Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 33
Guccione was still one of America’s richest men. He liked to boast that Penthouse, with its monthly circulation of 4.7 million in 16 countries, had started with a bank loan of $1,700 and had grossed $4 billion over its 30-year history. However, all that money could not save Guccione from what happened next: His wife and business partner, Kathy Keeton, was diagnosed in 1997 with galloping breast cancer. When she died, age fifty-eight, Guccione’s personal world collapsed. “Losing her blew out my lamps,” confessed Guccione. “I was never the same again.” His professional world was also about to nosedive.
Guccione had always lived beyond his means. No matter how much money poured in, everything he owned was mortgaged to the hilt. For a man obsessed by scientific developments in the realms of space exploration and energy production, he was surprisingly out of touch when it came to technological changes in his own field. First video and then the Internet were making pornography available in ways that print media couldn’t match. Penthouse was losing its status as the primary, most available source of sexually explicit material. Guccione responded with sensational offerings. He proposed that the infamous Unabomber write a column. He published nude photographs of Madonna. He tried to get Monica Lewinsky to pose for the magazine. To Penthouse’s now routinely exposed vulvas and anuses, he added sexual fetishes, such as photos of women urinating. This scared away advertisers without boosting circulation. Predictably, it also aroused the indignation of America’s religious right, leading to censorship problems under the Reagan administration.
Guccione responded to such attacks with righteous indignation of his own. Penthouse took great pleasure in exposing the sexual hypocrisy of TV evangelists Jimmy Swaggart and James Bakker, helping to end their ministries. In defending the American First Amendment right to freedom of speech, Guccione insisted, “Reagan’s presidency couldn’t deliver the prayer issue or abortion to the evangelists, who delivered his election, but they could deliver censorship.”
Now, with a circulation of just 400,000, Penthouse could no longer support Guccione’s other ventures. In 1984, Bob Jr. told his father, “The sexual revolution is over, Dad. You won. My friends and I don’t buy Penthouse anymore. We buy Sports Illustrated. The girls have clothes on—not many, but they do.”
Having interviewed ’70s Penthouse Pets, who described how exposure in Penthouse had launched them on respectable careers, I wanted to interview women who had posed for Penthouse after it became a hardcore failing magazine. I phoned Mark Spiegler, an L.A. agent for pornographic film stars, and told him, “I’d like to interview your client, Dana DeArmond, who once posed for Penthouse and was now directing her own sex films for Penthouse’s video division, for a documentary I’m doing on Bob Guccione.”
He replied, “She doesn’t do anal.”
I repeated, “It’s for a Guccione documentary.”
He said, “It’s six hundred dollars an hour, and I just want to remind you that she doesn’t do anal.”
“Listen, I’ve been on your website, and she does do anal, but that’s not why I need her.”
I agreed to the $600, and Dana DeArmond came to the Sunset Marquis Hotel where I was filming. She caused a stir in my crew when she walked in. She was gorgeous. She was also a businesswoman who had made millions marketing her brand; not a coked-up porn star, but a pro who directed her own scenes. She was insightful, not only about the Guccione years, but about the porn industry. When I asked her what her parents thought of her career, she responded in a way that didn’t quite make it into the film.
She asked, “Do you have a daughter?”
I said, “Yes.”
“You know, at some point you’re going to get a call saying your daughter skipped school, that your daughter was caught smoking in the washroom and so on. My parents got a call saying, ‘You know what? Your daughter takes two cocks in the ass.’ And I figured out, ‘So, what’s the difference?’” Dana pointed out the obvious advantages of Internet porn. “When buying online, you don’t have to look over your shoulder to see who’s watching.” She also made this rather contradictory statement: “You also need the element of taboo, because if everyone is taking two cocks in the ass, then it’s boring.”
Dana was intimidating, fascinating, sexy, the whole package. I asked her off-camera, “How do you handle ordinary dates with men?”
She replied, “When I answer the door, and my boyfriend is on the other side, I am expecting him to bring his best game.”
