The Gooch is down but he's not out.

Bob Guccione lost Penthouse, the magazine that made him rich and famous, in a bankruptcy sale last fall. His pig-headed arrogance has caused most of his children to stop speaking to him. Throat cancer has left him with slurred speech and a feeding tube in his gut. But the Gooch, now 74, isn't giving up.

"I'm going to be around for a long, long time," he says in "The X-Rated Emperor," Patricia Bosworths's wildly entertaining and oddly moving profile in the February Vanity Fair.

Guccione is one of the great megalomaniacal geniuses of American magazine history and Bosworth is the perfect choice to profile him. Not only is she a noted biographer -- author of books on Marlon Brando and Diane Arbus -- but she worked for the Gooch, editing Viva, his women's mag, before quitting in disgust when he wanted her to hire an alleged rapist to write an advice-to-the-lovelorn column.

"He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt," she writes. "He hired and fired people, then re-hired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next."

Guccione grew up in New Jersey, studied for the priesthood, then quit, determined to become an artist. Living in London in 1965, he started Penthouse as a raunchier version of Playboy.

In 1969 he moved to New York to launch an American version of Penthouse -- a mag that combined, Bosworth writes, "tabloid headlines, sensationalistic muckraking journalism and dirty pictures." It worked: By 1979, Penthouse was selling 4.7 million copies a month.

He used the profits to launch Viva and other publications, including a science mag called Omni. He also bankrolled "Caligula," an allegedly "classy" big-budget X-rated movie starring Malcolm McDowell and John Gielgud.

And, believe it or not, he also founded a laboratory designed to create a nuclear fusion reactor and he staffed it with 82 scientists.

That pipe dream cost him $17 million but he didn't mind. "He wanted so much to be acknowledged for something other than pornography," his son Bob Guccione Jr. told Bosworth.

Meanwhile, Penthouse, his cash cow, was losing readers. The decline began in the '80s, when Attorney General Ed Meese's anti-porn crusade caused many newsstands to stop selling Penthouse. The Gooch responded by making his dirty pictures even dirtier, which caused advertisers to flee. Finally, the Internet is hurting Penthouse, too -- who needs the Gooch's porn when you can download anything you want for free?

Bosworth tells the story of Guccione's rise and fall along with the sad tale of his shattered family life. But the best parts of the article are her hilarious stories of working with the Gooch.

Once, he called late at night to summon her to his house because he had a brilliant idea on how to promote Viva. When she arrived at one in the morning, he revealed his brainstorm: He was going to make her the madam of a Viva whorehouse located on an airstrip near Las Vegas.

"Guys fly in on their private planes, stop for a little pleasure at the Viva whorehouse," he said, all excited, "then get back onto their planes and zoom off!"

Bosworth balked and stormed out the door. The Gooch followed, yelling, "You're cute when you're mad, baby!"

For better or worse, there will never be another magazine publisher quite like him.

By-the-Book Speeches

Ted Widmer, a former Clinton administration speechwriter, sat down and read every word of every one of America's 54 presidential inaugural addresses and somehow lived to tell the tale.

"It's not a task for the fainthearted," he writes in a smart and witty essay in the American Scholar. "No one can enter those endless paragraphs about tariffs and civil service reform and emerge undamaged."

Widmer emerged undamaged enough to notice that "the typical inaugural can be broken down into specific set pieces; the thoughts arranged in a comforting sequence." As a public service, he reveals that sequence:

1. "I am not worthy of this great honor."

2. "But I congratulate the people that they elected me."

3. "Now we must all come together, even those of us who really hate each other."

4. "I love the Constitution, the Union, and George Washington."

5. "I will work against bad threats."

6. "I will work for good things."

7. "We must avoid entangling alliances."

8. "America's strength = democracy."

9. "Democracy's strength = America."

10. "Thanks, God."

Widmer's list can come in handy for folks eager to celebrate zestily while watching President Bush's inauguration on Thursday. Just keep the list in one hand and a tankard of grog in the other. As Dubya hits each numbered point, drink deeply. When he gets all 10, holler "Bingo!"

Unplanned Parenthood

Consumer Reports, the magazine that tests and rates the stuff we Americans buy, tested and rated condoms. In its February issue, the mag concluded that most condoms work very well. But it also found "two to avoid."

Ironically, those two are distributed by Planned Parenthood.

"If you obtain condoms from Planned Parenthood, avoid the low-rated scented Honeydew and Assorted Colors varieties," the magazine recommends.

"Instead, choose the Lollipop, a brightly colored condom packaged on a stick. We rated it excellent overall."

A condom called Lollipop? Packaged on a stick? Who knew?

When news of the Consumer Reports article broke, Planned Parenthood defended its condoms, claiming that they'd passed other tests "with flying colors." Maybe, but that won't stop me from making a dumb joke:

Q:What do you call a guy who uses Planed Parenthood's Honeydew condoms?

A: Daddy.

By the way, here's a word of advice for folks whose minds work like mine: Don't bother to apply for a job at Consumer Reports. They use machines to test the condoms.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com