In the concluding part of Tim Connelly‘s story, he talks about his XXX film career in the 1980s, and his marriages to Kelly Nichols, Kimberly Carson, and Christy Canyon. (You can read the first part of the interview here.)
This article is part of our series on the relationship between punk music and the adult film industry in New York, which previously included our story on Wendy O. Williams and Monica Kennedy.
Note: At the time of writing this article, Tim’s IMDb record is conflated with that of a different performer named Timothy Beckley. We hope that this article inspires a correction of Tim Connelly’s film record.
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9. Kelly Nichols
How did you meet Kelly Nichols?
I was in a band with Barry, her husband.
She wasn’t in the adult film industry at that point?
No. She was doing legitimate modeling. She’d been a stand-in for Jessica Lange in the film ‘King Kong’ (1976). And she’d just gotten a role in a slasher movie, ‘Toolbox Murders’ (1978), with Cameron Mitchell.
Kelly Nichols in ‘Toolbox Murders’ (1978)
I didn’t know her that well, but she was beautiful.
In fact, one day she came into Show World, and she ended up joining Helen (Madigan) and I on stage for a show. Kelly wanted to do it for fun, and of course I was like, “Wow, man! Of course!” Helen was a little bi, and Kelly said she was bi. We all got really fucking high, because Ron got us loaded – and we did it.
It was weird, because we wanted to get it on together, but we didn’t want to do it on stage. So afterwards, we decided to go back to our place, but Kelly had to go get some drugs first. And by the time she arrived, the moment was gone. So we let her sleep on our couch.
Live show players: Jean Silver, Serena, Marc Stevens, Jill Monroe, Helen Madigan and others
What was the band you had with Kelly’s boyfriend, Barry?
Barry and I were talking to Ron Martin in his office at Show World, and Ron said, “Tim, you’ve got your band, ‘Susan Shocks,’ and you two guys are creative, so why don’t you come up with a musical theater concept together?” And Ron said he’d write the script for it.
So we decided to call the show ‘Future Perfect’, because we thought it wasn’t going to last… I said to Barry, “Let’s be optimistic here. Maybe in the future, it’ll be perfect.”
I said, “Let’s get some girls to sing backups. Helen will do it.”
Barry said, “But Helen can’t even sing!”
I said, “It doesn’t matter. And Kelly can sing a little bit, so we’ll get Kelly and Helen, and then we’ll find someone else who really knows how to sing.”
I knew this black stripper called Liz, and she was fucking perfect. So now we’ve got the three girl backup singers, we’ve got our friend Larry on vocals, Barry on keyboards, and me on drums.
Ron got financing for us from the guys who owned Show World, and they paid for us to have rehearsal space.
How did it turn out?
It looked like it was going to be a big thing. But after a few weeks of working on the show, Ron canceled it. It turned out the whole idea was a front for the Show World guys to launder some of the illegal money they were making on the side…
But you remained good friends with Kelly and Barry?
Yeah, I became really good friends with Barry, and I also became really good friends with Kelly. But my friendship with each of them was on a separate level, because they didn’t really want to be together anymore. They’d started to lived separately.
Where were they living?
Barry was living at that hotel across from Show World on 43rd Street, and Kelly was sleeping at our place.
After a while, Barry said he wanted to leave town because Kelly’s drug taking was getting too much. She was toxic for him. They both did too many drugs together, and partied too much. They were really bad for each other. She was insanely unpredictable, and he was insanely jealous – so it was a bad mix all round.
But in the end, Kelly it was who ended up leaving town instead, and she went to Los Angeles.
Kelly Nichols
Meanwhile – how are you and Helen getting along?
I didn’t know how much longer I could stand being with her because she was getting too fucked up, too much of the time. She was drinking, and she wasn’t a nice drunk. Like every drunk, she ended up being pretty bitter. And she didn’t handle her booze well because she’d drink a lot, and then do blow. Or she’d smoke too much pot, and take a pill. She was always dangerously close to being too fucking fucked up at the wrong moment.
We went out to L.A. in 1981 because she wanted to get out of town. She wasn’t getting regular adult film work anymore because she wasn’t looking good, and she wasn’t handling herself very well either, so our relationship was pretty much on the skids.
I wanted to go to California to see if there was anything happening for me out in the L.A. music scene. All I was doing in New York was getting fucking high and hanging out at Bernard’s, dealing blow. I figured this was a waste of my life. It wasn’t what I’d bargained for.
What was the L.A. music scene at that time like?
Nothing interesting was really happening there. The punk thing had turned into new wave. Then we went to see this band – The Robert Stoddard Band. They were good, and they needed a drummer because theirs sucked. Robert had me come down for the audition, and they hired me after a half a song. We did shows at the Troubadour, the Whiskey, and the Starwood.
What did Helen do?
Helen and I had a big fight the same night I got hired by the band. My friends were telling me, “Tim, you got to get rid of her, man. She’s out of her mind. She’s way over the top on the drugs and the booze.” And so we broke up soon after that.
After that, I saw her on and off. She drifted: she was here, there, and everywhere… but nowhere around me. I remember she came over one Christmas Eve after she’d fucked Oliver Reed, but I didn’t see her much after that.
And you stayed out in Los Angeles?
Yes. I started working as a chef. I lied my way into that because I couldn’t cook.
*
When did Kelly come back in the picture?
I moved into an apartment in the same complex in Studio City as my friend Steve. One night I was sitting outside by the swimming pool… and who comes walking down the street looking drop-dead-fucking-gorgeous but Kelly! She’s dressed to the nines because it was the night of the AFA Awards, the Adult Film Association Awards, at the Sheraton in Universal City.
