In 1986, as he was preparing to turn 50, Wilt Chamberlain told a reporter for CNN, “I have no need to raise any little Wilties. Not any—especially in a world where overpopulation is our biggest problem.” Considering how many women he claimed to have had intercourse with, he and his thousands of partners were either very good with contraceptives or his childlessness is a historic statistical anomaly.
“He’s ultimately this prototype for a kind of playboy,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “A model for everyone to aspire to at a moment when people were really throwing off the social values of the 1950s and actualizing this idea of freedom. Moral freedom, freedom to adopt a hedonistic and unrestrained lifestyle.” It seems, he said, “just impossible” that Chamberlain didn’t father any children.
The fantasy of Chamberlain having illegitimate offpsring served as the starting point for a work in the Paula Cooper show. It’s constructed around a home movie from 1971, transferred from 8mm tape to video, that features a group of children on a trip to the zoo with two unidentified women; the patriarch either has been carefully edited out or is absent entirely. For a home movie, it is impossibly well-made. Mr. Pfeiffer is deliberately vague about its origins. “I don’t want to interfere,” he said.
Certain clues come from a series of photographs of locations from the film, which also appear to be heavily edited. The children and their mysterious chaperones are all absent, leaving behind what look like establishing shots of the zoo. They are all dated May 1971, and Alexis Johnson, an associate director at Paula Cooper, said they depict “Four locations for a home movie” and are “from a friend. That’s as much as Paul is giving us.” The year 1971, for what it’s worth, was when Chamberlain signed a two-year contract with the Lakers and won 33 straight games with the team in the 1971-72 season. It was also the year construction was completed on his mansion at 15216 Antelo Place in Los Angeles, the house where he built a chamber of sexual pleasures called the Playroom.
