Men (3 page)

This helped break the ice, though I was still in a state of mental confusion, faced with this large, damaged, flesh-and-blood man in place of my theoretical construct. On the one hand, I felt like I knew him intimately, having spent so much time conjuring him in my imagination and then crafting him on the page, but at another level everything was also unbridgeable between us. He, of course, had spent no time imagining me, I assumed, though he did pronounce my essay on him “feisty.” This pleased me a little too much—I wanted his good opinion, yet I also wanted not to care about what he thought of me. I also wasn't sure if by “feisty” he meant the various potshots I'd taken at him in print or just that I'd bucked received feminist wisdom about the magazine, which had not exactly been popular in those precincts.

He wanted to correct me on one point, he said. I'd repeated what I'd read elsewhere—that the shooting and surgeries had left him with no bowel or urinary control, an ironic fate for a man who'd built an empire offending bourgeois sensibilities with their horror of errant bodily functions. To compound the ironies, this man who'd raked in millions on the fantasy of endlessly available fucking was also left impotent—or so I'd written. Flynt said it was the only thing I'd gotten wrong: he'd never been impotent. This seemed like rather intimate territory given the brevity of our acquaintance. I said I'd take his word for it.

Having cleared that up, we talked more easily about my essay and his magazine, then he invited the ghostwriter (also in attendance) and me to tag along to a private movie screening up in the Hollywood Hills. Which we did, and afterward trailed Larry and his small entourage to a late-night deli in Beverly Hills. He was gracious and congenial, but I never lost the double consciousness of feeling I was accompanying a character sprung from the recesses of my own fantasies.

This feeling was compounded when the ghostwriter sent me an advance copy of the autobiography a short time later. I was taken aback yet, I have to admit, gratified to find that passages I'd written about
Hustler
had been inserted into Larry's mouth as his first-person account of himself. Another passage, followed by my name, had been excerpted and reproduced on the back cover in the form of a blurb, just below the ones by Oliver Stone and Milos Forman.

I mention this to explain why my attitude toward Flynt may have a certain proprietary quality: it's because I
invented
him. Or let's say I invented a version of him that I found palatable, and he went along with it. If only other men I've known had been so compliant. (Isn't this one of the main factors in relationship failure, by the way: other people not conforming to your idea of who they should be?) Though I never really got the impression Flynt had a very firmly fixed idea about who he was in the first place; I suspect he's more of a scavenger when it comes to identity, which was fine with me. I just wanted him to stay the way I'd fantasized him.

*   *   *

Which, as I've mentioned, was a lot different from the way filmmaker Milos Forman fantasized him.

Pained liberalism is the predominant sentiment in
The People vs. Larry Flynt
. Pornography may be a necessary evil, but Forman personally dislikes it and wanted it known, once the movie was released, that he'd never personally purchased a copy of
Hustler
. On my part, I at least sat down and forced myself to read the thing. I may have been disgusted by Flynt but I was willing to learn from him; Forman was all about teaching Flynt an etiquette lesson. The result is a masterfully made movie that sanitizes Flynt's cantankerous, contrarian life and career into one long, noble crusade for the First Amendment, while erasing everything that's most interesting about the magazine, namely the way it links bourgeois bodily discretion to political and social hypocrisy. The movie reeks of class condescension. I bristled on Larry's behalf, though needless to say he was basking in the attention, mostly worried about his waistline and promoting the upcoming autobiography.

For Forman, Flynt's story was about “becoming an American, a politically cognizant citizen”—as though he wasn't one to begin with. It may have been Czech émigré Forman's love letter to American democracy, but it's also a stunningly undemocratic one if it turns out that political cognizance is the province of the educated classes and Flynt has to learn good citizenship at the feet of his betters. As he does here, under the tutelage of his lawyer, Alan Isaacman (a composite of Flynt's many lawyers over the years, as he required a small army of them)—predictably, the character with the most education becomes the movie's moral center.

