the truth vs. larry flynt
LABASH, MATT
The Truth vs. Larry Flynt By Matt Labash "W S re are the experts in Hollywood on what you can and can't get away with," says Scott Alexander, one half of the screen-writing team that just won a...
...Flynt and His Daughters ome over here and let Daddy put his big d—k in your little p—y," Tonya twangs into my tape recorder in her best version of an eastern Kentucky drawl...
...But he says there is "no question" that Larry was allowing his girls to work on the side to keep customers happy...
...It's just part of my childhood...
...So he snapped the bird's neck and threw it in a creek...
...But Althea," Flynt protests, "I didn't try to f— her...
...Judy, 33, is Tonya's half-sister...
...But, she adds, "I never did it again because I couldn't...
...in fact, the last chapter of his book is entitled "Too Numb To Weep," and in it he says he could not cry because of the drugs the movie says he had kicked four years earlier...
...The movie tasks the government for its laxity in investigating the matter, but in fact, Franklin was wanted for questioning as early as 1980, two years after the shooting, and was indicted in 1984...
...Undoubtedly his inducement to stick around is a lot more powerful than devotion to the Constitution: Flynt's total estimated legal outlays over the years exceed $50 million...
...Larry Flynt make it a dishonest piece of work in almost every particular...
...In one scene (actually, a composite from two different trials), Flynt is upbraided by a fictional Judge Mantke for leaving the state of California against the court's orders...
...In the film, Isaacman first encounters Flynt in prison after he has been hired by Flynt's wife Althea to defend the pornographer on an arrest in Cincinnati for selling Hustler in violation of obscenity laws...
...Real life wasn't quite the same: Larry filed for divorce in 1981...
...But the article only talked about how Keating had been the godfather of the anti-pornography movement in the most general sense...
...The screenwriters, however, don't call it duplicity...
...She says Flynt told her he wanted to see if she was built like her mother...
...GIVE ME MORE...
...But these are biographical details that never made it into Alexander and Karaszewski's script...
...They were pimping my girls...
...While they wait for Theresa to enter, Flynt tells Althea that he's tired and that this isn't really serious, but then says Theresa is just trying to cause problems for him and Althea...
...Karaszewski just thought it was a nice "way of connecting his original enemy to his final enemy...
...He had been representing pornographers since the early 1960s, and in 1982 he visibly rankled the usually staid Supreme Court by fighting New York's anti-child-pornography statute in defense of an adult-bookstore owner who sold two films depicting sexual acts by young boys...
...And though the film ends with Flynt watching video of Althea after his increasingly hollow Supreme Court victory, he was composed enough to secure himself a mail-order bride just three months after her death (it didn't work out...
...She says it was all publicity shtick...
...but the jury didn't buy it...
...The truth is that, scene by scene and line by line, the distortions, omissions, and outright fabrications in The People vs...
...Larry Flynt By Matt Labash "W S re are the experts in Hollywood on what you can and can't get away with," says Scott Alexander, one half of the screen-writing team that just won a Golden Globe award for its latest film, The People vs...
...I think that Larry had a need to hurt me, it was like payback, to make me as low as he could, to hate me as much as he really wanted to—because of [my] getting pregnant with Judy...
...And at this point the movie's fictions multiply fast...
...Larry Flynt is so titled because a good deal of the action centers in and around Flynt's experiences in courtrooms...
...Flynt engages in merry-pranksterish behavior—hocking a loogie at the judge and chucking an orange at a bailiff until finally the judge explodes...
...Enticed by the promise of its egg sack, which he heard was "hot as a girl's p—y" but better, since chickens "wiggled around a lot more," Flynt proceeded to "thrust away...
...I'll add another six months...
...The movie's climax gives the Supreme Court a saintly glow as it decides in Flynt's behalf...
...Throughout the film, we are witness to the passionate and ultimately doomed love affair of Althea Leasure and Larry Flynt...
...So to reduce confusion, the film is forced to settle on one composite in the form of Alan Isaacman—the lawyer who garnered a 1988 Supreme Court victory over Jerry Falwell after Flynt published a parody in which Falwell supposedly confesses to having had sex with his own mother...
...The psychiatric examiner at the Missouri prison also notes that once Flynt got out of the Navy, "he started hustling and was involved with bars, factories, and pimping...
