The line-up of women accusing Bill Cosby of rape and their testimony has me puzzled, which is not the response I am supposed to have when a woman says she's been raped. So I'm uneasy with myself for being puzzled at all.
But Hollywood is an interesting place with some interesting people. All that glistens is not gold, as Shakespeare wrote. And for some reason this series of allegations reminds me of the impetus and fallout of passed Hollywood witch hunts.
Most of us know about the ones conducted in the 50's by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but these were actually begun in the late 40's in the House of Representatives under Rep. J. Parnell Thomas and "evolved" into grander show trials in the Senate.
But there was an even earlier witch hunt, by a decade, rarely discussed, which had a congruent purpose to weed out a subversive element from the film industry. The witch hunt of the 30's came as a result of the Christian Church threatening a mass boycott of films in the vulnerable economic times of the Depression. The Church leadership did not like certain themes discussed in film, and said so; they did not like how certain plots were developed and resolved, and said so; they loathed certain actors who exemplified these themes, and they blacklisted them in billboards nationwide as "Box-Office Poison".
The film studios, run by right wingers, like LB Mayer at MGM and Ray Cohn at RKO, fearful of the affect of the promised boycott and the visible affect the cultural blacklist was already having, set up in conjunction with the Christians the Hayes Office. This was a censorship tool to ensure the Church got what it wanted.
The Hayes Office ended in the late 60's when the motion picture rating system replaced it.
In the meantime, film scripts had to follow a certain formula. Topics were made off limits. More over, the film colony that developed since the Talkies was decimated. With the Talkies, producers looked to the New York stage community for actors, and what they got were beautiful speaking voices but basically the sort of people the Church despised: freethinkers, communists, homosexuals. I don't think I'm overstating this.
But with the new climate, the studio moguls not only demanded scripts be cleaned up but also the actors' public lives. Where possible, heterosexual marriages were quickly arranged, and gossip magazines feminized women and masculinized the men into red-blooded heteros.
The models and role models, the Golden Age, the Tinsel Town that we are told ever after to revere is really a horrible confection of lies and charades, hiding truths about the lives many of these actors lived. Of course, some careers could not be rehabilitated, and they either returned to Broadway or disappeared altogether.
That in the 30's was the first purge. The second came with Rep. J. Parnell Thomas in the House of Representatives a decade later. You have to know about the first purge to appreciate the second, more infamous one.
The threat of subpoena and blacklist got a lot of people who should have known better to come out and Name Names - and they should have known better because maybe at one point in their development they had been freethinkers or communists or affiliated with either. They certainly lived and worked alongside them daily.
But with the threat of a lost career they had to maneuver themselves away from the scrutiny of this witch hunt and offer a sacrificial lamb. Many to their shame did, and we really should memorialize their names in a Wall of Shame at an Academy Awards ceremony.
But what does this have to do with Bill Cosby? Maybe nothing. But knowing that behind the public relations departments of the studios and talent agencies press releases is a reality we are rarely treated to, Cosby among them. We believe the Make Believe. We believe in Dr. Huxtable or even the creator of Fat Albert. We do not believe in depression, sexaholics, group sex games, partner swapping, recreational drug use, serial abortionists.
I know if that same Christian mafia that started the original purge in the 30's was able to look today under some sheets and behind some closet doors they'd have epileptic fits, speak in tongue, and see their Jewish messiah.
When one of Cosby's accusers speaks about being in a hotel room with him in his bathrobe, accepting a pill from him, taking the pill, then drinking wine BEFORE SHE BLACKED OUT and woke having had sex, I am not directed immediately to call the Special Victims Unit. Did Cosby take a pill too? She doesn't say. Were these sexual games he played with others in the film industry? He's alleged [by her] to have been in a robe.
The scenarios only tell me that Cosby possibly had the sexual appetite of, say, John F Kennedy, whose rape victims have never come forward; or many of the film producers [and many more pretenders!] who coerced young male and female actors in auditions into having sex [rape], but rarely do the famous come out and Name Those Names.
That what some hyper-moralists would call sordid while they became wet between the legs is is all I am willing to accept as occurring ... so far. My jury is out.
But now, as with the Hollywood witch hunts before, a peculiar set of testimonies come one after the other, and another moral crusade seems to be afoot, and I just can't help seeing the ghosts of Louis B Mayer and Nazi Christians ready to set some new standards.
If the name Scotty Bowers means nothing to you, it shouldn't. It may mean nothing to Bill Cosby. But it apparently meant a lot to much of Hollywood for many, many years. Bowers was a former sex worker who turned his talents to procuring young men and women for Hollywood stars. He performed this pimp service for some time and with countless clients, some of whom he names in his memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of Stars.
Bowers isn't writing about one star with one secret.
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