Paul Krassner on Lenny Bruce, Old Times Police Brutality, & Cavalier Magazine - Ya Gotta Love Him

You know who I miss extra, extra much?

My friend Paul Krassner. Revolutionary Prankster about town. The bohemian spirit of the 1960s, the very best of it. Editor of The Realist.

A wit like no one else, and warmth like a hug you’d never let go. He’s been gone six years now.

Illustrations of Paul and Susie, © Jon Bailiff. Paul was a child violin prodigy at Carnegie Hall in 1939! Little did they know he’d become one of the Yippies to remember for all time.

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I got to know Paul the first time because I crashed a potluck of The Conspiracy Club at Jay Kinney’s. The 1980s? I don’t remember what the conspiracies were; I was laughing too hard. It was love at first sight, the best prank of all!

After that night, I wrote up a subversive wet dream (?) I had about then-Vice President Dan Quayle for Paul’s rag, The Realist, and we were off to the races.

For years, Paul and I traded writing for each other’s string of bizarre periodicals.

I recorded his memoir for audio, “Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut,” the title of which is taken from Paul’s FBI file

We became good friends, along with my partner Jon and his wife Nancy Cain. The last Christmas’s we spent together. . . well, I knew time was growing short, and it broke my heart.

I knew Paul would be cherished forever, because of his intelligence and intransigence to the powers that be. But you know what? He believed in the people he loved, so much. His belief in me, in our writing, was like nothing else.

Let me give you a nostalgic taste of Mr. Krassner’s life. We both worked as columnists and critics for a string of absurd publications, magazines no one remembers anymore, which had quixotic heydays.

Often, some horny entrepreneur/publisher funding the magazine had NO IDEA who they were hiring to write for them. In the heyday of “men’s magazines,” all kinds of kooks were funding publications, hoping to “meet girls”— ha!— and unwittingly hiring radical freaks. Hooray for us!

Below, Paul’s remembrance of one of the most upside down of them all, Cavalier magazine.

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Memories of Cavalier and Lenny Bruce, and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement

by Paul Krassner

The men’s magazine Cavalier was launched by Fawcett Publications in 1952. Their motto: “For the American Male.”

It was published the year before Playboy, to which it has often been compared. Imagine that this was a bastion of cutting-edge comic literature!

Back in the day, Cavalier tried to be seen as slightly hipper, more youthful, and considered a bit more clever than its big-name rival. —Almost an anti-establishment in Playboy. A slogan stated: “Your dad bought Playboy; you bought Cavalier.”

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I was invited to write a column, “The Naked Emperor,” for Cavalier, which was beginning to publish underground writers and artists. They paid me $1,000 a month.

My first column, in 1964, was a report on an auction of 2-inch squares from the hotel bedsheets slept on by the Beatles during their first trip to America.

The 2-inch squares of their unwashed towels and bed linens were sold for $1 each. The price included a notarized statement of authenticity.

My second column was about Lenny Bruce — titled “Lenny the Lawyer,” since he defended himself in his trials. He was arrested for “word crimes” under local obscenity laws, and in his act he ridiculed religious leaders.

I went to the bank and deposited my check, withdrawing half of it in cash, a $500 bill. Lenny was alone in his funky hotel room on Christmas Day when I presented it to him. And, with a large safety pin, Lenny attached the $500 bill to the outside breast pocket of his dungaree jacket.

My friend Michael Simmons, who has been the editor of National Lampoon, recalls that Cavalier hired many fine scribes. A few examples: Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, William Saroyan, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon. Characters show up from Andy Warhol to Timothy Leary.

At Lenny’s funeral two years later, in 1966, that safety pin was still attached on his denim jacket.

Two years before Lenny’s death, with his permission, I published his obituary in my own magazine, the Realist.

The point was, he couldn’t get work, and his work was his life— so he might as well be dead.

If people regretted that they hadn’t helped him, well, now they could have a second chance because he was still alive.

