An Unhurried View of Ralph Ginzburg

The early life and times of Ralph Ginzburg sound like the plot for a Herman Wouk novel of a poor-boy hero about to make good. Born and bred in Brooklyn of Jewish immigrant parents, the young Ginzburg pushed a wagon in the garment district, waited tables in the Catskills, sold ice cream on the beach at Coney Island, and dreamed of being a millionaire by the time he was 30. He got top marks and played in the band at New Utrecht High School, hurrying on to the City College of New York at the age of 16, where he competed with the returning veterans of 1946. He earned straight A's as a major in accounting, but a journalism professor encouraged his writing talent and so "changed my life"; it was to be the first of a dramatic series of such occurrences. While still an undergraduate, he sold his first piece of writing (an essay about Nathan's hot-dog stand on Coney Island, where he used to take dates on Friday nights), became the editor of The Ticker, student newspaper of the college's business school, and managed to get his picture in the New York papers for suggesting that the business school be named after its distinguished graduate Bernard Baruch; it was. He was known on campus as "Windy," and, as one classmate recalls, "We always knew he'd make it." They were right, but they never dreamed how.

There were no clues from his youth that presaged the future notoriety Ginzburg would gain as a publisher-promoter whose products earned him not only the beginning of a fortune and a small taste of fame, but also a conviction on 28 counts of criminal obscenity, a sentence of five years in the Federal penitentiary and a fine of $42,000. On June 14, 1963, Ginzburg was found guilty of criminal use of the U. S. mails for posting three different publications that were judged to be obscene: Eros, a lavishly produced hardcover magazine self-described as "A Quarterly on the Joys of Love"; The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, a frankly detailed confessional diary of the hyperactive sex life of an Arizona housewife; and Liaison, a biweekly "newsletter" which collected stray items of erotic interest rather in the style of a sexual Kiplinger Letter. Ginzburg's conviction was upheld last November by the U. S. Court of Appeals, but last spring the Supreme Court accepted the case for review, and is scheduled to hear arguments on it this fall. The eventual decision will not only determine the personal fate of Ralph Ginzburg, but will have far-reaching effects on the whole muddy field of obscenity, censorship and the law. An amici curiae brief in Ginzburg's behalf was signed by 117 leaders from fields such as publishing, writing, psychiatry and education, including Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, Herbert Gold, Paul Goodman, Arthur Miller, Christopher Isherwood, Norman Mailer, Louis Untermeyer, the minister of the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, the rabbi of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the chairman of the University of Chicago's Social Sciences Department, the dean of the University of Illinois School of Library Science, the managing editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the publisher of The New Republic. The brief argued that:

If this Court fails to set aside such acts of punishment and suppression of publications, we fear it will have severely constricted this country's parameters for permissible discussions of sex. If the judgments of the courts below are not reviewed and reversed, we fear this nation will go lame in the freedom of its sexual expression.

Another brief, filed by the 4000-member Authors League of America, stated that the decision in the Ginzburg case "creates a formidable deterrent" to the exercise of the "rights of free speech and press ... and must be condemned."

The controversy over the principles involved has been clouded in the press and the public mind by the controversial figure of the man in the middle of it all, for Ginzburg has a unique ability for stirring up extreme responses to himself and his activities. His old friend Lawrence Grossman, now an NBC vice-president, has compared Ginzburg's role in our society to that of "a Socrates," while to many people Ginzburg has become "a symbol of decadence," a label applied by William P. Riley, cochairman of the National Citizens for Decent Literature Committee.

But Ginzburg in person seems neither Socratic nor decadent. A fast-talking, friendly man of 36, he is bulging a bit in the middle, and wears owllike black-rimmed glasses that accentuate the paleness of a round face beneath a receding crewcut. His taste runs to colored shirts that are usually unbuttoned at the neck and adorned with a tie that is loosened to match the pace of his hectic activity. Ginzburg lives with his second wife and three children in a top-floor apartment of a new building on Manhattan's West Side, where he has a stereo set with earphones and a sweeping, neon-studded view of the city's midsection. He says that the $400-a-month apartment is "my only luxury," and even at home he is rarely given to relaxation. He keeps a pencil and note pad by the bathtub in case of emergency ideas for his current enterprise, a bimonthly exposé magazine called Fact, which is Ginzburg's outspoken answer to the decline of modern journalism and his contribution to the safety of "the democratic process." The magazine is actually a sensational potpourri, with boldface titles that promise more than is usually delivered in pieces covering such assorted subjects as Abe Lincoln's sex life, "evidence" that Dag Hammarskjöld committed suicide, a memoir exposing the fact that Ernest Hemingway sometimes used rough language and was curt to strangers, and a dissertation on the topic "Should a Jew Buy a Volkswagen?"

