There were some successes in Bruce's early career. He made a bit of a splash on the nationally broadcast variety show, "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scout," and played some decent nightclubs for a while, earning what was then pretty respectable money -- a couple of hundred bucks a week by some estimates. But that initial success soon faded. Bruce found himself filling in at various low-level venues for a couple of dollars a night. As Collins noted, there were times when even Bruce was ready to throw in the towel. When he left the Merchant Marines, however, he tried again.

In the years after the war, as he struggled to make his mark in the decidedly stultifying world of mainstream comedy, Lenny Bruce performed his funniest act offstage.

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In the Goldman/Shiller book, for example, Honey Bruce recounted how Lenny and some other showbiz people, including his mother, ran a scam in Miami, claiming to be priests collecting for an impoverished leper colony.

"They called it the Brother Matthias Foundation for Lepers," the authors quote Honey Bruce as saying. "Lenny was the founder. He'd visited a leper colony in British Guyana when he was in the Navy. He had a lot of feelings for those people and wanted to help them...so he organized this foundation and got it chartered by the state of New York. He got some very nice contributions from different people and was even written up in the papers."

But Honey told the authors that while working in Miami in the 1950s, not long after the beginning of their eight-year marriage, Bruce "began to ask himself, 'Why should I work so hard without getting paid?'...He decided to make a few bucks for himself."

"The way he worked the scam was really funny," Honey said. "He'd leave the hotel in a sport shirt and sandals and he'd have a little black shopping bag with him, and inside was the black suit, the black hat and that thing the priest wore, you know, the complete outfit." Once the change was complete - he'd first have to ditch his car, a blazing yellow convertible with leopard-skin seats - he'd go from door to door lining his own pockets with contributions meant for the poor lepers. In the end, according to Collins' book, he collected $8,000. About $2,500 of it went to the lepers; the rest went to what was fast becoming his favorite charity: himself.

"Lenny used to say that when he walked down the street like that, even the dogs would stop barking," Honey Bruce recalled. Ultimately, however, the outfit didn't fool the cops in Miami. Lenny Bruce was arrested for panhandling, which ended the work of the Brother Matthias Foundation.