A couple of years ago, Pacific Drift, a public radio show produced in Southern California, featured a segment on “three very successful writers who all got their start,” according to host Ben Adair, “in sort of a surprising place—Hustler magazine.” In particular, they all credited as their mentor Allan MacDonell, the former executive editorial director of Larry Flynt Publications, which publishes Hustler. For instance, Evan Wright, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of Generation Kill, recalled MacDonell telling him that he “might have been one of the top two or three writers for Barely Legal” (one of the many other porn titles published by LFP). “I was flooded with this sense of achievement,” gushed Wright. “I can tell you that it actually felt better than getting the National Magazine Award for my reporting on Iraq.” Pause. “Is there any irony in that,” the interviewer asked, “or are you being serious?”
MacDonell was fired from —Hustler in 2003, after some twenty years on the job; not surprisingly, he has written a book about his experiences working there. Anyone who can put fingers to keyboard and has worked in the adult industry has likely been tempted to write about it; not only do such titles stand a better-than-usual chance of getting published, but they might actually sell well. Oftentimes those writing on the porn industry employ one of two methods in order to distance themselves from their subject. They might observe and record activities in an anthropological way, that is, without engaging in the described activities (e.g., Luke Ford’s History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film; Legs McNeil’s The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored History of the Porn Film Industry); alternatively, they can go “behind the scenes” so as to offer a more accurate rendering and a greater understanding of the described activities (e.g., Lily Burana’s Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America; J. McIver Weatherford’s Porn Row).
MacDonell, however, is neither an anthropologist nor an interloper, but rather an industry veteran who wasn’t expecting to be fired. For that matter, he never really expected to be hired: “I’d come in as an assistant nobody and risen to the top, like scum on a cup of hot chocolate,” he writes in the introduction to Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine. “If this progression had occurred at Condé Nast, I’d be pushing my publicist for a five-page profile in Forbes. When we met during the filming of The People vs. Larry Flynt, actor Woody Harrelson, who portrayed Larry in the movie, said, ‘You’re the guy who’s got the best job in the world.’ If so, why did I start my car every morning, then sit behind the wheel for 10 minutes debating whether or not to open the garage door?”
It’s hard to imagine that anyone with this kind of sensitivity would work nine-to-five, for twenty years, on a monthly product that most people secrete away and “use” for just minutes at a time, if at all. There is genuine humanity in this memoir, though, not that any of it is uplifting or inspirational. Chances are slim that anyone will finish Prisoner of X and think, “Here is the path for me!” Nor does MacDonell romanticize the porn industry; its denizens are not revealed to have hearts of gold.
Instead, he writes about his career at Hustler with journalistic detachment and a novelist’s eye for telling detail; imagine Gore Vidal describing the psychological impact of being subjected to a video of, purportedly, a post-post-post Barbarella-era Jane Fonda wearing a strap-on and taking care of business with Ted Turner; imagine if the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote pornographic criticism about government officials and other public figures instead of pornographers; imagine if Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens wrote a feature-length article about fellatio as one of America’s great pastimes (oh wait, you don’t need to imagine that—Hitchens’ “As American as Apple Pie” appeared in the July 2006 issue of Vanity Fair).
I worked for MacDonell shortly after arriving in Los Angeles from New York. It was December 1999 and I had a résumé and a pile of writing clips, but no job. My first stint at Larry Flynt Publications involved writing for Leg World, which catered to men with such fastidious fetishes that it was difficult to come up with content that would please any majority of them. Some threatened cancellation of their subscriptions unless more shots of models wearing sheer stockings, preferably black with opaque, reinforced toes, were provided, while others forcefully argued in favor of the un-garbed foot. Seven months later, I was promoted to editor of Chic, Hustler’s presumably less raunchy twin. At one time, the Chic masthead included an editorial director, managing editor, associate editor, and cartoon editor, along with a list of contributors like Nat Hentoff, Norman Mailer, and John Ehrlichman. By the time my name appeared there in slightly bastardized versions (Allison Jenks, A.J. Ferguson), the magazine had been put on a starvation diet. Editorial content was stripped to the bare essentials, which meant the pictorials were broken up by a few Cosmopolitan-style “non-fiction” features (“Carnal Corporate Challenge—Get Sexually Harassed”), confessionals (“ ‘Does One Time Make You A Lezzie?’—Tattooed Love Girl Slips on a Clam”), and expert advice (“What Her Lingerie Reveals: More Than You Think!”), all intended to help the reader better understand the female psyche in order to get laid.
