7)  Redrupped – The Yanks 1967-1989

Our American cousins have always been slightly ahead of us in terms of progressive literary decensorship, partly because their First Amendment constitutionally protects Free Speech (although precisely what sorts of Speech might or might not be protected has been hotly debated over the years).  The US counterpart of European pioneers Girodias and Calder is really Barney Rosset (1922-2012) whose Grove Press (1951-85) was the first to break the American ban on Chatterley (1959) and Tropic of Cancer (1961), before going on to publish numerous groundbreaking modern classics.  Major legal battles had always ended up with the Supreme Court, who by the 1960s had developed a three-pronged test of obscenity: it had to (i) appeal to the prurient interest, (ii) be patently offensive, and (iii) lack any redeeming social value.  When called upon to adjudicate Fanny Hill’s merits in 1966 (via the entertainingly-named Memoirs vs Massachusetts), the Court decided that while (i) and (ii) were self-evident, it could not conclusively demonstrate that Fanny entirely lacked social value, and the floodgates were clearly about to open.

The key decision for US law really came a year later in May 1967.  The Supreme Court had to adjudicate an Appeal concerning two cheap paperbacks (Lust Pool and Shame Agent) for which Robert Redrup, a Times Square news-stand clerk, had been prosecuted in 1965.   Overturning Redrup’s conviction, the Supreme Court ruled that written works (providing they were neither sold to minors nor foisted on unwilling audiences) were constitutionally protected, and as a result routinely reversed without further opinion all such subsequent prosecutions – the books in question were colloquially said to have been ‘Redrupped’.  The practical effect of Justice Stewart’s landmark judgement was to free US literature and – as a side-effect – usher in the era of the hardcore paperback.  This unique period lasted until c.1989, by which point demand for such books had simply ended, store-shelves once filled with rows of tawdry paperbacks now filled with rows of even more tawdry videos and magazines.  But for about twenty years America basically replaced Paris as the main source of supply for Britain’s covertly-imported dirty books.

So, who were the US pioneers supplying this newly-legal domestic market?  There were about eight major names, most of whom had established themselves five / six years before the Redrup decision, and all of whom had interesting back-stories.

The Yanks.  From left: Milton Luros 1963, Reuben Sturman 1979, Michael Thevis 1974, William Hamling 1954, Marvin Miller 1969, Robert DiBernardo 1979

The ‘godfather’ was Milton Luros (1911-1999), an amiable Brooklyn illustrator who started out doing pulp bookjacket covers in the 1930s: “A diffident little guy with a slouch, a comfortable paunch hanging over baggy slacks and wearing a rumpled short-sleeved shirt… a constant bemused smile beneath his slightly crooked nose,… continuously jingling keys and coins in his front pocket, never speaks above a whisper even when angry, and more than anything loves reciting Talmudic parables and aphorisms for the benefit and enlightenment of his employees…”  to quote one of his later managers.

Luros was a skilled graphic designer and quite brilliant businessman, setting up his own agency ‘American Art’ in 1955.  In 1957 he started doing movie posters for Universal Studios (moving his family out to California in the process), and the following year became Art Director on a couple of west-coast men’s magazines, ‘Adam’ and ‘Knight’.  Things thereafter seem to have moved very swiftly – he was in the right place at the right time, saw the potential, and had the requisite business acumen.  By 1959 he was publishing his own magazine ‘Cocktail’ (under the American Art imprint) and had set up a national distributor, Parliament News, to handle similar material.  By 1967 (when he was finally prosecuted for obscenity) his annual income was listed at $5 million, and he was head of a vast publishing empire.  He beat the 1967 rap on Appeal, but came under increasing pressure from prosecutors, and was busted again (along with his wife) in 1974.  This time the jig was finally up, and it seems the authorities offered a secret deal to let him walk away providing he sold up and left the industry.  By this point he owned a large part of the San Fernando Valley and had nothing left to prove, so relaxed into a quiet 25 year retirement – practically the only figure in this part of the story to enjoy a conventional happy ending.  His main paperback imprint was Brandon House (classic reprints), but there were various others including Essex House (original fiction), Barclay House (non-fic) etc, all edited by Brian Kirby.

The man Luros sold out to in 1974 was Reuben Sturman (1924-1997), the biggest US pornographer of them all.  Sturman started out in Cleveland dealing comic books from the back of a truck, until in 1961 one of his employees suggested he add men’s magazines to his inventory.  Sturman was ruthlessly acquisitive, and by the 1970s had gained low-key Mafia backing (from the Gambino family – qv) something Luros had always cautiously avoided.  This allowed him to muscle-in on competitors with impunity – the mere SUGGESTION of what resistance might entail was generally enough.  Sturman beat every rap prosecutors threw at him, gaining a daunting reputation of invincibility until a young FBI agent (remembering how Al Capone was brought down) decided to dig into his financial arrangements (Sturman hated paying taxes and obsessively avoided doing so on principle).  He was finally imprisoned in 1989, and died in jail (heart attack) eight years later, embittered and alone – a harsh lesson in what money can and can’t buy.  Following Sturman’s takeover, the various Luros pbk imprints were merged into ‘Publishers Consultants’ (via a variety of branded series).

