Afleveringen
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Back in 2014, a woman called Stephanie contacted me at The Rialto Report. She described herself as âa designer of erotic costumesâ and shared some memories of the old days when she said sheâd made garments for many people in the early adult film business. Vanessa del Rio, Gloria Leonard, Bambi Woods, and others, she said. I must admit I didnât follow up very quickly â after all, I reasoned, isnât the point of erotic films just to take your clothes off?
A dumb reaction, I know, but a little while later, I did pick up the phone and called her, and the conversation we had was as surprising as it was entertaining.
Yes, she had made extravagant costumes for porn stars and sex films, and strippers, sex-club members, cross-dressers, hookers, and drag queens â but that was just the tip of the iceberg. She told me how sheâd emerged from a difficult childhood to become a successful, Black burlesque dancer in the seedy Times Square bars and theaters of 1960s and 1970s New York. In fact, sheâd used the stage name, Tanqueray. Sheâd been part of numerous illicit schemes to sell stolen goods. Sheâd had a regular column called âTattle Talesâ in the menâs magazine, High Society that detailed her outrageous sexploits. It was a fascinating life story populated by mobsters, pimps, thieves, and dancers, and even Donald Trumpâs coke dealer (allegedly) made an appearance. âIt was a time when 10,000 men in New York City knew my name,â she said.
When I spoke to her she was in her 70s, long retired, and suffering from ill-health, money issues, and the feeling that sheâd been long forgotten. I liked her: she was always smart, often filthy, invariably rude, and usually hilarious. She called me âWhite Boyâ and told me I needed to be fashionable. And after many years of being taken advantage of, she was also suspicious and short-tempered â which she readily admitted.
After our first call, we kept in touch, exchanging greetings cards and sometimes meeting up in Madison Square Park. She was lonely she said, but not enough to make any new friends. Very few people were worth the effort.
And then in 2019, something unexpected happened. A hugely popular social media account called Humans of New York, which features interviews with everyday New Yorkers, ran into Stephanie in the street in her Chelsea neighborhood and featured her in a post. Brandon Stanton, the creator of Humans of New York, was initially struck by her style but was drawn in by the same crazy stories that sheâd told me.
âMy stripper name was Tanqueray,â Stephanie told Brandon. âBack in the seventies, I was the only Black girl making white girl money and I danced in so many mob clubs that I learned Italian.â
That first post went viral, with millions following her life story over the next weeks as it unfolded on Facebook and Instagram posts.
And so began the third act in Stephanieâs life: suddenly she was an overnight sensation â after over 70 years of waiting. People from all over the world wanted to get in touch with her. In truth, the least surprised person was Stephanie herself. She took her newfound fame in her stride, remaining as unfiltered, coarse, and caustic as sheâd always been.
Stephanie and I recorded many of our conversations, and this is her story.
This podcast is 39 minutes long.
Photos courtesy of Humans of New York.
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Stephanie and Carmine
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The post Tanqueray â Iâve Always Been Different, Part 1: Podcast 163 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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The former adult film star Tiffany Clark passed away this week.
Some might say this comes with the territory when you cover an industry that began almost 60 years ago. But while Tiffany started in the business in 1979, she was only 18 at the time and just 65 when she died of cancer.
Others might ask why I would be sad about somebody I interviewed once almost 10 years ago. But I lucked out with Tiffany. I got to know her for quite a while before we ever did the interview, and weâve stayed friends ever since. Over the years there have been many dinners out and time spent with her family, both birth and chosen. Her home was full of people and animals and love.
And Tiffany was always at the heart of that home. She didnât have it easy over the years. She grew up in an abusive household that she ran away from when she was young. She struggled with drugs and went to prison. Performing in adult films and briefly running Platoâs retreat with her then husband Fred Lincoln was about the least transgressive thing she did in her early years.
Then she met Barry who would go on to become her beloved husband until this day. They moved to Florida with Tiffanyâs child from another father and started a new life, going on to have children of their own. And something remarkable happened – Tiffany, whose life had been the definition of instability, became a pillar of reliability. She was an anchor of love for her family and friends. She was a steadfast employee for companies that relied upon her. When her kids faced difficulties, she took in their children and raised them as her own. Tiffany and Barry renewed their vows in 2015 – a joyful event I was fortunate enough to be part of.
This is a reprise of my interview with Tiffany, in honor of my special friend who I loved dearly and will miss deeply.
For more pictures from Tiffany’s life, see here.
This episodeâs running time is 124 minutes.
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Tiffany ClarkTiffany Clark in Centerfold Fever
Tiffany Clark & April Hall
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The post Tiffany Clark (1961-2026), R.I.P. appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Memory is a tricky thing. Small details can burn brighter than some of lifeâs defining events. The act of recall and the power of suggestion can fundamentally alter the content of our recollections. Experiences that seem like they should be tattooed onto our psyches can be lost to time.
And memory can be selective. Whether thatâs by conscious choice, subconscious bias, or pure forgetfulness varies based on a lot of potential factors. But memoryâs selective nature is undeniable.
Take the adult film star Beth Anna. A striking beauty, she started out go-go dancing out on Long Island in the mid 1970s before being named one of the best strippers in New York. She wasnât in the adult film industry long, making just a handful of films in the late 1970s. But in that short period Beth Anna made an impact. She was the lead in the first adult film she ever made, Chuck Vincentâs Dirty Lily (1978). She starred in Ann Perryâs Sweet Savage (1979) as Shy Dove, a Native American who falls in love with a cowboy. And she dated fellow adult actor Pepe Valentine, the pair briefly becoming the âitâ couple of porn.
So what does Beth Anna remember about her time in the industry? WellâŠitâs selective. Some of itâs on the tip of her tongue, as if itâs been waiting to be asked. Other experiences are more elusive – and whether theyâre hiding or just neglected isnât obvious.
In this episode of the Rialto Report, Beth Anna shares what she remembers about her time in the adult industry. And what she doesnât is just as much a part of her story. When music critics laud Eric Clapton as one of the best rock guitarists of all time, he always says the same thing: listen for the space between the notes.
This podcast episode is 60 minutes long.
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The post Beth Anna â Sweet & Savage: Podcast 162 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Zebedy Colt is one of least likely characters we expected to feature in a podcast interview when The Rialto Report first began.
For a start, Zebedy passed away in 2004 at the age of 74, after a wildly varied and peripatetic acting career that had started with small parts as a child actor in Hollywood in the 1930s and continued on to regional theater and summer stock across the country, including several Broadway productions. Along the way, he also had a parallel music career, recording an LP with the London Philharmonic Orchestra entitled, âI’ll Sing For You,â which consisted of torch standards about men, originally intended to be sung by women but sung by Zebedy from a gay perspective.
And then, in 1974, he lost his job when the theater he was working for folded due to financial problems, so he answered an ad in a New York newspaper that had been placed by Leonard Kirtman, perhaps the most prolific producer of low budget hardcore adult films in New York.
Far from being put off by the nature of the films that Leonard was making, Zebedy did the unexpected: he entered an industry that was known for being sleazy and taboo, and made it a lot more transgressive. Over the following decade, he moved effortlessly between well-regarded mainstream theatrical productions and making his own unique brand of violent and twisted pornographic films, such as Sex Wish (1975) (where he plays a crazed serial killer terrorizing the city), The Devil Inside Her (1977) (in which a woman sells her soul to the devil to get to the man she loves), and Unwilling Lovers (1977) (in which Zebedy is a killer with the mind of a child who lives in the backwoods with his domineering mother and a penchant for playing with corpses) to name but a few.
All very weird, and all very Zebedy. So who was this man who brought such a bizarre vision to the New York sex film scene?
As part of the research for the oral history of The Freaky Gang, Leonard Kirtmanâs gang of misfits who made films for his studio in the mid 1970s, we discovered a collection of audio interviews with Zebedy that give us the chance to listen to man himself instead of one of the crazy characters that he played on film. Sadly, many of these conversations have such poor sound quality that theyâre unfit to be presented as a podcast, but due to their rarity, we wanted to present one here.
It’s a conversation with Barbara Nitke, who worked as a still photographer on adult films sets. Unlike other Rialto Report podcasts, this isnât a career retrospective – instead itâs a free-ranging, casual conversation that took place in a bar in 1986. It finds Zebedy in a world-weary state of mind. Heâs at a crossroads, the mainstream acting roles are drying up, his music career hadnât taken off, and the adult film business had recently turned to video thus taking away the opportunity to make more of his strange psychodramas on 16mm.
This is Zebedy Colt. Shooting the Breeze.
This podcast is 32 minutes long.
Many thanks to Barbara Nitke for sharing the interview with us. You can find more details about her work at Barbaraâs website and hear our podcast interview with her here. Copies of her book, âAmerican Ecstasyâ, can be purchased here.
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Zebedy Colt*
The post Zebedy Colt â Shooting the Breeze with the Eccentric Thespian of XXX: Podcast 161 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Back in the day, everybody seemed to have an opinion about Ron Jeremy â and maybe that was part of his appeal.
He was probably the most ubiquitous of all male adult film stars, and certainly the most polarizing.
In the early days of The Rialto Report, I was keen to interview him. My interest has always been in tracking down stories from the golden age of adult cinema that have never been revealed â but even though Ronâs story had been told many times before, I was still keen to ask him about his life and career. After all, Ron was ranked by Adult Video News at No. 1 in their “50 Top Porn Stars of All Time” list, who described him as the most recognizable porn ambassador to the world, ranking him ahead of people like Jenna Jameson, Marilyn Chambers, and John Holmes. In addition to his hundreds of adult films â both as an actor and director, he appeared in countless mainstream movies and music videos, there was a documentary and a best-selling biography, he was hired for personal appearances all over the country, and he was a brand spokesperson for products that included rum, cigars, beef jerky, and of course, male enhancement pills.
I met up with him at his home in Los Angeles on several occasions, and we often spoke about doing an interview â or rather I listened to him talk in what seemed like one continuous sentence, unable to get a word in between all of his detailed anecdotes and memories.
And then came 2017, and the multiple allegations of years of sexual misdemeanors.
In truth, the stories had circulated for a long time before that. Itâs just that now they were suddenly taken more seriously in the era of Me Too, splashed across newspapers, magazines, and social media. Iâd heard the accusations for years too â just as Iâd interviewed people who worked with him, whoâd described him as respectful and considerate, Iâd also met ex-colleagues who criticized him for being predatory.
My interest was centered on his early career, which was why I was excited when I came across a previously unpublished interview with him from the late 1980s. It was a conversation between Ron and Barbara Nitke that took place in, where else, a New York diner, not far from Queens where Ron was born and raised. At the time, Barbara was carving out a career as a still photographer on adult film sets in New York, and she was putting together a book of her pictures that she intended to be accompanied by a series of interviews with the stars. The book, ‘American Ecstasy,’ was eventually published as a picture book with short clips from the interviews, many years later in 2012. Itâs a fine testament to the mid-1980s industry in crisis, transitioning from high budget, scripted film productions to smaller and cheaper video shoots.
When Barbara interviewed Ron, he was experiencing the same transition â and the same existential doubts that came with it. Barbara asks about this â and more, in this conversation, which is presented here for the first time. Remarkably, given this was almost 40 years ago, she also asks about the women who were refusing to work to him at the time.
Many thanks to Barbara Nitke for sharing the interview with us. You can find more details about her work at Barbara’s website and hear our podcast interview with her here. Copies of ‘American Ecstasy’ can be purchased here.
Thanks too to NSS for the audio restoration and mastering.
This podcast episode is 50 minutes long.
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The post The Gospel According to Ron Jeremy in 1986, with Barbara Nitke – Podcast 160 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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In 1964, Lorey Kaye, a twenty-year-old from New Haven, CT, moved to Manhattan to start a new life in the big city. Lorey was a fresh-faced, dark-haired hippie, who attracted attention as much for her headstrong, determined, street smart attitude as for her striking good looks. She was hired as a waitress in a new nightclub that had just opened in Times Square â called Steve Paul’s âThe Sceneâ.
The club was an immediate hit with gigs by the likes of BB King, Jimi Hendrix, and Sammy Davis Jr., regular visitors like Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick â and Lorey was at the heart of the action. Another group, The Lovin’ Spoonful, also played there regularly, and their lead singer, John Sebastian, took a shine to her. John and Lorey started seeing each other, and Lorey became his muse, inspiring him to compose a number of the groupâs hit singles about her, such as âSheâs A Ladyâ and âRain on the Roofâ, even mentioning her by name in some of the lyrics.
Lorey and John Sebastian (1967)
They got hitched in 1966 â by then Lorey had started work as an insider gossip columnist at Hit Parade magazine â and now known as Lorey Sebastian, she became a popular staple in the 1960s Greenwich Village folk-rock music scene.
Lorey and Johnâs relationship was glamorous, high-profile, and short-lived. Lorey broke up with John in 1968 when they were in Ireland. The legend is that she fell in with a group of gypsies, and felt compelled to tune in, drop out, and join them instead. It was said that John never fully recovered from the breakup.
Lorey (right), with John Sebastian and Mama Cass (1967)
Fast forward to the mid 1970s. Lorey was back in New York, now in her mid 30s and looking for a purpose. Sheâd become a member of the television and film workers union, with the vague ambition of being a still photographer on movie sets. To make a little extra money, she also did work as a crew member on sex films.
It was on a Gerry Damiano movie that she met Jamie Gillis. Jamie sidled up to her, pushing her in the back, and exclaiming, âWhat a place to bump into a girl like you!â It was corny but it worked, and Lorey invited him back to her place.
The mutual attraction was instant and sexual â but, for Jamie, there was something more this time. For a confirmed promiscuous bachelor, Jamie confided to friends that, whisper it quietly, Lorey might actually be the one. He spent time with her, encouraged her photography ambitions, taking her to exhibitions and galleries, and was tickled that one of his favorite songs, The Lovin’ Spoonfulâs âDaydream,â had been written for her.
Not to suggest that Jamieâs relationship with New York magazineâs Insatiable Critic, Gael Greene, was over. Far from it. Even if the novelty of Jamie and Gaelâs physical and emotional relationship had subsided, they were still intent on documenting their lives, in and out of bed, for a proposed joint-autobiographical book. They continued to go the cityâs restaurants, cultural events, and glamorous parties, while Jamie spent his in-between time wrestling with whether he wanted an acting career, playing poker, going to the occasional audition, and making semi-regular starring appearances in adult films. In short, Jamie wanted to pursue Lorey, but not give up the affair with Gael.
This is Part 2 of the story of Jamie Gillis and Gael Greene in 1978.
Jamie
This podcast is 49 minutes long.
Listen to Part 1 of The Porn Star and the Foodie: Jamie Gillis & Gael Greene in 1978 here.
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The post The Porn Star and the Foodie: Jamie Gillis & Gael Greene in 1978 Part 2, Lorey Sebastian – Podcast 159 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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In âTaxi Driver’ (1976), Travis Bickle railed against social decay, moral corruption, and the depraved filth he perceived in the near-bankrupt New York City of the mid 1970s. An insomniac, alienated Vietnam War vet, his taxi trips revealed the city to him as a “sewer” filled with “scum” that needed to be “cleansed”.
Around the same time, another taxi driver, a real one, Jamie Gillis, was also recording audio diaries in a similar way. Jamie worked in cabs on and off in the 70s while he acted in adult films and the occasional play. But his tapes were the opposite of Travis Bickleâs: Jamie reveled in the cityâs seediness and the sexual possibilities it offered, and he documented his days with a detail that was as graphic as it was honest.
And so, perhaps Jamie Gillis was what Travis Bickle feared: Jamie was the moral decay.
He was the other Taxi Driver.
Not to say that Jamie was untroubled. He was plagued by doubts, questions, and phobias – his âsicknessâ, he called it. He feared that the initial promise of the porn film business, that had made him a star of sorts after his leading turn in The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), was about to come crashing down â that adult films would never live up to his high expectations, that he was turning into a sexual jester, and that he would never fulfill his potential.
So what is the story behind his recordings?
In 1976, Jamie met Gael Greene, a well-known character in the city. She belonged to the blue bloods of Manhattan society, having been New York magazine’s high-profile restaurant critic for the previous decade. She was a smart, sleek, feline blonde, ten years older than Jamie, well known and well-regarded in polite and cultured circles. And she was obsessed by Jamieâs sexually wanton lifestyle.
They first met when she was promoting her erotic novel, âBlue Skies, No Candyâ: âHe knew my work. I knew his,â she later wrote.
Jamie stopped, picked up the book, read a few lines, and laughed. “You’re the food writer from New York magazine,â he said to her. âAnd your hero has my name.”
Gael replied: “And you’re that actor. From those movies.”
She described him at the time as young, surprisingly shy, with shiny black curls and perfect posture. Even better-looking in person, she noted. “You were wonderful in Misty Beethoven,” she told him.
“That was fun to make,” Jamie replied,” because I liked the woman in that one.”
“What do you do when you don’t like the woman?” Gael asked.
Jamie looked her straight in the eyes, and said, “I can always get myself in the mood.”
They started a relationship that was tempestuous and torrid. They were an odd couple, but well-suited too: Jamieâs business was sex and his passion was food. And Gaelâs interest and passion were, well, sex and food. She claimed that “the two greatest discoveries of the 20th century were the Cuisinart and the clitoris,” and she was quick to reach for sexual metaphors whenever describing the ecstasy of tasting food in the upper crust restaurants of the city. âSex and food have been completely intertwined since the beginning of time,â she said.
They saw each other often, dealing with the pleasures, jealousy, and complications that resulted. Gael couldnât get enough of Jamieâs sexual explorations, and Jamie slipped into her world â overnight becoming her guest at places that had never been available to him.
But Gael, the insatiable critic as she was called, wanted more from their union. She believed Jamie could, and should, be a big-name actor, and so she connected him with A-list players in the industry â auditions with directors like Mike Nichols, strategy meetings with super agents like Sue Mengers. She took him to Europe to try new restaurants, and stay with friends like Julia Childs.
And came the book: it was Gaelâs idea. She persuaded Jamie they should write their story by documenting their hedonistic life together. It would capture the era through the eyes of two disparate people with similar lusts and appetites. Jamie agreed: he figured that with Gaelâs literary track record and contacts, it could be a hit, raising his profile, and enabling him to fulfill his vague dream of becoming a full-time theater actor.
Gael suggested Jamie keep an audio diary for one year. He would tape his innermost thoughts, feelings, desires, and the crude, unexpurgated details of his everyday life in all its seamy detail. In return, she would add her own experiences â and they would turn it all into a biographical tale of two lovers crisscrossing 1970s New York, slipping between the cityâs high society events and its grimy porn film scene.
So Jamie started recording: but his tapes ended up being more than a diary. They document a spiral â a downward journey into a damaged soul as he dealt with questions that plagued him: ambition, sexuality, art, talent, lust, and love. The recordings that resulted â unfiltered after hours reflections, candid and honest, are presented here for the first time. Needless to say, turn off now if you are liable to be offended.
This is Part 1 of the story of Jamie Gillis and Gael Greene in 1978.
This podcast is 49 minutes long.
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The post The Porn Star and the Foodie: Jamie Gillis & Gael Greene in 1978 Part 1, The Other Taxi Driver – Podcast 158 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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It all started over thirty years ago. I thought it would be interesting to track down people whoâd been involved in the very first adult films because I was intrigued to learn what they remembered about the time â and find out how the experience had affected their lives afterwards.
Bear in mind, this was over 30 years ago, before the era of social media, search tools, and online databases, so I had no idea how difficult this endeavor would be.
But I also didnât know how unwelcome my inquiries would prove â even if I did manage to find anyone to talk to. After all, most of the early pioneers used different names to conceal their identities, and therefore protect their future lives.
A few of them â people like Annie Sprinkle, Jamie Gillis, or Ron Jeremy for example â were still around, quasi-public figures whoâd been interviewed many times about their history. But I was more interested in finding the bit-part players, lesser-known figures, people whose involvement had been short, before disappearing, presumably blending back into more conventional 9-5 existences. What did they think about their involvement in such a salacious, unprecedented activity years earlier?
One of these was the actor, Jeffrey Hurst. Heâd been a handsome, friendly-looking, more-than-competent actor back in early films, always entertaining and engaging, and not just because of his standard-issue, best-in-class, 1970s porno mustache. Who was he, and what was his story?
Well, his name wasnât Jeffrey Hurst for a start: I met a director whoâd known him and who reluctantly told me that his real name was Jeff Eagle. I misheard him – and so for the next five years, I searched high and low â and unsuccessfully â for an ex-sex film actor called ‘Jeff Feagle.’ Not my proudest moment, and a lot a wasted effort ensued.
And then I met someone who was still in touch with Jeff, and who told me that Jeff was now a massage therapist living a quiet life in Tucson, Arizona. Whatâs more, apparently Jeff loved talking about his semi-scandalous past. I contacted him, and quickly became friends with one of the sweetest people Iâve ever come across. And so, when I started The Rialto Report, my interview with Jeff was one of the first that I put out as a podcast.
Jeff died last November. He is much missed. This is our conversation.
This episode running time is 61 minutes.
Jeffrey Hurst photographs:
______________________________________________________________________________________The post Jeffrey Hurst (1947-2025), R.I.P. appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Jeanna Fine passed away last month.
If you’re a regular listener to The Rialto Report, youâll know that we like to interview a person from a different angle. Itâs a more intimate and personal exploration, rather than just revisiting someoneâs fleeting moments on camera. And it can be a challenge to convince someone to open up in that way.
Sometimes itâs quick and easy to persuade a person to talk, but many others are more difficult: some interviews have simply ended up being off the record, or subjects changed their minds after finishing the conversation. A few decided that their interview shouldnât be released until after they pass, while others just werenât very interesting.
And then there was my interview with Jeanna Fine.
Weâd originally contacted her for all the usual Rialto Report reasons: Jeanna had been one of the adult industryâs biggest, and longest lasting, A-list stars, and I was keen to hear her personal story. Sheâd first appeared in X-rated films in the mid 1980s â getting her name supposedly when Barbara Dare told her that Jeanna looked so fine. It was the tail period of the so-called âgolden ageâ, just as the business was changing into a more corporate, studio-driven, rinse-and-repeat video industry.
But there was nothing standard about Jeanna. She stood out from pack, fiercely individual, different from many other identikit, girl-next door performers, with her short platinum-blond spiky punk hair, or later, long dark hair that turned her into a scowling femme fatale. She was androgenous, full of confrontational attitude â and her scenes bristled with a bad-ass aggression. And Jeannaâs rebellious streak didnât seem confined to her appearance, and the word was that she would turn up to shoots when and where she felt like it, and sometimes not at all. Sometimes she made scores of films in a matter of weeks, and then disappeared for months, even years. She had a long-term, and volatile, relationship with fellow actress Savannah. Jeanna eventually walked away from it â just before Savannah killed herself. On one of her breaks from the world of X, she got married and had a son, only to return to making films a few years later. Her on/off career continued into the 2000s.
But, and thereâs always a but, I wanted to know more about the woman behind the strong, confident, and forthright exterior, this character so full of piss and vinegar. I sensed a vulnerability, that her glamorous life in front of the camera perhaps masked secrets that were a world away from adult films. In short, who was the woman that created Jeanna Fine?
So I reached out to her, and over the next 10 years, we became friends and confidants through a series of conversations, phone calls, emails, and texts.
When we first spoke, sheâd been living a rural life in upstate New York for over a decade, and was experiencing something of an existential crisis. She was at a crossroads in her life: sheâd experienced recent tragedies â the suicides of both her husband and brother, she was empty-nester, and she was trying to figure out what she should do next.
Intriguingly, she decided to emerge from anonymity and return to the X-rated industry. She turned up at an adult fan convention, sheâd set up a Twitter account (as it was back then), and had a friend show her how she could earn money with a web-cam.
But the return to the sex industry was problematic, and I could see that she hadnât expected the extent of the emotions, the old secrets and lies, that this new direction was bringing back to the surface. What was being stirred in her past, I wondered? Jeanna insisted that she was keen to do the interview â she announced it on Twitter â but I was worried that she was feeling fragile. This podcast is the result of that conversation.
With big thanks to Patrick Kindlon and Self Defense Family – for the wonderful monologue, and to Steven Morowitz and Melusine – for the Video-X-Pix photographs.
This podcast is 52 minutes long.
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Jeanna Fine – Video-X-Pix photos*
Jeanna Fine portfolio*
The post Jeanna Fine: The Lost Interview – Podcast 157 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Regular listeners will know that over the last few years, Iâve spoken to many female adult film actors who were active from the 1960s through to the late 1980s, and, as interesting as their experiences were, it also made me intrigued to find out what it was like to be a male in the business during the same time.
So a few months ago, I contacted actor/director/agent and X-rated film producer, Bud Lee, to hear about his life â which I was curious to hear about, not only because of his career, but also due to his marriages to two of the biggest stars of the 1980s and 90s, Hyapatia Lee and Asia Carrera.
In the first part of my conversation with Bud, he spoke about how he got into the industry with Hyapatia and the struggles they encountered being a couple in the business. This episode picks up in the late 1980s, when their relationship broke down just while Budâs career making films for companies such as Vivid, Playboy, and Adam and Eve, was taking off. And Bud is still working today â filming scenes and being an agent â and he reflects on the significant changes that heâs seen in the industry, as well as the people involved.
You can hear Part 1 of the podcast here.
We have also included the transcript of an episode of the Donahue television show from 25 November 1986 which featured a conversation with Bud Lee, Hyapatia Lee, Jeanna Fine, Tony Rush, Nina Hartley, and David Hartley. The full episode can be viewed here.
This podcast is 49 minutes long.
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Bud Lee and Hyapatia Lee – on the Donahue show: full transcript*
The post Bud Lee â From Hyapatia and Asia to Only Fans, Part 2 â Podcast 156 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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The adult film business is unique in that it has usually focused on women as the figureheads and main stars, and therefore often relegated men to the background.
Over the last years, Iâve spoken to many female adult actors – from the 1960s through to the late 1980s, and itâs been interesting to see how their memories, experiences, and lives were affected as the sex film business changed.
But I also wanted to hear from someone on the other side of the equation – and find out what it was like to be a male in the business, perhaps a partner of a major sex film star, or someone who was a performer, director, or agent in the business.
Bud Lee is unique in that he has been â and still is â all of these things and more. And whatâs remarkable about his life is that it mirrors the history of the industry itself: consider this – after meeting and marrying Hyapatia Lee, one of the biggest stars of the 1980s, they appeared in adult films together, before Bud became a director for adult industry mogul, Harry Mohney, directing large and expensive productions like âThe Ribald Tales of Canterburyâ before working for Vivid Video, one of the biggest production companies of the era. Then Bud married Asia Carrera, one of the biggest names of the 1990s adult film industry, making films for Playboy and Adam and Eve, before becoming a talent agent. Today heâs still filming, for performers wanting content for their OnlyFans accounts – a far cry from the golden age, and a stark reflection of just how much the business has changed.
All this from someone who had no background in the sex film business before he met Hyapatia back in the 1970s – in fact he was a plumber whoâd briefly considered divinity school and a theological life.
This podcast is 65 minutes long.
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Bud and Hyapatia LeeBud and Hyapatia Lee, 1984 AFAA red carpet
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The post Bud Lee – From Hyapatia and Asia to Only Fans, Part 1 – Podcast 155 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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In 1979, Dennis Posa was on the verge of stardom. Against all odds, as Dennis Parker, heâd just released a disco record on a major recording label and was managed by the same team responsible for many of the biggest disco acts of the time. I say, against all odds, because less than 10 years earlier, heâd been a college dropout, the product of a difficult childhood on Long Island who struggled with his sexuality, who had moved to New York to unsuccessfully pursue a career as a theater actor.
Dennis was always a collection of contradictions: he was a private loner â who could also be the popular and gregarious center of attention socially; he took a desk job on Madison Avenue like a latter day backroom character in âMad Menâ but he dreamed of acting and singing; he seemed happiest when he was in his beloved apartment painting a landscape or doing his carpentry listening to his jazz records but he also enjoyed hitting the road on his motorbike and driving across the country, or hanging out in the cityâs gay bars at night.
And then in the mid 1970s came adult film stardom â in straight sex films no less. His face â and body â adorning movie posters and adult film screens across the country as one of the industryâs top stars.
That level of fame would be eclipsed however when he met the superstar disco music producer, Jacques Morali. They became a couple, and Jacques wanted to cast him as one of the Village People, before deciding to make Dennis a solo star. They recorded an album for Casablanca Records.
This is what happened next.
This podcast is 38 minutes long.
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When Dennisâ LP, âLike an Eagle,â was released in 1979, the promotional rollercoaster started in earnest.
Early that year, Dennis made an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show. This was a big deal. The Merv Griffin Show was an American television talk show institution. It had run from 1962, and by the late 1970s was one of the most prestigious shows for celebrities to appear on. It was nominated for Emmy awards most years, and more often than not, won them. Just take a look at the guest list on the day that Dennis first appeared on it: it featured Glenda Jackson, David Soul of Starsky and Hutch, and Brooke Shields. Needless to say, Dennis sung âLike an Eagleâ. Sadly, recordings of the episode have never been released, so we have to rely on the memories of those who tuned in to see it – and they vary somewhat.
