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 ach week, Peter Sagal hosts NPR's news-quiz show, Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me. Listening to him (which I do every week), he sounds completely untainted by vice. What he sounds like is a precise, well-informed newspaper reader with an enviable vocabulary who doesn't do much of anything wrong, which he doesn't, as he confirms in his new work of non-fiction, The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things and How to Do Them.His relative inexperience with guilty pleasures in tow, Sagal dives headlong into America's great temptation industry, visiting casinos, sex clubs and strip clubs with the spirit of a foreign correspondent.
Before we start in on the book, a few personal questions. Were you an extra in a Michael Jackson video? I was, for the song "Remember the Time." I was costumed, I was on the set, I was paid, I met Michael Jackson, but I do not appear in the video. They never shot my scene. I was supposed to be a snake charmer, and everyone was jealous because of the assumption that Michael Jackson liked animals more than people, and therefore was bound to stop and linger with the snakes. What was your impression of Mr. Jackson? He seemed very nice, although he did treat himself something like an Egyptian pharaoh. [In the video], Michael Jackson for some unexplained reason goes back in time to ancient Egypt, which is populated by all these African-American luminaries: Magic Johnson is there, Eddie Murphy is the pharaoh. [Michael] shows up, then runs away. There's a chase scene, and he keeps singing and singing as he runs. They rehearsed it with this guy who looked, and was costumed, just like Michael Jackson, and was amazingly good at dancing like him. Finally, the doors to the set opened, and in came a royal procession of videographers, bodyguards, reporters, attendants, and in the middle of it was Michael Jackson, resplendent in his costume, holding the hand of the most beautiful little girl I have ever seen, and I say this as a father with three little girls. Someone explained to me it was his niece. He came onto the set, and he did the scene, and he did it really well. Then John Singleton wandered over. He was the director, and I was angling to talk to him when all of the people I'm looking at start staring over my shoulder. I turn around, and there's Michael Jackson, who has decided, man of the people that he is, that he will say hello to everybody as he works his way off the set. What did he say? He's right in front of me all of a sudden, and he says, "Nice to meet you." What did you say? I said, "It's nice to meet you too." And I shook his hand, which was very soft and gentle. Okay, true or false? You wrote a screenplay called Cuba Mind that would eventually become Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. True. You wrote Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. This is what happened. Around ten years ago I wrote a play, and it came to the attention of a guy named Lawrence Bender who was and still is a big movie producer. I think he produced An Inconvenient Truth. Bender said to me, we want to sign you to write something, and we came up with something based on the life story of this fifteen-year-old American girl in the middle of the Cuban Revolution. I wrote a screenplay around that, and by the time I had finished with it, it was in fact well on the way toward being a Dirty Dancing manqué. I finished, they paid me, I went away and it sat on a shelf. I don't think there's a single line of dialogue in the movie that I wrote. Last personal question: Were you once a ghostwriter for a former adult-film impresario? Yes. A friend of mine in publishing knew I was a starving writer and said, "We're looking for a ghostwriter for a woman named
Which brings us to vice. Do you remember that show on Fox called Temptation Island? I think so. They brought couples to this island and exposed them to attractive young people of the opposite sex? Right, to see if they'd cheat on each other. Why do you think people were okay with that sort of vice being displayed on TV, whereas a vice like smoking has been demonized and deemed unacceptable for broadcast? Who makes these decisions? It's interesting. For example, a hundred years ago, it was fine for gentlemen to go to brothels on their day off and select from an array of fourteen-, fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls. Nowadays, that would land you in prison for forty years. My sense is that, with lurches and stops and shuddering halts, we're moving toward a less moralistic time, particularly when it comes to sexual vices. But I think that we're still in the grip of Prohibition era when it comes to drugs, particularly otherwise harmless drugs like marijuana. The thing that struck me about Temptation Island was that even though it was really distasteful, it was also a refreshingly honest look at our culture, because America is Temptation Island. Everywhere you look, there are opportunities and even encouragements to cheat on your partner. Oh, absolutely. Putting aside human nature, there's a tremendous industry — maybe you'd call it the temptation industry — that makes a tremendous amount of money by convincing you that you could be having a lot more fun than you're having now. And it does it by teasing you and by tempting you, and in some cases, in particular with gentlemen's clubs and porn, it offers you a fake reproduction of the experience you're expected to want to have. Whatever you think about pornography, bad or good, you have to understand, everybody is complicit in it. The Marriott Corporation of Utah, which is owned by good, moral Mormons, many