He was a jobbing actor whose energetic role in the most infamous porn movie ever made turned him into a cause celebre and an unwitting spokesman against censorship. It also nearly cost him his life. As a candid documentary is released, Harry Reems tells David A Keeps about his struggle to survive Deep Throat , www.xxxdeepthroat.com.
Utah- The man sitting on the edge of the bed and making love to the camera is arousing nothing but suspicion. Could this avuncular chap with the beetle brows and a shock of grey hair – who looks like what they used to call a ‘silver fox’ 30 years ago – actually be Harry Reems, the first male porn star and one of the few genuine survivors of the 1972 adult film Deep Throat?
Yes, and then again, no. This fellow, born Herbert Streicher in New York City in 1947, sitting here in his bucolic Park City, Utah, mountainside home in a plaid shirt and neatly pressed khakis, has the smile, the voice and the disposition of a breakfast DJ. It is easy to see the ghost of a cocksure rake, the role he played in silly skin flicks with such brio three decades ago, when Harry Reems was one of many noms de porn that stuck. It is even more apparent, however, that he is no longer the firebrand freedom-of-expression spokesperson – and, later, more sadly, the wasted sot – on display in Inside Deep Throat, the wildly entertaining new documentary about the most profitable porno film ever made. It is 15:01 on the celebrity clock for Harry Reems, or, as he puts it, ‘I’ve had my 15 minutes of fame, now I would like my 15 years of retirement.’
Though the film casts him as a tragic hero, Harry isn’t the least bit sucked in. ‘Nobody under the age of 50,’ he says with great joviality, ‘even knows who I am.’
A quick reminder: after making dozens of stag movies in the late Sixties and early Seventies, Streicher, a young and promising stage actor who discovered he could make $100 a day having sex on film, was hired to be the lighting director for a film about a woman, played by Linda Lovelace, who cannot achieve orgasm because her clitoris is located in her oesophagus. When an actor failed to show up, Streicher stepped in as the doctor who unravels the medical mystery that leads to the happy ending. Save for the titular talents of the lead actress, the film would have been a forgettable goof. Instead, zealous obscenity prosecutors intent on shutting the film down made it a hipness litmus test and a huge financial success. In a perverse twist of justice, Harry Reems would be brought to trial with Mafiosi who were involved in the distribution of the film and convicted for conspiracy to transport obscene material across state lines.
For nearly three decades, Harry had been content to leave things unexplained. The trial had unleashed demons that nearly killed him – drink, drugs, debt, debasement, destitution, disease, institutionalisation – until he staggered into 12-step meeting in Park City, Utah, in the summer of 1989.
His life has been blessed since then, he says. He has married, embraced Christianity (though he was raised and still identifies himself as Jewish), and become a successful real-estate broker. He had no need for vindication, no interest in mucking through the past until he met the documentary team of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, directors of Inside Deep Throat.
The Universal Pictures documentary is a broad social history – a cautionary tale about the puritanical streak that continues to define American conservatism. For Reems, however, it is something else entirely.
‘The directors saw it as I did, as a story of redemption,’ he says. ‘In the past, everybody wanted movies of the week with sex and drugs and rock’n’roll and the Mafia. And that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. I was making enough money – and still do – that I didn’t need to sell that.’
Reluctantly, Harry met with the filmmakers, who had already established a reputation for creating provocative and empathetic films about characters as diverse as Monica Lewinsky and Manhattan club kid murderer Michael Alig. Both sides were pleasantly surprised. ‘I had heard he was a born-again Christian,’ co-director Bailey recalls. ‘I was prepared for the worst. But Harry actually embodies the values the Christian extremists only pretend to.’
Harry was equally impressed. ‘They had done their homework. I said, “Well, how do you see me being portrayed in this documentary?” And they said, “You are one of the only survivors from those early days who is not still vicariously connected to the industry or dead or drunk.” And I said, “Well that’s the story I’d always wanted to tell.” Brian Grazer, who produces Ron Howard’s movies, was attached as a producer and HBO, Universal – I figured, how bad can it be?’
It has been quite good actually. Although he was paid only $800 for Deep Throat, a film that made some $600m, Reems has been handsomely compensated by Universal for helping to promote Inside Deep Throat. Though he has been asked not to publicise that fact, it always seems to slip out, the result of the chronic rigorous honesty that is the basis of his 15 years of sobriety.
