Incredible love triangle that impressed The Joy of Sex: Manual was based mostly on Dr Alex Comfort’s personal romps together with his spouse’s finest buddy – as Bridget Jones director makes a movie about their VERY difficult love life

Growing up as the son in a middle class family in Barnet, few could have predicted Alex Comfort, who had a striking fascination with molluscs, would have gone on to bring about a sexual awakening for millions around the world – but there were certainly signs of fire in the young teen’s personality.

At the age of 14, he blew up his hand and lost four fingers while experimenting with a new compound of gunpowder, leaving only his thumb remaining on his left hand. A few short years later, he won a place at Cambridge University where he studied medicine – and met his wife Ruth.

The conventional marriage to Ruth which bore a son, Nicholas, served both parties well until Ruth’s university friend, Jane Henderson, re-entered their lives and began a passionate affair with the gerontologist. 

Their love triangle led to the publication of revolutionary book The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide To Lovemaking in 1972, which will now be introduced to a whole new audience by way of a film of the same name, being made by Bridget Jones director Sharon Maguire.

Comfort’s book, a manual to having better sex which featured groundbreaking illustrations of the positions in which he made love to Jane, has sold more than 12 million copies and been translated into 30 languages. 

However, it also brought about the end of his marriage to Ruth, who saw the manual as a public humiliation of how her husband romped wildly with her best friend – in contrast to her more conservative sexual values.

The love triangle between Comfort, Ruth and Jane; eventually saw the gerontologist leave his wife to marry his lover and move to California where he could engage in the libertine lifestyle he believed would save humanity.

Speaking to the Guardian, Maguire said the complicated relationship that brought Comfort huge success by inspiring the book had also contributed to ‘the unravelling of his life’. 

She said: ‘The clashing psychologies of the three characters makes for this fascinating conundrum about love and sex and relationships that’s wrapped up in a comedy.’

Comfort and Ruth’s son Nicholas, who now lives a quiet life in south east London with his third wife, opened up about how his father’s extramarital affair had played out before he wrote The Joy of Sex.

Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2022, he said: ‘My mother was not the most tactile of people and Jane, presumably, was.

‘Dad was dividing his time between mum and Jane and this arrangement almost became a fixed state.

‘But then his research work (into gerontology, the study of ageing) at University College London came to an end, he went to America and ‘Joy’ came out.

‘Dad told me later there were quite a few gerontologists at Sandstone. He said all of them had a chronic fear of their own mortality which made them want to enjoy life more.’

The book, published in 1972, featured detailed illustrations of sex positions he used to experiment with Jane (a Plan B, after Comfort initially took Polaroids of himself having sex with Jane to horrified publishers).

As a librarian, her role was cataloguing the many twists and turns of their adventurous sex life. 

They also tried hiring pornographic models but they kept pouting seductively and didn’t match up to the image of average, loving couples. 

The illustrations were in part modelled on Charles Raymond, one of the illustrators, and his wife Edeltraud; while also featuring Indian and Japanese classic erotica. The publishing decision was taken over fear of obscenity lawsuits. 

Bearded Charles, one of the artists on the book (he usually painted flowers), and German-born Edeltraud, volunteered to recreate Comfort and Henderson’s sex life ‘and she got him through the positions with Teutonic efficiency’, said Nick.

The sex was not simulated, but real, he says, and took place in a freezing cold garret which could not be heated because of the miners’ strike. 

‘They were trying to do 200 different poses and it was during the power cuts,’ said Maguire. ‘Although it sounds like a sex romp, it was all well-intentioned, because there really was nothing like it. No textbooks, even medical ones, no illustrations, no pictures.’ 

When the book came out, it also made a star of ‘Hairy Man’, the hirsute lover  depicted adopting all sorts of extraordinary positions with his lover. 

Modelled on a cookery book. Its sub-title was A Gourmet Guide and the section titles were Starters, Main Courses and so on.

It sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Britain and spent 70 weeks in the American bestseller list between 1972 and 1974.

It is impossible to know how many people actually followed Comfort’s recommendations, or indeed how many read the book for titillation rather than instruction, but there is little doubt that it was highly reflective of the huge change in attitudes towards sexual behaviour taking place. 

Nicholas also reflected on the publication of the book, which laid bare Comfort’s exploits with Jane in detail, and how it led to Ruth’s public humiliation.

‘It would have been impossible for her not to have been [betrayed],’ he said. 

‘And in an ideal world Dad would have liked not to have made a formal split. But Jane was the needier of the two. My mother was better able to function on her own.

‘In fact I think she found Dad’s intellectual explosiveness and high-octane mind difficult to live with and, although she was hurt, in some way not having him around gave her a chance to recover.

‘Dad was still very fond of Mum and he felt desperately conflicted.’

Indeed, he had found a way to divide himself between the two women by spending Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with Henderson to carry out is ‘practical research’, and the rest of the time he was with his wife. 

