(or Flem Snopes in Skinland)
I had done a few pieces for New Times when editor John Larsen called me up one day and said: “We need a story on the hottest guy in publishing, Larry Flynt, and you’re our guy.” I was thrilled to hear those words. I was “their guy”! Hooray! The only problem was that I had no idea who Larry Flynt was. Never heard of the man. I didn’t want to tell Larsen that, though. I was afraid he’d think I was out of it, some kind of hick who still lived in Geneva, New York, and wasn’t the hip guy he’d thought I was after all. But there didn’t seem any way around it.
I told him and prayed he’d still want me.
“Larry Flynt is the hottest thing in magazine publishing,” John said. “He has this magazine that outgrosses Playboy. I mean that literally and figuratively. It’s called Hustler and it’s incredibly gross. He’s killing Playboy at the stands too. We’ve set up a deal for you to go out to Columbus, Ohio, and interview him. Stay as long as you want. I think he’s going to be a good interview. He’s this redneck guy who loves to drink and tell stories. You’re going to love him.”
“Right,” I said. “When do you want me to leave?”
“In two days. We’re overnighting you some Hustlers so you can get acquainted with the magazine before you go. You aren’t going to believe what you’re looking at. Outrageous stuff.”
“When do you need the piece?” I said.
“Oh, a week or so after you get back.”
“No problem,” I said.
I hung up, so wired with excitement that I couldn’t finish my lunch. A new assignment. Great! If I could just keep it up, get a name, I would actually be able to quit teaching and move with Robin to New York City.
The next day five copies of Hustler came by Federal Express. I opened the package and starting reading them. Or should I say “scanning them” since there was nothing much to read. The pictures were gynecological shots of open vaginas. The articles were amateur hour, but I didn’t think Hustler’s clientele was into reading anyway.
I was stunned by the magazine. It was so gross, so dumb… and yet there was something funny about it too. Redneck humor, outhouse guffaws.
Two days later, I got a pal to teach my course in American Novel and I was on my way to Columbus, Ohio, to interview the wildest character I’d ever met.
Then or since.
With Hustler magazine, Larry Flynt has proved an old adage: No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Burly Larry Flynt is sitting in his French Provincial chair, staring meditatively out of the fourteenth-story window of the New York Hilton. Below him are the winking, blinking red, yellow, and blue lights of the bankrupt Big Apple.
“This here is some city,” he drawls, barely moving his mouth and with a reptilian glimmer in his eyes. “This is the kind of a place where you would expect a Bob Guccione… or a Hefner.…. The big city. Me? I’m just a farm boy from Kentucky, you see? That’s the truth. Quit school in the eighth grade. In the army at fourteen and out at sixteen. Spent most of my childhood looking up a mule’s ass.”
“Oh, Larry, stop moving,” says Flynt’s girlfriend, Althea Leasure. “I’ve got to get this hair done. We’re gonna be late for the dinner!”
Larry Flynt shuts his heavy-lidded eyes, hangs his big belly yet another notch over his midnight-blue cotton pants, and lets Althea work his Roman curls up into a nice soufflé.
Althea is dark-haired, country-girl pretty, with just a few pounds of the bulge starting to pop out of her chiffon dress. She smiles a lot, a very appealing toothy grin, which makes her look at once innocent and vaguely malicious.
“Larry’s not always this… particular, you know. But this is a rather special occasion.”
“You see,” says Flynt, “it’s not every night that the publisher of Hustler magazine gets to eat with the publisher of Penthouse, the big, phony creep. I’ll bet when they give him the award, he doesn’t mention one thing about all the ass shots and wide-open beavers. That’s Guccione’s whole problem. He and Hefner won’t admit that their magazines are turn-ons first. Editorial content comes second. That’s why Hustler magazine is going to run them off the market. Wait till you get to Columbus and I show you the sales stats. We’re wiping them out. You know why? Because we know how to appeal to our readers. We’d rather have ten truck drivers reading Hustler than one college professor. We’re the only men’s magazine that tells it like it is. Our magazine is a turn-on. You see? And our magazine responds to what the people are, not what we’d like them to be. That’s why they love us so much.”
Which, all things considered, is the literal truth. Since its inception a mere eighteen months ago, Hustler has become the third leading contestant (circulation of 1.4 million) in what is politely called the Men’s Magazine Trade, trailing only Playboy and Penthouse. Arthur Kretchmer, editorial director of Playboy, and Bob Guccione, editor of Penthouse, both consider Larry Flynt’s magazine an abomination, a virtual encyclopedia of bad taste and vacuous content. And both deny that Hustler is making any impact on their sales or editorial policies. On the first score, at least, they’re telling the truth. Hustler is so lowbrow, so tasteless, so essentially moronic that one is tempted to write it off as a put-on. What can one make of a magazine that, for instance, runs a monthly column entitled “Asshole of the Month”? The total mindlessness of the magazine is astounding: A majority of the profiles are about other smut kings; the poorly drawn cartoons are the kind of thing junior high school kids find funny. (An old man and woman are in the kitchen. The woman is on the phone, the man is undressed and sticking his penis into a turkey. The caption: “Yes, honey, Granddad is stuffing the turkey this year.”) The fiction is written by rank amateurs from the Dick and Jane school of creative writing, and the photo layouts are simply gross caricatures that dehumanize everyone involved. (Butch, a black man with an enormous member, sticks it to Peaches, a white Southern belle; a teenage girl hops into bed with an inordinately ugly middle-aged goon.)
Still, after all this is said, one is left with the astounding fact that Hustler appeals to about one and a half million people every month. What’s more, Larry Flynt’s goofy, inane, and tasteless features (a centerfold of a fifty-year-old woman; thirty photos of Jackie Onassis swimming in the nude) have pushed both Penthouse and Playboy closer to hard-core porn—though both magazines deny it. Check inside either Playboy or Penthouse and you will see the mark of Larry Flynt. Penthouse, once considered an upstart in the skin business for showing pubic hair, is now coming on strong with “wide open beavers,” “female masturbation,” and the whole boatload of once taboo “erotica.” Playboy, according to editorial director Arthur Kretchmer, “will never be a magazine as low and tasteless asHustler.” But one look at the November issue gives the game away. There, in good old-fashioned heterosexual Playboy, is a very suggestive lesbian motif. In short, both Playboy and Penthouse may be feeling the hot beer and sausage breath of the Flem Snopes of Skinland—Mister Larry Flynt.
In fact, the heat is getting so intense in the skin world that Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione is starting a hardcore magazine (Bravo!) to compete with Flynt’s “raw” publication. And in the coming months, newsstand browsers may expect to be inundated with several new sex publications; in addition to Guccione’s venture, there will be Gallery’s offspring Pub and Dawn (a magazine for women). There are even rumors that Playboy (circulation six million) is starting a hard-core magazine, though Playboy’s Kretchmer stoutly denies it. As Dawn editor Gay Bryant put it, “Larry Flynt’s Hustler has caused a revolution in men’s magazines. He’s dropped the bottom out of the business.”
Moreover, skin-magazine fans can expect to pay higher prices than ever for their vicarious titillation. Playboy and Penthouse have gone up from $1.25 to $1.50 for their regular issues; $1.75 for their holiday issues. Hustler sells at a regular price of $1.75 and soars up into the ethereal ranges of $2.25 for its holiday issue. Just a cursory look at some magazine racks is enough to make one think we are truly living in the last stages of the Roman Empire. At one small and rather poorly stocked newsstand in the Chelsea district of New York City, I perused the following publications: Hot Sex, Swing, Pornocopia, Pussycat, San Francisco Ball, Fetish Times, Smut, Hooker, Pleasure, Screw, Orgy, Swingers Yellow Pages, Skin, Eat (For the Oral Minded), Sex, Gay Scene, Dick (The Magazine with Balls). Now, to be sure, most of these are what people in the skin-mag business call “garage publications,” but remember, friends, Hustler was once merely a two-page house organ for Larry Flynt’s Ohio Hustler Clubs. With a little capital and with the stiffly erect banner of Hustler successfully sailing in the wind, who knows how many of these small-time smut-mongers may decide to “go national.” In short, if Hustler is the success Larry Flynt and many others (not all) in the skin-trade business think it may be, then we may expect to see the geometric growth of these rags on every newsstand in the United States. One may imagine a day when there are over a thousand slick national sex magazines, filled with no stories at all, only endless color pictures of endless couplings, endless suckings, giving rise to endless ennui.
