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Holmes also had sex with men though he didn't boast about that. "John considered it as satisfying to stick his dick into a guy as into a pussy," says porn historian Jim Holliday. No one has claimed to have caught AIDS from Holmes, even though he kept performing long after he knew that he was HIV positive. Starring in 2500 flicks, John Holmes performed sex with two generations of porn stars - from Seka and Marilyn Chambers to Ginger Lynn and the Italian member of Parliament Ciccolina (Little Chubby). He's the only man to rank among porn's biggest stars. "John Holmes was the king," says Bill Margold, whose own dick measures ten inches. "He was living proof that not all men are created equal. "I worked in a scene where John Holmes was being blown by four women and I was sitting underneath, being blown by Lesllie Bovee. All of a sudden his dick popped out over my head like the opening shot of Star Wars. I was terrified. I had this horrible vision of it falling on my head and cracking my skull open." John's private life also revolved around his penis. Rich men and women paid handsomely to play with him. Though porn may have seen longer dicks (Dick Rambone supposedly measured 15 inches), none are as famous as John's organ, which his friend Bill Amerson swears measured 13 inches when fully errect. Bob Chinn produced and directed John's most successful series Johnny Wadd, where he played a hard-boiled detective. Holmes "was a thin bony trench-coated shamus, outrageously horny, beding down with client and quarry alike," says Al Goldstein of Screw. It was a goofy, crudely-made series, porn's first movie series. "Holmes was everyman's gigolo," writes Mike Sager, "a polyester smoothy with a sparse moustache, a flying collar and lots of buttons undone. He took a lounge singer's approach to sex, deliberately gentle, ostentatiously artful, a homely guy with a pinkie ring and a big dick who was convinced he was every woman's dream." (Rolling Stone 6/15/89) "I'm tired of hearing about John and his acting ability," says Jim Holliday. "No one ever gave David Niven grief for having a small penis." Holliday says that the 1977 movie Eruption demonstrates that John Holmes can act, as he plays Peter Winston, the insurance man drawn into a murder conspiracy by Sandy Bevin (Lesllie Bovee). John does his own stunts, including all the underwater scenes. John loved his work. "A happy gardener is with one dirty fingernails, and a happy cook is a fat cook. I never get tired of what I do because I'm a sex fiend. I'm very lusty." If you want porn, good porn, hardcore porn, and lots of it, go to Cybererotica.com. Click Here to signup now. P.S. CyberErotica is also the most POPULAR premium site on the net. It has thousands of streaming channels and more content than any other premium site. In a 1973 interview that appeared in the book Sinema, Holmes appeared hyper: "I just can't sit still," he says, and he really can't. He fidgets, licks his lips, rolls his eyes, chews his gum, runs his long fingernails down the side of the chair he seems constantly on the verge of leaping out of. He is so exuberant that "everybody says, 'Are you on uppers, are you on speed?' And I say, 'No, man, I've just got this natural kick-in-the-ass energy level." Constantly searching for new outlets for his energy, Holmes does all the stunt work for his films - "scuba diving, flying, sky diving, jumping from building to building, crashing motorcycles." And he does all this without benefit of artificial stimulants. As a rule, he never takes "any type of narcotic, dope, no pills, not even aspirin, not even Rolaids. I don't drink alcohol, wine, nothing. The hardest thing I ever drink is coffee." By his own lights, John Holmes is a very moral person. He will rarely give his word on something because "it's a life and death thing with me, when I give it, it sticks. You've got a moral obligation to do what you've said you're gonna do." And he has a personal code that others might envy: "Don't hurt anybody physically or mentally in your whole lifetime... And don't f--- with children." *** Born John Curtis Estes on August 8, 1944, in Pickaway County, Ohio, John never knew his father Carl Estes, a railroad laborer. A few years later, his mother Mary changed his last name to that of her husband, the alcoholic Edward Holmes, a carpenter. John was the youngest of three boys and a girl. The future stud remembers his dad puking over the kids. Mary was a Bible-thumping Baptist always yelling at her husband. John's mom married Harold when he was eight, and they moved to a small house in Pataskala, Ohio. A shy boy, John had a perfect attendance record at Baptist Bible classes and a tense relationship with his manic-depressive stepfather who occasionally became violent. John got his mother's permission to join the army at age 16 and spent three years in Germany with the Signal Corps. After leaving the service, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles where he worked odd jobs. While driving an ambulance, John met a nurse, Sharon Gebenini, who worked at USC County General on a team pioneering open-heart surgery. In August 1965, he married Sharon, still a virgin, at Fort Ord, California. While driving a forklift truck in and out of a freezer, John suffered (three times over nine months) a collapsed lung. While recovering, he hung out at a poker club in Gardena. One day in the bathroom he met a man who talked him into doing porno. John began hanging out at Crossroads of the World, a Hollywood landmark on Sunset Blvd. Miniature sound stages frequently used for pornography lay behind the storefront facades. Most of John's early assignments were for magazine works, according to Porn King. "I even had to keep my underwear on since showing a man's ass was illegal… Then they began to get really chancy and off came the underwear. For a series of shots, I had to dry hump a girl model. Everything was simulated…" As American became increasingly permissive during the 1960s, John specialized in 8mm loops of hardcore sex. One afternoon in 1968, according to the 6/15/89 Rolling Stone article, Sharon came home early from work and found John measuring his penis. She went into her bedroom and laid down. Twenty minutes later John appeared. He had a full