By Peter Landau
Over four explicit and exceptional volumes, Dian Hanson has charted the rise and rise of slap books. But that global tour of the tawdry, from the turn of the last century to the swinging '60s, all two-thousand illustrated pages of it, has only been a preamble to its finale, a one-handed salute to the '70s, a decade so decadent that it takes two 400-page tomes to do it justice.
The first book, Dian Hanson's: The History of Men's Magazines, Vol. 5 (Taschen), concerns itself with newsstand periodicals. Hanson writes in her essay, "Welcome to Pornotopia": "1967 was the year men's magazines became pornography," and then vividly proves her premise with colorful examples from around the world. The sexual revolution of the late '60s was in full revolt by the '70s, and it wasn't always pretty. There's even a disturbing portrait of a topless woman whose head is replaced by a right-on fist.
Everybody wanted to get into the party. Even criminal lawyer F. Lee Bailey published a nudie book called Gallery, a shameless knockoff of Playboy. But there were creative leaps too, and no one flew higher without a net than Al Goldstein, the ex-cabbie who, with partner Jim Buckley, published Screw, a sex weekly that changed the face of dirty magazines forever after.
There's a whole chapter devoted to Goldstein, "A Masturbator's Everyman," co-written by Hansen and Richard Jaccoma, a former managing editor at Screw. Goldstein was Alfred E. Newman and Screw his Mad magazine-like obscene parody of sex. It was also his soapbox to rant about his obesity, his obsession with consumer electronics, and even, every once in a while, prostitutes. Then there were the stock black-and-white photos of hairy hippies engaging in hardcore sex.
By the mid-'70s Screw was at the height of its success, but Goldstein was bitter and envious of his friend Larry Flynt (more on him later), who took the Screw template and gave it national exposure with Hustler. The big money was in glossies, and Goldstein launched his own version in 1976, National Screw. The magazine featured fiction by Charles Bukowski, an interview with Mad publisher Bill Gaines, and a feature by critic Lester Bangs on the new fad, punk rock. "Photos aside," write Hanson and Jaccoma, "National Screw was brilliant, fairly dripping with arch, smutty New York pop-porn sensibility."
But, as Hanson and Jaccoma explain, the hairy-palm set wasn't interested in the voice of Screw, its irreverent humor. The tabloid was a hit because of its back pages, cluttered with ads for hookers, massage parlors, and other distractions. And, naturally, those fornicating hippies who landed Goldstein in court countless times to fight for his right to publish hardcore sexual material. By 1977, with less than a dozen issues in print, National Screw folded. Screw still publishes, though Goldstein is no longer associated with it. He lost his creative property, all of his property in fact, becoming homeless briefly in 2003, before bouncing back as a sales rep for XonDemand.com, a porn video-on-demand outfit.
Goldstein's legal battles over obscenity paved a legal route for copycats like Flynt to enter the market. But Flynt was savvy to the public's tastes more than Goldstein. Hanson and Jaccoma write: "Middle America didn't want Screw with all its New York edge; it wanted a Middle American translation of Screw--with the added abundance of high-quality erotic photo spreads and vulgar, lowbrow cartoons--a version of Screw it could understand and enjoy." Flynt gave them all this and more with Hustler.
"Larry Flynt: The Original Redneck Hustler," by Jaccoma, introduces Flynt in 1972, a thirty-year-old Kentuckian, an owner of a string of strip clubs in Ohio with an ambitious plan to publicize them. His four-page black-and-white newsletter, Hustler Newsletter, was sent to his mailing list, which responded so positively he shortened the title, upped the page count to thirty-two, and hired women from his clubs to pose.
Despite the initial success, the venture wasn't making Flynt money. He was losing his shirt until he picked up a copy of Screw and got an idea. Screw had bought nude photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and sold a record number of issues when it published them in the New York market. But the national magazines, such as Playboy and Penthouse, turned down offers to buy the set. Not Flynt. He invested $18,000 for the full-frontal exposure of the First Lady and published them in the August 1975 issue with a bold and simple cover line: "Exclusive: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Nude." The issue sold a million copies and Flynt was in like Flint.
Hustler may have lagged behind Playboy and Penthouse in sales, but it pushed the erotic envelope and led the way to a filthier expression. It was the first major men's market publisher to show "pink", and the humor at Hustler was even surpassing the high (or low) standard set at Screw.
A typical feature was "The Bicentennial Ball," which opened with a two-page color illustration of Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller engaged in group sex with the Statue of Liberty. There are reproductions of infamous covers, such as the crucified bunny with the headline "The Commercialization of Easter," and a naked lady headfirst in a meat grinder with the quote from Flynt: "We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat."
Ironically there's a chapter on "The Last Laugh: The Decline of Sex and Humor Magazines," which may have lost its public appeal to the superior combination of hoot and hooters offered by Hustler. The naked pages of South American, European, and Asian magazines are also detailed, as are swinger magazines and a list of the top five American cover girls (Seka (Picture: ), Candy Samples (Picture: 1), Francesca Natividad (Picture: 1), Uschi Digard (Picture: 1), and Roberta Pedon (Picture: )). But most revealing is the chapter on "Real-Sex Pioneer Peter Wolff: Livin' La Vida Lobo" by Jaccoma.