...Both Karaszewski and Alexander say they adhered as closely as possible to actual trial dialogue...
...Though Flynt has always taken pains to stress there was no prostitution allowed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise...
...Judy, who was 20 then, allows that Flynt, whose letters were still signed "Dad," asked her to marry him...
...After Real piled on 30 days more, Flynt retorted, "Give me more, you chicken-shit son of a bitch...
...She says he welted her with a belt, had her watch porn videos, put her on a liquid diet, and weighed her in every Friday when she briefly lived with him (this is confirmed by her half-sister Theresa, who works for Flynt...
...The Trials The People vs...
...Galling and voluminous as such distortions may be, they pale in comparison to the omissions about Flynt's life and character...
...With Keating in particular, the ironies were beautiful: He ran a group promoting decency while later garnering fame for bankrupting our country...
...Unable to find any clear-cut news articles that linked Keating to Flynt's prosecution in any way, I faxed the relevant pages from the shooting script to Keating...
...He responds by calling up his office, asking if everyone is there, and then firing everybody because Althea told him they had all refused to shake her hand...
...For anyone who wants to delve into the chilling specifics of Larry Flynt's life, the movie isn't just wrongheaded...
...I do...
...Flynt and Falwell Jerry Falwell definitely was in courtrooms with Larry Flynt...
...Lawyers love us, because we know the rules...
...they are battle-ready for pedantic journalists, like those from the New Republic and Slate who have challenged the movie's portrait of the real-life pornographer Larry Flynt...
...Psychiatrists at the Springfield, Mo., prison had diagnosed him as suffering from a bipolar disorder, which might explain many episodes of bizarre and self-destructive behavior—like his abusive courtroom outbursts, a threat on Ronald Reagan's life, and his alleged million-dollar contracts on the lives of Frank Sinatra, Walter Annen-berg, Bob Guccione, and Hugh Hefner...
...Flynt didn't feel that way in his first Supreme Court go-around, an incident that doesn't appear in the film...
...Theresa says, "He just went like that and then I said, 'Nooo.'" They get in an argument about whether Theresa leapt out of the bed...
...Though I've come to like the duo, I confess, "Yes, I probably will...
...On the tape, her voice sometimes obscures the voices of others, and there is constant background noise from a television set, but all the parties are called by name, and nearly everything can be understood...
...Althea points out that he couldn't, since he is paralyzed...
...Also untrue...
...In the film, Isaacman is portrayed as a young, unblemished idealist, barely unpacked from Harvard...
...And then added: "Give me more, motherf...
...Mantke: Fine...
...Her "Daddy" is Larry Flynt, and she says those are the words he spoke to her on one of her visits with him...
...I would've thought if he were, that would've attracted my attention...
...A junkie and admitted bisexual with AIDS, Althea eventually drowned in her own bathtub...
...He denies that he reached down her knee "like you were going to spread her legs...
...Flynt begged her to come visit him...
...No matter...
...Flynt seems particularly frightened by women, whom he feels the need to control...
...Bill says Flynt asked him to perjure himself at one of Flynt's many trials, while Flynt alleged that Bill had molested his daughter Theresa...
...He pops a few wheelies, kisses her, then deposits her in the bathroom, where she ultimately drowns in the bathtub...
...He was too fat to pop wheelies, he could hardly push himself," says Marsha Rider...
...Most disturbing are her claims of sex abuse...
...Though Woody Harrelson plays Flynt as a charming and intelligent scamp, Flynt does come across as a somewhat belligerent drug addict and megalomaniac—but one who must be forgiven his inherent flaws and eccentricities because of his sacrifice for our civil liberties...
...Give me life without parole, you foul motherf...
...My conviction is simply a reminder that what we fought for 200 years ago can't be taken for granted...
...it did not link him to Flynt...
...Tonya says that in 1984 Larry developed an "extreme infatuation for my sister...
...Indeed, Flynt's manic courtroom antics were what first enchanted the screenwriters...
...The major revelation in a January Penthouse interview with the Riders was that they had an audiotape made by Althea in which Larry effectively admitted that he asked a 13-year-old Theresa to take her panties off so he could see her naked...
...The film opens in hardscrabble Kentucky in 1952, as we see a 10-year-old Flynt peddling bootleg whiskey on a rickety wooden cart through the mud with what the published version of the screenplay calls "Huckleberry Finn industriousness" (the filmmakers share a serious Finn fetish...