erection. "It's incredible," said John. "What?" "It goes from five inches all the way to ten. Ten inches long! Four inches around!" "That's great," said Sharon, turning a page of her magazine. "You want me to call the press?" John stared at her for a long time before he spoke. "I've got to tell you that I've been doing something else, and I think I want to make it my life's work." "I was appalled," remembers Sharon, who's never seen a porno film. That encounter in the bathroom marked the beginning of the end of their relationship, though it stumbled on for twelve more years. Sharon bought the food and provided for John, while he spent his porn earnings on himself. They slept in the same bed for the next decade but soon quit having sex. "I loved the schmuck," said Sharon. "I just didn't like what he was doing." (RS) In 1969, John answered an ad for porn performers placed by William Amerson who'd just entered porn. "My wife at the time - I've had a few - knew a couple of girls in the nudie business. They were making movies - all simulated stuff - and I went to work for them to learn how to do it. Back then you could shoot an X-rated movie for $4000 and make $60,000." (Playboy 3/98) Amerson first met John in 1969 while casting for magazine work at The Crossroads of the World on Sunset Blvd. Holmes was skinny with an afro haircut, unimpressive. But when he dropped his clothes for a Polaroid, Amerson knew he had a star. "In 1971 some friends and I decided to start showing actual penetration. We took $14,000 and a handful of bennies, and in one weekend, we made five films. We sold them in New York and Chicago, made back our investment in a week and went on to make a lot of money off those movies." (Playboy 3-98) The profits attracted the attention of several New York organized crime families. One family (Colombo?) sent an underboss (Joseph Torchio?) to get some of the money. "I told him I didn't want any partners," Amerson told Playboy. "Said I'd teach him the business but that I liked to work alone. He basically told me, 'If you don't work with us, you don't work.' I wanted to work." With the success of 1972's Deep Throat, The Devil In Miss Jones and Behind the Green Door, porn was chic but still illegal. "There was a tremendously tyrannical power that came down on the performers," Bill Margold told the 3-98 Playboy. "Everything we did back then was illegal. I was in 300 movies - 500 sex scenes - wondering through much of it if I was going to be arrested. And I was, many times." In 1973, to avoid serving time for pimping and pandering, John started informing to Sergeant Tom Blake, an LA Vice detective. "He liked playing the role of Dick Tracy," Blake told the documentary Wadd. "He'd tell us who'd be shooting the porno films, who'd be producing, who'd be directing... Who the money people were backing the films. When the film was being shot." Also in 1973, John met pornographer Bob Chinn. A slight Hawaiian who grew up in New Mexico, Robert Husong aka Bob Chinn began making amateur films at age 12. After semesters at the University of Miami and Santa Monica City College, he graduated from UCLA's film school in 1966. He built sets for commercials, and worked behind the scenes on pornographic productions until churning out his own sex loops and selling them to theaters. "In those days you could hire a girl for $25 and shoot ten or fifteen minutes of film, one reel. It was a strange period, when you could get away with hardcore if you did just a little, sort of slipped it in. There wasn't a lot of money in it then, but it was a living, and it led to my crewing on features and then to directing them. I was making films for Italian businessmen [Mafia]." (Playboy 3-98) Chinn remembers the day in 1973 that John Holmes walked into his office next to the Pussycat Theater on Western Avenue. "I'd heard about him from an actress I worked with," Chinn told Playboy's Craig Vetter (3/98). "And when I saw him with his clothes off, I thought, I could make an interesting movie with this man." Bob wrote a script for a porno starring Holmes as private detective Johnny Wadd. They shot the first film, Johnny Wadd, in a day. The 60-minute production cost $750. Holmes and Chinn made nine more Wadd films. It was the first porno movie series. Amerson says John began smoking marijuana in 1972. He progressed to mushrooms, pills and cocaine, a drug he never kicked. In 1975, to supplement his earnings, John Holmes became a carrier for the mob. He also flipped tricks with men and women who bought him cars and jewelry. In 1976, John began courting 15-year old Dawn Schiller. He bought her stuffed animals, roses and a ring. One night, he drove her to the beach in his van. "I didn't know what was going to happen, but I knew what might," says Dawn. "We sat on the rocks, the moon was just right. We sat for a long time and he was very, very quiet. He just stared. I played in the water. When I got out, he said, 'Let's go,' and we drove toward home. And then, just as we got to this intersection, he slammed on the brakes. It was dark, and there wasn't any traffic. He said, 'Would you make love to me? I literally shook to death. I said yes. I loved him. We did it in the van. After that I was his." (RS 6/15/89) At the height of his career in 1978, John Curtis Holmes earned three thousand dollars a day from f--- films. He traveled with Gloria Leonard to Paris in 1978 to make Johnny Does Paris. "The day we met," she relates, "he had this diva attitude, so I said, 'I'm sorry, my dear, but this set isn't large enough for two prima donnas.' He was a baby, really, and an egomaniac." (Playboy 3/98) John became increasingly addicted to drugs. Every ten to fifteen minutes he needed a hit of coke and then 40-50 Valium a day to cut the edge. "When he did coke," Schiller told Rolling Stone reporter Mike Sager, "He'd do it until it was all gone, and then he'd scrape the pipe and smoke all the resin he could find, then he'd take a bunch of Valium. He'd have me make these peanut-butter chocolate-chip brown-sugar butter cookies. All the sugar helped him come down. He'd have a big glass of milk, and we'd turn on the cartoons and then he'd go to bed in Sharon's room. I'd usually fall asleep on the couch." John got Schiller on drugs and eventually turning tricks (sex for money) to support his bad