The New Yorker Radio Hour - David Simon’s “The Deuce” Charts the Rise of Pornography

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

David Simon is sympathetic to the sex workers he depicts in “The Deuce,” which will return to HBO for its second season in September. He is even sympathetic to some of the pimps and mobsters who were involved in the early years of the porn business. He is unambiguously critical, however, of porn’s effect on America. He tells David Remnick that porn—universally available on the Internet in its most extreme forms — has warped a whole society toward misogyny, and that we have not yet begun to reckon with its effects. Plus, the fiction writer Yiyun Li on the appeal of cemeteries, and Nick Lowe talks about getting old gracefully in rock and roll.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When The Wire debuted on HBO over 15 years ago, I don't think it's an overstatement to say that it changed television as we knew it. The show traced the underworld and the politics and the street life of Baltimore. And it was an ambitious piece of sociology as much as it was, unbelievable drama. The wire was dense, it was challenging, and not a few people say it was the best thing ever on television. That show was the work of David Simon, and his latest project is a show called The Deuce, and what the wire had done for the drug trade of Baltimore, the deuce does for sex work and the rise of pornography in 1970s, New York City.

So, what's it like, Shea? Well, I'm just stuck. Loretta can tell you, she's going to Sunlight, oh, yeah. Really? Sunlight. Making movies during the day. By the machine. The Deuce is going into its second season on HBO, and I sat down with David Simon almost exactly a year ago,

just a few weeks after the first season had premiered. As I understand it, you and George Pelacconis, your collaborator on this program, had a conversation with somebody who sparked this idea. Tell me about that. We were working on Tramey and the assistant locations manager was a fellow named Mark Henry Johnson. And he encountered this guy and befriended him and taken down tape after tape after tape of his memories of being a mob front for the mafia, for the Gambino family on 42nd Street. Ran a bar up near the Brill Building that became quite famous in its day as sort of a Demi Mon joint.

Ran an After Hours Club later on. What was the name of the place? If I say that, I think it identifies him. And he's passed away, and so has his twin brother. But I kind of feel like there's a lot of kids and grandkids. And since the story is not, you know, it's not all heroics. I'm not sure that I have permission, if that makes sense. Fair enough.

But anyway, he's – Mark said, you've got to come meet this guy. You got to hear the stories. You know, it's about the rise of pornography. It's this moment where porn went from being under the counter back alley in the basement. to being the beginnings of a multi-billion dollar industry and a legitimate one. And what kind of stories was he telling you? About all the people he knew and what happened to them

and who survived and who didn't and who was attreated and what happened and all the lies within the truths and truths within the lies. But we didn't know that. We thought, oh, great, it's a porn story. So George and I put him off and put him off. And finally, we were coming up here for a sound mix, I think, on Tramey. And I said, George, you know, if we're, let's just get this all over with because, you know, it'll be an hour. We'll shake hands. We'll be at the door. Three and a half hours later, we walked out of Mark's apartment in Tribeca after, you know, listening to the guy for three and a half hours. He wasn't done. We were just, we pretended to go need a cigarette, neither one of a smoke. And we walked around the block and said, my God, I think we're going to do a story about the rise of pornography. I mean, the stories were that compelling.

When the first episode opens, the world that we're in is the world of streetwalkers and pimps, not the world of porn. What happened? Well, I mean, there was. Listen, there's been pornography since the... No, there's been skin magazines and the rest. Since the first French guy invented the camera. Right. And said, you know, he ran down the street

looking for Parisian hookers to take their clothes off. And there's been prostitution since, you know, since I believe our testament. So nobody invented these things. But what happened around 1971 was the New York City courts began interpreting the inherent confusion over what is obscene in a very, you can either say pragmatic or laissez-faire-way, which is to say we're done chasing this nonsense around to no particular point because we can't obtain convictions anywhere above an appeals court. And the Supreme Court can't even give us any real guidance. So we're going to- So was the courts more than... the sexual revolution that did this?