Henri Belolo, Dennisâ record producer, was over the moon: âI was just so happy to see Dennis on television,â he remembered. âDennis was broadcast from coast to coast singing his heart out, and that was when there were just three or four TV channels â so everyone in the country could see him.â
For Skip St. James, Dennisâ ex-partner from the early 1970s, the memories have a bittersweet tinge: âI didnât see much of Dennis after he moved in with Jacques,â he said. âThen one night, out of the blue, he invited me over for dinner, and he turned on the Merv Griffin show, and there he was singing âLike an Eagleâ on TV â all dressed up in shiny silver clothes. Heâd invited me over because he wanted me there to share it. I was impressed, although it was strange seeing him sing that kind of music. He hated disco and he hated dancing! Dennis was a jeans-and-leather guy, and was clearly uncomfortable in that silver lameâ jumpsuit. I thought he looked ridiculous. And when he smiled⊠it was like neon on his teeth. They were way too bright. But he was very proud of it, and I was very proud of him for it. We stayed in touch, but I never saw him again after that evening.â
As for Steven Gaines, the co-writer of the big two songs on Dennisâ album, âLike an Eagleâ and âNew York By Nightâ, well, his memory was less favorable: âWhen Dennis premiered âLike an Eagleâ on the Merv Griffin Show,â he said, âI invited a whole bunch of people over to my house. We all watched and suddenly Dennis appeared â and he looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz! And he couldnât really dance or move either. It was very artificial and clumsy. It was so bad that we started laughing. There were six or seven of us there just rolling around on the floor because it was so bad.â
Whatever people thought, Dennis was a hit, and he was in demand: he went on to make more television show appearances, including further bookings on The Merv Griffin Show, including a disco-themed episode on May 3, 1979, where he appeared with The Village People, The Ritchie Family, Patrick Juvet, and his partner, Jacques Morali.
Jacques felt that it was his responsibility to get Dennis maximum exposure for the new record, and so he set up a list of high-profile engagements that included The Mike Douglas Show, another high-rated chat show, and an appearance in a French feature film âMoniqueâ (1978), which featured âLike an Eagleâ as its theme song. A special mention should also be made of an appearance on a French television show called Exclusif, which is effectively a music video for âLike An Eagle.â You can still see it on YouTube and itâs glorious. In it, Dennis stands underneath the marquee of the Broadway Theater on 53rd Street singing âLike an Eagleâ, before striding through the streets delivering an extravagant rendition, and getting a perplexed reaction from the New York commuters around him. He looks great, and you have to admire his absolute commitment. Itâs peak Dennis Parker, disco star.
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All this attention meant that Dennis was suddenly a celebrity around town, and nowhere was that more evident than on the nightlife scene. He was a regular at Studio 54, where there were lines around the block to get in, but Dennis was welcomed with open arms and ushered behind the famous velvet rope into the VIP area. Dennis may have been an awkward disco star, sometimes uncomfortable with all the glitz and glamor and preferring the quieter jazz clubs, but he did love the night life â and the admiration that brought him. And that attention came in droves – from men and women, and Dennis didnât turn many opportunities down. and he was still getting great reviews for his performances. One friend, James Dunn, remembered: âDennis became a great sex symbol after his record hit. People â men and women â would go wild over him. It just seemed weird to me. But I can tell you one thing: I knew a guy who went to bed with him. I asked him, âWhat was it like?â, and he said, âOh my God⊠I donât know even what he did to me. It was incredible.â
Dennis was living the high life, and the publicity firestorm surrounding him wasnât confined to America either. As Henri Belolo remembered: âWe took Dennis to Europe on a promotional tour because we had strong connections with our record companies there. First, he went to France, then around Europe, where he did many TV show appearances.â
Dennisâ travel itinerary at the time was like a member of a royal family: over the first summer, he made four promotional trips to Europe, visiting France and Spain. Then he went to Italy, where he headlined a âSave Veniceâ festival. Next was Medina in Morocco where a huge public party was held in his honor, Rio where he stayed with Ursula Andress, the ex-wife of John Derek, whoâd directed him in âLove Youâ, and then to Majorca where Jacques commissioned a large â and expensive â portrait of Dennis from a renowned artist, which he wanted to place over the headboard of his bed back in New York.
Jacques accompanied Dennis on every trip â they were still a couple, despite the temptations that both of them succumbed to regularly â but in the interests of selling records, they decided it would be better for Dennis to present himself in public as an unattached, straight male â so they would concoct elaborate stories for the media to build Dennisâ image as a heterosexual, playboy lady-killer, complete with accompanying pictures showing him embracing a selection of beauties.
Hereâs an extract from a breathless article from a magazine at the time: â(Dennis) first stop was Paris, where (he) met and promptly fell for a Parisian beauty named Michelle. She was the costume designer for a hot Paris nightspot, The Crazy Horse Saloon. Through Michelle, Dennis met the star of the Crazy Horse show, Lova Moor, and soon the trio packed up and took off for the south of France.â
Dennisâ friend, James Dunn, remembered Dennis finding this subterfuge amusing: âWhen (Dennis) came back from his latest European trip, (he) would joke about the love affairs theyâd invented for him. Jacques had so many contacts with women in show business it was easy for them to arrange.â
Dennis, avec beards, in South of France
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Back in New York, Jacques had his eye on the next stage of his plan for disco domination â and he figured it was time for them all to make a move into film. Jacques had been impressed with the musical films, âSaturday Night Feverâ (1977) and âGreaseâ (1978). Even though he wasnât a fan of the music featured in either, he wanted in, so he became friends with Allan Carr, whoâd done the famous ad campaign for Saturday Night Fever, and had co-produced Grease, which, thanks in part to his promotional prowess, had become one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
At first, Jacques and Allan hit it off. Allan was a powerful powerbroker with an interesting backstory: in the 1960s, heâd worked behind the scenes at Playboy with Hugh Hefner and was a co-creator of the Playboy Penthouse television series, which in turn launched the Playboy Clubs. His career really took off in 1966, when he founded a talent agency which managed actors, like Tony Curtis, Peter Sellers, and Ann-Margret, and then produced a string of television specials with stars such as Joan Rivers, Paul Anka, and Cass Elliot of The Mamas and the Papas. Side note: it was Allan Carr who was responsible for the invention of the story that Cass Elliot had died by choking on a ham sandwich. Apparently, he thought that the story â even though deeply humiliating to Mama Cass â was preferable to the reality that her death was actually drug-related.
And then there was the fact that Allan was gay. It was no real secret, even though he never formally acknowledged it publicly. His personality was legendarily larger than life â just like Jacques, and together he and Jacques were drawn into a stormy creative relationship. Jacquesâ idea was a to make a musical comedy feature film, based on a fictionalized biography of The Village People, and it would also include his other stars like the Ritchie Family. âIt will be like âGreaseââ he boasted, âexcept with better music.â With such stellar talent at his disposal, and with Allanâs track record, how could it fail to be a success?
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So in 1979, Jacques and Henri Belolo teamed up with Allan Carr to make the film, âCanât Stop the Music.â Allan Carr insisted on writing it and he made sure he steered clear of addressing the band members’ presumed homosexuality in the script. In fact, it bore only a vague resemblance to the actual story of the groupâs formation. All of this annoyed Jacques, who became disappointed with the direction it was taking â but he was even more angry when Allan insisted on having casting approval, and turned down Jacquesâ request to make Dennis one of the stars.
Henri Belolo remembered the conflict well: âJacques pushed really hard to have Dennis have a big part in the movie. It was a good idea â Dennis was a good actor, but for some reason, Allan was always jealous about Dennis. Allan like to fool around young and good-looking boys, and maybe Dennis was just getting too much attention. Either way, he didnât want Dennis in the movie. So Jacques and Allan had a huge ego fight. I had to fly to California to mediate in the middle of shooting.â
In the end, Dennis didnât get a part in the big budget movie. Steve Gutenberg was cast in the role of Jacques, and didnât do a bad job. Certainly, better than Caitlyn Jenner, who as Bruce Jenner back then, is miscast as a lawyer.
When the movie was ready for release, Allan orchestrated wall-to-wall media coverage, which included a lavish series of premieres and a television special that co-starred Hugh Hefner and Cher. And though Dennis wasnât in the movie, he can be seen at all the promotional events and premiere parties.
They say timing is everything, and sure enough, when âCanât Stop the Musicâ was released in 1980, the disco craze was declining and the film was a major flop at the box office, losing millions. In fact, Allan Carr won the first annual Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture in 1981.
For Dennis, it was a case of conflicting emotions. Heâd yearned to be in a major motion picture, but on this occasion, he was happy to have avoided being part of such a turkey.
Jacques was less philosophical however. Discoâs waning popularity â as well as the stress of the filmâs flop â was beginning to take its toll on him, and he became withdrawn and depressed. This had an effect on Dennis and Jacquesâ relationship which started to cool. They remained friendly, but eventually Dennis moved back into his apartment on East 38th St where he started living with a new partner⊠who was his old partner, his former boyfriend, Joey Alan Phipps.
James Dunn remembered, âDennis always had a thing for Joey, even when he was with Jacques. I guess he never let Joey go. So they started being a couple all over again.â
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When Dennis split up with Jacques, he decided to return to acting. Jacques was crestfallen: they remained friends, but now, not only had he lost Dennis as a romantic partner, but Dennis wasnât interested in their music partnership either. In truth, Dennis had never been truly interested in cashing in on his disco celebrity or even recording a follow-up to âLike an Eagleâ. Sure, heâd enjoyed the limelight, the glamor, and the money while it lasted, but he didnât feel authentic in the disco scene â and he always had that nagging feeling that he was better suited to acting.
But Dennis was proud too, and this time he wanted to do it his own way, on his own terms. He rejected Jacquesâ offer to make some calls and set up meetings with TV and film studio execs. He wanted to start at the bottom, and liked the idea of establishing a career purely on his own merit â and so he set out all over again, just like he had done ten years previously, and started turning up at auditions, usually for small roles, some of them non-speaking parts. His friends were surprised: here was a guy whoâd just been on primetime television, featured in magazines all over the world for his recording career, and here he was seemingly happy to be a struggling actor again.
But the procession of auditions didnât last long, and Dennis was soon offered a leading part on a TV series. As his brother Richard remembered: âDennis told me went to a casting call for a role as an extra, but the producers really liked him, and so they offered him a full recurring role.â
The show in question was âThe Edge of Night.â
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âThe Edge of Nightâ was a popular daytime show: it was a long-running television mystery crime series and was produced by Procter & Gamble â the huge American multinational consumer goods corporation. If it seems strange that a company known for its household cleaning goods was producing TV shows, it actually wasnât: Procter & Gamble had produced and sponsored the first radio serial dramas back in the 1930s â and soon after that, other similar companies, like Colgate-Palmolive and Lever Brothers, followed suit and did the same. This business model became established, and with the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the new serials were sponsored, produced, and owned by these companies. And as Proctor and Gamble had been the first, and was known for Ivory Soap, these serials were referred to as âsoap operas.â In fact, itâs a model that still continues to the present day: this year, for example, Proctor and Gamble were co-producing a successful daytime drama about a wealthy Black family with CBS.
Over the years, Proctor and Gamble have enjoyed their association with the entertainment industry, increasing the brand awareness of their products and making profits from the shows. The only major hiccup was in 1972 â and that was caused by an event that was beyond their control. What happened there was they selected a young actress to be the figurehead of a new advertising campaign for their flagship product, Ivory Snow soap. The actress was Marilyn Briggs, who was starting out in films and had just appeared in a Barbra Streisand film, âThe Owl and the Pussycatâ (1970).
Proctor and Gamble liked her, and anointed her âthe Ivory Snow Girlâ, and soon her beaming innocent, clean-cut face appeared on the soap flake box, posing as a mother holding a baby under the tag line â99 & 44/100% pure.â The campaign was a resounding success, both for the company and for Marilyn, who figured sheâd hit the big time. She decided to capitalize so she moved to San Francisco, mistakenly thinking that the city was the entertainment capital of the world. After struggling to find work, she changed direction and appeared as Marilyn Chambers in a pornographic film, Behind the Green Door (1972). It proved to be an inspired casting choice by Jim and Artie Mitchell, the filmâs producers, not just because Marilyn was a charismatic and attractive star for their film, but also because when they realized Marilyn had been the star of the Ivory Snow campaign, they saw a golden marketing opportunity. They billed Marilyn as being â99 and 44/100% impureâ and instantly created a nationwide scandal. Procter & Gamble tried to distance themselves by dropping her, but Marilyn’s image was already so well-known from the Ivory Snow campaign that the damage was done. The film’s ticket sales rocketed, television talk shows joked about it, and âBehind the Green Doorâ became one of the most successful adult films of all time. Whether the whole affair hurt, or even helped, sales of Ivory Snow, Proctor and Gamble were left red-faced and determined to do whatever they needed to to never be associated with the adult film industry again.
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When Dennis was offered a starring role in âThe Edge of Nightâ, he didnât tell Proctor and Gamble, or the production team, about his adult film past. It wasnât that he was hiding it. According to his friends, he just didnât think it was relevant. Heâd had a whole other career in music since the last of his X-rated films, and no one had had a problem with the porn films then so why should they care now?
Besides, he didnât want to do anything that would jeopardize his big chance. Getting a role on âThe Edge of Nightâ was an important career step for him: the show had debuted on CBS in 1956, and ran as a live broadcast until 1975 when it moved to ABC. By the late 1970s, it was one of the most loved shows on the ABC network with a loyal following. The thing was, âThe Edge of Nightâ was no simple, romantic daytime soap. Rob Foy, a production assistant on the show, remembered: ââIt wasnât really a soap opera at all. It was a hybrid of a crime drama with some of the elements of a melodrama. So you had the cops, forensics, and attorneys dealing with cases, at the same time you also had romantic, marital, and family issues.â
Dennis was over the moon with his contract on the show. He had walked out of a promising career as an international disco heartthrob backed by one of the hottest record producers around into a leading role on a highly-rated national TV show. How did that happen? According to Rob Foy, it was down to one man. As he recalled, âIt was Erwin Nicholson that hired Dennis. âNickâ was the long-standing producer for the show, and under his guidance, âThe Edge of Nightâ got only the second Emmy ever given for a daytime drama. Well, Nick was smitten with Dennis, and loved him from the start. Nicholson was like a mentor to Dennis.â
The show was filmed on the seventh floor of a nondescript brick building at E.U.E. Studios at 222 East 44th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, just a few blocks from his apartment. When Dennis joined the cast, he quickly became one of the most popular members of the team. Sharon Gabet, one of Dennisâ co-stars, remembered him fondly when I contacted her. She said, âThe production was unique in that it was a half hour show. We shot it like it was live, meaning we would all shoot at the same time on the set as opposed to waiting in your dressing room until your scenes were up. So the regulars all became very close friends, and I worked with Dennis all the time. My character was engaged to his, and was using him terribly in the script. Poor Dennis! He was so good on that show.â
When I asked Sharon about Dennisâ abilities as an actor, she was unequivocal: âDennis was excellent. He really was. It wasnât an easy part to play. There was a lot of acting, but he managed to be sensitive and manly at the same time. He was really, really good in that part.â
Dennis big-time acting gig seemed to be going smoothly, but after the first few episodes were aired, the production company started receiving anonymous phone calls. Someone familiar with Dennisâ sex films had phoned in to complain: what was an ex-porn star doing in a family TV show?
The production team for âThe Edge of Nightâ had a problem. This was the sort of scandal that could sink a family show. Dennis found out about the anonymous calls from a production assistant, and according to Larry Engler, a member of the production team, he decided to take matter into his own hands: âDennis called a meeting with the bosses,â Larry remembered. âHe told them about what heâd done. Nicholson, the top producer, replied that he was doing a great job and that it didnât matter. He should just keep going and nothing was going to change that.â
But Proctor and Gamble had to be informed. The memory of the Marilyn Chambers public relations disaster still lingered within the company, and Dennisâ past was going to be a problem. As Rob Foy, a production assistant on the show, remembered: âThe way it was handled was secretive. Proctor & Gamble got involved and they were unhappy with the situation.â
Nicholson, the showâs producer, had a fight on his hands, but he stood firm. He was a formidable character: he went to speak to Proctor and Gamble senior management, and made a determined case for why Dennis was completely indispensable to the show. On the face of it, the argument was a mismatch, with the international corporate giant on one side and a TV producer on the other, but remarkably, Nicholson won the day, and Dennis was allowed to stay.
The production team was jubilant. Theyâd been nervous about the effect it could have on the showâs future, but they also saw the humor: Sharon Gabet remembered: âWhen we first found out about Dennisâ past, we all loved it. We thought it was hilarious. His films were frequently running nearby in Times Square at the time so weâd go there and just look at the marquees!â
If anything, Dennisâ position was strengthened by the whole affair. As Sharon Gabet remembered: âDennis got a lot of teasing on the set, but he was always a gentleman. He was such a nice guy. You could tell when you talked to him about his past that he was so proud of his adult film work. We got a kick out of that. He was not ashamed at all. He felt he did the best he could in every role that he had. He was very humble but very proud of his work. I mean, he was a star! He was a porn star! And the writers would play along too. Theyâd put the name âWade Nicholsâ into the scripts! That was their joke all the time. It was hysterical.â
And it wasnât just Dennisâ adult career that was made fun of â his disco music was also the subject of affectionate ribbing. According to Sharon: âThe producers would play his song âLike an Eagleâ on the set between takes. Weâd all just roar. Dennis played along. He was witty, intelligent, and really funny.â
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And so, Dennis went on to make appear in 142 episodes of the daytime soap opera â one of the most frequently-appearing actors in the TV seriesâ long history â and recognition came from all quarters. Richard Posa, Dennisâ brother, remembered, âMy mother was very proud of Dennisâ soap opera success. She kept scrapbooks of all the articles and pictures that she could find of him.â And Carter Stevens, who had directed Dennis in adult films, remembered: âMy daughter hit puberty just when Dennis was becoming successful on âThe Edge of Nightâ. She had an enormous crush on him. Iâd stayed in touch with him so I mentioned this to him, and a few days later a four-page letter arrived with half a dozen signed publicity shots for her. He was that kind of guy.â
Dennis used his TV celebrity to become active in fund-raising activities for a pet welfare organization called Bide-A-Wee Animal Shelter, which was just down the block from his apartment, and he also made personal appearances to raise money for autistic children.
And Dennis was enjoying a happy home life as well with Joey, in their beloved apartment where they would host dinner parties for fellow âEdge of Nightâ cast members. Joey was trying make a career for himself as an actor, and so Dennis persuaded the âThe Edge of Nightâ producers to hire Joey as an actor. In 1980, Joey was given the part of a character who was a puppeteer suspected of murder. He appeared in 23 episodes of the show but his involvement in the soap wasnât as successful as Dennisâ and after a few weeks, he was replaced unexpectedly with little explanation. Joey didnât have any significant acting parts after that, his only role of note coming as an understudy in Robert Altmanâs Broadway revival of âCome Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Deanâ, which featured Karen Black, Cher, and Kathy Bates.
For Dennis though, his life had finally turned out exactly as he wanted. After years of struggling, or working in the shadows of the adult industry, or in a music career that made him uncomfortable, he was where he wanted to be. In an interview he gave in 1982, he said: âI couldnât have been more pleased than when I landed the role on âThe Edge of Night.â I had a wonderful time traveling around the world in the fast lane but I wasnât happy with the music I was doing. The kind of music thatâs popular today, the kind the record company wanted me to do, just isnât my kind of music. Iâm still singing â but Iâm singing blues and jazz, not disco.â
In his spare time, he hung out with friends in jazz clubs, he entered a dance contest with Sharon Gabet â which they won, he made everyone laugh when he turned up each week to play in the âEdge of Nightâ softball team in the tightest shorts, and his friends still remember the joints he rolled as being big as babyâs forearms.
For the first time, he was happy being recognized in public as a celebrity. One friend, Andrew Rubinstein, remembered, âDennis wasnât crazy ambitious. I think he would have been happy being a daytime soap actor for the rest of his life, and he could have found work forever doing that. At the same time, he started to be curious about whether he could make it as a film actor. Once he made a name for himself on TV, he started to think about auditioning for bigger parts in movies. He looked at rugged actors like Harrison Ford, and thought⊠why not me?â
After a career as a star of adult films, then disco music, and then TV, could there be another chapter in store in Dennisâ life?
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This is a quote from my conversation with Richard Posa, Dennisâ brother: âIn the spring of 1984, Dennis called me and said he wasnât feeling well. He was having bad night sweats and felt weak. So he took some time off from âThe Edge of Nightâ. When he returned to the show, they did their best to cover up his physical deterioration. They were careful to shoot around his frailty. They had him sitting at desks and things like that.â
For Dennis, always concerned about his physical appearance, his first worry was that the illness meant he didnât look as handsome as he wanted to be. This sent him into a tailspin of self-doubt.
I asked Sharon Gabet what she remembered about how Dennis looked at this time. She said: âWe all noticed something was wrong, of course, because he started losing a lot of weight. He looked sick. He was white as a sheet. Yes, he was vain, but what actor isnât? Everyone would fight to get to the mirror. We teased him about it all the time. But we could see he was losing energy. The word on the set at the time was that he had mono. He never said anything. He was quiet about it.â
Friends told me that eventually Dennis went to see a doctor, who diagnosed that he had AIDS.
Henri Belolo, Dennis old record producer, still saw Dennis socially, and he was one of the first people who Dennis told about his illness. Henri told me: âPoor guy. AIDS. That was a horrible time. Except we didnât call it AIDS, we called it Kaposiâs sarcoma. We didnât know what was happening, and it was frightening.â
Dennisâ partner Joey tended to him throughout his illness, but understandably, the diagnosis took a toll on Dennis. âHe started getting grumpy,â Sharon Gabet remembered. âWe all felt terrible later because we were mean to him. Nobody got away with anything on set, so weâd say things like, âOh, come on, Dennis. Stop being so grumpy! It was very, very sad because no one knew he had AIDS. To be honest, no one really even knew what AIDS was then.â
Eventually, Dennis was unable to continue working on âThe Edge of Nightâ, and his character was written out of the show. His last episode aired on October 18, 1984, just 12 days shy of his fifth anniversary of his first air date on the show.
You can see Dennisâ last appearances on YouTube. Itâs a sad experience. This was less than seven years after he had played virile, athletic, sexually attractive lead characters in sex films, five years after people across the country had lusted over him seeing him singing on The Merv Griffin Show, a couple of years after heâd started running across the TV screen as a police captain. These final scenes show a thinner Dennis, looking tired and weary, and moving with difficulty.
A few years ago, Sharon Gabet, went back and re-watched the final 18 months of the show. She hadnât seen it in over 30 years: she found Dennisâ deterioration on camera shocking. âLooking back,â she remembered, âitâs pretty evident to me that Dennis was dying. He would just have enough energy to give his lines and then you would find him asleep in the chair or laying on one of the couches. He just couldnât do it anymore. They kept cutting his part back.â
Dennis left the show, and âThe Edge of Nightâ was cancelled a few months later.
He was treated at the Cabrini Medical Center near where he lived in mid-town Manhattan, and his mother returned to New York to be with him. Painfully aware of his physical deterioration, he didnât want to see anyone, and that included friends, present and past. His one-time partner, Skip St. James, remembered: âI wasnât in close contact with Dennis but I didnât visit him because I heard he didnât want anyone to see the way he looked. I remember seeing âThe Edge of Nightâ before he had to leave. He looked so bad.â
His brother Richard, remembered that on his 38th birthday, in October 1984, Dennis said that he was determined it would not be his last birthday. He said he would have other birthdays. He died three months later to the day on January 28th, 1985 in the same apartment in New York in which heâd been living since the late 1960s.
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The aftermath of Dennisâ passing was characterized by rumors that heâd killed himself.
Henri Belolo remembered: âThere was a mystery about the way he died. I mean, we know that he caught AIDS. But some people say that he died because he shot himself with a gun. Perhaps itâs because they want to create more drama, who knows?â Skip St. James heard the same stories: âA friend called me up and said that Dennis had shot himself. That was the rumor for a time. There were so many conflicting stories.â Sharon Gabet heard that Dennis had died just after she gave birth: âWhen they gave me the news that Dennis had died, the words AIDS were never used. No one knew about it.â Even the obituary that appeared in Variety didnât mention AIDS, just referring instead to âa brief illness.â The same obituary also omitted any mention of his adult film career.
Dennis died young, at the age of 38. And what happened to those who shared their lives with him?
Skip St James, the first partner Dennis lived with in New York, was alive and well when I researched this story, and generously shared his memories.
Joey Phipps who cared for Dennis at the end, went to live in California after Dennisâ death. In the early 1990s, he too contracted AIDS. This was a different era than when Dennis had contracted the illness. By now, cocktails of drugs were available which could have saved Joey. Unfortunately, he had other health issues and his body rejected the new drugs. Joey tried a variety of alternative cures. The costs were high, and he declared bankruptcy in 1995. Joey passed away on December 6th, 1996.
As for Jacques Morali, after the huge disco successes of the 1970s, his career had gone quiet for a few years. In 1990, several years after Dennisâ passing, Jacques gave a rare interview, and reflected on his career: âI think that the respect (for the work Iâve done) will come one day,â he said. âPerhaps after I die. Iâve had AIDS for five years, and most of my hits were back before I was ill.â
When he was asked for his happiest memory out of all the hundreds of artists heâd recorded with and the thousands of songs heâd produced, Jacques paused and said: âDennis Parker. I was completely in love with him. It was Dennis who sung âLike an Eagleâ. When Dennis died, it completely shook me.â
Jacques died of AIDS in 1991. He was buried in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in France.
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Iâve heard it say that when you write a biography of someone, you end up revealing more about yourself than you do about the subject. And I guess that might be true with this profile of Dennis Posa. Over the past three episodes, I recorded facts, memories, and opinions. They tell the outline of Dennisâ life and the road markings of his journey – but do they reveal who he really was? Do you feel like youâd know him now if he walked into your life? Iâm not sure I do. But PERHAPS the mystery of life isnât a problem to solve but rather a reality to experience. Iâll keep looking out for Dennis on Eighth Avenue, outside the theaters, inside the bars, and whenever I walk past his apartment on East 38th St.
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The post Wade Nichols: âLike an Eagleâ â His Untold Story Part 3: The Soap Opera King – Podcast 154 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Iâve always loved movies, especially the films I grew up with in the 1970s. I was seduced by their gritty realism, social commentary, complex characters, and a more honest portrayal of the human condition. And I was fan of that generation of film stars too: always surprising, sometimes conflicted figures, artists more than the celebrities that we have today. Movie genres seemed less important to me, so when I first saw Wade Nichols in an adult film on the big screen, it had just as big effect on me as, say, seeing Brando in âThe Godfatherâ, De Niro in âTaxi Driver,â or that fish thing in âJaws.â
Ever since then, it feels that Wade Nichols has always been a part of my life, never far away from my thoughts. Iâve sometimes found myself wondering what it wouldâve been like if Wade Nicholâs career had continued into the mainstream.
Wade Nichols is Indiana Jones in âRaiders of the Lost Ark,â perhaps.
Or how about John McLane in âDie Hard.â
Mr. Miyagi in âThe Karate Kid.â
Ok, scrub that last one. The point is that he captured my imagination in a way that was just as powerful as many of the recognized greats, and so I wondered about the possible twists and turns of his life that were prevented by his death.
Years ago, I turned my attention to finding who he really was, and perhaps also, why heâd remained important to me ever since my teenage years. That disproportionate impact of an early moment in your life that is instrumental in creating your adult sense of self.
This is Wade Nichols: âLike An Eagleâ â His Untold Story. This is Part 2.
Parental Advisory Warning for those not familiar with The Rialto Report: this podcast episode contains disco music. This may be disturbing for younger listeners who may wish to switch off. As for the rest of you, clear a space on the dance floor and letâs get down.
This podcast is 42 minutes long.
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In 1975, Donna Summer was a little-known American singer whoâd been living in Germany for eight years where sheâd appeared in stage musicals. One day, she was playing around with a single lyric, âLove to Love You Baby,â which she sang to an Italian musician and record producer, Giorgio Moroder. He liked the hook, and came back a few days later, having turned it into a three-minute disco song. He suggested to Donna they record it together. She wasnât sure about the idea, mainly because the whole thing that Giorgio had come up with just sounded so damn sexual. In the end, she agreed to sing it as a demo which they could give to someone else. So she did, but the trouble was that her erotic moans and groans so impressed everyone who heard it that, they decided to release it as a Donna Summer single anyway, and âLove to Love Youâ went on to become a small-time hit in Europe.
