A VERY POPULAR GUY in my collection of male tricksters was a porn star by the name of John Holmes. John was a legend. While flaccid his penis was said to be nine to eleven inches long and perhaps an inch or so longer when erect. However, the real truth will never be known. Every source lists a different statistic. But whatever length it was, John was gifted with a mighty long schlong.
I once introduced John to George Cukor. After an hour with him George called me up and said, “Yes, well, interesting, but . . .”
“But what, George?” I prodded.
“Well, he is certainly beautifully hung but the poor boy really doesn’t know what to do with it,” he said.
George went on to say that poor old John had trouble getting an erection and also couldn’t ejaculate. When I asked George why he thought that was he said that John was probably so addicted to stuff like coke and heroin that he had permanent erectile dysfunction and could no longer achieve a hard-on. I knew that John had a drug habit, and a very bad one at that. But then George jokingly went on to say that John probably had so little gray matter upstairs that any blood that flowed from his tiny brain to his gigantic penis may have caused him to pass out. George was not bereft of humor.
John Holmes was not gay, but he did anything for money, including gay porn movies. Lots and lots of them. As he was totally addicted to drugs he did whatever was requested of him either in front of or behind a camera to pay for his habit. He often bragged that he had slept with over ten thousand women and that he had made well over a thousand porn movies but I firmly believe both figures are gross exaggerations. As time went by John became totally broke. He had innumerable affairs and was married twice but he ended up a lonely, broken, and impoverished man. Drug dependency, the demands of the pornographic industry, and a lack of inherent intelligence were an unfortunate combination.
John eventually joined a crime group known as the Wonderland Gang. They were responsible for various thefts, extortion rackets, and drug dealings. In the early eighties he got on the wrong side of the gang and they began to threaten him because of money that he owed them. At about the same time he developed a relationship with the notorious L.A. drug dealer and nightclub owner Eddie Nash. When threatened by the gang John told them that Nash had a large stash of money and drugs in his house. In June 1981 he engineered a robbery in which the Wonderland Gang broke into Nash’s home. Although John himself did not personally take part in the robbery Nash accused him of it. Forcing John to confess that the Wonderland Gang was responsible for the break-in, Nash arranged to have four of the gang’s members murdered. It was never determined whether John himself took part in the murders but, for all intents and purposes, his career as a porn star was over after that. He was jailed for a short time and then released for lack of suitable evidence. He was later arrested again and charged with all four murders but finally acquitted. In the mideighties he married again and spread rumors that he was suffering from colon cancer. The truth was that he had AIDS. He died on March 13, 1988, at the age of forty-three, a totally impotent and impoverished has-been.
The whole tragic escapade taught me one thing: I had to be extra cautious about who I included in my little black book of tricksters. Fortunately, I did not arrange tricks for John once he became a big porn star, but the sad story of John Holmes’s downfall still made a lasting impression on me.
27
The Seventies
As the sixties began inching toward the seventies my daughter Donna grew into a lovely young lady. A few years before she started college at Cal State University in Northridge I had bought her a brand new Volkswagen Bug. She treasured that car the same way she had looked after her dolls and toys as a child. Donna was a loving, beautiful person. She lived at home with Betty until she was twenty-two and then I set her up in her own little apartment near the college campus, from where she finally graduated with a teaching degree. I was so proud of her.
One hot summer afternoon in 1970 I went to check up on Betty at our North St. Andrews Place house. As I drew up I saw Donna’s Volkswagen parked outside. That’s good, I thought. Donna was visiting her mother. I was going to see both of them, a rare occurrence now that Donna had an apartment of her own. As I opened the front door I heard Betty whimpering in the kitchen. When I found her she was crying over a pot of soup that she was stirring on the stove. When I asked her what was wrong she told me that Donna had taken ill and was lying down in her old bedroom.