There was sort of a hollowed-out notion of what is the standard. And of course, what are community standards in Times Square? They're very different from the rest of America. So it happened here. And it happened with mafia money. And suddenly,

what was under the counter in a very short span of time became legal and unregulated. I want to play a clip from the show. There's a scene where Maggie Gyllenhauls' character, a prostitute who goes by the name of candy, she has a kid as a client, a kid who clearly it's his first time having sex or anything close to it. And not surprisingly, he has an orgasm in no time flat, and he wants seconds. What do, Stuart?

I'm in school. What's your daddy do? He sells cars? He's got a dealership? That's his job, right? comes in, knows just a car he wants, doesn't dick around, doesn't need a long test drive, doesn't argue about the color or whatever, does he get in the car for less? Does he pay less? And the guy who comes in takes forever, got to drive five or six cars, talk about the radio,

the white walls, everything else before he's done and ready to buy? He doesn't give the easy customer two cars for the price of one, right? It's my job, Stuart. There is, as there is in the wire and everything else you do, David, a really powerful sense of labor and even the dignity of labor in this... Even when it's undignified. There. That's exactly right, which is to say, I think our hearts, no matter where we go, whether it's recon marines or trombone players or drug dealers or cops or sex workers, our hearts are either with... It's either on the assembly line or it's with middle management. You know, I think that's where our point of view is always strongest.

I think that's what we're trying to convey. And then we're trying to show you, well, so where does the power and the money route itself? And if we sort of fail to do those two things, we fail to create a world where real people seem to be laboring and trying to scratch out an existence, a plausible existence. And if we fail, I think, to address what they get and what they don't get in more macro terms, then I think we probably screwed up our mission.

Unless I'm crazy, one of the dominant themes of this is not just systems and economies and relationships of that kind, but misogyny. Oh, yeah. And this is created by David Simon and George Pelicanos and Richard Price

is a dominant writer here, but your writer's room is really interesting. Tell me about that. You just played from the first few. And yes, When we were trying to establish the template, I relied on the sort of the writers that I came to the dance with many years ago on the wire. But in order to shape the whole story and to bring it to a point that it needed to be, this could in no way be the boy's version of sex work. The boy's version of pornography.

So how do you assemble a writer's room? How many people are in it and who's in there? Well, I chase novelists. That's my conceit, which is I'd rather have people who. know how to write a multi-pov novel, then people who know how to write television. I can fix what ails a scene in terms of television. I can't fix content, and I can't fix voice.

But even in the so-called golden age of television, you don't have faith in that? No, no, I don't. I don't want somebody who can deliver a clinical 43-minute-and-30 episode on TV. I want somebody who can write a novel to a conclusion that has a beginning and middle and end. So, you know, George was the first guy that I sort of threw it at.

And then he and I went together to get Price. And then on this one, we went for Megan Abbott and Lisa Lutz. We needed the woman's voice in the room. We needed to be argued out of our own sensibilities. We needed to be argued into other sensibilities. Tell me about some of those arguments. Give me an example. I'm trying to think.

The one that I'm coming up with right now is not particularly substantive, but it's telling. There's a character named, whose name in the scripts was Thunder Thighs. She was a heavyset girl, a heavyset woman who's working the corners. And she was named Thundersheyes because that's what the original guy

whose stories it was knew her as. We didn't have her real name. We had what he remembered her as and that was her street name. So she was that in the script. First moment when we brought women on, and they looked at the scripts and they said, can this person have a name?

And instantly, I think I felt, a level of shame that, like, I didn't anticipate. It was like, she absolutely can have a name, and I'm sorry. Your way better. Yeah, you're way better. But it was much more substantive than that. I mean, you know, there's a conversation in one of these later episodes where the working girls are in the diner,

and they all just want to get rid of the pimps. And they start talking about menstruation. And they start talking about it in the most hyperbolic terms. You hear about these sponges? Stick it up there. Stopped the blood long enough to fuck. John's can't tell the difference, but you need to be careful. Gave me a yeast infection once.

