Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  We ran articles by Arthur C. Clarke (he of 2001) and a few by Hunter S. Thompson before he became the Hunter S. Thompson we all knew and loved. Except for me. In a cover letter accompanying his first submission, Thompson wrote that his recreation included taking potshots with his BB gun at the gays going to the bathhouse at the bottom of his hill in Big Sur. (The article itself was a love story to Big Sur.) I had to grit my teeth when we accepted his second piece, a short story about murder at sea. The hero was no Travis McGee, but the story wasn’t bad. Thompson’s skill with a BB gun I chalked up to a reflection of American attitudes at the time, and besides, an editor should never let his personal life interfere with his professional one. (So much for embryonic gay liberation.)

  We published articles by big names (for the period)—Ben Hecht, William Saroyan, and Philip Wylie, among others—but the articles I was proudest of were those that were in-your-face and that I thought Playboy would never publish. They were the ones that were both offbeat and showed great bravery by the writer. Jerry DeMuth, a staffer for Regency Books (Hamling’s legitimate line), wrote a first-person article on SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—when it was involved in registering black voters down South. Jerry was never shot at or roughed up, but that wasn’t because he wasn’t exposed; he was just lucky.

  Despite the high quality—in my opinion—of our fiction and articles, we had two built-in handicaps. One was the size of the magazine. We had 80 pages, while Playboy was constantly increasing in size, to 120, 150, etc.

  The other one were the centerfold girls we ran. Frankly, I was a little bit at sea in picking girls who would appeal to our presumably heterosexual and very masculine readers. Hamling was a happily married man (a handicap under the circumstances) and had a physical difficulty—he was addicted to wearing sunglasses. This was most apparent when we went to the printing plant to inspect the initial copies of our centerfolds just coming off the press. The object was to call for color corrections. Much to the hilarity of the printers, who hid behind the presses to smother their laughter, Hamling never took off his sunglasses while calling for corrections.

  A younger and considerably more randy Hugh Hefner suffered from none of these handicaps. He loved women and was an expert at picking out those models who typified the girl next door in the first blush of youth. The public obviously agreed with him.

  When Harlan left I inherited Lenny Bruce, who was almost always late with his column. One time I had made up his column by excerpting some of his comments about our gatefolds in his letters to Hamling.

  Lenny Bruce was a man ahead of his time. The cops used to roust him at various clubs for routines they claimed were obscene (today you can see and hear much more obscene material on television and your computer—and without paying a cover charge). There was only one time when I saw Bruce at a loss for words. He had a gig at a nightclub in Chicago but the day before, its liquor license had been revoked. Bruce’s audience that evening were high school kids out for a night before their prom. Bruce knew he couldn’t use his usual routines, so he had to wing it. He flopped—badly. It was obvious then that he had worked on most of his routines beforehand and that this night his usual audience had been pulled out from under him.

  We lost Bruce a few issues after that. He had sold his autobiography to Playboy—the same autobiography from which we had excerpted a column months before. What Playboy printed was exactly the portion that we had, word for word.

  When I heard that Playboy had bought it, I told A. J. Budrys (formerly of Regency Books but who had defected to Playboy) that Rogue had published part of Bruce’s autobiography previously, but he didn’t believe me. When I finally saw it in Playboy I sent AJ the copy of Rogue and he in turn showed it to A. C. Spectorsky, head of the magazine division. The ever-phlegmatic Spectorsky simply shrugged and said, “I guess they’ll have to sue us.”

  I never told Hamling about it—AJ was a friend.

  Lenny Bruce died a few years later. The police found him sitting on the toilet, a needle still stuck in his arm. The word was that the police had put it there so the news photographers would know the cops were busy upholding the morals of the community.

  Myself, I suspected that there wasn’t a more moral man in show business than Lenny Bruce.

