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  The most pressing of their newly acquired adult responsibilities was assembling a staff of off-kilter, like-minded humorists who could crank out copy at a breathless clip—pitched somewhere between the juvenile idiocy of Mad and the sophisticated wit of The New Yorker. They needed people who were willing to work herculean hours and fill ninety-six blank magazine pages every month. And for cheap. At the time, the magazine business was exploding. The newsstands were fat with advertising. New niche publications such as Circus and Creem, which aimed at the same baby-boomer market that Jann Wenner had tapped into with Rolling Stone a few years earlier, were constantly popping up. But few were able to duplicate the innovative New Journalism of Wenner’s rock ’n’ roll bible or its plugged-in authenticity. Kenney and Beard knew the National Lampoon had to speak in their voices, not Simmons’s or anyone else’s.

  Kenney and Beard initially shared a claustrophobic office at Twenty First Century Communications’s midtown headquarters before the whole shop moved to 635 Madison Avenue shortly after the New Year. They began casting the net for outside agitators and simpatico bomb throwers, asking friends and friends of friends for writers who were willing to gamble on what Beard only half-jokingly called “one of the ten worst business ideas of 1969.” That’s when two old Harvard pals, Christopher Cerf and George Trow, first mentioned the name of Michael O’Donoghue.

  O’Donoghue was the son of an industrial engineer from Buffalo. Expelled from the University of Rochester in his junior year for failing to attend classes and stealing a campus police car, he had a dark streak as wide as the Niagara River and should have come with a warning sign that read CAUTION—DOES NOT PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS. Cerf, the son of famed Random House founder Bennett Cerf, had thought that O’Donoghue’s taste for the jugular might make an interesting counterweight to the Harvard grads’ brainy irreverence. His street smarts might add a serrated edge to their book smarts.

  O’Donoghue was slightly older than Kenney and Beard, and he looked like an urban guerilla in a torn Army surplus jacket, thinning unkempt hair, and a slim brown More cigarette constantly dangling from his mouth. He had made an underground splash writing for Evergreen Review and by publishing a lewd, offbeat comic strip parody of adventure stories called The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist (which Garry Trudeau would later cite as an inspiration for Doonesbury). But O’Donoghue thought of the Cambridge crowd as “a bunch of Harvard snot faggots who thought it was wrong to shed blood.” He preferred to think of comedy as a cruel, venomous attack on propriety—a baby-seal hunt in which no subject, no matter how taboo (cancer, the Holocaust,… baby seals), was off-limits. He was especially fond of saying that “making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.” It was generally agreed that if Kenney and Beard wielded a surgical satirical scalpel with their writing, O’Donoghue used a chain saw.

  Desperate to mock up the first issue of the National Lampoon by the early spring of 1970, Kenney and Beard were relieved to discover that O’Donoghue had, for years, kept methodical metal filing cabinets full of unpublished pieces and ideas for pieces that had never found an outlet. The three of them essentially wrote all of the magazine’s first issue, with Kenney writing the whacked-out dirty stuff, Beard writing the rapier-edged intellectual stuff, and O’Donoghue writing the corrosively outrageous, dangerous stuff. They were part Three Musketeers and part Three Stooges. On their good days, at least. On their worst, Kenney was prone to mysterious disappearances and the short-fused O’Donoghue to ripping phones out of walls when he detected some petty slight against his inarguable genius. Beard was left to mediate, the calm center of the storm.

  Eventually, other malcontents and literary sadists would find their way to 635 Madison. In addition to contributions from Christopher Cerf (now an editor at his father’s shop, Random House) and George Trow (cozily ensconced at The New Yorker and writing under the pseudonym Tamara Gould), there would be the wicked-witted boyfriend-girlfriend tag team of Michel Choquette and Anne Beatts; the absurd, bow-tied eccentricity of Brian McConnachie (who, Kenney insisted, was so strange that he hailed from a distant alien planet); the surly, Cambridge-educated British former stand-up performer Tony Hendra; the gonzo retro visual genius Bruce McCall; and Chris Miller, a gifted short story writer with a sweet tooth for filthy-bordering-on-pornographic male sexual fantasies.

