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

by Howie Gordon

  Having a baby had cut into our own time to act like children, and now real estate was really threatening to remove whatever foolishness that remained. We were playing with Carly’s parents’ money. We did not want to make any mistakes. I can’t speak for Carly here, but as much as I wanted it, I also found myself resisting the whole thing.

  Termite reports, insurance rates, water bills, gas bills, earthquake preparedness, fixed rates, variable rates, low-flow toilets, gas lines, property taxes, square footage, titles, escrow, fire damage, police reports, contractors, plumbers, carpet layers, carpenters, sheet rock guys, cement guys, electricians, Bank loans, second mortgages, liens, spleens, and fucking baked beans, I didn’t want any part of any of it. I had a few issues.

  I wanted to run away to Never Never Land and hang out with Peter, Pan, and Mary. When I had the money to buy a house, I’d buy a house. This was all bullshit!!! I wasn’t ready.

  Uh, it was Carly who conducted the negotiations with our landlord. Coached by her parents, that is, Carly conducted the negotiations. She was soon joined by a lawyer friend of ours who her folks recommended we hire to see us through the deal. I was about as useful in this process as I had been at the hospital when Carly was giving birth.

  As the purchase unfolded, and I had occasion to speak to a number of our friends who were homeowners, I was surprised to learn that almost all of them had received serious financial backing from their parents when they first bought a house.

  Oh.

  Okay, that calmed me down some, but there was still one more very large elephant in the room. It was time for Carly’s parents to know about my career. They needed to have a clear picture of our finances and it was just time. Not surprisingly, Carly got this job too. They were her parents.

  Sometime later, I asked Carly to write the story in my diary.

  She wrote:

  Maybe it was on Saturday, I’m not sure, but one day while my parents were visiting recently, I told them that Howie had made some X-rated films.

  I picked them up at the hotel where they were staying and after they got in the car I said:

  “I had a conversation with Sis while she was here that caused me to rethink some things, and I wanted to share it with you. We were talking about Howie, and she was asking questions about him, and his work and our money, and finally I said I was going to tell her a secret, and now I’m going to tell you. The secret is that Howie has made some films that have included some explicitly erotic scenes — some X-rated films. We never said anything to you about it because we felt you might be embarrassed, or we’d be embarrassed, or you’d disapprove — I’m not sure exactly why, but it just felt awkward and we never did. But the point is, he’s done it — and made some very good money at it — and we began to realize that he must look like a kind of a bum to you, and that it was unfair to you to go on seeing things without this information. What began as just something we didn’t think it was important to share, after a while we realized had become an active deception, which was not what we wanted to be doing at all.

  “You guys have always been so generous to us, and now lending us all the money to buy this house — and just all the things you’ve given us over the years, we didn’t want you to be thinking that Howie didn’t even have the willingness to earn any money — he earned as much money last year as I did, as a matter of fact.

  “So now you know. I don’t know how much you want to know, or how much he wants to say, but you certainly can ask any questions you have.”

  By this time we had arrived in the driveway of our house. My father began talking about a conversation he’d had with Howie in which he (Dad) had suggested that Howie take a course in accounting so that the business of managing our new property would not seem so scary, and went on to say that he felt pride of ownership was a wonderful change he felt he could see in Howie already.

  As we came up the front walk my mother said, “I only have one question. What will your children tell the other kids at school who ask what their daddy does for a living?”

  I replied, “They’ll say he’s an actor.”A few paces later, I added, “These films have all been made under a different name. Nobody has to know anything we don’t choose to tell them.”

  My mother turned and gave me a big hug and a kiss and said, “God bless you.”

  And that was all. (Later she asked his stage name, and I told her.)

  On the very next page of my diary, Carly drew a cheery picture in colored felt tip pens. It was a big tree set against the backdrop of a smiling sun and birds flying. Under the tree, the Potato Head Family was waving. There was Mr. Potato Head in a Derby hat, Mrs. Potato Head with a ribbon in her spud, and Baby Potato Head with a teeny ribbon. The baby said, “Hi.” It was happy. I could see what a relief it had been for my wife to tell her parents about my career in X. The caption over her picture read,

  “So there you have it!”

  It was a relief for me too. For the first time in almost seven years, I didn’t have to worry anymore about who knew I was in the business. Everybody I cared about now knew. Everybody else could just go fart under the covers and enjoy themselves. I counted myself extremely fortunate that our parents were able to accept my “unorthodox” career choice without any major traumas. Not all adult performers shared such a benign fate. Over the years, I’d heard stories of fractured families and bitterness that went as far as suicide. I was one of the lucky ones.

  On June 6, 1983, the thirty-ninth anniversary of D-Day, Carly and I signed a contract to buy the property from our struggling landlord. We beat the County Auction by two days.

  On July 22, thanks to the incredible generosity of Carly’s parents and the perfect lining up of all just the right stars, the title of ownership officially became ours.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Twenty-five years after Carly first told her parents about my career, my mother-in-law finally let me know what really happened. It was on the eve of my son premiering his one-man show, Debbie Does My Dad in San Francisco. Family confessions were abounding.

