The Other Hollywood Read online

  The Turkey Raffle

  MIAMI

  1968–1969

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I wanted to own a topless bar because I wanted to be around topless girls, and that’s a great way to do it.

  I was making good money flying—first crop dusting as a pilot for Minute Maid Orange Juice and then for the Ocean Reef Club. But bars were expensive, so I ended up buying an old raunchy beer bar on North Miami Beach, at 123rd Street. I think I paid maybe $2,000 for it. It was a real wreck.

  LINDA LOVELACE (PORN STAR): I was getting on the Taconic State Parkway in New York, coming out of second gear—it was raining. And this big Chrysler came over the hill; I could see he was going into a skid and coming across the highway. This all happened in two seconds, and then it was over.

  My forehead and face hit the windshield; part of one eye was hanging down, my jaw was broken, and my lower front teeth were sticking through my chin. The steering wheel broke my ribs and lacerated my spleen and liver. This was followed by a leaking of my intestine and peritonitis.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: We painted up the place, put in colored lights, I hired some girls, and called it the Las Vegas Inn. It was a topless beer bar.

  But because I was catering mostly to bikers and construction workers, it soon became a nude beer bar. I mean, my girls would be totally nude when they weren’t supposed to be, but they’d do it with the door locked, and luckily they never did it with any ATF agents in the place.

  LINDA LOVELACE: When they released me from the hospital, I went back down to Florida to live with my parents to recuperate, and my mother was really rough on me. “You have to be in by eleven o’clock. Call me, when you get there—so we’ll know where you are and who you’re with.” And if I came in one minute after 11:00 P.M., she would smack me in the face.

  I had just turned twenty-two.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I had a big, two-story house, with three or four girls living with me downstairs, and upstairs was a room we just used for screwing around.

  Then a friend of mine, Warren, broke up with his old lady, and said, “Chuck, I need a place to stay for a few days.”

  I said, “Okay, come stay with me. Stay upstairs.”

  LINDA LOVELACE: My mother would even look up my date’s driver’s license to make sure he had no violations or anything. And most of the guys I’d go out with had to borrow their parents’ car, and my mother would ask them if they had a bank account and how much they had in their savings. You know, like, whoa, too many rules and regulations.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I don’t think Linda was a prostitute before I met her, and she really wasn’t one after I met her, either. But she was not an inexperienced little farm girl from northern New York—like she’d have you believe.

  When I met her, she was dating another married guy—a biker who used to come in my bar all the time. He kind of told me about her. She was kind of a hot-to-trot, sleep-around kid.

  LINDA LOVELACE: My best friend Patsy is actually the one that introduced me to Chuck Traynor. He told her he was looking for bathing suit models or something. Patsy didn’t go out with him, but she had danced in his topless bar. That didn’t bother her at all. But I never would’ve done it.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Patsy brought Linda into the bar one night. She was kind of a cute, skinny-looking chick, but she had this big scar down the front of her body.

  Patsy said, “Oh, she’s really depressed because she’s got this big scar, and nobody wants to go out with her.”

  Later, I came up with the idea about the necklace to cover the scar. I showed her how to put the beads in front of her and dance topless. Even when the necklace swings or moves, there was still a shadow. So the necklace always drew enough attention away from the scar.

  LINDA LOVELACE: When I met Chuck, he had a Jaguar and a bar, and it seemed like he had his life together.

  So my mother didn’t do that to Chuck—ask all those questions. I think he got off the bank account rap by telling her he had his own bar. Plus he had an XKE Jaguar. My mother was impressed with that.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I told Patsy, “Hey, I got a roommate, Warren, and you know, the four of us can go someplace.”

  It was basically a double date. Warren had one of them fancy-ass Mustang Mach IIs. So Linda started dating Warren and moved into my house with him.

  LINDA LOVELACE: Chuck said I could stay at his house, so I wouldn’t have my mother constantly telling me what time to be home and stuff like that. I viewed it as a good opportunity for me in a lot of ways.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: One time I was gonna go upstairs and take a shower, and I said, “Hey, Warren, ya wanna take a shower with Linda and me?”

  He said, “Yeah.” So the three of us took a shower.

  You know, Linda was no virgin.

  LINDA LOVELACE: Chuck did have lots of money all the time, and he’d take me to dinner. We’d drive around during the day and stop at some shop, and he’d buy me a shirt or something or a piece of custom jewelry. Some hippie kinda thing. But I think his car impressed me more than anything.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Even though Warren went back to his wife, Linda kept staying at my house, and I was having sex with the three or four other girls living with me. We had a giant double waterbed, and Linda just sort of became one of the girls on the giant waterbed. It was totally open. I mean, the girls ran around the house nude most of the time, probably because they ran around the club nude most of the time.

  LINDA LOVELACE: When I was younger, my father and I were really buddies. We were very close, even though I had a half-sister. Then we moved to Florida when I was sixteen, and my mother started to go through this change of life, and she got really strange.

  She accused my father and me of having an affair because he wanted to buy me a sports car to go to college with. He was just proud of me; he was just excited he could do something for me. And my mother made all these weird accusations and gradually my father’s and my relationship sort of dwindled into nothing.

