L.A. Stories: My Life with Linda Wong, Rene Bond, and others – A Conversation with Stewart Dell, Part 1

Stewart Dell may not be an instantly familiar name in the world of adult film.

He is however a unique, Zelig-like figure who was involved in the industry from the 1960s to the 1980s in remarkable ways – from being an underage crew member on low-budget Los Angeles productions to relationships with some of the highest profile stars in the business, and culminating with a central role in the biggest scandal ever to hit the business.

Along the way are stories of performers including Rene Bond, Linda Wong, Linda Lovelace, Sulka, Traci Lords, and Demi Moore (!), filmmakers and producers including Harry Novak, Matt Cimber, and Bethel Buckalew, large quantities of drugs, the Chippendales, and much more.

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1.     Beginnings

How did you first become aware of the adult film industry?

My father made a long string of pornos in Los Angeles starting in the late 1960s. He enlisted me to crew on them. I was cheap labor, I guess. I didn’t have much of a choice.

Why? How old were you?

I was born in May 1954, and first helped him in 1968/69 – so I was around 15 when I got started.

And these were sex films?

Yes, softcore at first, then they evolved to being explicit, hardcore movies.

And when you were underage, you helped on all of them?

Pretty much.

In that case, perhaps we should start with your father: who was he and what was his background?

He went by the name Perry Dell. He was an alpha character. Good-looking, confident. Stout, strong, built like a bull. He was a cop in Vegas who married my mom when she was a casino croupier. Stardust Casino, I think.

But he was a hustler, always looking for an edge to get ahead, always working on a new scheme. Dishonest, basically (laughs).

What was your relationship like with him?

He had little patience with me growing up. I was a mess: I was shy, dyslexic, sickly, and quiet, and I had a stutter that made me self-conscious so I just wanted to be invisible. My father was rough with me, occasionally beating me.

So family life was difficult?

Yeah, and we moved around a lot which meant I never settled. Over the years, we seemed to live in every low-rent housing project in Vegas. I recently figured that I attended six different elementary schools, two middle schools, and seven high schools.

I remember our house burned down once. I found out later that my father hadn’t been making the payments on it, so he collected the insurance instead.

That was typical of him. Did he set fire to the house? Who knows, but he was a cop… so no one asked any questions.

What did he do in the Las Vegas Police Department?

He was the Director of Media Relations. That meant he got to know all the rich and wealthy characters in town. This was the late 1950s, the golden era of the strip. He knew the casino owners, the entertainers, the politicians. Two of his closest friends were Herb Tobman and Allan Sachs, who went on to own the Stardust and a few other hotels.

Was he a police officer throughout your childhood?

Nooo. He left the Las Vegas Police Department in 1961, and eventually conned a job as a ‘management efficiency expert.’

Then, when I was 13 or 14, he left us. He just announced he was going to be an actor in Hollywood, walked out, and we didn’t see him for a year after that.

What was life like after your father left?

I’d never had much communication with him so I didn’t miss him.

But my teenage years were tough. We moved around some more before ending up in San Dimas, east Los Angeles. I skipped school a lot: I had teenage anxiety which led to suicidal ideation and was diagnosed with a teenage form of bipolar disorder.

You lived alone with your mom?

I had three sisters. I was insecure so I wanted their approval. In fact, I’ve being trying to get approval from women ever since! (laughs) They ignored me, as did my mom.

My uncle Frank (Dell) was always around. He was in the Hell’s Angels so violence was never far away. And well… his ex-wife, Sue, had sex with me when I was 13. My only coping mechanism was pot, which Uncle Frank gave me in large quantities.

I ended up running away from home at 14.

How did that work out?

It was more difficult than I expected! I headed for the Sunset Strip and slept rough there with a bunch of runaways. After that, I hitchhiked around, smoked a lot of weed, changed my name from Stewart to Nelson, crashed in a few communes, but couldn’t find work so I eventually returned home.

Was there any pressure to get you back into school? After all, you were still just 14…

They tried but I had no interest, so I took part-time gardening jobs instead. Then my mother lost our home due to foreclosure so we moved to a new house on Waring St, three blocks from Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, with my uncle Frank and his drug supplier Dick.

Money was a problem…

Did your father help out in any way?

Nope. But he came back one day – and he’d changed completely.

How so?

He’d always been this hard-ass cop, and now he was a hippie – his hair was longer and he had a goatee beard!

Had his character changed as well?

Yep. Before, he’d been a strict discipline guy but now he was easy-going and relaxed. We hung out, smoked weed, and he told me that his acting was taking off: he’d been in a few films, formed his own theater company, and was directing plays.

And then, when we got really high… that’s when he told me he was also shooting sex films.

