The Harder They Fall

One of the shadowy figures leaned over the body and, with his right hand, propped himself against the brass bedstead. The cocaine in him rolled his emotions into a tight, focused ball, so that, somehow, the coolness of the brass impressed him to about the same extent as the astonishing amount of blood flooding from Ronald Launius' mangled skull. He didn't feel panic--the coke took care of that. He felt the cool brass and watched the bright-scarlet blood.

The steady impact of the black poker on flesh continued upstairs. It sounded like a sock filled with sand being thrown against concrete. The figure heard someone say, "Give me some help with his legs" and idly wondered if it were Deverell's corpse they were moving. Someone--Lind's girl--was pleading not to be killed with a voice so terrified as to sound inhuman. There were low moans from Susan Launius. The figure heard them but kept quiet about it. When the others left the house, he did, too. They went through the wrought-iron gate, leaving it open even though the pit bulls had gotten loose and were at run in the yard. The group crossed Wonderland Avenue, got into their car and drove down Laurel Canyon toward Sunset Strip.

It was around four A.M. on July 1, 1981, in the Hollywood Hills. What was left behind in the smeared-mustard-stucco box home at 8763 Wonderland Avenue was a grisly scene of mass murder.

Joy Audrey Miller, clubbed to death, had rented the house for $750 a month. A fringe figure with a history of arrests, she had been observed actually doling out drugs in front of the house at least eight times--this according to police affidavits filed in the case for which she was, at the time of her death, being prosecuted. At 46, she was a bizarre cross between Ma Barker and Edie Sedgwick, the matron of a drug-and-burglary ring, her house a demotic Eighties version of a crash pad. She had been through bouts with cancer, had had both breasts removed but had battled physical exhaustion to continue trafficking. Neighbors thought she lived off money from her father, the owner of a liquor store where Joy used to clerk. The 1969 280 SL Mercedes was an emblem of her success and its limitations. The recently purchased pit bulls were an emblem of her fear.

William Ray Deverell, clubbed to death, was Miller's lover. He, too, had a long string of arrests--13 between 1952 and 1958, seven for narcotics--but lately, police had been unable to arrest him at the Wonderland Avenue address, because Miller insisted on taking responsibility for all the drugs in the house. She was shielding Deverell, a saving grace in her life, a good, strong man. He was next to her on the floor when they found him.

Ronald Launius, clubbed to death, was a Sacramento import who passed himself off as something of a desperado. He, too, had a history of arrests, including one for murder. A Sacramento cop described Launius as "one of the coldest people I have ever met" and detailed a drug-smuggling scam that had Launius using teenagers to ferry drugs across the Mexican border in rebuilt cars. Witnesses in his court cases had shown a strange predilection for turning up dead. The ultimate irony about Launius, however, was that he was killed with a lethal case of blood poisoning in his veins. Left untreated, he would have died anyway from a dirty needle.

Barbara Lee Richardson, clubbed to death, was murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was the girlfriend of David Lind, Launius' partner, and was crashing in the living room at Wonderland Avenue. Lind had apparently been one of the murderers' targets but had left before the killers arrived. Richardson was his replacement.

The killers had left four corpses littering the floors at Wonderland Avenue. The neighbor who discovered the scene described it as looking as if someone had taken a couple of buckets of blood and flung it over the walls. The police had a more cynical tag for it. They were calling it the four-on-the-floor murders.

The fifth victim, Susan Launius, had part of her face and skull bludgeoned, her neck torn and bruised, the tip of the little finger of her right hand severed in what hospital people were calling a classic defense wound. She had come from Sacramento in an attempt to patch things up with Ron, her estranged husband, and it was only by the most awful twist of fate that she was present that night. Susan was to be the cops' star witness if she survived; but when she did, she said she remembered seeing only "shadowy figures." Shadows don't kill, they told her. Only shadows, she said. She drifted in and out of consciousness for 12 hours after the massacre, until a neighbor finally heard her low moans and walked in on the aftermath of the killings. Her cries of the early morning before had not elicited a response.

It was not unusual to hear noise from 8763, neighbors said. There were a lot of late-night parties, jacked-up stereos, screams. Strange guests came and went at all hours. The landlady had once rented the house to members of Paul Revere and the Raiders. Neighbors thought the band had been quiet by comparison.

Laurel Canyon is the kind of place one expects to be an enclave. The wooded Hollywood Hills provide a sense of sanctuary. Every news account about the murders soberly reported the fact that Jerry Brown's house was only two blocks from where Launius, Miller, Deverell and Richardson were killed. Early in the investigation, the murders were characterized as Manson-style hacking deaths, terrifying everyone. The Manson business had been too random, too casual as to choice of victim. Everyone in Laurel Canyon hoped the deaths were drug- or business-related. No one wanted the specter of chance death invading his refuge.

Ten minutes from this refuge, down winding roads perfect for road testing a Ferrari or a Porsche, the Strip rolls out its shabby carpet of decadence. Here is another world--harsh, menacing, abrasive, importunate. It is the world of the locust, the poseur, the objecdess hustle. One of its prominent denizens was Adel Nasrallah, a name he had Americanized--no doubt to give everyone an idea of his sense of taste--to Eddie Nash. A night-club owner--of the defunct rock showcase the Starwood, the soon-to-be-defunct Seven Seas, Ali Baba on the Strip, a lot of gay clubs (though authorities would charge that the clubs were only part of his dealings)--Nash was busted three times for drugs in the months surrounding the murders. Once, when police came up with $1,000,000 in coke from his private safe, his lawyers argued that it was for personal use. After the murders, his name would crop up in the L.A. media with increasing frequency--in an arson ring of which he was the only one acquitted among four coconspirators, the others convicted of racketeering and mail fraud. Then there was an overdose death at Nash's Studio City home: one Domenico Fragomeli, Nash's driver and butler.

