by Legs McNeil
SHARON MITCHELL: The years 1975, 1976, 1977 were the beginning of the great era of smut on Forty-second Street because that’s when it changed over from those old burlesque strippers to porn stars and rock and roll girls.
TIM CONNELLY: That night, my band and soon-to-be ex-wife went to Max’s Kansas City to see Sirius Trixon get married onstage. My band sits down—and Sharon Mitchell’s right across the table from us.
I thought, “This is unbelievable.” Sharon Mitchell was being regarded with as much celebrity as Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol and Brian Eno, who were all hanging out. The band and I just wanted to meet Brian Eno and John Cale and give them our tapes. Hopefully they’d want to produce us or something. So it was new to me—this connection between strippers, porn stars, and rock and roll.
SHARON MITCHELL: New York—it was just all new. It was wild—amazing, you know? I’m having experimental sex—sex with young girls, kinky sex. Because all these young girls had crushes on me, you know? Young girls loved me. I was slick; I was very masculine. I was very rock and roll and pushy and wiry and people loved me. Because I was “Sharon Mitchell,” and people loved that.
TIM CONNELLY: One of the guys in my band was dating Lolly Holly, the guitar player in Krayola, a New York all-girl punk band. Lolly was a stripper, and they wanted to bring in a drummer—this porn star/stripper named Helen Madigan—and they asked me to teach her to play drums.
I needed the money, so I agreed to do it. For Helen’s first drum lesson, I had to meet her at the Melody Burlesque, where she was working at the time.
When I got there, I walked in the middle of a Mardi Gras, which is when they send the girls to circulate in the audience. It’s the equivalent of lap dancing now, but then it was this dollar-a-lick thing.
C. J. LAING: I went back to New York from Texas after visiting my rock and roll boyfriend—and the Mitchell brothers had just come to New York. And we got together and partied, and they introduced me to the Buckleys, who had done Screw with Al Goldstein and were making their first movie. So that’s how I did my first movie with Jamie Gillis.
TIM CONNELLY: I was just fascinated by what the girls were doing at the Melody—and that the guys were paying for it. Coming from a good-looking rock and roll band, I never had a problem getting pussy. So I was just blown away that guys would pay money to have these girls bounce in and out of their lap for ten seconds.
SHARON MITCHELL: One night I got a call from Jamie Gillis, who had a horribly filthy apartment on Fourty-sixth Street and Ninth Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen. Hadn’t cleaned it in years—and Jamie has weird eating habits. I mean, you open up his refrigerator, and there’s like bull’s balls and fucking pickled eyes and pigs’ ears. It looks like a vivisectionist’s fucking refrigerator, you know? Goats’ heads—weird fucking shit he’d buy in Chinatown.
So anyway, I get this call from Jamie and he says, “Uh, Mitch, can you come up? I need some help.”
I said, “Sure,” because Jamie was one of the big brother guys that watched over me. Him and John Leslie and Eric Edwards—all those guys really flanked me and took care of me. So I would never ask, “Why?” even though it was two in the morning. I just said, “Okay.” I mean, I was up anyway. So I got in a cab and went up to Jamie’s filthy apartment, and he and C. J. Laing were having some kind of a weird sexual session. He had her head in the toilet—and he needed both hands to, like, keep her breathing and the toilet flushing.
He needed another hand to help get her head out of the toilet—so she wouldn’t drown.
TIM CONNELLY: Helen and I went back to my loft, and I tried to give her a drum lesson, but she was so fucking uncoordinated. I mean, she couldn’t even hold the sticks in her hands. But she just had this infectious laugh; she was really cute and sexy.
So after about half an hour I said, “You know what? Let’s not push it the first time. Maybe I’ll get you a Mel Bay book—the basic textbook of drumming—and then I’ll teach you how to read music.”
I gave her a pair of my sticks to take home, and she was so excited. She started running the sticks between her legs, right?
It had started snowing really heavily out so I said, “Maybe you should get going.”
