The Other Hollywood Read online

  We had this biker from Homestead, Florida, doing the film with his girlfriend, some girl named Vickie. Since it was soft-core, the guys weren’t allowed to get erections when we were shooting. But while we were taking a break, her boyfriend got an erection, and Vickie says, “Watch this.”

  She started at the top and went right down to the bottom. And that was the first time I’d ever seen deep throat.

  And I was like, “Oh my God; I can’t believe this!”

  VULTURE (SOUTH FLORIDA MOTORCYCLE GANG MEMBER): Almost all of us bikers were all hanging out with strippers because we were partying all night, getting high all night, and sleeping all day, you know? So the best kind of girlfriend to have, for us, anyway, was a stripper because then she’d be off working, making the money, while we was out whoring around!

  Plus, you could throw her on the back of your bike, and if you wanted to go to Atlanta, or New Orleans, or whatever, there was always some strip clubs she could work at. So you could stay on the road as long as you wanted and not have to worry about the money situation.

  LENNY CAMP: Vickie was so amazing that Sam Menning made a phone call to some money guy who told him to film her doing it. But Vickie’s biker boyfriend didn’t want her to do it, so Vickie slipped me her phone number before they left. About an hour later I called the number and I said, “Get on a bus, and come over.” You know, I didn’t even tell her to take a cab.

  So Vickie came over, and she stayed at my house. And she tells me, if she didn’t do deep throat, she couldn’t be a biker mama in this motorcycle gang in Homestead.

  VULTURE: Everything was free love. We weren’t passing around our old ladies, but we had plenty of chicks that hung around the club that would fuck whoever wanted to fuck them. You know, if ten guys wanted to fuck ’em in a night, that was fine. They had no problems with it. And chicks with chicks. It didn’t matter. I mean, sex was just no big deal.

  LENNY CAMP: So the motorcycle gang from Homestead are really the people who invented deep throat, but Vickie is the one who disseminated it.

  Yeah, of course she showed me how she did it. I had her staying at my place—are you kidding? Who the hell wouldn’t? And it was unbelievable. Just unbelievable!

  BILL KELLY: I spent half my career on Lenny Camp. I got him in the penitentiary so many times, I lost track. Lenny Camp was the Pied Piper of photographic pornography in South Florida. His real name was Leonard Joseph Campagno—Scumbag-Number-One-of-All-Time.

  LENNY CAMP: Vickie ends up staying at my place, and Sam Menning is giving her work doing bondage movies, so she could make some money.

  So one night there’s a knock at the door, and there’s Chuck Traynor and Linda Boreman. So we got to talking, and we went up to my spare bedroom, and Linda and Vickie started making it with each other.

  Oh, no, it wasn’t at Chuck’s prompting. Shit no, he was in the corner reading Playboy. Linda just did whatever she wanted. She and Vickie were doing this on their own—and both of them swore they had never done anything with a girl before.

  So I told Chuck, “Vickie does this thing—what she calls deep throat. She goes with these bikers in Homestead, and you have to be a deep-throat girl to hang out with these guys.”

  But Chuck was always very blasé. He was like, “So what? What does that mean?”

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I learned the deep throat technique in Japan when I was over there in the Marines. A buddy of mine and I lived with two hookers who could do deep throat—as well as a lot of other tricks.

  One had the ability to expand her ass big enough to put a fist in, and she could do the same thing with her cunt—expand it and tighten it back up to be able to hold your finger. But the deep throat technique, like anything else, can be learned in a couple of days.

  LENNY CAMP: Ninety percent of what Chuck says is just total bullshit. The night I told him about Vickie and deep throat, Chuck just stayed in the corner while the girls were teaching each other how to use the double-ended dildo on the bed.

  Vickie didn’t perform deep throat on Chuck that night. No, Chuck was very, very, very shy as far as having sex in front of people—although he liked watching other people have sex.

  LINDA LOVELACE: I think Chuck fucked me once a month or every six weeks—and when we had sex, it was bad. At first, I thought there was something wrong with me. I guess a woman always figures it’s her fault at first.

