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

by Howie Gordon

  There was joy in the land.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  From My Diary,

  Homecoming 1984. Whatever time there was, there’s less of it now. A newborn and a toddler have us spinning.

  Carly and Polly came home today. I picked them up around 2:00 p.m. at the hospital. Polly is a bit jaundiced and must be watched. We take her in early tomorrow morning for some shots or something.

  Juliana and I have severe colds. She gets away with being cranky, I don’t. Such is the transition in life from child to adult.

  Other than sickness and exhaustion, things are terrific.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  At the San Francisco Zoo’s Birds of Prey Show, we met a great horned owl named King Richard who they told us was mentally unbalanced because he’d only been fed baloney for the first two years of his life. Kind of like the people who watch Fox News.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  I've got daughters! Gordon Archive.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  I was delighted to win the first two acting awards that the Adult Video News ever gave out.

  These two awards given to me by AVN in 1984 might very well have been the mountaintop of my career.

  You know what my Dad would have said about me putting something like that in here? He would have said, “Self praise stinks!” But then again, my Dad never tried to make it in show business.

  Publisher Paul Fishbein and his AVN crew were just a small newsletter coming out of Philadelphia at this point, but they were the future and they were coming on strong. I felt seen by them and I felt appreciated. I thank you, gentlemen, then and now.

  The awards season continued in 1984, with those of the Adult Film Association of America. These guys were the old guard. By 1986, they would be out of business. Film would essentially be over by then as a source of adult product. The video revolution would have been completed and the Adult Video News (AVN) would become the new standard bearer for the entire industry.

  By now, she had fucked John Leslie and Jamie Gillis. She had fucked Joey Silvera too. She fucked Paul Thomas, Jerry Butler, Ron Jeremy, and about twenty-seven other guys as well, but who’s counting. This was the game we were all in.

  They dressed her up. They undressed her. They posed her and they hosed her. She wasn’t the first and she wouldn’t be the last. They made her Suzie Superstar! And they made her Virginia.

  They took her picture and put her in the magazines and in the movies. They made her Shauna Grant, the porn star.

  It was who she thought she wanted to be.

  Her escort for the Awards that night was Francis Ford Coppola, the acclaimed director of The Godfather. Yes, that was extraordinary. Hollywood royalty did not generally show up for an X-rated awards show. It made you think that something extra special was happening for this young woman.

  Shauna Grant was nominated four times in three different categories. Even for an X-rated actress, where the term “star” was bandied about loosely, Colleen’s rise had been astonishingly meteoric. She’d made a bunch of movies since we’d worked together. Two of them were now nominated for Best Picture, and Shauna Grant was nominated for Best Actress in each of them.

  I saw Colleen at the Awards rehearsal early that afternoon. All the freshness was gone. The baby pudge had melted away from her cheeks. She was now a sleek, young, LA greyhound.

  She told me that she had quit the business. Wow! She said she’d been out of it now for about six months. She had a boyfriend, she said, but he was in jail. She was working in his store and trying to get him out.

  Colleen invited me to come to her room after the rehearsal to have a drink. She said she wanted to introduce me to her new friend, Francis Coppola. I was impressed, but I declined the invitation. I didn’t figure he was hanging around Colleen because he wanted to meet me. We got on with the rehearsal.

  When I got back to my hotel room, I discovered corsages that Colleen had sent over for Carly and my daughters.

  Gordon Archive.

  They were very nice. It was a sweet gesture. When I called to thank her, she again invited me to her room for a drink. She said she was alone. So was I. Carly was out somewhere with the kids.

  We had champagne. I thanked her for the flowers. She started talking about her boyfriend in jail. She said that she was trying to get rid of him. She said that she had landed in the middle of a bunch of cocaine heavies and that she was trying to get out. She told me, and I quote her verbatim here, “If some people knew that I know what I know, I’d be in a lot of trouble.”

  Okay. I told her that sounded like a good scene to get out of. I asked her if she was still using cocaine. Her reputation for the stuff had become an industry joke. She said that she was off of the drug. We toasted to that.

  It was awkward then. The conversation seemed to have exhausted itself. We drank our champagne and very self-consciously did not touch each other. Carly was probably waiting for me with the kids by now. I knew she would not be too crazy about me being in Colleen’s room anyway. When another friend showed up at Colleen’s door, I took it as my cue to leave.

  I wished her well in the evening’s awards. We gave it a kiss and a hug with no hint of past feelings. I told her to call me anytime if I could ever help her. Then I heard what I had just said. It made me laugh. I amended it by saying, “Call me anytime you want before eleven at night.” She laughed. We said good-bye.

  With Coppola and his entourage at her table that night, Colleen was the belle of the ball. But it wasn’t to be her night after all.

  In fact, for a while there, it looked like it wasn’t going to be anybody’s night. Early in the show, some crazy had set off a smoke bomb in the orchestra pit and the whole room had to be cleared. The glitterati of the entire X-rated industry went spilling out into the LA streets in their ball gowns and tuxedos.

