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  The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

  Relationship Secrets from the Trenches

  Taylor Marsh

  Always, for Mark

  “How do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number one threat to women.”

  —Louis C.K.,

  from the HBO special Oh My God

  “Analysis is no substitute for guts.”

  —Naomi Shields,

  from The Chapman Report,

  Screenplay by Wyatt Cooper and Don Mankiewicz

  Contents

  Introduction

  1: What Do You Want?

  2: Hollywood to Sexy Baby and Girls

  3: Talk Dirty to Me

  4: My Year in Smut — No Fifty Shades

  5: Being Jackie, Being Hillary

  6: How to Catch a Man

  7: God’s Outdoors

  8: The Perfect Relationship

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Everyone remembers where they were on 9/11, the day nineteen hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center towers. I was sitting at home in Beverly Hills, California, getting ready for my early morning shift as a phone sex actress.

  It was the latest escapade in my sexual education that began when I discovered my father’s dog-eared edition of Candy in our garage attic, when I was around nine. Terry Southern’s raunchy erotica blew my mind and began a journey that landed me in the most outrageous places, especially for a former beauty queen.

  A goody two-shoes, Miss Missouri from the Show-Me State, I grew up during the modern feminist revolution that secured my interest in politics and eventually landed me as a national political writer living in the Beltway area of Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.

  How a Miss America contestant, not to mention a Miss Friendship in the Miss Teenage America Pageant, and homecoming queen, ended up as editor-in-chief of the first female-run soft-core website to make money on the web is only part of the story, but it did get my picture on the pages of USA Today at the time.

  Wait. But…

  How in God’s name could a former Miss Missouri also be a liberated feminist, especially if she chose to delve into the sex trade and adult entertainment worlds? She couldn’t possibly believe she could solve the questions of her own life by asking strangers looking for love, marriage and sex, questions about why they wanted what they wanted, let alone figure out what it all meant for others.

  When first the Washington Post and then the New Republic sent reporters to interview me for profiles during the height of the 2008 presidential election cycle, I described myself as “the Hugh Hefner of politics,” which became the title to TNR’s article. At the time I was excavating the adult industry, I intended to write about politics on the female-owned, soft-core website for which I worked, like Hugh Hefner did for Playboy, giving my political analysis of events, while offering the female-dominated site a social and political consciousness in an industry run by men. Hefner had been at the epicenter of the sexual revolution itself. When all hell broke loose in the early 1970s, I was part of the feminist generation that rose up and began changing what it meant to be a woman in America.

  In the mid-’90s, the web offered females in the sex industry their first glimpse at the possibilities for economic and creative independence, a prospect that fascinated me. Conservatives and feminists rail against the sex industry for good reasons, but I wasn’t there to judge women whose choices were theirs to make. I jumped at the chance to have a front-row seat at the history they were making in a man’s industry.

  But being Relationship Consultant at the LA Weekly in 1992 was my first foray into finding out what men and women want and how they go about getting it. When my column moved to the web in 1996, I became one of the first people writing about relationships, men, women and the politics of sex online. From helping love-seekers write mainstream personal ads to starting the first alternative personal ads in the LA Weekly, I helped people find fun, love and “special arrangements.” My trademarked relationship column was titled “What Do You Want?” The answer to that question is where it all begins for each of us.

  Online dating has now evolved into a multi-billion dollar business.

  The Pill made women’s liberation a reality, just as the modern feminist revolution made the next advances possible and relationships much more complex. The trajectory my life and writing career were taking as the web took off matched the arc of women’s freedom, sexual power and political ascension.

  Why I picked the family I did to drop into from oblivion I’ll never know for sure. So, no sins of omission or confessions here, just a simple explanation for the road I chose. My adventures were fueled by the crazy combustion of family life at the moment the feminine mystique collided with sexual liberation, leading to the birth of the modern feminist revolution.

  I’m also not a believer in dragging people through a tiresome chronicle about a screwed-up family. Abusive beginnings don’t make a life. And if I’m certain of one thing, whether I can explain it all or not, it’s that as sure as I was Miss Missouri, every exhilarating, unbounded experience and drama of my story has set me on the ride of a lifetime that I’ve authored myself. I wouldn’t change any of it. Without my family, I would not have found and tapped the bravery of kin to venture into places I was told a lady never went, and wouldn’t have come to understand my own humanity, let alone get a glimpse of others’, so I could relate to them and relay the stories of those who dared to tell their tales of love and lust to me.

  The heroine of my life is my mother, Marjorie, who almost 100 years ago blasted onto earth and dared to never give up so that I’d be here today. It wasn’t until April of 2013 that we finally pieced the rest of her story together and I learned she was originally named Phyllis. Born in 1916, she would learn she’d been adopted twice, was left by her father when her adoptive mother was killed, and had been told her wrong birthday, which she didn’t learn until she applied for Social Security. As she told it to me (but few others), the woman she thought was her birth mother, Eva, had stuffed herself out to appear pregnant when she was not.

