Lenny Lives!

Sitting on a pouf-strewn sofa in the pink living room of her modest Hollywood apartment, Sally Marr, the 84-year-old former dancer and comedian, writes a check for $350, pauses, sighs and tears it out of her checkbook. She hands it to her neighbor, a skinny young man who has recently emigrated from Miami in a black pickup truck with a $1200 paint job to make it as a rock musician in L.A.

The check is to cover what happened when Sally gave the gardener who takes care of the building a couple of dollars to back her 1977 Ford Granada out of the carport so she wouldn't scratch the musician's truck parked alongside. Wouldn't you know, the gardener did the scratching himself and the musician was half-crazed with grief until Sally silenced him by commanding, "Stop it! You're talking to a real person here!" Then she calmed him down, agreed on a settlement and wrote the check, which she can ill afford, except that, as she explains, money doesn't mean anything to her and it shouldn't mean anything to him, because we all come into this world without it and we all leave the same way.

The musician is quick to agree, even though the check, rather than the philosophy, would seem to be the source of his newly regained calm. But he gets excited once again when Sally starts telling him about her son, the legendary comic Lenny Bruce.

"You're his mother?" the musician asks. "That's fantastic! I love comics. Where can I see him work?"

"You can't," Sally says. "He hasn't worked since 1966."

"How come?"

She gestures aloft. "Because he's up there fucking around with Marilyn Monroe."

The musician glances upward, too, as if hoping to catch Marilyn dancing on the ceiling. "I don't get it," he says. "I don't understand what you're saying."

"He died, schmuck. You can't see him because he's dead."

•

Thirty years ago this fall, on the evening of October 4, 1961, two cops sauntered into a small San Francisco club called the Jazz Workshop. They approached the comic who had just finished performing and asked him to step outside. Then they arrested him for having violated section 311.6 of California's penal code, which provided, "Every person who knowingly sings or speaks any obscene song, ballad or other words in any public place is guilty of a misdemeanor."

The comic was Lenny Bruce and one of the alleged obscenities was a ten-letter word that, by virtue of his incredulous, then outraged, eventually obsessive but always principled responses to his persecution, found its own special place in the annals of free speech.

The word was cocksucker. You (continued on page 88)Lenny Lives!(continued from page 82) can say it in a public place now without fear of having to endure anything like the two trials, spanning a period of five months, that Lenny went through in San Francisco. I can say it in public print. I can write it twice in the same paragraph, just for the h-- of it. Cocksucker.

We use many words more freely than we did when Lenny was alive. As Sally says, "Lenny lived so that old ladies today can talk like he talked." We will indulge, up to a point, the erratic rants of Andrew Dice Clay. We tune our car radios, with eager anticipation, to the drive-time insults of such shock jocks as Howard Stern and Jay Thomas and their clones across the country. Recently, an FM station in Los Angeles plastered the town with billboards that stated, in a jagged crimson scrawl, Screw the rules. In Lenny's day, the billboards themselves would have been beyond the pale, never mind the station's Arbitron-sanctified loudmouths who do the screwing.

Looking back on the accounts of Lenny Bruce's obscenity trials in San Francisco, which were followed by much lengthier ones in Los Angeles and New York, it's tempting to see them as ancient history, perhaps translated from the original cuneiform characters: the judge in the first San Francisco trial, who found Lenny guilty, declaring with indignant irrelevance that he wouldn't let his grandchildren hear one of Lenny's shows; the jury and spectators in the second trial, which acquitted him, roaring with laughter as the plodding prosecutor asked a witness whether he saw anything funny in the word cocksucker, and the witness replying wryly that, no, he didn't, at least not as the prosecutor had just presented it.

Only last year, though, prosecutors played out an equally ludicrous scene in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, courtroom, when they put three members of the rap group 2 Live Crew on trial for having sung allegedly obscene lyrics. Here again, the culture gap proved unbridgeable, as a white vice-squad detective took the witness stand and became hopelessly flustered as she tried to translate a scratchy tape of black music that she had recorded on the sly but couldn't begin to comprehend.

