In the 1970s and 1980s, adult film magazines had a number of features in common; for example, they were either published in New York or on the west coast (Los Angeles/San Francisco), and they often were produced by heterosexual horn-dogs, such as Peter Wolff (Cheri, Adult Cinema Review) or Bobby Hollander (Cinema-X).
Video X was different: it was based in Miami, Florida, it was published by a gay impresario named Donald Embinder, and it wasn’t even that interested in pornographic movies.
While Video X was ostensibly a magazine about adult films, featuring film articles and interviews with stars like Kelly Nichols, Marlene Willoughby, and Samantha Fox, it was actually a mob-financed, elaborate cross-marketing exercise designed to target movie fans with the promotion of other products.
It was all masterminded by Embinder himself, an entrepreneur with connections to organized crime who had been publishing Blueboy, a gay lifestyle magazine, since 1974.
In this Rialto Report, we consider the first year of Video X – looking at the murky background behind the magazine, how it got started, and how it used the adult film industry to make money. We’ve also digitized all the issues of the magazine from 1980.
Thanks to the various people interviewed for this article, who have asked for their names to be withheld.
You can find The Rialto Report’s growing collection of digitized resources by clicking Library in our site menu. Check back for more digitized adult film magazines soon.
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Publications are being shared here purely for the purpose of research. They should not to be used or reproduced for any commercial gain.
Video X magazine: 1980 – The Story of the First Year
1. Donald Embinder
In the 1960s, Donald Embinder was working at Towson University, a public institution located in Maryland. After leaving his respectable job as a college administrator, Embinder moved into real estate and developed a series of commercial interests in gay nightlife venues.
In October 1971, he helped Donn Culver and Bill Bickford open the Lost and Found – one of Washington DC’s first gay-oriented discos, located at 56 L Street SE. Within a year, the Lost and Found was an institution: a 45,000 square foot dance club that sponsored spectacular shows, won a grand prize for its float in the 1972 Mardi Gras parade, and became the place to go for Sunday brunches and tea dances.
Embinder’s next project was The Hippopotamus – a gay club in Baltimore with one of the largest dance floors in the state – that he founded with partner Kenny Elbert in July 1972. It became a staple of Baltimore gay nightlife with nearly 5,000 patrons visiting each weekend.
In 1973, Embinder moved to Fort Lauderdale where, within weeks of arriving, he announced his intention to stand for Mayor of nearby Hollywood. Embinder could be economical with the truth when it came to his own past, and he said to the press that he had been “an assistant professor of business management at a Baltimore college” before coming to Florida. His anti-corruption platform drew much publicity in local newspapers, but failed to ignite the electorate.
Turnout for the October 1973 election was low, and the incumbent mayor won re-election by a landslide. Undeterred, Embinder applied for the role of Budget Officer for the town of Hollywood – this time describing himself as “a former budget officer at Towson State College.”
Embinder was unsuccessful, but by this time he had other plans. He had come across a small black and white journal called Blueboy that had taken his interest.
2. Blueboy magazine
Embinder re-imagined Blueboy as a full-color glossy magazine that combined tasteful nude photographs and erotic fiction with articles on dating, politics, and gay culture. It would be a high-end alternative to the growing pack of increasingly explicit gay magazines.
Embinder reinvented himself again, this time stating in interviews that he had been an advertising manager for After Dark, an arts magazine with a substantial gay readership. He purchased Blueboy and debuted the new publication in 1974 – touting itself as, “The National Magazine About Men.” The inaugural cover was a playful parody of the Blueboy painting by 18th century master Thomas Gainsborough.
Blueboy began as a glossy gay male magazine that covered the Washington D.C. area, but by volume 2 in 1975 it had moved to Miami, Florida. By the fourth issue, Embinder had secured national distribution, and the magazine grew from 26,000 subscriptions in 1975 to over 100,000 subscriptions in 1976.
Blueboy was quickly becoming a cornerstone of gay culture. It featured softcore pictorials, fiction, news features, essays, social commentary, and pieces on music and entertainment. Typical articles concerned social climbing, the latest fashions, picking up strangers, television and film reviews, and the secrets of love. It also touched on more pressing issues such as politics and gay rights, and featured interviews with or profiles of Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, and William S. Burroughs. (In the 1980s, singer Cyndi Lauper mentioned the publication in the first lines of her song ‘She Bop’: “Well, I see him every night in tight blue jeans, in the pages of a Blueboy magazine.)
But from the beginning, Embinder was interested in producing more than just a magazine: he wanted Blueboy to be a lifestyle brand. In conjunction with other businesses, he developed an array of personal items, clothing, stationery, beauty products and home furnishings. Blueboy-branded businesses included Blueboy Library: a collection of novels, and regional LGBTQ nightlife magazines in both New York and Los Angeles titled ‘Knight Life’. He also started Blueboy Forum, a late-night talk show broadcast from a Florida TV network and billed as “the nation’s first weekly, live sponsored forum from a gay perspective.” He invited two of the 1976 presidential candidates to participate in the first episode. Both declined.
The success of Blueboy lead to a new level of visibility for Embinder. When the magazine was first launched, he used the nom de plume ‘Don Westbrook’, but soon assumed his real name on the masthead. Why not? Embinder was a good-looking, articulate, and attractive spokesperson, and he actively courted the media – who returned the interest. He appeared on television chat shows like Phil Donahue and Tom Snyder, college panel discussions, and in press interviews. He spoke about and for the gay community, but always made sure he was promoting his own business interests.
In September 1976, Embinder made his most ambitious move yet. He purchased the venerable Lauderdale Beach Hotel in Fort Lauderdale. The six-story property included a complex of other buildings, gardens, and tennis courts and was situated along the Intracoastal Waterway. It had been one of the first major developments on the Fort Lauderdale beach when it opened in 1936, catering to conservative upper-middle-class Florida tourists. Embinder’s intention was to turn the hotel into a gay resort, though at first he was more circumspect about this: ‘We intend to cater to both homosexuals and heterosexuals,” he initially said when challenged by the press.
The hotel opened – as an all-gay venue – in October 1976, and the first winter season was a modest success.
3. In Bed with My Donor
Embinder’s rapid ascent begged one important question: where was the money that funded such rapid expansion and large investments coming from? It wasn’t from the success of Blueboy which, despite its increase in circulation, was still making a loss. The short answer was the mob. The longer answer was William Bittner, the owner of Casa Luigi restaurant, a popular mob restaurant in Miami that had recently burned down under suspicious circumstances.
Embinder and Bittner had become partners on Blueboy magazine, when Embinder wanted to expand the range of his operations. Bittner connected Embinder to the people and money that made this a reality. Bittner had a long rap-sheet for distribution of pornography. One indictment from 1973 revealed that he was directly tied to the elderly New York mobster Ettore Zappi, identified by a U.S. Senate subcommittee as one of the most senior organized crime members. A ‘Capo’ in the Gambino crime family, no less. According to court records, Bittner had been operating a duplication facility and distribution network on behalf of Zappi with noted pornography figure Mike Thevis. The charges were eventually dropped but not before many of the details of the illicit operation had been revealed.
Zappi moved down to Fort Lauderdale in the early 1970s, and continued to work with Bittner on real estate and pornography ventures. It was there that they planned their next operation.
In 1976, Embinder and Bittner took control of the Lauderdale Beach Hotel in Fort Lauderdale via a complex series of mortgages, leases, and sub-leases designed to obscure the fact that the deal was funded by Zappi. Embinder was listed as the owner and Bittner remained in the background, introduced only as ‘head of security.’
But problems began when Embinder applied for a liquor license for the hotel. The State Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco began asking questions. Where did all the money come from? When they received vague answers, the State Division started asking other questions like where did all the money go?
The authorities learned that in the first six months of the hotels’ operation, Embinder and Bittner had spent a $500,000 loan, received from a Cayman Islands corporation, on improvements and renovations. The problem was that there was no way that the hotel showed any evidence of that amount of work. With the evidence piling up against Embinder and Bittner, it would perhaps have been a good idea if they hadn’t hired Ettore Zappi’s nephew, Ronald Zappi, as the hotel’s ‘drink manager’. When asked about his connection to the mobster, Ronald replied, “Hey – I just share the same name. I can’t help who I’m born to.”
When no satisfactory answers were received to their questions, the State Division stated that it had no option: the application for the Lauderdale Beach Hotel’s liquor license was rejected in early 1977.
Without a liquor license, the hotel had a problem. In fact, it could barely call itself a hotel. The big plans that Embinder had for the business quickly foundered, and the hotel struggled. It was the first time that one of Donald Embinder’s ventures lost a large amount of money, and it called for a re-think.
What happened next showed that someone was re-thinking a little outside of the box.
4. Fire!
On March 21st, 1977, the Lauderdale Beach Hotel suffered a fire after an electrical transformer malfunctioned. Two weeks later the hotel suffered another, worse fire that was said to have come from a “suspicious origin.” Then in mid-April, a major blaze tore through the building. The fire gutted the first two floors, and more than 200 people were evacuated.
Were the fires caused by the owners ignoring health and safety regulations, bad luck, or something more sinister? Investigators suspected foul play when they found evidence of a large quantity of flammable liquid in one of the rooms where the fire started. Whatever the cause, no charges were brought, and the hotel closed down in April 1977.
But Embinder wasn’t the type to remain idle for long, and he and William Bittner were already negotiating to buy a gay nightclub, The Tangerine, at 624 SE 28th St in Fort Lauderdale. On the day the contracts were due to be signed, the building burnt down and the transaction was aborted. (The club swiftly re-opened under the former management but immediately experienced an armed robbery in which $10,000 was stolen. Five months later Bittner was arrested for the crime, which the police suspected was committed in retaliation for the failed deal. The trial later collapsed, and Bittner walked free.)
Undeterred, the Embinder/Bittner partnership decided to invest in a gay nightclub in Atlanta, The Magic Garden, which was to be managed by their former hotel ‘drinks manager’, mobster-nephew Ronald Zappi. On August 31st, 1977, four days after it opened… you guessed it: it burned down. These weren’t isolated incidents. More gay nightclubs across the country – a number of them with connections to Ettore Zappi or William Bittner – were burned down.
The newspapers loved it: they called it “the gay nightclub wars” and reported all the salacious details. “Someone crept onto the roof, poured gasoline down a ventilator, and burned half the place out. It was a familiar calling card in the turbulent world of gay nightclubs. Arson, death-threats – and death threats carried out – have been tools of the trade in a vindictive struggle for Atlanta’s increasingly profitable homosexual market,” wrote one journalist. Politicians entered the mix, and railed against the spate of fires: Rep. Barney Frank called the clubs, “the most obnoxious and irresponsible drinking establishments,” and decried the corrupt relationship between the club owners and the police.
As a result of suspicions relating to financial irregularities, arson, and connections to organized crime, federal authorities embarked on a multi-year investigation of the various people involved – including Embinder himself.
5. The Rise of Donald Embinder
Donald Embinder was a Teflon character. For all his problems, he was not retreating. Far from it. Blueboy magazine was selling better than ever – 135,000 copies sold in each month of 1978 – and Embinder spoke about how it would top 1,000,000 copies soon. It was now distributed by Flynt Distributing Inc., the company behind Larry Flynt’s Hustler Publications, which gave the magazine even more credibility. And Embinder continued to diversify his publishing group, launching magazines such as a raunchier gay rag ‘Numbers,’ and ‘For Women Only’ – a collection of “cute male models.
Embinder was profiled in glowing terms in major magazines, that overlooked – or were unaware of – his association with organized crime. At all times his carefully cultivated persona stressed that he “was just a marketing man that happens to be gay.” His official bio now referred to a stint working as an advertising executive on large accounts such as Proctor and Gamble. The media had a new gay best friend: “There’s no confusing Donald Embinder for a screaming, radical faggot,” one wrote.
Embinder’s pitch was that gay men had higher levels of discretionary income than their straight counterparts due to the fact that had no kids, baby-sitters or insurance policies to worry about. In fact they’d been ignored by advertisers for too long. Embinder spoke about how he had structured Blueboy around a simple concept: once you have a man’s attention through the magazine, why not exploit that and sell him other products? The genius was that most of the advertisements in the magazine were for products that his own Blueboy company sold. It was an effective, not to mention ruthless, exercise in cross-promotion: If you’re interested in reading articles about a gay lifestyle, why not treat yourself to products from the same tried-and-trusted source as the magazine in your hands?
However the finances behind the business didn’t always add up. Blueboy had made loss in each of the first four years of its short life. In 1977, Embinder declared that revenues were just over $2 million. In reality, it was half that amount – and the company made a loss of $27,000. In 1978, Blueboy made its first profit of $250,000. Claims that Blueboy was reaping revenues of $7 million were wide off the mark – the real figure was closer to $3 million.
The truth was that cash flow wasn’t a major problem as long as Embinder was financed by Zappi. But he wanted legitimacy, and so in 1979 he raised $756,000 via a public offering of 210,000 shares in Blueboy. As always, he hit the publicity circuit, claiming that Blueboy was now the very first public vehicle whose products were aimed almost exclusively at a homosexual market.
The SEC filing for the public offering stated that Embinder was now publishing nine special interest magazines, 32 paperback books, and “various products” advertised in the magazines. In addition, he held interests in a company selling the then-popular stimulant butyl nitrate, ‘Knightlife’ – a weekly entertainment guide for gays, and the ‘San Francisco’ nightclub in Miami. He spoke about new magazines (he debuted ‘For Women Only’ in 1979, aiming to dethrone ‘Playgirl’) and a series of Blueboy discos and clubs in cities like Miami, Toronto, Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia.
By the end of the 1970s, Bittner and Zappi said to Embinder that he should apply the same business model and tap into the straight male market. Embinder had resisted this idea for years. He identified strongly with the gay product he had developed. But if there was easy money on the table, it would be rude not to take it.
With the rise in interest in adult films as a result of home video, they created Video X magazine.
6. Video X magazine
The first issue of Video X magazine came out in March 1980 – and was produced out of a new Miami building that Embinder had built at a cost of $300,000. The Blueboy company was headquartered there, though printing for the magazines was done in New York by the printing company Goshen Litho. The address for the Miami office was poetically and appropriately-named: 6969 NW 69th St.
William Bittner was once again onboard, as always working behind the scenes to provide mob funding and distribution networks. His name may not have been on the magazine’s masthead, but his long-time girlfriend, Maria Freedell, was listed as the magazine’s Vice President.
The task of managing the day to day operations of the magazine was given to Bob Barco (aka Robert Barkow). Barco had been listed as a ‘production consultant’ on Blueboy magazine, but his involvement in pornography dated back to the 1950s when he was arrested for taking nude photographs in New York. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he fronted an extensive network of sex-oriented distribution companies that were set up by the Lucchese mob family. The businesses were often busted by the police, but the charges never stuck. Barco had protection from organized crime families, so each time he just started up again and continued to make money. With long-standing relationships with the adult film companies and a background in publishing and distribution, Barco was a smart choice to manage the magazine.
If you picked up the inaugural copy of Video X in its first year, you could be forgiven for thinking it was just another magazine interviewing porn stars and reviewing the latest adult films to be released on video-cassette. That was only half the story.
True to the cross-marketing approach adopted on Blueboy, Embinder was less interested in the magazine, and much more concerned with what else he could sell to magazine buyers. Video X was just a quasi-surreptitious way of getting the attention of a large group of men. And the first product Embinder wanted to sell them was video cassettes.
To avoid accusations of having conflicts of interest, Embinder and Bittner set up a separate company, ‘Vydio Philms’, using the contacts and financial muscle of Ettore Zappi and the Gambino family. Its address, a P.O. Box in Surfside just down the road from the Video X offices, was merely used to forward all mail back to Embinder headquarters in Miami. By no stretch of the imagination could Vydio Philms be described as a large company in its own right. It was just a clearing-house for products from major production houses such as Essex, Cal-Vista, and Quality X, with whom Zappi associates had relationships.
It was a naked effort to get readers to buy videos: on page six of the very first issue, a ‘Buyers Guide’ featured a four-page list of films available, all priced at $99.99. The guide was described as the “most comprehensive lineup of erotic video features available anywhere in the world. For the very first time you can order any of the these fabulous titles directly from Video X magazine.” Vydio Philms also offered other non video-cassette products including their Pretty Girls series – 8mm and Super-8 films, as well as Pretty Girls magazines.
To entice readers into buying video cassettes, the magazine had features on the films. But the films were not reviewed as they were in other magazines: Embinder and Barco figured that the best way to interest potential buyers was just to recount the plots in detail. There was no attempt to be topical either – some of the films described were new; others were several years old. And in another departure from competitors, hardcore gay films were also covered – including films like John Amero’s ‘Navy Blue’ and ‘Men Come First.’
Embinder recognized that not everyone had a video player in the late 1970s. They were large and expensive, and many customers were on the fence about making the investment. To encourage readers to make the leap, Video X had a regular column showing the cutting-edge hardware available to watch video cassettes or cable television. One bleeding edge product featured was the BetaMax SL-5400 which allowed users to search for an exact segment on a video cassette at three times the normal playing speed. Mind. Blown.
There were many other sexual novelties that Embinder wanted to sell – all available from the Video X office address at 6969 NW 69th St. What type of products? Just about anything you could imagine. It seemed that there was no limit to Embinder’s imagination – or shamelessness: the Senora Orgasmo (don’t ask…) and Electro Squirmy (really, please don’t ask…) were among the first products given rave reviews.
The PenisSIZER PLEASURIZER (the idiosyncratic capitalization is courtesy of the ad itself) was offered via a tagline that read “Announcing the End of Sexual Frustration and Boredom for the Rest of Your Life!” A progenitor of the modern day Fleshlight, it was described as “A Pleasure Machine Men Have Dreamed of For Centuries” and promised “Mind Blowing Sex Whenever You Want It.” The product was “custom fitted to you, to fit forever!” which in turn required the customer to perform some “accurate measurement” work in advance.
Did you want a Playmate sex doll? You could choose from six different versions – including Lovely Linda, Young Elsa, and Sweet Sugar – all available for only $19.95, though for that price one can only guess what would have greeted you when you opened the box.
A selection of sexual enhancement creams was also available: ‘Femme Climax Cream’ (sensitively advertised by asking “Women! Are you frigid?”) and its male counterpart, ‘Instant Erecto Cream’ (which would set you back “$10 for a 10 Day Supply” – though how much actual cream you needed for 10 days surely depended on the amount of horizontal jogging the buyer had in mind.)
Speaking of creams: Shouldn’t your special lady be buying “New Romance. The Feminine Rejuvenating Cream That Makes Her 20 Years Younger”? Why should this be important to you? Quite simply gentlemen, because “You’re Not Too Small. She’s Too Big.” Of course.
If that wasn’t enough ‘SGM’ promised a “new concept in penis enlargement.” Curious? Well, it “incorporates a device that avoids the dangers of vacuum methods while enlarging the internal structures which underlie the penis, and the penis itself, through a combination of scientifically developed exercises and hydro-thermal therapy. It requires one hour a day for 100 days.” Phew. And ouch.
What if you wanted a legal high? You could buy Discoroma (“a liquid incense… the aroma for dancers”) described as a liquid butyl nitrate-based product and “virtually the most powerful product on the market for provoking furious fandangoes of non-stop fornication.” Alternatively how about Snocaine (“Set your expectations high: Snocaine’s fine white powder will satisfy them”) which was “a specially developed scent patterned after the burnt offerings of coca leaves traditionally used in aphrodisiac rituals by the Incas of the High Andes.” Si señor!
Thankfully it wasn’t just sex, sex,and more sex. For example, what should you do with your growing video cassette tape collection? The answer was that you needed to buy a wood cabinet… and guess where you could get one?
All of these products, and more, could also be ordered from the same Video X address.
Occasionally, Video X magazine broke away from the format of adult films articles and copious advertisements. For example, the July 1980 issue featured an extensive selection of pictures from erotic photographer Ron Raffaelli. But where could the admiring onanist see more of them? Relax: the following month, Vydio Philms advertised a selection of Raffaelli’s books for sale. It was all part of Embinder’s master plan.
Video X also introduced a mail order video rental service: like Netflix, years before Netflix was conceived. For the special price of only $250, you could become a ‘Blue Ribbon Member’ which entitled you to a two-year subscription to Video X magazine, a free adult tape of your choosing, and rental of “up to 20 titles from our Special Connoisseur’s Collection” (at an additional cost of $20 each).
Video X was becoming a one-stop shop for all your needs.
Some historians have commented that magazines like Video X effectively became the publicity wing of the adult film industry, but that ignores the way that this magazine exploited the film business to make money for itself. This relationship was synergistic.
Video X did well in in 1980, its first year. It wasn’t the ground-breaking, critically-acclaimed publication that Blueboy had become, but it was nevertheless making money for Embinder, Bittner, and their associates. Lots of it.
The Rialto Report will revisit subsequent years of Video X magazine shortly.
It was perhaps Radley’s most typical film – wildly elegant, extravagant, and erotic – and so The Rialto Report wanted to commemorate the anniversary. We decided to try and visit all the film’s locations in a single day.
The only problem? Camille 2000 was shot in Italy. There was only one solution: we got on a plane, and headed to Rome.
Rome is often call ‘The Eternal City’ – but how many of the film’s locations would still be recognizable half a century later?
Loosely inspired by Alexandre Dumas fils ‘La dame aux camélias’, Camille 2000 tells the story of Marguerite, a beautiful, sensuous woman who is addicted to sex, drugs, and money. She is kept by a wealthy man, has a string of young lovers, and hosts wild orgies in her luxurious villa. When she falls in love with the handsome bachelor Armand, he insists on absolute fidelity. Armand’s controlling father soon intervenes to end the affair, triggering a tragic turn of events.
Radley moved to Rome in the summer of 1968 to plan the film’s production. He envisaged a shoot lasting two months, starting on Monday October 28th, 1968 and finishing on December 22nd 1968, though the production schedule was eventually extended into January 1969. He used an entirely Italian cast and crew, and each day was meticulously planned and recorded in a series of detailed production memos, which listed the day’s activities to the minute.
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1. Opening scene – Scalea Bruno Zevi
Camille 2000 begins with the slate displayed in front of the Scalea Bruno Zevi, a staircase on the Via delle Belle Arti, at the edge of the Villa Borghese:
The opening shot itself was taken from the entrance to the Gallery of Modern Art (shown here in 2018):
This is the before and after view of the stairs (use the vertical slider to compare views):
In the pictures below, Marguerite Gautier (left) (Danièle Gaubert) and Prudence (Eleonora Rossi Drago) are shown with boyfriends in the opening sequence (and The Rialto Report’s April Hall in 2018):
Several scenes take place in Piazza del Popolo in central Rome (where Radley would also return to shoot scenes six years later for The Opening of Misty Beethoven). This is Radley’s panoramic shot of Piazza del Popolo, taken from the Pincio hill overlooking Rome:
Piazza del Popolo is nowadays a pedestrian-only area, unlike in 1968:
Down in Piazza del Popolo itself, Armand Duval (Nino Castelnuovo) and Gastion (Roberto Bisacco) drive around in their yellow buggy:
The very first shot that Radley filmed for Camille 2000 on October 28th 1968 was the scene in front of the Rosati restaurant. Rosati is still in the same location of Piazza del Popolo, though it is now a ‘ristorante’ rather than a ‘pasticceria’ (pastry shop):
Even the restaurant next door, Ristorante Bolognese, is the same as it was in 1968:
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3. Picking up a passenger – Via Luisa di Savoia
Early in Camille 2000, Armand and Gaston see an attractive women driving a car alongside them – so they invite her to join them in their yellow jeep instead, much to the annoyance of a local policeman:
The scene was shot on the Via Luisa di Savoia, a street just outside the Piazza del Popolo. Fifty years later, a travel island is the only change to the road and surrounding buildings:
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4. Opera staircase – Palazzo Brancaccio
One enigmatic location was a scene that took place on a staircase leading into an opera auditorium. But the staircase isn’t actually in the theater in which the opera takes place:
We eventually found it in Palazzo Brancaccio, the last noble palace built in Rome, in the late 1800s. Today it is a service staircase used by kitchen staff:
The only remaining question about the staircase was: what happened to the gold statue of a cherub that stood so prominently on the banister?
We eventually found it on display in the reception area of the same building:
Interestingly we also noted the same staircase (and the same gold statue) in William Wylers’ Oscar-winning Roman Holiday (1953) that starred Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn:
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5. Opera House – Teatro Valle
One the the several set-pieces of Camille 2000 is the scene at the opera house – where Armand first meets Marguerite. The sequence was shot at Teatro Valle in Rome:
The Teatro Valle was built in 1726, and for the following two centuries regularly staged operas as well as prose comedies and, increasingly after 1830, serious melodramas. Since the middle of the 19th century however, the Teatro Valle has staged only spoken drama. Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ had its world premiere in the theater in 1921.
Gaining access to the theater in 2018 is difficult as it has been occupied by a group of protestors since June 2011. The protestors consist of artists, actors, and theater works who feared rumors that the theatre was to be privatized, and would thus lose its artistic independence.
The theater has been locked up since the occupation, and only opened for a few exhibitions, occasional plays, and sporadic tours.
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6. Marguerite’s house – Villa Miani
Perhaps the most frequently-used location in Camille 2000 is Villa Miani, where Marguerite lives.
The mansion, which is situated on one of the highest of Roma’s seven hills, dates back to 1873, when it was built as a strolling palace, dominated by a neoclassic building surrounded by acres of beautifully manicured gardens.
Today it is used by the Italian prime minister to entertain foreign guests, and also as a wedding event space. It is privately owned so you’ll need an appointment to visit.
Villa Miani, in Camille 2000 (1969)
Villa Miani, in 2018
Marguerite and Armand on the terrace of Villa Miani, overlooking Rome
The view from the terrace at Villa Miani, 2018
Villa Miani has been used in other films over the years, including several Rialto Report favorites (though non-adult film-related films):
‘Fantômas se déchaîne’ (1965)
Bertolucci’s ‘The Conformist’ (1970)
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7. Rome house – Casina Valadier
When Armand goes to pick up Marguerite, she rebuffs him and leaves with her lover instead.
The scene takes place in front of Casina Valadier, a small round-fronted building, that is now used as a high end restaurant and cafe’.
Armand and Gaston wait for Marguerite
Casina Valadier, in 2018
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8. Gardens – Villa Borghese
Several scenes take place in the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome – featuring marble busts of notable figures from Italian and world history.
Armand and Gaston in the Villa Borghese gardens
The Villa Borghese gardens, 2018
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9. Marguerite and Armand walk – Piazza della Consolazione / Santa Maria della Consolazione
The scene where Marguerite and Armand are reconciled is overlooking the Santa Maria della Consolazione church.
Piazza della Consolazione, 2018
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10. Disco scene – Discoteca Scarabocchio
The disco scene was shot at Discoteca Scarabocchio at Piazza Dei Ponziani, 8/c – remarkably still open at weekends in the same location, with the name ‘Nuovo Discoteca Scarabocchio.’
The disco as seen in Camille 2000
The exterior of Nuovo Discoteca Scarabocchio in 2018
Inside the Nuovo Discoteca Scarabocchio in 2018
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11. Concert Ballroom – Palazzo Brancaccio
The film’s climax takes place in a ballroom where a Beatles-esque group plays for the revelers:
The Palazzo Brancaccio function room remains almost completely identical in 2018:
The plot action moves from the floor of the ballroom to the surrounding balcony, where Gaston confronts Marguerite:
The same balcony was also used in ‘Roman Holiday’ fifteen years before in 1953
Thanks to your generous donations, we have since raised over $2,000 for her.
When we contacted her this week to give her the result of the fundraiser, she was overwhelmed by your kindness. She has asked us to share the following to thank all of you who donated:
I would like to extend all my gratitude to all those who donated money to help me begin rebuilding my life. I am humbled and overwhelmed by the generosity. Not only did you help me, you also supported and loved me more than I could ever have imagined.
I have just read all your comments and I can’t stop crying. I feel so thankful to those people who have generously helped me. I know I have made my mistakes: I take full responsibility for them, and hope that I can be an example to someone else who feels they will never be good enough. Acceptance is the answer to ALL of my problems today.
I appreciate your words as you have been encouraging and empowering. You spoke from the heart and with pure honesty. You helped me to accept myself and my circumstances just the way they are, and to start to work on some overdue changes that needed to be made. I recently was offered a full-time position back in the medical field. I get to put my scrubs back on. I have also been very fortunate through word of mouth, thanks to all of you, to be getting work in the industry and I’m having fun. I can give a little enjoyment to some while using my caring for others. I came back because I’m not ashamed of who I am anymore and just maybe I can help some of the other ladies from making the mistakes I made. The past made me who I am today and I think I might have found part of my purpose.
If God would grant one wish come true it would make me very glad to be able to express in words a special tribute to my dad. “While his life on earth has ended and he’s now with God above I will always remember him in the memory of his love.”
As much as we enjoy talking with veterans from the golden age of adult film, I’m aware that their perspectives are always those of an insider. Their observations, experiences, and even memories are affected by the fact that they were wrapped up in the industry. And an insider isn’t always the most impartial witness.
So we’re always keen to seek out people who ended up in porn by accident, or for a short period of time. People who never intended being part of the business.
We want to hear what their fresh eyes thought of this unusual world.
He was working in a theater in Manhattan when he got offered work on the set of the film.
And ‘Taboo – American Style’ was a great place to start. It was one of the last big budget films made in New York. It had an incest theme, was directed by Henri Pachard, and featured Gloria Leonard, Paul Thomas, Taija Rae, Raven, Joey Silvera, and Kelly Nichols. It was eventually divided into four different feature films – each of which were hugely successful.
So what did our crew member think of what he saw? What were his impressions of the people? How strange was this world to him?
And when the film came to an end, did he ever want to go back?
With great thanks to Douglas McMullen.
This podcast is 36 minutes long.
The musical playlist for this episode can be found on Spotify.
In a competitive situation, Valparaiso Pictures and Permut Presentations have snapped up screen rights to Ashley and April Spicer’s hot-read Daily Beast article Centurians Of Rome: How a Bank Robber Made The Most Expensive Gay Porno Of All Time.
Published last month, the article recounts the wild story surrounding George Bosque, a Brink’s security guard who stole $1.85M in the early 80s and disappeared into thin air. During his time on the run, he produced and financed Centurians Of Rome, the cult 1981 gay porn film set during the Roman Empire. Bosque was finally apprehended after a global search. He was prosecuted by a young aggressive attorney named Robert Mueller and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Released in 1986, he died five years later at the age of only 36 of a suspected drug overdose.
This was one of the biggest heists of its day and colorful character Bosque, a Miami native of Cuban descent, evaded capture for more than a year. Bosque said he had spent or given away all the money he stole in a spree in which he lived in penthouse suites and rode in limousines and helicopters. A warning of things to come, in his high-school yearbook he reportedly wrote, ‘”Life is a simple contest, in which not the strong and loudest win, but the silent, watchful strategist and calculist.’”
I hear there were a number of interested parties in on the screen rights, including Amazon and Greg Berlanti. You can see why.
Valparaiso’s David Carrico, Adam Paulsen, and Bobby Hoppey will develop the story into a feature and produce alongside Hacksaw Ridge and Face/Off producer David Permut at Permut Presentations, and Adam Blum under his Free Will banner. The team is looking to set a writer and filmmaker on the project.
Valparaiso’s David Carrico said, “Ashley and April wrote a compelling article – which carefully peels away to reveal the wildly unique character arc of George Bosque, who notoriously went from security guard, to bank robber to producer after he presented Centurians director John Christopher with a bag of cash. We knew how special this story was even before we finished reading the article,” said
Permut added, “The complexities of George’s character set against the backdrop of the sexual freedoms of the late 1970’s before the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic creates a multi-layered tale of ambition, love, crime and despair. It’s Dog Day Afternoon meets Boogie Nights! I’m very much looking forward to collaborating with the team at Valparaiso and Adam Blum on this provocative project.”
Adult film experts Ashley and April Spicer are consultants on HBO’s The Deuce and are the founders of The Rialto Report, an authoritative online archive for oral history, audio recordings, and photographs documenting the Golden Age of Adult Film.
Valparaiso is in pre-production on Ethan Berger’s coming-of-age thriller The Line, starring Alex Wolff, John Malkovich, Scoot McNairy, Jessica Barden, and Lewis Pullman; and the firm is developing the upcoming spy action-comedy No Glory with Kumail Nanjiani. Valparaiso recently premiered The Sound of Silence with Peter Sarsgaard and Rashida Jones in competition at Sundance 2019 where it was acquired by IFC.
Permut Presentations’ most recent productions include Oscar-winner Hacksaw Ridge and Netflix pic The Polka King starring Jack Black. The company is currently in production on a documentary that follows the creation of the nightclub Chippendales, which will serve as a companion piece for the feature film starring Ben Stiller and Dev Patel which is set to go into production later this year.
The Spicers’ are repped by Free Will and Murray Weiss of Catalyst Literary Management. Valparaiso Pictures is represented by Craig Emanuel of Paul Hastings. Permut Presentations is represented by John Tishbi at Pearlman & Tishbi, LLP. Adam Blum is represented Matt Wallerstein at Hirsch, Wallerstein, Hyum, Matlof, & Fishman.
You can find The Rialto Report‘s growing library of digitized resources by clicking ‘Library’ in our site menu.
Check back for more digitized adult film magazine collections soon.
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By 1981, the four founders of Cinema-X Review had added a number of high profile writers to contribute to the monthly magazine – including Vanessa del Rio, Lesllie Bovee, Candida Royalle, and Tina Russell. Each of these contributors was paid $25 to view a newly released film and submit a 500-word review. For a time, the formula worked: the magazine catered to an audience hungry for information about the adult film world, and its combination of star features, film reviews, industry gossip, and salacious ads proved instantly popular.
In truth however, by the second year most of the original ‘group of four’ had lost interest in publishing a magazine in New York when they could be producing adult films in California. Bob Genova, Teddy Snyder, and Jason Russell all jumped ship early in 1981, leaving Bobby Hollander, the driving force behind the creation of the publication, in charge.
Hollander moved the magazine’s main office from New York to California, but delegated much of the magazine’s daily grind to two New Yorkers – sometime adult film director David Davidson and his partner, adult film performer turned publicist Erica Eaton. David and Erica used their contacts to cobble to together enough material for each issue, but the challenge of producing a monthly magazine with input from both coasts took its toll.
By the middle of 1981, the writing was on the wall, and the magazine was sold – with the June 1981 being the last issue. It morphed into Adult Cinema Review, and continued under new management.
*
Cinema-X Review: The Complete 1981 Issues
January 1981 (Vol 2, No. 1) (click on cover to view magazine)
The first thing you notice when you meet Christy Canyon today, is just how good she looks. I honestly think she looks better now than she did 35 years ago… wait, that can’t be right. Has it really been 35 years since she burst onto the scene and became one of the biggest names in adult film back in the 80s?
Together with Ginger Lynn and Traci Lords, Christy Canyon was one of the original superstars of the California video era, when the girls had big hair, fast cars, and ripped through the business, tearing up the rule book.
Christy was part of a different kind of performer to the women who had come before. These new video vixens looked like the hottest girls in your high school, and for a time, Christy was everywhere – in loops, in films, and in magazines.
