Part 3 of a three-part special report on the future of Larry Flynt's Hustler empire.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I received the list of executives LFP was putting me in touch with, I was surprised to see Paul Cambria’s name on it. I knew of course about his longtime association with Larry Flynt and that he was there the day Larry got shot, and that he was his personal lawyer, but I did not know the extent to which he and his Buffalo, New York-based firm were involved with the corporate entity, with the individual divisions, and with the day-to-day operation of the company. So, to see his name there, and to hear Mrs. Flynt tell me he is the one person she calls now for advice, told me Cambria’s role in the company was substantial, and my curiosity was piqued. When I mentioned my initial surprise at the top of our call, his immediate reaction was classic Cambria.
“Here’s a question,” he shot back at me. “Why were you surprised? I’ve been the guy's lawyer since 1977, and I only left him for a brief period of time, coincidentally, when they were doing the movie (The People vs. Larry Flynt) and [Alan] Isaacman got credit for our work. Because as you know, in the movie, they've got Isaacman as the lawyer, being shot and all the rest of it, and he didn't even know Larry when that happened! It was [Herald] Fahringer and I who were with Larry when they shot him, and they shot our local guy. Anyway, I had left [Larry] for a brief period, and then he called me in 1995 and asked me to come back to be his general counsel again, and eventually that happened around 2000, I came back as his general counsel.”
“You know, it's interesting,” he continued, shifting focus, “we've been planning for this for quite some time, and not because Larry was ill or anything like that. It's just that the average lifespan of a paraplegic is 17 years, and he made it to 30-plus years. So, he and I had lots of conversations about the ‘what happens after Larry’ kind of thing, and he made it clear that he was 100 percent comfortable with Liz taking over his role basically, and especially since he had handpicked a number of people to be his division heads. And remember, Liz has been by his side since the early ’90s, basically with him every time he discussed business or did business. They always talked business, and he made it clear to me, when the time came to put his affairs in order, by virtue of a will and a trust and so on, that Liz was going to be the successor to Larry, and that he had been basically grooming her, if you will, to take on that role.
“And in the very last months of his life, he would call me, and I would come out there and meet with him, and we would make sure that everything was put in order. And it was interesting that once he did pass—and I met with Liz several times and I still meet with her, and I think she already told you that she confers with me a lot about things concerning the company and all the rest of it—I was delighted at how quickly she was able to take the reins and manage the staff.
“She really gets it, she's been around a long time with Larry, and frankly, I don't think they're going to miss a beat over there at all. [Larry had] a lot of very successful divisions, and nothing has changed as far as the operation of those divisions. I really don't see any difference in the operation, except obviously we lost our icon, who will never be replaced. Nobody could ever do that, he was a very unique guy, but the good news is that [Mrs. Flynt] has taken charge, the staff has confidence in her, and I don't see any major differences in the operation of the business.”
I noted Hustler’s uniqueness as the only company among the three iconic adult brands whose founders have passed—Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler—to have successfully diversified, and asked Cambria to clarify his role at the company, referring to him as in-house counsel by mistake.
“I’m not in-house counsel,” he corrected me. “I’m general counsel. We have an attorney in house. Jennifer Sacks. However, for 25 plus years, I have assembled a number of lawyers who are admitted in California, including myself, who are responsible for advising the various [LFP] divisions. We have people who advise the store division, the broadcast division, the online casinos; we do all the HR work and so on. We've been doing that for over 25 years and manage every aspect of their legal needs. The in-house lawyer handles the day-to-day stuff, and she worked with us, and that hasn't changed.”
Pivoting to my first question, he continued, “You see, the genius of Larry was that he knew he had to diversify, that things were not always going to be ink and paper magazines, and so he went into casinos, he went into broadcast, satellite and cable, he went into retail stores. He knew that he had to diversify and had to build those divisions, because the days of making movies or publishing magazines were basically over. And he realized that he had to put the people in place and pieces in place to keep the thing going.
