Beneath Contempt & Happy To Be There: The Fighting Life of Porn King Al Goldstein

By Jack Stevenson

The full, amazing sordid, riches to rags story of self-made sultan of Times Square, Al Goldstein ruled over his mythic realm of sin and corruption for decades, chronicling its forbidden pleasures in the pages of his trailblazing sex paper Screw. The overweight cab driver and welfare recipient and became the most outspoken figurehead of the sex revolution, a multi-millionaire and tireless opponent of all things establishment. He had sex with the world’s most famous porn starlets, rubbed elbows with Henry Miller and Phillip Roth, attended celebrity orgies with Gay Talese and Hugh Hefner, and then lost it all, morphing into America’s most famous homeless drifter of the new millennium. He threw his heart, soul and fortune into a series of bruising First Amendment battles and became a folk hero to the disgruntled masses, giving the finger to the world as his ex-wives and battles drained him, America’s last angry dirty old man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Headpress
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781900486958

Jack Stevenson

I was Born in the spring of 1930 which was the beginning of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years. At a early age I was taught by my dad to Hunt with 22 calibers rifle to help mother put food on the table so our family could survive those days. I became the Fourth Generation to live on my Great Grandfather’s original 160 Acre Homestead . My youngest Son, Todd, is now the Fifth generation to live there with his wife and their 4 children. During my married years to Betty, Her and I raised 5 children, 3 sons & 2 daughter's, who have given us 21 Grand children & some Greats. It is a wonderful family to be very proud of.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements / Dedication

Introduction

Youth

Free, White And Twenty-One

Working Stiff

Desperation

The Demon God Of Pulp

(Still) Birth Of Screw

Demon God Of Pulp Descending

Down Every Alley

Screw vs. Mainstream Culture

Screw vs. Underground Culture

Tomorrow The World

The Screw Two

Porn Chic And The Spawn Of Screw

The Painful Price Of Success

Midnight Blue

Trials

Death Magazine: Dead On Arrival

Battle Of The Bad Taste Titans

The Reagan Eighties

Screw Turns Twenty

Sweating In The Screw Poorhouse

Chillin’ With Grandpa

The Goldstein Curse

Fall Of The House Of Goldstein

The People vs. Goldstein

With Malice Aforethought

Homeless

Working Stiff (Again)

Walking Medical Time Bomb

Deep Shit

I, An Author

Goldstein For President

Conclusion: Deformed By Evil?

Appendix: Screw Goes To The Movies

Notes / Bibliography / Photo Credits

Index

About this book

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Jeff Goodman, Silke Mayer and Joe Coleman for use of their excellent photos and illustrations. And thanks to a young man named John Walsh who was employed by Screw magazine in the late eighties. One morning he came to work at the Milky Way Production offices to find they were cleaning house and had unceremoniously dumped piles of early issues of Screw and its bastard progeny into the filthy gutter of 14th Street. He quickly yanked out a selection of the cast-off issues before they were all heaved into the garbage truck a few minutes later, and, aware of my interest in these early publications, he mailed them to me. It was an act of archeological prescience — prescient in that these garbage pickings have aided me immensely in my exploration of the most interesting period of Screw, its cursed and besotted youth, and archeological in that these early issues were as yellowed, brittle and flaked as the skin of ancient mummies. All interesting things seem to rot quickly.

Dedication

Dedicated to all those who wonder why anyone should give a fuck about the ravings of an apparent madman. So I guess that’s just about everybody.

Introduction

Few transformations have been so jarring and outwardly unfathomable as the one that turned an overweight cab driver and welfare recipient into the most outspoken figurehead of America’s sexual revolution. But upon closer inspection perhaps not so unfathomable. The driving force behind America’s take-no-prisoners sex tabloid, Screw, that did so much to set that revolution in motion was a man by the name of Al Goldstein, who had been taken prisoner all his young life. Taken prisoner by a tyrannical father, by a brutal inner city school system and most of all by a culture of sexual repression that was endemic to forties/fifties America. It was natural enough that he would want to turn the tables. On the whole world. Forever. And, like so many of the other sexual gurus of that era, he was a quiet and introverted youth whose adolescent sexual passivity failed to hint that sex would in fact become his life’s great and endless work. Predictably enough, the fact that he was sexually retarded (his term) preordained it. The thought never left him.