Kelly Nichols
She was up for an award and she heard that I was living in Studio City. She just figured she’d find me, and I just happened to be walking down the street. It was funny because she didn’t have her glasses on, and she couldn’t see anything without them, so she didn’t see me until I got right up in her face. She’d dyed her hair blonde, and she looked like a fucking vision. She was at one of her peaks. One of her many peaks…
Did you re-connect?
Yeah, Kelly took me back to her house in Westwood that night. She was living with this girl called Autumn, a beautiful half-black model. Autumn was one of Jerry Buss’ girls, the owner of the LA Lakers. She was periodically one of the Lakers girls, and a cheerleader for the team, and she also had bit parts in some movies.
What was the deal with this house?
Jerry Buss originally got the house because he liked Autumn so much: he wanted to keep her away from his wife, but also because he didn’t want to be seen with a black girl. So he put her in this house in Westwood.
The house ended up full of girls who were fucking hookers – and some of them were working for Madame Alex, who was the madame for Heidi Fleiss. Alex was scary. Old, old woman. I think she was Hungarian.
Did Kelly ever get involved with Madame Alex?
Madam Alex once sent Kelly and Autumn to Dubai, and Kelly almost didn’t come back.
On an escort job there?
Yeah, yeah. It was right when we started seeing each other, and she and Autumn were gone for a weekend. Kelly came back and she had almost $18,000, and she said she got fucked two or three times, but that this crown Prince, or rather his brother, had started beating up her and Autumn.
By now, Kelly had become a popular adult film actress on both coasts, right?
Yes, but she was trying to stay out of the XXX business to be honest. She was doing some work for Don Davis, who was a film distributor, and he was a sugar daddy to her. He called her ‘Kelly Two Cents’ because he said she wasn’t worth a nickel.
I’d drive her to work, and Don would say to me, “Take my Lincoln Continental and get out of here.” He didn’t care for me: he just wanted Kelly around all day. He was so fat and fucking amped up on high blood pressure drugs and coke that he just wanted me gone. He’d give me $500 and tell me to go buy candy for his distributors. To be honest, Don wasn’t a bad guy – he just wanted Kelly around, whether he could fuck her or not.
Did Kelly move in with you?
Kelly lived with me in my apartment in Studio City, because Autumn became tough to be around, and also Jerry was bringing in new girls into their house all the time. He had this revolving door going because he got bored easy, and he always wanted new, new, new…
What was life with Kelly like?
It was a crazy lifestyle. Kelly was a genius, and I’m serious about that. She has a great intellect. But she was a heavy drug user.
She found out that smoking PCP shrinks your fat cells – you can lose 15 to 25 pounds in about two weeks… just like that. And you don’t become haggard like you do from coke. PCP maked you literally become smaller. It takes a while for it to come back because your fat cells don’t retain the same elasticity anymore, and in the end, it makes you look fucking weird. It’s clearly not healthy to lose weight like that. It’s almost like starving yourself. But it worked in the short term.
And Kelly was trying to lose weight?
Kelly was big-boned. I mean, she was a size 10 when she was thin. Some of the film producers wanted her to be an 8. I thought she looked great when she was a 12 – she was 5’ 10”, she had size 10 feet, so she looked great.
So yeah, the drugs sometimes helped her when she wanted to lose weight for the films.
Were you both doing a lot of drugs?
Put it this way: Kelly had a friend who also lived in Jerry Buss’ house named <redacted>, who was a half white, half black girl who was really beautiful. She was Kelly’s best friend.
One night we went over to <redacted>’s place around La Brea and Sunset. We went down to the swimming pool and <redacted> had angel dust, PCP, and so on. I was nervous about drugs near the swimming pool because I can’t swim. We smoked a little, and fell asleep.
About an hour later, I woke up and I said to Kelly, “Where’s <redacted>?”
Kelly said, “I think she went upstairs.”
I said, “No, I just came from upstairs.”
So we go looking for <redacted>, and when Kelly gets to the far end of the pool, she screams. <redacted> was in the pool, and she was dead.
I was freaked out. So we called the police, and we got the fuck out of there.
Kelly Nichols (left)
*
By now Kelly was a big star in the adult film industry…
Yes, but when she’d get high, Kelly would get wackadoodle high no matter where she was, or what she was doing – and that made her unreliable. I remember she did PCP at the AFA Awards one year. Chuck Vincent had told me, “You fucking take care of her. Make sure she shows up.” They all knew she was going to win the award for Best Actress. And right when she won the award, she was in the bathroom doing PCP! So I had go into the stall in the bathroom to get her.
I also remember that night for another reason: I was talking to Robin, Gloria Leonard‘s daughter, who I really wanted to fuck. And Kelly told me, “You want to fuck Gloria? Gloria wants to fuck you. You want to fuck Robin? You ought to do it. This is your Jane Fonda moment, you know?” Because that’s what they call it when you fuck a mother/daughter combination… It’s ‘doing a Jane Fonda’. I was really enthralled with the idea.
So Kelly had started cutting back her film work?
Suze Randall suggested that Kelly become a makeup artist, and started hiring her. Suze wanted her out of the business because she said, “Kelly, you’ve got too much going on. Get out of this business. It’s killing you.”
Suze was good to us. She found us a little guest house, a carriage house, right down by the beach by Speedway and Brooks in the heart of Venice. Beautiful little place. $400 a month.
