Being the hair-raising true story of John Holmes, hardcore's first male superstar. First published in Empire Magazine, February 2004
Laurel Canyon, which snakes through the Hollywood Hills from the San Ferdinando Valley towards the bowl of central LA, is home to one of Los Angeles’ many upmarket suburbs. For decades it’s been the kind of solid, respectable location where fading B-list stars contemplate their careers, plastic surgeons retire to dream of triumphant liposuctions past and geriatric retired television producers are gently fleeced by mistresses young enough to be their daughters’ au pairs.
Wonderland Avenue is typical of the many winding roads that twist around the canyon and number 8763, on the morning of July 2 1981, was typical of the relatively modest homes that line it. A bit messier than the others maybe; in need of some paint and attention to the plasterwork. There was an ugly iron cage that enclosed the walkway and there always seemed to be a couple of pit bulls by the door.
What was inside, that morning anyhow, was not typical. The inside of 8763 Wonderland Avenue looked like an abattoir after an earthquake. Its walls, floors and even ceiling were caked with spatters, globs and smears of what had, until relatively recently, been Joy Miller, Billy Deverell, Ron Launius and Barbara Richardson, better known as The Wonderland Gang, a notorious set of drug dealers who had been using the house as a base. The police had been called after workmen had heard faint cries from inside the building. By the time they got there, there was only one person left to save. Susan Launius, Ron’s wife, was carried out of the house with a missing finger and brain damage. The brain damage had been caused by the same thread-ended blunt implement that had systematically reduced the other four’s faces to chum, and it rendered Susan unable to give any evidence as to what had happened. In fact, it rendered Susan unable to do much at all.
What had happened on Wonderland Avenue was a multiple-murder so mind-bendingly savage that it was immediately compared to the Tate LaBianca killings which had horrified Hollywood almost a decade and a half before. The tabloids, inevitably, gave it its own name: The Four On The Floor Murders (ignoring the inconvenient fact that at least one of the corpses was found in a gore-drenched bed) and the pressure was on police detectives for a quick result.
But luckily, unlike the Sharon Tate case, the police had an early break. Forensics put someone known to them at the scene of the crime. Someone who was also known to be a drug user and a police snitch and who, even if he had not participated in the murders themselves, would know who had. He also just happened to be one of the biggest porn stars in the world. There was a problem though. He wasn’t talking.
But then talking wasn’t the thing that John Curtis Holmes did best.
For our purposes what has become known as the 'Golden Age' of hardcore began sometime around 1967 when a fleapit cinema in San Francisco quietly began running what were called “beaver loops” hidden among its otherwise less lubricious programming. They were called loops because the film looped around on itself, saving the projectionist the chore of changing the reel. The beaver part is probably self-explanatory: they showed vaginas, in close up, but they didn’t show much else. For that history would have to wait a few months until the “split beaver” loop made its debut. After that, there was no stopping it. The “action beaver”, with its few minutes of girl-on-girl wriggling pushed the boundaries even further until, after American audiences had been titillated with supposedly serious documentaries with faux academic titles about the state of porn Scandinavia (Sexual Freedom In Denmark (1970) and Censorship In Denmark: A New Approach (1969)), the dam broke completely with Deep Throat in 1972.
Deep Throat was a sensation, though according to aficionados, a woefully bad porn flick. Nevertheless, its implausible tale of a woman whose clitoris is located at the back of her mouth had for some reason not only the usual dirty mac brigade queuing at the box office but also rebellious youngsters, laid-back swingers and curious middle-aged couples, while hip celebrities such as Sammy Davis Jnr, chat show king Johnny Carson, Charlton Heston and, inevitably, Jack Nicholson turned up to catch what was 1972’s hottest ticket. It was the apex of the hardcore revolution. For a decade after not much could be banned on the standard legal justification that it “violated community values” since most of the community was busy being wowed down at the cineplex by Miss Linda Lovelace’s astonishing oral exertions.