  In time, order was restored and the smoke cleared away. Many people thought it had all been intended as part of the show.

  Actress Lee Carol and I presented the award for Best Supporting Actor. It went to Ron Jeremy for Suzie Superstar. I think it may have been Ron’s first major award. I was happy for him. Nobody in the business worked harder at it than Ron Jeremy.

  Shauna Grant was shut out. The Best Actress went to Kelly Nichols for In Love, and Kay Parker won Best Supporting for Sweet Young Foxes. Paul Thomas, who was Colleen’s leading man in Virginia, got the Best Actor for it, and Virginia won Best Picture as well. Shauna Grant didn’t win anything.

  The night belonged to my old mentor, John Seeman. He had both produced and directed Virginia. It was probably the most successful movie of his career. It won a ton of awards that year. And my personal highlight was getting to watch dear friend Vincent Fronczek mount the podium and accept an award for his brilliant photography. That was sweet. Vincent was usually the worker who was hidden in the workshop. It was nice to see him get some recognition.

  I ran into Colleen late at night in the hotel lobby. She was sniffing.

  At first, I thought she had been crying. Then, I realized it was cocaine. She was embarrassed that I knew, and that I knew, that she knew, that I knew. She shrugged it off. Said it was a special night. We chatted a moment or two as we waited for the elevator. I kissed her goodnight. I didn’t know it was a kiss good-bye.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Late night on March 22, just eight days later, I got a call from John Seeman. He said he wanted to talk to me about Colleen.

  “Sure,” I said, “what about her? What’s she gotten into this time?”

  “You haven’t heard then,” he said.

  “Heard what? I haven’t spoken with her since the Awards.”

  “She shot herself in the head,” John told me.

  “WHAT?!?” My shock was so big that Carly came running in from the next room to see what happened.

  “She’s being kept alive by life support systems,” John said. “There’s no brain activity.”

  I didn’t want to believe it. The X-rated world wa
s filled with drama queens and kings. This was all just another rumor, a terrible, terrible, unfunny rumor.

  I called Laurie Smith. Laurie was Colleen’s drinking buddy, her snorting buddy, her fuckfilm buddy, and her best friend. Laurie was crying over the phone.

  She had just gotten home from the hospital where she’d been with Colleen all day. She left when Colleen’s mother had arrived from somewhere in the Midwest. Laurie confirmed all the worst news.

  Within several days, the family pulled the plug. Colleen was gone. And then Colleen was gone gone. They took her back to Minnesota for burial.

  Shauna Grant became another Hollywood story.

  “If some people knew that I know what I know, I’d be in a lot of trouble,” she had said to me, and now, a week later, she was dead. How was I supposed to believe that her death was a suicide? And not just that but that she had shot herself in the head with a rifle! For God’s sake, how the Hell do you even do that?

  If I were a Russell Crowe or a Sylvester Stallone character, I’d have bought myself a big gun, hired myself some great writers, and then flown down to Palm Springs to flush out and chase down the bad guys.

  And “if a frog could fly, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much.” This was real life. It wasn’t the movies.

  The police, the family, all of Colleen’s friends, they were all pretty much content to call it a suicide. Who was I to argue? In time, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. No matter what which way, Colleen was gone and she was gonna stay gone.

  The mainstream media was all over this, from the tabloids to the networks. I stayed in the shadows. I didn’t want any part of that circus.

  I’ll always remember that Jamie Gillis wanted to make a movie about a young woman like Colleen. She’d be new in town, a countrified lusciousness come to Hollywood straight from the farm. She’d be all set to make her first sex film with a big star like Jamie. But instead of taking her to the set, he’d drive her back to the train station, kiss her good-bye, and send her home.

  Colleen, I wish we had. Would you have gone?

  Chapter Fifty

  How do you go on after something like that? Did the business kill Colleen? How could I not ask? Or was it the cocaine? Was it rooted in the conflict with her family back home? Was it even a suicide? Or was it really a very clever killing done by bad guys connected to her boyfriend’s drug dealing? Was somebody here getting away with murder?

  There were questions. Lots of ‘em. There were responsibilities to sort out. There was blame to cast. There were scapegoats to hang. There was coping to be done.

  If she did take her own life, Colleen would not be the first suicide to come out of pornography. It seemed like there was almost one a year. Sometimes, it was a man and sometimes a woman. Megan Leigh, Savannah, Marcy from Reel People, Jon Dough, and Alex Jordan were some of the ones I remember. Inevitably, family disputes, drugs, financial debts, and loves gone wrong were almost always part of the story.

  The big difference for me was that I didn’t get particularly close to any of those other people as I had done with Colleen. It changed things. It changed the way I did my career. I began steering way away from all the young ones. I wanted to work with only the seasoned pros now, the ones who knew what they were doing, the ones who had demonstrated that they could handle it. Whenever it was possible, there would be no more rookie partners for me.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Video was upon us. Anthony Spinelli came to town in April to shoot Spectators, his first video.