But it was the link to the Laurel Canyon murders that would prove most trouble-some to Nash over the next months. Greg Dewitt Diles, his massive, blubbery bodyguard--at 300 pounds a mountain of black lava--would be arrested for the murders and then be released for lack of evidence. Even the prosecution would characterize the deaths at Wonderland Avenue as "the gruesome revenge of Eddie Nash."

The trial for the murders would not be that of Nash, however. Based on a palm print found on the premises and on statements made by the police, John Curtis Holmes, an X-rated superstar who gave his trade as "actor and screenwriter," would be arrested and charged with the killings nearly six months after they took place. The press had a field day with sex-and-death porn-star headlines, and Holmes's arraignment would send shock waves through the tightly knit pornography industry in California.

Across the continent, the news about Holmes filtered into my office like a disease-carrying miasma. I reacted as strongly as the California porn community to the details of his alleged involvement with mass murder but for a different reason. It wasn't just dollars and cents to me. For a good part of my adult life, I have been obsessed with John Holmes. This was not simply porn's leading man who was in trouble but one of my personal heroes. And even though a jury, not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, would eventually acquit Holmes of being one of Susan Launius' shadowy figures that morning in Laurel Canyon, I would soon find that John Holmes has been a shadowy figure all his life.

•

I had followed Holmes's career with an avidity that bordered on neurosis. As the publisher of Screw, I was in a position to observe and critique every prick in the X-rated business. As a Jewish male, I was unable to lose a simple fascination with size as a quotient of sexual prowess. And Holmes's prick was huge. I recall the first time my paper had remarked upon a certain newcomer on the smut scene, then anonymous, as "that schmuck from L.A. with the enormous cock...." A star was borne between Holmes's legs.

That was in 1972. Over the next years, as the sexual revolution blossomed and the number of porn stars and movies burgeoned, Holmes unleashed his "14 inches of dangling death" in 2500 films, loops and features, finally to become the brightest star in the rather murky firmament of smut. Now, as the connection between Holmes and the Laurel Canyon murders became apparent, I couldn't help marveling at the direction Holmes's life had taken. Johnny Wadd, one of his main personae in his films, was a sullen, macho, gun-wielding shamus--porn's parody of a hard-boiled dick--exactly the type who would be involved with characters such as Eddie Nash, Greg Diles and something called the four-on-the-floor murders. It all sounded like a lousy screenplay. There were bitterly satiric Holmes jokes circulating in the Screw offices ("Bludgeoning? I think he was just naked and turned around fast without warning anyone!"). Calls came in daily from porno and publishing luminaries with gossip about the case.

Through it all, I tried to graph the porn world's connection to the Laurel Canyon murders, trying to define the limits of porn's culpability. Were the moralists (continued on page 100)Harder they fall(continued from page 96) right? Was this the domino theory of ethics--jerking off leading to smoking dope leading to snorting coke leading to murder and mayhem? Holmes and I had appeared together at countless sham celebrations of porn's success, the type of nonevents at which men with unclean fingernails glad-hand actresses whose perinea are more recognizable than their faces. Holmes and I seemed to share an insider's disdain for the porn establishment, he because he felt it had ripped him off, I because I was sickened by the bad-faith hypocrisy that infected it--that organization of bald-headed businessmen whose wives tell people that their husbands are in import/export, who call fuck films "erotica," who feel comfortable only when they can apply the word genre to porn. Had those pretentious, hypocritical moneymen distorted the ethics of poor John Holmes to the point that he thought it was all right to get involved in murder?

I had interviewed Holmes for Screw and had filled in what I had thought was a fairly accurate, if composite, portrait of the man. I thought we had become friends. And beyond friendship, there was always the psychological question of my attempted identification with him. The size of his prick brought out all the insecurity in me. With my oral fixation, I had always thought of it as a salami, but I've heard it compared to a woman's forearm, a cannon, a Sunday paper when the rest of us were just dailies. I had felt that if that prick were just attached to my body, this would be a very different world. I remember an exchange I had with my analyst:

Goldstein [on the couch]: I meet all sorts of people through my job, and they all have large pricks. I envy them. I'm intimidated by a guy like Holmes, because his shvantz makes mine look like half a pack of Turns.

The Shrink [intentionally bland]: What would your life be like if you had a larger penis?

Goldstein [getting excited]: I just feel that I would be laid a lot more often. Women would be begging for it. That moment of excitement when I dropped my pants. I wouldn't even have to show them my bankbook. Or the 700 issues of Screw. But I would drop my pants in the hallway somewhere and they would all drop to their knees and genuflect. I mean, instant power. It would be the same way the Pope feels with his cross. If I were panhandling in the street, selling pencils next to one of the guys running up to wash car windows, it wouldn't matter. A big dick would be a great equalizer.

The Shrink: Would you trade places with John Holmes?

At the time, I seriously considered the proposition. Holmes's prick was awesome. I had certainly seen enough of it in movies, and somehow, I thought that if you knew the prick, you knew the man.

But now I wondered. Details and contradictions began flooding in. Holmes began to recede in my mind into a strange sort of lacuna, until he was again, as he had been in the beginning, an anonymous schmuck with an enormous pecker. He became a shadow, an enigma, a cipher.

