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Perpetual Virginity
Unrequited Love and the Tortured Artist (or, Your Muse Is Just
Not That Into You)
“There is always some madness in love,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “but there is also always some reason in madness.” Modern research suggests that love is, literally, a form of madness. One study by the University of California, San Diego, revealed that the brain patterns of the love struck are almost identical to those who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Pine over your beloved or comb the fringes out of your rug; your brain doesn’t know the difference.
Despite the irrational effects of Cupid’s arrow, we really have no cogent means to defend ourselves against it. There is no bargaining with love. The brain’s feeble voice of reason is useless against the heart’s all-encompassing pangs of desire. This is not always a bad thing. If the person on the receiving end returns our love, we can expect to enjoy one of those happy endings that feel so disgustingly schmaltzy in Kate Hudson movies. However, when our love is not returned, our egos will just as forcefully cry out for validation. For tortured artists, unrequited love can launch entire careers, as was the case with the budding novelist Ayn Rand, who, years before she wrote The Fountainhead, had a love affair with a free-spirited young man who did not return her feelings. Rand was too hurt by the experience to publicly reveal the fellow’s identity, but she used him as the inspiration for Leo Kovalensky, the handsome love interest of her first published novel, We the Living.
Eric Clapton
Three decades later, in 1970, Eric Clapton skyrocketed to fame with the now-classic song “Layla.” The guitar virtuoso had fallen hopelessly in love with the mod fashion model Pattie Boyd, but the blueberry-eyed beauty was already married to his good friend George Harrison. Clapton realized that the only way to compete with a Beatle was to write a hit song, and apparently it worked: Boyd left Harrison in 1974 and married Clapton in 1979.
When unrequited love strikes the lives of artists, it often does so early, before they have achieved success. It happens before the fame, the admiration, the yes men. In other words, it happens when they are the most vulnerable to rejection. But ultimately the experience can inspire an artist’s most defining works. The following stories reveal how masterpieces can be shaped by a fleeting romance, a torrid affair, or even a simple crush.
(1265–1321)
Abstract: Stalk like a man
Birth name: Durante degli Alighieri
Birthplace: Florence, Italy
Masterwork: The Divine Comedy
Demons: Love and war
“Oh, misery … I will often be troubled from now on.”
—From La Vita Nuova, 1295
It should come as no surprise that the man who conceptualized our modern view of eternal damnation had a few personal demons, but Dante Alighieri was far more tortured than your garden-variety medieval wordsmith. As an influential versifier, Italy’s Sommo Poeta (“the Supreme Poet”) is often compared with Homer or Shakespeare, but as a young poet on the streets of Florence, he was simply a hopeless romantic who drew much of his inspiration from the accidental temptress Beatrice Portinari, a girl he barely knew.
Dante first laid eyes on this “glorious lady” at a May Day bash when he was nine and Beatrice was eight, and he spotted her all dolled up in a crimson dress. “From then on,” he fawned, “I say that Amor governed my soul.” If the thought of the Roman god of love governing the soul of an eight-year-old boy seems excessive, it helps to place the quote in context, meaning the Middle Ages, when courtly love was more fashionable than creepy. Nine years later, Dante crossed paths with Beatrice again, this time on the street, where she greeted him as she passed by. That brief encounter threw him into a veritable whirlwind of emotional expression.
“I left the crowd as if intoxicated,” he later wrote. “I returned to the solitude of my own room, and fell to thinking of this most gracious one.” Dante claimed to have met Beatrice only on these two occasions, and yet the brevity of their encounters did not stop him from making her his lifelong muse. Given this proclivity for unsolicited devotion, it’s tempting to liken Dante to that guy who kept getting arrested for stalking Uma Thurman, but whether his affections for Beatrice arose from true love or an untreated chemical imbalance makes little difference seven centuries onward. To Dante, Beatrice was an ideal, a quasi-religious experience through which he came to wrap his head around such abstract concepts as truth, purity, and undying love.
