by Legs McNeil
It was all psychedelics—all sparkly, sparkly sand, phosphorescent, beautiful moon, stars. We’re all alone on this tropical island beach—just gorgeous. It was really a high. And then we went back to his parents’ beach house and had our first naked hug and kiss—and he went down on me and licked my pussy.
Oh, it was really nice. It was all new. I thought it was very cool.
FRED LINCOLN: But because Miss Jones killed herself, she had to go to hell. And the Devil doesn’t know what to do with her. How do you punish this person who has never done anything wrong? Who has no sin and no wants! Because she’s never done anything, she doesn’t miss it.
How do you punish this person, you know? It’s like taking a kid who’s never been outside and saying you’re grounded.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: I didn’t play around with Van’s penis until he rode his motorcycle up from Panama to Los Angeles to see me. Penetration came when he finally got his house in the Valley. I was, like, totally awestruck by his penis. The day after I lost my virginity, I was so happy. It wasn’t a loss; it was a gain, you know? It was totally an improvement. A big improvement. I was so happy; I couldn’t stop smiling the whole day.
Van was an artist. He was a carpenter; he made furniture. And we ended up going to an art commune in Arizona together. He was a very talented, creative person. We were in love. But then I wanted to have sex with other people.
FRED LINCOLN: So Miss Jones says, “If I had known this, I would have lived my life differently.”
The Devil asks, “What do you mean?”
And she says, “I would’ve done all those things they told me not to do.”
He says, “How about I let you go back to do that?”
And she agrees to it. So first she meets Harry Reems, and he’s her instructor.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: Things were going well until this guy at the commune starts flirting with me. He was cute, you know: skinny, lanky, young. He was probably nineteen. So I ended up having sex with him.
It was in his van, and it was very hot. And of course I knew Van was going to be upset—and that I would feel somewhat guilty—but there was no stopping me.
That was really the beginning of the end for Van.
FRED LINCOLN: The sex is so real because Georgina is not a young girl who can go get laid whenever she wants. She’s like a little, chubby spinster. All of a sudden she’s got guys giving her head for a fucking hour, man. So she’s really getting off on this thing.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: It wasn’t a big, bad breakup. I just said to Van, “I think I need to get my own place.”
So I go and rent a one-room hippie pad for seventy-five bucks a month. And I worked as a hotel maid for two days and cleaned an oven. Then I got a job as a wallpaper hanger and for several months worked on construction projects—and had sex with all the guys on the sites: laid by the carpet layers, nailed by the construction workers…
FRED LINCOLN: Georgina’s really the only person in The Devil in Miss Jones. The other characters come and go. At least there’s the Devil to teach her things, but his character is flat, has nothing to it. But Georgina, you see her go from a spinster to a sex fiend. I mean, you really see it happen.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: They were cheating me out of money at the wallpaper job, so I answered an ad for a job at a movie theater and got hired as the popcorn girl. It was called the Cine Plaza Theater, this big, beautiful, old cinema in the heart of Tucson. It must have held five hundred seats. It could have been one of those old vaudeville theaters; it had that feel to it. Of course, I worked the late shift. But I didn’t know it was an X-rated theater.
As fate would have it, the first movie they showed after I was hired was Deep Throat. I’d never heard of the movie. Nobody had.
HARRY REEMS: A lot went wrong in the making of The Devil in Miss Jones. Locations were lost. We went way over schedule. The picture was almost dropped midstream. Two guys had each put up $15,000 to make The Devil. When it was made, one of them was convinced it was a bomb and asked to be bought out.
But for those of us who hung in there, it was one of the loveliest shoots ever. It was Georgina’s first big movie, and she did a damn fine job acting in it.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: When I went in to watch the movie, I had no idea that they actually filmed people having sex. I’d seen Playboy and Penthouse, read The Happy Hooker and The Sensuous Woman, but that was it.
So I was just in awe that they were showing Deep Throat out in the open—where anyone could see it. And I just fell in love with Linda Lovelace.
GERARD DAMIANO: Up until Miss Jones, I never had anything I wanted to say to the public. If people wanted to interview me because I was a porno filmmaker, I just was not interested in talking to them. But if anybody wanted to speak to me because I made films, then I was happy to talk with anyone. I just didn’t want to be bothered with speaking to a lot of superficial idiots.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: Did I get turned on watching Deep Throat? Fuck, yes! I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life! I watched it probably ten times. I thought Linda Lovelace was so cool. I loved her attitude and her look—and the way she could deep throat was just amazing.
GERARD DAMIANO: The only reason most of my films dealt with pornography was because at that time that was the only media an independent filmmaker could work in. I was gearing my films to sell to a specific market because there was not enough money involved to gear it to any other market.
Working within a limited budget—under $25,000—you could not do the great American love story. For that kind of money you had to stick to the bedroom and then every once in a while you’d get an opportunity to express an emotion other than sex.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: When people ask, “How’d you get into the sex industry?” I say, “Luck, just pure luck.”
Two or three months after I started working at the Plaza Cinema, they busted it for obscenity and closed it down. I ended up working in a massage parlor.