Perry Dell in No Tears for the Damned (aka The Las Vegas Strangler (1969))

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2.     Adult Films

What did he tell you about the films?

He’d set up a film company. I can’t remember the name of it. Something like Blue Persuasion, or Blue Entertainment. He started by shooting individual scenes of hippie girls writhing on a bed, and had just moved into 16mm softcore sex features that he wrote and directed himself. He said he was making a new film almost every week, shooting over a three-day weekend to take advantage of a single day rate for the rental film equipment.

He saw it as a stepping-stone to the mainstream. He would often mention ‘Barbarella’ with Jane Fonda as an example of what he wanted to do.

He asked me and my sister if we wanted to crew on the movies.

You were only 15 – and being asked to help make sex films. What were your parents thinking?!

Well, my mother was having mental issues after losing her job and we were about to get evicted again, so she wasn’t really present. She had a 5150 hold, which is when the health authorities detain a person against their will for their own protection because they’re a danger to themselves.

Perry came over to our home one night and presented the idea of working on his films. And if your parents think it’s a good idea…

So you went to work on Perry’s adult film sets?

Yes. I was going to Hollywood High Continuation School on and off during the week, and I started doing the sex films at weekends.

What do you remember about the first film you worked on?

I remember being greeted the first day by an actress in her early 30s actress with breast implants, who appeared in some of Perry’s films, and was also one of his girlfriends on the side. I have no idea what her name was.

I’m pretty sure that first film was shot in a Studio City apartment, and I remember a balding guy and an anorexically thin girl were the actors. Perry kept going over to the guy and whispering for him to “fuck slower”, and then I remember Perry explaining to me that the key was not to show an erect penis. That was real important, he said.

That film was called something like ‘Nympho Nights.’

And you got paid for the work?

Yes. $50 for 3 days’ work. I gave some to my mother, but pretty soon I moved out and got a place of my own. It was the first time I had money of my own and I spent most of it on weed.

How did you feel about working on the films?

I didn’t much like porn at that age, but I guess it made me feel a little more accepted by Perry.

What were you doing on the sets?

Perry put everything together during the week. He wrote the scripts, hired the actors, found the locations. Then at the weekend, he directed everything. My Uncle Frank wanted to get into the film business so he started doing the camerawork and sometimes they hired a lighting guy. I did anything else that needed to be done.

At least I wasn’t mopping the actor’s faces, which is what my older sister, Cathy, did.

How many films did you work on?

Over 50, for sure. It seemed like it was one or two each month for three years until I was 18. I started in 1969 and I helped Perry until 1972.

Do you remember the titles?

A few. Dr. Studley (1969) stood out because it was one of the first – and it was distributed widely. ‘Fifi’s Weekend,’ or perhaps it was called Weekend with Fifi (1969), was another? I have memories of Twilight Affair. I think another one was Girl’s School Scandal (1969) because that title always cracked me up. Oh, I remember Rindercella (1970) and Class of 69 (1970) too.

You have to understand, they all blur into each other. Especially after the first few. They may not even have had a title when we shot them. Or the title was changed by the time it was released. Once or twice, I saw posters for a movie playing at a local theater and I recognized it as one of ours from the one sheet or the newspaper ad!

Do you know what names Perry and Frank used in their films?

They were paranoid about being busted so everything they did was full of subterfuge. Most of their films had no credits, I think. Or if they did, they used fake names. They also kept my name far away given I was underage.

I remember for a few films Perry became Richard Zachary Evans. I think that was a tribute to the Welsh actor, Richard Burton, who he thought he looked like – though he looked more like Ernest Borgnine. Then he was Hardi Burton. I think that name was because he liked Richard Burton’s readings of the poetry of Thomas Hardy.

When the films became hardcore, their paranoia just got worse. Perry told me once that there was a warrant out for his arrest because of something dumb he’d done, unrelated to the films. He was only free because of his contacts in the LAPD. But he was always looking over his shoulder. That was how he lived.

Did your relationship with your father improve during this period?

I didn’t have a lot of respect for him. He was still the same hustler.

I remember once, a camera person jokingly asked if it was child pornography if the crew were children…

And all this time, you’re still going to school?

Well, from the Fall of 1970, I started going to Valley Free School, which was a progressive, hippie place. Perry paid for it – on condition that I continued helping out on his films. Of course, when he was short of porn money, the school payments stopped… so sometimes I was asked to pay my own school fees. That was Perry…

Where did Perry get the money to fund the films?

Anyone! One of my teenage friends was Rudy Sachs, the son of Al Sachs, who I mentioned became the owner of the Stardust Hotel in Vegas. Rudy was excited to make an adult film so he used his old man’s credit card to make a film with Perry!

