The Other Hollywood (25 page)

1977–1980

NEW YORK CITY
1977–1978

FRED LINCOLN
:
The idiots that kept the books for Plato’s kept both sets in the same place. I don’t quite understand that. Larry Levenson told me that the mob broke his legs with bats and shit a couple of times. So now the IRS gets the real books—not the cooked books—and Larry’s going away for tax evasion. Of course they wanted the guys behind Larry, not Larry, but you get your legs broken with bats twice—you know, you kinda think twice about talking.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
I’m the publisher of
Screw,
right, and when I come to Plato’s all I get is a massage. Never have I gotten laid there, just massages. Maybe when Larry goes to prison, I’ll take over as manager, and then I’ll finally get laid. I’m forty-five years old and still inept. Josh Alan Friedman, look at him. “How old are you? Twenty-five?”

Just a kid, but he thrives on sleaze, lives in Times Square. It’s okay for him to be inept, but there’s no excuse for it at my age.

PATRICE TRUDEAU
:
Al Goldstein wants me. I’ll charge him five hundred dollars. He’s a little Jew, so I’ll settle for four hundred. I know he’s an asshole. I can talk to you one way, but I have to talk to him because he’s a rich asshole. Besides, I want his digital watch. It’s a beautiful watch, like a Piaget. That’s what I would really like—a Piaget watch.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
I usually don’t get laid unless I pay for it. If I were a real swinger like Bernie Cornfield or Hugh Hefner, I would be getting laid every night by lots of new people. That doesn’t happen. But I’m obsessed with it. I feel I’m much more typical of the normal American male than affluent people who have their choice of harems.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Why’d Larry get his legs broken twice? I guess because he fucked the wrong people twice.

So Larry’s telling me his story. So I said to him, “Wow. This is incredible. You know, this would make a good movie.”

And Larry said to me, “Well, okay, if you wanna do the movie why don’t you come here?”

I go and I take the recorder and Larry tells me his story and I was transcribing it into a script.

Now Larry’s getting ready to go away to prison for three to five, and he said, “How about you and Tiffany run Plato’s for me while I’m gone?” Because I was married to Tiffany Clark at the time.

So I said, “Yeah, sure.”

TIM CONNELLY
:
Helen Madigan and I went to Plato’s when Larry was still running it. It was just really gross. The place was disgusting. I once went into a big room where they had a big hot tub—and Goldstein’s in the hot tub and he’s fat. The reality about swingers is that, for the most part, they’re not very good-looking.

FRED LINCOLN
:
While Tiffany and I were in Plato’s, I didn’t pay attention to what Tiffany was doing. We always had that kind of a relationship. And they’d pass the freebase pipe around, and I’d take a couple of hits, and I’d get up and go fuck.

I was in Plato’s! I wasn’t there to get high.

So I never even realized that Tiffany was standing there with Larry and those other people and staying with the pipe. I never realized how much it affected her.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Plato’s was really about Larry and Fred running the show and doing their thing. And the guys that were getting close to them were guys that had money or had access. I was always under the radar. I would come to Plato’s, fuck their old ladies, fuck a couple of chicks, and then leave. I didn’t really want to be a part of their world because I wasn’t an equal, on their level.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Larry would always let celebrities into Plato’s. He let Sammy Davis Jr. in—anybody who was a celebrity could come in, with or without a girl. Richard Dreyfuss used to come in every night—and he was on the balls of his ass—a stone coke freak.

While Larry’s in jail for tax evasion, I’m talking to Richard Dreyfuss, and I said, “You’re a great actor. How’d you like to play Larry if I do his movie?”

I’m thinking, motherfuckin’
score
—because this guy’s got an Academy
Award, you know? And he was perfect to play Larry. He’s a mutt, too—but a very talented mutt. What a fucking score and a half!

So I go visit Larry in prison, and I tell him, “Wow, Larry, man, I think Richard Dreyfuss’ll do this
movie
!”

“Fuck him! I don’t want him to play me.
I
want to play me!”

I said, “Larry, you gotta be kidding me. You can’t even do a talk show. You can’t play you!”

“Why not?!” he asks.

I said, “You know what, Larry? Let’s just forget the whole thing. Because if you’re turning down Richard Dreyfuss…lemme tell you something, you grab him now. He’s gonna sober up, and he ain’t never gonna talk to you again.”

That’s when I realized, “Oh my God, I’m dealing with an idiot.”

That’s when I said to Tiffany, “Let’s just get out.”

NEW YORK CITY
1977–1978

FRED LINCOLN
:
Cocaine swept New York like a fucking raging fire. I used to love driving at night—you’d stop at a light, look in the other car, and see all these torches blazing. It was amazing to me anyone would do that outside. How stupid. But they did it anyway.

