The cartoon showed a man dressed like a doctor doing a cigarette commercial, then changing to his civilian clothes in a dressing room, going back to his own office and getting dressed like a doctor again, and finally telling a patient, “You’re going to have to give up smoking.”
An unsolicited comic strip arrived from editorial cartoonist Frank Interlandi. It showed a man walking along, spotting a poster of a mushroom cloud with the question, If a Bomb Falls, What Would You Do? He continued walking as his answer appeared in a thought balloon: “I’d shit!”
Interlandi wrote to me: “Actually, I did the cartoon with the intention of sending it to the syndicate, but when it came to putting the punchline in, I couldn’t think of anything but ‘I’d shit!’The more lines I tried the less funny it got, and the surer I was that the original line was the best and only one—it was a genuine reaction; the feeling of being helpless and returning to infantilism. But why do I have to explain a cartoon? Naturally I knew the syndicate would reject it, so they never did see it, but I wanted to see it printed and I thought of you.”
At a convention of editorial cartoonists, several artists observed that Interlandi’s drawing should have won a Pulitzer Prize, but they knew it couldn’t. Nor would the Village Voice accept an ad including that cartoon, afraid of jeopardizing their second-class mailing permit. Ours was still pending.
A New Yorker artist who preferred to remain anonymous sent me a cartoon that he knew would also be rejected. The top half showed a guest on a TV talk show, saying, “Frankly I didn’t give a damn about it!” The bottom half depicted a family watching the program at home. Now the TV guest was saying, “Frankly I didn’t give a bleep about it!” Thought balloons indicated that the mother was thinking, “Fuck?” The father: “Piss?” The grandmother: “Shit?” And the son: “Crap?”
When the Cuban missile crisis occurred, Richard Guindon created his most popular cartoon for The Realist, which I put on the cover. It depicted a reclining nude woman, leaning on her elbow with her back to us—her buttocks fashioned a globe with latitudinal and longitudinal lines—as she faced a couple of faceless men, both naked except that one was wearing boxer shorts with stars and stripes while the other had a hammer and sickle tattooed on his chubby arm. The Kennedy-like American was gesturing toward the Khrushchev-like Russian and speaking to the Earth-woman:
“It’s his turn now and then me again.”
That cartoon captured a certain feeling of powerlessness that permeated the country. Two Broadway stars—Orson Bean in Subways are for Sleeping and Anthony Newley in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off—had it framed on their dressing room walls, even while certain bookstores and newsstands were displaying that issue face down.
And political satirist Mort Sahl chastised me: “I think The Realist is probably the most vital publication in America, but I don’t think the magazine should dissipate its time on crudeness. I don’t mind telling you, that kind of thing is offensive to me. I don’t think that both the United States and Russia are raping the world.”
“Now you used the word rape,” I said. “How do you know that the female representing the earth was not being submissive?”
“Or even seductive,” Sahl said. “Well, I’ll never know. I didn’t see her face in that cartoon. You didn’t emphasize that part, you know.”
I published a cartoon by Mort Gerberg, depicting a Mother Goose character—the old lady who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn’t know what to do—speaking on the phone: “Dr. Burnhill?—Uh, you don’t know me, but, uh, I’ve been told that you could, uh, perform a certain, uh, operation—” It turned out that there was an actual Dr. Burnhill, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who called me in distress after patients started bringing that issue of The Realist to his office.
Although I apologized to the doctor, every succeeding cartoon by Gerberg would include a character named Burnhill.
I had become friends with Paul Jacobs, a radical union organizer, who was commissioned by the Health, Education and Welfare Department to write a paper, “Keeping the Poor Poor,” for presentation at a social workers conference and to be included in a book on poverty. His analysis was prefaced by a quotation in its original language, Portuguese. Translation: “If shit ever gets to have any value, the poor will be born without assholes.”
In The Realist, I applied that proverb to the subject of abortion:A poor woman has to undergo an unsuccessful hassle to get permission for a therapeutic—that is, a legal—abortion, even though she contracted German measles from a syphilitic cousin who raped her and then stole all her money plus the secondhand toys of her eighteen children, then calmed her down with tranquilizers containing thalidomide. Whereas, a wealthy woman can avoid having an unwanted offspring under safe and sanitary conditions simply because she decided not to have a baby. Why, she might conceivably go so far some day as to achieve the ultimate status symbol by obtaining an abortion when she isn’t even pregnant.
Actually, when abortion was illegal, women had no choice but to seek out back-alley butchers for a medical procedure. If there was a botched surgery and the victim went to a hospital, the police were called and they wouldn’t allow the doctor to provide a painkiller until the patient gave them the information they sought.
There was an article in Look magazine that stated, “There is no such thing as a ‘good’ abortionist. All of them are in business strictly for money.” But in the June 1962 issue of The Realist, I published an anonymous interview with Dr. Robert Spencer, a humane abortionist, promising that I would go to prison sooner than reveal his identity.
