“Well, I was in the subway once—it was rush hour and it was really crowded—and an elderly lady’s buttocks kept rubbing against me, and I began to get aroused.”
“You’re sick!” Lenny yelled. The audience howled.
I said, “Thank you, Mr. President,” and ended the show.
Groucho Marx was in the audience, and Hopkins introduced him to Lenny and me.
“That was very smart, the way you finished,” Groucho said. “Besides, I was getting fidgety in my seat.”
On October 2, 1965, Lenny visited the San Francisco FBI headquarters. Two days later, the San Francisco FBI sent a memo to the FBI director in Washington, describing Lenny as “the nightclub and stage performer widely known for his obscenity,” and stating:Bruce, who advised that he is scheduled to begin confinement 10/13/65, in New York State as a result of a conviction for a lewd show, alleged that there is a conspiracy between the courts of the states of New York and California to violate his rights. Allegedly this violation of his rights takes place by these lower courts failing to abide by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court with regard to obscenity.
Bruce admitted that he has failed to exhaust his rights of appeal from the courts of either state, explaining that he has dismissed his attorney and is now a pauper. Further, he admitted that the Legal Aid Society locally refused to furnish him assistance and that several attorneys, whom he did not name, had refused to give any support to his contention that such a conspiracy as he described did, in effect, exist.
Bruce advised that he had made no other attempt to make a similar complaint at any other FBI office. The foregoing is furnished for the information of the Bureau and New York.
On October 13—Lenny’s fortieth birthday—instead of surrendering to the authorities in New York, he filed suit at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco to keep himself out of prison, and he got himself officially declared a pauper. He also asked the federal court to protect him from harassment by police in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, to determine how much money he had lost since his conviction in New York, and to order the police department there to pay him damages. Since his first arrest for obscenity in San Francisco, his earnings had plummeted from $108,000 to $11,000, and he was $15,000 in debt.
On May 31, 1966, Lenny wrote to me: “I’m still working on the bust of the government of New York State.” And he sent his doodle of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross, with a speech balloon asking: Where the hell is the ACLU? Lenny hadn’t identified with Christ’s jester, but now he did seem to be identifying with Christ himself.
On August 3, while his New York obscenity conviction was still on appeal, he received a foreclosure notice on his home. Lenny died that day from an overdose of morphine. It was two years since I had published his fake obituary. Ralph J. Gleason began his column: “There had been rumors before, even the grisly put-on when The Realist ran his obituary. But this time, you knew it had to be true. Lenny Bruce was dead.”
Lenny’s death was on the cusp of accident and suicide. In his kitchen, a kettle of water was still boiling. In his office, the electric typewriter was still humming. He had stopped typing in mid-word—Conspiracy to interfere with the 4th Amendment const—constitutes what, Lenny? Where was Blow Job Betty when he needed her? Why didn’t she wake him up with a phone call from the lobby of a hotel when he nodded out this time?
A week before, Lenny had told his girlfriend, comedian Maury Hayden (who later changed her name to Lotus Weinstock), “I’m gonna die this year.”
She pleaded, “If I get you some raisin cookies, will you wait a year?”
But Lenny wasn’t dissuaded by the promise of raisin cookies. Lotus recalled: “Lenny was half making plans to live, half to die. He didn’t go searching for drugs till that last week. The drug that killed him, he wanted more of it at that point. He was really in a self-destructive mode. I think he surrendered. There was part of him that wanted to die. He couldn’t bear the thought of being an old hippie. He may have played a part in it, but I don’t think that he ever intended to—I think he wanted to take the pain away, and I think he was gonna go as far as he had to go to make the pain go away that day. He wanted to live and he wanted to end the agony too.”
In a documentary about New York District Attorney Frank Hogan on WNET, a former assistant D.A., Michael Metzger, revealed that Lenny’s seemingly paranoid complaint to the FBI was not exactly unjustified. He said that Lenny “was prosecuted because of his words. He didn’t harm anybody, he didn’t commit an assault, he didn’t steal, he didn’t engage in any conduct which directly harmed someone else. So therefore he was punished first and foremost because of the words that he used. It’s wrong to prosecute anybody because of his ideas. It was the only thing I did in Hogan’s office that I’m really ashamed of. We drove him into poverty and used the law to kill him.”
Another former assistant D.A., Vincent Cucci, said, “It makes me, in retrospect, embarrassed to have been in an office that prosecuted with the vigor that Dick Kuh did prosecute the case for Frank Hogan. I would characterize Hogan’s attitude about that case as hysterical. You couldn’t look sideways. At one point he would not permit assistants to even sit in during the trial. He directed all assistants out of the courtroom, questioned each of them as to why they were there, and sent everybody on their way with the admonition that if anyone didn’t like the Lenny Bruce prosecution, they could quit right then and there.”
Four years after Lenny’s death, the New York Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s reversal of his guilty verdict.
Twelve years after Lenny’s death I found out the source of his final score. It was his own stepfather, Tony Viscarra. I sat there as Lenny’s mother, Sally Marr, tried to comfort Viscarra.
“Don’t feel bad,” she told him, with true compassion. “Lenny would’ve done the same for you.”
