By Peter Landau
"You know I'm beautiful now," Al Goldstein informs me on the phone from his Queens, New York, rental unit, generously paid for by magician Penn Jillette.
When I first met Goldstein back in the early '90s he was not a pretty sight. The bearded publisher of Screw magazine had hired me as associate editor for "The World's Greatest Newspaper," as its masthead boasts. He was grossly overweight and, well, just plain gross, conducting editorial meetings with a platter of pastrami sandwiches and pints of H?en-Dazs ice cream balanced on the meaty shelf of his gut.
Goldstein launched the sexual revolution with a $150 investment that allowed him to publish the newsprint tabloid Screw in 1968, paving a legal path for pornography to seep into every crevasse of society.
"I was thirty-two years old," he remembers. "Pornography did not exist. You couldn't see pubic hair." It would be years before Playboy stopped airbrushing its Playmates privates; Hustler and Penthouse didn't even exist. "At thirty-two, all I wanted to do was get laid and validate my own peculiar sexuality, which is 'I love pussy.'"
Goldstein saw a niche, an audience not being served. "We were in a world where oral sex was considered deviant, premarital sex was impossible, and men were all looking to marry virgins," he says. "There was no pornography. The closest you could get were nudie films. I'd go to a theater that had a nudie film and I'd go, 'Look, these people in the audience can't be aficionados of volleyball,' because that's all you saw, people playing volleyball. I said, 'These have to be guys like me who want to look at pussy and tits.'"
Screw was the first publication to review fuck films, rating them with its famous "Peter-Meter". It offered a consumers' guide to whorehouses, massage parlors, titty bars, and everything dirty in its "Naked City" column. Goldstein interviewed Linda Lovelace after she became famous for her fellatio skills in Deep Throat. "She blew me," he exclaims. "I ran photos of her sucking my cock."
Screw survived because of Goldstein's willingness to run afoul of the law. "I was arrested twenty-one times," he brags, "all misdemeanors. One of my convictions, which I am so proud of, is from 1971: I was convicted of showing pubic hair. You can see how fucked up things were."
Goldstein was never able to turn Screw into a national success, but as long as there were transsexuals lining up to advertise in its back pages he remained a wealthy man. For thirty-four years Screw never missed a weekly deadline.
Fortune turned for the Clown Prince of Porn in October 2003 when Goldstein filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. "I was embezzled," he says, blaming a cabal of conspirators. But the self-proclaimed bad businessman adds, "I was not fast on my feet with the web. Why buy Screw when you can get porno on the web?"
Suddenly, the man who calls himself the Godfather of Porn was living at the Bellevue Homeless Shelter with $8 in his pocket. "I was eating off the dollar menu at McDonalds," Goldstein moans. Old friends came to his aid, like the proprietor of the Second Avenue Deli in lower Manhattan, who hired him as a greeter. Goldstein slept overnight in the restaurant and was fired. He was arrested for stealing books at Barnes and Noble.
Things were beginning to turn around when his friend Penn Jillette of the magic duo Penn & Teller helped place him in an apartment and paid the rent. Then in March 2005 Goldstein got a call from Frank Ryan, president of XonDemand.com, the streaming adult-video company that bills itself as "The Adult Entertainment Online Multiplex."
"Al's high profile, he's got a lot of contacts in the industry," says Ryan. "I was looking for national exposure and hired him as a high-level marketer." And he got it. Goldstein has been on the Howard Stern show plugging www.XonDemand.com and its 1,600 X-rated movies available on RealPlayer and Windows Media Player.
"I'm now working for the very forces that put me out of business," laughs Goldstein. "It's a clich?if you can't beat them, join them." Goldstein has given www.XonDemand.com credibility in the industry. He says that he's gotten www.XonDemand.com in talks with Ed Powers and plans to distribute his New York City cable-access TV show, Midnight Blue--all 1,200 shows from its 27-year run, with interviews with everybody from Gloria Leonard to Marilyn Chambers and Seka. "What Howard Stern is to satellite radio, Al Goldstein is to streaming video," he says.
