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

by Howie Gordon

  Not surprisingly, there were more unpleasant incidents between Svetlana and me. We continued to clash. In hindsight, it all starts to sound like two students caught fighting on the playground who are then forced to tell their story to the Principal.

  “It’s all her fault!” I seem to be writing over and over again. “I didn’t do nothin’!”

  And even though I still believe that’s largely true, enough is enough. Let’s just say we never did get along and leave it at that.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Overnight Sensation

  By the third week, it was probably the word-of-mouth buzz started by Jamie Gillis that made Colleen Applegate a star.

  Like John Leslie calling from Philadelphia, all of “the guys” wanted to meet Colleen and all of the producers were trying to get her lined up for their next picture.

  After shooting one day, Jaime took Colleen and me to a big party that was a special private screening of Society Affairs.

  When we arrived, Harry Reems was putting his hands and feet in cement in front of the Pussycat Theater. We discovered too late that it was a tuxedo affair. They let us in anyway. Doors opened when you were with Jamie Gillis.

  The movie was a dog. It was supposed to be Harry’s big comeback movie. The only scene worth mentioning in the entire film involved Kelly Nichols bending over in a wedding dress. When Harry raised her skirts, the view was spectacular. There were audible gasps in the audience, mine among them. Colleen told me to be quiet and Jamie fondled her leg.

  Afterward, there was a fancy feed. Colleen was the belle of the ball. She was blossoming in the spotlight. She was the new kid in town and they were all lining up to talk to her.

  Producer Ted Paramour asked me for a private word. He told me that he had a new film that he wanted to discuss with me. When I went over to talk to him about it, he spent twenty minutes asking me if I could deliver Colleen.

  I waved Colleen over and told Ted to speak to her himself. He was charming.

  A star was born that night. It was clear that they all wanted to make Colleen the next Prom Queen of the X-rated business.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I suppose we need to talk about cocaine.

  Laurie and Colleen were coke buddies together. At this stage, they seemed to use it almost daily as a pick-me-up like others would drink a cup of coffee.

  When they would offer some to me, I’d decline. I’d gone a few rounds with cocaine and got myself knocked out every time. I couldn’t handle it. It was not a casual, social drug to me. It was a dangerous binge drug, which I found way too easy to abuse. With Carly’s help, I had learned to say, “No.” I said, “No.”

  Colleen liked her sniff of coke and drank her Bailey’s Irish Cream. It was chocolate milk with alcohol and hard drugs.

  It didn’t really get in the way of this movie, but it would come into play quite seriously later in Colleen’s short life.

  The shooting in LA was winding to a close. Colleen autographed my diary.

  Gordon Archive.

  Colleen hadn’t chosen a stage name yet and we made sport of finding her one on the set one afternoon. We all decided she should be “Callie Hollander.”

  Jamie came up with two movie scenarios that he wanted to make with her. One would star Colleen as the daughter of a Nazi Commandant at a concentration camp who would fall in love with him as a Jewish prisoner.

  The second would be all about a girl who tried to make it big in sex films. That movie would end with the big, famous, male sex star taking her back home to Indiana and telling her to stay there. He’d tell her she was too sweet for that business. He’d tell her that he didn’t want to see her lose that innocence.

  Shame we didn’t make that last movie.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Long Awaited and Much-Anticipated Sex Scene

  Oi, fergedaboutit! Not with a bang, but a whimper, it was a natural disaster. It was a “Hall of Lame” scene. It was the anticlimax of my entire career. You can’t begin to imagine how unhappy this made Svetlana—and that was just the good news.

  Q: Can you have a simultaneous premature ejaculation?

  A: Yes, if you both come before the camera gets enough hardcore footage, or any hardcore footage at all, for that matter.

  In the foreplay, Svetlana was already displeased. The touching was quiet, frightened, and tender. By now, the last thing that either Colleen or myself wanted was to have sex in front of Svetlana, but it was still our job.