  Spinelli hated video. He loved the movies. He loved the magic of the big, silver screen in the darkened theater. He had lived and breathed movies all his life. The producers just weren’t making that many X-rated films anymore. And the few films that were being made no longer had the budgets that could afford an Anthony Spinelli directing.

  The video revolution was making its impact. The message was clear: embrace the new technology or get out of the business. And the first results seemed to be sending the X-rated industry heading straight backwards. Everything was being made cheaper and crummier. With a project like Spectators, Spinelli was just trying to pay the rent.

  Spectators was a feature-length movie shot entirely in video. It took all of two days to make. Spinelli had originally cast Jerry Butler and Kay Parker as his leading players. After a last-minute cancellation by Butler, I was rushed in as his replacement.

  The good news was that I helped my friend Sam overcome all kinds of obstacles and make a feature-length movie in just two days. The bad news was the movie that we made.

  Spectators was brutal. It was brutal both in story content and in the pace that we had to work at to get the job done. It was dark, the kind of movie that Spinelli made when he was depressed. Unlike most of our earlier movies, there was no rehearsal. There was no rewriting. There was no arguing with Spinelli about what was erotic. There was no time. There was just plugging me into my lines and then plugging me into the women.

  “Action!”

  Spectators was the story of a couple on some kind of games-playing sexual retreat. The man had the woman as his toy. He used and abused her through five sex scenes until she discovered the good sense to pack up and leave him. It was mean, nasty, and stupid.

  Following, as it did, on the heels of Colleen’s death, it was the last kind of character that I ever wanted to play. Kay Parker, however, was not Colleen. She was an experienced woman and a veteran X-rated actress who probably knew the game even better than me. As individuals, the script disappointed both of us. As actors, we played pretend and did our best to just get through it. It was not our cup of tea.

  Shooting ended that first day when Kay quietly excused herself from the set and went offstage to have herself a good cry. This was after working for hours on what had been her second sex scene of the day. It had just gotten to be too much. Kay just popped. She was embarrassed by the whole thing. She later told me it was the first time anything like that had ever happened in her whole career.

  It had been important to me to help Spinelli in his transition from film to video. Sam had done so much for me. His films had been the backbone of my career. Still, after watching this movie, I wished that I would have been out of town when he called. It was the worst thing that Sam and I ever did together. I was not right for the part. The feelings I got when I saw myself playing such a role were not worth the money or the tsouris.

  Kay was all wrong for her part too. There were people out there in the business who would have enjoyed playing in that kind of thing. It wasn’t us. We both loved Spinelli and endured the exercise, but it was a burden to the spirit. If I’m not mistaken, that may have been Kay’s last video. I think by then she realized that she just might have had enough of sex in front of the camera.

  Within all that, Kay and I remained grateful for being able to be there for each other. She signed this Polaroid for me from that last day on the set of Spectators. She wrote:

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Marriage is a career and acting is a career and you can’t mix two careers. An actor’s marriage isn’t like other marriages. We don’t think about marriage as something going on and on, with children from generation to generation. It’s often just a passing whim.

  Mae West, Hollywood star

  I don’t know what it was about Kelly Nichols, but Carly smelled it right away and she was right. It was just chemicals or something. I was a goner.

  I actually had more sex off screen with Kelly than on. That was a pretty good clue right there. We only “worked” together once. Kelly and I had some history going in. We’d been on a few sets together, smelled each other pretty good, but never had the chance to touch each other. There was a hunger there. It had been building. She was no misguided dove who was wandering around in the wrong world. She was a red-hot flamethrower coming into the top of her game. We wanted to know each other.

  The show was Electric Blue for The Playboy Channel. We were there to do a straight sex scene. We went at it with a delight,
but every time I got hard and inside of Kelly, the director cut the tape. He said it was going to be an R-rated scene and he didn’t want any real sex going on.

  What?

  It made no sense. The camera couldn’t see what we were doing, but it made the “simulation” we were doing, look real. There were no other sex scenes scheduled for me to do afterward, so I wasn’t saving it for anything. I had it to give. No director in his right mind would ever have stopped rolling on that. But every time I got myself hard and inside of Kelly, which was not any kind of a chore at all that day, the schmendrick director would cut the tape. This was a first.

  Well, he was the director. I protested. He ruled. We had to finish the scene his way. Later, on our own time, we finished it our way. That was also when Kelly decided to share that our director was an old boyfriend of hers who just might have been having himself a few jealousy issues on the set that day.

  Oh.

  When that video was wrapped, I found myself alone in LA with Kelly. She had these two Australian money guys that were wining and dining her in limos. They were trying to get her to commit to doing some dancing and making movies for them in Australia.

  Kelly said that she didn’t entirely trust being alone with them and wanted me to hang around and be her “date.” It was fun. Them limousines in LA that somebody else is paying for are a lot of fun. And there’s hardly a man alive who wouldn’t be thrilled having Kelly Nichols on his arm. I think this is the kind of stuff that they call “the fast lane.” Riding around Berkeley in a VW bus doesn’t exactly prepare you for it. Along the way, Kelly asked me to think about coming to Australia with her.