Fast forward a few weeks, and a tape of the song found its way to Neil Bogart, who was the president of Casablanca Records in the U.S. He listened, liked it, and decided to play it at a party at his home the same night. Next day, Bogart got Moroder on the phone. There was a problem with the song, he said: at the party, heâd started playing the song and approached a girl, but by the time heâd started speaking to her, the three-minute single had come to an end. So he had to run back to the tape deck, rewind it, and start playing it again before resuming his pick-up lines with the girl. Just as he got to the stage of propositioning her, the damn song ended again. Same drill: rewind the tape, and start it over again. A few minutes later, he was at the point of asking the girl to join him in the bedroom when, you guessed it, the song finished once more. So, as Bogart protested to Moroder, âHow is this meant to work?â
Giorgio threw the question back to him: âHow long do you need to meet a girl, chat her up, seal the deal, take her to the boudoir, and do the deed?â he asked.
Bogart paused, doing the sexual math in his head: âI reckon sixteen minutes should be enough,â he said.
And so, sure enough, Moroder and Donna Summer made a recording of the song that lasted just over 16 minutes, and released that version in the U.S. In fact, it took up the entire first side of the album of the same name. But it worked, and the single hit number one on the Dance chart and became one of the great disco songs of all time. I once read that a group of scientists estimated than 1.5 million babies had been conceived to that 16-minute record.
The time was right for music and explicit sex to be combined. And so who was better placed to take advantage than Dennis Parker?
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1976Letâs go back to 1976. They say when a man makes plans, God laughs. Certainly, Dennisâ life was nothing like heâd planned, but he had few complaints.
For a start, he was now a movie star, adored and lusted over by men and women, earning reasonable money for his screen appearances in X-rated movies, and regularly interviewed in magazines who fawned over his acting talent, not to mention his smooth 1970s good looks. Every couple of months, Dennis would get a call from someone on the adult film scene offering him another porn job. Heâd always happily accept, turn up and do the business â which usually meant reciting lines with casual, effortless cool, having sex with the latest starlet, and then leaving with a few hundred dollars cash in hand. Most porn film jobs took a matter of hours, usually over a day or two, though sometimes thereâd be an ambitious project where an aspiring sex-film Francis Ford Coppola wannabe had raised enough money to make a movie they were convinced would be the mythical mainstream cross-over success. Films like âBlonde Ambition,â âPunk Rock,â âHoneymoon Haven,â and âMaraschino Cherryâ came and went with Dennis calmly enhancing them all and impressing fellow performers and fans alike.
By now, heâd jacked in his office day job, which meant that he had more time to devote to his art, carpentry, motorbike, jazz record collection, and his partner, a young actor/model, Joey Phipps, who he adored and doted on. They lived a quiet life in Dennisâ tiny apartment, punctuated by wild nights out in Manhattan sex clubs.
Ah the gay clubs of the 70s: Dennis came out when he was in college and spent the next decade in New Yorkâs darkest, horniest and most outrageous corners. Their names are all you need to know. The Eagles Nest, the Anvil, the Ramrod, and the Toilet. It was the era of poppers, gloryholes, and anonymous hook-ups in sweaty backrooms. As if that wasnât enough, Dennis also had a sideline as a male escort for wealthy clients who responded to his weekly ad for personal services. It was extra cash, and his friends told me about how he enjoyed meeting different people and making them happy.
In short, Dennisâ was a normal life in which almost everything was abnormal. And then it all changed. He met a Frenchman, a music producer whoâd recently moved to New York and was starting to enjoy huge international success writing and producing disco hits. He had an impish, youthful face with a chipmunk smile. His name was Jacques Morali.
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The Birth of DiscoJacques Morali was born in 1947, the year before Dennis, in Casablanca, French Morocco, to a Moroccan Jewish family. According to legend, he had a fiercely protective upbringing, and there are stories that he was dressed as a girl by his mother when he was growing up. When he was 13, his family moved to France, where Jacques became a musical prodigy, gifted at playing different instruments, and writing songs in any style. He wasnât afraid to be different: he was original, flamboyant, and gay. He was also outgoing, outrageous, and gregarious, and seemed to know everyone on the music scene in Paris. By the end of the 1960s, he was in demand, writing music for orchestras, for the Crazy Horse cabaret and strip club, and for himself in his bid to launch a career as a solo artist. And because of his knack for writing instant melodies, he was also writing and producing songs for others. An example Is an early single, a long-forgotten song called âViva Zapataâ for a long-forgotten artist called âClint Farwoodâ which gives you an example of the hallmarks of his developing style. Upbeat, check. Cheesy, check. Annoyingly catchy, you bet.
But Jacques, just like his music, was restless and always changing, and he was constantly looking for the next big idea. He was also impatient, demanding, and dissatisfied with the level of his success in France, so he started to look to America as being where he could really hit the big time. In the early 1970s, he discovered the music that was coming out of a studio in Philadelphia called Sigma Sound where the Philadelphia International Records label were recording a streak of hit singles. Songs like the O’Jaysâ âLove Train,â recorded at Sigma Sound, which hit number one in 1972.
As strange as it sounds, Jacques Morali wasnât the only prominent music producer and songwriter in Paris at the time who came from a Moroccan Jewish family in Casablanca, Morocco â and the other one was Henri Belolo. Given their similar backgrounds, it was natural they gravitated to each other.
Henri was ten years older than Jacques: he was also a talented musician, but he differed in that he was also a highly successful entrepreneur: Henri had already set up his own record label and music publishing company, imported and promoted records into France, as well as organized concerts in Paris by the likes of James Brown and the Bee Gees. And, just like Jacques, Henri was eyeing the music scene in America.
In 1973, Henri traveled to New York and set up a record company called Can’t Stop Productions to establish a presence in the U.S. music market. During his trip, he went down to Philadelphia to see friends, and thatâs where he discovered the same music scene that Jacques had fallen in love with. I met and spoke to Henri Belolo several times over the years, and his excitement for that music still shone decades later. As he told me: âI started to listen to this âPhilly Sound.â I became friends with the owner of Sigma Sound, which was the famous recording studio where all of the Philly people were recording, and I got acquainted with musicians and arrangers and the music that came out of Philadelphia International Records.â In particular, Henri loved âTSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)â by The Three Degrees.
The song was released in 1974 as the theme for the American musical television program âSoul Train,â and it was the first television theme song to reach No. 1. Henri told me that the song and the visuals of the TV show changed his life: âI suddenly knew that the next generation of music stars would be more beautiful to look at,â he said, âand that these new artists would be more physical and sexual.â Henri was so impressed with the city that he set up a talent scout office in Philadelphia. As he told me, âI returned to France a different man. I promised myself that I would come back to America, and Philadelphia, when I found THE idea. I just needed to find something unique and big and hot.â
So here you have two Moroccan Jews, one gay and one straight, both based in Paris, both ambitious, and talented musically, both enamored by the music coming out of Sigma Studio in Philadelphia, and both looking for ways to break into the American music scene. Back in France, Henri says Jacques started turning up at his office to offer his services: âHe was so enthusiastic,â Henri remembered, âJacques dreamt of going to America, so he was pitching new ideas to me every week.â In the end, Henri told Jacques that if he came up with one really good idea, then heâd take him to America â but it had to be a really special idea, because nothing that Jacques had suggested so far had convinced him.
Then in 1975, a breakthrough. Jacques went to see Henri and told him his latest idea: heâd found an old Carmen Miranda song, âBrazilâ, that he wanted a group of larger-than-life females to sing, and record it with production values that would turn it into an epic record for the clubs. It was a crazy idea, but Henri liked the concept: âYou have to remember the word ‘disco’ didnât really exist at that stage,â he remembered. âBut I loved the idea of making a big club record: it captured my imagination, so I agreed to work on it with Jacques.â
Not only did he like the idea, Henri agreed to finance a residency for Jacques at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, the very home of the music they both loved. The two of them flew out to Philadelphia and within two weeks theyâd found three beautiful black women who they named The Ritchie Family, even though the singers were entirely unrelated to each other, and then Jacques hired the best strings and horns from the elite pool of Philly Sound musicians.
The single âBrazilâ was released in July 1975, and it was the U.S. hit that Jacques and Henri wanted: it peaked at No. 11 on the Hot 100, became a worldwide success, and Billboard were so impressed they created a separate Disco chart for the first time: Brazil hit No. 1 on that chart too.
The record convinced Jacques and Henri they should continue to work together, and so they both moved over to the U.S., and became long-term musical partners and a virtual disco-hit factory. Belolo would write the lyrics and handle the business side, and Jacques provided the hook-driven, dance music. More success came quickly with No. 1 disco hits, such as âThe Best Disco In Townâ (1976)
Jacquesâ music was characterized by simple arrangements, a unique sense of camp, and simple catchy melodies that could be remembered easily. It wasnât rocket science, but it didnât need to be â few others could do it as well as him. In the next eight years between 1974 and 1982, he recorded over 65 albums, for artists as diverse as Cher, Dalida, and Pia Zadora.
Henri and Jacques were on top of the world, splitting their time between New York and Philadelphia. Henri remembered that if they werenât producing music, they were partying: âWe were going every night of the week to every club in town,â he told me. âThat included the straight and gay clubs â Jacques was gay, I was not â but we had a lot of gay friends, and I was always keen to know what they listened to. I would dance until the early hours, and then go home and get some sleep. But Jacques would party all night â and it was on one of those nights when he met Dennis.â
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Dennis meets JacquesThere is some mystery surrounding how Dennis first met Jacques.
Some friends, including Dennisâ brother Richard, thought that it must have been at a bar or a disco. Could be, though it seems less likely to me as Dennis didnât spend a lot of his time in discos, and the bars he frequented tended to be ones that were more interested in sex than music. According to others, they met through the ad that Dennis ran in the weekly newspapers. âThat was what Dennis told me,â said a friend called Chip that I spoke to. âHe told me that Jacques was lonely, or horny, one weekend, and came across Dennisâs ad offering company.â
What is known is that when they met in 1977, Jacques instantly fell head over heels in love with Dennis. As Henri Belolo remembered: âJacques told me straight away that heâd met this sexy and handsome guy that he was madly attracted to. He always said he loved a good-looking mustache! So obviously, Dennis fit that description.â Chip concurred: âJacques was completely besotted by Dennis, it was obvious for everyone to see. His world suddenly revolved around Dennis.â
And so, while Jacquesâ music career in America was taking off and he was becoming a household name in the music world, he and Dennis started a romantic and physical relationship. It was a fascinating union: on the one side, a flamboyant, big-time disco music producer, and on the other, a quiet jazz-loving porn star with a sideline doing escort work.
There are many aspects that intrigue me here: firstly, there was the fact that Dennis was still starring in adult films when he met Jacques â and continued doing so after they met. But far from being a problem for their relationship, Jacques was intrigued by the emerging and sexual world of XXX, and he enjoyed Dennisâ stature as a sex star. As Henri told me, âJacques was excited by the fact that Dennis was a porn star⊠not only in gay movies but in straight movies too. It just increased the allure that Dennis had in Jacques eyes. It was a challenge for him to have an affair with a porn star like Dennis.â
And in the free love, anything-goes, no-judgement world of the New York club scene in the mid 1970s, Dennisâ porn films posed no risk to Jacquesâ career â if anything, Dennisâ sexual standing was an asset to Jacques.
But if Dennis was perfect for Jacques, was the reverse true? What did Dennis find attractive in Jacques?
Tip Sanderson, a friend of Dennis at the time, reckoned that it was the showbiz allure that was the appeal for Dennis. âWhat Jacques had in his favor was the music business,â Tip says. âThe glitz, the scene, the money⊠and he exploited it to the max. He told Dennis he would make him a star, a big music star. Dennis was seduced by that. I mean, who wouldnât be?â
But was it love between Jacques and Dennis? Friends are still skeptical. Tip Sanderson said this: âJacques was clearly infatuated with Dennis. Totally in love with him. It was sheer physical attraction. But Jacques wasnât Dennisâ physical type at all, so perhaps the attraction wasnât as⊠mutual.â
Henri Belolo agreed saying, âJacques was in love with Dennis, but I donât know about Dennis. Itâs hard to know, but I doubt it. Was Dennis really attracted to Jacques? I donât think it was mutual. But the fact that Jacques was a successful music producer definitely helped their relationship.â
Which brings me to another question. What happened to Joey Phipps in all this, Dennisâ partner who heâd been close to and living with for a while? That was a problem, everyone admitted to me. Most said that Dennis was still in love with Joey.
As Tip Sanderson told me: âIt was sad because they were tight. In the end, Dennis chose Jacques over Joey. Maybe the allure of fame was more powerful than his feelings for Joey. Either way, Dennis moved in with Jacques.â
So Jacques and Dennis became a couple, with Dennis leaving Joey behind in his tiny, beloved apartment, and he moved in with Jacques, a few blocks away, in his luxury, extensive suite at The Bristol, a prestigious uptown New York address in the Sutton Place neighborhood.
For some reason, Iâm reminded of the Terrence Malick period drama film, âDays of Heavenâ. It came out around the same time that all this was going on. The comparison is imperfect, sure, but if you havenât seen the movie, the plot involves an impoverished couple, played by Richard Gere and Brooke Adams. Their life is a struggle though they are essentially happy â but then Gereâs character encourages his girlfriend to marry a wealthy grain farmer, played by Sam Shepherd. The reason is the financial security that this will bring. So she leaves Gere, and heâs left living in their small sharecropper property looking up the hill at the mansion into which sheâs moved. Thereâs a heartbreaking element of poignancy and sadness to their separation, and a reminder that not all stories of true love have a happy ending. Did Dennis get what he wanted but lost what he had? Did his new lifestyle come at the cost of love?
It certainly was a step up in terms of lifestyle: being an adult film star had given Dennisâ life an occasional glamor, but this paled in comparison to what he experienced with Jacques. Richard Posa, Dennisâ brother, remembers Dennis telling him that Jacques was making around $8 million a year â and this was back in the 1970s. Jacques was generous with his money, and Dennisâ lifestyle changed overnight. For Dennis, the days of the dark and moody gay leather clubs were over. It was now fancy discos like Studio 54, The Loft, and the Paradise Garage.
Steven Gaines, a friend of them both, told me about visiting their apartment: âJacques gave me a tour. He took me to the bedroom which was really over the top, and everything in it was super-expensive. There was this beautiful suede headboard â and Jacques said in a thick French accent, âZees ees where I fist fuck my boyfriend.â I donât know what I was thinking, but I said, âBut what about that suede headboard⊠arenât you afraid of ruining it?â Jacques looked horrified, and said, âWhaaat? Do you think weâre peeegs?!ââ Which reminded Steven of a joke that he told me: âHow do you make a gay man scream during sex? You wipe your hands on the drapes.â
Henri Belolo, Jacquesâs music business partner, was living around the corner from Jacques and Dennis, and they would all hang out regularly. As Henri remembered: âI was great friends with Dennis, and I liked him a lot. We had dinner regularly. And my wife liked him because he was a good guy, very soft-spoken, well mannered, and elegant. In many respects, Dennis was the opposite to Jacques. Jacques was loud and extravagant, and Dennis was quiet and reserved. Iâm sure that Jacques drove Dennis crazy a lot of the time.â
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The Village PeopleThere are two stories about the how the idea for the Village People first came about.
Jacquesâ version was that he went to a costume ball at Les Mouches, a gay disco in Greenwich Village, way over on 11th Street on the west side. He was so impressed by all the costumes and the macho male characters portrayed by the party guests, that the idea came to him to put together a group of singers and dancers, each one playing a different gay fantasy figure.
Henri Belolo remembers it differently, saying that he and Jacques were walking through the Village one day, when they saw a man in a native American Indian outfit walking down the street, complete with bells attached to his feet. They followed him into a bar where he danced on the tables â watched by a cowboy and construction worker. According to Henri, âJacques and I looked at each other and suddenly had the same idea. We said âMy God, these characters. They represent the different types of the American man. We need to start a music group like this!â
Whichever story you believe, they took the concept and started work on a single, and signed a licensing deal with Casablanca Records, one of the most famous disco labels â and founded by Neil Bogart, the same Bogart who had requested the 16-minute version of âLove to Love You, Baby.â The label was already prestigious because of acts like Kiss and Donna Summer, but according to Henri, he and Jacques were most excited just because of the name, given that theyâd both been born in Casablanca. They decided to name the new group âThe Village Peopleâ because the idea came from the characters theyâd seen in the Village, and the first single was âSan Francisco (You’ve Got Me).â
The irony was that when the single came out, the group just consisted of one singer, a Broadway star called Victor Willis, who was appearing in the Broadway production of âThe Wizâ at the time, and they dressed him up as a cop.
Sales of the single soared, and so, as Henri told me, âWe said to each other, âWeâd better put together a real group now’ because weâd signed up to an album with Casablanca Records.â They set about assembling a group of five males, each one having his own distinctive character. To do this they took out an ad in a theatre trade paper which read: “Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache.”
And who fit that bill better than Dennis?
Henri told me that Jacques had been looking for an opportunity to give Dennis a starring music opportunity ever since they had first met: he told me, âTo be honest, every time Jacques met someone, heâd say, âI will make of you a star, my dearâ with his big French accent. And Dennis was no exception. Except of course, Jacques was in love with him. So this time, Jacques was really serious about it.â Dennisâ brother Richard remembered the same: âWhen Jacques was putting the Village People together, he offered Dennis a role in the group.â
Itâs intriguing to imagine Dennis as a member of the Village People. Would he have assumed one of the character identities that ended up in the group, or would he have developed a different identity of his own?
Somewhere along the line however, the idea was dropped in favor of making Dennis a star in his own right. As Dennisâ friend Tip Sanderson said to me: âDennis said that he and Jacques decided that they would not make him part of the Village People â where he would be only one of five members of a group, but rather theyâd hold him back and launch him as a solo star instead. And so, the two of them carefully mapped out a plan to create a music career for Dennis.â
Meanwhile the rest of the members of the Village People were hired â representing stereotypes such as a leather man, cowboy, construction worker, and native American. They were largely recruited for their look rather musical abilities, with Victor Willis, taking all the main vocal duties. Together they became one of the most successful acts of the disco era with hits such as âYMCAâ (1978), âMacho Manâ (1978), âIn the Navyâ (1979), and âGo Westâ (1980).
Their success only increased Jacques Moraliâs reputation as a top disco producer and star maker.
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Dennis Parker â Disco StarI was intrigued by the decision to give Dennis a solo singing career. I wondered what Dennis thought of the idea. Was he just as excited by it, or did he go along with it because of Jacquesâ ambition and exhilaration?
On the one hand, Dennisâ ex-boyfriend Skip had told me that Dennis always wanted to be a torch singer, and so this was an opportunity to be produced by one of the hottest disco producers in the land. Dennis did love performing and though this wasnât acting on a theater stage, it was still about embodying a character.
But then there was another side to it: Dennis was a private person, happiest when doing carpentry, driving on his motorbike, and listening to his jazz records. How did he feel about making himself a more public figure?
And then there was the type of music Dennis would be singing. Tip Sanderson saw this contradiction too: âDennis wasnât a big pop or disco music fan,â Tip said. âSo he had a few reservations about the idea of a solo dance music career. But Jacques was so enthusiastic that I guess Dennis was caught up in the excitement.â
Whatever doubts existed however, Dennis signed up and went along with Jacquesâ vision of making him a disco star â and the first step was a significant one. These are the words of Skip St. James, Dennisâ former partner from the early 1970s: âI saw Dennis on and off after our relationship ended. I knew heâd been dating Jacques Morali. Then at one point, Dennis disappeared completely for a short while. When he re-appeared, he said heâd been in Philadelphia. I was struck by the change in his appearance. He had new teeth and a new nose! His old nose was a handsome Roman one, and when he came back he had a turned-up nose that he said was modeled after mine. I didnât like his nose because I adored his old one. To be honest, I think he was better looking before the nose and teeth work.â
It was true, when Dennis started to be groomed by Jacques for disco stardom, his appearance changed noticeably: his cheekbones, nose, and chin were now leaner, sharper, and more pronounced than the way he looked in the films and the photo features. He looked great, just rather different than the adult film star, and completely different from the nerdy school kid in the pictures that his brother Richard had sent me.
The second change that Dennis made was that he stopped making X-rated films. Unlike many ex-adult film stars who leave the business and immediately disavow their sex film past, Dennis never did. The sex films were not something he ever regretted or denied. But his retirement from the adult business was the only sensible course of action if he was going to make a serious bid for stardom in mainstream America. It wasnât a difficult choice: he was in his thirties, heâd already appeared in over 30 sex films, he didnât need the money, and according to his friends he felt it was time for a change anyway. One of the last events of his sex movie career was that Screw magazine voted him âMan of the Yearâ in 1978. Dennis got a kick out of that, and bought copies for all his friends.
So now Dennis looked the part, and had a superstar producer in Jacques in his corner, but what about the singing part of this career change. After all, his singing activity hadnât consisted of much more than humming along to his jazz records, so recording a whole album was going to be a completely new experience for him.
One of the skeptics was Henri Belolo. Henri told me about the day he first learned of the idea: âJacques said to me, âWeâre going to make an album with Dennis.â I told him, âBut Jacques, we canât. Heâs not a singer!â Jacques said, âI know. Heâs an actor, but heâs good looking and believe me, we can make him a star. Trust me.ââ Jacquesâ argument was that theyâd already turned several non-singers into the Village People â so why not Dennis? So together they agreed to produce an album for Dennis.
Not that Jacques went easy on Dennis: Henri told me that Jacques made Dennis work hard. He got Dennis to take singing lessons, practice night and day, and prepare intensively. And then in 1978, Jacques secured a record deal for Dennis with Casablanca Records, and so the record idea suddenly became real.
Henri and Jacques snapped into action and started to assemble a selection of songs. Henri described how they split the work: âJacques and I had different roles,â he told me. âJacques was the melodist. He was a magician with all the hooks and the melodies. I was the one that came up with the ideas for the lyrics. But my English was not too good at that time, so I started to write the song in French or in bad English and then I got help.â One of the people he turned to for lyrics for Dennisâ record was Steven Gaines, a journalist whoâd just written an article about how the Village People had been formed. Gaines told me, âI wrote about how Jacques was selling the Village People like a sports team with different characters and personalities. And now, he was going on to âinventâ somebody else â and that was Dennis.â
Jacques loved the write-up, so he called Gaines up and suggested that he write the lyrics for Dennisâ album. Gaines recalled that a few days later, Jacques sent him click tracks to work with. The click tracks were just audio clicks to show the rhythm of the song⊠nothing else. But he gave it a shot, and came up with the lyrics for âLike an Eagleâ.â
Gaines recalled Jacquesâ reaction to that song: âWhen Jacques heard it, he said that the words were too complicated for people to listen to on a dance floor. Iâd done a lot of work on them, and believe me, they werenât that complicated! Jacques said he would work on them. He did â and in the end, the lyrics were as followsâŠ: âLike an Eagle, Like an Eagle, Like an Eagle, Like an Eagle, Like an Eagle, always searching, always wanting, Like an Eagle.â So, he certainly made them much less complicatedâŠâ
When the songs were ready, Jacques and Henri assembled many of the musicians that had played on their favorite records that came out of Philly, including the same rhythm section that featured on the Village People records. Also notable is that they decided to use synthesizers instead of strings, which was new for the time. When everything was ready they booked, where else?, the Sigma Sound studios â but not the original location in Philadelphia.
In 1977, a second Sigma Sound studio had opened in New York City. It was located in the Ed Sullivan Theater building â thatâs the same building where David Lettermanâs and Stephen Colbertâs Late Show is filmed each night. This studio was used by the Village People for their records, and would later be used by singers and groups like Madonna, the Talking Heads, Rick James, Aretha Franklin, the Ramones, Whitney Houston, Paul Simon and others.
The whole endeavor was now a big deal, and Dennis was at the heart of it all. How did he cope with the pressure, in that environment, in that recording studio? He was surrounded by professional musicians of the highest quality, used to recording with many of the great vocalists of the time. Was he overawed, out of his depth, and did he struggle? I contacted many of the musicians who recorded with Dennis to find out their memories of making the record.
Alfonso Carey was the first I spoke to. He was the bass player that played on all the Village People hits⊠from âYMCAâ to âMacho Manâ and the rest, as well as records by The Ritchie Family and Patti Labelle. In fact, he also wrote the song âWhy Donât You Boogieâ for Dennis which was included on the record.
Careyâs first memory was that he found Jacques flamboyant: âJacques was very âout there,â âCarey told me. âHe would let you know in a minute that he was wonderful and gay. He brought Dennis into the studio, and Dennis was completely different. We thought he was cool, and much more chill than Jacques.â I asked Carey about Dennisâ vocal ability. He said that Dennis had talent, not like Victor Willis of the Village People with a voice that could really move you, but he was somebody who could hold a note and that he did all right.
Henri Belolo also remembered being impressed with Dennis: âDennis voice was actually pretty good!â he told me. âWe had to work around it at times, for example, Jacques sang certain passages at the same time as Dennis to augment Dennisâ vocals. So on âLike an Eagleâ when you hear the high voice sing just after the chorus, thatâs mainly Jacques singing. We also used background singers to cover up some parts as well. But I have to say, honestly, Dennis did his part, and did a great singing job for someone who had no experience.â
Phil Hurtt was Dennis vocal coach and he also wrote two songs for Dennisâ album: âIâm A Dancerâ and âI Need Your Loveâ. Hurtt told me that when Dennis recorded the album, the musicians were actually not there most of the time. That was normal. Theyâd already recorded the basic tracks by then. So when Dennis was in the studio, he was just there with Jacques and Henri, the engineers, and Phil himself. âI was the only one actually in the recording booth with Dennis because I was teaching him the vocals. I stood alongside him until he got it. That was what I always did.â Phil Hurtt was keen to point out that Dennis had a better voice than you hear on the record. âI think he was misused,â Phil said. âI think if he had been working with a producer who knew how to produce different types of music then he would have done even better. He was a nice guy though. Quiet and polite.â
The other song that Gaines wrote for Dennis was âNew York By Night.â
This is how Gaines remembers writing it: âI wanted to write something that was contemporary about New York, and so I included details like the hustlers on 53rd St.
Henri told me: âThe lyrics of âNew York By Nightâ are fantastic. One of my favorite lines goes â âAt Studio 54, theyâre waiting at the door, Canât get in, just canât win.â It captures the moment when we went to Studio 54 every night. We were in the middle of the disco revolution. It was crazy, my God, but so much life, so much happiness, so much enjoyment. We werenât fighting a war, the economy wasnât too bad, and people wanted to go out after Vietnam. They wanted to have a good time. Sex was starting to get liberated, the gays were starting to come out. Everything was exploding, it was a new generation, and of course they did not want to be the old generation that was pop or rock â they wanted to be disco. Thatâs what it was.â
Once again, Jacques said it was too complicated. He wanted me to dumb it down because he said that Dennis couldnât sing so many words that quickly.â
But this time, Jacques was overruled, both by Dennis, who insisted that he could handle the words, and Henri Belolo â who loved the lyrics.
Whoever I spoke to, everyone always seemed to come back to Dennisâ personal qualities. He was gentle, kind, and considerate. Carla Bandini-Lory, the recordâs Assistant Producer told me: âDennis was a sweetheart, and he impressed everyone. He was a gentleman, he held open doors, never acted above the support staff â which many other people at that time did. He was a total pro. He listened, he took direction from Jacques, and he understood what was going on. Even so, he was always in Jacquesâ shadow. Everyone was in Jacquesâ shadow. Jacques was always the biggest personality in every room.â
Steven Gaines, the writer of âLike an Eagleâ and âNew York By Nightâ, went to the studio and to watched them record his songs, and his memory was similar: âDennis was very cool, and very low key. I donât remember a big ego or personality thing about him at all. Jacques was a French queen, quite the opposite⊠a big flamboyant character. When Jacques was good, he was very, very good, but when he got mean, he was really horrid.â
Henri Belolo agreed, and admitted that sometimes Jacques would blow up. Henri said: âDuring the recording sessions, Jacques got upset and frustrated with Dennis. Jacques could be rude with him. I kept telling Jacques, âRelax. Dennis is not a professional singer. You must be patient with him, heâs doing his best. It was your idea to do this album with Dennis, so now you have to learn to work with him. The final result will be good.â But what amazed me was that Dennis was very calm even when Jacques was angry. Dennis was always calm. I never saw him excited or shouting or mad. He was a pleasure.â
Henri was the Executive Producer for the record, so had overall creative control of the record, and he told me he was happy how it turned out. Neil Bogart, the head of Casablanca Records, liked it as well and was excited to release it. Dennis adopted the name âDennis Parkerâ to distance himself from Wade Nichols and his previous career as a sex film star.
The last step was a photo session of Dennis in New York at night for the record sleeve. Letâs spend a moment on that LP cover, as itâs magnificent. If you havenât seen, try googling it. It features Dennis at his zenith, all cheekbones, moustache, a hint of a dimple in his sculpted chin, and casually tousled yet carefully curated shoulder-length hair, dressed in a denim shirt and a gray sports jacket. Somehow looking coy, mistrustful and confident at the same time. He knows a secret that he might just share with you⊠if youâre good to him, that is. Iâd pick this picture for my mantelpiece over the Mona Lisa any day of the week.
So everything was in place, but how would the disco crowd react? After all, no one had even heard the record yet.