  I was so dumb.

  LENNY CAMP: Chuck had nothing to do with the girls. He was trying to be like Hugh Hefner. Oh, he would have loved to have been Hefner. He thought he was Hefner. But Chuck was a superpimp, that’s all he was. He put the talk on everybody. I mean, as far as he was concerned, it was whatever the girls could make, and whatever he could get away with. That’s all he wanted.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I’m shooting porno movies of Linda and other girls, and then Linda moved in to a houseboat with me and some other girl, and that’s when Linda became my old lady.

  Did I fall in love with her? Love? I think I probably loved her, somewhat…. I mean, it probably wasn’t like the way John Derek loved BoDerek. Because, you know, they called me the John Derek of the porno business.

  LINDA LOVELACE: My closest companion when I was with Chuck was my vibrator.

  LENNY CAMP: In the meantime, behind my back, Chuck gave Vickie his number. Within a matter of a week or so, Chuck, Linda, and Vickie were traveling to Coconut Grove and South Miami, putting on shows for people.

  I didn’t even know. A guy that worked in a bank down in Miami told me about it. He said, “Remember that guy, Chuck Traynor? He got two girls, and they put on an act. And they don’t get that much money, either.”

  I said, “Yeah, that sounds like them.”

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: See, in Miami, a $100 trick isn’t that easy. Unless you’re tied to a hotel or something, you had $20 tricks, maybe, or $25 tricks, but Linda was limited because she wasn’t really glamorous. She didn’t have any clothes. She couldn’t go to the beach and talk with anybody because, you know, she is not really a talker.

  In Miami, if a guy’s going to pay $100 or $150, he wants a chick he can take out to a club and carry on a conversation with. So we decided to go to Aspen, Colorado, because a friend of mine was opening a club out there, and he really liked the way our bar had been clearing $2,000 a week.

  LINDA LOVELACE: I had learned not to press Chuck for details, but this time he volunteered a little information. A friend of his had just started a bar in Aspen, and he needed a go-go dancer and an after-hours hooker.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: We got as far as Biscoe, Arkansas. We were in a Volkswagen, and a drunk rolled into us and totaled the car.

  LINDA LOVELACE: All of a sudden, Chuck’s little Volkswagen just took off. It had been hit from behind by a station wagon driven by a drunk. We swerved to the right, then to the left, then off into a ditch, and over onto one side. The next thing I knew, truck drivers were crawling all over the car, looking for a way to lift us out.

  I heard one of them say, “That little car has had it.”

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: The accident put Linda back in the hospital, and it put me in the hospital for a couple of days—screwed my teeth up here in front. The ski season was starting in Colorado, and by the time Linda got out of the hospital it was too late to go there. The guy hired another manager, and we were stuck in Little Rock.

  LINDA LOVELACE: Little Rock was definitely not Chuck’s sort of town. So we got a ride to New York—and that was definitely Chuck’s kind of town.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I didn’t know anybody in New York, but I’m a pretty fair cameraman, and I had done loops in the past. So we came here to the cold and rented an apartment in New Jersey.

  LINDA LOVELACE: After putting up a month’s security and month’s rent, Chuck had less than $50 left. He invested it in purchasing every sex tabloid in New York City.

  There were hundreds of people who made their livings peddling sex in New York. What’s amazing to me was how quickly one got to know them all. They were all links on the
same chain; you met one person, and he passed you along to the others. The still photographers knew the club owners who knew the madams who knew the eight-millimeter directors who knew the peep show kingpins who knew the adult bookstore owners and on and on. I swear, before the week was out, Chuck Traynor managed to meet every prominent pervert in New York.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: When we got to New Jersey, Linda went up to see her sister in upstate New York. I stayed in the city and said, “I’m gonna go find something to do.”

  So I went down to Forty-second Street and met a black guy who wanted to shoot crotch shots of chicks. I said, “I got a chick for ya.”

