GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985

by Nelson, Jill C.

  Cathouse

  In 1981 during the beginning stages of her adult film career, Laurie was enthralled by the attention and glamour the new and alternative Hollywood lifestyle afforded her. The money was better than what she managed to earn as a sales clerk and she welcomed the sense of family unity.

  At that time, they were still shooting thirty-five millimeter movies. I was definitely star struck. In my mind, it was just like Hollywood: “Take 1,” “Scene 5,” “Rolling” — boom — “silent on the set,” and “Action!” What eighteen year wouldn’t be Hollywood bound at that point? The fact that we were making decent money to do this too — wow! And the catering, oh my god, did they do some good catering back in the day! This was not McDonald’s fast food. Having your hair and makeup and wardrobe done was very cool. I remember that I stayed in a huge mansion with a pool and tennis courts and game rooms. Believe me, it was really quite an experience for a young girl.

  My first movie was called The Best Little Cathouse in Las Vegas (1982) with Rhonda Jo Petty who was starring in the lead role. Rhonda became one of my favorite actresses for the longest time.

  Directed by Hal Freeman, Laurie made her film debut as “Misty Dawn” (not to be confused with the contemporary porn starlet Misty Dawn) in The Best Little Cathouse in Las Vegas wherein she played one of the young prostitutes at the brothel owned and operated by Rhonda Jo Petty. When the IRS lands on the premises of the bordello to ensure the company’s finances are not overextended, the girls use their assets to effectively keep Big Brother at bay. During the time of the production, Laurie was eighteen years old and she appeared even younger. Much to the delight of adult film fans, with some exceptions, Misty Dawn would become known in the industry for convincingly depicting females more youthful than her years.

  Valley Girl

  Shortly after I finished the movie, someone told me that if I really wanted to be in the industry, I needed to go to the San Fernando Valley. One of the girls gave me a few phone numbers and hooked me up with a place to stay and someone to pick me up at the airport.

  Laurie soon found a home with a group of performers living together above the former Seven Seas nightclub owned by restaurant manager/ nightclub owner Eddie Nash (Adel Gharib Nasrallah). The friends became known as the “Hole in the Wall Gang” because of their tendency to knock down walls to expand their residence for new tenants.

  In the early years, I was star struck and found it all to be extremely exciting. After a while, I found that it wasn’t what I had initially thought. I didn’t get as much work as when I first started working just like everyone else, and there was always someone new or prettier coming along. I found it was hard to cope with feelings of rejection at such a young age. It was very difficult. You are so young and you try to hide those feelings. I know I did, but still, they are there inside of you to deal with.

  Back in those days, the industry was the forbidden fruit so to speak, and if you chose to work in porn, you certainly didn’t do anything to bring heat to anyone in the industry. There were unspoken rules that you just abided by. It was dangerous which made it that much more exciting, and it was also illegal which made it that much more profitable too. We believed that if we brought heat to anyone in the business we would be killed or something bad would happen to us. Back in the day, the Mafia ran the adult business — it’s as simple as that.

  The Feds believe that as early as Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat (1972) and probably earlier, Mafia involvement particularly in the areas of financing and distribution of sex films has been an open secret. It is alleged members of the Peraino family who belonged to the Colombo crime syndicate were instrumental in loaning funds and overseeing the production of Deep Throat and other illegal X-rated films. This trend continued over the years throughout the porno chic era and beyond. Whether or not it can be verified, other porn producers living in the L.A. region such as Bill Amerson have openly claimed to have had mob affiliations.

  Late 1982, Laurie and a friend drove up the coast to San Francisco where she was hired to co-star on the set of Marathon (1983) featuring luminaries Jamie Gillis, John Holmes, Ron Jeremy, Bill Margold, Don Fernando, Sharon Mitchell, and Drea in a story centering on various sexual activities during a Masquerade party and at a hospital. While on set, the young actress was introduced to Holmes who had recently been released from a four-month stint at L.A. County jail. Within a few months, the couple began to cohabitate at the home of John’s friend Bill Amerson in Sherman Oaks, California. Toward the end of the year, Laurie and John moved out of Amerson’s home and into their own apartment, along with Laurie’s young son.

  In 1983, Misty Dawn appeared on the box cover for The Newcomers directed by Roy Karch and produced by Bill Amerson. She joined Peter North, R. Bolla, Shaun Michelle, Cara Lott and Summer Rose in a storyline that perfectly captured the early 1980s climate of adult filmmaking by showcasing a bold new generation of female starlets paired with seasoned performers. Concurrently, the industry was transitioning from film to video. Laurie is one of the first newcomers to have worked on the cusp of both mediums including loops. Under her stage name “Misty Dawn,” Laurie made a few more movies during the next couple of years including the third installment of the Taboo series supporting Kay Parker, Pat Manning, and Mike Ranger. She also had a primary role in the wildly entertaining video California Valley Girls (1984).

