Robert Rosen

If my business—if you can call what I do a business rather than a grand delusion that I've been pursuing for more than 50 years—needed a slogan, something like, "Just Do It" or "Finger Lickin' Good," it would be: "Pissing People Off Since 1971." This occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about all the people whom my writing has enraged or who have been infuriated by cartoons that other people have created and that I published in newspapers and magazines I once edited.

 

It's true that in the 1970s I did publish things to intentionally piss people off. In those days of emerging punk and outrage for the sake of outrage, it was a generational response to coming of age in a society run by criminals and hypocrites and seeing no path forward into a bleak-looking future. The Sex Pistols had good reason to sing, "No future for you." 

 

The best-known episode of this protopunk era was the publication, in 1974, in Observation Post (OP), a radical college newspaper I edited, of a cartoon of a "nun using a cross as a sexual object" (as The New York Times put it), drawn by the late artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio.

 

The drawing was Attanasio's statement on his childhood abuse at the hands of the Catholic clergy, which left him with what I now think was a case of PTSD. And the public reaction to the cartoon, which I touched on in Beaver Street, and which I'm exploring in detail in the book I'm currently working on, was so extreme, I'm still trying to make sense of it.

 

A very pissed off ultra-conservative New York Senator, James Buckley, led the charge against OP, calling for a federal investigation and the expulsion of the editors responsible for the cartoon. But nothing of the sort happened. Student newspapers, the courts declared, have a constitutional right to criticize religion in any manner they see fit, and the Catholic Church is not above criticism—which I'd think is especially true for those who've been subjected to the Church's abuse.

 

The people who became enraged at my John Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, were Yoko Ono's media flacks as well as Lennon fans who didn't like the inherent truth I communicated in the book. The media flacks were just doing what they were told to do. But fans of the man who sang "Just give me some truth," yet are opposed to learning the truth of who Lennon was in real life, have always puzzled me. It wasn't my intention to piss anybody off with Nowhere Man. It just happened naturally.

 

Beaver Street, my history of the adult entertainment industry, pissed off a lot of people, too. Some of them were enraged that I treated certain characters with what they thought was too much sympathy. Others were angry for the opposite reason. But nobody was more pissed off than the late Gloria Leonard, a former porn star and figurehead publisher of High Society magazine. Leonard demanded I make clear that she was the real publisher, not a figurehead. I refused. The barrage of junior-high-school-level insults she lobbed at me were reminiscent of the wit and wisdom of Donald Trump. The episode saddened me. I'd met Leonard several times and I liked her. But she was not the publisher of High Society. That would be Carl Ruderman, who hid behind Leonard's skirt.

 

I've run into only one person whom my latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, pissed off. It happened at an event where I read from the book and then took questions from the audience. A woman, making no effort to hide her rage, said that she grew up in Flatbush, only a few blocks from where I did, and what I described in the book was nothing like what she experienced. She implied that I was lying. My response: "Each block was like a mini-neighborhood and everybody had their own experiences." And I moved on.

 

There are more recent examples that I prefer not to get into here. Because there's no need to re-infuriate people whose wounds are still raw. But it does remind me of an old adage: If your stories don't piss anybody off, what you're writing is public relations, not journalism.  

 

And, of course, there are the immortal words of Joan Didion: "Writers are always selling somebody out."

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The news is all over Twitter and Facebook, but has yet to penetrate the mainstream media: Gloria Leonard, a popular adult film actress of the 1970s, and the former figurehead publisher of High Society magazine, passed away last night, in Hawaii, after suffering a massive stroke. She was 73.

Leonard, whom I'd met on numerous occasions when I worked at High Society in the 1980s, was a skillful public relations professional who was instrumental in selling "free phone sex"--the first fusion of erotica and computers--to America. As I say in Beaver Street, she presented High Society to the media as "visionary corporation" run by "a media-savvy porn star/publisher who was now making millions of dollars with phone sex, an explosive new business that hadn't existed two months earlier." And the media bought into it with a vengeance.

