The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 71

The Funky Smell of Liberation By-Andrew Tully McNmught Syndirale I 'i look like me. No powder, no lipstick, no eye shadow, no rouge. I don't know what they do for a living, but it is plain they do not toil in a chorus line. Maybe they're all corporation presidents who spend their evenings playing pinochle and smoking big cigars. I am in favor of equality for both sexes, and, for that matter, for anybody in between.

It does not bruise my male ego to discover that a United States senator is a woman, and I would not sell my two shares of General Motors stock if that little outfit suddenly was taken over by a female president. Women are as strong as horses and a lot smarter, and there may be something to the argument that the country wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble in the past if females had been running things. But what I can't understand is why women must sock to stop looking and smelling like women when they embark on careers in commerce, those who would say you should wear it only when entirely alone." I recall nostalgically the age of "forbidden" scents that drove men mad with lust and caused them to abandon jobs and run away to live in sin in Tahiti. Mind you, I have always been unequivocally opposed to such abdication of responsibility, but it was nice to know that a girl might be trying to interest me in signing up for at least a tryst in a corner booth at When a girl smelled as if she had just emerged from a bathtub full of My jSin, a regular fellow could assume she had not arrived to discuss international monetary policies. A RIDE on a bus.

a train or a flying machine these days is enough to convince any 100 per cent, red-blooded American male that glamor is out in the distaff department. Women not only smell pretty much like me, they seem to want to politics, bartending and ditch-digging. Most Of, them were born prettier than males, and their architecture is much more attractively They worry not about five o'clock shadow. Thus, were I a woman, I would not long to smell like a truck driver and look like my kid brother or Martin Van Buren or even Paiif Newman. I would squirt a gill or two of allure-behind my ears and treat my natural beauty to' 15-minute session with a makeup box.

Then, calm, in the assurance that I was irresistible, I would step outside and set about the pleasant chore of leading my favorite male to a life of delightful shame. AFTER ALL, women, you only live once, and do you really wish to spend your old age thumbing-through a scrapbook consisting exclusively of newspaper clippings about the bills you got passfict; in the House of Representatives? Washington EQUALITY FOR women has done us males in. Women don't smell as good as they used to. In the rush to doff her femininity in order to 'get elected dictator, the average female seems to feel that a whiff of Lifebuoy is more appropriate to her new status. Indeed, the more dedicated or frenzied the Women's Lib movement make a point of neglecting association even with a bar of soap in the mistaken belief that exuding the effluvium of a peasant just in from slopping the hogs gives them special standing with the masses.

But let that pass. I yearn for the bad old perfumed days of Tabu and Unbridled Passion, when women were dangerous and therefore objects of pursuit. Of Tabu, it used to be said it was "so intimate there might be 1 a Bizarre Crime Through a og Day Agaiiro i hi tx 1 v4' if i -I V. 1 1 Behind the Filming of By Jerry Parker New York EVEN HOLLYWOOD could not have thought up a bank robbery like this one: Three homosexual desperadoes rob a Chase Manhattan Bank branch of $213,000, they hold nine bank employees hostage for 14 hours, and it is all for the avowed purpose of financing a sex-change operation for the transvestite "wife" of one of them. It was Warner Bros, who gave us Bogey and Lorre, Cagney and Robinson, Garfield and Greenstreet; but probably not all of the brothers Warner with their heads together could have come up with celluloid criminals like Little John Wojt-owicz, Sal Naturile and Bobby Westen-berg.

That is one reason why this particular Warner Bros, cops and robbers movie is being shot in Brooklyn instead of Hollywood. This one is too improbable for Hollywood. It had to happen in Brooklyn. V': BROOKLYN IS where it actually did happen, on a sweltering August afternoon in 1972 at a small Chase Manhattan branch at Avenue and East Third street. The three robbers, friends who plotted the robbery in the back room of a Greenwich Village gay bar, entered the bank at closing time.

