Golden Age of Porn: Interview with Richard Pacheco, Pt. 2

All the Girls He’s Loved Includes Top Tier Porn Talent and His Wife.

Note: This is Part 2. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.

When Howie Gordon became porn star Richard Pacheco for the filming of multi-award-winning Talk Dirty to Me, he entered a world that most men can only dream of watching. But, like swinging and polyamory, sex with beautiful porn women always includes the risk of falling in love with someone taboo. For Gordon, who entered the industry during the free love era and met his wife-to-be on a Berkeley commune, this temptation would eventually complicate his personal life.

During a recent conversation with Gordon and after devouring Hindsight, his compelling autobiography, the astonishing number of top-tier Golden Age adult actresses that he both acted with and fucked was revealed. Not an exhibitionist by nature, he found it difficult, when not impossible, to work with women who had no interest in him as a person.

“For other guys, that was heaven,” he confided. But for him, “I would just as soon be with a friendly-type person who wants to be at least nice enough to honor the social contracts of ‘hi’ and shaking hands.” It wasn’t just newbies or unprofessional starlets that would “just turn around and bend over and stand there waiting for me to get hard and get in them.”

Everyone had their own way to protect their heart. Gordon, on the other hand, both craved the sensual side of porn and wore his heart on his sleeve. Or his dick. “Monogamy,” he explained, “we thought of it like racism and imperialism. It was something of yesterday but not tomorrow. So, we had an open marriage. And we tried to make that work. What I learned is that it’s easy to do when you’re not in love. When you don’t care, you don’t care. But when you care, jealousy says ‘hello!’ and jealousy is a motherfucker. And a fatherfucker, too.”

ANNETTE HAVEN

Gordon did his best to blend his work and private life, so his wife was included. In addition to assistance with practical aspects of his career, there were occasional shared social events. One of those was a dinner at home with guests John Leslie, Anthony Spinelli, Annette Haven, and Juliet Anderson (aka Aunt Peg) a week before Talk Dirty to Me began filming. The couple showed off their foodie skills and served beef Wellington and a fancy French dessert with French wine. Haven, who was the most beautiful “queen of the industry in those days,” did not get along with Leslie despite how many times they worked together.

Throughout the dinner, the two would “sort of bark at each other.” In time, “they made a comedy routine out of it. They were doing a show.” In addition to being a guest with a funny schtick, Haven was someone that Gordon had special feelings for. “It was a long time, and I was in it,” he confessed. But he was a married man, and Haven had a respect for matrimony. “These feelings were way out of place,” he said. “We were dancing in the ballroom of public sex. These were personal feelings. They had no business here. They were supposed to be left in the dressing room.”

The effort to keep emotions in the dressing room became more difficult when they co-starred in the disaster known as Las Vegas Maniacs. She had demanded a real orgasm, which offered an opportunity for the two to get to know one another better. As Gordon described it, the scene “served as an excellent foreplay for the epic love scene we would later share in The Seven Seductions of Madame Lau.” During the filming of that classic, Gordon experienced what he still considers to be “the best scene I have ever had.”

Several years, and, in his case, three children later, they were paired up again during The Huntress. Metro billed the movie as “the sensational return of Annette Haven and Richard Pacheco.” Alas, as Gordon has sadly admitted, the sex was not good. He was tired. A married father of three kids tired.

KAY PARKER

Gordon’s introduction to Kay Parker was the stuff of porn fantasies. While appearing in the 1981 movie The Dancers, Gordon found himself required to push some personal boundaries and make a good friend. With a history of being chubby, the idea of portraying a male stripper was more than intimidating. He was supposed to enter a working shower located on a stage with a live audience of 40 women, remove his clothes, and dance... with a hard-on. This was difficult because he had been “a fat kid” while growing up. Fat kids did not dance in those days.

“I’m trying to get hard,” he confided. “And all I get is fear. Nothing. I can’t get myself hard. I’ve got my eyes closed and I hear this voice say to me, ‘Need some help, love?’ I look down where the voice came from and Kay Parker is on her knees, reaching for my dick. And she puts me in her mouth. Then 30 seconds, 40 seconds, I’m hard. She says, ‘Go ahead now, love. You can do it!’ And I went ahead and did what they wanted. That was ‘hello’ from Kay Parker.”

GEORGINA SPELVIN

One of the highlights of Gordon’s career came when he worked with the Grande Dame of Porn, Georgina Spelvin in The Dancers. The duo had met three years prior on the set of Candy Goes to Hollywood. In The Dancers, their scene is one of the most evocative and emotionally poignant in the movie, which features what Gordon calls “actual lovemaking” between the two. As star-crossed May-December lovers, both performers had the opportunity to show off their acting skills. As for the sex, Gordon remembers it as “one of the three great sex scenes of my career. I love her. The best person in porn.”

LOVE ON CAMERA

“There were a number of women that I talk about in my book,” Gordon observed, referring to his autobiography, Hindsight. “And it happens. You’re sitting there pretending ‘I love you’ and trying to be convincing on the camera and before you know it, you’re feeling it. And then what do you do about it?” In Gordon’s case, the saving grace was the short amount of time required to shoot each production and the spell-breaking call of “That’s a wrap!” Then the choice is to go home and re-enter domestic reality or stick around the set and hope to find someone to re-create the transient sense of pornographic make-believe.

That land of make-believe, as well as the nation at large, had to face a brutal reality on November 10, 1984. On that day, The San Francisco Chronicle broke the news that AIDS, which had previously been assumed to be a “gay” disease had made its way into the heterosexual population. As Gordon explains, “The high-risk group for potentially transmitting the disease was identified as gay or bisexual men, Haitians, and intravenous drug users. The X-rated industry had two out of the three.”

Not ready to quit the lucrative and largely enjoyable work of a professional sexual Renaissance man, Gordon chose to appear in three more movies over the objections of his wife. Whether AIDS was a risk for the porn community was still a matter of debate. John Leslie shouted at Gordon for hesitating. Others, including Nina Hartley, assured him it was not a big deal. Only fellow performer Haven shared his concerns. A test was not yet available to the public and there was still much ignorance about how the virus was transmitted.

LOVE AT HOME

“I’ve been monogamous for 20 years now,” Gordon said with a tinge of regret. He and his wife of nearly 50 years entered their matrimonial state nude as the sun rose over their commune. Like many during those horny pre-AIDS days, they were uncertain how to put their lofty sex-positive values into practice. “We had colliding and competing visions of marriage,” he admitted. “I wanted my homey bliss with the woman I loved, and I also wanted to be paid well to go to exotic locations, play pretend in the movies, and get to have hot sex with every kind of woman imaginable. Was that too much to ask out of life?”

Once he completed the movies that his wife and fellow performer Haven did not want him to make, he found out.

“The kids had gone to bed. My parents had gone to bed. My wife and I were finally alone. She hadn’t wanted me to make those last three movies. I had made them, anyway. I was home now. The work was finished. The money was in the bank. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had sex. I reached for her. ’Do you really think we should,’ she asked. What? I thought it was preposterous that she would even ask. She said, ‘Don’t you think it would be prudent if one of us remained alive to raise the kids?’ It was the brick wall. I crashed right into it. When I woke up, I was retired and monogamous.”

Now that Gordon is a distinguished man of 76, he says that “the 60 years seems like a blur now. It seems to speed up in retrospect. I like to say ‘63’ and that sounds really old. But that’s already 13 years ago! How’d that happen? My hair gets whiter, and my skin gets wrinklier. Lots of people I know are already dead. You might as well enjoy yourself. That’s what I think you should know.”