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

by Howie Gordon

  Sexloose (Las Vegas Maniacs)

  I had two days in this film. I played a cat burglar who broke into Annette Haven’s house. She was a police detective who caught me red-handed. This being Pornoland, naturally, we would have sex.

  I thought I was eager for the embrace, but once begun, I became as tentative and caring as I could be while still working in a movie.

  I had always perceived Annette as so strong, so tough. When we got eyeball to eyeball and I was poised for the penetration, I was taken aback to suddenly see her as vulnerable. It gave me pause. There was a sadness to it. This knowing seemed far too intimate. In some ways, it just seemed wrong.

  These feelings were way out of place. We were dancing in the ballroom of public sex. These were personal feelings. They had no business here. They were supposed to be left in the dressing room. We had a job to do. I had a job to do. Hell, I didn’t even know what she was thinking. This was all just going on in my head.

  Surprisingly, the sex still happened anyway, as if it had a life all its own. A lot seemed to pass between us while the cameras rolled. Eventually, I reached my orgasm and I thought the scene concluded, but no.

  That day, Annette insisted on doing her own orgasm for real. She refused to simulate it. She argued that it would look better. She DEMANDED that the director shoot it that way. Wow, if there hadn’t been an Annette Haven, we would have had to invent her.

  I know I’ve told you before that most of the actresses I’d ever worked with had confided that they could “never come in front of all of these people!”

  It was an aspect of the movie sex that I’d always hated. In the real world, it left me all alone to seek out my arousal while my partners just made a bunch of phony noises. It sucked.

  And here now was Annette Haven insisting on doing her own come shot. I thought that was great. It was both my honor and a pleasure to help her get to the ecstasy.

  At the very end of that ride, Annette kind of hyperventilated herself into a faint. She went out cold there for a little while. I just held her until she made her way back to the planet. It was very peaceful and never seemed like she was in any danger.

  In the finished movie, there appears little trace of what was happening between us as lovers that day. The scene was cut fast and looked like any other ten sex scenes. Las Vegas Maniacs was largely a waste except for the fact that it broke a lot of the intimate ice in getting to know Annette, and it served as an excellent foreplay for the epic love scene we would later share in The Seven Seductions of Madame Lau.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The Seven Seductions of Madame Lau

  I read the script in my urologist’s office. I’d play the famous British explorer, Christopher Hamilton. I had conquered Everest and the North and South Poles, but had grown weary of the external world.

  This film would now trace my spiritual search into the meaning of erotic love. My guide in this odyssey would be the mysterious Madame Lau, portrayed by Annette Haven.

  Lest one think porn had dared an original thought, this film was just “piggybacking” on the The Seven Faces of Dr. Lau (1964). It starred Tony Randall.

  In Madame Lau, I had arrived in the land of the X-rated leading man. I would be doing seven sex scenes in six days. This was John Leslie territory. For me, it was going to be like cliff-diving in Acapulco. This was obviously a big risk being taken by the producers and Director Charles De Santos. I don’t know if I would have hired me, but I took the job when they offered. At this point in my career, I was feeling just cocky enough to give it a shot.

  Speaking of which, I was at the urologist’s office to have my sperm analyzed. It was just possible that after all my turbulent early years in the business, some of my sperm were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Carly and I had been trying to get pregnant for six months and it just wasn’t happening. It was now time to bring in medical science to kick the tires and check the oil and water.

  The doctor had asked me to not have an orgasm for four days prior to my office visit. I had sperms backed up into my brain.

  My urologist looked like Mr. Rogers. First, he had me piss into three different cups. Well, you didn’t see that every day in the Wonderful World of Make-Believe. Then, he measured my testicles. That was fun. This should have been the first scene in the movie.

  After these preliminaries, he donned the rubber glove and stuck a finger right up my ass. “To check your prostate,” he said. No flowers, no candles, no nothin’, just stuck his finger right up my ass. Boy, oh, boy, how was Madame Lau ever gonna top this?