Steven Gaines remembers that, just before âLike an Eagleâ came out as a single, Jacques got a disc jockey to play it at a gay club called the Flamingo one night. The Flamingo was a calculated choice: the club had opened in 1974, and was New Yorkâs first exclusively gay disco. It was located in an upstairs loft space on the second floor of a building at the corner of Houston and Broadway. The club was actually secret and had an unlisted telephone number because there was a constant fear of police raids. And it was exclusive too: members paid up to six hundred dollars a year for a membership. It was known for its wild parties, there were stories of a Crucifixion night with models dressed as Roman legionaries and a Jesus Christ who would, from time to time, turn his eyes heavenward and ascend a cross. This was the crowd that would be the first in the world to hear Dennis Parker.
Gaines, understandably, decided he wanted to see his song unveiled publicly for the first time â especially to this audience, so he went along with his lawyer. As he told me, âIt was a big dance place, and an important place to launch a record. There were 1,500 gay guys with their shirts off, completely stoned on ethyl chloride. Then the song came on for the first time, and it was really, really thrilling.
âPeople didnât know it obviously, and it starts with that whooshing sound before building up.
âIâll never forget how exciting that moment was⊠it just really, really worked well⊠at least until my not-so-brilliant lyrics started. It got a great reaction, the crowd really loved it.â
When the song came to an end, the Flamingo club members demanded that it was played again. And then again, even chanting the title lyrics over and over.
For the second time in his life, quiet, unassuming Dennis had become a star again.
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The post Wade Nichols: âLike an Eagleâ â His Untold Story Part 2: Disco! – Podcast 153 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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This past week I phoned Paul Thomas, former adult performer and film director, also known as PT. Iâm heading out to LA shortly and was calling to set up a date with him and his wife. Seeing the two of them when Iâm out west is one of my favorite things. It starts sitting together in their backyard under the Los Angeles sun, catching up on whatâs been happening since my last visit. Then strolling slowly through the Venice canals as PT pontificates on one thing or another and his wife and I roll our eyes at him, before we end up at a local restaurant lingering over a meal and drinks.
PTâs wife picked up his phone. I said I was calling to make a date with them. She told me she’d found PT dead in their home a few hours earlier. She spoke with disbelief. PT had endured a few health challenges in recent years and apparently had been feeling ill over the past few days, but nobody saw this coming. On the contrary, heâd recently suggested to me that we all take a biking holiday together in the south of France.
PTâs wife said she couldnât believe sheâd never get to speak with him again. I feel the same way. PT and I had a playful relationship from the very start. While some found PTâs arrogance to be a flaw in his character, I always found it endearing – a feature, not a bug. And not because I enjoy egotism – humility is one of my favorite traits. But because with PT, you could put a pin in his balloon of self-importance and it would fast deflate, leaving us both laughing.
I last texted PT a few weeks ago to ask him what he remembered about a director of one of the old adult films he’d acted in. PT wrote back that the director was short and fat and could be overly prescriptive in choreographing the sex scenes. Then he countered saying actually the man was tall and skinny and that he left the performers to direct the scene themselves. Either way, he said, it was too early in the day to be sure, and that he was too sober to think properly about these questions. He wrote, âYou know me well enough to know that Iâd like to make up all sorts of shit right now because it would make good copy, but I know you donât want me to stray too far from facts.â
He closed the text saying âWe have much to talk about. Iâll leave the light on for you when you next come to California.â
He was one of the true originals: a talented performer, adult film director, husband, father, and my friend. I’m April Hall, and this is a reprise of my interview with PT.
Please leave the light on for when we meet again.
This podcast is 169 minutes long.
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Paul ThomasPaul Thomas, or PT as heâs typically known, is one of the iconic names of the adult film industry.
He was born Philip Toubus, and started out as a porn performer for the Mitchell Brothers in mid-1970s San Francisco. Until the last few years, was still in the business as a director.
During the past four decades, PT won every kind of adult award – from Best Actor to Best Director, and was inducted into every Hall of Fame the sex film industry has ever invented.
But there are two aspects to PTâs background that make his presence and success in adult film even more interesting.
First he came from a wealthy family â one that owned household-name businesses like Sara Lee and Jim Beam â and he was brought up in relative luxury.
And secondly, by the time PT started his career in sex films in his mid 20s, heâd already achieved considerable success and fame on stage in musical theater. Heâd starred on Broadway in Hair and played the role of Peter in the 1973 film version of Jesus Christ Superstar. In fact, he was being groomed by the William Morris Agency in Hollywood for a big career in mainstream television and movies.
So with all the money and success, what motivated PT to move into the newly formed adult industry â a business frowned upon by much of mainstream society, not to mention full of legal and reputational risks for its participants?
It all comes down to a series of questions: Why? Why did he do it, when he had so many alternatives? Why did he stay in the business for so long? And what effect has it had on him? These questions have stayed with PT to this day.
Iâve known PT for years, and weâve talked about doing an interview for almost as long as Iâve known him. We actually started once, but after over five hours of conversation, we realized that we hadnât even reached the time he’d started school, so we scrapped the idea.
Recently though we decided to try again, and this time I got PT to agree to a strict format. I would pick ten areas of his life that have shaped him. Ten provocations â in keeping with the biblical theme of his most famous role in Jesus Christ Superstar. I would ask him whatever I liked about these subjects â and nothing would be off the table. Weâd cover adult films, both as an actor and as a director, his troubled relationships, his experiences with drugs, his multiple times in jail, and much, much more.
And weâd finally see if we could get closer to answering the question that has plagued PT for so long: why the hell did he go into, and stay in, the adult film industry?
This is the first time PT has told his story. These are the ten provocations of PT.
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Paul Thomas in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
Paul Thomas in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
PT and April Hall
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The post R.I.P. Paul Thomas (1949 â 2025) – Podcast Reprise appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Years ago, I first saw the 1970s adult film Barbara Broadcast (1977) on the big screen, and it made a big impression.
In the film, thereâs a scene which shows a man standing behind an industrial kitchen worktable, a shirtless, mustached piece of beefcake that was Wade Nichols. Rugged yet pretty. Lean, toned, and handsome. He looked like the Marlboro man from the distant plains, if that cowboy had inexplicably turned up in New York and started moonlighting as a Manhattan sous-chef. He had the appearance of a man in love, or a rather a man in lust, most likely with himself. He was the perfect embodiment of the era, that made you wonder if you were to look up â1970s Americaâ in the dictionary, there could well be a picture of Wade Nichols there.
I immediately wanted to know more.
It turned out heâd been a prolific actor in many adult films over a four-year period in the late 1970s, much loved and much missed. Slowly over the years, I found other details, but often they were in the form of conflicting rumors.
Though heâd been the leading man in many straight sex films, he was supposedly gay, or maybe bisexual? Some remembered him better as the lead actor of a popular TV soap opera, while others said he was a big disco recording star whoâd come close to being one of the original Village People. And then there was the question of how heâd died: it had been reported that he shot himself in 1985, but others insisted he was a victim of AIDS.
I was hooked on finding more. But because it was before the internet age, I had no way of finding out much about him. So, years ago, I started to track down anyone who had known him, from his family, to acquaintances from the New York club, bar, and disco scene, adult film actors and directors, music and television industry friends, and many more, to try and find who he really was. I ended up writing an article for The Rialto Report with the information I learned. But my interest didnât end then, and I continued to track down, reach out, and contact anyone with memories of him.
This is Wade Nicholsâ story – in podcast form.
This podcast is 50 minutes long.
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Why is that so many of the movies we first saw as teenagers remain important and enduring to us for the rest of our lives? Same thing for the music and books that we discovered back then. And, why does it become rarer that we have that same deep connection to films we discover as we grow older?
Psychologists have suggested itâs because our teen years coincide with the period referred to as âthe emergence of the stable and enduring self.â Basically, the thinking is that this period, occurring between the ages of 12 and 22, is the time when you become you. As a result, the experiences that contribute to this process become uncommonly, and disproportionately, important to you throughout the rest of your life. This is because they didnât just contribute to the development of your self-image; they are part of your self-image. In other words, these experiences and memories become an integral part of your sense of self.
Ok, ok, so much for the theory, but what does that have to do with the life of an adult film actor who died 40 years ago?
The answer is that todayâs story is personal. Well, all the stories that I cover are personal in some way, but this one is perhaps even more so than the rest.
When I first saw the 1977 adult film âBarbara Broadcastâ as a teenager, I knew nothing about the male lead, Wade Nichols, but he made an impression on my teenage self. I know, I shouldnât have been in the porn theater in the first place. Wholly inappropriate, too young, etc. and so on. I get it. But I was there, and I watched it. And I liked the film. And yes, just like some of the other films I discovered then, it stayed with me in a strangely meaningful way. Itâs part of the reason I wanted to find and tell the stories that I share on The Rialto Report, I think.
It became part of understanding that moment as a teen when I sat wide-eyed in a theater. Perhaps part of the memory that had created that sense of self all those years ago.
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1. Freeport, NY (1950s):The first information to know is that âWade Nicholsâ was really a fictional character, existing only for the sex film screen. Wadeâs real name was Dennis Posa. He was of Italian heritage â a fact that he was proud of. I found out that Dennisâ father originally came from Casamassima, a small town in southern Italy. That was the first surprise to me in this story, because the summer before I saw âBarbara Broadcastâ all those years ago, Iâd actually visited Casamassima as a young boy. I remember it being a tiny, picturesque place, notable mainly because it was called âThe Blue Townâ. That name dated back to the 1600s when a ship arrived in the nearby port of Bari bringing sailors whoâd all been infected with the plague. They came ashore, and all hell broke loose. In a short time over 20,000 locals had died in the epidemic. In response, the most powerful Duke in the town ordered all of the buildings, monuments, and churches to be painted with quicklime mixed with sulphate copper. These chemicals slowed the spread of the plague from infected corpses by accelerating the decomposition of the bodies and thereby reducing the bacteria â and these chemicals were bright blue in color, meaning that the town literally turned blue overnight. It was a story that Dennis would tell over the years â joking that it was ironic that one of the biggest stars of blue movies had, in effect, come from the Blue Town.
After moving to America, Dennisâ father grew up in an Italian neighborhood of the Bronx. He was a popular kid and a small-time rogue, and he ran around with a bunch of minor league hoodlums and gamblers, getting in and out of trouble all the time. He hung out in jazz clubs where his friend, the noted jazz musician Johnny Guarnieri, headlined on piano with his band. Dennisâ mother was dating Johnnyâs bass player, but when she met Dennisâ father, it was love at first sight â or something like that. They hooked up and got hitched the following year. Dennisâ father was 26, his mother was 20.
Once he was married, Dennisâ father felt he had to go straight, so the newlywed couple did the sensible thing and moved out to the commuter town of Freeport, NY, thirty miles east of Manhattan, on the south shore of Long Island. They rented an apartment, and his father got a job as a florist, while his mother worked in the childrenâs section of the local library. And there they started a family â two boys, Richard and then Dennis, who was born in 1946.
A quick word about Freeport: it was a great place be in the summer, a popular and vibrant spot where people from Manhattan flocked to vacation, but the rest of the year, it was a little different â an anonymous, depressed, forgotten, and empty place â which made it pretty grim for residents.
I tracked down Dennisâ brother, Richard. Richard is a quiet-spoken friendly man, with a bemused but huge affection for his younger brother, and he was happy to share memories of their childhood. He fondly remembered their first years which he described as happy and good. Their father was a good-looking man and he was initially caring towards the boys. After a while though, something snapped: overnight, he seemed to lose interest in the family, and started to disappear for weeks at a time. When he returned, heâd fight with his wife â and sometimes get verbally abusive to the boys too.
It transpired that a big part of his problem was his gambling, and he regularly squandered the money that was meant for the familyâs food. Richard remembered that Friday was the weekly food shop day, but often his father would just take the money and not return home. When this happened, it was usually because heâd fallen behind with bookies, and needed the cash to settle his debts.
On one occasion, the family found out that the bookies were threatening to break his legs if he didnât pay up⊠so they helped him out and covered the debt for him. But he never paid them back, so the family joked that next time, they were going to be the ones breaking his legs.
Richard remembers that it all seems amusing now, but at the time, it had a destabilizing effect on them. It wasnât a happy childhood any more, he said, and at times, home life became pretty uncomfortable. Dennis was the more daring of the two, and one time he decided he was going to go through their fatherâs affairs â where he found $8,000 worth of racing stubs. Bear in mind, in those days their fatherâs annual salary was only $5,000 a year, so this was a huge amount to be betting. Dennis wanted to confront him, and the brothers discussed it but, in the end, decided against the idea.
The boys werenât the only ones suffering: the family problems took a toll on the boysâ mother as well. Just when the boys needed her the most, she became agoraphobic and withdrawn, afraid of leaving the apartment.
As a result of all this, neither boy were close to either parent, and initially, they werenât particularly close to each other either. For a start, the two brothers were very different. Richard was studious, into reading, mathematics, and school work. Dennis liked artistic pursuits, preferring to draw, paint pictures, and make things, developing an interest in carpentry. But physically, there was no getting away from each other. The family apartment was small, and they shared a tiny room throughout their childhood years.
What they did have in common was a passion for their pets, and as kids they always had dogs and cats. Both boys were also keen members of the rifle team in High School â though their love for animals meant they had no interest in hunting.
While I was getting a sense of Dennis, I wanted to understand what he was like as a boy. What was his character like, I asked Richard? Did he have friends, and was he popular? Richard remembered that Dennis was initially quiet socially, but went through a sudden change when he was 13 or 14 â coincidentally when he had his tonsils taken out. Overnight, Dennis came out of his shell, becoming more energetic and outgoing, even something of an extrovert sometimes.
One aspect of Dennis didnât change however â and that was his taste in music which stayed with him throughout his life. For a kid who came of age during the 1960s, at the tail end of rock nâ roll and amid the onset of Beatlemania, Dennisâs interest was unusual. He inherited his parentâs musical passion â which meant jazz, from traditional forms like Louis Armstrong to newer artists like Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. âHe would spend hours with his head next to the gramophone listening to jazz records,â one school friend remembered.
I asked Richard if he still had any pictures of Dennis from his teen years, and Richard sent me a selection. I was taken aback by what I saw. I was used to seeing Dennis from his adult films, looking sexual and virile, or from his music career where he embodied confident disco chic, or from his time in soap operas where he projected control and confidence. But these teenage black and white pictures were from a different period entirely, and showed someone I didnât recognize. A geeky teenager with a crew cut, cross-eyed with unfashionable eye glasses, half-smiling self-consciously.
Later, I came across an interview that Dennis gave where he admitted as much: âI wasnât very attractive as a young kid,â he said. âI was a loner so it was tough.â
I asked Richard about whether Dennis dated. Richard replied: âHe didnât date in High School, but I didnât think much about it either. It just wasnât something that we talked about. I do remember he used to look at the pictures of women in Playboy magazines â but that seemed normal⊠all of the boys did that. I certainly didnât get a sense that Dennisâ sexuality was different from the rest of the boys.â
And so a geeky jazz-loving, animal-adoring, and gun-collecting Dennis graduated high school in 1964, an initially quiet then outgoing kid, whoâd had a difficult home life. His last year book entry read, âClever, quiet, and profound, Dennis will spread much goodwill abroad as a member of the Peace Corps.â
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2. Philadelphia (Late 1960s)Dennis didnât seem to have a rebellious streak, but he did have a good number of reasons to leave home and start his own life with his own identity. Whatever plans he may have had to join the Peace Corps were abandoned in favor of heading a couple of hours south to Philadelphia to the cityâs College of Art where he enrolled in a degree course studying pottery and design. I tracked down several college friends, and they told me that he was a happy and popular member of their circle. Some remembered he dated a couple of girls, taking one of them back to Freeport to meet the family. I was intrigued, and so pressed them on this, but none of them remember much more about his sexuality.
It was while he was a student in Philadelphia, that Dennis became interested in acting. In a later interview, Dennis said it started with a friend who had worked on the Beatlesâ films. This person was making an avant-garde, short film called âFor One Onlyâ, and he wanted Dennis for the lead role. The film was made though apparently never released, but it was a turning point, and Dennis became hooked on acting after that. He started auditioning, one early success being for a 1966 traveling production of Euripidesâ âThe Trojan Womenâ.
After a couple of years in college in Philly, Dennis dropped out. Friends of his still disagree as to why: some say that it was money issues, others say that he wanted to pursue acting in a more concerted manner. Whatever the reason, over the next couple of years, Dennis appeared in a number of low budget theatrical productions in the area, while sustaining himself by picking up carpentry or construction work. It was the start of the typical life of a struggling actor.
But what of his future adult film career which was still almost ten years away? Were there any signs, any clues as to what was in his future? A few friends recall that when he was short of money, Dennis did nude modeling nude for still-life art classes at the college. I also found an interview where he later claimed that he appeared in a few ânudie-cutie loopsâ while in Philadelphia. In this interview, Dennis said: âSome guy named Edwards got me into them â for money â good money in those days. I got $60. It was fine. Art students are notoriously poor. They were the old morality stag films⊠black socks, boxer shorts⊠but that was not really porno then. A lot of time we just stood and bounced around. There was very little story, no sound, and they were sold under the counter.â Itâs a possible story, I suppose, but it seems unlikely given there is little other evidence and weâre talking about 1966 in Philadelphia. Certainly none have ever come to light.
But it was during this period that Dennis told the first of his friends that he thought he was gay. The female friends I spoke to werenât surprised â though a few of them expressed disappointment: âHe was such a gentle, sweet man,â one them, called Sylvia, said. âA lot of us had a secret crush on him, but deep down we always wondered.â
Dennis came out to his mother and father on one of his trips home to Freeport. This is how his brother Richard remembers the occasion: âIn 1968, Dennis told our parents about his sexuality. He didnât tell me at the time â I learned about it from a cousin. I donât know much about these things, but my impression was that Dennis was bi-sexual.â
I asked Richard how his parents took the news. âNot that well,â he said. âMy mother was squeamish about sex anyway, so she didnât talk about it with anyone. As for my father, he told other people that he was heartbroken. That was difficult for Dennis. So I guess it was difficult for all of them.â
Not long after this, Dennisâ father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Heâd been a heavy smoker all his life, and by the time he was in his 40s, he had emphysema and was in bad physical shape. When he became sick, it hit Dennis hard, and he started going back to Freeport every week to see him. His father died shortly afterwards in his mid-50s.
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3. Move to New YorkIn 1968, Dennis moved to New York. He took an apartment at 25 East 38th St, which heâd keep for the rest of his life. It was a fifth-floor walk-up, a small rent-controlled place, and he paid $75 a month. It was basically a studio with a skylight and a tiny kitchen. There was a bedroom but Dennis used that as his art studio, and he slept on a pull-out sofa in the main room. It was an old building â when he took up the floorboards to lay down new flooring, he found newspapers that dated back to World War One. It was cramped, but Dennis loved it and was proud of his new space.
Most of all Dennis loved New York â and was in awe of the opportunities it provided. He got into motorcycles, got one of his own, and went everywhere on it⊠no distance was too short or too long.
But his main priority was to see if he could make it as an actor so he set about auditioning for theater parts. Some of his friends commented that he had talent, but all were in agreement that his temperament was not suited to constant auditions. He hated learning a scene, schlepping across town, delivering it to a group of supercilious theater execs, and then never hearing from them again. One friend commented that he thought Dennis lacked the resilient temperament needed to be a successful actor: âHe was a gentle soul, a little vulnerable, and he was easily bruised by setbacks,â he said.
Nevertheless, Dennis persisted, and in 1969, Dennis replied to an ad in the Village Voice for an off-off Broadway play called âThe Sound of a Different Drummerâ that was looking for actors to take part in âa counter-culture experienceâ. The heading read: âDo you Dig Being Naked in the World? Love Boys Love Girls? Participate in the Ultimate EMBRACE! Get Bread for Doing Your Thing in Our HIT SHOWâ. Dennis auditioned and got the part. He claimed later that at first, he had no idea what it was all about and was attracted simply because it was a regular, paid acting gig. This was the era of sexually frank musicals like âHairâ and âOh Calcutta,â and Dennis embraced the new environment enthusiastically. He appeared in it for several months, but then disaster struck: one night he collapsed onstage and was rushed to hospital with acute appendicitis. This health incident, though not life-threatening, would have a lasting impact on Dennisâ acting career. I spoke to Jon Bletz, a friend of Dennis, who remembered: âIt took Dennis some time to recover physically from that, but when he returned to the theater, his part in the play had been given to someone else. Dennis was really upset and discouraged, and so he decided to jack in the whole acting thing. He was already pissed by how much you had to struggle for acting jobs⊠with little guarantee you were going to get anywhere.â
So Dennis gave up on his thespian dream, and decided it was time to get a full-time 9-5 job. He was hired by Jiffy Simplicity, a company that made dress-making patterns for women.
But the change in his employment wasnât the only change in Dennisâ life. According to Dennisâ friend, Jon Bletz, after the disappointment of trying to be an actor, for a time, Dennis seemed to become more jaded and cynical. He responded by hitting the New York gay bar scene hard. As Jon expressed it, âIt was like ânothing is gonna get in my way now.ââ
His first favorite bar was The Eagleâs Nest on 22nd St down by the West Side Highway, and Dennis would head over there every night on his motorcycle. The Eagleâs Nest was one of the legendary gay clubs in New York. It had been a longshoreman’s tavern that opened in 1931, but, prompted by the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the sudden growth of the city’s gay culture, the tavern’s owners painted the walls black and converted it into a gay bar in 1970. Not just any gay bar either: The Eagleâs Nest became the most popular gathering point for the leather-clad S&M crowd and biker groups, eventually spawning copycat clubs across the country.
Dennisâ friend, Mark Martinez, remembered the scene well: âThe Eagleâs Nest was the best leather bar,â he recalled. âIt was isolated in a quiet, dark area by the water, and it reeked of menace and thrill. The place itself was hot and sweaty and exciting. Dennis was there all the time, and I hung with him. He was a beautiful man, and sexually voracious. It was difficult not to love him.â
Another friend, Errol Jones, also remembers Dennis in this period. âFor years, I ran into Dennis all over town. He seemed to be at every gay club,â he laughed. âYou couldnât miss him. For a start, he was good looking. And secondly, he was⊠well⊠willing and enthusiastic.â
During this time, Dennis also had his first steady male partner. In early 1969, heâd met Skip St James. Dennis was 26 at the time, Skip was in his early 20s. Skip remembers first seeing Dennis in different bars, and heâd just stand there and stare, finding Dennis absolutely beautiful. Skip says that Dennis chased him around for a year or so, but Skip was always with somebody else. And then one day, they finally hooked up, became a couple, and were together for the next four years.
Skip moved into Dennisâ tiny studio apartment on East 38th St â and Skip remembered they werenât the only people who enjoyed the space⊠âI remember every Wednesday afternoon, heâd give his apartment to this woman who was married,â he said. âI think she was someone he worked with at Simplicity. Anyway, every week, sheâd go there and have sex with her boyfriend. Obviously, weâd have to make ourselves scarce for a couple of hours. But that just seemed very New York back then.â
For the first time, Dennis was in a steady relationship and living with his partner. But that didnât stop him from enjoying the New York night life â as Skip remembers: âDennis was very sexual. All the time. Sex was number one for him, and always on his mind.â
Not just that, but friends remember that Dennis was always focused on his physical appearance. Skip recalls: âI remember wearing tackaberry buckles. Dennis insisted on wearing them, and he bought me one. He showed me how youâd hang your keys from left to right. I was new to all this. He was a showman more than anything else.â
Needless to say, their relationship was not exclusive. As Skip remembers, âDennis insisted it wasnât exclusive. We had space for other relationships â either individually or together. He was very into three-ways, orgies, and cruising, and he loved leather bars. He liked to watch too. As far as sex would go, he was not a top. He was a bottom. In fact, his big thing was being on the receiving end â and getting fist-fucked.â
This being the early 1970s, safe sex, well⊠it wasnât really a thing. As Mark Martinez says: âNeedless to say, Dennis didnât use condoms. None of us did. Why would you? We expected to live forever.â
Skip confirms this: âDennis was never safe with sex at all. Once we went to Puerto Rico, and we went to the old part of town where there were all these shacks. I forget what the place is called. Itâs supposed to be dangerous. We walked down there. I remember him screwing this Puerto Rican kid in broad daylight.â
Another of Dennis favorite hang-outs was âThe Barnâ, a popular gay bar in the Village at 216 Waverly Place. The Barn was a hub that attracted a large crowd â and it had the added attraction of having back rooms. Skip still remembers âThe Barnâ scene well: âWeâd often go back there, always looking for a three-way.â
Errol Jones again: âI remember seeing him come out from the restrooms in one place that was renowned for glory holes. So I approached him, and he was friendly. I suggested we go back to my place, but he gestured for me to join him in the back of this club. It was an area I rarely went because it was so dark. But he led me back there, and⊠well, itâs a happy memory.â
For Dennis, it seemed that the only way to get rid of temptation was to yield to it.
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What I found interesting about Dennisâ early life was the transformation from a quiet, reserved kid on Long Island, happy in his own company and interested in painting and carpentry, to the outgoing, sexually-liberated party guy in Manhattan. But the real paradox with Dennis was that by day, his New York life was still straight and unassuming. Though most of his friends were people from the bar and club scene, everyone else I spoke to was keen to emphasize his gentleness and kindness, and his love of animals.
He still worked as an artist at Simplicity Pattern Company on Madison Avenue, just around the corner from the apartment: it seemed ironic to me that this regular in S&M gay bars spent his days drawing dress patterns for the American housewife. Skip remembers that Dennis was taking his carpentry seriously too, building wall to wall bookshelves and cabinets for their apartment, and spent time drawing with charcoals and painting with oils.
And when he wasnât trawling the bars â without or without Skip â Dennis could be found at any of New Yorkâs jazz clubs. The 1970s was a vibrant period for jazz in the city, with several legendary venues like Village Vanguard, Birdland, and Blue Note hosting many of the greats in their autumn years as well as new emerging artists. Dennis was a jazz fan boy, always hanging around the stage doors after the shows so that he could meet his idols. His large collection of vintage 78s was growing â his preference was 1920s jazz â and he idolized Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and Sarah Vaughan. He told Skip that he his secret dream was to be a torch singer.
He started collecting antique firearms â particularly black powder guns, which had been the primary type of firearm for centuries before the development of smokeless powder and cartridge-based guns, and flintlock firearms. He became a registered gun owner and kept his collection in a cabinet in his apartment that he built.
Dennis life seemed to be hedonistic and happy, but in the back of his mind, he had unfinished business. He still had the acting bug, and hadnât completely given up on the idea of performing one day. Sure, he got the occasional part in no-budget off-off Broadway plays, but friends remember that it was generally unsatisfying to him.
From time to time picked up the occasional modeling job, and one such gig was for a popular local gay magazine called âMichaelâs Thingâ which was a pocket guide to entertainment around town. Ads for bath houses, porn theaters, escorts, and lots of sex⊠that sort of thing. Dennis appeared in a pictorial on his motorcycle on a bridge over the pool at the Ice Palace at Cherry Grove on Fire Island. His circle of friends loved the mock serious-looking poses, and Dennis took their affectionate ribbing in good humor.
The modeling may seem to be a small part of his life, but according to his friends, it was a little more important to Dennis. And that was because Dennis took his looks very seriously. One friend compared him to Oscar Wildeâs character, Dorian Gray, saying, âWe all care what we look like, but Dennis took it to another level. He was obsessed with his appearance and freaked out about getting old.â As Oscar Wilde wrote: âYouth is the only thing worth having.â
Skip agreed, saying, âDennisâ looks meant everything to him. He had a good body. He was just naturally trim, not muscular by any means. He was Italian so he was hairy. I never even knew until late in our relationship that he used to meticulously trim all his chest hair down. In short, he was insecure, and he could be self-absorbed. I donât mean that he was shallow. He wasnât by any means, but he took great care of his appearance, and he could be vain.â
Another friend from the early days, Jon Bletz, remembered, âDennis never met a mirror that he didnât like. He was always stopping to look at himself, and ask whether his cheekbones were sharp or if his nose was elegant enough. It was as if he feared that heâd be loved less, or worse still, ignored, if he were to let himself go â so he became obsessive about his looks.â
In 1973, Dennis and Skip split. âWe had a good time, but most things come to an end, right?â is how Skip remembers it. âIn some ways, I consider him the love of my life, even now.â
Part of the reason for the break up was that Dennis had started a relationship with Joey Alan Phipps. Joey was an aspiring actor and sometime model for gay photo layouts, and was 11 years younger than Dennis.
I found pictures of Joey and was struck by his youthful appearance. Even when he was older, he looked like a perennial teenager, the sort of cheeky, smiling kid youâd see on the Partridge Family TV show.