  Sean Kelly, an Irish-Catholic college professor in Montreal who would join the ranks shortly after the National Lampoon’s inception, recalled that “meeting Henry was like meeting Holden Caulfield. He had that preppy disheveled thing going on, sucking on a pipe. And Doug was obviously some kind of superstar. When you met him you knew that he was not average. He was the brightest star in whatever room he was in. But he was so uncomfortable in his own skin. There was nothing he couldn’t do, but he was always second-guessing himself. I think he probably always thought he was getting away with something.”

  With Kenney, Beard, and O’Donoghue working around the clock (Rob Hoffman, always more of a businessman than a writer or editor, was receding into the background), the fourth floor of 635 Madison would soon start to feel like the Island of Misfit Toys—the Algonquin Round Table with a couple of wobbly legs. Just as the National Lampoon’s debut issue was about to hit newsstands, in April 1970, Newsweek ran a four-paragraph story about the brash publishing-world newcomer under the headline “Postgraduate Humor.” It was a pretty rote Lampoon origin story, but it wraps up on an oddly cynical, downbeat note. The Newsweek writer predicts: “Putting out a monthly that will entertain the nearly-30s may make the three youthful editors old fast.”

  The article wasn’t wrong. The debut “Sexy Cover Issue” in April features a come-hither model wearing a dark, military-green one-piece bathing suit in front of a visually muddy orange-brown background with a cartoon duck leering off to the side (Kenney’s misguided attempt to mimic Playboy’s bunny mascot). The first issue was aggressively ugly, and its contents more sophomoric than smart or titillating. It sold less than half of the 500,000 copies that had been run off the press. Inside, though, what would soon become the Lampoon’s DNA of generational in-jokes and sacred-cow slaughtering was evident, if a little unfocused. There was Aristotle Onassis’s lost, pidgin-English love letters to Jackie Kennedy, a gallows-humor piece titled “The Case for Killing Our Aged” (penned by O’Donoghue, naturally), and a lewd, self-pleasuring Dr. Seuss character named Seymour the Splurch. The two brightest standouts were a pair of Kenney contributions: the fictitious Letters page (from correspondents such as fusty Nobel Prize–winning author John Galsworthy, and Renaissance portraitist Hans Holbein begging for smutty pictures) and “Mrs. Agnew’s Diary”—a column ostensibly penned by Vice President Spiro Agnew’s wife, Judy, that paints the inhabitants of the White House as paranoid, tight-assed rubes who dine on meat loaf and cottage cheese. Both would become recurring features.

  Back at Harvard, Kenney and Beard’s stumble out of the gate was met with a not-surprising degree of schadenfreude. A recap of the debut issue in The Harvard Crimson reads, “It seems that The National Lampoon staff culled the poorest secondary school bathroom graffiti to paste together their April issue.” It continues, “The National Lampoon will be chalked up as a business failure unless the overall quality of the publication improves soon. Plain curiosity helped sell the first issue. The May edition will need some original ideas and more mature humor in order to hold its own on the nationwide newsstands.”

  Things would get worse before they got better. With Simmons calling the shots on the business side, Hoffman decided to return to Harvard and get an MBA before joining his father’s soft-drink-bottling business. Meanwhile, Doug Kenney and Henry Beard were, just as Newsweek predicted, getting old very fast indeed, scrambling to fill the magazine every month.

  “That was the hardest time,” says Beard. “It felt like you had a deadline every eleven days. It was so constant and frantic. The question wasn’t: Should we publish this? It was: Can we get two more just like it?”

  That June, Kenney and
Garcia-Mata got married at her parents’ home in the wealthy, white-bread suburb of New Canaan, Connecticut. The two had met as undergraduates while Garcia-Mata was studying at Radcliffe. She was smart, beautiful, and cosmopolitan in a manner to which a self-conscious working-class kid from Chagrin Falls could only aspire. Still, all of Kenney’s friends couldn’t fathom why he would want to walk down the aisle at twenty-three, especially with someone who couldn’t seem to keep pace with his rocket-fueled sense of humor. Kenney himself wasn’t quite sure either.

  His best man was the musician Peter Ivers, one of his closest friends and confidants at Harvard (in 1983, Ivers would be found in his LA apartment mysteriously bludgeoned to death with a hammer at the age of thirty-six). Lucy Fisher was Ivers’s girlfriend at the time, and she recalls asking Kenney shortly before his wedding day why he was getting married so young. “I’ll never forget it,” she says. “He said, ‘I have no idea.’ I remember feeling even then that he already seemed a little lost.” On the morning of the nuptials, Ivers and Kenney smoked a joint and Ivers offered to call off the wedding, all Kenney had to do was say the word. But, in the end, he went through with it.

