The Rialto Report

Previously on Chasing Butterflies – Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida:

After Dolores Carlos’ retirement from acting in South Florida nudie films in the late 1960s, she still remained close to her circle of Cuban filmmaker friends, and none more so than José Prieto, Greg Sandor, and Rafael Remy. They would still meet regularly, and all three took an active interest in her daughter Marcy’s well-being. From time to time, they would joke about the fortune teller that the three men had consulted when they escaped from Cuba. Greg Sandor had moved out the California and had indeed found the money and respect that had been predicted for him. Similarly, José Prieto had found a degree of fame and notoriety following the success and outcry that followed the release of films he made, such as Shanty Tramp (1967) and Savages from Hell (1968). The only exception to the mystic’s forecast was Rafael Remy: he’d fared well and was not seeing the trouble and strife that had been foreseen in his future.

Rafael had lived a lower profile existence but with more regular work than his two friends: due in part to his jack-of-all-trades skill-set and willingness to get involved in anything, he was always in demand. He was a cameraman, editor, lighting, gaffer, soundman, and production manager who was cheap and could always be relied on to deliver a decent job.

But as the 1960s turned into the 70s, the film business was changing: the innocent exploitation films that had greeted them when they arrived from Cuba were giving way to more explicit sex movies whose legality was questionable, and Rafael was suddenly being offered an altogether different kind of job.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve tracked down and spoken to many people involved in the Florida film business of the 1960s and 1970s. Their overlapping personal histories reveal an untold chapter of adult film history – and the hidden role that Cubans played in shaping it. These are some of their stories.

This is the concluding episode of Chasing Butterflies, Part 4: Rafael Remy’s story.

You can listen to the Prologue: Dolores Carlos’ story here, Part 1: Manuel Conde’s story, Part 2: José Prieto’s story, Part 3: Marcy Bichette’s story.

With thanks to John Minson, Tom Flynn, Ronald Ziegler, Leroy Griffith, Veronica Acosta, Marcy Bichette, Mikey Bichette, Lousie ‘Bunny’ Downe, Mitch Poulos, Sheldon Schermer, Ray Aranha, Manny Samaniego, Barry Bennett, Randy Grinter, Herb Jeffries, Tempest Storm, Chester Phebus, Michael Bowen, Norman Senfeld, Richard Falcone, Lynne O’Neill, Something Weird Video, and many anonymous families and friends who have offered recollections, large and small, over the years.

This podcast is 45 minutes long.

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In the late 1960s, Rafael received a called from someone called Emile Allan Harvard.

In a strong Eastern European accent, Harvard explained that he was new to Florida and was looking for a film man: someone who knew how to put a movie together, someone who knew where to find actors, crew, locations, and equipment. Harvard had heard that Rafael could be the man to assist him, and that Rafael was a man with expertise who’d built an extensive network of contacts in the years since he’d arrived penniless from Cuba. But Rafael was wary: he asked around about this new arrival in the state, but could find no one who knew anything about Harvard.

Rafael was right to be cautious: Harvard was a mysterious hustler with an unusual history. Emile Harvard was a Romanian Jew, who’d started his adult life in 1930s Bucharest training to be a cameraman. And then in the build-up to World War 2, Harvard became a spy for the British. It was a volatile period in Romania as the country’s fascist dictatorship was aligned to Nazi Germany and the government was suppressing any opposition by force. Despite the dangers, Harvard loved the subterfuge. He was given a cover profession to conceal his espionage activity which was to be a newsreel cameraman for British Movietone News. He used these media credentials to gain access to key government sites and report on them to his British paymasters. It was a perilous assignment, but one he performed with alacrity.

Romania was a key supplier of the oil for the Nazi war effort and so he also gathered information on the refineries and transport routes. Then he captured footage of Romanian military operations, like airfields and supply depots. But Harvard never seemed happy doing the same activity for long, and soon he was suggesting ways that he could sabotage Nazi efforts. His motivation was less born out of deeply-held ideological convictions, but rather out of a love of excitement and intrigue. A later acquaintance described Harvard as “an enigma, rather than a real person, a shady, shape-shifting person with many identities, a man who you felt you could never truly know.”

The useful life of a spy is a limited one – and in 1943, his cover was blown when Harvard apparently blabbed to someone he shouldn’t have and was reported to the authorities. Life In Romania was suddenly impossible for him so his British employers moved him to Tel Aviv, a city then in British-administered Mandatory Palestine, where he got married and had a daughter, Esther.

When the war ended, Harvard obtained Israeli citizenship before moving to Canada, first Montreal, then Toronto, where he started a career as a TV producer and director. He formed several small-time companies, including Harvard Productions, ostensibly to make television series for the American market. His wartime activity may have been over, but in truth Harvard still enjoyed living a partly fictional life, and with each career move, he inflated the achievements on his resumé which he generously shared with the press. He frequently spoke about working for MGM for twelve years, producing content for NBC, CBS, and Pathé, and having a successful career in Hollywood – none of which was true.

A few years later, without any major credits to his name, Harvard decided on a radical change of direction: after a vacation to see his brother in Miami, Florida in 1960, he was inspired to announce that Harvard Productions was planning a Florida-themed club in Toronto to be called ‘Oceans 11’, after the Rat Pack movie that had hit the cinemas that year. It was to be an exclusive, high-end, rich-members-only place, which he described as a “health and entertainment” club. The Florida theme meant palm trees, a glass sun-roof, a 500-seat restaurant, nightly entertainment, and a swimming pool with a state-of-the-art wave machine – all to be housed on the top three floors of a Toronto office building. “It will be just like Miami Beach,” Harvard told the newspapers, who lapped up the project with excitement filling pages of breathless newsprint. It was ambition on a grand scale, the kind that comes from someone with a big imagination, not to mention someone whose own money is not at stake. Sure enough, the project failed when it was the funding failed to materialize, and so for Emile Harvard and Harvard Productions, it was back to square one.

Just like the wartime spy Harvard had been, the next years were spent donning various different identities and promoting different business schemes. Some seemed serious, others were harebrained. They included hawking time-share properties, selling Jacuzzis, and offering dubious healthcare products (“at last a cure from embarrassing itching!” read the copy for one innovative cream.) Perhaps part of his success came from his appearance: Harvard was a tall, distinguished, and earnest-looking man who projected intelligent seriousness. But in 1967, Harvard was in the news again, this time posing as a doctor, prescribing Belltone hearing aids, and persuading pensioners to sign up for exorbitantly-priced payment plans. He was arrested and charged for his involvement in the fraudulent scheme.

Each time he was embroiled in a scandal, Emile Harvard somehow managed to wriggle out, and re-emerge a year or two later involved in another dodgy deal. The irony was that he was never afraid of the media. Quite the opposite: he was first in line to give newspapers interviews and quotes, just as long as they spelt his name correctly.

*

And so, in the late 1960s, on the lam from his latest scam, Harvard turned up in Miami, in his early 50s, with his wife and two teenage children. This time he decided to return to his first love – filmmaking. A cursory glance at the local theater scene in South Florida convinced him that he needed to speak with the most powerful and influential player in town – and that was Leroy Griffith.

