Beaver Street: The History of Modern Pornography
2003-07-15 10:16:55
With a Masters degree in journalism from the
City College of New York (CCNY), Robert
Rosen "started at High Society then moved to Swank Publications
in '84. There I worked on Swank, Stag, For Adults Only, D-Cup,
Shaved, X-Rated Cinema, Sex Acts, etc., etc. When Lou Perretta
bought Swank in 1993, he gave me Buf and Plump & Pink. Perretta
fired me in '99 after I sold my John Lennon biography "Nowhere
Man: The Final Days of John Lennon," which became an international
best seller and is now available in six different editions in
various languages. Random House, the book's first corporate publisher,
recently brought out a Spanish-language edition, and it's getting
a lot of press in Mexico."
Luke: "How did you get into the porn magazine business?"
Robert: "It was early 1983. I was 30 years old. I'd worked as
a straight freelance journalist for ten years. I'd been involved
with Yoko Ono, which was how I got the material to do that Lennon
bio. A close friend of mine was hired in 1979 as John Lennon's
personal assistant. After John was killed, he came to me and said
that John had told him that if anything happened to him, it was
his job to tell the true story of the final years of Lennon's
life. My friend hired me to help him write this book. It took
me 20 years to get the book out and it became a best seller in
various languages, which is how I've been supporting myself since
I left porno.
"I was born in Brooklyn. I moved to Manhattan in 1975. My undergraduate
degree was in creative writing. I studied with such people as
Joseph Heller and James Toback. My father owned a candy store
in Brooklyn. He sold that in the mid 1960s and he became a salesman.
My mother was a housewife and went back to work as an administrator
in a medical laboratory."
Luke: "So you were opening up The New York Times in early 1983
looking for a job?"
Robert: "It was a bad time for the economy. Reagan was President.
The unemployment rate was something like 10%. I had been unemployed
for some time. I was looking for anything. All of a sudden, all
these jobs popped up in porno. They didn't call it porno. They
called it men's sophisticates. I didn't realize at the time that
the reason there were all these sudden openings in porno was because
phone sex had taken off and there was this huge influx of money
into the porno biz.
"I applied for the job. It turned out to be High Society magazine.
I was hired in April 1983. This was my first permanent full-time
job."
Luke: "And Gloria Leonard was the publisher?"
Robert: "Gloria Leonard was the figurehead publisher. The real
publisher was Carl Ruderman. That became apparent in the first
couple of days. My job was associate editor and writing phone
sex scripts."
Luke: "How often did you see Ruderman?"
Robert: "He was there every day."
Luke: "Now he's more solitary."
Robert: "He seems to be a silent partner now. He claims to have
sold the magazine. I can't prove it but I'm certain he's still
an owner.
"When I was doing research for my new book, "Beaver Street: The
History of Modern Pornography," (check out "A Demimonde in Twilight"
from "The City" section of the NY Times June 2, 2002), I was trying
to figure some things out about Carl Ruderman. I noticed your
name kept popping up in writing about Carl Ruderman. It seemed
to be accurate, which is impressive because there's so little
information out there about Carl Ruderman."
Luke: "I want to know why he didn't get busted for those Crescent
Publishing Internet scams. He was the money behind them.
"What was your take on Ruderman?"
Robert: "I only lasted at High Society for about ten months. I
didn't know anything about commercial pornography. I just assumed
that this must be what all magazines are like. The thing about
Ruderman was how totally schizophrenic he was. Obviously High
Society was a porn magazine. But he did not allow the use of the
word pornography in the office. It was always 'adult entertainment.'
He had all these rules. If you used the word 'porno,' an editor
would pull you aside and inform you that you were violating the
rules.
"While Ruderman didn't put his name in the masthead and hid behind
Gloria Leonard, he insisted that everybody use their real name
in the masthead. And if you were balking at it, 'I don't know
if I want to put my real name in a porno magazine,' they would
say, 'Are you ashamed of working in adult entertainment?'
"When you work in publishing, you like to come to the office in
the morning, have a cup of coffee, and open up the Times. You
were not allowed to read newspapers there. You were only allowed
to read other porno magazines. The Holy Grail there was Hustler.
High Society deliberately patterned itself after Hustler. That
was the gold standard. We studied Hustler like the Bible.
