The Other Hollywood
Page 52
BILL AMERSON: The first movie John made when he got out of jail was for Hal Freeman in San Francisco. That’s where John met Laurie Rose. Laurie was known as Misty Dawn, the butt-fucking queen of the porno industry. That was her specialty—doing anal sex with a number of guys, one after the other.
She said to Bill Margold—who was on the set—“I really want to meet John. And I really want all that in my ass.”
Bill told John. John thought it was amusing, thinking that it wasn’t going to happen. But off camera it did happen. Laurie fell in love with him.
LAURIE HOLMES: I fell for him, and he fell for me. But he didn’t let on that he really felt for me, which made me want him more.
John gave me his phone number back here in Los Angeles. He was living at Bill Amerson’s house. I waited four or five days and then I called him. I went up to see him for a few minutes. I knew he liked young girls, so I, you know, dressed as the young girl.
BILL AMERSON: My first contact with Laurie was on my birthday. My wife had gone out of town to visit her relatives in Arizona. I was watching a boxing match, and there was a knock on the door. I opened the door and there was Laurie Rose—wrapped in a red ribbon.
I said, “John’s room is the second door down that hallway.”
Then John asked me if she could move in and be, like, his housekeeper and his maid, and I agreed.
LAURIE HOLMES: Everybody always concentrates on the mistakes John made and not the person himself. Yeah, he got into drugs. Yeah, maybe he stole a few things, got mixed up with the wrong people. But that was only a part of his life, a part of the person. John had a heart of gold. He was a great person. I mean, he was great to me. That’s all I know.
BILL AMERSON: John liked Laurie because she could be nasty. That was his word. He said she was willing to try anything.
LAURIE HOLMES: I think John had an addictive personality. When he got into drugs, immediately he was addicted. He was addicted to scotch, that’s for sure. I’m not sure if that was to wash down the drugs, or if he liked the taste, or whatever. Definitely addicted to sex, there’s no denying that.
BILL AMERSON: Laurie would sit in his bedroom for two hours while he was in the bathroom doing drugs. She didn’t like the fact that he used cocaine—she wanted him to just smoke pot—but I don’t believe that she got him off drugs.
LAURIE HOLMES: A lot of people who worked with John felt he was a mystery man—reclusive. I mean, could you blame him? He didn’t trust people very much. His thing was, “Friends will get you killed.” With me anyway, it was, “If they can get ahold of you, they can get to me.” That’s the one thing I admired about John: I knew without a shadow of any doubt that he would have taken a bullet for me at any time. As a woman, that made me feel good.
So, no, he did not trust people. Maybe he did ham it up a little bit when it came to the other male actors. He liked to be a prima donna—he was a prima donna—maybe it was his right to be one.
BILL AMERSON: All of John’s relationships were sexual. Even while Laurie was living with us he had a couple of mistresses—a producer and an actress.
LAURIE HOLMES: John had asked me to marry him back in the summer of 1983. We had gotten our own apartment. His whole plan was, “I’m getting older. I want to make a bunch of money and then I’m going to get out of the business, and we’ll go away.”
He had someplace picked out where we could get married and retire. But he would never tell me where it was, and I still don’t know.
Then—I guess it was 1984—he came home and said, “I’ve got something to tell you. My divorce was final today. I know you didn’t know I was married.”
I go, “No, I didn’t.”
He goes, “Well, that’s because there was no reason to bring it up. We’ve been estranged for years; and it’s just one of those things. We finally went through it, and it was no big deal.”
I said, “Oh, okay.”
BILL AMERSON: John and Laurie got married because John found out that he was HIV positive. You see, John and I initiated HIV testing for performers in the adult industry.
Prior to shooting Rocky X, everyone had to take an HIV test. And to show the performers that we were really serious, John and I took the HIV test together. And we both came back negative.
About four or five months later we took another one. We were going to do it every six months because we wanted to show the industry that we weren’t afraid of the tests and everything was okay.
LAURIE HOLMES: We lived in Encino for a long time. A typical yuck apartment, two bedrooms on Burbank Boulevard. Swimming pool, freeway behind us. Nothing special.
We watched a lot of movies. People think John Holmes was this big party animal—and I’m sure he was in his younger days—but he was just a homebody. We’d go to the mountains, parks, or movies, or whatever. He was a fine connoisseur of fine food or so he liked to portray himself. As long as he had his scotch and coffee it didn’t matter.
BILL AMERSON: My test came back negative; John’s test came back positive. I was with John at the doctor’s office when the doctor informed him that he was HIV positive and explained that he could live another fifteen, maybe twenty years if he changed his lifestyle. The doctor told him to stop smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. Start taking vitamins and watching his diet. John—being as reactive as he was—immediately doubled his drug usage. Started smoking five packs of cigarettes a day. Drank a quart of scotch a day and just didn’t give a shit about anything.
He knew he was going to die.
LAURIE HOLMES: John came back to the apartment in Encino, and he had that coldness about him, you know, that distance. He says, “I’m going to die.” And then he drove off. Bill Amerson told me, “John tested positive.”
Then he came back about half an hour later, and he was laughing about it. We took the rest of the day, went to the beach, and talked.