“Some of his last conversations with me, a few weeks before his death, were, ‘We've put this place together such that it's going to last longer than I am, and it's going to have a life after me.’ And he was successful in that, and really handpicked people over the years. These people really know what's happening. The place is still expanding. I mean, every day, we're being consulted about new deals, new stores, new growth. Nothing has changed. He was successful because he diversified. And he put people in place who basically just need to be managed going forward. I don't see anything changing there at all, the company's strong, doing well, very, very, very profitable, and everybody's still just humming along.”
I mention Flynt’s lack of sentimentality toward Hustler magazine on its 40th anniversary and asked Cambria if he thinks his unique brand of fearless decision-making will carry on. “Well, it's interesting,” he said, “because the things that are in existence today probably are not going to become obsolete. Retail stores are not going to become obsolete; casinos won't be obsolete, and broadcasting will do nothing but grow. So, he was smart enough to say, OK, buggy whips aren't going to be used anymore, but buggies are going to be around. They may look differently, but they're going to be around. And that was the genius of this guy. You realize, he used to have Cherie, that was his other magazine. He cut that loose 20 years ago. It was a softer version, a Playboy competitor, and it was like, OK, it did its thing, it's gone. Next?”
That Flynt and Cambria had come together at all was a story for the ages, and it occurred to me that this was as good an occasion, maybe the perfect one, for Cambria to explain this one-of-a-kind relationship from the beginning, if he would. So, I asked him, how did you guys meet?
“Well, here's how it went,” he said, launching into the story as I listened spellbound on the other end of the line. “In 1976, Herald Fahringer and I tried the Al Goldstein, Screw magazine case in Kansas City, Kansas. We won the case, and about a week later, the phone rings in Buffalo. Secretary says, ‘There's a guy on the phone. His name is Larry Flynt. He’d like to talk to you.’ OK. And he got on the phone, and he said, ‘I'm a friend of Al Goldstein's, and you guys just won that case, and I'd like to do a feature article on the trial and put you guys in my magazine called Hustler.
"I said, ‘Never heard of it.’ He goes, ‘Well, we've only had three issues out. This is the fourth issue, and we'd like to interview you two.’ So, I said, ‘Sure, that's not a problem.’ In the course of the conversation, he said, ‘Do you guys just do obscenity work?’ And I said, ‘Oh, God, no, that's about 10 percent of our business. We're hardcore criminal defense lawyers.’ He goes, ‘Well, I got a couple of charges against me in Cincinnati. Would you guys be interested in representing me?’ They were relatively minor things, and I said, ‘Sure, we're always interested.’ He asked what it would cost, and I told him, and it was funny because he didn't really have all the money at once and wanted to know if he could pay it in installments. I said, ‘Sure, not a problem,’ because there was just something about him that attracted me immediately.
“So, Fahringer was in New York City when I got the call, and he comes back to town, and I tell him we're on our way to Cincinnati, and I tell him about the payment arrangements. And he goes, ‘We're going to Cincinnati basically on credit, and you don't know this guy?’ I said, ‘You know, there's just something about him, Herald. I don't know what to tell you.’”
“I was about 27 at the time,” he continued. “We get to Cincinnati, and it turns out that in the middle of these relatively minor cases, the prosecutor there charged Hustler magazine. And it's a big trial at that point, because they had passed a new law called organized crime, which was really not organized crime. Under their definition, it was five or more people who come together to commit any offense for profit. You could get seven to 25 years, and of course, it was ridiculous. It could be five kids stealing apples, right? Well, anyway, they indicted him for that, and that was the big case. We tried it, he and the company got convicted, his brother, who was an employee at the time, got acquitted, and so did his wife and his production manager. We appealed it, and on appeal, we got the statute declared unconstitutional and all the charges dropped.
“That's how we got to meet Larry and how he became famous, because the line at the time and the reason why it got so much publicity is that the guy who published a magazine got 25 years in jail, and that was a national story. He was on all the talk shows and everything else. What happened after that is that the magazine got popular, they didn't want to sell it in various places, like Atlanta, because they were threatened by prosecutors. The distributors were afraid to sell it because if they did, they were going to get prosecuted.
