Larry Flynt is the last king of porn

WITH both Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione no longer with us, Larry Flynt is the last of his kind.

WITH Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner recently following Penthouse founder Bob Guccione into the grave, Hustler magazine’s Larry Flynt is the last of his kind.

But the larger than life men’s magazine publisher, who turns 75 today, has more reason to be dead than either Hef or Guccione, given he served in the military, was once a bootlegger, was shot by a sniper, had a drug addiction, nearly died from an overdose and also had a stroke.

But he is nothing if not a survivor.

Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt arrives at his Beverly Hills office in his gold plated wheelchair with wife Liz in 2003

Born Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. in Lakeville, Kentucky in the US on November 1, 1942, he was the oldest child of Larry Flynt snr, a sharecropper who was serving in WWII when Flynt was born, and his teenage wife Edith.

His sister died of leukaemia in 1951 and in 1952 his parents split. Flynt moved with his mother to Indiana but later went to live with his father because he disliked his mother’s boyfriend.

Legend has it he had early sexual encounters, including one with a cousin at age seven, and later a chicken. At 15 he ran away from home and was molested by a man posing as a policeman who pointed a gun at him. He later said: “It didn’t cause any psychological trauma.”

US publisher Larry Flynt, owner of the magazine Hustler, in 1978.

Not yet 16, with the help of a fake birth certificate he enlisted in the army, but was honourably discharged due to personnel cutbacks. He did odd jobs and was briefly involved in bootlegging before he headed back to the military, joining the navy in 1960. In 1961 while on shore leave awaiting deployment he married a woman he met in a bar but they divorced the next year. In the navy he moved up to radar operator before receiving an honourable discharge in 1964.

With his savings from the navy he bought a bar owned by his mother and refurbished it as a men’s strip club. By 1966 he owned three clubs.

Working long hours and taking drugs to stay awake, he began to mistreat his girlfriend Peggy Mathis, who he married in 1966. The marriage soon broke down and Flynt shot a gun at Peggy’s mother (he missed), leading to a brief stint in a mental institution, to avoid charges of attempted murder. The couple divorced in 1969.

Flynt is taken by stretcher to a hospital in Ohio for surgery the month after he was shot outside a courtroom in Georgia.

Meanwhile Flynt’s nightclub empire was growing.

In 1968 he opened the first Hustler Club, with semi-clothed hostesses and in 1972 began sending out a two-page Hustler Club Newsletter. It was so popular with clubgoers he soon expanded into longer versions.

Seeing a business opportunity, in July 1974 Flynt published the first edition of Hustler magazine. He was pitching at a more blue collar reader than either Playboy or Penthouse, pushing the boundaries with even more explicit shots of women.

His publication of paparazzi shots of a naked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in a 1975 edition sent sales through the roof and made Flynt millions, money which came in handy to fight obscenity and libel charges.

In 1976 he married Althea Leasure, a former go-go dancer from one of his clubs. Then in 1977 he met US president Jimmy Carter’s evangelist sister Ruth Carter Stapleton and claimed to be a born-again Christian although this period didn’t last long.

In March 1978, while waiting outside a courthouse, Flynt and his lawyer were shot by a sniper. Evidence pointed to white supremacist and serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, who was never charged for the shooting but died by lethal injection in 2013 for a series of murders. Flynt survived the shooting but suffered spinal damage that confined him to a wheelchair and left him dependent on painkillers (later causing him to have a stroke).

Flynt with singer Courtney Love, who played his wife in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Picture: AP

Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love in The People vs. Larry Flynt.

But his willingness to outrage was unabated and he was frequently back in a courtroom.

After threatening to release surveillance tapes damaging to the FBI in 1983, Flynt was taken to court to force him to reveal his sources. When he turned up wearing an American flag as a nappy, he was sent to prison for six months for desecrating the US flag.

Althea’s death from AIDS-related illness in June 1987 sent him into depression and in September he took an overdose of drugs (it was deemed accidental).

Televangelist Reverend Jerry Falwell had successfully sued Flynt for libel in 1983 for an unsavoury depiction in a Hustler cartoon, but in 1988 Flynt had the decision overturned, arguing it impinged his right to freedom of speech.

In 1996 he returned to the public spotlight as the subject of a film, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, about his court battles and starring Woody Harrelson and in 1998 married Elizabeth Berrios.

This year Flynt was back in the headlines for offering $10 million for anyone with information that could lead to the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Larry Flynt on the 40th anniversary of Hustler magazine in 2014. Picture: AFP

Originally published as Larry Flynt is the last king of porn