Table Of ContentBENEATH CONTEMPT
AND HAPPY TO BE THERE
The Fighting Life of Porn King
AL GOLDSTEIN
by Jack Stevenson
www.worldheadpress.com
Contents
Page 3 Acknowledgements / Dedication
4 Introduction
7 Youth
13 Free, White And Twenty-One
16 Working Stiff
19 Desperation
22 The Demon God Of Pulp
26 (Still) Birth Of Screw
33 Demon God Of Pulp Descending
37 Down Every Alley
51 Screw vs. Mainstream Culture
53 Screw vs. Underground Culture
61 Tomorrow The World
66 The Screw Two
69 Porn Chic And The Spawn Of Screw
77 The Painful Price Of Success
84 Midnight Blue
88 Trials
92 Death Magazine: Dead On Arrival
Page 106 Battle Of The Bad Taste Titans
111 The Reagan Eighties
123 Screw Turns Twenty
127 Sweating In The Screw Poorhouse
134 Chillin’ With Grandpa
138 The Goldstein Curse
144 Fall Of The House Of Goldstein
150 The People vs. Goldstein
157 With Malice Aforethought
165 Homeless
174 Working Stiff (Again)
179 Walking Medical Time Bomb
183 Deep Shit
186 I, An Author
190 Goldstein For President
195 Conclusion: Deformed By Evil?
202 Appendix: Screw Goes To The Movies
210 Notes / Bibliography / Photo Credits
213 Index
218 About this book
Aknowledgements
Special thanks to Jeff Goodman, Silke Mayer and Joe Coleman
for use of their excellent photos and illustrations. And thanks to
a young man named John Walsh who was employed by Screw
magazine in the late eighties. One morning he came to work at the
Milky Way Production offices to find they were cleaning house and
had unceremoniously dumped piles of early issues of Screw and
its bastard progeny into the filthy gutter of 14th Street. He quickly
yanked out a selection of the cast-off issues before they were all
heaved into the garbage truck a few minutes later, and, aware of
my interest in these early publications, he mailed them to me. It
was an act of archeological prescience—prescient in that these
garbage pickings have aided me immensely in my exploration of
the most interesting period of Screw, its cursed and besotted youth,
and archeological in that these early issues were as yellowed,
brittle and flaked as the skin of ancient mummies. All interesting
things seem to rot quickly.
Dedication
Dedicated to all those who wonder why anyone should give a fuck
about the ravings of an apparent madman. So I guess that’s just
about everybody.
4 Beneath Contempt and Happy to be There
Introduction
Few transformations have been so jarring and
outwardly unfathomable as the one that turned an
overweight cab driver and welfare recipient into the
most outspoken figurehead of America’s sexual revolution.
But upon closer inspection perhaps not so unfathomable.
The driving force behind America’s take-no-prisoners sex
tabloid, Screw, that did so much to set that revolution in mo-
tion was a man by the name of Al Goldstein, who had been
taken prisoner all his young life. Taken prisoner by a tyran-
nical father, by a brutal inner city school system and most
of all by a culture of sexual repression that was endemic to
forties/fifties America. It was natural enough that he would
want to turn the tables. On the whole world. Forever. And,
like so many of the other sexual gurus of that era, he was a
quiet and introverted youth whose adolescent sexual pas-
sivity failed to hint that sex would in fact become his life’s
great and endless work. Predictably enough, the fact that
he was “sexually retarded” (his term) preordained it. The
thought never left him.
Goldstein’s life and career have been full of jarring trans-
formations. He is like no other celebrity on the American
scene; a larger-than-life confirmation of all the stereotypes
of the uncouth, foul-mouthed dirty-old-man pornographer,
who the next instant reveals a painfully human side and
tends to quickly tear-up.
Unlike most corporate publishing bosses who hide
behind a wall of lawyers, publicists, and spokesmen, he
refused to be “handled.” Consuming sex, food, fame, TV
sets, gold watches and obscenely expensive cigars with the
voraciousness of a garbage dumpster, he burned through
five wives and a fortune, blazing a descending arc across
Introduction5
Joe Coleman illustrated
the cover of this 1980 Screw “special”.
that dark and misty void known as the adult entertainment
industry. He came to symbolize all that was good, bad and
oh so ugly about America. He could never have survived,
thrived and become what he was in any other culture.
But I get ahead of myself. In the beginning, the very
beginning, he was cute. Like all babies.
… you think?
Little Al at his Bar Mitzvah.
Youth7
A 1
CH PT R
YOUTH
With a smack on his scrawny little ass and a scream, Al
came into the world in 1936, born into a first-generation
immigrant Jewish family of humble origins that lived in
a house on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
He had a “psychotic” brother he almost never refers to, a
“dumb father” and a “delusional” mother.1 So far so bad.
That mother, Gertrude Breslow, tended to the house while
husband Sam plied his trade as a shutterbug for the Daily
Mirror. Although he had served bravely as a photographer
during WWII, Al would forever characterize him as a
gutless weasel, a man who “walked around his whole life
in mortal fear… the personification of Camus’ The Stranger…
a man who said ‘sir’ to elevator operators.” A man who
quietly acquiesced to his wife’s long term affair with her
diet doctor. But there was one person on earth he could lord
it over—little Al.
And yet he took his stuttering, bed-wetting son to sports
events other boys could only dream about. They went to a
lot of the Friday night boxing matches at Madison Square
Garden, and little Al was there at ringside on October 26,
1951, when a brawling young Rocky Marciano floored an
over-the-hill Joe Louis with a left hook in the eighth round,
his dad hanging into the ropes trying to get the pic, eye
glued to his boxy camera. Little Al was also in tow on fre-
quent forays to Ebbets Field to see the great Dodger teams
of the forties. He got his picture taken with Jackie Robinson.
He devoured the Sporting News every week and became
so knowledgeable about the team that he guested as the
statistics-spouting “Little Alvin Goldstein” on a post-game
radio show. He also assisted his dad on more mundane jobs,
such as wedding photo shoots and such like.
