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

by Howie Gordon

  I would suspect that in reality his great cock was at once a gift and a nightmare for the man who had to live with it. A photographer friend of his once boasted to me on John’s behalf that more film footage had been shot of Holmes than of any American president. You have to wonder what the man’s private life was like. I heard a rumor that an oil-rich sheik had once flown him halfway round the world just to witness that super-sized puppy in action. Goldstein of Screw thought he had done the definitive Holmes interview in what turned out to be late in John’s career only to discover that much of John’s information had been fabricated. It seems that the public John Holmes played pretty fast and loose with “the truth.”

  Anyway, back on the set of Pizza Girls, I was taking some pictures of a young starlet with my own camera when the legendary John C. Holmes called out to me, “Hey, how’d ya like t’have your picture taken with the big fella?”

  The picture we took together came out nice. He later obliged me by autographing an enlargement. It made me giddy. I wouldn’t have dared to ask. I thought of old high school buddies I would be sending copies to in the mail. It reminded me of when I shook hands with Muhammed Ali.

  John’s behavior on the set of Pizza Girls was extremely mercurial. I saw him take considerable time and effort to educate a raw rookie on some aspect of filmmaking and I saw him reduce an unsuspecting starlet to tears. I was never sure which John Holmes he was going to be at any given moment. I figured to just stay out of his way. He was the star. He was nice to me and I was grateful, but I wouldn’t say we had become drinking buddies. It was clear that he was a power on the set with which one had to contend. I did nothing to even vaguely offend.

  Holmes was on the set watching when I attempted my sex scene with the young and vivacious Candida Royalle (who later founded her own production company, Femme). Candida, in one of those early scenes in our careers we’d both be only too happy to forget, played a pizza delivery girl on a skateboard. When she knocked on my door with the pizza, I had to deliver the immortal line, “I’ve got a stovepipe in my pants a-just a-waitin’ fer yew!” Fucking Marlon Brando couldn’t have done it. One can only hope that the writer was paid enough to afford his necessary medications.

  And upon hearing this eloquent declaration of love and devotion, Candida was to fall upon her knees and begin ministering to my manhood. She did so, placing my soft cock in her mouth. The room grew deadly quiet. I closed my eyes and searched for pleasure. It was like trying to find a light switch in the dark. When I did not rapidly become aroused, they cut the camera to wait for me. You want to talk about pressure? People tiptoed about and spoke in hushed tones. Candida dutifully munched on.

  I thought I had prepared myself for this moment. A week before we were to shoot this scene, I had called Candida in San Francisco and asked if she would be kind enough to meet with me before we shot this scene. I was hoping that some familiarity, some friendship with each other, might make the task less intimidating for me.

  What I really wanted to do was “rehearse” the sex, and I think Candida smelled that all the way across the Bay, but she didn’t say no. She was very guarded at first, but, eventually, she agreed to meet with me.

  We were on the rooftops in San Francisco. I had brought my camera and was hanging out with Candida and some of her friends. Lailani was one of them. She would be in Pizza Girls too.

  Candida turned out to be a bold, wild child. I was a married man who had to find a way to get close to her, at least close enough to make one sex scene work, and then find my way back home. We got stoned. And on the rooftops, we did have sex. We were not staring deeply into each other’s eyes, but the plumbing all worked and to me, that’s what mattered at the time.

  And now, we were trying to have sex again on the set of Pizza Girls. It was tense, when against the heavy odds, life began cautiously flowing into my dick. Candida was sucking and I was responding. The attentive director whispered,

  “Roll sound.”

  “Sound is rolling,” whispered back the audio technician in the storied catechism of moviemaking.

  “Roll camera,” whispered the director.

  “QUIET ON THE SET!! THIS IS A TAKE!!” bellowed the production manager at the top of his voice. I jumped a foot. The set exploded in laughter. The director quizzically looked at his production manager as if the poor soul had lost his mind.

