Beneath Contempt by Headpress

BeneATh ConTempT charts Goldstein’s rise to fame as the founder of the pioneering sex tabloid sCrew and his subsequent battles against censorship, political correctness and good taste. in the process he became a king of the sex industry and a multimillionaire, loathed by moral crusaders and feminists alike. The collapse of Goldstein’s empire, his survival as a street bum living in homeless shelters, and his defiant return from the ashes to run for the presidency in 2008 is mapped out in meticulous detail in this highly entertaining and lavishly illustrated profile of America’s last angry dirty old man.

abLy b o r P i “ not wouLd criPPLed at tack ackS who hunchbProSy. have Le n again but thee So they arc that i PathetiwouLd.” think iStein Ld S – aL go

JACk sTevenson is the author of several film books, including Fleshpot, scandinavian Blue and a biography of lars von Trier.

Three legends meet: Al Goldstein (left) and Myron “the Demon God of Pulp” Fass chat while fondling a figurine of King Kong.

Biography

US $19.95 UK £12.99 AUS $21.99

www.worldheadpress.com

Jack StevenSon beneath conteMPt and haPPy to be there the Fighting LiFe oF Porn king aL goLdStein

The incredible life of Al GoldsTein, an overweight cab driver and carny barker who became the most outspoken leader of America’s sexual revolution, is captured in this unauthorized biography in all its X-rated glory.

h t a e n e b Pt P M e t e n r e h o cand haPPy to be t

e F i L g n i t h g i F g the n i nk

n r o P F o

n i e t S d L o g L a Son n e v e t kS bbyy Jac

HEADPRESS

This is a sample from a Headpress book copyright ÂŠ Headpress 2012

For more information or to buy a copy of the book visit www.worldheadpress.com

BENEATH CONTEMPT AND HAPPY TO BE THERE

The Fighting Life of Porn King

AL GOLDSTEIN by Jack Stevenson

www.worldheadpress.com

Contents Page

Acknowledgements / Dedication

Introduction

Youth

Free, White And Twenty-One

Working Stiff

Desperation

The Demon God Of Pulp

(Still)â&#x20AC;&#x2030;Birth Of Screw

Demon God Of Pulp Descending

Down Every Alley

Screw vs. Mainstream Culture

Screw vs. Underground Culture

Tomorrow The World

The Screw Two

Porn Chic And The Spawn Of Screw

The Painful Price Of Success

Midnight Blue

Trials

Death Magazine: Dead On Arrival

Page

106

Battle Of The Bad Taste Titans

111

The Reagan Eighties

123

Screw Turns Twenty

127

Sweating In The Screw Poorhouse

134

Chillinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; With Grandpa

138

The Goldstein Curse

144

Fall Of The House Of Goldstein

150

The People vs. Goldstein

157

With Malice Aforethought

165

Homeless

174

Working Stiff (Again)

179

Walking Medical Time Bomb

183

Deep Shit

186

I, An Author

190

Goldstein For President

195

Conclusion: Deformed By Evil?

202

Appendix: Screw Goes To The Movies

210

Notes / Bibliography / Photo Credits

213

Index

218

About this book

Aknowledgements Special thanks to Jeff Goodman, Silke Mayer and Joe Coleman for use of their excellent photos and illustrations. And thanks to a young man named John Walsh who was employed by Screw magazine in the late eighties. One morning he came to work at the Milky Way Production offices to find they were cleaning house and had unceremoniously dumped piles of early issues of Screw and its bastard progeny into the filthy gutter of 14th Street. He quickly yanked out a selection of the cast-off issues before they were all heaved into the garbage truck a few minutes later, and, aware of my interest in these early publications, he mailed them to me. It was an act of archeological prescienceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;prescient in that these garbage pickings have aided me immensely in my exploration of the most interesting period of Screw, its cursed and besotted youth, and archeological in that these early issues were as yellowed, brittle and flaked as the skin of ancient mummies. All interesting things seem to rot quickly.

Dedication Dedicated to all those who wonder why anyone should give a fuck about the ravings of an apparent madman. So I guess thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just about everybody.

4 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There

Introduction

ew transformations have been so jarring and outwardly unfathomable as the one that turned an overweight cab driver and welfare recipient into the most outspoken figurehead of America’s sexual revolution. But upon closer inspection perhaps not so unfathomable. The driving force behind America’s take-no-prisoners sex tabloid, Screw, that did so much to set that revolution in motion was a man by the name of Al Goldstein, who had been taken prisoner all his young life. Taken prisoner by a tyrannical father, by a brutal inner city school system and most of all by a culture of sexual repression that was endemic to forties/fifties America. It was natural enough that he would want to turn the tables. On the whole world. Forever. And, like so many of the other sexual gurus of that era, he was a quiet and introverted youth whose adolescent sexual passivity failed to hint that sex would in fact become his life’s great and endless work. Predictably enough, the fact that he was “sexually retarded” (his term) preordained it. The thought never left him. Goldstein’s life and career have been full of jarring transformations. He is like no other celebrity on the American scene; a larger-than-life confirmation of all the stereotypes of the uncouth, foul-mouthed dirty-old-man pornographer, who the next instant reveals a painfully human side and tends to quickly tear-up. Unlike most corporate publishing bosses who hide behind a wall of lawyers, publicists, and spokesmen, he refused to be “handled.” Consuming sex, food, fame, TV sets, gold watches and obscenely expensive cigars with the voraciousness of a garbage dumpster, he burned through five wives and a fortune, blazing a descending arc across

Introduction 5 Joe Coleman illustrated 80 Screw “special”. the cover of this 19

that dark and misty void known as the adult entertainment industry. He came to symbolize all that was good, bad and oh so ugly about America. He could never have survived, thrived and become what he was in any other culture. But I get ahead of myself. In the beginning, the very beginning, he was cute. Like all babies. … you think?

Little Al at his Bar Mitzvah.

