Want a Sex Toy With Your Coffee?

Porn makes us uncomfortable, so the thought of meeting the diamond-studded skin king nearly made us break out in hives. But when we had coffee with Larry Flynt at Hustler Hollywood last week, we were quite charmed by the man with the golden chair.

He’s got a certain flash in his eyes . . . let’s call it the Flynt glint. Speaking softly, like a proud parent, he discussed his Sunset Boulevard baby.

The L.A. coffee bar-newsstand-sex toy store celebrated its first anniversary Friday, and a new outpost is planned in Cincinnati next year. Flynt hopes to make his Hustlers the Barnes & Noble of the erotic marketplace.

“There aren’t people going into our stores in raincoats,” he said. “These are erotic boutiques where anyone can feel comfortable shopping.”

Although Flynt went after Republican family-values hypocrisy--offering cash for confessions of adulterous behavior involving Republican legislators during the Starr investigation--he shocked us by saying he could imagine voting Republican for the first time in his life if Sen. John McCain gets the GOP nomination.

He added that his investigative staff is busy researching Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

“He’s got an enormous amount of people protecting him,” Flynt said. “But it’s like putting your fingers in the dike. At some point it’s gonna blow.”

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After resigning from her fashion house two weeks ago, Pamela Dennis is back in business.

The New York-based designer, who has created awards-show frocks for half of Hollywood, has secured a new group of backers consisting of “mostly personal friends,” she told us at the Divine Design gala last week, where she was honored.

“I am ready to get my arms and legs back. It felt like they were cut off for a while there.”

Dennis said she resigned in mid-November from Cheil, a subsidiary of South Korea’s Samsung Group, because it failed to provide her with enough advertising, promotion money and design staff. Tensions got so high last month, Dennis said, that Cheil reps actually threw some of her fur-trimmed and beaded gowns in the dumpster behind her New York showroom.

“They are in a different business, the electronic business. There are also cultural differences. We needed a divorce.”

Samsung representatives did not return three of our calls.

Dennis says she wants to expand her daywear line, start another lower-priced clothing line, and put her name on accessories.

“Jamie [Lee Curtis] and I have been thinking about names for the secondary line. Since I’m from New Jersey, it might be the Jersey collection,” she said.

Curtis, Dennis’ muse, introduced the designer at Divine Design at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center on Thursday night. Curtis wore a skin-tight, sequined Dennis gown that she recycled from the MTV Video Music Awards.

“This dress,” she joked, “gets more fan mail than my father’s loincloth in ‘Spartacus.’ ”

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A Christmas card signed by Adolf Hitler and mailed to the grandson of composer Richard Wagner is among material to be auctioned by Butterfield & Butterfield on Dec. 14. The auction will be simulcast at the Butterfield galleries in L.A., San Francisco and Chicago, and open to online bidders at https://www.butterfields.com. Also included: documents signed by John F. Kennedy and Ben Franklin, first editions by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Jack London, and a 1708 document attesting that the residents of Hingham, Mass., do not believe that one of their own, Mehitable Warren, is a witch.

Booth Moore can be reached at booth.moore@latimes.com.