Columbus Monthly / November 2011 / My life with Larry Flynt

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My life with Larry Flynt

As the famous pornographer returns to Central Ohio with the opening of a Hustler Hollywood boutique in Clintonville, his former confidant, bodyguard and personal aide reveals his adventures with the most notorious publisher in America.

My daughter, Alex, and I went to the Cincinnati première of The People vs. Larry Flynt. About 900 people crowded into three theaters to see one of the most anticipated movies of 1997, especially in Ohio. Like me, many at the event were old-timers from Hustler’s early days in Columbus, the birthplace of the magazine. I caught up with old friends while Alex got a glimpse of the life I left behind.

Alex, then 25, and her boyfriend at the time sat in the back of the theater. I was in the front. A straight-laced banker, Alex didn’t want to be with me as I joked around with my old Hustler buddies. Before the movie started, she noticed a dark-haired man dressed in a black fedora and a dark overcoat enter the theater. A scar ran down the side of his face, and part of his left arm was missing. “Oh my god, he’s mafia,” she told her boyfriend. The man walked down the aisle and, to her surprise, headed straight for me. He was an old friend named Michael. (And, yes, he was a gangster; his missing arm was blown off by a shotgun.) I gave Michael a big hug and pointed out Alex in the back of the theater. She hid her face in embarrassment.

Later, the crowd headed to Plaza 600, a downtown restaurant, for a post-première party hosted by Larry Flynt and Woody Harrelson, the star of the movie. Even with Harrelson there, Larry was the main attraction. The movie had given him the mainstream fame and respectability he always wanted. He no longer was just a pornographer. He was a champion of the First Amendment, a guest on national talk shows, the author of a new memoir, An Unseemly Man, and a person worthy of a big Hollywood movie. Cincinnati, the town that once tried to put him in prison, was literally rolling out the red carpet for him.

Amid the hoopla, I introduced Alex to Larry. She last saw him when she was 6 years old. “You’ve grown up, haven’t you,” he told her.

My daughter and I lived in Larry’s mansion in Bexley as I served as his 24/7 bodyguard and personal aide during the early wild days of Hustler. Before that, I helped Larry and his brother, Jimmy, launch the forerunner of the magazine, the chain of Hustler nightclubs in Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo and other Ohio cities. I was Larry’s friend, confidant, guardian and travel companion. I saw it all: orgies, brawls, emotional breakdowns. Larry and Hustler were my life, until the day arrived when I had to choose between them and my daughter.

The movie changed Hustler history a bit, replacing Columbus with Cincinnati to keep the story simpler. But it was close enough to hurt, almost too much for me to bear to watch Courtney Love portray Althea, Larry’s wife and my friend, who drowned in her bathtub after years of drug addiction.

Larry asked me what I thought of the movie. “It was good,” I said.

He smiled. “You should write a book,” he said. “You know all the good shit.”

 

Larry and I were on the road, heading to Akron to open up another Hustler club in 1972. It was late, around midnight, and the dark drive put Larry in an introspective mood. “One day,” he said, “everybody will know who I am.”

The next day, I played a prank on him. We went to a Kresge store to buy picture frames for photographs of our “board of directors”—shots of Al Capone and other famous gangsters that hung behind the bar at our clubs. I dropped Larry off and then snuck up on him after I parked the car. He was grabbing the frames from a high shelf when I found him. “Oh my god! That’s Larry Flynt,” I said, disguising my voice.

He turned around, eager to meet his first groupie. His smile disappeared when he saw me. “You make fun of everything I do,” he said.

As Hustler expanded throughout Ohio, we moved to Columbus in 1972 for its central location. I was the district manager, the number three man at Hustler behind Larry and Jimmy. I oversaw the clubs and made sure they ran efficiently. I also was Larry’s muscle, a job well suited for me. I averaged about three or four fights a week—and never lost one.

