The Other Hollywood (54 page)

They said, “You know what? We’ll take the line out.” So that was kind of a little get-even for me—Traci didn’t get the role,
I
got the role…. And I did it while I was in prison, ha, ha, ha!

LOS ANGELES
1989

TOM BYRON
:
Was it big news when Teddy Snyder got shot in front of his Rolls Royce holding the vial of coke? Oh, that was so poetic. Well, it made the newspaper.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, AUGUST 20, 1989: KILLING OF PORN PIONEER STILL BAFFLES POLICE, PEERS; INQUIRY AFFORDS RARE PEEK AT “PLAYPEN OF THE DAMNED”
:
“Police say Snyder was found shot to death at 11:15
P.M
. near his parked car at Blackhawk Street and Wilbur Avenue. He had been shot four times in the front of his body and five times from the rear. Three wounds bore gunpowder marks. Nearby witnesses reported hearing a loud argument before the shots.

“Law enforcement officers familiar with the case said details of the killing show that Snyder may have known his assailant and tried to run away as he was being shot.

“Sharon Snyder, now four months pregnant, said her husband had been trying to get out of the porn business because customers were not buying products anymore. ‘Maybe people aren’t as perverted as we thought,’ she said.”

PHIL VANNATTER (LAPD DETECTIVE)
:
I didn’t know who Teddy Snyder was until the Devonshire detectives—realizing they were dealing with a big-time pornographer—called us in. About eight to ten hours after the actual murder occurred, we took it over.

When we interviewed Sharon Snyder, she said she’d been doing laundry, and Teddy just disappeared; she didn’t even know he was leaving.

TOM BYRON
:
I think Paul Thomas is the one who called me up and said, “Hey, hear about Ted Snyder? He just got fuckin’ blown away.”

I went, “Well, that’s not surprising,” ha, ha, ha. But that came with the territory, man. People were gettin’ whacked all the time.

LOS ANGELES TIMES,
AUGUST 20, 1989: KILLING OF PORN PIONEER STILL BAF FLES POLICE, PEERS, INQUIRY AFFORDS A PEEK AT “PLAYPEN OF THE DAMNED”
:
“Amid the loose papers and frayed girlie posters of a bankrupt porn empire, Bob Genova telephoned a business acquaintance in Philadelphia with the latest news.

“‘You hear what they did to my partner?’ asked Genova, whose company had earned a reputation for B-movie porn.

“‘They killed him,’ he boomed in a nasal voice that echoed into the hallway outside his office, where a visitor waited to see him. ‘It’s hard to figure. I’m all by myself now. They’re whittling me down.’

“Three weeks after Teddy Snyder’s body was found punctured by nine bullets in a quiet San Fernando Valley neighborhood, the death of the balding pornographer with a taste for gold chains, leisure suits and luxury cars remains a mystery to police and to Snyder’s colleagues in Los Angeles’ billion-dollar adult film industry.

“There is no shortage of theories about his death.”

PHIL VANNATTER
:
To me it didn’t look like a mob hit because Teddy was shot numerous times, right out in the middle of the street. It wasn’t in his front yard, it was on the other side of the Valley—on Blackhawk Avenue, in the Devonshire Division. He lived on one side of the Valley and was killed on the other. I said, “You know, I never heard of a mob hit where they machine-gunned somebody right in the street, in a prominent neighborhood, a nice neighborhood. Normally it’s one or two shots to the head.” And this guy was shot with what appeared to be an automatic weapon—just sprayed with it.

This homicide reeked of a drug deal gone bad.

BOBBY GENOVA
:
Nowadays there are so many drug deals that go awry.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, AUGUST 20, 1989: KILLING OF PORN PIONEER STILL BAF FLES POLICE, PEERS; INQUIRY AFFORDS RARE PEEK AT “PLAYPEN OF THE DAMNED”
:
“One theory is that drugs were involved; he was regarded in the industry as a heavy user, and a vial of cocaine was in his hand when he was found dead on a Northridge street.

“A law enforcement investigator familiar with the case said the killing had the appearance of an organized crime–style hit. Court records show that the Northridge company Snyder founded, Video Cassette Recordings Inc., owed
money to a company allegedly controlled by a man linked by federal prosecutors to an East Coast crime family. And VCR’s offices have been searched as part of an ongoing investigation by a state and local law enforcement task force probing organized crime links to the porn business.

“However, many in the porn industry doubt that organized crime was involved in the killing. ‘It’s much ado about nothing,’ Genova said.

“Whatever the reason for Snyder’s death, Genova is shedding no tears for his partner, calling him a drug abuser and creep who did not care about their failing business.”

