Larry Levenson with a girlfriend during his swinging years. Before he founded Plato’s Retreat, he lived a normal middle-class Jewish life, having a bar mitzvah, marrying a Jewish woman, and raising two kids. Right: A sign outside the “Orgy Room.”
by Eric Herschthal Staff Writer
Larry Levenson should have been a butcher. His father cut brisket for a living and, for a while, it looked like his son would, too. Larry got close, becoming the manager of a McDonald’s, then opening up his own deli in Brooklyn. But a year before he hit 40, he switched to a different kind of flesh.
In 1977, Larry opened Plato’s Retreat, a club that became the world’s most renowned venue for public sex this side of Amsterdam. Though meant for swingers — couples who swapped sex partners — Plato’s Retreat was eventually drawing singles and swingers alike.
Journalists flocked to the place, too, as did the merely curious. And celebrities couldn’t get enough: the cast of “Saturday Night Live” stopped
by regularly, as did Sammy Davis, Jr., and the former Yankee first baseman Joe Pepitone. It’s rumored that Madonna went there, and possibly even Ed Koch — though he, as mayor, ultimately ordered it shut down in 1985, when the AIDS epidemic was reaching its peak. “Larry was a fascinating character,” said Mathew Kaufman, director of “American Swing,” a new documentary about the club and its founder opening this Friday. “I always thought that Larry was like a middle-class Moses ... who led people to their sexual freedom,” he said.
During an interview last week, Kaufman sat on the stoop of an Upper West Side walkup, not far from the club’s original home in the basement of Ansonia Hotel, on 74th and Broadway. He said Levenson’s story was too intriguing to pass up: a typical middle- class Jewish New Yorker, not unlike like himself, but who ultimately rejected a more conventional life to become the “King of Swing.”
Though Levenson’s empire would fall, that actually gave Kaufman just what he needed. “The dramatic arc,” Kaufman said, “you had it all.” With the journalist Jon Hart and funding by the media mogul Mark Cuban, “American Swing” became a reality. The film has its bawdy moments, but you could not call it smut. Rigorously reported, often hilarious and sometimes even bittersweet, “American Swing” offers an account of the place one interviewee calls “the poor man’s Playboy Mansion.”
There are plenty of Jewish references, too. One patron likened the atmosphere at Plato’s to a bar mitzvah, with all the singing, dancing, Jewish clientele and an enormous free buffet. Another one jokes about how after a night at Plato’s, Jewish couples would talk about carpooling their kids to Hebrew school. After a sneak preview screening last week at the IFC Center, a former patron who goes by the name Captain John, told The Jewish Week about the Jewish faction that called itself the “612 Club.”
“I learned there were 613 laws in the Jewish religion,” said Captain John, who is not Jewish. “And they broke one.”
But one needn’t look far. Levenson’s life itself is filled with the trappings of a typical middle-class Jewish upbringing. He was born in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, had a bar mitzvah, married a Jewish woman and fathered two kids. For much of his professional life, he worked in the food business, like his father the butcher. “He came from a completely normal Jewish family,” Kaufman said.
But after a divorce, Levenson met Ellie, a married woman who introduced him to the world of swinging. They met at the Golden Gate Motor Inn in Sheepshead Bay, and in no time Ellie was taking Levenson to small swinging parties. Levenson, though, wanted more. As Hart wrote in 1999, for an article in the Village Voice, “that was not enough for the king-to-be. He wanted to host a party of his own.”
With the backing of Frank Pernice, a Brooklyn caterer, and his associate Harry Gordon, Levenson got the money to open a swinger’s club in what was formerly a gay bathhouse. But Plato’s Retreat, Levenson’s new heterosexual club, made many improvements: an expansive swimming pool was put in, a 60-person Jacuzzi, a state-of-the-art sound system, dance floor, private rooms for sex and even a less private one: the notorious mattress-covered “Orgy Room.”
The film splices in a few seconds of grainy homemade videos from inside these spaces, but Kaufman insists the peeping isn’t the point. “This is not a movie about sex,” he said. “It’s a historic time capsule about New York.”
It is more than that, too. Coming in the wake of the sexual revolution, Plato’s Retreat ignited a culture war about American values. Howard Smith, a reporter for The Village Voice interviewed in the film, broke the story first. But soon after he published his story, legions of reporters were banging on the club’s doors. Dan Dorfman, a journalist who wrote a cover story about the club for New York magazine, told The Jewish Week that he heard Levenson was going to license out the name. “The idea of franchising sex was an interesting story,” he said. (Aside from Plato’s West in Los Angeles, the plan never took off.) But when he got there, it was even more shocking than he had suspected: “It was like you were watching a live production of a dirty movie. There were people screwing everywhere.”
Like the AIG bonuses, Plato’s Retreat became a symbol for a culture that had run amok, at least for social conservatives. And several scenes in “American Swing” rehash old footage of Levenson defending his club on “The Phil Donahue Show,” the “Oprah” of its day. In one clip, Levenson even debates a rabbi. It’s adultery, the rabbi argues. It isn’t for everybody, Levenson charges back. It won’t fix a broken marriage, either, he adds. But it very well might add pleasure for mutually consenting couples.
Ultimately, Plato’s closing had less to do with moral codes than politics. As mayor, Koch was under pressure for closing several gay bars when AIDS was still suspected of being a homosexual disease. Scientists were saying that AIDS was transferable through any kind of anal sex or fellatio, though. And so to save face, Koch ordered any clubs shut down where either act took place. On New Year’s Eve of 1985, Plato’s was gone for good.
Levenson died a decade ago, and Plato’s Retreat was shut down almost 15 years before that. But Hart revived interest in his story after he met the lonely, adrift Levenson in 1995. Hart learned that the former owner of the famous sex club was now driving a taxi, and he started to track him down. When Hart finally found Levenson, he was a 270-pound diabetic, four years away from his death. But the two struck up a friendship, playing golf at Van Cortlandt Park, eating pork chop lunches, going to baseball games and trading stories. And when it came to talking about Plato’s Retreat, Hart said in a separate interview, “He was quite open about it. He wanted to tell me things.”
Kaufman read one of Hart’s stories, and, in 2004, approached him about making a film. Kaufman had a friend who worked for Cuban’s production company, Magnolia Pictures, which has funded independent films like “Two Lovers” and “Man on Wire,” and got the trailer for “American Swing” put on the top of Cuban’s desk. “He loved it,” Kaufman recalled, and over a weekend, Cuban gave Kaufman and Hart the money to make a full-length film.
There are many other dramatic turns in Levenson’s story — tax evasion, prison, drug problems and more — but the film doesn’t spend much time examining his internal life. Hart said it was more alive than those carnal appetites might suggest, though. “There was this sweet warm heart beneath that girth,” Hart remembered. And towards the very end of his life, Levenson became deeply reflective. “He wondered whether God approved of the club he created,” Hart said Levenson told him. “He’d say, ‘I provided so much pleasure, but how could it be right?’”
“American Swing” opens at the Quad Cinema at 34 W. 13th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, on Friday, March 27. Call (212) 255-8800 for showtimes and prices.
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