  My mother-in-law explained that she and Carly’s dad had flown to Canada right after the conversation in which they had received the news of my adult career. They were about to catch their train for their intended cross-country Canadian journey. My mother-in-law swears that she got so sick trying to recover from the shock of Carly’s news that they had to cancel their trip and fly back home where she took to her bed.

  She was a rabbi’s daughter. She had a view of herself and her family as part of a cultural elite. I had ridden through that notion of refinement and community standing like a Cossack with a saber. This was a Fiddler on the Roof moment and then some! Like Tevya’s struggles to embrace the men his daughters fell in love with, she had to move a long way to find room in her heart for me.

  She waited more than twenty-five years to tell me that story, but by then, we were all living in another galaxy. We had found love and devotion for each other and I’m sure glad that we did.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “All’s well that ends well, I suppose,” Marty the literary agent said. He was quoting Shakespeare. “But that was a pretty tough chapter,” he added.

  “You’re telling me!” I said.

  “You sure you want to put that in there? It’s not exactly you at your best,” Marty said. “You come off like every parent’s nightmare. I mean, what would you do if one of your own daughters suddenly showed up at your front door married to a clown like you were in those days?”

  “Oi,” I said, “Oi.”

  “Exactly. So, whatta ya think?” Marty asked. “You do remember where the ‘delete’ button is, don’t you? People reading this to find out about the ‘Golden Age of Porn’ don’t need to be tuned in to this level of your personal life.”

  “Oh, I think that ship sailed a long time ago, Marty. I don’t know if this is even about porn anymore. I think that writing your memoirs is a lot like taking an all-expenses paid trip through Purgatory where you have to wa
tch all of your life, the good, the bad, the embarrassing, and even the incomprehensible. You have to watch all of your life up there on the big screen and find a way to write about it.”

  “Well, nobody’s making you write these memoirs!”

  “I am,” I told him, “I am.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The best part of going to the Adult Film Association Awards that year in LA was taking my friend John O’Keefe.

  I thought that John O’Keefe was the finest actor in the world, bar none. To begin with, like Richard Burton and Ronald Coleman, he had one of those rich, melodic voices. He had the alchemy to make spoken language into music.

  Out of the theatrical incubator of the University of Iowa, O’Keefe was even more keen on being a playwright and a director than he was on promoting his career as an actor. He once told me that it made him crazy to have to take direction from people who were dumber than he was.

  As powerful as he was as a performer, he became even more celebrated and honored for his work writing and directing over the years.

  John O’Keefe, Bob Ernst, and David Schein were the founding members of Berkeley’s Blake St. Hawkeyes, a legendary Bay Area ensemble of the avant-garde. And John and Bob were my first two acting teachers. Carly took their classes too. From our beginning as their students, we developed fertile friendships with them both that have lasted for years.

  During the summer of 1983, John was working at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival near LA, when we invited him to take the night off and join us in town for porn’s big awards show.

  For me, it was a replay of the New York Awards held earlier that year. John Leslie won Best Actor, Jamie Gillis got Best Supporting, but my picture, Irresistible, was once again named Best Picture of the Year.

  After the show, we were driving through Beverly Hills in our limousine on the way to the Playboy Mansion for the after prom. John O’Keefe and I had shared some pretty lean times together back in Berkeley, and here we were riding in a stretch limo through Beverly Hills. We were going to Huey Hefner’s house. Fuckin’ A. We stood up in the back of the limo and stuck our heads out through the sunroof. It was a dark night filled with bright stars and warm breezes. All we had to do was look at each other.

  Later, back inside, John said, “Oh, shit! I’m out of cigarettes!”

  “No problem,” I told John. “We’ll just stop at a Seven-Eleven and get you some more.” Our driver, an English fellow, who had a pretty refined voice of his own, said,

  “Sir, there are no Seven-Elevens in Beverly Hills.”

  It seemed like we laughed for twenty minutes.

  Once inside Mr. Hefner’s Playboy fortress, John O’Keefe simply died and went to Heaven. I owed Screw publisher Al Goldstein a huge thank you for his smuggling John onto the guest list. I’d never seen John more tickled. For once, he was undeniably on the inside of the American Dream instead of just hanging around on the outside with his nose pressed against the glass. It made our night joyous.

  Carly and I left early. We’d been on this ride before and we wanted to get back to the hotel to be with our baby. John stayed at the Mansion until the sun came up. He’d gotten himself stranded. He somehow had missed connection with the ride that we had arranged for him. Ron Jeremy bailed him out. Ron Jeremy drove him all the way back to the Padua Hills Playwright’s Festival. That was really nice of him. Thanks, Ron!

  Win, lose, or draw, “The Awards” were always special.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Just before Seka’s film got started, I did my first TV talk show appearance as Richard Pacheco. I’d done a fair amount of these TV things, but they had all been as Howie for Playgirl.

  This show was Finnerty & Company, a local TV talk show in Sacramento. I was on an adult film panel with fellow performers Annette Haven, Juliet Anderson, and John Seeman. We did pretty well considering that it was a fairly conservative environment.