Flynt, however long he lasts, has succeeded in exposing the grimy exploitative foundation of all the other men’s magazines by merely embodying, and unconsciously parodying, all of their most base values. If Hefner shows big, melony breasts, Larry Flynt shows severed nipples. If Guccione gives the reader a big, wide swath of curly, black pubic hair, Larry Flynt finds the pinkest, most yawning cavern he can buy and spreads it all over a four-page pull-out centerfold. In short, Hustler is a prod, a critique, and an unconscious parody of the exploitation, stupidity, and tasteless mediocrity of all the men’s magazines.
Scene:The Annual National Publishing Industry Dinner in Support of the Brandeis University Scholarship and Fellowship Program.
Larry Flynt, Althea Leasure, and I are sitting in the back seat of a cab that is parked in front of the St. Regis Hotel. Larry is paying the driver and eyeing the procession of angry, sign-carrying women who are circling the pavement in front of the entrance. Flynt is just finishing explaining to me why Hustler magazine is the “biggest publishing success since Henry Luce came on the scene with Life magazine.”
“You see,” Flynt says, fishing in his pocket, “it’s like this. The American public don’t respond to repressive, ah, things. I mean take, for instance, the two biggest successes of the last year in the movie world. What were they? I’ll tell you. See, it was Jaws and Godfather. Why? Because the American people identified with Al Pacino because he wasn’t repressed. I mean the character he played wasn’t repressed. See? The same with Jaws. That shark wasn’t repressed. The American people don’t like repression. What the hell is this?”
Larry is shutting the door to the cab and staring at the nine women who are marching around yelling things like “We don’t want Guccione’s money. Dirty man. Dirty money. Bob Guccione is a male chauvinist pig. An exploiter of women.”
Larry shakes his head and stops one of the girls.
“Are you a student at Brandeis University?” he says.
“Yes,” the girl says. In her two hands she clutches a big sign condemning Guccione.
“Well, don’t it cost a lot of money to go to school?” Larry says.
“Yes,” the girl says politely.
“Well, isn’t Bob Guccione going to give Brandeis University one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for their scholarship fund? And won’t that make it easier for some kids to go to school?”
“Maybe so,” says the girl. “But we don’t want that kind of money. Do you realize that Bob Guccione made his fortune exploiting women? Penthouse is a sexist rag, and I think it is disgusting that my school is groveling to him by offering him an award as Publisher of the Year.”
“Penthouse is sexist, huh?” says Larry.
Althea is standing there in her pink chiffon dress. She is staring wide-eyed at the girl, as if she is looking at a recently landed alien.
“Well, lemme ask you this,” says Larry Flynt in his soft Kentucky accent. “Would you think it was wrong if Ms. was offering you the money?”
The girl stops and assumes a thoughtful look. “No, that would be all right. Ms. is a good magazine.”
Flynt opens his eyes a shade more. “Ms. isn’t sexist?” he says. He stares at Althea, who immediately starts to smile her big-toothed, country grin.
“Ms. isn’t sexist, huh? Gloria Steinem isn’t sexist? That’s good. Hell.…” Flynt wants to go on with this, but an older woman in the protest, a NOW member, comes up and gets the Brandeis students marching again.
“Harvey,” Larry says, as a middle-aged couple walks toward us. “Harvey, I want you to meet Bob Ward. He’s here to do an article on us. Harvey Shapiro, Bob. He’s our circulation man. I stole him away from the National Enquirer. He put them over the top… got them from two million to four million. This is Harv’s wife, Bob. Babs, Bob. Bob, Babs.”
“Hi, Babs,” I say, and we start up the steps to the St. Regis.
The dinner is sponsored by the National Publishing Industry, a trade association of magazine publishers, retailers, and circulation people. Each year Brandeis and the NPI honor some prominent figure with the Publisher of the Year award. This year the golden Justice Brandeis plaque goes to Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, who just happens to have recently contributed to the Brandeis University Scholarship and Fellowship Program.
As we enter the lobby, we are surrounded by a weird assemblage of people: dapper-looking academics and administrators from Brandeis and little munchkin people, short little guys with balding heads and large pots. These are the retailers, jobbers, and executives from the NPI. They are dressed in tuxedos but have the lines of the street in their faces. We are all flowing by the check-in desk, waiting for the elevator. A very uneasy marriage, this alliance between the Smut Kings and the Academics. Larry Flynt chooses this moment to vent his opinions on the women who are protesting this affair.
“Did you see them out there?” he says to Harvey. “They told me that Ms. magazine isn’t sexist. That Gloria Steinem isn’t sexist! Can you believe that? Bunch of filthy whores! You know what my ultimate dream is?”
“No,” I say. “What is your ultimate dream?” Around us the faces fall apart. People are gazing desperately at the elevator dial, as if they are looking at a votive light.
“My ultimate dream is to take Butch—you know that big, black stud we had in the last issue of Hustler, the one with the fourteen-inch cock? I want to take Butch over to Gloria Steinem’s and get him to ram his huge organ up that bitch’s ass. That’s my ULTIMATE DREAM!”
Harvey smiles and shakes his sad-eyed Dopey Dog head.
“Did ya hear that, Babs?” he says. “Larry… you are such a kidder.”
Babs looks a little faint but manages a nice, appreciative smile. Everyone else rushes for the elevator, as though they are trying to get away from an earthquake.
Gore Vidal is standing in the exact center of the St. Regis Room. He is sipping a drink and talking earnestly with Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw. Vidal, impeccably dressed and using his Victor Mature eyebrows to show his patrician disdain for one and all, explains the problems of “making the big leap” to Al.
“You’ll never get on the Carson show, Al,” Gore says, raising the eyebrows. “It’s not that you wouldn’t be good. It’s just the name of your publication. Johnny would come on and say, “And now we have Al Goldstein, editor of.…” And that’s it. You’re through!”Gore turns his head slowly, rolls his eyes and arches his eyebrows a few more times.
Goldstein laughs and runs his hand over his silken, poodle, wide tie, which hangs like a dead turkey neck from his tight blue body shirt. Though Al had been animatedly talking with Larry Flynt about circulation problems and his upcoming trial (Goldstein is under indictment in Utah and claims he could go to jail for “six hundred years”), Al is now silent, and his eyes take on a doe-like quality. Here he is, a nice Jewish smut merchant from Brooklyn talking with a world-famous author. Al and Gore trading tidbits! Who woulda thought it?
Before Al can answer Gore, their conversation is interrupted by Herald Fahringer, a lawyer who has made his name by defending people like Goldstein, Larry Flynt, and Monique Von Cleef, the “Torture Queen” who ran a “House of Pain” in New Jersey. Fahringer is so slick, so distinguished (in the Rossano Brazzi mold) that he and Vidal look as though they are having a contest. Actually it’s nolo contendere, for once Fahringer speaks it’s obvious that he is deferring to Vidal’s greater fame.
“I just loved your book Burr, Mr. Vidal,” Fahringer says. “I found it to be so… historically accurate! Just what are you doing here? It’s such a thrill to meet you!”
Vidal makes his eyebrows go up and down in double time. “I’m here with The Big Gucco,” Vidal says in his 1950, FBI documentary voice. “The Big Gucco and I are doing a movie together Caligula… but not Camus.”
Althea Leasure speaks up.
“Oh thaat,” she says. “Larry and I saw thaat.…. It wasn’t thaat good.”
Vidal eyes Althea and exhales a short snort of breath. A second later he wanders off in search of the Big Gucco.
Al Goldstein looks at Larry Flynt and Herald Fahringer.
“He’s tremendously important,” Goldstein says. “A literary giant!”
Flynt nods his head and smiles. At that moment the great teeming crowd of academics and members of the National Publishing Industry head into the main dining room. Dinner and Culture shall be served.
