Column: My liaison with Lenny Bruce

Lenny Bruce had been part of the new wave of gifted and irreverent comedians who burst on the scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s and made a huge impact on pop culture in America.

No Lenny Bruce means no George Carlin or  Richard Pryor, both of whom acknowledged their debt to Lenny.

Others who helped launch that revolution included Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart and Dick Gregory. But Bruce was — by far — the most rebellious.

What made Bruce so notorious, of course, was his language. His comic routines were heavily sprinkled with gross obscenities and in that still-decorous era, such industrial-strength vulgarisms were viewed as serious no-nos. And that’s what got him into trouble with the law.

His first arrest for obscenity occurred in October 1961 at a club in San Francisco called The Jazz Workshop. What prompted it was a long riff on sexual behavior with language still not suitable for this newspaper.

Bruce was acquitted of that charge, but it set off sirens in other precincts and over the next couple of years, there were more obscenity arrests. The most famous took place in April 1964 after a performance at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. And, as fate would have it, I happened to be in the audience that night.

I was there on assignment. That spring the combination of Bruce’s assaults on decency and good taste — and the spate of legal problems they provoked — had transformed him into a major cult figure, a polarizing presence admired by some and reviled by others.

In other words, he was good copy, and so I managed to cajole my feature editor at UPI into granting my request to do a story on Bruce. “Just keep it clean,” he cautioned with a sly wink.

I proceeded to set up a get-acquainted meeting with Lenny over coffee at some joint in the Village. It was more of a courtesy thing than an interview, but we seemed to hit it off O.K. We agreed I would catch his act the following night and then take it from there.

The performance I saw at the Café Au Go Go was vintage Bruce. Which is to say that many of his rapid-fire riffs were both funny and offensive. For obvious reasons, I won’t go into specifics. But even if I could quote his obscenities in full, his humor would not come across that well on the printed page.

That’s because a large part of Bruce’s appeal was his jive-talk delivery. More than any other stand-up comic, he performed in the cool-cat style of a jazz musician. Most of his meandering monologues were spiced with the jargon of a street-wise hipster.

To appreciate Lenny’s distinctive talent, you had to see, or at least hear him in action before a live audience, and if you’d like confirmation of that, Google him or check out his act on YouTube.

Whatever the case, he certainly was a big hit on that April night at Au Go Go. Most of the patrons, including me, lapped up his act. But then moments after the show came to an end, word spread through the café that Bruce had been arrested — again! — and the laughter that had filled the room now gave way to groans and cries of outrage.

Over the next few days, I phoned Lenny a couple of times, but couldn’t reach him. I eventually received a call from a young lawyer named Martin Garbus, who identified himself as a member of the Bruce defense team.

He told me the Au Go Go obscenity case was going to trial later that spring, and that Lenny wanted to know if I would be willing to testify as a defense witness.I said I would be honored. Garbus said he would keep me posted on what the next steps would be.

He then added: “Oh, I almost forgot. Lenny sends his best regards.”

Getting that call made me almost giddy with anticipation. I began to have grandiose visions of my eloquence on the witness stand. I would extol the First Amendment as the Holy Grail of our Constitution and forcefully declaim that it protected Lenny Bruce’s artistic right to utter any words that crossed his mind, no matter how obscene they were.

Even now, these many years later, I cringe at the memory of how naïve I was.

I made my appearance on the witness stand shortly after the trial began in late June, and I quickly discovered that the rigid and prosaic reality of courtroom testimony bore no resemblance whatsoever to the fanciful notions I had nurtured.

The first questions came from Garbus. He asked if I was offended by anything Mr. Bruce said or did at the Café Au Go Go. My answer was no. His other questions were in a similar vein and could also be answered in just one or two words.

That was fine as far as it went, but I wanted to expound a bit. Yet when I tried to elaborate on one of my replies, Garbus smiled and extended an open palm in my direction, a gesture of restraint that clearly said:

“That’s enough. It’s all we need.”

Then the prosecutor took over and his opening salvo was to bombard me with a torrent of dirty words.

When he finished his litany, he asked me if I thought such language was obscene.

“Well, yes,” I replied, “I suppose it is. But that doesn’t mean” — and that’s as far as I got. The prosecutor cut me off in mid-sentence with a crisp assertion that I had answered the question.

And that’s the pattern he followed. All his questions dealt with obscenity. Did Mr. Bruce say this? Did Mr. Bruce use that word? And whenever I tried to extend my answer beyond a feeble “Yes, but,” he’d browbeat me into silence.

I left the courtroom in a rage, furious at the legal system and myself for having failed to resist the manipulations of the two lawyers, even though I had to admit that at least Garbus’s motives were benign.

I later learned that other defense witnesses at that trial — most of whom had credentials and reputations far more impressive than mine — had similar complaints about the way they were treated during their testimony.

The trial dragged on for five months. When the three-judge panel presiding over the case finally handed down its verdict, Bruce was found guilty. Although he’d been arrested 19 times, that was his only conviction. He was sentenced to four months in a workhouse, but a long appeals process kept him out of jail.

Because of his conviction, Lenny was blackballed from appearing in most of the major clubs across the country. He did manage to pick up a few gigs here and there, but he now spent most of his time grappling with his legal problems. In short, his once-dazzling career was basically over and he was approaching death at an early age.

Bruce was known to be a drug user (at least one of his arrests was for possession), and with all the stress that was now bearing down on him, the habit became more acute.

The end came in August 1966 when he was found dead on the floor of his bathroom in his Hollywood Hills home. He was 40 years old.

Lenny Bruce’s death was officially attributed to “an accidental overdose” of morphine. But a prominent record producer and Lenny’s close friend, may have been closer to the mark when he mordantly declared: “Lenny died of an overdose of police.”