Griffith’s theater business had come a long way since he moved to Miami in the early 1960s and bought the Paris Theater staging burlesque shows with Tempest Storm before meeting Dolores and moving into the sexploitation movie business with men like Manuel Conde. By the early 1970s, Griffith’s empire had grown to 12 adult theaters, including the Paris, Roxy, and Gayety theaters, and 15 adult book stores in the area, and he claimed to have produced 30 softcore adult films too. By now, Griffith was a well-known figure in Miami, though he was at pains to point out, in an interview in 1969, that he made films that specialized in ‘nudity’ and not ‘exploitation.’ ‘Exploitation’, he explained carefully, referred to “torture, fetishes, and lesbianism”, subjects that he just wouldn’t touch.

Griffith was intrigued by Emile Harvard: here was an older, seemingly sophisticated European, who boasted of a successful Hollywood career and wanted to make films for him to exhibit. Griffith told Harvard to speak to José Prieto and Rafael Remy, two men who would give him a crash course download in Florida low-budget filmmaking. So Harvard did, and came away impressed with both the Cubans’ experience. But Harvard explained he wanted to make a different kind of flick. He didn’t want to join the crowded field of slasher films, biker movies, or nudie-cuties: he wanted his films to go further and push the envelope. In short, he wanted to put sex up onscreen. Real sex, sex that happened before your very eyes. Harvard formed a company, set up a small office, and offered José and Rafael in-house jobs working on his upcoming sex film projects.

José was unsure. He didn’t seek film work as much as Rafael, happy to pick up temp jobs outside of the movie business when he needed money and wait for movies that interested him. He also wasn’t sure about making more explicit sex films. They were still illegal, right? He’d had enough of hiding and fleeing from government interest, and now he preferred to keep his head down and enjoy a quiet life. But Rafael felt differently. This could be a new income stream: the films would be cheap, so there would be more of them. That would mean more regular and reliable paychecks. He was in, and he persuaded José to give it a try as well.

In early 1970, Harvard – using the nom de porn of ‘Emilio Portici’ – made their first feature, Fear of Love (1970). Harvard directed, José shot it, and Rafael, the production manager, corralled the available Cuban film crew from Calle Ocho to help out. It was a cash-in imitation of a recent sex documentary called Man and Wife (1969) which had been hugely successful. ‘Fear of Love’ was a similarly pseudo-instructional tale of marital problems caused by sexual woes that are resolved by a marriage counselor – and it too played well in Leroy Griffith’s adult theaters.

*

Leroy Griffith took note of the film’s success, and had an idea: he had a string of former burlesque theaters, so he suggested that Harvard convert the movie into a risqué live performance piece. Griffith even promised he’d finance a theatrical run on the stage at the Roxy, one of his Miami theaters.

Harvard liked the idea, and the stage show opened in September 1970, advertised as “an educational drama in two acts.” The cast included one Barry Bennett, a fresh-faced 25-year-old New Yorker, in the central lead role of the sex counselor. Barry had studied acting at college, and Harvard had taken a shine to the kid, offering him the chance to star in movies soon to be made by his newly-formed company. Barry had just proposed to his girlfriend, and wasn’t sure that sex movies were for him, but he jumped at the chance to have a starring role in this high-profile stage production.

One of the first people in line to see ‘Fear of Love’ onstage at the Roxy was the Miami Beach mayor. He wasn’t impressed. He reacted by writing a letter to the Dade County Grand Jury declaring that the play showed “live complete nudity, simulated sexual intercourse, and homosexuality among females.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, it also had an “extremely thin plot.” At first, it seemed that the play’s run would be allowed to continue as a Miami Beach Municipal Judge ruled that it was not obscene. But then the performance was busted, and Leroy Griffith and six cast members were arrested when they left the stage. They were ordered to get dressed, and taken to Miami Beach police station where bonds were set at $2,500 each. Griffith was booked for operating a building of lewdness, and the actors for lewd and lascivious conduct. Barry Bennett was arrested, even though he was the only actor who didn’t take off his clothes, and he was charged with participating in an obscene performance.

The performance resumed two days later, whereupon the vice squad burst in – and arrested everyone all over again. Griffith protested loudly as he was led away, “People are being robbed out on the street, and yet you guys are in here?!” To which the arresting officer replied: “I think that people are getting robbed every time they watch this performance.”

The result of the legal kerfuffle were two 30-day jail sentences and a $600 fine for Griffith, $300 fines for the naked cast members, and a $150 fine for Barry Bennett. When I spoke with Barry years later, he remembered that it was a serious moment for the cast. They were facing jail sentences for simply acting on stage. In October 1970, Leroy Griffith reluctantly took the play off the schedule, and his theater returned to playing adult films.

As a sidenote: Griffith was getting beaten up from all sides. In 1971, he stopped showing adult films in some of his theaters so that he could exhibit the feature film ‘Che!’ (1969) starring Omar Sharif. It was an intentionally noncommittal version of the Cuban revolution that recounted Che Guevara’s transformation from doctor to political revolutionary in Fidel Castro’s coup. The movie greatly displeased many of the Cubans in Miami, especially those in the filmmaking community who’d worked on Griffith productions – and they retaliated in force. There were bomb threats, physical violence, and even an incident when a Cuban turned up at Griffith’s office brandishing a gun. It was all too much for the theater owner, and so Griffith decided to go back to the safer activity of exhibiting sex films.

*

Meanwhile, Emile Harvard wasn’t entirely disappointed at the controversy caused by the ‘Fear of Love’ production: he’d arrived in Miami with a splash, made some money, and was now ready for the next step. Griffith and Harvard felt there was more mileage to be obtained from the stage play so they convinced Jack Cione, owner of the Forbidden City Theater in Honolulu to put on ‘Fear of Love’ in a two-week run starting January 7th, 1971. Harvard flew over to Hawaii, and took some of the same actors from the Florida production, including Barry Bennett.

Harvard was smart enough to know he had to play up the play’s socially redeeming features, so he gave interviews in Hawaii claiming that “a group of eight psychiatrists came to see the show and they said they were sorry it couldn’t have been seen on-stage 30 years ago – as it would have saved a lot of marriages.”

But Harvard wanted to have his cake and eat it: when ‘Fear of Love’ opened, billed as “direct from Miami Beach”, it was also described as “a graphically nude work” and “the most shocking we’ve seen.” The campaign worked: ‘Fear of Love’ was a sell-out twice a day for its engagement. It was reviewed in the local newspapers as “a two-act play, seven actors, serio-comic dialogue, and a lot of simulated sex,” and the TV news ran several features on it.

From Hawaii, Harvard took the play to San Francisco when it had a run at the Basin Street West Theater. Harvard heard that the local cops had been tipped off about the play’s run in Hawaii, and they were primed to bust it – so he tweaked the title, calling it ‘For the Love of Love’ in an attempt to throw them off the scent. It was a good idea, but the police were wise to his tricks and the play was busted on opening night, and three of the cast were cited for obscenity. The theater manager panicked and canceled the rest of engagement. Harvard was undeterred and just moved it down the road to the Encore Theater, where it opened in April 1971. Harvard downplayed the hiccup, maintaining that the Basin Street Theater shows had just been rehearsals intended for a private audience.

Once again, Harvard granted interviews to the local newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, and once again he exaggerated the success of the play, saying that it had played for two months in Miami, seven weeks in Honolulu, and would transfer to Washington DC next. Now he boasted his own experience included “33 years of Hollywood and 122 major feature-length productions, eight television series, awards from the Vatican and the Edinburgh Festival, and a track record that included working with Universal, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox.” He claimed the reason he used a fake name ‘Emilio Portici’ was not because his stage play was pornographic, but rather because he was in the middle of “negotiating a major deal with MGM” and didn’t want to jeopardize it. All the bluster and boasting worked: the stage show was a hit again, and additional midnight performances were added to the twice-an-evening offering.

