COVER STORY : A Natural Setting : Stripped of their inhibitions, nudists at Elysium Fields in Topanga Canyon say the safe environment sets them free. The camp has endured since 1968 despite efforts to shut it down.

On warm weekends, its grassy, eucalyptus-scented grounds are covered with naked men and women. Waitresses and teachers mingle with affluent couples and aging hipsters, their tanned bodies glistening in the sun. Some play tennis in nothing but sneakers. Others skinny-dip in the pool. Children romp across the lawn.

With the passage of time, the Elysium Fields nudist camp in Topanga Canyon is more quaint than risque. A product of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, it has survived prudish neighbors, prayer vigils outside its gates, and, until recently, persistent efforts by Los Angeles County officials to close it down.

Although a few of the nation’s 100 or so nudist camps have fallen on bad times, Elysium Fields--like nude recreation generally--thrives.

The camp, where sex is prohibited, has become a popular venue for self-awareness experts spreading the New Age gospel. Parents take their kids there to explain the birds and bees. Women who wouldn’t be caught in a singles bar swear by the secluded, eight-acre compound as a place to meet quality men.

“What we were hoping for and fighting for in the ‘60s, people are more comfortable doing now,” said Ed Lange, Elysium’s 72-year-old founder and a former Life magazine photographer. Sitting on a veranda overlooking his domain, wrapped in a towel as a concession to the weather, Lange resembles a professor who has just stepped out of the shower. He is among the movement’s elder statesmen, having spent four decades trying to demystify the nudist way of life.

As the publisher of nudist books and magazines, Lange has fought numerous legal battles, including one that led to a 1956 U.S. Supreme Court decision that granted second-class mailing privileges to nudist publications.

In the late 1950s, he persuaded Eastman Kodak to change its policy of refusing to return prints of nudes that were sent for developing. Later, he successfully challenged the publishers of Look magazine after they took exception to him calling one of his publications Nude Look.

He even scandalized daytime TV viewers in the early ‘60s by appearing--fully clothed--on “Art Linkletter’s House Party” to promote the lifestyle.

For the past 26 years, his focus, and the source of his pride, has been Elysium Fields.

Nestled below a hill at the end of a tree-lined back road, Elysium is a rustic Shangri-La where visitors are encouraged to shed their problems along with their attire.

A sign on a towel rack beside the steam bath reads, “Leave Your Hang-ups Here.”

There are no loudspeakers, televisions or radios. Patrons are invited to get in touch with their senses, to smell the grass, enjoy the fresh air, count the clouds.

On sunny weekends, when crowds number in the hundreds, the grounds are filled with couples and families with lunches spread on picnic blankets. People read, meditate, sunbathe, throw Frisbees.

It is a park scene like any other, except that, for the most part, the participants aren’t wearing clothes.

And yet eroticism is strangely absent.

“Small bits of clothing are far more seductive than nudity can ever be,” explains a divorced fashion model, lounging in a lawn chair, her chin resting on her knees. She brings her young daughter whenever possible. “If I wanted to be leered at, I’d go to the beach.”

Although uninhibited among themselves, many nudists remain wary about revealing their lifestyle to others, noting the lingering stigma associated with it. The model, for instance, didn’t want her name revealed for fear that it would complicate a child custody battle.

“I used to think nudists were wackos,” says Paul Stevens, 82, a Woodland Hills pharmacist who began coming to Elysium with his wife in the late 1960s and has continued since her death 10 years ago. “It’s easy to ridicule something that you don’t know anything about.”

Like other nudists, he extols the lifestyle for its ability to break down ordinary social barriers. “Communication is easier when you’re naked,” he said. “Out of their uniforms, people are on a level playing field.”

He tells of once talking to a pleasant man from England named Alex for nearly an hour “right here where you see me now” and not learning until later that he was Alex Comfort, the noted biologist and author of “The Joy of Sex.”

In the pool with Stevens this day was a brain surgeon, a prominent child psychologist and a former National Geographic photographer on his first visit to the camp.

Daniel Kaufman, the newcomer, had brought his 5-year-old daughter to attend one of the numerous “clothed” events hosted by Elysium throughout the year. When his daughter insisted on swimming, he shed his clothes and joined her.

At the end of the day, he was hooked.

“I didn’t meet any strange, weird or questionable characters,” he said. “Nor did I see it in anybody’s eyes.”