"So, Larry went down to Atlanta himself, opened a little kiosk on the street, and sold [the magazine] himself. While he was selling it, a prosecutor from Lawrenceville, which was an hour down the road, came over and arrested him because they had some issues [of the magazine] that were mailed to Lawrenceville. So, we went to trial in Lawrenceville and that's when they shot him, and they shot him in front of me. I was on a phone—they had phone booths in those days—he’s walking across the square with our local council, a guy named Gene Reeves, and as they're walking across the square, they both get shot.”
It is quite the recitation, segueing directly into the shooting, an event that was certainly one of the seminal building blocks of their relationship. “How far away were you?” I asked Cambria.
“I was right across the street,” he said. “There was a phone booth. It was lunchtime and Gene Reeves, who we had hired for 500 bucks to help us pick juries because it was a little town and he knew everybody, he said to us, ‘Do you mind if I hang out after jury selection? It would be good for my practice?’ And we said, ‘No, that's not a problem. You can babysit Larry, keep him out of our hair while we're preparing.’ Larry had just gotten on the stand testifying on direct exam, and lunchtime came. Gene took him to lunch while Herald and I stayed at the courthouse. I walked outside to call my secretary to get my messages. They're walking across the street; they get shot. I run over. Gene’s rolling around; he’s shot. Larry's really shot. An ambulance comes. I tell them, take Larry, he's in trouble, this guy just got shot in the arm. Well, it turns out Gene’s [bullet] went all the way through [his arm] and out the other side. So, off we go to the hospital, and I get on the phone with a lawyer friend of mine in Atlanta, and I said, helicopter some doctors in here, we’ll need a thoracic man, and a surgeon, and they all flew in. But some little doctor at the hospital there in Lawrenceville is the one who actually saved his life.”
“And of course, that's when Carter was president, and Carter's sister, Ruth, was a minister and friendly with Larry,” he continued. “So here the president’s sister comes down, and it's me, Fahringer, the president’s sister, and all these news people from around the nation calling and showing up. That's how he became famous. I had left [Larry’s employ] by the time they did the movie, and his business lawyer, Isaacman, had just taken over business. There were no more criminal cases, but he did the deal on the movie, and the writers gave his name as the lawyer for Larry in the movie, and then fictionalized that little bit, had him shot, said he was still with him till this day. But he didn't get shot, he wasn't even there, and Larry didn’t even know him.”
The incident still obviously sticks in his craw, but it was also a slight that Larry was acutely aware of at the time and had to address. “It was funny,” recalled Cambria, “because a month before the movie came out, Larry called me to represent him again. And I said, yeah, you know, I got to let bygones be bygones. So, I came to LA., and he met me for lunch with Liz, who he was not yet married to. This was about 1995. And he started crying when he saw me, and he said, ‘I really want you to come back and be my lawyer.’ And then he said, ‘You might get mad, because they've done this movie and they sort of wrapped everybody together and gave Alan’s name.’ And I said, ‘I don't care. What do I care?’”
“Well,” he continued, “then when we went to the premiere, and Alan’s shaking everybody's hand like he really was the guy. (He starts laughing.) All these congratulations, all this stuff, and I’m thinking, the fucker wasn’t even there! We went through all this shit. But anyway, long story short, about a year later, Larry fired him for some issues that occurred that were not too cool, and then he said to me, can you come back and be my general counsel? I said, yeah, I can. That was in 2001, and ever since then we've done all his legal work and I was his personal advisor right till the day of his death. I'm out in Los Angeles every other week anyway because I got a bunch of clients [out there], but he would call me and say, ‘I've got something to talk to you about; I need some advice,’ and I'd come.
“He did that a couple of weeks before he died, and the whole conversation was about succession and the company going on after the day that he passed. He didn't think he was passing at that day, but he knew that the end had to come sometime. And so, all those things were put in place. I obtained an estate and trust lawyer and oversaw that whole process. And here we are.
"And, like I say, I'm very pleased at how well the transition went, and how quickly Liz stepped in and is doing a great job, and the other department heads feel the same way. They've said so. And so, it's a good thing. We're sorry we lost him. It was a shame. I was a pallbearer at his funeral, and they flew his private jet over, the coffin and all this stuff. And it was sad; it was very sad. The guy was my friend since ’76, right around there. I mean, we were tight.”
