LARRY FLYNT Hustling the American Dream

Bob Colacello

I hereby announce my candidacy for the Presidency of these United States of America. On February 28, I will enter the New Hampshire primary as a Republican. I am running as a Republican rather than as a Democrat because I am wealthy, white, pornographic and, like the nuclear-mad cowboy Ronnie Reagan, I have been shot for what I believe in. . . .If elected, my primary goal will be to eliminate ignorance and venereal disease.

—from an October 16, 1983, advertisement paid for by the Larry Flynt for President Committee

The first thing that strikes me about Larry Flynt, the forty-one-year-old publisher of Hustler, a magazine for men that makes Playboy and Penthouse look like magazines for nuns, is his wheelchair. It is gold-plated, the seat, back, and armrests of crimson velvet, the tires an elegant oyster gray. It is being pushed across the lobby of the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., by a pigtailed American Indian I assume at first to be Flynt’s running mate, Russell Means, but who is actually William Means, the kid brother of the hero of Wounded Knee. Surrounding this mobile throne as it rolls past the doorman to a waiting limousine with American flags waving above its shiny black hood in the crisp November wind is Flynt’s private militia, a half-dozen incredible hulks wearing loaded holsters under their three-piece black suits. Flynt, a paraplegic since 1978, when he was gunned in the gut as he arrived at a Lawrenceville, Georgia, courthouse to defend himself against obscenity charges, is lifted onto a board and slid into the backseat. The entire procedure is being filmed by a three-man crew from Cable News Network—a measure of the importance the press has attached to Flynt since last fall, when he mysteriously acquired videotapes made by the FBI during its investigation of John De Lorean and turned them over to CBS.

“Colacello,” shouts Flynt’s chief of security, the samurai-like Bill Rider. “Get in the car with Larry.” Following orders, I slip into the seat facing the self-proclaimed “meanest man in America.” He is wearing brand-new black-and-white sneakers, freshly pressed bell-bottom blue jeans, and a clean white T-shirt printed with the cryptic message “The Russians Will Apologize When Nixon Does.” Other than his fingernails, everything about him is clean. His face, baby pink and lightly freckled, sits under a thinning shock of reddish waves. It is not an ugly face or a handsome one, but on the whole rather heavy and petulant, and from certain angles it does look mean: the forehead too short, the nose too sharp, the lips Cupid-shaped but thin, the chin ending in a weak point. Most memorable are his lucid blue eyes, always in motion—except when they are fixed in an evangelical stare. By way of greeting, Larry Flynt asks me, “What’s the circulation of Vanity Fair?” Having apparently deemed it sufficient, he then introduces me to the tensed-up man in the gray pin-striped suit and black ankle boots who is sitting on the other side of the built-in bar/TV. This is Gordon Novel—“Chairman Emeritus, Force 1 Ltd., New Orleans,” according to his red-white-and-blue business card. Opposite him sits Bill Rider, a fat black revolver hanging from his belt.

The limo pulls into Washington traffic, followed by two others packed with security men, lawyers, publicists, and camp followers. Larry Flynt launches into a virtual monologue that lasts all the way to New York. Indeed, before we’re out of the District of Columbia, this latter-day dadaist manages to allege that Jessica Savitch was murdered (“It was no fuckin’ accident, and I’m gonna prove it”); that Jerry Falwell, who sued Flynt for $46 million, paid for his anti-nuclear freeze ads with money from the late Cardinal Cooke; that Henry Kissinger is a Nazi (“How do you think he can wander around the Middle East and kiss a Jew one day and an Arab the next?”).

