John Holmes: A Life Measured in Inches

by Jennifer Sugar, Jill C. Nelson, William Margold (Foreword)

"The tree of life represents the roots of man. The branches are the different directions a man can take, live or exist. When you're dead, those that you leave behind will put you in a part of that tree. It represents what was, what is and what will be. It's eternal." -- John Holmes. Most people might, understandably, predict that the world's first porn star was a woman, but they would be wrong. John Curtis Holmes was just a simple country boy from Ohio when he moved to California in 1964. It was the infancy of hardcore, so in Holmes' wildest dreams, he could not have predicted the turbulent ride on which he had embarked by publicizing his private parts. With the fame he achieved by playing his most famous character - a gun toting detective named Johnny Wadd - came money. Holmes was pleased to spend it on his wife and mistresses, but soon was in over his head after he became addicted to cocaine. Unfortunately for Holmes, in the years that followed, his addiction led him into several desperate choices - including setting up a robbery at the home of Ed Nash, a powerful L.A. nightclub owner. The robbery resulted in one of the most gruesome, unsolved, multiple-murders in Hollywood history. Amazingly, before his untimely death in 1988, Holmes regained his momentum, remarried and rebuilt his life and career. However, the grave consequences of his addiction, his association with the Wonderland murders, and his AIDS-related death made him an infamous figure in pop culture. Digging past the stigmas, John A Life Measured in Inches - the first biography about John C. Holmes - unearths the human being behind the penis and proves that there was more to him than could be measured in inches. This biography includes material from the authors' new interviews Laurie Holmes, Bill Amerson, Bob Chinn, Julia St. Vincent, Detective Tom Lange, Detective Frank Tomlinson, Paul Thomas, Ron Jeremy, Seka, Marilyn Chambers, Candida Royalle, Rhonda Jo Petty, Dr. Sharon Mitchell, Bill Margold, and many others! Also included is additional source material containing extensive interviews Sharon Holmes, Dawn Schiller, Dr. Vonda Pelto, Ph.D., and L.A. Times film critic, Kenneth Turan. With 114 reviews of John's most notable feature films, 86 loops synopses, 3 photos sections including rare nudes, and a comprehensive 21 page filmography.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

584 pages, Paperback

First published August 8, 2008

Reviews

[Valerity (Val) · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read jam-packed with info about his life and times, his affairs, his career and the crime he was involved in that some aren't aware of. He was quite a sad character.

[Harold · Rating 5 out of 5]

This would make a great gift for the Holmes freak in your life (especially if that freak is you). The incredible filmography and descriptions of select films & loops are reasons enough to shell out for the book. The authors make use of copious source materials (all of the DVD documentaries released to date, the Porn King autobiography, Exhausted, the Rolling Stone piece, hundreds of John's surviving films, etc) and supplement their reconstruction of (and conclusions about) the King's life with interviews (new and previously published) of people who actually knew him. There are lots of facts herein that were new to me and I've researched John's life pretty extensively over the past two decades (we're from the same hometown). The recollections of the Amerson family were especially poignant.
Though the authors attempt to be as objective and unbiased as possible, it's obvious that they are fans of the Wadd, so they attack the project with a passionate adoration.
Quite an achievement.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps, the compendium of John Holmes. The depth and volume of information is quite hefty; the sources varied and balanced. A warehouse of facts, opinions, accounts, reflections, and fables; pieced together in an attempt to tell the tale of a troubled and complicated life. Do we ever learn who the real John Holmes was? Are we ever sure of the true story? Probably not; and, one questions if Holmes knew the answers himself. What the authors have achieved in this book is a depiction of the many roles John Holmes played out over the course of his life. Hero or villain, colorful character or pathetic loser, nice guy or monster; he portrayed a different persona to each person who crossed his path and we read of the John Holmes each of them knew; an enigmatic life told from many perspectives.