  “It was a product of momentum rather than determination or intent. One thing leads to another and suddenly you’re up there and someone’s saying, ‘Do you take this woman…’ and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?!’” remembers Henry Beard.

  In a sense, Kenney now had two spouses wrestling for his attention: Garcia-Mata and the magazine where he was now spending ninety to one hundred hours every week. The first five issues of the Lampoon would be soul-crushing commercial and creative disappointments. That would all change, though, with the September 1970 issue, the magazine’s sixth. Simmons had decided that the magazine’s original art directors, an underground band of long-haired, knicker-wearing hash smokers from Cloud Studios who operated out of an East Village storefront, had to go. In came Michael Gross—a twenty-six-year-old Pratt Institute graduate with more aboveground credentials, including a stint at Cosmopolitan.

  The shake-up instantly cleaned up the magazine’s design. The duck mascot was eighty-sixed. The focus sharpened. The covers started to pop. In fact, the cover of that month’s “Show Biz” issue was adorned by the image of Minnie Mouse opening her dress like a 42nd Street flasher and revealing a pair of microscopic rodent breasts covered by daisy-shaped pasties. It jumped off the newsstands but not without causing a major headache for Simmons.

  The Walt Disney Company sued Twenty First Century Communications for $8 million—way more than the highly leveraged company had in the bank at the time. Not used to humbling himself, Simmons reluctantly groveled at Disney’s feet, promising never to parody one of its wholesome characters again. Privately, though, he delighted in the gallons of free ink that the dustup with the Mouse House had produced. It was a marketing masterstroke. Nothing was sacred, not even Minnie freakin’ Mouse. National Lampoon was suddenly dangerous. Circulation began to slowly take off, and within three months the Lampoon would finally nudge its way into the black. Advertisers, who had once turned up their noses, were beginning to circle back and sniff around.

  By late 1970 and into the first half of 1971, the Lampoon was on a roll, smashing taboos and breaking fine china with each new issue. “It was like there was this big ironbound wood door that said ‘Thou Shalt Not!,’” says Beard. “We touched it, and it just fell off its hinges. It was incredible.” The new misfit-toy recruits were humming with inspired ideas that were tweaked, jazzed up, and spit-polished by Kenney. Although Nixon and his posse of inept West Wing cronies were frequent and obvious targets, liberals (from John Lennon and Yoko Ono to the radical student left) weren’t immune from the staff’s merciless piñata swings.

  “Some people thought the Lampoon was a counterculture magazine,” says Chris Miller. “God knows we went after Nixon tooth and claw. But we also raked Teddy Kennedy over the coals. It wasn’t like we were anti-Republican, pro-Democrat … we were just anti-asshole.”

  Between the exhausting all-nighters, Kenney’s increased consumption of alcohol and pot, and a tense marriage that seemed to skip the honeymoon phase altogether, made him begin to show disconcerting signs of becoming unglued. It didn’t help that he’d carelessly launched into an indiscreet affair with a female coworker that had become public knowledge around the office. The guilt ate at him. For the most part, he stayed away from home. Beard urged him to slow down. His wife urged him to see a psychiatrist. Instead, Kenney just stepped on the gas pedal.

  By early summer, the Lampoon’s editorial staff was beginning to brainstorm ideas for its upcoming August “Bummers” issue at its favorite drinking hole, a rank-smelling dive called The Green Man. One of the ideas being kicked around was a hilariously offensive takedown of our neighbors to the north, titled “Canada, the Retarded Giant on Your Doorstep.” For the issue’s cover, the staff decided to take a cheeky swipe at Esquire’s now-infamous 1970 portrait of a smiling Lt. William Calley Jr. posing with Vietnamese children. Calley was a US Army platoon leader who was convicted of murdering 109 unarmed, innocent South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre. In the Lampoon version, Calley would be portrayed by gap-toothed Mad magazine poster boy Alfred E. Newman, whose famous catchphrase (“What, me worry?”) was turned into: “What, My Lai?” It was right in the Lampoon’s wheelhouse: stealthily thought-provoking, slightly profane, and more than a little offensive.