I asked him how he would describe their relationship. “Well, we clearly had a professional relationship, and he had confidence in me and my advice, and all the people I have at my firm,” Cambria said. “We have 50 lawyers in our firm, but we have about four who are pretty much dedicated [to LFP Inc.], in the sense that they have the history and have been part of the business and the advisory group. But he would fly his plane up here and come to Buffalo, come to my house, come to a party, a summer party and stuff. For a man who really didn't have a lot of men friends, I was his friend, Mike Warner was his friend, Ron Braverman was his friend, Susan Colvin was his friend. That was his little group, if you will, and he wasn't a guy that had time for friends, because he was always about business, business, business. But we were friends.”
He was also a man of the world, I noted. He knew everybody. “And they loved him,” said Cambria. “I’ll give you an example. One night—this is hilarious—we’re at The Grill on the Alley having dinner, and Don Rickles comes up. And everybody knew Larry. So, Don comes up, ‘Hey, Larry, how you doing?’ ‘Great, Don, how are you?’ He goes, ‘Hey Larry, good luck with Dancing With the Stars tonight.’ It was hysterical, and Larry loved it. He just laughed and laughed. But he had that kind of friendship with lots and lots of people. He was a real celebrity.”
A celebrity to celebrities. “For real,” responded Cambria. “And you know, he wore it well. He wasn't a pushy guy. I never once saw him dress somebody down in front of somebody else. He wasn't that guy who would bitch somebody out in front of an audience, that kind of thing. If he had something to say and he was upset, it was one on one. So, he wasn't a jerk, you know what I mean? A lot of these people who are celebrities who make a lot of money and so on, are jerks.”
Did he also hear Larry’s voice in his head like all the employees I’d spoken with? “What would Larry do? I hear that all the time,” he said. “How would Larry handle this? Yeah, no doubt about it. And they were sad, emotional at the funeral,” he said, referring to the staff. “There were only 10 people allowed into the actual crypt, and I have to tell you, a couple of them were his top people, division leaders, and they were crying. I mean, they were really upset. It was a passage. He was an icon, and it was a passage. But the good part is that it's all living on after him.”
Speaking of that, I noted that Mrs. Flynt could not think of one person who could take her husband’s place as a First Amendment fighter. “Well, he wasn't just a champion of the First Amendment as it involved adult products, and I’ll give you an example, something that people don't know about Larry Flynt,” said Cambria. “I get a call one day. ‘Cambria.’ That's always how he referred to me. ‘Cambria, I don't like the way that it’s going with this Afghanistan war. This President Bush is not letting the press onto the battlefield, and every war has always had correspondents on the battlefield, and so I want you to sue [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld for access to the battlefield. I've hired a journalist with some fantastic credentials, and I want him to be able to go over there and cover this war and tell the American people the truth.’ And I’m like, ‘OK.’
“So, we sued Rumsfeld, and interestingly, we won the preliminary part. We were in D.C. in federal district court, and within months, everything changed, and reporters were given access to the battlefield so that they could report what was really happening rather than being spoon-fed information by some PR hack in the Bush Administration. That's the kind of stuff where you think to yourself, who would think of that, especially a guy in his business? Who would do that? He would do it.
"You remember when he took down the Speaker of the House [Bob Livingston] when [President Bill] Clinton was being impeached? This guy was a critic of Clinton’s, and Larry found out he was having an affair and exposed it, and the guy resigned. And the Speaker said something about having to deal with people who are in the sewer, meaning Larry. Larry said in response, ’And when I got down to the sewer, look who I found?’”
Did he know why Flynt did stuff like that? “Well, you know, he hated hypocrisy in government,” he said. “He was up to speed on politics as much as anybody. He would watch TV and read nothing but politics all the time. He was so interested in it and hated hypocritical politicians, and those are the ones he went after. Everybody who was a hypocrite, he went after them. That was his thing.”
I asked Cambria if his life would have been appreciably different had he not met and worked for Flynt? “Well, it would have been,” he said, “but understand, I already was representing major people in the business, and all these companies. So that part of it, yes, but doing things like suing Rumsfeld? No, that takes a special kind of person to say, let's take the government on at the top, and he was that guy. So, to that degree, absolutely. And what are the chances I'd have another client get shot in front of me. I mean, these things are all definitely unique.