Lenny was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles. At the funeral, his roommate and sound engineer, John Judnich, dropped Lenny’s microphone into his grave before the dirt was piled on. Later, friends wanted to have a picnic on his plot, but the owner closed the premises.
He asked Lenny’s mother, “Who’s gonna clean up?”
In New York, I emceed a memorial service at Judson Memorial Church, where a religious fanatic carrying an American flag came up onstage and started preaching, while a woman sitting in a back pew was nursing a baby wearing diapers made of an American flag. Lenny would’ve enjoyed that.
And finally, there was a séance. A medium who had never seen him perform went into a trance, wobbling her head just like he used to wobble his. Was she actually going to do Lenny speaking?
My generation saw a few of the freaks in the carnival—you know, Zip and Pip, the Onion-Head Boy, Lolly and Lulu, the Mongoloid, the Chinless Wonder, the Alligator Lady, and the guy who could typewrite with his toes. Our kids won’t see any of those freaks, at least only a few of them. It’s a shame. But we will see a few of them.
Yeah, thank God for the Catholic Church there’ll still be freaks—those thalidomide babies will grow up and get a good tie-in with the Barnum & Bailey sideshow. So they’ll still see Zip and Pip and Flip and Mip. Yeah, that’s what I really got busted for.
And it’s really strange. I know that the peace officer that busts me really doesn’t even realize that, that’s what he’s busting me for. But here’s how it ends. One day I’m going to get an order to appear in court. “Oh, shit, what it is this time?” But when I get there the courtroom will be all decorated, dig, with balloons and streamers and confetti, and when I walk in they’ll all jump up and yell, “Surprise!” And there’ll be all the cops that busted me, and the judges and the D.A.s who tried me, and they’ll say, “Lenny, this is a surprise party for you. We’re giving you a party because even after everything that happened, you never lost respect for the law.”
But, no, the medium merely channeled a couple of messages from Lenny Bruce: “I’m very high now.” And, “You can’t live your whole life on a
pplause.”
Lenny’s mother had brought his old faded dungaree jacket to the séance. That large safety pin was still there, pinned to the outside breast pocket.
In 1999, a documentary, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, was nominated for an Academy Award, but as producer Robert Weide told me, prophetically, “If there’s a documentary about the Holocaust, it will win.”
“You don’t think you have any chance at all?” I asked.
“The odds against my film winning are six million to one.”
Lenny would really have appreciated that. Onstage, he had once held up an issue of The Realist with the headline, “Six Million Jews Found Alive in Argentina.”
In May 2003, Robin Williams, Penn and Teller, Margaret Cho, Tom and Dick Smothers, First Amendment scholars, lawyers, and Lenny’s daughter Kitty were among the signers of a petition addressed to New York Governor George Pataki. Referring to the 1964 obscenity conviction at the Café Au Go Go, it stated:
“A pardon now is too late to save Lenny Bruce. But a posthumous pardon would set the record straight and thereby demonstrate New York’s commitment to freedom—free speech, free press, free thinking.”
In July, Pataki was still giving this blatant no-brainer “serious consideration.” Finally, in December, he granted the posthumous pardon. “Freedom of speech is one of the great American liberties,” Pataki said, “and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve as we continue to wage the war on terrorism.” Lenny would have been simultaneously outraged and amused by the irony that the governor had pardoned him in the context of justifying the invasion of Iraq, which Lenny would have opposed.
When rock star/activist Bono received an award at the Golden Globes ceremony in 2003, he said, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.” The FCC ruled that he had not violated broadcast standards, because his use of the offending word was “unfortunate” but “isolated and nonsexual.” You see, it was merely an “exclamative” adjective. The FCC did not consider Bono’s utterance to be indecent because, in context, he obviously didn’t use the word fucking to “describe sexual or excretory organs or activities.”
But the next year, in a duet with Janet Jackson during the halftime extravaganza at the Super Bowl, Justin Timberlake sang the lyric, “Gonna have you naked by the end of this song,” and in what was defended as “a wardrobe malfunction,” he exposed Janet Jackson’s breast for 9/16th of a second. I had never seen the media make such a mountain out of an implant.
That incident served as an excuse to crack down on indecency during an election year. So, in 2004, the FCC reversed their own decision, contending that Bono’s utterance was “indecent and profane” after all. But an appeals court reversed the FCC’s reversal, and suddenly Bono was, once again, not guilty of indecency.
But in 2009—six days after Fox News anchor Shepard Smith shouted on the air, “We are America! I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps [get information from suspected terrorists]! We do not fucking torture!”—a Supreme Court ruling reversed the reversal of the reversal. It was suddenly retroactively unacceptable for Bono to say, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.”
But then in 2010 an appeals court struck down the FCC policy because barring the use of “fleeting expletives” violated the First Amendment and could inhibit free speech. A fucking brilliant decision. Thus, the reversal of the reversal of the reversal was reversed.
In 2012—another election year—the Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of an FCC action against the TV series NYPD Blue for showing partial nudity (the buttocks of actress Charlotte Ross), as well as those naughty-language cases. Conservative pundit Dennis Prager has characterized the fight over fuck as central to civilization’s “battle to preserve itself.”