As we cross the Fourteenth Street Bridge and turn onto the George Washington Parkway, tales of pedophilia involving two prominent politicians, a newspaper publisher, and the coroner who “told ’em to cree-mate Rockefeller” are quickly followed by accusations against high-ranking administration officials: “I tell everybody I’m gonna use the [supposed Vicki Morgan] sex tapes in New Hampshire, but I’m not goin’ to—I got somethin’ much bigger than that, much bigger. We got everybody in Justice an’ the White House on tape,” he crows, the voice high-pitched, the accent country-southern. “Takin’ kickbacks,” he continues, “an’ a hundred eighty million dollars in payoffs on the nuclear power plants up in Washington [State].” Then, whispering: “On the plane I’ll let you listen to the tapes, okay? An’ these tapes aren’t like De Lorean’s, which are hard to hear. These are the real things. By the time you ever come out with this story—and you got you a cover story, you know that, don’t you?—the fuckin’ Reagan administration is gonna be fuckin’ done with. Put to bed and outta the way.” He’s no longer whispering. “I keep sayin’ I don’t know who’s gonna be my opponent in New Hampshire, but it ain’t gonna be Ronald Reagan, and nobody believes me. I think it could very well be Richard Nixon. I’m doin’ a parody on the back cover of the February issue of Hustler about it, called Psycho III. We’ve got the White House there and we put Nixon’s head on Anthony Perkins’s body, and we’re callin’ it, ‘It’s ten years later, an’ Norman Bates Nixon wants to come home.’ He jus’ won’t go away. He jus’ won’t go away.”

Novel and Rider chuckle loudly at what they obviously consider to be their leader’s brilliant sense of humor. Flynt adds, “I tell you, there’s more reality in Hustler than in anything you read.”

Flynt then proceeds to describe, with so much braggadocio as to make everything he has said so far seem humble by comparison, his much-publicized outburst in the Supreme Court on November 8, the day before our interview. He was there to argue a case brought by Penthouse vice-chairman Kathy Keeton over a cartoon run in Hustler which implied that she had contracted a venereal disease from Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. The essential question before the Court, however, was not one of libel but whether the plaintiff in a libel case has the right to bring suit, several years after the fact, in whichever state has the most favorable statute of limitations— in this case, New Hampshire. Penthouse lawyers argued yes; Flynt, who was denied his request to represent himself and given a court-appointed attorney instead, responded in this sanctum of established American authority with a tantrum that made all three major networks. Here is his unexpurgated version of the event: “You shoulda seen Sandra Day O’Connor’s face. I didn’t wanna be sexist, you know. I started to jus’ call ’em eight assholes an’ one cunt, but I thought that would be a sexist remark, so I jus’ said, ‘You goddamn fuckin’ assholes, all nine of you, and you token cunt, you.’ And she went, ‘Who, me?’ I said, ‘Yeah you, you bitch. All of you are denyin’ me my constitutional right to counsel of my choice, namely myself, an’ when I get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue I’m sendin’ the FBI over to lock every one of you motherfuckers up. I’m gonna charge you with obstructin’ justice..”

“You don’t really think you’ll ever get to the White House, do you?” I interrupt, by this point unable to distinguish between the Larry Flynt who’s joking and the Larry Flynt who’s serious, a distinction I’m beginning to doubt he makes himself.

“I know I’m gonna get there,” asserts the Perdn of porn. “Down in Kentucky, where I’m from, they’ll vote everybody in the graveyard. If they think Johnson was bad down in Texas, votin’ people in the graveyard, wait’ll the graveyard vote comes in for me. Okay? So you jus’ remember this: When I get to the Oval Office, every one of those motherfuckers is goin’ to jail, and they’re gonna do every fuckin’ day. But I ain’t gonna waste the taxpayers’ money by puttin’ ’em in prison and feedin’ ’em. I’m gonna build me a glass cage over by the Smithsonian Institute and I’m gonna take all their clothes off, take their privacy away from ’em, put Sandra right in there with ’em, ’cause they represent what’s been pervertin’ the Constitution of America for over two hundred years. They’ve been playin’ with individual rights, civil rights. They’ve been nothing more than a facade for the fascist regime that runs this country! An’ if you play, you gotta pay.”

We are at National Airport now. As two of his bodyguards lift him under the arms and carry him up into his private plane, he yells against the sound of revving engines, “When I’m elected, we’re gonna move toward anarchy!”

I am seated opposite Larry Flynt on his jet, a spacious Gulfstream G-II, tastefully done in camel and beige. It is, according to its owner, only one in a rapidly expanding squadron: “I got a Westwind, a BAC-111— that’s my personal plane, it’s real big an’ roomy. I’m gettin’ me a 747 with a helicopter in the belly. Right now, I’m workin’ on a deal, ’cause all the people in my campaign need transportation. So I’m tryin’ to buy EJA. Executive Jet Aviation. They’ve got a fleet of Learjets.”

