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Home , Barbara Broadcast, Behind the Green Door, Constance Money, Dictionary of Sex, Georgina Spelvin, Gerard Damiano

When a writer The goes in search of Legend the great of of the of porn, she gets more than she bargained for Henry paris

BY TONI BENTLEY Photography by Marius Bugge 108 109 What’s next? The fourth title that kept showing up on best-of lists of the golden age was The Opening of Misty Beethoven by Henry Paris. Who? Searching my favorite porn site, ­.com, I found that this 1975 film was just rereleased in 2012 on DVD with all the bells and whistles of a Criterion Collection Citizen Kane reissue: two discs (re- mastered, digitized, uncut, high-­ definition transfer) that include AAs a professional ballerina, I barely director’s commentary, outtakes, finished high school, so my sense of intakes, original trailer, taglines inadequacy in all subjects but classi- and a 45-minute documentary cal ballet remains adequately high. on the making of the film; plus a In the years since I became a writer, magnet, flyers, postcards and a my curiosity has roamed from clas- 60-page booklet of liner notes. sic literature to sexual literature to classic sexual literature. When Misty arrived in my mailbox days later, I placed the disc A few months ago, I decided to take a much-needed break in my DVD player with considerable skepticism, but a girl has to from toiling over my never-to-be-finished study of Proust, pursue her education despite risks. I pressed play. Revelation.­ Tolstoy and Elmore Leonard to bone up on one of our most interesting cultural phenomena: . I had heard • of this long-ago era called the “golden age,” so I thought I First off: The Opening of Misty Beethoven is an actual movie, not would start my education at the beginning, ­often—though an extended loop of in-and-out close-ups. In fact, the film not ­always—a good place to start. is so good, so funny, so sexy, that The has you will not be tempted to press an undisputed point of entry: pause after the usual 12-minutes- Deep Throat. It’s 1972 and Linda to-,­ time-for-a beer routine Lovelace—God rest her unhappy that porn reliably delivers. This soul—has her clit in her throat, may be a downside, depending on your expectations, but more likely you will be delighted as you realize In 24 months, Metzger this is hardcore like no other—the hardcore we never knew to desire, made five hardcore Howard Hawks hardcore. We are in Paris, the real one, Henry Paris films, of nighttime in a sodden Pigalle, and which Misty Beethoven a handsome chap in a trench coat— porn legend , a rich is the crown jewel. man’s Elliott Gould—is ­meandering around looking serious. He is giving an absurdist, and pernicious, feminist veneer to an en- renowned sexologist Dr. Seymour Love, a modern-day Kinsey, tirely chauvinist story. While the film’s premise is a frustrated his latest best-seller called The Anals of Passion. He enters a dirty- woman’s search for pleasure, it is in reality the ultimate fella- and encounters a cute, $5-hand-job gal played by tio fantasy. The film was the career-defining effort of a horny , née Susan Jensen. This young woman’s bright hairdresser, . (Years later even he admitted, pink lipstick is painted so far beyond her lovely lips that it all but rather endearingly, “No, I don’t think it’s a good movie.”) meets the mound of blue eye shadow drowning her sparkling I proceeded to Damiano’s second hit and far more imagina- blue eyes. The good doctor is both intrigued and appalled by tive feature, , starring . this “sexual civil-service worker.” He books a session with her at Unlike Lovelace, Spelvin manages to inject considerable style a nearby maison. As they walk, Dr. Love asks her name. into her effort; she appears to ­actually be turned on. “Misty Beethoven.” On to , made “Is that your real name?” by the notorious flesh ­peddlers the “No, I changed it to make myself . (Jim eventu- seem more important.” ally murdered cokehead brother “What was it before?” Artie.) Starring Marilyn Cham- “Dolores Beethoven.” bers, who had previously modeled And so (continued on page 142) as a young mother on the famous Ivory Snow detergent box, this film Top: IN HIS PRIME, sports the conceit of a normal and CIRCA THE LATE . Middle: A respectable young woman who be- scene from Metzger’s 1970 movie comes the centerpiece of an orgy The Lickerish Quartet. Filmed in (she is devoured) in front of a siz- Rome in a studio made famous by able audience; the Ivory Snow girl Fellini, this shot features two is eventually coupled with an Afri- lovers in a library, the floor a giant blowup of a dictionary page can American man, boxer Johnnie with definitions for words SUCH Keyes. This film is the first notable AS fornicate and ecstasy. Bottom: a porn flick to feature an interracial scene from metzger’s “love story,” fuck—­every thrust a bona fide civil thérèse and isabelle. Right: A 110 rights movement. collage of Metzger movie posters. 