  The grand finale was my own come shot. You know what? I was lucky to have gone through the Basic Training of adult films. A civilian could’ve easily freaked out in this scene. The doctor gave me two cups. He wanted me to squirt the first blast of orgasm into one cup and then switch cups for the rest. He coulda been directing loops.

  No problem, Doc, I’m a professional. Just gimme a little makeup and tell me where the camera’s gonna be. Unfortunately, no nurses were being provided as tech support and none volunteered. They put me in a little room alone and I made do with some fond high school memories and my ever-loving right hand. Soon, I was the proud father of two cups of sperm. I gave them to the doctor. The doctor smeared some on a slide and placed it under his microscope.

  “They look good,” he said. I beamed with pride. “You want to see?”

  “Sure, I do.” There they were, hundreds of little Howie’s looking for an egg. Pretty much told the story of my life, right there.

  “You and your wife keep on trying,” the doctor said. “You’re doing fine. If you don’t get pregnant in the next six months, you come on back.” And out the door I went. It was like I just had my batteries recharged.

  Okay, I was ready for Madame Lau. I was ready for anything. I called Director Charles to see about rehearsal and I got Tigr from Nothing to Hide.

  She was going behind the camera to be the production manager on this one. Tigr suggested that Carly and I stop trying to get pregnant and just adopt her. She also told me that there wasn’t going to be any rehearsal, citing too many conflicting commitments and too little time.

  Uh-oh, that was definitely not a good sign. It never was. Made me feel bad and mad. This was my first lead in a big-time movie. I wanted to hit a home run. Fucking Pornoland!

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Madame Lau began with producer Aaron Linn flying the director and me up to the Clear Lake location in his own private airplane. Well, that was a nice unexpected touch of class. I already felt like the great international explorer Christopher Hamilton and we hadn’t even started shooting yet. The rest of the cast and crew were being driven up from San Francisco.

  The day was given over to costume fittings and generally getting ready. There was a lot of partying. I stayed away. I studied my script and hung out by the pool working on my tan. I needed all the rest I could get. I was about to embark on a sexual marathon.

  Day One

  On the morning of the first day, naturally, we were shooting the very last scene of the movie first.

  Briefly, the story of Madame Lau was this: Leaving behind Veronica his wife, Christopher Hamilton sought out the infamous Madame Lau as a teacher of erotic love and spiritual union. They engaged in a sequence of metaphysical conversations filled with simplistic, mystical truths, all of which led to scenes of Christopher getting laid, one way or another.

  In the conversations, lots of candles were lit, incense was burned, and Tarot cards were read. In the sex scenes, bosoms and booties, cocks and cunts abounded.

  “Excuse me!”

  “Marty! What you doing here? I’m busy.”

  “I was just wondering. Do you have to say ‘cunts’ there? Women just hate that word.”

  “’Bosoms and booties, cocks and cunts,’ I like the alliteration. Now, will you get the fuck out of here?”

  “And you say ‘fuck’ too much!”

  “Marty, now is not the time.”

&n
bsp; “I can’t wait to get this shit to an editor.”

  “Good-bye, Marty.”

  So. So after Madame Lau has taken Christopher on this whole sexual merry-go-round, he ends up all enlightened and he returns home to his wife. It actually sounds a lot like my career. In a plot twist at the end, though, we discover that Madame Lau really was Christopher’s wife all along, in disguise. This gets revealed to the audience, but poor schmendrick Christopher never did figure it out.

  Kay Parker played my wife. And as I mentioned before, we were beginning by shooting the film’s ending first. In the climactic love scene on the beach, Kay and I would be having sex with each other for the first time. We started out hot and eager for each other. When the cameras rolled, as Christopher, I declared my new and profound and undying love for her. We embraced. We kissed.

