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Thu., August 09, 2007 Av 25, 5767

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Pulp fiction

By Yotam Feldman

In the evening, after an interview in the cafeteria of Petah Tikva's Beilinson Hospital, Shmuel Mor, 78, is more vigorous than ever. One would never know he had just finished recounting his life history for five hours, preceded by a lengthy blood transfusion for the rare allergic disease from which he suffers. Mor, an indefatigable entrepreneur, leaps from his seat toward the hospital exit and to his home, where he will continue to work on his current publishing venture.

Truth and fiction are interwoven in the stories told by the man who brought yellow journalism and pornography to Israel, and it's not always easy to tell them apart. Finding consistency or a commitment to any particular ideology in Mor's biography is also no easy task. In 1948, he refused an army commander's order to expel Lod's Arab residents, but a few years later he worked for the right-wing newspaper Herut and today he lives in a West Bank settlement "for health reasons." He espouses a communist outlook, but since the 1960s he has had his own business, and his employees claim he is stingy and doesn't pay salaries on time. His now-defunct magazine exposed sex scandals involving the defense minister at the time, Moshe Dayan, but it also exploited women (including minors), showing them in demeaning pornographic poses.

"Being anti-establishment gives all kinds of people the feeling that they are important," Mor says. "I never felt I was important. I wrote books, but not in order to screw the establishment. I did it in order to sell newspapers." Mor has written two books. "Supermarket Ha'ashlayot" ("The Supermarket of Illusions"), was awarded the ACUM prize in 1959, given by the society of composers, authors and music publishers in Israel. But his main claim to fame is as the founder and editor of the sensationalist weekly Bul from 1965 to 1972. He remained the owner until it closed, in 1989. Mor also published the Hebrew entertainment weekly Love and the men's magazine X. He founded the Topaz publishing company, which specialized in paperback books and published Hebrew translations of Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled detective novels. Mor brought out dozens of cheap pulp mini-magazines, as well as post-war victory albums after the Six-Day War, advertising brochures and an encyclopedia of sex.

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Nor was he deterred from (or disappointed by) various get-rich-quick schemes. Mor tried exporting roses to Russia and Finland, importing cardboard from Japan and selling tomatoes to Abu Dhabi. He also spent 135 days in prison on espionage charges, for publishing an article that revealed Israeli involvement in the assassination of Moroccan opposition figure Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965. In the course of his career, Mor has been prosecuted for libel, income tax evasion, various types of fraud and publishing obscene material. He has emerged unscathed from most of these brushes with the law.

'Yellow' line

A magazine that is barely known outside Israel and doesn't seem to carry much weight here, either; poorly printed, on coarse newsprint, filled with extravagant nude photos and written in slangy, careless Hebrew - thus did The New York Times describe Bul (target or bullseye) in an editorial after the 1966 arrests of Mor and the assistant editor, Maxim Ghilan, in connection with the Ben Barka affair.

Mor was familiar with the marriage of muckraking journalism and smut from his work at the now-defunct Ha'olam Hazeh, but his vision was heavier on the sensationalism, with less commitment to ideology. Later on, when a further incarnation of his magazine ran into difficulties, he also became increasingly less committed to reality.

Mor became enamored of the tabloid press during a visit to England in 1956. "I happened to see the Daily Express," he recalls, "and suddenly my eyes zoomed in on the headline: 'Prime minister's wife arrested on suspicion of kleptomania.' Don't forget that I was a frustrated journalist and I wanted to sell papers, I simply wanted to sell papers."

With Uri Avnery at the helm of Ha'olam Hazeh, the nude photos were banished to the back page, with the front cover reserved for reporting scoops. But Mor envisioned a magazine with two back pages and more flesh. "Bul didn't have a political bias and had no political orientation," Mor says.

Mor began Bul with Yitzhak Gutman, a crossword-puzzle magazine publisher who went on to become a millionaire thanks to the puzzle empire he founded in Britain. Mor's second partner was the poet and left-wing activist Maxim Ghilan.

Bul was more than just sex. To boost sales, it also carried news items, some real and others less so, which did not appear in other media outlets. "We continued with the 'yellow' line that Ha'olam Hazeh started," Mor says. "But because Avnery dreamed of glory and Knesset jobs and was everyone's pal, he stopped before orgasm. Ha'olam Hazeh was coitus interruptus. There were stories that Avnery killed so as not to destroy the national consensus, but I didn't care about the national consensus."

Did Bul have no ideology at all?