Everybody
was doing cocaine.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I had been working steadily. Gloria Leonard was editing
High Society,
and I was working there during the day and babysitting for her at night. I was doing a couple of Off-Broadway plays, and I was in a rock and roll band. You know, we’d do these a cappella versions of “Peter Gunn” and we’d all dye our hair flaming pink and drive motorcycles around the Mudd Club and then scale the side of the building. Just some fun shit. It was great to be young and alive and creative. It was a great life. That’s when I started getting into drugs.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
They had started
High Society
with a different girl. What the fuck was her name? Jesus. Brie? She used a couple of names. She was a cutie. She looked a little like Courteney Cox. Brie something or other.

Well, anyway, as it turned out, she was purely a figurehead. And, uh, with drugs being so prevalent on the scene in those days, not the most reliable spokesperson.

I had been a stylist for Peter Hurd, who was a photographer for a lot of the girlie magazines. And we shot a lot of stuff for
Cheri
—and even
High Society
—before I became publisher. I would do the makeup and wardrobe, set up the whole scenario. He just came in with the camera and shot the girls with whatever I put there.

So I had a magazine background and brought to the table a certain wis
dom that a lot of the younger girls didn’t have. Because by that time I was thirty-six or thirty-seven years old.

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
I did a lot of shoots for
High Society
and
Cheri
. That’s how I met Gloria Leonard—on a shoot for
High Society
. We became very good friends. We partied together—everything then was cocaine and Quaaludes. We all loved Gloria because she was smart. She was like an older sister or aunt to a lot of us.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
I was not publisher of
High Society
in name only. I came in every day. I wrote cover lines, I wrote captions, and I went out and supervised shoots. I’d go on the road and meet with wholesalers and do six or seven interviews a day. We had a public relations firm that represented us. I used to travel probably an average of a hundred thousand air miles a year for them.

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
I’d go see Gloria a lot…. And then—Oh God!—she’d be out of town shooting, and her boyfriend, Bobby Hollander, would call me, and I’d end up at his place because of the drugs.

And that wasn’t a real good thing—but it didn’t end up being a problem because she knew that Bobby screwed around on her a lot.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
High Society
decided to use my voice on a recording giving a little preview of what was coming up in the next issue. But the day the magazine hit the stand, we blew out the circuits for, like, a four-block radius.

So then we bought twenty answering machines. And I figured, “Okay, this should handle it.” Then the twenty grew to a hundred. There was no way we were making money; it was costing us money to buy all these machines! We couldn’t figure out how to make money with this system—until the 976 thing.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I could go anywhere I wanted; I could do anything I wanted. I didn’t wear fucking clothes—I wore maybe a G-string and a mink coat. I had a lot of money. It was great then—just great! Coke really helped because I was afraid I was going to miss something. I was really enjoying life so much. Coke really helped me stay up for quite a few years.

Then I started shooting it. And that was fabulous!

GLORIA LEONARD
:
The genesis of that whole 976 phone sex thing was that AT&T and Ma Bell were told by the federal government that they had to break themselves up. And a part of the breakup was that they had to make some of the 976 numbers available to other sectors of the market.

It used to be that the 976 numbers were the weather, the horoscope, dial-a-joke—you know, that kind of thing. And they had no method for distributing these numbers. They just picked names out of a hat.

And, as luck would have it, we came away with one of them—they picked our publisher’s name. Drake or Crescent. I don’t know which name they were using in those days.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
All I had to do was hide a little briefcase of coke in my apartment and let some guy come pick it up in two weeks, and somebody would give me an ounce of coke. I didn’t have to fuck them. They just told me not to get into it.

They were heavy-duty Colombian guys, you know? And I just felt completely complete whenever I did that stuff.

And then I lost that connection, probably because I did something inappropriate. I really don’t remember—but I’m sure it was something inappropriate.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
Phone sex was a huge success. There was one cartoon done by Rigby in the
New York Post
after it turned out that the Pentagon had made seven thousand dollars’ worth of calls in one day.

And so they started putting blocks, you know, on outgoing calls. ABC was one company that ran up a huge bill.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Tiffany bought, like, three grams once. She cooked it up. She was lucky she got two hits outta that. I said, “What the hell is that?”

Nobody knew what the hell they were getting. No, it just swept—not only New York—but also the whole country. California had a lot. Jesus, directors, producers, everybody.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
After phone sex became so successful, there were attempts to stop it by lots of religious right and political right-wing groups that said this was inappropriate. I mean, I was on every talk show you could think of. Oprah, Maury, Larry, and Geraldo. There’s hardly a talk show I haven’t done. I was basically saying that this is a matter of choice, if you want to call the number or not.

