The Other Hollywood (11 page)

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
Nobody was doing full-length features. So I said to the Mitchell brothers, “You know, if I do this, I want this amount of money, and I want a percentage of the film.”

They said, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

I said, “Okay, fine.”
Phew!
So I went home—and then I got a call, like, an hour later. The Mitchell brothers said, “Okay, we’ve got the contracts ready. We’ll be right over.”

They called my bluff, so I had to do it, ha, ha, ha.

LOS ANGELES
1969–1973

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
John Holmes was the biggest cock in the business. He always had mythic stature to me. He was almost in the world of Greek Gods. He walked among us with that massive tool, banging on the floor like some huge dinosaur.

So when I met him, I figured I’d meet a guy who had paradise regained, who had everything. Instead I met a sociopath and a liar. In effect, every manifestation of this man’s life was a lie, a distortion, duplicity, a quagmire of deceit.

The one truth was he had a big dick.

SHARON HOLMES (JOHN HOLMES’S FIRST WIFE)
:
I came home from work one evening and found John measuring himself in the bathroom. This was about three or four years after we’d been married.

I thought this was a little strange but okay. So I started dinner, and John came in and said, “I think I’ve found what I want to do.”

That’s when he said, “I want to do porno.”

I said, “Movies?”

He said, “Wherever it will take me.”

I was appalled. I’m sorry; I was appalled. It didn’t sound like something one would want to make one’s life’s work. But what do you say?

BILL AMERSON (PORN PRODUCER/JOHN HOLMES’S BUSINESS PARTNER)
:
I first met John in 1969 while casting for some still-photo porn magazine stuff at the Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard.

We had an open casting call. It was toward the end of the day and in walked this really skinny kid with an Afro haircut. He didn’t look like the type we could use.

My partner said, “Have him go in the back room, take off his clothes, take a Poloroid, and then say, ‘Thank you very much’—and that’s the end of that.”

So we went into the back room.

John undressed.

He turned around. I looked at it and said,
“You’re going to be a star!”

SHARON HOLMES
:
John out and out told me, “This is probably my only shot at being famous for something. I really want to do this.”

I said, “Are you asking for permission?”

John said, “No, I’m going to do this.”

It took me a while to react because I didn’t believe I was hearing this. I told him I wasn’t particularly happy about it because it was one step up from, or one step below, prostitution. So I thought, “Maybe this is a passing fantasy—who knows…”

BOB CHINN (PORN DIRECTOR)
:
I’d just come out of UCLA film school and started making porn films for a budget of about seven hundred and fifty dollars. One day this scruffy, bushy-haired guy came up to the office looking for a job as a grip or a gaffer. He had this big Afro-looking hairdo.

I told him, “We don’t have any openings for grips or gaffers.”

Then he said, “Well, I’m really an actor. My name is John Holmes.”

That sort of rang a bell because one of the actresses I knew had mentioned this guy—told me about his attributes. So I said, “Okay, so you’re John Holmes. What have you done? Show me your credentials.”

And then he showed me his credentials.

BILL AMERSON
:
It was thirteen-and-a-half inches long. I know because John measured it many times for many people who didn’t believe him. And they’d ask him how thick it was, and he’d say, “Grab my wrist.”

But I didn’t think he would stay in the porn business very long because he was very nervous. He was an awkward kid. He was like a fish out of water. He just didn’t seem to fit.

SHARON HOLMES
:
When we were first married, John was very quiet and not very sophisticated—he was a country boy. And believe it or not, he wasn’t comfortable in large groups. It was hard to get him to agree to go to a Christmas party. I think he was very aware of the fact that he was not as educated as he wished he could be. And I think that made him self-conscious around my nursing school friends.

So even though I was only a year older than he was, as far as education went, I was ten years older because John never really went beyond the ninth grade. He was very, very possessive of me and pretty dependent on
me to pay the bills and that sort of thing. I mean, I didn’t realize until after we had been married a year that he had never filed a tax return.

BOB CHINN
:
After he showed us his credentials, my partner and I sat down and said, “We can make a film with this guy.”

My partner said, “God, what a wad that guy has.”