Christy first retired from the business within a year, but since then, she’s had more comebacks than Frank Sinatra – and along the way, she became a Vivid girl, was a featured dancer, published a book, appeared in over 100 films and loops, and is a member of every adult film hall of fame ever invented.
For me, she was always the star that girls wanted as their best friend, and your boyfriend wanted to run off with.
Nowadays she hosts her own radio show – which is a natural for her, as she’s one of the most entertaining people you could hope to listen to.
And if anyone tells you that all women in adult films are exploited, just send them to Christy. I’ve rarely met someone as tough and independent as she is, yet she still has a heart of gold.
Christy Canyon, with husband Rob and The Rialto Report’s April Hall
We’re proud to announce that The Rialto Report has an article published in The Daily Beast article today: the remarkable story behind the making of the early adult film Deep Sleep (1972).
In 1972, Alfred Sole, a first time filmmaker, made an X-rated film called ‘Deep Sleep’.
He didn’t know much about adult films or the industry, so he shot it in his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey and using a cast and crew made up of friends and family members.
This meant that the local lawyer, banker, policeman, high school teachers, funeral home director, the mayor’s wife, even Alfred’s wife and his mother were part of the film-making group. It seemed like everyone in Paterson knew someone who was involved in the making of ‘Deep Sleep’.
And so predictably when it came out it was a smash hit in New Jersey, with long lines of people breaking box office records trying to get into the theaters to see it.
But not everyone was impressed. And what followed was one of the most remarkable and notorious prosecutions of an adult film in American history. First the filmmakers were indicted on a state basis under an ancient anti-fornication statute, and then on a federal level for interstate transportation of pornography. Suddenly Alfred Sole found himself at the center of a storm. He was under attack both from the law and from everyone who’d helped him make the film in the first place.
The people involved speak out for the first time in 40 years.
The Rialto Report was due to start a spring vacation today – but then we came across a portfolio of unpublished photographs of 1970s adult film actress, Serena, from 1976, and wanted to share them with you.
A timeless, though long forgotten, picture taken in a police station.
It features a group of wildly disparate people bound together by a low-budget sex film made on a deserted island in New York City. Each of them were at a crossroads in their lives, and the decisions they made as a result of that day would affect them – and the sex film business – for years ahead.
It’s the story of an Oscar-winning film director, a small-time sex film actress with big dreams, a mobster who revolutionized the distribution of pornography, and a photographer whose career lasted over seven decades.
Who were these people? What were they doing in a police station? What was the nature of their offense? And who took their photograph?
It’s been fifty years and change, so what happened to each of them since that day?
The Rialto Report tracked down the people involved to hear their very different tales: a history that tells part of the story of adult film in New York.
The image is in black and white. Of course it is: it’s a 1960s newspaper photograph, a long-forgotten snap taken for the New York Daily News.
The scene is the inside of a police station. Behind an elevated desk, a uniformed sergeant stands in front of a map of Staten Island. He looks down, suggesting that he’s working on paperwork relating to the people – three women and a man – who stand in front of him.
The man before the desk sergeant is on the periphery to the right hand side of the picture. He seems to be turning away from the other people. In fact, you wouldn’t know he was connected to the women unless you were told. And you probably also wouldn’t suspect that all four of them had been picked up for a sexual misdemeanor just an hour before.
Two of the women have their backs to the camera. They’re wearing plain flip flops, and are dressed in casual, loose-fitting clothes. Their heads are bowed and covered with headscarves. They huddle together, trying to merge into a single shape in a bid to become more anonymous.
But the third woman is a study in contrast. She wears tight pedal pushers, shiny sandals, and a platinum blonde bouffant that would shame Jayne Mansfield. But it’s her pose that ignites the tableau. She raises a shoulder, bends a knee, and fixes you in the eye. She dares you to ignore her, like a model who’s reached the top of the catwalk and is momentarily, finally, in the glare of attention.
But the rest of the world is taking no notice – except for the cameraman.
His job is to transform the ephemeral into the immortal. So he does.
The Photographer
Jim Romano was an old-school, first-on-the-scene, Staten Island news photographer with a sixth sense that drew him to the scene of a disaster like a hungry moth to a burning flame.
Take December 16, 1960, for example. Jim was buying rolls at the Buda Bakery when the shop assistant mentioned a report of a fire at nearby Miller Field. Jim raced out to his car and followed the sounds of fire engines until he reached the site of the tragedy. Two airplanes had just collided in mid-air, scattering 134 dead bodies into the clear winter sky. “I got a photo of the dead pilot in the cockpit with a cigarette still in his hand, and then got the hell out of there, real quick,” Jim remembers.
The tragedy at Miller Field, photographed by Jim Romano
Jim’s success relied upon getting to a news scene in double quick time – preferably before anyone else showed up. So he pimped his car out with radios, all tuned to local police and fire department frequencies that provided him with a running commentary of Staten Island activity. Jim spent his days listening, and waiting, and listening. But when something happened, he was fast. He’d take off – and often beat authorities to the location. Sure, he’d likely be evicted from the scene soon after he arrived, but not before he’d taken some grisly photographs that recorded the mayhem.
Not all the events he rushed to were disasters though. In his time, Jim covered the visits of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy. “I was interested in taking pictures of anything and everything,” he says.
Jim Romano (with camera), and JFK
By the mid 1960s, he’d worked the island for twenty years and had seen most things, from births to deaths, and whatever happened to people in between. But late in the afternoon on August 3rd, 1965, he picked up a strange conversation on his police radio: eleven people had just been arrested on nearby Hoffman Island.
The charge? Mass indecent exposure and obscenity.
That was a first for Jim.
It wasn’t just the salacious charges that intrigued him. The location, a small tract of land in the Lower New York Bay off the south beach of Staten Island, was a place shrouded in local lore. Jim only knew what everyone else did about Hoffman Island: that during the late 1800s and early 1900s, it’d been a quarantine station where new immigrants were sent if they were diagnosed with a contagious disease. And that it’d subsequently fallen into disuse, a place that no one ever visited. It’d been in the news in 1961 when all the existing buildings on the island were razed. In the four years since then, Hoffman Island had cast a deserted, ghostly shadow.
The police radio chatter revealed that the arrested were being brought back to Staten Island by boat, and taken to the 120th Precinct station house in St George to be booked. But when Jim got there, most of those involved had already been released and disappeared into thin air. Only four people remained: three women who’d been apprehended in flagrante delicto, frolicking nude and maybe doing a whole lot more, and a man who was accused of filming them.
Jim never had the luxury of time. He knew that the only picture the newspapers wanted would be a snap of the wanton women. The problem was that two of them, the dark-haired Ann Marie Perri, 25, and Constance Crindall, 22, weren’t playing ball. They covered their faces, turned their backs to him, and refused to respond to his cat calls.
But there was hope. The youngest of the group, Victoria Bourke, 19, a glamorous blonde with wrap-around shades and high heels, seemed intrigued by Jim’s attention as if he was a paparazzo and she was a big shot movie star.
When a police officer spotted Jim and his camera, he ordered Jim to leave the precinct.
As Jim backed off, he called out towards the blonde: “Say lady: d’ya wanna be a star?”
Victoria spun around, tossed her head backwards, and pouted at the cameraman like a promiscuous Jackie O.
Jim’s camera clicked. The moment was preserved.
The Model
Rita Bennett was just relieved that she’d put her clothes back on by the time the two cops showed up on the island. She’d spent most of the morning nude, playing her part for the film, before taking advantage of the warm summer weather by retiring to a rocky beach to sunbathe.
The policemen still arrested her though. They cuffed her for just being part of the group on the island rather than for any immoral behavior. Rita felt bad for the other girls. After all, she was the ringleader who’d got them together for the day’s shoot.
At 24, Rita was one of the older women arrested that day. She’d grown up an only child on Long Island, only forty miles away from Manhattan, but a world away from the excitement she craved. As a kid she had few friends, and little affection for her parents, an old-fashioned couple trapped in the soulless prison of a loveless relationship. On a good day, her father was cold and distant. On a bad day, his temper was as sharp as a switchblade and almost as dangerous. Rita’s mother took the brunt of the physical abuse, which only increased Rita’s contempt for her: her Dad may have been a brute, but her mother was weak, spineless, and clearly lacked the courage to leave. Rita had no time for either of them. She felt neglected and forgotten, and she wanted out.
As she entered her teenage years, Rita suddenly became attractive and popular. She was smart enough to know the two were connected, so she devoted herself to curating her looks. She bought make-up, beauty treatments, and clothes. She paraded in front of the mirror for hours, modeling herself on Rita Hayworth and other sirens of the silver screen.
Rita Bennett
The payback was instant, as she became the object of men’s desires. Rita cared little for forming a lasting bond with any of her suitors – she was contemptuous of the idea of a suffocating full-time relationship – but she recognized what men could do for her. Men had power and money, and now she had something to offer in return.
Rita left home at 16 and moved into a room in a Manhattan apartment with five other girls she barely knew. She found work as a hostess in a bar, where her job was to engage men in flirtatious conversation so they’d stick around. She had to subtly persuade them to buy drinks at regular intervals, one for themselves and one for her. All the hostess’s drinks were supposed to be watered down, but Rita persuaded the bartenders to give her the real thing because she disliked diluted alcohol. The result was as predictable as it was messy: by the end of her shift each night, Rita was well done. The liquor numbed the pain of childhood, but left her unable to resist the unwanted advances of more persistent barflies who’d shove her into a taxi and take her to a cheap hotel room. The nights became a drunken blur, but that was OK. She preferred the details to be out of focus.
Shortly after Rita got work as a model. She smiled next to cars, restaurants, cigarettes, boats, and household goods. She paraded clothes, fancy jewelry and hats. The pictures appeared in newspapers, magazines, and on billboards. She became the face of an ad campaign for a Manhattan department store, which adorned the side of every midtown bus. Rita was proud of the work. She cut out every picture of herself, and glued them into a series of large scrapbooks that never left her bedroom.
Rita Bennett
Her recurring fear was that she would end up like her mother: wholly dependent on a violent man, popping pills to colorize a black and white existence. So Rita made hay while the sun shone. Her body became the product, and she sold it wherever she could. She worked as a topless dancer in clubs across the city, and posed for nude pictures in men’s magazines. The extra money meant she could pay for a place of her own, so she moved into a room at the Imperial Court Hotel on West 79th St. It was less glamorous than the name suggests, but she finally had what she wanted most: her independence.
Rita Bennett
The stripping and nude modeling work opened other doors, though most of them had ‘Sex’ written on them. She turned tricks, and started to strut her stuff for primitive black and white adult films. Her first (unsuccessful) audition was for Radley Metzger who was hiring girls for sexy inserts to spice up Les Collégiennes, a French film he’d imported, and she took an uncredited bit-part in director Joe Sarno’s sexploitation debut, Nude in Charcoal (1961).
Rita, seated, in Joe Sarno’s ‘Nude in Charcoal’ (1961)
But it was a huckster called Barry Mahon who gave her regular appearances in film. Mahon, an ex-war hero and ex-manager of Errol Flynn, was re-inventing himself in New York as a nudie film producer. He went bananas when he saw Rita do the mashed potato one night at the Peppermint Lounge, and was sold. He smooth-talked her into appearing au naturel in his next nudie-short – but in truth, she needed little encouragement. Rita joined a repertory company of strippers and models, and in quick succession appeared in tame flesh operas such as Sin in the City and Crazy Wild and Crazy.
Rita Bennett
Rita can’t remember how she first heard about the job on Hoffman Island. It sounded fun though. A day in the sun, a boat trip, some modeling, and cash in hand by sundown. She recruited some friends from the stripping and modeling circuits, such as Dawn and Darlene Bennett (sisters, but no relation to Rita) and the Germanic, volcanic blonde Gigi Darlene. They all featured in the first segment filmed on Hoffman Island that day.
Rita also brought along Vicky Burke. Vicky was a New Jersey runaway who Rita had met at a hostess lounge. She was five years younger than Rita – which seemed like a lifetime at that age. Vicky was naïve and sweet, but wild and irresponsible too. She reminded Rita of the person she’d been when she left home. Everything Vicky did was to provoke people into noticing her. Her self-worth depended on attention. She dressed suggestively, drank to excess, and ran with a gangster crowd. But Rita could see through Vicky’s hard shell. Vicky was a good kid, and just needed some protection from herself.
So Rita found work for Vicky, such as the shoot on Hoffman Island. And it was Vicky whose suggestive shrieks during filming attracted the attention of two waterfront cops in a nearby boat.
The newspapers said that the policemen found Vicky ‘unadornedly abashed.’
The Film Director
Leon Gast was 29 when he was arrested on Hoffman Island.
He was an accidental pornographer, and never had any desire to spend his life making sex films. In fact, as a teenager, he didn’t have the grades or the motivation for any kind of career plan. But a cousin invited him to join a class on The History of Film at Columbia University, and the effect on Leon was instant: “It blew my fucking mind. I had that… ‘this is what I want to do’ moment.”
From that day, he consumed film as if he was playing catch up. His favorites were gritty, realistic, newsreel-style works like ‘Battleship Potemkin’ and ‘Paths of Glory.’ He enrolled at Columbia and took courses in documentary film and TV commercials.
For Leon the 1960s were all about getting filmmaking experience. If he’d been in Hollywood, it might have been easier, but in New York, his options were more limited. And ‘limited options’ usually meant working on industrials or sex films, so Leon did both.
He started working for advertising companies filming ‘table-tops’ – short interactions between, say, a couple of housewives, which present a product.
Leon explains: “Two women are having coffee.
One says: ‘Jane, you look a little uncomfortable, could it be hemorrhoids?’
‘Why, however did you know?’
‘Because I suffered myself until discovering Preparation H.’
The voice-over floats in: ‘Preparation H… in ointment or suppository form… brings instant relief to the afflicted area.’”
But Leon also had an eye for a good camera shot, and was soon engaged by fashion companies: “I started shooting hats for $7.50 a piece. Then corsets and bras, until eventually I’m shooting wedding dresses. That’s a much tougher gig, so I got more money for that.” His work appeared in Vogue, Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar.
And then there were the sex films. It was strictly ‘bra and panties’ work at that time, with nobody taking all their clothes off. Filmmaker Jack Bravman, who employed Leon, remembers, “For the girls, it was just about dropping your dress and acting sexy. Anything that resembled actual sex was purely accidental.”
For Leon, it was plentiful work, easy to do, and brought in a much-need income stream. Along the way, he learned how to use Arriflex film cameras, Nagra sound recorders, and the rest. Nearly all of his involvement was below the radar and uncredited, so it didn’t jeopardize his mainstream work. Only once was his involvement in sex films formally noted, as cinematographer in the low budget but ambitious drugs-music-and-sex opus, Blonde on a Bum Trip.
But to call Leon the ‘film director’ for the Hoffman Island caper, as the newspapers did, is overstating his role. He’d been hired by a guy he’d met through a friend of a friend. The instructions were straightforward: he was the only cameraman – or crew member – involved, and his job was to shoot three set-ups over the course of the day. Each one was a cute vignette involving the actors – mostly women – disrobing. The only difference from the usual sex flick work that he did was that this job was taking place outside in bright sunshine, instead of in a small apartment bedroom.
It was late in the afternoon when the two patrolmen suddenly appeared in Leon’s shot. Somehow, they’d come onto the island unnoticed, and were now observing three women writhing on beach towels, their clothing long discarded. They were also watching Leon standing a few feet away, his lens trained on the naked flesh.
Leon had been caught red-handed and red-faced. The cops assumed Leon was the big fish. He was the one issuing the instructions so they figured he must be the boss, right? Leon protested his innocence. He described himself as a ‘freelance photographer’, strictly small cheese. He told them he had no idea what was going to happen to the film he was shooting. It was all true, but Leon was booked anyway, and named in all the newspaper reports. The film itself was confiscated by the police.
The Daily News loved the story, declaring that, “when the films are exposed, the charges may be fleshed up.”
The ‘Laborer’
The New York newspapers referred to the man at the side of the photo in the police station as a ‘laborer’. That was because he’d described himself that way to the cops.
The man insisted he was just an irrelevant guy from Brooklyn who had no idea what was going on. The Daily News believed his story, and reported that, “his labors just consisted of transporting the dedicated company to the shooting site in his 27-foot cabin cruiser.”
Theodore ‘Ted’ Rothstein wasn’t pleased that he’d been arrested, but he was happy with the way he was described. It wasn’t accurate, but at least it didn’t draw attention to his business. Any adverse publicity for his company would be the last straw right now.
The irony was that Ted was the brains behind the film shoot on Hoffman Island. The newspapers described the participants as a group of ‘Greenwich Village-type beatniks’, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. It was a professional operation by a budding pornographer.
Ted had set it up and paid everyone. He’d hired Leon to shoot it. He knew Rita from a girlie magazine shoot that he’d done. He asked her to pull together a group of actresses for the day. And it was Ted who was going to sell the Hoffman Island film to make some much-needed cash to keep his business afloat.
Ted owned a magazine distribution company, Star Distributors, that operated out of Brooklyn. It’d been incorporated back in 1948, specializing in niche trade publications. Initially it’d done reasonably well but suffered when richer national companies merged and squeezed Star to the margins.
Ted had taken over Star in the early 1960s looking to turn it around by finding new markets. He found one distributing risqué, softcore pinup magazines that the bigger companies were afraid to touch. It seemed a good idea on paper, but the sex business was influenced by the mob, and Ted’s Star Distributors found it difficult to gain a foothold. Star lost ground and lost money. Soon its operations were severely hampered by a shortage of cash. In the short term, the only way for it to stay in business was to change their payment terms: Star started asking publishers to pay them in cash in advance before they did any distributing. This broke the golden rule in the trade, where materials were taken on a consignment basis. Star became even less popular with its clients.
Ted tried branching out into producing his own publications – cheesecake pin-up magazines and nude photosets – but it was small beer, and it failed to stop the rot.
And then came the debacle on Hoffman Island. A court case loomed, with escalating costs and unwanted publicity. Ted kicked himself because he never had to be on Hoffman Island that day. But he was, and he was caught, and now he was paying the price.
It was Hoffman Island that convinced Ted that he needed to take more drastic action to save his company. Star didn’t just need a new plan. It needed new blood, a fresh vision, and a lot more money.
Step in a 28 year-old, smooth-talking Italian-American from Brooklyn named Robert, who called himself DiBe (pronounced DEE-BEE), an abbreviation of his surname, DiBernardo.
DiBe was a polished operator, a dapper dresser who preferred a mod cut to his stylish clothing. He wore tinted, aviator-style glasses, and his brown hair, although receding, was stylishly and regularly coiffed. On the surface, DiBe was a friendly, well-connected, and happily married family man with four kids. But he was also rumored to have organized crime connections: the word was that made his money in the wheel-alignment business with Gaetano ‘Corky’ Vastola, an ex-con and member of the DeCavalcante mob family.
DiBe approached Ted and made him an offer: Ted could stay on as the company president, but DiBe would became vice president and principal financier of Star. And DiBe would have the last word on any significant matter relating to the Star business.
Ted accepted. He had no choice.
DiBe’s first pronouncement was that Star would switch its focus: It would now deal in hardcore sexual material. It was time to get serious.
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2. Since Yesteryear
The Photographer
Jim Romano never left Staten Island. He’s 90 now, and still lives in the same house he shared with his wife until she died in 1979.
It’s been 73 years since the start of his colorful career shooting black and white images. In his own words, “I began with a one-dollar camera and a lot of personality.” He traded in that first camera and graduated to a 16mm folding model that he borrowed from his brother-in-law, before finally acquiring a hefty Speed Graphic, de rigueur for professional news photographers in that era. Nowadays he still takes photographs, though he uses a simple digital camera most of the time.
Jim Romano
Jim was self-taught as a photographer: “Everybody has their own capabilities. Mine were stamina, patience, personality, and connections. That’s all there was to it.”
In the years since the Hoffman Island scandal, he continued taking pictures for all the New York newspapers. Predictably his archives burst at the seams with all of his photographs, but the one he still carries in his wallet is a close-up picture of JFK. He could “charm the birds out of the trees,” Jim says.
“But today you can’t do what I did back then. I could do whatever I wanted in those days. I made friends with police and firemen, and they often let me in. Today the restrictions on access are ridiculous… incredible. A working photographer like me isn’t allowed anywhere near the locations I went to. And that’s bad for the general public. They don’t get to see what is happening up close anymore. We’re desensitizing ourselves. We don’t know whats going on any more.”
The world may have changed since the afternoon he took the picture of the Hoffman Island arrests, but Jim’s reaction to it remains the same: “I don’t know what the hell to believe today – but if I see something… I still just photograph it.”
Jim Romano
The Film Director
Leon Gast’s skill as a filmmaker was always matched by a keen ability to take advantage of any situation – crucial for success in the documentary film world that he aspired to join.
Take the first mainstream film he directed for example: Our Latin Thing / Nuestra Cosa (1972). In the six years after the events on Hoffman Island, Leon continued to shoot commercial photographs and the occasional softcore film: all were notable solely for their lack of success. Then in 1971, he was hired by Jerry Masucci – who owned Fania Records, a New York based Salsa record label – to shoot the cover for an album, The Fania All-Stars Live at The Red Garter. Other LP covers for Fania followed, so Leon suggested a film documentary that chronicled the birth of Salsa. It would center around an August 1971 concert at The Cheetah Club in midtown Manhattan, featuring Fania’s finest musicians, the cream of New York’s Latin scene. Masucci liked the idea, and gave him the green light. Leon’s film was a breakout success, finally putting him on the map as a filmmaker.
A couple of years later, Masucci again hired Leon. This time Masucci had teamed up with boxing promoter Don King to put together one of the biggest match-ups in history: the undefeated world heavyweight champion George Foreman fighting against the former champion, Muhammad Ali.
A three-night-long music festival to hype the fight was planned to take place in the days leading up to the big fight, on September 22–24, 1974. The festival would include performances by James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, the Fania All-Stars, and many more.
The problem was that King and Masucci didn’t have the money – neither for the fight, nor for the concert.
Needing a large sum of money in a hurry is never a strong negotiating position, so when a solution was found it was unconventional and ethically-dubious: the whole event would take place in Zaire, sponsored by the country’s torture-and-murder-embracing dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, eager for the publicity such a high-profile event would bring him. And the proceeds from the concert would be used to make a lavish music documentary that would be released in theaters around the world. Masucci picked Leon as the man to make the movie, and so Leon left for Kinshasa.
But the best laid plans of mice and men (and Masucci and Mobutu) often go awry.
In this case, there were two setbacks. Firstly, Zaire’s despotic ruler declared that the music concert would be free-of-charge just days before it was supposed to happen. This was problematic given that Leon’s documentary was supposed to be funded from ticket sales.
And secondly, five days before the scheduled fight, Foreman acquired a bad cut above one of his eyes, and the fight was postponed for six weeks.
All of which meant Leon was stranded in central Africa.
So he turned his attention to the fight itself, and filmed Ali in the build-up to the big night. It proved to be a prescient decision: Ali, golden and God-like, was full of political bluster and bravado, preaching about the dignity of the native Africans and his hopes for African-Americans in the future. And when the fight took place, attended by 60,000 and dubbed ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’, it was a classic. Ali won by knockout, knocking out Foreman at the end of the eighth round.
When Gast returned from Kinshasa, he was broke – but he had 300,000 feet of unique and valuable footage. Over the next years, he paid the bills by making documentaries on the Grateful Dead and the Hell’s Angels. It wasn’t until fifteen years later, in 1989, that he found someone willing to invest $1 million to finish the Ali project. Even then, it took him a further six years to bring the film to the screen.
The resulting documentary was worth the wait. When We Were Kings (1996), was critically lauded and commercially successful. It went on to win the 1997 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award.
Gast himself was feted as being “a great chronicler of our times, a master of capturing the spontaneity of the moment.”
It was a far cry from a secret sex film on Hoffman Island.
Leon Gast (right), with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman
The ‘Laborer’
Ted Rothstein quickly got over the Hoffman Island setback.
With hindsight, it’d been a watershed moment. He’d hit rock bottom, and the arrest forced him to seek external help for his business. With DiBe onboard, Star Distributors’ financial strength and credit rating improved dramatically. Cash flowed into the company, and Star went back to receiving merchandise on consignment. The business soon became one of the city’s largest wholesale outlets for pornographic magazines.
One of the most lucrative of Star’s clients was an explicit sex newspaper, founded in 1968, named Screw magazine. Screw was run by a couple of censorship-challenging upstarts, Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley, who freely admitted that their rag was distributed by a mob-controlled company like Star, but insisted they had no other options.
“When Screw was first published, distributors and operators of newsstands refused to handle the paper out of fear that they would be arrested on obscenity charges,” Buckley said. “It’s the law that forced us into Mafia distribution.”
Goldstein and Buckley signed a contract with Star, who agreed to handle the paper outside of New York – but not within the city. Law enforcement officials said that this was because Star and DiBe were linked to the De Cavalcante family which feared angering other Mafia families by encroaching on their local territory. (Distribution in New York City was handled by a different mob faction.) Nevertheless, the contract was lucrative for all sides, and Star flourished.
Another major source of revenue was on Star’s doorstep in Times Square. A multitude of new businesses trafficking in porn product had sprung up in an area where the police seemed incapable of preventing the flouting of obscenity laws. It provided Star with a lucrative and ready-made income stream, and their most notable outlet was Show World at 669 Eight Avenue, a self-described ‘supermarket of smut.’
Under DiBe and Ted’s guidance, Star became a multi-million dollar sex empire conglomerate, branching out nationwide, taking controlling interests in other sex-industry companies, expanding their scope to pornographic films, sexual devices, and dirty books, and controlling the bookstores, movie theaters, and publishing houses that they supplied. Star also formed relationships with other pornography magnates around the country such as Reuben Sturman. (Law enforcement was never clear whether DiBe and Ted were collaborating or extorting the people with whom they did business.)
If DiBe had created a new model for porn distribution, he was also a new kind of pornographer. DiBe didn’t hide his involvement in the sex business behind a middle man or a series of innocuous shell companies. He conducted his business openly. He drove between his suburban home on Long Island and Star’s downtown Manhattan offices at 150 Lafayette St in a 1972 Mercedes Benz with personalized number plates.
By the mid-1970s, DiBe’s mob connections were known to all. He was even caught by FBI bugs telling another pornography magnate, Michael Thevis, that ‘the family’ was in charge of all of his businesses. But DiBe was one of the very few thought to have become a ‘made man’ in the Mafia without committing a murder. In fact, he didn’t even have a reputation for violence and, unlike most Mafia members of his status, he didn’t retain a crew to back him up. Nevertheless, his Mafia links deterred potential competitors and warded off other criminals.
DiBe was seen as a phenomenal money maker, and described by a journalist in 1977 as “packing an unparalleled reputation as a tough-minded, competent, and shrewd businessman.” He cultivated a mainstream image as well, diversifying into investments such as automotive repair franchises, a car wash, pinball arcades, and several mainstream media distribution firms.
But Star’s high profile didn’t do DiBe or Ted any favors when the heat was turned up on obscenity prosecutions in the late 1970s. In 1980, a 2½ year undercover investigation by the FBI came to a conclusion. Based in Miami, and termed MIPORN, the operation aimed to crack the nationwide conspiracy controlling the multibillion-dollar pornography industry. DiBe and Ted were among the 45 people targeted, arrested, and charged with interstate transportation of obscene materials.
Newspaper article, listing the MIPORN arrests, including that of Robert DiBernardo and Ted Rothstein
The investigation singled out four men it said were the country’s major traffickers in dirty books and movies: Rubin Sturman of Cleveland, Harry Mohney of Durand, Michigan, and Mickey Zaffarano and Robert (DiBe) DiBernardo, both described as organized crime figures from New York. The arrests meant that DiBe and Ted faced long jail sentences. Fortunately for them the case came crashing down when one of the two key witnesses, a dim-witted undercover agent called Pat Livingston, was arrested for trying to steal a sweater from a department store. DiBe’s attorney argued that Livingston’s crime was indicative of psychiatric problems that made it difficult for him to distinguish between his real identity and his undercover identity, and between truth and fiction. This made his testimony and actions highly unreliable.
Case dismissed, DiBe and Ted were free to go back to work.
With hindsight however, DiBe probably wished that he’d been ordered to serve jailtime. Despite, or perhaps because of, his success over the previous two decades, DiBe had slowly become caught up in powerplay politics between John Gotti and mob underboss Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano. On the evening of June 5th 1986, DiBe left his office at Star to take his family out for the evening. He was told to stop off at the basement offices of Gravano’s drywall company on Stillwell Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. While there, DiBe was shot in the back of the head. His body was never found.
Robert DiBernardo, aka DiBe, is missing, presumed murdered
But the business that Ted had built, and DiBe had perfected, was too big to fail, and Star Distributors continued to be profitable even after DiBe’s disappearance. Ted moved the Star offices into a single 40,000-foot location at 20-40 Jay Street in Brooklyn, where he continued to start and acquire new businesses. By the 2000s, the company was divided into three additional parts: Bizarre Video, acquired from California which focused on adult films; Media Distributors, which distributed newspapers; and Novelties by Nasswalk which sold sex toys.
The flagship company, Star, concentrated on what it had done back almost half a century before – distributing magazines.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Robert DiBernardo, aka DiBe
The Model
I first met Rita Bennett in 2005, almost 40 years to the day after the events on Hoffman Island.
Unlike most actresses of the time, she only ever used her real name. I found her listed in the phone directory, living in an apartment just off Times Square on West 43rd St. She was happy to get together, and chose to meet in an old-fashioned steakhouse nearby. Age 64, she turned up in an immaculate white evening gown and an elegant large-brimmed, black and ivory hat. The overall impression was an aging Audrey Hepburn from ‘My Fair Lady.’ She spoke in a cultured, refined manner, and flirted gently. Clearly the teenage hostess from the 1950s had never left the building.
She remembered the day on Hoffman Island well. The arrest had been “unwelcome”, but the charges against her were dropped a few months later. She later had a relationship with a cop who went into the NYPD archives and got hold of the reels of film that Leon had shot. He gave them to Rita as an sign of his influence. Rita left the cop, but kept the film along with her scrapbooks.
Rita said that the Hoffman Island experience been a strange turning point for her. After that she felt a strange sense of empowerment: “I knew I was beautiful, but after Hoffman Island, I felt invincible too.”
Rita smiled: “But I was young then. And youth makes you feel stronger than you are.”
Rita, in Joe Sarno’s The Bed, And To Make It (1966)
The new confidence made Rita want a career in movies. She continued to strip in clubs across the tri-state area, but now she got an acting agent and eagerly turned up at auditions for every big movie that was shooting in New York. She got parts in movies – some arthouse, some grindhouse – but drew the line at hardcore when sex films became more explicit in the 1970s: “I was a lady, after all.”
The good news was that Rita got roles in several major films: John and Mary (1969) with Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), and Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). The bad news was that she was hired to play a stripper in each one. And then there was the harassment: producers wanted to get to know her more intimately, but wouldn’t consider her for anything that would break out of the stereotype she’d created.
Rita, in ‘John and Mary’ (1969)
By the mid-1980s, Rita stopped looking for film work, and stopped stripping too. “The world had changed too much. I was from a different era. No one seemed interested in anything I had to offer by then.”
She was still determinedly single (“I knew that a permanent man in my life would kill my spirit eventually”), so she found new passions: fashion and animal welfare. She didn’t stay in touch with anyone from the old days, but occasionally socialized with fellow characters from the day, such as Quentin Crisp and Taylor Mead.
I kept in touch with Rita after our first meeting, and saw her on and off for years. Sadly, the truth behind her glamorous façade was rather different. Her apartment wasn’t worthy of the name. She lived in a minuscule single room in an SRO building that she shared with a large dog, Buck. The building was overcrowded with poor, unwell, or mentally unstable residents, and Rita spent most of her time behind her carefully locked door in a room that hadn’t been cleaned in years. I joked that Quentin Crisp, who’d lived in a similarly messy space, always said that after four years an apartment doesn’t get any dirtier. “It’s just a matter of keeping your nerve,” he’d say. Rita just looked embarrassed.
But Rita’s problems were deeper than an untidy living space. She’d been an alcoholic for longer than she cared to remember. After our first few meetings, she either decided that she couldn’t, or couldn’t be bothered, to hide it. Years of good-time girl drinking in clubs and bars had taken a toll. Each time we met, she beseeched me to bring her a bottle of vodka, and a part of each of visit consisted of her throwing up in her postage stamp bathroom. To make matters worse, she’d been declared bankrupt the previous year.
Apart from Buck, she had one source of pride left: the scrapbooks that she’d kept since the 1950s. Lovingly curated volumes tracing her life through the films, commercials, and news events that she’d passed through. A chronological record of an eventful life that she was proud to share. She kept the books on top of her wardrobe with the Hoffman Island film reels.
Rita, in ‘Flying Acquaintances’ (1975)
I spoke to Rita in early 2017. She’d left the city and moved into an apartment block in the Hudson Valley, twenty miles north of Manhattan. She said she was happier there. It was a safer building, and Buck had more space to play, but she was keen to have visitors.
I called her a few weeks later to arrange a trip, but received no response. I tried again over the next months but with no more luck. Eventually I contacted the management company for the building in which she lived. They told me she’d died a few months before. She’d been buried in a potter’s field somewhere. No one seemed to know.
I asked about her possessions. What had happened to them, in particular her scrapbooks and the film reels?
The management company said she had no relatives, no next of kin, not even any friends who came forward to claim her personal effects when she passed. In situations like this, they said, the company can’t take responsibility for the deceased’s belongings. So they trashed it all. All of Rita’s belongings, recording her existence, were thrown away.
Rita, with Robert De Nero in ‘Raging Bull’ (1980)
The Photograph
Today Jim Romano’s photograph taken in the Staten Island police station is long forgotten. The people in the photo are long forgotten. And Hoffman Island is pretty forgotten as well.
In the 1980s, the island was suggested as a place where some of the city’s homeless could be sheltered. Unsurprisingly the plan came to nothing. It’s currently managed by the National Park Service, and to protect the island’s endangered bird population, it’s strictly off limits to the public. The only visitors in recent years have been harbor seals observed wintering on the island.
The 1965 arrests are long forgotten too. In fact, it’s difficult to understand why a group of people could be arrested – and make the news – for something that thousands of people do on their iPhones every day.
But August 3rd, 1965 saw the brief collision of a handful of people. A local photographer, a hopeful actress, a budding filmmaker, and a failing businessman. They came together, made a sex film, got arrested, and never saw each other again.
If life is the sum of one’s choices, their lives were shaped by what happened that summer’s day.
We look back at the east coast publication Cinema Blue by reviewing the magazine’s first year in business – 1984 – and speaking with Joyce James, the magazine’s editor during the first years.
Fully digitized copies of each 1984 magazine can be found in the article below. You can find The Rialto Report’s growing collection of digitized resources by choosing Library in our site menu.
Click on the covers below to access the full magazines. Due to the fact that the magazines are scanned in high definition, allow time for each page to load. If you are viewing on a phone, view in landscape orientation.
Magazines are fully searchable; use the icon displayed in each magazine to search by keyword.
