“John Holmes and I were working on an orgy scene in a 3d X-rated film called The Disco Dolls’ Hot Skin. These three bubbly nymphos were attending to John, and Lesley Beauvais was orally servicing me – those who know say she’s the finest fellatrix of all time.
Anyway, John’s penis suddenly sprung free from the girls’ grasp and swung right over my head. I looked up at the exact moment, and from my angle, well, damn if it didn’t look just like the opening shot of Star Wars.”
Bill Margold (porn historian, writer and actor.)
John Curtis Holmes had a 14-inch penis. It was the beginning and the end of him: his making and undoing. Size got him into the porno game, and in the course of Holmes’ 19-year career as a hardcore superstar and occasional gigolo, his penis is reckoned – by the murky, unverifiable common knowledge of the porn world – to have entered 14,000 women and many men too.
It went into Seka and Marilyn Chambers, the starlets of the ’70s when porn had just begun to edge into the mainstream. In the ’80s, when home video gave the industry a growth spurt, John Holmes’ penis went into the infamously under-age Traci Lords, Italian MP Cicciolina and Ginger Lynn Allen, who went on to become Charlie Sheen’s girlfriend.
It made more than 2,200 movies (a figure Holmes calculated by placing a peanut in a large jar for each shoot), and it earned $3,000 a scene at its peak. It was an A-list penis.
When it was in its glory, John Holmes’ foot-plus organ measured about four inches in circumference. Never mind a baby’s arm – it was a bricklayer’s forearm with an apple in its fist.
Yet the world’s most famous and in-demand penis was seldom completely erect, onscreen or off. A prolonged full erection would have drained too much blood from the rest of Holmes’ body, and over the year, that body accumulated its own inventory of problems.
After a decade in porn, Holmes had a habit of freebasing rock cocaine. He did a hit every 15 minutes, all his waking hours. Later there would be colon cancer and the HIV that would ultimately kill him.
John Holmes’ extraordinary penis turned its owner into the Elvis Presley of porn – the first, the best, the icon, The King. It also made him the nexus of baffling tragedy. It went like this: his fame introduced him to the freebase pipe.
Because of the drugs, he got in far too deep with the dealers and petty criminals who lubricated Hollywood pornography’s dealings with coke, heroin and Quaaludes. And because of these new associates, his debts, and his perpetual cocaine daze, John Holmes became implicated in a mass murder so bloody and incredible that for a while, Los Angeles police compared it to the Manson killings at Sharon Tate’s home.
On Wednesday the 1st of July 1981, four of Holmes’ drug dealer acquaintances were bludgeoned to death at their house in Laural Canyon. Forensics placed Holmes at the scene – just – but though the actor denied the killings, he would not say who’d committed them. He was too terrified.
All this because of a giant penis. Well, not just the penis, to be truthful. John Holmes’ problems came as much from the things he didn’t have as the things he did. Overblessed in one department, Holmes was bereft in most others.
He was born in Ohio in 1944 to a passionate Baptist mother and an alcoholic father; his childhood was a confusion of drunkenness and argument.
Apart from sex, he had no noticeable skills, interests or ambitions, and only the most shoddy and faulty of loves in his life. He had nothing going for him. All he could do was get it up – all he could do was porn.
John Holmes’ agent, a man who represented the actor for 30 years, is Reb; he works in West Hollywood, and his company is called Pretty Girl International.
I asked him whether John had any interests off the set.
“It was pretty much drugs,” he replies. “Drugs and gardening.”
Gardening?
“Oh yeah,” he continues, in a sun-baked, seen-it-all, pulp fiction, porno-world voice. “John had green fingers. He did the lawns and the flowers, the roses. He’d take care of the pool, too. He liked that. But only at frieds houses. He never really had a place of his own.”
Reb first met Holmes some 30 years ago. Directionless and short of cash, lost in a string of no-hope jobs, Holmes had already made his first, tentative steps into the world of porn.
He’d danced in sex clubs and posed for still pictures, and, to the dismay of his wife Sharon, a nurse, he’d decided that the industry might provide a life for him. Sex interested him. Now he wanted a proper ‘in’.
According to Reb, Holmes was also turning tricks at this time, running an ad in a Hollywood free paper that promised the benefits of his unusual anatomy. “He was selling himself out for sex services.” the agent claims.
“It didn’t matter to him whether they were male or female.” Reb’s interview procedure was standard for the industry – he asked Holmes to drop his pants – but the talent scout was still astonished by what he discovered.
