The Other Hollywood (39 page)

1981–1984

LOS ANGELES
1981–1982

MICHAEL LONDON (WRITER)
:
A lot of what happened to Colleen Applegate wasn’t very different from what happened—years ago—with girls who had some dream of stardom in the legitimate film business.

I don’t think wanting to be in sex films was what was driving her; it was that I think that she wanted be the center of attention, to be successful. She had these huge, vague dreams of stardom.

And what Colleen Applegate of Farmington, Minnesota, had to offer was something in precious short supply in Hollywood: innocence. For a business devoted to spinning fantasies about the archetypical midwestern girl-next-door, Colleen Applegate was the real thing.

KAREN APPLEGATE (COLLEEN’S MOTHER)
:
You see movies about young girls wanting to be movie stars who get out to Los Angeles and get mixed up with the wrong people—but you never think of it happening to you. Colleen just wanted to be somebody. It wasn’t enough for her to stay in a small town and work in a bank.

GINGER LYNN (PORN STAR)
:
I left my hometown when I was nineteen. I came to California from Rockford, Illinois, to visit my grandfather, who was very sick. I had one suitcase packed with my things.

I thought that when you lived in California, everything was free and beautiful and you lived on the beach, you know. It was the eighties. I had this delusion that everything was like it was in the movies.

KELLY NICHOLS (FORMER PORN STAR)
:
I was the girl who gets murdered in the bathtub in
Toolbox Murders
. That’s how I got my SAG card. Yeah, I’m
the girl on the poster. I was getting paid for it—but I wasn’t that excited about it because I don’t want to be a straight actress. Bob Veze, my mentor, was always very frustrated with me because he thought I could be Demi Moore—who came out of his studio.

But I didn’t want it that bad, and you have to want it bad to exist in Hollywood. You’ve got to be willing to go to all the auditions. I went to auditions, and I hated them. I didn’t want to stab anybody in the back. I didn’t want to fuck to get a part. I just didn’t care that much.

Instead I’d say, “I don’t need the part. Just invite me to one of your parties—then I’ll fuck you!”

MICHAEL LONDON
:
Colleen Applegate was accompanied to a Steve Hicks photo session by Mike Marcell—her longtime Minnesota boyfriend who drove her west. The pair had scouted a variety of jobs in the month since they arrived in Los Angeles, but nothing had come through. Then one of them spotted an ad for World Modeling, an agency in the Valley that aggressively seeks out new recruits for “figure modeling.”

JIM SOUTH (PORN AGENT)
:
To me, Colleen had a real look. When I first saw her she was very classy, with an almost girl-next-door look. I thought she was very nice and would do very well.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Jim South is the ultimate porn broker. He runs an ad in every goddamn local newspaper in Los Angeles, and 90 percent of the girls who come into the business get in by answering that ad.

He’s really the same guy that’d be selling you an encyclopedia or a Bible or a hooker on a street corner. He’s really just selling a commodity. And he never wavers from that.

MICHAEL LONDON
:
Steve Hicks’s photo session immediately led to others, so ultimately Colleen’s relationship with her boyfriend soured. The pair broke up less than two months after they reached Los Angeles. Marcell joined the army, but before signing up he called up his family and friends in Farmington with a hot piece of gossip—Colleen Applegate had become a nude model.

PHILLIP APPLEGATE (COLLEEN’S FATHER)
:
I don’t think it would have been such a big deal if Mike Marcell hadn’t talked about it.

MICHAEL LONDON
:
Mike Marcell was angry. He was hurt and he felt rejected. Colleen was clearly moving on to more worldly men, and that was his way of striking back.

GINGER LYNN
:
I was living in my grandparents’ fifth-wheel trailer in Revins, California. Then I moved up to an apartment building with a beautiful
pool—unfortunately it had a crack in it and no water and rats lived in it. I lived in a one-room studio, and I was paying triple what I had paid for a two-bedroom, split-level apartment in Illinois.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
My husband, Bobby Hollander, was Colleen Applegate’s manager. She was that homespun little midwestern kind of girl that guys
love
. That shiksa-blond-thing, you know?

MICHAEL LONDON
:
Bobby Hollander began managing Colleen in the fall of 1982, casting her in several feature-length productions for his Gourmet Video line. Hollander even coined what he felt was an appropriately “classy” screen name: Shauna Grant.

BOBBY HOLLANDER
:
When I first met Colleen, she was making a hundred dollars a day, which was more than her father made. Remember, this was a girl who came from Minnesota in a polyester dress and a pair of wedgies. Under me, her pay rate rose to nearly fifteen hundred a day for hard-core—and seven hundred a day for nonsexual roles. Offscreen, she received star treatment—limousines, first-class hotels, and her own makeup artist, Laurie Smith.

LAURIE SMITH
:
She always played the one who stays a virgin for the whole movie and then gets laid in the final scene.

KELLY NICHOLS
:
Shauna was best friends with Laurie Smith, who was Bob Veze’s girlfriend after me. So we were just a tight little circle.

MICHAEL LONDON
:
At that time—this was pre-video—they were still making actual movies. They were shot over multiple days, the budgets were larger, and there were more of the trappings of a real film—so it was easier to delude yourself that you could use this as access to the legitimate film business.

GINGER LYNN
:
I had a boyfriend in Illinois who decided—since I now lived in California—that he loved me. So he moved in, and I found myself paying all of the bills.

Was he an asshole? No, more an opportunist than an asshole. We began to have problems.

KELLY NICHOLS
:
I worked as Jessica Lange’s stunt double for
King Kong
. They wanted to use the gorilla hands on me—they were like these robot hands with fur.

