Thy Neighbor's Wife (51 page)

At fourteen, his parents transferred him to a public high school in Queens, exposing him for the first time to students who were not physically handicapped, which intensified his sense of isolation; and the daily proximity of young girls, whose healthy budding bodies he diffidently adored, sent his mind spinning at night with scenes of splendid fantasy. But the woman with whom he remained most comfortable was his mother, who was always loving and protective, if at times overbearing. His father, a humble man who worked long hours in the composing room of the New York
Daily News
, was never a forceful presence in the home, and the only influential male in Stanley’s youth would be an NYU student named Bernard Hewitt, who during the 1930s began to date, and would eventually marry, Stanley’s sister Florence. Assuming the role of an older brother, Hewitt often interceded in Stanley’s behalf for more independence from his mother; and when Stanley turned eighteen, Hewitt convinced Mrs. Fleishman that her son should be sent to a college far from home, to a campus on which he would be free to progress as best he could without her persistent attention and concern; and Stanley, endorsing the suggestion, announced that he wanted to attend the University of Georgia.

He was aware of Georgia because it was the state in which his hero and fellow polio victim, Franklin D. Roosevelt, went to relax and swim in the miracle waters of Warm Springs. While Fleishman had no idea how far the health spa in Warm Springs was from the campus in Athens, he assumed that it would be close enough for him to enjoy frequent visits with the President; and with this image vividly in mind, Stanley Fleishman hobbled up the steps of a railroad car in Pennsylvania Station in 1939 and began the long southward journey to the sound of steel wheels clacking in the night.

On the following day, he met a group of gregarious soldiers on the train who taught him how to shoot craps; and after he expressed a willingness to try his luck at their game, they proceeded to relieve him of seventy-two dollars, which was all the cash that he had in his pocket. Fortunately, on arriving at the railroad station in Athens, a university-bound vehicle was waiting to carry him to the campus; but once there he discovered that he had greatly overestimated his ability to function as an independent student. Unlike the buildings he had known in the North, the grand academic halls in Georgia did not have handrails, and it took him hours to maneuver up and down the steps. There were also no handrails affixed to the shower room in his dormitory, and he was so disoriented during his first three weeks at school that, despite the help extended to him by a few amiable but awkward students, it took him three weeks to unpack his luggage, and longer to learn how to balance himself on the slippery tiles of the bathroom.

But within the first year he began to gain confidence and a sense of liberation in being away from his mother’s dominating support; and while he was only an adequate student, he passed all of his courses. In the dormitory at night, he enjoyed the rap sessions with the other freshmen, being particularly impressed by the many differing attitudes between southerners and northerners with regard to politics, government, and life in general. During the latter part of his first year at Georgia, he considered himself ready to make his first pilgrimage by train halfway across the state to Warm Springs, thinking that the great Liberal Democrat would graciously open the gates on learning of the arrival of a crippled student who admired him. But on reaching the entrance of the estate, which reminded him of pictures he had seen in books of southern plantations, he was confronted by tall black custodians who were gently-spoken but steadfast in informing him that “outpatients” were not accepted at the spa. When Fleishman inquired as to the whereabouts of the President, to whom he wished to make a personal appeal, he was told that Mr. Roosevelt was in Washington. Summoning the verbal skill that
would later distinguish him as a lawyer, Fleishman prevailed upon the gatekeepers to permit him at least to enter the grounds, explaining that he had traveled for hours in the hope of visiting the President’s renowned Little White House. Finally they agreed to give him a cursory tour and lunch—after which they put him on the next train headed back to the Georgia campus.

Much more hospitable was Stanley Fleishman’s visit to an off-campus whorehouse, a place in Athens called “Effie’s” that was patronized by townsmen and a few college boys. Here for the first time Fleishman experienced intercourse, an act of such wondrous satisfaction that he decided as he left the brothel that he should definitely return, which he did. During his sophomore year he became sufficiently self-assured to approach co-eds and ask them for dates; but while they seemed to enjoy accompanying him to the movies and to the local mead halls, the evenings invariably ended with the young ladies’ relative virtue in no way affected.

