Bob Guccione Independent Caligula Interview 4/24/04

Bob Guccione: Porn free

No one lived larger than the legendary publisher of 'Penthouse' magazine. But the years have taken their toll on Bob Guccione. In a rare interview, he looks back with John Colapinto
Independent UK 4/24/04

    He rarely leaves "the House", a vast, vine-covered Upper East Side crypt that is Manhattan's largest private residence. Confining himself to a modest suite of rooms on the third floor - a level from which he will sometimes not stir for weeks - he sleeps by day and works by night, hunched over a light table in a chaotic, paper-strewn office-garret, poring over slides of naked young women. He is at once a public-relations master and a recluse; a street-savvy cynic and a gullible optimist; a tough-guy heavy and a sensitive artist. At the pinnacle of his power, when he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he even dreamed of defying death. Today, his business is bankrupt, his house up for sale, his personal debt in the tens of millions of dollars.
    Now 73, he is Robert Charles Joseph Edward General Guccione, creator of Penthouse, the greatest adult magazine in history. Unlike Playboy's airbrushed, schoolboy take on boobs 'n' buns, Guccione's Penthouse made sex look like something that happens between real adults (who weren't your parents). Darker and more decadent than Hugh Hefner's magazine ever dreamed of being, Penthouse played bad-boy Rolling Stones to Playboy's perky Beatles. A prime artifact of the glamorously gritty Seventies, Penthouse was the adult magazine that wormed its way into the kinkier recesses of the libidinal subconscious and, arguably, did more to liberate puritan America from its deepest sexual taboos than any magazine before or since.
    Guccione has always made it a point to leave visitors waiting - and today is no exception. As I wait in the second-floor ballroom of his mansion, I have time to admire the Icelandic goatskin rugs, the hand-carved tables and chairs, the gilded 18th-century piano and mosaic-inlaid indoor swimming pool. After 40 minutes, Guccione finally makes his entrance, descending a curving marble staircase from his office-and-bedroom suite. Despite all he has been through lately - and it would be enough to crush a lesser man - he carries himself with an imperial swagger, shoulders back, head high. He gives very few interviews these days, most by fax, almost none in person. The reason is obvious the moment he speaks.
    "Very nice to meet you," he says in a mushy half-whisper that is almost indecipherable. The sad condition of Guccione's once-famous baritone is the result of cancer that has claimed most of his tongue, soft palate and epiglottis. A liquid nutrient mixture, administered by a tube attached to his abdomen, is his sole means of sustenance now - a cruel circumstance for a man whose taste for female flesh was rivaled only by his pleasures as a gourmand and amateur chef. "This," he says with a smile, as he settles into a chair opposite me, "is a time when you realize that food is even more important than sex."
    Otherwise, Guccione seems surprisingly well. A face-lift he had some years ago startles less in person than in photographs. His hairpiece is age-appropriate, at least. His lean, muscular body exudes more than a little of the old sexual threat: the famous chest, sun-lamped to a ruddy roast-beef hue, is partly covered by a fisherman's jersey, sleeves rolled high to expose powerful biceps. But reminders are everywhere of his diminishment. Gone from amid his graying chest hairs are the multiple gold chains and medallions that were his sartorial signature. He has been forced to edit his neckwear to a single gold strand. "I was getting so many MRIs and tests," he explains, "you have to take them on and off - it got to be a pain in the ass."
    Today, Guccione is nothing if not the victim of cruel fates. But though he blames much of his ruin on others - the FBI, the Reagan administration, Atlantic City gaming officials, the zeitgeist itself - the reality is that his dramatic fall is chiefly his own doing, the inevitable result of the very confidence, grandiosity and entrepreneurial braggadocio that allowed a middle-class Jersey boy to build what was one of the most successful magazines in publishing history and become, for a time, one of the richest men in America.