Al found out but instead of getting mad he decided to finance some of Perry’s sex films at $5k a pop. The deal was that Perry would return the investment plus 25% of the profits.

And I’m pretty sure that ‘Dr. Studley’ was financed by Manny Conde, a Jewish Cuban exile filmmaker who Perry became friends with. Perry wanted Manny’s money so pretended he was Jewish too – and did the whole Jewish act! He saw it as all part of his acting career. He stayed close to Manny for years.

Where were Perry’s company offices?

He ran his porn business out of a small office in the back of an acting school in a red brick building near Gordon and Santa Monica Blvd.

The building belonged to Ivan Markota who Perry had met through a mutual friend, Marvin Miller. Marv owned a mail-order business specializing in pornographic films and books. A year or two later, Marv was arrested – and the court case, Miller v. California, was one of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions which defined obscenity.

Ivan was a one-time ballet-dancer, boxer, and failed actor in Hollywood in his early 40s, and he acted in some of Perry’s theater plays. When Ivan realized that he wasn’t going to make it as an actor, he started an acting school – the Van Mar Acting Academy. Ivan was ex-military, belligerent and aggressive, and he and Perry clashed all the time but they became friends – and they partnered on a string of sex films together. Ivan would get the money, and Perry would make them.

Ivan’s school was successful later, and he went on to give a start to actors like Bryan Cranston and Mariska Hargitay who he taught his method to.

How was the building used?

Simple. It was an acting school for Ivan during weekdays, then at nights and weekends it turned into a porn production stage for Perry.

What do you remember about it?

It was always neat and clean, and at the center was a 20-feet high, 30-feet wide white cyclorama where you could hang stage lights. In the side rooms, there were racks with rows and rows of 16mm canisters. Perry had a small office at the back with some of his softcore film posters on the wall.

How did Perry find actors?

Mainly through a guy named Hal Guthu. Hal had a Melrose Ave office-studio. Hal handled all the actors in the early porn films, before getting cold feet in the mid-1970s and after that he just did low budget mainstream or soft T&A films.

Did you get to know any of the actors?

A few of them stand out. The main one was Rene Bond. She was only two or three years older than me, but had a maternal quality with me from the moment we met. She would seek me out each time we worked together, ask how I was doing, and generally made sure I was on the right track.

I worked on a few films with her, and she was always full of happiness and laughter. Then one time, she came on set looking sad. She told me she was breaking up with her boyfriend. Or husband, I can’t remember which. That night she told me she didn’t want to be alone, and so I went back to her place. I seem to remember it was in North Hills, near San Fernando Valley. For some reason, I want to say she lived on Natick Avenue. She had a sweet house that was tastefully decorated and comfortable. I spent the night with her, and she made breakfast for us the next day.

Rene Bond

Did your relationship continue after that?

Yes, I saw her for a few months, like a big sister-girlfriend. She wasn’t a big party girl unlike many of the other girls in the business, so we stayed in, cooked, played games, and watched TV a lot. She was close to her mom and I got to know the two of them pretty well. Her mom was a scream, and the two of them were best friends. We often went out and did things together as a threesome.

What was she like as a person away from the set?

Rene was funny and bubbly, but she was also pretty serious about becoming a regular entertainer, an actress, or whatever. She could’ve been great on a sitcom if some studio exec had given her a chance. She was just fun and she exuded warmth.

How did your relationship end?

We were mainly just friends. We were both probably feeling lost in life at that time, and perhaps were looking for something or someone that would give our lives more structure or meaning. We helped each other through a few months and then drifted apart. It was never too serious, but I really liked her.

I messed around with a few other people I met from them being in Perry’s films, but their names are lost to me. Apart from Rene, the one that everyone was in awe of was Suzanne (Fields). She was pretty and fun, and everyone congregated around her, but she was married, or had a boyfriend, who was named Michael, and she disappeared back to him every time the film ended. He was a rock musician, I think. Everyone wanted to get with her.

But yeah, I would see Rene on the cover of magazines all the time after that. In that small world, she became a big star.

Rene Bond

Who was the core group making these sex films with you?

Perry directed everything, and Uncle Frank was always on camera, mostly using a hand-held. Frank’s best friend was a cameraman named Kenny Gibb, and he gave Frank and I a crash course on everything about how to shoot, and was sometimes on the set.

I did the lighting: we had one reflector on a stand and an additional reflector for the dark areas of people’s bodies… My friend Rudy was sometimes the grip, Frank’s wife Jackie did sound on Nagra plus she did wardrobe, make-up, catering and most everything else.

I had another friend, Steve, who I did drugs with, who sometimes performed in the sex scenes using the name ‘Nick Sinister.’

You mentioned that Perry and Frank were worried about being busted – did that ever happen?