This time the jurors asked the judge for permission to laugh, and the judge had the good grace to grant their request, noting that "some of them are having physical pain" from holding their laughter in. This time, as might have been predicted from such a request, the jury laughed the prosecution's ill-conceived, ill-prepared case out of court.

Yet the last laugh doesn't always go to the defendants. Even now, three decades after Lenny's first bust for obscenity, squads of thought police still prowl the land, wrapping themselves in clerical status, political power or simply the flag. They are still trying to peddle their pinched notions of clean and dirty, nasty and nice, and to prosecute fellow citizens who believe, as Lenny did, that the First Amendment means exactly what it says.

•

"Lenny never cared about show business," Sally says. "People would say to us, 'Gee, you're the most unusual thing I've ever seen, a mother comic and a son comic. How come you went into that business?' I'd say, 'We don't even like it. We're not in show business. We have no other skills.' "

•

This is a good time to rediscover Lenny Bruce, assuming that you're old enough to have been aware, as well as alive, when he was in full cry; or to discover him, if you were just checking in as he was checking out. Of course, any time is a good time to connect with Lenny, for his was a wild life--sometimes joyous, often harrowing but, above all, instructive to anyone who cares about what happens when comedy spirals up into the perilous realms of social criticism.

If that sounds like the beginning of a prospectus for an extension school course, why not? "Lenny Bruce: The Seminal Comic," though one cringes at the thought of academics' doing their own stuffy versions of his shtick. (Lenny himself cringed, during his infamous 1964 trial in New York, when Inspector Herbert Ruhe, who had been sent by the city's Department of Licenses to monitor his performance, mimicked his routine in front of three stone-faced judges. "This guy is bombing," Lenny whispered to his attorney, "and I'm going to jail!") The course could be taught late at night, say from midnight to two A.M., and broken down into snappy subtopics such as the following:

Semantics! Lenny was an impassioned believer in language's power to clarify, as well as to offend. There is no such thing as a dirty word, he liked to say, only scummy thoughts in the listener's mind.

Jurisprudence! In the five years between his San Francisco obscenity trials and his death, as the result of a drug overdose, in 1966, Lenny was hounded by the police of other cities, including but not confined to Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, to the point where he'd been stripped of his cabaret license in New York, could no longer work, was almost broke and became possessed, like the most desperate jailhouse lawyer, by a naïve conviction that he could turn the law to his own purposes and set himself free.

Logic! Lenny, born Leonard Schneider, started out as a hugely gifted but conventional Jewish performer (Jewishness and show business having been the mulch in which his genius sprouted) who found that he could make people laugh by telling the truth about such things as religion, sex and politics. Then he pursued the logic of those truths to astonishing, sometimes shocking extremes.

Psychodynamics! As his career caught fire in the late Fifties, a time of social conformity and political narcolepsy, Bruce sought to shock audiences into an awareness of their follies and hypocrisies. The more he succeeded in this, the more he ran afoul of public fears and hostilities, puritanical cops and self-righteous judges. But high on his enemies list was the enemy within. His gifts for self-destruction were epic, and his weapons of choice were drugs; grass, speed, coke, heroin--you name it and he abused it.

As required reading for such a course, there would be Lenny's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, and Albert Goldman's engrossing biography, Ladies and Gentlemen-- Lenny Bruce!! As optional listening for extra credit, Lenny Bruce Remembered, Larry Josephson's excellent four-hour documentary that was broadcast on public radio, and which is available for purchase. As optional viewing, the movie Lenny, a disjointed, distanced, oddly dispirited affair directed by Bob Fosse in which Dustin Hoffman plays our hero as a wisecracking Christ.