  Svetlana wanted more animation from us. Colleen wanted the lights turned out and the covers pulled up. I just wanted to finish the scene and go home. We were up in San Francisco now. The magic between us of LA was gone. It was over. After three weeks, I had slept at home with Carly last night. We didn’t have sex. I was saving it up for this scene, but we had reconnected. And I had reconnected with my daughter too. I was home.

  And Colleen? Colleen was already halfway into John Leslie’s arms and her next picture. She was on her rocket to stardom.

  I had forced Svetlana and David to honor their contract with me and shoot this sex scene in San Francisco. In her own typically sweet and diplomatic way, Svetlana had tried several times to bully me into shooting it in LA. It was illegal, risky, and dangerous to shoot sex scenes in LA. All of the reputable companies came North and shot theirs in San Francisco. Only the slimiest and most desperate tried to shoot their sex scenes in LA.

  I had held my ground and forced them to come up here.

  Not to belabor the obvious, but in hindsight, it was a big mistake.

  Doing the right thing turned out to be the wrong thing. I should have risked the arrest because the San Francisco shoot was a colossal flop. But there was no way to predict that, there was no way to see it coming.

  At least we didn’t get arrested.

  Svetlana wanted a scene of raw, animal lust like the one I had given her in the original Bad Girls with Tanya. It had been a spirited, energetic coupling. When I played that scene, I was a lean and mean young halfback eager to run hard in Saturday’s big game.

  In this sex scene with Colleen, I was a limping, battered older man. In the makeup room before we started, Colleen and I were talking about death and friendship and things so totally inappropriate to our coming sex scene that even we took notice of it and had a good laugh.

  When Svetlana wanted more animation, we gave her more animation. We acted the passion. It felt phony. It was phony. I’m sure it had to look phony, but they shot it anyway.

  When it came time for the actual fucking, Svetlana left the room. That was a sigh of relief for everybody. Eugene, the director of photography, was left in charge. I would cue him when we got it going.

  In mere seconds, I was hard and inside of Colleen. It felt wonderful. Too wonderful. Way too wonderful!

  Eugene was filming our faces when our arousal just took off. We’d been at it only moments and I was on the verge of coming. Colleen seemed to be right there with me. We were having a terrific time, but I realized that they had absolutely no hardcore footage!

  I froze. I tried to stop my orgasm, a difficult, most ungallant task. Colleen moaned her disapproval. I told Eugene to shoot some hardcore stuff, NOW, that I was close to coming. Wrong. Two hesitant strokes later, I came anyway. I came inside of Colleen. Oi. It was all a big mistake.

  By the time Eugene got in position to shoot some hardcore footage, all he got was my fading erection ingloriously plopping out of Colleen. I had never come that fast ever. What are you gonna do? Once again, the sex had proven to be an inexact science.

  Well, I could now add “premature ejaculation” to the list of honors I had achieved in this life.

  At first, I thought, No problem! I’ll just wait a little while, get another hard-on, and then give them all the hardcore footage they need.

  It never happened. There was something about having tried so hard to shut down the orgasm that got in the way of trying to up and restart the arousal engines. Literally, it was like flooding your carb
uretor when you try to start your car. If you can’t wait long enough for the flood to subside, you’ll just keep wasting your battery trying to get the engine going. If you don’t wait long enough, you’ll just get a dead battery. I’ve done that. More than once. To both my car…and my dick.

  We tried for a long time to get me going, but failure and terror gave way to more failure and terror. Despite the best live efforts of Colleen the lover and me doing an exhaustive masturbatory search throughout my entire sexual memory, we, all of us, could not get another glimmer of life out of my poor, dead dick.

  A stunt cock would have been extremely helpful at that point. Jon Martin, Mike Horner, John Seeman, Ron Jeremy, Randy West, you were the guys that had bailed me out before. Where were you now? They were nowhere to be found on this day.

