Lust on the Air--What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Television is often better at making love than at making love appealing.

There are times when you get the impression from TV that everyone is either sexually depraved or confused, that all relationships are fleeting or petty, that contact between the genders is trivial or farcical, that the history of the sexes is drawn from Monty Python.

Sometimes . . . all of the above.

Take Sunday and Monday, when the evidence ranged from the greed, lechery and degeneracy of “Divorce Court” to the greed, lechery and degeneracy of “Hollywood Wives,” the two-part 1985 miniseries that ABC was repeating.

Spewed from a steamy novel by Jackie Collins, “Hollywood Wives” was rotten and trashy enough to attract as many flies as viewers, a putrefying tale of see-through characters who spent their empty lives doing lunch, nails, hair and sex, not necessarily in that order.

It was the kind of Hollywood garbage masterwork that made you its prisoner.

“With all the expertise in this city, they come up with this?” my wife huffed indignantly.

“Shall we turn it off?”

“No!”

Of course not. It was irresistible--a mean-spirited universe where everyone acted out their four-letter fantasies.

Fading movie star Ross Conti (Steve Forrest) first slept with his makeup girl and then with playgirl Karen Lancaster (Mary Crosby), daughter of a superstar (Robert Stack) who once slept with a 15-year-old girl on his dressing room floor. Scheming sex priestess Gina Germaine (Suzanne Somers) slept with studio head Oliver Easterne (Rod Steiger) and director Neil Gray, who had heart failure in bed with Gina while his wife, Montana (Stephanie Powers), was in bed with aspiring actor Buddy Hudson (Andrew Stevens), a former prostitute who didn’t know that he and his homicidal twin brother were the illegitimate sons of Conti and superagent Sadie LaSalle (Angie Dickinson).

Lust was heavy in the air. Karen made a pass at Ross on the street. The Conti pool man made a pass at Ross’ wife, Elaine (Candy Bergen). A girl made a pass at Buddy as he walked by a pool. Someone made a pass at Buddy’s wife, Angel (Catherine Mary Stewart), in a grocery store. Then a pimp tried to recruit Angel on the street.

“Hollywood Wives” really went through the roof, however, when the alcoholic Neil, after being blackmailed by Gina, began throttling her in a fury, only to end up torridly kissing her in bed.

But TV’s cynicism is a much more varied rainbow of ironies and neon colors than this.

Studying Monday’s TV listings, you couldn’t help noting that the 8 a.m. offerings included “The PTL Club” on KHJ-TV Channel 9 and “Bodies in Motion” on KDOC Channel 56, and that the lead guest on KABC-TV’s “A.M. Los Angeles” at 9 was Jessica Hahn.

She’s on the talk-show circuit again, this time to promote her latest appearance in Playboy magazine, where, as “A.M. Los Angeles” co-host Steve Edwards put it, she’s “showing her all.” And, once again, telling it.

The question, as Edwards framed it, was whether Hahn was as “naive and virginal” as she claims she was during her alleged forced sexual encounters in 1980 with fallen TV preacher Jim Bakker and another clergyman, John Fletcher. Or to put it another way: Just how much more titillation is she--and Playboy--going to squeeze from this Great American Story? Apparently a lot, based on the TV time she’s logging and the slobbering interest she encounters.

Hahn repeated her charges, with Edwards occasionally interrupting. “This is the difficult part for you,” he said. “But what happened now?”

Difficult? If it’s difficult, then Hahn must be an epic masochist. She has spilled her guts about the infamous Bakker everywhere.

As always, she was very convincing with Edwards, and every word about the incident and her subsequent pain may be true. But it’s Hahn, with the help of the media, who is prolonging it now and popping her buttons for TV exposure, each side exploiting the other for self-serving reasons.

If her story is true, she experienced true horror. If not for capitalizing on her alleged victimization, on the other hand, she’d still be anonymous and without her new fame, new nose and new bankroll.

Edwards asked about the money she received from Playboy. “I didn’t get quite a million,” said Hahn, who added that she now wants a career in broadcasting, the logical next step.

Onward now to more acrimony between the sexes, only the benign and amusing kind. It’s “The Love Connection,” a syndicated matchmaking series (on KHJ-TV), hosted by Chuck Woolery, in which a man or woman chooses among three potential dates who introduce themselves in brief videos. Then the daters tell the audience how their dates went.

These days, mostly awful.

This is getting to be the hate connection, and you have the impression that the producers encourage displeased daters to degrade and insult each other as they recall their experiences together.

Her: “It was awful! Awful! Awful! Awful! I couldn’t wait to get rid of him!”

On another of this week’s dates, a 58-year-old woman and a 60-year-old man, who said he’d been married six times, had a lousy time together. She left him briefly at a restaurant where they dined, then returned to find him hugging another woman. Actually, he told Woolery, she hadn’t seen him hug two additional women.

Then, in another show, came Doyle the laugher, a 44-year-old chef who’d been married four times. Woolery asked him about the marriages.

Doyle: “They were all great! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

Doyle let the studio audience pick his date from the videos. When they picked Judy, he pointed to her big-screen picture and reacted. “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

Onward now to the ABC soap opera “Loving,” where Egypt Jones threatened her former husband, whose present wife was reminded by her son that his father had slept with his governess.

Then it was the syndicated “Sally Jessy Raphael” show (on KHJ-TV again), where the topic was “sexual confusion” and the guests were a man born with male and female organs and a cross-dressing, married father who said he felt like a lesbian and would “go to bed with a man provided I had the parts of a female.” A third guest named Edmund said his body was acquiring the parts of a female and that he didn’t know at this stage whether he was a man or a woman.

Raphael saluted her guests, telling them: “It is very difficult to come on and describe your private parts.”

But not private lives. Later, on “The New Newlywed Game,” host Bob Eubanks asked the usual young couples if they would characterize their previous week together as a love or a horror story. “Love story,” one husband replied.

“How can you say that?” his wife shrieked. “I scream at you all the time and the walls are so thin.”

By then, “Hollywood Wives” was looking better and better, and a line from Gina Germaine’s victim, poor old Neil Gray, came to mind: “If you have no taste, you can do anything.” TV proves it.