Flynt's Fond Farewell to Falwell

As a magazine publisher, Larry Flynt made Playboy’s Hugh Hefner look like a choirboy. First Amendment advocates held their noses while defending his legal right to foist Hustler on sexually retarded readers.

But here is Flynt playing Jerry Falwell’s Marc Antony in the Los Angeles Times to tell us that the porn publisher and the preacher were birds of a feather.

Flynt, who says he was deflowered by a chicken he later killed, now claims a kinship with Falwell: “I knew what he was selling, and he knew what I was selling, and we found a way to communicate.”

The road to friendship was rocky, paved by a five-year $50 million lawsuit over a parody involving Falwell, his mother and an outhouse, which ended with the Supreme Court upholding Flynt’s First Amendment rights. Ten years later,
on the Larry King show, Falwell literally embraced Flynt.

Afterward, the publisher says, the preacher came to his office, proposing they do their act in colleges across the country. They bonded and became a hit team.

“We'd have interesting philosophical conversations,” Flynt writes. “We'd exchange personal Christmas cards. He'd show me pictures of his grandchildren. I was with him in Florida once when he complained about his health and his weight, so I suggested that he go on a diet that had worked for me. I faxed a copy to his wife...”

So, friends and country men, if you have tears, shed them now. As Velma told Roxie in “Chicago” about their working together despite their differences: In show business, “that’s no problem at all.”