I was still doing my music even though I didn’t have a car. I remember one day Kelly came to pick me up in this fucking beautiful car that she’d rented – and she was with Laurie Smith and Shauna Grant. Wow… I was loving life, man.
Didn’t you move back to New York around this point?
Yes – because Chuck Vincent contacted us and he said, “I want to do this movie, In Love (1983), with Kelly and Jerry Butler, and I’ll give you 50.”
Kelly knew and liked Chuck. They’d made movies like Roommates (1982) and Puss ‘n’ Boots (1982) which were both great. So Chuck says, “Tim, I want you to help me. I want her for this movie. I want her to go out on top. I’m going to give her $50,000, but I’m going to pay you to help me make sure she shows up for this movie.”
Chris Covino was going to be involved in it but he was starting to get sick with AIDS, so Chuck wanted everyone to come together as a family help make the film. Chuck was a really decent guy. So together we helped Kelly get her shit together.
The Stoddard band broke up when we went back to New York to do this big feature.
Where did you live back in New York?
We went back to some friends I had, Dee and Tony. Dee work for Jane Friedman who was Patti Smith’s manager. Tony was a live sex performer at Show World. Tony was big black guy who looked like Sidney Poitier. His mom was a judge up in Harlem. He was an articulate, smart guy – but he was developing a drug problem.
In truth, their house was a fucking drug den. G. E. Smith (the lead guitarist for Hall & Oates, and musical director for Saturday Night Live) stayed there, and so did Michael “Busta Cherry” Jones from Talking Heads. Lemmy was there too.
So not too healthy for Kelly, I guess…
It wasn’t too healthy for anybody, man. We never slept, and it was all fucking heroin and cocaine.
Then these Colombian drug dealers gave Dee some money to open up a rehearsal studio because so many musicians were buying cocaine from them, they wanted a place that was a good cover!
Dee found a place on Fourth Avenue, and we called it ‘A Step Above’ because their coke was always a step above. I helped Dee run it. The space was on the second floor, and the Colombians put a two-way mirrored wall in there because there were so many famous people coming in – like Motorhead, who were in there all the time, and Billy idol, Luther Vandross, Chaka Khan too – and the Colombians were star fuckers, and they just wanted to sit there and watch everyone…
*
Did you get married to Kelly?
Yeah, we got married twice. I got married to two of my wives twice. One day Kelly and I are sitting around with my friend Doug. I always told him I’d want him to be my best man if I ever got married. So Kelly said, “Why don’t you marry me?”
We went down to City Hall, got married, rented a room at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and partied there for a week blowing our fucking brains out on cocaine. It was ironic because Dee came over and stayed with us… because she wanted to get away from all the drugs at her home!
But Kelly and I decided we should also get married the right way. Both of our moms are great people, and they both wished we’d gotten married within the Catholic Church. So we picked the church across from Dee’s house on Sixth Ave and 16th St, and we got married a second time. We flew our moms out and we put them up at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and we had the most straight-up wedding you can imagine. The girls from Club 90 (Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, Veronica Vera, Gloria Leonard, and Veronica Hart) were all maids of honor. Or, as we called them, the maids of dishonor.
Was the partying more restrained this time?
Well, we blew our brains out with cocaine in the sacristy, because my best man Doug said, “After what you went through at the seminary, I think it’s only fitting that we should snort as much fucking cocaine as we can on the tabernacle…”
We had a party that lasted another three days, then we went to the Chelsea Commons and played Frisbee in the morning naked on 10th Ave. It was insane.
Where did you live after the wedding?
Kelly and I lived at 10th and 25th – by ourselves at that point.
How was your music career going?
My friend Doug joined Edgar Winter’s band, and got me an audition. I start playing ‘Frankenstein’, the song by Edgar Winter, but when I got to the solo – I hate doing drum solos – I just look around and lost interest.
I thought, “I don’t want to be here. I’d rather be playing with Johnny Winter, not Edgar Winter.” So I put my sticks down halfway through the solo, and I got up and said, “I can’t do this, I can’t.” I walked out.
I met this guy at a club called Rob Parissi, who’d written the song ‘Play That Funky Music, White Boy’ for his band, Wild Cherry, back in the 1970s. By now, he was Gloria Estefan’s keyboard player. He was up from Miami and we clicked. He and I wrote the music for a John Leslie movie. I think Kelly was happy that I wrote the music for a movie instead of fucking in one.
How was the relationship with Kelly?
Up and down. She wasn’t in demand as much as she had been…. We both messed around a lot in those days and it damaged our relationship.
Kelly Nichols
*
Who else were you seeing?
One day I ran into Jean Silver (amputee adult film actress), who I had done shows with at Show World. Jeannie and I had this magical sexual connection. The chemistry we had was unbelievable. And because of that, when Kelly was out of town, Jeannie would say, “I don’t want to go home, and I’m all alone. Take me to your house and fuck me.” And she liked to shoot speed, and I’d shot speed before. The speed just made me want to fuck her longer.
She’d stay with me for three days, and that was an intense time. Our veins collapsed. We couldn’t get fucking a register anywhere. It was like crazy how much sex we had. We fucked until my dick couldn’t get hard, and her pussy couldn’t fucking get wet anymore. And then we’d take a cab to get some more works down on the Lower East Side.
Jean Silver
We never went back to Jean’s place, so one day I asked her if she lived alone.
She said, “Didn’t I ever tell you about my boyfriend? I’m with Snake.”
I replied, “Are you fucking kidding me? Snake – the bouncer from the Nursery? He’s a Hell’s Angel!”
She goes, “I know. And he would kill you. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
I freaked out hearing this.
