The Other Hollywood

by Legs McNeil

She said, “I just want to because it’s so fascinating.” She said it like his dick was this disembodied thing.

  JIM SOUTH: I got Traci a lot of work. The first or second shoot she did was for a guy named Lance Kincaid. And according to Lance—who only shot single-girl or simulation, where you’re just touching—Traci ended up getting on top of someone and having sex, so he had to stop the shoot.

  TOM BYRON: The first time I had sex with Traci on-screen was during a still shoot, which turned into a hard-core scene because we were so hot for each other. It just kind of slipped in: “I’m sorry,” you know?

  GREG DARK: Then Traci jumped on this guy and started sucking his weenie for, like, the next three hours. Meanwhile her pussy’s getting sopping wet—we didn’t even have to spray water on it for realism. It was all I could do not to dive in between her legs and do her. It was rough. I got a headache from the whole thing.

  HUMPHRY KNIPE: Did Traci enjoy sex? Undoubtedly. Not just having sex on-screen because there’s a certain amount of fakery that goes with that, but offscreen—you know, assistants, realtors, just about everybody.

  One of our assistants told me what a great fuck she was. He said she had an amazing muscle. I was too embarrassed to ask, ha, ha, ha, “Ah, what exactly do mean?” I just thought, “Uh-huh.”

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): All my boyfriend has to do is stick it in—if I haven’t had it in a while, I’m already getting off. Ten seconds, two strokes. I like to come about three or four times. The first time is okay; the second is something. The third and the fourth are just like, “EEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!”

  GREG DARK: Here’s Traci sucking wildly on this guy’s dick—with her pussy dripping—and the other girl there is going, “How can she do that? It’s completely gross and look—look! She’s turned on!” She thought it was the sleaziest thing she’d ever seen.

  CHRISTY CANYON (PORN STAR): Traci Lords knew more about sex than the whole porn industry put together.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): I like to see the dick in my face when it’s coming. On the face first. Oh, yeah, I like the way it pulsates before it comes. I like the big dicks.

  CHRISTY CANYON: I didn’t have a car at the time—or it was broken, or something like that—so I was waiting for a girlfriend to pick me up at this bus stop in Hollywood when this guy pulls up in a brand-new, white Trans Am. He gets out and says, “God, you’re so pretty; you’ve got such a great body. How would you like to make a lot of money?”

  I said, “I don’t even know your name!”

  He said, “I’m Greg Rome,” like I should know who he is. He gave me a card from World Modeling, with Jim South’s name on it. And he goes on to say, “It’s figure modeling. There’s some nudity, but nothing else. No sex or that kind of thing.”

  So I took the card and threw it somewhere in my apartment, thinking, “I’ll never call.” But I never threw the card out because I was working three different menial jobs just to get by.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): I will not be with girls that are underdeveloped. That’s one of my strong rules. I like boobs and asses and nice figures. I don’t like fat at all. I like long hair. And I favor blonds.

  Why the boobs? I like the way they feel. I like to play with them.

  RON JEREMY: Traci had the most nicest, natural tits of anybody I’ve ever seen—other than Christy Canyon. Traci’s would slope straight out. Silicone can’t do this. And then there were the nipples—big, thick, red nipples. I mean, aureolas—oh my God!

  CHRISTY CANYON: One day I was down to five dollars in the bank. My rent, car insurance—everything was overdue—and my phone was going to be turned off. So I found the card and called the number. I worked for nine months straight after that.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): I like Ronnie Jeremy. He can fuck good. And Tommy Byron’s pretty good.

  TOM BYRON: Traci lived in Redondo Beach, and she didn’t have a car—which, you know, was because she wasn’t old enough to fucking drive a car, I guess. I don’t know.

  I would pick her up, and she would stay at my apartment in Sherman Oaks because she was booked all the time. She worked all the time.

  HUMPHRY KNIPE: Traci was Suze’s good model. Suze shot twenty shoots with her, and we did about three cool movies with her.

