The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz

by Ron Jeremy

  Hang gliding in the Catskills, mid-1970s.

  “There’s your son,” she said helpfully. “That’s Ronnie up there.”

  My mom had just finished her first round of cryosurgery, and she’d been in a medicated stupor for most of the day. She hadn’t said so much as a word to anybody. But the moment she saw me, a smile crept over her face.

  “Nobody really understands my Ronnie,” she said with a sigh.

  She was right. And I hope that wherever she is, she’s still one of the few women in the world who does.

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a paralyzing fear of death. I know that I’m going to die someday—hell, we all are—but the very idea of it is usually enough to give me nightmares. It may have something to do with watching my mom die, but I’ve had this anxiety long before she got sick. It just scares me to think that one day I’ll cease to exist, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do to stop it.

  Over the years, I’ve found a way to overcome this existential terror. And it’s all thanks to a distant cousin whom I never met.

  His name was Eliott Weiss, and he died a war hero during World War II. Like most Jews at the time, he wasn’t allowed to be an officer because of his faith. So he lied and told the army that he was a Christian. He never actually converted, but he wore a cross and professed to believe in Jesus. Though it was an obvious ruse, it worked, and he was promoted to lieutenant and sent to fight in the Battle of the Bulge as an airman, where he was shot down by a German sniper while trying to rescue his fellow soldiers. He was buried in Brussels under a cross. Later my aunts had his body exhumed and brought back to the States, to be buried under the Star of David, because, despite what his superiors believed, he was still a Jew.

  He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Airman’s Medal of Honor. I still have the airman certificate, dated March 24, 1945, which goes word for word like this:

  He lived to bear his country’s arms. He died to save its honor. He was a soldier and he knew a soldier’s duty. His sacrifice will help to keep aglow the flaming torch that lights our lives, that millions yet unborn may know the priceless joy of liberty. And we who pay him homage, and revere his memory, in solemn pride rededicate ourselves a complete fulfillment of the task for which he so gallantly has placed his life upon the altar of man’s freedom.

  Every time I read those words, I get choked up. The tears just come streaming down my face. And it reminds me that I have no right to be so afraid of dying. “How dare you?” I tell myself. “Who the fuck do you think you are? You’ve had such a phenomenal life. These guys sacrificed everything, and most of them were killed when they were still kids. They didn’t get to experience half of what you did. So get over yourself.”

  I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation, but if it’s true, I’m pretty sure that I was once a soldier. I can’t watch World War II footage or even a war movie without breaking down. And while most of my family did, I never served even a day in the military. I managed to escape the Vietnam draft because it was a war that I didn’t feel was necessary, so I missed my chance to experience war firsthand. But I still feel a connection with the men who fought and often lost their lives in combat. I’ve wondered if there might be some spiritual explanation for why I have so much empathy for them.

  What better way to be reincarnated than as a porn star? As Henry Miller once wrote, “Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.” So maybe there’s a dead soldier, or soldiers, inside me, making up for lost time. It makes a certain kind of sense. Think about it: if you went to heaven and God gave you a choice of how you could be reincarnated, who would you pick?

  “Well, you can be a scientist or a teacher or a porn star or a—”

  “Wait, back up. What was that last one again?”

  “Uh, porn star?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Sign me up for that.”

  Shortly after my mom passed away, I flew back to Los Angeles to be a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. It wasn’t the big break I’d been hoping for, but at least I would be on TV. And I needed something to distract me from the heartbreak of losing my mom.

  For obvious reasons, I competed under the name Ron Hyatt, not Ron Jeremy. I’m sure that Chuck Woolery, the host, wouldn’t have been amused to learn that his family-friendly show had been infiltrated by a porn star. I did well. I came in second and won a bunch of gifts, including a trip to Mazatlan, Mexico, and graphite tennis rackets. I even made a dumb joke. When Chuck Woolery told me that I’d won a $20 gift certificate to a Beverly Hills clothing store, I said, “Twenty dollars in Beverly Hills? That won’t even pay for parking.”

