THE TRUTH VS. LARRY FLYNT

“So,” Karaszewski asks, “are you gonna screw us?” Though I’ve come to like the duo, I confess, “Yes, I probably will.” Not to worry; 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. 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). No matter; 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. Larry Flynt lionizes a repulsive man.

They know more about Larry Flynt than any person on earth could possibly care to. And they seem to think the script they’ve written is an honest and objective look at him. Alexander says their critics are “being so reductive. Anybody with half a brain could see Larry Flynt is not the hero of the movie, he’s the [subject] of the movie.” Flynt himself has said: “The movie was true. It didn’t glorify me.”

Maybe someone should alert the other Hollywood celebrities responsible for the Flynt Renaissance. Coproducer 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.” Not to mention these words from director Milos Forman: “I will always admire Larry Flynt: his life, his courage, and his tenacity.”

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. “You’ve got a disgusting man and a righteous cause,” Karaszewski says, “and the ambiguity is what makes an interesting story.” A lovely sentiment — but the movie is far less ambiguous than he thinks.

For anyone who wants to delve into the chilling specifics of Larry Flynt’s life, the movie isn’t just wrongheaded. Nor can its inaccuracies be excused as the result of the filmmakers’ desire to entertain, rather than deliver a rigorously factual documentary. The truth is that, scene by scene and line by line, the distortions, omissions, and outright fabrications in The People vs. Larry Flynt make it a dishonest piece of work in almost every particular.

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) Quite impish, no?

And untrue. According to Flynt’s own autobiography, An Unseemly Man, he never was an elementary-aged bootlegger; he did, however, drive legal hooch from a wet county to a dry county while in his late teens.

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. It came when he deflowered a hen. 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.” But what perfectly encapsulates Flynt’s character is the concluding part of the anecdote. Finishing his business, he worried that his grandmother would notice the hen “staggering, squawking and bleeding.” So he snapped the bird’s neck and threw it in a creek.

This did not make the movie.

 

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. 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. In the film, Isaacman is portrayed as a young, unblemished idealist, barely unpacked from Harvard. 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. 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.

Also untrue. 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. Fahringer was not young, nor did he have any apparent aversion to pornography. 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 antichild-pornography statute in defense of an adult- bookstore owner who sold two films depicting sexual acts by young boys.

Shortly after the Isaacman character is hired in the movie, Flynt is featured at a rally delivering a Pattonesque 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. “This is not a pep rally for pornography,” Woody Harrelson cries out. “My conviction is simply a reminder that what we fought for 200 years ago can’t be taken for granted!”

Fahringer, who is otherwise very pleased with the movie, claims credit for the oratory. “I hope it doesn’t sound boastful, but I was certainly the main speaker there,” he says. “I don’t know whether Larry spoke. . . . But all this stuff about the First Amendment with that rear projection behind him, there was none of that, of course.”

The film portrays Flynt as a man of formidable intelligence and surprising literacy. 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. “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.” (The original script did have such a scene, but it was cut by Forman.)

The real-life Isaacman actually met Flynt shortly after Flynt had been shot and crippled by a sniper’s bullet in 1978. And at this point the movie’s fictions multiply fast.

First of all, Isaacman was 36 years old at that time and had 10 years of trial experience. Unlike his film portrayal by Edward Norton, he was neither a baby-faced idealist nor a specialist in the First Amendment. 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.

Isaacman represents Flynt not just in free-speech matters, which is what the film suggests, but on all matters. 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. 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.

In the movie, the Isaacman character takes a bullet in the same Lawrenceville, Ga., assassination attempt that crippled Flynt. 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.”

No, he wasn’t. The man who was actually shot was a Lawrenceville lawyer named Gene Reeves, who was working for Flynt on an obscenity case. Nor did Reeves make a sacrifice for a friend: “I only knew him for a couple of days,” Reeves says.

The film’s epilogue informs us that Flynt’s “assailant was never brought to justice.” This is a half-truth at best. 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. 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.

“They never brought him to trial,” Reeves says of the man who shot him, ” because, as I understood it, neither Mr. 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.”

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.” Still, the shooting has always been a vehicle for Flynt to float the conspiracy theories that have become his stock in trade. 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. (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.)

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 attemptedmurder and assault- and-battery charges — one time for squeezing off a few rounds in a former mother-in-law’s house). But these are biographical details that never made it into Alexander and Karaszewski’s script.

