The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz

by Ron Jeremy

  We had so much fun that we decided to camp out in the desert and make another film. Why make one desert movie when you can make two? It was easy enough; we just changed the scenario and shot the entire thing again. Instead of girls being stranded and getting saved by the guys, the guys were now looking to buy land and build homes in the desert and the girls were real estate agents. It still resulted in hot sex in the desert, so who cared about the setup?

  I did a lot of these “one-day wonders” for Mark. It was probably my most inspired period as a porn filmmaker. I was forced to be creative because I didn’t have the budget or resources to make an “epic” motion picture. I was just shooting with whatever we had at our disposal and making the most of it. And once the wheels were in motion, I could just sit back and relax and, if I was so inclined, take a short nap.

  It’s true; I do have a reputation for falling asleep on my sets. But this is just a sign that a movie is in good shape. When a scene is going badly, I have to be on the sidelines, whispering advice to my actors. But when everything is exactly the way I like it, I can sneak away and start snoring. I guess this is the fundamental difference between me and a real director like Martin Scorsese. If he’s doing his job right, he should be exhausted by the end of the day. If I’m doing my job right, I should wake up well rested and ready for the long drive home.

  Some of my actors have taken advantage of my tendency to fall asleep during a shoot. On more than a few occasions, I’ve woken up with my nails painted pink,* or some obscene word written in lipstick on my forehead. Some of them have even taken pictures of me with an actor’s penis dangling dangerously close to my mouth. One of the hazards of the trade, I suppose.

  John Stallion, Mark Carriere’s brother-in-law, was the smartest prankster of all. When I fell asleep, he’d get a porn star with the biggest, blackest penis—somebody like Ray Victory or F. M. Bradley—to come over and place his penis right next to my nose. Then he’d yell out, “Ron!! Hey, Ron!!” I’d wake up and they’d snap a Polaroid before I realized what was happening. Because my eyes were wide open in the picture, I didn’t have an alibi. I couldn’t claim to have been asleep.

  Anyway, over a period of two months, shooting weekends only, we made more than fifteen desert movies in the time it usually takes to shoot one mainstream B movie. At one point, I got the crazy notion that we should make a science-fiction movie. We were in the desert, after all, and it could’ve passed for the rocky terrain of a foreign planet. I had Mark deliver us some dynamite astronaut spacesuits from “Western costumes,” and with only my half-baked idea to go on, we filmed a takeoff of Planet of the Apes called Space Vixens.

  The story begins with a group of astronauts landing on another planet, or at least what they think is another planet. They take off their helmets and realize, “Wait a minute, we can breathe!” After exploring the planet, they stumble across a tribe of cavewomen, dressed in tiny loincloths and very little else. They have sex with the cavewomen, and eventually one of them figures it out.

  “We’re not on some strange, distant planet,” the head astronaut tells the others. “We’re back on Earth! We…we…went back in time!”

  It was exactly as hilarious and corny as it sounds. And as if that wasn’t enough, there were some truly spectacular astronaut/ cavewoman sex scenes. Really, what more could you ask for?

  Space Vixens is probably one of my most glorious moments in porn. It was cheap, it was easy, and it still stands up as one of the most intentionally and yet unintentionally funny comedies in the canon of adult cinema.

  I never saw Sam Kinison laugh so hard as when I showed him Space Vixens. He was one of the first people to screen it, and his reaction was exactly what I was hoping for. He loved every last frame, every campy and overacted conceit. But Sam appreciated details that even I hadn’t anticipated.

  “You worked so hard to make it look authentic,” Sam told me.

  “You had real costumes, and the actors weren’t wearing jewelry or high heels or anything else that might give them away. You never accidentally shot a car or a telephone pole in the distance. But Ronnie, the astronauts are using a fucking clock radio to check the atmosphere.”

  He paused on the scene to give me a closer look. And sure enough, there it was. The astronauts were using a device to calculate the planet’s oxygen levels—sort of a hackneyed version of the Star Trek tricorder—and after a far-too-pregnant dramatic pause, they said, “The machine says that the atmosphere is…like Earth.” But upon closer examination, it was clear that their seemingly intricate piece of astronaut technology was, in fact, just a standard clock radio. You could even see the clock’s cord tucked into the actor’s pants.

  “Well, what do you want from me?” I yelled at Sam. “I’m not fucking Orson Welles.”

  “That,” Sam said, wiping away his tears of laugher, “is painfully obvious.”

  I don’t think I understand,” I said. “Are you telling me that you don’t want to see me anymore or you don’t want to do porn?”

  Tanya shrugged. “I guess it’s a little of both.”

  I was sitting on our bed, watching Tanya pack the last of her clothes into an overstuffed suitcase. The bedroom was the only room left that hadn’t already been stripped clean. There were a few boxes left, piled in otherwise empty corners, waiting to be carted away. Her Brooklyn apartment had the eerie echo of a warehouse.

  Actually, it was our apartment. It had been our apartment for two years, until today. We had both decided that the time was right to move out to Los Angeles for good. And we were going together, or at least that had been the plan. But somewhere along the way, Tanya had apparently changed her mind. About something. I still wasn’t quite sure what she was telling me.

