How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
Page 22
(Incidentally, shortly after I’d left Chicago, the Gate of Horn lost its liquor license and the owner had to sell out.)
While out on bail in Los Angeles, I received the following communication from Celes Bail Bond, the local company which was standing my surety:
Sir: It has come to our attention through news media that you are to be in court in Chicago today. May I suggest to you that you are not to violate the conditions of your bail. You are not to leave the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County, considering all the other court appearances that you are to make here in Los Angeles.
So, if I left California, I would be arrested for jumping bond. I remained there. And in Chicago I was found guilty of obscenity—in absentia—and sentenced to the maximum penalty of one year in the county jail and a fine of $1000.
The case, on appeal, bypassed the appellate court and went directly to the Illinois State Supreme Court. On June 18, 1964—the same day they declared Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer obscene—my verdict of guilty was unanimously upheld.
Ordinarily, my next court of appeal would have been the United States Supreme Court, but a case was already in their hands that would have an effect on the outcome of my hearing, Jacobellis v. State of Ohio, involving a movie, The Lovers. On June 22, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the film was not obscene on the grounds it was of social importance. Because of their ruling, the Illinois Supreme Court dropped its affirmation of my guilt and ordered a reargument which was held July 7, 1964, and concluded:
“Our original opinion recognized defendant’s right to satirize society’s attitudes on contemporary social problems and to express his ideas, however bizarre, as long as the method used in doing so was not so objectionable as to render the entire performance obscene. Affirmance of the conviction was predicated upon the rule originally laid down in American Civil Liberties Union v. City of Chicago . . . that the obscene portions of the material must be balanced against its affirmative values to determine which predominates. We rejected defendant’s argument that Roth v. United States . . . struck down this balancing test and held that material, no matter how objectionable the method of its presentation, was constitutionally privileged unless it was utterly without redeeming social importance. It is apparent from the opinions of a majority of the court in Jacobellis that the ‘balancing test’ rule of American Civil Liberties Union is no longer a constitutionally acceptable method of determining whether material is obscene, and it is there made clear that material having any social importance is constitutionally protected.
“While we would not have thought that constitutional guarantees necessitate the subjection of society to the gradual deterioration of its moral fabric which this type of presentation promotes, we must concede that some of the topics commented on by defendant are of social importance. Under Jacobellis the entire performance is thereby immunized, and we are constrained to hold that the judgment of the circuit court of Cook County must be reversed and defendant discharged.
“Judgment reversed”
They’re really saying that they’re only sorry the crummy Constitution won’t permit them to convict me, but if they had their choice . . .
Chapter Twenty-Three
The most impressive letter I’ve ever received came from the vicar of St. Clement’s Church in New York:
Dear Mr. Bruce:
I came to see you the other night because I had read about you and was curious to see if you were really as penetrating a critic of our common hypocrisies as I had heard. I found that you are an honest man, and I wrote you a note to say so. It is never popular to be so scathingly honest, whether it is from a night-club stage or from a pulpit, and I was not surprised to hear you were having some “trouble.” This letter is written to express my personal concern and to say what I saw and heard on Thursday night.
First, I emphatically do not believe your act is obscene in intent. The method you use has a lot in common with most serious critics (the prophet or the artist, not the professor) of society. Pages of Jonathan Swift and Martin Luther are quite unprintable even now because they were forced to shatter the easy, lying language of the day into the basic, earthy, vulgar idiom of ordinary people in order to show up the emptiness and insanity of their time. (It has been said, humorously but with some truth, that a great deal of the Bible is not fit to read in church for the same reason.)
Clearly your intent is not to excite sexual feelings or to demean but to shock us awake to the realities of racial hatred and invested absurdities about sex and birth and death . . . to move toward sanity and compassion. It is clear that you are intensely angry at our hypocrisies (yours as well as mine) and at the highly subsidized mealymouthism that passes as wisdom. But so should be any self-respecting man. Your comments are aimed at adults and reveal to me a man who cares deeply about dishonesty and injustice and all the accepted psychoses of our time. They are aimed at adults and adults don’t need, or shouldn’t have, anyone to protect them from hearing truth in whatever form it appears no matter how noble the motive for suppression . . .
May God bless you,
The Rev. Sidney Lanier
Reverend Lanier says that my comments “are aimed at adults.” Often I am billed at night clubs with a sign saying FOR ADULTS ONLY. I am very interested in the motivation for such billing. I must assume that “for adults only” means that my point of view, or perhaps the semantics involved with my point of view, would be a deterrent to the development of a well-adjusted member of the community.
The argument is that a child will ape the actions of an actor. What he sees now in his formative years, he may do as an adult, so we must be very careful what we let the child see.
So, then, I would rather my child see a stag film than The Ten Commandments or King of Kings—because I don’t want my kids to kill Christ when he comes back. That’s what they see in those films—that violence.
