Kingdom of Fear Read online

  . . .

  The Goldstein situation developed very quickly, with no warning at all, about halfway through lunch at Pier 23 on a gray afternoon in mid-April, just a few days before the trial was set to begin. We had come through the general hysteria surrounding the “world premiere” on The Grafenberg Spot, and no disasters had happened. No scandals had erupted, nobody had been arrested, no personal or professional tragedies of any kind. I had lost my temper in public a few times and been rude to the local press, but so what? It was not my job to be nice. I was, after all, the Night Manager of the most notorious live sex theater in America, and my job was to keep it running. It was a strange obligation that I had somehow taken on, for good or ill, and if I failed, we might all go to jail.

  Certainly the Mitchell Brothers would go, and the theater would probably be padlocked and all the fixtures sold to pay off the fines and the court costs. The lawyers painted a grim picture of disgrace, despair, and total unemployment for everybody, including me. Our backs were all to the wall, they said; Mayor Dianne Feinstein, now a senator, was full of hate and not in a mood to compromise. She had been trying to close the O’Farrell for most of her ten years in politics, and now she had everybody from Ed Meese and God to Militant Feminists and the president of the United States on her side. The deal was about to go down, they said. No more lap dancing in San Francisco, and never mind the busloads of Japs.

  It was about this time, less than a week before the trial, that Al Goldstein arrived in town for a personal screening of the new film. It was bad timing, but there was no cure for it. Al is one of the certified big boys in the sex racket. He is the publisher of Screw, the film critic for Penthouse, and perhaps the one man in America whose opinion can make or break a new sex film. Penthouse alone sells 4 million copies a month, at $2.95 each, and the prevailing retail price for X-rated video-cassettes is $69.95.

  The wholesale net to the producer is about half that, or something like $3.5 million on sales of 100,000 in the first year—which is no big trick, with the combined endorsement of Penthouse, Screw, and Al Goldstein. So if only one percent of the people who buy Penthouse buy an X-rated videocassette that comes highly recommended by the magazine, the wholesale gross is going to be $1.5 million, before rentals. The retail gross will be about twice that—on a total investment of $100,000 or so in production costs and another $100,000 for promotion.

  That is not bad money for a product that any three bartenders from St. Louis and their girlfriends can put together in a roadside motel across the river in Memphis. There is no shortage of raw talent in the industry, and posing naked in front of a camera is becoming more and more respectable. The line between Joan Collins and Marilyn Chambers is becoming very hazy. Not everybody on the street these days can tell you the difference between Jane Fonda in leotards and Vanessa Williams in chains.

  I can. But that is a different matter, and it will take a while to explain it. We are dealing, here, with a genuinely odd contradiction in the social fabric. At a time when not only the new attorney general of the United States, and the president of the United States, and the president’s wife, and the president’s favorite minister, along with the Moral Majority and the Militant Feminists and the TV Guide and also the surly fat brute of a manager at the 7-Eleven store in Vernal, Utah, who refused to sell me a copy of Playboy at any price & then threatened to have me arrested when I asked why . . .

  . . . At a time when all of these powerful people and huge institutions and legions of vicious dingbats who don’t need sleep are working overtime to weed out and crush the last remnants of the “Sexual Revolution” that was said to grip the nation in the 1960s and ’70s . . . And at a time when they appear to be making serious public progress with their crusade.

  This is also a time of growth, vigor, and profit for the American sex industry. Business has never been better. A wino from Texas made a fortune selling Ben-Wa balls; he is now a multimillionaire and listed in big-time money magazines. He shuns publicity and lives alone in the desert. Women write him letters, but he has never had much luck with them. He has no friends and he will never have any heirs, but he is rich and getting richer. One of his agents who recently visited him said he was “weirder than Howard Hughes.”