I said, “Let’s call him ‘Johnny Wadd,’ make it a private detective thing.”

We wrote the first script on the back of an envelope and shot it two days later. I hired John Holmes to play Johnny Wadd at the unheard of price of seventy-five dollars a day; at the time we were paying actors only fifty.

SHARON HOLMES
:
John had always told me, “Somehow in my life, I’m going to be a millionaire. I am not going to be the failure my father was and my mother is.” He really felt they had nothing to show for all the years they had lived on the planet. That’s why he decided to go into porno—he thought it was his instant ticket to fame and fortune. I was speechless.

John was very immature when we got married. I first met him in 1964 when he was involved with a fellow nursing student friend of mine, and they came over to have dinner. When he broke up with her about two months later, John started bringing me flowers and asking me to go out with him.

John was very, very sweet. He always had an arm around me, we were always holding hands, and things just gradually evolved into a real tight relationship. And we were married five months later.

BOB CHINN
:
New York was our biggest market, and within two weeks of us sending the film out, our distributor in New York called and said they wanted more films with Johnny Wadd.

Then I called John, hired him, and we shot
Flesh of the Lotus
. It took one day to shoot the film, we developed it the same night, and then we cut the original negative. It was out on the market within a few days. Within a week after it was shot, it was playing the theaters.

BILL AMERSON
:
At first John didn’t really like the name Johnny Wadd, but it went over big, and John became a star behind that name. We’d run into people, and they’d call out, “Hey, Johnny Wadd!”

I’m not sure why people were so fascinated by the size of his penis. I just know they were. And it was a great marketing tool, if you will.

SHARON HOLMES
:
It wasn’t until our wedding night that I found out about his large appendage. Mmm-hmm. He hadn’t warned me about it. And I was probably thinking, “Oh dear,” because I think I was the last virgin left—certainly in California.

But it was no big deal for me because John was a great lover. Very, very thoughtful and very, very gentle. He wasn’t a maniac. Not at all.

BILL AMERSON
:
The Johnny Wadd series was the start of the star system in the adult film industry. It became famous throughout the world.

SHARON HOLMES
:
At first, I think John was probably a bit embarrassed by his size because he knew he was different, but I don’t think he knew just
how
different. I can’t imagine why not because he was in the service, he was familiar with whorehouses in Europe, and had sex with married women. He had a lot of sexual experience. But I don’t think John realized how terribly unique he was until he got into porno.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
I was always fascinated with John Holmes because he had everything I didn’t have. He was hung like a horse; I’m hung like a squirrel. He had what all the guys dream about. We’re all size queens. We want to have that big cock.

I’m not gay, but I thought one day I’d love to suck that cock. Feel that power. Transcend my limit in size and swallow his virility in the same way some African tribes cannibalize their enemy. I could see blowing him and swallowing his sperm—and being better for it.

BOB VOSSE (PORN PRODUCER)
:
I’ll give John credit; he was the easiest to work with from the girl’s point of view because he was extremely gentle. He was nice to the girl, he gave her presents—that he probably stole the day before—but she would love him for it. I never had one girl complain or refuse to work with him again.

In fact most of them asked, “Can I work with John Holmes again?”

ANNETTE HAVEN (PORN STAR)
:
I ended up doing my first film with John Holmes, but he wasn’t a name to me. He was just the star of the film or really his dick was. That’s basically what sold John.

But I was impressed with him because he had the wit and the extremely good mind to set up the arrangements so that Lesllie Bovee and I were sharing a bedroom that adjoined his suite.

So I ended up exploring John’s little suite area, and it was really interesting. His entire bathroom was one big line of vitamin bottles—about forty-five bottles—because he was into health food. And then he showed Lesllie and I our room, and then gave me some really excellent head. Got me off, too.

I’m a jawbreaker, a serious jawbreaker, particularly at that time. You give me head for three or four hours, so what? But John got me off in fifteen or twenty minutes.

BOB VOSSE
:
Some of the girls John would work with would fall in love with him.

I’d tell John, “Do you remember that cute little girl you worked with on that film?”

He’d say, “I didn’t like her.”

I’d say, “But she keeps calling; she wants to see you.”

