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“The difference between writing and literature is agreeable style and irony. This book has both.” —NORMAN MAILER
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LAURA MEETS JEFFREY at an upscale New York City brothel in 1980 and it’s love at first orgasm. And so begins this shameless, hilarious erotic cyclone.
At dinner parties she’s a witty artist and lingerie model... and a famous film director’s ex lover. Jeffrey is her new media wizard boyfriend—he worked for John & Yoko and Apple Records and created PURITAN, the world’s most literary and largest-selling explicit sex magazine. On weekends he boxes with Ryan O’Neal and José Torres.
In the demimonde of call girls, porn stars, coke dealers, BDSM, sex clubs, orgies, Timothy Leary, Jerzy Kosinski, Al Goldstein and a horny White House speechwriter or two, Laura and Jeffrey transform into unquenchable libidomaniacs.
Norman Mailer considered his interview with Michelson and Bradley, “Ethics and Pornography” (excerpted in this book) one of the best of the more than 600 he gave in his lifetime. Mailer bequeathed the book’s foreword and Legs McNeil contributed the introduction. Both helped edit this documentary of the excesses and dangers of the wild era just before the door slammed shut on sexual liberation’s primetime.
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“Undeniably brilliant.” —LEGS McNEIL
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“Swimming in audacity.” —DWAYNE RAYMOND
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“It’s a side of life most people don’t even know exists. I didn’t.” —NORRIS CHURCH MAILER
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Available in print, audio and digital
LauraMeetsJeffrey.com
JEFFREY MICHELSON
and LAURA BRADLEY
Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania
2012
Uncorrected proof | Not for sale | Private distribution only | Please do not quote without prior publisher approval | For information contact Meryl Moss at 203-226-0199.
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NEW BLUE BOOKS
a division of Blue Mountain Marketing Inc.
www.newbluebooks.com
Copyright © 2012 by Jeffrey Michelson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States of America by New Blue Books, a division of Blue Mountain Marketing Inc., Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.
www.bluemountainmarketing.com
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, except for brief excerpts in a review or essay referring to this book, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact Meryl Moss at Meryl L. Moss Media Relations Inc., 203-341-9429
[email protected]
Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data
Michelson, Jeffrey.
Laura Meets Jeffrey : both sides of an erotic memoir / by Jeffrey Michelson and Laura Bradley — 1st ed
Digital Distribution, $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-9850098-1-6
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Limited First Edition, $50.00
Signed by both authors; gold gilt; embossed black leather bound with red satin bookmark ribbon. Available only at LauraMeetsJeffrey.com
ISBN: 978-0-9850098-2-3
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Trade Hardcover, $24.99
ISBN: 978-0-9850098-4-7
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Audio Book, $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-9850098-3-0
Manufactured in the United States of America
COVER AND BOOK DESIGN BY JOHN LOTTE FOR BLUE MOUNTAIN MARKETING | WEB DESIGN BY BLUE MOUNTAIN MARKETING
LauraMeetsJeffrey.com
To Joanna and Andrea
The last prejudice man will overcome is our prejudice toward beauty.—Malcolm Braly
Contents
A note to the memoir police
Foreword
Norman Mailer
Introduction
Legs McNeil
The world before Laura, part one
October 1979
The world before Laura, part two
October 1979–April 1980
Enter Laura stage left
Late April 1980
Falling in love in a whorehouse
Ten minutes later
My heart gets flushed down the toilet of love
Early May 1980
Shake it off. Get back in the game.
Twenty minutes later to three weeks later
Anal sex
The return of Laura
A Friday afternoon in June 1980
Emblematic mojos rising
The hooker, her husband, her sugar daddy, her lovers and me
Six o’clock on a Friday night in June 1980
The ‘test spank’ and beyond
One moment later
Whip this
Laura moves in
Late June 1980
Our first threesome
Summer 1980
What lives in the slime on a porn booth floor?
Late summer 1980
Soft-core and hard-core masturbators
Laura quits the whorehouse, shaves her legs, and becomes a model
Autumn 1980
Autumn almanac
October–November 1980
John, Yoko, and the washing machine repairman
December 8, 1980
Puritan interview with Norman Mailer
December 28, 1980
My first orgy
Flashback to May 1, 1971
My second orgy
Three weeks later in May 1971
A history of the New York orgy
1971–81
Laura’s first orgy
Early 1981
Hot babe gone wrong
Flashback to 1972
The lyrics and music of sex
Olympic pissing at the Hellfire Club
February 1981
The Norman Mailer/José Torres Saturday Morning Boxing Club
and my war with Ryan O’Neal
Sex slavery at Club O
March 1981
The pleasure of pain
Relationships and drugs
Two tricks
October 1981
Living weird is the new normal
1981–82
Lynne Something or Something Lynne
Late spring 1982
Puritan interview with Timothy Leary
Summer 1982
Alea Iacta Est
Two days later
The cocaine Ponzi scheme
Mr. Tall and the world’s ugliest swing club
October 1982
The art of war
The beast comes out of the bedroom
Early November 1982
Getting stale
Late 1982
The S&M pimple comes to a head
December 1982
S&M clarification
December 1982
New Year’s Eve 1983
Little Richard meets the Sopranos: The wedding of Silvio Dante
The final chapter
Spring 1983
Epilogue: Only the dead know Brooklyn
Early autumn 1983
Afterword
Since then
The history of this book
Acknowledgments A
Acknowledgments B
Ten things I learned from Norman Mailer
A note to the memoir police
Some names and places are changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty. Otherwise only minor liberties have been taken.