  (We ran a photo feature on Lenny Bruce and his ex-wife, Honey, in our December 1960 issue. Bruce had written the caption for a partial nude shot of Honey: “I still think that Honey can cut most of the Woolworth clerks you guys seem to favor.” He was absolutely right.)

  Garry Marshall (a very popular film producer later on and an acquaintance from Northwestern) and his sidekick Fred Freeman both had articles on humor in the same issue. Years later, when Rogue was a fond memory, I dropped in on Marshall and Freeman at their offices on the Desilu lot in Hollywood—they were producing Hey, Landlord at the time—and applied for a writer’s job. I got turned down, but as second prize they give me several free tickets to I Love Lucy. It was an act of mercy—when it came to writing sitcoms I would have been horribly out of my depth.

  X

  THE FIRST FEW issues of the new Rogue came out in 1959, and we tried for a more serious bent than Playboy. One of our major efforts along those lines was when we reviewed the movie The Intruder in an early 1960s issue (to the best of my knowledge, we were the only publication that did). We had run the article by Jerry DeMuth about his adventures with SNCC, and we thought this would be a good follow-up. We had some terrific photographs from the film and a great article by O. C. Ritch. It was also one piece I was intimately connected with. We ran it in the back of the book, but in retrospect, we should have splashed a blurb on the front cover.

  We decided to review the movie based on the book by Charles Beaumont (“C. B. Lovehill”). It concerned a northern rabble-rouser who goes down South to the little fictional town of Caxton, Missouri, which had just started to desegregate its schools. Adam Cramer (played by William Shatner) claims he is a representative of the “Patrick Henry Society” and is intent on stirring up trouble between blacks and whites embroiled in the desegregation of their high school.

  The film was shot in two towns in southern Missouri, and the actual desegregation of some eight years before was still a sensitive subject in the minds of the townspeople. The only filmmakers willing to produce the movie with no changes to Beaumont’s text were the Corman brothers, who had never read a classic horror story they didn’t want to film. This was to be a switch for them, their first serious endeavor in filmmaking. They had approached the majors for funding, but no one was interested in as hot a property as The Intruder promised to be.

  The budget was pared to the bone, less than a hundred grand—most of the money coming from the Corman brothers themselves, who mortgaged their houses. To save money they decided to shoot on location in an area that if it weren’t for the occupation by Northern troops in the Civil War, would have joined the South.

  The natives never forgot it, and at the start, the desegregation of the schools was strictly token. Two blacks in a white high school were one too many.

  Whether or not the Corman brothers realized how dangerous the shoot would be, I don’t know. But they soon found out. Hard looks and lack of cooperation were the order of the day. Many of the actors were locals, and as a precaution the script was handed out daily—page by page.

  Charlie Beaumont called me and asked if I wanted to be in his film. He didn’t go into details but hinted it might be on the dangerous side. (I found out later that he carried a tear gas canister disguised as a fountain pen for personal protection.)

  I asked Big George to come along—hey, an adventure, he was all for it! We packed some overnight bags, and George found a baseball bat he thought might come in handy if there was trouble. Hours later we drove into Charleston, Missouri, site of most of the shooting. From the looks people gave us on the street, we were more of those damned northern types coming into town.

  We found a motel, grabbed a sandwich at a luncheonette, and hit
one of the local bars—all white, of course. About two beers later a drunk sitting on a stool next to George wised off, and George grabbed the edge of his bar stool and spun it around so the drunk went flying off. A moment later it was our turn to go flying out of there—the other patrons didn’t like us.

  It was late and we headed for the motel. George put the bat by the side of his bed and we finally dropped asleep. The next morning we discovered that while George had remembered the bat, he had forgotten to lock the door.

  The shooting was done in sections, and the last three—the most inflammatory—were scheduled for that Saturday. They included a Ku Klux Klan automobile parade through the center of the “badlands” (the other side of the tracks, or “niggertown,” as some of the locals called it), followed by the burning of a cross and blowing up the front of the local black church. Big George was cast as one of the Klansmen burning the cross; I rode in the automobile parade and later shoveled the debris off the top of the church when they blew off the false front.