As I opened Donna’s bedroom door I saw that the curtains were closed and the room was in darkness. I didn’t want to wake her but when Betty came in with a bowl of soup Donna stirred and sat up. I opened the curtains, only to get the shock of my life. Poor Donna looked awful. Her face was pale and she was obviously in great pain.
When I asked her what was ailing her she began to sob uncontrollably. Then she came out with it. She had gotten pregnant and had gone to have an abortion that morning. Clearly, it had been a botched back-street job because she was bleeding badly and had a high fever. We summoned an ambulance immediately but two days later she went into a coma and never revived. Forty-eight hours after arriving home my darling Donna was dead.
The event resonated on the deepest level with me. The tragedy was all the more difficult to bear because my own mother had been twenty-three years old, the same age as Donna, when she had given birth to me. And in an even harsher twist of fate, my brother Donald had been killed in battle on Iwo Jima when he was twenty-three. And Donna had even been named after him.
It was a devastating time. Betty and I shared our grief but the pain was almost intolerable. We both suffered terribly. After that awful event, whatever remained of the relationship between Betty and me became even more strained, more distant, more detached. I continued to care for her, of course. We still had a home together. But little else remained between us. We had separate bedrooms in our little house and, on those very infrequent occasions when I did sleep at home and not with some trick or other, Betty and I never had sex.
I was overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt brought on by how little I had really seen of my daughter during her brief life. She had been such a sweet, loving, good-natured person. And now she was gone.
Betty was forty-five years old and I was forty-three. In the years to come she would slowly retreat into her shell, living out her life in quiet solitude at North St. Andrews Place. As for me, I hid my pain deep down inside and came to terms with the fact that, no matter what, life had to go on.
ONE OF MY VERY GOOD FRIENDS at that time was producer Ross Hunter. I had first met him back in the fifties when he was producing low-budget romantic comedies for various studios, many of them starring Doris Day. Ross had so many successful pictures under his belt that one of the studios regarded him as a profitable asset worthy of a special gift, so the studio bought him a gorgeous house on Truesdale Place in Beverly Hills. Ross was gay and lived with his longtime lover, the set decorator and later producer, Jack Mapes. Because it sounded more classy and trendy, Jack went by the French version of his name: Jacques. He had worked on many good movies, including Singin’ in the Rain. I often used to fix up tricks for both Ross and Jacques, but always together. They were a couple in every way, but when it came to sex they often enjoyed indulging in a ménage à trois or a foursome. I had lots of willing participants for them to choose from.
Among Ross’s many credits were Flower Drum Song, Madame X, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and, in 1970, the film that made a fortune for Universal Studios, Airport. The night he screened it in his large home theater Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and many other big Hollywood names were there. Even though my proper place was really at the wet bar at the back of the room Ross insisted that I sit down and enjoy the show with everyone else. He was always like that. At the end of any screening he would go around the room asking for feedback and opinions, and he always included me. One night in 1972 he threw a dinner party and announced that he was going to produce a musical remake of the classic 1937 fantasy adventure, Lost Horizon, directed by
the great Frank Capra and starring Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, and my good friend Edward Everett Horton. Later that night, when all his guests left, Ross and Jacques were sitting in the kitchen sipping a nightcap as I packed the last of the glassware away.
I turned to Ross and said, “Ross, you surely aren’t serious about remaking Lost Horizon, are you?”
Ross squinted at me over his brandy and said, “Sure, I am. Why ever not?”
“Because,” I retorted, “the original was a classic. You can’t trivialize it by turning it into a musical.”
But it was a case I wasn’t going to win.
Ross told me that he had already lined up British director Charles Jarrott to direct it. Jarrott had recently won acclaim for his direction of Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots. He said that Burt Bacharach was already writing the music for it. Russ said he was confident that the movie was going to be a hit. But I wasn’t sure. The whole idea just didn’t ring true. It turned out my hunch was right.