She said, “Well, you know, I can hang out…if you want…”
SHARON MITCHELL: It was something with the pull chain and the drain—and we needed four hands to get the girl’s head un-flushed and save her. It was a weird incident. But a nice one. I mean, it wasn’t like everyone didn’t know Jamie had a penchant for weird S and M scenes.
I was just glad I could be there for my friends, ha, ha, ha.
C. J. LAING: There was some little talent agency in Times Square that represented me. This old woman ran it, and she was a cunt. Oh, she was horrible!
So I started doing a lot of porn—and I started becoming like a circus-act girl. I was the girl that did farm boys that were coming in with eighteen-inch cocks. These guys that couldn’t speak but had…anomalies, right?
I’m the girl that deep-throated John Holmes, and I’m the girl that double fisted with this one and that one—and did all of these very intense sex scenes.
I purposely would not act. I despised the people in these films that said they were actors.
I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me! This is about fucking and sucking!”
SHARON MITCHELL: The two big places to dance were the Melody Burlesque and Show World. But Show World was really happening: It had four floors with different types of sex—you know, transsexuals, porn stars, unisexuals, S and M shows. Everybody was there, and we were all featuring at different times.
One night, Vanessa Del Rio was downstairs at Show World—and Ming Toy and I were cofeaturing upstairs. That’s when the vice detectives walked in.
ERIC EDWARDS: I met Arcadia Lake at Show World. Marc Stevens introduced us. Then I did a couple of live sex shows with her. It was not professional. It was like, “Oh, wow, I like her! I’ll go do it onstage! Why not?”
I was doing penetration right there onstage with her. And then I invited her to go with me to Jamaica because I liked her.
SHARON MITCHELL: I was doing this well-choreographed act—a Western show with Roy Rogers chaps and a little bra. I had six guns, little snappies, a whip, and lollipops to hand out to the audience. By the third song I was down to bra, panties, garter belt, fishnets, and boots, right?
And that’s when one of the DJs spots the vice detectives in the house. This DJ was an ex-con, a junkie of course, and he could smell a cop. So he turns the music down and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Let’s hear it for Sharon Mitchell!”
The audience got all uptight because I hadn’t taken anything off yet. So the officer says to me, “You better put your clothes on because we’re going to go for a little ride downtown.”
I said, “I don’t want to go for a little ride. I have another show at midnight.”
TIM CONNELLY: After the attempted drum lesson, we just sat there talking. And Helen told me all about herself, how she grew up in California and started doing porno movies up in San Francisco. I think she told me the first movie she did was Teenage Peanut Butter Freaks.
Then she started making porno movies and stripping in New York and became friends with Marc Stevens. That intimidated me a little bit because he was known as Mr. Ten-and-a-Half.
I was like, “Oh, fuck! I got no shot here!”
I didn’t even want to pull my pants down around her. For a moment I thought, “What am I getting into? I’m throwing myself up against all these guys that have giant cocks!”
Then I thought, “Well, just ride it out. Let’s see what happens.”
SHARON MITCHELL: The cops followed me upstairs and kept trying to put an officer in the room to look at me while I changed. They hadn’t seen me naked so they didn’t know what sex I was. They couldn’t tell, so finally they told me I was under arrest. They busted me on obscenity—even though they knew I hadn’t taken off my clothes. They just fucked up.
I said, “Aha! So, you don’t know, do you?”
Now, I have the gift of being able to piss standing up if I want. So I said, “You’ll have to guess.”
They said, “You’ll have to take a piss sometime.”
I said, “Yeah, you’re right. I probably will.”
TIM CONNELLY: Helen and I talked until about four in the morning, and then we had sex for like four or five hours. I had a nine-to-five job at the time, but I bailed on that.
And I thought, “What am I doing?” This is the road to ruin, you know? The sleigh ride to hell—and it was great!
Around noon, Helen wanted to go back to her apartment on the Upper East Side, which had a couch and a mattress and a bunch of really cool records. And G-strings hanging all over the place because her roommate was Nikki Knights, who was also a stripper.
