THE MAKING OF A HUSTLER
As societal strictures loosened, Larry Flynt took smut all the way to the Supreme Court
As dreams go, Larry Flynt’s was a modest one. It went something like this: Buy a bar. Put some plywood over the pool table. Hire a young woman in a bikini to dance on it. Nothing fancy. No delusions of respectability. Just a safe bet that the world was full of men willing to pay cash to drink cheap beer and look at pretty dancers. This was Flynt’s business model when he opened the Hustler Cocktail Lounge in early 1968 in Dayton, Ohio.
“When I started out, I just wanted to make money and have a lot of fun,” Flynt said. “That was basically my vision.”
His timing could not have been better. The opening of his bar in the late 1960s made possible a career that would propel Flynt from dirt-poor Kentucky boy to one of 20th-century America’s most successful and reviled pornographers.
More opportunist than pioneer, Flynt saw fractures developing in American society and quickly made a home in those widening gaps. His strategy was as simple as it was crude: Find a tried-and-true formula to make a buck and take it as far as the changing culture would allow.
Strip clubs had been around for decades, but Flynt ran his with the shameless flair of a carnival barker. Pornography had existed since humans began drawing on cave walls, but Flynt took his to extremes unseen outside of gynecology textbooks.
Smut peddlers had always stumbled into fights over obscenity, but Flynt became an accidental champion of the First Amendment by carrying a fight over his Hustler magazine to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Along the way, he denigrated women, coarsened the culture and almost single-handedly redefined the mean- ing of bad taste.
Would he publish an image of a woman being run through a meat grinder? Yes, he would. Racist jokes? Absurd publicity stunts? Photos of a naked Jackie Kennedy Onassis? Flynt said yes to all of it.
“He certainly pushed the buttons on what could be tolerated,” said Jon Hughes, a journalist and former University of Cincinnati professor who has followed Flynt’s career. “Flynt was the catalyst for thinking about what obscenity is and is not.”
Considering the media landscape Americans inhabit today, where images of sex and violence appear with the swipe of a cellphone, it’s hard to argue Flynt alone changed the trajectory of American culture.
More likely he was a product of that culture, a man whose greatest gift was
recognizing he was in the right place at the right time.
A decade earlier, in the more conservative 1950s, Flynt’s career may not have happened. A decade later, in the more permissive 1970s, it may not have mattered.
But in 1968, on Third Street in Dayton, Flynt saw an opportunity to make a modest dream come true. There, he would watch one of America’s most chaotic years unfold.
Unlike millions of his fellow Americans, Flynt was not alarmed by what he saw. He was inspired by it.
The hustler
Every few months in 1968, Flynt stuffed photos of his dancers into an envelope and mailed them to his brother, Jimmy, in Vietnam.
He’d used the photos to promote his bar and figured his brother and his Army buddies would appreciate them. They did. The young soldiers tucked the photos into pockets or pinned them to the walls of the bunkers they’d hollowed out of the ground.
Back home in Dayton, Flynt learned soldiers weren’t the only ones eager to see images of his dancers. After purchasing a tabloid called Bachelors Beat in 1968, Flynt turned it into a promotional vehicle for his dance club.
The paper found an audience among the same working-class men who frequented the bar, which got Flynt to thinking: What if he ran a publication the way he ran his bar? What if he stripped away the pretense and gave the crowd what he thought it wanted?
Flynt was just getting started. A few years later, in 1974, he was the owner of eight dance clubs in Ohio and the publisher of a promotional newsletter called The Hustler, which would become the glossy magazine Hustler that he still publishes.
He recognized the potential of the magazine to attract the same guys he saw every night at his bars. He didn’t think they were interested in the kind of pseudo-artsy centerfolds they saw in Playboy, and he was certain they didn’t care about the articles.
“Playboy taught you how to make a perfect martini or told you what kind of car you should drive,” Flynt said. “People who buy these magazines want their porn to be porn.”
So that’s what he gave them. Hardcore porn. Those instincts led him to the audience he knew was out there. It wasn’t as large as the 5 million a month who bought his tamer rivals, Playboy and Penthouse, at their peak. But Flynt managed to shock, offend and entertain his way to 3 million readers in the 1970s and ’80s.
If he was unsure where civil society drew a line, Flynt would keep going until he crossed it. Even then, he might keep going.
Flynt argued his pornography met the standards of his time, no matter how offensive it might be.
His opponents said he was trying to redefine community standards by degrading women and dragging the culture into the gutter. Worse, they said, he encouraged millions of Hustler readers to do the same.
“Being a woman, what he did frightened me. It was so distressing,” said Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women. “It’s clear he doesn’t think of women as living, breathing human beings.”
Flynt wanted to be the guy who delivered the pornography America deserved, or at least the kind he thought could make him rich.
This was 1968, after all, and he was feeling ambitious.
The crusader
He soon found ambition could lead to trouble, especially in his line of work. Police raids and the fate of his liquor license were constant worries during those early years in Dayton.
Flynt was stubborn. Despite his problems, he opened clubs in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo. Wherever he went, he met resistance with the same defiant attitude he first showed in Dayton.
When Cincinnati police told him to remove a go-go dancer from the front window of his club, Flynt replaced her the next day with a closed-circuit TV showing a live broadcast of the same dancer.
“You just couldn’t tell Larry he couldn’t do something,” said Lou Sirkin, a Cincinnati lawyer who met Flynt in the 1970s and represented him in the 1990s.
Flynt didn’t set out to be a free speech crusader. But as his businesses grew, he found common cause with those who saw the late 1960s as an opportunity to expand individual freedoms.
He started showing up at panel discussions in Dayton and Cincinnati about the First Amendment and obscenity, sharing the stage with college professors and lawyers.
Hughes said Flynt patiently listened to those with opposing views, then in his slow Kentucky drawl, he calmly defended his right to offend his fellow Americans. “He was kind of charming,” Hughes said.
A growing chorus of critics thought otherwise.
Evangelist Jerry Falwell, in particular, was not amused when Flynt published a satirical interview suggesting the preacher lost his virginity to his mother. Falwell sued, but Flynt fought him to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Once I made money, that’s when I really became dangerous,” Flynt said. “I could afford lawyers.”
Good lawyers, as it turned out. The Falwell case ended in a landmark decision supporting the right to publish parodies of public figures. It’s the first line of defense today for South Park, The Onion and Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump skits on “Saturday Night Live.”
Flynt was battling an obscenity charge in Georgia in 1978 when a would-be assassin shot him as he left the courthouse.
Paralyzed from the waist down, he descended into years of mental health struggles and erratic behavior.
For some, the shooting solidified Flynt’s position as a free speech icon, as a martyr for the cause. For others, it was a tragic distraction from the damage Flynt’s business was doing to American society.
“To call Larry Flynt anything other than a porn peddler is giving him way too much credit,” said Aaron Baer, president of Citizens for Community Values in Ohio. “There are ways to campaign for the First Amendment that don’t harm women and children.”
Baer said Flynt embraced the First Amendment to make a buck, nothing more. In other words, he’s the same guy he was back in Dayton in 1968.
Flynt, 75, doesn’t entirely dispute that interpretation. He’s still a pornographer, one who has again adapted to his times by branching out to video production and the internet. But he takes obvious pride in the Supreme Court case that bears Hustler’s name.
“When you talk about expanding the parameters of free speech, that’s not a bad thing,” Flynt said.
Will he be remembered as a pornographer or a free speech champion?
Flynt would gladly claim both, but only the first description was intentional. The second, a gift of the times.
“I think I started at the right time,” Flynt said.
“There was a niche there that really worked for me.”