The first catalyst for Dante’s inner torment was Beatrice’s sudden death at the age of twenty-four, the cause of which remains a mystery. That incident sent the poet into a creative frenzy, and he spent the next three years composing love poetry in Beatrice’s honor (an obsession that no doubt irritated his wife, Gemma). The collection of verse eventually became the book La Vita Nuova, which marked a momentous step forward in the development of Dante’s poetry. In it, Dante retells his personal story of unrequited love and the transformative journey on which it had taken him. His early encounters with Beatrice spark lustful yearnings, causing Dante despair and shame. Following her death, however, he undergoes a spiritual renewal of sorts, with his love for the girl taking its most idealized form.
Unfortunately, just as Dante seemed to be working through his issues, he suffered a second mental wound, this one inflicted not by love but politics. As a man of esteemed social status, he was heavily involved in Florentine affairs. However, Italian city-states tended to be quite volatile, and Dante, being of a liberal slant, found himself on the wrong side of a fierce political divide. When his political party, the White Guelphs, lost control to the more radical Black Guelphs, the poet was sentenced to exile and condemned to be burned alive if he were ever to show his face in Florence again. The sentence was devastating to the patriotic Dante, who spent the next few years aligning with other outcasts in hopes of regaining power. When those alliances proved fruitless, Dante grew increasingly disillusioned by the ineptitude of his fellow exiles. It’s no coincidence that around this same time he began work on Inferno, the first—and darkest—canticle of The Divine Comedy, a three-part masterpiece that would propel him into the literary stratosphere and help give birth to the modern Italian language. Here Dante demonstrated the sort of self-obsession common among tortured artists when, in a cutting-edge play on structure, he made himself the hero of his own epic. Such an Everyman formula was unheard of at a time when protagonists were generally written as Schwarzenegger-esque warriors. Inferno recounts the hero’s journey through nine circles of Hell, with each circle holding more astringent punishments for more severe sinners. Fittingly, Dante reserved the final and most caustic circle of Hell for traitors, as the author likely enjoyed placing those responsible for his exile in the domain closest to Lucifer himself.
Dante revived Beatrice one last time in Purgatorio and Paradiso. His lifelong object of desire appears in these canticles as his personal tour guide through heaven, apparently the only being pure enough to get past the bouncer. It’s here that all traces of the historical Beatrice are lost, and she transforms into a pure work of fiction—an allegory of virtue and goodness dreamed up by the author’s fertile imagination. In contrast to Dante the unrequited romantic, there was, one assumes, an antipodal version of the man, a dedicated husband and father of four who was secretly consumed by the things he could not have. Of course, any comment on his wife, Gemma, would be pure speculation. Public records from the era are scarce, and Dante, for all his writings, never mentioned her once. 
Nine Circles of Dante’s Personal Hell
One: His mother dies when he’s only seven.
Two: He falls in love with Beatrice at the age of nine. Unfortunately, he’s too young to do anything about it.
Three: At twelve, he’s arranged to be married to Gemma Donati, despite the fact that he’s still hung up on Beatrice.
Four: At twenty-four, he fights in the Battle of Campaldino and learns that, um, war is hell.
Five: He goes on a writing binge upon Beatrice’s death and writes La Vita Nuova.
Six: His political party falls out of favor; he gets booted out of Florence.
Seven: He takes part in failed attempts to regain power.
Eight: He becomes a disillusioned loner after prolonged exile.
Nine: He gets in touch with his bitterness and begins work on what will become The Divine Comedy.
(1775–1817)
Abstract: Tales from the snark side
Birth name: Jane Austen
Birthplace: Hampshire, England
Masterwork: Pride and Prejudice
Demons: The marriage machine
“I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.”
—In a letter to her sister, December 24, 1798
In an effort to uncover details of Jane Austen’s personal life, curious biographers are often left scratching their Regency bonnets. It seems that despite the endless Austen Societies, BBC Miniseries, and cheeky zombie parodies, we really don’t know very much about the real facts surrounding the life of this endlessly popular chick-lit pioneer. We know from her fiction, of course, that she possessed a sublime wit and was critical of the conventions of her era, particularly the fact that marrying for money was pretty much the only option available to young women. However, getting to know Jane herself, and what punishing imperfections may have chipped away at her psyche, is a puzzling affair.
