Hindsight: True Love & Mischief in the Golden Age of Porn

by Howie Gordon

  “Whatever you were doing,” Bob says to me, “you just do that again.” And to Nancy he adds, “You just wait for him.”

  So, I closed my eyes and went back into that room again. There was Sally. The magic was still there. My dick started to rise. I stroked on. I got myself hard. Then Nancy touched me. Oh, no, BIG mistake!! As soon as she touched me, my dick said, “Hell, No! I’m done with you. You and I are finished! No! No! No! No!” What a temperamental little bastard my dick had turned out to be? One day on an X-rated set and he was already a fucking diva!

  It was Director Bob Chinn to the rescue. In one of the more brilliant moves of his long Hall-of-Fame career, he said to Nancy, “Don’t touch him!”

  And then he said to me, “You jerk off! Just keep going until you come!”

  Back to Nancy, he added, “And you sweetheart, don’t touch that penis until the first squirt is out! When that first squirt goes out, grab it like you did it!” She certainly earned the right. She had put in the time.

  And lo and behold, as he had wished for, it all did happen. I did squirt. She did grab it. They shot the shot. You see this movie, it looks like every other come shot you’ve ever seen. In all, the scene is divided into two parts that add up to about a minute-and-a-half of screen time. You watch the scene and there’s absolutely no indication of all the insane chaos that we had endured to shoot it.

  What did I learn? Well, for openers, I discovered yet again that I was not much of an exhibitionist. It did not give me any great buzz to have people watching me have sex. And what completely threw me for a loop was to learn that a sex scene involved a lot more than me getting to make out with an exotic woman. I had to jerk off in front of people! I had to be able to get myself aroused! I had to be able to make myself come! Whoa, how’d you like them apples?

  I didn’t! Not at all!

  Somehow, the idea of masturbating in front of other people was unbelievably humiliating to me. I would never have signed up for that! You couldn’t have given me enough money to jerk off in front of somebody else! I mean, if it was private and a woman, well, yeah, but if there were men watching too, and an audience of thirty, forty more people and crew, plus the cameras, yoi. My Lord, let me outta here! I had no idea that was gonna be part of the package. The price I paid that day was pretty much all of the dignity I had amassed in my young life. It was horrible to feel that exposed.

  And after all of that struggle, when I finally did come—

  You remember Rocky, the original Rocky? He didn’t win that fight! He just didn’t get knocked out! That was his victory! And that’s exactly how I felt!

  I came! I made it! And when I finally had that orgasm, I heard the cheering of millions! Then a towel came flying in and hit me in the face! Someone said, “Go home, Champ! Sleep it off!”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Never let the fear of striking out get in your way!”

  Babe Ruth

  They invited me back for the orgy and I went.

  I know, I know, but I’ll tell you why. There was another $200 in it for me. That spoke pretty loud. Besides that, I’d had a few days to recover from the blow job and I didn’t think the orgy could possibly get any worse. In fact, I had a hunch it would be a lot easier with other naked people around on the set having sex too.

  Chapter Twelve

  At first, I was eager to make contact with some of the other men who would be performing in the orgy. I wanted to hear their ideas about the sex. I wanted to ask them how they learned to do it.

  Didn’t happen. There were no openings. Guys were barely civil to me. Actually, I couldn’t get much of a hello out of anybody, male or female, as we all sat around most of the morning waiting for the crew to prepare our set. There were three other actors and about four or five actresses. They were all porn veterans. I was the rookie. They all pretty much ignored me. When you’re a nobody in that world, you just are nobody. All the women want to fuck a star. You get a star interested in you, you can drop a name! You got a résumé! You can get some more work! If you fucked a nobody, well, you fucked a nobody. I sat off to the side and bided my time. This was not exactly a confidence building experience for me. Since there was nothing to do but wait, I contented myself with watching them all interact.

  Late in the morning, Bob Chinn the director took the men aside and instructed each of us to make a list of the top three actresses we wanted to work with. He explained that he’d go over the lists and then make the assignments. He also told me that I’d be coming up first when we started shooting. “In that way,” he explained, “in case you experience any of the ‘difficulties’ like you did in your earlier scene, we’ll just move ahead and then come back and get you later. Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was more concerned with the fact that I had no women at all to put on my list. Seeing as how I’ve never been particularly attracted to women who ignored me, it appeared I had a problem. I watched the other fellows for a clue about how to approach the women.

  Two of the guys, Don Fernando and Rock Steadie, started strutting their plumage. They literally took out their penises and began approaching some of the women. The girls giggled. It was like an adult version of the second grade. A couple of the women recoiled from their advances. “No pay, no play!” sing-songed another as she also backed away. Seemed like she could have added, “Oooh, cooties!”

