Doin’ the Hustle
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That Senator Brownback invoked the phrase "community standard" is no accident. He's referring to a key part of the Miller Test, the Supreme Court's legal definition for determining whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene. But perhaps the surest way to gauge community standards is to run afoul of them, which is what magazine publisher Larry Flynt did in the mid '70s in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he faced down a local anti-pornography committee, and again in New Hampshire, in the 1980s, and again in the '90s, back in Ohio. Most of Flynt's employees would swiftly come and go through the turmoil, but one man managed to stick around for nearly two decades. Allan MacDonell worked his way up from deckhand to editorial captain of Larry Flynt Publications, and has written a memoir of his voyage. It's called “Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine.” MacDonell says that around the office, one thing never changed.
ALLAN MacDONELL: There's not anybody who worked for Larry for more than three or four weeks who didn't do an imitation of him.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: It was just – you cannot resist it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How did you end up at Hustler?
ALLAN MacDONELL: I wanted to write. I wanted to be a paid writer. And I live here in Los Angeles, and it was one of the few things that was open to me. I'd kind of crapped out at college, plus I really liked the stance of the magazine, where you could do whatever you want and say whatever you want.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you developed a real talent for critical invective, which you employed to excellent effect as a triple-X movie reviewer for one of Flynt's subsidiary magazines. And I think one of my favorite lines of yours quoted in the book was when you referred to a director's effort as a quote, "talky, pretentious blop of slop, a cancer on the body [LAUGHING] of sleaze."
ALLAN MacDONELL: I had a lot of fun with that stuff, because our goal was if the movie was really boring, well, then make the review at least more interesting than the movie. And it was kind of somewhat futile, because, I mean, who read ‘em?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: You know, no one read ‘em, and no one kept ‘em. Certainly there's not going to be a collection of my porn reviews ever put out, you know. But later on, there was a column in the magazine – it was set right up in the front of the magazine, and the title of it was, you know, a bodily orifice considered like a synonym for "jerk." So it was this bodily orifice of the month.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: And that column was just pure invective, and it was written in the foulest language, but with very solid logic, exposing like hypocrisy or some kind of double dealing or just really bad behavior on the part of some kind of public figure. And I felt I was born to write that column.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] I think for the sake of accuracy, let's call that feature "A-Hole of the Month," which is closer to what it's actually called. This was a real prime example of how Hustler related to media stars, to celebrities.
ALLAN MacDONELL: We didn't have to worry about pleasing any publicist, because no celebrities were going to appear in our magazine or endorse our magazine. So we had a free hand to basically take the air out of these people, you know, in a way that no one else really does.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, that was Hustler's position, because, as you say, no publicist was going to work with you anyway. Do you think that was also the perspective of your audience? How do you see your average reader?
ALLAN MacDONELL: You know, he's either in prison or he's in junior high, you know.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: So think of someone kind of like you, and by you, I mean me and the people I would hire. Like at any time, I would have a staff of eight or ten people, you know, men and women. You know, as kids, they'd love Mad Magazine. They'd love like the early National Lampoons. So generally they're people who came in with this sort of skewed perspective on what the mass culture was presenting to us. I read Mark Twain religiously from the age of like 10 or 12, and he had this kind of viewpoint all the way through. So I've got to assume that it's a standard American audience, because Mark Twain was a very popular writer. And so there's kind of an American kind of - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wait a minute, wait a minute. [LAUGHS] Wait a minute! [OVERTALK]
ALLAN MacDONELL: I feel there's an American - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Are you actually comparing the oeuvre that, if you look back over the issues, Hustler might comprise, to that of Mark Twain?
ALLAN MacDONELL: When I would read Mark Twain, like the things he would say about politicians, and the excellent misanthropy - I mean, the way he pointed out these negative characteristics in everybody - that kind of thing is what I'm saying. We were a continuation of that kind of satirical bent.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As you note in the book, Larry Flynt seemed to go in and out of the day-to-day management of the magazine, based essentially on his pain level, his health, his various surgeries.
ALLAN MacDONELL: Mm-hmm [AFFIRMATIVE].
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How did that affect you when you became editor?
ALLAN MacDONELL: Well, initially, it was kind of rough because he was very heavily medicated, probably for my first two or three years. But then, Larry, he met his nurse, named Liz. Through her influence, he went into a rehab and he got off the drugs. And he came back and he announced that now that he was clear of the drugs, his primary focus would be on restoring the edge to Hustler. And people just looked around and kind of smirked at me - like you are, you're dead. You're gone. But somehow Larry and I, we ended up bonding, because I had, before he came back, I had run it on his template. You know, it's the whole chip-on-your-shoulder kind of deal.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it probably found its fullest expression during the Clinton years. That was the magazine's crusade in the run-up to President Clinton's impeachment.
