The Other Hollywood (15 page)

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
It wasn’t a big, bad breakup. I just said to Van, “I think I need to get my own place.”

So I go and rent a one-room hippie pad for seventy-five bucks a month. And I worked as a hotel maid for two days and cleaned an oven. Then I got a job as a wallpaper hanger and for several months worked on construction projects—and had sex with all the guys on the sites: laid by the carpet layers, nailed by the construction workers…

FRED LINCOLN
:
Georgina’s really the only person in
The Devil in Miss Jones
. The other characters come and go. At least there’s the Devil to teach her things, but his character is flat, has nothing to it. But Georgina, you see her go from a spinster to a sex fiend. I mean, you really see it happen.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
They were cheating me out of money at the wallpaper job, so I answered an ad for a job at a movie theater and got hired as the popcorn girl. It was called the Cine Plaza Theater, this big, beautiful, old cinema in the heart of Tucson. It must have held five hundred seats. It could have been one of those old vaudeville theaters; it had that feel to it. Of course, I worked the late shift. But I didn’t know it was an X-rated theater.

As fate would have it, the first movie they showed after I was hired was
Deep Throat
. I’d never heard of the movie. Nobody had.

HARRY REEMS
:
A lot went wrong in the making of
The Devil in Miss Jones
. Locations were lost. We went way over schedule. The picture was almost dropped midstream. Two guys had each put up $15,000 to make
The Devil
. When it was made, one of them was convinced it was a bomb and asked to be bought out.

But for those of us who hung in there, it was one of the loveliest shoots ever. It was Georgina’s first big movie, and she did a damn fine job acting in it.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
When I went in to watch the movie, I had no idea that they actually filmed people having sex. I’d seen
Playboy
and
Penthouse,
read
The Happy Hooker
and
The Sensuous Woman,
but that was it.

So I was just in awe that they were showing
Deep Throat
out in the open—where anyone could see it. And I just fell in love with Linda Lovelace.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
Up until
Miss Jones,
I never had anything I wanted to say to the public. If people wanted to interview me because I was a porno filmmaker, I just was not interested in talking to them. But if anybody wanted to speak to me because I made
films,
then I was happy to talk with anyone. I just didn’t want to be bothered with speaking to a lot of superficial idiots.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
Did I get turned on watching
Deep Throat
? Fuck, yes! I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life! I watched it probably ten times. I thought Linda Lovelace was so cool. I loved her attitude and her look—and the way she could deep throat was just amazing.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
The only reason most of my films dealt with pornography was because at that time that was the only media an independent filmmaker
could work in. I was gearing my films to sell to a specific market because there was not enough money involved to gear it to any other market.

Working within a limited budget—under $25,000—you could not do the great American love story. For that kind of money you had to stick to the bedroom and then every once in a while you’d get an opportunity to express an emotion other than sex.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
When people ask, “How’d you get into the sex industry?” I say, “Luck, just pure luck.”

Two or three months after I started working at the Plaza Cinema, they busted it for obscenity and closed it down. I ended up working in a massage parlor.

At that time, all the massage parlors were in little trailers. This guy named Zeke ran it. He was a big, tall, gorgeous hippie guy—and very charismatic. I had the hots for him. But I don’t remember if I fucked him—I can’t remember all the people I fucked, you know?

Did I go from hand job to blow job to fucking them? No, I just went right into fucking, the first day. Oh, totally—I wanted to fuck them.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
The Devil in Miss Jones
came about for basically the same reason
Throat
came about, but adversely. With the success of
Throat,
everybody and his brother was running around trying to make a sexy, funny, camp picture. I felt that if this is what everyone else was doing, it was time to do something different.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
I was not into romance. I was into pure sex. You know: one guy, two guys, five guys. No women at that time, just guys. Because my mother was so intense, I didn’t want to be around women because I felt judged by them. My dad was the sweet one, so I was more attracted to men. Men felt safe. I was very threatened by women—unless they were prostitutes.

So all the girls at the massage parlor were great. There were hippie girls, as well as some seasoned prostitutes that had worked in Vegas—and biker women, and some drug addicts. It was kind of homey, you know?