  Traci was a fun kid. She was full of life and loved attention—she loved showing off sexually and being a firecracker. You can see that in a lot of her films. She had a pretty vivid sexual life. She used to talk about things she did, the usual sort of sexual shenanigans—aircraft, sex in funny places.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): Who gives the best head? In my experience, I would say, probably men. Do I get off on giving head? Yeah, but it depends on my mood. Sometimes I’m exceptional—but sometimes there’s times I don’t want to do it—and it shows.

  CHRISTY CANYON: Then one day I arrived at work, and there were video cameras everywhere. I called Jim South to find out what the hell was going on. He said, “Darlin’, I told you it was a video shoot….”

  There was no way I would have ever done it had I known. But he pressured me, and I thought to myself, “Five hundred dollars! Gosh, I can pay this off and that off….”

  I hated it! Everything on the set was dirty. And afterwards I felt real dirty. The scene was with Ron Jeremy. Yuck! It was really tough. I had just turned eighteen, and I had only been with a few guys in my personal life.

  HUMPHRY KNIPE: I directed two movies with Traci. One was called Lovebites, and the other was a piece of rubbish called Miss Passion—which was a cheap video, but she did a scene with Ginger Lynn. Traci did her best work with Greg Dark. Traci did a lot of stuff—I don’t know how many hundreds of feet of film.

  GINGER LYNN: Back then it was such a small industry that we were all pretty tight—everybody hung out with everybody. But Traci was never in the group. She would go off with a person one-on-one, but she never fit into “the gang.”

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): I don’t have a problem with any of the other girls. I like a lot of them a lot. I don’t have any jealousies at all. I receive vibes—bad ones—from them. I get twinges of jealousy from other girls because, you know, they’re like, “Why should Traci make so much money?”

  CHRISTY CANYON: After the shoot I called Jim South and told him that it had been the worst experience of my entire life. Jim said, real calmly, “You know, darlin’, you’re already booked to do a scene tomorrow. After that, if you don’t like it, I won’t get you any more work.”

  I thought, “Okay, I’ll do one more, and that’s it.”

  I got there, and it was like 180 degrees different. It was for Paradise Visuals, and the producer was a guy that I ended up having a relationship with. All the really good people were there—Traci, Ginger, Peter North, Tom Byron. I really found myself getting into it.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): I like boy/girl a lot better than I like girl/girl. I like girls a lot—but there’s very few in the business that I wanna be with. I like Ricki Blake. And I like Ginger Lynn. That’s about it on girls.

  GINGER LYNN: I worked with Traci in five or six scenes, and the scenes were wonderful because my dislike for her was so extreme that on camera it came across as chemistry.

  TOM BYRON: I’d walk into a restaurant with Traci feeling like the king of the world. Everyone would be looking at her like, “What the fuck is she doing with that dork?”

  It made me feel good, but I think I was more in love with the idea of being in love with her. I mean, we hung out, we did drugs, we fucked, and I said, “I love you, Krissy.”

  She said, “I love you, too, Tommy,” but I don’t know if you’d really call it love. But at that time, I definitely thought it was.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): How many men have I slept with? I’d say about five hundred. Women? About two hundred. Had I gotten together with women prior to going into the business? Yeah. Have I ever been in love with a woman? No.

  GINGER LYNN: You know how you can look at some people and kind
of see through them? Traci had this look in her eyes—or rather a void—that scared me.

  CHRISTY CANYON: Traci and Ginger hated each other.

  TOM BYRON: There was something about Traci that was very distant. She would start talking and cut herself off in the middle of a sentence because obviously she had a lot of things that she couldn’t talk about.

  GINGER LYNN: Traci made me nervous. She could be extremely cruel. I didn’t find her attractive. I instinctually had a bad feeling about her.

  HUMPHRY KNIPE: Traci wasn’t any less forthcoming than anybody else. It was all irrelevant. She came from somewhere, you know? She didn’t discuss her past. We just did movies with her.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): There’s a part of me—the “Traci Lords” part—that’s rude, spoiled, and bitchy. But I have to protect myself. Like if I say, at 3:30 in the morning, “I’m leaving after this scene, whether you like it or not,” everyone may think, “What a bitch!” But they’d like to do the same thing—only they can’t get away with it.

