The Other Hollywood (22 page)

So I went home with Harry that night. An uncle of his had an apartment on East Thirty-fourth Street that we could party in. It was Jamie Gillis, Harry, and myself. You know, we just always sort of had these sexual romps. I wasn’t into threesomes, but with Jamie and Harry it was just us.

This was before Serena.

LARRY PARRISH
:
Linda Lovelace had been granted immunity by a grand jury in New York, so we didn’t have an option of prosecuting her. She was subpoenaed by the grand jury in the Eastern District of New York, and she appeared, was granted testimonial immunity, and testified at length to everything there was to know about
Deep Throat
.

So that immunity kept her from being indicted by us, but it also made her a witness. She could never refuse to testify, and she was subpoenaed fifteen or sixteen times around the country.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
I was a witness. They threatened me with prosecution, and then they called me in and asked a buncha questions. I just always thought, “What are they gonna do? Put me in jail? For what?”

I never had any big fear of Larry Parrish. I didn’t tell ’em anything. But I could never figure out why—when they would bring me to Memphis—they didn’t bring Linda. I mean, they knew who she was. She had testified before a grand jury before. But I don’t think she ever really had anything intelligent to say to them. Parrish probably talked to her once and thought, “Man, this chick’s a dingbat; no sense gettin’ her in court.”

LARRY PARRISH
:
I had subpoenaed Linda Lovelace to testify for us but decided at the last minute not to use her because she was very, very flaky. She had recently testified in Albuquerque—and she was late to court. The marshals had to go get her. Then she came to court with her hair in rollers. She had just become a spectacle, and we didn’t need her, so I didn’t use her.

BILL KELLY
:
I spent three years working on
Deep Throat
before we ever got it to trial in Memphis. That was probably the most complicated obscenity investigation I ever worked on.
Deep Throat
required a lot of work because there were hundreds of people involved. You know, you had three hundred theaters showing the film. You had at least three hundred employees out there, one or two in every theater, working for the Peraino family.

So you don’t meet a lot of high-class people in the porno business. All these people were either immoral or amoral. And a lot of them had mid-Mediterranean backgrounds, ha, ha, ha. As a
Miami Herald
article put it, “Organized Crime Muscle Dominates Porno Distribution.”

LARRY PARRISH
:
I never saw
The Godfather
. When you live in the midst of this real mob world stuff, why go see a movie about it? When you spend time with real people and see them shedding real blood and see the horror of it all from the inside rather than the outside, then why go see it portrayed as fiction? To me, it just loses something.

AL RUDDY
:
I met with Joe Columbo—head of the Columbo family—before we made
The Godfather
. They wanted us to remove the word “Mafia” from the script, which was actually easy to do because it was used only once.

Remember when Bobby Duvall comes to Hollywood, to meet the producer to give Johnny Fontane the job, and the producer flips out? And he says, “No guinea, gumba, greaseball, wop. Mafias are coming out of the woodwork…”

Now it was, “No guinea, gumba, wops are coming…”

So that was the whole thing. That’s all they wanted, and that’s all they got. I never had another problem with them. And they helped us shoot
The Godfather
.

BILL KELLY
:
This is a very large courtroom in a new Federal District Court in Memphis, and it sits right smack on the Mississippi River, okay?

So over on the side of the courtroom closest to the river are twelve defendants—all the Peraino gang and a couple of other guys and Harry Reems and eight lawyers. And one of these defendants was Joe the Whale, who weighed at least 350, if not 400, pounds. He took up two chairs.

On the other side of the courtroom was Larry Parrish and an FBI agent named James Donland, the case agent in Memphis, who did the best job I’ve ever seen done by a new FBI agent. There must have been four tons of meat on the defendants’ side—and 350 pounds on the government’s side. The courtroom was so weighted that I could almost see it starting to tilt and flip over, right into the river.

LARRY PARRISH
:
Even Harry Reems, who was subpoenaed, did not want to sit with those people. There would be the gang around the defendants’ table, and over there in the corner would be Harry Reems sitting on a bench. And the judge would say, “Mr. Streicher, you gotta get over here with the defendants! You can’t sit over there!”

TONY BILL
:
I did answer a lot of factual questions: “What does a producer do? What does a director do?” Then, at a certain point in the trial, Larry Parrish asked, “Who paid for you to be here today?”

I said, “I’m not being paid to be here today.”

He said, “Well, who paid your travel expenses?”

I said, “I did,” which he was kind of flummoxed by.

It was a curveball for him to discover that an expert witness he’d intended to portray as a mercenary had in fact not taken a dime. It was the first chink in his armor.

BILL KELLY
:
I talked to Harry Reems at that trial. He was as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. He didn’t want to be associated with these people of mid-Mediterranean origin, him not being one of them, see?

I think he was looking at me to sort of shelter him from these people—and here I am trying to help put him in jail along with the rest of them.

TONY BILL
:
The next tack Larry Parrish took was a line of questioning about pornography—“What did I consider pornographic?”

I allowed as how I didn’t think there was probably any subject that couldn’t be treated with taste, with artistic expression, and that there was probably no subject that was off base when it came to artistic expression, in a movie or a painting or a poem or a novel or whatever. I couldn’t think of anything that was inherently pornographic.

BRUCE KRAMER (DEFENSE ATTORNEY)
:
At the beginning of the trial the jury
was fairly friendly to us. They would look at Harry, make eye contact with us—until the day we all got on the bus and went to a Memphis midtown theater to see a screening of
Deep Throat
.

After that, their demeanor changed. I mean, it’s one thing talking in the abstract about explicit motion pictures and another thing for these people to actually see it.

TONY BILL
:
Larry Parrish continued that line of questioning by asking, “What about bestiality?”

