THE CHEATIN' SIDE OF TOWN

By LANCE MORROW

In the current Broadway production of the King and I, the King of Siam, once played with electric virility by Yul Brynner, comes off as curiously sexless. Overt animal masculinity seems to have been suppressed, perhaps as being retrograde, or even offensive to the spirit of the age. That musky beast belongs offstage, or in the Museum of Natural History.

It is the same in the theater of politics. If we accidentally glimpse animal masculinity there--the Tasmanian devil of male desire--it is like stumbling upon secret squalor, the hand under the table, the old Packwood charm. A public exposure of the full horror of male desire sometimes leads to public relations catastrophes. On the other hand, Bill Clinton has shown that such storms can be weathered without noticeable damage.

The theater is filled these days with graphic homosexual stories. Gay sex interweaves a certain risque prestige with the drama of its poignant risk. But public male heterosexuality, like water seeking its own level, has settled down in the tabloid bottomlands, where it does its best to provide low entertainment. So we have hilariously unwholesome scenes in which, for example, the chief political strategist to the President of the U.S. is described as barking around an expensive Washington hotel suite on all fours. Besides that arresting scene, the story offers continuing suspense: Will Rover's wife forgive him this untidiness? Has she heard of the Invisible Fence?

Every age has its styles of sex--and of infidelity. The Whig aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries pursued faithlessness with a sportive exuberance that called for tiptoeing up and down the corridors of country houses in the middle of the night. It was a style that John F. Kennedy, brought up under the influence of old Joe Kennedy's dream of being a Whig aristocrat himself, imitated as energetically as he could.

But the class structure of J.F.K.'s adulteries was different; philandering in an inclusive democracy, he wound up in the arms of women like Marilyn Monroe or Judith Exner, Sam Giancana's girlfriend. The American Dream. J.F.K.'s restless unfaithfulness was as American as Hollywood and gangsters.

The U.S. succeeds where England fails. Aristocratic cross-pollination there suffered a steep devolution on the way to Charles and Diana. Bed hopping in country houses was probably never quite as careless or harmless as it seemed. Poor Lord Melbourne (whose biography by David Cecil was J.F.K.'s favorite book) suffered stoically for years while his ardent and unstable wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, made an idiot of herself with Lord Byron and others. But at least Melbourne, Lady Caroline and Byron were more interesting than Charles and Diana. Maybe Bill Clinton belongs to a more vigorous tradition of plebeian friskiness: Tom Jones transplanted to Arkansas.

There is always the winking Old World idea that adultery is an essentially victimless indulgence. At Francois Mitterrand's graveside not long ago, the mistress mourned alongside the widow. Further, what was once considered the seed-scattering privileges of the seigneur may have yielded to the modern thought that reckless masculinity is characteristic of the risk-taking personality best suited to strong leadership.

But the New World has been different from the Old in its infidelities. The true American choirmaster is Hank Williams--"Your cheatin' heart/ will tell on you." From Hester Prynne to "family values" runs a line of anxious lubricity, of guilt and retribution. Moans of sex prefigure moans of regret, Jimmy Swaggart's repentant tears. A reproving Puritan finger wags through American social history like a metronome.

But the gesture seems quainter and more futile now. America has evolved. Neither the God-haunted conscience nor family-values rhetoric is a match for the pornographic American id, wherein the primal power of sex has gone partners with the commercial energy of greed.

Adultery is not a victimless sport. If you rinse away its deliciously corrupt excitement, infidelity means the infliction of pain upon one's spouse for the sake of a fresher pleasure. It seemed odd when the Dick Morris story broke open that the President, First Lady and Vice President placed calls of consolation to Dick Morris. If anyone needed to be comforted, it was Morris' wife, Eileen McGann. But, of course, there may have been other, compelling reasons for the consolation calls (for God's sake, keep Dick on the reservation).

But outside the Beltway, darlin', it's all just country music. It starts simply enough. Yet up ahead (if you do not make a U-turn and head back home right away) lies a complicated road: the thrilling whispered call next day to arrange to meet again; the furtive check-in on the cheating side of town; and eventually, the moment when you can't hide your lying eyes. Then comes the heartache.

Or, if you play it right, a $2.5 million book contract.