The Gooch is down but he's not out.
Bob Guccione lost Penthouse, the magazine that made him rich and famous, in a bankruptcy sale last fall. His pig-headed arrogance has caused most of his children to stop speaking to him. Throat cancer has left him with slurred speech and a feeding tube in his gut. But the Gooch, now 74, isn't giving up.
"I'm going to be around for a long, long time," he says in "The X-Rated Emperor," Patricia Bosworths's wildly entertaining and oddly moving profile in the February Vanity Fair.
Guccione is one of the great megalomaniacal geniuses of American magazine history and Bosworth is the perfect choice to profile him. Not only is she a noted biographer -- author of books on Marlon Brando and Diane Arbus -- but she worked for the Gooch, editing Viva, his women's mag, before quitting in disgust when he wanted her to hire an alleged rapist to write an advice-to-the-lovelorn column.
"He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt," she writes. "He hired and fired people, then re-hired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next."
Guccione grew up in New Jersey, studied for the priesthood, then quit, determined to become an artist. Living in London in 1965, he started Penthouse as a raunchier version of Playboy.
In 1969 he moved to New York to launch an American version of Penthouse -- a mag that combined, Bosworth writes, "tabloid headlines, sensationalistic muckraking journalism and dirty pictures." It worked: By 1979, Penthouse was selling 4.7 million copies a month.
He used the profits to launch Viva and other publications, including a science mag called Omni. He also bankrolled "Caligula," an allegedly "classy" big-budget X-rated movie starring Malcolm McDowell and John Gielgud.
And, believe it or not, he also founded a laboratory designed to create a nuclear fusion reactor and he staffed it with 82 scientists.
That pipe dream cost him $17 million but he didn't mind. "He wanted so much to be acknowledged for something other than pornography," his son Bob Guccione Jr. told Bosworth.
Meanwhile, Penthouse, his cash cow, was losing readers. The decline began in the '80s, when Attorney General Ed Meese's anti-porn crusade caused many newsstands to stop selling Penthouse. The Gooch responded by making his dirty pictures even dirtier, which caused advertisers to flee. Finally, the Internet is hurting Penthouse, too -- who needs the Gooch's porn when you can download anything you want for free?
Bosworth tells the story of Guccione's rise and fall along with the sad tale of his shattered family life. But the best parts of the article are her hilarious stories of working with the Gooch.
Once, he called late at night to summon her to his house because he had a brilliant idea on how to promote Viva. When she arrived at one in the morning, he revealed his brainstorm: He was going to make her the madam of a Viva whorehouse located on an airstrip near Las Vegas.
"Guys fly in on their private planes, stop for a little pleasure at the Viva whorehouse," he said, all excited, "then get back onto their planes and zoom off!"
