Teens/Youth culture

Shacking up, 1968-style

It’s unlikely that New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud envisioned the hornets’ nest she was poking exactly 42 years ago, on March 4, 1968, with this article about cohabitation at U.S. colleges.  ”College administrators dryly refer to it as ’student cohabitation.’  But to the students themselves, it’s better known as ’shacking up,’ ‘the arrangement’–or, more commonly, just plain ‘living together.’”  That lead paragraph  packs in a lot euphemisms for what is left unsaid, that is, it’s about “young people having sex.”  Klemesrud (already carving out a reputation as the Times‘ most incisive reporter on women’s issues) reassuringly writes:  ”Some view an ‘arrangement’ as a necessary prelude to marriage; very few say it is primarily for sex.”   Students offered a long list of factors that led to their choice to live together: “birth control pills, alienation from parents, new liberal student housing rules, drugs, the love philosophy of the hippies, liberal-minded landlords, and the influence of such musicians as The Beatles and Bob Dylan.”

Sex and women’s rights

The issue might have gone away, dismissed with a little tsk-tsking about “those kids today,” had it not been for the ill-advised revelations made by one of the couples, here identified as “Susan and Peter,” a Barnard sophomore and a Columbia junior, both 20.  The article says that “Susan is supposed to be living in a dormitory,” but she had gotten a waiver because she told the school she was taking a (fake) job as live-in maid.  Barnard officials quickly tracked down the perpetrator — real name: Linda LeClair–and called her before the college’s judicial council, where she was charged with lying about her housing arrangements.  Meanwhile, LeClair had written letters in the school newspaper, arguing that women were being discriminated against, since Columbia men were not obliged to live on campus in single-sex dorms (the only kind of dorms there were in 1968).   The council found her guilty, but called for reconsidering the college’s housing regulation.  Her punishment was being banned from the school cafeteria.  The Barnard president, Martha Peterson, rejected the council’s decision as too mild, and put pressure on LeClair to drop out, which she eventually did.

Moralism and salaciousness

As historian Beth Bailey writes in her book Sex in the Heartland:  ”The media were quick to take up a story that offered such potential for twinned moralism and salaciousness.  And so LeClair’s conduct and her fate became the focus on what amounted to a national referendum on the sexual mores of the nation’s youth.”

“Linda LeClair, the issue”

Nearly two months after the Times story, LIFE carried a photo story about the same phenomenon, also called “The Arrangement.”  The  photo at the top of this post is the story’s title spread, and Linda and her boyfriend are depicted upper left.

It also included an interview with Linda, who said that, in the intervening weeks, she was finding it “hard to think of myself as a person any more.  I have ceased to exist.  I am Linda LeClair, the issue.”   The LIFE reporter writes: “A sexual anthropologist of some future century, analyzing . . .the artifacts of the American Sexual Revolution, may consider the case of Linda Le Clair and her boyfriend, Peter Behr, as a moment when the morality of an era changed.”

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Ladies Home Journal was not, to put it mildly, a political magazine.  Not in the 1960s, not now.

But for the first issue of 1968, that most “political” of years, the chief editors at Ladies Home Journal–every single one of them men, by the way–decided to take a different tack.  As the editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, wrote in his “Dear Reader” column, this was because “there are more and more problems in our world and fewer and fewer answers– not only national and international problems, but increasing friction about community, family and personal matters.”  LHJ announced that each issue would “be consciously planned not only to entertain and inform you better than ever before, but to be used–to solve your problems, to help improve your life.”  Readers would be offered “the opportunity to participate in the making of each issue . . . to put you in touch with the triumphs and defeats of 13 million other Journal women.”  New features were added:  a “Journal Board of Experts,” who would answer readers’ questions.  The Board included personal finances advisor Sylvia Porter, TV journalist David Brinkley, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and etiquette maven Amy Vanderbilt.   A new monthly readers’ poll, “The Voice of Women,”  was begun, surveying thousands of readers by mail.

