BENEATH CONTEMPT AND HAPPY TO BE THERE The Fighting Life of Porn King AL GOLDSTEIN by Jack Stevenson www.worldheadpress.com Contents Page 3 Acknowledgements / Dedication 4 Introduction 7 Youth 13 Free, White And Twenty-One 16 Working Stiff 19 Desperation 22 The Demon God Of Pulp 26 (Still) Birth Of Screw 33 Demon God Of Pulp Descending 37 Down Every Alley 51 Screw vs. Mainstream Culture 53 Screw vs. Underground Culture 61 Tomorrow The World 66 The Screw Two 69 Porn Chic And The Spawn Of Screw 77 The Painful Price Of Success 84 Midnight Blue 88 Trials 92 Death Magazine: Dead On Arrival Page 106 Battle Of The Bad Taste Titans 111 The Reagan Eighties 123 Screw Turns Twenty 127 Sweating In The Screw Poorhouse 134 Chillin’ With Grandpa 138 The Goldstein Curse 144 Fall Of The House Of Goldstein 150 The People vs. Goldstein 157 With Malice Aforethought 165 Homeless 174 Working Stiff (Again) 179 Walking Medical Time Bomb 183 Deep Shit 186 I, An Author 190 Goldstein For President 195 Conclusion: Deformed By Evil? 202 Appendix: Screw Goes To The Movies 210 Notes / Bibliography / Photo Credits 213 Index 218 About this book Aknowledgements Special thanks to Jeff Goodman, Silke Mayer and Joe Coleman for use of their excellent photos and illustrations. And thanks to a young man named John Walsh who was employed by Screw magazine in the late eighties. One morning he came to work at the Milky Way Production offices to find they were cleaning house and had unceremoniously dumped piles of early issues of Screw and its bastard progeny into the filthy gutter of 14th Street. He quickly yanked out a selection of the cast-off issues before they were all heaved into the garbage truck a few minutes later, and, aware of my interest in these early publications, he mailed them to me. It was an act of archeological prescience—prescient in that these garbage pickings have aided me immensely in my exploration of the most interesting period of Screw, its cursed and besotted youth, and archeological in that these early issues were as yellowed, brittle and flaked as the skin of ancient mummies. All interesting things seem to rot quickly. Dedication Dedicated to all those who wonder why anyone should give a fuck about the ravings of an apparent madman. So I guess that’s just about everybody. 4 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There Introduction Few transformations have been so jarring and outwardly unfathomable as the one that turned an overweight cab driver and welfare recipient into the most outspoken figurehead of America’s sexual revolution. But upon closer inspection perhaps not so unfathomable. The driving force behind America’s take-no-prisoners sex tabloid, Screw, that did so much to set that revolution in mo- tion was a man by the name of Al Goldstein, who had been taken prisoner all his young life. Taken prisoner by a tyran- nical father, by a brutal inner city school system and most of all by a culture of sexual repression that was endemic to forties/fifties America. It was natural enough that he would want to turn the tables. On the whole world. Forever. And, like so many of the other sexual gurus of that era, he was a quiet and introverted youth whose adolescent sexual pas- sivity failed to hint that sex would in fact become his life’s great and endless work. Predictably enough, the fact that he was “sexually retarded” (his term) preordained it. The thought never left him. Goldstein’s life and career have been full of jarring trans- formations. He is like no other celebrity on the American scene; a larger-than-life confirmation of all the stereotypes of the uncouth, foul-mouthed dirty-old-man pornographer, who the next instant reveals a painfully human side and tends to quickly tear-up. Unlike most corporate publishing bosses who hide behind a wall of lawyers, publicists, and spokesmen, he refused to be “handled.” Consuming sex, food, fame, TV sets, gold watches and obscenely expensive cigars with the voraciousness of a garbage dumpster, he burned through five wives and a fortune, blazing a descending arc across Introduction5 Joe Coleman illustrated the cover of this 1980 Screw “special”. that dark and misty void known as the adult entertainment industry. He came to symbolize all that was good, bad and oh so ugly about America. He could never have survived, thrived and become what he was in any other culture. But I get ahead of myself. In the beginning, the very beginning, he was cute. Like all babies. … you think? Little Al at his Bar Mitzvah. Youth7 A 1 CH PT R YOUTH With a smack on his scrawny little ass and a scream, Al came into the world in 1936, born into a first-generation immigrant Jewish family of humble origins that lived in a house on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He had a “psychotic” brother he almost never refers to, a “dumb father” and a “delusional” mother.1 So far so bad. That mother, Gertrude Breslow, tended to the house while husband Sam plied his trade as a shutterbug for the Daily Mirror. Although he had served bravely as a photographer during WWII, Al would forever characterize him as a gutless weasel, a man who “walked around his whole life in mortal fear… the personification of Camus’ The Stranger… a man who said ‘sir’ to elevator operators.” A man who quietly acquiesced to his wife’s long term affair with her diet doctor. But there was one person on earth he could lord it over—little Al. And yet he took his stuttering, bed-wetting son to sports events other boys could only dream about. They went to a lot of the Friday night boxing matches at Madison Square Garden, and little Al was there at ringside on October 26, 1951, when a brawling young Rocky Marciano floored an over-the-hill Joe Louis with a left hook in the eighth round, his dad hanging into the ropes trying to get the pic, eye glued to his boxy camera. Little Al was also in tow on fre- quent forays to Ebbets Field to see the great Dodger teams of the forties. He got his picture taken with Jackie Robinson. He devoured the Sporting News every week and became so knowledgeable about the team that he guested as the statistics-spouting “Little Alvin Goldstein” on a post-game radio show. He also assisted his dad on more mundane jobs, such as wedding photo shoots and such like.