Well, let me just take your kids to a dirty movie:
“All right, kids, sit down now, this picture’s gonna start. It’s not like Psycho, with a lot of four-letter words, like ‘kill’ and ‘maim’ and ‘hurt’—but you’re gonna see this film now and what you see will probably impress you for the rest of your lives, so we have to be very careful what we show you. . . . Oh, it’s a dirty movie. A couple is coming in now. I don’t know if it’s gonna be as good as Psycho where we have the stabbing in the shower and the blood down the drain. . . . Oh, the guy’s picking up the pillow. Now, he’ll probably smother her with it, and that’ll be a good opening. Ah, the degenerate, he’s putting it under her ass. Jesus, tsk tsk, I hate to show this crap to you kids. All right, now he’s lifting up his hand, and he’ll probably strike her. No, he’s caressing her, and kissing her—ah, this is disgusting! All right, he’s kissing her some more, and she’s saying something. She’ll probably scream at him, ‘Get out of here!’ No, she’s saying, ‘I love you, I’m coming.’ Kids, I’m sorry I showed you anything like this. God knows this will be on my conscience the rest of my life—there’s a chance that you may do this when you grow up. Well, just try to forget what you’ve seen. Just remember, what this couple did belongs written on the walls of a men’s room. And, in fact, if you ever want to do it, do it in the men’s room.”
I never did see one stag film where anybody got killed in the end. Or even slapped in the mouth. Or where it had any Communist propaganda.
But doing it is pretty rank. I understand intellectually that a woman who sleeps with a different guy every night is more of a Christian than a nun, because she has that capacity for love—but emotionally I’m only the 365th guy . . . because I learned my lesson early, and you can’t unlearn it.
I know intellectually there’s nothing wrong with going to the toilet, but I can’t go to the toilet in front of you. The worst sound in the world is when the toilet-flush noise finishes before I do.
If I’m at your house, I can never say to you, “Excuse me, where’s the toilet?” I have to get hung up with that corrupt façade of “Excus
e me, where’s the little boys’ room?”
“Oh, you mean the tinkle-dinkle ha-ha room, where they have sachets and cough drops and pastels?”
“That’s right, I wanna shit in the cough-drop box.”
One of the things I got arrested for in Chicago was showing a picture of a girl that was really pretty. I wanted to point out the God-made-the-body paradox of the decent people who would object to that groovy-looking chick.
Christ, I could never sit on a jury and put anybody away for looking. If I’m dressing and there’s that chick across the way—that blue-eyed, pink-nippled, sweet high-ass from Oklahoma—I am going to look, and I am going to call my friends to look.
But, in our society, it’s “Pull down the shade”—and charge two bucks to get in.
That’s what repression does.
I’d really like to fight the Chicago obscenity rap on a whole different issue. The obscenity law, when everything else boils away, is: Does it appeal to the prurient interest?
I must get you horny—that’s what it means.
If I do a disgusting show—a show about eating pork—that’s not obscene. Although you Jews and vegetarians and Moslems will bitch your asses off, that’s my right as an American, to talk about pork, to extol its virtues, to run in front of a synagogue, yelling: “Here’s pork! Look at it, rabbi!”
“Get him out of here, he should be arrested—that’s disgusting!”
It doesn’t matter. Again, that’s why the Pilgrims left England, man. If a guy wants to wail with pork, that’s his schtick.
Or, if I do a vulgar show—if I sing rock and roll tunes, wear platform shoes, Kitty Kellys with ankle straps—it’s not obscene.
No, obscenity has only one meaning: to appeal to the prurient interest.
Well, I want to know what’s wrong with appealing to prurient interest.
I really want the Supreme Court to stand up and tell me that fucking is dirty and no good.
The lowest of the low—from both the policeman’s and the felon’s point of view—is the child molester. But his most heinous crime is simply that he is bereft of the proper dialog, for if he spake his lines thusly, he would never be busted:
“C’mere, Ruthie, c’mere to your Uncle Willie . . . look at those little apples on you, lemme lift you up, she’s gonna have to get a bra-zeer soon . . . let your Uncle Willie tickle-ickle-ickle you, rump-bump-bump on the floor . . . she’s getting some hair on her booger, tickle-ickle-ickle, watch her wriggle-wiggle-giggle in Uncle Willie’s ruddy palm . . . don’t tell Mommy or you’ll break the magic charm.”
And Uncle Willie’s Mason signet ring snags little Ruthie’s nylon under-things . . . children don’t wear panties.
Town E: New York, I’d been playing New York, concerts and night-club engagements, for eight years, but in 1964 I got busted for obscenity at the Café Au Go Go. I continued performing and got busted there again that same week.
Then I got pleurisy. My lung was filled with fluid. I couldn’t breathe. I went to a doctor, but he wouldn’t see me because he didn’t want “to get involved.” I finally did get a doctor—who, coincidentally, was a fan—and I ended up in a hospital, on the receiving end of a five-hour operation.
When Newsweek called up a friend of mine to find out how I was, he told them the surgeon cut all that filth out of my system, too.
The trial in New York was postponed while I recuperated in Los Angeles.
When I returned to New York, it turned out that the police didn’t have complete tapes of the shows I was arrested for, so they actually had a guy in court imitating my act—a License Department Inspector who was formerly a CIA agent in Vietnam—and in his courtroom impersonation of me, he was saying things that I had never said in my life, on stage or off.