About the only complaint I would lodge with this book is the need for a professional editor's touch. There are passages that could have been better organized, expanded upon, or cut down for sharper focus. Several commentaries were unnecessarily repeated, as if the authors had forgotten their earlier use. Additionally, while the authors generically list their source material, there wasn't an effort made to differentiate between what was compiled from first person interviews and what was rehashed from others' works (earlier books, articles, documentaries, etc.); i.e. notes and an annotated bibliography should have been included.

[Grump · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Holmes was an Ohio country boy who had a huge penis and an abusive dad. He moved to California and married this real sourpuss nurse woman and the two of them collected knick-knacks until some guy saw John’s pipe while he was peeing at a restaurant or something. So then John started making porno loops behind his wife’s back. Then she found out but they stayed married and he became the king of porn. They had a weird relationship.

Then one day a 15-year-old girl moves into his apartment complex and they start dating. His wife is sort of ok with it until he also gets super into freebasing coke. John also steals a bunch of stuff and pisses off a lot of his porn friends. So, he makes new friends and they happen to be a bunch of junky thieves. Eventually Holmes owes them money for freebasing a bunch of their coke. To remedy this, he arranges an opportunity for the junky thieves to rob a guy named Eddie Nash. Eddie Nash is a Palestinian drug dealer and night club owner to whom Holmes has pimped out his youngster girlfriend a couple times for coke money. The junky-thieves rob Nash who then figures John Holmes has something to do with it. He has his goons beat the shit out of him and then, though it was never 100% proven in court, he had his goons bring Holmes over to the junky-thief house and help murder them all by bursting their heads open with lead pipes. Four people end up graphically dead.

John Holmes ends up going to jail for a bit because he doesn’t want to spill the beans about Eddie Nash and his goons being drug-murderers. His teenage girlfriend runs away because he keeps kicking her ass and pimping her out. But not to fear, after he gets out of jail he meets a new teenage girlfriend and starts making pornos again. Life’s pretty sweet until he gets diagnosed with AIDS. We never really find out where he got it from but there’s speculation it was from the time he made a gay porno and had sex with this guy named Joey Yale who later died from the disease. No big deal though because Big John gets an offer to make some pornos in Italy so he does what’s logical and doesn’t tell anybody and makes the pornos anyway. Luckily nobody in Italy gets AIDS from him and neither does his girlfriend so they get married of course. Then John Holmes dies from AIDS.

In the end, everybody remembers him for his big, big heart.

It’s a fucked up story. And the book is written as an oral history so that makes is kind of cool to read. On person is like “John Holmes was the sweetest smartest man that ever was.” Then the next one is like “John Holmes was a lying cokehead thieving AIDS skeleton.” So that makes it kinda fun. It’s a more complex story than you get from Wonderland or his own (very shitty) autobiography, Porn King but probably all I need to read on the subject.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The definitive biography, an oral (pun intended) history of the life and death of John Holmes. This goes in-depth into every aspect of his life including his childhood and the infamous Wonderland murders. It looks at Holmes not just as a porn star but how he shaped the industry with his life and death, and also as a legend.

[James Cobo · Rating 3 out of 5]

worth a read

As difficult to believe as it is to put down; not usually a compliment I would pay to a non-fiction book, but I'm willing to make an exception for a book this captivating and bombastic. Totally worth your time if you're interested in the subject matter in the slightest.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly complex. An interesting bio about addiction, family, sex and America, especially L.A.

[Melissa Everhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book.

Good book, if your interested in this kind of thing. L last part was not as interesting, but was good to know I guess.

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good - but long (cue, that's what she/he said joke)

[Zeka Sixx · Rating 5 out of 5]

É quase viciante essa completíssima biografia do maior (em todos os sentidos) astro pornô de todos os tempos. O livro é uma calhamaço de quase 600 páginas e mesmo assim li em poucos dias. A história de ascensão e queda desse personagem tão peculiar é minuciosamente retratada através de entrevistas, no estilo do consagrado "Mate-me por favor" (livro sobre a história do punk). De brinde, temos ainda resenhas e resumos dos principais filmes estrelados por John Holmes.
"Tell them Johnny Wadd is here".