Mor: "You do what you can. Sometimes you pound the right people - and there were people who had it coming, especially after the victory orgy that followed the Six-Day War. I'm not saying that Bul promoted democracy, it was just a magazine."

It was not until the 50th issue that an Israeli woman was persuaded to be photographed in the nude for Bul. Mor recalls it as a gala issue. "For the first time we had a hot Israeli, a waitress, on the cover. We thought we had found a gold mine - a color centerfold with Israeli girls. At first we paid 50 lirot per photo, but then we upped it to 500."

How did you persuade the women?

"It wasn't me, it was the reporters. They'd find a girl and say, 'She's an easy mark.' But there were two things I insisted on: The girl's consent, witnessed by a lawyer, or parental consent if she was under 18."

And parents agreed?

"Parents signed. They dreamed of a modeling career, and they were right because a few did become models. Sometimes the parents changed their mind and came to complain, but there was nothing they could do once they signed."

Photographing minors in the nude? Today that's a serious offense.

"When the law was changed, we stopped. But what's so bad about it? Do you think someone who exposes her breasts is doing something wrong?"

Maybe the person who publishes it is doing something wrong?

"I don't see any moral problem here. A mature girl who dreams of a modeling career can get ahead like that. We also had beauty queens, a well-known actress - unintentionally, we became a springboard."

That people are ashamed of afterward.

"Sure they're ashamed - to be photographed for 50 lirot?"

Don't you think there is a connection between pornography and violence against women?

"Sex is connected with violence? Knock it off with those feminist definitions. Bring me a feminist and I'll show you a frigid woman. People who have good sex aren't violent. Why did Playboy become what it is? It came to a puritanical society, in which the words 'dick' and 'cunt' were out of bounds, and began shattering the Victorian codes."

You'll never be

a journalist

Mor's father, a flourishing fruit grower, was shocked by his son's career choice. "It wasn't just my father," Mor says. "I came from one of the most respectable families, in financial and social terms. Seventeen generations of rabbis and Torah scholars, yeshiva students, a great-grandfather who built Petah Tikva, and suddenly the son is acting up. But even as a boy I wrote stories and put out the class paper. My father used to say, 'Go water the orchard, stop wasting paper.'"

Mor's political awareness began developing in his teens, when he joined the left-wing Hashomer Hatza'ir youth movement. "I did terrible things, from my family's point of view. On May Day 1946 I marched with a red flag in the parade." A few months later, he joined the Palmah, the elite strike force of the pre-state army, and was a nonconformist there, too. Mor says that in 1948 he refused to take part in the expulsion of Arabs from Lod.

"After we conquer Lod, we get up in the morning and there is an order from [Palmah commander] Yigal Allon to load the Arabs onto trucks," he relates. "As the guys are rounding them up, I start shouting at them, 'What's wrong with you, are we Nazis? This is a Nazi act.' An argument started. Half were for expelling them, half against, and we almost got physical with each other. I said I would fire a rocket into the engine of the truck as soon as the first Arab got on, and I hear my company commander, Nahum, saying, 'Okay, you're going to jail for refusing an order.'"

You understood the meaning of the expulsion already then?

"A lot of guys understood. In the youth movement they brainwashed us with socialism and the brotherhood of nations, so people understood. How can we expel people after the Holocaust? Usually they ran away, but expulsion is something else."

After the army, Mor began working as a journalist, for Israel Radio, Yedioth Ahronoth, Herut and The Jerusalem Post, and finally for Ha'olam Hazeh, as a copy editor and then as a member of the editorial board. Mor says he founded Bul after Avnery fired him. "Avnery called me into his office and said, 'Mor, you'll never be a journalist. Go work for your father.' And that's how Bul began."

Avnery relates that Mor didn't make a particular impression on him, neither as an employee nor as a rival. "Thinking that Bul was a competitor to Ha'olam Hazeh is like thinking that the local paper in Beit She'an is competing with Haaretz."

The veteran journalist Dan Margalit, who Mor says was his "student" at Ha'olam Hazeh, is astonished by this characterization. "Shmuel Mor was very far from being my teacher," Margalit says. "I didn't have much to do with him. I remember him as an opinionated man, with something to say about almost everything, but not as a person who held his ground - certainly not against Uri Avnery," Margalit said.

The cover of Issue No. 74 of Bul, scheduled for publication on December 11, 1966, screamed: "Scoop! Israelis in Ben Barka affair? Stunts by the French Security Service." Inside, there was a short story about Israeli Mossad agents pretending to be filmmakers who led Ben Barka into a deathtrap set in France by the Moroccan secret service. The hint was clear: The Mossad was involved in the assassination. Bul's editors thought they could slip past the censors by calling the account fictional.

