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Sent: 5/15/2019 12:17:32 AM
To: George Krassner [
Rebecca Risman
Subject: rather long and a few typos
paul krassner ________________________________________
•; nick kazan [
; Linda W. Grossman
REMEMBERING CAVALIER MAGAZINE
]; Mrisman02
1
LAUNCHING A MAGAZINE
My friend Michael Simmons, who has been the editor of National Lampoon and High
Times, observes that cavalier hired fine scribes. A few examples: Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth,
William Saroyman, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon. Cavalier was launched by Fawcett
Publications in 1952.
Men's magazine Cavalier (motto: "For the American Male") was published the year
before Playboy to whom it has often been compared, and back in the day tried to be seen as
slightly hipper, more youthful and considered a bit more clever than its big name rival. Almost
an anti-establishment Playboy. A slogan stated: "Your dad bought Playboy, you
bought Cavalier."
I BECAME A COLUMNIST
I was invited to write a column, named "The Naked Emperor," for Cavalier, that was beginning
to publish underground writers and artists. They paid me $1,000 a month. My first column was a
report on an auction of two-inch squares from the hotel bedsheets slept on by the Beatles during
their first trip to America.
There were 300 screaming young girls, off on a fetishist's holiday. Obviously, there wouldn't be
enough items to go around, but it was announced that the Beatles' unwashed towels and bed
linens were to be cut into two-inch squares and sold for $1 each. The price included a notarized
statement of authenticity.
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My second column was about Lenny Bruce___titled "Lenny the Lawyer," since he defended
himself in trials He was arrested for obscene performances only because there were no blasphemy
laws. I went to the bank and deposited my check, withdrawing half of it in cash, a $500 bill.
Lenny was alone in his hotel room on Christmas Day when I presented it to him. And, with a
large safety pin, Lenny attached the $500 bill to the outside breast pocket of his denim dungaree
j acket.
AFTER JFK ASSASSINATION
In another column of mine, "Jack Ruby and His Dirty Little Secret," it began, "Lenny Bruce
told me how all the night club comics used to Jack Ruby's "tattoo of a lady's schmutzik (translate:
pussy) in his armpit." If it wasn't a fact, I was quite willing to settle for an apocryphal allusion
which nevertheless crystallized the entire personality of that alleged murderer who wanted so
very much to be liked.
I say alleged because upon Ruby's own death. Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade said he
would dismiss the murder charge against him, a promise which has since been kept, although no
such posthumous grace was ever officially bestowed on Lee Harvey Oswald. See, they grant you
retroactive innocence only in the face of innumerable witnesses who were present at the actual
event through the miracle of inadvertent televised coverage.
Now Jack Ruby's dirty little secret has been forever sealed away in his armpit by the hymen of
history. Oh yeah, and at Lenny's funeral, that safety pin was still attached on his jacket.
JULES SIEGEL
Two years before Lenny's death, with his permission I published his obituary in my own
magazine, The Realist. Before the issue went to press, he called his mother and a few others to
let them know it would only be a hoax. The point was that he couldn't get work and his work was
his life so he might as well be dead. And if people regretted that they hadn't helped him, well,
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now they could have a second chance because he was still alive. The obituary evoked inquiries
from newspapers, wire services, foreign publications, radio and TV.
"What's the meaning of it?" one editor asked me. "There's a lot of excitement at the city
desk."
"That is the meaning of it."
A few years later, without my permission, Jules Siegel, the editor of a short-lived
magazine, Cheetah, published a fake obituary of me. I thought it was funny. An Associated Press
reporter called, and I explained that it was a hoax.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Of course. I would tell you if I was dead."
Siegel started writing for cavalier. His first assignment was a profile of Sterling Hayden, an actor
best known in Dr, Stranglove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Journalist Adam Ellsworth described Siegel's "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God" with his most
famous example of rock journalism, but his most revolutionary was his article, "The Big Beat."
It appeared in the Playboy-esque Cavalier magazine in 1965 and was one of the earliest writings
he'd ever seen on the development of rock and roll, from slaves singing in chains on their way to
America to Bob Dylan "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival.
Then Jules' friend, Arthur Kretchmer, became Cavalier's managing editor. "When the editorial
director later resigned," Kretchmer said, "there was a 24-hour hiatus before the new editor
arrived." Siegel and Kretchmer had been discussing the possibility of publishing an issue on rock
and roll, so to make it happen, Kretchmer went into the office at night and retyped the magazine's
schedule to include their ideas.
When the new editorial started, Kretchmer handed him the schedules and said, "Here's what
we're working on." The new editorial director suspected nothing and the rock and roll issue went
ahead. Once the laughter died down, Jules talked for a good 25 minutes about
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some of the ups and downs of his writing career and how hard it is to make a
living as any kind of a writer, let alone a "rock journalist." and the people who
created it, seriously.
Now everybody writes about rock and roll that way. Jules was one of the
people who did it first. "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!" is Jules's most famous
example of rock journalism, but I think his most revolutionary is his article
"The Big Beat." It appeared in the Playboy-esque Cavalier magazine in 1965
and is one of the earliest writings I've ever seen on the development of rock
and roll, from slaves singing in chains on their way to America to Bob Dylan
"going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival.
Jules Siegel died of a heart attack on November 17, 2012 at the age of 77.
