by Ian Gittler
We were becoming friends—or had already become friends—before I was the one who pulled back. Aside from any stated intent on my part to try and brave intimacy (I was enjoying the first successfully, rewardingly monogamous relationship of my life), Jon’s willingness to be close—our closeness—made me uncomfortable. Change itself isn’t a decision, I was learning, but a process: I was still me; Jon was up for being friends. The porn stars open to forging relationships with me seemed willing in as un-qualified a way as I’d ever encountered—love and acceptance contingent upon nothing, except the same in return. That was the hard part. Initially I had entered their realm in search of an emotional freeze, a safe haven. They were stars, not people. Accepting them in their totality, with difficult pasts and complicated presents, and most of all, with a wealth of good love to give, was frightening. I wasn’t prepared for that.
There were easy ways out: a girlfriend not too keen on my continued involvement with porn stars, and the fact that the porn world—a world Jon was inextricably connected to—was something I’d decided I needed to distance myself from in order to get on with my life.
I wondered if that’s why Jon—or Debi—was so emotionally brave—if, because of what they did for a living, the threat of their being really loved and accepted for who they were was only a remote possibility. Any risk of truly getting what their hearts craved was slight at best. If nothing else, this line of reasoning was a way of letting myself off the hook. But it made me feel small.
NINA HARTLEY CALLS. The star says she’s framed the cover of U.S. News & World Report and hung it on her wall. It’s a close-up of her face. Actually it’s an extreme crop of a photograph I shot for this book in 1992, in which Nina’s body is fully, casually exposed. Nina says she loves the cover and that she’s staring at it as she speaks.
“The reason I’m calling,” Nina begins, “well, my girlfriend and I are always thinking of new ways to market ‘Nina Hartley’ We were wondering if there was some way you might license us that cover picture—you know, we’d pay a fee, of course. We think it would work great as a mouse pad.”
Grinning—no, smiling, broadly—I decline as politely as I can. I don’t know that it really matters, but I’ve never profited from this work as a pornographer and don’t want to start now. Nina accepts that cordially and wishes me good luck. Before she goes I ask her what John Stagliano thinks of his full-page portrait in U.S. News, since I have her on the phone and don’t plan on calling him myself. The caption next to his studly frame dubs Stagliano “The nation’s leading director of hard-core videos.”
“I don’t know, Ian,” Nina says. “I mean the last couple of times we’ve spoken, it hasn’t been about that. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but John is HIV positive.”
It’s like an afterthought, casual. Icy. She says everyone in the porn community knows and that all of Stagliano’s recent lovers have been traced, that so far they’re all fine. Hartley goes on to say that her organization has finally achieved one of its biggest goals: getting health and dental insurance for X-rated performers.
“C’mon, Nina,” I say. “How’s that really gonna help—except in degrees—if you’ve got AIDS? What if one of the busy actors was HIV positive, even for like two weeks, before anyone knew?”
NINA HARTLEY
She’s undeterred.
“At least our bodies aren’t being inundated with semen,” Hartley says. “Thank God for cum shots.”
I’M NOT SURE what I expect to hear or how exactly to handle it, but I dial his number, maybe half an hour later, and reach Stagliano at his home in Malibu. He sounds the same—totally present, casual, and somehow completely insulated all at once, and not surprised to hear from me. He confirms what Nina said, that he is HIV positive, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. He only bristles when asked to talk about it more, to give an interview.
“Why? This has nothing to do with the industry. This is my personal life. Listen, I have friends over. I have to get off the phone now.”
A COUPLE OF DAYS later I call Jon Dough to gear myself up for another conversation with Stagliano. Jon has to get rid of someone on the other line—“my buddy asking for girlfriend advice,” he says. Jon tells a story where he leaves Cheyenne in a bar in the middle of Topanga Canyon after watching a De La Hoya fight, all because she threatened to leave first.
“That’s not a good thing, y’know?” The story is Jon’s way of illustrating how ill-advised asking him for girlfriend advice is. But the actor is still with Cheyenne. They’ve been living together for a year. Jon says he hasn’t done a sex scene in almost four months, that he’s still mostly directing for Vivid.
Jon says his friend at A & M Records has been asking him for music video treatments, that two A & M bands, Monster Magnet and Orbit, came close to using him to direct their videos before “chickening out.”
Jon says that for a while there he fell off the wagon, “hard,” but that Steven Hirsch, more than anyone else, helped him get it together again, get clean. “He was fucking great. You’d be proud of me, Ian.”