In 2003, General Media was forced into bankruptcy. Guccione had to sell off his beloved art collection to pay $100 million in back taxes. Jane Homlish removed each painting from the wall and handed it to the auctioneers. But she did more than that. “After we lost our very last one, I spent all night till sun-up, hanging Bob’s own paintings in their place. When he finally came downstairs, he could see that they looked beautiful.”
It was also Jane who picked up the first phone call from General Media’s new owners: “Is this Jane? I just phoned to let you know that you and Bob are fired.”
Guccione lost his mansion to his mortgage holder that same year. He also underwent surgery for throat cancer, losing in the operation his ability to swallow solid food along with his sense of taste. Though it made it difficult for him to talk, he still managed to say, “I probably desire food more than sex.”
Before Kathy Keeton died in 1997, she had decided that Guccione should not live alone, and suggested that he marry her friend, April Warren, a model from Texas. “April was extremely aggressive about living with Bob,” said Homlish. “Bob needed to be entertained, and thought this would help him to get over Kathy. I don’t think that worked, but I believe she made him feel alive again.”
Guccione appointed Warren creative director of Penthouse, and married her in 2006. She was with Guccione in 2010 when he died, age seventy-nine, of lung cancer in a Plano, Texas, hospital. By then, both Bob Jr. and Nick had made peace with their father.
“It was shocking to see Dad wind up in a crap hospital in the middle of nowhere,” said Nick.
“I think he just gave up,” said Bob Jr.
People kept bringing up the name of Al Goldstein when I was conducting interviews for the film. When you talk about freedom of expression in the ’60s and ’70s, especially when the subject is sex, you talk about Hugh Hefner, you talk about Bob Guccione and you talk about Al Goldstein. It was Goldstein who produced the radical tabloid with the self-explanatory title Screw. In its twenty-five-year history, the tabloid’s most sensational scoops were nude pictures of Jacqueline Kennedy and an article entitled, “Is J. Edgar Hoover a Fag?”
Goldstein was very much a New York kind of guy who, at the height of his notoriety wore Rolex watches and diamond bling and had homes all over the world. He oozed sleaze. And, like Guccione, he experienced a precipitous fall, living homeless for a while in Central Park. My research team finally found him in a nursing home for veterans in Queens. When I phoned him, he said, “I loved Bob. I’ll do an interview. It will cost you five hundred dollars.”
We made a date. I kept phoning to confirm that it was on until he said, “Why are you calling? It’s done. Bring the five hundred dollars.”
The more serious problem was getting permission from the hospital to take in a film crew. Because they never answered my request, I told my people, “We’re going to do this guerrilla-style.” We walked into the home with our film equipment hidden in our coats, pockets and bags. When a guard asked whom we were visiting, I said, “Mr. Goldstein. ” He replied, “Ward seven, third floor, room sixty-eight.”
I’m not good at hospitals, as I’ve said many times, and this place was like something out of Scorsese’s Shutter Island combined with The Shining. Even Ken, who’d survived Xaviera and filming in jungles, was getting shaky. Just as we arrived at Goldstein’s room, a nurse came out wearing rubber gloves and a neck-to-toe rubber apron. I told her, “I’m here to see Mr. Goldstein.”
“Well, I have to finish cleaning him up. He’s made a mess. Why don’t you wait in the reception area?”
When we got to reception, another nurse asked who we were visiting. I repeated, “Mr Goldstein.”
“Oh yes, he’s a very nice guy, very mild-mannered.”
Nice? Mild-mannered? I told her, “That doesn’t quite fit what I know of Al Goldstein.”
“Oh, I was talking about Dave Goldstein. Al Goldstein is in Ward eight. You go down to the basement then take the tunnel . . . Is somebody escorting you?”
“No.”
“Oh.” She seemed both pensive and surprised.
We went down to the basement and it was the most frightening underground walk ever. People were wandering around like zombies, and we could hear strange noises. When we took the elevator up to Ward 8, this was now Destitute Island, where people had been left to rot. I’d seen bad stuff before, but this sad case of lost souls’ decline really bothered me. I put on my blinders, and we found a room with “Al Goldstein” on the door. I knocked and he yelled, “Enter and fuck you!”