Mor says he decided to publish the story after Herut MK Shmuel Tamir, "an ideological supporter of Bul," misled him by telling him that Ha'olam Hazeh was about to break it, and claims he obtained transcripts attesting to Israel's decision to cooperate with King Hassan of Morocco despite the potential damage to Israel's relations with France. Mor says he viewed it as a public service as well as a journalistic scoop. "I was against Ben Barka's liquidation," Mor explains. "Why did we have to serve reactionary imperialists? 'Yellow' or not, Bul was a news magazine, and a journalist doesn't hold onto reports that the public needs to know. Everyone was afraid to publish it, but we thought we had found a way. I thought nothing would happen to us."

Mor maintains that Shalom Cohen, Avnery's co-publisher in Ha'olam Hazeh, was the first to go to the police with Bul's story. The police immediately began confiscating every copy of the magazine, which was on its way to the distribution points, and editors Mor and Ghilan were arrested. The espionage offense they were charged with carried a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, but they each received a one-year sentence and they were pardoned by president Zalman Shazar after serving only 135 days.

The Shin Bet security service did not want to shut down Bul, which would only have drawn attention to the affair. Thus, Mor claims, he and Ghilan were permitted to edit the weekly from their cell. "We were moved to a new, spacious wing in Ma'asiyahu [Prison]," Mor relates. "The reporters were allowed to visit us and we wrote and edited. The warden was on our backs the whole time to make sure we didn't miss our printing deadlines."

A 'senile' Sartre visits

Soon after Mor and Ghilan began serving their terms, the international press picked up the story as a violation of freedom of the press, with reports and opinion pieces in The New York Times, Newsweek, Time and French publications. Bertrand Russell sent a cable of support, while Jean-Paul Sartre visited them in prison. "He came and expressed the support of proponents of freedom in France and throughout the world," Mor says. "We sat in the warden's office, coffee and cake were served and the warden sat in to monitor the conversation, which Ghilan conducted with Sartre in French. [Sartre] was already completely senile and had no idea what it was all about. He said he wanted to write to us. We said that would be fine and never heard from him again."

After the pardon, Mor sold his interest in Bul to establish a daily, Express, which appeared for a few months in 1968 and 1969. He says it failed because after the Six-Day War the public wanted more positive stories. Bowing to public demand, Mor brought out "Bul - Album Hanitzahon" ("Bul - The Victory Album"), which he says was one of his all-time bestsellers. "Only 'Sodot Ha'ahava' ("Secrets of Love"), a sex education encyclopedia for adults, did better."

After Express folded, Mor returned to Bul, which gradually assumed more modest proportions. The editorial offices moved from the entire floor of a building to a small apartment on Tiomkin Street in Tel Aviv. Many articles were translated from foreign publications and passed off as original Bul pieces. The racy photographs were also lifted from foreign magazines, with Israeli names and fictitious biographies given to the subjects.

Left-wing activist Rami Livneh worked at Bul in the early 1970s, until his arrest for contacts with a representative of a Palestinian organization. "I saw an ad for work as an editor, so I went for an interview at the editorial office, if you can call it that. It was an apartment - two bedrooms and a living room. Shmuel's office had a big desk, a half-empty bookcase and a bed. Everywhere you looked there were stacks of soft-porn magazines from all over the world, that's where they stole the photos and articles from."

What did you talk about?

Livneh: "[Mor] gave me a few copies of Bul to read and asked what I thought," Livneh related. "It was the most daring writing in Hebrew up to then. From Ha'olam Hazeh he took the necessity of using a flowing, non-convoluted style, with a lead and subhead - the main point at the top."

Was it impressive?

"Not at all, a lot of it was crap," Livneh said.

The apartment on Tiomkin Street became a word factory. A team of no more than four people put out not only Bul but also Love, X, the women's magazine Jasmine, dozens of porn booklets under different names and small 140-page paperbacks, each of which took a week to write. The editorial secretary, Sara Raz, describes Mor as "feverish" in this period. "Every week he would come up with a new idea about how to become a millionaire, and every idea was more divorced from reality than the previous one."

Livneh describes Bul as endless literary labor, which he did together with writer Menahem Portugali, Raz's partner. Bul had no staff writers, only an editor and a copy editor who invented stories and rewrote translated articles from the foreign press, which they published under the magazine's many fictitious bylines. "We created a back story for every reporter," Livneh relates. "Moshe Charuvi was an itinerant correspondent, riding the European rails. Dr. Meir, the psychologist, was sometimes Shmuel and sometimes Menahem; he would write both the questions and the answers for a Q&A. There was a horoscope, and sometimes in the same week I wrote the horoscope for Bul, Love and X."