The only organizations Ginzburg belongs to are the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed its own amici curiae brief for his case, and the Y.M.C.A., where he goes to run around the track and lift weights. He usually works ten hours a day, seven days a week, which leaves little time for hiking and bird-watching--which he says are his only hobbies. In case he can't get to the Y, he keeps a set of weights in his office, but does not look as if he has spent much time lifting them. He also keeps in his office an electric coffee maker, a can of Medaglia D'Oro and a tin of Droste's chocolate--the only stimulants he allows himself to indulge in. He has never experimented with drugs of any kind, and spurns filter cigarettes as well as marijuana.

"Smoking of any kind makes me sick," he explained. "As for alcohol, I can actually get high on a glass of beer. I'm really a tenderfoot when it comes to the so called vices."

Ginzburg added that he has no moral objections to drinking, but he fears the effects might slow him down. "It would impair," he explained, "my working capacity."

There is the sense that if Ginzburg had stuck with accounting, his college major, he might today be a symbol of free-enterprise achievement for the Junior Chamber of Commerce, instead of a symbol of decadence for the National Citizens for Decent Literature Committee. Though raised as a Jew and self-remodeled as an atheist, his all-work-no-play approach to life--though it certainly hasn't made Ralph a dull boy--could serve as a model for the Protestant ethic. But his eager energy was channeled into the erratic publication of erotica, a subject that still lies under society's massive taboo in spite of all the "enlightenment" and progress of recent years--as Ginzburg's case has so dramatically proved. Ironically, his entry into that socially forbidden area seems almost accidental.

Though Ginzburg left CCNY convinced he'd make his million by the age of 30, he still wasn't sure what field he would make it in. A 17-month stint as an Army draftee failed to abate his search for success, for while serving in the Public Information Office in Washington, he sold free-lance magazine articles to the Reader's Digest, Collier's, Coronet and other national magazines, and took on a full-time night job as rewrite man for the Washington Times-Herald. Restlessly roaming to Europe after his discharge in 1951, he tried his hand at free-lance photography, and returned to New York, where he did some continuity writing for NBC. But he wasn't content.

"I was dying to get a staff job on a magazine," Ginzburg recalls of that time, "and I pounded the doors of Time and Life, but without any luck."

A friend helped him get a job at an ad agency, but he chafed at his copywriting chores and continued to dream of breaking into big-time magazine work. The frustration seemed even greater because the ad agency he worked for was located in the Look magazine building, at 488 Madison Avenue; Ginzburg felt he was in the right building but on the wrong floor, so he turned his discomfort into a pitch for finding a remedy.

"I had an artist friend draw a picture of a fish flopping around, and I sent it off with a letter to Gardner Cowles, publisher of Look, saying, 'I feel like a fish out of water up here on the 17th floor in an ad agency--I ought to be down on your floor.' "

Ginzburg's fish landed him an interview, and Ginzburg landed a whopping job--at the tender age of 23: circulation-promotion director of Look, with a $2,000,000 budget, a private secretary and a staff of ten employees. Was this what Ginzburg was looking for?

"At first I enjoyed the job," he says now, "and I felt like a big shot. There I was, a kid of twenty-three, making fifteen grand a year, and I had my own staff and secretary--all the accouterments of success. But I began to see that those things didn't make me happy."

Even so, Ginzburg soon gained a reputation in the magazine world, as--in the words of one former colleague--"a newsstand promotion hustler, and a damn good one." Some of his severest critics admit that Ginzburg has a natural talent, even a "genius," for the fine art of promotion; yet the use of that gift has never seemed to satisfy him. Even while successfully handling his high-powered promotion job, Ginzburg was writing free-lance magazine articles, and in 1957, while still at Look, he was given an assignment by Esquire that resulted not only in a change of job, but eventually in a whole new career--the one that led to his present notoriety and his five-year jail sentence.

The fateful assignment Ginzburg took on was to write an article entitled "An Unhurried View of Erotica"--the idea and the title came from an editor at Esquire--describing and quoting from some of the world's great erotic literature.

"At the time," Ginzburg admits, "I was anything but an expert on erotic literature. The only thing I knew about was the history of the laws suppressing erotic literature."