  “I thought I heard voices upstairs,” he said defensively. In the meantime, my timid erection had vanished.

  We started over again, but, sadly, my penis had died of fright. Candida applied serious mouth-to-mouth, but it was already too late. I was locked in panic. My cock held the tension of over-cooked spaghetti.

  There’s an old Indian expression that says, “The bad snake charmer always blames his snake.”

  “Bad Snake! Bad Snake!”

  It was hard to be the little engine that could on the set with John Holmes.

  Given my inglorious recent track record, the powers that be had no intention of waiting around for me to revive. They moved ahead to Plan B.

  The director had us simulate a wild fuck and told me to be funny. “Ho-ho-ho,” I was a laugh a minute. I sang, “She’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain when she comes,” as I feigned intercourse by hiding my soft dick against Candida’s bottom and also tried to hide the shame and humiliation that came along with it. They shot this abomination.

  Afterwards, I had to surrender my costume to a stand-in so that they could get the necessary hardcore footage they needed. It turned out to be my buddy the production manager. The village idiot would be my stunt cock. They would shoot close-ups of him fucking Candida and then edit them into my scene. The viewers would never know. I had to stand on the sidelines and watch. John Holmes patted me on the head and smiled. There wasn’t a rock big enough for me to crawl under. I took great perverse glee when the production manager couldn’t get it up either. The scene would remain soft-core.

  It was another bad day at the office only this one felt like playing a Little League game in Yankee Stadium. There was something preposterous and overwhelming about trying to fuck somebody in front of John Holmes. You’d just have to say I wasn’t up for it.

  Holmes went on to make a bunch more movies and, oddly, so did I. Over our careers in the nefarious fraternity of male porn stars, if Holmes was the general, then I probably made lieutenant, maybe captain. I ran into him once at an audition. Afterwards, he invited me to snort some cocaine with him. Sure, why not? It was the early-eighties then. Cocaine was the new marijuana. It was everywhere. The bodies hadn’t started piling up on the beaches yet. Within a year or so, the carnage of wrecked lives gave people pause to reconsider this cocaine thing. I was saved by the strength of my wife and our decision to start making babies. I got out of it. I don’t know that John Holmes ever made it out.

  John and I didn’t do too many movies together. Once a year, I’d run into him at the X-rated Awards, which were hosted back then by the Adult Film Association. John Holmes was always an honored guest and a presenter, but he never won any of the prestigious acting awards. Jamie Gillis dominated the field in those years with a bunch of different guys vying for the supporting actor awards. Jamie was Holmes’s only real rival to the mythical throne of smut. Indeed, many thought Jamie Gillis to be the true King of Porn with Holmes as a kind of intriguing sideshow.

  For one thing, Jamie Gillis was a fine actor. He had that New York sophistication laced with charm and wit. There was an intelligence about him. Skilled at comedy and triumphant in playing characters with darker qualities, Jamie also had that soothing, recognizable voice. Comparatively, Holmes was a country bumpkin.

  In his serialized movie autobiography, “The Mad Satyr,” published in Screw, Jamie Gillis wrote compassionately of John Holmes back in 1975, “Sadly, no one ever considered him (Holmes) as anything but a big dick.”

  Ah, but that was precisely the point! He did have that big dick! Perhaps he had the biggest dick in the world! Most American men of my generati
on and older knew the rumor about slain 1930s gangster John Dillinger. It was said that his dick was being saved in some glass jar over at the Smithsonian Institute because it too was so gigantic. John Holmes was the living reincarnation of Dillinger’s dick. The kinds of characters he played only added to that association, both on screen and off.

  While Jamie Gillis was a big man with a well above average-sized dick, he was still mortal. John Holmes was something else. Like Achilles and Hercules, he rode with the gods.

  John Leslie, the top-stud heir to both Holmes and Gillis, once admiringly referred to Holmes as “the Babe Ruth of Porn.” If that be so, then Jamie Gillis will forever be Ty Cobb. Talk baseball to me. Sure, Cobb had 4,000 hits, all those batting titles, stole bases and hit .400, but Babe Ruth hit all those titanic home runs. Like Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan after him, he was bigger than the game he played. Those folks captured the imagination of their generation.