PHIL VANNATTER
:
During our interviews we found out that Patty, Sharon Snyder’s older sister, had apparently dated and almost married a capo in the Gambino family. My partner, Detective Kirk Mellecker, immediately jumped on that with blinders and said, “Oh my God. This has got to be a mob hit.” But I thought it had to do with Teddy and Sharon’s narcotics involvement or with Teddy’s business in the Valley.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Once Teddy was at work all day with Bobby Genova, it was almost like they were
playing
mob, you know? They didn’t seem like
real
mob. But there was a lot of stuff going on with those guys.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, SEPTEMBER 25, 1989: ALLEGED EAST COAST MOB FIGURE NAMED IN VIDEOTAPE FRAUD.
“A man authorities describe as a New Jersey leader of an organized crime family has been charged with setting up a ‘bogus’ company in Chatsworth to defraud other firms out of more than $1 million worth of videotape and equipment, most of which was distributed by Los Angeles pornographers.

“Martin Taccetta, 38, of Florham Park, N.J., who federal and New Jersey authorities say is a prominent member of the Lucchese crime family, faces conspiracy and grand theft charges along with three alleged business associates. All four men are expected to be arrested today, district attorney’s officials said.”

BOBBY GENOVA
:
I knew I was a logical suspect. Two days after the shooting I walked into my warehouse and along comes this big Mercury Marquis. These two detectives came out and introduced themselves. They made an appointment to come over to my house at 7:00
P.M
. on Friday evening.

These guys saw drugs, sex, Mafia, and thought they had a high-profile case. I knew their theory was cockamamie. They were bumbling and fumbling.

PHIL VANNATTER
:
Bob Genova wasn’t really a lot of help, but I never felt he was involved. He seemed very upset by the fact that Teddy had been
killed. And apparently they had made a lot of money together.
A lot of
money.

And Patty—Sharon’s sister—was apparently the brains of the organization. I don’t think Bobby Genova was very bright, to be honest. I think he was riding on Teddy’s coattails.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, SEPTEMBER 25, 1989: ALLEGED EAST COAST MOB FIGURE NAMED IN VIDEOTAPE FRAUD.
“The criminal complaint, filed late Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, emerged from a three-year investigation into organized crime influence in the $1 billion local pornography industry, officials said. An undercover Los Angeles police officer at one point got a job at the company under investigation, Ollinor Video Products, Inc.

“One company that received tape from Ollinor was Video Cassette Recording (VCR), a Northridge-based producer and distributor of pornography videos. Ted Snyder, 47, co-founder of VCR was found shot nine times on a Chatsworth street on Aug. 1, 1989.

“No arrests have been made in the slaying.”

BALTIMORE/LOS ANGELES/FT. WORTH, TX
1989–1990

JOHN WATERS
:
When Traci came to shoot
Cry-Baby
, she came with a gentleman that—I didn’t know until much later—was involved with her in the porno business. And halfway through the film she bonded very heavily with the cast. This shoot was like rehab.

I mean, think about it: We had Susan Tyrell; Patty Hearst; Johnny Depp, who had just had some illegal incident; David Nelson; Iggy Pop, who was totally sober, you know? We played a game with the staff: Who
hasn’t
been arrested? Everyone had a record.

So for the first time Traci felt like no one was judging her. I mean, we didn’t care. I used to say to her, “The only problem was that you were too good of a porno star.”

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
So I pleaded not guilty and went to trial, which lasted about a year. They had three parts to the trial, and I won the first two, but on the third one they had Traci Lords waiting to testify—and her mother, who had testified in the two other cases.

My lawyer says, “A mother’s a mother, and you can’t make a mother look bad.” So the mother came with her lies, like, “Such a nice girl she was…”

PATRICIA BRICELAND (MOTHER OF TRACI LORDS)
:
We were living in Redondo Beach. My older daughter is Lorraine, she’s 22; my next daughter is Nora, she’s 20; I have a 19-year-old, Rachel; and a 17-year-old named Grace, G-R-A-C-E, Grace. And Nora lived with us up until she was—just right before her sixteenth birthday, when she did decide to leave home….

When Nora was fifteen, she was a sophomore in high school, and she was at the age where girls get rebellious with their mothers. There was a
strain between us. The move, that caused a lot of problems. I knew Nora was having a lot of problems. I knew she was concerned about money, and things were tough.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
We had a good relationship. Traci used me as sort of a confidant where she would come to me with her problems, and I would try to help her out. And Traci had a lot of problems. She had problems with her mother. She had a problem with drugs. She was having problems with producers not paying her the full amount of money she thought she was supposed to get. You know, just run-of-the-mill problems of someone working in the business.

