The Other Hollywood (6 page)

TINA RUSSELL
:
Harry had been uptight that day, and I made him feel good.

HARRY REEMS
:
Tina did a deliriously good job on me, and I erupted right on schedule. But there wasn’t a second to savor the post-ejaculatory glow.

“Okay, get your clothes on, Harry,” Caprice was saying in her smart executive voice, “get your money, and get out.”

Tina Russell said, “You’re good. Would you like some more work?”

“Sure,” I said.

With that one word, my new career was launched.

GEORGINA SPELVIN
:
I’m not a very good cocksucker, but I am a good actress. Every role I’ve ever gotten has dealt with things that have been foreign to me, so I simply try to make them a part of my experience in order to portray them convincingly. If I have to learn how to twirl the baton, I’ll do the best I can to learn it in the time I have available. If I haven’t got enough time, I’ll learn how to fake it.

You see, in my personal life, I didn’t achieve a real orgasm until I was twenty-six, and it was a great mystery to me at what point the body takes over—is no longer controlled. That’s why when women talk about orgasms, they say if you’re not sure, you haven’t had one.

HARRY REEMS
:
The guys were getting $75 for a day’s work and the girls $100. I protested, and it worked. We all got the same pay, except for the girls who did anal scenes, who got an extra $25.

GEORGINA SPELVIN
:
The girls went on strike and said the boys should be paid as much as the girls. So everybody got $100. And then it went up to $115.

HARRY REEMS
:
I never knew what I was being hired for. I just went and came. Some nights I’d literally limp home, I’d be so sore.

GEORGINA SPELVIN
:
There are so many films out there that have been made of cutting-room trash, with different names—and since I never received a royalty, not one penny, from any film I ever made, I cannot tell you what I did or did not do.

If my picture is there, and you’re absolutely sure it’s me, then chances are I did it, ha, ha, ha. If the name alone is there, and you’re only seeing scattered body parts, it could or could not be me. I can’t guarantee it.

HARRY REEMS
:
I stayed out of acting from April to June, except for an occasional loop. Then an enormous, nine-foot beanpole Jamaican by the name of Smitty entered my life. Smitty said, “Hey, Harry, you want to make some films?”

FRED LINCOLN
:
Smitty basically did loops. He was a one-man band. He’d set the lights, set the camera, and then we’d just do whatever we wanted to do.

HARRY REEMS
:
God knows where Smitty got the money to become a producer. Maybe selling coke to Caprice or pulling heists in the garment center. Nobody ever dared to ask. Big, black, skinny—Smitty was the “open sesame” to the “summer of my content” and to the most fun I’ve ever had in the profession.

JAMIE GILLIS
:
That summer was a terrific time because there were a lot of film companies in Times Square. Harry Reems was there and a guy named Sean Costello, who was a wonderful character. I met Harry at Sean’s office, when we started doing loops together.

HARRY REEMS
:
Jamie Gillis was very much with us in the making of those loops. Jamie’s into everything sexually. There’s almost nothing that doesn’t turn him on. Guys, gals, S and M. You name it, and he’d love to do it. When none of the rest of us wanted to work with a woman, we’d call Jamie in. Even if a woman stank to high heaven, Jamie would eat her right up.

JAMIE GILLIS
:
Those guys who had seniority, Harry, Sean, and Fred—who had been around a little while—got the prettier girls. Sean, of course, would get the top one. Then Harry got some, too. It took a while before you could lay claim to the really hot ones.

But one time there was one girl, Lucy, who was so, so cute, that I just kept fucking her.

I pretended that I couldn’t come. So I just kept fucking her and fucking her—for I don’t know how long. I just wanted to keep her, you know? I figured, well, she wasn’t going to come home with me, so this might be the only chance I had. So I just kept everyone waiting on the set—while I kept fucking Lucy.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Jamie used to get next to ’em and he would be fuckin’ ’em and he would whisper in their ears, “You fuckin’ hate me now, but I don’t give a shit, cause I’m gonna fuck you for two hours and then I ain’t gonna come for another hour and then when I come, I ain’t even stoppin’, you cunt!”

JAMIE GILLIS
:
I did think about sex a lot. I did enjoy sex a lot, probably more than the average guy.

And no, I wasn’t molested as a kid. When I was eleven, some old guy did try to molest me. He took me home and said, “I’ll give you a quarter to watch me play with myself,” and he showed me a dirty magazine—a sunbathing magazine, one of those nudist magazines.

