Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  I glanced around at the various Mafia figures sitting at their tables, wondering if they had killed anybody. Then I remembered what Jerry Garcia had said about evil. So these guys might be executioners, but they were also victims. The spaghetti was still wiggling on my plate, but then I realized it wasn’t really spaghetti, it was actually worms in tomato sauce.

  The other people at my table were all pretending not to notice.

  Each tablet of Owsley White Lightning contained three hundred micrograms of LSD. I had purchased a large enough supply from Dick Alpert to finance his trip to India. The day before he left to meditate for six months, we sat in a restaurant discussing the concept of choiceless awareness while trying to decide what to order on the menu.

  In India, he gave his guru three tablets, and apparently nothing happened.

  Alpert’s postcard beckoned, “Come fuck the universe with me.”

  Instead, I stayed tripping in America, where I kept my entire stash of acid in a bank vault deposit box.

  LSD was influencing music, painting, spirituality, and the stock market. Tim Leary once let me listen in on a call from a Wall Street broker thanking him for turning him onto acid because it gave him the courage to sell short. Leary had a certain sense of pride about the famous folks he and his associates had introduced to the drug.

  “But,” he told me, “I consider Otto Preminger one of our failures.”

  I first met Preminger in 1960 while I was conducting a panel on censorship for Playboy. He had defied Hollywood’s official seal of approval by refusing to change the script of The Moon Is Blue. He wouldn’t take out the word virgin.

  At the end of our interview, he asked, “Ven you tronscripe dis, vill you vix op my Henglish?”

  “Oh, sure,” I replied quickly. “Of course.”

  “Vy? Vot’s drong viz my Henglish?”

  I saw Otto Preminger again in 1967. He was making a movie called Skidoo, starring Jackie Gleason as a retired criminal. Preminger told me he had originally intended the role for Frank Sinatra.

  Skidoo was pro-acid propaganda thinly disguised as a comedy adventure. However, LSD was not why the FBI was annoyed with the film. Rather, according to Gleason’s FBI files, the FBI objected to one scene in the script where a file cabinet is stolen from an FBI building. Gleason was later approved as a special FBI contact in the entertainment business.

  One of the characters in Skidoo was a Mafia chieftain named God. Screenwriter Bill Cannon had suggested Groucho Marx for the part. Preminger said it wasn’t a good idea, but since they were already shooting and that particular character was needed on the set in three days, Groucho would be playing God after all. During one scene, Preminger was screaming instructions at him.

  Groucho yelled back, “Are you drunk?”

  I had dinner with him that evening. He was concerned about the script of Skidoo because it pretty much advocated LSD, which he had never tried, but he was curious. Moreover, he felt a certain responsibility to his young audience not to steer them wrong, so could I possibly get him some pure stuff and would I care to accompany him on a trip? I did not play hard to get. We arranged to ingest those little white tablets one afternoon at the home of an actress in Beverly Hills.

  Groucho was especially interested in the countercultural aspects of LSD. I mentioned a couple of incidents that particularly tickled him, and his eyes sparkled with delight. One was about how, on Haight Street, runaway youngsters, refugees from their own families, had stood outside a special tourist bus—guided by a driver “trained in sociological significance”—and they held mirrors up to the cameras pointing at them from the windows, so that the tourists would get photos of themselves trying to take photos.

  The other was about the day that LSD became illegal. In San Francisco, at precisely two o’clock in the afternoon, a cross-fertilization of mass protest and tribal celebration had taken place, as several hundred young people simultaneously swallowed tabs of acid while the police stood by helplessly.

  “Internal possession wasn’t against the law,” I explained to Groucho.

  “And they trusted their friends more than they trusted the government,” he said. “I like that.”

  We had a period of silence and a period of listening to music. I was accustomed to playing rock and roll while tripping, but the record collection at this house consisted entirely of classical music and Broadway show albums. First, we listened to the “Bach Cantata No. 7.”

  “I’m supposed to be Jewish,” Groucho said, “but I was seeing the most beautiful visions of Gothic cathedrals. Do you think Bach knew he was doing that?”

  “I don’t know. I was seeing beehives and honeycombs myself.”

  Later, we were listening to the score of a musical comedy, Fanny. There was one song called “Welcome Home,” where the lyrics go something like, “Welcome home, says the clock,” and the chair says, “Welcome home,” and so do various other pieces of furniture. Groucho started acting out each line, as though he were actually being greeted by the clock, the chair, and the rest of the furniture. He was like a child, charmed by his own ability to respond to the music that way.

  There was a bowl of fruit on the dining room table. During a snack, he said, “I never thought eating a nice juicy plum would be the biggest thrill of my life.”

  Then we talked about the sexual revolution. Groucho asked, “Have you ever laid two ladies together?” I told him about the time that I was being interviewed by a couple of students from a Catholic girls’ school. Suddenly Sheila Campion, The Realist’s Scapegoat, and Marcia Ridge, the Shit-On—she had given herself that title because “what could be lower than a Scapegoat?”—walked out of their office totally nude.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Paul,” said Sheila, “but it’s Wednesday—time for our weekly orgy.”