Larry loved to provoke people, as long as I was around. During a visit to the Toledo club, we discovered a big hairy biker was scamming free drinks by claiming to be Larry’s “hitman.” Larry confronted the biker, punched him in the face and then ran behind me. “Get him, Ollie,” he said, as I finished the job and threw the guy out of the bar.

I was an intimidating presence—6-foot-2, 290 pounds, with biceps 22 inches around and a big, bushy beard. Once, a small boy noticed me walking down the street in Columbus. I had on platform shoes, a full-length black fur coat with a matching hat, and I was carrying a 6-foot artificial palm tree, a gift for my mother. “Mommy, mommy,” the boy said. “There’s King Kong.” I wanted to kick the little bastard, but I was laughing too hard. I guess I did look like a giant gorilla.

The job was tough: long hours, constant travel and so-so money (I made around $300 a week). But the perks were fabulous. We’d have orgies—or “parties,” as we called them—once a week. Larry and I would have sex with three, four, even eight women at once. Larry was insatiable. I could manage maybe two encounters per day, but Larry would do four. He’d have sex in his car, office, an apartment behind his office, the back of the club—anywhere, really.

In 1971, Jimmy and I hired a pretty brunette named Althea Leasure to dance at the club on Gay Street in downtown Columbus. She was a good dancer, with a nice figure and a cocky attitude. Within a month, however, I fired her. At 17, she was underage, and I decided she wasn’t worth the trouble after she inexplicably lit into a customer who tried to buy her a drink.

The next day, Larry came up to me. “Don’t get mad at me,” he said. “But I hired her back.” Larry saw Althea dancing before I canned her and was intrigued. Althea and I got along much better the second time around, and soon I approached her on Larry’s behalf.

“Larry would really like to get with you,” I said.

“I heard he’s a pervert,” she said.

“No, that’s his brother Jimmy; they always get them confused,” I said with a smile.

That night after work, I drove Althea and Larry to the Howard Johnson motel on West Broad Street for their first tryst. The next morning, I picked Larry up at 7 for a court appearance. He was smitten. “She called me kinky,” he said. “She’s the bad one.”

 

I met Jane—a tall, thin, pretty blonde dancer—at the Hustler club in Dayton. We started dating, but it was nothing serious. Jane, not her real name, was one of several girls I was seeing regularly back in those days. In December 1971, she told me she was pregnant, and the baby was mine. We continued to see each other, but I didn’t change my lifestyle or commit to her. When our daughter, Alex, was born in August, I wasn’t even at the hospital.

But my indifference to fatherhood didn’t last long. I remember showing up at Jane’s place late at night, drunk, and seeing little Alex, just a few months old, sleeping in the bed with her. My daughter was so beautiful, so fragile, and I wondered what her life would be like if she didn’t have a father in it. I proposed to Jane, and about a year after Alex was born, we were married in a small civil ceremony.

A few months after my wedding, Jimmy called me at home one Sunday night. He wanted me to come to the Toledo club immediately. I said I couldn’t do it. It was my day off, my first one in a long time, and I wanted to spend it with my daughter. When I arrived in Toledo the next day, Jimmy fired me.

I told Larry to intervene. “Stop this crap,” I said.

“I can’t,” Larry said. “He’s my partner. What can I do about it?”

I took a job as a bouncer at a club in south Dayton. The money wasn’t enough, so I found a new business opportunity: transporting marijuana from Tucson, Arizona, to Dayton. I started driving up to 400 pounds of pot across country per trip, making about $2,000 per week (more money than I ever made with Larry).

Meanwhile, my relationship with Jane disintegrated. I never loved her, frankly. I married her so my daughter would have my last name. Jane also became afraid of me—and I don’t blame her. I had a bad temper, a bad attitude, and I hurt people for a living. I’d hit her in the past, too.

My lucrative side job ended after about two months. About 20 police cars surrounded me and Jane as we were driving out of Phoenix with marijuana in the trunk of my car. As the officers separated us, one of them said, “You are going to learn to hate that bitch.” We divorced a few weeks later. I learned from reading court records that Jane, who wasn’t charged in the case, cooperated with police.