  LENNY CAMP (PHOTOGRAPHER/CONVICTED CHILD PORNOGRAPHER): Linda followed Chuck around like a puppy dog. She had read, “The way to make your lover fall in love with you is to write your name on his shoes, on the toilet, on the milk bottles…”

  Linda would write, “Linda and Chuck, Chuck and Linda, Linda and Chuck,” on all kinds of paper, and leave them all over the house. Pinned up to the wall, taped to the refrigerator…

  LINDA LOVELACE: Chuck wasn’t ugly, so I started dating him. At first he was like a gentleman—a real human being, you know? He would open the car door for me and light my cigarettes.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Linda was never a steady girlfriend or anything when we lived at the house. I was going out with a doctor’s daughter, named Ginger, that was about fifteen or sixteen years old. It was funny, her father hated me because I was in my mid-to-late twenties—and here I was with his “virgin” daughter.

  LENNY CAMP: Chuck was a funny guy. These girls did fall in love with him, you know? Like the first girl that he had was eighteen years old, but she was madly in love with him. She was at his beck and call. She would do anything for him. Anything.

  LINDA LOVELACE: There were a lot of strange things going on at the bar. When we walked in to close out the register—the girls would usually call Chuck to tell him not to come yet. But this one night some of the girls were topless when we got there, and some of them were naked. Let’s just say strange perversions were going on.

  Chuck said, “I should have called first to make sure things were okay. These girls are getting out of hand! I’m going to have to put a stop to this!”

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: We’d do a turkey raffle, but it really wasn’t a turkey we were rafflin’. On Friday evening, everybody came in, paid a buck, got a ticket, and drew a number out of a hat. Then we had a drawing, and if you won a number from one through seven—that stood for each one of the seven girls—then you got the girl you drew.

  You got her for whatever you wanted her for. I was selling five or six hundred dollars’ worth of tickets a week. But if we did
n’t know you, if we thought you were a cop, then you got the turkey.

  You could always tell who the cops were, and we’d bring ’em this old dried-ass-up turkey out of the refrigerator.

  And he’d go, “What’s this?”

  I’d say, “It’s the turkey you just won.”

  He’d say, “Well, I thought…”

  I’d say, “You thought what? What’d you think?”

  We got away with that for a long, long time. But the cops were always after my ass.

  LINDA LOVELACE: The girls were turning tricks there; they were having orgies there after-hours. I was so naive about that kind of stuff, I really was. When Chuck said, “Well, that one’s a hooker, and that one’s a junkie, and that one’s a prostitute…”

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Linda didn’t like that too much.

  LINDA LOVELACE: Chuck told me, “I had this old business where I used to get people together, and you know, they’d spend some time together.” Eventually I realized he was talking about prostitution.

  BILL KELLY: Chuck Traynor was a nickel-and-dime guy as far as I was concerned. He wasn’t big-league or anything. So I don’t think I ever did a real extensive investigation on him. I considered Chuck Traynor a pimp. What else would you call him? Miss Linda Lovelace’s agent?

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Linda didn’t have any problems with anything back then. She now says that orgies and things that went on were actually set up hooker deals, and that she hated that, and I’d beat her up if she didn’t do it, but that was bullshit.

  I mean, everybody would just get stoned and party, you know?

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

  NEW YORK CITY

  1969–1970

  HARRY REEMS (PORN STAR): In 1969, everybody in the East Village was going to make it as an actor. Whether you went to an anti–Vietnam War rally or a macrobiotic restaurant, all the talk was about auditions.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS (PORN STAR): I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, about fifty miles west of New York City. When I was about sixteen, I learned how to write my mother’s name on notes to get out of school—and then I’d take the train into the city to go to auditions.

  My whole growing up consisted of me in front of a mirror playing records like West Side Story and Bye Bye Birdie. I really wanted to be Ann-Margret, to tell you the truth.

  ERIC EDWARDS (PORN STAR): While I was in college in Waco, Texas, I got a scholarship from ABC Television to go to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. They auditioned twenty thousand people from all over the country, and I think they picked sixteen people. I mean, this was the big point in my career, it was like a stepping stone—I was getting letters from Lillian Gish, from the president of ABC, from all these top executives saying, “You have received a scholarship to come to New York.”

  In fact, Lillian Gish handed me my diploma. Henry Fonda was there backstage; I spoke to him in awe. I was, like, melting.

  GEORGINA SPELVIN (PORN STAR): One of my first experiences in New York was when the state employment office sent me to see about a modeling job. It was a big, high-class studio, and I had to see someone with one of those hairdresser names: “Mr. Charles” or “Mr. Gary.”

  After everyone else had left, he brought me into the studio and—through the course of taking many pictures—he eventually got me very drunk and nude and then he balled me. I don’t even remember how I got home; I passed out midway through the thing. But I never got the chance to tell him I had the clap, and I wondered how long it took him to find out and connect it to me.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: My dad was in the advertising business, and he really tried to discourage me from modeling. One of his big accounts was Avon—“DING DONG! AVON CALLING!”—so he knew about models. He told me, “It’s a cutthroat business. It really stinks. And I don’t want you to be involved.”

