by Legs McNeil
“‘Reuben feels that he’s been a victim in this,’ said Adam Bourgeois, Sturman’s Chicago-based attorney. ‘Money was taken from him, and when he asked for it to be returned, the guy wouldn’t give it back.’”
ROGER YOUNG: Oh, there’s no question that Sturman gave the money to Atkin to try to get it to Judge White.
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER, JUNE 22, 1995: COURT NAILS LAWYERS FOR PORN KING: “‘I think we’re finally at the end of the road,’ said Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig S. Morford, who has spent much of his eight years with the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting Sturman and his associates.”
REUBEN STURMAN: I was a businessman. I didn’t see pornography as good. I didn’t see it as bad. It was just a product to be sold. You want to know how the industry started? Well, you’re looking at the person who started it. No one was anywhere near me. In the world. I was the biggest in the world, and there will never be another.
BILL KELLY: Reuben Sturman is deceased as of October 27, 1997, in federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky. Edward Joseph Wedelstedt is Reuben’s successor on most of the businesses. He’s probably the number one guy in the country.
If he’s not, Kenny Guarino is. And if not Guarino, then it’s Harry Virgil Mohney, who owns that Deja Vu chain of strip clubs—who’s also a major pornographer. They’re probably the top three guys in the country.
REUBEN STURMAN: I had a wonderful life. If I die tomorrow I’m going to die with a smile on my lips.
Waiting for Wood
LOS ANGELES
1995
HENRI PACHARD: I had returned from my thirty-fifth high school reunion when I showed up in Las Vegas for the VSDA show. Someone says, “Henri, there’s a party goin’ on in suite such-and-such.”
So I went up to the party, and the place is packed with the porn industry. And this person yells out my name from all the way across this big hotel suite. “HENRI PACHARD, WHY DON’T YOU EVER CAST ME?”
It was Cal Jammer.
“You never call,” I said, cleverly, instead of the truth: “You have dick problems.” I didn’t want to embarrass him.
TIM CONNELLY: Cal Jammer was about five foot eight, had light to medium brown hair—which he bleached blond a lot—and looked like a rugged surfer type with an acne-scarred face, like Jan-Michael Vincent.
Cal photographed real well up close because he looked a little pock-marked and tinted and a little ravaged from the sun. But you could tell he wasn’t going to age well because of his features. But he had really beautiful blue eyes. Striking blue, sharp, with a gleam in them. And he had a decent body. He had that whole West Coast porn star look down.
But he was white trash, you know? I think he was from Valencia, California.
HENRI PACHARD: I’m known around the world as a very nice guy in the porno business; everybody likes Henri Pachard. So when Cal Jammer asked, “Henri, why don’t you like me?” the answer was, “Because you don’t wanna be liked, you asshole, or you wouldn’t act the way you act.”
How could he ask me such a humiliating question in front of a thousand other people? So he can hear, “Because you have a poor penis?”
TIM CONNELLY: When I met Cal, he was always comparing himself to other guys, and he’d try to make a point of stating what he thought his better performances were. Cal felt like he was always underestimated, and it seemed very obvious that he had no self-esteem.
HENRI PACHARD: I worked with Cal a couple times, and he was terrible. He had dick problems, and it was never his fault. When you’re shooting video, the guy doesn’t have a fluffer anymore—a person down there dedicated to sucking your dick to get you hard. You jock your dick up, and you stay there. I mean, like all the top-of-the-line guys, the pros, stay ready.
TIM CONNELLY: The problem with a guy like Cal Jammer was that when he gets into the business—because he’s a new guy—people want to use him. But if you have an average-size cock, that’s actually a small cock in the porn business. So eventually they always would rather hire the bigger cock. Doesn’t matter if the guy looks retarded or acts retarded. If he’s got the bigger cock, he’s gonna get the gig.
