by Gael Greene
“It is not free.” He was indignant. “I give you everything cheap, cheap, cheap,” he promised, pronouncing it chip, chip, chip. He would do mussels vinaigrette to start. “Mussels cost me ten cents a pound.” I wanted the house’s famous pasta primavera. “Vegetables, spaghetti—that costs nothing, and I give you kiwi tarts for dessert.” (The kiwi had just been discovered and was not yet a joke fruit.) We could save money, too, by bringing our own wine, he agreed. I was in so deep already with Jean-Louis (insisting, and believing, that not even a little hanky-panky could blur my critical faculties) that it was a cinch to convince myself that ten dollars per person was totally reasonable for mussels and noodles, and not perhaps the most unethical thing I’d done to date.
New York’s wine writer, Alex Bespaloff, agreed to take me to a Sommelier Society wine tasting to find drinkable wines within our budget, and, to my amazement, there he was, Jamie Gillis, with a goblet of red in his hand.
He’d come with a friend. He had been out of town doing a movie. He’d decided it was probably too late to return my call. Pretending not to notice his friend, I invited him to the party at Le Cirque. He wrote the address and time on yet another mangy scrap of paper. I didn’t really expect him to come.
It doesn’t matter who you are, major culture hero, boldface name, social scion, in New York, as anywhere else, people tend to stay glued to people they know at parties. But given the challenge to wander the party room at Le Cirque, trying to trade a hunk of trash for a treasure, strangers were instantly caught up in provocative dialogue. Someone who hated a Tiffany pottery platter for strawberries and cream was thrilled to trade it for paisley pajamas with someone who loved pottery and strawberries. One of my personal candidates for recycling brought his gift in a plain brown paper wrap. Convinced from the shape of the box and the swapper’s innuendos that it was a vibrator, an actress friend eagerly traded a burgundy cashmere scarf, then laughed on discovering she’d gained a curling iron.
I was surprised when Jamie walked in, wearing a gray velvet suit and that same plaid shirt unbuttoned at the collar. I admired the air of confidence he wrapped himself in. It was as if he had a wonderful secret.
“You didn’t bring your worst gift,” I said, sitting down beside him and making sure he had grated Parmesan for his pasta.
“I have two tickets to the burlesque to trade.” He patted his pocket.
“I didn’t realized burlesque still existed,” I said.
“Oh yes. For an extra five dollars, one of the girls will sit on your lap.”
“Maybe you’ll take me one day,” I said.
He smiled.
Liz Smith’s beribboned toilet-bowl cleaner was voted the worst gift, and she won the prize, a ride home in a horse-drawn carriage we had hired that was parked outside. Everyone danced. It was like the prom I should have had. Instead of the bored boyfriend I had borrowed from an older friend so I could go to my high school prom, I now had a succession of partners.
As the room began to clear, I took stock of my options, my dancing partners, the seductive whispers. It seemed that I had a choice of three men to go home with: The dauphin of a wealthy upper-crust family, who was between wives. The unabashedly promiscuous Jean-Louis. Or the porn actor I’d met at the book fair. I thought about my mother. Yes, I did. I thought how Saralee would love the rich man’s son, smart, talented, dashing, a suitable age.
But Mom knew me better than that.
Jean-Louis was waiting. “It was a dream party. Thank you, and please thank Sirio, too,” I told him. “I’ll see you soon.” His mouth dropped open in surprise. The charming scion, waiting for me near the door with his coat over his shoulders, seemed dazed, as if too drunk to rise in protest as I kissed him good-bye.
Jamie Gillis took in the small drama and seemed bemused. I took him home and had my way with him on the living room floor. He let me have his lips. He let me force his lips open with my tongue. He let me loosen his belt and unbutton his shirt. He was there. He’d gotten himself in the mood, as advertised. He was the most passive man I’d ever met. The total opposite of his cinema persona. How odd. What a challenge. Quickly, I was hooked.
35
THE PRINCE OF PORN AND THE JUNK-FOOD QUEEN
I WAS FASCINATED BY HIS STORY. I WANTED TO KNOW WHAT HAD LED JAMIE Gillis, née Jamey Gurman, from a cum laude degree in English at Columbia University and then acting school to reciting Shakespeare while performing live sex at the Show World Center on Eighth Avenue. His father got the name Jamie from Tyrone Power’s pirate in The Black Swan and that’s how he spelled it, but his mother—the two were separated—insisted on Jamey.
