Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "College Cherries" (1974)

College life is the pits, according to Ed Wood.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "College Cherries." Originally published in Fantastic Annual (Gallery Press), 1974. Credited to "Dick Trent."

Excerpt: "The day of the goldfish eating, the crowding of as many bodies as possible into telephone booths, even the panty raids seem to have disappeared into history to be replaced by pot-sex orgy parties. Taking any kind of survey would prove that few students have escaped the vapors of pot . . . and it was reported recently that the grass smoke was so thick in one dormitory that even nonsmoking visitors were enveloped and sent to their own rewards simply by being there . . . or guilt by association."

Another of Ed Wood's explorations of college life.

Reflections: Ed Wood was part of the so-called Greatest Generation, i.e. those Americans born between 1901 and 1927 who lived through the Great Depression and fought in World War II. I'm guessing many of Eddie's readers in the 1970s were also members of this fabled generation. But the Greatest Generation was middle-aged or older by this time, long past the days of having wild, uninhibited sex with multiple partners. As a result, most of the articles in When the Topic is Sex tend to focus on the erotic escapades of the younger generation. In a more general sense, then, you could say that this book is Ed Wood's critique of the Baby Boomers—their manners and morals.

"College Cherries" purports to be an exposé of what was happening on America's college campuses in the early 1970s. Namely, the students were screwing each other's brains out in every possible combination. Now, what Ed Wood didn't know about college life you could almost squeeze into the Hollywood Bowl, but he paints a pretty vivid picture in "College Cherries" anyway. He's essentially a sci-fi writer imagining what life must be like on a distant planet.

Above all, Ed wants us to know that the days of virginal college girls are over. "A cherry in the student body is something that's few and far between," he writes. So, then, why is this article called "College Cherries'? I'll chalk it up to administrative oversight. Or maybe Ed just didn't think these things through. Anyway, according to this article, the modern college girl wants to have as many sexual partners as possible. Ed also takes this opportunity to disparage the missionary position once again. (He writes about this so often that it seems like a personal vendetta.) 

Before college girls started to "put out," Ed Wood informs us, college boys had to resort to whorehouses or homosexuality. "After all when a male reaches college age his sex stimulation has become very important to him," Ed writes. I have no idea if this is true. Did straight college boys used to hump each other in their dorm rooms? This article implies that they did.

At least for the purposes of this story, Ed sides with the youngsters and their attempts to undermine or sidestep the "ancient rules" imposed upon them by the prudish, old-fashioned college administrators. These include curfews and the segregation of men and women in the dorms. Eddie even seems to approve of the students having marijuana-fueled orgies and switching partners every few weeks. At the article's conclusion, he writes:

 If anything is being done to stop the forward sex motion of these young people, either by parents or the faculties, it is being done in entire secrecy . . . secrecy from the students and themselves as well. So far little harm is being felt by these sexual friendships, and in none too few cases it is said that the sexual freedom movement has done a hell of a lot more good than bad . . . it might be a mind stopper to some, but it is a tremendous mind builder to others.

A pretty forgiving attitude, wouldn't you say?

Compare this to Ed Wood's script for The Class Reunion (1972), in which the twentysomething characters express nothing but contempt for college kids and their immoral ways. Then again, those same twentysomethings wind up having an orgy in their hotel room, so who are they to judge? Maybe Ed mellowed a bit between The Class Reunion and "College Cherries." Or he was in a grouchy mood when he wrote the former.

Incidentally, "College Cherries" is another article that I had already reviewed. If you want to know what I thought of this story back in 2019, I invite you to read a blog post entitled "Ed Wood Goes to College."

Next: "Head—Heaven and Hell" (1973)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 84: Ed Wood Goes to College (1974)

This week, let's put the "Ed" in "higher education."

"My school was the open road, pain and suffering my textbooks. My teachers? The gypsies and rapscallions I met along the way."

-Manny Coon

Anderson House in Washington, D.C.

