| John C. Holmes | |
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John Holmes as Joe Murray in Prisoner of Paradise (1980) |
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| Born | John Curtis Estes August 8, 1944 Ashville, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | March 13, 1988 (aged 43) (AIDS related complications) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Other names | John Duval, John Estes, Big John Fallus, Big John Holmes, John C. Holmes, John Curtis Holmes, Johnny Holmes, Bigg John, Big John, John Rey, Johnny Wadd, John Sacre, Bernard Emil Weik II, Long John Wadd, Johnny B. Wadd, Johnny the Wad |
| Ethnicity | Caucasian |
| Height | 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m) |
| Weight | 146 lb (66 kg) |
| No. of adult films | 2250 |
| Website | |
| http://www.johnholmes.com | |
John Curtis Holmes (August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988) better known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd (after the lead character in a series of related films), was one of the most prolific male porn stars of all time, appearing in about 2 250 adult loops, stag films, and pornographic feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s. He was best known for his exceptionally large penis, which was heavily promoted as being the longest, thickest, and hardest in the porn industry, although no definitive measurement of Holmes' actual penis length exists.[1] Near the end of his life, Holmes attracted notoriety for his involvement in the Wonderland murders in 1981, and eventually for his death from complications caused by AIDS.
Holmes was the subject of several books, a lengthy essay in Rolling Stone magazine, two feature length documentaries, and was the inspiration for two Hollywood movies, Boogie Nights and Wonderland.
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John Holmes was born John Curtis Estes on Tuesday August 8th, 1944 in the small rural town of Ashville, Ohio, located a few miles south of the state capital of Columbus. The youngest of four children born to twenty-six year old Mary June Holmes (nee Barton), the name of John's father was not listed on his birth certificate. Mary and her husband, Edward Holmes, the father of Holmes' three older siblings, Dale, Edward and Anne, were separated numerous occasions throughout their marriage and John never knew his biological father, Carl Estes, a railroad worker. In order to help smooth over her indiscretion, Mary changed John's surname to Holmes. It wasn't until 1986 at age forty-two, prior to a trip to Italy, when his mother provided him with the hand written copy of his original birth certificate that Holmes discovered Carl Estes was his biological father. John's mother was a devout Southern Baptist, who regularly attended the Milport Chapel Church along with her children, where John had perfect attendance.
John's stepfather, Edward Holmes, was an alcoholic, who would come home inebriated, stumble about the house, and even vomit on the children.[2] As a child, John enjoyed a reprieve from home when he would visit his maternal grandparents. Mary Holmes divorced her husband when Holmes was three or four and moved with her children to Columbus, Ohio, where they lived in a low-income apartment project building with a friend of Mary's and her two children. The two women worked as clerks and did waitressing jobs in order to support their young children. When Holmes was eight, his mother married Harold Bowman. Shortly after, Holmes and his family moved from Columbus and settled in the small town of Pataskala, Ohio about 10 miles east of Columbus. Holmes recalled that Bowman was a good father until his younger half-brother, David, was born, at which point Bowman lost interest in his non-biological children and began neglecting them.[1][3]
Because he was the youngest, John began to suffer several beatings by Bowman (who is said to have had Bipolar disorder) that continued well into his late adolescence. By the time he reached his teenage years, Holmes, who was very tall and strong for his age, fought back after Bowman had thrown him down a flight of stairs.[3] After this incident, Holmes ran away from home at age 16, and after several days of living on the streets, returned home and informed his mother that if he moved back in he would kill Bowman. With his mother's written permission, Holmes dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army at age 16. After advanced training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, he spent three years in West Germany in the Signal Corps.[3] Upon his honorable discharge, Holmes moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in a variety of jobs, including selling goods door-to-door and tending the vats at a Coffee-Nips factory. It was during his stint as an ambulance driver that he met a nurse named Sharon Gebenini in December 1964. They married in August 1965.[4]
For the next two years, Holmes and Sharon lived uneventful lives. Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a meat packing warehouse in nearby Cudahy, California. However, repeated exposures to inhaling the sub-freezing air in the large walk-in freezer after being outside inhaling the desert-hot air caused severe health problems, leading to a pneumothorax (lung collapse) of his right lung on three separate occasions between seven to nine months during the two years he worked there.[4] According to Sharon Holmes, during the first 17 months of Sharon's marriage to John, she suffered three miscarriages.