Youth 7

CHAPT R 1 YOUTH

With a smack on his scrawny little ass and a scream, Al came into the world in 1936, born into a first-generation immigrant Jewish family of humble origins that lived in a house on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He had a “psychotic” brother he almost never refers to, a “dumb father” and a “delusional” mother.1 So far so bad. That mother, Gertrude Breslow, tended to the house while husband Sam plied his trade as a shutterbug for the Daily Mirror. Although he had served bravely as a photographer during WWII, Al would forever characterize him as a gutless weasel, a man who “walked around his whole life in mortal fear… the personification of Camus’ The Stranger… a man who said ‘sir’ to elevator operators.” A man who quietly acquiesced to his wife’s long term affair with her diet doctor. But there was one person on earth he could lord it over—little Al. And yet he took his stuttering, bed-wetting son to sports events other boys could only dream about. They went to a lot of the Friday night boxing matches at Madison Square Garden, and little Al was there at ringside on October 26, 1951, when a brawling young Rocky Marciano floored an over-the-hill Joe Louis with a left hook in the eighth round, his dad hanging into the ropes trying to get the pic, eye glued to his boxy camera. Little Al was also in tow on frequent forays to Ebbets Field to see the great Dodger teams of the forties. He got his picture taken with Jackie Robinson. He devoured the Sporting News every week and became so knowledgeable about the team that he guested as the statistics-spouting “Little Alvin Goldstein” on a post-game radio show. He also assisted his dad on more mundane jobs, such as wedding photo shoots and such like.

8 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There

As a late-eighties photo collage from Screw testifies, Al never took his Jewishness seriously. Growing up in Williamsburg, he often gazed out his bedroom window at the skyscrapers of Manhattan and wondered what kind of world lay on the other side of the river. Living here in this neighborhood meant exposure to the largest orthodox Jewish community in the U.S. Al himself was Jewish and attended an orthodox synagogue as a boy, but his family was not particularly religious and he came to harbor a great dislike of the devout, oddly dressed Jews he encountered. He later claimed that when he was given a car in high school one of his main endeavors was to try and run them over. One of the most traumatic events of his young life was being sent to an orthodox Jewish summer camp. Though he would make much of his Jewishness throughout his life, it was mostly in the form of a running gag line, and he later declared himself to be an atheist and agnostic by turns. Growing up in Brooklyn also meant frequent trips to Coney Island. In this working class Shangri-La by the sea he was able to indulge the two obsessions that would dominate his life: food and the female sex. He had better luck with the food part, plowing into knishes, lobster rolls, hotdogs and the meaty scalloped French fries to be had there. The

Youth 9 memories of these adolescent gastronomic conquests would provide him with much warmth and solace later in life. In this prudish postwar era he also registered his first fleeting impressions of sexuality as he eagerly hung over the rail at the Insanitorium, a kind of haunted departure hall at the end of the steeplechase ride. Here discombobulated thrill seekers would dismount and file out, only to have their fannies whacked by a dwarf while blasts of compressed air lifted the skirts of a million Brooklyn babes to squeals and blushes. “I, little Alvin Goldstein,” as he would recall, “caught my first stolen glimpses of the indentation of pussy protruding from panty-girdles. I saw midgets poke them with an electric stinger. Imagine how politically-incorrect this would be today—midgets blowing up girls’ skirts, whacking their tokhis with paddles, and poking them with electric prods…” He recalled specifically a “horny dwarf” called Little Angelo who in the 1940s “whacked women’s fannies with a dingbat as their skirts blew up from the floorboard airbursts. Then his tiny greedy hands grabbed at their tits as they lost balance. Little Angelo’s disreputable behavior as a carny molester finally cost him his job.”2 Back home in Williamsburg he experienced a typically American male rite of passage—finding porn in his father’s underwear drawer. An older and wiser neighborhood pal taught him how to jerk off, which he began to do regularly with the aid of Tijuana Bibles3 and photos of the hot blonde stripper called Candy Barr. By the time he reached his mid teens he had amassed the largest collection of porn in high school. In addition to being a dedicated masturbator, he was also a confirmed lefty. But his father didn’t share his politics and at age fifteen when Al joined the ACLU Sam threw him out of the house, calling him a communist. For six weeks Al lived at the house of a friend. At seventeen a pal introduced him to mescaline. He “tripped” a number of times, this long before the Summer

10 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There of Love, and read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. But when this flabby, stuttering teenager closed the book and came down from his high, he was still in deepest Brooklyn, a land as far from the budding promise of hippy bliss as could be imagined. And there wasn’t much peace and love at his almost all-black high school (two percent white) in the slums of Bedford-Stuyvesant, which many years later Mike Tyson was also to attend. Of the ten street fights he got into he lost every one. (“I was weak and white and never learned how to throw a punch.”) As a way to curry favor with his classmates and buy his protection, he became the school photographer, snapping photos of the black sports heroes and giving them copies. He also joined the debating team: if he couldn’t define himself with his muscles he would define himself with his mouth. In his own words he was “painfully shy” and “sexually retarded,” and what made meeting girls even more difficult was the fact that this was an all-boys school, called in fact Boys High. Perhaps due to the lack of real flesh-and-blood females, his perception of the opposite sex became excessively sentimentalized. He fantasized incessantly about the rapturous charms of the fairer gender, gushing to crooners like Johnny Ray and Frankie Lane on the radio and mail ordering books like How to Kiss Girls and How To Write Love Letters, although he had no one to send them to. He read as much as he could about sex, thumbing eagerly through the books of D.H. Lawrence and other controversial authors of the period. As he speculates in his autobiography, I, Goldstein, “some say if I’d been allowed to pull my pants down in public as a boy, there never would have been Screw… Screw was such an anti-romantic publication as compensation for that.”4 Indeed. Screw would not only attempt to deal honestly with sex but also to strip away the romanticism and sentimentality that surrounded it, and brutally so. He felt he had been badly duped about love and sex and his eternal mission in