  Most of these stories never get out. Nobody knows, for instance, who holds the patent on the penis-shaped, soft-plastic vibrator that sells for $9.95 in drugstores all over the world. There are stores in San Francisco that sell a hundred of those things every day. When I asked the night clerk at Frenchy’s in San Francisco who had the dildo concession, who collected the royalties, he said it was an elderly Negro gentleman from Los Angeles. “We’ve known him for years,” he said, “but he never mentioned the patent. He comes by every week in a green Mercedes van and drops off five or six cases of dildos—sometimes nine or ten. He’s a good man to do business with. We don’t know him at all.”

  That is how it works in the sex business, which is generally estimated—without much argument from anybody connected with the business, pro or con—to be worth between eight billion and ten billion dollars a year in America. The true figures are probably much higher, but only the IRS really cares. Ten billion dollars a year would just about equal the combined earnings of Coca-Cola, Hershey, and McDonald’s.

  . . .

  Most nights are slow in the politics business, but the night we flogged Al Goldstein on the wet rug floor off the Ultra-Room was not one of them. It was a fast and cruel situation, a major problem for the Night Manager. It was the first real test of my crisis-management skills, and I handled it in my own way.

  The immediate results were ugly. It was so bad that there were not even any rumors on the street the next day. Any high-style fracas at the O’Farrell Theatre will normally rate at least a colorful slap from Herb Caen, or at least a few warning calls from the District Attorney’s office—but in this case, there was nothing. Nobody wanted any part of it, including me.

  But I was blamed, the next morning, for everything that happened, from the shame of the flogging, to the presence of innocent by-standers, to a million-dollar loss on the books of The Mitchell Brothers Film Group.

  My job was in jeopardy and my reputation as a “blue” political consultant was called into serious question.

  But not for long. It took about 44 days, as usual, for the truth to finally come out—and in the meantime, life got weirder and weirder. I was arrested seven times in six weeks—or at least charged, or accused, or somehow involved with police and courts and lawyers so constantly that it began to seem like my life.

  And it seemed almost normal, for a while. Going to court was part of my daily routine. At one point I had to appear in the dock twice in 72 hours and take a savage public beating in the national press, simply because the Judge had changed his mind.

  “That’s impossible,” I told my lawyer Michael Stepanian. “The judge cannot change his mind. He would be overruled on appeal.” Which proved to be true.

  A week or so later the police stole my paddle-tennis racquets—causing me to forfeit my challenge for the championship of the West Coast—and then subpoenaed me to testify against a nonexistent burglar in exchange for giving my racquets back.

  That case is still pending, along with a civil complaint from the neighbors about “beatings and screaming.”

  The Sausalito police are also still holding my personally engraved Feinwerkbau brand Olympic championship air pistol—the most accurate weapon, at 10 meters, that I’ve ever held in my hand. It was one of those extremely Rare pistols that would shoot exactly where you pointed it, and it didn’t really matter who you were. Women and children who had never aimed a pistol at anything could pick up the Feinwerkbau and hit a dime at 15 feet. Beyond that range, or in a wind on the end of a long bamboo pole off the balcony, we would use slightly larger targets, about the size of a quarter, which were tin buttons showing a likeness of San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein with eight tits, like the wolf mother of Rome.

  The Mitchell Brothers had
printed up 10,000 of these—for some reason that I never quite understood—in the months of angst and fear and hellish legal strife before the trial. I still have about 1,000 of them, and there are maybe another 2,000 in the bushes and on the huge flat roof of Nunzio Alioto’s house at the entrance to Sausalito. Nunzio, a close relative of former San Francisco mayor Joe Alioto, was one of my closest neighbors in Sausalito. He was right below me, the next stop down on the tramway. We lived on a very steep cliff, looking out on San Francisco Bay.

  I am Lono (Lalia Nabulsi)

  The apartment is gone now, so we can talk about it freely. It will never again be for rent. The reasons for this are complex, and it is not likely that they will ever be made totally clear—but I like to think that I lived there in a style that honored the true spirit of the place, that if the redwood beams and sliding glass walls and the bamboo stools in my Tiki bar could vote for president, that they would vote for me.

  Maybe not, but I feel pretty confident about this. Every once in a while you run across a place that was built in a certain spirit, and even the walls understand that it was meant to be used that way.

