Give That Lady A Big Cigar!
“About those pictures. If I looked like that at 75, I would walk down the aisles of the supermarket naked. Hey—wait a minute! In support of your encouragement to perform outrageous acts, I’m going to do it anyway!”—Irana Zisser
The Birthday Column, as always, elicited massive response. We’re grateful to everyone who took the time to write, especially Marcia Dalton, who commented, “nice tushie.” Where else can senior citizens get this kind of fan mail? As usual, the male responders discussed the editorial matter and the women discussed everything. Men will not be talking to other men about naked unless it refers to women. Although one guy did write to say he had looked at me and he had looked at his doctor and he’d be getting his health advice here in the future. Let’s not get carried away.
Since nude is the color of the month, we continue our November caravan with a tale of the most famous naked woman since Lady Godiva. Long live her fame and long live her glory and long may her story be told.
Pamme Brewer
Of all the female qualities which draw the eye—a face like Helen of Troy, golden tresses extending like a waterfall to the depths below, a body like Barbarella—the least considered is probably carriage. Perhaps the reason why is that few women have developed it into an art form now that Charm School is on the decline, leaving us with pitifully few practitioners of the art, for whom regal bearing is natural. Pamme Brewer was one of these. She caught my eye one day while I was driving down University Avenue in Gainesville, floating briskly down the sidewalk with an armload of books. Of one thing I was immediately certain: this woman had mastered the art of walking, if not on water, then slightly above the surface of the Earth, so smooth was her glide. Perhaps she had little jets on her shoes which kept her elevated, who knows? From the side and slightly behind, I couldn’t tell what she looked like but that was of secondary importance. I had to meet this sylph, this dancer-on-air, before she disappeared into the ethers, never to return. You get one chance, best take it. I found an illegal parking spot, jumped out and caught up with the maid of the mists.
“Hey, hold up a minute,” I beseeched her. She stopped, surprised and turned. “Did I do something wrong,” she asked. The girl looked about 17, had an elfin face and dancing eyes. “Just the opposite,” I told her, explaining the Charlatan needed a model for a front-page Honda motorcycle ad and she might be it. In all the years of making similar requests, I have never found a woman who refused. She has been elevated to a higher echelon, chosen over all others, her photograph to be widely published. I kept waiting for someone to ask me “What the hell is the Charlatan,” but nobody ever did. In this respect, Pamme Brewer was no different. She did the photo shoot with smashing results. Naturally, she was invited to our post-publication party, where she won the crowd, including me. After years of abstinence involving such places, I was again required to return to a women’s college dormitory and have the front desk buzz my date. This is what happens sometimes when a man is not careful. And when he is lucky.
Pamme became a regular at the infamous Charlatan House on NW Sixth Street, sharing her days with Dick North, Gerald Jones, Newt Simmons and their revolving girlfriends, eventually renting her own residence nearby. PB had arrived at the University of Florida from Jamaica, where her father was a U.S. State Department official. Shortly after her enrolment, her family, which included one brother, moved from the island to northern Virginia, near Washington. We visited them one holiday weekend and Pamme later came with me to Massachusetts to meet my family. She helped out with the magazine when she had time. Then, one day, she made the ultimate contribution.
In those days, Playboy magazine was ascendant. Pseudosophisticates devoured Hugh Hefner’s liberating Playboy Philosophy with a wink and a nod on their way to the nekkid pictures—or, more correctly, on the way back. Playboy often boasted that this or that model was a college girl, though most of them had never seen the inside of a classroom. In the sixties, America’s universities, armed with a sword called in loco parentis, were prone to throw a girl out for such a breach of etiquette. The Charlatan, already battling with UF over Freedom of the Press as regarded the heavily monitored campus newspaper, The Florida Alligator, decided to run a photo of a skimpily-dressed coed to test the waters. The model was summarily called in and threatened with expulsion for any future misbehavior, scary front-page news in the Alligator. “Well,” I surmised, “I guess we’re dead in the water on this one. Nobody’s going to take that kind of risk.” Pamme, listening off to the side while battling her homework, looked up. “I’ll do it,” she said, unworried. Nobody jumped for joy at the news. Did we want to put our girl at risk?
