One Hand Jerking

by Paul Krassner

  And then there was Robert Scheer. He had been researching 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 first-hand what was happening in Southeast Asia, but they wouldn’t send him. Since The Realist had already sold a couple of thousand FUCK COMMUNISM! posters at a dollar each, I was able to give him a check for $1900, the price of a round-trip airline ticket. He traveled to Vietnam and Cambodia, then wrote his seminal report.

  Four months after the assassination of John Kennedy, William Manchester was authorized by the family to write a book, The Death of a President. Jackie Kennedy submitted to ten hours of intimacy with his tape recorder. Two years later, she insisted on cutting material that was too personal for publication. Bobby Kennedy sent a telegram to Evan Thomas, editor-in-chief at Harper & Row, suggesting that the book “should neither be published nor serialized.” Thomas wrote to Kennedy advisers, asking for help in revising the manuscript, which he felt was “gratuitously and tastelessly insulting” to Lyndon Johnson.

  Bennett Cerf of Random House read an unedited manuscript and said it contained “unbelievable things that happened after the assassination.” Jackie filed a lawsuit, and in 1967 the case was settled out of court. Harper & Row made the requested deletions. So did Look magazine, which had purchased serialization rights for $665,000. I tried unsuccessfully to obtain a copy of the original manuscript, so I was forced to write “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” myself, imitating Manchester’s style.

  It began with a true news item. During the Democratic primaries, LBJ attacked his opponent on the grounds that his father, Joseph Kennedy, was a Nazi sympathizer when he was U.S. ambassador to England, from 1938-1940. Then I segued into stories—such as JFK’s affair with Marilyn Monroe and LBJ’s incredibly crude behavior—that media folks knew about, but not the general public. Next came made-up anecdotes that reeked of verisimilitude, all leading up to a few paragraphs that plunged The Realist into the depths of its notoriety:

  “During that tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the assassination, Jackie inadvertently walked in on Johnson as he was standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling. . . .

  “Of course, President Johnson is often given to inappropriate response—witness the puzzled timing of his smiles when he speaks of grave matters—but we must also assume that Mrs. Kennedy had been traumatized that day and her perception was likely to have been colored by the tragedy. This state of shock must have underlain an incident on Air Force One which this writer conceives to be delirium, but which Mrs. Kennedy insists she actually saw.

  “‘I’m telling you this for the historical record,’ she said, ‘so that people a hundred years from now will know what I had to go through. . . . That man was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he’d learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realized—there is only one way to say this—he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new president.’

  “[Handwritten marginal notes: 1. Check with [Warren Commission head] Rankin—did secret autosy show semen in throat wound? 2. Is this simply necrophilia, or was LBJ trying to change entry wound from grassy knoll into exit wound from Book Depository by enlarging it?]”

  My printer refused to print that issue of The Realist, and I spent a couple of months trying to find a new printer. I never labeled an article as satire, in order not to deprive readers of the pleasure of discerning for themselves whether something was the truth or a satirical extension of the truth. The most significant thing about “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” was its widespread acceptance as truth—if only for a fleeting moment—by intelligent, literate people, from an ACLU official to a PeabodyAward-winning journalist to members of the intelligence community.

  Daniel Ellsberg said, “Maybe it was because I wanted to believe it so badly.”

  My favorite response came from Merriman Smith, the UPI correspondent who always ended White House press conferences with the traditional “Thank you, Mr. President.” He wrote that I had published “filth attributed to someone of national stature supposedly describing something Johnson allegedly did. The incident, of course, never took place. . . .”

  That issue reached a circulation of 100,000, with an estimated pass-on readership of a few million. In 1974, however, I ran out of money and had to suspend publication of The Realist, only to reincarnate it in 1985 as a newsletter. “The taboos may have changed,” I wrote, “but irreverence is still our only sacred cow.”

  When I originally started publishing, I was truly a lone voice, but now irreverence has become an industry. The Realist served its purpose, though—to communicate without compromise—and today other voices, in print, on cable TV and especially on the Internet, are following in that same tradition.

  The last words in my final issue, published in 2001, came from Kurt Vonnegut: “Your planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of you.” My own swan-song editorial concluded: “And so this little publication comes to an end, neither with a bang nor with a wimper. Just a deep sigh of satisfaction. The Realist has been a way of life for me, but, of course, old editors never die, they just run out of space.”

  IN PRAISE OF OFFENSIVE CARTOONS

  In the late 1950s, I read an article in Esquire by Malcolm Muggeridge, former editor of Punch, the British humor magazine. “The area of life in which ridicule is permissible is steadily shrinking,” he wrote, “and a dangerous tendency is becoming manifest to take ourselves with undue seriousness. The enemy of humor is fear and this, alas, is an age of fear. As I see it, the only pleasure of living is that every joke should be made, every thought expressed, every line of investigation, irrespective of its direction, pursued to the uttermost limit that human ingenuity, courage and understanding can take it. . . . By its nature, humor is anarchistic, and it may well be that those who seek to supress or limit laughter are more dangerous than all the subversive conspiracies which the FBI ever has or ever will uncover. Laughter, in fact, is the most effective of all subversive conspiracies, and it operates on our side.”

