The March issue of Hustler magazine ran a feature article about a stand-up comic described on the cover as "the new Lenny Bruce." That brings to thirteen the number of comedians I have seen described as "the new Lenny Bruce." But there is no new Lenny Bruce. He was unique and irreplaceable.
These days, when young people think of Lenny Bruce, they think of Dustin Hoffman, who portrayed him in the movie biography Lenny. The real Lenny would have appreciated the irony of folks buying the soundtrack album from that film. They could hear Dustin Hoffman playing Lenny Bruce complaining about the district attorney doing his act.
Lenny's first arrest for obscenity took place in San Francisco in December 1962. He had used the word "cocksucker" to describe one. A couple of decades later, Meryl Streep used the word "cocksucker" instead of "seersucker" in Sophie's Choice, and won an Academy Award. Another nominee, Jessica Lange, used the word "cocksucker" to describe her occupation in Frances. We've come a long way, baby.
In the late fifties, the mass media were already translating Lenny's irreverence into "sick comic," although he had not yet been branded "filthy." During my first interview with him, I asked, "Could you be bribed to do only 'safe' material from now on?"
He replied: "What's the bribe? Eternal life? A cure for cancer? Forty-five million dollars? What's the difference what I'd take? I'd still be selling out."
"Do you think there's any sadism in your comedy?"
"What a horrible thought. If there is any sadism in my work, I hope I -- well, if there is, I wish someone would whip me with a large belt that has a big brass buckle."
Around that time, Dr. Albert Ellis was becoming the unofficial theorist of the sexual revolution. In an interview, he told me:
"My own standard is that certain modes of expression, including the use of many of the famous or infamous four-letter words, are unusually appropriate, understandable, and effective under certain circumstances, and at these times they should be unhesitatingly used. Words such asfuck' or 'shit' are most incisive and expressive when properly employed.
"Take, for example, the campaign which I have been waging, with remarkable lack of success, for many years in favor of the proper usage of the word 'fuck.' My premise is that sexual intercourse, copulation, fucking, or whatever you wish to call it is normally, under almost all circumstances, a damn good thing. Therefore, we should rarely use it in a negative, condemnatory manner. Instead of denouncing someone by calling him 'a fucking bastard,' we should say, of course, that he is 'an unfucking villain' -- since 'bastard,' too, is not necessarily a negative state and should not only be used pejoratively."
"Isn't the apparently inconsistent use of the word 'fuck' due to the fact that it actually has two meanings? One, it means intercourse. Two, it means screw -- you know, like in business -- 'I fucked him.'"
"You're right. But since the word 'screw' has the same two meanings, and since screwing is (in my unjaundiced view) just as enjoyable as fucking, I would want the usage to be 'I unscrewed him' when we meant that I outwitted him or gave him a rough time."
"How about the famous Army saying 'Fuck all of them but six and save them for pallbearers.' There 'fuck' means 'kill.'"
"Yes, and it is wrongly used. It should be "Unfuck all of them but six." Lots of times these words are used correctly, as when you say, 'I had a fucking good time.' That's quite accurate, since fucking, as I said before, is a good thing, and a good thing leads to a good time. But by the same token you should say, 'I had an unfucking bad time. . . .'"
Lenny Bruce was amazed that I could publish that and get away with it. At the time, magazines always used dashes or asterisks to indicate that kind of language. At that point in his career, Lenny was still using the term "frig" onstage.
In his hotel room, we had a discussion on the semantics of profanity. I explained that it was not illegal, since the Supreme Court had defined obscenity as material which appeals to the prurient interest. Lenny took out the unabridged dictionary that he carried around in his suitcase and looked up the word "prurient."
"Itching," he read out loud. "It means itching! What does that mean -- they can bust a novelty store owner for selling itching powder along with the dribble glass and the whoopee cushion?"
"It's just their way of saying that something gets you horny."
Lenny closed the dictionary, clenching his jaw and nodding his head in mock affirmation of a new sick discovery: "It's against the law to get you horny!"
He asked me to give out copies of the Albert Ellis interview in front of New York City's Town Hall before his concert there that night. As a result, he was barred from performing there again.