There was a strict protocol that rarely changed: everyone would meet at Norm’s restaurant in West Hollywood, and then we’d car-pool to the secret location to avoid cops.

We got busted once. When the cops knocked on the door, Perry saw what was about to happen and shouted to everyone to pretend they lived in the mansion while he hid the film equipment. Then he let the cops in and they couldn’t find anything to incriminate us.

I mean, I was 16 but they didn’t think to check my age.

When you weren’t shooting in Ivan’s acting studio, what locations would you shoot at?

The irony was that most were shot indoors but we usually went to a different house with a beautiful swimming pool. Half the time they seemed to be in the Valley. Hal Guthu often hooked us up. One place was supposedly owned by a former Olympic swimmer and his swinger wife, and had a big orange grove surrounded by a high wooden fence.

You said that Perry aspired to be in the mainstream film business. Were all of his early films pornographic?

He once started a company with his new wife, Merriana, and Uncle Frank. Marriana was a Jamaican ex-hooker, who he’d busted in Vegas for prostitution years earlier when he was a cop – ironically when Al Sachs called the police to have her removed from his premises.

Well, she was now Perry’s wife – although that didn’t stop him from having sex with some of the women he hired for his films. Like I say, he was a crook.

Their company was called ‘Merridell Productions’ and Merriana persuaded them to make a documentary about hookers in Vegas. I guess it was her area of expertise…

Was the film produced?

Yes – ‘The Ways of the Harlot.’ Perry got a lot of publicity for it. I remember seeing articles in the newspapers. Perry told me it did ok, and made money for them.

You say that Merriana was a hooker: did you know anything about her background?

A little. By the time the film came out, Perry had created a whole fake backstory for her. She wasn’t a hooker he insisted, rather she’d been a dancer in Vegas, had studied acting in New York, and had a string of TV credits to her name. Perry turned her into a mini-celebrity for a time – which was incredible as she’d only had a single walk-on role in a Walter Matthau film, and then nothing.

She was bald though, and that made her stand out (laughs).

Did you work for other filmmakers at this time, or just for Perry?

I would say about 80% were for Perry but he also sent me out to work for friends. One was Alan Roberts who made a lot of sex films back then – always using different names. He had a face only a mother could love and was emotionally unstable, but he was ambitious and he often hired me.

He loved Rene more than anything, and he’d have put her in every scene of every movie if he could! (laughs). I did a few regular films, and I remember working on The Sexpert (1972) and Sex Clinic Girls (1973) – both of those were Alan’s and they were around the time I was seeing Rene, I think.

After three years of making sex films, Perry stopped production. What happened?

Basically, he stopped paying child support and apparently was being pursued by the authorities. He was worried that his adult films would catch up with him and make things worse because he hadn’t been paying taxes on any of the film income either.

So he and Merriana fled the country and went to Rome, Italy, and he tried to make it as an actor there. He’d heard about American actors, like Clint Eastwood, who had been successful in Italian films and it seemed like a good idea to him. He went over there, and he told me he acted in spaghetti westerns and sex comedies.

Perry Dell in …E il terzo giorno arrivò il corvo (1973)

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3.     Life After Perry Dell

What did you do for money when Perry’s XXX film work dried up?

I was broke. I lost my apartment so I couch surfed. I ended up living with a girlfriend in Santa Monica, near the beach.

We were both 20, and our only interests in common were sex, pot, and acid. She introduced me to LSD and we tripped, day and night, for a while.

How did that turn out?

Not great. My brain got fried, and we got married for a hot moment. She was tall and beautiful, of Slavic descent, and was studying to be a nurse. It didn’t last long, about a year. We split up, and I heard she became a hooker. Lake Tahoe. She killed herself by walking into the lake one night and drowning after doing LSD. It was sad.

It was my Uncle Frank that helped get me back on my feet after that.

What was he doing?

Uncle Frank was even more of a crook than Perry in some ways (laughs).

He was a high school drop-out but he’d taught himself everything – lighting, photography, auto mechanics. He got a pilot’s license and around this time, he started running drugs into the country from Mexico. Basically, he learned how to pimp out the planes they used so they could fly faster, and outrun the border police (laughs).

One of his closest friends was a guy named Bethel ‘Buck’ Buckalew – another crook! A professional gambler and securities trader, Buck was a pilot too. He was part Irish, part native-American. He was larger-than-life, a jovial and friendly rogue, with long, blonde greying hair and a handle-bar mustache. He and Uncle Frank got on like a house on fire. He’d flown blood diamonds out of South Africa, so he was all in on the drug running.

Did they make a lot of money doing that?

