Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  Lenny thought that prostitutes had a special insight, and he once hired a hooker to read his manuscript.

  “If it’s all the same to you,” she said, “couldn’t we just ball?”

  Lenny said no, that wasn’t what he paid her for. But he began his show that night with this opening line: “I’ve balled every waitress in this club.” It might even have been true.

  In Rosman County, North Carolina, there was a persistent rumor campaign that “those people [at Camp Summerlane] have six nigger families hidden up in them hills and are going to bring them out in September to integrate the Rosman High School.” The mayor claimed that The Realist had a sexual promiscuity theme and was “unfit to be read by gentlemen.” The sheriff agreed. The paper was atheistic, he said, and “we’re mostly Baptist and pretty serious about it.” And so it came to pass that a mob of serious Baptist gentlemen raped a children’s summer camp.

  Stones were thrown at kids and counselors in two canoes, an act which escalated into physical beatings, a knifing, a posse of armed men, rifle shots, a bullet-riddled bus, gasoline being thrown on the pond, then on the lake, with matches set to both. Nobody was killed, but there was an awful fear. Summerlane was evacuated at 7 o’clock the next morning, and the scared campers headed for New Jersey. They had never seen a lake on fire before.

  While Jeanne was in New York, fielding calls from understandably hysterical parents who didn’t know where their kids were, en route from North Carolina to New Jersey, I was at the Playboy mansion in Chicago, working on the Lenny Bruce book.

  Dick Gregory was performing at the Playboy Club and invited me to his show. Two years previously, Negro comedians performed only in Negro nightclubs, and Gregory was no exception. But one evening the regular white comic at the Playboy Club in Chicago got sick, and Gregory took his place. It made Time magazine, and he was invited to perform on The Tonight Show, but he declined unless, after doing his stand-up act, he would be asked to sit down and talk with Jack Paar. The gamble worked, and Gregory became an instant celebrity, breaking through the color barrier with humor.

  Although he was getting a lot of publicity in the mainstream press, he requested to be interviewed in The Realist. Eventually we became friends and fellow demonstrators. Now he was performing at the Playboy Club, not as a substitute comic but as a star attraction. They had to supply me with a jacket, and a tie that was decorated all over with bunny symbols. Gregory was already onstage.

  “How could Columbus discover America,” he was asking the audience, “when the Indians were already here?”

  In his dressing room between shows, Gregory took out his wallet and showed me a tattered copy of his favorite poem, “If,” by Rudyard Kipling. I laughed and he looked offended, until I explained that I was laughing because it was also my favorite poem, and “the unforgiving minute” was my favorite poetic phrase. Meanwhile, in New York, a young stand-up comic found out where Jeanne and I lived and tried to convince her that I should interview him for The Realist. His name was Bill Cosby, and he wanted to prove that a Negro comedian didn’t have to talk about racism.

  Jeanne and I finally left the old Mad building so that we could work together at home. We moved into a duplex brownstone on East 18th Street. The entire side of one building on that block featured a fading advertisement for a cleanser personified by the Gold Dust Twins, a pair of little Negro boys. It had originally been painted right on the bricks.

  When Dick Gregory saw it, he said, “They ought to take that whole wall and preserve it in a museum somewhere.”

  In August, Jeanne and I went with some friends to the March on Washington. It was hot and crowded when we got there. Jeanne was a few months pregnant and extremely uncomfortable. All she really wanted to do was go to an air-conditioned movie. So, while Martin Luther King was delivering his most famous speech, we were alone in a theater, watching Bye Bye Birdie. Reverend King had a dream, but we were cool.

  Jeanne was the personification of sauciness. At John Francis Putnam’s outdoor Fourth of July party, she beckoned me into the bushes, pulled down her panties, and we screwed standing up, accompanied by fireworks and the smell of barbecue smoke.

