Born in the Bronx in 1926, Matusow was a Jewish street hustler who was picking pockets by age ten, and went on to work throughout his life as a Spy, DJ, Thief, Broadway Agent, Gambler, Stand Up Comic, Actor, Author, Musician, Professional Red Baiter, Filmmaker, Impresario, TV Clown and Social Activist. He was married twelve times, and palled around with Billie Holiday, Norman Mailer, Jason Robards, Steve McQueen, Emile de Antonio, Yoko Ono, Art Carney and Genovese mob boss Frank Costello. Ladybird Johnson invited him to the White House, and he invented the myth that smoking banana peels would get you high (as an ill conceived plot to extract geopolitical revenge on the United Fruit Company, aka Chiquita Banana).
In his later days he replaced LSD with LDS, converting to Mormonism and rechristening himself as Job Matusow. In his final years, he worked as a tireless advocate for the homeless, runaway teenagers and prostitutes while he made ends meet by establishing a successful children's theater / TV show starring himself as Cockyboo the Clown.
We all turn into Cockyboo the Clown in the end. False Witness, his memoir of inventing Communists for McCarthy to expose is partly available here. Sadly, Matusow died before he could firm up this autobiographical sketch into a proper book. Archive available here. If I ever get round to indexing this here blog, he's definitely going under rogues.
I've heard of people fleeing to the UK to escape McCarthyism (like Andrew "parliamentary profiles" Roth), but that's the first case I've heard of in which a McCarthyite fled to the UK to escape responsibility for it.
Also, comments gold: It was not "Anna" Lockwood but "Annea," a fluxus artist known in the 1960s and 70s for burning and drowning pianos...how many of those 12 marriages took place AFTER Harv became a Mormon?...Yes, I met Harvey Job Matusow in 1992. He was running a run down motel, just outside of Tucson, Arizona,USA. He had set up a scheme as the Ghandi Peace Center...He had keys to all the mail boxes, and was stealing Federal Food Stamps from the tenants, and selling them for extra cash. And yes, he went to church every Sunday.... The little chihuahua tucked into the bib of his overalls beneath the dark countenance's of his sizing-you-up face
Posted by: Alex | December 19, 2012 at 03:21 PM
And he can't spell Paul Robeson's name.
Posted by: guano | December 19, 2012 at 03:55 PM
But I will cut a certain amount of slack to anybody who "organized International Society for Abolition of Data Processing Machines and wrote and published my third book, THE BEAST OF BUSINESS, A RECORD OF COMPUTER ATROCITIES."
Posted by: chris y | December 19, 2012 at 05:47 PM