The Showgirl, the Sick Comic, and the Psychic: A Tribute to Lenny Bruce on the 50th Anniversary of His Untimely Death

“ Life is a four-letter word.” ~ Lenny Bruce

Fifty years ago, on August 3, 1966, Lenny Bruce was found dead, naked in the crapper, with a needle filled with morphine hanging out of his arm. I'm sure Lenny Bruce, the Jewish patron saint of potty humor, found this a fitting way to die; after all, he had watched his life spiral down the drain, and knew full well that he was up shit creek without a paddle.

I’ve always been obsessed with Lenny Bruce ever since I was seventeen and read a copy of his autobiography How To Talk Dirty and Influence People. My tell-it-like-it-is, sometimes shocking sense of humor, accentuated with an ample dose of swear words, has been greatly influenced by this man, who grew up in the same Merrick-Bellmore school district that I did. Lenny wrote in his autobiography, “Long Island had loads of screens and porches. Screen doors to push your nose against, porches to hide under.” Even as a kid, Lenny sought refuge from a bad, bad, bad, bad world.

I’m always surprised to learn just how few millennials actually know who Lenny Bruce was, but life as they know it, with uncensored TV, radio, music, movies, Internet, and books, wouldn’t be possible if Lenny hadn’t continued his no holds barred, curse-laced, politically-challenging, stand-up comedy routines, despite his numerous arrests on obscenity charges. He was arrested for publicly using words like cunnilingus and fellatio (and the more colorful street words for these acts), and for regularly dropping the F-bomb, but it was more the topics that he chose to shed a comic light on that infuriated people. He tackled the hot issues: racism, sexism, abortion rights, police brutality, nuclear testing, drugs, sexual taboos, the Ku Klux Klan, how unjust the legal system was, and just about any and every topic that could rattle the antiquated mores of the establishment, including capitalism and organized religion. “Everyday people are straying away from the church and going back to God.” Yes, that was the kind of thing Lenny liked to say, and back in the day, that could really piss off a lot of people. He epitomized the counter-culture revolution and ultimately helped usher in the hippie-era with all its sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Lenny had an ax to grind, and in the tradition of other great satirists, such as: Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift, he used humor to deliver his messages. Don’t just sit there. Do something against bigotry and hypocrisy. Defy convention, if convention is wrong. Stand-up for your inalienable rights.

Lenny could mesmerize his audiences, and on February 3, 1961, in the midst of a blizzard, he packed the house at Carnegie Hall. After his stellar performance, Albert Goldman, the author of the bestselling book, Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce, reacted to this ground-breaking performance by saying, “…Sending, sending, sending, he would finally reach a point of clairvoyance where he was no longer a performer but rather a medium transmitting messages that just came to him from out there — from recall, fantasy, prophecy.”

Lenny once predicted, “If I get busted in New York, the freest city in the world, that will be the end of my career.” Sadly, on April 3,1964, just five months after JFK was assassinated, and shortly after the Beatles landed on our shores, Lenny’s worst nightmare became a harsh reality. He had procured a steady, lucrative gig at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, but on this particular night, before he could do his scheduled 10 P.M. show, two plain-clothed officers arrested him and Howard Solomon, the club owner, on obscenity charges. The highly-publicized trial went on for six months, and both of them were found guilty of obscenity on November 4, 1964, despite the list of luminaries who gave testimony and petitions on Lenny's behalf, including: Woody Allen, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Jules Feiffer. How absurd it must have seemed to him, and to everyone else for that matter, that in the selfsame city that once welcomed him to Carnegie Hall, now saw fit to convict him of obscenity charges.

He had prior arrests for possession of drugs, and some of these searches and subsequent busts, had been less than legal ones. The cost of repeatedly having to defend himself, combined with the harsh reality that the obscenity charges made him basically unemployable, systematically bankrupted him -- financially, psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally. In his autobiography, he makes it perfectly clear why financial ruin of any sort would destroy him: “My father instilled in me a few important behavior patterns, one of which was a fantastic dread of being in debt.”

No doubt, Lenny was a prophet, a psychic, a soothsayer, and getting busted and convicted in New York was not just the end of his illustrious career — it was the death of him. His last typed words on that fateful day were, “Conspiracy to interfere with the fourth amendment…” Obviously, his endless court battles weighed heavy on his heart and soul.

It’s my contention that this comedian’s obsession with his legal battles didn’t just stem from Lenny Bruce, the man, the comedian, the drug addict versus the State of Pennsylvania, the State of California, the State of Illinois, and the State of New York, but from his deep-seated belief that he viewed himself as Everyman; therefore, he represented every American, past, present, and future. This WW II veteran, turned stand-up comic, fought to defend the inalienable rights as set forth in our constitution by our forward thinking forefathers, particularly the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the First Amendment, which protects our right to freedom of speech.