All of the high drama was over by 5 a.m. the next day, Wojtowicz in custody, a police dragnet closing in on Westenberg, Naturile shot dead by an FBI agent's bullet, and all the hostages safe. The whole bizarre incident currently is being recreated a mile or so from the scene of the crime. The movie, called "Dog Day Afternoon," has a cast headed by Al Pacino, a $3.5 million budget and a script that has undergone the scrutiny of the image-conscious National Gay Task Force. ALTHOUGH virtually every character in the cast has a real-life counterpart, names have been changed to protect the guilty as well as.

the innocent. Pacino, who figures in practically every scene, is called Sonny in the film but he is Little John Wojtowicz through and through. The other night, Pacino was filming a scene in which he emerged from the bank to inspect an airport limousine that he had ordered to take robbers and hostages to John Kennedy Airport. Just out of camera range, a movie cop and a real life cop stood side by side watching the shot. The real-life cop, The Now Society 'Hey! What the hell are you S.F.

Sunday yf, Lit mj' I I ft oimig He took the lesser amount after he was released from prison last April, after serving 19 months. "I was so he said recently, "I would have taken $20." Wojtowicz received $7500 for the motion picture rights to his story. He also will receive one per cent of any net. Wojtowicz, who is serving a 20-year sentence in the federal penitentiary Lewisburg, directed his attorney to give $2500 of his movie money to Ernie Aron. Aron took the money and, as Little John had wanted him to do, proceeded with the sex change operation that, he had been planning.

Ernie Aron now calls herself Liz Eden. Naturile and Weslernberg had motives of their own tor the robbery. "We were standing around the bar, talkin' with Little John about how poor we all were and how sick of New York," said "Sal and me were going to take the money, drive to California and open a boutique." THE FAMILIES of all three robbers seem more embarrassed by the h6m-' osexuality than the armed robbery. Mrs. Wojtowicz still cannot bring herself to use the term, but talks instead about "that life" and "those people in Village." Westenberg's younger brother keeps a scrapbook of all his press clippings and carefully crosses out all references to "homosexual" or "gay." Naturile's uncle is outraged that the film will refer to his nephew as gay and argues that he was not.

He adds, "I got nothing against bank robbers, as such." Ronald Gold, communications director for the National Gay Task Force, was allowed to read the script. He said found it and tasteful." Most of the people involved in the incident have had no contact with the movie people since they signed releases more than a year ago. "I have the Wojtowicz, Little John's Anna Magnani-like mother, said the other day, "that they got what they wanted from us and that's it." AFTER TWO years, the principals' lives remain curiously intertwined. One hostage, for instance, recently read of Westenberg's plight the 23-year-dId is out of. work, in jMor health and has tried to commit suicide since his release from jail and she appeared at his Chelsea apartment with a box of clothing for him.

Westenberg stays in touch with" Liz Eden and Terry Wojtowicz. he received a letter from John in which John claimed that he still loves both Liz (Ernie) and Carmen, his heterosexual wife. Liz Eden is also financially distressed. Lately, she says, she has turned to streetwalking to make ends meet and hopes she can sell her memoirs. She said she also borrowed $300 from Carmen to further finance the series of silicone and electrolysis treatments that she needs' to complete her sexual transformation.

Not that there is any affection between the two wives of John Wojtowicz. "John told her to give me the money," Liz explained the other evening, "and he is a very domineering person." EVERYONE, NATURALLY, wants to see "Dog Day Afternoon" when it is released, which probably will be next summer. "I just hope it's a good account of gay life," Westenberg said. "That's all I care about." "I'd like to go to the premiere," Liz Eden said, "but I doubt if they'll invite me. I'll probably have to go with the common folk." Little John may not get to see it for awhile.

A spokesman for the Lewisburg warden said the homosexual aspects of the film might eliminate it from -the prison's film program. Wojtowicz will be eligible for parole in June 1979. Of course, Sal Naturile will not see it. He is buried next to his father in an Elizabeth, N.J. cemetery.

Warner Bros, paid for the funeral. PAGE 7 The families seemed more embarrassed by the homosexual' ity than by the armed robbery got nothing against armed robbers, as such" said one uncle. CARMEN Police Officer Frank Clifford, was telling" the actor in uniform that he had been among the first police on the scene of the robbery. Clifford, who pronounced Paci-no's performance realistic, said that he had been assigned along with a number of fellow officers to an adjacent rooftop during the long night's siege. They all watched with amazement that night, when FBI agents escorted a thin, animated young man to the door of the bank and stood by while he and Wojtowicz embraced and kissed.