The movie does at least dramatize how ready a nation founded on the principle of free speech was to back up its codes of social propriety with storm troopers: Flynt is variously gagged with electrical tape, carted off to jail for disrupting courtroom proceedings, and sent to a psychiatric prison for smart-mouthing a judge. To the sober-sided Isaacman, Flynt's behavior is simply crazy: why would a sane person defy the law? Probably because for Flynt it was just another scam. It thus became his compulsion to locate every loophole he could in the nation's obscenity laws, and use them to taunt his fellow citizens; his favored tactic being to systematically and extravagantly violate, in the grossest way possible, each and every deeply held social taboo, norm, and propriety he could find.

Failing to appreciate the neo-Rabelaisian inventiveness, the nation responded with its knee-jerk response to all perceived insults and injuries: the lawsuit. Flynt was endlessly clapped in jail on obscenity charges brought by the state, and spent upwards of $50 million over the years defending himself against the hundreds of civil suits brought by his outraged targets. Then there were the contempt charges. Flynt loved playing the wild man in official settings, and in the years following the shooting, his public behavior became even more bizarre—in constant pain, he'd become addicted to morphine and Dilaudid, finally detoxing to methadone. He famously appeared in court sporting an American flag as a diaper and was arrested; at another trial, described by the local paper as “legal surrealism,” his own attorney requested permission to gag his unruly client. On one of his Supreme Court pilgrimages, Flynt got himself arrested for shouting at the justices, “You're nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt!”

It's one of the all-time great lines in the annals of uncivil disobedience, but Forman despises these bad-boy theatrics; Flynt's dissidence makes him uncomfortable. Instead, for him the hero of the story is the Supreme Court (he's said as much in interviews). Flynt only deserves our respect when he starts kowtowing to the state: proper citizenship in this movie means obeisance and sucking up to power; freedom means the freedom to conform. When Flynt finally behaves himself and shuts up for the first time at the landmark Falwell libel trial,
that's
the film's moment of triumph. When Isaacman beams approval at Flynt for finally acting like a grown-up, tears welled in my eyes—that's how adept Forman is at peddling this pap. Repackaging Flynt's raunchy career into a tribute to American tolerance, wrapping it up in Hollywood's favorite narrative cliché, personal growth—it's exactly the kind of syrupy sentimentality
Hustler
always ridiculed. But so what—you're going to leave the theater snuggled in a big, warm self-congratulatory glow, whether you want to or not. Look how great we are! Long live America! Lost amidst the flag-hoisting is the awkward fact that
Hustler
's entire reason for existing was to crap on this sort of national self-idealization.

Of course, as Forman himself said, he'd never actually read the magazine. His contempt for it leads him to miss the crux of the story: the hero wasn't the Supreme Court. It's been pornography that's pushed the boundaries of political speech ever since the invention of print. The interesting paradox is that as long as political and religious authorities keep trying to suppress them, obscenity and blasphemy will always be wonderfully effective ways of mounting social criticism. Flynt didn't invent the tactic, though he did use it to leverage his unique brand of anti-authoritarianism into an empire.

Please don't think I'm mounting an argument for liking
Hustler
—quite the opposite. The existential dilemma of obscenity is that it requires our inhibitions in order to be effective. So let's hear it for sexual propriety and shockability, which were, among other things, Flynt's ticket out of grinding rural poverty—born in Magoffin County, Kentucky, then the poorest county in America, the son of a pipewelder, Flynt is very much the product of the white trash demographic the magazine supposedly addresses. From Magoffin County to Beverly Hills: if anyone owes a debt to sexual repression, it's Larry Flynt, though you might say the same of Freud too, who built a nice little career for himself on similar foundations.

*   *   *

I imagine the dilemma for anyone who's had a movie made about his life is whether you end up consciously or unconsciously transforming yourself into the movie's version of you. After Forman's film converted Flynt from loathsome pariah to chubby-cheeked media darling, after he watched Manhattan's glitterati coo over his supposed life story at the closing night of the New York Film Festival and was jetted to Czechoslovakia with director Forman to screen the movie for fellow dissident Václav Havel—after Flynt chose Forman's version of him over mine, in other words—what was to become of him and his unbeloved magazine?

