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

by Howie Gordon

  All went well the day we shot that scene. Her character of Catherine was in awe of my character Jonathon’s acting ability.

  In a scene of pillow talk, I told her that anybody could act. To prove the point, I convinced her that even she could “do” Shakespeare. We used the words to “Cupid,” the old Sam Cooke pop song and I “showed” her how to deliver them like a soliloquy from Hamlet:

  “Cupid, draw back your bow

  And let your arrow go

  Straight to my lover’s heart,

  For me, no one, but me.”

  It was a wonderful little scene, clever, even, if I do say so myself. I don’t know if it translates here, you should check it out and decide for yourself. Again, not your everyday porn.

  When it came to our actual lovemaking in the movie, well, I consider it one of the three great sex scenes of my career. By comparison, a guy like John Leslie, say, may have had three great sex scenes in a month. I only had three in my whole career, so, I sure as hell can remember them.

  I don’t know exactly what it was, I can only guess, but I couldn’t get rid of my boner that day. I was cocky. I could’ve done jumping jacks or hung a tennis racket from my dick and still it would’ve stayed hard like a velvet bone.

  I was so proud to be bedding this great Lady Guinevere that nothing but my very best would have been acceptable. It was happening on a cellular level. My body rose to the occasion! It wouldn’t let anxiety get in the way.

  When I came, I came inside of her. There was no pulling out in gross display of the inane and insane come shot.

  Anxious to return the favor, I continued to stimulate her. But every time she got herself close, there’d be a cut, or a film run-out, or some other distraction. She finally said that it was starting to make her crazy, so we stopped trying.

  That night, back at the HoJo, where I might have offered to “finish” the scene, my wife showed up to pay me a conjugal visit. When Carly was around, I was a married man. We didn’t swing and we didn’t leave each other hanging. As it turned out, Carly and Georgina hit it off really well and spent several hours talking about books they’d read while I watched a football game.

  P.S. By the end of the film, of course, Sam hated the producers and they hated him. It gave Sam great pleasure to learn that my little Shakespearian improvisation using the words of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” was going to cost the producers an additional $5,000 for the rights to use those words in the movie.

  Deemed too critical to be edited out after the movie had been wrapped, they had to pony up the extra money. Sam was overjoyed.

  In a similar vein, while the production was winding down, word came from the producers that we would not be allowed to keep our costumes.

  It pissed me off. This was being really cheesy. These were Goodwill clothes for God’s sake. We’d been living in them for a month. We busted our asses working for them in those clothes. There was real sentimental attachment to them. Nope, all the costumes had to be returned.

  We had been on a great ride, but it was all coming to a halt. I gave my clothes back to Barbara, the costume lady, and she checked them in through “Customs.” She later stole me back the shirt that I had come to love and gave it to me gift-wrapped for Christmas. Thank you. For everything.

  Jackie and the Dreams. We kidded around a bit when the movie was completed about literally taking the live show of Jackie and the Dreams out on the road. We were ready. Life was all set to imitate art. We had a great act at a time when male strippers were a very hot item. But, sigh, sigh for what might have been. We all had money in our pockets. It was almost Christmas and what the Hell! We didn’t do it. Within two weeks, I’m sure I gained ten pounds and was just grateful that I’d never have to dance like that again.

  Every now and then, Spinelli threatened us with a sequel, but it never happened.

  And that’s the story of The Dancers I would tell you solely by plumbing the depths of my memory.

  Here’s what I would add after jolting myself awake by actually sitting down and watching the whole movie once again, these thirty years later.

  The Dancers, which is by far one of the best porn productions I was ever in, was not a good movie. There were some wonderful moments in it, but it was maybe eighty percent of a good movie. And I’m being generous, of course, because I’m in it.

  One could argue that it was on its way to becoming a good movie, but it sadly fell short. It fits into that apologetic category of “good for porn.” That’s a genre where you apply different standards than those used in evaluating mainstream films or TV. In a porn film, if you are not too humiliated by what transpires in between the sex scenes, then you may have yourself a rollicking success on your hands because in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

  In the finished cut of The Dancers, there remain whole scenes where either bad performance, poor writing, or grating background music are still left in the movie. As one of the collaborators who wants to take pride in this work, it’s embarrassing that an editor could have made those decisions and that a director or producer could have let those “errors” pass.

  Even the great “Cupid” scene that I wrote and acted with Georgina wasn’t nearly as good as it was in my memory. I could have been a lot better. Georgina’s performance still holds up. She far out-classed me in that scene. Again, for porn, I was Laurence Olivier and she was Meryl Streep. But when viewed critically, as a regular movie, I think the scene could have been very much improved.

  How odd, that even with these glaring flaws that smell of your basic high school production value, The Dancers was still wildly celebrated and honored as an award-winning production. I’m sure you’ll understand how it gives me no great pleasure to point out that “the Emperor wore no clothes.”

  The other great problem I have with The Dancers is that at its very heart, it suffers from the same cynical, misogynist poison that haunted so much of porn. As an actor in porn and a husband and father, it confronted me with my own contradiction once again.