Regarding Stagliano, Jon won’t go into detail about what he knows except to say “those new Magic Johnson drugs work great” and that Stagliano didn’t catch the virus from someone in the industry. Jon admits he wouldn’t want to be HIV positive.
IN THE MIDDLE of all this Andrea calls. April Rayne. I assumed long ago I’d heard the last from her. After telling her I wanted to interview her, I hadn’t tried very hard to make it happen, and eventually I gave up altogether. Andrea tells a story about an ex-boyfriend she sought out and found closure with as a way of saying she’s trying to handle things differently now, not push people away. I think she means that to apply to me, which makes me squirm. She says she’s been seeing a therapist twice a week and that sometimes she brings her son along, too. She never made that comeback video.
I tell Andrea I want to jump right in, do that interview. She says she’s ready. She doesn’t back off at all, so I proceed, stiffly, having cornered myself. Date of birth: August 21,1967. Place: Culver City, Los Angeles. Education: Beethoven Elementary, Mark Twain Junior High, Ventura High School.
“How old were you when you lost your virginity?” I ask.
She says at twelve she had her first boyfriend, a twenty-eight-year-old guy named Hector.
APRIL RAYNE
Andrea in 1991.
“He had the coolest Vespa,” Andrea giggles.
I ask again.
“I was raped when I was nine,” she says. “You have to understand: My dad always called me his favorite son, y’know, he said he wanted to teach me to be tough. So he would drop me off in places like Sawtell, y’know, bad neighborhoods, and let me find my own way home.”
Andrea tells the story like she’s fine about it, like it is what it is.
“I wandered into some courtyard, a building with gates, y’know, and three—I think three—black guys basically passed me around. I know there were two more, Mexicans, standing watch by the gates. Then I think I blacked out,” she says. “Anyway, I was more afraid of what my father would do to me when I got home. I had a broken nose and a bloody lip—I fought—so I knew he’d know something.”
Andrea says she’s not sure if anything happened before that, or if her father ever sexually abused her. She describes a second rape, at fourteen: A guy pinned her against a Dumpster behind the cheesecake factory where Andrea worked. This time she spiked the guy in his eye with one of her high-heeled shoes, then ran.
“That was an easy one for the cops ‘cause they knew who they were looking for—someone holding his eye,” Andrea says, laughing.
“What did your father do?”
“Oh, he died when I was twelve,” she says. “Thank God. You pretty much know what happened from there. At twenty-two I became ‘April Rayne.’”
Andrea says she has two brothers. One is a U.S. Navy Seal. The other, the younger one, writes and makes his living as a snowboarding instructor.
“He’s like my son, re
ally,” Andrea says. “You know, besides my real son. I love him so much.”
Six months ago Andrea’s mom joined the Peace Corps. She’s teaching English in Bangkok.
“Uh ... I just wanted to let you know,” I offer as a closer, “um, since I’m basically done with the book, you know, we won’t be speaking again, probably. You know, I mean I’ll probably be changing my number and everything.”
It takes a second before she gets it; the shittiness of it, of my timing, of my having to say it at all.
“Oh . . . ‘Andrea says.” . . . OK.”
She picks up the conversation again. I’m useless. She makes small talk and stewards our clumsy good-bye. Then right before she goes Andrea reverts to her “great news” tone of voice—the one she uses for dropping bombs—and says she’s just been certified to operate an escort service in Sacramento.
“Certified?” I say, thinking, Jesus, escort service?
“Yeah, you need a license,” she says. “An escort service. I’m doing it under a different name. I don’t need to know about anything illegal they do”—she chuckles—“just as long as I get my percentage. I have three girls so far. It’s hard to find good ones around here. I’m thinking about moving back to LA, ‘cause I’d make a lot more money down there.”
Andrea says there are certain clients—“my favorites”—that she’ll always keep for herself. Then she says she looks great, that she’s more voluptuous than she used to be. Andrea says she has a boyfriend, a fireman, and that another friend told her she looks like Police Woman—era Angie Dickinson.
“I thought that was a really high compliment,” Andrea says.
STAGLIANO
THE LAST THING I want to do is have this conversation with Stagliano. It’s intrusive, and probably insensitive too, but I finally get the guts up to call him—it’s almost a month already—when there’s nothing else left to write, when finishing this book depends on it.
“This is not depressing,” he says. “I don’t want any sympathy. The drugs I’m taking are fantastic.”
Stagliano says being HIV positive is completely different now than it was just a year and a half ago.
He says four or five months ago—before him—an actress named Nena Cherry tested positive. He says she worked with a few guys, but that they’re all negative.