  As it turned out, I never got to enjoy my hard-won free trip to Mexico. Hours before I was going to get on a plane, I got a call from Bob Vosse, a photographer for Club and other mags. He asked if I was interested in doing a photo layout with Marilyn Chambers for a new book called Marilyn Chambers’ Love Positions. I nearly crapped in my pants. This wasn’t just another job; it was a chance to work with a legend, the star of Behind the Green Door and the Resurrection of Eve. I was in awe of Chambers, and not just because of her incredible body and scorching sexual prowess. She had a business savvy about her career, which was a rarity among actors in the adult industry. She was smart enough to negotiate a contract with producers that gave her a percentage of the gross from her films. With the profits from Green Door alone, she probably made more than a few million in two years.

  I told Vosse yes. I’d do it. To hell with Mexico. I could eat tacos in the sun any day. But how often does a guy get to cozy up to a bona fide porn icon?

  I showed up at Vosse’s studio the next day, and it was like I was a newbie all over again. I had butterflies in my stomach, and when Marilyn waltzed into the room, naked as the day she was born, I nearly blacked out. The shoot was soft-core, meaning that there wasn’t any actual penetration. We were just supposed to simulate sex. But the moment I crawled onto the bed with Marilyn, I got a whopping boner that wouldn’t go away.

  Vosse stopped and gave me a disapproving scowl. “Ronnie,” he said, “what the hell is that?” He pointed at my engorged knob. “You know this is soft-core. We’re not supposed to see it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Give me a minute.” I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. I thought about dead puppies, car crashes, open-heart surgeries, my grandmother—anything to discourage my boner. But it refused to wilt.

  It was ironic, really. I’d been on countless porn sets where I was expected to have a raging hard-on. Some days I was in the mood, and some days I had to fake it and beat the little bastard into submission. But the one time I didn’t need a boner was exactly when it decided to pop out of its shell and get stiffer than a two-by-four.

  “Oh come on, Ron,” Vosse yelled at me. “Hide it behind her leg or something.”

  “I’ll try,” I told him.

  “We can’t shoot anything until you get that thing out of the way.”

  “I’m doing what I can.”

  “I have an idea,” Marilyn said. We both turned to her. She had a mischievous grin on her face. “You can hide it right here.”

  Boom, right in her vagina.

  She slipped it inside so casually I almost didn’t realize what was happening. But when she started thrusting against me, my jaw very nearly dropped to the floor. I was screwing Marilyn Chambers! Me, a punk kid from Queens, a relative nobody in the industry. I couldn’t believe it. The world must’ve turned on its axis. There was no other reasonable explanation for my good fortune.

  Vosse frowned at us, but then just shrugged and began snapping pictures. “Fine,” he said. “Works for me.”

  I’m not sure how long we were fucking before I heard a door swing open and heavy footsteps heading toward us. I was having too much fun to care, but out of the corner of my eye I could see a huge figure standing near Vosse. I turned and saw Chuck Traynor, Marilyn’s husband and manager, glaring at us from the sidelines.

  I th
ought that I was going to have a heart attack.

  I’d never met Traynor before, but I knew his reputation. He was Linda Lovelace’s former husband, and the man responsible for orchestrating her porn career. Lovelace had just published a book called Ordeal, in which she claimed that Traynor had beaten her and held a gun to her head during the making of Deep Throat. I heard from very reliable sources that Linda was lying. She was just resentful about how quickly her star had fizzled. After Deep Throat, the one-time queen of porn quickly lost the spotlight to more ambitious and talented starlets like Marilyn Chambers. So Lovelace concocted an outlandish story about kidnappings and beatings, which perfectly played into the antiporn fanaticism of some of the feminists and religious zealots. The media ate it up. But none of it was true.

  I think.