‘Dad was dividing his time between mum and Jane and this arrangement almost became a fixed state,’ Nick explained.  

The book, when eventually published, was released first in America, a decision made by Comfort to spare his long-suffering wife’s feelings.

‘Dad didn’t want to upset her any more than she had been. She’d had to put up with enough,’ Nicholas said. 

Comfort also tried to put some distance between himself and the publication by claiming he was the editor rather than the writer.  

At the time, too, there was a prohibition on doctors advertising, and he was fearful that the book might infringe this — and that he could be struck off the medical register.

After the marriage broke down and Comfort and Jane moved to California to indulge in a hedonistic lifestyle at the Sandstone Retreat.

The retreat was a nudist, free love commune founded in 1969 in Topanga Canyon, by John and Barbara Williamson. The middle-class married couple felt stifled by the shackles of monogamy.

They had begun to explore polyamory in the late 1960s when they invited friends to swingers parties in their Mulholland Drive home, before going on to found Sandstone. 

The Retreat offered indoor and outdoor communal sleeping areas, a spa and communal bathrooms; but all members were interviewed before being allowed to join. 

After moving to California, Comfort and Jane kept many details of their antics quiet – a striking contrast after having laid bare their sex life to the world.

‘I think they believed that what went on in Sandstone, stayed in Sandstone,’ he says.

‘Ironically, Dad was a fairly private man. He didn’t talk about his own sex life. Very few people do. He talked in generalities rather than in the particular.’

But even before his father went on his odyssey of sexual experimentation, and published The Joy Of Sex, he was making radical pronouncements.

Nick was 17 and a boarder at Highgate School in North London when Dr Comfort announced, daringly, on a radio broadcast — this was 1963 — that no responsible teenage boy should go to a party without a condom in his pocket.

‘I wasn’t embarrassed until people started teasing me about it,’ says Nick. ‘And they did.’

Comfort came to believe sex was the antidote to war, as a strident pacifist who had been arrested and jailed in the 1960s for his activity with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Speaking about Comfort’s middle-aged sexual awakening, filmmaker Maguire said: ‘I think he genuinely thought that sex was a means of changing the mindset away from fighting and wars.’

She described his exploration of sex as like an ‘epiphany’. 

However, after indulging hedonism throughout the 1970s, Comfort’s adventurous exploits and frequenting of orgies came to an end at the close of the decade – which coincided with the emergence of Aids.

Indeed, in an update to The Joy of Sex in 1991, he warned readers of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, writing that Aids ‘totally alters the sexual landscape’. 

He added: ‘If your newly found love won’t use a condom, you are in bed with a witless, irresponsible and uncaring person.’ 

Not only did he understand the need for safe sex between lovers; but according to Nicholas, his father would be disappointed by the rise of ‘unfeeling sex’ in the modern age.

‘He would have been sad that young people feel pressured to have sex earlier than ever.

‘He felt it was something you’d come to in your own time and in your own way. He welcomed the fact that more people were enjoying it and he wanted them to be properly educated about it,’ he said. 

Comfort died in the year 2000 aged 80, by which time he had almost exclusively been dubbed ‘Dr Sex’ thanks to his world-renowned book. 

After his death, Claire Rayner wrote in the Guardian: ‘[He] would have been extremely annoyed today to be reminded that, for many people, his name means only sex.’

As a pacifist, gerontologist, writer and poet, Comfort had hoped he’d be remembered for his broad accomplishments rather than the one groundbreaking book he produced.

Jane had died of a heart attack in 1991, the same year Comfort had a huge brain haemorrhage. 

Despite exposing Ruth to public humiliation through The Joy of Sex, Comfort maintained an amicable relationship with his first wife, Nick revealed – and he routinely had them over for lunch together on special occasions. 

Later in the 1990s, Comfort had another stroke which left him in a nursing home until his death. He was paralysed, but remained largely cognisant.

Speaking of the book’s legacy, Nick reflected: ‘Dad would have regarded its values as lasting ones.

‘He was a great believer that sex had its place as part of a caring relationship; not as something purely mechanical. He felt that people’s feelings should not be exploited,’ says Nick.

‘I think he would be disappointed by the growth of unfeeling sex. He would have been sad that young people feel pressured to have sex earlier than ever.

‘He felt it was something you’d come to in your own time and in your own way. He welcomed the fact that more people were enjoying it and he wanted them to be properly educated about it.

‘But I don’t think he would have been happy about very young children being told too much about it either.

‘He’d be worried about the ubiquity of internet porn; that it might reach people who could be damaged by it.’

Dr Comfort, also a fervent advocate of free speech, would have been ‘exasperated’ by the current stifling of academic debate on transgender issues.

‘He believed passionately in open debate, that people were entitled to express their opinions even if they were at odds with his own.’