According to Skip, Joey was a roommate of one their best friends: âJoey was a cute kid, and Dennisâ preference was blond Twinkies,â Skip said. âHe did date a young black guy once for a short time, but mainly it was blonde Twinkies. I was a blonde Twinkie. Joey was a blonde Twink.â
Dennisâ friend Mark Martinez remembers the time well: âDennis was head over heels about Joey,â he recalls. âAt first, we all figured it was just a physical thing, but pretty soon, Skip moved out and Joey moved in, and he and Dennis became inseparable.â
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4. Adult FilmsIn 1974, Dennis decided to quit his day job in the Simplicity office. He was intent on making his living through his carpentry. Friends remember how he was proud of the idea of making a living simply by using his hands. There was something primordial about it, he said. He placed ads in local newspapers and picked up a series of freelance jobs making cabinets, beds, or tables for people furnishing their Manhattan apartments. It wasnât a huge amount of income, but he was doing what he loved and everyone I spoke to remembers that he seemed genuinely happy.
In reality though, Dennis had two other sources of income â and these were two activities that he kept quiet about.
The first of these was that heâd started posing for photo sets for gay-oriented companies like Target Studio. A few years ago, I tracked down Jim French, an artist, photographer, and publisher, whoâs best known for his alter ego, Rip Colt, and his association with Colt Studio that he founded in 1967 which he turned into one of the most successful gay porn companies in the country. Jim also had a sideline painting portraits that were used as album art for Columbia Records, for singers like Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, and Johnny Mathis â and over the years, Dennis had seen Jim at jazz clubs around town, but it wasnât until he turned up at Jimâs offices to try out for some modeling work that he realized who Jim was.
The audition was a success: Jim was taken by Dennis and offered him work immediately. Jim was older than Dennis â there was a 14 year age difference between them â but their similar interests â jazz, art, design â meant they quickly became friends. Jim told me that they also bonded because he too had worked as an illustrator and artist on Madison Avenue, just like Dennis, except that itâd been a few years earlier and Jim had designed textiles not dress patterns.
Jim remembered: âDennis was one of my favorite models from the time. Always willing, professional, and easy to work with⊠and he had a great look. It was easy to take great pictures of him.â
Jim also remembered that Dennis had another way of earning money too: âIt was an open secret that Dennis ran a personal ad in the Village Voice,â he said. âIâm not sure of exactly what the ad was for â but it was for services that were sexual in nature.â
The story that Dennis was a sex worker â or more specifically, an escort or prostitute â is something that various people I spoke to remembered. Carter Stevens, an adult film director, who later became close to Dennis, said that heâd described himself as a âcall-boyâ before he got into films. Jamie Gillis, the adult film actor went further: âHe was fag hooker,â laughed Jamie. âHe told me plenty of stories about fucking aging queens on the Upper East Side.â And Dennisâ old friend, Mark Martinez, remembers running into Dennis coming out of a restaurant one day with a distinguished older man on his arm â and studiously avoiding eye contact with anyone who might know him. Dennis later told him that the man was a âclientâ who was âvery generousâ to him. Then again, several other friends I spoke to insist that Dennis also had clients that were female. Dennis would just joke that it was no big deal, just regular âMidnight Cowboyâ kinda work, he said.
In 1975, Dennis appeared in his first adult film, a gay porn movie by the director David Durston called âBoy âNappedâ. For this movie, Dennis adopted the name Wade Nichols, created from his middle name and his fatherâs first name.
Durston was one of the first people I spoke to about Dennis, and he still remembered him fondly, describing him as a gift to porn films, being great looking and having an incredible body that looked like he worked out every day â even though Dennisâ brother Richard insists that Dennis never really did any sports.
Dennisâ co-star on the film was Jamie Gillis, who was a veteran in the business even back then. Jamie remembered his own beginnings as a period when heâd had performance difficulties, so he was surprised when this newcomer was seemingly so at home on a sex film set: âDennis told me it was his first experience,â Jamie said. âAnd itâs not a natural environment. But he was very relaxed. I remember thinking how natural he looked around the other guys in sexual situations. I thought, Hereâs a guy whoâs not a stranger to having sex in front of an audience⊠Dennis could perform sexually, and act well.â
It seems that at first Dennis just considered Boy-napped to be just a quick way to make some extra cash, but it was a success and he enjoyed it. He figured this could be an opportunity to make some more money with other films, and perhaps establish his own carpentry studio where he could make custom furniture.
He found the first adult film parts through an agent called Dorothy Palmer, a tough old broad, straight out of central casting, who operated out of a small, cluttered office near the theater district. Dorothy was notorious for not telling her actors that a role being offered was in a pornographic film, instead leaving it for them to find out for themselves when they turned up on set and find they were expected to do a little more than just recite lines. This left a lot of actors with red faces and indignant reactions. That clearly wasnât a problem for Dennis, and his acting ability, good looks, and sexual reliability quickly made him a hot commodity â and he was soon appearing in films such as Jailbait and Virgin Dreams.
One early admirer was aspiring actor/director David Davidson, who fell for Dennis â much to the annoyance of Davidâs beard girlfriend, Erica Eaton. Davidson cast Dennis in two of his films, Summer of Laura and Call Me Angel, Sir, in the hope that it would win him favors with the newcomer. The problem was that Erica was also the producer of both films and she wasnât impressed, which made the shoot of both movies rather problematic. Dennis, calm and unruffled as always, was amused by the love triangle, and enjoyed Davidâs favors on the side when Erica was away.
Looking at Dennis in these early films is like looking at early silent films, in that directors hadnât accounted for the fact that he could really act and so typically used him as a physical stereotype. But even so, Dennis shines â smoldering intensity, an immaculate porno âstache, and pronounced Fire Island tan-lines.
The menâs magazines sat up and took notice, eager to profile the new star, and wrote breathlessly about visiting him in his beloved midtown apartment.
This from Rustler: âWade Nichols is special. The handsomest and most talented of this breed of super-men. Perhaps he is the last of the true matinee idols. Right now, he is content, building furniture, traveling and making erotic films. The Clark Gable of Porn was hanging a chandelier when we visited his hand-built (decorated, at least) Manhattan apartment.â
Or how about this from Skin Biz: âYoung, energetic, good-looking and bold. He comes to the door wearing a tight work shirt and faded blue jeans with a navy-blue handkerchief flapping from his back left pocket. His Manhattan apartment in a 5-storied brownstone is eclectically hip. The flavor is rustic, offset by a burning wood fireplace, beautifully shuttered windows and cabinets which he made himself. A motorcycle helmet, sitting on the floor, accompanies his Honda 550 garaged down the street. His telephone rings nonstop until he finally hooks it to his answering machine. His name is Wade Nichols, one of todayâs swinging 32-year-old bachelors, but with one exception. While most men only dream about their sexual fantasies, this man indulges in them⊠on screen.â
Dennis was fast becoming a star in straight porn films, which raises the question that is perhaps discussed more than any other when it comes to Dennis â and that is his sexual orientation.
Everything that I had heard about him from friends and contacts â at least since his school days â was that he was exclusively interested in men, and had an active, varied, not to mention voracious sex life on the New York gay scene. Yet when it came to sex work â and this goes for the adult films and his escorting â people who knew him remember that he didnât seem to have a preference between men or women. Many described him as simply being a gay man who was so sexual that he could perform with anyone. But occasionally, I did speak to someone who disagreed â and one of those was Jim French, the photographer at Colt and Target. âDennis was this rare phenomenon,â Jim said, âin that he appealed to women just as much as he appealed to men. I always thought he was bi-sexual.â
Fellow actor Jamie Gillis was impressed: âI knew he could act, but I was still surprised to see that he started turning up in straight films after Boy-napped. I figured that he was a guy who wasnât interested in having sex with women⊠but he was just as natural in the straight films too.â
Perhaps the most surprised person was Skip, Dennisâ previous partner from the early 1970s: âWhen I found out that he was making adult films, I was surprised,â Skip remembered. âNot surprised that he was doing porn, but that he was making straight porn⊠he never had relationships with women. He wasnât bisexual in any way.â
And then the sex magazines started to come across his gay films and his photo spreads for Target Studio, and they asked him about his orientation. Dennis was smart enough to know that future work as a hetero porn star probably depended on him taking a firm position, so he went out of his way in interviews to deny that there was anything to it: âIâm NOT by nature a guy who fucks guys,â he insisted. âIâm embarrassed by it. I only did it because I got five hundred bucks for two days work.â
By 1977, Dennis adult film career was in full swing, and he was appearing in movies by the more notable New York directors such as Gerard Damiano, Radley Metzger, Carter Stevens, and the Amero brothers.
As his star rose, something else was happening: Dennisâ mainstream acting aspirations seemed to be receding. Perhaps it was because his acting itch was being scratched, but it was unusual: the mythical cross-over from X-rated to regular films was the holy grail to most of the actors in porn. Even today, when I speak to the pioneers from the early years, they still talk about the forlorn hopes they once had that their sex film success might pave the way into a successful TV or feature film career.
Dennis appeared to be different. In interviews, he insisted that he was content making porn, and had no desire to do anything else: âI have no pretensions of becoming a star,â he said. âI already tried legitimate acting and wasnât making any money. Acting is a tough business. You can spend your whole life going to every casting call and only wind up with small character parts or walk-ons when youâre 80 years old. As an actor in these adult films, I do my best making them good. Iâm serious about my work, but not about myself where I believe Iâm going to be a star.â
I asked his friends about whether this was true and most agreed, saying that one of the reasons for this was that Dennis was always a person who valued his privacy. He liked that that he was able to be a genuine star in the X-rated world, yet remain unknown outside of it at the same time. The adult film industry at the time was a strange beast: on the one hand, it had its own star system, awards, and media, and you could be idolized and admired in that world. Yet outside of that, it was also relatively anonymous â which was exactly what Dennis wanted.
From speaking to the various people that Dennis knew in the 1970s, it was clear that Dennis liked to compartmentalize the different parts of his life. He had his family, then there were the adult filmmakers and actors, the gay bar and club scene, his music friends in jazz clubs, the antique gun club members, his clients â both for his carpentry work and his escorting, and there was his partner, Joey. He liked having different personas for different people â often contradictory ones: Here was a loner who enjoyed collecting guns by himself, but was the popular center of attention in social gatherings. He was devoted to his partner Joey, but make sex films and did sex work on the side. He was gay, but was a big star in straight sex movies. He was the epitome of cool, but was also an old-fashioned nerd, his favorite films being âCasablancaâ or âCaptain Bloodâ, and the only music he listened to were 1920s jazz records. And everyone loved him and said he was thoughtful, kind, and gentle, but they also found him enigmatic and wished they could know him better.
Dennis was also afraid of the two worlds colliding, and possibly facing public shame as result. He admitted this in an interview saying, âI have a fear of doing modelling jobs and having them find out a month or two later who I am and what I am doing in this business.â
And then there was his family â his mother and brother who had moved down to live in Richmond, Virginia. Dennis visited them regularly. Richard remembers one visit: âDennis came down, and asked me whether Iâd ever been to the Lee Art Theater, which was the local adult film cinema there. I thought it was a strange question and I wondered why he asked it. Later, he told me he appeared in adult films, and I realized that his films had been playing in that theater and that heâd been on all the posters. My mother found out about it at the same time. I know she wasnât too happy about it but she just didnât say anything. Thatâs what she was like.â Richard had been curious when Dennis told him about the X-rated films, and he asked Dennis how he could have sex in front of other people. Dennis said that the nude modeling that heâd done at art school had got him used to it.
In the meantime, the movies kept getting bigger. In 1978, Dennis starred in the lead role of Armand Westonâs âTake Offâ. If any sex film can be described as almost autobiographical of its star, perhaps âTake Offâ was it. More intricately plotted that most porn features, it is loosely based on Oscar Wildeâs âThe Picture of Dorian Grayâ telling the story of Darrin Blue (played by Dennis), a handsome but vain man who is obsessed with remaining eternally young â in his case, by keeping a stag film hidden in his attic. It was a high budget movie involving much of the businessâ best talent â both in front of and behind the camera. Dennis received $2,000 for his role, declaring it the biggest, most beautiful porn film ever.
And then there was âBarbara Broadcastâ â and the scene that introduced me to Dennis. If youâve seen the film, youâll already know what Iâm talking about. Itâs the restaurant kitchen scene. Two actors â Wade Nichols and the incredible C.J. Laing. No dialogue. No music. And no sex either â at least not for the first, and best, part of the scene. Just the industrial kitchen metal clanging in the stifling heat of a New York restaurant kitchen in summer. A restless and curious woman descends a staircase into the sweaty bowels of the building. She happens upon the kitchen. She wanders among the anonymous cooking staff but is invisible to all of them. And then she sees Him, shirtless and sweaty. She circles him smiling. He spots her, and returns her glance with an incredulous, amused gaze. The only noise is the sound of cooking pots banging against each other. These two are at the center of the universe, oblivious to the irrelevant world that circles them.
She spies a large metal mixing bowl on the floor. An idea flashes across her mind. She laughs, and kicks the bowl, positioning it beneath her parted legs. She looks back at him, giggling manically. He smiles, his eyes narrowing quizzically like the hero of a low-rent spaghetti western. She starts to crouch over the bowl. The realization of what she might be about to do slowly dawns on him.
Years later I spoke to the filmâs director, Radley Metzger. He told me he felt dizzy when directing this scene.
In 1978, Dennis traveled to California and Hawaii to appear in one of his last X-rated films, âLove You.â The film was directed by former Hollywood actor and now director, John Derek, perhaps more famous for his marriages to Ursula Andress, Linda Evans, and, Bo Derek.
âThe film featured a small cast, comprising of just Annette Haven, Leslie Bovee, Eric Edwards, and Dennis.
Johnâs wife at the time, 22-year-old Bo Derek, was closely involved in the production â and became its biggest cheerleader when it was made: ââLove Youâ is sexy and erotic,â she told newspaper reporters. âThe picture has very explicit sex scenes. It shows everything. Itâs the first beautiful erotic, hard core film ever made. I showed it to 600 women libbers in a NOW meeting and they liked it. They said it was not degrading to women. The picture is about love, and you donât play around with that.â
Years later, Eric Edwardsâs main memory of the movie was a nude wrestling match between him and Dennis â which he remembers because John Derek insisted they film it again and again. Eric said, âDennis was a nice guy. Very respectful. We all liked him. But shooting that wrestling scene seemed to last forever, and John Derek seemed fascinated by it. I wondered if he was gay â which seemed unlikely because Bo was there at his side, watching all the time.â
Within a couple of years, Dennis had become one of the biggest stars in the adult industry. Heâd earned enough money to make himself self-sufficient, which allowed him to pursue his passions independently. For most people in the adult film industry, this represented success.
What Dennis didnât know was that it was just the beginning.
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Tune in next time for the concluding part of âWade Nichols: Like an Eagle.â
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The post Wade Nichols: âLike an Eagleâ â His Untold Story Part 1: The Early Years – Podcast 152 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Who was the original actor cast in the lead role of the golden age blockbuster, The Devil in Miss Jones (1973)?
Not Georgina Spelvin, the talented doyenne of adult films who starred in many pre-video era features, first in New York then in California, and who was the eventual star of the film as âMiss Jones.â
No, Gerard Damiano first chose another actress, Sue Flaken, to fill the role, only to change his mind at the last minute. The movie went on to become one of the biggest hits of the era, making Spelvin one of the most famous of the first generation of porn stars.
The sliding doors moment changed Georgina Spelvin’s life forever. But what of Sue Flaken, who was instead relegated to a minor, non-speaking part in the film? Who was she, why did she miss out on the life-changing role, and what happened to her afterwards?
The answer includes supporting involvement for Allen Ginsberg, Tommy Lee Jones, Georgina Spelvin, Harry Everett Smith, Al Gore, the Chelsea Hotel, Joe Sarno, Terry Southern, industrial quantities of hallucinogenic drugs, and much more.
This is the untold story of âSue Flaken.’
This podcast is 35 minutes long.
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sliding doors
/ËslÄ«diNG dĂŽrs/
plural noun
definition: a seemingly insignificant moment that has a profound and lasting impact on a person’s life or the trajectory of a relationship. These moments, while often unnoticed, can dramatically alter the course of events and significantly affect future outcomes.
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What if Franz Ferdinand hadnât been shot, and the event that triggered World War I hadnât happened?
What if young Adolf Hitler hadnât been rejected twice from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and instead had gone on to became an artist instead of pursuing politics?
Butterfly-effect inflection points which, if they had turned out differently, might have caused a different world.
Or another example, only less consequential perhaps: what if Gerard Damiano hadnât decided at the last moment to promote Georgina Spelvin from her role as the cook for the cast and crew on The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and instead given her the starring role?
The story is oft-told: Damiano was shooting the follow-up to Deep Throat (1972) in a converted apple-packing plant in Milanville, Pennsylvania, and needed someone to provide craft services for the long-weekend location shoot. He offered the job to Chele Graham, an ex-Broadway chorus girl whoâd featured in stage productions such as âCabaretâ, âGuys and Dollsâ, and âSweet Charityâ before being timed-out by her age – she was a near-ancient 36 by the time of âMiss Jonesâ. Chele accepted the catering job, needing the money for a film collective that she and her lover were setting up in lower Manhattan.
Damiano had already hired someone for the all-important lead role of Miss Jones â a newcomer named Ronnie, an actress he was raving about â but by the time production started, Chele had become Georgina Spelvin and assumed the role of Miss Jones, instantly creating one of the more memorable characters in adult film history – as was borne out by the contemporary critics.
Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, ââThe Devil in Miss Jonesâ is good primarily because of the performance of Georgina Spelvin in the title role. Miss Spelvin, who has become the Linda Lovelace of the literate, is something of a legend. There burns in her soul the spark of an artist, and she is not only the best, but possibly the only actress in the hardcore field.â
Addison Verrill writing in Variety wondered, âIf Marlon Brando can be praised for giving his almost-all in âLast Tango in Paris,â one wonders what the reaction will be to âMiss Jonesâ lead Georgina Spelvin? Though she lacks the specific sexpertise of Linda Lovelace and sheâs no conventional beauty, her performance is so naked it seems a massive invasion of privacy.â
So the sliding doors of history closed shut, Georgina was unexpectedly immortalized as an improbable sex star, and Damiano had another sex film hit.
History is often written by the protagonists, but truth is most often found in silence and the quiet places. Everyone else has told their story about the film, so what about Ronnie, the original Miss Jones? When Georgina was catapulted into A-lister sex-film stardom for the next decade, Ronnie disappeared without a trace. She became a parenthesis in a footnote to the appendix of adult film history.
Who was she, and what happened to the original Miss Jones?
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Gerry Damiano had rated Ronnie highly: âSheâs really a dynamo,â he said to Harry Reems, the movieâs male lead, who wrote about her in his autobiography, âHere Comes Harry Reemsâ (1975). Gerry continued, âSheâs voluptuous, sheâs got a wild afro-cut, and an ass that just wonât quit.
Ronnie was enthusiastic about being given the Miss Jones role too: âI can fuck and suck better than any woman doing this shit,â Harry said that she told everybody.
But the reason that Georgina took her place has been a mystery for decades. In fact, there are three versions on record.
Firstly, in her autobiography, Georgina claimed that her getting the part was all a happy accident: she’d been meeting with Damiano to discuss the food: âWe discuss how to feed 17 people for three days on $500. An actor arrives to read for the part of Abaca. Gerry asks if I would mind reading the part of Miss Jones with him since Iâm just sitting there.â She remembered that Damiano was so impressed with her read-through, that he offered her the part.
Harry Reemsâ recollection was different, claiming Georgina was only given the lead role when Ronnie was diagnosed with a dental issue two days before the production started: ââHowâs Ronnie going to do blow jobs with an impacted wisdom tooth?â I asked Gerry. Good question. Gerry threw in the dental floss. Ronnie was out and Georgina Spelvin was in.â
The last version comes from fellow ‘Miss Jones’ actor, Marc Stevens – aka Mr. 10Âœ on account of the supposed length of his furious fescue. Marc remembers the last-minute change the most prosaically in his memoir: â(The filmâs production had) the usual whining, ego-tripping, and petulance endemic to film. Ronnie decided, all of a sudden, she didnât want the starring role. (Instead) she wound up blowing me in another scene.â
Itâs true. Whatever issues Ronnie had with motivation â or her teeth â she did in fact appear in âMiss Jonesâ, in a smaller, sex-only role, partnering with Georgina Spelvin to give head to Marc Stevens. She appeared in the credits as âSue Flaken.â
It remains among the only feature film footage of Ronnie, and sheâs an electric presence. (She appears as ‘Terri Easterni‘ in The Birds and the Beads (1973), and supposedly made brief appearances in two other X-rated films: Lloyd Kaufmanâs The New Comers (1973) (tagline: âThe First X-rated Musical!â) and the one-day wonder, Sweet and Sour (1974), but both are virtually unfindable today.)
In âMiss Jonesâ, sheâs filmed in a single spaghetti-western-style close-up. Her face is framed by a thicket of coal-black curls, and punctuated by roundly incredulous eyes to which an immaculately-applied smokey-eye contrasts with Georginaâs 1970s porno-blue eye shadow. Ronnie smiles a lot, showing off detergent-white teeth like a suburban neighborhood picket fence.
Sexually, Ronnie steals the scene, performing enthusiastically, selfishly even. Her sequence exists within the film to show Miss Jones making up for having been a virgin for too long – but, just like Ronnieâs unknown life, the scene exists in its own microcosm, unconnected to anything that precedes or follows it.
And then Ronnie disappears behind the sliding doors, and is never seen again.
Sue Flaken (left), and Georgina Spelvin, in ‘The Devil in Miss Jones’ (1973)
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Whenever I met people whoâd been present on set with Ronnie for those few short days â people like Gerry Damiano, Georgina Spelvin, Harry Reems, Levi Richards, and others â I always made a point of asking about her. Remarkably, given that theyâd all known her for such a short period several decades earlier, everyone still had a memory or two concerning her. And many of their memories were the same: Ronnie was beautiful, exciting, but unpredictable, wild, feral even. She wasnât part of their usual repertory group of performers, but rather teetered around the edge, maverick and unpredictable. No one had any idea what her second name was.
Then I met Jason Russell, former husband of New Yorkâs first porno star, Tina Russell, and sometime adult film actor himself. I interviewed him in his Florida home towards the end of his life, when his world-weary, tobacco-stained cynicism betrayed his every statement.
âEver hear about âRabid Ronnieâ?â he non-sequitured with a jaded sigh at the end of the day.
I perked up. You mean the Ronnie who was in âThe Devil in Miss Jonesâ?
Jason mumbled back, âYep, that one. She was a trip. Whacko. Insane. I wrote about her in Tinaâs book. Only worked with her once. It was on the set of Joe Sarnoâs Sleepyhead (1973). Crazy chick. Fierce. Almost killed the whole film.â
I pulled out a copy of âPorno Starâ (1973), Tina Russellâs autobiography that Jason had ghost-written, and found the description of events.
âHalfway through the first day, one female member (Ronnie) of the cast announced, âIâm tripping my brains out!â She proceeded to flip out to the point where she caused herself and many others a lot of pain, and cost the budget at least $2,500 to $3,000. We had to find a replacement for her role overnight, and re-shoot with the new girl all that we had managed to shoot the first day. This was only the second time that such a situation had occurred in the three years that we have been working in the business. We all went home with grueling tension headaches.â
What happened exactly, I asked?
âAcid, Iâm guessing. She dropped a tab, and she was gone. She lost her mind. She was like a wild horse. Flared nostrils and violent eyes.â
Did you ever come across her after that?
âNooo. She vanished. Sheâll be long dead now, Iâm sure. She was an acid casualty, you know? People were experimenting with drugs a lot back then. Theyâve always done that. But we didnât knew the limits, so we were guinea pigs for some of the newer drugs. And some people paid the price. I guess Ronnie was one. I still think about her some times, and wonder about how she ended her days.â
*
The film that Jason mentioned, âSleepyheadâ, was Joe Sarnoâs first as an explicit sex film director after a prolific decade making films that managed to insert tense erotica into humdrum black and white existential kitchen-sink dramas. When I heard Jasonâs story, Joe was still alive and we were friendly. I called him, and he remembered Ronnie and the âSleepyheadâ incident well.
Joe recalled heâd been wary of the newly-formed X-rated acting fraternity, and decided he needed to hear them all read before casting any of them. So he held an old-fashioned open-call audition in his apartment, and Ronnie turned up. Good actors in porn in the early 1970s were as scarce as a polyester suit without a wide collar, and Ronnie immediately stood out to him as a talent. She was attractive too, firecracker small, with an impish grin. Joe was impressed and took Ronnie aside. They hit it off, and she distractedly told him sheâd attended all the prestigious acting schools in the city, and was now fielding a number of promising theater offers. Joe was skeptical of her claims but offered her a principal role in his plot-driven narrative, and Ronnie accepted gratefully.
Two weeks later, the Ronnie who turned up for the first day on set was a different character: âShe seemed drunk, stumbling around and acting unsteady. Her make-up was a mess and she clearly wasnât prepared for the dayâs shoot. So I sat her down and waited to see if she got any better – but it just got worst. Iâve never understood drug-taking so I was bewildered when she started hallucinating and arguing angrily with invisible people who werenât there. I was worried about her sanity. We tried shooting a few scenes with her and made some progress, but then she got out of control and I had to let her go. We started again next day – this time without her.â
A few months after I spoke to Joe, he was clearing out cabinets in his apartment and came across a collection of old paperwork and ephemera relating to his career: scripts, actor resumes, and stills. In amongst the ancient history was a familiar face. It was Ronnieâs headshot – with her full name and performing experience.
Her address, albeit several decades old, was also shown: The Chelsea Hotel, New York City.
Sue Flaken’s headshot
*
My first call to Ronnie wasnât a positive one.
At first, I couldnât even figure out why I should call her. There were plenty of other people whose film experiences were more significant and meaningful, so why Ronnie? Then one day, her headshot fell out of a file in front of me and so I decided to act on impulse. Another sliding door moment perhaps.
I found a phone number for her online. She was no longer living at the Chelsea, having seemingly married and moved down to Florida many years before. I called and introduced myself, and gave a reason for my interest. You know: the usual waffle weâve all approached complete strangers with – you start by asking about acting in a famous pornographic film decades earlier, you throw in a reference to a potentially mind-altering mushroom-mind-trip that people still remember, and close by telling them about a recently-discovered headshot lying long-forgotten in a drawer. In other words, a pretty standard opener.
I heard a sigh at the other end of the line before a tired voice: âAnd so⊠the call Iâve always expected but forever feared is happening right now,â she said with resignation.
Silence, followed by more waffle from the caller, this time the predominant theme being backtracking, reversal, and retraction.
Ronnie sighed again. âI like your English accent,â she offered eventually.
I explained I was intrigued with knowing more about her early life and her brief involvement in adult film.
âAnd what is going to happen to the information?â she asked.
It didnât have to go anywhere, I said. This was a just curious inquiry about a small part of her life.
âI donât want it told,â Ronnie said. âItâs not something I share with people. Even with those who are close to me.â
I left my email address in case she changed her mind – and the conversation ended.
A few months later, I received an email from her: âIâve wrestled with the idea of sharing details from my life. I felt that they were too private to share with you. Hence, the hesitation and late response. But I have come to realize that your heart and spirit are in the right place, and therefore I wish to help you.
“But know this: the only reason Iâm telling you is that you are anonymous and therefore I donât feel it will have any effect on my life. You’ll be like a canyon that I whisper into. The sounds will disappear with the wind and leave no trace.â
So we started talking.
âWhat is it you want to know?â she asked.
The Chelsea Hotel, New York City
*
Ronnieâs life started in 1947 – born in a Manhattan hospital, raised in East Rockaway on Long Island, and by her teen years becoming a self-described Jewish American Princess.
Her father was heavily involved in community theatre, and occasionally ventured into film, once appearing in a movie with Kim Novak. Ronnie caught the performing bug from an early age and joined every stage production she could find. For as long as she could remember, she wanted to be a famous movie star. Dad took note and enrolled her in elocution lessons followed by acting schools in the city throughout her high school years.
Ronnie showed talent, and was granted a place at the Stella Adler Studio where she studied for several years. Opportunities started to spring up that were as exciting as they were varied: she modeled for Spiegelâs Catalogue, she was hired as a singer in a Harry Belafonte show that premiered at a Brooklyn night club, she did skits on stage with Bette Midler, took acrobatic dance lessons with Joe Price, the legendary director of the Dance Master Association, she did voiceover work with Chuck McCann, and found time to briefly date both preeminent teen idols of the time, Paul Anka and Frankie Avalon. As some of the work was in Hollywood, she got a local manager in California, attorney Jimmy Talbort, who also managed Redd Foxx, but Ronnieâs main interest was in live theatre, preferring drama plus the occasional comedy.
In 1966, she embarked on a Theater Studies degree at Queenâs College, at the same time she was attending the Herbert Berghof Acting Studio. She started dating her high school boyfriend, a smart Long Island kid named Jimmy who got accepted into Harvard. Ronnie visited him often and hung out with his two roommates, Al and Tommy Lee. Theyâd later become future politico, Al Gore, and âFugitiveâ actor, Tommy Lee Jones. The four of them formed an inseparable group for a short while.
Ronnie spoke proudly about her young life, still amazed that the people she mixed with would become such successful professionals in various roles.