Ginzburg's knowledge of the laws concerned with obscenity in literature dated back to 1949, his senior year in college, when he worked nights as a copy boy at the old New York Compass. At the time, the paper was preparing a series on John S. Sumner, the retiring head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and Ginzburg did some investigation into Sumner's career. But he became more fascinated with Sumner's predecessor, Anthony Comstock, who from 1873 to 1915 sent literally hundreds of authors, publishers and book dealers to prison and destroyed tons of allegedly obscene literature. Comstock worked for the passage of almost every obscenity statute currently on the lawbooks--including the postal statute under which Ginzburg was given his five-year jail sentence.

Ginzburg began collecting material for a biography of Comstock, a project he still is working on. When offered the "Erotica" assignment, he turned his attention from the laws concerned with book banning to the books themselves. He not only wrote the article for Esquire, but also got himself hired as the magazine's articles editor--a move that finally enabled him to abandon the promotion field in which he excelled for the editorial side that he admired.

But Esquire never ran the article. The (continued on page 172)Ralph Ginzburg(continued from page 96) magazine was going through a shift in its own editorial emphasis, and it was felt that the "Erotica" article didn't fit the image of the "new Esquire" that was being developed at the time. Ginzburg asked the magazine to return the rights to the article to him, and they did. He decided to expand it into a hardcover book, and persuaded Dr. Theodor Reik and drama critic George Jean Nathan, both of whom he had met through his work as Esquire's articles editor, to write a brief foreword and introduction to the volume. With those two eminent names, his own expanded article (the book was only 20,000 words long, about one third the size of the average hardcover volume), the lure of the title and a budget of less than $10,000, Ginzburg launched his first publishing venture, grinding out An Unhurried View of Erotica under the imprint of his own Olive Branch Press in 1957.

Ginzburg's entry into publishing was as unconventional as it was successful. He had first tried to sell Erotica to established publishing houses, but after "about a dozen" rejections, he decided to do it himself. First he took a number of big, handsome ads in places like The New York Times and Saturday Review, offering the book for sale by mail order. At the time the ads were first placed, the book had not actually been published, and its eventual publication depended entirely on the response to the ads. The theory was that if the ads didn't yield enough response to justify publication, Ginzburg would return the money that had been sent in. The response, however, was "terrific," says Ginzburg; the novice publisher had scored. On different occasions, Ginzburg has told reporters that the book sold 250,000 copies in hardcover and made him a profit of $250,000; and that it sold 150,000 and made him $150,000. The figures he gave most recently were the lower set; he said the book had sold 150,000 copies and that he made about a dollar on each copy.

Looking back now, Ginzburg feels that this first book was "superficial, but in its own way, slightly pioneering. It printed extracts, for instance, from Lady Chatterley's Lover, which hadn't been published here, and I think it served as a kind of 'shoehorn,' or opening wedge, that helped that book and others to be published." Whether or not the Erotica book was "superficial," it was so profitable that Ginzburg didn't have to worry when, soon after its publication, he was forced to leave Esquire. The magazine didn't want to be associated with the Erotica book; Ginzburg refused to disassociate himself from promotion for the book, so he and the magazine parted company.

He returned for a while to his research on Comstock, turned out more freelance magazine pieces (including two for Playboy, entitled Cult of the Aged Leader and Capital Gainsmanship), and wrote a book called 100 Years of Lynching, describing anti-Negro brutality, which he published himself through his Olive Branch Press. The reception of Ginzburg's second book was "a great disappointment" to him, for, as he admits, "it didn't make a ripple on the literary scene." But more important during this period was an idea brewing in Ginzburg's mind for publishing a magazine.

"I felt that the success of Unhurried View indicated that there might be a demand for a really fine periodical on the subject of sex--one that would carry no advertising, that would include works of some of the most gifted artists and writers of our time, plus material from the great archives of antiquity: suppressed things by De Maupassant, Rembrandt, Ovid, Aristophanes, and so on."

So was born the idea of Eros. Ginzburg launched it in 1961 with the same prepublication technique he used with the Erotica book: First he sent out lavish promotion circulars, and then, after getting a good response, published the product. He eventually sent out 9,000,000 promotion circulars, which he says brought in 150,000 subscriptions (a year's subscription cost $25) and a revenue of some $3,000,000. The direct-mail circular for the magazine, designed by Ginzburg and art director Herb Lubalin, was praised in a journal of the direct-mail advertising trade with the judgment that it "outshines anything done in direct-mail appeals in many a year."