An oasis of tranquillity where the two most common status symbols--cars and clothes--have no currency, Elysium seems an unlikely target for the kind of campaign that forced Lange to spend an estimated $1 million in legal fees in order to remain open.

“A less determined person would have walked away a long time ago,” said Los Angeles criminal attorney Stanley Fleishman, whose clients, besides Lange, have included the publishers of Henry Miller novels and the exhibitors of the movie “Deep Throat.” “Ed has stuck to his guns because of his beliefs.”

Not until early last year, following a series of court reversals, did the county finally recognize the camp’s right to exist. A political realignment in 1991 had removed Elysium from the district of County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, a longtime foe.

The camp’s troubles began almost as soon as it opened.

Responding to complaints from neighbors, deputies arrested Lange and two dozen other nudists on successive weekends in 1968, charging them with indecent exposure under a 29-year-old county law.

After Lange waged a successful legal battle to overturn the law, the county used zoning changes in an attempt to drum Elysium out of business. When that tactic also failed, the supervisors--led by Antonovich--asserted that the property was seismically unsafe to accommodate visitors.

Some of the complaints once lodged against the camp border on the comical.

Stephen Rohde, a Los Angeles civil attorney, still chuckles when recalling a courtroom exchange with an Elysium detractor, a woman whose house bordered the grounds.

“I said, ‘After dinner parties, do you take guests up to the attic with binoculars to peer over the eucalyptus trees?,’ and she said, ‘We don’t do it all the time.’ ”

Although some neighbors still object to the nudist camp, local opposition has largely melted away.

The same Topanga Chamber of Commerce whose members once shunned Elysium now use its clubhouse for their functions.

“All the stuff that our opponents imagined was hidden was revealed to be nonsense,” Lange said. “I didn’t have a tail and horns and there were no orgies being conducted on the grounds.”

Lange became fascinated with nudism as a teen-ager growing up in Chicago after buying an early nudist magazine, Sunshine & Health, under the counter at a drugstore.

Unlike other young men drawn to the magazine because it was the only publication at the time to offer an unimpeded view of the female anatomy, he was more interested in the articles than the pictures.

“I resented guys in school who were only out to (score), and I resented girls who were only out to find a lifetime meal ticket,” he said. “Unhealthy attitudes about sex and the human body seemed to drive each group.”

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Abandoning Chicago along with his strict Baptist upbringing, Lange moved to Los Angeles in 1940. He found work as a set designer and free-lance photographer and renewed his interest in nudism just when one of the movement’s pioneer West Coast leaders came under attack.

Besieged by hostile newspaper accounts and under pressure from authorities, Lura Glassey was on the brink of losing her popular Elysia nudist park in the hills above Tujunga in the San Fernando Valley.

The Los Angeles Herald-Express printed stories hinting at “unspeakable orgies” behind the “impenetrable walls” of Elysia. In 1939, county supervisors passed a law effectively prohibiting the practice of nudism in the county--the same law that Lange was later responsible for overturning.

To comply, Elysia’s female members took to wearing G-strings. But when an unsuspecting sunbather dropped hers to go skinny-dipping, sheriff’s deputies, peering through binoculars, swooped in.

Glassey was arrested. As her case languished in court, she was forced to sell the property and close the nudist park. Through the ordeal, Lange was one of her strongest supporters.

“It made me angry,” he said. “From that point on, my dream was to some day open my own camp and do something to improve conditions for nudists.”

The nudist philosophy is simple: To be nude is to be natural. It isn’t that nudists are opposed to clothes. They simply believe that clothing restricts the full enjoyment of nature and outdoor activities.

A favorite adage is: “Clothed when practical, unclothed when possible.”

Once regarded as nut-eating, berry-chewing exercise fanatics and treated as social lepers (outsiders often even referred to their gathering places as “colonies”), nudists by tradition have tended to be socially conservative.

“The movement was created in an environment of fear where to acknowledge that you were a sexual being was to imply that you were a pervert of some kind,” Lange said.

He and his former wife, June, set about to change what Lange refers to as nudism’s “puritanical streak” when they formed the Sundial Club for nudists out of their Hollywood apartment in the early ‘50s.

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Many in the movement were dismayed when a stunningly attractive club member, Diane Webber, posed for Playboy and later became one of the most photographed female sex icons of the ‘50s.

