In 1970, 17-year-old Althea Leasure walked into Larry Flynt's Columbus, Ohio, girlie bar to take a job as a go-go dancer. Flynt took one look at the runaway with her voluptuous figure and scarred psyche and saw, as friend Roger ''Ollie'' Brooke remembers, that she was already ''something special to him.'' Still, neither could guess that the meeting would spawn one of the most unconventional and tender love stories in tabloid history.
That relationship, captured in The People vs. Larry Flynt, brought out the best and worst in the couple, who were married 11 years before Althea's AIDS-related death in 1987 at age 34. ''The initial attraction was physical,'' remembers Brooke, a former Flynt bodyguard who also ran his clubs. ''Then they found out how much they had in common. She was the love of his life.''
Yet for the free-spirited Althea -- who was eight when her father shot her mother and then himself, leaving her to be shunted between relatives and finally placed in an orphanage -- Flynt, fresh from his third marriage, represented even more than someone to love. ''I said to myself, 'He thinks big,''' she later recalled. '''On top of it, he's a renegade, like me.''' As Flynt often says, ''She was a true soul mate.''
When Flynt started Hustler in 1974, he named his wife, who posed for the magazine's first life-size centerfold (''Name's Leasure, rhymes with pleasure''), copublisher. Friends credit Althea, who eventually drew an annual salary of $1.6 million, with saving the blue book when Flynt wanted to revamp it during a brief 1977 religious awakening. Privately she cracked, ''God may have walked into his life, but $20 million a year walked out.''
It was the bisexual Althea -- as a wedding gift, Flynt treated her to a woman at a New York brothel -- who came up with some of Hustler's most outrageous concepts (''I always liked the sick stuff,'' she said). To keep her husband happy, Althea procured sex partners for him, getting upset only if he kissed them. ''Had she tried to stop that part of his life,'' says Brooke, ''she knew she'd have lost him.''
''She was very determined to be her own person,'' says Althea's sister, Sherry Maynard, a Columbus stockbroker. ''I don't think she or Larry really cared which label you put on them, as long as they were okay with how they felt about themselves. Althea was against prejudice. And if anything drove her, it was that she would prove to the world not to be judgmental.''
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