...These perverted lifestyles have to stop...
...He is personally revolted by Hustler but so passionate about the First Amendment that he has no choice but to represent the world's most repugnant porn dog...
...So write Alexander and Karaszewski in the shooting script of The People vs...
...The original script did have such a scene, but it was cut by For-man...
...Here is what Flynt actually said to Judge Manuel Real: "F— you...
...The man who was actually shot was a Lawrenceville lawyer named Gene Reeves, who was working for Flynt on an obscenity case...
...But no former Hustler employees or members of Althea's family I spoke with remember Althea being ostracized because she had AIDS, nor do they remember Larry firing anyone for not shaking her hand...
...Her abuse charges are unsubstantiated, as these things usually are...
...We also see Keating conspiring with Falwell and offering his file on Hustler to Falwell's lawyer, Norman Roy Grutman...
...It came when he deflowered a hen...
...The Cleveland Press reported in 1978 that Flynt's publishing interests were helped along by allegedly mobbed-up vending-machine companies (for many years, a Gambino crime-family porn king ran Hustler's East Coast distribution...
...This remark impels Flynt to get on the horn to Isaacman and tell his lawyer to take the preacher all the way to the high court...
...There were other theories going around immediately following the shooting that revolve around Flynt's sinister past (records I have obtained from his stay at a psychiatric prison report a spate of attempted-murder and assault-and-battery charges—one time for squeezing off a few rounds in a former mother-in-law's house...
...In the film, Falwell is brought the news about the publication of the parody from pious underlings in the cloisters of Liberty University...
...Flynt on Tape Isaacman has dismissed the Riders as disgruntled employees, and indeed they were—to the tune of $8.6 million, which they won in a wrongful-termination suit against Flynt after he fired them both in 1983...
...But it is true that he regularly fired people or threatened to (including Althea, according to her sister), often for the most bizarre reasons: for refusing to take a supposed cure-all algae product called blue-green manna, or for smoking or drinking at home...
...Althea turns the accusation back on Larry: "You asked to see her down there, and you asked her to remove her panties...
...That's all, and then she runs her mouth to you...
...But what perfectly encapsulates Flynt's character is the concluding part of the anecdote...
...We're not writing history, we're writing a movie...
...Maybe someone should alert the other Hollywood celebrities responsible for the Flynt Renaissance...
...her nurse did...
...Joseph Paul Franklin, who shot Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, Ind., and has confessed to numerous killings, says he was the sniper and that he was motivated by the sight of an interracial couple in Hustler...
...Flynt, who has refused repeated requests for an interview, now calls Tonya a "wacko"—a point she readily concedes...
...In the film, Keating makes regular appearances: monitoring Flynt, speaking at a banquet where he warns against the "destruction of the soul of our country," and ominously smiling when a judgment is delivered against Flynt inside a Cincinnati courtroom...
...I don't know whether Larry spoke...
...Lay 18 months on me, you dumb motherf...
...Theresa enters, and after some coaxing from Althea, she says her father had wanted to know how many times she'd done it, asked her if she had ever had an orgasm, and then suggested she take off her nightgown...
...On Golden Globes night, he sat there beaming, his girlfriend patting his quilted tuxedo shoulder while the screenwriters accepted their award, ticking off benedictions to Milos and Woody and Oliver...
...This did not make the movie...
...For her loyalty, he promised her a job and security in Los Angeles, and 13 years later, as Judy resides with her grandmother in Jacksonville, one gets the sense she is still waiting...
...Denny Haller, a retired Dayton police detective and old friend of Flynt's, says Larry once bragged to him that he made his money by selling "p—y and pills...
...According to Flynt's own autobiography, An Unseemly Man, he never was an elementary-aged bootlegger...
...It wouldn't have made it as a neighborhood bar" otherwise...
...his legal battle with Fal-well takes up most of the third act...
...Though the characters must deal with his manias and their addictions, they always appear deeply in love and profoundly loyal to one another...
...Right there," said Alexander, pointing to the first Economist article he came to...
...They know more about Larry Flynt than any perMatt Labash is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard...
...When Althea asks Flynt why he was so interested in whether Theresa had ever had an orgasm, Flynt replies, "I was just trying to keep her from being so uptight about her body...
