by Ron Jeremy
“Think you can fake it?” he asked.
“You want me to just interview people without getting it on film?” I said.
“Well, there’ll be a camera on you. But it’ll be empty. We don’t want to offend anybody, so just pretend that we’re actually getting it on tape, okay?”
It wasn’t as pointless as it sounded. A porn premiere always attracted the media, from local newscasts to national shows like Speak Up America and Current Affair. And whenever their reporters saw me interviewing somebody, they’d come running over and aim their cameras at me. They wanted to find out what I was saying and who I was talking to. There’d be ten microphones shoved in my face, so it didn’t matter anymore if my microphone was live. My role was mostly as media bait, an excuse to get the theater and the movie’s title on the nightly news.
Later that night the stars began to arrive, and I took my place on the red carpet. John Holmes pulled up with his entourage, and he walked straight over to greet me.
“Little Dick,” John exclaimed. “Long time no see!”
He gave me a hug, and I could feel a lump on his back, which felt suspiciously like a concealed firearm.
“What’s that?” I whispered to him.
He glanced at the reporters that were already beginning to descend on us. “Don’t say anything,” he muttered.
“Please tell me that’s not a gun.”
“You don’t understand, Ron,” he said, his voice tinged with real panic. “There are people after me.” He was referring to his involvement in the Wonderland Murders.
I looked over at Bill Amerson, John’s manager and best friend, and he also had a conspicuous bulge in his jacket.
We were already surrounded by camera crews and enough microphones to catch even the most hushed whispers. So I went on with the interview. I introduced him to an up-and-coming young comic named Sam Kinison, and then led him over to the wet concrete, where he made imprints of his hands.
“Is there anything else you want to put in there?” I teased him. “Come on! Dip it in! We all know you want to.”
He laughed and declined the penis dip, and we actually managed to have a pretty good interview. It wasn’t always easy with John. We had an understanding that it was all in good fun, but at times he’d take my ribbing too seriously. I made a few jokes about his recent legal troubles that made his expression turn suddenly aggressive.
“Are you trying to embarrass me?” he hissed.
“What?” I said, backing away. “No, no, John, I’m trying to be funny. That’s what I do.”
He studied my face, trying to figure out if I could be trusted. “I’m in no mood for this, Ron. If you think I’m a moron, just come right out and tell me.”
The last thing I wanted to do was offend a man with a gun strapped to his back. “No, no, Johnny, you’ve got it all wrong. You’ve got a big penis, I crack jokes—that’s how this works.”
Eventually the TV camera crews moved on, but John continued with the interview. He told me about his upcoming movies and his marriage to Laurie Rose. Everybody had moved inside for the screening, and we were the only two people still on the street, having a conversation in front of a camera that only one of us knew didn’t have film in it.
“John, John,” I finally said, cutting him off. “This is all great, but nobody’s going to know what you’re saying now that the media’s gone.”
He looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean?”
“The camera,” I said. “It’s…it doesn’t work.”
His head snapped toward the cameraman, who had already retreated inside the theater. He plucked the microphone out of my hand and examined it.
“I suppose this is fake, too?” he asked.
“No, it’s real,” I said. “But it’s not connected to anything.”
He yanked at the cord, trying to determine where it led. “There’s something on the other end of this.”
“Well,” I said, “let’s find out together.”
We followed the cord inside, pulling on it like Sherpas scaling a mountainside. We crept through the lobby, into the back of the Pussycat, finally coming to the end of the cord at Vince’s office, where it was tied securely to a doorknob.
“There you have it,” I said. “For the last half hour, you’ve been talking to a doorknob.”
“Well,” he laughed, letting the microphone’s useless cord drop to the floor. “I guess it’s what I deserve for calling you Little Dick.”
John Holmes and some other porn stars indulged in drugs on occasion.* A young porn stud with connections could have access to an endless supply of pot, booze, crystal meth, amphetamines, methamphetamines, uppers, downers—a veritable pharmacological potpourri. It was all available for the taking, and I wasn’t interested in any of it.
It’s not like I was sitting at home every night, watching TV and going to bed before nine P.M. I never missed a party. I went to nightclubs and discos, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, rock stars, and the type of people your mother used to warn you about. But I wasn’t the guy in the bathroom, plunging his face into a small mountain of coke until he couldn’t remember his own name. I was the guy upstairs, having sex with the drug dealer’s wife (with the dealer’s permission, of course).
Sex was in no short supply during the 1980s. With AIDS still considered a mostly gay disease, casual sex reigned supreme, and you couldn’t shake a stick without finding somebody ready to jump on top of you to take a quick ride. And you didn’t need to go to someplace like Plato’s where sex was the main attraction. You could go to Studio 54 and have sex in the coat-check room.* You could swing by the Hellfire Club and have sex before you even left the parking lot. And if nothing else was available, you’d just need to find out where the porn actors were socializing. Wherever they went, there were certain to be plenty of willing sex partners to go around.
