The Other Hollywood

by Legs McNeil

  JOHNNY KEYES: I was fucking the hell out of this chick—I was acting like I was ten thousand Africans making up for that slavery shit. Here’s this white woman that the African is fucking to get revenge on all those white motherfuckers that used to rape our mothers and aunts all those years ago, right? That’s what I used as an incentive to fuck Marilyn Chambers.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: That scene broke out of the old porno mold of hand-held cameras and lousy color and showed people that there’s a great deal of beauty in the mystery and majesty of an orgasm.

  I call it artsy-fartsy now because I’ve seen it so many times, but the first time a person views it, they’re kind of stunned. And they get all horny inside. Of course, that sequence is the ultimate in the fantasy of man conquering woman.

  JOHNNY KEYES: I made love to Marilyn for about an hour and forty-three minutes without stopping. She came about seven, eight, nine times, and then she fainted on me.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: When Johnny put it in, it hurt—I had tears in my eyes. And then it just clicked. It was like going from being scared to “Yeah!” You can see that in my eyes. It was a primitive, animalistic type of thing. And then we were on our way, ha, ha, ha.

  JIM MITCHELL: We were scheduled with the six nuns for two days, and Johnny Keyes for two days, and the trapeze people had two days. Then the audience orgy was to be a master cover scene with fifty people for one day, then each group for two days. Seven or eight days in total.

  But then, after stalling for a year and a half, we finally had to go to trial. See, we got busted three weeks after we opened the O’Farrell Theater in 1969. We’ve been in a lot of court battles since then—local, muni, superior, state, appellate, State Supreme Court, federal, federal district, Federal Ninth Circuit of Appeals, U.S. Supreme Court.

  We’ve won all the way to the Supreme Court.

  JACK BOULWARE: San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein acted as a schoolmarm to the Mitchell brothers. She would attempt to regulate them, and they would gleefully thumb their noses at her.

  They were harassed by her so many times—via the police department—that they actually put her home phone number on their theater marquee that said, “For a good time, call Dianne.”

  She had to change her number—and then they got her new number, and they put it on the marquee again!

  JIM MITCHELL: So on the day of the big orgy—we had costumes, people, makeup, a set—we had to go to trial. So we started our trial, and we had to shoot the big scene in one day!

  JOHNNY KEYES: My fuck scene with Marilyn was so intense that the sixty or seventy people who were hired to be the audience, just started taking off their clothes and fucking!

  It was like a nightclub setting: Me and Marilyn were onstage, and these actors and actresses were sitting there watching the scene. But everybody got carried away watching us—and they just started fucking. They must have had three cameras, and they just let them roll.

  JIM MITCHELL: We shot five thousand feet in one day—until we just couldn’t shoot anymore. After we ran out of film and turned all the cameras off, it got pretty weird, man. It got a lot funnier than what was on film.

  JOHNNY KEYES: You know, if you’re in a room where everyone is making love, man, it’s going to get pretty freaky. And, oh yeah, it was!

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: What’s a better turn-on than five different guys jerking off all over a pretty girl’s face and letting her lick their sperm from her lips and chin?

  C. J. LAING: I was totally jealous that I wasn’t in Behind the Green Door. Completely. I wasn’t pissed at the Mitchell brothers, more dejected. But I didn’t complain to Jim and Artie—and what, risk them saying they turned me down because I’m a little scrawny kid from nowhere?

  JOHNNY KEYES: At the premiere of Behind the Green Door, there were all kinds of women trying to fuck me. I mean, one chick was like half owner of some big hotel. And I was having a blast! I was young and full of cum, baby! And people at the premiere were sitting in the audience playing with each other. Shit, you’d see people getting turned on because the movie was like, really psychedelic!

  ARTIE MITCHELL: About the time Behind the Green Door opened, Marilyn came over and said, “The new Ivory Snow box came out—and here it is.” And Marilyn was on it, right?