"John Holmes was to the adult film industry what Elvis Presley was to rock 'n' roll. He simply was The King."—Cinematographer Bob Vosse in the documentary Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes.
It has been speculated that while recovering from his illness, Holmes attended a men's card-playing club in Gardena, California which was called 'The Poker Palace' where one evening, a still photographer, standing next to him at a urinal, noticed his extraordinary penis size and encouraged him to do pornography. However, Holmes had actually already initiated his career in the adult industry in the mid-sixties when his girlfriend at the time, burgeoning erotic film actress Sandy Dempsey, invited him to appear with her and others in a nudist film shot by Taboo director Kirdy Stevens and his wife Helene Terrie. During the mid-late 1960s, Holmes did magazine layouts and an occasional 8 mm loop, keeping his work in porn a secret from his wife.
Determining the number of films he made during the early part of his career is difficult because the ad copy rarely named him. Those that did usually used entirely inconsistent names. For example, one early "Swedish Erotica" brochure from 1973 has five loops featuring Holmes, each with a different name. In the early years of his porn career, Holmes was nicknamed "The Sultan of Smut", a pun on Babe Ruth's nickname, The Sultan of Swat.
In 1971, Holmes' career began to take off with a porn series built around a private investigator named Johnny Wadd most of which were written and directed by Bob Chinn. The success of the first film of the series, Johnny Wadd, created an immediate demand for more Johnny Wadd films so Chinn followed up with Flesh of the Lotus (1971).
With the success of Deep Throat (1972), Behind the Green Door (1972), and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), porn became 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 LAPD.[5] Using his status as an informer, it is alleged Holmes systematically had his competition in the porn industry arrested, although there is no substantiated evidence to support the claim that anyone in the adult industry was arrested as a result of Holmes' efforts.
By 1978, Holmes was reputed to be earning as much as $3,000 a day as a porn actor.[1][5] He starred at a time when personality could compensate for a lack of other aesthetic characteristics, and a certain amount of acting ability was still demanded of porn stars.
While his voice was 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 the late 1970s, his use of cocaine and freebasing was becoming a serious problem. Professionally, it affected his ability to maintain an erection, as is apparent from his flaccid performance in the 1980 film Insatiable. To support himself and his drug habit Holmes ventured into crime, selling drugs for gangs, prostituting himself to both men and women, and committing credit card fraud and petty theft. In 1976, he met a 16-year-old girl who became his girlfriend. After Holmes fell on hard times, he prostituted both her and himself, as well as beating her in public.[6][7][8]
In 1981, he began to claim that he had intercourse with 14,000 women.[5] The number had in fact been invented by Holmes to help salvage his waning image.[1] (Holmes later joked to psychologist Dr. Vonda L. Pelto who had counselled Holmes in 1982 and other notorious inmates during her employment at L.A. County jail, that he had purposely exaggerated the number of women he'd slept with and the actual figure was 13,895.) To substantiate this number, and assuming Holmes' first experience with a woman occurred at 16 as he claimed, then he would have had to have sex with 666 different women a year—1.8 women a day—for the next 21 years.[9] Pornography historian Luke Ford calculated the number of Holmes' sexual partners over the course of his lifetime to be a more modest 3,000 or 2.7 new women per week.[9]
His performances included at least one homosexual feature film, The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes,[10] and a handful of gay loops. All of the male stars of Private Pleasures, including Holmes, eventually succumbed to AIDS.[11]
In the early 1980s, Holmes developed a close friendship with drug dealer and nightclub owner Eddie Nash. At the same time, Holmes was closely associated with the Wonderland Gang, a group of heroin-addicted cocaine dealers, 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 gang. In June 1981, allegedly in exchange for his life, he told gang leaders about a very large stash of drugs, money and jewelry Nash had in his house. Holmes helped to set up a robbery that 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 it. After getting Holmes to confess to his participation, and threatening his life and that of Holmes' family, Nash exacted revenge against the Wonderland Gang. In the early hours of July 1, 1981, four of the gang's members were found murdered in their hideout. Holmes was allegedly present during the murders, but it is unclear if he participated in the killings.