Yet there's a much more immediate way to appreciate Lenny Bruce, for his greatest legacy--more precious than the ghastly details of his persecution, more compelling than the sentimentalized myths of his martyrdom--lies in his humor, in the pieces of the act that put him on the map. Like his soulmate Billie Holiday, who sang so sweetly before drugs, booze and grief ravaged her voice and addled her brain, Lenny (continued on page 165)Lenny Lives!(continued from page 88) speaks to us most clearly from the period of his halcyon days in the late Fifties, before his struggles with the law, and with himself, took their deadly toll; in incomparable bits such as "Religions, Inc.," "Thank You, Masked Man," "Lima, Ohio" and "Comic at the Palladium," all of which can still be found at record stores throughout the country. Hear the bits, laugh at the bits, and the rest of Lenny's life comes into focus.

•

"I wanted him to play Berkeley. I said, 'Your problem is you're working with the parents. They're the assholes and the hypocrites. The children coming up think like you think, but you're not catering to them. I want you to go and play the colleges, Lenny.' He said, 'No, I'm too old, I'm thirty-nine years old, I'm much too old to be working in front of those people.' I said, 'You know who you're working to? You're working to the enemy, and you're not going to change them. But you go with the kids, you'll be a hero.' And I was right. He went to Berkeley and he was such a hit he was in shock. They tore up all the test papers, the little books, and threw the pieces in the air. He thought you had to be nineteen years old to convince the kids that what you're saying is right."

•

On the simplest level, "Lima, Ohio" details the rigors of the road--a comic schlepping and spritzing his way through Middle America. Audiences are a drag, and the worst part is that some of the dullest customers want to make friends. (Instead of going the obvious route with cartoon rednecks, Lenny saddles himself with provincial Jews--"the wife is a schlub, she's wearing this short-sleeved dress and she's got a vaccination mark as big as a basketball"--who wake him up at his motel at the crack of dawn, invite him to their home and show him their closets so he can see how well all their towels are folded.)

Back in those days, most of American cultural life was the big snooze. The Fifties were the Eisenhower years of sturdy family values, steady striving, dedicated consumerism and bland paternalism, when Father knew best and the Atomic Energy Commission--with a straight face--told school kids to crouch beneath their desks in the event of nuclear attack. To understand what an electrifying figure Lenny became, one must realize just how sheltered his audience was. Ten-letter words? Hey, a movie called The Moon Is Blue shook the nation by retaining, in the face of implacable opposition from Hollywood's Production Code and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency, a six-letter word in its frothy dialog. The word was virgin.

•

"The teacher called me one time and I went to meet her in the principal's office. She said, 'Your child is very vulgar.' I said, 'What did he say?' 'He said a four-letter word.' I said, 'Really? I talk that way, too. Is there something wrong in that? I never killed anybody with it.' Then I got mad. 'By the way,' I said, 'how much money do you make?' Who knows what they made back then--a couple of thousand a year, maybe--but I said, 'Why are you wasting time worrying about a kid who said a four-letter word? You're teaching the next generation that's going to be here, and they're learning that some four-letter word is dirty ? Why don't you get other teachers together from a couple of schools and go to Washington and see if you can get more money?' "

•

By the time Lenny portrayed the Lone Ranger as an insufferable Jewish moralizer who's too haughty or repressed to wait around for so much as a thank you from people he has helped, the masked man of radio fame had already become a semicamp icon, except that camp, in the lexicon of the Fifties, still meant a place where kids went in the summer to swim. What made "Thank You, Masked Man" so perfect was the surreal unfolding of the parody, though many people at the time found it as difficult to follow as the shorthand film language of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, which did away with most conventional transitions.

"Here's a bit," Lenny begins laconically, "about a man who's better than Christ and Moses--the Lone Ranger. Who wants Tonto so he can perform an unnatural act with him. Who never waits for a thank you, because he can't deal with intimacy. He also wants to do it with that white horse...."