  And John Holmes, for whatever acting he could do, still had that huge dick, the Washington Monument of dicks, and it was served up to us in the Ziegfeld Follies of smut.

  “So, step right up, Ladies and Gentlemen, under the big top, for your viewing pleasure, believe it or not, the one, the only, Johnny Wadd!”

  And we did too. John Holmes was box office, a one-man donkey show. He made a lot of money for somebody. I only hope he made some for himself and whatever family he had.

  I used to love to watch the women who were “working” with John Holmes for the first time. You could see the sheer wonder in their faces. They were amazed, as were we in the audience watching them. They could put both hands around his dick when it was hard and still not have him covered. Was that driving a Cadillac or what?

  This was going to be the actual moment…

  WHEN SHE FOUND OUT IF BIGGER WAS BETTER OR NOT!

  There would be no more myth, no more controversy, she would soon know! We would all know. The anticipation was delicious. The energy in those scenes crackled. It was real and electric.

  When they’d put their mouths to that dick, it looked like they were eating some kind of German bologna. Then, when they’d try to take him in their wombs, some of those women melted away in a pure religious ecstasy, others seemed to be struggling with what was an erotic trial by ordeal, and, of course, others just had to beg for mercy or scream to stop.

  Late in his career, Holmes burst onto the front pages with that drug murder thing in LA. I never did get the details straight. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to know anything about it except what I read in the paper.

  It was 1982. I was out of the business. We had just had our first baby and I was remodeling the house when the phone call came. It was a guy named Stu from Miracle Films.

  “How would you like to do a sex scene with Marilyn Chambers and John Holmes?” Stu asked. He sounded as if he were offering me the keys to the kingdom, like I was supposed to jump up and down and yell, “whoopee!”

  Well, I would rather have fallen off a ladder. The very idea of a ménage-a-trois with those two shrunk my gonads. John Holmes had just been in the headlines with three months of squalid tales of drug dealers, betrayals, murders, and police. I thought he was still in jail or protective custody or whatever they were calling it. Stu assured me that the big fella was out and was eager to resume his career.

  Oh, goody! I could just see me and my five-and-three quarter inches paired up with John and his fourteen-and-a-half. It would be like going on a see-saw with the offensive line of the Washington Redskins. There would be no balance. My feet would never touch the ground. I just knew that I would never get a hard-on.

  Even without John Holmes, Marilyn Chambers was no big thrill for me either. I had worked with her twice and still didn’t have a clue who she was. There was absolutely nothing special happening between us. I had a baby. I was retired. I told Stu I was retired.

  Stu wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. He explained that he was stuck. I had worked with Stu and Marilyn six months earlier on a movie called, Up and Coming. The backers were insisting on adding another sex scene before it could be released and for some odd reason my character had to be involved.

  “But Stu, I’m fifteen pounds heavier than when we shot last summer.”

  “I don’t care,” says Stu, “you can leave some clothes on.”

  “I don’t think so, Stu, I’m way too fragile. I haven’t done a sex scene in months and I’m up to my ass in Huggies.”

  “Come on, pal, it’s just like riding a bike.”

  “Look, Marilyn Chambers and John Holmes are just too much power for me to handle. I won’t be able to function sexually.”

  “Well, hey, you got some power there too!” he said.

  If I ever needed proof that he really was stuck, that was it. “You don’t even have to have an orgasm,” he said. “If it happens, fine . If it doesn’t, no big deal. Just be in the scene.” Very few producers have ever tried that hard to give me a job. When he finally started throwing more money on top of my already considerable rate, I was unretired. After all, Huggies weren’t that cheap.

  We shot the scene at the private home of a Marin County proctologist which turned out to be appropriate because John Holmes ended up fucking Marilyn Chambers in the ass.

