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

by Howie Gordon

  After his seminar was over, Jamie asked me, “Do you think it went alright?” There was me, him, and John Leslie. We were having the post-game show at a North Beach bar. I had video-taped an earlier version of Jamie’s class some months before. After that one, we had discussed the strengths and weaknesses in great detail. “So, what did you think of this one?” he asked. “Tell me, what was the downside?”

  “The downside? The only downside,” I told him, “was that we had to leave! The downside was that the clock strikes midnight and Cinderella’s carriage turns back into a pumpkin.” I told Jamie that I thought we had just witnessed the birth of an X-rated Bingo Long and the Traveling All-Stars.

  I counseled the big guy to drop the whole business part of the show, add a few more name stars with stories, a couple of songs and strippers, put in some big screen video clips from adult movies, and let’s take the whole show to Broadway!”

  I thought he had the makings of an extraordinary Golden Age of Porn Review. We could all hang out with each other and feed for a long time at that trough. We could tour the country. We could go abroad.

  Jamie Gillis was the Pied Piper of people pursuing personal pleasure. He was like a viral infection of joy. Where he went, joy seemed to follow. He seemed to have an unparalleled appetite for sexual adventure.

  Y’know, folks, nothing is ever as it appears to be.

  They tell us that pornography is supposed to be this and that and the other thing. And porn’s leading men, guys like John Leslie and Jamie Gillis, they’re the men’s men that good society purports to dismiss and dishonor as brutes and rulers of an indecent empire.

  Well, John Leslie, he of the cobra-green eyes and volcanic alpha-male mentalities is also among the most sensitive of human creatures I have ever met. And Jamie Gillis, the Casanova of our generation, the dark prince who wanders in all those places that most of us only see with our eyes closed, he is a man so bursting with life that others can’t help but bloom in his presence.

  These are not the bad guys, world. These are supreme sensualists. I’m honored to call them both friends. Their ideas, their lives fascinate me, enrich me. I am bigger for having known them.

  At dinner, John tells me a story about Jamie. It’s about a time when Jamie was so broke that he couldn’t afford to buy the fruits and melons of which he is so fond. “You know what he did?” John asks me. “He used to go to that fruit store, pick up the melons, and just smell them!” It’s a story that amazes and touches John.

  Later, Jamie, well lubricated by a few glasses of red wine, is recounting a tale of lost love to us. Unexpectedly, tears fill up his eyes and roll down over his smile. He is more surprised and embarrassed by this sudden display of emotion than we are. He apologizes to us. It is so unnecessary. He is our big brother.

  This world, my friends, is often an upside-down place. Secretly, scumbags are frequently hidden behind the masks of public virtue while those free spirits we would so quickly condemn and dismiss from polite society are often apt to be the real people of heart and substance that are the worthy.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Well, that came out of nowhere,” Marty the agent said.

  “I know, death can be like that,” I said.

  “No, no, I mean, in your book,” he said. “We haven’t even really met Jamie as a character in your story yet and you’re already writing about him dead. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Did you read the story that Eric Edwards told about him? I saw it on the ladieznight.com website:”

  “Yes, I heard (he died) last Friday,” Eric said. “What a shock. I worked in many a film with him and we were good friends, yet totally opposite in our characters. I can’t remember who told me this, but a famous Jamie Gillis line was once when he was eating out a girl, the director said he couldn’t see the action and told Jamie to move aside a bit. Jamie’s response was, ‘If you wanted a smaller nose, you should have hired Eric Edwards!’ I shall miss him.”

  “What about your book?” Marty asked.

  “What about it?’

  “Well, you were cruising along talking about becoming a star and all of sudden you just got off the train and it’s like you’re headed somewhere else.”

  “Hey! Jamie Gillis just died. We’re sitting shivey here, man! He was like one of the founding fathers! There was Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, George Washington, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, and Jamie Gillis!”

