The Other Hollywood (16 page)

1975
–
1977

NEW YORK CITY
1975–1977

VANESSA DEL RIO
:
I started go-go dancing at Billy’s on Sixth Avenue.

One day this guy walked in with a dollar in his hand, and there was a girl dancing on the stage. He threw the dollar on the stage, stuck his finger in her pussy, and then just kept walking. It was like, “Stick your finger in a slut for a buck.” I don’t even think he looked at her.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
It was the Harmony Burlesque—that was changed to the Melody Burlesque—that started the trend of porn stars doing live burlesque. Tina Russell was the first porn star I remember appearing in person at the Melody. It was a big deal for a porn star to be so out in public, and it was successful.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I was one of the first porn stars that was billed as a “porn star” who started stripping at the Melody Burlesque on Forty-eighth Street. None of the old strippers liked me. Except Tempest Storm—who I actually started as a cofeature underneath. Oh, I loved Tempest! She was so great to me. But all those old strippers were like, “What do you think you’re going to do?”

I said, “Bump and grind.”

They said, “Ha! Not with that body, kid!” Because I was this skinny girl, I went out there and tried to imitate what they were doing, and it wasn’t quite working. The old strippers were like, “Kid, isn’t there some other kind of dance you can do?”

So the first thing I stripteased to was the entire “Rhapsody in Blue”—from beginning to end. All in lace, jumping around the stage and doing leaps and bounds and high kicks and spread shots everywhere! It was fabulous!

FRED LINCOLN
:
The Melody was owned by my friend Freddie Cincadi, who was also the assistant district attorney of New York City. How he got away with that for twenty years, I don’t know. But Freddie was my best, best buddy.

We hung out. I brought girls to him. I brought Serena to the Melody. I brought Annette Haven to New York. I brought Lesllie Bovee, Sharon Mitchell, and Ming Toy. Anybody that was in the business, I put them in the theaters, and they made a ton of money.

VANESSA DEL RIO
:
The Melody started the famous “boxed lunch”—which was when the girls sat on the stage or on the bar in front of a guy—and the guy would eat her out. It cost a dollar! Then she’d wipe herself with a baby wipe and move to the next guy, until she made her way around the bar. And in the middle of the stage was a little mountain of baby wipes.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
All those baby wipes! There would be twenty dancers on the stage with their legs spread in a line, and each dancer had her own box of baby wipes mixed with dollars bills! And that’s where lap dancing started.

FRED LINCOLN
:
The girls used to make so much money. My God! Those guys were just lined up. All I could think of was, “Wow, men are really pathetic.”

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
The Melody was way ahead of Show World on everything.

VANESSA DEL RIO
:
At that time, we didn’t really have much to do with Show World. The Melody was true burlesque.

FRED LINCOLN
:
The Melody used to call it “Mardi Gras,” when the customers could lick the girl for a dollar a lick. The girls used to take the dollar and throw it over their shoulder; the guy would get down, lick once, then this leg would push him away, and the other leg would reach out and grab the next one; the girl would take his dollar and throw him out.

It was like this leg assembly line.

What was funny was we went out in the lobby and the guys would talk about how they got to the girl! They’d say, “Wow! I could feel it trembling. If they gave me just one more minute…”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I was doing a movie and two guys were going to stick their cocks in me, at the same time, both in my pussy. And my pussy’s not really big. I certainly wasn’t going to let them fuck me in the ass. Because I knew damn well my asshole’s about the size of a fucking dime, a pea. I thought, “No, that will never work.”

But I really didn’t know how to say no.

I had befriended these guys I had done a couple movies with on and off, and a couple of girls that were really nice to me, like Vanessa Del Rio—who protected me and really helped me.

Vanessa said, “You look like a kid from Jersey!”

I said, “I
am
a kid from Jersey!”