âWe had the world at our feet,â she smiled.
*
And then the craziness began. To quote Ronnie quoting Charles Dickens, âIt was the best of times, it was the worst of timesâ.
It started in 1969, after graduating Queens College, when she moved to Manhattan to pursue an acting career. I asked how serious sheâd been about acting?
It was always my intention and interest to act. In retrospect, I realized later that it was more of an interest than an intention.
Iâd been fortunate. Up until then, everything had been handed to me on a plate. I had a lot of acting offers and I thought life was easy. But I started to let people down.
What does that mean?
I wasnât a serious person. I was a wild child.
Your teen years donât strike me as having been crazy. So⊠was there a turning point?
Yeah. I met Harry Smith.
Harry Everett Smith, the artist and poet?
(laughs) Yes, though he was more than just an artist-poet. He was crazy, an eccentric, larger-than-life persona who’d been one of the most prominent figures of the Beat Generation scene in New York. He made underground films, was an early hippie and a spiritual guru, he put out records, collected esoteric objects⊠and he collected people too.
Harry Everett Smith
Drugs were important for him as well, werenât they?
He was heavily into anything mind-expanding, and he loved the creative possibilities of hallucinations.
And you knew him well?
Very. At first, I was a member of Harryâs âtribeâ. Then we became close and we spent a lot of time together. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel, and after a while I moved in with him. We lived together in the legendary Room 731.
I got caught up in all the craziness that surrounded him. And that included the drugs and the mind-trips.
What was the Chelsea like at the time?
People romanticize it now because so many famous artists, singers, and writers lived there. And itâs true, people like Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe, Hendrix, and Bob Dylan were there when I was there, so that was exciting.
But in reality, it was also an insane asylum for incorrigible drug addicts. Sadly, I fit right in. I became a big druggie. A major drug userâŠ
How so?
I spent all my time experimenting with drugs. Hallucinogenics: LSD, mushrooms, acid, peyote. I did it all. All the time, too. I think I must have dropped about 500 tabs of LSD that first year.
As I say, I never make the same mistake twice: I make it six or seven times, just to be sure.
How were you supporting yourself?
I survived off very little. Harry didnât have much money, but he was so well-known that even when he couldnât pay his rent, the Chelsea management couldnât touch him or throw him out. His notoriety also meant that the best drugs came our way too.
Did you mix with the other Beats?
Oh sure, it was a close group. Harryâs best friend was Allen Ginsberg, so we spent a lot of time with him. Through them both, I got to know Gregory Corso, the poet. Gregory lived in the Chelsea too, so Iâd sometimes take refuge in his place when it got too much with Harry. The problem was that Greg struggled with alcohol and drugs as well – because he was so lonely and damaged.
It was a loving, talented, but strange and dysfunctional gang.
Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso
What was it like being on the inside of their group?
On the one hand, I was excited. These were men whose works I had read and whose philosophy and thought I had admired. And all of sudden, I was there, listening to them, learning, and being part of their lives.
But then there was a melancholic desperation to them as well.
Why so?
They were older than people Iâd hang out with – Harry was about 25 years older than me, Gregory was, maybe, 15 years older. By the late 1960s, they were men without a time. Theyâd preceded the whole hippie thing: in fact, their philosophy had, in part, led to the hippies, and they were revered by the young counter-culture – but now they also felt old and marginalized. So they doubled down, and became more into drugs and drink.
Were you doing much theater during these years?
As much as my drugged-out state would allowâŠ.
I did plays all over town, many of them small, experimental productions for no money, and I continued my acting training at the La Mama Plexus workshop. That was a notoriously difficult, taxing, emotional process⊠even if you were in control of your faculties.
And I was spiralingâŠ
How long did you live at the Chelsea?
I got my own room there after a while. I became involved with another writer, Terry Southern. Heâd written a racy book, Candy (1958), and then became a screenwriter of a bunch of counter-culture films⊠Dr Strangelove (1964), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1969), and others.
What was he like when you knew him?
He was basically an alcoholic and an amphetamine user, and was becoming less reliable as a result⊠which meant he was less in-demand with filmmakers and so he had money problems.
We partied hard.
In 1970, Southern wrote a novel, Blue Movie, about the production of a high-budget pornographic film which starred major movie actors.
Yeah, he was fascinated with sex films. Obsessed. He talked about them all the time. When the first sex films started appearing in theaters â I mean real sex â he took me off to a Times Square cinema, and we went to see one. He watched them all the time. I dunno, perhaps he normalized the whole idea for me.
âBlue Movieâ was the result of his interest, but it was a flop and didnât sell well.
It was a shame, because he was an incredible talent. Stanley Kubrick loved his work.
Terry Southern (left), with Rip Torn
*
If Ronnie spoke about being a casualty of the 1960s drug culture, the 1970s were the brutal hangover where life really went downhill for her. I asked her about whether âThe Devil in Miss Jonesâ was her first direct experience of working in the adult film industry. At first, she brushed off the questions blaming drugs and a poor memory.
I have a very scant recollection of my days in the porn industry. At that time, I was still using LSD heavily, and that creates these large black⊠blank periods in my memory.
Do you remember if it was your first sex film experience?
I have a feeling that it was not. Whether I had made a feature, or two, or whether I just some of those individual scenes that were shot on a hand-held portable camera, Iâm not sure. I think I did something before âMiss Jones.â
Ronnie in ‘The Birds and the Beads’ (1973) – where the same head shot is shown on the table. Ronnie is credited as ‘Terri Easterni’ – a reference to boyfriend, Terry Southern
What do you remember about the âMiss Jonesâ shoot?
I recall Gerard Damiano, the director. He was kindly and paternal – and serious too.
I think that I was supposed to play the lead, but something changed at the last minute. I donât recall what it was.
One story was that a problem with a wisdom tooth?
I have no recollection of that.
Do you remember the scene that you did with Georgina Spelvin?
Hardly. I do know that on set we improvised a lot, and I remember helping Gerry set up a scene or two by sketching out detailed improv scenarios. I was used to doing that at the Stella Adler Studio so that was straight forward.
Do you remember anyone else from the production?
I recall Georgina as being an older, matter-of-fact, no-nonsense broad.
I remember Harry, the lead in the film. I think I worked with him in a few films. Itâs a blur.
I also recall a beautiful petite French girl that I acted with. Who would that be?
Did you remember being aware of the commercial success of âMiss Jonesâ?
Only much later. A few years later in fact. I had no idea what the name of the movie was when I made it, but it dawned on me much later. I was horrified when I realized. Iâve still never seen it.
Did anyone ever recognize you from your appearance in it?
Not that Iâm aware ofâŠ
Do remember appearing in any other adult films?
I vividly recall a director named Joe Sarno who I worked for. He lured me in by insisting that his films were soft porn, not hard porn. He liked me, so he gave me a prominent acting role. I liked him too.
On the first day, we were shooting a scene and I was wearing a white fur coat with black spots. I was tripping on LSD. A really heavy trip.
Long story short, I cost Joe at least a full dayâs shoot because of something I did.
What was that?
Itâs painful to remember. I did the sex scene, and I had fur all over my face. Then I took some of the white substance… use your imagination⊠and I smeared it all over the camera lens. I didnât know what I was doing. I was hysterical. That didnât go down wellâŠ
Do you remember Joeâs reaction?
Joe was the nicest, most down-to-earth person. I had great fondness for him. He took me aside and told me that I did not belong on a porno set. He said that I was a nice Jewish girl, and had too much class to be in this environment. He told me to go home and think seriously about what he said.
And what was your reaction?
I did what he told me to. And I donât believe that I ever graced a porn set again.
*
The most painful part of Ronnieâs life came after the X-rated films.
As she tells it, she was still living at the Chelsea Hotel, struggling to find work, and dealing with increasingly severe addictions. With dwindling options, she was kicked out of the residence, and resorted to couch-surfing at the apartments of people she barely knew. Eventually she turned to escorting and dealing drugs. It was a dangerous combination. If she wasnât risking her life being beaten up by johns or drug gangs, she was getting into trouble with the law. She suffered physically, was arrested on a semi-regular basis, and was banged up for weeks in prison, but somehow managed to avoid lengthy jail sentences.
Ronnieâs discomfort talking about it was plain: âShort story, I turned to sugar daddies and more dealing. I still have a hard time sharing many of the shady experiences from my past. Theyâre both shameful and immoral. I was raising holy hell. Those were the bad old days for sure.â
Remarkably she still acted on occasion, mainly in theatrical productions but sometimes in bit parts in movies such as âLords of Flatbush,â (1974) notable for early starring roles for Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler. The film earned her SAG membership, but it was too late: âMuch to my regret, I had to accept it just wasnât in the cards for me. The promise I had shown had evaporated â and together with it, all the opportunities, hope, and dreams. I was lost.â
It came to a head when Ronnie experienced a complete breakdown, both physical and emotional, followed by period of mental illness. Recognizing that she needed a complete change to save her life, she moved to Florida and trained as a teacher, gaining a doctorate from the Union Institute & University, an organization was based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. She married, and resumed a limited acting career finding work in commercials and training videos for bodies like the Miami Police Force. Her resumeâ at the time described her as being available for look-a-like work too – for anyone wanting a Sophia Loren, Marlo Thomas, Isabel Allende, Judge Judy, Bobby Gentry, Barbra Streisand, and Marsha Clark.
She became a Certified Drama Teacher, school counselor, and motivational speaker who spoke about her first-hand experience with drug addiction, mental illness, and recovery: âI truly have gone through a complete transformation in my life. It was a time that I was not proud of,â she repeated to me.
*
I kept in touch with Ronnie ever since our first calls. Weâd exchange emails, holiday cards, and invitations to visit each other. Mostly we’d talk about what was going on in the world or in our lives. Sometimes she asked random questions about people in the adult film industry: âHow is Harry Reems? How does he feel about the films he made?â She’d ask about Joe Sarno. âWhere does Joe live now? Is he happy? Please give him my love if you speak with him again. And, most of all, thank him for getting me out of the porn business.â
Occasionally, we returned to talking about the details of her early life, and we pondered the vagaries of existence. The various sliding door moments that could have completely changed the way her life turned out. And she still couldn’t fathom just how her life would’ve been different if she had been ‘Miss Jones.’
Once she called me and asked me about the plot of âThe Devil in Miss Jonesâ: âItâs about a woman who lived her life as an innocent virgin, but she wants to have a second go-round before she goes to hell â is that right?â
Yes, I replied. The tagline of the film was âIf you have to go to hell, go for a reason.â
Ronnie replied: âIâm the opposite of her then. Iâd like a do-over where I donât do all the crazy things.â
*
Every so often, I asked her if sheâd be interested in talking more publicly about her life experience in adult film? Could I write an article about her life, for example?
The answer was always the same: âI am so ashamed of it all. Itâs embarrassing. And no one would be interested anyway.â
I assured her she had nothing to feel guilty about, and that sheâd lived more interesting lives than a room full of other people.
âWait until I die,â sheâd laugh. âThen I really donât care what you do.â
Are you serious, I asked?
âYes,â she said. âWait until then. After that… well… my life has to have counted for something, it has to have had some meaning. It wasnât just a serious of sliding door moments, right?â
And then sheâd sign off her emails in the same way she always did: âLife is good. You must take care. Ronnie.â
*
Ronnie passed away in February 2025.
*
The post Sue Flakenâs Sliding Doors – The Mystery of the Original Miss Jones – Podcast 151 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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In the first part of our interview with Susan Hart, we heard about Sueâs early years in 1970s Los Angeles, growing up in a strict Catholic family, running away from home when she was 15, and becoming involved in a bad relationship. She escaped â into the army of all places, before finding a different kind of home, of sorts, as a prolific performer in the early adult video industry.
But what is unusual and remarkable about her story is that Susan is willing to tell it at all. As you will hear in this concluding episode, Susan left Los Angeles in the late 1980s and pursued a professional career, living in constant fear of being confronted by her past. When we contacted her, we had no idea that it would bring out many of her worst fears.
This is Sueâs story.
You can hear the first part of our interview with Susan Hart here.
This podcast is 60 minutes long.
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Susan Hart: Adult Industry Photos*
The post Susan Hart – Confidences and Confidence, Part 2: Podcast 150 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Perhaps one of the less obvious aspects of The Rialto Report is that it may lead to the impression that people involved in the adult industry forty or fifty years ago are all pretty comfortable talking about their pasts and have led serene lives, free of incident, since they stopped making sex films. After all, our podcasts and interviews are filled with people talking pretty openly about their experiences.
In fact, quite the opposite is normally the case. You see, the truth is that the majority of people we approach â actors, directors, producers â are usually rather keen to not go public with their memories. And thatâs understandable: despite the length of time that’s passed since their images and names were splashed across posters and theater screens, the reality is there is still a very real stigma in current day America for something they did all those years ago. The result is that, sadly, these voices are largely absent from the selection of oral histories that we present in The Rialto Report.
So all that begs the question: why on earth did Susan Hart agree to an interview?
You see, Susan was a prolific actress in the California video explosion of the mid 1980s. She appeared in a hundred or so movies and countless spreads in menâs magazines. She had an interesting backstory too: a Latina from Los Angeles, the product of a Catholic upbringing, she joined the Army to break free. Then, she became an adult film performer and later was approached to take part in a sting operation against the sex film business. She was pretty, happy-looking, popular, and we always wondered about her.
So we sent her a letter. Little did we realize that sheâd spent the last 40 years terrified that her past would catch up with her, and that her biggest nightmare was someone like us contacting her and asking her to reveal who she was, and is.
But we spoke, and Sue agreed to tell all â including exploring how she feels about it today.
She still canât quite understand why she did adult films, but we hope sheâs happy about this interview.
This podcast is 60 minutes long.
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Susan Hart: Personal Photos*
The post Susan Hart – Confidences and Confidence, Part 1: Podcast 149 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Previously on Chasing Butterflies â Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida:
After Dolores Carlosâ retirement from acting in South Florida nudie films in the late 1960s, she still remained close to her circle of Cuban filmmaker friends, and none more so than JosĂ© Prieto, Greg Sandor, and Rafael Remy. They would still meet regularly, and all three took an active interest in her daughter Marcyâs well-being. From time to time, they would joke about the fortune teller that the three men had consulted when they escaped from Cuba. Greg Sandor had moved out the California and had indeed found the money and respect that had been predicted for him. Similarly, JosĂ© Prieto had found a degree of fame and notoriety following the success and outcry that followed the release of films he made, such as Shanty Tramp (1967) and Savages from Hell (1968). The only exception to the mysticâs forecast was Rafael Remy: heâd fared well and was not seeing the trouble and strife that had been foreseen in his future.
Rafael had lived a lower profile existence but with more regular work than his two friends: due in part to his jack-of-all-trades skill-set and willingness to get involved in anything, he was always in demand. He was a cameraman, editor, lighting, gaffer, soundman, and production manager who was cheap and could always be relied on to deliver a decent job.
But as the 1960s turned into the 70s, the film business was changing: the innocent exploitation films that had greeted them when they arrived from Cuba were giving way to more explicit sex movies whose legality was questionable, and Rafael was suddenly being offered an altogether different kind of job.
Over the last twenty years, Iâve tracked down and spoken to many people involved in the Florida film business of the 1960s and 1970s. Their overlapping personal histories reveal an untold chapter of adult film history â and the hidden role that Cubans played in shaping it. These are some of their stories.
This is the concluding episode of Chasing Butterflies, Part 4: Rafael Remyâs story.
You can listen to the Prologue: Dolores Carlos’ story here, Part 1: Manuel Conde’s story, Part 2: JosĂ© Prieto’s story, Part 3: Marcy Bichette’s story.
With thanks to John Minson, Tom Flynn, Ronald Ziegler, Leroy Griffith, Veronica Acosta, Marcy Bichette, Mikey Bichette, Lousie ‘Bunny’ Downe, Mitch Poulos, Sheldon Schermer, Ray Aranha, Manny Samaniego, Barry Bennett, Randy Grinter, Herb Jeffries, Tempest Storm, Chester Phebus, Michael Bowen, Norman Senfeld, Richard Falcone, Lynne OâNeill, Something Weird Video, and many anonymous families and friends who have offered recollections, large and small, over the years.
This podcast is 45 minutes long.
*
1. Rafael Remy, the fortune-tellerâs prediction â and Emile HarvardIn the late 1960s, Rafael received a called from someone called Emile Allan Harvard.
In a strong Eastern European accent, Harvard explained that he was new to Florida and was looking for a film man: someone who knew how to put a movie together, someone who knew where to find actors, crew, locations, and equipment. Harvard had heard that Rafael could be the man to assist him, and that Rafael was a man with expertise whoâd built an extensive network of contacts in the years since heâd arrived penniless from Cuba. But Rafael was wary: he asked around about this new arrival in the state, but could find no one who knew anything about Harvard.
Rafael was right to be cautious: Harvard was a mysterious hustler with an unusual history. Emile Harvard was a Romanian Jew, whoâd started his adult life in 1930s Bucharest training to be a cameraman. And then in the build-up to World War 2, Harvard became a spy for the British. It was a volatile period in Romania as the countryâs fascist dictatorship was aligned to Nazi Germany and the government was suppressing any opposition by force. Despite the dangers, Harvard loved the subterfuge. He was given a cover profession to conceal his espionage activity which was to be a newsreel cameraman for British Movietone News. He used these media credentials to gain access to key government sites and report on them to his British paymasters. It was a perilous assignment, but one he performed with alacrity.
Romania was a key supplier of the oil for the Nazi war effort and so he also gathered information on the refineries and transport routes. Then he captured footage of Romanian military operations, like airfields and supply depots. But Harvard never seemed happy doing the same activity for long, and soon he was suggesting ways that he could sabotage Nazi efforts. His motivation was less born out of deeply-held ideological convictions, but rather out of a love of excitement and intrigue. A later acquaintance described Harvard as âan enigma, rather than a real person, a shady, shape-shifting person with many identities, a man who you felt you could never truly know.â
The useful life of a spy is a limited one â and in 1943, his cover was blown when Harvard apparently blabbed to someone he shouldnât have and was reported to the authorities. Life In Romania was suddenly impossible for him so his British employers moved him to Tel Aviv, a city then in British-administered Mandatory Palestine, where he got married and had a daughter, Esther.
When the war ended, Harvard obtained Israeli citizenship before moving to Canada, first Montreal, then Toronto, where he started a career as a TV producer and director. He formed several small-time companies, including Harvard Productions, ostensibly to make television series for the American market. His wartime activity may have been over, but in truth Harvard still enjoyed living a partly fictional life, and with each career move, he inflated the achievements on his resumĂ© which he generously shared with the press. He frequently spoke about working for MGM for twelve years, producing content for NBC, CBS, and PathĂ©, and having a successful career in Hollywood â none of which was true.
A few years later, without any major credits to his name, Harvard decided on a radical change of direction: after a vacation to see his brother in Miami, Florida in 1960, he was inspired to announce that Harvard Productions was planning a Florida-themed club in Toronto to be called âOceans 11â, after the Rat Pack movie that had hit the cinemas that year. It was to be an exclusive, high-end, rich-members-only place, which he described as a âhealth and entertainmentâ club. The Florida theme meant palm trees, a glass sun-roof, a 500-seat restaurant, nightly entertainment, and a swimming pool with a state-of-the-art wave machine â all to be housed on the top three floors of a Toronto office building. âIt will be just like Miami Beach,â Harvard told the newspapers, who lapped up the project with excitement filling pages of breathless newsprint. It was ambition on a grand scale, the kind that comes from someone with a big imagination, not to mention someone whose own money is not at stake. Sure enough, the project failed when it was the funding failed to materialize, and so for Emile Harvard and Harvard Productions, it was back to square one.
Just like the wartime spy Harvard had been, the next years were spent donning various different identities and promoting different business schemes. Some seemed serious, others were harebrained. They included hawking time-share properties, selling Jacuzzis, and offering dubious healthcare products (âat last a cure from embarrassing itching!â read the copy for one innovative cream.) Perhaps part of his success came from his appearance: Harvard was a tall, distinguished, and earnest-looking man who projected intelligent seriousness. But in 1967, Harvard was in the news again, this time posing as a doctor, prescribing Belltone hearing aids, and persuading pensioners to sign up for exorbitantly-priced payment plans. He was arrested and charged for his involvement in the fraudulent scheme.
Each time he was embroiled in a scandal, Emile Harvard somehow managed to wriggle out, and re-emerge a year or two later involved in another dodgy deal. The irony was that he was never afraid of the media. Quite the opposite: he was first in line to give newspapers interviews and quotes, just as long as they spelt his name correctly.
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2. Emile Harvard and âFear of Loveâ (1970)And so, in the late 1960s, on the lam from his latest scam, Harvard turned up in Miami, in his early 50s, with his wife and two teenage children. This time he decided to return to his first love â filmmaking. A cursory glance at the local theater scene in South Florida convinced him that he needed to speak with the most powerful and influential player in town â and that was Leroy Griffith.
Griffithâs theater business had come a long way since he moved to Miami in the early 1960s and bought the Paris Theater staging burlesque shows with Tempest Storm before meeting Dolores and moving into the sexploitation movie business with men like Manuel Conde. By the early 1970s, Griffithâs empire had grown to 12 adult theaters, including the Paris, Roxy, and Gayety theaters, and 15 adult book stores in the area, and he claimed to have produced 30 softcore adult films too. By now, Griffith was a well-known figure in Miami, though he was at pains to point out, in an interview in 1969, that he made films that specialized in ânudityâ and not âexploitation.â âExploitationâ, he explained carefully, referred to âtorture, fetishes, and lesbianismâ, subjects that he just wouldnât touch.
Griffith was intrigued by Emile Harvard: here was an older, seemingly sophisticated European, who boasted of a successful Hollywood career and wanted to make films for him to exhibit. Griffith told Harvard to speak to JosĂ© Prieto and Rafael Remy, two men who would give him a crash course download in Florida low-budget filmmaking. So Harvard did, and came away impressed with both the Cubansâ experience. But Harvard explained he wanted to make a different kind of flick. He didnât want to join the crowded field of slasher films, biker movies, or nudie-cuties: he wanted his films to go further and push the envelope. In short, he wanted to put sex up onscreen. Real sex, sex that happened before your very eyes. Harvard formed a company, set up a small office, and offered JosĂ© and Rafael in-house jobs working on his upcoming sex film projects.
JosĂ© was unsure. He didnât seek film work as much as Rafael, happy to pick up temp jobs outside of the movie business when he needed money and wait for movies that interested him. He also wasnât sure about making more explicit sex films. They were still illegal, right? Heâd had enough of hiding and fleeing from government interest, and now he preferred to keep his head down and enjoy a quiet life. But Rafael felt differently. This could be a new income stream: the films would be cheap, so there would be more of them. That would mean more regular and reliable paychecks. He was in, and he persuaded JosĂ© to give it a try as well.
In early 1970, Harvard â using the nom de porn of âEmilio Porticiâ â made their first feature, Fear of Love (1970). Harvard directed, JosĂ© shot it, and Rafael, the production manager, corralled the available Cuban film crew from Calle Ocho to help out. It was a cash-in imitation of a recent sex documentary called Man and Wife (1969) which had been hugely successful. âFear of Loveâ was a similarly pseudo-instructional tale of marital problems caused by sexual woes that are resolved by a marriage counselor â and it too played well in Leroy Griffithâs adult theaters.
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3. âFear of Loveâ â the Live ShowLeroy Griffith took note of the filmâs success, and had an idea: he had a string of former burlesque theaters, so he suggested that Harvard convert the movie into a risquĂ© live performance piece. Griffith even promised heâd finance a theatrical run on the stage at the Roxy, one of his Miami theaters.
Harvard liked the idea, and the stage show opened in September 1970, advertised as âan educational drama in two acts.â The cast included one Barry Bennett, a fresh-faced 25-year-old New Yorker, in the central lead role of the sex counselor. Barry had studied acting at college, and Harvard had taken a shine to the kid, offering him the chance to star in movies soon to be made by his newly-formed company. Barry had just proposed to his girlfriend, and wasnât sure that sex movies were for him, but he jumped at the chance to have a starring role in this high-profile stage production.
One of the first people in line to see âFear of Loveâ onstage at the Roxy was the Miami Beach mayor. He wasnât impressed. He reacted by writing a letter to the Dade County Grand Jury declaring that the play showed âlive complete nudity, simulated sexual intercourse, and homosexuality among females.â As if that wasnât bad enough, it also had an âextremely thin plot.â At first, it seemed that the playâs run would be allowed to continue as a Miami Beach Municipal Judge ruled that it was not obscene. But then the performance was busted, and Leroy Griffith and six cast members were arrested when they left the stage. They were ordered to get dressed, and taken to Miami Beach police station where bonds were set at $2,500 each. Griffith was booked for operating a building of lewdness, and the actors for lewd and lascivious conduct. Barry Bennett was arrested, even though he was the only actor who didnât take off his clothes, and he was charged with participating in an obscene performance.
The performance resumed two days later, whereupon the vice squad burst in â and arrested everyone all over again. Griffith protested loudly as he was led away, âPeople are being robbed out on the street, and yet you guys are in here?!â To which the arresting officer replied: âI think that people are getting robbed every time they watch this performance.â
The result of the legal kerfuffle were two 30-day jail sentences and a $600 fine for Griffith, $300 fines for the naked cast members, and a $150 fine for Barry Bennett. When I spoke with Barry years later, he remembered that it was a serious moment for the cast. They were facing jail sentences for simply acting on stage. In October 1970, Leroy Griffith reluctantly took the play off the schedule, and his theater returned to playing adult films.
As a sidenote: Griffith was getting beaten up from all sides. In 1971, he stopped showing adult films in some of his theaters so that he could exhibit the feature film âChe!â (1969) starring Omar Sharif. It was an intentionally noncommittal version of the Cuban revolution that recounted Che Guevara’s transformation from doctor to political revolutionary in Fidel Castro’s coup. The movie greatly displeased many of the Cubans in Miami, especially those in the filmmaking community whoâd worked on Griffith productions â and they retaliated in force. There were bomb threats, physical violence, and even an incident when a Cuban turned up at Griffithâs office brandishing a gun. It was all too much for the theater owner, and so Griffith decided to go back to the safer activity of exhibiting sex films.
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4. âFear of Loveâ â On Tour!Meanwhile, Emile Harvard wasnât entirely disappointed at the controversy caused by the âFear of Loveâ production: heâd arrived in Miami with a splash, made some money, and was now ready for the next step. Griffith and Harvard felt there was more mileage to be obtained from the stage play so they convinced Jack Cione, owner of the Forbidden City Theater in Honolulu to put on âFear of Loveâ in a two-week run starting January 7th, 1971. Harvard flew over to Hawaii, and took some of the same actors from the Florida production, including Barry Bennett.
Harvard was smart enough to know he had to play up the playâs socially redeeming features, so he gave interviews in Hawaii claiming that âa group of eight psychiatrists came to see the show and they said they were sorry it couldnât have been seen on-stage 30 years ago â as it would have saved a lot of marriages.â
But Harvard wanted to have his cake and eat it: when âFear of Loveâ opened, billed as âdirect from Miami Beachâ, it was also described as âa graphically nude workâ and âthe most shocking weâve seen.â The campaign worked: âFear of Loveâ was a sell-out twice a day for its engagement. It was reviewed in the local newspapers as âa two-act play, seven actors, serio-comic dialogue, and a lot of simulated sex,â and the TV news ran several features on it.
From Hawaii, Harvard took the play to San Francisco when it had a run at the Basin Street West Theater. Harvard heard that the local cops had been tipped off about the playâs run in Hawaii, and they were primed to bust it â so he tweaked the title, calling it âFor the Love of Loveâ in an attempt to throw them off the scent. It was a good idea, but the police were wise to his tricks and the play was busted on opening night, and three of the cast were cited for obscenity. The theater manager panicked and canceled the rest of engagement. Harvard was undeterred and just moved it down the road to the Encore Theater, where it opened in April 1971. Harvard downplayed the hiccup, maintaining that the Basin Street Theater shows had just been rehearsals intended for a private audience.
Once again, Harvard granted interviews to the local newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, and once again he exaggerated the success of the play, saying that it had played for two months in Miami, seven weeks in Honolulu, and would transfer to Washington DC next. Now he boasted his own experience included â33 years of Hollywood and 122 major feature-length productions, eight television series, awards from the Vatican and the Edinburgh Festival, and a track record that included working with Universal, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox.â He claimed the reason he used a fake name âEmilio Porticiâ was not because his stage play was pornographic, but rather because he was in the middle of ânegotiating a major deal with MGMâ and didnât want to jeopardize it. All the bluster and boasting worked: the stage show was a hit again, and additional midnight performances were added to the twice-an-evening offering.
At the end of the San Francisco run, Harvard decided to retire the play: it had had a good run, but it was expensive to produce, flying and accommodating his actors and crew, and paying for potential legal fees to defend lawsuits. He decided to focus his efforts and money on his fledgling film studio. In mid-1971, he returned to Miami, and dedicated himself to his new activity: making sex films.