Goldstein wants to expand www.XonDemand.com to include products like his early movie ventures. He has been in twenty porno films, his first also being the debut of director Wes Craven called It Happened in Hollywood (1973), where he played the High Priest of the Philistines. There was also Screw on Screen (1975), produced by his then-partner, Jim Buckley, and most notoriously Jerry Damiano's puppet porno Let My Puppets Come (1976), where Goldstein was pleasured by a plush toy.
Back in the jizz biz and newly married for a fifth time to a woman less than half his age, Goldstein feels like a player again. "Not only am I sixty-nine, but my wife is twenty-eight," he beams. "Why am I married to a twenty-eight-year-old girl? She has low self-esteem, but she loves me and I give her orgasms by licking her clit. What more can you want from an old Jew?"
Goldstein's life should be a movie, from the first publication of Screw, which corresponded with the presidential election of Richard Nixon, who put Goldstein on his infamous enemies list, to his numerous court cases and recent homelessness and phoenix-like rebirth at www.XonDemand.com. And it has been, in not one but two documentaries, Screwed (1996) and more recently Porn King: The Trials of Al Goldstein (2005).
While Goldstein has moved on to the Internet, his beloved Screw has been bought out of bankruptcy by a consortium of its former employees and continues publishing without its Leerless Feeder. "It's absurd! It's like Disney shooting off Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck," he protests. "It's a schlocky piece of shit that I'm told is going to fold next week."
Charlie Mordecai, the editor of the re-launched Screw, says that the paper is doing fine and will continue to publish biweekly regardless of Goldstein's curse. He has even gone on record offering Goldstein a job. "I am personally inviting Al to come back to Screw. We all want his voice to be heard," says Mordecai. "But the first time I come to work and I find him sleeping under my desk it's all over!"
Asked if he was given a job offer at his old haunt, Goldstein is blunt. "No," he says. "I didn't want to work for a penny-saver or jerk-off paper."
"He's a fucking mental defective," counters Mordecai. "He's got a whole legacy of employees who want to piss on his grave because he was a horrendous boss. We want him to work for us. We'll treat him a lot better than he treated us."
"I don't understand all the hatred towards Al Goldstein. I never did," says former Screw staffer and author of When Sex Was Dirty (Feral House) Josh Alan Friedman. "I suppose if you were his personal secretary and had to deal with his daily caprices it would drive you insane. But being an employee of that place and working under him was a great experience. He'd come in for editorial meetings, but we were pretty much left alone to do as we pleased. He was a great boss by my estimation. He always treated me very respectfully."That love-him-or-hate-him reaction to Goldstein is not reserved for those who worked under him. Goldstein is estranged from his son, a Harvard Law School graduate, who wants nothing to do with his dirty old man.
After a lifetime of pushing the boundaries of good taste, does Goldstein have any regrets? "No," he answers sharply. "I should have pulled out and come on his mother's stomach. The wisest thing I could have done was not fuck [the mother of Goldstein's son] but eat her pussy."
Few get praise from Goldstein. His longtime friend Ron Jeremy, Steve Hirsch of Vivid, and Adult Video News publisher Paul Fishbein all lent Goldstein money when he was down on his luck and he thanks them. But Goldstein saves his harshest bile for those in the business who betrayed him. "Larry Flynt would not lift a finger to help me," he says. "There is a pimp; I was the first guy to write about him. His name is Dennis Hof, he owns the Bunny Ranch. I said it would be fun to be a maitre d' at a whorehouse. He would not even lift a finger to help."
Today America's foremost hedonist is less likely to pull his pud than eat a sub. "On my TiVo I have eighty hours of stuff I taped, of which seventy-five hours are recipes. All I do is watch the food channels: stuffed chicken, Italian sausage, baked spaghetti, roast pork loin, and spicy marinara sauce." With a diet like that it's amazing that the former Lard and Masturbator of Screw has slimmed down to a streamlined 180 pounds.
"I'm a senior-citizen Adonis," he says. But his young wife wants a baby, so the old man of smut needs to get it up sometimes. Again, he turns to his friend TiVo. "I do have permanently on twenty minutes of Nixon giving his resignation speech. I have trouble getting a hard-on. I look at Nixon sweating and quitting--that gets me hard."