  The interviewers left in a hurry. Sheila and Marcia led me up the stairs to my loft bed, and we had a delicious threesome. It had never happened before and it would never happen again.

  At one point in our conversation, Groucho somehow got into a negative space. He was equally cynical about institutions, such as marriage—“legal quicksand”—and individuals, such as Lyndon Johnson, whom he referred to as “that potato-head.”

  Eventually, I asked, “What gives you hope?”

  He thought for a moment. Then he just said one word: “People.”

  I told him about the sketch I had written for Steve Allen, “Unsung Heroes of Television,” with the man whose job it was on You Bet Your Life to wait for the secret word to be said so that he could drop the duck down, and Groucho told me about one of his favorite contestants on the show.

  “He was an elderly gentleman with white hair, but quite a chipper fellow. I asked him what he did to retain his sunny disposition. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Groucho,’ he says, ‘every morning I get up and I make a choice to be happy that day.’”

  Groucho was holding onto his cigar for a long time, but he never smoked it, he only sniffed it occasionally. “Everybody has their own Laurel and Hardy,” he mused. “A miniature Laurel and Hardy, one on each shoulder. Your little Oliver Hardy bawls you out—he says, ‘Well, this is a fine mess you’ve gotten us into.’ And your little Stan Laurel gets all weepy—‘Oh, Ollie, I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry, I did the best I could.’”

  Later, when Groucho started chuckling to himself, I hesitated to interrupt his reverie, but I had to ask, “What struck you funny?”

  “I was thinking about this movie, Skidoo,” he said. “I mean some of it is just plain ridiculous. This hippie inmate puts a letter he got, which is soaked in LSD, into the water supply of the prison, and suddenly everybody gets completely reformed. There’s a prisoner who says, ‘Oh, gosh, now I don’t have to be a rapist anymore!’ But it’s also sophisticated in its own way. I like how Jackie Gleason, the character he plays, accepts the fact that he’s not the biological father of his daughter.”

  “Oh, really? That sounds like the ultimate ego loss.”

  “But I’
m really getting a big kick out of playing somebody named God like a dirty old man. You wanna know why?”

  “Typecasting?”

  “No, no—it’s because—do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?”

  “Always?”

  “If they’re not, then it’s a misuse of your power to make people laugh.” His eyes began to tear. “That’s funny,” he said. “I’m not even sad.”

  Then he went to urinate. When he came back, he said, “You know, everybody is waiting for miracles to happen. But the whole human body is a goddamn miracle.”

  He recalled Otto Preminger telling him about his own response to taking LSD and then he mimicked Preminger’s accent: “I saw tings, bot I did not zee myself.” Groucho was looking in a mirror on the dining room wall, and he said, “Well, I can see myself, but I still don’t understand what the hell I’m doing here . . .”

  A week later, Groucho told me that members of the Hog Farm commune who were extras in the movie had turned him on with marijuana on the set of Skidoo.

  “You know,” I said, “my mother once warned me that LSD would lead to pot.”

  “Well, your mother was right.”

  When Skidoo was released, Tim Leary saw it, and he cheerfully admitted, “I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He’s much hipper than me.”

  I met Otto Preminger again in 1969, when we were both guests on The Merv Griffin Show, guest-hosted by Orson Bean.

  Deadpan comedian Jackie Vernon was also a guest on the show. He reacted to my long hair. “Why don’t you take a bath?” he said. Nobody had ever asked me that on network TV before. Later, I would have a Monday-morning-quarterback session with George Carlin, who applied a kind of aikido to life as well as to comedy, turning negative energy into positive energy.

  He suggested, “You should’ve said, ‘Why, thank you, Jackie, I hadn’t considered that.’”

  But when it happened on TV, I was caught off guard and just kept silent. So did the audience. The tension was broken by Preminger.

  “Dot iss duh seekness ov our society, dis stereotypical ottitood.”

  Then the audience applauded, and we went to commercial.

  Over dinner, Preminger told me that his father was the equivalent of the attorney general in Austria before Hitler’s conquest. And he said that someday he wanted to direct a film about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  “They were lynch victims of the Cold War,” he said. “The law says spies can be executed during wartime. If Eisenhower had commuted their sentences to life, a less hysterical review of their case could later have resulted in their freedom.”

  Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver went underground to avoid being tried for a shootout in Oakland, and I mentioned on the show that I had interviewed him, which wasn’t true, although Stew Albert was in fact trying to arrange such an interview. That week, a pair of FBI agents showed up at my loft. They wanted to know where Eldridge Cleaver was. I refused to let them in.

  “Why should I cooperate with you?” I asked. “The FBI continually hassles people who haven’t broken the law.”

  “Come on, now. That’s the FBI. We’re individuals.”

  “I don’t believe it—this is just great—here’s the FBI warning me about the danger of guilt by association.”

