Lyle Stuart

From Philosopedia.org

Stuart, Lyle (11 Aug 1922 - 24 June 2006)

Named Lionel Simon when born in Manhattan, he was the son of a mother. who was a secretary, and of a salesman father who committed suicide when the boy was but six years old. Dropping out of James Madison High School in Brooklyn, he joined the Merchant Marine, later calling himself Lyle Stuart partly because of having experienced anti-Semitism while in the service.

When a young man, Stuart wrote a country song, “Someone Left That Golden Gate Open,” that was recorded by Grand Ole Opry star Red Foley.

When 22, he married Mary Louise Strawn and founded small muckraking publications like Exposé (1951) and a monthly tabloid, The Independent (1951-1975). His first notoriety came when he fought with Walter Winchell, the powerful columnist in the 1940s and 1950s. Typical of his writing and unhappy that Winchell had ridiculed the black entertainer Josephine Baker, Stuart revealed,

I wrote eight tabloid pages about Winchell, the entire issue. I knew him very well. I knew who the No. 1 girlfriend of the moment was - oh, yeah, he was married; where he was renting a love nest for $30 a month; that - next to Rudy Vallee - he was the cheapest tipper in New York.

After his wife died, Stuart married his secretary, Carole Livingston, who became an integral part of his various publishing ventures.

When Winchell struck back, Stuart sued for libel and won an $8,000 judgment, using the money to start the publishing concern, Lyle Stuart Inc. (1956).

An atheist, he was paid to write “Go to Church on Sunday Morning” for retailer and philanthropist J. C. Penney.

Stuart was once a reporter for International News Service (1945) and Variety (1945-1946); editor of Music Business (1946-1948); business manager of MAD (1952-1954); and president of Citadel Press (1970-1989).

Since 1990 he had been President of Barricade Books. Never one to shun taboo subjects or controversial books, he published The Anarchist Cookbook; Ferdinand Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super-Rich; The Sensuous Woman; The Sensuous Man; The Marriage Art; Where Did I Come From?, a book for youngsters about sex; and Warren Allen Smith's Who's Who in Hell (2000.

He was author of God Wears A Bowtie (1949); The Secret Life of Walter Winchell (1953, a time when the gossip columnist was most powerful); Mary Louise (1970); Casino Gambling for the Winner (1978); Lyle Stuart on Baccarat (1983, revised 1997); and Winning at Casino Gambling (1995). Known as a skilled casino gambler, he once entered two baccarat tournaments in Atlantic City, winning first place both at Bally’s Grand and the Taj Mahal for a total of $245,000.

In 1999 on Radio WEVD’s Alan Colmes’s talk show, Stuart livened the discussion by saying,

There is no god. There are no gods. There is no life before conception, and there is no life after death. Religion thrives on ignorance, fear, superstition, and ignorance.

Callers immediately telephoned their objections, but Colmes has no taboos on his show and, according to Stuart, “is one of the few sound liberal voices still on any major radio station.”

When Stuart wrote Running Scared, an exposé in which he called Steven A. Wynn the “emperor” of Nevada who had ties to the Mafia, Wynn sued and won a $3.1 million libel judgment against Stuart, which forced Barricade Books into bankruptcy in 1997. Later, the judgment was reversed, but the experience was not a happy one for all concerned.

Stuart died a week after sending the following letter to Vanity Fair (September 2006):

I take exception to the statement by Christopher Hitchens that the blow job came into its own with Deep Throat in 1972 ["As American as Apple Pie," July]

In 1969, I picked up Joan Garrity, a former employee of my publishing company, in a taxi and gave her a lift to a job interview a few blocks away. I had phone to tell her that I was going to "change her life." I told her I wanted her to write a book. "Don't you remember," she said, "we parted because I couldn't write a press release."

"I want you to write the way you talk," I said. Then I spoke the words that would trigger a gross of nearly $50 million world-wise. "I want you to make cocksucking respectable in America."

The book was titled The Sensuous Woman, and it remained on the best-seller lists in 1970 as a cloth-cover book for almost a year, selling more than 600,000 copies. The paperback edition has sold more than 10 million copies to date. With that single book we turned what had been considered a perversion into a normal sex act.

Deep Throat, which Mr. Hitchens wrongly credits with doing that, came two years later, when it was discovered at the World theater and publicized by Al Goldstein in his Screw magazine.

Before his death, the 5-foot-9 Stuart broke his legs when falling, used a cane, and weighed 240 pounds. He had a heart attack and died at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in Englewood, N.J., near his home in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Barricade Books filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2007.

Correspondence

Stuart commented in one of his 1958 letters to The Humanist Book Review Editor Warren Allen Smith about Albert Ellis's not being up to The Humanist's standards .