  Tigr was dispatched on an emergency run for bug repellent. When it arrived, we slathered ourselves silly with the toxic potion and then proceeded to have to kiss, suck, and lick it from each other’s bodies for the rest of the scene. What? And give up show business?

  That wasn’t even the worst of it. I had been hired with the contractual agreement that I would only have to perform “one sex scene” per day. This was a business matter. Each sex scene was $1,000. Because the script called for me to do seven sex scenes in six days, it was decided that one of those sex scenes would just have to be “simulated.” Problem solved. Hardly.

  From an artistic point of view, I have generally preferred that “simulated,” or R-rated sex scenes, be shot with the performers actually having real sex and then just hiding the X-rated parts with the appropriate camera angles. In that way, the audience is spared the agony of having to watch the actors “acting” like they’re having sex, which is most often an embarrassment of semi-biblical proportion.

  But in this case, because of the financial concerns and faced with the prospects of my own physical limitations, my idea for this particular “simulated” sex scene was like no erection, no penetration, no orgasm, no nothing. Because I would have to do a complete-full-bodied sex scene soon afterward, on that same day, I wanted everything in that first sex scene to be acted. They’d just have to settle for the best job we could give them.

  The producers and directors didn’t see it that way. They wanted the “simulated” sex scene to involve like an hour of real, hardcore action with only the orgasm “acted” at the very end.

  I never dreamed that they would ask me to perform all this real sex and stop just short of orgasm. That was crazy. I never would have agreed to that. It was an hour’s worth of sex without coming. That sound like any fun to you?

  Unfortunately, we didn’t discover this little difference of opinion until we were already on the set and up to our short hairs in it.

  My solution would have added another shooting day to the schedule and put another $1,000 in my pocket. They made it clear that wasn’t going to happen.

  Well, you’re one person when you’re negotiating a business deal and you’re quite another when you’re on a set taking direction. This was my first day on the film. Hell, this was our very first scene! I let myself get bullied, but I swore it would be the last time.

  Kay Parker was an angel about all this, by the way. She just hung in there with me. As the simulated sex progressed, I got so close to coming at one point with Kay that if she would have blinked…but she didn’t. And so I didn’t.

  When they got all the footage they needed, we acted the orgasm and got up and walked away.

  I was grateful to have worked with Kay Parker that day. And I’ve since been grateful to have known Kay Parker all my life.

  Throughout the afternoon, we did a bunch of dialogue scenes, shot some action footage of the airplane, and I tried hard to uncross my eyes.

  At twilight, the magic hour, the second sex scene finally commenced. I was getting a blow job from Phae Burd in the cockpit of the airplane. It had been eight hours since I’d been ready to spill my seed with Kay. By the time that Phae started to suck, I was ready to explode. In what might have been the shortest blow job of my life, I thought I was going to come right through the top of her head. Mercifully, Phae safely and expertly released the pressure, and day one of Madame Lau passed into history.

  I was granted the luxury of the return flight home in the producer’s private plane. That was nice. I was tired. It turned a two or three hour drive into a thirty-minute flight.

  Day Two

  You think you’re catching a break. It says right there in the script that four women are going to pleasure me. That’s one, two, three, four women are gonna pleasure me, all at the same time, and then, Annette Haven is going to anoint me with oil and give me a hand job.

  That’s four women! That’s eight tits! That’s eight hands! That’s four tongues! That’s four vajayjays! That’s four asses with eight butt cheeks. That’s forty fingers and forty toes and sixteen lips! And Annette Haven, well, that’s Annette Haven!

  What could possibly go wrong with all of that? Funny you should ask.

  The room was cold. Even with the stage lights on, the room remained cold. I was blindfolded and naked. I got the shivers. They had to stop shooting when I started shaking and put a blanket on me. Take two. Take Three. Take Four. Take Five.

  One of the women had a bad cold. She was hacking and wheezing and coughing up phlegm. In between shots, those were among the sounds I heard while I lay there bound and blindfolded. Then upon “action,” a tongue would get shoved down my throat. Made me worry about whose tongue it was.