...Still, she says, "He's the one that's portraying cut-off body parts and severed nipples and clitorises with fishhooks in them [in the pages of Hustler...
...Five minutes later: "I think we have film of him at the trial," says Karaszewski, still frantically surfing...
...Flynt and Mrs...
...Five minutes later: "We did our research three years ago, so we might be a little forgetful," says Karaszewski...
...I've even been friends with a couple of them...
...In the movie and in Flynt's book, Althea tells Larry that at the orphanage where she was raised (her father killed her mother and himself) she had been molested by nuns...
...he was one of the officers who arrived on the scene...
...Apparently, Flynt also tried to engineer his own exit by writing a letter saying he wished he were Oswald so he could've killed Kennedy...
...First of all, Isaacman was 36 years old at that time and had 10 years of trial experience...
...It came in 1983 in a hearing involving the girlfriend of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione...
...Haller says Flynt was running a bar about three miles from a large truck terminal, "and I know he was selling amphetamines to truckers...
...Could his cause be any more righteous...
...Flynt was not in prison when he found out his wife had AIDS...
...After all, someone obviously saw something redeeming enough in Flynt to seat him at the winner's table at the Golden Globes, as he has been ensconced in VIP seats on awards nights past and no doubt will be again next month on Oscar night, lacquered-up with his usual accoutrements: the Piaget watch, the pudgy Cohiba cigar, the vagina-shaped pendant with the diamond-studded clitoris...
...Believe it or don't, but there are other members of the family, who are much more reluctant to talk, but tell similar stories...
...Find it, Larry," barked Alexander, commanding his other half to spin through videotapes they insisted would show Keating conducting a rally on the steps of the courthouse during the trial...
...Peggy would not quarrel with that assessment...
...And though he threatens to quit Flynt's employ in the movie, in real life he's managed to represent him for almost two decades now...
...At that point Althea tells him she's going to call Theresa on the mansion phone and get her to come to their room...
...powerful men who grabbed a lot of power and alienated a lot of people...
...Flynt, you leave me no choice but to sentence you to nine months— Larry: That's all ya got...
...Unlike his film portrayal by Edward Norton, he was neither a baby-faced idealist nor a specialist in the First Amendment...
...Flynt explodes at his daughter: "Pack your f— clothes and get out of this house...
...That seems to apply to most of the women in his life, as his psychiatric evaluation notes: "Mr...
...Not to mention these words from director Milos For-man: "I will always admire Larry Flynt: his life, his courage, and his tenacity...
...In the movie, the Isaacman character takes a bullet in the same Lawrenceville, Ga., assassination attempt that crippled Flynt...
...Isaacman represents Flynt not just in free-speech matters, which is what the film suggests, but on all matters...
...Co-producer Oliver Stone puts him in the "rapscallion tradition of Huckleberry Finn," imploring us to "empathize as a fellow traveler with his suffering and his triumph...
...No way...
...Maybe they lost it...
...And as long as you don't have Jerry Falwell saying something inappropriate, it's cool...
...She sued Hustler for cartoons that suggested Guccione gave her a venereal disease...
...Before Flynt takes on Falwell in the movie, he is pursued relentlessly in Cincinnati by an anti-pornography crusader named Charles Keating...
...The film is mum on all this, though Flynt himself has been slightly more forthcoming: "I've known a lot of mob people in my life...
...Flynt's favorite was always that the government needed to eliminate him because he (like the movie's producer, Oliver Stone) was so interested in the Kennedy assassination...
...Fifteen minutes after I was ready to leave, they still hadn't found it...
...It was not something I wanted to do, or could...
...Nor did he sob...
...When Althea asks if he spread her legs, he says, "No, she didn't want me to, and I didn't...
...they call it "dramatic legerdemain...
...The film portrays Flynt as a man of formidable intelligence and surprising literacy...
...The Riders allowed me to listen to and transcribe the tape, which runs approximately 15 minutes...
...Maybe you've seen her on Inside Edition or Charlie Rose or the scores of other shows she's done, telling whoever will listen how her father molested her between the ages of 10 and 18...
...Now 27, Theresa vehemently defends her father from accusations that he molested her, though she does remember "vaguely this taping that you're talking about, but I know that Dad never did anything to me...
...Finishing his business, he worried that his grandmother would notice the hen "staggering, squawking and bleeding...
...But there is just as much duplicity in the portrait of Falwell in The People vs...