  ERIC EDWARDS: When I got to New York I was signed with the William Morris Agency. I had a three-year contract. I was sent out to different auditions and movie companies, and I was getting work—I had Close-Up toothpaste and Gillette TracII commercials running on television.

  HARRY REEMS: I enrolled in a no-fee neighborhood acting class. Presto! I was doing Coriolanus in some marginal coffeehouse where they passed the hat around at the end of the performance. I hammed it up to high heaven. I was lousy. But those scrapings out of the hat somehow kept me alive until my roommate split for greener pastures. In no time, I went from burgers and beans to eviction notices and welfare.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: I figured the best way to get involved in being an actress was to be a model. So I went to the Eileen Ford Modeling Agency first—and Eileen Ford told me I was too fat. And my face wasn’t angular enough. And it was too flat. I was so humiliated.

  Then my dad started telling me, “Well, you’re too fat.” But I wasn’t fat. I was never fat.

  GEORGINA SPELVIN: I wanted to be a dancer. My first love has always been ballet; I still think it is the high church of dance. I still practice the principles on a daily basis. But I had neither the training nor the body to make it as a dancer.

  But I was fortunate enough to get a job as a replacement dancer in The Pajama Game on Broadway. Then I got into the chorus; then I got the understudy to the lead role. When the lady playing it, who was a gal named Neile Adams, decided she would rather run off and marry Steve McQueen, I got to play the lead role for the last year that the show ran in New York. Then I was invited to recreate the choreography and the role for a touring company that went to South Africa.

  SHARON MITCHELL (PORN STAR): My dad was a cop. A drunk, dysfunctional cop. You know, a womanizing kind of guy. My kind of guy, ha, ha, ha! A guy that I’ve been role modeling after—and looking for others just like that—all my life. I learned a lot of interesting examples from him. You know: lying, cheating, and associating with mobsters. I always had an Uncle Don this, an Uncle Vito that.

  Now that I look back on it, I had every toy in the world. And we had dryers and washers and everything. I mean, cops don’t make that much money, and we had this huge house.

  Then my mom hit him on the head with a frying pan—because he was out fucking someone else—and the marriage was over shortly thereafter.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: So after that I went to the Wilhelmina Modeling Agency—and, God, Wilhelmina was just so nice to me. She accepted me, and she signed me. I was totally thrilled.

  Needless to say, though, I didn’t get that many modeling jobs. It was tough because at that time Twiggy was in—flat and skinny. Even though I didn’t have big boobs or anything, I was very athletic.

  I did do a Clairol commercial, and they ruined my hair. It was falling out in the sink. It was horrible.

  GEORGINA SPELVIN: When I came back from South Africa, I couldn’t get another Broadway show, try as I might. I did shows and stock and touring companies and what have you, but my next appearance on Broadway wasn’t until Cabaret. And again, I went in as a replacement and did the show for about the last year and a half of its run. By that point, I was getting pretty long in the tooth to be a dancer. And I got tired of not having any money.

  ERIC EDWARDS: I had major commercials running on television and had some good residuals coming in. Still, there were times I needed to pay the rent.

  But it wasn’t just the rent. I was going through a divorce—and I thought the porn business would help me to prove I was a sexual person. My wife wasn’t all that interested in sex. She blamed me for all of our problems. And I believed her. I thought I was a lousy fuck.

  So when I saw an ad in Screw magazine that was looking for actors and actresses who were willing to, you know, take off their clothes and “do it,” I submitted my photo.

  GEORGINA SPELVIN: I started working for the JCPenney Company in the audiovisual department, creating slide shows, creating soundtracks, doing a lot of tech stuff. And in the course of that, we made a series of short films—what they called point-of-sale (P.O.S.) presentations—around department stores.

  I became abs
olutely entranced with film and film editing. I thought, “This is what I want to do when I grow up! Thank you!”

  HARRY REEMS: One day two old veterans of burlesque came to the drama workshop looking for a “third banana,” a young guy who would help them through all the wheezes that have been used on the circuit since the beginning of time—the nuthouse bit, the golf bit, the crazy doctor bit.

  The old duffers offered me a hundred and seventy-five clams, and I was on my way. First stop: Staten Island. The next stop was Atlantic City. There we got third billing behind the headliner, Damita Jo, and “The Astonishing Assie: Interpreter of Exotica,” which translated to “stripper.”

  SHARON MITCHELL: Where I grew up in Jersey, I was a hick, and I was adopted. My family were farmers. New Jersey was the Garden State—all dairies and farms and woods and lots of snow and animals.

  My mom was having trouble getting child support from my dad. So it was me and mom and my grandmother. I was down on a dirt road, you know? The house looked like Tobacco Road. I was really embarrassed to walk into my own house. When the school bus would drop me off, I would walk to the neighbors’ house.

  HARRY REEMS: Assie really lived up to her stage name. She was a beautiful Puerto Rican; woman—and she’d come out onstage and say, “El-lo, my name is Assie; would you like to see my pussy?”

  Assie would lift her skirt and underneath she was wearing a G-string with a pussycat appliquéd on. For me, it was love at first sight.