Publications are being shared here purely for the purpose of research. They should not to be used or reproduced for any commercial gain.
Cinema Blue – An Interview with Editor Joyce James
What is your family background?
My entire family are New York City police officers. My mother was actually a famous female detective in New York City, so I grew up with a well-known hero-mom, who won lots of awards for bravery.
Joyce James’ mother in action
What had you been doing prior to your involvement in adult magazines?
I was at the University of Buffalo finishing my PhD in English literature. I got married when I was 21, like a good little Italian girl. As I was finishing my PhD, I got pregnant with my first son… which completely sidelined me as pregnancy has a tendency to do. The next thing I knew I had a kid, was in an unhappy marriage, and had no work.
How did the opportunity in adult magazines come about?
My marriage was breaking up and I had a two-year-old son to support. I was at a Leche League meeting and asked if anyone knew of any job openings. A friend of mine, who was in the middle of squirting milk into her child’s mouth, said that a friend of hers knew a guy who was a magazine editor – and his name was Peter Wolff. She said he badly needed an assistant.
I looked at her and said, “An assistant to a magazine editor? Are you crazy? I’ve never written or edited anything except my doctoral thesis. She said that Peter was so desperate he’d hire anyone with a college degree.
All she knew was that the magazine was called Oui. The name meant nothing to me whatsoever, but I was excited.
Joyce James
Do you remember going into work your first day?
I was 28 at the time, and I remember I dressed up in a blue silk suit with a white ruffled blouse. I looked like a college professor. Or actually Miss fucking Congeniality.
I went into this sleazy, dirty building in midtown that had no signs. I opened the door and it looked like an old deserted, insane asylum. It was like walking into The Twilight Zone.
What did you find inside?
I walked up the hallway, and found people in various stages of undress walking out of this one office. I went up to the door, and there was a piece of paper taped to it on which someone had written ‘Oui’ in pen. So I opened the door and went in.
Inside it was like a zoo. There was a very beautiful black woman named Sparky Vasc. She was a good kid. She was there with a girl named Lisa Cintrice. They were working at this place, and I think Susie Nero and Sharon Mitchell were there too.
Of course, Dian Hanson was always there, with her husband Little Bobby Hanson who was a magazine photographer. She was Peter Wolff’s second in command. Dian was such a powerhouse. She and I would disagree, very strongly, on a lot of things.
By now, you must have figured out that Oui was essentially a pornographic publication?
Yes, they had copies of the latest issue laid out on the tables. I saw it had a girl on the cover and her boobs are out and inside there were centerfolds and so on. I figured that basically it was a low-rent Playboy or Penthouse magazine.
What experience had you had with pornography before that?
I thought I was a pretty hip person, but I was also an English professor who was used to academia and libraries. I’d never seen an X-rated film before.
The closest I’d come to pornography was in my marriage: my husband had, on occasion, bought Penthouse Letters, which we read and thought were entirely genuine reader experiences. That’s how naive we were. And we’d say, isn’t it weird that the people who write these letters always have these amazing experiences and we don’t? We were in awe of the people who are having all this crazy consensual sex.
What was the reaction of the people at Oui magazine to have someone as inexperienced as you turn up for work?
All the women were wearing little tank-tops with names like Show World or Oui emblazoned on their boobs, so I thought I was going to struggle to fit in. They all looked me up and down, and they cracked up like Mary Tyler Moore had just walked into their office.
Then I saw a porn star on her hands and knees lapping at a bowl of water. Really?! Is this supposed to be someone’s idea of sexy? Later on I saw Peter put Lisa and Sparky on leashes and walk them around the office. I wasn’t a prude, but I also felt I knew what is sexy and what’s not sexy. And I certainly didn’t see anything remotely sexy about what Peter was doing.
So I was expecting the worst.
Do you remember the first instructions you were given?
Peter came out of his office and took a look at me. He had a huge stack of papers in his hand and threw them on a desk in front of me and said, “Sit here, edit this, this is the next magazine.” Then he went back into his office, and closed his door.
Most of the papers were typed, but there were also illegible little pieces of paper written in pencil that I was told I had to edit. Dian told me that the scraps were Ron Jeremy’s monthly gossip column. She said there wasn’t usually very much there, and that I should do whatever I could with it.
I said, “Who’s Ron Jeremy?” I had no clue.
I noticed that all of the copy that’d been handed to me said ‘Adult Cinema Review’ on the top. No one had told me that I wasn’t hired to work on Oui magazine. So I finally asked someone and found out that they’d actually hired me to be the editor of Adult Cinema Review, not Peter Wolff’s assistant.
How did you balance the job with being a mother?
It worked out well. I had split custody of my son with my ex, and I was still teaching college a couple of nights a week. The rest of the time I was working on the magazine – and best of all, I actually had an income now.
What was your family’s reaction to your job?
My mom was extremely protective, so you can only imagine her response when I told her what I was doing for a living. I’ll never forget her reaction. She said, “But I lock up people who do what you do…”
I felt so sorry for her. I was very much a Mamma’s girl, so that was rough. But in some ways, I was following in my mom’s footsteps – she was a rebel who’d been told to stay at home, be a nice Italian girl, make pizza, and bring your husband his slippers. And she said, “Nope, I’m going to become a fantastic lady detective. I’m going to show them.” So I felt I was similar to her in being rebellious… even though I was rebelling against my mom. I did it on my own terms.
Joyce James, with Danielle
How difficult was it to get up to speed on the requirements of being a magazine editor?
I knew nothing: I’d never edited, I didn’t even know how to proof-read. I was expected to take this material that someone else had written and turn it into stuff that could actually appear in a magazine. I didn’t know how to do any of it at all. There was so much I was supposed to know and I never let on that I was clueless.
At the beginning, it was like someone was speaking hieroglyphics to me. I didn’t know what a font was, or a subhead. What’s a blurb?
But I listened. I bluffed. And I found people outside of the company that could explain things to me. I learned these little mysteries, but it took a long time.
Do you remember the first interview that you did for the magazine?
Peter Wolff came up to me with a scrap of paper. Everything was on scraps of paper. It was a piece of an envelope with an address in Queens. Peter said I had to go out there to interview the producer of a film that we were going to feature the following month.
I expected it to be a film studio but it was this guy’s apartment. He opened the door wearing one of the 1970s shirts that stuck to your skin. It was open to his naval, showing off full chest hair and tons of bling.
He talked me through the plot intricacies, and then showed me the movie. It was the first X-rated film I’d ever seen in my life – and it was terrible. Absolutely the worst, most exploitative sleazy porn movie – though to be fair, I hadn’t seen any others so I was in no position to judge just how bad it was. All I knew was objectively, it was bad.
But I didn’t complain, and I think Peter accepted me after that. I think I proved my spurs because I could’ve come back and said, “How dare you send me there by myself? Instead I think he thought, “She’s got something.”
Who else worked with you to put the magazine together?
I had an art director. One of my first tasks was to go and meet him. Peter gave me his address, which was in the East Village. He was this odd, little gnome man, much shorter than me, probably in his forties. And he looked like he’d never left his apartment. I would put good money on the fact that I was the first woman who’d ever knocked on his door: the look on his face when I showed up was priceless.
I said, “Apparently we’re supposed to work together on the next magazine, so why don’t you show me how you usually do it with Peter?”
He had all the necessary equipment in the apartment – a slide projector and a screen for us to view the chromes and to decide which to use. We started to review the photographs, and obviously they were all pictures of people screwing. This wasn’t pin-up photography, these were from hardcore sex shoots.
About five minutes into this, he stands up and I see that he’s got his dick in his hand. Now it turns out that this dwarf-like man is very well-endowed. In fact, with his cock in his hand, I was surprised he didn’t topple over onto his face.
He says, “I hope you don’t mind me jerking off.”
I was thinking, “Okay. This must be how they do it. Every month everyone must sit around, jerk off, and that’s how they figure out what’s going to be in the magazine. Oh my God, am I now expected to start masturbating too?”
So I said, “Oh sure, that’s fine.”
After a while, he finished. He pulled his pants up and he didn’t say another word. He certainly didn’t touch me. He made no attempt to grab me. He didn’t even come near me. And from that moment on, he had such a crush on me. It was a trial-by fire initiation, but it was nothing cruel. It wasn’t Louis C K: he didn’t slam the door on me, turn around and start masturbating and force me to stay until he finished, threatening to ruin my career if I spoke about it. It wasn’t like that. No, no. So as it turned out, the world of porn might be safer for women than the world of comedy. Other than that, I can’t say I saw anyone abused or mistreated in any way on the set of a porn movie or photo shoot. I never saw anyone forced to do a scene. I mean, no one wanted to screw Ron Jeremy, but that’s another story.
Joyce James, with Kelly Nichols and friend
What do you remember about Ron Jeremy?
He came in to see me each month to hand in his latest gossip column. He was getting paid about $400 a column – an outrageous amount of money for doing virtually nothing. He would plead with me and say, “Can you edit it into something that sounds like it was written properly?”
I treated him like one of my students. Eventually, he learned to not bust my chops.
What challenges did you face with regards to censorship?
My aim was always to get as close to showing penetration as we could. I fought with every publisher over the dots and the spots and the bars that they wanted to add to the pictures to cover the point of penetration and obscure it. I even designed a pig head to cover the action. I wanted to make fun of it because I thought it was ridiculous.
I became very pro-pornography and pro people’s right to watch it. That became something that I wanted to fight for. It was very important to me.
So you eventually got used to the job?
The way I saw it was that I was this hot, bright, single woman investigating the underworld of pornography and erotica. I used it to get myself into all kinds of situations so that I had great stuff to write about. It made my life that much more exciting.
I adopted a persona, who I called ‘Joyce James’ – which was the reverse of the writer ‘James Joyce.’ Joyce James’ life became ‘The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pornographer.’ During the week, I was very much the observer. And then I’d go back up to Westchester, and I’d go to the La Leche League meetings, and I’d go teach college, and I’d take my baby to Rye Playland, and we’d play in the sand and ride the ponies. And my son had a perfectly normal childhood because he was never near any of what I did in the city.
After a while, I thought: this is actually fun. I feel safe here.
*
Cinema Blue: The Complete 1984 Issues
February 1984 (Vol 1, No. 1) (click on cover to view full magazine)
‘The Sins of Ilsa’ is Radley Metzger‘s most mysterious film as a director – mainly because no one has ever heard of it, let alone had the chance to see it.
The story of Radley’s film career is well-known – and for good reason: Radley was one of the pioneers of American adult cinema, directing his own highly stylized films – including Therese and Isabelle (1968), Camille 2000 (1969), The Lickerish Quartet (1970), and Score (1974) – and distributing many European movies through his New York based company, Audubon Films. His films straddled both the soft and hardcore eras, and included a mainstream effort, The Cat and The Canary (1978), before the cinematic landscape changed in the early 1980s. The advent of shot-on-video adult films and the waning appetite for elaborately produced, plot-driven erotica meant that his career effectively came to a standstill. After directing The Princess and the Call Girl in 1984, he retired from making feature films and turned his attention to producing a series of videos on alternative health care.
Except that’s not the full story.
In 1984/85, Radley directed one more film: a soft-core movie called ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ that has remained unknown until now.
The Rialto Report came across a copy of the film and watched it – perhaps the only people to see it in the last 30 years.
Over the past year, we’ve spoken to many people to piece the story together – actors, agents, crew members, friends, crew who provided locations or equipment, and more. We are indebted to them all for their time and for the details they provided to us. Some asked to remain anonymous, and so have been redacted from documentation they provided at their request.
This is the story of Radley Metzger’s unreleased final film.
During the final decade of Radley Metzger’s life, I had lunch with him each week, usually at the Palace Diner on East 57th St in New York. Perhaps it was fitting that in many of our last meetings, our conversation often turned to the films he’d never made.
He spoke lovingly about films he’d wanted to make, films he’d researched thoroughly, films he had deals to make, but somehow films that never quite materialized. And there were many of them – from a documentary about the how the Spanish Civil War was portrayed on the silver screen through to countless scripts he’d written that remained unproduced, even including an early 1970s blaxploitation movie. With hindsight, these conversations were fitting and poignant, as he looked back wistfully at the different paths his career could have taken.
In one of these conversations, he mentioned a curious anomaly: a film that he HAD made, but that had never been released.
He said it was a film that never appeared on his filmography, had never been shown to the public, and that he’d never mentioned to anyone in interviews. Typical of Radley, he was enigmatic about the details, amusing himself by teasing me with new scraps of information each time we met. After a few conversations about it, I had a vague outline of the mystery film: it had been shot in New York and Paris in 1984/85, he’d directed and written it himself (though he’d used a series of pseudonyms in the credits), and, like many of his films, it was drawn from a literary source.
And the film had a title: it was called ‘The Sins of Ilsa’.
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1975 – ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ – The Origin
The story behind ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ starts ten years before it was actually made.
In the summer of 1975, Radley was preparing to shoot his magnum opus, The Opening of Misty Beethoven – which would be filmed in October and November 1975. At this stage, ‘Misty Beethoven’ was just referred to as ‘Project 175’, before assuming the working title, ‘Society’ (the eventual title of the film was only settled later in post-production.)
Radley’s first choice for the titular role in ‘Misty Beethoven’ was French actress, Béatrice Harnois, who’d just starred in the French smash-hit Le Sexe qui Parle (1975) (aka ‘Pussy Talk’ in the United States, though sometimes bowdlerized in newspaper ads at the time to just ‘Talk’.)
‘Le Sexe qui Parle’ was France’s equivalent of Deep Throat (1972): it may not have been the first French hardcore production, but it enjoyed unprecedented box-office success thanks to a short-lived wave of ‘porno-chic’ in a newly sexually-liberated and erotic-curious marketplace.
In September 1975, Radley invited Harnois to New York to audition for the lead role in ‘Misty Beethoven’ and to film some test footage with her. In actual fact, Radley had a little more in mind than just shooting test footage: he’d worked up a short script that he intended filming, and needed several other actors to complete the cast.
He contacted Dorothy Palmer, a New York talent agent who ran an ostensibly mainstream clearing-house for actors, but who earned more for persuading performers to disrobe and have sex on screen. (“It’s all part of method-acting, my darling” she’d say to convince her charges. “It will help you shed your inhibitions.”)
Radley’s only stipulations to Palmer were that she provide him with talent that was both attractive and could act, and that hadn’t been used before. Palmer recommended a couple that were experienced theater actors but who were new to the X-rated business, Robert Kerman and Crystal Sync. Palmer also sent him a young all-American-looking male, who went by the suitably all-American nom-de-fuck of Lance Knight. Knight wanted daytime TV soap opera work and was on the fence about making the plunge into porn, but was eventually persuaded as he’d been a fan of the movies Radley had made in the 1960s. Three additional one-shot-wonder actors, who would never be seen again on X-rated screens, rounded out the group.
Robert Kerman, in a still shot by Radley, from 1975
Lance Knight, in a production photograph shot by Radley, from 1975
Over the course of two busy days, September 20th and 21st 1975, Radley filmed several scenes using Béatrice Harnois and the other actors recruited from Dorothy Palmer. The scenes had dialogue, and all included hardcore sex.
The convoluted plot for this short film, as far as it can be established, concerns Brigette, a French visitor to New York (played by Béatrice Harnois) who meets the ‘Hat Lady’ at a diner near Times Square. After they leave the restaurant, they somehow end up in Brigette’s hotel room where the Hat Lady forces Brigette into having sex with her at gunpoint. The Hat Lady then returns to her own apartment where she has a weekly role-playing game with her butler (played by Robert Kerman). The butler assumes the role of a jewel thief and pretend-rapes the Hat Lady when she finds him stealing from her. However, this time they’re discovered by the Hat Lady’s husband (played by Lance Knight), who reacts by leaving in disgust. While walking the streets, the husband meets Brigette, they become friends, and return to her hotel room for sex. Afterwards, Brigette gives the husband a neck scarf to remember her by. But when the husband returns home to the Hat Lady, the Hat Lady takes it from him saying that she’d lost it earlier in the day.
The scenes that Radley shot for this scenario are as follows:
Diner scene / Street scene, with Béatrice Harnois and Actress 1 (the Hat Lady)
Béatrice Harnois, in a still from 1975
Sex scene with Béatrice Harnois and Actress 1 (the Hat Lady)
Béatrice Harnois, in a production photograph from 1975
Sex scene with Robert Kerman and Actress 1 (the Hat Lady) with Lance Knight walking in on them
Robert Kerman and Actress 1 (the Hat Lady), in a production photograph from 1975
Street scene with Beatrice Harnois and Lance Knight (playing the partner of the Hat Lady)
Béatrice Harnois and Lance Knight, in a still from 1975
Sex scene with Béatrice Harnois and Lance Knight
Béatrice Harnois and Lance Knight, in a still from 1975
Apartment scene with Lance Knight returning to the Hat Lady
Lance Knight, Robert Kerman and Actress 1 (the Hat Lady), in a production photograph from 1975
In addition to the above, Radley shot five additional scenes which did not form part of the above narrative. They are as follows:
Sex scene with Actress 2 (playing a hooker) by herself
Sex scene with Béatrice Harnois and Actress 2 (playing a hooker)
Sex scene with Crystal Sync by herself
Sex scene with Crystal Sync and Actress 2 (this time playing a nurse)
Sex scene with Crystal Sync and Actor 1 (playing Crystal Sync’s partner)
Radley shooting the scene with Crystal Sync and Actor 1 (playing Crystal Sync’s partner)
Apart from the restaurant scene, which was shot at the Greek diner Syntagma Square at 680 Eighth Ave, just off 43rd St, all scenes were filmed in the apartment of Ava Leighton, Radley’s long-time Audubon partner. Much of the same artwork that was previously seen on the walls of The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974), which was also shot in the same location, is visible.
Radley remembered working with Béatrice Harnois: “She was tiny, probably no more that 5’ tall, and was very sweet. She was no trouble to work with at all.”
I pushed Radley on why she didn’t become Misty Beethoven: “She had a strong French accent, and I wasn’t convinced she could handle the dialogue. I could have dubbed her lines, but I also thought that she had the air of a sweet, young girl, which wasn’t a perfect fit for the role of a prostitute. Then I came across Sue (Jensen, aka Constance Money) and I thought she’d be more suited to the part.”
Radley on set with Béatrice Harnois
After the two day shoot in New York, Harnois returned to Paris. Radley remembers: “We didn’t stay in touch. I inquired about her a year or so later as I had another role in mind for her. I was told that she’d fallen in love, married, and disappeared from the film business. I never heard anything about her again after that.”
By now, the production schedule for ‘The Opening of Misty Beethoven’ was fast approaching, so the scenes he’d shot were placed in his storage facility over the river from Manhattan in Long Island City, where they were largely forgotten for almost 10 years.
The mid 1980s were not a happy period for Radley: the advent of VHS and the abundant quantity of cheaper, less artistic adult films effectively took away the market for his trademark style of stylish, elegant erotica.
He turned down offers and stayed out of the business until in 1984, against his better judgement, Radley was persuaded to make another film.
The decision to make another movie was one of the few areas relating to this film that Radley opened up about: “The money was attractive. Not in terms of the overall budget – which was fairly low – but in terms of what I was being offered. My terms were simple: I would produce, write, and direct it, but I insisted that my name would not be associated with it in any way.”
I pushed Radley on the reason for this: “Just as I didn’t want Henry Paris to be associated with the films I’d made with my real name in the 1960s, I didn’t want this film to be associated with any of my other work. I also didn’t want people to put me in the same box as always – as a sex film director.”
As with many of his films, Radley took inspiration from a literary source – in this case it was an Iris Murdoch novel. And so the working title of the film became ‘The Iris Movie’.
Radley wrote a script which told the story of Joanie, an aspiring New York journalist, who decides to write an article on a former adult film star, Iris, who has disappeared since she retired many years before. Joanie travels to Paris to look for Iris, but instead meets Iris’s former boyfriend, Salvador, who tells her that Iris now resides in New York. Joanie returns home where she finds the former star running an S&M studio. Joanie befriends Iris, and together they watch many of Iris’s old films together. Joanie reunites Iris with Salvador, and decides not to write a story about her, as it would betray Iris’s confidence.
Initial synopsis for ‘The Iris Movie’
Radley wanted to make the film as inexpensively as possible. One way he achieved that was to use much of the Misty Beethoven test footage he’d shot back in 1975. He would cut this footage the new film by positioning it as Iris’s old movies that she shows to Joanie. In the end, eight of the ten test scenes from 1975 would be used in this way in the new film (the only exceptions were the two scenes shot with ‘Actress 2’ who played a hooker. These sequences were not used and only stills from these scenes are thought to exist today.)
The new film would be shot in New York over seven days from December 14th to December 20th 1984. In addition, Radley decided to travel to Paris to film exteriors, just as he had done for ‘The Opening of Misty Beethoven back’ in 1975.
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1984 – ‘The Iris Movie’ – The Casting
Radley had been wrestling with whether to shoot ‘The Iris Movie’ with explicit sex, or just make a ‘cool’ version (Radley’s preferred term for soft-core): “I favored a ‘cool’ film, but I knew that it would make more money if I produced two versions. It was a big decision because it also impacted the choice of actors. Also, the footage that I’d shot in 1975 was all shot hardcore. Sometimes you can edit hardcore sex into a cool version, but other times it’s more difficult.”
On November 8th, 1984, a casting call went out to adult film agents and industry contacts on both coasts – including Jim South, Hal Guthu, and John Seeman.
The communication invited photos and resumes to be submitted to ‘Idlewild Productions’, the production company run by Radley and Ava Leighton, though it listed a different name for the film’s director. In fact, there was no direct reference whatsoever to the fact that this was a Radley Metzger film.
As Radley hadn’t made a final decision about whether the film would be explicit or not, it was announced that, “many of the roles require nudity and/or simulated sex.” Radley’s notes from his phone call with Jim South read like a who’s who of the mid-1980s California adult film business. Jim recommended Traci Lords (listed as Kristie Nussman), Amber Lynn, Raven (listed as ‘Vickie Vickers’), Dino Alexander, Jade Nichols, Stacey Donovan (listed as Kelly Howell), Bunny Blue (sic), Misty Regan (listed as ‘Mistie Blackmore’), and Peter North (listed as Al Brown). Radley called Jim on the phone to discuss the options, and wrote the individual names down, including comments from Jim relating to each of them, such as ‘pretty,’ ‘busty’, ‘coke husband,’ ‘does all,’ and even ‘yeast infection’.
Radley liked one actress, a Teutonic older woman named Helga Sven, whose blonde looks reminded him of Marilyn Monroe: “She had the ability to look gentle and kind, but also become fearsome and dominant. There weren’t many other actresses in her age range, so I asked for more details about her experience and inquired about her availability.”
Radley liked what Jim South sent him about Helga, and sent a draft agreement to Jim for her to sign, agreeing to pay her for two days work and cover the costs of flying her in from her home in Los Angeles plus per diem expenses. The rest of the cast was recruited from New York, including the lead role of Joanie, played by Sharon Moran, an actress who went on to small roles in several of Chuck Vincent’s last movies.
Today, Helga remembers working with Radley with great fondness: “He was a real gentleman, quite elegant and European. But there was an edge to him that you didn’t want to provoke. He was in complete control over all aspects of the production, and if you didn’t pay attention to him, he would express his displeasure. Fortunately I stayed on his good side, and so the experience was a pleasure.”
In the end, Radley decided to make the ‘The Iris Movie’ as a soft-core film. But he wanted to leave the door open to the possibility that he might change his mind in post-production and use the hardcore footage from 1975. If he did that, he recognized that this could create a legal issue with actors – who may have objections about unwittingly appearing in a pornographic film. To get around this risk, he inserted a clause into the actor’s releases which specified: “There is a possibility that there will be a hard-X version of the film (for some territories) but it is specifically agreed that the artist will not appear in any hard-X scenes.”
It seemed to do the trick, in that none of the actors objected – though, in our research, the only version of the film that we found was a softcore one.
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1984 – ‘The Iris Movie’ – The Production
As the film shoot approached, Radley still had not decided on a title.
He wanted something that would be instantly commercial, and perhaps resonate with fans of cult movies. He remembered a conversation he had with his old friend, cult horror film producer Richard Gordon: “Richard and I were discussing film franchises that had been successful, and we were both marveling at the enduring success of the ‘Ilsa’ series, which had done so well.”
Radley decided to take advantage of the name recognition of the ‘Ilsa’ series, and include Ilsa in the title of his film. It was a nakedly exploitative decision: apart from a light scene of S&M, Radley’s film bore no resemblance to its Ilsa predecessors, either in tone or theme. Nevertheless, at the last moment, the lead character’s name was changed from ‘Iris’ to ‘Ilsa’ to reflect the title of the film. (The other lead character’s name was also changed from ‘Joanie’ to ‘Sue’.)
But Radley still wasn’t sure what to call the movie: while he had decided that it should contain the name ‘Ilsa’, he was still playing with titles such as ‘Young Ilsa’ and ‘Sinful Ilsa’. As a result, he still continued to call the movie ‘The Iris Movie’ for the duration of the shoot.
As planned, the production started on Friday 14th December with shooting beginning at 6am. The production crew had been drawn from the New York film community, and the equipment was hired from Goblin Market Film Services out on Staten Island.
The first scene was shot inside the Pink Pussycat, a West Village sex shop that doubled as a Times Square sex emporium. (The Pink Pussycat is still in the same location at 167 West 4th Street.) The sequence includes a sex scene in a video booth at the back of the sex shop, but this was filmed in the afternoon, back at Ava Leighton’s apartment – the same location where the inserted footage had been shot nine years earlier. Ava’s apartment would be used for several other scenes in the film, each representing different locations. Helga flew in on schedule from Los Angeles for the fifth and sixth days of shooting, which took place in a townhouse on East 16th St that had a sauna and large jacuzzi.
The shoot concluded after seven days on Thursday 7th December back at Ava’s apartment.
Four months later in April 1985, Radley set off for Paris to shoot exteriors that depicted Sue’s visit to Paris to look for Ilsa. Before he left, he sent photographs of the actress who played Sue (Sharon Moran) to an old friend, adult film producer/distributor Wilfrid Dodd, requesting that Dodd provide him with a girl who was the same “general outline and figure.” Radley shot Dodd’s supplied actress on the streets of the city wearing a wig that made her look like Sue. Radley had the footage developed while in Paris so he could assess whether he needed to re-shoot any scenes and, when he was satisfied, he shipped the film stock back to New York and returned home.
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1985 – ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ – Post-Production
Back in New York, Radley had various one-sheet poster mock-ups produced that showed stills from the movie – trying out a few different titles before finally settling on ‘The Sins of Ilsa.’
According to the film’s credits, ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ was edited by Jimmy McDonough, nowadays perhaps best known for his biographies of Russ Meyer, Andy Milligan and Neil Young. McDonough remembers getting a job with Radley several years earlier: “Radley wore a scarf during my initial appointment for the gig. Something I never thought I’d experience… a job interview with a fancy scarf-wearing man. It was like a scene out of one of his movies.”
Jimmy had worked as Radley’s editorial assistant on The Princess and The Call Girl, but says he remembers little about ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ today: “Radley often had me working on these little invisible projects of his, and much of the time I didn’t know what they ended up being.”
The 1975 footage was inserted into the newer film – and the crude editing betrays the fact that the earlier footage was shot hardcore.
As promised, Radley didn’t use him own name in the credits, instead choosing ‘Gene Borey’ for the story, ‘Peter Wolfe’ in his role as producer, and ‘Stanley Paul’ as the director.
When a rough cut of the film was ready, a viewing was set up on September 17th, 1985, attended by Radley and two producer friends. It didn’t go particularly well, and many pages of notes and suggestions were compiled.
After retreating into the editing suite and making the necessary changes, the film was deemed ready to be sold – and was shopped around to various home entertainment companies such as Vestron Video.
As 1986 dragged on, the film was rejected by all, and its prospects looked bleak. Having invested time and money, it seemed like no one wanted the film unless it bore the ‘Radley Metzger’ name. Radley stood firm in his desire not to use his name, and in truth his attentions were elsewhere: Ava Leighton, his business partner of over 25 years, was being treated for cancer. She would die in August 1987.
That year, ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ was shelved definitively.
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1985 – ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ – The Aftermath
Perhaps predictably, given its perfunctory fate, ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ is not Radley’s lost masterpiece. In fact, it’s not a great film by any standards. The undemanding plot is full of holes, the script lacks Radley’s trademark sparkling humor, the performances are listless and flat, and there is none of the creative cinematography or imaginative art design that marked his successful works.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of ‘The Sins of Ilsa’ is that it contains the footage that Radley shot with Béatrice Harnois in anticipation of making ‘The Opening of Misty Beethoven.’ Previously thought to be lost, it allows us to see Beatrice Harnois acting in a Henry Paris-era movie, with the strong French accent that Radley remembered so well. It’s intriguing to imagine how ‘Misty Beethoven’ would have turned out with her in the starring role.
After the disappointment of ‘The Sins of Ilsa’, Radley turned his attention to producing videos on alternative health care which included a five-part video series on homeopathy.
‘The Sins of Ilsa’ remained forgotten – until now. It is an intriguing, though minor, footnote to an otherwise successful and always fascinating career.
Edited footage, shot in September 1975
Opening sequence for ‘The Sins of Ilsa’, shot in December 1984
The Castello di Balsorano – in the Abruzzo region of Italy, 130 kilometers east of Rome – is one of the great locations in exploitation film history. It has been used in over 100 giallo, horror, sword and sandal, softcore and hardcore sex films – as well as the occasional mainstream film – from the late 1950s through to the 1990s.
Today the castle is not currently open to the public, but we were privileged to have been given a personal guided tour. It’s an impressive structure – with two restaurants, three bars, an armory, a library, a ballroom, a chapel, 35 bedrooms, various roof terraces, full parking, and two swimming pools.
In fact, it’s currently on sale for €5.9m (negotiable). So how about a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds so we can all secure this landmark cinematic location?
The Balsorano Castle (also known as Castello Piccolomini) was originally a Guelph building first built in the 1200s when it belonged to the Naples crown.
In 1463, the Barony of Balsorano was passed to Antionio Piccolomini who restored and enlarged the building. The castle stayed in the Piccolomini family for several centuries until it was purchased in 1850 by the French industrialist Carlo Lefebvre.
The building was badly damaged by a 1975 earthquake in the area – and the Lefebvre family and the Italian government spent millions restoring it. Evidence of the damage is still evident today.
Over the last century, the castle has changed hands twice: in 1929, it was sold to the Zanelli-Fiastri family who, in the late 1950s, approached several film companies in Rome offering the building as a film set. It was a perfect location – just over an hour away from the many film production companies based in Rome.
In 1975, the castle was acquired by the current owner, IASM srl, who continued to rent the facilities out to film crews – increasingly of a pornographic nature. In recent years, the complex was renovated and turned into a destination for weddings and a conference center.
Today it stands empty, awaiting a buyer and the next chapter of its storied existence.
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1. The Lickerish Quartet – Title sequence
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2. The Lickerish Quartet – Exteriors
The Rialto Report’s April Hall, in the role played by Erica Remberg
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3. The Lickerish Quartet – The Dungeon Scenes
The stone detail is unchanged since the 1960s
A panorama of the dungeon in 2019
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4. The Lickerish Quartet – Stairway
A different statue now stands in the same spot
The staircase in 1969
The same staircase in 2019
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5. The Lickerish Quartet – The Yellow Room scenes
The corner of the Yellow Room in ‘The Lickerish Quartet’
The corner of the Yellow Room in 2019
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6. The Lickerish Quartet – The Corridor
The corridor in ‘The Lickerish Quartet’
The corridor in 2019
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7. The Lickerish Quartet – The Main Ballroom
Erica Remberg sits in front of the unique wallpaper in the Ballroom
The same wallpaper still exists in 2019
The Ballroom – prepared for a film screening – in ‘The Lickerish Quartet’
The Ballroom – prepared for a recital – in 2019
The main fireplace in the ballroom in 2019
The main fireplace in the ballroom in ‘The Lickerish Quartet’
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8. The Lickerish Quartet – The Bedroom
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9. The Lickerish Quartet – The Roof
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9. The Lickerish Quartet – Surrounding Vineyards
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Epilogue – Bloody Pit of Horror (1965) (aka Il boia scarlatto)
The film was one of many that used the identical locations in the castle as Radley would use.
One of the entrances to the castle in 1965
The same door in 2019
The main courtyard in 1965
The main courtyard 54 years later
The dungeon
The main ballroom
The main corridor
The spiral staircase to the roof
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Postscript
Thirty years after ‘The Bloody Pit of Horror’ was filmed at the Balsorano Castle, the location became a staple for shot-on-video historical porn films, many of them filmed by Joe D’Amato.
These included Marquis de Sade (1994), Hamlet: For the Love of Ophelia (1995), and Decameron X (shown in the screen shot below – clearly showing the same wallpaper visible in The Lickerish Quartet.)
San Francisco, 1979: Four people’s lives converged for an intense few months in an apartment on Polk Street.
There was Serena, a 29 year-old model, stripper, and porn star, who had just broken up from her husband and the father of her two year-old daughter.
There was Jamie Gillis, 36, a restless and jaded adult film actor, star of hundreds of sex films dating back to the early days of the industry.
There was Lysa Thatcher, the ingénu baby of the group at 20, sweet-natured and quiet, a novice stripper-dancer and adult film initiate.
And the fourth person was R.A. Morgan, an artist and outsider, who recorded the events that took place in the apartment in a series of remarkable, and largely unpublished, photographs.
Together with a revolving cast of friends from the nearby Mitchell Brother’sO’Farrell Theater, they lived, loved, danced, and performed for each other in a short-lived erotic salon. They created a series of prime-colored tableaux vivants that played out night after night in the Polk Street apartment.
These are R.A. Morgan’s memories of the time, together with a selection of his pictures from this time.
R.A. Morgan has published a series of books. Readers of The Rialto Report will find two of particular interest: ‘SF79’ which can be downloaded here, and ‘Dungeon Portraits’ which can be downloaded here.
In late winter of 1979, I lived in a studio apartment on Polk Street, just six blocks north of the O’Farrell Theater.
From my apartment, it was a five minute walk to The Palms, a bar and music venue in the evening; a coffee shop with an espresso machine in the daytime.
I worked at The Palms as a cocktail waiter, and spent so much time there that I called it my office.
R.A. Morgan, The Palms, 1979
Upstairs were four floors of flats, each with a hallway running the length of the apartment, with rooms on either side, similar to a passenger train car.
One day, through the window of my makeshift office, I watched a group of new tenants battle the San Francisco winds as they encouraged a trio of muscular men to move their possessions into a flat above the café.
Serena, Polk Street, 1979
Jamie Gillis, Polk Street, 1979
Lysa Thatcher, Polk Street, 1979
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Serena, Jamie Gillis and Lisa Thatcher moved into the second floor, four-bedroom apartment.
It was obvious who Serena was when she arrived. I already knew Annette Haven as she lived in the same area, and she would stop by the apartment to see the others. It was a confluence of like-minded people through geography.
Serena had a suite in the apartment with a large window that looked out onto Polk Street. You could see the landmark liquor store, Sukkers Likkers, across the street.