...According to his book, they were at home in their bedroom...
...No, he wasn't...
...A letter from that time shows how Flynt toyed with Judy: "Althea resents you only because she doesn't know who you are, she thinks Frank was your father [he was], and only you and I know the truth...
...Judy says that behind closed doors, Larry dropped much of his manic nuttiness...
...Maybe not, but his early days were hardly uneventful...
...I told her her mother was skinny and she had a nice-lookin' body, I think you should take my advice and we'll take off your gown, and I said 'Theresa, all you need to do is lose about 25 pounds...
...In reality, he was told by a reporter at a Washington press conference...
...The film shows Flynt trying to rescue Althea from drugs, which we see him kicking by 1983, though in his book he says he didn't get off the stuff until a 1994 operation completely reduced his pain...
...Just what kind of man is the real Larry Flynt...
...AIDS is a plague," Falwell says...
...Keating's] group had its fingers in every major obscenity trial at that time...
...But if he has, so has Herald Fahringer, Flynt's attorney at the time: "I can't remember whether Keating was ever in the courtroom or not...
...Wishing to argue on his own behalf but having been appointed an attorney instead, Flynt sported a "F— the court" T-shirt and, clutching a King James Bible, later shouted "F— this court," dubbing the justices "eight a—holes and a token c...
...And indeed, courtroom exchanges do track closely with court transcripts—except for their generous sani-tization...
...So where's the lie...
...Flynt claims he's seen her only about 30 days to 6 weeks in her whole life...
...Keating told me he has never had a conversation with Falwell about Flynt and asked, puzzled, "Who's Grutman...
...Two years Althea's senior, Marsha says she lived with Althea in both orphanages...
...Before his mismanagement of Lincoln Savings and Loan made him a national figure, the real-life Charles Keating did indeed cut quite a swath through Cincinnati as the head of a group called Citizens for Decent Literature...
...F— you in your a...
...Fahringer, who is otherwise very pleased with the movie, claims credit for the oratory...
...In the film, after her death and after Flynt has lost to Falwell in a district court, he sees Falwell on television...
...It worked...
...It took several hours to document every word, because while Althea had the presence of mind to make the recording, she sounds high on drugs...
...Flynt's Real Past Flynt's vocational choices—pornography, bars, and vending-machine businesses in Ohio—were a gangster's candyland...
...I am seated across a conference table from Alexander and his partner, Larry Karaszewski, in their office on the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, Calif., which is trimmed with heavily ironic arcana like framed Slim Whitman records and Chicks in Chains movie posters...
...When she was 10, she says, "He would not take my panties down—he'd tell me he wanted me to take my panties off, he'd make me do it so I felt scared and ashamed and humiliated, and he'd get his jollies off doing that...
...Fahringer was not young, nor did he have any apparent aversion to pornography...
...Never really done any business with them...
...The inscription says "Santa Claus is Coming...
...The real-life Isaacman actually met Flynt shortly after Flynt had been shot and crippled by a sniper's bullet in 1978...
...When I brought this up to Alexander and Karaszewski, they scrambled for their Nexis binders...
...On the inside, indeed he is, with his belly hanging out, among other things, as a naked girl gets him off and he showers the sky in a cloud of ejaculate...
...Another movie falsehood: While Flynt admits in his book that he had a nearly 10-year amphetamine habit beginning in the 1960s, the movie makes it seem as though his drug use began solely because he needed to alleviate his pain after the 1978 shooting...
...I hope it doesn't sound boastful, but I was certainly the main speaker there," he says...
...But old Navy records of Flynt's dated 1964 indicate he "had an unusual preoccupation with sexual activities and literature...
...The screenwriters don't even pretend this has any basis in fact...
...In the first, he's in prison when she breaks the news to him that she has AIDS...
...I've slept in the same bed with my dad probably over 2,000 times as a kid...[until I was] probably about 15...
...The movie suggests he was doped up only on painkillers, when he in fact not only had a history of amphetamine abuse, but has also admitted he did the same with cocaine and opiates...
...She made the announcement last year in the middle of filming and has traveled well since: The first time I spoke with her, she was staying in Gloria Steinem's house in New York...
...That's all you need to do.' I said, 'You know, I said you're built exactly like your mother.' I said, 'Your c— even looks like your mother's.'" He goes on to say he told Theresa to take down her panties and talked to her about orgasms...