  “So you want to quit porn,” I said cheerfully. “That’s no big deal. I’m fine with that.”

  She threw a shirt onto the mound of clothes and scowled at me. “But you’re not going to quit, are you?”

  “Well, no, of course not. Why would I?”

  Tanya shook her head reproachfully, like I was missing some obvious connection between the two things.

  “You see, that’s why it’ll never work between us,” she muttered.

  “I can’t be with anyone who’s involved in this business. It’s time to grow and move on. You’ve won plenty of awards already. We should both get out.”

  The porn lifestyle can be a tough one. When you’re in what you think is a committed relationship, the last thing you want to hear your partner say in the morning is, “Okay, honey, I’m off to have sex with Seka. I’ll see you around five for dinner, okay?”

  But with Tanya, I had found somebody who lived a life as unconventional as my own. She above anybody would understand that monogamy had nothing to do with my feelings for her. I could go to work and have sex with countless beautiful women, and at the end of the day I’d come home to her and be as devoted as ever. And when she made porn films, it worked the same way. I would call it emotional monogamy…physical nonmonogamy.

  “So what exactly is it about porn that you have a problem with?” I asked her.

  “It uses people and then spits them out the other side,” she growled.

  “Since when did porn ‘use’ you?” I asked. She had hit a nerve with me. “Please tell me that you’re not becoming one of those women who blame the industry for everything they don’t like about their life.”

  There were very few things that made my blood boil like a porn star playing the victim. If it was coming from some innocent Catholic high school girl, I might’ve been able to partially accept it. But Tanya was by no means innocent. Porn had not corrupted her. Even before she got into the business, she had been stripping for bachelor parties and doing things that were too wild even for me. And now here she was, pointing a critical finger at porn as if it had somehow robbed her of her sexual virtue.

  The truth is, she had approached me about getting into adult films. We had met at a party in New York. She originally asked Mark “Ten and a Ha
lf Inches” Stevens about the business, and he recommended that she talk to me. Her first sex scene was with me, in Gerard Damiano’s Whose Fantasy Is It Anyway? And she was very, very good. She didn’t need me to hold her hand. She was a sexual dynamo, and when we did scenes together, it was a wonder our genitals didn’t spark a small fire.

  And she was rewarded for her efforts. She was making upward of a thousand dollars a day, which was a huge sum even for name performers. After only a year in the biz, she was nominated for a FOXE (Fans of X-rated Entertainment) Award for best new starlet. For somebody who seemingly loved sex so much, and was paid so handsomely for doing films, she had absolutely nothing to complain about.

  “So you’re just going to throw it all away?” I asked.

  “This was never going to be forever,” she said, finally getting her suitcase closed. “I was only ever going to do this for a few years, just long enough to get some money saved away.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “How can you say porn is bad when it’s done so much for you? It paid for your education. It allowed you to travel and take flute lessons in Florence, Italy. You were able to do a small part in 9½ Weeks.* It gave you the freedom to do whatever you want to do.”

  That might have been one of the reasons I had fallen in love with Tanya. She had so many interests and talents outside of porn. She played classical flute, and she was probably the best musician I’d ever known. I went to her concerts and met the other members of her chamber ensemble. When she went to Italy to study flute with the masters, I flew over to see her and to take her sightseeing. She couldn’t have asked for a more supportive and enthusiastic boyfriend.

  Was that what I was? Her boyfriend? I suppose so, though we never really defined ourselves in that way. We didn’t introduce each other as “boyfriend and girlfriend.” We were just roommates or, better still, “friends with benefits.” It didn’t have the same possessive connotations that came with being a couple.

  I did love Tanya, however, and I had told her as much many times. I don’t know if she realized just what a scary leap that was for me. I’ve always had a rule in relationships: never be the first one to say those words. Because once you say “I love you,” you become a slave. But with Tanya, I didn’t need to think about it. I didn’t tell her because I thought it was something she wanted to hear. I told her because I meant it, with every last cell in my body.

  “So what do you want to do?” I finally asked her. Her bags were packed. The apartment was empty. All that remained was for one of us to make the first move and leave.

  “I don’t know,” she said weakly. “Meet a nice guy. Maybe get married.”

  “So marry me,” I offered, kind of half seriously.

  She tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a hiccup. “No offense, Ron, but you’re not the marrying type.”

  That wasn’t true. I wasn’t the monogamous type, I’d give her that. But I wasn’t totally opposed to the idea of marriage.

  “Can we talk about it?” I asked. “This doesn’t have to be over.”

  She looked at me with so much tenderness I wanted to pull her onto the bed with me and just kiss her. But it wouldn’t have made a difference. Somewhere in her head, she had already left me.

  Ronnie, what’s wrong?” Mimi asked, gazing down at me with her toothy smile. “You’re turning blue.”

  When Como and Navarro walked into the bedroom, knocking so casually you’d think we’d been expecting them, I just about had an aneurysm. I was cuddling with a lady friend named Mimi, and the moment I saw them standing in the doorway, I threw Mimi to the side and pulled the blanket over me. Como walked over to the bed and sat on the edge, patting the mattress like he was testing its buoyancy.