He was a brilliant author, but neither Rolling Stone nor the New York
Times honored him with an obituary. Not even a fake one.
COMIC STRIPS
Art Spiegelman tells me his work at Cavalier 50 years ago:
I was first invited into the mag to do two full-color comix pages in 1969 (when being printed in color
was a Very Big Deal for me as was Getting Paid more than 25 bucks for a drawing), somehow in
proximity to a big article on underground comix. It was around the time Vaughn Bode was made a
regular contributor to the magazine, They were running some Crumb "Fritz the Cat" pages. All thanx
to their hip, laid back and kind editor, Alan LeMond.
I also did some gag cartoons, short strips and occasional illustrations for Cavalier (one especially
bad drawing for a story by Bruce Jay Friedman, I recall). My work in 1969, as an apprentice
underground cartoonist taking too many drugs was really, really awful so I'm grateful for the editor's
hip and laid-back kindness. But, hey, I was proud to be in a mag that published pieces by Pynchon,
Manny Farber and you.
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By the time I'd gotten incrementally better as a cartoonist in the first half of the 1970s I was regularly
doing illustrations for soft-core fiction stories in Cavalier's low-rent sister
mags, Dude, Gent and Nugget (even wrote a story or two there and got several of my San Francisco
comix cronies (Spain Rodriguez, Bill Griffith and Justin Greene) illustration gigs with Alan for those
mags as well.
I was first invited into the mag to do two full-color comix pages in 1969 (when being printed in color
was a Very Big Deal for me as was Getting Paid more than 25 bucks for a drawing), somehow in
proximity to a big article on underground comix. They were running some Crumb "Fritz the Cat"
pages. All thanx to their hip, laid back and kind editor LeMond. I also did some gag cartoons, short
strips and occasional illustrations for Cavalier (one especially bad drawing for a story by Bruce Jay
Friedman).
My work in 1969, as an apprentice underground cartoonist taking too many drugs was really, really
awful so I'm grateful for the editor's hip and laid-back kindness. By the time I'd gotten incrementally
better as a cartoonist in the first half of the 1970s I was regularly doing illustrations for soft-core
fiction stories, even wrote a story or two there and got several of my S.F. comix cronies (Spain
Rodriguez, Bill Griffith and Justin Greene) illustration gigs with Alan for those mags as well.
[Note in Wikipedia: Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman,
serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences
as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodemist techniques and
represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. In 1992, Maus won a Pulitzer Prize.]
COMIING AND GOING
I wrote some movie reviews for Cavalier. I recall that Midnight Cowboy was 50 years ago. I
always went to two screenings. The first one I would go stoned with magic mushrooms. The
second one I took notes. However, I got fired by Cavalier.
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They declined to publish a particular column--my review of MASH as though it were a Busby
Berkeley musical called Gook Killers of 1970-- ostensibly on the grounds of bad taste, but I
learned that three wholesalers had told the publisher they were pressured by the FBI and would
refuse to distribute Cavalier if my name appeared in it.
On top of that, my name was on a list of sixty-five "radical" campus speakers, released by the
House Internal Security Committee. The blacklist was published in the New York Times, and
picked up by newspapers across the country. It might have been a coincidence, but my campus-
speaking engagement-bookings stopped abruptly. It felt just like a film.
OH, WELL
It was over for me, but it had been fun___like the issue with only the one large red headline
on the Cavalier cover: "BEAT 'EM SENSELESS FIRST"___THE FREE SPEECH
CONTROVERSY, BY PAUL KRASSNER . . . "Ironically," I wrote, "it is this concept of the
total education experience on campus which I believe to be the basic significance of the much-
misunderstood free-speech imbroglio at the University of California in Berkeley."
The sit-in lasted till 3 a.m. Next day, October 1, 1964, ten tables were manned again, and
a campus policeman approached one of the tables (manned by the Congress of Racial Equality)
where a dozen persons were seated. One was singled out and placed under arrest. But before you
could say nonviolent demonstration, the police car was surrounded, its captors reaching as many
as 3,000 students. During the late evening, bored fraternity men gathered and tossed lighted
cigarettes and eggs on those sitting in the plaza. The demonstrators responded with silence.
Next day, 450 police assembled on campus to remove the cop car and its arrested inhabitant,
but an agreement to negotiate was reached and the demonstrators dispersed. One of the folk songs
to come out of the Free Speech Movement incidentally, was If I Negotiate With You, to the tune
of the Beatles' If IFell in Love With You.
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Over the next couple of months there was a series of sit-ins and attempted negotiations, and
then, on December 2, the infamous Sproul Hall sit-in. It took twelve hours for 800 students to be
arrested by some 600 instructors of a new course called Introductory Police Brutality. These were
from the lab notes student took.
There was a freshman co-ed at Berkeley who___long after she had forgotten what some
professor spouted during an official lecture about Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment___would
remember, with perhaps a twinge of frightened pride, learning from a fellow demonstrator that if
she planned to go limp when the police arrested her, it would be an act of practical feminine
foresight to remove the earrings from her pierced lobes in advance.
So, now in 2019, fighting over free speech has been happening heavily at Berkeley campus again.
Meanwhile, Trump grabbed a pussy on the Statue of Liberty. Cavalier, anyone?
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