...Flynt admits, "So I told her . . . she looks a lot like her mother...
...In the early days," he says, "I was furnishing him with a lot of what I consider the important rhetoric of free speech and the First Amendment...
...Larry: GOOD...
...But someone forgot to tell Larry Flynt, who repeats it in his book (which the screenwriters tell me he wrote after he'd seen the screenplay...
...When Judy heard from Flynt, she had just broken up with a boyfriend and was practically destitute...
...Judy was conceived while Larry was abroad...
...Theresa tells Althea she was scared, and repeats it two more times...
...I went into the nuthouse because of what my dad did to me," she says...
...they watched Flynt continuously hijack headlines by acting up in court, as when he garnered a handful of contempt-of-court citations in a two-month span...
...They never brought him to trial," Reeves says of the man who shot him, "because, as I understood it, neither Mr...
...I certainly don't recall him being in any way prominent during that period of time either publicity-wise or taking a position against Larry or anything else...
...One would not know from the movie that Flynt was ever in the Navy, nor that he was recommended for administrative discharge because he had "shown much evidence of emotional instability in the past...
...This is not a pep rally for pornography," Woody Harrelson cries out...
...Larry tells a different story in his book: "My many sexual experiences at liberty ports around the world had not dampened my desire for a reunion with Peggy...
...Larry Flynt as in the insertion of Keating as his arch-nemesis...
...He ended up marrying Peggy anyway, and also gave Judy's father such a beating that the family says he still limps to this day...
...Milos Forman, who touts the exhaustive research he did for his Oscar-winning Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but claims never to have bought a Hustler, writes in the foreword of Flynt's book: "The Supreme Court of the United States is and always will be my hero...
...Nonsense," says Marsha Rider, Althea's sister and Flynt's former executive assistant...
...When he sees her lifeless under water, he flings himself out of the wheelchair sobbing uncontrollably...
...Haller confirms the foot-shooting incident...
...First, they portray Flynt as a naif who just stumbles into publishing as a way of promoting his strip bars, though by the time he started what became Hustler in the mid-'70s he'd already had a go at two other failed publications...
...Nor could this story or any version thereof be accurate, because Althea died in June 1987—and Isaacman spoke publicly about filing his appeal to the Supreme Court six months earlier, in December 1986...
...Not to worry...
...This heroic sacrifice elevates Isaacman in the viewer's eyes and allows us to root for him later in the movie when Flynt begins to rant about the shooting and Isaacman brings him up short by saying: "Hey, I was there, too...
...Tonya's mother Peggy was Larry's second wife...
...Most of the criticism so far has centered on the fact that while Flynt was indeed the key figure in a landmark First Amendment decision, this should not be allowed to obscure the nature of the material he publishes, which is not only pornographic but includes heaping servings of racism, female evisceration, and gang rape, with scatological garnish, occasional bestiality, and child molestation (a 1986 report for the Justice Department said Flynt's flagship Hustler magazine depicted children sexually an average of 14.1 times per issue...
...Flynt nor myself expressed any interest in trying him due to the security risks and everything else—and if you're serving [six] life sentences for murder, aggravated assault is the least of your concerns...
...she ended up staying in a motel outside the prison for about four months, running detailed errands and getting power of attorney to help him handle his affairs...
...On the record, Judy says the least about Flynt, the man she believed was her biological father until she was 14...
...The Lawyer and the Bullet With Flynt's having been engaged in well over 50 lawsuits, most of them libel or contempt actions, he has had myriad attorneys...
...Alexander and Karaszewski have thick black binders full of Nexis research and an entire bookcase packed with videos of every Flynt television appearance to disabuse me of the notion that The People vs...
...Yet if anything, the film exaggerates her flaws—a dramatic device to make Flynt look good by contrast...
...According to Flynt's own account, in their final days together there was "an unbridgeable gap between us" with the clock measuring "the intervals between her fixes and my doses...
...This is a half-truth at best...
...The records also describe him as a "characteristic sociopathic personality...
...Flynt didn't find Althea's body...
...The film jumps directly from his childhood to his years running Hustler Clubs in the early 1970s...
...He convinced her once "to have sex for money...
...maybe Keating has forgotten his whereabouts 20 years before...
...Likewise, Flynt himself has promoted the idea that he was never fixated on pornography, and had never even seen a Playboy or Penthouse until he decided to research the idea that became his own magazine (around 1972...