Holmes was questioned regarding the murders in July 1981, but released due to lack of evidence. Holmes refused to co-operate with the investigation. After spending nearly five months on the run with Dawn Schiller, he was arrested in Florida on December 4, 1981 by former L.A.P.D. homicide detectives Tom Lange and Frank Tomlinson and returned to Los Angeles. In March 1982, Holmes was charged with personally committing all four murders. On June 26, 1982, Holmes was acquitted of all charges except contempt of court.[12]
In November 1982, after serving 119 days of jail time for contempt of court (the longest in California history at that time) and unrelated robbery charges, Holmes was released and almost immediately re-entered the adult film business. However, his cocaine use and freebasing continued on and off, although it has been almost unanimously attested by Holmes' co-stars (post Wonderland) that Holmes was consistently professional on set. By the early to mid-1980s, the adult film industry began a transition at making porn movies from film to videotape. Holmes continued to find work during his comeback, and along with many of his male contemporaries, he helped to usher in the new starlets of the decade such as Ginger Lynn, Amber Lynn, Sheri St. Claire and Kimberly Carson as upcoming directors focused on looking for younger talent. Most of Holmes' appearances in adult films and videos during the 1980s were cameos as he started concentrating his efforts on working in other facets of the adult industry. Coinciding with the revival of his film career, Holmes and his partner Bill Amerson were hired by VCX in 1984 where Holmes worked part time as a line producer and director.
In January 1983, he met his future girlfriend and wife, Laurie Rose, a.k.a. Misty Dawn, on the set of the film Marathon in San Francisco. Shortly after their meeting, Holmes invited Rose to move in with him at the residence of Bill Amerson in Sherman Oaks.
In February 1986, six months after testing negative for the virus, Holmes was diagnosed as HIV positive. According to Laurie Holmes, Holmes claimed that he never used needles and was deeply afraid of them. Both his first wife, Sharon, as well as Bill Amerson, separately confirmed later that Holmes could not have contracted HIV from intravenous drug use because Holmes never used needles.[1]
During the summer of 1986, Holmes was offered a substantial sum of money by Paradise Visuals (who were unaware of Holmes' positive HIV status) to travel to Italy where he filmed his last two porno movies. The next-to-last was The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empress (originally released in Italy as Carne Bollente) for director Riccardo Schicchi. The film starred Holmes, the later Italian Parliament member Ilona 'Cicciolina' Staller, Tracey Adams, Christoph Clark, and Amber Lynn.[13] His final film was The Devil In Mr. Holmes, starring Tracey Adams, Amber Lynn, Karin Schubert, and Marina Hedman.[14] These last films created a furor when it was revealed that Holmes had consciously chosen to not reveal his HIV status to his co-stars before engaging in unprotected sex for the filming.[13][15][16][17] He continued to make public appearances at autograph signings, as well as hosting video clips during 1986 and 1987, during which time the gaunt physical appearance resulting from his health problems became increasingly evident.
