“Incidentally,” he added, “I can only come up with $50.”
The case was dismissed.
In October, Lenny was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco for playing a character who used the word cocksucker to describe a cocksucker. He got busted for aptness of vocabulary. The officers said they came because of an anonymous phone call the previous night, although the doorman insisted that there had been no complaints or walkouts.
“We’re trying to elevate this street,” a sergeant told Lenny. “I took offense because you broke the law. I can’t see any way you can break that word down. Our society isn’t geared to it.”
Lenny replied, “You break it down by talking about it.”
He was writing an autobiography—How to Talk Dirty and Influence People—which Playboy planned to serialize, then publish as a book, and they hired me as his editor. We hooked up in Atlantic City, where Lenny drove around in a rented car. We passed a sign warning criminals must register, and he started thinking out loud:
“Criminals must register. Does that mean, in the middle of the holdup, you have to go to the county courthouse and register? Or does it mean that you once committed a criminal act? Somebody goes to jail, and after fifteen years’ incarceration, you make sure you get them back in as soon as you can by shaming anyone who would forgive them, accept them, give them employment—by shaming them on television—‘The unions knowingly hired ex-convicts.’”
This kind of reaction was an instant amalgamation of Lenny’s comedic, moralistic, and legalistic instincts. Indeed, a few years later, the ACLU would support a group of New Jersey citizens who were opposed to that criminal registration ordinance, because it could be used to harass people who had paid their debt to society and were attempting to build law-abiding lives for themselves. And so Lenny decided to dedicate his book: “To all the followers of Christ and his teachings; in particular to a true Christian—Jimmy Hoffa—because he hired ex-convicts as, I assume, Christ would have.”
Lenny was taking Dilaudid for lethargy, and had sent a telegram to a New York contact, with a phrase—de lawd in de sky—as a code to send a doctor’s prescription. Now, in Atlantic City, Lenny got sick while waiting for that prescription to be filled. Later, while we were relaxing on the beach, I hesitatingly brought up the subject.
“Don’t you think it’s ironic that your whole style should be so free form, and yet you can also be a slave to dope?”
“What does that mean, a slave to dope?”
“Well, if you need a fix, you’ve got to stop whatever you’re doing, go somewhere and wrap a lamp cord around your arm—”
“Then other people are slaves to food. ‘Oh, I’m so famished, stop the car, I must have lunch immediately or I’ll pass out.’”
“You said yourself you’re probably gonna die before you reach forty.”
“Yeah, but—I can’t explain—it’s like kissing God.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna argue with that.”
Later, though, he began to get paranoid about my role.
“You’re gonna go to literary cocktail parties, and you’re gonna say, ‘Yeah, that’s right, I found Lenny slobbering in an alley—he would’ve been nothin’ without me.’”
Of course, I denied any such intention, but he demanded that I take a lie detector test, and I was paranoid enough to take him literally. I told him that I couldn’t work with him if he didn’t trust me. We got into an argument, and I left for New York. I sent a letter of resignation to Playboy and a copy to Lenny. A few weeks later I got a telegram from him that sounded like we had been on the verge of divorce—why can’t it be the way it used to be—and I agreed to try again.
In December 1962, I flew to Chicago to resume working with Lenny on his book. He was performing at the Gate of Horn. When I walked into the club, he was asking the whole audience to take a lie detector test. He recognized my laugh.
Lenny had been reading a study of anti-Semitism by Jean-Paul Sartre, and he was intrigued by the implications of an item in The Realist, a statement by Adolf Eichmann that he would have been “not only a scoundrel, but a despicable pig” if he hadn’t carried out Hitler’s orders. Lenny wrote a piece for The Realist, “Letter from a Soldier’s Wife”—namely, Mrs. Eichmann—pleading for compassion to spare her husband’s life. Now, onstage, giving credit to Thomas Merton’s poem about the Holocaust, he requested that all the lights go off except one dim blue spot. Then he began speaking with a German accent:My name is Adolf Eichmann. And the Jews came every day to what they thought would be fun in the showers. People say I should have been hung. Nein. Do you recognize the whore in the middle of you—that you would have done the same if you were there yourselves? My defense: I was a soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious day’s effort. I watched through the portholes. I saw every Jew burned and turned into soap.
