Remembering Our Own: Adult's Free Speech Pioneers

 

Elsewhere in this issue, you will find discussions of various efforts by people and organizations to protect this industry and the right to free speech. Both are being shelled from many fronts—but that isn’t new. To put things in perspective it was suggested that this author pen a piece about free-speech champions of yore. Some of these folks died before many of you were old enough to read this magazine. So, returning to those thrilling days of yesteryear (with the William Tell Overture thundering in the background), here are thoughts about a few whom the author has known, but most of you likely have not.

 

Hef needs no introduction. His attitude was akin to, “Stick it where the sun don’t shine, Queen Victoria!” Sex could comfortably be associated with sophisticated humor, literature, political analysis and every other aspect of what was on the top shelf. Hef has been the topic of books, documentaries and all manner of criticism. If you have any interest in this historical stuff, read Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream (written by Steven Watts and published Wiley & Sons, Inc., in 2008). Words like “visionary,” “genius,” “crusader,” “revolutionary” and a whole thesaurus full of synonyms come to mind. He is certainly familiar to you; the rest of the folks on the list may not ring a bell. 

 

First admitted to the bar in 1945, Stanley literally invented how to defend obscenity cases. In the first of his 12 arguments before the United States Supreme Court, he challenged the California obscenity conviction of one David S. Alberts, a mail-order operator from Los Angeles. In a companion case, New York bookseller Samuel Roth had been convicted in federal court in New York under the federal obscenity statute for essentially the same conduct. Stanley vigorously argued that the First Amendment, which the Court already had held applied to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment, said precisely that legislative bodies could enact “no law” abridging the freedom of speech. While the Court upheld both convictions, it articulated what became known as the “Roth test” for obscenity, which would stand for 16 years until it was modified somewhat in the 1973 Miller v. California decision. We all have been living with Miller ever since.

 

After Roth was handed down, Stanley—significantly handicapped since suffering from polio in the first year of his life—would vigorously defend obscenity cases under the three-prong Roth test, and later the Miller test, unabashedly arguing that whatever material he was defending—novels with racy passages at first and, later, the same character of hardcore materials to which we long have been accustomed—was completely acceptable. Stanley’s last Supreme Court argument in United States v. X-Citement Video, a case that was clearly doomed from the outset because he had persuaded the Ninth Circuit to hold the federal child pornography statute unconstitutional, was a success even though he lost; the Court importantly read a knowledge-of-age requirement into the statute. A vivid recollection of a telephone conversation with Stanley shortly before that argument has Stanley, in response to the gloomy predictions about the case, proclaiming, “What do you mean? I’m going to win!” He absolutely meant it.

 

After he graduated from college in 1948, Reuben entered the comic book business, which by the early 1960s had become an empire. Discovering that sex magazines were more profitable than comic books, he shifted gears in the 1960s, by the end of which time he was the largest distributor of pornography in the United States. Until his death in 1997, he was a central figure in the American erotica business. My last encounter with Reuben was in the federal courthouse in Los Angeles, where he found himself in a lockup after being arrested for having escaped from a federal prison camp. Though he died in prison, his single obscenity conviction did not meaningfully play a part in his sentence, which was handed down primarily for extortion and tax evasion. He dodged obscenity charges for three decades. A soft-spoken guy, Reuben always meant business. And he was a consistently generous contributor to the defense of the First Amendment.

 

In about 1971, Louis “Butchie” Peraino, a reputed New York mobster, reportedly paid Gerard Damiano $25,000 to shoot Deep Throat. When it opened at the Pussycat Theater in Hollywood, it ran 24/7, grossing a quarter-million dollars in the first week, with the profits going to New York with Chuck Bernstene, Peraino’s bag man. There were lines around the block, first in Hollywood and then across the country—not of perverts but, rather, of middle-Americans. It was the first hardcore porn movie that anyone would admit to having seen, as was widely reported in national magazines. Deep Throat was a billboard for the sexual revolution, which started with The Pill in the early 1960s, to the 1967 Summer of Love, to the 1970s, when people’s sexual behavior finally became what it was believed to have been in the 1960s. Deep Throat made porn entertaining and mainstream for the first time.

 

During the 1980s, detractors figured out that a surefire way to stifle the porn industry was to accuse the actors of prostitution and, logically, the producers of pandering, which in California is a three-year-no-probation felony. While the pandering laws were designed to get after pimps—a noble purpose—the statute was used with a heavy hand against the porn industry. When that began, adult shoots went stealth. The producers would contrive ways that the participants in a shoot would not know where it would be until a few hours beforehand. Many in the industry faced serious prison time, although some very comical things occurred: “No, officer, they didn’t pay us to have sex; we just got carried away.”

 

All of that changed when Hal Freeman, a gruff, tattooed (long before it was so fashionable) fellow, reminiscent of a Marine drill sergeant (but one hell of a nice guy), took his pandering conviction to the California Supreme Court and won. The court held that the California legislature never intended pandering laws to apply to making movies; and, if it had, it would run afoul of the First Amendment. The unanimous decision literally saved the industry. Sadly, Hal did not live to enjoy the fruits of his battle, dying of cancer not long after his stunning and landmark court victory.

 

Parliament News likely was the most vertically integrated adult media company ever known, from photography to printing to distribution to retail. Under Wisner’s reign, it produced and distributed everything from paperback novels to adult video and all in between. Meeting Wisner away from his business premises, you would have believed that he was a most philosophical rabbi. A great raconteur if there ever was one! He would speak of his early days: “sit downs” in New York, dodging the law, and other adventures. Vivid memories of very entertaining lunches!

 

The common thread of this handful of people is that they are, in all but one case (Hef), no longer with us; they were legends in the business, and this author had the honor of making the acquaintance of each of them (except Peraino) during his lifetime.

 

Of course, there were many, many more, some living but many not. Here are a few, in no particular order: Michael Thevis, Stanley Marks, Vince Miranda, Robert DiBernardo, Harry Mohney, Noel Bloom, Larry Flynt, Russ Hampshire, Bruce Seven, Jim Holliday, Bill Margold, Kenny Guarino, Jim and Artie Mitchell, Ted McIlvenna, John Leslie, John Holmes, current and former directors of the First Amendment Lawyers Association (of which Fleishman was the first chair), Ron Jeremy, Fred Hirsch, John Stagliano, Roy and Don Splawn, Fred Lincoln, Charlie Brickman, Ron Sullivan, Al Bloom, Bill Pinkus, Bob Tremont, Howard Green, Ruby Gottesman, Norman Arno, Ralph Levine, Mel Kamins, Joe Spiegel, Gloria Leonard and Bobby Hollander, Bill Hamling, Ron Selinger, Robert Best, Marty Greenwald, Ferris Alexander, Larry Minkoff, John Coil, Don Wiener, Eddie Wedelstedt and, of course, Paul Fishbein (see this column in AVN’s March 2012 issue).

 

There is not enough space for a comprehensive list, so apologies to those who were omitted and to their loved ones. Veterans will recognize most of these names. Younger readers, you should Google and learn!