•

For five months, from the murders on July first to November 30, 1981, Holmes was unavailable to help me figure him out. Following the murders, Los Angeles police had immediately picked him up on an unrelated charge and kept him for some days, shunting him around to various downtown hotels under heavy guard, grilling him about Laurel Canyon. When they released him on his own recognizance, he disappeared.

I searched for ways to pin down his personality. There was, for example, a disturbing story from Gloria Leonard, the porn star. Discussing Holmes in the weeks following the murders, Leonard told me of the last time she had seen him. They had once worked together in France but had gone a couple of years without seeing each other when Holmes called her to set up a reunion at her new home in Los Angeles. He arrived at 9:30 in the morning. "He looked like he'd been going," Leonard told me. "Like he hadn't been to bed yet. He looked--well, he's so painfully thin; you know, he's all cock." In the course of two hours that morning, Holmes had free-based more than three grams of coke. A week later, he and Leonard were to meet at her home once again--at noon, since, as she told him, she had an appointment that morning. When she returned to meet him, her house had been burglarized to the tune of $25,000--jewelry, electronic equipment, guns. Holmes never showed for their appointment.

"I had heard he had a serious cocaine problem, but it wasn't until after that particular encounter that I realized how serious it was," Leonard said. "I heard he lost a lot of his possessions. His cars, his house, his jewelry, everything else. He had obviously not worked in films for about a year or more, because he was just so immersed in the drug culture."

It was while Holmes was on the lam that Exhausted, his last film before the trial, was pushed into release. Suzanne Atamian, a.k.a. Julia St. Vincent, a 22-year-old former girlfriend of Holmes's, produced the film and engineered a publicity campaign to coincide with the notoriety provided by the murders. It is a strange fuck film, a pastiche of interviews, clips and testimonials, a "documentary" on John Holmes the man. Watching it amid the hype of the murders--the screening was invaded by cops who thought Holmes might be there incognito--I felt unable to separate shadow from substance. In the film, the sex goddess Seka said that Holmes was the man who erupted with "the come of God." That was the Holmes I knew and idolized. But in one of the interviews slotted throughout Exhausted, I saw him groping for a sense of himself: "Everybody ... sees into that character that I portray, which is not me. I'm just like everybody else.... [But] it's tough making the split sometimes." I knew I wouldn't get any answers from Exhausted. The film was fascinating but about as phony as the tip that had caused police to bust the screening. A good publicity ploy but nothing at all behind it.

Atamian was also the source of a few of the bits and pieces I gathered together on Holmes. She was convinced that he was a pathological liar, that, despite their romantic involvement, he had lied to her. "I caught John dead-faced in the middle of a lie," she told me. "It was a personal lie that he had told me, and he just sat there and did not say a fucking thing." Atamian also mentioned Holmes's younger brother, David, who owns a Los Angeles antiques store. He told Atamian, "John's main problem is the size of his cock." When I called David, he made it clear that he wasn't talking about his big brother to anybody in the press.

In the months that followed, I attempted to lend more substance to the man I knew as Johnny Holmes. I dug up the old two-part Holmes Screw interview, still definitive enough to support a rash of biographies in the men's-mag press but spurious enough to make them all wrong. It became clear that Holmes was an inveterate liar. His claims of a New York birth, of a rich aunt who raised him in Europe, of first getting laid by his nanny--it was all contrivance, I would learn. There were a few fascinating facts among the dreck: Holmes's cock measured 12 and three quarters inches when erect, not the 14 inches of the publicists. That, of course, was simply a rectification of an untruth and only showed how slippery--I shudder at the image--the footing around Holmes was.

(continued on page 176)Harder they fall(continued from page 100)

When I knew him during the period of the interview, there were no paranoiac tics, no rolling up in an embryonic ball, no coke habit to dwarf all other elements of his life. He was able to attend to the superficial niceties of existence to the extent that I thought of him as a friend. That was the period of Johnny Wadd's greatest success, with literally hundreds of Holmes films lighting up the splattered screens of peep shows and theaters across the country.

But looking back at the interview, I am reminded of a man who was shown a Rorschach blot by his shrink and was asked what he saw. "I see the penumbra of a silhouette of a shadow of a simulacrum of a puppet." Holmes keeps fading beneath a mask of mendacity and dissemblance.

Take, for example, the question of his early years:

Goldstein: At what age did you become aware that you were "abnormally" large?

Holmes: When I was eight. When I lived in Florida with my aunt, she was always running to Europe to get married or get divorced.... I had a Swiss nursemaid. And whenever my aunt was out of town, she would give me head. She taught me to give head. It was just great. I loved it. We had this huge house all to ourselves. We had a gardener and a cook and a butler, altogether, and then we had a maid who cleaned the place....

I now know the entire aunt story to be fabricated. Being charitable, I can imagine the famous Johnny Wadd's contriving the ruse to shield his family from the awful truth. But it is odd how conveniently the ruse aligned with Holmes's self-aggrandizement, his need for a more romantic, less mundane personal history. Yet, at times, the adjustments of reality in the interview were such that they embraced typical American-male fantasies:

Goldstein: Did you have any sexual experiences involving ... the girls you went to school with?

Holmes: Oh, yeah. I fucked a lot in high school. I think I got everybody but three girls in my class, and then the class before, quite a few of 'em; and then the senior class ahead of me, I got most of them.

I have spoken with a woman from Holmes's high school, the head of the alumni association, an ex-cheerleader, Miss Popularity. She graduated the same year Holmes would have. She didn't remember him, she said when I called her, but she was going to a meeting later in the day to organize the 20th class reunion. She would ask the people there. When I got back to her, she reported that Holmes was in none of the yearbooks. One girl had vaguely remembered his "walking to school all the time." This was in a graduating class of fewer than 100 people.