  Putnam wanted to give us a housewarming gift. He had designed the word fuck in red-white-and-blue lettering emblazoned with stars and stripes. Now he needed a second word, a noun that would serve as an appropriate object for that verb. He suggested america, but that didn’t seem right to me. It certainly wasn’t an accurate representation of my feelings. I was well aware that I probably couldn’t publish The Realist in any other country. Besides, a poster saying fuck america lacked a certain sense of irony.

  There was at that time a severe anti-Communist hysteria burgeoning throughout the land. The attorney general of Arizona rejected the Communist party’s request for a place on the ballot because state law “prohibits official representation” for Communists and, in addition, “the subversive nature of your organization is even more clearly designated by the fact that you do not even include your zip code.”

  Alvin Dark, manager of the Giants, announced that “any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist.” And singer Pat Boone declared at the Greater New York Anti-Communism Rally in Madison Square Garden, “I would rather see my four daughters shot before my eyes than have them grow up in a Communist United States. I would rather see those kids blown into Heaven than taught into Hell by the Communists.”

  So I suggested communism as the second word, since the usual correlation between conservatism and prudishness would provide the incongruity that was missing. Putnam designed the word communism in red lettering emblazoned with hammers and sickles. Then he presented Jeanne and me with a patriotic poster which now proudly proclaimed fuck communism! —suitable for framing. I wanted to share this sentiment with Realist readers, but our photoengraver refused to make a metal plate, explaining, “We got strict orders from Washington not to do stuff like this.”

  I went to another engraver, who said no because they had been visited by the FBI after making a metal plate of a woman with pubic hair. So instead of publishing a miniature black-and-white version of the poster in The Realist, I offered full-size color copies by mail. And if the post office interfered, I would have to accuse them of being soft on Communism.

  The first person to buy a poster was an employee of Radio Free Europe. After a few days, the security people took it off his office wall. His employer explained that it was funny but he didn’t want women to see it. The fuck communism! poster was purchased by an Episcopalian priest, a mayor, an astronaut, by college groups for mock political conventions, by Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, and Joseph Heller, who sent posters out as Christmas gifts. Chicago disc jockey Dan Sorkin kept one in the front window of his home, just waiting for any Commie sympathizer to dare criticize him. Somebody gave a fuck communism! poster to Gus Hall, head of the Communist Party. He accepted it.

  “People have been saying that to me for years,” he laughed.

  In London the head of the UN mission to Ethiopia spotted a Playboy executive’s poster and commandeered it for his office in Addis Ababa. Playwright Arthur Cowan had one framed and shipped it to England with instructions that it be installed in his Rolls-Royce. Country Joe McDonald stuck one on his car bumper and almost got arrested by a confused traffic cop. Paul Jacobs brought a couple of posters to Washington and gave them to Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz and Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver, who kept the poster in a back room used it to beguile selected Peace Corps recruits.

  One subscriber bought twenty-five posters and asked me to send them to, among others, J. Edgar Hoover, the John Birch Society, and 1964 presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson—all with a personal note from me: “Dear So-and-So: A reader of ours thought you might get a chuckle out of the enclosed patriotic poster.” Senator Goldwater’s response to receiving a fuck communism! poster crystallized the generic spirit of political campaigns everywhere and forever:

 
; “Your comments and suggestions mean a great deal to me,” his form letter stated. “You may be sure that I will keep them in mind as the campaign progresses. I want you to know I appreciate your taking the time and trouble to write.”

  A couple who lived on a former ferry that was now docked at the houseboat community in Sausalito, California, stapled a fuck communism! poster to their floating home. One afternoon a sheriff’s captain marched down the gangway, climbed up the ferryboat, tore the poster down, and ripped it to shreds. He proceeded to arrest the couple for “outraging public decency.”

  Newspapers reporting the arrest described the poster as a “blunt anti-Communist sign” and “a colorful attack on Communism,” substituting asterisks or dashes for fuck. A jury was finally selected, but when the bailiff removed three teenage girls from the courtroom to spare their ears, the defense moved for a dismissal. The judge refused to grant this motion, but charges were dismissed before the case came to trial. The district attorney said that he had received assurances that the incident was “an isolated case and repetition is unlikely.”

