Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (46 page)

After the publication of
Renegade Hustler
, Steward suspended his writing of porn. He did so partly because the policy at Greenleaf had now changed, demanding that each manuscript be “50% explicit sex,” but mainly because he had now written about sexual relationships between men as thoroughly and intimately as he could, and he saw no point in repeating himself since there were no material benefits to be had for the effort. For a moment, however, he was tempted to write one more Phil Andros novel for the Olympia Press. After years of catering to specifically heterosexual tastes in erotica, Olympia had recently started a line of books for male homosexuals called the Other Traveler series, and Steward wanted very much to be published by them, for he had a great respect for Jack Kahane, its founder, who had published books so brilliantly in Paris during the 1930s.
^*
In February 1972, Olympia offered Steward a $1,500 advance against royalties (a vast improvement on the usual work-for-hire flat fee), and Steward immediately signed. But then Olympia declared bankruptcy, for the entire future of pornographic publishing had suddenly been cast into question by a new Supreme Court ruling. As Steward later explained,

Luckily, J. Brian invited him to work on another film project just a couple of months later. For some time Brian had wanted to make
$TUD
into a movie, for he felt that these early Phil Andros stories were culturally significant works of homoerotic fiction—and he wanted, above all, that his own films be seen as something more than mere gay porn. During the filming of his
$TUD
movie, Brian spoke to
The Advocate
about wanting to create homosexual erotica that was “more than just the regular cliché-type bed scenes…[I want to] develop plot, characters, and real dialog for people who are interested in seeing a true male homosexual film. My idea is to take a theme or an idea and present it totally, just leaving the bedroom doors open.” Since Steward liked both Brian and his hustlers, he quickly agreed to work with them on the project, even mentioning to his former editor at Greenleaf that he was working on “a movie (still in the box) with a base of [three or four] early Phil Andros stories. The tentative title will be
Four: Money or Love
.”

Though written and shot quickly, the film—starring Joe Markum,
^*
a swarthy, curly-haired young stud who had already worked for Brian for several years as both a hustler and a photographic model—would not appear for some time. Just as Brian began editing the footage, the J. Brian Modeling Agency was raided by the police, and Brian was arrested for running a house of prostitution. Most of his hustlers were also arrested. Brian’s troubles worsened in March when police seized
Seven in a Barn
at the University of California at Irvine just before it was to be shown as part of a panel on pornography. Two months later they arrested Brian yet again, this time on felony charges of “aiding and abetting sodomy and oral copulation.”

Brian responded to the arrest by speaking out in
The Advocate
against the San Francisco vice squad’s persecution of the city’s gay community. He also went on record as stating that the felony charge of “aiding and abetting” was unique in the history of the prosecution of erotica, and added that he was determined to “fight it into the Supreme Court if necessary.” But the case against him was strong, since the police had Joe Markum as their informant and chief witness—and it was his deposition, stating that he had seen J. Brian filming oral copulation and sodomy, that had been used to present cause for the search warrant. Only after reading the deposition did Brian discover that his longtime hustler, model, and porn actor had previously worked as an informant for both the Los Angeles and the Denver police.

The second arrest was particularly catastrophic for Brian’s business and finances, for during the raid of his studio the police confiscated all his available film footage, all his moviemaking equipment, and all his financial records. Over the next few months he would struggle to get the film version of
$TUD
finished and distributed (under the peculiar, punning title of
Four: More Than Money
^*
) while ducking creditors, paying lawyers, and watching his entire business empire fall apart. Ultimately the case would bankrupt him.

Steward stuck with Brian through the worst of his legal troubles: in November 1972, he even filed a report on Brian with the city and county of San Francisco, vouching for Brian’s character, stating that Brian had “learned from his mistakes,” and suggesting Brian would certainly benefit from probation. But in January 1973, after
First Time Round
was screened at the Paris Theater in San Jose, police issued yet another warrant for Brian’s arrest. Brian had not knowingly violated his probation—the screening had been arranged by a former business partner without Brian’s knowledge—but even so, Brian was charged in absentia in San Jose with conspiracy to exhibit an obscene film, a felony charge that held a possible sentence of up to fifteen years imprisonment.

Jaguar, the producer-distributor for the film, meanwhile made J. Brian’s editing work on
Four: More Than Money
almost impossible even as it demanded Brian hand over the completed film. The company had ceased financing Brian’s editing because it had problems of its own: it, too, was being prosecuted for the production and distribution of pornography. The star witness against Jaguar was Brian’s former hustler, Joe Markum. Unable to complete the film given the circumstances and facing imminent imprisonment in California, Brian simply patched the footage together as best he could, deposited it with Jaguar, and fled to Hawaii.

In April 1973, Jaguar premiered a butchered, half-finished version of
Four: More Than Money
in West Hollywood. Nearly incoherent and featuring totally botched sound, the film was a complete disaster.
^*
Later that month it opened in San Francisco, and Steward, having seen it announced in the paper, bought himself a ticket to the screening and attended it alone. Though appalled by what he saw, he subsequently wrote a note of consolation to Brian in Hawaii suggesting that the poor San Francisco box office results might have been caused, at least in part, by Jaguar’s odd decision to hold the film’s premiere on Good Friday. He then went on to apologize for his own “momentary burst of ill-temper and downright meanness,” for he had been hurt and upset when Brian had stiffed him on his (already very meager) payment for the film script. But Steward was a little insincere in this apology, for he was just then completing his (fifth and final) Phil Andros novel
Blow for Blow
, a pornographic account of Brian’s calamitous downfall told from the firmly tongue-in-cheek perspective of Phil Andros.