But after the first day of shooting the hands broke. So I got the run of the MGM lot for two weeks. I just walked around in my little costume, and onto the set of
New York, New York
, and
Logan’s Run
.

GINGER LYNN
:
I always had high expectations of myself, but they weren’t really about being in the entertainment industry. I didn’t come to California to become an actress or a star. I never saw myself like that.

When I was growing up, I wasn’t a cheerleader, I wasn’t a jock, I wasn’t one of the popular people. I was what we used to call a “head.” You know, I hung out in the alley and smoked pot.

EDDIE HOLZMAN (PHOTOGRAPHER/COLLEEN APPLEGATE’S BOYFRIEND)
:
Someone told Colleen Applegate that I made a comment about her weight, so she starved herself. It made me feel awfully powerful. She was very vulnerable at the time. On our third date, she told me she loved me. I told her to slow down and get ahold of herself.

MICHAEL LONDON
:
Eddie Holzman was a photographer for
Playboy
,
Penthouse
, and
Hustler
, but he had his dividing line. He wasn’t happy when he found out that Colleen was doing movies behind his back. You know, everyone in that world has their line: “This is acceptable, and this isn’t.”

EDDIE HOLZMAN
:
I got tired of being the father figure. She was so young and innocent; she could be an instant star in porn—and instant gratification was what she wanted. Like cocaine.

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
In 1979 or 1980, I was going out with a big shot at MGM. He’d call me up and say, “Meet me in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Then he’d pick me up and take me to his house; his wife would be out of town. His house was just absolutely outrageous. He used to even send for me at his fucking office. I don’t even know how I met him. It was purely sex and money, ha, ha, ha. He paid me a thousand bucks a night.

KELLY NICHOLS
:
They were going to use my boobs because Jessica Lange didn’t want hers showing when King Kong’s finger came down her chest. But then at the last minute, Jessica decided she
did
want her boobs in the movie.

I really didn’t belong in the Hollywood system.

GINGER LYNN
:
I went to the Colorado River with thirty people from my gym, and along the banks they had all these little bars with signs saying “Hot Legs Contest” or “Wet T-Shirt Contest.”

KELLY NICHOLS
:
I mean, the whole casting-couch thing—there was more crap like that going on in straight Hollywood than in porn. There were more people that wanted parts so bad—and people would hold that over their heads.

GINGER LYNN
:
We had run completely out of money by the first day, so me and this other girl started entering these contests. I won the first one—it was a “Hot Legs” contest. I made a hundred bucks and I thought, “Oh my God, this is so cool!”

VERONICA HART
:
The difference between the porn business and the straight business is that in porn you don’t have to fuck anybody to get a job. I pretty much fucked everybody in Hollywood, and it doesn’t get you anywhere, ha, ha, ha.

Hollywood is all about dangling promises and hopes. That’s the most refreshing thing about dealing with most of the people in porn—we’re pretty down-to-earth and not full of too much bullshit.

GINGER LYNN
:
There were all these girls that were extremely well-endowed, and I’m average. And the other girls were taking their tops off and pinching their nipples. I was too shy to do that, but I was willing to show my butt and my legs and you could see my wet nipples through my T-shirt.

I think I won three or four different contests. Between my girlfriend and I, we probably brought in four or five hundred bucks a day.

KELLY NICHOLS
:
I had one experience with a very famous producer. He really liked me, and it was one of those times when I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, so I was fucking him. He was trying to promise me things, but I told him, “I’m just here because I want to be.”

VERONICA HART
:
I really believed that there would be a merging of Hollywood and us—although when I went into the porn business, I gave up my aspirations to be a straight actress. I realized when I went into porn that this was not going to further a straight career.

“Fuck the straight business,” I thought. “I don’t need the hypocrisy.”

That was the lovely thing about being in the porn business. I didn’t have to fuck anybody or blow anybody to get a job.

KELLY NICHOLS
:
The producer was trying to tell me, “This town sucks!”

I was like, “No, life is still good….”

He goes, “I’ll show you. Just stay in the other room.”

He makes a phone call and this little girl comes over. She stands outside his office and starts unzipping her top. She goes in. Brings her portfolio. He talks to her then has me come in and meet her—and then he kicks her out.

He says, “That girl is fifteen and a half. Her mom dropped her off and parked down the block. She was upset when she left because her mom
wanted her to stay longer. You know why? Because she wanted her daughter to fuck me.
That’s
the town you’re living in.”

GINGER LYNN
:
When I got back, my boyfriend and I discussed what had happened on the trip. We thought it would be a good idea if I started stripping at bachelor parties. So I found this quote-unquote agent, and I went to the first bachelor party, and I brought my little tape deck, and my boyfriend came along as a bodyguard.

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
A lot of these movie star people were very fascinated with pornography, and they’d show up on the sets. Max Baer (Jethro Bodine from
The Beverly Hillbillies
) was one of my best friends. Nick Nolte and Max Baer would hang out together. And they wanted me to come over and party with them a few times, but I never really ended up doing it.

GINGER LYNN
:
I hadn’t really thought it through, so when I walked into this room and there were twenty drunk bachelors waiting for the stripper, I freaked. I ran out and left the tape deck—and my boyfriend—and they beat him up. It was horrible.

So I called the agent and said, “You know what? I don’t think I’m really cut out for this.”

GLORIA LEONARD
:
Robin Leach was a gossip columnist for the
Star
, the tabloid that we all know and love. Robin is really one of the few gossip people who enjoys relationships with people like Liz Taylor, Suzanne Somers, and Cher. He’s English, and he’s terribly charming, and whatever the protocol for gossip columnists is, he’s followed it.

So our publicist set up an interview because I was getting a lot of attention as a result of all the celebrity nudes we were running in
High Society
, and of course that was right up the
Star
’s alley.