  My biggest mistake was offering a car ride back to the Bay Area to both Annette and Juliet. In hindsight, I should have picked just one of them, because on this particular occasion, they did not exactly bring out the best in each other. My car radio was broken and I had two hours and 120 miles of just-trying-to-stay-out-of-it.

  Though it was chilly outside, every now and then I had to open the window just to let some of the words out.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Greatest X-rated Movie Never Made

  We spent over $600,000 making this Spinelli epic, which should have been the pinnacle of our X-rated careers. But World War III broke out between all the powers connected to this film and the movie ended up being stashed in a vault somewhere by angry owners who vowed never to release it to the public. So far, they haven’t.

  The movie had the now ironic title of:

  There were so many plots, sub-plots, intrigues, betrayals, and private agendas that went along with the making of this movie that this is really a hard story to tell. Frankly, there was a lot of juicy stuff going on here that really was none of my business. An accurate rendition of this story would resemble a treasure map that had been torn into several key parts that would all have to be pieced back together to gain any glimmer of the whole truth.

  It will never happen, but I will tell you what I can.

  In the middle of a trend toward making lower budget feature films, Sunny Days came along like a blockbuster fluke. It started big and it started great. It was top drawer all the way. All the excitement was because of Seka.

  The way that Spinelli explained it to me was that the producers had come to Seka with their checkbooks open.

  She had been out of the business for a while, but spelled out some terms for them under which she might be induced to make another film. Sam said that the numbers were high and the word was that the producers didn’t even blink. Seka was back in the business.

  Seka had risen from the loops to the top of the adult industry. She was the reigning blond bombshell of the Age. Nobody had confused her early films with great drama, but the sex had always been superb. In this film, Seka wanted to take a big step up as an actress. She arranged for Anthony Spinelli to direct. And not only would Seka star in this film but she would also share in producing it as well.

  Spinelli. Sam. He was acknowledged as the most legitimate director and the best acting teacher in the business. He dispatched his writer son, Michael Ellis, to Chicago to hang out with Seka and develop a screenplay based upon her life. Within a couple of months, there was a script. Spinelli hired John Leslie me and for the film, but I would play the lead this time. The money was great.

  Rehearsals started in early August. As usual, Spinelli and I butted heads a lot. He’d take what he liked of my ideas and then bend me to his will with the rest.

  His son had originally written Seka’s “character” as Seka. I thought that was all wrong. Here she was trying to make a dent for herself as an actress and she was gonna play a character that was supposed to be herself? Didn’t make any sense to me.

  I suggested we call her “Sunny.” Seka could look very sunny. When she was smiling, she could light the room. Sam went for it. “Sunny” became her character and Sunny Days became the movie.

  I also managed to get my old acting teacher Bob Ernst cast in the role of “Sunny’s” acting coach in the movie. Bob Ernst was an actor’s actor. While Fame and Fortune may have eluded him and been awarded to the fluffier and less deserving, no one who has ever seen him perform has ever walked out of a theater less than amazed by his talent. Sam was happy to have him.

  I wasn’t so successful with suggestions about my own character. I named him Dugan. That much, Sam allowed. But while I was thinking of a quiet guy with an understated strength, Sam was thinking of a clownish buffoon. I was after Gary Cooper. Sam wanted Lou Costello. Y’know, maybe I was lucky after all that this movie was never released. Lord only knows what kind of performance I gave trying to resolve that conflict. It was not a fun process, but it was becoming a familiar pattern.

  Late
ly, it seemed like whenever I’d come up with a solid handle on how I wanted to play a character, Spinelli would figuratively blindfold me, spin me around seventeen times, rip off the blindfold, and then call, “Action!”

  Either he liked my performance when I was off balance and confused or else I was just being punished for trespassing upon what he perceived as his domain. Sometimes it seemed that the only point he was really trying to make was who held the power. He never gave an inch in those arguments, often I felt, to the detriment of the picture.

  Sunny Days was a lot more of the same. The only difference was maybe I argued a little harder. This was a big opportunity for me, I wanted to give it my best effort. We’d done a lot of projects together. Maybe I was getting to the stage where I was stretching my own wings a little more. I wanted to try more of my own ideas. Could be I was getting ready to fly out of the nest.

  “You act! I direct!” Sam had told both John Leslie and me on many, many, many occasions.

  John would argue more vociferously than me and he would pout longer when he didn’t get his way. But in the end, he too would bow to the will of Spinelli. We were his odd couple. We were his boys. In both cases, the relationships were personal. They went beyond “the business.” There was a lot of love there. Still is.

  Seka and Spinelli fought a lot too, but that was a different story. Sam didn’t always win those confrontations. And he was not the least bit happy about it either.

  Seka had the ear of the producer. I don’t know if she was actually going to be credited as an associate producer or an executive producer herself, but whatever she was, she got Sam hired and it appeared she could get him fired too.

  As an actress, even the star, her job was to obey the director. She had made the point of wanting Spinelli in the first place. He had accepted the task of eliciting a strong dramatic performance from her. She was to be the paint. He was to be the painter. However, in league with her friend the producer, Seka could also tell Sam where to get off and she frequently did.