It was then that I decided to check things out myself--at a place I usually make it a point to fly over, preferably asleep while cruising at high altitude.

•

Ohio is, for me, an utterly foreign and almost surreal sector of America. Listening to news reports in Columbus on New Year's Day, I heard that the year before, there had been four murders on the first day of the new year in that city alone. The locals were evidently tuned in to their radios to see if the record would be broken. The murder vigil sounded like something out of the South Bronx. The countryside around Columbus was impoverished, blank, vaguely menacing.

It was into that almost border-state environment that John Holmes was born, as John Curtis Estes, on August 8, 1944. Two years later, the birth certificate was corrected to list the child's name as John Curtis Holmes. The original listed Carl L. Estes, railroad laborer, as father. The correction listed no father at all, though the man from whom John took his surname was evidently a carpenter named Edward Holmes. John seems to have been born and raised in rural, depressed Pickaway County without anyone's particularly remarking upon his existence. The only man I could find who remembered the Holmes clan told of the large family "across the tracks.... We used to call that type of folks something that rhymes with 'might clash,' " he said. The only remarkable information about Holmes's Ohio upbringing was to come later, from his lawyers. They had obtained his Sunday-school attendance record. It showed perfect attendance for 12 years. I got goose bumps when I heard that, as a quote from the Screw interview surfaced in my consciousness: "It's totally insane," Holmes had said. "The perfect child that always goes to church and goes out and cuts 50 people's throats."

The Ohio experience merely deepened my depression and added to the list of shadow figures I was tracking. John Curtis Estes, born in rural-Ohio poverty. John Curtis Holmes, perfect Bible student. Johnny Holmes, all-around good guy, a sculptor, a Greenpeace supporter, in love with women, a man who just happened to be the proud owner of one of the largest schlongs in the world. Johnny Wadd, porn star/private dick/tough.

And there was the rumor that circulated later, in the mid-Seventies, that proved what a chameleon the Holmes persona was. The rumor was to the effect that John Holmes was actually Ken Osmond, the actor who played Eddie Haskell on the old Leave It to Beaver television series. Osmond does resemble Holmes to some degree, and people were obviously indulging in an irresistible poetic justice in believing that Eddie Haskell had ended up a porn star. Osmond even sued the distributors of Holmes's films in an attempt to halt the rumor, and the whole bizarre situation concludes with a twisted irony: Osmond is now a Los Angeles cop.

My desultory investigations were interrupted when, on November 30, 1981, Holmes was arrested in a Florida hotel on a fugitive warrant from California. He was taken in on a charge unrelated to the Laurel Canyon murders but on December ninth, as soon as he was extradited to Los Angeles, he was charged in the deaths. Three days later, I flew out to see him.

What I found was a terrified man looking out at me from behind the thick prison Plexiglas with strangely bulging eyes. It seemed astounding to me that this was the man I had idolized in those flickering screenings all those years. He wore a nondescript uniform and complained wearily, when we spoke on the phone intercom, of the lousy prison food and the lack of bail. I resisted an impulse to ask him whether or not the famous Holmes cock was being used in jail. Even at that meeting, as long as he managed to hold together the mangled shreds of his personality, we were comfortable with each other. I was moved and slightly astonished when John asked me how my son was, by name, after what was nearly a seven-year gap in our relationship. Again, the appearance of a Holmes I could not possibly imagine committing murder: a man who remembered the name of my child, casually mentioned, years later. It put our meeting on a basis of friendship. I don't have the investigative reporter's aggression, so I worked the conversation gingerly around to the question of the murders. It was a mistake.

I had thought that the best way to find out what went on that July morning was to talk to contacts in the Los Angeles porn world. It's a tightly knit community, but I found that it had turned its back on its favorite son with surprising alacrity. The murders, coming after a year or two of behavior made erratic by coke, made Holmes a pariah in his own back yard.

I finally connected with someone who had only good to say about him. Bill Margold is a talent scout/actor/producer in X-rated movies and loops, a self-styled renaissance man of porn. His agency has its offices in the crumbling Cineart Building on Sunset Boulevard, across from the Chinese Theatre, and from there, Margold had placed Holmes in a number of films. He told a story of giving him $1500 up front for a one-day shoot in a swimming pool. When the temperature of the pool proved to be too cold for the Wadd's liking, he backed out of the shoot. "He actually gave me back the $1500," Margold recalled. "All of it and at once. After that, no one can tell me that Holmes isn't a straight guy." With a final touch of irony, Margold noted that the Cineart Building, with its fading Chandleresque glamor, is owned by Eddie Nash.

I had no idea where to fit Nash into the mosaic. Police identified him as a suspect in the case, and authorities hammered away at the Nash-Holmes connection.

"I have personally heard of his [Nash's] name since the mid-Seventies," Bob Schirn, the head of the L.A. district attorney's organized-crime-and-narcotics division, told the L.A. Herald Examiner. "I know of law-enforcement interest in him at that time."

But Nash's actual appearances in court had been few, and he'd been lucky. A pandering charge was thrown out of court in 1969, and of that complicated arson-and-mail-fraud scheme in 1982 in which only Nash was acquitted, the prosecutor in the case says, "We would have liked to convict all of them, but the jury didn't agree that Nash financed it."

Even his age is a mystery. At one trial, Nash's psychologist claimed that Nash had given him three birth dates, making him 60, 52 or 54 years old. All that is known for sure is that Nash opened a sandwich stand called Beefs Chuck in 1960 on Hollywood Boulevard and somehow built it into a million-dollar empire of night clubs, strip joints and restaurants. "He's pure power," says Ron Coen, the prosecutor in the Laurel Canyon case. "He's an intelligent man, just by the fact that he makes successes out of all these businesses."