He was sitting in a wheelchair, wearing shorts with a T-shirt pulled above his belly. It was tattooed with the words, “Let’s Fuck.”
Goldstein greeted me, “Good Shabbat,” a Jewish greeting reserved for Friday nights. He added, “I’m ready to go. Do you have the five hundred dollars? I’m sorry to ask but I need it.”
We closed the door to set up the cameras, and it was boiling hot. The New York Times book section and other signs that Goldstein was a voracious and cultured reader, were scattered about the room. He wanted to know, “Is Côte Basque restaurant still around? I’d love to get out and have a good lunch with you and smoke some weed.”
It was Ken’s job to put the microphone up Goldstein’s T-shirt, a task he clearly wasn’t looking forward to. This man hadn’t washed in God knows how long, but when we started the interview, he was charming. Unfortunately, he’d had a series of strokes, so he’d start a great story, then lose it, then repeat it, provide another nibble or moment of brilliance, and then say something like, “Have you ever had a Thai woman? They’re the best.” Or he’d talk about having to be satisfied with nursing manuals to masturbate. He also kept taking out his teeth because he felt he could talk better that way. It was a crazy interview, and it was sad. I didn’t want to exploit him, but I thought it was important to put him in the film. The best I could get was his assertion, “I could jerk off to Penthouse.”
Goldstein died on December 19, 2013, aged seventy-seven, from renal failure at a nursing home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
I premiered Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, to which I invited both Jane Homlish and Victoria Lynn Johnson. These two women were a study in opposites: Victoria was the still-beautiful, long-time mistress; Jane was the lovelorn, long-suffering personal assistant and loyal confidante, who remained sexually invisible to him. Jane had never had her fifteen minutes with Bob, ever. Victoria, a Penthouse Pet, who had travelled the world, was used to the red-carpet treatment, which Jane resented. Jane kept complaining that Victoria was hogging the spotlight, and that her stories weren’t true. Finally I had to tell her, “Jane, this is a film to celebrate Bob’s legacy. If you say one more negative thing, you’re going back on the plane to New Jersey, so go ahead and test me.”
As for Xaviera Hollander, now that I was her best friend, who’d immortalized her in the Guccione film, she told me, “Barry, I’d love to come to Toronto for the festival, but I have an outstanding legal issue.”
“What is it, Xaviera? I know the best criminal attorney in the world, so maybe he can make it go away.”
“In the seventies, when I lived in Toronto, I was having a ménage à trois with brothers of a prominent retail family. They dared me to go to a store owned by a rival retailer and to steal a negligee. I did, and I got caught shoplifting.”
I told Eddie Greenspan. He asked, “How many years ago was this? I don’t think it will be an issue.” But then he looked into it and found Xaviera’s problem was an outstanding tax issue, not a shoplifting one, so she couldn’t attend the premiere.
I sold the documentary internationally, and it did well. Not unexpectedly, it met with a mixed critical reception, because I had taken a man who exploited women and told the story of his life from the standpoint of insiders instead of exposing him as a scumbag. I was angry, because I thought the film was a fantastic story about the rise and fall of a business empire. I didn’t see it as a tragedy, the way his sons saw it, because Bob Guccione had lived most of his life the way he wanted. He just had a bad Act III. Some people are unlucky that way.
I continued to visit Playboy Mansion when I was in L.A., mainly because I loved the movies. (My friends refused to believe this; they think it’s like saying, “I read Playboy magazine for the articles.”) I’d go for the 6:30 screening, then join other friends for dinner.
While making the Guccione documentary, I had taken Hef aside to ask him if he would participate. He replied, “Barry, I have never gone on record about Penthouse magazine, and I’m not going to do it now. I don’t need to do it. It’s over. Penthouse was an imitator, Playboy was the real deal.” I think Hef just forgot about the documentary, but the friends I had made at the mansion did not. They kept egging me on when it was finished. “You’ve got to have Hef show your film here.”