Youth 11 life was to make right on this fraud. Many years later he would bemoan “Romeo and Juliet and the lies about love. All the songs we hear about unrequited love and the sadness when our hearts are broken are bullshit. If Romeo and Juliet really loved each other, they would have hope that they would find love again and wouldn’t have killed themselves. Love is a deception and a trap. Love is a big myth…”5 He did manage to get laid at sixteen, but only via the intervention of his parents (or at least his mother, accounts differ) who arranged for his uncle George to set up Al with a “loose” older woman in a hotel room. George was a hipster: a divorcee (rare in 1952), a jazz buff whose flat was only two blocks from the famous bop club Birdland, and an imbiber of pot who also turned Al on to same. Showing up in his by now ill-fitting Bar Mitzvah suit, Al was put through the paces but never saw the woman’s face, which remained hidden in the shadows. He did however get up close and personal to other parts of her anatomy, and this was his first go at cunnilingus, something he’d discovered before in the novels of Henry Miller and Frank Harris—and now it was happening for real. But then it was straight back to the everyday grind where females remained a theoretical conception, and yet however cowed and timid he was as a youth, there were the occasional acts of pointless bravado. One of which, the hurling of a water balloon at his high school civics teacher, got him booted out of school before graduation. Not very civil. At the age of nineteen he finally got out of Brooklyn by enlisting in the army. On his last free night he saw Johnny Ray at a club called the Latin Quarter. Seeing his idol up close made a deep impression on him. “He was like a fag Janis Joplin—all emotion.” This was 1955 and rock’n’roll had yet to rear its ugly head. He had originally been assigned to the infantry, but his father, who as a photographer had connections, pulled some strings and after basic training at Fort Dix he ended

12 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There up pursuing same profession in a Signal Corp unit based in Arizona. Here he snapped pics of parades and military ceremonies and on one occasion, under orders, of his sergeant getting a blowjob from a hooker. It was here in Arizona, from Tombstone Union High School, no less, that he belatedly got his diploma. After a year in the service he was still, in his own words, just a “whining Jew faggot” and he had his dad pull strings again to get him re-assigned to the Second Photo Platoon in Long Island City. Here he worked in a darkroom, developing propaganda for the military, and tooled around New York City in a jeep. He rather enjoyed it…

Young G.I. Goldstein with camera in hand.

Free, White and Twenty-One 13

CHAPT R 2 FREE, WHITE AND TWENTY-ONE

Awarded an honorable discharge in 1956, Al Goldstein enrolled in the English department at Pace University on the G.I. Bill. This was more like it. He grew a goatee, earning him the nickname “weird beard,” and became the school’s resident beatnik. He had girlfriends and he became head of the International Relations Club and captain of the debating team, which helped him to lose his stutter. He even tried his hand at acting. It was a disaster by his account, with him bombing in both Our Town and Hedda Gabler. When Allen Ginsberg came to Pace to do a reading, Al interviewed him for the college paper. Ginsburg used the word “fuck” which ended up printed in Al’s article and got him into hot water. Disillusioned, he quit the school rag and launched his own humble literary publication called Skepsis. By now he was a full-fledged “pinko lefty” who faithfully listened to the likes of DJs like WMCA’s Barry Gray. The progressive ‘father of talk radio’ who ruled the late night airwaves of the Big Apple through the fifties and sixties, Gray pioneered listener call-ins, was a tireless opponent of bigotry and was not afraid to tackle risqué subject matter, otherwise off-limits stuff like nudity in European films and NYC prostitution. He often hosted authors on his program and had even read their books beforehand—a rarity. When not tuning into Gray, Al was spinning the dial in search of the new rock’n’roll beat. He had graduated from Frankie Lane and Johnny Ray to this new music and began attending Allen Freed’s New York area rock’n’roll shows. He bought the hottest new 45s “on the negro side of Flatbush Avenue,” and as captain of the debating team defended this new street music against the snobbish Ivy League opponents who were classically inclined.

The resident beatnik at Pace University.

Free, White and Twenty-One 15 He attended Pace for four years, paid for by the G.I. Bill. Later in life he spoke dismissively about it, claiming they would take anyone who had a pulse, but it would figure as a defining experience in his life. At one point he had a black girlfriend, but the hateful stares and comments they encountered on the street wore them out and their interracial relationship lasted but six months. He had a white girlfriend too, their romance straight out of a Hubert Selby novel. He describes her as a beautiful girl, a student at Hunter College. And a junkie. “The only path to her pussy was through the ritual of shooting heroin. Men will do anything. She mainlined me four times. The blood was fearsome coming back up the needle. I only skin-popped afterwards. I heard heroin stopped your sex drive, but Althea was so hot when stoned, I remained just as horny through my deep lethargy. I would have let someone cut a finger off to taste pussy. Why else would I put a needle in my arm, when I was afraid of blood work? When she was bombed out, I put my dick in her mouth, she didn’t care. She was a heroin whore, a white girl who knew where to cop in Harlem.”6 They occasionally did their thing in Uncle George’s hotel room. But once he caught them and got angry, so they went back to Al’s flat, a one room studio (with bathroom across the hall) in a slum building at 305 West 71st Street. Althea was to die of an overdose in the late fifties.

26 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There

CHAPT R 6 (STILL) BIRTH OF SCREW

One day Buckley and Goldstein had a meeting in the offices of the New York Free Press, with Steve Heller and possibly others sitting in. They were the oddest of odd couples; an ungainly loud-mouthed Jew and a quiet, soft-spoken Irish kid who could have passed for a choirboy and by his own admission was anything but a sex fiend. Nevertheless it was Buckley who suggested they start their own paper, and that it should be “…a sex paper!” Goldstein was all for the idea, so much so that many years later in his autobiography he claims credit for suggesting it. Yet his earlier, and one might assume more accurate utterances, clearly indicate it was Buckley’s idea to launch a sex publication. Whatever. Both agreed it should wallow in sex and dispense with the violence. They both needed to make more money and it was no secret that “sex sold” in the underground as successfully as it sold in the mainstream media. As Heller later recalled, “At the time social and political underground papers, like the East Village Other… were making considerable income from personal ads. The New York Free Press… sold best when semi-nude women were featured on the cover, even if the rest of the issue was devoted to, say, the rioting at the 1968 Democratic convention.” That was fine with Al. He was an admitted sex fiend. That’s what he brought to it. Buckley knew the mechanics of putting out a newspaper and brought an underground sensibility to the project. Goldstein was no hippy and had worked jobs so far ‘above ground’ that the air got thin, but he had never been comfortable doing these things and felt himself an outsider in both worlds, in all worlds. At thirty-two, nor was he young anymore. Whether Buckley or Goldstein was the more politically engaged is not clear since they had such different person-