Reaching for relevance

The Journal was, in short, reaching for the most 1960s of goals:  Relevance.  Henceforth, the magazine would serve their readers in new, meaningful ways, to help them make sense of a world that–suddenly– seemed a lot more complicated.   Naturally, the covers would need to reflect this more engaged identity.  Ladies Home Journal “cover girls” in 1967 had been the usual lineup:  Mia Farrow, Jacqueline Kennedy (pre-Onassis), Twiggy and other fashion models, cute kids and Moms.  This one doesn’t feature a celebrity at all, but rather an unidentified woman in a sweater festooned with an array of slogan or campaign-type buttons.  The words announce the issue’s contents: an excerpt from Bobby Kennedy’s new book, To Seek a Newer World, which came out just before he entered the presidential race; a true story, “My Son is On LSD. Is Yours?”; an article by an obstetrician, writing under a pseudonym, confessing that he prescribes birth control pills for unmarried “girls”; and an article on how “We Can Close the Generation Gap.”  The new poll feature concludes that “We’re Scared of Our Kids,” revealing that “many parents are so tyrannized by their children that they are not altogether sure that adults are still running the world.”

A story in need of revision

My personal favorite story in this issue is an excerpt from a forthcoming (1968) biography of Charles A. Lindbergh, The Last Hero, by Walter S. Ross (one of many unauthorized biographies that had appeared since 1927, all of them despised by Lindbergh).   The introduction to the excerpt here says that Lindbergh–who turned 66 in 1968–was “scarred by tragedy [i.e., the kidnapping of his son in 1932], and retreated into a shell of secrecy.  Inside it, however, Lindbergh raised five children to be responsible, self-reliant young men and women.  To him, the Generation Gap was just another Atlantic–and he spanned it with an unusual mixture of fatherly love and iron discipline.”   The cover “button” that calls Lindbergh “America’s Most Remarkable Father” is richly ironic, of course, since we now know that the 1960s were exactly the years that Lindbergh was carrying on three separate extramarital affairs in Europe, and fathering no fewer than seven additional illegitimate children.   Remarkable.

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The guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and US colleges

Just about 42 years ago, this issue of LOOK magazine was hitting American mailboxes and newstands.  On the cover was one of the more unusual stories of our transformative year:  the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the impact of his “transcendental meditation” on the American college scene.

Beatles, Mia, and a Beach Boy in India

Actually, the Maharishi (only “Mahesh” is part of his given name; maharishi and yogi are honorifics) had been making international news since the 1950s, teaching his meditation techniques and spiritual beliefs on an incredible series of round-the-world tours, including the United States (his first tour here was in 1959) and cities on nearly every continent.  But it was only when the Beatles (along with Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence; singer/songwriter Donovan; and Beach Boy Mike Love) made a pilgrimage to India in early 1968 to study with the Maharishi that his fame exploded.  The Beatles, of course, were “more popular than Jesus,” in John Lennon’s famous line from 1966; and Mia Farrow had been an American tabloid fixture since her marriage to Frank Sinatra in 1966. (Her breakout movie, Rosemary’s Baby, wasn’t released until months after she returned from India.)  Suddenly, in early 1968, the beatific image and inscrutable pronouncements of the Maharishi seemed to be everywhere.

“The Non-Drug Turn-On Hits Campus”

Not surprisingly, the guru and his teachings had their greatest impact–in the United States, at least–on young people.  ”TM” followers were mostly white, college-educated baby boomers, rejecting the conventions (like traditional Western religions) of their parents’ generation and seeking distinct new identities and “heightened consciousness.”  The author of the article here in LOOK goes to a lecture by Jerry Jarvis, head of the Student International Meditation Society, the principal vehicle by which American college students connected with transcendental meditation.  (The preppy kids on the magazine cover are at Yale, but the event described here is at Berkeley.)

Something super-groovy

“The students had heard of the Maharishi . . . There wasn’t one who didn’t realize that he was the same jet-age guru who had guided the Beatles off the psychedelic drug scene by way of a new, nonchemical turn-on.  The motives of the Berkeley crowd were typical: some came to hear about what had gotten the Beatles so excited; some had a vague interest in all things Eastern and alien; many were acid heads or pot devotees in search of ‘mind-expanding’ ecstasy without the ill-effects of psychedelics (the chief of which being jail).  But more than anything else, the majority of the crowd knew individual meditators who were noticeably Better People as a result, and who must therefore be on to something super-groovy.”