Despite the inclusion of stars like Peter Finch, Michael York, John Gielgud, Charles Boyer, George Kennedy, Liv Ullmann, and Sally Kellerman, when the movie was released in 1973 it turned out to be worse than a disaster. It was a complete flop. The critics loathed it and the public didn’t go to see it. But Ross held his guns. He never admitted his error and he certainly never said that I was right. Nevertheless Ross was a good guy and I always had a soft spot for him.
IN THE SEVENTIES pornography finally burst forth from the closet and made its way into mainstream America. In addition to Playboy you could now buy explicitly sexual girlie or boy magazines at certain news sellers and bookstores. In New York City Screw magazine, founded by porn publisher Al Goldstein in 1968, was available on most downtown street corners. But to see movies you had to go to a theater. Triple-X-rated cinemas began to proliferate in areas as conspicuous as Times Square in New York and on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Most of the movies were appallingly bad productions with terrible camerawork, pathetic lighting, ghastly editing, and substandard soundtracks, and featured actors who were atrociously untalented. And then one single film came along that changed every thing. It boosted porno movie making to new heights of technical and creative accomplishment. It also made porn more popular and profitable than ever. The year was 1972 and the movie was Deep Throat. It was made by a guy called Gerard Damiano and starred a pretty dark-haired and little-known twenty-three-year-old porn actress by the name of Linda Lovelace. It became a worldwide phenomenon and went on to make a fortune.
Linda played a girl with an anatomical anomaly. In the story she never enjoyed sex. She could not climax. A medical examination revealed that the poor girl was without a clitoris. However, closer investigation proved that she did have one, but it was situated in an unusual place, at the back of her throat. The only way for her to achieve an orgasm was to stick an erect penis down there, then vigorously thrust up and down on the shaft to stimulate her clitoris. The results of this activity are not too difficult to imagine. After the movie was released Linda became a popular talk show guest. She made headlines not only in the counterculture world and in the underground press but in newspapers nationwide and abroad. One night I got to meet her at a Beverly Hills party and we became quite good friends. Everyone wanted to meet her, including my pal, British-born motion picture director Tony Richardson.
Tony was in his midforties at the time and was fresh from a slew of highly successful films that had garnered critical acclaim. In 1961 he won a BAFTA Award for Best Film for A Taste of Honey and, in 1964, Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had honored him with two Oscars, one for Best Picture and another for Best Director for the raunchy period film Tom Jones starring a very young Albert Finney. In fact, under Tony’s direction Finney would be nominated for an Academy Award, as would many other actors who worked under Tony on later productions, including Laurence Olivier and Jessica Lange. Tony was a masterful director. His credits included intelligent, thought-provoking movies like The Entertainer, Charge of the Light Brigade, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Loved One, and Ned Kelly. When I first met him he was still married to lovely British actress Vanessa Redgrave. However, it was a short marriage, only five years, ending in divorce in 1967 (the couple had been blessed with a delightful little daughter by the name of Natasha).
I did not know Vanessa Redgrave very well, although I had met her at various parties in town. Tony was another matter. I knew him intimately. He was gay and, once he had moved to L.A. from England, he settled down in a nice little rented place on King’s Road in Hollywood. I often worked for him there as a bartender. Also, I was constantly arranging tricks for him. When Deep Throat came out Tony was extremely anxious to meet Linda Lovelace. He was curious about her talents and techniques. One day he called me up and told me that he was having a party for some of his friends. He said that he had had a brainstorm: he wanted to treat them to a lecture by Linda. He thought she could offer them valuable tips regarding oral sex. I told him that he must be kidding. I said no one knew more about oral sex than gay men. What on earth could she teach them? But Tony was adamant. He insisted on meeting Linda. I duly introduced the two of them and, for a fairly steep fee, Tony booked Linda to come and give a talk at a party at his home. About twenty-five movers and shakers in the gay community were invited and Tony asked me to come along and bartend. On the night of the party Linda showed up with a large latex dildo so that she could demonstrate the best techniques for fellatio. As her talk and demonstration got under way you could hear a pin drop. Every single male in the room was utterly fixated by every word she said.
