by Howie Gordon
(It should be noted here for the record that this rejection of crewmen by the actresses did not generally apply to the directors of photography, the head cameramen. They pretty much made out like bandits. All the actresses wanted to have sex with them. They were the guys who were responsible for making the actresses look good on film. It was good to have them on your side.)
John Leslie and Star Woods did the first sex scene. They had fun. I didn’t. And it only got worse when Blair Morse worked with Bonnie Holiday in the second.
Bonnie Holiday was exquisite. It took my breath away to watch her sweating and moaning in the heat of her passion. Blair Morse fucked her for what seemed like hours. Every time I sensed he was ready to come, he’d back off and then he’d fuck her some more. He actually was doing that for his own pleasure! It shocked me to see an actor do that.
I had progressed by then to where I could do a competent sex scene, but this was an entirely different galaxy. Blair Morse was a complete revelation to me. It never even dawned on me to take the kind of time he was taking to enjoy the sex like that. He was just having himself a private party and Bonnie Holiday was the entertainment. The director was letting them run with it. Smart fellow.
During the breaks, shooting my stills of Bonnie, I couldn’t have flirted with her any harder. She just looked at me with dreamy eyes that seemed to say, “Uh-huh, call me in about a month, I’m doing fine just now.” She was too. She was loving Blair and he was loving her. Me and the rest of the crew were climbing the walls.
It was a hot scene. By now, you and I both know that it doesn’t always happen that way.
In my second adventure behind the camera, I worked sound.
I was Vincent Fronczek’s boom man.
In fact, I hit Seka in the head with the boom mic that day. Oh, it was an accident, but she’s never let me forget about it.
Vincent Fronczek was probably my best friend in the business. He was a photographer by training and choice, but did a lot of sound work too. I liked to call him, “The Count.”
To people meeting The Count for the first time, it may have appeared that he was a few cards short of a full deck. Vincent liked it that way. He played at being more eccentric than he really was. He was very convincing. He had a slight speech impediment that he made worse when he really didn’t want to talk to you and that totally disappeared when he did. In later years, he explained to me that it was one of the ways he used to protect himself.
First and foremost, Vincent Fronczek was an artist. I always thought of him as the Toulouse Lautrec of the X-rated world. From photography to watercolors, design and woodworking to gardening, Vincent Fronczek had the golden hands. Still does. His social skills never matched his creative ones and unscrupulous employers often took advantage of him. His friends took it upon themselves to look out for him. We still do. Vincent is one of the innocents. He’s an angel running around on this planet. He’s a natural resource.
Vincent put a star on my locker one day after he’d seen me perform. It’s when I knew I had arrived.
Chapter Twenty
I used to like honey. I wasn’t a serious devotee or anything, but I used to like a little in my tea…when I had tea…and it was good mixed with butter and peanut butter on toast too. Yeah, I actually used to like honey, but that was all before I shot my second movie with Anthony Spinelli.
It was called Vista Valley PTA and was pretty much just a remake of Easy, which had scored very well at the box office.
The foreplay featured me squirting honey all over Jesie’s vajajay and then licking it off of her en route to the eventual in-and-out.
As I recall, there must have been a lot of dialogue during the honey-licking sequence because Sam had us shoot it over and over again. Take after take, I had to squirt that honey and lick her clean. And take after take, it went on and on and on, maybe all afternoon. We shot that scene over thirty years ago. I haven’t ever been able to eat any honey since.
The sex scene itself was another one of those vengeful, male dominating mambos that have always made porn such a big Mother’s Day favorite.
This one was preceded by a long telephone conversation where I had to graphically intimidate Jesie’s character with all this threatening, ominous talk about the nasty things that I was going to do to her. Oi.
When we shot it, Jesie sat at a big wooden desk. The camera was in tight on Jesie showing her transform from being initially frightened to being completely aroused by such an experience. I think she ended up masturbating.