of their hotels offer pay-per-view systems that have dirty movies. You also talk about monogamy in the book, and why, contrary to popular belief, humans might actually be a naturally monogamous species. You have two bodies of evidence. On the one hand, you have evidence from biology. It turns out, despite what you may have heard about trumpeter swans or lovebirds or whatever, monogamy in nature is vanishingly rare. Almost every species cheats rampantly. This is true of both males and females. It turns out that basically every individual creature is trying to hump as much as possible and get as many chances to reproduce, and so any monogamy in nature is a rounding error — statistically, it doesn't exist. Same time, if people are mating and reproducing outside their marriage, there'd be genetic evidence of it in their offspring. You'd find genes that weren't supposed to be there. And the human evidence of this is on the low side, so most people believe that, for whatever reason, human beings tend to be mostly monogamous. Also, one of the indicators of a tendency to engage in polyamorous behavior is testicle size, because those males are engaged in significant sperm competition with other males. Human beings tend to have small testicles relative to their body size, so that's an indication that human beings are not engaged in significant sperm competition. And this can actually vary from individual to individual as an indicator. If a person has large testicles, it might mean that he's genetically programmed to use them. So if you're checking out somebody and you want to see if he's loyal, have him drop his pants. You and your wife visited a sex club for the book. I was disappointed you two didn't have sex at the sex club. Even if you didn't want to swing, you could've had sex with each other. You didn't think that experience would have added to the reporting? That's an interesting thought. I never had it. When we went there, I didn't know what would happen, because I had never been to anything like this. I didn't know if I would look around and go, "Wow! I want to be a part of this. I want to do this." Or what if all of a sudden [my wife] wanted to, because that's a common enough occurrence at sex clubs that it's become a bit of a cliché — that the man will bring the wife to the sex club to check it out, and the woman gets much more enthusiastic than the man once they get there. In fact our reaction was, as I honestly described in the book, the opposite. We didn't want to do any of it. I just balk at doing something so unattractive to me sexually, you know? And you do say in the book that you're fairly vanilla. No question. It's funny, my editor at HarperCollins just edited the memoirs of Slash from Guns 'N' Roses. "There's
Why are politicians prone to vice? I think because they think they deserve it. They become powerful and, because they're powerful, they think they're immune to rules. If you're the governor of a state, you don't wait for a red light, do you? No. And there are a vast number of other rules that you're exempt from. I use this example in the book: the pharaoh of Egypt married his own sister and, like I said, it's not something you might want to do, but he could and you can't. And I think that goes through history. I wrote about this in a chapter I didn't end up putting in the book, but everybody talks about Catherine the Great. I just said Catherine the Great, and what did you think of? She had sex with a horse. It's true that Catherine the Great did not have sex with a horse. That was an unpleasant myth that was told about her. But she did have sex with a lot of people. She was a powerful woman who decided to, as many powerful men do, institutionalize her sex life. She actually had a courtier, a woman whose job it was to simply select her next lover — she would audition them sometimes, quite hands-on, and then she'd select one and pass him on to Catherine, and Catherine would enjoy his favors. She did this until she was in her sixties. And because of this, Catherine the Great has a reputation of being this weird nymphomaniac, and people tell stories about her having sex with horses. No. She was doing exactly what every powerful person in Europe, and as far as I know the whole world, has ever done. The only reason Catherine the Great seems odd is because it's so rare for a woman to achieve that kind of political power. So you're asking me about politicians, and I think even if you're a congressman from some district in Indiana — and I'm not making any reference to any congressman, you understand — you walk around and everyone treats you like a god, and you must start thinking, well, why not me? They also live, as my friend [Washington Post "Reliable Source" columnist] Roxanne Roberts will tell you, in an environment where power has indeed, as Henry Kissinger would say, an aphrodisiacal quality. Politicians, especially Republicans, often run on anti-vice platforms: zero tolerance for drugs, abstinence, no gay marriage, things like that. Why do you think some people care so much about other people's vices when they don't affect them at all? I think it's fear of young women having sex. I think sexually active, powerful women freak out men. They want them to be monogamous and married and not have premarital sex. There's a tremendous sexual fear going on in all those politics. And I think a lot of it is jealousy. People who live under those moral restrictions and don't cheat and don't misbehave resent people who do because they're jealous. Because they'd like to. There's nothing more upsetting than the idea that someone's having more fun than you're allowed to have. n°
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