by Mike Edison
Thanks to Ruderman’s insistence on camouflaging our appearance, the office looked like any late-eighties pseudo-corporate maze of prefab cubicles with an unfortunate mauve color scheme, not like the headquarters of an officious gang of big-city smut peddlers. But underneath the hideous semigloss paint job was a superheated fantasy world of women in fuck-me pumps with perfectly formed pudendas, pouty lips, heart-shaped behinds, and traffic-stopping breasts. There were provocative photos everywhere. Every nook and cranny in that office was filled with porn. Every working surface was covered in wide-open beaver and ass shots. It was hard not to let it get to you: How were you supposed to look at these eye-popping models and then go home to your plain Jane sweetheart? No kidding—the women in these magazines were drop-dead gorgeous and photographed under the same exacting conditions used to launch lunar probes. We’d airbrush the covers, sometimes “blue the eyes,” the idea being that azure orbs sold better than brown, but between the pages we never bothered. There was no need.
Rosenbaum let it get to him. In a world of über-women in slut shoes, he could no longer find “normal” women appealing. It was heartbreaking to listen to him. He was such a nice guy and took his job so seriously, really getting into the finer points of each photo, studying each model with gynecological precision. It was kind of creepy, actually, but he took a lot of pride in his work. Unfortunately, he could not separate his chosen profession from reality. “Edison,” he would say to me, “I asked this girl to dinner and she had the nerve to show up wearing flat shoes. I didn’t want to take her out after that.” When one girl showed up on a date wearing flip-flops, he nearly had a coronary. He had psyched himself out so badly that he had no idea how to score. He became a neurotic mess. “Edison, I had to poop today after lunch. Later I have a date. Should I go home first and take a shower? I live like two hours away.” How the fuck was I supposed to answer that?
The secret to working in such a highly charged environment lies a lot closer to detached objectivity than chronic tumescence. You obviously couldn’t do your job walking around with a boner all day, but you had to enjoy the subject matter and be able to edit the magazines to the audience’s taste. That’s a very important lesson that Ronson taught me: Know Thy Reader. We’d see guys cater to their own cooze-conscious connoisseurship, putting freaky punk-rock-looking chicks in a mag cherished by cheerleader-loving dolts—and then wonder why it didn’t sell.
I love sex, and I love pretty women, and being in that environment liberated me from ever being intimidated by the kinds of women whom a lot of guys might be afraid to approach—models, strippers, A-list angels, fantasy girls. I’m not a real ladies’ man. I’m a short Jewish guy with a receding hairline, and I’ve been rejected enough that even though it always sucks, I can deal with it because I like who I am. Some women want Brad Pitt, some women want guys like me (I try to go with the latter), and their relative good looks are not indicative of their kindness, sense of humor, or intellect, which is the ultimate turn-on. I always respected the women in our magazines and never looked down on them, but I never put them so high on a pedestal that they would be unattainable, either. I’ve dated women who look as if they had just leaped out of the centerfold, and women who to a man like Rosenbaum would be considered unexceptional, but they set me on fire. It’s all an illusion. Once you learn that, happiness is just a shot away.
I liked all of these guys, but none of them were ever going to be feted as visionaries. Not surprisingly, they were very protective of their jobs and senior staff positions. They went out for lunch together every day and kept a good distance between themselves and the rank and file, who—beneath the stratum occupied by Carmine’s Gang of Four— were my extended posse of twenty-something editors and art directors, the A Team who really put the pages together and got the books out the door.
Back in the art department were the young Turks we called the Happiness Boys: Gil, Kurt, and Braino. Gil was a good-looking guy with dark features. He looked like the son of a Greek shipping magnate and fancied himself some sort of Lothario. We’d be out drinking, and in five minutes he’d have the phone numbers of half the girls in the bar, which he would promptly lose after getting smashed on vodka. But it was inspiring to see him work. His greatest contribution to Drake Publishing was building a cardboard fort under an art table, where people could take naps after getting stoned at lunch.
Kurt was a talented painter who was there because he needed a job. He thought the whole place was absurd, and he just rolled with it. Braino was a punk rocker who later became a celebrated tattoo artist.
