Hindsight: True Love & Mischief in the Golden Age of Porn

by Howie Gordon

  “What’s my name?” I asked him.

  Mitch looked me up and down and said in a heavy Spanish accent, “Richard Pacheco.” He held the “o” for a long time and kept nodding his head.

  “How do you spell it?” I asked him. He told me. Then, I signed my new name.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Y’know, there’s another Richard Pacheco! I went to his website. He’s got a shaved head and a beard. Doesn’t look a bit like me. Lists himself as an actor, writer, director, and producer. Shit, I don’t know, maybe he is me. Could I have been living in Bedford, Massachusetts all these years without even knowing it? Do I have a life I’m keeping secret from myself? Is this The Twilight Zone? Am I an X-File?

  I wonder if people who look up Richard Pacheco on the Web and see this guy just figure that’s just what I must look like nowadays? Our biographies seem to be bleeding into each other a bit. I saw a filmography of mine that listed a movie “I” made in 2005 and when I looked it up, it was him!

  Wow! Sure puts a dent in any feelings of uniqueness and immortality. I wonder how that Richard Pacheco feels about having to share his name with a guy like me? Jesus, sorry, pal.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It turned out that “there was no crying in porn,” after all. Over Sam’s most strenuous objections, the producers chopped that crying scene right out of the movie. “Tore its guts out!” Sam screamed. Bottom line, it was their movie. They paid for it. They owned it. They had the right.

  Fuck it. That and a whole lot of other disagreeable shit had led to a World War III situation between them and Sam. They had a three-picture deal going in with each other. Talk Dirty to Me was just supposed to be the first. Now, after all the feuding, capped by cutting out the film’s climactic scene, they couldn’t even be in the same room.

  I called them up and asked if I could have the footage. I just wanted to see it. It was one of the most extraordinary moments of my life. “Sure,” they said, “sure.” They didn’t care at first, but it never happened.

  When Talk Dirty to Me became this big-time X Rated hit, anyway, everybody immediately started talking sequel. The producers wanted John and me to make Talk Dirty Part Two without Sam. Sam asked us not to do it. He wanted us to make our own sequel without them.

  It got messy. When I sided with Sam, the producers stopped taking my calls. They never gave me that footage. I never even got to see that crying scene.

  Gordon Archive/Screw Magazine.

  Gordon Archive.

  Sam Weston — aka Anthony Spinelli. Gordon Archive.

  VCX.com

  Dewey Alexander and Laurien Dominique. Gordon Archive.

  Serena. Gordon Archive.

  Dewey Alexander & Jesie St. James in Easy. VCX.com

  Working with Jesie. Gordon Archive/VCX.com

  Michael Morrison. Gordon Archive.

  Gordon Archive.

  Gordon Archive.

  Vincent “The Count” Fronczek. Gordon Archive

  Gordon Archive.

  In Vista Valley, I had another sex scene with Jesie. VCX-com

  VCX-com

  VCX-com

  Fuckin’ Nuts! Gordon Archive.

  Lenny and Jack, it was a buddy picture. Gordon Archive/KBeech.com

  Jesie St. James and John Leslie. Gordon Archive/KBeech.com

  Lenny. Gordon Archive/KBeech.com

  It was different from the very beginning. Gordon Archive/KBeech.com

  Uncle Izzy. Gordon Archive.

  Talk Dirty was different. It was different from the beginning. Gordon Archive.

  Cameraman Jack Remy. Gordon Archive.

  Gordon Archive/KBeech.com

  Being directed by Anthony Spinelli. Gordon Archive

  Spinelli with still photographer Mark Focus. Gordon Archive.

  That’s actually Sharon Kane on the bottom right. Mark Focus/KBeech.com

  Part Four

  Gordon Archive.

  Star Drek

  The Continuing Discussion of My Career in Pornography: An At-Once Tantalizing, Yet Traumatizing Exploration of Human Love and Erotic Coupling featuring Intimate Variations of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and other Basic American Love Rituals.

