One Hand Jerking (18 page)

And indeed, the Gate of Horn's liquor license was suspended. There were no previous allegations against the club, and the current charge involved neither violence nor drunken behavior. The only charge pressed by the city prosecutor was Lenny's allegedly obscene performance, and his trial had not yet been held.

Chicago boasted the largest membership in the Roman Catholic Church of any archdiocese in the country. Lenny's jury consisted entirely of Catholics. The judge was Catholic. The prosecutor and his assistant were Catholic. On Ash Wednesday, the judge removed the spot of ash from his forehead and told the bailiff to instruct the others to do likewise. The sight of a judge, two prosecutors and 12 jurors, all with a spot of ash on their foreheads, had the surrealistic flavor of a Lenny Bruce fantasy.

After the first week of the trial, Lenny flew to Los Angeles—Town D—where he was promptly arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. Years later, the arresting officer went to prison himself, for drug smuggling. When the Chicago case resumed, the jury found Lenny guilty. The judge gave him the maximum penalty—a year in jail and a $1,000 fine—“for telling dirty jokes,” explained a network newscaster.

A week later, the case against the Gate of Horn was dismissed, but it had become obvious that Lenny was now considered too hot to be booked in Chicago again. In San Francisco, the jury found him
not
guilty of obscenity. Arresting officers admitted that his material didn't arouse their prurient interest. But in Chicago, the judge refused to permit that line of cross-examination by the defense. Nor would he allow the head of the vice squad to take the stand, on the grounds that his testimony would be extraneous to the issue before the court.

“Chicago,” said Lenny, “is so corrupt it's thrilling.”

In less than two years, Lenny was arrested 15 times.

“There seems to be a pattern,” he said, “that I'm a mad dog and they have to get me no matter what—the end justifies the means.” It became a news item in
Variety
when he
didn't
get arrested one night. While the Chicago verdict was on appeal, he was working at the Off-Broadway in San Francisco. The club's newspaper ads made this offer: “No cover charge for patrolmen in uniform.”

Since he always talked on stage about his environment, and since police cars and courtrooms had lately
become
his environment, the content of Lenny's performances began to revolve more and more around the inequities of the justice system. “In the Halls of Justice,” he declared, “the only justice is in the halls.” But he also said, “I love the law.” Instead of an unabridged dictionary, he now carried law books in his luggage. His room was always cluttered with tapes and transcripts and photostats and law journals and legal briefs. Once he was teasing 10-year-old Kitty by pretending not to believe what she was telling him.

“Daddy,” she said, “you'd believe me if it was on tape.”

Lenny's jazz jargon was gradually being replaced by legal jargon. He had become intimate not only with the statutes concerning obscenity and narcotics, but also with courtroom procedure, and his knowledge would be woven into his performances. “Query,” he'd begin. “If a tape recording is my voice, are they using me to testify against myself, since it's my voice that would indict me?” As club owners became increasingly afraid to hire him, he devoted more and more time and energy to the law. When he finally got a booking in Monterey, he admitted to me, “I feel like it's taking me away from my work.”

One time we were fooling around with a tape recorder, and Lenny began spinning out quaint, absurd imagery:

Lenny's problem was that he wanted to talk on stage with the same freedom he exercised in his living room. That harmless little bit of incongruity about Eleanor Roosevelt would show up in his act from time to time. It certainly didn't fall within the definition of hard-core pornography which the Supreme Court had ruled was not protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, Lenny was arrested in supposedly sophisticated New York at the Cafe Au Go Go for giving an indecent performance, and at the top of the police complaint was “Eleanor Roosevelt and her display of tits.”

Ultimately, Lenny fired all his lawyers in the New York trial and defended himself. He was found guilty, even though the law stated that to be obscene, material must be
utterly without any
redeeming social importance; therefore, if
one single person
felt that Lenny's performance had
the slightest bit
of redeeming social importance—and there were several witnesses who so testified—then he should've been found not guilty.

Lenny hadn't been able to get work in six months. Club owners were afraid to book him. He almost got an engagement in Philadelphia, but the deal fell through when the district attorney demanded that Lenny show up a couple of days early and take a Naline test to prove there was no morphine in his system. Plus he was told to present his material in advance. CRIMINALS MUST REGISTER. He performed at a club in Westbury, but on his way to the parking lot after the first performance, a district attorney warned him, “If you do another show like the one did tonight, I'll arrest you.” Then the D.A. told the club owner, “If you let him go on, I'll pull your license.”