"That's when we realized they were homosexuals." Clifford said. "It, ah, broke the ice." THAT SCENE, which involved a friend of Wojtowicz's named Pat Coppola, is not in the script. A scene in which a group of gay liberationists and a group of hardhats exchange punches behind the police barricades which really never happened is in the script. "There are no major departures," producer Martin. Bregman said, "but we have taken some dramatic license." The script does include the dramatic appearance outside the bank of Little John's "wife," Ernie Aron, a transvestite (and, later, a transexual) who was cooking? This is 'The Joy of Sex'!" Examiner Chronicle, Sunday Punch, December LIZ EDEN TODAY John's other wife Beauty Was Raped By Michael Hellier CJirouiele Forrijm Seniee London QLEEPING BEAUTY was a rape vic- 'tim and an unmarried mother This lamentable news comes to us in a book published by the Oxford University Press here which virtually demolishes many of the folktales on which generations of children have been reared.

The authors are sociologists Iona and Peter Opie, who suggest it was the sensitive, prim authors of the last century who doctored the fairytales and censored those sections which would have been offensive to the strait-laced mid-19th Century puritans. "The tales were not originally for children. In the first place they were written for adults," says Iona Opie in the book, "The Classic Fairy Tales." It was the Victorian fairytale publishers who came up with the version that it was a kiss from a handsome Prince that awoke Sleeping Beauty and they lived happily ever after. In the original version, traced back to the 17th Century, what really happened was that not only did Sleeping Beauty sleep right through the princely kiss but, as Iona Opie puts-it, "she stayed unconscious right through the. rape that followed." Still sleeping, she gave birth to twins nine months later who sucked at their unconscious mother's breast.

Then, one day, one of the babies mistakenly sucked at her finger, drawing out the splinter that had originally cast the lovely Princess into the enchanted slumber. "It was thus that Sleeping Beauty, rape victim1 and unmarried mother, awoke." THE STORY of Cinderella, say the authors, originated in Italy, and "the heroine was by no means the genteel girl we know today. "In fact she plotted with her governess to murder her stepmother, and then persuaded her father to marry her governess. But her misdeeds profited her little, for the governess's daughters took her place and Cinderella was relegated to the kitchen." There can be no doubt, say the authors, that the practice of writing down the legends and fairytales as literacy developed, softened and sentimentalized the orginial versions, which were both crude and brutal. Sleeping i WOJTOWICZ AND DAUGHTER A slap in the face brought by police from the psychiatric ward of Kings County Hospital, to which he had been taken after a suicide attempt.

It also contains the lamentations of Little John's legal wife, heavy-set, heterosexual Carmen, who looked upon the loss of her husband's affections to a man as "a slap in the face." And it contains the violent end, when an FBI man cooly shot and killed Sal Naturile as he sat in a limousine at Kennedy Airport, waiting for an airplane to fly him to freedom. THE MOVIE'S coproducer, Martin Elfand, was the first to see a potential feature film in the robbery attempt. He was inspired not by the incident itself but by a long account of it that appeared in Life magazine a few weeks later. The article, called "The Boys in the Bank," was a painstaking reconstruction of the event. It also was very much the personal saga of Wojtowicz, a 27-year-old former bank teller and Vietnam veteran who, in the months preceding the robber-y, had left his wife and two children in Brooklyn and "married" Ernie Aron in an elaborate drag ceremony in Greenwich Village.

Before they could proceed with the film script, the producers felt it necessary to obtain releases from all of the people involved in the incident who would be portrayed on the screen. "They all had to be convinced," Bregman said, "that we would tell it pretty much the way it happened." Everyone involved did sign a release and received a payment from Warner except for one woman hostage who wanted too much money and was written out of the script. Elfand himself met with the hostages, with Wojtowicz's and Westen-berg's court-appointed attorneys and with the families to negotiate for their releases. He found "hostility mistrust" on all sides. "Everyone was suspicious," he said, "and I don't really blame them.

There was this feeling of the little guys being exploited by the giant corporation. I understand that." EACH OF the hostages, except for the sole holdout, received $600. Westenberg, who helped plan the robbery but walked out of the bank almost the moment he walked in because he saw a police car cruise by, eventually settled for $750. On his lawyer's advice, he turned down a $2000 offer while he was still in jail serving a two-year sentence for conspiracy to commit bank 22, 1974.