and he was about to be confirmed and then the senate investigators asked her to speak. So throughout the book, I’m talking to different people, whether it be Paula Jones, or Lorena Bobbitt, or Monica Lewinsky who in fact has become a friend and I edit her at Vanity Fair, she has a column now that she writes for the magazine, she’s an anti-bullying advocate and quite… has a great TED talk… So the book really is a look at… this sort of parade of scandal and sea change in the culture.

CC: I wanted to ask you about a number of themes that kind of emerge from the book and I wanted to start by asking you: what for you is the single event that begins the 90s?

DF: The funny thing is… if you look back at the last week of the 80s, Donald Trump is on a slope… ski slope in Aspen, with his girlfriend at the time, Marla Maples, and they run smack into his wife Ivana Trump. And it’s this big scene, and commotion, and about a month later kind of leaks out into the press, I think Liz Smith broke it, and became the cover of the New York Post, front page of the New York Post, “best sex I ever had!” it was some comment by Marla, supposedly, about Donald Trump--

CC: [Laughs]

DF: But who knows who made that comment or who called the New York Post… but it was a big scandal, and it basically was the first domino in 90’s scandals, but they got divorced and Trump really went into a decline. And… that sort of set a tone there, you just sort of had this sleazy guy, or this guy who… not sleazy guy, but a guy who then became known for cheating in different ways in his life. And I think the fact that he’s president now tells you something about the sort of lying culture that kind of grew up. And clearly this is part of what reality TV is about, reality TV began in 1992, really contemporary reality TV with MTV’s Real World--

CC: You mentioning—you just hit the word that fascinated me about what you were writing about, and that was the word “lying”. Lying. One of the thing that’s so fascinating about what you do in this book is how you interweave for the 90’s, the history of sex and a kind of history of lying. In a way that we haven’t really seen done before, and--

DF: Well, I’m glad you felt that.

CC: You do that in two kind of interesting ways. First off, you do a fantastic set piece on the Clintons 60 Minutes interview, early in 1992 I guess after the Superbowl. What do you find significant about that moment, in terms of what we see for the rest of the 90s?

DF: It’s interesting, well, to tie into what you’re saying about lying, basically… yes. Johnson lied about Vietnam, Nixon lied about Vietnam, and Watergate, and was kicked out of office for it… we’ve had, over time, people who were in positions of power in this country who were obfuscating. But Clinton was really this sort of… they called him Slick Willie when he was governor of Arkansas, and he really was introduced to us that night at the Superbowl where Bill and Hillary Clinton both went on to lie… he went on to lie about his relationship with Gennifer Flowers, who while he was governor… he had had an affair with. Later under oath, he admitted that he had had an affair, but on the show he said no, we both denied that, we haven’t had anything but I have caused pain in my marriage. So he admitted, you know, the big A, the adultery word there. However, most of America got to meet Bill Clinton, really – both Clintons – that night where he was lying about sex. When he took to… the first week he was in office and assumed the presidency, he was wrapped up in what then became Don’t Lie, Don’t… Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Which was really the military’s policy that if you were non-heterosexual you had to lie about your sexual preference--

CC: And I thought that was fascinating, a fascinating insight of yours. Was that we--

DF: Well, thank you, yeah, and then continued. He was impeached in 1998 because he lied about whether or not he’d had an affair. So this is really a sort of… this will continue with George W. Bush, he would lie about “mission accomplished”, and weapons of mass destruction, Cheney and Bush were… they brought it to a high art. Frank Rich wrote about it in a book called “The Greatest Story Ever Sold”, or something, I think that was the title. And then look at what we have now. I’ve said this… did a panel the other night with Maureen Dowd and Brian Steltzer at the 92^nd Street Y in New York--

CC: My wife was there for that, David, you did great—

DF: She was there?! Oh god!

CC: My wife made sure to attend, yes.

DF: It was totally packed! I couldn’t see the people around, it was so dark, but that’s--

CC: [inaudible] ticket out front--

DF: That’s great of her.