  Well, I couldn’t do it like those guys. That wasn’t me. And the only other actor on the set was Paul Thomas. He was a tall, blonde, handsome devil, who seemed to be the alpha male of our bunch. He had let me know pretty early on that he had just performed one of the lead roles in a Bay Area production of Jesus Christ Superstar. One had the distinct impression that Mr. Thomas was just “slumming” in pornography. After our little meeting with the director, Paul went back to his newspaper. It was The Wall Street Journal. He was checking in on his stocks. Okay, that wasn’t me either. The list of my top three choices remained blank.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Makeup was the best thing that happened to me all morning. I hadn’t really paid much attention to it the first time around, on the day of my blow job. I guess I just had too many other things on my mind. But this time, when Sharon the makeup lady finished working on me, she had to leave the room for some reason.

  I was left alone looking in the mirror. Wow! I had never ever looked that good! Makeup was awesome! It improves us! I was completely fascinated by that guy in the mirror. Shhh, don’t tell this to anybody, but I think I fell in love!

  And when I came out of the makeup room, boy, did I ever land in clover! There in the costume room was a red-headed woman I hadn’t seen yet. Phaedra. Phaedra Grant! She was busy “rehearsing” with both Don and Rock. She was bent over blowing one of them while the other pumped into her from behind. It was all pretty as a French postcard.

  When our eyes met and she smiled at me, she twinkled. That was all the encouragement I needed. It was a now or never moment and I joined the party. I unzipped myself and she made me very happy with a free hand.

  It was exactly the kind of rehearsal you needed in this business to get ready. When one of the guys found himself getting too close to his orgasm, he had to pull himself out and zip himself back up. He had to save “the money shot” for the movie. I took his place until I too reached a similar plateau. When I turned in my list, it read:

  1. Phaedra

  2. Phaedra

  3. Phaedra

  When the director assigned us our partners, I had no competition for Phaedra. The other men had all picked other women.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The set design was really quite clever. Imagine a semi-circle, like the top half of clock. Phaedra and I were in one bed placed at the nine of nine o’clock. There was another grouping going on at the ten, one at eleven, another at twelve and so on. The camera was placed right in the center of the clock and had only to pan slightly to move from one whole scene to another. It saved huge amounts of time and money than if they would have had to brea
k down and move everything from one set to the next. Of course, all this movie stuff was brand new to me. It was easy to become fascinated by it.

  As the set readied itself for the first call of “Action,” the director gave us all a breakdown of how it was going to go, beginning with Phaedra and me. We were in standby. Out of absolutely nowhere, this angelic male voice comes wafting through the set singing this lilting melody:

  “So, let the sideshow begin.

  Hurry, hurry, step right on in.

  Can’t afford to pass it by,

  Guaranteed to make you cry…

  Let the sideshow begin.

  Hurry, hurry, step right on in.

  Can’t afford to pass it by,

  Guaranteed to make you cry.”

  It was a perfect moment. Life doesn’t give us very many of those. It was a song called “Sideshow” popularized by the group Blue Magic in 1974. I wish this book could sing those words to you right now. I have no idea what inspired Paul Thomas to just burst out in song like that, but, right then and there, he did, and it was forever engraved in my heart. It was a soaring triumph of voice and heart and the moment. I thank you, Paul. These thirty-some years later, I still thank you. I became your fan for life.

  And thank you, Phaedra! Because on “Action” from Bob Chinn, I fell into your warm embrace and a scant 10,000 kisses later mounted the wings that took me to my own soaring triumph of orgasm. I gave the director everything he wanted, no muss, no fuss, no bother. How the hell did that ever happen?

  I said to her after I came, “Do you want to come?” because that’s what you say at a moment like that if it happens that way, at least that’s the way my girlfriends had trained me.

  She said to me, and it was to be the first of many times that I would hear this from my movie lovers over the next ten years, “Are you kidding? In front of all these people?”

  Boy, was that assbackwards! Generally speaking, the women were being paid two or three times what the men were making because they were the stars of the industry. The paying audience was overwhelmingly male. I understood that, but I was completely amazed that the women didn’t have to have real orgasms and I did.

  Chapter Fifteen

  John and Joey

  John Leslie and Joey Silvera. Eyetalian. Very. Coupla big city boys. John was the alpha wolf. Joey was the goofy sidekick. They hated The Beatles. How could anybody hate The Beatles? They did. Think Santino in The Godfather telling his brother Michael that he was a fool for joining the Marines to fight for his country.

  It was my second movie, The Legend of Lady Blue. I was hired for one day to play Hank, a U.S. soldier in a whorehouse in Vietnam. The Candy Stripers had been a lark, an adventure. The Legend of Lady Blue was an act of getting myself into “the business.”

  Thirty actors had been brought on the set at 8:00 a.m. They put us in army fatigues and then herded us into a corner of a cold San Francisco warehouse that was serving as a soundstage. The production manager ordered us to, “Stay!” He wanted us on the set, in costume and makeup, and ready when he called. The fact that we sat around useless for a good six hours apparently meant nothing to him. They paid by the day and took complete advantage of that fact. The most exciting thing that happened for hours was when the script girl fell off of her chair and knocked over several cans of paint.