  Chapter One

  “Every time I try to make it,

  I end up stepping in it.”

  David Schein, Blake Street Hawkeyes

  When Talk Dirty to Me was released theatrically, it made a lot of waves.

  It was not the monster epidemic that swept the country like Deep Throat had done almost a decade earlier, but a lot of adult producers sat up and took notice. They smelled the possibility of bigger profits for a better product. They smelled greater legitimacy. They smelled “the crossover film.”

  For directors like Spinelli, the crossover film became the Holy Grail of adult films. It would be a movie with explicit, hard-core sex that would be so well done that it would cross over into the mainstream markets. It signaled a brief period in the making of adult films that called out for bigger budgets, better scripts, and better performances, better everything. It was the perfect time for a guy like me to be in the business. If I’d had to depend solely on my skills as a “cocksman,” I’d have been one and done after The Candy Stripers.

  Reviews of Talk Dirty started turning up in places that usually ignored the adult film industry, like Esquire magazine for one.

  In the article titled “Deep Thought on Porno,” reviewer James Wolcott suggested that if porn continued to develop with the kind of emotional content as portrayed in Talk Dirty to Me, it might actually be growing up and be able to offer some real cultural value as an art form. And again, as I mentioned earlier, Wolcott concluded by saying that “until porn was made by the artists, it would continue to wallow in the shallows of human experience.”

  Richard Pacheco got rave reviews for Talk Dirty to Me. I never quite understood that. My best work was on the cutting room floor. The character was great, but the finished movie, eh. My guess is that the movie, and all the performances in it, get a whole lot better when you compare them only to the other porn films made that year. In which case, we were Gone with the Fucking Wind.

  At the 1981 Adult Film Association Awards (AFAA) in Los Angeles, John Leslie won the Best Actor “Erotica” for his performance as Jack. I won Best Supporting Actor for playing Lenny. Talk Dirty to Me was named Best Picture of the Year in a tie with Urban Cowgirls. The tie was a bit of bullshit, but we didn’t let it rain on our parade.

  The Awards were A Night at the Opera with Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Scummo! We all got to dress up in ball gowns and tuxedos and play “Oscars.” We even got to ride in limousines! By the time we arrived at the Playboy mansion afterwards, I felt like a little kid staying up way past his bedtime. There was the mighty Hugh Hefner in his pajamas shaking our hands and saying hello to everybody. Wow. We swam naked in his palace of pools. It was a magical night of fulfilled dreams.

  Later in the year, at the rival New York Critics Adult Film Awards on the East Coast, we won all the awards again.

  The phone was now ringing for Richard Pacheco. There were job offers and interviews. It was heady stuff! Talk Dirty to Me was a big hit, but not everyone was pleased. I received one scathing phone call from a veteran porn actor and self-proclaimed industry spokesperson named Bill Margold. To be kind, he “argued” most vociferously that we were taking the industry absolutely in the wrong direction. He was not gentle in making his points. Wasn’t much of a conversation going on. He was pitching and I was catching. His view was that porn belonged to cultural outlaws who needed to remain cultural outlaws. “Porn should be kept in the gutter where it belongs,” he scolded.

  By the end of that phone call, I felt like I had spoken with a buzz saw. We did not exactly see eye-to-eye. If Margold’s view of sex and the industry were the only one available, I’d have much rather taken a job at Taco Bell. It seemed like I had made a formidable enemy for myself without even trying. Margold was a loud, strident, sensationalist voice who was
dedicated and active in many phases of the X-rated business. Fortunately, our paths did not cross all that much while we both worked as actors in the late seventies and early-eighties.

  In the end, the industry actually proved large enough to accommodate the both of us.

  When Margold and I would meet in later years, it was always civil and with a handshake. By then, we had many industry friends in common. For all of his hard-edged bluster, I came to see in Margold a guy who behaved quite differently behind the scenes than you’d expect from someone with his ultra-abrasive public persona. Like my mentor, Spinelli, Sam, Bill Margold was very protective of the young actresses and actors he met in the fields of porn. He had a well-earned, avuncular reputation for making many life-saving efforts to help the lost, the wild, and the drowning kids who got caught up in drugs and in the torrid life of LA in the fast lanes.

