John Holmes (actor)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other persons named John Holmes, see John Holmes (disambiguation).
| John Holmes (actor) | |
|---|---|
 DVD box cover for the 1977 porn feature Eruption starring John Holmes |
|
| Birthdate: | August 8, 1944 |
| Birth location: | Ashville, Ohio, USA |
| Birth name: | John Curtis Estes |
| Date of death: | March 13, 1988 |
| Penis size: | in dispute |
| Height: | 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) |
| Weight: | 165 lb (75 kg) |
| Eye color: | Brown (wore blue-colored contact lenses) |
| Hair color: | Brown |
| Orientation: | Bisexual |
| Ethnicity: | American |
| Stage Name(s): | John Duval, Big John Fallus, Big John Holmes, John 'Johnny Wadd' Holmes, John C. Holmes, John Curtis Holmes, Johnny Holmes, Bigg John, Big John, John Rey, Johnny Wadd, Long John Wadd |
| John Holmes (actor) at IMDb | |
John Curtis Estes (August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988) better known as John Holmes, John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd (after the lead character in a series of related films), was one of the most famous male porn stars of all time, appearing in about 2,500 adult loops, stag films, and porno feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s, including at least one gay feature film and a handful of gay loops. He was best known for his exceptionally large penis, which was heavily promoted as being the longest in the porn industry; its exact dimensions are, however, uncertain and the subject of controversy. Holmes also attracted notoriety for his involvement in the brutal Wonderland Murders in 1981, and for his death from AIDS.
Holmes was the subject of a long article in Rolling Stone magazine in 1989 and a feature length documentary, and the inspiration for two Hollywood movies (Boogie Nights and Wonderland).
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Born in Pickaway County, Ohio, as John Curtis Estes, Holmes knew very little of his father Carl Estes, a railroad worker, who walked out on the family when John was three or four years old. John's mother Mary, a devout Southern Baptist, married Harold Holmes a few years later and changed the family's surname to Holmes. His new stepfather proved to be a violent alcoholic who would come home inebriated, stumble about the house, and even vomit on the children. Mary Holmes later divorced him, and moved to Columbus OH with her children where they lived on welfare for a few years. When John was age eight, his mother met and married her third husband; Harold Bowman. After a few years of marriage, Bowman frequently beat Holmes, the youngest of four children, according to Sharon Holmes (John Holmes' wife) in Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes..
When John was 16, Bowman started to beat him, but the strapping teenager instead struck back and decked Bowman, sending him down a staircase (Reference Sharon Holmes in Wadd). John ran away from home and after a few days of living in the streets, he returned to his home and told his mother that if he stayed in the house much longer he would kill Bowman (ibid). After asking for the permission of his mother, Holmes enlisted in the United States Army and spent three years in Germany in the Signal Corps. Upon his discharge, Holmes moved to Los Angeles where he worked in a variety of jobs, including selling goods door to door, tending the vats at a Coffee-Nips factory, and occasionally as a homosexual prostitute. It was during his stint as an ambulance driver that he met a nurse named Sharon Gebenini in December 1964. They married in the spring of 1965.
[edit] Porn career
For the next two years, Holmes and his wife lived quiet, uneventful lives. Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a meat packing warehouse. But the rigors of driving in and out of a frozen warehouse caused severe health problems, leading to a pneumothorax (lung collapse) on three separate occasions. While recovering from his illness, Holmes frequented a club in Gardena, where a man in a restroom noticed his extraordinary penis size and encouraged him to do pornography. Initially during the late 1960s, Holmes did magazine work and an occasional 8 mm loop, keeping his work in porn a secret from his wife, which was easier to do in those days as pornography production and distribution were semi-clandestine, and there was no mass productions of video cassettes or DVD's, and no Internet.
So, while the ad copy for his first few dozen loops rarely named him, those that did usually gave him a name that was nowhere near what his real first name was. In fact, one early "Swedish Erotica" brochure from 1973 has five Holmes loops listed, each of which has a different name referring to Holmes even though it is obvious from his facial features that "Fred", "Dave", "Rudy", "Big Dick", and "Stan" are all the same person.
With the success of Deep Throat (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones (1972), and Behind the Green Door (1973), porn had become chic although its legality was still hotly contested. Holmes was arrested during this time for pimping and pandering, but he avoided prison time by becoming an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department.
In 1973, Holmes' career began to rise with a porn series built around a private investigator named Johnny Wadd. By 1978, Holmes was reputed to be earning as much as $3,000 a day as a porn actor. He starred at a time when an attractive personality could compensate for a lack of other aesthetic characteristics, and a certain amount of acting ability was still demanded of porn stars on a level that is not seen or necessary in today's porn films.