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: I had failed to mention to the Mitchell brothers that, “Oh, by the way, I posed for the Ivory Snow box a couple of years ago. And I think it’s about ready to come on the shelves.”

  Jim and Artie just went, “What!!? Oh my God!!!”

  JOHNNY KEYES: One day we were having a big barbecue out at the Mitchell brothers’, and me and Marilyn went to the store to pick up some turkey wings. I walk down the soap aisle and see this picture of Marilyn on the Ivory Snow box, holding this baby. I grab it and go back to Marilyn and say, “Hey, look at this box!”

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: So we all went to the grocery store, and there it was. It was like “Cha-ching, cha-ching”—the sound of a cash register, you know?

  JOHNNY KEYES: Dollar signs just rolled in Art Mitchell’s head.

  Then they went back and started all this publicity—but I was the one who found the box! In the store! It was an accident!

  ARTIE MITCHELL: We knew it was big. But we didn’t want Procter & Gamble to pull out of it immediately—at all. So we all decided to wait at least six months, to make sure they had the box out everywhere.

  JIM MITCHELL: We went to New York and opened the movie. The first week we did thirty thousand dollars total between two theaters, which wasn’t very good. We had fifteen thousand dollars in advertising, we had houses to pay for, and we’d been advanced fifteen thousand. And we didn’t get a check, right? We needed the money.

  It had only been three or four months after the Ivory Snow box had been out, but we decided, “What the hell? We have to go with it.”

  Russ Fradkin was doing the publicity for the theater in New York. We went to him and the theater owner, and we said, “Here’s the story…. here’s the boxes.”

  They didn’t get it, really. They didn’t know how big it was. So we told them, “Call Earl Wilson, the columnist; give it to him first.”

  Wilson sat on it for a week, called back, and said, “It’s not an item.”

  ARTIE MITCHELL: The New York Post sat on it for three or four days, so I just took the Ivory Snow box, told Russ that Procter & Gamble were the largest television advertiser in the world, and went to Tony Mancini, a reporter for the New York Post.

  You see, Playboy had already done a story on Marilyn and porno, and we dropped the Ivory Snow story on the writer. He was going to get a break on it. But this was three months before publication. A long wait.

  So I told Tony Mancini what the story was, he called Marilyn out in California, and it made the second page.

  JIM MITCHELL: The box office the next week went to $60,000. It was unnatural, no doubt about that. We weren’t trying to say how smart we were.

  ARTIE MITCHELL: Straight fluke! What an avalanche of free publicity! We were just standing in the wings. It came up, and we just had to play the cards that were dealt out.

  You can’t break the chariot of Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Snow—which is sixty percent of their action—that often, you know? The girl who was on the Ivory Snow box before Marilyn was on it for twelve years. They don’t fuck with that box! That box is their baby. They went through two years of backroom bullshit to finally agree that that was the look they were going for—the young, blond mother image. Only this young blond turned out to be a porn star.

  And then we went to Cannes right as the story was breaking.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: Never before had an adult film been reviewed at the Cannes Film Festival. It was quite something.

  JOHNNY KEYES: Jim and Artie called me and said, “You just got nominated for an award at Cannes for the best fuck scene ever shot!”

  ARTIE MITCHELL: At Cannes, we were up at the top of the theater. After the movie was over, they turned up the house lights. But the people wouldn’t l
eave. We couldn’t tell if they liked us or hated us. It seemed as we looked down there, there were all these faces from all over the world just looking up at us. A cold, weird kinda thing. Like they didn’t know where we were coming from at all. I was getting a bit nervous. Then six police officers came in and started working their way up to us.

  Finally, one drunk Frenchman stood up and started shouting, “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!!”

  The cops dragged him out, and that kind of broke the ice. Then everyone left. They’d been sitting there, for about five minutes, in sweltering 85-degree heat. They were stunned. Really stunned.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: The press was just phenomenal. I mean, I was just inundated. I was famous overnight because of the Ivory Snow box and Behind the Green Door. Kind of a paradox, but the press ran with it. Show magazine was saying, “This is the new Marilyn Monroe!”

