The Other Hollywood Read online

  The Other Hollywood

  The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

  by Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne

  with Peter Pavia

  Because I miss her and love her more

  every day, this book is dedicated to:

  Shannon McNamara

  May 9, 1974–January 26, 2001

  “Everyone gets everything they want.

  Absolutely goddamn right.”

  —Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Authors’ Note

  Introduction

  Prologue: Nudie-Cuties

  Part One: The Sword Swallower

  The Turkey Raffle

  If You Can Make It There, You Can Make It Anywhere

  Vickie Killed the Nudie-Cuties

  Rent

  Doggie Style

  Mary Had a Little Lamb

  “Do You Mind If I Smoke While You Eat?”

  Screw’ed

  Don’t Count the Money, Weigh It

  Part Two: Porno Chic

  To Bowl or Not to Bowl?

  Size Matters

  Ebony and Ivory Snow

  Hair of the Dog

  Automated Vending

  Trading Up

  The Devil in Miss Steinberg

  Holmes v. Wadd

  Part Three: Show World

  Boxed Lunch

  The Ballad of Jason and Tina

  Turnover

  Plato’s Retreat

  Part Four: Family Affairs

  This Thing of Ours

  Memphis Backlash Blues

  Deep Cover

  Nobody Does It Better

  Looks Like We Made It

  Part Five: Porn Goes Better With Coke

  Down the Drain

  “Blow”

  Stayin’ Alive

  Seka to the Rescue

  Johnny on the Pipe

  Beauty and the Beast

  Falling Out

  St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

  “Ordeal”

  Part Six: Wonderland Avenue

  The Godfather of Hollywood

  “It’s Not Like You Said It Was Gonna Be”

  Nobody Waved Hello

  “Think This Will Fuck Up My Fourth of July Weekend?”

  Part Seven: Getting Out

  Method Acting

  On the Lam

  Don’t Embarrass the Bureau

  Grave’s End

  The Trial

  Part Eight: Video Vixens

  Hooray for Hollywood!

  Mr. Untouchable

  Shattered Innocence

  Fast Forward

  Club 90

  Kristie Nussman

  Part Nine: The Party’s Over

  The Porn Marriage

  To Be or Not to Be?

  Grid

  Pimping and Pandering

  Who Dropped the Dime on Traci?

  Part Ten: Backlash

  The Meese Commission

  Disappearing DiBe

  Conclusions

  Christmas Eve with Lori and the Kids

  The Last Chance

  Jail

  Another Mob Hit?

  Cry-Baby

  Divorce: Porn Style

  Part Eleven: Fame and Misfortune

  Rock and Roll High School

  Tired

  Cain and Abel

  The Bombing

  Part Twelve: Killer & Filler

  The Girls who Marc Built

  Severed

  The Great Escape

  John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut

  Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead

  Caught

  Waiting for Wood

  Going to Extremes

  Celebrity Porn

  Outbreak

  Source Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Authors

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Authors’ Note

  The overwhelming majority of the material in The Other Hollywood is the result of hundreds of interviews conducted by the authors. In some cases, interviews and text were excerpted from other sources, including anthologies, magazines, newspapers, journals, federal wire taps, police reports, FBI 302s, coroners’ reports, psychiatric records, court records and testimony, published and unpublished interviews, and other books. A list of these sources appears on page 591. We wish to acknowledge the contributions of these sources, which have enriched the content of our book.

  Introduction

  Of the seven years it took us to complete The Other Hollywood, we spent roughly half the time trying to sell the book to a publisher. Surprisingly—or not—pornography was considered an uncommercial venture by the literary publishing industry, who seemed to believe that even people who watched porn would not want to read about it. It wasn’t until we produced the three-hour television series Adults Only: The Secret History of the Other Hollywood for Court TV—and it became that channel’s highest rated original program to date—that the New York publishing world took notice. In the end, it was the maverick publisher Judith Regan who took a chance on us; we can only hope this book will live up to her expectations.

  Just before this book was sold to ReganBooks, my girlfriend, Shannon McNamara, died, after injecting herself with black tar heroin that had been infected with flesh-eating bacteria. When the infection spread throughout her body, Shannon was forced to undergo surgery to amputate her leg and did not survive the operation. I didn’t know she had been using dope, nor dealing it, and the resulting emotional fallout was crippling for me. For some time I couldn’t face the book—or myself, for that matter. It was Gillian McCain, my coauthor on Please Kill Me, who reminded me that if I didn’t continue my work on The Other Hollywood, no one else would tell the story of the porn industry’s rise from a marginal criminal enterprise of starving hippie actors and mob-sponsored back-alley loops to the multibillion-dollar juggernaut it is today.

