Larry Flynt, the tenacious, controversial and free-thinking entrepreneur who took a string of strip clubs and built them into Hustler, one of the world’s most successful sex-based brands, has died. He was 78.
Flynt died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from a sudden illness, according to his manager Minda Gowen.
Flynt changed the face of publishing with Hustler magazine, an explicitly lewd monthly featuring nude photos and crude, below-the-belt humor. Launched in 1974, it focused on a part of the female anatomy that Flynt felt Playboy was overlooking.
“I was always interested in the crotch,” he told The Independent in a 2011 interview. “And [in] real women … I dared to portray people’s real sexual fantasies, not somebody’s idea of what fantasies should be.”
After a year on newsstands, Hustler because a sensation in 1975 when it published naked photos of Jacqueline Onassis. Flynt had purchased them for $18,000 from a paparazzo who had snapped them without the former first lady’s knowledge. The issue sold more than a million copies, making the up-and-coming publisher a millionaire.
His blue-collar approach to raunch worked; Hustler was viewed alongside Playboy and Penthouse as one of the world’s leading sex magazines, and at the height of its popularity, it sold more than 3 million copies a month.
“It is what the people want,” Flynt told People magazine in a 1977 profile. “When I started Hustler, I wanted to deal with sex as I knew it — as a boy growing up on a farm, working in a factory, on the street — four-letter words and all. That’s the approach I’ve taken, and it cost me my freedom.”
In 1976, Flynt was tried in Cincinnati on charges of obscenity and organized crime and convicted, sentenced to seven to 25 years in prison. But after serving six days in jail, he was freed amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and jury bias.
While fighting another obscenity charge in 1978, the flamboyant publisher was shot outside a courthouse in Gwinnett County, Georgia, suffering spinal cord damage that put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He later struggled with an addiction to prescription drugs.
Although no one was ever charged with the shooting, white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin years later admitted that he was the sniper. He said an interracial photo spread that Hustler had published was his motivation.
The shooting and Flynt’s legal bouts were the focus of the 1996 biopic The People vs. Larry Flynt. Directed by Milos Forman, it starred Woody Harrelson as the embattled title character and Courtney Love as his fourth wife, Althea Leasure.
As seen in the film, Flynt met Leasure, then 17, when she applied for a job as a dancer at a Hustler strip club, and she went on to become co-publisher of the magazine and its first life-sized centerfold. The two wed in 1976.
In 1987, Althea Flynt, then 33, drowned in her bathtub. According to an investigation, she passed out from a prescription drug overdose. Flynt revealed that his wife had AIDS and was told by doctors that she only had a year to live.
The film centered on Flynt’s most notorious legal skirmish — Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell — the case that cemented his reputation as the First Amendment’s most unusual champion.
In the November 1983 issue, Hustler had featured a parody of an ad satirizing then-popular televangelist Jerry Falwell.
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter