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

by Howie Gordon

  For her part, I think that Colleen had to see for herself that there really was a wife and a baby. Nothing spectacular happened. Carly didn’t bite her head off or anything. In fact, she was the gracious hostess. Still, Colleen seemed somehow to get the message that I really wasn’t available.

  I thought that had been made clear all along, but sometimes, men, and I suppose women too, are just plain stupid. Colleen found a different me, at home with Carly and the baby, than the man she had known in LA. The movie really was over and all that went with it.

  After this visit, her calls became less frequent and soon stopped altogether.

  There were a lot of pros and cons discussed over whether or not I should resume my career. This last movie, as crazy as it had been, had bought us some time, but neither one of us ever wanted to endure another long separation like that. Carly was horrified at the prospect of being a single parent again. She didn’t want me off in New York or LA, fumbling with the next Colleen.

  When forced to choose, I didn’t want it that way either. We had worked hard to make a baby together. I wanted us both to raise that child. I had no doubts of that. Everything else had to line up behind that.

  Yeah, so, I did retire from the business. I wasn’t gonna be a porn star anymore.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  My retirement lasted six weeks. When Stu Segal called with that job in Up ‘n Coming, we were back in the business. He made us an offer that was too good to refuse. It bought us a lot of Huggies.

  Carly was already acting as my salary negotiator. It had become her job to serve as my buffer in the financial dealings when the producers or directors invariably tried to lower my rate during a negotiation.

  For me to continue on in the business, we decided that we would have to expand Carly’s powers further. The career had to better reflect our partnership. For instance, if a job involved too long a separation between us, she would have the right to veto it.

  More importantly, she would also have the right to veto any potential sex partner for me, period. If a woman gave her the heebie-jeebies for any reason whatsoever, we would request another partner or just let go of the job. There were any number of women in the business that Carly had met with whom she didn’t mind me working. But if she felt a woman was too needy, or looking to fall in love with me, or likely to start calling our house after Midnight, she now had the power to veto them.

  We would just take a pass on any deals that smelled like they were going to upset our family applecart.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  January of 1983, we hadn’t told Carly’s parents yet about my career in porn, but that day was just around the corner.

  Phil Donahue’s people called me in January and invited Richard Pacheco to be on their show. They hadn’t put it together that Richard Pacheco was also Howie Gordon and that I had already been on their show three years earlier as Playgirl’s Man-of-the-Year.

  Interesting situation. Should I tell them? Would Donahue or anybody from his staff even remember me when I came walking out from backstage?

  The other guests invited to be on this Donahue-Does-Porn episode were actresses Veronica Hart and Seka, and Marga Aulbach, who was one of the producers of The Dancers.

  It was tempting. Donahue was the Oprah of his day, the top-rated afternoon talk show on TV. A lot of people watched that show. And that’s why we turned it down. We weren’t ready for that kind of big publicity.

  To many, it may just seem like splitting pubic hairs, but it was one thing to take the national stage as a Playgirl centerfold and quite another as a porn actor. It was the difference between an “R” Rating and an “X.” The difference also was that my in-laws didn’t know anything about my porn career, and if I’d have done this Donahue show, they probably would’ve found out.

  I took my lead from Carly. We weren’t ready to cross this bridge. Carly said that she was afraid that her parents were going to send her to her room for about a million years because she had married a porn star. Later, she accused me of exaggerating. She said that they would only send her to her room for about fifty years.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Carly got a bug up her ass that we should buy a house.

  Beyond what we were spending on childcare and diapers, we had about thirty-two cents in the bank, but Carly wanted to buy a house.

  On a recent visit, her parents had made some comment about being willing to help us out with a down payment. It had gone in one of my ears and out the other. But Carly wanted to buy a house.

  Next thing I knew, Carly was dragging me and the baby to open houses every Sunday afternoon. Y’see, football season was over. The NBA wasn’t up to their play-offs yet. And baseball was still in spring training. What was a fellow to do? Carly wanted to buy a house.

  We saw lots of beautiful homes and some fixer-uppers too. They all cost hundreds of thousands of dollars we didn’t have, and it freaked me out. I hated it. I was still defining wealth as having enough peanut butter to get me through the munchies. Having a baby had made me a nervous wreck, but shopping for houses had me ready for a straightjacket. It was a job for a grown-up. I wasn’t even remotely qualified.

  When it came to the real “adult” world of insurance policies, taxes, property management, stocks & bonds & investments, annuities, gratuities, and how to avoid probate, Carly and I were babes in the woods.

  It was a kind of a deaf and dumb by choice. Berkeley, for a lot of people like us, was a Never Never Land where we were all still waiting for Bob Dylan to become Peter Pan and lead us up against the bad guys. It was something like that, but Dylan never did want the part and nobody else came even close. Besides, all the house meetings got to be such a drag. The sixties were long over, but a lot us were still stuck in that time.

