In 1971, Ken Kesey and I co-edited The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, which would also serve as an issue of The Realist. Kesey had been reading a book of African Yoruba stories. The moral of one parable was, “He who shits in the road will meet flies on his return.” With that as a theme, we assigned R. Crumb to draw his version of the Last Supper. He came through with a cover so delightfully irreverent that it could zap Mel Gibson with severe apoplexy. In response to Mr. Natural reciting the moral of that parable, Jesus says, “Tsk! Please, I’m eating!”
Many years later, when Woody Allen was accused of sexually molesting his own child, I wrote a full-page comic strip, “Honey, I Fucked the Kids,” illustrated by Kalynn Campbell. Stewart Brand wanted to reprint it in the Whole Earth Review but their printer refused, so they blacked out that entire page and found a new printer for the next issue.
In 2001, I was awaiting inspiration for a cover of the last Realist. Norman Rockwell’s paintings on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post had always been synonymous with saccharine wholesomeness, but now on C-Span I saw his son, Peter, speaking at the National Press Club, and he mentioned that his father’s long-standing ambition was to visit an opium den. Ultimately, he was dissuaded from taking that trip by advertisers in the magazine, but I immediately assigned Kalynn Campbell to capture the venerated artist’s secret vision in Rockwell’s familiar style. And, indeed, this under-the-surface image of American culture served as an appropriate metaphor for the final issue of The Realist.
THE PARTS LEFT OUT OF THE REAGAN MOVIE
The way CBS chickened out of telecasting their miniseries, The Reagans, you would’ve thought that the screenplay had referred to the claim, in a biography of Peter Lawford by his widow, that Nancy Reagan “was known for giving the best head in Hollywood.” You would’ve figured that it must have revealed the details of her affair with Frank Sinatra—he did it her way—or maybe, who knows, her apocryphal fling with Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates. You would’ve been certain there was footage from that gay orgy in which, according to Larry Flynt, Ronald Reagan had participated before he was president.
When I was eight years old, I saw the movie, Knute Rockne—All American (the Notre Dame football coach), starring Ronald Reagan as “The Gipper.” Reagan immediately became my first role model—he was handsome and dynamic, with a twinkle in his eye—and I even started combing my hair just like his, using water to maintain a fancy pompadour.
Eventually, I got disillusioned, and when I grew up to be a stand-up comic, Reagan became a favorite target. I didn’t have to make stuff up, just report it. For example, he promised, “If I am elected, I will end the inheritance tax, for rich and poor alike.” My career as a TV writer was bracketed by the Reagan family.
In 1980, I was hired as head writer for an HBO special, satirizing the election campaign. The show, titled A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the White House, took place in a modern newsroom, with Steve Allen as anchor. This was the first time in American history that three major presidential candidates—Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John Anderson—had all publicly declared themselves to be born-again Christians. So the election was no longer a choice between the lesser of two evils; it had become a matter of choosing between the least of three sinners.
Near the end of March 1981, I delivered a keynote address at the Youth International Party convention in New York. (These were latterday Yippies, originally launched as Zippies during the 1972 Republican convention.) I asked the audience a rhetorical question, “How would you like to be a Secret Service agent guarding Ronald Reagan, knowing that his vice president, George Bush, is the former head of the CIA?” On March 30, the new president was shot by John Hinckley in order to make a favorable impression on actress Jodie Foster. And if that seemed crazy, Hinckley later came out for gun control, and Reagan came out against it.
Although it took more than a decade after the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy for there to be a band called The Dead Kennedys, it took only a few months after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan for there to be a group called Jodie Foster’s Army. (Other bands were named Sharon Tate’s Baby, Jim Jones and the Suicides, and Lennonburger.)