  The Dancers celebrated the male lifestyle of hunting women for trophy. Either by charm, wit, guile, or deception, men sought to access “the flower” of women and once attained, did not even bother to put those flowers in a vase before running off to the next conquest. It was the ennobling of Casanova and the reduction of women to mere prizes in a continuing game of lust.

  As a believer in true love, as a husband and a father of three, in particular, two daughters, I found this a sad, damaged, and juvenile exercise, even while I practiced it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Where could you possibly go from there?” Marty the agent wanted to know.

  “I have no idea,” I told him. “I had no idea that was even coming.”

  “You’re book is getting real,” he said, “Mazel Tov.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Fresh from The Dancers, I got myself a featured role in a national television commercial. Kawasaki Motorcycles was promising me a big payday. There’d be $500 or $600 paid for the one day of shooting, and then another $5,000-$8,000 more in residuals that would be paid for the run of the ad. Hot damn, and thank you, ma’am!

  We shot Kawasaki Saturday Night three days before Christmas.

  It was a fun and easy night shoot. The set was festive and merry.

  Why wouldn’t it be?

  And afterwards, we started spending some of that money. We had a fun holiday that year. Bought a buncha stuff.

  Shortly after the new year, I got a letter from the J. Walter Thompson Company who had produced the ad. Paragraph 2 said something like:

  This is just to advise you pursuant to Paragraph 26 B.1 of the 1979 Commercials Contract pending between us that none of the footage or sound track in which you rendered services on the date(s) specified above will actually be utilized by us in our commercial.

  Sincerely yours, thank you very much, yours truly, and go fuck yourself,

  Mr. & Mrs. Kawasaki

  Did they tell us why they kille
d our commercial?

  No, not a peep. Sayonara!

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Y’ see what was going on here? The straight stuff wasn’t exactly panning out. I had another $500 audition where I had to fly down to LA again. Didn’t get that job either. It was for a TV pilot called Ethel and the Elephant. That show actually made it on to the air. I think it lasted maybe three or four episodes before it got cancelled.

  But you know what else got cancelled? It was my desire to go on chasing a straight career!

  In a review of Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, a documentary about the show business life of the longtime comedienne, The San Francisco Chronicle writer Mick La Salle wrote:

  “She (Rivers) describes the showbiz life as one of constant rejection; and over the course of the film, we see that’s true. People who fail in show business get rejected all the time. Successes, like Rivers, get rejected most of the time.”

  I flirted with it, but I couldn’t ignite an LA career while commuting from Berkeley. My wallet couldn’t take it, and neither could my ego nor my marriage.

  In the straight world, having been Playgirl’s Man-of-the-Year, was like winning a beauty pageant in Kansas. It qualified me to move to LA and to start making the rounds.

  But no, I didn’t want to move to LA. In LA, I was nobody. I didn’t want to be another nobody looking in the windows on Rodeo Drive. Berkeley fit me better. In Berkeley, I knew who I was. Child of the Sixties, I liked me. I liked us.

  Besides, working out of the Bay Area in the smaller pond of X-rated films, I was already a rising star.

  How did the old Robert Frost poem go?

  “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.”

  I believed in sex. I believed in love. I thought that we were the generation that was gonna make lust respectable.

  Yeah, let’s see where that takes us.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Did I tell you that Carly and I were engaged to get pregnant? We were. And you know what? It wasn’t easy. Month after month, we failed!

  Holy shit! Made you wonder about all those years of worrying about the birth control. Here we were trying to get pregnant, and it wasn’t happening. It just wasn’t happening!

  “Perseverance furthered,” counseled the I Ching.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “There you go again, Mahatma Howie! Why you fucking quoting the I Ching?”

  “Marty! Marty the agent! It’s good to see you! Haven’t heard from you in pages! How you doin’?”

  “Better than you, asshole, I picked up a penny from the sidewalk this afternoon.”

  “Marty, that hurts.”

  “And Robert Frost! Jesus, that’s just tacky. Are you ever gonna finish this fucking book?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Publishing is changing. I think we can sell it on the Internet.”

  “Oi.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Loni Sanders. As close to Tinkerbell as I ever got. She was such a pixie that I could hold her bottom in one hand. And I have small hands. She made me feel like Shaquille O’Neal.

  We were working for The Louis Brothers in Please Mr. Postman. The Louis Brothers were an in-group of X-rated crew people who were pooling their own money and doing this production for themselves. One of the brothers was actually a woman. She was the production manager who hired me.

  This was not Spinelli porn, pushing the envelope and trying to take the industry to the next level. The Louis Brothers were more like the factory workers of porn. It was down, dirty, and cheap. They were only paying me half my rate, but I took the job anyway because we had plumbing problems at home that couldn’t wait until a better-paying job came along. They said that they were “happy to have an actor like me in their film.” They said that, “as long as I didn’t slow them down or cost them any extra money, I was free to act all I wanted.”