I’d been thinking about writing something about Lenny, for the upcoming Golden Anniversary of his death, and as synchronicity would have it, through my work as a psychic, I was put into contact with Betty Jo Spyropulos, a woman who'd met Lenny in 1961, shortly after his appearance at Carnegie Hall. She was a beautiful, young, naive, showgirl, one of the “fabulous Club Harlem girls.” She laughed as she told me, “I really had no idea just how famous he was. He was just a nice guy, sitting quietly on a stage prop, a chicken coop used in the Caribbean number, waiting all night for me to finish up my act, so he could talk to me.”

Lenny was quite smitten with her, and on August 30, 1961, he sent her a Western Union Telegram that said, “Dear Betty, I have been waiting two thousand years until four AM. Will it ever arrive. I will be at the bar wearing a mended heart. Love = Lenny.” (A copy of this telegram can be seen at Brandeis University Libraries Special Collections Department.)

Back then, the now defunct Club Harlem, located at 32 North Kentucky, was the place to be, if you wanted to catch the best nightlife in the area. This bar and performance space seated 900 people, and showcased Afro-American talent. Billy Holiday, Sammy Davis, Jr., Sam Cooke, James Brown, and Ray Charles are just a few of the stars that graced this club. Summer was the busy season, and the music played continuously from Saturday night until Monday morning. It was the place to see and be seen, and Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, and yes, Lenny Bruce, would stop in and perform impromptu acts — just for the hell of it.

By the time Betty Jo came into Lenny’s life, he was already a veteran, a well-known comedian, a con man (he got caught posing as a priest to raise money for lepers and himself), an intravenous drug user, and a divorced man with a young daughter. Within a few months of meeting Betty Jo, he got arrested for the very first time on a narcotics charge in Philadelphia, and a week later, he was arrested a second time in San Francisco for violating California obscenity law. Betty Jo remembers spending hours with Lenny and some of his friends and supporters combing through legal documents to see if they’d missed something or could discover a pertinent piece of information that could be used in his defense.

One of his New York prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney, Vincent Cuccia, admitted after Lenny’s death,“I feel terrible about Bruce. We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. I watched him gradually fall apart. It’s the only thing I did in Hogan’s office that I’m really ashamed of. We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”

Lenny once said, “If I just stuck to pot I might have found out what a drag being an aging hipster actually was.” Still, I, for one, wish he’d stuck around. We could use a little Lenny Bruce right now, especially with the upcoming 2016 Presidential election. I wonder what Lenny would have to say about that three-ring circus? I bet you that he'd just run around repeatedly reciting the name of his 1960 album -- I Am Not a Nut, Elect Me!

“I’ve been accused of bad taste, and I’ll go down to my grave accused of it and always by the same people, the ones who eat in restaurants that reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” Yes, that statement and countless others like that are the kinds of things that drove mean-spirited, small-minded, bigoted people to crucify Lenny Bruce.

“Once the country was settled and built, the bosses changed the order from a stack of educated workers to a barrel of minimum wage lottery dreamers.” This astute observation of his still rings true to this day.

“I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.” I’m certainly comforted that he felt that way, but I really wish he’d lived long enough to see that his legal struggles eventually changed the laws about what words and thoughts could be expressed publicly. No other stand-up comic in this country has ever been convicted on obscenity charges, and unfortunately for Lenny, like most martyrs, he never lived to tell.

40 years after his death, on December 23, 2003, the Governor of New York at that time, George Pataki, as “a declaration of New York’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment,” granted Bruce a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction. Better late than never, I guess…but the whole thing just seems more like a day late and a dollar short to me.

In honor of Lenny Bruce, I’d like to see August 3rd designated as National Amendments’ Remembrance Day. Yes, that would be a just and fair tribute to him.

Dick Schaap, one of the most revered journalists and writers of the 20th century, eulogized Lenny in a 1966 Playboy article entitled The End of Lenny Bruce. He concluded that amazing piece of writing with the following unforgettable words:

“One last four-letter word for Lenny.

Dead.
At 40.
That’s obscene.”

(Photo of Betty Jo Spyropulos used with her permission.)

Cindi Sansone-Braff, the Romance Whisperer, talks with the dead to show you how to live well and love better. She is the author of the spiritual/self-help book, Grant Me a Higher Love, and Why Good People Can't Leave Bad Relationships. Click on the following link to visit Cindi's web site.