"They'll book me," he said. "They made too much money on that concert. I'd have more respect for them if they didn't ever book me again. At least they were keeping their word."
But he was right. They did book him again.
Several months later, Playboy magazine assigned me to edit the autobiography Lenny was working on, titled How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. I was fascinated by the way his mind played with ideas. I was also charmed by a certain streak of niavete, for Lenny was genuinely surprised that the Reader's Digest had rejected his manuscript.
He was staying at the YMCA in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was performing at a local nightclub. I checked in and then met with him in his room. We talked for a while before going out to eat. As we were leaving his room, he asked furtively, standing in the doorway, "Did you steal anything?"
I took my wristwatch out of my pants pocket -- which was where I kept it since I didn't like to wear it on my wrist --and placed it on his bureau without saying a word. He laughed one loud "Ha!" and kissed me on the forehead.
That night, after he did two shows, we stayed up talking till morning. At one point we took turns naming all the books that neither of us had ever read. Coincidentally, though, we were both reading books by Nathanael West. I was reading Miss Lonelyhearts and he was reading The Dream Life of Balso Snell. There was a line in the latter about an old actress with severely shaved armpits that inspired Lenny to improvise on what would later become one of his bits about the female singer who became a sensation by shaving her unshaved armpits at the audience. This was decades before Madonna.
He told me about his fantasy of fucking a deaf-mute. Back in New York, I arranged for a hooker friend to pretend she was deaf. She knew sign language, but Lenny kept trying to make her laugh out loud. He succeeded with a fart and this comment: "And now, boys and girls, we're going to find out how the speed of smell is faster than the speed of sound."
Once we were walking around Greenwich Village, and there on the cover of Newsweek was a photo of Caroline Kennedy, the president's young daughter. I remarked, "She probably plays with herself with a bobby pin."
"What a great image," Lenny said. "Can I have that?"
His genius was an uncanny ability to integrate imagery into an absolutely appropriate context. This one became a throwaway line in his hot-lead enema routine, where he talked about how he would never be able to withstand torture: "I'll give away state secrets -- Caroline Kennedy plays with herself with a bobby pin --just don't give me that hot-lead enema!"
His tragedy was that he was not merely being hypothetical. He had once turned somebody in to the police --a sleazy dope dealer -- in order to save himself from going to prison on a drug charge. One man's hot-lead enema is another man's prison. Although the fellow may have earned his fate, Lenny was tortured by his own awareness. When he said onstage, "Have a little rachmones for that guy behind bars who can't kiss and hug a lady for twenty years," he was talking to himself more than to the audience.
"I am part of everything I indict" was the closest he could come to a public confession.
Hanging around with Lenny Bruce was tremendously stimulating because you could just watch him turn fantasies into reality.
Once, driving around Chicago, we passed a religious novelties store with a portrait of Pope John in the window. Lenny went in and bought it. A short while later, we passed a parochial school in the midst of letting out all these little Catholic girls in their pristine uniforms. Lenny beckoned a pair of them to the car. "Hey, come here, I got the real thing, look" -- and he popped the pope up to the car window.
"Their parents," he said later, "only warned them against taking candy from strangers."
With one particular incident, Lenny literally lived out one of his own insights. He had talked onstage about the difference in sexual conditioning between men and women. A guy would do it to a chicken, to mud, to anything. If he got his leg chopped off in an automobile accident, he would still make a play for the nurse in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. If the guy's wife called him an animal for that, he would justify his act: "I couldn't help it; she had a cute ass."
Well, Lenny was staying at the Swiss-American Hotel in San Francisco. Hugh Romney, whom Lenny called "the perfect entertainer," was working with a satirical troupe, The Committee. (He later became Wavy Gravy of the Hog Farm.) Hugh was dealing LSD at the time. He wandered around North Beach with a chromium lunch box that had green velvet lining and a thermos filled with soup. He kept his supply of LSD on the inner lining. DMT, too.