Flynt’s empire is growing on the ground too. In addition to Hustler, which Flynt inaccurately claims has doubled in circulation, to two and a half million copies per month, since his wildly successful publicity gimmick of sending complimentary subscriptions to every member of Congress, he owns Gentleman's Companion, Chic, and an interest in The Mole, a muckraking political weekly. In flight, he discusses plans for three more magazines: The Rebel, a newsweekly (‘‘on sale November 22, for the anniversary of the assassination”); Bizarre (“It’s a step beyond. See, we’ve had a revolution in the crotch. Now we need a revolution between the ears”); and The Rage (“Fashion with a vengeance”). His magazine-distribution company, one of the largest in the United States, circulates another 200-odd titles ranging from Trailer Life to The New York Review of Books. Then there’s all that money oozing in from the merchandising of low-cost, high-priced sex toys and equally lucrative hard-core movies. And, as if that weren’t enough, Flynt tells me, “I’m gettin’ me a cable channel. Callin’ it the F Channel. The national and international news is gonna be called The Top of the News. I want Dan Schorr to do it topless. With a topless co-anchor... a former Miss America. An’ I wanna get me a gay weatherman an’ put him in charge.”

Very large glasses of orange and tomato juice are placed on the tray in front of Flynt by a stewardess, the only female aboard other than Flynt’s twenty-four-hour nurse, an elderly Oriental from Hawaii named Ki Okino. Flynt has been a quasi vegetarian ever since spinal surgery a year and a half ago, which left him incontinent but free of the pain that had driven him to addictive medicines like Dilaudid and morphine. “Now I’m adamantly opposed to drugs,” he says. “I’ll legalize ’em, but I’ll expose ’em at the same time.” As the stewardess, who looks and acts as if she were flying Eastern, returns with a plate of sliced fruit, Flynt explains his theory that drugs are part of a CIA plot involving the Papacy, Central America, Lebanon, and Klaus Barbie. “That’s why De Lorean got set up,” he concludes.

There’s only one commandment: Do unto others as you would have them do unto youbut do it first”

Then, borrowing a Bible from the tall, quiet man across the aisle, whom Flynt calls “the greatest spiritual warrior in the world” (his business card reads, “Rooks Boynton, Evangelist, Clarkston, Georgia”), Flynt resumes the tirade he began in the limo. “If you don’t quote me on anything else in your article,” he tells me, “quote me on this: Matthew sixteen, verse eighteen, okay? ‘I say also unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ Peter was his cock, the rock meant he had a hard-on, and church was his philosophy—life is supposed to be one big orgasm! And there’s only one commandment: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but do it first."

Slamming the Holy Book shut, Flynt goes on and on and on: “This is the biggest piece of shit ever written. It’s been fucked with since the beginning of time. Religion’s done more harm than any other single idea; every war since the beginning of time was the fault of religion. I mean, ask the Jews what they think about religion. And try to find a Jew that’s not gonna vote for me.

“Here’s the January issue. You see, I had Jesus made publisher, an’ then I had Him endorse me for president. He says that in two thousand years neither He, the Holy Ghost, or the Father has ever endorsed a political candidate. Now is the time to do it. An’ we dispel rumors that He was gay. He said, ‘Look, jus’ ’cause I hung around with twelve men doesn’t mean I was gay, ’cause I was fuckin’ Mary Magdalene at the time...’

“Jus’ about every hotel or motel around Washington is all bugged, so they get ’em on audio bugs, they get ’em on videotapes, and then they get ’em to vote the way they want ’em to vote. See, that’s why I’m exposin’ all this and gettin’ people to come outta the closet. Not to admit what their sexual preferences are, but if you’re gonna be a public servant you give up any right you have to privacy. ’Cause the voters can’t allow their representatives to be blackmailed. You know, this country has got to develop so people stop feelin’ guilty over the concept of obscenity and sin, ’cause it defies definition, what may be sin to one person...

“I share the same philosophy as Thomas Paine. I don’t wanna kill fascists, I wanna kill fascism. When Paine went to France to help ’em form their government, when he became part of the French convention, he voted against beheadin’ the king. He says, ‘I don’t wanna destroy the monarch, I wanna destroy the monarchy. I’m sayin’ the same thing today. There’s nothin’ that hasn’t been said before; it’s jus’ been said different, that’s all...

