Phil Gramm, porn mogul

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, not quite. He was a small-time investor, not a mogul, but, if nothing else, as Max Blumental recounted at HuffPo the other day, Gramm's forays into the porn industry in the '70s were rather amusing.

Back in 1973, he tried to invest $15,000 in a soft-core movie called Truck Stop Women ("No Rig Was Too Big For Them To Handle"). With that oversold, he eventually put his money in Beauty Queens (about pageant judges and contestants). When that fell through, he "contributed at least $7,500 towards... a satire of the Nixon White House called White House Madness that featured the crazed president wandering around the White House in the nude."

Gramm may or may not have known that his money ultimately went to help finance a soft-core anti-Nixon spoof -- the director of Beauty Queens, Mark Lester, shelved that project in order to make White House Madness, a sequal to his Tricia's Wedding (about drag queens) -- but what is clear is that, from the outset, he eagerly wanted to invest in porn. Not that he had much success, however. White House Madness was a failure. "Like the rest of Gramm's endeavors," Blumenthal notes, "his soft-core porn career was a complete disaster."

(And have I mentioned that Gramm is a conservative Republican who, until just recently, was a top McCain advisor? But surely you knew that already... Update: Actually, as Joe Gandelman is reporting over at TMV, Gramm is staying on as McCain advisor and surrogate. Madness!)