He’d say, “No, I don’t want to see her.”

He really had no interest in them. After one time, that was it. Except if he was fresh, and he’d slept the night before, then he would do a good job. Sometimes he would do two groups in a day.

ANNETTE HAVEN
:
After John got me off, he didn’t want to fuck me, which was even better. He went and fucked Lesllie Bovee, which was perfect. So John made a very big hit with me.

And when he got on the set, he did his thing, didn’t try to make a romance out of it. He was a professional. Got it up, got it off, and got the hell out of your hair.

BOB VOSSE
:
John wouldn’t go to sleep and wake up fresh and ready to work. Instead he’d pick up one of the little girls he hadn’t worked with yet—or maybe it was the girl he was going to work with the next day or some girl who was scheduled to work with some other guy—and talk them into coming up to his room that night. Of course he’d sleep with them, then they’d go to the set to shoot, and he’d have no interest in them, didn’t want to work with them.

So that was part of my job—find enough girls to feed the monster.

BUNNY BLEU (PORN STAR)
:
John and I went on a promotional tour in Texas signing autographs in adult bookstores, and it was really wild—because women would line up around the block. They would actually piss their pants they were so excited to meet him.

One lady actually went home, changed, cleaned up, came back, and said, “I want another autograph.” That takes a lot of balls. I don’t think after peeing in my pants from meeting somebody, I would come back and see them again.

SAN FRANCISCO
1973

JOHNNY KEYES (PORN STAR)
:
I was in San Francisco, and a bunch of kids said, “Hey, listen, they have an audition for this movie, right? Let’s go check it out.”

So we go down—and it was for
Behind the Green Door
. I mean, I was in a nude scene in
Hair,
but the Mitchell brothers asked, like, “Would you do X-rated?”

I said, “Ah, man. Fuck this. I don’t do no X-rated movie shit. I’m in theater. I’m a thespian, you know?”

But the Mitchell brothers had seen me in
Hair
. They called me back and said, “Listen, man, you should come play this part. There’s gonna be a lot of money, and you’re gonna be on a trapeze, and this chick’s gonna suck your dick…”

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
I was still pretty nervous. The black-and-white sex thing—I knew this was a very big taboo, as it still is in our country. And I thought, “Now my father’s really going to kill me!” Ha, ha, ha!

JOHNNY KEYES
:
I couldn’t do the part of the guy on the trapeze—I think I missed the date—so Jim and Artie said, “Well, you’re gonna be the guy behind the green door, and you’re gonna make love to this girl, Marilyn Chambers.”

And then they were like, “Listen here. You take her out, and get to know her.”

So I took her to a restaurant called the Triton right on the water in Sausalito. Then I took her home, and we fucked for a couple of days. She was, just—well, she was impressed.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
When I saw Johnny Keyes’s thing, I went, “Oh, shit! Oh my God! I’m not sure if I can get this inside of me.”

JOHNNY KEYES
:
In those days it was taboo for black men to fuck white women, but I had been fucking white women for years. When I was playing in a band in Waikiki, they would come in from all over the world…. I was young. I was a real handsome dude, too. That didn’t hurt.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
The first day, we had a couple beers and a joint or something to loosen up. I really didn’t want to know too much about what was going to happen. Because in the movie I am supposedly kidnapped, and I wanted it to happen like the real thing.

It was really fun—they blindfolded me, put a gag in my mouth, and threw me in this car. We did it at night, and when we got somewhere, they shoved me through this door. And I didn’t know where I was going. For real.

It was really cool. It was interesting to be able to just go with it because it was safe, but it was still scary. It was a great fantasy.

JOHNNY KEYES
:
I was fucking the hell out of this chick—I was acting like I was ten thousand Africans making up for that slavery shit. Here’s this white woman that the African is fucking to get revenge on all those white motherfuckers that used to rape our mothers and aunts all those years ago, right? That’s what I used as an incentive to fuck Marilyn Chambers.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
That scene broke out of the old porno mold of hand-held cameras and lousy color and showed people that there’s a great deal of beauty in the mystery and majesty of an orgasm.

