In Like Flynt

THE LATE PORN KING LARRY FLYNT WASN’T EXACTLY FAMOUS FOR HIS GOOD TASTE. STILL, HIS OLD GOLD-PLATED TCHOTCHKES JUST FETCHED A FORTUNE AT AN ONLINE AUCTION

BY JOEL STEIN

THE MOST ridiculous part is that it worked. Not the aesthetics. No, they don’t work at all.

But Larry Flynt’s fight to be taken seriously—that totally worked.

When the porn titan died last February, his New York Times obit called him a “freespeech hero.” And now, in an even greater sign of respectability, the Hustler founder’s furniture was peddled off at an online auction in December by Abell Auction Company, the 107-year-old house that once sold the items of Hollywood royalty like Cecil B. De Mille, Jack Warner, and Barbara Stanwyck.

I am shocked at everything I see during my presale peek in November at the Flyntorabilia stored in the auction house’s 100,000-square-foot warehouse. It isn’t the 1980s Patrick Nagel cocaine-inspired sex-dungeon decor I idiotically expected.

Flynt was born to a sharecropper in rural Kentucky. He wanted respectability. So he went full dictator chic. The stuff here is VIP room