The obituary evoked inquiries from newspapers, wire services, foreign publications, radio and TV.

“What’s the meaning of it?” one editor asked me. “There’s a lot of excitement at the city desk.”

“That is the meaning of it.”

A few years later, without my permission, Jules Siegel, the editor of a short-lived magazine, Cheetah, published a fake obituary of me. I thought it was funny. A reporter called, and I explained that it was a hoax.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Of course. I would tell you if I was dead.”

Siegel started writing for Cavalier. Journalist Adam Ellsworth described Siegel’s “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God,” about the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson’s attempts to finish the opus Smile, as his most famous example of rock journalism.

Ellsworth wrote, “But I think his most revolutionary is his article “The Big Beat.” It appeared in the Playboy-esque Cavalier magazine in 1965 and is one of the earliest writings I’ve ever seen on the development of rock and roll, from slaves singing in chains on their way to America to Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival.”

Now everybody writes about rock ’n’ roll that way. Jules died of a heart attack on Nov. 17, 2012, at the age of 77. He was a brilliant author, but neither Rolling Stone nor the New York Times honored him with an obituary. Not even a fake one.

Art Spiegelman, who won the Pulitzer for Maus, tells me about his work at Cavalier 50 years ago:

“I was first invited into the mag to do two full-color comics pages in 1969, when being printed in color was a very big deal for me, as was getting paid more than 25 bucks for a drawing— somehow in proximity to a big article on underground comics. They were running some [Robert] Crumb ‘Fritz the Cat’ pages.”

“I also did some gag cartoons, short strips, and occasional illustrations for Cavalier. My work as an apprentice underground cartoonist taking too many drugs was really, really awful.

“By the time I’d gotten incrementally better as a cartoonist in the first half of the 1970s, I was regularly doing illustrations for soft-core fiction stories in Cavalier’s low-rent sister mags, Dude, Gent and Nugget and got several of my San Francisco comics cronies — Spain Rodriguez, Bill Griffith and Justin Greene — illustration gigs for those mags as well.”

I wrote some movie reviews for Cavalier. I always went to two screenings. The first one I would go stoned with magic mushrooms. The second one I took notes.

However, I did get fired by Cavalier.

They declined to publish a particular column of mine— my review of “MASH” as though it were a Busby Berkeley musical called “Gook Killers of 1970.” Ostensibly on the grounds of bad taste.

I subsequently learned three magazine wholesalers had told the publisher they were pressured by the FBI and would refuse to distribute Cavalier if my name appeared in it.

It was all over for me, but it had been fun — especially the Cavalier issue with only one large red headline on the cover: “Beat ’em Senseless First”—The Free Speech Controversy, by Paul Krassner.”

At the University of California in Berkeley in September 1964, then-Dean Katherine Towle banned posters, easels and tables at the Bancroft-Telegraph Street entrance to the Berkeley campus “because of interference with flow of traffic.”

She also reminded student groups of “rules prohibiting the collection of funds and the University facilities for the planning and implementing of off-campus political and social action.”

As a result, students held a sit-in.

Next day, 10 tables were manned again, and a campus policeman approached one of the tables (staffed by the Congress of Racial Equality), where a dozen people were seated. One was singled out and placed under arrest. But before you could say “nonviolent demonstration,” the police car was surrounded, its captors reaching as many as 3,000 students.

Next day, 450 police assembled on campus to remove the cop car and its arrested inhabitant, but an agreement to negotiate was reached and the demonstrators dispersed.

Over the next couple of months there were a series of sit-ins that culminated in the infamous Sproul Hall sit-in. It took twelve hours for 800 students to be arrested by some 600 instructors of a new course called “Introductory Police Brutality.”

These were from the lab notes student took: “We should do like they do in them foreign countries — beat ’em senseless first, then throw them in the bus.”

Today, fighting over free speech has been happening heavily on the Berkeley campus again. Campuses everywhere. Meanwhile, Trump grabs the pussy of the Statue of Liberty. Cavalier, anyone?

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