While his vocal inflection was arguably somewhat higher in pitch than one would expect for a "hard boiled private dick", most film critics and fans agreed that Holmes did demonstrate enough acting ability to keep the character of "Johnny Wadd" from being merely a banal, one-dimensional parody of Raymond Chandler's creation, the tough and uncompromising private detective Philip Marlowe. By this time, his addiction to cocaine was becoming a problem, so much so that it was beginning to affect his ability to gain an erection.
[edit] Just how endowed was he?
Despite his lack of acting ability, what made Holmes famous was his exceptionally large penis. Holmes' first wife, Sharon Gebenini, recalled him claiming to be 10 inches (25 cm) when he first measured himself. However, at the start of his cinematic career, he was widely publicized as having a penis ranging from 12.5 to 16 inches (32–41 cm) long when fully erect.
So celebrated was Holmes' reputed penis size that it was even used as a marketing tool for films in which he did not even appear. In the porn classic Anybody but My Husband, the promotional tag line read "Tony The Hook Perez has a dick so big that he gives even John Holmes a run for his money." (Citation: Various web promos and accounts of the film).
Different attempts to objectively ascertain the actual length of his penis have led to varying results. An American study of video footage of Holmes' penis concluded his penis was 10–11 inches long (25–28cm), whereas another study comparing many pictures of his penis to the estimated measurements of other parts of his own body led to the conclusion of 8 3/4 inches (22cm). Holmes' longtime manager, Bill Amerson, stated in the documentary Wadd, the Life and Times of John C. Holmes that "I saw John measure himself several times, it was 13 and a half inches". This measurement has been repeatedly confirmed by Holmes' last wife, Laurie "Misty Dawn" Rose, both in interviews and on her now-defunct website.
Veteran porn actress Dorothiea "Seka" Patton has claimed Holmes' penis was the biggest in the industry[1], though not all who had sex with him agree.
Regardless of what the actual length of Holmes' penis was, some people question whether he ever achieved full erections on movie sets. Veteran porn actress Annette Haven, for instance, recalled in the documentary Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes that "as the joke goes, if John ever became fully erect, he'd lose consciousness from lack of blood to the brain because his dick was that big. And it's true that his cock was never hard. It [having onscreen sex] was like doing it with a big, soft kind of luffa."
[edit] How many women did he have sex with?
Penis length was not the only questionable statistic used in connection with Holmes. In 1981, he began to spread the rumour that he had had sex with 14,000 women. However, more realistic estimates, such as that of Luke Ford, put the figure at around 3,000. If you assume Holmes' first experience with a woman occurred at 16 as he claimed, then he would have had to have made love to 700 different women a year—1.9 women a day—for the 20 years that had passed. Quick estimates based on the number of loops where Holmes did in fact perform a sexual act with at least one woman, allowing for sexual encounters not performed before a camera, and further mitigated by counting a performing partner only once—again, some actresses, such as Seka, the porn star with whom he was rumored to have had a lurid affair, Connie "Little French Maid" Peterson, Eileen Welles, Victoria Waters, Linda McDowell, Juliet "Aunt Peg" Anderson, and Desireé Cousteau, made numerous loops with Holmes in the 1970s—Ford's estimate of 3,000 by 1981 is closer to being realistic.
It is worth noting that, according to Holmes' close friend Bill Amerson in the documentary Wadd, even Holmes lost track of the exact number of women with whom he had sex. According to Amerson, Holmes became so fervent in spreading false publicity about himself that he eventually lost track of what stories were true and which were lies; at one point in Wadd, Amerson recalls that Holmes, early in his career, told the press that a wealthy British socialite paid him to travel to England once a year and pleasure her for twenty-four hours. Later in life, Holmes fondly recalled to Amerson his adventures in England--which, of course, never occurred.
[edit] The women in Holmes' private life
While estimates of his on screen and professional sex partners range in the thousands, it appears that there were perhaps 4 or 5 women who actually were close to Holmes in his private life. Holmes was reputedly meticulous in keeping his professional and private lives separated.
In 1965 he married a young nurse named Sharon Gebenini. He remained married to her until 1985.
In 1975 he met Julia St Vincent, on the set of his blockbuster film, "Liquid Lips", which was being produced by her uncle, Armand Atamian. Holmes and St Vincent stayed close until 1981 and the Wonderland affair. St Vincent is the woman who produced the ersatz biographical film of Holmes' life, "Exhausted". (Citation: "Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes")
In 1976 he met a young 16-year-old, Dawn Schiller, who was his girlfriend from '76 through the Wonderland incident in '81. She left Holmes for good in December 1981 when she turned him into police in Florida. (ibid)
In 1983 Holmes met his second wife, Laurie Rose. They were married in 1987.