I call it artsy-fartsy now because I’ve seen it so many times, but the first time a person views it, they’re kind of stunned. And they get all horny inside. Of course, that sequence is the ultimate in the fantasy of man conquering woman.

JOHNNY KEYES
:
I made love to Marilyn for about an hour and forty-three minutes without stopping. She came about seven, eight, nine times, and then she fainted on me.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
When Johnny put it in, it hurt—I had tears in my eyes. And then it just clicked. It was like going from being scared to
“Yeah!
” You can see that in my eyes. It was a primitive, animalistic type of thing. And then we were on our way, ha, ha, ha.

JIM MITCHELL
:
We were scheduled with the six nuns for two days, and Johnny Keyes for two days, and the trapeze people had two days. Then the audience orgy was to be a master cover scene with fifty people for one day, then each group for two days. Seven or eight days in total.

But then, after stalling for a year and a half, we finally had to go to trial. See, we got busted three weeks after we opened the O’Farrell Theater in 1969. We’ve been in a lot of court battles since then—local, muni, superior, state, appellate, State Supreme Court, federal, federal district, Federal Ninth Circuit of Appeals, U.S. Supreme Court.

We’ve won all the way to the Supreme Court.

JACK BOULWARE
:
San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein acted as a schoolmarm to the Mitchell brothers. She would attempt to regulate them, and they would gleefully thumb their noses at her.

They were harassed by her so many times—via the police department—that they actually put her home phone number on their theater marquee that said, “For a good time, call Dianne.”

She had to change her number—and then they got her new number, and they put it on the marquee again!

JIM MITCHELL
:
So on the day of the big orgy—we had costumes, people, makeup, a set—we had to go to trial. So we started our trial, and we had to shoot the big scene in one day!

JOHNNY KEYES
:
My fuck scene with Marilyn was so intense that the sixty or seventy people who were hired to be the audience, just started taking off their clothes and fucking!

It was like a nightclub setting: Me and Marilyn were onstage, and these actors and actresses were sitting there watching the scene. But everybody got carried away watching us—and they just started fucking. They must have had three cameras, and they just let them roll.

JIM MITCHELL
:
We shot five thousand feet in one day—until we just couldn’t shoot anymore. After we ran out of film and turned all the cameras off, it got pretty weird, man. It got a lot funnier than what was on film.

JOHNNY KEYES
:
You know, if you’re in a room where everyone is making love, man, it’s going to get pretty freaky. And, oh yeah, it was!

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
What’s a better turn-on than five different guys jerking off all over a pretty girl’s face and letting her lick their sperm from her lips and chin?

C. J. LAING
:
I was totally jealous that I wasn’t in
Behind the Green Door
. Completely. I wasn’t pissed at the Mitchell brothers, more dejected. But I
didn’t complain to Jim and Artie—and what, risk them saying they turned me down because I’m a little scrawny kid from nowhere?

JOHNNY KEYES
:
At the premiere of
Behind the Green Door,
there were all kinds of women trying to fuck me. I mean, one chick was like half owner of some big hotel. And I was having a blast! I was young and full of cum, baby! And people at the premiere were sitting in the audience playing with each other. Shit, you’d see people getting turned on because the movie was like, really psychedelic!

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
About the time
Behind the Green Door
opened, Marilyn came over and said, “The new Ivory Snow box came out—and here it is.” And Marilyn was on it, right?

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
I had failed to mention to the Mitchell brothers that, “Oh, by the way, I posed for the Ivory Snow box a couple of years ago. And I think it’s about ready to come on the shelves.”

Jim and Artie just went, “What!!? Oh my God!!!”

JOHNNY KEYES
:
One day we were having a big barbecue out at the Mitchell brothers’, and me and Marilyn went to the store to pick up some turkey wings. I walk down the soap aisle and see this picture of Marilyn on the Ivory Snow box, holding this baby. I grab it and go back to Marilyn and say, “Hey, look at this box!”

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
So we all went to the grocery store, and there it was. It was like “Cha-ching, cha-ching”—the sound of a cash register, you know?

JOHNNY KEYES
:
Dollar signs just rolled in Art Mitchell’s head.