After nibbling at the fat-laden roast beef and playing around with the Brie and the sherbet (this tasteless gunk cost $150 a plate?), the great assemblage of magazine people, smut kings, and Brandeis officials is introduced to a whole rash of speakers, all of whom think they are on the Catskills’ Borscht Belt Circuit. One speaker after another gets up and tells a bad Yiddish joke. However, only one is bad in a truly interesting way. A short, pinched-voice representative of the school gets up and looks out at the audience:
“This reminds me of a story,” he says. “A man goes to the rabbi. The man has his dog with him and says to the rabbi, I would like to have my dog bar mitzvahed.” The rabbi looks sternly at the man and says, “We don’t bar mitzvah dogs here.” The man persists. He says, “Look, my dog is thirteen and I want him bar mitzvahed.” The rabbi is just as stern as before. “I told you once already, we don’t bar mitzvah dogs here.” Finally, the man gets a glow in his eyes and says to the rabbi, “‘I’ll give you $50,000 for your building fund.” The rabbi smiles and says, “Funny, I didn’t know your dog was Jewish.”
That particular joke is met with an uneasy laughter, and the speaker receives a dark frown from the Big Gucco. Surprisingly, the joke is not lost on Larry Flynt, who leans over to me and says:
“See, them teachers and them professors are just the same as everybody else. It’s money that makes them move. Just a bunch of whores.”
Althea smiles and looks down at her sherbet.
“This isn’t sweet,” she says. “I just love sweet stuff. I can’t wait until you come to Columbus, Bob. You’re gonna have such good food. There’s a lotta stuff out there that’s really good.”
The great moment has come, and the Big Gucco is given the big golden plaque: the Justice Brandeis Award for the Publisher of the Year. He nods and talks in a gravelly voice, reminiscent of the Godfather.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” mumbles the Big Gucco. “Dis is da most touching… the most moving thing that has happened to me since circumcision.….”
Now that’s FUNNY! Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein laugh with much abandon. Al looks serious and says, “Class. You got to give it to him. He has class.”
“Yeah,” says Flynt. “But you watch. He won’t mention one thing about the wide-open beavers. He don’t want to admit that he’s selling tits and ass just like the rest of us.”
“Yer right there,” says Goldstein.
And indeed Big Bob Guccione doesn’t mention it. Rather he dwells on the plight of Vietnam veterans and how much the cause has personally meant to him. All humble, the Big Gucco says he took on the cause in the first place because “it seemed right.” He would have us believe he is a noble savage, one strong man rising up from the urban wilderness. And as for the “so-called exploitation of women,” the Big Gucco claims that the protesters “don’t fully comprehend how much Penthouse is behind women. We support the ERA, for God’s sake.”
Larry shakes his head and plays with his tie—black silk with white polka dots and red roses. But he does seem impressed. Could it be that L.F. feels just a touch of admiration? Not on your life!
“I’ll bet when he’s sitting in bed getting head from Kathy Keeton,” Larry says, “he doesn’t talk about the Viet vets. I’ll bet he talks about how Hustler is showing more pussy and better pink shots than Penthouse, and how they better get that old beaver open or they’ll get blown off the market!”
“I’ll be glad to get home,” says Althea. “Then we can have sweets and Bob can meet Wendall.”
“Who’s Wendall?” I say.
“Wendall is the grossest person in the world,” Althea says. “He can make musical notes with his farts. I’m not kidding. He can play tunes with ’em. And he’s so accurate he can let one fly and blow out a candle!”
At the Columbus airport I am met by Larry’s brother, Jimmy Flynt. He is copublisher of Hustler. He is wearing a dark blue cotton suit and black pointy-toed Italian jobbies with scarlet red heels. The shoes clash violently with the hayseed image of the suit, making him look like some kind of strange cross-pollination between Puerto Rican hipster and Kentucky Bible salesman. It isn’t until later that I realize this bizarre hybrid defines Larry Flynt and Althea Leasure as well as Jimmy.
“We ought to stop in here at the airport newsstand a minute,” Jimmy says. “Then we got to get right in and attend the editorial meeting. Larry wants you to see it.”
“Great.”
At the newsstand Jimmy turns on the old country charm.
“How’s it going, darling?” he says to the woman behind the counter. “Hustler selling well?”
“Yes, it is,” the woman drawls. “It’s doing fine… outselling Playboy and Penthouse.”
Jimmy smiles and squeezes the woman’s arm. She smiles like Olive Oyl and goes back behind her cash register.
On the way out to the car, Jimmy is critical.
“That’s a sloppy operation there. She’s a good girl but just doesn’t have the manpower to move Hustler like she could. Man, they sell out of there as fast as we can get ’em in. The damned distribution problems are terrific. We send in ninety a month, they sell out in two days, and then they can’t get no more of ’em.”
We throw my bags in a big, white Chrysler and pull out of the airport. On the way to Columbus, Jimmy tells me about his childhood in Kentucky.
“We weren’t born with a silver spoon in our mouths. We were down in Lakeview, Kentucky, in the Appalachias, man, where there was nothing. We knew we had to get out of there or we didn’t stand a chance. I was at the Hazel Green School, this boarding school, my father was a pipe welder, but he hits the juice too much, and Ma was up in Dayton running a country and western club. Larry was gone off into the Navy on forged birth certificates at fourteen. I couldn’t sit still for class. It didn’t mean nothing. I remember the day I left there. The teacher told me I could go to the barn and get a beating with a rod, or I could leave school. I said, ‘Hell, that ain’t no choice at all!’ I went home, packed my bags and started hitching for Dayton the same afternoon. I was up near Covington, Kentucky, coming into Cincy, when I got a ride with a man named Joe Jet. He was a nice guy at first, but then a bulletin comes over the radio that says they are hunting for him. He’s an escaped con! We started going about a hundred miles an hour then, and when we got up near Warren County, a cop starts in chasing us, and, man, we was going around curves and everything, and we slammed into a ditch, and I bashed my head on the windshield, and this huge welt comes up right up here, above my eye. They caught him but let me go, ’cause I was just a kid. I don’t ever go back down there now if I don’t have to.”
“What happened to your father?”
“Dad? He works in the mailroom now, along with our stepmother. They open mail and love it. Hustler is really a family success story.”
From the outside, on Gay Street, the Hustler building is a seedy-
looking dump, the exact kind of place one would imagine a hard-core sex factory to operate from. The building, ugly gray stone, is situated next to an alley, and the Hustler sign, which hangs over the street, looks like any cheap, gaudy bar neon. As we go inside, Jimmy Flynt tells me this is all about to change.
“Larry’s doing everything,” he says. “He’s going to blast the bricks. One side of the building is going to have a kind of ‘Chicago look,’ and on the other side we’re adding wrought-iron balconies, to make it look like New Orleans.”
I nod and wonder why it would be considered advantageous to have two different looks on what was going to be one office-club complex. Like Jimmy’s strange clothing combinations, the building itself would become a kind of crazy quilt of incompatible styles, a palpable embodiment of the various forces that drive the Flynts: hippies, hillbillies, smut kings, and capitalists. A strange pastiche of conflicting selves, and not a little unsettling.
On the walls of Larry Flynt’s office are giant centerfolds of the Hustler Honeys. All of the girls have a country look, and many of them are staring down at their genitals with open-mouthed astonishment, as if they are seeing themselves naked for the first time. The ones who aren’t staring at themselves are touching themselves and staring off into a far horizon. In their eyes is a mystical dreamy look, and though it’s easy to put the photographs down as moronic, it is perhaps instructive to note that the looks in the women’s eyes are the same magical mystery look that used to be on happy hippie love posters of the late ’60s. Sentimentality and simple-mindedness rule the roost in more places than Hustler.
Behind his massive oaken desk, Larry Flynt is sitting in an open-necked silken shirt. Around his neck he wears an ornament of some kind, a silver ornament that looks familiar to me but that, upon first entering, I cannot name. Directly behind Flynt is a poster that shows the ultimate Hustler Honey, a blonde space cadet who looks suspiciously like Barbarella; in her hand is a Luger and under her right leather, knee-length boot is a squashed Penthouse turtle. Beneath her long, muscular left leg is a murdered rabbit; there are blood stains on the Playboy Bunny’s stomach and its eyes are crossed in surprised pain. In front of the desk, sitting on couches, is the Hustler staff. Flynt introduces me to Bobby Flora, the art director, a young man of twenty-two with a neatly blow-dried shag and a reindeer sweater. Next to Bobby is a middle-aged bearded man named Jimm Grady, the cartoon and humor editor. Beside Grady is Steve Hanley, a recently signed on associate editor; Jack Sharp, the Hustler ad director; John Hegenberger, another associate editor; and Althea Leasure, who holds the grand title of associate publisher and executive editor. All of these people shake hands with me and then give their complete devotion to Flynt, who begins with this speech:
“Bobby, you know I’m going to be Asshole of the Month.…”
Bobby Flora nods and swallows a bit. He looks nervous.