The magazine itself was expensively produced; it won a number of prestige art awards, and occasionally--but all too rarely--came up with a striking feature, most notably the fine set of nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe taken shortly before her death by the noted photographer Bert Stern. The editorial content of Eros included suppressed tales from the classics, and was heavily weighted with what one critic described as "old chestnuts," such as "Was Shakespeare a Homosexual?", "The Male Chastity Belt" and "Slave Owners and Negro Concubines." At best a mixed bag, it is hardly possible to feel that a magazine offering such fare as "How Do Porcupines Do It?" (answer: "Carefully") lived up to Ginzburg's promotional promise that "The publication of Eros represents a major breakthrough in the battle for the liberation of the human spirit."

Perhaps the most amusing--and sadly enlightening--feature that Eros published was a reprint of responses from the public to the magazine's promotional mailings. These reactions from all over America included such scrawled sentiments as "Repent!," "Filth!," "I think you are a bunch of Navel Movers," "You filthy, lousy, sex-maniac bastards leave me alone," and such moving requests as "Could you give me information on your male chastity belt? I have a son in college" and "Please send me a free copy. I am very poor and very horny."

The reactions of the press were more diverse, but sometimes as emotional. Saturday Review said that Eros "is likely to become known as the American Heritage of the bedroom"; Time magazine described it as "a four-letter word spelled BORE"; the Catholic magazine America said, "We feel sick"; and daily-paper reaction ranged all the way from the "Wow!" of The Miami News to the "Dirty" of the Chicago Daily News.

But not all the criticism came from the press. Three weeks after Eros published its first issue (on Valentine's Day of 1962), Representative Kathryn Granahan of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Post Office Operations Subcommittee, spoke on the floor of the House to demand that the Postmaster General suppress the magazine. In a burst of impassioned--and alliterative--oratory, Mrs. Granahan said: "The presses of this pornographic pestilence must be stopped and its scabrous publisher smitten."

Postmaster General J. Edward Day replied that after reviewing the matter, he found that "in the light of the Court decision in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case," Eros was not in violation of the postal obscenity statutes.

But that did not end the outcry. A number of organizations devoted to sniffing out obscenity took off after Eros and Ginzburg, whom they verbally crowned as "The King of Smut." Reports on this new-found villain, who was portrayed as trying to undermine the morals of American youth, appeared in publications of the country's 300-some smut-searching organizations, such as the Legion of Decency, National Office for Decent Literature, Guardians of Morality in Youth, Operation Moral Upgrade and Americans to Stamp Out Smut. The post office eventually received more than 35,000 pieces of mail complaining about receiving invitations to subscribe to Eros. Most damaging were charges that the magazine had sought to recruit subscribers from boy-scout troops, high schools and 4-H Clubs.

Ginzburg says that "we never purposely circularized boy-scout troops or high schools or any of that. Why the hell should we? Children aren't about to buy a magazine that costs $25 a year."

The promotional circulars were sent to the mailing lists of other magazines, Ginzburg claims, such as Saturday Review, American Heritage, Show and Horizon, as well as to all public libraries. "Somewhere along the line," he admits, "it is possible that a few children--maybe library monitors--opened our prospectus and read it."

Though denying that the magazine's circulars were ever purposely sent to kids, Ginzburg personally feels that it wouldn't be so harmful for children to have access to publications dealing with sex:

"It's my own personal belief that pornography can even be useful to children. In the general absence of intelligent sex education in our schools, and in the absence of any proven correlation between antisocial behavior and pornography, pornography may very well educate children in matters they are otherwise kept in the dark about. You tell a little girl she was brought by the stork or found under a cabbage leaf, and if nobody--no teacher, no school program--ever tells her the real facts of life, on her wedding night she may be shocked to the point of revulsion."

It is doubtful, of course, that such theories as this would have helped Ginzburg's cause in the eyes of the post office. At any rate, in the midst of the Eros office Christmas party on December 19, 1962, a U. S. marshal dampened the holiday spirits by handing Ginzburg an indictment charging him with criminal use of the U. S. mails, and threatening maximum penalties of $280,000 in fines and 280 years in prison.

Ginzburg was asked to stand trial in Philadelphia, and he believes that the choice of that city was a shrewd and deliberate move on the part of the post office. The City of Brotherly Love had recently been stirred by a number of antipornography campaigns, including newsstand raids, the purging of Tropic of Cancer from public library shelves, and the removal of Huckleberry Finn from the high schools in favor of a "cleaned-up" version of the book. The extremist spirit of local censors reached a bizarre and grotesque climax when an actual burning of banned reading matter was staged on the steps of a Philadelphia cathedral. The local superintendent of schools set the blaze, and a group of choir boys sang Gloria in Excelsis for background music. A Philadelphia librarian later commented in the February 1, 1964, issue of the Library Journal that "Ralph Ginzburg has about the same chance of finding justice in our [Philadelphia] courts as a Jew had in the courts of Nazi Germany."