PATRICIA BRICELAND
:
About a month after she left home, Nora came in and talked to me for a little while and took off again. She would come and see me for a couple of hours, and sometimes we would go out to lunch. I would say it continued like that from then up to the present time.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Traci came to me one day in tears. She said she had an opportunity to go to London, England, for a modeling job, but she didn’t have any money to go. And I couldn’t believe it because she’d been working—she must have, at that time, made at least a hundred movies and was still working. I asked her where the money was? She just said, “I need this job. Could you lend me three thousand dollars?”

I asked when she was going to give it back, and she said she’d send it from London in thirty days. And she would call me in two weeks. I bawled her out. I told her she made a lot of money. What happened to all of it? But I finally gave her the money.

PATRICIA BRICELAND
:
Nora came for my other daughter’s birthday party; she came for Christmas. She would spend a great part of the day here. We would talk about family relations.

She told me she was modeling, but she didn’t tell me
where
she was modeling. I confronted her; she lied to me. She told me she was doing legitimate modeling. As it turned out, she was doing legitimate modeling, but she was doing other modeling, too.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
So Traci called me from London and told me the modeling job didn’t work out and that she was coming home. And two weeks after that she came over and paid me back the three thousand—and then, besides that, offered to lend
me
money.

PATRICIA BRICELAND
:
I found that Nora seemed to be missing school without telling me. I didn’t have any idea of what was going on.

But I heard rumors to the effect that Nora had been doing nude photography. So I confronted her with it.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
She was complaining about her mother. I told her, “You’re old enough to do your own thing. You’re not no baby. You’re twenty years old. You should know better.”

Does she look twenty to me on these box covers? You can’t tell because of the makeup. Some she looks thirty; some she looks nineteen. She looks different in every picture. There is a hundred and twenty pictures where she looks different. It’s the way they make her up.

PATRICIA BRICELAND
:
I told her that I heard rumors to the effect that she was involved in nude modeling, and she said it wasn’t true.

I had heard such rumors when she was sixteen years old, yes, I had. Her sister, Lorraine, told me that she had friends who said they had seen Nora’s picture in some magazines, but when I confronted Nora with that…she said it wasn’t true.

I think she probably started doing the nude modeling—I think she got involved with these people—probably just before she left and began doing it very soon after she left.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Traci worked her head off for two years, and she kept on telling me she wanted to make a lot of money and quit.

I says, “Quit now.”

She said, “I can’t. I don’t have any money.” But she said, “You watch. I’ll come up with something.”

PATRICIA BRICELAND
:
Eventually I did see some pictures, in
Penthouse
. And I confronted her with that. They were tastefully done, basically, but they were nude pictures.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
All of a sudden, I hear a rumor that Traci has her own company, TLC, Traci Lords Company. Then I heard that they’d produced a movie in Paris. And the day after this rumor started—that she’d just turned eighteen in June or something—this movie comes out, and it belongs to her.

PATRICIA BRICELAND
:
I think anyone can see just by looking at these pictures she went from a chubby little adolescent—although she had a nice figure—to a much more slender, more adult face.

Just looking at the pictures, you could see the change in the face, the cheekbones and the width of her face and the weight and the way it was distributed. She was pudgy at fifteen. People consider that voluptuous, but I consider it pudgy.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
They screened me to testify as a witness against Traci, and I said, “What? Can you tell the difference between a seventeen-year-old tit and an eighteen-year-old tit?”

They said, “Get her out of here.”

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Caballero, which was probably in a state of receivership at that time, took over the movie—and as of last week they’ve sold a hundred thousand copies. I know for an exact fact that she got ten bucks for every copy that was sold in royalties. So she made her million dollars.

PATRICIA BRICELAND
:
I told Nora that if she didn’t stop I would go to the police, and I would go to
Penthouse
. She told me that if I did, the people that she was involved with would kill her. I believed that could be possibly true, and so I only tried to keep the lines of communications open with Nora.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, APRIL 27, 1989: DAUGHTER FEARED DEATH FROM MAKERS OF PORN FILMS, MOTHER TESTIFIES
:
“Traci Lords, fearing for her life, pleaded with her mother not to reveal that she was underage when she made many of her films, the porn star’s mother testified Wednesday.

“‘She told me to keep my mouth shut or I would get her in terrible trouble,’ Patricia Briceland said.”

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
So every other movie—in Traci’s mind—became illegal. And in the law’s eyes, too. So this movie,
Traci, I Love You
, which she made when she was of legal age, not only sold out, but I sold approximately six thousand pieces of this movie, more than any other movie in the history of my company. And it continues selling. I just bought fifty tapes yesterday. I buy fifty at least once a week. Got to buy them in fifties to get a discounted price. It’s the only Traci Lords movie that’s out there. And it just sells out. They don’t rent it, they
buy
it.