I have no idea – but they seemed to do it out of a sense of adventure rather than to get rich. They’d fly across country high on acid! It’s crazy that they survived.

How did Frank help you?

I had a job working in a bike shop, but he got me to quit and join him as a technician on films.

Frank and Buck kept up regular work in films. Frank had stayed in the film business after Perry left, and he and his friend Kenny Gibb had become a pretty successful camera team working in Los Angeles. Buck started out as the production manager on the same films, so that’s how they knew all each other.

They were good to me, and found me work on the crew on many productions.

What were the films you worked on?

Mostly low budget stuff, a lot of sex films, but also non-union commercials for all the car companies, like Honda, Toyota, and Datsun.

What do you remember about those sex films?

Buck became friendly with Harry Novak, who had his own film company, Boxoffice International Pictures.

Buck and Harry were both a generation older than Uncle Frank and Kenny, so they saw things differently: they weren’t interested in hardcore sex films but they knew sex was profitable. They liked cornball humor instead, with country bumpkin girls being chased around farms by big, muscular farmhands.

So they teamed up and made a string of films – all of them pretty dumb, but I worked on a bunch of them and Harry paid the crew well. These were films like Country Cuzzins (1972), Sassy Sue (1973), and The Dirty Mind of Young Sally (1973).

Rene Bond often starred in these types of films.

Harry loved Rene because she looked so wholesome! They often hired her and so I saw her around. It was difficult for me because Rene was… Rene, and I stayed in love with her forever. You couldn’t help it. She was a sweetheart, and she looked out for everyone and made sure I didn’t feel uncomfortable.

Having said that, she had a new Italian boyfriend in tow who thought he was too cool for school. Arrogant guy, who said he was going to be a big-time actor, but who basically lived off her. They might even have gotten married, I don’t know.

Rene Bond

You show up in the credits of some films that you worked on – like The Dicktator (1974), The Love Butcher (1975), Alias Big Cherry (1975), Deep Jaws (1976), and Fantasm (1976) but not others. How did that happen?

To be honest, I tried to keep my name off the films. I figured the fact that they were sex films would turn out to bite me at some stage and I didn’t want that hanging over me for the rest of my life.

But Kenny always used his real name in the credits, and Uncle Frank did sometimes – until he was on the run for not paying child support to one of his five wives. Then he started calling himself ‘Jonathan Silveira’ for a while. I have no idea how he came up with that name.

You were working steadily during that time: do any films stand out in particular?

I remember a western that Uncle Frank and I did that was shot in Utah. A Dirty Western (1975), it was called. We shot it on the same set where the TV series Gunsmoke was filmed. That was a change from Los Angeles bedrooms.

I remember a battle of wills between the director (Joseph F. Robertson) and the leading actress (Barbara Bourbon): she didn’t want to do the explicit scenes and claimed she’s been misled. Of course, it wasn’t true, but it was a problem because she was in nearly every sex scene. There was a standoff for a while and she demanded extra money to go ahead.

What about The First Nudie Musical (1976) – which you, Uncle Frank, and Kenny Gibb all worked on?

Oh yes! We were all grips. I think Buck worked on that one as well. That was the biggest film I’d done – wasn’t it Paramount who produced it?! It was a big deal.

And we all fell in love with Cindy (Williams) – who became Shirley from ‘Laverne and Shirley.’ She was like Rene. Completely adorable. I remember talking with her a lot on the set. She said that she was the only one who had a clause in her contract NOT to take her clothes off. Which was very unlike Rene (laughs). I loved Cindy.

The movie actually turned out well but I think the studio was embarrassed so they buried it. It was one of the better films I was involved in.

Do you remember any movies that you considered the worst?

Well… those early pornos that Perry made were barely even real films. But in terms of films that tried to be good… Hollywood High (1975) was a terrible experience. Uncle Frank became friends with a couple, Patrick (Wright) and Tallie (Cochrane), who thought they were big-time movie producers – but they didn’t have a clue. They stiffed us on the payment too.

Did you ever run into Rene Bond again?

I think the last time I saw her was when I was the cameraman on Fantasm (1976) and Fantasm Comes Again (1977). It was great to see her again – she screamed when she saw me – and she took me out for a meal. She’d split from the Italian guy. Something had changed in her though. I found her different.

How so?

She’d become all about making money. I don’t know if it was because she was nearing the end of her film career and she was trying to cash in while she still could? Maybe. She’d had a boob job, she was doing more personal appearances, and she had a mail order fan club. I think she may have been dancing or stripping too, but I can’t remember for sure. But I always loved seeing her. I still can’t believe she died in her 40s.

And all this time, Perry was working in Italy?

Yes. I knew that Manny Conde [the Jewish Cuban exile filmmaker] was trying to get him back into the U.S. and get his child support case thrown out due to the statute of limitations.