Jean says, “You’re right. We shouldn’t fuck anymore Tim. I’m thinking this through now. And we should not fuck anymore.”
I’m said, “No kidding?!?” Unbelievable…
About a week later, I run into her at Bernard’s. She says, “Ron Martin wants you to come back and do live sex shows.
I tell her, “I’ll bark for him, but I won’t do any more shows.” So I started to bark at this place on 49th or 50th and Broadway. It was a Show World property, but it was called something else. It was on the second floor.
Tell me about what it’s like to bark for a place.
The way you bark is you watch people, and you see what they gravitate towards. If you see some guy, and he’s over by the black dominatrix section, you go, “That’s right, guys, on stage now, we have black girls dominating you, dominating your dick, taking you places you’ve never been before, making you hurt so good, you’re never going to want to leave.”
One of the first people I barked into the show was the singer Joe Jackson. He was a big tit freak.
So you’d bark in the store as well as on the street?
Yeah, whatever you had to do. I didn’t like to go on the street. That was fucking cold. I knew that if they came into the building, I had them. In the beginning, I used to get a spiff when it was really rocking: a spiff meant that if you barked them in for five bucks, you get one for yourself. I got really good at it. They stopped that because I was making too much money.
And then Ron asked me to go back to Show World and do shows again.
Did you go back and do a show on stage?
Yeah, and guess who was going to be my partner? Long Jean Silver… So, I got to fuck her some more. I just fucking loved fucking her, man.
At one point, the Show World guys made me and Jeannie do a bachelor party at the theater on Broadway. There were over a hundred Navy guys there. The only instructions were, “You go up there and you fuck for an hour.”
I did it because I needed a new drum set. Also Kelly hadn’t get her final payment from Chuck Vincent for her last film with him, because he was pissed at her because she’d gained weight, so it took a while to get the money out of him. Chuck insisted that she had to lose weight to get the rest of the cash because he wanted her in good shape for the premiere.
What was your role in that type of situation?
I cop to being a suitcase pimp. I was riding Kelly’s coattails to get the money. Even though I helped to do everything, I shouldn’t have been counting her money. That was wrong.
How did the bachelor party with Jean Silver go?
We had to fuck for an hour, man, and that was all there was to it. So we did it, and towards the end of the show, I could see that these Navy guys wanted a big finale.
I looked around, wondering what we’re gonna do to provide a climax. Jeannie leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Tear off my leg and throw into the audience.”
I replied, “Are you fucking kidding me!?”
She said, “Do it. They’re going to go crazy.”
So while I’m fucking Jeannie, I turned to the audience and said, “You want to see something you’ve never seen before? Who wants to see it? This is going to blow your fucking minds.”
They all cheered and shouted, “Yeah, yeah! Hell yeah!”
And I took her leg, and threw it in the air. It was like everything happened in slow motion. The leg flew through the air, spinning over the audience. And when it eventually hit the ground, you could hear a pin drop. A hundred Navy guys stood there with their jaws dropped.
And I shouted, “What do you say, guys? Come on! Let’s hear it for Long Jeanne Silver! Does this girl have some fucking ovaries or what?!”
And all of a sudden, they all fucking applauded and went nuts. Holy shit!
The guys that organized the party gave us a $500 tip, though one of the gangsters who ran the joint made us hand over 10% to him as commission…
I was able to buy my drum set. I quit live shows again after that. In fact, that was the last show I did.
But it was a great way to go out, man.
Jean Silver
*
What were Kelly’s feelings towards Jean?
She knew Jeannie had a boyfriend, and she knew we were just fuck-buddies, so she thought it was kind of cute. And we had an open relationship.
Kelly was still making movies but getting smaller parts, and we started drifting apart because it wasn’t really working.
I remember she went to California to shoot for Alex de Renzy. She didn’t talk to me most of the time she was there. I was worried about her because she lost her glasses again. That was just me being a caring partner. And I couldn’t find Alex’s number, so we didn’t speak for a while.
Our thing was that you don’t ask what the other person was doing, and if you’re not there when something happens, you don’t need to know. If you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t worry about it because it doesn’t affect you. But… it does, you know?
Kelly was drinking a lot, and she was getting heavier. She was getting sloppy with the booze and the drugs. And I still partied with her because… well, I partied with her. But at least I knew to stop when it was time to fucking pull the trigger. I was no saint: I was dealing coke and doing heroin and just fucking doing too many drugs.
I felt bad because she was making films when she wasn’t in the right state to do them.
So I started doing porn again to make money on the side so Kelly didn’t have to do it.
Did Kelly have a reaction to you starting to appear in more adult films?
She didn’t really care. We never wanted to work together. Some people you work with, but others – like Kelly – you don’t.
Had you made many feature films up to that point?
Not many. I’d been in Sizzle (1979). That was my first movie. That was the first thing I did after the loops.
The best advice I had was from Georgina Spelvin, who told me, “Don’t ever think of adult movies being anything more than a well-paid part time job.”
When you started appearing in more films, you used different pseudonyms – such as Dick Howard. How did that come about?
I didn’t want to be a porno ‘name’, you know what I mean? As long as I could go without having a ‘name’, that was cool. But Jason called me Tim Madigan in that first loop. And that made Helen pissed. She said, “You’d better start figuring out what name you want, because I don’t want you to be called Tim Madigan. I don’t want people to make the connection.”
And of course, I wanted a career in the music business, so I knew I needed a different name.
My first choice was ‘Johnny Steele.’ I thought that sounded good, you know? I remember telling Joey Silvera, and he said, “That’s a cool name. But if you call yourself Johnny Steele, they’re going to put your name up front all the time.”
