John Holmes - 13 1/2 Inches to Freedom

By Ajax Synecdoche

Reviewed: Wonderland , directed by James Cox, starring Val Kilmer and Kate Bosworth.

Boogie Nights , directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Burt Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, and Heather Graham.

Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes, directed by Wesley Emerson and Alan Smithee.

"Gain her respect -- and that's treating her as an equal. Don't bullshit her. Treat her as a human being. Treat her as you would treat yourself. As soon as you have that respect for her, she'll treat you with the same respect you show. Then you fuck the shit out of her."

John Holmes, ladies and gentlemen.

Holmes, we learn in Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes, was a welfare brat who grew up in rural Ohio with an abusive stepfather, before leaving, at 16, for Army boot camp in Germany . After boot camp, he returned to visit his family for about a week. Then, like many aimless youth in the mid-1960's, he struck out for California .

He married young, and for a long time work a dead-end meatpacking (no pun intended) job, where the extreme cold led to several long collapses. Holmes needed to get out before the job killed him. He found his salvation between his legs: a 13 ½ inch (allegedly -- we're at the nexus of myth, reality, and legend here; the same way his number of credited films varies from 200 to over 2500 and the number of his conquests balloons the longer he remains dead, Holmes's member is like an overexposed Loch Ness monster, its very existence denying rational, objective measurement) penis.

Holmes told his appalled wife he was going to be in porn. When she asked that he at least not use his real name, he replied, "This is what I'm going to be about. I'm going to use my name. This probably is my only shot at being famous for something."

The late-60's, early-70's porn industry that Holmes entered is perfectly captured in Boogie Nights . It was a strange time -- the production of pornographic movies was still a felony in California , yet directors of the era still believed capital-a Art was possible within the industry. Scripts were longer -- 100 to 150 pages, compared to 5-10 today -- and the talent and craft put into each film rightly earns this era its "Golden Age of Porn" label. Simultaneously, directors and stars spent much of their time dodging vice squads on the way to producing their Art.

Holmes teamed up with Bob Chinn, who created the character of Johnny Wadd, the first recurring character in porn. Noir-ish, hard-boiled detective stories, the Johnny Wadd films caught on immediately; Holmes was an overnight star. Everyone wanted to work with him. He made more money per scene than any porn star in history.

Yet within the industry he had few true friends, no social life. He never trusted the people who, he thought, used him for his dick. He called them "dirt" and "scum" even as they filled his pockets with crisp hundreds. His now-estranged wife, who couldn't bear to be with him physically and considered him a whore, was the only one he really trusted. He never gave out his phone number, instead referring people to an answering service. Bill Amerson, his manager, began to see his role as finding "new girls to feed the monster" between Holmes's legs; Holmes would rarely work with a girl more than once.

He'd never taken drugs before entering the porn business, but as he became a star the drugs naturally came along. Everyone brought their own stash to the party back then; Holmes got into coke and alcohol, carrying a quart of scotch with him everywhere. He was making $3000 a scene, most of the cash going up his nose.

So Boogie Nights ' Dirk Diggler, based on Holmes, became the Val Kilmer John Holmes of Wonderland. If Boogie Nights (the first half, anyway) is about a crew of misfits finding a community in porn, Wonderland is about that community's dissolution, and Holmes's descent into self-absorbed destruction By the late-seventies, his drug habit had gotten so bad that directors refused to work with him. He was too much of a headache, stealing from the set and hiding out in closets to coke up. His personality faded; all that remained was the addiction. Kilmer's Holmes is a coked-out has-been, a manic sociopath caught in a deadly spiral of being unable to work because of the drugs, and being unable to afford drugs because he had no work.

And he'd picked up a 15-year-old mistress named Dawn, who often spent days in his van, with a soda can to pee in, while Holmes scored drugs. Sometimes he'd pimp her out for coke, then call her a dirty whore. One of his repeat clients was Eddie Nash, a drug dealer with supposed ties to the Israeli mafia.

Eventually he fell in with the Wonderland Gang, a group of low-level criminals. He agreed to help them rob Nash in exchange for a cut of the drugs and cash. Nash, humiliated by the robbery, tracked down Holmes -- who'd holed up with Dawn to snort his loot -- and forced him to let Nash's thugs into the Wonderland Gang's apartment. Inside, they killed the whole crew while Holmes watched.

Nash had made his point. Holmes was charged with murder, but refused to testify against the drug dealer. Instead, he took Dawn on the run. Across the country they drove, until the money ran out and Holmes again resorted to pimping the young girl. Again he hit her, and after a particular brutal beating, Dawn turned him in.

He stood trial for the Wonderland murders, winning an acquittal in June of 1982. He returned to porn and even married a former porn star, though he never remembered the actual ceremony. In 1986 he tested positive for HIV. Doctors told him he could live for 15-20 years if he cut back on smoking, alcohol, and drug use. Instead, he doubled his excess: 500 mg of valium a day to balance the coke, 5 packs of cigarettes a day, and the ever-present scotch. He became increasingly sicker, wasting away as he continued to shoot films, never revealing his HIV status.

He finally checked into a VA hospital, dying a few days later, on March 13, 1988 , at the age of 43. He died believing the business destroyed him, that the hunk of meat between his legs was all anyone wanted from him.

In trying to find real John Holmes, said porn impresario Al Goldstein, "We enter a quagmire of deceit. The one truth is that he had a big dick and he could come on cue." The man himself admitted to weaving a persona around his fortunate accident of birth, but as money and fame piled up, he began to believe his own hype. John Holmes the porn star couldn't be separated from John Holmes the man, whoever that was. But in blurring the line, in becoming "John Holmes: King of Porn," he got exactly what he wanted. As he said early in his career, "Everything in life is an act. It's the performance that counts." With the man gone, what lives on is the myth, the legend, the performance.