Leonard made tens of millions of dollars for the real publisher, Carl Ruderman, who, terrified of being publicly identified as a pornographer, “hid behind her skirt,” as Hustler publisher Larry Flynt put it.

Leonard, however, was no fan of Beaver Street, and vehemently objected to her portrayal in the book as a “figurehead” publisher. She threatened to sue me unless I told the story the way she wanted it told. It was a forceful PR gambit that, unfortunately for Leonard, failed. I didn’t change a word and she didn’t sue. Still, it saddened me to find myself in an adversarial relationship with somebody I’d once admired.

Leonard has many fans and admirers in the adult entertainment business, and I’ve no doubt that they’re feeling her loss deeply. To them, and to her family, I extend my condolences. Read More 

Much of the time I spent writing Beaver Street was devoted to research. It took me about a year to unearth all the information I needed for the Traci Lords chapter alone. Though time consuming, the problem wasn't finding material. Between Lords and the Meese Commission, there was too much material, and the challenge was to sift through it all, figure out what was important, and then integrate it into my narrative.

Carl Ruderman, the anonymous publisher of High Society magazine, posed an entirely different problem. The “Invisible Man of Smut,” as Al Goldstein called him, hid behind figurehead publisher Gloria Leonard and went to great lengths to keep his name out of the media, at least in connection with anything having to do with porn. In fact, as I said in Beaver Street, “an internet or library search for any connection between pornography and Carl Ruderman produces little that’s concrete or substantiated.”

Well, that’s changed since the book was published. In the past year, much that connects Carl Ruderman to pornography has been popping up on the internet. One example that I wrote about a few months ago was an article in the New York Observer that bore the headline, “Porn’s ‘Invisible Man’ Prices His Condos at $13.5 M.”

Yesterday, I found something even juicer: the Justice Department’s 1987 appeal of the dismissal of an indictment against Ruderman for “various federal obscenity crimes in connection with the operation of a ‘dial it’ telephone service whereby persons could call a New York City telephone number and listen to a sexually suggestive, pre-recorded message.”

You can read the entire document by clicking here.

I’ve posted this link for my own reference and as a service to any future researchers who want to cast more light on a man who revolutionized the porn industry but has, for the most part, managed to escape being credited (or indicted) for what he did. Read More 

In Beaver Street, I write at length about Carl Ruderman, the publisher of High Society magazine, who, in 1983, launched the age of modern pornography by giving the world “free phone sex,” the first fusion of erotica and computers.

Ruderman was schizophrenic in the sense that he didn’t permit the word “pornography” to be used in the office—“adult entertainment” was the acceptable term—and he wanted to be both anonymous and as famous as Hugh Hefner. “I want High Society to be a household name,” he’d often say at staff meetings. Ruderman’s name didn’t appear in the High Society masthead—he hid behind figurehead publisher Gloria Leonard, the porn star.

With the exception of Larry Flynt crowning Ruderman Hustler’s “Asshole of the Month” in November 1983, very little about him ever appeared in the press. Al Goldstein called Ruderman the “Invisible Man” of porn.

However, I recently noticed that The New York Observer ran a piece about Ruderman in the real estate section of their September 8, 2009 issue. It said he was selling his “full-floor, 5,550-square-foot, 13-room, eight-bedroom” condo at the Bristol Plaza on East 65th Street in Manhattan for $13.25 million. The story quotes an architect, Frank Visconti, who’d done work for one of Ruderman’s neighbors, as saying that the former porn publisher is “a very nice man.” Referring to the bust of Ruderman, labeled “The Founder,” that once graced the High Society reception area (High Society is now owned by Lou Perretta), Visconti says, “You don’t see statues with glasses.”

Most surprising is the photograph of Ruderman that appears with the article. The ex-pornographer, smiling and tanned, now dyes his silver hair black. Photographs of Ruderman are so rare that Larry Flynt offered $500 for one to run in Hustler. But nobody who had a photo was willing to accept his offer. Read More