So I’d come up with different alternate names all the time. For example, one of my closest friends was Steve Catania, the studio engineer at Electric Lady, so when I did this movie called Private School Girls in 1983, I used his name. That made him so happy.
What do you remember about that film?
Chris Covino (aka John Christopher) was the director. Chris and I were really good friends. He lived up on 57th St with his lover, a coke dealer named Daniel. Chris used to have pajama parties up there. I liked him, but I didn’t fucking want anything to do with that scene, you know? I was fucking on stage in Times Square. Why would I want to go with some people from the porn industry to wear pajamas and sit around in some gay guy’s place on a Friday night? I’d rather go to Riker’s Island, you know? Their coke wasn’t even that good…
But I really liked Chris. He was a great guy. I’d met him through Chuck Vincent, and he was like the boy wonder. He was sweet, funny, real, and he was empathetic. There was something about him, man. We became good friends.
And they flew Shauna Grant in for that movie. Man, oh man, she was something. She was really, really special.
What else were you doing for money during this time?
I was working at Berlin, an after-hours club in Manhattan. I was a doorman there – and I was so not the doorman type. I had a pink leather jacket with the fucking shag haircut. They told me they hired me for the job because, “You’re not what people expect to see at the door, and you’ve got an attitude.” It’s true, I tend to look at people really intensely. They don’t know where the fuck I’m coming from.
I also started producing some porn films that were shot on video – with a guy called Toby Ross who primarily made gay porn. It started with a movie called Double Trouble (1986).
I met Toby through Danny Mamane who owned a lot of theaters, and I met Danny through Don Davis. Danny was a crazy character who’d have people send him their 35mm films to run in his theaters. He’d say, “Send it to me, and I’ll take a look at it. I need to watch it myself before I decide if I want to put it in my theaters.” Then the first thing that Danny would do when a 35mm film came in was to take it down to fucking Canal Street where Kemal (Horulu) had a dupe lab. Kemal made a copy, and then Danny sent the movie back.
Anyway, Toby had a hard-on for me, and he decided that he was going to do a series of movies, and he wanted me in two of them. Danny didn’t want me in any of them, but Toby insisted.
What was your reaction to Toby’s offer?
At first, I thought what does this homo want…? Jesus Christ, this is going to be the longest month of my life, banging grade C-level girls in shitty video productions with stupid ideas. But I needed the money, you know? So I thought, why not? Kelly wasn’t working, so I figured that this money would keep her sober.
And you’re producing them as well as appearing in them?
Yeah, that was what the hook for me. I’m wanted to get my production credits up, so I got a deal out of it. I got guys like Ron Dorfman and Larry Revene to help shoot them.
What was your thinking about the fact that you were getting more into the films – right when film production was being replaced by video?
I felt like an outsider. The people that I’d been friendly with – Jamie Gillis, Marc Stevens, Joey Silvera, Sharon Mitchell, and all the rest – did the movies because they wanted to. It wasn’t about fame, or money, or anything like that – we liked it! And we were good it.
With video, anyone could make a film for a fraction of the price, and so a new type of person came into the business. It wasn’t the same any more.
Kelly Nichols
*
When did you first become aware of AIDS?
It was Marc (Stevens) who first mentioned it to me – around about 1983/84. We’d hung out at Show World a few years earlier, and still saw each other when I was around.
What did he tell you?
He just said that there was something going down in the Village. That men were getting really sick and dying.
It was like nothing anyone had seen before, and so there was a lot of misinformation and weird theories going around in those early days. I remember two things: first, we thought if was connected to amyl nitrate. Everyone was doing it at the clubs – especially in the gay discos – it gave you a cheap and quick high, and then the Village Voice did an article about the connection between the drug and illness.
The second thing was that I was convinced that the illness had been created by someone who hated gays. Gays were the only ones who seemed to have it, and they were the only ones who were talking about it.
Who was the first person that you knew who contracted the illness?
Well… Marc got it, but the first person I knew who had it was Chris Covino. I was on the set on Brooke Does College (1984) which Chris directed, and he looked horrible. Really terrible. He could hardly move and he said he ached all over, so I reached out and touched his shoulders to make him feel better. He pulled away, and said it hurt him too much.
Shortly after that he moved out to Los Angeles. He ended up in a hospital in Venice, so Kelly and I went to see him when we were out there. He’d become as skinny as a rake, and he was covered in big black sores. We were told to wear masks and gloves and protective gear. He died soon after that.
When did you realize that it had moved beyond the gay community?
Tony, my friend from Show World who had developed a drug problem, got AIDS. Even though he’d been doing the live sex shows for years, I knew there was no way that he’d gotten the illness from gay sex. This was from a needle.
How did AIDS impact your own behavior?
At the time, I thought it made me more careful. I was having more sex with people in movies, so I was vigilant to who I was paired with. But looking back, it was an illusion: I had no real control over who I was fucking.
Did it have much of an effect on the XXX industry in the 1980s?
When John Holmes got AIDS, that’s when people started asking questions: How did he get it, who else is at risk, you know? People were talking about intravenous drug use, transsexuals, a European trip where he’d fucked anything that moved…
The truth was that he fucked Joey Yale in the ass. Joey was one of the first of the male stars of the business to contract AIDS, so that’s probably how it happened.
The industry was in denial for a long time.
John Holmes
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10. Kimberly Carson
Do you remember when you met Kimberly Carson?
