Larry Flynt

Lore & Background

Flynt was born in Lakeville, Magoffin County, Kentucky, the first of three children of Larry Claxton Flynt Sr., a sharecropper, and Edith (née Arnett), a homemaker. He had two younger siblings: sister Judy and brother Jimmy Ray Flynt. His father served in the United States Army in the European theatre of World War II. Due to his father's absence, Flynt was raised solely by his mother and maternal grandmother for the first three years of his life. Flynt was raised in poverty, and said Magoffin County was the poorest county in the nation during the Great Depression. In 1951, Flynt's sister, Judy, died of leukemia at age four. The death provoked his parents' divorce one year later; Flynt was then raised by his mother in Hamlet, Indiana, and his brother, Jimmy, was raised by his maternal grandmother in Magoffin County. Two years later, Flynt returned to live in Magoffin County with his father because he disliked his mother's new boyfriend. Flynt attended Salyersville High School (now Magoffin County High School) in the ninth grade. However, he ran away from home and, despite being only 15 years old, joined the United States Army using a counterfeit birth certificate. It was around that time that he developed a passion for the game of poker. After being honorably discharged, Flynt returned to his mother in Indiana and found employment at the Inland Manufacturing Company, an affiliate of General Motors. However, there was a union-led slowdown and he was laid off after only three months. He then returned to his father in Kentucky. For a brief period, he became a bootlegger but stopped when he learned that county deputies were searching for him. After living on his savings for two months, he enlisted in the United States Navy in July 1960. He became a radar operator on . He was the operator on duty when the ship was assigned to recover John Glenn's space capsule. He was honorably discharged in July 1964.

Reader's Guide

In early 1965, Flynt took $1,800 from his savings and bought his mother's bar in Dayton, Ohio, called the Keewee. He refitted it and was soon making $1,000 a week; he used the profits to buy two other bars. He worked as many as 20 hours a day and took amphetamines to stay awake. Flynt decided to open a new, higher-class bar, which would also be the first in the area to feature nude hostess dancers; he named it the Hustler Club. From 1968 onward, with the help of his brother Jimmy and later his girlfriend Althea Leasure, he opened Hustler Clubs in Akron, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Toledo, Ohio. Soon each club grossed between $260,000 and $520,000 a year. He also acquired the Dayton franchise of a small newspaper called Bachelor's Beat, which he published for two years before selling it. At the same time, he closed a money-losing vending-machine business. In January 1972, Flynt created the Hustler Newsletter, a two-page, black-and-white publication about his clubs. This item became so popular with his customers that by May 1972, he expanded the Hustler Newsletter to 16 pages, then to 32 pages in August 1973. As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, the American economy entered recession and the revenues of Hustler Clubs declined. Flynt had to refinance his debts or declare bankruptcy. He decided to turn the Hustler Newsletter into a sexually explicit magazine with national distribution. He paid the start-up costs of the new magazine by deferring payment of sales taxes his clubs owed on their activities. In July 1974, the first issue of Hustler was published. Although the first few issues went largely unnoticed, within a year the magazine became highly lucrative, and Flynt was able to pay his tax debts. Flynt's friend Al Goldstein said that Hustler took its inspiration from his own tabloid Screw, but credited his comrade-in-arms with accomplishing what he had not: creating a national publication. In November 1974, Hustler showed the first "pink-shots", or photos of open vulvas. Flynt had to fight to publish each issue. Many people, including some at his distribution company, found the magazine too explicit and threatened to remove it from the market. Shortly thereafter, Flynt was approached by a paparazzo who had taken pictures of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis while she was sunbathing nude on vacation in 1971. He purchased them for $18,000 a

Did You Know?

• Flynt joined the U.S. Army at age 15 using a counterfeit birth certificate, but later enlisted in the U.S. Navy in July 1960.
• He was a radar operator on a ship assigned to recover John Glenn's space capsule, though the source does not name the ship.
• Flynt was shot and paralyzed in 1978 by serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, who was outraged by an interracial photo spread in Hustler.
• Flynt married five times, and his fourth wife Althea Leasure died in 1987 from drowning in a bathtub; she had ARC (AIDS-related complex).
• He died from heart failure in Los Angeles on February 10, 2021, at age 78.