Do you people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you had done to them? Hiroshima auf Wiedersehen. [German accent ends.] If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls, Jim. Are you kidding with that? Not what kid told kid told kid. They would just schlep out all those Japanese mutants. “Here they did; there they are.” And Truman said they’d do it again. That’s what they should have the same day as “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Play them in unison.
Lenny was arrested for obscenity that night. One of the items in the Chicago police report complained: “Then talking about the war he stated, ‘If we would have lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls.’” The cops also broke open Lenny’s candy bars, looking for drugs.
They checked the IDs of audience members, including George Carlin, who told the cops, “I don’t believe in IDs.” Then they arrested him for disorderly conduct, dragged him along by the seat of his pants, and hoisted him into the police wagon.
“What are you doing here?” Lenny asked.
“I didn’t want to show them my ID.”
“You schmuck,” said Lenny.
Lenny and Carlin had similar points of view—for example, they were both outspoken about the decriminalization of drugs—and they were both self-educated, but their working styles were different. Lenny didn’t write his material, it evolved onstage, whereas Carlin did write all his routines and then memorized ’em. Although both were unbelievers as far as religion was concerned, Lenny came from a Jewish background, and Carlin came from an Irish Catholic background.
“I guess what happens,” Lenny told me, “if you get arrested in Town A and then in Town B—with a lot of publicity—then when you get to Town C they have to arrest you or what kind of shithouse town are they running?”
Chicago was Town C. Lenny had been released on bail and was working again, but the head of the vice squad warned the manager: “If this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion, I’m going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? You’ve had good people here. But he mocks the pope—and I’m speaking as a Catholic—I’m here to tell you your license is in danger. We’re going to have someone here watching every show.”
And indeed, the Gate of Horn’s liquor license was suspended. There were no previous allegations against the club, and the current charge involved neither violence nor drunken behavior. The only charge pressed by the city prosecutor was Lenny Bruce’s allegedly obscene performance, and his trial had not yet been held.
Chicago had the largest membership in the Roman Catholic Church of any archdiocese in the country. Lenny’s jury consisted entirely of Catholics. The judge was Catholic. The prosecutor and his assistant were Catholic. On Ash Wednesday, the judge removed the spot of ash from his forehead and told the bailiff to instruct the others to do likewise. The sight of a judge, two prosecutors, and twelve jurors, every one with a spot of ash on their foreheads, would have all the surrealistic flavor of a Lenny Bruce fantasy. Variety reported:T
he prosecutor is at least equally concerned with Bruce’s indictments of organized religion as he is with the more obvious sexual content of the comic’s act. It’s possible that Bruce’s comments on the Catholic Church have hit sensitive nerves in Chicago’s Catholic-oriented administration and police department.
On the fourth day of his trial, thirty girls from Holy Rosary, a Catholic college, dropped in on a tour of the court. Judge Ryan requested them to leave because of “the nature of the testimony.”
Lenny said, “That was the thing that really did me in, in front of the jury.”
Driving around Chicago, we passed a religious novelties store with a framed portrait of Pope John in the window. He was the first pope in history to smoke cigarettes. Lenny went in and bought the painting.
“I just know I could make him laugh,” he said.
Later we stopped near a parochial school in the midst of dismissing a flock of young Catholic girls in their pristine uniforms. Lenny beckoned a pair of them to the car.
“Hey, c’mere,” he said. “I got the real thing. Look!”
And he popped the pope up to the window. The girls giggled their way toward the car and examined the portrait of the pontiff.
“Their parents only warned them against taking candy from strangers,” Lenny observed.