 

Flynt’s Real Past

Flynt’s vocational choices — pornography, bars, and vending-machine businesses in Ohio — were a gangster’s candyland. One Flynt employee had his car bombed and another was shot within eight months of the attempt on Flynt’s life. 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). 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. I’ve even been friends with a couple of them. Never really done any business with them.”

Maybe not, but his early days were hardly uneventful. Whether for expedience or for burnishing their protagonist’s image, the filmmakers nearly always err on the side of innocence.

First, they portray Flynt as a nail 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.

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). But old Navy records of Flynt’s dated 1964 indicate he “had an unusual preoccupation with sexual activities and literature.” 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.” The records also describe him as a “characteristic sociopathic personality.” (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. It worked.)

The film jumps directly from his childhood to his years running Hustler Clubs in the early 1970s. While the clubs look fairly sleazy, the movie still doesn’t quite do them justice. Though Flynt has always taken pains to stress there was no prostitution allowed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise. 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.” Haller says Flynt was running a bar about three miles from a large truck terminal, “and I know he was selling amphetamines to truckers. It wouldn’t have made it as a neighborhood bar” otherwise. “No way.” (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.)

As for the hookers, “it wasn’t a wide-open prostitution operation or we would’ve busted it,” Haller assures me. But he says there is “no question” that Larry was allowing his girls to work on the side to keep customers happy. 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.” 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. “They were pimping my girls.” (Haller confirms the foot-shooting incident; he was one of the officers who arrived on the scene.) 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.”

 

The Trials

The People vs. Larry Flynt is so titled because a good deal of the action centers in and around Flynt’s experiences in courtrooms; his legal battle with Falwell takes up most of the third act. Indeed, Flynt’s manic courtroom antics were what first enchanted the screenwriters; 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. Both Karaszewski and Alexander say they adhered as closely as possible to actual trial dialogue. And indeed, courtroom exchanges do track closely with court transcripts — except for their generous sanitization.

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. Flynt engages in merry-pranksterish behavior — hocking a loogie at the judge and chucking an orange at a bailiff until finally the judge explodes. In the published screenplay, the exchange reads:

Mantke (outraged): I’ve had ENOUGH OF THIS! Mr. Flynt, you leave me no choice but to sentence you to nine months —

Larry: That’s all ya got?! GIVE ME MORE! Mantke: Fine. I’ll add another six months. Larry: GOOD!

Here is what Flynt actually said to Judge Manuel Real: “F — you. Give me life without parole, you foul motherf — .” After Real piled on 30 days more, Flynt retorted, “Give me more, you chicken-shit son of a bitch.” And then added: “Give me more, motherf — . Is that all you can give me, you chicken- shit c — ks — er. Lay 18 months on me, you dumb motherf — . . . . F — you in your a — .” For a topper, he threatened to kill “every motherf — ” Supreme Court justice.

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.” The movie’s climax gives the Supreme Court a saintly glow as it decides in Flynt’s behalf.

Flynt didn’t feel that way in his first Supreme Court go-around, an incident that doesn’t appear in the film. It came in 1983 in a hearing involving the girlfriend of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. She sued Hustler for cartoons that suggested Guccione gave her a venereal disease. 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 — .”

 

Flynt and Keating

“The bad guys in Larry Flynt’s life were like 1980’s supervillains: Jerry Falwell, Charles Keating . . . powerful men who grabbed a lot of power and alienated a lot of people. With Keating in particular, the ironies were beautiful: He ran a group promoting decency while later garnering fame for bankrupting our country.” So write Alexander and Karaszewski in the shooting script of The People vs. Larry Flynt.

Before Flynt takes on Falwell in the movie, he is pursued relentlessly in Cincinnati by an anti-pornography crusader named Charles Keating. 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. 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.

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. 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.”

When I brought this up to Alexander and Karaszewski, they scrambled for their Nexis binders. “Right there,” said Alexander, pointing to the first Economist article he came to. But the article only talked about how Keating had been the godfather of the antipornography movement in the most general sense; it did not link him to Flynt. “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. Keating denies having done so.

Five minutes later: “I think we have film of him at the trial,” says Karaszewski, still frantically surfing.

Five minutes later: “We did our research three years ago, so we might be a little forgetful,” says Karaszewski.