Weighing The Odds
I talked to Pamme long and hard about the ramifications. She felt, as did the rest of us, that the University had no right to monitor one’s personal life as long as criminal behavior was not involved. It’s easy to have opinions, however, another thing to put your college career on the line for them. And even if she won, there would be the inevitable harassment from classmates and other students, perhaps even professors. This was no walk in the park. I suggested she tell her parents what she had in mind. She demurred, feeling they would forbid it and she would be forced to defy them. I was still reluctant. Finally, she said, “Bill, if it was someone else outside the staff, you’d take them up on it in a minute. You believe in something or you don’t. Let’s get on with it.” I spoke with friends in SDS and the ACLU, all of whom were supportive. “Okay,” I told her. “You’re on.”
Not THE explosive photo which set things off, but the ultimate decider.
The Nude Coed
Nobody could have imagined the outcry which greeted the photographs of Pamme Brewer, posed lying on one side, breasts exposed but with the genital area hidden in the center fold of the magazine. “NUDE COED!” headlines exploded in newspapers all across the country, including the upper Virginia area. “NUDE COED!” was everywhere, in magazines, on television, day after day, unending. The letters came, sacks full of them. People, and I use that term loosely, who had no idea of Pamme’s address sent letters to “Pamme Brewer, Gainesville,’' or even “Naked Coed, Florida” and we got them. Some were written in crayon by crazed Neanderthals, threatening fire and brimstone. Others advised such as “You look like a nigger and act like one!” while carelessly neglecting to tell us which nigger they meant. There were even a few from sane people, fans even. Pamme read them and was initially crushed by the weight of their demented hatred. “Come on,” I told her. “These are so horrible, they’re actually FUNNY.” We alternated reading them to one another, competing to see who could find the most outrageous or incomprehensible missive. Pamme had a good sense of humor and bounced back. “Do I get extra points,” she asked, laughing, “if ALL the words are misspelled?” We had discovered a new source of entertainment. Unselfishly, we shared the lot with friends and eventually published a ton of them in the magazine. But all was not wine and roses. The Empire struck back.
In February, 1967, the University of Florida formally notified Pamme she would have to appear before an administrative committee to learn her fate. The ACLU insisted she be allowed to present a defense, hiring a sharp young local attorney named Selig Goldin to carry the ball. The assignment was a boon to Goldin’s career; he was immediately inundated with calls from radio and newspaper correspondents across the country requesting interviews and he took them all, branding the University’s actions “unconstitutional.” Selig Goldin was more than optimistic. He was remindful of the cartoon cat with a SWAT squad outside the mousehole.
The Inquisition was scheduled for a modest-sized meeting room in UF’s administration building, Tigert Hall. No one would be allowed to enter except the University’s Committee, Pamme and her legal team, an arrangement which led SDS honcho Alan Levin to label the session a “Star Chamber,” a council akin to an ancient high court in England highly prejudiced to the prosecution. “Let the people in!” Levin insisted. When the trial began, Tigert Hall was mobbed, filled to the brim, the lines of attendees stretching out the doors, down the steps and out to the street. Alan Levin was there with his cronies, all in full throat, carrying signs. Protestors from other groups complemented SDS and hundreds of unaffiliated students showed up to register their individual objections. The news media was everywhere, none so apparent as Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News crew, microphones rampant. There were only three television networks of consequence at the time and Cronkite was the Godfather of Evening News.
Shouts of “LET US IN!” became louder, more demanding and soon there was pounding on the walls of the meeting room. Campus police were in evidence but vastly outnumbered and the University chose peace, finally yielding to the demands of the crowd. The hearing was moved to the vastly larger Law School Auditorium nearby. It was still overfilled. When Pamme entered the room with her lawyers, an enormous cheer rose up. Alan Levin looked at me and said, “You know, we’ve been out there on campus trying to get a rise out of these students with civil rights demonstrations and war protest parades. Nothing. And this is what they show up for.” I looked at him with a smile. “Nude Power,” I said. “You need new signs.”