N
orman Mailer wrote his foreword after he read my first draft. A few weeks before he died in November of 2007, he suggested that when I was finished I give the book to Laura, whom he knew and loved, to get her side of the story.
She agreed.
Three years later when my part was done, Laura read my manuscript and relayed her version to Legs McNeil in a series of interviews.
Mailer’s commentary on my boxing matches with Ryan O’Neal was first published in Esquire magazine in 1993. The interviews that Laura and I did with Mailer and Timothy Leary first appeared in Puritan magazine in 1981 and 1982.
Foreword
Norman Mailer
Between the appearance of the Pill in the late ’60s and the first onspread of AIDS in the ’80s, there was an opening—call it a broad highway—into a wide-open world of sexual experiment and laissez-faire promiscuity.
A great many Americans went off on a non-stop gymkhana of libido exercises and group excursions. Jeffrey Michelson’s book captures the heart of that fifteen-year period with a directness and candor that lifts his work above the directly pornographic.
The result is most readable and, considering his own involvement, surprisingly objective and funny.
A subtle pathos mixes with an unquenching optimism and the result—no matter what a plethora of the salacious we have here—is perversely—dare I say it?—Uplifting!
The difference between writing and literature is agreeable style and irony. This book has both.
Introduction
Legs McNeil
Jeffrey Michelson has achieved the impossible—he has written about extreme sex in an objective, factual and funny way—with a raging hard-on—yet he’s neither bragging nor a jerk about it, and writing about sex is one of the hardest things in the world to get right and not sound like an asshole.
Michelson’s articulate style, like a veteran sportscaster enthusiastically calling out the play-by-plays with candor, humor and an unerring eye for all the details, invites the readers to stand over the bed and observe all these debaucheries, smell the sheets after the deed is done and not have to get any of the mess on themselves.
Be warned: This is a dirty book, an odd romantic S&M love story bathed in bodily fluids.
And be invited: This is one of the best-written nonfiction works I’ve ever read.
As Norman Mailer pointed out in his foreword, there was a very short window in world history when it was safe most of the time to have indiscriminate sex with anonymous partners without having to worry about unwanted pregnancies, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, or AIDS.
Penicillin was the first breakthrough; before the invention of penicillin, people died or went insane from “social diseases.” And with the advent of the Pill in the early ’60s—the first modern form of birth control—this duo created, for about twenty years, true sexual freedom for anyone daring enough to experiment. Then came herpes and AIDS in the ’80s and the window closed.
Thank the Lord someone finally had the balls to write down those swinging times, because I don’t think future generations would ever believe the stuff that happened in those good old days. It came and it went just like that and I’m not sure that window will ever open again, at least not while my dick is still working.
LAURA MEETS JEFFREY traps that era’s Zeitgeist and though other books document that time, none are as sexy and make you wish you were part of it more than this one. It took Michelson over thirty years of separation from that period to look back at a man he no longer was and have the comfort of neutral insight to write about it.
Laura—Jeffrey’s object of desire, lust and obsession—was truly the woman of most men’s dreams. The only complaint from her lips was the demand for “More!” I knew her and like most men, and many women, I wanted her. I knew Jeffrey and Laura socially but didn’t know Laura was a hooker. If I had known, that would have been money I would have spent.
Surrounding our unknown libertines are some of the era’s biggest icons: John & Yoko—who kick-started Jeffrey’s design career; Jeffrey’s boxing nemesis Ryan O’Neal; plus Jerzy Kosinski, Al Goldstein, Tim Leary, and Norman and Norris Mailer... a sprinkling of famous porn stars; cameos by Steve Van Zandt, Little Richard and Bruce Springsteen; and a Whitehouse speechwriter or two.
Reading about Laura is like watching one of those incredibly beautiful porn stars getting gang-banged, and thinking, “My God this woman is sooo beautiful; she doesn’t have to be doing this!!!!”
Then it hits like a lightening bolt! The reason is even more sinful—she’s doing it because she enjoys it!
Norman Mailer’s suggestions to have Laura read Jeffrey’s manuscript and add her side of the story is a wonderful literary, marketing and fact-checking device, a great parting gift from the old master to his friend. Laura completes the pictures and makes this book a richer history. She wrote some of her commentary, and most she gave as candid monologues of oral history. It was my pleasure to interview her several times and record her shameless well-aged reflections.
