Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition (33 page)

In the cynical, insincere racket of newsstand sex magazines, run by formula hacks whose contempt for the “readership” echoes with every cliché, Stephanie stood out as genuine. She understood and empathized with male sexual obsessions. Readers were taught to wear their perversions as badges of honor, to shed their debilitating embarrassment. Monthly essays espoused masturbation as the ultimate safe sex. Fetishes were nature’s way of diverting DNA from reproduction in an overcrowded world. Did excessive masturbation further separate people from human contact? Wasn’t it harder to come back to earth for a relationship? These questions were overlooked, because one thing obsessive masturbation led to was larger magazine sales. There’s nothing more stale than last month’s pornography.

Mason was forever on the prowl in search of feet. She was recently ejected from the biggest topless bar in New York, trying to recruit talent. She asked male acquaintances at social events whether she could view their wives’ feet. Would they consider having them photographed? Apologetically, she was forever checking women’s toe spreads, arches, seeking sharply defined angularity as opposed to stubby or corny features. She considered her own feet lacking in angular grace. She used great photographic care in striking the most flattering pose for her own monthly leg snapshots, which accompanied editorials. Like silent screen stars knew how to angle their faces, Stephanie knew which side of her heel was her good side. She loved dressing up and posing her models at photoshoots, like a big girl playing with demented Barbie dolls.

But, like Sammy, she was also known to do subtle, not-so-nice things.

In walked Yvette Venice, a veteran stripper, here for a model interview. She sat before Stephanie’s desk draping her fox fur behind the chair. Stephanie glared at the portfolio. “God... you’re old,” blurted out Stephanie. “I’m thirty-two. You must be at least ten years older than me, right?”

Yvette was only in her mid-thirties, hoping to play younger. She squirmed in discomfort but kept her composure. “A lady never tells,” said Yvette.

Though Stephanie would find a place for Yvette’s pictures somewhere, she kept playing the cruelty card. “These must be your swan song shots, right? How many kids have you had? Be honest.”

Yvette never had any kids, at least none that she can remember. This interview stung.

Stephanie Mason learned the joys of her trade from her mentor, the late Pete Fox, another enemy of Sammy’s. Stephanie and Pete were once inseparable, founding several sex magazines together in the 1970s. They invented the gonzo style of editor participation.

Pete would go to work on new recruits that he flew in to New York from Southern trailer parks. He humiliated prospective models from the get-go. Like Sammy, Fox’s eagle eye strained to find a stretch mark, a scar, evidence of motherhood, anything to play upon an insecurity. He knew how to zero in on a fault: “So, where’d you get the nosejob? Is your tit tuck starting to sag again?”

“C’mon, Peter, that’s not nice to say,” came Stephanie, playing good cop. If a girl was willing to put up with this, if her self-esteem was that low—and most girls were masochistic—Pete worked that fault for all it was worth. Of course, girls took negative criticism to heart. No matter how beautiful the girl was, if she stayed, he knew she regarded herself as no better than a sack of shit. When the recruits first laid eyes on this skinny-assed, alkie editor, who looked like Willie Nelson’s grandfather, they’d think, “Oh, my god, I’ll
never
fuck
him.”

Fox resembled an aging “Hell No, We Won’t Go” hippie from 1969—which he was. He wore a gray ponytail, torn blue jeans, a biker bandanna. Once, when he was editor of
Outlaw Biker,
he was confronted by a motorcycle gang at a rally. Fox couldn’t name a single part of the Harley. He walked off in humiliation before the laughing bikers, revealing himself as a total dilettante.

Fox’s predatory talent lay with the girls. He never came on at first. He waited until breaking down what little confidence the maidens possessed. Here they were, flown all the way into the Big Apple from some Missouri pig farm at the expense of a national magazine, thirsty for a few crumbs of recognition and a compliment or two for the only tangible assets they had—their bodies. At the end of Fox’s procurement sessions, he’d invite a few girls back into his office. Then he seized the moment, holding aloft several mockup covers with their photos attached: “I can put either
you, you
or
you
on the cover. It’s up to all of
you
—
you
make the decision.

“Now... Who goes home with me?”

That was Fox’s legacy to Stephanie, before he dropped dead of a heart attack in his late forties. Now Stephanie ran the whole ship by herself, and was quite gifted.