    During Playboy's recent 50th-anniversary celebrations, Hugh Hefner was heard to complain that he didn't get enough hugs as a child. Hustler's Larry Flynt grew up deprived in the South, where his first sex partner was a chicken. By contrast, Guccione's childhood was exceptional for its abundance of love and stability. Born in Brooklyn, he was raised in Bergenfield, New Jersey. The eldest of three children and the only boy, he was doted on by his first-generation Sicilian-American parents. His father, Anthony, was an f accountant for a neon-light company owned by one of his wife's brothers. Guccione was devoted to both parents but especially his mother, Nina. The feeling was mutual, and may explain Guccione's youthful confidence.
    "At school, my classmates would follow me," Guccione says. "I would set the pace: This is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to do it." At the same time, he showed an early penchant for reclusiveness, sequestering himself for hours with pencil and paper.
    After a brief flirtation with the priesthood, the 18-year-old Guccione perhaps wisely rededicated himself to his childhood dream of becoming an artist - a dream which took him to California, Romme, Paris and Spain, where he supported himself by sketching portraits of tourists. His dark, sullen good looks won him small roles in Italian movies; and by night, he painted oils of startling mastery: still lifes, landscapes, portrait heads. But after five years, during which time he had married (briefly) and acquired a daughter, he had sold no canvases.
    When his wife and daughter returned to California, the freshly unencumbered Guccione sailed to North Africa and joined a circle of expatriates who had formed around the writer William S Burroughs. Guccione smoked pot, played chess, painted and further educated himself in bohemianism. He also met a 25-year-old British cabaret singer called Muriel Hudson, whom he married in 1956.
    The couple moved to London and had three children. Despite considerable poverty, Guccione even then carried himself with a lordly confidence that led Muriel's friends to sardonically dub him "JC"- short for Jesus Christ. By his early thirties, however, he found himself in a most unlikely role: as husband and father renting a small house in Chelsea and working as the manager of a dry-cleaning firm. It was around this time that he started haunting newsstands to see what was selling and why. He noticed an American magazine that was doing a brisk business: Playboy.
    Though Hefner's magazine had been around for a decade in America, Guccione had missed it during his travels. But he thought a similar magazine, featuring British nudes and editorial, would sell even better than Playboy in England. He admits to a "voyeuristic" bent but says that creating Penthouse was primarily a way to generate income so he could pursue his true calling: painting. But once committed to Penthouse, Guccione poured into it all of his bohemian-artist's loathing for sexual repression and censorship. "People said it was pornography," he recalls, "and I argued with them. I said, 'What's pornography? Censorship is pornography.' I wasn't just a businessman rationalizing his business. I was a believer!"
    He spent three years trying to find other believers to invest in Penthouse. No one bit. So he decided to do it himself - establishing a pattern that would persist for the rest of his life: a refusal to take on partners; to act as lone wolf. He talked up the not-yet-in-existence magazine - for which he had no money - to trade publications and newspapers. To raise cash through subscriptions, he produced a brochure filled with photos of half-naked girls and sent them out by direct mail - a scheme which saw him denounced in Parliament and dubbed a "sex fiend" by the tabloids.
    For Guccione, it was a publicity bonanza worth millions. Subscriptions poured in, and when the first issue finally hit the newsstands in 1965, bearing an original Guccione cover shot of a sulky girl in an oversize sweater and nothing else, it sold out in two days. "Far from liberating myself to paint," he says, "I became so inundated with responsibility that there was no way I could pick up a brush." Instead, he worked 20-hour days, writing, cartooning, taking pictures, composing limericks, selling ad space. Ask him about Swinging London, and he snorts, "I missed it all."