habits. Sharon befriended Dawn and looked after her as best she could. "The poor girl was emaciated. I knew the whole picture," says Sharon. "He was picking on a kid that didn't know any better. I had to let her know there was another world out there, that John was not God Almighty. "John was terrified that I was going to confront her. But I had no reason to confront her. Why? Why would I confront her? He meant nothing to me that way." (RS) Holmes was gone much of the time, making films in Europe, San Francisco and Hawaii. Because of his drug use, he became difficult to work with. Persons on set joked that you had to leave a trail of freebase from the bathroom to the bedroom to get Holmes to perform. Soon drugs killed John's abilities to get erect. The man who had claimed to earn half-a-million dollars a year from his sexual talents became a drug delivery boy for the gang of outlaws and junkie who lived on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. John and Dawn lived for months out of Sharon's Chevy Malibu. Eventually, John got Schiller into an apartment in the San Fernando Valley with porn actress and high-priced hooker Michelle. In his 1998 autobiography, edited by his widow Laurie, John portrays his friend and manager of 20 years, Bill Amerson, as an evil man. Bill supposedly introduced John to cocaine. John Holmes became the godfather to two of Amerson's children. "He lived with us in the big house we had in Sherman Oaks," Bill told Playboy, "and the two of us became like brothers. He liked to garden, did handyman stuff. We went hunting and fishing together, partied around town. He had a heart as big as the f---ing world, but as he got more and more f---ed up on drugs it became impossible to make movies with him. He started hanging out with his suppliers, real assholes, people like Eddie Nash and Ron Launius." John spent hours at Bill's big home on the hill, "the perfect party pad," according to Porn King. "With Bill, the producer, and me, Mr. Porno Stud, girls were drawn to us like bees to honey. His wild nudist romps, especially in the heat of summer around his pool, were the raging ticket in town. The girls didn't mind who they f---ed, just as long as we wanted them or they thought it would get them in movies." To support his drug habit, John committed felony crimes most every day. He stole luggage off conveyor belts at LAX, bought appliances with his wife's credit cards and traded them for cash. Police finally caught him January 14th, 1981 stealing a computer out of a car. Gloria Leonard remembers the day in 1981 that John visited her at her home in Los Angeles. He looked skinny and seemed "all cock." By 9 AM, he'd already freebased three grams of coke. When the porn actress returned from an errand, she found Holmes gone, along with $25,000 worth of jewelry, electronics and guns. Nightclub owner and drug kingpin Eddie Nash bailed John and Dawn out of jail. Schiller fled. John chased her to the bus station but Dawn had convinced the clerk to give John the wrong information, saying her life was at stake. John followed the wrong bus all the way to San Francisco. He then returned to Sharon and beat her up. A 22-year old ex-girlfriend of John's, Suzanne Atamian aka Julia St. Innocent, produced a 1981 porn "documentary" about John's life called Exhausted. During 1980-81, John became closer to Nash whose real name is Adel Nasrallah. Born and raised in Lebanon, he came to Los Angeles around 1950, and opened a hot dog stand on Hollywood Boulevard. Thirty years later, in his 50s, Nasrallah owned the Seven Seas, a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, the strip joint Kit Kat, several clubs for homosexuals and a rock n'roll hangout Starwood. A heavy coke addict similar to the character in Boogie Nights that Dirk Diggler and company attempt to rob, Nash rarely left his large home in the San Fernando Valley. He sold coke, heroin and other drugs. Gaunt with dark wavy hair and a vicious temper, he threw wild parties that lasted for days. "He was an awful man," says Laurie Holmes. "John told me he used to leave the bathrooms without toilet paper, then offer the young women cocaine if they'd lick his ass clean." (Playboy 3/98) Nash's huge bodyguard Greg Diles slept in a back bedroom with a shotgun under his blanket. Holmes became a star attraction at Nash's parties and eventually began running drugs to repay his drug debt. On Nash's 1980 birthday, John presented him with Dawn Schiller as a sexual present. Eddie was so pleased he gave John a quarter pound of hard cocaine. John thought Nash the most evil man he'd ever met but couldn't figure him out. So John just hung around. While delivering drugs, John became intimate with the criminal underground. "From the outside, their homes or apartments looked perfectly respectable. On the inside, however, they were armed camps containing entire rooms filled with crates of automatic weapons, shrapnel grenades and ammunition, suitcases packed with counterfeit money, boxes and bags crammed with jewelry and narcotics." (Porn King) At home in Oregon in early 1981, Dawn refused for months to answer John's phone calls. Eventually she relented. In June, 1981, five months after fleeing him, Schiller reunited with John in West Los Angeles. It was just two days before the most frightening week of John's life. In late June, Holmes was in a bad position. He'd smoked a couple of drug deliveries for the Wonderland Gang, a group of drug dealers (Joy Miller, William Ray Deverell and Ron Launius) who lived in a stucco house (formerly belonging to the rock group Paul Revere and the Raiders) at 8763 Wonderland Avenue on a steep, winding road in the hills above Hollywood. The name on the lease of the house was Joy Miller, a 46-year old junkie with an arrest record for dealing. She lived with her heroin addict lover Billy De Verell, 42, who'd been arrested 42 times. They lived with 37-year old drug smuggler Ron Launius who, one day, beat up John with a walking stick when the porn star smoked a coke delivery. Then Ron asked Holmes how he was going to make good. Desperate, John told him: "Eddie Nash. I've known him for three years. He trusts me, calls me his brother. I know the house, where the drugs are, and the cash. I'll draw you a floor plan. I'll visit him and leave the door unlocked. You cut