After I was arrested, Larry came to my aid. He hired a lawyer for me, Don Ruben, a Columbus criminal defense attorney who had worked for Larry in the past. After I was sentenced to four years in federal prison, both Larry and Jimmy continued to look out for me: putting money in my commissary account, sending me magazines, paying for a Sunday subscription to the Washington Post. (Jimmy and I put our tiff behind us and have been friends ever since.) Larry could afford to be generous now. Since I was fired, he’d become rich. He’d transformed the little black-and-white newsletter we used to promote the clubs into a crude, blue-collar national girlie magazine called Hustler.

I also managed to get a brief taste of fun and freedom thanks to Larry. I requested a transfer from Arizona to another prison camp in Pennsylvania to be closer to my family. Believe it or not, the warden in Arizona allowed me to fly commercially on my own across the country if I paid for the ticket myself. The catch was if I was just a half-hour late for my appointed arrival time in Pennsylvania, the feds would add another five years to my sentence. Larry fronted me for my ticket and, best of all, hooked me up with his friend “Weird” Harold Rubin, the late Chicago porno entrepreneur who was featured in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife. During a stopover in Chicago, Rubin set me up with a prostitute. We had a quickie, and then I was back on a plane, heading to the Allenwood prison camp in the Allegheny Mountains. I made it with plenty of time to spare.

Larry wanted me to work for him again when I got out of prison. I was dubious. The clubs, my expertise, were gone now. Larry sold them to focus exclusively on the magazine, which had become a sensation after it published nude paparazzi photos of Jackie Onassis in August 1975. “I don’t know how to write a magazine,” I said.

“All you have to do is take care of me, make sure I don’t get hurt, make sure I get everything done,” Larry said.

In 1976, I was released from prison on parole after about 11 months and sent to a halfway house on the east side of Columbus. The manager of the facility gave me the rundown. I had to get a job. I had to be home every night at 6. If I was a bit late, I’d lose privileges. No exceptions. The next day, I went to work for Larry. When I returned that night, Althea, now Larry’s wife, dropped me off in a red Rolls-Royce. “I don’t think we’ll have any problems with you,” the manager said.

 

Shortly after I got out of prison, Jane called me. She was nervous. I’d been trying to get in touch with her for some time. “You’re not going to do anything to me?”

 “No,” I said. “I just want to see my daughter.” I missed Alex terribly. I hadn’t seen her since I went to prison.

Jane took me for my word and brought Alex to Columbus. As we got reacquainted over dinner, Jane told me about their adventures while I was gone. They traveled all over the country: California, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio.

I’m an open-minded guy—and no angel, of course. But when it comes to my daughter, I’m conservative. I wanted her to have a stable, secure home. I offered to take custody of Alex. Jane signed the custody papers, and I became Alex’s sole caregiver.

Alex and I moved into an apartment above the three-car garage of Larry’s mansion in Bexley. Granted, the arrangement was odd. Here I was, an ex-con, still on parole, raising a 4-year-old daughter in the home of the most notorious skin magazine publisher in America. And for the first 11 months we were together, I had to tuck Alex into bed every night and then head to a halfway house, where I was required to sleep.

But I made it work. I’d get up early every morning so I could get back to the mansion before Alex woke up. Plus, Larry’s household staff and his mother, Edith, a wonderful woman who lived with Larry, helped me out. And contrary to the depiction in The People vs. Larry Flynt, there never were any wild parties in the mansion. Actually, it was a quiet, family-friendly place. Larry and Althea still enjoyed having a good time. They just did it elsewhere.

I became Larry’s around-the-clock bodyguard and personal aide. I had an office next to Larry’s at Hustler headquarters on Gay Street in downtown Columbus, but I didn’t know why. I had no official role at the magazine. Mostly, my job was to care for Larry. I’d travel with him, pick out his clothes, run errands, protect him in crowds, keep things moving smoothly. If Larry asked you to do something, I made sure it got done. Above all, I was his confidant. I’d sit in on meetings, and Larry would ask for my thoughts afterward. He knew I’d give him an honest answer, whether he liked it or not.