Ginzburg's feeling that the climate of opinion would be more favorable to him in New York proved to be correct, for on May 3, 1963, a grand jury in New York City that heard testimony on Eros, Erotica and The Housewife's Handbook, ruled that Ginzburg had not violated the state's obscenity statutes. The decision, of course, was heartening to Ginzburg, and he faced his Philadelphia trial with new confidence. On June 9, the day before the trial, he called a press conference on the steps of the New York Post Office, and told newsmen that he "looked forward with relish" to defending free speech in the Quaker City. Obviously in high spirits, Ginzburg finished his statement and then bounded down the post-office steps, slid into his battered old 1953 Ford convertible and rode off to Philadelphia to slay the dragon of censorship.

Ginzburg likes to tell reporters that he cares nothing for clothes and hasn't had time to buy any new outfits for years, but he evidently felt the need to dress for this historic occasion. He showed up in court the next day incredibly bedecked in a black double-breasted pinstripe with a white carnation in the lapel and, perhaps as a nod to Philadelphia's boating crowd, topped off with a jaunty straw skimmer. The presiding judge was not impressed with Ginzburg's version of sartorial splendor, and remarked to an aide: "Where's he think he's going, to his wedding?" When he later appeared for his sentencing, Ginzburg purposely wore "the squarest suit I could find, a blue serge," but it was too late.

From the first, the Ginzburg case was unique in the recent history of censorship, partly because his publications stirred controversy not only among the public, but also in the intellectual community that has fought against book banning and gone to bat--in print and sometimes in court--in defense of the works of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Hubert Selby, Jr., William Burroughs and John Cleland. In one of his press-critique columns for The Village Voice, Nat Hentoff noted that not a single New York paper had run an editorial defending Ginzburg, and he cut to the heart of the matter when he commented that "protesting an obscenity rap against Henry Miller is now a matter of self-congratulatory custom among 'respectable' civil libertarians, but Ginzburg and his opulent advertising matter do not present so luminous a spur to virtuous battle against censorship."

Norman Podhoretz, noted critic and editor of Commentary magazine, had testified several years before in behalf of Hubert Selby, Jr., whose short story Tra-La-La (a powerfully written account of what amounted to a gang bang), published in the Provincetown Review, had been charged as "obscene." Podhoretz and other literary figures went to Provincetown to testify to the literary merit of the story. But Podhoretz, after consideration, refused to go to Philadelphia to testify for Ginzburg's publications. He recently explained that "I certainly don't want to see Ginzburg go to jail; I'll be horrified if he does. But as the law stands, the only way I could have helped him was to testify, as a critic, that Eros and The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity have social usefulness or aesthetic merit, and I don't honestly think that they do."

According to the most recent legal definition--as set forth in the case of the U. S. vs. Roth in 1957--the Supreme Court defines obscenity by three main criteria: (1) "To the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme [of the work alleged to be obscene] taken as a whole [must] appeal to prurient interest"; (2) it must go "substantially beyond customary limits of candor" to the point of "patent offensiveness"; and (3) it must be "utterly without redeeming social importance."

The literary intellectual in recent obscenity trials has performed a kind of stylized ritual in which he testifies as an expert to the literary merit of the work in question. But Ginzburg's publications, though they seemed inoffensive to many intellectuals, did not present a clear-cut case for literary endorsement. Despite the complexities of the case, however, Ginzburg was able to get two ACLU lawyers to represent him, and author Dwight Macdonald, well known as a critic of the U. S. cultural scene, agreed to serve as a witness at the trial. Macdonald later explained his feelings about testifying when he said that "They're exploiting sex, but there's nothing wrong with that....The only good stuff they run is from the classics. But then I thought I ought to defend them. They're being persecuted."

On the witness stand, Macdonald was careful to make clear his own criticism of Eros. He was able to be most unqualified on the point of whether Eros went beyond the "customary limits of candor" tolerated by the society, when he said, "No. I should say it goes considerably this side of it, the safe side, the legal side, the nice side."

As to specific contents of the magazine, Macdonald singled out those features he thought had merit: The fourth issue of Eros, which had brought the indictment, carried a feature called "Black and White in Color. A Photographic Tone Poem," and Ginzburg believes that this feature, which showed nude pictures of an interracial couple in attitudes of love, was the main thing that brought the indictment against him. Macdonald said of that particular photographic essay, "I suppose if you object to the idea of a Negro and a white person having sex together, then, of course, you would be horrified by it. I don't. From the artistic point of view, I thought it was very good. In fact, I thought it was done in great taste ..." On other matters, Macdonald was not able to be as positive, as illustrated by this exchange:

Defense Attorney: I take it there are articles in here that you don't think are of great literary merit?