  And beyond the shame and confusion of a dead dick, I had to face the wrath of the Dragonlady.

  I told Svetlana that I’d try all night if she wanted, but that nothing was happening. She took me at my word and wrapped the set. I felt badly. I was disappointed that I hadn’t given her the scene that she wanted. Svetlana was disappointed because she didn’t get the scene that she wanted. And the crew was disappointed because they all just wanted to have been home in bed two hours ago. It was lose-lose everywhere you looked and I did not expect Svetlana to go quietly without exacting her pound of flesh.

  When the storm came, I accepted her rage. In all fairness, I had earned a fair amount of this abuse and I figured that she was entitled to her say. So, I kept my cool. Maybe that’s what put her over the edge. I expected her to be an asshole and she was, but she crossed a line somewhere way beyond my “It’s my fault line,” and I had no choice but to start defending myself.

  I’ll spare us all the details. Like I said before, it’s two kids who got caught fighting on the playground and then taken before the Principal.

  Svetlana and I ended our relationship with people having to come between us that day, to keep us apart. In what may have been the unkindest cut of all, I have to admit that she got in the best blow when she spat out at me. “And if I’d have wanted a sex scene like that, I could have had real actors!”

  Bitch sure knew how to hurt a guy.

  Y’know, in hindsight, maybe Svetlana and I should have done that sex scene. We certainly had a ton of passion going on between us. Of course, it was homicidal in nature, and not erotic, but maybe we could have worked with that. It suggests an anal penetration scene of absolutely biblical proportion. No doubt, it certainly would have been a bone of contention as to which one of us was going to take it up the ass.

  I would have voted for her.

  P.S. When I started seeing doctors about my knee, I called David Marsh’s office twice to get the name of the film’s insurance company. Both times I was told that he was in a meeting and would get back to me. He never did.

  Carly tried calling him at home one night. When he answered the phone and Carly identified herself, he quickly gave the phone to Svetlana. Regarding my knee injury, Carly reported Svetlana said:

  “He was already hurt before the movie. He never was really hurt. He had a little bruise. He miraculously recovered. He slipped once, but he’s all better now. We’re not paying for anything. Good-bye.”

  What a surprise. Naturally, I was furious. I called a lawyer friend of ours. I wanted to sue them. I wanted them to be held accountable. I spoke to a number of producers of the Adult Film Association. Several volunteered assistance in any action that would legally rebuke David and Svetlana. It seemed that the Marshes had offended lots of people. We were invited to become pawns in other peoples’ games of revenge.

  Carly talked us out of it. She said “that woman” had just brought out the very worst in me. Carly said that I had come back from LA spewing poison. She said she didn’t even want to be around me when I was talking about Svetlana. She pointed out that a lawsuit could be costly and could keep David and Svetlana in our lives for months, if not years to come.

  Carly voted that we just try to get back to our lives and forget that David and Svetlana ever existed. At first, I resisted that notion.

  I was diagnosed with a partial tear in the meniscus. Surgery wasn’t indicated. It was suggested that when the swelling went down, I begin physical therapy. The doctor also recommended some anti-inflammatory drugs.

  Anti-inflammation seemed to be the general prescription for just about everything at this point. As John Leslie would have said, it was time to “calm the fuck down.” Okay, we decided to just forget David and Svetlana. In fact, we decided that I’d retire from the business.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dad, you never told me anything about all the girls you kissed before mom. I don’t know how old you were when you first had sex or who was the first woman you ever had sex with. Or where you had it? Did you do it in a bed? Was it in a car? What position? Did she suck your dick?

  Dad, we shoulda maybe talked about some of that stuff. I was so clueless. I coulda used some help from you with all the preliminaries. You never told me how you even learned anything about sex either. Or did you? And I just forgot. Maybe you told me that your brother Jack taught you. I don’t remember now. It seems that you just showed up in my room one day when I was seventeen and told me to use protection.