  Please Mr. Postman was another high school play with a lot of explicit sex. The only good thing about being in the film — other than paying off our Berkeley plumber, who, by the way, had a PhD. in Philosophy from Princeton — was that I got to meet and work with Lonnie Sanders. She was an absolute delight.

  Having only done one or two movies, Lonnie was still new to the business. She was fresh, cute, and vivacious. I liked her. I took a big brotherly interest in her. One could see that Lonnie needed to learn the ABC’s of the business. She was doing two sex scenes a day and not getting paid nearly enough for them. She was tossing in the extras like doing trailers for nothing. She had no idea what she was worth in this business.

  She told me that she was living in LA and I suggested that she get herself into an acting class down there as soon as possible. Any good-looking woman who could handle the sex and also call herself an actress could double her rate overnight. With just the sex, it took a little longer.

  Lonnie said that X-rated actor Mike Ranger was her boyfriend and that he was helping her make her way into the business. I didn’t know him very well and I suggested that she meet with Annette Haven who had always been very generous and outstanding at teaching the new women how best to play the game with a minimum of exploitation and a maximum of profit.

  When Lonnie and I did our sex scene, it was like eating strawberry shortcake with lots of whipped cream. You get lucky sometimes.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Business of the Business

  Producer Harold Lime called to offer work in his upcoming Centerspread Girls. He was lavish with his praise of my talent as he told me that he wanted me in his film. He promised to send a script.

  Harold Lime was a biggee amongst X-rated producers and I was hot to work for him. When the script came, he indicated that I would be playing W.W. Williams, a bible-thumping hypocrite who publicly preached a Fundamentalist morality and then privately acted the lecher. It was alright. It was double the budget of the Louis Brothers stuff. It had possibilities.

  I hated negotiating salaries. I was lousy at it and it always made me crazy. Like Harold Lime, the producers would call, tell me how wonderful I was, and explain how much their movie needed me. Then, they’d ask me what my rate was.

  I’d tell them my rate. Then, they’d tell me that I wasn’t that wonderful, they didn’t need me that badly, and they’d counter with a substantially lower offer. I always thought that a rate was a rate, y’know, like a price in a menu. Period. When it says a steak cost $20, you don’t go offering the waitress $15! The producers always treated my rate like it was the first figure in a negotiation process. I’d get angry. They’d get indignant. I’d get alienated. They’d tell me, “Take it or leave it.” I’d leave it. They refuse to pay my rate, fuck ‘em, I turn the job down. See my lower lip sticking out here? See, I’d show them!

  If I would take a job at a lower salary, I’d feel resentful. I’d have to take direction from some turd who had just hammered me into lowering my price. No good. It didn’t work.

  No sir, this “business” part of “The Business” was never my strong suit. Back in Pittsburgh, it seemed like the family business had always been to not be very good at business. My mother was forever teasing my father about what a schnook he was in such matters.

  Oh, there was always food on the table, but the blue collar nature of his business affairs never rose very high up the ladder of the great American Dream. It bothered both of them more than it bothered me.

  By the time I came of age in the sixties and “The Revolution” was afoot, “business” or American corporate greed had been identified as one of the great villains of the late twentieth century. Sure, I wanted money and the good life and all of that, but not at the expense of the war in Vietnam or supporting oppressive dictatorships all over the world in the name of Wall Street and American corporate profit. We wanted America to be the good guys.

  Did you notice how I slipped out of the “I” and into the “we” there? Joined the revolution, I
did. Grew my hair long. We thought we were all part of something pretty big back then. We thought it was a rebirth for America and a reaffirmation of all that good guy stuff in the Declaration of Independence that had once made this country the light of the world.

  Business was the bad guy. We were getting fat off the resources of the world. What’d they call it? “The American Century!”

  Well, clearly, when it came to this business thing, I had some gaps in my education. Yeah, so, ya know what we did? We made my wife Richard Pacheco’s business manager!

  Carly was far better at that stuff than I was anyway. She volunteered to handle that aspect of the business and I was happy to go into the next room and turn on the TV while she did all the negotiating.

  In the end, she’d just present me with the offer and we’d decide to take it or leave it. I now had a buffer. Like Willie Cicci said in The Godfather, “The family had a lot of buffers.”

  When Harold Lime didn’t want to pay my rate, I turned him down. Oh, he could well-afford to have paid me, he just didn’t want to. He figured I’d cave in and go to work for less, but I didn’t. If Harold Lime wasn’t going to pay my rate, then nobody else would either. I turned it down. I had to establish myself. They made Centerspread Girls without me. Paul Thomas ended up playing the part they offered me. But ya know what? The next time Harold Lime called to offer me a job, he paid me my full rate with no questions asked.

  I never had those kinds of problems working for Anthony Spinelli. Sam would always give me a raise before I even had to ask.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  2010, from my diary…

  I was talking to my mother-in-law yesterday. I had read her the “business” chapter as she has been occasionally curious about the progress of this memoir. I deemed it sufficiently innocent and unprovocative enough to be able to share it with her. Unlike my own parents, she and her husband were actually very good at business. They had owned and operated several successful retail businesses over the years. My father-in-law even spent some time teaching business at the college level.