"It was the November 1983 issue of Hustler where Carl Ruderman
was picked as the 'Asshole of the Month.' They put a $500 bounty
on his head to supply a photograph. That month that Hustler was
on the stands, Ruderman vanished from the country. That was the
one month we were not allowed to look at Hustler.
"It was an incredibly schizophrenic place. Ruderman was so paranoid
about being found out. He'd have these big editorial meetings
every week. He'd call on people and say, 'What have you done to
make my magazine a household name?' And if you didn't come up
with anything, he'd say, 'Mr. Rosen, do you want to be standing
on the bread line?' He would do that over and over. If you came
up with something really perverted, he'd say, 'Mr. Rosen, you're
a creative genius.'
"He was into gimmicks. Phone sex was the ultimate gimmick. He
wanted to be Hugh Hefner. He also wanted to be anonymous. It was
an incredibly tense place and Ruderman's schizophrenia was at
the root of it."
Luke: "Was Carl Ruderman banging a lot of the models?"
Robert: "I don't know that for sure but I've heard that from various
photographers in Stockholm. During the time I was there, he married
some stewardess."
Luke: "Was there sex going on in the office during your 16-years
in porn journalism?"
Robert: "No. I know that Ron Jeremy stayed behind closed doors
with some female editor for about three hours. Who knows what
happened. Suddenly there's an eight-page photo spread on 'Ron
Jeremy Anal Master.'"
Luke: "How often would you see Gloria Leonard?"
Robert: "She'd come up about once a month."
Luke: "What grasp did she have on her job?"
Robert: "She didn't have an editorial job. Her job was to talk
to the press. She was the public face of the magazine. She was
good with the media. She was charming and articulate. She did
a nice job making High Society seem like a magazine making a fortune
on the cutting edge of new technology [phone sex] not this tawdry
sleazoid porno rag.
"There were times when Ruderman logged 700,000 phone-sex calls
per day. The media frenzy was intense. There were lawsuits over
junior high school kids running up thousand dollar bills calling
phone-sex. The magazine was under a lot of scrutiny. Because High
Society was so closely patterned after Hustler, Larry Flynt hated
Ruderman. There was all this scrutiny and really bad, bad vibes
coming from all different directions. People there were very nervous.
"Towards the end of my tenure, the FBI came up to deliver a subpoena
to the editor-in-chief. They got past the woman at the front desk
and they walked right into the editorial department, found the
editor, handed him this subpoena and said, 'We have you on tape
giving an enema to an underage girl.' The editor goes completely
white. He looks like he's going to faint. Then the FBI guy says,
'Just kidding. We're only the FBI. When the IRS comes, that's
when you know you're in trouble.' This all had to do with phone
sex and that all these kids were calling the phone-sex lines.
"I got fired from High Society because of the John Lennon thing.
I was getting phone calls from the occasional reporter asking
about John Lennon and what was going on with the book. I told
a reporter from the New York Post that I worked on a porn magazine
called High Society. I got fired for saying in the New York Post
that High Society was a porn magazine. They said I was giving
the magazine a bad name.
"After that, I thought, if all porn magazines are like this, I
never want to work in porn again. I just collected unemployment
for seven months. It was running out. Nobody was breaking down
my door offering me jobs. I started looking through the classifieds.
I was quickly hired by Swank Publications, owned and operated
by Chip Goodman. His father, Martin Goodman, had founded the company
in 1932, publishing pulp magazines. Then he started publishing
comic books. He founded Marvel Comics. Before Swank and Stag became
porn magazines, they were men's adventure magazines. They had
people like Bruce Jay Friedman and Mario Puzo writing for them.
These magazines had an interesting history. We felt like we were
following in the footsteps of giants.
"Unlike Carl Ruderman, Chip Goodman was not totally obsessed with
phone sex. He had hundreds of different titles. He had become
wealthy as a straight-forward publisher. High Society had only
been around nine years while Swank Publications, in one form or
another, had been around over 50 years. Swank had a much better,
a much looser atmosphere. This changed over the years but when
I started working there, I felt like I had found worker's paradise.
"Carl Ruderman didn't have benefits. Chip Goodman had health insurance.
This was more like a real company."