I was like, “This is fucking great, man!”
ERIC EDWARDS: Then I found out Arcadia’s problem: heroin. I said, “Well, let’s fix this. I’ll help you.”
SHARON MITCHELL: So they put me in the tank with all the transsexuals, and I learned a very valuable trick that evening. I learned how to make blue eye shadow out of matches. So all was not lost in the Tombs that night.
ERIC EDWARDS: I could have fallen in love with Veronica Hart—who was just coming on the scene—but I was in love with Arcadia when I met Veronica. I’m a monogamist, and I had said to Arcadia, “You and I can fix this heroin problem.”
So I played doctor for a year. I was decreasing her dosage little by little and taking her on vacations and stuff like that. I was totally in love with her.
FRED LINCOLN: I wrote around eight skits for the performances at Show World, and then after the show, we would invite people up to get beat. And I’m tellin’ you it was so good. I played Pink Floyd music. I had lighting cues. I had strobe lights. I had a bouncer—a huge black guy who was six-foot-six. His girlfriend was a little, teeny thing—five foot.
He would tie her up to this pole and take this bullwhip and whip her with it. You’d hear, “WHHHHAAACK!” The Pink Floyd is going, “Bbummmmbadummmmbadummm!” And the strobe lights are going, and you see this big, black, oiled guy and this little girl go, “Aaaaaaaahhhhh!”
You’d hear the whip cracking and see her getting whipped, but she had a leather vest on, and it would hit the vest. It never hurt her—but nobody knew that.
Fucking people went crazy. Variety reviewed it and said that if all pornography were like this, it would be reason enough to legalize it. Of course the cops came the next week and busted us anyway.
SHARON MITCHELL: The cop asked me, “Which bathroom do you want?”
I said, “The men’s room.”
So I went in, stood up, and peed in the urinal. The cop was looking. When I came back from the bathroom, they checked off “male” on the booking sheet.
The lawyers were going crazy because everybody else wanted to sign off on some lesser plea for prostitution. I said, “No way! I didn’t do anything obscene, and I’m not a fucking prostitute! Why the fuck would I do that?”
Show World really liked that and provided me with some hotshot lawyer. God, it must have cost them thousands. We continued on with the case—and I won it.
TIM CONNELLY: Even after we started fucking, Helen still couldn’t play drums. So I told her, “Look, I really think you’re great—I want to hang out with you—but you can’t fucking play.”
Helen was fine with it—relieved, actually. So Krayola found another drummer, and I ended up moving in with Helen into that apartment—which was actually a duplex she shared with some of the girls from Krayola.
Helen and I lived downstairs. The band I had moved to New York with—the Boo Hoo Band—had broken up, and I’d played some gigs with Richard Hell and had gotten ripped off. So I was broke, with no gigs, and the rent due.
That’s when Helen said, “Look, if you want, I can get you into a movie.”
ERIC EDWARDS: I got Arcadia down to zero. In fact I’ve got a picture of her going “thumbs up!” Wonderful. Beautiful. I loved her then. That was great.
And then she met somebody else and got back into it.
FRED LINCOLN: I went out to San Francisco to do a movie, and while I was gone Ron Martin changed everything I’d done at Show World. He was so jealous of my success. He tied this one girl up and let this other girl beat the shit outta her onstage.
I said, “What the hell’s the matter with you? That’s not what we’re doing—hurting people. This isn’t what she signed on for! We’re puttin’ a show on. This girl is full of fucking welts, you idiot. What if she gets a lawyer?”
Ron said, “Oh, they loved it.”
TIM CONNELLY: At that time, the downstairs theater at Show World was like a really old fashioned burlesque theater. It was about a hundred seats and a stage with curtains that opened and closed and a dressing room behind it. And upstairs was the S and M show. That was more of a “T” stage with chairs around it. Eventually it was known as the “Triple Threat Theater.”