111 ing Gray as one of two men in an energetic deceased) went on to medical school and sexy foreign films in the U.S. In the 1960s the film. He bought it for $5,000, and on a library floor that is a giant enlarge- three-way.) The ­Henry Paris films consti- became an ob-gyn; as adults they joked this meant an occasional naked bosom or after his usual dubs and edits, the film ment of a dictionary page, the definitions tute an anomaly in the history of porno- about ending up in related professions. veiled body shot accompanied by a risqué was released in 1966 with the tagline “It for masturbate, fornicate, ecstasy and copulate graphic pictures. They are hardcore satires, Metzger attended Columbia Univer- story and always a beautiful ingenue.­ is entirely possible to make excitation a as their literary backdrop. Score, an explo- screwball porn with magnificent allusions to sity but dropped out during the Korean Audubon had a secret weapon, some- way of life.” By 1966 standards it was hot ration of , was Metzger’s first the French and Italian New Wave masters. War to sign up for the Air Force, where thing no other distributor had: Metzger’s and edgy. It became a sensation, pulling foray into pushing-the-envelope soft-core. Each film has unexpected attributes: origi- he opted for training as a film editor for expert skills as an editor. Typically he in an unprecedented female audience to The film has real and is based nal music, actual scripts and stories that go military propaganda films. After the war he would buy a European film cheaply and a “dirty” picture. “It touched something on a sexy off-Broadway play (in which an from A to B to XXX. joined , where he began edit- then rework it, editing the story for speed in women. It was probably the first femi- unknown played a randy I became obsessed. Who was Henry ing and occasionally dubbing the Ameri- and accessibility, dubbing it into ­English, nist erotic film released in the 1960s, and telephone repairman). Paris? Was he dead, as are his unlikely can trailers for the A-list foreign films that occasionally shooting nude inserts to help it pushed a button with ­every woman in By this time, however, Deep Throat had m contemporaries Damiano and the Mitchell were at the time making cinema history—­ the narrative along and adding spar- America,” says Metzger. arrived, and the entire landscape for erotic brothers? Or perhaps he didn’t exist at all ’s L’Avventura, kling taglines for the ad campaign. It was “A door opened,” he recalls, “and I films changed virtually overnight. After THE LEGEND OF HENRY PARIS and was a stand-in for several now dead ­François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and the a winning formula at just the right time: walked right through it.” weak box-office receptions for his previous people? I even thought perhaps he was a films of the great Dane . pre-hardcore, with the pill and the age of two films, Metzger felt forced—“We tried Continued from page 111 woman, so advanced were his sexual poli- “One of the best compliments I ever Aquarius in full swing. • to resist”—by the market demand (and tics and so beautiful his aesthetic. got,” recalls Metzger, “was from Bergman, Audubon made a lot of money. Beginning in 1963, as the Audubon coffers bill collectors) to venture into the hard- begins the great ride that is The Opening Henry Paris is in fact the “nom de who liked the trailer I did for Through a The Twilight Girls (tagline: “Dangerous started to fill, Metzger started to make his core ­arena. And so Henry Paris was born. of Misty Beethoven. Wearing a T-shirt with fuck” of Radley Metzger—­director, pro- Glass Darkly.” He also remembers sitting love!”) stars the Henry is Metzger’s American Express and MasterCard logos ducer and writer (under the moniker Jake alongside in an editing room gorgeous Agnès middle name, and, on its front, Misty states her rules: “I do a Barnes, a sly nod to the castrated hero of in , doing the cuts and dubbing ­Laurent and Cath- he explains, “some- straight fuck. I don’t take it in the mouth, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises) of more for the U.S. release of Can-Can. “Renoir erine ­Deneuve in one named Paris I don’t take it in the ass, and I don’t take than 10 other films shot in the 1960s and said something to me that I have never her first screen role. was very helpful to it in the bed.” Dr. Love makes a bet with a early under his real name. And forgotten,” says Metzger. “ ‘There is always Metzger added a five- me at one point in friend: He will train Misty at his school of ­according to Wikipedia, he was not dead. just one moment in a film that everyone minute sequence of my life.” What a way love to become not only the hottest girl of So where was Metzger? He had no website, remembers,’ he said. ‘And that is enough.’ ” two girls kissing and to repay a favor. the season but to reach the ultimate—­being no LinkedIn listing. By his mid-20s Metzger had raised just some flashes of na- Over 24 months, named the Golden Rod Girl by famed sex- Some time later, something remark- enough money—“If we’d had twice as ked , and the Metzger, as Henry magazine tycoon Lawrence Lehman. Misty able happened. I received a query from much it would have qualified as a shoe- film was off and run- ­Paris, made his Beethoven proceeds to retell the enduring someone on behalf of one Radley Metzger, string ­budget”—to make his first film. Dark ning. Other releases five hardcore “fuck /My Fair Lady story, but instead of who had “made a number of well-received Odyssey, a Kazan-like story of a Greek immi- ­included Warm Nights films,” as he calls teaching a vulgar street urchin to enunci- erotic films in the 1970s and 1980s.” He grant honor killing, contains some stunning and Hot Pleasures them, all released in ate, she is taught to fuck. wanted to know if the film rights to my shots of the 1950s New York skyline, includ- (“Where sex goes skin the next few years. Director Henry Paris is a parodist of erotic memoir The Surrender were available. ing the George Washington Bridge before deep”), The Weird It is these films on considerable wit and balls, though with A bizarre coincidence? Absolutely. And a it had a second level. Although Howard Love ­Makers (“They which his reputation an affectionate, light touch. Within a few brilliant one. The next thing I knew, I was Thompson gave the film a good word in do everything!”), The now, rather errone- frames of the film’s opening, we realize we on a flight to New York to meet the creator , it was a box-office bust. Fourth Sex (“Is she ously, is based. are in the capable hands of a master of self- of Dolores “Misty” Beethoven himself. “Even my relatives didn’t want to see it,” or isn’t she? Only The Private After­ referential humor, elegance and killer one- Metzger has said. “I’ve heard de- her lover knows for noons of Pamela liners, whose tongue is planted firmly in his • fined as a foreign film nobody wants to see, sure…”) and Dani­ Mann was shot over cheek—and soon will be in yours. This is We arrange to have a drink at a sophisti- and this was an American art film. I don’t ella by Night, which six and a half days no basement production. We are in black- cated, dimly lit bar on ’s Low- know if there’s a word in English, in any introduced ­Elke in New York. Its tie and gowns at operas in Paris and Rome, er East Side. I am late, unable to decide what language, that sums up the flop this thing Sommer to Ameri- premise involves a at vast country estates with multiple uni- to wear to meet the man who has become, was. I don’t like to blow my own horn, but can ­audiences (she rich husband who formed servants (who give head to every- to me, the king of cinematic sex. Entering I believe it holds the record for the lowest later had big roles hires a (horny) pri- one, male and female, nonstop). Everyone the bar, I see no one. I walk around a cor- gross of any film ever made.” in every­thing from vate eye to spy on is beautiful. We are, in other words, in a ner and there, at a cozy circular table, sits a The humiliation Metzger suffered (not ­Peter Sellers’s second his beautiful, cheat- sexual nirvana where ­reality—the great en- disarmingly handsome man, arms lazily out- to mention the debts he amassed) was the Pink Panther movie to ing wife. The first emy of the erotic—is nowhere to be found. stretched along the curve of the red-velvet catalyst for his future career. He, like many The Love Boat). scene: ­lovely Bar- The film premiered in 1975 to rave re- booth. He rises to greet me; he is very tall. achievers, finds failure both more useful Metzger learned Bourbon, a views and huge audiences and garnered Metzger, now 85, remains impossibly el- and more interesting than success. “The to walk that un- mainstream actress multiple awards over the years. It opened egant, gray silk cravat around his neck à la one thing people are defenseless against in defined, thin line in her first (though at a first-run theater in Washington, D.C. Fred Astaire. With his twinkling blue eyes this business is success,” he says. “It’s the when it came to the not last) hardcore and did not close for seven years. Lovely and great head of wavy silver , he looks single most corrupting influence.” laws. “I film, blowing a for- star Constance Money was invited to do like a cross between Leonard ­Bern­stein Heavily in debt, Metzger took the leap always stayed five tunate young man a July 1978 ­ pictorial. The movie and Samuel Beckett. And so we chat. He from young artist to pragmatist, quickly miles ahead of the on a park bench made a fortune and even added a phrase has a mind like a steel trap, a razor-sharp noting what sold a film and lured an audi- speed limit,” he ex- on the East River to our pop-culture lexicon. As one charac- wit (no surprise there) and a knowledge of ence: sex. He had been involved in dub- plains. Nevertheless, Audubon was never own movies again, turning out in fast