“When I check into a hotel, I never know which name to use,” he confided. “I feel responsible more and more for Jamie Gillis, since I created him. I had no control over Jamey Gurman. I used to think I was a prince left by mistake. This couldn’t possibly be my family.” I watched him play Jamie Gillis out in public with me, turning on the self-conscious strut, the velvet confidence of his voice. Inside, I believed he still felt like Jamey Gurman, myopic, unathletic, failing at high school, no one to take to the prom. We were both Cinderella. Immediately, he became that deprived child, Jamey, to me.
Jamey was hungry. His hunger made my hunger seem quite tame. He was fascinated with tasting. He seemed to get an almost sexual thrill—his nose would twitch like a cat’s—from a new taste he had never experienced before. His dream, he told me in all seriousness, was one day to invent a fruit.
Does that sound goofy? I thought it was sweet and saw my role in this drama. I would be the cherished facilitator, setting untold delights on his plate, finding my joy in his joy. And he would open an underground world of sexual secrets to me. Granted, he was a porn actor. But here I was, at the peak of my own sexual power. It was just another ascent. So he fucked for money. Not nearly as much money as the women got, but top money for a guy, he boasted. But he had an innocence, a fresh way of looking at things, that I found appealing. And he seemed remarkably happy.
I don’t remember ever meeting anyone quite that pleased with himself. He filled his afternoons with pleasure—treating himself to a jar of lingonberries, slipping into a theater with the intermission crowds to see the second act of a Broadway play, signing an autograph for a fan on the street. What a turn-on, especially if the fan happened to be a woman. Evenings, he weighed his options, so many delightful options that he could never be bored. He loved his life. He was in love with his work. He never ceased being amazed that he was paid for making love to dewy young beauties and aging Lolitas. Even his tears were joyful. Telling me about an early love he’d lost when she fell in love with another woman, he began to weep. Then he wiped his eyes and smiled.
“That felt good,” he said.
After Don’s melancholy and the deep discontent I perceived in Andrew, Jamey’s talent for happiness was irresistible. To some people, the adult-film world might have seemed dangerous, a sordid scene with drugs and Mob money. But I saw a rather naïve guy, young for his age but smarter than I would have expected—Columbia, after all, and the New York Times with coffee every morning. He’d been moved by a certain passiveness into what seemed easy money, but he appeared no more sexually obsessed than I.
I took him into my world. He looked dashing at the Four Seasons or at Frank Valenza’s wonderfully outrageous Palace in that pinstriped brown flannel suit he’d worn in Misty Beethoven. I had to be subtle and diplomatic to convince him that the lapels of his shirt looked better inside the jacket, not open and out, à la John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He liked to wear a shiny floral tie that still had its strip of masking tape inside, labeled “orgy scene.” At gatherings of the lit clique, Gay Talese, immersed then in skinny-dipping research for Thy Neighbor’s Wife, his monumental opus on swinging in the seventies, was clearly fascinated. Jamey already knew Jerzy Kosinski from grungy cellars of sadomasochism downtown in the Meatpacking District. At The Literary Guild anniversary party at the Four Seasons, they shook hands, grinning,
like comrades from a secret sect.
Jamey let me know he had a special girlfriend. She was smart enough to give him freedom to roam, he said. I was seeing him once or twice a week, shamelessly playing to his weakness. I am nothing if not competitive. I dangled Lutèce; he couldn’t say no. The Cellar in the Sky at Windows on the World . . . a different wine with every course. How could he resist? He’d grown up in poverty on West 103rd Street, one of six children. “The only white boy in my PAL group,” he said, referring to the Police Athletic League. He dreamed of one day buying the brownstone he’d grown up in and turning it into a castle. “I’d invite everyone I love to live in it,” he confided.
“What happened to your acting career?” I asked.
“I am an actor.” He was clearly insulted. “I make a living as an actor. Not many actors do, you know. Five percent, according to Variety. I really tried to find something I could do, something to care about besides acting. I took an aptitude test. I thought maybe law, or teaching. I almost did get a job once teaching in a school for bad boys.” He laughed. “If it had been bad girls, I would definitely have taken it.”