  “I’m a little surprised,” he said, winking at the cameraman who was cowering in the corner. “This seems like a small-time operation for a star of your stature. What, you couldn’t afford a full crew?”

  “What are you doing here?” I grumbled at him. “Didn’t we win?”

  It was true. Both of the pandering charges against me had been dropped. And it was all thanks to Hal Freeman.

  Hal had taken his case to the California Supreme Court, and in late August 1988, his conviction was overturned in a 7-0 decision.

  “In order to constitute prostitution,” the court had decided, “the money or other consideration must be paid for the purpose of sexual arousal or gratification.” Using this logic, the payments that Hal had made to his performers for the film Caught from Behind 2 were nothing more than “acting fees,” and the director did not “engage in either the requisite conduct nor did he have the requisite [intent] or purpose to establish procurement for purposes of prostitution.”

  In a single morning, pornography had become legal in California.

  It had a domino effect on the rest of the industry. Every other porn director like myself, who had seen his sets raided by vice cops and been slapped with pandering charges, were suddenly in the clear. Our cases were dropped; there was no longer a legal precedent for convicting us. Freeman had cleared the way for hundreds of adult filmmakers, making the world safe for porn again.

  So what the heck were Como and Navarro doing in Mimi’s bedroom?

  “Relax,” Como said. “We’re not here to bust anybody. Now that you guys are all legal and everything, we’re just checking in to make sure you have the right permits.”

  Como put his arm around me and gave my shoulder a tug. “You’re with the big boys now, Ronnie.”

  Navarro took some of the porn stars aside and asked to see their IDs, just to make sure they were over eighteen. But as he was checking, he noticed me slipping something under the mattress.

  “By the way,” Navarro said. “You wouldn’t happen to have your address book on you, would you?”

  “Very funny,” I snarled.

  “Is that what you’re hiding under there?” he said, lifting the mattress and peering underneath. “You worried that we’re gonna confiscate it again?”

  I gave them the permits, but I wasn’t happy about it. Though I was thrilled to be legal finally, I thought it was unfair that we were treated like a big-budget Hollywood production. If you had money to burn, as many of the Hollywood studios did, you could afford a few extra thousand dollars for permits and insurance. But for a porno shoot, which usually operated on a shoestring budget, it was enough to break the bank.

  The vice cops weren’t harassing nonunion indie films, demanding to see permits. I believe that they singled us out because we were doing porn, and they were just annoyed that we’d beaten them. If they couldn’t bust us for pandering anymore, they’d use any loophole they could find to hassle us and make our jobs more difficult.

  And they weren’t just nailing us for permits. In the hills of Laurel Canyon, which is considered a fire zone area, a film production was required to have a fire marshal on set at all times.* We had to pay a fire marshal $600 a day. Six hundred goddamn dollars! Back then, the girl doing anal wasn’t getting $600.

  Before long, the administrative vice unit in California closed its porn doors for good, I believe. Without the big, bad porn industry to pick on anymore, the cops were forced to chase street prostitutes, gangsters, and drug dealers (which should have been their focus in the first place).

  I saw Como a few years later, outside a Hollywood nightclub.

  “Tell me the truth,” I asked him. “How much did you really know?”

  “You mean about Hawaii?” he said. “We knew everything.”

  My jaw dropped as he told me about our every secret location, every backwoods home and remote beach that we’d ever used for that shoot. We’d found places that weren’t on any map, so secluded and inaccessible that even a Navy SEAL wouldn’t have been able to track us down. We scaled dangerous hills, traveled through forests, swam into underwater caves. But Como knew about it all, every twist and turn, every descent into deep valleys and shadowy crevices, right down to our last carefully guarded step.

  “How come we
never saw you?” I asked.

  “Oh, Ronnie,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “We didn’t want you to see us.”

  Of all the cops in the world to be chasing us, it was just our luck that the man on our trail was a surveillance genius. He even taught surveillance at the police academy.

  In fact, years later through him I was invited to Officer Don Smith’s retirement party. I was out of town, but I believe I signed a card.

  It was the least I could do for a friend.

  With a young Charlie Sheen.

  chapter 11

  HOLLYWOOD NIGHTS

  I have paid for sex only once in my life, and it was all Charlie Sheen’s fault.

  During one balmy summer night—I believe the year was 1989—Charlie invited me to a party at his Hollywood Hills home. I arrived with two of my roommates, Heather Hart and Devon Shire, who both wanted to meet Charlie. Charlie—who, I’d like to add, was single at the time—had also invited over a few friends, most of them young and attractive and with stomachs so tight you could bounce a quarter off them. We nibbled on snacks and watched some television, and soon people were pairing off and disappearing into any spare bedroom they could find.

  My lady friends didn’t waste any time making friends. I caught one of them in the Jacuzzi with a guy, and the other somehow ended up making whoopee in a utility closet. Before long, a hot blonde number sat next to me on the couch and started kissing my neck, which seemed as good an indication as any that she was looking for more than casual conversation. I took her by the hand and led her to the nearest bedroom, and we spent the next few hours playing Naked Twister.