Approaching this quandary, one might logically begin with Jane’s looks, which would have been a defining characteristic in a society ruled by a woman-as-commodity mindset. Unfortunately, the author’s appearance is shrouded in as much uncertainty as her private life. The only authenticated image of her is a watercolor/pencil sketch drawn by her older sister, Cassandra, when Jane was in her thirties. The sketch is decidedly prosaic, casting Jane as a thin-lipped spinster with apparent facial edema. It’s also a stark contrast to the bright-eyed Anne Hathaway, who portrayed Jane in Julian Jarrold’s 2007 film, Becoming Jane, but then Hollywood is famous for such revisionist makeovers. (Does anyone really believe Jesse James looked like Brad Pitt?) Still, while Jarrold’s film no doubt took liberties with Jane’s appearance, its central focus—namely her ill-fated romance with the Irishman Tom Lefroy—gets to the root of the author’s tortured soul.
Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy were both just twenty years old when they met over the Christmas season of 1795, he a hotshot law grad on his way up the ladder, and she a small-town girl of modest means.
Literary types tend to squabble over the seriousness of the couple’s involvement. Jarrold’s film, like the book that inspired it, envisions Jane and Lefroy in a passionate, reciprocal affair, one savagely cut short by differences in social status. Other historians believe Jane’s strong feelings for Lefroy were unreturned, insisting that the status-driven Irishman could not have been very serious about a penniless country girl. This latter theory is bolstered by the fact that Lefroy married a well-heeled heiress three years after he and Jane said their goodbyes.
Ultimately, it isn’t relevant whether Lefroy was truly smitten or just out slumming it for the holidays. The relationship, for what it was, had a profound impact on Jane, and its emotionally wrenching repercussions worked their way into her literary legacy. Consider poor Marianne Dashwood, the romantically challenged heroine of Sense and Sensibility, who is crushed when the dashing John Willoughby passes her over for a richer prospect. Evidence of Lefroy’s influence can also be found by looking at Jane’s creative output: The author was extremely productive in the period following her brief romance, completing three novels in just four years. Two of these, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, are by far her most beloved. (The third, Northanger Abbey, is known colloquially as “the one nobody reads,” but let’s not split hairs.)
“A Lady” in Waiting
Jane’s long journey to see her work in print:
1795. Inspiration: Jane pens three novels in four years. For entertainment, she reads the books aloud to her family, who fortunately have no mobile devices to distract them.
1797. Rejection: Jane’s father pitches Pride and Prejudice (original title First Impressions) to the publisher Thomas Cadell, who quickly rejects the query. Two centuries later, Cadell is still believed to be kicking himself.
1801. Depression: When her father retires, Jane is forced to move to the hopping resort town of Bath. The move is traumatic for the country girl; over the next decade, she barely writes a word.
1811. Publication: Jane’s brother finally finds a publisher for Sense and Sensibility, which had been written thirteen years prior. Because female writers (or, rather, female professionals of any kind) were looked down on in those days, Jane uses the pseudonym “A Lady.”
1813. Vindication: Sensibility sells some 750 copies. (The average middle schooler gets more follows than that on Twitter nowadays, but it was a lot for back then.) Jane, unmarried and still dependent on her brothers for support, finally wins a taste of financial freedom.
Jane Austen’s popularity has grown considerably since her death. In book clubs around the world, dutiful Janites converge with regularity to exchange their admiration for the author’s work. The mere fact that she has spawned a namesake sect of doting fans puts Jane in the company of such cultural institutions as Star Trek and the Grateful Dead. The irreverent Lizzy Bennet would probably scoff at such comparisons, but they’re impressive to us mere mortals nonetheless.
(1865–1939)
Abstract: The mourning after
Birth name: William Butler Yeats
Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
Masterwork: The Wild Swans at Coole
Demons: An incendiary giantess
“The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”
—Interview with the literary critic John Sparrow, 1931
In December 1908, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats woke up in a spacious loft on Rue de Passy, in Paris, snuggling comfortably next to Maud Gonne, the feminist and Irish nationalist whom he had long pursued. A liaison had transpired the night before, the particulars of which Yeats and Gonne took to their graves, but it was no ordinary affair by any definition. Rather, it was the culmination of a cat-and-mouse game that had persisted for nearly two decades. Yeats had almost given up. He had proposed to Maud, fruitlessly, more times than he cared to count, only to submit to her insistence that their very close friendship remain unencumbered by physical affection. In other words, Maud had adopted the same stance as the female pals of many a brace-toothed geek: Why spoil a perfectly good friendship with sex? Yeats knew then, as geeks know today, that such a question is ridiculously rhetorical.