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5. Rafael Remy and Emile Harvard â The Miami XXX FactorySo you may be wondering what this all has to do with Rafael Remy. After all, this is meant to be his story. When Harvard got back to South Florida, he called Rafael, now his go-to film man, and explained the plan â and he wanted Rafael to be his right-hand man.
His business model was simple: with the help of Leroy Griffith, Harvard would finance and produce sex features and shorts that he would send to labs up in New York for processing where they would then be distributed to theaters across the country. Harvard set up a studio at 1238 North Miami Avenue, and formed an inner circle of trusted associates that would deliver an inexpensive, rinse-and-repeat formula that would maximize profits. This small group consisted of Rafael, who would also be production manager, main cameraman, and editor; Jack Birch, a pockmark-faced wannabe actor who had aspirations to be a Jack Palance-style on-screen heavy, and Jackâs girlfriend Carol Kyzer, a quiet, blonde, part-time model whoâd done topless layouts for Bunny Yeager; Brad Grinter, a veteran of the horror film scene in Florida who had just made Flesh Feast (1970), a terrible movie whose one claim to fame was its star, 1940s bombshell Veronica Lake; Bradâs son Randy, a 22-year-old who would be Rafaelâs assistant; Harvardâs daughter, Esther, who was given the job of office manager; and finally there was Barry Bennett, the young actor who would take the lead performing role in the films.
Carol Kyzer, photographed by Bunny Yeager
Barry had an additional role â and a critically important one: he was the one whoâd take the films to the labs in New York to get the film stock processed and the prints cut. It was a risky assignment: the U.S. Supreme Court still hadnât come up with an agreed-upon definition of obscenity and so interstate transportation of pornography was a dicey proposition with offenders facing years of imprisonment. But Barry wanted the extra cash that Harvard promised him â so he figured he could deal with the dangers.
Due to the potential illegality of what they were all doing, most of the group took different names to mask their involvement: Harvard reverted to his âEmilio Porticiâ identity, Rafael Remy became âRoberto Raphaelâ â if he had a credit at all, Brad and Randy Grinter used any name â just as long as it wasnât theirs, and most of the time it wasnât, Jack Birch had a variety of Western-macho names like âJack Coltâ or âMichael Powersâ, Carol Kyzer became âCarol Connorsâ, a name that she would use for the next decade, and Barry Bennett took the name âMarc Brock.â Harvard would be the nominal director of the films, but in practice, he would share the responsibility with Rafael.
For the next three years, Harvardâs studio churned out sex films on a regular basis: titles like Penny Wise (1970), The Good Fairy (1970), The Eighteen Carat Virgin (1971), Mary Jane (1972), Your Neighborhood Doc (1972), School Teachers Weekend Vacation (1972), and Female Stud Service (1972). Most of them were made according to a template loosely agreed with Leroy Griffith: each feature film would be roughly 65 minutes long, and would cost less than $15,000. Most were shot in Harvardâs small studio at 1238 North Miami Avenue, though they would occasionally venture out into fancy houses like a Coconut Grove mansion belonging to a friend of Harvard, Sepy Dobronyi.
Nearly all of them starred Barry Bennett, who, as âMarc Brockâ, quickly became Floridaâs leading male porno star. He wasnât the most charismatic performer youâd ever seen but he could be relied upon to use his improv and comedy skills to fill the holes in the scripts. Many of the movies also featured Jack and Carol, who soon became a married couple.
All the films did ok but none were spectacular. Rafael worked hard behind the scenes, and nearly all of the crews consisted of his old Cuban friends, including José Prieto who came onboard for an occasional job. Randy Grinter remembers Rafael telling him that the softcore sex film business In Florida had been built by Cubans, and now it was Cubans who were responsible for the hard-core films too.
And then in 1972, Deep Throat became a national smash-hit: it had cost $25,000 and had made several millions for the New York mob that distributed it. It was essentially a New York film: the financing came from the Brooklyn-based Peraino family, and the director, stars, and crew were mostly New York-based. But Emile Harvard didnât view it that way: âDeep Throatâ was shot in Miami, making ample use of the exteriors and locations that he normally used like Sepy Dobronyiâs pad, and two of his featured players, Jack and Carol, both had roles in it. For someone who had labored for the previous two years to make money in the business, Deep Throatâs wild success felt a kick in the teeth to Harvard. He was mad and resolved to get even. Crew members who worked with him remember him shouting, in his thick eastern European accent, about the fact that the success should have been his. Harvard reacted swiftly, increasing production, widening his distribution, and expanding his business: the least he could do was to cash in on the new bigger market that âDeep Throatâ had created.
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6. XXX, after âDeep Throatâ (1973)Emile Harvard and Leroy Griffith were strange bed-fellows, but their relationship was symbiotic and so they had regular contact about the sex film market â and how to exploit it. For example, Griffith suggested ripping off âDeep Throatâ by making a movie called Dear Throat (1973) saying that people would see the ads in the newspapers but not realize that they were two different films with similar names. Harvard obliged, making a cheap knockoff starring, who else?, Marc Brock and Carol Connors. It was blatant plagiarism, and so Harvard used a different name for the film â P. Arthur Murphy â fearing reprisals from the mob owners of âDeep Throat.â It was one of an increasing number of different identities he started to use, as the legal heat increased around adult films. Thirty years after the war in which heâd hidden his identity to work undercover, Harvard still seemed incapable of living a simple life as himself.
Not that heâd grown afraid of publicity: Harvard gave a number of interviews to newspapers and magazines. In one of them, he used the name âBrunoâ â much to the amusement of the Cuban crews. One interview quoted âBrunoâ (âin a guttural European accentâ) as someone who âused to be big in Hollywoodâ and that he was âonly turning out this stuff between engagements.â The reporter was even invited to Harvardâs studio where he reported that all the technicians were Cuban, and that âBrunoâs studio contains, as scenery, an office desk, a couch, and a bed: the three essentials for a porno movie.â While he was there, Bruno warned him not to speak loudly as he was making a âquality movieâ and the actors âare very sensitive about what they have to do.â
Harvard may have been unhappy about missing out on the âDeep Throatâ deep cash, but he was still doing pretty well â a fact that was evident to many of the Cuban crew, as one of them remembered: âEmile was a very different guy to us Cubans, but he liked us and always had work for us. He paid by the hour in cash at the end of each day, but we never hung out with him or anything like that. And we could all see that he was making big money.â
It was true: Harvard made no attempt to hide a pretty luxurious lifestyle â he lived on Palm Island, a man-made development, situated between the city of Miami and its glamorous suburb of Miami Beach. The area was famous for its celebrity residents, and neighbors had included gangsters Al Capone and Meyer Lansky, and the non-gangster, TV presenter Barbara Walters. Harvard drove to work every day from his large house in a new cherry-red Buick Centurion, and often talked about eating at Miamiâs finest restaurants. It may have irritated some of the Cubans who worked for Harvard, but Rafael Remy was happy. As Harvardâs number two, he was faithful to a fault, despite the difference in the money they were earning. Rafael had become the glue who held everything together and he kept people happy. He ran a tight ship, making sure they had a right-sized team for every shoot, choosing actors and crew carefully, and making sure everyone was paid.
In 1973, Harvard confided in Rafael that he felt fatigued. Worse heâd started feeling pain in his joints and bones. He figured he was just getting old â heâd recently turned 60 â and said he wanted to take a step back and delegate more of the filmmaking to the others, like Rafael himself, Marc Brock, and Jack Birch.
When I spoke to Brock many years later, he remembered the change in how Harvard operated: âEmile was a control freak, and then all of a sudden, he handed the reins over to the rest of us, and so we started to alternate the directing duties.â
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7. âDaddyâs Richâ (1973) – and the (next) Cuban RebellionIn October 1973, Harvard got Marc Brock to shoot his latest film, Daddyâs Rich. Marc was a reliable sex performer, having appeared in most of Harvardâs features and loops, but the Cubans on the crew knew he was a sloppy operator, being regularly picked up by the cops for petty misdemeanors like shoplifting, a small stash of weed, and minor DUIs. Marc put together a rough budget for the movie, but it was higher than normal. The film wasnât materially different from the rest of Harvardâs efforts, but somehow Marc convinced a distracted Harvard that he needed more money this time.
For a start, there were ten crew members â more than double the normal number â and there was an inflated cast of nine. Then there was the location: Marc arranged with Sepy Dobronyi that they would shoot most it in the same Coconut Grove house where âDeep Throatâ had been shot the previous year. Rafael argued with Marc that there was no need for the exterior location, but Marc was adamant. And then Marc withheld payment from the Cuban crew after the first day. Harvard had always treated everyone fairly and so the crew were suspicious Marc promised that everyone would be paid the following day, but the Cubans were unconvinced, a clash erupted, and they nearly came to blows.
Sepy Dobronyi’s house, venue for the filming of ‘Deep Throat’ (1972)… and ‘Daddy’s Rich’ (1973)
One of the crew that I spoke to years later remembered what happened next: âOne of the guys, a grip on the shoot, took exception at Marc Brock after that â big time,â he said. âThis grip was a new guy, and he was a hothead who liked to overreact. Next day, when the grip didnât show, I called him up, and he just said, âFuck Brockâ. When I told him to do the right thing and come to the set, he threatened to call the cops and tell them about the shoot. We didnât really believe him but we kept an eye out for the police that day.â
Sure enough, halfway through filming, Rafael noticed a cop car slowly coming up the road towards the house. He shouted in Spanish âGet the hell out of here now!â, and the crew scrambled their equipment together, much to the confusion of the semi-clad actors. Remarkably all eight crew on set that day made it out over the rear hedge, and down the lane, where they jumped into cars and fled the scene. They left Marc with Stan, his assistant director, as well as six actors, in the house â who were all arrested. Marc and Stan were charged with manufacturing obscene material, while the actors were charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, and indecent exposure. Sepy Dobronyi, the owner of the house, wasnât helpful, making a statement to the newspapers that he was playing tennis at a nearby park at the time â and that the actors had broken into his home at which point his house guests had called the police.
Harvard, fearful of negative publicity for his business, called Leroy Griffith for help. Griffith snapped into action dispatching his main attorney, Alan Weinstein, to the precinct. Weinstein had been getting Griffith out of scrapes for years, including helping out when âFear of Loveâ had been shut down. Weinstein got everyone out of jail â and threw in an indignant statement to the press: âThe police had no right to be on the premises,â he said. âThere were more cops involved in arresting people taking pictures than there are on a murder case. Someoneâs priorities are out of whack.â
The arrests caused a mini-media storm in the Miami newspapers, and for a few months, Harvard had to curb back his movie production schedule. Harvard blamed Marc Brock: heâd once viewed Brock as a protĂ©gĂ© and an investment for the future, and so heâd ignored Marcâs legal indiscretions because he was essential in transporting the films up to the labs in New York, as well as being a reliable performer in front of the camera, but Harvard had had his fingers burned by this.
When Harvard looked into the finances of the film and saw that Marc had been using the inflated budget to line his own pockets, pilfering money for himself, he called Marc and told him he was fired.
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8. Trouble in WonderlandBy 1974, it seemed that the immediate hardcore boom after âDeep Throatâ was starting to subside, and some of the players whoâd been involved were looking to go legit â or at least, go more legit than being underground producers of hardcore smut.
Leroy Griffith still played Harvardâs XXX films in his theaters as a cash cow source of income, but he was branching out in other directions. For one thing, he decided to revive the burlesque variety shows that heâd pioneered in Miami in the 1960s, this time opening a big production, âHello Burlesqueâ in Miami Beach with strippers, comedians, and music acts.
Harvard was looking to diversify too. Heâd acquired theaters of his own, including the Cameo at 1445 Washington Ave, and when he and Rafael Remy had to put their sex films on hiatus, they decided to make a different kind of film. Or as Harvard bellowed one day, âLetâs make a serious movie!â
Harvardâs daughter, Esther, had written a sensitive script called âOf Gentle Heartâ about an escaped convict who befriends a young boy. It was originally intended as a touching character study, but when Harvard got his hands on it, he couldnât help himself. His exploitation instincts returned, and he renamed it Fugitive Killer (aka Fugitive Women) (1974). Rafael was on hand as always to oversee the production.
When the film was released, after a gentle opening on a wholesome and bucolic farm, it turned into a rape and murder exploitation film. Marketed with the catchphrase, âOnce he started, he couldnât stop! If he didnât rape you, he killed you,â the film was a bizarre mess, and despite being distributed by Harry Novakâs Boxoffice International Pictures, Inc., it failed to raise much interest.
It turned out that the filmâs lack of success was the least of Harvardâs concerns. They say that bad news comes in threes, and it was certainly true for Harvard in 1974. Heâd already scaled back his sex film production as a result of the bust of âDaddyâs Richâ, when he lost his son, Roy, who died after a short illness. Then, Harvard received an explanation for the fatigue and pain heâd been experiencing: he was diagnosed with bone cancer. He began treatment immediately, and told Rafael they had to put all filmmaking on hold.
Another surprise awaited him though. In April 1975, the FBI turned up at his front door to arrest him: theyâd been tipped off by a source that Harvard had been transporting pornographic films between Miami and New York. Two films were specified in the indictment: âValley of the Nymphsâ and âBall and Chainâ, which were described by the FBI spokesperson as âreally raunchy stuff.â Harvard faced five felony charges relating to âsubstantive conspiracy counts of interstate transportation of obscene matter,â two of which carried penalties of five years in prison.
Arrest warrants were issued for three other people: two of them were Harvardâs New York associates, Charles Abrams and Sidney Levine, who had taken delivery of the films over the years when Marc Brock smuggled them into the city. Both Abrams and Levine were taken into custody.
But the final arrest warrant was for Rafael Remy â except that Rafael got away. Somehow, after Harvard was arrested, he got word to Remy and told the Cuban of his arrest. Remy drove straight to Miami airport and left the country, flying to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, to avoid the Feds catching up with him.
What nobody realized â not Harvard nor Rafael â was that the FBI source, the person who had alerted the authorities to Harvardâs pornography operation, was actually Marc Brock. After Brock had been arrested on the set of âDaddyâs Richâ â and then fired by Harvard, heâd panicked. He already had a string of minor arrests to his name, and now feared that this time the judge would throw the book at him. So Brock decided to get his revenge on Harvard, and bought some protection for himself, by spilling the beans on how Harvardâs sex film business worked. Brock laid out how he personally shipped films to the New York labs, where prints were struck and shipped to theaters across the country. In return for singing, Brock was granted immunity from prosecution.
Three months later, Remy tried to slip back into Miami. He didnât want to involve family, so he needed someone to stay with. Of all the people he could have contacted, he called Marc Brock, unaware that Brock was working with the FBI. And so, when Remy landed at Miami airport, they were waiting for him. An additional charge of fleeing arrest was added to Rafaelâs woes.
As for Harvard, he was understandably nervous: he was the ringleader and owner of the business, the man controlling all the moving parts, and the mastermind behind the operation. So he did what he always did when he was in a bind: he hustled. Harvard told the Judge that his bone cancer was terminal, and that jail time would be dangerous to his health. He said that the real criminals were actually the two aging New Yorkers, Abrams and Levine. They were the ones who distributed the films far and wide, whereas he was just a cog in the machinery. In short, Harvard pleaded guilty and offered to testify for the government. The Judge consented, and Harvard was set free.
After a life of bluffs, double bluffs, and downright lies, this time Emile Harvard was telling the truth about his health. His bone cancer quickly got worse, and in 1976, his health deteriorated. He died that August.
Rafael Remy was eventually let off when the charges against him were dropped. Marcy Bichette, the daughter of his old friend Dolores Carlos, had put on a rock show to raise some money for his legal costs which made the ordeal easier.
Marcy Bichette
But he was now in his early 50s, and heâd had enough. Within the previous two decades, heâd gone from having a promising career in films in Cuba, working on global productions like âThe Old Man and the Seaâ (1958) and âOur Man in Havanaâ (1959) to fleeing Cuba to escape Castroâs revolution, and ultimately making a home in Florida sex films â all the way from the softcore tease days to now being arrested for hardcore films. He often joked that he couldnât escape the fortune tellerâs prediction that had foretold trouble and strife for him, but he consoled himself that heâd lived a full life. Now he wanted the easy life.
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9. AftermathAnd so, the late 1970s marked more or less the end of the roads for the band of Cuban filmmakers who had revolutionized sex filmmaking in Florida.
Dolores Carlos was living a quiet life still working in the bank, married, and with a new family. Her daughter Marcy toured with her band Bitter Sweet, until, by 1981, when the travel and late nights became too much. Sheâd been on the road for years, hadnât had a break, and the lounge scene was dying. Marcy was 30, and figured it was time to accept that the acting and music dreams were over. She found a place in Miami not far from Dolores, and they remained close seeing each other often. Later on, they would go see Marcyâs step-brother, Dante Bichette, play baseball when his team came to Florida. Dante was an outfielder for various teams, and was a four-time All-Star and contender for the Most Valuable Player Award in Major League Baseball.
Marcy and Dolores, early 1990s
Marcy got work as a bartender, giving much of her spare time â and money â to local animal rescue centers. In 1983 she got married. The guy developed a drug problem, and though she stuck around for three years, his habit effectively ended the marriage. They divorced, and she never saw him again.
Dolores and Marcy, mid 1990s
From time to time, Dolores hosted reunions for the old Cuban gang, and theyâd get together and swap stories. Gradually the reunions became fewer and less well-attended as one-by-one the various friends died.
K. Gordon Murray, the exploitation film man, known for re-dubbing and re-releasing foreign fairy tale films for U.S. audiences, and whoâd been the first person who had trusted Dolores as a potential filmmaker, ended up getting into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. They seized his films and took them out of circulation. Murray protested his innocence, but the case dragged and, in 1979, before it could come to a conclusion, he died of a heart attack.
As for Manuel Conde, after leaving Florida in the 1960s, he settled in California where he embarked on another stage of his sex film career by producing and directing hits such as The Danish Connection (1974), Deep Jaws (1976), and The All-American Woman (1976). By the early 1990s heâd developed dementia and he died in 1992.
JosĂ© Prieto and Raphael Remy, the two inseparable Cuban friends whoâd escaped their homeland after Castroâs takeover, both passed â Raphael, relatively young at 60 years of age, in 1984, while Prieto died an old man, two decades later.
In 1996, Dolores became sick and was diagnosed with cancer. The first person she told was Marcy. Marcy was heartbroken, but she immediately called each family member to tell them the news. At first the signs were good, and doctors hoped they had caught everything in time, but it was a false hope. It was a painful, drawn-out process, and Marcy did everything she could to make it easy for her mother. The family rallied â one family member admitted they all pulled together for Marcyâs sake as much as anyone else â but it was to no avail. Dolores died in January 1997. She was 66.
Marcy and Dolores, mid 1990s
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10. EndgameIn 1999, Marcy married her boyfriend, Tom Flynn. Theyâd met a few years before, and their first date was going to midnight mass with Tomâs mom. They become inseparable: Marcy had found the relationship sheâd always wanted. She stopped bartending so she wasnât out at night and could spend more time with Tom. She took up a new career â perhaps the one to which she was best suited of all: she became a pet stylist and groomer.
Marcy, dog groomer
Tom had proposed to her at the Hollywood Beach Hotel in Miami. The venue was significant: Tomâs parents had met there when theyâd both been employed by the hotel years before. Not only that but it was also where Tom had been conceived when his folks had taken refuge in one of the rooms during Hurricane Diana, a fierce tropical storm back in 1960. The hurricane happened to hit Miami the night of Marcyâs tenth birthday. So it made sense that their wedding took place there as well.
Marcy and Tom, wedding day
Marcy and Tom spent the next two decades happily married in South Florida. Tom knew a little about Marcyâs films, and sometimes asked about her past but she didnât talk about it much. The present and the future were more important to her. Marcy did appear in another film, âMarley and Meâ (2007) with Owen Wilson, where she had a fleeting, blink-and-youâll-miss-it walk on part.
And then three years ago, Marcy was diagnosed with colon cancer, the same that Dolores had. Marcy passed away in May 2021 at the age of 70. She was cremated and her ashes scattered at, where else, Hollywood Beach Hotel, where she and Tom had got engaged and married.
I took Tom out for dinner recently and told him some of the stories Iâd learned about Marcy, her mother Dolores, and the people theyâd known and worked with. He was surprised to find out about it all, and shook his head in sad happiness hearing stories about her. Most of all though, he just missed Marcy. âI always wonder what I did in a previous life to deserve her,â he said. âI mustâve done something right somewhere along the way. She was a good person, and she was chasing butterflies to the very end.â
Marcy and Tom
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PostscriptThe United States has always been a nation of immigrants â some of whom, like the Cubans in this series arrived in the country fleeing from adversity. The vast majority have helped drive business creation, fuel innovation, and fill essential workforce needs, all core principles of American values. Their stories are often overlooked, but worse, all too often theyâve been maligned and mistreated. Iâm an immigrant, and at the naturalization ceremony, the presiding officer will tell you that now you have become an American, the most important thing you can do is to hold onto where youâve come from: the culture, the customs, the food, and the way of life. If you can do that, youâre told, youâll be preserving what truly makes America great. Youâll be keeping this a nation that is welcoming of differences, diversity, and inclusion.
People like Dolores Carlos, Manuel Conde, José Prieto, and Rafael Remy who came to this country, and chased butterflies of their own.
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Marcy
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The post Chasing Butterflies: Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida – Part 4, Rafael Remy’s Story – Podcast 148 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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Previously on Chasing Butterflies â Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida:
You may remember Marcy Bichetteâs start in life from our earlier episodes: she was born Marcelle Denise Bichette in St Petersburg, Florida in August 1950 to a young married couple who had distinctly different ambitions in life. Her father, Maurice Bichette, had married looking for a settled, quiet existence, but her mother, Dolores, wanted to live her life moving in the opposite direction. Dolores had come from a protected, patriarchal, patriotic Cuban household, and she longed for the excitement and glamor that she saw onscreen in her favorite Hollywood movies. Maurice and Doloresâ marriage couldnât, and didnât, last. They divorced, and Marcy lived with her father and his new wife Mary, while Dolores, moved to Miami to pursue a modeling career.
Dolores did well, changing her name to Dolores Carlos, her photos featuring in magazines and newspapers, winning beauty contests, and then, starring (and being arrested) for a hit nudie film, Hideout in the Sun. The success of that film led to her appearing in other films such as Pagan Island (1961), Diary of a Nudist (1961), and Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962) in quick succession, and thereby becoming the unofficial pin-up queen for nudists.
But perhaps Doloresâ biggest impact came in the way that she became a tireless advocate, promoter, and organizer of the Cuban immigrant film talent that had arrived in Miami, a group of people keen to make a new life in the U.S. after escaping the Castro revolution. Her friendships with local film producers and theater owners like K. Gordon Murray and Leroy Griffith kick-started the American careers of many of these Cubans in Florida, including men such as Manuel Conde, JosĂ© Prieto, and Rafael Remy.
The only downside in Doloresâ new life in the early 1960s was that she was separated from her adored daughter Marcy, a problem that she longed to fix.
Over the last twenty years, Iâve tracked down and spoken to many people involved in the Florida film business of the 1960s and 1970s. Their overlapping personal histories reveal an untold chapter of adult film history â and the hidden role that Cubans played in shaping it.
These are some of their stories. This is Chasing Butterflies, Part 3: Marcy Bichette’s story.
You can listen to the Prologue: Dolores Carlos’ story here, Part 1: Manuel Conde’s story , and Part 2: JosĂ© Prieto’s story.
With thanks to John Minson, Tom Flynn, Ronald Ziegler, Leroy Griffith, Veronica Acosta, Marcy Bichette, Mikey Bichette, Lousie ‘Bunny’ Downe, Mitch Poulos, Sheldon Schermer, Ray Aranha, Manny Samaniego, Barry Bennett, Randy Grinter, Herb Jeffries, Tempest Storm, Chester Phebus, Michael Bowen, Norman Senfeld, Richard Falcone, Lynne OâNeill, Something Weird Video, and many anonymous families and friends who have offered recollections, large and small, over the years.
This podcast is 39 minutes long.
Marcy Bichette
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1. Marcy Bichette, beginningsAfter the divorce, Maurice had quickly remarried. This new wife was his third and final: his new bride, Mary, had already been married four times before, and together they would enjoy, or rather endure, a decades-long relationship. Mary was a difficult character and Marcy, her step-daughter who lived with them, would suffer as a result.
Marcy, age 7
Maurice and Mary quickly started another family, which would grow to include three children of their own, Maurice Jr, known as Mikey, Valerie, and Dante. Mikey, the oldest of the three, remembers growing up with his step-sister Marcy as being one of the best parts of his childhood. Marcy was eight years older and took over maternal tasks from Mary, such as playing and dressing him. The kids also remember Dolores coming to see Marcy whenever she had breaks from modeling and filming in Miami: they loved Aunt Doloresâ visits and all her glamorous, exciting stories. Needless to say, Mauriceâs feelings were less enthusiastic â he still didnât approve of Doloresâ lifestyle â but his problems with his ex-wife didnât stop them both from being close to Marcy. Everyone recalls Marcy was his favorite out of all the kids â in truth, Marcy was everybodyâs favorite â and, despite their separation, Maurice and Dolores doted on her.
Marcy and Dolores
For someone whoâd had an unconventional home life, Marcy seemed the most normal girl in the world. Family members today describe her as an unusually gentle and thoughtful person. They talk about her kindness and the way she saw the good in everything and everyone. She was unfailingly happy and positive. She never had a cross word or thought, never had an argument, and made everyone feel special.
One person however wasnât a fan, and that was her step-mother, Mary. Mikey, Maryâs eldest son, pulls no punches in a description of his mother: âMy mother could be a bad person, a monster at times. She resented the attention and love that Marcy had â especially from her father â and so she made Marcy suffer, and treated her terribly. But how did Marcy respond? Marcy respected my mom no matter what: she never reacted, never said anything bad against her. She just bore the brunt of all the evil and turned the other cheek.â
Maryâs neglect of Marcy continued when Marcy developed an infection in her heart in 1959, and spent four months recovering in hospital. Marcy returned home with a permanent heart murmur and more ill treatment from her step-mother. It got so bad that her father Maurice eventually called Dolores, and they agreed that Marcy had to move out, go down to Miami, and start a new life living with Dolores. It was heart-breaking for Maurice and his other children who never forgave Mary for her behavior.
Dolores and Marcy, hospital in 1959
Dolores however was over the moon. Sure, it couldâve been a difficult situation for her: Doloresâ career was taking off â and hers was hardly a kid-friendly lifestyle. She was appearing in racy, not to mention scandalous, nudie films, arranging meetings for her coterie of Cuban filmmaker friends, and hustling her own sex film projects around town to potential financial partners.
Dolores, photographed by Bunny Yeager
It made their everyday life complicated, but Dolores and Marcy both loved the new arrangement and Dolores relished living with her daughter in her small apartment on NW 1st St. And despite her physical distance from her father, Marcy called Maurice every Sunday without fail, something she continued to do for decades. However busy she was, Marcy made regular trips to visit him and his family, where she loved taking care of her step-brothers and sister. Despite her parentsâ acrimonious separation, Marcy harbored no favoritism, loving them both equally as if they were still together.
In Miami, Marcy started attending the cityâs Senior High School where she fit in immediately. She was popular there, acting in the lead roles in high school productions and playing the piano and guitar in music groups. She had a sweet singing voice, and teenage friends still remember her carrying a guitar everywhere. She loved singer-songwriters and sung in music groups, transforming Doloresâ apartment into a rehearsal space for her latest musical project. She was Doloresâ daughter in every way, loving performing and dreaming of a career in show business.
But her biggest passion was animals, especially dogs, and she spent hours training them and playing with them. She signed up for animal welfare organizations in her neighborhood, always taking in strays. One of her friends said of her: âMarcy had such a passion for life and animals, and everyone loved her. I almost hate to say it because Iâd love to give you some gossip or salacious stories, but thatâs the truth. She was a sweetheart. I still picture her running around the back yard as a teen chasing butterflies.â
Dolores and Marcy
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2. Dolores Carlos â The Nudie Queen Single MotherIn the mid 1960s, Dolores told friends sheâd never felt happier and yet somehow, she still felt strangely unfulfilled. Deep down, she knew she couldnât live this life forever. Time moves slowly but passes quickly, and she wanted to remain relevant and use her accumulated knowledge and connections to create a more lasting career. She argued that sheâd made as many films as anyone else, she had well-connected and powerful friends, and she could mobilize a Cuban film crew at the drop of a hat, so why was it so difficult to get someone, anyone, to take the chance and invest in her?
She wondered out loud about whether it was because she was a woman, or a Latina, or that she was in a business that prized youth and beauty â and there she was, a single mother now in her mid 30s. Or perhaps it was because everyone still thought of her as being just a sex film actress? She knew that success was a double-edged sword â on the one hand, she was still offered plenty of nude film and modeling work which helped pay the extra bills after Marcy moved in, but it also perpetuated the stereotype of her as being just a sex object.