“In the ’60s we knew that the CIA was smuggling heroin from Southeast Asia,” I’d say at a campus gig. “In the ’80s we know that they’re smuggling cocaine from Central America. The same planes that fly weapons for the contras to airports in Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica come back to Florida, Louisiana and Arkansas with their cargos filled to the brim with cocaine, even though the Administration is carrying on its antidrug campaign. The pilots only have to be careful to evade the radar screen. So while Nancy Reagan is saying, ‘Just say no,’ the CIA is saying, ‘Just fly low.’”
When I met the Reagans’ daughter, Patti Davis, in 1981, I told her, “I really respected your decision to appear at that antinuke rally while your dad is the president.”
“I was doing that before my father was president,” she said. “I have to do it. I’m serious about that. It’s the planet.” (This was a logical extension of the time musician Graham Nash told Patti that she had a cute ass for a president’s daughter, and she said, “I had a cute ass before I was the president’s daughter.”) Patti’s Secret Service guards had been at that antinuke rally. “I wanted to take a stand,” she told me, “by having all female Secret Service guards, but there’s very few of them.”
I met Patti’s brother Ron in 1991, when I was hired as a writer on The Ron Reagan Show. It was an ironic association in view of the kind of material I had written and performed about his father. But young Ron was a fellow cultural mutation, and he understood that I had treated his parents as political symbols. One time I noticed a bumper sticker that said “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm,” which I mentioned to Ron, and he adopted it as the syndicated talk show’s unspoken credo.
We decided to defuse the fact that he was the son of the former president in a promo which included a recent clip of Ron as host of Evening At the Improv, saying, “I am the love child of Frank Sinatra”—immediately followed by an old black-and-white film clip of Ronald Reagan saying, “Can you imagine what the Commies will do with this!” But Fox head Barry Diller happened to be watching TV at home. He felt that the promo was exploitative and yanked it off the air.
In the original CBS script of The Reagans, when Ron told his parents he was getting married, the reaction was, “Thank God he’s not gay.” In real life, Ron had been falsely outed by militant gays in New York. We knew this issue was likely to enter the dialogue on an upcoming program about gay rights, so he was prepared. In fact, gay activist Michelangelo Signorile was one of the guests, and he mentioned those rumors on the show.
“I was a ballet dancer,” Ron responded, “and any straight ballet dancer gets a rather thick skin about this sort of thing. But it occurred to me that it’s insulting to my wife of eleven years, because it says she’s living a lie, and I don’t like that.”
Ron had a charming sense of irreverence. In the conference room, we were watching a clip from the film The Rapture, which was to be included on a program about religion. “I met a guy,” Mimi Rogers is telling her husband. “You should meet him. You could love him too.”
“You fell for some rich homosexual,” the husband says, laughing.
“He’s the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“And,” Ron added, “he’s hung like a stallion.”
A producer, another writer and I were the pot-smokers on this show. We would smoke a joint while walking around the block. The producer bought his stash from an actress on a popular series, and one time we drove to her house to make a purchase. Ron came along for the ride. He told us how, when he had been a toker as a youth, his dad once found a marijuana-filled baggie in his bureau and confiscated it.
Another time, the four of us went for lunch at a nearby restaurant, and the hostess shook hands with Ron, saying, “I thought it was really cool for your sister to talk about masturbating in Vanity F
air.” However, that particular scene was not included in The Reagans when it appeared on Showtime.
WHY I’M OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE FUTURE
Recently, on a beautiful, serene afternoon, I was strolling along the crowded Venice, California boardwalk, playing my part in God’s ant farm. A common spirit seemed to transcend age, gender, appearance, vocation, ethnicity, language, religion. It was like a mobile oasis; as if a truce had been declared, where inhumanity was replaced by empathy. Despite my awareness of unspeakable anguish occurring around the world, a feeling of hope surged through my body. That kind of epiphany had occurred many times before.