For sound purposes, I was an off-camera voice hidden under the desk so that we could record both sides of the conversation.
It was a long scene. In true Spinelli fashion, I’m sure that we shot it a whole bunch of times. I was menacing, menacing, and menacing. Then, I was menacing, menacing, and menacing some more. I fucking hated it. It was not who I wanted to be when I grew up.
If it had been a straight movie, think of the Jack Palance/Robert DeNiro bad guy character in Cape Fear. I could’ve been putting myself in line for an Oscar. But it wasn’t a straight movie, it was porn, and I thought that my playing such a character was contributing to the delinquency of a culture. Sex deserved a better fate than more homage to male rage.
At what turned out to be the end of a long day, I had just finished slowly speaking all my nasty, chilling madness yet again and there was all this heavy tension in the room. We were just stewing in it waiting for Sam to call, “Cut.”
I blew it up. I made a joke and the room exploded in laughter. Everybody was laughing, everybody but Sam. When our eyes met, he looked sad, like I had just kicked his puppy. He had been working hard to create that mood and my joke had utterly destroyed it. It was an awkward moment for us. I had long passed the point where I gave a rat’s ass about that particular scene, but I did care about Sam’s feelings.
We got over it. Our relationship survived. Hell, our relationship thrived. The best was yet to come, and he never asked me to play one of those angry, vengeance-driven motherfuckers ever again.
Chapter Twenty-One
Talk Dirty to Me.
“There’s no crying in porn!” That’s what Sam told me the producers first said when they saw his rough cut. “The kid’s fucking crying, Sam! What is this shit?” They were not happy. “There’s no fucking crying in porn!”
Talk Dirty to Me was different. It was different from the very beginning. Sam told me he wanted to do a “buddy” picture. Said he wanted me to play in it with John Leslie. “You two will be great together,” he said. I told Sam I thought he was fuckin’ nuts.
I didn’t want any parts of John Leslie. He and his pal Joey Silvera had been mean to me when I’d first met them on the set of Legend of Lady Blue and I was not eager for a rematch.
“John and Joey are great together,” I told Sam. “John and I got nothin!” I tried to give the part to Joey. I didn’t want to work with John.
“You’re so wrong on this, kid,” Sam said. “You and John will have great chemistry. Trust me on this,” he said, “I know what I’m talking about. You two will make magic.” And you know what?
We did.
The crying scene was being shot at sundown, golden hour. We were going to use natural lighting. This put us under the gun. It was a long scene, at least a five-minute take, maybe longer. We’d only get one or possibly two shots at it when the sun would be just right.
We were in a hilltop apartment in San Francisco. I would be at John’s side while he played the harmonica. The setting sun and the San Francisco Bay would be our backdrop through a picture window. I would weep while he played and deliver my lines about the loneliness of my life.
“There’s no crying in porn!”
I was playing a character based on my Uncle Izzy. He was my mother’s younger brother, the mentally retarded uncle I lived with when I was growing up.
I was playing Lenny. He wasn’t near as far gone as Izzy, but they had a lot in common. John Leslie was playing Jack. He was the guy taking care
of Lenny, kind of like a gruff older brother. Jack & Lenny loved each other. Let’s just say it was a stretch for John and Howie to get there, but I think we did.
Talk Dirty was different. It was different from the very beginning.
Sam had once been friends with a young retarded man. His name was Melvin and he lived on the same street as Sam at one point. Melvin was a beloved figure on that street. The whole neighborhood seemed to take care of him. Sam told me that he thought it would be great do a picture about a guy like Melvin. When I showed up in Sam’s life, an actor familiar with my own Melvin-like character, the seed soon germinated for Sam and his writer son, Mitch, to write the script.
Jack was a confident womanizer with a trail of naked bodies behind him. Women seemed to fall at his feet. He was Joe Namath the quarterback and Mickey Mantle the centerfielder.