“And porn?”
“I was doing Shakespeare Off Broadway for nothing and driving a cab for a living. Then one day, I saw an ad for actors to do nude photos. The job paid forty dollars an hour. That was what I took home for driving a cab all day. And it was easy. It was fun. Everyone was sweet, and I loved the sex.”
For a while, it looked as if sex films were getting better and there would be a breakthrough, he said. Everyone in the business talked about serious actors doing explicit sex in big-budget Hollywood films. “I felt good about being in the avant-garde. I felt like a sexual missionary,” he told me.
His story was touching. I was impressed by that English honors degree. Originally, he’d gone to Hunter to enroll for classes, but he found the system too confusing, he said. A friend knew an administrator at Columbia. There, registration could be arranged. Second from the bottom in his New Jersey high school graduating class, Jamey found himself uncharacteristically motivated in college.
“At Columbia, I just decided to do it. I was at the top of my class. Got all A’s and B’s. Everyone said, ‘This kid has potential.’” He hesitated, aware that I might think he had squandered that potential. He looked away. “There’s a need being unfulfilled in me,” he said, turning back with a grin. “That’s part of my charm.”
That charm was working on me. I felt he’d never really had a chance. I wanted to do something to help him. I didn’t see red lights blinking. Or if I did, I didn’t care. I felt I could handle it. I found his dark world intriguing—the movies shot in two days, women rebelling against deeply religious homes and fundamentalist religions, the men mostly Jewish, all of them paid so little in an industry that raked in millions. He didn’t seem to think of himself as exploited. He accepted the limitations; indeed, he was proud that he was among the top-paid men in porn, didn’t seem to mind that work was occasional, unpredictable. He was happy. He made just enough money to support an unambitious lifestyle. And oh, the girls. “They were so sweet. So juicy.”
“You’re like a pig in shit,” I said one day. Jamey laughed. “I love what I do.” But he was a trained actor, after all, I reasoned. Perhaps all he needed was a little push, a few phone calls to open other doors.
“No one has crossed over from porn to straight film,” he told me. Did he seem dangerously passive? I dismissed the thought. With my confidence and connections, he would get the energy to pursue it, I felt sure.
“I was thinking about writing an article on pornography,” I said one evening. “But your story is much more interesting. It should be a book.”
“Funny,” he said. “Norman Mailer told me the same thing. I met him once at a party. What do you think? Should I let Mailer do my story?”
He wasn’t ready to trust me. Too many promises broken, I thought.
Whenever we went to dinner, we’d go dancing after at Regine’s or Xenon or the Ice Palace, a dark place with pin lights, butch lesbians, and great disco music. We danced apart, we danced close. Moving slowly to Sinatra, I’d put my hand around his neck, fingers tangled in his dark curls. I find it hard to explain what it was about dancing. The high school wallflower became the queen of the prom. I had great moves. I had the best-looking guy on the dance floor. I was transformed. I had never been good at anything athletic, although I’d always loved to dance, long before disco. Now I was a dancer every night of the week. I could imagine the physical abandon, the elation, the kinetic ecstasy of Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron, of Ginger Rogers matching Fred Astaire step by step, only backward (as Gloria Steinem pointed out).
There would be a long line vying to get by the doorman at Regine’s. Someone would spot me. “Let Miss Greene in,” the hostess would call out. Someone would take my long fur cape and hand it to the cloakroom attendant over the heads of mere mortals patiently queued. I was given no coat check—two hundred coats, but no check for mine.
“It’s rude the way the woman who takes your coat doesn’t even see me,” said Jamey. “She doesn’t acknowledge I’m standing there. It’s rude to you.”
“You’re right. I’ll say something.”
“Don’t do it for me. I know who I am,” he said. “In my world, no one would know you, either.”
Camille, the very blond captain I knew from Le Cirque,* would put us at a table up front. Jamey would order Perrier. I would ask for ice water. Camille would bring fancy cookies. And we would wait for the movie star-handsome tuxedo-clad waiters, carnations in their lapels—Regine must have hired a casting director—to push back the screens that hid the dance floor during dinner. Then the DJ would switch vibes from supper-club mellow to jump-around disco. And there was the see-through Plexiglas dance platform, with its pulsating neon.
