One Hand Jerking (24 page)

The
Los Angeles Times
reported that one of the ringleaders “forced naked detainees to masturbate, showing them how to move their hands back and forth until ‘one of them did it right.'”

Pompous legislators self-righteously perused the photos—here a man forced to wear women's panties on his head, there a naked man on the ground wearing a dog collar attached to a leash held by a female soldier—and these congressmen were plenty angry. Why? Because, for that kind of activity,
they
have to pay extra to those Washington hookers.

In 1953, I went to the office of
Expose'
—a free-speech tabloid, the forerunner of today's alternative press—to subscribe, and I ended up with a part-time job, stuffing envelopes for a dollar an hour. The editor, Lyle Stuart, was the most dynamic individual I'd ever met. He became my media mentor and my unrelenting guru. He and his wife Mary Louise became my role models and intimate friends. Lyle was working on a book,
The Secret Life of Walter Winchell,
having already published an article about the infamous gossip columnist in
Exposé
.

“Circumstance is a funny thing,” Stuart recalls. “You miss a traffic light and your whole life changes. That's what actually happened to me when I was about 15. I was with two high school buddies on 6th Avenue [Avenue of the Americas]. In those days, from 42nd St. to about 45th St., there were a number of little auction shops. We went into one and became what they called “a tip”—the auctioneer offered some little wrapped packages to anyone who would bid a penny, so we bid a penny, and a black guy standing among us bid a penny too, and of course what that does is, it keeps you there for the whole length of the auction. You're part of the audience, and that draws people in.

“At the end, we got our prize, and it turned out to be a little pocket comb, probably worth about a penny. We left the auction place, walked to 42nd St., and we were about to cross, but the light changed. This black fellow followed us, and we were joking about our prize, and he was about to walk to Times Square to get the subway to uptown. We chatted a little bit and he said, ‘How'd you like to come to my place for a drink sometime?' And, being young, adventurous kids, we said, ‘Sure.' A couple of nights later, we went to Avant Keel's home in Harlem, and I began my lifetime friendship with him.

“All because of that one penny, spent in 1939, I became very much involved with black affairs, and it would eventually cost Walter Winchell his TV career decades later. Winchell was the most powerful journalist—not of his time, but probably of all time—because his column was of such great importance that he could make a stock rise or fall by mentioning it. He could make a show close by panning it, he could keep a show open as he did with
Hellzapoppin'
when all the
critics were against it. Even the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, would give him items.”

Stuart's first contact with Winchell was when he started doing publicity and came up with a line about a stripper who was 6'4” and, purely as a publicity stunt, she married a midget. They had a real wedding and then separated. The line: “Lois Deefay and the midget broke up because they couldn't see eye to eye.” Winchell sent a telegram saying it was the funniest line he'd heard all year. Stuart placed more and more material with him and later started ghosting complete columns, each on one subject.

(Ed Sullivan didn't use ghosted material. Rather, press agents had to play poker with him once a week, and they made sure to lose.)

Stuart was particularly sensitive about racism. One of his favorite books was
Kingsblood Royal
by Sinclair Lewis, about a white man who discovered that he had Negro blood. In fact, he felt so strongly about race that when he was courting Mary Louise, as a test he told her that he was “part Negro.” Winchell published almost everything Stuart wrote, but when he submitted a column about blacks in the south, Winchell—who was gradually moving toward right-wing politics—decided Stuart was too liberal for him.

One night, Stuart picked up the next morning's
Daily Mirror
and, like most
Mirror
readers, automatically turned to Winchell's column. Winchell had been carrying on a campaign against dialect comics (“vomics,” he called them), short-circuiting several careers in the process. He had also been repeatedly smearing internationally renowned black singer Josephine Baker, wrecking her career in America. But this time, at the top of his column, he presented a dialect story about Baker—supposedly she had wandered into the kitchen at a party and said something to the cook, who responded, “Honey, why don't yo speak the way yo really is?”—and this enraged Stuart.