Dr. Spencer had served as an army doctor in World War I, then became a pathologist at a hospital in Ashland. He won the town’s respect for going down into the shafts after a mine accident, and aiding miners to obtain Workmen’s Compensation for lung disease. Now, at a time when five thousand women were killed each year by criminal abortionists who charged as much as $1500, his reputation had spread by word-of-mouth, and he was known as “The Saint.” Patients came to his clinic in Ashland, Pennsylvania, from around the country.
I took the five-hour bus trip from New York to Ashland with my gigantic Webcor tape recorder. Dr. Spencer was the cheerful personification of an old-fashioned physician, and used folksy expressions like “by golly.” He had been performing abortions for forty years. He started out charging $5, and never more than $100. He rarely used the word pregnant. Rather, he would say, “She was that way, and she came to me for help.”
Ashland was a small town, and Dr. Spencer’s work was not merely tolerated; the community depended on it—the hotel, the restaurant, the dress shop—all thrived on the extra business that came from his out-of-town patients. He built facilities at his clinic for Negro patients who weren’t allowed to obtain overnight lodgings elsewhere in Ashland. The walls of his office were decorated with those little wooden signs that tourists like to buy. A sign on the ceiling over his operating table said keep calm.
Q. Do you have any idea about how many actual abortions you’ve performed during all these years?
A. To be accurate, he replied, it’s 27,006.
Q . Have medical people come to you, who would otherwise shun you?
A. Oh, yes, I’ve had medical people who bring me their wives, and I’ve had quite a few medical people send me patients.
Q . But they wouldn’t perform the operation themselves?
A. No, they’d never perform it, and just exactly what their attitude would be, I don’t really know. Some of them, I presume, were absolutely against it, because I’ve had ministers, and they’d bring me their daughters or their nieces.
Q . Have police come to you for professional services?
A. Oh, yes, I’ve had police in here, too. I’ve helped them out. I’ve helped a hell of a lot of police out. I’ve helped a lot of FBI men out. They would be here, and they had me a little bit scared—I didn’t know whether they were just in to get me or not.
Q. What would you say is the most significant
lesson you’ve learned in all your years as a practicing abortionist?
A. You’ve got to be careful. That’s the most important thing. And you’ve got to be cocksure that everything’s removed. And even the uterus speaks to you and tells you. I could be blind. You see, this is an operation no eye sees. You go by the sense of feel and touch. The voice of the uterus . . . But the only thing I can see is hypocrisy, hypocrisy. Everywhere I look is hypocrisy. Because the politicians—and I’ve had politicians in here—they still keep those laws in existence, but yet, if some friend of theirs is in trouble . . .
That issue of The Realist included a reprint of an article from the London Observer, which began: “Three Roman Catholic theologians have expressed the opinion that, in times of revolution and violence, it is lawful for women, particularly for nuns, to take contraceptive pills and precautions against the danger of becoming pregnant through rape.” On that same page was our Rumor of the Month: “So-called ‘flying saucers’ are actually diaphragms being dropped by nuns on their way to Heaven.”
After my interview with Dr. Spencer was published, I began to get phone calls from scared female voices. They were all in desperate search of a safe abortionist. It was preposterous that they should have to seek out the editor of a satirical magazine, but their quest so far had been futile, and they simply didn’t know where else to turn.
With Dr. Spencer’s permission, I referred them to him. At first there were only a few calls each week, then several every day. I had never intended to become an underground abortion referral service, but it wasn’t going to stop because in the next issue of The Realist I would publish an interview with somebody else.
A few years later, state police raided Dr. Spencer’s clinic and arrested him. He remained out of jail only by the grace of political pressure from those he’d helped. He was finally forced to retire from his practice, but I continued mine, referring callers to other physicians who he had recommended. Occasionally I would be offered money by a patient, but I never accepted it. And whenever a doctor offered me a kickback, I refused, but I also insisted that he give a discount for the same amount to those patients referred by me.
Eventually, I was subpoenaed by district attorneys in two cities to appear before grand juries investigating criminal charges against abortionists. On both occasions I refused to testify, and each time the D.A. tried to frighten me into cooperating with the threat of arrest.
In Liberty, New York, my name had been extorted from a patient by threatening her with arrest. The D.A. told me that the doctor had confessed everything and they got it all on tape. He gave me until two o’clock that afternoon to change my mind about testifying, or else the police would come to take me away.
“I’d better call my lawyer,” I told him.
I went outside to a public phone booth and called, not a lawyer, but the doctor.
“That never happened,” he said.
I returned to the D.A.’s office and told him that my lawyer said to continue being uncooperative. Then I just sat there waiting for the cops.
“They’re on their way,” the D.A. kept warning me. But at two o’clock, he simply said, “Okay, you can go home now.”
Bronx District Attorney (later Judge) Burton Roberts took a different approach. In September 1969, he told me that his staff had found an abortionist’s financial records, which showed all the money that I had received, but he would grant me immunity from prosecution if I cooperated with the grand jury. He extended his hand as a gesture of trust.
“That’s not true,” I said, refusing to shake hands with him.