From time to time, Perry returned briefly to make a film or two with Manny. When he did, he always called me and wanted to know if I could work for him for a little pay. Same old Perry.

What were the films you made with Perry then?

The Dicktator (1974) and Deep Jaws (1976). Both of them were more fun to make than to watch because all the old gang got back together. Perry directed, Buck did the production management, Manny shot them, and Manny’s and Buck’s families did most of the crew work – including their wives and kids! I was the assistant director and gaffer on both.

Both of them were softcore – which was less common for sex films at the time.

None of these old guys wanted to do explicit sex films. They were like the last holdouts, making strange surreal T&A films that nobody was that interested in seeing (laughs).

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4.     Linda Wong

How was your life outside of working on the movies in the mid 1970s?

I suffered from depression and that drove me to cocaine. But, in that respect, I was in good company: all the crews – especially the guys who worked on commercials where the deadlines were much more aggressive – all used coke to stay awake for the long hours.

Did cocaine become a problem for you?

Hell yeah! Cocaine is always a problem… It got worse when I started to take Quaaludes to counterbalance the cocaine and come down off a high. It was a rollercoaster ride. The only person who loved ludes more than me was Linda Wong.

How did you first meet Linda?

I remember seeing her at the Hippopotamus Restaurant in San Francisco. I’d gone up there because there was a writer’s strike in L.A., and so I took a job on a hardcore sex film, Oriental Babysitter (1977).

The thing is… I could swear that was in May 1975. I’d just turned 21, and Linda was 24. I’m sure of it. But I see that the film was released in February 1977 so I’m still trying to figure that out.

What were your first impressions of Linda?

Oh, she was a class act. Refined, beautiful, and funny. She was smart too. Really intelligent and well-educated. I hate to express it like this… but she was very different from the other people I met in hardcore films. In fact, my initial thought was – what is a girl like her doing in a business like this?

We got along great right from the start. We just talked and talked. Her real name was Linda Seki – and that’s how I knew her.

Linda Seki (left), 1969

What did she tell you about herself?

She was basically a beautiful nerd. She’d excelled in school, always on the honor roll, a girl scout, a member of the debating society. She’d done some modeling when she was a teenager, gotten married – too young – at 19, then divorced and she went back to college.

She worked for a time in Melvin Belli’s law office in San Francisco – he was a famous impresario who won huge settlements in personal injury cases for celebrity clients.

We just clicked and we started going out immediately.

What do you remember about the ‘Oriental Babysitter’ production?

It was a world away from the softcore tease films that Novak, Buck, and Uncle Frank had done. This was hardcore – and proud of it! The director, Sam (aka Anthony Spinelli), had no fear or paranoia about being a pornographer. He was part of a new generation of porno filmmakers. He was exactly where he wanted to be: shooting sex films with a real budget.

But he cared that he was making a good film too. The night I met Linda was the eve of the production – and Sam took everyone out to celebrate and to get to know each other. That would never have happened on the early films with Perry.

How did your relationship with Linda progress after that?

We were inseparable for a while. We didn’t need much money because we lived cheaply. We hung out at the beach or hitchhiked around Northern California for weeks at a time. It was carefree, and it was the first time I felt really close to someone.

I proposed to her and we got married at a hippie commune in Marin. I still have some photos of the ceremony. Lots of flowers and food.

Linda Wong

What did you make of her appearing in adult films?

I didn’t much like it but I lived with it, I guess. She always promised to quit porn but she kept going back. She was the first Asian to become a star so she was this big novelty and was well paid for a few days’ work. The temptation to do the films instead of getting a real job was always there. She could make four or five films in a year instead of working in an office…

Did she talk about how she felt about them?

Oh, she didn’t take them seriously but she liked many of the people she came across. Occasionally she joked about anyone who took themselves too seriously – and one of those was John Holmes. She would make me laugh by impersonating him walking onto the set as if he were the most important person in the world.

Did she have a drug problem when you were together?

Well, she popped Quaaludes like candy. Nothing heavier than that. But I got the impression that behind her happy-go-lucky exterior she was trying to numb some pain. One time, she told me her father raped her as a teenager, so, you know, there was that…

Linda Wong

And you continued to work on films while you were with Linda?

Oh sure. In ‘75 or ‘76, I remember that Uncle Frank, Kenny (Gibb), Buck, and I did a sequence of films for Matt Cimber, Jayne Mansfield’s ex-husband. It was like… we came as a package, all together. I was a camera assistant on those films.

Which movies were those?

There was Alias Big Cherry (1975), Candy Tangerine Man (1975), Lady Cocoa (1975), and The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976).