    But while Carnaby Street may have eluded him, his working life was far from monastic - as his intense one-on-one photo sessions attest. Guccione did everything himself, including the models' hair and make-up. He instructed the girls not to smile or look at the camera, so that he appeared to be peering in on their intimate moments of self-exploration. "We followed the philosophy of voyeurism," he says. "To see her as if she doesn't know she's being seen. That was the sexy part. That was the part that none of our competition understood." Guccione often spent days on a shoot. "I used to throw away rolls of film just wooing the girl into being relaxed," he says. "Making her laugh, directing her expressions. 'Close your eyes, half-close your eyes...' "
    Meanwhile, and perhaps not surprisingly, Guccione's marriage to Muriel was in trouble. "Even before Penthouse, he was very sexually active," says Bob Jr, Guccione's eldest son. "So when he started the magazine, it was like finding out that an alcoholic had bought a pub. My mother had had enough."
    By the time divorce proceedings were begun, however, Guccione had met a woman more amenable to the Penthouse ethos. Kathy Keeton, a slim blonde from South Africa, had come to England at 12 on a Royal Ballet scholarship. By the age of 26, she was working as a burlesque dancer and actress. Smart and ambitious, she jumped when Guccione offered her a job as Penthouse's first ad salesperson. Unlike Muriel, Keeton had little problem with the magazine's emphasis on naked girls. "She understood it completely," Guccione says. "She enjoyed it." Keeton became Guccione's lover and soul mate. They would remain together - despite his serial infidelities - for the next 32 years, until her early death in 1997.
    Penthouse was three years old when Guccione's British distributor mentioned that the magazine was outselling Playboy two-to-one among American servicemen in Vietnam - the prime 18 to 30 year-old male demographic. It was then, Guccione says, that he realized his erotic vision could rival Hefner's in America. So he and Keeton moved to New York, set up headquarters at the Drake Hotel and in 1969 took out a full-page ad in the New York Times showing Playboy's rabbit logo in the cross hairs of a gun. The caption read, "We're going rabbit hunting".
    Guccione vowed to catch the bunny in five years. A few months later, in the April 1970 issue, he hit on the formula for doing so. There, he ran a small photo of a naked blonde walking on a beach - a shadow at the top of her thigh was just identifiable as pubic hair. "Back then, the legal line between what was 'obscene' and what was acceptable was pubic hair," Guccione says. "When there was no prosecution, we went even further." Within a year, Penthouse's circulation passed a million.
    As the Seventies progressed, Guccione kept one step ahead of Playboy in the evolution towards greater explicitness. But not all of Penthouse's exposés were devoted to female genitalia. The magazine also carried tough investigative journalism on topics ranging from CIA corruption to the mob, and from the sleaziness of the medical establishment to the shoddy treatment of Vietnam veterans.
    By July 1977, Penthouse had drawn even with Playboy, both magazines posting circulations of 4.5 million. That month, Guccione was pictured in Time wearing a rare grin, doodling a weeping Playboy bunny and boasting of Penthouse's pioneering firsts: "Lesbians, threes, full-frontal male nudity, erect penis." No wonder he sounded buoyant. Pocketing a large percentage of the then-hefty $2 cover price of each newsstand sale, he was growing richer by the instant, soon amassing a personal fortune of around $500m (the equivalent of several billions today). Guccione threw himself into the role of empire-building publishing magnate with a vengeance, buying an entire building at Broadway and 68th Street to house his burgeoning magazine group, which he dubbed General Media and which eventually included the science magazine Omni, its spinoff Longevity and sex quarterlies Forum and Variations, as well as a welter of titles on subjects ranging from cars to bodybuilding.
    With dreams of establishing his own movie studio, he branched out into Hollywood, investing money in The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds, The Day of the Locust and Chinatown. In 1976, he began work on the world's first megabudget X-rated porn flick: Caligula, a Roman epic he hoped would shatter the boundary between our unspoken sexual desires and the polite restraints imposed by society. Guccione commissioned Gore Vidal to write the screenplay, and hired top actors including Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole. Eighteen months, US$17m of Guccione's money and many lawsuits later (both director Tinto Brass and screenwriter Vidal demanded to have their names taken off the credits), Caligula opened in late 1979. Or was meant to. Distributors refused to touch a movie featuring brother-sister incest, bestiality and many, many languorous blow jobs. Guccione announced, "Fuck 'em", and rented his own Manhattan cinema. The reviews were murderous, the box-office feeble (although the movie is now Penthouse's best-selling video) but Guccione was unfazed. He made plans to film the second in a projected trilogy of sex epics, the story of Catherine the Great, with himself as director.