Nash was involved in a high-wire-balancing act; he had been charged but never convicted. The stakes for which he played were always high, and Holmes was just one of the players. One scenario put forth by the police on the Nash-Holmes connection had Nash fronting coke to the Laurel Canyon group--of which Holmes was a member--and taking stolen property in return as collateral. But there was another connection that police were pursuing, one that was much more ominous.

Two nights before the Laurel Canyon massacre, Nash's house on Dona Lola Place in nearby Studio City was burglarized and Nash was robbed. Later, in court testimony, David Lind would admit that he, Deverell, Ronald Launius and an associate named Tracy McCourt had pulled off the break-in with tactical and logistical help from Holmes. Holmes mapped out the floor plan at Dona Lola Place, rehearsed the burglary, insisted it was a good mark. Nash was something of a porno groupie--who else do you take to parties to impress people like John Belushi?--and an intense relationship had grown up between him and Holmes. Holmes went to Nash's house the evening of the burglary and unlocked a sliding door. Then he went to the Wonderland Avenue house and awaited the results.

It worked like a dream. Deverell, Launius and Lind entered through the door Holmes had left open, flashing fake badges to confuse Diles (it didn't take much). McCourt waited in the getaway car while, inside, Launius seemed to delight in terrorizing the inhabitants. The burn had differing results. It netted a cache of drugs, $20,000 in currency, some jewelry. Holmes got 12 and a half percent of that. It also led police to suspect that the later murders were the result of vengeance and that Holmes, with his obvious connections, had either led the murderers into the house or participated himself.

The level of violence in the deaths appalled me and gave me a peculiar sense of dislocation. I could not connect Holmes to it; it was too macabre, too distant from the soft-spoken schlong owner I had idolized. I decided to attend the trial in one more effort to get a handle on Laurel Canyon, Holmes and my own feelings of relative sanity.

•

To get my bearings, I mentally listed three trials that would help me get through this one. My own Federal trial, in Kansas City in 1976, was for obscenity and tied into the sensationalism of the Holmes case. Reporters, I found then, couldn't pass by a chance to turn up their shit-stained little noses at porn, even while using it to lend their stories a trumped-up appeal. The Holmes trial also coincided with the start of the Hinckley trial, tagged by the press as another saga of love and madness. The Patty Hearst case, replete with elements of coercion and forced wrongdoing, completed the trio of precedent-setting trials that prepared me for this one.

Throughout the preliminary hearings, Holmes sat with his attorneys, looking alternately haggard and flip, uncomfortable in a Sears, Roebuck leisure suit. While the reporters from the Los Angeles Times, the Herald Examiner and the Daily News attentively took notes, I felt curiously dazed by the proceedings, as if the courtroom atmosphere had lobotomized me. All I could think about was cocks.

Penis size, when it comes right down to it, is basically a concept of the rational mind. It is quantitative, safely within the orderly realm of reason. In a society thought-obsessed and feeling-poor, it seems perfectly all right to measure a man's sex in inches. The finite mind of the male reasoner is comfortable with this because he can grasp it, anally control it. Seen from the intuitive, emotional, female side, though, the whole concept seems ludicrous. That side wants soul, passion, exubernce--those messy, qualitative things that push sex into the realm of mystery.

Holmes, therefore, could be considered a victim of a society that could not see body as body but, instead, saw it as 12 and three quarters inches when fully erect. The Gloria Steinems of the world had finally got what they wanted: a male sex object. I tried to imagine the weariness with which he looked at the world. For anyone with a foot-long cock, everyone else was a size queen.

Seeing Holmes in the courtroom, bulbous and tic-ridden, in that pathetic mail-order double knit made me realize that if I had that shvantz, I wouldn't be Al Goldstein. I'd get used to standing in the shadow of a huge cock, and pretty soon I'd be a shadow. Just like John Holmes.

The months on the lam could have been the best of his life. That was the theory, anyway. "I grew a great big ugly beard and hung out," he said. Freed from the onus of his cock, Holmes was finally unburdened of his public identity. He could have penetrated the real anonymity of America, the anonymity of characters in Kerouac and Twain. And he did lose himself for a while in the wastes of Montana, visiting his sister, changing the plates of his car (legally, oddly enough) and painting it a different color. When the cops were tipped to his presence in Miami, they found him working as a handyman at a local hotel.

Of course, this romantic vision of a glans on the run fails to take into account the ultimate terror of Holmes's position. He had left Los Angeles, he said, because he had been shot at. It's difficult to fix the source of the shots. McCourt--as revenge for the finger? Lind--in the name of Barbara Lee? Eddie Nash? Holmes wasn't inclined to name names.

"There are good guys, bad guys and the in-between, and they are all out for me, one way or another," his wife had quoted him as saying in an interview she gave to the Los Angeles Times. That wife was another revelation to me. She seemed to have dropped from the sky into the Times and was, even then, filing for divorce. I was astonished to find out they had been married for 17 years, though no one in the X-rated biz had known about it.

I recalled Holmes railing against marriage in the Screw interview: "Marriage is wrong. And it always gets messy with marriage. You can't break it off. One out of a thousand marriages breaks off beautifully." I wonder how the former Sharon Gebenini, married to Holmes for all of eight years when he said those words, felt about them. According to her Times interview, Sharon was getting out because Holmes had run up $30,000 in "household debts" by charging goods to credit cards and then selling them for cash. She also spoke of his fear of Nash, saying that Holmes had called him "evil incarnate."