me in for whatever you think is right." (Playboy 3-98) On June 29, 1981, John partied at the Nash villa for several hours and bought drugs. On the way out, he unlocked the door as promised. In the early hours of June 30, Launius, De Verell, and two friends, Tracy McCourt and David Lind, slipped through the unlocked door and surprised Nash and his bodyguard. Waving a stolen police badge and a .357 Magnum, Lind told them to freeze. As the Wonderland Gang struggled to handcuff the obese Diles, Launius fell against Lind's gun hand and the .357 went off, grazing Diles' back. Crying, Nash begged for his life. Launius shut him up by sticking his gun into Nash's mouth and demanding the combination to his floor safe. Holmes had said that was the Palestinian's repository for drugs. Lind, Launius and company stole over $100,000 cash, $150,000 of jewelry, a kilo of heroin, more than eight pounds of cocaine and 5000 quaaludes. The gang returned home to find Holmes waiting for his share. John smoked some of their new coke. After he received $3000, coke and jewelry, Holmes complained he deserved more. Launius punched him in the stomach and threw him out. Around 4:30 PM, July 1, 1981, Detective Tom Lang and his partner Bob Souza, received a call to investigate four murders. In 1994, Lang and his next partner, Philip Vannater became famous as the lead investigators in the O.J. Simpson double murder. "Tom and I thought we'd seen it all," Bob Souza told Playboy regarding the carnage they witnessed in 1981. "But I'd never seen so much blood. Four people bludgeoned to death and a fifth victim who survived. It was gruesome." For the first time, the LAPD used videotape to record the multiple-murder scene on Wonderland Avenue. The tape reveals blood everywhere - on the walls, ceilings, furniture and floors. Lind's girlfriend Barbara Richardson lies in a pool of blood and brains. Joy Miller and Ron Launius lie in a bloody bed. Billy DeVerell slumps beneath a television. Susan Launius, Ron's wife, was beaten around the head. Playboy says the blows crushed her skull in a way that limited bleeding, thus enabling her to survive. Neighbors heard her moaning a few hours after the attack. Attack by whom? Now private detectives who are writing a book with Nils Grevillius about the crime, Four on the Floor: The Laurel Canyon Murders, Lange and Souza say the following happened: While wearing a ring that belonged to Nash and was stolen in the robbery, John got caught in the San Fernando Valley by Nash's 300-pound karate-expert bodyguard Gregory DeWitt Diles, a convicted felon. Diles took Holmes' address book and dragged John to the furious Nash. Looking through the book, the drug lord found names of John's friends and family. Nash threatened Holmes that he'd murder them if he didn't lead them to the Wonderland gang. Holmes took them into the house on Wonderland Avenue where the gang stayed. With a pistol held at his temple, John watched Nash's flunkies beat with an iron bar five members of the gang into a bloody pulp. Four men died and one woman barely lived, suffering permanent brain damage. Other accounts claim that the gang members were already thrashed by the time John, Diles and Nash arrived. The gang had its share of enemies wanting to do them in. Lange and Souza say that from the position of the bodies, they know that at least three, and as many as five, assailants participated in the slaughter. (Playboy 3-98) Early that Thursday morning, July 2nd, John, covered with blood, knocked at Sharon's door. He told her he'd seen murder. "Why didn't you do something?" Sharon asked. "I couldn't," said John. "It was either me and my family, including you, or them. They made Nash beg for his life. They deserved to die." (RS) John then went to Schiller and fell asleep. She heard him cry out in his sleep, "Blood, blood, blood, so much blood." On the late TV news she saw a report on the murders of the four Wonderland gangsters. She put everything together and waited until morning. After John awoke, he told Schiller a made-up story. (RS) That same day, police met with David Lind, who was not home when the murderers arrived. "He sat there popping pills - rainbows, cartwheels, everything," says Lange, "and told us the whole story of the Nash robbery and Holmes' involvement. In fact, he was the one who figured out that Holmes had played both ends against the middle and had set up the Wonderland gang the same way he had set up Nash." Lange says that John may have helped kill Launius. "He hated him, was terrified of him. We found Holmes' palm print on a bed rail above Launius' body, an incriminating place for it to be." (Playboy 3-98) "He was there…but he didn't do it, and neither did Nash," Amerson told Playboy. He says people were lined up to kill the Wonderland gang. "The morning of the murders I got a call from a good friend, Dee Samuels, who was a hit man. He'd been staking out the Wonderland house because he had a contract to kill the guys and was waiting for his moment. He told me, 'I just saw your friend John Holmes coming out of there alone, covered in blood. I went it to see what was going on, and they were all dead.' John showed up at my [Amerson's] house a half hour later, all wild and bloody, saying he'd gone over there to let the Nash bunch in and found everybody, except Susan Launius, dead already. She was moaning, so he rolled her back onto the bed, then went through the house looking for coke and whatever else he could find. He was carrying something in a pillowcase when he showed up at my place. He was crazed, said he needed money and a car. So I gave him $20 and a fully restored 1960 Ford Fairlane convertible, and he took off. A while later Dee told me that along with his contract and Nash's contract, there was a third hit out on these people and that two methamphetamine dealers who'd been burned by the group got there first." Lange and Souza interviewed the two speed dealers. The detectives say the men arrived after the murders, searched the scene before leaving Susan Launius moaning on the floor for help. The detectives say their investigation was frustrated by superiors. It appears that Nash and Holmes had police and political connections that kept them from getting interrogated by the detectives. (Playboy) John's friend Detective Frank Tomlinson took over