    He also began work on the home that would, after Penthouse, become his greatest labor of love. He bought two adjacent town houses on East 67th Street, gutted them and built his palatial 27,000 sq ft, 45-room mausoleum to the self. Architects worked for three years to realize Guccione's fantasy. Artisans were flown in from Italy to do the marble work. As well as the swimming pool, movie-screening room and ballroom, the house was filled with paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Van Gogh and Durer.
    Yet despite the opulence, which seemed designed to rival Playboy's West Coast mansion, life was very different chez Guccione than at Hefner's pad. Where Hefner promoted an image of himself as randy harem-master of the "love grotto" frequented by movie stars and rockers, Guccione expressed his power and wealth through the application of a chilly decorum. At the House, there were no bacchanals, no drugs, no orgies. "We had parties," Guccione says, practically lifting his nose in the air, "but they were business parties, for advertisers; not for fun."
    Meanwhile, Guccione himself kept a shy, awkward distance from his visitors. At dinner parties, he often remained for hours in the kitchen cooking pasta sauces for his guests. When Guccione did put in an appearance, he would soon make an early dash for his bedroom upstairs with a favored Pet.
    By the dawn of the 1980s, Penthouse was, improbably enough for a $140m-a-year porn business, a family firm employing three generations of Gucciones. In a clear bid to retain control over his empire, Guccione had hired his retired accountant father as company treasurer, one of his sisters as office manager, the other as a PR agent, his eldest daughter as head of West Coast promotions and his eldest son, Bob Jr., as head of circulation and marketing. This was life as Guccione liked it: holed up 24 hours a day in his mansion with his artwork, his dependents and his Pets. Editorial meetings were conducted at the House, where a given editor would meet with him in a dark wood-paneled office off the second-floor ballroom, guard dogs asleep at Guccione's feet. "The dogs were flatulent," recalls one former editor, "so you'd have these farting Ridgebacks in the dark room with the red chandelier. This heaviness fell over my body whenever I was there. After a while you think, 'Aww, man, how can he take this? There's not enough oxygen, there's no light.' "
    Yet Guccione thrived on such seclusion, which left him free to indulge his intellectual enthusiasms and hobbies, which now included a serious foray into life-extension - a field close to his heart, as he and Keeton advanced into middle age. As guinea pigs for the dreams of living-to-100-and-beyond outlined in their magazine Longevity, Guccione and Keeton ingested up to 500 diet supplements daily, tinting themselves orange from massive doses of beta carotene. The couple's regimen also included human growth hormone to halt the ageing process and, to keep Guccione's sexual motor revved up to full capacity, testosterone. A family member recalls how the couple spoke of being cryogenically frozen, shot into space, then brought back to Earth once mankind had developed the technology to resurrect them.
    To those close to Guccione, such crazy dreams spoke less of his grandiloquent ego than of an unlikely gullibility that left him prey to all manner of hustlers who managed to talk their way past the security gates. "He simply believes what people tell him," one former business adviser says. "You say, 'Bob, I can get green cheese from the moon, and I think it would sell here.' He'll say, 'You think so? I can do a marketing plan!' "
    Hence, in the early 1980s, Guccione decided single-handedly to fund research into creating the world's first nuclear-fusion reactor, a power source that would, if successful, solve the world's then-pressing energy crisis, rid the planet of pollution-causing fossil fuels and, perhaps not incidentally, make Guccione the richest man in history. He set up nuclear physicist Robert Brussard and 82 experts from around the world in a research lab in San Diego, all paid for by profits from Penthouse. His former business adviser remembers trying to talk Guccione out of the project. Guccione wouldn't budge. To this day, Guccione remains unapologetic about the $20m he squandered on the doomed project. "It's a wonderful feeling to be a pioneer," he says, "and had that been successful, we would have solved all the energy problems of the earth."