After the first week of the trial, he flew to Los Angeles—Town D—where he was promptly arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. Years later, his arresting officer went to prison himself, for drug smuggling. Ralph J. Gleason wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle:
“A columnist who privately agreed once that Bruce might have been framed on his narcotics conviction, and that the case might be broken open if the cop-turned-smuggler angle were publicized, admitted he couldn’t lead the crusade, because his paper wouldn’t let him.”
When the Chicago case resumed, Judge Ryan instructed Lenny’s attorney to make a formal move for postponement. This the attorney did, but then the judge denied the motion, forfeited Lenny’s bond, issued a warrant for his arrest, and asked the state’s attorney to start extradition proceedings. Next day, the jury found Lenny guilty. The judge gave him the maximum penalty—a year in jail and a $1,000 fine—“for telling dirty jokes,” in the words of one network newscaster.
A week later, the case against the Gate of Horn was dismissed, but it had become obvious that Lenny was now considered too hot to be booked in Chicago again. In San Francisco the jury found him not guilty of obscenity. Arresting officers admitted on the witness stand that his material didn’t arouse their prurient interest. But in Chicago, Judge Ryan refused to permit that line of cross-examination by the defense. Nor would he allow the head of the vice squad (“I’m speaking as a Catholic”) to take the stand, on the grounds that his testimony would be extraneous to the issue before the court.
“Chicago is so corrupt it’s thrilling,” Lenny said.
In less than two years, Lenny was arrested fifteen times.
“There seems to be a pattern,” he said, “that I’m a mad dog and they have to get me no matter what—the end justifies the means.”
In fact, it became an actual news item in Variety when Lenny didn’t get arrested one night. While the Chicago verdict was on appeal, he was working at the Off-Broadway in San Francisco. The club’s newspaper ads made this offer: “No cover charge for patrolmen in uniform.”
Since he always talked onstage about his environment, and since police cars and courtrooms had lately become his environment, the content of Lenny’s performances began to revolve more and more around the inequities of the legal system. “In the Halls of Justice,” he declared, “the only justice is in the halls.” But he also said, “I love the law.”
Instead of an unabridged dictionary, he now carried law books in his suitcase. His room was always cluttered with tapes and transcripts and Photostats and law journals and legal briefs. Once he was teasing his ten-year-old daughter, Kitty, by pretending not to believe what she was telling him.
“Daddy,” she said, “you’d believe me if it was on tape.”
Lenny’s jazz jargon was gradually being replaced by legal jargon. He had become intimate not only with the statutes concerning obscenity and narcotics but also with courtroom procedure, and his knowledge would be woven into his performances.
“Query,” he would begin. “If a tape recording is my voice, are they using me to testify against myself, since it’s my voice that would indict me?” But as club owners became increasingly afraid to hire him, he devoted more and more time and energy to the law. When he finally got a booking in Monterey, he admitted, “I feel like it’s taking me away from my work.”
Lenny lived way up in the Hollywood Hills. His house was protected by barbed wire and a concrete gate, except that it was always open. He had a wall-to-wall one-way mirror in his living room, but when the sun was shining you could see into the room instead of out. He was constantly hassled by police on his own property.
One evening in October 1963, we were talking while he was shaving, and four officers suddenly appeared, loud and obnoxious. He asked them to leave unless they had a search warrant. One of the cops took out his gun.
“Here’s my search warrant.”
Then Lenny and the cops had a discussion about the law—specifically, the rules of evidence—and after half an hour they left. Lenny tried to take it all in stride, but the encounter was depressing, and he changed his mind about going out that night. Later, when everything was quiet, we went outside and stood at the edge of his unused swimming pool. Dead leaves floated in the water. Lenny cupped his hands to his mouth.
“All right, you dogs,” he called out. “Bark for the rich man!”
Thereby setting off a chain reaction of barking dogs, a canine chorus echoing through the Hollywood Hills.
