John Baldwin

How well should people know each other before they have sex? In the biggest classroom at UC Santa Barbara, sociology professors John and Janice Baldwin are reeling off survey results showing that male and female students are almost equally willing to sleep with someone they love. But the hall erupts in knowing laughter as a gender gap emerges: Men, the long-married couple reports, remain eager for sex through descending categories of friendship and casual acquaintance. Women don't.

Robert Browning Baldwin, a former actor and Ventura Realtor, died Saturday at his daughter's home in San Diego after a brief illness. He was 92. Baldwin, who was born Jan. 7, 1904, in St. Louis, lived in Ventura County for 38 years before moving to San Diego in April to be closer to his family. Baldwin was an actor under contract with 20th Century-Fox for 20 years and had appeared in many films.

It wasn't part of their routine, and Rena Inoue was puzzled. She and John Baldwin were taking their bows last Saturday after their finale at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, waving to the crowd as they had done hundreds of times. But when she turned to face another section of St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center, Baldwin wasn't beside her. He was down on one knee, reaching for her hands. "I thought at first he was tired or something," Inoue said. "I was looking at him like, 'What's going on?'

John Baldwin remembers walking to a nightclub near the hotel where he and partner Rena Inoue were staying last month during the Grand Prix figure skating final in St. Petersburg, Russia. Inoue, tired after their exhibition performance and wary of venturing beyond the hotel, remained in their room while Baldwin and another skater went out with two women they had met during the competition. The group was together about an hour, until he went to search for a restroom.

Leave it to the L.A. guy, the one with the blond hair and bare chest, to celebrate skating history as if it were beach volleyball. Shortly after John Baldwin threw and twirled Rena Inoue from here to Turin, he shouted and pumped his fist at her. Then he made out with her. At center ice. "C'mon, I've kissed her before," Baldwin said. "But never, ever on the lips in public," his father, John Sr., said.