the investigation. He took John, Dawn and Sharon into custody at the luxury Biltmore hotel in downtown LA. John enjoyed the attention and told a lot of stories. But he refused to testify because he feared that Eddie Nash would murder his family. After a few days of expensive meals and drink, the police released the three. Dawn and Sharon dyed John's hair black. Schiller and Holmes spray painted Sharon's Chevy Malibu and the two of them took off across the country. John broke into cars along the way to support them. When they arrived in Miami, John got Schiller turning tricks at the beach. When she tired of it, he publicly beat her and she ran away. Dawn worked as a stripper. A couple of weeks later, on December 4, 1981, she led the police to Holmes. It was the last time that John and Dawn saw each other. John went on trial in Los Angeles, beginning May 20, 1982, for murdering the Wonderland gang. Because of his fear of Eddie Nash, John refused to testify. His lawyer claimed he was the "sixth victim" of the Wonderland murders, and that Eddie Nash was "evil incarnate." "Ladies and gentleman," said John's lawyer at the beginning of the trial, "unlike some mysteries, this is not going to be a question of 'Who done it?' This is going to be a question of 'Why aren't the perpetrators here?'" Holmes unique defense, that he was "the man in the middle," was later incorporated into law books. The prosecution said John had double-crossed his friends and then beaten at least Ron Laurnius to death. To keep his mind off his troubles, John worked on his autobiography while he living in jail. On June 26, 1982 the jury found him not guilty. Holmes was held in jail on an outstanding burglary charge. Facing a judicial order to tell what he knew about the Laurel Canyon murders, John refused to testify. He spent 111 days in Los Angeles County Jail, surviving a murder attempt that he believed was a contract hit. The Four-on-the-Floor murders eventually resulted in four trials over nine years, two mistrials and one retrial. In the Spring of 1982, police arrested Nash, his bodyguard Diles and others on charges of drug possession and drug selling. On November 22nd, 1982, Nash got the maximum sentence of eight years in jail. Diles received seven years for shooting at a policeman at the time of his arrest. Upon hearing the news of the sentences, John Holmes testified that same day before a Grand Jury (giving innocuous and useless information) and was released. John phoned Sharon who, during his incarceration, had divorced him. Sharon told him to "get the f--- out of my life." "The day he got out of jail he showed up at my house driving a VW van he'd borrowed from his attorney," Amerson told the 3-98 Playboy. Bill hadn't seen John since his arrest. "He moved in and started a gigolo thing with a 65-year old woman who gave him money and leased him a car. But he wasn't happy with it. He wanted to make movies, but nobody would hire him because he was so unreliable." John first performed in California Valley Girls, where he does one scene. He sits on a couch while six girls work on his penis. The movie was directed by Bill Margold, who introduced Laurie to John during the 12/82 making of the video Marathon in San Francisco. "I can't wait to get that man up my ass," said Laurie. She did off-camera before they even did a scene. "I was stuck in a hospital bed in the second half of the movie," remembers Margold. "Laurie and John have sex on top of me and Drea. "John had just gotten out of jail. He showed me his legs which were full of pencil marks. He said that he'd been stabbed a lot with pencils while in jail. "Laurie was part of the hole-in-the-wall gang which lived on the second floor of 6912 Hollywood Boulevard. Photographer Sam Menning, who moved in in 1973, ran the [porn] studio with a whole bunch of faceless nameless men and Laurie. "Ed Nash owned the building. On the first floor he operated the Polynesian style nightclub THE SEVEN SEAS. "They were known as the hole in the wall gang because they had taken one office on the second floor, then, as they expanded, they simply knocked down walls. They began by knocking holes in the walls, then kept going through. They kept all these animals. There was an earthquake. Place fell into a state of disrepair by 1985. "Laurie lived in one of the rooms around 1981. She was everybody's adopted sister." Laurie Rose was 19 years of age. An anal queen, she used the porn name Misty Dawn. She came from a small town outside Vegas. She looked like Dawn Schiller. Sporting a vivid Caesarian scar, Misty appeared in such flicks as Aerobisex Girls, Desire and Nasty Nurses. John and Laurie began dating - smoking freebase cocaine and having sex. They watched videos. They went to swap meets and yard sales on weekends. Holmes insisted Laurie quit porn. They worried about contracting AIDS. "If I'm going to take a chance," said John, "that's enough." At the January 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Al Goldstein ran into John signing autographs for Reuben Sturman's Caballero. "You're gaining weight, Goldstein," said Holmes. "You should be on the same diet I'm on, the cocaine diet." Al stared at the emaciated porn star, remembering Gloria Leonard's remark that he seemed "all cock." He asked John where was the signature diamond ring he wore in most of his films. "Gone," said John, "with the rest of it. Up my nose in a couple of toots." "So this whole thing was coke, John?" Holmes looked away hurt as Goldstein remembered a quote from Bruce Jay Friedman, "Don't let that little frankfurter run your life." By March of 1983, Laurie had moved in with John at Amerson's house. Now a counselor to drug addicts who include prominent porn queens, Bill still wears a diamond ring on his pinkie finger. Later in 1983, John made a homosexual porno, The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes, where he performed anal sex on gay star Joey Yale, who died soon afterwards of AIDS. After serving a couple of years in jail, crime kingpin Eddie Nash was released early for good behavior. John worried but Eddie did nothing to him. His fortune destroyed by drugs and legal expenses, Nash started anew. At night, he took business classes at a local college. In 1985, Amerson left VCX to start his own porn production company, Penguin