  Through me, Gillian had become friends with former porn stars Jane Hamilton (whose stage name was Veronica Hart), Sharon Mitchell, and Tim Connelly, and she realized that their story demanded to be told—without the cheap put-downs and hip moralizing that every magazine reporter who went slumming in the porn ghetto had already exhausted. As Fordham professor Walter Kendrick wrote in The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, “Pornography turns writers and readers alike into amateur psychologists, who never ask what an object is, only what is meant by it…. Pornography names an argument, not a thing.”

  What I remembered, from my conversations with Gillian, was the goal that had started me down this path in the first place: to try to capture the birth and first few decades of the porn film business in all its hilarity and horror, to tell the story of America’s obsessive love/hate relationship with sex through the voices of those who embodied it. It was Gillian’s inspiration that sent me back to work, and I’m grateful to her for it, as for so much else.

  All these many words and hundreds of pages later, I’m certain we’ve left out as much as we were able to put in. If we haven’t managed to include your favorite porn star or stories from the making of your favorite porn film, I’m sorry. I regret that this isn’t the history of gay porn: We tried, but in the end discovered that that’s another book unto itself. And to all our born-again Christian friends, I’m sorry that we’re not judgmental in our narrative—but to our minds porn’s been demonized long enough. What we wanted to do, instead, was to let the people involved speak for themselves: the actors and actresses, cops and mobsters, producers and directors, photographers and writers, hustlers and suitcase p
imps, and everyone else in between. Whether my cowriters, Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia, and I have succeeded is for you to decide.

  —Legs McNeil

  October 2004

  Prologue: the NUDIE-CUTIES

  1950–1968

  JOHN WATERS (FILMMAKER): There was a theater in Baltimore, where I grew up, called the Rex Theater, that showed all the nudist camp movies—which was what we had before porno.

  Since I was twelve years old I’d read Variety, which was the only paper that covered the pornography business at the time. Variety reviewed every film—and I saw them all. Not just the exploitation movies, but the nudie movies, which had to be the most ludicrously unsexual films ever made, like a girl on a pogo stick or a nude volleyball game. You just saw their backs—asses and tits, but never dicks.

  DAVE FRIEDMAN (EXPLOITATION FILM PRODUCER): The exploitation business was an extension of the circus carnival—girlie shows, freak shows, gambling games, rides, ballyhoo, hullabaloo, all done at a local level. But think about this: If you’re in the carnival business, you can be in only one place at one time. And if you get rained out, you’re dead.

  But what if, all of a sudden, you can put this stuff inside? And be in more than one place at one time? That’s when these guys started figuring out: “Hey, we’ll put this crap on film!”

  JOHN WATERS: Kroger Babb was one of the first great exploitation filmmakers. He went around to bingo halls and firehouses with his movie Mom and Dad that played for ten years all over the whole world.

  Why? Because Mom and Dad showed the birth of a baby. It was the only way to show parental nudity at the time. I guess men liked looking at the vaginas, and ignored the baby—which is really scary—birth as an erotic act. And they would have men see it in the day and women see it at night. They also had fake nurses selling sex education literature.

  So Kroger Babb is one of my heroes. I mean, I have the poster for Mom and Dad in the hallway of my house.

  DAVE FRIEDMAN: The exploitation filmmakers quickly realized they could make a picture about any controversial subject—as long as it was done in bad taste.

  They had to do only one thing: They had to “square it up,” like you do in the carny. The “square-up” is the pitch at the beginning of the picture where they say, “The producers of this picture show you these scenes not in any terrible attempt to exploit this subject, but to make the public aware that these things exist in our beloved land, and that through education it will be brought to the attention of the proper authorities, so that child marriage can be stamped out, so that dope can be stamped out, so that miscegenation can be stamped out, so that juvenile delinquency can be stamped out…”

  JOHN WATERS: The exploitation film business was an industry based on slowly and sneakily showing what the studios wouldn’t show—like the nudist camp movies.

  DAVE FRIEDMAN: These movies were about as erotic as walking through the cold storage room of Swift and Company in Chicago. You got these poor, tired old dames with their breasts hanging below their navels, and these old guys walking around…

  Nudist camps were the salt mines of sex, so to speak.

  ROGER EBERT (FILM CRITIC): The nudist camp movies were one of the most pathetic and least significant of the 1950s subgenres, of interest largely because of the actors’ difficulties in manipulating bath towels while standing in shrubbery. Their inevitable strong point was a volleyball game made somewhat awkward by the need for the male actors to keep their backs to the camera.