The article concludes by quoting a “Los Angeles meditator”:  ”The student’s life is so tense today.  You go to school and get involved in the peace movement and the Sexual Freedom League and everything, and, gee, by that time you’re too uptight to have to think about studying too!  We’re really fortunate in this generation to have the Maharishi.”

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Generation gap– a Sixties “meme”

Certain phrases migrate from being just a combination of words to something with a little more immortality.  Mundanely, we might call them “catchphrases.” Today we would probably call these virally spreading cultural nuggets ”memes.”  That word probably had little currency in the 1960s, but one of 1968’s most pervasive memes was “generation gap.”  It was the upheavals of the 1960s that gave rise to this term, if not the actual phenomenon, which had been around for centuries.  Sociologist Kenneth Keniston, in his influential 1968 study Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, found his informants to be “hostile . . . to patterns of power and authority.” No lesser lights than Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, and Margaret Mead all produced social-psychological studies focusing on generational divides and challenges in this era.

Understanding the gap

Margaret Mead, in the book Culture and Commitment (subtitled “A Study in the Generation Gap”), based on a series of lectures in 1969, turned her anthropologist’s eye to the problem:  ”Today, nowhere in the world are there elders who know what children know, not matter how remote and simple the societies in which the children live. In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up with a cultural system.  Today there are none.”  Classically, of course, young people define themselves in relation to—if not always in opposition to—the values of their parents’ generation. But the Sixties sharpened this process, compelling one to find a place on one side or the other of a yawning “generation gap.”

To be young again

A national obsession with youth and youthfulness and youthful rebellion was evident throughout the decade.  LIFE magazine, with this May 17 issue, was actually a little behind the curve in finding currency in this concept.  TIME, after all, had declared “Men and Women Under 25″ to be their “Persons of the Year” way back in January 1966.  LIFE’s hook was to document an actual gap, to publish the conflicting views of two men–Richard Lorber (age 20) and his uncle, Ernest Fladell (age 42), both New Yorkers, who decided to write a book together about their experiences when young Lorber moved in with his uncle in 1967.   That’s Lorber’s head on the cover, with his uncle pictured in his right eyeglass lens.  (Of course, it’s not surprising that LIFE’s choice for these stand-ins for “the gap” are both white males.)

Communicating across the gap–or not

The pair have some archetypal adventures together:  Richard turns Ernie on to pot; Ernie enjoys it, but Richard turns resentful when afterwards Ernie professes great insight into the drug’s appeal:  ”It is as if he had crashed a very private party I was having with myself.”   Richie and Ernie hook up with Richie’s friends in Greenwich Village (Ernie wants to meet a “few bona fide hippies”), and it gets a little weird with some girls they hang out with. (Ernie proclaims that “the so-called sexual revolution isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”) They visit a few head shops in the East Village (e.g., the “Psychedelicatessan”).  They disagree–strongly–about the “Negro riots” which Richie sees as “the most hopeful sign I have seen in the past year;” he understands “exactly” how blacks have been “driven to violence.”  Ernie is appalled:  ”I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.”  Richie and Ernie (a veteran of World War II) disagree on military service.  After Ernie’s draft board reclassifies him, he gets worried, and tells Ernie that he was “facing one of the most agonizing decisions of his life.”  Ernie says: “I went to war weak with fear but strong in pride. Richard has only fear.”

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Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead

Sooner or later, this blog was going to have to get around to MAD, right?  We could have done the 1968 election issue, with all of the candidates’ pictures scrambled (and maybe we’ll get to that one eventually).  But this issue — this cover, at least– is priceless:  Alfred E. Neuman– by this date universally recognized as the archetypal dope–decked out as a “hippie,” with a decorative border incorporating some distinctive five-part leaves and a classic MAD motto:  ”Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead.”  (”Drop dead” was a favorite MAD expression.) Here, Al is sporting a scraggly beard and longer red hair than usual, but he has the familiar gap-toothed grin, freckles, jug ears, and vacant expression.  Plus beads, flowers in the hair, cowbell and bear-claw necklace– like, wow.