Macdonald: Yes. There are a considerable number that, it seems to me, are either trivial or poor...."Bawdy Limericks" I don't think are terribly funny, and I think quite vulgar, but again, I don't think they're obscene or pornographic.

But U. S. District Court Judge Ralph C. Body, who presided at the trial, did not take such a temperate view. In his decision he characterized the three publications in question as "dirt for dirt's sake, and dirt for money's sake." Even more surprising was the opinion of the U. S. Court of Appeals, which not only upheld the conviction, but condemned Ginzburg for "pandering to and exploiting for money one of the great weaknesses of human beings." It is sobering to note that in the solemn judgment of a U. S. Appeals Court, sex is regarded as "one of the great human weaknesses."

Many intellectual and literary leaders who had been ambivalent about the merits of Ginzburg's publications rallied to his support after these surprising legal judgments, which not only seemed extreme in their punishment (more commonly in obscenity cases, the Government seeks only to end publication and distribution of the work in question, rather than to jail the publisher as well), but also represented a violent backward surge from the more recent loosening of censorship measures. Many distinguished writers and intellectuals joined with editors, publishers, librarians and other professional people in the amici brief, previously cited, which stated that the signers were "alarmed that under our constitutional system a person may be sentenced to prison for using the mails in the distribution of publications concerned with sex."

In the meantime, when the trial in Philadelphia was over, Ginzburg returned to New York and the now-empty offices of Eros. His right-hand man, Frank Brady, decided that since the magazine had ceased publication, he would look for another job, but Ginzburg urged him to stay--and have faith.

"Just give me a couple of months," said Ginzburg, "and I'll have another magazine going."

Brady didn't, but Ginzburg did.

The newest journalistic creation to spring from Ginzburg's brow was Fact, a magazine launched with full-page ads proclaiming that "The American press is no longer the voice of the people." In the face of this abdication, Ginzburg was offering Fact as "a partial antidote to this serious threat to the democratic process."

As usual, Ginzburg had placed his ads before actually publishing the magazine, and also as usual, his ads pulled a big response. Whether or not on this occasion he also needed other financial backing, after the losses incurred by Eros' demise, is hard to establish. At the time, Ginzburg told one reporter that he "got a loan from a relative" to get things going, and he also has referred in the past to "a loan from a friend." Today he refuses to say anything at all about his financing, and the silence has not surprisingly given rise to a number of lurid rumors, suggesting that Ginzburg is being supported by the Communists or the Mafia, or both. He has now developed a standard answer to such charges:

"Communists, right? The mob, right? That's terrific. You just print that my money is coming from Joe Bananas. No, wait--it's a syndicate, see--it's coming from Joe Bananas, Bobby Baker and Mao Tse-tung. They met one night in an opium den and floated the stock issue behind my magazines. You print that."

And everyone does. It's all that Ginzburg will say now about anything concerning the financing of his projects.

Ginzburg's new publication (he says it now has a circulation of 200,000) had at least one thing in common with all his other projects: It immediately stirred up controversy. Paul Krassner, publisher of the far-out Realist, complained that "When I first saw their ad I sent in $7.50 for a six-issue subscription, along with a note of encouragement. Then I received the January--February issue. I sent a telegram to The New York Times protesting Fact's misleading advertising....The ad had listed 22 impressive names as 'contributors,' when actually they had simply sent in statements critical of Time magazine, many of which are exactly one sentence long. The Times made Fact change the ad." Krassner complained further that the ads had promised that Fact would be sold only by subscription, and yet it was soon appearing on newsstands. Perhaps, quipped Krassner, Ginzburg might now be at work on a new book--A Hurried View of Ethics.

Dwight Macdonald, who had testified for Ginzburg, was one of the "impressive names" who sent in brief statements critical of Time which were published in the first issue of Fact--and then was listed in ads as a "contributor" to the magazine. Ginzburg had also asked Macdonald for permission to reprint an article he had written some years ago in Encounter, and Macdonald explains that "I told him that first I wanted to see some issues of Fact before allowing him to reprint my article in it. He sent me the issues, I read them, and I told him I didn't want to appear in the magazine. I thought it was sensational and exploitative."

Macdonald asked Ginzburg to stop using his name in ads as a "contributor" to Fact, and when still another ad with his name so listed appeared in The New Republic, Macdonald wrote to that magazine and explained that he was not a "contributor" to Fact but had simply sent in the brief statement they had published in their symposium on Time.