L.F. turns to me and turns on his slow sidewinder’s smile.
“What happened, Bob, is that the retailers all said I should be Asshole of the Month because in the last issue I called them all cocksuckers. So, I’m gonna do it, though I really think it should be Jamaica Airlines… but we’ll work that up, too.…”
Larry turns his majestic head back to Bobby Flora. It occurs to me that when Flynt moves his head, he rarely moves anything else, so one has a sense of almost Romanesque grandeur, as if the king must not weary himself with excessive movement. The only thing lacking in Flynt’s Roman motif is muscle or bone structure in his face. While his profile is suitably striking, a full view of his face reveals him to look more like a baked potato with red hair on the top than an ancient emperor. Still, an impressive sight, this slow, grave rotation.
“Now for the cartoons,” says L. F. “Has everybody seen this cartoon?”
Larry hands a cartoon around the room. Each editor looks at it and nods.
The cartoon is a picture of Bob Guccione cast as a nudie photographer. In front of him is a pair of open legs, and next to the legs is a whole case of Vaseline petroleum jelly. Gucco’s face shows astonishment as a blond, strongly resembling Kathy Keeton (the Big Gucco’s real-life “Living Associate”), comes to the door.
“What we need is a cutline on this cartoon,” Flynt says. “Something funny!”
Althea starts to say that she doesn’t think the artwork is really “first rate,” but Larry Flynt is adamant.
“I said I’m satisfied with the artwork, so there’s no point in saying anything about that. Now I want a funny cutline. Can anyone think of one?”
Steve Hanley speaks up:
“Ah… how about ‘Still using that greasy kid stuff’?”
Everyone gives a small, tentative laugh. They are waiting to see if the Boss laughs. Larry nods the head but does not stretch the mouth.
“Well, that’s pretty funny,” he says, in the tone of a grave digger. “But I’ve seen it someplace before.”
Althea chirps up: “How about having Kathy say, ‘If you’re good enough for Bob, you’re good enough for me’?”
Everyone laughs at that one. (When the Boss’s girl makes a joke, everyone laughs.)
“That’s pretty good. Yeah… but we better think about it. Jimm, see if you can come up with something.”
From the doorway, Jimmy Flynt pops in: “Say, Larry, did Linda Lovelace call you up yet?”
“Yes, she did,” says Larry, pursing his lips a little in displeasure. “She said she would not fly all the way out here for an interview. So I told her agent the hell with it, and he said, ‘Well, do you want some pictures of her anyway? I could send you some,’ and I told him, ‘No, I already got pictures of her,’ and he said, ‘Which ones,’ and I said, ‘The one where she’s fucking the dog, and that’s the one we’re going to run.’”
Larry looks at me and smiles. Machiavelli of the porn kingdom. Step on the Godfather of Smut with your fancy Hollywood ways, and you end up underneath a giant King Husky!
The editorial meeting goes on and is uneventful. Larry hands me a pile of letters just recently delivered to Hustler. Like many people, I’ve always naively assumed (and hoped) that the skin mags make up their letters. Unfortunately, this is not so. The first letter I look at is written on a piece of torn, yellow legal paper. The correspondent pays no heed to such things as keeping each sentence on a single plane. Rather the words run up and down the page with reckless and desperate abandon. The first half of the letter is a celebration of Butch Williams’s fourteen-inch cock; the second half is in the form of a request. Could Hustler please induce Butch Williams to part with a piece of his underwear, which would provide the reader with great “smell thrills”? I open another letter, which is addressed to Larry Flynt himself. The writing in letter two is nearly as bad as in the first, and the message is just as bizarre. The writer claims that Larry Flynt is the only man in the world honest enough to run for president, “because Larry Flynt tells it like it is.”
Suspicious that Flynt is feeding me the more “baroque” letters, I request that I be able to look through a group at random. Larry agrees, and soon I am seated outside in an office with a huge stack of letters, all of which have come in just this morning. In a few minutes I am trapped inside a whirlpool of lust, yearning, and mindlessness that seems bottomless: endless letters from soldiers describing what they would like to do to a certain Hustler Honey. Letters from housewives in Kansas saying what they would like to do with Butch Williams; a letter from a man who begs Hustler to show women nude, with their legs open, smoking cigarettes! A letter from a man who claims to be in his late sixties but “hung like a horse”; he wants to “get in touch with a certain Hustler girl named Donna.” And letters from several men asking Larry to set them up with Althea Leasure. After a half hour of reading these letters, I become groggy. At first they had been amusing, then depressing, and finally one had no reaction at all. I am amazed how quickly my feelings have become blunted. In forty minutes I am no longer astonished by any of it. Not even a letter from a man demanding that Hustler show nude women “doing housework,” “show them nude making beds, cleaning filthy ovens” has much effect on me. I put the pile aside and think that I have really learned my first lesson. That is, after entering into the world of skin shocks, all moral and social distinctions tend to blur.
Jimm Grady and Larry Flynt are sitting side by side in Flynt’s office. They are going over the cartoons that have come in for Hustler. Flynt considers the cartoons one of the most important features in Hustler, perhaps as important as the Hustler Honeys. In the language of a layman, Hustlers cartoons are “gross.” By design, they are at the opposite end of the cartoon spectrum from, say, the New Yorker. Where a New Yorker cartoon makes one smile and gives one the “shock of recognition” (real life problems of upper-middle-class people recognized and skillfully parodied), Hustler cartoons make one hold one’s hand to one’s head and say, “Oh, my God.” Even though the intent is lowbrow, there is nonetheless a recognizable aesthetic at work. Where the New Yorker might say, “Elegance needs no defense,” Hustler might counter with a parody of Wallace Stevens, “Grossness is all.”
“Do you get a lot of freelance stuff?” I ask Grady.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” he says. “We can’t get them to hit hard enough. There’s always too much restraint used… they just won’t be really gross.”
Flynt picks up a cartoon and smiles. “Lord,” he says, pushing out his breath. “Where in the hell did you get this? It’s unbelievable.”
Grady smiles and leans over toward Larry. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it? That’s the one I’m most happy about. It’s terrifically drawn, too. It’s almost a woodcut.”
“Yeah,” says Flynt. “But it could get us in big trouble. I mean if those Southern bigots ever haul us into court and we have something like this in the magazine… they’d never let up on us. We can get away with the open pussy shots, but they’d pass right by those and fry us if they saw this.”
Grady shakes his head and rubs his hand over his goatee. “Aww, come on. I want to fight for this one. I mean this one really does it.” Flynt hands the cartoon across the room to me. “What do you think, Bob?”
I look at the cartoon in disbelief. Pictured is the Crucifixion. We see Jesus’ body from the waist down. His penis is hanging out of his loin cloth, and around the head of his cock is a crown of thorns. Beneath him, two Roman soldiers are staring at his member and saying, “He may rise again, but that thing sure won’t.”
“Well?” says Larry.
“Christ,” I say. “Are you gonna print this?”
Grady slaps his fist into his open palm. “We have to, Larry! That’s hard-edged. That’s the kind of thing our readers want.”
Flynt and I are sitting in his office going over some sales statistics. While Flynt likes to talk about anything concerning the magazine, his favorite topic of conversation, one that he returns to again and again with monotonous regularity, is the way he is cutting into Playboy and Penthouse’s markets.
I am nodding my head but not really hearing. Rather, I am entranced by the silver medallion that I had seen the first day but could not recognize.
“Larry,” I say, “that, ah… thing you are wearing. It looks like
a…”
“A cunt!” Larry says. “I make them nervous with that. A little old woman cashier in the Hilton started fondling it and saying how pretty it was. ‘What is it, young man?’ she said. I said, ‘That’s a cunt, lady.’ You should have seen her jump!”
As Larry begins to laugh, the phone rings. “Hello,” he says. “Yes… Oh, yes, how are you? Tonight? Dinner? Well, sure, I’d like to have dinner with you tonight, but you see there is this reporter here from New Times magazine. He will be with me tonight, and if you don’t mind him coming along, then fine… what?… wait, I’ll ask him.”
