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

by Howie Gordon

  Al Goldstein.

  “The coming of age of adult films. The Spinelli’s big hit, while loaded with the usual quota of sex, deals with genuine human emotions, including love, friendship, and romance. Richard Pacheco and newcomer Chelsea Manchester are a knockout!”

  Sir magazine

  “…a dramatic and erotic masterpiece, that makes you laugh, cry and generally feel good all over. (FULL)

  Hustler magazine

  Chapter Sixteen

  I was riding high. Finally had a few bucks in my pocket. I decided that I wanted do something nice for my Aunt Kitty and Uncle Manny’s upcoming wedding anniversary.

  Kitty and Manny were my favorite aunt and uncle. She was the vivacious Ukrainian Catholic who converted and married into a family of Orthodox Jews. On her wedding day, at the reception that night, she gathered all the nieces and nephews around her and said to us, “Manny and I can’t have any children of our own, so, you’ll all be our kids. And I want you all to know that I’ll be Jewish 364 days a year, but on Christmas, yins can all go to hell!” And she let out a cackle of a laugh that lit the room. I thought it was the greatest thing I ever heard.

  I called Aunt Kitty and told her that I wanted them to have a night out on me. A limousine would pick them up, take them to their favorite restaurant, and then drive them home.

  Aunt Kitty said that was real nice of me, but, “No, thanks.”

  I protested. I cajoled. I pleaded, “Let me do this for you. You’ll have fun. It’ll be a kick!” All to no avail, Aunt Kitty just wasn’t interested. I couldn’t believe it. I continued berating her with my offer of a big night out in Pittsburgh.

  Finally, exasperated, she said, “Look, your Uncle Manny’s favorite restaurant is Long John Silver’s…and I’m not going to Long John Silver’s in a limousine!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I was in LA when we wrapped Nothing to Hide. I spent the night at the home of an old high school girlfriend who was trying to make it there herself as a musician and a straight actress. I would fly home in the morning.

  It was a bad idea. Carly freaked. We had a crazed long-distance phone call that night.

  It’s been a long time since we discussed the jealousy wars and the tensions of having other lovers, but that doesn’t mean that those battles weren’t all part and parcel of the women who came and went during my marriage and career.

  The work ones were a lot easier on Carly than the personal ones, that’s for sure, but on this particular night, I was furious with her for begrudging me some out-of-town time with an old girlfriend. I always figured geography relaxed the rules. I was in another city.

  On the other hand, I heard the voice of my mate, my wife, in fear and distress over the phone and that just wasn’t right either.

  That there was conflict was “nothing new under the sun.” That the boundaries were shifting was always a topic for heated conversation and the prospect of monogamy still brought out my fangs and claws. I just wasn’t interested. I couldn’t imagine that I ever would be.

  I wished that she could accept my old lovers for the two or three nights a year I sought them out without all that trauma. She would roll her eyes at such a comment, implying that I was grossly understating the pain of the situation.

  We could each both do both parts of the argument. We’d had it that many times.

  I was willing to accept her old lovers if she still wanted them. I knew it could get rough out there in the seas of jealousy. I bled there too, but it appeared to be the price we had to pay to live with the kind of freedom that we wanted. Only, Carly had stopped wanting it. I didn’t. Besides that, she told me I was full of shit. She claimed I got pretty insane when I was jealous too. Couldn’t really argue with her there, but I was still willing to go through it.

  A lot of times, I gave in to her wishes. I was hoping that by so doing, it would buy me a little of that freedom every now and then without all the fireworks, but she didn’t see things that way. The X-rated work was one thing, but she wanted all the personal ones to be done and gone. She wanted to ignore the fact that she married a man who still took great pleasure in his old loves. I always figured that if you’d been lucky enough to ever find love with anybody on this planet, why on earth would you ever want to let it slip away?