  The article was called “America Needs a Punch,” and I took the implications of that title as my personal marching orders. After I launched The Realist in 1958, it developed a reputation as a haven for material which could be published nowhere else.

  Our first cartoon, unsolicited, by Drury Marsh, was a reaction to the National Association of Broadcasters amending its TV code to ban the use of actors in “white-coat commercials.” The revised ruling read: “Dramatized advertising involving statements or purported statements by physicians, dentists or nurses must be presented by accredited members of such professions.” The cartoon showed a man dressed like a doctor doing a cigarette commercial, then changing to his civilian clothes in a dressing room, going back to his office, getting dressed like a doctor again, and finally telling a patient, “You’re going to have to give up smoking.”

  Another unsolicited cartoon arrived from syndicated editorial cartoonist Frank Interlandi. It showed a man walking along, spotting a poster of a mushroom cloud with the question, “If a BOMB Falls, What Would You Do?” He continues walking—thinking, thinking—and finally says out loud to himself, “I’d shit!” Interlandi told me that he simply could not conceive of a more appropriate reaction, and he had refused to compromise.

  When the Cuban missile crisis occurred, Richard Guindon created his most popular cartoon for The Realist, which I put on the cover. It depicted a reclining nude woman, leaning on her elbow with her back to us—her buttocks a globe with latiduinal and longitudinal lines—as she faced a couple of faceless men, both naked except that one was wearing boxer shorts with stars and stripes while the other had a hammer and sickle tatto
oed on his chubby arm. The Kennedy-like American was gesturing toward the Khrushchev-like Russian and speaking to the Earth-woman: “It’s his turn and then me again.” That cartoon captured a feeling of powerlessness that permeated the country. Two Broadway stars—Orson Bean in Subways Are for Sleeping and Anthony Newley in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off—had it framed on their dressing-room walls, even while several bookstores and newsstands were displaying that issue face down.

  When abortion was illegal, I published a cartoon by Mort Gerberg, depicting a Mother Goose character—the old lady who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn’t know what to do—speaking on the phone: “Dr. Burnhill?—uh—you don’t know me, but—uh—I’ve been told that you could—uh—perform a certain operation—” It turned out there was an actual Dr. Burnhill, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who called me in distress after patients started bringing that issue of The Realist to his office.

  Every succeeding cartoon by Gerberg had a character named Burnhill, except for his double-page spreads, “The Poverty Pavilion,” “The Junkie Battalion” and “The Fag Battalion.”

  New Yorker regulars sent me their cartoons that were rejected for controversial subject matter, poor taste and taboo violation. Ed Koren had a centaur on the Unemployment line, being asked by the clerk, “Are you sure you looked for work this week?” Another Koren centaur at a cocktail party was saying to a woman, “I find it very difficult to be an intellectual in the United States.” Ed Fisher depicted a Native American ceremony with a few hippies sitting cross-legged among a large group of Indians, with the chief saying to an associate, “Yes, ever since drug-trances were ruled a legitimate practice of our religion, they’ve been drifting in . . .” Fisher was so prolific that “Ed Fisher’s Page” became a regular feature in The Realist.

  Another New Yorker cartoonist who preferred to omit a byline presented a TV talk-show guest saying, “Frankly I didn’t give a damn about it!” Then we see a family at home watching him say, “Frankly I didn’t give a bleep about it!” Thought balloons show the mother thinking “Fuck?”; the father thinking “Piss?”; the grandmother thinking “Shit?”; and the little kid thinking “Crap?” That cartoon graced many kitchen refrigerators and office bulletin boards, especially at TV channels.

  And Lee Lorenz sent a cartoon—bypassing the New Yorker because he knew it would be rejected—where, in the corridor of an office building, a man with an attache case is about to enter the office of the Anti-Defamation League, while right directly across from him a man with a briefcase is opening the door to the office of the Italian Anti-Defamation League. The caption: “Wop!” “Kike!”

  William M. Gaines was the head of Entertaining Comics, which published a line of crime and horror comic books—plus Mad. Here was a comic book that poked creative fun at society in general and comic books in particular. What a kick it was to see “Clark Bent” undressing in a phone booth to change into his “Superduperman” outfit, only to find that it was already occupied by a woman. Mad’s gang of artists and writers were slicing through American piety with irreverence and imagination.

  When Mad became a magazine, I started writing free-lance articles for them. My first article was based on the premise, “What if comic strip characters answered those little ads in the back of magazines?” I wrote the script and Wally Wood did the artwork. Orphan Annie sent for Maybelline for her hollow eyes. Dick Tracy sought a nose job. Alley Oop got rid of his superfluous hair, only to reveal that he had no ears. But Popeye’s flat-chested girlfriend, Olive Oyl, wasn’t permitted to send away for falsies.

  Gaines explained, “My mother would object to that.”

  “Yeah,” I complained, “but she’s not a typical subscriber.”

  “No,” he replied, “but she’s a typical mother.”

