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

by Howie Gordon

  Now, it was paying off a year later when she cast me in the lead for Irresistible at my full daily rate. I liked Summer. She was a dish, a vivacious woman, smart, and with beautiful eyes. I wished that she would play one of my lovers in the movie. Like in Madame Lau, there would be a lot of them. This would be another sexual marathon for me but Summer Brown wasn’t putting herself on the menu, on screen or off. Too bad. At our first meeting at Annette’s house, Summer had whispered in my ear, “I’m having a party in my mouth. Ya wanna come?”

  Whoa! Maybe that was an oldie but a goody, but I had never heard it before. It sure spun my head around, but Summer was just laughing at me, having some fun with the younger man. She didn’t mean anything by it at all.

  What? Yeah, I know this is a long way from being seven months pregnant with my one true love and our first baby on the way, but that was the very nature of this business. You left yourself, your wedding ring, and your clothes in the dressing room when you went out there and you had to be one hundred percent sexually available to whatever Fate or the director was gonna throw your way.

  “Christ, y’know it ain’t easy.

  You know how hard it can be.

  The way things are going,

  They’re gonna crucify me.”

  John Lennon, “The Ballad of John & Yoko”

  Admittedly, it was an odd time to be leaving home, but it was the male lead in a prestigious movie and the bucks were very good. Carly and I decided that I should take the job.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The phone rang. Carly answered it. A male caller. He asked if Howie was there. Carly told him, “Yes,” and then asked, “who’s calling?”

  “Bill,” he said. I came to the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Is your penis big and hairy?” asked Bill.

  “Ah, Bill,” I said, with all the air completely coming right out of me. “Is that the best you can do?”

  “No, I really want to know,” he said.

  “See a shrink, Bill,” I suggested and hung up the phone. Carly said,

  “We got to get an unlisted number!”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Samantha Fox had won Best Actress at the LA Erotic Awards two years in a row. That made her the reigning Queen of the industry. She was coming in from New York to San Francisco to play my wife in Irresistible. I wanted to greet her in style. I rented a limo and picked her up at the airport with a big bouquet of roses. Summer thought it was such a good idea that she even split the costs with me. That was nice of her. Samantha was properly tickled by the whole circus of it.

  Samantha and I were put up at a hotel in San Francisco where we shared adjoining rooms. We had a week to wait before our one and only sex scene in the movie.

  Early on, we spent a lot of time together rehearsing our dialogue and doing some getting-to-know-you. I was full of pregnancy stories. She was telling me all about Bobby Astyr, the boyfriend back in New York. He was a big X-rated star in his own right, often referred to as “the clown prince of porn.” I had met Bobby once. I remembered his comment that “God was in-between Samantha Fox’s legs.” I was looking forward to gaining insight into Bobby’s views of theology.

  Samantha and I wondered if we were supposed to be having offstage sex. Should we practice? Rehearse? Find the lust? See if the plumbing worked? What?

  Somehow, it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. We decided on just being buddies and saving it all for the cameras.

  I was grateful. I had to do six sex scenes in five days. I would need a lot of sleep, but I would still be very much looking forward to meeting Samantha Fox at the end of the rainbow. She was a talented, delicious woman.

  Every day on the set with her became foreplay. I enjoyed watching her work. She was clearly a top-of-the-line professional. It was called The Golden Age because a lot more juice went into the performance aspect of the movie. And among the best of us, there was always great pride taken in the acting. A lot of us enjoyed that as much as the sex. And a lot of the others thought it was a complete waste of time. Well, fuck them.

  Backstage, Samantha and I spoke a lot about relationships. She was trying to figure out how to get Bobby to propose marriage. I enjoyed the scheming with her. Hell, I was happy just to know her.

  When our sex scene finally did come around, it was spectacular. I couldn’t have written a better script for it than the way it unfolded.

  Late in the afternoon, we were doing some dialogue in bed. There had been no sex yet, just a lot of talk. During a break, Samantha had to leave the set to take a phone call from her Bobby. He was at the New York Adult Film Critic’s Awards Show. When she got back in bed with me, she told me that I had just been given their Best Actor and their Best Supporting Actor Awards for that year.

  Wow, that was a stunning bit of foreplay! The reigning Queen had just crawled into my bed and told me I’d been chosen King. Her eyes revealed a happiness and a respect. My spirits soared. I felt that I had earned my place to be next to her.

  We finished shooting the dialogue and then dressed for the climactic love scene of the movie. Costumed in 1964 wedding finery, we were going to shoot the love scene of our wedding night. We’d been building up to it all week.

  When the sex was about to commence, director Eddie Brown made a gesture of genius. He put on some mood music. It was Air Supply’s “Every Woman In the World,” a popular love song of the day.

  It was ten pounds of uncut schmaltz. I adored it. They would later edit it out of the film so that they wouldn’t have to pay anybody residuals, but Eddie wanted to use it during shooting for the effect it would have on us. It was brilliant! It was a majestic home run right out of the ballpark!