  I first met Jamie in 1978. It was at the Adult Film Association’s Awards Banquet in Hollywood. Jamie was collecting his third straight Best Actor award. I suggested to John Leslie that they should just give up and name the award after him. They should call it “The Jamie.” I still think it’s a pretty good idea.

  Jamie once told me. “We were making Misty Beethoven back in the seventies,” He told this story a lot. Said he was pretty excited about that movie. Said he thought it was gonna be great.

  “I turned to one of the crew guys,” Jamie said, “and I told him, ‘Y’know, this is probably the best adult film ever made.’ You gotta understand,” Jamie said, “that these guys usually worked in straight movies. They were just doin’ this porn movie on the side for extra money. Well, the crew guy looked at me like I was crazy.”

  “He said, ‘Best adult film?’ y’know? ‘So what? Big fuckin’ deal,’ he said. Well, that kind of set the tone for me about my career in the X-rated business.”

  It kind of set the tone for a lot of us. It seemed that X-rated movies would always be “small potatoes” as far as the outside world was concerned. Still, a lot of us found a home there. Jamie Gillis found an iconoclast’s empire.

  “Y’know, a lot of people didn’t like Jamie Gillis,” Marty said. “I know one porn queen who told me, ‘He was an asshole, a jaded jerk, and a non-consensual pusher of boundaries.’”

  “Yeah, well, life’s messy like that,” I told him. “Not everybody likes everybody else. Why, impossible as it may seem, there may be some people out there who don’t even like me!”

  The world sighs an audible, “Gasp!” Cut To:

  Chapter Thirteen

  And now, back to our story

  It was the first day of the shoot and they left without me! Can you believe that? I was like twenty minutes late and they were already gone! The bus was nowhere in sight. I couldn’t believe it! I woke up late with a head cold. I was sick. I rushed and got myself together as fast as I could. I thought I was bulletproof with Anthony Spinelli. I thought he would have waited for me. He didn’t.

  It was a real eye opener. He was letting me know that I wasn’t as big a star as I thought I was. He was letting me know that the movie was going to go on without me.

  I was just lucky that another couple showed up late and missed the bus too. But unlike me, they at least knew where the location was. I hopped in their car and we made it to the set.

  Sam didn’t say a word to me about it when we got there. He didn’t have to. I don’t think I was ever late for another one of his shoots again.

  And after looking around, I understood why Sam hadn’t waited the bus for me. This was a huge cast with big-time star voltage. There was Jamie Gillis looking positively regal. He was a bigger man than I suspected and had a commanding presence. Like a king he sat there with John Leslie, the heir apparent, at his side. They seemed to like each other. Jamie was the old superstar Joe DiMaggio and John was the young Mickey Mantle, the new kid in town. They were surrounded by a whole bunch of rookie wannabes hanging on their every word and bumping into each other while trying to impress.

  Nearby, porn’s great beauty Annette Haven was a queen holding her own court. She was giving lecture to a bevy of starlets that included Dorothy Le May, Lisa Thatcher, Brooke West, Misty Regan, and some others. I’d met Annette a time or two before, but like with Jamie, this was my first time on a set with either one of them. They both had the aura of X-rated royalty.

  The working title was Rah-Rah-Rah and we were a traveling high school football team complete with a full roster of
players, coaches, cheerleaders, and teachers.

  It was a genuine zoo. And stuck in a bad case of life imitating art, Anthony Spinelli had the unenviable task of trying to control this large and rowdy bunch while shooting exteriors for a film without any permits. For the next three days, he exhorted us to keep a low profile while we traversed the back roads of Sonoma County shooting scene after scene on that school bus.

  At one point, we were parked on the side of the road taking a break. Keeping a “low profile,” Brooke West was sunbathing topless with her ample breasts on display for all the world to see. Cars going by honked wildly. When Sam came over to see what all the ruckus was about, he scolded Brooke and told her to cover up. When she was slow to respond, he threatened that he would fire her. To which Brooke sassed back with one of the great retorts in all of porn history:

  “Big deal!” she said, “so, I won’t be a porn star!”