‘I do not do anything for free as it relates to Deep Throat,’ he declares. ‘If people are going to use me to sell more tickets, then I should be paid.’
He does not overestimate his importance to Inside Deep Throat, which, he says, ‘is a very pro-porno documentary that says sex is good and makes all these conservatives out as idiots’. Though he comes across as an articulate foe of censorship in the film, he demurs, ‘I was a cause celebre, but I never felt like the voice of a movement.’
His distance from the adult film industry is now so vast that he has little to say on the subject. It baffles him that there are people who are celebrities now because of their risque behaviour, and celebrities who have become even more famous for their home movies. ‘I haven’t seen a porno film in 20 years or more,’ he says. ‘No need to. I got my wife.’
When the photographer has departed, Harry brews a pot of coffee, fires up the first of a series of cigarettes and slides into a leather recliner in front of the stone fireplace. He had back surgery recently and the post-surgical medication makes him constipated, but Harry’s mouth works just fine.
He talks about his childhood, being the baby of the family. He’s fond of his sister, who is ill and lives in Florida. He rarely speaks to his brother, a dancer whom Harry believes is consumed by bitterness because their father hated him.
Harry, the athlete, was more to his father Dan’s liking, but Dan was a distant man who led a rough life and died at 47. ‘Just to give you a little taste of who they were, my dad actually was a bag man, picking up money for the gangster Myer Lansky, and eventually he became a bookie himself. My mum, Rose, who we called Crazy Razie, originally was a runway model.’
There was more tension than affection in the relationship. ‘I only saw them kiss once,’ Harry remembers. They were watching television on the sofa. I don’t know what the kiss was about, maybe they had sex the night before, or maybe my father agreed to do something my mother wanted.’
Harry’s father ultimately went into the printing business and was prosperous enough to move his brood to Westchester, New York. Herbert, as Harry was then known, played trumpet and ran track, but was not particularly popular. ‘I was this skinny little kid with a big nose and pimples.’
One girl, however, took a shine to him and took his virginity on a golf course. ‘I was so scared, I ejaculated prematurely,’ he sighs. ‘She rode my leg, got off and that was the end of that. I only had one sexual experience in high school and that was it.’
In 1965, he went to university to become a dentist. ‘My number came up and I was going to be drafted, so I went and enlisted in the Marine Corps. I guess I watched too many John Wayne movies growing up.’ He was home on leave and came down with pneumonia when his outfit got their orders: Vietnam. ‘I’m in the hospital and suddenly they’re bringing these people in with no legs and heads half off, and suddenly I really got the fear. My father became terminally ill, I applied for a hardship transfer and never got overseas. It’s just as well – 87 per cent of my unit were wounded or died.’
After the military, he took his veteran’s schooling allocation and moved to the East Village in Manhattan, where his brother and his brother’s old college roommate were struggling actors. ‘I was a hippy going to see Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore East, and hanging in the streets and smoking doobie and saying, “Make love, not war.” I got hung up in that social atmosphere.’ One day, he tagged along to an audition. ‘The casting guy said, “You’re right for the part, come on in.” It was Coriolanus. I played Aufidius on a stage no bigger than that fireplace. I got the acting bug. I liked the attention.’
A natural hustler, he worked all the time, in off-Broadway shows and even as ‘the third banana in a group of original burlesque comedians who were as old as dirt’. The show also featured a Puerto Rican stripper named Fabulous Fanny. ‘I was in my early twenties, and she was in her late thirties and she taught me everything I know about sex,’ Harry says, with a smile. ‘I thought I loved this woman. I followed her to Puerto Rico and while I was there I signed up with a talent agency and did three commercials for Wheaties, a breakfast cereal, with some famous athletes of the time. I lived off that money for years.’
His feature film debut was less impressive. ‘My knees are in Klute,’ he says. ‘It was a scene in a bar, and here comes Jane Fonda, wiggling through the tables and – wait, there! – you see my leg.’ The camera loved you from the waist down, is that how you found yourself on the set of a porn film?
‘A fellow actor said, “I know where you can pick up an extra hundred bucks for an hour’s work.” I was scared, I had to take three subways and thought I was being followed. That’s how paranoid I was. But I did it, I walked into this room and the next thing I know I’m in bed with these two beautiful girls – and it was nirvana. I had no problem creating the fourth wall – it was like, “Go ahead and film, I’m focusing on what I get to look at.”‘
‘I loved the sexual activity in the films, but the process got old very quick. When you’ve got 20 people behind the camera, and lights and things in your eyes, and people dragging hoses and wires over you while you’re trying to have sex, it became a job.