I got hired to do a movie called Pleasure Island (1985). Kelly was the star of the movie, and she got me the part. Michael Evans from Cheri magazine was the director and Vince Benedetti was involved so parts of it were shot at Adventure Studios, as well as on location on Long Island and at various lofts around town. Fanne Foxe‘s apartment was one of the locations we used. I was the main guy on the cover with Kimberly Carson, who was the ingénue who they’d flown in from California.
She was flown in to star in it?
Yes, and I was going to basically have a sex scene with her and that was it. I was in the movie because I was the magical character who was like the baggage handler guy on ‘Pleasure Island’, and my deal was that people would have sex and find the love of their life around me, but I never seem to be able to find love. Thus meant that I had to be in all of these dialogue scenes with Kimberly, who was a good actress.
Kimberly Carson
What was her personal situation?
Her marriage was breaking up. The guy she was with was a suitcase pimp.
What was your first impression of her when you saw her?
I wasn’t sure about her because she wore a wig. I’d seen her on box covers and in layouts, and she always had this bad black poodle wig.
And I thought, “What the fuck man! I hate wigs. I’ve got to work with that…?”
But when I meet her at her hotel, she had this perfectly coiffed, natural hair. It was permed, but was brownish-red. I thought she was beautiful, so I said, “What’s the deal with you with the dumb poodle wig?”
She says, “I wear that because I didn’t want people to really recognize me. I normally have straight hair.
And I said, “I like your hair the natural more.”
She says, “Yeah, I’ve been getting tired of the wigs, so I’ve decided, fuck it, I don’t care anymore. Who cares if people know who I am? So I just perm my real hair now, that’s all.”
I said, “Well, fuck, now we’re talking. The perm I can live with.”
What was the experience on that movie like for you?
Kimberly and I were around each other every day, but we were only having sex once – and it was at the end of the week. That was the way they used to do it with big budget adult features. I was good at the dialogue after years of improv at Show World. I could talk for five minutes on whatever you told me to. And now I’m the star, I’m the leading man.
Tim Connelly
How did Kelly do on that movie?
She’d basically started living with this guy called Skip, who eventually became her husband. He was a science fiction writer. I couldn’t understand that: I said, “Why do you want to hang out with this fucking guy, man? He smokes fucking cigars and draws comic books, come on!”
Had Kelly moved out from your apartment?
No, she hadn’t moved out, but she didn’t come home either. I mean, things were still okay with us. We had the attitude that we let each other do whatever we wanted to do.
She first spent the night over at Skip’s because she lost her glasses and her bicycle, and so couldn’t get back home. I could’ve gone out and helped her, but I just fucking couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t go find her and hold her fucking hand through it all.
The problem was that Kelly was meant to be the star of this movie, ‘Pleasure Island’. I showed up on the first day and she didn’t. So everyone is asking me where she’s at.
She was off doing whatever. And I realized that our relationship was effectively over. I was kind of sad about that.
But Kimberly was going through the same thing with her husband. He was her suitcase pimp. She didn’t want to even be in the business. She did it to please him, because he was a swinger and he just wanted to get into all that kinky shit. He was riding her coattails and pushing her and pushing her and pushing her. He got her to go to swing clubs. He got her to go to nudist camps… and she was not into the whole thing, but she loved him and wanted to make him happy. She was sexual – just not in that kind of way.
Kimberly Carson
What was Kimberly’s background?
His father was the owner of Ogden Porsche-Audi, the biggest Porsche-Audi dealership on the West Coast… so he had a lot of money.
How did you get on with her on the set of the film?
The sex was fucking amazing: we had a week of gearing up to it so by that time we were really horny for each other.
I saw that she had this little girl quality, like a damaged puppy dog in the rain. I always wanted to heal my father, so after he passed I wanted to take somebody and make it right for him and not have them suffer. Kimberly responded by coming onto me because her marriage was failing… and we started falling for each other.
What was her husband’s reaction?
He wasn’t in New York, because they didn’t fly him out for the shoot. He was back in L.A. When he realized that something was going on, he started calling her up, threatening her, saying, “I’ll ruin your fucking career. Let me talk to Paul Thomas. I’ll fucking tell him that I’m going to ruin your fucking name unless you have me come out there now. I don’t trust you with this leading man guy.”
He was screaming from 3,000 miles away. I just thought he was fucking retarded. I never even said a word to him, and PT never said a word to him.
I just told Kimberly, “You’re going to have to go back and deal with this guy.”
She said, “Too late. I already told him to move out.”
Meanwhile Kelly’s role in the movie just got smaller and smaller as the week went on because she was unreliable and wouldn’t show up for work. She was so out of it.
So eventually Kimberly says, “What are you going to do, Tim? Are you going to wait around for Kelly to come back so you can have a miserable, horrible breakup, when she doesn’t really even care anymore?
So I said, “You know what? You’re right. I’ll just go with you. I got enough money. If your old man gives you a hard time, we’ll call the fucking police. He can’t get away with this. I’ve been around too long for him to try and pull any of that bullshit on me.
Kimberly Carson, with Tom Byron
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So you and Kimberly moved to California?
Yeah, I had nothing left in New York, other than Kelly… and as it turns out, she was going to Australia with Sharon Mitchell, so we decided to get rid of our apartment.
Kimberly got offered a lot of work in Los Angeles. Ted Paramore (aka Harold Lime) loved her so he used her all the time on the films he made with Jack Remy.
I met Christy Canyon on the set of one of those films, Ladies and Lace Party (1985). I watched as Jack trimmed her beaver for her scene. It was funny: I had to go pee, and I walked into the bathroom, and Jack was down on his knees trimming her pussy.