  At a midwestern college, one graduating student held up a fuck communism! poster as his class was posing for the yearbook photograph. Campus officials found out and insisted that the word fuck be airbrushed out. But then the poster would read: communism! So that was airbrushed out too, and the yearbook ended up publishing a class photo that showed this particular student holding up a blank poster.

  Writer Robert Scheer was doing research for a booklet, How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam, to be published by the Fund for the Republic. He was frustrated because he wanted to witness firsthand what was going on in Southeast Asia, and they wouldn’t send him. Since The Realist had already sold a couple of thousand fuck communism! posters at a dollar each, I made out a check for $1,900, the price of a round-trip airline ticket. Scheer traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia, then wrote his seminal report. He also wrote an article for The Realist, titled “Academic Sin,” documenting the role of Michigan State University professors in the Diem dictatorship.

  Proceeds from another poster—originally a Realist cartoon depicting an anthropomorphic deity buggering Uncle Sam, with the legend one nation under god—were used to bail the artist, Frank Cieciorka, out of jail after he was arrested for voter registration work in Mississippi.

  In November, Dr. Spencer and his wife had Thanksgiving dinner with us. Jeanne told them how she had switched gynecologists mid-pregnancy because she wanted to have our baby the Lamaze way. It was not yet a trendy method. We warned our new obstetrician that if he delivered a boy, we weren’t sure whether we would allow him to be circumcised.

  When Jeanne was seven months pregnant, we went to a Happening at Café Au Go Go where nothing happened. She felt this was a ripoff, so she created her own Happening. She stood on the shoulders of Mort Gerberg and borrowed a huge, colorful Mardi Gras head that was hanging on a wall in the lobby. Later she noticed—in a calendar from a liquor store advising, “You don’t have to wait till Christmas”—that Enrico Rastelli Day was coming. He was a famous Italian juggler. So we held our Christmas party on December 19th that year. And since the Mardi Gras head looked like Enrico Rastelli must have looked, it went on top of the tree.

  On the afternoon of January 23, 1964, I had been planning to attend a conference sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation. Instead I ended up in a delivery room. Jeanne and I walked to the hospital, which was only a block away. She stopped to lean against a car while she had a contraction.

  “Listen,” I told her, “you don’t have to go through with this if you don’t want to.” It was my way of being supportive.

  Watching our baby being born was a profound and humbling experience. Jeanne was awake, alert, and laughing. She said that when the doctor brought forth the baby’s head, it felt like a simultaneous climax and withdrawal. Our baby didn’t even have to be slapped on the buttocks, because the trip through the birth canal was so quick there was no need to gasp for oxygen. She came out wailing. The doctor let us know indirectly that our baby was a girl.

  “Well,” he said, “you have one less decision to make.”

  We considered calling her Kay Sarah, as in qué serà, but instead we named her Holly, after the character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. Holly was, of course, breast-fed.

  “I finally found out what tits are really for,” Jeanne said.

  Holly’s shit smelled so sweet we wanted to bottle it, proud parents that we were. Three days after she was born, our monkeys had a litter of two, just like in the movies. Jeanne checked with the zoo and found out that it was extremely rare for marmosets to have offspring in captivity, and usually it would only be a single birth.

  We named the twins Wit and Half-Wit. We also had a dog named Clit. Jeanne claimed that she was officially registered with the American Kennel Club as Clitoris Humphrey. One day, Clit was running around with Lenny Bruce’s hypodermic in her mouth. Lenny tried to get it back, but Clit ran under the couch.

  “C’mere, you freaky dog!” Lenny yelled. “You better bring me that this minute!”