As he was about to enter his junior year, Fleishman began to see his future in the field of law, envisioning himself as a wise counselor and artful debater whose professional fulfillment would not be restricted by the braces and crutches that would always be his burden. Receiving financial aid to attend Columbia University during the summer of 1941, he decided to forgo the trip South and to reside full-time in his native New York, while maintaining his independence from his family by living in a campus apartment on Morningside Heights.

But after graduation from Columbia Law School in 1944, and two years’ employment as a legal associate working on probate cases and labor disputes—and after losing his balance and often falling during the winter on New York’s icy streets as taxis and buses swerved past his prone body—Fleishman concluded that his destiny would be better served in a balmy, palm-lined city of tropical climate. Leaving for Los Angeles in 1946, and passing the California bar examination a year later, he would never regret his move to the West Coast—even though, while riding in an automobile driven by a colleague in 1948, his body was battered
and bruised in an auto accident that hospitalized him for nine months.

Practicing law from bed in his own behalf, he sued the driver and collected $10,000 in damages. Fleishman also befriended the hospital dietitian, a woman he would marry in 1949. When the hospital refused to grant her an extra week’s salary that she insisted was long owed her, Fleishman sued the hospital—and collected the money with interest.

Fleishman first gained professional recognition in Los Angeles during the early 1950s, the period of the Hollywood purge of reputed Communists working in the film industry. While Fleishman’s clients did not include any of the famous names on the Hollywood blacklist, he nonetheless was noticed and admired by other lawyers for his vigorous efforts in a number of obscure cases involving alleged subversives. One defendant was a screenwriter and teacher who had been arrested as a party sympathizer and was held without bail indefinitely in a Los Angeles jail despite Fleishman’s outraged protests to the judge. On the following day, Fleishman read in the newspapers that Justice William O. Douglas had arrived in San Francisco to attend a conference of federal jurists of the Ninth Circuit, the western judicial region over which Douglas presided; and although Fleishman did not have an appointment to see Justice Douglas, nor was he sure that it was entirely proper to privately approach a justice of the Supreme Court, Fleishman quickly left his office for the airport, flew to San Francisco, took a taxi to the locale of the meeting, and waited for hours in the corridor until the message he had sent into Douglas’ conference room had been replied to—resulting in Douglas’ recommendation of bail and a hearing that would free Fleishman’s client from prison.

During the later 1950s, as the pornographers gradually replaced the Communists as the caitiffs of society, Fleishman sometimes worked without a fee for the opportunity to defend obscenity cases on First Amendment grounds, a legal position that in those days was as untenable to most judges as it was confusing to most pornographers, only a few of whom had ever heard of the
First Amendment, and fewer still shared young Fleishman’s lofty illusions about their constitutional rights. While the pornographers feared and resented imprisonment, they were, like most gamblers, quietly resigned to bad luck; and since their principal passions in life had little to do with literary freedom or even sex, and much to do with making money, their pragmatic solution to avoiding jail was in offering payoffs to the police or trying to dodge the law by constantly changing their business addresses.

But Fleishman was instrumental in altering the pornographers’ thinking—not by lecturing them on the law, although he did much of that, but by proving with his achievements in court that the obscenity laws were flexible, were capable of being bent, shaped, extended to allow greater freedoms. Like the English writer Kenneth Tynan, Fleishman saw pornography as beneficial to much of mankind—it “assuages the solitude,” Tynan wrote, and offers the “illusion of release” to people who are “sexually condemned to solitary confinement” or are unable for varied reasons to bring sexual variety into their lives. Since Fleishman had been on compatible terms with pornography since his college days, enjoyed looking at pictures of well-formed bodies engaged in freedoms that he could appreciate, he was a sort of surrogate-defendant in every obscenity case he argued; and there was no case too small for him to handle if it involved sex and censorship.