  Carly had found her way back into the mainstream by becoming a therapist, but when I looked into the mirror, I saw a college graduate who had largely majored in whoopee. I was now an unemployed porn star. Try telling that to your wife’s parents!

  I liked being a porn star. It had some panache. I was happy with that. And when I had played it just right, Carly was even happy with it too, but it remained a daunting task to think that we could share that information with her folks.

  I didn’t really know what Carly’s parents thought of me. I was just irritated that I had to worry about another set of parents at all. I was doing fine with my own at the time, who needed the aggravation?

  Carly and I had been married for seven years. We now had a baby. It was their grandchild too. They had two grandsons already by Carly’s older sister, but this was their first granddaughter. They were doting. They were wonderful. They were Carly’s parents, for God’s sake! Yoi, this was a tough scene to play.

  We told them about the odd straight job I would do here and there in local Bay Area commercials, but, so far, had said nothing about my X-rated life. I guessed they thought of me as a guy who just hadn’t found himself in the business world yet who was content to live off their daughter, the psychologist. What a can of worms!

  I stopped going on the Sunday afternoon house hunts. Carly went alone with the baby. I stayed home with Señor Marijuana.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Irresistible won the Best Picture award from the New York Adult Critics in March. I was nominated Best Actor for that movie and also Best Supporting for Damiano’s Never So Deep.

  I lost twice.

  Jamie Gillis got the Supporting award and John Leslie got the Best Actor for, of all things, Talk Dirty to Me, Part Two.

  I wasn’t thrilled for John. I had turned down a role in that movie when I stayed loyal to Spinelli in his feud with the Talk Dirty producers. Not only did John break ranks with us and get himself a big payday for that movie but now he was picking up what I thought would be my Best Acting trophy for Irresistible. It wasn’t my night.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  On May 12, 1983, I was having a tough day at the typewriter. I had writer’s cock. As the blank pages stare
d at me, I had already beat off twice and it was just before three o’clock.

  I was frustrated and cranky when the phone rang. I picked it up and said, “I can only stand to hear good news right now. What is it?”

  Carly’s voice at the other end said, “I’m pregnant!”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I used to have fantasies about having sex with the women of the X-rated movies. Now, I’m having fantasies of managing a Little League team.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Being introduced to Dave Friedman was like being taken behind the curtain to meet the Wizard of Oz. Dave Friedman was the grandfather of the entire X-rated film industry.

  And when Dave Friedman invited me to join a Blue Ribbon industry delegation, which he was presenting to The Sixth World Congress of Sexology gathering in Washington, D.C., I was honored to be included.

  There was no salary, but the Adult Film Association of America, of which Friedman was the long-time president, would be picking up all the expenses for me, Carly, and the baby. Besides the career boost of being included with industry luminaries, it was a free trip to the East Coast and a chance to let my parents have a visit with their new granddaughter.

  Dave Friedman assembled quite a crew. He began with three queens.

  He added Director Anthony Spinelli, Producer Marga Ahlbach, Producer Chuck Vincent, First Amendment Attorney John Weston, Jimmy Johnson, president of the Pussycat Theater chain, and yours truly.

  It was a big step up for the makers of adult films to be taken seriously by a body of mental health professionals who dealt responsibly with sexual issues. We had on our industry’s best face as we talked about the possibilities for the sexual media in American culture.

  And we acquitted ourselves well. The mainstream stereotypes of those who participated in the making of pornography were so damning and pervasive that when people discovered you could actually walk and chew gum at the same time, they were often stunned.

  Dave Friedman understood this all very well. He’d been fighting for adults to see adult materials most of his life. When we were all done with our days work in DC, I got to have a late night walk with him back at our hotel. I had served him well as an apologist for sex films and he rewarded me with a giant cigar and regaled me with some tales of his past. I felt like one of the boys.

  Believe it or not, Friedman was not a fan of the X-rated movies we were making back then. They had become too explicit for his taste. “Left nothing to the imagination,” he said. It’s ironic how the rebels and pioneers of one generation become the fuddy-duddies of the next. The great Mae West comes to mind.

  “You show ‘em the sizzle,” Friedman was famous for saying, “not the steak.”

  Dave Friedman was a master pitchman, a flim-flam man schooled in the days and ways of the American carny, the traveling road show. “The secret of my stuff was the old carnival tease,” he told the LA Times in 2002. “The audiences would think, ‘Oh, boy, we didn’t see it this week, but next week…’

  They never did see it, but they kept coming back!”

  Friedman made a bunch of sexploitation films in the fifties and sixties, “nudie cuties” like Lucky Pierre that pushed at the obscenity laws everywhere in the nation. Like some kind of glad-handing, folksy rogue, you got the feeling that Dave Friedman was a likable fellow who was always two steps ahead of the local sheriff.

  Always looking for the next big moneymaker on the fringes of mass culture, in 1963, he moved on from strictly sex films to make Blood Feast, a “splatter movie” with blood gushing everywhere. According to his LA Times obituary, Friedman said that the film cost $24,500 to make and turned a $6.5 million profit.