Christy looked at me, and she smiled and said, “Hi. I like you.”
I also met Traci Lords that day. Tracy was going to be the star of an upcoming New York movie called Rising Star (1986). It was going to be like ‘A Star Is Born’, and Traci and Kimberly were going to be the stars.
I was the male lead in that.
What was your reaction to working with Traci?
I was thinking, “Fuck yeah. I’m going to work with Traci Lords!”
She was hot. She was sixteen at the time, and she admitted it, and we all knew it.
She admitted to being underage?
Yeah, but she wasn’t the only one. I fucked Raven when she was 16. That was for Ron Sullivan (aka Henri Pachard).
How did you find out?
Raven just came out and told me while we’re fucking.
I said, “God, how old are you?”
She goes, “I’m 16.”
What was your reaction?
I thought, “Come on. This girl knows what the fuck she’s doing. She’s no 16-year-old. And anyway, whatever she’s gone through in life, she’s making her own choices.”
Did you say anything to her about it?
I said, “God, you’re going to make me fucking bust. Shut up and don’t tell anybody that!”
Same thing with Kristara Barrington. They brought her out to New York to work in a movie for Joyce James. I fucked her outside of Joyce’s house in upstate New York. Tajia Rae was the star of that movie.
Kristara looked at me and I said, “How old are you?”
She said, “I’m 17. Why, are you going to arrest me?”
I said, “No, but I sure love fucking you. Don’t tell anybody you’re this age. It’ll get you into a lot of trouble.”
She said, “I seem to be doing all right with you.”
I replied, “I’m not the one you need to worry about!”
*
So you were getting more and more lead roles in adult films?
Yeah. I finally didn’t give a fuck about the business, and suddenly I’m getting lead roles at 10 grand a pop. Eric Edwards was pissed. He was supposed to be the lead in some of them, and he said, ” I can’t fucking believe this. Tim Connelly is fucking stealing my fucking job in the business!”
I wanted to say, “Tim Connelly doesn’t even want your job!”
Tim Connelly and Kimberly Carson
You and Kimberly worked on both coasts for a time?
Yes, it was Howard Winters (aka Cecil Howard) who wanted us to come back and do these features for him. Howard wanted Kimberly in a big movie, Sinners (1988), and he wanted me as well because he liked the way I acted. And I liked Howard. He paid us $10,000 each, and put us in a hotel on the Upper East Side.
What do you remember about Howard Winters?
A few years before, I’d been asked to review a movie for High Society magazine – and that was Howard’s Firestorm (1984). I wrote a great review about it because I thought it was an incredible movie by adult film standards. It kept me awake… and that’s rare, you know?
When you came back to New York, who were you friendly with?
We were friends with Sharon Kane and her boyfriend, Eugene, who used the name Michael (Bruce). I’d met them on a movie for Ron Sullivan called Hypersexuals (1984), and we hit it off because Michael was a little out there, until he started getting crazy from drugs.
Then Sharon ended up with Scott, who was this easygoing guy who was the manager of this club. He was a drummer, and a coke dealer, so obviously we fucking bonded, man.
Sharon was always a sweet girl, and we really bonded too. Never a sexual thing, but we got on great. They stayed with us in our little house up in Shadow Hills when they came out for the XRCO awards, which I hosted with Kimberly.
Then Kimberly and I got hired by a guy called David Michel, for a movie called Double Heat. He wanted me to be the lead playing a gambler who gets caught up in loansharking, and is torn between two doppelgangers, Kimberly and another girl, played by Michelle Bauer. They made Kimberly’s hair straight so she and Michelle looked really alike.
I knew Michelle Bauer (aka Pia Snow) from Rinse Dream’s Café Flesh (1982), so when I found out that she was in this film – and that I’d be fucking her – I fucking lost my mind. She’s exactly the type I like. What killed me was that the director didn’t tell me it was R-rated when I agreed to do it! It never occurred to me that it’d be anything but X-rated because he’d made his name in the porn business doing a Traci Lords sex film called Sex Waves (1985) that was briefly one of the hottest movies out there. I couldn’t believe it when I found out that it would only be simulated sex.
What do you remember about the shoot?
The gambling scenes were shot in Vegas. And while we were there, Kimberly said, “Since we’re in Vegas, and we want to get married, why don’t we just get hitched while we’re here?” So we got married that weekend.
And you had a daughter?
Yes. She’s beautiful. I love her to death. And Sharon Kane was our daughter’s godmother originally: she stayed with us for the birth.
What was life like with Kimberly?
It wasn’t easy. She’d had a tough life. She’d been molested by her stepfather, who’d effectively kidnapped her when she was small. He took her out of Virginia, the state she was born, and took her down to Tennessee where he was from. He eventually took her back to Virginia – but when she told her mom that she’d been abused, her mom’s response was “Daddy Bill has done everything for us. Your real father was a no good musician who always left me high and dry, holding the bag, and he went back out on the road. If you keep up like this, and you mention this one more time, I’m going to throw you out. Because, if it’s got to be him or me, I’m going to take him, because you’ve never been a good kid to me and you’re just like your old man.”
That’s a terrible upbringing.
Well, then her real father, the musician, turns up, when she’s a teenager and she was about to run away from home. One day he pulls up at the bus stop when she’s coming home from school, and they saw each other, and they’ve got the same nose. They recognize each other, even though she’d never seen him.
And he said “Kimberly, I’m your dad.”
And she says, “I know.”
Her birth father was one of the screenwriters for ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ and ‘Sledge Hammer!’ So they end up in court so that she can go and live with him in North Hollywood. And after about two years, when she’s getting her life back together, finishing high school, getting ready to go to college, he molests her.