  Shhh, don’t tell anybody, but Bill Margold is really one of the good guys!

  The success of Talk Dirty to Me made Sam the top director in the industry behind only Gerry Damiano. It elevated John Leslie to a leading man status matched only by the big boys like John Holmes, Jamie Gillis, Harry Reems, and Marc Stevens.

  For me, it was like being called up from Triple A to play in the Majors.

  “Richard Pacheco” became my full-time name, and I joined the ranks of a whole slew of second tier talent that would feature guys like the aforementioned Bill Margold, Paul Thomas, Eric Edwards, Joey Silvera, R. Bolla, Bobby Astyr, Herschel Savage, Jon Martin, Ron Jeremy, Mike Ranger, Jerry Butler, Mike Horner, Randy West, Don Fernando, Billy Dee, and, no doubt, some other significant players.

  We were the actors of what I would call the second great wave of porn. It was begun after the initial successes of the groundbreaking Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door generation. Our era transcended the last of the films being made in the mid-to-late-seventies on up to the complete video revolution that revamped the industry by the mid-eighties. That’s when the guys like Tommy Byron, Peter North, Sean Michaels, and Robert Bullock started showing up.

  Many fans and critics refer to our era as the Golden Age of Porn.

  Pericles was doing pop shots and the sexual revolution was at its zenith.

  Chapter Two

  It was 1979. The Pirates won the World Series, the Steelers won the Super Bowl, and I was Playgirl Magazine’s MAN-OF-THE-YEAR. It was a good year for Pittsburgh.

  If I were a gambler, like my mother and father and all of my uncles and aunts before me — except maybe for my Uncle Izzy — I’d have to say I was riding a nice little hot streak.

  And for dessert, the director of Insatiable called and offered me a lot of money to get a blow job from Marilyn Chambers, the number-one X-rated female star in the world.

  “Gee, I’ll have to think about it a minute. Let me get back to you.”

  The Ivory Snow Lady

  Marilyn Chambers wasn’t a regular porn queen like Annette Haven, Seka or Vanessa Del Rio. She wasn’t a regular in the industry. She hadn’t come up through the ranks. Much like John Holmes was among the men, Marilyn Chambers was in her own special category. Her name recognition and status all came from the great Ivory Snow scandal of 1972.

  As the story goes, when filming had been completed on her starring role in the groundbreaking Mitchell Brothers’ pornographic film Behind the Green Door, newcomer Marilyn let them know that she was “the Ivory Snow Girl.” In supermarkets all across the nation, she was being featured on box covers of Ivory Snow soap suds.

  Many have written that Marilyn was pictured cuddling a baby under the infamous Madison Avenue tag line of “99 and 44/100% pure.” Now it just so happens that my friend Albert Levy gave me an actual box of the Marilyn Chambers Ivory Snow soap suds (Regular size, 13 ozs. with the original soap still in it) and I have just scanned it my ownself into the computer.

  As you can see in the photo below, it is simply not true that Marilyn is posed under the phrase of “99 and 44/100% pure,” but then, as we have seen time and time again, History — with a capital H — is often written by only those who can manage to get it published! For the record, then, the phrase “99 and 44/100% pure” appears only on the back of the Ivory Snow box, in the upper right corner in red ink.

  Still, The Mitchell Brothers were savvy enough to use that phrase as well as tons of pictures of a tastefully naked Marilyn posing with a box of Ivory Snow in their advertising for Behind the Green Door.

  Maybe it was one of those slow news days, but the story of Marilyn’s “double life” as a soapsuds model and a porn star struck a HUGE chord in the mainstream media. It was everywhere. Marilyn was quoted at the time as having joked that her appearance in Behind the Green Door would probably help Proctor & Gamble to sell even more soap!

