Death of a Swinger

At first he was just part of a story, one about a bygone place in Atlanta called Riverbend. In the 1970s, Riverbend was arguably the most infamous singles apartment complex in their short, debauched history in this country. A college football player turned cop, then nightclub owner and real estate mogul, Arthur Jeryl Hensley was the charmer who, just for fun, ran the clubhouse at Riverbend. Clothes and traditional relationships fell away willy-nilly on its grounds. Playboy called it the epicenter of the sexual revolution. Along the way, Jeryl made and blew millions, spent few nights alone, and claimed the macho old maxim for his own: “I spent 95 percent of my money on cars, women and booze—and I wasted the rest.”

The first time we talked on the phone in 2009, Jeryl didn’t make much sense. My inquiry into the past puzzled him. “You weren’t even born,” he said. “You can’t understand this stuff.” Not wishing to hang up, however, he told me about a pet lion he’d kept awhile at Riverbend—it ate steak and made him some enemies—but otherwise failed to say much I could grasp. The conversation occurred after lunch, and, I soon realized, this meant he was drunk.

We finally met last September, well before lunchtime, at a Waffle House in Atlanta. He lived in a modest retirement home nearby. Some old pals had suspected that he might be homeless, but there he was getting out of a beat-up Cadillac, then holding a door open for a young lady. He had the dried-up face of a career drinker, a nose like a sponge, looking a decade older than his sixty-eight years. He appeared little like the vital man embracing Evel Knievel in a photo I’d seen.

Jeryl had just been to the eye doctor, and his left eye dripped: “I ain’t crying. Just limping a little.” Limping was how he described his existential condition. Only a small Playboy tattoo on his right ankle suggested what more than a dozen former friends and sweethearts had said: that his love life rivaled Hugh Hefner’s for a time. Jeryl talked about the past, or tried to, but his hands trembled and his mind stalled. After a few more meetings, still struggling to lay out the most basic facts, he provided some evidence: “The pictures speak for themselves.”

Jeryl had no regular women left, but he had plenty of glossy nude reminders of those that he’d known. Each time I visited his little apartment on the eleventh floor, I sat on his bed holding photocopies. There wasn’t anywhere else to sit, except the old sofa chair where he hunched over his bottle of cheap vodka waiting for his telephone to ring, a woman to appear, or his heart to stop. He used to live in a mansion next to Isaac Hayes, he’d remind me.

My first tour amounted to a run-through of the women on his walls. Then he turned on a projector he’d set up for my visit: a grinning Jeryl sprawled nude on a boat in Cuba flanked by two winking young ladies (“I wasn’t much to look at, but they sure was”); a picture of an extra-large hot tub, at his estate on the Chattahoochee River, crammed with pink flesh (“I wouldn’t let any other fellas get in”). Here was Ozymandias, only his shattered remains were dusty slides.

My story on Riverbend came out a few months later, and Jeryl’s social life flickered again. An “old gal in her eighties,” who lived a few floors below, had knocked on the door and offered him “favors.” He’d politely declined, citing the diminishing returns of old age. But he began calling me every few days, sometimes sober, always beginning: “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening to me over here!” No longer a journalist’s subject, a tragicomic horndog, he was a friend. And I was something like a son to a man without any.

“When I die,” he told me during our final visit, “you’d better get in here quick and grab these nudie pictures and porno films, ‘cause there’s no telling what they’ll do with them.” Well, he died suddenly on a Saturday, his favorite day of the week. Died sitting by the phone. Died from too much drink and not enough memory. We’d planned to meet for lunch the next week to discuss a book about his life. “I just don’t know how you’d tell it, Coach,” he’d said, perplexed. “I can’t hardly remember it myself.”

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Charles Bethea is a journalist and writer based in Atlanta. His nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Outside, Rolling Stone, and The Wall Street Journal. He most recently won the 2010 City and Regional Magazine Association’s reporting award for his Atlanta magazine story, “Final Exit.”