  There were fires and there was breakage. We had a homemade waterfall in the oak trees out in front of the Tiki bar, and we wandered around naked half the time, drinking green chartreuse and smoking lethal Krakatoa cigarettes, and I built a world-class shooting range that hung in midair from an elegant 22-foot rod off the balcony looking out on Angel Island and Alcatraz.

  My attorney called it “the best room in the world.”

  16 Alexander

  July 31, 1985

  Owl Farm

  To: Michael Stepanian, Esq.

  819 Eddy Street

  San Francisco, CA 94109

  Dear Michael,

  The (enc.) letters from Judith to your new client, Ms. Laryce Sullivan, at 16 Alexander Ave. in Sausalito, where I lived with Maria, should give us a nice handle on a $33 million slander suit—against Judith and her quarrelsome husband Norvin, a thus-far unindicted co-conspirator, and the computer company that brought them up here from Orange County and caused them to live in a situation (16 Alexander) that they were unable to handle personally and which led them to eventually file a lawsuit (against Ms. Sullivan) that names me in a provably false, wrong, hurtful, and personally (and financially) troublesome characterization—i.e.: “Beatings and screaming . . .”

  What Beatings? You were there—you met Jacques (the “husband”) in the hallway when you were trying to beat down my door.

  In any case, my new book—The Night Manager—will be cast in a shadow of ugliness by these charges—which Judith and Norvin have filed, repeat “filed.”

  So in addition to stealing my air pistol and my binoculars and my jock-straps and my custom-built SORBA paddle-tennis racquets and my Job-Related video tapes and two or three packs of my Dunhills on some cheap Nazi scam that nobody believes—now the fuckers want to bash me in civil court (and the public prints) for beating Maria—night after night while the neighbors fled in terror.

  Whoops—a bit of a creative outburst there. I couldn’t resist. The elegant hum of that title. A smart writer could have fun with a notion like that.

  Why not me?

  Okay—back to business. I am deep in debt to you and Joe and Tanya and Patty and everybody else who suffered through the hellbroth of lost sleep and character-testing that accompanied my recent attempt to come down from the mountains and live even vaguely like a normal, middle-aged, middle-class, criminally inclined smart urban male with a job (and a few habits—okay. Ask Nancy for details here . . .).

  It was a disaster. We (you and me) had enjoyed no legal or even human congress for many years (for reasons of sloth and dumbness, no doubt, but. . .).

  Yeah. And I didn’t even come to you with a case or a crime or a problem—except that I had, for reasons of my own, recently taken on the job as Night Manager of the weird and infamous O’Farrell Theatre—which happened to be right around the corner from your office, and also a nice, nice headquarters, a suitable place to invite my best and most trustworthy friends for a drink, from time to time.

  (One thing we want to keep in mind about the Mitchell Brothers is that they were utterly dumbfounded by most of what I did while I was there—

  They are good boys. And I kept them out of jail. The good Lord didn’t make seesaws for nothing.)

  My job, as I saw it in the beginning, was merely to interview the Brothers as part of a long-overdue assignment from Playboy on “feminist pornography”—which was beginning to bore me, by that time, and in fact the only reason I went to see the Mitchell Brothers was the chance that they might be interesting enough—for 48 hours—to sustain my interest in the Feminist porno story long enough for me to crank out the necessary 6,000 or 7,000 words.

  Jesus Christ! That is how it all started. I was bored with the article after watching five or six triple-X films a day for most of the football season. . . . I became a connoisseur—a knowledgeable critic in the field; I compiled my own Top Ten list—and the Mitchell Brothers were not on it—which is one of the things I told Jim (the elder) when I called him one night in the autumn.

  “You want to talk?” he said. “Good. We will talk for 48 hours. You will be our guest. Just get on a plane.”

  Well . . . shucks. You don’t get many offers like that—48 straight hours, just for openers, eyeball-to-eyeball with the rotten Mitchell Brothers.

