The Other Hollywood (4 page)

I went to my wedding only because I felt bad about my family spending all this money.

But they said, “Fuck it. If you’re not happy, we’ll kill him.” My dad had done something to a boyfriend who’d hit me once—he threw him in jail forever.

I said, “No, Daddy, don’t kill Larry.”

HARRY REEMS
:
When I got to Puerto Rico, Assie said, “Go back home. It won’t work. I’m ten years older. We come from two different worlds.”

Then we fucked.

Then she said, “Stay.”

So I faked my way into a job teaching scuba diving at La Concha Hotel, though I had never scuba dived in my life. I went to the library and read up on it the weekend before I started work. During the first two or three months I taught some two hundred people how to scuba dive, without once putting the tanks on my back.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
That old Ivory Snow photographer was disgusting. It was gross—this seventy-year-old guy right on me!

I mean, I was running around, going, “What are you doing?! Get out of here!”

After we shot the box, they told me it was going to take about two years to get my picture on the new one.

I said, “Whatever.”

HARRY REEMS
:
It was high season in Puerto Rico—and open season. Suddenly a whole Disneyland of vacationing goodies materialized: Hank Aaron; and Mike Seiderhaud, the champion water-skier; and Tom Weiskoff, the winner of the Golf Open came down to shoot some Wheaties commercials.

And one of the local talent agents got me into the act. In the water-skiing commercial, Mike Seiderhaud was supposed to fall. I was the one who stood in for him and took the fall.

But I had a double role in that commercial. After that spill, I could be seen close-up in the stands, yelling, “HEY, SEIDERHAUD, YOU DIDN’T EAT YOUR WHEATIES!”

I made it into the Hank Aaron commercial, too. When Aaron slices the air, I was in the stands booing and yelling, “HEY, AARON, YOU DIDN’T EAT YOUR WHEATIES!”

FRED LINCOLN (PORN STAR/PORN DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER)
:
That’s how I got into porn—doing television commercials. See, me and this guy Paul Matthews were doing a Benson & Hedges commercial together. It was the one where I’m sitting on a float in the pool, smoking a Benson & Hedges, and I turn around and look at a girl in a bikini and the cigarette blows up the float, and I fall in the water. It was about, you know, what lengths people went to for these extra long cigarettes.

On the set, Paul and me were talking about girls and stuff—and he asked me if I wanted to do a fuck film.

To be honest with you, for years I used to dream of some guy coming up to me and saying, “Hey kid, you wanna make a fuck film?”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Larry hit me—and I remembered, you know, about my mom and dad. My dad hit my mom once, and that’s all it took. My
mom said, “That’s it.” Because once that happens—it never fucking gets better. I mean, guaranteed that it never gets better. You’ve just got to move on with your life—because all of that heal-change crap will never work.

Larry was fucking crazy. I saw him put his head through a plate glass window. He’d terrorize me, like step on the gas when I was in the car, and say, “So, you want me to do this?!!” Sheer abuse and terror.

Eventually, Larry killed himself. Maybe eight years after we got divorced. I take no responsibility for it.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
After I graduated from high school, I was going out with this guy, Patrick, who was an actor and a model. In those days they weren’t all gay, ha, ha, ha.

He asked, “Do you want to go to see a real movie being made?”

I said, “Yeah! I’d love to.”

Patrick was playing either Robert Klein or George Segal’s stand-in for the movie
The Owl and the Pussycat.

So I get to the set. I’ve got my little portfolio with me. I’m nervous. I’m standing around watching, totally intrigued, like, “Wow! This is what I want to do!”

HARRY REEMS
:
Enough money from the Wheaties commercial trickled down to Puerto Rico for me to live it up. I wined and dined Assie and took her to casinos. Then I deserted her for a week and blew a lot of money. And a lot of girls. Assie blew up like a cyclone when I crept back.

Out came the Latin jealousy and the temper tantrums.

“I cook dinner. You be here on time. Do those whores you go with cook dinner for you?”

I was deeply fond of her. And I loved all the creature comforts of home, of being looked after. But finally I had to admit that she was right. We came from different worlds.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
While I was on the set, Barbra Streisand started pulling some shit. She was really childish. Yeah, I really don’t want to say that, but I mean she was just horrible! Just a real witch, you know? To
everybody
.

Ray Stark was the producer, and Herbert Ross was directing. So Ray Stark was walking around the set, and he came up to me and asked, “Are you an actress?”

I said, “Oh, yes! Of course.”

He said, “Well, you know, we just happen to be casting for the part of Robert Klein’s girlfriend. Would you be interested in trying out?”

I said, “I’d love to!”

HARRY REEMS
:
Back in New York, I floundered. There were a few more commercials—Ballantine Ale, JCPenney, Dickies work clothes, a toilet tissue….

But these were test commercials, and somehow I managed to spend the bread faster than it was coming in.

GEORGINA SPELVIN
:
I opened my own editing facility down in the West Village. It was called The Pickle Factory, and we were doing a lot of underground films at that point. I was very much into the peace movement. By the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies, I was interested in making revolutionary films and ending world hunger.

We were scrambling to make the monthly rent on the place to begin with, so I said, “Okay, it’s near the first of the month again, and we don’t have any money! Somebody’s got to make some money!”

So I bought all of the local trade papers—
Showbiz
and
Casting Call
—and I just called everybody who was casting films. At that time, there was a lot of tits and ass films going on. Nudie-cuties.

I’d say, “I know I’m not what you’re looking for in the way of casting; but, I can coil cable and make coffee. I’m looking for any kind of a job. Do you need anyone?”

And, indeed I got someone who said, “Well, we need someone to scout some locations for us.”

I said, “You got it! What do you need?”