  We had colliding and competing visions of marriage. We weren’t alone. A lot of couples were still walking that tightrope. It was like the tippy-tippy end of the sixties. Soon, our children would come along. That would change everything. And not long after that, there’d be AIDS to contend with too. That would change everything else!

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Wait a minute, now, wait a minute. Back up here. You were going so good. You were movin’ to LA. What ever happened to your straight career?”

  “Oh, yeah, my straight career. Who wants to know?”

  “We’re your unborn grandchildren.”

  “Oh, it’s you guys!

  “Yeah! We wanted to know how come you didn’t turn out to be Jack Nicholson?”

  “Well, the short answer is that Jack Nicholson already had the part. And the almost clever, face-saving, long answer was that I had my hands full just trying to be Howie Gordon. You kids deserve the truth and the sad truth of the matter is that I gave it my best shot.”

  Every visit to LA impressed me more and more with the fact that I was living in the wrong town. If I ever really wanted to get anywhere in the straight movie biz, LA was gonna be a must. There was no getting around it. The action was there. When I was in town, I’d go make some rounds, get all caught up in some promises and introductions, and then I’d go back home and forget all about them. I just didn’t want to live there. Our home was in Berkeley and it seemed like every time I turned around in LA, it was always time to be heading back.

  If God wanted me to be a movie star, She was gonna have to figure out how to make it happen with me living in Berkeley.

  I got as far as Richard Pacheco and that pretty much was the ceiling. Big-time stardom just wasn’t meant to be. I never played catcher for the Pirates either. Or middle linebacker for the Steelers. I never followed Alexander the Great into Persia and I never got to have sex with Julie Christie. I wanted to be a basketball star like my father, but it turned out to be my worst sport. Hours and hours of practice made absolutely no difference. Even today, when I go to throw a balled-up wad of paper into a wastebasket, I generally miss, not always, but most of the time.

  Alas, dear grandchildren, the list of my failures is a long one. Oi, you should have seen me in high school chemistry. I was clueless for an entire year.

  But I did make a hole-in-one once. In golf. That was pretty cool! It was with a seven iron on #4 at Lake Chabot. Sucker went right into the cup.

  And I’m pretty sure, despite all my bitching to the contrary, and with sincere apologies to every other woman that I have ever loved, I may actually have succeeded in having had the best wife that anybody has ever had in the whole long history of wifery.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Remember that bus ride to New York where I got that handjob from Veronica LeBlond on my way into town?

  Yeah, well, I was going there to do this print job for Martini & Rossi. It was probably the highlight of what was my very short career as a commercial male model.

  Y’see, the woman I was with in those last two photos was sitting on a stool. I was standing next to her. If she would have risen to her feet, my mouth would have come up to her boobies. In that world, the women are tall and the men are supposed to be taller. The photographer told me that I was “perfect,” but about five or six inches too short.

  The only reason I got this job was because of little Stevey Freedman — himself about six feet four inches — who was a dear sweet friend of mine who just happened to be in charge of shooting this major league ad for his company, Martini & Rossi. They worked around my height that day because Steve asked them to and he was signing the checks. It was to be my only big-time modeling job in New York City�
�or anywhere else for that matter. Thanks, Steve. It was fun.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Playgirl job falls through.

  Go believe we were house hunting in LA again. We started out in Venice and then drifted over to the Playgirl offices in Santa Monica. When we got there, they told us there had just been a $2 million accounting error and that the job they were gonna give to me, no longer existed.

  Oh. Okay.

  It was March 5, 1980. We were trying to get pregnant. It didn’t seem like a good time for the two of us to move to LA just to be unemployed. Carly decided to continue on in her job as a therapist in Berkeley. I decided that I would stay with her in Berkeley, work in X for a while longer for the money, and would try commuting to LA to get my straight career going down there.

  I found an agent. Actually, it was a whole agency. And we planned that when they had an audition for me, I would just fly down to LA and do it.