Larry, one of the pimps, you know, throws down his fork, shoves his plate away, and walks away. And then they can talk because he's not around. It was one of the most fundamentally feminist scenes in the piece. And it was, I think it was Lisa Lutz, if I'm remembering correctly. She delivered that one. So, I mean, what you're looking at is that's something, you know, I would not have thought to write that scene. And if I did write it, I literally would have gotten to the parts about, I would have gotten to all the, you know, all the genital realities and said, or the venereal realities and said,

you would have run away from it. Yeah, you can't get a PA come in here and tell me, you know, you know. I think anybody who's watching this show has got to be casting their heads forward to where this lands, which is to say porn on every phone and computer and all the rest that did the ubiquity of porn. And the effect it's having. I mean, how do you feel about the effect of porn in society? Well, listen, you know, I come from newspapers. I'm a First Amendment literalist. I don't see any means to regulate speech, open speech.

But I think this has happened so fast that we've gone from, in 50 years, from stealing your dad's Playboy or Penn House magazine for a 12-year-old to have. having any form of pornography, regardless of how sort of misogynistic the imagery might be, be available at your fingertips without intercession to that same 12 or 13-year-old. We've gone so fast. I'm not sure we've taken stock of just how profoundly. You think it's affected consciousness in a way? Absolutely.

I certainly think it's even affected political consciousness in the country. I don't think some of the things that were said in this last campaign cycle and accepted. and not just the pussy grabbing, which is, of course, the most startling moment. I mean, if you think back two political generations, maybe one and a half to Jimmy Carter and lusting in his own heart in 1976, a very Christian, very sincere comment

when asked about infidelity that he had lusted in his own heart for other women, and nearly capsized his campaign. Trump barely broke stride after the tape came out. It was really a remarkable moment of... And you think that's... somehow to porn. I think the blunt ubiquity of pornography has made the terminology

and the demeanor with which men address women now. I think it's transformed it, yeah. And I think you really see it in give men the slightest bit of anonymity. You know, you have a lot of writers at the New Yorker. I imagine that what comes across the transom in terms of social media or comments at women, more than men, you know, never fail. I mean, women are used to it. If you ever get used to it, women have now been putting up with it for 10, 15 years of the

internet. It's astonishing. I'm, you know, my wife is a novelist. What comes across at women nowadays. She gets letters. She gets emails. She has a website, you know, and I mean, you know, you kill it out and you keep moving and, you know, obviously the anonymity is, is part of the dynamic. but what men feel entitled now to say and to think and to even argue, I think is entirely informed by a 50-year run-up. That porn itself influences the misogyny directed at a... And the misogyny pushes porn. I mean, I think it's quite a cycle.

All these projects and all your reporting and all your thinking in your adult life has led you to have what politics, David? I'm lefty How lefty? You know what? I'm a left wing on about 85% of the issues And where not?

I got no patience for anything that interrupts the idea of open speech I find what's going on on college campus is to be incredibly naive almost childlike I'm very disappointed

and I think open dissent requires speech in order to survive, particularly in a time of an authoritarian government. And the idea that you would trade that away over some snuck that's saying some stupid stuff in a Berkeley lecture hall is embarrassing to me. It's like, you would trade this weapon for that. That's not even tactical. So there are moments where I just walk, I listen to the left and I walk away and I say,

man, you know, you never fought the way it has to be fought in your life. And that's why you just came up with that answer. But there are other times where I find myself to the left of the democratic platforms. I mean, you know, I think there should be a graduate guaranteed income. I think we've reached the point in terms of the death of work and where we're going is this society and automation, that we should already be guaranteeing people basic income, which frankly, Richard Nixon got close to doing. He did. And was told, this will work.

You know, you give somebody $20,000, $30,000, $40,000. You give families that kind of money. It's all going back to the economy. It's not going into mutual funds. It's going right back into the economy. It would be an incredible boon to the country, and it would honestly take into account the fact that we don't need as many Americans

to run this economy as we once did. You started out as a journalist and a damn good journalist, and I think you have a kind of love and some hate relationship to what lingers in journalism. How do you feel about it now, and do you have any plans to sort of make anything more than an op-ed-like re-entry into journalism? Because I could think of a good place for you to write.