Porn stars always had the best parties. Mark “Ten and a Half Inches” Stevens, of Devil in Miss Jones fame, would host parties every other weekend in New York, attracting all the biggest names in porn. I never appeared in a film with him, but he once asked me to play a priest in his mock wedding at a disco called Magique,** when he married his one-time porn costar Jill Munroe. Stevens’s most legendary parties happened on Valentine’s Day, held at Magique. The place was packed with porn stars like Serena, Vanessa Del Rio, Seka, Samantha Fox, and Jamie Gillis. They’d show up in leather outfits or black lingerie or sometimes nothing at all. We danced beneath strobe lights and, of course, had sex in every available room, private or otherwise.
Los Angeles was a nonstop sex smorgasbord as well, especially if you knew where to go. A few times in the 1980s, the Playboy Mansion was a hotspot for porn gatherings, when Hugh Hefner hosted the after parties for the AFAA Awards. Al Goldstein and I were in charge of the guest list. Hef’s only stipulation was that he wanted more actors and actresses than executives. He didn’t want the mansion filled with producers, distributors, and exhibitors. He wanted sexy women. So that’s what we got him.
Although the entire six-acre mansion would be overtaken by frolicking porn stars, most of us preferred to stay in the grotto, if only because that was where the real action took place. It was a synthetic cave that you could enter through a waterfall. Once inside, there were Jacuzzis, cushioned loveseats, and a lagoon-shaped swimming pool that was kept warm year-round for skinny-dipping.
On one memorable evening, I brought a porn star named Mai Lin to the grotto. All of the naked flesh must have put her in a frisky mood, because she announced that she wanted to have a gang bang. No surprise, there were plenty of volunteers, and she ended up having sex with a dozen guys in just under an hour.
After she finished off almost every guy in the grotto, she looked over at me. She cozied up to me in the Jacuzzi and tried to sit on my lap. I picked her up and carried her over to the Jacuzzi’s jets.
“That should do it,” I said. “It’s like a douche.”
I had her sit there for so long, I think she clean
ed her tonsils. When I was confident that there wasn’t a drop of man juice left, we had sex in the Jacuzzi.
Hefner himself would occasionally join us in the grotto. Whenever he showed up, he always brought a few Playmates with him. During one visit, a sexy lady (who might have been a Playmate) swam over to me in the pool and began giving me head. This went on for a while, and then I noticed that Hefner was standing behind her. It was like being in the presence of greatness. He wasn’t just another run-of-the-mill porn publisher. Hefner was a legend, the grand pooh-bah of the sexual revolution.
He was massaging her shoulders and rubbing against her. When the lady realized that Hefner was behind her, she turned around and began hugging him. I watched them for a few minutes and then thought, Hey, what happened here? I thought we had something going. Hefner and the woman were fondling each other, and I was all but forgotten.
I’m not one to interrupt a master like Hefner when he was in the middle of enjoying a sexy model, but I was feeling a little ignored. I decided to give her a friendly reminder that I was still there, and I still had a massive erection that needed some attention. I stood up and began slapping my penis against the girl, just a few light bops on the back of her shoulder, kind of in a humorous way.
Everybody in the grotto was watching us and laughing, and even the girl was giggling, reaching behind and jerking my penis with a few good strokes. If Hefner was aware of what we were doing, he didn’t appear to be bothered by it.
Without so much as a nod in my direction, Hefner took the lady by the arm and led her out of the pool. I followed them, just hovering in the distance, hoping that Hef might ask me to join them. I wasn’t looking for a handout. I could’ve brought a girl to join in. I would’ve made it worthwhile. But he didn’t even look at me. He just escorted the lady out of the grotto, taking her straight to his bedroom.
I stood there and watched them go, my erection waving in the breeze like it was saying good-bye. Anthony Spinelli, a renowned porn director, was standing next to me, and he could see the disappointment in my face.
“So you thought he was going to invite you up to his bedroom, too, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “I was kinda hoping. It would’ve been nice. I mean, I was fooling around with her, too.”
He laughed and shook his head, amazed that I had not yet figured out what was so obvious to everybody else.
“Oh, Ronnie,” he said. “He threw you a bone.”
It wasn’t all parties and gang bangs. I was still one of the busiest actors in porn, performing in more movies than there were hours in the day. And as if my schedule wasn’t hectic enough, I was even starting to dabble in directing. My directorial debut, The Casting Couch (which starred me in the title role), was a huge hit. Later on, a producer named Mark Carriere hired me to direct for his company, Leisure Time Entertainment. Mark appreciated me because I was able to deliver what we called “one-day wonders.” I could direct a film in a single afternoon, bring it in under budget, and provide him with enough scorching scenes to use and reuse in countless other compilation videos.
But my first love was still acting, and it allowed me to express myself creatively in ways that directing didn’t. I had my favorite filmmakers, like Hal Freeman, who always cast me in his popular Caught from Behind movies. They were usually campy and goofy, and they allowed me to show off my comedic skills, especially when he let me play the perennial lead role of Dr. Proctor.
In September 1983, I took my motorcycle out to Rancho Palos Verdes, a southern suburb of Los Angeles, to appear in Hal’s latest sequel in the Caught from Behind series. But as I pulled around the corner to Hal’s house, the streets were lined with police cars.