Hugh laid a couple of hits of acid on Lenny, who had never had any before. Hugh figured Lenny would just give it to someone else, not take it himself. He also left some DMT in his room, with a note saying: "Please smoke this till the jewels fall out of your eyes."
Lenny came by later, saw the package on his dresser, took the two hits of acid, and smoked the DMT till the jewels fell out of his eyes. He said that he had never seen color before in his life, only blacks and whites and grays.
He was talking with great animation, standing on a window ledge. Suddenly he fell backwards. It was an accidental fall, but once he realized he was committed to it, he called out in mid-air: "Men shall rise above the rule!" Then he hit the pavement below.
Eric Miller had been in the hotel room. He was a black guitarist who sometimes worked with Lenny in bits such as "How to Relax Colored People at a Party." Now Eric was on the sidewalk trying to comfort Lenny. A black man was not supposed to embrace a white man. The cops dismissed it as interracial faggotry.
The window of that hotel room was broken by a perfect imprint of Lenny's body, his pose outlined in glass like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Both ankles and his pelvis had been broken, but he asked the nurse if she would please give him some really good head.
When Lenny had finally completed writing his book, I sat in the office of the publisher's lawyers. They wanted to avoid libel, so they kept changing the names of any person who might bring suit. One of these was someone Lenny had mentioned in passing. Her name was Blowjob Betty. The lawyers were afraid.
"You guys must be kidding," I said. "Do you actually believe anyone is going to come out and admit her name is Blowjob Betty?" My protest was futile. They changed Blowjob Betty to Go Down Gussie. "I sure hope someone named Go Down Gussie sues for invasion of privacy."
Meanwhile, the arrests continued. New York District Attorney Richard Kuh recommended in court that no mercy be granted to Lenny Bruce because he had shown a "lack of remorse."
"I'm not here for remorse, but for justice," Lenny responded. "The issue is not obscenity, but that I spit in the face of authority."
A friend of mine who dated Richard Kuh swears that he took her back to his apartment and played Lenny Bruce records for her. That was a long time ago, of course. Today that district attorney would play the Dustin Hoffman version of Lenny complaining that the district attorney was doing his act.
Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of Lenny Bruce's death. In the late '50s and early '60s, while most stand-up comics were reciting jokes on such subjects as mothers-in-law, Bruce was exploring the satirical implications of nuclear testing, racism, illegal drugs, homophobia, back-alley abortions and the death penalty. He wanted only to talk on stage with the same freedom he exercised in his living room. But he ended up visiting FBI headquarters in San Francisco to complain that there was a conspiracy between the courts of New York and California to violate his rights.
Lenny's fear was not exactly unjustified. "He was prosecuted because of his words," said a former assistant district attorney. "He didn't harm anybody; he didn't commit an assault; he didn't steal; he didn't engage in any conduct which directly harmed someone else. So, therefore, he was punished, first and foremost, because of the words he used... We drove him into poverty and used the law to kill him."
When I first interviewed Lenny in 1959, he said that the role of a comedian was to get a laugh every 15 to 25 seconds. "The comedian I'm discussing now is not Christ's jester, Timothy," he said. "This comedian gets paid , so his first loyalty is to the club owner, and he must make money for the owner. If he can upgrade the moral standards of his community and still get laughs, he is a fine craftsman."
A few years later, he could become so serious about what he was discussing that he would go minutes without getting a laugh. "I'm changing," he told me. "I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce." He realized he was now a symbol, as well as a performer. I became the editor of his autobiography, "How to Talk Dirty and Influence People."
At first, Bruce was paranoid about my role. "You're gonna go to literary cocktail parties, and you're gonna say, 'Yeah, I found Lenny slobbering in an alley, he would've been nothin' without me.'" I denied any such intention, but he demanded that I take a lie-detector test, and I was paranoid enough to take him literally. I told him I couldn't work with him if he didn't trust me. We reconciled a few months later, in December, 1962. He was performing at the Gate of Horn in Chicago. When I walked in, he was asking the entire audience to take a lie-detector test. He went on to discuss girlie magazines and religious hypocrisy.
