In his heyday, John C. Holmes was compared to Elvis Presley and Errol Flynn. But Holmes didn’t sing and, although his greatest exploits were on film, he wasn’t much of an actor, either. Holmes owed whatever success he achieved in the entertainment industry to something else: He had a big dick.
If it weren’t for his “discovery” in a California men’s room, Holmes’ greatest physical attribute would have likely remained a secret, known only to his wife and closest confidantes. But once his super-sized manhood hit the screen, a legend was born. And Holmes, who just a few months earlier was content with his job as an ambulance driver, happily embellished the emerging storyline.
Holmes spoke of how, when he was born, his mother was told that her son had “three legs, but only two feet,” a not-so-subtle reference to his prodigious tallywacker. He told of how he was raised by an aunt who split her time between London, Paris and Florida where he lost his virginity at age six to a Swiss nursemaid. He claimed to have had sex with all but three girls in his high school class, earned the nickname “Horse Dick” and was regularly recruited by mothers to deflower their daughters.
As a porn star, he bragged that he’d slept with 14,000 women, including three state governors and a U.S. Senator. He’d written nearly 30 books, had an equal number of fan clubs and had sex in airplanes, elevators and 50 feet underwater while wearing scuba gear.
While Holmes’ claims were hyperbole at best and mostly outright lies, the verifiable facts of his life are amazing enough. It’s estimated that the number of his sex partners is closer to 3,000, still well above the American norm. He appeared in about 2,300 porn films (including a large number of short “loops”) in his 17-year porn career, with most of those produced between 1967 and 1980. He earned as much as $3,000 a day for his work, but in the twilight of his career he was crippled by a $1,000-a-day cocaine habit.
Holmes liked to brag that his penis was “bigger than a pay phone, smaller than a Cadillac.” It was sometimes compared in length to a normal man’s forearm, with a circumference equal to a man’s wrist. One critic doubted that Holmes ever had a full erection because the blood flow required would certainly render him unconscious. Holmes, on the other hand, boasted that his career was so successful because he could maintain an erection for five hours despite the stress of filming.
Truth is, there is no truly accurate measurement of Holmes’ fully inflated schlong. Guesstimates range from 10 to 15 inches. Early in his career, he preferred short, slender partners which further emphasized his length and contributed to the legend.
There was nothing in Holmes’ childhood in Ohio that gave even a hint of celluloid stardom. A gangly, shy youth, Holmes spent much of his time hunting and fishing, anything to escape a house where drunkenness and physical and mental abuse by first his father and later by his stepfather was rampant. When he was 16, his mother allowed him to join the U.S. Army. After his discharge at 19, he relocated to southern California where he found work as an ambulance driver.
There he met a graduate nurse, Sharon Gebenini. He stole flowers from a neighbor’s garden for their first date, but within a year they married and Holmes took a job as a forklift driver at a meatpacking pack. The cold work environment proved harmful to Holmes, who suffered a collapsed lung on three occasions. The young couple was also thwarted in their plans to start a family, with Sharon suffering three miscarriages in 17 months.
Holmes drifted through a variety of sales jobs and was a chocolate stirrer at a Candy Nips factory when his big break came at a urinal in a men’s card-playing club. A photographer noticed Holmes’ huge penis and suggested he might have a career in the thriving Southern California pornography industry. Soon Holmes was moonlighting, sharing his unique talent in magazine pictorials, unbeknownst to his wife.
Until a summer day in 1968, that is, when Sharon came across her husband in the bathroom, a tape measure in his hand.
“It’s incredible,” he said. “It goes from five inches all the way to ten. Ten inches long! Four inches around! … I’ve got to tell you I’ve been doing something else, and I think I want to make it my life’s work. … It’s like being a carpenter. These are my tools.”[1]
Soon Holmes diversified, adding short 8mm porn features known as loops to his resume. He met Bob Chinn, a producer of raunchy magazine pictorials and grainy stag films, who had lofty ambitions. The evening he met Holmes, Chinn dashed off a three-page screenplay featuring a seedy detective, a cross of a film noir private dick and a smarmy lounge singer. Holmes, of course, would play the detective who would be known forevermore in porn lore as Johnny Wadd.
Chinn and Holmes would parlay the polyester-clad gigolo to riches in the mid-1970s golden era of porn that had been sparked by art house classics Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and The Devil and Miss Jones. Though the Johnny Wadd films lacked the polish of those movies, some did feature the same female leads, all eagerly yielding their bodies to the mustachioed lothario. Holmes was getting plenty of sex in front of the camera, but he wasn’t getting any at home where Sharon had drawn the line.
