Bob Fosse, Lenny Bruce, Honey and Kitty Bruce, and Fosse’s Bleak as Hell Biopic Lenny

LENNY 

(Bob Fosse, USA, 1974, rated R, 

111 mins) 

"He never served any time, and he never paid any fine. He only paid with his life."--Howard Solomon, owner of the Cafe Au Go Go

Kitty Bruce, the only daughter of Lenny Bruce, passed away this year at the age of 70. Like her father and mother, Kitty struggled with drug abuse, but unlike Lenny, she kicked the habit and went on to become the keeper of his flame, overseeing every project involving his work with tact, taste, and understanding. Lenny was unlucky in many ways, but he was fortunate to have a devoted daughter who looked after his legacy with such care. 

Whether he was lucky to be immortalized by Bob Fosse, in a film released eight years after his 1966 death from a morphine overdose, is another story. Kitty, as a character, plays only a small role in the biopic, but it's an authorized portrait, and both daughter and ex-wife served as advisors. 

Fosse's second feature, an adaptation of screenwriter Julian Barry's 1971 stage play, begins with a pale, frame-filling closeup of a narrow-lipped mouth. Lenny's fame rests primarily on the things he said--things that offended straight society and small-minded judiciary--so it must surely be his mouth. It isn't. The mouth belongs to Honey, played by former showgirl Valerie Perrine. 

This bait-and-switch establishes that though Fosse will be focusing on Lenny, the more famous member of the duo, he prioritizes Honey's perspective, and not due to any feminist impulse on his part, but because she outlived her ex-husband, and throughout the film, she reflects on their relationship to a tape recorder wielded by an unseen interviewer--voiced by Bob Fosse. 

Harriet Jolliff, aka "Hot Honey Harlow," was working as a stripper in 1951 when she met the former Arnold Schneider (Dustin Hoffman in the wake of Straw Dogs), who was working as a comedian, but the screenplay neglects to mention that he was also serving in the Merchant Marine after a stint in the Navy. (Tony Award winner Cliff Gorman, Broadway's "Lenny," played the Lenny-by-way-of-Hoffman standup comedian in Fosse's All That Jazz.) 

Two months before Kitty, Valerie Perrine passed away at 82, whereas her now-88-year-old costar remains active, most recently appearing in Daniel Roher's Tuner (though accused by several women of sexual harassment in 2017, Hoffman has faced no significant repercussions). Most Perrine obituaries led with Richard Donner's Superman, in which she played Lex Luthor's main squeeze, and it's understandable--the 1978 movie was her biggest hit--but Fosse gave her her best role. For her efforts, she was awarded Best Actress at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.  

It wouldn't have been in character for the director to  depict Lenny's childhood, and he doesn't. Consequently, I don't recall any mention of his podiatrist father. Instead, Fosse introduces him as an aspiring standup emceeing strip shows around New York. It wasn't his ultimate goal, but he enjoyed looking at the scantily-clad ladies, so it wasn't exactly the worst gig in the world, and without it, he wouldn't have met his first and only wife. 

Fosse also presents Lenny's ancestral home as one dominated by women, especially his supportive mother, Sally Marr (Jan Miner), also a comedian. 

Sally shares her flat with his aunt, who isn't as supportive of his use of profanity or his cavorting with a shiksa stripper, leading to moments of levity in a film that isn't all that funny--including Lenny's act, which plays like on-screen narration, since it's so intensely autobiographical. (As Fosse told Hoffman when he asked, "I don't think Lenny Bruce is funny.")

The results are insightful, to be sure, and Hoffman is a convincing stage performer, but Lenny has got to be one of the least funny A-list films about a comedian ever made, and not just because of the bleak, tabloid way he died. 

True to Fosse's form, though, it's never boring! It's also beautiful in its ugliness. Bruce Surtees, who received one of the film's six Oscar nominations, shot the entire thing in high contrast black and white, and many sequences--especially the last--play like crime-scene photographs come to life. Fosse also peopled Lenny's stripshow audiences with sweaty, leering, pock-marked faces, recalling Diane Arbus's queasy work. To quote Sean Baker, "B&W cinematography and production design is A+...and the editing by Alan Heim has the rhythm of a Lenny Bruce stand-up show." 

Initially, Honey is the star, and Surtees shoots an early striptease from a low angle as if she were a goddess. Perrine shines like a diamond, much as Jessica Lange would in Fosse's All That Jazz five years later. Or Mariel Hemingway in 1983's Star 80, his final film. In the early-1950s, though, Lenny was just a schlemiel, a schlimazel--to quote Laverne & Shirley--stumbling through showbiz impressions for an audience of hard-drinking, chain-smoking manly men who just wanted to watch ladies disrobe. The well scrubbed, mixed-gender, collegiate record buyers would come later. 