  There are maybe two girls in the past three or four years who get what I get paid: Ginger Lynn and Raven. No one else.

  GINGER LYNN: On The Grafenburg Spot we had a motor home that would take us from location to location, and Traci fucked the entire crew in between filming. And I never once—and back in those days I did drugs—saw her do a drug. I never saw her do anything that she was forced into doing. She seemed to enjoy herself.

  TOM BYRON: I mean, we did drugs together, but she was always on the set on time, you know? She was very professional and always knew her lines. As a matter of fact, on that movie What Gets Me Hot she had to read a page-long monologue, and she did it in one take, okay? I can’t see how anybody that’s whacked out on drugs is gonna be able to do that. She was a consummate professional, which is why she was paid as well as she was and worked as often as she did.

  I mean, she had to ask for days off because everybody wanted her. She could have worked every single day.

  RUBY GOTTESMAN: Traci Lords—a strange thing. I got to meet her, and I took her to Texas, and we became good friends. She came to see me all the time.

  Matter of fact, one day I was takin’ lunch—and Traci comes over to the office, and someone on the intercom says, “Your wife is waitin,’” and Traci gets all undressed—like naked. Just kiddin’ around, that’s the way Traci was.

  Traci was on drugs, but she knew what she was doing. Absolutely.

  RON JEREMY: Traci was getting a thousand dollars a day before anybody else. And then she went to a few thousand a day.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): Christy Canyon raised her rate to a thousand dollars a day, and no one used her so she had to go back down to seven-fifty. But I’m way beyond that now. I make a thousand for a video, and fifteen hundred for film. How far do I want to go? I want to keep on going until I drop to number two—and then I quit.

  HUMPHRY KNIPE: Traci would’ve been very happy to be a movie star, but to be an actress you have to have the voice. Without it, you’re dead. Traci’s got the nasty, bratty look down cold. But not the voice.

  CHRISTY CANYON: People would always say to me, “You’re right up there with Ginger and Traci,” like it was supposed to be a big thing. But I didn’t think of it like that. I just thought, “I’m having a good time. It’s fun, and I’m making the same money as them.” I guess I was young and naive.

  TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985): What am I doing with the money? Investing. I’m buying a condo in Palos Verdes. I already own a house in Redondo Beach. And I have a Corvette and a Trans Am.

  What’s the wildest thing I’ve ever done sexually? I’d say fuck my boyfriend on the hood of my Corvette—at night, in public—on the Pacific Coast Highway, overlooking all of L.A.

  It was offscreen, and it was my boyfriend. He was a really good lay.

  TOM BYRON: She was living in Redondo Beach with a guy named Tommy—this surfer dude, this little, pretty boy. When Traci and I were on the set of Sister Dearest—you know, one of those incest things—it was real late at night, and we were just kind of like commiserating, when all of a sudden she goes, “Tommy’s spending all my money. He treats me like shit; he just dented my car. I gotta get away from this guy.”

  I said, “Well, what’s the problem? Come stay with me.”

  She says, “I can’t.”

  I go, “What do you mean you can’t? I’ll pick you up. I’m not scared of this guy. I’ll wipe the floor with him. You come stay with me.”

  She goes, “I can’t. He knows too much about me. He’s holding something over my head.”

  I was just like, “Well, whatever. You got my number. You know where I live. You got a place if you need it.”

  Part 9:

  THE PARTY’S OVER

  1984–1987

  The Porn Marriage

  NEW YORK CITY/LOS ANGELES

  1984

  TOM BYRON: Teddy Snyder was a guy I worked for doing loops. He owned a company called VCX—had a partner named Bobby Genova. He was always a nice enough guy to me.

  FRED LINCOLN: Christ, I couldn’t tell you how many films I did for Teddy Snyder. When I was working for him, Ted would shoot, and Bobby Genova was his tote guy. Teddy and I were best buddies.

