Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  “But,” I argued, “if you can’t even put nipples on a cover, how are the distributors gonna let you get away with pubic hair?”

  “If it’s Jackie Kennedy’s pubic hair,” Larry replied confidently, “they’ll display it.”

  The first born-again issue of Hustler would feature a heterosexual couple making love in various positions on a chair especially designed for that purpose. They were professional models who had never met before, but they both got so turned on that what had started out as simulated intercourse soon became quite real. The violation of the no-erection rule had been canceled out by the violation of the no-penetration rule. For here was the most paradoxical rule of all—penetration is allowed if it is so fully to the hilt that you cannot see the erection.

  As for the cover with a nude pregnant model, that dilemma was resolved—instead of a photo, there would be an artist’s version of a cut-away diagram of a fetus in the womb. The nipples of this unreal mother-to-be had high visibility, but that was no problem, because there were different standards for photography and art. However, another issue of Hustler was scheduled to include a portfolio of nineteenth-century miniature erotic paintings from India. Somebody noticed there was penetration that was clearly visible. Unlike the unknown couple, here was visible penetration, so these classics were altered at the printer, thereby reversing the usual double standard for photography and art.

  As a symbolic act, I had my first lunch meeting with Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement. They were planning a four-month march, from Sacramento to Washington, D.C., to protest anti-Indian legislation. When we finished eating, I reached for the check, saying, “This is my first editorial lunch.” But Banks grabbed the check before I could.

  “No,” he said, “this is my first bribe.”

  Next, Wavy Gravy came to town, and he wanted to interview Tiny Tim for Hustler. I went to the hotel with Wavy. Even though I was now making $90,000 a year, I ate leftover food right off the room service trays that guests had placed outside their doors. Those old habits die hard. When I was a kid, my mother used to stand by the garbage can, warning me—“I’m gonna throw it away”—before she scraped the food off the plates. I took it on as my lifetime personal responsibility not to waste food.

  Also, I was still too cheap to actually buy a box of facial tissues, so instead I always carried a few squares of toilet paper neatly folded in my pocket. It was only after the Kleenex people, who had a plant in El Salvador, dropped their sponsorship of Lou Grant—because the star of the series, Ed Asner, had demonstrated against the U.S.-financed death squads of El Salvador—that my frugality became a political protest. Almost three decades later, I was on a panel about “Fake News and Public Decency in the Age of Terror,” and Ed Asner was in the audience, so I told that story. Later, as we were shaking hands, he said, “Listen, forget about the toilet paper—you have my permission to use Kleenex.” Though I still don’t.

  Anyway, while Tiny Tim was rambling on about show business and Jesus, he confessed to spreading a lady’s bottom with chunky peanut butter. It seemed appropriately kinky for Hustler, until Bruce David walked into my office, visibly agitated that I had even suggested such an interview. “I’m profoundly disturbed,” he said, wrapping a long strip of Scotch tape from the dispenser on my desk around his hand and proceeding to remove the lint from his blue serge suit.

  “The readers of Hustler are not interested in Tiny Tim,” Bruce continued. Since he knew the magazine so intimately, I deferred to his judgment quite often. However, we did have one strong editorial disagreement. I had wanted to assign freelance reporter Laura Daltry to write an article, “Does Pornography Incite Men to Commit Rape?”—based on interviews she would conduct with convicted rapists serving time at San Quentin Prison. “But,” Bruce asked, “suppose what she finds out makes Hustler look bad?”

  “If it’s a good piece,” I said, “we’ll publish it no matter what.”

  Bruce explained, “It isn’t that I want to be dishonest and hide the information, but this would be stacking the deck against us, because I don’t think the rapists themselves are in a position to know whether they’ve been influenced or not. I don’t think they’re necessarily smart enough or clearheaded enough.”

  Another editor added, “Laura Daltry has a feminist bent, so she’ll be predisposed to find the connection.” And, somewhere along the chain of command, my proposal got sabotaged. The article was never assigned.

