In this case, sex didn’t sell

YOU KNOW HOW, when someone says, “It’s a sure thing,” it’s never a sure thing?

Here’s something that really was supposed to be a sure thing. A lead-pipe cinch, a dead-bang perfect enterprise. Even I might have bet on it, and I wouldn’t give you even odds on tomorrow’s sunrise: the Erotic Museum.

It was in Hollywood. On Hollywood Boulevard. A stone’s throw -- the Magdalene kind of stones -- from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

So much for a sure thing. The Erotic Museum -- born January 2004, died May 2006. R.I.P.

What happened, doctor? He was so young, so strong, so full of potential.

My diagnosis: The Erotic Museum was too classy for Hollywood. Sex sells. Erotica tanks. From-the-waist-down versus from-the-brain-down.

The valedictory press release fixed the blame “in part due to dwindling tourism.” But Hollywood is a happenin’ place. The shops no longer just sell kitsch and tattoos. At Hollywood and Highland, tourists and their money are soon parted. How could it fail?

The museum’s CEO, Boris Smorodinsky, a slim, bald, curatorial man, explains it frankly, using a word I can’t. “Our problem was that we didn’t get across the message that this isn’t about [you know], it’s about erotica.”

I was there Sunday, the museum’s scheduled final day in business, but Boris just couldn’t let go quite yet, and now Saturday, he says, is “absolutely” the last day.

On Sunday, tourists loitered at the door, just as they had for nearly two years, in a state of puzzlement and curiosity and timidity. Boris has watched them hover there long enough to know what they’re thinking, but not why. “We created a unique institution to educate people, to entertain people and inspire them. You find couples standing there ... deciding to go in or not. More often they go [away]. If it’s perception, or shyness, I don’t know. If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t close.”

The place is not remotely sleazy, but neither is it about what Americans are used to associating with a museum. In Hollywood’s golden age, this address was the shop of corsetiere and “lingerist” Shirley Maxwell (“the absolutely backless brassiere”). Then it became the fabled Pickwick Books. The rolling ladders in the gift shop were Pickwick’s, and Boris, who restored some of the place’s tile work and carved cornices, ran a wistful hand along the polished wooden rails.

He might keep one. But there are two floors of exhibits that he has to find buyers for. A huge set of Russian nesting dolls, each bland-faced and tricked out in a sex-gear ensemble. Displays about sex education and feminism. About the San Fernando Valley porn industry. About the Hays Code -- the blue-nosed list of “no-nos” that changed the way Hollywood made movies. A huge rendering of the Farrah Fawcett poster in vivid yarns. A Picasso video exhibit. A display of sexual expression in 20th century America, from Edison’s early short film “The Kiss” to rock ‘n’ roll excesses.

The shop is on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Boris always enjoyed pointing out that his storefront ran “from Disney to Liberace.” Right out front is the star for novelist Harold Robbins, the 1960s’ cheerful smut-with-a-story-line stylist.

Robbins illustrates the American paradox. We’re either sniggering at low-rent sex, or we don’t want to think about it at all -- a nation terrified that sex education will teach people how to have actual sex (how ever did Cro-Magnon man procreate without filmstrips?).

We have pretty funny ideas of what’s obscene. President Reagan fretted about the naked male and female torsos at the L.A. Coliseum, and the Olympics commemorative silver dollar shows them turned so you can’t tell what gender they are.

President Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, spent $8,000 of my tax money on blue drapes to cover up two classical topless statues at the Justice Department.

Charles Keating, the slick S&L; operator who crusaded against pornography, saw obscenity everywhere except in his own actions, which bankrupted old people and cost taxpayers nearly $3 billion. His convictions in state and federal court were later overturned.

Boris figures his museum was ahead of its time, or its place. “There is a big cultural gap,” he said, “between having sex and understanding sexuality and whatever is related.”

Years before and many blocks east of the Erotic Museum, the Pussycat porn theater opened on Western Avenue. Its owner, Vincent Miranda, was haled into court so often his desk nameplate read “Vincent Miranda, Defendant.” But he never put sleaze on his marquee, he told me, because someone might see it on the way to church.

Miranda had his own ideas of what was vulgar, and on a tour of his neighborhood, we drove past a store of a down-market, now-defunct discount chain called Zody’s. “See that?” the cine-porn king asked, pointing accusingly. “Things have gone downhill around here ever since that Zody’s moved in.”