So I had a great time. I worshipped and adored all the girls. And I was fascinated by prostitution, as I still am.

FRED LINCOLN
:
At the end of
The Devil in Miss Jones,
Miss Jones is back in hell. And she’s with this guy—Gerry played the part—and he won’t fuck her; he won’t touch her; he won’t do anything.

She’s going crazy! She just wants sex.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
My pornography connection came about when the State of Arizona tried to find
Deep Throat
obscene. They busted the film in
1973 and everyone involved in it. But it took six months until I got a subpoena. I have no idea how they found me, but somebody actually showed up at my door and handed me one.

It was totally ridiculous that they called me to testify—the popcorn girl at the theater—because I didn’t know anything. But that’s how I met Gerard Damiano.

FRED LINCOLN
:
You want to talk about a woman who liked sex? Annie Sprinkle really liked sex, man. But I didn’t even know that Gerry had an affair with Annie. Even when Annie was eighteen, the S and M came from her, not from Gerry. Annie—boy, she was a freaky little girl, man, let me tell you. I don’t know where all that came from.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
There was a witness room where we all sat around while we waited to testify, and I’d never seen Gerard Damiano, but someone introduced him to me as the director of
Deep Throat
.

I was starstruck. I was like all hot for him. He was forty-six years old, and I was eighteen. And he was just charming—Italian, with a great sense of humor. I just adored him.

The first thing I said to him was, “Will you teach me how to deep throat?”

GERARD DAMIANO
:
The only people that’s worth knowing are people who take what they’re doing seriously, more than the average person. Maybe it was my own defense of what I was doing. If I didn’t take myself seriously, why should anybody else?

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
We went out to dinner that first night. And then I had sex with Gerard Damiano. I had sex with him three or four times during the trial. We had great sex, really great sex. And I think he was taken by me in a way—probably our artistic sensibility just gelled and our interest in porn.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
I didn’t know Annie at the time, but I did know Paula, Gerard Damiano’s girlfriend. I worked with her. I love that term, “Worked with her.”

You know, everybody says that in this business. “Well, I worked with so-and-so, and I worked with so-and-so.”

“Oh, you mean you fucked them?”

“Well, yeah, that’s what it boils down to.”

Yeah, so I “worked” with her in the early days. In fact, she was one of the loop people. And she was a sweetheart, very easy to “work with.”

So that’s why I didn’t know Gerry was having an affair with Annie. But I’ve never been that close with Gerry.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
Gerard Damiano was the Fellini, or you know, the Scorsese of porn. A lot of these guys use a lot of Catholic symbols—undertones and overtones of pain and pleasure in their films. I didn’t know Annie Sprinkle at this point, but Damiano sort of lets this out—when he had that big S and M relationship with her.

GEORGINA SPELVIN
:
Do I think that
Miss Jones
has a lot to do with the Catholic-guilt thing? Absolutely. You know, pain and pleasure—there’s a thin line, you know? George Carlin said it best: “You know, Catholics, they’re always pushing for pain, and I’m always pulling for pleasure.”

GERARD DAMIANO
:
Do I think I’m personally responsible for some of the movement toward sexual liberation in this country? Of course I’m responsible!

Is Linda Lovelace responsible? Is Jamie Gillis responsible? Is Harry Reems responsible? We’re
all
responsible—every fucking one of us. We went out there and did things that were never done before. And we weren’t ashamed of it; we did it, and we had fun.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
Linda Lovelace and Gerard Damiano were staying at the same fancy hotel in Tucson. Linda was always hanging out by the pool in a bikini. Chuck Traynor wasn’t around. But I met Linda briefly and I said, “Oh God, you’re my hero!”

She was kind of aloof—friendly—but aloof. She didn’t really want to talk; she just wanted to get a tan and be left alone. Linda didn’t look like she was too worried about the trial.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Why have me go all the way to Tucson, Arizona, to be a witness for the government? It was the publicity. The publicity for the government was terrific in places like Kentucky and Arizona. I made the front pages of newspapers in those towns, just because I was there.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
Of course there was a lot of news about the trial. It was kind of exciting, and I think I was happy to be a part of it. You see, the massage parlor where I worked got busted quite a few times—but I was never there. Yeah, I was just always lucky—but I kind of wished I had been busted, too. I felt like I missed out on some rite of passage.