  It was Marilyn’s “fifteen minutes of fame” even before Andy Warhol got famous for coining the phrase about having “fifteen minutes of fame.”

  Procter & Gamble kept the story growing when they fired her as their model and pulled all of her boxes off of the store shelves. Marilyn did a world of interviews and hit all the TV talk shows. Ticket sales for Behind the Green Door soared. The Mitchell Brothers became notorious. The Ivory Snow boxes became collector’s items. In fact, I know where you can get one.

  And Marilyn Chambers’s fifteen minutes of fame ended up lasting for the rest of her life.

  Now, let’s talk about that blow job.

  Y’know, I could tell lies here. Who’s gonna know? Marilyn’s long gone now. She passed on to that great come shot in the sky back in 2009. Only fifty-six years old, she was. That was too young.

  I could write about how thrilled she was to have had sex with me. How she had whispered in my ear after having a positively torrential orgasm that I was the best lover she ever had. Yeah, I could say that, but, ah, that’s not exactly how it happened.

  The movie was called Insatiable.

  “Odd name for a sex film,” my wife observed. “Why would anybody want to make a sex film about a woman who can’t be satisfied? Sounds like being in Hell to me.”

  The movie was being made by Miracle Films. They had the best motto in the business: “IF IT’S A GOOD FILM, IT’S A MIRACLE!” It rang true on sooo many levels!

  A gaffer named Charlie Stephens picked me up in his ailing sports car for the long ride to the set in the Sacramento Delta. Charlie was good fun. We got stoned and bullshitted the miles away. Always liked Charlie.

  Mostly, guys — and girls — on the X-rated film crews of those days were very energetic and alive people. In fact, I often had the thought that the wrong people were in front of the cameras. They were funny and they had fun. They were knowledgeable, sharp, fast-talking and glib. They absolutely worshipped the movie business. Film crews were hip. Or at least they had me fooled.

  Charlie’s car coughed and sputtered, but somehow we made it. When we got to the hotel, we hung out in the bar and waited for our people to return from some location work. As Fate would then have a wicked laugh at my expense, an absolutely stunning woman flirted with me and tried to pick me up. Sonuvabitch, wouldn’t ya just know it? The last thing on earth I needed the night before shooting a sex scene was a hungry woman! Experience had painfully taught me the need to save my sperms for the battle to come. Sex was definitely not on my agenda that night. Retreating alone to my bed, I rested my loins and memorized my lines.

  In the morning, I was driven from the hotel to the set and there was Marilyn. She was in David Clark’s makeup chair. Her hair was up in rollers, but there was still no mistaking the fact that she was a real thoroughbred. We were introduced. It was light and easy. I acted like I belonged as I stowed my gear to get ready for the day’s events.

  Marilyn had her own hairdresser with her. This was already big doings compared to most of the women I had met in the business. Marilyn made lots of jokes and so did I. Keeping it light was the order of the day. I took out my camera and with her permission, snapped some pictures.

  I was hoping that this would be a day I
would want to remember. I was hoping that these would be some pictures that I would want to share with all of my Marquis buddies from high school. ‘Hey, Goose! Lookahere! Go fuck yourself!”

  Marilyn and I ran our lines. She knew hers and I knew mine. Good, good, it was all good. She appeared to like me well enough. Our scenes were going to be shot out of sequence. The blow job would come before lunch. It seemed like we were behind schedule before we even got started. They were already trying to speed things up.

  Oddly enough, the story we were shooting in the film mirrored our real life situation. She played a famous actress who has sex with a nobody.

  I wasn’t exactly a nobody, but certainly compared to Marilyn, I was.

  Her character was running away from fame in a Ferrari, and my character had run out of gas and was hitchhiking when Marilyn pulled over to render assistance. Before she was about to become overwhelmed with her “insatiable” desire for my nubile body, she handed me a bit of a rubber hose and suggested that I siphon some gasoline from her car into my gas can.