Court Refuses to Let Sunbathers Bare It All

Those dignified justices in the black robes who make up the U.S. Supreme Court passed along a word of warning Monday to overly liberated Angelenos: Better not bare your bottom at the beach.

Rejecting arguments that there is a constitutional right to sunbathe in the nude, the high court without comment left intact a decades-old Los Angeles ordinance that bans nudity at public beaches.

The brouhaha began in the mid-1980s when the police began citing the nudists who gathered regularly at the zaniest stretch of sand of all--Venice Beach.

It was there that retired salesman Ed Smart, now 71, was arrested for flashing too much flesh, a technical violation of the law that is rarely enforced in this day of the thong bikini.

“I was just lying on my stomach in my G-string bathing suit minding my own business and some undercover cops came along and busted me,” the longtime nudist recalled from his new home in Las Vegas, where he occasionally throws low-key nude bashes.

Venice was also the spot where Suzie Davis, now a 56-year-old widow, disrobed with her husband in a 1987 protest against the city’s law. The couple invited the media to watch their flouting of the law and attracted a horde of police as well.

The officers, some of them on horseback, swept in, arresting husband and wife. The experience still brings tears to Davis’ eyes.

Fed up with such tactics, Smart and Davis in 1990 joined nudism activist Cecil Cinder in filing suit against the city in federal court. They wanted to be the plaintiffs who would go down in history for uncovering the naked truth of the U.S. Constitution--that nudism is a right.

On Monday, they failed.

“People ought to be very upset about this,” said Cinder, 66, a leader in the Beachfront U.S.A. nudist group. “The beach ought to be one place where people can get away from government.”

Cinder, a retired teacher, estimates that there are 50,000 “card-carrying nudists” nationwide and many more who are de facto nudists but too shy to publicize it.

Despite the decision, there are still some stretches of sand outside city limits where police have not targeted the sunbather without clothes. There is an isolated cove on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and some sparsely populated stretches in Malibu. But overall, Southern California is no St. Tropez.

Stanley Raskin, the attorney who represented the three nudists, said he would not rank the decision with landmark civil rights cases but considers it significant nonetheless and a setback for those concerned about individual freedoms.

“These are ordinary people who have a quasi-religion called nude sunbathing,” Raskin said. “They want a segregated part of the beach where they can take off their clothes. I’m not a nudist but I understand the problem.”

The ordinance bans baring of a whole bunch of unmentionables not usually mentioned in a family newspaper. Without getting too specific, Assistant City Atty. Jack Brown, who argued the city’s case in federal court, put it this way:

“Society has certain mores and moral values and the society, in this case the City Council, believes it is inappropriate that the large number of families and young children . . . should be exposed to people who don’t feel like wearing clothes.”

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco essentially agreed with that reasoning, ruling last fall that the ordinance “is constitutionally sound despite ‘incidental limitations’ on the plaintiffs’ rights to free expression and association.”

At Venice Beach, where lifeguards say they have not spied a nude sunbather for years, Monday’s ruling irked some in the anything-goes crowd on the boardwalk, where jugglers and fortunetellers have scrapped with police over their right to perform for money on public land.

“It’s society’s attempt to control Venice’s free-spiritedness,” said Ronald Kay, a Hare Krishna priest in a Mickey Mouse cap who was selling books on healing. He said cityhood would allow Venice to set up its own nude beach zone.

Hemp activist Robin Grant, who sunbathes nude only in private, saw a parallel with her cause. “We’re trying to free marijuana and they’re trying to free their bodies,” she said.

Even some clothed sunbathers favored a designated nude area.

“People do whatever they want here--it does go with the idea of Venice,” said 17-year-old Natalie Filipovski, on spring break with friends from Michigan. “But I don’t think you should be able to do it whenever you want.”

Nearby, Amy Byron--lounging in a neon pink bikini on the stretch where nudists once erased their tan lines--doubted that she would go nude even if she could. “I come here to relax, not to worry about who’s looking at my body parts,” she said.

But Jody Pauley, who still sunbathes topless at the beach, ordinance or not, had another view. After being ticketed twice by police and harassed by oglers, she found her own secluded spot just south of Venice.

“There’s less traffic and less weirdos,” she said of her favored spot. “You kind of learn to roll over when (lifeguards) drive by. . . . I like the overall tan. I hate tan lines.”