We didn’t have any sex after that. He was protecting me. But in his mind, to never have sex again was like the ultimate punishment. You know, why even bother breathing?
RON JEREMY: The next thing you know, Laurie married him.
BILL AMERSON: One afternoon I got a phone call from John, who was obviously stoned. Appeared to be out of his mind.
He said, “I think I got married.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He said, “Laurie and I are in Las Vegas; and I think I got married a little while ago, but I’m not sure.”
Well, John was up to taking fifty ten-milligram Valiums a day. Which should kill some people, but it didn’t kill him. His cocaine elevated him so much that he needed that much Valium to come down.
It turns out they did, in fact, get married. Laurie had the idea that it was all a romantic thing. Laurie believed that John loved her. He may have told her that, but I never heard him.
TIM CONNELLY: When John came down with AIDS, everybody started thinking, How did he get it? Where did he get it? And we all knew he’d just gone to Europe, on this trip to go fuck all over Rome and Germany.
RON JEREMY: I had heard that John went to Italy knowing he had the virus. He couldn’t really get a job in America; he did a gay movie here. He supposedly got the virus when he was in jail; his male lover supposedly died of it. So he went to Europe to work with Cicciolina—the Italian porn star who got elected to the Italian parliament.
I knew he fucked Cicciolina because she told me about it when I was in Italy years later. And that’s kind of mean; that he knew he had it, and he went to work anyway.
CICCIOLINA: I had never met John Holmes; I didn’t even know who he was. There was a production company, I don’t remember the name, that had offices in Rome and in the United States, and they contacted me about a movie project involving some American talents. I agreed, and the day before production started they told me that I had to do this scene with this famous American actor that was hung like a horse.
TIM CONNELLY: The immediate suspicion was that John got HIV in Europe. But people who knew him a little bett
er, who knew the history of him in the movies, knew he’d fucked this guy Joe Yale in the ass in a movie, and this guy was one of the first guys in gay porn to come down with AIDS and die. So he probably gave John the disease.
I immediately thought about intravenous drugs, transsexual hookers, you know. I mean, John Holmes was so out of his mind on drugs, and he fucked transsexual hookers. I mean, John was completely irresponsible in all areas of his life.
But I never really knew John to shoot drugs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody said that John would never touch a needle. I don’t know, but I never saw needle marks, and he never went out of his way to hide his arms, you know what I mean?
RON JEREMY: I asked a friend of John’s whether he’d known about the disease before going to Europe, and he said he did. So I said, “Why didn’t you stop him from going?”
He said, “I couldn’t.”
I said, “Why didn’t you call Italy and warn them what’s coming across the ocean?”
CICCIOLINA: The first impression I had was that he was a very sad man, very kind. Very skinny and tall. He looked very sick, but I thought he had a flu or something. I mean, I had no idea what kind of disease he had. He was really, really skinny, but I didn’t think he was seriously ill.
LAURIE HOLMES: After John was diagnosed, he really wasn’t working on films or doing anything. Then he was offered this film in Europe, and he talked to me about it. It was a lot of money—money we could really use. Most of the actresses he was going to be working with were being flown out from here. The theory was that he had gotten AIDS from inside the business. He just figured, if they don’t get it from me or they don’t already have it, they’re going to end up with it anyway—ignorance on AIDS was even within the business at that time. So he decided to do it.
We needed the money; he needed the money.
CICCIOLINA: My role in the movie was very brief; I only had to be on the set for about a day and a half. I just had to do a sex scene with him, but the fact that he wasn’t feeling good caused a delay because he had serious problems getting an erection. When he finally got one, he could only stay hard for a short time, so we had to shoot the whole scene in just five minutes, and then edit it so that it looked longer.
TIM CONNELLY: The progression: Joe Yale, who fucked Holmes, gets AIDS. Then Lisa de Leeuw disappears, and we hear she has AIDS. Then John Holmes gets HIV, then AIDS. Then Lori Levine comes down with HIV and AIDS.
I mean, I don’t know who gave what to who, but you have to wonder.
LAURIE HOLMES: We had started the John Holmes Relief Fund. Caballero, the movie company, gave me a thousand dollars; a few other people—Suze Randall, Annie Sprinkle, probably about ten people—gave money. Not many, though. John was very hurt. He felt like people had turned their backs on him. His whole attitude was, “God, I’ve made all these people all this money, and they won’t return my phone calls.”
TIM CONNELLY: I don’t think it was indiscriminate sexual behavior among people in the adult film industry that gave John Holmes AIDS. I think it was irresponsible, drug-related behavior, addictive behavior patterns, and the way that carefree goes to careless. You get strung out on something, and then when you’re on a bender for three days doing crack cocaine, the only thing that might get your dick hard is a couple of transsexual hookers and some heroin, you know?
No condom? Fine.
TOM LANGE (LAPD DETECTIVE): We knew Holmes was dying. The only reason we went to see him was that we felt it would be irresponsible if we didn’t because he still had information that could have shed light on what happened with these murders, and you’re not going to find out unless you go ask. Holmes had always played a game with us. He played a game his whole life, I think.