  TOM BYRON: The very first time I worked with Traci Lords on film was for Teddy Snyder. It was called Tracie Lords—before, you know, the “official” spelling. It was a collection of loops.

  Did Teddy direct it? Direct. No. You know, Teddy paid for it, and he was on the set. But Jason Russell filmed the thing—he was the cinematographer with his little sixteen-millimeter camera. Ted was just there.

  SHARON MITCHELL: Very few of the connected guys were chick-fuckers. Usually they’d only get a porn girl to come out if it was a setup for information—a business thing, you know? “Let’s put pussy in front of him, and we’ll get what we want. After all these girls work for us.” And any favor that was asked of us was complied with instantly.

  I was asked to do a favor once or twice.

  TIM CONNELLY: Teddy Snyder was about six foot two, wore cowboy hats and cowboy boots and a lot of gold. Weighed about 225. Big guy with a big gut—but hard fat, you know, not sloppy fat. Looked like he could kill you with a snap of his wrist. And he was like a cocaine cowboy. Pouring sweat all the time. Real tough guy. And he liked to fuck the girls.

  SHARON MITCHELL: One night Teddy Snyder knocked on my bedroom window, asked me to come down the fire escape, get into a car, and make a movie in the middle of the night as entertainment for certain people. I went, “Sure.” I knew who these people were. I was getting paid. As far as I was concerned, it was just a movie.

  FRED LINCOLN: When I first came out to Los Angeles, I wasn’t getting any work, so Teddy gave me a contract to do a music video for Ginger Lynn. He paid me five hundred bucks and gave me a Porsche. And they never asked me to do a thing—except to plan this video.

  ERIC EDWARDS: Teddy was the first guy I worked for. He was cool back then: My only complaint was—when he wanted a girl to do an anal, for example, he would say, “Hey, I’ll give you another ten dollars.”

  Teddy had all this gold dripping off his neck; he bragged about crashing his airplane and then buying a new one. So I would go up to him and say, “Ted, come on, give her some more money, for Pete’s sake!”

  FRED LINCOLN: Teddy Snyder and Bobby Genova spent, like, a million dollars on Ginger’s music video. It was supposed to be a legitimate thing—like what Andrea True did—but it never even came close because they didn’t like the way Ginger sang. So they got somebody else, and they wanted her to sing while Ginger mouthed the words.

  I said, “Wait a minute, guys. Let’s say it’s a success? The real singer’s not gonna be quiet! She’s gonna say, ‘Hey! That’s me singing!’ And then we’re gonna look like fuckin’ idiots!” That’s when I backed out.

  TOM BYRON: Teddy got a kick outta me. I mean, a lot of those connected guys did. You know, “Ah, look at this fucking kid. He did a cum shot
, hit the fuckin’ wall, this fuckin’ guy. Look at the big, fuckin’ prick on this fuckin’ kid ova hea’.”

  That’s why I got to hang out at all their parties—I was nonthreatening. The girls who were there were for those guys. I didn’t move on any of the girls. I just sat there.

  I was just like, “Mr. Sabatoni, how you doin’? Oh, is that coke? Sure, I’ll do a line. Thanks.”

  And they’d bust my balls. I was kinda like fucking Spider from Goodfellas. “Spider, go get me the fuckin’ drink, Spider!” But I’d never tell them to go fuck themselves—so I never got shot in the foot.

  All that coke that we used to snort over at fucking Bobby’s—I heard it came from Henry Hill. Yeah, it was Goodfellas coke.

  BOBBY GENOVA: Henry Hill was a good friend of mine.

  TOM BYRON: I’m a big fan of the Godfather movies and all that other shit. I mean, I’m half-Italian, you know what I’m saying? I’m one of those guys. I admire that “code of honor” kind of thing. I mean, sometimes the line gets distorted or whatever, but when it comes to keeping a secret, I believe in that. I admire that. But Teddy, ahhh…

  FRED LINCOLN: Teddy Snyder and Bobby Genova were makin’ money. They had a plane. Were they fucking in the plane? No, Bobby just wanted to learn how to fly, ha, ha, ha. Bobby was a strange guy, still is.