  I went back, got Linda, she posed for him, and then I asked, “What’s there to do here in New York? A country boy like me? A good honest John…”

  Rent

  NEW YORK CITY

  1970–1971

  FRED LINCOLN: I did my first loop for Butchie Peraino. I went to this place in Brooklyn, and Butchie was shooting film and Vinnie, his bodyguard, was shooting the stills. Butchie and I got along, and we were friends ever since. We were just the same kind of people. Italian people. And as I said, the girl was just gorgeous!

  I guess she was a German hooker. Blond hair, big tits, yeah, a beautiful girl. Oh, it was incredible!

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: When we first came to New York, someone said, “Go to the Film Center Building. There’s a lotta stuff goin’ on over there.”

  So I go up to the seventeenth floor, and I meet Lou Perry, who was really Lou Peraino. They all called him Butchie. I just walked in and asked if they were hiring anybody, and the girl sitting in front said, “You wanna be in a movie?”

  I said, “Uh, yeah, I’ll be in a movie.”

  She said, “Well, go in the back; talk to Butchie.”

  So I go back there. He was sitting in his office. I said, “I make movies. I’ve made a lotta movies.” I had made two or three, you know.

  Butchie said, “Well, tell you what. Why don’t you make me a few movies, and bring ’em in, and I’ll see if we can do it. How ’bout that?”

  So I said, “Okay.”

  FRED LINCOLN: I don’t think Butchie made any more loops after that. I think that first one was for fun; he was horny or something. But as soon as he figured out how to make a loop, he had other people make them. He bought eight-millimeters from other people.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I went and got Linda and rounded up some more people on Forty-second Street, just anybody that I talked to for more than two minutes. I’d ask, “Do you wanna do a porno film?”

  Most of the girls I knew back then were girls who were either dancing or turning tricks—but I mean, I’d ask waitresses, anybody. And usually I’d do it in a joking way, so if they screamed I’d say it was a joke.

  If they said, “Well, yeah, I dunno, maybe. How much money can I make?” then I’d take them up to the apartment and start making porno movies on the Bolex.

  ERIC EDWARDS: The place we shot my first loop was some loft on Forty-second Street. It kind of looked like a bedroom/studio set, with one cameraman with an eight millimeter windup camera.

  I was scared shitless, shaking up a storm, because I had no idea what I was in for. The cameraman was Teddy Snyder, and the girl was Linda Lovelace, only she wasn’t Linda Lovelace yet—she was just Linda Traynor, Chuck’s wife.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: We had gotten married before we left Miami. Mainly it was for her parents. Her mother was the kind that was always sending out private detectives and threatening this and that. She said, “You’re taking my daughter across state lines. I’m gonna getcha.”

  And I said, “Fuck her. We’ll get married, and then she can’t do nothing,” and that’s what we did.

  ERIC EDWARDS: So it was Linda and Chuck and another girl, some redhead. Chuck couldn’t perform, so I was brought in to perform with these two girls. And I started feeling fine, you know? I mean, I had two women that were kind of cute, and I was gonna make forty bucks, so I thought, “Wow!”

  GEORGINA SPELVIN: I had done some casting for a film on a boat, and one day a guy who was working the lights came over and asked me if I would play this madam. The older woman they had gotten to play the madam for all of the white slave traffic that was coming and going on this boat had gotten a better job.

  So I said, “Sure.” But I foolishly asked for a script—and they just stared at me, of course. They said, “Oh, just make up anything you want. But it does require a hard-core scene.”

  The movie was called High Priestess of Sexual Witchcraft.

  ERIC EDWARDS: Even though I was nervous, I did fine—probably because Linda did perform deep throat on me that very first time. And I was amazed.

  She swallowed my member all the way. I had never had that, no, no. There wasn’t even a name for it because Deep Throat hadn’t come out yet.

  The girls got fifty dollars, and I got forty, which was all right, you know, fine, fine, fine. We were there for about two hours. And from my first loop on, Linda kept calling me, saying, “Hey, you did good. Do you wanna work again? I got another job for you.”