ALLAN MacDONELL: What we set out to do was to prove that the Republican legislators who are waging this so-called moral crusade against Bill Clinton had just as many moral failings, if not more. And what we did is we went trolling. We put an ad in The Washington Post and we offered one million dollars to anyone who could come forward with proof, validating that they had had an adulterous affair with a high-placed government member – we didn't specify whether Republican or Democrat – and we placed that ad on a Sunday, and on a Monday we had about 8,000 responses. We hit pay dirt.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: A couple of times.
ALLAN MacDONELL: Well, the biggest one we got was the speaker-elect, Bob Livingston, from Louisiana. He eventually resigned, because we insinuated that we had information on him having affairs.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Which you didn't actually have.
ALLAN MacDONELL: We had nothing on Livingston.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: What happened was we got one phone call, and they said, this is the phone number of Bob Livingston's girlfriend. And the woman, she just told us to, you know, go mind our own business, and then she hung up on us.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And with that indicting evidence, you insinuated that Livingston was having an affair, and he resigned, thus apparently proving your point.
ALLAN MacDONELL: Within an hour, within an hour and a half, Livingston was giving a press conference saying he'd been Larry Flynted.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What will you do now?
ALLAN MacDONELL: What will I do now? Well, about three weeks after I got fired, I was looking on Mediabistro, seeing what kind of jobs were available, and they had an interview with Art Cooper, the long-time GQ editor. And he was talking about the time when he had been at Penthouse, because he ran Penthouse for a short time. And he said, the sign that came to him that he had to get out of Penthouse was when another magazine came along, a disgusting magazine called Hustler.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: And he knew that he had to move on. And when I read this guy - he was being inducted into the Magazine Hall of Fame – refer to my entire resume as "the disgusting magazine called Hustler," I knew I was going to have some opposition to, you know, overcome.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think would be the perfect job to follow this one?
ALLAN MacDONELL: I'd like to move into radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Really?
ALLAN MacDONELL: I think I'd be pretty good in radio. Yeah. Yeah, they took in G. Gordon Liddy. They took in the Marine who sold - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oliver North?
ALLAN MacDONELL: - sold arms to – Oliver North. There's room for me in radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: I think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The media employer of last resort, perhaps. [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: Maybe.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, welcome to the biz, Allan.
ALLAN MacDONELL: [LAUGHS] Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But before you go, tell me, how did you get fired?
ALLAN MacDONELL: Well, I was drafted to perform at a roast of Larry Flynt, and somehow I did not get the memo that by "roast," they meant "tribute." And I went in there and I did a pretty stiff roast. And within about two or three months, I was out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Allan, thank you very much.
ALLAN MacDONELL: Thank you very much. You've been kind to me. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Allan MacDonell is the author of “Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine.” [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo and edited – by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Mark Phillips and Anni Katz. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
ALLAN MacDONELL: There's not anybody who worked for Larry for more than three or four weeks who didn't do an imitation of him.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: It was just – you cannot resist it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How did you end up at Hustler?
ALLAN MacDONELL: I wanted to write. I wanted to be a paid writer. And I live here in Los Angeles, and it was one of the few things that was open to me. I'd kind of crapped out at college, plus I really liked the stance of the magazine, where you could do whatever you want and say whatever you want.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you developed a real talent for critical invective, which you employed to excellent effect as a triple-X movie reviewer for one of Flynt's subsidiary magazines. And I think one of my favorite lines of yours quoted in the book was when you referred to a director's effort as a quote, "talky, pretentious blop of slop, a cancer on the body [LAUGHING] of sleaze."
ALLAN MacDONELL: I had a lot of fun with that stuff, because our goal was if the movie was really boring, well, then make the review at least more interesting than the movie. And it was kind of somewhat futile, because, I mean, who read ‘em?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: You know, no one read ‘em, and no one kept ‘em. Certainly there's not going to be a collection of my porn reviews ever put out, you know. But later on, there was a column in the magazine – it was set right up in the front of the magazine, and the title of it was, you know, a bodily orifice considered like a synonym for "jerk." So it was this bodily orifice of the month.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: And that column was just pure invective, and it was written in the foulest language, but with very solid logic, exposing like hypocrisy or some kind of double dealing or just really bad behavior on the part of some kind of public figure. And I felt I was born to write that column.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] I think for the sake of accuracy, let's call that feature "A-Hole of the Month," which is closer to what it's actually called. This was a real prime example of how Hustler related to media stars, to celebrities.
ALLAN MacDONELL: We didn't have to worry about pleasing any publicist, because no celebrities were going to appear in our magazine or endorse our magazine. So we had a free hand to basically take the air out of these people, you know, in a way that no one else really does.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, that was Hustler's position, because, as you say, no publicist was going to work with you anyway. Do you think that was also the perspective of your audience? How do you see your average reader?