  William Shatner, immortalized a few years later as the intrepid Captain Kirk, played the smooth-as-silk Adam Kramer. (It was Shatner’s best role—he’d had stage experience and it showed.) Two of Charlie Beaumont’s friends—George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan—had also been invited to appear in the film. All three had frequently written scripts for The Twilight Zone. Beaumont played the principal of the local high school being integrated, Nolan portrayed a southern “cracker” and Johnson a psychotic version of the same. (George could have made a career out of playing psychotics.)

  Whether any of them knew what they were getting into, I didn’t know. Shatner was a Canadian and ignorant of a lot of American politics. Johnson and Nolan thought it would be a hoot until they got down there.

  The KKK drive through the badlands had struck all of us as highly dangerous. What would happen? A riot? Stoning? We were genuinely frightened. I was sitting in a car with a sheet over my head, running every five minutes for the gas station on the corner because my bladder had sprung a leak. At one point a curious black man poked his head through the car window and asked if we were in some kind of “pee-rade.” “Yeah,” I mumbled, “some kind of pee-rade.”

  We were totally unprepared for what actually happened. “Hey, they’re shooting a real movie in the middle of our town!” Everybody in “Caxton” showed up to mingle in the badlands, and nobody seemed to care whether they were standing next to a white or a black in the crowd. It was carnival time (the cameras picked up a knifing on film but it wasn’t serious and the injured woman recovered).

  The cross burning went off without a hitch, and when they blew the false front off the church I dutifully shoveled a wheelbarrow of debris over the front. In the spirit of good fellowship I asked the local kid helping why he’d signed up for the movie.

  He shrugged. “I just wanted to see what you nigger lovers from up North were like.”

  Everybody packed in a hurry the next morning and left town before the locals could put two and two together and figure out just what the movie had been all about. Big George and I picked up Charles Barnes, the black kid who was the hero of the film, and drove him back to Chicago with us. He would stay with his grandmother and major in engineering at a nearby university. He had had enough of the movies.

  His mother had fried up a huge vat of chicken, and we nibbled on that and compared notes about our Big Adventure. It never showed on film, but Barnes had been frightened all the way through. If he had stayed in town, he was convinced that sooner or later somebody would have taken a shot at him.

  The locals cast in bit parts did a great job (the sheriff was played by a man who could put his thumb on the aluminum top of a salt shaker and punch through it). I heard later that a few of the locals had actually traveled to Hollywood to see what it was like and maybe find work.

  It had been a three-week shoot of dodging the sheriff, of doing our best to delude the townspeople, of being kicked off the grounds of one high school and driving to another a few miles down the road to finish a scene.

  Shatner was a wonder. His most inflammatory scene was actually silent for the first take. He realized there could be a real riot if the crowd heard what he was going to say. He explained in a hoarse voice that he had laryngitis and had to save his voice for later. The crowd followed the orders of the camera crew and moved this way and that, shouting and hollering as they watched the silent Shatner wave his arms.

  After it was dark and almost everybody had gone home, the cameras dollied in to get a close-up of Shatner actually shouting the words that could have caused a genuine riot. One spectator in the crowd who hadn’t left with the others frowned and asked Shatner if he believed what he’d just said. Shatner shrugged and said, “Hey, it’s just a movie, fella.”

  The Intruder was the only film the Cormans made that lost money. There was no way it was going to play in any theater down South. Distributors up North boycotted the film—they felt the unvarnished use of the “n-word” would be too much for their audience.

  The film can be had only on DVD, and while crude and amateurish in spots, it is the only film ever made that gave an honest portrayal of what desegregation was really like, or what the people involved actually believed.

  XI

  ROGUE MADE A little money, added eight more pages, and doubled the staff. We now had a circulation department (which didn’t do much to increase the circulation) and an ad department (which didn’t do much to bring in ads). Understandable, I suppose. We were playing Jack the Giant Killer but no way were we going to slay the giant.