I kept right on driving. I didn’t even slow down long enough to get a better look. Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see actresses being led outside in handcuffs. If they saw me speeding past, they were kind enough not to say anything.
I went straight to a gas station and called Hal at his home. I didn’t really expect him to pick up. For all I knew, he was in the back of a police car, being hauled off to jail. When I heard his voice, I contemplated hanging up, just in case the phones had been tapped. But I needed answers, and that overrode any sense of self-preservation.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked him.
“So you saw?” he said. “I was going to call you, but I assumed you were already on your way over.”
“There are cop cars everywhere. Did something happen? Is everybody okay?”
It never crossed my mind that the cops were there for anything having to do with the porn shoot. John Holmes and the Wonderland Murders were still fresh in my mind, and I was terrified that something similar had happened to Hal.
“They busted us for pandering.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“It’s part of some new antipimping law. I don’t know, my lawyers are looking into it. But it seems serious.”
“We’re not pimps,” I said. “This is ridiculous. Since when does making a movie mean that you’re involved in prostitution?”
“Since today, I guess.” Hal sighed, and I could tell by his voice that a part of him was more afraid than he was letting on. “The times are changing, my friend.”
And so they were. More than any of us realized. The ground under our feet was shifting, and it was only a matter of time before it gave way entirely.
Promotional photo for Bad Girls II. (Courtesy Collectors/Gourmet Video)
chapter 8
OF VICE AND MEN
“Was it really necessary to break down the door?”
There were sixteen police officers in the living room of my rented house in Laurel Canyon. Which is odd, given that the so-called “criminals” they were there to arrest, which included my entire cast and crew, totaled no more than five people, including me.
Detective Como glanced down at the door that his officers had ripped from its hinges. “Sorry about that,” he said with a half smile.
“Y’know, we would have opened it for you. All you had to do was knock.”
Como just shrugged. “What can I tell you?”
“You do realize that I’m going to have to pay for that, don’t you? That’s coming out of my salary.”
Como’s eyes narrowed as he studied me. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d be worried about something besides the door.”
I was directing a film called Fade to Black. We were almost finished for the day when the cops came storming in, literally kicking down the door and causing such a ruckus that it was like a small hurricane had singled out our house for destruction.
There were so many voices yelling at us to freeze we weren’t quite sure who we should be listening to. Were we supposed to freeze for the eight cops standing in front of us, the six cops behind us, or the cops who were still filing into the room? The actors looked at me, hoping I might have a better idea. I just rolled my eyes and lifted my arms halfheartedly into the air.
“Could you maybe tell your boys to put down their guns?” I asked. Most of the cops yelling freeze were heavily armed. It wouldn’t have made much sense otherwise. Needless to say, they had us pretty well covered.
Como nodded, and the cops immediately holstered their guns. “My apologies,” he said. “It was our understanding that there were firearms on the premises.”
“Hey, the only gun here is in my pants.”
It was a smart-ass remark, and not the sort of thing you probably want to say when your living room is filled with police officers, but I was feeling cocky. I had done nothing wrong. I was shooting a porn film. So what? As far as I knew, that wasn’t against the law.
I tried not to think about Hal Freeman. It’d been almost three years since his arrest, and although he had not yet served jail time, it was starting to look grim.
It had all started with David Roberti, a Democratic state senator who created an antipimping law in 1982 to crack down on the city’s streetwalkers. The law required a minimum three-
year sentence for anyone convicted of “pandering,” which was just a fancy legal term for selling sex for money. This gave the Los Angeles district attorney an idea. The new law, he reasoned, could be used to target porn. If selling sex for money was illegal, it could be argued that pornographers—who paid actors to have sex—were also guilty of pandering. The city hoped that by criminalizing the industry they could force it out of L.A. completely and make it somebody else’s problem.
But before they could scare the industry into packing up shop and skipping town, they needed to show that they were serious. And that meant making an example of somebody.
Hal Freeman was the first filmmaker to get busted. He was charged with five counts of pandering—one for each of the female performers in his film. Nobody really understood why the men weren’t charged, but that’s L.A. logic for you. When the case went to trial at the Van Nuys Superior Court, Freeman was found guilty on all counts. The judge refused to give him the mandatory three-year sentence, calling it “cruel and unusual punishment.” Instead, he was sentenced to ninety days in jail and a $10,000 fine. Freeman’s lawyers took the case to the California Court of Appeals and lost again. There was talk that Freeman might take it all the way to the California Supreme Court, but very few people expected his case to be accepted. Or if it was, that he would win.
Since then, several other porn productions had been raided, and mine was just the latest. I probably should have been more scared than I was. But because Hal hadn’t given up, I didn’t see any reason why I should either.
I watched from the couch as officers interviewed my actors—all two of them—asking about their involvement in the film and taking down names and phone numbers. The actress was already in tears, and God knows what she was telling him. The other officers were searching the house, collecting whatever money they could find and confiscating the camera equipment.