The old guy said, “Let me see your thing. I bet you’ve got a big one.”
And that was the only reason I didn’t take my pants down. I was eleven years old, and I knew I didn’t have a big one. If he’d said, “Oh, I like little boys,” I’d have said, “Oh yeah, sure, buddy.” But I thought, “If I didn’t think I’d disappoint ya, I’d do it.” That was as close as I ever got to being molested.

HARRY REEMS
:
Smitty paid Sean Costello a sum of money to produce five loops a day. The first thing Sean did was to hire me and Fred Lincoln to help him produce, direct, and act in these films.

Sean, Fred, and I must have made 150 loops that summer. We earned our nickname of “The Dirty Three.” We created a whole new atmosphere. The Dirty Three were about as reliable as anybody in the industry for getting it off on cue—perhaps the most reliable. That’s why we had all the work we could get and why we kept hiring one another when we were commissioned to make loops.

FRED LINCOLN
:
It was me, a guy by the name of Sean Costello, Harry Reems, Paul Matthews, Jamie Gillis, and Jason Russell. Of course, there was Tina Russell, Jason’s wife, who was magnificent and that was it. We were like the core of guys that did the films. But it was the hippie days, so a lot of people would drift in and drift out—but we were the core group of porn actors.

HARRY REEMS
:
The Dirty Three were so horny that sometimes we’d get into the bathtub with our partners and fuck between loops. But we wouldn’t come—because we knew we had to save it for our “art.” In another half hour we’d be doing another loop.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Smitty is the only casualty I know of in this business. He fell out of a hotel room window. Yeah, poor guy. Nobody knows who he was working for. We didn’t know anything in those days.

GEORGINA SPELVIN
:
There were rumors that the mob was financing these films. I never knew it for a fact; I never met anybody that had Mafia on their shirt: “Members Only,” ha, ha, ha. I wouldn’t know a Mafia if I saw one! And I wasn’t paid by check, so I didn’t have any name on the check to refer to. I was usually paid in cash.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Why did Smitty get thrown out the window? I dunno. Smitty did a lot of stuff; he must have stole money. But I don’t think it was the mob because Smitty was into some shit. It’s too bad he went out the window, though, because he always got the best-looking girls. Smitty had good taste.

GEORGINA SPELVIN
:
People would ask, “Aren’t you afraid of the mob coming in and interfering in your life?”

I’d say, “What mob? C’mon, you’ve got to be kidding!”

I mean, it was a wonderful atmosphere! For all of my dealings with people in the porn business—any porn film I made—if I went in to talk with anyone about doing a film, I didn’t have to audition. People called and begged me to work for them, begged to give me money. And money was what I really needed at that point. Money is still what I need. I haven’t outgrown that.

If I wasn’t comfortable with the people or with the circumstances, I’d just say no. It was that easy. I was never forced to do anything.

HARRY REEMS
:
Late 1971 was the high noon of the business. Everybody was getting into the act. You could stand on a street corner in Times Square waiting for traffic lights to change and ask a stranger, “How’s the new film going?”

Almost never would anyone ask, “What film?”

Anyone who wanted work could find it. You had the luxury of turning down three, four, or five jobs a day.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
I was still signed with the William Morris Agency, when the Leiber Brothers—the advertising agency—wrote me a letter. Obviously, one of their executives found a loop or something that I did and canceled my Close-Up toothpaste commercial. The words of the letter were something about how it was discovered that I had “done nudity.”

Heaven forbid! I had taken off my pants!

JAMIE GILLIS
:
The first time I saw my picture on a poster I was furious and even thinking of suing somebody—because there were pictures of our faces.

I thought,
“My God, I’m a serious actor. People are gonna see this poster, and it’s gonna ruin my career!”

You see, I was still working with the Classic Stage Company, and we were having a limited audience doing some
Pericles
or some far-out Shakespeare thing, so I said to them, “You know what we should do to attract noise? We should do this nude! You know, just do
Pericles
nude, and people will come. It’s never been done!”

The director said to me, “You know, Jamie, I think you’re in the wrong company.” Ha, ha, ha—in a way he was right.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
What was funny about the Close-Up ad being pulled—it was this commercial that involved a girl and a guy on a beach, and it was called “Smiles and Whispers,” and my line was, “And because we smile and whisper a lot, we carry Close-Up with us wherever we go.”

“Because we smile and whisper a lot?” It was a very sexual commercial. I could have redefined the whole meaning of Close-Up!