  I worked for Playboy much later on, a well-staffed, very professional organization where the going was sometimes rough. Working at Rogue, on the other hand, was frequently a hoot. Looking back, it was one of the most enjoyable times of my life. Hamling stayed down in San Diego most of the time, masterminding the stroke books and visiting Evanston maybe once a month to see how his overworked mice were doing. A lot of our slack attitudes were due to Bruce Elliott, a recent hire from New York, who introduced us to the three-hour lunch. It would start at the “dark place,” a bar on Howard Street—which cut dry Evanston off from Chicago—and end at the office with most of us carrying the remains of our liquid lunch in a takeout coffee cup.

  (I never did find out what Elliott did in his position as executive editor. I think he spent most of his time trying to subvert the entire staff, and he probably came close.)

  Second in popularity were the occasional office fights with Ping-Pong-ball rifles. One day Bruce Glassner—another recent hire—was hit in the eye with a ball and we hustled him over to the eye doctor. The doctor examined him carefully, then called his assistant to come in and take a look. “You won’t believe what did this.”

  Bruce’s eyes remained intact and still blue.

  Our two new employees, David Stevens and Bruce Glassner, had taken an apartment together on Chicago’s near North Side. Bruce had escaped from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and David was a star graduate (so he said) from Syracuse University, a top journalism school. Bruce was a straight arrow, more or a lot less, and David was a would-be world adventurer who later became a life member of the Chicago chapter of the Adventurers’ Club. To David the Sahara eventually became as familiar as somebody else’s front yard. David and Bruce had the second floor in their apartment building, and the third was perennially occupied by airline stewardesses who considered David and Bruce horny godsends. I stayed over one night and the next morning all three of us jammed ourselves into Dave’s Morgan for the ride back up to Evanston. It was winter and the Outer Drive was covered with snow and black ice (invisible to the naked eye). We hit a patch, did a 360, and ended up on the shoulder, still pointing in the right direction.

  The Morgan was a British car with a wooden chassis. If anybody had hit us, they would have had to dig us out from under a pile of toothpicks. We finished the drive in absolute silence. Once safely in the office, I raced to the john and wrung out my shorts.

  Afte
r hours we frequently had dinner at The Bear, a small club run by some of the actors from Chicago’s Second City troupe. It didn’t last long, but while it did they had a chef who was easily one of the best in the city. They also had a cigarette machine that sold Wings and Spuds, brands that hadn’t been carried in the States for years. Where The Bear got them, I never knew.

  No club is without its entertainment, and The Bear frequently showcased new talent. One night after dinner the stage was taken over by a performer named Bob Dylan, complete with guitar and harmonica. We listened to his set and all agreed the young man couldn’t sing.

  Six months later Dylan was featured at Chicago’s Arie Crown Theater—capacity five thousand, and it was packed. His first albums had been released and were sensations. I kept wishing I had listened more closely to him at The Bear.

  Those of us on the editorial end of the magazine didn’t mingle much with the production people, the salesmen, or the art department. We were a little, closely knit group, and we were younger and more adventuresome than the staffers at Playboy. At one time we were going to do a piece on a small porno film outfit in Chicago. It would be an inside job, telling the reader what it was like to be in the porn business.

  The problem was we didn’t know anybody working there. A young and enthusiastic staffer volunteered to infiltrate the organization and get the inside scoop. When he came back that day he was very quiet and didn’t want to talk about it. Another staffer suggested that we go down and watch some of the outtakes and write it as an exposé.

  Our volunteer refused to go, insisting he had something better to do. The rest of us trooped on down and crowded into the little screening room to take notes. For once we were shocked. Our embarrassed staffer was the third one up, in the buff, and trying valiantly to perform. But it’s one thing to have sex in the privacy of your bedroom and quite another to try to do it on a soundstage with a director and a cameraman watching.