  I kept trying to push it out.

  And another of the women was having some fun with me. Every now and then, there’d be a nip with some teeth or a flick of a finger nail on the head of my penis. I’d flinch. This kind of pain wasn’t working for me at all. I told the director to tell whoever it was to cut it out. I expected him to protect me.

  Four tongues, eight tits, sadly, none of this was arousing. I have nothing but bad memories and then complete relief when Annette Haven finally made her entrance and shooed all the rest of them away.

  We were doing a parody of what was then a very famous sex scene in Behind the Green Door. As foreplay, wholesome Marilyn Chambers was being roughly pawed and savaged by a whole group of guys who eventually all gave way to Johnny Keyes, cast as the greatest African stud muffin of all time.

  Inter-racial sex was still a screaming taboo back then. This was a raw scene of in-your-face lust.

  In our little scenario, we reversed the genders. I had the Marilyn Chambers part and Annette played the Johnny Keyes role.

  She was completely done up in black makeup with an Afro wig and wearing a necklace made of tiger teeth. Annette was in little-girl-playing-dress-up heaven. She loved playing the part. And I loved her being there. She was the cavalry come to rescue me from the banshees.

  She got me up and off quickly and I got into a hot shower and licked my wounds.

  By the end of the second day, I knew that Madame Lau was in trouble. We were making two different movies at the same time. The parts being directed by Charles De Santos were going after funny slapstick, while the parts being directed by Christie MacDonald, oozed metaphysics and sought deep meaning.

  Charles touch could be seen right from the opening blow job scene in the airplane. It featured me getting head while I was trying to land a seaplane. Three times I touched down on the water and three times I shot back up in the air because I was out of control with arousal. Once was almost funny. Three times was the Pornoland sledge hammer. In addition to which, my sex noises sounded like they were being dubbed in by Jerry Lewis.

  If that wasn’t Three Stooges enough, we had Carol Doda in the movie. She was still channeling Mae West. “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you happy to see me?” She played my secretary Dolly Jean and had a running love affair with Madame Lau’s driver Guido. It was pretty silly stuff and the whole movie might have been better served if we had just kept it all going in that direction.

  Beca
use on day two, when we moved to San Francisco to shoot the rest of the movie, Christie MacDonald took over directing large chunks of the script. I thought he was just the art director and that he was helping Charles out, but he wasn’t doing anything funny.

  Specifically, Christie seemed responsible for all of the deeply meaningful mystical chit-chat that would be going on between Madame Lau and Christopher Hamilton for the rest of the movie. And there was a lot of it. In between related sex scenes, it was dark and moody stuff. There was no intentional ha-ha involved. It was come shots and Kierkegaard.

  Day Three

  It came out of nowhere. On day three came the best sex scene I ever had. It was with Annette Haven.

  I know, I know, I said earlier that the best sex scene I ever had was with Georgina Spelvin in The Dancers. And you know what? It was. And in a couple of chapters from now, I’m gonna tell you that I did the best sex scene I ever had with Samantha Fox in Irresistible. And it was too!

  You probably forgot by now, but you’re still listening to the man who lost his virginity three times back in 1966.

  All three of these sex scenes were great. I was in more than a hundred and these were the only great ones. “Great” is not a term I bandy about loosely. Choosing the best between them is impossible. Near perfect they were, each in their own way. They were just different, that’s all. All three deserve to be called the greatest. Like Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali, like Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and Julie Christie, all three were the greatest.

  And this one in Madame Lau was all about Annette Haven.

  On day three, it seemed like Annette and I had been doing hours and hours of this long, dry dialogue. Our biggest challenge was just to remember the lines, which were being written and then rewritten as we went along. It wasted time, money and energy that we hadn’t done all this in rehearsal, but, aside from Spinelli, that was the X-rated business.