Flynt puts his hand over the receiver and addresses me: “There’s a man on the phone who wants to see me tonight. He’s going to be on the board of directors I’m setting up. But he’s got very close ties to the legal and social establishment of Columbus, and he wouldn’t want any publicity. Can our meeting be off the record?”
“All right,” I say. I figure I’ll get something out of it, even if I can’t use the guy’s name.
Larry goes back to the conversation:
“Yeah, it’s all right. He says he won’t use your name, and I’m sure you can trust him. What? You’d rather not? Well, I’ll be tied up all week. Call me next week and we’ll have dinner then. Right. Goodbye.”
Flynt puts down the phone, gets up and stretches his leisure suit.
“See, I’m setting up this board of directors. I can’t have all sexual fiends on it. I’ve got to have some good legal and business minds, and unfortunately most of those kinds of people are conservative. Bunch of goddamned hypocrites. They want a piece of the action in a winner like Hustler, but they don’t want anyone to know about it. That’s the whole fucking problem with this country. It’s like what I was talking about the other night. It’s repression. They are just a bunch of whores, like everybody else.”
Around a big circular table in the back of an old Columbus hotel sit Larry and Althea, Lee Henry (a well-known Columbus restaurateur), a PR man with a local restaurant newsletter, an architect named Bill (who is looking for Flynt to give him some work), and myself. The architect is trying to get a few words in edgewise but for the most part is being snowballed by Larry, who wants to tell me about his own sex life.
“Well,” says Bill, tossing his head around like a spring doll in the back of an automobile, “I had a dinner date with Joey Heatherton. Just a dinner date. That’s all.”
“Too bad,” says Larry. “I ball most of the girls who come in to model for the magazine. I get them in the office and I ask them if they want to model and if they have any inhibitions, and then they say no, and I take out my Polaroid camera and tell them I’ll have to take a few test shots, and they take off their pants and I just start posing them, and pretty soon I say, ‘You’re getting pretty horny aren’t you, honey?’ and I can see they are, and then I just lock the door and pile on!”
Bill makes this odd little clucking noise in his throat. Could it be that he’s just a bit repulsed by this grisly story of mutual corruption? If so, he gets himself under control. He wants to finish his story.
“Well, that sounds like fun. Haha. I wish I coulda done that with Joey. But, you know… it was strictly business.”
“Bob,” says Larry, totally ignoring Bill, “I’ll tell you. I am dead serious about repression. Now you take me. The key to my success was reading Napoleon Hill’s How to Make a Million. The most profound book I ever read. I got to this part where it was called ‘Why Men Are Seldom Successful Before Forty,’ and lights went off in my head. In there Hill says that all great men have a huge sex drive. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But they learned to channel their sexual drive into their work. Well, that really hit me, because when I owned the Hustler Club all I did was structure my work around all the pussy I was getting. I would ball so many girls that I would have to ask Althea when a girl came into the club, ‘Say, have I balled her yet?’ And Althea would tell me. Anyway, when I read Napoleon Hill, I realized that if I channeled myself into my work fifty percent and my balling fifty percent, then I would be a success. I mean with Hustler there is plenty of pussy, but it is not like the bar business. Besides, having come from Kentucky, and being dirt poor, I went through a stage when I had to have the finer things. But now that I’m thirty-three I’m beyond that. I understand why I had to have them things.…. Hell, in Kentucky I remember sitting on a bridge looking down at the water. I wore Anvil Brand overalls, polo shirts, and I had holes in my shoes. And my mother had started crying because she was so sorry to see me have to go out in the snow without shoes to school. And I thought right then, ‘I’m going to get rich someday and then my mother won’t have to cry no more about me not having good shoes.’ Anyway, I was in the navy at fourteen and got sent overseas to Italy. Then they found out I was underage, and they threw me out, so I forged some more birth certificates and joined the army. And after I got out of there, when I was eighteen, I got married. Man, I was bankrupt once and married twice before I was even twenty-one. I even worked in a mattress factory. Then I started my tavern business. The first one was Larry’s Hangover Haven. I met every con man in the world. If we didn’t have two or three good fights every Saturday night we didn’t consider ourselves a success. From there I got some other clubs, like Larry’s Hillbilly Heaven. All in all, I’ve owned over forty clubs. Hustler started off as a house organ in one of the clubs. Two pages… just to tell you which girls was appearing in which clubs, stuff like that… but it wasn’t until I read Napoleon Hill that I learned to channel my sex life.”
“And I’m sure your good woman had something to do with that, Larry,” says the PR man.
“Yes,” says Larry. “Althea has been a great help to me. But that don’t mean she’s the only pussy I want. I don’t mean to say I’ve settled down yet. I mean, I took her out when she was a dancer in the clubs, and I balled her, and she started hanging onto me, you know… and…”
Althea, who has been talking with Lee Henry, stops and gets a look of mock indignation on her face.
“Larry,” she says, “I did not hang onto you.”
Larry smiles. “Now you know you did. I mean you liked it, didn’t you?” Althea rolls her eyes and changes her look to mock guilty.
“Anyway,” says Larry. “I told her right then and there that no one pussy, even if it was lined with gold, was going to be enough for me!”
“Satin’s not good enough for you?” Althea says.
Next to me, Bill is making that odd clucking noise. He is turning pale. The PR man is smiling this big puppet’s smile, as if he is just hanging on every word, but his eyelashes are going up and down like windshield wipers in a shit blizzard.
“What if Althea wants to sleep with someone else?” I ask Larry. “Could you handle that?”
Larry smiles and looks super sincere.
“If she wanted to, it would be all right with me. But she don’t have them kind of desires. She’s not like that.”
“Not with men anyway,” Althea smiles. “If I’m going to sleep around, I’d rather make it with women.”
“Are you serious?” I say.
Althea happily nods her head. “I like any kind of sex, but I really prefer women.”
Bill’s clucking takes on the sound of the whole henhouse. The PR man’s eyes go all hazy, and even dapper Lee Henry looks a bit ruffled.
I look for some reaction from Larry, but he is merely laughing and shaking his big belly. He reaches over and gives Althea a tender, loving squeeze.
“This here is the Fulfillment Room,” Larry says. “We started off the mail order business first because we knew we’d have trouble with advertisers. We wanted Hustler to be totally self-sufficient, so we sell our line of Leasure Time Products. It brings in an amazing amount of money.”
We walk through the long, ugly mail order room. About fifteen long-haired teenage boys are packing away posters and cardboard boxes filled with what Flynt calls Fulfillment Items.
“What the hell is all this stuff?” I ask.
Flynt smiles, opens a cupboard and pulls out a couple of plastic bags filled with stuff that looks like marijuana. One package is called Volupte, the other Fiord.
“This here is just a bunch of useless herbs,” Flynt says. “We advertise it in Hustler and people buy the crap. It’s unbelievable. I guess they put it in with their grass, or maybe the dealers cut their grass with it. I don’t know.”
I look the stuff over: ginseng herb, which can be bought at any health food store, and a couple of other herbs, probably oregano. Price: $4.95.
“Don’t you advertise that people can get high smoking this stuff?” I ask.
“Not exactly,” says Flynt. He gets a copy of Hustler and shows me the ad. It reads: “2 Brand New Ancient Ideas For Lovers. Sensuous Exciting herbal blends that you smoke like marijuana, or mix with your stash. Volupte is a secret mixture of herbs used as aphrodisiacs for centuries, including ginseng root from China, plus damiana, verbascum, flowers and more. Fiord contains African yohimbe bark, one of the most powerful sex herbs ever discovered, said to even have caused spontaneous erections. Fiord sells for $4.95. Volupte sells for $5.95.”
“You wouldn’t kid folks, Larry, would you?” I say. Flynt smiles and looks in the cabinet for some other goodies. “No, sir,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to lie to Archie Bunker. See, I know what he wants. He likes this stuff because it’s exotic. Here is something you might like to take back to your girl.” Flynt hands me a huge rubber penis with a giant head at either end.
“That’s the Double Dong.” Flynt says. “You get two lesbians hanging on that thing… it’s wild.”
“You’re kidding,” I say.
“No. You mean you never seen that? You ought to come to one of our orgies. I was going to try and throw one for you, but it being Thanksgiving, I didn’t know if we can get many of the girls together. You ought to come out to our big Christmas orgy though. We get about thirty girls together and about fifteen guys. It’s wild. Of course, you got to have ‘screamers.’”
