SEXIS WRONG

Sent by Jewish Welfare to another foster home at age thirteen,
he remained there for five years. He went back into the
public school system. He attended Chicago’s Hyde Park High
School, remained a good student. Summers were spent as a
camp counselor. During the school year he worked at Sears
and—this is key to his future—at Donnelley Printing, one of
the largest such facilities in the US. He graduated, barely seventeen,
and enrolled in the University of Chicago. But he was
now used to having money in his pocket and, despite the
workload from school, got a job.
The Miller legend now begins, a legend based on fact.
He went to work for Reynolds Aluminum. At the time, Cuba
was responsible for manufacturing 25% of the world’s supply
of party tchotchkes—hats, noisemakers, etc.—the vast
majority of which required aluminum foil in their making. But
Cuba had a big problem: Reynolds, due to a strike, couldn’t
fulfill its contracts to Cuban party-supply factories. Marvin,
He was the Oliver Twist of the porn
business, albeit Oliver Twisted,
an Artful Dodger who grew into a
porn-Fagin with a fondness for silk
underwear.
already possessed of a keen eye for financial opportunity and
a survivor’s grit to pursue such tenaciously, made a brilliant
move. Who in all the world could supply the Cubans with the
aluminum foil they needed? Marvin knew: Hershey’s Chocolate.
What?
Hershey’s has to wrap all its candy bars in something; as a
matter of course, it bought giant rolls of aluminum foil, but
the candy bars are specifically sized, and Hershey’s routinely
had to trim the excess foil. The company had a shitload of
trimmed ends sitting around that it would just toss out.
As Carolyn See wrote, “[B]y the time he was eighteen, then,
Miller has not only chosen his life’s partner, but earned and
lost his first million, and been educated in the best schools—
from the street to the University of Chicago to respectable Big
Business itself—to every nicety of rip-off.” 3 He had learned
the value of a dollar at a tender age. Like Scarlett O’Hara in
sharkskin after the Civil War: “As God is my witness, I’ll never
be hungry again!”
In the late 1940s, Marvin pulled up stakes and with the
little money he had left, moved with his wife to California.
He neglected to tell Ms. See about one of his early business
ventures in the Golden State: managing a large linen-supply
business and being convicted and incarcerated for falsifying
its corporate records and embezzling over $35,000. 4 Prison
counselors regarded Marvin “as a born-hustler, a man with
a certain charm but also a limited sense of how the social
system work[s], and even less awareness of what might get
him in trouble.” 5 Upon his release, he invested in carpets, becoming
something of a carpet king via innovation,
offering, as he recalled with the pride of a
merchant prince, “the first tufted carpet ever
introduced into the state of California.” 6 Unfortunately,
his factory blew up. “Too much viscose
in the air,” he explained to Carolyn See. 7
He next opened a doll-manufacturing factory.
It blew up, too.
Not coincidentally, Marvin acquired a nickname, a moniker
that on the surface appeared to reflect his incendiary temper:
“The Torch.” But a fiery temper was not the inspiration behind
this sobriquet; it was Marvin’s incendiary activities, for
he had decided to take a few shortcuts toward his next fortune.
He got into the flame-’n’-claim game. Yes, Marvin became
a larcenous arsonist, a master of insurance fraud, and
did very well. Until he got busted. In 1959 Marvin went to jail
for the third time, doing two years in California’s Chino State
Prison on the flaming doll-factory rap before his parole. 8
Marvin, independent of his employer, made a deal with Hershey’s
for all its foil remnants. Then he went to Cuba and
made a deal to sell them to the tchotchke manufacturers.
They gave him a letter of credit from Chase Manhattan Bank.
With that, he bought Hershey’s foil remnants. He quit Reynolds,
shipped the foil to Cuba. He got paid. By the time the
Reynolds strike was over, Marvin was a millionaire. He was
seventeen.
Flush with success, he married his high-school sweetheart,
invested his money in a home-appliances venture with a connection
from the old neighborhood, a man twice his age, and
went on a three-week honeymoon. When he returned, his
partner—and his investment—had disappeared.
When he got out in 1961, he went to work for a finance company
headquartered in Chicago. A trained accountant, Marvin
became a turn-around whiz. When companies fell into
financial straits, enter Marvin, whose financial acumen would
bring them back from the brink. Marvin was now running a
few businesses for his employers, two of which, significantly,
were a publishing company and a print shop. His experience
working for printers during high school had given him an unofficial
degree in the mechanics of the trade; he knew the ins
and outs, how to make a printing press print money. He took
a shot at men’s magazines: Reel, Now, and Sports Review.
He was getting his feet wet, kinda thrashing around, seeking
a niche. He knew printing, but publishing is another matter,
and he’d soon learn another lesson that would only sharpen
238 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG