The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (11 page)

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay,” Samantha said, letting my flaccid penis fall out of her mouth.

“This doesn’t usually happen, I swear.”

“How can we help?” the director asked. If he was annoyed by my inability to perform, he wasn’t letting on. He voice was calm and encouraging. “Do you want to go see the fluffer again, or would—?”

I jumped up and ran toward the stairs like somebody was chasing me. “Yes, thanks, that’d be great,” I said, all but pushing a cameraman out of the way.

When I got upstairs, Christie was already working on the next guy. He looked up at me with panic in his eyes, probably assuming that it was his turn to perform.

“Listen, I hate to be a bother,” I said, “but do you mind if I borrow her for a minute?”

“Excuse me?” he said.

I pulled Christie to her feet and dragged her out of the room.

“Just five minutes and then I swear, she’s all yours.”

We found an empty bedroom and Christie started blowing me again. But it wasn’t working this time. I kept thinking about all the cameramen and gaffers and grips and makeup people downstairs, waiting for me and expecting me to come waltzing in with an erection that could cut glass. I needed something a little more intense to put me in the right mind-set.

“Can I ask a favor?” I said to Christie. “Would you be offended if I ate you out a little?”

“Sure,” she said with a shrug, “knock yourself out.”

I know this may surprise you, but I’ve always preferred giving head to receiving it. There’s nothing I enjoy more than being face-deep in a woman’s snatch. And though this may sound like bragging, I’m very good at it. Maybe it’s because I like to eat. Vagina, lasagna, whatever.

It was working. My penis was beginning to show signs of life. Just to be on the safe side, I stood up and rubbed it against her pussy. I didn’t insert it, just rubbed the tip against her lips. That was another technique of mine, which I’d been using since my teens. There was a time when girls called me Ron “Just the Tip” Jeremy. It’s not as penetrating as actual sex, and I’ve found that it’s the perfect way to get a girl nice and wet, because you’re rubbing the clitoris under the hood.

Sometimes, when I was about to have actual sex (often anal), a girl would say, “I don’t know if this will work,” or “You’re too big.”

“How big is your boyfriend?” I’d ask.

“Six inches.”

“Fine. I’ll only put in four.”

It worked every time. And the excitement of just being in the vicinity of a vagina was usually enough to make me hornier than a dog in heat.

Though my erection was as stiff as could be expected, I wanted to be sure. No point in returning to the set only to go limp again. Perhaps something a bit more adventurous would ensure that my boner stayed at attention.

“Do you mind if we screw?” I asked Christie. “Just a stroke or two?”

“Sure,” she said, with enough enthusiasm to let me know that she wasn’t just being polite.

“Want to just ride me?”

“Sure,” she said. She threw me to the bed and jumped on top of me, slipping my cock inside her without the slightest hesitation.

It was at that exact moment that a PA came barging into the room. “Are you about ready here?”

“Almost,” I muttered.

It took him a minute to realize what was happening. “What the hell? Are you out of your mind?”

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I know what I’m doing.”

He stifled a laugh. “Y’know, Samantha is more than happy to fuck you. You didn’t need to save it for the fluffer.”

Christie, a consummate professional, could feel that I was coming dangerously close to cumming and promptly jumped off of me. I stood up, shoved the PA out of the way, and bolted toward the door.

I tumbled down the stairs, screaming at the top of my lungs, my massive boner waving in the air like a pendulum.

“Roll! Roll! Roll! Roll the cameras! Roll the cameras!!”

I
saw my first porno film in 1969, when I was just sixteen years old.

Actually, I’m not sure if it counted. The only reason it could’ve been called porn at all was because it had the word
pornography
in the title. It was called
Pornography in Denmark
, a documentary about the first country to legalize adult films. By today’s standards, it wasn’t even scandalous enough to shock the typical PBS viewer. But when my dad announced that he was taking me to the American premiere at the Mayfair Theater in Fresh Meadows, Queens, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep for a week. All I could think was, “I’m going to see a movie about boobies. Boobies, boobies, boobies. What god did I please?”