“McDonaldgate, or whatever you want to call it, is murder...McDonald had to go. We intentionally flew that aircraft [over Soviet territory]. I knew when I wrote that ad [reprinted in the January Hustler] that he didn’t Jim Jones himself into history, and I also knew that Yuri Andropov wasn’t tryin’ to impress Jodie Foster...

“Look, I jus’ turned over some confidential files to Jack Anderson, but I don’t mind you havin’ copies of ’em.. .includin’ the porno picture of Congressman Larry McDonald.” Flynt makes the same offer to Larry Woods, Sr., of Cable News Network, then leans over to his “minister of everything,” Gordon Novel, and instructs him, “You gotta tell Jack [Anderson] that I gave CNN and Vanity Fair the McDonald file.. .’cause I’m not interested in no exclusives. I’m interested in stoppin’ what’s happenin’ to these kids.”

I presume this to be a reference to the alleged childsex scandal he first mentioned on the way to the airport, but before I can ask, he says, “Make sure you mention Blue-Green Manna,” and begins dropping a thick brownish liquid into his mouth from a small bottle labeled ALGAE EXTRACT. “Blue-Green Manna’s what Moses fed the masses with, an’ J.C. too. ’Member when all those various Jews was runnin’ around the desert starvin’ to death? This is what they were eatin’. ’Member when J.C. fed five loaves? An’ I’m the worldwide distributor on this. See, I’m the new kid on the block. Jus’ tell ’em, ‘He licked the Blue-Green Manna off his fingers like molasses.’

“See, everybody’s got to come to me to get the manna.” He’s almost chanting now. “Ya gotta come to me to get the water that Jesus turned to wine. See what I’m sayin’? If they want eternal life, they gotta come to me. Nobody else. Ain’t nobody gonna help ’em...

“I’m dead serious, as serious as I am about the presidency. That’s why everybody’s gettin’ on the bandwagon. ’Cause the day of reckonin’ is here. When I was before the Supreme Court, that was Gabriel blowing his trumpet...

“I knew who shot me the day I was shot. I knew who was gonna shoot me the week before I was shot. Congressman Larry McDonald. I’ve had the big picture for six years...

“I can play jus’ as dirty as they can. See, unlike Washington and Carter, George and Jimmy, I can tell a lie and I will tell a lie. Anytime it’s in the best interest of mankind, I’d tell a lie. Anything that would prevent a nuclear war, I would lie about. If I can prevent a child from goin’ hungry, bein’ murdered an’ molested, I’d lie...

“I’m gonna be up an’ walkin’ around next year. Then everybody’s gonna start believin’ me, see. When I get outta this wheelchair to make my State of the Union message, everybody’s gonna start believin’...

“I used to spend twenty percent of my time fuckin’ with them and eighty percent of my time fuckin’ women. Now that I can’t fuck, I spend a hundred percent of my time fuckin’ with them. See, I’m paralyzed from the waist down, but I ain’t paralyzed from the waist up. That’s why I’m their worst nightmare come true!”

He grins, then cackles. As the plane lands at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey (though Flynt and Novel tell me it’s LaGuardia), I inquire if there is anyone Larry Flynt admires. He pauses for as long as he ever pauses, and replies, “Jus’ about everybody’s got chinks in their armor.” He pauses again, then names atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Timothy Leary, G. Gordon Liddy, Jr., and John De Lorean.

The plane empties of entourage, TV crew, briefcases full of tapes, guards, guns. Flynt sits quietly, waiting for someone to carry him off. I ask him once again, after having had the question ignored several times, about his background: Where did he come from, and how? He keeps his biography, unlike his opinions, brief: “The county I’m from in Kentucky, when Johnson commissioned his study on poverty in 1964, was rated at the bottom. Magoffin County. Our biggest industry down there is jury duty. Then I went up to Newport, Kentucky, and opened me a little gamblin’ operation, a little whorehouse, before I went over an’ opened up the Hustler up in Ohio. See, that’s why I’m gonna legalize prostitutin’ and gamblin’. As soon as I get to the White House I’m gonna buy all the Arabs’ oil, and then I’m gonna win the dollars back from them playin’ poker!”