Hoping to capitalize on the buzz from the movie, Flynt issued his ghostwritten autobiography,
An Unseemly Man: My Life as Pornographer, Pundit, and Social Outcast
, shortly later, another attempt at repackaging his life story in an audience-soothing way. Yes, it's sprinkled with bestiality, sybaritic sex, drugs, and vulgarity, but more often it's the new, “improved” Larry Flynt sauntering through the pages: waxing patriotic, spouting platitudes—“America is the greatest country in the world because it's the freest”—and analyzing himself in the upper-middlebrow idioms of pop psychology.

After all those years of using the national stage as a public toilet, now Larry wants our love? His version of his life was as sappy as Forman's.

When I met up with him next—he was visiting Chicago on a publicity stint for the book—he was still floating in a post-biopic bubble, which I found myself wanting to puncture. I asked him if it felt weird to be receiving so much media adulation—did he resent people trying to clean him up, to make him palatable to middle America? He said, “What's weird isn't getting all the attention now; what felt strange was being so vilified for all those years.”

The vilification had indeed been pretty intense. Even after the assassination attempt, the country's reaction was barely sympathetic. Flynt had made a national nuisance of himself, like some attention-grabbing overgrown adolescent boy mooning the guests at a church social, and the general attitude was that he more or less got what he deserved. News reports of the shooting took a sardonic tone:
Time
billed it “The Bloody Fall of a Hustler.” The thing worth saying, though, is that unlike your run-of-the-mill pornographer, Flynt's own body has been on the line too, including, it turned out, as a sacrifice for America's long history of racial pathology. That Flynt, who was regularly accused of racism, was shot and paralyzed by a white supremacist outraged about
Hustler
's liberality on interracial sex—another sensitivity the magazine trod upon long before it was an unremarkable thing—was another twist in an exceedingly convoluted story.

Still in bubble-puncturing mode, I told him I thought the movie had sanitized him too much. He readily agreed, but added earnestly, “If the First Amendment can protect even a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you, because I'm the worst.” It was a mawkishly noble sentiment, and also a line directly from Forman's movie script—hearing it from both “real” Larry and movie Larry, I cringed on each occasion.

Or maybe I'm being too hard on him. Who can hold out forever against the malign forces of conventionality? No doubt my Flynt was every bit as fabulated as Forman's; still, it was painful to hear him saluting the flag instead of using it as a diaper, and parroting the film's banalities. I couldn't help thinking that America hadn't been content with simply paralyzing Flynt, it had to finish the job by reconfiguring him as a patriot and then dousing him in approval for finally growing up.
That's
how they get you, I thought darkly. Even lowlife pornographers are suckers for love and a place in the history books, it turns out, lifting a pudgy cheek to the breeze when the world is blowing kisses their way.

*   *   *

We talked on the phone a few times after that—I was attempting to interview him for a magazine piece, but given my lack of skill at it, the interviews mostly devolved into chats. He liked to introduce his body into the conversation, I noticed and was never exactly sure how to respond—I could only think of it as a tragic deadweight, a thing best left unmentioned. He announced with pride that his most recent diet had been a great success: he'd lost thirty pounds. “Trying to make yourself more sexy for the ladies?” I asked lamely. “Nah, I just looked at myself in the movie [he has a cameo role as a judge] and saw how fat I was, and I said, ‘Who wants to be a porker like you?'”

Falling back on feminist prosaicisms, I tried goading him about how he'd like having the spotlight turned on himself instead of it always being women's bodies on display. “How about a Larry Flynt centerfold?” I asked. He answered immediately, “The reason more men don't want to take their clothes off is because they're so uptight about their little dicks. In all the X-rated videos and magazines they're twice the size of a normal penis and it's given every man in America a complex. Even though women all tell me that as long as a guy knows what he's doing, size isn't that important.”