    Solving the earth's problems proved to be an expensive proposition, however, even for a man of Guccione's wealth. He planned to supplement the funding with cash from a new revenue source: casinos. Owner of a prime site in Atlantic City, he had begun work on the Penthouse Casino back in 1978. Typically, Guccione funded the massive project entirely with his own money. "People were saying to me, 'You have to be careful; they might not give you a license,' " Guccione recalls. "But I said, 'There's no way in the world they cannot license me. I have a completely clean record.' "
    Today he admits that he might have been naïve in his assumptions about the gaming commission, which was under intense pressure to keep out anyone who carried even a whiff of sleaze. Guys like...Bob Guccione.
    "The impression they must have had of me was: a Sicilian pornographer coming in to own a casino, with no partners. That spelled Mafia to them." Guccione denies that he has ever been connected to the mob. "I wouldn't be in the trouble I'm in if I was Mafia," he says.
    But suspicions about Guccione - exacerbated, he insists, by an FBI probe that turned up no wrongdoing on his part - scuttled his chances in Atlantic City. A bank that had, he says, promised him a loan of $125m to complete the casino backed out. By 1980, he had sunk some $65m of Penthouse profits into the stalled casino project. "It was an albatross around his neck," says his former business adviser.
    That albatross only grew heavier as Penthouse saw its sales decline as the 1980s progressed. The advent of Aids, the ageing of the baby-boomers and the election of Ronald Reagan seriously chilled the sexual revolution. Several major retail chains yanked Penthouse from their shelves, a huge blow to the bottom line. In July 1984, Penthouse made publishing history by selling the single largest number of issues of any publication ever: 5.4m copies of a spread featuring Miss America Vanessa Williams. But that cash bonanza was a one-off anomaly, and sales continued their slide.
    In the 1990s, explicit sex offerings on cable and pay-per-view television further eroded Guccione's share of the soft-core market. Then came the rise of the internet. Penthouse's sales went into free fall, dipping below a million, then dropping like a stone to 600,000 copies a month. To stay competitive, Guccione took Penthouse hard-core with excursions into areas - like anal sex and what the trade calls "water sports" - it had previously avoided. He says he had no choice: "A soft-core magazine today just doesn't have a chance." Advertisers, however, left in droves - especially over the water sports. Profits continued to shrink, and Guccione was forced to fold Omni and Longevity.
    Things were even worse on the home front. In 1995, Kathy Keeton was diagnosed with breast cancer that spread quickly to her stomach and liver. After a two-year battle, she died in 1997. Guccione was inconsolable. He obtained a special dispensation and had Keeton buried on the lawn of their country estate. He has left her name on the Penthouse masthead, where she is still identified as vice chairman of General Media. In a 1999 interview, he broke down discussing Keeton's death, sobbing, "I've never fully recovered." To me, Guccione, misty-eyed, choked out, "She was a monumental part of my life." Indeed, some close to Guccione say her influence extends beyond the grave. In her final months, Keeton befriended a pixieish ex-model named April Warren. Guccione and Warren remain together to this day.
    From the beginning, Guccione viewed himself as the patriarch of a clan that, like the Kennedys (which went from bootlegging to the White House in a generation), would go from porn to the presidency in his lifetime. When his second son, Tony, was a child, Guccione spoke of how he would become President. When Tony later pointed out that he was born in England and thus could not occupy the Oval Office, Guccione replied, "Senator, then." But those dynastic dreams, like so much else, have withered. Guccione is estranged from all but one of his five children (he still speaks to Tonina, daughter from his first marriage). "My father was extremely loyal right up to the point when people crossed him or slighted him," says Tony. "And then he'd cut them off with no regret."
