Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  New York Criminal Court Judge Benjamin Gassman agreed. A short, stern, religious conservative who had fled his native Kiev in 1903 after an anti-Semitic pogrom, Gassman favored Talmudic literature; he wasn’t impressed by Fanny Hill. “While it is true that the book is well written,” he wrote in the court’s unanimous decision, “such [a] fact does not condone its indecency. Filth, even if wrapped in the finest packaging, is still filth.” When Downs was found guilty in mid-November 1963, Reverend Hill called the ruling “a ray of hope that the corruption of youth in our land will be speedily halted and a fair warning to cesspool publishers and dealers that our youth is protected by law.”

  That same month, the Wagner administration’s antiobscenity crusade began shuttering downtown cinemas that screened underground films. As promised, the city used any legal technicality at its disposal. The Pocket Theatre on Third Avenue and East 12th Street was closed in December for showing films without New York State’s censor’s seal of approval. In early 1964 Mekas, a Lithuanian-born poet, archivist, and Village Voice film critic, began screening avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures at the Gramercy Arts Theatre on East 27th Street. The controversial forty-five-minute feature was a campy piece of black-and-white celluloid depicting male and female genitals, transvestites, and a cunnilingual rape scene. The film broke barriers and was seemingly all things to all people: City officials considered it obscene; Smith called it “a comedy set in a haunted music studio”; and Mekas waxed poetic about it in the Village Voice, calling the film the “most luxurious outpouring of imagination, of imagery, of poetry, of movie artistry.”

  For three consecutive Mondays, Mekas showed the film at the Gramercy without a problem. Then on February 15, 1964, police issued a summons to the venue’s owner, ending its run. Undeterred, Mekas began showing the controversial feature at the New Bowery Theatre on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. However, on March 3 the police interrupted the movie, arresting Mekas and several moviegoers and seizing the film’s print and the projectors. Mekas was held in jail overnight and released.

  But Mekas didn’t scare easily. In the early 1940s, he and his brother Adolfas ran an anti-Nazi underground paper in their native Lithuania, and both escaped a German labor camp before landing in New York in 1949. Once there, he established himself as a patron of avant-garde art. In 1955 he started a magazine, Film Culture, and four years later became a film critic for the Village Voice. He even overcame his own homophobia, recanting earlier critical comments that New York’s avant-garde film scene was falling prey to “the conspiracy of homosexuality” (he blamed his reactionary ideas on his Marxist views at the time).

  In 1962 Mekas created the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which lent out film equipment to avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Ronald Rice, and Kenneth Anger—all artists whose work would eventually run into censorship issues. One of the aspiring filmmakers that Mekas helped out was Andy Warhol, who had begun to make movies in 1963, inspired by the East Village underground film scene, and Jack Smith in particular. “He’s the only person I would ever copy,” Warhol said of Smith. “I just think he makes the best pictures.” Warhol’s early films included Kiss (various shorts of Warhol hangers-on kissing), Sleep (literally eight hours of an actor sleeping), and Empire State (an eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Building, for which Mekas operated the camera).

  Mekas was also a filmmaker. After seeing a performance of the Living Theatre’s play The Brig, an antimilitary drama about the inhuman conditions inflicted on soldiers in the Marine Corps’ prison (aka the brig), Mekas filmed the group’s final performance of the show in January 1964. The film would go on to win the Grand Prize at the 1964 Venice Film Festival and bring the left-wing radicalism of the Living Theatre to a wider audience.

  And Mekas the filmmaker also continued screening avant-garde films. Just a week after his arrest for showing Flaming Creatures, he was busted again for screening the 1950 French film Un Chant d’Amour (A Song of Love), about the unconsummated affair between two male prisoners and the guard who spies on them. Un Chant d’Amour, written and directed by novelist Jean Genet, is a bold depiction of homosexuality that includes full-frontal nudity and masturbation. Although made fourteen years prior in France, it was an extraordinarily provocative work for 1964 America and exactly the type of film that the Wagner administration and Operation: Yorkville considered obscene. Ultimately the case was thrown out on a technicality, but not before French writer and intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature later that year, and his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, author of the landmark feminist work The Second Sex, wrote protesting Mekas’s arrest as an act of censorship.