Five minutes later: “Here’s my argument,” says Alexander. “We’re not writing history, we’re writing a movie. [Keating’s] group had its fingers in every major obscenity trial at that time. So where’s the lie?”

Says Karaszewski: “The problem is, we’ve lost a lot of our tapes.” Fifteen minutes after I was ready to leave, they still hadn’t found it. Maybe they lost it; maybe Keating has forgotten his whereabouts 20 years before. 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. I would’ve thought if he were, that would’ve attracted my attention. . . . I certainly don’t recall him being in any way prominent during that period of time either publicitywise or taking a position against Larry or anything else.”

 

Flynt and Falwell

Jerry Falwell definitely was in courtrooms with Larry Flynt. But there is just as much duplicity in the portrait of Falwell in The People vs. Larry Flynt as in the insertion of Keating as his arch-nemesis. The screenwriters, however, don’t call it duplicity; they call it “dramatic legerdemain.”

In the film, Falwell is brought the news about the publication of the parody from pious underlings in the cloisters of Liberty University. In reality, he was told by a reporter at a Washington press conference. We also see Keating conspiring with Falwell and offering his file on Hustler to Falwell’s lawyer, Norman Roy Grutman.

Falwell recently told Larry King that he’s met Keating only once, in a Phoenix hotel lobby years after the trial. Keating told me he has never had a conversation with Falwell about Flynt and asked, puzzled, “Who’s Grutman?”

The screenwriters don’t even pretend this has any basis in fact. Karaszewski just thought it was a nice “way of connecting his original enemy to his final enemy.”

But there is more trickery involved with Falwell. Throughout the film, we are witness to the passionate and ultimately doomed love affair of Althea Leasure and Larry Flynt. A junkie and admitted bisexual with AIDS, Althea eventually drowned in her own bathtub. In the film, after her death and after Flynt has lost to Falwell in a district court, he sees Falwell on television. “AIDS is a plague,” Falwell says. “These perverted lifestyles have to stop.” 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.

Could his cause be any more righteous? 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. 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.

The screenwriters opt for full disclosure: “We made it up,” says Alexander. 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).

Galling and voluminous as such distortions may be, they pale in comparison to the omissions about Flynt’s life and character.

 

Flynt and His Daughters

“Come 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. Her “Daddy” is Larry Flynt, and she says those are the words he spoke to her on one of her visits with him. 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. 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.

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.

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). That’s in keeping with Flynt himself, who never paid her much mind. Flynt, who has refused repeated requests for an interview, now calls Tonya a “wacko” — a point she readily concedes. “I went into the nuthouse because of what my dad did to me,” she says. 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. 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]. Who’s got the mental problem here?”

Her abuse charges are unsubstantiated, as these things usually are. Flynt claims he’s seen her only about 30 days to 6 weeks in her whole life; she claims she lived at his Bel-Air mansion for six months to a year in 1983. She does produce a Christmas card she says he sent her when she was a child. The inscription says “Santa Claus is Coming.” 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.

Tonya tells me a lot of things about Larry, none of which made the shooting script. 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). Most disturbing are her claims of sex abuse. 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.”

Believe it or don’t, but there are other members of the family, who are much more reluctant to talk, but tell similar stories. Tonya’s mother Peggy was Larry’s second wife. 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.

A devoutly religious woman now, Peggy used to be something of a hellraiser, “but you gotta understand, I would’ve done anything for him.” That seems to apply to most of the women in his life, as his psychiatric evaluation notes: ” Mr. Flynt seems particularly frightened by women, whom he feels the need to control. He has accomplished this generally through denigration and sexual exploitation.” The report goes on to cite Flynt’s credo: “The man who controls p — y controls the world.”

Peggy would not quarrel with that assessment. He convinced her once “to have sex for money.” But, she adds, “I never did it again because I couldn’t. He was involved with prostitution, he was involved with pimping girls. . . . It was not something I wanted to do, or could. 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.”

Judy, 33, is Tonya’s half-sister. Judy was conceived while Larry was abroad; Peggy says Flynt had called off their relationship and that she became involved with Judy’s father, Frank Reed, before she and Flynt reconciled. 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.” 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.