Dolores, photographed by Bunny Yeager
She did much more than that, she said, and the variety of her work did have a striking range: she was called upon by film production honchos like K. Gordon Murray to assist and advise in their film productions; she advised theater chain managers like Leroy Griffith on new film ideas; she found work for scores of Cubans; and sheâd started writing film scripts and movie pitches. She knew she was appreciated, admired, cherished even, but whatever she did, she never seemed to be able to parlay her success into a more profitable, respectable, and permanent career: âI could be a powerful rocket, but at the moment, Iâm a failure to launch,â she told a friend.
And Dolores worked more regularly than most. In the 1960s, she appeared in a lengthy sequence of sex films that reads like a history of South Florida sexploitation: there was Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera (1963) â a Barry Mahon effort which featured many models shot by Bunny Yeager including Doloresâ friend Bunny Downes; she work again with Doris Wishman in Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (1963), shot at Sunny Palms Lodge nudist reserve; there were two more Barry Mahon films â both nudist roles â in Crazy Wild and Crazy (1964) and International Smorgas-Broad (1964); a rare though brief role in a mainstream film, How to Succeed with Girls (1964) â perhaps interesting mainly for the presence of future Golden Girl, Rue McClanahan; then a part in Eve and the Merman (1965) where she was typecast as a pin-up; and then the lead role of sorts in The Beast That Killed Women (1965), a breathtakingly strange film by returning champion Barry Mahon, about a rampaging gorilla who disrupts the calm of a Miami nudist resort â this time Spartan’s Tropical Gardens Nudist Camp â by kidnapping and murdering nude women.
She wasnât short of male attention either: when she and Bunny Downe appeared as two of the nudists in Herschell Gordon Lewis and Dave Friedmanâs Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963) â Dolores had a brief, behind-the-scenes fling with the filmâs star, Joey Maxim, the recently-retired but still handsome heavyweight boxing champion from the 1950s. All the experiences were fun, all kept her in the public eye, and all paid a little spending cash, which was increasingly important as Doloresâ savings had started to dwindle â but she wanted, and needed, more.
While Dolores was toiling in Southern Floridaâs exploitation film business, her teenage daughter was an interested and empathetic observer. Marcy may have made life more costly, but she had become her motherâs best friend. Marcy could see the pleasure her mother derived from performing and putting films together, and friends still talk about how the two would talk together about all aspects of the production, distribution, and exhibition of Doloresâ films.
Marcy
And then Dolores did make a film of her own. It was produced with a close friend, Richard Falcone, with whom sheâd acted on the set of her first movie, ‘Hideout in the Sun’ (1960). Falcone was a polymath â if a polymath means an Italian who combined being a property developer, interior designer, bodybuilder, butterfly collector, the founder of Sunshine Beach Naturist Club in Tampa, and a keen photographer who snapped primarily nudist pictures to sell to naturist magazines.
There was a reason for them making the film. Falcone had gone through a tough time after appearing in âHideout in the Sunâ: in 1961, heâd been arrested as the supposed mastermind of a prostitution and pornography ring when police broke down his door and confiscated all his nudist photos. Falcone insisted he was entirely innocent and said that this was a simple case of harassing an honest man who just happened to have an alternative lifestyle. But this was the early 1960s and Falcone was fighting a losing battle to make his case. The media coverage treated him as a pervert which in turn caused him to lose his real estate business, his photography job, and then his apartment lease. No matter that the charges were eventually thrown out when the initial police search was deemed unlawful. Dolores, ever the supportive friend, was one of the few who remained by his side helping him rebuild his life.
One of her ideas to get him out of the hole he was in was for them to make a film together, and they hatched a plan to produce a nudist movie based on a script that Dolores had written, Naked Complex (1963). The story was admittedly contrived: Johnny is a playboy and an expert at sports â from water skiing, golf, and racing cars, but heâs hopeless around women. Somehow, after being humiliated by the newspapers who reveal his inadequacy, he crash-lands his personal airplane on a remote island where nude women cure him of his problem. It wasnât âGone With The Windâ but it was exciting for the pair to be putting their own movie together for the first time.
Dolores assembled an entirely Cuban production team to shoot the movie, and gave acting roles to some of her Cuban friends from Little Havana, including a female snake dancer whoâd just arrived from Cuba smuggling her three exotic serpents into the country. They shot the story at â where else? â the Sunshine Beach Naturist Club, the nudist resort which Falcone had founded. Oh, and Dolores starred in the movie as well, of course.
Their film wasnât hit â or even that great, but the budget was minimal, Dolores had shown she could both produce and star in a movie, and it made a little money. Unfortunately, the experience still failed to open any new doors.
Chastened by the experience, Dolores sat down with Marcy to figure out next steps. The truth was that she didnât have a lot of money left in the bank, and she was getting aged out of the nudie films that had been such a cash cow for her. She needed a new plan. It wasnât a decision she wanted to take, but Dolores decided she had to get a more regular paycheck.
And so the Queen of the Nudies took a position as a teller in a local Miami bank.
Marcy
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3. âThe Nazi filmâWhen Marcy was fifteen, she asked Dolores if she could get some semi-professional acting work.
Dolores had seen Marcyâs talent in school plays and so took her for an audition at Miamiâs Merry Go Round Playhouse Theater on Miracle Mile in the Coral Gables neighborhood. The Merry Go Round was a staple of Miamiâs theater scene, part of a broad trend at the time to present plays âin the roundâ â a more immersive experience by placing the stage at the center with seating surrounding it. Marcy was transfixed by the theater from the first moment she saw it â and the Merry Go Round management liked her too, offering her a contract to appear in their childrenâs productions.
Marcy snatched the opportunity and started appearing in bit parts straight away. She was mentored in the theater by a black actor, Ray Aranha, a local probation officer who did acting in his spare time. Ray was a decade older that Marcy but he saw that her talent and enthusiasm made her a natural, as he remembered years later: âMarcy was a ray of sunshine. I couldnât help feeling happy whenever she walked into the room. She was a rare person. And she was a talented actress⊠I used to coach her and read lines with her: she took direction well, and we were all convinced that she was going to end up in Hollywood starring in movies someday.â
Marcy, at the Merry Go Round Playhouse
Marcy loved the theater, and it wasnât long before she started to pester Dolores for film roles too. Her father, Maurice, was horrified at the thought of his daughter appearing in sex movies, and made Dolores promise that she would keep their daughter far away from the sex film business.
In 1966, Dolores became friends with Norman Senfeld, a virulently anti-Castro Nicaraguan, who she met in a bar in Little Havana. Senfeld was an ardent activist who was intent on raising awareness of the evils of the Cuban regime, as well as raising money to overthrow it. The Cuban expats liked him, even though there were rumors that he was involved in some illicit money-laundering activity to fund his efforts to subvert and destabilize Castroâs government.
Senfeld told Dolores he wanted to move into films and maybe she could help him. He said he was impressed with her extensive connections. Together they formed a company, called Stage Four, with another wannabe filmmaker, Bobby OâDonald. The new company was set up quickly, suspiciously quickly in fact, and from the start it seemed to be awash with cash. The mystery was where the money had come from. Friends of Dolores from this time still speak about their surprise â and suspicion â at the large sums of money that Senfeld and OâDonald, two inexperienced and unknown newcomers on the film scene, had available to make their films.
In April 1966, they made a film called Full House (later renamed âMafia Girlsâ). Dolores got Manuel Conde onboard to shoot it, which was his final film before he left for California. The movie was about a crime syndicate in Miami Beach that extorts politicians by filming them at sex parties, and Dolores had a starring role taking time off from her bank job. Despite its supposedly large budget â and extensive press coverage, the resulting film seemed to disappear without a trace, with a number of its crew claiming, years later, that it was never actually released theatrically.
For their next movie, Dolores volunteered a script that sheâd been developing for years. It was supposedly an action-packed exploitation thriller that was far from the nudist camp flicks for which she was known. Sheâd already pitched different drafts to her usual trusted benefactors, men like K. Gordon Murray and Leroy Griffith, but they showed little interest in financing it.
The script was called âRevenge of the Swastikaâ: it told the story of the Miami branch of the American Nazis headed up by a Colonel von Stissen who was supported by his right-hand gal, Major Olga. (Bear with me here.) Their fascist group is about to launch âOperation 11â, a plan that will destabilize society and bring them to power. First, they have to take over the William Penn hotel in Miami and hold the vacationers and staff hostage. The twist was that the FBI had already infiltrated the group of Nazis and was aware of their plan, but they decided to wait and see how the insurrection would play out. Got that?
Quite how much of this plot was Doloresâ work or how much was embellished by Norman Senfeld after he got hold of it is unknown. Senfeld himself described the story as a metaphor about authoritarianism, and by implication, the Castro regime that he despised. He agreed it should be the next Stage Four production. Dolores was amused by Senfeldâs political interpretation but pleased that her script would finally be made into a feature.
If you wanted to be generous, you could say the story was ahead of its time, as nazi-sploitation films like Love Camp 7 (1969), Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975), and countless others would follow in the years ahead. But in truth, this was a bizarre story that was every bit as strange as it sounds.
The film was shot in the second half of 1966 â but with a different title, Storm Troopers U.S.A. By the time of the shoot, Dolores was no longer a producer, but involved instead, behind the scenes, as a production manager though she received no on-screen credit. The shoot received a large amount of press coverage in the local newspapers, with Miami residents complaining about the unannounced extras wearing Nazi regalia who suddenly appeared on their streets. The producers proudly stated that the film would be released within 90 days â though they admitted it probably wouldnât be seen in Miami theaters. Dolores had an acting part in the film, and they found a role for Marcy too, her first appearance in front of the camera. In fact, both can be seen in stills from the movie wearing Nazi armbands â though neither of them featured in the credits.
Dolores, on set of Storm Troopers U.S.A. in 1966
The finished film was heavily padded with stock footage from World War II and was nothing like the serious action thriller that Dolores had originally intended it to be. Worse, it did exactly what she vowed not to do and it succumbed to amateurish sex film tropes.
What happened next is another mystery. What is known is that, just like âMafia Girlsâ, the movie disappeared and doesnât seem to have been released theatrically. And thereâs a strange postscript twist to the story: for years to come, Dolores claimed she made a large sum of money from the film. In fact, she claimed the money was so substantial that she used it to buy her first home, which enabled Marcy and her to move from their small apartment to a comfortably sized house at 3790 SW 121st Ave, Miami in 1967. This story became part of family lore, and for years, they would all talk about how âthe Nazi filmâ that no one ever saw had made Dolores a small fortune.
This made some friends skeptical, suspicious even, and there were rumors that the film had been made as a front for money-laundering activity. Others wondered if Doloresâ windfall was actually a hush-money payment she received when she discovered that the company was involved in illegal activity.
So what is truth behind what happened to the film, and the source of the money that Dolores said that she received?
A few years ago, I tracked down and interviewed the director, Norman Senfeld. He spoke at length about how he got to know the Miami Cuban filmmaking collective through Dolores and his anti-Castro activism. He spoke fondly of her, and the few films they made together. He said that both âMafia Girlsâ and âStorm Troopers U.S.A.â had indeed been released in theaters at the time, and he claimed that he had bought Dolores out of Stage Four, the film company they created, so that he could exert greater control.
But when I asked about where the companyâs funding had come from, and about the rumors of money-laundering, Senfeld claimed it all happened a long time ago and that he couldnât remember much anymore. I pressed further suggesting it was strange to have made two films â that received much so publicity â but that didnât seem to have been released. And what about the large payoff that Dolores received that enabled her to buy a house. Senfeld claimed ignorance, and then quickly and quietly made his excuses and hung up. Iâd like to claim to have found the answers but, for now at least, the story remains a mystery. Senfeld died in 2016.
As for the Stage Four production company, it came to a sudden end in 1968, when Bobby OâDonald, Senfeldâs partner, was arrested for owning what the feds described as an obscene pamphlet. It turned out the booklet in question was nothing more than the pressbook for their next film, Night Hustlers (1968). Whatever the merits of the case, the accompanying scandal signified the end of the film company.
As for Dolores, she went back to her job working as a teller in the bank.
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4. Marcy Bichette: The Film ActressWhile Dolores was busy juggling her 9-5 job with occasional film work, she was unfailing in her support of Marcyâs regular acting roles in childrenâs plays at the Merry Go Round Playhouse. Marcy was now 16, and had progressed from walk-on parts to lead roles, garnering good reviews in the local newspapers. And when she wasnât acting, she was singing in a band that covered 1950s and 1960s rock nâ roll standards and volunteering at animal rescue centers. Sheâd also started modeling.
Just like Dolores had done fifteen years previously, Marcyâs modeling work led her to enter beauty contests â with some success. Dolores saw a chance to help advance Marcyâs ambitions, so she called up Bunny Yeager whoâd photographed her for various pin-up magazines at the start of her career. Bunny suggested something different â her first mother/daughter pictorial. The shoot took place on the sidewalk by Miami Beach in December 1966. The resulting bikini photos are as unglamorous as they are touching: Dolores looks very much the older, wiser mother, and Marcy the self-conscious, awkward, but pretty and happy-go-lucky teen.
Dolores and Marcy, photographer by Bunny Yeager in 1966
Marcy, photographed by Bunny Yeager in 1966
Dolores also found another film role for Marcy, through her long-time friend, Louise âBunnyâ Downe. In the years since they started in sex films together, Downe had started working exclusively for Herschel Gordon Lewis, the Florida-based director, who was making a name for himself as the âGodfather of Goreâ through a series of gory and grisly, low-budget, splatter films. Downe had worked on the script for their next film, The Gruesome Twosome (1967), about a demented elderly woman who has her mentally challenged son kill and scalp various young women to use their hair for her wig shop. Downe told Dolores she had a role for Marcy â and Marcy jumped at the chance to be in the movie. She loved it too: no matter that the production was a pantomime of incompetence at times, with supposedly dead bodies blinking and breathing after their bloody demise. The film set was exciting â and Marcy wanted more of this in her life.
Back at the Merry Go Round Playhouse, Marcy was now impatient. Sheâd been in a movie, and was growing tired of the childrenâs matinĂ©e parts. She wanted to be involved in the more senior productions of the theater. Marcy spoke to her friend Ray Aranha, the probation officer/actor who she trusted and who helped guide her developing acting career. Rayâs presence was always calming and he reassured her: there was no need to hurry. She was talented, sheâd been identified as an actor the theater wanted to develop, and more serious roles would come her way. He would personally make sure of that.
Marcy, at the Merry Go Round Playhouse
And then Rayâs theatrical career blew up in his face: newspapers ran stories about his appearance in Shanty Tramp (1967), a sexual film of miscegenation that was shocking Florida. The scandal led to him being fired from his day job and hounded out of the south Miami theater scene. Dolores and Marcy were particularly shocked by the events: it had been Dolores who had recommended him for the role, and she felt personally responsible, and Marcy had lost someone she viewed as an older brother. Both of them were devastated. When I spoke to Ray years later, Ray still spoke warmly, though sadly, of his friendship with Marcy, wondering what had happened to her in the years after the scandal.
But if the fall-out from âShanty Trampâ had been a firestorm causing the lives of some of the protagonists to be affected forever, others were quietly pleased with how the film had been received. The three people behind it, producer K. Gordon Murray, director JosĂ© Prieto, and writer Reuben Guberman, saw their film break out of the usual ghetto of B-movies and into the mainstream, and that meant mucho boffo at the box-office â as they probably donât say in Cuba.
For the writer, Reuben Guberman, the question was slightly more complicated. Guberman, you may recall from the last episode, was the New Yorker, the ex-hamburger cook, drive-in restaurant manager, radio announcer, newspaper editor, and one-time political candidate, and as pleased as he was with the outraged reaction his script had elicited, deep down he had loftier aspirations to be a serious writer. Sure, he was happy to write another potboiler, but he wanted some critical admiration too. So he decided to seek redemption by writing a play, âSocial Tripâ, which would be a morality piece warning kids against the dangers of drugs. As usual, Dolores was on hand to help, and she arranged for the Merry-Go-Round Playhouse to put it on in January 1968 â with Marcy in the lead role, of course. It may have been a cynical ploy for Guberman to rehabilitate himself â but it worked. Dolores pulled strings to get the newspapers to run positive stories about how instructional and moving the play was, and many who had attacked âShanty Trampâ now came out to endorse and praise the new play.
Meanwhile, K. Gordon Murray was waiting in the wings. After âShanty Trampâ, the only question he had was how could he follow it up â and produce another profitable smash hit? Murray asked, nay demanded, a new script, and so Guberman offered him something heâd written called Savages from Hell (1968). It was a biker movie about a vicious gang who pick a violent fight with a farmworker and his family. Murray liked it enough and offered it to JosĂ© Prieto, by now his go-to director. JosĂ© assembled a crew consisting almost exclusively of Cubanos to film it, including his best friend Rafael Remy, who did the cinematography and editing. Of course, Dolores insisted that there was a prominent role for Marcy in the cast too, alongside Cyril Poitier, brother of Sydney.
âSavages from Hellâ was released in a blaze of publicity, with lurid posters blaring that the film âMakes the Hell’s Angels look like Boy Scouts!â. In truth, Gubermanâs script was an under-cooked effort lacking the elements that had made âShanty Trampâ so enjoyably bad, and it would be his last involvement in film. The movie failed to attain the success of their previous effort, the only semi-scandal being a lawsuit from American International who sued K. Gordon Murray for imitating its biker films.
The movie was notable for one reason, however. It was Doloresâ last appearance in front of a film camera. It was a small role as a redhead at the Roadhouse bar. She was in her late 30s now, with a steady job at the bank, and happily living in her new house financed by âStorm Troopers U.S.A.â. Sheâd also just got married, and she figured it was finally time to settle down.
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5. Marcy in the 1970sMarcy had made just two films â three if you count âStorm Troopers U.S.A.â â but after she turned eighteen, she started getting more offers. The problem was they were nearly all for sex movies and Marcy was more interested in stretching her acting abilities. She had no judgement against the increasingly explicit trend in movies â after all, she knew her mother had made a career out of the early nudie-cutie films â but as Dolores kept repeating to her: âI made those films so that you donât have to.â Also, Marcy had seen how Ray Aranha had been hounded out of theater work after the sexual shenanigans of âShanty Trampâ â and she didnât want the same to happen to her. After she graduated high school, many of her friends on the theater scene encouraged her to go west and try her luck in Hollywood.
The Miami theater world was small, they said, and she had the attributes that could make her a star. One was a fellow Merry-Go-Round Playhouse actor, Mitch Poulos, still a character actor today having appeared in shows like âCurb Your Enthusiasmâ, âArrested Developmentâ, and âThe Office.â Mitch was a few years younger than Marcy â and was part of the childrenâs theater group. He remembers Marcy as a combination of a caring older sister whoâd protect him when drugs were being passed around backstage, a talented actor who he still believes could have been a star, and a beauty who looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor: âShe was the most beautiful woman Iâd ever seen,â he said, âvoluptuous, talented, elegant, and with a sweet, kind heart.â
Despite all the encouragement to leave for California, get an agent, and try her luck in the film industry, Marcy was happy in Miami and so decided to stay. Besides, the Merry-Go-Round theater director had started casting her as the lead in nearly all the companyâs adult plays. Mitch Poulos remembers: âThe theater played into her beauty, and they started choosing plays and roles that specifically accentuated her good looks.â
Marcy, at the Merry Go Round Playhouse
Looking through the theater records today, itâs clear that Marcy was the undoubted star of the repertory company, acting and appearing in an eclectic selection of works â often receiving glowing reviews in the newspapers.
And there were lots of plays: starting in 1968, she starred in the political work â âMac Birdâ; plays that were transfers from Broadway like the comedy âThurber Carnivalâ; melodramas like âThe Manâ; âMadness of Lady Brightâ â where a review described her as âeffective, and tightly disciplinedâ; âOh Dad, Poor Dadâ â where the review described âbeautiful Marcy Bichette, a talented character actressâ; Neil Simonâs âStar-Spangled Girlâ; the Barbra Streisand role in âThe Owl and the Pussycatâ; Spider Lady in âSupermanâ; lead roles in âRashomonâ; Maleficent in âSleeping Beautyâ; Cleopatra in George Bernard Shawâs âCaesar and Cleopatraâ; Mary Poppins; and Desdemona in âOthelloâ to name but a few. Sometimes she appeared in other Miami theatersâ productions too, such as the Jane Fonda leading role in âBarefoot in the Parkâ.
Marcy, at the Merry Go Round Playhouse
For each play, Dolores was in the front row, always Marcyâs biggest cheerleader â but she was perhaps proudest when Marcy was approached by Las Mascaras, the largest Spanish-language theater group in Florida. The troupe had been started by two Cubans, Salvador Ugarte and Alfonso Cremata in 1968, specifically to keep alive the culture and traditions of Cubans who had fled to the United States. Dolores loved the troupeâs vision, and offered them her services, which included raising money for the company. Marcy starred in their production of âGaslightâ at the Merry Go Round Playhouse. Marcy was a hit in the play, and she and Dolores became close friends with Ugarte and Cremata, and supporters of their work.
Dolores and Marcy, c. 1971
Marcy wasnât overly ambitious, but she liked staying busy, and when not acting in theater productions, she continued to pursue music and modeling. She was desperate to go to Woodstock in 1969, but her father vetoed the idea, saying he was worried about the drug scene. For Marcy, it was a blow: sheâd been saving up her money from the Merry Go Round and doing modeling jobs for the newspapers in which she would appear as a daily temperature girl showing the expected weather on the beach â just as Dolores had done years before.
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6. Miss Leslieâs Dolls (1973), and beyondBy the early 1970s, the three Cuban friends, JosĂ© Prieto, Gregor Sandor, and Rafael Remy, whoâd escaped the island ten years earlier, were still close. Sandor had spent most of his time in California, building a successful career in film that would lead to jobs such as shooting Monte Hellmanâs cult hit âTwo-Lane Blacktopâ (1971) and Brian De Palmaâs âSistersâ (1972). The three amigos would get together periodically, often having reunions at Dolores and Marcyâs Miami place. Dolores would sometimes invite the rest of the Cuban contingency of filmmakers as well for a day of food and drink. She was an expansive host, serving large portions of lechon asado, ropa vieja, and arroz con pollo, with guests drinking Cuba libre, Havana Loco, and El Presidenteâs late into the night.
Rafael Remy was a frequent visitor, and had become close to Marcy. Heâd known her since he arrived from Cuba, and was a passionate supporter of her acting, often accompanying Dolores to watch her at the Merry Go Round Playhouse. He also encouraged her music aspirations, suggesting she write her own songs, and he found places for her to gig too. Ironically one of the venues he found for her to play regularly was Tomâs Bar, a country and western roadhouse in Davie. It was where âShanty Trampâ had been filmed â the same bar that had not allowed Ray Aranha to enter on account of his race.
It was at one of Doloresâ open house gatherings in early 1971, that Rafael suggested they all make one last film together. Rafael said he would produce and write it, JosĂ© could direct it, Gregor could shoot it, all their other Cuban compadres would join the crew, and he would write a role for Marcy. Rafael said that it would be their collective swansong to the Florida scene, and it would be the strangest film anyone had ever seen. Everyone had been drinking too much that night, but they all agreed it was a great idea.
A few weeks later, when everyone had forgotten about it, Rafael shared his script for Miss Leslieâs Dolls (1973) with JosĂ©, and JosĂ© was shocked. Rafael had been true to his word: his vision was indeed bat-shit crazy. It told the story of a young professor and three of her students who are forced to seek refuge at an isolated farmhouse one night due to bad weather. There they encounter a transvestite who collects the bodies of biological women, with the aim of transferring her spirit into them. Or something like that. The plot read like a mash-up of ‘Psycho’ (1959), ‘Glen or Glenda’ (1953), ‘Thundercrack!’ (1975), and ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ (1975), with some âScooby Dooâ thrown in for good measure.
Yes, José found it weird, but he was amused by it too. Dolores read it, and thought it was a hoot. She said she had the perfect actor for the strange drag-queen lead role of Miss Leslie: her friend Salvador Ugarte, the founder of Las Mascaras, the Spanish-language theater group with whom Marcy had worked. Rafael loved the idea and snapped Ugarte up. As always, the crew consisted mostly of Cuban expatriates.
The film shoot took place in the summer of 1971 and lasted six weeks â longer than the regular schedules for run-of-the-mill exploitation films. Marcy loved making it, and often spoke about the pleasure of working with her motherâs Cuban friends who she had grown up around.
Marcy in ‘Miss Leslie’s Dolls’ (1972)
The resulting film, that hit theaters in late 1972, is like few others. Sure, itâs clearly a low-budget production with cheap sets and stilted dialogue (Rafael Remyâs halting English still wasnât fluent â and it shows in the script), but âMiss Leslieâs Dollsâ is consistently bizarre, well-shot, campy, entertaining, and unique. There are certainly highlights, one of which is Salvador Ugarteâs performance. Here was a serious theater actor dedicating his life to promoting Cuban culture, dressed as a woman in a cheap blue dress and sporting a pronounced five oâclock shadow. To matters each more incongruous, he had a dubbed female voice in the film â an unusual touch enabled by the experience that Rafael and JosĂ© had had working with K. Gordon Murray’s dubbing team when they first arrived from Cuba. Marcyâs fresh-faced performance shines as always.
Marcy (in green) and Salvador Ugarte in ‘Miss Leslie’s Dolls’ (1972)
âMiss Leslieâs Dollsâ was perhaps too unusual for its time, perhaps too unusual for any time. It received a limited release in the U.S. before being the supporting feature in a bizarre double bill with The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972) in the U.K. in 1973.
For all Marcyâs acting talent, the sad truth was that she was missing the boat. She was simply in the wrong part of the country. Few films were being made in South Florida and Marcy didnât have an agent to follow up even if there were.
But if âMiss Leslieâs Dollsâ was strange, Marcyâs next and final film was even more off-the-wall. Coming off stage at the Merry Go Round one night, she was approached by two men who introduced themselves as film producers. They said they were making a South American horror film called The Swamp of the Ravens (1974) (aka âEl pantano de los cuervosâ) and wanted to fly Marcy down to Guayaquil in Ecuador, to be the female lead in their Spanish-U.S. co-production. Marcy had just gone through a relationship break-up and thought the break from Miami would do her good.
Marcy in ‘Swamp of the Ravens’
The resulting film is a disturbing tale of zombies, necrophilia, and autopsy footage. The film died a death, receiving a limited release in outposts that included Mississippi and Texas, and failed to advance Marcyâs film career. Years later, Marcy remembered little about the experience, except for the fact that she was dubbed throughout the film apart from one blood-curdling scream when she wakes on a mortuary slab. Somehow, it was a fitting but sad end to a once-promising career.
Marcy in ‘Swamp of the Ravens’
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7. Marcy Bichette and Bitter SweetThe Ecuador experience left Marcy feeling jaded about acting. She still loved being on a theater stage, but it had all started to feel restrictive and limiting compared to the freedom of playing music. Rafael Remy, always her trusted advisor, suggested she form her own band, so in 1973, she formed Bitter Sweet, a four-piece group, with Marcy playing acoustic guitar and keyboards, and she had her new boyfriend Chester, on bass. For the next seven years, she became a full-time touring musician, traveling up and down the state, playing gigs from Key West to Tallahassee.
The band hit the road hard: it was a relentless and thankless slog which included playing the Holiday Inn scene, performing from 8pm-2am every night. Mitch Poulos, her old acting friend from the Merry Go Round Playhouse remembers going to see her and coming away impressed with the show â and Marcyâs talent. The group would mainly play covers, with Marcyâs vocal style coming off like Linda Ronstadt.
The band became popular, and developed its own following â so they recorded some demos.
This is Marcy singing Fleetwood Macâs Dreams recorded around 1978.
She sent the tracks off to a hot shot producer in Nashville. He replied straight away: he loved Marcy as a singer, he said, and wanted to fly her in to try out some new songs. Only snag, he wasnât interested in the rest of the band, so Marcy turned the offer down. They were a unit, she said, and she wasnât interested in success if it was without the guys sheâd spent so much touring with.
Another time, Criteria Studios in Miami got in touch: theyâd seen Marcy at one of her shows and wanted to explore working with her. That was a big deal: the Eagles had recorded half of their âHotel Californiaâ album in the studio, and bands like Black Sabbath and the Bee Gees also made hit records there. The band went over and played for the in-house producers, but it was the same story. Criteria just wanted Marcy â and she wanted her band.
Whenever the band were close enough, Dolores would come out and see them play â as would JosĂ© Prieto and Rafael Remy, always supporting their quasi-adopted daughter. One show in particular was unusual â and important to Marcy: it was a show that she did especially for Rafael. It wasnât a regular gig: the purpose of this one was to raise funds for an attorney to try and keep him out of jail. Rafael had been arrested for distributing hardcore films that heâd also been involved in making.
It seemed like the Cuban fortune teller from all those years before had been right: Rafael Remyâs film work had indeed led him into trouble and strife.
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Tune in next time for the final episode of Chasing Butterflies: Rafael Remyâs story â and the birth of Florida hardcore.
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The post Chasing Butterflies: Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida – Part 3, Marcy Bichetteâs story – Podcast 147 appeared first on The Rialto Report.
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