  In California Valley Girls, Laurie is featured as one of four “Valley” girls hired to work for an escort service owned by Becky Savage and Shaun Michelle. The quality story is actually a star-studded commentary on the 1980s San Fernando Valley girl scene which hosts veterans Ron Jeremy, Paul Thomas, Herschel Savage, Eric Edwards, and John Holmes. Along with Cindy Shephard, Desiree Lane, and Dominique, Laurie does a great job feigning an authentic “Val” accent. The multi-faceted still photographer Kenji wrote the hilarious theme song for the film.

  Subsequently, the young starlet had her first starring role as Dr. Misty Banks in Dreams of Misty in 1984. Misty Dawn portrayed a psychiatrist treating sexual repression in her patients by imparting samplings of her own erotic fantasies shown in sequence revealing the various desires and fetishes originating in her childhood. (Pat Manning and Nick Random are both exceptional as Misty’s parents.) Laurie has said she felt she was not mature enough to portray the lead in the film at that time, but she is quite believable as the sexy Dr. Banks, and had an opportunity to extend her range as a young actor while enjoying a variety of partners including Marc Wallice and Scott Irish. Laurie eventually gave up performing for the first time in 1984.

  Family Business

  While Holmes continued to support the family making movies, Laurie concentrated her efforts on raising her young son. In 1985, she demonstrated her capability as a business administrator when she was hired to organize the office affairs of John and Bill Amerson’s joint venture Penguin Productions. Penguin was a start-up company between the two long time friends that produced movies on video for adult audiences. Remaining behind the scenes only, Laurie did not make an appearance in a Penguin feature.

  When John and Bill first formed a business partnership and started up Penguin Productions, I was supposed to help get the office organized. It wasn’t John’s intention for me to work there. It was Bill Amerson’s idea to hire me on as secretary and after he got a taste of my office skills, he moved me to office manager. Later, I became Vice President of the company. At the very end of my employment there, Bill incorporated the partnership right out from under John. It was challenging working with Bill because he played many head games especially towards the end when John was very sick [with AIDS]. Bill Amerson knew that I wasn’t sick with HIV and there were many times when he flirted with me. On a few occasions, I remember that he chased me around a desk.

  I believe that I did a great job running Penguin. The books were right on the money, maybe sometimes too much on the money. Bill had hired his children to work at Penguin and they didn’t always feel they had to adhere to my business standards.
Bill had also hired his sixteen-year old daughter [Denise] to work in our porn office, and I was concerned about that in addition to the fact that at that time, the industry was still illegal. Many of the porn companies were getting raided all around us, but not us, which is interesting when I look back on it. I had to try to explain to my warehouse people why Bill was talking to the Feds behind closed office doors which was tough — I wanted to know the answer to that myself. I went into my office and shut the door, and discovered that holding a glass up to the wall really works. When I went home that night and told John about what and whom Bill talked to the Feds about he blew a gasket. That was the end of my employment at Penguin and the end of the relationship between John and Bill Amerson.

  For the record, Laurie did not wish to divulge exactly what it was that Bill Amerson shared with the Feds when she overheard his one-sided conversation.

  John was very proud of me at the end of his life about this. He felt I handled myself better than he had expected, but the games were getting to be too much for me to handle. To this day, I really dislike head games.

  Mental Toughness

  Laurie and John married in Las Vegas in January 1987 just fourteen months before Holmes’s death from AIDS-related causes. Saddened and embittered following her husband’s passing, Laurie left Los Angeles and attempted to make a new start as a dancer, doing bartending work, and through other means of employment. She found it difficult to re-invent herself and felt torn and stigmatized because of her work in the adult entertainment industry. After giving birth to another son, Laurie eventually returned to the San Fernando Valley where she re-established herself as a performer, and later, met her second husband Tony Montana on a film set. She and Tony were married in 2001.

  Through the years of bouncing between dancing and performing in sex films, Laurie developed an addiction to methamphetamines and alcohol. She illuminated the cyclical grind of life in Porn Valley.

  I danced from age twenty-nine to thirty-five, and even at that age it was rough. I needed the speed to get me there and keep me dancing throughout the night. I needed the alcohol to cut the chase of the speed. The sugar in the alcohol also gave me a false sense of energy and security. In my experience, ninety-nine percent of the girls were in the same boat I was. There was usually one girl in the entire bunch that didn’t need the drugs or alcohol, and usually, she was the youngest one.

  In many ways, stripping is much harder on your body and your psyche than doing porn. When you are in a movie, you have wardrobe, a make-up artist, and a cameraman looking to get the best angle on you. When you are stripping, you don’t. Women are stripping because they can no longer get work in the movies. It takes a lot of energy to dance all night, so like I said you have got to have something to get you there and keep you there. You know in your mind that you’re not the same hot sex object that you used to be and the competition is fierce, yet when you come out on stage everyone is expecting to see the way you were, not the way you are now. It takes even more drugs and alcohol — and some tips — to make you feel like “you’ve still got it,” until the next day when you wake up, look in the mirror and your reality and mortality is staring back at you. Then you turn around and do it all over again. It is rough enough for a regular aging stripper, but to have the expectation of being what you used to be on top of it — yet, if you were to use a different name other than your porn name, nobody would come see you at all.