So now I finally got my chance to be busted, with Gerard Damiano—but he wasn’t in Tucson that long, maybe a week. Then he went back to New York, and we stayed in touch. Was I in love? I would say, “smitten.”

But yeah, we had started a hot affair. About a month later, when Gerard had to go to San Francisco, he sent me a ticket to go meet him. That’s when
The Devil in Miss Jones
came out.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
MGM called me after I did
The Devil in Miss Jones,
after they’d read some of the reviews—and the film’s grosses I might add—and made me a fat contract offer. Jim Aubrey sent his limo over for me—the whole impressive bit. But in addition to giving me an offer to make films under their auspices, they also gave me a formula. I had to make a film for them that had at least one hippie scene and one lesbian scene, among other things.

I don’t make films to formula. I write my own films and direct them depending on what subject matter I choose to do at the time and how I choose to relate it.

MGM couldn’t understand that, so the offer is still on my desk—and MGM is out of business.

FRED LINCOLN
:
I know that Hollywood came to Gerry and offered him to do some movies, and he was afraid. Why? I honestly don’t know.
Deep Throat
made fifty-five million dollars. If that don’t ring Hollywood’s bells, man, I don’t know what does! That’s all they’re interested in—the bottom line.

GEORGINA SPELVIN
:
The Devil in Miss Jones
is pretty existential, especially for a porn film. I think that’s the reason that it got the kind of critical notice that it did. But it was not really a very successful porn film. I mean, guys came out of that film shaking their heads, saying, “I came here to jerk off; I didn’t come here to think!”

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
When I got into the sex show biz, I wanted a new name. Ellen Steinberg just didn’t sound sexy enough to me. I was lying on my bed, and I heard a voice whisper, clear as a bell, in my ear, “Annie Sprinkle.”

I had been using the name for several years when my Uncle Sylvan sent me this photo he took of a tombstone he found in Baltimore. I got an eerie feeling. Annie M. Sprinkle was born in 1864 and died when she was only seventeen in 1881. In my travels, I later met one of the Sprinkle family descendants who confirmed my suspicion that Annie M. had grown up in a strict religious community and had never married.

It’s likely that she died a virgin with unexpressed passion and desire. I believe that it was her spirit that whispered her name in my ear and that she now lives vicariously through me. She guides me and keeps me safe from harm. I have taken flowers to her grave.

It’s a nice story, isn’t it?

LOS ANGELES
1973–1976

SHARON HOLMES
:
There was a period of time when John was gone for almost five months working in Hawaii doing nude dancing. He may have been doing photo layouts—I have no idea what he was doing. I’m pretty naive about this stuff. But that was as much as he was willing to tell me. I think that made it a little more palatable. If he was away, it wasn’t affecting us.

BOB CHINN
:
It was a strange period to be shooting porn in Los Angeles, because Los Angeles County Vice were busting shoots. That’s when I thought, “Why don’t we all take a vacation? Go to Hawaii?”

I took my crew, and we went to Hawaii and made a film called
Tropic of Passion,
which was really a lot of fun. There was no pressure. John enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. Everybody enjoyed it.

SHARON HOLMES
:
It wasn’t until 1973 that I found out how really deep John was into pornography. He had been lying quite a bit, saying, “No, I’m not doing a film; I’m doing the lights or the sound.”

I found out because he left a still photograph out for a promo of one of the films he’d starred in. It was hard-core, showing penetration, with women. Up until then I hadn’t seen any of that.

I just looked at it, and I thought, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” And it chewed at me, and it chewed at me, and it chewed at me…

BILL AMERSON
:
The 1970s, for me, was a continual hiding, peeping, and running from whatever authority wanted to stop the flow of adult businesses. There was a lot of police harassment. At that time, I was not only in the adult film business but also owned bookstores and theaters around Southern California and some in Arizona.

SHARON HOLMES
:
I talked to John about it. I said, “I want to know exactly what you are doing and how often.”

John had never lied to me. If I confronted him, he could not lie to me. He’d try to gloss it over, and I’d know he was doing it, and it ate at me for about two months.

