Description:

Bruce Lenny

Lenny Bruce Tells His Jazz Organist How to Get “Dirty Channells” on Ham Radio

 

LENNY BRUCE, Autograph Letter Signed, to Lewis DePasquale, n.d. With black-and-white photograph of Lenny Bruce coming out of court.  1 p., 7.75" x 10" Photograph: 1 p., 4.5" x 3.25"

 

Complete Transcript

Dear Lewis

            Here is a present for you that you do not have to let Delores know about. As I told you you get all these dirty channells (It Picks up Ham Radio Operators when there screwing) As soon as Delores come in to A? picks up and shifts to the Inedala? A Dover Boston Clarinet Band

            Anthony De Angleo Conducts

                                                                        Yours Truly Len Bruce

 

Leonard Alfred Schneider, Lenny Bruce (1925-1966) was born in New York to Jewish-American parents who divorced when he was very young. He grew up with various relatives. Bruce joined the U.S. Navy in 1942 and saw active duty during World War II in the Mediterranean. In May 1945, he staged a comedic performance for his shipmates while dressed in drag and then convinced the ship’s medical officer that he was experiencing homosexual urges, which led to his dishonorable discharge in July 1945. He settled in New York City and attempted to establish himself as a comedian. Bruce wrote screenplays early in his career and then recorded a total of four albums of original material. Considered a “sick comic,” he was largely banned from television, though it appeared occasionally. Most of his performances were in night clubs or strip clubs, where he performed throughout the 1950s. In 1951, he was arrested in Miami, Florida, for impersonating a priest, though he was found not guilty.  In 1961, he was arrested in San Francisco for obscenity, though again acquitted, and in Philadelphia, for drug possession. Additional arrests for his performances followed in Chicago in 1962, Los Angeles in 1963, and Greenwich Village in 1964. Convicted in New York in November 1964, he was sentence in December to four months in a workhouse. He was set free on bail pending an appeal, but he died before the appeal was decided. He was banned from England as an “undesirable alien” and from several U.S. cities.  By 1966, Bruce was blacklisted by nearly every nightclub in the United States. He died of a drug overdose in his Hollywood Hills home in August 1966.

 

“Count” Lewis DePasquale (1930-2001) was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and he married Dolores Martino in 1951. DePasquale served as a cryptographer and musician in the special services during the Korean War. He was a jazz keyboardist and played the organ for such performers as Ella Fitzgerald and Harry Belafonte. He was widely known as “Count.” In January 1960, he was introduced to Lenny Bruce in Miami, Florida. Bruce immediately like DePasquale and asked him to come open for him at the El Patio Club across town.  Over the next six years, the Count played, worked, and wrote movies with Bruce. When he died in 2001, he was in the process of writing a memoir of his experiences with Bruce.

 

Condition: Letter: Several folds but otherwise good.  Photograph: Very good.

 

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