So she took me shopping, and spent like two thousand dollars on me in one day. She took me to the Late Show and Trash and Vaudeville—all those little hip places. They cut my hair and whipped me into shape.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
When Show World started to have porn stars appear live, that’s what put me through college.

TIM CONNELLY (FORMER PORN STAR)
:
First Rod Swenson booked Show World—he’s the guy who married Wendy O. Williams and managed the Plasmatics. Wendy used to do live sex shows at Show World long before I got there. Then Rod Swenson gave way to Freddie Lincoln, who was a great guy—and then Freddie Lincoln gave way to Ron Martin.

But there was a short time when Ron Martin booked the show downstairs, and Freddie booked the show upstairs.

FRED LINCOLN
:
I used to do a thing in New York City’s Greenwich Village called the Party, which came about because I took an ad out in
Penthouse
asking if anybody had any bizarre fantasy that they were afraid to share. And we got thousands of letters—some of the most pathetic creatures on earth, ha, ha, ha. And we would reenact them in this loft in the Village—every Friday and Saturday night. It was a big success; it was packed every weekend.

Before we closed, Ron Martin came down and said to me, “I wanna take you uptown to Show World. And you can have the lower theater.”

I said, “And I can do anything I want?”

He said, “Yeah. Anything you want.”

TIM CONNELLY
:
Fred started this thing at Show World called the Ultra Burlesque—which could be anything; S and M shows or burlesque skits, live sex or strippers.

The concept was “what you gave them is what they expect they should get”—it could be Serena coming from San Francisco and stripping; if she wanted to fuck, they’d bring a guy to fuck her. And depending on how she wanted to fuck, they’d bring in a dominant guy or a submissive guy. At that time, Joey Silvera was working there. Jamie Gillis would blow in every now and then. Helen Madigan and Marc Stevens—it really was anything goes.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Vanessa Del Rio lived in Independence Plaza, and I was doing a movie with her. But I really wasn’t up on my cocksucking technique.

She said, “Well, you know, I can help you with that.”

So one day she takes me over to see her boyfriend, Johnny. She sets up a three-way mirror around Johnny’s dick. She gives me a bunch of coke, right? And teaches me how to suck dick. “Now be aware of your nose and your angles…. It has to feel good as well as look good…and watch the camera now…”

It was really helpful. Because when I was sucking Johnny’s cock in front of the three-way mirror, I could see how I looked from every side.

Then I got into pussy hair coiffing. So I would exchange these cocksucking lessons in exchange for coiffing Vanessa’s pussy hair.

FRED LINCOLN
:
The Mitchell brothers and I used to exchange people for our clubs. I would call them up, and we would discuss different girls and different acts. See, I was the first person to ever put porno girls in theaters and nightclubs in New York.

I did it by convincing this guy, Bernie, to hire Bambi Woods. He paid her three thousand dollars and told me, “If she don’t make this money back, you gotta pay us.”

I said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get your money back.”

She packed the club.

TIM CONNELLY
:
When I came to New York, I was married to an English girl, a girl I’d met in Chicago. Our marriage had pretty much failed, but she wanted to come with me to New York.

We were walking through Times Square, and we decided to go to Show World. I couldn’t believe there was this giant multilevel emporium of pornography, you know?

We went into one of those dollar peep-show booths. The screen came up, and there was this pretty good-looking Puerto Rican girl. And my wife, who was pretty normal in terms of sexuality, gets wildly turned on by this naked girl writhing and masturbating and talking dirty to us. I had never had that experience with her before. So on the way home I just pulled her in to some building and took her on the stairwell and fucked her because we were just so turned on.

I felt weird about it afterward. You know, like what the fuck happened to me? I knew I was entering a new area. It was exciting—and confusing.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
The years 1975, 1976, 1977 were the beginning of the great era of smut on Forty-second Street because that’s when it changed
over from those old burlesque strippers to porn stars and rock and roll girls.