  While Lenny was staying with us, Holly had the hiccups, and Lenny did a running commentary, like a radio announcer:

  “We’re on the air. This is the fourteenth day of little Holly and her hiccuping. We’ve tried everything. We’ve got her tongue pulled out now. You sit with her for a while, Paul. God only knows. Poor little curly-headed darling.”

  When Jeanne was nursing Holly, Lenny averted his eyes. Jeanne teased him about his shyness.

  “But,” he said, “everybody knows that titties are dirty. That’s why you can’t show pictures of them.”

  “Except if they’re in atrocity photos,” Jeanne added.

  Later, in his performance at the Café Au Go Go, Lenny said, “If a titty is bloodied and maimed, it’s clean. But if the titty is pretty, it’s dirty. And that’s why you never find any atrocity photos at obscenity trials, with distended stomachs and ripped-up breasts.”

  That night, Lenny got busted for obscenity again.

  Lyle Stuart had originally helped me find a printer for the fuck communism! posters. They were supposed to say, at the bottom in small print, “Additional Copies Available from the Daughters of the American Revolution.” I wasn’t afraid of a lawsuit, figuring that the D.A.R. would have to acknowledge the fuck communism! posters before they could disclaim them, but Mary Louise Stuart suggested that I change it to “Mothers of the American Revolution” and I liked that better.

  John Francis Putnam designed a patriotic Mothers of the American Revolution letterhead, which appeared to be the stationery of a pressure group, so I could use it as a means of getting information that might otherwise be held back from The Realist. The first such opportunity was inspired by this news item: “Catholic travelers on Trans-World Airlines may eat meat on Fridays and on other days of abstinence under a special dispensation granted the airline by the Holy See in Rome.”

  Mothers of the American Revolution wrote to every airline: “We would like to know if the Vatican has granted special dispensation to Roman Catholics traveling on [your airline] in regard to abstaining from eating meat on Friday—and if not, why not?”

  Typical response: “We are happy to report that Japan Air Lines passengers are granted a dispensation from the law of abstinence so that on Fridays and all other days when that law pertains, Catholics may partake of any meat courses served on board JAL flights. I hope we may have the pleasure some day of welcoming the ladies of your organization aboard a Japan Airlines Jet Courier.”

  Mothers of the American Revolution also wrote to every cigarette-paper company to find out how they felt about manufacturing a product that was used for illegal purposes.

  When I had been working for Lyle Stuart, Ralph Ginzburg was preparing An Unhurried View of Erotica. I recommended that Lyle turn down the opportunity to be copublisher, which he did. Nevertheless, he guided Ginzburg through the book’s publication—finding
him a typesetter, a printer, a distributor, a mailing house, and when the post office seized Ginzburg’s mailing piece, Lyle sent attorney Martin Scheiman to Washington to obtain release of the mailing.

  One day, Lyle was giving Ginzburg help on his ad campaign.

  “I’m publishing a book by Albert Ellis called Sex Without Guilt,” Lyle said. “When you book some of your radio and TV things, could you suggest him as a fellow guest?”

  “But the topic will be pornography.”

  “Ellis is a pornography expert. He’s testified in many trials.”

  “I can’t do that,” Ginzburg said. “What’s in it for me?”

  Thus did Ralph Ginzburg make Lyle Stuart’s permanent shit-list in a single bound. Years later, on the basis of his mail-order book success, Ginzburg went on to publish Eros magazine. He wrote to the postmaster of Intercourse, Pennsylvania: “After a great deal of deliberation, we have decided that it might be advantageous for our direct mail to bear the postmark of your city.”

  The response: “I acknowledge receipt of your recent letter concerning the bulk mailings. I must inform you that our office is very small and our equipment and facilities are limited. So, in view of this, I feel we are not able to handle mail in such a volume.”

  Ginzburg made the same request to the postmaster of Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, and received essentially the same response. Eros was, however, granted a bulk-mailing permit from Middlesex, New Jersey. In five months more than five million subscription invitations were mailed.