She was very experienced at what she did but I have to admit that twenty minutes into the demonstration I leaned over to Tony and whispered, “Tony, old buddy, this is about as useful to this bunch of guys as having a ranch hand explain how to milk a cow to a gathering of dairymen. Sucking dick is what these queens do all the time, for cryin’ out loud. She’s not teaching them anything new. I think you’ve wasted your money.”
Tony shrugged, chuckled, and continued to listen intently as Linda carried on with her demonstration. Well, needless to say, when it was all over some of the guys went over to Linda and politely sat her down to offer her one or two tidbits of advice, and, out of courtesy and appreciation, most of them thanked her profusely for her time and advice.
Days later I was working at an afternoon cocktail party at a fashionable Beverly Hills women’s social event. Most of the ladies present had blue-dyed hair, were wealthy, bedecked in pearls, and in their late sixties to eighties. One of them told me that she knew Tony Richardson and his ex-wife, Vanessa Redgrave. As we chatted I mentioned Linda Lovelace’s lecture at Tony’s place. Well, it didn’t take long for the news to spread around the room. As I was leaving one of the more elderly of the women came up to me and pulled an address book from her purse.
“Do you think you could write down Miss Lovelace’s telephone number for me?” she enquired very demurely, with just a trace of embarrassment.
“Sure,” I said as I dug into my pocket for one of my little black books. Rummaging through it I found Linda’s number and scribbled it into the woman’s address book. She thanked me, placed the book back in her purse, and left to find her chauffeur-driven car. Two weeks later Linda called to tell me that she had just been paid a very attractive fee to give a demonstration of oral-sex and hand-job techniques to a large group of wealthy, dainty old ladies in Beverly Hills. Just goes to show. When it comes to sex, it is never ever too late.
28
Kew Drive
Kew Drive is located on a precipice high in the Hollywood Hills. It is about 2,000 feet above Sunset Boulevard and commands an unsurpassed sweeping view of the entire Los Angeles basin. To the east you look over the downtown area with its cluster of soaring skyscrapers, ribbons of freeways, and glittering nightscape. To the west lies Santa Monica and the shimmering Pacific Ocean. In between those two extremes stretches Hollywood, Century City, and
most of Beverly Hills. Beyond all that sprawls an endless carpet of cities and suburbs, including Long Beach, Orange County, and Anaheim. The view is unique, probably the best in all of L.A.
I knew the place well because an old friend of mine, choreographer Jack Cole, lived on Kew Drive. Jack’s major claim to fame was that he was the one who taught Marilyn Monroe how to dance in the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which she hoofed it opposite the great Jane Russell. Jack had an impressive résumé. Among his other credits are The Jolson Story, David and Bathsheba, River of No Return, There’s No Business Like Show Business, Kismet, Les Girls, and Some Like It Hot. Getting up to Kew Drive was not for the faint of heart. You had to negotiate a maze of narrow twisting roads, barely wide enough to accommodate one car. Meeting an oncoming vehicle was a major challenge and could take up to ten minutes to resolve. But frankly, the difficulty in getting there and the isolation of the place were part of its charm for me. My favorite property on the road was number 2114, owned by another friend of mine, Dale Orr.
Dale bought the property just before World War II, probably around 1936 or 1937. Dale was gay and had been an army pilot during World War I. Whenever I went up to see him or to take a young trick up there to spend the night with him I always cast envious glances at his charming and cozy two-bedroom house, its garden, guest cottage, and two small empty plots, one on either side of the property. I coveted the place more than anything else in the world. I began going to see Dale often, just so that I could be on that plot of land. As Dale aged he decided to move to something a little more accessible. He set his heart on a small lot behind a grove of avocado trees down the coast near the U.S. Marine Corps base of Camp Pendleton, just outside the town of Fallbrook. When I heard about his plans I went up to see him straight away. I was determined to buy that fantastic Kew Drive property from him.
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