At the end of the San Francisco run, Harvard decided to retire the play: it had had a good run, but it was expensive to produce, flying and accommodating his actors and crew, and paying for potential legal fees to defend lawsuits. He decided to focus his efforts and money on his fledgling film studio. In mid-1971, he returned to Miami, and dedicated himself to his new activity: making sex films.

*

So you may be wondering what this all has to do with Rafael Remy. After all, this is meant to be his story. When Harvard got back to South Florida, he called Rafael, now his go-to film man, and explained the plan – and he wanted Rafael to be his right-hand man.

His business model was simple: with the help of Leroy Griffith, Harvard would finance and produce sex features and shorts that he would send to labs up in New York for processing where they would then be distributed to theaters across the country. Harvard set up a studio at 1238 North Miami Avenue, and formed an inner circle of trusted associates that would deliver an inexpensive, rinse-and-repeat formula that would maximize profits. This small group consisted of Rafael, who would also be production manager, main cameraman, and editor; Jack Birch, a pockmark-faced wannabe actor who had aspirations to be a Jack Palance-style on-screen heavy, and Jack’s girlfriend Carol Kyzer, a quiet, blonde, part-time model who’d done topless layouts for Bunny Yeager; Brad Grinter, a veteran of the horror film scene in Florida who had just made Flesh Feast (1970), a terrible movie whose one claim to fame was its star, 1940s bombshell Veronica Lake; Brad’s son Randy, a 22-year-old who would be Rafael’s assistant; Harvard’s daughter, Esther, who was given the job of office manager; and finally there was Barry Bennett, the young actor who would take the lead performing role in the films.

Carol Kyzer, photographed by Bunny Yeager

Barry had an additional role – and a critically important one: he was the one who’d take the films to the labs in New York to get the film stock processed and the prints cut. It was a risky assignment: the U.S. Supreme Court still hadn’t come up with an agreed-upon definition of obscenity and so interstate transportation of pornography was a dicey proposition with offenders facing years of imprisonment. But Barry wanted the extra cash that Harvard promised him – so he figured he could deal with the dangers.

Due to the potential illegality of what they were all doing, most of the group took different names to mask their involvement: Harvard reverted to his ‘Emilio Portici’ identity, Rafael Remy became ‘Roberto Raphael’ – if he had a credit at all, Brad and Randy Grinter used any name – just as long as it wasn’t theirs, and most of the time it wasn’t, Jack Birch had a variety of Western-macho names like ‘Jack Colt’ or ‘Michael Powers’, Carol Kyzer became ‘Carol Connors’, a name that she would use for the next decade, and Barry Bennett took the name ‘Marc Brock.’ Harvard would be the nominal director of the films, but in practice, he would share the responsibility with Rafael.

For the next three years, Harvard’s studio churned out sex films on a regular basis: titles like Penny Wise (1970), The Good Fairy (1970), The Eighteen Carat Virgin (1971), Mary Jane (1972), Your Neighborhood Doc (1972), School Teachers Weekend Vacation (1972), and Female Stud Service (1972). Most of them were made according to a template loosely agreed with Leroy Griffith: each feature film would be roughly 65 minutes long, and would cost less than $15,000. Most were shot in Harvard’s small studio at 1238 North Miami Avenue, though they would occasionally venture out into fancy houses like a Coconut Grove mansion belonging to a friend of Harvard, Sepy Dobronyi.

Nearly all of them starred Barry Bennett, who, as ‘Marc Brock’, quickly became Florida’s leading male porno star. He wasn’t the most charismatic performer you’d ever seen but he could be relied upon to use his improv and comedy skills to fill the holes in the scripts. Many of the movies also featured Jack and Carol, who soon became a married couple.

All the films did ok but none were spectacular. Rafael worked hard behind the scenes, and nearly all of the crews consisted of his old Cuban friends, including José Prieto who came onboard for an occasional job. Randy Grinter remembers Rafael telling him that the softcore sex film business In Florida had been built by Cubans, and now it was Cubans who were responsible for the hard-core films too.

And then in 1972, Deep Throat became a national smash-hit: it had cost $25,000 and had made several millions for the New York mob that distributed it. It was essentially a New York film: the financing came from the Brooklyn-based Peraino family, and the director, stars, and crew were mostly New York-based. But Emile Harvard didn’t view it that way: ‘Deep Throat’ was shot in Miami, making ample use of the exteriors and locations that he normally used like Sepy Dobronyi’s pad, and two of his featured players, Jack and Carol, both had roles in it. For someone who had labored for the previous two years to make money in the business, Deep Throat’s wild success felt a kick in the teeth to Harvard. He was mad and resolved to get even. Crew members who worked with him remember him shouting, in his thick eastern European accent, about the fact that the success should have been his. Harvard reacted swiftly, increasing production, widening his distribution, and expanding his business: the least he could do was to cash in on the new bigger market that ‘Deep Throat’ had created.

*

Emile Harvard and Leroy Griffith were strange bed-fellows, but their relationship was symbiotic and so they had regular contact about the sex film market – and how to exploit it. For example, Griffith suggested ripping off ‘Deep Throat’ by making a movie called Dear Throat (1973) saying that people would see the ads in the newspapers but not realize that they were two different films with similar names. Harvard obliged, making a cheap knockoff starring, who else?, Marc Brock and Carol Connors. It was blatant plagiarism, and so Harvard used a different name for the film – P. Arthur Murphy – fearing reprisals from the mob owners of ‘Deep Throat.’ It was one of an increasing number of different identities he started to use, as the legal heat increased around adult films. Thirty years after the war in which he’d hidden his identity to work undercover, Harvard still seemed incapable of living a simple life as himself.

Not that he’d grown afraid of publicity: Harvard gave a number of interviews to newspapers and magazines. In one of them, he used the name ‘Bruno’ – much to the amusement of the Cuban crews. One interview quoted ‘Bruno’ (“in a guttural European accent”) as someone who “used to be big in Hollywood” and that he was “only turning out this stuff between engagements.” The reporter was even invited to Harvard’s studio where he reported that all the technicians were Cuban, and that “Bruno’s studio contains, as scenery, an office desk, a couch, and a bed: the three essentials for a porno movie.” While he was there, Bruno warned him not to speak loudly as he was making a “quality movie” and the actors “are very sensitive about what they have to do.”

Harvard may have been unhappy about missing out on the ‘Deep Throat’ deep cash, but he was still doing pretty well – a fact that was evident to many of the Cuban crew, as one of them remembered: “Emile was a very different guy to us Cubans, but he liked us and always had work for us. He paid by the hour in cash at the end of each day, but we never hung out with him or anything like that. And we could all see that he was making big money.”

It was true: Harvard made no attempt to hide a pretty luxurious lifestyle – he lived on Palm Island, a man-made development, situated between the city of Miami and its glamorous suburb of Miami Beach. The area was famous for its celebrity residents, and neighbors had included gangsters Al Capone and Meyer Lansky, and the non-gangster, TV presenter Barbara Walters. Harvard drove to work every day from his large house in a new cherry-red Buick Centurion, and often talked about eating at Miami’s finest restaurants. It may have irritated some of the Cubans who worked for Harvard, but Rafael Remy was happy. As Harvard’s number two, he was faithful to a fault, despite the difference in the money they were earning. Rafael had become the glue who held everything together and he kept people happy. He ran a tight ship, making sure they had a right-sized team for every shoot, choosing actors and crew carefully, and making sure everyone was paid.