The third important early character is Michael Thevis (1932-2013) who, like Sturman, died in prison.  He ran a hand-to-mouth Atlanta news-stand in the 1950s, before doing an early-60s stock-take which revealed that Playboy accounted for just 10% of his sales but over 90% of his profits.  Unlike Luros (who avoided criminality altogether) and Sturman (who generally only used the THREAT of it), Thevis gleefully embraced the gangster lifestyle, embarking on a short but explosive career of murder and arson directed against his rivals.  He was imprisoned in 1976, but briefly escaped in 1978 to shotgun the stool-pigeon ex-associate who had earlier betrayed him to the cops.  By this time he was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, and (quickly rearrested) was sentenced to Life in a Minnesota prison where he eventually died of heart failure.  His main paperback imprint was Pendulum Publications.

William Hamling (1921-2017), started out writing teenage science fiction in Chicago, getting his first novel accepted soon after the War, by which time he was working as an assistant editor for a minor local publisher.  In 1950 he started his own sci-fi imprint Greenleaf Pubs, and in 1955 launched Rogue magazine, an early imitator of Playboy.  This did so well that in 1959 he shifted into the emerging field of adult paperbacks and never looked back, employing (amongst many others) Robert Silverberg, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block and Harlan Ellison to churn out manuscripts to order under a variety of pseudonyms.  His editor throughout the 60s was Earl Kemp, but the pair came badly unstuck in 1971 when they cheekily published their own ‘Illustrated’ (ie porno) edition of the Govt’s landmark ‘Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography’ report.  Both went to jail as a result and were afterwards obliged to disassociate themselves from Greenleaf (which nevertheless continued well into the 80s).

Robert ‘Dibi’ DiBernardo (1937-1986) was a Mafiosi who from the late 1960s ran Star Distributors in NYC for the Gambino crime family.  A capable businessman lacking any personal reputation for violence, unlike most Captains of his seniority Dibi critically did not run a Crew for personal protection, which – given the amount of money he was channelling – left him vulnerable to rivals.  Details of his subsequent assassination at 49 are murky, but it seems that one ambitious (and notoriously volatile) associate, Angelo Ruggiero, owed him about $250,000.  Ruggiero managed to convince imprisoned Boss John Gotti that Dibi was acting ‘disrespectfully’, then told henchman Sammy Gravano that Gotti had accordingly ordered him whacked for subversion.  Gravano was dubious, failing to see what possible threat the unprotected loner could pose, but decided Ruggiero would not dare fabricate the instruction.  DiBernardo was accordingly lured to a meeting in Gravano’s basement office and shot in the back of the head.  His body was never found, and Gotti was reportedly furious when he heard what had happened.

A mix of US titles (all c.1982) later pirated for the UK market – see below…..

In keeping with this wholesome, upbeat tone, Star Books are generally judged to have published the most extreme books of all – the sort of ‘specialist’ titles that even connoisseurs tend to feel give pornography a bad name.  Sample titles include: Hurt Me! Beat Me! Whip Me! / Raped By the Devil / Please Give Me Disipline [actual cover spelling] / Hot Fireman In Drag / An Enema For Emilia / Vicki’s Furry Friend [her alsatian] / Back Door Lover / The Cheerleader’s Wet Panties  …. and so on.  More tea, vicar?

Marvin Miller (1929-1992) was, to quote one terse assessment, “a reckless sociopath with a volcanic temper”.  He seems to have been a formidable mix of highly astute businessman and unrepentant career criminal, first arrested as a boy for stealing a doughnut in his native Chicago.  He made and lost a fortune (via precocious trading in aluminium) while still in his teens before moving to California where he was swiftly imprisoned for embezzling $35,000 from his new employers, then later still became a master of insurance-fraud gaining the happy nickname ‘Marvin the Torch’.  Eventually in 1961, he settled down to become a prolific pornographer via his main Collectors Publications imprint, initially pirating Girodias’s Olympia Press classics on the cheapest, shoddiest paper available.  Within a year he had a backlist of 170 titles and was universally disliked, but very rich.  Busted for obscenity in 1969 he appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, who found against him in 1973 in a landmark judgement which significantly tightened the existing law.  While literature was still protected, pictorial material was now far more vulnerable to local prosecution, and William Hamling (to take one example) promptly recalled all Greenleaf’s illustrated books in response, writing off nearly $1m-worth of stock in the process.  Miller was eventually imprisoned for tax-evasion in 1976, and thereafter seems to have faded from view.