FRED LINCOLN: So Ron and I split up, and every week the police would come. Sometimes they would spot me in the back and say, “Hey! What do you do? You look like a producer to me!”
I said, “How the fuck do I look like a producer, you idiot? I look like a hipster!”
KELLY NICHOLS (PORN STAR): Fred Lincoln was great. He was always fun to work for, very enthusiastic and weird. He’d say, “Just go for it. Do something different.” He had this long, white hair. He was almost a psychic touchstone because he was older than all of us.
FRED LINCOLN: I was doing film, An Adult Fairy Tale, in San Francisco with Serena at the same time I was booking Show World, so when we finished the film I brought her back to New York with me.
JAMIE GILLIS: I met Serena in Los Angeles in about 1973—but she was living with a guy, so I let it go. About a year later she was independent, and she came to New York to dance at Show World.
FRED LINCOLN: So I was with Serena, and Jamie Gillis wanted her. We both liked her, although I had already done her in San Francisco. But it was pretty funny—the three of us went out one night, and Jamie wanted Serena so bad. You know, we were having some drinks, and we went here and there, and then we went to a hotel room. And when Serena went to take a leak, Jamie ran into the bathroom to be her toilet.
So I said, “Okay, Jamie. You win.”
I just left. That’s when Jamie and Serena became an item.
KELLY NICHOLS: Serena was a nude model with me in Los Angeles. I knew she was a dominatrix, and I knew she was gorgeous. I used to love to look at her because she looked like a drawing—like Jessica Rabbit. She would wear these short miniskirts and thigh-high wool stockings and these shoes—and she had these big, full lips. Just gorgeous.
I thought, “That’s what I wanna be when I grow up!”
SERENA: My ex-husband, John Gault, got me into porn. We were just a couple of kids living on the streets of Berkeley and hitchhiking around California. John helped me from the beginning. Neither one of us knew anything about the porn scene, but John kept people in line who would have taken advantage of me.
But he didn’t relate to me fucking other men. There was this really bad film called Love, Lust and Violence where I gave someone head. It was the first hard thing I’d ever done without John, and he was very pissed. I had to turn down lots of films because I would only work with John. And that caused a lot of tension between us. I probably never should have gotten him involved in the business at all. That’s why I was very glad to meet Jamie Gillis.
JAMIE GILLIS: I went to see the show—just to see Serena—and I went back to her hotel with her right after. We had sex, and I thought that was going to be it. But then we started hanging out, and I’d go to the shows. It was fun because she’d be working in these little hot pants, and I’d watch her, and she was just having a good tim
e being a really sexy young girl. That was a great moment in New York. She was so free.
FRED LINCOLN: So I hooked Jamie and Serena up, and they were together for years. And when they became an item, I put them in my live sex show at Show World. Oh, they were wonderful onstage! It would start with Serena dancing through the audience for tips, and then Jamie would catch her sitting in somebody’s lap, and he’d snap, “What are you doing?”
Serena would say “I…I…I was making extra money, baby—for us.”
Jamie would say, “Well, how much did you make?”
She’d say, “Two dollars!”
Then Jamie would just grab it from her.
JAMIE GILLIS: Serena and I would have sex onstage for the hell of it. We lived in the neighborhood, so it was just something to do. I was really having a lot of fun with it.
I like sex. The idea that there’s something weird, far-out, or freaky about that is strange. I think of myself the same way Marc Stevens’s mother described him—as “an actor with a specialty.”
SERENA: I come best, generally, when I’m onstage dancing. When I say “dancing” I mean working on and off at Show World doing their “Bizarre Burlesque.” But I don’t do a burlesque strip. The only instrument I play is my body, and I’m very good at it.
I’m first and foremost an exhibitionist—and if I ever make contact with someone, they’ve been fucked, and they know it. I see a lot of wet spots in their pants, those daddies out there. They feed my energy. So with all those people’s energies supporting me, their mouths hanging open, sitting on the edge of their chairs while I do my number, I explode. That’s my biggest come—like my fluids are gushing down my leg.