(Still) Birth of Screw 27 al styles, but in any case they both had the same heroes, the likes of Henry Miller, Lenny Bruce, Barney Rosset of Grove Press, Paul Krassner of The Realist and Abbie Hoffman. Al yearned to be a firecracker up the ass of the establishment. He so badly wanted to be one of the “Chicago Seven,” but he was nobody then and well aware of the fact. Over the summer of 1968, Buckley and Goldstein began working on the first issue of a tabloid they would call Screw. Steve Heller, still in his teens, was on board as art director. Although in his book Goldstein played down his involvement, Heller was (and is credited as) the art director on the first issue and stayed on in that capacity for a while. As the young graphics whiz would later admit, he no idea what he was doing. He wasn’t alone. Goldstein had just bigamously married a woman by the name of Mary Phillips, a blonde, blue-eyed hippy stewardess from Charleston, South Carolina, whom he met while driving a cab or while he was on welfare—accounts differ. (If he was driving cab while receiving welfare that would make him a welfareFly me to the moon: cheat.) At this point, when he Goldstein and Phillips was able to control his weight, about to embark. he was still capable of appearing relatively svelte, his goatee still in place along with a fondness for turtleneck sweaters and suitcoats. Though she is perhaps the “wife that got away,” the “ex” he remembers most fondly, he claims he married her in large part just so he could get vast discounts on air travel.

28 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There Screw The first issue ofcomple te with original masthead.

He credited her as publisher of this first issue, not being sure his divorce with Lonnie had gone through yet and not wanting Lonnie to reap any financial rewards that the paper might generate. The editorial staff was a clutch of mostly obvious and less than clever pseudonyms, like Jean-Paul Bo-

(Still) Birth of Screw 29 gart, Al Nego, Ivan Tolstoi and Aristotle Agnew. Most were aliases for Goldstein, who penned the bulk of the material. Others hid behind first names only. The result was a crude twelve-page mélange of uneven press-on lettering and linotype text in different fonts, and it was printed in b&w on newsprint so cheap it began to get brittle as soon as one picked it up. how to buy sex books, exposing a fake vagina and screw reviews a beaver film were some of the enticements posted on the cover, which featured a girl in a bikini and fifties style hairdo hoisting what appears to be a giant salami. Sophisticated Screw wasn’t. But it had ambition to spare. Buckley and Goldstein promised to uncover the entire world of sex for the awestruck first-time buyer, to be the Consumer Reports of sex but with a hip twist. “We don’t want kids to read Screw if their folks are hung up,” proclaimed the editorial, “but we do want adults who admit they dig the same thing we do and want to cut the sham and groove on the truth. It’s your move now—king me!—Screw is here!” They got down to business in an article entitled screw goes to market which dealt with product testing. Their first task was to rate an artificial vagina they had mail ordered for twenty bucks. It took a month-and-a-half to arrive: a square six-inch canvas-like pillow that contained a small four-inch slit with rubber sides for insertion of the erect member. Connected to this hole in the bag was a long rubber cord with a rubber bulb. By squeezing the bulb air was forced into the rubber “lips” of the canvas bag causing them to dilate. Their test was less than scientific, in fact it never happened; “We found the whole concept of trying to fuck a burlap bag with gill-like breathing apertures much too ludicrous to get aroused over,” Al recalled. So they fucked it with a dildo instead. They had some laughs and enough evidence to give it a rating, pronouncing it “fair” in a fit of charity over the fact that anything at all had arrived in the post.

30 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There Substantial text and photo-play were given to a pair of reviews of the movie Barbarella that oddly didn’t seem to be written by Buckley or Goldstein (though they might well have been). Additionally there was a full page photoladen report of a brief nude happening on the Alan Burke TV show. On page nine appeared a pre-Stonewall tip: “Best place for gay pickups, blowjobs and various perversions that feel nice is down at the boats on West Christopher Street, after nine p.m. Head for the trucks and follow the crowds of participants and voyeurs. Police harass the folk but rarely run anybody in. If cops bother you, say you’re taking a piss.” Lame one-liners like “Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman are going steady,” “Ralph Nadar is a reckless driver”… “Ralph Ginsburg [sic] is a prude” and “John Wilcock is an old stay-at-home” were pasted up randomly throughout the pages. Beastly crude and just plain sloppy, this inaugural issue exhibited a penchant for the type of anarcho-hippy humor that tended to the bizarre, exalted in vulgarity and found an echo in various other contemporary manifestations of underground culture, such as the music of Frank Zappa, the antics of the Cockettes (a San Francisco based troupe of transvestite performers) and the movies of an as yet unknown Baltimore filmmaker by the name of John Waters. Wigging out middle class respectables just by one’s very existence was an art and a science of the times, and with its first Screw You! editorial the paper delivered this kind of in-your-face defiance in spades. It was raw and immediate. You had the feeling you were seeing real people in these first issues, not models. Indeed, some of the nudies on display sported bad teeth, freaky hair and patchy skin that’s rather jarring to look at today. Goldstein and Buckley dumped just about all the money they had into this first issue, $350. This covered the printing bill of $217, at least one ad in another un-