Jamie had his own little bedroom and it was locked up a lot. Lisa stayed in Jamie’s room when he was there. Sometimes she stayed there when he wasn’t there too.
The decorations in the flat were haphazard. Serena painted it in bold primary colors, and I think she thought that was sufficient. But little by little it started to be covered by the oddest collection of postcards, tickets, and announcements for upcoming concerts and shows.
Jamie had more of a hand in setting up the dining room. He set it up like a cigar room. There would be the racks of wine and framed artwork on the walls.
The space was all about attracting people, and their new home was seldom empty.
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Serena had a 2½ year old daughter who had been living in Humboldt County with the girl’s father. A number of the porn people bought 40-acre parcels of land in Humboldt County where they’d grow weed. Then they’d come down to San Francisco during the harvest and bring their pot from the farms.
Everyone called Serena’s girl, ‘Lil’ L’: two syllables, slurred together, with the emphasis on the sound of ‘elle’. She was fiercely energetic, with metallic honey blonde hair that spiked wildly in the breeze as she ran between the wind-whipped pedestrians on the sidewalk.
Despite being a strong, dynamic woman, Serena had come to motherhood as a submissive, and that may have informed the way she dealt with her daughter. So if, for example, they were in a restaurant, and the kid started screaming, which kids of that age will do, Serena would freeze and say “What do you want? What does it take to stop this?”
I met Serena at a punk club where I also worked, and I invited her and L down to a carousel near the club. When they arrived, I could see that Serena was having difficulties with L, so I stepped in and told her that I’d take care of the situation. I’d been doing some hypnosis, and so I probably hypnotized L a little bit. After that, when I put my arms out, the kid jumped into them. Serena was amazed and said, “Oh my God, can you do that every single time? If you can, I’ll pay you whatever you’re getting at the moment to work for me, and I’ll give you a bonus.”
I’d always wondered what it would be like to have children, so the idea interested me. Lisa had been looking after L up to that point, so I didn’t know what my function or role would be. But I moved into the apartment, and after a transition, I took over. In the year that I was with L, she was never alone.
Lysa Thatcher, with L
Lil’ L
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It was Serena who bought camera equipment for me because she thought I’d be a good photographer. I’d been in art school, where they assume that if you can draw you can probably take a photograph too, so people were always asking me to help them with their projects. I made a point of learning how to do all the basics, such as how to light a scene and get the right exposure.
Serena liked my work and wanted me to take photographs of her and the friends and acquaintances who passed through the apartment.
Nearly every day, the apartment was enlivened by the arrival of the performers from the O’Farrell Theater. The beautiful girls of the legendary adult-entertainment establishment dropped in, between sets and on their days off, to share cocktails, beers, joints, cigarettes, gossip, and to get their pictures taken.
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One of Serena’s great joys was to organize photo sessions in the two rooms that made up her lair. For her, it was the same as going to the Mitchell Brothers theater: she would do a performance at the theater, and then she’d come home and invite the girls that were on the shift with her, and they’d say, “Let’s do it again here”.
It was my understanding that prior to moving in to the Polk Street apartment, Serena had decided she was done with being a submissive. I think she was trying that out, so the new home and new life was a big part of what was going on in that period. She was spreading her wings for the first time in that role.
I referred to her as ‘The Boss’: she was very dominant and strong-willed, and she couldn’t help herself, even when it was inappropriate. She draped herself in black velvet with colorful embroidery, and the fabric clung to her muscular dancer’s body as she prowled the flat with the assurance of a true leader.
Sometimes she’d find herself standing there looking for someone to order about and there simply wasn’t anything to do, but she was dressed up and ready to perform.
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I’d be sitting in the apartment doing something and she would say, “What time are you putting L down for a nap”?
I’d say, “four-thirty,” and she’d say, “At four-thirty I’m going to show up with two girls and you have 45 minutes to shoot us before they go back to the Mitchell Brothers”.
And then she’d start arranging items, pinning things to the wall like lingerie. She’d open a trunk with all sorts of props in it, and proceed to arrange the furniture meticulously. I’d light the scene and take photographs.
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Serena would come and get me at any time of the day and night to take photos of her. Some of these sessions were at three in the morning while everyone else was asleep.
We didn’t always speak as we worked until the dawn’s light – or until L arrived in search of breakfast.
Everything was carefully choreographed, but I also wanted something else: I wanted to make Serena and the other subjects stop posing – and instead make them laugh, distract them, or catch them with their guard down.
*
Jamie was often on the road. He wasn’t crazy about San Francisco, so he would book things and he would take off for weeks at a time.
He kept his own room adjacent to The Boss though, as a couple, they often went their own way. Nevertheless, The Boss proclaimed they had ‘a vibrant partnership; entwined opposites, linked in love.’
They were always bringing playthings into the apartment. Jamie would go find a smelly man, and say, “You’re going to fuck this man in my bed,” and that kind of thing. It was like they were putting on a show for each other.
When he was around me, Jamie allowed himself to go back to what he considered the golden era of his existence, when he was a young thespian in theaters and when he toured Europe as a mime.
He felt a kindred artistic spirit with me, as I wasn’t someone with whom he needed to play sexual games. When he sat down with the two of us, L and I, he was a different person. He would have a sip of wine, and we’d talk. He’d remember how delightful his youth had been, when everything was lovely and spontaneous. By 1979, he’d already done Misty Beethoven, and he felt that he’d painted himself into a corner.
But outside of that context, Jamie was a predator: the rest of the time he was just out scoring – in as many ways as possible. Jamie was poly-everything.
One time, I remember L and I came up the stairs to the apartment. I had a new Babar and Celeste book for her, and I said, “Hey let’s go into Jamie’s room.”
Er, no, Jamie’s got two boys on leashes there. We can’t do that.
“Okay, let’s go into the dining room.”
Er, no, Mommy’s getting fucked on the dining room table. We can’t go there either.
Every day seemed to be like that.
*
Lisa was considerably younger than Jamie. There was a lot of role playing in the apartment, and Lisa was often his slave. She was also referred to as a roommate, cook, porno friend, and sweetheart.
In many ways she was given the responsibility for the house. Serena and Jamie would both get distracted, and Lisa was intelligent and resourceful, so she kept things together. It was like there were two characters that she had to play: she had to play the sub and walk around naked and sleep at the foot of the bed, and the rest of the time she was a normal, sensitive, intelligent woman who took care of the apartment. And she truly enjoyed helping to raise L.
One night I was woken up by the sound of someone being whipped in the hallway. Serena wasn’t getting along with the father of her child, so he was banished from the flat. Occasionally however he’d show up with a quantity of pot. This time Serena was out of town, I think she might have been in Germany doing a movie. In the middle of the night, I heard flogging and someone shouting “No, no stop, no, stop, no don’t stop, don’t stop”, and I opened my door just a little bit because they were right outside my room. It was Lisa, manacled to the balustrade, and it was Serena’s ex that was whipping her.
The events in the apartment felt like pieces of performance art.
We look back at the east coast publication High Society by reviewing the magazine’s second year in business – 1977 – and our unpublished interview with Gloria Leonard, who took over as the magazine’s ‘publisher’ during the year.
How did an adult film star come to be involved in publishing a major men’s magazine?
Fully digitized copies of each 1977 magazine can be found in the article below. You can find The Rialto Report’s growing collection of digitized resources by choosing Library in our site menu.
Click on the covers below to access the full magazines. Due to the fact that the magazines are scanned in high definition, allow time for each page to load. If you are viewing on a phone, view in landscape orientation.
Magazines are fully searchable; use the icon displayed in each magazine to search by keyword.
Publications are being shared here purely for the purpose of research. They should not to be used or reproduced for any commercial gain.
The Rialto Report met with Gloria on several occasions from 2005 until her passing in 2014 – each time interviewing her about a different part of her varied life.
The first time we spoke with her, we asked her about her role in High Society. We took several copies of the magazine to show her – which she admitted she hadn’t seen for many years.
Surprisingly, she said it was the first and only time she’d been interviewed about getting into the magazine business.
This is an extract from that interview.
*
Before we discuss High Society, let’s put some context on where you came from: what is your family background?
I was the last of four children, and when I say the last of four, the sister closest to me was married and gone by the time I was five – so for the most part I grew up sort of like an only child.
Where did you grow up?
The Bronx, though I knew that I didn’t belong there from an early age. As soon as I was 18, I was out of there and as much as I loved New York, moved to California where I stayed for a couple of years. But I missed New York dreadfully and so I came back. That would be the late 1960s. I’m the quintessential Native New York babe.
What do you remember of the city when you moved back?
New York now versus New York at that time is like a tale of two cities. Back then people wanted to have a good time and have fun – that meant going out. The 1970s were the beginning of the disco era which had a lot to do with how people celebrated and partied. It changed the complexion of New York City – in that people who didn’t normally go out on a Friday or Saturday night were now going to clubs like Regine’s, which was a posh disco in the Hotel Drake. Of course then came Studio 54 and a couple of others like it. It was great fun, and there was a lot of sex, drugs, and rock n roll. It was a wild and crazy time; it was kind of like the Wild West but in the Wild East.
Ultimately I think the birth control pill had the most to do with a more liberal attitude towards sex because both women and men were always terrified of a pregnancy. Once the pill came along, it gave women the ability to explore things that perhaps otherwise they would have been reluctant to do.
What was your working life before you became involved in the adult industry?
I was divorced, raising a child on my own, doing the 9-5 thing as best I could. I toiled at a variety of careers and jobs, from working as a secretary and a waitress to being a publicist where I used to represent Johnny Carson.
I can’t for the life of me actually remember the person who introduced the idea of appearing in a porn film to me, but I thought jeeze… the money sounds great, you know? I mean in those days $200 dollars a day was big money. At first I appeared in films while I juggled my 9-5 job, but I got offered more and more film work as word spread quickly between producers and directors. I was getting calls from just about everybody. Some I turned down, some I didn’t. There were some that I wish I did turn down, there were some films I appeared in that I’m very proud of, and there were others that I wish I could crawl under this couch when I think about them.
I entered this business perceiving myself to be an actress in a film that happens to have sex in it. I had done some straight acting work as well, and acting with sex wasn’t any different than other acting. Sex is a natural thing that people do.
You were considerably older than most other actors at the time.
Yes. In fact I was somewhat taken aback with how well I was accepted into the adult business because I was easily ten years older than almost every other woman. I was in my 30s when I got into this business and the prospect of becoming a so-called sex symbol was strange to me. I was raising a child at the time as well. I did explain it to my then 13-year-old daughter. I didn’t do it arbitrarily: we sat down and talked about it before I actually performed for the first time. I explained to her that in the same way that there are films with comedy, and films with action, and films with crime, there are also films with sex. I told her I had been asked to appear in one of those. My daughter said, “Well Mom, you do whatever it is you need to do as long as its safe. But you must remember that you have to give me the same latitude when I grow up.” And of course that’s kind of difficult to argue with.
What do you remember about the men’s magazine business in the mid 1970s?
A lot of those so called girlie magazines, or as we used to call them ‘men’s sophisticates’, had been around for a long time, even before the adult film business came alive. But when porn films started to be popular, they were a rich resource of material for the magazine pages. Suddenly they’re interviewing the stars or the directors, or featuring several pages with stills from a film. It was a great marriage of the print media and the film world.
Then of course, magazines started up that addressed nothing but the adult film business. My late husband Bobby Hollander created several of them.They were devoted solely to the people and the products of the adult business.
How did you get involved in High Society?
I was invited to do a column for High Society, which was easy work. I remember being described as ‘Porndom’s newest shining star’. I would write about life on adult film sets and erotic adventures offset.
One day, I received a call from Carl Ruderman, the gentleman who owner Drake Publishers, which put out High Society.
Carl had made an adult film actress named Sue Richards the titular head of the magazine. He gave her the title of ‘Publisher’ but in reality she was just a nominal figurehead to provide some glamor. Sue had done some films and was popular, but her behavior – particularly on the road representing the magazine – had become less than professional. The rumor was that she had a drug problem.
Carl called me to say that he’d dismissed Sue, and he wanted to discuss me taking on her role. We met for lunch at the Palm. I made it clear that if I was to take on the mantle of publisher of the magazine, I would expect to be ‘hands-on’ and compensated accordingly. Carl was skeptical, but I showed him where I could add value – I had contacts, I could write, I was a good spokesperson, I knew how to deal with difficult people, and I was commercial – and he eventually agreed.
Sue Richards
There was a big party to celebrate your new role…
Yes! We had a party at Regine’s with seven hundred people. Reggie Jackson was there – and that was the year that the Yankees and Reggie Jackson had kicked butt. He was hot and it was a great party. I have a lovely photo of me and Reggie Jackson whispering to one another. We also hired all the lookalikes in New York for that particular party, such as Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli. We took pictures of them, and used them in our publicity.
I wore a gardenia in my hair for the party – which was very difficult to find because gardenias have a limited shelf life and so very few florists carry them. But it was important to me because I had long been a great Billie Holiday fan. Gardenias were her trademark and I wanted to pay tribute to her.
Gloria with Reggie Jackson
What did you see as your main responsibilities at the magazine?
From the start I wanted High Society to be much more than a sex magazine. I wanted proper articles, good fiction, cultural essays and so on. I didn’t want it to be filled with endless pictorials of nude women. Of course, I wanted plenty of that too, because that was the raison d’etre of High Society – but I wanted to do more.
I wasn’t alone in having that vision: people like Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt had the same desire to shake up society and challenge the way people thought. I saw myself as being part of that group.
What was your level of involvement in the magazine?
I was very much engaged in the day to day running of that operation. I did everything from writing blurbs and captions for photos to writing cover lines on the front, to doing interviews. I also oversaw the shoots of the centerfolds.
I traveled back and forth across the country looking for stories, and writing articles. One of the favorite things I ever did was go out to California where I joined a bunch of people who skydived naked out of airplanes. And I enjoyed going to one of those legal whore houses in Nevada and spending a day interviewing the girls there. I had a couple of photographers with me, and as a reward for their hard work I managed to get a session for each of them with one of their favorite ladies. We added it to the expense tab. Talk about job perks…
I didn’t just contribute to the magazine. I went on the road and visited the different wholesalers who delivered High Society to the newsstands across the country. I would bring a carousel of slides and materials with me to show them what was coming up in the next issue so they’d invest in us. Then I’d go out and meet the drivers, the guys who delivered the magazine to the newsstands, and buy them coffee and donuts at 6am in the morning. I even went up to the printers occasionally and checked things out.
I was very involved.
What was your relationship like with Carl Ruderman?
It was good. He had no clear idea what he wanted to do with High Society, so he appreciated strong opinions and a can-do attitude – both of which I brought to the table.
The first year of the magazine had been characterized by high staff turnover and low morale, and that started to change when I became involved.
He was adamant about one thing though: there was to be no reference to his involvement anywhere in the magazine or in the press. The fact that I had a higher profile meant that I took the heat and the publicity away from him, and he appreciated that.
What do you remember about the first year that you were involved in High Society?
I wanted to make a mark, and ensure that people realized there was a new gal in town. So I went for broke. I didn’t take prisoners.
With hindsight, I think that some of my decisions were a little… misguided. I took advantage of the power I had, and the end result wasn’t always perfect.
But I have no regrets.
What are you referring to?
There were a few articles which caused controversy.
The first issue that I put out was in July 1977, and it was a ‘Special Racism’ issue. We wanted to poke fun at racial stereotypes in America – especially against black people. So we commissioned an outrageous comic strip, and there was a KKK sex pictorial in which the KKK members in robes were black women. Some people didn’t see the funny side… We had serious articles in there too, but they were over-shadowed by the more offensive material. C’est la vie…
I wanted to show you some present-day copies of High Society – and get your reaction to them.
Wow… I haven’t looked at any High Society magazines for decades…
(Looking at the masthead at the beginning of the magazine) Wow – so there is no more ‘Publisher’?
(Looking at the first few pages) Wow, they really do hit you fast with all the porn stuff, huh? And the pictures are so explicit. Woah! TMI! I’m somewhat shocked to tell you the truth… These girls… pierced tongues… what is that about? There are too many photo layouts, not enough articles.
(Looking at the last pages) Its all ads, there’s no real content – just sex…
This is nothing like the magazine that I edited. There’s nothing counter-cultural about this.
It’s sad, but life moves on, I guess. That’s progress for you.
January 1977 (Vol 1, No. 9) (click on cover to view full magazine)
High Society contents:
– Gerry Damiano’s discovery of Linda Lovelace
– The Mother/Daughter Hooker team
– Dyanne Thorne pictorial
– Gloria Leonard column
– Film reviews of The Affairs of Janice, Hot Nasties, Baby Rosemary
– Sex on the Subway pictorial
February 1977 (Vol 1, No. 10) (click on cover to view full magazine)
High Society contents:
– How the Porn Vote swung the election
– Blowdry (1977) preview
– One Fucked over the Cuckoo’s Nest – the story of sex in mental asylums
– Sharon Mitchell pictorial
– Jean Silver, Alexandria, and Elda Stiletto in the Psycho Ward
– Clea Carson/Loren Michaels pictorial
March 1977 (Vol 1, No. 11) (click on cover to view full magazine)
High Society contents:
– X rated film reviews, including Peach Fuzz, The Spirit of Seventy Six
– History of Pornographics
– Richard Miler’s Guide to Pimps
– Wendy O. Williams pictorial by Rod Swenson
– Rock n Roll orgy with Alexandria
– Harry Reems Celebrity Defense Fundraiser
– Nancy Dare and Marlene Willoughby Dracula pictorial
April 1977 (Vol 1, No. 12) (click on cover to view full magazine)
High Society contents:
– Tiny Tim interview
– X-Rated film reviews, including Blonde Velvet, Tapestry of Passion, The Starlets
– Bettie Page retrospective
– Sharon Mitchell pictorial
June 1977 (Vol 2, No. 2) (click on cover to view full magazine)
High Society contents:
– Suze Randall book release
– Investigation into Voodoo: the occult world of possession, sex and drugs
– X-Rated films reviewed, including The Autobiography of a Flea, The Porn Brokers, The Kink Ladies of Bourbon Street
– The sensuous art of eating ice cream
August 1977 (Vol 2, No. 4) (click on cover to view full magazine)
High Society contents:
– Gloria Leonard takes over High Society
– Most Heinous Sex Crimes in History
– X-Rated film reviews, including Captain Lust, Sweet Taste of Honey, Heat Wave
– Violence on Japanese TV
– High Society Birthday Party with Jennifer Welles, Jamie Gillis, and celebrity lookalikes
December 1977 (Vol 2, No. 8) (click on cover to view full magazine)
High Society contents:
– Kelly Nichols wrestling pictorial
– X-Rated film reviews, including Feelings, Big Thumbs, My Sex-Rated Wife
– Vintage erotica
– Samantha Fox pictorial
– 1978 Calendar
Michael Findlay was one of the most prominent of New York’s sexploitation filmmakers in the 1960s. He and his wife Roberta specialized in early slasher films which contained sadomasochistic sex scenes.
In the 1970s, his career and personal life changed direction, as he separated from Roberta and became interested in developing a new technology for making 3-D films, before he was prematurely killed, at age 39, in a tragic accident on top of the iconic PanAm building in Manhattan.
The Rialto Report has spoken to those closest to him to piece together the story of his last year.
Michael wasn’t really interested in making dirty films: he just felt this compulsion.
I think what he really wanted to do was murder women, so he did it on film instead. Without the films he would probably have killed women for real. He was a troubled person.
Actually he was a big coward, so he probably wouldn’t have followed through.
John Amero (filmmaker, Michael Findlay’s best friend):
Mike was my closest friend after I arrived in New York.
In 1961 I was working for ABC, and one day I was met by an awkward, gangly young man. He was tall and wearing a shirt much too small for his 6’ 2” frame. He was just standing there looking unhappy. I approached him and he anxiously replied “This is only my first day. I’m sorry but I really don’t know anything.”
He looked like he was about to have a nervous breakdown. Out of a combination of pity and curiosity, I introduced myself, and he told me his name was Mike Findlay.
Roberta Findlay:
Personally Michael was a very sweet guy. But he had his demons and was very crazy, and had a lot of problems.
All his brothers were the same. His older brother was a psychologist, who once told me: “The only difference between me and the mental patients I treat is the desk that I sit behind.”
I blame their mother. A crazy Irish woman.
John Amero:
I invited Mike for a drink after work, and though he was painfully shy, we hit it off right away. It was clear that he had an enormous knowledge of and passion for movies so we talked endlessly about film.
Mike and I became fast friends, and we’d regale each other with stories about our favorite films, actors, and scenes. I quickly realized that while we both enjoyed many of the same movies, I liked the full spectacle of the show, whereas Mike was often more interested in the racier elements. He told me he’d once skipped school when Rita Hayworth’s ‘Salome’ (1953) played at the Roxy Theater – he hoped, in vain, that he’d see a flash of nudity.
Roberta Findlay:
I moved in with Mike, and we got married. I was in love with him – for about 2 weeks. Somehow I stayed with him another 10 years.
I was crazy as well, so we were probably well-suited for each other.
As I got to know Mike better, it became clear that his strange demeanor the day I met him was not unusual. He was wildly neurotic by nature and full of Catholic guilt and repressed sexual feelings – all of which was tempered by regular doses of Valium. But there was something about him that I found endearing and fascinating.
Roberta Findlay:
Michael was smart – in all fields. He was very bright, almost like an idiot savant.
He was fascinated with cameras and lenses, and would spend hours taking them apart and experimenting with them.
We hired a camera once for a film he was making, and of course he dismantled it. The tightly wound spring that was inside exploded out of the camera. It was lucky no one was hurt. There was no way we could get it back in – so we had to return it like that.
We told the rental shop we had no idea what happened.
John Amero:
The films that Mike made, like the ‘Flesh Trilogy’, were in some way a release – a relief – for him. A way that he could express his neuroses.
We used to go to the bar together and conjure up more and more imaginative ways that we could have strippers murdered on screen. It was fun – and we didn’t take it seriously at all.
Mike, as I recall, was pretty devastated when Roberta moved out. I didn’t know him that well, but I saw he retreated into himself, and started resembling the character he’d played on screen in the ‘Flesh’ movies.
Mumbling, unkempt, and withdrawn.
Roberta Findlay:
John Amero called me up one day, and said that Michael wasn’t doing well. Apparently Michael wasn’t making any money, and John said he wasn’t taking care of himself. He said that Michael was living like a homeless person. He urged me to reach out and go and help him.
I encouraged Mike to divorce Roberta since there was no likelihood of them reuniting. She was with Shackleton and showed no interest in getting back with him.
To deal with the pain, Mike was regularly taking Valium – which we jokingly referred to as ‘brain candy’ or ‘attitude adjuster’ tablets. He washed them down with copious quantities of beer.
But despite Mike’s struggles he remained good company, and I valued our friendship.
I was never really close friends with Michael, but after I stopped acting in the 1960s, he came into a midtown bar in which I was working.
He didn’t recognize me – probably because I always wore a wig in his films. He sat at the bar, and drank and drank.
John Amero:
The owner of the Big Top Theater and the Broadway Baths, Bill Perry, asked me if I’d be interested in making a gay feature for him. I was intrigued by the idea, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it by myself. So I approached the only other person I thought could assist me; my old partner-in-crime Mike. Talking to him about Bill’s offer was going to be a difficult conversation. For a start, despite our close friendship, we’d still never discussed my being gay.
My strategy was to take him out for drinks and see if I could convince him to make this film with me. After numerous beers, I laid out my proposal, with an added emphasis on the monetary component to pique his interest.
I could almost see Mike doing the math, adding and subtracting. For good measure I repeated, “We’d make a few thousand dollars apiece in a couple of weeks. It’ll be a challenge but who knows, it might be fun.”
Mike finally agreed, and we made a series of films together under the name ‘Francis Ellie.’
Roberta Findlay:
Michael made fewer sex films of his own in the 1970s, and became more involved in lenses and optics.
I wasn’t intimately involved because we weren’t together by that point, but he told me he’d started developing this portable 3-D system.
John Amero:
Mike’s 3-D system was called ‘Super Depth.’ We talked about it all the time, and I saw the prototype he was working on with an engineer.
The problem with 3-D for exhibitors was you needed two cameras to shoot it, and you needed two projectors to show it…which also meant that you had to stop the film in the middle and reload everything, because both projectors were running. Michael came up with this idea of having two lenses on the front of one camera – one for the left eye, one for the right eye. When the images come through, a prism or mirrored device makes one go to the top of the 35 mm frame and one go to the bottom. So what you’ve got on a negative, that’s still the same shape as the 35 millimeter square film, is the left eye and the right eye. The projection lens reverses the process.
This was real 3D, not the phony red and blue.
Lorraine Borden (film publicist, wife of film distributor Stanley Borden):
Stan had been friends with Mike since the 1960s, when he distributed some of Mike’s films. He thought Mike was brilliant.
As Mike started work on the camera, Stan offered to fund its development – in return for a share of the profits when it was sold.
Roberta Findlay:
What had been used in the 1950s for 3-D was a tremendously cumbersome camera system that lost an incredible amount of light. Michael’s new system got around all of the limitations that had been so problematic in the past. As I understand it, it was two lenses that were attached to the front of one camera, and they blended the images in a synchronized way in front of the lens and the film plane. It could be adapted for any camera.
John Amero:
When the 3-D equipment was ready, Mike called me and asked me to help him shoot some test footage.
The first sequence I worked on was a diving board scene – and we wanted to film the same stripper that had appeared in A Touch of Her Flesh back in 1967, the one that was outrageously dirty. The idea was that she would be playing on a diving board. Not in a swimming pool, just a diving board. We shot it in the basement of the Paramount Hotel, where Stan Borden had his offices. Michael wanted to track in and just head right for her snatch, with her legs spread way, way, way around the camera – and show that in 3-D…
The problem was that she’d put on some weight since the 1960s, and when she got to the end of the diving board, we could see that she was too heavy for the structure we’d built – sort of a box to hold the camera. The structure started tipping over because of her weight. We resolved it by building a box at the other end of the diving board, and I had to climb inside the box and sit in it as a counter weight so the diving board wouldn’t collapse on the floor while she was throwing her legs around.
Mike was loving it. But I wasn’t confident that I was heavy enough for when she started gyrating and grinding and humping the diving board.
But it held. And after that we worked on a few other sequences, all shot in the same place.
Michael was operating the camera all the time. I never touched it.
Roberta Findlay:
I had nothing to do with the 3-D system. Never used it, never made a film with it. That was just Michael’s thing.
John Amero:
Mike was very protective – in that he didn’t want anybody to know what he was doing. He was trying to keep his invention secret – until he was ready to market it.
Lorraine Borden:
Stanley was getting nervous that he’d given money to Mike to develop this thing, but had seen nothing back. So he suggested that Mike make a quick 3-D porno that they could put out cheaply and make some quick money.
Mike used some of the test footage that he’d shot, and Stan put out the film calling it Funk 3-D. That was late in 1976, I think.
John Amero:
Mike called me up one day and told that he’d made a sex film out of the test footage I’d helped him shoot.
I said, “Oh, I gotta see it.”
It opened at the Cameo Theater. Outside the theater, somebody had built a clever little octagonal viewer, almost like a View-Master where you could stick your eye, and look in and see 3D slides of the film. It was like a peep show. It was neat.
Lorraine Borden:
Stanley heard about some interest in Michael’s 3-D idea from places overseas, like Taiwan.
Some Taiwanese filmmakers came over to New York, and we met with them and showed them ‘Funk 3-D’… which was a little embarrassing, given that it was an explicit sex film.
Anyway they liked what they saw and signed a contract with us to use the equipment for two Kung Fu films.
John Amero:
When Mike interested these Taiwanese filmmakers in using his 3-D idea, they invited him to go over there as the technical supervisor so he could oversee how they used the equipment. I think he went over there twice, and each time he would write me letters explaining how it was going. Because I actually understood it, although not to the extent that Mike did, and I found it fascinating.
He also sent me his checks, and I was depositing them for him in his bank account in New York.
Roberta Findlay:
Michael loved the Far East, so when the chance came for him to go to Hong Kong and Taiwan to work, he jumped at it.
Michael was introduced to me by the director Mei Chun Chang. We were in pre-production for the film Dynasty, and the director wanted to use a new 3-D system invented by Michael.
Michael was a tall, big man, but very soft-spoken and gentle. Of course, he was knowledgeable about the 3-D camera, but he was also very helpful in telling us how to shoot scenes that would have the maximum 3-D impact on screen.
’13 Nuns’ opened at the Rivoli on Broadway. It’s the one where they saw the top of a guy’s head off. The guy is in a vice, like in a big oak table. It’s pretty gruesome.
Jamie Gillis:
I ran into Mike in midtown in the mid 70s. He was more upbeat than I’d seen him in ages. He was talking about this new 3-D camera that he’d invented. He was upbeat and animated, excited about the opportunity he had.
He told me that he was going to Cannes to exhibit the camera, and hoped to raise money from investors so he could turn it into a successful commercial venture. He was very upbeat.
John Amero:
I sensed a real improvement in Mike’s state of mind and felt he’d started to return to his former self. I was excited for him, and it was encouraging to see him optimistic and energized by his 3-D venture.
I was keen to give him a good send-off on his trip to Cannes. So late afternoon on May 16, 1977, my brother Lem and I went to the top of the PanAm Building near Grand Central to see Mike off. He’d paid $25 to take the 10-minute helicopter ride to JFK airport. Mike was terrified of flying, so traveling to the airport this way was a bold move for him. I took it as a sign of his new-found confidence overcoming some of his phobias and perhaps enjoying himself at last.
We met at the PanAm Building’s ‘Copter Club.’ We enjoyed a few drinks and discussed his plans for Cannes. As it came time for Mike to leave, Lem and I asked the staff if we could accompany him to the flight deck but were told that for safety reasons, only passengers were allowed up top. Lem and I hugged Mike goodbye, wished him a great trip and left him at the elevators.
Publicity materials from 1968, Pan American Heliport, Manhattan, New York:
The heliport is located on top of the Pan American Building, at 200 Park Avenue, New York.
It is at an elevation of 855 feet m.s.1. and has an effective landing area of 131 feet by 131 feet.
The heliport pavement is of reinforced concrete. A lighted windsock is located at the northwest corner and another at the extreme northeast corner.
History of the Pan American Heliport Operation:
Heliport operations began in 1965 from the PanAm Building with New York Airways (NYA) operating Boeing Vertol 107 equipment. There was public pressure against the NYA petition for noise and safety reasons. Hearings were held and the operation was ultimately approved. A 5-year permit from the NYC Planning Commission was issued for the period of 1964 through 1969.
In February 1968, NYA ceased operations from the heliport because of a contractual disagreement between Pan American World Airways and Trans World Airlines. No further petitions were presented, and in 1969 the NYC Planning Commission permit expired.
On November 24, 1976, the New York City Planning Commission held a public hearing to consider the application of New York Airways, Inc., for a resumption of scheduled helicopter operations from the roof top heliport on the Pan American Building. The operation was approved by the New York City Board of Estimate, the Department of Marine and Aviation, and by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Operations began again on February 1, 1977, and New York Airways conducted 7,240 helicopter operations from the rooftop until May 16th, 1977.
John Amero:
As we exited to the street from the PanAm building, Lem and I looked up to see if we could catch Mike taking off. We were surprised to see several helicopters hovering near the top of the building. We waited a few minutes to see if Mike’s helicopter would ascend but when it didn’t we decided to set off to meet a friend.
Radley Metzger (film director):
I remember going to the Friar’s Club and seeing a lot of commotion by the PanAm building.
Smoke, helicopters, police cars, ambulances, and crowds of people running around.
From Aircraft Accident Report, National Transportation Safety Board, New York Airways – Sikorsky S-61L, N619PA:
On May 16, 1977, New York Airways, Inc. (NYA) Flight 972, a Sikorsky S-61L, N619PA, was being operated as a regularly scheduled passenger flight from the rooftop heliport (JPB) of the Pan American Building at 200 Park Avenue, Manhattan, New York, to John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), New York, New York.
The flight originated as Flight 971 from JFK Airport and landed at the heliport at about 17.32. There were 20 passengers and a crew of 3 aboard.
After landing, the aircraft was taxied to the boarding gate, and the passengers began to deplane. According to witnesses and passengers, the landing had been smooth and gentle.
The captain remained in his seat with his hands on the controls. The captain estimated that they had been sitting on the heliport for 1 to 2 minutes before the outbound passengers began to board.
At about 17.35 , the right landing gear of helicopter, N619PA, failed while the aircraft was parked, with rotors turning. The captain heard a “faint noise,” which he believed to have come from the rotor system, followed immediately by a “crumpling, crunching noise” and a buckling sound. The crumpling sound was accompanied by a settling and yawing motion, followed by a roll of the aircraft to the right.
The aircraft rolled over on its right side and was substantially damaged. Four passengers had boarded the aircraft and other passengers were in the process of boarding. The passengers and the three crew members onboard received either minor or no injuries; however, four passengers who were still outside the aircraft and were waiting to board were killed and one was seriously injured. One pedestrian on the corner of Madison Avenue and 43rd Street was also killed and another seriously injured when they were struck by a separated portion of one of the main rotor blades of the aircraft.
The five color coded main rotor blades had been damaged exclusively. Each blade was 28 feet 10 inches long and weighed 209.3 Ibs. All blades had bent upward along their span, and heavy surface contact smears were located on their bottom surfaces beginning at midspan and continuing outward toward the tip.
John Amero:
When we arrived at our friend’s apartment, we found him glued to his television set. There was a breaking news story about an accident at the PanAm Building. The landing gear of a helicopter waiting to take off for JFK had malfunctioned, turning the craft on its side and breaking off a rotor blade. That blade had slashed four of 21 waiting passengers, killing three of them instantly. The blade fell over the side of the building, falling to the ground along with a shower of glass from breaking windows. It ultimately came to rest on the street below killing one more person, a woman walking on Madison and 43rd St.
I silently prayed that Mike wasn’t one of those killed and held my breath for what seemed like an eternity. My worse fear was confirmed when the name Mike Findlay was displayed on screen, listed as one of the deceased. He’d been struck in the chest by the spinning rotor and died almost immediately.
(Click on the cover to access the full report)
Roberta Findlay:
I first heard about Michael’s passing from John Amero. He left me a message that said there had been an accident and that “Michael hadn’t made it.”
I didn’t understand the message at all.
John Amero:
We were all in shock. I felt incredibly numb as I tried to take in the fact that one of my dearest friends was dead. Mike had been like a brother to me, and his importance in my life is impossible to overstate. We’d shared innumerable hours talking happily about films. We’d made our first film together and continued to make movies with each other over the years. We’d experienced life’s ups and downs together, and creating Frances Ellie had brought us even closer.
The gangly, awkward and lovely young man I’d met in the shipping department of ABC was now gone before he was even 40 years old.
‘5 Victims Had Diverse Backgrounds,’ Daily News, May 18, 1977:
“Michael Findlay was a brilliant advertising man who invented a patented 3-D projection device,” said Lorraine Borden, his associate at Great Scott Inc., 57 West 57th St.
