![]() Now, lots of folks aren't going to mourn the passing of Penthouse any more than they'll bemoan the demise of the Oldsmobile. The judge, as I recall, knocked the award down a few hundred million. The jury found in Guccione's favor and awarded him $400 million or something like that. Guccione is wearing three or four gold chains around his neck right now." Quarnstrom, what do you mean when you say that my client is 'bejeweled'?" I think I pointed to Guccione, who was sitting in the courtroom staring stilettos at me, and said, "Well, from where I sit, it looks like Mr. I seem to recall that after a half day grilling me on the witness stand, Guccione's high-powered lawyer pointed to something I'd written in Hustler and asked, "Mr. I was there to testify in the trial of Guccione's multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Larry, claiming that Flynt and Hustler had invaded his privacy and libeled him. I spent one of the most miserable weeks of my life in Columbus, Ohio, described as "the city of seven flat places" by the Hustler editors who'd left there for the West Coast when Larry moved his operation to L.A. You have to miss that kind of competition between skin mag dudes. In fact, Guccione was bound and determined to prove that Larry was jealous enough to be out to get him, to discredit him, in the pages of Hustler. ![]() And I'll always remember the wise advice he cackled at me in his back-country Kentucky hillbilly drawl: "Lee, always put a pretty girl on the cover of your magazine!" He pronounced "put" "putt."Īlthough he never admitted it in my presence, I suspect that for all of his bluff and bravado, Larry was for a while a bit jealous of Guccione and of Playboy czar Hugh Hefner. ![]() Larry Flynt's genius, as I figured out after some months of his tutelage, was in doing something different each issue, something sexier, something even more outrageous than he'd printed the previous month. Hustler was a breakthrough of sorts in the smut biz. Our Hustler Honeys were more like the hot little number down at the bar who'd likely give you a blow job out in the parking lot if you'd buy her a couple of beers. And true, we tried to be crude and tasteless in cartoons and other humor sections, and we presented the models as neither sophisticates nor the girls next door. Hustler has always touted its hard-hat-wearing, lunch-pail-carrying blue-collar clientele. ![]() Before Hustler, the choice was between the girls next door with gigantic tits in Playboy or those with smaller breasts in the slightly kinkier Penthouse. Hustler's motto, by the way, used to be "For the rest of the world" - that is, guys who found Penthouse and Playboy effete. I don't even pick up Hustler, the magazine where I spent some happy seasons as executive editor nearly a quarter-century ago. He recently told the New York Times that "there is no future for magazines such as Penthouse."Ĭall me sentimental, but I'm gonna miss Penthouse. Guccione claims his 37-year-old publication is millions of bucks in the hole and selling only 650,000 copies each month - down from a high of 5 million back in the good old days of print onanism. Reports that Penthouse boss Bob Guccione may throw in the towel and literally stop the presses at his venerable strokebook are alarming: Can it be that glossy print pornography is headed for oblivion, like "burlesk" and 8-page dirty comics? Are DVDs, the Internet and, of all things, those awful rags featuring tattoos, skateboarder duds and pretty gals in thongs replacing the T&A books that helped millions of chronic masturbators - myself included - through our youthful years? ![]()
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