Her birth father molests her?
Yes. And this all started to come out after Kimberly and I had our daughter. I feared for my daughter. I took Kimberly to therapy, got her into Stella Adler to take acting lessons, got photographers to come and take her photos… because she could really act, and she could sing, and she could play guitar. We bankrolled everything.
And she started cheating on me, and going out with a crackhead guy that she met at Stella Adler. And the next thing I knew, he was driving my fucking Mercedes and she wasn’t coming home. And she decided she wanted to move out.
I went to see a lawyer who said, “You’ve been with her almost ten years, and unless you file for divorce in the next thirty days, she’ll be able to qualify this marriage as long-term, and you’ll have to pay her alimony for the rest of your life.”
I didn’t want her to go. I wanted to get her back. I wanted her to be the mother to my kid. I didn’t know how to be a dad, let alone be a mom as well.
But in the end I said, “Ok, file for divorce.” And I was really fair and honest, and really giving to her.
Did you get custody of your daughter?
I did, but I let Kimberly have as much access as she wanted.
So Kimberly stayed in the same area?
Yeah, and then she went back to school, became a school teacher, and eventually moved away.
Tim Connelly
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11. Christy Canyon
How did you meet Christy Canyon?
We’d always known each other, and we’d sometimes go out for dinners and stuff. We always said, “God, if we were ever single at the same time…” and she has this great flirtatious personality that got me every time. So we always got on great.
The year that she was inducted into the X-rated Hall of Fame, Jim Holliday said to me, “Go get her, and make her your date for the evening. You got to show up with her, because she doesn’t go out to many events. We’re counting on you, because we know you like her, and she likes you, so don’t fuck this up.” So I did, and I brought her.
Christy Canyon
She’d gotten out of the XXX industry by then?
She was out of the film business by then, but was still dancing and stripping. She was doing well, making about twenty grand a week. So I go and pick her up at her house in the Hills, and she introduces me to her fiance’, who’s a construction guy that’s fixing her house. This guy looked like the assistant from ‘Home Improvement’. And I thought, “What the fuck is this all about!?”
I took her to the award show, and on the way there, I said to her, “I had lunch with Greg Dark, and I asked him what to do because I have such a crush on you.”
She said, “Oh yeah? What did Greg say?”
I said, “He said I should pull over, and take out my dick and say, ‘Kiss me. I want to fuck you.'”
And she says, “Well, why don’t you?”
I said, “You’re engaged, but if you weren’t… I’d wait until we got home at the end of the evening and I would make it more romantic.”
She said, “Boy, did I meet the wrong guy first.”
About six months later, she calls me up about and says, “I’m single. It didn’t work out. He was an asshole.”
I said, “So am I. What are we going to do?
She took me out to lunch and we started a relationship, and within six months I was living with her. We got married in her mom’s backyard. I think the reason why she wouldn’t marry me in her own backyard was that’s where she married the last guy.
It sounds like a whirlwind relationship.
There was something about her that got me: she seduced me. And I loved that, because I’d never had that kind of attention. And she was one of the most beautiful women I was ever with.
How did you two juggle with the reality that she was on the road stripping?
I was fine with her going on the road stripping. I was a busy guy. I was running Adam Film World, and eight other magazines too. I had my shit together and I was making a fortune. Happy as a pig in shit. I mean sure… sometimes I thought, “I hope you’re not fucking the whole world out there”, but I liked her, my daughter liked her, so I just wanted to move forward.
Christy Canyon
You didn’t stay married for long though?
She told me she didn’t want to go out on the road anymore, and she was going to take the summer off, and then she wanted to start thinking about having a kid. So I had a vasectomy reversal for her. I figured: this is it. This relationship is the one.
We decided to go to Big Bear and start our future together. I couldn’t wait. The night before we were due to leave, I was looking for something, and I open up a drawer and it’s full of tickets and itineraries: I realized that she was about to go on the road for the next four months, and was leaving the following morning.
I didn’t know what to do. I was completely fucking blown out of the water. Everything I had expected was not going to happen. Not only that, but she’d known it for six months before we started dating.
What happened after that?
Without going into all the detail, from that point, it got real volatile between us. We fought – verbally and physically, she threw me out, we went to court, we got back together, she threw me out again, she changed the locks… and then I left for good. It was a mess.
We’ve not been in contact since then.
Christy Canyon
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Epilogue
Are you still involved in the adult business in any way?
No, I just do music now. I pay drums with a few different groups, I have my own studio. Life is good.
How do you look back on your three decades in the adult business?
It’s changed so much today that it bears no resemblance to the old industry. I’ve kinda cut myself off from it. I’m not in close contact with anyone from back in the day – and I don’t speak with any of my exes. I’d like to say hi to a few people, like Helen (Madigan) and Sharon Kane, but I haven’t spoken to them in ages.
The business used to be a tight knit family, and we all knew each other. I remember when Sharon and her boyfriend, Scott, came out to Los Angeles for the XRCO Awards. We were all staying in the same hotel. About six in the morning, Sharon says, “We’re staying at the Continental Hyatt, and we’ve just hosted the XRCO awards, and we’re the hottest stars in the business. So why are we not fucking?!”
And Scott says, “I don’t know: why aren’t we fucking!?”
I said, “I know why. Because we’re friends, and we don’t want to fuck. We just don’t want to fuck. And that’s okay. Now can we go to the beach?”
So we all went to the beach. And we were friends.
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Tim Connelly, 2019
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