In 1973, Harvard confided in Rafael that he felt fatigued. Worse he’d started feeling pain in his joints and bones. He figured he was just getting old – he’d recently turned 60 – and said he wanted to take a step back and delegate more of the filmmaking to the others, like Rafael himself, Marc Brock, and Jack Birch.

When I spoke to Brock many years later, he remembered the change in how Harvard operated: “Emile was a control freak, and then all of a sudden, he handed the reins over to the rest of us, and so we started to alternate the directing duties.”

*

In October 1973, Harvard got Marc Brock to shoot his latest film, Daddy’s Rich. Marc was a reliable sex performer, having appeared in most of Harvard’s features and loops, but the Cubans on the crew knew he was a sloppy operator, being regularly picked up by the cops for petty misdemeanors like shoplifting, a small stash of weed, and minor DUIs. Marc put together a rough budget for the movie, but it was higher than normal. The film wasn’t materially different from the rest of Harvard’s efforts, but somehow Marc convinced a distracted Harvard that he needed more money this time.

For a start, there were ten crew members – more than double the normal number – and there was an inflated cast of nine. Then there was the location: Marc arranged with Sepy Dobronyi that they would shoot most it in the same Coconut Grove house where ‘Deep Throat’ had been shot the previous year. Rafael argued with Marc that there was no need for the exterior location, but Marc was adamant. And then Marc withheld payment from the Cuban crew after the first day. Harvard had always treated everyone fairly and so the crew were suspicious Marc promised that everyone would be paid the following day, but the Cubans were unconvinced, a clash erupted, and they nearly came to blows.

Sepy Dobronyi’s house, venue for the filming of ‘Deep Throat’ (1972)… and ‘Daddy’s Rich’ (1973)

One of the crew that I spoke to years later remembered what happened next: “One of the guys, a grip on the shoot, took exception at Marc Brock after that – big time,” he said. “This grip was a new guy, and he was a hothead who liked to overreact. Next day, when the grip didn’t show, I called him up, and he just said, ‘Fuck Brock’. When I told him to do the right thing and come to the set, he threatened to call the cops and tell them about the shoot. We didn’t really believe him but we kept an eye out for the police that day.”

Sure enough, halfway through filming, Rafael noticed a cop car slowly coming up the road towards the house. He shouted in Spanish “Get the hell out of here now!”, and the crew scrambled their equipment together, much to the confusion of the semi-clad actors. Remarkably all eight crew on set that day made it out over the rear hedge, and down the lane, where they jumped into cars and fled the scene. They left Marc with Stan, his assistant director, as well as six actors, in the house – who were all arrested. Marc and Stan were charged with manufacturing obscene material, while the actors were charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, and indecent exposure. Sepy Dobronyi, the owner of the house, wasn’t helpful, making a statement to the newspapers that he was playing tennis at a nearby park at the time – and that the actors had broken into his home at which point his house guests had called the police.

Harvard, fearful of negative publicity for his business, called Leroy Griffith for help. Griffith snapped into action dispatching his main attorney, Alan Weinstein, to the precinct. Weinstein had been getting Griffith out of scrapes for years, including helping out when ‘Fear of Love’ had been shut down. Weinstein got everyone out of jail – and threw in an indignant statement to the press: “The police had no right to be on the premises,” he said. “There were more cops involved in arresting people taking pictures than there are on a murder case. Someone’s priorities are out of whack.”

The arrests caused a mini-media storm in the Miami newspapers, and for a few months, Harvard had to curb back his movie production schedule. Harvard blamed Marc Brock: he’d once viewed Brock as a protégé and an investment for the future, and so he’d ignored Marc’s legal indiscretions because he was essential in transporting the films up to the labs in New York, as well as being a reliable performer in front of the camera, but Harvard had had his fingers burned by this.

When Harvard looked into the finances of the film and saw that Marc had been using the inflated budget to line his own pockets, pilfering money for himself, he called Marc and told him he was fired.

*

By 1974, it seemed that the immediate hardcore boom after ‘Deep Throat’ was starting to subside, and some of the players who’d been involved were looking to go legit – or at least, go more legit than being underground producers of hardcore smut.

Leroy Griffith still played Harvard’s XXX films in his theaters as a cash cow source of income, but he was branching out in other directions. For one thing, he decided to revive the burlesque variety shows that he’d pioneered in Miami in the 1960s, this time opening a big production, ‘Hello Burlesque’ in Miami Beach with strippers, comedians, and music acts.

Harvard was looking to diversify too. He’d acquired theaters of his own, including the Cameo at 1445 Washington Ave, and when he and Rafael Remy had to put their sex films on hiatus, they decided to make a different kind of film. Or as Harvard bellowed one day, “Let’s make a serious movie!”

Harvard’s daughter, Esther, had written a sensitive script called ‘Of Gentle Heart’ about an escaped convict who befriends a young boy. It was originally intended as a touching character study, but when Harvard got his hands on it, he couldn’t help himself. His exploitation instincts returned, and he renamed it Fugitive Killer (aka Fugitive Women) (1974). Rafael was on hand as always to oversee the production.

When the film was released, after a gentle opening on a wholesome and bucolic farm, it turned into a rape and murder exploitation film. Marketed with the catchphrase, “Once he started, he couldn’t stop! If he didn’t rape you, he killed you,” the film was a bizarre mess, and despite being distributed by Harry Novak’s Boxoffice International Pictures, Inc., it failed to raise much interest.

It turned out that the film’s lack of success was the least of Harvard’s concerns. They say that bad news comes in threes, and it was certainly true for Harvard in 1974. He’d already scaled back his sex film production as a result of the bust of ‘Daddy’s Rich’, when he lost his son, Roy, who died after a short illness. Then, Harvard received an explanation for the fatigue and pain he’d been experiencing: he was diagnosed with bone cancer. He began treatment immediately, and told Rafael they had to put all filmmaking on hold.

Another surprise awaited him though. In April 1975, the FBI turned up at his front door to arrest him: they’d been tipped off by a source that Harvard had been transporting pornographic films between Miami and New York. Two films were specified in the indictment: ‘Valley of the Nymphs’ and ‘Ball and Chain’, which were described by the FBI spokesperson as “really raunchy stuff.” Harvard faced five felony charges relating to “substantive conspiracy counts of interstate transportation of obscene matter,” two of which carried penalties of five years in prison.

Arrest warrants were issued for three other people: two of them were Harvard’s New York associates, Charles Abrams and Sidney Levine, who had taken delivery of the films over the years when Marc Brock smuggled them into the city. Both Abrams and Levine were taken into custody.

But the final arrest warrant was for Rafael Remy – except that Rafael got away. Somehow, after Harvard was arrested, he got word to Remy and told the Cuban of his arrest. Remy drove straight to Miami airport and left the country, flying to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, to avoid the Feds catching up with him.

What nobody realized – not Harvard nor Rafael – was that the FBI source, the person who had alerted the authorities to Harvard’s pornography operation, was actually Marc Brock. After Brock had been arrested on the set of ‘Daddy’s Rich’ – and then fired by Harvard, he’d panicked. He already had a string of minor arrests to his name, and now feared that this time the judge would throw the book at him. So Brock decided to get his revenge on Harvard, and bought some protection for himself, by spilling the beans on how Harvard’s sex film business worked. Brock laid out how he personally shipped films to the New York labs, where prints were struck and shipped to theaters across the country. In return for singing, Brock was granted immunity from prosecution.