Nevertheless, they continued to live together as man and wife and worked together as managers of a Glendale apartment court, a complex of 10 aqua stucco cottages. In addition to his film duties, Holmes was the complex’s handyman and gardener. A collector of everything from copper wires to animal skulls, Holmes also trolled the area in his El Camino, sifting through dumpsters and grabbing up furniture from yard sales.
It was at the apartments where he became acquainted with 15-year-old Dawn Schiller, a recent transplant from Florida with her dad and younger sister. Schiller was immediately intrigued by the 32-year-old Holmes, known to her family as a soft-spoken, polite Save the Whales activist who occasionally brought her gifts when returning after a film shoot. Holmes hired the Schiller sisters to do odd gardening jobs around the complex.
It was probably inevitable that Holmes and Dawn Schiller would progress from sharing cheeseburgers and fries dunked in blue cheese dressing at Bob’s Big Boy to a tryst in the back of a van. But Schiller had no idea of Holmes’ cinematic achievements until the night he drove her and her sister to the Pussycat Theater where they saw his name on the marquee. He took them into the theater.
“We’re slumped down in our seats, and I’m covering my face, and my sister’s covering her face,” Dawn Schiller recalled. “People are walking by, trying to get John’s autograph, whispering, ‘Oh, my God. He’s here!’ My sister and I are hugely embarrassed.”[2]
When Schiller’s father returned to Florida with her sister, Dawn moved into a cabana with Holmes’ half-brother for a short time before moving in with Holmes and Sharon.
Holmes’ career was starting to slide as his involvement with Schiller grew. In the early years of his porn life, Holmes had resisted many of the temptations of the business. He didn’t smoke, drink or do drugs. But, by the time Schiller came along, he was drinking. His drink of choice was scotch, and he rarely was seen on set without a brown Samsonite briefcase that contained a quart of J&B.
Although he had resisted the steady offers of cocaine that were so common in the business in the early years, by the late 1970s he was hooked on the stuff. The scotch was supplanted in the briefcase by drugs and the equipment necessary to transform cocaine powder into crack. His free-basing habit threatened to derail his career. His erratic behavior included difficulties with the hydraulic functions of his most obvious asset.
With his porn career deteriorating, Holmes turned to petty crime to support his drug habit. He ransacked the rental homes where he was filming. He broke into cars and stole luggage from airport baggage claim carousels. He hit rock bottom when he and Schiller were living out of his wife’s Chevy Malibu, subsisting on occasional fast food tacos while Holmes pimped out Schiller’s sexual services. He also turned into a cocaine delivery boy, including rock stars, lawyers and dentists among his customers.
He became intimately involved with two of his drug suppliers — nightclub owner Eddie Nash and a group of heroin addicts who operated out of a rented house on Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles.
Nash was the Americanized name of Adel Gharib Nasrallah, an immigrant from the Middle East who launched a successful business career in 1960 with a hot dog stand on Hollywood Boulevard. By the time he crossed paths with Holmes, he held 36 liquor licenses for the string of eclectic nightclubs he owned, as well as some prime real estate, pushing his net worth north of $30 million.
He was also a heavy user of drugs, especially free-base cocaine. In support of his habit, Nash also dealt drugs, which were always in ample supply at his luxurious ranch home in the hills above Studio City.
Holmes bartered a pair of antique guns owned by the Wonderland camp for $1,000 worth of heroin from Nash. The Wonderland gang wanted the guns back and thought the best way to get them was to steal them. Working in concert with Holmes, the Wonderland gang, impersonating cops, broke into Nash’s home and robbed him of drugs, cash, jewelry and the antique guns.
Two days later, Holmes was spotted by Nash’s bodyguard wearing a ring stolen from Nash. Holmes was snatched up and brought before Nash. His hands were bound by electrical tape and he was tortured for 14 hours to wring from him information about the Nash robbers. An irate Nash then dispatched a team of his associates to the Wonderland house, led by Holmes.
There, in the early morning hours of July 1, 1981, four of the five occupants were brutally beaten to death. (The fifth, also brutally beaten, survived). Some veteran L.A. detectives called it the most gruesome scene they’d ever seen. It became known as the “Four on the Floor” murders.
Holmes’ role in the murders is unclear. He claimed to have been forced to watch, but police believed he participated in the lead-pipe bludgeoning of at least one victim. Holmes’ bloody palm print was discovered above one of the beds at the crime scene.
Although Holmes and Schiller went into hiding, Los Angeles detectives tracked them down in a local motel. Police interrogated Holmes extensively but got nowhere. Following his release from police custody, Holmes and Schiller took off for Florida.
They settled into a seedy hotel in North Miami Beach where Holmes dyed his hair black and worked in construction by day while forcing Schiller to turn tricks at night. Schiller eventually was rescued by several of the hotel’s residents. After telling her family where she was, her brother tipped off police. Detectives found Holmes watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, slapped on handcuffs and whisked him back to Los Angeles.