Jamey never seemed to be in a hurry to get home, unlike other men, normal men with jobs. He so rarely worked, he didn’t have to be anywhere at nine o’clock in the morning. As it got later, the after-dinner revelers crowded onto the Lucite floor, anonymous bodies pressing against one another. Jamey closed his eyes, losing himself in the orgiastic intensity of it. I saw his hand brushing a passing chiffoned ass. I let my hand wander, too. He smiled and closed his eyes again. One evening, Elizabeth Taylor danced alongside us, orchid eyes glued to her rangy escort as if he were the next Richard Burton. She seemed to move in a halo of light.
Often, it was two or three o’clock in the morning when we claimed my cape and then walked home. The sex was never hotter than the night Jamey spent dancing inches from the exquisite goddess of his dirtiest reveries, the adolescent Brooke Shields. “Oh, my precious baby,” he crooned, eyes closed—but so what?
His world, a crazy world. I’m writing a book, I thought. This is research. But in fact, I was being naughty and it was fun. I liked doing whatever it took to turn him on. It was hot. I was a new, more aggressive me. I was learning how many women had passed through his life. He spun the tales slowly for my little notebook and the book we’d agreed to write, but, of course, he was rationing his confessions, not sure what I could handle. One day, he spoke of us in the past tense and I got huffy. I realized I wanted to be the one he could never let go. I was sure we had a blockbuster book. “We’re going to be very rich,” I promised him. The book would bind him to me. I might never be the one woman, but I could be the one woman he really needed.
We were feeding quarters to the porno-flick machines in a cubicle at Show World on Eighth Avenue, a rare afternoon together (“for the book,” I’d suggested).
“I remember this film. Oh, these were my babies, my beautiful babies,” he moaned, masturbating as he watched himself flanked by what looked like a pair of Lolitas, rubbing against him on-screen. You didn’t buy much footage for a quarter. The machine flicked off. He added another quarter. “I can’t believe you’re taking notes,” he said, zipping up to run outside to the cashier for more quarters. Sticky world. I had a new dimension. I did my work. I met my de
adlines. I tasted meals not worth writing about and set up photo shoots for the magazine’s issue on entertaining. I dated other men. I danced after dinner with other men. But I obsessed about Jamey. My friend Naomi couldn’t understand it. “He sounds to me like a giant mouth,” she said. Jean-Louis, at Le Cirque, warned me that he could only be trash and might have something contagious. My wise and permissive therapist, Mildred, thought Jamey was just another symptom of my unresolved neurosis. Don was concerned, “though I don’t really have a right to be,” he said. Why did nobody understand what I saw in Jamey?
Even as intrepid girl reporter for the Post, I had avoided the sleaze of Times Square. And now in the late seventies, the neighborhood was scabrous, full of desperadoes, dealers conducting brazen drug sales on Forty-second Street, scantily dressed runaways from Minnesota in white plastic boots offering themselves on Eighth Avenue. One evening, I found myself trailing Jamey through the tawdry scene, among the child whores and winos, as he stopped at Smiler’s for the Times and his morning grapefruit, my hair soaking wet from nonstop dancing till 3:00 AM after some fancy benefit, wearing my mink, my black velvet gown sweeping the pavement.
“Why don’t we go to your place?” I said.
“I didn’t have a chance to clean,” he warned as he led me upstairs to his second-story apartment.
I gasped and stumbled as he pushed the door open, stung by the chaos.
He saw my reaction. “I like it this way. It feels cozy to me.”
I took care to avoid sliding on the scattered girlie magazines and underwear. There was a home-movie projector next to the unmade bed, clothes draped and dropped everywhere, a half-eaten baguette, turned to wood now, handcuffs and dildos and lacy panties, a riding crop, a black stocking draped over the bathroom mirror, open jars of strawberry jam and dregs of wine in bottles sitting amid the fan mail on the kitchen table, unwashed plates piled into the sink. A cockroach I pretended not to see skittered away. I wondered how he could dress at night and emerge so pressed and clean from this chaos. It must have some special meaning to him, I thought.