But persistence pays, or so the story goes, and conventional wisdom has it that Maud finally gave in to his physical advances that night. “The long years of fidelity were finally rewarded,” as one of Yeats’s former lovers later said. Rare in the annals of poet/muse relations is a story of such blissful triumph. The whole thing would seem even sweeter had it not left Yeats himself feeling beaten, betrayed, and pierced with regret for the rest of his life.
W. B. Yeats—or Willie, as Maud referred to him—first met Maud Gonne in 1889. Barely twenty-four, the young poet was an idealistic anti-industrialist who preferred Celtic myths and the occult to steam engines and electricity. Maud was a fan of his ethereal poetry, but she did not share his ethereal nature. She was opinionated, politically minded, fiercely intelligent, and an imposing presence in every quantifiable sense—a 6-tall Amazon who fought tirelessly for Ireland’s independence from Great Britain. Her boxy jaw, thin lips, and knotty hair were not particularly idealized by Victorian tastemakers (in pictures she looks like a cross between Bea Arthur and the bass player from Twisted Sister), but Willie saw something irresistible in her nonetheless. Over the course of his career, he produced volumes of verse and prose in her honor. However, he broke from the Dantesque tradition of muse worship that would have relegated him to humble stalkerdom. Willie was not content to worship Maud from afar, and he chased her with all the hormone-fueled purpose of an Irish wolfhound.
Throughout their decades-long friendship, he made a waggish habit of proposing to her, and she made equal sport of turning him down, claiming a fixed opposition to the institution of marriage. And although Willie and Maud shared the dream of an independent Ireland, they had different ideas about how such a dream could be brought about. Willie expressed himself with words; Maud was a woman of action who organized protests, founded women’s groups, and used such expressions as “the first principle of war is to kill the enemy.” Still, there was always an undeniable attraction between her and Willie, as evidenced by that night in Paris. Much to Yeats’s dismay, however, it changed nothing. He may have won her body for a night, but he had not captured her heart.
The following day, Maud wrote Willie a letter, insisting that he move on for good. “Loving you as I do,” she wrote, “I have prayed and I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you.” If that sounds like a mixed message, welcome to Willie’s hell. While he had grown accustomed to her refusals, there was something even more humiliating about being shot down on the day after their shared night.
Eight years would pass before Willie would propose to Maud again (we knew it was coming), only to have her refuse him one final time. It was 1916. Ireland was roiled in a fight for its very soul, and Maud was pushing fifty, the years of activism showing on her creased face. Yeats, no spring chicken himself, wanted to produce an heir, and with Maud unwilling to oblige, he went for the next best thing. He proposed to Maud’s daughter, Iseult (the product of an on-again-off-again affair between Maud and a French journalist), who was now twenty-one years old. Iseult admitted to a girlish crush on the famous writer, but in the end she carried on her mother’s tradition by turning him down flat.
For Yeats, the double rejection, coupled with the conflict in his native country, caused a midlife crisis that would change the direction of his poetry and his legacy. The following year, he published the collection The Wild Swans at Coole, marking a transition into the late-career writing for which he is largely remembered. Gone was the naive escapist preoccupied with Celtic myths. Yeats, embattled from the insatiability of his long-unfulfilled desires, had matured. The new poems reflected on mortality, on death, on the struggle to find beauty in a cold world as our bodies age and decay before our eyes. (The collection’s title refers to a wedge of swans that lived on a property Yeats had been visiting for nineteen years. He marvels at how, in all that time, the swans’ “hearts have not grown old.”) Yeats is unusual among modern poets in that he was really quite a late bloomer, producing most of his well-known works between the ages of fifty and seventy-five. His was not the voice of brash, youthful ruminations but rather of a cultivated sage whose slow path to wisdom was obtained through decades of deep self-analysis. In that regard, he owes a debt to a rejection that spanned twenty years and two generations of women.