Porn was suddenly acceptable, fashionable, and it was everywhere. Within less than a decade the yearly box office takings for filmed hardcore pornography were equivalent to one-fifth of the yearly takings for all Hollywood mainstream movies. In 1980 the FBI estimated that Deep Throat alone had made over $600 million, which, with 20 years’ worth of inflation and ancillaries to add on would today probably put it in the top 3 movies ever made. Movies such as The Opening Of Misty Beethoven, The Devil In Miss Jones and China Girl all exploited the new porno-chic but while these films made stars of some of their female performers no male figure had emerged to encompass the spirit of the new age. That was about to change.
One Sunny day sometime in 1968 in a small apartment in Glendale, California Sharon Holmes was relaxing with a magazine after a hard day’s work when her husband John walked into the room. In one hand was his erect penis – as erect as it ever got anyhow – and in the other was a tape measure. “It’s amazing,” he had informed her. “It goes from 5 to 13 inches long!”
“What do you want me to do, call the papers?” Sharon had said, and went back to reading her magazine.
John may have been a little crestfallen by the apparent lack of interest. But he continued talking anyway. This was important. “Look,” he told her, “I’ve decided that I’m going to do something else, I’m going to make it my life’s work,” he said, as his penis drooped in his hand. “I’m going to be a porn star.” Sharon looked at him, bewildered and asked if he was joking. She’d never even seen a porn movie and in her opinion the stars of such films were either one step up or one step down from prostitutes. Either way, the two professions were close company. He said that he wasn’t joking. She asked if he was asking her permission. He wasn’t. He was going to try to do this whatever she thought about it. It was his dream.
Cometh the hour, then, cometh the man.
Most truly effective film star biographies begin with a childhood of deprivation and misery so as to throw the later success into sharp and satisfying relief. The life story of John Holmes is no exception to the rule. He was born on August 8th, 1944 in Ashville, Pickaway County, Ohio the youngest of four children. His mother, Mary, was a Baptist of the bible-thumping variety while dad was an alcoholic of the yelling and vomiting variety who left the family, mercifully most thought, when John was just 4. The remaining quintet wandered for a while, winding up in Columbus stuck on welfare for a couple of years. But then Mary remarried and the family relocated to another rural backwater, this time Pataskala, again in Ohio.
There followed a somewhat bucolic interlude, and what seems to be one of the happier times in John’s life. Pataskala was surrounded by woods and fields and John would occupy his time exploring, hunting, catching frogs and fishing the local streams. A faded black and white photograph survives of John from this period: a skinny, platinum blond country boy in dungarees posed, mildly defiantly, with a rifle and a dog – a latterday Tom Sawyer.
But things soon went bad again. With the birth of his stepfather Harold’s first child, John and the other kids were relegated to second best and soon after that the beatings began. Harold seemed to reason that now he had his own boy he didn’t need to be nice to the others anymore, and so he wasn’t. John took the brunt of it because he was the youngest and not too bright. He never seemed to realise that he should get out of the house when he saw Harold coming in a rage. Harold often backhanded John so hard he’d fly out of his chair right across the room. The violence carried on throughout John’s unhappy teenage years until one day, when John was 16, Harold threw him down the stairs once too often and the inevitable happened. John got up and hit Harold so hard that he knocked him cold. John fled the house only to turn up a couple of days later with the enrolment forms for the US Army, which his mother duly signed.
After three years of uneventful service, mostly spent in Germany, the army spat John Holmes out, as it had hundreds of thousands of other young men over the years, with no particular ambition or clue what to do, but, perhaps thankfully, loosed from whatever had sent them to Uncle Sam in the first place. California has always exerted a magnetic influence on drifters – something to do with the sun or the fact that it is as far in one direction as you can go – and so it wasn’t too much of a surprise that John finally wound up in Los Angeles working as an ambulance driver.
In the middle of this unremarkable existence he’d met Sharon Gebini, a nurse, sometime in 1964. Sharon had been struck by how sweet and gentle he was, how he courted her with flowers from next door’s garden and bottles of Mateus Rose. They were married 5 months later. But then John had become ill. He’d got a job as a forklift driver in a meat packing plant and the frozen air had led to his lung collapsing three times. So he’d quit and was supposedly training as a security guard. Sharon had thought that their lives were going well in an unassuming little way. And now here was her husband coming out of the bathroom with his dick in his hand saying he was going to be a porn star.
