John Holmes (actor)

Early life

Holmes was born John Curtis Estes on August 8, 1944, in the small rural town of Ashville, Ohio, about 25 miles (40 km) south of Columbus. He was the youngest of four children born to 26-year-old Mary June (Barton) Holmes, but the father's name, Carl Estes, a railroad worker, is left blank on his birth certificate. Mary Barton had married Edgar Harvey Holmes, who was the father of her three older children - Dale, Edward and Anne. She and Holmes were married and divorced three times, as is documented by wedding certificates dated April 13, 1936, August 13, 1945, and September 12, 1947. At the time of their first marriage in 1936, Edgar Harvey Holmes was 35 years old and divorced, while Mary Barton was 17. After divorcing for the third and final time, Edgar and Mary each married one more time.

Mary changed John's surname to Holmes when he was a child. In 1986, when Holmes applied for a United States passport for the first time prior to a trip to Italy, his mother reportedly provided him with the handwritten copy of his original birth certificate, Holmes learned his biological father was Carl Estes.

Holmes' mother was said to be a devout Southern Baptist and with her children regularly attended the Millport Chapel Church, where he had perfect attendance. In contrast, his stepfather Edgar was an alcoholic who would come home inebriated, stumble about the house and even vomit on the children. As a child, Holmes enjoyed a reprieve from his turbulent home life when he visited his maternal grandparents, John W. and Bessie (née Gillenwater) Barton.

Mary divorced Edward when Holmes was three or four and moved with her children to Columbus, Ohio, where they lived in a low-income apartment project with a friend of Mary's and her own two children. The two women worked as clerks and waitresses in order to support their young children.

When Holmes was eight, his mother married Harold Bowman on December 31, 1951. Shortly afterward, 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 Holmes' younger half-brother David was born, at which point Bowman reportedly lost interest in his stepchildren and began neglecting them.

Holmes left home at age 16 and enlisted in the U.S. Army, with his mother's written permission. He spent most of the three years of his military service in West Germany in the Signal Corps. Upon his honorable discharge in 1963, 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. During his stint as an ambulance driver, Holmes met a nurse named Sharon Gebenini in December 1964. They married in August 1965 after Holmes turned 21.

In April 1965, Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a meatpacking warehouse in nearby Cudahy, California. However, repeated exposure to the freezing air in the large walk-in freezer after being outside inhaling the desert-hot air caused him severe health problems, leading to a pneumothorax of his right lung on three separate occasions during the two years he worked there.

Sharon had health problems too, as during the first 17 months of her marriage to Holmes, she miscarried three times.

Film career

"John Holmes was to the adult film industry what Elvis Presley was to rock 'n' roll. He simply was The King".

Determining the number of films Holmes made during the early part of his career is difficult, because the ad copy rarely named him. Copy that did usually used entirely inconsistent names. For example, one early "Swedish Erotica" brochure from 1973 has five loops featuring Holmes, each citing a different name.

In 1971, Holmes' career began to take off with a porn series built around a private investigator named Johnny Wadd, written and directed by Bob Chinn. The success of the film Johnny Wadd created an immediate demand for more Johnny Wadd films, so Chinn followed up the same year with Flesh of the Lotus. Most of the subsequent Johnny Wadd films were written and directed by Chinn and produced by the Los Angeles-based company Freeway Films.

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 reputedly becoming an informant for the LAPD.

By 1978, Holmes was alleged to be earning as much as $3,000 per day as a porn performer. Around this time, his consumption of cocaine and freebasing were becoming an increasingly serious problem. Professionally, it affected his ability to maintain an erection, as is apparent from his flaccid performance in Insatiable (1980). To support himself and his drug habit, Holmes ventured into crime, selling drugs for gangs, prostituting himself to both men and women, as well as committing credit card fraud and various acts of petty theft.

In 1976, he met 15-year-old Dawn Schiller, who became his girlfriend. After Holmes became desperate for money, he forced her into prostitution and often beat her, which he did at least once in public.

Number and gender of partners

In the 1981 feature documentary Exhausted, John C. Holmes, The Real Story, which was made about his life and career by director and confidante Julia St. Vincent, Holmes claimed during an interview segment that he had intercourse with 14,000 women. The number had in fact been invented by Holmes to help salvage his waning image. Holmes later joked to psychologist Vonda L. Pelto, who had counseled Holmes in 1982 and other inmates during her employment at L.A. County jail, that he was exaggerating the number — which was actually 13,895.

The true number of women (and men) with whom Holmes had sex during his career would never be known. After his death, his ex-wife Sharon claimed to have come across a footlocker plated in 24k gold leaf, which contained photographic references to Holmes' "private work", and which she burned.

His performances included at least one homosexual feature film, The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes, and a handful of loops which contained anal sex.

Drugs and the Wonderland murders

In late 1980, a mutual friend introduced Holmes to Chris Coxx, who owned the Odyssey nightclub. In turn, Coxx introduced Holmes to Eddie Nash, a drug dealer who owned multiple nightclubs, including the Starwood Nightclub in West Hollywood. 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 hangout: a rowhouse located on Wonderland Avenue in the wooded Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. Holmes frequently sold drugs for the gang.

After stealing money during a couple of drug runs as well as using more than his share of the gang's drugs, Holmes was in trouble with the gang. In June 1981, allegedly in exchange for his life, he told the gang's leaders (Lind and Ron Launius) about a 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: a scenario that was represented in the films Boogie Nights and Wonderland.