And what of that one night in Paris? It stands, in hindsight, not as a vindication but a cautionary tale. Yeats broke Golden Rule One for unrequited love: Keep it unrequited. Some couples are simply better off apart. Whether or not Yeats and Gonne fully consummated their relationship that night, we can never really be sure, but Yeats, in later years, nearly affirmed as much with his increasing cynicism toward lust. Sexual intercourse, he said, always ends in failure, if only because the act inherently takes place on one side of the gulf that “separates the one and the many, or if you like, God and man.”
Yeats did eventually have two children, although suffice it to say, they were not Maud’s. And yet, in a way, his and Maud’s unusual relationship did spawn an heir: Ireland itself. Maud’s activism helped bring about an independent nation while Yeats, under her spell, emerged as one of its foremost literary figures. He was a new voice for a new republic, fueling an innate gift for lyricism with a lifetime of longing and sadness. It doesn’t get more Irish than that.
(1922–2000)
Abstract: Win, lose, and draw
Birth name: Charles Monroe Schulz
Birthplace: Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Masterwork: Peanuts
Demons: Rejection
“You never do get over your first love. The whole of you is rejected when a woman says, ‘You’re not worth it.’”
—Interview with the Star Tribune, 1997
In 1945, Charles M. Schulz, twenty-three and fresh out of the army, took a job as a teacher at Art Instruction, a learn-by-mail art school in Minneapolis. It wasn’t the most prestigious job in the art world. The school was, and still is, known mostly for its long-running “Draw Me!” ad campaign, which invited would-be artists to sketch the likenesses of various cartoon characters in profile—Tippy the Turtle, Cubby the Bear, that weird pirate, and so forth. In art-education circles, Art Instruction is regarded as something akin to those x-ray glasses you used to get from the back of comic books, promising more than it delivers. But for Charles, then an aspiring cartoonist, it was an exciting stepping stone, a chance for a real career in art. Four years later, he was still teaching there, still toiling away in obscurity, when a diversion entered his workplace. Her name was Donna Mae Johnson, the new girl in accounting.
Charles was instantly drawn to Donna, and how could he not be? She was an ideal midcentury catch, a confection of Rockwellian peach skin, cherubic cheeks, and bright red hair. She was also, as luck would have it, looking to settle down. At twenty-one, she was already seven months older than the median age of marriage for women in Harry Truman’s America.
Charles was one of two eligible bachelors whom she considered worthy prospects. Unfortunately for Charles, the other bachelor was Donna’s high school sweetheart, Alan Wold, a hardworking, overprotective, at times jealous sort, who was studying to become a firefighter. Donna dated both men, simultaneously, for several months, but she became more partial to Wold as time went on. Who could blame her? Firefighters are the closest thing we have to real-life superheroes, and aspiring cartoonists, more often than not, end up sketching tourists in Atlantic City. But it wasn’t Charles’s limited earning potential that cooled Donna off; it was his shyness. He was a terminal introvert, sweet and well intentioned but too reserved for his own good, and he was worlds away from the assertive alpha male with whom Donna had always pictured herself.
Charles had been a passive observer in the rituals of courtship for most of his life. He did not so much pursue members of the opposite sex as observe them, quietly, from a safe distance, often developing a focused admiration for women he considered unapproachable.
Donna was Charles’s first love—the first reciprocal relationship in the life of a young man who lost his mother at twenty and was still living at home at twenty-seven.
And on the night of June 14, 1950, he excitedly told her that he had just signed a deal to develop a cartoon strip for United Feature Syndicate. Armed with the newly minted promise of a bright future in cartooning, Charles at once overcame the vexing fear of rejection that had prevented him from approaching women his entire life. He asked for Donna’s hand in marriage, but his proposal did not evoke the response he had hoped. In fact, she refused Charles outright, stating to the effect that she did not want to marry him or anyone else. “I just want everyone to leave me alone,” she blurted. Four months later, she married Alan Wold.
Charles Schulz’s future in cartooning was, of course, more than bright. His Peanuts comic strip, which he drew from 1950 until shortly before his death in 2000, grew to become the most successful comic strip of all time. At its peak, it appeared in about 2,600 newspapers worldwide, reaching an audience of more than 355 million people. It’s hard to imagine any comic strip achieving such a reach today, even if we were to ignore the obvious observation that the world probably doesn’t have 2,600 newspapers left in it. And yet Peanuts spread far beyond its funny-page roots. It spawned movies, TV specials, stage plays, books, and endless merchandizing. There is no medium, no Macy’s parade, no MetLife blimp that the strip did not infiltrate.