Productions. He gave John a junior partnership in the company. Penguin made 15 videos in six months, most starring John. In 1985, Laurie, John, Bill Amerson and his wife tested HIV negative. "Bill and I tried to organize an AIDS testing program within the business," writes John in his autobiography. "Our goal was to form an organization that would require current AIDS test results on every actor, male or female, we hired for a film. …When the time came to take action, the other performers surprisingly refused. No, they said to testing, believing that to make it mandatory was in violation of their civil rights." John and Bill tested again in 1986. "The doctor told us he had good news and bad news," says Amerson. "Then he looked at me and said, 'You're all right.' John turned white. The doctor told him that just because he was HIV-positive didn't mean he would get AIDS, and that if he'd stop smoking and drinking and drugging up, he could live another 20 years. "John had a death wish. He went up to six packs of cigarettes a day and two quarts of scotch instead of one, and began using more drugs than ever." Laurie Rose suspects that the US government gave John AIDS. "John and Bill went to Washington DC right around the time John would have contracted AIDS," she writes in Porn King. "It was also during the time that Edward Meese and his "Meese Commission" were on a crusade to shut down the porn industry. I remember hearing that Meese showed President Reagan some porn movies at the White House, one of which I was in. Then along came John and Bill and a few others to fight… John even met one of Reagen's Secret Service men. Could it be that John Holmes was injected or somehow given a strain of the AIDS virus? Maybe it was the United States Government, not God, making an example of John to underscore the "horror" of pornography." Though HIV positive, Holmes kept doing porn, including The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empress starring Ilona "Ciccolina" Staller, a future member of the Italian parliament. "He just figured that if they don't get it from me, or if they don't already have it, they're going to end up with it anyway," says Laurie. "He just figured that everybody in the business was going to die of AIDS anyway." (WADD) Amerson later accused John of stealing $200,000. John lost his health insurance. Pain dominated John's last two years. Bill Amerson and Laurie set up the John Holmes Relief Fund. Donors included Gloria Leonard, Annie Sprinkle, Suze Randall, Ron Vogel and Caballero Productions. John married Laurie Rose at the Little Chapel of the Flower in Las Vegas in 1987. He called Bill. "I think I'm married. I'm all f---ed up. I'm not sure, but I've got a ring, Laurie's with me and I think we're married." John beat Laurie regularly. As his health declined, he checked into the VA hospital. Lange visited him for the last time. Laurie was in the room. "It was one of the greatest performances of his life," she says. "John would lean over slowly to stub out his cigarette, then start to answer the question, then become incoherent. He didn't tell them anything." (Playboy 3/98) "It was a performance for sure," said Lange, "as if the cameras were rolling. It was typical John, full of s---." (Ibid) Sean Amerson says that Laurie prevented any of the Amersons from visiting John in the hospital. On March 13, 1988, John Holmes died in peace with Laurie beside him. "His eyes were open," says Laurie, "and it looked like he had looked up to Death and said, 'Here I am.' It was the most peaceful look I ever saw in my life. I tried to shut his eyes like in the movies, but they wouldn't stay shut. "He wanted me to view his body and make sure that the parts were there. He didn't want his dick to end up in a jar. I viewed his body naked, and then I watched them put the lid on the box and put it in the oven. We scattered his ashes over the ocean." (RS) "In the morning [after John's death] there was a phone call on my machine from Laurie," says Denise Amerson, Bill's daughter. 'Your godfather died last night and you did not even care enough to go see him.' Then she hung up. That's how I found out that he died. "John had wanted to be buried and he wasn't. He was cremated. I guess she [Laurie] took it upon herself to make that choice. And that's what she did, before we had a chance to say goodbye to him." (WADD) A week later Amerson paid for a memorial service at Forest Lawn Cemetary in Los Angeles. Out of the 52 friends invited (Laurie not among them), 50 showed. John had become increasingly reclusive through the 1980s. "It doesn't pay to have friends," he'd say. "Friends will get you killed." (Playboy 3/98) Six months later, on September 8, 1988, Diles and Nash were charged with the murders on Wonderland Avenue but acquitted. "No one dies of AIDS per se," notes Pat Riley on RAME. "AIDS is not a disease, it's a syndrome: Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Officially a person is classified as having AIDS when they meet certain criteria established by the Center for Disease Control. "Even though the actual cause of death may be cancer, the death certificate will state (nowadays, reporting was lax in the early stages to spare the family) that the person died of ......(insert name of specific disease) while suffering from...AIDS. From a non-medical viewpoint it's correct to say "Holmes died of AIDS". "Before his death, Holmes complicated matters by saying he suffered from intestinal cancer presumably to be able to work and in particular to do the Italian movies with Cicciolina. "Where Holmes picked up HIV is subject to conjecture. It's unlikiely he got it on the set of a heterosexual movie because (1) transmission from female to male is very unlikely and (2) none of the females he screwed have died or are reportedly ill. His last wife, Misty Dawn, is alive despite having had anal sex with him on film. His homosexual appearances on video have always had him as the top so these are also unlikely however they do indicate a frame of mind where in his private life he may have bottomed. Drug use is a likely factor too." How did John catch HIV? "I had a feeling that he was probably shooting [up]," says Kitten Natividad. Mark Wahlberg aka Marky Mark plays Holmes in Boogie Nights - a movie loosely based on John's life. "He starts