He laughs, then turns earnest: “I wanna update Thomas Paine’s whole philosophy as it applies to what we’re goin’ through in the twentieth century. Jus’ call it Larry Flynt on Thomas Paine. ’Cause I think the greatest book ever written was The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.”

The limousine ride into New York is uneventful— that is, as uneventful as any half hour spent in the scapegrace world of Larry Flynt can be. The names of Jackie Kennedy, Ari Onassis, Ben Bradlee, Philip and Katharine Graham, John and Mo Dean, Jesse Helms, Richard Nixon (“he jus’ won’t go away”), Gerald Ford, Jack Ruby, George Bush, Jerry Falwell, Pope John Paul II (“Didya see our T-shirt, ‘The Pope Likes Valley Girls’?”), G. Gordon Liddy, Jr., Frank Sinatra, Henry (“the Kike”) Kissinger, Deep Throat II, Ruth Carter Stapleton, William Casey, Ronald Reagan, William French Smith, Senator Paul Laxalt, Eugene Gold, Vicki Morgan, and a supposed CIA double agent known as Sasha are dropped with abandon, over and over again. As we enter Manhattan, Flynt talks of combining “the white left, Kennedy’s people,” with “the black left, Stokely’s people,” to achieve victory at the polls this November. Gordon Novel protests that he wants to be more than minister of everything; he has his heart set on national security adviser.

“Then you’re gonna help me overthrow the world, right?” counters Flynt. “See, I decided after two years in the White House I’m gonna turn it over to [Russell] Means. I’m jus’ gonna go on to bigger and better things. I’m gonna rule the fuckin’ world. The king of kings. I wanna be king. Emperor.”

What sort of anarchy allows for an emperor?

“Only for the Second Coming. I told you, I’m the main man, I’m J.C.’s man. The new kid on the block. Everybody’s got to come to me. You gotta understand, you’re from Vanity Fair. You wouldn’t have talked to me two months ago. Everybody’s got to look me in the eye now, ’cause I got the Blue-Green Manna and the holy water! They got to come to 364 St. Cloud in Bel Air.” That’s the address of Flynt’s home-headquarters, a Hustler parody of the nearby Playboy Mansion West. Though who knows where the parody lies, when Flynt himself has said, “Parody has become so real that we’re gonna stop doin’ parody.”

When we pull up at the Waldorf-Astoria, where Flynt is hosting a lunch for several magazine wholesalers in one of the Louis XVI conference rooms, a small crowd of gaping tourists forms as the gold-plated wheelchair is removed from the trunk of Flynt’s stretch limo. “What’s everybody lookin’ at?” asks Flynt, momentarily annoyed. Then he sees the bright side. “It’s ’cause we have the flags on the front of the car everybody’s starin’. They think it’s Reagan gettin’ outta the car.”

As he is slid across the worn pine board into his wheelchair, he looks back and says, “I’m gonna ask Andy Warhol to be my official White House photographer.”

In a sense it’s his most logical statement of the day. For, like Andy Warhol, Larry Flynt is a peculiarly American phenomenon, a twentieth-century inversion of the cherished Horatio Alger myth. Like Warhol, he was born into Appalachian poverty; like Warhol, he was shot and almost killed; like Warhol, he loves tape. And, of course, like Warhol, he is a master of mystery, put-on, and parody, a demon at the manipulation of the media and the accumulation of publicity, almost all of it bad. But perhaps the most important similarity is that Larry Flynt, like Warhol, has realized that in a society which worships fame, there is no such thing as bad publicity. The likeness fades, however, when you look to the end beyond the means.

The major difference between the two (and there are many others) is that Warhol pursues his cynical vision in the name of Art, then prices his output so far beyond the reach of the average citizen that his message can hardly be considered incendiary. By contrast, Flynt’s mad genius—and I use both words advisedly after twelve hours spent in his company, and countless more playing back the tapes of our conversations—is potentially dangerous because he has injected his nihilistic megalomania into the arena of electoral politics, waving videocassettes and “sex tapes” the way Joe McCarthy once waved “lists” of Communists in high places, lists that turned out to be blank pieces of paper.