“Screamers?”
“You know, chicks that start screaming as soon as you put it in ’em. That’s what gets everybody else turned on. Here’s something else.” Flynt hands me a rubber, flesh-tone object with hideous lips and ugly-looking hair. He also hands me a catalog describing what is in my hands. “ARTIFICIAL VAGINA FOR YOUR LOVE! (rubber type with hair implanted on the outside) will provide hours of stimulating pleasure. These artificial vaginas can be of aid when normal penetration is not possible. Two models: personal size, Pocket Pal, #73 for home use, and family size, #41, for couples.”
I stare down at the artificial vagina. Behind it is a long plastic sack, presumably for one’s penis. I feel a vague wave of nausea wash over me, and Flynt begins to laugh.
“Something for everyone,” he says. He is enjoying my reaction. Suddenly, without warning, his mood changes and he chews out a boy who has failed to properly paste on labels.
I put down the Pocket Pal, and we make our way out of the Fulfillment Room.
Upstairs, Larry introduces me to an attractive girl named Chris Zwilling, who answers the phones for Hustler’s mail order service. I ask her what kind of phone calls she gets.
“Weird ones. I’m used to it now. But the first few really shocked me. A lot of people call up and want you to describe the stuff to them and how to use it. Soon you realize that they are using you to get off sexually. Either that or they just start saying what they’d like to do with you.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not really, not anymore. I just tell them politely that I have work to do and hang up.”
The red button on the mail order phone lights up and Chris answers the phone. After she has taken the order, I ask her if Flynt has approached her about appearing in the magazine. “Oh yes,” she says. “I’m probably going to do it soon.”
“Don’t you feel any reservations about appearing in Hustler?”
“No. Why should I? Everyone around here has done it: Marie and Vicki and Cindy Spain—they’ve all appeared in it. And Jocelyn, down in the mail room. You get a nice trip—like Jocelyn just got back from Jamaica—and you get paid pretty well now, $750.”
“But what about the women’s liberation arguments? You know, that you’re being exploited, that it’s degrading.”
Chris Zwilling shrugs her shoulders and smiles vacantly. “I just don’t see it that way,” she says.
Nor does Jocelyn of the mail room, who tells me that everyone treated her with great courtesy on her Jamaican trip, that she got to work with James Baes, one of the leading European photographers, and that she was put up at the home of Lyle Stuart, the New York publisher who made his millions with The Sensuous Woman and other sex fantasies.
“How about feeling exploited?” I ask her.
“No,” she says. “I had a great trip. I wouldn’t want to do it for anyone else though. I mean I like it here.”
There is a simplicity about the women who work at Hustler; they are hometown girls, naive and provincial. One has the sense that for them, at this stage in their lives, the whole Hustler world seems romantic and exciting. What could be simpler? Just spread your legs and lie about and you are paid $750. It seems easy, harmless—after all, everyone else does it.
When I ask another girl if she has taken part in Flynt’s orgies, she sheepishly admits she has. “But only once,” she adds. “I was surprised that I wasn’t uptigtht. It was a very exciting experience. And next time I go I’ll get paid.”
“Paid? How much?”
“Fifteen or twenty dollars. Whatever I want.”
She stops, her face reddens and she looks nervous, even a bit fearful, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” she says.
“He pays you to go? Does he pay everybody?”
“I don’t know,” the girl says. She rubs her face nervously and swallows hard.
Columbus’s three best restaurants are all owned by Lee Henry, the man who had attended the lunchtime sexual confessions of Althea and Larry two days before. Flynt, Althea, and I are eating a delicious Polynesian dinner and sipping something called a mystery drink from stone goblets. Around my neck is a pink plastic lei, and all around us fake lightning flashes and a sprinkler system shoots out a booming mechanical downpour.
“What about this payment thing?” I ask Flynt. “Do you have to pay everyone to go to these things?”
Flynt blinks his eyes and smiles a big, innocent smile. “I don’t know what she could have meant,” Flynt replies. “We pay the girls to deliver drinks or be waitresses but not to go to the orgies. I never tell people who to fuck.”
Althea smiles, shakes her head, and opens her Orphan Annie eyes. The pair are the absolute apogee of small-town innocence.
“Look, I’ll tell you honest,” Larry continues. “I don’t have to pay people. Once they get into the spirit of things, they just want to screw. I recently went to a retailers’ convention in Las Vegas. Now I took a whole bunch of girls with me. I never said to them, ‘Screw so-and-so because he helps sell Hustler.’ I didn’t have to. I mean, I didn’t take no squares with me, if you understand what I mean—but that’s all part of good business. And like I say, the girls I take like to have fun.”
“You don’t think you are repressing them or exploiting them?”
“Repression?” Flynt looks aghast. “That’s what I’m against! Hustler isn’t like the repressive magazines. We’ll print anything. We believe in getting hang-ups right out front.”
“Well how about your Butch and Peaches spread?” I say. “Now a lot of people would say by publishing a black man with a huge cock like that you’re merely trading on the oldest racist tale known. And by having him making it with a white woman you are appealing to the fears of white men. Not to mention the fact that the whole thing would be denounced as the fantasy of a male chauvinist pig.”
Flynt smiles and sips his drink.
“Well, first of all, I knew that. I mean I figured it would be funny, and I figured it would outrage everybody. The whites, the blacks, the women—everybody. But that’s why Hustler is so successful. We’re irreverent and that’s why people love us. As for the male chauvinist stuff, I am a male chauvinist; women are here to serve men. Look at them, they got to squat to piss. Hell, that proves it.”
Althea laughs proudly. “Larry got the award as Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year at one place he worked,” she says.
Larry squeezes Althea, and she puts her head on his big stomach.
“We been together four years and never even have arguments,” Larry says.
In her office, Althea Leasure details her favorite jobs at Hustler.
“I came up with the idea for the Bits N Pieces part of the magazine,” she says. “I came up with the ‘Man Eating Shit’ feature. I also came up with the ‘Guillotined Cock’ feature, also the ‘Bit Off Nipple,’ and stuff like that. Weird stuff. I get my ideas by going across the street to a novelty store and looking around. Like I’ll see a little guillotine and I’ll think. ‘What if it was a guillotine for cocks. Hustler readers would like that.’ People go for the shocking and the weird and the strange. You ever seen the ‘Man Eating Shit’?”
“No,” I say, “I don’t believe I have.”
Althea smiles and yells out, “Eric. Eric.”
From next-door, a small, gnomelike-looking man comes meekly into the room.
“Eric,” says Althea, “go get the slides of the ‘Man Eating Shit’ and the ‘Guillotined Cock’ and the ‘Girl Catching the Man with the Fishing Line Up His Ass’ and ‘Bit Off Nipple.’ Bring them in here please.”
“Yes,” says Eric. “Let’s see… that’s the ‘Man Eating Shit’ and the ‘Bit Off Nipple’ and what else?”
“‘The Fishing Rod Up the Guy’s Ass,’” says Althea, getting a little cross.
Eric smiles weakly at me and disappears down the hall.
“You see,” says Althea, “I know what turns men on. I know what turns women on. Women like the big stud and the ‘force-fuck.’ I think that’s a big turn on for women. I mean not rape, but the ‘force-fuck.’ A woman likes to know that a man is willing to take the pussy no matter whether she’s going to give it or not.”
She stops and gets a glazed look in her eyes. “You know what would turn me on, what I would really like and I plan on having? Two female slaves. I want them to dress in old Roman gowns, and I want to have their hair piled up on their heads like Greeks, and I want them to be my ladies-in-waiting. I mean my slaves. I’d treat them good. They could go shopping with me, and they could take baths with me, and they would be there to serve my guests and to take care of them sexually, but only if I told them so. And I wouldn’t want them to sit around chewing gum and gossiping and watching television and that kind of stuff while I was gone. They would have to act like that all the time. I mean if they didn’t, it would ruin the whole fantasy, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say, “I suppose it would. Tell me, what did you do before you got into this line?”
“Well, I was an orphan,” she says. “I lived in a lot of orphanages all over Ohio. I ran away from most of them, they were so repressive. I was at the Soldiers and Navy Orphanage and I lived with my aunts. Say, what do you want to know stuff like that for anyway?” She is getting nervous, fidgeting with her T square.