  I think it’s extremely sad that many of the girls don’t know how to become normal working people after porn, and they have such little self-esteem they think they can’t do anything else but rely on their aging and abused bodies. It’s a vicious, psychological cycle enhanced by your over-the-hill aging body. Again, I stripped for roughly five years and I would never do it again. I feel sorry for those girls. Porn was much easier and prettier.

  A few years before bowing out of movies indefinitely, Laurie was asked by director Bob Chinn to make a non-sex cameo appearance as a moll in a movie project Chinn modified from an original Johnny Wadd script he’d written years before titled Magnum Love (1999) with Billy Glyde, Veronica Hart, Chloe, and Mike Horner. Laurie’s final film came four years later.

  The very last movie that I performed in was titled Voyeur Vision (2003). I was forty years old and used the name “Misty Dawn” for the very last time. I had left the industry several times and returned. This would be my last movie. I looked great and wanted to be remembered that way.

  A more mature version of her former self, Holmes retained her sex appeal in Voyeur Vision playing one of the temptresses to entice a Federal Agent employed by a United States Senator in a special program designed to prove prostitution should be decriminalized.

  When Laurie finally retired from performing, she was hired to work in various capacities for adult film production companies situated in Las Vegas such as Hollywood Video and VCX “The Home of the Classics.”

  Not one to mince her words while addressing the subject of the contemporary pornographic movie industry, Holmes believes there is a distinct difference between the current genre and her era even though she acknowledged the business was flawed during the time she was employed.

  I feel that the industry today is disgusting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always been a meat market, but there was a time when, even though the industry was a sex industry, it had class and it had art form. The golden peak years of porn are gone forever — we could never bring them back. Today, it is how many cocks can be shoved up an ass at the same time. It’s about gangbangs and degradation. Psychologically, I believe it was damaging years ago when we were being filmed having relatively normal sex, but the outcome of what the people in the industry today are going to have to deal with afterwards is far worse. What will the long-term repercussions be for those people? To be exploited for doing things that society doesn’t accept is bad enough, but being exploited for doing things that are totally sexually abnormal in society’s eyes is even worse. I believe we will see many more suicides in years to come, not to mention, the physical damage these individuals are doing to themselves. I recently watched a woman shove a dildo larger then a baby up inside of her rectum. She will probably be wearing Depends diapers by the time she is thirty-five.

  I consider myself a very strong person. Even so, there were times that I thought about suicide. All I had to do was pull that trigger and I wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout from porn anymore. There are three reasons why I didn’t ever follow it through. My two sons were the two main reasons, and not wanting to give the industry that much satisfaction was the third. We are worth more dead to the industry than we are alive. Our content is worth more money to the production companies after we are gone. You are a dime a dozen alive to them otherwise.

  If I could go back in time and change anything in my life, I would have never worked in pornographic movies. I have to wonder how different my life would have been. The problem is that even if it’s something you think you know you’re getting into at the age of eighteen, what the hell does anyone really know until forty? A vulnerable person can be convinced of just about anything at a young age, but until you have experienced life, the world, relationships, and all the ups and downs sociologically — I think the statistics speak loud and clear.

  Many times, I have been scrutinized or judged unfairly because of my involvement in the adult industry. Sure, nobody ever held a gun to my head or twisted my arm to do it. Still, I feel I was a victim. I was a young kid, and woman, and exploited many times with nothing more to show for it than the fact that I survived it all. I believe that porn tears down the moral fiber of a person’s sexuality. It destroys lives, relationships, futures, and families. If you think that it doesn’t, ask a porn producer if he would want his own daughter fucking in front of the camera and engaging in sex acts so physically challenging that can actually physically and psychologically destroy her later. He will tell you “No,” I guarantee it. We didn’t subject our families to pornography. We did our thing on the set and then c
ame home to our families — all of us. There was a reason for that.

  Despite her strong feelings about having participated in performing sexual acts before a camera, more importantly perhaps, Laurie understands that no matter how much a person’s life can change after leaving adult film work, portions of the past remain a constant.

  You know, once you are involved in the industry it just becomes a part of you forever. It’s not that you are close friends with everyone forever, but you see each other or hear of each other now and then as years go by. It’s a part of your world away from your world if that makes any sense. Unless a person has ever been a part of the industry it is hard to understand us, but we share a connection that never ends.

  Health Risks

  I would discourage anyone, male or female from doing pornographic movies and so would John Holmes if he were alive today. The way he felt in the end was that it was despicable. John wanted health insurance benefits, and yes, some counseling as well as education and financial building for what he truly considered his people. He wasn’t named “The King of Porn” until long after he was gone and not until they discovered how valuable his content was. In fact, he felt as if the industry had literally turned their backs on him while he lay dying of AIDS in his hospital bed. I witnessed this so I know. I think his dying at that point was a desirable option for John as this was his belief in the end.