“Well, what if kids listen to it?” So, what are they going to hear? A girl moaning and groaning and enjoying herself? I mean, better they should hear that than some of the other horrors that are going on. I was just trying to shoot holes in the stupid hypocrisy of it all.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Then I was doing other forms of coke—but I couldn’t deal it because I was doing too much of it.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
We fought for a lot of years. Laurence Tribe was
High Society
’s counsel of record. He’s a professor of law at Harvard with Alan Dershowitz. He made the case for us in the Supreme Court—and won!

FRED LINCOLN
:
After we left Plato’s, Tiffany stopped doing coke. Tiffany and I never had a freebase problem until then. Never had a cocaine problem before that. I used to buy a gram of cocaine, and it would last us two weeks. I could leave it on the table, and she would never even touch it.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I had a lot of bad episodes. I mean with guys with guns. I used to get high with this lonely guy, an eccentric crazy guy named Joey. He dealt Uzis. He was Greek.

FRED LINCOLN
:
So Tiffany stopped freebasing. Six months went by; she was dancing, she was doing movies, and I thought, “Well, if she stopped, I guess she didn’t really have a problem.”

I made a mistake and bought her some coke one night. It was the beginning of the end because we had stopped. So I blame myself for that.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
High Society
is the pioneer of phone sex. It was my idea. And I never realized a single dime off it.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Joey used to build these incredible pipes and smoke from them. We’d sit around and smoke and talk. Every once in a while he’d just take out an Uzi and shoot holes in the walls—probably shot some of the neighbors.

He was crazy. I used to, like, take another shot of coke and pretend it didn’t happen, you know?

FRED LINCOLN
:
I had said to Tiffany, “We can’t do this. I can’t do this shit. You’re ruining my life. We don’t eat. We don’t go out. The only people we hang out with are people who do this shit.”

I said, “I want nothing more to do with this coke thing.”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I moved to Thirteenth Street, and I was hanging out with some well-known rock and roll people. They were getting really high downstairs in this town house, and I was upstairs. So I said, “I want some of that.”

The dealer was like, “No. No, no.”

So I went downstairs, whining, “Give me some, man!” And they said no because they liked me. Everybody liked me. They thought they would protect me as long as possible. And they didn’t want to give me any of their dope, you know. So they gave me this cotton shot.

And I was like, “Oh, wow!”

FRED LINCOLN
:
There was this guy from New York who owned some escort services, and he was really after Tiffany. He used to give her all the shit she wanted. He used to make Tiffany’s mouth water—for smoke.

He got all the girls that worked for him strung out. He had this girl Harley, who used to go and get girls for him. I’ve got to admit, he was a pretty shrewd businessman. He even sent his girlfriend after me!

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I went, “Oh! Oh, man!” That was just, like, such
peace.
It was just peace and solace. And I had control. I had control. I felt like I’d been waiting my whole fucking life for this shot.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Why didn’t I have the guy who was giving Tiffany shit whacked? ’Cause I’m not like that. I’m a nice man. Bad karma.

I figured it was my fault. I thought about it for days, and I figured out I’d have to get every drug dealer—anybody who ever gave the stuff to her—and that would include me.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I probably instantly got a habit. I did good stuff—I had a lot of money. I didn’t even know I had a habit, not really. I always had stuff. I made sure I was always in the right place to be around people that had stuff. I had huge tracks. I would go to work, and everybody in the business knew I had a habit.

But I performed really well. I did what I needed to do. I believe heroin made me function. Heroin and coke together made me function really well for decades. I was able to get things done. I was able to come—make myself come on camera—so it helped me.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Tiffany knew I was in town; she called me. I knew the people she got stuff from. It was pretty sad. She was goin’ out to cop as soon as I gave her the money.

She didn’t wanna go to a detox. She liked her life. She was runnin’ from the cops. She had broken parole. The federal marshals were coming for her.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Did I shoot up on the set? Yeah. Oh, sure. Everybody knew. I didn’t hide it. If you hired me, I had to know where the nearest methadone clinic was ahead of time, so I could transfer my dose.

I never hid the fact that I was a drug user. And nobody seemed to mind. They were like, “Okay, that’s Mitch, and that’s what comes along with her.”

FRED LINCOLN
:
I realized it was my fault—bringing people to the house, buyin’ the stuff and doin’ it. It wasn’t even Tiffany’s. If I had never said that one day, “Let’s do this,” I don’t even know if it would’ve happened because she would never go and do anything without me.