TIM CONNELLY
:
That night, my band and soon-to-be ex-wife went to Max’s Kansas City to see Sirius Trixon get married onstage. My band sits down—and Sharon Mitchell’s right across the table from us.

I thought, “This is unbelievable.” Sharon Mitchell was being regarded with as much celebrity as Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol and Brian Eno, who were all hanging out. The band and I just wanted to meet Brian Eno and John Cale and give them our tapes. Hopefully they’d want to produce us or something. So it was new to me—this connection between strippers, porn stars, and rock and roll.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
New York—it was just all new. It was wild—amazing, you know? I’m having experimental sex—sex with young girls, kinky sex. Because all these young girls had crushes on me, you know? Young girls loved me. I was slick; I was very masculine. I was very rock and roll and pushy and wiry and people loved me. Because I was “Sharon Mitchell,” and people loved that.

TIM CONNELLY
:
One of the guys in my band was dating Lolly Holly, the guitar player in Krayola, a New York all-girl punk band. Lolly was a stripper, and they wanted to bring in a drummer—this porn star/stripper named Helen Madigan—and they asked me to teach her to play drums.

I needed the money, so I agreed to do it. For Helen’s first drum lesson, I had to meet her at the Melody Burlesque, where she was working at the time.

When I got there, I walked in the middle of a Mardi Gras, which is when they send the girls to circulate in the audience. It’s the equivalent of lap dancing now, but then it was this dollar-a-lick thing.

C. J. LAING
:
I went back to New York from Texas after visiting my rock and roll boyfriend—and the Mitchell brothers had just come to New York. And we got together and partied, and they introduced me to the Buckleys, who had done
Screw
with Al Goldstein and were making their first movie. So that’s how I did my first movie with Jamie Gillis.

TIM CONNELLY
:
I was just fascinated by what the girls were doing at the Melody—and that the guys were paying for it. Coming from a good-looking rock and roll band, I never had a problem getting pussy. So I was just blown away that guys would pay money to have these girls bounce in and out of their lap for ten seconds.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
One night I got a call from Jamie Gillis, who had a horribly filthy apartment on Fourty-sixth Street and Ninth Avenue, in Hell’s
Kitchen. Hadn’t cleaned it in years—and Jamie has weird eating habits. I mean, you open up his refrigerator, and there’s like bull’s balls and fucking pickled eyes and pigs’ ears. It looks like a vivisectionist’s fucking refrigerator, you know? Goats’ heads—weird fucking shit he’d buy in Chinatown.

So anyway, I get this call from Jamie and he says, “Uh, Mitch, can you come up? I need some help.”

I said, “Sure,” because Jamie was one of the big brother guys that watched over me. Him and John Leslie and Eric Edwards—all those guys really flanked me and took care of me. So I would never ask, “Why?” even though it was two in the morning. I just said, “Okay.” I mean, I was up anyway. So I got in a cab and went up to Jamie’s filthy apartment, and he and C. J. Laing were having some kind of a weird sexual session. He had her head in the toilet—and he needed both hands to, like, keep her breathing and the toilet flushing.

He needed another hand to help get her head out of the toilet—so she wouldn’t drown.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Helen and I went back to my loft, and I tried to give her a drum lesson, but she was so fucking uncoordinated. I mean, she couldn’t even hold the sticks in her hands. But she just had this infectious laugh; she was really cute and sexy.

So after about half an hour I said, “You know what? Let’s not push it the first time. Maybe I’ll get you a Mel Bay book—the basic textbook of drumming—and then I’ll teach you how to read music.”

I gave her a pair of my sticks to take home, and she was so excited. She started running the sticks between her legs, right?

It had started snowing really heavily out so I said, “Maybe you should get going.”

She said, “Well, you know, I can hang out…if you want…”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
It was something with the pull chain and the drain—and we needed four hands to get the girl’s head un-flushed and save her. It was a weird incident. But a nice one. I mean, it wasn’t like everyone didn’t know Jamie had a penchant for weird S and M scenes.