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

by Howie Gordon

  “Uh-huh, could ya hum a few bars of that, I think I know that tune.”

  And I, of course, was all set to work with Colleen, who would eventually get her billing as Shauna Grant.

  We were three powerful, experienced actors working with three novice actresses. Apparently, all three of these women had just turned eighteen and it seemed like all three were just taking out their titties for their first shake- down cruise in an X-rated movie.

  I was told that Svetlana and David liked them new, young, and pretty and that they excelled at finding these girls and launching them into the adult business. It had been a key to the success of their earlier films.

  When we first met the girls, Jamie ignored his own costar and sat right down in Colleen’s lap and started to woo her. Well, that was a bit of a surprise. We both knew that he was supposed to work with Tina and I was supposed to work with Colleen, but one did not tell the bull goose moose where to put his antlers.

  Svetlana wouldn’t even introduce me. I was dressed in a long, red bathrobe that made me look like Michael from Peter Pan. Svetlana later told me that when she saw me in that robe, she was too embarrassed to introduce me. Well, that was nice of her to share. Seemed like Svetlana never missed an opportunity to spread a little good cheer.

  In the meantime, Jamie was getting nowhere with Colleen. One could see that he frightened her. When I took the opportunity to introduce myself, I didn’t do much better. Thinking I was being gallant, charming, I kissed her hand. With big eyes, she looked at me like I was from outer space.

  Okay, I told her that I’d see her on the set. Jamie told her his room number.

  Once outside their room, I “suggested” to Jamie that he fuck her as soon as possible, and get it out of the way, because I was supposed to be in love with her by the end of the week. He said that he’d do his best.

  Chapter Ten

  Well, Svetlana started me off with a lie.

  Oh, it wasn’t any great blockbuster of deception, more like just a little evil sprinkled lightly on my french fries. She came to my room and told me that I wouldn’t be working today.

  “Is that so!”

  Earlier that week, when I called from up North to tell her that I’d just been hired to do a computer commercial for the eighteenth. She told me not to take the job because I’d be working for her that day.

  So, I cancelled the job. And here I am, bright and early on the eighteenth in sunny LA — and now she tells me I won’t be working. Then she added, “Of course, you knew that already, I told you that when you were in San Francisco.”

  “What?” This is how this woman operated.

  I told her that she had said no such thing to me. I reminded her that she told me not to take that job because I would be working for her today.

  She said, “Oh, no, I told you that you didn’t have to be here today. You must not have been listening.”

  Now, she was pissing me off.

  I told her again that she had said no such thing. I could see her smile breaking through under the mask. She was actually going to look me in the eye and keep on doing this. We repeated the dialogue twice more before she laughed and flitted on to another subject like a tangent to a circle making a clean getaway.

  That’s the way she began with me, full of shit and combative. And I’m wondering, what am I supposed to do? That’s who she is and that’s the way this shoot is going to go. If this wasn’t such a big pay day, I’d be on my way home now. That she cost me $300 for the commercial I gave up makes me mad. That she plays me for a total fool makes me furious. I bite my tongue. It’s too early. I’ve got three weeks to go with her as my director. Oi.

  A simple apology was all that was needed. Shooting schedules change all the time in production. But no, that level of simple kindness and taking responsibility was beyond her. Maybe she was afraid I was going to hold her accountable for the lost income. She had to make it out to not be her fault, but the in-my-face lying was just so crude.

  We lost each other that day. The chaos had begun.

  As I mentioned earlier, I would have never gotten through it without Jamie Gillis. She didn’t get to him the way she got to me. They had a history. Jamie had been a big star who had worked for them when they were just starting out. He had done them favors. They owed him. Svetlana kept her beast in check with him.

  I had no such luck. Svetlana abused me. She fired me three times and I quit twice. She got under my skin. She seemed to enjoy it. Jamie got between us and defused things when they started getting ugly. And even when they did erupt, he was there afterward to smooth things over. Never would have made it without Jamie.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’m in the makeup room with Colleen. She’s walking around mostly naked with her hair up in rollers. She’s being nonchalant and cool while she lets the whole world know that she is a natural blond.

  Okay, I’m having a hard time not staring. She’s gorgeous. She’s the most American looking woman I’ve ever seen. She looks like fresh cheese off a Midwestern farm.

  We moved to the set and played some dialogue scenes. If I were her, I would enroll in an acting class like yesterday. She’s got world-class good looks, but is completely clueless as an actress. We’ll just have to see what we can work out here.

  Randy West came to the door of our set wearing a very realistic policeman’s uniform. It was a dance costume that he uses in strip shows. Randy announced that he was looking for me. Having never met him before, both Jamie and Jerry thought he really was a cop. They let him in.

  When I saw Randy, I smiled and stepped toward him with my hand held out to shake. When I got close, he pulled out his revolver and fired two LOUD blasts into my stomach. I thought I was dead.

  Blanks. When I realized that I hadn’t been shot, I wanted to bash his skull open. I restrained myself. Randy was well over six feet tall and built like an All-American. He was laughing hysterically. He thought it was very funny.