Goldstein’s life and career have been full of jarring transformations. He is like no other celebrity on the American scene; a larger-than-life confirmation of all the stereotypes of the uncouth, foul-mouthed dirty-old-man pornographer, who the next instant reveals a painfully human side and tends to quickly tear-up.

Unlike most corporate publishing bosses who hide behind a wall of lawyers, publicists, and spokesmen, he refused to be handled. Consuming sex, food, fame, TV sets, gold watches and obscenely expensive cigars with the voraciousness of a garbage dumpster, he burned through five wives and a fortune, blazing a descending arc across that dark and misty void known as the adult entertainment industry. He came to symbolize all that was good, bad and oh so ugly about America. He could never have survived, thrived and become what he was in any other culture. But I get ahead of myself. In the beginning, the very beginning, he was cute. Like all babies.

. . . you think?

YOUTH

With a smack on his scrawny little ass and a scream, Al came into the world in 1936, born into a first-generation immigrant Jewish family of humble origins that lived in a house on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He had a psychotic brother he almost never refers to, a dumb father and a delusional mother.¹ So far so bad. That mother, Gertrude Breslow, tended to the house while husband Sam plied his trade as a shutterbug for the Daily Mirror. Although he had served bravely as a photographer during WWII, Al would forever characterize him as a gutless weasel, a man who "walked around his whole life in mortal fear. the personification of Camus’ The Stranger . . . a man who said ’sir’ to elevator operators." A man who quietly acquiesced to his wife’s long term affair with her diet doctor. But there was one person on earth he could lord it over—little Al.

And yet he took his stuttering, bed-wetting son to sports events other boys could only dream about. They went to a lot of the Friday night boxing matches at Madison Square Garden, and little Al was there at ringside on October 26, 1951, when a brawling young Rocky Marciano floored an over-the-hill Joe Louis with a left hook in the eighth round, his dad hanging into the ropes trying to get the pic, eye glued to his boxy camera. Little Al was also in tow on frequent forays to Ebbets Field to see the great Dodger teams of the forties. He got his picture taken with Jackie Robinson. He devoured the Sporting News every week and became so knowledgeable about the team that he guested as the statistics-spouting Little Alvin Goldstein on a post-game radio show. He also assisted his dad on more mundane jobs, such as wedding photo shoots and such like.

Growing up in Williamsburg, he often gazed out his bedroom window at the skyscrapers of Manhattan and wondered what kind of world lay on the other side of the river. Living here in this neighborhood meant exposure to the largest orthodox Jewish community in the U.S. Al himself was Jewish and attended an orthodox synagogue as a boy, but his family was not particularly religious and he came to harbor a great dislike of the devout, oddly dressed Jews he encountered. He later claimed that when he was given a car in high school one of his main endeavors was to try and run them over. One of the most traumatic events of his young life was being sent to an orthodox Jewish summer camp. Though he would make much of his Jewishness throughout his life, it was mostly in the form of a running gag line, and he later declared himself to be an atheist and agnostic by turns.

Growing up in Brooklyn also meant frequent trips to Coney Island. In this working class Shangri-La by the sea he was able to indulge the two obsessions that would dominate his life: food and the female sex. He had better luck with the food part, plowing into knishes, lobster rolls, hotdogs and the meaty scalloped French fries to be had there. The memories of these adolescent gastronomic conquests would provide him with much warmth and solace later in life.