The first time it happened, I was seven years old. A fellow student had stood in front of the class, unzipped his fly, and exposed his penis. He was sent to reform school. Without having the vocabulary to express it, I thought that the punishment didn’t fit the crime. The next morning, I walked to school with a mission. I stood in front of the class, unzipped my fly, and exposed a portrait of my penis that I had drawn the previous evening. While carrying out that self-assigned art homework, I had become engulfed by a blast of pure optimism—I was totally confident that I would not get in trouble for what I planned to do. My parents were called to school and advised to take me to a psychiatrist, but they knew better. In retrospect, though, I still have to wonder, “What the fuck ever made me do that!” If it were to happen now, I would undoubtedly be force-fed Ritalin through a Pez dispenser.
I never knew when I would experience these flashes of optimism. In December 1960, when I traveled to Cuba, the State Department was financing counter-revolutionary broadcasts from a radio station on Swan Island in Honduras. Program content ranged from telling Cubans that their children would be taken away, to warning them that a Russian drug was being added to their food and milk which would automatically turn them into Communists.
In the Sierra Maestra, where battles once raged, there were now under construction schools and dormitories for 20,000 children—to match the 20,000 Cubans who lost their lives, many after torture, under the U.S.-supported Batista regime. At one of these educational communities, some young students removed the string that been set up by a landscaping crew to mark off a cement foundation. Next morning, the school director lectured them about such immorality. “Even a little thing like that,” he explained, “does harm to the revolution.” The children of Cuba were being programmed for cooperation rather than competition, and it made me quiver with hopefulness.
A recent study concluded that human beings are “mentally wired to cooperate,” and I witnessed that concept in action at the shadow conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles during the 2000 presidential campaign. Once, at a benefit, I met songwriter/troubadour Harry Chapin backstage, and I’ll never forget his words: “If you don’t act like there’s hope, there is no hope.” Placebos do work, after all. And yet, in retrospect, I realize that I often acted as if there were no hope.
During the ’60s, when abortion was illegal, I ran an underground abortion referral service, but I never dreamed that it would become legal in my lifetime. I didn’t like to eat in restaurants or fly in planes because of cigarette smoking, but I never thought it would become illegal in my lifetime. I joined protest demonstrations against the Vietnam War and for civil rights, against circumcision and for an end to nuclear testing, never speculating as to how effective we were, but always knowing that the other option was to do nothing.
I became obsessed with investigating a government plot to neutralize the countercultural threat to control-freaks and economic-forecasters—the FBI had a special “Hippie Squad” where they were taught how to roll joints, the better to infiltrate—and I eventually freaked out from information overload. A turning point in this psychotic episode came late one night while talking with an old friend, Julius Karpen. As we spoke, we were rolling billiard balls back and forth across a pool table in the living room, pushing and catching them with our hands rather than hitting them with a cue-stick and waking up our hosts.
“How long is it gonna go on?” I asked.
“How long is what gonna go on?”
“You know, the battle between good and evil, when is it gonna end?”
“Maybe never.”
Suddenly I felt a wave of relief. So it wasn’t all my responsibility. Such a heavy burden had been lifted from my soul. I understood that I could participate in the process of change without becoming attached to it. That I could maintain sanity in the midst of insanity by developing the ability to be a passionate activist and an objective observer simultaneously. That I needn’t take myself as seriously as my causes.
I asked my friend and former High Times editor Steve Hager, who is deep into conspiracy research, how he remains optimistic. He replied, “My rule is: Forget about tearing down the establishment (it’ll never happen, the Octopus is too powerful). Instead, concentrate on building an alternative culture and passing it down to anyone who cares. Real ceremonies create positive energy, but when you focus solely on exposing Nazis, you are living in their twisted world.”
This renewed my sense of optimism, but of course that may merely be a result of my damaged chromosomes from taking too many acid trips.
GOT PORN?
SHOWING PINK
As Penthouse magazine was on its way to bankruptcy, publisher Bob Guccione said, “The future has definitely migrated to electronic media.” And Hustler publisher Larry Flynt—who eagerly joined that migration—has complained, “If you ever cruise the Net and see everything that’s available, it’s glutted with sleaze. It’s a nightmare out there. This has to be affecting the revenues of people like myself.”