At the core of its success have always been Charles Schulz’s multifaceted neuroses, expressed to exhaustion in the strip’s antithetical hero, Charlie Brown, the mustard-shirted born loser with a masochistic need for endless self-reflection. Charlie Brown was a sloping Everykid, who sought acceptance from his peers, got depressed around the holidays, and blew off homework to play baseball only to then beat himself up for procrastinating. Peanuts presented childhood as it really is: full of misery and loneliness.
However, the one theme in the strip that stood out above the rest was rejection. The characters could feel love, but they were never loved back, and Schulz took great pains to make sure it always stayed that way. Thus Sally’s girlhood crush on Linus was never returned, Lucy’s curt advances toward Schroeder were always futile, and Peppermint Patty and Marcie never realized how perfect a lesbian couple they really made. Then there was Charlie Brown himself, who spent countless school lunches alone on a bench, pining hopelessly for the Little Red-Haired Girl. This character, only seen through Charlie Brown’s point of view, is the manifestation of the redheaded secretary who passed Charles over for another guy. In a 1997 interview he even named her by name, explaining how he never really got over the sting. “I can think of no more emotionally damaging loss than to be turned down by someone you love,” Schulz said. “A person who not only turns you down, but almost immediately will marry the victor. What a bitter blow that is.”
Till Death Do Us Part
Charles Schulz was never coy about the fact that he and Charlie Brown were alter egos. They shared the same first name, their dads were both barbers, and they were both endlessly melancholy. But the eeriest commonality between the two might have been their last. When Schulz announced his retirement in December 1999, he requested that United Feature Syndicate discontinue Peanuts after his death. He drew enough Sunday strips to last only through mid-February, and on Saturday, February 12, 2000, he passed away. The final Peanuts strip was printed, coincidently, just a few hours after his death.
Donna herself has also been interviewed on the topic, saying that she has no regrets over her decision. And although she may claim not to wonder about what might have been, let’s face it, she does. Peanuts is a masterpiece of minimalism, a pen-and-ink Greek tragedy through which the simplest drawings expose the harrowing experience that is childhood. It’s impossible not to think about how different the strip would have been had she said yes that night in 1950. Imagine Charlie Brown getting some tongue. It doesn’t quite work.
(1925–1966)
Abstract: How do you like me now, Honey?
Birth name: Leonard Alfred Schneider
Birthplace: Mineola, New York, USA
Peak Performance: Cafe Au Go Go, Greenwich Village, 1964
Demons: The transition from telling jokes to becoming the punch line
“All my humor is based on destruction and despair.”
—Interview with Newsweek, 1961
Christians have Jesus. Intellectuals have Socrates. For comedians, the one true martyr is Lenny Bruce, patron saint of stand-up comedy and defender of our constitutional right to talk dirty and influence people. At a time when other comics were milking stale bits about Chinese waiters (with all due respect to Mr. Hackett), Lenny pulled audiences into a world of social satire, scorn for the establishment, and, of course, profanity. And while his legacy will forever be dominated by the obscenity battles that derailed his career, his contribution to the American laughscape did not merely open the floodgates for unchecked foul-mouthery. Lenny’s improvisational diatribes on society’s ills reimagined what stand-up comedy could be, freeing it from the formulaic setups and corny punch lines that had defined the form.
Lenny was one of the first comics to embrace his tortured psyche. The fact that he was ultimately found naked on the bathroom floor of his Hollywood Hills home, dead of a morphine overdose at the age of forty, mandates his inclusion in any semieclectic anthology of tortured artists. Yet the catalyst behind Lenny’s transformation from nightclub obscurity to counterculture hero was not the glut of booze and drugs that led to his untimely demise but rather the broken heart he acquired along the way.
To understand how lovesickness factored into the formation of Lenny’s infamous comic persona, it’s necessary to go back to the early 1950s, a time when Lenny was an unremarkable workaday comic, steeped in mediocrity. Early in his career, he tended to err toward the conventional, with a flavorless stand-up routine that consisted of little more than innocuous pot shots and the occasional Katharine Hepburn impression. In effect, he played it safe, held back. The manic energy that he would later unleash in a flurry of comic tirades against the established order was, at the time, focused on passions of a different sort—namely a beautiful and sexually charged young stripper called Hot Honey Harlow, whom Lenny met in a Baltimore coffee shop in 1951 and married that same year.