After his own dealings with Ginzburg, Macdonald believes that "he is an irresponsible fellow, and more of a commercial exploiter than a journalist."

Comedian Henry Morgan, who also had signed the amici brief for Ginzburg's case, commented after reading Fact that Ginzburg's new publishing venture "reminds me of what we used to say about Al Capone: 'Jeez, can you imagine all the money he coulda made if he'd of gone straight!' "

While the executive director of the ACLU, John de J. Pemberton, praised the magazine's "emphasis on controversial issues" as "a good thing for discussion and dissent in our country," a number of critics have attacked Fact for not living up to its name. One reporter questioned Ginzburg about an inaccuracy in an exposé of Barry Goldwater in Fact--a compilation of comments on the Republican candidate's psyche culled from a survey of American psychiatrists, with an introductory diatribe by Ginzburg himself. Ginzburg explained that he simply did not have the "time or resources" to send men out to Arizona to check the matter. When the reporter pressed him as to why he then had printed the item, Ginzburg angrily answered that "You seem to make a religion out of authenticity." That would hardly seem a bad religion to be followed by any magazine--especially one called Fact, which is purportedly on a "quest for truth."

Pursuing this "quest," Fact has found a number of dragons to slay with its eye-catching, boldface blasts at what often turn out to be well-worn targets. Having already attacked Time magazine, The Star-Spangled Banner, American cars and Coca-Cola in cover-story features, there seems little left for Fact to expose besides mom's apple pie.

Perhaps the best comment on the spirit and style of Fact was made in a parody issue of the magazine published by the Columbia Jester, the undergraduate humor magazine of Columbia College. In the same style and format of the magazine itself, it featured a cover which asked, in large, important-looking type: "Is Lionel Trilling Alive in Argentina?"

Ginzburg didn't think it was funny; in fact, he does not think many things are funny, and a number of reporters and publishing colleagues who have come in contact with him have remarked on his lack of a sense of humor. He himself once revealingly said in describing the atmosphere of City College when he was there as a student in the post-War years: "There was no social life at school. There wasn't much humor. It was very stimulating."

One of Ginzburg's heavy-handed but mercifully infrequent attempts at humor resulted in more trouble than laughs. The Government prosecution brought out during the Eros trial that Ginzburg had attempted to have the magazine mailed from towns such as Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, Intercourse, Pennsylvania, and Middlesex, New Jersey. This brand of boys'-camp ribaldry hardly matched the stated intentions of Eros to present sex in a "mature" and "beautiful" manner. But it was Ginzburg's notion of humor, and, as he recently commented, "I still think it was a cute gag."

Despite his recognized talent for promotion, Ginzburg's taste--or lack of it--often provokes criticism of his sales techniques as well as of his editorial judgment. Nat Hentoff, who consistently has defended Ginzburg's right to publish what he wishes, recently said, "I do not presume to tell anyone how to promote his wares, but I do have my reactions. And to me, the way that Ginzburg hawks Fact, and has hawked his other publications, reminds me of the guy in Times Square with his 18-tools-in-one magic little housewife's friend for $1.98. But that, too, is part of the American pluralism that we don't have nearly enough of, so I would oppose any attempts to silence or mute him. And at the same time, I will stand on my civil liberty not to buy his wares."

Ginzburg's brash methods have stirred up a great deal of speculation about his motives, and the game of guessing what sort of man he really is has resulted in extreme opinions from both friends and enemies. One of the ACLU attorneys representing Ginzburg feels that he is "a crusader for freedom" and "not an ordinary man." U. S. Attorney Drew J. T. O'Keefe was able to agree only with the second part of that judgment, when he told reporters that "Ginzburg is not the ordinary furtive smut peddler--he's much worse." If Ginzburg indeed has become a "crusader," it is only a recent development, and there are those who remember him before he put on his shining armor. A former magazine colleague of Ginzburg's recalled that once in an editorial conference someone happened to make a derogatory reference to a man as being "a real Sammy Glick." Ginzburg promptly said, "So what's wrong with Sammy Glick? That's who I am."

But since then Ginzburg has found that money doesn't necessarily buy happiness, and his ambitions have shifted more to fame than fortune. He recently said that "I'd like to go down in posterity as a great editor and an important writer," and he speaks confidently of his belief that the post office will make him a hero and a martyr. To match these later, loftier ambitions, he has acquired appropriate intellectual guideposts, such as the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that is now framed on his office wall: "A man should share the action and passion of his times at peril of being judged not to have lived."