To many writers and critics of the day, such gags were more than startling, they were sick. Sick was the fourth estate's favorite sobriquet for Lenny, though Herb Caen, a San Francisco columnist, was one of the first to rise to Lenny's defense (other eloquent defenses came later from such writers as Ralph Gleason and Nat Hentoff) with a column that began, "They call Lenny Bruce a sick comic--and sick he is. Sick of the pretentious phoniness of a generation that makes his vicious humor meaningful."

As for Lenny himself, he knew exactly what he was doing, even if his attacks on pretension and hypocrisy were swirled together in a shaman's brew of sexuality and flipped-out invective. In one of his many recorded versions of the Lone Ranger bit, he adds a self-serving, self-revealing coda:

"One day someone will say, 'There are no more "Thank You, Masked Mans." The Messiah has returned. You see, men like yourself and Lenny Bruce, you thrive on the continuance of segregation, violence and disease. Now that all is pure, you're in the shithouse.' "

Not to worry about purity quite yet. If, in the recent tradition of Elvis sightings, Bruce were to reappear with his psyche as well as his physique intact, he would find the comic's trade more challenging than ever.

Not because of outright censorship, though he would doubtless incur the fundamentalist wrath of the Reverend Donald E. Wildmon and his American Family Association, along with that of the assorted know-nothings who go after rock lyrics, the National Endowment for the Arts and such dens of cultural iniquity as the Cincinnati museum that displayed Robert Mapplethorpe's photos.

Rather, Lenny would come back to a future weirder than the landscape of his most surreal bits. Who knows how he would address himself to the eerie blandness of poll-driven politics, the amoral horror of the homeless sprawled on our sidewalks, the dumbing down of TV news, the sanctimonies of George Bush and Spike Lee, the earnestness of Dances with Wolves, the loony lexicons of those who refer to civilian slaughter as "collateral damage" or to discrimination against the handicapped as "ableism," which was recently defined by a Smith College handout as "oppression of the differently abled by the temporarily able"? Lenny himself was differently abled, God knows, though far from feeling handicapped, he parlayed his differences into his strength, his weapon.

•

"Lenny was insecure. He went to six different public schools before he graduated from the eighth grade. Six. He really had more experience than the average child. He kept it all inside, but he had all the facts down. Lenny was also very shy. He didn't have what I had. What I had came from necessity. My mother wasn't a well woman. She was a child abuser. I always had to run away and hide. And my father used to say, 'If the neighbors ask what's happening, you tell them nothing, your mother just got mad.' Everything was a secret, a disgrace. It was a disgrace la be mentally ill. And probably with a Valium, she wouldn't have been mentally ill, but I was ashamed of my background and I thought the whole world knew my mother was crazy. That's why I became the eccentric that I was; I went my own way just to break out of it, you know, and for no reason at all, I would make everyone laugh. You can understand that, can't you? And Lenny went his own way because he found three impressions that he could do."

•

That last remark needs transliteration, from the Oedipal into the literal. (Not to lean too heavily on a mother's devotion to her son, but Sally, who started doing comedy three years before Lenny did and shared some of his early material, still says things like, "It was a very unusual relationship that I had with my kid; we were like one person.") The three impressions--of James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart--were the ones that Lenny did in his first radio appearance, in 1948, on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts.

Listening to a tape of that ancient debut--Larry Josephson used an excerpt from the Godfrey show in his documentary for public radio--you're struck at first by the humble beginnings of Lenny's humor: Those impressions of Cagney, Robinson and Bogart hardly hinted at his eventual emergence as a unique force in contemporary comedy. By the same token, the impressions are charmingly warped: They're all filtered through the persona of a Bavarian comic with a quasi-Hitlerian accent. While it took the studio audience a few moments to catch on, they ended up laughing uproariously. Lenny had, indeed, gone his own way.