As for Bono’s casual use of such a hazardous word, in June 2012, the Court decided not to reverse the reversal of the reversal of the reversal of the reversal of his right to say fuck on the air. Otherwise, as a monument to political opportunism, former Governor Pataki might have revoked his posthumous pardon of Lenny Bruce. All I know is that when the little kids on my block are playing outside, they actually curse at each other by yelling, “Bleep you!”
CHAPTER 4
QUEEN JEANNE
In the course of publishing The Realist, I pored through so many newspapers and magazines that I hardly had any time left to read books, although I scanned a lot of nonfiction. I kept buying books and not reading them. Instead I practiced a kind of mystical bibliomancy. I would put my index finger into the pages at random and zero in on a particular passage. So, although I never read Aldous Huxley’s novel Antic Hay, I happened to discover in it my favorite literary phrase—“excruciating orgasms of self-assertion”—and that began to serve as one more filter through which to perceive all human behavior.
When I attended my first literary cocktail party, I felt like a real impostor. And looked the part. I was the only guy there not wearing a tie. In The Realist I had revealed that beat-generation novelist Chandler Brossard was the ghostwriter of Norman Vincent Peale’s advice column in Look magazine. Now I was being introduced to Brossard. “So you’re the one,” he said. “I could sue you.” But, several drinks later, he admitted that not only had he written Peale’s answers but he had also made up the questions.
I also met Joseph Heller there. His book Catch-22 had recently been published, and he asked me if I had read it. “I’m in the middle,” I said. The truth was, I hadn’t started reading it. I didn’t even have a copy.
In the next issue of The Realist, I publicly confessed my lie. Heller sent me a copy of the book with this note: “If you haven’t read it yet, there’s no hurry—you practically write Catch-22 with every issue of The Realist.” I asked him for an interview, and he accepted. Then, I didn’t just read Catch-22, I studied it. And then I learned a fundamental lesson in advanced satire.
Q. I want to ask you about the use of exaggeration as a vehicle for satire. Do you think you may have exaggerated too much beyond the possibilities of reality?
A. Well, I tried to exaggerate in almost every case, gradually, to a point beyond reality—that was a deliberate intention, to do it so gradually that the unreality becomes more credible than the realistic, normal day-to-day behavior of these characters. Everything in Catch-22 could possibly happen—nothing in there is supernatural—but it defies probability. But so much of what we do—without even thinking about it—so much of what is done in our day-to-day existence defies probability if we stop to examine it. And this is the effect I wanted to achieve, to make these characters seem more real in terms of their eccentricities carried to absurdity.
When Norman Mailer wrote his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, he used the euphemism “fug” for “fuck.” At our first encounter in Lyle Stuart’s office, I asked Mailer if it was true that when he met actress Tallulah Bankhead she had said, “So you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”
With a twinkle in his eye, he told me that he had replied, “Yes, and you’re the young woman who doesn’t know how to.”
I saw Mailer again in 1961 at City Hall Park. We were among a thousand citizens committing civil disobedience of the law that we had to seek shelter during an air-raid drill. Umbrellas bearing the legend portable fallout shelter were held up while we sang “America the Beautiful.” As soon as the air-raid siren sounded, the police chief announced, “Officers, arrest those persons who do not seek shelter!” The cops seized those persons who were nearest to them. Then the all-clear sounded, and the rest of the crowd began to disperse.
When The Realist was originally launched, I had requested an interview with Mailer. He declined, and declined again, but in late 1962, after I published the Joseph Heller interview, Mailer called me. He was finally ready. We met at his house in Brooklyn Heights. Mailer sat in his chair, poised like a prizefighter. And I was his sparring partner.
Q. Is it possible that you have a totalitarian atti
tude toward masturbation?
A. I wouldn’t say all people who masturbate are evil, probably I would even say that some of the best people in the world masturbate. But I am saying it’s a miserable activity.
Q. Well, we’re getting right back now to this notion of absolutes. You know—to somebody, masturbation can be a thing of beauty—
A. To what end? Who is going to benefit from it?
Q. It’s a better end than [what you referred to as] the beauty of a bombing.
A. Masturbation is bombing. It’s bombing oneself.
Q. I see nothing wrong if the only person hurt from masturbation is the one who practices it. But it can also benefit—look, Wilhelm Stekel wrote a book on autoeroticism, and one of the points he made was that at least it saved some people who might otherwise go out and commit rape.
A. It’s better to commit rape than masturbate. Maybe, maybe. The whole thing becomes difficult.
Q . But rape involves somebody else.
A. Just talking about it on the basis of violence: one is violence toward oneself; one is violence toward others. Let’s follow your argument and be speculative for a moment—if everyone becomes violent toward themselves, then past a certain point the entire race commits suicide. But if everyone becomes violent toward everyone else, you would probably have one wounded hero-monster left.
Q. And he’d have to masturbate.
A. That’s true . . . But—you use that to point out how tragic was my solution, which is that he wins and still has to masturbate. I reply that at least it was more valuable than masturbating in the first place. Besides, he might have no desire to masturbate. He might lie down and send his thoughts back to the root of his being.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 12