  That we didn’t get busted and were able to complete the shoot was nothing short of miraculous. Whether it was worth it, is a whole other story.

  High School Memories was one of my least favorite Anthony Spinelli films. Making it just sucked. It was hot, I was sick, and it seemed that Sam was just distracted from the very beginning. Rumor was there were the usual backstage squabbles going on between him and the producers, but this time, it seemed to really make a huge difference.

  To begin with, this one had no rehearsal time at all. I can’t think of a single other Spinelli film or video that we ever made without rehearsal. And once on the set, when we weren’t actually shooting, Sam was completely missing in action. He was nowhere in sight. This was totally out of character for Sam. He lived to be on the set. I think he hated getting stuck trying to control that many loose cannons. He was a film director and did not want to be the head counselor at a summer camp for juvenile delinquents. Sam wasn’t having any fun. Lord only knows what else was going on in his life at the time, but this movie, despite a first-rate cast, never quite seemed to have a chance. It just got lost in the chaos.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fellow X-rated actor Michael Morrison once invited Carly and me to one of his famous S & M parties in Sausalito. Carly said that she would only go to an M & M party, but promised that she would eat the chocolate until it hurt.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lenny Again

  Carly and I went to “The Awards” in July of 1980. It was the 4th Annual Erotic Awards Ceremony put on by the Adult Film Association of America (AFAA). Porn Diva Georgina Spelvin used to refer to these gatherings as “the Company Picnic.” Every year it seemed that Jamie Gillis would win a Best Actor and she’d win a Best Supporting Actress. This year was no different. They both won those awards again for Ecstasy Girls.

  Ted Paramour’s Ecstasy Girls and Henri Pachard’s Babylon Pink shared all the awards that year and they both got to make lots of speeches and get their pictures taken.

  Producer Sidney Niekerk didn’t win anything. We were sitting at his table with Anthony Spinelli, Spinelli’s wife, and John Leslie. I wasn’t nominated that year. In fact, I was just attending on a ticket purchased by Playgirl. It was research. I was writing an article for them called, “The Men of X.” Didn’t even mention myself in the piece, still figured I was on my way out of the industry.

  Years later, Sam would say that the main reason Nothing to Hide finally got funded was because of how jealous Sidney Niekerk got that night while watching those other producers come up to the podium and make their speeches. Sidney wanted to do that. He wanted to produce a picture that could win it all for himself. So, Sidney took out his wallet.

  Enter Anthony Spinelli. Or should I say, reenter. As a director, Sam had an on-again off-again relationship with Sidney the producer. Sidney even adopted the stage name of “Bernardo Spinelli” as if the two were great brothers.

  I remembered them fighting like cats and dogs on the set of Easy. While Director Sam was putting me through twenty takes of a horrendous scene, Producer Sidney was putting his arm around me and whispering in my ear not to listen to Sam, “that crazy director.” Sidney was telling me that he hired and fired directors all the time. Twenty minutes later, the two of them would be hugging and kissing.

  No doubt, they were an extremely odd couple, but they were about to partner up again and make what many still consider to be the best X-rated movie of all time.

  Nothing to Hide began with two weeks of rehearsal. That was a real X-rated revolution right there.

  As a true sequel, John Leslie and I were playing Jack & Lenny again. We’d had the whole Talk Dirty to Me as a rehearsal. The characters were completely fleshed out. Michael Ellis wrote us a good script and we spent those two rehearsal weeks improving it before we ever went in front of the cameras. Where Talk Dirty had been Jack’s story with Lenny as the offbeat sidekick, Nothing to Hide costarred both characters. It was a story about Lenny falling in love and Jack coping with his jealousy and learning how to let go of his little buddy. It was an attempt to add a real movie to the sex.

  Make no mistake, Nothing to Hide was still a porn movie. But for a minute there, we hijacked the crap and kicked it all into another direction.

  It gave a breath of fresh air to an industry mired in muck. And it gave hope that our sexual media might one day grow up.