  The music elevated the beast. A sex scene became a love scene. Our spirits entwined. We were a husband and wife in the movie who had just rediscovered each other after surviving an intense marital crisis. This was the healing. This was the consummation. This was a romantic joining of love and lust. What a joy it was to be feeling all of those feelings while the cameras were actually rolling. The specialness of this scene came from the intimacy and trust we had earned with each other.

  Samantha Fox was strong, and proud, and beautiful. She was creamy and free. I marveled at Eddie’s touch and then I marveled at hers. I ate it up. She was every woman in the world to me. She was my Carly. I was her Bobby. For one brief moment, it was all the same stuff. It was transcendent. In that scene, we were two actors at the height of our powers on a free trip to paradise.

  The music was one of the finest triggers any director had ever pulled for me.

  It was the best sex scene of my entire career, again. This scene with Samantha Fox completed the trilogy of the three I’ve called “the best sex scenes of my career.”

  When my parents wanted to see one of my movies, Irresistible was the one I chose. I showed them the R-rated version, Simply Irresistible. It played on Showtime for a while. What a kick it was to see my name in the TV listings. My dad confessed that he was surprised I actually spoke lines in the movie! “You were good,” he said. “My son, the actor!”

  And my mother wanted to see me on the Johnny Carson Show. Couldn’t give her that one. It never happened.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  “You’re stuck again!”

  “God! It’s you!” I was surprised to see Him. A visit from God is always something special.

  “What’s going on?” He asked.

  “The Steelers,” I said. He just interrupted me.

  “Fuck the Steelers!” He said.

  “You did! Last night,” I told him. “You had New England shit all over them. They couldn’t even touch Tom Brady.”

  “This isn’t about the Steelers,” He said.

  “You’re right,” I told him.

  “I know,” He said. “It’s funny how it always seems to work out that way.” There was a pause. “You haven’t written anything in almost two months.”

  “I know.”

  “Say his nam
e,” He told me.

  “Harold,” I said.

  “Good,” He said. “Now, say it again.”

  “Harold.”

  “Okay,” He said, “Now, get back to work.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  My in-laws were driving up from San Diego. It was late March of 1982. They were driving North for the baby shower and bringing us a crib. When the phone rang, I thought it was them. It wasn’t. It was Harold’s wife.

  “Harold flipped out,” she said. I didn’t know what to say. “All the way out,” she continued. “He killed himself. He put a steak knife through his own heart.” Jesus.

  She gave me whatever details she gave me then, but none of it really registered. There was just the one glaring fact to comprehend. My friend Harold was dead.

  Harold was my partner. Harold was my buddy. Harold and I were gonna conquer the world together.

  First it was Harold and David and David and Harold. They were like best friends from before kindergarten. By the time they got to high school, David had to straighten up to one day make it into medical school. He began refusing some of Harold’s invitations to run off and join the circus. David had to stay home and do his homework. I didn’t. That’s when Harold and I started having some after school adventures. On a dare one day, we hitchhiked all the way from Pittsburgh to Michigan State. It was a great trip. I became the stand-in best friend.

  We had a pretty good run there as Butch and Sundance, but just after college, back in 1971, when Harold first told me that he was the reincarnation of Jesus and I was Peter, well, shit, I knew we were headed into a world of trouble.

  There was a lot of talk in those days about the “generation gap,” but not too many people were discussing manic depression and schizophrenia.

  Look, it’s a long story and this is neither the time nor the place. Besides, I’ve already written that book. It’s called Dear How and it’s sitting on a shelf somewhere. Trust me, it’s depressing. For our purposes today, it’s now 1982, and my partnership with Harold has just been permanently dissolved. Well, maybe not exactly, but I’m the only one left who is still attending the board meetings.

  When the next call came, I stopped crying and answered the phone. It was Carly’s parents. They were calling from Highway 5 just this side of Bakersfield. Okay. They’d had a fire in their car! What? It’s okay. They were safe. They’d even been able to save the crib they were bringing to us, but their car had been destroyed.

  “Can you please come and get us?” they asked.

  “Yes! Of course I can. Of course I can.” I didn’t tell them about Harold. I didn’t tell them about Harold. I had to collect myself. I had to collect myself and stop saying everything twice. I had to jump into the Volkswagen bus and get on the road. Carly was at work. I left her a long note.

  It was either dark and raining when I started out or else it was just me. Carly was pulling up to the house as I was backing out of the driveway. Thank the Lord. I gave her all the news and she climbed on board the bus. We hit the road together. There was a lot of crying in the dark.

  I didn’t fly across the country for Harold’s funeral. The only person that I would have wanted to see there was already dead.

  Rumors reached me of some kind of ooga-booga about whether a suicide was allowed to be buried in certain kinds of Jewish cemeteries, but I didn’t keep up with any of that crap. I still don’t even know where he’s buried.

  Harold was so Nutsy Fagin by the end that many of us who loved him were just grateful that he only killed himself then, and that he didn’t take ten other people with him on his way out the door.