“The Hippie”: Becoming a laugh line and a stereotype

To land on the cover of MAD in the 1960s was to achieve some sort of pinnacle of pop-cultural notoreity; MAD editors wouldn’t have bothered with you if you weren’t somehow culturally “of the moment.”   But the famous individual, or trend, or icon, or sacred cow had to have attained enough breadth of recognition to allow for sufficient pungency as a MAD lampoon.  And so the arrival of the hippie get-up on MAD in April 1968 tells us quite a lot about the hardening and the codifying of this stereotypical “Sixties” character.

It all happened pretty quickly.  Etymologists generally point to an early-1965 usage of “hippie” (in TIME magazine) as the first “conventional” use of the word, as opposed to earlier, more marginal uses– as variants of the beatnik-era “hipster,” for example.  So throughout 1965 and 1966– and especially by the January 1967 “Be-In” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and, later that year, the “Summer of Love”– the hippie moved rapidly from being “sub-cultural,” socially detached, and “different” to being an utterly familiar archetype–AND a figure of nearly bottomless hilarity.  I would not be surprised if there were “hippie” Halloween costumes in stores by 1968–as there are today.   I wonder when the first sitcom hippies appeared– 1968 again would be a pretty good bet. ( I know that some kind of nadir was reached the following year, when Lawrence Welk showed up in wig and full hippie regalia on his show:  not hard to find–but hard to watch–on YouTube.)

A “weird sub-culture”

So here’s MAD, throwing its considerable weight behind this process of Stereotype Formation.  I remember this issue well (I was 17 when it appeared on the newstands, its price now “30 cents– Cheap” instead of 25), not so much because of the cover but because of the hilarious (well, maybe you had to be there) send-up of one of my favorite TV shows, “Mission: Ridiculous.”   But the issue also includes an extensive “cover story”– a mock magazine called “Hippie: The Magazine that Turns You On (if you’re cool enough to light it up and smoke it!)”  The introduction says:  ”There’s a wild new group of people who have become prominent in America recently.  They have their own unique language, their own strange behavior, and their own bizarre philosophy which is commonly misunderstood by many oldsters.  The group is known as ‘Moderate Republicans.’”    It goes on to explain that there’s another “weird sub-culture” kn0wn as hippies, and MAD is going to explain them in this magazine as a public service.

For sentimental hippies?

The magazine includes fake movie ads (”The Wild Freakout Acid Trip at the Hippie Teeny-Bopper Love-In Orgy on the Strip”); classifieds (”Help! I’m being held prisoner in my Hi-Fi and TV-equipped own room in the suburban home of my materialistic, conformist parents”); a takeoff on the Peanuts “warm puppy” bestseller, this one called ”Uptight is a Dry Sugar Cube”; a gossip column (”Drachma the Digger has made arrangements for starving N.Y. orphans to receive food packages from Vietnam War Orphans”); and a gift guide for “sentimental hippies who want to collect relics of the past:  shoes, ties, soap, bras, draft cards, combs.”

You get the picture.

Finally, it’s been so long since I looked at MAD that I forgot that they carried no advertisements–except gag ads, like this takeoff on ads for “100 millimeter” cigarettes from the back cover of this issue:

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The triumph of the teen magazine

Taking this magazine with me and my laptop to my favorite coffee shop was not a decision I made lightly.  Could I, a graying old boomer, really sit here and avidly pore over a teeny-bopper magazine from the 1960s?  (If you’ve seen Todd Solondz’s movie Happiness, you probably understand my trepidation.)  But I got over it.   Magazines devoted to teen “idols”–mostly  TV and recording stars, where the youth market dominated–began to take off in the late 1950s and early 1960s: think Elvis, Annette Funicello (and the beach-movie crowd), Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin, Bobby Vee and other “American Bandstand” stars.  By 1966, the magazines– Tiger Beat, 16, and the like– got a real shot in the arm by the appearance of The Monkees, the famously manufactured “rock-and-roll” (actually, pure pop) foursome, whose records and TV shows were huge hits from 1966 to 1968.

