"Smut's my vocation, but politics is my hobby," the publisher purrs.
The roots of Flynt's latest political foray date to the 1970s, when Washington was rocked by two sex scandals. In one, powerful Congressman Wilbur D. Mills (D-Ark.) was forced to admit a relationship with stripper Fanne Fox after police stopped his weaving car early one morning and the burlesque dancer sprinted away, plunging into Washington's Tidal Basin. In the second, House Administration Committee Chairman Wayne Hays (D-Ohio) resigned after it was revealed he had put his young, blond mistress Elizabeth Ray on the congressional payroll.
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Bob Livingston stepped down when he found out Flynt had the goods on his sexual escapades.
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Inspired by such imbroglios, Flynt tried to take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post offering $25,000 to anyone who could prove an adulterous liaison with a congressman. The Post rejected the ad. So Flynt called Rudy Maxa, a journalist friend at the newspaper, and asked him to find out why Editor Ben Bradlee, who had guided the Post's coverage of Watergate, wouldn't run it. According to Flynt, Bradlee threw Maxa out of his office, sneering, "I don't want anything to do with Larry Flynt."
Undeterred, Flynt shot off a letter to Katherine Graham, the Post's feisty owner. "How can you refuse to run an ad that is so clearly rooted in the First Amendment and is all about free speech?" he asked.
More than 20 years later, Flynt still grins about his "great joy" at going over Bradlee's head. "I got a handwritten note back from Katherine Graham, telling me to resubmit my ad."
But after battling to see it in print, Flynt was disappointed by the response it drew. He eventually got some photos of Larry McDonald, a Republican from Georgia, lying naked in bed with a woman who was not his wife. But the impact of the revelations published in Hustler was blunted after McDonald was killed in 1983, along with hundreds of others, when Soviet fighters shot down a Korean jet, the ill-fated Flight KAL 007.
When Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky began sparking talk of impeachment, Flynt, who says his sole connection to Clinton is that he voted for him twice, grew appalled at the hypocrisy of the Republican-dominated Congress and began mulling over another ad. A longtime Hustler reader, Allan Landon, egged him on, as did several friends. Although he doubted it would stir up anything, Flynt went ahead with a new ad in the Washington Postlast fall, this time upping his offer to $1 million.
The impetus was twofold. "To provide a voice for the 70 percent of Americans who did not feel the president should be removed from office and to expose the hypocrisy and let people know that it crosses party lines, and no one has a monopoly on it," Flynt explains.
The ad ran Oct. 4, 1998, and Flynt says he was genuinely amazed at the thousands of calls, letters, and e-mails he received. There were so many that Hustler's voice mail jammed, requiring an expert to come out and retrieve the messages.
Why the change in just one generation? Flynt believes it was because of the amounts of money offered, the ongoing Lewinsky scandal, and a change in the American cultural scene.
"The greatest thing I've ever done is run [the latest] ad," Flynt says. "We've given women an excuse to come forward. Before, they've never had a reason to expose a member of Congress. We've established that there's a place sources can come to where they're going to get treated better and earn more money than the National Enquirer or the Star."
Flynt believes that America is going to see a lot more tabloid-style and even checkbook journalism in the upcoming national campaigns. But he stresses that anything he exposes has to meet his standards of legal and journalistic proof.
For instance, several months ago, a Houston attorney got Flynt all excited about the possibility of bringing down possible Republican standard-bearer George W. Bush by dangling a story about Bush in his youth that would have been at odds with some of the Texas governor's public positions. But after discussing the matter with Flynt's people, the attorney has failed to produce documents or signed affidavits that would have substantiated his claim. For now at least, the rumor remains just that. But things could always change.
"We're becoming so competitive that people are going to be paying for these stories, even among the mainstream media," Flynt maintains. "I'm talking about the major networks. It's indirect, but it's already there. For instance, Monica Lewinsky's appearing on the Barbara Walters show. That was closely tied in with the book deal."