CC: It was like Springsteen on Broadway, David. You and Maureen? Come on!

DF: [Laughs] Me and Maureen – oh man, we’re a good duet. I know, because Brian was doing the… one of the things I said that night was that Clinton… Donald Trump is really what Mary McCarthy said of Lilian Hellman, that every word out of her--

CC: Every word is a lie--

DF: mouth is a lie including the words “and” and “the”.

CC: [Laughs]

DF: I think that’s true of Trump, you see it day in day out, he just doesn’t… know how to tell the truth. I hate to say it.

CC: And as you point out, it’s certainly not just Clinton who wasn’t fully disclosing in terms of his sexual… his true sexual life throughout the 90’s, Clinton’s accusers would also be concealing portions of their lives in terms of their sexual life… and another point that, you alluded to something that really fascinated me, that’s another really central and key portion of the naughty nineties, which is as you’ve discussed… your working relationship, how you’ve come to understand the friend Monica Lewinsky. In what respect has her sharing her story of what happened to her shaped your view of what took place in the decade--

DF: Yeah, yeah, it has. Clinton wouldn’t talk on the record, but… I’ve read every book on the subject, I’ve talked to her at length, and I really got the sense that… here’s someone who… while she says fully that this was a consensual relationship she had with the president, she was a 22 year old intern at the time and there was a power… you know, as we see with some of the things that’ve come out in these scandals lately… there is a power relationship, and when a boss… makes sexual overtures to… a coworker, it really is a power dynamic that’s quite… you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and it’s really hard to make complaints. So she was sort of caught up in that, and I think they did have more than just an affair, they were constantly trading gifts, they were constantly talking on the phone and not just about sexual matters, about really deep matters, and he would… this continued for a couple years. And I do feel that what had happened was… the US government then decided, the head of the FBI, decided to do a sting as part of the Star investigation and arrested her – or threatened her with arrest – and asked her to wear a wire and tape the president and talk and see and she refused. And they threatened her with years and years in prison if she wouldn’t… and threatened her mother as well, if she wouldn’t cooperate. So she had to cooperate with an investigation that was really politically motivated, to talk about her affair. Or her relationship. And this is really chilling, I think. And I think one of the downsides of having a special prosecutor – you know, what we needed with Nixon - we’re lucky we had a special prosecutor, everybody should see this new movie called Mark Felt about where… Liam Neeson plays Deep Throat, it’s a great film and it really gives you the sense of how special prosecutors really are important. However, in this case, it was sort of a witch hunt as Trump calls his special prosecutor, and now again we’re seeing the same special prosecutor and… Robert Muller, I think we’re all in a better place because we have this sort of a backup by having Muller and having a special prosecutor. I don’t know if that answered your question.

CC: You mention that you spoke to Paula Jones, you spoke to Anita Hill, you spoke to Monica Lewinsky… you make reference to the OJ case, and what seems clear along with the culture of deceit or lying is the sense that in the 90’s these women were very much denied a voice. They were characterized in the media, they were slandered in the media, they were called all these names… and when we go back and look at the decade you laid out before us, it’s very clear that the voice of women, the stories they told were not being believed, were being mischaracterized, their reputations were being besmirched. And it’s something that, from a perspective of where we are now, particularly how women’s voices at this particular hour are being heard with clarity and strength, it’s something that really indicts the 90’s, and your conversation with Monica Lewinsky kinda brings that out.

DF: I think that’s true, and I think that there is a voice now, but part of it is the internet. The internet began… the World Wide Web began in 92, 3. Didn’t really catch on until the late 90s. So there weren’t really platforms for people to speak out. And even though the 90s were in the stage which domestic abuse really became judicated against, there were new laws prohibiting sexual violence and domestic violence and abuse, there were new laws against workplace harassment, new laws attempting to protect women on many different levels… However, it took a long time for society to follow – and for culture to follow the lead of the law, and people--

CC: That’s true, and I can remember—oh, go ahead.