  John Leslie was fabulous in this movie. Once again, he did all the heavy lifting in the sex department.

  Shown here with the wonderful Holly McCall, John played in four sex scenes with four different women. As Lenny, I only had one, with Karen, my soul-mate and bride-to-be.

  Spinelli spent a long time looking for the right Karen. She had to act the mirror of the backward Lenny, who was a pretty strange duck. We began rehearsals without the part being cast. Then one day, Sam just found her.

  We spent some time getting acquainted. I learned that Tigr was a drummer into “new wave” music and culture. She also described herself at the time as a vegetarian, bi-sexual lesbian. Within the first thirty minutes of our relationship, she called me sexist. Oi. I remember suggesting to Tigr that she wait until she had a chance to meet some of the other “gentlemen” in the business before she decided that I was one of the bad guys.

  Truth was, I Iiked Tigr. She was young and bright and just full of piss and vinegar. It was encouraging to me to see this kind of strong, independent young woman attracted to the business. There was nothing “porny” about her.

  Off-camera, there would be no blazing, passionate love affair between us. I looked twenty-three and crazy, but I was thirty-three and happily married. I was “old wave.” As Karen, though, she was just about the perfect mate for Lenny.

  Our sex scene was great. It was played in character with the passion as awkward as we were. It came toward the end of the movie after Karen has accepted Lenny’s proposal of marriage. We were young and innocent, inexperienced and scared and that’s how Spinelli directed the scene. It was light years away from the “Bend over, bitch,” of most porn.

  When we undressed, we stood looking at each other for a long time in silence and then went into each other’s arms.

  At one point during the lovemaking, I moistened my finger in my mouth and stroked one of her nipples. “What are you doing?” Spinelli said, “Lenny would never do anything like that.” Once a sex scene heats up, it’s easy to forget all about the movies and characters. Usually, Spinelli would just take a snooze during the sex scenes and leave it all up to his cameraman. Not this time, though, Spinelli was vigilant. He kept us locked into Lenny and Karen.

  Many have criticized this scene as being way too personal too real. They squirmed too much with us over the sexual anxiety. Others said that they felt guilty and embarrassed watching people like Lenny and Karen make love. It was hard to even call what they did fucking. I can understand that. It certainly was different. Hardly anybody’s idea of whack-off material.

  Oddly enough, it was a complete accident that we used a rubber in that scene. Tigr had shown up without any birth control. We were counti
ng days from her last period and trying to guess if it was safe for me to come inside her. Bullshit, I wasn’t about to make a mistake who could knock on my door twenty years later and say, “Hi, Daddy!” We used that rubber for our own protection first. It’s always been ironic that people who have praised that scene usually talk about our putting on the rubber. When I came, I came inside of the rubber and inside of her.

  I was holding her and catching my breath when Tigr began to weep. That was not in the script either, but Sam kept the cameras rolling. It was great. Tigr was great.

  The last scenes filmed were those of our wedding. We shot those in Los Angeles at this crazy little wedding chapel, which I’ve seen in a whole bunch of movies. The fly in the ointment was that every five minutes, a plane took off from nearby LA International. Made the soundman crazy.

  When all the scheduled shots were done, Spinelli wanted us to improvise a food fight with wedding cake. None of this footage ever made it into the movie, but I own a scar on my forehead from the incident. Tigr had picked up a whole tier of the wedding cake and was supposed to smash me in the face with it. Hey, it’s the movies! As she swung to do it, the cake slid off the tier and I got bashed with the metal serving tray. Saw stars. It was appropriate.

  We were just a few miles from Hollywood.

  When Nothing to Hide was released, we won everything there was to win. Many considered it to be the crown jewel in Spinelli’s long and distinguished career as an adult filmmaker. It made me a star in the industry and it made John Leslie a superstar.

  “Warm, wonderful and sexy. An absolute masterpiece.”

  Female Forum

  “…a highly emotional film, inhabited by real people who have the ability to make you laugh and cry. Highly recommended on every level and thoroughly deserves its rating. 100%”