In this prudish postwar era he also registered his first fleeting impressions of sexuality as he eagerly hung over the rail at the Insanitorium, a kind of haunted departure hall at the end of the steeplechase ride. Here discombobulated thrill seekers would dismount and file out, only to have their fannies whacked by a dwarf while blasts of compressed air lifted the skirts of a million Brooklyn babes to squeals and blushes. I, little Alvin Goldstein, as he would recall, caught my first stolen glimpses of the indentation of pussy protruding from panty-girdles. I saw midgets poke them with an electric stinger. Imagine how politically-incor- rect this would be today—midgets blowing up girls’ skirts, whacking their tokhis with paddles, and poking them with electric prods. He recalled specifically a horny dwarf called Little Angelo who in the 1940s whacked women’s fannies with a dingbat as their skirts blew up from the floorboard airbursts. Then his tiny greedy hands grabbed at their tits as they lost balance. Little Angelo’s disreputable behavior as a carny molester finally cost him his job.²

Back home in Williamsburg he experienced a typically American male rite of passage —finding porn in his father’s underwear drawer. An older and wiser neighborhood pal taught him how to jerk off, which he began to do regularly with the aid of Tijuana Bibles³ and photos of the hot blonde stripper called Candy Barr. By the time he reached his mid teens he had amassed the largest collection of porn in high school.

In addition to being a dedicated masturbator, he was also a confirmed lefty. But his father didn’t share his politics and at age fifteen when Al joined the ACLU Sam threw him out of the house, calling him a communist. For six weeks Al lived at the house of a friend.

At seventeen a pal introduced him to mescaline. He tripped a number of times, this long before the Summer of Love, and read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. But when this flabby, stuttering teenager closed the book and came down from his high, he was still in deepest Brooklyn, a land as far from the budding promise of hippy bliss as could be imagined. And there wasn’t much peace and love at his almost all-black high school (two percent white) in the slums of Bedford-Stuyvesant, which many years later Mike Tyson was also to attend. Of the ten street fights he got into he lost every one. (I was weak and white and never learned how to throw a punch.) As a way to curry favor with his classmates and buy his protection, he became the school photographer, snapping photos of the black sports heroes and giving them copies. He also joined the debating team: if he couldn’t define himself with his muscles he would define himself with his mouth.

In his own words he was painfully shy and sexually retarded, and what made meeting girls even more difficult was the fact that this was an all-boys school, called in fact Boys High. Perhaps due to the lack of real flesh-and-blood females, his perception of the opposite sex became excessively sentimentalized. He fantasized incessantly about the rapturous charms of the fairer gender, gushing to crooners like Johnny Ray and Frankie Lane on the radio and mail ordering books like How to Kiss Girls and How To Write Love Letters, although he had no one to send them to. He read as much as he could about sex, thumbing eagerly through the books of D.H. Lawrence and other controversial authors of the period.

As he speculates in his autobiography, I, Goldstein, "some say if I’d been allowed to pull my pants down in public as a boy, there never would have been Screw . . . Screw was such an anti-romantic publication as compensation for that."⁴ Indeed. Screw would not only attempt to deal honestly with sex but also to strip away the romanticism and sentimentality that surrounded it, and brutally so. He felt he had been badly duped about love and sex and his eternal mission in life was to make right on this fraud. Many years later he would bemoan Romeo and Juliet and the lies about love. All the songs we hear about unrequited love and the sadness when our hearts are broken are bullshit. If Romeo and Juliet really loved each other, they would have hope that they would find love again and wouldn’t have killed themselves. Love is a deception and a trap. Love is a big myth.⁵

He did manage to get laid at sixteen, but only via the intervention of his parents (or at least his mother, accounts differ) who arranged for his uncle George to set up Al with a loose older woman in a hotel room. George was a hipster: a divorcee (rare in 1952), a jazz buff whose flat was only two blocks from the famous bop club Birdland, and an imbiber of pot who also turned Al on to same. Showing up in his by now ill-fitting Bar Mitzvah suit, Al was put through the paces but never saw the woman’s face, which remained hidden in the shadows. He did however get up close and personal to other parts of her anatomy, and this was his first go at cunnilingus, something he’d discovered before in the novels of Henry Miller and Frank Harris — and now it was happening for real.