  Gimme strength, Lord. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll still be trying to get over it.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Eighth month of pregnancy, we were getting ready for a Gemini baby. We had a budget. We’d been able to set aside enough money so that we could both just take it easy until the baby was born. After that, there was even enough for a few more months just to get ourselves used to being parents.

  We had all the basics covered, but there wasn’t enough money in the budget for a video camera. Hell, we needed a video camera. How can you start a new family without a video camera?

  I was a star now. I was winning awards. I was charging $1,000 a day. If they weren’t offering to pay me that, I was just sayin’ “No,” to the job, but we didn’t have a video camera. Hell, we needed a video camera.

  There were no “big” pictures on the horizon. There were no $1000-a-day jobs in sight. So, I went slummin’. I took a job at half my rate. I got 4 days in a low-budget number that would buy us that video camera.

  Got off on the wrong foot, I did, when I showed up at the hotel for a rehearsal the night before shooting was to start. I landed in the director’s room where a starlet was holding court. She was completely drugged out of her mind. Cocaine was my best guess and she couldn’t stop talking. There were like seven people sitting around all waiting for her to shut up.

  The director was a young cameraman I knew who was moving up to the director’s chair for this job. He was helpless. Everyone in the room was waiting for him to tell her to shut up, but it appeared he didn’t want to risk offending the porn princess. I was spoiled. Anthony Spinelli would have fired her, or at least got her out of the room and put her to bed until she sobered up. It was the director’s job to manage this kind of crap.

  I sat there for a while until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I gave her both barrels about being completely unprofessional and wasting everybody’s time. The starlet was stunned and the director was horrified.

  Oddly enough, I was the one that he wanted to leave the room and to calm down. Evidently, my cock would be a lot easier to replace than her pussy. He didn’t really care about all my acting awards.

  Okay. They didn’t fire me, but after that, the starlet and I were never scheduled to be on the set at the same time again. And that was a very good idea.

  I had one sex scene to do in this film and it was with an actress who turned out to be having a serious outbreak of genital herpes that day. I’d been told herpes could be very big trouble for a woman giving birth so we had to create a scene to protect me in order to protect my wife.

  The foreplay was not a problem. She stroked me. She sucked me. When it came time for me to appear to enter her, we placed a towel inside her thighs that completely shielded us from any skin-on-skin contact. The camera was strategically placed so that the towel would never be seen. When I “entered” her, I fucked the towel. Viewers would never know.

  And that’s how we got a video camera.

  Chapter Fifty

  Her name was Marci. It was Anthony Spinelli’s Reel People. I think it was the most intense orgasm I ever had in the movies.

  I watched it twenty-eight years later and was still amazed. I had to replay it four times. I could see on film how it had surprised me. That was rare.

  When we shot that scene, I hadn’t slept in three days. I’d just gotten back to the set from the hospital where my wife had only hours before given birth to our first baby. It had been Hell and Heaven and Heaven and Hell. Through a difficult birth, I had just born witness to the magic of creation. I was raw.

  Anthony Spinelli was way out in front of the adult industry when he conceived and directed Reel People. His was the first movie to intentionally feature “amateur” sex in front of the cameras.

  Spinelli was on to something big, but his timing was just a little off. To begin with, Reel People was shot on film.

  Several years later, after video had completely taken over from film, guys like Jamie Gillis and Ed Powers used “amateur porn” to create a huge craze in the industry. The lowered costs of production and the relaxed technical needs of shooting video made it a natural for amateur porn to flourish. It soon became its own genre within the business. But back in 1982, it was Anthony Spinelli who was there first.

  In his initial project, Sam interviewed a number of people about their sexual fantasies and then offered
some of them the chance to make those dreams come true in his movie.

  Reel People featured a “professional” cast of Juliet Anderson, John Leslie, Gayle Sterling, Paul Thomas, Priscilla Shields, and Richard Pacheco. Those amateurs who chose to “star” in their own sexual fantasies were soon partnered up with the “pros” to help make it all happen.

  It was a different kind of erotic movie and it had some very hot scenes in it, mine included.

  Sam needed investors to make Reel People. Money behind porn was no different than money behind anything else. It was conservative. It didn’t like to take risks. None of the conventional porn funding sources were interested in backing Sam’s oddball idea.

  Sam asked me if I wanted to invest any of my money in his film.

  Well, sure I did. Sam was making my name in this business. He was my friend, my mentor, my advisor, and my director. Naturally, I wanted to help him out.

  I only said, “No,” once to Sam in my whole career. I had shown up for work one day and without asking me, he had arranged for me to do a sex scene with an older woman. I was early thirties, she was early sixties. It was beyond anything I could even imagine. Every inch of me said, “No.” Sam was taken aback by the rigidity of my response. He thought I’d go for it. I didn’t. He thought he could talk me into it. He couldn’t. He had to get somebody else to do it. He did.

  But that was it. That was the only time I ever said, “No,” to Sam and was able to make it stick. “Yeah, I’d like to invest some money in your film,” I said, “but first I’m gonna have to talk it over with Carly.”