  I was just happy that I wasn’t dead. The fact that I hadn’t shit my pants was a bonus.

  Chapter Twelve

  By the end of the first week, the news from home wasn’t good. One of my wife’s colleagues at the therapy institute had been diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer. Carly was shook-up, tired, and alone. We talked a long time on the phone. I told her that if it got too funky, she should just jump on a plane and we’d hold each other up the best way we could.

  I told her that working for Svetlana and David was proving to be a difficult experience.

  Beyond that, Carly was also not pleased to hear that I’d had a couple of offscreen sexual encounters, one with Monique Gabriel and Jerry Butler, and the other with Laurie Smith.

  Laurie started out in this film as an actress but became the makeup artist when Svetlana fired the first one after only a couple of days.

  It’s hardly news at this point that backstage sex was part of the lifestyle that went along with being on location in a porn film. If you were not saving up your desire for the next day’s sex scene or for some other personal or strategic reason, this casual kind of backstage sex was always going on amongst the cast, and the crew too for that matter, although there definitely was a “caste” system at work about mixing the two.

  Not only was this kind of sex pleasurable for its own sake but it was like rehearsal sex. It toughened you up for the business that we were in that often required us to have sex with strangers. Besides that, these two “strangers” that I just had sex with could turn out to be my costars tomorrow. Guys were all different, but I always felt my job was easier to do if my partner and I were not just “meeting” for the first time on screen.

  In any case, on this film, and just about every other one I ever worked on, there was usually a lot of tip-toeing in the hotel hallways after midnight. And who was with whom in the coffee shop at breakfast the next morning was always fascinating.

  This kind of sex, especially in another city, had never been “verboten” between me and Carly before. In that ch
anging landscape of our “open” relationship, we were up to the part where flings and one-night stands were considered okay, but falling in love with somebody else was taboo.

  Carly had never been on my case about backstage sex with porn actresses before, but things were changing. Hell, I thought I deserved some extra credit for not calling up an old high school girlfriend who lived in LA and had been a major source of jealousy squabbles between Carly and me in the past. Dumb. Just bringing up her name was a bad idea.

  Carly was making my life harder. I was making her life harder. I slept by myself that night. I pouted.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My call was for five o’clock in the afternoon. When I showed up on the set, Svetlana told me that they were never going to get to my scenes. They were way behind schedule. She said I could leave. I hung around awhile, playing cards with Jamie, and then I went back to my room and watched TV.

  The next day it rained blissfully on Los Angeles. After four days of baking in the heat, it was wonderfully chilly. I was grateful.

  I worked in one short scene in mid-afternoon and hung around waiting to do an outdoor shot of walking with Colleen. Colleen, by the way, had warmed considerably. We’ve enjoyed talking to each other all day.

  Over the phone, Carly told me that the baby played with a rattle for the first time today. It made me cry. She also told me that I was allowed to get laid even though she was 400 miles away with a stomach ache because it was written down in the law books that God gave to Moses.

  I’m not sure exactly what that meant either, but I was grateful that we were both laughing about it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  An early morning five-thirty wake-up call. Laurie and Colleen both spent the night in my room. While Laurie slept or pretended to sleep in one bed, Colleen and I made love for the first time in the other. Yeah, I noticed too. I said, “made love.”

  It was dark and quiet and under the covers. This girl was not a porn queen. In mid-stroke, she asked me to look at her. It was fascinating. The animal came to her beautiful face and she was alive and refreshing. It was a glowing moment and a gift. It gave me pause.

  Alright, alright, I can see it now. In hindsight, this was where the lifeguard, the wifeguard, should have blown his whistle and told me to get the hell out of the deep end. This was where he should have said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Mr. Husband with a brand new baby?”

  But there was no lifeguard there. And this was just Hollywood. This was just work and this was just fun. This was where grown-ups competed to play make-believe like children and got paid for it. On camera, off camera, it got to be hard to tell the difference, especially for a guy sleeping by himself in a crummy motel.

  I wasn’t thinking of Carly and the baby in Berkeley. I was thinking of me and myself playing the movie game in Hollywood. I wasn’t thinking of hurting Carly. I was just wondering, what am I going to do tonight?

  I was disconnecting from one life and making up another one. I thought of it as a temporary condition, like riding a roller coaster or taking a drug. I thought of it as rehearsal. I thought of it as free play. I thought of it as a privilege of the profession and an adventure in an alternative universe.

  It all seemed very doable.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The set was a shoe store where my character worked. Svetlana and David were late when we arrived so I curled up on a couch and went to sleep in the stockroom.

  I was awakened by Svetlana howling like a banshee. She was screaming at me because the girls had slept in my room. Svetlana had spies everywhere. I told her who slept in my room was none of her goddamned business. She insulted my breath. I backed away. I told her that I couldn’t handle any more insults until I had a cup of coffee.

  In the makeup room, I learned that she and David had gotten lost on the way to the set. She had arrived in a tornado of a snit-fit and was pissing on everybody.