HENRI PACHARD: A lot of the actors that can’t get it up will get right up in your face and tell you how well they’ve double fucked some girl with some other guy, and it’s usually a DP—a double penetration—which is the hardest thing to do for most male performers.
There’s a little, thin piece of skin between a woman’s vagina and her anus, and it heats up. You have to be able to feel it. Now DPs, we shoot a lot of them. But how many people in the world have DPs in their personal lives? I mean, I’ve had a lot of sex, but I can’t raise my hand to this. I’ve never experienced a DP. I’ve never had the desire.
I don’t think most men are physically able to do the old DP. It doesn’t happen that much in the real world—it’s a freak show. You can’t get a good angle unless you get really close up—you know, stretch this, stretch that. If you can get ten good seconds of it, you’re doing well. It’s very sweaty and nasty, and it’s very difficult to shoot.
TIM CONNELLY: Cal fucked like an eighteen-year-old kid, you know? He just seemed like a lemming, you know, running to the sea. It seemed like he was jack-rabbiting every time he fucked. No finesse. Later on, he got okay; he became a good model for stills.
HENRI PACHARD: So these guys complain that they don’t get booked, but when it comes to DPs they do their own selling: “Let me tell you about the time me and this guy DP’d this girl!” And they’re not lying—they probably were great. They got their dick in that girl’s ass, and they were wonderful at it—because it felt so good to rub their dick against another guy’s dick, and they didn’t even know it.
I said, “I’m happy for you.” I tell them they could be out making gay movies.
He’d say, “I don’t do that.”
I’d say, “All right.”
I mean, this is an identity crisis they’re in. They want me to feel sorry for them and give them money for their failures because they cannot accept their sexuality, and they’re half my age. What am I gonna do, guide them? “Son, it’s time you just accepted your proclivities….”
That’s not my job.
TIM CONNELLY: Cal met Adrianna Moore—who is now Jill Kelly—at a strip club in San Bernardino called the Tropical Lay. She was a stripper who was doing porno movies and some girl/girl stuff—she started around 1993 or 1994, and she was very selective about the work she did.
I found Jill very attractive. She hadn’t had any of the surgery—the boob job, or the liposuction, or the nose job. Don’t get me wrong, she’s beautiful now. It’s just that back then she looked very natural and real. She had this sort of doe-eyed innocence about her.
JILL KELLY: I was fifteen the first time I danced naked. I was nervous, but they, of course, thought I was of age. Then I broke up with my then-boyfriend because I was making money. So he called them up and told them. My name was Angel then; they said, “Angel, can you bring in your ID?”
I’m like, “Yeah, sure.” Of course I never went back until years later when I was over eighteen—and they didn’t even recognize me.
I did live sex shows with Tiffany Million in San Francisco at the O’Farrell Theater. Then, a year later, she called and told me she was doing adult, and said she wanted me to be her date to the awards show, which I did. And when I watched the porn stars come in, they had a line of people waiting for them. They didn’t have to work and beg for dances every time. I thought, I could do that.
That’s the weekend I met my first husband. His name was Cal Jammer.
TIM CONNELLY: Cal and Jill hit it off and started working together. Cal was trying to promote her as this girl he was with, who was now going to do other guys. When I ran into him at the AVN Awards in 1995, Cal acted like Jill was just this chick he was trying to help out.
I had just broken up with Kimberly Carson—after ten years—and it was the first time I was sort of back out in the field. And there I was in Las Vegas, and Jill was
being a little flirtatious with me. And I thought, “Hey, I like her. She’s not your typical porn star.”
Cal was like, “Tim is the guy from Adam Film World, and he can really help you out.” I made a point of saying that I’d seen her in some films, and I was interested in her and, you know, “Is she in, or is she out?” I was kind of curious about Jill—and Cal was sort of throwing her at me.
JILL KELLY: Me and Tiffany were gambling at one of those bars in Vegas. Cal was across the way, and he smiled at me. Later on Tiffany and I were at the bar, and I met him. I didn’t even know he was an adult film star. It was like instant chemistry. It was kind of weird, you know? Cal was very sweet and kind of dorky, but you could tell he had a really good heart.