ALLAN MacDONELL: You know, he's either in prison or he's in junior high, you know.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: So think of someone kind of like you, and by you, I mean me and the people I would hire. Like at any time, I would have a staff of eight or ten people, you know, men and women. You know, as kids, they'd love Mad Magazine. They'd love like the early National Lampoons. So generally they're people who came in with this sort of skewed perspective on what the mass culture was presenting to us. I read Mark Twain religiously from the age of like 10 or 12, and he had this kind of viewpoint all the way through. So I've got to assume that it's a standard American audience, because Mark Twain was a very popular writer. And so there's kind of an American kind of - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wait a minute, wait a minute. [LAUGHS] Wait a minute! [OVERTALK]
ALLAN MacDONELL: I feel there's an American - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Are you actually comparing the oeuvre that, if you look back over the issues, Hustler might comprise, to that of Mark Twain?
ALLAN MacDONELL: When I would read Mark Twain, like the things he would say about politicians, and the excellent misanthropy - I mean, the way he pointed out these negative characteristics in everybody - that kind of thing is what I'm saying. We were a continuation of that kind of satirical bent.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As you note in the book, Larry Flynt seemed to go in and out of the day-to-day management of the magazine, based essentially on his pain level, his health, his various surgeries.
ALLAN MacDONELL: Mm-hmm [AFFIRMATIVE].
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How did that affect you when you became editor?
ALLAN MacDONELL: Well, initially, it was kind of rough because he was very heavily medicated, probably for my first two or three years. But then, Larry, he met his nurse, named Liz. Through her influence, he went into a rehab and he got off the drugs. And he came back and he announced that now that he was clear of the drugs, his primary focus would be on restoring the edge to Hustler. And people just looked around and kind of smirked at me - like you are, you're dead. You're gone. But somehow Larry and I, we ended up bonding, because I had, before he came back, I had run it on his template. You know, it's the whole chip-on-your-shoulder kind of deal.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it probably found its fullest expression during the Clinton years. That was the magazine's crusade in the run-up to President Clinton's impeachment.
ALLAN MacDONELL: What we set out to do was to prove that the Republican legislators who are waging this so-called moral crusade against Bill Clinton had just as many moral failings, if not more. And what we did is we went trolling. We put an ad in The Washington Post and we offered one million dollars to anyone who could come forward with proof, validating that they had had an adulterous affair with a high-placed government member – we didn't specify whether Republican or Democrat – and we placed that ad on a Sunday, and on a Monday we had about 8,000 responses. We hit pay dirt.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: A couple of times.
ALLAN MacDONELL: Well, the biggest one we got was the speaker-elect, Bob Livingston, from Louisiana. He eventually resigned, because we insinuated that we had information on him having affairs.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Which you didn't actually have.
ALLAN MacDONELL: We had nothing on Livingston.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: What happened was we got one phone call, and they said, this is the phone number of Bob Livingston's girlfriend. And the woman, she just told us to, you know, go mind our own business, and then she hung up on us.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And with that indicting evidence, you insinuated that Livingston was having an affair, and he resigned, thus apparently proving your point.
ALLAN MacDONELL: Within an hour, within an hour and a half, Livingston was giving a press conference saying he'd been Larry Flynted.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What will you do now?
ALLAN MacDONELL: What will I do now? Well, about three weeks after I got fired, I was looking on Mediabistro, seeing what kind of jobs were available, and they had an interview with Art Cooper, the long-time GQ editor. And he was talking about the time when he had been at Penthouse, because he ran Penthouse for a short time. And he said, the sign that came to him that he had to get out of Penthouse was when another magazine came along, a disgusting magazine called Hustler.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: And he knew that he had to move on. And when I read this guy - he was being inducted into the Magazine Hall of Fame – refer to my entire resume as "the disgusting magazine called Hustler," I knew I was going to have some opposition to, you know, overcome.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think would be the perfect job to follow this one?
ALLAN MacDONELL: I'd like to move into radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Really?
ALLAN MacDONELL: I think I'd be pretty good in radio. Yeah. Yeah, they took in G. Gordon Liddy. They took in the Marine who sold - [OVERTALK]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Oliver North?
ALLAN MacDONELL: - sold arms to – Oliver North. There's room for me in radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: I think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The media employer of last resort, perhaps. [LAUGHS]
ALLAN MacDONELL: Maybe.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, welcome to the biz, Allan.
ALLAN MacDONELL: [LAUGHS] Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But before you go, tell me, how did you get fired?
ALLAN MacDONELL: Well, I was drafted to perform at a roast of Larry Flynt, and somehow I did not get the memo that by "roast," they meant "tribute." And I went in there and I did a pretty stiff roast. And within about two or three months, I was out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Allan, thank you very much.
ALLAN MacDONELL: Thank you very much. You've been kind to me. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Allan MacDonell is the author of “Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine.” [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo and edited – by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Mark Phillips and Anni Katz. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
Produced by WNYC Studios