Saturday, May 17, 2008
Larry Flynt on his investigations, why the Washington Post ran his ad and what he'd do if he had five more lives.
Jan 30, 1999 | On the 10th floor of Larry Flynt's oval, black-glass Beverly Hills headquarters, amid Persian rugs, lush velvet curtains, carved pseudo-royalist furniture and reproductions of romantic paintings peering from ornate gilt frames, silence reigns. Flynt, the dark prince of pornography and self-declared mortal enemy of the Republican Party, is waiting, dwarfed by his enormous desk, signing checks and pushing papers at the far end of his office, an eye-shaped room that could easily house a family of four. His blond, freshly scrubbed assistant, Stephanie, leads the way with the cheerful pragmatism of a Midwestern housewife showing off the farm. She takes papers from his hand. He fumbles with a pen, peers through cloudy vision and asks if Salon has any affiliation with the Drudge Report. Or is Salon actually the Drudge Report?
Flynt's less-than-lucid demeanor suggests that he might be one of those men, like the sickly Boris Yeltsin or the deranged, aging Chairman Mao, who continues to wield power but only as a feeble puppet. His handshake has the limp-boned delicacy of an aging aristocrat. The whole impression is one of such startling vulnerability that it seems peculiar more journalists haven't observed the paradox of this lithium-muted, handicapped terror. The man whose political scandals and fleshcapades have created firestorms of controversy now sits quietly in a wheelchair and tries to remember just who will interview him next.
But if this is the first impression, it is also a fleeting one. For out of this slow body comes a flood of words: familiar, witty sound bites roll off his tongue, one after another. Like anyone who has bathed in the limelight for decades, he's a pro at getting his message out.
It's been nearly 25 years since Flynt launched Hustler, the first skinmag aimed at the rough-hewn libidos of his working-class brethren; 21 years since he was shot and paralyzed by a right-wing sniper outside the Georgia courthouse where he was fighting an obscenity case; 12 years since his fourth wife, Althea, ailing from AIDS, drowned in a bathtub and Flynt, after years of pain relievers and erratic behavior, began a sobering lithium therapy; 10 years since the Supreme Court upheld his right to publish a cartoon that suggested Jerry Falwell lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse; two years since Milos Forman portrayed him as a charismatic free speech martyr in "The People vs. Larry Flynt" and his daughter Tonya, protesting the movie, publicly accused him of sexual molestation; and four months since he placed an ad in the Washington Post offering up to $1 million to anyone who could prove they had an "illicit sexual relationship with a congressman."
His latest crusade to reveal the hypocrisies of Republican politicians began explosively, when Speaker-designate Robert Livingston shocked Washington by abruptly retiring after he learned that Flynt was going to publicize his extramarital affairs. But the next bombshell was something of a dud. Flynt went after Bob Barr, revealing that the rabid Clinton-hater and anti-abortion zealot had refused under oath in the divorce of his first wife to reveal whether he'd had sex with his current wife (his presumed mistress at the time) and that he had paid for his wife's abortion. But the media ho-hummed the revelations. Flynt was a victim of the expectations created by his success: Having created an appetite for think-pink scandals, he laid a PR egg by merely demonstrating hypocrisy. And since then, Flynt's assertions that he has the naughty goods on a varying number of other Republicans -- in our interview, he claimed 12 -- has begun to ring hollow.
But none of this has dampened the latest revival of the man who once ran for president with the slogan "A smut peddler who cares." A survey published in late January in the Washington Post revealed that Flynt has been one of the more popular figures to emerge from the scandal. Forty percent approved of the Flynt investigation, with 46 percent saying they wanted the media to report his findings. While these might not be numbers that could win landslides, they're higher than the dismal approval ratings for many Republican pols, to say nothing of the Attila the Hun-like depths occupied by Linda Tripp and Kenneth Starr.
This makes Larry Flynt an especially happy guy these days. While sipping black coffee in an eggplant jacket and trademark diamond watch, Flynt discussed Thomas Paine,whom he might out next and what he would do if he had five more lives.
You've had a dual career, both as publisher of pornography and as a public figure involved in politics. Is politics something you've always been interested in?
Yes. Since I was a child I've always questioned everything in my life, whether it be authority, politics, religion or whatever. I sort of inadvertently got involved in this First Amendment battle, and it's been going on now for over 20 years. I think I had to stand in a courtroom and listen to a judge sentence me to 25 years in prison before I realized that freedom of expression was something that could no longer be taken for granted. And that was back in 1977, and since then I've been totally uncompromising on First Amendment issues.
I'm so passionate about the First Amendment because I see it as the cornerstone of our democracy. The First Amendment gets its vitality and meaning from the unrestricted right of free choice. Majority rule will only work if you're considering individual rights. You can't have five wolves and one sheep vote on what they want to have for supper, because the sheep will lose every time. I've always seen my role as protecting that sheep, those individuals.
Like you, a lot of people connected to the sex industry have ended up getting into political battles, often over the First Amendment. Why do you think this is?
I'd be less than truthful if I didn't say that part of it is that they're protecting their livelihood. But I think many of them very strongly believe in what they're doing. You see, so many people think that their civil rights and their civil liberties are part of their birthright. They take them for granted. But when somebody that's in the business I'm in is faced with prosecution, harassment by the police, then all of a sudden he becomes aware that what we take for granted is not really there. And that many of the freedoms we've gained can be lost as easily as they were gained.
Why did you embark on your latest crusade to out Republicans?
I kept seeing that 70 percent of the people didn't feel that the president should be impeached. It started with this partisan effort to impeach, and I thought, the mainstream media is ignoring this 70 percent of the people. Because the editorialists were asking for Clinton's head. And even though they would flash the polls on the television, nobody gave any credence to the significance of that. And I felt these people don't have a voice. And that was really the deciding factor in me placing the ad in the Washington Post. Because I wanted to demonstrate that hypocrisy crossed party lines. And that despite the fact that the pundits and the legal scholars were talking about perjury and obstruction of justice, it was a case about sex and it had always been a case about sex, and I think the American people did not want to impeach, came to that conclusion long before Congress ever did. Because people have had incidents in their own family or friends where you know affairs have taken place. Sometimes, you know, you forget and forgive, and sometimes you go your separate ways, but it's something like --everybody knows someone in their family who has cancer. Everybody knows someone who has had an affair. So it was something that people could identify with.
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