Larry also liked the way I messed with people, even him. He used to wear a diamond-encrusted gold number “1” around his neck. I told him he should buy a number “2” for me. He laughed and sent me to a downtown jeweler to get the necklace made. As we suspected might happen, both Jimmy and Althea, now the editorial director at Hustler, weren’t pleased to see my new $1,700 piece of jewelry.

A few days later, Larry approached me about the necklace. “I’ve got to have it back,” he said.

“It’s mine,” I said.

“Ollie, I paid for it.”

“It was a gift. I’m not giving it back.”

“I’ll give you 17 hundred.”

“It’s worth 25.”

He laughed and gave me the money. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

Still, my attitude could annoy Larry. The joke around Hustler was that he’d fired me 51 times, and I’d quit 50. Sitting in my office one day, I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote “Ollie fired” on one side and “Ollie quit” on the other. I then hung the sign on my wall. Larry didn’t like it. “You make a joke out of everything,” he said. “You’re fired.”

“OK,” I said, indifferently.

“C’mon, asshole,” he said, reneging on the firing. “Let’s go.”

Honestly, I didn’t care if he canned me. It would have been a mixed blessing. Always an unstable personality, Larry became even more unhinged in the late 1970s. He went through his infamous conversion to Christianity. And there was other weird behavior. The night before Larry was supposed to appear at a legislative hearing in California about pornography, he barged into my hotel room, wrapped in a sheet and crying uncontrollably. He was holding a book. I thought it was the Bible at first, but it turned out to be Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. “He’s so smart,” he said between sobs. “He was before his time, and he was punished.”

My job was to protect Larry and that meant protecting him from himself, too. Jack Gallagher, a top executive at Hustler, asked me if we should let him go to the hearing. “Jack, I’ll sucker punch the son of a bitch,” I said. “I won’t let him out of this hotel. I ain’t going to let nobody see him like he is.”

In December 1977, I was home, enjoying a rare break and some quality time with Alex. Larry complained that I took nothing serious. He was right, to a point. My daughter was the one exception. I embraced fatherhood. I loved being my daughter’s provider and caregiver.

But I’d begun to question whether Alex and Larry, the two major figures in my life, could co-exist. I wondered what might happen if I continued to raise her in Larry’s world.

I got a phone call from Larry. He was in the Cayman Islands with Althea. He wanted me to fly to a resort and spa in Murrieta Hot Springs, California. “I’m tired,” he said. “I know you’re tired. I want you to go out to Hot Springs and relax for two weeks with me.”

I refused. Larry kept up the pressure. He said if I didn’t go, I’d lose my job. I wouldn’t back down. Then he had Gallagher, the Hustler president, call me and repeat the threat. But I meant it. I wasn’t leaving my daughter.

“Then I got to fire you,” Gallagher said.

“Then I’m fired,” I said.

Larry tried to find a compromise. He called me again from the Cayman Islands. “You know this is bullshit,” he said.

“I ain’t going out there,” I said.

Larry and Althea were moving to Los Angeles. He offered to fly me out to California. “Why don’t you take off a few months,” he said. “When I come back, will you come out and talk to me?”

“Sure,” I said. We’d been through this before. I figured he might triple my pay, which would have been hard to resist.

Three months later, however, a sniper shot Larry outside a courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia, where he was on trial for obscenity. The bullet left Larry paralyzed from the waist down. Everything changed after that, and we never had that meeting.

 

A few months after the movie première, Larry was back in Cincinnati. I drove down from Columbus to see him. It was supposed to be a social visit, but I quickly realized Larry needed my help. A big crowd greeted him as he arrived to open a new downtown newsstand to sell copies of Hustler. The magazine hadn’t been available in Cincinnati since he was convicted on obscenity charges 20 years earlier in the city.