But what road did he think he was on? Young comics don't set out to be unique forces, they simply do whatever it takes to be funny and to make people laugh. That's what Lenny did, too. Like all of his contemporaries in the funnyman business, he tinkered with ordinary jokes in routinely mechanical ways: What's the setup? What's the payoff? Polish the delivery. Adjust the timing. The first joke he ever did on religion had an odd, iconoclastic edge; still, it was only a joke:

"I tried to find a statue of Christ today, and I tried to talk to priests, and no one would talk to me, but I finally got a chance to talk to one, and he sold me a chance on a Plymouth."

But Lenny soon improved on his mundane notion of a priest peddling raffle tickets, elevating a gag into the kind of abstract fantasy that became his hallmark:

"The Dodge-Plymouth dealers had a convention, and they raffled off a 1958 Catholic church."

That was something new. That was an audacious idea with a twist that made you gasp before you laughed. And that, as he explained in his autobiography, was the beginning of "Religions, Inc."

•

It's hard to believe that "Religions, Inc." is more than three decades old; the bit still sounds like a contemporary response to the TV pitchmen, such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, who kept insisting, until their recent comeuppance, that their shows were sponsored by God. But "Religions, Inc." did, indeed, burst upon the scene in the late Fifties, and it was more than a piece of prophecy; the routine posed grave dangers to Lenny's career.

That was a time, after all, when most Americans still went to church on Sunday, Billy Graham ruled the pop-prayer roost, evangelists such as Oral Roberts were revered by their radio flocks and, four or five years before John F. Kennedy, prejudices ran so high that few people thought a Roman Catholic could ever be President.

Along came Lenny Bruce, an outspoken Jew with yet another of his laconic/anarchic fantasies, this one about a merchandising operation, called Religions, Inc., that resembled, in some versions of the routine, a national corporation's sales conference and, in others, an ad agency on Madison Avenue or a theatrical booking agency on Broadway. Whatever the referents may have been, the picture of organized religion as big business was abundantly clear, and some of the dialog seemed diabolically inspired, as when Oral Roberts takes a collect call from his boss in Rome, the newly elected Pope John:

"Hello, Johnny, what's shakin', baby? Yeah, the puff of smoke knocked me out.... Got an eight-page layout with Viceroy: 'The New Pope Is a Thinking Man.'... Hey, listen, Billy wants to know if you can get him a deal on one of them Dago sports cars.... When you comin' to the Coast? I can get you the Steve Allen show the nineteenth.... Wear the big ring.... Yeah, sweetie, you cool it, too.... No, nobody knows you're Jewish!"

When Lenny first unleashed "Religions, Inc." upon a devout world, he had his own flock, a small if devoted group that loved it. But larger, immeasurably more powerful groups were deeply offended by it and despised it. One of those groups was the police, who were still predominantly Roman Catholic in San Francisco, Chicago and New York. While Lenny's use of drugs made him vulnerable to harassment, and his use of dulcet endearments such as cock-sucker set him up as a favored target for bluenoses, his broadsides against organized religion made it certain that the authorities would seek him out, knock him down and try to crush him. That's what happened, with increasing frequency, after narcotics arrests in Los Angeles and Philadelphia and obscenity busts in San Francisco and Chicago. The climax came in New York, in 1964, at a time when the city, and its district attorney, Frank Hogan, happened to be under siege from Operation Yorkville, an antismut crusade organized by a local rabbi, a Lutheran minister and a Catholic priest.

•

"When Lenny was younger, I'd say, 'You think you'd like to be a lawyer? You think you'd like to be this or that?' I was trying to fish out of him what he liked, so he could do it. He'd say, 'I don't know what I want to be. Maybe I'll be a fireman; what do I know? Why are you asking me now?' See, he ad-libbed his whole life away."

•

Lenny did become a lawyer, in his fashion. By the time his New York trial began, he was physically ill, irreversibly drugged, getting obese and starting to talk of suicide. (Although he was found guilty in that trial and others, all of his obscenity convictions were reversed after his death.) During the proceedings, which lasted almost six months, and which Albert Goldman called "the greatest obscenity trial in history," Lenny received passionate support from an illustrious succession of defense witnesses and was represented by a team of topnotch attorneys.