“He had the largest penis I’d ever seen. I took pictures of it to show to clients. I didn’t know what to think. All I saw were dollar signs.”
John Holmes became Johnny Wadd, a porno detective, or sometimes Big John Fallus. In time, his real name would become title enough.
These were the early days of pornography when the industry was still close enough to the ’60s counter-culture to be considered (and to consider itself) radical and cool.
So when Holmes developed the JOhn Holmes onscreen persona, he also created everything you think of when you imagine a caricature ’70s porn star: a superfly, open-shirted, mustachio’d loverman; a man’s vaguely comical idea of a woman’s dream.
He was Dr Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex made flesh. Bill Margold noticed Holmes’ uncommon gentleness when they first worked together on a 70mm widescreen porn flick called Panorama Blue in 1973.
“I watched him with the women before he started,” Margold says. “He would prepare them for the shoot. He kneaded them like they were loaves of bread.”
As Holmes’ career took off, his marriage slid into disrepair. In 1976, he took up with a 15-year-old mistress. Amphetamines had already begun to make him paranoid and unreliable on the set.
By 1978, he was freebasing cocaine continuously – he’d picked up the habit on a movie set in Las Vegas. Soon his mistress was on the pipe too.
His reality was burned away in the butane haze, and Holmes’ life began to resemble the kind of porno movie for which no budget would be sufficient.
There were movie openings, flights to Europe and Hawaii for shoots, and private tricks with men and women all over the western world. The more his fame spiralled higher, the more voracious Holmes’ appetite for cocaine became.
All his money went on drugs. He would disappear off the set in mid-shoot to cook up freebase, using a petri dish and pipe which he kept on him at all times, smoking the money as fast as he made it.
And he was making a lot of money. Holmes would shoot two scenes a day if his penis could take it. Increasingly, it couldn’t.
In the days before Viagra, there wasn’t much help available. He’d consume 40 to 50 valiums daily to keep his mental state balanced against his massive cocaine intake.
It became a joke in the industry that the best way to get him on set was to leave a trail of coke from the bathroom to the stage. Holmes was so broke that, when he needed a car, all he could afford was an old milk truck.
“People tried to help him,” Reb says. “They kept bringing him to work even when he couldn’t do it. But all he did was steal stuff. He stole a load of videos from the warehouse and then sold them on the street himself.”
By spring 1981, John Holmes, the most famous male porn actor ever, was living in Sharon’s (his now ex-wife) car with his teenage mistress. His penis no longer worked to order, so nor did he.
Instead, he stole luggage from LAX airport, and his girlfriend prostituted herself to raise money for their drugs. He owed a fortune to a quartet of drug dealers who lived in Laurel Canyon. They were violent, desperate, and addicts themselves, and Holmes had no way of paying them back.
“You must be very careful of what you say about the murder case,” Bill Margold warns. “You can rest assured that the facts around it will never, ever be known. The King took many of them to his grave. And with justifable reason.”
Margold – a man with a creamy sportscaster’s voice and the heedless, delinquent optimism that the porn world sometimes breeds – always referred to Holmes as The King.
He met Holmes in 1976 and claims he bestowed this nickname when writing ads for a Holmes movie called The New Erotic Adventures of Casanova – ‘When he made love, he made history!’ – in 1978.
Margold used to run Pretty Girl International. Now he tells me, he’s “involved with” something called the legends of Erotica Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and two typically peculiar porn-related organisations, FOX (‘The Fans of X-Rated Entertainment) and PAW (‘Protecting Adult Welfare.
We make sure that the kids… the performers… can have someone to talk to about their problems.’)
Margold does not seem bothered that his nickname for Holmes has barely caught on. Instead, he rattles on about The King with the die-hard enthusiasm of a sports fan who had somehow got to play for his idol’s team.
Did I know that The King had supported Greenpiece? He was sensitive and decent and, when circumstances allowed, a family man? Mistily, Margold recounts shooting Marathon in 1982, in which he, The King and two other men gleefully swarmed over a woman for “the famous ‘Forty Inches Of Meat’ scene”.
One of the co-stars was Ron ‘The Hedgehog’ Jeremy, so-called for his ability to curl up and fellate himself. The woman was Margold’s then-wife, Drea.
On the subject of the Laurel Canyon murders, he becomes reticent.
“My defence is that I don’t believe John Holmes physically killed anybody.” he declares. “I told the cops when they came to see me that if those people were dug dealers, then they deserved to die.”
The people who died were members of a small-time Beverly Hills drug outfit based at a heavily-secured house on Wonderland Avenue, Laurel Canyon.