  Mekas received a six-month suspended sentence for screening Flaming Creatures and appealed the case all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1967. Although the court refused to hear the case, it would have a lingering political half-life. Associate Justice Abe Fortas, a liberal who was appointed to the High Court by his longtime friend President Lyndon Johnson, wrote in his minority opinion that Mekas’s conviction should be overturned, essentially declaring that Flaming Creatures was not obscene. In 1968, when Johnson nominated Fortas to become Chief Justice, Senator Strom Thurmond used Fortas’s vote to paint him as a protector of pornographers (it was his way of getting even with Johnson for his civil rights legislation). Due to his support of Flaming Creatures and financial improprieties that Congress uncovered, Fortas withdrew his nomination. Instead of having a liberal-leaning Fortas court in place, incoming president Richard M. Nixon named the next Chief Justice, thus altering the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court for decades.

  While the city was closing theaters, it was also harassing owners of East Village coffeehouses that frequently staged poetry readings, places like Lé Cafe Metro. On February 10, 1964, Lé Cafe Metro was given a summons for operating without a cabaret license. Obtaining one was expensive, but without it, such cafes like it were sunk. The move was the Wagner administration’s attempt to put establishments that catered to the downtown bohemian set out of business. For Ginsberg, the bard of the Beat Generation, whose 1955 poem “Howl” changed the course of American poetry, this was all a case of déjà vu.

  In 1957 Ginsberg’s friend and fellow Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was put on trial for publishing Howl and Other Poems, which, due to its celebration of gay sex, San Francisco city officials dubbed “obscene.” Ferlinghetti owned and operated San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperback store in the country, and its publishing division, City Lights Books. Howl and O’Hara’s Lunch Poems were part of City Light’s popular Pocket Poetry Series, whose avid fans frequented establishments like Lé Cafe Metro and underground cinemas.

  Although Ferlinghetti eventually won the case seven years later, the same strain of American Puritanism was rearing its ugly head in New York. “I’m in the middle of struggle with license dept. on poetry reading in coffeehouses, now Jonas Mekas been arrested twice, once for showing Flaming Creatures and once for showing Genet film,” Ginsberg complained in a letter to Ferlinghetti. Uniting with fellow downtown poets like Diane di Prima and Ed Sanders, Ginsberg formed the Committee on Poetry, or COP, to fight Mayor Wagner and the city, who, they argued, were trampling on their First Amendment rights.

  Ginsberg and his committee worked their way around the city’s various agencies—albeit peacefully, as per Ginsberg’s suggestion—including the mayor’s office and the Cultural Commissioner’s office. COP got help and advice from their local congressman Ed Koch, the future mayor of New York, and Henry Stern, member-at-large for the City Council. Ultimately their peaceful work-the-system strategy succeeded: On April 3 the License Department backed off, leaving Village coffeehouses and the New York poetry scene alone to flourish.

  But that very same day, New York opened a new front in its war against art or speech that it considered obscene. This battleground would see action for years, even after its main prota
gonist was dead. Just hours after Ginsberg and his fellow activists won their victory, thirty-eight-year-old comedian Lenny Bruce was in his dressing room at the Café Au Go Go, a Greenwich Village club on Bleecker Street. As he prepared to go on for his 10:30 p.m. show, plainclothes police arrested him and the Go Go’s manager, Howard Solomon, for obscenity. The charges were based on a tape recording undercover cops had made of a show at the same venue earlier that week. Bruce, who had already faced criminal charges in San Francisco and Chicago, was no stranger to the law and wanted to know which statute he had violated. The policeman cited Section 1040 of the Criminal Code.

  “But that’s prostitution,” Bruce protested.

  “Aww, Lenny, don’t be technical,” the cop complained. “It’s one of them numbers.”