Three months later, Remy tried to slip back into Miami. He didn’t want to involve family, so he needed someone to stay with. Of all the people he could have contacted, he called Marc Brock, unaware that Brock was working with the FBI. And so, when Remy landed at Miami airport, they were waiting for him. An additional charge of fleeing arrest was added to Rafael’s woes.

As for Harvard, he was understandably nervous: he was the ringleader and owner of the business, the man controlling all the moving parts, and the mastermind behind the operation. So he did what he always did when he was in a bind: he hustled. Harvard told the Judge that his bone cancer was terminal, and that jail time would be dangerous to his health. He said that the real criminals were actually the two aging New Yorkers, Abrams and Levine. They were the ones who distributed the films far and wide, whereas he was just a cog in the machinery. In short, Harvard pleaded guilty and offered to testify for the government. The Judge consented, and Harvard was set free.

After a life of bluffs, double bluffs, and downright lies, this time Emile Harvard was telling the truth about his health. His bone cancer quickly got worse, and in 1976, his health deteriorated. He died that August.

Rafael Remy was eventually let off when the charges against him were dropped. Marcy Bichette, the daughter of his old friend Dolores Carlos, had put on a rock show to raise some money for his legal costs which made the ordeal easier.

Marcy Bichette

But he was now in his early 50s, and he’d had enough. Within the previous two decades, he’d gone from having a promising career in films in Cuba, working on global productions like ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ (1958) and ‘Our Man in Havana’ (1959) to fleeing Cuba to escape Castro’s revolution, and ultimately making a home in Florida sex films – all the way from the softcore tease days to now being arrested for hardcore films. He often joked that he couldn’t escape the fortune teller’s prediction that had foretold trouble and strife for him, but he consoled himself that he’d lived a full life. Now he wanted the easy life.

*

And so, the late 1970s marked more or less the end of the roads for the band of Cuban filmmakers who had revolutionized sex filmmaking in Florida.

Dolores Carlos was living a quiet life still working in the bank, married, and with a new family. Her daughter Marcy toured with her band Bitter Sweet, until, by 1981, when the travel and late nights became too much. She’d been on the road for years, hadn’t had a break, and the lounge scene was dying. Marcy was 30, and figured it was time to accept that the acting and music dreams were over. She found a place in Miami not far from Dolores, and they remained close seeing each other often. Later on, they would go see Marcy’s step-brother, Dante Bichette, play baseball when his team came to Florida. Dante was an outfielder for various teams, and was a four-time All-Star and contender for the Most Valuable Player Award in Major League Baseball.

Marcy and Dolores, early 1990s

Marcy got work as a bartender, giving much of her spare time – and money – to local animal rescue centers. In 1983 she got married. The guy developed a drug problem, and though she stuck around for three years, his habit effectively ended the marriage. They divorced, and she never saw him again.

Dolores and Marcy, mid 1990s

From time to time, Dolores hosted reunions for the old Cuban gang, and they’d get together and swap stories. Gradually the reunions became fewer and less well-attended as one-by-one the various friends died.

K. Gordon Murray, the exploitation film man, known for re-dubbing and re-releasing foreign fairy tale films for U.S. audiences, and who’d been the first person who had trusted Dolores as a potential filmmaker, ended up getting into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. They seized his films and took them out of circulation. Murray protested his innocence, but the case dragged and, in 1979, before it could come to a conclusion, he died of a heart attack.

As for Manuel Conde, after leaving Florida in the 1960s, he settled in California where he embarked on another stage of his sex film career by producing and directing hits such as The Danish Connection (1974), Deep Jaws (1976), and The All-American Woman (1976). By the early 1990s he’d developed dementia and he died in 1992.

José Prieto and Raphael Remy, the two inseparable Cuban friends who’d escaped their homeland after Castro’s takeover, both passed – Raphael, relatively young at 60 years of age, in 1984, while Prieto died an old man, two decades later.

In 1996, Dolores became sick and was diagnosed with cancer. The first person she told was Marcy. Marcy was heartbroken, but she immediately called each family member to tell them the news. At first the signs were good, and doctors hoped they had caught everything in time, but it was a false hope. It was a painful, drawn-out process, and Marcy did everything she could to make it easy for her mother. The family rallied – one family member admitted they all pulled together for Marcy’s sake as much as anyone else – but it was to no avail. Dolores died in January 1997. She was 66.

Marcy and Dolores, mid 1990s

*

In 1999, Marcy married her boyfriend, Tom Flynn. They’d met a few years before, and their first date was going to midnight mass with Tom’s mom. They become inseparable: Marcy had found the relationship she’d always wanted. She stopped bartending so she wasn’t out at night and could spend more time with Tom. She took up a new career – perhaps the one to which she was best suited of all: she became a pet stylist and groomer.

Marcy, dog groomer

Tom had proposed to her at the Hollywood Beach Hotel in Miami. The venue was significant: Tom’s parents had met there when they’d both been employed by the hotel years before. Not only that but it was also where Tom had been conceived when his folks had taken refuge in one of the rooms during Hurricane Diana, a fierce tropical storm back in 1960. The hurricane happened to hit Miami the night of Marcy’s tenth birthday. So it made sense that their wedding took place there as well.

Marcy and Tom, wedding day

Marcy and Tom spent the next two decades happily married in South Florida. Tom knew a little about Marcy’s films, and sometimes asked about her past but she didn’t talk about it much. The present and the future were more important to her. Marcy did appear in another film, ‘Marley and Me’ (2007) with Owen Wilson, where she had a fleeting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it walk on part.

And then three years ago, Marcy was diagnosed with colon cancer, the same that Dolores had. Marcy passed away in May 2021 at the age of 70. She was cremated and her ashes scattered at, where else, Hollywood Beach Hotel, where she and Tom had got engaged and married.

I took Tom out for dinner recently and told him some of the stories I’d learned about Marcy, her mother Dolores, and the people they’d known and worked with. He was surprised to find out about it all, and shook his head in sad happiness hearing stories about her. Most of all though, he just missed Marcy. “I always wonder what I did in a previous life to deserve her,” he said. “I must’ve done something right somewhere along the way. She was a good person, and she was chasing butterflies to the very end.”

Marcy and Tom

*

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants – some of whom, like the Cubans in this series arrived in the country fleeing from adversity. The vast majority have helped drive business creation, fuel innovation, and fill essential workforce needs, all core principles of American values. Their stories are often overlooked, but worse, all too often they’ve been maligned and mistreated. I’m an immigrant, and at the naturalization ceremony, the presiding officer will tell you that now you have become an American, the most important thing you can do is to hold onto where you’ve come from: the culture, the customs, the food, and the way of life. If you can do that, you’re told, you’ll be preserving what truly makes America great. You’ll be keeping this a nation that is welcoming of differences, diversity, and inclusion.

People like Dolores Carlos, Manuel Conde, José Prieto, and Rafael Remy who came to this country, and chased butterflies of their own.