Just like in the old days, I tried to keep the mass of people at bay. Larry, in his trademark gold-plated wheelchair, stationed himself next to the cash register, signing autographs and making chitchat with customers as they bought copies of Hustler’s Christmas issue, which featured Santa Claus groping a naked woman on the cover. Everything went smoothly—no arrests, the crowd was well-behaved. Afterward, Larry and I talked in his hotel room. “If you stayed with me,” he said, “you could have been retired by now.”

After Larry fired me, I never worked for him again. Like Larry, my daughter and I moved to California in the late 1970s, but we went our separate ways. While Larry moved into a mansion in Hollywood, my daughter and I settled into a mundane, middle-class life. We moved to Rancho Cucamonga, a city about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, and I opened a vitamin and health food store. In 1985, we returned to Columbus to be closer to family, and I bought a small medical supply company.

A bad real estate investment forced me to declare bankruptcy last year. I’ve also had health problems. I’ve been battling prostate cancer since 1991. It’s under control, but it’s not going away. And I’ve had five neck and back surgeries to fix my severely damaged spinal cord, possibly caused by all those fights during the nightclub years. Today, I use a wheelchair to get around. “I want to be just like Larry,” I joke.

Still, I’m glad I left Hustler when I did. There was no guarantee Larry would have made me rich or rewarded me for a lifetime of loyal service. Consider what happened to Jimmy, his brother and partner who worked with him since 1969 and helped keep the company running during Larry’s battles with drug addiction and mental illness. Last year, Larry fired Jimmy out of the blue, a decision that has damaged my relationship with Larry.

But mostly, I know I made the right choice for my daughter. Caring for her alone all those years (I never remarried), I did whatever it took to raise a daughter: shuttling her to camps and piano lessons, mastering a curling iron, helping her buy her first bra. She’s the most important thing in my life, and I’m proud of what she’s become: a thoughtful person, a successful businesswoman (she’s a vice president with a major bank) and a wonderful mother. With her in my life, I don’t need Larry. •

FYI

This story is based on more than seven hours of interviews with Roger “Ollie” Brooke. Jimmy Flynt, Larry Flynt’s brother, confirmed to Columbus Monthly many of the details in Brooke’s account: his role as the number three man during the Hustler nightclub years, his hiring and firing of Althea Leasure (later Larry Flynt’s wife), his eventual job as Larry Flynt’s bodyguard and personal aide, how he was twice fired from the organization and the nearly two-year period he lived in Larry Flynt’s mansion. Jimmy Flynt says Brooke was like a brother to him and Larry. “We were very close,” he says. “We shared everything. We shared our residence, our money, our women.” In an interview with Columbus Monthly, Brooke’s daughter, Alex, also recalled living in the mansion in Bexley, as well as how her father raised her alone since she was about 4 years old.

Jimmy Flynt also confirmed that Brooke spent time in federal prison during the 1970s, and the unusual transfer he made from a prison camp in Arizona to another one in Pennsylvania that included a visit in Chicago with the late porno entrepreneur “Weird” Harold Rubin. Columbus Monthly was unable to find any court or prison records related to Brooke’s drug conviction. The magazine filed a public records request with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in late July, but the agency has yet to respond. The U.S. District Court in Tucson, Arizona, said no records related to the case were available anymore.

In a telephone interview from Hustler’s California offices, Larry Flynt didn’t recall most of the details in Brooke’s account and denied two claims: that Brooke was the number three guy in the organization during the nightclub years and that he and his daughter lived in the Bexley mansion. He pulled back a bit on both denials, however, after Columbus Monthly told him about his brother’s confirmation of those details. After first insisting Brooke served as just a bodyguard, Flynt changed his story and said Brooke was the manager of the Columbus Hustler club. He also said it was possible Brooke and his daughter did live with him. “If everybody else is saying it happened, maybe it’s true,” he said.

—Dave Ghose