And then I thought, “I’m married to a whore.”

I mean, that’s the only thing I could equate it to. I felt it was a betrayal.

BILL AMERSON
:
The LAPD formed a very special vice squad for pornography. We nicknamed them the “Pussy Posse.”

We had “Pussy Posse” T-shirts made up and mailed fifteen of them to the Los Angeles Vice Squad, which, looking back on it, wasn’t the prudent thing to do. It really pissed them off. I don’t think they ever wore the shirts.

BOB VOSSE
:
What’s weird is no one in the industry knew John Holmes socially. John had no social life; he’d never stick around for parties, and he had very few friends. I tried to be John’s friend. We worked together in many places, many times; I shot more than half of the films that John made in his life. But he never trusted me. He never trusted anyone.

So if you want to talk about John Holmes’s social life, you’re going to have to talk to someone else.

DAWN SCHILLER (JOHN HOLMES’S GIRLFRIEND)
:
When I was fifteen, my father divorced my mother in Florida, and I chose to move with him to California.

But we had nowhere to live. Then a hitchhiker we picked up on the way to California told us we could stay with his girlfriend. But when we got there, she said she would have to ask the manager first. So in walked John Holmes. He was the manager of the apartment complex.

John looked me up and down and then asked me how old I was.

I said, “Fifteen.”

And he went, “Mmmmmmm, too bad.”

SHARON HOLMES
:
By 1973, I was literally eating my own guts alive because of the emotional upheaval of trying to deal with John’s porn career and maintain a physical relationship with him. I couldn’t handle it anymore; I was hospitalized with pancreatitis.

The doctor sat me down and said, “You know, if this keeps up, you’re going to lose your pancreas. You have to do something about this. Do you know what is bothering you?”

Surely, you jest. Of course I knew.

So when I got home, I told John, “I have no problem with your living with me, but I don’t want anything to do with you physically. I don’t want
to hear about what you’re doing. I’ll do your laundry. I’ll be your mother, I’ll be your confessor, I’ll be your sister, I’ll be your friend, but I don’t want to be physical anymore.”

He begged and pleaded, saying, “This porn stuff means absolutely nothing to me.”

I said, “John, it doesn’t mean anything to you, but it means a lot to me. I’m married to a hooker. I’m not comfortable with that. I can’t handle it anymore.”

So by 1975 we no longer had a physical relationship. We slept in the same bed, we hugged, we kissed, we felt intimate with each other—but not sexually intimate.

So John found Dawn, a skinny fifteen-year-old whose dad was one of those expatriates who settled in Thailand after Vietnam because of the drug connection. On his first trip home after the Vietnam War, Dawn’s father told his wife he wanted a divorce and that he wanted to take the kids to California—to Disneyland.

When they got here, they moved into our apartment complex—five people in a one-bedroom apartment.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
John knew that me and my sister liked to smoke pot, and he always came home with the best stuff. He’d say, “Here, try this,” flick it on the couch, and leave. He always had a dramatic air. And I thought, “God, he’s cool!”

My sister thought he was weird because he was too old to be hanging around us. She figured that out. But I liked him.

SHARON HOLMES
:
Dawn was a very nice-looking girl: big-boned but skinny. And John hired Dawn and her sister, Terry, to do the gardening around the apartment complex, so they could make their own money. Their father had money, but he didn’t spend it on his kids. He was always off doing some business deal with his friends from Thailand.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
John Holmes courted me for about a good six months—and always with my sister, like a chaperone. He had to pay her in armloads of frozen Snickers bars, so she wouldn’t bitch about having her apartment used or having to share her pot.

TOM BLAKE (LAPD VICE DETECTIVE)
:
In 1973, we had an informant that advised us that John Holmes was going to be involved in a film with some other people, and we were told that they would be meeting at a certain location in Hollywood.

They would tell the actors and actresses to go to a restaurant at a certain time and wait. They’d never tell them where the film was actually being shot.

