Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  Ah, but not David Frye—he could do Lyndon Johnson.

  Hanging around with Lenny was a true delight, except perhaps for the time that someone told him red cabbage was a fantastically healthy food and he ate a whole head of red cabbage in one sitting. In New York he was staying at a funky hotel in Greenwich Village. There was no television in his room, so a friend borrowed a TV set from the hotel lobby. They wanted to watch me on Les Crane’s late-night call-in show.

  Cartoonist Jules Feiffer and I were guests. The first call was from an anti-Semite. She wanted to know why there was a preponderance of Jewish guests. Later, in the middle of the show, Michelle Cole came to the station with a note from Lenny: “To offset the Jewish imbalance, I am sending my Hawaiian friend.”

  “I’d like to point out something,” I said. “I don’t consider myself Jewish. I equate religion with organized superstition. And anyone who thinks of Judaism as a race rather than a religion is accepting the Nazi tenets.” I hesitated, sensing that my syllogism was somehow incomplete. “Therefore,” I added, “Lenny Bruce is a Nazi.”

  Crane immediately pressed the little red panic button which—thanks to a five-second delay that was a feature of live tape—enabled him to eliminate the sound for the viewing audience. During a commercial, he explained why I got cut off.

  “That’s actionable, Paul.”

  “Of course it is, but can you possibly imagine Lenny Bruce suing me for libel because I called him a Nazi on television?”

  One time we were fooling around with a tape recorder in his hotel room, and Lenny began spinning out a fantasy:I will confess to some experiences that I’ve had. Forbidden sights I have seen. The most beautiful body I’ve ever seen was at a party in 1945. I was in the bedroom getting the coats. The powder room door had been left intentionally ajar, and I viewed the most perfect bosom peeking out from the man-tailored blouse above a tweed pegged skirt.

  “You like what you see? They are nice, aren’t they?” she said, caressing the area near her medallion.

  “Yes, they are very nice.”

  “Would you like to touch them?”

  “I’m—I’m—”

  “You’re shocked,” she said, “aren’t you?”

  Indeed I was. Eleanor Roosevelt had the prettiest tits I had ever seen or dreamed that I had seen.

  “I’ve got the nicest tits that have ever been in this White House, but because of protocol we’re not allowed to wear bathing suits, you know. I get a million offers for pictures, but being saddled with the Girl Scout coordinators has left me with only a blind item in a gossip column: What Capitol Hill biggie’s wife has a pair of lollies that are setting the Washington-go-round a-twitter?”

  Lenny’s problem was that he wanted to talk onstage with the same freedom he exercised in his living room. That harmless little bit of incongruity about Eleanor Roosevelt would show up in his act from time to time. Murray Kempton, whose criticism was usually of a more political nature, said that it reminded him of A Child ’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.

  Poetic or not, it certainly didn’t fall within the definition of hard-core pornography which the Supreme Court had ruled was not protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, Lenny was arrested in a Greenwich Village club, the Café Au Go Go, for giving an indecent performance, and at the top of the police complaint was “Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits.”

  Lenny’s New York obscenity trial reeked with hypocrisy, as epitomized by one witness for the prosecution, Daily News columnist Robert Sylvester, who stated under cross-examination that he had used the very same taboo words in his private conversation for which Lenny was arrested.

  “You have, in fact,” asked the defense attorney, “used those words condemning censorship, have you not?”

  Sylvester admitted, “I have.”

  Another witness, National Review correspondent Ernest van den Haag, supposedly an expert on contemporary community standards, testified that he had made a study of nightclubs even though he hadn’t been inside one for twenty years.

  An additional charge against Lenny was making “masturbatory motions” with his hand. Actually, he had gestured with a microphone, nowhere near his crotch, to bless the audience in papal fashion. At one point, attorney Ephraim London asked a witness who had been present at the performance, “Did you see Mr. Crotch touch his bruce?”

  I wrote in The Realist:Henceforth and forevermore, we shall have had at that precise moment a meaningful new synonym added to our language.*“Mommy, look, there’s a man sitting over there playing with his bruce.” *“Beverly Schmidlap is a real bruceteaser.” *“Kiss my bruce.”