  By the time we shot it, Lilly Marlene and Herschel Savage had been added to the cast. I was grateful. Their addition helped reduce the pressure on me.

  We were all on the set early that morning except for John Holmes. He wasn’t scheduled to come in until the afternoon. Stu had been right. It was just like riding a bike. Once the cameras started rolling, my squeamishness evaporated. I’d been there before. Y’see, I eventually did learn how to have sex on camera.

  Marilyn Chambers was in a buoyant mood. The old boyfriend Chuck Traynor was gone. She had a new one now and she was far less aloof than in our previous encounters. I enjoyed her. There was a lot of kibbitzing on the set with cast and crew and she was just one of the guys. I liked Lilly Marlene a lot too. Lilly was one of the most underrated females of that era. She flat out adored sex. Working with her was always fun, hot, and easy. Rarely did you come across an actress who actually enjoyed the coupling as much as she did.

  John Holmes showed up in the middle of the afternoon. He appeared strange and moody. It was just what you’d expect from a guy who’d just been released from months in “protective custody.” I didn’t really know him well enough except to say, “Hello.”

  He said, “Hello,” back and that was about it. I didn’t want to ask about his problems with the cops and the bad guys and he wasn’t making any speeches. He kept pretty much to himself that day. I remember that when the sun went down, we all had to bundle up for warmth between takes. Not John. He stayed naked in the cold and appeared comfortable. Somebody whispered the offhand remark, “Well, that’s what prison will do for ya.”

  I was first up in the sex scene department with a double blow-job from Marilyn and Lilly. Piece of cake, it was one of my favorite flavors. All I had to do was kick back while the two willing women traded my lollipop from one mouth to the other. They stayed fresh, I stayed stimulated, and John and Herschel waited in the wings for me to finish. I had no trouble scaling Mt. Come Shot that day, it felt quite good. I was even smug enough to take my time. Eventually, I reached nature’s liquid conclusion.

  Next, Herschel did an anal scene with Lilly. She was one of the few who actually enjoyed anal sex and no one had heard about AIDS yet. I watched a bit of their tryst from an overhanging balcony and then found the kitchen buffet to nibble at the groceries. I was back there eating when I first heard Marilyn Chambers’s screams. They were loud. They were come-and-see-what’s-going-on loud.

  When I peeked out over the balcony, I saw John Holmes feeding his living monument into Marilyn’s ass. She was howling, but she wasn’t howling, “Stop.” Her face revealed a frenzied confusion of pain and pleasure. She was on-line electric with face ablaze. It mesmerized everybody there to watch as their fury mounted. When Holmes was
completely and unbelievably sheathed by her anus, Marilyn went into a yogic breath-of-fire. It was extraordinary. It reminded me of my wife giving birth. Although relatively fresh from my blow-job, my cock hardened again in my shorts. The look on Marilyn’s face was like…I don’t even know how to describe it. I had never seen a woman that out of control, that transported during a sex act, cinematically or privately. It was like the sexual equivalent of speaking in tongues.

  I don’t remember if Holmes came inside of her or gave it the traditional porn pull out and squirt. All I can remember was that look on Marilyn’s face. When he withdrew from her ass, you could have parked your car in there. Their scene left me numb. I stumbled through collecting my pay and went home. It was the last time I ever saw John Holmes.

  For months afterward, I told people that this was the greatest sex scene ever. I couldn’t wait to see the movie. When that day came, I couldn’t have been more disappointed. They seemed to have kept the camera locked down on the meat shot. It was a close-up of the cock plunging the asshole ad nauseum. Marilyn’s face had been mostly ignored.

  In his 1982 film biography, Exhausted, Holmes was asked by an interviewer, “If you had it to do all over again, would you do it?”

  “I wouldn’t change a stroke,” Holmes replied.

  Well, I bet you he changed his mind. I heard a rumor back then that John Holmes’s widow claimed that he contracted the AIDS virus while working on one of his last five videos.