...The screenwriters opt for full disclosure: "We made it up," says Alexander...
...One was Methodist, one was a state home, and "there were no nuns...
...Five minutes later: "Here's my argument," says Alexander...
...Quite impish, no...
...What transpires is horrifying...
...No, except for one problem—Falwell did make similar remarks, but he made them in 1983, a year before Althea had even been diagnosed with AIDS...
...He tries to put it off until morning, but Althea makes the call anyway...
...Flynt The portrait of Flynt's relationship with Althea is one of the film's central acts of deception...
...He has accomplished this generally through denigration and sexual exploitation...
...Flynt and Keating he bad guys in Larry Flynt's life were like 1980's supervillains: Jerry Falwell, Charles Keating...
...Falwell recently told Larry King that he's met Keating only once, in a Phoenix hotel lobby years after the trial...
...Nor did Reeves make a sacrifice for a friend: "I only knew him for a couple of days," Reeves says...
...And they seem to think the script they've written is an honest and objective look at him...
...The real Althea was a drug addict and sexually promiscuous, securing women for Larry early in their marriage and often joining in...
...A lovely sentiment—but the movie is far less ambiguous than he thinks...
...One Flynt employee had his car bombed and another was shot within eight months of the attempt on Flynt's life...
...It didn't glorify me...
...But while Fahringer says Flynt was a quick study with native smarts, he required a bit of tutelage on the Constitution, since he was an eighth-grade dropout...
...She is now courting movie-of-the-week offers, but on this January afternoon in squat, dowdy, wood-paneled 'n' cinderblock Jacksonville, Fla., she looks like she belongs right here—sitting on this bar stool at a Longhorn Steakhouse, slamming margaritas on my expense account and pushing roasted peanut shells onto the floor before ordering a dessert to take home to her daughter, whose life she claims Larry once threatened if she went ahead with a book about him...
...So," Karaszewski asks, "are you gonna screw us...
...he agrees...
...And then, finally, it was his turn, as Karaszewski offered a special note of thanks to Larry Flynt for, as he put it without a trace of irony, "living the life...
...Flynt himself has said: "The movie was true...
...And in true Mack Daddy fashion, he boasts of warding off black pimps hanging out in his bar: "I shot a n— ger in the foot for not taking his hat off," Flynt said...
...Though it had been nine years since she had seen the man she regarded as her father, he contacted her after being sentenced to prison in Butner, N.C., one of several psychiatric facilities where Flynt did stints in the 1980s...
...Alexander says their critics are "being so reductive...
...And he was bedridden as she pulled her from the tub...
...He never followed through, but Marsha says her sister left Flynt at least three different times...
...Tonya tells me a lot of things about Larry, none of which made the shooting script...
...Flynt accuses Theresa of trying to break up his marriage...
...The conversation begins with a slurry-voiced but competent Althea confronting Larry about what Theresa has just told her— that her dad had Theresa lying nude right next to him...
...Whether for expedience or for burnishing their protagonist's image, the filmmakers nearly always err on the side of innocence...
...In fact, the seminal experience of Flynt's boyhood, to hear him tell it in the opening chapter of his memoirs, bears no echoes of Huck Finn whatsoever...
...Larry Flynt lionizes a repulsive man...
...Psychiatric records from Flynt's stay at a Springfield, Mo., prison (in the movie, he is sent there after an outburst in a courtroom where he appears in a diaper made of an American flag) report his bragging to the observing psychiatrist that his "girls" were "trained psychologists and whores...
...He says they spoke in monosyllabic grunts when they spoke at all, and she never hopped on his wheelchair...
...And untrue...
...Perhaps it is unfair to take his measure from estranged children, ex-wives, former in-laws, psychiatric evaluations, and audiotaped confessions of yore...
...Anybody with half a brain could see Larry Flynt is not the hero of the movie, he's the [subject] of the movie...
...Isaacman says he had done everything from antitrust work to entertainment law, had represented Jerry Lewis and Buddy Hackett, and had first come into Flynt's orbit not after a jailhouse interview set up by Althea but after being vetted by Flynt's in-house attorney in Isaacman's own office in Los Angeles...
...The worse she is, the greater her need of saving, and he is somewhat ennobled by the severity of her decline after his shooting...