It isn't an auspicious start, but Honey finds Lenny "cute" and "huggable"--and he can't take his eyes off the statuesque glamor gal. There's a sequence in a diner in which he stares and stares, but what should be creepy really isn't, even as Honey, dining with an older comedian, coyly pretends not to notice. 

Fosse presents their entire courtship as intensely romantic--rose petals and everything--amidst the squalor of their surroundings. In short order, they put together a double act, but it never really takes off, so Honey returns to stripping despite Lenny's increasing discomfort. They need the money. 

He may have old fashioned notions about women, but his no-holds-barred approach to comedy proves so far ahead of its time that older comedians, like a Milton Berle-type, insist he clean up his act. In the film, he does nothing to curry their favor, which might have helped his prospects, except Lenny is honest to a fault and refuses to kiss up to sleazy old men who grope his wife, so it's fortunate he has an agent, Arnie (producer Stanley Beck), to look out for him (Barry based the character on Alan Sobel). 

Lenny's rise through the ranks is marked by more downs than ups. 

When he and Honey are in a serious automobile accident, for instance, and she lands in the hospital with her pretty face bandaged-up like Rock Hudson in Seconds--and where she develops a taste for morphine--he has a fling with a candy striper. Fosse doesn't depict anything untoward, but Honey figures it out soon enough. 

She recovers, and the two push on to Detroit before ending in California. By this point, they're both addicted to heroin. In 1955, Harriet gives birth to Kitty, but their marriage continues to falter, and they split two years later. 

Left to her own devices, Honey's life completely unravels, and she ends up serving a two-year bid for possession. Fosse proceeds to depict Lenny as his daughter's caretaker, which wasn't the case at all--his mother took her in. 

While Honey is doing time, Lenny releases records and buys a house in the Hollywood Hills--thanks to Steve Allen and Hugh Hefner, he also makes several television appearances, which Fosse omits--but the high times don't last long. Just as Honey is getting her shit together, he starts to lose his. 

Other than one disastrous gig that plays for an uninterrupted seven minutes, Fosse speeds through this period mercifully quickly--unlike Robert B. Weide's detail-oriented 1998 documentary--though Lenny's troubles went on for years. It isn't just the drugs, but a string of arrests for narcotics and obscenity that exacerbate his paranoid tendencies. Granted, he had every right to feel persecuted: one arrest was for saying the word "schmuck" on stage--schmuck! In truth, it wasn't so much about the profanity so much as his outspoken opinions about the Vietnam War and the Catholic Church. 

It's hard to watch, and Fosse has no interest in exploring the politics of the situation--I don't recall any mention of the War or the Church–but the reality is even worse than the bummer he depicts. At the end of his life, Lenny wasn't slim and trim like Hoffman, but bloated and barely comprehensible. 

Fosse's film ends when Lenny does: with the comedian, naked, stretched out on the floor of the house he was about to lose. Though alone when he died, he had a housemate and a fiancée, except they're excised from the picture, and Fosse doesn't even cushion the blow with an intertitle or two.

I was 10 when I saw Lenny for the first time. 

My father, a fan of the comedian, took me to the film upon its original release. Near as I can tell, it never occurred to him that it might not be suitable for a child--and thank God for that. I only saw my divorced dad, who lived on the Left Coast, once a year, and I welcomed any insight into his preoccupations, no matter how dark. Nor was it a passing phase. Thirty years later, he gifted me with Lenny Bruce - Let the Buyer Beware, a six-CD boxed set compiled by Hal Willner with assistance from Kitty Bruce and Lenny producer Marvin Worth.

So, I've always had a special place in my heart for this grim, if beautifully-crafted picture. Dad held truth-to-power guys, like Lenny and Richard Pryor, in high regard, and it's especially sad to think that today's truth-tellers are facing similar reprisals--not so much through the courts, but through politically-motivated cancellations--simply for describing things as they are. 

After Lenny’s death, Honey Bruce published a 1976 memoir, remarried, and built a new life for herself in Hawaii. None of this is mentioned in Lenny. It all happened years later, and doesn't have much to do with the story Fosse chose to tell. Nonetheless, Honey and Kitty never gave up in their efforts to clear Lenny's name, and in 2003, they secured a posthumous pardon from New York Governor George Pataki. Honey died two years later. 

With the passing of Kitty Bruce, who didn't have any children, Lenny's bloodline comes to an end, but Lenny lives on as an acid-tinged portrait of the vital necessity--and terrible fragility--of free speech rights in America.

Lenny, in a new 4K digital restoration, is out now on The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray and 4K+Blu-ray with a 2015 commentary track from Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo (from the Twilight Time release), a new interview with Alan Heim, a new essay from Mark Harris, and archival interviews with Bob Fosse in print and Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine on French TV. 

Images: the IMDb (Hoffman's eyes, Perrine's mouth, the two together, Perrine with Jan Miner, and Perrine in the hospital), Valerie Perrine / Facebook (on stage), and Dangerous Minds (Honey, Kitty, and Lenny Bruce).