On the record, Judy says the least about Flynt, the man she believed was her biological father until she was 14. Tonya says that in 1984 Larry developed an “extreme infatuation for my sister.” Judy, who was 20 then, allows that Flynt, whose letters were still signed “Dad,” asked her to marry him. 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. When Judy heard from Flynt, she had just broken up with a boyfriend and was practically destitute. Flynt begged her to come visit him; 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. 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.

Judy says that behind closed doors, Larry dropped much of his manic nuttiness. 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 Annenberg, Bob Guccione, and Hugh Hefner. She says it was all publicity shtick. But he was clearly playing dangerous head games with his stepdaughter. 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. It was my way of punishing your mother for f — everyone else except me.”

 

Flynt and Mrs. Flynt

The portrait of Flynt’s relationship with Althea is one of the film’s central acts of deception. The real Althea was a drug addict and sexually promiscuous, securing women for Larry early in their marriage and often joining in. Yet if anything, the film exaggerates her flaws — a dramatic device to make Flynt look good by contrast. The worse she is, the greater her need of saving, and he is somewhat ennobled by the severity of her decline after his shooting.

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. “Nonsense,” says Marsha Rider, Althea’s sister and Flynt’s former executive assistant. Two years Althea’s senior, Marsha says she lived with Althea in both orphanages. One was Methodist, one was a state home, and ” there were no nuns.”

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. (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.) In the course of the 1980s, he overdosed no fewer than six times — including three months after Althea’s death.

Though the characters must deal with his manias and their addictions, they always appear deeply in love and profoundly loyal to one another. Real life wasn’t quite the same: Larry filed for divorce in 1981. He never followed through, but Marsha says her sister left Flynt at least three different times.

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.

Two of Flynt’s most human moments in the film involve his gallantry on behalf of Althea, and both are pure fantasy. In the first, he’s in prison when she breaks the news to him that she has AIDS. 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.

Flynt was not in prison when he found out his wife had AIDS. According to his book, they were at home in their bedroom. 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. 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.

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. He pops a few wheelies, kisses her, then deposits her in the bathroom, where she ultimately drowns in the bathtub. When he sees her lifeless under water, he flings himself out of the wheelchair sobbing uncontrollably.

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.” He says they spoke in monosyllabic grunts when they spoke at all, and she never hopped on his wheelchair. “He was too fat to pop wheelies, he could hardly push himself,” says Marsha Rider.

Flynt didn’t find Althea’s body; her nurse did. And he was bedridden as she pulled her from the tub. Nor did he sob; in fact, the last chapter of his book is entifled “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.

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).

 

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. 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. Theresa supported Flynt’s story; but the jury didn’t buy it.

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. When I called Isaacman to ask what he thought about the alleged tape, Isaacman said, “I have no reason to believe it exists at all.”

I do. The Riders allowed me to listen to and transcribe the tape, which runs approximately 15 minutes. 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. 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.

What transpires is horrifying. 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.

Flynt admits, “So I told her . . . she looks a lot like her mother. 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. 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. He denies that he reached down her knee “like you were going to spread her legs.” At that point Althea tells him she’s going to call Theresa on the mansion phone and get her to come to their room. He tries to put it off until morning, but Althea makes the call anyway. 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.

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. She says Flynt told her he wanted to see if she was built like her mother.

Flynt explodes at his daughter: “Pack your f — clothes and get out of this house.” After Althea presses him on whether he put her hand on her thigh, he says, “Althea, I didn’t play with her c — .” When Althea asks if he spread her legs, he says, “No, she didn’t want me to, and I didn’t.” 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. Theresa tells Althea she was scared, and repeats it two more times.

Flynt accuses Theresa of trying to break up his marriage. Althea turns the accusation back on Larry: “You asked to see her down there, and you asked her to remove her panties.”

“But Althea,” Flynt protests, “I didn’t try to f — her.” Althea points out that he couldn’t, since he is paralyzed; he agrees. 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. That’s all, and then she runs her mouth to you. I don’t want anything to do with the fat little pig anyway.”

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. . . . I’ve slept in the same bed with my dad probably over 2,000 times as a kid . . . [until I was] probably about 15. . . . It’s just part of my childhood.”

Just what kind of man is the real Larry Flynt? Perhaps it is unfair to take his measure from estranged children, ex-wives, former in-laws, psychiatric evaluations, and audiotaped confessions of yore. 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 diamondstudded clitoris.

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. 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.”

Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.