Wolff was Hanson's mentor and responsible for the launch of dozens of classic titles, including Bachelor and Ace! (1972), High Society (1975), Cheri (1976), Partner (1978), and Adult Cinema Review (1980). His last work was Oui (1981), and his parting words to his readers: "We're just a bunch of average guys (and dolls), but we're having WAY more fun than you are."
This was no idle boast. Overweight, unkempt, a compulsive gambler and drinker, Wolff still managed to have sex with most of his models thanks to his wit and charm. But he was less appealing to his publisher bosses. Even though his magazines were constantly innovative and, more important to the brass, profitable, he was fired from Gallery, for example, because he insisted on publishing readers' naked photographs of their wives. After Wolff was let go, the reader response was so overwhelmingly positive to his sexy swansong that the feature was brought back as part of a continuing section, "Girl Next Door," which remains a staple of the magazine today.
While Goldstein, Flynt, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Wolff reign like an unholy trinity over Vol. 5, Dian Hanson's: The History of Men's Magazines, Vol. 6: 1970s Under the Counter (Taschen) is a fractured, freaky tale of myriad private magazines exploring every nook and cranny of sexual perversion. The first thing a reader notices creaking open the thick volume is pussy: wet pussy, hairy pussy, shaved pussy, spread-eagle pussy, licked pussy, fingered pussy, fucked pussy. There's even a chapter entitled "When Beavers Ruled the Earth" that gives credit for the first pubic-hair shots to publisher Milton Luros in his fake nudist magazines Jaybird and Sol.
There are other heroes spotlighted in the volume, such as "Reuben Struman: All Hail the King." Called "America's king of porn," Struman is credited with creating the adult bookstore in the States, the peepshow booth, the hugely successful Doc Johnson sexual-aids company, and introducing hardcore to our Puritan shores. The government wasn't impressed by his resum?referring to him as the "Godfather of the Porn Mafia" to color him in more notorious strokes. But Struman was known to don Groucho Marx glasses for his public appearances, laughing all the way to the bank. Regardless of his notoriety, Struman lived like royalty in a Cleveland mansion decorated with paintings by the Old Masters.
Regular old masturbators were happy to buy the one-shot and under-the-counter dirty magazines in his stores. There are chapters on Swedish hardcore titles, lesbian books, horny housewives, racial erotica, psychedelic turn-ons, marriage manuals, and fetish publications. And a chapter on the filthiest magazine ever printed, "Puritan's Progress: How Hardcore Became Artcore," written by Jaccoma.
Starting with the second issue, Jaccoma worked as an associate editor at Puritan. It was his first staff job on a sex magazine, but Puritan was no typical throwaway cum-rag. Each issue was individually numbered, printed on the best-quality paper stock, and a credits page listed the minutiae of the production details for every photoset. Yet the publisher was the owner of peepshows and often funded his magazine with bags of peepshow quarters. High and low art came home to roost at Puritan.
Hanson also got her start in the sex business at Puritan and remembers publisher John Krasner: "On his New York visits, he'd take us out for late-night dinners at the Plaza Hotel . . . then ask waitresses to look at the hardcore photo spreads and tell him what they thought of them. If he liked their suggestions, we'd have to change things."
When Krasner was murdered in a Florida parking lot in 1979 at the age of fifty-five, his family continued publication of his beloved magazine. Following his death, Puritan published erotic photography by Robert Mapplethorpe and interviews with writers as renowned as Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. By the time mainstream men's magazine publishers began following suit, printing hardcore sets, Puritan was long gone, ending its run just shy of its sixty-ninth issue in 2001.
More sad tales come from "Edward D. Wood Jr.: Worst Director's Great Magazines," a chapter on the fabled schlock filmmaker responsible for Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) and posthumously lionized by Tim Burton in Ed Wood (1994). His various careers fed one another. When he edited Swap, published by Pendulum, he procured the nude models he worked with in print for his film Take It Out in Trade (1971). Necromania (1971) features the debut of Rene Bond (Picture: 1), one of porn's first stars and frequently seen on the pages of Swap that same year.
By 1972 he was editing and writing Skin & Bones, Balling, Party Time, Deuce, and Cherry, published by Gallery/Calga. Regardless of his movie work, Wood always used his real name on the magazines' mastheads. Hopelessly alcoholic, Wood died in 1978. The noted transvestite fetishist left his wife only his angora sweaters and back issues of Swap.
There's a chapter, "Big Softies: Five Flaccid Years of 'Soft Dicks'," which describes a genre of erotica between girlie softcore and hardcore trades that first appeared in 1972. That is not a condition readers of these final installments in Hanson's Herculean history need fear. Whether these magazines traveled the newsstands or were sold under the counter, Hanson and her crew fondly pay tribute to each, the better for you to fondle yourself.