I said, “Well, one of the most famous images in the history of art is ‘The Rape of Leda by the Swan,’” and that stopped him.

To my great pleasure, when it was all finished, and I got down from the stand, the head of the ACLU turned to me and said, “You’ve turned the tide of this trial. That was brilliant. He should never have asked you that question.”

LARRY PARRISH
:
After the jury saw Harry Reems in all his glory on a huge screen—everybody just stared at him once they got back in the court room.

Harry Reems was an embarrassed bird. He was humiliated by that experience, you could tell. He never told me, “I was humiliated,” but he had this air of guilt about him, as if he knew he had done something wrong.

BRUCE KRAMER
:
Joa Fernandez, the cameraman on
Deep Throat,
took the stand, and Larry Parrish was very animated, very intense, as he led him through his direct examination.

Joa Fernandez was a very hip character. A dude, ha, ha, ha. So when Larry asked Mr. Fernandez to describe a group sex scene in the movie, Fernandez said, “Hey, man, there ain’t no group sex in
Deep Throat
.”

Larry was taken aback, and asked, “Mr. Fernandez, weren’t you the cameraman on this film?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you filmed all of the scenes?”

“Yes, sir.”

Then Larry starts describing the scenes in detail—almost frame by frame—and asking Joa if he remembers them. “Do you recall the scene where Mr. Reems is engaged in cunnilingus with so and so and at the same time so and so is engaged in fellatio with Mr. Reems?”

“Yeah, yeah. I remember that.”

Larry asks, “Well?”

And Joa Fernandez says, “Hey, man, that’s only three—that ain’t no group.”

LARRY PARRISH
:
I am probably an overly modest person, personally. But if you’re going to prosecute this stuff you have just got to steel yourself to it and just do it. And probably, sometimes, in trying to overcome that part of me, I would overdo it.

So now we’re at the end of the trial, and we have just seen the film, ha, ha, ha, and it’s time for me to make my final argument.

I said, “Now, I’m really not trying to personally offend you, and I’m not trying to offend myself, but let’s just take a five-minute segment of this film, and let me describe it to you, as you saw it from the screen….”

BRUCE KRAMER
:
When Larry Parrish was describing that scene, he was, in my opinion, absorbed in a morbid, pathological, salacious, lascivious, lustful description—because he got to the point where he was describing cum dripping off the woman’s lip.

I thought that was unnecessary.

LARRY PARRISH
:
I went through it—“Did you see him take his penis out and ejaculate all over Miss Lovelace? And did you see the semen run down out of her eyes into her mouth, and she licked it with her lips?”

After about three minutes of that, the jurors were filled with hatred, thinking, “You pervert, shut up.”

And then I just stopped and said, “Did you feel all those feelings running through your veins? Did you feel the feelings you were having toward me? That’s called prurient interest—what you were reacting to is that you were hearing me describe what any normal human being would say is an appeal to prurient interest. Now when the judge asks you to find whether or not this film appealed to prurient interest, think of how you felt when I just described that scene.

“There’s no way—there’s no way on earth that any of this material can be found nonobscene.”

BILL KELLY
:
Larry Parrish took every one of those twelve defendants to trial, with their eight high-powered lawyers, and he just beat them down and whacked them good—and every one of them got convicted.

LARRY PARRISH
:
The Perainos convicted themselves on the organized crime front just by their demeanor, their attitude, the way they talked to each other, and the way their lawyers spoke.

They were just obnoxious.

They were Yankees—bad Yankees. They were everything you see on TV. They’d get up and strut and preen and try to be smart alecks and irritate the judge and jury. I just gave them some rope and watched them hang themselves.

BILL KELLY
:
They didn’t get much in the way of sentences, though. The head of the operation, Anthony Peraino Sr., got convicted, but he decided he wasn’t going to jail—so he took off for Italy and stayed gone for about five years.

NEW YORK TIMES,
MAY 1, 1977: EIGHT MEN SENTENCED IN
DEEP THROAT
CASE
:
“Fed. Dist. Judge Harry W. Wellford has sentenced eight men convicted in the
Deep Throat
obscenity trial to prison terms ranging from three months to one year and has imposed fines of up to $10,000. Harry Reems had his conviction overturned. Those sentenced are Michael Cherubino, Anthony Novello, Joseph and Louis Peraino, Carl Carter and Mario DeSalvo. Plymouth Distributors is fined $10,000.”

BILL KELLY
:
Bobby DeSalvo was the international distributor for
Deep Throat
. He thought he was getting shortchanged because all this money was coming in. But the Mafia is not a good place to go to collect money.

Bobby DeSalvo’s body was never found because he went to Italy to try to collect additional money from the Peraino family. We traced him as far as London and haven’t seen him since.

I imagine he’s fish food.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
It was my job to pick up Bobby DeSalvo when he came to Los Angeles and drive him around in the Mercedes. He came out every week from Florida. Nice guy. He gave me two-hundred-dollar tips and took me to lunch and dinner.

Then a week or two goes by, and there’s no Bobby.

So I go to Butchie, “Where’s Bobby?”

He says, “Forget about it.”

I says, “What do you mean, forget about it?”

He says, “He ain’t comin’ no more.”

I says, “Oh, yeah? What happened to him?”

He says, “I ain’t tellin’ ya. None of your business.”

I find out Bobby’s with the fish.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Butchie Peraino did nothing but make movies; that’s all he ever fucking wanted to do. He didn’t extort from people, he didn’t hit people, he didn’t hurt people—he made movies. That’s what he did, that’s what he always wanted to do, and that was his love.

BILL KELLY
:
On the second trial the government decided, “Well, we got our shots in,” and they dropped the charges against Harry Reems. That was Larry Parrish’s decision, originally, I think. But the government deliberately drew a lot of attention to that trial because they prosecuted an actor.