Porn star ends silence Deep Throat's Reems reclaims life
TORONTO -- He wasn't born Harry Reems. But the 1970s porn actor has decided to retain what is one of the most obvious noms de plume in film history. At 58, Linda Lovelace's notoriously endowed co-star in the seminal adult feature Deep Throat has pulled his once-seamy life out of the sewer and has reinvented himself as a still-handsome, silver-haired and successful real estate entrepreneur in the tony winter resort community of Park City, Utah. But it was a close call. For 20 years he kept silent about his story, convinced only recently by the producers of an HBO documentary Inside Deep Throat (released last week on DVD by Universal) that they would portray him fairly. They did. And so now Reems is speaking out. Born Jewish in the Bronx in 1947 as Herbert Streicher, he has reclaimed his marquee name despite the imagery. "I'm not looking to garnish any business because of it," he says. "I didn't want to be thought of as denying my past. So I kept the name Harry Reems and (am) very forthright about who I am and what I've done. Park City is a very small town of about 3,000 families and everybody knows everybody." He began making X-rated pictures in the 1960s - when they were still known as stag films. He had worked with both Lovelace and Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano before. But in late 1971, Damiano had the idea of breaking with convention and shooting a film to take visual advantage of Lovelace's special talents for onscreen fellatio. Reems played a faux sex doctor who discovers a solution to the Lovelace character's frustrating anatomical anomaly. The film was shot in six days for $25,000 US and went on to gross more than $600 million, making it technically the most profitable film in history. But it did more than that. It broke through morality barriers, playing in big cities and small towns, attracting lawsuits and the ultimate attention of the feds. As Reems explains it, the Nixon administration wanted something to detract from Watergate (which had its own infamous Deep Throat) and so launched a massive legal campaign against pornography. The FBI arrested Reems in the middle of the night and he was put on trial for conspiracy to transport obscene materials. This, even though he was only an actor in the film who had been paid $100. "Linda Lovelace and Gerry Damiano were witnesses for the government," Reems recalls. "They were granted immunity. I was not. They took the stand, pointed at me and said, 'Yes, that's the guy.' " Also arrayed against Reems were witnesses from the Columbo crime family, which owned the rights to Deep Throat. "It was a kangaroo court," Reems says. Stars like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson came to his defence, but it was Jimmy Carter's winning of the White House in 1976 that saw the $3-million trial thrown out by the Democrats. Reems was then offered the coach role in Grease but was dropped after 10 days. "So the writing was on the wall. I knew I was not going to make the conversion into more conventional entertainment." He was depressed, afraid to make any more X-rated films, and slid into years of booze, drugs and panhandling. Once he fell asleep in New York and woke up in L.A. county jail a week later, bailed out by Hugh Hefner. He entered a 12-step program on Hefner's advice and today boasts he's clean and sober. "It turned my entire life around. I've converted to Christianity, I'm happily married and monogamous." Asked delicately if he still attracts curiosity for his legendary, er, manhood, Reems just laughs. "Oh, I get those questions, I don't answer them."
|