In any case, it was pulled off the air. And after they pulled that, my Gillette TracII and Coleco Toys commercials were pulled off, too.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Harry Reems and I were walking down Eighth Avenue one day. We went past a theater called the Cameo, and there’s Harry’s picture with one of these girls on the poster. And Harry just went fucking ape shit.
“What are they doing? This is gonna kill my career!”

I said, “Harry, you ain’t got no career. This is what we do. We make an occasional commercial, but this is it—we get laid, and they give us a hundred bucks.”

NEW YORK CITY
1971

FRED LINCOLN
:
I used to have to chase Linda Boreman, or Linda Traynor, whatever she was calling herself, away from me on the set. She was a pain in the ass. She would just get down between my legs and try to open my fly. And I’d say, “I gotta work.”

I mean, everybody fucked while they were waiting to fuck. We’d fuck before—we’d fuck after—we’d fuck during. But I didn’t like Linda; there was just something about her…

So did I do any scenes with Linda? No. I just did pretty girls.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
I think it was Linda who called me and said “Hey, I got a new guy, Bob Wolfe, that’s doing stuff. Let’s do another scene.”

Linda liked working with me. Or fucking me, I should say. She liked the idea of me being able to perform. I would get called by Linda, so I also did several scenes for Bob Wolfe, not just the famous one.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Bob Wolfe made a million loops. He was a nice, black-haired guy. I think Linda and I made probably between ten to fifteen loops at that time for him. It’s really hard to say because with someone like Bob Wolfe who shoots with two cameras you never know how many you’ve made.

FRED LINCOLN
:
They would call us—I think it was Vinnie, Butchie Peraino’s bodyguard—and say, “Come at nine o’clock in the morning.”

We’d show up, and they’d figure out who’s gonna work with who and who’s gonna do what. That’s the way we worked, cause, you know, we were stoned, ha, ha, ha! This was the hippie days: We’d smoke a joint, we’d do acid, and we’d fuck.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Bob Wolfe was, of course, doing the freakiest films. He had a place down on Fourteenth Street. Linda and I were sitting there, and he just asked her.

He asked, “Lady, would you ball a dog?”

And she said, “Sure.”

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Bob Wolfe asked me, “We’ve been thinking of making a dog movie. Would that interest you?”

I said no before I even considered the question. A dog movie? A
dog
movie? I knew they weren’t thinking about
Rin Tin Tin
or
Lassie Come Home
. They were undoubtedly considering a girl-meets-dog movie.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
I was sitting there, and Bob Wolfe said, “Jesus, we could do three or four films, and I could pay you some extra money.” So I figured, what the hell?

LINDA LOVELACE
:
“There’d be a lot of money in it,” Bob said. “A lot more than usual.”

“I’m not interested,” I said. “I’m afraid of dogs.”

ERIC EDWARDS
:
I’ve known Chuck Traynor for a long time, and I have never, ever seen anything other than a businessman in him. I’ve never seen any kind of malevolence in him. He was more involved in the business and getting his wife to do certain things. But I never,
ever
saw any kind of abuse.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
The following morning, Chuck informed me that I would be making a movie with a dog. I didn’t say anything to Chuck. I knew the only time to tell him was when the other people were around. Witnesses.

There would be a beating, I knew that much, but it would be easier on me if other people were nearby. For once, the prospect of a beating was not the worst alternative. Any beating, no matter how severe, would be better than being raped by a dog.

Our destination that morning was a studio down in the East Village. A large room…the usual clutter…the double bed…the movie lights…the cameras…the director, Bob Wolfe—fat and greasy and black-haired.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
I always felt that Linda was enjoying everything that she did in front of the camera. I never had a feeling that she was
not
enjoying herself.

Even with the dog—and I was
in
that loop.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Chuck led me back into the main room. Wolfe and his assistant were sitting behind a small table. Chuck joined them on their side of the table.

“Okay, Linda,” Wolfe said. “Why don’t you get undressed, and we’ll get on with this.”

“No.”

“I’d advise you to think that over pretty carefully,” Wolfe said.

I looked at the three men. And then I noticed that on the small table directly in front of them there was a gun, a revolver.

“Now, are you sure you don’t want to make this movie?” Wolfe asked.

“Take off your clothes, cunt,” Chuck said.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
There was no gun pointed to her head; there were no people around, other than Bob Wolfe and me. There was no forcing her to do anything. Chuck wasn’t even there, not on that particular set. He was more of a manager that came in to make sure everything was okay and then would leave.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
It wasn’t my film. So I wasn’t even on the set. Bob Wolfe came up with the idea. It was just these guys trying to think of new things to come up with so they could make another movie.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
The dog wasn’t on the set already, no, I don’t believe so. I think I just went in front of the camera with Bob, shooting, doing a scene with Linda. We finished the scene, and the plot was advanced: “Oh, okay, the boyfriend now leaves to go to work, and the doggie comes in to satisfy Linda.”