  The first was for the movie The Right Stuff, the one about pilot Chuck Yeager and the astronauts. I was to meet with Casting Director Lynn Stalmaster on a motion picture lot. This was the real thing.

  He was alone when they sent me in to meet the great man. I had seen the name of Lynn Stalmaster as the casting director in the closing credits over a thousand times. If you were my age, you had too. In movies and TV shows, he’d had his hand in a jillion of them.

  He looked me up and down with a seasoned eye. I was nervous, but he seemed to allow for that. He was used to it. He’d been sizing up horse flesh for a long time. They had me read for the role that eventually went to Dennis Quaid. I was supposed to play it all cowboy. It was Pizza Girls all over again.

  I was terrible. Nervous and terrible. And all wrong for that part. Lynn Stalmaster knew it and I knew it and after about five minutes, the interview was over.

  The only salvation was that I felt I registered somewhere on his radar.

  He knew exactly who I was in the game, how raw and all, but he appeared to make the mental note that if the part ever showed up that called for one of me, he would now know exactly who to cast. I may have imagined it, but it let us both have some dignity and humanity in this game of the flesh market. There was a handshake good-bye.

  I left there all aflutter. The short-notice plane fare had been a couple of hundred dollars. The car rental was over a hundred too. Carly didn’t want me staying with my old girlfriend, so, I think there was a hotel bill, and throw in some money for food too.

  Bottom line was that my little commute to LA had cost us over 500 bucks. And that was 500 bucks for five minutes of me being scared.

  Hmmmm…

  Fuck that shit!

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Did I tell you I was in love with Annette Haven? I was. It was a long line and I was in it.

  She was a proud swan in the sea of cocksucker red lipstick. Oh, she could, and did, suck cock with the best of them, but there was just so much more to the ensemble.

  Annette was already a reigning Queen when I entered the business and she seemed to live the part both on screen and off. John Seeman first introduced me to her. He took me to her San Francisco apartment on Vallejo Street where she would hold court. It was like an inverted barnyard. Annette was the rooster and all the men would sit around clucking like hens and vie for her attention. I remember a day when Annette wore a see-thru blouse and we all tried hard not to drool on the furniture. Sophisticate Raul Lomas, perhaps the classiest director of photography in the X-rated business, once opined that Annette Haven’s breasts belonged in The Louvre. I wouldn’t have argued with him.

  Like the suitors for Penelope while Odysseus was away at sea, the men would gather at Annette’s apartment in the afternoon and each would dream that he would be the one invited to stay for dinner and to spend the night.

  I would always go home. I had a wife. Annette respected matrimony. Annette respected herself. We would never have the hanky-panky on the side, but one day…one day, we would get to work together.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They find you, y’know. They smell your wannabe in the water and they really do come at you like sharks. You wouldn’t think that they’d waste their time with nobodies, but, then again, that’s who’s most vulnerable, now, isn’t it?

  He gave me a name when he called, but what does it matter? I’m not gonna tell you his name. There’s no point. It could easily have been, “Just-Didn’t-Take-My-Meds-Today” or “I want to fuck you in the ass,” but you don’t know any of that right away when you’re just picking up the phone.

  “Hi. Is this the Howie Gordon,” he asked, “the one that’s been in Playgirl?”

  “Yes, it is,” I told him. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s what I can do for you, pal!” he said. “I’m a film producer and I want to cast you in my movie.”

  That’s all it took. I was hooked. He said it was a $24 million sci-fi movie and that I was the handsome man who would be perfect for the lead part. He’d seen me in Playgirl. He’d seen me in Insatiable. He was dropping names of famous people left and right, but he wanted me to play his lead actor.

  Vanity, vanity, the sin was mine. I was perfectly willing to believe that I was Lana Turner and he was Fame & Fortune discovering me sitting at the mythical Hollywood lunch counter in Schwab’s Pharmacy. It was my turn, that was all. I was ready for it. ‘Bout fuckin’ time too!

  “I don’t want to cast stars,” he said, “I want to make stars!