Luke: "Who were some of the most memorable people you worked with?"
Robert, incredulous: "It was an intensely creative group of people
who all had something going on the outside. There were actors,
musicians, and people writing novels and screenplays. Everybody
was up to something.
"Neil Wexler stands out. He's still a friend of mine. He writes
porn screenplays and edits magazines. When it came to porno, he
seemed to know everything there was. He was my mentor.
"My office mate was an actor who'd turn up in Hollywood movies
playing Nazis. I saw him on TV all the time.
"It was a stimulating, competitive, and creative atmosphere. There
were people there who had worked with Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay
Friedman and Stan Lee. There was always this sense of history
underlying everything."
Luke: "How did things change in 1993 when Lou Perretta bought it?"
Robert: "Everything turned upside down. They took the company
out of New York and moved us to Paramus, New Jersey. This was
right when Bill Clinton was coming in to office. This was the
aftermath of the Meese Commission.
"After Meese and Traci Lords, Chip Goodman wanted to get out of
porn. Before that, he'd never felt a great urgency to do so. Then
when Traci Lords and the Meese Commission happened, there was
such shame now in being associated with porn. Anybody who could
get out of the business did. That's when Chip Goodman started
actively looking to sell the magazines. It still took him until
1993 to get the kind of deal he was looking for. He sensed that
the whole business was going to change. Magazines were losing
a lot of ground to videos.
"When Lou Perretta took over, it went from being a publishing
business to a printing business. Lou Perretta is a printer. When
Swank was owned by Chip Goodman, the point was to put together
a magazine that people would want to buy. When Lou Perretta took
over, the whole aim of the editor changed. It took me a few years
to catch on to this.
"From 1993 on, the purpose was not to sell as many magazines as
possible, but to keep the printing presses running seven days
a week, 24-hours a day. Every time you would come in for a salary
review, Lou would say, 'Your magazine is not making money. We
are making money as a printer. We are not making money as a publisher.'
"The business became more mechanical. All the emotion and energy
that used to be part of it was taken out of it. It became more
boring, more high-pressured. Then, in 1995, the Internet started
kicking in. Sales were going down. It was entirely possible that
if Lou Perretta wasn't a printer, the magazines wouldn't have
been making money any more. By 1997, the kind of sales figures
that would've been laughable in 1991, were considered great.
"In the late eighties, if you sold 30% of your copies, you were
low. If you sold 35%, you were doing as expected. If you sold
40%, you were high. With Perretta, if you were selling 28% of
your magazines, you were doing great.
"When I was at Swank under Goodman, the standard price for a pictorial
was $2500. That's what photographers expected. One of the first
things Perretta did was to cut the price to $1600, which threw
everything into turmoil. It became harder to get quality material."
Luke: "Which parts of your job did you find meaningful?"
Robert: "The most enjoyable years I had, when the business was
exciting to me, were between 1986-1991. That's when I started
doing D-Cup, the first magazine I edited. The magazine immediately
took off and sold well. I started making more money. They flew
me off to Europe to work with photographers and find these new
large-breasted models. I was always flying off to London and Amsterdam
and Stockholm to find girls with big tits. I was having a blast.
After Perretta took over, I felt like I spent seven years in Siberia.
I had this ringside seat to watch the magazines collapse and watch
the Internet take over.
"When the Internet first started happening, the publishers wanted
to pretend that the Internet wasn't happening. Finally, by 1996,
they realized that to stay competitive, they had to have their
own websites."
Luke: "How many models did you get to sleep with?"
Robert: "I'm a married man now. Let's talk about something else.
I've seen your website. I've seen what you do to those models
there. I'm sorry."
Luke: "Why did you get fired in 1999 by Lou Perretta?"
Robert: "He said my books weren't selling. But nobody's books
were selling. It was really my attitude. I couldn't stand being
there anymore and didn't try to hide it.
"I hated being in New Jersey. Editing porn mags had stopped being
interesting a long time ago. Buf and Plump & Pink were repulsive.
And then I got a deal for my John Lennon book I'd been trying
to publish for 20 years. I'm not even sure Perretta knew about
that."
Luke: "How much journalism did you get to do during your tenure
with these magazines?"
Robert: "What do you consider journalism? I spent a lot of time
interviewing the different models. I interviewed hundreds of models.