So enjoy the ride. Take a trip with Jeffrey Michelson and Laura Bradley, who had as much sex, drugs, and rock & roll as any two people who aren’t Keith Richards!
It was sexual liberation primetime in New York City.
1
The world before Laura, part one
October 1979
The Legend of Laura Bradley starts with Sherry, and Sherry deserves a few minutes if just for her skin.
Sherry was a fiery blonde with thrilling-to-the-touch white buttermilk flesh and a rattlesnake disposition. We’d been seeing each other for about half a year, spending several days a week together, some in her apartment in New York City and some at my cabin in the foothills of the Poconos, even though we shared nothing except thermonuclear chemistry.
She was a former Texan—proud, loud and stubborn. But you can’t really be a former Texan. You can only move out of Texas. To be a former Texan would be like growing up in Italy, moving out, and being formerly Italian.
Sherry’s father had abandoned her mother and her when she was a baby, and Sherry was going to make sure all men received payback. At first I tried to understand her hostility, but I developed compassion fatigue.
I met Sherry one autumn night in 1979 in Manhattan when Freddy, my whoring buddy and I were driving around, smoking pot and deciding which whores to visit. I was between main squeezes, dating a lot, none of it great, and garnishing my sex life with the occasional hooker.
I saw a sparkling blonde vision in high heels and a white fur coat unsuccessfully hailing a cab at 23rd and Lexington. From one hundred yards away I wanted her. I pointed her out to Freddy and he said, “Wow! Let’s offer her a ride.”
Freddy coached me while he hung a big U-turn on 23rd. “Take a deep breath and let it out before you start,” he said, “like snipers do.”
Freddy, forty-five, and twelve years older than me, was married and not looking for any relationship with a woman who wasn’t his wife except those that lasted less than two hours, cost more than $50 but less than $200, involved women who were about half his age and were already wearing lingerie. As we pulled up he said, “Relax. We’re two nice-looking middle-class Jewish guys in a big new Mercedes. We don’t look like trouble. Just put on your game face.”
Game face. Not so easy. My heart had been broken less than a year before when my fiancé, after a three-and-a-half-year relationship, left me for another guy. I was past being a mess, just getting past missing her every moment but not even halfway out of the pain from rejection, so I was not oozing confidence.
I didn’t do as well as many guys getting girls but I did okay. I wouldn’t classify myself as good-looking: I’m too Semitic, my nose is big and my forehead is a little too caveman. But I did have some decent attributes for a bright Jewish kid from Boston with lots of energy: I was just under six feet tall with broad shoulders, I had a healthy curly dark brown Jewfro, and even though I carried five, ten pounds too many, I was in decent shape. I was an amateur boxer, very amateur, but
a real weekend warrior.
In the Penis Department, I was a notch bigger than average according to Cosmopolitan and Playboy but only half a notch larger than what I saw as average in the gym showers, a notch or two smaller than some of the guys, and three to four notches smaller than the salamis you see in porn films. There were some women who liked my hippie/biker/rabbi look, but most of the women who would get naked with me did so for other reasons.
It’s said that men fall in love with what they see and women fall in love with what they hear. Thank God, since I wasn’t blessed with the gift of handsome, at least I got the gift of gab. And once in bed, if a girl is into talking dirty, I’m DJ Eros with sex rap, play-by-play, color commentary, and fantasy scenarios. I love a dirty audio track. Plus I love to direct in bed. I love telling women what to do sexually and many crave to be told. I am a natural dominant and submissives need that.
Another gift—and one that only shows up after the deal has been at least opened and on the road to closing—is that it takes me forever to climax. As far as orgasms go I was an ugly duckling. In my late teens I suffered from an affliction: I was horny enough for three guys and I got hard as a rock, would fuck, stay hard forever, and not achieve a climax. I couldn’t come fucking. I couldn’t come being sucked. I would have to stop fucking and have the girl touch me or suck my balls while I jerked off. Maybe I jerked off too well and that’s the reason why I had the problem.
This condition was hell to me but a gift to the many girls with boyfriends cursed oppositely with premature ejaculation. Some times I’d be passed around from a girlfriend to her girlfriend as if I was something between a miracle cure and a circus act. By my mid-twenties this problem worked itself out but it was still difficult for me to climax fucking. It took a long time, sometimes thirty or forty-five minutes of concerted effort, sometimes longer. I was also, and not to my choosing, the horniest man I ever met, read about or heard of. I didn’t sign up for it: it was just the way my hormones lined up.
The main reason I pulled women is that I truly love women. There’s the old sexist saw that if girls didn’t have vaginas there would be a bounty on their heads. I disagree. Even if you couldn’t fuck them, I would still wander over to their caves occasionally just to smell them, look at their bodies, and listen to them talk. They don’t work the same way men do, and I find that a constant source of amusement. Often exasperating but seldom boring.
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