...She's from the part of Flynt's life that is completely ignored by the filmmakers (Althea was his fourth wife, which would come as news to anybody who has seen the movie...
...Nor can its inaccuracies be excused as the result of the filmmakers' desire to entertain, rather than deliver a rigorously factual documentary...
...Marsha and her husband Bill, who was Flynt's longtime chief of security, claim that Flynt not only cuffed Althea—she admitted Flynt beat her, but in the movie we see him deliver only a simple slap, which she immediately and successfully corrects—but that he also once fired a .38 Smith & Wesson at her, a weapon Bill Rider says he had to take from his boss's hand...
...As for the hookers, "it wasn't a wide-open prostitution operation or we would've busted it," Haller assures me...
...Still, the shooting has always been a vehicle for Flynt to float the conspiracy theories that have become his stock in trade...
...For a topper, he threatened to kill "every motherf—" Supreme Court justice...
...It was my way of punishing your mother for f— everyone else except me...
...The final scene between them is perhaps the most touching: An AIDS-ravaged Althea wants to take a bath, and Flynt tells her to hop up on his wheelchair...
...In the course of the 1980s, he overdosed no fewer than six times—including three months after Althea's death...
...After Althea presses him on whether he put her hand on her thigh, he says, "Althea, I didn't play with her c...
...son on earth could possibly care to...
...But all this stuff about the First Amendment with that rear projection behind him, there was none of that, of course...
...He describes Peggy as "having the morals of an alley cat"—this, mind you, after he boasts in his book of cheating on her while on shore leave in Cannes, buying "twenty naked French whores, ass-end up," then working his way down the line until his back went into spasms...
...She does produce a Christmas card she says he sent her when she was a child...
...Responding through his lawyer, Keating said he has never "participated directly or indirectly in any trial" of Flynt's, and he has "never spoken with Flynt, does not know him, never saw him in person...
...The report goes on to cite Flynt's credo: "The man who controls p—y controls the world...
...But he was clearly playing dangerous head games with his stepdaughter...
...Who's got the mental problem here...
...Keating denies having done so...
...Theresa supported Flynt's story...
...He was involved with prostitution, he was involved with pimping girls...
...That's in keeping with Flynt himself, who never paid her much mind...
...A devoutly religious woman now, Peggy used to be something of a hellraiser, "but you gotta understand, I would've done anything for him...
...Is that all you can give me, you chicken-shit c—ks—er...
...Two of Flynt's most human moments in the film involve his gallantry on behalf of Althea, and both are pure fantasy...
...she claims she lived at his Bel-Air mansion for six months to a year in 1983...
...he did, however, drive legal hooch from a wet county to a dry county while in his late teens...
...Says Karaszewski: "The problem is, we've lost a lot of our tapes...
...While the clubs look fairly sleazy, the movie still doesn't quite do them justice...
...But there is more trickery involved with Falwell...
...Flynt publicly maintains that he doesn't know if Franklin is the shooter, but Isaacman says, "It sounds credible to me, and probably to Larry...
...And there is a scene in the film where that and other theories are offered, though they're all in the mouths of other characters...
...Shortly after the Isaacman character is hired in the movie, Flynt is featured at a rally delivering a Pat-tonesque speech in front of a screen showing a montage intercutting naked women with mutilated bodies from various Vietnam atrocities, asking what is more obscene, war or a woman's body...
...The film's epilogue informs us that Flynt's "assailant was never brought to justice...
...Peggy says Flynt had called off their relationship and that she became involved with Judy's father, Frank Reed, before she and Flynt reconciled...
...I don't want anything to do with the fat little pig anyway...
...You've got a disgusting man and a righteous cause," Karaszewski says, "and the ambiguity is what makes an interesting story...
...She shows me her psychiatric evaluation from the 11th grade, and she's definitely her father's daughter: a diagnosed manic depressive with horrible anxiety, currently on a fistful of antidepressants...
...In the published screenplay, the exchange reads: Mantke (outraged): I've had ENOUGH OF THIS...
...Flynt's lawyer in that case was actually Herald Price Fahringer, who tells me he was hired after being interviewed at the Parklane Hotel upon being recommended to Flynt by Al Goldstein, the editor and publisher of Screw...
...When I called Isaacman to ask what he thought about the alleged tape, Isaac-man said, "I have no reason to believe it exists at all...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 22