[Garry Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. He was a bigger than life character and you hear from every person at all times through his life. Some of the people came across very self serving in their accounts and it seems he was surrounded by a lot of narcissists. Up to the 65% point is his story, 65-75% is pictures. The final 25% of the book is reviews of every film he did. I skimmed through that part. I would have been better to cut it down to just reviews of his most notable work.

[Chad Montabon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more enjoyable than I thought it would be.
It is entirely bits of conversation from people who knew him, so the format is a little off-putting in the beginning, but it builds.
By the time you get to the serious cocaine use, Dawn Schiller and Wonderland it has you completely engrossed and the multiple takes on his actions and personality draw you in.

[Clay Moeller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this during my work trip to Europe. It had some interested bits but honestly it rambles on and on about repetitive uninteresting details. Way too exhaustive and not well organized. It's like a bunch of manuscripts and notes all dumped into a single volume of unedited work. Could be about 200 pages less. That said there is some interesting social and cultural history captured here.

[BRNTerri · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a large, heavy paperback that is almost 600 pages long and weighs about 1 1/2 pounds. It contains many black and white photographs of John and his co-workers along with a lot of photos that were taken from his adult films. There are a couple nudes of just John by himself with his ‘member’ on full display. I give this 4 1/2 out of 5 stars. It’s a definite keeper for me.

I really enjoyed this book and thought it was well put together. I didn’t know much of him before reading this, except that he was a porn star, famous because of the size of his penis (there are more than a few photos of it in this book), and that he’d died from an AIDS related illness. The highlight of the book was hearing from his ex-wife, Sharon. I’d been curious about her since hearing of her in another book and was more than delighted that this book included many, many excerpts that she’d given to others in the past. My second favorite part was reading all the interviews from people who knew him, including other porn actors, some of which I’ve seen in action before or had heard of.

This was really just a sad story of a sex addicted man (a real whoremonger) who later became addicted to drugs. What some think may have caused him to get HIV is having sex with a male porn actor who died from AIDS three years later, which was the same year, 1986, that John was diagnosed with HIV. Personally, I think that if John had sex with a gay man on-screen, for pay, what in the world makes people think he wasn’t doing it in private off-screen? I feel he was bi-sexual and wasn’t comfortable with it, at least with people knowing about it, so he didn’t let anyone know, including the people he was close to. So really, if indeed he did have sex with other gay men, he could have contracted HIV from any one of them.

My two complaints about this book is that I’d like to have heard from his mother and siblings about what they thought of him becoming an adult actor and I wanted to hear more about his abusive childhood. It was only mentioned that he had an abusive step-father. But most off all, I really wanted/want to know more about something that a man named Mike Sager said. He wrote an article about John in Rolling Stone magazine in 1988 though he’d never met John. Here’s the quote from Mike that is in the book, “The main explanation was- he wasn’t gay, but he did at a time, make money for sex- there were wealthy men that would pay to be with him.” I want to know more about that. Who are these men and who knew about them? Have any of them ever been interviewed anywhere?

At the front of the book is a list of some of the people who were interviewed for the book or had been interviewed about John for other films and book publications. That is very handy. I have that section marked with a tab so I can filp to it faster when I need to. Pages 437-581 is a detailed filmography of John’s adult films and there are some photos, some with nudity, throughout that section. I really like that the authors thought to add a filmography. It was a nice, helpful touch that I appreciate.

To read more, please visit the authors website. There you’ll find photos, some of which weren’t in the book and can only be found online.

[Bobby Daugherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well researched biography of the late John Holmes. It covers his impoverished youth, tenure in the Army, work as a fork lift operator in a frozen chicken warehouse, career in pornography, drug addiction, Wonderland murders, and final hours suffering from AIDS. A difficult guy to like, but a tragic story none the less of a troubled man that could of had a simple and happy life, but compromised his principles and continued to give in to impulse until it was to late.