  GEORGINA SPELVIN: I had helped cast the large black mass scene for the film. And while this scene was being shot, I was sitting on the throne next to the high priest of sexual witchcraft—who turned out to be Marc Stevens, who naturally asked, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  And we got to chatting. Very funny guy. And we just had a good time, you know?

  Marc Stevens was called Mr. Ten-and-a-Half because he reportedly had a ten-and-a-half-inch member when it was fully erect.

  HARRY REEMS: The address I had been given to go to shoot my first loop was in the East Seventies. The address turned out to be a tenement, a fourth-floor rear walk-up.

  I buzzed the buzzer of one Caprice Buzzard. Behind the door, there was lots of shuffling and shushing.

  “Who’s there?” a man whispered.

  “It’s me. The new boy,” I said.

  GEORGINA SPELVIN: I was having sex with the high priest and with the dude that was playing my son.

  Was I nervous? No. He was a very attractive young man, and I had always felt that having sex was the friendliest thing two people could do. I only realized in retrospect that I’d been the school tramp. I was the girl all the guys would take out to fuck—but never took to the dances.

  HARRY REEMS: “The new guy’s here,” Caprice Buzzard yelled. I assumed I’d be working with her, and I wasn’t turned on by the idea.

  Then I heard footsteps in the back room. Someone came down the hall toward me. It was a beautiful girl with a magnificent body. She looked like a young Gene Tierney. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  I knew I’d have no problem getting an erection. Or getting rid of it. In fact, it was starting already.

  The girl was Tina Russell.

  TINA RUSSELL (PORN STAR): I did not have any idea what was involved in a pornographic film. In the beginning, I had no type of contact with any part of the business. My husband, Jason, had seen only a couple of eight-millimeter loops years before while in the army.

  Anyway, my friend Suzanne, who had done some films, suggested the idea of us making loops because she really liked Bob Wolfe, the director. “He’s a real character!” she said.

  So as relaxed about nudity as we had always been, by ourselves and with our friends, we decided sure, why not? I assumed that we would make love—only it would be for a camera.

  Well, Bob Wolfe shot a ten-minute loop, during which he would leave the camera unattended several times while it was still running, and disappear for two minutes. Each time he returned with a fresh beer and yelled, “All right, sweetie, I’m comin’ in for a close-up.”

  So that was it! A few kisses, a lot of tongue action, some fondling, and a lot of spread shots. All I had to remember was to be sure not to look at the camera and to be sure to keep my legs spread directly to the camera.

  GEORGINA SPELVIN: We made quite a few films. I called them one-day wonders. Marc Stevens and I had sex together
on-screen many times, but he was like my kid brother. I didn’t have “affairs” with anybody; I just had sex with a lot of people—there was a group of about six players. I referred to us as “The Rep Company.” It included Marc Stevens, Harry Reems, Eric Edwards, Sean Costello, and of course Tina and Jason Russell.

  TINA RUSSELL: There was an incredible contrast between the types of jobs we did in those days. One night it was working in a dirty studio in the Forty-second Street district doing a soft-core, S and M job. The next day, it was a short job requiring a half-hour to an hour of making love for a hard-core fill-in, to spice up a film shot years before. Or maybe a job requiring only straight acting, not even nudity, in a higher-budget production.

  HARRY REEMS: When I arrived to shoot my first loop, Tina Russell was dressed like a hooker—in a short, short ribbed maroon miniskirt and a black pullover jersey and high heels. And no bra. Then a handsome, thin, bearded young man joined us.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Jason. Tina’s husband.”

  My erection dropped like an express elevator.

  “Are you going to be in the film, too?” I asked Jason.

  “Nope. Not today.”

  “Why me instead of you?”

  “Because Tina and I have done too many together. Caprice thinks a new face and bod are needed. I agree.”

  I was confused and embarrassed. All the blood in my system rushed to my face. “But…but,” I stammered, “they told me I’d have to have…relations…with…”