‘I never got a sense of accomplishment from adult films. In fact, I regretted the fact that I left the theatre. When I started to do porn films I was an Equity contract member of the National Shakespeare Company.’
Harry shrugs off these anecdotes modestly, but perhaps telling these tales is also a pre-emptive strike to keep the darkness at bay. As Inside Deep Throat reveals, he was the Christ figure in the very public prosecution of the film.
In Harry’s estimation, Deep Throat was a trifle ‘take out the sex and it was 11 minutes of burlesque’ – that put his previous experience as a comedian to good use. Like a randy Groucho Marx, Harry brought a giddiness to the role of the doctor who saves the damsel in distress from a life of frigidity. ‘I always played a doctor,’ he recalls. ‘You had to have someone in a white lab coat to give a sex film some socially redeeming value to avoid obscenity charges.’
By the time it was deemed obscene by New York City courts, the film had become a social phenomenon, part of Manhattan cocktail party conversation and a titillating punchline for late-night TV comics. It created notoriety for the film’s star, Linda Lovelace, and turned Harry Reems into ‘a celebrity’s celebrity’. He hung out at the Playboy Mansion, partied on the nude beaches of Negril and, he recalls, people said, ‘”Oh, come on, I want you to screw my wife!” It was that time in America.’
Harry did B-movies in Europe, including a French version of Deep Throat. ‘Gorge Profunde, I believe it was called,’ he says with a laugh. He also moved to Hollywood and was cast as the highschool coach in Grease, only to be dropped from the film due to his indictment by the US government.
He explains the story of the trial as simply as he can: ‘I was the first actor ever prosecuted for his work by the federal government. I was brought on trial for conspiracy to transport obscene materials interstate. They were basically saying that because I had knowledge that a piece of obscenity was crossing state lines, that because I didn’t disavow and destroy that conspiracy, I was responsible for it.’
The trial commenced in Memphis, Tennessee, in March 1976. From the outset, Harry says, ‘It was a stacked deck.’ The judge, the prosecutor and the DA were all Nixon appointees, though the president had resigned in disgrace after the Watergate scandal two years earlier.
The prosecutor was ‘a right-wing Southern Baptist type, waving the Bible at the jury. No one was allowed to see Deep Throat, no one was allowed to be on the jury who had ever seen a porno film.’ The film’s director and star were witnesses for the prosecution and granted immunity.
Harry didn’t blame Linda Lovelace. He had worked with her, doing short films called stag loops, and found her ‘quiet and shy’. Years later, with great fanfare and the support of prominent feminists including Gloria Steinem, Linda published an autobiography, Ordeal, that claimed she had been coerced into a life of pornography and described her participation in Deep Throat as a case of rape. ‘There was no evidence of any beatings or brutality or guns being held on her on the set,’ Harry says, calmly. ‘I was there full time. If I wasn’t acting in it, I was the lighting director.’
He seems to have no hard feelings about the book, but notes that Linda wanted to leave the world of pornography but was ill-equipped for the mainstream. ‘She was a nice enough lady,’ he says, ‘but she couldn’t act.’ Towards the end of her short life, before she died from injuries sustained in a 2002 car crash, Lovelace softened her hard-core stance against pornography, doing a soft-core lingerie spread in Leg Show magazine.
‘There wasn’t a lot of consistency to her story,’ Harry says, sympathetically. When she needed a liver transplant, he sent money, ‘but I’d never talked to her since the movie’.
It was Harry who had to stand trial, along with several members of the Mafia, who had been involved with the distribution of the film and extorted money from the exhibitors. Throughout the nine-week ordeal, Harry heard horror stories about the violence inflicted upon theatre owners who did not play ball with the Mafia. Every day outside the courthouse, he recalls, ‘there were people with signs spitting at me and throwing eggs until eventually I needed a police escort’.
At night, he continues, ‘I went back to the liquor store and bought another bottle of wine, just to kill the feelings from the day, from hearing testimony about a car being found with two bloody fingers in it and no body. It was the loneliest time of my life.’
Hollywood rallied behind him. Shirley MacLaine, Julie Newmar and Stephen Sondheim hosted benefits for his legal defence fund. ‘I convinced Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson to come to Memphis and testify, but they were not allowed in the courthouse. The only time I ever met them was at a fundraiser in LA. After Inside Deep Throat, everybody thinks these are my good friends.’