  To pour salt on her wounds, the soundman had been robbed the night before. Several sound tapes had been stolen out of his car. All those scenes were going to have to be reshot.

  This was the way the day started and it all went downhill from there.

  David and Svetlana both directed that day and spent a good deal of time arguing with each other. This was a common occurrence when they were both on the set. We shot one scene where I had to come running out of the stockroom and do a hook slide on the carpet in front of Colleen. David directed one take. Svetlana directed another. This one was no good for sound. That one was no good for camera. David wanted to try it this way. Svetlana wanted to try it that way.

  I slid on that floor, carpet over concrete, twenty times. On the nineteenth try, something in my left knee went “pop.”

  I told them both that I had just hurt myself. They wanted one more take. I told them it was going to be the last one. We shot it. When I hit the floor, the pain was again sharp in my knee. I ignored it and finished the scene. I didn’t want to have to try and do it again. Within half-an-hour, my knee swelled up to the size of a bowling ball.

  I was worried. I’d already had a major surgery on my right knee. It was no picnic. I knew what was involved. It took nine months out of my life for the healing and the physical therapy. I was afraid that I was going to have to go through all of that again.

  While we were still in the shoe store, I asked David Marsh if the film had insurance. He said that it did. I told him not to bullshit me because I knew that it could get expensive. He said, “No problem. We’ll take care of you.”

  We wrapped around nine-thirty that night. I limped back to the hotel and put my knee on ice.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Yom Kippur

  It was supposed to be a day off!

  The production manager called early to arrange for the three guys to go and get fitted for tuxedoes for a coming scene. I told him that I was going to have a hard time getting the pants pulled up over my knee. It was still swollen to twice its normal size. I could barely stand on it to hobble to the bathroom.

  John Leslie called from Philadelphia. He wanted to know if Colleen’s ass was really as fine as he had heard. I didn’t know what to tell him. Colleen’s ass was lying right next to mine in the bed when he called. My first reaction was jealousy.

  Colleen had spent the night with me again. Despite some heavy flirtation from Jaime, she had bedded down with me. Jaime was seriously infatuated. He sat at Colleen’s feet like a puppy. I made a lot of room for him, but Colleen kept hiding behind me. He was danger. I was safe.

  Last night with Colleen had none of the first night’s heat. I was hurting. I had been protecting her from Svetlana and Jaime. Now, she was going to take care of me. It didn’t really work. Desire had been one thing, but this kind of caring was something else. It felt very awkward to have somebody besides Carly even attempt to care for me when I was hurting. It was like playing house in a comic book. It felt wrong.

  Svetlana called. This phone call went South in a hurry. She wanted me to work more days than we had agreed upon in our contract and she wanted me to add them all in for free.

  Well, that sucked. I hardly knew what to say to her. I told her that she would have to discuss it with Carly, who was being my business manager.

  “No,” she said, “I’m not going to do that.”

  Then, “I’ll discuss it with her,” I told Svetlana, “and with my fellow actors too. If we can come up something that seems fair, I’ll do it.”

  She called me “unprofessional” again. She said that I was the highest paid actor on the set and that I should do the additional days for free. Further, she said that I was not permitted to discuss my salary with anybody.

  I reminded her that we had made no such agreement. I told her that I strongly doubted I was being paid more than Jamie Gillis. I told her that she used the word “unprofessional” every time that she didn’t get her way, and I suggested that she had a very, very odd way of asking me to do her a favor.

  That’s when Svetlana s
tarted shouting at me over the phone. She continued to berate me about my salary and I screamed back, “I CAN’T EVEN WALK, BITCH!! WAKE UP!!!”

  That’s when she hung up the phone.

  I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I was shivering. I knocked on Jaime’s door. He was gone. I didn’t know what to do. I started packing to go home.

  Jaime came back soon and I told him my troubled tale. Then, the phone calls started. First came the production manager. Then, David called. And then, Svetlana called again. Another uneasy peace had been restored. It was agreed that Svetlana and I would never discuss business again. All future negotiations would take place between David and Carly.

  As a peace offering, David wanted to take Jaime and me out to dinner. Svetlana couldn’t even look at me for the first half of the meal. When she finally did perk up, I got it that she was irritated with me because my leg injury meant that she was going to have to change her shooting schedule. I was stupefied, yet again.

  In the end, they didn’t even need any more days from me than what we had originally contracted. The entire confrontation had proved unnecessary. In the process, Svetlana hadn’t even bothered to see if there might have been a peaceful solution before she sent in the bombers. It was just her way, Svetlana against the world.

  Behind Svetlana, tagged along the dutiful David. At thirty, he looked like fourteen. He cleaned up well after her. They made a good combination. My sympathy went out to anyone who was unlucky enough to come under their dominion. I would never work for them again.

  At the restaurant that night, I mentioned to Svetlana, “Y’know, I didn’t hurt my leg on purpose.” She gave me a half-smile and then the poor dear complained of having a headache.