Witnesses for the prosecution included New York Daily News columnist Robert Sylvester, Marya Mannes from The Reporter, John Fischer, editor of Harper’s magazine, and a minister.
Witnesses for the defense included Jules Feiffer, Nat Hentoff, Dorothy Kilgallen, and two ministers.
“Sitting in on Lenny Bruce’s current New York ‘obscenity’ trial,” Stephanie Gervis Harrington wrote in the Village Voice, “one gets the feeling of being present at an historical event—the birth of the courtroom of the absurd. Of course, if you sit through it long enough, you gradually adjust to the fact that eight grown men are actually spending weeks of their time and an unreckoned amount of the taxpayers’ money in deliberation—passionate deliberation on the prosecutor’s good days—over whether another grown man should be able to use four-letter words in public without going to jail.”
The ludicrousness of it all was inadvertently summed up by my attorney, Ephraim London, when he asked a witness who had been at my performance at the Café Au Go Go: “Did you see Mr. Crotch touch his Bruce?”
On reporting the incident, The Realist predicted, “Henceforth and forever-more, we shall have had at that precise moment a meaningful new synonym added to our language.” And the magazine’s editorial proceeded to demonstrate its use:
“Mommy, look, there’s a man sitting over there with his bruce hanging out.”
“Beverly Schmidlap is a real bruceteaser, y’know?”
“Kiss my bruce, baby.”
And a cartoon by Ed Fisher had a judge saying, “Before I pass sentence on you, Lenny Bruce, is there anything you wish to say—anything printable, that is?”
Meanwhile, back in real life, a three-judge Criminal Court, in a 2-1 split vote, sentenced me to three four-month terms in the workhouse, to be served concurrently. But the State Supreme Court has granted me a certificate of reasonable doubt and—at this writing—the case is on appeal.
What does it mean for a man to be found obscene in New York? This is the most sophisticated city in the country. This is where they play Genet’s The Balcony. If anyone is the first person to be found obscene in New York, he must feel utterly depraved.
I was so sure I could reach those judges if they’d just let me tell them what I try to do. It was like I was on trial for rape and there I was crying, “But, Judge, I can’t rape anybody, I haven’t got the wherewithal,” but nobody was listening, and my lawyers were saying, “Don’t worry, Lenny, you got a right to rape anyone you please, we’ll beat ’em in the appellate court.”
The New York Law Journal pleaded guilty to not publishing the lower court’s statement, with an explanation: “The majority opinion, of necessity, cited in detail the language used by Bruce in his night-club act, and also described gestures and routines which the majority found to be obscene and indecent. The Law Journal decided against publication, even edited, on the grounds that deletions would destroy the opinion, and without the deletions publication was impossible within the Law Journal standards.”
Among the examples of my “obscene references” that the court had quoted in its opinion, the very first was this: “Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of ‘tits.’”
Now, in the course of my research I obtained the legislative history from Albany of the statute under which I had been arrested, and I discovered back in 1931 there was added to that statute an amendment which excludes from arrest stagehands, spectators, musicians and actors. The amendment was finally signed into law by Governor Roosevelt. The court refused to be influenced by this information.
Well, I believe that ignoring the mandate of Franklin D. Roosevelt is a great deal more offensive than saying that Eleanor had lovely nay-nays.
June 1964—graduation time—honorary degrees were being handed out all over the place. The TV show, That Was The Week That Was, bestowed on me—or rather upon a photograph of me with a graduation cap superimposed on my head—an honorary Doctor of Letters: “To the man who won fame using them four at a time.”
I’m really so fed up with the “dirty word” thing. People think, Christ, I’m obsessed with that. But I just have to defend myself because you don’t know how much I’m attacked on it. Every new time I go on the road, the papers are filled with it.
A Jew.
In the dictionary, a Jew is one who is descended from the ancient tribe of Judea, but—I’ll say to an audience—you and I know what a Jew is: one who killed our Lord. Now there’s dead silence there after that.
When I did this in England, I said, “I don’t know if you know that over here, but it got a lot of press in the States.” Now the laughs start to break through. “We did it about two thousand years ago, and there should be a statute of limitations with that crime.” Now they know—the laughter’s all there—but I’m not kidding, because there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, and those who pose as Christians—paraphrasing Shakespeare—neither having the gait of Christians nor the actions of Christians—still make the Jews pay their dues.
I go from a pedantry (Shakespeare) to the hip argot (pay their dues) for another deuce.
Then I ask, why should Jews pay these dues? Granted that we killed him and he was a nice guy; although there was even some talk that we didn’t kill Christ, we killed Gesmas, the one on the left. (There were, you recall, three who got done in that day.) But I confess that we killed him, despite those who said that Roman soldiers did it.
Yes, we did it. I did it. My family. I found a note in my basement: “We killed him—signed, Morty.”
“Why did you kill Christ, Jew?”
“We killed him because he didn’t want to become a doctor, that’s why.”
Now sometimes I’ll get sort of philosophical with it and maybe a little maudlin: “We killed him at his own request, because he was sad—he knew that people would use him.”