He did get to know Alan Dershowitz – the highprofile civil liberties attorney, who would later successfully defend Klaus von Bulow on murder charges, coached Harry.
‘Dershowitz said, “You’ve got to fight it publicly. You’ve got to bring this to the attention of the American people and get them in a rage about what is happening. You can’t go out as a gumchewing, cigarette-smoking porno actor who says, ‘Hey, they’re trying to get me!'” So I became very knowledgeable about conspiracy, obscenity and criminal law – in fact, I went out and spoke at colleges for two or three years to make a living. I’m not the brightest guy in the world, but I’m a survivor.’
For quite a while, Harry Reems survived on liquid courage. ‘I started drinking during the Memphis trial. When it was over I moved to Los Angeles, thinking I would be able to work in movies. I did get some parts, but the writing was on the wall.
In 1982 I declared bankruptcy and agreed to do another adult film, which I think was called The Society Affair. I got paid $120,000 for nine days’ work.
‘I’d blow all the money flying all my friends to Jamaica and hanging out. I just hated the fact that I had to go back and do these adult films. I was pushing my mid-thirties. It’s like the athlete who tries to go on for one more season. I got very depressed. I knew this wasn’t where I belonged any more, and I couldn’t compete with 20-year-olds. I got lost in booze. I drank and I drank and drank. I’d show up drunk on set, they’d carry me to a chair and I would deliver five lines and then I’d drive home. I cracked up a lot of cars, but was so drunk I didn’t get really hurt. I lost teeth and busted up my nose pretty good a few times.’
‘By 1985 nobody would hire me any more. That’s when the real alcoholism kicked in. I was drinking 24 hours a day and the seizures started. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I never went to bars. I always bought my booze and went home and drank until I passed out, making sure I had enough left for the next morning so the shakes wouldn’t hit me.
‘The years of 1985 to 1989 are a blank to me, completely gone. You lose your house, your job, your money – more importantly you lose your self-esteem and self-respect. I used to have a little pistol and I put it to my head so many times, and thank God I didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger.’
How were you keeping body and soul together?
‘I have no idea. I was out on the streets panhandling on Sunset Boulevard. I had no direction, the only thing I wanted to know was where was my next bottle of booze coming from. I was living behind a supermarket. Some nights I slept in the dumpster; other times I just curled up on cardboard. More often I was in jail, like I was when my mother passed away, or in the hospital.’
Did you try going to rehab?
‘Many times. I hid out in rehab from drug dealers I owed money to. When friends would come visit me I would ask them for quarters for telephone calls. I was there for 32 days, and I walked out of that hospital and right across the street with those quarters and bought a bottle of vodka. I woke up a week later in Los Angeles, laying in jail in my own puke and faecal matter, and I had no idea how I got there. Hugh Hefner bailed me out.’
You were lucky to have friends.
‘One of them sent me a ticket to Park City, Utah. I’d been there before, skiing with Kate Jackson from Charlie’s Angels. I had moments of clarity. I got a job selling time shares – it was something I’d done in Jamaica, but I don’t remember any of the four or five times I got arrested in Park City.
‘I’d break into people’s houses and sleep on their couch and they’d call the police, or I’d get busted for public urination, or lewdness, or whatever.’
When was enough enough?
‘July, 1989. I didn’t want to drink any more and didn’t have the courage to take my life, so I called around and I found out there were 12-step program meetings in Park City at city hall. The police station was also there and before I got in the meeting I was arrested. Seems I had a number of warrants. And I pleaded with that sergeant, “Please let me go in this meeting and see what these people do.”
‘Afterwards he drove me to the county jail and that cop said to me, “Harry, you have no idea how much value you could be to people if you only got sober. You have no idea how many people you could help.” That was the first time anybody had said I had value. Ever.’
Harry Reems hasn’t had a drink since that meeting. At first it wasn’t easy, he admits. ‘I didn’t detox properly and I really needed hospitalisation. I was lost. I cried so much. I didn’t know who or what to be. I didn’t trust myself.’
And as he straightened up he discovered other worries – financial ones for, example. ‘I had nothing but debt when I first got sober. I hadn’t paid my taxes and I finally cut a deal with the IRS, but they had me peeing in a cup for five years.’ He was cleaning up the mess he had made, going to court houses around the country, answering bench warrants with humility, explaining that he was sorry and he was sober. It was a frightening prospect, he says, ‘but invariably every one of those judges said keep doing what you are doing’.