As it turned out, boobies in Denmark were hard to come by, even in a documentary
about
boobies. There were plenty of ancient-looking sexologists talking about boobies. But when it came to actually
showing
us boobies, they were apparently in short supply.

Things slightly improved during the summer of 1972, when
Deep Throat
opened in New York. I was nineteen at the time, and less interested in seeing other people have sex than doing it myself. But with all the media hullabaloo surrounding the film, I was at least curious enough to check it out. I went with a date to the Mayfair, which probably wasn’t the best of ideas. This was no
Pornography in Denmark
.
Deep Throat
featured lots of explicit hard-core sex with very little left to the imagination, which isn’t exactly the sort of thing you want to watch with a prudish date. Luckily, the rest of the movie was pretty goofy, so we made the most of an awkward situation by mocking the terrible acting and sloppy production values.

Though I wasn’t very impressed with
Deep Throat
as a porno, I wasn’t so jaded that I couldn’t appreciate Linda Lovelace’s fellatio skills. Her technique was, if nothing else, unique. She didn’t take the entire shaft in one gulp. She’d break a blow job down into stages. She’d take a penis into her throat almost to the point where it hit her epiglottis, and then she’d pause for a moment before sucking the rest of it down. It was as if she was deciding just how much she’d need to expand her throat to fit the rest of it inside. She’d make a cute little grunting noise—an “unngh” sound—and then boom, the penis would be gone, right down to the balls.

Harry Reems, Lovelace’s costar, wasn’t exactly small in the cock department. How she got all of him inside without his dick popping out the back of her head was a miracle. I was just in awe. It wasn’t until years later that I learned a trick that Little Oral Annie used to do. Before a blow-job scene, she would cover her gums with butter or margarine. Apparently the lubrication made it easier for a cock to slide naturally inside and keep right on going.

A few years later, I saw the sequel,
Deep Throat 2
, in the Catskills. There was a drive-in movie down on Route 42 that showed adult movies exclusively, so I went with some of my teaching friends from Crystal Run. It was horrible. There wasn’t any actual sex in it. It barely passed for soft core. My friends and I were outraged and left halfway through. I found out later that Arrow, the company that produced the original
Deep Throat
, was being investigated by the FBI, so they decided to make two different versions of the sequel: one an X-rated version and the other a softer, less-explicit R-rated version. The X-rated reels were stolen from the lab, so the company had no choice but to release the R-rated version. It flopped, of course, because who wants to see
Deep Throat
without any deep throating?
*

I went to see a few other adult films when I lived in the Catskills, mostly at the insistence of my friends. I didn’t find them particularly erotic, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to jerk off to any of them. For the record, I’ve never jerked off to porn. When I was a kid, I occasionally masturbated to
Gilligan’s Island
and
I Dream of Jeannie
. I still prefer Mary Ann to Ginger. But jerking to porn just seemed too obvious.

It never crossed my mind that a career in adult films might be something I’d want to pursue. The actors weren’t really actors, after all. They were just stunt people who could handle some dialogue. They were movable body parts hired to reenact fantasies. I wanted to be a
thespian
, performing great plays on Broadway or starring in major motion pictures. I wanted to be appreciated for something other than the size of my penis, or my ability to fuck in front of a camera. No, I thought, the very idea is preposterous. Not even worth considering.

It’s funny how quickly your entire outlook can change.

I
n 1978, not long after my
Playgirl
spread, an acting friend arranged for me to meet Jim Sandberg, a New York–based director who’d made a name for himself with low-budget B movies. I was beside myself with excitement. It was my first contact with a legitimate filmmaker, and I was ready to take whatever role he offered.

“I hate to break this to you,” Jim told me when I called. “I don’t really make B movies anymore. I’m mostly doing X-rated stuff these days.”

My heart sank. “Oh, well that’s—”

“Have you ever thought about doing an adult film?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said, being totally honest.

“We could use a guy like you. I’ve seen some of your theater credits, and I’m very impressed. You studied with Dr. Stephen Macht and Joel Zwick
*
of La MaMa, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah.”

