Sex positivity, polyamory, threesomes: they may not be universal practices but the extent to which they are more acceptable these days has a lot to do with a largely forgotten British polymath called Alex Comfort. In 1972, the physician, expert on molluscs and gerontologist published The Joy of Sex, the first popular book in the English language that explained and celebrated the art of making love.
A coffee table how-to guide with tasteful drawings of a naked couple in an imaginative range of sexual positions, it became a huge international bestseller and helped shift perceptions of sex some way along the procreational-recreational axis.
The extraordinary story of how the book came to be written is the subject of a comedy film due to go into production later this year from Sharon Maguire, director of the first and third Bridget Jones films, two of the highest-grossing comedies in British history. Maguire was also the inspiration for the character Shazza, Bridget’s close friend, played in the films by Sally Phillips.
“In a way, it’s a film about what made the Bridget Jones generation, because her parents would have probably read The Joy of Sex,” says Maguire. “But we didn’t have it in my house, growing up, because it was Irish Catholic. Sex wasn’t mentioned, never mind a book about it.”
The film, also called The Joy of Sex, will focus on the love triangle between Comfort, his wife, Ruth, and her best friend from university, Jane Henderson, a librarian who became Comfort’s lover and collaborator in cataloguing the choreography of their sexual adventures.
The middle-aged couple took Polaroids of their bedroom exploits, which Comfort, thinking they could be used in a book, proudly showed his publishers, much to their distress. Instead, two illustrators were commissioned to depict the graphic scenes that the writer described, but they struggled to find appropriate models to draw.
“They employed some pornographic models but that didn’t work because they kept putting their prices up and pouting at the camera,” says Maguire. That wasn’t deemed suitable for the target audience of loving couples. Eventually, one illustrator, Charles Raymond, volunteered with his wife to re-enact Comfort and Henderson’s sex life, while the other illustrator drew them.
“They were trying to do 200 different poses and it was during the power cuts,” laughs Maguire. “Obviously, poor old Charles kept shooting his load. Although it sounds like a sex romp, it was all well-intentioned, because there really was nothing like it. No textbooks, even medical ones, no illustrations, no pictures.”
Raymond was hippyishly hirsute, which initially deterred US publishers – Playboy thought the images featured a cave-dweller – but he no doubt helped establish beards as a symbol of virility in the 1970s.
For a number of years, while Comfort conducted his practical research with Henderson, he divided his time between the two women: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with his lover, and the rest of the week with his wife. “It was that tempestuous triangle that led to the creation of The Joy of Sex,” says Maguire, “but also, in a sense, to the unravelling of his life. The clashing psychologies of the three characters makes for this fascinating conundrum about love and sex and relationships that’s wrapped up in a comedy.”
Maguire is also simultaneously making a documentary about the book, and wants to get in touch with original readers who would now be in their late 70s or 80s. “It’s important to hear first-hand testaments and to bring to life the huge and positive impact of the book,” she says, “because, seen through a modern lens, I’m not sure Alex would appear in the most forgiving light. So I want to hear from couples or throuples or even singles whose lives and relationships were enriched by the book.”
Comfort was certainly enriched financially, although nowhere near as much as his publishers. But it led to the end of his marriage. His wife had tolerated sharing him with another woman but couldn’t bear the public humiliation of what she viewed as his and Henderson’s sex diary. Comfort held back publication of the book in the UK for two years while he divorced Ruth and married Jane.
The newlyweds relocated to California, where Comfort, then 53, took up a post at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal thinktank in Santa Barbara.
His son, Nick, once said of his father: “He had a suffocating upbringing. When he found what life could be like in California, there was no stopping him.”
Comfort was a prodigy who was largely home-schooled. At 14, he blew four fingers off his left hand when an attempt to make his own fireworks went wrong. The accident didn’t stop him, aged just 18, from publishing a well-received book based on a trip he took with his father to South America and Africa.
At Cambridge University, where he studied natural sciences, he was seen as a formidable intellect by his peers, but he was clueless about women, marrying the first one who approached him: Ruth Harris.
Like many men of his generation, he found sex hard to talk about. While his wife greatly admired his mind, she was not interested in pushing back the sexual boundaries. “The marriage was a ticking timebomb,” says Maguire, who believes that Comfort came to see sex as a liberating antidote to war.
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A conscientious objector, he was imprisoned in 1961 with Bertrand Russell for taking part in nuclear disarmament protests. But he grew to doubt the effectiveness of demonstrations. “I think he genuinely thought that sex was a means of changing the mindset away from fighting and wars,” says Maguire. “At first, when I started researching, I just thought that was his excuse to have a great time having sex. But I think that when he started having sex properly in his 40s, it was an epiphany.”
Henderson, Harris’s university friend, had re-entered the couple’s lives, and she seemed to share Comfort’s utopian ideas about the transformative powers of sexual congress. Comfort liked to compare sex to cooking. If knowing what to do in the kitchen results in better meals, he believed that knowing what to do in the bedroom would lead to a happier life.
When he moved to California, he became a regular – sometimes with his wife, often alone – at Sandstone, a clothing-optional resort and celebrity sex club in Topanga Canyon that attracted the likes of Dean Martin, Timothy Leary and Daniel Ellsberg.
Also in attendance there was the journalist Gay Talese, who wrote: “The nude biologist Dr Alex Comfort, brandishing a cigar, traipsed through the room between the prone bodies with the professional air of a lepidopterist strolling through the fields waving a butterfly net.”
The sunny libertine days did not last long. The scientist who saw sex as a great emancipating and pacifying force had failed to consider the risks of unlimited promiscuity. He was completely blindsided by Aids.
In any case, by the end of the 1970s, Henderson had wearied of orgies and permissiveness and told Comfort that she wanted a conventional marriage. “I think she had pretended she wanted an open relationship,” says Maguire, “but I don’t think she did.”
In 1985, they returned to the UK, where Comfort struggled to re-establish his reputation. His studies in gerontology failed to attract the academic interest he had expected. Although he was the author of some 50 books, the only thing people wanted to discuss with him was The Joy of Sex, which had become, by his own admission, an albatross around his neck.
In 1991, Comfort suffered a massive haemorrhage in his most prized organ, his brain. As he moved in and out of a coma, his wife died of a heart attack. Another stroke left him in a nursing home, living out his last years alone and paralysed but still in reasonable mental shape.
Not blessed with telegenic looks, Comfort never became as well known as the bestselling book that bore his name. For all his reservations about its effect on his reputation, he would have been pleased, thinks Maguire, that unorthodox forms of sexuality are now “more out in the open”.
Yet the sexual revolution he envisaged never quite materialised.
“He must have believed the experiment in his life would become the norm,” says Maguire. “But. of course, it didn’t. For all the complications of sex and love and desire that we all experience, monogamy remains the norm.”
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