  Other articles I proposed were assigned, and published, ranging from Marilyn Katz on abortion rights to Eric Norden on the murder of Malcolm X, and I appointed science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon as Hustler’s book reviewer. I felt privileged to be reaching this otherwise neglected blue-collar audience with informative anti-establishment material, even if other pages of the magazine would undoubtedly become stuck together by several hundred thousand dried-up sperm cells that had mistakenly assumed they were heading toward the Fallopian tubes.

  Moreover, I would have The Realist again as an outlet for my own peculiar vision. I began to gather together a small staff, people I’d worked with before—Art Kunkin, former publisher of the Los Angeles Free Press, as managing editor; Lee Quarnstrom as articles editor; and Jeanne as researcher and cartoon editor—she would move to Los Angeles with our daughter, Holly, and Holly’s younger brother, Bill.

  On the phone with Ken Kesey, I asked, “Does hiring one’s ex-wife count as nepotism?”

  “Well,” he said, “nepotism is better than nopetism at all.”

  I repeated this to Larry Flynt. He laughed and said, “Look, the next time you perform somewhere, maybe you could use that line and mention that I said it.”

  “Oh, sure—in fact, why don’t I call Kesey right now and tell him that you said it?”

  In another building a few blocks away, The Realist shared offices with Flynt’s conspiracy researchers, Mark Lane and Donald Freed. Lane discovered that when Lee Harvey Oswald was in the service, he contracted a venereal disease “in the line of duty,” according to an official military document—proof positive that he was no ordinary Marine, but one who had gone to bed with a female Japanese spy in yet another brilliant career move.

  Flynt had recently purchased the Los Angeles Free Press. When its editor, Jay Levin, founder of the L.A. Weekly, ran a story on Flynt in the Free Press with the wrong middle initial, Flynt insisted on a front-page correction. The “assassination squad”—as they were referred to by Realist staffers—published a special issue of the Free Press headlined, “JFK Murder Solved: Killing Coordinated by CIA.” On the back cover, Flynt offered a million dollars to help bring the slain president’s killers to justice. There were an awful lot of calls, but nobody collected the reward.

  Flynt also offered a million dollars to various female celebrities, many nominated by readers, to pose nude and show pink for Hustler—Cher, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Caroline Kennedy, Sally Struthers, Barbara Walters, Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman), Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman), Angie Dickinson (Police Woman), Barbara Eden (I Dream of Jeannie), Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith, and Kate Jackson (Charlie’s Angels), and singers Olivia Newton-John and Linda Ronstadt—but none of them ever took him up on it.

  He also tried unsuccessfully to give a million dollars in cash to President Jimmy Carter to re-establish the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in order to find out if obscenity and pornography are really harmful. Meanwhile, shortly after my appointment as publisher of Hustler, Ruth Carter Stapleton suggested to Larry Flynt that he “get rid of” me. He refused. However, he did have an idea for a Hustler cover:I wanna have an illustrator draw a photograph of Jimmy Carter’s face after he’s just been told that Ruth, his sister, is in the centerfold of Hustler. His hair will be jumpin’ out like an Afro and his teeth’ll be poppin’ out and he’s gonna be all reared back holdin’ a copy of Hustler. We’re only gonna have one headline on that cover—“Ruth Carter Stapleton Shows Pink for Hustler! What Will Jimmy Think?” We’re gonna shrink-wrap every single
copy so nobody’ll know what’s in it, and Ruth is gonna issue a press release about a week before the magazine goes on sale.

  She’s gonna go on vacation, and the press release is gonna say, “The reason why I decided to pose for Hustler is because I felt that if a middle-aged woman like myself decided to pose for a publication like Hustler it would help people in the world to become at ease with their sexuality.” Now when you open it up to the centerfold, we’re only gonna have one picture of Ruth in there, and it’s gonna be a full-length centerfold shot of her wearing a very pretty pink dress, holding a pink Bible, wearing pink shoes, with a pink background, pink nail polish, pink stockings, pink lipstick, but she will be fully dressed.