There he was reunited with an old friend, Detective Tom Lange. Ironically, real detective Lange first met bogus detective Johnny Wadd on a porn set, where Holmes was arrested on a morals charge. For the next several years, Holmes was an informant to Blake on matters related to the porn industry. Lange, who would go on to greater fame in the 1990s while investigating the murder of O.J. Simpson’s wife, was the lead investigator on the “Four on the Floor” case.
Blake pressured Holmes with offers of immunity and protection in exchange for his testimony, but he refused, claiming his family feared for their lives. With only Holmes’ palm print and a couple of fingerprints from a table at the crime scene as evidence, he was charged with the murders. On June 16, 1982, jurors acquitted Holmes but he was found in contempt of court for refusing to testify before a grand jury.
Holmes spent 110 days in Los Angeles County Jail on the contempt charge. During that time he staged a 32-day hunger strike, losing 16 pounds, before jailers started force feeding him. Holmes also spent many evenings working on an autobiography with writer Barbara Wilkins, who shared many of the details in a Hustler magazine article in June 1983. Some of Holmes’ claims:
— He was held in the “High Power” section of the jail, where high profile prisoners such as the Skid Row Slasher, the Hillside Strangler and the head of the Black Mafia were also incarcerated.
—He took up yoga and transcendental meditation to escape the boredom of his solitary confinement.
—While other prisoners hung pages from Penthouse and Playboy in their cells, he hung pictures of casseroles from food magazines.
—He claimed to have given out thousands of autographs while in jail, to deputies, judges, district attorneys and secretaries.
Holmes was finally released when he was given the green light to testify from those who had previously threatened him. He immediately returned to his old lifestyle.
Porn was experiencing a renaissance in the early 1980s thanks to videotape. Bill Amerson, a former Holmes business partner and longtime friend, had snatched up the rights to many of Holmes’ old films and was re-packaging them in the new medium. With Holmes he created John Holmes Productions and began producing new product with his old friend, whose popularity was again on the rise thanks to the murder case.
It was on a movie shoot that Holmes met another porn star known as Misty Dawn, who bore a strong physical resemblance to Dawn Schiller. He was immediately smitten with the 19-year-old (real name: Laurie Rose) and within a short time, they were a couple. Rose had a steadying influence on Holmes. He quit drugs and persuaded Rose to leave the porn business. With AIDS on the rise, Holmes figured it was best to have just one porn star in the family.
Although Holmes cut back on his porn work, he was still seen as a superstar in the medium. At the premiere of his film, Girls On Fire, on Feb. 7, 1985, his handprints were immortalized in concrete in the sidewalk in front of the Pussycat Theater.
Holmes, who was an early advocate of AIDS testing for porn stars, ironically was one of the first to test positive for the disease. But months after being diagnosed, Holmes took off for Italy where he made the last of his XXX movies, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empress, with eventual Italian Parliament member Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller as his co-star.
Holmes resumed his drug and alcohol use following the diagnosis, telling friends that he was dying of colon cancer rather than sharing the true reason for his ill health. He finally shared his diagnosis with Rose around the time of their marriage on Jan. 23, 1987. He continued to make public appearances through the end of 1987, when he began a series of hospitalizations. In February 1988 he was admitted to the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Sepulveda, Calif., where he died on March 13, 1988. He was 43 years old.
His death was attributed to encephalitis, a swelling of the brain, a consequence of AIDS. The source of his disease could have been his pornographic occupation or his excessive drug use, though close family members claimed that he was deathly afraid of needles and never took drugs intravenously.
Another thing Holmes feared was that his famous penis would someday be preserved in a jar or become a subject of scientific study. To that end he insisted his body be cremated intact, a task his widow apparently dutifully respected before his ashes were spread in the San Francisco area.
The Holmes legend gave rise to several books and documentaries but was most prominent in a pair of Hollywood movies. Boogie Nights was a 1997 success that featured Mark Wahlberg in the Holmes-inspired role of Dirk Diggler. Co-star Burt Reynolds claimed a Golden Globe for best supporting actor. Wonderland, a less-successful 2003 production, starred Val Kilmer as Holmes and focused on the Wonderland murders.
While Holmes’ legendary penis is no more, foot-long replica dildos carry the legend forward in sex shops and on the Internet, for as low as $45. According to the Associated Press, his memoirs were worth just $35 at the time of his death.

[1] “The Devil and John Holmes,” Mike Sager, Rolling Stone, May 1989.
[2] “In Too Deep,” Allan MacDonell, L.A. Weekly, Oct. 3, 2003.
John Curtis Holmes, porn star
Born: August 8, 1944
Died: March 13, 1988 (age 43)
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
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