STEVE ORENSTEIN
:
I don’t think Traci Lords was a typical kiddie porn case, or what you’d think of as a child pornography case. When this came down about her being underage, people were shocked because she was very sexually aggressive on the sets. I mean, it was quite the opposite of her being a victim—she certainly wasn’t someone getting taken advantage of.

JOHN WATERS
:
In
Cry-Baby
Traci played a sexpot—which is always the best way to rid yourself of an image, by playing it and making fun of it. That’s what Johnny Depp did, too. He was on
Jump Street
, and he hated playing a teen idol, so I said, “Stick with us; we’ll kill that.” And we did—in the right way, you know?

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, OCTOBER 24, 1989: VIDEO PORN DISTRIBUTOR GETS ONE-YEAR SENTENCE
:
“A Woodland Hills video distributor was sentenced to a year in prison Monday for selling videotapes of teenage porn actress Traci Lords in violation of child pornography laws.

“U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon sentenced Rubin Gottesman, 56, to an additional term of three years’ probation and fined his company, X-Citement Video, $100,000.”

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
The mother actually won the case, so when it came down I got one year. They recommended that I go to Boron Federal Prison in California, but the judge said, “No, you’re a child pornographer, so you go to Forth Worth, Texas, where they have all the people like you.”

But Fort Worth was nice—I mean, for a jail. It wasn’t bad.

JOHN WATERS
:
During the making of
Cry-Baby
, the federal agents raided the set to make her come back to testify. Traci was terrified. I remember her sobbing—Patricia Hearst was comforting her—and Traci saying, “I’m so embarrassed.”

I said, “Don’t be embarrassed; everyone here’s been arrested.”

So I think we made her better. We rehabilitated Traci Lords.

STEVE ORENSTEIN
:
Why did I get five years’ probation, and Ruby did time? Because I was silly, and I made a plea bargain. I mean, I had an attorney every day telling me to make a deal. Because it wasn’t just the Traci Lords stuff, it was some bondage product as well, and that was potentially a problem. But that was dropped from the trial.

JOHN WATERS
:
Traci Lords fell in love with my best friend Pat Moran’s son—who practically grew up on all of my sets, and who’s now a very successful propmaster. So he and Traci had a big, very straight wedding in an Episcopal church in Baltimore.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Once I was in jail, I got friendly with the cop in the dorm, and there were, like, two hundred and eighty guys on the floor. And they made me like an orderly. The cop was like a nice guy—he took a liking to me, you know? He’d bring in bagels for me, and shit like that. A nice guy, some Irish kid. And I was in charge, right?

JOHN WATERS
:
The day before the wedding, the priest asked Traci, “Have you been baptized?”

And she said, “Yes.”

Later, Pat said, “You’re half Jewish—you weren’t baptized. Go over to John’s, and he’ll do it.” See, I’d been ordained by Johnny Depp’s lawyers to marry Johnny and Winona in the Universal Church. I talked him out of it because they were both too young. But I have these powers, so I’m legitimate, and I do happen to have a tabernacle. So I figured, “Well, come on over.” And I played this record of castrated altar boys. I got all black tulips, and I wore all black.

Did she have to get naked or wear white robes? No, certainly not—we were doing the opposite of getting naked. We were wiping away males’ defiant sexual behavior toward her, ha, ha, ha.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
One day, around lunchtime, I was supposed to be watchin’ that nobody steals nothin’. My job was cleaning the phones—I’d disinfect the phones. So I’m hangin’ around the phones, and here comes this redneck guy. There’s a group of like twenty guys, and I recognize him to be one of them, with the tattoos and the beard and the hair—a redneck, you know?

He asks, “Your name Rubin Gottesman?”

Holy shit.
I says, “Yeah, why?”

He says, “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”

Now I’m lookin’ for the cop. There’s no cop. The redneck comes over, and what is he bringin’? A four-year-old
AVN
with a story about me.

And he says, “Is this about you?”

I says, “Yeah.”

He says, “I thought so.” I became a hero. These guys, they’d come over and say, “Can we borrow the
USA Today
, just the sports section?” I says, “You can have the whole paper.”

JOHN WATERS
:
I wiped away her sexual defiance, and I wiped away males’ piggish behavior to her. And Traci started crying. She was scared, I think—because she didn’t expect quite this much of a production when she came over. I took it dead seriously.

I think I splattered some holy water on Traci—Evian.