An Audience With Beelzebub

The pervert is back.

Actually, that line belongs to Larry Flynt himself. He used it when he returned, in 1983, from five years of drugged stupor at his Bel-Air mansion to resume control of America’s most loathed publication, Hustler magazine.

But the line fits just as well today. After being lionized in the 1996 movie “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” he has decided to resume playing his favorite role in our national life: the guttersnipe who reminds us we were born in slime and will likely die there.

Last week, as members of the House of Representatives waxed long on the historic significance of their impeachment inquiry, Flynt was taking responses to his offer of $1 million to anyone with verifiable evidence of “adulterous sexual encounters” with any of the said members.

As always with Flynt, the offer is part joke and part deadly serious threat. Full-page ads announcing the offer ran in the Washington Post and were posted on Hustler’s Web site. In the nation’s capital, the talking heads on the Sunday morning news shows didn’t know which way to play it.

Cokie Roberts on ABC’s “This Week,” for example, seemed uncharacteristically flummoxed. She described the offer and then asked:

“What does this mean? Where does this look like we’re going here?”

No one could answer. Perhaps, in Washington, they are not as accustomed to Flynt’s escapades as we are in Los Angeles. After all, we’ve had plenty of practice.

From his office at the top of his Beverly Hills building, Flynt seems pleased by the confusion he is creating. Nothing delights him so much as causing the high and mighty to squirm over matters sexual.

“They are hypocrites,” he says in a voice emerging as a soft croak. “They want to pretend they have no skeletons in their closets, that they don’t wind up in hotel rooms with people they aren’t married to.

“But they do.”

Thus far, Flynt says, the response to the offer has been “overwhelming.” Two investigative reporters in Washington have fielded more than 300 or so calls and letters that have come flowing into his offices.

“Most of the responses will turn out to be bogus, no doubt,” Flynt says. “We will toss those out and keep the ones that can be verified. We are looking for times, dates, places and possibly photographs.”

How long until the results are published?

“About six weeks,” Flynt says.

In sum, Flynt intends wholesale outings. He intends to go after the biggest fish in Congress, and is willing to pay big money to get them.

Notice how this plan nauseates and titillates at the same time. Flynt has a perfect ear for that sort of thing. You want to turn away from it, but you can’t.

“People say to me, ‘Aren’t you doing the same thing as Starr?’ ” Flynt says. “I tell them that’s right. Starr got everything down into the mud. I’m just getting down there with him.”

As he talks, Flynt delicately smokes a Cuban cigar, his hands trembling ever so slightly. The office is bathed in utter quiet and furnished like an Italian bordello. No one bustles in or out. I have the feeling I have been granted an audience with Beelzebub.

But a courtly Beelzebub. A devil who gets the joke. Maybe that is why Flynt is so hard to categorize.

In the movie, after Flynt is shot and paralyzed by an assailant’s bullet, he contemplates moving Hustler’s offices away from its birthplace town, Columbus, Ohio, which now reviles him. But where?

“I need to find someplace where perverts are welcome,” says Woody Harrelson, playing Flynt.

That place, of course, turned out to be Los Angeles. And Flynt, with all his cruelty, humor and, yes, commitment to his own principles, flourished here beyond his dreams.

I first met him when he was living at his mansion on St. Cloud Road in Bel-Air, a few blocks down from Jimmy Stewart. It was 1983 and Flynt had just announced his candidacy for the presidency. The very notion was ludicrous, and I suggested as much.

“Yes,” Flynt answered. “But think of the fun we’re going to have. Here I am, a wealthy, crippled pornographer who’s willing to spend his last dime to tell people what’s really happening. For the elites who run the country, I am their worst nightmare.”

As it turned out, Flynt was almost right. He displayed a genius for using his fortune to needle the establishment, and the circus continued for six weeks. Flynt first unveiled the DeLorean tapes that eventually resulted in the auto maker’s acquittal on drug charges. Then he defied the federal courts when they demanded that he reveal the tapes’ source.

And throughout, he teased everyone with the promise of the so-called Vicki Morgan tapes that allegedly showed members of the Reagan Cabinet participating in a call-girl ring. No one knew if Flynt actually had such tapes, but if he did. . . .

Then, suddenly, the fun ended. Flynt suffered from manic-depressive disease, and a downward spiral drove him back into the cool recesses of his mansion. The presidential campaign was over.

Still, for good, for bad, Los Angeles has always tolerated Flynt’s antics and his smut. Perhaps it’s the Hollywood tradition of overlooking eccentricities; perhaps it’s because Los Angeles simply likes to live and let live. I don’t know.

For whatever reason, over the years Flynt has become our pervert. He belongs to Los Angeles because--if for no other reason--we have never kicked him out.

If he now makes good on his threat to uncover the bedroom farces of Washington, I suspect nothing much will change in the relationship between Flynt and Los Angeles. He pays his taxes, after all, and from time to time he’s good for a few laughs.

In Los Angeles, that’s all we ask.