He was macho incarnate, smart and tough, and a man of the world. A lot of guys had played this character before in porn. It was nothing new. But none of them had ever had a sidekick like Lenny.
Lenny was neither Melvin nor Izzy. We played him as an immature young man, shy of women, slow of wit, and more of a homeless urchin of the street. When the story is joined, Jack already has become his friend and protector. Jack has taken him in. They live together like brothers. Jack takes care of Lenny. It humanizes his character. It shows us a heart that is rarely revealed in any leading man of porn. It makes him more than a conquering dick. In addition to whatever else he is, it also makes him likable.
On June 23, 1979, it was a week before shooting was to start. We were in rehearsal. My wife and I had invited some movie people over to our Berkeley cottage for a fancy dinner. There was Sam and his son, Mitch, John Leslie, Annette Haven, Juliet Anderson, Michael Morrison, Vincent Fronczek, and John Seeman.
We really did put on the dog that night: triple cream cheeses and patès, breaded oysters, a cucumber soup, Beef Wellington, and a tasty French dessert called Dacquoise. The champagne flowed. We were showing off for the movie people.
It got to be after midnight. There was laughter and we were all feeling the wine. Annette Haven and John Leslie were putting on quite a show. They were two alpha personalities hurling barbs at each other. It was a duel of wits; it was the battle of the sexes. They were locked in a comical struggle for gender supremacy. Neither gave an inch. They had done this dance before and were comfortable keeping us all laughing.
And then the phone rang. Who was calling this late? I went into another room to answer it. It was my Dad. He was calling from the East coast. It was the middle of the night. My Daddy was crying. Over the phone, I could hear my mother wailing in the background.
My Uncle Izzy had died. They were calling to tell me that Izzy was dead.
I couldn’t hear the laughter in the next room anymore. It was a dim echo. Izzy was dead. How could that be? Izzy could get so creative with names. When he couldn’t figure out how to pronounce Mrs. Bohonek, he called her Mrs. Mahoney. And when it came to trying to say Billy Kubiak, Izzy called him Billy Half-a-cup. A Volkswagen was a “ranchwagon.” Hubcaps were “Hepcats.” Hawkeye was “Hucko.” Everything cost “about 600.” And, of course, he’d look you right in the eye and say, “I can’t say Perry.”
How could Izzy be dead? He was sixty years old. Doctors said his mind worked like an eight-year-old. That meant that he’d been eight years old for fifty two years!
“Hey, How, when you leavin’?” That’s what he’d say to me whenever I came home for a visit. His hello was, “Hey, How, when you leavin’?”
They told me that Izzy died in his sleep with a smile on his face.
My Dad described the last day of his life to me. I’d had a T-shirt made for Izzy with a picture of his face on it. I had given it to him on his last birthday. My mother didn’t like it. He was smiling in the photo and it showed that he only had one upper tooth remaining. My mother said it made him look funny. She didn’t want him to wear it and he never had…until this morning. This morning, he came down from his room in the attic wearing it for the first time. My mother said he was very proud of it.
Many neighbors later told my parents that Izzy had stopped by that morning. It was as if he’d walked the neighborhood to say his good-byes.
In the early afternoon, my mother had left him home alone as was their custom. She went out shopping for the evening meal. When she returned, she said that she found him in his room asleep with a “sweet” smile upon his face. When she touched him to awaken him, his body was already cold. “It went through her like a knife,” she said, he was gone.
Carly had somehow let our guests know that I had just learned of a death in my family. Sobered by the news, they were packing up and getting ready to leave when I came back. I told Sam it was Uncle Izzy who had died. There was a special hug. We were supposed to start shooting this movie in six days. We both knew there were some real decisions to be made. We would be in touch.
There was no sleep that night. I called my brother overseas in Israel. It was a phone call I didn’t want to make and it was a phone call he didn’t want to get. My parents had asked me to do it. I did it.