Livneh says that readers occasionally showed up looking for a reporter. "Some angry reader would enter and ask to see Moshe Charuvi because of some story we had concocted. We had standard answers: that Charuvi was doing reserve duty, that there was journalistic immunity. Other readers came looking for the models. They went through all the rooms asking where the naked girls were."

Were there models?

"There wasn't a single Israeli model. They were all photos Shmuel cut out and invented stories for. Once he found a photo of a naked girl in a cornfield and told me to do a story. So I wrote a piece about a girl from Dimona who hooked up with one of the Black Hebrews from Dimona and got pregnant and was in trouble, because she couldn't have an abortion and couldn't lie about the father because the baby might turn out black. The story ended with her looking for a generous man who would be willing to care for her and the baby. A great many responses came in from readers - we couldn't believe how many responses there were," Livneh said.

Some former employees claim that Mor constantly evaded paying their salaries or his debt. "He persuaded people to defer payments," Raz relates. "Sometimes, when people came to collect their money, he hid in a room or gave them a pile of checks, which would bounce. There were cases when the collectors lost their patience and a few times even beat him up."

And the staff?

Livneh: "With me he was all right, at first. Once we called a strike, after he went one month and then two months without paying, and I kept working because of the promise that the money would be there in a jiff. One day, when the magazine was about to go to print, I told the delivery man, 'You didn't get money, either, so take the plates to such-and-such apartment on Kibbutz Galuyot Street and wait with them there and say you won't hand them over until you're paid.' I went to Mor, locked the door behind me and threw the key out the window. I told him, 'Now you're here and I'm here and the plates aren't at the printer's, they're somewhere else and they won't come until we all get our salaries.'"

What was his reaction?

"'No problem, here's a check,' but I said the checks bounce. He had a silent partner, Benny Rimalt, the son of a Gahal MK. I agreed to take a check from him because I knew there was no way he would want to get tangled up with a bounced check connected to Bul." (Rimalt confirmed that he was involved with the magazine "for a short time" and had nothing more to say on the subject.)

Mor rejects the employees' allegations - "Why did they keep working if they didn't get paid?" - and claims their complaints were driven by irrelevant interests relating to old disputes with him. He also finds it difficult to remember suits against him. In 1984, for example, he was arrested for fraud after several Bul readers complained that they never received sex toys they had ordered from the magazine. Mor says he does not recall the incident. Most of the suits, he says, were against him only formally, because in 1972 he left Bul and handed it over to "contractors" while remaining on the masthead.

Why did you keep the magazine if it only got you into trouble?

"If you had a good son who became defective, would you throw him out? I treated Bul as my creation. Economically, that was a very bad mistake, because I lost a great deal of money. Everything I earned went down the drain there. So I'm either stupid or sentimental, and when people ask I say I don't have an answer."

One regret

Mor had a son with his first wife. Tammuz, 46, is a partner in a truck company and sometimes worked with his father in the past. Mor lives with his second wife, Yael, on a settlement in the northern West Bank - "but for health reasons, not political ones. In anti-allergy communities inside the Green Line the residents simply do not follow the rules." Together with his wife, Mor is working on Shoshelet ("Dynasty"), a series of books about, and funded by, Israel's leading families.

In his free time, Mor reads thrillers ("I like reading books on sale"), listens to classical music and looks after two huge dogs. "When I go through the papers every morning, I don't see anything that I didn't do," he says. "I have only one regret - that I didn't have the sense to take out copyrights. Everything I see, I say, 'I already did that.' I read an article and immediately give it a headline that I'm sure would sell 10 times more than the one they gave."

To who would you liken yourself?

"Jack London. In my opinion, a serious writer is one whose book you open and read to the end with enjoyment."

What about Hugh Hefner of Playboy?

"Just some small-time guy who joined the trend. What did he do? Screwed broads. I don't have to put out a magazine to screw women."

Larry Flynt?

"Playboy is tasteful; Flint's material is crap, disgusting."

What did you most enjoy doing?

"I most enjoy what I'm doing now, the historic family albums. We can be proud of what we've done: We weren't just riffraff that was persecuted all over the world, we became a nation."

And all this history, just to sell porn?

"Porn is part of a free society that is not afraid of sex, of death or of war." W

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