DF: People now have this platform, and I think they’re getting support from strangers who can now… you see this, just as the web has sort of become mob rules and let’s take people down, and y’know scandal television and scandal sheets are doing this all the time… the web is also a force for good, in helping mobilize people against what is seen as bad behavior.

CC: You talk about how the internet in its earlier stages was, like so many things in culture, driven by sex. Driven by the ability of people to remain anonymous and to connect and find fulfillment in ways they had not been able to do in the public sphere.

DF: Yeah, the book has two chapters on the sexual history of the birth of the internet, birth of the World Wide Web. A lot of it started with AOL where you had chatrooms that A, did not charge by the minute, you had one fee so you could talk as much as you wanted, and then you also could meet up with the people you were talking to and a lot of people had sexual conversations, and they weren’t censored on AOL like they were on Prodigy or other services. So you know, AOL sort of took off in that regard, and then pornography became rampant, and people were using the web for… sort of the whole smorgasbord of sexual… experience was put on display and people, since the beginning of the species, no one could go to one place and see everything that happened sexually between human beings but suddenly you could, and suddenly young people could do that. And it really did alter, and has altered, the sex lives of many. And you have a chapter on sex addiction, which really became a tsunami in this period and since, and I really do believe that… our sex lives, in many cases, are the poorer because of young people learning too much too quickly before they can handle it, and adults seeing too much too quickly.

CC: I believe the old Lena Dunham line was “you didn’t come up with that on your own, young man from Quebecois”.

DF: That’s great! That’s right. That is her quote, yes.

CC: Along those lines, as we were sort of talking about sex in the public sphere, there’s a lot of your book about individual sexual fulfillment, and new barriers being pushed aside in pursuit of individual sexual fulfillment. And here you are really our boon companion, taking us places into… and with people we never would have gotten to see or experience before. Part of the great fascination of your book. What were those things like for you?

DF: Well, thank you. I did find the man who invented the upscale gentleman’s club, that was pretty wild. He had this idea once in the late 70s, early 80s, that he went to a strip club and sorta felt… his name was Michael J. Peter. Great name. He went to the strip club and realized… this is such a seedy joint, why don’t I create my own? He was running discos at the time, which were dying. Why don’t I create a club that has upscale women in beautiful gowns and have everyone be a ten and have bouncers with tuxedos and a DJ and… he sorta came up with this crazy concept, and then a few short years after that he had these clubs in the late 80s and early 90s all over the world. And I interviewed him and people associated with him. I just came back from San Francisco where I did a panel with the woman who is the guru of orgasmic meditation, her name is Nicole Daedone, she runs a group called One Taste that is in about twenty different cities now, but it’s really about women’s orgasm. It’s called orgasmic meditation, this practice she began because she got involved with in the 90’s. It’s sort of in this period where yoga is getting big, and you were gonna be in touch with your body much more, men and women, but this is really about women’s fulfillment and we had this panel and like about 60 people showed up from her organization. All women, maybe about 5 men. But like 55 women, who all have multiple orgasms several times a day through this procedure. It’s really sort of fascinating. So I went… brought my wife to that one, we went to this sort of not an ashram, but people who were in this sort of ashram, who went to an orgasmic meditation demonstration. And we witnessed this, and it was just sort of fascinating. I hope people will buy the book just for that chapter.

CC: It is phenomenal.

DF: [Laughs]

CC: It is something I’ve never seen before, and just as you begin your investigations with Helen Fischer in the wake of Sex and the City, going to the Pleasure Chest I think it is? Your ability to take us into these dark unlit recesses of--

DF: Wow, you really read the book!

CC: -- of unique fulfillment is very powerful stuff.

DF: Thank you.

CC: David, I can’t keep you on the phone forever – I’m going to attempt a grand synthesis here, which is unlikely to succeed but we’ll see what happens.