It is the day before Thanksgiving and Larry Flynt is looking over some new girlie photos that have been taken by a very hip-looking black photographer from New York named Tony. In the past, when Hustler was still struggling and Flynt was using freelancers a lot, he depended on Tony’s work. In the December issue of Hustler alone, Tony shot the cover, the centerfold, and another girlie spread called Donna Sea Nymph. Now, however, though Tony doesn’t yet know it, things have changed. Hustler is doing well, and Flynt is planning on using fewer American photographers. Instead, Larry wants to pick up on people like James Baes, the cameraman who is famous for his pictures in the French magazine Lui. For the past two days, Flynt has raved about what good artists the Europeans are. It’s as though he has discovered the Cubists or the Surrealists. But these great artists have vastly different aims, such as shooting “great genital shots,” getting “good color textures to the skin” and using “exciting, exotic backgrounds” and “original layouts.” like those found in French Schoolgirls Meet Dracula.
While Tony, in a leather leisure suit, smokes a cigarette and paces the floor, Flynt is hunched over the light table.
“You’re gonna love these girls, Larry,” says Tony. “These are Grade A girls.”
I watch Tony prance about. Though he has been exuding confidence, personality, and hipness (“Like I have put together this really totally unbelievable package, which I knew Larry and Althea would be stunned by”), it’s obvious the man is very nervous.
“You get rejections on these from Oui and from Playboy before I see ’em, Tony?” Larry says.
Tony feigns horror and passes his long artistic fingers across his face.
“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” he says. “These are pictures taken strictly for Hustler magazine, Larry. I want you to know that.”
Larry begins to shake his head. He sucks in his breath and gives out a little sigh.
“Tony, you take great ass shots. You know I love your ass shots. But this chick’s ass is ugly. Bob,” he says to me, “I want you to look at this chick’s ass. Look closely and tell me what you see.”
I lean over the loop, squint my eye, and look down at a perfectly normal ass. (Having seen several thousand asses this week, I have come to look at the human body as a mere piece of meat, and not a particularly interesting one at that.)
“Looks like a normal ass to me, Larry,” I say.
“Look again, Bob. Look right in the ass.”
I squint and look right in the ass. I see nothing unusual. “I see nothing unusual about this ass,” I say.
“For Christ’s sake,” Larry says, grabbing the loop out of my hand. “Look again. This chick has got the hemmies. Tony, I can’t believe you’d try and sell me a goddamned group of pictures with an ugly-looking whore like this whose hemmies are hanging out!”
Tony is sweating and looking like he’d like to crawl out of his leathers and fade away.
“Hemmies,” he says. “I didn’t notice any hemmies!”
Larry is pounding his hands on the counter.
“Not only does this whore have the hemmies,” he says, “but her pussy isn’t even opened up. You’ve got to get that pussy open, you hear, Tony? I mean you make it with these broads. Do it yourself.”
“Honest to God,” says Tony. “I never laid a hand on her.….”
“Well maybe,” says Larry, “maybe you should have. She’s got to have an open pussy, Tony. I want that pussy opened up like a beautiful flower, you understand? The way it looks now is like a pile of cow shit a wagon wheel has rutted through!”
Tony is sweating. All his New York City hip, hustling Superfly cool is fast fading away.
“Take a look at the other ones, Larry,” Tony says. “I’m sorry about those. I didn’t mean to break your chops, heh heh.…”
Larry looks at another group of photos.
“Not bad. This is a good-looking girl with a nice ass. How much you want for these?”
Tony manages to recoup a bit.
“For you, Larry, $1,500 for the whole package, and I’ll pay the girl.”
“I’ll tell you what,” says Larry. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars for these pictures, Tony. I’ll pay the girl myself. She gets $350 and another $400 if she doesn’t appear in another magazine for six months.”
Tony gulps and shakes his head.
“Larry,” he says. “I mean, you’re paying her a total of $750. I’ve already got expenses of $400. Which means I clear only $600. She makes more than me… and I worked and broke my chops to put this package together. That’s not right, Larry.”
Larry gets up from the viewing table and walks over to Althea’s desk. He picks up a copy of Lui, and opens to the centerfold.
“You see this?” he says. “You see this? Can you take pictures like this, with these colors that just jump off the page? Can you get locations like this? Can you make the water on the broad’s stomach stand out like that?”
Tony is shell-shocked. Here he is, the leading man for Hustler magazine, a man with three covers and even Donna Sea Nymph to his credit, and he is being treated like a swine.
“I could, Larry,” he murmurs, “if I had the money.”
“Tony,” Larry says, “I’m using Michelle Moreau and Dominique from Switzerland and James Baes. All these people are bankrolled. They go wherever they want, and if I ask them to shoot something again, they do it forty times until we both got what I want. You take your pictures in some broad’s apartment on her couch, Tony. Hustler is going first-class now. That stuff was all right before, Tony, but it’s out now, over and out!”
Tony starts to speak, but words fail him and he slumps down on the table.
At the door, a little photographer’s agent named Nat shows up. He has an overbite that makes him look like a ferret.
“Hello, Larry,” he says. “Wait till you see what I brought you from France.”
Tony looks as though he wants to leap out of the window. Larry spreads out Nat’s hundreds of girlie slides on the viewing table. In a few minutes Larry is whistling and commenting on the “great pink” shots. Nat is smiling and shaking his head, and Tony is standing around, all loose, uncoiled, as if a tense wire spring inside him has snapped, leaving him a formless mass of bad nerves.
“Man,” he says. “Everywhere I go I get my head beat in.”
Larry Flynt and I are sitting in the basement of the Wine Cellar, a classy backdrop that conflicts with Larry’s crude, hilljack persona. Right now Larry is a bit down in the dumps.
“I know Hustler’s writing stinks,” he says. “I wish I personally knew more about writers. Say, you’re a writer, Bob. Who’s the greatest writer of the century?”
“James Joyce,” I say. “But you can’t buy him for Hustler. He’s dead.”
“Hmm,” Larry says. “Did he ever win a Pulitzer Prize?”
“No,” I say, oddly touched by his massive ignorance. “He was too good to get a Pulitzer.”
“Well, hell, did he ever have a bestseller?”
“Not exactly.”
Larry shakes his head and shoves his fork in the air.
“Well, I don’t get it! I mean why even write a book if it ain’t going to be a bestseller? I wish I had some good writers,” he says. “I’d like to have writers for Hustler as good as… as… Hemingway.”
“But then your readers might be turned off,” I suggest.
Larry nods. “Yeah, that is a problem. What I need are some writers as good as Hemingway who specialize in pornography. That’s it. I need some pornographic Hemingways!”
Althea and Larry and I are driving out of Columbus on the Interstate to Althea’s sister’s house for the Thanksgiving feast. Larry is telling me about his marriages.
“I’ve had four wives and five kids,” he says, “I really miss those kids. Next year I’m going to buy the old governor’s mansion and move in there and get the kids. Then Althea will gradually leave the magazine and take care of the kids. I really want the kids now. I don’t approve of the way their mothers are raising them.”
“Won’t the judge hit you with some kind of rap like ‘A smut king shouldn’t be allowed to raise kids’?” I ask.
Larry laughs and shakes his head. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not going through the courts. I’m just going to each of the mothers and making them an offer.”
“You’re going to buy your kids from their mothers?”
“Well, I’m not going to put it that way,” Larry Flynt says, “but that’s what it comes down to. Every woman has her price.”
“How much do you think it will cost you?” I ask.
“Oh, maybe continued support payments for the rest of their lives.”
“That will be astronomical, won’t it?”
Flynt again shakes his head.
“No. I only give about twenty-five dollars a kid now. Of course I spend a lot more. I buy all their clothes and stuff like that. But I only have to legally pay twenty-five dollars a week per kid.”
“How can that be?” I ask, astonished. “I mean you say you are going to make six million dollars on Hustler this year, and you’ve projected your profits for next year at twenty million dollars, so how come you pay so little child support?”
Flynt pulls the car into a working-class neighborhood, turns a corner, and stops in front of an old white, wood-frame house.
“Well,” he says, “it works like this. In Ohio there is this wonderful law which bases a man’s support payments on his salary, not his holdings. Now, as it says right in Hustler’s publisher’s statement, I draw a salary of only two hundred dollars a week, so I pay support based on that and not on all my holdings.”
“I see,” I say. “And you also tell the working people who buy Hustler that you have a two-hundred-dollar-a-week salary just like them. So that makes them identify with you.”
