Thy Neighbor's Wife (48 page)

Adroit legal maneuverings and endless delays by Ginzburg’s attorneys managed to keep him free on bail for years, and eventually they did prevail upon the judicial system to reduce Ginzburg’s jail term from five to three years; but inevitably the day arrived when he was forced to deliver himself into the care of federal marshals, in the penal city of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where less than two decades before the government had incarcerated such circulators of words and ideas as Wilhelm Reich and Samuel Roth. After Ginzburg had made a final sidewalk speech to the press in Lewisburg deploring his circumstances, and had crumpled a parchment copy of the Bill of Rights and tossed it into a wastebasket at the curb, he turned toward the federal office building in which he was to formally surrender. Later he was seen by reporters walking out of the building wearing handcuffs, linked to a black prisoner convicted of bank robbery and manslaughter, and escorted by federal marshals to a vehicle that would transport him miles away toward the walls and steel gate where a warden was waiting.

The Supreme Court continued to hear the appeals of new violators of old moral questions; and a year after the Ginzburg issue had been disposed of, the Court dealt with a literary outlaw who was neither a publisher, distributor, editor, nor writer. He was a man who had worked as a Times Square newsstand vendor, an unfortunate man who during an afternoon in 1966 had
sold two paperbacks—entitled
Lust Pool
and
Shame Agent
—to a customer who also happened to be a plainclothes policeman. The vendor, Robert Redrup, had neither read nor even heard of the paperbacks until the plainclothesman had requested them. In fact, Redrup was not even a regular employee of the newsstand; he had just been filling in that day for another man, an acquaintance, who had taken the day off due to illness. But such circumstances were of no interest to the policeman who, after flashing his badge, took the haggard Robert Redrup into custody, where he was fingerprinted, berated by detectives, and charged with having violated Section 1141 of the Penal Law of the State of New York, which prohibits the sale of any “obscene, lewd and indecent book.”

Redrup’s bail and legal defense were the responsibility of the publisher of
Lust Pool
and
Shame Agent
, William Hamling of San Diego. And although Hamling had just spent more than $300,000 during a two-month obscenity trial in Houston—in which a twenty-five-count indictment against him and several of his books was subsequently dismissed after a hung-jury verdict—Hamling unhesitatingly committed himself to Redrup’s defense, which would extend through the appeals route in New York and finally up to the United States Supreme Court. Defending the two seventy-five-cent paperbacks and their Times Square vendor would cost Hamling $100,000; but he considered it money well spent when, in May 1967, seven justices ruled in his favor, freeing Redrup and ruling that the two salacious paperbacks were not legally obscene. It was a
per curium
decision, one that did not bear the written opinion of the justices; but the
Redrup
case would soon be celebrated by sex publishers as the most liberal ruling yet reached by the Court—for if
Lust Pool
and
Shame Agent
were not obscene, hardly
any
book could be called obscene. These paperbacks were as unredeeming as anything that the convicted Edward Mishkin had previously published, and they were beyond the sexual scope of the material for which Ginzburg had been indicted. The
Redrup
ruling was thus interpreted by First Amendment attorneys and legal scholars as sig
nifying the virtual end of book censorship in America. As long as a book was not advertised in the “pandering” manner of Ginzburg, and was not otherwise foisted upon an unwilling public or sold to a minor, it had the Court’s permission to exist and be sold to whoever wished to read it, no matter how erotic, emetic, or unredeeming its contents.

Handing was ecstatic. As he saw it, the courtroom battle that had begun more than thirty years before in the case of
United States
v.
One Book Called Ulysses
, resulting in a victory for the literary elite, had now ended in 1967 with a triumph for the man in the street. It was no longer necessary for a sexually explicit book to justify itself as a Joycean masterpiece, or even as a novel of redeeming value like
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
; now, in
Redrup
, the Supreme Court finally seemed to be relinquishing its role as the nation’s literary arbitrator, a task for which it admittedly had neither the time nor talent, and the ramifications were awesome. It suggested that
any
book, a trashy book, a volume of words replete with the most angry expletives and scatological ravings of the least talented novelist in the land, might be published and sold no matter what a policeman thought of it, or a clergyman thought of it, or the CDL thought of it. It meant that the paperback novel
Sex Life of a Cop
, distributed by a California publisher in Fresno named Sanford E. Aday—and prosecuted by the government in Michigan, Iowa, Texas, Arizona, and Hawaii—was now legal, because of the
Redrup
decision.