It's not like journalism was encouraged there. I knew from the
time I started working at High Society that there was a book about
the porn business that hadn't been written. I wanted to write
that book. That book is Beaver Street. I had been taking notes
for 16 years.
"In the book, I say that I've done everything from directing shoots
of amateur housewives f---ing themselves with dildos in Times
Square hovels, to directing porn stars having sex in 18th Century
English castles. I've seen the business from the sleaziest part
to the high-end part. I got a sense of the whole business from
top to bottom. I think Beaver Street is going to be the antidote
to the Traci Lords book. It puts in what Traci Lords leaves out
about the porn business - the five Ws - who, what, when, where,
why and often the how - of pornography. Beaver Street is like
Wall Street with an open pussy. A new age Tropic of Capricorn.
A serious history of corporate porn in the computer age that reads
like a comic novel. That was all put together by doing journalism
day-in and day-out for 16 years.
"Right before I got fired, I was doing this magazine called Succulent,
a big breast magazine. It only lasted a few issues. Around that
time, Trinity Loren died. Obviously she was a big breast icon.
Over the years, she helped me sell so many magazines, especially
D-Cup. The surprising thing about Trinity Loren's death was that
when it happened, nobody seemed to know about it. I found out
a month afterwards. There was no mainstream media coverage.
"One of the last things I did as a professional pornographer was
to investigate Trinity Loren's life and death. I did a long detailed
story about what happened, who she was, and how she died."
Luke: "What did you find out about her death?"
Robert: "I got that from police reports, a couple of little paragraphs
in Adult Video News... It sounds like she was drinking, taking
heroin, and some pills too... She died from drug poisoning. I
found it curious that somebody who had done so many movies and
had been such a popular porn star just died and nobody cared.
That was the essence of the story."
Luke: "How far along are you on Beaver Street?"
Robert: "I've got a rough draft of the entire book. I've got the
whole thing outlined. I've got a final draft of the first 100-plus
pages and my agent is sending it out. Nothing is easy. It took
me 20 years to get the Lennon book out. Beaver Street is something
I've been working actively on for four years, since I left porno.
Eventually I'm going to get a deal. It's always harder than you
think it is going to be."
Luke: "How did porn change you?"
Robert: "I don't think it changed me much. I would not have succeeded
as a pornographer for 16 years if I did not have a facility for
doing this kind of thing. To me, it was just a job. It's not like
I underwent some great personality change. I can't say I'm more
comfortable with sex and pornography because I was always comfortable
with sex and pornography. I never thought it was going to go on
for 16 years. I thought it would be a one or two year gig and
I'd get a book deal or something. I always kept a certain distance
from it.
"My friend Neil Wexler looks upon porn as other people might look
upon classical literature. I didn't get into as deeply as that.
"I learned a sense of the lowest common denominator from trying
to communicate with people on a large scale."
Luke: "Did you find your work in porn socially isolating? Did you
lose friends over it?"
Robert: "No. I didn't lose any friends. I found that I had to
be careful who I told what I did. It's not like you go into a
party and say you are a pornographer. The thing about Swank when
Chip Goodman owned it - they did porn magazines and straight magazines.
From 1987-92, on top of the porn magazines, I was also doing car
magazines. That was my cover. I would always tell people - 'I'm
a car magazine editor.' It was only once I got to trust somebody
that I would let them I know I had something to do with pornography.
Fortunately, my wife who I met while doing this, is an open-minded
woman. It never really bothered her. We've been together since
1990. She's an established editor and writer for mainstream books
and magazines. Unfortunately, not the kind of publishers who'd
like a book like Beaver Street. I prefer to remain optimistic
or I would not be able to work on the book on a daily basis."
Luke: "Are there any porn journalists that you hate?"
Robert, taken aback: "No. Porn journalism is not taken seriously
by people outside the industry. I spent a long time reading porn
journalism. It was fun to read. I liked to read the vile stuff
in Hustler and Screw, particularly the ones where Carl Ruderman
is the 'Asshole of the Month' and Chip Goodman is doing a lot
of cocaine. The porn journalists I know, I like. There's nobody
writing in porn that's offended me so much I've taken to hating
them.