Security—especially of the emotional sort—had never been a presence in Lenny’s life. His parents divorced when he was five, and he spent much of his childhood getting shuffled between assorted Long Island relatives. His mother, a nightclub performer and aspiring Broadway diva, took him to live with her in Manhattan for a time, but she considered single motherhood a cramp on her glitzy lifestyle. Within months, she shipped Lenny back to the sterile recesses of Nassau County, scarring him with a lifelong case of separation anxiety. Years later, Lenny’s impulsive marriage to Honey Harlow offered him the emotional security that was absent from his fractured upbringing.
Lenny and Honey were kindred drifters. They had both run away from home in their teens—he to join the navy and she to dance with a carnival—and they were drawn together by a mutual interest in the bottommost fringes of show business. Their relationship was a frenetic one, marked by excessive drug use, wild sex orgies, and the kind of all-night showbiz parties that typically ended with someone getting hit over the head with a hookah pipe.
From the outset, Lenny was enthralled by Honey’s arresting mix of raw sexuality and angelic beauty. He called her a cross between a hooker and the Madonna, the perfect woman to satisfy his need for excitement and security in equal doses. Unfortunately, the fear of abandonment that had latched onto Lenny’s psyche from childhood thwarted his chances for a healthy relationship. He was intensely jealous and possessive, and at one point he even insisted that Honey give up stripping because he couldn’t bear the thought of other men ogling her. The couple’s financial situation was dire, however, and Lenny was not earning enough from his occasional club gigs to support them. Despite his objections, Honey continued to accept stripping jobs whenever she could—out of town, of course, where he couldn’t witness the aforementioned ogling. The time apart put a further strain on their relationship until the free-spirited Honey finally decided she could no longer put up with Lenny’s fierce possessiveness. The two divorced in January 1957.
With Honey gone and his career still puttering along in first gear, Lenny found himself alone and deeply depressed. Determined not to drown in a pool of self-pity, however, he took his unrequited passion for Honey and channeled it into the one thing he had left: his act. It wasn’t long before an edgier comic persona began to emerge. Lenny, as if gerrymandering a new identity out of bitterness and spite, soon perfected the feral voice that would make him both famous and infamous.
Within a year after his breakup, he started to gain a following among late-fifties counterculture types for his outlandish bits on everything from religion to racism to sniffing airplane glue—not to mention his frequent rants on marriage and divorce. Even Honey conceded that his later success might have been the result of her abandonment. “I think Lenny just wanted to show me what I had given up,” she admitted in a 1998 documentary. “And he did.”
Lenny, as any First Amendment aficionado knows, was not rewarded for the distinctive voice he discovered after his breakup. In 1961, he was charged with obscenity, mainly for saying the word “cocksucker” in a San Francisco nightclub. Although acquitted on that charge, Lenny landed on the radar of morality police across the country. Several more arrests followed, and soon club owners were afraid to book him. In 1964, Lenny’s many detractors finally got their way when the comic was convicted of obscenity for two performances at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. Bankrupt and increasingly desperate, Lenny became obsessed with clearing his name, toiling over law journals and preparing for a legal vindication that would never come. He died less than two years later, while the case was still under appeal.
Today, we take George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” and Eddie Murphy Raw as established watersheds in the annals of American stand-up comedy, but without the obscenity battles fought by Lenny Bruce, contemporary comics might still be subjected to the same draconian censorship imposed upon their predecessors. Larry the Cable Guy aside, the art of making people laugh is far better off without the restraints and forever indebted to Lenny and Honey’s irreconcilable differences.
The People vs. Lenny Bruce, a Mini-Timeline
1961—Bruce is arrested after a performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village.
1964—Bruce is convicted of obscenity, despite a petition signed by Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Woody Allen, and many others urging that the charges be dropped.
2003—New York Governor George Pataki acknowledges Bruce’s invaluable contributions by overturning the comic’s obscenity conviction. It was the first posthumous pardon in the state’s history.