  Bruce David objected to the dishonesty of playing such a trick on those readers who would buy the magazine expecting to see Ruth Carter Stapleton totally naked, spreading her legs apart, with her pious pussy kept wide open by spirit gum, her love-tunnel glistening with glycerin and a staple in her belly button. Nevertheless, a realistic painting of her eventually appeared in Hustler, with Jimmy Carter’s picture on the cover and a headline, “The President’s Sister Shows Pink!” She didn’t issue a press release, but Hustler’s publicity department did.

  Althea Flynt was wistfully predicting that Walter Cronkite would announce, as the final item on the CBS Evening News, “The president’s sister, evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, shows pink in the new issue of Hustler magazine—and that’s the way it is.”

  Larry Flynt had been traveling around a lot, but he happened to be back in L.A. at the same time that Ram Dass was visiting, so I had the unique pleasure of introducing them. Larry, Althea, Ram Dass, and I went to a health-food restaurant, where we discovered that we shared something in common: We were all practicing celibacy—Larry at the suggestion of Dick Gregory, Althea by extension, Ram Dass for spiritual purposes, and me just for the sheer perversity of it.

  Over lunch, Larry told me that I should “take more power.” He said he was actually bored with pornography, but felt so strongly about his right to publish it that he had gone to Atlanta to defy a ban and sell Hustler personally. He got arrested for that, but first he had to stand trial for obscenity in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

  The next week, he called me from Lawrenceville. “Now I know why you introduced me to Ram Dass,” he said. “Is his name one word or two?” I told him it was two words, and he continued: “Ram Dass really helped me to get rid of my hang-up about labeling myself as a ‘celibate.’ I can just say that I’m not having sex.”

  “And you don’t have to worry about the label ‘fasting’ either. You can just say that you’re not eating food.”

  “Oh, listen, Paul—you know those ads for guns we have in Hustler— well, you know, I’m against violence, but I’m also against censorship, so just move ’em to the back of the magazine, okay?”

  A few days later, while walking on the sidewalk in Lawrenceville during a lunch break in the obscenity trial, an American flag pin on his lapel, Larry Flynt was shot twice in the abdomen. The .44-caliber magnum bullets came from across the street, one lodging near Larry’s spine. His local attorney was also wounded.

  According to the doctors, if Larry hadn’t taken an enema the day he was shot, he would not have lived, because the contents of his intestines would’ve caused a fatal infection. He’d had only grapefruit juice for lunch. His spleen and several feet of his intestine were removed. The Hustler staff was in a state of collective shock.

  A group of employees donated blood for Larry. I flew to Atlanta on the Thursday before Easter and went directly to Emory University Hospital. Althea brought me to Larry’s room. It was extremely unsettling to see such a powerful personality lying there so helpless, being kept alive by medical technology, with one tube feeding him and another tube breathing for him. He appeared bug-eyed with painkiller. Althea lifted the sheet and showed me his gaping wounds, a truly awesome sight.

  “Oh, God, Althea—he’s showing pink.”

  “I’m arranging for a photographer to come in here,” she said. “We’re gonna publish Larry’s wounds in Hustler. I want people to see what they did to him.”

  I sat down in a chair by Larry’s bed. I didn’t know what to say. We simply clasped hands for a while. Finally I broke the silence. “Larry, tomorrow is Good Friday,” I said. “So, uh, you don’t have to go to work.”

  I glanced toward Althea to reassure myself that I hadn’t indulged in irreverence that was too inappropriate, but she said, “Oh, Paul, look”—gesturing toward Larry—“he wants to show you something.” Above the oxygen mask, Larry was blinking his eyes over and over again in rapid succession. “He’s laughing,” Althea said. It was a moment of unspeakable intimacy for the three of us.

  As I was leaving the hospital, I heard Althea’s voice from the other end of the corridor: “Oh, Paul!” I thought she was about to say something like, “Thank you for coming to see me in my hour of need.” Instead, she called out, “Remember—go hard-core!”