Is that an invitation? It's always been an invitation. Well, I owe you a piece. You do. I owe you a piece. I mean, there are parts of me that think there's going to be a common port where you don't want to sit in those goddamn deck chart chairs at 4 in the morning at 164th Street, you know, and wait for them to move the light. And at that point, maybe you should be writing prose again. All right, then I'm patient.

Because then it's you and it's an editor and a copy editor. And maybe a photographer. Well, I'll wait for that day. And in the meantime, I'm loving this work. Oh, well, thank you. David, thank you. Thank you for having me. David Simon, season two of the deuce which he created along with George Pelicanos,

comes out next month on HBO. Ian Lee is a fiction writer who's published some great short stories and essays in the New Yorker going back to 2003. Lee grew up in Beijing in the 70s. She was a child of the communist regime, and as a teenager, she spent a year in the Chinese army. After dark, though, she'd pull out her journal from where it was hidden under her bed, and as often as possible,

she'd lose herself reading American novels. She moved to the States after college and started writing her own books, in English, her second language. Lee eventually settled in Oakland, California, in the Bay Area, and she took us to one of her favorite places in the city. And he's really a massive. and coldy day for East Bay or for the Bay Area.

It's wet and cold and chilly and windy. So it's a great day to visit a cemetery in a way. So this is the entrance, and so there's a main avenue. We are driving in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. Wherever I go, I visit cemeteries. You know, I love Paris, and mostly I go to the cemeteries. When we visited Zagreb, we walked all the way uphill to, I think, one of the oldest cemeteries in Central Europe. And in Ireland, of course, in America, too.

I think part of the reason I'm drawn to cemeteries, I think there are a lot of human stories buried in cemeteries. And I write fiction, so I like to imagine lives already lived. and lives that are in the past so I can I can reimagine their lives and then I couldn't make up a story I think that's the main road and we can try to go up on the other side

you know this is very much Haley California Berkeley it's all hills and so all the roads are winding around the hill and I think a lot of cemeteries you can easily find, you know, each lot who is buried there. And here it's a little difficult because it's a little bit like a maze.

And every time you walk up there, you find new things. Look at this. I don't know what this tree is. It's beautiful. And I think sometimes you know these names that you know right away. It's like Girideli, the chocolate person. And some of the names are interesting to me. I think mostly because of the local history.

You know, I'm not from California. I immigrated from China, and so I thought, you know, it doesn't matter if I'm from elsewhere. Once I settle here, I want to know a little bit of this place. I want to know what happened. The making of California is almost like in itself

a little story about this nation, which to me is interesting. Different, different, nationalities, different ethnicities, and I always imagine the people I read in the book, some of them probably are buried here. So now we're on top of the hill and if you look afar, you can see San Francisco. But look at here, George J. Mazanti. So if you see, it's two hearts. And that is Angelo Guy Mazanti. So it's a five-year-old little boy was a little picture of a five-year-old boy that says forever young.

So, you know, the grandfather died in 1990 and the grandson died in 1988. So the grandfather outlived the son for almost two years. And just think about that man, how that man felt. I like this plot a lot because they're from different places. A lot of immigrants buried here. United States ambassador to the federal state of Micronesia, California secretaries of state, California State Assemblyman. So this is a Chinese American who held all these positions.

