Neanderthal Night

Franco's Spain, like Cromwell's England, maintains a stern attitude toward the proprieties. Respectable ladies of Madrid see that their evening gowns are cut high in back as well as in front, men wear two-piece bathing suits on the beaches, and unmarried girls are never permitted out after dark without a chaperone. Spaniards have long viewed with horrid fascination and some alarm the thriving colony of fun-loving American expatriates at sunbaked Costa del Sol, southwest of Malaga.

One stormy night last November, two stern and intractable members of Franco's Guardia Civil, on routine patrol on the beach in search of smugglers, peered into the windows of an American's seaside cottage to see what was to them an appalling sight: ladies in fig leaves and leopard-skin bras dancing with gentlemen in fur loincloths. Wanamaker Heir Gurnee Munn Jr. had invited the American colony to a caveman party. Many of the 100-odd guests he had invited to come in fancy undress had decided to stay home because of the bad weather. Those that came, despite their Neanderthal getup, behaved as circumspectly and with the same dogged gaiety as any like group in Sacramento or Scarsdale. But to the zealous guardsmen the party was saturnalia run amuck, and so they reported to their commanding officer, who alerted the military at Malaga. But the military could find no law against private gatherings of cave men and their women, and unaware of the commotion they had caused, the party guests went home.

But when a local photographer began to display some of the pictures he took that night, the military governor at Malaga seized the pictures and sent them to the civil governor, who in turn sent them on to Madrid. There, it was rumored, they were shown to Franco himself. As a result, Munn was fined $250 for arranging a meeting "of manifestly immoral nature." Each of his 40-odd guests was fined $75 for attending. Last week, after protesting in vain to the U.S. embassy, Cave Man Munn and a dozen of his playmates hired Spanish lawyers to file an appeal.

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