Emotionally derailed due to alcohol and drug addiction by the late 1980s, since her retirement from the industry, Petty has wrestled with her share of demons. In recent years, she has worked on making peace with her past and forgiving her father. Today, they share a precarious and delicate relationship, but Rhonda still feels the lingering effects of a traumatic childhood.
Rhonda Jo resides on three acres of land in Riverside, California, along with her two adult children, a couple of dogs, several horses and some chickens. As she grapples to put it all in perspective, Petty is proud of her reputation as a pioneer, and remains one of the industry’s most noteworthy and personable feature female stars. On April 12, 2012, Petty was inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame.
I interviewed Rhonda Jo Petty in the fall of 2009 and early winter of 2010.
San Fernando Valley
I was born in North Hollywood in 1955. My parents were eighteen years old when they met, and nineteen when they had me. They’d met at a party in the San Fernando Valley. Back in those days, you got married — to get an abortion was underground. They got married and had me. My father was a very angry young man and my mother was a passive, sweet, mousy type of woman. She would give you the shirt off of her back — just the sweetest thing in the world, but my dad had issues.
My childhood was like a black hole. It was horrible and there was lot of physical abuse. I mean, hardly a day went by when my father didn’t beat me, and my sister. My sister is two years younger than I was. I got the brunt of it because I was the older one. My mom stayed with this man and she was scared to death. He would threaten her life and he’d beat her.
After I was born, they lived in an apartment for a while and my mom told a friend of mine a story that I didn’t even know until a few years ago. After I came home from the hospital, if I cried, my dad would stick me in the closet and wouldn’t allow my mom to get me. The first time I do remember, I was about three years old, and we lived in a little house in San Fernando right outside of Van Nuys. My dad was a construction worker and he was a plasterer. He was a hard worker and he did well. I remember one day my mom standing in the kitchen. She was stirring something in a bowl, and she was crying and crying. She was there all day long; it seemed to me. I went into the kitchen and I said, “Mom, why are you crying?” She wouldn’t answer me.
Television was a big thing then and my dad bought a TV. I recall the house and the neighborhood because a Mexican family lived next to us and they had lots of kids. Even when I was three and four, I’d go next door and they would feed me. I always loved to go next door. I don’t remember my dad being around too much then. I can’t place what my bedroom looked like, or my parents’ bedroom — I can only remember the rest of the house. I don’t know if something happened there, I just blacked out.
When I was five years old, we moved to Van Nuys and we lived right next to the Van Nuys Drive-In. In fact, I think that’s still there today. I remember going to the elementary school there, but the house in Van Nuys is when all of the abuse really went on and my mom’s life was being threatened. One time, my dad beat her and cut her face and she went to my grandmother [my dad’s mother]. My grandmother told her, “You need to go home, Joan, and you don’t tell anybody about this.” Back in those days, they didn’t have help for women who were abused.
There were three boys in my dad’s family and they were from Canada. They are Norwegian, but they lived in the western part of Canada in Saskatchewan and my grandmother’s parents [my father’s mother] owned a big wheat farm there. They started a town, Hanley, and owned the Red and White store and they also owned a trucking company. My grandmother’s family was pretty well to do. I don’t know too much history on my grandfather’s [my father’s father] side except that he was a very kind, gentle man. I loved him to death. My grandmother was the one who was screwed up. I’ve seen pictures of my dad tied up in high chairs and there are toys tied to it, and I heard stories of her keeping leashes on them and tying them to doorknobs. I’m sure she beat them; she would beat me with a wooden spoon. She was a very uptight, skinny little thing that always wanted to know where you were going, what you were doing, and very controlling. She could be a bitch, so I really believe that my dad and his brothers were abused by her. She had a very saucy mouth. Something happened to my father for him to have become so abusive and sadistic.