[edit] Drugs and "Wonderland Murders"
Holmes's drug addiction began to seriously affect his ability to perform in porn, and producers' willingness to hire him, so he ventured into crime, selling drugs for gangs, prostituting himself to both men and women, committing credit card fraud and petty theft. In 1976, he met a 16-year old girl, Dawn, who became his girlfriend, and after he fell on hard times he later prostituted both her and himself. Dawn, who apparently appeared in news stories as "Jeana Sellers" after Holmes allegedly once publicly beat her in Florida, [citation needed] is not to be confused with Holmes's second wife, Laurie Rose, a porn actress who was sometimes called "Misty Dawn". In 1981, Holmes was arrested for stealing a computer from a car.
Holmes had developed a close friendship with drug dealer and nightclub owner Eddie Nash, who supplied Holmes with drugs he desired, principally cocaine. At the same time, Holmes was closely associated with the "Wonderland Gang", so-called for the location of their hideout; a rowhouse located on Wonderland Avenue in the wooded Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. Holmes worked for the gang, frequently selling drugs for them. After stealing money during a couple of drug runs, Holmes found himself in trouble with the Wonderland Gang. Allegedly in exchange for his life, he told gang leaders in June 1981 about Nash and a very large stash of drugs, money and jewelry Nash had in his house, and helped to set up a robbery which was committed on the morning of June 29, 1981.
Although Holmes did not participate in the robbery, Nash apparently suspected that Holmes had a part in masterminding it. After getting Holmes to confess to his participation, Nash allegedly exacted revenge against the Wonderland Gang. Two days after the robbery, in the early hours of July 1, 1981, four of the gang's members were found murdered in their rowhouse hideout in what is now known as the Wonderland Murders. Holmes was present during the murders, but it is unclear whether he participated in the killings.
Holmes had been incarcerated in connection with the murders, but released due to lack of evidence. He spent six months on the run with another girlfriend Dawn, but was arrested in Florida and returned to Los Angeles where he was tried and was acquitted of all four murder charges in June 1982. Holmes once again refused to tell authorities what he knew about the case, and spent some time in jail for contempt of court. Holmes rationalized to friends and stated to police that it would profit him nothing to tell the truth because "someone he loved would die" if he did so (see "Porn King"). When Holmes was released from jail, he attempted to reunite with his estranged wife, but she was not interested. According to Sharon Holmes, "He said that he would change and get out of the business. I told him that he didn't know how to change. I remember this because it is the first time I said the word fuck and I told him Get the fuck out of my life." [1]
Holmes then sought to reunite with Dawn, his earlier girlfriend, who, unknown to Holmes, had gone to Thailand with her father, where she stayed for nearly seven years. She did not return to Los Angeles until several weeks before Holmes's death in 1988. [citation needed]
Gebenini divorced Holmes in 1985, but only after an IRS tax lien on Holmes (and by proxy his wife) nearly wiped out her finances.
When Holmes resumed work in porn in November 1982, the industry had begun the transition from film to video. Work was still plentiful, but less lucrative and he was no longer the premier male star. His drug addiction continued, as did the inconsistent performances on set. At this time, he appeared to have become disillusioned with the porn industry. His inability to gain an erection was becoming common and employers began opting for younger talent.
[edit] Business activities
In 1979 Holmes and his half-brother opened a combination locksmith service and antique shop called the "Just Looking Emporium". However drug usage soon took precedent over business matters and the company went out of business before the year was over.
Later, after his 1982 murder trial and acquittal, Holmes began a business partnership with Bill Amerson, as they founded and operated a production company "Penquin Productions", where Holmes could be a triple-threat writing, directing, and performing. [2]
[edit] Last days
As Holmes' career started to decline, he starred in his only full-length feature gay porn movie, The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes, in 1983. In the movie, Holmes performed anal sex with Joey Yale, who died of AIDS in 1986. In spite of his appearance in this film, many of his heterosexual fans remained unaware that Holmes was bisexual, having also had sex with men in some early loops and as a male prostitute outside the porn industry.