At that time, all the massage parlors were in little trailers. This guy named Zeke ran it. He was a big, tall, gorgeous hippie guy—and very charismatic. I had the hots for him. But I don’t remember if I fucked him—I can’t remember all the people I fucked, you know?
Did I go from hand job to blow job to fucking them? No, I just went right into fucking, the first day. Oh, totally—I wanted to fuck them.
GERARD DAMIANO: The Devil in Miss Jones came about for basically the same reason Throat came about, but adversely. With the success of Throat, everybody and his brother was running around trying to make a sexy, funny, camp picture. I felt that if this is what everyone else was doing, it was time to do something different.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: I was not into romance. I was into pure sex. You know: one guy, two guys, five guys. No women at that time, just guys. Because my mother was so intense, I didn’t want to be around women because I felt judged by them. My dad was the sweet one, so I was more attracted to men. Men felt safe. I was very threatened by women—unless they were prostitutes.
So all the girls at the massage parlor were great. There were hippie girls, as well as some seasoned prostitutes that had worked in Vegas—and biker women, and some drug addicts. It was kind of homey, you know?
So I had a great time. I worshipped and adored all the girls. And I was fascinated by prostitution, as I still am.
FRED LINCOLN: At the end of The Devil in Miss Jones, Miss Jones is back in hell. And she’s with this guy—Gerry played the part—and he won’t fuck her; he won’t touch her; he won’t do anything.
She’s going crazy! She just wants sex.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: My pornography connection came about when the State of Arizona tried to find Deep Throat obscene. They busted the film in 1973 and everyone involved in it. But it took six months until I got a subpoena. I have no idea how they found me, but somebody actually showed up at my door and handed me one.
It was totally ridiculous that they called me to testify—the popcorn girl at the theater—because I didn’t know anything. But that’s
how I met Gerard Damiano.
FRED LINCOLN: You want to talk about a woman who liked sex? Annie Sprinkle really liked sex, man. But I didn’t even know that Gerry had an affair with Annie. Even when Annie was eighteen, the S and M came from her, not from Gerry. Annie—boy, she was a freaky little girl, man, let me tell you. I don’t know where all that came from.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: There was a witness room where we all sat around while we waited to testify, and I’d never seen Gerard Damiano, but someone introduced him to me as the director of Deep Throat.
I was starstruck. I was like all hot for him. He was forty-six years old, and I was eighteen. And he was just charming—Italian, with a great sense of humor. I just adored him.
The first thing I said to him was, “Will you teach me how to deep throat?”
GERARD DAMIANO: The only people that’s worth knowing are people who take what they’re doing seriously, more than the average person. Maybe it was my own defense of what I was doing. If I didn’t take myself seriously, why should anybody else?
ANNIE SPRINKLE: We went out to dinner that first night. And then I had sex with Gerard Damiano. I had sex with him three or four times during the trial. We had great sex, really great sex. And I think he was taken by me in a way—probably our artistic sensibility just gelled and our interest in porn.
ERIC EDWARDS: I didn’t know Annie at the time, but I did know Paula, Gerard Damiano’s girlfriend. I worked with her. I love that term, “Worked with her.”
You know, everybody says that in this business. “Well, I worked with so-and-so, and I worked with so-and-so.”
“Oh, you mean you fucked them?”
“Well, yeah, that’s what it boils down to.”
Yeah, so I “worked” with her in the early days. In fact, she was one of the loop people. And she was a sweetheart, very easy to “work with.”
So that’s why I didn’t know Gerry was having an affair with Annie. But I’ve never been that close with Gerry.
GLORIA LEONARD: Gerard Damiano was the Fellini, or you know, the Scorsese of porn. A lot of these guys use a lot of Catholic symbols—undertones and overtones of pain and pleasure in their films. I didn’t know Annie Sprinkle at this point, but Damiano sort of lets this out—when he had that big S and M relationship with her.
GEORGINA SPELVIN: Do I think that Miss Jones has a lot to do with the Catholic-guilt thing? Absolutely. You know, pain and pleasure—there’s a thin line, you know? George Carlin said it best: “You know, Catholics, they’re always pushing for pain, and I’m always pulling for pleasure.”
GERARD DAMIANO: Do I think I’m personally responsible for some of the movement toward sexual liberation in this country? Of course I’m responsible!
Is Linda Lovelace responsible? Is Jamie Gillis responsible? Is Harry Reems responsible? We’re all responsible—every fucking one of us. We went out there and did things that were never done before. And we weren’t ashamed of it; we did it, and we had fun.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: Linda Lovelace and Gerard Damiano were staying at the same fancy hotel in Tucson. Linda was always hanging out by the pool in a bikini. Chuck Traynor wasn’t around. But I met Linda briefly and I said, “Oh God, you’re my hero!”
She was kind of aloof—friendly—but aloof. She didn’t really want to talk; she just wanted to get a tan and be left alone. Linda didn’t look like she was too worried about the trial.