  We did talk about that hooker you and Uncle Leo had been seeing, remember? I was twenty-four then, when you and Mom came out to California and first met Carly. You told me about it when I said we should be friends. I said that we should talk about stuff. It happened when we were alone one day. You told me that you and Uncle Leo were seeing a prostitute on the side.

  I got angry then, Dad. The part of me that was my mommy got pissed at you, angry and indignant. How dare you cheat on my mommy?

  Sorry, that it freaked me out so much, Dad.

  Will my kids handle all this any better?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Gordon Archive/VCX.com.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The roots of our little family had been shaken. We needed to heal.

  “Abandonment,” was a word that Carly used. Being left alone at home with our baby had felt like abandonment. In some ways, it didn’t even matter what I was out there doing. It’s just that I wasn’t at home with her.

  In hindsight, I wanted to be the happily in the happily married family man, but I also wanted to be Casanova, the man with the magic pee-pee.

  I wanted my homey bliss with the woman I loved and I also wanted to be paid well to go to exotic locations, play pretend in the movies, and get to have hot sex with every other kind of woman imaginable.

  Was that too much to ask out of life?

  Apparently, yes, if I wanted to stay married to Carly, it was. If I wanted to have a family with her, it was. And now, she was letting me know all about it.

  I remember Carly once asking my mother for her advice about being married. My mother told her without hesitation, “Stick up for your rights.”

  During my senior year of high school, after I had lost all that weight and was suddenly juggling a few new girlfriends, I was standing in the kitchen with my mom when the phone rang. I told Mom as she was reaching to pick it up that if it was, say, Linda, “Tell her that I’m not home.”

  “Hello,” my mom said. She listened to the caller and then handed me the phone. “It’s Linda,” she said. “I’m not gonna lie for you.”

  Thanks, Ma, and thanks for telling my wife to “stick up for her rights.”

  My actual homecoming with Carly had been romantic and sweet, but that part was very short. There followed a lot of tension in our house. After the pace of Hollywood, Berkeley was like watching the grass grow. And after three weeks of life as a single man living in a motel, I returned to the sleep-deprived ozone of a new father and an attentive husband. It was not an easy transition.

  Carly was more fragile than I had ever seen her. The single parenting, the long separation, and her friend’s struggle with cancer had all combined to frazzle her. I wasn’t in such gr
eat shape either.

  We thought maybe I should retire from the business. We thought maybe I shouldn’t be a porn star anymore.

  We fought a lot. We were still in the process of deciding what to do about David and Svetlana. And in those days right after the movie, Colleen was calling a lot.

  We were still friends, Colleen and I. She was telling me all about the exciting new things that were happening in her career. She was asking for my advice. It was her ride up. It was volcanic.

  Carly didn’t like her calling. I tried to tell her it was just business. Carly wasn’t buying it. She said that the mere mention of her name revived all the anguish of our separation. She wanted me done with Colleen.

  One night, Colleen called way too late and woke us both up. I grabbed the phone and took it into the next room so that Carly could get back to sleep.

  Carly followed me with a scowl on her face. She made a thumbs-down gesture and then went back to bed.

  On the phone, Colleen prattled on about the latest movie and the latest producer promising stardom. On the surface, at least, it was all business. She talked business details and sought business advice, but I was getting all of the heat and none of the pleasure that went along with having a full-blown love affair. It was like paying a tax for what had already taken place between us earlier. It stunk.

  Colleen soon came to the Bay Area to work on a Bob Chinn film. She took a cab over from San Francisco to visit us. She met Carly and she met the baby.

  As you might imagine, it was tense and odd. With Carly and Colleen in the same room, I felt like two different expressions were trying to fit on my face at the same time. It was actually physical and it was quite impossible. They were incompatible. I couldn’t get both of those faces on me at the same time, and I was a stumbling bumbler coping with that revelation.