And of course he was going to help me get into the business, and you know, all that kind of good stuff.
HENRI PACHARD: I think there was an attraction that lasted about an hour with Jill and Cal. Cal was obsessed with her—but he’d gone through five other girls that he’d brought into the business. You know, “She only does scenes with me”—until eventually they would wise up and go work with everybody. Then Cal would find another girl.
He just ran outta girls.
TIM CONNELLY: When I started talking to Jill, I could feel there was a chemistry between us, at that moment—however fleeting or unimportant or unreal it was.
Then Cal started pulling me aside, saying, “Hey, you know, I don’t know how to deal with this. You’ve been married to porn stars. I’m with her now, and I’m trying to help her out, but I don’t know how I feel about her doing scenes with guys, and we’re kind of together, and we’re talking about getting married.”
HENRI PACHARD: Who knows what happened? Jill Kelly’s got a lot of money. What the fuck was she doing with this guy? She needed him like she needed a third tit.
JILL KELLY: Cal was a really supersweet guy, and later on I noticed that people took advantage of that fact. People would tease him, you know? Get real hard on him.
TIM CONNELLY: So I came up with some sort of therapy speech for Cal because I had just come out of therapy myself. He said, “Oh my God, you have no idea how much you’ve touched me. This is what I need to hear. Can I call you?”
I handed him my business card.
He said, “No, I have your office number. Can I call you at home?”
I asked, “For what?”
He said, “To talk about problems like this. You seem to know what to do. This is fucking my head up. I’m not getting any work, and I’m real jealous, and it’s causing all this strain. We fight all the time.”
JILL KELLY: Cal had a hard problem with, um, getting a hard-on. Of course, no one can stand that. It made it tough for him to get work, and it was tough on him emotionally—personally, you know? He was extremely insecure.
HUMPHRY KNIPE: I’ve seen a guy cry when he couldn’t get it up. It’s so humiliating. The whole set, everyone’s sitting there: “Oh fuck, I wanna go home. I wanna get paid.” The girl’s humiliated because she can’t get the guy up; she’s worn her lipstick tube to the bone trying to get him hard. And the more worried he gets, the worse it gets.
I mean, if you don’t have penetration and a cum shot, then you don’t have a movie. It’s a lot of pressure, and it can get pretty sordid.
Of course, this is before Viagra.
HENRI PACHARD: Cal liked feeling other guys’ dicks alongside his. What’s wrong with that? Is it such a bad thing that you feel you have to hide behind some stripper girlfriend who’s gonna dump you in a minute? Why would someone set themselves up to fall like that?
JILL KELLY: After a month, Cal and I got married—which was the first mistake. I was twenty-one.
We were together for, gosh, like three months when I finally decided, “Okay, I’m ready to do movies.” Because I’d been too chicken. Then Cal said, “I don’t want you to.”
Cal had always told me, “If you get into the business, you’ll become a big star and forget about me.” And I was so madly in love with him, I said, “That’s impossible.” Whatever. So I didn’t get into the business.
But then I found out that he was cheating on me, off camera. That was the deal breaker. Because it’s one thing when you’re doing it for work and another thing to actually have some intimate time with somebody else.
TIM CONNELLY: Cal is saying all of this, and I just looked at him and said, “Look, dude, you can’t have my home phone number. Call me at the office when you get back to town. I’ll give you the number of my fucking therapist. I can’t deal with these kinds of fucking problems.”
Cal said, “That’s what I needed to hear.”
At that moment I look back at Jill Kelly, and she seemed to be completely shut down. I think because she realized whatever was happening at that moment was a little more than she could deal with, emotionally.
Cal never did call me.
JILL KELLY: I was okay with Cal doing movies, but the one thing I wasn’t okay with was him lying to me. Because, you know, going out to dinner with somebody and holding their hand is more intimate than actually having sex with them. At least that’s what I used to think.