The editorial department was an equally mismatched group of miscreants. I wouldn’t describe any of us as “normal,” but certainly Spooner (he never explained how he got that nickname, but that’s what he insisted we call him) was the weirdest. In fact, he was one of the weirdest guys I ever met, especially in the context of a porn factory, since he never showed any inkling of liking girls or sex. While the rest of us would discuss the relative pulchritude of the models in the most piggish manner possible, the best we could coax from Spooner was “Well, I guess she’s hot.” We all thought he was gay, except he wasn’t cool enough to be gay. He was extraordinarily anal, which was actually a plus on a staff where no one was all that organized. Even his hair looked alphabetized. It was always perfect, as if it were designed by some great architectural firm and combed with a T square. Spooner would hang out with us after work, everybody really liked him, but after two drinks he’d be as drunk as a sailor on leave and we’d have to send him home to Weehawken, New Jersey, where he always kept his table set, like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.
Next to Spooner, Chip was the boy next door. He was a fresh recruit from Norman, Oklahoma, where he used to race stolen cars at an abandoned air force base. He was never without his briefcase, which always contained about an ounce of marijuana and a handgun. He never went anywhere without his gun. One night he scared the living fuck out of all of us, firing it out the window of a car that was driving us back from a party. Chip loved smut and would go on to edit a number of porn mags and become Al Goldstein’s ghostwriter.
Paul Proch (rhymes with “coach”) was way too smart to be working at Drake. Brilliant but lost, he was trying to break into television and film writing and was constantly applying for jobs at art magazines, which invariably turned him down because his résumé itself was too much like the blueprint for a nonobjectivist installation, and his cover letters read like deranged manifestos. I have no idea how he got through the rigorous Drake screening process. He came with a gorilla costume, which he would wear in his office while he smoked cigarettes out of a long plastic filter. Naturally, we got along famously.
I ran my department like a workshop in Dada publishing. I bought everyone lab coats, clipboards, and stethoscopes to walk around in like it was a M*A*S*H* unit. We armed ourselves with toy suction dart guns and had daily battles. In the mornings we listened to the Make Believe Ballroom on WNEW-AM. They played 1940s-and ’50s-era swing and popular standards—lots of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Benny Goodman. In the afternoon we tuned in to a local heavy metal show that leaned hard on Motörhead and the first Guns N’ Roses album. Despite the myopic weltanschauung of our employers, we had cultivated a real clubhouse environment where everyone pushed everyone else’s creativity. If you were thin-skinned, you would not have lasted a second. The ribbing was rampant, and no one was immune. Hey, Barry, did that belt come with those pants or did you have to buy it separately? Hey, Spooner, who does your hair, Frank Lloyd Wright?
After work we went out and blew our money at a dizzying gauntlet of bars and after-hours dives, sometimes staying up all night snorting coke, just showering off before work. But we were always on time the next day, as was our usual breakfast of pizza burgers and chocolate milk shakes, which would arrive just as punctually. We had the guys at the Midtown Deli trained.
Carmine gave my guys a long leash because our work was good, we were motivated, and we didn’
t miss deadlines.
One enchanted evening we were out at the Irish bar across the street from Drake. We had been drinking for a while when we realized that the regular after-work crowd had turned into a creepy pickup scene. Unbeknownst to us, it was karaoke night, and the bar was suddenly packed with yuppie douche bags lining up to sing “Da Doo Ron Ron.” The guys told me they would pay for all my drinks if I just got up and belted “My Way.”
I had already absorbed a few martinis, so I was going for it. I gave it my best Sid Vicious, climbing on a table and warbling with a vibrato wider than the Jersey Turnpike. I was intent on being eighty-sixed from the place. I couldn’t stand the crowd of jocks in blue shirts and power ties and the women who all wore Reeboks with their business suits (don’t forget, this was the eighties).
By the time I got to the “What is a man, what has he got?” part, I had thrown my jacket into the crowd and was working on my shirt and tie. I was punk-rocking it hard, full tilt, at the top of my lungs, half naked, falling forward off of a table into a crowd of stunned nine-to-fivers. I was sure I’d be getting tossed. Except it backfired: dudes were high-fiving me, fat women were kissing me, and the guy in charge of the karaoke came running over and said, “That was great! You win!”
