But now Larry Flynt was having a religious vision on his Lear Commander jet—which, when it belonged to Elvis Presley, had been painted red, white, and blue. Flynt purchased the plane for $1.1 million and had it painted pink. Up in the air with Ruth Carter Stapleton, he saw Jesus Christ together with a man calling himself Paul, who was laughing heartily. Flynt felt a warm, powerful sensation. There was a medicinal taste in his mouth. His entire body was tingling. He fell to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer to Jesus.
It was in this context that Larry Flynt was converted to born-again Christianity by the president’s sister. It just seemed too bizarre to be true. Certainly there was suspicion at the White House as to Flynt’s motivation, but there were also those who thought that Reverend Stapleton wanted Flynt to turn her fantasy of a Dallas religious center into a reality. But Flynt was putting out a tangible product every month, by which the sincerity of his conversion might be judged, so the intriguing question was: If he continued to publish Hustler, how could it possibly be changed?
At the time, I was writing a column which was syndicated to various alternative weeklies. Specifically I was working on my “Predictions for 1978,” and I led off with this one: “Since Larry Flynt has been converted to born-again Christianity by Ruth Carter Stapleton, the new Hustler magazine will feature a special Scratch ’n’ Sniff Virgin Mary.”
Larry Flynt wanted me to write a profile of Lenny Bruce. He considered Lenny to be a satirical prophet. He’d recently read How to Talk Dirty and Influence People—which Lenny had ended with, “My friend Paul Krassner once asked me what I’ve been influenced by in my work,” followed by a montage of cultural influences. Before I could begin writing the article, I was invited to Hustler’s 1977 Christmas party in Columbus, Ohio. They would put me up at a hotel, there would be a prepaid round-trip ticket, and I would be picked up at the airport.
But I didn’t know what to wear. I owned one pair of jeans, torn at the knees and backside. I had simply worn them out. This was before people paid extra to have fashion designers cut holes in their new jeans before they wore them. I could’ve worn my tattered jeans, but I didn’t want to flaunt my poverty. Instead, I borrowed $15 from my friend Scoop Nisker, KSAN news commentator, and bought a new pair. I didn’t know that there would be an official dress code at the Hustler Christmas party—“Men: Jackets or Shirt and tie. Women: Dresses or Pants Suits. No Jeans.” Otherwise I might have worn my tattered jeans just to be ornery.
The party was being held in some kind of union hall. There were meatballs which you had to impale on a toothpick and then dip in tomato sauce, but there were no napkins, so everybody was standing in a bent-over position to avoid dripping tomato sauce onto their good clothes while they ate their meatballs. That was a moot problem for me, since I was on the fourth day of a juice fast. Then I met Larry Flynt for the first time.“Whattaya doin’?” he asked.
“Stand-up comedy, now and then. I have a question for you, about your conversion. Do you believe that Christianity is the one and only true spiritual path?”
He answered, “I believe that Jesus was not a more important teacher than Buddha, and that neither Jesus nor Buddha is more important than any individual.”
Dick Gregory was at the party, and Flynt asked each of us to perform, but first he would take the microphone himself. And so it came to pass that Larry Flynt, looking like a slick gambler, wearing a maroon jacket with velvet lapels, would stand and deliver unto his assembled employees, in a Kentucky hillbilly twang and rhythm, what I christened “The Sermon on the Mount of Venus”:When Hustler moves to the West Coast we’re gonna take Ohio magazine offices, and we’re gonna be turning this into a daycare center which will be paid for by the company, so any of you females that have children, I don’t think that you should leave them with babysitters, I think you should bring them into the daycare center, and we’ll have professional people there to take care of ’em. I think you should spend lunch hours with your children, and I think you should spend your morning breaks and your afternoon breaks with your children because they need you. They need the kind of love and affection and cuddling and attention that they don’t necessarily get from a babysitter . . .
The first publisher’s statement that I do under my borned-again theory, I intend to dress up as a baby with a diaper on and put a pacifier in my mouth and get in a crib and let a photographer take my picture, and then I’m gonna write about what happens when you become born-again. You see, everybody thinks that you get a little flaky. [subdued laughter] You know [more laughter]—everybody. Also you know [laughter increases ]—will you people please shut the fuck up so I can talk—and that’s the last time. I’m gonna put everybody out of here that don’t keep their mouth shut till I finish . . .