In Los Angeles he successfully defended a proprietor of a topless tavern; a mail-order merchant who was selling coasters showing a nude picture of Marilyn Monroe; and also the owner of a Beverly Hills store that displayed nude statuary in its window, including a replica of Michelangelo’s David. Among Fleishman’s major triumphs was the Supreme Court case of
Smith
v.
California
in which he argued that his client—a bookstore owner named Eleazer Smith who had been arrested for having on his shelf an obscene book called
Sweeter Than Life
—could not be held responsible unless the police could prove that Smith was aware of the obscene nature of the book. In another Supreme Court ruling
—A Quantity of Copies of Books
v.
Kansas
—Fleishman gained from the justices rigid restrictions on the search and seizure tac
tics that could be employed by vice agents while raiding warehouses or bookshops. Fleishman also traveled to several states-Michigan, Iowa, Texas, Arizona, Hawaii—in defending Sanford Aday’s right to publish
Sex Life of a Cop;
and once after flying through a snowstorm into Chicago, and being assisted down the slippery steps of the airplane by male traveling companions, Fleishman walked into court to argue in behalf of a cigar store merchant who had been caught selling a magazine called
Exotic Adventures
. Insisting that the description and discussion of sex should be entitled to the same legal protection as the description and discussion of religion and politics, Fleishman told the jury: “At the root of all suppression is the fear of unorthodoxy, whether in religion or politics or morals—a fear that has no place in our country”; and he added: “Only people who are afraid of sex think
Exotic Adventures
dangerous. Those with a healthy attitude toward sex may find it dull or entertaining, depending on their taste. They properly dismiss as preposterous, however, the idea that the magazine can corrupt an average person.”

After deliberating for six hours, the jury voted for acquittal.

Although Stanley Fleishman had previously won all the cases involving his client William Hamling, this latest trip to Washington in mid-April 1974, in defense of Handling’s illustrated brochure, was a source of deep concern, for he now would be facing a conservative Supreme Court majority that—if it voted as it had a year ago in the
Miller
ruling—would inevitably put his client behind bars. While Fleishman was reasonably confident that his legal position in court today would be supported by Justices Douglas and Brennan, Stewart and Marshall—the four who had sided with Miller—he knew he would have trouble with the other five, whose aversion to pornography was not only evident in their past voting records but was further emphasized in newspaper articles written by such Washington correspondents as Nina Totenberg, who obviously had close sources within the Supreme Court building. Describing how the justices reacted while watching
porno films in their screening room, Miss Totenberg wrote that Justice Powell seemed highly embarrassed, that Justice Blackmun became almost “catatonic,” and that Justice White became restless and referred to such films as “filth.” Although the junior member of the Court, Justice William H. Rehnquist, had once been characterized in the New York
Times
as being a surreptitious “girl watcher” in court, he was known to be as antipathetic to pornography as Chief Justice Burger, who usually boycotted the screenings.

Also absent most of the time, but for reasons different from Burger’s, was Justice Douglas—who, interpreting the First Amendment as disallowing sexual censorship no matter what was being shown on the screen, could not justify spending part of his busy workday sitting in a dark room watching what was purportedly the latest X-rated scandal. Justice Brennan, an aging Catholic who had once opposed pornography, had in recent years seemingly become so accustomed to it that it no longer bothered him—and thus he usually voted with Douglas to allow it on First Amendment grounds. The only justice who, according to Nina Totenberg, seemed amused while watching the films was Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been overheard by clerks to be laughing in the screening room, and occasionally expressing words of encouragement to the actors. Justice Potter Stewart, the fourth member of the Court who generally opposed sexual censorship, wrote ten years ago in his
Jacobellis
opinion that obscenity was indeed difficult to define, but “I know it when I see it”—a comment that later gave rise to what members of the press would privately call Stewart’s Casablanca standard: i.e., if what Justice Stewart saw in sex films was not worse than what he had seen during his wartime navy days while visiting the salacious seaport of Casablanca, then it was not obscene.