During my tenure at LFP, I was always treated respectfully by MacDonell—more than I deserved, seeing as I was frequently late and spent a lot of time reading back issues of the New Yorker, which I hid between the covers of Penthouse and Juggs (if anyone asked, I was analyzing the competition). Nor was I a special case. He rarely, if ever, reprimanded anyone for being late or for dressing like a bum, even though he himself dressed to the nines and his door was always swung wide open by 9:00 a.m. He also taught new skills to everyone on his staff, from the editorial assistant to his managing editor, and was quick to champion their promotions. It was from him that I gained an appreciation for the art of photo selection, creating paginations, and working with the graphic designer to create eye-catching covers and layouts.
MacDonell insisted on excellent writing and attention to graphic detail. By word and example, he instilled in his staff the idea that writing was an act of service—no matter the topic, you put forth your best effort within the parameters of the assignment. That meant consulting the LFP style guide to, say, see if you’d used the word “ass” too many times; scouting out synonyms for “buttocks”; noting that “blowjob” was one word (not two, and no hyphen); and remembering to capitalize Lycra—and, in fashion text, include a registration mark: Lycra®. These things mattered.
All Chic cover lines, every last punctuation mark, and each faux letter from the readership was scrutinized by MacDonell. (Real letters were generally too depressing to run; Chic’s editorial content, he explained, was supposed to infuse the reader with hope for a hot sex life, not remind him that he was in prison, or had never had a girlfriend, or was subject to other unpleasant but all-too-common realities.) He read your copy carefully while you sat across from him, waiting. His pen would hover over the page and then suddenly strike, slash, add, omit—it was always an instant improvement, and usually a lesson in correct usage. If you wrote something, anything, that he didn’t touch, you felt proud, even if it was only a caption for the table of contents.
Unfortunately, sales never picked up at Chic, and I lost my job when it folded. A couple of years later, I was surprised to hear that MacDonell had been fired. Rumor had it that his command performance at Flynt’s celebrity roast had crossed the line of taste and decorum, which must have been a difficult line to discern. “From the very beginning of my employment at Larry Flynt Publications, I joked that any day could be the last,” he writes in Prisoner. “It happened just as I had predicted, although the ax took almost 20 years to fall.”
Reading MacDonnell’s memoir, it’s clear that, all the more to his own discomfort, he is acutely and instinctively aware of the motivations and feelings of those around him. You might not think that someone who penned a column titled “Asshole of the Month,” chock-full of highly creative and even more highly obscene invective, would have a highly developed sense of others’ feelings, but there it is: empathy. In one section, MacDonnell describes a long elevator ride with Flynt’s first wife, Althea, who then was succumbing to the effects of AIDS and drug addiction. “Althea slouched to the back of the box and slithered down the wall. A pair of giant, mullet-headed bodyguards bookended her, but did nothing to prop up her slide … This harried vision was a far cry from the firebrand who had slammed her fists down on a long marble tabletop and menaced a conference room full of Judases. The elevator dropped down a floor, opened, and three suits stepped in. They checked Althea with the black contempt that they would toss at any bum. It was easy to feel for Ms. Flynt in this state. She faced the arrogant suits and responded to their dismissive sneers in a manner that justified you pulling for her: ‘I am you and you are me, and we are all together,’ she sang in an opiated drawl.”
The scenario might serve well as an analogy for those unable to understand—or believe—that the literary line between “legitimate” publishing and porn is imaginary, mainly serving (self-serving) those who chose to draw it. MacDonell was an editor and writer on par with and perhaps superior to any in the “legitimate” publishing world. His tenure at LFP gave him a unique vantage on American celebrity, culture, politics, and sexuality, and because it was a view that many would prefer not to see, his perspective is all the more interesting.
“There are some former Hustler editors who have overcome the anti-Hustler prejudice and done quite well in ‘mainstream’ journalism,” MacDonnell wrote in response to an emailed question about whether he’s been snubbed professionally because of his résumé. “Laziness, lack of focus and narcissistic, arrogant aspects of my personality are factors that have contributed to my failure to be embraced by the journalism industry at large, along with the anti-Hustler prejudice. That said, I do have one anecdote: a week or two after I’d been fired by Flynt, I was looking through the Media Bistro site at their job listings, and I saw a Q&A with longtime GQ editor Art Cooper. Cooper was being interviewed upon his induction to the Magazine Hall of Fame. He talked a bit about his short stint at the editorial helm of Penthouse magazine, back in the 1970s. Cooper said he realized that he had to quit Penthouse when the men’s sophisticate niche was irrevocably perverted by the arrival of ‘Hustler magazine, a disgusting magazine.’
“That’s when I realized that my jump to Vanity Fair contributing editor would not be without obstacles.”
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