Lenny went before the Court of Appeals in New York, seeking an injunction
that would prevent district attorneys from arresting him in the future. The three-judge panel was headed by Thurgood Marshall, former chief counsel for the NAACP, who would later become the first black justice appointed to the Supreme Court. Lenny pleaded that he was like a carpenter whose tools were being taken away. He compared the denial of his rights to “a nigger who wants to use a toilet in Alabama.”

“You're not a Negro, Mr. Bruce,” said Judge Marshall.

“Unfortunately not, Your Honor.”

And Lenny's request was denied. A week later, he was due to be sentenced. Once again, he would act as his own attorney. In court, he borrowed a watch, because he planned to state for the record what time he began and ended his argument—“so that the judge can't close me out for taking too long.” Lenny spoke for a solid hour. He did everything in this one-time-only matinee performance short of applying burnt cork to his face, donning white gloves, getting down on his knees and singing “Nobody Knows De Trouble Obscene,” but his most relevant argument concerned the very obscenity statute which he'd been accused of violating.

As his legal homework, Lenny had obtained the legislative history of that statute from Albany, and he discovered that back in 1931 there was an amendment proposed which
excluded from arrest
in an indecent performance: stage-hands, spectators, musicians and—here was the fulcrum of his defense—
actors
. The law had been misapplied to him. Despite opposition by the New York Society For the Suppression of vice, the amendment was finally signed into law by then-Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Lenny had complained that prosecutor Richard Kuh tried to do his act in court. A friend of mine who dated Kuh swears that he took her back to his apartment and played Lenny Bruce records for her. Maybe someday he would play for her the sound-track album from the movie
Lenny
, with Dustin Hoffman doing Lenny's act on stage where he complains about the district attorney doing his act in court. But now, before sentencing, Kuh recommended that no mercy be granted because Bruce had shown a “lack of remorse.”

“I'm not here for remorse,” Lenny responded, “but for justice. The issue is not obscenity, but that I spit in the face of authority.”

The face of authority spat back at Lenny that afternoon by sentencing him to four months in the workhouse. Then, in the press room of the Criminal Courts building, a reporter asked, “Do you believe in obscenity?”

“What do you mean?” asked Lenny. “Do I believe we should
pray
for obscenity?”

As we walked into the lobby, a man came up and said, “Listen, I have some stag films and party records that you might be interested in.” Lenny and I went for some pizza instead. Then we headed for his hotel room where, to help unwind from the day's tension, he played some old tapes, ranging from a faith healer to patriotic World War II songs.

“Ignoring the mandate of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” observed Lenny the lawyer, “is a great deal more offensive than saying Eleanor has lovely nay-nays.”

On October 2, 1965, Lenny visited San Francisco FBI headquarters. Two days later, they sent a memo to the FBI director in Washington, describing him as “the nightclub and stage performer widely known for his obscenity” and stating that “Bruce, who advised that he is scheduled to begin confinement, 10/13/65, in New York State as a result of a conviction for a lewd show, alleged that there is a conspiracy between the courts of the states of New York and California to violate his rights. Allegedly this violation of his rights takes place by these lower courts failing to abide by decision of the U.S. Supreme Court with regard to obscenity. . . .”

On October 13, Lenny's 40th birthday, instead of surrendering to the authorities in New York, he filed suit at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco to keep out of prison, and he got himself officially declared a pauper. He also asked the federal court to protect him from harassment by police in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, to determine how much money he had lost since his conviction in New York, and to order the police department there to pay him damages.

Since his first arrest for obscenity in San Francisco, his earnings had plummeted from $108,000 to $11,000, and he was $15,000 in debt. Under great emotional and financial stress, he had not yet filed a proper appeal in his New York case. Au Go Go owner Howard Solomon had been convicted of the same charge, and that ruling
was
reversed on appeal.

On May 31, 1966, Lenny wrote to me: “I'm still working on the bust of the government of New York State.” And he enclosed his doodle of Jesus nailed to the cross, with a speech balloon asking, “Where the hell is the ACLU?” Lenny hadn't
identified with Christ's jester, but now he did seem to be identifying with Christ himself.

On August 3, he received a foreclosure notice on his home. Lenny died that day from an overdose of morphine. His death was on the cusp of accident and suicide. In his kitchen, a kettle of water was still boiling. In his office, the electric typewriter was still humming. He had stopped typing in mid-word:
Conspiracy to interfere with the 4th Amendment const

Constitutes
what
, Lenny?

At the funeral, his roommate and sound engineer, John Judnich, dropped Lenny's microphone into his grave before the dirt was piled on. But, like any pioneer, Lenny's legacy continues on. I asked a few thoughtful stand-up comics how he had influenced them.