But then it was straight back to the everyday grind where females remained a theoretical conception, and yet however cowed and timid he was as a youth, there were the occasional acts of pointless bravado. One of which, the hurling of a water balloon at his high school civics teacher, got him booted out of school before graduation. Not very civil.

At the age of nineteen he finally got out of Brooklyn by enlisting in the army. On his last free night he saw Johnny Ray at a club called the Latin Quarter. Seeing his idol up close made a deep impression on him. He was like a fag Janis Joplin—all emotion. This was 1955 and rock’n’roll had yet to rear its ugly head.

He had originally been assigned to the infantry, but his father, who as a photographer had connections, pulled some strings and after basic training at Fort Dix he ended up pursuing same profession in a Signal Corp unit based in Arizona. Here he snapped pics of parades and military ceremonies and on one occasion, under orders, of his sergeant getting a blowjob from a hooker. It was here in Arizona, from Tombstone Union High School, no less, that he belatedly got his diploma.

After a year in the service he was still, in his own words, just a whining Jew faggot and he had his dad pull strings again to get him re-assigned to the Second Photo Platoon in Long Island City. Here he worked in a darkroom, developing propaganda for the military, and tooled around New York City in a jeep. He rather enjoyed it.

FREE, WHITE AND TWENTY-ONE

Awarded an honorable discharge in 1956, Al Goldstein enrolled in the English department at Pace University on the G.I. Bill. This was more like it. He grew a goatee, earning him the nickname weird beard, and became the school’s resident beatnik. He had girlfriends and he became head of the International Relations Club and captain of the debating team, which helped him to lose his stutter. He even tried his hand at acting. It was a disaster by his account, with him bombing in both Our Town and Hedda Gabler. When Allen Ginsberg came to Pace to do a reading, Al interviewed him for the college paper. Ginsburg used the word fuck which ended up printed in Al’s article and got him into hot water. Disillusioned, he quit the school rag and launched his own humble literary publication called Skepsis.

By now he was a full-fledged pinko lefty who faithfully listened to the likes of DJs like WMCA’s Barry Gray. The progressive ’father of talk radio’ who ruled the late night airwaves of the Big Apple through the fifties and sixties, Gray pioneered listener call-ins, was a tireless opponent of bigotry and was not afraid

Reviews for Beneath Contempt & Happy To Be There

[calum7iain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jack Stevenson’s book is a fine read and an excellent evocation of a lost age of sleaze and although I left it with an excellent picture of Al Goldstein in all his gratuitous glory I’m not sure if I have any real insight into what made Al tick and what made him the great iconoclast that he undoubtedly was. The self-made sultan of Times Square, Goldstein ruled over “The Deuce” for decades chronicling its forbidden pleasures in the pages of his insane sex paper “Screw” and becoming in the process one of the most outspoken figureheads of the sexual revolution. “Beneath Contempt” colourfully chronicles Goldstein’s rise out of the counter-cultural underground to become a multi-millionaire and tireless opponent of all things establishment before losing it all and becoming a homeless vagrant. A tireless battler against censorship and for the “First Amendment” – he was the last soldier standing in the fight for freedom of speech, after his leftist, hippy colleagues had departed the field and after Rolling Stone and such-like had long since sold-out. Goldstein was described by the New York Times as “insightful, irrational, generous, self-absorbed, vindictive, funny, obnoxious and eloquent” – never have there been so many contradictions so alive within one man. Jack Stevenson (a brilliant scholar of filth) captures many of these contradictions in this unauthorized biography and has many sensational and sordid stories to tell. Stevenson tells the story well, with beautiful prose and an easy style, which produces an excellent and provocative read. As I finished the book, however, I don’t think I’m really any the wiser about what drove the rage and self-hatred of America’s last angry, dirty old man.