So I began to get a reputation as someone who could get things done. And the next thing I knew, I was getting calls to do casting.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
Ray Stark takes me by the hand; he’s about seventy-something—all the old guys like me, ha, ha, ha—and he takes me upstairs to a room, and there’s a whole bunch of women in there auditioning.

I’m sitting there thinking, “Yeah, right, there’s no way I’m going to get this.”

They call me in, there’s a whole bunch of people sitting around a table, they asked me some questions, I go back out, and they come out and say, “You got the part.”

I went, “What?! You’re kidding?!” It was like being discovered in Schwab’s Drugstore.

HARRY REEMS
:
I was broke. I was taking out small loans to pay the rent and telephone bill. So I put the question to a buddy in the National Shakespeare Company. “Do you know how I could get some fast bread?”

He said, “Yeah, I do, if you consider $75 ‘bread.’”

I said, “I consider $75 ‘bread.’”

He said, “You can pick up $75 a day doing stag films.”

Stag films! Was he kidding? What would that do to my burgeoning career as an actor on the legitimate stage?

So I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

JAMIE GILLIS (PORN STAR)
:
I was driving a cab a few days a week and doing Shakespeare at the Classic Stage Company in Manhattan at night. Driving a cab part-time is pretty brutal. You know, I’d wake up at dawn, drive a cab twelve hours a day, and then I’m doing Shakespeare all night, you know? Pretty heavy.

MARILYN CHAMBERS
:
So they take me down to the set of
The Owl and the Pussycat
. They get me undressed and throw me in bed with Robert Klein. And I was supposed to be topless, but Barbra Streisand said, “Absolutely not.”

Then we did a thing where I’m walking to the door with him when we’re leaving. It took me about two or three days to shoot it; I was so nervous. But that’s how I got my Screen Actors Guild card. And that’s how I moved into the city, got my first apartment on Thirty-third and Third—and started going to acting classes.

ERIC EDWARDS
:
About six months after I submitted my photo to the ad in
Screw,
I got a call. A guy said, “Can you do it? Because we’re having problems with the guy who’s supposed to do it right now.”

I said, “Sure, man. I’m a swinger, you know, my wife and I are cool. No problem.”

I hung up the phone and the shakes started to settle in. I was thinking, “Oh my God—I’m gonna go over there! Can I really perform?”

JAMIE GILLIS
:
I was looking at the ads in the
Village Voice
for jobs, you know, to see if there was something else I could do besides drive a cab. I would never have looked for it, but under a part-time job listing I saw something like “modeling” or “nude modeling”—something that sounded easy enough.

So I call up the guy and then went over to this dirty basement on Fourteenth Street, next to a funeral parlor. There was a mattress on the floor and this guy in overalls, with long hair, who looked sort of like a hippie, says, “I’ll take your picture.”

HARRY REEMS
:
Then a letter arrived from the bank threatening to put out a warrant for me if I didn’t start showing good faith, so I asked my friend if the stag film offer was still open.

JAMIE GILLIS
:
So the guy shoots a black-and-white Polaroid of me—and sure enough, he calls me to come in and do a loop. And that’s how I started working for Bob Wolfe.

FRED LINCOLN
:
I was still doing legitimate commercials and stage work, but when Paul Matthews asked me to do that first fuck film, I said, “Well, who am I gonna be working with? What’s the girl look like?”

I figured it was some beast they were gonna get me.

He said, “Oh, I’m meetin’ her tonight. We’re gonna have a coupla drinks; come along if you wanna meet her. Her name is Utta. She’s from Germany.”

I go meet her—and my God, she was beautiful. Aww, she was gorgeous; blond hair, German, big tits. I said, “Holy shit. How much you gonna pay me to do this?”

He said, “A hundred bucks.”

I thought, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world!”

MIAMI
1970–1971

BUNNY YEAGER
:
If Chuck Traynor called me and said, “I have a pretty girl for you to shoot,” I knew she would be pretty. But then he brings over this girl, Linda Boreman—and the trouble with Linda was that she was flat chested. Not that there’s anything wrong with small bosoms, but what I’m thinking is, “I can’t sell her.”

Another thing: I didn’t want to bring this up, but Linda had a scar all the way down the middle of her chest. But I shot her anyway, more as a favor to Chuck.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
I’d made a big mistake with the Las Vegas Inn because in Florida, if you owned a bar, you had to have a P.I.C. card, which stands for “Person in Charge.” And the person with the P.I.C. card—could be one of the girls or a manager—had to be there all the time.

Well, the ATF came in once, and nobody had a card. So they closed me up.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
At that point, Chuck wanted me to go out in the streets and pick up girls to get them to work for his prostitution business. And I was not very good at that at all. I thought, unconsciously, “Well, he’s finally going to get rid of me.”

He told me that I was a failure at what I was doing, but he didn’t get rid of me. Chuck decided that moviemaking was his next step.

BUNNY YEAGER
:
It was while we were doing our second film,
Sextet,
when Chuck called and asked, “Can’t you use Linda in the film?”

I said, “Well, we’ve got everybody that we need, but I guess we could throw her in as an extra…”

So you have to look fast to catch her. She’s just sitting on some guy’s lap on a couch during a party scene. And I only used her because of Chuck.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Linda just hung in and hung in after the ATF closed the Las Vegas Inn, so I said, “You know, we should make porno movies or something.”

I had an old Bolex Double-A film camera that shot sixteen-millimeter film. You shot one side, then turned it over, and shot the other side. Then the lab cut it in half, and you had two eight-millimeter films.

LENNY CAMP
:
One time me and Sam Menning, a guy from New York, were making a nudie-cutie film in some condo in North Miami Beach. It was strictly simulated sex, soft-core, because it was 1971, and nobody was doing hard-core then, except for loops.

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…”