Ginzburg's office is a one-man roost on the top floor of the building where Fact has its headquarters, across from New York's Bryant Park on West 40th Street. The elevator goes only as high as the 26th floor, where the 27-member staff of Fact operates; but to get to Ginzburg's own inner sanctum, it is necessary to make a dramatic climb three flights farther up, by means of an iron spiral staircase which leads through semidarkness to a door with a cardboard sign that says Eros. By then the visitor, slightly dizzy and surely impressed, is prepared to open the door and find nothing less than the Phantom of the Opera at work on his memoirs.

But it's only Ralph Ginzburg, pattering swiftly on the keys of an electric typewriter. He has no secretary, for he feels that such an intermediary would only slow down the pace of his creative inspiration. From his single window he commands a view of barges moving purposefully up and down the Hudson, and the only other decorations are potted plants, gray metal filing cabinets, a bookcase--and the framed quote from Holmes.

Ginzburg speaks frankly and freely, and in some ways--though only some--he is his own best critic. Discussing his activities, he is alternately brash, humble, self-critical and self-aggrandizing. There is a sense that he almost doesn't know what to think about himself, and so goes from one tone to another, as if trying on hats that never quite seem to fit. Explaining his role as a crusader, he said, "When I started Eros I wasn't a crusader, I was just a writer-publisher. I wasn't out to change the world. I just wanted to publish in this field and have fun doing it, and make a living at it. It was the attacks and harassment that forced me into a crusading position. I wasn't at all prepared to lay down five years of my life for this cause. But I got enraged, and I guess I began to acquire the coloration of a crusader--or a madman, depending on your point of view."

Fact presents itself as a crusading magazine, but Ginzburg did not predicate it on any particular political point of view or belief.

"I was never really political," he said. "I'm still not really a political guy. I guess many things I believe are slightly left of center--if voting rights and social welfare are 'left.' On the other hand, I never quite made up my mind, politically. I don't have strong political feelings except in the area of free speech and world survival. I also get hopped up about the Catholic Church--not as a religion, but when it becomes a political body, I feel very much threatened."

In addition to its exposé functions, Ginzburg hopes and believes that Fact will eventually become a "leading intellectual magazine." But whether or not such a dream is realized, Ginzburg himself hardly seems to qualify as an intellectual, by personal preference or inclination. He admitted that he doesn't have much time for books, and that "the only things I read concern my business--other magazines, for instance."

Ginzburg is frank to admit that whatever its future achievements, right now Fact is "an imperfect young magazine. A buck and a quarter for an issue is an outrageous price for it. But," he quickly adds, "if it lived up to its potential, it could be the best thing in American journalism."

"Someday," he said, "I hope to be able to revive Eros, and when I do I'm seriously considering the possibility of bringing it back as a nonprofit corporation, like National Geographic. I'm not doing this because I feel overly defensive and must prove to the world that I'm really not in this for money, but because I think there's almost a charitable, a socially beneficial character to that magazine."

Appraising his own role as a publisher-promoter, Ginzburg explained that "By the values of most people, I'm a contradiction. They expect you to be either a 'capitalist exploiter' or a person with editorial acumen. But I have elements of both."

Yet Ginzburg himself admits that he does not possess these two "contradictory" talents in equal measure.

"Both my magazines--Eros and Fact--have been characterized by first-rate promotion and faulty execution," he said. "The execution has never yet lived up to the potential, or to the promotional promises, which are quite grandiose. I often fall short of the mark editorially--but I seldom do promotionally."

Ginzburg's evaluation of his products seems both candid and accurate. The concept of a well-produced magazine that would deal tastefully with the subject of sex, and a hard-hitting, muckraking magazine that would shake up the complacency of contemporary journalism, are both worthwhile and stimulating projects. As Ginzburg himself recognizes, the trouble arose in the difficult area that lies between the conception and the execution.

But evidently bothered by his own frank appraisal, Ginzburg later said that he wanted to add to his criticism the opinion that his magazines, whatever their shortcomings, were better than most other publications.

"Even in spite of its faulty execution," he said, "I believe that Fact is better than 95 percent--no, 99 percent--of the magazines in America."

Self-promotion began to triumph over self-criticism, and a further encouraging thought occurred to Ginzburg.

"There's another thing that typifies all my projects," he said. "They're fresh and original. I like to be fresh and original."

Ginzburg isn't easily discouraged--not even by Ginzburg.

"As long as I keep trying," he said, "I'll click eventually. You look at the history of every guy who's made it big, he had a lot of failures at first."

It is difficult to see Ralph Ginzburg as either a crusader who is out to change society, or a villain who is out to corrupt it. He simply wants to make it big.