Findlay, who lived at 325 West 45th St, had sold his projection system to a Taiwanese film company, and was leaving for Cannes, France for its debut at a film festival.
“In the field of optics, Michael was a genius,” Mrs. Borden said.
Jamie Gillis:
I read that parts of the helicopter were found all over midtown. It was amazing that more people weren’t killed. Helicopter parts were sprayed everywhere.
John Amero:
Mike’s funeral was a heart-wrenching affair. His brother organized the service which took place at a Catholic church on the Upper East Side. It was well-attended though there was a noticeable split between one side of the church where his understandably devastated parents and relatives sat, and the other side where Mike’s film friends such as Bobby Sumner, Chuck Vincent, Lorraine Borden, and Lem and myself sat. As is Catholic tradition, it was an open casket ceremony and it was surreal to see our friend made up and carefully arranged.
Roberta also attended the funeral. She told us that she deliberately left her strong prescription eye glasses at home as that was the only way she could approach the open casket without breaking down.
Roberta Findlay:
When Michael died, Lorraine Borden contacted me – because apparently I had inherited the copyright for the system. I was still his wife, so I guess it all reverted to me.
She asked me to sign papers to pass ownership of the system, the intellectual property, over to her and Stan. No payment involved, just basically give them the rights to it. I was with Walter Sear by then, and he disagreed saying I should negotiate a sale to them, but I went ahead and did it anyway. Can you imagine that? Me of all people… giving something away for free…
Lorraine Borden:
Stan had sunk a lot of money into Mike’s project, hoping that it would become a big success. When Mike was killed, Stan wanted to recoup his investment. He took it around to a few people, but wasn’t a technical expert, and couldn’t sell it.
Then Stan died – so nothing ever happened with it.
John Amero:
Lorraine and Stan didn’t understand the process very well, so the whole thing died with Mike. I’m sorry that I never got my hands on any of the technical stuff that Michael would have shown to the Taiwanese people.
The engineer who worked with Mike on the prototype is still around. Occasionally I see his name on the credits of a movie.
I don’t know who has the device now.
Roberta Findlay:
There was a payout for the victim’s families as a result of the helicopter accident. Sikorsky, who were found to be responsible for the crash, negotiated settlements.
The payments were apparently substantial – except that they found that I had not been living with Michael for a while. They said that I’d abandoned him – which was true.
So they reduced my payment to $30,000. I gave most of it to Michael’s mother.
John Amero:
I didn’t go to the cemetery the day of the funeral because we were too distraught. It was a heavy loss.
I felt immense sadness for many years after, and still think about Mike to this day.
This week The Rialto Report lost a friend, the French music producer and songwriter Henri Belolo who passed away at his home in Paris
We became friends with Henri several years ago when we were researching the life of Dennis Parker, who had found fame as a disco singer and soap opera actor, as well as having an adult film career using the name Wade Nichols.
Henri was born and raised in Casablanca, Morocco, before traveling to Paris, France, in 1956 when he was 20. He worked for Polydor Records in Paris, and organized concerts in Paris in the 1960s by James Brown, the Bee Gees and others.
In 1973, he moved to the US and set up Can’t Stop Productions in New York City. He met Jacques Morali in early 1975, and the pair produced the single “Brazil” by the Ritchie Family. Unlike Morali, Belolo was not gay, but he visited clubs with Morali and saw the potential of appealing to the gay nightclub scene. In 1978, they set up the group Village People, seeing their image of gay stereotypes as a way to embody a certain partying spirit. Belolo and Morali began working with a number of other disco acts – including Morali’s lover, Dennis Parker, who had a hit single with the single, ‘Like An Eagle’.
Dennis’ story was more interesting than just being a disco star: He was a gay man – but appeared in largely straight porn films. He had a high profile in 1970s disco – even though he disliked disco music. And he finally found success as a daytime soap opera star – just as he became terminally ill.
Henri spent hours with us talking about his life – and his memories of Dennis. He was king, generous, and great company. We stayed in touch with him afterwards, and he remained a friend.
Over 30 years after his passing, Dennis Parker remains an enigmatic figure: featuring new interviews with his family, acquaintances from the New York club and gay bar scene, adult film actors and directors, music and television industry friends, and many more, this is the story of Dennis Parker’s life.
Henri Belolo
With thanks also to Lansure for sharing wonderful photos of Wade Nichols.
The stifling heat of a New York restaurant kitchen in summer.
A restless and curious woman wanders away from the dining area. She’s looking for trouble. The elegant patrons eating to the soundtrack of a Strauss waltz hold no interest for her.
She descends a staircase into the sweaty bowels of the building. She happens upon the kitchen. She wanders among the anonymous cooking staff, but is invisible to all of them.
And then she sees Him.
Standing behind a worktable is a shirtless, mustached piece of beefcake. He is rugged yet pretty. He’s Marlboro man from the plains, moonlighting as a Manhattan sous-chef. He’s lean, toned, and handsome. He has the appearance of a man in love, most likely with himself.
His look is unequivocal: ‘Come to where the flavor is’.
The female circles her victim snarling like a hyena. The male spots her, and returns her glance with an incredulous gaze.
The only noise is the sound of cooking pots banging against each other. These two are at the center of the universe, oblivious to the irrelevant world that circles them.
She spies a large metal mixing bowl on the floor. An idea flashes across her mind. She laughs, and kicks the bowl, positioning it beneath her parted legs. She looks back at him, giggling manically.
He smiles, his eyes narrowing quizzically like the hero of a low-rent spaghetti western.
She starts to crouch over the bowl.
The realization dawns on him. She’s not going to, is she? Surely not?
She lowers herself towards the bowl.
‘Cut’, whispers the film’s director, Radley Metzger. He stands up straight, and wipes his brow. He feels dizzy. He’s seen it all in a 20 year career in film. But, as he admits decades later, this scene feels different. And he hasn’t even started shooting the sex yet.
He calls over the two actors, Wade Nichols and C.J. Laing. In a hoarse voice, he tells them about what comes next.
*
1. Freeport, NY (1950s):
Wade Nichols was born Dennis Posa on October 28, 1946 and grew up in the town of Freeport, NY, thirty miles east of Manhattan on the south shore of Long Island. In the summer, the town was a popular vacation spot, but during the off-season, it became an anonymous and forgotten place.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
We spent all our childhood in Freeport. I was born in 1943, so I was three years older than Dennis.
We grew up in an apartment building, where there were a couple of families with kids our age.
Our father was a florist who worked for a number of different businesses. His family was of Italian heritage and hailed from Casamassima, a town in southern Italy. Our mother worked in the children’s section of the local library.
They both liked jazz – in fact, that’s how they met. My father had a friend, named Johnny Guarnieri, who played piano in the Bronx, and my father and his friends would tag along to go and listen to the shows. My mother was dating Johnny’s bass player, Leo, so that’s how they found each other.
My father was maybe around 26 when they met. My mother was 20.
Dennis’ childhood was not an entirely happy one. Both his parents had their demons, which had a destabilizing effect on the boys.
Dennis (bottom left) and his brother Richard (bottom right)
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
The first few years were good. When Dennis and I were young, our father was caring. He was a very good-looking man, and Dennis looked somewhat like him. I always thought this made my father favor Dennis a bit more.
As we grew up though, my father lost interest in the family, and began to disappear for weeks at a time. When he returned, he and my mother would fight all the time and he’d be verbally abusive to us too.
A big part of the problem was my father’s gambling. He was a gambling addict, regularly blowing the money that was meant for our food. Friday was the weekly food shop day, but often he’d just take the money and not come home. When this happened, it was typically because he’d fallen behind with bookies, and he used the money to settle his debts.
When he disappeared, he was usually hiding out with one of his five sisters. On one occasion, the family found out that the bookies were threatening to break his legs if he didn’t pay up… so they helped him out and covered the debt for him. Needless to say, he didn’t pay the family back, so the family joke was that the next time, they were going to break his legs…
Dennis had a lot more nerve than I did, and once he went through our father’s stuff and found $8,000 worth of racing stubs. Bear in mind, in those days our father was making $5,000 a year, so this was a huge amount. Dennis and I talked about confronting him but we decided against it.
My father’s problems tended to overshadow my mother. She developed severe issues of her own, and became agoraphobic and was afraid of leaving our apartment. Fortunately, the library where she worked was only a few blocks away. She was happy there. She loved books, and read a lot of English literature.
It wasn’t the happiest of childhoods, and at times, home life became terrible.
Neither Dennis nor Richard were close to their parents as kids, and when they were young, they weren’t particularly close to each other.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
As kids, Dennis and I were quite different. We became closer later in life, but growing up we lived separate lives. I was into reading and mathematics whereas Dennis was more of an artist and loved to draw and paint pictures. He also loved to make things and developed an interest in carpentry.
We did have some things in common. We loved animals, as did our parents, so we always had a dog and cats. Also, we both belonged to the rifle team in High School; we had no interest in hunting – we loved animals too much for that – but we joined because we thought that target shooting would be fun. Dennis continued this interest long after his school days had finished.
Physically there was no getting away from each other. Our apartment was small, and Dennis and I shared a room in which we had bunk beds – Dennis was always on top.
He was quiet for most of his early life, but I noticed a sudden change when he was 13 or 14. For some reason it coincided with him having his tonsils taken out. After that, he came out of his shell, and was more energetic and outgoing.
High school pictures of Dennis show a geeky teenager, almost unrecognizable from the future disco and adult film idol.
From an interview in Mr. magazine, May 1978:
“I wasn’t very attractive as a young kid. I was a loner and it was tough.”
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
I didn’t get a sense of Dennis’ sexuality when we were growing up. I remember he used to look at the pictures of women in Playboy magazines – but that seemed normal… all of the boys did that.
He didn’t date in High School but I didn’t think much about it. It just wasn’t something that we talked about.
*
2. Philadelphia (Late 1960s)
When Dennis was 18, he was keen to leave home. He also wanted to continue studying the arts that he had enjoyed in school.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis graduated from High School in 1964, and went to study pottery and design in Philadelphia at the College of Art. I didn’t know too much about what he did there, but I remember he dated a couple of girls. He brought one of them home to meet the family.
While a student in Philadelphia, Dennis became interested in acting.
From an interview in Rustler, Volume 1 Number 5:
“In 1965, I was in art school, and was into art only so far as painting and sculpting… making things with my hands… like furniture.
(Then) a friend who had worked on the Beatles’ films pulled me out of study and told me I could act, and that he wanted me for some project he was working on. The film was very avant-garde. It was called ‘For One Only’ and it never got released.
(After that) I got a role in a traveling production of ‘The Trojan Women’. That was 1966 in Philadelphia.”
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
In the end he dropped out of college in 1966 after two years. I was never sure why he didn’t finish, but I always wondered if it was because of money.
Over the next couple of years, Dennis appeared in a number of low budget theatrical productions, while sustaining himself by picking up carpentry and construction work, and modeling nude for still-life classes at the college.
In later interviews, Dennis often claimed that he also appeared in a few ‘nudie-cutie loops’ while in Philadelphia, though none have ever come to light.
From an interview in Mr. magazine, May 1978:
“Some guy named Edwards got me into them – for money – good money in those days. I got $60. It was fine. Art students are notoriously poor. They were the old morality stag films… black socks, boxer shorts… but that was not really porno then.”
From an interview Skin magazine, Vol 1, Number 5:
“A lot of time we just stood and bounced around. There was very little story, no sound, and they were sold under the counter.”
In one of his trips home to Freeport, he came out to his mother and father as gay.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
In 1968, Dennis told our parents about his sexuality. He didn’t tell me at the time – I learned about it from a cousin. I don’t know much about these things, but my impression was that Dennis was bi-sexual.
My parents didn’t take it that well. My mother was squeamish about sex anyway, so she didn’t talk about it with anyone. As for my father, he told people he was heartbroken.
It must have been difficult for Dennis. It was difficult for all of them.
Not long after this, Dennis’ father passed away.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
My father remained a compulsive gambler to the end. When I was 21, he suggested that I buy a car. I hadn’t had it long when he stole and sold it. I confronted him, and he said he junked it because he found that it was defective, so he had to get rid of it. That was the way he was.
He was a heavy smoker, and by the time he was in his 40s, he had emphysema and was in bad shape. I found out later that Dennis visited him when he got sick. Dennis went up there once a week to see him.
Our father died of lung cancer on October 10, 1970. He was only in his mid-50s.
*
3. Move to New York
In 1968, Dennis moved to New York.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
He got this rent-controlled apartment at 25 East 38th St, which was to be his home for the rest of his life.
He was proud of it. It was an old place; he put in new flooring, and when he took up the old floorboards, he found newspapers beneath them that dated back to World War One.
Dennis was keen to continue acting, and started auditioning for theater parts.
From an interview in a later press release:
“Acting was more satisfying that anything I’d done up to that point. And I decided to see what I could do in that milieu.”
Ad in the Village Voice (1968) for an off-off Broadway play called ‘The Sound of a Different Drummer’:
“Do you Dig Being Naked in the World? Love Boys Love Girls? Participate in the Ultimate EMBRACE! Get Bread for Doing Your Thing in Our HIT SHOW”.
This Village Voice ad for ‘The Sound of a Different Drummer’ was looking for actors to take part in ‘a counter-culture experience’. Dennis auditioned and got a part in it. He claimed later he had no idea what it was all about, but it was a regular, though low-paying acting gig. It lasted for several months, but came to an end when he collapsed onstage one night, and was rushed to hospital with appendicitis.
Jon Bletz (Dennis’ friend):
It took him some time to recover physically from that incident, and when he returned, his part in the play had been given to someone else. He was upset and discouraged by that, and he decided to jack in the whole acting thing. He was pissed by how much you had to struggle for acting jobs… with little guarantee you were going to get anywhere.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
He supported himself by getting work as a commercial artist. Then he started work for Jiffy Simplicity, a company that made dress-making patterns for the American housewife.
Meanwhile back in Freeport, Dennis brother and mother decided to leave the area.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
After my father died, I moved down to Virginia, and my mother moved down with me too. Dennis visited and helped me make bookcases and build some things for my new house. He was good at that.
He’d come down to see us a few times a year, and I’d go up to New York too. His apartment was small, so we always slept in the same bed!
We started to become closer as brothers. We talked more, and became more like friends. I talked to him once a week on the phone.
In early 1969, Dennis met Skip St James. Dennis was 26 at the time, Skip was in his early 20s.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
Dennis chased me around for about a year or so, but I was always with somebody else. I’d see him in bars, and he’d just stand there and stare. He was absolutely beautiful. And then one day, we finally hooked up. We became a couple and were together for four years, from 1969 through 1973.
I moved in with him and we lived together in his apartment at 25 East 38th St. He lived in a fifth floor walk-up, a tiny one bedroom rent-controlled place, which he paid $75 a month for. His apartment was basically a big studio. It had a small room where he slept on a pull-out sofa. It had a tiny kitchen. Really tiny. Then there was a bedroom with a skylight. He used that bedroom as his art studio.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
He was really into his art. He did drawings, charcoals, and painting. He was a master carpenter too. All around the fireplace, he had built-ins from one wall to another. They were beautiful.
We weren’t the only people who enjoyed the space… I remember that every Wednesday afternoon, he’d give his apartment to this woman who was married – and she’d have sex with her boyfriend there. Obviously, we’d have to get out for a couple of hours. I think she was someone he worked with at Simplicity.
For the first time, Dennis was in a steady relationship and living with his partner. But this didn’t stop him from enjoying the New York night life.
Jon Bletz (Dennis’ friend):
After he gave up trying to be an actor, I thought he became a little jaded and cynical. He responded by hitting the bar scene big time. It was like “nothing is gonna get in my way now.”
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
He was very sexual. All the time. Sex was number one for him, always on his mind.
Our relationship was not exclusive. Dennis insisted it wasn’t exclusive. We had space for other relationships – either individually or together. He was very into three-ways, orgies, and cruising, and he loved leather bars. I remember wearing tackaberry buckles. He insisted on wearing them, and he bought me one. He showed me how you’d hang your keys from left to right. I was new to all this. He was a showman more than anything else.
His favorite bar was The Eagle’s Nest on 22nd St where the West Side Highway is. We went there all the time on his motorcycle.
The Eagle on the West Side Highway at 142 11th Ave and 21st St. It was a legendary drinking spot that catered to Manhattan’s leather-clad S&M crowd.
Mark Martinez (Dennis’ friend):
The Eagle was the best leather bar. It was isolated in a quiet, dark area by the water, and it reeked of menace and thrill. The place itself was hot and sweaty and exciting.
Dennis was there all the time, and I hung with him. He was a beautiful man, and sexually voracious. It was difficult not to love him.
Errol Jones (Dennis friend):
For years, I ran into Dennis all over town. He seemed to be at every gay club. You couldn’t miss him. For a start, he was good looking. And secondly, he was… well… willing and enthusiastic. I remember seeing him come out from the restrooms in one place… that were renowned for glory holes. So I approached him. He was friendly. I suggested we go back to my place, but he gestured for me to join him in the back of this club. It was an area I rarely went, because it was so dark. But he led me back there, and… well, it’s a happy memory.
Mark Martinez (Dennis’ friend):
Needless to say, he didn’t use condoms. Why would you? None of us did. We expected to live forever.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
Another place we went was called The Barn. They had back rooms. We’d always be looking for a three way.
As far as sex would go, he was not a top. He was a bottom. In fact, his big thing was getting fist-fucked, and being on the receiving end. He liked to watch too.
Dennis was never safe with sex at all. Once we went to Puerto Rico, and we went to the old part of town where there were all these shacks. I forget what the place is called. It’s supposed to be dangerous. We walked down there. I remember him screwing this Puerto Rican kid in broad daylight.
Even though we weren’t exclusive, I felt close to him. He was the love of my life. At the time.
By day, Dennis’ life was more straight and unassuming.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
All the time I knew him he worked at Simplicity Pattern Company on Madison Avenue. It was just around the corner from his house. He was an artist there, and he drew their patterns for them. That’s all I ever knew him to do. He worked there for years.
In his spare time, Dennis hadn’t completely given up on the idea of performing.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
He told me he wanted to be a singer. And he had a beautiful voice. He also acted occasionally, and he did a play on 14th St. off 5th Ave. I can’t remember what it was called, but it was a really dark play.
I’ve read rumors online that when he came to New York, he went to NYU and also studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio. I don’t believe that’s true at all. I would have known that.
Dennis had modeled at college in Philadelphia, and still picked up the occasional modeling job.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
He appeared in this New York magazine called ‘Michael’s Thing’. It was a small guide to gay entertainment in town… you know, bath houses, porn theaters, and lots of sex… that sort of thing. It would feature pictures of Dennis on a motorcycle on a bridge over the pool at the Cherry Grove Ice Palace.
His looks meant everything to him. He was insecure, and he could be self-absorbed. I don’t mean that he was shallow. He wasn’t by any means, but he took great care of his appearance, and he could be a little vain.
He had a good body. He was just naturally trim, not muscular by any means. He was Italian so he was hairy. I never even knew until late in our relationship that he use to meticulously trim all his chest hair down. Not off, but down.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis got into motorcycles sometime after he left home, and he would go everywhere on them… no distance was too short or too long. He and Skip drove from New York to Virginia on the motorbike to visit us for Thanksgiving in 1973.
Skip was a nice guy, friendly and pleasant. They didn’t make a big deal about being a couple so that part was unclear, but when they came down they slept in the living room.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
He loved his motorcycle and we liked to ride on the weekends and go to museums. We’d go to shows at night. You couldn’t keep him off it.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
When I visited Dennis in New York, we wouldn’t do anything crazy. He was still doing his carpentry and he developed an interest in cooking.
We’d ride around the city and go to the Village. He loved jazz and he had a large collection of old 78s. His preference was 1920s jazz. We went to a few concerts. I remember seeing Stéphane Grappelli with him.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
Dennis loved guns too, and he was an avid gun collector. A place on 11th St and West 4th St. had antique guns in the window. We used to stop by there and go in. He loved that place.
From Rustler, Volume 1 Number 5:
Rustler: What types of guns do you collect?
“Black powder mostly. Flint locks and antiques.”
Rustler: Are you a legal collector?
“Oh yes… registered… the whole bureaucratic bit.”
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
Most of his friends were people from the bars. Dennis was simple like that.
He cared about other people greatly. He was very jovial and wasn’t mean spirited in the slightest. He was a good guy, and we had happy times. We spent a lot of time together.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis lived with Skip for four years or so, but they eventually split up.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
We had a good time, but most things come to an end, right?
After Dennis and I split up, he started dating a guy named Joey, who was the ex-boyfriend of my best friend, Tony Gianetto. Joey and Tony were roommates.
Joey Alan Phipps was an aspiring actor and sometime model for gay photo layouts, and was 11 years younger than Wade.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
Joey was a cute kid. Dennis’ preference was blond Twinkies. That’s what he liked. He did date a young black guy once for a short time, but mainly it was blonde Twinkies. I was a blonde Twinkie. Joey was a blonde Twink.
*
4. Adult Films
By 1975, Dennis had left his day job in the office, and started making his living through his carpentry. He also made money by posing for photo sets for gay-oriented companies like Target Studio and others.
Jim French, aka ‘Rip Colt’ (photographer, founder of Target Studio and Colt Studio):
Dennis was one of my favorite models from the time. Always willing, professional, and easy to work with… and he had a great look. It was easy to take great pictures of him. He was this rare phenomenon, in that he appealed to women just as much as he appealed to men. I always thought he was bi-sexual.
A number of friends remember Dennis having another source of income.
Jim French, aka ‘Rip Colt’ (photographer, founder of Target Studio and Colt Studio):
It was an open secret that Dennis ran a personal ad, I think, in the Village Voice. I’m not sure of exactly what the ad was for – but it was for services that were sexual in nature. I think it was in the Village Voice, or maybe the East Village Other.
Dennis told me he also was a call-boy before he got into films. He was very open about it.
In 1975, Dennis appeared in his first adult film, David Durston’s ‘Boy ‘Napped’ (1975). He adopted the name Wade Nichols, created from his middle name and his father’s first name.
I met Dennis, or Wade as he wanted to be called, on the set of ‘Boy ‘Napped’, and he told me it was his first experience on a film set. It was an all-male cast and I remember thinking how natural he looked around the other guys in sexual situations. I mean… that’s not normal. It’s an unnatural environment. I had difficulty when I started out. But he was very relaxed.
I thought, “Here’s a guy who’s not a stranger to having sex in front of an audience…” Later he told me he’d been some kind of an escort.
Wade Nichols in ‘Boy ‘Napped’ ‘ (1975)
David Durston (director of Boy ‘Napped’):
Dennis was a gift to porn films. Here was this great looking guy, and an incredible body that looked like he worked out every day.
Dennis makes a rare personal appearance to promote a movie
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis wasn’t a sporty guy. As far as I know he never played any sports. He did some weight lifting at some point but not seriously, and it didn’t last long.
Jamie Gillis (adult film actor):
Dennis could perform sexually, and act well, but I was still surprised to see that he started turning up in mostly straight films after that. I figured that he was a guy who wasn’t interested in having sex with women… but he was just as natural in the straight films too.
Dennis starting making a name for himself in the growing adult film industry, first appearing in small roles such as ‘Guy in Woods’ and ‘Delivery Guy’, but then in more prominent lead parts in bigger budget features.
The newly-launched adult film magazines fawned over the rising star, and were eager to profile him.
From ‘Skin Biz’, Vol 1, Number 5:
Young, energetic, good-looking and bold. He comes to the door wearing a tight workshirt and faded blue jeans with a navy blue handkerchief flapping from his back left pocket.
His Manhattan apartment in a 5-storied brownstone is eclectically hip. The flavor is rustic, offset by a burning wood fireplace, beautifully shuttered windows and cabinets which he made himself. A motorcycle helmet, sitting on the floor, accompanies his Honda 550 garaged down the street. A light barbell set, outside his apartment door, keeps his 6’ 1”, 180-lb physique in shape.
Reefer odors permeate the air, and the telephone rings nonstop until he finally hooks it to his answering machine. His name is Wade Nichols, one of today’s swinging 32-year-old bachelors, but with one exception. While most men only dream about their sexual fantasies, this man indulges in them… on screen.
From Rustler, Volume 1 Number 5:
Wade Nichols is special. The handsomest and most talented of this breed of super-men. Perhaps he is the last of the true matinee idols.
Right now, he is content, building furniture, traveling and making erotic films.
The Clark Gable of Porn was hanging a chandelier when we visited his hand-built (decorated, at least) Manhattan apartment.
From Flick, May 1977:
He loves biking and the outdoors. He loves camping out and making love with nature. He loves fucking on his motorcycle and being spontaneous.
From an interview in Flick magazine, May 1977:
“You know, being a film star is really an ego trip for me. I love it when people come up and ask for my autograph, or stare at me and point. But I don’t like to see myself on film. I’m really a bit shy, not aggressive at all…”
At first, Dennis didn’t intend the film work to be more than an occasional way to make some extra cash. After his early success however, he saw an opportunity to use the film money to establish his own carpentry studio.
From an interview in Rustler, Volume 1 Number 5:
“One day I decided to take a last stab at it. (I’d) make a bunch of films and set myself up in a shop making custom lofts and furniture. Well, things picked up, so well, in fact that I remembered that I could act if I had to.
If you are working with people like Georgina (Spelvin), or Annette (Haven) or Leslie (Bovee)… you work extra hard on the acting. I worked hard and soon had no carpentry tools left. So now, I intend to keep working in the blue film business until the police tell me that I can no longer make these films.”
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
I only found out that he was making adult films years later. I was surprised. Not surprised that he was doing porn, but that he was making straight porn… he never had relationships with women. He wasn’t bisexual in any way.
Dennis worked in the occasional gay film or loop, but predominantly appeared in straight films. This created a problem for the magazines that had started to cover the industry. They wanted their male stars to be fiercely heterosexual to cater to a male audience.
As a result, Dennis adapted his public persona to comply.
From an interview in Rustler, Volume 1 Number 5:
“I was making my only gay loop with Jamie Gillis. We were burglars. We tied this guy up and ass-fucked him. Anyway, let me preface by stating that I am NOT by nature a guy who ass-fucks guys.
Jamie and I still remember that gay film we did. We’re mutually embarrassed by it.”
Rustler: Why did you make the gay film if it isn’t your bag?
“Five hundred bucks for two days work.”
Rustler: I take it that you have a list of things you find repulsive?
“Ass-fucking with me on the receiving end…”
By 1977, Dennis adult film career was in full swing, and he appeared in movies by the more notable New York directors such as Carter Stevens, Gerard Damiano, Radley Metzger, and the Amero brothers. In interviews, he insisted that he was content making porn, and had no desire to move into the mainstream.
From an interview Skin magazine, Vol 1, Number 5:
“I have no pretensions of becoming a star. I tried legitimate acting and wasn’t making any money. Acting is a tough business. You can spend your whole life going to every casting call and only wind up with small character parts or walk-ons when you’re 80 years old.
The creative angles in the porn industry are still there. As an actor in these films, I do my best making them good. I’m serious about my work, but not about myself where I believe I’m going to be a star.”
Many people in the industry have good memories of Dennis, but he remained enigmatic. He didn’t socialize with many from the business.
From an interview in Flick, May 1977:
“We’re more like a family… We’re really good friends and we stick together a lot. Like I said, we don’t date that much, and I rarely go out with anyone in the business. It gets too boring.
Most of us are hard-working professionals, and most of our scenes are for real. Although we work as long as 12 hours or more a day, we only do one sex scene a day so we can really make it believable. Girls like Sharon Mitchell and Gloria Leonard are real hard workers… We don’t mix outside of the job.”
Dennis was the sweetest and most gentle person I met in the business. He was so thoughtful. He gave me a beautiful leather briefcase for me to put my acting headshots in. He was lovely.
In interviews, Dennis admitted that he was pleased that the adult film industry was still relatively anonymous. He was able to be a star in this world, yet unknown outside of it. In fact, he was hesitant to pursue acting or modeling opportunities outside of porn.
From an interview in Mr. magazine, May 1978:
I have a fear of doing (modelling jobs) and having them find out a month or two later who I am and what I am doing in this business.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Once when Dennis came down to visit me in Richmond, Virginia, he asked me whether I’d ever been to the Lee Art Theater, which was the local adult film cinema there. I thought it was a strange question and I wondered why he asked about this.
Later he told me he appeared in adult films, so his question made more sense. Apparently, his films had been playing in our local cinema.
My mother found out about it at the same time. I know she wasn’t too happy about it but it didn’t change her feelings towards him. If something bothered her, she just didn’t say anything. That’s what she was like.
I didn’t have strong feelings about Dennis’ adult films, but I was curious. I asked him how he could have sex in front of so many other people. Dennis said that the nude modeling that he’d done at art school had got him used to it.
In 1978, Dennis starred in the lead role of Armand Weston’s ‘Take Off’. It was a high budget film involving much of the business’ best talent – both in front and behind the camera. More intricately plotted that most porn features, it is loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ telling the story of Darrin Blue (played by Dennis), a handsome man who has remained eternally young since the 1920s by keeping a stag film in his attic. He moves through the ensuing decades, meeting women from each subsequent generation – including Georgina Spelvin as a silent-era flapper, and Annette Haven as a film noir femme fatale.
From an interview in Mr. magazine, May 1978:
“It’s the biggest porn film ever. It’s a shame to call it porn. It’s a fantasy-adventure with sexual scenes, and it’s a beautiful film. It was quite a project.”
Perhaps it was too elegant for the porno audiences of the day, but ‘Take Off’ didn’t take off at the box office. It is now recognized as being one of the high watermarks of the golden age era features. In interviews, Dennis claimed to have been paid $2,000 for the three week’s work involved.
“Armand Weston is my favorite director because of the way he works close to his actors and takes care of you from one moment to the next. Carter Stevens is my next favorite because I admire what he can do on a small budget. He really knows how to get mileage out of film. ‘Punk Rock’ (1977) will be a spectacular film and he only had about $35,000 to work with. The ideas in his head come first and he translates them well.”
Carter Stevens (adult film director):
Dennis was one of the sweetest people you could ever meet. I loved him.
When I made ‘Jailbait’ (1977), he was my lead actor. We shot it up in Nyack NY, which was a sort of a mini porn capital for filming in those days. I had this gay make-up artist working on the crew, and after a couple of days, he proudly came to me to announce that he had “turned” one of my actors.
I asked him which one?
He said it was the star, Wade Nichols!
I inquired if he knew that Wade had been a professional call-boy before the films?
The make-up artist looked pained, and said: “Oh that queen! He told me I was his first!”
Dennis, and his favorite adult film co-star, Sharon Mitchell
From an interview in Flick magazine, May 1977:
Rustler: What sort of films do you see? X-films?
“Never, unless it’s a screening or something. I love Star Wars. I love older films more; revivals of things like ‘Casablanca’ or ‘Captain Blood’… I collect early jazz recordings of the 1920s. Music is my life.”
In 1978, Dennis traveled to California and Hawaii to appear in one of his last X-rated films, ‘Love You.’ The film was directed by former Hollywood actor and director (and then-husband of Bo), John Derek.
The film featured a small cast, comprising of just Annette Haven, Leslie Bovee, Eric Edwards, and Dennis.
22-year-old Bo Derek was closely involved in the production.
Bo Derek, from ‘Bo Derek A Real ‘10’ in the Daily Press newspaper, October 7, 1979:
It is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done. I raised the money, was involved in lighting, editing, dubbing, and the hiring and firing, while John directed and photographed. We shot it in Hawaii, on a budget of $120,000, with what you might call a reduced crew – John and me, his daughter as script clerk, and two girls as sound and camera assistants. I learned all the basics, much more than I could have in film school.
The film’s release was delayed until 1979 – by which time Bo was creating waves of her own following her breakout role in the Blake Edwards’ hit ‘10’ (1979).
Bo Derek, interviewed in the Daily World newspaper, October 1, 1979:
(‘Love You’) is sexy and erotic. The picture has very explicit sex scenes. It shows everything. It’s the first beautiful erotic, hard core film ever made. I showed it to 600 women libbers in a NOW meeting and they liked it. They said it was not degrading to women. The picture is about love, and you don’t play around with that.
Eric Edwards (adult film actor):
The movie featured a nude wrestling match between me and Wade Nichols. Now, we all knew he was gay. It was common knowledge. I didn’t have a problem with that – or with the scene, and I figured Wade would enjoy it!
However when we started filming it, the shooting seemed to last forever, and John Derek seemed fascinated by it. I wondered if he was gay – which seemed unlikely because Bo was there at his side, watching all the time, so maybe he was bisexual. I don’t know.
The strange thing was that Wade seemed nervous about the whole set up, and I could feel his tension. In the end, we had a private chat, and I just told him to loosen up and go for it. After that, it was fine.
I think he was just concerned that I was concerned!
Dennis was a nice guy. Very respectful. We all liked him.
*
5. Music
Being an adult film star gave Dennis’ life an occasional glamor. But this paled in comparison to the glamor he experienced when he met Jacques Morali.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis met Jacques Morali at a bar in New York in 1976 or 1977.
Steven Gaines (writer):
I heard that they met through Dennis’s ad that he had in one of the weekly newspapers.
Jacques Morali was a groundbreaking French disco and dance music singer / songwriter, producer, and arranger, and creator of acts like the Village People and The Ritchie Family.
Born July 4, 1947 in Morocco, where according to legend, he used to be dressed as a girl by his mother, by the age of 13 his family moved to France. Jacques made his start in the music business at the end of the 1960s, writing music for orchestras in Paris, for the Crazy Horse, and for himself as a solo artist.
After not finding the success he hoped for in France, he tried his luck in North America.
In the early 1970s, he met fellow French music producer Henri Belolo.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Jacques was pitching ideas to me all the time. In 1975, he called from America and said he wanted me to help him create a huge, dance club record. He wanted to adapt the song ‘Brazil’ from a musical starring Carmen Miranda. He wanted it sung by larger-than-life female singers, so he found three singers and called them ‘The Ritchie Family.’
I liked the idea, and I came over to the U.S. That was the start of our partnership.
Jacques Morali, with The Ritchie Family
While Jacques’ music career in America was taking off, he and Dennis started a romantic relationship.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Jacques was openly gay… he never hid that fact.
According to what he told me, Jacques was instantly attracted by this sexy and handsome guy. As he used to say in his heavy French accent… he was always attracted to a good-looking mustache! So obviously, Dennis fit that description. Dennis had a mustache and was very good looking.
Jacques was also excited by the fact that Dennis was a porn star… not only in gay movies but in straight movies! So it was a challenge for him to have an affair with Dennis, and that’s what happened.
Tip Sanderson (Dennis’ friend):
Jacques and Dennis were an interesting couple. Jacques was clearly infatuated with Dennis. Totally in love with him. It was sheer physical attraction. But Jacques wasn’t Dennis’ physical type at all, so perhaps the attraction wasn’t as… mutual.
What Jacques did have in his favor was the music business. The glitz, the scene, the money… and he exploited it to the max. He told Dennis he would make him a star, a big music star. Dennis was seduced by that. I mean, who wouldn’t be?
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Jacques was in love with Dennis, but I don’t know about Dennis, you know? It’s hard to know. I doubt it. Was Dennis attracted to Jacques? Who knows? But the fact that Jacques was a successful music producer definitely helped their relationship.