(Still) Birth of Screw 31 derground paper ($75) and not much else. It was dated November 29, but ready to hit the streets on November 4, peeking out of the racks of a handful of newsstands on the same day Nixon was crowned President (having run on a law-and-order platform that contained a very pronounced anti-obscenity plank). It was a press-run of between 4,500 and 7,000 copies (discrepancies exist between the numbers Al quotes in 1988 and in 2006). “The printer promptly burned the plates and mats and any evidence that he had printed such a thing,” recalled Al. Part-time underground distributor Archie Gordon, known as “old Archie,” agreed to handle the paper, but his wife hated it and he dragged his feet getting it out. It was a disaster: 2,500 copies were destroyed and Goldstein and Buckley were almost crushed when a mountain of 4,000 were returned to them. These numbers hold if the press run of 7,000 is correct, meaning only 500 were sold, stolen or simply lost. That should’ve been that, but they refused to admit defeat and decided to distribute it themselves. Al had no car so he hit the streets on his bicycle and rode the subways, lobbying all the newsstands in mid Manhattan to take it. “I remember going to dealers along 8th Avenue,” he recalled twenty years later. “These old Jewish guys would yell at me and call me filthy and disgusting and they’d rip up the papers right in front of me… For eight weeks cigar-chomping fat guys with aprons told me I was vile and should be ashamed.” He finally found a newsstand at 53rd and 3rd Avenue that would take the paper and he was so grateful he told them they could keep all the money. By the end of December Screw was only available for sale on one lone newsstand, and yet eventually twenty-two vendors agreed to sell it. For their trouble they were threatened by the police and told that they would be thrown in jail along with the publishers. At first glance this was perhaps odd since the inaugural issue contained no hardcore imagery. A personal ads section

32 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There entitled cocks and cunts and a centerfold featuring the full frontal nudity of a “body-painting happening” in Central Park by Japanese performance artist Yayoi Kusama, however, crossed the threshold of smut for most people at a time when Playboy was still air-brushing pubic hair and hardcore pornography had yet to appear on any theater screen. (It didn’t help that besides being nude the two hairy men in body paint were wearing bizarre gender-bending Shirley Temple wigs.) Much has been made of sixties liberality, but in regards to average American mores in 1968 it might have well have been 1948. The paper was something new and so was the way Al conducted himself in this most disrespected of professions. Previously pornographers had kept a low profile, copping pleas, using aliases and scurrying back into the shadows whenever the glare of attention shone on them, but Goldstein was visible—with a vengeance. According to Al’s most recent recollections, this first issue eventually sold out and they funneled that money into the second.

Back page personals from the May 1969 issue.

Demon God of Pulp Descending 33

CHAPT R 7 DEMON GOD OF PULP DESCENDING

It was tough work, but as Al proudly notes in his autobiography, by early 1969 Screw was so successful that it made Myron Fass irrelevant, “driving his whole dreck factory, and others like it, to the bottom of the newsstand racks.” Al maintains Fass fired him as soon as Screw came out because his grammar was so bad, the clear implication being this was just an excuse and that Fass was angry at being one-upped. All in all Screw’s success was sweet vindication for Al, and his triumph over the evil Fass was poetic justice. Except that none of it was really true. In another account Al says that Fass fired him in late November, weeks after Screw appeared, because he asked for a raise, a brave act in and of itself considering that Fass was known to flaunt a loaded gun whenever an argument with an employee erupted. Fass was no peacenik and once savagely beat up a business partner with his fists in front of the whole office, but Al emerged from this encounter unbloodied although needless to say he didn’t get his raise. Judging from passages in his book, it seems Al has only scorn for Fass. In addition to the above quotes, he states that “His father worked for the WPA in the sewers of New York and Myron worked in the sewers of publishing.” In fact Al has previously admitted the substantial debt he owed to Fass, and himself applied a very “Fass-ian” approach when he began to issue forth with a flurry of Screw spin-off publications and opportunistic one-shots (to be discussed later). He had clearly learned from the master. In fact evidence indicates they parted friends. Pictures exist of a smiling Fass paging through an issue of Screw, and another, taken the same day, of Fass pouring coffee while Al looks on lovingly. At some point after Screw had established itself, Al even made Fass

34 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There

Laying down the gauntlet: Manifesto from the back page of an early Screw.

Demon God of Pulp Descending 35 the recipient of the Al Goldstein Award, although it is unlikely that an old-school operator like Fass cared much for Screw. The final misimpression Al gives in his book is that Screw drove Fass’ empire out of business. Hardly. The demon god of pulp continued to flood magazine racks with a dizzying array of cheap publications, among them Official UFO, Ancient Astronauts, Jaws of Blood, Erotica, Crime, Son of Sam, True War, Tales From the Tomb and countless other car, gun and outerspace magazines. In fact the seventies proved to be his golden age: In 1977, Fass grossed $25M and claims to have doubled that the following year. There was no disaster so tragic nor murder so bloody that he couldn’t make a cheap magazine out of it, even rushing out something called Larry Flynt of Hustler after the porn king was shot. Complete with bloody photos, offensive comics and tasteless humor in the tradition of Flynt himself, this publication was truly beyond the pale and is today hard to find due to the fact that many copies were reportedly destroyed by a disgusted distributor. These and other “one-shots” were his special passion, but his favored strategy was to carpet-bomb a subject to death. Rock’n’roll for example. There was Rock, Hard Rock, Super Rock, Punk Rock, Acid Rock, Groupie Rock, just to get started. Fass continued publishing into the eighties but grew increasingly reclusive and paranoid, moving to Florida where he ran a gun shop and hid behind a wall of aliases. He couldn’t go cold turkey from publishing though, that was his ‘jones,’ and as late as the mid nineties he was reportedly still at it, pseudonymously pumping out titles like Gadget World, People Today and a slew of gun magazines under an umbrella company called Creative Arts. He passed away in Fort Lauderdale on September 14, 2006, age eighty, a shadowy presence until the end. Although he had no formal connection with Weekly World News—the throwback scandal sheet that became iconic in the eighties when the checkout counter crowd acquired a sense of irony—that was his real headstone, a crazy-quilt of

36 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There

Goldstein and Fass, friends after all. every bizarre fascination he had popularized in the preceding decades. But Al Goldstein had something Fass didn’t have, an original idea. And just as innovative was the way Screw functioned as a business. Fass made his fortune selling magazines off the newsstand; he had very little advertising and wasn’t keen on selling subscriptions. Subscriptions were also problematic for Screw since they invited busts by the feds when copies were mailed to more conservative parts of the country, but selling ad space was Screw’s lifeblood. That’s how the magazine prospered, by giving the world’s oldest profession its first public forum with which to advertise its goods and services.