    His estrangement from his children is the only topic Guccione refuses to discuss with me, and indeed it is when I press him on this issue that I finally glimpse the Guccione described by author Michael Korda as a "genuine tyrant". In a low growl, Guccione repeats that he will not discuss "family matters", then falls into a funereal silence.
    IN 1998, less than a year after Keeton's death from cancer, Guccione began to experience pain in his head and neck. A year of CAT scans, MRIs and other tests turned up nothing. Then, on a visit to his dentist in 1998, Guccione was told there was a mark on his tongue. Cancer. He underwent five laser surgeries and six weeks of radiation, which left him cancer-free but badly weakened. Meanwhile, his money problems only got worse. In a bid to reduce his debt to bondholders, he sold all his peripheral magazines and much of his art collection; but it was too little, too late. When the deadline on the remaining US$40m in bonds came due in 2000, Guccione couldn't pay back his lenders. He narrowly avoided a forced auction of his house only by agreeing to extend the bonds an extra three years - but at a crushing interest rate of 15 per cent and with a commitment to make regular payments on the principal.
    With Penthouse's newsstand sales now dipping below 500,000, Guccione couldn't make the payments. Last April, the magazine suspended publication for a month. Layoffs cut the staff in half, and those who remained saw their paychecks reduced or suspended. In June, he ran out of options. The bondholders wanted their money - now. "I had meetings with them," Guccione recalls. "I said, 'Please just take interest; we can service the interest; we've been doing it for seven years. Otherwise, you'll destroy us.' They wouldn't hear of it." Guccione was forced to declare bankruptcy.
    Last December, Guccione resigned as chairman of General Media. Two weeks later, on the eve of his 73rd birthday, he was forced to do the unthinkable: to consider selling Penthouse. "My idea was not to sell under any circumstances, because it was too personal an extension of myself, my dreams, my emotions."
    Meanwhile, Guccione's money problems slid toward nightmare. Having defaulted on the loans he'd taken out on his house, he was under pressure to pay off the $17m mortgage or face eviction. When I asked where he'd go if forced from the House, he mumbled, "Probably my [country] house upstate." But this home, too, has been for sale for months.
    Given his travails, it was hardly surprising that Guccione, at times, succumbed to moments of fatalism in my interview. At one point, I mentioned that he must be glad his cancer surgeries were successful. "Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease," he slurred. But such glimmers of despair were infrequent. Mostly, Guccione's mood was that of a fighter who will not surrender.
    Only when pressed did he admit that he even has any regrets about debacles like Atlantic City. "Of course I'm upset when I look back," he said. "But I don't beat myself up about it like some people do."
    Earlier this year, after several false starts, Guccione finally appeared to find a white knight to rescue Penthouse. He struck a deal with the Mexican businessman Dr Luis Enrique Molina - to sell Penthouse on the understanding that Guccione be left alone to guide the magazine with his own vision (and at a salary of US$1m a year) while Molina exploits the brand name in other business and licensing ventures including cable TV, video and the internet. Guccione was also able to stage an eleventh-hour escape from eviction from his beloved House. On 23 February, Molina wired $24m in cash to Guccione's creditors, even as a moving van, locksmith and three sheriffs were outside awaiting orders to bodily remove the legendary pornographer from the mansion. Under an agreement with Molina, Guccione will continue to live there, paying one dollar a year in rent.
    Whether Guccione has won permanent reprieve from his money woes or has simply forestalled them remains to be seen. Equally vexed is the question of how Guccione will adjust to living as a tenant in his former dream palace, not to mention as a salaried employee at the company he created and ran with absolute control. No matter what happens, you have to admire his superhuman toughness in battling back from the brink again. This is a 73-year-old man battered by cancer, creditors, widowhood and family problems - yet he never gave up. Tell Guccione he's a tough bastard, and he shrugs.
    "It's not like it was a job," he says. "It was a major part of my life - and you would do exactly the same thing if somebody came and stripped you of what probably was the most important thing in your life. You would fight back. Anybody would. I don't know how strong that is. It's just a survivalist attitude."