When I tried to book a flight into Pittsburgh, the best I could do was one getting into town late in the afternoon. When I told my parents this, they let me know that the funeral would already be over. The Orthodox Jews put their dead into the ground in a hurry. I would not be able to make it home in time for the funeral. They suggested that I not come. Whoa! I felt wrong in not being there for Izzy’s funeral, but I couldn’t beat the clock and I wanted to abide by my parents’ wishes. I think they were so caught up in their own loss that they didn’t want to have to worry about my pain. They were protecting me from death again and they were protecting me from the full face of their own grief.
To play Lenny or not to play Lenny, that was the question. This was a fuck film for God’s sake. I was in mourning. Lenny was Izzy. Izzy was Lenny. Could I do this? Should I do this? Fuck show business! The show did not have to go on. I had a choice.
I roiled in these seas without my old family. There had been five of us, mother, father, brother, Uncle Izzy, and me. Now, one of us was gone. The other three were beyond my reach. For the first time in my life, the circle was broken. This was grief. This was sorrow. This was bitter. This was the price of having loved deeply. There were no cures and no short cuts.
There was, however, my wife! We were a “new” family in the making, one with “fuck and death included.” I thank God and all her cousins that I had my wife there to help me through this.
Obviously, in the end, I decided to make the movie. Izzy was such a fine and gentle soul. He would make a splendid mentor for my Lenny. In my own way, I chose to honor my Uncle Izzy’s memory with this performance.
We were going to shoot this crying scene as one long master. There would be no punching in for close-ups. This was it.
When Sam called, “Action,” John Leslie launched into a quietly, soulful harmonica. He was a very talented musician. Who knew?
I began sobbing and delivered my long tale of sadness and loneliness.
When we completed the scene, there was applause from the crew. That was rare. Sam was on his feet coming towards us when the applause started. He turned back to the crew, and with one withering look, shut it off like it was water from a tap.
They were breaking the mood. Sam wasn’t done yet. He hadn’t gotten what he wanted from me. He leaned in close.
“We’re gonna go again,” he said, “right now.” He took my face in his hands. “This time,” he said, “I want you to let it out, just let it out,” and he went back to his place behind the camera.
A strange thing happened then after, “Action.” John played his harmonica. The tears flowed from my eyes. The long speech poured from my lips. The scene was playing itself. It was all happening on automatic pilot. Inside, I was somewhere else. Inside, I was watching my own movie, a different movie. I saw my dead Uncle Izzy stick his head out from behind the clouds. He said,
&nbs
p; “It’s okay. Go ahead. Use it.”
The hair was standing up on my neck. The camera was still running.
The scene was finishing itself. “And cut!” Sam had a smile on his face. He was happy with it. We were done.
It was the only time in my life that I ever felt like I “understood” acting, and I really didn’t know if I even approved of it. It reminded me of reading about the barnstorming theater troupes of medieval Europe. They were often persecuted by the Church. They were subject to arrest, being tarred and feathered, and being run out of town by the local clerics. Their sin, to the medieval mind, was that they “played” with life. Some people argued that life should not be played with.
Anyway, that was my own private little world at that moment. Around me, they were offering congratulations and breaking down the set. John Leslie looked at me and smiled. “The actor!” he said, mocking me with love like a real big brother. That was sweet. Sam was right about us. We were good together. This was still just a fuck film. It wasn’t Gone with the Wind or anything, but we were breaking some new ground together and that was good.
My sex scene with Sharon Kane was up next. Sam was looking after me. “You have to go from being as sad as you’ve ever been in that last scene,” he said, “to as happy as you’ve ever been in this next one! You hit the peaks with Anthony Spinelli!” he shouted and cracked himself up.
When we were signing our model releases and getting paid after shooting this movie, Sam put a meaty paw around my shoulder and said, “Kid, you did a great job, but I’ll tell you what. I don’t want any fucking Dewey Alexander’s in my movie. Pick a new name,” Sam said to me. I turned to his son Mitch who had written the script.