I’m happy to be able to announce tonight that Ruth Carter Stapleton is gonna allow Flynt Distributing Company to distribute her new magazine, The Christian Woman. We’re also gonna be taking on National Screw. We’re gonna be distributing a health magazine that Dick Gregory is gonna be publishing. Now, with Hustler, I am getting ready to write my last publisher’s statement, and the new publisher of Hustler is gonna be a fellow by the name of Paul Krassner. And I’m starting Paul off at $90,000 a year. If he does a good job, I’ll give him a raise. Now, he’s gonna have all kinds of excuses why he can’t take the job, but he’s not gonna have too much of a choice . . .
This was the first that I had heard of it. Suddenly I felt dizzy. Maybe it was from my four-day fast. Could I have hallucinated what I thought I had just heard? Very subtly I flapped my arms like wings, but I remained standing instead of flying, so I knew that this was really happening. I was in a daze while Flynt talked. Then came my turn. It had been twenty-five years since I performed at the Mad Christmas party, but my déjà vu was overshadowed by a slight state of shock. I managed to speak on automatic pilot:Now there’s a few things I have to think over, because when I first heard about Larry’s conversion, I imagined the Martians coming to see Hustler magazine, and when you come from Mars you have very little conditioning to overcome so you look at stuff with like a child’s eye, and you open up this magazine and, “Aha! Earth women trying to turn themselves inside out—and succeeding.” So I’ve looked at Hustler’s pink, and I thought, well, maybe they use rouge, that’s it. And they must use Crazy Glue to keep that outer labia stuck to the thighs there.
One of the photographers got some Crazy Glue stuck in his fingers when he was arranging a model and couldn’t get his thumb and forefinger apart. So Larry fired him because he couldn’t operate the camera with maximum efficiency. But then he got born-again, and as an act of Christian charity he hired this guy back again. Not as a photographer, but as a roach clip. He just goes around from desk to desk.
I’m looking forward to a Scratch ’n’ Sniff Mary Magdalene. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost go to a gay sauna bath. New tricks you can do with your rosary beads. Anyway, it’s gonna be interesting to see how the change comes about in the magazine. I’m pretty jaded, but my mind got blown when I heard about Larry’s conversion, because I figured either it’s a scam or it’s sincere, but either way it’s real, because he said you are what you think you are and I’ve always said you are what you pretend to be. But it becomes the same thing anyway.
I mean I know one guy who got out of the army by saying “quack, quack” every time somebody talked to him. An officer would come up and say, “Attention!” And the guy’d go, “Quack, quack.” And he would keep doing that until they finally had to get rid of him because they know anybody with that much determination ain’t gonna stay and fight their war for them, or would probably shoot a sergeant on the wrong side. But once that guy got out of the Army, he was still saying “quack, quack” to people. See, it stays with you. So it doesn’t matter if he was faking it or if it was real, because the “quack, quack” was real when he didn’t have to do it.
So, there are two factors in my decision. One—about cigarettes—I was pleased to see that anti-cigarette
ad on the back cover of Hustler. I’m more offended by seeing ads for cigarettes in magazines than pictures of vaginas, because one kills and the other gives life—and I think that’s an important difference.
And the other thing, in Larry’s conversion, he didn’t put Jesus above Buddha and he didn’t put Buddha or Jesus above any individual. So, as long as religion is going in the direction of liberation rather than control, then it’s a healthy thing. So I guess I’ll accept—since you made the offer publicly, I’ll accept publicly [loud applause]. And I’d like to give a new slogan to the magazine: “Out of the toilet, onto the crucifix!” Now, in my fresh capacity as publisher of Hustler, I proclaim my first rule: At next year’s Christmas party, everyone will be required to wear jeans.
People started coming up to me and shaking my hand and saying, “Congratulations.” I was seeing this whole scene through a dreamlike haze. I had the sensation of having been thrust onto a movie screen, except that I could feel the flesh of their hands. Before, I had been wondering how Hustler would change, and now it turned out that I was the answer to my own question. What had irony wrought? For Larry Flynt to bring me in as redeeming social value was an offer too absurd to refuse.