There is no solid evidence to suggest that Edward D. Wood, Jr. earned any degree beyond his high school education. He likely never even finished the 12th grade. But the pre-Hollywood years of his life are still only sketchily documented at best, so it's entirely possible Ed continued his studies in some fashion after his 1942-46 stint in the military. In Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy, Wood's widow Kathy recalled: "He told me he went to Northwestern University in Chicago after he got out of the Marine Corps." Could this have been another of Ed's tall tales or did the director of Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) really study at the prestigious institution?

Ed's business partner John Crawford Thomas alleged that Eddie studied writing at the Kingsmith School of the Creative Arts in Washington, D.C. and even typed the script for Crossroads of Laredo on official Kingsmith stationery. The address Thomas lists for the place—2118 Massachusetts Ave. NW—is that of the historic Anderson House, which since 1939 has been a museum and library run by the Society of the Cincinnati. Rudolph Grey's own timeline of Ed Wood's life states that in 1946, Ed studied "at Kings School of Dramatic Arts, Frank Lloyd Wright Institute, Washington, D.C." Note the subtle name change from Thomas' version of the story.

Whatever academic adventures Ed Wood may have had in his own life, higher education remained a sub-motif in his work from the 1950s to the 1970s. In Glen or Glenda (1953), for instance, Dolores Fuller's character, Barbara, is introduced as a college student with "only seven months to go" in her schooling. She is apparently studying psychology and has graduated by the end of the film, crowing, "My studies are through, college is concluded, and I'm free at last!" Not that all this education helps Barbara cope with the tricky issues of life. "The end of study is only the beginning of reality," she somberly declares. I've seen Glenda with college-age audiences, and this line tends to get appreciative howls from them.

In truth, by the way, Dolores Fuller only pursued her own education after leaving Ed Wood. In Nightmare of Ecstasy, she lists "going to college" as one of her proudest post-Wood accomplishments. Eddie, meanwhile, merely frequented a bar called the College Inn with actor Kenne Duncan and cinematographer Bill Thompson.

More college connections? Well, The Undergradute (1971), which Ed Wood wrote for producer Jacques Descent, takes place entirely on a college campus and consists of an explicit sex lecture given by an open-minded teacher (John Dullaghan) to his libidinous students. The Class Reunion (1972), one of Ed's many collaborations with producer-director Stephen C. Apostolof, centers around the horny alumni of "the old alma mater," who gather in a hotel for a weekend to screw, drink, and reminisce. Wood and Apostolof would have explored collegiate life further in two more films, The Basketballers and The Teachers, but neither of these scripts was ever produced.

And then there are the two collegiate-themed articles I'm covering this week, both of them from 1974. Technically, these fall under the category of non-fiction, but Ed's supposed "research" is so obviously fraudulent that I'd be willing to think of them as short stories. These are presented as true-to-life exposés, but they derive solely from the imagination of Ed Wood.

More collegiate adventures.

The stories:

• "College Cherries," originally published in Fantastic Annual, January/February 1974. Credited to "Dick Trent." 
"College Interview," originally published in Cherry, vol. 3, no. 1, January/February 1974. Credited to "Ann Gora." Both of these articles were anthologized in Short Wood: Short Fiction by Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Ramble House, 2009).

Synopses:

• "College Cherries" describes the sex lives of contemporary college students, particularly females. Girls are no longer concerned about protecting their virginity, so boys are therefore less reliant on prostitutes and homosexuality to fulfill their needs. Meanwhile, the innocent campus fads of old, such as goldfish-swallowing and panty raids, have been replaced by "pot-sex orgy parties." Girls are also much more sexually aggressive now, which is an improvement over the old days, when women entered into marriage with little to no sexual knowledge. College, the article concludes, is a time for people to experiment with as many sex partners as possible. When these young people get married, they'll know "what it's all about" in the bedroom.
• "College Interview" presents itself as the testimony of a young woman called Dolores S., supposedly a student at "a major university." She does not believe that society will return to the puritanical ways of the past, when girls who got pregnant or even talked about sex openly were disowned by their families. Dolores says things are better now, when people can talk honestly about their sexual hang-ups. She says that sexual frustration drove people to insanity or alcoholism in the past. But no more! Dolores will do whatever she wants, including fellatio and lesbianism. Sex is out in the open, and it can't be "shoved back into the dark closet ever again."