Nearly thirty other obscenity cases on the Court’s 1967 docket were similarly overturned with just one word stamped on each petition—Redrup. It also meant that a distinguished publishing firm in New York, Random House, would be able in 1968 to distribute without censorship threats and enormous legal fees the autoerotic novel by Philip Roth,
Portnoy’s Complaint
. Hamling now saw the frontiers of free expression in America as not being extended by the literary establishment in New York, but rather by déclassée California publishers like himself and Milton Luros and Sanford Aday—men who spent fortunes in court each year fighting the convictions of city vice squads, federal agents, and
southern sheriffs in the Bible Belt, and in so doing they opened up the territory that would later be explored more easily and no less profitably by the reputable publishers of a Philip Roth or Norman Mailer, a William Styron or John Updike.

Hamling’s satisfaction with the
Redrup
ruling was quickly counterbalanced by a nationwide backlash sponsored by such groups as the CDL, which besieged Congress and President Johnson with thousands of letters and telegrams protesting the sexual permissiveness of the Earl Warren Supreme Court; and it was in reaction to this protest that two congressmen and honorary CDL members—Senator Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota and Representative Dominick V. Daniels of New Jersey—introduced the legislation that formed the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and ordered it to examine, among other things, “the effect of obscenity and pornography upon the public, and particularly minors, and its relationship to crime and other antisocial behavior.” The ACLU and other liberal elements were initially opposed to the formation of the commission, knowing that no liberal congressman would risk his career with the voters by openly defending “smut,” and also believing that the commission would inevitably become the tool of the political Right wishing to justify its censorious ambitions in the name of “morality.”

And thus the commission’s conclusions delivered two years later—the report that Father Morton Hill would denounce as “a Magna Carta for the pornographer”—would pleasantly surprise First Amendment absolutists as much as it would alarm the CDL; and the resultant furor would only be escalated by Hamling’s decision to later publish and distribute his Illustrated Report adorned by dozens of orgiastic pictures and drawings. This was the most brazen act of Hamling’s career, and among the many people who were upset by his decision was his old friend Hugh Hefner. Hamling first became aware of Hefner’s feelings after
Playboy
had refused Hamling’s request to publicize the Illustrated Report in
Playboy
’s book-review column, a rejection
that was explained in a letter sent to Handing’s editorial director, Earl Kemp, by Hefner’s managing editor, Nat Lehrman. Of the Illustrated Report, Lehrman wrote:

When Hamling was shown Lehrman’s letter, he felt betrayed; and he suddenly saw
Playboy
and Hefner as cowardly and hypocritical. Hefner, having made his fortune in the sex industry, now seemed to have become conservative and defensive, perhaps reacting to the fact that Nixon was now in the White House and the antiobscenity campaigns were being endorsed on the editorial pages of most metropolitan daily newspapers. In a letter to Hefner, Hamling wrote:

Hugh Hefner did not reply, but among the responses that Hamling would soon receive after distributing his Illustrated Report around the country was a federal indictment brought against him in Dallas and San Diego by the United States Attorney General, John N. Mitchell. Hamling and three members of his staff in San Diego were charged with circulating and selling an “unauthorized” edition of the Presidential Commission Report on Obscenity and Pornography, and depicting the work with sexually obscene pictures.

Within a week of Mitchell’s announcement, Handing bought a full-page ad in the Los Angeles
Times
and the two San Diego dailies in which he criticized Mitchell’s act as a “thinly veiled political move” by the Nixon Administration to divert the American public’s attention to the “Pornography Menace” and away from “problems like: unemployment, hunger, poverty, growing urban blight, education, crushing taxation and undeclared wars far from home. The taxpayers’ money,” the ad continued, “should not be wasted on policing the thoughts and reading habits of the American people nor should citizens be punished for criticizing official action. The valuable time of the courts should not be wasted with such matters. The Attorney General, and the Administration, should devote their time and attention to the pressing problems of the day.”

Although the government’s legal proceedings against Hamling began conveniently in his home city, sparing hum the extra ex
pense of starting with a trial in Dallas—where the FBI had purchased his illustrated book—the federal judge Hamling faced in San Diego, Gordon Thompson, had been a recent Nixon appointee; and even before the trial began Hamling felt that he was deeply ensconced in unsympathetic circumstances. First, Judge Thompson denied the defense attorney’s request for a one-month trial delay which would have allowed the court’s master wheel, from which jurors’ names are drawn, to include a recently compiled list of newly registered young voters who might be more sexually tolerant than the older names contained in the wheel that had been unrejuvenated for three years. Then the judge overruled the defense attorney’s suggestion that each prospective juror be asked such questions as: “Are you a member of the CDL?”; “Do you consider yourself deeply religious?”; “Have you recently heard a sermon at your place of worship dealing with the subject of obscenity?”