*

Marcy

*

The post Chasing Butterflies: Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida – Part 4, Rafael Remy’s Story – Podcast 148 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Previously on Chasing Butterflies – Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida:

You may remember Marcy Bichette’s start in life from our earlier episodes: she was born Marcelle Denise Bichette in St Petersburg, Florida in August 1950 to a young married couple who had distinctly different ambitions in life. Her father, Maurice Bichette, had married looking for a settled, quiet existence, but her mother, Dolores, wanted to live her life moving in the opposite direction. Dolores had come from a protected, patriarchal, patriotic Cuban household, and she longed for the excitement and glamor that she saw onscreen in her favorite Hollywood movies. Maurice and Dolores’ marriage couldn’t, and didn’t, last. They divorced, and Marcy lived with her father and his new wife Mary, while Dolores, moved to Miami to pursue a modeling career.

Dolores did well, changing her name to Dolores Carlos, her photos featuring in magazines and newspapers, winning beauty contests, and then, starring (and being arrested) for a hit nudie film, Hideout in the Sun. The success of that film led to her appearing in other films such as Pagan Island (1961), Diary of a Nudist (1961), and Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962) in quick succession, and thereby becoming the unofficial pin-up queen for nudists.

But perhaps Dolores’ biggest impact came in the way that she became a tireless advocate, promoter, and organizer of the Cuban immigrant film talent that had arrived in Miami, a group of people keen to make a new life in the U.S. after escaping the Castro revolution. Her friendships with local film producers and theater owners like K. Gordon Murray and Leroy Griffith kick-started the American careers of many of these Cubans in Florida, including men such as Manuel Conde, José Prieto, and Rafael Remy.

The only downside in Dolores’ new life in the early 1960s was that she was separated from her adored daughter Marcy, a problem that she longed to fix.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve tracked down and spoken to many people involved in the Florida film business of the 1960s and 1970s. Their overlapping personal histories reveal an untold chapter of adult film history – and the hidden role that Cubans played in shaping it.

These are some of their stories. This is Chasing Butterflies, Part 3: Marcy Bichette’s story.

You can listen to the Prologue: Dolores Carlos’ story here, Part 1: Manuel Conde’s story , and Part 2: José Prieto’s story.

With thanks to John Minson, Tom Flynn, Ronald Ziegler, Leroy Griffith, Veronica Acosta, Marcy Bichette, Mikey Bichette, Lousie ‘Bunny’ Downe, Mitch Poulos, Sheldon Schermer, Ray Aranha, Manny Samaniego, Barry Bennett, Randy Grinter, Herb Jeffries, Tempest Storm, Chester Phebus, Michael Bowen, Norman Senfeld, Richard Falcone, Lynne O’Neill, Something Weird Video, and many anonymous families and friends who have offered recollections, large and small, over the years.

This podcast is 39 minutes long.

Marcy Bichette

*

After the divorce, Maurice had quickly remarried. This new wife was his third and final: his new bride, Mary, had already been married four times before, and together they would enjoy, or rather endure, a decades-long relationship. Mary was a difficult character and Marcy, her step-daughter who lived with them, would suffer as a result.

Marcy, age 7

Maurice and Mary quickly started another family, which would grow to include three children of their own, Maurice Jr, known as Mikey, Valerie, and Dante. Mikey, the oldest of the three, remembers growing up with his step-sister Marcy as being one of the best parts of his childhood. Marcy was eight years older and took over maternal tasks from Mary, such as playing and dressing him. The kids also remember Dolores coming to see Marcy whenever she had breaks from modeling and filming in Miami: they loved Aunt Dolores’ visits and all her glamorous, exciting stories. Needless to say, Maurice’s feelings were less enthusiastic – he still didn’t approve of Dolores’ lifestyle – but his problems with his ex-wife didn’t stop them both from being close to Marcy. Everyone recalls Marcy was his favorite out of all the kids – in truth, Marcy was everybody’s favorite – and, despite their separation, Maurice and Dolores doted on her.

Marcy and Dolores

For someone who’d had an unconventional home life, Marcy seemed the most normal girl in the world. Family members today describe her as an unusually gentle and thoughtful person. They talk about her kindness and the way she saw the good in everything and everyone. She was unfailingly happy and positive. She never had a cross word or thought, never had an argument, and made everyone feel special.

One person however wasn’t a fan, and that was her step-mother, Mary. Mikey, Mary’s eldest son, pulls no punches in a description of his mother: “My mother could be a bad person, a monster at times. She resented the attention and love that Marcy had – especially from her father – and so she made Marcy suffer, and treated her terribly. But how did Marcy respond? Marcy respected my mom no matter what: she never reacted, never said anything bad against her. She just bore the brunt of all the evil and turned the other cheek.”

Mary’s neglect of Marcy continued when Marcy developed an infection in her heart in 1959, and spent four months recovering in hospital. Marcy returned home with a permanent heart murmur and more ill treatment from her step-mother. It got so bad that her father Maurice eventually called Dolores, and they agreed that Marcy had to move out, go down to Miami, and start a new life living with Dolores. It was heart-breaking for Maurice and his other children who never forgave Mary for her behavior.

Dolores and Marcy, hospital in 1959

Dolores however was over the moon. Sure, it could’ve been a difficult situation for her: Dolores’ career was taking off – and hers was hardly a kid-friendly lifestyle. She was appearing in racy, not to mention scandalous, nudie films, arranging meetings for her coterie of Cuban filmmaker friends, and hustling her own sex film projects around town to potential financial partners.

Dolores, photographed by Bunny Yeager

It made their everyday life complicated, but Dolores and Marcy both loved the new arrangement and Dolores relished living with her daughter in her small apartment on NW 1st St. And despite her physical distance from her father, Marcy called Maurice every Sunday without fail, something she continued to do for decades. However busy she was, Marcy made regular trips to visit him and his family, where she loved taking care of her step-brothers and sister. Despite her parents’ acrimonious separation, Marcy harbored no favoritism, loving them both equally as if they were still together.

In Miami, Marcy started attending the city’s Senior High School where she fit in immediately. She was popular there, acting in the lead roles in high school productions and playing the piano and guitar in music groups. She had a sweet singing voice, and teenage friends still remember her carrying a guitar everywhere. She loved singer-songwriters and sung in music groups, transforming Dolores’ apartment into a rehearsal space for her latest musical project. She was Dolores’ daughter in every way, loving performing and dreaming of a career in show business.

But her biggest passion was animals, especially dogs, and she spent hours training them and playing with them. She signed up for animal welfare organizations in her neighborhood, always taking in strays. One of her friends said of her: “Marcy had such a passion for life and animals, and everyone loved her. I almost hate to say it because I’d love to give you some gossip or salacious stories, but that’s the truth. She was a sweetheart. I still picture her running around the back yard as a teen chasing butterflies.”

Dolores and Marcy

*

In the mid 1960s, Dolores told friends she’d never felt happier and yet somehow, she still felt strangely unfulfilled. Deep down, she knew she couldn’t live this life forever. Time moves slowly but passes quickly, and she wanted to remain relevant and use her accumulated knowledge and connections to create a more lasting career. She argued that she’d made as many films as anyone else, she had well-connected and powerful friends, and she could mobilize a Cuban film crew at the drop of a hat, so why was it so difficult to get someone, anyone, to take the chance and invest in her?

She wondered out loud about whether it was because she was a woman, or a Latina, or that she was in a business that prized youth and beauty – and there she was, a single mother now in her mid 30s. Or perhaps it was because everyone still thought of her as being just a sex film actress? She knew that success was a double-edged sword – on the one hand, she was still offered plenty of nude film and modeling work which helped pay the extra bills after Marcy moved in, but it also perpetuated the stereotype of her as being just a sex object.