  Ultimately, Lenny fired all his lawyers and defended himself. He was found guilty, even though the law stated that to be obscene, material must be utterly without any redeeming social importance; therefore, if one single person felt that Lenny’s performances had the slightest bit of redeeming social importance—and there were several witnesses who so testified—then he should have been found not guilty.

  He hadn’t been able to get work in six months. Club owners were afraid to book him. He almost got an engagement in Philadelphia, but the deal fell through when the district attorney demanded that Lenny show up a couple of days early and take a Naline test to prove there was no morphine in his system—plus he was told to present his material in advance. criminals must register.

  Lenny performed at a club in Westbury, but on his way to the parking lot after the first performance, a district attorney warned him, “If you do another show like the one you did tonight, I’ll arrest you.” Then the D.A. told the club owner, “If you let him go on, I’ll pull your license.”

  Lenny went before the Court of Appeals seeking an injunction that would prevent district attorneys from arresting him in the future. The three-judge panel was headed by Thurgood Marshall, former chief counsel for the NAACP, who would later become the first black justice ever appointed to the Supreme Court. Lenny pleaded that he was like a carpenter whose tools were being taken away. He compared the denial of his rights to “a nigger who wants to use a toilet in Alabama.”

  “You’re not a Negro, Mr. Bruce,” said Judge Marshall.

  “Unfortunately not, Your Honor.”

  And Lenny’s request was denied.

  A week later, he was due to be sentenced and, once again, he acted as his own attorney. In court, he wanted to borrow a wristwatch, because he planned to state for the record what time he began and ended his argument—“so that the judge can’t close me out for taking too long.” I didn’t have my watch with me. I tried to borrow one from Jules Feiffer, who was sitting at the back of the courtroom, but he declined.

  “Think how awful it would be,” Feiffer said, “if the judge gave Lenny three years, and then I had to go and ask for my lousy watch back.”

  Lenny finally borrowed a watch, and he spoke for a solid hour. He did everything in this special one-time-only matinee performance short of applying burnt cork to his face, donning white gloves, getting down on his knees, and singing “Nobody Knows de Trouble Obscene,” but his most relevant argument concerned the very obscenity statute which he’d been accused of violating.

  As his legal homework, Lenny had obtained the legislative history of that statute from Albany, and he discovered that back in 1931 there was an amendment proposed, which excluded from arrest in an indecent performance: stagehands, spectators, musicians, and—here was the fulcrum of his defense—actors. The law had been misapplied to him. The amendment had finally been signed into law by then-Governor Franklin Roosevelt, despite opposition by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

  Lenny had complained that District Attorney Richard Kuh tried to do his act in court. A friend of mine who dated Kuh swears that he took her back to his apartment and played Lenny Bruce records for her. Maybe someday he would play for her the soundtrack album from the movie Lenny, with Dustin Hoffman doing Lenny’s act on stage where he complains about the district attorney doing his act in court.
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  But now, before sentencing, Kuh recommended that no mercy be granted because Lenny had shown a “lack of remorse.”

  Lenny responded, “I’m not here for remorse, but for justice. The issue is not obscenity, but that I spit in the face of authority.”

  The face of authority spat back at Lenny Bruce that afternoon by sentencing him to four months in the workhouse.

  “Where can I appeal?” asked Lenny.

  “The court cannot act as counsel,” replied the judge.

  Then, in the press room of the Criminal Courts Building, reporters were interviewing Lenny. WNBC’s Gabe Pressman asked, “Do you believe in obscenity?”

  “What do you mean?” said Lenny. “Do I believe we should pray for obscenity?”

  As we walked into the lobby, a man came up and said, “Listen, I have some stag films and party records that you might be interested in.”

  Lenny and I went for some pizza instead. Then we headed for his hotel room where, to help unwind from the day’s tension, he played some old tapes, ranging from a faith healer to patriotic World War II songs. “Goodbye, Mama, I’m off to Yokohama, the Land of Yama-Yama . . .”