The problem for Dennis was that he was still in love with his boyfriend, Joey.
Tip Sanderson (Dennis’ friend):
It was sad. In the end, Dennis chose Jacques over Joey. Maybe the allure of fame was more powerful than his feelings for Joey. Either way, Dennis moved in with Jacques. But he continued to see Joey when he could… which Jacques either didn’t know about or didn’t care about…
But after that, Jacques and Dennis were a couple.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Dennis kept his own apartment, but they lived together just round the corner from me. My place was on East 55 St. between First and Second Aves. Jacques and Dennis were two blocks away at 300 East 56th St. They lived together there for a few years.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis told me Jacques was making around $8 million a year – and this was back in the 1970s. He was doing really well. Jacques was very generous with his friends though.
Steven Gaines (Co-writer of ‘Like an Eagle’ and ‘New York By Night’):
I visited Jacques and Dennis in their apartment, and Jacques gave me a tour. He took me to the bedroom, which was really over the top, and everything in it was super-expensive.
There was this beautiful suede headboard – and Jacques said in a thick French accent, “Zees ees where I fist fuck my boyfriend.”
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I said, “But what about that suede headboard… aren’t you afraid of ruining it?”
Jacques looked horrified, and said, “Whaaat? Do you think we’re peeegs?!’
Which kinda reminds me of a joke: How do you make a gay man scream during sex? You wipe your hands on the drapes.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
I was great friends with Dennis, and I liked him a lot. Dennis, Jacques, my wife and I often went out together. We went to Studio 54 and all the discos. We had dinner regularly. My wife liked Dennis because he was a good guy, very soft-spoken, well mannered, and elegant. He was a very good man.
In many respects, Dennis was the opposite to Jacques. Jacques was loud and extravagant, and Dennis was quiet and reserved. I’m sure that Jacques drove him crazy a lot of the time.
Dennis continued to make adult films after he met Jacques. Far from being a problem for their relationship, Jacques was intrigued by the emerging and sexual world of XXX, and he enjoyed Dennis’ stature as a sex star in the industry.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
They were together for several years. It was through Jacques that Dennis had a disco career. Jacques was putting the Village People together, and at first he offered Dennis a role in the group.
Jacques had attended a costume ball at Les Mouches, a gay disco in Greenwich Village. He was impressed by all the macho male stereotypes portrayed by the party guests. The idea came to him to put together a group of singers and dancers, each one playing a different gay fantasy figure. He formed the group and called it The Village People.
He and Henri Belolo signed a licensing deal with Casablanca Records, one of the most famous disco labels, and the Village People hit the big time with songs including ‘YMCA’ (1978), ‘Macho Man’ (1978), ‘In the Navy’ (1979), and ‘Go West’ (1980). They became one of the most successful acts of the disco era.
Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo – with the Village People
Tip Sanderson (Dennis’ friend):
Dennis told me that he and Jacques decided that they would not make him part of the Village People – where he would be only one of five members of a group, but rather they’d hold him back and launch him as a solo star instead.
The two of them carefully mapped out their plan for a music career for Dennis. Dennis was not a big pop or disco music fan, so he had a few reservations, but Jacques was so enthusiastic that I guess Dennis was caught up in the excitement.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Every time Jacques met someone, he would say, “I will make of you a star, my dear” with his big French accent. Dennis was no exception. Except of course, Jacques was in love with him.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
I saw Dennis on and off after our relationship ended. I knew he’d been dating Jacques Morali – who I knew as the creator of the Village People. Then at one point, Dennis disappeared completely for a short while. When he re-appeared, he said he’d been in Philadelphia. He had new teeth and a new nose!
His old nose was a very handsome Roman one. I don’t want to say it was a hook nose… but, you know. When he came back he had a turned-up nose that he said was modeled after mine. I didn’t like his nose at all because I adored his old one.
To be honest, I think he was better looking before the nose and teeth work.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
One day Jacques said to me, “We’re going to make an album with Dennis.”
I told him, “But Jacques, we can’t. He’s not a singer!”
Jacques said, “I know. He’s an actor, but he’s good looking and believe me, we can make him a star. Trust me.”
So we agreed to produce an album for Dennis.
In 1978, Jacques secured a record deal for Dennis with Casablanca Records, and he assembled a selection of songs.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Jacques and I had different roles. He was the melodist. He was a magician that came with all the hooks in the melodies. I was the one that came up with the ideas for the lyrics. But my English was not too good at that time, so I started to write the song in French or in bad English and then I got the help of Victor Willis, the lead singer for the Village People.
The two strongest songs, ‘Like an Eagle’ and ‘New York By Night’, were written by Steven Gaines, a writer who had penned a pair of biographies – one about former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner, and one of Alice Cooper entitled ‘Me, Alice.’
Steven Gaines (Co-writer of ‘Like an Eagle’ and ‘New York By Night’):
At the time, I was writing about pop music and pop culture for a variety of publications including New York magazine. I’d just written a two-page article about how Jacques Morali had formed the Village People, and how he was selling them like a sports team is sold. And now, he was going on to ‘invent’ somebody else.
Jacques loved the story, and he called me up to say thank you. Then he said he wanted me to write the lyrics for an upcoming album featuring his boyfriend.
Jacques said, “If you write for me, I will make you rich!”
And I wanted to be rich, so I said, “Great, I’ll do that!”
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Normally we didn’t work with other writers, but for some reason Jacques brought Steven in to write for Dennis.
Steven Gaines (Co-writer of ‘Like an Eagle’ and ‘New York By Night’):
A few days later, Jacques changed his mind and decided he only wanted me to do two songs, and he sent me click tracks to work with. The click tracks were just audio clicks to show the rhythm of the song… nothing else. So I wrote the lyrics for ‘Like an Eagle’.
When Jacques heard it, he said that the words were too complicated for people to listen to on a dance floor. I’d done a lot of work on them, and believe me, they weren’t that complicated! Jacques said he would work on them. He did – and in the end, the lyrics were as follows… and please forgive me if I recite them to you:
“Like an Eagle, Like an Eagle, Like an Eagle, Like an Eagle, Like an Eagle, always searching, always wanting, Like an Eagle.”
So he certainly made them less complicated…
The other song I wrote was ‘New York by Night’. It was hard writing lyrics with only a click track, but I wanted to write something that was contemporary about New York, and so I included details like the hustlers on 53rd St. and things like that. Once again, Jacques said it was too complicated. He wanted me to dumb it down, because he said that Dennis couldn’t sing that many words that quickly. But this time, Dennis convinced him that he could handle it, so they kept my lyrics and didn’t change them.
I was mocked for those lyrics at the time, but now people seem to like them.
‘New York By Night’ by Jacques Morali, Henri Belolo, Steven Gaines:
Bushes in the park, shadows moving dark,
Fast romance, furtive glance,
Dancing at Flamingo, watching all the lights go,
Dance with me, a New York melody.
Sitting on a rooftop,
Lovers loving non-stop,
Come with me, come with your fantasy.
This is New York by night,
New York by night,
Filled with glamour, drama, laughter and spice,
Such a pretty city.
New York by night,
This is New York by night,
It’s a galaxy of pleasure and pain.
Dennis Parker – ‘New York by Night’:
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
The lyrics of ‘New York By Night’ are fantastic. One of my favorite lines goes –
“At Studio 54 they’re waiting at the door
Can’t get in, just can’t win.”
It captures the moment when we went to Studio 54 every night. We were in the middle of that disco revolution of that time. It was something crazy, short but, my God, so much life, so much happiness. So much enjoyment. We were in the middle of no war, the economy was not too bad, people wanted to go out after Vietnam. They wanted to have a good time. Sex was starting to get liberated, the gays were starting to come out. Everything was exploding, it was a new generation, and of course they did not want to be the old generation that was pop or rock – they wanted to be disco. That’s what it was.
Former adult film actor Andrea True had found success two years before by recording a disco hit whose lyrics referred to her porn career. Similarly, the lyrics to ‘New York By Night’ also referred to adult films:
“On 42nd Street, X-rated is the beat,
See some skin up on the silver screen”
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Before the recording sessions, Jacques made Dennis prepare intensively, taking singing lessons, and practicing a lot. He really made Dennis work hard.
The recording sessions boasted an impressive roster of musicians. Apart from Jacques and Henri, Phil Hurtt was a member of The Salsoul Orchestra, Marty Nelson was an original member of The Manhattan Transfer, and soul singer and session singer Frank Floyd was a member of the group, The Writers.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
We recorded it at Sigma Sound as usual. We also used synthesizers instead of strings, which was quite new for the time. We had the best musicians and arrangers. In fact we used the same rhythm section that featured on the Village People records.
Phil Hurtt (singer, songwriter – ‘Like an Eagle’):
I wrote two songs for Dennis’ album: ‘I’m A Dancer’ and ‘I Need Your Love’.
This is how it went: Jacques would ask the session guys to play something, and they would play around until he liked what he heard. Normally he would get a catchy hook or a chorus that he liked, and then Jacques would call me, and I would come in and complete the song.
I would also teach the vocals to the singer and sing background vocals. That’s how the songs got created.
I’m the bass player that played on all the Village People hits… from ‘YMCA’, ‘Macho Man’, and the rest, as well as The Ritchie Family, Patrick Juvet, and Dennis. In fact, I also wrote the song ‘Why Don’t You Boogie’ for Dennis.
Jacques Morali contacted me and told me to come down to play on his boyfriend’s record.
Jacques was very ‘out there…’ He would let you know in a minute that he was wonderful and gay. He brought Dennis into the studio and we thought he was cool, and much more chill than Jacques.
Dennis’ singing career hadn’t consisted of much more than humming along to his jazz records, so recording an album at one of the premiere studios in New York was a completely new experience for him.
Phil Hurtt (singer, songwriter – ‘Like an Eagle’):
When Dennis recorded the album, the musicians were actually not there most of the time. That was normal. They’d already recorded the basic tracks by then. So when Dennis was in the studio, it was just Jacques and Henri, myself, and the engineers.
I was the only one actually in the recording booth with Dennis because I was teaching him the vocals. If I wrote a song, I’d have to sing it for the artist to learn it, and then I would stand alongside of them until they got it.
I stood with him training him through the song. Every artist I worked with, I did that.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
During the recording sessions, Jacques got upset and frustrated with Dennis. Jacques could be rude with him. I kept telling Jacques, “Relax. Dennis is not a professional singer. You must be patient with him, he’s doing his best. It was your idea to do an album with Dennis, so now you have to learn to work with him. The final result will be good.”
But what amazed me was that Dennis was very calm even when Jacques was angry. Dennis was always calm. I mean, I never saw him excited or shouting or mad.
Alfonso Carey (Bass player on ‘Like an Eagle’):
Dennis had a little talent, but it wasn’t a talent like Victor Willis of the Village People, or anything like that. I, myself, wouldn’t say Dennis was a great singer. I’m not talking down on him, but he wasn’t a singer-singer if you know what I mean. He was definitely somebody who could hold a note, but he didn’t move me with his voice. He did all right, though.
Phil Hurtt (singer, songwriter – ‘Like an Eagle’):
I think Dennis had a better voice than what came across. I think he was misused. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, but I think if he had been working with a producer who knew how to produce different types of music then he would have done even better.
He was a nice guy though. Quiet and polite.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Dennis voice was actually pretty good! We had to work around it at times, but that was OK. For instance, Jacques sang certain passages at the same time as Dennis to augment Dennis’ vocals. So on ‘Like an Eagle’ when you hear the high voice sing “ah huhhhh” just after the chorus, that’s mainly Jacques singing. We also used background singers to cover up some parts as well.
But I have to say, honestly, Dennis did his part, and did a great singing job for someone who had no experience.
Carla Bandini-Lory (Assistant Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Dennis was a sweetheart, and he impressed everyone. He was a gentleman, he held open doors, never acted above the support staff – which many other people at that time did.
He was a total pro. He listened, he took direction from Jacques, and he understood what was going on.
Even so, he was always in Jacques’ shadow. Everyone was in Jacques’ shadow. Jacques was always the biggest personality in every room.
Steven Gaines (Co-writer of ‘Like an Eagle’ and ‘New York By Night’):
I went to the studio and I watched them record my songs.
Dennis was very cool, and very low key. I don’t remember a big ego or personality thing about him at all. Jacques was a French queen, quite the opposite… a big flamboyant character. When Jacques was good, he was very, very good, but when he got mean, he was really horrid.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
As Executive Producer, I had overall creative control of the record, and I was happy how it turned out. The whole package was very nice. The photo session of Dennis in New York at night for the back cover of the LP was great.
Neil Bogart, the head of Casablanca Records, liked it and thought it was a very good record. He was excited to release it.
The resulting LP, ‘Like an Eagle,’ was released in 1979 – with Dennis adopting the name ‘Dennis Parker’ to distance himself from the adult film career of Wade Nichols.
Steven Gaines (Co-writer of ‘Like an Eagle’ and ‘New York By Night’):
Just before ‘Like an Eagle’ came out, Jacques told me that a disc jockey was going to break it at a gay club called the Flamingo one night, so I went along with my lawyer. It was a big dance place, and you had to have a membership and all sorts of bullshit just to be there, but it was a really important place to launch a record. There were 1,500 gay guys with their shirts off, completely stoned on ethyl chloride.
Suddenly the song came on for the first time and it was really, really thrilling. People didn’t know it at first but it has that whooshing sound, and it just really, really worked well. I’ll never forget how exciting that moment was… at least until my not-so-brilliant lyrics started.
It got a great reaction, the crowd really loved it.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
When the record was released, I asked Dennis if the adult films were behind him. Dennis said yes, but he was pleased with the work he’d done nevertheless. He also mentioned that Screw magazine had voted him ‘Man of the Year’ in 1978 – and he got a kick out of that.
Dennis stopped appearing adult films once the record was released. New films featuring Wade Nichols continued to be released, but they had been shot beforehand. ‘Love You’ (1979) was shot just before Dennis entered the recording studio, ‘Blonde Ambition’ (1981) had been shot in 1976, ‘Blue Voodoo’ (1984) was shot at the end of 1977, and ‘Maraschino Cherry’ (1978) had largely been shot in 1977.
Unpublished photo showing Dennis rehearsing his scene in ‘Maraschino Cherry’ (1978) with Gloria Leonard
Unpublished photograph showing Dennis, between takes on the set of ‘Maraschino Cherry’ (1978), with Gloria Leonard
Tip Sanderson (Dennis’ friend):
Dennis was very relaxed about his pornographic films. No one was pressuring him to stop making them, and he could have continued, but he just didn’t need the money once he got with Jacques and his record came out, so he just stopped.
In early 1979, Dennis made his first appearance on The Merv Griffin Show – where he sung ‘Like an Eagle,’ and appeared alongside Glenda Jackson, David Soul, and Brooke Shields.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
I didn’t see much of Dennis after he moved in with Jacques. Then one night, out of the blue, he invited me over for dinner, and he turned on the Merv Griffith show. There he was singing ‘Like an Eagle’ on TV – all dressed up in shiny silver clothes. He’d invited me over because he wanted me there to share it. I was like… holy crap, he’s really… like wow!
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
I was impressed, although it was strange seeing him sing that kind of music. He hated disco and he hated dancing! Dennis was a jeans and leather guy. He liked corduroys and jeans, and was clearly uncomfortable in that silver lame’ jumpsuit.
I thought he looked ridiculous. And when he smiled… it was like neon on his teeth. They were way too bright.
But he was very proud of it, and I was very proud of him for it.
We stayed in touch, but I never saw him again after that evening.
Steven Gaines (Co-writer of ‘Like an Eagle’ and ‘New York By Night’):
When Dennis premiered ‘Like an Eagle’ on the Merv Griffin Show, I invited a whole bunch of people over to my house. We all watched and suddenly Dennis appeared – and he looked like the tin man from The Wizard of Oz! It was so weird, horrible, really spacey. And he couldn’t really dance or move either. It was very artificial and clumsy. It was so bad that we all started laughing, and we screamed with laughter. There were 6 or 7 people just rolling around on the floor just screaming with laughter because it was so bad.
Dennis went on to make many more television show appearances, including further appearances on The Merv Griffin Show, such as a disco-themed episode on May 3, 1979, in which he appeared with The Village People, The Ritchie Family, Patrick Juvet, and Jacques.
Jacques’ contacts in France also secured a brief appearance in the French film ‘Monique’ (1978), which featured ‘Like an Eagle’ as its theme song.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
We took Dennis to Europe on a promotional tour because we had strong connections with our record companies there. First he went to France, then around Europe. He did many TV show appearances there.
When Dennis was on promotional duties, Jacques would travel with him, but they would concoct elaborate stories for the media to build Dennis’ image as a heterosexual, playboy lady-killer, complete with accompanying pictures showing him embracing a selection of beauties.
James Dunn (Dennis’ friend):
When he came back from his latest European trip, Dennis would joke about the love affairs they’d invented for him. Jacques had so many contacts with women in show business it was easy for them to arrange.
Magazine article (1980):
His first stop was Paris, where Dennis met and promptly fell for a Parisian beauty named Michelle. She was the costume designer for a hot Paris nightspot, The Crazy Horse Saloon. Through Michelle, Dennis met the star of the Crazy Horse show, Lova Moor, and soon the trio packed up and took off for the south of France.
Dennis with ‘girlfriend’ Michelle (left) and Crazy Horse dancer and recording artist Lova Moor (right)
Dennis with Michelle, opposite Jacques and Lova Moor. Jacques mother is at the end of the table.
What was real however was that Dennis was definitely living the high life. He made regular promotional trips to France, Spain and Italy (where he visited Venice for a ‘Save Venice’ festival), he visited Medina in Morocco and Rio (where he met up with Ursula Andress, John Derek’s ex-wife), and Jacques commissioned a large portrait of him from a renowned artist and his wife in their 14th century chateau in Majorca.
According to Dennis, Jacques paid over $7,000 for this portrait in 1978. It is currently hanging in Dennis’ brother’s living room.
Carla Bandini-Lory (Assistant Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
After the record came out, I continued to see Dennis. I worked at Sigma Studios, which was at 1697 Broadway on the 9th and 10th floors, and Studio 54 was right around the corner. When Dennis was in the city, he used to come over in the early hours, after going to Studio 54, and he and Jacques would tell me all the latest gossip from the club scene. He was hilarious.
James Dunn (Dennis’ friend):
For many people, Dennis became a great sex symbol after his record hit. People – men and women – would go wild over him. I thought he had a kind of artificial look and it just seemed weird to me. But I can tell you one thing: I knew a guy who went to bed with him. I asked him, “What was it like?”, and he said, “Oh my God… I don’t know even what he did to me. It was incredible.”
Horace Ott (strings and horns arranger on ‘Like an Eagle’ LP):
After working on the record, my wife Gloria and I went out to Long Island with Jacques and Dennis. They were clearly a happy couple. Dennis was fun, a real gentleman.
A few months later, we were down in Virginia at a wedding, and we found ourselves sat at a table with Dennis’ mother! She even had a copy of Dennis’ album with her and was showing it off to people. She was very proud of Dennis and his music success.
In 1979, Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo teamed up with Allan Carr to make ‘Can’t Stop the Music,’ a musical comedy that was intended to be a pseudo-biography of The Village People, though it bears only a vague resemblance to the actual story of the group’s formation.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Jacques pushed really hard to have Dennis star in the movie, but for some reason, Allan Carr was jealous about Dennis. Allan like to fool around young and good-looking boys, and maybe Dennis was just getting too much attention. Either way, he did not want Dennis in the movie. So Jacques and Allan had a huge ego fight. I had to fly to California to mediate in the middle of shooting.
In the end, Dennis was not in the movie, even though he was included in all the promotion and premiere parties.
Towards the end of the 1970s, Dennis and Jacques’ relationship started to cool. They remained friendly, but eventually Dennis moved back into his apartment on East 38th St where he started living with a new partner… who was his former boyfriend, Joey Alan Phipps.
James Dunn (Dennis’ friend):
Dennis always had a thing for Joey, even when he was with Jacques. I guess he never let Joey go. They started being a couple again.
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6. ‘The Edge of Night’
According to friends, Dennis was never interested in recording a follow-up to ‘Like an Eagle’. He’d enjoyed the limelight, the glamor, and the money while it lasted, but the disco scene wasn’t for him. When he split up with Jacques, he started concentrating on acting – and this time he auditioned for mainstream parts.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis told me he got an audition for ‘The Edge of Night’ without any help from Jacques. He went to a casting call for a role as an extra; the producers liked him and they offered him a full recurring role as Police Chief Derek Mallory.
‘The Edge of Night’ was an American television mystery series that was produced by Procter & Gamble. So many of the early sponsors of serials had been soap manufacturers like Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers, that the media called these shows ‘soap operas’.
Rob Foy (Production assistant on ‘The Edge of Night’):
‘The Edge of Night’ wasn’t really just a soap opera. It was a hybrid of a crime drama with some of the elements of a melodrama. So you had the cops, forensics, and attorneys dealing with cases, at the same time you have romantic, marital, and family issues. It was very successful for decades.
‘The Edge of Night’ debuted on CBS on April 2, 1956, and ran as a live broadcast on that network until November 28, 1975; then the series moved to ABC, where it aired from December 1, 1975, until December 28, 1984. In total 7,420 episodes were produced.
Rob Foy (Production assistant on ‘The Edge of Night’):
It was Erwin ‘Nick’ Nicholson that hired Dennis. He was the long-standing producer for the show. He was smitten with Dennis, and loved him from the start. He was like a mentor to many of us, and particularly someone like Dennis.
Dennis appeared in 142 episodes of the daytime soap opera – one of the most frequently-appearing actors in the TV series’ history.
On October 30, 1979, Dennis made his first appearance on the ‘The Edge of Night’ (he appears at the 7 min 50 sec mark):
‘The Edge of Night’ was filmed on the seventh floor of a nondescript brick building at E.U.E. Studios at 222 East 44th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.
I worked with him all the time. My character was engaged to his, and was using him terribly in the script. Poor Dennis! He was so good on that show.
The production was unique in that it was a half hour show. We would all shoot at the same time on the set as opposed to waiting in your dressing room until your scenes were up. We shot it like it was live. So the regulars all became very close friends.
And I have to say, Dennis was an excellent actor. He really was. That was not an easy part to play. There was a lot of acting, but he managed to be sensitive and manly at the same time. He was just really, really good in that part.
I heard that Dennis’s past as an adult actor had been leaked to the producers, so Dennis took it upon himself to call a meeting with them. He told them about what he’d done. The top producer at the time, Nick Nicholson, told him he was doing a great job and that it didn’t matter. He should just keeping going. Nothing was going to change that.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis told me that the producers of ‘’The Edge of Night’ received a few complaints in the early days, because of his XXX past. The producers liked him though and stood by him.
Rob Foy (Production assistant on ‘The Edge of Night’):
The way it was handled was quite secretive. Proctor & Gamble were involved and the rumor was that initially they were unhappy with the situation. But Nick Nicholson evidently stood firm. He was a formidable character: Under his guidance, ‘The Edge of Night’ got only the second Emmy ever given for a daytime drama. He won the day, and Dennis stayed.
Sharon Gabet (Actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
After that, the producers were quite protective of him. We all knew about his adult film career because the films were frequently running nearby in Times Square at the time! When we first found out about his past, we’d go there and just look at the marquees. We all loved it. We thought it was hilarious.
That was another thing about The Edge of Night: No one got coddled on that show. Nobody. Everybody made fun of everybody. I’ve never laughed so much working in my life like on ‘The Edge of Night’. We really were great friends. Dennis certainly got a lot of teasing by the entire set, but he was always a gentleman. I thought he was such a nice guy.
And the writers would play along too. They’d put the name ‘Wade Nichols’ into the scripts! That was their joke all the time. Maybe it was just for dress rehearsal; I don’t know if it was ever used but it was hysterical.
You could tell when you talked to him about his past that he was so proud of his adult film work. We got a kick out of that. He was not ashamed at all. He felt he did the best he could in every role that he had. He was very humble but very proud of his work. I mean, he was a star! He was a porn star!
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
My mother was very proud of Dennis’ soap opera success. She kept scrapbooks of all the articles and pictures that she could find of him.
Carter Stevens (adult film director):
My daughter hit puberty just when Dennis was becoming successful on ‘The Edge of Night’. She had an enormous crush on him. I’d stayed in touch with him so I mentioned this to him, and a few days later a four-page letter arrived with half a dozen signed publicity shots for her. He was that kind of guy.
Sharon Gabet (Actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
The producers would play his song ‘Like an Eagle’ on the set. We would all just roar. The video for that song is just so wonderful and hilarious.
Dennis played along. He was very witty, extremely intelligent, and really funny. Yes, he was vain too, but what actor isn’t? Are you kidding? Come on. Everyone would fight to get to the mirror. We teased him about it all the time.
He also had a wonderful partner. They were just a joy. I went over to dinner at their place a number of times.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis seemed very happy. His apartment was near this place called Bide-A-Wee Animal Shelter, which was a pet welfare organization. He loved animals, so he’d go there to play with them and talk to the people that worked there.
Dennis became active in fund-raising activities for Bide-A-Wee, arranging functions and making personal appearances, as well as getting involved in other causes like raising money and awareness for autistic children.
Dennis at a Bide-A-Wee fundraiser
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
His life was good, and he tried to persuade my mother and I to move back to New York to be closer to him, where he was living with his boyfriend, Joe.
In 1980, Dennis got Joey an acting part in ‘The Edge of Night’ – as a puppeteer.
Larry Engler (puppeteer on ‘The Edge of Night’):
I taught Joey how to use the puppets. I was told that I was too old to get the part myself, so they brought Joey in.
Joey Alan Phipps in ‘The Edge of Night’
Joey appeared in 23 episodes of the soap in mid-1980 before being replaced. Rumors circulated about the reason for his dismissal, but most people involved insist he was just a bad fit.
Another actor was brought in to take Joey’s character’s role.
Larry Engler (puppeteer on ‘The Edge of Night’):
I thought that Joey was let go because he just didn’t click with the production. I didn’t hear anything else.
The funniest thing was the way that Joey’s exit was handled on the show. Another actor was immediately cast in Joey’s place, and he suddenly appeared on the show despite not looking anything like Joey! There was no explanation, no plot device to account for it, no nothing.
Joey didn’t have any significant acting roles after ‘The Edge of Night’, his only role of note coming as an understudy in Robert Altman’s Broadway revival of ‘Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean’, which featured Karen Black, Cher, and Kathy Bates.
David Ellen (friend):
I met Dennis at a record store in the early 80s. I loved traditional jazz records and I saw that he had an armful of them that he was going to buy, so we struck up a conversation. I invited him back to my place and we hit it off, and we had these long conversations – swapping stories about the early jazz and bluesmen.
I didn’t know he was on TV or that he was gay. He just told me he was an actor. It was only when I introduced him to a girlfriend that she told me he was a soap star. It turned out all the women I knew were madly in love with him.
Sharon Gabet (Actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
We would go out dancing together. He was a celebrity. In fact, there was a disco contest for soap people, and Dennis was my partner.
From ‘Shows ‘Em How To Boogie’, United Features, 20 December 1980:
The soap stars were sweating blood. The tension was feverish. The competitiveness was boiling. The event was the ‘ABC Soap Bubble Boogie: Daytime Stars in a Disco Dance-Off.”
It was the routine of Dennis Parker and Sharon Gabet that really got down to the ‘fun gutter’. Garbed in leather, vinyl and ‘el cheapo’ leather skin tights, Dennis and Sharon performed a quasi-Apache dance with fake claps and rough-house antics. As one observer noted, “It’s a good thing the ABC censor isn’t here. This stuff would end up on the cutting room floor and bring a massive coronary to image-conscious executives.”
Sharon Gabet (Actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
We dressed up in the most hilarious outfits. Wild disco. I had silver skintight pants and some leopard skin top. He wore skintight leather pants. We choreographed this just wild dance. And we won the whole thing!
Sharon Gabet (Actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
We also had an ‘Edge of Night’ softball team. There were a lot of very athletic guys on the crew and in the cast. Dennis would show up in these tight shorts… and an ascot! He would be there swinging a bat – with his ascot. It was hilarious.
‘The Edge of Night’ software team, with Dennis on far left
Andrew Rubinstein (friend):
He was a very modest guy. I’d known him a couple of years before he even told me that he had had a hit record. He was amused by it. When we hung out, we’d smoke joints and talk and listen to his extensive record collection. When it came to music, he knew what he was talking about.
And the joints we smoked?! The joints he rolled were the biggest I’ve seen. They were like baby’s forearms…
David Ellen (friend):
Dennis’ life slowed down – in a good way, and he seemed happy. He loved the life of being a regular and recognizable TV actor on a show like ‘The Edge of Night’.
Larry Engler (puppeteer on ‘The Edge of Night’):
Working on ‘The Edge of Night’ was great – it was a real family and people were great to each other. Dennis was a key part of that happy ensemble.
Dennis features several times in this ‘Edge of Night’ blooper reel (see the 12:30 mark.)
From an interview in 1982:
“I couldn’t have been more pleased than when I landed the role on ‘The Edge of Night’. I had a wonderful time traveling around the world in the fast lane but I wasn’t happy with the work I was doing. The kind of music that’s popular today, the kind the record company wanted me to do, just isn’t my kind of music.
I’m still singing – but I’m singing blues and jazz, not disco. Plus the role of Derek Mallory is a plum, it’s getting more involved and intense all the time.”
Andrew Rubinstein (friend):
Dennis wasn’t crazy ambitious. I think he would have been happy being a daytime soap actor for the rest of his life. And he could have found work forever doing that. At the same time, he started to be curious about whether he could make it as a film actor. Once he made a name for himself on TV, he started to think about auditioning for bigger parts in movies. He looked at rugged actors like Harrison Ford, and thought… why not me?
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7. The End
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
In the spring of 1984, Dennis called and said he wasn’t feeling well. He was having very bad night sweats and felt weak. He took some time off ‘The Edge of Night’. When he returned to the show, they were careful to shoot around his frailty. They had him sitting at desks. They did their best to cover up his physical deterioration.
Sharon Gabet (actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
It was very, very sad because no one knew he had AIDS. To be honest, no one really even knew what AIDS was then. We all noticed something was wrong, of course, because he started losing a lot of weight. He looked sick. He was white as a sheet. He was losing energy. I think the word on the set at the time was that he had mono. He never said anything about it. He was quiet about it.
He started getting grumpy. We all felt terrible later because we were mean to him. No one, like I said, nobody got away with anything, so we would just say, “Oh, come on, Dennis. Stop being so grumpy!”
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
Dennis was treated at the Cabrini Medical Center near where he lived in mid-town Manhattan. My mother went to see him in New York when he was sick.
Dennis’ partner Joey tended to him throughout his illness.
Sharon Gabet (actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
Recently I watched the final 18 months of the show. I hadn’t seen it in over 30 years. And to watch Dennis’ deterioration on camera was shocking. It was so clear. His suits would hang off him.
I remember it was just awful to see him on the set. He just sank. He had no energy. Now when I look back, it’s pretty evident to me that the man was dying. He would just have enough energy to give his lines and then you would find him asleep in the chair or laying on one of the couches. He just couldn’t do it anymore. They kept cutting his part back.
There was some talk that came out that really upset me – where people quoted me saying, “Oh, I was pregnant, and I wouldn’t let Dennis near me, let alone kiss me.” It is just complete and utter bullshit. I adored him.
It was also a very rough time for ‘The Edge of Night’ as it proved to be our last year. No one knew how fast we were going down because we were losing our affiliates. We were the only show on ABC that wasn’t owned by ABC. They hired a new writer, and that didn’t turn out so well. The producers were really fighting for their lives.
By now, Dennis was unable to continue working on ‘The Edge of Night’, and his character was written out of the show. His last episode aired on October 18, 1984, just 12 days shy of his fifth anniversary of his first air date on the show. (His last scene is at the 16 min 10 sec mark).
Sharon Gabet (actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
There was just so much going on that Dennis got lost in the drama of everything else. His character just had this mysterious disappearance. You never saw Chief Mallory again.
‘The Edge of Night’ was cancelled a few months later.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
I wasn’t in close contact with Dennis towards the end. I saw a clip of ‘Edge of Night’ before he had to leave. He looked so bad. I didn’t visit him because my friend Tony said Dennis didn’t want anyone to see him the way he looked.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
Poor guy. AIDS. That was a horrible time. I was living in New York. We didn’t call it AIDS, we called it Kaposi’s sarcoma. We didn’t know what was happening, and it was frightening.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
On his 38th birthday in October 1984, he told me he was determined that this would not be his last birthday. He said he would have other birthdays.
He died three months later to the day on January 28th, 1985. He died in the same rent-controlled apartment in New York where he’d been living since the late 1960s. He did not kill himself as some have suggested.
I have a photo taken of him on his deathbed. It was so sad.
Skip St. James (Dennis’ partner in the early 1970s):
Tony called me up and said that Dennis had shot himself. That was the rumor for a time. There were so many conflicting stories.
Whatever the truth is, I’ll always remember and cherish our time together. Like I say, he was a good man.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
There was a mystery about the way he died. I mean, we know that he caught AIDS. But some people say that he died because he shot himself with a gun. Perhaps it’s because they want to create more drama, who knows?
Sharon Gabet (actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
I was giving birth when Dennis left the show. Then the producers called me up a week after I had the baby and said, “Can you come back and just shoot the final two weeks?” When I got there, they gave me the news that Dennis had died. The words AIDS were never used. No one knew about it.
It ended up that two other of our dear friends on the show suffered the same fate. Joel Crothers, who I spoke to the last few days of his life, was in L.A. at the time. He called me to say goodbye. Irving Allen Lee, who was the other police detective, Calvin Stoner, also passed. All three of them died of AIDS within a year or two. It was just horrible.
Variety’s obituary – February 6, 1985:
Dennis Parker, 38, actor, who for the last five years played Police Chief Derek Mallory on the ABCTV soap opera “Edge of Night,” died Jan. 28 in New York after a brief illness.
Born in Manhattan, Parker grew up in Freeport, Long Island. He attended the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, where he concentrated on pottery and furniture design and had his first taste of acting when, while still a student, he won a role in a touring company production of ‘The Trojan Women.’ After graduating, he returned to his native New York and studied acting at New York U. and the H. B. Studio.
Parker was also an accomplished singer and instrumentalist, and several years ago toured Europe on behalf of an album he made for the Casablanca label.
He was an avid animal lover, and devoted a great deal of time working in their behalf.
Survivors include his mother and brother.
Tributes also came from his fellow actors.
Sharon Gabet (actress on ‘The Edge of Night’):
He was so good and such a sweetheart, and of course none of that made any difference in the end. He was a dear friend. I loved him.
After the huge successes of the 1970s, Jacques Morali’s career had gone quiet for a few years. His last successful production work had been in 1983 with Break Machine and 1984’s Eartha Kitt album, ‘I Love Men.’
In 1990, several years after Dennis’ passing, Morali gave a rare interview.
Jacques Morali (Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’, interviewed in 1990):
I think that the respect (for the work I’ve done) will come one day. Perhaps after I die. I’ve had AIDS for five years, and my most recent hits, with Break Machine and Eartha Kitt, were back before I was ill.