out as a young, gullible guy," says Mark about his character, "a wonderful person. He has this gigantic penis and everyone just wants to use him. He becomes a porn star and begins to believe the bulls--- which everyone is feeding him. He gets strung out drugs and burns out. Looking back, he realizes that his porn success was the one good thing he had in his life." John Holmes serves as the inspiration for Mark's character, but the story is not meant to be taken as a literal account of his life. "It's based on a lot of stuff that John did, but it's not supposed to be John Holmes. The characters talk about John degrading women, beating up women, like it's not cool...and then we turn round and do the same thing." M.K. Hutcheon writes that "two props are pivotal to Mark's character. The hair extensions are a pain to deal with, the prosthetic penis is surprisingly easy." Boogie Nights depicts the porn film industry in the 1970s and follows Mark's character's descent into excess and ruin. Porn veterans agree that Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 film Boogie Nights presents an unfairly negative view of the industry. Paul's movie compresses about 15 years of change into seven and concentrates on many of porn's worst parts: exploitation of children, widespread use of drugs, Mafia influence, the low intelligence and sloppy moral character of many of its participants, and its occasional falls into violence. While most everything shown in Boogie Nights occurred frequently in porn in the '70s and '80s, the movie focuses on the negative. "I was prepared to have a really brutal picture painted of all of us," Jane Hamilton told the 10-02-97 Las Vegas Review-Journal. "But he [Anderson] put the humanity into who we were and what we were trying to do. "As cute and pathetic as we were, we really meant it. We weren't model types. We were more like the girl next door. The films were more indicative of women and sex. In the larger scheme of things, (our pretensions) were pretty funny." When Jane first read the script for Boogie Nights, she thought, "this is terrible. All they're doing is drugs." Then she thought about it, "all we did was drugs." Boogie Nights sloppily recreates the '70s, showing, for instance, widespread use of platform shows when they had been out of fashion for years. Eight track stereo and the Shaft look in men's wear were similarly out of date. "From the very first shot this crappy movie demonstrated how lazy the filmmaker was going to be when it came to veracity." (R. Geoff Baker) "I didn't care enough about the characters to find it heartbreaking," writes Larry Rosenhein on the internet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.current-films. "But I do find it depressing to spend so much time with such dim people…. It's commonplace to make films about dim or dysfunctional people, about hoodlums and avaricious white collar goons. It's the equivalent of "good copy"… What I'd like to see are some films about smart, well-intentioned people who have conflicting interests…" Among the porn veterans appearing in Boogie were Nina Hartley, Veronica Hart, Tony Tedeschi, Summer Cummings, Skye Blue, and Little Cinderella. Pornographers point out the following elementary mistakes in just one sequence. The director, played by Burt Reynolds, smokes a cigar next to the camera lens while filming Dirk's first sex scene entirely in long shot. He allows Diggler to ejaculate inside the female, instead of demanding the customary pop shot. Also, the camera equipment the pornographers used in the film was ten years out of date, says Bob Chinn. "By 1975 we were shooting in 35mm Panavision on sound stages with full crews." Porn veteran and pro-porn idealogue Juliet Anderson says, "It's one of the most awful movies I've ever seen in my life. I feel like I've been assaulted." Juliet hated the movie's depiction of porn-world figures as "losers and weirdos who couldn't make it any other way -- which is totally untrue. The vast majority of people I knew behind and in front of the camera had regular lives. "They have the man who shoots his wife, the pedophile, the token black guy, the underage guy, the drugs, the violence. Every cliche. I'm surprised they didn't bring in bestiality." "There were a lot of people doing drugs," Wesley Emerson told the San Francisco Chronicle, "but it had nothing to do with the porn industry -- it had to do with the world at large. I'm not defending it, but drugs were rampant. "It's about America. Pornography just happened to be the vehicle in which it's carried; it's a secondary factor. That's the whole trick." (San Francisco Chronicle, 10-23-97) Bill Margold wants to destroy the film. "Dirk Diggler? You've got to be kidding? It's inane. Why not Peter Heater? If I'd known my beloved industry was this dysfunctional, I would've joined the priesthood." "Neither The People vs. Larry Flynt nor Boogie Nights honestly deals with the real-life porn industry," writes Camille Paglia for Salon magazine, "which they condescendingly show as overrun by dimwitted buffoons. Neither movie comes close to capturing the sizzle of outlaw sexuality… "Far from pornography becoming mainstream, popular culture is showing less and less ability to create and sustain an erotic charge… "The best pornography depends on a strict sense of social limits and norms, which the picture or story violates… "Porn has paradoxically gotten weaker in the 1990s, after my side in the culture wars defeated the Catharine MacKinnon-Andrea Dworkin anti-porn feminist/Christian conservative coalition that ruled the 1980s." During her screening of Boogie Nights, sex journalist Susie Bright wanted to yell: "Stop rolling! That's not how it happened!" According to Bright, Anderson "has made an awful big pile of baloney. It's stylish and energetic and melodramatic, but he either doesn't know what he's talking about or he doesn't care… "The biggest influence on the porn tribe is how they've been treated by the rest of society… "In "Boogie Nights," a Big Porn Producer is shown suffering in jail because he's a pathetic opportunistic pedophile. But in the real porn business, a producer -- and his wife, and his secretary, and his shipping clerk -- are more likely to be sitting in a penitentiary because they sold a mail-order tape to an undercover cop in