suc- walkway. She takes down Marc “10½” ter goes down on her lover, she says, “I’m film—from The Birth of a Nation on—to go bing the sensational 1957 French import not in court—for more than two years with cession a series of playfully erotic (though ­Stevens’s ­humongous cock with such going to suck your cock like the inside of head-to-head with Martin Scorsese. Over And God Created ­Woman, which had turned The Twilight Girls. not yet pornographic) films. smooth and slow plunges that she makes a ripe mango.” A little later, she descends several days we meet again and again, and an unknown young actress named Bri- “They said, ‘It’s a dirty picture,’ ” recalls First came , the story of two ’s Deep Throat efforts of the again: “Ripe mango, take two.” the true story behind the legend of Henry gitte ­Bardot into a superstar. Metzger had Metzger, “and I said, ‘No, it isn’t dirty,’ and ­prostitutes—one a streetwalker, the other previous year look sophomoric. It is posi- I’ll take four. Paris unfolds—as strange and dramatic as watched the bombshell effect on an Ameri- they said, ‘Well, it’s a lousy picture,’ and I a high-class call girl—­exquisitely photo- tively poetic, with a massive payoff. Charmed out of my thong, I began to in- any of his films. can public delighted by breasts—and hun- said, ‘That’s like saying a rich man deserves graphed in various stages of nudity and is based on the vestigate this “Henry Paris” and discovered Radley Henry Metzger was born in 1929, gry for more. Metzger pounced. more justice than a poor man.’ We finally activity. Next was The Alley Cats, which fea- best-selling book by Penelope Ashe, who he directed only five hardcore films—all the year of the stock market crash, on the In the early 1960s he formed his own won.” It was one of the last big cases tried tures the only cameo of Metzger himself, was, in fact, no fewer than 24 authors, shot within two years in that brief bubble of Grand Concourse in , second son production and distribution company, by the New York State Censorship Board jumping into a swimming pool in full eve- masterminded by New York Newsday col- porn’s golden age in the 1970s—of which of Jewish parents who were hard hit by the Audubon Films (named after the first mov- before it was permanently dismantled. ning dress—“The guy for the scene didn’t umnist Mike McGrady (who later co-wrote Misty Beethoven is the crown jewel. This Great Depression. “My first word was not ie theater he attended), with a colleague Sexy films were here to stay. The only show, so I filled in.” And Carmen, Baby Linda Lovelace’s memoir Ordeal). The film small collection of films (all newly available mama but dispossessed,” says Metzger, smil- named Ava Leighton (who also worked at question that remained was, How explicit (“The total female animal”), which became contains extraordinary sequences, such as in high-definition digital transfers) includes ing. Plagued by severe allergies, he found Janus Films), and while Leighton set up the could they get? Metzger’s highest-grossing film, netting one in which a reluctant chap gets head The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, ­Naked the only sure cure: air-­conditioned movie business in New York, Metzger set off for In 1965, having read a small notice in Audubon $3 million. on the top of a red double-decker bus as it Came the Stranger, and theaters, where, as a youngster, he would Europe to seek their fortune. He screened ­Variety about a Swedish film called I, a Lickerish Quartet includes a stunning sex drives down Fifth Avenue. One can see all Maraschino Cherry. (This last work contains a often take in three or four films a day. His hundreds of films, and over the next decade ­Woman, Metzger flew to Denmark—“It scene—shot at Cinecittà studios in Rome, the familiar storefronts pass by, as well as 142 noteworthy scene featuring a young Spald- apparently even handsomer brother (now Audubon became the ­premier ­distributor of wasn’t even a screening room”—to see home of —with a couple the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. 143 Shooting on a Sunday morning—“Every with an evocative original score by ­Georges independent filmmaker’s best friend,” says Auric, the film is a haunting, lyrical tone Metzger—the crew, director and actors poem starring the luminescent Essy were onboard for hours as the bus cruised ­Persson as Thérèse and Anna Gaël as the up and down the avenue, the tourists be- delicate but rebellious Isabelle. When I ask low oblivious to the events on the top deck. Metzger what he wanted most in a female Within two years, however, Metzger lead, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Innocence.” abruptly stopped making hardcore. “I’d He found it in spades in these two young ­done everything I wanted to do. I was actresses. Using an abandoned monastery ­done,” he says. Shortly thereafter he as a boarding school, the film tells the ­story stopped making films altogether. He cites of beautiful