My relationship with my father today is totally different. He has mellowed, and today he is trying to have a relationship with me, but those sixteen years with him were a nightmare. He has called me at times and told me how sorry he is that he wasn’t there for me, even when I was little, and that he feels bad about everything. My sister has talked to him about what happened, but I never really have. You know, I’ve had to go through all of this and tried to get to a point where I just appreciate the relationship that I have with him today. What happened in the past is the past. I can’t change that. It is sad what I had to go through — I could tell horror stories of what he did. He was very sadistic. He would kill animals in front of me. He would beat me with chains and just do horrendous things.
Escape Route
When I was nine, we moved to Canoga Park. The Valley was very cliquey compared to where my husband who grew up in Pennsylvania in a little town called Tars. My dad knew a lot of people in the movie industry, the legit movie industry, so I knew people who were drivers, make-up artists and wranglers.
I fell in love with one of my dad’s friends, Harold Bates, who was so good to me. He was a wrangler and I loved horses. He wrangled out animals for the movies — mostly horses. In Van Nuys at that time, they had a ranch where they’d house all the movie horses. They had a white Stallion named King Cotton that they used in a movie, and the Hollywood TV show horse, Fury, was there. Harold Bates would take me to that ranch a lot and he’d pick out a horse for me to ride. He was wonderful to me and I looked up to him. He was a great guy.
I have been a horse freak for as long as I can remember. My mom would buy me those Breyer statues of horses which I still have from back then. I would dive into my horse fantasies with my Breyer horses and that’s how I would escape. I wanted a horse so bad. When we moved to Canoga Park, my mom finally bought me one around age twelve. We boarded it down the street. The Eppers family lived across the street. Jeannie Epper was the stuntwoman for Wonder Woman. We used to play with her kids so I grew up with her kids but she was flippin’ crazy. That woman was wild. She’d get pissed at her husband, get on her horse, and go down to the bar and ride the horse into the bar! They were all drinkers and partiers and they were crazy. All of her kids ended up going into stunts. Jeannie Epper recently received a [Taurus] Lifetime Achievement Award because she was the first stuntwoman in films. I was around all of those people.
Jeannie Epper, whose film and television appearances include Romancing the Stone (1984), Armageddon (1998), Wonder Woman, and Charlie’s Angels, is the first woman to receive the prestigious Taurus award for over two hundred appearances in a fifty-year career span. The 2004 award-winning documentary Double Dare chronicles Epper’s life and career.
Around that same time, my father did drugs very heavily. He was a very high functioning addict. He did speed for a long time. Back in those days, they did those double-cross bennies, and he’d go to work with a jar full of bennies and feed them to his crew and they’d get the work done. There were uppers and downers, and so I was around drugs a lot because of my father. He smoked marijuana; he took drugs but he was never a big drinker. My dad hung around with a gang of motorcycle guys, and was sort of in a motorcycle club called The Scramblers. They were the first club that started dirt bike racing. Back then, they used to race BSAs [Birmingham Small Arms Company] and Triumphs, and they started the dirt bike races which later turned into Motocross. My dad was very out there and people loved him. He had a great personality. He knew lots of people; he worked hard and made good money.
My dad had me on motorcycles from the time I was five years old — dirt bikes. I knew a lot of the motorcyc
le racers including some of the big guys like Jim Pomeroy. I used to know all the big wigs because my dad was pretty well known in that industry. That’s what everybody was doing in the Valley, riding dirt bikes, or this or that. I rode motorcycles and dirt bikes for years.
I started doing drugs when I was just twelve years old. I would be dragged to parties out in Malibu where they’d put mescaline in the punch and people would be all fucked up. Cheech [Marin] lived next door to one of the places we used to go. My younger friend and I would be on the beach and he’d be smoking pot. He had two black dogs and they had bandanas around their necks. The other kids and I couldn’t sneak any drugs from the party so we’d go down to the beach and smoke pot with him. My uncle [mother’s brother] did drugs, but not my mom. She drank and smoked in the very beginning, but when I was around five years old, she went back to her religion which was Mormon. She dragged me to the Mormon Church, but by the time I was twelve years old, as I said, I was doing heavy drugs. Pot was not a big thing for me, but the downers around then like the Pink Ladies, the F-80s, and the F-40s — those are all downers. I started taking acid when I was around thirteen or fourteen years old.