“I guess we could put you in our new
Over 40
magazine,” Stephanie told Yvette, finally offering a concession. “But don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

The aging stripper trudged on. And soon after retired.

Down the hall, Sammy took pains to avoid contact with Stephanie in their workaday environment. Sometimes they made cold contact when passing the reception desk or water cooler. Stephanie got Sammy in trouble recently by clipping a particularly bad review of
Oui
which she made sure their publisher in Connecticut saw. A “horsey” woman, Sammy dismissed her as an “ugly bitch who blabbers too much.”

Sammy dressed like a stock analyst in a suit and tie every morning. Gynecological slides were scattered across his desk.

“We’re waiting for this one to turn eighteen,” he whined, passing over contact sheets with a loupe. A shoot with a seventeen-year-old brunette sucking dildos. She had that dumb “sloe-eyed” expression that Sammy so covets—eyes rolled up in swallowing abandon, only the whites showing.

Grubman suffered a hard lesson with this exotic beauty. The mother presented fake I.D. when she accompanied her daughter to the office for Sammy’s mandatory “test shots.” Sammy went bonkers over the girl, got her oiled up and soon she was deep-throating a veiny, black rubber dildo before the camera.

Five months later, when the photo set hit the stands, the mother filed a $l-million lawsuit. If that ain’t entrapment. It became one of Sammy’s ongoing headaches, but one he planned to avenge. Sammy had a second, even dirtier photo shoot with the girl, which he intended to publish after her eighteenth birthday.

All kinds of trailer-trash mother-daughter scams befall poor schmucks in the girlie business. Although the lawsuit named only Sammy, he was a smokescreen for the real publisher. There were a dozen men’s magazine goniffs in New York, each with their own independent second-rate empires. None were proud frontmen like Hefner, Guccione, Flynt or Goldstein—who made up the frontline, the Detroit of sex. Sammy fronted for the shadowy, second-string imitators. Ashamed of their work, these businessmen remained hidden behind layers of paperwork. They hid behind shell corporations with noble-sounding names, like Knight Publications. One secretive smut king stirred up the ire of environmentalists by building a heliport on his pristine Connecticut land, scattering geese and ducks every time he coptered in from the city.

Sammy had worked for most of them. They saw in Sammy a younger version of themselves. They would perhaps like to have done badder things on a grander scale, but like Sammy, they all lacked the balls to be murderous. So they settled on being shrewd, deceptive, eager to cheat—characteristics they also admired in Sammy. They were actually no different than publishers of most mainstream publications, maybe better. If Sammy was sly enough to embezzle a few shekels from the budget, then by God, these men wanted him fronting their operations.

Sammy’s Childhood Heroes

Sammy Grubman’s personality was shaped by the pawnbroking business. Pawnbrokers were his heroes growing up. His mother didn’t love him and his father gave him beatings. “Not on the head, not on the head!” Mrs. Grubman screamed at Sammy’s father as he flailed away at little Sammy. Sammy’s only solace after school was retreating to Simpson’s Hockshop to revel in the company of old Jewish pawnbrokers and their fabulous mockey cons.

Sammy’s favorite memory was when a black hustler came rushing into Simpson’s demanding a hundred bucks for some jewel. Old Mr. Simpson laughed, said it wasn’t worth a tenth of that. The black dude then asked for $50. The pawnbroker said forget it, it was worthless, a fake. Maybe he’d pay five bucks. The black guy left in a huff. But a minute later he walked back through the door, asking $25. The pawnbroker, with great impatience, totally disinterested, said he’d give the guy ten bucks. The black guy took it.

The moment the black guy left, the broker was on the phone. A group of diamond district merchants from 47th Street with loupes arrived ten minutes later. They gasped when they saw the gem,
oohed
and
ahhed.
They offered twenty grand.

What impressed Sammy was how the broker Jewed the black guy down to $10, risking a twenty grand loss. It was all a game, the spirit of it being to see how much you could get for nothing. The broker sensed the black guy’s desperation, knew he’d be back in a minute. And he derived his satisfaction by acquiring the gem for a sawbuck, rather than even giving the guy a hundred bucks, still a ridiculous fraction of its worth.

“Why not give the guy a few hundred—it would still be ripping him off?” I asked Sammy.

Sammy recoiled, as if I’d missed the whole point, the beauty of it. “The guy stole the gem anyway, why should he
not
get ripped off?