If I had ever accepted any money, I’d have no way of knowing that he was bluffing. The D.A. was angry, but he finally had to let me go.
Attorney Gerald Lefcourt (later president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers) filed a suit on my behalf, challenging the constitutionality of the abortion law. He pointed out that the district attorney had no power to investigate the violation of an unconstitutional law, and therefore he could not force me to testify. In 1970, I became the only plaintiff in the first lawsuit to declare the abortion laws unconstitutional in New York State.
“Later, various women’s groups joined the suit,” Lefcourt recalls, “and ultimately the New York legislature repealed the criminal sanctions against abortion, prior to the Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade.”
Dr. Spencer never knew about that. He had died in 1969. The obituary in The New York Times acknowledged the existence of his abortion clinic. The obituary in the local paper in Ashland did not.
I continued to carry on my underground abortion referral service. Each time, though, I would flash on the notion that this was my own mother asking for help, and that she was pregnant with me. I would try to identify with the fetus that was going to be aborted even while I was serving as a conduit to the performance of that very abortion. Every day I would think about the possibility of never having existed, and I would only appreciate being alive all the more.
Pretending to be the fetus was just a way of focusing on my role as a referral service. I didn’t want it to become so casual that I would grow unaware of the implications. By personalizing it, I had to accept my own responsibility for each fetus whose potential I was helping to disappear. That was about as mystical as I got. Maybe I was simply projecting my own ego.
In any case, by the time these women came to me for help, they had already searched their souls and made up their minds. This was not some abstract cause far away—these were real people in real distress—and I just couldn’t say no. So I made a choice to abort myself every time.
For nearly a decade, that became my fetal yoga.
Postscript:
Before Roe vs. Wade, when abortion was illegal, I thought it would never be legalized in my lifetime. And then I thought abortion would never be illegal again. So now, in 2012—fifty years after my interview with Dr. Spencer—it’s disheartening to see the right-wing religious conservative movement that supposedly wants to keep government out of our lives, while simultaneously promulgating compulsory transvaginal probes in the process of trying to re-criminalize reproduction rights in my lifetime.
Things seem to be going backward. The Dinosaur Follies—better known as the Republican presidential primaries—suck so badly that the candidates have finally turned themselves inside out. Most despicable is the way they’ve all pandered to their fanatical anti-choice constituents.
My unofficial Campaign Pandering Award goes to Mr. Anti-Choice, Mitt Romney. He wants to destroy Planned Parenthood and to overturn Roe vs. Wade. And yet, in 1994, when he was running for the Senate, he came out in favor of choice for women. Freelance journalist Suzan Mazur has revealed that he admitted to Mormon feminist Judith Dushku that “the Brethren” in Salt Lake City told him he could take a pro-choice position, and that in fact he probably had to in order to win in a liberal state like Massachusetts.
While Romney believes that life begins at conception, Rick Santorum believes that life begins at foreplay. He has gone way beyond his frenzied position against women’s right to abortion. He’s also against birth control, even though that would prevent the need for an abortion. He claims that “contraception is not OK” and that it turns sex into “simply pleasure.” He has also vowed to “ban all pornography”—or as I call it, “Masturbation Helper”—even though watching porn would prevent the need for contraception.
CHAPTER 3
LENNY THE LAWYER
In 1960 I was a misfit among misfits attending a comedy workshop in a Times Square rehearsal loft. A group of would-be stand-up comics met every week and tried to make each other laugh. There were two performers who did impressions. One was Vaughn Meader, whose specialty was John Kennedy; the other was David Frye, whose specialty was Richard Nixon. And so it became an attachment beyond ordinary political considerations that motivated Meader and Frye to root respectively for Kennedy and Nixon in the presidential campaign.
As vice president, Nixon had labored behind the
scenes to establish Operation 40, by which the CIA covertly trained Cuban intelligence officers in exile here. Ironically, during the election campaign, Kennedy began advocating a plan to invade Cuba. Nixon couldn’t reveal that the plan was already in effect, because Operation 40 was a secret organization. Furthermore, Nixon found himself in the schizophrenic position of attacking his own scenario whenever Kennedy articulated it, because it violated treaty commitments. In April 1961, Operation 40 would serve as the missing link between the White House and the CIA in in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
During the campaign, I became disillusioned with Frank Sinatra, my early adolescent role model. At first I admired him for attempting to defy the Hollywood blacklist by hiring Albert Maltz to write a screenplay for The Execution of Private Slovik, based on a book about the army deserter. Maltz had been an “unfriendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee, exclaiming, “I will not be dictated to or intimidated by men to whom the Ku Klux Klan, as a matter of Committee record, is an acceptable institution.” But then, under pressure from Kennedy’s father, Sinatra fired him. Ironically, Maltz had written that short film, The House I Live In, which originally inspired me.
When Kennedy won the election, Vaughn Meader seized the opportunity. He began to comb his hair with a flamboyant pompadour dipping across his forehead. He consciously regressed to the Boston accent he had previously tried so hard to lose. And he made a comedy album, The First Family, which broke sales records and turned him into a star.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 8