“Wasn’t I here last evening, and didn’t I go through every kind of screw, and you didn’t charge me a sou?”
Again he went through his performance, but this time, when he made a bluff at paying the piper he was informed the charges were seven hundred francs. He could barely wait till dinner time before he again presented himself before the bawds. All next day he hugged his secret to himself. “There is no charge,” said the lady of the house.Īstonished, but not disposed to argue the matter, her guest left. Thoroughly drained, the gentleman from Idaho went downstairs, where he asked the madam what his bill was. After the meal the man entertained himself in various ways with his playmate, who taught him positions of which even Elephantis, Aretino and Luisa Sigea were ignorant. Went there by himself, quietly, asked for a private room, and, after selecting his partner, ordered dinner with lots of wine. So he asked a cabby to give him the address of a good whorehouse. The following version, for example, comes from a 1927 humor collection:Ī gentleman from Idaho was in Paris and didn’t want to make himself too conspicuous. In these older versions, however, the victims are not sweethearts or married couples innocently engaged in private lovemaking (as in the example above), but characters such as adulterers or bawdy house patrons who are being punished for having transgressed the sexual mores of their times.
What makes this legend particularly interesting from a folkloric standpoint is its age - tales of secretly-filmed sexual encounters antedate the development of the home video market by several decades. Moreover, it was at a Cove Haven, a small hotel on a lake in the Poconos, where Morris Wilkins invented and installed the world’s first heart-shaped bathtub in 1963. Pennsylvania Poconos feature no less than eight resorts that cater to couples by offering a variety of romantic facilities. That version’s setting of the Poconos (“the honeymoon capital of the world”) is an obvious one, for the The Canterbury Inn case involved no cameras, but with the advent of home video equipment has grown progressively cheaper, smaller, and better in quality, the creation of a legend (real or not) like the example quoted above was inevitable. They won their invasion of privacy lawsuit to the tune of $4.3 million in punitive and compensatory damages (although they eventually settled for $1 million, the limit of the hotel’s insurance coverage). Gave someone a view into their suite that night.
In one of the most prominent examples, an Iowa couple who celebrated their engagement night with a private evening in a penthouse suite at the Canterbury Inn in Coralville, Iowa, in 1988 sued the hotel after discovering a peephole behind a two-way mirror - a peephole that Tales of peepholes set up to allow the furtive observance of people’s private activities in bathrooms and hotel rooms - and lawsuits resulting from them - have been circulating for years, many of them based on real incidents. Engaged in the deeply personal and intimate act of making love with your partner? How about finding out that someone had secretly made a video tape of the event - one that had been distributed to countless others for their viewing pleasure? Such is the premise of this legend.
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