  Long before Deep Throat, Traynor cast Lovelace in a series of 8mm stag films. This was in New York, I think, around 1971. The films were mostly nasty stuff. One was called Piss Orgy, which involved Lovelace getting peed on. There was also The Fist and The Foot, in which Lovelace masturbated with the respective body parts. But the most infamous was a bestiality loop called Dogarama or Dog Fucker.

  I’ve never seen the film, but I heard about it from Eric Edwards, an actor who performed with Lovelace in most of the loops and claimed that he held the dog while Lovelace had sex with it. From what I understand, Lovelace sucked the dog’s dick and then got fucked—literally—doggy-style. The dog’s name was Norman.

  I’d just like to reiterate that I’ve never been a witness to anything like this. I’ve never seen it, never been a part of it, and never would be. I know that it happens. I saw ads for bestiality movies in Times Square during the late 1970s. But I’ve never had any interest in that sort of thing. I’ve always been able to love animals in a different way.

  But Lovelace wasn’t so strict with herself when it came to human-on-dog sexual relationships. Or, if she is to be believed, Traynor wasn’t. She claimed that Traynor forced her to do it, that he promised to kill her if she didn’t have sex with a canine on film. I don’t buy any of that story.*

  This was all I could think about as I was lying on the bed in Vosse’s studio, my dick plunging in and out of Chuck Traynor’s wife while he watched just a few feet away.

  I didn’t really expect him to get angry. He’d been married to Marilyn Chambers for almost five years, and she seemed far too smart to stay with a guy who was abusive to her. But still, he cast an imposing figure. And even if you didn’t believe all of the wild stories about him, it was still a little distressing to be caught in the act of screwing his wife, especially considering that it wasn’t what he or Marilyn had hired me to do.

  I remained perfectly still, waiting for some kind of reaction from Traynor. He was clearly surprised, but if he was angry with us, he wasn’t letting on. And then, after the silence had become almost deafening, he began to laugh.

  “Well,” he said, winking at us, “I guess we can’t really call this soft core anymore, can we?”

  I didn’t meet Chuck Traynor again until years later. He invited me to a dinner party at his house up in the hills of Las Vegas, where he and his new wife, Bo, were operating a horse stable and shooting range. (He and Marilyn had divorced, but they remained business partners and good friends.) I brought a girlfriend with me, partly because I wanted the company and partly because Traynor still made me a little nervous. I loved and trusted the guy, but still, it never hurts to have a pretty girl around.

  Traynor cooked us a lovely steak dinner, and afterward we sat in his living room, sipping on cocktails and chatting about the business. It was just a friendly get-together, and I didn’t expect anything more to come of it. But just as it was getting late and I thought about calling it a night, Bo turned to Traynor and asked, “Would you mind if I fucked Ron?”

  He smiled and gave her an approving pat on the knee. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead. Have some fun.”

  She walked over to me, took my hand, and pulled me down to the carpet with her. I was not one to refuse free nookie, but it was weird nonetheless to be screwing Traynor’s wife in his own home, right in front of him, after he had just cooked me a delicious steak dinner.

  As Bo and I were screwing, my girlfriend joined Traynor on the couch and tried to return the favor by blowing him. But as skilled as she was in the oral arts, he politely declined her advances. He was more interested in watching Bo and me have sex than in doing anything himself.

  After a few minutes of riding my cock like she was drilling for oil, Bo looked back up at Traynor and asked him, “Chuck, could Ron put it in my ass?”

  “Sure, baby,” he said, like she had asked for nothing more bizarre than to freshen up her drink.

  So I changed positions, knelt on the floor, and began fucking her ass.* I was having the time of my life, all the while shooting sympathetic glances at my date. I couldn’t help but feel badly for her. She was stuck on the couch, watching the two of us go at it without getting to enjoy any of the action. But we were in Traynor’s house, and, as his guests, we both felt obligated to follow his rules.

  When we had cum and cleaned up, we thanked Traynor for a lovely evening and said our good nights. As we were leaving, I nearly tripped over a dog sleeping near the door. It was an elderly German shepherd (I think) that appeared to be at least ten years old. I squatted down to pet him, and as I was rubbing his stomach, a horrible thought occurred to me.