Aftermath
Jarred by the extent of the resistance and wishing to put a quick end to the extensive press coverage, the University of Florida tribunal absolved Pamme of Major Crimes and gave her some vague probationary period to mend her ways. Case closed, point made, and that should have been the end of the matter. In the next issue of Charlatan, however, we included another photo of Pamme in with a group of past girls-of-the-month, this one with the model posed on her stomach, less anatomy revealed. It was from the previous shooting session and Pamme had nothing to do with the decision to publish it. Our feeling was that we had won the day and with it the right to continue printing such photographs. Abruptly, Selig Goldin abandoned his representation of Pamme, apoplectic that he had not been advised of our intentions. Then, her parents, not unsympathetic with the lot of the university, withdrew Pamme from school. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. She called me with the news. “I overreached,” I told her. “Big mistake. Some people never learn.” But Pamme was totally unfrazzled. “Forget it,” she said, unconcerned. “We’ve got more important things to do. We’ve got a store to open.”
The Subterranean Circus And Beyond
In mid September of 1967, Pamme Brewer, Dick North and I opened the Subterranean Circus with $1200 worth of inventory bought from wholesalers in Greenwich Village. The building, at 10 SW 7th Street in Gainesville, was previously an old warehouse owned by the Standard Fertilizer Company. The first day we were open we made $27, but hey, we doubled it the second day. On the morning of the third day, the Gainesville Sun ran a front-page photo of Pamme in the Circus doorway, a large paper flower in her teeth. The gross jumped to $100 that day and continued to rocket upwards. Over the 23 or so years the Circus was extant, the average day’s gross exceeding $1000. Pamme and I split up a couple of years later. She eventually married a gentle fellow named Tom Fristoe and moved to California. Communication was scant until one year, on my birthday, I received a nude photograph of Pamme posed in the same manner as was the photo in 1967. And still looking pretty good, by the way. I expressed my gratitude to the return address and got a PB update a week later. Life was good.
Years later, out of the blue, a call barged in from The Coast, a stunning call, not the kind of call you want to get. On the other end, a fellow named Tom, last name lost to the years, an old boyfriend of one-time Circus employee Laura Hansen. “Pamme has uterine cancer,” he advised. “She’s on some kind of drip medication, in and out of consciousness. If you want to talk to her one last time….”
I called the number given, unsure whether it was a hospital, some sort of hospice operation or whatever. Pamme Brewer answered in a sleepy but familiar voice. “Pamme, it’s Bill,” I told her. She was happy, got a brief surge of energy. I asked her how she was doing. “I’m feeling better,” she said, and asked about me. “I’m great, things are going well. You know, Pamme, I’ve always felt guilty for getting you pulled out of school back in the day.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then, an answer.
“I want to tell you something, Bill. I could care less about school. I’ve enjoyed my life, love California—always wanted to come out here. And you know what? I don’t think there has been a day in my life I haven’t thought about those Nude Coed days, all the hubbub, the television interviews, the trial, sticking it to the university. We showed ‘em, Bill, didn’t we?”
“Yes, Pamme, we did. Mostly, you did. Wiped out ‘in loco parentis’ in one fell swoop. Most of the other universities across the country followed suit. It was a dead issue. And you did it. You.”
“Well, I’m getting tired now, gotta go rest. Thanks so much for calling. I’ll come and see you when I get better.”
She didn’t, of course. Pamme died a day or so after that call. The next time I phoned, the number was void. Someone was nice enough to notify me several days later.
What would have happened without Pamme Brewer? Well, you could make a case that there never would have been a Subterranean Circus and all that followed. The $1200 it took to start the business, meager as it was, came from the profits of the issue containing Pamme’s centerfold, the only Charlatan which ever required republishing, so great was the demand. For me, the store was the match that lit the flame, allowing me to proceed on to a bountiful life, an almost charmed existence which continues today. How would it all have gone for both of us, I wonder from time to time, if I’d let that girl float down the sidewalk unbothered, oblivious to the world she was about to enter.
That’s all, folks….