In his decline, Holmes had become their drug courier and owed them a lot of money. Early in 1981, he had incurred their further wrath by messing up a drug delivery.
They’d cut off his supply, beaten him, and told him he had better come up with the money he owed or suffer the consequences.
The Laural Canyon gang were in trouble, with ravenous drug habits and contracts out on their lives for passing counterfeit drugs. They’d recently sold on a pound of baking soda for $250,000.
The solution that Holmes’ coke-battered brain came up with revolved around a Palestinian cocaine dealer, club owner and day-long freebaser called Eddie Nash. Born Adel Nasrallah and now a naturalised American.
Nash was a self-made millionaire then engaged in the long business of smoking his money away. Bill Margold managed one of his buildings.
Nash liked to have John Holmes hang around his house in the San Fernando Valley and had been generous in drugs with his friend, the famous porn star.
Holmes now owed Nash almost as badly as the Laural Canyon gang. He proposed that the gang rob Nash for the money, cocaine and heroin he kept at home, thus solving their problems and Holmes’ own.
Holmes left a sliding door in Nash’s house open. Waving a stolen police badge, three of the Laurel Canyon gang burst into Nash’s home and handcuffed him and his bodyguard Gregory DeWitt Diles.
They then abandoned their pretence and threatened the two with guns until they revealed where the drugs and money were.
One gang member forced the barrel of a Magnum into Nash’s mouth; another drew a knife across Diles’ throat. The gang made off with 8lb of cocaine, 2lb of top-quality heroin, 5,000 Quaaludes, $110,000 in cash, and jewellery that later sold for $150,000—deliberately conning Holmes.
They lied about the haul, gave him $3,000 and threw him out of their house on Wonderland Avenue.
Two days later, Diles bumped into Holmes by chance and saw that he was wearing one of Nash’s stolen rings.
Within the hour, Holmes was on the floor in Nash’s house, begging for his life and the lives of his family, as Eddie Nash smoked base in a rage and screamed that he would kill Holmes and all of his relatives if he didn’t get his property back.
Not long after, a person or persons unknown used a metal pipe to batter to death four people in Nash’s house on Wonderland Avenue.
That is as far as the law got with the case. The victims were Joy Miller, her lover and fellow heroin addict Billy DeVerell, Ron Launius, who had forced his gun into Eddie Nash’s mouth, and a woman called Barbara Richardson.
A fifth person, Launius’ wife Susan, was carried out by medics with brain damage and a severed finger. The brutality of the killings was exceptional: the walls were covered in brains, blood and screw marks from the end of the pipe.
The police called it the ‘Four On The Floor Murders’.
Holmes and his teenage mistress were arrested and questioned. The porn star told how he’d taken some people to the house, got them past its elaborate security system, and then watched helplessly with a gun to his head while the Lauren Canyon gang members were beaten to death.
Holmes offered the police everything he knew about the drugs, vice and crime in L.A., apart from the names of the killers. There was no deal.
Released, he and the girl fled to Miami. For money, he broke into cars, and she once again sold herself for sex. That December, he was arrested again, and this time charged with the Four on The Floor Murders.
John Holmes was acquitted of the indictment. The only prosecution evidence was his palm print on a wall; his defence was that Eddie Nash had ordered the killings.
The case fizzled out in confusion, but the notoriety it bestowed provided Holmes with his Indian Summer in porn.
He began to get bit parts, walk-ons, and cameos. Bill Margold directed him in California Valley Girls, and he recalls a scene in which four girls set to work on Holmes’ equipment as if it were the finale of Raging Bull.
Holmes even got married again, to a 19-year-old starlet called Laurie Rose, aka ‘Misty Dawn, the anal queen of porn’, who he met in 1983 on the set of a movie called Flesh Pond.
Margold claims that it was he who introduced Rose to Holmes. “I remember her first line to me was: “It was love at first sight. First sight of his dick.”
Laurie Rose’s influence even appears to have persuaded Holmes to give up the greatest love of his life – freebasing cocaine. By 1985 he was off drugs. He was also HIV positive.
John Holmes died of an AIDS-related illness on the 13th of March 1988, aged just 43, but as far as Margold was concerned, it could have been anything. His diagnosis is grimly familiar.
“I think near the end, he really wanted to be worn down,” Margold opines. “He had began to toss in the towel, he no longer wanted to fight.
It was tough to be someone like The King. Once you’re famous, you gotta live up to it. When you don’t, you start to question your whole reason for living.”
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