But both have played pivotal roles in the evolution of popular pornography. Men’s magazines had started out showing breasts but not nipples, buttocks but not anuses—and never, never a vagina. Nor did pubic hair used to be all over the place, only to eventually get Bikini-waxed out of existence except for occasional exclamation points. Even nudist magazines had once air-brushed men and women into department-store manikins without genitalia playing volleyball.
The great pubic breakthrough occurred in Penthouse in 1971. A triangular patch of dark curly hair eventually opened Pandora’s Box wider and wider until Hustler began “showing pink” in 1974. Even Flynt’s own wife Althea showed pink. One issue featured a Scatch-’n’-Sniff centerspread. When you scratched the spread-eagled model in her designated area, a scent of lilac bath oil emanated from her vulva.
In November 1977, Larry Flynt was flying with Ruth Carter Stapleton, the evangelist sister of President Jimmy Carter, in Flynt’s pink-painted private jet, which when it belonged to Elvis Presley had been painted red, white, and blue. Up in the air, Flynt had a vision of Jesus Christ. Flynt’s entire body was tingling, and he fell to his knees, clasping his hands in prayer. Thus was he converted to born-again Christianity.
The next month, at Hustler’s Christmas party, Flynt announced that I was going to be the new publisher. This was the first that I heard the news. Before, I had been wondering how the magazine would change, and now it turned out that I was the answer to my own question. For Flynt to bring me in as redeeming social value was an offer too absurd to refuse.
Now that Flynt has evolved from a con artist into an authentic First Amendment hero—in July 2000, he spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco—I recall what a pariah he was in 1977. In Los Angeles, at the building in Century City which housed his office, Hustler was not allowed to be listed in the lobby.
At the time, I was writing a syndicated column for alternative weeklies. Specifically, I was working on my “Predictions for 1978,” leading off with this: “Since Larry Flynt has been converted to born-again Christianity, the new Hustler will feature a special Scratch-’n’-Sniff Virgin Mary.”
“Hey, that’s a great idea,” said Flynt on New Year’s Day at Nassau Beach in the Bahamas. “We’ll have a portrait of the Virgin Mary, and when you scratch her crotch, it’ll smell like tomato juice.”
He was rubbing su
ntan lotion on my back.
“I’ll bet Hugh Hefner never did this for you,” he said.
Flynt wanted to know who would be an appropriate 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.
There was an unwritten agreement among men’s magazines that human female nipples would not be clearly visible on a cover. I was also learning to accept certain arbitrary rules then governing the inside pages. An erect penis must not be shown. Semen must not be shown. Penetration must not be shown. Oral-genital contact must not be shown.
A few months later in Georgia, Flynt was shot during a lunch break in his obscenity trial. I flew to Atlanta and went directly to the hospital. Althea brought me to Larry’s room. It was extremely unsettling to see such a powerful personality so helpless, kept alive by medical technology, with one tube feeding him and another breathing for him. He appeared bug-eyed with painkiller. Althea lifted the sheet and showed me his gaping wounds, a truly awesome sight.
“Oh, God, Althea,” I said, “he’s showing pink.”
“I’m arranging for a photographer to come in here,” she said. “We’re gonna publish Larry’s wounds in Hustler. I want people to see what they did to him.”
I sat down in a chair by Larry’s bed. I didn’t know what to say, We simply clasped hands for a while. Finally I broke the silence. “Larry, tomorrow is Good Friday,” I said. “So, uh, you don’t have to go to work.”
I glanced toward Althea to reassure myself that I had’t indulged in irreverence that was too inapppropiate, but she said, “Oh, Paul, look,” gesturing toward Larry—“he wants to show you something.” Above the oxygen mask, Larry was blinking his eyes over and over again in rapid succession.
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