“Thank God it’s such a difficult virus to spread. It’s so hard to spread, it’ll probably never really hit this industry.” Stagliano says Nena Cherry’s is an industry story, not his, then mentions it’s his personal life again.
For some reason, the words “how did you get it?” won’t come out. Instead, I remind him the personal lives of people in his industry is part of what this book is about.
Stagliano angrily blurts out the answer to the question I can’t ask.
“I got HIV from getting fucked in the ass in Brazil by a transsexual with a cut on his dick,” he says. “I make no secret about it. But I don’t want to talk about it any more than that.”
I nervously mumble something about wishing him good luck, but the discussion is over.
JON DOUGH, two days later. He says that what Stagliano told me is the truth, then adds that Stagliano is “doing great,” that he’s “not depressed at all,” that they were just on the phone. Jon seems up, himself.
“You can tell this is the sober Jon Dough, right?” he asks. “The Jon Dough that gets angry, and all that shit.” Then, “Man, you have to fly out to LA this weekend.”
Jon says that on Sunday he’s going to have sex with 101 girls, that that’s more girls than any guy has ever “done” in one movie.
“It’s gonna be fucking wild, Ian. I’m calling it Gang-Bang 101,” he says. “The number just sounded good. It’s like a prerequisite course, y’know? I don’t know how everyone found out, but it’s already on the radio out here. Howard Stern is gonna pick it up, too. Ian, this is gonna make me famous.”
Gang-Bang 101. My send-off. One last reminder—in the form of an over-the-top bit of inspired, goofball kink—that nothing—not love, not AIDS—will stand in the way of the impulse-fueled juggernaut that is porn. That’s obvious, and fine, I guess. Jon at the helm is the letdown. In a way, the grandness of his gesture, the scope of it, is the ultimate fuck you.
All I can think to say to him is that it sounds like he’s making up for lost time. Jon chuckles, ignoring my sarcasm, oblivious to my disappointment, and says the most difficult part is finding parking for 101 porn chicks.
I give in. It is funny. And I like Jon. He says he and his producers finally decided on a huge house up on Mulholland Drive. The guy who lives there owns LA’s Recycler paper. Jon says his girlfriend, Cheyenne, is “totally into it,” that she and another girl called Missy will wear strap-on dildos. “The Strap-On Girls—my henchmen. They’ll follow me around,” Jon says, “you know, to assist with DPs since I’m only one guy.”
John Stagliano in 1992.
I ask him how much time he can possibly spend with each actress.
“Max tape length is 220, ‘cause we won’t use extended play. Extended play sucks. So 220 minutes. Figure it out. You do the math. It’s not much.
“But I’m gonna employ—in one day—every girl working in the business. You know, who’s in LA. Jeanna Fine, Nina Hartley. They’ll all be there.
“Ian, did you ever see On the Waterfront?” Jon says. “Brando. All the guys hang out, try to get work that day. There’s the boss, the guy who comes out and tells them yes or no. Most of the time it’s no. But on that one particular day, he comes out and gives the good word. That’s what I’m gonna say at the beginning of the video—you know, use his line.”
Jon is laughing but he’s not kidding.
“’Everybody works today!’”
APRIL 1997
Jon Dough in 1997.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Francesca, Candace, and Richard DiLello
Bret Easton Ellis
Eric Schlosser
Shawn Dahl
Robert Love, Heather Schroder, Robert Asahina, Leila, Massimo, and Luca Vignelli, and everyone at Vignelli Associates, Richard Kelly, Donald McWeeney, Cary Frumess, Heidi Kelso, Anthony Wilson, Elizabeth Corwin, Dave Sokolin, Marie Hennechart, Chris Meyer, Robert Castro, Erin Fitzgerald, Michael Reichman, Dan Siegler, Dale Ellis, Dr. Claus Herz, Mike Sager, Dahlia Elsayed, Chris DiMaggio, Jesse Frohman, Baruch Rafic, Michael Daks, Andrew Nehra, Michael Nehra, Al Sutton, Andy Sutton, Gar Lillard, Sarah Ross, Scott Hagendorf, Patricia Katchur, Ethan Hill, Ana Debevoise, Dominick Anfuso, Catherine Hurst, Tamara Katepoo, Barbara Gittler, Stephen Lemberg
Black and white film processing by Gar Lillard at Lab One, Inc., New York Digital work by Nucleus Imaging, Inc., New York
Black and white photographic printing by Ian Gittler
Shortly before its release,
Jon Dough’s Gang-Bang 101 was retitled
The World’s Luckiest Man.
Table of Contents
Cover
Description
Back Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Dedication
September 1991
October 1991
July 1992
July 11, 1994
The Valley
Acknowledgments