John Curtis Holmes (August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988) better known as John 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 2,500 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 and thickest in the porn industry, although no definitive measurement of Holmes' actual penis length exists. 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.
Holmes was born as John Curtis Estes in Ashville, Ohio, the youngest of four children to Carl Estes and Mary Barton. He knew very little of his father, an alcoholic railroad worker who abandoned his family when John was an infant. John's mother was a devout Southern Baptist, who regularly attended the Milport Chapel Church along with her children.
In 1946, John's mother married Harold Edward Holmes, and changed her children's surname to Holmes. His stepfather was an alcoholic, who would come home inebriated, stumble about the house, and even vomit on the children. Mary Holmes divorced her husband two years later, and moved with her children to Columbus, Ohio, where they lived on welfare for several years. When John was eight, his mother married Harold Bowman. Shortly after, John and his family moved from Columbus and settled in the small town of Pataskala, Ohio. 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.
By the time John reached adolescence Bowman began beating him, but the teenaged Holmes, who was very large and strong for his age, fought back and knocked Bowman down a flight of stairs. John 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 his junior year of high school and enlisted in the Army. After advanced training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, he spent three years in West Germany in the Signal Corps. 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 April 1965.
For the next two years, Holmes and Sharon lived uneventful lives. Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a meat packing warehouse in 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.
While recovering from his illness, Holmes attended a men's card-playing club in Gardena, California, where one evening a still photographer, standing next to him at a urinal, noticed his extraordinary penis size and encouraged him to do pornography. During the late 1960s, Holmes initially did magazine work 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.
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. Using his status as an informer, Holmes systematically had his competition in the porn industry arrested, leaving him as one of the few free porn stars in Los Angeles.
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. By 1978, Holmes was reputed to be earning as much as $3,000 a day as a porn actor. 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 was becoming a serious problem. Professionally, it affected his ability to maintain an erection, as is apparent from his 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, named Dawn Schiller, who became his girlfriend. After Holmes fell on hard times, he prostituted both her and himself, as well as beating her in public.
In 1981, he began to claim that he had sex with 14,000 women. The number had in fact been invented by Holmes to help salvage his waning image. 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. Pornography historian Luke Ford calculated the number of Holmes' sexual partners over the course of his lifetime to be roughly 3,000.
His performances included at least one gay feature film, The Private Pleasures of John Holmes, and a handful of gay loops.
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, 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 incarcerated in connection with the murders, but released due to lack of evidence. After spending six months on the run with Dawn Schiller, he was arrested in Florida and returned to Los Angeles. Holmes refused to co-operate with the investigation. He was eventually charged with committing all four murders, but was acquitted of all charges except contempt of court.
When Holmes resumed work in porn in November 1982, the industry had already begun the transition from film to videotape. Work was still plentiful but less lucrative, and Holmes was no longer the premier male star. His drug use continued, as did the inconsistent performances on set. His inability to maintain an erection was a serious issue, and employers began opting for younger and more attractive talent.
In 1983, he met his future girlfriend and wife, Laurie Rose, a.k.a. Misty Dawn, on the set of the film Marathon. She had a reputation as the "queen" of anal intercourse scenes, and was fascinated by the concept of anal sex with Holmes. The two had sex off-set and became a couple.
In February 1986, Holmes was diagnosed as HIV positive. According to Laurie Rose, 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.
During the summer of 1986, unable to find work in America, Holmes traveled to Italy where he filmed his last porno movies, including The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empress, which co-starred the later Italian Parliament member Ilona 'Cicciolina' Staller. His final film was The Devil In Mr. Holmes. 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 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.
During the last four months of his life, he was essentially bed-ridden, constantly going to hospitals for treatment. 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. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea off the coast of Oxnard, California.
Holmes' legacy is infamous. A documentary of his life, Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes, has achieved cult status among some independent film houses in college towns. Some elements of the film Boogie Nights were based on Holmes' life, and the Wonderland murders were the basis of the 2003 movie Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer as Holmes. Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Marika Tur wrote extensively on the Wonderland murder case and believed that Holmes led several 'hit men' to the two story residence where they murdered four people for the armed robbery of reputed drug dealer, Eddie Nash. The only survivor to the killings was Susan Launius, who sustained critical head injuries.
After his death, Holmes was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Adult film industry. It was accepted posthumously by his godson Sean Amerson, the son of Holmes' career-long manager Bill Amerson, who also delivered the eulogy at Holmes' memorial services.
Of the 2,500 porn film appearances John Holmes made in his lifetime, at least 60 to 70 percent of them are one-reel 8 mm loops or stag films. Since the majority of Holmes' loops and stag films have gone into public domain following the collapse of Caballero Control Corporation in 1990, there are efforts underway to locate all surviving 8 mm loops starring Holmes that he made during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s and convert them to DVD for posterity. However, since the life expectancy of most 8 mm films is very brief (due to the nature of the film stock used at that time), it is believed that the majority of Holmes' loops are forever lost.
Holmes was close to perhaps four or five women in his private life. With one obvious exception, he was meticulous in keeping his professional and private lives separate.
* In August 1965, he married a young nurse named Sharon Gebenini. He remained married to her until their divorce was finalized on January 17, 1983.
* In 1975, he met Julia Saint Vincent on the set of his film, Liquid Lips, which was being produced by her uncle, Armand Atamian. Holmes and Saint Vincent stayed close until 1981 and the Wonderland affair. Saint Vincent produced the ersatz biographical film of Holmes' life, Exhausted.
* In 1976, he met a 15-year-old girl named Dawn Schiller, who was his girlfriend from 1976 through the Wonderland incident in 1981. She left Holmes in December 1981, when she turned him in to the police in Florida.
* In 1985, Holmes met his second wife, Laurie Rose. They married in January 1987.
The true number of women (and men) with whom Holmes had sex during his career will never be completely known; his 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.
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. Holmes' first wife recalled him claiming to be 10 inches (25.4 cm) when he first measured himself. Holmes himself once claimed his penis to be fifteen inches (38.1 cm) long. Holmes' longtime manager, Bill Amerson, said that "I saw John measure himself several times, it was 13 and a half inches" (34.3 cm). 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
Another longstanding controversy regards whether Holmes ever achieved a full 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. Holmes' co-stars have stated that his penis was never particularly hard during intercourse, likening it to "doing it with a big, soft kind of loofah."
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 "Brian Grimes 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 premier of the film Wonderland, patrons were given thirteen-and-a-half inch rulers as gag gifts.
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 and heroin for himself, the business failed by the end of that very year.
Later, after his 1982 murder trial and acquittal, Holmes began a business partnership with his manager Bill Amerson, as they founded and operated a production company titled Penguin Productions, where Holmes could be a triple-threat: writing, directing, and performing.
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.
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:
* Holmes' penis was so big that he had to stop wearing underwear because "I was getting erections and snapping the elastic waist band 4 or 5 times a month."
* Holmes had degrees in physical therapy, medicine, and political science from UCLA. Holmes was in fact a high-school dropout who never returned to school; according to Bill Amerson, "the closest John ever got to UCLA was breaking into cars in the school's parking lot."
* A teenage Holmes played the role of Eddie Haskell in the TV series Leave it to Beaver. (The character was portrayed by actor Ken Osmond, who bore a resemblance to Holmes.)
Joey Stefano, the stage name of Nicholas Anthony Iacona, Jr. (January 1, 1968 - November 26, 1994) was an American pornographic actor who appeared in gay adult films.