  I had two pages of dialogue to do with a guy named Ken. We were to play army buddies in the whorehouse. Ken was a law student who said he made a fair amount of money on the side doing sex films. He explained that he usually made loops, which were sex scenes without any sound. He said that the sex was easy for him, but when he had to do lines, it made him really nervous. I told him that I had it the other way around. He told me that I’d get used to it. It just takes some time. We rehearsed a lot. When we weren’t running lines, he was buried in his law books.

  The set came alive when Jesse Pierson, the director showed up. Twenty years earlier, he had played Conrad Birdie, the Elvis character, in the big-time Hollywood film of Bye-Bye Birdie. It was exciting just to see him. It was like we were all playing minor league ball in Dubuque and a former major leaguer just showed up at the ballpark looking all rich and famous with a sun tan. It completely energized the set.

  Actors John Leslie and Joey Silvera soon made their appearance too. It hadn’t been all that long since I’d been making out with Carly in the backseat at the X-rated drive-in movie and watching both of them up there on the big screen. They were movie stars too. I wanted to meet them, be their friend, have them like me. I ran up to them like an eager puppy.

  It was a big mistake. They had me for lunch. John and Joey just played a game of amusing themselves at the expense of everybody around them. They were assholes. It was their world, you were just visiting. If you weren’t in on their joke, you became their joke. I was just another new schmuck on the set and was treated just so. I took enough of their abuse to get the picture and then just tried to stay out of their line of fire. If you would have told me they would one day become good friends, I would have told you that you were out of your mind.

  My scene with Ken opened with the two of us wandering around the whorehouse. In real life, I had never been in the army or a whorehouse. It was fun to play. As the story went, Ken’s character accidentally stumbled into a backroom where he came face-to-face with Casey, a crazy misfit who had just escaped from the enemy. Casey attacked. He grabbed Ken by the balls with one hand and was threatening them with a knife in the other. I came along, apologized for Ken’s intrusion, and got my buddy out of danger.

  We got into a long line of soldiers waiting for a turn with the whores. Our line eventually led us into a room where a group of soldiers stood surrounding a bed. On the bed, John and Joey were busy fucking the brains out of a young Chicano woman playing a Vietnamese whore. Ken and I joined the circle of soldiers around the bed who stood watching and masturbating.

  That was weird. There was me and Ken and a bunch of short Black men with big dicks. We were all supposed to jerk off.

  Halfway through the scene, the director changed the woman playing the whore. Out went the young whore and in came “the Empress of Saigon,” the queen of the whorehouse. And she was being played by none other than Phaedra. That’s right, my Phaedra!

  Well, she wasn’t “my Phaedra” any more. I had to watch while John and Joey just plowed right into her. The rest of us stood there stroking.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Things That You Learn the Hard Way #1

  Was I jealous? Damn right I was jealous! Phaedra was the fallen angel who had just taken me from the Hell of sexual dysfunction to the Heaven of the successful come shot. But none of that mattered.

  In the X-rated world of movie making, you experienced all the same emotional crap that you experienced in your private relationship life, but you weren’t really entitled to any of it. It wasn’t personal. It was all just a job.

  And you had to learn how to take all those pesky little feelings and emotions like desire and love and possession and jealousy and process them all at lightning speeds because, in the morning, you could be doing a tender wedding scene with your one true love, and in the afternoon, she could be taking Jamie Gillis up her ass.

  Welcome to Pornoland.

  Things That You Learn the Hard Way #2

  It took over four hours to shoot that circle-jerk scene. I spent a least two of those hours actively engaged in rubbing my dick without any lubrication. It seemed I was either getting it up or trying to keep it up. The director wanted the jerks in the circle to come. Many of us did. I didn’t. My cock was raw. When I left for home that day, my penis felt like it had been sandpapered. I had to pack it in Vaseline for about three days.

  I learned. The next time I would use lubrication.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In 1977, the adult business was calling out to me and I was listening. I was taking notes.

  New York and San Francisco were the two major centers of production in the mid-seventies. The New Y
ork scene was harder, dirtier, and had a real “Fuck you” kind of gritty to it. You’d expect that from New York. The San Francisco scene was hippie-dippy and outdoorsy. There was a lot more exploited innocence and sunshine.

  Almost all of the production companies that shot in San Francisco were based in Los Angeles. They couldn’t shoot down there because of political and police pressure. At considerable expense, the LA film companies would have to pack up all their gear, shoot their movies in the Bay Area, and then return to LA for all the post-production. It wasn’t exactly legal to be shooting in San Francisco either, but it was a “don’t ask — don’t tell” kind of situation. If there weren’t any complaints, the officials didn’t go out of their way looking for illegal productions to shut down. In LA, they did.

  Was organized crime involved? Well, rumor had it so, but you’d never really find out much about that by asking any actor. I mean, nobody ever came up to me and said, “Hi, we’re with the Tattaglia Family and we’ve got some great medical and dental benefits if you’d like to sign up with us to make some pornographic movies.”

  The money that paid our salaries came from production companies. More often than not, we were being paid by check. Deductions were being withheld. Model releases were being signed. Somebody was maintaining books and records. The companies appeared to be perfectly legit.

  However, who actually owned those companies and how they got their funding was not exactly information generally made available to the performers.