He headed straight for his office and his typewriter. The entire second issue of
Expose'
would be devoted to exposing Winchell. But an ambitious attorney who had organized a phony union, the Newspaper Delivery Association, poured mimeograph ink over all 3,000 copies and notified Winchell about his action. Stuart had enough money to go back to press; then he an associate distributed the issue themselves. One Times Square newsstand alone sold 1,450 copies. Altogether, 85,000 copies were printed and distributed.

A publisher offered Stuart $1,000 to write a book about Winchell. While Stuart was working on it, thugs ambushed and beat him with blackjacks in order to
ingratiate themselves with Winchell. When the book was published, it drove Winchell crazy. He had been attacking the Copacabana in his column because they fired one of his girlfriends from the chorus line, so the nightclub sent a limousine to
Expose'
and bought 50 copies every day and handed them out to their best customers each night. Winchell heard about this and never mentioned the Copacabana again.

But he continued to attack Stuart—in print, on radio and television—resulting in three successful libel suits against Winchell, enabling Stuart to start his own publishing company. In the third lawsuit, Stuart personally handed a summons to ABC-TV president Bob Weitman, who told Winchell that they would pay the damages but he would be responsible for the punitive. Winchell said he would resign if he didn't get a piece of paper indemnifying him for the punitive damages. To Winchell's surprise, Weitman accepted his resignation.

“So they used me,” Stuart says, “to break his lifetime contract. Again, circumstance is a funny thing. Put a penny on a prize and become very interested in black affairs, leading to that Josephine Baker item in the column, which led to my anger at Winchell, and my doing to him what he had done to people all of his career, and recently we [Barricade Books] re-published
The Secret Life of Walter Winchell
.”

Expose'
was way ahead of its time, dedicated to good old-fashioned muck-raking, with articles such as “Cancer Research” and “The Telephone Monopoly.” But the name
Expose'
got confused with the slick scandal magazines that were flourishing then—
Exposed
,
Confidential
,
Whisper
,
Secret
—so
Expose'
became
The Independent
, and I eventually became its managing editor.

When Lyle was originally writing the Winchell book, I helped a little with the research. I was still a college student, committed to working as a camp counselor that summer, and my mother would send me a collection of Winchell's columns each week. When Stuart sued
Confidential
for libel, he assigned me to serve a subpoena on the publisher, Robert Harrison. I succeeded on my first attempt, and then just stood there in Harrison's office, basking in my own naiveté.

“Okay, it's served,” he snarled. “What the hell are you waiting for, a
tip
?”

It was a great moment of cringe.

Along with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, there was a spiritual revolution at the core of the 1960s counterculture. However, in his book,
Turn Off Your Mind
, Gary Lachman (who, as Gary Valentine, was a founding member of the group Blondie) writes, “There was a shadow side to all the love and peace that supposedly characterized the decade. Brotherhood and compassion were the face the sixties showed the world, but underneath was a different picture. The most obvious emblem of this is Charles Manson and his Family, responsible for the gruesome Tate-LaBianca killings that ended the naive optimism of the flower generation.”

He is factually incorrect, reporting that Manson wrote a weekly column in the
Los Angeles Free Press
. “Not true,” former
Free Press
publisher Art Kunkin told me. “I brought Ed Sanders out here to cover the trial, but Manson himself never wrote a column.” Also, Lachman falsely asserts that after Timothy Leary escaped from prison, he “smuggled twenty thousand hits of LSD into Algiers, but Eldridge Cleaver wasn't interested.” Actually, Cleaver did take an acid trip there, though he insisted on wearing his guns.

Lachman presents tidbits of truth, but fails to report interesting details. He discloses that Michael Hollingshead (who first turned Leary on) “dosed two undercover policemen,” but omits the rest of that story: A pair of Scotland Yard agents had arrested Hollingshead and were extraditing him from Stockholm. During the flight he managed to slip LSD into their coffee; they were still disoriented and hallucinating when the plane landed, so he disembarked alone, breezed past Customs and called Scotland Yard, advising that Thorazine be administered to ease the agents' return to ordinary reality.