  Yes, Sir! The first time he said that, it was such magic to my ears. By the fifth or sixth time he said it, I was no longer smiling. I couldn’t stop the fire alarms from going off in my head. I did not want to hear them either. I did not want to believe that this guy was crazy as I already knew he was. Besides, so what? There could still be a real job here, couldn’t there? I mean, he could be crazy and still be a real Hollywood producer, right? You show me in the manual where it says that all the Hollywood producers have to turn out to be sane?

  I gave this guy a lotta time, but the longer he talked, the more painfully it all sank in. My whacko meter was beeping off the charts. The evidence was overwhelming. This guy was a 24 karat loon. When he finally invited me to a secret midnight script reading in his hotel room, I’d had enough. At that point, it seemed that all there really was left to decide, was, who was gonna bring the Vaseline.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The working title for my next film was Jackie And the Dreams. It was to be a road picture about a team of barnstorming male strippers playing a small town in backwater USA.

  Jackie Sail was the manager. Had to be played by John Leslie, just had to be. Jackie was a former dancer himself, as well as an actor, entertainer, and musician. He was now the General in charge of this bumbling, little circle of male buffoonery. Jackie was the hustler who kept the show alive. He organized us, arranged the bookings, and drove the Cadillac that served as our tour bus.

  Jackie emceed the show. He introduced the dancing Dreams for all the ladies to enjoy. We were three struttin’ roosters, each one more sexy than the next.

  Sebastian was “the vain one.” Played by Randy West, Sebastian lived for the beauty of his own reflection in mirrors…and in the eyes of all the women that he seduced.

  Jonathon was the boy next door, “the sensitive one.” I was an actor given to disappearing into books when I wasn’t trying to land a role on the New York stage.

  Joey was “the mean one,” “the bad boy.” Played by Joey Silvera, he was the master put-on artist who drove the womens wild. Lookout, because when he took to the stage anything was possible.

  We were…The Dancers.

  Spinelli sprung it on me full blown. “We got the script! We got the money! And we even got a whole month to rehearse this thing!” You couldn’t help but love Sam when he was like this. He was buoyant! He filled the room with his happy. It was infectious. And when he said, “we” like that, well, Dear Lord, you were ready to hit the beaches at Normandy or go defend the Alamo.

  He
wanted me to play a dancer. Uh-oh…

  “A what?” I asked him.

  “You’re gonna play a dancer!” he said, “a male stripper.”

  “Sam, I can’t dance!” I told him.

  “You’ll learn,” he said. He didn’t even blink.

  It was all scar tissue, y’know, a carryover from my days as the fat kid. When my friends were out there doing the jitterbug and the twist, I was standing on the sidelines watching. I was too embarrassed and humiliated to dance. I didn’t want to do anything that called attention to my body. I learned to slow dance, but that was about it. Sam had no idea of the ghosts he had just awakened in me.

  “We got a choreographer,” he boasted. “This guy was one of the originals at Chippendales!”

  Chippendales was a famous nightclub in LA. In the late seventies, they were the first to feature male strippers for women. Their idea caught fire. Chippendales rapidly grew to be so successful that they had twenty-six franchised nightclubs up and running at their peak. They were in New York, London, Hamburg, all over the place.

  “Sam, I’m just not a dancer!”

  “What are you, crazy?” he asked. He had no idea and I didn’t particularly want to tell him about it. “Look,” he said. It was his quit-fuckin’-around voice. “You’re an actor, you’ll act. Howie, this is a good part for you! We’re not talkin’ ballet here! You don’t gotta be Gene Kelly. We got a choreographer, he’ll teach you a few steps, show you a few of the moves, and you’ll do just fine. You gotta trust me on this, Howie. You’ll be fine.”

  I thought I would keep a day-to-day journal on the making of this film, but I was so traumatized by my very first “dance” lesson that I didn’t wanna have to face the prospect of any more self-awareness.