In fact, unbeknownst to Sharon, he’d already embarked on his career change. A few months before he’d met a guy called Joel in a bathroom of some poker club or other. He had turned out to be a professional photographer and somehow they’d wound up talking about John’s penis. Later Joel had shot a few still pictures of it which had sold quite well. There’d been a bit of nude dancing too which he’d enjoyed, and shortly after that – pursuing an intro to the porn industry proper – he’d been introduced to another guy called Reb who’d said that he was a manager. After the obligatory small talk, Reb asked him to drop his pants to see if he was worth managing. “He had the largest penis I ever saw,” Reb told journalist Stuart Muirhead in 1999. “I took pictures of it to show clients. I didn’t know what to think. All I saw were dollar signs.”
“John’s penis was 13 and a half inches* long,” says producer/manager Bill Amerson who worked with Holmes throughout his career. “I can tell you that for certain because John measured it many times for many people who didn’t believe him.” (*13 and a half inches is just a sliver less than the width of the fully opened magazine you are now holding - ed.)
And thus the strange, stellar career of John Holmes, the first ever male hard-core megastar, was born. He started like all the other male performers, earning about $35 for the loops which were shot in a matter of hours and shipped out either to the burgeoning grindhouse cinema industry on both coasts or to owners of the so-called “pay and sprays” – coin-operated peepshow booths that served those too nervous to be seen queuing for a ticket.
Within months Holmes was gaining a reputation as something special, and not just because of the size of his penis. The early black and white movies, before the Teflon Afro and ill-judged facial hair of the 70s, reveal in him a goofily likeable, almost boyish, demeanour. He was moderately good-looking, too in a rangy, uncoordinated way, and so laughably unconvincing in his inept braggadocio that the women who worked with him almost seemed to want to mother him rather than, in the regrettable though much-repeated industry parlance, have him fuck their brains out.
But John wasn’t content to copy, he wanted to innovate. And so, in 1971, Johnny Wadd, porno detective, was born. Director Bob Chinn came up with the idea of a private dick, scribbled a script on the back of an envelope and they shot the same day (“I could have a movie shot edited and playing in the theatres within a week in those days”, Chinn boasted to documentary filmmaker Cass Paley in 1999”). The movie was a hit and was followed by a series – the first in filmed porno’s history – featuring exotic, noirish titles such as Flesh Of The Lotus (1972), Tropic Of Passion (1973) and The Jade Pussycat (1977). Not so much hard-boiled as half-baked the stories followed the fictional detective as he jaunted his way around the world extracting information from pneumatic “witnesses” with the use of his Colt.45, which he fired with consistent ineptitude, and his gargantuan member, which he employed somewhat more expertly. (There was however the odd flash of sub-Chandleresqe wit: In Around The World With Johnny Wadd, our hero introduces yet another of his “employees” like this: “Sally is my faithful secretary. She’s been with me since last week. She can’t type worth a damn, but it might help if I got her a typewriter sometime.”)
Whatever it was that appealed to the masses, the series’ success was stratospheric. John Holmes had finally hit the big time. Misty Dawn (real name Laurie Rose) The “Anal Queen Of Porn” summed up the industry’s fulsome sense of delight and admiration for their new superstar. “I’ve just gotta (ital) have that guy in my ass!” she enthused. (She would have her wish granted and more when she starred with Holmes in Fleshpond (1983) and later became his second wife, though Holmes, at that time regularly taking up to 50 Valium a day, claims not to have remembered getting married, only discovering his betrothal when he found a wedding picture on the coffee table.)
“I remember working with John on a 3D film called The Disco Dolls: Hot Skin,” says porn actor Bill Margold of Holmes at the height of his career. “John was being attended to by these three bubbly nymphos while I was being serviced by Lesley Beauvais who is the finest fellatrix of all time. Anyway, John’s penis suddenly broke free from the girls’ grasp and it swung right over my head. I looked up at that exact moment and from that angle, well, damn if it didn’t look just like the opening shot of Star Wars.”