  I got a ten-page spread in Playboy—a celebrity layout. I was signing thousands of pictures. And I started getting calls for straight movies.

  ARTIE MITCHELL: At 2:00 P.M. the next day, they showed the movie again. We stayed down on the beach this time. We got reports that there were crowds of people outside. They couldn’t all get in. The police asked us to cancel our third show to avoid a riot. The word had gotten around pretty fast.

  JIM MITCHELL: We came back from Cannes and had another Ivory Snow box press conference. That’s what was so funny. It was a good story. It hit everywhere. So now hundreds of reporters showed up. They had nothing, but they rehashed the same thing. And the story went out again.

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: We were treated like movie stars. We had limos, and suites at the Plaza Hotel, and Cristal champagne, and openings, and premieres and it was just so glamorous—really, really glamorous. Johnny Carson lined up to see the film. I mean, you had to go to the theater and stand in line, so you weren’t anonymous. You were there for all the world to see.

  JOHNNY KEYES: I got fifteen hundred bucks for a day’s work. That’s pretty good. But then, after it became a hit, we renegotiated. And I got part of the movie. They gave us residuals. Yeah, the Mitchell brothers were all right with me and Marilyn. Not with nobody else. They paid people good, but me and Marilyn’s the only ones who got residuals.

  JIM MITCHELL: Behind the Green Door brought Marilyn about twenty-five thousand dollars, plus residuals, and there were no sour grapes about it. She made more money on Behind the Green Door than anyone in the history of this business has ever made as an actor or actress in a movie.

  JOHNNY KEYES: I did about three more movies for the Mitchell brothers. But none of the other women I worked with were big stars; they were just regular nude people. Was I turned on? Yeah! They was bringing all these little chicks for me to fuck, and of course, I would have my pick of the girls. And they were paying me!

  MARILYN CHAMBERS: The next film I did for the Mitchell brothers was The Resurrection of Eve, which didn’t have as much success as Green Door. But that was okay because I really wanted to do legit films.

  I was still just this little hippie chick in San Francisco, married to this hippie bagpipe player who did nothing.

  Hair of the Dog

  NEW YORK CITY/CHICAGO/LOS ANGELES

  1973

  LINDA LOVELACE: The one good thing about Butchie Peraino was that he introduced me to Sammy Davis Jr., who was doing a telethon for seat belt safety, and I was going to be on with him. I was gonna do a skit or something on the show because if I had my seat belt on, none of this stuff would have happened to me.

  But they wouldn’t allow me on. They wouldn’t even open the door to let me in. Sammy came out and was all apologetic. He tried his best, but they didn’t want me. Sammy said, “We’ll have dinner or something later.”

  I think probably deep down inside, I was hurt. But Sammy and I went out for dinner later that night, and then we went back to his hotel.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Sammy used to tell me he was more interested in meeting and knowing me than he was in fucking Linda. He would fuck her, but that was secondary. He said, “I gotta know how you control women. I gotta know what makes them follow you like they do. What motivates you? Why do you do it?”

  I said, “Well, beats shovelin’ shit for a living.”

  AL GOLDSTEIN: I ran the stuff in Screw about the eight-millimeter films Linda had made before Deep Throat, where she gets fucked by a dog and gets pissed on—and Linda and Chuck got terribly angry. I tried to explain to them that anything she did was news. Apparently, they felt being a cocksucker was news, but to be fucked by animals—that was too kinky to be published.

  So I became the enemy. Two of her friends—managers or whatever you want to label them—called me up and said they were going to break my legs.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: When I found out Al Goldstein was doing some stuff about bestiality on Linda in Screw, I was up there with the Peraino people in their office, and I told them I didn’t like it.

  I told them I was gonna go show Al Goldstein which way to think. They said, “Well, if you wanna do it, go ahead, but anything he writes about us is okay because it’s just more publicity.”