The trial itself left Holmes caught between a cock and a hard place. If he testified, he feared, he would be killed as a stool pigeon, a canary, a rat--part of the menagerie of the informer. If he didn't testify, he would be tried for murder--and mass murder and murder committed during a robbery are both capital crimes in California. He would testify and die or lie and fry. The prosecution, I was relieved to hear, was not asking for the death penalty, but only because it didn't think it could get it. Juries don't like greedy prosecutors.

The preliminary hearing didn't go in Holmes's favor. Lind and McCourt, the surviving Dona Lola burglars, testified, as did Frank Tomlinson, who was to be the most controversial witness of all. A robbery/homicide detective, he claimed to have taken a sketchy confession from Holmes the previous December, though he failed either to tape it or to corroborate it by having another cop in the room. He told the court he had feared spooking Holmes and had assumed, mistakenly, that he'd later be able to get a formal confession.

Nevertheless, his account was damaging: He said that Holmes admitted that he had taken the murderers to the Wonderland Avenue house but strongly denied that he had done any of the killing himself. By his own account, Holmes had been the finger, and he had done it, he told Tomlinson, because Nash wanted revenge and had threatened him and his family. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of Tomlinson's testimony fit snugly with what Lind and McCourt said about the burglary. Susan Launius--frail, motor-impaired but still pretty--also took the stand, sticking by her three-shadowy-figures story.

Through all this, the Shadow Man himself sat silent, exchanging hate stares with Lind but refusing to testify. When it was over, Judge Nancy Brown decided that there was enough evidence to justify the charges against Holmes. Brown appointed the firm of Hansen and Egers to defend him before Superior Court Judge Betty Jo Sheldon. Earl Hansen and Mitchell Egers were both USC Law School graduates and ex--L.A. prosecutors. They made an effective team: Hansen, the articulate, dapper, gray-haired senior partner, the eloquent debater and consummate strategist; Egers, the Jewish intellectual in glasses, the law mechanic. Hansen had made his name in capital-punishment defense with the case of William Bonin, the so-called Freeway Killer accused of murdering 21 people.

Prosecutor Coen, a stocky, square-shouldered man who wore the sleeves of his shirts too long, reminded me of a white Jim Brown. His strategy in the case seemed straightforward enough: Scare the fuck out of Holmes and force him to finger the real killers. Until he does, keep the pressure up, to the point of trying to prove that Holmes actually killed someone that morning at Wonderland Avenue.

Hansen and Egers had their hands tied from the beginning. Holmes's fear of the murderers was such that he was talking even less now than he had when he was questioned by police in July. Hansen gave a few smoke-screen interviews to the press, saying that he was "encouraging" Holmes to take the stand on his own behalf. He believed Holmes would be destroyed if he testified, but he also knew that if the prosecution thought it was going to get a chance at Holmes on the stand, it might neglect other aspects of its case. "John said from the outset that he did not wish to testify," Hansen would say later. Holmes's timidity (or good sense) notwithstanding, the defense attorneys put out cautious feelers about immunity in exchange for testimony, only to have the move explode in their faces when the defendant issued a public statement from jail vetoing the idea. "I have not agreed to testify against anyone," Holmes stated.

•

It was difficult to tell just who was on trial during the opening arguments. Egers said that "fingers of guilt" pointed to Nash; Hansen was quoted as saying that Nash was a "specter" in the proceedings; even the prosecution claimed the murders were Nash's revenge. "It's not a question of 'Who done it?' " wailed Egers, "but of 'Why aren't the perpetrators here?' "

The lone witness that first Thursday of the trial was Lind, the Sacramento bounty hunter (though he denied the tag) who, by chance, left the Wonderland Avenue house hours before the murder, supposedly just to "wander around." Asked on the stand for his occupation, Lind said, simply and fiercely, "I rob." In concise terms, he told the court about the burglary at Nash's home that set up the murders. Nash's huge, blubbery bodyguard, Diles, had whimpered to the floor after Launius' gun accidentally discharged and left Diles with a powder burn on his thigh. You got the idea that Diles was one of those people who would kill for Nash even if Nash were dead. The primal image of the burglary, though, was of Nash on his knees, praying for his life to be spared for the sake of his children.

The first of a string of rulings against Holmes and his lawyers came when the trial resumed the following Monday. Yes, the judge said, a 30-minute video tape of the murder scene made just hours after the bludgeoned bodies were discovered was admissible as evidence. Yes, the still pictures made at the same time could also be shown. Judge Sheldon overruled Egers' plea that the tape and the photos would inflame the jury. It was the first time in the history of American jurisprudence that a video tape of a murder scene was allowed as evidence at a criminal trial.

In the darkened courtroom, I watched the monitor while the tape was played. The gruesomeness of the scenes seemed not to affect the irony of the situation. Holmes, star of a thousand loops and video tapes, was being hoisted by the same technology that had made him famous. Somehow, however, the lousy technical quality of the tape, the graininess and the gaudiness of the color brought out the film reviewer in me. The carnage did not move me. I watched Holmes as the camera panned in on the brutalized body of Barbara Lee Richardson, lodged between a couch and a table on the floor of the living room. Had Holmes watched this woman being murdered? I allowed my imagination to play with that thought. But it came home to me only when I saw the stills, with their freeze-frame clarity: The images were those of the death camp--inhuman, vomit-inducing.