We were able to find out what restaurant they were at, and we observed that several women—plus some males, including John Holmes—were at this location. We ran license numbers of the vehicles and found out the names of these people. Then we followed them from Hollywood out to Moorpark, in the Valley, and observed them going to a residence.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
John and I were getting closer and then he started getting camping trips together—to the beach—in his van. He had a Chevrolet van with a WADD license plate. I guess that was a porn series that he did. The camping turned into overnight camping, always with my sister, and John always made it fun. He’d build a big bonfire on the beach, and we’d eat peanut butter brown sugar chocolate chip cookies, which is the ultimate when you’re stoned.

He was quite a romantic.

TOM BLAKE
:
John was very famous. He was probably the biggest male porno star in the United States through the seventies and eighties. He was very well known for his tool, if you want to call it that.

We’d seen him at several locations but had never been able to make a case on him. And John, most of the time, did not procure people to be involved in films.

John was basically working through an agent—but on this particular film, he was actually the one that procured these two girls who lived in Calabassas.

I believe they were only sixteen or seventeen years old. We found this out because we made the search warrants on the house where they shot the film. Then we obtained the film from the laboratory and viewed it and ran the licenses through the DMV and found out who the two girls were. Then we interviewed them.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
One time John set it up at the beach so that my sister couldn’t be there and asked me to go camping by myself. And, like, we both knew this was the night.

TOM BLAKE
:
We obtained the arrest warrant through the Ventura County district attorney’s office. Then myself and Detective Joe Gandley and a couple of other people went to John Holmes’s house in Glendale.

We knocked on the door. John answered it and let us in. We met his wife, Sharon. Very nice lady. We sat down and talked a little bit. We advised him that we were arresting him for pimping and pandering for that film shot in Moorpark.

He said, “Oh no, those girls?”

I said, “Yeah, those girls.”

I think he knew they were young, and I think he probably knew that they were the ones that talked about him.

I mean, he was really nice. He says, “I’m an athlete. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I run every day.” He had a cupboard in his kitchen that probably had twenty-five or thirty vitamins he took every day. He was a health fanatic.

Anyway, we ended up arresting him and booking him. And I did not see him until we went to court up in Ventura.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
So we went to Malibu, walked on the beach, and it was a full moon. It was low in the sky. It was perfect, and John was very quiet. We just sat on the rocks and watched the moon. The atmosphere was magical.

TOM BLAKE
:
I think that this was John’s first real encounter with the LAPD—as far as being arrested. We went to court, and after being convicted of pimping and pandering, John was going to be sentenced to three years in jail.

He had an option through his attorney to either cooperate with me and be on probation for three years—or do three years in jail.

So John decided he’d talk to me. He and I worked together for three years, until the terms of his probation ended in 1976.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
Without saying anything, John got down from that rock and just took my hand, and we walked to the van and that was the night.

Yeah, I was completely shocked by how large he was. But it was like being a virgin again. He was very attentive. He knew how to get you to relax, you know?

And he was extremely gentle and extremely awesome. Just
awesome
…

TOM BLAKE
:
John would tell us who would be shooting the films—the producers, the directors, and sometimes the money people backing the films. And when the films were being shot, he would tell us where the actors were being picked up.

All this made our work much easier.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
When Tom Blake—Big Tom, we called him—called on the phone at Sharon’s, that meant something, like some mysterious signal. It was a code word, and I was absolutely supposed to put the call through, no problems. He was the only person that had the home phone number, so that was a big deal.

TOM BLAKE
:
Through John Holmes, we already knew the shoot location, so we could set up police officers for surveillance with our vans and our cam
eras. We’d shoot people coming in and out of the location. It was perfect identification.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
Big Tom was always immediately directed to either Sharon or John. I handed it to Sharon if John wasn’t there or straight to John if he was. If not, it was, “Just tell him Big Tom called.”

SHARON HOLMES
:
After Dawn and John became intimate—though I didn’t know it at the time—Dawn became like a daughter to me, and I tried to show her that John wasn’t God almighty. But I guess to a fifteen-year-old who’s getting showered with gifts—and John telling her how wonderful she was—she would have done anything he wanted.

And eventually she
did
do anything he wanted.

DAWN SCHILLER
:
I felt as if I was his newborn child. I mean, that’s how precious he treated me.

But then John would have to go away to do a film. I knew what kind of movies he was making, but we never really talked about it. I just knew he was going to work. It was called “going to work,” and he never brought it home.