They were fun, because it was like an old boy’s reunion every time, and Cimber was such an old warhorse with great stories about Jayne that he’d share after hours. He seemed to know everyone in the business.

I remember meeting Linda Lovelace when we were shooting ‘Alias, Big Cherry’ in the Silver Slipper Casino in Las Vegas. Linda was dating Ernie Roebuck, one of the grips on the movie who we often worked with. When the casino management found out Linda Lovelace was on the set, they accused us of making an X-rated movie. They shut us down and kicked us out of the casino. There was still this huge fear of XXX films, even then.

Did you have any contact with Linda Lovelace?

Oh yes. Linda (Lovelace) found out I was married to Linda Wong and one evening during the shoot, she invited me to her suite to ask about what the sex film industry was like at that point… this was only a few years after Deep Throat (1972) but I guess it had changed a lot and so she was curious. We imbibed copious amounts of substances together – she knocked it all back without blinking and we had a great night.

How did your relationship with Linda (Wong) develop?

We separated after 9 months. I think we had a drunken fight over a movie that she was going to do. I told her she was doing the fuck films because she needed the money for drugs… and that she did drugs because she needed to hide. I shouldn’t have said all that. She walked out, and it was over. Such a quick end after a happy relationship. We had been close.

I heard many years later that she died of a heroin overdose, but I never saw her again after we finished.

What happened after your marriage to Linda?

After I split with Linda, I was depressed and was prescribed Lithium.

Buck took me under his wing and offered me work helping him with the pre-production of a biker movie, ‘Ramblin’ Man’, with Peter Fonda and Connie Stevens.

That’s a step up from what you’d all been working on…

Yes, it was still an independent movie but it had a bigger budget, for sure. The producer was Rick Robinson, a tall, thin, early 40s, ex-deputy sheriff with an Afro, who’d made a few successful sex films and was moving into the big time. The money guy was someone named Steven Dushere, though none of us ever saw him.

What did your work consist of?

I was based in the production offices which were at Rick’s Northridge home, and we sat around the backyard pool setting it up. Rick and his wife were nudist swingers, and, perhaps because I was so much younger than the rest of the team, they took a shine to me. Rick and I would ride his Harleys to a private nudist colony in Topanga Canyon called Elysian Fields.

I hung around with Peter Fonda for a few weeks, and that was fun. He was a laid back guy that managed to be both privileged and counter-cultural at the same time. Smart guy.

What was Buck doing on the film?

Buck was supposed to be directing it, I think – or maybe he was just the production manager. But he was notorious for cutting product placement deals on the side – and pocketing the extra cash. So when he worked on straight movies, he’d promise a company that he’d show their product in return for a modest payment. I remember he once cut a deal with a hamburger joint in return for free burgers for life!

On this biker movie, he spent most of his time making deals with Harley Davidson, Tony Lama boots, Resistol cowboy hats, and Heublein for some liquor.

What happened to the movie?

It never got made because some of Dushere’s money was from Saudi investors and that clashed with another producer’s Israeli money so it all fell apart. I think that Rick eventually got a film project going with Peter Fonda after that, and that turned out to be High-Ballin’ (1978), but Buck and I weren’t involved.

Buck felt bad so he hired me as the production manager on a TV movie he was making. It was called My Boys are Good Boys (1979) and it had an oldies cast that included Ida Lupino and Ralph Meeker. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind, and I got pissed when Ralph Meeker and his wife turned up drunk one day, and I got into a fight with them. I got fired. The film was terrible, anyway.

By that time, Perry had returned to the U.S. permanently – is that right?

Yeah, one day, he called me from Italy and announced he was coming back on a fake passport. He said he had a new name… which was his old porn name, ‘Richard Zachary Evans.’

What brought him back?

While he was making westerns in Italy, he’d become friends with a film guy named Phillip Yordan. Philip had won an Oscar for writing ‘El Cid’ (1961) which had starred Charlton Heston, so he was a big deal. He supposedly had the financial backing from a group of Mormons, who wanted him make a biopic of Brigham Young, the founder of their church. So Phillip and Perry put that movie, Brigham (1977) together, and I was a production assistant.

A religious subject is quite a stretch from the porn films Perry had just been making a few years earlier…

Right?! Plus Perry hated all religion… so go figure.

But it went well enough for the Mormons to invest in another flick, Cataclysm (1980), which a crazy guy, Phillip Marshak, directed. Marshak was a strange choice too, because it was around that time that he made a porn version of Dracula. [Dracula Sucks (1978)].

What was it like working on those two films?

Actually, it was great. Both films took almost a year, and the Mormons spared no expense so when any new equipment was needed – cameras, motorhomes, cars, you name it – they just bought it for us. They treated me particularly well and gave me some money at the end which allowed me to finally take a break from film work.