“Understand that through all the years, there was only one person for Larry, and it was me. I was glad to do it, we were friends, and he meant a lot to me. I liked him. I mean, I watched as he almost died. I sat there with his other wife, Althea, on his bed after he was shot, for two weeks. We were told that he had a 10 percent chance for survival, and we sat there basically waiting for him to die, and it didn't happen. He was at my wedding; he came to my house; we were friends. But I was his advisor over everyone, and [Mrs. Flynt] was there when all of that was happening, not everything, but most everything. And I'm glad to say and I think it's true that she has developed the same confidence in me as a person, not looking for something, just doing my job, and then the solidness of the advice.
“And in the waning days of his situation, we had lots of decisions to make, there were a lot of medical things going on, and I was always there and always will be. Larry made me promise that I would always be there for her. That was one of our last conversations. ‘Promise me, you will always be there for Liz.’ And I said, ‘Larry, how can I not be there for Liz? Are you kidding me?’ And so, that's how it's been.”
I mentioned the subtext of Larry’s passing, the obvious comparison with the founders of the other two iconic adult brands—Hefner and Guccione—and the fate of their companies. “Think about it,” he said. “The other two never grew with the times. They never diversified, and that was the big difference. Larry was just a much better businessperson than they were.”
I said I was not sure that either of the other two gentlemen were businessmen. “They were not,” he concurred. “I did work for them. I can tell you that. There was a vast difference. Larry was 100 percent business day in, day out. One day, I'll never forget this, I get a call early in the morning. I'm driving into work, and it's Larry, and he's crying. And I go, ‘Larry, what's the matter?’ He says, ‘You're never going to believe what this—and he names one of the city’s—store is doing? The numbers are fantastic.’ It was a store that I had to litigate, and at one point he had said to me, should we just take a pass? And I go, ‘No, Larry, I think we can win this thing. Let's fight it out.’ And sure enough, we won it, and he called me crying. In fact, he was incoherent, and Liz was with him, and I go, ‘Liz, what's he telling me? What's wrong?’ And she goes, ‘Oh, he's happy.’ And Larry goes, ‘Thanks for hanging in there with me. This is unbelievable, the numbers.’ And he was crying. It was the best.”
He was crying from happiness this time, I said. “‘Thanks for hanging with me and fighting this,’” repeated Cambria. “That was the whole conversation.”
It tells you that money was important, but there was something else driving him. “On the day that they sentenced him to 25 years,” Cambria recalled, “they take him away and I go down to the lock-up, and I say to him, ‘You know, Larry, we're convinced we're going to get this law knocked out.’ This was in Cincinnati. And I said, ‘We will have you out on bail by the end of the day.’ And he goes, ‘No, no, no. I don't want to be out on bail.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ He goes, ‘If I'm out on bail, this would just be another case. If I'm not on out on bail and I'm in jail, people are going to understand that for publishing one goddamn book, a magazine, a guy is in jail. How bad is that? I don't want to be out on bail.’ OK. And then he does about five interviews through the bars, you know what I mean? He got it. He knew how to do it. He knew how to make an issue, how to make a point.”
Where did that come from, I wondered aloud. He was in the service twice. He was “a hillbilly…”
“All hillbilly,” Cambria interrupted, “but one thing about him. It didn't take long for him to learn everything he had to learn. He reminded me of… remember the movie Zelig, the Woody Allen movie where if he’s by a fat guy, he gets fat, if he’s by a Black guy, he gets Black? If Larry was by the gentry, he would become gentrified. If he was by assholes, he'd be an asshole. Larry had that chameleon ability to change. When I first started representing him, he was absolutely hillbilly. Within a year of making it—and Hustler was a big, vital magazine, and the Jackie O stuff was published, and Larry was a millionaire and all that—suddenly, he's in a house in Bexley, Ohio, and you would think you were in there with the queen. I mean, the manners, the furniture, the taste, everything had changed. He was as sophisticated as anybody. He spoke well, his entire diction had changed. Everything had changed. Because he was a fast learner, and he understood what he had to do, and that was the metamorphosis of Larry that was just amazing to me.
