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

by Howie Gordon

  At the end of that very long day, Annette and I got to make love. It was like a reward.

  I would not presume to speak for Annette Haven, but after what had been our long courtship, it seemed that Annette and I had developed some genuine passion for each other. Since such a union did not fit into our private lives, we had it to give to the movies. We had experienced foreplay in that getting-to-know-you embrace in Las Vegas Maniacs and in the hand job from the day before. This was to be our main event.

  We were two young and healthy bodies at the very peak of our physical powers. We were both born lucky enough, and had worked hard enough, to be pretty! In addition, we both took our acting seriously. In our scene work, we were as eager to win the respect of each other, as we were to please our bosses.

  The set that day was a dark, candlelit room. We began the lovemaking with a massage. I was placed face down on a glamorous bed of fur while Annette oiled and massaged my back, bottom and legs.

  It was the bridge over the troubled waters. It was not the usual, “You drop your drawers and you suck him until he gets hard” kind of direction. This was something else. This was taking the time to develop the mood and relax the lovers. This was taking the time to get it right.

  Annette’s massage was lovely. Her strong hands and long strokes eased away all the pre-sex jitters I knew so well. The massage turned me dreamy and cuddly. There were soft lights, fuzzy furs, and Annette Haven was caressing my entire body. I became eager for the sex. Arousal came all by itself. All I had to do was turn over.

  When I did, Annette mounted me and joyously rode for her own pleasure as well as mine. Giddy-up. In a massive understatement, she liked being on top. It was all fine with me. The cameras rolled. There was no need for an “Oh, baby,” soundtrack or any of the traditional porn mugging of acting passion. We were genuinely there.

  We’d both been through enough movie sex to let them get all the angles and footage that they required without letting their process be in our way. It became one of the few times in my entire career that I was ever more into the sex than I was the filmmaking. They played with their lights and cameras and we played with each other.

  When they finished shooting, they quietly shut down their equipment and just left the room. We hardly noticed. We continued until all the wax was melted, for both of us. It was a lovely experience.

  Director Charles is to be applauded for his fine touch in creating this scene, as well as his wisdom in knowing when to leave well enough alone.

  When I’m eighty years old and dream back on the days I pretended I was Casanova, this will be a scene that I should like to see again.

  Day Four

  On the fourth day, I was pretty pooped. They had me do an outdoor scene on a San Francisco rooftop with Georgina. I had to struggle to get it up and keep it up. I felt embarrassed. I was reduced to hanging in there.

  Like a boxer used to three-round preliminary fights, I was having trouble moving up in class and going at this longer distance. I apologized over and over to Georgina for the delays. No woman really wants to hear that. It’s humiliating enough that the guy is having trouble getting aroused. It’s just a trying situation all way round. Georgina was sympathetic and patient. For that I was grateful. A man is just so pathetic and vulnerable when his great blade wheezes and sputters.

  Nature abhors the vacuum. The young bucks paw the earth and snort. They will attack the old stag and try to kill him. If not, they will just drive him off and take over his females. But these were not the African plains of the Serengeti — this was just a rooftop in San Francisco.

  Eventually, we tortured me into an orgasm and I went home to try and get a good night’s sleep. I still had two days to go.

  Y’know, one must marvel here how the author can expect our sympathy. All he has to do is have sex to earn his daily bread and yet he has the nerve to complain. I suppose that’s the whole point. There were no bad days in the dream of being the sex star. Reality proved to be something else. I read somewhere that it was the great English playwright, George Bernard Shaw, who once said, “Hell is when you have to do, what you like to do!”

  Day Five

  There was a lot more dialogue with Annette and I had to have sex with three different women and come on a mannequin.

  The ladies of the day were Phae Burd, a young, uncredited French woman, who barely spoke any English, and Laura Lazare. Both Laura and the mannequin were made up to look like Farrah Fawcett, the femme fatale of the age.

  It was a workmanlike day at the ranch. I did my job well. The French girl deserved some note. She was memorable because she began wildly screaming as soon as I entered her. She bounced and bucked and did all the work of the sex at a furious, phony, and unsustainable pace. It was a good show, but it didn’t fit the scene at all. We had to calm her down. She was a young, happening ball of fire. Without the benefit of language, it took a while.

  And she certainly awakened somebody else’s interest besides my own. When she went to dress herself after the scene, she discovered that someone had stolen her both her pants and her panties. She had to leave the set that day with her raincoat buttoned.

  Day Six

  The last day of the shoot, it was another sex scene with Annette.

  We were teenagers making out on a couch. I wanted to deflower her. She didn’t want me to do it. Then she did. Then she didn’t. Then she did again, and we did it.

  When I arrived on the set that day, producer Aaron Linn smiled at me and said, “You look a little tired.” I was, but this was the last scene, the home stretch. Nobody was in a hurry and the pressure was off. The scene itself was a real turn-on for me. I’d had a lot of experience wrestling with girlfriends in the backseat. There were a lot of hot memories in that vault.

  Annette and I were very comfortable with each other here. It was nostalgic and charming. This was puppy love and it was nice.