The next day, there was yet another ruling against Holmes: Robbery/homicide detective Tom Lange was allowed to testify about Holmes's being tailed to Nash's home. According to Lange, Holmes had a closer relationship with Nash than with the burglary ring. He visited Nash repeatedly after the murders, once less than two hours after telling Detective Tomlinson that he had let the murderers into the Wonderland Avenue house out of fear of Nash. I couldn't help wondering the obvious: If the murderers were going to brutally murder four people (an attempted five), why not add Holmes, the only witness, as another--unless he was allied with the murderers himself? What if Holmes hadn't set Nash up at all; what if he had murdered one of the victims himself, as police theorized?

And then, the next day, came the ruling that pulled the floor out from under the rug the defense thought it was standing on. Sheldon ruled that Hansen and Egers could not defend Holmes with the argument that he had been coerced into cooperating with the murderers. Detective Tomlinson once again testified about the private, untaped conversation he had had with Holmes, when Holmes had told him that Nash had gotten hold of Holmes's address book, copied the names of his relatives and told him they would be killed if Holmes informed on Nash to the police. Taking the defense by surprise, Sheldon ruled that coercion would not be allowed as a basis for the defense.

The ruling set off a feverish legal battle that sent Hansen and Egers to the state court of appeal and delayed the trial for a week. Again, the outcome went against Holmes. Wearily, the defense readied its closing arguments. "There were so many adverse rulings in the case," Hansen recalled, that he decided to rest his case without calling a single witness. He would take his chances with the jury and with some last-minute legal maneuvering. He had gotten a commitment from the judge to limit closing arguments to one day. Coen gave a short summation, expecting Hansen to do the same. Instead, he argued eloquently for half a day, leaving little time for Coen's rebuttal. Such legal soft-shoe, Hansen knew, often meant the difference between defeat and victory.

He was not optimistic, however, when the trial went to jury. Holmes was taking a tremendous gamble, Hansen believed. What was held in the balance was the quality of justice versus the quality of mob vengeance. Deep down, Hansen believed Holmes innocent, but he knew that this was not what Holmes had based his plea on. Holmes sought to take his chances on court justice because he felt the murderers' vengeance to be a certain thing. It was, in a way, a very cynical decision. Given the rules of law, you might just squirm through. The rules of the mob were deadly, immutable.

I saw it differently. I felt sure the jury would convict. The weight of the evidence, coupled with the refusal of the judge to admit duress as a defense, made the jury's decision, in my mind, obvious. What fascinated me were the peripheral questions in the case. Had the jury been influenced by Holmes's work in porn? I found it odd that although none of the jurors had, in the selection process, evinced any prior knowledge of Holmes, Johnny Wadd or any of the Holmes personae, several had known my name--that according to a clerk who said that the jury was impressed that I was in the courtroom.

Holmes himself was another question. All my life, I had prayed for a bigger dick; just a few more inches and I would have everything: money, women, success. John Holmes had those few more inches, and they had given him nothing. He was no more than a haggard, hounded man sitting in the courtroom, a man waiting for his own life sentence to be passed.

The jury remained out for four days. With each succeeding day, Holmes's chances improved. I knew that if the jury had gone for a conviction, the decision would have been short and quick.

The ballots in the jury room were coming out nine to three and eight to four in favor of acquittal. Finally, one of the jurors, a hospital worker named Kathy Wood, noticed and read aloud an instruction from Judge Sheldon: "No person may be convicted unless there is some proof of each element of the crime independent of any confession or admission made by him outside of his trial." That clinched it. The next vote was unanimous. On June 26, 1982, the jury acquitted John Holmes of the Laurel Canyon murders.

•

The prosecution was outraged. Coen and Lange believed that the jury had misread the instructions, that it had been misled about the weight of Holmes's confession to Tomlinson. Holmes's gamble had paid off. He had beaten the system.

Or had he? Despite his acquittal, Holmes was kept in jail, first on a stolen-property conviction, then on contempt-of-court charges for refusing to answer the grand jury's question about the Wonderland Avenue killings. He would spend 111 days in jail for contempt, something of a legal record. He would also have plenty of time to contemplate his future.

Word on the street had him finished in porn. Those he hadn't alienated with his drug-induced craziness now shied away because of his association with the murders. Even I wondered whether or not audiences would want their fantasies acted out by a man involved, even tangentially, with such a gruesome crime.

"John really loves the [porn] business," Hansen told me after an hour-and-a-half session we had with Holmes. Hansen was kind enough to list me as a witness in the Laurel Canyon case, giving me access to Holmes that no other journalist had. At first, I didn't understand the reason for that, especially after I had told Hansen that the story would not necessarily project a favorable picture of Holmes. But his reason became clear: Holmes, in the months he spent in jail, missed the world of porn, the world he had traveled in. Hansen couldn't help him, but I could at least gossip and give him a sense of his world. I was touched by the relationship between the two men: Hansen would give Holmes cigarette money from his own pocket, and Holmes openly considered Hansen a hero.

But not even Hansen could protect Holmes from jail. As the months stretched out after the acquittal and he found himself still behind bars, he became more and more frustrated. "He's going to stay there until he tells us what he knows about the Laurel Canyon murders," vowed Coen. Holmes spoke of Coen's "vendetta," his "hatred" for Holmes. "It's political," he said. "Coen knows I didn't do it." Under California law, a person may be jailed for contempt for coercive but not for punitive reasons--to force him to testify, in other words, but not to punish him for failing to do so. Holmes and his lawyers considered the line crossed early in the imprisonment, and Holmes went on a hunger strike to call attention to his plight. "A fast between meals," sniffed Coen, saying that Holmes ate--even gained weight--during his strike. All I could think of, on the other hand, was the famous Holmes cock wasting away from malnutrition.