  “Is this, uh…?” I could barely get the words out. “Is this your dog?”

  “No,” Traynor said with an evil sneer. “It is now, but it belonged to Linda.”

  “Linda as in Linda Lovelace?”

  “That’s the one.”

  I just stared at him. Was he really telling me what I thought he was telling me?

  “It’s not…?” I asked. My face had gone white.

  “It sure is,” he said. “That, my friend, is Linda Lovelace’s son.”

  Chuck had a sick sense of humor. But in all actuality, it was the grandchild of the dog Linda slept with for the porn loops. Strange but true.

  I earned a brown belt in Kung Fu—here I am jumping off sand.

  chapter 5

  THE HUMAN OUROBOROS

  “Can you really suck your own cock?”

  It’s not the kind of thing you expect to be asked by a pretty young woman just minutes after meeting her. But among porn actors, who were likely to be seeing one anothers’ genitals before they had uttered so much as a hello, I suppose the normal rules of social decorum don’t apply.

  The year was 1980, and I’d just arrived on the set of Co-Ed Fever, which was being shot at a luxurious mansion just north of San Francisco. Even by Hollywood standards, it was a major production. We had a ridiculously large budget, a director who’d been plucked from the mainstream, and the most famous names in the business, like Vanessa Del Rio, Jamie Gillis, and John Leslie. But the producer, Harold Lime, had a thing for fresh faces. So for every legitimate star in attendance, there were at least three young beauties just getting their start in adult films.

  And every one of them, it seemed, already knew about me, the kid from New York.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked my buxom interrogator. “What did you say again?”

  “I heard that you could give yourself head,” she repeated. “Is that for real?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Where’d you hear that?” It was a rhetorical question. I knew damn well where she’d heard it. I’d started the rumor myself. I should’ve known that it’d be only a matter of time before it came back to bite me in the ass.

  “Is that a yes or no?” She was persistent, I’d give her that.

  “Maybe,” I said coyly.

  She wasn’t going to get an answer out of me quite so easily. We continued to stare at each other, our eyes locked in a meaningful gaze, like a flirtatious Mexican standoff. I could’ve just come out and told her what she was clearly dying to know, but I wanted to toy with her a bit longer.

  “Can I see?” she
finally asked, lowering her voice to a whisper.

  I looked around the room to make sure that nobody was listening. “Okay, fine,” I said. “But not here. Let’s go someplace private.”

  I led her into the bathroom.

  Let’s back up:

  Eleven years earlier, I was just another teenage boy with a very large penis and no idea what he could do with it.

  I didn’t always know that my dick was on the larger side. I assumed that I was a little larger than average, give or take an inch or two. I didn’t have much basis for comparison, save for occasionally showering with other guys after gym class at school. And then the black dudes seemed to have the advantage. It wasn’t until I started dating that I realized the size of my schlong might be in any way big.

  Mandy was the first to tell me. Well, she didn’t really volunteer the information. I had to finagle it out of her. Not long after we began seeing each other seriously for the second time, I was in her bedroom while she was talking on the phone with one of her girlfriends. In the middle of their conversation, Mandy covered her mouth with a hand to keep me from overhearing. Normally I had no interest in her girly chats, but the secrecy had piqued my curiosity.

  “What were you whispering?” I asked after she’d hung up.

  “None of your business,” she said, her face going beet red.

  “Come on,” I prodded. “You can tell me.”

  “I really shouldn’t.”

  “Yes, you can. What were you whispering?”

  She hesitated. “Promise you won’t get mad?”

  “I won’t get mad.”

  She smiled feebly. “I told her that we were dating again and that I was glad because I loved your big dick.”

  It took me a minute for this to sink in. “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve got a big dick, Ronnie. Don’t act like you don’t know.”

  I didn’t. “It’s really big?”