  “Ignoring the mandate of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” observed Lenny lawyer, “is a great deal more offensive than saying Eleanor has lovely nay-nays.”

  When Lenny finally completed his book, I sat in the Playboy office with their attorneys. They were anxious to avoid libel, so they kept changing or deleting the name of any person in his original manuscript who might bring suit, all the way to the end. Lenny had written:My friend Paul Krassner once asked me what I’ve been influenced by in my work.

  I have been influenced by my father telling me that my back would become crooked because of my maniacal desire to masturbate; by reading “Gloriosky, Zero” in Annie Rooney; by listening to Uncle Don and Clifford Brown; by smelling the burnt shell powder at Anzio and Salerno; torching for my ex-wife; giving money to Moondog as he played the upturned pails around the corner from Hanson’s at 51st and Broadway; getting hot looking at Popeye and Toots and Caspar and Chris Crustie years ago; hearing stories about a pill they can put in the gas tank with water but “the big companies” won’t let it out—the same big companies that have the tire that lasts forever—and the Viper’s favorite fantasy: “Marijuana could be legal, but the big liquor companies won’t let it happen”; Harry James has cancer on his lip; Dinah Shore has a colored baby; Irving Berlin didn’t write all those songs, he’s got a guy locked in the closet; colored people have a special odor.

  It was an absurd question. I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.

  The false gossip items about Harry James and Dinah Shore were edited out of that paragraph, but for some unfathomable reason the one about Irving Berlin remained. In his manuscript, Lenny had mentioned an individual named Blow Job Betty, and the lawyers were afraid.

  “You must be kidding,” I said. “Do you believe anybody would actually come out and admit that she’s known as Blow Job Betty?”

  There was one incident which was omitted entirely from the book. Lenny had been working at Le Bistro, a nightclub in Atlantic City. During his performance, he asked for a cigarette from anyone in the audience. Basketball star Wilt Chamberlain happened to be there, and he lit a cigarette and passed it up to Lenny.

  “Did you see that?” Lenny whispered to his microphone. “He nigger-lipped it!”

  There were liberals who could accept Lenny’s profane alternatives for sexual parts and functions, but weren’t able to similarly discard their reaction to ugly racial and religious names—“Nigger!” “Kike!” “Wop!” “Chink!” “Sheenie!” “Spic!” “Mick!”—so Lenny would go onstage and play with the audience by combining those epithets in poetic cadences as though he were reciting poker hands, demystifying the words until they became nonsense.

  (He did not walk up to a black man and shout “Nigger!” in his face, as the film Lenny would later depict, nor did he ever perform so zonked out that he wore only one shoe.)

  Lenny and I had an unspoken agreement that there would be nothing in the book about his use of drugs. When I first met him, he would shoot up in the hotel bathroom with the door closed, but now he just sat on his bed and casually fixed up while we were talking. That’s what we were doing one time when Lenny nodded out, the needle still stuck in his arm.

  Suddenly the phone rang and startled him. His arm flailed, and the hypodermic came flying across the room, hitting the wall like a dart just a few feet from the easy chair in which I uneasily sat. Lenny picked up the phone. It was Blow Job Betty, calling from the lobby. She came up in the elevator and went down on Lenny. In front of me.

  After a little while, Lenny said to her, “I wanna fuck you now.”

  “In front of him?” Blow Job Betty protested, gesturing toward me.

  “Okay, Paul, I guess the interview’s over now.”

  The next day, Lenny said to me, “I’m not usually an exhibitionist.”

  “That’s okay,” I replied. “I’m not usually a voyeur.”

  Anyway, the Playboy lawyers changed Blow Job Betty’s name to Go Down Gussie.

  “I hope there actually is somebody out there named Go Down Gussie,” I told them, “and that she sues for invasion of privacy.”