I lost too many friends. When Dennis died, it completely shook me.
What’s your happiest memory?
Mmmm… (he pauses). Dennis Parker. I was completely in love with him. It was Dennis who sung ‘Fly Like an Eagle’.
Henri Belolo (Executive Producer – ‘Like an Eagle’):
After Jacques split up from Dennis, he had a big love affair with a guy named Harold Striegel who was a bartender in Los Angeles. Harold was a young German, mustache, very good looking – just Jacques’ type. They lived together for six or seven years, but Harold died dramatically as well when he caught AIDS too.
Jacques Morali died of AIDS in 1991. He was buried in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in France.
Richard Posa (Dennis’ brother):
After Dennis’ death, Joe Phipps went to live in California. Somewhere in the early 1990s, he contracted AIDS. This was a very different era than when Dennis had contracted the illness. By now, cocktails of drugs were available which could have saved him. Unfortunately, Joey had some other kind of health issue and his body rejected the new drugs.
Joey tried a variety of alternative cures. The costs were high, and he declared bankruptcy in 1995.
Joey passed away on December 6th, 1996.
*
Epilogue – New York, 2010:
Several decades later, Radley Metzger stood on the same spot where he had shot the kitchen scene with Wade Nichols for his film, ‘Barbara Broadcast’.
The surroundings were identical to how they looked in 1976.
Radley seemed amused by the interest in the scene he had devised and shot years before. He revealed an unusual combination of pride and modesty.
Looking around, he said: “You can never tell what’s going to work on film. Not even after you’ve shot it. You have little idea. It’s only when you get back to the editing suite that you see if you’ve captured something special.
“When I started to edit the footage, I was happy that scene worked so well. And people still contact me today about it. I still get letters about it.
“Of course, I owe it all to the actors, Wade Nichols and C.J. Laing. They made it very easy.”
He paused.
“Wade Nichols. I haven’t thought about him for a while. He died of AIDS, I think. I don’t know much more about him. He seemed to be an interesting man, but he was such a mystery.
“I wish I’d known more about him.”
Wade Nichols and C.J. Laing
*
The music of Dennis Parker lives on. Here is a selection of tracks that sample ‘Like an Eagle’:
Punk music. Adult films. Both were subversive art forms in New York in the 1970s. They challenged conventions, shocked audiences, and took artistic expression to another plane.
This week The Rialto Report starts a short series dedicated to the way that music and adult entertainment overlapped in the 1970s.
We start with the story of two fearless female performers – and the man who stood in the shadows behind them, helping them to shine.
It is the story of Monica Kennedy, perhaps the most notorious and legendary stripper and sex performer in 1970s New York; Wendy O. Williams, live sex show actress-turned shock rock queen as lead singer of the Plasmatics; and Rod Swenson, the mercurial intellect behind the scenes who created the perfect stage for them both.
(noun) a star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness because of a catastrophic explosion that ejects most of its mass.
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Monica, Rod, and Wendy
1976.
Three people sit backstage at New York’s Show World sex emporium.
In some ways, they couldn’t be more different, but in other ways they have much in common.
Monica – glamorous, extrovert, outrageous – is the undisputed star of the anarchic show, Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater, that shocks nightly on stage.
Rod – sharp and inquisitive eyes darting nervously – is the brilliant, entrepreneurial Svengali behind the production and other sex-related ventures.
Wendy – shy and unprepossessing at first sight – is the seething newcomer, an insurgent lost girl looking for a new path that will match her seditious worldview.
They share a contradictory desire to satisfy an audience by giving them exactly what they want – while also shocking spectators into questioning their own beliefs.
But tonight the three of them are together to separate.
There is a silence in the room. But they all know.
This is a crossroads for each of them. A passing of the torch. The moment one person suddenly loses their place, becomes less relevant, and ages overnight, at the same moment that another rises to take their place in the spotlight, and have a shot at immortality.
Tonight everything is about to change.
*
Monica
It was a mismatch from the get-go: if a person is meant to be a product of where they came from, what the hell happened to Monica Kennedy?
Amelia County, 35 miles southwest of Richmond, Virginia, is a sparsely populated, impoverished rural area. Hunting and fishing country. Family values. Church on Sunday. Guns, barbecues, and pick-up trucks. High-tone girls with frosty pom-pom curls. ‘Merica in its purest white trash form.
Monica Kennedy was born there in 1946, and she stood out like a psychedelic peacock in a flock of crows.
She was a light-skinned, African American girl, pretty in a way that drove the farming men hog wild. And she didn’t make life easier for anyone as she ruthlessly flirted with the local hayseeds. That was a problem in Amelia County in the 1950s, where moral purity was as important as apple pie on Sundays.
Monica remembers: “Sex was a sin when I was growing up, and it was hidden and suppressed in every way it could be. My grandparents were particularly outraged by anything having to do with sex. In fact, the whole town was. You couldn’t even kiss your boyfriend goodnight on the cheek without people calling you the worst of names.”
Her upbringing was sheltered, but on occasion she glimpsed the shining Babylon beyond the rural villages. Ten cent movie magazines, like Photo Play and Screen Book, revealed Hollywood sirens with fancy cosmopolitan names. Monica dug the vampy blondes the most: Jean Harlow. Veronica Lake. White-hot hair, tight wound gowns, lustful cool.
By her teen years, Monica had had enough. She knew she was clever, but she was through with school. Books and lessons no longer held her attention. She left home at 16, and took a bus 500 miles north to Boston, MA. She lied about her age to get a job as a secretary in an insurance company, but soon realized she’d traded one form of repression for another. Sure, city life was better than rural Virginia, but she hated the rigid 9-5 job, she hated being broke, and she hated the grating sexual advances from her boss. So she enrolled at the Boston School of Modeling and crossed her fingers for an escape route from her office desk.
The modelling course had an immediate effect: it allowed her to be herself for the first time. She flourished and felt beautiful. She liked showing off her curves, and all the attention made her feel like a woman. But as comfortable as Monica was in her own skin, she was business-minded too. She knew that being an African American girl was going to be a drawback in the modeling world, but was determined not to let anything limit her opportunity to make some green. Monica may have resembled Cardi B – all booty, attitude, and sass – but this was decades before hip hop culture and the acceptance of a sexualized strong black woman on stage. She figured she needed a new persona, a whiter version, and one that emulated her silver screen idols. So she donned a platinum blonde wig, applied body make-up, and soon her golden skin found favor modeling bikinis.
She also got herself a boyfriend – Stelios, fresh off the boat from Athens. Monica was starry-eyed though naïve about him: “I adored him, but we were a couple of kids without a clue. I was a struggling model, and he… hell, I don’t even know what he did… But I knew we were in love.”
Monica and Stelios got hitched, to the relief of the Virginia Kennedys back home: “I still had my beautiful cherry when I got married. The family was all proud of me. In fact, I didn’t even lose it on my wedding night because I locked myself away in the bathroom all night.”
But the marriage was short-lived: it was broken up when Federal Immigration came knocking. It tuned out that Stelios had entered the country illegally, and so he was deported back to Greece with a recommendation to forget about applying to return.
Monica was broken by the loss: “If Stelios and I had been allowed to stay together, I could’ve stayed pure. Forever. Everything else that happened in my life would’ve been different.”
Monica needed a second fresh start, so she left Boston for New York, and left secretarial work for show business. She’d heard that go-go dancers made good dough, so she bought a cowgirl outfit, cut off the sleeves and pant legs, and sewed on as many rhinestones as she could afford. It worked. She got dancing gigs straight away at clubs all over the city, as well as upstate on the Catskill Mountain Borscht Belt circuit where her showgirl act supported comics like Don Rickles.
Monica found work at bigger venues too like the Peppermint Lounge, a disco on West 45th Street that was around from 1958 to 1965. It was run by Genovese crime family captain Matty ‘The Horse’ Ianniello, and was the hottest spot in town for a time, with The Beatles visiting during their 1964 U.S. visit. Monica danced between featured music acts, that included the Beach Boys, the Ronettes, Liza Minnelli, and the Four Seasons.
TV work came her way when she was hired as a dancer in a cage on The Clay Cole Show, a rock music show that aired on WPIX-TV, and featured appearances by acts such as The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond, Dionne Warwick, and Simon & Garfunkel.
When the Peppermint Lounge lost its liquor license in early 1966, Monica lost her regular cash flow. But she was on a roll, and decided to take her dancing in a different, more risque’, direction: “I was wild and restless. I’d seen the nightlife in New York, and I wanted more. I didn’t want to be on stage between the star acts: I wanted to BE the star act.”
She signed with Sol Goodman, an agent legendary for all the wrong reasons. Working out of Baltimore, Sol’s greatest claim to fame was changing Fanny Belle Fleming’s name to Blaze Starr and putting her in his Two O’Clock Club, in the heart of Baltimore’s red-light district. But Sol was more than that, and he farmed out a large stable of burlesque girls into strip joints across the country. It was rumored that his M.O. was to send out sexually explicit pictures of his acts to club owners – who’d rush to book them in expectation of the raciest possible show, only to be disappointed when a more modest, pasties-and-bloomers gal turned up to dance.
Monica was clear about the act she wanted to deliver. She wanted to be different. She wanted to stand out. She wanted to combine high production values with novelty. But most of all, she wanted to add as much raunch as she could get away with.
But at that time there were limits. The burlesque circuit in the 1960s was still stuck in the pre-war past: show a little T&A but always maintain the tease. Monica remembered: “I loved playing the theater circuit in the good ol’ days. But you had to keep your pasties and G-string on. I had a wardrobe mistress to catch my clothes and there was always a lighting director. And timing was everything. Shows were seven minutes long, and they had to be exact.”
Monica’s new act was successful, and she was soon headlining in clubs. Her regular theaters form a long-forgotten minor league trail of arcane Americana sex joints. In Pennsylvania: the Argo’s in Pittston, and the Seville in Scranton. In Wisconsin: the Dangle or the Whiskey A-Go-Go in Madison, and Tubby’s Show Lounge in Racine. In New York City: the 42nd Street Playhouse, and the Broadway Burlesk. In Vegas: the Palomino Club, one of the first clubs to have both a liquor license and totally nude dancers.
Monica appears in Pennsylvania in October 1967
But times were a changin’, old-school burlesque was turning into newly-permissible stripping, and Monica was on the front line of the assault on American decency. In fact, whenever standards changed – legal, moral, social, you name it – she updated her act to take advantage of new, more permissive rulings. When G-strings came off and pubic hair was finally visible, she was the first burlesque dancer to trim hers into a heart shape, or an arrow pointing downwards into her crotch. And of course, on the Fourth of July she dyed it red, white, and blue. God Bless America.
Audiences loved her for it. She was re-booked time and again to the same venues as growing legions of fans clamored for her return – and each time her rate went up.
Since time immemorial, all headlining dancers worth a damn were billed with an instantly recognizable nickname. Monica’s moniker was simple: she was ‘The Sexiest of Them All.’
Her act became more outrageous: she went further than the rest of the girls, insisting on pushing limits and doing things that hadn’t been done before, things that the other girls were afraid of doing: “All of the other girls thought I was out of my mind. But it’s very simple: I’ve never been afraid to take the chance for my fans, or to face an arrest. They know that. They want a piece of it, and when they leave, they’re happier than when they came in. And that’s the ticket. I’m making people happy.”
And Monica would stop at nothing to please her audience, as columnist Earl Wilson learned when he witnessed her show at New York’s Broadway Burlesk in 1972: “A high-spirited girl, with a bottom that was bulgier than her bosom, she was obviously adored by her audience. When someone yelled, “Take it off!” – an unnecessary remark since she had already taken off everything – she pulled a few hairs out of her pubis and threw them into the audience.”
A backstage worker on her show recalls another story: “She always went out there bouncing, bubbly and laughing. Everybody loved her. Once she sat down on top of this guy’s head and when she stood back up, she had this guy’s toupee stuck inside her. When she realized what she’d done, she tried to pat it back on without being too obvious, but we were laughing so hard, I nearly fell out of the light booth…”
Another trick she did included an audience member’s spectacles. After collecting a pair from a volunteer, she rubbed them over her breasts and between her legs before apparently inserting them into her rear so the audience could see them protruding out. Monica was keen to qualify this: “I didn’t really put them up my butt. Just in the muscle at the top. Let’s be clear about that.” The clarification is appreciated, your honor.
Other favorite parts of her act included whipped cream, sparklers inserted in private parts, even the ability to pick up a bottle of chianti with her lady parts: “But it must have a cork in it,” she specified. “With an uncorked bottle you run the risk of vacuum.” A cautionary piece of advice we can surely all relate to.
As Monica drew bigger crowds, her fee continued to rise. The downside was that the law also turned up to see her – and started arresting her frequently. But her charge sheet must’ve been a treat: she was once busted in Port Washington for standing on her head with a cigarette in her vagina blowing smoke rings out of it. Honestly officer, it isn’t what it looks like.
She worked with all the strippers of the day – including future adult film director Phil Prince and his wife Teresita when they were a live sex-show fixture in Times Square. And she always wore her trademark white cowgirl outfit, with a sombrero, and a belt holding her two toy pistols.
Along the way, Monica acquired a second husband, an Italian with whom she had two girls, though that didn’t stop her from lamenting to journalists that her sex life wasn’t exciting, and sure didn’t live up to her volcanic stage exploits. In fact, she considered herself frigid, and spoke openly about being incapable of orgasm.
She claimed music was her first and deepest love. She put together a band, ‘Monica Kennedy and The Family Jewels’, and put out a record called ‘Football Pete.’ The band gigged around New York. It was a departure for her as this was a family-friendly show, the first time she wasn’t selling sex. But a problem lay ahead: “Everything was sweet. I could bring my family and friends to my shows. But then the theaters began to show porn movies before my music performances.
“At first, I protested: I launched a campaign on the radio to keep porn films out of my music shows. They refused. So I decided, ‘Ok, if they want to play dirty, I’ll play dirty.’”
If you can’t beat ’em, then fuck ’em. Monica did that literally. And she knew how to play dirtier than anyone: “One night I brought in a case of champagne, popped the corks, and told everyone in the first row to take out his cock. I washed them all in champagne, and then sucked the champagne from 79 cocks.”
So what’s the truth behind this story? This is New York in the 1970s. It’s the Wild East. Who knows..? But when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
What is true is that Monica’s shows perfected the art of breaking the fourth wall with the audience in the most flagrant way ever seen on stage: “I’d bring out flavored douches, and I’d douche right on stage into this nice little pan. Then I’d cover my pussy with whipped cream and cherries and say, “C’mon babies, it’s feeding time.” That was my catchphrase.”
Soon the interaction became a staple of her act: for the climax of her act, she would lie on the stage and take on up to ten audience members in a single show.
Once people saw Monica getting away with it, other venues and strippers followed suit, like the Melody Burlesk in New York which started the famed ‘box lunch’. The Melody assistant manager, Dominique, remembers: “Things were starting to get raunchy. The girls started to charge for sitting in the customer’s laps – and we weren’t getting in trouble for that… so we thought – let’s go further. Bob (the theater manager) would say, “Come to Mardi Gras, we’re serving lunch today.” He even put that on the marquee.”
Before long, newly minted porn stars like Annie Sprinkle strutted on the T-shaped Melody stage, before reclining on the edge and offering themselves to the audience members. One dancer at the Melody was even nicknamed ‘Starburst’, in tribute to the candy pessary she used to refresh her intimate areas between tricks.
But Monica remained the most outrageous show in town, interacting intimately with audience members in every show.
One day, a young sex-business entrepreneur, Rod Swenson, stopped by to check her out for himself. He’d heard about her barely-believable act, and he wanted to see how much was true.
He wasn’t disappointed.
*
Rod
Unlike Monica, Rod was a native New Yorker. But just like Monica, he believed in the shock value of entertainment. The difference for Rod was that he wanted to create shocks that served as political statements, not just sexual titillation.
Born in 1945, Rod developed an early passion for painting, earning a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum and studying at the Art Students League as a teenager before going to Colorado to earn a BFA in painting from the University of Denver in 1967. He then traded painting for conceptual, performance, and neo-Dadaist art, enrolling in Yale University where he pissed off the faculty with his avant-garde concepts, but was still awarded a Masters degree in 1969. Another of his interests was packaging consumer goods: “I was doing a mass-produced thing. I built a plastic vacuum-forming machine in my studio, which wasn’t too popular,” he said.
After graduation, Rod kicked around in a few jobs before discovering granola on a trip to the West Coast. He’d tired of making plastic multiples for their own sake, but now saw an opportunity to join his packaging know-how with large-scale granola production.
In 1971, he founded The Good Shepherd Cereal Company with his brother to mass-produce the first granola to be stocked in East Coast supermarkets. It was a sensation and expanded rapidly: New York Magazine called it the “patriarch” of granolas, and credited the company with the commercialization of the cereal. Suddenly Rod was president of a large successful company, and had the world at his feet.
But Rod didn’t see it that way: “For me, it was sculpture, not food. I didn’t call it art, but that’s what it was.”
Nevertheless, it made him a rich man at age 22 and a “hippie capitalist” in business features written about him. “I suppose I could have stayed,” he said. But he didn’t, selling the business to Sovex Foods in 1973, and deciding to do something completely different. He joined the Sunshine Park nudist camp in New Jersey – a community built around the health aspects of nudism.
On the surface, Rod looked every inch the young nudist: a lithe body with a golden perma-tan, a receding hairline, and a small satyr’s beard. But Rod was a natural entrepreneur, and in 1974, he was commissioned to set up and run a natural foods restaurant at America’s largest naturist resort. The same year he also published a guide to naturist resorts through Popular Library. But his most high-profile venture was the creation of All-Bear Entertainment Corporation, whose principal activity was to stage the Ms. All Bare contest (‘America’s Honest Beauty Pageant’.)
Ms. All Bare Ms. America ran for three years from 1974 to 1976, and was widely covered by mainstream news outlets, which included lengthy interviews with the deep-thinking, earnest man behind the enterprise.
The second All Bare Ms. America was held at the Beacon theater in New York in September 1975, and Rod insisted that this was no tacky throwaway, no peep show. It was to be a fantasia. Don Imus was the compere, and Rod had big plans for the event: he intended for the pageant to be broadcast on closed-circuit television and transmitted all over the country. Big sponsorship was on the way, and the event would rocket the lucky winner to stardom.
The reality was less glamorous – at least according to New York magazine:
“The girls came out topless – for the ‘personality segment’ (“How are you”, “Are you feeling nervous”, “What would you do if you won”). Then they came out completely naked, parading patiently, like race horses in a paddock.
The biggest cheer went to a lady truck driver with the shoulders of a George Foreman, the belly of a Jackie Gleason, and a chest straight off a men’s room wall.
“Why did you enter this business?” Imus asked her, consulting his notes.
“None of your fucking business,” came the swift reply.
If Rod had spotted commercial opportunities in marketing sex in New York, he was also acutely aware of the city’s cutting-edge music scene: “I became involved with the underground rock scene in New York. Rock ‘n’ roll to me was the most legitimate form of contemporary art, and places like CBGB’s looked to me like ideal experimental laboratories to spawn culturally shattering things,” he said. “I liked CBGB’s for the same reason I liked Eighth Avenue – because it was very free. I thought it was explosive and dynamic and exciting and real.”
Rod started shooting videos of then-unknown, emerging punk groups like The Ramones, Blondie, and The Dead Boys. He promoted shows too – being the first to put on a Patti Smith show in an actual theater-sized venue in New York larger than CBGB’s (the then-Elgin Theatre in Chelsea).
The common denominator for Rod’s sex and music projects was simple. He held that true or high art should be measured by how confrontational it is: “The extent to which art confronts the status quo or conventional ways of seeing and thinking… that’s a measure of how important it is. Things that pass as art are often just imitative or redundant, so they are measured by how well they imitate some already existing ideal or model. That’s always been extremely boring and meaningless to me.”
In Rod’s mind, great art should revolutionize the way people see and think about things. And it can only do that if the artist takes risks in the most unexpected areas. He decided that a perfect synthesis of his aesthetic was to start a counter-culture theater company. The shows he would produce would deal with political satire and sexual taboos. They would shock people out of their mediocrity.
He was in the right place at the right time – in the heart of Times Square: “I was looking for a place to produce experimental theater with a repertory company, and at the time before the ‘cleaning up’ of Times Square. Eighth Avenue was the section of town for doing outlier kinds of things. It was seedy and fairly dangerous late at night, but loaded with energy, character, and grit, all of which have now been eliminated in favor of corporate, mass-produced vacuity.”
The venue he chose was Show World, a newly opened, multi-level, ‘supermarket of sex’: “There were a lot of old burlesque theaters around that had well run their course and were sitting empty most of the time, so I made a deal with the owners to front me their theatre for a percentage of the ticket sales after the basic overhead was reached, which they agreed to cover.”
Rod called his show ‘Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater’, and it was a hit from the start: “The deal started on a week by week basis, but soon drew solid crowds. It seated about 150 people, and we ended up running five shows a day beginning at lunchtime seven days a week.”
Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater
The show itself was an anomaly, combining old-world burlesque (theatrical, well-executed, and naked) with coarser sections involving carefully choreographed scenarios ending in live sex (“bare-assed secretaries and big black mama with tits full of milk,” as Cheri magazine described it).
Rod remembers: “The format was short, fast-paced vignettes, typically intentionally absurd and comedic, often with erotic themes, each running for about 20 minutes for a total show of about an hour and half backed with a lot of (then) cutting edge music. It was a lab of sorts.”
Rod always insisted that Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater was first and foremost a political act. Explaining one act, which featured Dr. Marx – a puppet complete with realistic genitals, who ejaculated all over the audience – Swenson explained, “It’s a total imbalance of values and pure hypocrisy for America to condone and permit a brutal and violent exhibition like prize-fighting, while sex on stage in all its forms is one of the very most important and beautiful things in life, and until people in general – and society at large – achieve public consciousness of this, we’re all living a lie.”
It was busy and it was a lot of work, but demand for tickets was high: “We launched a new show each week on Monday, so the new show had to be written and rehearsed on Sunday night after the theatre closed at midnight so that it would be ready to open for the early matinee on Monday. We hardly ever slept.
Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater
“We never sold advance tickets and there was always a line for our opening show on Monday and many other shows typically sold out. It was kind of a small cultural hub, and there was a lot of traffic between CBGB’s and Captain Kink’s with various performers from CB’s coming to shows at Captain Kink’s, and also to work there on the technical crew doing lighting or helping with props. It was a real energy-charged environment.”
By late 1976, Rod was talking about expanding Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater to go national via a six-theater tour. But the success had a predictable side effect: as it grew, and its reputation spread, police busts became more frequent. In one two-week span, there were thirteen arrests reported.
Then Rod met Monica Kennedy.
*
Rod and Monica
Lisa Alligood was the reigning Ms. All-Bare America, and thus Rod’s protégée. She was a roving ambassador for his All-Bear enterprise, and she’d heard about Monica’s act at the 42nd Street Playhouse in New York. She insisted that Rod and her go see Monica in action.
Monica was 30 now, older perhaps than the newer strippers, but her act hadn’t mellowed. Au contraire. Monica was now taking sexual performance art to new levels.
Rod remembers seeing her for the first time in 1976. He wrote about his first impressions in Cheri magazine: “Out of the thousands of shows and acts I’ve seen and produced as a live-sex show promoter, Monica Kennedy has not at any time, in any way, ever ceased to be mind-blowing.
“When Lisa, myself, and some friends entered the Playhouse, Monica was already on stage. Some of the customers in front of the theater were lined up to eat her out, while others scattered around the decaying old theater had their cocks out of their pants and were jerking off. You have to remember that this kind of wide-open sex was much less prevalent at that time and there was virtually no performer-audience contact in any of the theaters I was then involved with.
“But even these facts seemed to me to be far less shocking than the outrageous physical conditions braved by both Monica and her fans. It was mid-winter, and there was no heat in the far-from-full theater. Still, there were a good 30 fans sitting in the ice-cold strip joint, shivering in their winter coats and earmuffs, and yes – most of them were jerking off with their gloves on! How’s that for fan loyalty?”
Rod approached Monica and brought her onboard as part of the Captain Kink Sex Fantasy Theater. The first night she came on stage in her trademark costume, performed a brief dance routine, and then invited audience members onstage by bellowing: “OK babies, it’s feeding time.”
Another day she asked, “I’m always showing you mine. How come you’re never showing me yours?” A short man ran to the front, taking his clothes off along the way, as the audience started to applaud.
Hecklers fared no better: when one shouted, “Hey baby, eat me!” Monica stopped her routine and forced him up on to the stage as the crowd egged him on. She had sex with him, before discarding him back into the audience. Other times she would climb over the front rows to get to the men at the back.
Monica’s appearances started breaking records for attendance. People fought for front row seats, and some days ticket lines began forming at 8.15am outside the theater.
Cheri magazine reviewed Monica’s show in 1977, and was in no doubt as to her impact: “She is the raunchiest, most direct performer, but also the most intelligent and conscious, and warm and gentle. She develops the best relationship with the audience; she is like a sex therapist, never making anyone feel bad. She reacts to seeing a small penis by saying, “Wow – three inches, just what I like.”
“And they keep coming back. They never know what she was going to do next. Of all the guys that I’ve seen leaving the show, I’ve never seen one who felt he didn’t get his money’s worth. The most common expression is one of disbelief and utterances under the breath to the effect of, “I don’t believe it.””
And Monica being Monica always had to take everything one step further. Next stop? She started to become known for her golden showers on stage, getting help from the audience by asking them to make the sound “shshshshsh” as she delivered. “It sounds like an Indian chant as everyone says it unison,” she’d say.
The marriage of Monica and Captain Kink worked well. Monica was good for Rod, and Rod was good for Monica.
But Monica had gone as far as she could go: after all, what the hell do you do next when your act consists of literally fucking your own audience?
Rod knew this. What he needed was someone who could take his political agit-prop statements to a different level. He needed a front person who had a similar amount of brazen rebellion, subversive charm, and sex appeal as Monica, but someone who could be marketed to a bigger audience.
That’s when Wendy walked in.
*
Wendy
Wendy Orleans Williams liked her middle name – mainly because her initials spelled ‘WOW’. And that conferred a more exciting identity than she inherited at birth.
Wendy O. Williams was four years younger than Rod and Monica. She was born into a comfortable but strict family in Rochester, NY, on May 28th 1949. She referred to her parents – her father, an affluent Eastman Kodak chemist; her mother, a stay-at-home-housewife – as “cocktail zombies,” and Wendy felt misunderstood from an early age.
It wasn’t any easier at school: classmates and teachers recall Wendy as a “shy and pretty girl who spoke so softly you had to lean toward her to hear her,” but other kids were less charitable, making fun of her “birdlike figure and hand-me-down clothes.” Wendy retreated into caring for animals, bringing home strays — from wounded birds to raccoons — and caring for them in the family’s four-acre backyard in suburban Webster, NY. “The thing about animals,” she said, “is that they don’t judge you. They accept you the way you are.”
But Wendy liked to be the center of attention as well: “She grew up feeling out of place. She had something that needed to come out, and it was big,” Rod said. “And it couldn’t come out when she was younger.”
Wendy’s first taste of show biz came at age six, when she won a local tap dance competition and was selected to appear on the Howdy Doody show as a member of the Peanut Gallery. Later, as a teen, she was a clarinetist in her high school’s concert band, and won a scholarship to the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester.
But Wendy had deeper problems. Rod remembers: “By her account, her childhood, and especially adolescence, was really difficult for her. She felt differently than the way people around her seemed to want her to be, and she grew up feeling frustrated, thwarted, and often times coerced and punished for trying to be who she was. She was an original, and she paid a price for it growing up. As a teen she became increasingly rebellious and got into all kinds of trouble. Despite all kinds of measures to keep her under control, including the attempt to medicate her and even institutionalize her at one point, by her account, she refused to submit.”
Wendy phrased it more simply: “I’d rather be dead than be brainwashed into the complacent robot everybody wanted me to be.”
Her teen years have been the subject of much mythologizing over the years, much of it from Wendy herself. She always claimed that a turning point in her life was her first run-in with the law – a bruising incident that supposedly occurred at the age of 15 – when she was arrested for sunbathing nude. Shortly afterwards she took off by herself, losing her virginity in an “act of mutiny,” and spending the rest of her teenage years in a sea of “drugs and furious sex,” traveling, living rough, and working in a variety of temporary jobs.
This story has always been widely accepted. But newspaper articles from the time reveal that, far from being 15 when she was arrested for nude-sunbathing, Wendy was in fact 21 – and still living with her parents in Rochester. Whatever the reason for this embellishment, her early 20s were characterized by a restless wanderlust that she said took her all over the world. She claimed to have hitchhiked her way to Boulder, Colorado, where she camped outside the town in a tent. She made and sold beaded necklaces, worked part-time at a Dunkin’ Donuts, experimented with LSD and mescaline, and began dabbling in Far Eastern religions. She traveled down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she slept on the beach and sold string bikinis that she crocheted herself. She also sold handmade macramé, hanging plants and vitamins, and worked as both a lifeguard and sailing instructor. She went to Europe and wound up bartending in an Amsterdam bar, then working as a macrobiotic cook in London, before joining a traveling gypsy dance troupe, with whom she developed a bizarre original dance that involved a six-foot Buddha. She claimed to have studied with a guru in the Himalayas, worked as a stripper, was arrested for shoplifting while in England, and spent a night in an Italian jail for passing counterfeit money.
Whatever the truth behind this period of her life, by 1976 Wendy had turned up in New York City, where she rented a roach-filled room in a seedy Times Square hotel, trying to figure out what to do next.
She happened upon a copy of Show Business Weekly, discarded on the floor of the Port Authority Bus Terminal station. In it she saw a casting call for a ‘performance artist’ dancer that would act out scripted sex fantasies at Rod Swenson’s Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theatre, located on 42nd Street near Eighth Avenue.
It sounded like a big fuck-you to the world. And that appealed to her.
So she answered the ad, ready for the chance to raise a defiant middle finger to New York and beyond.
Rod and Wendy at Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater
This week, we conclude the story of Monica Kennedy, perhaps the most notorious and legendary stripper and sex performer in 1970s New York; Wendy O. Williams, live sex show actress-turned-shock-rock-queen as lead singer of the Plasmatics; and Rod Swenson, the mercurial intellect behind the scenes who created the perfect stage for them both.
This story forms part of our series dedicated to the way that music and adult entertainment overlapped in the 1970s.
When Wendy O. Williams showed up at Rod Swenson’s Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater at Show World, she was carrying a small suitcase, and almost everything she owned was in it. The only exception was a gold Buddha which she carried under her arm.
She cast a distinctive, unusual presence: shortish reddish-brown frizzy hair with thick black eye make-up, a rail thin body that made her head appear oversized, and an attitude that projected both vulnerability and defiance at the same time. Her audition for the theater group was equally curious: she danced with her Buddha to an instrumental version of ‘Foxy Lady’ by the Jimi Hendrix Experience – but with her own voice on the tape.
Rod was intrigued, though he didn’t quite know what to do with her: “I had no idea where to put her, but she made this impression on me. She was incredible in a way I couldn’t define.”
Rod and Wendy (left) at Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater
Rod knew he had to hire her, so Wendy started performing in the sex shows. One of her regular routines was a ping pong spectacle where she shot plastic balls from between her legs.
A regular at the theater when Wendy was making her first appearances remembers: “Wendy was the strangest sex performer you’d ever see. And I saw a whole lot of ’em… She wasn’t pretty in any conventional way, and the first time she appeared on stage, I feared for the worst because she projected… well, she look menacing. And that’s not exactly what you want to see in a live sex show. But she had this utter conviction about her – and you just couldn’t take your eyes off her. She was raunchy and hot, and she prowled the performance area like an animal. That was sexy. She was dynamite. She was so real.
“I remember an audience member went up to grope her once, and she smiled at him – before – BAM! – she hit him between the eyes, and he was out like a light. No one moved. We just sat there and she continued her act as if nothing had happened. It was like sex and violence were close neighbors in her mind. The guy she hit was still unconscious when we shuffled out ten minutes later.”
Rod realized that Wendy was more than just a live act: she was creative, thoughtful, and had ideas about the fantasy productions and costumes the girls could wear.
But Rod and Wendy connected in a deeper way than just through the theater company. They shared the same political starting point: they felt revulsion for the banality and conformity of contemporary cultural consumerism and its consequences, and were both determined in their own ways to launch a head-on assault on superficial materialist values.
Rod remembers: “From the first time we met, I think we both knew there was big chemistry for something that was going to happen that was unavoidable. She scared a lot of people, but what scared them was just what made her so exceptional to me. It’s really something you can’t put into words. She was an absolute one-of-a-kind, just very authentic. I think we both knew this about each other; there was something that was going to happen there.”
For Wendy, her attraction to Rod was more simple: “He was the first person who didn’t try to change me. When I met Rod, I found what I’d always been looking for.”
Rod and Wendy (left) at Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater
Rod knew that Wendy had potential beyond Captain Kink, and he masterminded explicit photo spreads of her in High Society magazine’s March 1977 and March 1978 issues. The articles were replete with Wendy’s anarcho-sexual declarations: “Most people don’t express their potential because they are afraid to let themselves go. I’ve made it with lots of different guys in almost every different way, and although my sex drive is so high some people think I’m a nymphomaniac, I find most men rather boring at this point in my life.
“Even though I’m one of the most independent women you’ll meet, I like a man who can dominate me. I like to be the slave, and the man the master.”
*
Rod
Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theater was a strange mix of vaudeville and live sex, but it was a success – and people who worked there enjoyed it.
Roy Stuart – a struggling drummer, sometime sex film actor, and future erotic photographer – remembers the atmosphere: “I got a job as a stage manager. I met Rod Swenson and thought he was very creative. My job there wasn’t very complex. I would set the small stage, handle the spot light, things like that.
“The shows were… well, it’s too bad that no one really filmed an entire show. There would be so many different things going on. Sometimes Rod had me wearing roller skates. He would announce, “Hold on while the stage manager resets the stage on his roller skates. I worked there for a year and a half or so. I enjoyed it.”
Wendy quickly developed a fan-following at Captain Kink’s, but one that extended to the NYPD as well. In a series of raids in the city, she was arrested eight times for live sex performances in a twelve-week period.
This was not uncommon. Monica Kennedy, the self-proclaimed ‘most outrageous performer in town’, was arrested for a number of reasons – the most common being for weapons possession on account of the toy guns that formed part of her costume.
But in the Spring of 1977, the city – led by Mayor Abe Beame – embarked on a more concerted effort to rid Times Square of smut. And Rod’s Show World, now billed as “America’s Most Outrageous Live Fantasy Theater,” was in the firing line.
In March 1977, Beame personally led two police raids that resulted in the closure of an adult bookstore and peep show, a topless bar, and the Show World center itself.
The charges against Show World? A building code violation on the first floor of the 12-story building. The violation stated that the building was in imminent danger because it had no sprinkler system.