LINDA LOVELACE
:
As I reached up to unbutton my blouse, I knew I was surrendering. If I could have foreseen how bad it was going to be, I wouldn’t have surrendered. I would have chosen the possibility of death.

I am able to handle almost everything that has happened to me in my life—but I’m still not able to handle that day. I’ve been raped by men who were no better than animals, but this was an
actual
animal—and that represented a huge dividing line.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
After my scene with Linda, I sat on the set, and I saw this guy bring in—I’ll call him “Fido”—a greyhound, I believe. Maybe an Afghan, shaved, but it was a short-haired dog.

Thin tail.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
When the film began I was to be in bed with Eric Edwards, who would stay with me for just a few minutes, just long enough to seem to get me aroused, and then leave me. At that point, I was supposed to look frustrated, unsatisfied.

As Wolfe directed the action, he said, “Now look around the room…slowly…slowly…. Now you see your dog, and you go, ‘Oooooh!’ And now you look excited…. Make it look like all of a sudden you’re coming up with a brilliant idea…. That’s right, now snap your fingers.”

ERIC EDWARDS
:
When I saw what was happening in front of my eyes, my jaw dropped to the floor. Because Linda did something that totally blew my brains out. She immediately went down on the dog.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
They had the dog lick me. All that time they were telling me to smile and to laugh. I was supposed to look very excited. I was feeling nothing but acute revulsion. Even as this was happening to me, I had trouble believing it. How much time was I actually with the dog? Maybe an hour or two, but there seemed no end to it. I felt sure he would bite me.

“Okay, Linda, get down on your hands and knees. No, down on all fours. That’s right…”

ERIC EDWARDS
:
She just went down on the dog, got him excited, and as soon as Linda got on all fours, the dog mounted her because the dog knows that when somebody’s on all fours, bang—we know what that’s all about.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
It went on, without end, until Bob Wolfe’s voice came through the fog.

“Okay, we got enough,” he said. “Wow—far-out!”

“I never thought we’d get this,” his assistant said.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
After it was over, I could see that the dog had actually ejaculated inside of her. I could see the expression on the dog’s face. Dog pulls out, asks for her phone number, smokes a cigarette, and everything was over.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
When they pulled the dog away from me, I was in the deepest valley I’d ever been in, devastated, wanting only to die. I looked up and saw Chuck.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
I wasn’t there. I had come down around noontime and went out to get some apple pie at this little dumpy joint around the corner. I cut the slice of pie and I happened to see something and I turned it over—it was all moldy on the bottom, all green.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
Linda didn’t seem upset. No, not at all. Linda just seemed to me like a hippie, free-love chick, you know? She had the headband, beads, the whole thing. Free love was all around.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Chuck was staring at me, studying me, measuring my reaction. He had to realize this was the worst moment of my life.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
At that particular time, everybody was trying to do dog movies. But the dogs had to be able to perform. There were several times
when we would have a production scheduled, and the girl would sit back—and the dog didn’t want to have anything to do with her whatsoever.

We’d try mayonnaise, we’d try hot dogs, we’d smear stuff on her pussy, and it wouldn’t work. The dog would whimper and whine and back off.

But this particular dog that worked with Linda was a pro.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
They were shooting up in Carter Stevens’s studio, and I walked in and saw Linda having sex with these dogs. It didn’t look like they were forcing her to do anything. It looked like they were forcing the dogs!

I was really young and new and going up there to shoot a scene with Chuck Vincent. When I walked in there and saw that, I was like, “Okay, I’m out of here.”

They were like, “No, no, no. We’re shooting another scene in another part of the studio later in the day. You’re just here for makeup.”

But I was like, “No way, man.”

So I ran down the stairs. It scared me. It was just too weird because nobody was holding anybody anywhere. Nobody was forcing her to do anything.

BILL KELLY
:
Linda was making bestiality movies, and Chuck was involved in that with her. Linda even admitted it before the Attorney General’s Commission. Supposedly she made them under duress. I don’t know whether I believe her or not. Because there was more than one bestiality film. And I even knew who one of the dogs was. I think it was Bruno or something—a great, big, damn dog.

I can’t even remember the breed.