CAROL: Some swingers will send pornographic pictures of themselves to other people in a first letter, and then they wonder why they get into trouble. You would think people would show a little common sense.
BOB: Well, it looked as though Frannie was showing a little more common sense than usual, or else she just didn’t understand what it was all about. We were a little worried about having her over for the evening, and then one of us making a pass at her and that poor little kid going straight up the wall. So instead of getting on the phone and calling her, Carol wrote out another letter asking her if she had swung much in the past, trying to word it so that if Frannie wasn’t hip to this sort of thing, she would just have it all go over her head, but if she was, then she would know to let us know it.
CAROL: Well, she called me one morning when Bob was out. She said she was Frannie, and I said hello and how I was glad to hear from her, and then she said evidently she hadn’t made herself very clear in her letter. She had this tiny shy little-girl voice.
And while I was thinking that she was no swinger at all and it was good we had checked, she said how she lived with her folks and had this job with the Board of Education and had to be very careful about appearances. “I fuck and suck and everything,” she said, in this same little-girl voice, “but I don’t like to put it on paper.”
Now I was speechless. We had this whole image of little innocent Frannie, and we were even thinking about how if she wasn’t a swinger yet it might be worth a try at getting her a little liquored up and converting her, and then she just laid it right on the line like that. I just stood there with the phone in my hand and she said after a minute that she hoped I wasn’t shocked and that she hadn’t said anything out of line, but she wanted to make everything clear.
I said, “Oh, absolutely. And why don’t you come over tonight, and Bob and I will give you all the fucking and sucking you can possibly handle.”
Now I had never talked over the phone like that before in my life.
BOB: She came over that night and we had a really great time with Frannie. Even in person she was the same as she was in her letters, very shy and demure and innocent, and then she would come out with a line that was purely shocking coming from her. You wouldn’t think twice to hear your average swinger talk like that. It would either seem like nothing at all or it might have a vulgar sound to it, but from Frannie it was like hearing it in church.
CAROL: She was a lot better looking than her picture showed.
BOB: I’ll tell you, she didn’t look twenty-three. She could have passed easily for seventeen, maybe less than that. She didn’t wear any makeup and she had a very young face. Big wide blue eyes. She was very slim. Hardly any hips at all and cute little breasts. Very good legs and a pert rear, and always this serious little-girl voice.
CAROL: But once things got started, she knew just what she wanted and she couldn’t get too much of it.
BOB: She just about took charge of things. She would say who should do what, and we let her call the signals. “You get on your hands and knees,” she told Carol, and Carol did it. “And now you get on her and give it to her doggie-style,” she told me. And I did just what she ordered, and she crawled underneath and ate us both at once while we did it. We had never done it quite this way before, but believe me, it was a way to do it that we didn’t forget about in a hurry. She was a real greedy little girl, Frannie.
CAROL: She stayed all night. Told her mother she was sleeping at a girlfriend’s house and stayed all night long. And we didn’t sleep much, either. We’d no sooner doze off than she’d be at one or the other of us and wake us all up all over again.
BOB: She told us she only liked to swing once in a while, maybe one time a month, and only with couples, and only if she really liked them. Her entire sex life was this once-a-month swinging. She had this one ad running, and she would get dozens of replies to it every week. Plenty of them from single guys, of course, but also a great many from couples. And she hardly answered any of them because everything had to be just right about a couple before she would have anything to do with them. Then she would have her one date of the month and fit a whole month’s worth of sex into one night.
We’ve swung with her three times since then. She doesn’t advertise any more. She has maybe a dozen couples that she will see off and on. And that’s just the way she wants it. She’s completely bisexual. There’s nothing we ever thought of doing that she doesn’t like to do. But it’s no good at all for her unless she’s with a couple. One guy alone or one girl alone — she won’t have anything to do with it.
CAROL: Not that everybody has to be involved in the act, but she has to be together with a couple, they both have to be in the same room with her.
BOB: We’ve been trying to figure her out, you know. It’s hard because she doesn’t want to talk about her personal life at all. My guess is that she had her first sex with a couple when she was very young. This is maybe a little more than pure guesswork. She let something slip, I don’t remember exactly what, but it gave this impression. I would even suspect it was relatives that seduced her. An aunt and uncle or a pair of older cousins or something. And then this formed her sexual attitudes, and she never changed them.
CAROL: I like her, though. I’d see her more often, if we could. But she has this rule of no more than once a month, and about a dozen couples she goes with more or less regularly, so we don’t get to see too much of her. I told her one time she ought to marry some boy and find an extra girl for threesomes, but that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She has to be the extra girl or she’s not interested.
JWW: It is always interesting to speculate on the reasons why people are willing to discuss the most intimate aspects of their lives with an interviewer. After all, I take a great deal of their time probing into their sex lives and offer them no compensation for their time and trouble beyond my personal gratitude.
(There has been one exception. For Tricks of the Trade, in which nine call girls were interviewed to create a “hooker’s handbook of sexual technique,” I had no choice but to pay the girls rather handsomely for their time. But they, after all, were professionals, and their credo that time is money operates whatever use is made of that time.)
The most obvious explanation — that a great many persons are inclined to be genuinely cooperative — is certainly true. Swingers are especially generous in this respect, and have often expressed the thought that wider dissemination of information on the sexual underground will open more people to the possibilities of the life and will make their own lot in society less potentially troublesome. Many enthusiastic swingers are sincerely evangelistic; they often mention that they first became interested through books on the subject, and welcome a chance to contribute to this educational process.
For others, particularly those with ambivalent feelings about the lives they are leading, the interviewer furnishes an extra ear similar in certain ways to that of a priest or psychiatrist. The confessional impulse transcends religion, and serving as the subject of an in-depth interview concerning sexual matters provides the chance to justify oneself to oneself, to obtain absolution for what one regards as sinful, and, finally, to clarify one’s thoughts by using the interviewer as a sounding board. Time after time subjects have followed general or personal observations with the notation that they have never had this particular thought before, and I don’t doubt that the interview situation does afford good opportunities for self-analysis.
In A Married Couple, a cinéma vérité filmmaker moved his camera into the apartment of a Canadian couple and filmed several weeks of their life together, producing ultimately a remarkable ninety minutes of brutally revelatory film. At the same time, his presence served to crystallize the attitudes of the man and wife toward each other and toward their marriage. In much the same fashion, I have occasionally found myself playing a catalyst’s role in a relationship. This was particularly true in the extended, almost painfully incisive interviews which saw print as The Wife Swap Report.