He asked me if I had gotten anything to eat yet.
“No, thanks, I’ve been fasting for a few days.”
“Oh really?” He seemed intrigued. “Why you been fasting?”
“Well, because I wanted to be real clearheaded when I got here. I was curious to see if you were a con artist or not. And you are. And you’re good.”
He hesitated for just a split second. Then he smiled and said softly, “I’m the best.”
On Thanksgiving Day, Dick Gregory had been arrested in front of the White House for protesting the lack of human rights in South Africa. Larry Flynt had a premonition that there would be an assassination attempt on Gregory. Flynt contacted him a couple of weeks later, and they became friends. Gregory was now staying at Flynt’s mansion in Columbus, helping him change to a vegetarian diet. Flynt had already taken off forty pounds. On the day before the Christmas party, Gregory was in the middle of giving himself an enema when Flynt walked in.
According to Gregory, “Larry said, ‘Let me tell you about this fantastic guy I’ve got comin’ out, and I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet but I just wanna talk with him.’ And I said, ‘Well, who is it?’ He said, ‘Paul Krassner.’ And I just fell out, and said, ‘Are you serious? He’s one of the hippest minds in the whole world.’ Then he came back and said, ‘How long you been knowin’ him?’ and I told him, ‘All through the sixties,’ you know. And I said it was a fantastic idea.”
Of course, not everybody felt that way. A corporate executive at the party grabbed me by the collar and said, threateningly, “You’re exploiting a very sick man.” I didn’t know how long I would last as publisher of Hustler, so when editor Bruce David showed me around the next morning, I began exercising my power immediately. The cover of the April 1978 issue—the one that would not feature a woman—was scheduled to have a teddy bear wearing a negligee. I changed it to an Easter bunny nailed to a crucifix, with a basket of painted eggs toppled over in the foreground, and assigned a staffer to write a piece on “The Commercialization of Easter.”
I also went through Larry Flynt’s publisher’s statement and removed every masculine reference to God. That afternoon, Larry brought me into his office. I didn’t know what to expect, but he said that he really liked my cover idea, and he agreed with me that God is genderless. “You know,” he said, “I’ve always been of a philosophical bent.” Then he gestured toward the wall. “You see these walls? I could make them come tumbling down by sheer will power.”
“Oh, boy, this is gonna be some job.”
“But I don’t wanna misuse my power.”
“Oh, shit, why doesn’t anybody ever wanna misuse their power for me? C’mon, Larry, please, just once . . .”
Flying back to San Francisco, I decided—perhaps foolishly—not to ask him for a contract. If indeed I was exploiting a very sick man, at least I wanted him to be able to fire me as frivolously as he had hired me. Flynt told the Los Angeles Times, “I wanted someone Christ-like. I always felt Lenny Bruce was Christ-like. And Paul was closer to Lenny than Christ. Maybe I can provide Lenny with the last laugh.”
On December 23, while I was spending the Christmas holidays with the Kesey family in Oregon, Larry Flynt’s brother Jimmy and others were making arrangements to have Flynt locked up and declared insane. They were concerned about his behavior ever since his conversion—Flynt had been flying back and forth across the country, making speeches and deals, buying newspapers and real estate, attending religious revivals and subsidizing religious groups—and they convinced a probate judge to order his arrest and detention for a sanity hearing, not such an easy task since Flynt traveled with bodyguards.
Although the judge personally informed the sheriff, and plans for this legal kidnapping were put into effect, the order was withdrawn without explanation on Christmas Eve. Flynt called me in Oregon and invited me to the Bahamas for New Year’s. Kesey’s daughter, Shannon, was giving him a haircut, stretching out each individual coil and then clipping off the end of it while Kesey gave me his farewell blessing: “Christ’s plan has a place for pink. All you have to do is lace it with love . . .”
Suddenly I found myself parasailing over Nassau Beach, harnessed to a long rope with a parachute attached to a motorboat. I was sailing high up enough that when I urinated into the air, my entire bladder was emptied before the stream of piss hit the ocean.