Tennessee. The tape probably featured nothing more criminal than an interracial buttf---ing scene between enthusiastic adults. "The reason the porn world is such a tight-knit family is that only people on the inside understand how their biggest handicap isn't that they're committing vice, but that they've been ghettoized into a third-rate division of the entertainment business." (Salon magazine) The Burt Reynolds character in Boogie Nights is an amalgam of several pornographers including Bob Chinn. An interview in the porno masquerading as a documentary, Exhausted, between Chinn and John Holmes, appears almost word for word in the Paul Thomas Anderson film. "It was the part where Holmes is saying that I allowed him to do his own blocking for his scenes and I turn to him and say, "What are you talking about John? I don't allow you to do your own blocking." There were also cuts taken scene for scene from my movies," Chinn told the magazine Cult Movies. "Boogie Nights is an entertainment film, not a documentary. "I don't think it is an accurate portrayal of the era…" Film critic Roger Ebert called Boogie Nights "an epic of the low road, a classic Hollywood story set in the shadows instead of the spotlights, but containing the same ingredients: fame, envy, greed, talent, sex, money. The movie follows a large, colorful and curiously touching cast of characters, as they live through a crucial turning point in the adult film industry. "In 1977, when the story opens, porn movies are shot on film and play in theaters, and a director can dream of making one so good that the audience members would want to stay in the theater even after they had achieved what they came for. By 1983, when the story closes, porn has shifted to video and most of the movies are basically just gynecological loops. There is hope, at the outset, that a porno movie could be "artistic," and less hope at the end. "…Few films have been more matter-of-fact, even disenchanted, about sexuality. Adult films are a business here, not a dalliance or a pastime, and one of the charms of "Boogie Nights" is the way it shows the everyday backstage humdrum life of porno filmmaking. "You got your camera," Jack explains to young Eddie. "You got your film, you got your lights, you got your synching, you got your editing, you got your lab. Before you turn around, you've spent maybe $25,000 or $30,000." "Jack Horner is the father figure for a strange extended family of sex workers; he's a low-rent Hugh Hefner, and Burt Reynolds gives one of his best performances, as a man who seems to stand outside sex and view it with the detached eye of a judge at a livestock show. Horner is never shown as having sex himself, although he lives with Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a former housewife and mother, now a porn star who makes tearful midnight calls to her ex-husband, asking to speak to her child. When Jack recruits Eddie to make a movie, Amber becomes his surrogate parent, tenderly solicitous of him as they prepare for his first sex scene. "In examining the business of catering to lust, "Boogie Nights" demystifies its sex (that's probably one reason it avoided the NC-17 rating). Mainstream movies use sex like porno films do, to turn us on. "Boogie Nights" abandons the illusion that the characters are enjoying sex; in a sense, it's about manufacturing a consumer product. "By the time the final shot arrives and we see what made the Colonel stare, there is no longer any shred of illusion that it is anything more than a commodity." Sources say that Laurie Holmes, John's widow, remains addicted to drugs and abusive men. She works as a stripper, hooker and and porn star. Journalist Hart Williams worked in the porn industry from 1978-88. He hated Boogie Nights and Craig Vetter's 3-98 article in Playboy. Vetter supposedly earned $5K for 5K words. Hart writes on RAME: One of the first things I learned in Hollywood pornoland was that PLAYBOY had a dark and sleazy side that was only exacerbated by their snobbery vis a vis porn. Porn is an onion, and the deeper you peel away the layers, the more is revealed. Vetter barely scraped the skin, and seems to feel he got the "inside dope." Who did Vetter think he was, venturing into a secretive and arcane world and thinking that a couple of phone calls would clear things up? And people wonder that "the media" gets so much fouled up! Dollar to a donut that the LAPD moonlighters' book is excerpted as PLAYBOY's "Real Crime" feature within the next few months. [Vetter wrote in his first sentence that John Holmes "wasn't too bright."] When I was selling scripts in the heady days of the mid-80s, I remember selling John a script called "Lust In America" (still available at Excalibur). John said to me (as he filled out his American Express application) "Wait a minute. This is Clair Booth Luce's 'The Women.'" Now, at that subliterate time, I think I might have counted the number of people in Hollywood, per se, who'd have picked up on that (masked as it was) on the fingers of one hand and had plenty left. His conversation, as we digressed into the play, was sparkling, and, yes, brilliant. He might have made a cracker-jack drama critic. Holmes was well-read, charming and evidently smart enough (by Vetter's own words) to outwit two of LAPD's finest on his death bed. Amerson's truthfulness in this matter [John's supposed theft of $200K] has been a subject of some speculation in many industry circles for a long time. My sources have alleged that Mr. Amerson's charge of embezzlement against the Holmes' may be self-serving -- if, as some suggest, the money was NOT entirely Mr. Amerson's, but was borrowed from other sources -- and point to the extreme poverty of John and his wife in Holmes' last days. It seems to me that for $190K, it is odd that Holmes was forced to rely on the free services of the VA Hospital for medical treatment. …Bad math. Poor research. Pedestrian writing. Unsubstantiated stereotypes. Unreliable witnesses. Focus on one event in a man's life to the exclusion of most of the rest of it (except that which conveniently backs up one's thesis). The Tawdry Tale of Johnny Wadd By Matthew Beer WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT THIS MAN'S AWFUL LIFE? Read about Laurie Holmes
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