Down Every Alley 37

CHAPT R 8 DOWN EVERY ALLEY

For the first few issues they didn’t even have a real office. Eventually Screw moved into quarters just north of the East Village, at 13th and Union Square, and kept pumping out issues. The paper persisted, found its audience and success came quickly. They were onto something big. Screw had tapped into a huge market no one knew existed and were riding the crest of the wave of the sexual revolution. The famous peter-meter, a rating symbol that depicted a male member in various states of arousal, had appeared by issue four, and by issue nine (April 1969), Screw went from bi-weekly to weekly. It joined the political fray by endorsing mayoral candidate Lou Abolafia, who advocated copulation in public, and slammed Jackie Gleason for hosting a “decency rally” in Miami in reaction to Jim Morrison’s obscenity bust. Soon the paper had introduced its own obscene crossword puzzle. Circulation was growing by leaps and bounds, with a 20,000 jump in the press run between issue ten and eleven, the latter clocking in at 50,000 copies. As Screw became a living legend over the years, Goldstein and Buckley have been Screw issue nine with new apportioned ninety-nine psychedelic masthead. percent of the credit.

38 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There

Squalid hippy excess flourishes in the pages of an early Screw.

Down Every Alley 39 In fact others were also a part of the birthing process. As noted, Steven Heller played a role, as did Michael Perkins, an English professor with a flair for serious literary criticism who wrote the Fuck Books column. And he continued to do so for decades, earning him Goldstein’s loyalty in the process. There were many; writers, photographers, unclassifiable “friends of the family” who helped in some fashion for an issue or two and then moved on. But Goldstein and Buckley were the ones who took all the heat. They were the two fearless leaders. And yet for all their new found status they hardly counted among the movers and shakers of the underground. They were in fact relative nobodies, this fat Jewish guy with frizzy hair and this quiet Irish kid, his partner. And (horrors!) they had even both been in the service, odd for people who moved in those circles. In a milieu full of long-haired hipsters who exuded tons of studied cool they were the odd men out. They were certainly not of the stature of people like the legendary John Wilcock, who had been and would continue to be a key figure in the founding of so many underground publications, or the tall, bearded Walter Bowart who had co-founded the East Village Other (EVO), America’s most influential alternative paper, along with Allan Katzman and Sherry Needham. Screw had taken everybody by surprise, including these folks. Yet, the EVO supported Screw and its belligerent anti-censorship stance from the outset, accepting their ads, which neither the Village Voice or the New York Times would do. Very quickly however a competitive relationship evolved. As EVO writer Alex Gross remembers, acting publisher Joel Fabricant “was beside himself both with the threat [Screw] posed and the opportunity it offered.” Envious of its success, which they themselves had done much to pave the way for, in April EVO launched their own sex paper called Kiss. They did so, as they readily admitted, “to make a killing.” When Screw launched a sister publication, Gay, EVO very quickly followed suit with Gay Power.

Poster display case for The Metropolitan Theater says it all.

Down Every Alley 41 Other titles appeared from both parties in a frenzy of diversification. Screw even announced plans to clone itself with a new tabloid called Erect, although it’s uncertain if Erect ever saw the light of day. Suddenly sex publications were not such a cursed commodity. Seeing the money to be made, even ‘Old Archie’ Gordon was now putting out his own rag called Pleasure and was distributing Kiss. When the cops did their rounds of obscenity busts, Al, Old Archie and the editors of competing rags often ended up sharing the same jail cell, forcing Goldstein to endure their low company, much to his disdain. One of these new sex papers carried the high flautin’ title, the New York Review of Sex and Politics, and was headed by Steven Heller no less, who had quit Screw after a blowup with Goldstein over a design issue. During his run as editor

Erect is announced in issue thirteen of Screw.

42 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There at the new paper he was hauled in on obscenity charges like all the rest, and though still in his teens he was once tossed into an adult cell full of prostitutes. The New York Review… was short-lived, however, going out of business after just twenty issues and prompting Heller’s distributor to dryly remark that he was “the only person in New York who could make a sex paper fail.” But Screw remained unique thanks to Al’s inexhaustible drive.

Early issues of Screw were full of these type ts. of ads peddling dubious produc The product testing continued full bore. One moment Al was wrestling with a rubber blowup doll and the next he was fearfully inserting his member into a dangerous looking electric “cock-enlarger.”14 Buying adult products through mail order at that time lacked any consumer safeguards as the average customer was generally too apologetic and guilt-ridden to complain. It was a no-man’s land swarming with fly-by-night companies who bilked the gullible and sometimes peddled products that were actually life-threatening. Now they would be held accountable, and if necessary, pilloried in Screw. Al also went out and pounded the pavements, bringing his experience in investigative journalism to this new sphere of public sexuality, personally visiting all the most forbid-