Yet he drove his own lawyers half-mad with his muddled interpretations of the law; and at the end of the trial, just before his sentencing, he made a frantic, barely coherent appeal to the court. "Let me testify, please, Your Honor, don't finish me off in show business," Lenny said. "I have no job. I got out of the hospital to come here...." But it was too late. The trial was over and Lenny's life was drawing to its tortured end.

•

" 'Comic at the Palladium,' that was him, that was really Lenny. He kept doing all those dumb jokes at first and I said to myself, He's not gonna make it, he'll get out of the business. And, sure enough, after the Arthur Godfrey show and his first appearance on Broadway, at the Strand, he came home very depressed and he was looking out the window and I said, 'I know what's the matter, Lenny, I know what you're thinking.' He said, 'What?' I said, 'You're thinking about the next boat that's goin' out.' He said, 'Ma, how did you know ?' I said, 'I lived with you long enough to know who you are.' And that's what he did, he joined the merchant seamen for a while."

•

In the pantheon of pain, there's a special niche for the comic who bombs. Actually, the hero of "Comic at the Palladium," Frank Dell, isn't a comic at all; he's a compost heap of bad gags that should have been buried with the wheezy jokesmiths who churned them out. But Frank doesn't know he isn't funny, which is why we find him hilarious and a bizarre object of pity and compassion. This unquenchable twerp from Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, this blank slate unsullied by the slightest scratchings of self-knowledge, thinks he has been a failure all these years because his agent has gotten him the wrong bookings.

By common agreement, "Comic at the Palladium" is Lenny's best work, a dense, complex piece whose sleazy hero yearns to graduate from the same low-rent night clubs and strip joints in which Lenny started out. One reason it works so well is its dramatic structure. From the first moment the comic confronts the agent--it's not just a better booking he wants but the very best, London's Palladium theater--we know he's going to bomb; the only question is how horribly.

Frank gets to the Palladium, of course, then waits in the wings, listening to one sensational act after another. When he finally goes out on stage, he gives them the best he's got, which is not merely insufficient but, in the eyes of the English audience, the next worst thing to nothing: The deadly gags about Las Vegas, the motel jokes, the Army jokes, the Al Jolson impression, the dying jokes--"I wasn't born here, but I'm sure dying here"--nothing works, no one comes to his rescue. This is Frank Dell's funeral, death of a comic, and Lenny Bruce's most masochistic fantasy, with an anguishingly funny climax that he might have dictated during the darkest night of his soul.

•

"We had a conversation two days before he died. I'll never forget, he wore a gray-and-white shirt and he was in such pain, they'd taken away his cabaret license in New York and everyone knew he was losing the Hollywood house. He said, 'I really think I failed at what I tried.' I said, 'Don't say that; I think you're a big success, because you stuck to what you believed in.' He said, 'I don't know, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking about. I thought I could show them a way to care; instead of feeling hatred, I wanted to wipe out all the hypocrisy, but it's like opera, not everyone loves opera, only a handful of people would go along with me on that....' "

•

Comics always fail. Failure is written into their contract with a tumultuous world that has more pressing things to do than laugh. And the stronger the comic's moral or ethical imperatives, the more inclined he'll be to conclude that all was for nought, that jokes don't change the course of history. Yet every once in a blue moon, or a lifetime, along comes a comic with the power to change people's perceptions of their culture. That's what Lenny did with his furiously funny fantasies. In his lifetime, Americans liked to snooze, so he tried his crazed best to wake them up. In ours, the culture suffers from snooze deprivation. People sense that chaos threatens to engulf them, so they stay anxiously awake, but switch off, veg out, gaze inward, pretend that all is well when it's patently not. And there's no Lenny Bruce to sound the alarm.

"There is no such thing as a dirty word, he liked to say, only scummy thoughts in the listener's mind."

' "The wife is a schlub, wearing this short-sleeved dress and a vaccination mark as big as a basketball.' "