So Cal and I were separated for a couple of months. Then we got back together, and it became even worse. Cal would make all these promises not to cheat and would never deliver. And I was supposed to stop my life and wait for him. I finally got tired of it, and I left him again.
RON JEREMY: I don’t know why I can’t forecast these things. They always told me in school how to look for the warning signs. I never saw it in Cal Jammer, that this guy was this unhappy—and that hurt me because I was kind of close to him.
JILL KELLY: Throughout our whole marriage—even in the beginning—Cal used to fake like he was going to kill himself. One time he was laying in the hallway with a gun—which wasn’t even a gun; it was a pellet gun or a BB gun or something like that—and he was faking it. He pulled that stuff all the time.
TIM CONNELLY: People were like, “Wow, you were really harsh on Cal.”
I was like, “Hey, fuck him! This self-serving asshole is just trying to promote some chick he’s banging, and he’s throwing her at me, and then all of a sudden he’s jealous and insecure and defensive and worried and paranoid, and I throw out some low-level fucking therapy platitude at him, and suddenly he wants my home number and wants permission to call me twenty-four hours a day to talk about his ‘issues.’”
I just thought the only thing I could do with a guy like that is give him the number of my therapist. Because there’s no way I can fucking help him because he’s just pissing me off because he’s being a complete idiot.
He just seemed way too fucked up for me.
JILL KELLY: I’d been at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and I was driving through Laurel Canyon. Cal was on the phone, going on and on. I’m the kind of person who is strong on the phone, but as soon as I see the person, I melt. So I knew I didn’t want to see him. And he was like, “I’m coming over there right now.”
By this time I was home. So I said, “No, I’m leaving.”
Cal was like, “If you don’t see me, you’re going to find me dead on your doorstep.” Of course, I was like, “Yeah, you know, whatever.” Called my mom, and called my best friend, and they were like, “Don’t listen to him. He pulls shit like this all the time.”
HENRI PACHARD: I’m a lousy fuck on camera, and I’m a lousy fuck off camera. What’s the big deal? I’m not gonna kill myself over it!
But Cal wasn’t getting enough bookings to keep up with his lifestyle. And poverty is just nature’s way of telling a man he’s in the wrong line of work. I mean, if you’re broke all the time, it’s time to change jobs.
JILL KELLY: I had never been scared of Cal, but for some reason—I don’t know why—I was scared. And Buck Adams called me and said, “Get out of the house.”
And I’m like, “Why?”
Buck was like, “He’s coming there to kill you and kill himself.”
And I was just like, I totally
would never expect that. So I just acted like I wasn’t there—because I didn’t want to see Cal—because then I’d melt and say, “Whatever you want.”
And then I heard this big crash. I thought it was a broken window.
But it was a gunshot.
TIM CONNELLY: Apparently Cal had called her on the cell phone; there was a trail of people Cal called on his way to Jill’s. And when he got to her apartment, she wouldn’t answer the door. I heard he was screaming at the window for her—and then he shot himself.
JILL KELLY: I waited a few minutes. Then, finally, I said, “Fuck it. I’m going out there.” I locked my house up, walked down the steps, and there was Cal, lying in the gutter. It was sprinkling, and I’m just like, “Get up.” And I laughed because I totally thought he was just like…I’m like, “Give me a break,” you know?
Then, all of a sudden, you realize—when I first saw the blood, I thought it was from the magic store. And I saw part of his brain, and I thought it was, like, a chewed-up hot dog. But I went to nursing school, so I’m listening and looking for a pulse, and I felt nothing. I lifted up his sweater, thinking, “He can’t hold his breath that long.” Your mind just plays all these tricks on you.
RON JEREMY: Cal had always been insecure. But to go to his girlfriend’s house and threaten to kill her and then blow his own brains out—why couldn’t I have seen it?