  We used a condom in the scene, as we would have back when we were both a lot younger. You didn’t see many condoms in the porn world of the Golden Age. Birth control pills had rendered them relics and AIDS had yet to become a factor in the need to protect ourselves from disease.

  I thought the best part of the scene happened just after I had come. Annette hadn’t, but she’d been very close. In a way that only Annette Haven could, she threw everybody off of the set but me and we continued until she got hers too. Then, we invited them back in to finish their movie.

  Epilogue

  Several months later, Annette and I were summoned to a San Francisco studio to do some voice-overs. We held hands while we watched ourselves making love on the screen and tried to match the movements of our lips with appropriate moans and groans. It was all very awkward and silly. We had no sex in the studio that day though I confess I had hoped we might. It seemed that our time had passed.

  Epilogue Part Two

  I watched the movie! Twenty-eight years later, I watched the movie. Wow.

  The music was good! How often can you say that about a porn film? Tucki Bailey wrote the original score and Kathleen Amorose wrote the lyrics to “The Temptress,” Madame Lau’s theme song. Hey guys, if you’re still out there, nice going!

  I did the whole movie in a British accent. Occasionally, it wasn’t bad! And once in a while, mind you, I actually nailed Richard Burton’s voice. Thank you very much.

  Then, there was my body. I was in my early thirties then, still in peak physical condition. Wow, what a gift it was that I got to have a body like that even for a little while. My thanks to the great cosmic prop man!

  There really were two directors, by the way! In the opening credits, both Charles De Santos and Christie MacDonald are listed under Director.

  Remember all that time I spent telling you about how I didn’t have an orgasm with Kay Parker in that first love scene on the beach? Well, forget that! When you watch the movie, you’ll see that I did! Apparently, they shot another couple on the beach at Clear Lake and cut their orgasm footage into my scene with Kay. I c
ould tell because, when I came, all of a sudden my ass was a whole lot hairier than it was in the rest of the scene. It was movie magic!

  Speaking of which, they also added more hardcore footage to my scene with Georgina too. I was so caught up in my own sexual meltdown that day that I hadn’t noticed how terrific Georgina really was in that scene. She played my boss and my mentor, a kind of Mrs. Robinson figure and her performance was outstanding.

  When you see this scene in the movie, it’s actually quite good. It’s hot. It’s got nothing to do at all with my earlier depressing remembrance of torturing myself into arousal. This was one scene that they really did “fix in the post.” It was a huge improvement!

  But more than all of this, what really jumped out at me from watching the movie after all these years was in seeing how much I was in love with Annette.

  Our sex scenes just crackled with it. I had always remembered that first scene as being so special between us, and it was, but it was the second one that completely surprised me, the one where we were the young lovers. I rarely knew passion like that in the movies. When I heard the sounds of my orgasm in that scene, it had nothing to do with acting, and that’s as good as it gets.

  Chapter Forty

  Q: How can you tell if an elephant has been in the refrigerator?

  A: You can see his footprints in the butter.

  Old elementary school riddle

  Yeah, let’s talk about that elephant in the room again. I hear this married man going on and on about loving Annette Haven and I wonder what’s up with that? I know for a fact that he also loved Kelly Nichols too. And there was Sharon Kane way back at the beginning of his career. And later on, there’ll be Shauna Grant and Kay Parker and Nina Hartley.

  Is it only men who are foolish enough to think that they can keep people compartmentalized into relationships that don’t spill over on to each other? I’ll keep this woman over here and that woman over there.

  Do women think like that too?

  Actors and actresses play with life, both on screen and off. For most, it’s all just part of that lifestyle.

  Cybill Shepherd wrote well of the practice in her autobiography, Cybill Disobedience (2000):

  “It’s a nod to the hyper reality of the film business that everybody in Hollywood knows the maxim: no names on location. Cast and crew conspire in an implicit acceptance and discretion about the phenomenon of musical beds, about who is seen emerging from which star’s trailer or which grip’s room at the Motel 6. The set is like an office Christmas party, where indiscretions are absolved when the party’s over, or like the miniature village around the model trains that I coveted as a child, a bantam community assembled for fun. Everyone has a common purpose, everyone is paid to be creative, and everyone can pretend to be someone else. It’s a dreamscape of sorts, basically free of familial and adult responsibilities. I was twenty years old when I entered that world, mischievous and recklessly self-absorbed.”

  Yeah, it was fun to play pretend. It was fun to be a star. It was fun to make money. But, the greatest gift by far of working in the X-rated industry was the incredible intimacy I got to share with some truly extraordinary women along the way.

  Y’know, you can fuck somebody all day long, or even fuck them two, three, four, maybe five or six different times and still never have a whiff of intimacy. The carnal knowledge of having sex does open the door, but it doesn’t necessarily get you invited into the house.

  Just as in real life, intimacy is different. It’s something else. It’s special. It only happens when it happens, but getting naked and going through the make-believe of such biblical knowing, certainly creates all kinds of opportunities that most people don’t get to have while they’re working in an office. Besides, that’s not make-believe. That’s real life, and the consequences for such behaviors there tend to be much more severe.