And this is an old-fashioned Chinese character that looked almost like paintings. To me, it's interesting as a writer, you need years of accumulation to understand the place. So I think I've written about China for 10, 12 years now, I think. But now I've lived in California for a little bit over a decade now. I realize California is coming into my fiction, too. So more and more California feels native to me in a way, you know, looking at it. the trees, the land. I've been working on this novel, and one of the main characters, really the narrator, she's an old woman. And she actually, in my imagination, she's in a

retirement home not far from here, probably like five minutes away. And she, in my imagination, would one day be buried here. In Lee at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California, her most recent book is a collection of essays called Dear Friend, for My Life I Write to You in Your Life. In a moment, we'll talk life and death with the beloved songwriter Nick Lowe. Stick around. I'm David Remnick, and next week on the show, the New Yorker's Eliza Griswold talks with Franklin Graham. Graham, who's the son of Billy Graham, is one of the most influential evangelical leaders in America,

and they'll talk about Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and why Graham thinks both men have helped the cause of conservative Christians. That's next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Okay. So this is downtown Perman. Nice. It looks like I'll be able to get a fancy coffee here. Yes.

Is that something you would like? Yes, I think it is. The sidewalk bistro looks like the place. Last summer, the New Yorker's Nick Poundgarten met up with one of his heroes, the singer and songwriter Niccolo. Hello. Hello. How are you?

I'm well, thank you. Are you? Lying into the area? Yeah. Graff. I'm afraid that information is top secret. Oh, God. Lowe made it big as a pioneer of what the English called pub rock,

a kind of back-to-basics rock movement that swept Britain in the 70s. Nick Lowe and Nick Poundgarten met a few years ago, and they went shopping for eyeglasses for some reason. Lowe wears these big, thick, heavy, black frames that are a sort of signature look for him, and last summer, Poundgarten decided to catch up with Nick Lowe again. Nick Lowe is this tall, blonde, geeky guy with glasses. Except he's not blonde. He's got this great shock of white hair.

And he's not really geeky either. He's actually about as cool as they come. The Jesus of Cool, they call him, after an album of his from 1978. Nick was staying near a town called Piermont on the Hudson River. He was playing some gigs nearby. One morning he and I went for a walk around town. Just before I came away. A few weeks before, he had loved.

lost one of his dearest friends and co-conspirators, his longtime producer, Neil Brockbank. And he was pretty broken up about it. This was Neil. Neil, Brockbank. Oh, yes. Thank you for knowing, mate. He was way more than a friend, really.

He worked for me for years and we collaborated. He used to produce my records. He also used to tell me if something I did was completely shit. Well, he died unexpectedly. And really threw me for me. quite a loop. There was a sort of, there was a trio. It was me, a fellow called Bobby Irwin and Neil.

And now, I'm the only one of those left. The other two are now dead. Bobby died a couple of years ago. Yeah, that's right. Both of lung cancer. Smoke like chimneys. I've been interested for a while in how rock and roll artists handle getting older. Some do the McJagger thing.

They pretend they're still jumping Jack Flash. Some go the Rod Stewart route. They sing, it had to be you. But Lowe found a different way to go about it. He started writing and performing these low-key, suave, cheeky little gems, played with poise and panache. I'm 61 years old now,

Lord, I never thought I'd see 30. Though I know this road is still some way to go, I can't help thinking on Will I be beloved and celebrated For my masterly climb Or just another bum When it comes to check out time The thing was for me

To accept the fact that I was getting older And to actually sort of embrace it And use it as a sort of an advantage Instead of trying to hide it Or be embarrassed about it Some of my colleagues and associates have to do that, really, behave like they did when they were young. And I wanted to avoid that rubbish, you know, at all costs. And it sort of worked.

It gave us the excuse, you know, to do almost whatever we wanted. I saw him perform recently at Lincoln Center, and in some ways he seemed better than ever. But still, this getting older business. business, the deaths of old friends. It's all caused him to think a little bit more about his father. His dad was an officer in the Royal Air Force. When was this? This was after the war? Yeah.