Rod decided to fight back – so he and Wallace Katz, the owner of the building that housed Show World, held a press conference in the theater. In a well-attended event, Rod claimed that the theater shows were in fact “a stabilizing influence in the neighborhood” and that his business employed 60 people. He was adamant that, “Sex between consenting adults is not against the law,” and announced that he was bidding to have the theater re-opened within days.
Rod (right), and Wallace Katz, Show World 1977
Katz declared: “I’m not ashamed of being the landlord of the building housing Show World – which is an asset to the community. In fact I’m happier with Show World than I was with Chemical Bank.” (One informed source pointed out that this was because Show World paid triple the rent that the bank used to pay.)
Rod won his bid to reopen Show World, but decided that wasn’t enough: it was time to go on the offensive. He sued the city for $3 million in damages and asked the federal government to withdraw its funding of the Midtown Task Force, which had led the clean-up efforts.
“This is true obscenity in its rawest form,” Rod said. “The mayor’s Midtown Task Force is the most disgusting and obscene live show ever produced in Times Square. The mayor is using fraudulent and Gestapo tactics. This is nothing but a political smokescreen to fool the public.”
The lawsuit came to nothing, but it was an important part of Rod’s emergence: he was ready to challenge authority at a high level.
*
Monica and Rod and Wendy
Monica stood in the Show World dressing room, and realized that her time in the spotlight was coming to an end.
It was only yesterday that she’d been the star, the headliner, pushing the limits, and breaking every taboo. She was still only in her early 30s, but taking your clothes off for a living wasn’t what it used to be. The business had changed completely in recent years. And she should know: she was partly responsible for that. Gone were the days of tits, tease, and tassels. Now people preferred seeing explicit sex films in color in theaters – with every imaginable combination of couplings. Somehow Monica’s sex shows suddenly seemed anachronistic and old hat.
She had taken her act as far as she could go. She recognized that. But where does an old broad go when the audience moves on and leaves the star behind?
Perhaps she’d do more music and cut back on the stripping, she told herself. After all she had a couple of daughters now. Maybe it was time to start again.
Wendy stood in the same dressing room, outwardly resembling a clenched fist, but inwardly gentle and empathetic.
It was a silent changing of the guard. The old world, with its outdated conventions, was ending. A new order, that favored more political ideas and a different approach, was already here.
For Wendy, life was beginning.
*
Wendy and Rod and the Plasmatics
One day in 1977, Wendy and Rod were in a taxi cab together, and Wendy started singing an old Bessie Smith tune, ‘Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.’ The song ignited a spark for Rod.
Rod had long been energized by his involvement with the punk bands that he’d filmed. Every so often, he was asked to guide a new band, but he always resisted: “I just didn’t see any group that I wanted to manage,” he said.
Part of his reluctance was that he was a natural-born control freak, and if he was going to be involved in a rock group, he would have to do it all his way: he would decide on personnel, select their look, design their stage show, and be involved in songwriting. In short, he would build the group from the ground up.
But even if he could find a group that could be molded and shaped to his satisfaction, who could front a band with his level of ambition? Who had the charismatic presence to embody a radical persona that could exploit punk music and performance art with a nihilist attitude?
And then Wendy started to sing in the taxi.
It was a strange sound – guttural, effortless, snarling, and non-musical – but it had something.
Rod had been taking Wendy to rock clubs while he was shooting videos of the bands, but it was only in the taxi that the idea to form a punk band around Wendy as the lead singer dawned. Her androgynous look, her anarchic energy, and her pitch-perfect, angry weltanschauung was a perfect combination.
Rod remembers: “Creating a radical challenge to the conformity of the status quo – became the compelling thing for me to do. Something way beyond anything anyone had seen before, and with Wendy as the focal point…”
Rod created and named and built the Plasmatics around her. Now all he needed was a group of supporting musicians, simpatico to their aesthetic.
In 1976, Roy Stuart, Rod’s stage manager at Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theatre, had joined forces with two friends, the painter Michael David, and guitarist Richie Stotts, to form a band called The Numbers. They’d become a fixture in New York’s early punk rock music scene, playing in clubs alongside pioneers Television, Blondie and the Ramones.
In 1977, Rod told Roy about his idea of forming an art-project punk band and that he was looking for backing musicians to put behind Wendy. Roy invited him to see one of their shows in an underground loft on Greenwich Street and Canal. Rod like what he saw – and co-opted the band. The Plasmatics were formed.
On a steamy Wednesday night on July 26, 1978, the Plasmatics were unveiled at CBGBs on New York City’s Bowery. It was like Wendy’s coming out party: “She was a natural,” Rod said. “She was pure performer. And in a way, it became almost her vehicle because she exploded in it. She just became alive.
On stage, the self-described “marginal nymphomaniac and terminal exhibitionist” played the role of a fierce dominatrix, billing herself as ‘The American Dream Girl Gone Nightmare.’ Her fearless attitude and uncompromising aggressive vocals, claimed territory previously reserved for males.
From their initial gig, the Plasmatics quickly rose in the New York City punk underground scene of the time, bringing a rabid, snarling ferocity that scared even the most jaded audiences. From playing a single weekday night, they moved quickly to playing repeated stands of four nights straight with two sold-out shows each night. They had lines stretching around the block and brought more fans into CBGB’s than any other band during the time.
They realized they needed another guitarist to hold them together musically. Wes Beech was recruited and became, after Wendy, the only permanent member playing or touring in every Plasmatics and Wendy O. Williams show or record.
There was a strong emphasis on visuals. Wendy’s hairdo seemed to change each show, from a pink mullet to a white skinhead – and most mutation in between. Her breasts were prominently displayed in push-up, studded bras. Her chest was a walking billboard for slogans such as ‘Death to Techno Pop’ or ‘Tear Down the System.’
The backing musicians were a good foil for Wendy. Richie, a 6-foot-7 guitarist, was one of the first musicians to sport a Mohawk, taking inspiration from the Travis Bickle character in the movie Taxi Driver. And in an effort to keep up with his consistently outrageous lead singer, he’d cross dress in nurse’s uniforms, tutus, wedding dresses and French maid outfits.
The band’s stage shows became notorious, with guitars being chain-sawed in half as part of their performance (Richie was a big fan of Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Michael David, the group’s bass player, remembers: “Half the theatrics came from Rod via 42nd St and Russ Meyer movies, and the other half came from Captain Sensible and movies like ‘Freaks’, and ‘Friday 13th.’”
The group quickly outgrew CBGB’s, so Rod made a deal to book what was then a little-known polka hall called Irving Plaza with the Polish War Veterans who ran it at the time. The band repeatedly sold out the venue, with the Plasmatics helping give Irving Plaza national recognition and launch it on the path to becoming an established rock venue in New York City.
In 1979, Wendy expanded her reach, and appeared in Gail Palmer’s XXX film, Candy Goes to Hollywood (1979), where she was credited as ‘Wendy Williams.’ She was featured as a performer on a parody of The Gong Show, reprising her Captain Kink act shooting ping pong balls across the set from her vagina. It was a brief cameo, but it was a daring step built on her counter-cultural reputation.
The Plasmatics had arrived – and were achieving a more subversive and perverse success than even Captain Kink’s Sex Fantasy Theatre had aspired to.
*
The Plasmatics and success
It was 1979, and even though it was barely a year since the Plasmatics started, they’d become one of the biggest drawing bands in New York. Rod was looking for even larger venues for the group, and secured a gig headlining the 3,300 capacity Palladium, the first band in history to do so at full ticket prices – and without a major label recording contract.
But headlining the venue wasn’t enough. The big question was: What were they going to do on such a big stage – given that Wendy’s goal for each show was “to put the audience’s heart in their mouths”?
Rod remembers: “I started thinking about the stage – and the space that was on it. I thought, ‘this is big enough to blow up a car, and it’s gonna have to be a Cadillac.’
“It was an insane idea by ordinary thinking, but to us, in the mode that we were in, we saw it as an act of sanity in an insane world. We sold the idea to Ron Delsener, the promoter, very straight faced, and said that this is what we plan to do. He was fine to do it. We’d done a lot of stuff already at CBGB’s without major incidents, so people trusted us to that degree.
“It took a lot of work and experiments to get the explosives to work right. We tethered the doors to wires so they would just blow to the edge of the stage and not into the audience. Wendy did things – like smashing out the windshield before we put the explosives in – to keep the glass from flying.
“One critic wrote in a review that he was actually afraid he might die during the Palladium performance, and I think he was sincere. And it’s true, if you didn’t do it right, or if somebody was in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could have gotten killed. Of course, we didn’t want to maim the audience or hurt anybody, but it was tricky to design it so that wouldn’t happen.”
The Palladium show took place on November 16, 1979, and Rod wasn’t sure what was going to happen: “I was a little apprehensive, but I wasn’t really worried. That explosion was so loud, I couldn’t hear the rest of the band for a couple of seconds. I was playing along, and hoping that once my hearing came back, we would still be together. It’s fair to say that nobody else has ever dared to do it, and I don’t think you’ll ever see anything like that on stage again live.”
Billboard called the stunt, “the absolute limit of what can be accomplished in rock and roll theatrics.”
Just like Monica Kennedy’s show had kept pushing the boundaries of on-stage depictions of sex until she reached an impossibly explicit conclusion, The Plasmatics pushed the boundaries of their live shows to became more comedically violent and extreme. Wendy cut an indelible, charismatic figure, screaming insurrectionist lyrics with shredded clothes barely covering her body, chanting openly about sexual needs, and demolishing stacks of televisions with sledgehammers. One song, ‘Butcher Baby’, featured a chainsaw sawing through a guitar instead of a guitar solo.
It was a perfect time to launch their attack: Reagan’s 1980s, with its rampant materialism, was in full force, and Wendy was symbolically destroying symbols of American mass culture, consumerism, and conformity. Here was a muscular, mohawked woman, gleefully destroying television sets and automobiles, the beloved symbols of American middle-class complacency, while simultaneously belting out some of the most confrontational songs in the history of rock. This wasn’t just entertainment; this was warfare. And the ringmaster behind this attack on consumerism and apathy was Rod Swenson.
Rod: “One of the phrases we memorialized on one of our tour T-Shirts was from a message that was edited in backwards at the end of one of our albums so you had to spin the album backwards manually to hear it. It said “the brainwashed do not know they are brainwashed.”
“People respond to shock in different ways. Shock can move people from one place to another in a good way, but others people become defensive, and denial is one form of it. Typically we did the TV smashing during the song “Living Dead,” where part of the lyric is:
“You sold your life in the discount store
You watch TV you don’t want anymore
You got ideas in your head
They won’t happen
You’re the living dead.”
Wendy had become simultaneously the most authentic performer and most fearsome woman in music.
The notoriety of their stage act meant many U.S. record labels were afraid to sign the band. Stiff Records in England, famous for punk and new wave acts such as Nick Lowe, the Damned, and Elvis Costello – heard about the Plasmatics and flew executives to New York to see a show in person: could everything they’d been hearing and reading about actually be real?
The day after seeing the performance, Stiff made an offer and a record deal was signed within a month. Their company tagline seemed a perfect match for the Plasmatics: “If it ain’t Stiff, it ain’t work a fuck.”
The Plasmatics blew into England like a cyclone, where Wendy told the assembled hacks she’d come to give “a cultural enema to the British people.” Always knowing how to play showbiz at its own game, their planned debut at London’s Hammersmith Odeon sold out way in advance. Amidst sensational headlines (‘Queen of Shock Rock’, ‘Dominatrix of the Decibels’, ‘Evel Knievel of Rock’) the Greater London Council banned the show at the last minute, labeling her an anarchist and citing safety reasons. No matter, they returned to the States to release their first record, and begin a sold-out North American tour.
To kick off the dates, Wendy wanted to drive a 1972 Cadillac onto an exploding stage on Pier 62 in New York. The car would be loaded with explosives, and she would jump out moments before the car would hit the stage, blowing up all the equipment. The required permits were hard to obtain and only allowed for an estimated 5-6,000 people. The day of the performance, 10,000 showed up, jamming the downtown streets and lining the rooftops.
The couple who sold them the Caddy told the newspapers they weren’t too comfortable selling it to the Plasmatics knowing it was bound to die a violent death.
“Everything must die,” Wendy told them, “but your car will be immortalized”.
The stunt worked and even though the whole exploit cost virtually the entire advance for the US release of their first album, Wendy was unrepentant: “It was worth it because it showed that these are just things and… people shouldn’t worship them.”
Some critics got it, such as Dante Bonutto of Kerrang! who said the group was designed as a “battering ram against the establishment from day one.” Others, such as Jim Farber of Sounds, focused misogynistically on the female singer: “Lead singer/ex-porn star/current weightlifter Wendy Orleans Williams (W.O.W. for short) spends most of the Plasmatics’ show fondling her family size breasts, scratching her sweaty snatch and eating the drum kit, among other playful events”.
Guitarist Wes Beech saw Wendy from the other side and recognized the effort she was investing: “She was totally committed to her craft. People don’t realize how hard she worked. She would work out, run six miles a day, and push the band to get the most out of us. We would rehearse every other day. We’d run through our whole set like it was an actual show at the same level and the same intensity. When we got through the set, we would be sweating and tired and panting, and she would look at us and go, “OK guys, let’s do it again.” That was the enthusiasm she had for it.”
Wendy knew what the concerts meant to her audience: “The fans come to these concerts, and the blood gets pumping and the sweat starts flowing, and they get this relief and this release, and nobody gets hurt.”
But Wendy was also clear what the experience meant to her specifically: “I don’t know what I’d do without the Plasmatics – I’d probably slit my wrists.”
*
The Plasmatics and the law
The barely-controlled chaos of a Plamatics show meant that fans who came to see them on their national tours weren’t disappointed by the volatile mix of noise, sex and violence.
But there was also the usual unwanted side-effect of taking risks: the anti-social nature of the shows incurred the wrath of the mainstream establishment. And Wendy refused to back down – even if it scared concert promoters into cancelling their shows. As Rod said: “It is difficult to imagine how threatening the establishment found Wendy at this time.”
American culture had never seen such an outraged, outrageous woman fronting a band, and one that broke feminist taboos too; wearing only underwear, or maybe topless but for whipped cream (an idea taken from Monica’s stripping routine). Back at a time when there was less nudity available, she emerged on stage with her pneumatic chest, leather chaps and matching thong, and 80’s heavy metal staple white high top trainers.
Then in January 1981, the trouble escalated.
It started with a newspaper article in the Milwaukee Sentinel on January 16th where the local police read that, “Miss Williams had exposed portions of her body during her act.” Presumably fearing the collapse of western civilization, undercover police were dispatched to Wendy’s next show – at the Palms nightclub in Milwaukee, two days later, to see her act for themselves. What happened after her arrest filled headlines and courtrooms for the next three years.
After a show that included, according to a Milwaukee Journal reviewer, Wendy making “sexual gestures” and wearing “what appeared to be whipped cream or soap lather on her upper torso”, she was arrested and charged with conduct prohibited in a licensed premise.
Or to be more precise: she was busted on obscenity charges for simulating masturbating with a microphone and a sledgehammer.
Wendy was also charged with battery to an officer and resisting arrest. Police said Wendy kicked one officer, injuring his hand, while Rod, trying to stop police struggling with the singer, was said to have kicked another officer in the face. So Rod was also arrested for obstruction and battery to police officers.
The reality of what happened was actually very different: it started when Wendy was touched indecently by a police officer while she was being put into a police van. She slapped him and a fight broke out. Wendy maintained that she was thrown to the ground by five police officers, and bloodied and beaten up by several of the offending cop’s buddies, before being held outside in the snow for a long period of time, and forced to walk from the police van into the police station with no shoes on. Wendy also said that an officer told her, “We don’t like your kind here in Milwaukee… I’ll bet you’ve got a weird sex life.” Wendy later admitted she feared for her life: “I was afraid I was dead in Milwaukee. I was afraid they were just going to open fire, just start shooting.”
As for Rod, he was beaten unconscious when he tried to intervene: “I saw her on the ground getting her face kicked – it was hideous. It was about the most shocking and awful thing I had ever seen in my life at that point. I just raced to her defense. I don’t know what would have happened, but they grabbed me and dragged me behind a car and beat me unconscious with a nightstick. We both ended up in the hospital, and then they put us in jail and charged us with attacking them.”
Wendy and Rod were released on $2,000 bail the following day.
The following week, it emerged that a local photographer had taken pictures of Wendy’s arrest at the Palms — and they showed that Wendy and Rod were telling the truth. According to one newspaper, one of the photos showed an officer “with his hand on Williams’ neck, shoving her head into the snow, while she appeared to be crying out in pain.”
In Rod’s opinion, the reason for the trouble was simple: “This was a sexist thing. The vice squad decided they were going to put a stop to this very threatening woman and the radicals coming into their town. They’d heard about our show the week before, and they just said this isn’t going to happen in our town. We’re going to put a stop to it.
Over the next months, all of the charges against Wendy and Rod – from felony battery to simulating a sex act onstage – were reduced, dropped, dismissed, or the pair were found not guilty. In short, they were cleared of all charges.
Wendy and Rod in court
On January 19, 1982 — a year to the day after her clash with the police — Wendy filed a $5.95 million lawsuit against the police officers involved in her arrest. After a trial that lasted three weeks during the fall of 1984, a jury ruled that the six officers didn’t use excessive force or unlawfully arrest Wendy.
Despite being cleared of any wrongdoing, the incident had a lasting effect on the Plasmatics – both financially and in terms of future bookings.
Rod remembers: “We were facing fairly serious charges and actually could have gone to jail. It ended up going to trial, and one thing it also did was to bleed us financially. The cost of the legal fees and everything was insane. And we had big problems recovering from that for the next year or more.
Legal fundraiser show
“The other thing it did: it was part of a cracking down on us by the establishment, because many promoters after that wouldn’t book us because of the publicity. Even though we won, there was pressure on them from communities, and they were afraid of what might happen. So we had other arrests, and we had other places where clubs were shut down by the towns.”
Later that year in Cleveland, Ohio, Wendy was acquitted of an obscenity charge for simulating sex on stage wearing only shaving cream.
Creem, the influential music magazine, attacked the sexism of those who “can’t handle… even resent the very idea of a woman singing rock and roll with ferocity – which is to say the same qualities they would applaud if they were coming from a man, providing there was a man around today with the balls to do that”.
If there was a silver lining it was that the publicity regarding their legal problems had the unexpected consequence of raising Wendy’s public profile, and the band’s notoriety ended up leading to all kinds of nationwide TV appearances, including stints on the ABC series ‘Fridays,’ a Saturday Night Live-style knock off, and the sketch comedy show ‘SCTV’ (often appearing with John Candy.)
Studio execs on SCTV had decided they would not air Williams’ performance unless she changed out of her costume that revealed her exposed nipples, but Williams refused, and so the show’s make-up artists found a quick compromise by painting her breasts black.
The Plasmatics also appeared on Tom Snyder’s late-night talk show, ‘Tomorrow,’ where the host introduced them as possibly “the greatest punk rock band in the entire world”. They performed two songs, and the band blew up another car. Snyder said later that he “didn’t get it.” Poor lamb.
By now, the Plasmatics was a revolving troupe of musicians. The only real consistents were Wendy and Rod, the latter’s name appeared on albums under the heading: “Concept and Management: Rod Swenson.” But as Rod points out: “Whatever I did was so that the well-deserved attention would go to Wendy. I did all these things, but she was the star, it was built with and around her.
“She was astoundingly fearless. That is when it came to taking on the establishment and the stereotypes about the way women could sing or look. We came into a situation where women were expected or were told to sing pretty or be cute or smile, but certainly don’t be angry, don’t sing tough, don’t sing hard. They were expected to do what Wendy used to call “apple pie,” which she always said made her gag.
“But she was truly fearful, on the other hand. What made her depressed was the kind of blind conformity – what we used to call “consensus programming” – that we attacked in our songs. It was that which drove her on.
“What I found from almost the first time that I met her, in almost a true heroic sense, “I’m going in there to try and conquer this thing or fight it regardless.”
*
Monica
In the mid-1980s, Monica Kennedy was still working the strip circuit.
She had an ampler form now, but was still traveling the country, hustling a living in small night spots, sporting the same platinum blonde wig, and flashing a toothy grin. She was onto her third husband, a businessman who lived in Las Vegas and didn’t travel with her, and she still harbored vague ambitions of being a singer.
Monica in 1985
Porn-performer-turned-writer Veronica Vera met Monica in early 1985 when the star made an appearance at Show World. The bloom was off her rose, but Monica was still a returning champion of sorts – and that counted for something. She had her own dressing room, separate from the regular strippers and sex show performers.
She also had an assistant, Lee, who watched her every move, and stood by admiringly as she put on her gold-sequined bra, and prepared for the show. Monica sat in the corner carefully outlining her heart-shaped pubic hair with an eyebrow pencil. It had been her trademark for two decades.
Veronica remembers Monica’s star having faded but that she was still surprisingly buoyant, and her initial assessment was: “Monica seems to be a little bit crazy, but in a way that makes a lot of sense.”
Monica still dressed up in a white cowgirl outfit – this one a recent $1,200 purchase from former stripper Dixie Dew, a gal once renowned for taking a bath on stage in a large champagne glass. The new costume hadn’t been fully paid for though, and Dixie Dew turned up backstage before the show to demand the final $100 installment. Monica hadn’t been paid in cash for her gig, so couldn’t pay up. Their beef escalated, and soon the two women were yelling and fighting over whose life had turned out to be tougher.
When the tiff subsided, Monica told Veronica about how her act had changed since her heyday: she didn’t engage in sex with audience members as much as she used to, though she did find a use for a rubber hot dog that particular night: “Nowadays I don’t usually fuck the guys in the audience, and if I do, I pick the ones that I know, the ones who’ve been following my act for years. Otherwise I save fucking for special occasions.” She was, she said, giving her body a break.
Her on-stage chastity extended to oral sex too: “When your body is getting all that action, it can take weeks to heal. Sometimes, I have to put ice cubes in my throat.”
Her conversation with Veronica was interrupted when she welcomed a fan backstage, and cleared out her dressing room so that she could tend to him. Some habits, it seem, die very hard.
Ron Jeremy and his porno squeeze turned up to pay tribute to the homecoming queen, and Monica milked the attention.
Her two daughters were teenagers now, and she carried around pictures of them that she maintained in the pages of her Bible. They’d been fighting a lot with her recently. Cat fights, squabbles, and petty jealousies. Veronica asked if it was perhaps all related to their mom being a stripper?
Monica, pioneer of the most outrageous on-stage sex shows, replied: “If they don’t like what I do, I guess they’ve got to forget about me being their mother. It’s all part of the package. I didn’t get scandalous ‘til I was 27. I didn’t lose my cherry until I got married. Kids today are no longer virgins by the age of 16.
“If my daughters want to complain about my behavior, I can complain about theirs. It works both ways.”
Monica’s local residency concluded, and she moved on to the next city. She spent the next years eking out a quiet existence in the penumbra of diminishing returns. When the road no longer called for her, she retreated to Las Vegas, the sanctuary for dreamers who’d lost their way.
*
Wendy
Wendy was showing no sign of slowing down.
A second album, ‘Beyond the Valley of 1984’ was released in 1981, followed by a tour the same year, ‘The 1984 World Tour,’ which bore the slogan, ‘Down On Your Knees and Pledge Allegiance!’
And then a breakthrough: in the spring of 1982, a major record deal was signed, a worldwide contract with Capitol Records, that would bring Wendy’s shrill political shriek to a large audience. The resulting album, Coup d’Etat, was a breakthrough, blending punk and metal genres for the first time, and Wendy’s vocals were a powerful tour de force. Her delivery was so intense that it was rumored she needed daily medical intervention to avoid permanent damage to her vocal cords.
Rod directed a video for one of the album’s songs, ‘The Damned,’ which featured Wendy driving a school bus through a wall of TVs, climbing onto the roof of the bus which had been loaded with explosives to sing, and jumping off a few moments before the bus goes through a second wall of TVs – which is then blown sky high. It was crude symbolism, but it was spectacular, effective, and more viscerally informed than anything that Boy George and Culture Club were doing.
But shortly after the Plasmatics record was released, Capitol had second thoughts: pretty boy new wave groups were appearing and their names gave away their intent: did anyone think that A Flock of Seagulls were ruthlessly trying to change the world? These newcomers could be relied on to sell records with none of the political liability and fallout.
Within weeks, Capitol Records dropped the Plasmatics.
But there was no shortage of true believers to the Plasmatics cause: in 1982, Lemmy of Motörhead proposed a Wendy and Lemmy duet of the country classic ‘Stand by Your Man.’ The same year, Kiss got Wendy and the Plasmatics to appear as a special guest on their tour, and Gene Simmons asked to produce the next Plasmatics album.
Lemmy and Wendy
The resulting record, WOW, was released in 1984, and Kiss members, including Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, Eric Carr, and Gene himself (credited as Reginald Van Helsing) appeared on the LP. It was a critical success: Kerrang! magazine picked it as their album of the year, and splashed Wendy on the cover – the first woman to have that honor. She also received recognition with a Grammy nomination for ‘Best Female Rock Vocal’ in 1985. The record was a commercial disappointment though, selling just 70,000 copies and failing to break into the mainstream. Wendy’s 1986 follow-up album, Kommander of Kaos, fared little better.
Ever the stage entertainer, Wendy tried her hand at acting, and in 1985 starred in ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ at the Westport Playhouse in St. Louis. In 1986, she appeared in Tom DeSimone’s indie-film Reform School Girls. (Neither she nor Rod liked the film, but the soundtrack included three tracks from Kommander of Kaos so at least it was a showcase for the music.) She also made guest appearances on the TV series The New Adventures of Beans Baxter, and in an episode of McGyver.
Wendy’s two last records were oddities: in 1987, she made an environmentally-conscious sci-fi concept album called Maggots: The Record, described as “a thrash-rock opera about the development of trash-eating insects that escalate an ecological nightmare.” Kerrrang! gave the record its highest rating, and called it “quite simply a masterpiece… a work of genius… a mixture of hedonistic operatic melodies… gut-forged to some of the heaviest armadillo beats you’re ever like to hear committed to vinyl.”
In 1988, Wendy put out another album, this time a “thrash rap” record called Deffest! and Baddest! under the name “Ultrafly and the Hometown Girls.”
Neither sold well, and Rod remembers that harassment from the law and the establishment was finally taking its toll: “On the “Maggots” tour, we had police burst into our hotel room at three in the morning to arrest Wendy for some odd thing that somebody claimed. Usually we beat these things, but the legal costs became huge and it became harder and harder to keep the thing afloat. At the same time, promoters had pressure on them not to promote the shows. They would say, “We love Wendy, but we can’t do it, we can’t risk it, we can’t afford to do it,” although the music was getting better, the recognition and the achievement levels were increasing.
“We kept getting into a point of diminishing returns because we had whole areas of the country we couldn’t play. And so this got to be a point of where we would have had to make a lot of compromises, and she refused to do it. That wasn’t her, that wasn’t what she wanted to do. We didn’t want to make money and fund ourselves in that way.
“We made a pact when we started that everything has a life, and there’s a place where you realize that you’ve hit your peak in some sense, and rather than go downhill, we just agreed that we weren’t going to do that. If it ever came to a point like that we’d stop.
“And so we stopped. We didn’t say we were stopping at that time. We said we were going on hiatus, but the two of us knew we were pretty much done.
“It was really not wanting to compromise in a sense, that’s what it boiled down to.”
The irony was that Wendy’s offstage life was completely different from the persona who delivered manic on-stage displays of rock aggression and punk attitude: she spent much of her free time devoted to personal causes, relating to animal-protection, health, and environmental issues. She was a vegetarian, who refused to wear makeup manufactured by companies that use animals for laboratory experimentation. She gave up drinking alcohol, and quit smoking – her dressing room was off-limits to anyone who smoked – and she swore off all drugs, even aspirin. She turned to exercising, and she jogged, swam regularly, and lifted weights.
The Plasmatics’ last tour was in late 1988, and Wendy’s last known performance of a Plasmatics song occurred at the prompting of Joey Ramone. She sang ‘Masterplan’ with Plasmatics’ guitarist Richie Stotts, when Richie’s band opened for the Ramones on New Year’s Eve, 1988.
Her career had lasted just over a decade: a long time in rock terms. Her supernova had burned more defiantly and fiercely than anyone else, but now it was her turn to step out of the spotlight.
*
Wendy and Rod
Wendy and Rod moved to Storrs, Connecticut, a quiet state university town, where he built them a geodesic dome to live in.
Looking back, Rod has mixed feelings about how successful they were. On the one hand they had built Wendy into an international newsmaker who infiltrated suburban living rooms, challenged mindsets, changed music and fashion, and established paths for women that would come after her.
But did the lasting legacy match up to their hopes? Rod isn’t sure: “Both of us were really hopeful revolutionaries. We really thought we could change, in a deep structural way, the course of culture; get things off of what we thought was the disastrous course they were on. In this larger sense, it can’t be said that we succeeded. The world today, instead of being turned around, is headed at increasing speed toward many of the things – if not all the things – we warned about. So much that we warned about has come true.”
Rod lectured as a research fellow at University of Connecticut’s Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, and wrote scientific papers.
Wendy got herself a couple of jobs in nearby Willimantic including working as a veterinary assistant and animal rehabber at the Quiet Corner Wildlife Center, as well as a job working at a health food co-op, promoting vegetarianism and helping customers make healthy food choices.
Rod felt that the root of her love of animals and her advocacy for them lay in her great sympathy for the underdog: “She felt like that herself when she grew up, and she saw animals as innocent. And as far as the mess humans have placed the planet in, they were the victims. Whether it was factory farming or pointless testing of vanity products on animals, or animals in need of rehabilitation after some injury or mishap with a human, she just felt compelled to help. She was a person with deep empathy.
“The same month that she was on the cover of Kerrang! she was also on the cover of Vegetarian Times. I always thought that was kind of cool. Those were just two dimensions of her and actually fit very well with who she was.”
For a time, Wendy was happy amid the wildlife of eastern Connecticut, even as she struggled to find a new role for herself. But after everything she’d been through, she ultimately found it difficult to lead what she thought was a normal life. She didn’t want to be an elder statesperson forever trapped in the iconoclastic persona she had created. In the videos, she always emerged from the flames a survivor, defiant and unbeatable. In Storrs, where she was struck by the tedium of day-to-day life, she did not.
Williams first attempted suicide in 1993 by hammering a knife into her chest where it lodged in her sternum. She changed her mind and called Rod to take her to the hospital.
She attempted suicide again in 1997 with an overdose of ephedrine.
She’d made up her mind, she insisted it was for the best, and all Rod could do was try to delay the inevitable.
On Monday, April 6, 1998, she walked out of the back of her home in Storrs, into the woods, and shot herself in the head with a handgun. She was 48 years old.
She’d put a bag over her head so that when Rod found her – there among the animals that she fed and loved – he wouldn’t have to see the full horror of her suicide. On a nearby rock, he found broken nutshells: she’d evidently been feeding the squirrels before turning the gun on herself.
Later Rod found a package she left for him that contained some noodles he liked, a packet of seeds for growing garden greens, some Oriental massage balm, and sealed letters she’d written. She’d left a series of suicide notes in their home that confirmed she’d been contemplating taking her life for many years. The notes detailed her state of mind for those who wanted to know why she would take such a fatal step:
“The act of taking my own life is not something I am doing without a lot of thought. I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.”
Another note Swenson found read, simply: “I die with a clean warm feeling like the sun and water we shared together as when birds fly or fish swim.”
She signed the note, “Love always, Wendy.”
*
Rod
“Wendy’s act was not an irrational in-the-moment act,” Rod said.
The contrast to the excitement of fronting the Plasmatics was too much, he said. “There was a part of her that just came alive,” in her Mohawk-sporting role in the Plasmatics. Despite her work in health foods and wildlife rehabilitation, “this ordinary life that a lot of us are required to occupy” was not enough to fill the void left by the rock days.
“I spent the better part of four years trying to dissuade her, or at least postpone it. Anger, in any case for someone who takes this ultimate step, is not something I would readily understand. Utterly deep and inexpressible grief and loss. But anger no.”
Throughout the Plasmatics’ ten-year life, Rod seldom gave interviews or discussed his ideas with journalists. He still doesn’t. Back in the day, he left that to Wendy, who provided some of the most memorable interviews, music videos, and talk-show moments of the 80s, such as her appearances on The Sally Jesse Raphael Show and The Joan Rivers Show.
“I will tell you that while she was here she lived with an authenticity that few can rival, and this, I think was a goal in life she set with a determination at a young age. Despite remarkable hurdles, I believe she achieved this goal. Her work and her legacy speak for itself.”
Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie, agreed Wendy was a trailblazer: “She was such a big deal back then. She showed her tits and she blew up cars on stage and broke TVs – and now it would just be normal.”
Today, Rod is a fellow at the University of Connecticut. He has been published in several scientific journals for his research on the laws of evolution, thermodynamics, and entropy.
He remains true to the vision that ignited his path: “Think for yourself, always question, and remember: the hope for the world is in outliers.”
*
Monica
2018.
Far from the maddening crowd, the lusty hordes of yesteryear, and itinerant traveling lifestyle, Monica sits in a small apartment in Las Vegas. Not the glitzy, neon-infested Vegas that tourists see. This is a gated senior living community.
Her name has long changed. Her two daughters have grown up and are leading their own itinerant lives. Wild, crazy lives too, just like their mom decades previously; apples clearly don’t fall far from the tree.
Monica has hustled all her life, but the days of her dreams, of her scandalous acts, of her name in lights are now in the rear-view mirror. She followed Wendy’s loud and abrasive punk career from afar until Wendy faded from view in the 1990s.
Monica occasionally thinks back to the old days, but doesn’t dwell. There’s no point in being sentimental at this stage. She can’t share the memories with anyone either – who’d believe her? It all seems to have happened yesterday, yet it all seems to have happened a thousand years ago.
Her fridge magnet bears the message: ‘Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.’
What happens when you’re raised in a loving suburban home, an athletic but painfully shy kid who went to church every Sunday with his very Catholic parents? A boy who developed an early love of dance but had to hide it because his mother thought that would mean he’s gay? A young man who was so intimidated by girls he stayed a virgin until he was 20 years old?
Well you go on to become one of the most prolific male porn stars in history of course. Mike Horner entered the business in the late 70s – just a few months after he lost his virginity and a few weeks before his 21st birthday. He stayed in the business for the next thirty years racking up thousands of film titles and sex partners.
So how did a good Catholic boy run off the rails of a straight and narrow life? How did a brief adventure turn into an almost life-long career, and certainly an enduring identity? And what happens when you outgrow the business that in part taught you to be the man you are?
In this episode of the Rialto Report, we speak with Mike Horner about his decades long career in the industry and what he looks forward to now. Hint, it starts with S and ends with X.
The PenisSIZER PLEASURIZER (the idiosyncratic capitalization is courtesy of the ad itself) was offered via a tagline that read “Announcing the End of Sexual Frustration and Boredom for the Rest of Your Life!” A progenitor of the modern day Fleshlight, it was described as “A Pleasure Machine Men Have Dreamed of For Centuries” and promised “Mind Blowing Sex Whenever You Want It.” The product was “custom fitted to you, to fit forever!” which in turn required the customer to perform some “accurate measurement” work in advance.