  Actors and actresses are lucky that way. They get to make trade of feelings and emotions as if these things are somehow controllable commodities. And when they’re not, when things get tangled and the shit hits the fan, there is still that safety net. It all comes out in the wash when the film or play is wrapped and the make-believe abruptly comes to an end. Somebody turns off the lights, locks up all the doors, and says,

  “Everybody go home.”

  The industry served us well in the early years of our marriage. I was in no way ready to embrace monogamy then, and being an actor in the X-rated world provided me with a safety valve, a protected zone where I could continue to sort out the confusions and contusions of my lusts and loves without putting too heavy a burden on my primary relationship. We had an arrangement. What happened on a movie set or a location was one thing, what happened at home was another.

  All that, by the way, was seriously about to change. On September 15, 1981, Carly phoned from the doctor’s office to tell me we were pregnant. The balance of power would never be the same.

  Chapter Forty-One

  I wrote in my diary:

  A big turn of the wheel.

  The egg took the sperm. “Houston, we have lift-off!”

  A newt was hard at work yesterday growing its tail in Carly’s belly. Sometime in late May or early June, another in a series of biologically reproduced humans will make an entrance on the grand stage of earth-life drama. Carly and I have volunteered and pursued the seeding of this new being and will serve as parents when the egg is hatched.

  Nothing will ever be the same. It already isn’t. Twelve months of sperm chasing egg has already remodeled our union in a dozen significant ways and from now on, our little family is going to be busy gearing up for the population explosion.

  Carly says, “Don’t call the baby a newt!”

  “To Horse! To Horse!” There are a trillion-zillion things needing instant change. This is as good as conquering the world, Alexander, and you don’t even have to leave home to do it!

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Weeks passed without any offers of new work. That wasn’t cool. It was a most unwelcome time for a dry spell.

  Spinelli wanted me to meet his old friend Chris Warfield. They were about to shoot It’s Called Murder, Baby. It was a big-budget 1940s period piece which would eventually be released as Dixie Ray. John Leslie and Lisa De Leeuw were set to star. Hollywood veteran Cameron Mitchell had a role in it. Chris was producing. Sam was directing. Sam just wanted me to meet Chris to see if he might have a part in it for me.

  We gathered at the Holiday Inn in San Rafael. I took along my portfolio. I met Chris Warfield. Spinelli praised me to him and him to me. Chris began looking at my book of photographs. He was turning the pages telling me how good I looked. Unfortunately, he was holding my book upside-down. I didn’t correct him. Chris Warfield was suffering from glaucoma. He was very close to blind. It was sad. Chris had nothing for me in this film. Spinelli was just trying to be a friend.

  On the way home, I stopped by Michael Morrison’s in Sausalito to audition for a more typical X-rated film called The Mansion. I met Eli the director and read for him. He liked my reading and offered me a part doing a sex scene with Danielle, the film’s young star. I had never met her, but recently had heard both John Leslie and Joey Silvera raving about her body.

  I told Eli that the part was okay enough, but that I wouldn’t work with anyone who had herpes. Now that I was pregnant, it was a whole new ballgame. I wasn’t going to fuck it up. It was my understanding that an outbreak of herpes in a delivering woman would eliminate the possibility of a normal vaginal birth and would require a Caesarian section. Eli said he’d respect my wishes and would check everything out in advance. Fine. He then proceeded to offer me exactly half of my daily rate. I politely declined. He was nice about it. So was I. He told me that he wouldn’t always be making such low-budget features and he hoped that we’d get to work together in the future. I told him that would be swell and that’s how we left it.

  Chutzpah

  A week later, I’m lying in bed late one morning when the phone rings. If you
must know, I had just finished masturbating. Shhh!

  It’s Eli. They were in the middle of shooting their movie. A guy they had hired to work with Danielle couldn’t get it up. Was I willing to rush over and take his place? They would gladly pay my full rate.

  It was an hour’s ride to the set. It would maybe be another hour before we got to the sex. Would that be enough of a refractory period?

  “Sure,” I told him. “I’ll be right over.” I couldn’t believe I said that. Never knew I had that kind of chutzpah.

  “Bravery is a man in search of a test,” once wrote the Sufi’s. This was opportunity knocking — about $1,000 worth. I was game to give it a shot. I didn’t say a word about my masturbation, but I did ask about herpes. Eli told me that Danielle was fine. “Good,” I said, “good.”

  When this book gets made into a movie, this will be the scene where I’m rushing across the Golden Gate Bridge in my VW bus and we’ll be listening to Gordon MacRae singing “My Boy, Bill” from the soundtrack of the Broadway show, Carousel.

  “I got to get ready before she comes!

  I got to make certain that she

  Won’t be brought up in slums

  With a lot o’ bums like me

  She’s got to be sheltered

  And fed and clothed

  In the best that money can buy!

  Now, I never knew how to make money,

  But, I’ll try, By, God, I’ll try!

  I’ll go out and make it or steal it

  Or take it or die!”