  Other ideas of mine were rejected because the subject matter was considered “too adult.” Since Mad’s circulation had already gone over the million mark, Gaines intended to keep aiming it at teenagers.

  “I guess you don’t want to change horses in mid-stream,” I said.

  “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass,” Gaines responded.

  John Francis Putnam, Mad’s art director, wrote a piece about the apocryphal publication of an collection, Tillie and Mac: Those Little Comic Books That Men Like, resulting in an obscenity charge. Accompanying this was Mad’s Sergio Aragones’ hysterical full-page parody of the genre, labeled as “Exhibit A,” with “excerpts” ranging from Blondie in bed with her husband’s boss—“Now Dagwood, stop complaining! You’re disturbing Mister Dithers!”—to Orphan Annie copulating with Sandy, her hollow-eyed canine. “Gee,” Annie says, “a girl’s best friend is a dog!” And Sandy, wagging his tail, barks back, “Arf! Arf! (Pant, pant) Aaaarrrf!”

  Recently, Simon & Schuster published an actual such anthology, Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s. It was a case of satirical prophecy. The introduction is by Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Spiegelman, whose cartoon showing two soldiers smooching on a bench in front of a sign—“Make Love, Not War!”—appeared in The Realist. As the Vietnam war escalated, and monks began immolating themselves as the ultimate form of protest, Don Addis depicted a gas station attendant asking a Buddhist holding a gas-can, “Regular?” During the burgeoning days of underground comics, I published Disney adversary Dan O’Neill, S. Clay Wilson, Skip Williamson and Jay Lynch, who contributed a psychedelicized logo.

  The Realist was the first to publish Sam Gross, a mild-mannered accountant who visited my office with his samples one day and eventually replaced Charles Addams as the king of macabre cartoonists. Take, for example, his drawing of a man with a hammer nailing a sandwich-board, reading “Christ Died For Our Sins,” onto the back of a religious zealot. Or his Cyclops-inspired gynecologist with one large eye centered on his forehead. Or a Gross full-page spread, “Humor of the Handicapped,” offensive to many, though lauded by disabled readers.

  Ed Sorel’s first published illustration, “A War for Civilization”—with a parade led by Cardinal Spellman, followed by a biker gang and other assorted stalwarts—appeared on a Realist cover, bleeding through to the back cover. Robert Grossman contributed a series of movie posters, starting with the musical, “Ethel and Bob Kennedy in I Got Rhythm, produced by 18th Century Fox.” Charles Rodrigues did a sardonic full-page spread, “Up With Violence,” and B. Kliban gave me a cartoon with a door marked “Sperm Bank,” with a nearby slot for “Night Deposits.”

  Proceeds from a poster—a cartoon first published in The Realist, depicting an anthropomorphic deity sodomizing 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.

  When Walt Disney died, I somehow expected Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and all the rest of the gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering the eulogy and the Seven Dwarfs serving as pallbearers. Disney’s death occurred a few years after Time magazine’s famous “God Is Dead” cover, and it occurred to me that Disney had indeed acted as the Intelligent Designer of that whole stable of imaginary characters who were now mourning in a state of suspended animation. Disney was their Creator and he had repressed all their baser instincts, but now that he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire. I contacted Mad’s Wally Wood and, without mentioning any specific details, I told him my general notion of a memorial orgy at Disneyland. He accepted the assignment and presented me with a magnificently degenerate montage:

  Pluto is pissing on a portrait of Mickey Mouse, while the real, bedraggled Mickey is shooting up heroin. His nephews are jerking off as they watch Goofy fucking Minnie Mouse on a combination bed and cash register. The beams shining out from the Magic Castle are actually dollar signs.. Dumbo is simultaneously flying and shitting on an infuriated Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey and Louie are peeking at Daisy Du
ck’s asshole as she watches the Seven Dwarfs groping Snow White. The prince is snatching a peek of Cinderella’s snatch while trying a glass slipper on her foot. The Three Little Pigs are humping each other in a daisy chain. Jiminy Cricket leers as Tinker Bell does a striptease and Pinocchio’s nose gets longer.

  This centerspread became so popular that I decided to publish it as a poster in 1967. (A digitally colored edition of the original poster is now available via my Web site, paulkrassner.com.) The Disney corporation considered a lawsuit but realized that The Realist was published on a proverbial shoestring, and besides, why bother causing themselves further public embarrassment? In Baltimore, a news agency distributed that issue with the Disneyland Memorial Orgy removed; I was able to secure the missing pages, and offered them free to any reader who had bought a partial magazine. In Oakland, an anonymous group published a flyer reprinting a few sections of the centerspread, and distributed it in churches and around town.

  The police would have moved in for an arrest had it not been for my west coast distributor, Lou Swift, who asked them not to act until they got a complete issue of The Realist. In Chicago, however, a judge found the whole issue to be obscene—for the cover story was “Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book”—but the ACLU sought a federal injunction restraining authorities from interfering in any way with local distribution. I tried to imagine a prosecutor telling a jury how they might get horny because “look what Goofy and Minnie Mouse are doing,” but even if the memorial orgy did arouse prurient interest, the rest of The Realist was not utterly without redeeming social value.