Recreational use of psychoactive drugs gained in popularity particularly among teenagers during the mid-late 1960s. Ingested primarily for mind-altering purposes, regular use of psychedelic substances during adolescent years can have detrimental immediate and long term effects as the physical and psychological components of an individual’s constitution have not yet developed. Each person’s reaction to the influence of chemicals within the system is independent of another’s.
Between the ages of twelve and thirteen, in an abusive family situation with a mother who couldn’t help me, my grandfather [my dad’s father] became this big teddy bear in my life. My grandmother watched me a lot, and she loved me because she always wanted a girl and I was the first girl born. During the years when I was a baby and on she would watch me because my mother became a hairdresser, so she took care of me when my mother worked until I was around seven years old. I became very attached to my grandfather; he was the one who saved me. When he came over to our house, he’d always say, “Leave Rhonda alone”. He was my whole world and he passed away when I was around thirteen. That devastated me because I felt as if he abandoned me into this situation. It’s crazy. You would think that somebody would notice the bruises or something, either my uncles or someone in my family, but it was just not discussed back then. After my grandfather died, I just sort of gave up because there was no one around to save me. A lot of my dad’s friends were using too and were abusive parents, so I really grew up thinking that all of that was normal. That’s what surrounded me.
I thought my father was going to kill me. I did not think I’d make it past eighteen. After my parents divorced, my mom wasn’t really around but I lived with her. She had met another man and got married, but I don’t know where she was. I was using drugs and still riding my motorcycles, still getting in trouble and not really going to school. I remember she bitched and yelled at me. My dad was in another relationship. He got married to a woman who had three kids. I’m very close to his new wife. I have always had a good relationship with her.
Helter Skelter
I got kicked out of junior high four times for drugs and would be sent back and forth between different junior high schools. My dad beat the shit out of me every time; believe me. He was livid. The first time I was busted in junior high, I had taken some downers and I ended up passing out in class. When I woke up, everybody was gone except for the teacher sitting at her desk. She said, “Rhonda?”
I said, “Oh shit.” I took off running into my locker — I don’t know why except that I was really messed up and had taken too many downers. Next thing I know, the principal is in my face, the teacher is there and there’s security. They dragged me into the office and they called my mother. I’ll never forget the principal sitting there with a pencil telling me to follow the pencil with my eyes. They called the police and they kicked me out. It was on my father’s birthday. My mom came to the school, and picked me up and brought me home. She paced back and forth in the living room and kept saying, “Your father’s going to kill you.” It was at that point that I couldn’t take it anymore. This was going to be a big beating. I thought, “I don’t care anymore.”
That was the day that I disconnected and I cut my head off from my body. I mentally just disconnected. It’s funny, down the road when I did films I was able to do that. It is disassociation. You know, I was a self-injurer and I didn’t even know what that was then but I would burn myself. I was in so much emotional pain that the oven in our house had a lip on the top and it would get very hot. I wore bangs and I would pull my bangs up, I don’t know how I ever figured this out, or what made me do it but I would sit there and burn my forehead on that oven. I would do that a lot. I’m surprised I don’t have scars on my forehead. Generally, I’ve been diagnosed as bi-polar stage one.
Based upon the information known about self-harming; it is the process of inflicting pain upon oneself which generally occurs in the form of cutting, burning, scratching and head banging. Injurers often exhibit acts of self-mutilation in order to relieve feelings of stress, depression, self-loathing and failure. Individuals who demonstrate this form of masochistic behavior are often recipients of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, and can be excessive users of various substances.
I was thirteen when I had sex for the first time and it was with my sister’s boyfriend, but she wasn’t really going out with him anymore. His name was Blair Burnbahm. I had quite a few girlfriends. We stayed together all the way through. We were close in high school. One was Wendy Gregory and the other one was Cindy Lang. The three of us were tight for years. My girlfriend, Wendy, was going out with Blair’s brother and she got pregnant by him. She was only fifteen and her mother was dying of cancer. Wendy and Cindy were my best friends and we got into so much trouble together. We all had horses so we’d ride horses together. The three of us used to go ride at Spahn’s ranch.