Holmes’s success as a hardcore star was unprecedented. The thousands of fans who wrote to his offices were all rewarded with a signed picture of their hero together with a small envelope containing some black hair shavings and a cheery note: “Have some of my pubic hair!” (In fact, the keepsake was clipped off a poodle kept in the office for just this purpose by John’s teenage Godson, Duke, who also signed all the pictures. Within months the poodle was mostly bald and the fans had to make do with just the picture.) Holmes’ fees were unprecedented: $3,000 a day. And he was earning at least as much on the side for the private tricks he was pulling.
It wasn’t, however, an occupation without risk. They were always in danger of being busted. Once were in a small town in New Jersey where they’d been filming an orgy scene in a beauty parlour. The cops peered through a hole in the black sheeting over the windows for a full two hours before calling for the paddy wagon and John found himself in a cell with the entire cast signing autographs for cops who were fans through the bars while their colleagues looked “cunnilingus” up in the dictionary so they could write down the charges.
But it was worth the hassle because he needed the money. Since the mid-70s Holmes had been consuming ever greater quantities of drugs, firstly marijuana but then cocaine which he soon learnt how to freebase – separating the more potent ‘base’ from the raw white powder with an ether solution and smoking the crystalline residue. It was an incredible high, and John liked to do it every 20 minutes or so. Which cost a lot of money and which used a lot of cocaine.
And which was probably how he met Eddie Nash.
Everybody thought Eddie Nash was a drug dealer. He had to be. There was the house for a start; an expensive white stone job out in Studio City. Nash rarely left it, preferring to drift around its rooms all day and night (though the categories were pretty flexible and had little to do with diurnal phases: day being that time that drugs were consumed, night being that time when unconsciousness occurred) wearing nothing but a silk dressing gown and a pair of ridiculous bikini briefs. But plenty of people came to visit. It was a 24-hour party zone. There’d always be an eclectic crowd of friends and hangers-on. And there’d always be drugs. Nash loved to freebase as well, getting through up to 3 ounces of pure cocaine a day. He’d wander around languidly with his pipe and a butane torch offering people hits with the invitation “would you like to play baseball?” And there was heroin if you wanted it; grass and Quaaludes too.
In fact everybody had got it wrong. Eddie Nash’s involvement with narcotics was predominantly a demand-side phenomenon. Eddie didn’t deal: he consumed, avidly. “What really cracks me up is that people thought that he was a dealer,” an unnamed attorney who knew Nash told Rolling Stone journalist Mike Sager in 1989. “He lost upwards of a million dollars a year directly attributable to drugs.”
What he and the gang were variously cutting, chopping, snorting, shooting, toking, cooking and freebasing away were the remains of the various businesses which had over the previous decade made him a millionaire, success built on the back of a single hot dog stand he’d started on Hollywood Boulevard.
It was probably no wonder that Holmes had drifted into his orbit, either through the drug connection or the sex clubs that Nash owned. However they’d met, by 1981 the relationship had gone very sour indeed. While Nash might not have been a dealer in the conventional sense – i.e. making a profit – he did expect people to pay their debts. Holmes was into Nash for thousands of dollars and Nash was getting impatient. Holmes had belatedly concluded that Nash was the most evil man he’d ever met so was eager to get him off his back, but there was a problem. His spiralling drug use had affected his ability to perform and he’d become impossible to work with. Bob Chinn had refused to make any more Johnny Wadd movies and there’d been an unfortunate incident where a crew had lost a whole day’s filming as he was impossible to find. Eventually he had been discovered curled up in a tiny cupboard where he’d been freebasing for 8 hours straight.
So he had no money. Worse he was also into the Wonderland Gang for another fortune. In order to get drugs he’d been acting as a mule for them, but in his usual inept way had managed to screw a big delivery up. They figured he owed them the cash and beat him up before demanding he find a way to pay. Holmes came up with the worst idea he’d ever had. They’d rob Eddie Nash. So they did. Then Holmes made his second big mistake.
