John Curtis Holmes (August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988) better known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd (after the lead character in a series of related films), was one of the most famous male adult film stars of all time, appearing in about 2,500 adult loops, stag films, and porno feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s, including at least one gay feature film and a handful of gay loops. He was best known for his exceptionally large penis, which was heavily promoted as being the longest in the porn industry; however, its exact dimensions are unknown. Holmes also attracted notoriety for his involvement in the brutal Wonderland murders in 1981, and for his death from AIDS.
Holmes was the subject of a long article in Rolling Stone magazine in 1989 and a feature length documentary, and the inspiration for two Hollywood movies (Boogie Nights and Wonderland). There is also a definitive biography about John Holmes that came out on August 8, 2008, called "John Holmes: A Life Measured in Inches."
Born in Ashville, Ohio, as John Curtis Estes, he knew very little of his father, Carl Estes, a railroad worker, who walked out on the family when John was three or four years old. John's mother Mary, a devout Southern Baptist, married Harold Holmes a few years later and changed her children's surname to Holmes. His new stepfather proved to be a violent alcoholic who would come home inebriated, stumble about the house, and even vomit on the children. Mary Holmes later divorced him and moved with her children to Columbus, Ohio, where they lived on welfare for a few years. When John was eight, his mother met and married her third husband, Harold Bowman. They moved from Columbus and settled in nearby Pataskala, Ohio. After a few years of marriage, Bowman frequently beat Holmes, the youngest of four children, according to Sharon Holmes, his first wife.
When John was 16, Bowman started beating him, but the strapping teenager instead struck back and decked Bowman, sending him down a staircase. John ran away from home and after a few days of living in the streets, he returned to his home and told his mother that if he stayed in the house much longer he would kill Bowman. After asking for the permission of his mother, Holmes enlisted in the United States Army and spent three years in Germany in the Signal Corps. Upon his 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 August 1965.
For the next two years, Holmes and his wife, Sharon, lived quiet, uneventful lives. Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a meat packing warehouse in Cudahy, California. However, the rigors of driving the forklift truck in and out of a large walk-in freezer and repeated exposures to inhaling the sub-freezing air in the 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 within the period of seven to nine months during the two years he worked there. While recovering from his illness, Holmes frequented a men's card-playing club in Gardena, where one evening, a still photographer standing next to him at a restroom 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. This was easier to do in those days; pornography production and distribution were semi-clandestine, there was no mass production of video cassettes or DVDs, and no Internet.
While the ad copy for his first few dozen loops rarely named him, those that did usually gave him a name that was nowhere near what his real first name was. In fact, one early "Swedish Erotica" brochure from 1973 has five Holmes loops listed, each of which has a different name referring to Holmes even though it is obvious from his facial features that "Fred", "Dave", "Rudy", "Big Dick", and "Stan" are all the same person. In the early years of his porn career, Holmes was referred to as "The Sultan of Smut".
With the success of Deep Throat (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), and Behind the Green Door (1972), porn had become 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.
In 1973, Holmes' career began to rise with a porn series built around a private investigator named Johnny Wadd. 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 on a level that is not often necessary in today's porn films.
While his voice was arguably 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 this time, his use of cocaine was becoming a problem, so much so that it was beginning to affect his ability to maintain an erection.
Holmes' main asset in the porn business was his exceptional large penis. Holmes' first wife, Sharon Gebenini, recalled him claiming to be 10 inches (25.4 cm) when he first measured himself. However, at the start of his cinematic career, he was widely publicized as having a penis ranging from 12.5 to 16 inches (32–41 cm) long when fully erect. "It is the size of two and one half 6 inch rulers," as John Holmes once claimed in a video shoot. Ron Jeremy has stated that Holmes was actually 11½ inches and used to brag that he was 14 inches.
JOHN HOLMES AT WORK
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