Unlike Steward’s previous novels, this final Phil Andros tale was more a black comedy than an erotic picaresque, and seems mostly to have been written out of fascination with J. Brian’s disastrous recent turn of events. In it, Phil gets a job as screenwriter and “star” of a low-budget porn movie being made by a Mason Street brothel owner named Jerry.
^*
In an effort to entrap Jerry and shut down his operation, the police place an undercover officer in the Mason Street house as a call boy, but Phil immediately recognizes the undercover cop as his former lover, Larry Johnson. Using a hidden camera, Phil and Jerry then film Larry taking real pleasure in being the passive partner in a sex act with an old friend of Phil’s named Art Craine. Phil subsequently uses the footage to blackmail Larry into becoming his sex slave. Jerry, however, is undone by a second undercover agent. Police ransack his brothel, confiscate his records and equipment, and issue a warrant for his arrest. Phil is luckier; in reconnecting with the burly, charismatic Craine, he is given the opportunity to leave town. As Jerry’s world falls apart, Phil spends a blissful week with Craine at his comfortable suburban home in western Pennsylvania.

Blow for Blow
told the story of J. Brian’s downfall with dark humor rather than anger, and J. Brian seems to have been more amused by it than anyone, for he readily resumed his friendship with Steward upon returning to San Francisco after a year of avoiding creditors (and imprisonment) by living in Hawaii. While Brian’s legal problems kept him, in his own words, “out of the business for two years,” he returned to erotic filmmaking in 1975 by bringing out a new film
^*
pieced together from old footage of Joe Markum, shot before the hustler turned state’s evidence.
^*
Though J. Brian never gave up his dream of “tak[ing] that pioneer step into the regular theater market,” he never managed to do so; beset by money troubles, he continued instead to make depressingly run-of-the-mill pornographic videos until his early death from unspecified causes in the early years of the AIDS epidemic.

•

Following the debacle of
Four: More Than Money
, Steward decided to take a trip to Copenhagen to visit his old friend Knud Rame. He may have been exploring the possibility of once again publishing with Rame, since the prospects for commercially published erotica in the United States were, at that moment, not good. Upon receiving the largely satiric
Blow for Blow
,
^*
Steward’s editor at Greenleaf had returned the manuscript demanding more “hots,” but by the time Steward provided them, Greenleaf, like Olympia, had gone out of business.
^*
Steward was nonetheless able to live and travel with relative financial freedom, for he had recently experienced a financial windfall. Shortly after Steward had changed all the dollars in his secret Swiss bank accounts into Swiss francs in 1972, Nixon devalued the dollar three times, and the value of his Swiss francs rose sharply. “It’s sorta like the goose’s golden egg,” he told an old friend. “Just keeps growin’.”

In early 1973,
^*
however, Steward had a tremendous scare: a doctor, after taking various EKGs, diagnosed him with myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that frequently results in congestive heart failure. While the doctor was out of the examining room, Steward peeked at his medical chart and saw the words “Abnormal heart. Prognosis: very poor. Six to 12 months.” Tremendously shaken, he returned home determined to disperse his vast collections of erotica and memorabilia to prevent their being thrown away en masse at the time of his death. Within a few weeks he had placed many of his most treasured possessions on consignment with rare book and manuscript dealers, and put other equally valuable items up for auction. The sales did not go unnoticed; in November 1974, Donald Gallup at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University wrote Steward, “I am happy to report that we recently acquired your letters from Thornton Wilder [from a private dealer]. Sorry to hear that the Toklas letters
^*
got away from us.” Steward, who had since been told by his doctor that he was not going to die, responded miserably to Gallup that “disposing of all the treasures I had was a severe shock to me, but I did it, I suppose, because
timor mortis conturbat me
.”
^*
His intense regret over this hasty selling-off of his most treasured memorabilia would haunt him for the rest of his life.

•

Although Steward would be sought out frequently during the 1970s and ’80s for interviews concerning his erotic fiction, he would write no more Phil Andros novels after 1972, and only a few more Phil Andros stories. From 1973 to 1975 he returned instead to his Stein-Toklas memoir, and during this time developed a friendship with the writer Christopher Isherwood, who by happy coincidence lived just around the corner from Steward’s sister in Santa Monica.

In his free time Steward also helped a new friend, the independent scholar Roger Austen, to research his groundbreaking study of homosexual fiction,
Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America
. Austen would quote Steward directly (as “Phil Andros”) in several sections of the book, and rely heavily on information from Steward for many other sections. Steward’s conversations with Austen about his Phil Andros fiction, meanwhile, informed Austen’s conclusion that “the mid-seventies consensus appears to be that pornography is more ‘exciting’ and nonfiction more ‘real’ than old-fashioned homosexual novels, and thus the traditional [novel] writer is now threatened not so much by the homophobia of establishment publishers and reviewers as by the lack of interest on the part of his [sexually] preoccupied gay brothers.”