There are other parallels, almost as obvious: Huey Long, Juan Peron, George Wallace—“Wallace knows everything I know,” says Flynt. But the person Larry Flynt most reminds me of, and perhaps it’s just the nasal backwoods drawl that is not without its charm, is Truman Capote, especially when Capote is on vodka and at his “La Cote Basque” bitchiest, taunting Polish princesses in absentia just as Flynt decries Supreme Court justices, finding conspiracy where others see nothing more than coincidence. We must remind ourselves, however, that Truman Capote has brought poetry into this world; Larry Flynt’s only by-product is pornography.

“David, get your fuckin’ pad out!” David Kahn, Larry Flynt’s round-the-clock corporate counsel, takes dictation as Larry rails: “I don’t like the way I’ve been treated in this city, and I want a suit filed against Mayor Koch, also against the New York police for the way they harassed the limousines in front of the Waldorf-Astoria. I want a suit filed against the Waldorf-Astoria. I want a suit filed against the Park Lane, because they wouldn’t let us hold our meeting here. Gordon, you have somebody put the pin on the people downstairs. Tell them the next time I come into this city I want the presidential suite, unless Reagan’s in town. I’m a bona fide candidate, and I expect to get treated the same way as Mondale and Glenn when they come into this town.”

Larry Flynt and company have just checked into a suite, nonpresidential, on the thirty-eighth floor of the Park Lane Hotel, facing Central Park. Within an hour there are almost twenty people in the living room, including Joe and Shirley Wershba, both of CBS News; Ad Lighthall, whose business card reads, “Adroit Enterprises, Salem, Oregon”; Alan Graham, who says he is producing a movie about Jim Morrison that Flynt is financing; a New York “media consultant” named Irwin Billman; and, of course, the CNN crew, the nurse, the lawyer, the evangelist, the armed bodyguards, the chief of security, the minister of everything. Elegance enters around six, in the person of Herald Price Fahringer, the aristocratic lawyer who lost the Claus von Biilow case. In his impeccable Paul Stuart suit, his blue shirt with white collar, his highly polished English slip-ons, he has come to see his client, the pornographer who is running for president, the provocateur in trouble with the Supreme Court. “You’ve been waitin’ all your life for this one— we’re gonna subpoena every fuckin’ one of’em,” is the way Flynt greets him. “Includin’ Sandra.” Then he asks this highly paid, exquisitely turned-out defender of the First Amendment, “Do you know there’s no toilet for the handicapped in the Supreme Court? I think we ought to sue ’em an’ make ’em put one in.”

The Larry Flynt Show starts all over again, the evening performance almost a word-for-word repeat of the matinee. The monologue encompasses, somehow, every question mark in recent American history, from the Bay of Pigs debacle to Jessica Savitch’s death, always returning, somehow, to Korean Air Lines flight 007 and Congressman Larry McDonald, the late chairman of the John Birch Society in whose district Flynt was shot nearly six years ago. The only thing that’s changed is the star’s T-shirt: this one bears the slogan “Larry Flynt for President” and features a cartoon woman spread-eagled around the Capitol dome.

Althea Leasure Flynt, a thirty-year-old former go-go girl born in Marietta, Ohio, arrives at the Park Lane from Los Angeles at close to eight in the evening. Her black hair streaked blue, two earrings pierced through one ear and another through her nose, she heads straight into the bedroom, ignoring the full house to which her husband plays. Like a restless teenager she flops onto the king-size bed and makes a series of rapid phone calls, the last to cancel, disappointedly, a date for later that night to meet punk star Billy Idol—Novel has informed her that they are flying back to Washington in a few hours. When she hangs up, I ask her: What does she think of all this? Mrs. Flynt, her down-home twang not quite lost despite years of Bel Air living, answers: “I think it’s crazy. I want to get my husband away from all these weirdos and get everything back to normal.”

Mrs. Flynt’s wish may have come true. On December 6, 1983, her husband issued the following statement:

Larry Flynt today announced his decision to withdraw from the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

“I can, ” Flynt said, “quote William Tecumseh Sherman when he said, If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve.’”

Flynt also said he will consider running for a seat in Congress at a later date because "I can raise more hell there.”