Nudist sensitivities were also tested with the opening of Elysium Fields, with its more libertine rules.

Elysium allowed touching, frowned upon at other camps. Professional masseurs, unheard of in the nudist world at the time, were added to the staff. And Elysium was designated as “clothing optional,” a departure from camps that required guests to disrobe before getting past the entry.

Proponents say such changes have helped make nudism more acceptable to the public.

“This place represents a different attitude toward sexuality,” said Art Kunkin, who gained notoriety in the ‘60s as founder of the Los Angeles Free Press, the nation’s first underground newspaper. He works for Lange part time as publisher of Journal of the Senses, an Elysium quarterly.

Although not a full-fledged nudist (“I’ll take off my clothes to go in the pool”), Kunkin was attracted to Elysium as a kind of truce zone where men and women relate to each other without being caught up in the sexually infused gamesmanship involving fashion and possessions. “People here aren’t abusing one another,” he said.

Following the example of Esalen Institute, the personal development center near Big Sur, Lange introduced a curriculum of personal growth seminars--including yoga, diet and fitness experts, psychological counselors and herbalists--and promoted them in his own as well as non-nudist publications.

“Elysium has been on the cutting edge in any number of ways,” said Debra Peterson, an official with the American Sunbathing Assn., the nation’s largest nudist group, with 44,000 members.

Long content to keep a low profile, that group now actively promotes nudism by sending speakers to civic clubs and to trade and travel conventions, places Peterson insists “would have been out of the question just a few years ago.”

At Elysium, the membership roll recently topped a record 1,400, and Lange anticipates a new growth spurt now that the threat of closure has dissipated.

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Like nudist camps everywhere, Elysium strives to keep a balance between men and women.

“It’s established that if the balance gets out of kilter, both men and women start to feel uncomfortable,” says Norm Swirin, a librarian who moonlights as the camp’s tennis coach.

Camp leaders say that currently, 65% of members are men.

Although not a requirement, male enrollees are encouraged to bring their wives and girlfriends, with discounts provided for couples. Besides the $200 annual dues, members pay daily grounds fees that range from $8 to $11, depending on the season and the day of the week.

Sessions for prospective new members are held three times a week. A staff member gives the newcomers a tour, lays down what few rules there are (“Don’t violate others’ personal space; use a towel when sitting”) and tactfully seeks to weed out voyeurs from those genuinely interested in nudism.

Even when the weather is lousy, a few people usually show up.

On one such day recently, a weekday morning, three men came, including Don, a young UCLA graduate student, and Carl, a retired insurance salesman.

Don said he learned of the place after meeting a young woman at a shopping mall who had an Elysium bumper sticker on her car. By the end of the day, he was eager to share the experience with his girlfriend.

Carl, who was visiting from Florida, had slipped away from his wife on the pretext of sightseeing. And that was exactly what he was doing. “She wouldn’t go for this,” he said.

Betty Lesley, Elysium’s executive coordinator, insists that people who come for the wrong reasons usually don’t return. “They see what goes on and the type of people here and we usually don’t see them again,” she said.

Lesley, a former ballet dancer, recalls her first day at Elysium 10 years ago with mixed emotions.

Stressed from the demands of motherhood and her job as a network TV censor, she had been admonished by a doctor to find somewhere to unwind.

A friend suggested Elysium Fields.

“I said, ‘You’re kidding, how do you get naked with a whole bunch of people?’ ”

Her first husband, the late film director Nicholas Ray, had been a private nudist, shedding his clothes after coming home from work the way some people toss their shoes. It was not something she cared for.

But her friend was persistent.

She recalls mustering the courage to walk out of Elysium’s ladies room after disrobing. “I whispered, ‘Let’s go somewhere up the hill where nobody will notice us.’ ”

Soon, the stack of TV scripts she had brought from the office were abandoned. “I discovered for the first time in my life the pleasure of being totally unfettered, like a baby,” she recalled. “It was extremely liberating.”

WHERE TO GO

What: Elysium Fields nudist camp.

Location: 814 Robinson Road, Topanga.

Hours: Open 365 days a year; 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday-Saturday.

Price: Membership--$200 per person; $300 per couple; plus daily grounds fees of $8 to $11 depending on season and day of week. Free introductory tours every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m.

Call: (310) 455-1000.