“Huh?”
I’d had no idea it was a contest. I was now a finalist for a ski trip to Vermont. They gave me an absolutely hideous sweater as a prize and told me to come back the next week, which I didn’t. One must never do the same trick twice for the same audience.
7
YOU CAN BURN IT
Drake was a real paper mill. We put out something like eighty magazines a year, twelve issues each of our core mags—High Society, Cheri, Live, Celebrity Skin, and Playgirl—plus the Best of High Society and Best of Cheri, and a faux fashion rag called Swimsuit (like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, but every month). Stuff came flying out of the production department. But all of it was knocked off from someone else’s ideas, without regard or respect for the originality, adventurous spirit, personal risk, or culture shifts that spawned a sexually explicit vista within a truly free press.
Hefner, Guccione, Flynt, and Goldstein all understood that the simple act of putting out a porn magazine was a political act. Larry Flynt was shot for it.
I have always admired Larry Flynt. When it comes to defending free speech, he is as radically outspoken as he is irrepressible. In the early 1970s he showed up in court to face obscenity charges wearing the American flag as a diaper. Later he was held in contempt of the U.S. Supreme Court, whom he called, right to their faces, “eight assholes and a token cunt.”
Whereas the Hustler knockoffs I had been working for had simply swiped the formula for producing pecker-popping squack rags, they never had the brains or swagger to use their platforms as bully pulpits and swing freely at the self-righteous, moralizing assholes who wanted to nanny the country. Larry, like Al Goldstein, said “fuck ’em all” and made legal history with his precedent-setting victory over pietistic Moral Majority popinjay Jerry Falwell, whom he had depicted having sex with his mother in an outhouse. That case brought him once again to the Supreme Court, which had the wisdom to overlook his previous outburst. Its decision defended the right to parody public figures, a major kick in the balls to holier-than-thou celebrities and politicians who were now officially fair game for professional shit slingers like Hustler and Screw.
In 1978 Larry was shot by a sniper outside a Georgia courthouse where he was fighting obscenity-related charges. His injuries left him paralyzed from the waist down, making him the unimpeachable gold standard for First Amendment martyrdom.
There is still some speculation about who shot Larry and why. There have always been rumors that it was mob-related retribution for having begun his own distribution company—Larry was also one of the first distributors of High Times—outside the aegis of organized crime, which had traditionally controlled the sex industry. But the guy believed to have done it is Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist driven to insanity by Hustler’s interracial fuck shots. Franklin, who confessed to the shooting while in jail (although he was never tried for it), became something of a star in the dark world of racist, ultra-paranoid right-wing survivalist hate freaks: the fellow who wrote The Turner Diaries—the book that inspired Tim McVeigh to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City—dedicated another of his books to Franklin.
In 1989, soon after I was hired at Cheri, the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. Johnson that flag burning is a protected form of speech. It was a great day for First Amendment advocates, a group to whom I believed we as pornographers not only belonged, but somehow represented the vanguard. New York Newsday, then the only New York daily that printed color on the cover, ran a brilliant photo of Old Glory in flames and the screaming banner YOU CAN BURN IT. I put it on the wall of my office, proud to live in a country that defended my right to Free Speech. In about five seconds I was told to take it down.
This was also the time of the Meese Commission on Pornography, a Reagan-sponsored study that unambiguously set out to connect the dots between pornography and violence. They didn’t find what they were looking for, so they cooked the results. The final report said that without any evidence, the link between sexually explicit material and aggressive behavior is “plainly justified by our own common sense,” and that’s what they took to the American people. It was a frightening time: the Cold War was over, and the right-wing administration needed a new enemy. With the help of the Moral Majority and a virulent faction of antisex feminists headed by the indomitable tag team of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon, they wanted to shut us down. You would think that anyone who did what we did for a living would have at least a passing interest in civil liberties and a sense of righteous indignation, but in our office, no one gave a fuck.