  Then, when my mother was still a baby, the gas stove blew up, engulfing the house and killing Mom’s first adoptive mother, Eva Gaynell McKain Cloughley. Her adoptive father Robert promptly turned tail and ran for the hills, never to be seen again. That is, until she took us on a visit when I was in my early teens to Wichita, Kansas, and he appeared out of nowhere at the front door of the person we were visiting, decades after running out on my mother when single-fatherhood came calling. Just the thought of him being at the front door sent my mother into hair-raising panic. She bolted from the house, dragging me out the back door, and drove immediately back to Missouri without staying one night in Kansas, talking a blue streak about her crazy life as we drove along. She forever awakened my wide-eyed consciousness, as she told me what she knew of her beginnings, how she entered the world.

  My mother’s second adoptive mother, Lily M. McKain, became my great grandmother, whom I never knew, but who is legend in our tiny surviving family. In this part of her story, my mother got lucky, because the McKains had some money, as their living on the north side of Joplin, Missouri at the time signified. This is how Mom landed in college, the University of Arkansas, pledging Tri Delta. In the early twentieth c
entury, going to college was unheard of for a girl raised near the Boot Heel area of Missouri.

  In the middle of my mother’s dramatic entrance, throw in a handsome rapscallion dandy of a man, my father Floyd. He was a smooth-talking shoe salesman, popular with the ladies, and a bastard of a man from start to finish. This is the relationship that everyone goes back to for any girl, especially one who takes close to a ten-year detour to excavate the worlds of sex and men, women, dating and relationships. The first male relationship seals a girl’s destiny on the road to understanding men and even finding love for daddy’s little girl, or so the shrinks tell it. Ours was a short, strange and unhealthy relationship, and that’s all you’re going to get from me on it.

  Hurricane Floyd tore through our lives and left carnage across the family landscape. But it’s not like he planned it. His mother, grandma Marshall to me, was a witch of a woman, with my life’s embedded memory of her simply a picture in my mind: Grandma Marshall standing over my beloved grandpa as he sat at his desk, hissing at him in a voice that sent chills down my spine as I watched from the stairs. My daddy simply labeled it “black Irish,” which for our family meant a vicious strain of temperament that seemed to wreak havoc through evil.

  Before Floyd showed up at the University of Arkansas and my mother climbed out the sorority window to elope with him, Daddy had plenty of troubles of his own. One moment that seemingly haunted him was the time he was driving and ended up in an accident that left his date dead and him still alive. The girl riding shotgun had been named Marjorie, the same as the woman he would marry, my mother. But after Daddy married Mom, he always called her Duchess, the name Marjorie never spoken from his lips.

  Floyd and Marjorie were beautiful people, epic partiers and big drinkers. Not that I was there to see it, because they had me late, so by that time Daddy spent most of his time in the hospital, and I in front of the TV. But the pictures left behind show it, the happier chapters of their lives unfolding frame by frame on the flip side of the carnage-riddled drama their partnership organically caused. Happy times turned to dramatic soap opera events at a time in the twentieth century when roles for men and women were starting to implode, and late-entry kids like myself watched it all unravel.

  The next generations, including my brother, sister and me, were all forged through this emotional volcano and not only survived it, but thrived as a result of being made stronger and smarter as a result of it, making ours a quintessentially American story. This isn’t a whine, but the truth, the foundation and the proof of the inevitability of the modern women’s revolution and just one of the stories that helped shake it loose from America’s gut. Our family was a microcosm of the foundation that came before what continues to play out in our culture, though today’s families have more outside forces invading, while ours came from internal thunder.

  It’s just that nobody talked about what was happening openly when it was happening. We never processed anything; we pushed the struggles and the secrets down. Life played out on top, while underneath was a landscape of cultural convulsion and societal fracking, a precursor of what’s going on today in the great information giveaway, as parents melt away and controls disappear. It was back during the 1950s and ’60s when the traditional notion of relationships started falling apart, because women had begun to rebel on the way to being set free to walk away from the setup.

  Mom and Dad were smokers, caught in the cloud of advertised glamour in the Mad Men era. My Aunt Maxine and Uncle Dick were part of the cast of the musical of my family life, which always had a soundtrack playing in the background. It began with Frank Sinatra, but included all things cool and male and libidinous. A smoldering track was always playing at our family record store, Marshall’s Record Rendezvous. Maxine was a bombshell of a broad who, while my Uncle Dick was off flying way too many missions in WWII (and ending up with battle fatigue for his heroism), was trying her hand at modeling, which was quite the scandal for the midwestern norm. The scuttlebutt was she was too much woman for him, because she wasn’t the housewife type.