Down Every Alley 43 ding haunts of New York’s sexual subcultures and reviewing them in Screw. He wrote about theaters, movies, sex clubs and even apparently alleyways and backlots. This was the world Al immersed himself in, a shadowy realm dealt with in the most mysterious and ominous fashion in movies like Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Hardcore and countless others. These films did much to shape the popular perception that these clubs and twenty-four-hour theaters were dens of degenerate filth, and that the people who ran them were murderous psychotics. It was an urban mythology that middle America bought into with great enthusiasm. Bullshit, one can almost hear Al say in his slightly lispy Brooklyn accent. Of course there were plenty of bad guys involved, that’s because the consumer had no power in this game and there was no regulation of the trade and no pride in delivering goods and services. These were things he was trying to change. This idea that the sex trade was by nature inherently morally evil was the biggest con in his book, a misconception nurtured by politicians and special interest groups on the right who sought to keep a hold over their constituents through the power of fear. When the urban legend, the “snuff film,” rose to prominence in the seventies and eighties, he offered $10,000 to anyone who could offer evdence of its existence. The reward has never been claimed. Al was all over the city. He caught the end of burlesque in issue nine (April 18, 1969) when he reported on a visit to the Mayfair Burlesque on 235 West 46th Street. Penned in his defiantly personal style, nearly half the article is dedicated to memories of jerking off to Candy Barr when he was younger. It had nothing directly to do with the Mayfair Burlesque; he had seen Ms. Barr at the Gaiety the year before and was still thinking about that. Finally he got on track and focused on the Mayfair, only to admit he found nothing feminine or erotic about strip shows. “The burlesque show brings out feelings of isolation and apartness in me and truthfully I can’t wait to get back to the Hudson Theatre.”

44 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There

The legendary Variety PhotoPlays in its heyday. He interviewed a friendly stripper called Linda Darling because, as he states in the article, he wanted to get backstage. She was working “the circuit,” from Cleveland to St. Louis, Toledo, Buffalo and then back to New York again. He asked her if the audience had changed in the last few years. “The first three rows in the audience of baldheaded and loyal customers are the same. I sometimes think the same people follow me from city to city. Even the clucking sounds they make seem to be exactly as I remember when I started in this business.” The piece was entitled, appropriately enough, bare tits and bald heads. This was the last dying gasp of burlesque in Times Square, and within a year and a half genuine burlesque went belly up as pornographic cinema rendered the art of the tease obsolete. Al went to all the early porno theaters when they were just starting to come into existence. These were dark, smelly little joints for the most part. In some cases old theaters sim-

Down Every Alley 45 ply dropped live acts and started showing hardcore porn, the dusty ages-old atmosphere still intact. Any theater big enough to have a balcony was sure to be trouble. The Variety PhotoPlays at Third and Twelfth was one such venue. So was the Metropolitan on 14th and 3rd Avenue. They were the seediest theaters south of Times Square and would only get worse through the seventies and eighties, the balconies and toilets swarming with tricks, piss freaks and unclassifiable flotsam. (Reality intersects with cinema here: In Taxi Driver Robert De Niro’s character first meets Jodi Foster’s in the Variety, and the film’s closing shootout happened right around the corner from the theater.) The Metropolitan regularly advertised in Screw. Al frequented both, particularly the Variety PhotoPlays, which was closest to the Screw office where it was affectionately known as Suck Theater. The look of the paper itself was improving incrementally. For one, the retarded doodlings of the first issue were soon replaced by serviceable underground comics from the likes of Bill Griffith and illustrators from the B.G. syndicate stable, like Billy Graham. By the spring of 1969 there was a popular personal ads column where everything from sex lessons to novelties like “hippy lipstick” and “legal hash” were hawked. Uninhibited swingers pleaded for more females… guys and gals sought each other in all combinations and hues, and someone offered “thrilling bohemiam” [sic] friendships. Erotic manuscripts were sought, suspicious mail-forwarding services were advertised and picture books promising the world were promoted. These were hardly the first personals to appear in the underground press, but they had their own character and there was a diverse and uninhibited aspect to it all that had not been seen before to this degree. The more commercially oriented back page ads also grew in size and variety. Cordless vibrators were advertised along with French ticklers, dildos, dirty books and tubes of

46 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There

Screw provided the only substantial advertising opportunity for the newly emerging circuit of and gay. pornographic theaters, straight

Down Every Alley 47 joy jelly, and in one issue there was even an elaborate invitation to a bi-sexual Tahitian Orgy (“no nudists!”), all of this oddly side-by-side with straight ads for Levine’s restaurant (Irish Jewish Canadian cuisine), the Empire Messenger Service, which was also hiring runners, and the House of Games where you could learn to play chess and bridge. Max’s Kansas City (“Steak, Lobster, Chick Peas”) also advertised in early issues. In issue thirteen (May 1969), the play Che, which featured

Screw’s back pages offered sanctuary to quacks, charlatans and conspiracy theorists alike. a genuine act of fellatio and had recently been closed down by the authorities, was reviewed at length in an article headed “Fuck the Revolution.” Goldstein, writing under the pseudonym of Aristotle Agnew, praised the nude stage production as “the sexiest, raunchiest thing I have seen since my last trip to Tijuana.” He concluded: “Che is ten times more sensual than I am Curious (Yellow), which explains why I am Curious (Yellow) is still playing while Che is in the doldrums of the legal system. Once it reappears, though, it will shake the Establishment to its core and overturn the roots of all artistic endeavor in the United States. Fuck the Revolution, let’s fuck!”

48 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There Screw subscription

advert Screw had been folissue. from January 1972 lowing the saga of Che for several weeks and had criticized the role played by assistant District Attorney Kenneth Conboy in closing it down. The paper’s coverage had allegedly prompted Conboy to retaliate in the form of a rude grilling administered to Goldstein’s fifty-six year old mother on some pretext or other, and now Al damned Conboy to Hell in a fiery editorial. The attacks against Screw had already begun from many quarters. “Some have said we created a Frankenstein monster, and can only be devoured by our own creation,” noted the editorial with uncanny prescience. It was a heady experience to be hunted and hated by so many. It kept the adrenaline pumping. Goldstein’s desire to break barriers also drove him to print in the same issue a two-page spread of grainy gay male photos. This, he bragged, constituted “the first pictorial presentation of actual homosexual love ever permitted to see the light of day in the United States”. Perhaps more shocking than the less-than-revealing photos was the poem this budding Walt Whitman (undoubtedly Goldstein) composed to caption them: “a man loves a man. Warm flesh burning into wet lips. Lovers fingers intertwining and searching beneath the yoke of body apartness. A man loves a man is the same journey as a man loves a woman and a woman loves a woman. A search and a find. A giving and a taking infused with the desire to reach out and get beyond the self. A trip into the deepest recesses of selfhood.”

