Show Business: Bruce Boomlet

Obscenity and drug arrests had neutralized Lenny Bruce even before he died of an overdose of heroin in 1966. Few clubs would risk employing him. His lacerating attacks on social convention had evolved into convoluted harangues against the legal system that was successfully muffling him. He stuffed himself with soda and candy bars, a junkie's diet, and became fat. He undertook his own defense in court and, like a character out of Kafka, became lost before the law. His annual income in the late '50s and early '60s averaged $100,000; in 1965 he was legally declared a pauper.

Even in the last grim days, Bruce retained a legion of loyal admirers; they bought his records and his autobiography, and won new converts to the cult. Among the faithful there were some who admired not only the thrust of his satire but the drama implicit in his life. Critic Albert Goldman delivered a healthily skeptical Brucian epitaph:

"Alive Lenny was a problem. Dead he's a property."

His death did put his life into perspective for some; the surprising result now, five years later, is a Bruce boomlet. Tom O'Horgan, following his production of Hair, planned to do a film of Lenny's life; the project stalled and O'Horgan reworked it as a Broadway play, scheduled to open this week. Writer-Director Fred Baker decided to produce a multimedia homage off-Broadway. Meanwhile a crude movie biography opened in New York to capitalize on the still-growing revivals.

Hot Today. "A prophet has arrived," says Sally Marr, Lenny's 63-year-old mother. "This is his day." Says Lenny Greenblatt, a self-described "Bruce freak" who is music director of a Boston FM station which plays Bruce records often: "His satire is so relevant. All the., things he martyred himself for are hot today." Fantasy records, which released the first five Bruce albums, is readying a sixth extracted from old tapes. Bruce's autobiography is a campus bestseller. A paperback collection of Bruce material has already sold close to a half million copies. Critic Goldman is preparing a detailed biography due next winter.

O'Horgan's Lenny uses Bruce, played by Cliff Gorman, as a symbol to illustrate how America silences her rebels. Abetted by elaborate theatrical masques and imaginative staging, Lenny attempts to be a frenzied morality play, acting out Bruce's wildest fantasies and using his own words. Says Playwright Julian Barry, who played in a band that accompanied Lenny in the '50s: "To me the whole play is like Lenny's day in court." Adds O'Horgan: "I want to tell people something about this guy who kept trying to tell the truth. Some of the words he got busted for, Barbra Streisand says in movies now, and people just react with 'Isn't that cute?' " To judge from the previews, Lenny is a sincere testament, whatever the verdict of the New York critics. Dirty-mouth, the film, on the other hand, looks like a ripoff. Made on a budget that could not have been much higher than a ticket to the movie itself, it features Bernie Travis, a borscht belt-style comic sweating through an Alumicron suit, impersonating Lenny as if he were a bileful Henny Youngman.