Flynt chuckles, and we get out of the car and walk up to the house. Althea’s brother-in-law and sister answer the door. They are sitting in their living room, watching a football game.
“Welcome, Larry,” says the man. “You all want a beer?”
We say we do and sit down on the couch. It’s a small place, and the dinner is going to be served in the kitchen.
“You know,” Larry says to me, “Althea was raised in a Soldiers Orphanage. She never had nothing as a kid, I mean. I really want to get my kids so they can have all the advantages. I want to take them to ball games, let them be kids. I don’t think kids should be punished for what adults do, which is fuck up the world.
“I like you,” he says. “You’re a hip guy. I’m kind of hippie myself, you know. Half hippie and half hick. I call myself a hickey.”
I smile and shake my head. It’s a corny term but somehow adequate. Some more relatives show up, good old boys who work at a construction site. One of them starts telling Larry how he “took a couple copies of Hustler up to the site, and you shoulda seen the guys.”
“Yeah, well, wait till you see what’s coming up,” Larry says. “We’re offering Jackie Onassis a million dollars to appear on The Tonight Show with me.”
The relative doesn’t seem astonished.
“Think she’ll take it?” he says.
“I don’t know,” Larry says. “She might not, but then again, you can never tell. She’s just like everybody else. There ain’t much people won’t do for money.”
“That’s true, for sure,” the man says.
“Amen,” says Althea, winking and laughing. “Now let’s all get out here at the table. You men can eat first, but make it quick ’cause I’m hungry.”
We trudge through the house and sit at the table. Larry looks at me and smiles, then glares around the table and starts laughing. “Althea,” he says, “you say grace.”
Althea smiles and winks again and makes her hands into a little chapel: “God is great/God is good/Let us thank Him/For this food/Now let’s eat!”
Her voice is little, childlike, and sends a chill down my back.
“Great job, baby,” Larry Flynt says. “We all got a lot to be thankful for. Now let’s dig into this good country cooking!”
He gives a big down-home grin to his relatives, who stare at him with open awe. These are his people, the poor, the wiped out, the hopeless, the ones he knows so very well. Without another word, he grabs the plate of sweet potatoes and starts helping himself.
On December 18, the day after this story went to the typesetter, Larry Flynt was indicted in Cincinnati on charges of bribery and sodomy. Along with Flynt, Cincinnati Police Chief Carl Goodin and six vice-squad officers were indicted on charges that included bribery, extortion, and perjury. Ward spoke with Flynt by phone the next day. His comment: “It’s just harassment. They probably are gonna say I was giving presents and money to the police. Which is, of course, not true. You know I’m not the kinda guy who would do anything like that.”
When I got back from Columbus I slept for two days solid. Being around Larry and Althea was exhausting. The entire time I was out there I had affected an Arkansas accent. I had gone to school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and picked it up easily. It wasn’t as pronounced as a true Arkansas or Mississippi accent but sounded both Southern and Southwestern. I was a natural mimic and found myself using that talent to good effect with Larry. I also made a number of cornball jokes and basically established myself as a good old boy.
When Flynt had asked me whether the piece was going to be positive or negative, I came up with an answer that even surprised me. I said, with a big, wide, Andy Griffith smile, “Larry, I am here to set the record straight!” He smiled and shook his head.
I could hardly believe he had gone for that, but I found out that that fame was a heady drug. People wanted to believe that their side of the story was the only side and since you were there to talk to them, then, of course, you would be exclusively giving their side.
After that day I used the “I’m here to set the record straight” line every time I met with a subject, and not once did anyone ever question what it meant. It was a great answer, because it was the truth. The record was the truth and I was there to get it. If they couldn’t figure that out, that was their tough luck.
Though it had only been a few months I was already taking Tom Wolfe’s advice and becoming much tougher regarding my work. This wasn’t a joke or an experiment anymore. I wanted to do it, and I had to take it seriously.
I was dead tired and I was counting on a whole week to write the piece but another editor, Marty Bell called me one day after I got back.
“Got some tough news for you,” he said. “One of our lead articles for the new issue didn’t work. You have two days to write it and get it here. I know you can do it.”
With that he hung up.
I felt my heart racing, my mouth getting dry. Two days. Jesus, I had like a book of notes. Five or six notebooks chock full of outrageous stuff. I could spend a month on this piece. Easily.
But that was the business.
I put on some coffee and started reading my notes.
I worked nonstop for thirteen hours, collapsed, slept maybe three hours, got up again, and started writing again.
By the end of the weekend I had the piece you’ve just read. Ten thousand words!
The article was a huge success. A few people called New Times and cancelled their subscriptions, but I was on the radio all over the United States. I got phone calls from other magazines, including Rolling Stone, and I was thrilled. The guys at New Times loved it and found themselves getting more newsstand sales than ever. The PR more than made up for the cancellations.
I still wondered, however, what Larry Flynt felt about it all.
About a week after the piece came out I found out.
I was sitting in my Geneva apartment having a drink with Robin when the phone rang. I picked it up. It was Larry. He spoke in a high-pitched Southern drawl.
“This here Bobby Ward?”
“Yep. Hi, Larry.”
“I just want to say one thing to you. I ain’t mad. That was one hell of a job you done on me but I ain’t mad. But Jimmy, my brother, is furious.”
“Jimmy,” I said. “But he’s barely in the article.”
“Yeah, but you said his new shoes made him look like a Puerto Rican hustler on Forty-second Street. He wants to hit you in the hade with a ballbat!”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m trying to talk him out of it but no telling what ol’ Jimmy might do.”
I couldn’t help it. I started laughing.
“Well, I’m glad you aren’t too mad, Lar,” I said. “I thought it was a pretty good likeness.”
“Yeah, well, live and learn,” Larry said. “You one of them truth-tellers. You fucking guys.…. I’ll be seeing you, Bobby.”
He hung up the phone and so did I.
A chill went down my back. Man, I had only done two or three pieces and two of my subjects, the Geneva cops and Larry Flynt, wanted to kill me.
This gig was even more exciting than I had thought. But nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.
About a week after Larry had called me to tell me how Jimmy wanted to beat up my head with a ballbat, the phone rang again. This time Robin answered it.
“Yes, yes. Oh, hi, Larry.”
She looked at me and started laughing.
“It’s Larry Flynt again.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I was already immune to being threatened.
“Listen, Larry,” I said, taking the phone. “Let’s cut the shit. I don’t want to hear any more of your threats, okay?”
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “You got me all wrong. I ain’t gonna threaten you. No, sir. I been thinking about it and I come to the conclusion that anyone who could fool me as good as you did should be on my side. I need a new editor for Hustler magazine and I want him to be Bob Ward!”
To say I was surprised by this offer would be the greatest understatement of my life. I almost fell over from the shock.
“I’ll start you off at fifty thousand a year but you’ll make a lot more than that in year two.”
I was making eleven thousand teaching. Fifty thousand a year sounded like BIG money. But Hustler?
“Larry, thanks, but.…”
“I knew you was going to say that, but at least think about it for a day or two, Bob. We would have a hell of a lot of fun and all the pussy you could ever want!”
I was in shock. I mumbled goodbye and hung up.
Needless to say I didn’t take the job. I didn’t lose any sleep over it, but for a guy with about five hundred bucks in his pocket it was tempting. Still, living out there with Flynt and those other characters? I knew I could never look at myself or any of my family again.
Two months after I turned him down Larry Flynt got his man, Paul Krassner, of Realist fame. Paul, who is now a friend of mine and a brilliant guy, went to Columbus and lasted about one year.
I thought that was the last time I would ever hear from Larry, but he called me a year later and asked me if I wanted to get my friends Alan King and Rupert Hitzig (who were producing my feature movie Cattle Annie and Little Britches) involved with a documentary on his life.
This I was interested in but only if it was going to be as real as my article had been.
We had a meeting in New York but Larry had already learned his lesson. He wanted control over the content of the film. And final cut.
So no deal.
But Flynt isn’t a man who gives up. He eventually got the movie he wanted made: The People vs. Larry Flynt, which made him look like a First Amendment Hero.
I once asked the movie’s screenwriter, Larry Karaszewski, if he knew of my piece. He said, “Oh, yeah, we read that. That was a great piece. You told the truth. We took the… uh, more mythic approach.”