Sammy’s sunken eyes were like loupes, the kind used by jewelers and by sex magazine editors who pored over contact sheets. He sold hot watches to magazine publishers—notorious old
schtarkers
of the newsstand wars, like Myron Fass, Murry Traub, Carl Ruderman, Harvey Shapiro. And that is how he first came to meet them. From selling them watches. They saw their younger selves in Sammy, a shrewd throwback Jew, the kind they didn’t make anymore. They hired him to helm their skin divisions, the second-rate tits-and-assers that were last-choice impulse buys on the newsstand, after the masturbator had already gone through that month’s
Playboy, Penthouse
or
Hustler.
Sammy would siphon off a thousand for himself, scrimping and cheating his way through the cut-rate monthly budgets of each rag. When bosses caught him raiding the cookie jar they only admired him more. Sammy would rip off a writer here, a nude model there. Just like a pawnbroker.

“You have to get on your knees to get paid by Sammy Grubman,” moaned one photographer to Shark.

“Lower,” said Shark.

Sammy also fenced off bicycles. He’d pay ghetto thieves $20 for freshly stolen bikes at the corner of St. Mark’s Place, then resell them to shops. After several weeks in the bike black market, he learned to take apart a new Panasonic Japanese bike, then put it back together with cheaper cannibalized parts—so he could resell the bike, and then the parts. Grubman made regular visits to city marshal dispossession auctions with his ancient pawnbroker cronies. They acquired stereos, TVs, tape recorders. Sammy had his own clique of old-Jew customers, including the sex publishers, who bought the merchandise from Grubman, all of them satisfied that the merchandise came at the price of someone’s loss. Sammy derived great pleasure in knowing the stuff was stolen.

One of the oldest pawnbrokers, Sam Katz, once advertised himself as “The Honestest Man in New York.” He taught Sammy the secret “scratch test” for gold. When Sammy was a child, Katz took him into the vaults harboring fine jewelry, sterling silver, athletic trophies pawned by down-on-their-luck sports champs. He was a star pupil of Katz’s, who’d taught him how to appraise gems, watches, estimate the worth of stereos and TVs, a jack-of-all-merchandise appraiser. Sammy appraised girls the same way—notating blemishes, pimpled asses, cellulite and future wrinkles on their naked bodies. He was never really able to enjoy any of this merchandise himself—either the stereos or the women—just appraise and resell it. The enjoyment was in the turnover, making money he would sock away and take to the grave.

Sammy was currently editorial chief at
Oui,
and the conceptual editor of endless one-shot specials. An
idea man.
He didn’t bother with nuts-and-bolts copy editing. Other editors took care of the mechanics while Sammy played the field. Guys like associate editor Michael Melville. A nerdy sort who never participated in any sexual endeavors of the magazine, Melville did line editing, proofreading, took care of punctuation. But judging by endless typos and grammatical mistakes in any 1980s issue of
Oui,
one might gather the proofreader was a bit distracted.

According to Sammy, he was just dumped by a blind girlfriend after he bought her a stereo which she considered the wrong brand. So he went back to dating a “welfare Negress with three kids,” says Sammy, one who stole the furniture out of Melville’s apartment before she last left him.

“Somehow,” said Sammy, “the Negress got Michael to pose for some weird pictures. Pictures of Michael standing there examining his own penis under a microscope. The Negress convinced Michael that this was so funny they should make prints and send some to his friends. Then she convinces him to send them to his own mother, father and relatives. So, reluctantly, he did. Now the parents want to have him committed to a mental institution.”

Meg at SNL

“This is beautiful,” said Shark. “‘Meet at the NBC security desk,’ they love those kind of words. ‘Checkpoints’ at NBC, that’s great, ya have to keep it a professional thing the first date.”

I arranged a visit to a
Saturday Night Live
rehearsal the week Francis Ford Coppola hosted. Several friends on staff at the show made this easy. Sammy and Shark coached me over the phone like I was pinch-hitting in the playoffs, coming off the bench to replace the Stud as cleanup batter. Everybody, it seemed, wanted Meg Calendar to get a good stiff banging, maybe for the first time. Then they could vicariously enjoy hearing the details of conquest. Shark called Meg throughout the day, repeating the “Francis, Francis” mantra. As if the fix was in for a part in his next film.