  Released on $1,000 bail the next day, Bruce and Solomon pleaded not guilty before New York’s Supreme Court. The trial was set to begin April 23—the day after the World’s Fair opened. Now freed, Bruce returned to the Café Au Go Go’s stage that very night to perform his act, which included the same skits that were considered obscene: “Eleanor Roosevelt’s Tits,” an extended comical riff about the former First Lady’s breasts, and “Hauling Ass to Save Ass,” a fearlessly tasteless commentary about the Kennedy assassination, which had transpired barely five months before. Bruce’s skit was based on the widely seen Time magazine photo of Jackie Kennedy, who moments after her husband had been shot, reached across the trunk of the presidential limo to assist a Secret Service agent. Rather than see the former First Lady performing an act of bravery, Bruce claimed she was running for her life, or “hauling ass to save ass.”

  This time, though, rather than utter the words that New York City officials deemed obscene, Bruce spelled them out. It worked for the moment. But his luck didn’t last. On April 7, while once again performing at the Café Au Go Go, Bruce was arrested again, this time in the middle of his set, along with Ella Solomon, who co-owned the Go Go with her husband, Howard.

  Ginsberg was infuriated. First gay bars, then the arrest of Mekas for showing films, the attempt to silence the coffeehouse poets, the harassment of the politically radical avant-garde Living Theatre on charges of tax invasion, and now Bruce, who had transformed nightclub comedy into social satire spiked with as many four-letter words—or ten-letter or twelve-letter words—as he could squeeze in. For Ginsberg, the city’s antiobscenity crusade had morphed into an all-out assault on artistic expression.

  The poet quickly organized the Emergency Committee Against the Harassment of Lenny Bruce, eventually enlisting a hundred esteemed artists and intellectuals like Ferlinghetti; theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; Lionel Trilling, Ginsberg’s old Columbia University mentor (who believed Bruce was “a very remarkable and pointed satirist”); cultural critic Dwight Macdonald (who called Bruce’s language “rough” but said he used it in “a witty, sophisticated and parodic way”); and novelists like Mailer, Terry Southern (of Candy fame), James Baldwin, Joseph Heller, and Henry Miller, among others. The group released a statement, noting that Bruce continued the tradition of such literary satirists as “Swift, Rabelais and Twain.” Bruce certainly appreciated the support, even if he admitted he had never read any of the literary lights with which the committee associated him. But the poet’s crusade still made him nervous. “The problem with people helping you with protests is that historically they march you straight to the [electric] chair,” he quipped.

  Born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Mineola, Long Island, Bruce was raised by various relatives until the age of sixteen, when he joined the Navy. After getting discharged he moved to Hollywood and attended acting school on the GI Bill. He began working the club circuit, traveling around the country before landing back in Tinsel Town and establishing himself (along with Mort Sahl) as one of the new so-called “sick comics.” Working his way up the show business food chain, Bruce found important benefactors in comedian and TV host Steve Allen (“Lenny Bruce is literally a comic genius, a philosopher” Allen told The New Yorker) and Playboy founder and editor Hugh Hefner.

  For Bruce, there was nothing sacred in postwar America: not sex, not religion, not language, not motherhood. How could there be in a country that lived with Jim Crow and under the omnipresent threat of an atomic mushroom cloud? Bruce loved to expose the hypocrisy of the political establishment, moralistic censors, and, of course, religious leaders—preferably with as many obscene words and scatological references as possible. His comedy was fueled with rage against the Establishment. As jazz composer Stan Kenton once told Bruce, “You’re really a preacher, and the nightclubs are becoming churches because of your moralizing.”

  Admittedly, Bruce’s shtick-as-sermons weren’t for everyone. The New York Times cautioned that his nightclub act amounted to “shock therapy” for the audience. The Daily News was more pedestrian in its criticism, labeling the comic “The Man From Outer Taste.”