A 1960s visual icon

Just viewed as an object of graphic design, this cover (or any other teen mag of the era) is a triumph of 1960s art:  brilliant, vivid colors; a riot of type faces and colors; the cover-every-inch aesthetic; the goofy photo heads on cartoon bodies.  Promised inside were nine color posters– with “autographs”– and, yes, there they are, ready for ripping out and Scotch-taping up to your wall.

Davy vanishes and Jim offers a sing-along

16 SPEC was a quarterly spinoff of 16, a teen mag first published in 1957 (with Elvis on the cover). SPEC was more “special” or “spectacular,” with more pin-ups and profiles.  There is lots of coverage of the Monkees (”Davy Vanishes!” is an article about Davy Jones, the British Monkee, and his taking a vacation). The bopper band Paul Revere and the Raiders is a close runner-up; heartthrob Mark Lindsay was co-hosting (with “Bandstand’s” perennial teenager, Dick Clark) the TV show “Happening ‘68″).  There are photo spreads with the (not-very-hearthrobby) actors from Star Trek and the teenage stars of the new movie version Romeo and Juliet.   There’s an article encouraging you to “Sing-Along with Jim Morrison & the Doors,” with all the words from the new album by this far-from-squeaky-clean rock star.

White boys, white girls

Who, I wondered, is “Sajid”?  For a few months in the 1960s Sajid Khan was everywhere in teen fandom.  I had to look him up– and there he is on the Internet, a young (well, he used to be young; now he’s 58)  TV star from India, who had made a movie about an elephant — Maya– that became a short-lived TV series in the 1968 season.  Some savvy agent obviously saw great teen-idol potential in Sajid and he therefore had his moment in the sun.  Here Sajid answers “60 Mysterious Questions.”  (”Do you believe in flying saucers?”  ”I have never seen one.”).  If he counts as a Person of Color — and I guess he does, even though he’s a not-too-dark, not -too-Asian, sort of American-looking Indian–then he is one of two in this entire magazine.  The other is Aretha Franklin, in a very small B+W photo in the back of the magazine.  Overwhelmingly, the stars here are (1) white, and (2) male.  Why? That’s easy:  the market, teen and preteen girls, encouraged by the articles and photos and gossip columns to think of themselves as potential match-ups with the hot guys inside.

What you’ve always wanted to be

And let’s not forget that this audience numbered in the millions:  ”middle boomers,” born in the mid-1950s, an enormous cohort of teenage girls (OK, there may have been some boys who read these mags, too), children of relatively more affluent parents, with TVs in the home, and lots of money for movies, magazines, and — by “enclosing a one-dollar bill”– a copy of 16’s “How You Can Be Prettier” book, or  (another buck) “16’s Popularity & Beauty Book,” which will tell you “how to act, look and be like you’ve always wanted.”

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EYE magazine, where hipness met consumerism, was a brief candle amidst the flickering lights of the 1960s.

EYE magazine was a short-lived (15 issues, 1968-69) effort by the Hearst Corporation to cash on the exploding youth market in publishing (and, of course, in advertising profits).  The rainbow logo, with its echoes of Peter Max and  ”Op” art, gives you a hint right away.  Hearst was already publishing Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Harper’s Bazaar– and EYE, it seems, was largely meant for younger, female readers, to judge strictly by the advertising in this issue:  makeup, perfumes, hair products, more makeup, handbags, and a Wonder Bread (”Helps catch boys!”) ad inside the back cover:  ”Don’t forget this: boys love to eat. And they love Wonder sandwiches.”).

The Beatles–two of them, at least–and “Beautiful Persons.”