  Unfortunately, before the issue hit newsstands there would be a more serious bummer closer to home.

  2

  If You Don’t Buy This Magazine …

  ON THE MORNING of July 4, 1971, Henry Beard woke up to find a note pinned to the mantel over the fireplace written in Doug Kenney’s scrawl. It cryptically referred to “the great eye in the sky” and said that he needed to split town.

  “Doug was basically saying, I’m gonzo, I’m out of here,” says Beard. “My reaction was, you know, What the fuck? He had basically been the strongest presence in the office anytime he was there and suddenly he was gone. He was just burned out. He’d been working like a monkey. But there was a sense of, What the hell are we going to do now?”

  Some thought that Kenney’s strange, paranoia-laced missive was a suicide note. But Beard suspected otherwise—that his partner had simply been working without a break for a year and a half by that point, secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) buckling under the constant, helter-skelter rhythm of putting out a monthly magazine. He was in the midst of a full-fledged midlife crisis at the age of twenty-four. Still, no one had any clue where the Lampoon’s boy genius had vanished to.

  Without telling anyone, including his wife, Kenney had boarded a flight to Los Angeles, carrying nothing more than a knapsack, his Lampoon American Express card, and exactly one change of underwear. All he knew was that he had to get away; he didn’t know for how long. When Kenney arrived at LAX, he took a taxi to the Laurel Canyon home that his friends Peter Ivers and Lucy Fisher were renting. But they hadn’t moved in yet. They were still in Berkeley, the last pit stop on a cross-country road trip from Cambridge. So Kenney sweet-talked the landlord into letting him crash there until his friends arrived. When they finally showed up, Ivers and Fisher were greeted at the front door by a smiling Kenney: “Hi, Mom and Dad, I’m home!”

  Kenney’s lost weekend in LA would last for two months, give or take. Fisher remembers Kenney as seeming like a lost soul—a wounded Peter Pan who wanted only to be taken care of and mothered. Ivers and Fisher did just that. They had breakfast at Schwab’s almost every day; Fisher read him bedtime stories; he and Ivers had cap-gun fights in the Hollywood Hills; they went to Disneyland. Kenney was trying to go back to his childhood. Clothes were rarely worn around the house. It was all very early-’70s California.

  “This was before anyone had ever heard of the words ‘addict’ or ‘rehab,’” says Fisher. “In our minds, there were no alarm bells with Doug.” Fisher knew that Beard and Simmons (not to mention his wife) had to be worried, so she purchased
a handful of postcards and urged Kenney to let everyone know he was OK. He finally gave in, scribbling a note to his boss, Simmons. It consisted of just five words: “Next time, try a Yalie!”

  Back at the magazine, there was confusion, concern, and more than a little disappointment among the Lampoon’s staff. But there were still deadlines to meet. Other writers shared Kenney’s workload. The magazine, which had just begun to hit its stride, didn’t stumble, thanks to Beard, who was forced to step up as editorial ringleader—a role he didn’t particularly want. When Kenney returned, in September, the mood at 635 Madison had turned. The magazine was no longer his; it was Henry’s. Kenney skulked into an office full of resentment and tension, mumbling apologies and saying all the right things. Yet a trust had been violated. The man who managed to get along with everyone so effortlessly that Chris Miller had once compared him to “type O blood” was now toxic. Could he be depended on? “The guys were really pissed at him when he came back,” Simmons recalls. “They felt Doug had betrayed them.”

  Recalls Beard, “It wasn’t like ‘You stabbed us in the back, you piece of shit!’ But there was a certain tentative quality … Are you really back?”

  Shortly after returning, Kenney and his wife, Garcia-Mata, began the process of getting a divorce. The marriage had lasted just over a year. Simmons, desperate to find a way to keep his biggest and brightest star happy and committed, sent Kenney on a grassroots speaking tour of college campuses to help spread the Lampoon gospel. Kenney was eager to hit the road and leave his messy life behind. Speaking in front of lecture halls packed with Lampoon-adoring undergraduates who were still swept up in the new freedoms of the late ’60s, Kenney was treated like a rock star—a counterculture prophet dropping head-shop references and cracking down-with-Nixon jokes. He decided that he could get used to the showbiz glare of klieg lights and fame.