LAURIE HOLMES: I’d been tipped off that the cops were on the way. I cut out of work and got to the hospital fast. You never knew what state of mind John was going to be in; some days he was all there, and some days he thought Ronald Reagan was outside with a bomb.
I didn’t want them to trick John into saying anything. John could have spun a whole tale on something that would have come down on someone else that wasn’t true. I told him the cops were on the way, and I said, “Don’t say anything. Just act like you’re out of it, and I’ll cover for you.”
TOM LANGE: It was, quite frankly, a waste of time, but as responsible law enforcement officers following up on a very brutal quadruple murder, we had to at least try to see if on his deathbed he’d give us some information.
Of course he didn’t. It was all nonsense.
LAURIE HOLMES: John moaned and groaned the whole time. About ten minutes later, Detective Lange turned to me and said, “What about you? Do you know anything?”
I said, “I don’t know anything.” I could just see John looking at me with that shakes-head-no look. I didn’t know anything, and they would twist anything he would say, anyway. He was worried for me at that point.
TOM LANGE: We had to wheel Holmes out beneath a staircase. He was in quite a bit of agony. He wanted a cigarette, and he couldn’t smoke in his room. So we got him a cigarette. He said, “You know, I always respected you guys, and I played a cop, and the LAPD is the greatest law enforcement outfit in the world.” And on and on. It was a big stroke job.
He knew why we were there, and he wasn’t about to answer any direct questions.
LAURIE HOLMES: They left disgusted. Oh, well.
CICCIOLINA: This was the time when I started my relationship with Jeff Koons, the famous American artist. He’s like Andy Warhol; he makes art, like painting or sculptures, and he’s very talented. He was courting me, and he knew I did this scene with John Holmes. So when John died, he called me from the States, and he asked me if I knew that John Holmes died of AIDS?
I said I didn’t; they told me that the cause of his death was colon cancer. But Jeff told me that he’d been informed by friends in the hospital that the real cause was AIDS. So he faxed me the report from the hospital, and it really did read: Cause of Death—Related to HIV.
LAURIE HOLMES: John did get in touch with his brothers and sisters during his life but just toward the end. He sent his dog—our dog, Charlie—to his sister. His mother was trying to get him and his half brother, David, to make amends. John’s mom had made a mistake and tried to rectify it later on. They were good people.
CICCIOLINA: I got really scared, but I went to take a test, and I was okay. Later that year Jeff and I got married in Budapest, and we went for our honeymoon in Germany, where we conceived our baby, Ludwig. Well, throughout our relationship, which lasted a couple of years, we both took tests every three or four months, and everything was fine. So I guess I’m fine.
LAURIE HOLMES: John didn’t want a funeral. He was adamant about it. The funeral he did have wasn’t really a funeral. He was cremated. I viewed his body before they put him in the oven. I put a picture of Jesus on his heart and watched them wheel him in.
I asked them, “Why is he green?”
They said, “That’s the decay.”
When we got his ashes, his mother and his half brother and I went around the islands on a boat out of Oxnard called the China Clipper, and I slept with John’s ashes that night. I didn’t want anybody to steal them. His brother David had drilled holes in the urn and put tape over them; around 4:30 or 5:00 that morning—before it got light—we all got up, peeled the tape off and tossed it over. We didn’t say anything; our thoughts were inside us.
But you know, there was no funeral. I wasn’t aware that a memorial service was going to be held until I heard it on the news, after the fact, you know?
Nobody invited his widow.
Jail
BALTIMORE/LOS ANGELES
1988–1989
TIM CONNELLY: I was making a movie in Sam Kinison’s old house in the Hollywood Hills; Ron Jeremy was directing it. We’d been fucking all day and doing lines with Sam—off a mirror that had John Belushi’s face on it—when we heard that the Hal Freeman conviction was overturned on appeal.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, AUGUST 25, 1988: SUPREME COURT EXONERATES FILMMAKER OF PANDERING: “Pornographic filmmakers cannot be convicted of pandering for paying actors who engage in sex acts in movies, the California Supreme Court ruled today.
“Sexual acts in filmmaking are protected free speech rights, the court unanimously held in overturning the conviction of Hollywood filmmaker Harold Freeman on five counts of pandering in the film Caught From Behind II.”
BUD LEE: When Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles were defeated in their attempts to prosecute Hal Freeman on the grounds of pandering, that’s what enabled us to move down from San Francisco. Because then, to make movies, all we had to do was buy insurance and get our insurance certificate to the permit office. Now we were the same as everybody else.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, DECEMBER 24, 1988: REJECTED LEGAL ASSAULT ON SEX FILMS APPEALED: “The district attorney’s office is trying to revive a novel legal assault on pornography—rejected by the California Supreme Court in a case involving Hollywood sex filmmaker Harold Freeman—by appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
JOHN WATERS: I knew that Traci Lords was the top porno star at the time. I had never seen her in a movie, but I knew about her, and I knew about the scandal. That had just happened.
At the time I was casting Cry-Baby. It was my first Hollywood movie; I was with Universal, and it was actually the only time I had much power there—because Hairspray was perceived as a big hit. I had accidentally made a family movie.