DF: Cool, cool.

CC: As we arrived at Amherst College, I arrived in ’74, I guess you got there in ’73… there was what we would now immediately recognize as a deeply offensive story that ran in the Amherst Student called “Sleazing”.

DF: Yes.

CC: If you recall that.

DF: I do.

CC: It was… it was purported to be a guide to dating the women of Mount Holyoke and Smith, and it discussed in terms that today we would immediately recognize as being highly offensive, stereotypes, and… certain indications that would ostensibly allow the men of Amherst College to have greater social success with the women of Smith and Mount Holyoke. In 2017, we recognize that communications like this are sexist, offensive, oppressive, constitute sexual harassment… and are dealt with appropriately. My question, I guess, is how do you think the single events of the 90’s – your decade – what happened to Anita Hill, what happened to Monica Lewinsky, what happened in some respects to Nicole Brown Simpson – helped make this new world, this improving world, possible?

DF: That’s a lot to unpack from that. I think what happened in the 70’s, as we’re talking about the “Sleazing” article, the “Sleazing” article was a political article. As much in bad taste as it was, it was released the weekend that the board of Amherst was meeting to go co-ed, and I believe it did. Or if it didn’t that weekend, it was soon thereafter. So that article was offensive, and would today I think, probably result in the writer – whom you and I both know by name, but he’s been the anonymous homunculi or homunculus when he wrote it – would have been expelled from the school. But in its day, it was really trying to make a point that we were… that the sexual revolution of the 60s really had an underside, and that there was it was an anachronism, that the whole idea of a “men’s college” had passed its shelf life, and it was time to make a change, and the habits that had grown up associated with it were supposed to change, and needed to. And I think that was, in effect, underscoring what was deeper fissures in society because of sex roles. So the people who were coming of age then, in the 60s and 70s, the Boomers, then took power in the 90s. And I think that’s what we’re seeing now, is their children a generation later, and their value systems, have become the values of the culture, that… this progressive sense of inclusion, of respect for others, is the law of the land. And that’s why it makes it so difficult to have this president we have now, and the values that we’re seeing of… it’s almost like there’s a counter-reaction. I write in the book, I quote Susan Faludi who wrote the book “Backlash”, that what happens when women’s rights are asserted is that the male patriarchy over responds and over exaggerates its reaction to the loss of their power. So you see this exaggerated, macho behavior on the part of people… you look at the Trump cabinet, it’s like a cigar bar in the 90s, it’s just a bunch of big weird white guys who are just skimming money from the top… many of them profiting from what they’re doing. And it really is unnerving. And I think people are finally getting wise to it.

CC: Is this because we didn’t negotiate the contradictions of the 90’s? Is this because we didn’t really settle the contradictions--

DF: Well, no. Maybe? Maybe it’s because the Democrats in the 90’s were bad messengers, were bad actors, paid a lot of lip service to being supportive of women’s rights and LGBT rights, but on the other hand we’re not necessarily in the fight fully. But also it was that we had George W. Bush who continued some of the policies from Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior. But then we had… we didn’t recognize there was a lot of anger that came up after the eight years of Barack Obama, that under the surface there was still a lot of… seeing what was perceived as not centrist, but liberal policies became anathema to too many people. And so, yes, and I think things were not resolved.

CC: Well, your analysis of the decade is fascinating, and the prisms through which you show it to us are in some cases familiar, and you provide new takes on familiar battles, familiar scenes, familiar personalities, and then you introduce us to so many people who have had effects on our lives that we had no knowledge of. And so for both of those reasons, your book The Naughty Nineties is one that everyone should read to understand not only how we passed through that decade, but how we got to where we are. David Friend, thank you for talking to us on Amherst Reads, always great to catch up with you.

DF: Always great, Chris Connelly is… you’re the best. I can’t believe it. This is a pleasure to do.

CC: I’m thrilled that we got to talk. Thanks so much.

DF: Thanks, man. Great.