When my parents got divorced, we moved to Chatsworth. That’s where the porn industry is now, in the San Fernando Valley, way up in the north end in the hills. It’s kind of a real rural area. You could have horses then but not so much anymore. My mom got an acre. I was in 4-H. I had bred and raised goats from the time that I was twelve and I used to show my goats at the L.A. County Fairground for a few years. My girlfriend Cindy’s mom had a ranch not that far from us that was really at the bottom of the hill where Spahn’s ranch was. My other girlfriend lived down the street so we’d usually go riding at Spahn’s ranch. His place was like a studio that resembled an old western town, and he had an area where he would board horses. They shot a lot of westerns out there because it had a lot of large rocks and woods, and it is horse country. We’d hang out there and help with the horses, and it was just a place for us to go. Old man Spahn was nice and we weren’t any trouble, but I remember when Charles Manson moved in there. He always scared the shit out of me. He never said anything to me and never approached me, but he would catch my eye, or he’d be looking at me as I rode past him. He had a pet crow and it sat on his shoulder. As time went on, more and more hippies showed up. I was only around thirteen. I remember some of my girlfriends’ older sisters and brothers were going in and out of there because there were drugs available. I think if I’d been a little older, sixteen or seventeen, Manson would have approached me. Mostly it was the older kids who were hanging out there.
Spahn ranch is a five hundred acre spread located just above Chatsworth, California. Over the years, it was used as a set for films and television programs requiring a western flavor. The sprawling rural desert property was purchased by dairy farmer George Spahn in 1948, and later, became a hideout for Charles Manson and his “Family” of devotees. Allegedly, old man Spahn benefitted from the sexual services provided by Manson’s female members in exchange for free lodging, although Spahn was actually blind and unaware of the extent of the nefari
ous activities taking place at the ranch.
The infamous murderous rampage carried out by members of the Family occurring in 1969 resulted in the deaths of seven people including movie star Sharon Tate. Although he was not present during the killings, Manson orchestrated the murders, and he and several members (another male and four females) were convicted of First Degree murder on all counts. Out of curiosity, Rhonda and a childhood boyfriend visited the house in Benedict Canyon where the pregnant Sharon Tate had lived along with her husband, French-Polish director, Roman Polanski. (In 1977, Polanski was arrested for sexual assault of a thirteen-year old girl and indicted on six charges including rape. Polanski pled not guilty to all charges and agreed to an eventual plea bargain.) The residence was located up the street from Rhonda’s friend’s mother’s home. Years later, when Petty began working in adult entertainment and was scheduled to do a layout for Playboy Magazine, Sharon Tate’s sister, Deborah, was the make-up artist hired to apply Rhonda’s make-up. During the course of conversation, Deborah informed Rhonda that if Manson were ever to be released, he would not live to see the light of day. Manson continues a lifetime incarceration in maximum security at Corcoran State Prison in California.
As time went on, they were living in the rocks and running around naked and they were doing acid — it was just getting more packed up there. My mom’s brother ended up living there for a couple of months; he was a speed freak. He and my dad were good friends, but they’ve had a rough relationship.
Up in Chatsworth, people lived in the hills and the knolls, and everybody knew who the drug dealers were. There were rock bands that lived up in that area, and somehow, my uncle met Manson and he got dragged up there. My dad told me that he went up there one time to get some drugs. He pulled up in a brand new green Cadillac and asked for drugs. Apparently, Manson came out and got upset with my uncle for bringing my dad there. He considered my dad a “pig” because he had money and drove a brand new car. He was “the establishment,” so I guess my dad got chased off. Manson was upset and kicked my uncle out. My uncle eventually moved in with us and I remember him having to withdraw from speed.
GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985 Page 30