Lenny was arrested that night, ostensibly for obscenity. The head of the vice squad later warned the Gate of Horn's manager: "If this man ever uses a four-letter word in this club again, I'm going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he ever speaks against religion, I'm going to pinch you and everyone in here. Do you understand? ... He mocks the pope -- and I'm speaking as a Catholic -- I'm here to tell you your license is in danger."
Chicago had the largest membership in the Roman Catholic Church of any archdiocese in the country. Lenny's jury consisted entirely of Catholics. The judge, the prosecutor and his assistant were Catholic. On Ash Wednesday, the judge removed the spot of ash from his forehead and told the bailiff to instruct the others to follow his lead. The reality of a judge, two prosecutors and 12 jurors, every one with a spot of ash on their foreheads, had all the surrealistic flavor of a Lenny Bruce fantasy.
Lenny was arrested 15 times within two years. "There seems to be a pattern," he said, "that I'm a mad dog and they have to get me no matter what -- the end justifies the means." It was news in Variety that Lenny didn't get arrested one night.
While the Chicago guilty verdict was on appeal, Lenny worked at the Off Broadway in San Francisco. Since Lenny always talked about his environment, and since police wagons and courtrooms had BECOME his environment, the contents of his performances revolved more and more around the inequalities of the legal system. "In the halls of justice," he declared, "the only justice is in the halls."
When I first met Lenny, he carried an unabridged dictionary in his suitcase. Now, he carried law books. His hotel rooms were always cluttered with tapes, transcipts, photostats, law journals, legal briefs. With club owners increasingly wary of hiring him, Lenny devoted more and more time to the law. When he finally got a booking in Monterey, he said, "I feel like it's taking me away from my work."
Indeed, it was his own legal research that provided a foundation for his defense in his New York City obscenity trial. His most relevant argument concerned the statute he was accused of violating. Having obtained the legislative history of the statute from Albany, he discovered that, in 1931, the law was amended to exclude indecent performances by actors, among others. Hence, the law had been misapplied to him. His argument didn't prevail.
Before sentencing, Dist. Atty. Richard Kuh recommended that no mercy be granted, because Lenny had shown a "lack of remorse." Lenny responded: "I'm not here for remorse, but for justice. The issue is not obscenity, but that I spit in the face of authority." The face of authority spat back, and Lenny was sentenced to four months in the workhouse. Four years after Lenny's death, the New York Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's reversal of his guilty verdict.
A few months before he died, Lenny wrote to me: "I'm still working on the bust of the government of New York state." He sent his doodle of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross, with a speech balloon asking, "Where the hell is the ACLU?"
Actually, Lenny Bruce served as a pioneer of free comedic speech, opening doors for the current plethora of young performers whose abuse of that freedom would undoubtedly offend Lenny. But he would be the first to say, that's the risk of freedom of speech.
Lenny Bruce's book? Well, Playboy Magazine serialized it and they knew that Lenny and I knew each other and he was writing it but ... they needed somebody to help structure it and to draw him out ... get questions answered. And so they asked me. And I jumped at the chance, because he was a rare individual and influenced comedians today who don't even know they were influenced by him. And he was attacked for the language he used, but he was really attacked because he used organized religion as a target. And that was really why they went after him..... if the police would go after him in San Francisco, then the police in Los Angeles would say we got to go after him, then the police in Chicago say well we got to go after him. Especially in Chicago where the church was big. When he was on trial in Chicago it was Ash Wednesday, and all the jurors and the judge and the prosecutor had the ash on their forehead there. It was very spooky..... I think to be consistent with your principles is not self-destructive, but a lot of people thought he should compromise. And that would have been self-destructive. He got serious, but ... when I first interviewed Lenny I asked him, "What's the role of a comedian?" And he said, "To get a laugh every 15 to 25 seconds." But then later on, when he was reading from court transcripts and police records ... and I said to him, "Lenny, you're not getting a laugh every 15 to 25 seconds." And he said, "Yes, but I'm changing." And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, I'm not a comedian, I'm Lenny Bruce." So he knew that he had become a symbol of free speech. He was still funny, but he didn't get a laugh every 15 to 25 seconds. He was funny sardonic....