   
Wood trademarks: "Missionary position" (again italicized, cf. "The Exterminator," "Never Look Back"); whorehouses (cf. "The Whorehouse Horror"); typing in ALL CAPS (cf. "Never Up—Never In"); phrase "what it's all about" (cf. Necromania); women's underwear (cf. Bloomer Girls); ellipses (cf. nearly all stories in Blood Splatters Quickly and Angora Fever); invention of the automobile and the airplane (cf. Glen or Glenda); disdain for puritanism (cf. Orgy of the Dead); the scourge of alcoholism (cf. Nightmare of Ecstasy); mention of the play The Blackguard (cf. The Blackguard Returns); character named Dolores (possible nod to Dolores Fuller); "medical men of science" (cf. Glen or Glenda).

Excerpts:

• (from "College Cherries") "And of course the panty and brassiere raids of yesterday were mild events when considered with the demands of today. Simply stealing the undies isn't enough any longer. Now the boys demand getting into the places which the panties and the brassiere covered… and where the lipstick was once well painted. However there are still the collectors… such as the young fellow who brags about having more than a hundred panties in his locker… each taken from a girl he has laid… or had various forms of sex with."
• (from "College Interview") "Now isn't it better that the whole thing is right out in the open? There certainly are fewer people going to the rubber room at the happy farm because of their sexual hang ups. Bedlam, the kookoo bin in England, might never have been necessary if the medical men and men of science started thinking with an open mind centuries ago. But they are a stubborn lot. They wanted all the knowledge so they could keep the rest of the people from finding out what a phony most of them were."

   

Dr. Alton in Glen or Glenda.

Reflections: Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, college campuses were seen as hotbeds of sexual experimentation, where students were living wild, libertine lifestyles, finally unshackled from the stifling morality of the past. Or at least that's the image of campus life consistently presented in pornography of the era. In a way, this makes sense. College kids are generally young, healthy, and of legal age. Plus, they're out on their own, living away from their parents for the first time. And students of the era were challenging social and political norms.

But the middle-aged men in the porno biz didn't really care about politics or society. They just wanted to drool over those attractive college kids having no-holds-barred, no-strings-attached sex. Sex without guilt! Sex without commitment! Sex with one partner after another!

It's interesting to me that these adult magazines had to disguise all this as supposed scientific research. Pseudo-documentary films like Glen or Glenda (1953) and The Undergraduate (1971) have been called "white coaters," since they attempt to present salacious or lewd material in a dry, educational manner. "College Cherries" and "College Interview" are the textual equivalent of "white coaters," since they're both written like news articles. In the former, Eddie even cites a bogus expert named Dr. Graham B. Balini, who insists that "Radcliffe girls think petting is dirty because it's teasing. They feel if you are going to do it, it's better just to have sexual intercourse.” Uh huh. Sure. Please do not ask for Dr. Balini's professional credentials.

It's difficult to suss out Ed Wood's true opinion of homosexuality in these articles. In "College Cherries," he writes: "Perhaps something very good has come from the sexual revolution on the campus however, because the incidents of male homosexuality has dropped considerably. When the girls were keeping the legs of their panties tight and the boys couldn’t find a whore or street girl they naturally turned to their own kind for their releases." Naturally, Ed.

In "College Interview," Dolores says that homosexuals will have no problem finding others of their kind on college campuses today, since everything is out in the open. Homosexuals existed in the past, too, "but whoever heard of homosexuality then except a few long bearded psychiatrists who turned out to be some kind of sex freak themselves?" I can't be sure, but I think Dolores is referring to Sigmund Freud here.

In all, "College Cherries" and "College Interview" are minor but interesting footnotes in the Ed Wood saga, mementos of a time when horny, aging men were obsessed with the sex lives of college students. For more nonsense in this same vein, be sure to check out College Girls (1968), a film by Stephen C. Apostolof. Neither Ed nor Steve knew a damned thing about youth culture or college life, but that didn't even slow them down!