  Given the climate in the country, particularly in New York City, it was only a matter of time before Bruce made powerful enemies, including the head of the New York Archdiocese, Cardinal Francis Spellman, another target of his blasphemous barbs (“Spellman does it with the nuns”). After the cardinal reportedly complained to officials, Bruce’s troubles in New York began in earnest. The comic and his defense team, then headed by free-speech lawyer Martin Garbus, drew a direct line between the cardinal and Bruce’s legal woes. “It was rumored that Spellman was behind the trial,” Garbus said. “We wanted to believe desperately that Cardinal Spellman was behind the whole thing. Lenny firmly believed it and that raised it to the level of truth in many people’s eyes.”

  There were plenty of reasons to think so. Just six days before the Bruce trial was about to begin in Manhattan’s Criminal Court—one of the most costly antiobscenity fights in New York City history and paid for by taxpayers—Spellman sought to publicly take control of Wagner’s antiobscenity crusade. Speaking at Fordham University’s commencement ceremony in early June 1964, he suggested the creation of a citizens’ commission to battle the sale of “salacious literature.” Clearly, Spellman thought Wagner’s efforts weren’t “effective” and the theocrats of Operation: Yorkville too “silent.” The cardinal’s speech demanded that a stronger, more experienced hand was needed to guide the city’s collective antiobscenity crusade, and what better hand than that of the man called the American Pope?

  But as Spellman marshaled the troops in New York, and the Bruce trial dragged on, the US Supreme Court handed down two landmark decisions later that same month. In the first, Jacobellis v. Ohio, the court struck down the Buckeye State ban of the French film The Lovers (Les Amants) in a six–three vote; with the second, Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein, the court voted five–four to lift the ban on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a book that had been outlawed by twenty-one states for decades. These decisions, which set new standards for the legal definitions of obscenity—declaring that neither The Lovers nor Tropic of Cancer were obscene—incensed Cardinal Spellman, who said the High Court had now allowed an “acceptance of degeneracy and the beatnik mentality as the standard way of American Life.” The Cardinal declared a crusade was needed in “every city, town and village of this great nation” to combat the cancerous effects of smut, filth, obscenity, and pornography.

  The same day the cardinal ripped into the Supreme Court, Mayor Wagner announced his creation of the Anti-pornography Committee, for which Spellman had lobbied. The new committee would have twenty-one members, including civic, educational, business, and labor leaders. New York’s vast right-wing crusade, launched ostensibly to battle obscenity—and laced with a powerful undercurrent of homophobia—was working. During Mayor Wagner’s administration, New York’s religious leaders and city officials consistently and repeatedly persecuted avant-garde artists and East Village poets, and shuttered gay bars. When it decided to persecute Bruce, it took on the First Amendment itself.

  Ironically, this was all happening at the same time that the US Supreme
Court redefined obscenity and empowered the freedom of speech for all Americans, while out on the West Coast at the University of Berkeley, a Queens-born ex–New Yorker named Mario Savio was leading a student revolt that would ultimately become known as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Thanks to its myopic leaders, New York—the unabashed capital of the nation in so many ways, as Moses bragged to the World’s Fair Committee in 1960—was falling behind the times.

  Even as Mayor Wagner and Cardinal Spellman worked diligently with Moses to ensure the success of the World’s Fair, they were two of the architects behind a crusade against free speech and artistic expression—a crusade that was certainly at odds with the message of the World’s Fair, once again proving that the glittering pavilions of Flushing Meadow’s manicured Fairgrounds and its utopian slogans had little—if anything—to do with the political turmoil of the city around it.

  20.

  Negroes are fed up and there’s going to be a revolution.

  —Dick Gregory

  In the early months of 1964, militant activists in New York who had grown disillusioned with the city’s political establishment and the civil rights movement’s national leaders planned to disrupt the World’s Fair. The citywide protests throughout the summer of 1963 had done little to improve the lives or job prospects of black New Yorkers and had poisoned the city’s already precarious state of race relations. Despite saying all the right things, the collected efforts of Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. and Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller had yielded few tangible results.