Around this time he met his future girlfriend and wife, Laurie Rose, a.k.a. Misty Dawn, a porn actress. In the early 1980s Rose was known by some as one of the industry's many so-called anal queens. Rose and Holmes met on the set of the film Marathon. Holmes choniclier and confidante Bill Amerson states that Rose commented that "I want to have all that up my butt" (referring to Holmes) and, in fact, off camera that did happen and Holmes and Rose became a couple from that point forward. (Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes, 1998)
In February 1986, Holmes was diagnosed as HIV positive. According to Laurie Rose, Holmes claimed that he never used needles and was deeply afraid of them. However, many porn historians and industry insiders from that era have heard testimony from some of Holmes' fellow performers to the contrary. Some have first-hand knowledge of his heroin abuse and also cite on-screen evidence of visible vein damage to the insides on Holmes' forearms. This damage becomes more apparent as Holmes moved from 8 mm loops to feature films, where the better quality of the 35mm film stock showed the detail that grainy 8 mm tended to mask.
Regardless of the nature of his addiction, other risk factors were present in his lifestyle, and there is no way to identify which of them led to his HIV infection. There has been speculation that experimentation with homosexuality—including the frequently mentioned rumor that he used the services of transsexual prostitutes—was the source of his infection. Other reports claim that, while in jail during the Wonderland Murders investigation, Holmes had at least one male-male sexual encounter with another prisoner who was HIV positive; the more gaudy version has jail guards bribing Holmes with better treatment, including beer and other contraband, if he would sodomize other prisoners who either had violated prison rules or were known to be homosexuals and were the victims of sadistic games on the part of the guards. To date, however, no clear evidence of any of these assertions has ever been offered.
Holmes's first wife Sharon Gebenini and longtime porn friend Bill Amerson both dispute the rumors of intravenous drug abuse. Says Gebenini: "When I heard that he had contracted AIDS I knew that it had to have been transmitted sexually rather than from drug abuse. This man was terrified of needles, absolutely terrified. So I knew it was sexually transmitted. There is no other way". Amerson similarly states, "To those who claim to have shot drugs with John I say bullshit. John was terrified of needles." These accounts are all the more significant when one considers that while Gebenini and Amerson were both very close to Holmes, they barely knew each other as Gebenini wanted nothing to do with Holmes's porn friends and did not associate with them at all.
Some Holmes historians, including Luke Ford, Adair Carter and Amerson, have noted that evidence of Holmes' intravenous drug usage can be seen in frames from his last films. Closeups of his forearms in scenes where the lighting was suitable clearly show the type of venous discoloration associated with damage observed in heroin addicts. Frames from earlier films show the same damage, though to a lesser degree, and provide significant evidence that Gebenini's contrary claims regarding Holmes' drug problem are incorrect.
Holmes continued to have unprotected sex in the adult film industry without informing any of his partners of his status, and worked until the disease emaciated him in 1987. One notable female performer he worked with, "Lisa DeLeeuw", did indeed die of AIDS in 1993. The last time she performed with Holmes, however, apparently was in 1981, which makes it unlikely that she contracted HIV from Holmes.
Holmes married Laurie Rose in January 1988. Two months before his death, two police detectives visited him in the hospital, in another futile attempt to extract information about the Wonderland murders. John Holmes died from AIDS on March 13, 1988 at the age of 43. His body was immediately cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea off the coast of Oxnard California. Laurie Rose took the name Laurie Holmes and later published the book Porn King: Autobiography of John C. Holmes in 1998.
[edit] Legacy
Holmes's legacy has become more renowned and publicly acceptable. A documentary on his wild life (Wadd—The Life and Times of John C. Holmes) has achieved cult status among certain late-night college campus independent film houses, and some elements of the film Boogie Nights were loosely based on Holmes's life, including the Laurel Canyon "Wonderland" murders. That aspect of Holmes' life was presented in a biographical movie called Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer and released on October 17, 2003.
Finally, since the majority of Holmes' loops have gone into public domain following the collapse of Caballero Control Corporation in 1990, there are efforts underway to locate all surviving 8 mm loops starring Holmes and convert them to DVD for posterity. However, since the life expectancy of most 8 mm films is very poor due to the nature of the film stock used at that time it is believed that as much as 60–70% of Holmes' loops may already be lost forever.
[edit] References
- ^ Source: Sharon Holmes interview in the documentary Wadd: The life and Times of John C. Holmes
- ^ Citations from "The Devil in John Holmes", Rolling Stone Magazine 1989
[edit] Biographies
- Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story (1981 documentary)
- Wadd - The Life and Times of John C. Holmes (1998 documentary)
- The Devil and John Holmes by Mike Sager, Rolling Stone, June 15, 1989; reprinted in "Scary Monsters and Super Freaks" (2004).
- Porn King: Autobiography of John C. Holmes (1998).
- XXXL: The John Holmes Story (2000 documentary)
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- John Holmes at the Internet Movie Database
- John Holmes's acting credits at the Internet Adult Film Database
- Interview with the maker of the 1998 documentary
- Summary of biography