Getting Holmes to talk was only one gambit the D.A.'s office had in the works. While Holmes sat in his cell, the wheels of justice were slowly grinding down on Eddie Nash, but this time the charge was drugs, not murder. Nine days after the Laurel Canyon murders and only a few days after Holmes had implicated Nash in his statement to the police, the cops launched a successful drug raid on Nash's Dona Lola house. Then, a few weeks later, they raided it again. And again. In all, they found more than $1,000,000 worth of drugs, and Nash found himself in jail, unable to meet his $5,000,000 bail.

It was frontier justice at its best. The authorities had both their murder suspects in jail, despite the fact that one had been acquitted and the other not even charged with the murders.

Holmes might have been silent, but Nash was not. First he told Coen that Holmes had taken part in the murders, then he wrote Holmes a letter that read: "Jhon [sic] you know as God is your witness that I am innocent and that I never sent anybody with you to kill anybody anywhere or anyplace. So don't you think it's about time to tell the truth?"

Another letter followed: "Jhon [sic] I swear man I will forgive you for what you did to me if you snapp [sic] out of it and tell them the truth and come and save me out of my miseries."

Still, Holmes kept quiet, at least until the day of Nash's sentencing. Nash, not surprisingly, was hit with the maximum sentence: eight years in prison and $120,350 in fines. His lawyer was furious, claiming that the average term for similar drug charges is two to three years. "There is no doubt he was not sentenced for crimes that he committed but the crimes he was suspected of," thundered his attorney, Dominick W. Rubalcava, to reporters. Frontier justice had struck again.

Moments after the sentencing, Holmes had a change of heart about testifying and promptly appeared before the grand jury. Later, I found out that when Nash was about to go to prison and all parties concerned wanted to be rid of Holmes, his lawyers and the prosecution worked out an arrangement. Holmes would testify if two tacit conditions were met: (1) he would not be prosecuted for perjury for anything he would say; and (2) major probation restraints against him would be dropped. The first condition was major; it gave Holmes a free hand to tailor his version of events the way he wanted. The second was less important, though a probation officer hovering around would, in Holmes's line of work, be a little inhibiting.

The proceedings were secret, but some insiders think that the testimony Holmes gave to the grand jury was useless. All the time I sat in on his trial, the thought kept recurring: In the halls of hell, no angel can testify. "Don't hold your breath for an indictment," Coen told me as I was finishing this story.

So it appeared that Holmes the manipulator, Holmes the hustler had, indeed, won out. Even in testifying before a grand jury, he had worked his dodge. The system had changed to accommodate Holmes, and that is the basic thrust of any hustler, whether he deals three-card monte or sells vacuum cleaners: to find the elasticity in the system and stretch it in ways to suit his purpose. Later that night, November 22, 1982, John Holmes walked out of prison a free man--as free as a man can be when he's constantly looking over his shoulder.

•

The trumped-up glamor of Las Vegas seems a perfect setting for the coda to the John Holmes story. It was late afternoon on the second day of the 1983 International Winter Consumer Electronics Show, a huge annual technological orgasm spread across acres of convention floor. All the X-rated companies were ghettoized in the Hilton, across a parking lot from the mainstream, where Toshiba and Sony reigned.

John Holmes strode up to me out of nowhere. He was signing autographs for Caballero Control, a distributor of X-rated films, many featuring his famous anatomy. He gave me a nudge in my anatomy. "You're gaining weight, Goldstein," he rasped. "You should be on the same diet I'm on, the Cocaine Diet." And he was thin, almost emaciated, reminding me of the haggard specter he was when he entered jail.

It took a while for that scene to sink in. Holmes had come full circle. He was once again in porn, in drugs, in need of another Eddie Nash. The merry-go-round had ratcheted his life around for a while, but he had gotten off exactly where he got on. It was hard to tell if this were a victory or a defeat.

It made me think of one of the times I saw him when he was still in jail. He was quietly exultant but seemed oddly jumpy to me when I remembered his pretrial languor. We spoke of my victory in the Kansas City obscenity case.

"That's what makes us alike," Holmes said softly. "We're both winners. Sometimes, the good guys win." His eyes were glittering, unfocused. Christ, I thought, was he getting it in jail? Holmes spotted the watch I had on, a garish, gold-and-gem-incrusted monstrosity mounted on a Mickey Mouse dial face.

"You give gold a bad name, Goldstein. I wouldn't be caught dead on the streets with you."

I asked about a large diamond that he used to wear as a ring, a sort of trademark, visible in many of his films. It was his signature, and a phrase tossed about was that he wore "a diamond as big as his dick."

"Gone," he said, "with the rest of it. Up my nose in a couple of toots." Drugs had stolen the man's only identifiable characteristic outside his pants.

"So this whole thing was coke, John?"

Holmes looked away, the unfocused eyes narrowing painfully, and I knew that if he said yes, it would be a lie. His whole life, from Ohio to Hollywood, had been more or less twisted, and coke was more of a facilitator than a cause. Laurel Canyon was cut of the same fabric as the rest of his existence. A quote from Bruce Jay Friedman floated into my mind: "Don't let that little frankfurter run your life." You've got to hold up something more than a shadow to all this light. John Holmes couldn't manage much more than that, the overpowering shadow of a foot-long cock hiding an empty, suggestible, characterless persona. He had brought this shadow around--worse yet, had brought it in front of the klieg lights. He was disappearing from me, dissolving in some sort of solvent of untruth. "Would you change places?" my shrink had persisted. No way. I'll take my failures.

"I had always thought of it as a salami, but I've heard it compared to a woman's forearm, a cannon...."

"They had obtained his Sunday-school attendance record. It showed perfect attendance for 12 years."