Dolores, photographed by Bunny Yeager

She did much more than that, she said, and the variety of her work did have a striking range: she was called upon by film production honchos like K. Gordon Murray to assist and advise in their film productions; she advised theater chain managers like Leroy Griffith on new film ideas; she found work for scores of Cubans; and she’d started writing film scripts and movie pitches. She knew she was appreciated, admired, cherished even, but whatever she did, she never seemed to be able to parlay her success into a more profitable, respectable, and permanent career: “I could be a powerful rocket, but at the moment, I’m a failure to launch,” she told a friend.

And Dolores worked more regularly than most. In the 1960s, she appeared in a lengthy sequence of sex films that reads like a history of South Florida sexploitation: there was Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera (1963) – a Barry Mahon effort which featured many models shot by Bunny Yeager including Dolores’ friend Bunny Downes; she work again with Doris Wishman in Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (1963), shot at Sunny Palms Lodge nudist reserve; there were two more Barry Mahon films – both nudist roles – in Crazy Wild and Crazy (1964) and International Smorgas-Broad (1964); a rare though brief role in a mainstream film, How to Succeed with Girls (1964) – perhaps interesting mainly for the presence of future Golden Girl, Rue McClanahan; then a part in Eve and the Merman (1965) where she was typecast as a pin-up; and then the lead role of sorts in The Beast That Killed Women (1965), a breathtakingly strange film by returning champion Barry Mahon, about a rampaging gorilla who disrupts the calm of a Miami nudist resort – this time Spartan’s Tropical Gardens Nudist Camp – by kidnapping and murdering nude women.

She wasn’t short of male attention either: when she and Bunny Downe appeared as two of the nudists in Herschell Gordon Lewis and Dave Friedman’s Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963) – Dolores had a brief, behind-the-scenes fling with the film’s star, Joey Maxim, the recently-retired but still handsome heavyweight boxing champion from the 1950s. All the experiences were fun, all kept her in the public eye, and all paid a little spending cash, which was increasingly important as Dolores’ savings had started to dwindle – but she wanted, and needed, more.

While Dolores was toiling in Southern Florida’s exploitation film business, her teenage daughter was an interested and empathetic observer. Marcy may have made life more costly, but she had become her mother’s best friend. Marcy could see the pleasure her mother derived from performing and putting films together, and friends still talk about how the two would talk together about all aspects of the production, distribution, and exhibition of Dolores’ films.

Marcy

And then Dolores did make a film of her own. It was produced with a close friend, Richard Falcone, with whom she’d acted on the set of her first movie, ‘Hideout in the Sun’ (1960). Falcone was a polymath – if a polymath means an Italian who combined being a property developer, interior designer, bodybuilder, butterfly collector, the founder of Sunshine Beach Naturist Club in Tampa, and a keen photographer who snapped primarily nudist pictures to sell to naturist magazines.

There was a reason for them making the film. Falcone had gone through a tough time after appearing in ‘Hideout in the Sun’: in 1961, he’d been arrested as the supposed mastermind of a prostitution and pornography ring when police broke down his door and confiscated all his nudist photos. Falcone insisted he was entirely innocent and said that this was a simple case of harassing an honest man who just happened to have an alternative lifestyle. But this was the early 1960s and Falcone was fighting a losing battle to make his case. The media coverage treated him as a pervert which in turn caused him to lose his real estate business, his photography job, and then his apartment lease. No matter that the charges were eventually thrown out when the initial police search was deemed unlawful. Dolores, ever the supportive friend, was one of the few who remained by his side helping him rebuild his life.

One of her ideas to get him out of the hole he was in was for them to make a film together, and they hatched a plan to produce a nudist movie based on a script that Dolores had written, Naked Complex (1963). The story was admittedly contrived: Johnny is a playboy and an expert at sports – from water skiing, golf, and racing cars, but he’s hopeless around women. Somehow, after being humiliated by the newspapers who reveal his inadequacy, he crash-lands his personal airplane on a remote island where nude women cure him of his problem. It wasn’t ‘Gone With The Wind’ but it was exciting for the pair to be putting their own movie together for the first time.

Dolores assembled an entirely Cuban production team to shoot the movie, and gave acting roles to some of her Cuban friends from Little Havana, including a female snake dancer who’d just arrived from Cuba smuggling her three exotic serpents into the country. They shot the story at – where else? – the Sunshine Beach Naturist Club, the nudist resort which Falcone had founded. Oh, and Dolores starred in the movie as well, of course.

Their film wasn’t hit – or even that great, but the budget was minimal, Dolores had shown she could both produce and star in a movie, and it made a little money. Unfortunately, the experience still failed to open any new doors.

Chastened by the experience, Dolores sat down with Marcy to figure out next steps. The truth was that she didn’t have a lot of money left in the bank, and she was getting aged out of the nudie films that had been such a cash cow for her. She needed a new plan. It wasn’t a decision she wanted to take, but Dolores decided she had to get a more regular paycheck.

And so the Queen of the Nudies took a position as a teller in a local Miami bank.

Marcy

*

When Marcy was fifteen, she asked Dolores if she could get some semi-professional acting work.

Dolores had seen Marcy’s talent in school plays and so took her for an audition at Miami’s Merry Go Round Playhouse Theater on Miracle Mile in the Coral Gables neighborhood. The Merry Go Round was a staple of Miami’s theater scene, part of a broad trend at the time to present plays ‘in the round’ – a more immersive experience by placing the stage at the center with seating surrounding it. Marcy was transfixed by the theater from the first moment she saw it – and the Merry Go Round management liked her too, offering her a contract to appear in their children’s productions.

Marcy snatched the opportunity and started appearing in bit parts straight away. She was mentored in the theater by a black actor, Ray Aranha, a local probation officer who did acting in his spare time. Ray was a decade older that Marcy but he saw that her talent and enthusiasm made her a natural, as he remembered years later: “Marcy was a ray of sunshine. I couldn’t help feeling happy whenever she walked into the room. She was a rare person. And she was a talented actress… I used to coach her and read lines with her: she took direction well, and we were all convinced that she was going to end up in Hollywood starring in movies someday.”

Marcy, at the Merry Go Round Playhouse

Marcy loved the theater, and it wasn’t long before she started to pester Dolores for film roles too. Her father, Maurice, was horrified at the thought of his daughter appearing in sex movies, and made Dolores promise that she would keep their daughter far away from the sex film business.

In 1966, Dolores became friends with Norman Senfeld, a virulently anti-Castro Nicaraguan, who she met in a bar in Little Havana. Senfeld was an ardent activist who was intent on raising awareness of the evils of the Cuban regime, as well as raising money to overthrow it. The Cuban expats liked him, even though there were rumors that he was involved in some illicit money-laundering activity to fund his efforts to subvert and destabilize Castro’s government.

Senfeld told Dolores he wanted to move into films and maybe she could help him. He said he was impressed with her extensive connections. Together they formed a company, called Stage Four, with another wannabe filmmaker, Bobby O’Donald. The new company was set up quickly, suspiciously quickly in fact, and from the start it seemed to be awash with cash. The mystery was where the money had come from. Friends of Dolores from this time still speak about their surprise – and suspicion – at the large sums of money that Senfeld and O’Donald, two inexperienced and unknown newcomers on the film scene, had available to make their films.

In April 1966, they made a film called Full House (later renamed ‘Mafia Girls’). Dolores got Manuel Conde onboard to shoot it, which was his final film before he left for California. The movie was about a crime syndicate in Miami Beach that extorts politicians by filming them at sex parties, and Dolores had a starring role taking time off from her bank job. Despite its supposedly large budget – and extensive press coverage, the resulting film seemed to disappear without a trace, with a number of its crew claiming, years later, that it was never actually released theatrically.