This issue features counterculture superstar John Lennon, in an oddly unmemorable (not to mention poorly focused) photograph by Linda Eastman, already gaining a reputation for her portraits of rock musicians.  He and Paul McCartney had been in New York in May for a whirlwind visit in connection with the creation of Apple Corps, their new company.  Their “101 hours” in New York are chronicled by Lillian Roxon, the Australian journalist who would soon be publishing her “Rock Encyclopedia,” a landmark in rock history.  Roxon was a Contributing Editor at Eye, and was responsible in this issue for two other pieces.  The first is a feature called “Elevator: People on the Way Up (and Down),” in which she calls the reader’s attention to 27-year-old “Mike Cimino,” who had just won the award for the World’s Best Television Commercial (a spot for Eastman Kodak), and who had his eye set on doing something big in Hollywood.  (As Michael Cimino, he would direct The Deerhunter and win an Oscar in 1978).   The second is an embarrassing one-page sermon on “Cosmetics of the Soul,” described as “the art of being as beautiful inside as outside. . . . Whatever you want to call it, it’s what everyone wants to be these day.  A Beautiful Person.”

Glitz, glamour, and guys with money

EYE was well known for its high-quality inserts:  foldout posters of celebrities, a record, a comic book (Spiderman).  In this issue, there are record reviews, a car review (the Bond-ish Lotus Europa), a fashion spread (fake furs, sexy models), an article about flying a glider, an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s best-selling The Pump House Gang, an article about student radicals, and a gushing profile of four under-30 male entrepreneurial success stories, with the guys posing together in a bank vault: “Members of a generation in a hurry . . . not likely to stand still waiting for Success to happen.”

The conquest of cool

Though it was a brief candle in the life of Sixties publishing, EYE might well stand as Exhibit A for the “rise of hip consumerism” so well documented by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool (1997)–the rather rapid “discovery” that hipness and the counterculture were easily converted into commodities, and could be effective bandwagons for making money, even for corporations as historically identified with the conservative Establishment as Hearst.

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The wacky adventures of Archie Andrews and his friends–permanently enrolled in Riverdale High School, somewhere in the United States–began appearing in comic books just a few weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  The Archie franchise moved quickly from comic books to a radio series and newspaper funny pages in the 1940s.   But it was as comic book characters that they are best remembered, and in 1968 the comics were still going strong (though the price had gone up from 10 to 12 cents).  In fact, that year might be said to constitute a major milestone in the life of this durable series.  See that little miniature drawing above the title on this cover?  Yes, that’s “The Archies,” the fictional garage band (well, of COURSE it’s fictional–all of the band’s members are cartoon characters) that cut its first album in 1968 and became an animated cartoon series on television, tying in with the launch of the band.  The group appears in a story in this issue, saving the day by stepping in as a substitute for a string quartet at the annual teachers’ “tea dance.”   In the cover image, that’s blonde Betty Cooper on the left, attired in hip-huggers; rich, brunette Veronica Lodge on the right, in mod go-go boots; and the combo itself:  Archie on guitar, Jughead Jones on drums; and Reggie Mantle on bass.  (If the catchy beat of The Archies’ hit single of 1969, “Sugar, Sugar,” suddenly and annoyingly popped into your head, my apologies.)

The characters of Archie and his friends were said to be inspired by the successful “Andy Hardy” series of the 1930s, though in the world of Archie, there are no counterparts to the wise Judge Hardy (Andy’s dad) among the series’ buffoonish adults (the school principal, Mr. Weatherby; spinster schoolteacher Miss Grundy; tycoon Mr. Lodge, etc.).  In the 1950s, Archie and his friends (along with the somewhat similar Dobie Gillis gang) became widely recognized as stand-ins for “Typical Teenagers,” something of an obsession of that decade.  They changed very little over the years, even as the teenage years and youth culture in general became more complicated in the 1960s.  Hints, however, are dropped every now and then into these pages that the counterculture and the generation gap were affecting even these “average” teens and their followers (who were kids and pre-teens, for the most part).   There is that band, after all–unthinkable, probably, without the precedents of the British bands and their American imitators (e.g., the Monkees) in the 1960s.  And there’s an ad in this issue for “Psychedelic Poster Covers” for books; they’re “mind-blowing,” with “groovy love slogans.”   Finally, there is a panel in one story in this issue in which Archie’s lazy friend Jughead shows up at the Andrews’ front door, yawning and saying: “Is there a place for us guys who don’t want to make love OR war?”

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