  AL GOLDSTEIN: Linda’s book, Inside Linda Lovelace, came out almost twelve months to the day after I met her in that hotel room. She had a fancy press party in New York to launch the book. I’ve never seen the press more awestruck. They were fighting to get her autographed photo.

  During the party, Chuck Traynor called me over and said there were grand juries that were trying to nail her on the dog photos, that they had these big movie contracts and that I should lay off.

  LINDA LOVELACE: Al Goldstein was trying to sign me for his movie, but I wasn’t interested. Let’s just say the script left me cold. That marked the day that Screw started screwing me. I wanted to sue them for their untrue allegations, but my lawyer advised against it.

  AL GOLDSTEIN: In Dog Fucker, Linda was still not the cocksucker or charmer that she becomes in her later work. In any film retrospective on Linda Lovelace, I’m sure that this short will merely be a historical footnote in her thrilling show business career.

  LINDA LOVELACE: My lawyer said the magazine meant nothing in the straight world, and to the Screw readers—who are very important to me—it wouldn’t matter either. His contention was that those readers are much too sophisticated to believe ridiculous claims and too sharp to believe it was really me in that bestial photo.

  NICK TOSCHES (WRITER): Linda claimed that Goldstein was a liar, that she was not the lady receiving the dog in the film, and that Big Al was just pissed off because she refused to act in his movie, It Happened in Hollywood.

  Goldstein in turn slapped a $250,000 slander suit on Linda, saying that, yes, it is she in the film, and she shouldn’t deny it—she should be proud of it.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Why did Linda deny the dog-fucking pictures? Well, Linda never realized that people were interested in her as a freak. She figured, “If the dog-fucking pictures come out, I’m dead.”

  LINDA LOVELACE: We were living back in Florida when Hugh Hefner contacted Butchie Peraino, who said that Hefner wanted to meet me and Traynor—but Traynor was into the D-O-G thing. I think that was Hefner’s motivation. I mean, that’s what he was looking forward to seeing, you know?

  AL GOLDSTEIN: Only in America could a cocksucker go so far.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Hefner sent his personal plane down to pick us up to bring us to California. Well, I had a great, big, old dog named Rufus, and he flew to California with us. Hefner had these sheep dogs, and Rufus was put in the kennel with them—and that night Rufus killed one of Hefner’s sheep dogs and seriously chewed the other one almost to death.

  So Rufus wasn’t real welcome around the Hefner mansion after that.

  LINDA LOVELACE: Hefner was a terrific guy. A wonderful guy. He did something that Chuck could never do. He treated me like a human being.

  Chuck got his kicks from weird things—like imagining how many guys could manage to stick their fingers up my behind when I wore a short skirt. When we first met Hef
ner, Chuck would make me go around the Playboy mansion in Chicago to see how many butlers and servants could stick their fingers in me or whatever. He used to say that if Hefner heard about me doing that, he would think I was really great. But when I finally met Hefner and got to know him, I found out how totally wrong Chuck was.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Linda never realized that the doggie movie was probably one of the only reasons Hefner was interested in her in the first place. Hefner’s probably got the second or third biggest porn collection in the world.

  And I think Hefner’s interest in me was that he would show me old eight-millimeter porn films, and he’d ask, “Do you recognize any of these people?”

  I’d say, “Yeah.”

  He’d ask, “What are they doing now? Where’s this girl now?”

  It was a big fascination with him. I’d find out by calling people I knew and asking this and asking that. I did that for quite a while for him.

  Hefner wanted to have a file on all the people that had ever done porn and their whole life history. “Did they graduate from school? Did they go to work? They go to college? Are they working now? Did they get married? Did they have kids?”

  LINDA LOVELACE: Hefner would have “orgy night” in the pool—inside the cave. He would come down to the Jacuzzi, and as soon as he took off his bathrobe and stepped into the water, Chuck started pushing me toward him.