At Drake, there were no idealized conceptions of being muckraking journalists, Establishment-battling warriors of the Fourth Estate. There were no dreams of being next-generation Hefners, pop culture pioneers making lasting contributions to lifestyle publishing. The only belief system was to crank out these “me too” jerk-off mags and make Ruderman richer. Which is fine for a business model but somehow unevolved as a worldview. Even when slinging shit, there should always be a certain pride and nobility in enjoying the upper reaches of free speech.
Typical of the Drake experience was their stab at a higher-end men’s mag, which somehow got strapped with the shockingly queer title Hawk. It featured the usual manly features about electronic gadgets and college football, some obviously gorgeous women, and adventure stories about extreme mountain climbing or some other equally testosterone-driven nonsense. It was undistinguished in every possible way, and without a point of view or a voice of its own, it failed miserably.
But I loved my job. I would have enjoyed a little more appreciation for the iconoclasm of the X-rated, but otherwise, putting out inconsequential slap rags was a lot of fun. And I was learning a ton—I hung around in the production department and sopped up everything there was to know about four-color printing from the ground up. I studied the sales numbers and every possible variable trying to figure out why some issues sold better than others. Common sense said that the cover was what sold the book—a lot of times the magazines were wrapped in plastic, so you couldn’t even flip through them. We spent weeks picking the right girl and the right background color. Sometimes white sold really well, and then it wouldn’t. It was impossible to tell. We carefully crafted cover lines and positioned them for maximum exposure, so that when the books were racked and you could see only the left side of the magazine, you could still read them. But clearly it was satisfaction with the entire package that helped build a loyal following, and our books were very consistent. You had to give a lot of bang for the buck, and you had to invest energy and joie de vivre in even the dumbest magazines or the reader could tell in a heartbeat. If you didn’t care, why should they?
I watched Carmine pore over the layouts for High Society and Cheri—he
would drive editors and designers nuts making them tweak and redo layouts. He had a great eye for girl sets. It was a competitive business, and he was not going to settle for anything less than approaching perfection in his magazines. And of course he was right. High Society and Cheri made boatloads of money.
I took a lot of my cues from Carmine. The way he managed me was brilliant. Some people like to be coddled, but I hate that namby-pamby bullshit. I’m a professional. Tell me what’s on your mind. A lot of people disagreed with the way New York Yankees manager Billy Martin handled his pitchers (including most of the pitchers themselves)— “Hey, asshole, throw strikes”—but sometimes there is nothing else to be said. When I’m up on that mound, I don’t want to talk about my problems at home, I want to get guys out. The important thing is that Carmine always treated me with respect, praising my good work and complimenting me when things were going well. I felt as though he was rooting for me. He was a hard-ass, but he wasn’t dismissive. He engaged me, and when I disagreed with him, he listened. He answered all my questions about the business. He forced me to challenge myself and be better at my job. I was rewarded with raises and promotions.
My favorite part of the week at Drake was the Friday photo meetings, when we would vet piles and piles of photo sets that had been submitted for approval. In those days, a few years before Penthouse opened things up by going hard-core (and in the process almost going out of business, losing pretty much all of their national advertising after they started printing piss shots, perhaps to satisfy some bizarre Guccione fetish), there were some pretty strict rules that we had to follow. There was no penetration allowed. If a girl was touching herself and you couldn’t see her fingernail, that was penetration, and it was not going in the magazine. No mouth-to-genital contact, no genital-to-genital contact. In the boy-girl sets, no erections. What constituted an erection? Anything more than a 45-degree angle between the body and the penis. Rosenbaum used to walk around the office with a magnifying glass and a protractor and some boy-girl photo he had fallen in love with, asking people if they thought the guy had a hard-on or not. (The myth is that this had to do with government censorship, but in fact the guidelines came down from regional distributors who wouldn’t carry a magazine that had crossed some arbitrary line of decency, as if a partially obscured digit would lay waste to the Eastern Seaboard but seven girls bent over the hood of a Jeep Wrangler spreading their asses was somehow okay.) We would go through a hundred sets of photos in a few hours, cracking jokes about weird-looking tits or particularly robust genitalia, approving of the obvious knockouts, and howling when we spotted a hemorrhoid. These meetings generally brought out the worst in everyone.