The Wonderland Gang stiffed John on the deal. They gave him a mere $3,000 and some jewellery (they’d actually netted drugs, cash and jewellery worth nearly half a million dollars). Still as dim as he’d been when he hadn’t noticed his stepdad coming to give him another hiding, Holmes had worn one of the rings around town. Unfortunately one of the people who admired it was a 300-pound man named George DeWitt Diles. Diles was Nash’s bodyguard and recognised the ring. Diles had dragged Holmes back to the house in Studio City where he supposedly spent 14 hours in his company. Just him, Holmes, Nash and a roll of duct tape. Nash had screamed that he wanted the Wonderland Gang’s eyeballs delivered to him in a bag. He’d grabbed John’s address book and found addresses for his mother and Sharon and promised that he’d kill them. He’d said that, as restitution, John was going to have to help get some people into the house on Wonderland Drive. On the evening of July 1st Holmes and some other people – who have never been identified – got into a car and drove up to Laurel Canyon. One of them carried a blunt, thread-ended implement.
Four On The Floor. It sounded like the title of one of Holmes’s gang-bang flicks. In fact it was one of the most publicised trials of the decade. John Holmes was charged with murder, but acquitted after the prosecution failed to prove that he had been involved in any of the actual killings. In the 6 years he lived after the trial he never named anyone else who had been at the house that night.
HIV/Aids of course changed everything in the porn industry, and it certainly changed John C. Holmes's involvement with it, in that it killed him. With a sexual resume like his, it was difficult to identify exactly when or with whom the fatal encounter had occurred. Some put it down to his brief involvement in homosexual porn, he had after all had his gay-for-pay moments (specifically his one full-length all-male film, The Private Pleasures Of John Holmes, during which – in a performance that could most generously be described as desultory and unenthusiastic – he had serviced gay porn actor Joey Yale while both were attired, bafflingly, in oversized glittery turbans of the kind favoured by children’s magician Ali Bongo). Or it could have been one of the tricks he pulled, straight or gay. Or some said that he’d been shooting up heroin all the while. Who knew?
What is certain is that Holmes reacted to the news in his usual dimwitted way. Only this time his stupidity had consequences for other people. “Everyone in the porn industry’s going to die anyway,” he is supposed to have reasoned and continued, mostly unsuccessfully, to try to resuscitate his porn career, flying to Italy and performing with, among others, Cicciolina – the notorious actress who would later become an Italian MP and selflessly offer to sleep with Saddam Hussein if he would withdraw from Kuwait.
John Holmes died of complications related to Aids on March 13th 1988, and in a sense The Golden Age Of Hardcore died with him. In 1981 there had been nearly a thousand hard-core cinemas in America. By the time of John’s death the number was below 200 and falling. Ronald Reagan was in power and as far as he was concerned The Times They Were A’Changing – Back. In 1986 Attorney General Edwin Meese launched a federal government commission to ‘investigate’ the porn industry while, in an unholy alliance, radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon together with the Christian right launched a pincer movement on the industry, formulating Draconian anti-pornography laws. Federal agents got around the “violating community values” defence by locating themselves in hick Southern towns and ordering material from out of state (often of a multi-racial nature) and prosecuting it there. The rise of the VCR helped force pornography away from its brief flirtation with public respectability and back into the shadows, though the industry itself continued to grow.
But for some reason, the legend of John Holmes refused to die. For a generation living in the shadow of Aids, and weathering a more conservative moral climate, the feckless hedonism which Holmes exemplified became tinged with a potent blend of kitsch and nostalgia. Details of Holmes’ garish life seeped into the hipper outskirts of popular culture. References were made In Beastie Boys lyrics and snatches of dialogue in Quentin Tarantino movies. He was a vanished era’s Draylon-clad icon; the James Dean of porn. A Day-Glo Gigolo who, improbably, proved that the American Dream was alive and well; that you could come from nothing and nowhere and – as long as you had a thirteen-and-a-half-inch penis – and if only for a while, be the biggest star in the world.
In 1988 Eddie Nash and George DeWitt Diles were charged with the Wonderland murders. They were acquitted. In May 2000 Nash and five other people were arrested on various charges including some relating to the murders of 1981. Nash was freed when the jury found itself unable to return a verdict. Sharon Holmes never remarried and has still never seen a pornographic movie, including any of her ex-husband’s. According to the most recent edition of The American Physician’s Desk Reference, the average erect human penis remains between 5 and 7 inches long.
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