Golden Age of Porn: The Holocaust Escapee Who Conquered the Deuce

Chelly Wilson Built a Porn Theater Empire in Mid-Century Times Square

“The Deuce” was a dicey neighborhood in midtown Manhattan’s Times Square when Chelly Wilson moved into it. Avoided by most “respectable folks,” it was a hub for adult film theaters from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. The area was swarmed with soldiers, sex workers, pickpockets, massage parlors, peep shows, and people of color. Wilson chose an apartment over the all-male Adonis Theater that provided her with enough space for her and her second husband Rex to live, as well as to entertain her followers and female lovers.

A day after the 31-year-old Wilson left Athens in 1939 on a ship to the United States, World War II began. The Jewish Greek divorcee left behind her two children, Dino with his father and Paulette in the care of a trusted, non-Jewish guardian. Both children survived the impending Holocaust and were eventually reunited with their mother in the States. Once in the Land of the Free, Wilson began humbly, selling hot dogs and playing Greek movies in rented theaters. Although she identified as a lesbian, in 1941 she married Jewish projectionist Rex Wilson whom she dearly loved. The couple had two children who did not find out about their half-siblings until after the war.

“It was nice,” she says in a raspy voice during the documentary Queen of the Deuce, directed by Valerie Kontakos, and packed with film and audio archive footage, home videos, animation, and brutally honest interviews with friends, family, and business associates. Available on both Amazon Prime Video and AppleTV, she continued. “He provided me with cigarettes.” This stood in stark contrast to her first marriage, which had been arranged by her highly conservative Jewish father. “Every kiss he put on my body, I wanted to kill him. He was so repulsive to me, the son of a bitch.”

Although the fate of her first husband is unknown, in April of 1941, the same year as her marriage to Rex, the Nazis took over her hometown and slaughtered nearly every Jewish citizen. Son Dino survived by escaping to Mandatory Palestine. Daughter Paulette survived by living with Gentiles.

Showing Greek films had provided her with enough of an income for her bills, cigarettes for herself, manicures for Rex, money to donate toward Anti-Nazi efforts in Greece, and to help her fellow immigrants gain legal status. But the market was finite. In time, Wilson needed to find a new way to bring money into the household. After dabbling in real estate, restaurants, and movie theaters sold cheap as their owners fled Times Square, she chose porn. She still showed Greek films for sentimental reasons but, before long, she owned multiple theaters. Some of them featured movies and others peep performers, and she moved into the upper floors of the Eros Theater.

Always the savvy businesswoman, Wilson saw that the way America viewed porn was changing. Despite rising opposition from feminist activists including Andrea Dworkin who believed that all forms of pornography were intrinsically anti-woman, Wilson, who clearly lived by her own rules, continued to produce and distribute sexual films. Living in the era of “porno chic,” she saw that there was big money to be made by showing films like Deep Throat and Blue Movie.

Variety Magazine opined in a 1971 article that Wilson avoided troubles with the district attorney by requesting cuts to films. Nonetheless, she began and continued to ask for films with hardcore close-ups and sexual content. Because they sold. Likewise, as one of the first people to show gay porn in New York City, Wilson’s decision was probably not made from a desire to promote gay liberation or equality. With a huge and largely ignored market for gay films, she was able to charge their audiences more than she charged to see straight film showings.

Pornography was very, very good to Wilson and the 1970s were among the best years for her to be in the Times Square porn business. As a female powerhouse in the industry, her rise during that decade earned her praise as a trailblazer, an entrepreneur, an unconventional matriarch, and one of the most influential and charismatic individuals of the era.

Not everyone loved her, though. Even while she became luxuriously wealthy and drew large crowds of adoring adult entertainers, poker players, girlfriends, family members, and friends for cigarettes, coffee, laughter, and gossip at her home. Even her grandchildren would join the fun. But some of the people she did business with were less than enthused by her.

Like many during her time in the Deuce, Wilson probably did some business with the Mafia, which was everywhere in the New York City adult entertainment world. While her actual connections with Mobsters is not known, her grandson tells the audience during the Queen of the Deuce documentary, that she was “like a Mafia queen.”

New Voices refers to an interview with porn director Phil Price in The Rialto Report where he said, “We had to deal with her, but she was a little cunt.” More to the point, he insisted that “She was cheap, man. No one liked her.” Arthur Morowitz, a film producer who did business with Wilson in 1965, claimed that she took advantage of his naivete and charged him unreasonably high rates to advertise movies he had investments in. As Morowitz insisted during the documentary, this was “a very typical Chelly kind of deal.”

Nonetheless, Wilson was popular and loved by many. She was also a major player in the Deuce before it became sanitized. She preferred the company of people she respected; quick thinkers, smooth talkers, people who could get things done, and those who looked up to her. Sometimes this meant she got ripped off and sometimes it made her bank. John Colasanti worked for Times Square sex emporium Show World Center and says that he and Wilson hit it off immediately. “I think perhaps that’s why she took a liking to me because she saw the admiration I had on my face when I would speak of her.”