I remembered how Hef always sat down at his magnificent dining-room table at 6:15, to greet his guests, who sometimes gave him gifts before the screening. With trepidation, I joined the lineup, gave him a DVD of Filthy Gorgeous, then beat it to the door, where I could see how he reacted while in a position to escape before being thrown out. Hef picked up the DVD, looked at it for a moment, then called to his assistant. I heard him say, “Take this upstairs to the bedroom.”
I’ve since returned to the mansion. Hef has never said a word about the film. So I don’t know how he felt about that famous ad with the silhouette of his Playboy bunny, riddled with bullet holes, or the film’s take on The Pubic Wars.
Chapter Twenty-Five
QUALITY BALLS:
THE DAVID STEINBERG STORY
As a Jewish kid from Montreal, I grew up watching Winnipeg’s David Steinberg—another Jewish kid like me—develop a great standup career.
An earlier generation of comedians, such as Bob Hope, George Burns and Jack Benny, shot well-rehearsed, rapid-fire, one-line zingers. Steinberg was different: he led a new wave of comedians who told stories. Like Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin and George Carlin, he was willing to give up the fast laugh to invest in a bigger climax five minutes up the road. He wasn’t afraid to improvise, and he was political in the way Jon Stewart is today. Steinberg was on fire in the ’60s. He made more than 130 appearances on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, second only to Bob Hope. After that, he launched a second career, directing sitcoms like Seinfeld, Friends, Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
I grew up wanting to be like David Steinberg, so working with him was a dream come true. In 2006, I hired him to do a series of humorous commercials for a wealth management company. We shot the ads over four or five days in Palm Springs and had dinner together every night. We traded jokes. We were like two old comedic souls who’d fallen in love on a first date.
Five years later, when HBO green-lit a documentary about Steinberg, he and producer Debbie Nightingale suggested that I direct it. Could life be any sweeter? I signed a contract with the production company as a director-for-hire, not as a producer, which was my usual dual role.
David and I met several times to talk about the arc of the film. My brainchild was to shoot David performing standup, which he hadn’t done in thirty-five years. I attempted to pitch this idea to him over lunch at Il Pastaio, one of his favourite Beverly Hills restaurants. As I discovered, David and his wife, Robyn, had become very particular about what they would eat. At first, it was funny, but then it became wearing: We will have the poppy seed, but it has to be washed in mineral water. Does the waitress have a cold? Is this table too near the UV lighting? Has somebody walked by who might some day get Ebola?
Izzy, the Steinbergs’ giant standard poodle, was also present. I liked Izzy. He was a well-mannered dog, but he was treated as if he were a person who appeared to be taller than me. Everything at that lunch came down to two imperatives: preserving David’s health so he would live to be 190, and catering to Izzy’s every imagined whim.
David loved my standup idea, but was understandably nervous about performing before an audience after so many years. What would his new act be about? How would he prepare his material? I suggested honing his performance in La Jolla, down the coast from L.A. Billy Crystal performed there over seven hundred Sundays before taking his show to Broadway, where it enjoyed massive success. Billy had worked with Des McAnuff, a Tony Award–winning director and former artistic director of Stratford. Since Des and I had worked together on The Tempest and Caesar and Cleopatra, I felt confident recommending the idea. David also brought in a well-known Saturday Night Live director and the brilliant writer, Alan Zweibel.
As David was honing his show, I was attempting to set up interviews with people who had worked with him. I kept asking David to arrange access to well-known comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Paul Reiser from Mad About You, but nothing was happening. When David contacted me to say he wanted to see me, I flew to L.A. for another lunch. After the usual fuss about the food, he told me, “Barry, I’ve been thinking, and I believe we should bring in someone else instead of you to interview the comics.”
Since this film was already off-track, and I was still working on my Guccione film, I didn’t get as insulted as I might have done. “So, you want to bring in someone else. Why is that?”