schoolgirls who fall in love un- m one factor that played a role in his filmic der the scrutinizing gaze of parents, school- disappearance: the long, painful death mistresses and, most critically wicked of all, from cancer of his production partner at their own peers. Audubon Films, Ava Leighton, who had Thérèse and Isabelle make scrambling, been with him from the beginning. By passionate love in a bathroom stall, on the then, the mid-1980s, the industry had stone floor of the stark sanctuary with a changed, Metzger says. “And when she crucifix looming above them and, finally, died, all the fun went out of it. Her death outside the school walls, alone at last, at left a great void.” twilight on the shore of a river, their naked Unlike so many of the players in the bodies gliding into each other like merging early days of hardcore who sold their films shadow selves. for a pittance, losing out on future mil- Metzger’s allegiance to his source had lions, Metzger retained full ownership of him layer Leduc’s exact prose over the his. (Distribpix currently distributes all the lovemaking scenes, a risky cinematic con- Henry Paris films in remastered form.) vention, as so often words detract from Since that time, he has played on the fringe erotic effect. But it works. Leduc’s stark with ideas and scripts and insists he may text evokes the intense, dreamlike, anar- have another movie in him. Who knows? chistic experience of discovering sexual pleasure as a foreign land. It seems only • fitting that it was during the shooting of There is a common theme to Metzger’s Thérèse and Isabelle that Metzger fell in love films, both hard and soft, uncommon in himself, married and had a daughter. a genre designed to sexually excite: clas- Called the “finest commercial feature sic love stories of separation and recon- about adolescent lesbian love,” the film ciliation. The Dirty Girls, The Alley Cats, was popular at drive-ins—but only with Score, The Image, The Private Afternoons of an ­added-on ending (not in the book) Pamela Mann, Naked Came the Stranger and that Metzger despises. The entire film is of course Misty Beethoven all feature this a flashback told by Thérèse, who visits conceit. Unlike most Hollywood love sto- her childhood school as a woman; in the ries, the journey of separation in Metzger’s drive-in version, at the close of the film ­oeuvre inevitably involves sexual adven- she is seen climbing into a waiting car tures that not ­only are given full play but, with her…­husband. What a relief—not a more often than not, are the actual cata- lesbian after all. lysts for the couple’s reconciliation. All the “A 100 percent story was a very fright- fun and games take place in sophisticated, ening concept in 1968,” says Metzger. But in rich (no one works for a living in Metzger’s the intervening years, he has located every world) and exotic settings. “Who wants to single print with the heterosexual ending see sex in ?” Metzger says. Sex is and, he says with considerable satisfaction, portrayed as a unifying, guiltless, happy they are “buried in an unmarked grave.” ­indulgence—the utopian dream that was For me the film stands alone in Metzger’s the promise of the before oeuvre—and in the ever-evolving genre the unforeseen consequences of the 1980s that attempts to depict the complexity of sent to and fear. female eroticism. He miraculously melded Although Metzger is best known for an unapologetic, graphic depiction of fe- Misty Beethoven, I believe his masterpiece male sexual excitement with that most un- came earlier, with his 1968 film Thérèse derrated erotic component of all, the thing and Isabelle, in which love and sex meld that sexually explicit films refuse in their so deeply and cling so close to the bone headstrong prurience: love. that even Metzger the master jokester sur- And there it is, that one memorable rendered to the only serious tagline of his moment—as Jean Renoir pointed out to ­career: “A love story.” And so it is. Metzger—that makes a film. I remember In keeping with his usual practice of the absolute wonder of Thérèse’s face, basing films on works of literature—“I close up, bursting beyond the edges of the came from the editing room, and I wasn’t giant screen, as she endures Isabelle’s re- very ­secure in creating narrative story lentless lower ministrations. It is one of the ­structure”—Metzger bought the rights to most beautiful, intimate extended images a by the cult French writer Violette I have ever seen on film. And somehow, Leduc. He remembers the one thing she said miraculously, the more pleasure Thérèse to him before he made the movie: “Don’t inherits, the more innocent she becomes, make a dirty picture.” And he didn’t—and and the beauty and pain that is the deep- in doing so, Radley Metzger (not as Henry est pleasure a woman can know is revealed. Paris) made his most erotic film ever. Thanks, Radley. Shot outside Paris in somber, velvety 144 black-and-white by the great Hans ­Jura, b