LINDA LOVELACE: Why have me go all the way to Tucson, Arizona, to be a witness for the government? It was the publicity. The publicity for the government was terrific in places like Kentucky and Arizona. I made the front pages of newspapers in those towns, just because I was there.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: Of course there was a lot of news about the trial. It was kind of exciting, and I think I was happy to be a part of it. You see, the massage parlor where I worked got busted quite a few times—but I was never there. Yeah, I was just always lucky—but I kind of wished I had been busted, too. I felt like I missed out on some rite of passage.
So now I finally got my chance to be busted, with Gerard Damiano—but he wasn’t in Tucson that long, maybe a week. Then he went back to New York, and we stayed in touch. Was I in love? I would say, “smitten.”
But yeah, we had started a hot affair. About a month later, when Gerard had to go to San Francisco, he sent me a ticket to go meet him. That’s when The Devil in Miss Jones came out.
GERARD DAMIANO: MGM called me after I did The Devil in Miss Jones, after they’d read some of the reviews—and the film’s grosses I might add—and made me a fat contract offer. Jim Aubrey sent his limo over for me—the whole impressive bit. But in addition to giving me an offer to make films under their auspices, they also gave me a formula. I had to make a film for them that had at least one hippie scene and one lesbian scene, among other things.
I don’t make films to formula. I write my own films and direct them depending on what subject matter I choose to do at the time and how I choose to relate it.
MGM couldn’t understand that, so the offer is still on my desk—and MGM is out of business.
FRED LINCOLN: I know that Hollywood came to Gerry and offered him to do some movies, and he was afraid. Why? I honestly don’t know. Deep Throat made fifty-five million dollars. If that don’t ring Hollywood’s bells, man, I don’t know what does! That’s all they’re interested in—the bottom line.
GEORGINA SPELVIN: The Devil in Miss Jones is pretty existential, especially for a porn film. I think that’s the reason that it got the kind of critical notice that it did. But it was not really a very successful porn film. I mean, guys came out of that film shaking their heads, saying, “I came here to jerk off; I didn’t come here to think!”
ANNIE SPRINKLE: When I got into the sex show biz, I wanted a new name. Ellen Steinberg just didn’t sound sexy enough to me. I was lying on my bed, and I heard a voice whisper, clear as a bell, in my ear, “Annie Sprinkle.”
I had been using the name for several years when my Uncle Sylvan sent me this photo he took of a tombstone he found in Baltimore. I got an eerie feeling. Annie M. Sprinkle was born in 1864 and died when she was only seventeen in 1881. In my travels, I later met one of the Sprinkle family descendants who confirmed my suspicion that Annie M. had grown up in a strict religious community and had never married.
It’s likely that she died a virgin with unexpressed passion and desire. I believe that it was her spirit that whispered her name in my ear and that she now lives vicariously through me. She guides me and keeps me safe from harm. I have taken flowers to her grave.
It’s a nice story, isn’t it?
Holmes v. Wadd
LOS ANGELES
1973–1976
SHARON HOLMES: There was a period of time when John was gone for almost five months working in Hawaii doing nude dancing. He may have been doing photo layouts—I have no idea what he was doing. I’m pretty naive about this stuff. But that was as much as he was willing to tell me. I think that made it a little more palatable. If he was away, it wasn’t affecting us.
BOB CHINN: It was a strange period to be shooting porn in Los Angeles, because Los Angeles County Vice were busting shoots. That’s when I thought, “Why don’t we all take a vacation? Go to Hawaii?”
I took my crew, and we went to Hawaii and made a film called Tropic of Passion, which was really a lot of fun. There was no pressure. John enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. Everybody enjoyed it.
SHARON HOLMES: It wasn’t until 1973 that I found out how really deep John was into pornography. He had been lying quite a bit, saying, “No, I’m not doing a film; I’m doing the lights or the sound.”
I found out because he left a still photograph out for a promo of one of the films he’d starred in. It was hard-core, showing penetration, with women. Up until then I hadn’t seen any of that.
I just looked at it, and I thought, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” And it chewed at me, and it chewed at me, and it chewed at me…
BILL AMERSON: The 1970s, for me, was a continual hiding, peeping, an
d running from whatever authority wanted to stop the flow of adult businesses. There was a lot of police harassment. At that time, I was not only in the adult film business but also owned bookstores and theaters around Southern California and some in Arizona.
SHARON HOLMES: I talked to John about it. I said, “I want to know exactly what you are doing and how often.”
John had never lied to me. If I confronted him, he could not lie to me. He’d try to gloss it over, and I’d know he was doing it, and it ate at me for about two months.
And then I thought, “I’m married to a whore.”
I mean, that’s the only thing I could equate it to. I felt it was a betrayal.
BILL AMERSON: The LAPD formed a very special vice squad for pornography. We nicknamed them the “Pussy Posse.”
We had “Pussy Posse” T-shirts made up and mailed fifteen of them to the Los Angeles Vice Squad, which, looking back on it, wasn’t the prudent thing to do. It really pissed them off. I don’t think they ever wore the shirts.
BOB VOSSE: What’s weird is no one in the industry knew John Holmes socially. John had no social life; he’d never stick around for parties, and he had very few friends. I tried to be John’s friend. We worked together in many places, many times; I shot more than half of the films that John made in his life. But he never trusted me. He never trusted anyone.