"Before submitting to an interview with someone who has such a
mixed reputation, I tried to find out everything I could. I didn't
find anything new about you. It's always interesting to talk to
a famous journalist. The only porn journalist with a real reputation
is you. I've never had strong opinions about you. I've used you
as a source of information.
"I'm writing a personal book but I'm trying to remain neutral.
There are good and bad things in porn. I try to explain those
things in the most evenhanded way possible."
Luke: "How long do you think it will take you to finish it?"
Robert: "If I get a deal, I could finish it off in six months.
It's always easier to write when there's a real deadline and real
money involved."
Luke: "How would you describe yourself as a porn editor?"
Robert: "I tried to maintain a certain professionalism. I know
there are people who try to bang every model who comes along.
That makes it less professional. It makes it difficult to have
normal relationships in the real world. Look who I'm talking to.
I sound like I'm moralizing.
"This is no secret. When I started working at Swank, I met Neil
Wexler, who became my guide into the world of hardcore pornography.
He edited For Adult Only, a quirky little magazine. I was thinking
in 1984 that I had to do this porno book. I want to understand
what it's like to be in front of the camera as a porn model. I
can't write about this unless I experience what it's like to get
a hard-on in front of the camera.
"I was Neil's managing editor. I wrote a short story called 'The
$5 Blowjob.' It's about a cab driver who gets blown by his passenger
because she's $5 short on the fare. I decided to illustrate the
story. I decided to get in front of the camera and play the cab
driver and get the $5 blowjob while Neil took pictures. I did
that.
"The two questions I get more than any others is why do people
do it and how do people do it. It was the beginning of my personal
understanding of how difficult it is to be a porn stud. How difficult
it is to get an erection in front of the camera with people watching,
and the lighting... It was the only time I tried something like
that. It was humiliating and enlightening at the same time. It
gave me a certain insight into this peculiar talent. It explains
why people like Ron Jeremy can do it forever. These guys are hard
to replace."
Luke: "Who was the woman you worked with?"
Robert: "I do not know her name. She had just flown in to New
York City from Budapest. She spoke no English. She was a cute,
tall Hungarian model picking up an extra $100 for doing this amateur
photo shoot in a guy's Times Square apartment. I did it well enough
that the pictures were published. The pictures came out in 1985.
I never heard the end of it. People were still throwing this in
my face in 1999. They really didn't believe that I was doing this
as a journalistic experiment."
Luke: "People on the other side of the camera look down on those
who have sex in front of the camera."
Robert: "Yeah, I was surprised by the hypocrisy of it. All these
people are making their living putting together porno magazines,
be it in the accounting department or circulation department or
the art department or editorial department. It was shocking that
they would feel such contempt for somebody who would dare to cross
that line, especially when he didn't have to. I wasn't doing it
out of desperation or a need for money. I was a 34-year old professional
with a Masters degree, making a good salary, who had a good job,
who chose, as a journalistic experiment, to cross this line and
get a blowjob."
Why So Few Black Girls In Porn Magazines?
2003-07-21 10:14:48
I ask Robert Rosen. The author of
"Nowhere
Man: The Final Days of John Lennon," he worked in
porn mags from 1983 - 1999 and is working on a book about
that era called Beaver Street.
Robert replies: Re black girls: At Swank, under Chip Goodman,
we were prohibited from putting any "ethnic" women on
the cover, no matter how good looking or popular they
were. They feared it would hurt sales. The ideal Swank
covergirl was a young, white, large-breasted (but not
too large-breasted) blonde. They'd rather put a blonde
on the cover of D-Cup, over, say, Ebony Ayes, even if
the blonde wasn't featured in the magazine. I don't recall
ever running any ethnic girls in the centerfold, either.
It was different with Lou Perretta, but he didn't seem
to pay that much attention to what went into the magazines.
(There were too many magazines to keep track of.) In New
Jersey, I finally got to put a Latin woman, Angelique,
on the D-Cup cover, and it sold well. (But still never
a black woman.) At Swank, black women were generally confined
to the ghetto of "Black Lust," "Black Heat," "Portfolio,"
etc.
High Society was worse. In the time I was there I don't
recall even a single picture of a black woman in the magazine.
In Beaver Street, I explore this phenomenon in detail.
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