One time we were walking around and passed a newsstand where, on the cover of Newsweek, there was a photo of Caroline Kennedy, the president’s young daughter.
I commented, “She probably plays with herself with a bobby pin.”
“What a great image,” Lenny said. “Can I have that?’
“Sure. It’s not even mine. I once knew a guy who told me his sister actually did that.”
Lenny’s genius was his ability to integrate imagery into a satirical context. That particular image became almost a throwaway line in his hot-lead-enema routine—inspired by the capture of U2 spy pilot Gary Powers—where Lenny talked about how he himself would never be able to withstand torture:
“I’ll give away state secrets”—and, presaging decades-later revelations about the futility of torturing for information—“I’ll even make up secrets—Caroline Kennedy plays with herself with a bobby pin—just don’t give me that hot-lead enema!”
But Lenny’s tragedy was that he was not being merely hypothetical. According to Sandy Baron, who played the title role in the Los Angeles and Broadway productions of Lenny, he had once turned in a drug dealer in order to save himself from going to prison, which would’ve been his equivalent of the hot-lead enema. But he continued to be tortured by his own secret awareness.
When he would say onstage, “Have a little rach manus [sympathy] for that guy behind bars who can’t kiss and hug a lady for twenty years,” he was talking about himself as much as to the audience.
“I am part of everything I indict,” Lenny would say.
That was the closest he would ever come to a public confession.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Lenny Bruce and I were both scheduled to do shows, and we each knew that our performance would be influenced by an acute awareness of the president’s death. On Saturday evening, one day after Kennedy’s assassination, I was supposed to perform at a fundraiser for the Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants, a case which involved trumped-up kidnapping charges against civil rights activists.
“What are you gonna say?” Lenny teased me. “Tell ’em that Steve Allen said satire is tragedy plus time, and you want a postponement.”
The ben
efit was held in a meeting hall at the headquarters of the Young Socialist League. They published a tabloid newspaper, The Militant. A doctored photo on the cover of Life magazine would soon feature Lee Harvey Oswald posing with a rifle in one hand and a rolled-up copy of The Militant in the other. The headline on the flyers for this event promised: laugh with paul krassner! But it wouldn’t be easy. This was an all left-wing audience, which had at first assumed that Oswald was a right-winger.
“Aren’t you sorry,” I began, “that it turned out to be one of your nuts instead of one of theirs?”
With that opening line, I was, in effect, acknowledging the single-assassin, left-wing, lone-nut theory. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the intelligence-community lingo that Lee Harvey Oswald used to describe himself. “I am only a patsy,” he shouted to reporters. It just didn’t make any sense for a lone killer to say that. If it were true, he would have to be killed himself. And, on Sunday morning, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot Oswald to death, live on TV, in a Dallas police station. For those who slept late, the scene would be repeated over and over again, throughout the day and evening, in spastic slow motion.
Lenny told me, “I know other comics who have worked for Jack Ruby. Dig this. They say he has a tattoo of a vagina on his upper arm, and whenever he flexes his muscle, the vagina dilates open.”
Lenny was booked to perform at the Village Theater on the Lower East Side a week after the assassination. The whole country was still in a state of shock, and the atmosphere in the theater was especially tense that night. The show hadn’t begun yet, but the entire audience seemed to be anticipating what Lenny would say about the assassination. Now he walked onstage. He removed the microphone from its stand. When the applause for his entrance subsided, he stood there in silence for a few seconds, milking the tension.
He finally whistled into the microphone, “Whew! Vaughn Meader is screwed . . .”
And there was an instant explosion of laughter. But Lenny was right. Meader had been scheduled for appearances on two TV shows—Hootenanny and To Tell the Truth—but he was canceled out of both during the week following the assassination, even though he had planned other material for Hootenanny and would not have appeared on To Tell the Truth as President Kennedy. Yes, Vaughn Meader was indeed screwed.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 10