The Experts Failed to Blush

Esquire is the kind of magazine in which a mother says, "Have a good time at the party and be a good girl," and her daughter replies: "Make up your mind." In Washington last week the Post Office Department began a hearing to determine: 1) whether Esquire's jokes and its "Varga Girl" drawings are obscene (TIME, Oct.11; 2) whether second-class mail privileges should be denied to the widely read (circ. 695,285), 50-c- smoking-room slick.

For four days, balding, humorless Post Office Attorney Calvin Hassell, a pious man and a Boy Scout worker, led witnesses on a sexy jaunt through a collection of ribald material culled from eleven Esquires. Spectators had the most fun.

Tuesday-Wednesday. Boston (and Harvard) Psychiatrist Kenneth Tillotson gazed soberly at samples of Artist Alberto Varga's skimpily clad babes, then testified "as a doctor who has examined hundreds of women." Said he: Varga girls are "inspiring" and not abnormally hippy, though sometimes their feet are too big. He was shown an Esquire joke about a corporal who found two luscious blondes in his Pullman berth and said, "One of you girls will have to leave." Dr. Tillotson's reaction: "That I call funny."

Thursday. Principal Herbert W. Smith of Chicago's Francis W. Parker School (375 children, all ages) pooh-poohed the Post Office, testified he had found such words as "whore" in Shakespeare, "sono-va-bitch" in the Chicago Tribune. He looked at an Esquire cartoon in which a harem beauty with a "Happy Birthday" tag on her ankle approaches two Yanks in the desert. Says one Yank to the other:

"How did the Sultan know it was my birthday?" Harmless humor, said Witness Smith, and cracked: "She'd be very difficult to dispose of in the ordinary army barracks."

Friday. Most surprising witness was Louis Croteau, executive secretary of Boston's bluenosed, privately financed Watch and Ward Society, "watchdog of New England's morals." He qualified as smut expert because he sees four or five burlesque shows a week for 40 weeks a year (enough to make it pretty tiresome), hunts indecency in some 60 to 70 publications weekly. Said he: "After profound consideration, I didn't find anything. . . . lewd [in Esquire']. ... It is in the spirit of good clean slapstick humor and we could all use a little more of it right now."

Testified Yale Psychiatrist Clements Fry: "I have seen Varga girls pasted up in boys' rooms at Yale, and don't think the boys pay a great deal of attention to them."

He told Prosecutor Hassell Biblical stories about Abraham, who took a "handmaiden," and Jacob, who worked seven years for Rachel, was tricked into marrying her sister Leah, then had to work seven more years for Rachel--making two wives. "Do you [think] the Bible is sexually as stimulating as Esquire?" bristled Hassell. "Certainly not," replied Dr. Fry.

At week's end more witnesses were to come, and the decision was days, possibly weeks away. Because defeat would be expensive (loss of second-class, cheaper-rate mailing rights would cost some $400,000 a year), Esquire was ready to appeal to the Supreme Court if it lost.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.