  While Uncle Dick was off fighting the enemy for his country, my dad was at Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas doing his part for the war efforts in an essential industry that meant he couldn’t be spared for combat. However, what isn’t known is whether he ever had a choice to fight in combat instead, which was an option given to many men of draft age, while women were taking their places in factories so the men could fight.

  Since I was so young when all this played out, I relied on parts of my story’s validation from my older brother Larry, the only real father I’ve ever known. The man who became my sister’s rock, but also rescued my mother and me, too, when Daddy died. He would also become the mentor of my political life, because of the impact John F. Kennedy had on him, something I chronicled in my one-woman show, Weeping for JFK. Whatever a father is supposed to mean to a little girl growing up, Larry was that for my sister and me.

  When my father died my mother didn’t even know where the checkbook was kept. That’s the way it was. It hardly mattered, because there was nothing in it. Daddy had left a financial black hole behind. Mom also had to get her head around working for a living again at midlife, while learning to cope with a young, ambitious hell-on-wheels little girl with dreams of Broadway and changing the world. It was an all-hands-on-deck moment, and as usual, there stood Larry to help guide me on a path, which I blasted into on a trajectory that no one quite understood.

  Making sense of a gang of disparate misfits, otherwise known as my family, wasn’t easy, but that’s what I did. Eventually. So I chose my mother as heroine and cast my dad as a character fitting a Hemingway novel, which gave his life some grace and allowed me to face my family, understand and forgive. It was far more satisfying than the psychobabble alternative that didn’t fit the grand sweep of the life I intended to manifest, which had no place in it anywhere for moping victimology. Our story was as American as anyone else’s, it being hardly original that my father left me with more than the usual share of daddy issues, even if the details diverged.

  All of this was the story of my family, the drama of the woman who gave birth to me in her late thirties at a time in the 1950s when few women that age were having children. Mom told me the event of her pregnancy made the papers, though that may have just become part of her myth on the way to surviving it all.

  Marjorie’s life was all so unbelievable for its force of insanity and unfairness, particularly when you look at the burden she carried so much of the time in a moment in America when men were king. It’s part of the inheritance feminists are still fighting to change. The woman who sent me on my journey was born in the second decade of the twentieth century. Now, as we travel through the second decade a hundred years later, telling her tale is part of the book on the road to women’s independence. The rest of this story represents our struggle for equality, especially in our relationships.

  Watching my mother fight for us at midlife, our secret celebrations when she’d get a nickel raise per hour, her generosity when she’d send me five dollars one month at college, and then leaving me that final payment to finish off my school loan in a tiny life insurance policy that might as well have been a million dollars to me, stays with me, because of what it meant about her life and ours.

  Before it was over, my mother got yet another shock. When applying for Social Security, she couldn’t locate a birth certificate. There was a call to my big brother, the curious story shared, letters back and forth to the Social Security Administration, and then, she finally was told that the birthday we’d always celebrated wasn’t the actual date of her birth. She wasn’t born in July 1916, but in June 1916. It was a weird moment in a life that had its start tumultuously, with her birth mother, Catherine, handing her off to someone who thought that adoption wasn’t proper and had to be kept secret, so she had pretended to be pregnant when she wasn’t. You simply didn’t openly adopt in those days. But also the shame of not being able to conceive, a woman’s primary value
at that time, was too much.

  If I’d been born in my mother’s age, I would have been swallowed up whole and never allowed to rebel and discover. If I’d listened to my sisters in the modern-girl revolution, I wouldn’t have had the gall to dare to venture into the man’s world and find answers to questions women had been asking for years about men, sex and relationships. These were questions from women who couldn’t figure out what they wanted or how to get it when they knew.

  It’s also the reason beauty pageants came into the picture. They offered scholarships and money, leading to industrials and other gigs that paid better for a beauty queen, who was also a dancer and actress, all of which made me more marketable. It was a way to college at a time when everyone was determined to get me there, especially me. There was no money from Daddy and no loan options, so I would have to get my degree by whatever means necessary, which I did, a semester early.

  But coming at the moment when women’s liberation was front and center, modern judgments abounded for beauty pageants and their queens. Like when I was in Atlantic City, New Jersey competing in the Miss America Pageant. I came out of the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel one day, where I was staying, to find N.O.W. picketing the pageant. One female protester confronted me, asking, “How can you demean yourself like this?” That was easy, so I simply replied: “You want to pay for my college tuition?”

  Mine was a journey in the Age of Gloria. Steinem, of course. She was that gorgeous girl who commanded attention and rocked America’s comfy, traditional world. She even took it to Hugh Hefner, exposing his business practices and how he treated women who worked for him, who weren’t the chosen top models. People don’t talk about it much today, but feminism in the Age of Gloria was S.E.X.Y., caps required. But it would forever be for me a complex juggling of societal expectations and my own renegade vision for myself that included no boundaries on what I could explore.