Lenny Bruce: Sicknik
In April 1964, Lenny Bruce managed to get himself busted for obscenity twice in one week, and in one location: the Cafe Au Go Go, Howard and Ella Solomon’s new coffeehouse in the basement at 152 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. He got the Solomons busted as well. Getting arrested was almost routine for Bruce by 1964. He’d been doing it regularly since 1961. His comedy had made him effectively an enemy of the state.
Born Leonard Alfred Schneider on Long Island in 1925, he was raised by his divorced mom, a dance instructor and performer, and by various relatives. He ran away from home at sixteen and volunteered for the Navy at eighteen, in 1942. After three years of action in the Atlantic he’d had enough war; he dressed up in a female officer’s uniform to get a psychiatric discharge. He got his start in showbiz in 1947, emceeing for his mother and appearing in rigged amateur-hour shows at clubs like George’s Corner in the Village, earning two dollars a night plus carfare. In 1951 he married Honey Harlowe, a redheaded stripper he met in Baltimore. While they were both performing in Miami he came up with a scheme to earn enough cash so that she might quit the business. He created a legal foundation and, dressed as a priest, went door to door in Palm Beach soliciting donations for a leper colony in British Guiana. He later joked that he first considered bronchitis, cholera and the clap before reading an article about lepers. After a week he had raised eight thousand dollars. He was arrested, but since the foundation existed on paper, and he had in fact sent twenty-five hundred dollars to Guiana – pocketing the rest as administration fees – he was found not guilty.
They headed to Los Angeles, where his mother joined them. Honey went back to stripping while he worked as a comic and emcee in what he called “burlesque shithouses” and “toilets.” It was in these joints that he started going to any excess to grab the audience, “working blue,” as comedians said back then, adding sex jokes and profanities to his routines, once throwing a whipped cream pie in the face of a heckler, on another occasion strolling out on stage dressed only in socks and shoes. If the “dancers” were stripping, why not the emcee? He tried his hand at Hollywood as well, writing the screenplays for a pair of Grade Z no-budget movies, Dance Hall Racket and Dream Follies. He wrote parts for Honey, his mom and himself; he plays a switchblade-flicking hoodlum in Dance Hall Racket and wrote himself one great line: “Big deal, so I killed a guy. That makes me a criminal?” They were directed by Phil Tucker, better known for making the classically bad drive-in features Robot Monster and The Cape Canaveral Monsters. Meanwhile Bruce’s behavior off-stage got out of hand. He loved partying with the guys in the band, he loved his hookers and strippers, he loved his drugs, and he indulged himself fully. A bit like Elvis, he found doctor fans who willingly gave him prescriptions for uppers and painkillers, while his jazz musician pals hooked him up with junk.
Bruce and Honey’s tumultuous, drug-impaired marriage split up shortly after the birth of their daughter, Kitty, in 1955. In 1957 he moved up the coast to North Beach, the Left Coast’s Left Bank, and graduated from burlesque to legitimate nightclubs. He debuted a new act at Ann’s 440, a cabaret popular with gays and lesbians, where Johnny Mathis got his start. It happened to be just around the corner from City Lights. The same year that Lawrence Ferlinghetti was winning his right to publish Howl, Bruce began pushing his own free speech rights, becoming the man Time dubbed “the high priest of the sick comedians.” Other satirists of the late 1950s – Mort Sahl, Jean Shepherd, Tom Lehrer, Nichols & May – teased Americans about their shortcomings and foibles. They kept their patter light and their jokes clean. Bruce not only used forbidden language, he pushed America’s buttons about sex, race, religion, violence. He tipped sacred cows all over the cultural landscape. He made fun of the pope and Oral Roberts, observed that Eleanor Roosevelt had nice tits, depicted the Lone Ranger wanting to schtup Tonto and Silver, conjugated the verb “to come” to a jazz beat, interrupted his routine to ask the audience “Are there any niggers here tonight?” and advised white people on how to make colored guests feel welcome in their homes. He declared that two people having sex was never obscene – Hiroshima was obscene. He poked liberals and conservatives, squares and hipsters. (Kerouac hated his act.) He made some people laugh, but he made a lot of others uncomfortable and angry. “Constant, abrasive irritation produces the pearl: it is a disease of the oyster,” the theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in his foreword to Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, published by Playboy Press in 1965. “Lenny Bruce is a disease of America… a pearl miscast before swine.” It’s no coincidence that Bruce emerged at around the same time as Elvis, the Beats and Sputnik. Like Elvis, he represented a rebellion against sexual repression, and was seen as dangerous and “dirty.” Like the Beats, he loved jazz, spontaneous riffing and lots of drugs. And like Sputnik, he startled the government into hostile reaction.
By ‘58 his reputation as a “sicknik” was such that Steve Allen did a parody sketch about “one of the most offbeat performers around,” Lenny Loose, on his Steve Allen Show. He had Bruce himself on his show in 1959, introducing him as “the most shocking comedian of our time.” After a grueling session with the show’s executives, Bruce was on his best behavior, though he did do a bit about kids huffing airplane glue. It’s hard to imagine he ran that one by the executives. In his career, not surprisingly, he would appear on national television only a handful of times. But it didn’t matter: He was one of the most written and talked about comedians in America by then, and far and away the hippest. His albums The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce and I Am Not a Nut, Elect Me! sold well, and club owners clamored to book him, though they often posted disclaimers and For Adults Only signs outside. In '59 he made a triumphant return to New York City, playing a midtown basement club called the Den and delighting audiences that included Miles Davis and Dorothy Kilgallen. In 1960 he got a more chilly reception at the Blue Angel, a swank Upper East Side club run by the Village Vanguard’s Max Gordon, which Bruce said looked like “the inside of a coffin.” Swells walked out on him and undercover cops hid tape recorders under their jackets; the Daily News denounced him as “the man from outer taste.”