  In 1971, during an interview with Flash magazine, Groucho Marx said, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon’s assassination.” Yet he wasn’t subsequently arrested for threatening the life of a president. In view of the indictment against Black Panther David Hilliard for using similar rhetoric, I wrote to the Justice Department to find out the status of their case against Groucho, and received this reply:Dear Mr. Krassner:

  Responding to your inquiry, the Supreme Court has held that Title 18 U.S.C., Section 871, prohibits only “true” threats. It is one thing to say that “I (or we) will kill Richard Nixon” when you are the leader of an organization which advocates killing people and overthrowing the Government; it is quite another to utter the words which are attributed to Mr. Marx, an alleged comedian. It was the opinion of both myself and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles (where Marx’s words were alleged to have been uttered) that the latter utterance did not constitute a “true” threat.

  Very Truly Yours,

  James L. Browning, Jr.

  United States Attorney

  It would later be revealed that the FBI had published pamphlets in the name of the Black Panthers, advocating the killing of cops, and that an FBI file on Groucho Marx had indeed been started, and he actually was labeled a “national security risk.” I phoned Groucho to tell him the good news.

  “I deny everything,” he said, “because I lie about everything.” He paused, then added, “And everything I deny is a lie.”

  The last time I saw Groucho was in 1976. He was speaking at the Los Angeles Book Fair. He looked frail and unsmiling, but he was alert and irascible as ever. He took questions from the audience.

  “Are you working on a film now?”

  “No, I’m answering silly questions.”

  “What are your favorite films?”

  “Duck Soup. Night at the Opera.”

  “What do you think about Richard Nixon?”

  “He should be in jail.”

  “Is humor an important issue in the presidential campaign?”

  “Get your finger out of your mouth.”

  “What do you dream about?”

  “Not about you.”

  “What inspired you to write?”

  “A fountain pen. A piece of paper.”

  Then I called out a question: “What gives you the most optimism?”

  I expected him to say “people” again, but this time he said, “The world.”

  There was hardly any standing room left in the auditorium, yet one fellow was sitting on the floor rather than take the aisle seat occupied by a large Groucho Marx doll.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE PARTS LEFT OUT OF THE KENNEDY BOOK

  John F. Kennedy had a reputation for being a real womanizer. Sweet young models asked not what their country could do for them as they were frisked by Secret Service agents—in a lingering fashion—because the president was a busy fellow and had no time for foreplay. Early in 1962 I began hearing stories about JFK, ranging from a Newport socialite who bore twins by him, to a blonde showgirl who landed in a helicopter on the White House lawn.

  Then I heard a rumor that he had been married previous to Jackie Kennedy, and I got a tip that there was a genealogy that actually listed the alleged previous marriage. I decided to check it out as a matter of routine procedure, and sure enough, The Blauvelt Family Genealogy, published in 1957, had the following listing on page 884, under Eleventh Generation:(12,427) DURIE (Kerr) MALCOLM (Isabel O. Cooper [her mother] 11,304). We have no birth date. She was born Kerr, but took the name of her stepfather. She first married Firmin Desloge IV. They were divorced, and she married, third, John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England. There were no children of the second or third marriages.

  That rumor had now become the basis of a valid news report. I called up the White House for the first time in my life.

  “May I speak to President Kennedy, please?”

  “Who’s calling the president?”

  “Paul Krassner of The Realist magazine in New York City.”

  “The president is in conference right now.”

  “Can I speak to [Press Secretary] Pierre Salinger?”

  “I’m sorry, he’s tied up right now.”

  “How about [Salinger’s assistant] Andrew Hatcher?”

  “Mr. Hatcher isn’t here right now. Is there anybody else who could help you?”

  I settled for a lower echelon employee and asked about the genealogy.

  “Well, it’s completely untrue.”

  “Could you elaborate on that at all?”

  “You want a real statement, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “This is n
ot for publication, but for guidance. There are three mistakes in that. One is that she was never married to the president. The second is that they have the two husbands in the wrong order. And the third is that since 1947 she’s been married to a Mr. Thomas Shevlin. She’s been living in Palm Beach and Long Island.”

  “Is there any reason that it’s not for publication? Because, you know, the rumor has been going around. It’s the most frequently asked question at the Daily News Information Bureau.”

  “You just can’t say ‘Mr. Salinger said’ or you can’t say ‘The White House said’ either. But you can go on and quote what I just gave you. You could say ‘A reliable source said.’”

  I learned that supporters of Barry Goldwater had been systematically spreading the rumor, but Goldwater told friends that he believed the Democrats were behind it in order to discredit the Republicans.

  The wedding between Durie Malcolm and John Kennedy was supposed to have taken place in Oyster Bay in March 1947. The compilers of the genealogy wouldn’t speak to me, but I finally reached Durie Malcolm by phone. She had nothing to say though. She had married her third—or fourth—husband, Thomas Shevlin, on July 11, 1947. On their marriage certificate, where it called for the number of times previously married, she wrote only one and listed Fermin Desloge.

  When word got out that The Realist was going to publish the item, I was contacted by newspapers, magazines, wire services, radio and TV news departments, and various foreign correspondents. Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson had been ready to run it a year earlier. Instead, his assistant, Jack Anderson, sent a confidential memo to all editors who carried the column.