  “It was crude. The acting was terrible, and the effects were homemade,” Friedman was reported to have said of his film. “But it was just something new, something no one had ever dared to do before.”

  Other splatter movies followed as well as more soft-core comedies like The Erotic Adventures of Zorro.

  Dave Friedman died on Valentine’s Day, 2011. He was eighty-seven years old. His memoir is titled, A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King. It was published in 1990.

  Chapter Thirty

  Payback

  Before we left the Sexology Conference in Washington, Sam took me aside and told me he was working on a new project with Seka.

  Seka was the hottest star in the business at the time and Sam was excited. He told me this was going to be a very big picture and he wanted me to play the male lead in it.

  It was welcome news. I hadn’t had a paycheck in six months and Sam let me know that this was gonna be a big one. Though it wasn’t spoken out loud, I knew this was my payback for remaining loyal to him and turning down the offer to work in the Talk Dirty sequel made without him directing. Usually with Sam, John Leslie got the lead role and I was his costar. This time, it would be reversed.

  Sam swore me to secrecy. I could tell Carly, but that was it. He said that there were still a lot of ways that this deal could fall apart so he wanted to keep his cards close to the vest. This was late May of 1983. He wanted to start filming in July. The only reason he was telling me now was because he wanted me to head back to the gym and get myself into the best shape of my life. The character I was to play was a gym owner who worked as a personal trainer to the stars. Sam wanted me back in my Playgirl Centerfold’s body.

  All right, I agreed to it. Putting a carrot like that on a stick was about the only way I could get this ass of mine back in the gym. I was getting awfully tired of doing sit-ups. But for a big job like this, I would revisit Narcissus again.

  And speaking of heavenly bodies, Seka was in on all of this because she not only was going to star in this movie but she was also going to be one of the film’s producers. She wrote this note in my diary:

  Chapter Thirty-One

  We went to Pittsburgh after DC and while we were there, Aunt Kitty took us out to her favorite Chinese restaurant.

  When we were reading our fortune cookies afterward, my Dad asked, “Where’s mine?”

  “It’s in your cookie,” we told him.

  “Oh, no!” he said, “I ate it!”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  When we got back to Berkeley, we were stunned to see Official County Notices posted on both our cottage and on the big brown house in front that the entire property was being put up for Public Auction. It was just two weeks away.

  Our landlord had defaulted on his loans. He was a contractor who had been buying up run-down properties with the intention of fixing them up and then reselling at a profit. For whatever reasons, his real estate empire had gone kerflooey and the powers that be were now biting his ass. The entire property was being put up for Public Auction in two weeks.

  “You said that already.”

  “I know. It made me nervous.”

  The very next day, I was in bed reading when I heard Carly suddenly scream outside. The back of the brown house was on fire!!

  It was serious. You could hear the fire. Dried cedar shingles were crackling. Windows were exploding. The place was lit up!

  Carly rushed into the cottage for the baby. I rushed by her for the garden hose. I got water on the fire just as Carly carried Juliana out toward the street. I was joined a moment later by a stranger visiting next door who had rushed over with their garden hose running. We sent another neighbor into the front of the brown house to make sure all the people were out of there. Someone else called the fire department.

  We battled the blaze with our two little garden hoses for a very long five minutes before the big guys showed up with their heavy artillery. We hadn’t come close to putting out the fire. but we did slow it down some from spreading. The firemen had it out in about ten minutes. Then they tore into the house with axes to make sure there were no hidden embers.

  The fire had centered in an added-on room that had been damaged by the blaze and then totally destroyed by the firemen. The rest of the house was still intact. Firemen said our quick respo
nse had probably saved the brown house, our cottage, and the two neighboring buildings on either side. They said we were all very lucky.

  This began a series of improbable events that saw Carly and I becoming homeowners within the next few weeks.

  What?

  This began a series of improbable events that saw Carly and I becoming homeowners within the next few weeks.

  First of all, the fire, following on the heels of the Official Public Auction notices, looked awfully suspicious. Everyone pretty much assumed foul play, but it didn’t really take fire officials very long to dismiss that notion. They said it was just a coincidence. The fire had apparently been started by an article of clothing left draped over a space heater by one of the tenants.

  It actually made sense to us. The guy who lived in that room was a real unconscious Joe. My mother would have described him as the kind of fellow who would lose his feet if they weren’t attached. It was easy to imagine him as the cause of such a blaze. He moved out hours after the fire and hasn’t been heard from since.

  We had a one-year-old baby and we were pregnant with number two. We either had to buy the property, now, or worry about where to move if we didn’t fit into the new owner’s plans.

  The money came from Carly’s parents. And so did all the patience, skill, and knowledge about how to play such a hand as negotiating and buying a house.

  Carly and I, who knew next to nothing about such things, did our best to say, “Thanks,” and tried to follow their orders. They were such grown-ups. We were such pretenders. It wasn’t easy for anybody.