  Playboy had dropped their Playboy Panel feature, switching to individual interviews, and I was taken off their payroll. Instead, I was invited to write a column, “The Naked Emperor,” for Cavalier, a men’s magazine that was beginning to publish underground writers and artists. They paid me $1,000 a month. My first column was a report on an auction of one-inch squares from the hotel bedsheets slept on by the Beatles during their first trip to America.

  My second column was about Lenny Bruce. I went to the bank and deposited my check, withdrawing half of it in cash, a $500 bill. Lenny was alone in his hotel room on Christmas Day when I presented it to him. He was grateful, but I quoted his own line to him:

  “There’s no such thing as an anonymous donation,” I said. “So maybe I should’ve just left it for you at the front desk.”

  “Yeah, but then I would’ve gone crazy trying to guess who it was from.”

  And, with a large safety pin, Lenny attached the $500 bill to the outside breast pocket of his dungaree jacket. Ironically, he had begun to dress like me.

  In 1964, with Lenny’s permission, I published his obituary in The Realist. Before the issue went to press, he called his mother and a few others to let them know it would only be a hoax. The point was that he couldn’t get work and his work was his life so he might as well be dead. And if people regretted that they hadn’t helped him, well, now they could have a second chance because he was still alive. The obituary evoked inquiries from newspapers, wire services, foreign publications, radio, and TV.

  “What’s the meaning of it?” one editor asked me. “There’s a lot of excitement at the city desk.”

  “That is the meaning of it.”

  Some readers assumed that they had missed the news in their daily papers. Others assumed that it had been suppressed. One of Lenny’s lovers, Gloria Stavers, the editor of Sixteen, a rock magazine, called me with understandable hostility, but we eventually became friends, and she took me to the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium. You could hardly hear them sing above the screaming of the crowd. One girl held up a sign: it’s all right, john—i wear glasses too.

  When the obituary was published, Lenny and I sat in his hotel room, discussing it.

  “This way,” I said, “when you really die, my grief will be pure. I won’t have to stop and think, ‘Oh, shit, now I have to write an obituary.’”

  “There’s just one thing you’re overlooking, Paul.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I may outlive you.”

  One time, Lenny literally lived out one of his own satirical insights.

  He had talked onstage about the difference in sexual conditioning between men and women. A guy would fuck a chicken, mud, anything. If he got his leg ch
opped off in an automobile accident, he would still make a play for the nurse in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. If the guy’s wife called him an animal, he would justify his act: “I couldn’t help it—she had a cute ass.”

  Now Lenny was staying at the Swiss-American Hotel in the North Beach section of San Francisco. Nearby, Hugh Romney was working with a satirical troupe, The Committee, and distributing LSD in his spare time. He wandered around carrying a chromium lunch box that had green velvet lining, a thermos bottle filled with hot soup, and his dope supply in the inner lining. Lenny wasn’t in his messy room on the second floor of the hotel, but Eric Miller was, so Romney left a couple of hits of acid there. Lenny had never tried LSD before, and Romney figured Lenny would just give it to someone else, not take it himself. He also left another hallucinogenic, DMT, with a note saying: “Please smoke this till the jewels fall out of your eyes.”

  Lenny returned, saw the package on his dresser, swallowed both hits of acid and smoked the DMT. He had never seen colors like this before in his life. He was standing on the low window ledge, talking to Miller with great animation, when suddenly he lost his balance and fell backward, through the window. It was an accident, but the instant he realized that he was committed to the fall, he called out in midair: “Man shall rise above the rule!” Then he hit the pavement below. Miller ran down to the sidewalk and tried to comfort him. Lenny’s pelvis and both ankles had been broken, but he managed to ask a nurse if she would please give him some head.

  When Lenny got out of the hospital, he became the Hermit of Hollywood Hills. Jerry Hopkins, a talent booker for the Steve Allen show, arranged for me to perform at the Steve Allen Playhouse, and Lenny, in one of his rare departures from the house, came to my show, both legs still in casts. At one point during my performance, I was talking about the importance of having empathy for other people’s perversions. During the question-and-answer session with the audience that followed, Lenny stood up on his crutches and asked me to clarify what I meant by that.