He did. And in so doing, Harry found love. Her name was Jeannie Sterrett, a woman from San Diego who had moved to Park City when she was 21 with a boyfriend. The relationship didn’t work out, but Jeannie had found her home.
As if on cue, Jeannie, blonde and sunny and fit, looking very much at the infancy of middle age, arrives at the house, fresh from a trip to the grocery. Bingo, the dog, runs to greet her; Pinky, the cat, makes a tentative appearance at the top of the stairs. Jeannie picks up the story.
They met at a 12-step meeting. ‘I thought it might be a good place to meet someone who believed in God,’ she explains. ‘Everyone else I knew was an atheist. I never spoke because I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I really enjoyed hearing the stories.’
She caught Harry’s eye. They had met in 1982 when he was on a ski trip. He stole a kiss and gave her his Malibu number on a little matchbook, which they found after they were married. ‘The minute she told me who she was I asked her to marry me. I don’t know what it was,’ Harry continues. ‘I knew that she was the person that I wanted to spend my life with. It was a spiritual awakening. So we’re walking out of the meeting, and I said, “Why won’t you marry me?” “Because,” she said, “I don’t know you, but I will go on a date.” It was 27 May, so I said, “If we’re still going out by 4 July will you marry me?” Still she says no. “Well what if we’re still going out the following 4 July? Which is a year and change.” “Well,” she said, “I guess I’d marry you.” I said, “Great, we’re engaged.”‘
They both laugh at the story, which, she says is so typical of Harry’s personality. They had to borrow $1,500 for the wedding, a conventional church affair. ‘I used to say I refuse to make the same mistake once, when it came to marriage. That changed.’
Harry had changed, too. ‘I took my very addictive, compulsive personality traits and applied them to my work,’ he says. He got his real-estate licence, was soon regularly nominated salesman of the year, and now owns his own firm.
It never occurred to him to change his name or deny his past. ‘I very consciously decided to keep the name Harry Reems. I didn’t want people to walk up to me and say, “Oh, I know who you really are!” If people have problems with the fact that I’m the guy who did those films, then I probably don’t want to be around them anyhow.’
There were other changes. Though he was raised Jewish, he found the Christian faith ‘a very loving one because of one particular minister’.
In some ways, it is as if Harry Reems is twice reborn: redeemed from demon rum by Christianity, he remains, at heart, a Jewish liberal who cannot tolerate intolerance. ‘I think that there is a conservative, right-wing majority right now that doesn’t only want to crush sex, but they want to control people. They would like to have little chips implanted in us to know where all of us are at any given time. It’s just shameful what some people do to trample on other people’s rights.’
But this too shall pass. Harry has too much love in his life. He has his wife, with whom he walks on the beach in Mexico. She fills their homes with stuffed animals and pretty things; he in turn, buys her gemstone hearts and hides them in her desserts.
He learned a very simple lesson about recovery. ‘I was told the only thing you have to change is everything,’ he says. ‘That’s the only thing you can count on in life. Things are gonna change and then you’re gonna die.’
That inevitability gives Harry pause. His liver is shot. A few years ago, on a golf trip, he caught pneumonia and briefly slipped into a coma.
Still, he says, ‘I’m happier today than ever. I saved my own life. I’m content with the way I conduct myself with my marriage, my home, my business. I live in a small town where everybody knows everybody and nobody thinks of me as a porn actor.’
Some of his friends, neighbours and clients saw Inside Deep Throat at the Sundance Film Festival. Their reaction? ‘It’s usually one of two comments,’ he replies, ‘”Boy, they really focused on you.” Or, “I had no idea you went through all of that.”
‘I assume that anybody who has a problem with who I am or what I used to do is not going to contact me. And I have the luxury of not having to work with anybody who doesn’t take me for what I am today. I built a reputation with the locals here in town. Police officers started to call me to say, “Would you list my house and find me another one?” And this is the drunk they used to arrest.’
Later, Harry takes me for a drive. There is classical music playing in the SUV and, with a cigarette dangling in his fingers out of the open window, Harry oohs and aahs at the town’s Victorian and modern architecture, calling one house ‘cute as a button’, then pointing out how another needs a new foundation. We stop at one of his new listings, a condo being offered at just under half a million. ‘Oh,’ he says, surprised as we walk in, ‘I’m not sure about that colour carpet.’ Yes, we can confirm: Harry Reems is a new man.