  “We know who you are, Doc,” he said. “Normally we don’t give interviews—but in your case, we’re going to allot 48 hours, because we hear you’re a player.”

  I have all this on tape. I taped everything—from the first high-macho phone arrangements to our first berserk meeting at the San Francisco airport to broken bones and craziness and limousines full of naked women and relentless orgies at the Miyako Hotel—being rolled around the lobby on a baggage cart with people screaming somewhere behind me in the distance, far down the hall in the direction of my suite with the deep green water tub and the bamboo walls and strange women in the bathroom putting lipstick on their nipples. . . .

  Whoops, again.

  But so what? I may as well get this memo down somewhere—and why not to You?

  Why indeed? A hideous streak of six (6) insanely complex legal confrontations—sudden war on all fronts: open container (work-related), Red Light (ditto), Maria crashes two National Rental cars at the Oakland airport, HST burglarized by Sausalito police, HST crushes three negroes on a ramp near the Hall of Justice . . . ugly financial claims; après moi le déluge. . . Getting to know Mr. Wrench, Boz Scaggs, and Diane Dodge . . . Insurance claims and driving school, constant Jeopardy. THE JUDGE HAS CHANGED HIS MIND.

  Hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, light-years of frantic attention . . .

  Even Bondock was consulted: the best minds of our generation, tied in knots by the vagaries of an irresponsible jurisdiction. That is how I explained it to Joe Freitas—“You were once the D.A. in this town,” I said to him, “which is all I need to know.”

  If Joe was still the D.A., I’d be doing 30 days of SWAP and he would be coming to visit me with the occasional bottle of Absinthe and asking around the office for Maria’s phone number in Phoenix.

  I warned you about liberals. . . .

  It was a weird time. Not many people could have taken that series of shocks and come out of it thinking, “Yes, we are champions.” When the Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he will ask my advice. . . .

  And I will tell him about many things—no details will be spared; I owe you that. . . .

  So I will tell him about Leonard Louie and how you had the insane balls to run me right between Andre’s eyes on the night before the first trial and about the otherworldly madness that enveloped us when that giddy chink changed his mind . . .

  . . . And about getting my $86 check back from the court clerk in Sausalito, after my secretary had already plead guilty for me . . . and about the floating horror of that 15 mph red light violation
in the midst of the drunk-crash nightmare. . . .

  And the time when the cops stole my finely engraved air pistol because my neighbor, Al Green, complained.

  Okay. I’ll call you on this and other matters—and if in the meantime I happen to speak as I do, from time to time, with the Great Scorer—you can bet all three of your eyes that I am going to tell him how you ripped and pounded me out of my happy bed one morning at 16 Alexander and dragged me—and poor innocent Maria—out in a cold gray fog somewhere north of the Farallon Islands on a 15-foot Boston Whaler into known big shark waters with no radio and no flares and only one good rod and a dinky little 18-inch gaff—after tracking me down (or up, actually) in the raw dirt and dead limbs of my Tiki bar.

  And how we prevailed, on the sea—how we caught a fine fish—when all the others had gone south to Pacifica that day—and how we then came to the profoundly high decision to run straight through that maniac crease in the breakers and into Bolinas harbor—because we were thirsty and tired and we had our elegant 16-pound salmon—and because I knew a man with the whiff who lived in a small wooden house that we could almost see from a mile or so out on the ocean.

  The Great Scorer will like that story—and when he adds it in with the others, he will know that he is dealing with a warrior.

  HST at work in Rio de Janeiro (Robert Bone)

  Okay. I don’t want to get mushy here. All I did in the beginning was invite you over to my weird new office at the Theatre—which I knew you’d enjoy, and also because I figured that part of my new job as Night Manager was to keep these two sleazy, baldheaded bastards out of jail by making them so suddenly hip and respectable in the public prints that no judge in SF—not even a Nazi—would feel comfortable about putting them on trial in the eye of a media circus.

  That strategy worked nicely. If I’d billed the Mitchells for my work as a media-political consultant, the tab would have run at least $400K net. I did my work well, and I’m proud of it.