  DAVE FRIEDMAN: Nudist camp movies couldn’t show “pickles and beaver”—which was the trade term for genitalia.

  ANN PERRY (FILMMAKER): If you accidentally got a shot of a man’s penis, the cameraman would yell, “PICKLE!” and have to reshoot the scene.

  JOHN WATERS: That took a long, long time—to show pubic hair. So you really had to use your imagination—because naked people hidden by pogo sticks are not exactly erotic.

  BUNNY YEAGER (MODEL /PHOTOGRAPHER): Doris Wishman made all her movies down here in Miami. I did a lot of her stills. Doris was a pioneer, of sorts, because nudist camp movies were pretty bold for that time, even though she wasn’t showing total nudity. I think the first one was called Nude on the Moon.

  DORIS WISHMAN (FILM DIRECTOR): I don’t care what people say. I make my films with love and care, and as I always say, “Not Eastman Color, but Wishman Blood.”

  BUNNY YEAGER: Doris couldn’t afford to shoot her films with sound in them, so when somebody’s talking, you only see the reaction shots. After filming was finished, she would hire experienced actors and have them dub in the sound in New York.

  DORIS WISHMAN: I think Chesty Morgan was from Poland. So I had to dub all of her lines because you couldn’t understand what she was saying. And a lot of the people I worked with couldn’t speak properly, so I had to go back and dub in their lines, which was more costly—but at least it was professional, and you could understand what they were saying.

  DAVE FRIEDMAN: Bunny Yeager was very important in those early days because she had a stable of chicks in Miami that you couldn’t believe. You see, Bunny had something going for her as a woman. She would see a beautiful girl walking down the street, and she could walk up to her and ask her to pose.

  BUNNY YEAGER: I was always out looking for girls because at that time I had a rivalry going with Russ Meyer. We were both selling pinups to the same magazines. And Russ always had the big-busted girls—bigger than anybody. And I just thought, “Where does he find them?”

  DAVE FRIEDMAN: Bunny would say, “Excuse me, dear. I’m Bunny Yeager. Have you ever considered modeling?”

  The girl would say, “No.”

  And Bunny would say, “Well, would you consider it? Maybe with underwear or maybe…uh, nude?”

  If that would’ve been me, the girl would’ve smacked me in the mouth.

  BUNNY YEAGER: I was a high fashion model. I posed in furs and dresses and did runway work. And if you did that, you weren’t supposed to do bathing-suit modeling, but I liked bathing-suit modeling—so I went out and got my own work.

  I was kind of a maverick at the agency; I did what I wanted to do. They didn’t like it, so I said, “As long as you get paid your fee—what do you care?”

  BILL KELLY (FBI SPECIAL AGENT): I was in love with Bunny. When she was thirty years old, she was the best-looking thing on two legs you ever saw.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR (LINDA LOVELACE’S FORMER HUSBAND AND MANAGER): Was Bunny Yeager good-looking? Well, you know, to a sixteen-year-old, anybody with long blond hair and big boobs is good-looking, ha, ha, ha. That was enough for me.

  BUNNY YEAGER: I had been called “The World’s Prettiest Photographer” on U.S. Camera magazine. Here’s how it happened: Roy Pinney, who was a New York photographer, came down to Miami every year to shoot stock photos—a woman pushing a grocery cart, a woman holding a baby—and he used me as a model.

  After we finished, Roy said, “Let’s shoot some cheesecake—you know, in some bathing suits.”

  So while he was shooting me, he asked, “What are you doing these days? Anything new?”

  I said, “Oh, I’m going to photography school.”

  He said, “That’s a good angle. I’d love to do a human interest story on you.”

  I said, “Well, that’s lying because I’m not really a photographer; I’m just taking this course for the fun of it.”

  DAVE FRIEDMAN: Back then, there were thousands of young girls and guys that lived up north, and come wintertime, they’d do anything in the world to get out of that weather. They’d come down to Miami and become waiters, waitresses, whatever—anything to make enough money to spend the winter in Florida.

  BUNNY YEAGER: That’s how I met some of the girls, because I’d modeled with them. Most of them were too shy to pose in bikinis, so I was thought of as a little risqué. But that’s how I met Maria Stinger; her husband showed me a picture of his wife and asked me to make a bikini for her. He said she was shy, but she looked like a movie star. I said, “D
oes she do any modeling?”

  Eventually she agreed to let me shoot her at her house. But I preferred shooting in natural light, so I asked her, “Would you like to pose with some wild animals?” She said she loved animals, so I said, “Let’s go up to ‘Africa U.S.A.’ in Boca Raton. I’ll make you a little leopard bikini, and we’ll take some pictures with live cheetahs.”