“I also saw you in a production of
Salome
. That was probably the best interpretation of King Herod I’ve ever seen.”

“Thanks.” I was blown away. He seemed to know more about my theater career than most of my closest friends.

“And, of course, I had to sneak a peek at you in
Playgirl
. Not bad at all. If you don’t mind my saying, you have an extraordinary penis.”

I had no clue how to respond to that.

He offered me a small part on his latest film,
All About Gloria Leonard
, based on the memoirs of the female publisher of
High Society
magazine.

“No,” I said, a bit too quickly. “No, I think I’ll pass.”

“Okay,” he said, unable to hide his disappointment. “Well, if you ever change your mind, feel free to call me. I’m sure I can find something for you.”

I spent the rest of the week telling myself that I’d made the right decision. But all around me was mounting evidence that I had made a mistake. Since the mainstream success of
Deep Throat
, adult films had achieved a legitimacy that would’ve been unthinkable just years earlier. Porn directors were no longer stringing together unrelated sex scenes with flimsy or nonexistent story lines; they were creating actual plots with compelling characters. Gone was the silly hamming of
Deep Throat
. The new breed of adult actors performed, in some ways, with the intensity and commitment of a trained Broadway player.

Even more surprising was the crossover potential. In the days of porn loops and stag films during the 1960s, there was a clear line between adult and mainstream actors. But thanks to the growing popularity of porn, it was beginning to change. Georgina Spelvin, who starred in the original Broadway production of
The Pajama Game
, took a break from theater to appear in
The Devil in Miss Jones
, and it only
helped
her career. Marilyn Chambers, who became an overnight sensation in the porn classic
Behind the Green Door
, was cast as the lead in the David Cronenberg film
Rabid
, and nobody in Hollywood questioned whether the public would buy a porno actress in a nonsexual role.

The floodgates had opened, and porn was no longer a shameful profession dominated by drug addicts and filth mongers. It could be a very real stepping-stone into the mainstream, and it seemed as if I was the only actor in New York who hadn’t figured it out yet.
*

But I wasn’t ready just yet to jump blindly into the porn trade. Before I made such a monumental, life-altering decision, I needed to talk to my dad.

He listened silently as I explained it all to him. I told him that I wasn’t looking to stay in adult films forever. It would just be a temporary thing, just long enough to get a few film credits under my belt. I told him about the director I’d spoken to, Jim Sandberg, who was widely considered to be one of the best foreign-sex-film directors of all time. I wasn’t putting myself in the hands of some hack smut peddler, I told him. This guy was a genius. A respected filmmaker who could feasibly help my acting career.

“Well,” my dad said after a long and thoughtful pause, “I guess, if you think it sounds like a good idea, you know more than me.”

“Really?” I hadn’t expected it to be so easy.

“You’ve been in
Playgirl
, so people have already seen you nude.” “That’s exactly what I thought!”

“At least you’re performing in front of a camera—and there’s some story line to it, and you’re doing some acting. If you
really
think this is a wise choice, you have my permission. But I do hope you go on to better things.”

I hugged him so hard, I nearly broke his neck. “Just one thing,” he said, his face buried in my chest.

“Anything.”

“If you use the name Hyatt, I’ll kill you.”

I could only imagine that, somewhere downstairs, my grandmother was thinking exactly the same thing.

D
o you want me to cum now?”

The entire crew was staring at me, as if I had just sprouted wings and a tail. I wondered if I was being too presumptuous. Maybe I should just shut up and do as I was told. I didn’t want to be branded as difficult before I’d even finished my first scene.

“Uh, yeah,” the director, Jim Sandberg, said. “You think you can?”

I didn’t just think I could, I
knew
I could. Cumming had never been a problem for me. Once I have an erection, I could time my orgasms literally down to the second. I could stall for hours or pop within seconds, depending on my mood. In my social life, this was nothing more than a mildly amusing trick. But, as it turned out, on the set of a porno film, it was a valuable and rare commodity.