Although Holmes was not present during the robbery, Nash apparently suspected Holmes had a part in it. After forcing Holmes to confess to his participation and threatening his life and those of Holmes' family, Nash dispatched enforcers and Holmes to exact revenge against the Wonderland Gang. In the early hours of July 1, 1981, four of the gang's members were found murdered and a fifth severely battered and near death in their rowhouse. Holmes was allegedly present during the murders and left a left palm print (not "bloody" as Los Angeles media outlets covering the story erroneously reported) over one victim's headboard, but it is unclear whether he participated in the killings.

Holmes was questioned regarding the murders in July 1981, but he was released due to lack of evidence. He refused to cooperate with the investigation and, after spending nearly five months on the run with Dawn Schiller, Holmes was arrested in Florida on December 4, 1981, by former LAPD homicide detectives Tom Lange and Frank Tomlinson, and extradited to Los Angeles. In March 1982, Holmes was charged with personally committing all four murders. After a three-week publicized trial, Holmes was acquitted on June 26, 1982, of all charges except contempt of court. The Holmes Murder Trial was a landmark in American jurisprudence, as it was the first murder trial in America where videotape was introduced as evidence.

Later life and death

After his release from L.A. County Jail for contempt of court in November 1982, Holmes quickly resumed his career in porn with a new generation of pornstars. His drug addiction continued off-and-on and, although work was still plentiful, it was no longer as lucrative as it had been, given the explosion in the use of cheaply made videotapes that saturated the porn market. Most of the feature porn films and videos he made during the 1980s were little more than cameo appearances.

In February 1986, five or six months after testing negative for the virus, Holmes was diagnosed as HIV positive. According to his second wife Laurie Holmes, he claimed that he never used hypodermic needles and that he was deathly afraid of them. His first wife Sharon Gebenini and friend/former colleague Bill Amerson separately confirmed later that Holmes could not have contracted HIV from intravenous drug use, because he never used needles.

During the summer of 1986, Holmes was offered a lucrative deal from Paradise Visuals, which was unaware he was HIV-positive, to travel to Italy to film (what were to be his last) two pornographic films. Holmes' penultimate film was The Rise 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. His final film was The Devil In Mr. Holmes, starring Tracey Adams, Amber Lynn, Karin Schubert and Marina Hedman. These last films created a furor when it was revealed later that Holmes had consciously chosen not to reveal his HIV status to his co-stars before engaging in unprotected sex for the filming. Not wanting to reveal the true nature of his failing health, Holmes claimed to the press that he was suffering from colon cancer.

Holmes married Laurie Rose on January 23, 1987, in Las Vegas, after confiding to her that he had AIDS.

During the last five months of his life, Holmes remained in the VA hospital on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles. He 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, aged 43. His body was cremated, and his widow Laurie and mother Mary scattered his ashes at sea, off the coast of Oxnard, California.

Significant others

Charitable work

Despite the notoriety and infamy associated with Holmes, he devoted significant time to charities involving the environment. He was involved with Greenpeace and was known to campaign and collect door-to-door for charities such as Save the Whales and Save the Seals.

Hobbies

Holmes enjoyed clay sculpting, woodworking, and outdoor activities such as visiting beaches, camping, fishing, and hiking.

Holmes was uncircumcised.

Penis size

Holmes' main asset in the porn business was his exceptionally large penis. No definitive measurement or documentation verifying his penis' length or girth exists, leaving its exact size unknown.

Veteran porn actress Dorothiea "Seka" Patton has said that Holmes' penis was the biggest in the industry and in the documentary film Exhausted she described oral sex with Holmes as similar to fellating a telephone pole. Holmes' first wife recalled his claiming to be 10 inches (25.4 cm) when he first measured himself. On another occasion, Holmes once claimed his penis was 16 inches (40.6 cm) long and 13 inches (33.0 cm) in circumference. Holmes' long-time friend and industry associate, Bill Amerson, said, "I saw John measure himself several times; it was 13 and a half inches [34.3 cm]". In contrast, medical studies of human penis size have consistently found erections average between about 5 and 6 inches.

At the height of his career, Holmes claimed to have had his penis insured by Lloyd's of London for $14 million. Holmes reveled in claiming he was insured "for $1 million an inch".

There was debate over Holmes's ability to achieve full arousal, despite evidence from his earlier films indicating he could attain a significant erection. A widespread jest within the 1970s adult film industry humorously suggested that Holmes could not achieve full arousal without risking fainting due to the required blood flow diversion. Annette Haven, a colleague and film actress, commented on the condition of his arousal, comparing it to a "big, soft kind-of loofah" during intercourse.

After Holmes' death, the length of his penis continued to be used to market Holmes-related material. For example, at the premiere of the film Wonderland (2003), patrons were given 13 ¹⁄₂-inch rulers as gag gifts.

Business activities and endeavors

In 1979, along with his younger half-brother David Bowman, Holmes opened in Los Angeles a locksmith shop managed by Bowman and an attached used goods store called The Just Looking Emporium, named by Sharon Gebinini and managed by Dawn Schiller. However, because of Holmes' escalating drug addiction, which distracted him from buying inventory for the Emporium and siphoned its working capital, the Emporium "close[d] its doors forever by the end of September 1980". According to Schiller, "David [kept] his part of the business open while John remove[d] our inventory and [sold] it all for coke".

Later, after his 1982 murder trial and acquittal, Holmes began a business partnership with his friend, manager and associate Bill Amerson. They founded and operated a production company named Penguin Productions, where Holmes could be a triple-threat: writing, directing and performing. Holmes appeared in seven of Penguin's 20 productions between 1985 and 1988. After requesting permission to use the name Johnny Wadd from his old director and friend Bob Chinn, Holmes reprised the detective role for the Penguin Production:The Return of Johnny Wadd (1986) – one of his last films.

Holmes mythology

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:

Awards

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Documentaries