Down Every Alley 49 Despite his declarations of solidarity, Goldstein would have as ambiguous a relationship with the gay community as he had with every community. He had published a gay column from the outset and was a sympathetico and a lefty fellow traveler, and yet, as noted, no one was spared from his satiric blasts. His unflinching use of gay stereotypes was done in the cause of deactivating those very same stereotypes, much in the same fashion that Lenny Bruce and George Carlin tried to dispel the power of “bad words” by confronting them and rendering them simply banal. But not everybody was in on the joke. Only a small minority of gays found his cutting humor funny, and he had the same sort of conditional relationship with blacks. He had gone to a largely black high school, had a black Attack minded: Goldstein girlfriend and claims he was was never coy about colorblind; that he harbored targeting his enemies no innate animosity towards and his “shit list” blacks. But his employment r ula column became a reg of black stereotypes was feature of Screw. equally merciless. Then again he was just as merciless with Jews. And himself. The left had more than its share of pranksters and court jesters, but Goldstein’s slashing humor and warrior spirit was novel and struck a chord. It made him both friends and

50 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There enemies. He got an interview with John and Yoko during their bed-in for peace in Montreal and that was printed in issue eighteen. Lennon was and would remain an avid supporter of the underground press.15 The interview was a real scoop and gave the paper credibility. As Goldstein later declared, this was the moment when Screw “hit the big time.” Al’s relationship with rock’s first couple continued: he was featured in Yoko’s underground film, Knees, and had dinner with them more than once. Lennon was Screw’s only sacred cow, and when he was gunned down in 1980 the editorial was uncharacteristically somber and respectful. Not everyone in the underground was a fan of Screw. Al would always boast that Screw was about “sex positivism,” but Village Voice cartoonist Jules Pfeiffer dismissed the paper as being about as “pro-sex as the clap.” Another Voice columnist by the name of Jonas Mekas, a leading advocate of underground cinema, gave it a thumbs-down in his column of August 14, 1969, in which he weighed in on the new popularity of pornographic movies and porno in general. “… what’s the use of talking about sex. Because there really are no movies about sex. At least I haven’t seen any, and I see many. All the sex, porno, exploitation, beaver movies, and now, sex newspapers (undoubtedly a reference to Screw and its imitators), are really children’s dirty movies and papers: they aren’t real.” Goldstein would have begged to differ. That was precisely what he was trying to do—make sex real, to laugh about it, to show it in its awkward and imperfect moments, to knock it off the pedestal where magazines like Playboy had placed it.

Screw Vs Mainstream Culture 51

CHAPT R 9 SCREW VS. MAINSTREAM CULTURE

He had from the very beginning created Screw to be the antithesis of Playboy, casting himself as an obnoxious and ungainly Jew Quasimodo in opposition to Hefner’s dandified and pretentious WASP. Hef liked to sip cocktails at the Playboy mansion and bask in the party lights while Al was at home in dingy clubs and theaters where he was busy “overturning every rock and crevice to reveal dark secrets heretofore untold.”16 Hef’s glossy parade of perfect air-brushed women symbolized to Goldstein the original fraud; sex as nothing but endless masturbation and one-way fantasy; sex as an activity only the wealthy could afford or were worthy of. The pipe-smoking pajama-clad dilettante had created the concept of the modern woman as something almost untouchable. A shrine. Screw now set about blasting away at the foundations of this shrine with the leveling power of satire. With his Rabelaisian girth, insatiable appetites and a wont to reveal personal details with a jolting frankness reminiscent of Charles Bukowski, Goldstein would drag sex back into the gutter and celebrate it as a physical act. Playboy was elitist, Screw was fiercely democratic. Goldstein boasted that upon thumbing Screw’s back pages any schmuck could get laid within an hour. Playboy was artificial, Screw was all too real. Instead of employing young, perfect-bodied models, the pages of Screw were filled with b&w porn stills, which Al had purchased in bulk and staffers randomly pulled from a big battered cardboard box as it suited them. These images of “real people” were constantly re-used. “Those women have been in the paper hundreds of times,” Al would wax nostalgic many years later, relishing all the money he’d saved. “They’re so old now, they’re in nursing homes.”17

52 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There Screw might pull some sleight of hand in the photo department, but it was not guilty of complicity in the biggest charade: peddling fake values and phony ideals. This was the main charge leveled against Playboy but it applied to more than just one magazine, it applied to American culture in general. “What was missing from Playboy centerfolds, sexploitation films and automobile and cigarette ads with sex,” Goldstein would state in his autobiography, “was simple honesty.” The films and yellow press played the sex card behind a façade of guilt, shame and violence, while the advertising industry excelled at unabashed titillation. It was all part of the same con. Sexual content could be tolerated to a degree in film and printed matter if the total work contained, in the fabled words of the Supreme Court, sufficient “redeeming social value.” This meant the sex had to be presented in an artistic or educational context and it could never be allowed to arouse. This was absurd. Why would anyone want to watch explicit sex if it was so unappealing that it had no power to arouse? But “legitimate” books, papers and films were forced to adhere to this approach by the moral guardians of American society. Sex could only be justified in the service of ideas or to advance a certain moral conclusion. It could not be allowed to exist in and of itself, as it did in real life. This was the sucker’s game everyone had played, the game that now in this small window of opportunity in the late sixties a pathetic little cut-and-paste tabloid was refusing to play. “We don’t have to… fob ourselves off as a conscientious newspaper with ‘redeeming social value,’” Screw defiantly declared in its inaugural issue. Years later Goldstein would still be stressing this principal: “We don’t surround our raunchy material with academic bullshit about redeeming social value. A hard-on is its own redeeming value.”18 Screw was about to lead a revolution against mainstream culture, a revolution against the reigning middle class norms that tamed and repressed and hushed sex up. Screw was going to open the cage and let it out.

For more information or to buy a copy of the book visit www.worldheadpress.com