Yes. Although he joined the Air Force in the 1930s when it was... I don't think back then there was anything cooler you could have done than be an RAF pilot. It was like being in U-2. You know, he himself was from a military. family but his parents really treated him rather badly actually they seem to do their best to avoid seeing him as much as they could so he they were in india they sent him to boarding school in the

uk and in the in the holidays instead of going out to india like a lot of them did you know he used to go and stay with his friend of his parents he's right out on his bike one day he was about 14 or 15 i think and he saw a plane in the sky and it landed in a field and my dad asked the pilot if he could get a job you know in the wherever the airfield was that he'd come from which wasn't very far away he got a job sweeping up and cleaning out the place and in return for that this guy gave my dad flying lessons and he learned to fly and as soon as soon as he could he joined the air force and he always used to say that the air force was became sort of his family.

I gather your father didn't know what to make of the music you were making or the music you were into. He wasn't. No, he didn't. He didn't really get it. You know, he was, I think he was sort of disappointed, you know. My mom was my big champion. You know, she sort of taught me how to play the guitar. She was a musician, your mother?

Yeah, she came from a show business family, in fact. So she encouraged me like mad. and even if I brought her some of my really terrible records she made my dad listen to him, poor chap. But the only record I actually saw him put on was when we first got a stereo and he bought this record which was of trains pulling into the station.

I don't think he had a clue what stereo was but when he heard this record of trains pulling into the station you put that and he could, you know, and the train noise would go from one speaker to the other and he'd say, yes, come over here, You can hear about, yes, I think it's better over here, yes. You know, stepping over into the different parts of them. No, no, if you come here, you come here in all his magnificence.

That cheered him right up. Not for him, Sergeant Pepper's. Nothing like that. When did your father die? It was probably about 12 years ago now, something like that. And had he come around to what you were doing at this point? Yeah, he had totally got it. By this time, I suppose I had more...

more actual visible success. When I was on the TV all the time and actually getting records in the charts. Well, he didn't really like that stuff very much. He liked the later stuff much more. Yes, it was rather sad. When he was dying in hospital, I went to see him.

And he had this R.E.F. mustache all his life, even from very early pictures of him, He had this handlebar mustache, you know, sort of cliche in a way, you know, except he had one in the 1930s. Right. And I came to see him shortly before he died, and someone had shaved half of it off. You know, they'd obviously come around, they'd obviously come around to do a, to shave him. Yeah. And their hand had slipped or something like that.

And they'd go, oh dear, oh dear, dear, but they just left him with half a mustache. It was very, very sad and point. moment. He didn't know anything about it, but I thought, oh man, this is the ending. This is very, very bad. Very bad form indeed. You didn't have to tell him. No, I didn't tell him. I didn't tell him. But yes, he saw me for a man, he always thought that the greatest pop record ever made was Limbo Rock by Chubby Checker. And he said to me one night when he was he'd had a few drinks, he said, why would anybody bother with this stuff anymore? It's impossible to beat it, you know. So, you know, the majesty of bridge over troubled waters, you know, moved him not.

Imagine could have been anything, limbo rock, chumption. The military world, you know, felt totally natural to me. You know, I've never recoiled in horror for, ooh, all that marching, you know, I used to think, oh, it's all makes sense, you know, because I was, raised in it. I would have liked to have been in the Air Force as well. You know, I would have been a pilot. I would have loved it. But I wasn't nearly bright enough to tackle the maths and all the other stuff and to apply myself. And in any case, by that time rock and roll had come along and I was, you know, it's willing slave. It wasn't so much rebellion for you as it was just

following the life that interested you. Yes. And that would have you, a life that would have you. And a life that would have me. How well put. Yes, it was a life that would have me exactly. In my life I've done things I'm not proud of. And too often watch my dreams turn to sand.

But it looks like I might have turned you make to be there. There's no new leaves left for me to turn over. I'm in a prison built by my own hand. I pray I've found salvation to make me I can't go on living this way. And that's a fact I know you understand. I don't know. Nick Lowe. He'll be on tour starting in Texas next month,

and he spoke with the New Yorkers, Nick Poundgarten. And that's it for the show today. We hope you'll join us next week. And in the meantime, make sure to follow us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. Have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Lexus Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riann Corby, Jill Duboff, Calaliyah, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Stephen Valentino, and Richard Yeh, with help from Terence Bernardo, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.