Actors - John Holmes

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	Actors - John Holmes

John Curtis Estes (August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988) better known as John Holmes, John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd (after the lead character in a series of related films), was one of the most famous male porn stars of all-time, appearing in about 2,500 adult loops, stag films and porno feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s, including at least one gay feature film and a handful of gay loops. He is best known for his large penis (the exact length of which remains in debate), his involvement in the brutal Wonderland Murders in 1981 and his death from AIDS.

He was the subject of a long article in Rolling Stone magazine in 1989 and a feature length documentary, the inspiration for the character Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights
and the subject of the biopic Wonderland.

Early life

Born in Pickaway County, Ohio, as John Curtis Estes, John never knew his father, a railroad worker. John's mother, a devout Southern Baptist, married Ed Holmes a few years later and changed the family's surname to Holmes. His new stepfather proved to be a violent alcoholic who frequently beat John, the youngest of five children.

At 16, with the permission of his mother, Holmes enlisted in the United States Army and spent three years in Germany in the Signal Corps. Upon his discharge, Holmes moved to Los Angeles where he worked in a variety of jobs, including occasional homosexual prostitution. It was during his stint as an ambulance driver that he met a nurse named Sharon Gebenini. They married in 1965.

Porn career

For the next two years, Holmes and his wife lived quiet, uneventful lives. Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a warehouse, but the rigors of driving in and out of a frozen warehouse caused severe health problems, leading to a pneumothorax (lung collapse) on three separate occasions. While recovering from his illness, Holmes frequented a club in Gardena, where a man in the bathroom encouraged him to do pornography. Initially during the late 1960's, Holmes did magazine work and an occasional 8mm loop, keeping his work in porn a secret from his wife.

While the ad copy for his first few dozen loops rarely named him, those that did usually gave him a name that was nowhere near what his real first name was. In fact, one early "Swedish Erotica" brochure from 1973 has five Holmes loops listed, each of which has a different name referring to Holmes even though it is obvious from his facial features that "Fred", "Dave", "Rudy", "Big Dick" and "Stan" are all the same person.

With the success of Deep Throat (1972), The Devil in Miss Jones
(1972), and Behind the Green Door
(1973), porn had become chic although its legality was still hotly contested. Holmes was arrested during this time for pimping and pandering, but he avoided prison time by becoming an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department.

In 1973, Holmes' career began to rise with a porn series built around a private investigator named Johnny Wadd. By 1978, Holmes was reputed to be earning as much as $3,000 a day as a porn actor. He starred at a time when an attractive personality could compensate for a lack of other aesthetic characteristics and a certain amount of acting ability was still demanded of porn stars on a level that is not seen in today's porn films.

While his vocal inflection was arguably somewhat higher in pitch than one would expect for a "hard boiled private dick", most film critics and fans agreed that Holmes did demonstrate enough acting ability to keep the character of "Johnny Wadd" from being merely a banal, one-dimensional parody of Raymond Chandler's creation, the tough and uncompromising private detective Philip Marlowe.

Just how endowed was he?

Despite his acting ability, what made Holmes famous was his enormous penis. Holmes' first wife, Sharon, recalled him claiming to be 10 inches (25 cm) when he first measured himself, and at the start of his cinematic career, he was widely publicized as having a penis ranging from 12.5 to 16 inches (32 - 41 cm).

A recent attempt to discern his length by comparing images of his penis to his hand, forearm, and the heads of female costars, the most likely measurement is (22.2cm).

How many women did he have sex with?

Penis length wasn't the only statistic that was questionable. In 1981, Holmes began to spread the rumour that he had had sex with 14,000 women. However, more realistic estimates, such as that of Luke Ford, put the figure at around 3,000. If you assume Holmes' first experience with a woman occurred at 16 as he claimed, then he would have had to have made love to 700 different women a year -- 1.9 women a day -- for the 20 years that had passed.

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