Turn Off Your Mind
is essentially a chronological laundry list of references that could conceivably serve as an aid in preparing for a stint on
Occult Jeopardy
:

☞This group had a professional
I Ching
consultant who was paid to toss the coins at their office every morning. (Who were The Beatles?)

☞The Manson girls ran up a massive gonnorhea bill with his doctor. (Who was Dennis Wilson?)

☞In 1970 this invidual received a bachelor's degree in magic from the University of California in Berkeley. (Who is Isaac Bonewitz?)

☞He once attached a petrol-soaked sanitary napkin to a helium balloon, lit
it and sent it across Lake Michigan, as a result of which police and local radio stations received reports of a flying saucer. (Who was Alan Watts?)

☞He was introduced to witchcraft in his teens by his 74-year-old grandmother, who taught him the art by taking his virginity. (Who was Alex Sanders?)

☞While on LSD he had paranoid visions of secret messages coming from Jack Benny and Doris Day on television. (Who was Timothy Leary?)

☞His black mass included crushing a sugar cube soaked in LSD, urinating on marijuana, and hanging a picture of Leary upside down. (Who was Anton LaVey?)

☞She called LaVey's Church of Satan philosophy “Kahlil Gibran with balls.” (Who was Jayne Mansfield?)

☞He wore a black armband to school, believing the rumor that Paul McCartney was dead. (Who is Gary Lachman?)

Lachman's fixation on fascism in
Turn Off Your Mind
taints his perception. He claims that, “With [Jerry] Rubin, [Abbie] Hoffman epitomized the new irrationalism that burst upon the radical scene in the late '60s. . . . The association of late-'60s radicalism with the Nazis isn't far fetched.”

And this: “The abyss isn't some possibility in the future; it is ‘here now,' whether it is the start of Germany's trip to the absolute elsewhere, or the mud-splattered abandon of Woodstock.”

Of course, we all have the capability of surrendering to the forces of darkness within ourselves, but it's a matter of choice, and the positive side of the '60s is still alive and celebrating. The annual Rainbow Family Gathering attracts 20,000 people. In
The Cultural Creatives
, Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson estimate that 50 million Americans are broadly sympathetic to hippie values. It has been a few decades since the original Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park preceded 1967's Summer of Love—and, indicating the role of technology in the evolution of the counterculture—a worldwide Digital Be-In has now been scheduled.

Lachman chooses to focus on the negative aspects of a mass awakening that provided hope, inspiration, joyfulness and a sense of community to countless young people. In the process, he resorts to the kind of lying generalizations—“As in most ashrams and hippie households, the kids were abandoned and pretty much left to themselves”—that will surely appeal to the Fundamentalist Christians and '60s-bashing markets.

Unless you happen to be a hard-core enthusiast of occult esoterica, you'll
probably find reading Lachman's book to be a chore rather than a pleasure. Marred by a dependence on secondary research, it is virtually devoid of humor, and even takes metaphors literally to express his prejudice: “A famous Zen injunction advises that if we see the Buddha on the road, we should kill him. Cassady and some of the other mentors of the Beats might have done just that.”

Lachman writes, “Many believed that [Herman Hesse] received the Nobel Prize less for his great novel
The Glass Bead Game
than for the fact that he hadn't been a Nazi. Hesse had become the focus of every literate late adolescent with a bad case of
Weltscherz
,” admitting that, “Needless to say, I was one of these.” Ah, if only he had mentioned that
San Francisco Oracle
editor Allen Cohen was so enamored of Hesse's
Siddartha
that he changed his
own
name to Siddartha and moved to a commune, where everybody thought his name was Sid Arthur, and they all called him Sid.

While serving five years in federal prison for growing medical marijuana in Los Angeles, Todd McCormick contributed a couple of stories—about his experiences with psilocybin and ketamine—to my collection,
Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy
, and when it was published, I immediately sent him a copy.