“I mean, the first day I had dinner at his place in Columbus, I remembered the old Beverly Hillbillies thing where they notched out the pool cues and thought they were pot passers at the dining room table. And I thought, when are they going to notch out the pool cues and pass the pots? Within two months, you got there, and you thought that Emily Post had infused herself into Larry. I mean, he had that ability to talk to anybody at any range of society. And that was the genius of the guy. He was a fucking genius, and there's no doubt about it.”
I mentioned my unproven theory that everyone else in adult tried to follow Larry’s example once they saw him diversify, but that it was easier said than done to do successfully at scale. “Here’s what happened,” said Cambria, launching into yet another priceless anecdote. “When Larry came to Los Angeles, he was there a few years, and I was gone,” he said. “Then he invited me back, and I told you the story about becoming a general counsel again around 2001. Well, I arranged a dinner at the Buffalo Club on Olympic. At that dinner, I had Steve Hirsch, Steve Orenstein, Mike Warner, Susan Colvin, Ron Braverman, all of the kingpins in the industry, because Larry had no relationship with any of them. None. He was doing his thing, and he was basically a magazine guy and a magazine distributor. But they did some movies, and that was it.
"I got with him, and I said, ‘Larry, all these people are my friends. I'd like to set up a dinner so you can meet them all. And I think you should get into the movie business.’ As you might recall, after that dinner, Vivid started making movies for Hustler, and then they eventually parted ways, and Larry branched off into broadcast and all this other stuff. But he was all by himself with no inroads to anybody else. Within a short period of time, after that meeting, he then started to become friends with people, and one of his closest friends was Mike Warner, and then Susan [Colvin], and then Braverman, and for a while Hirsch, which disintegrated after a while because they were competing.
“So, he got out of the magazine business and started broadcast, and then got off cable satellite broadcast, and then got into more stores and all that, and he was a leader. Quickly, he became the leader of everyone, and they all looked to him. But Larry was always the leader, and let's face it, he was the most successful one of all of them.”
I noted how surreal it was to drive around Los Angeles and hear radio ads for Hustler Casino Family Day, sitting there in wonderment that someone was able to transition their brand from one of the most explicitly sexual…
“…raw porn to ‘Bring the family on down,’ said Cambria with a laugh. “Think about this. When Larry was originally doing Hustler, to get financed at the time he made a deal with a distributor in Connecticut. The distributor would finance the magazine, get it printed, ship it out, and then take in the money and pass off the money to Larry. Well, after [the magazine] made it big, the distributor would delay the payments, and basically have Larry hanging by a string to keep control over him as he was trying to get more money and that kind of thing. He was the one who originally bankrolled him, but then he was trying to take advantage of him when the success came. So, we were there, and Larry said, ‘I'm going to start distributing my own magazine.’ I said, ‘If you start distributing, he's going to try to get an injunction to stop you, and it could be catastrophic.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, well, I'm going to think about it.’
“The next thing you know, the next issue of Hustler comes out, he sends me a courtesy copy, I see Flynt Distributing Company on there, and I go, holy shit. I call him up. ‘You did it!’ He goes, ‘Yeah, those guys, let them sue us. I got you guys.’ And sure enough, it turns out the guy's lawyer was Paul McCartney's brother-in-law, and we wound up in a big-ass lawsuit, and we wound up succeeding in getting a $4 million verdict. But it's that kind of balls. A normal person would say, shit, we’re going to have to litigate. Larry goes, screw you, I'm going to distribute my own magazine and you can sue me. That kind of balls you don't see every day.”
I could have easily asked Cambria another hour’s worth of questions, but we had been at it for 90 minutes already and it was getting late. I thanked him profusely and we hung up. But of all the stories he had told, the ones of Larry calling him on the phone crying are the ones that stick for me. Not once, but twice he called, sad the first time, happy the next, revealing in those two calls a vulnerability that Flynt rarely, if ever, revealed publicly, and a level of trust with his colleague that only the passage of time and the trials of life can forge, a trust so solid that if something should happen to Mrs. Flynt, Cambria becomes the trustee. It’s a beautiful story for all time in my book, and one that will surely transcend the temporal angst of a movie that got it so wrong.