My “Predictions for 1978” had been published, and I gave a copy to Flynt in his hotel suite. “A Scratch ’n’ Sniff Virgin Mary,” he mused. “Hey, that’s a great idea. We’ll have a portrait of the Virgin Mary, and when you scratch the spot, it’ll smell like tomato juice.” Then he wanted to know who would be a good person to write an article for Hustler that would expose the pope as gay. I suggested Gore Vidal, who had already stated in an interview that Cardinal Spellman was gay. So much for our first editorial conference.
Dick Gregory was in the kitchen, diligently preparing a health drink for Larry—this must have been the birth of his Bahamian Diet powder—and he was also feeding unfiltered conspiracy theories to his eager student.
Althea Flynt was there too. She was a combination of Evita and The Beverly Hillbillies. When she was eight, her father murdered her mother, her grandfather, her mother’s best friend, and then he killed himself. Althea was the perfect wife for Larry. When they met, she was a seventeen-year-old go-go dancer making $90 a week, jaded with street smarts. After they were married, she continued to bring home other women for him to fuck. And now she was making $500,000 a year.
Althea had been hostile to me at the Christmas party, but we became friends in the Bahamas, and she confided to me how upset she was that so many professional Christians were all lining up for money when Larry became so generous after his born-again experience. “God may have walked into his life,” she said, “but twenty million dollars a year walked out.”
Larry had never seen The Realist, but on New Year’s Eve he offered to start publishing it again—with a staff. I accepted, as long as he agreed that I would have complete control of the contents. At midnight, we all went out on the dock and stood in a misty drizzle as Dick Gregory uttered truly eloquent prayers for each of us. When he finished, Althea whined, like Lucy in the Peanuts strip, “My hair’s getting all wet.” It was her way of saying “amen.”
On New Year’s Day, we were sitting in the sand, just relaxing. Larry had bought a paperback novel by Gore Vidal in the hotel store, but first he was reading the Sunday New York Times and worrying about the implications of juries with only six members. A moment later he was rubbing suntan lotion on my back.
“I’ll bet Hugh Hefner never did this for you,” he said.
In 1967, at the War Is Over demonstration in Los Angeles, police had forced thousands of protesters back into a grassy area where now stood C
entury City, an architectural phoenix rising out of the ashes of the peace movement. From my thirty-eighth-floor office in one of the twin towers, I could stare out a large plastic window which couldn’t be opened, at the view of a restricted country club below. I found a tiny apartment in Beverly Hills for only $235 a month, and walked to work every day. I was the Lone Pedestrian.
Since Mother’s Day falls in May, the idea was to have a nude pregnant woman on the cover of the May 1978 issue—another Hustler first—and, on the inside, an article, “Motherhood—Celebration of Life!” We found a pregnant model, and the photos combined beauty and dignity. There was a slight problem, though—you could see one of her nipples. An unwritten agreement existed among the publishers of men’s magazines that human female nipples shall not be clearly visible on a cover, or else wholesalers were likely to refuse to distribute the magazine to retail outlets.
“But this is insane,” I protested. “I mean, when that woman gives birth, there’ll be no protuberances to nurse her baby with.”
Yet I was learning by osmosis to accept certain arbitrary rules as the net in this pornographic tennis game. An erect penis must not be shown. Working hours are from 9 am to 5:30. Semen must not be shown. Spring water must not be used to make coffee. Penetration must not be shown. If a call is interrupted by Larry Flynt’s secretary, you must hang up immediately. Oral-genital contact must not be shown. This world of pornography was another separate reality that Carlos Castaneda never dreamed of. (Castaneda was, of course, one of the actors who got a blow job in Deep Throat.)
An Italian magazine, Playman, had published full frontal nude photos of Jacqueline Kennedy taken on a Greek island by the grace of a telephoto lens. Lyle Stuart brought the issue from Italy and gave it to Al Goldstein, who reprinted the photos in his raunchy tabloid, Screw. Then Larry Flynt published a five-page spread in Hustler. But now he wanted to put the naked Jackie on the cover with a banner headline: Did Onassis Kill Kennedy? Was Jackie Worth It? On the inside, readers whose curiosity had been aroused would find “The Gemstone Papers,” a conspiratorial amalgam of facts and apocrypha.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 36