Then they went back and started all this publicity—but I was the one who found the box! In the store! It was an accident!

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
We knew it was big. But we didn’t want Procter & Gamble to pull out of it immediately—at all. So we all decided to wait at least six months, to make sure they had the box out
everywhere
.

JIM MITCHELL
:
We went to New York and opened the movie. The first week we did thirty thousand dollars total between two theaters, which wasn’t very good. We had fifteen thousand dollars in advertising, we had houses to pay for, and we’d been advanced fifteen thousand. And we didn’t get a check, right? We needed the money.

It had only been three or four months after the Ivory Snow box had been out, but we decided, “What the hell? We have to go with it.”

Russ Fradkin was doing the publicity for the theater in New York. We went to him and the theater owner, and we said, “Here’s the story…. here’s the boxes.”

They didn’t get it, really. They didn’t know how big it was. So we told them, “Call Earl Wilson, the columnist; give it to him first.”

Wilson sat on it for a week, called back, and said, “It’s not an item.”

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
The
New York Post
sat on it for three or four days, so I just took the Ivory Snow box, told Russ that Procter & Gamble were the largest television advertiser in the world, and went to Tony Mancini, a reporter for the
New York Post
.

You see,
Playboy
had already done a story on Marilyn and porno, and we dropped the Ivory Snow story on the writer. He was going to get a break on it. But this was three months before publication. A long wait.

So I told Tony Mancini what the story was, he called Marilyn out in California, and it made the second page.

JIM MITCHELL
:
The box office the next week went to $60,000. It was unnatural, no doubt about that. We weren’t trying to say how smart we were.

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
Straight fluke! What an avalanche of free publicity! We were just standing in the wings. It came up, and we just had to play the cards that were dealt out.

You can’t break the chariot of Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Snow—which is sixty percent of their action—that often, you know? The girl who was on the Ivory Snow box before Marilyn was on it for twelve years. They don’t fuck with that box! That box is their baby. They went through two years of backroom bullshit to finally agree that that was the look they were going for—the young, blond mother image. Only this young blond turned out to be a porn star.

And then we went to Cannes right as the story was breaking.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
Never before had an adult film been reviewed at the Cannes Film Festival. It was quite something.

JOHNNY KEYES
:
Jim and Artie called me and said, “You just got nominated for an award at Cannes for the best fuck scene ever shot!”

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
At Cannes, we were up at the top of the theater. After the movie was over, they turned up the house lights. But the people wouldn’t leave. We couldn’t tell if they liked us or hated us. It seemed as we looked down there, there were all these faces from all over the world just looking up at us. A cold, weird kinda thing. Like they didn’t know where we were coming from at all. I was getting a bit nervous. Then six police officers came in and started working their way up to us.

Finally, one drunk Frenchman stood up and started shouting, “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!!”

The cops dragged him out, and that kind of broke the ice. Then everyone left. They’d been sitting there, for about five minutes, in sweltering 85-degree heat. They were stunned. Really stunned.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
The press was just phenomenal. I mean, I was just inundated. I was famous overnight because of the Ivory Snow box and
Behind the Green Door
. Kind of a paradox, but the press ran with it.
Show
magazine was saying, “This is the new Marilyn Monroe!”

I got a ten-page spread in
Playboy
—a celebrity layout. I was signing thousands of pictures.
And
I started getting calls for straight movies.

ARTIE MITCHELL
:
At 2:00
P.M
. the next day, they showed the movie again. We stayed down on the beach this time. We got reports that there were crowds of people outside. They couldn’t all get in. The police asked us to cancel our third show to avoid a riot. The word had gotten around pretty fast.

JIM MITCHELL
:
We came back from Cannes and had another Ivory Snow box press conference. That’s what was so funny. It was a good story. It hit everywhere. So now hundreds of reporters showed up. They had nothing, but they rehashed the same thing. And the story went out again.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
We were treated like movie stars. We had limos, and suites at the Plaza Hotel, and Cristal champagne, and openings, and premieres and it was just so glamorous—really, really glamorous. Johnny Carson lined up to see the film. I mean, you had to go to the theater and stand in line, so you weren’t anonymous. You were there for all the world to see.