  Back home that night, I got into a bathtub full of burning hot water as if to experience Larry’s pain, but it couldn’t possibly feel the same. Besides, I was doing it out of choice and could stop voluntarily, whereas Larry would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, paralyzed from the waist down. I almost fainted when I got out of the tub.

  The next day I was scheduled to have my photo taken for the upcoming born-again issue. I had been wearing the same old windbreaker to work every single day, but on this particular morning I decided to vary my wardrobe by wearing an old cowboy hat. The photographer asked me if I would take off my clothes and pose nude. I agreed, but I got caught up in Hustler’s editorial schizophrenia.

  In the “Advise and Consent” column at the front of the magazine, you could read about how penis size doesn’t matter, but in the ads at the back of the magazine, you could send away for penis enlargers. So, when I went into this little bathroom at the photo studio to remove my clothes, I fondled my penis just enough to make it a little larger without becoming erect.

  Then I posed for the camera—completely naked except for my cowboy hat—shrugging my bare shoulders and smiling helplessly. This was the first time any publisher of a men’s magazine had ever presented his own full frontal nudity. Moreover, the photo accompanied an interview wherein I admitted what no other publisher of a men’s magazine had ever publicly admitted before: Q. Have you ever jerked off to copies of Hustler or Playboy or Penthouse?

  A. All of them. Sometimes I would pile them up, put Playboy on top, then Penthouse and then Hustler, so that the flowers would open wider as I went from one magazine to the next. I see showing pink as a reminder of vulnerability.

  Q. And have you noticed that if you squint your eyes in a certain way the photographs become somewhat three-dimensional?

  A. Well, I would have noticed it, but jerking off has made me blind. What I do notice is that every time I jerk off it’s a mixed blessing, because I enjoy it and yet I know something’s missing . . .

  In my publisher’s statement for the born-again issue of Hustler, I wrote:The shooting of Larry Flynt has been referred to as “senseless violence.” It kind of makes you wonder exactly what sensible violence is. The difference seems to be that senseless violence isn’t permitted by law. Sensible violence allows landlords to ignore peeling paint that, when tasted by curious infants, can result in death by lead poisoning. Sensible violence enables the liquor lobby to persuade legislators not to pass a bill that would require funds to be allocated for the rehabilitation of motorists arrested for drunken driving.

  Sensible violence is getting the highest possible percentage of the population hooked on coffee, and then—because caffeine is naturally bitter—there is mass sugar addiction to boot. Sensible violence is displayed in that TV commercial in which a famous actress tries to make parents feel guilty for not feeding their kids Twinkies, manufactured by ITT, the same folks who sabotaged the legally elected Allende government in Chile. Sensible violence is the production
and distribution of cigarettes, justified by a printed warning that has become as meaningless as playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a ball game.

  The advertising department thought I was trying to sabotage their efforts to obtain cigarette ads. They sent an advance copy of what I wrote to Althea at the hospital, asking her to veto it. Instead, she called it “the best publisher’s statement we’ve ever had.”

  Meanwhile, heavy security procedures were put into force at the Hustler offices. I wanted to hire Frank Wills, the security guard who originally discovered the Watergate break-in when he noticed a piece of tape keeping a door unlocked even though the janitorial staff had already departed. But his current whereabouts were unknown.

  Besides, while I was in Atlanta, Chick Canzoneri, a former bodyguard for Frank Sinatra, had been hired as our chief of security. Now he was concerned that I might be in danger because the Los Angeles Times mentioned in an article about me that I walked to and from work.

  “Don’t worry.” I assured him. “Every morning, before I leave for the office, I check to see if there’s a bomb in my boots.”

  Althea Flynt asked me, “What’s the cover of the first issue of The Realist gonna be?”

  “Well, this year will be the fiftieth anniversary of Mickey Mouse, so I’ll have a quote from Life magazine, about how the three most powerful graphic images of the twentieth century are the Coca-Cola bottle, the Nazi swastika, and Mickey Mouse. And the cover illustration will show Mickey Mouse drinking from a Coke bottle and wearing a swastika armband.”