David Zentner (1917-2002) was a rather more low-key character, born in Shanghai and educated in Britain, who published mainstream magazines in the 1950s including ‘Real’ a cheerfully trashy supermarket-checkout type gossip mag.  He later moved into the emerging pin-up market with titles like Bare, Keyhole, Topper and Escapade before launching his popular BeeLine Books in 1965 – other paperback imprints subsequently included Boudoir, Century, Epic. Goldstar, Intimate, Moonglow, Nitelight, Uptown, and likely many more.  Opinion on Zentner seems mixed: he has been described alternately as a “great raconteur” and “nasty SOB”.  Of course, it’s possible he was both.

Finally, our last key name, Jim Stevens (?-?) is by some way the most obscure figure in this disreputable line-up.  A Harvard-graduate lawyer and ‘high-roller’, he established Liverpool Library Press (LLP) in 1967, initially in Majorca to avoid taxes.  Stevens knew little about publishing to begin with, so shrewdly hired an experienced editor, Jim Cardwell, who rapidly turned LLP into the biggest-selling imprint in the business.  Most porn paperbacks of the era sold between 30-40,000 copies per title, but LLP regularly shifted up to 80,000 thanks to an excellent European distribution network.  Stevens insisted his writers – who briefly included a slumming Bill Pronzini – move to Europe so their cheques avoided the US banking system (and consequent attention of the IRS) but made it well worth their while, paying a whopping $1,200 per manuscript along with covering the overseas rents.  LLP was also the first imprint to take branding seriously, standardising a uniform jacket design with single-colour (typically khaki) border framing a professional softcore line-drawing.  This look soon proved highly influential, and was widely imitated by most of the rival names already discussed above.

Three other notable companies from our point of view (ie who all reprinted classic Euro-erotica) were Holloway House, run by veterans Bentley Morris and Ralph Weinstock in LA (latterly of emerging academic interest as pioneers of Black pulp-fiction), Continental Classics of Long Island City NY, who offered “consistently well-done novels of classic and original erotica with a vague European pedigree, reflected in their uniform covers which evoked the famous Olympia Press books and emphasised their Euro-sensibility with a recurring Eiffel Tower graphic…. The stories all take place either in the UK or “on the continent,” and feature an alternating tone of classic Victorian erotica and modern-day hippy jet-set sex scorcher”, and finally Gargoyle Press of Canoga Park CA, probably run by Leonard Burtman, who published 35 titles 1968-69, virtually all flagellation-related.

It is impossible to overstate just what an INCREDIBLE volume of material these (and innumerable other) characters churned out in the US over the twenty-year period in question.  Every conceivable sphere of interest, no matter how specialist or unlikely, was covered by multiple titles / variations on a theme.  To take just one example, let us say you possess the impeccable good taste to find librarians particularly arousing.  You were catered for by (at a bare minimum) several dozen dedicated offerings, a small handful of which can be illustrated here to reinforce the point:

Librarians: phwoaar…

A large part of these books’ latterday kitsch-appeal in the States is naturally based on their striking cover-art (by such cult fetish illustrators as Gene Bilbrew, Bill Ward, Eric Stanton, Robert Bishop etc etc), but a central irony from our point of view is that these were only very rarely seen in the UK.  The bulk of the smuggled-in versions sold under-the-counter in England’s sex-shops were instead crudely pirated in the most slapdash manner imaginable.

Virtually all of the 1970s-80s UK versions of the US paperbacks discussed above are simple photocopies of the originals, done on cheap cartridge paper (the original page-edges fuzzily reproduced around the borders).  All the imprint pages (and most title pages) are missing – these books simply open up on page 1 of the text.  The original (illustrated) jackets have been replaced with plain card-covers (light blue, pink, green or yellow mostly) with the title (and possibly author) applied in smudgy letraset.  Sometimes these match the original typeface, sometimes not, and sometimes are a new title entirely.  The spines are quite often written in biro.  Occasionally an original cover-photo has been reproduced in grainy b&w, though (given how murky these tend to look) this was obviously largely considered a waste of time.

These are REAL pirate publications, their print-runs (or rather, photocopier runs) surely limited to a couple of hundred copies at the most.  But it would have been worthwhile economically for the astronomical mark-ups that could have been routinely later attached in the shops.  Someone, somewhere, was laboriously dismantling original US paperbacks, re-arranging the loose pages into a simple work-and-turn formula, and then running these through an ancient Xerox again and again and again.  So long as openly publishing this sort of material remained risky in Britain, the cottage-industry alternative was the proverbial licence to print money.

Pirated (ie photocopied) UK sex-shop editions of mixed US pbks, all early 1980s.  Six of the original US covers have already been illustrated for comparison.

So, who were the shady UK retailers ordering up these things, and how did they first get involved in the Dirty Book business?  It is time to leave America behind, and return to the sleazy heart of London to warily shake hands with the original Guvnors of Soho…….

 

CLICK HERE FOR NEXT CHAPTER:

(8)  Soho Barons – W1 Retailers 1954-82