Not wanting to reveal the true nature of his failing health, Holmes and his partner, Bill Amerson, claimed to the press that he was suffering from colon cancer. Holmes married Laurie Rose on January 23, 1987 in Las Vegas, confiding to her that he had AIDS.[18]
During the last five months of his life, Holmes remained in the Veteran's hospital on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles. John Holmes died from AIDS-related complications (according to his death certificate, cardiorespiratory arrest and encephalitis due to AIDS, associated with lymphadenopathy and esophageal candidiasis) on March 13, 1988 at the age of 43.[10] His body was cremated, and after hiring a fishing boat, his widow Laurie, his mother Mary (Bowman), and his brother David scattered his ashes at sea off the coast of Oxnard, California.[19]
Shortly after his death, a memorial service was held for Holmes by the Amerson family at the Old North Church in Hollywood Hills, Forest Lawn, in Los Angeles and was attended by a small group of invitees. The service (which leaked to the media) was an opportunity for Holmes' three godchildren to say goodbye. Holmes' eulogy was delivered by the adult industry's first historian, the late Jim Holliday.
The true number of women (and men) with whom Holmes had sex during his career will never be completely known. After his death, his ex-wife Sharon came across a foot locker that was plated in 24k gold leaf, which contained photographic references of his "private work." She burned all of it.[21]
Holmes' main asset in the porn business was his exceptionally large penis. No definitive measurement or documentation verifying this exists, leaving its exact size unknown. Holmes was also one of the first uncircumcised actors who became popular in American porn.
Veteran porn actress Dorothea "Seka" Patton has stated that Holmes' penis was the biggest in the industry.[22] Holmes' first wife recalled him claiming to be 10 inches (25 cm) when he first measured himself.[23] Holmes himself once claimed his penis to be fifteen inches (38.1 cm) long and 12 inches (300 mm) in circumference.[23] Holmes' longtime friend and industry associate, Bill Amerson, said that "I saw John measure himself several times, it was 13 and a half inches" (34.3 cm).[1] A review of Holmes' films over the course of his career shows that most of his early co-stars tended to be short and slender, whereas women with whom he engaged in onscreen sex later in his career were much taller and had proportionately larger bodies; as a result, the size of Holmes' penis appears to fluctuate in his films, relative to the height and mass of his co-stars.[9]
Another longstanding controversy regards whether Holmes ever achieved a full erection although much of his early work clearly reveals he was able to achieve a substantial erection. A popular joke in the 1970s porn industry held that Holmes was incapable of achieving a full erection because the blood flow from his head into his penis would cause him to pass out.[24] A Holmes co-star stated that his penis was never particularly hard during intercourse, likening it to "doing it with a big, soft kind of loofah."[24]
So celebrated was Holmes' penis size it was used as a marketing tool for films in which he did not appear. Anybody but My Husband had the promotional tag line "Tony The Hook Perez has a dick so big that he gives even John Holmes a run for his money." After his death, the length of Holmes' penis continued to be used to market Holmes-related material. At the premiere of the film Wonderland, patrons were given thirteen-and-a-half inch rulers as gag gifts.[25]
In 1979, Holmes with his younger half-brother, David Bowman, opened up a locksmith and used furniture store called The Just Looking Emporium in Los Angeles which both managed. But because of Holmes' escalating drug addiction and of the lack of money to operate the store since Holmes was squandering all of his and other people's money to buy cocaine for himself, the business failed by the end of that very year.[26]
Later, after his 1982 murder trial and acquittal, Holmes began a business partnership with his friend and associate Bill Amerson, as they founded and operated a production company titled Penquin Productions, where Holmes could be a triple-threat: writing, directing, and performing.[26] Of Penguin's twenty productions between 1985 and 1988, Holmes appeared in seven films. After requesting permission to use the name from his old director friend, Bob Chinn, Holmes reprised the detective role for the 1986 Penguin Production:The Return of Johnny Wadd.
Despite the notoriety and infamy associated with Holmes, he also devoted much time to charities involving the environment. He was known to campaign and collect door-to-door for charities such as Save The Whales.[26]
Holmes' career was promoted with a series of outrageous claims that he made over the years (many made up on the spur of the moment by Holmes himself). The most dubious ones include:
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