By Peter Landau
It's the greatest story never told, until now. Legs McNeil, author of Please Kill Me, the chronicle of the New York City punk scene in the '70s, had a dream eight years ago. He wanted to chart the rise and rise of the adult film industry from its nearly innocent beginnings with horny hippies pushing the envelope of free love to the involvement of the Mafia and finally its current place today as a cornerstone of the multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry.
"I kept reading these porn books and they were all theory, no one ever said what it was," says McNeil from his home in Pennsylvania. Following an assortment of colorful characters that includes Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems, Sharon Mitchell, John Holmes, and behind-the-scenes players, McNeil has told an epic story of lust, greed, love, and hate that is never anything less than fascinating. Who would expect a quote from Carol Connors (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5), who was a The Gong Show hostess and a porn star, playing a nurse in Deep Throat (1972)?
For the first four years of McNeil's toil in recording the narratives of the key players in modern film pornography from its beginnings--which he marks as the release of Deep Throat--to the AIDS outbreak in 1998, no publisher was interested in the story. Today, with Jenna Jameson on the bestseller charts and writing recipes for Esquire and big Hollywood studios backing documentaries like Inside Deep Throat, pornography is almost a part of the mainstream. The timing of McNeil's book couldn't be better.
"There wasn't any more rock and roll eight years ago and I realized they were going to be pulling stuff from porn and the more they pulled stuff from porn the more it was going to be mainstream," McNeil says. But porn in its infancy was a dark and quasi-legal place. The story begins in the '50s with the Nudie Cuties and goes through the '60s and the evolution of the exploitation marketplace to hardcore loops that fed the burgeoning adult bookstore niche and its mainstay, the peepshow. Familiar names such as Linda Lovelace and her then-husband and manager Chuck Traynor begin to pop up, and so does the inconsistency inherent in oral histories.
Lovelace's remembrance of things porn and the accounts of everyone else involved in her story often go their separate ways. In her famous autobiography Ordeal, Lovelace painted a picture of the adult industry as a place of abuse and intimidation. Then there's the infamous dog-sex loop, which Lovelace claims she was coerced into doing.
"Linda was a liar," McNeil bluntly states. "She lied to me. You know what, she wasn't that smart. I hate to say that. If you recount her story she's a victim of Chuck Traynor, then she's a victim of her second husband, then she's a victim of Women Against Pornography. She's always a victim. Once you find that, you say, 'OK, something's wrong here.'"
But readers take away their own version of the truth as it's laid out over the six-hundred-plus pages of McNeil's exhaustive study. That's the great thing about giving the participants in the history of adult film an opportunity to speak without editorializing. And, oh, what they say!
"I didn't think I'd be able to fuck on camera; I thought I'd break out into a rash and go crazy," says Marilyn Chambers (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5), the Ivory Snow box model, on her venture into pornography in the Mitchell Brothers' Behind the Green Door (1972). "But I liked their approach. They didn't say, 'Well, honey, you gotta screw me first.' It was, 'Here, smoke a joint,' you know?
Those early days of longhair piece freaks getting nasty for a Super 8 changed when Deep Throat became a multi-million-dollar cultural phenomenon. Johnny Carson was lining up with the rest of America to watch Lovelace's oral skills. Sammy Davis Jr. became involved with the blowjob queen and was reportedly obsessed with her cock-sucking abilities, which he learned and tested out on Traynor. Less debatable was Davis's attempt to take Lovelace's career to the next level with a Las Vegas show, but her talents beyond the boudoir were sadly limited.
Everybody was getting into porn by the mid-'70s, including the mob. Large sections of the book are filled with tough guys working to corner pornography distribution and the law enforcement officers working diligently to bust them. Sometimes too diligently, as in the case of FBI agent Pat Livingstone, who went undercover as a porn buyer and enjoyed the lifestyle of big-breasted bimbos, pimp mobiles, and late-night partying a bit more than required. It ended up costing him his marriage, his job at the Bureau, and even the life of his father, who suffered a fatal heart attack after learning that his son was arrested on shoplifting charges.
"I don't know if I concentrated too much on the mob, but that interested me," says McNeil. "When I was there [porn] was kind of going through its last dying stages from the mob handing it over. Most of the porn studios are pretty legitimate nowadays. And porn is kind of boring now. When you get it on your computer all the time it's not so illicit. I think it was more exciting when it was more illicit."
Between stories of mobsters blowing themselves up to gain a stranglehold on all the money America is willing to pay to masturbate to people fucking on camera, there are the personalities that are willing to be filmed at their most intimate. It is not always a happy crew. From the legendary thirteen-inch John Holmes and his spiral into cocaine addiction, alleged involvement in the Wonderland murders in Los Angeles, and death from HIV, '80s superstar Savannah's and Cal Jammer's suicides to Traci Lords's scandal, the book is rife with damaged goods. But McNeil prides himself on not being judgmental or moralizing.
"That's like saying punk was a colony of damaged goods," he protests. "Until it becomes slick and accepted by mainstream America everything is 'damaged goods'. My friend Jane Hamilton, who is [porn star] Veronica Hart, read Please Kill Me and she said, 'Oh, God, I feel so clean.'"
McNeil gained unprecedented access to the people who made the adult industry and gained their acceptance largely because they didn't know him. His notoriety as the founder of Punk magazine didn't proceed him into the porn valley of Chatsworth, California. And while he supported himself writing porno scripts, including Marilyn Chambers's hardcore comeback Still Insatiable (1999), it was not his first introduction into the world of pornography.
"I was the assistant director on a porn film in 1974 called Blow Dry that wasn't very good, but I was eighteen years old, the year before we did Punk magazine, and I fell in love with one of the porn stars," recalls McNeil. "I kind of did it then and forgot about it. I realized, 'Gosh, I was there at the beginning of the porn industry.' And I wondered, 'Wow, I wonder what happened to those people?' That got me thinking about [writing the book].
"Next up for McNeil is a biography on Ramones frontman Joey Ramone, which is co-authored by Mickey Leigh, and he's currently shopping a book with Punk cofounder John Holmstrom called Watch Out, Punk Is Coming. It looks like a return to the rock world that first brought him recognition. But once bitten by the porn bug, it's only a matter of time before it brings up its ugly head again.