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5.     Life After Film

So it’s 1978, you’re 24, and you have a lot of life behind you already. What do you do next?

I started a skate business in May ‘78. That, and I used a lot of cocaine, dealt it briefly too. Same with Quaaludes too. I was diagnosed a manic depressive.

What was the skate business?

It was a roller-skate business on Hermosa Beach. I formed a company called Dell Leisure Company Inc, and through that I started ‘Street Skates.’ I got the idea from my drug dealer who was involved in a business called ‘Cheap Skates’ in Venice. We got some good publicity in the newspapers.

Was it successful?

Are you kidding…? It was the golden age for roller-skating on the beaches in SoCal, and we did great.

Hermosa had the Strand which was a 20-mile bike/pedestrian path along the beach from Redondo to Santa Monica.

I found a building on 13th St and the Strand on Hermosa Beach which had been the Strand Bath House in the early 1900s. It’d deteriorated badly so I got a good deal. The problem was that I had to bring Perry onboard as a silent partner because I didn’t have the credit history to sign the building lease. Obviously, that wasn’t a good idea.

Did Perry mess things up?

First, we had a burglary, and Perry negotiated with the insurance company that he had to be on site instead of me going forward. Then I found that he’d stolen $30k from the company. I would’ve taken legal action, but it was too expensive to pursue. Perry agreed to buy me out but he stiffed me on the payments, so I was left with nothing.

Did Perry keep the store going?

In 1982 he turned it into a health spa and collected membership money from hundreds of people… and then disappeared with all the cash.

Same old Perry, I tell ya.

What did you do next?

I got married, got my wife pregnant, and figured I needed a job, so I enrolled in Ivan Marcoda’s acting school.

Ivan, the same guy who’d been the early porn partner of Perry?

Yes (laughs), but by this stage he’d become respectable and his acting classes were very popular.

What was it like being back at Ivan’s – where you’d shot porn a decade earlier?

Ha! (laughs) Ivan was terrified – and kept insisting that I could never mention his old porno days.

Did you get much acting work?

I did some TV commercials – for Heavenly Ice Cream, and I got some modeling work – and then I got a part in Choices (1981) which was one of Demi Moore’s first films. I played a high school football player. No one expected Demi to become a big star and we hung out for a while. She was sweet and down to earth.

It was ok but my heart wasn’t in it.

Stewart Dell in ‘Choices’ (1981)

Did it pay the bills?

It didn’t even pay for my drugs: I had an expensive habit that was getting worse by the day.

I didn’t have much money, so I went back and took crew jobs on some porn films.

Do you remember any titles?

Sulka’s Wedding (1983), Corrupt Desires (1983), Sulka’s Daughter (1984). A few others.

What were they like?

Boy, I’d seen some things to that point but nothing like transexual porn… that was a crazy trip. The crew saw that I was uncomfortable and called me ‘Stella’ as a joke. I’m even credited as Stella Dell on those films, I think (laughs).

I forget the name of the guy who produced them (Kim Christy): he offered me a full-time job in his porn films going forward. I did a few more with him but then I turned him down. I wanted to do something different.

How did you come to set up a film company of your own?

I sold cocaine to Steve Banerjee who’d created the Chippendales, and he gave me a job behind the cash register in his club wearing a skin-tight stripper costume – occasionally, I took part in the stage shows there.

But I wanted something more serious, so one day I went to Steve and explained that I wanted to set up a film company that would produce new films and also license old films for release. He liked the idea and gave me a loan to fund the company, and he took a stake in it. I called the company Oceans International Inc.

I never paid the money back to Steve – he killed himself in jail ten years later.

Where was Oceans based?

I ran into Alan Roberts – the film director who I worked for back when I was a teenager. I rented office space from him on Holloway Road – and despite having no money, I built up a catalog of twenty titles. I even got Roger Corman and David Winters to agree to have me do pre-sales for their upcoming films.

Alan was brilliant and helped me get established, but he was a crazy psychopath. One night he called and asked for help robbing a store because he’d heard the owner had gone to jail so he wouldn’t notice…

And did you help him?

Yeah… we broke in and took a whole mess of leather goods. My wife was happy, though she never knew where her new handbags came from.

What were your expectations for your company?

It was difficult. I specialized in workout videos, old TV series, low budget features, and public-domain movies. I went to the Cannes festival where I took a booth with Alan, and I started to make deals that would generate revenue and build it up. It wasn’t easy, but I had high hopes.

But that all disappeared the day that Traci Lords walked into my office. Nothing was the same after that.

Traci Lords

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Up next, Stewart meets Traci Lords and finds himself in the middle of the biggest scandal to hit the adult industry.

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