In 1961, police working a tip entered his hotel room in Philadelphia, saw a fair amount of drugs and syringes lying around, and arrested him. A week later, out on bail, he was back in San Francisco, at a club called the Jazz Workshop, where he was arrested for using the word “cocksucker” while reminiscing about his time at Ann’s 440. A jury later found him not guilty, but it was just beginning. Between then and his Cafe Au Go Go gig in 1964 he was arrested four times on obscenity charges in Los Angeles, where one of his lawyers was Melvin Belli and one of his prosecutors was Johnnie Cochran; once for possession of narcotics in L.A.; and once for obscenity in Chicago. He was also refused permission to perform in Canada and in Detroit, banned from Australia (after he walked on stage in Sydney, declared, “What a fucking wonderful audience,” and was instantly arrested), and turned away from England. With a few exceptions – Ralph Gleason in San Francisco, Nat Hentoff in New York – the media now portrayed him as a dirty-mouthed drug addict. Club gigs began to dry up, his record sales slumped, and his bills escalated, as did his drug use. By the time he opened at the Cafe Au Go Go at the end of March 1964 he was broke, paranoid, exhausted, strung out and his health was failing.
The Solomons had only just opened their Parisian-themed coffeehouse that February. He was a stockbroker and she was a fashion designer. Booking Bruce was a bold act. In advance of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, New York City had launched extensive campaigns to clean itself up for the tourists. The NYPD executed Operation Pornography and arrested more than one hundred and fifty sellers of pornographic materials, mostly in and around Times Square. The city’s clergy pitched in; Operation Yorkville, a movement founded by a priest, a rabbi and a minister (which sounds like the start of a Lenny Bruce routine), organized sting operations against sellers of lewd material like Fanny Hill to minors. The city bore down on strip clubs, nightclubs, cabarets and bars. There was even a new Coffee House Law enacted with the specific purpose of reigning in those scruffy bohemian enclaves of Greenwich Village and the East Village. Under this law, poetry readings were defined as entertainment, which required the hated cabaret license. While the Solomons were opening their coffeehouse in February, the Cafe Le Metro over in the East Village was being issued a summons for hosting unlicensed literary events. Allen Ginsberg led a protest, and in March a judge overturned the law.
The Manhattan District Attorney had his man in the Au Go Go audience furiously taking notes when Bruce opened on March 31. He caught a lackluster performance. Bruce, as he would for what was left of his career, spent much of it obsessing over the minutiae over his court cases, interspersed with some of his raunchy old bits. A few nights later, cops entered Bruce’s dressing room before his show and arrested him and Howard Solomon for violations of Penal Code 1140-A, which prohibited “obscene, indecent, immoral, and impure” entertainment that might “tend to the corruption of the morals of youth and others.” Out on bail, Bruce went onstage the following night. This time he and Ella Solomon were arrested.
At Allen Ginsberg’s request, fans of Bruce’s wrote and circulated a petition against his “censorship [and] harassment.” Nearly one hundred cultural heavyweights signed, including Arthur Miller, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Paul Newman, Henry Miller, Dick Gregory, Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Gore Vidal, Malcolm Cowley, Nat Hentoff and Irving Howe. Kerouac refused. Contrarian to the bitter end, Bruce quipped: “The problem of people helping you with protest is that historically they march you straight to the chair.” Protesters showed up at the trial to denounce the “Courtroom of the Absurd.” The testimony of the inspector who’d taken notes at Bruce’s show amounted to a terrible Lenny Bruce impersonation. Bruce complained that the guy was not only flagrantly misquoting him but murdering his act. As the trial dragged on, Bruce fired his lawyer, whom he couldn’t pay anyway. He proceeded to make a pitiable shambles of defending himself, at one point pleading with the three judges, “Don’t finish me off in show business!” They did. They pronounced him guilty and sentenced him to four months in the workhouse, which he never served. More damagingly, his cabaret card was revoked, ending his career in New York City.
But his career was all but dead by then everywhere. Almost no club owner would touch him now. He found some work in San Francisco, but – again, one thinks of Elvis – he was a distracted, drug-addled ghost onstage. His final performance was at the Fillmore, sharing the bill with the Mothers of Invention. He was like Elvis in one last way: he died on the toilet in his home, of an overdose, in August 1966. He was forty. His resurrection as a free speech martyr began soon after and culminated in 2003 when New York Governor George Pataki granted him a pardon for the 1964 conviction, the first posthumous pardon in the state’s history.
The Cafe Au Go Go went on to be one of the great rock, folk and blues clubs in the city. The list of acts who played and jammed there before it shut its doors in 1969 includes Jimi Hendrix, the Fugs, Cream, the Blues Project, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Chambers Brothers, the Youngbloods, Judy Collins, Richie Havens and a band called the Company that morphed into Buffalo Springfield. Professor Irwin Corey, of whom Lenny had been a big fan, also performed there, and George Carlin, who’d carry on Lenny’s anti-censorship challenges in his own way.
by John Strausbaugh