For their next movie, Dolores volunteered a script that she’d been developing for years. It was supposedly an action-packed exploitation thriller that was far from the nudist camp flicks for which she was known. She’d already pitched different drafts to her usual trusted benefactors, men like K. Gordon Murray and Leroy Griffith, but they showed little interest in financing it.

The script was called ‘Revenge of the Swastika’: it told the story of the Miami branch of the American Nazis headed up by a Colonel von Stissen who was supported by his right-hand gal, Major Olga. (Bear with me here.) Their fascist group is about to launch ‘Operation 11’, a plan that will destabilize society and bring them to power. First, they have to take over the William Penn hotel in Miami and hold the vacationers and staff hostage. The twist was that the FBI had already infiltrated the group of Nazis and was aware of their plan, but they decided to wait and see how the insurrection would play out. Got that?

Quite how much of this plot was Dolores’ work or how much was embellished by Norman Senfeld after he got hold of it is unknown. Senfeld himself described the story as a metaphor about authoritarianism, and by implication, the Castro regime that he despised. He agreed it should be the next Stage Four production. Dolores was amused by Senfeld’s political interpretation but pleased that her script would finally be made into a feature.

If you wanted to be generous, you could say the story was ahead of its time, as nazi-sploitation films like Love Camp 7 (1969), Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975), and countless others would follow in the years ahead. But in truth, this was a bizarre story that was every bit as strange as it sounds.

The film was shot in the second half of 1966 – but with a different title, Storm Troopers U.S.A. By the time of the shoot, Dolores was no longer a producer, but involved instead, behind the scenes, as a production manager though she received no on-screen credit. The shoot received a large amount of press coverage in the local newspapers, with Miami residents complaining about the unannounced extras wearing Nazi regalia who suddenly appeared on their streets. The producers proudly stated that the film would be released within 90 days – though they admitted it probably wouldn’t be seen in Miami theaters. Dolores had an acting part in the film, and they found a role for Marcy too, her first appearance in front of the camera. In fact, both can be seen in stills from the movie wearing Nazi armbands – though neither of them featured in the credits.

Dolores, on set of Storm Troopers U.S.A. in 1966

The finished film was heavily padded with stock footage from World War II and was nothing like the serious action thriller that Dolores had originally intended it to be. Worse, it did exactly what she vowed not to do and it succumbed to amateurish sex film tropes.

What happened next is another mystery. What is known is that, just like ‘Mafia Girls’, the movie disappeared and doesn’t seem to have been released theatrically. And there’s a strange postscript twist to the story: for years to come, Dolores claimed she made a large sum of money from the film. In fact, she claimed the money was so substantial that she used it to buy her first home, which enabled Marcy and her to move from their small apartment to a comfortably sized house at 3790 SW 121st Ave, Miami in 1967. This story became part of family lore, and for years, they would all talk about how “the Nazi film” that no one ever saw had made Dolores a small fortune.

This made some friends skeptical, suspicious even, and there were rumors that the film had been made as a front for money-laundering activity. Others wondered if Dolores’ windfall was actually a hush-money payment she received when she discovered that the company was involved in illegal activity.

So what is truth behind what happened to the film, and the source of the money that Dolores said that she received?

A few years ago, I tracked down and interviewed the director, Norman Senfeld. He spoke at length about how he got to know the Miami Cuban filmmaking collective through Dolores and his anti-Castro activism. He spoke fondly of her, and the few films they made together. He said that both ‘Mafia Girls’ and ‘Storm Troopers U.S.A.’ had indeed been released in theaters at the time, and he claimed that he had bought Dolores out of Stage Four, the film company they created, so that he could exert greater control.

But when I asked about where the company’s funding had come from, and about the rumors of money-laundering, Senfeld claimed it all happened a long time ago and that he couldn’t remember much anymore. I pressed further suggesting it was strange to have made two films – that received much so publicity – but that didn’t seem to have been released. And what about the large payoff that Dolores received that enabled her to buy a house. Senfeld claimed ignorance, and then quickly and quietly made his excuses and hung up. I’d like to claim to have found the answers but, for now at least, the story remains a mystery. Senfeld died in 2016.

As for the Stage Four production company, it came to a sudden end in 1968, when Bobby O’Donald, Senfeld’s partner, was arrested for owning what the feds described as an obscene pamphlet. It turned out the booklet in question was nothing more than the pressbook for their next film, Night Hustlers (1968). Whatever the merits of the case, the accompanying scandal signified the end of the film company.

As for Dolores, she went back to her job working as a teller in the bank.

*

While Dolores was busy juggling her 9-5 job with occasional film work, she was unfailing in her support of Marcy’s regular acting roles in children’s plays at the Merry Go Round Playhouse. Marcy was now 16, and had progressed from walk-on parts to lead roles, garnering good reviews in the local newspapers. And when she wasn’t acting, she was singing in a band that covered 1950s and 1960s rock n’ roll standards and volunteering at animal rescue centers. She’d also started modeling.

Just like Dolores had done fifteen years previously, Marcy’s modeling work led her to enter beauty contests – with some success. Dolores saw a chance to help advance Marcy’s ambitions, so she called up Bunny Yeager who’d photographed her for various pin-up magazines at the start of her career. Bunny suggested something different – her first mother/daughter pictorial. The shoot took place on the sidewalk by Miami Beach in December 1966. The resulting bikini photos are as unglamorous as they are touching: Dolores looks very much the older, wiser mother, and Marcy the self-conscious, awkward, but pretty and happy-go-lucky teen.

Dolores and Marcy, photographer by Bunny Yeager in 1966

Marcy, photographed by Bunny Yeager in 1966

Dolores also found another film role for Marcy, through her long-time friend, Louise ‘Bunny’ Downe. In the years since they started in sex films together, Downe had started working exclusively for Herschel Gordon Lewis, the Florida-based director, who was making a name for himself as the ‘Godfather of Gore’ through a series of gory and grisly, low-budget, splatter films. Downe had worked on the script for their next film, The Gruesome Twosome (1967), about a demented elderly woman who has her mentally challenged son kill and scalp various young women to use their hair for her wig shop. Downe told Dolores she had a role for Marcy – and Marcy jumped at the chance to be in the movie. She loved it too: no matter that the production was a pantomime of incompetence at times, with supposedly dead bodies blinking and breathing after their bloody demise. The film set was exciting – and Marcy wanted more of this in her life.

Back at the Merry Go Round Playhouse, Marcy was now impatient. She’d been in a movie, and was growing tired of the children’s matinée parts. She wanted to be involved in the more senior productions of the theater. Marcy spoke to her friend Ray Aranha, the probation officer/actor who she trusted and who helped guide her developing acting career. Ray’s presence was always calming and he reassured her: there was no need to hurry. She was talented, she’d been identified as an actor the theater wanted to develop, and more serious roles would come her way. He would personally make sure of that.

Marcy, at the Merry Go Round Playhouse

And then Ray’s theatrical career blew up in his face: newspapers ran stories about his appearance in Shanty Tramp (1967), a sexual film of miscegenation that was shocking Florida. The scandal led to him being fired from his day job and hounded out of the south Miami theater scene. Dolores and Marcy were particularly shocked by the events: it had been Dolores who had recommended him for the role, and she felt personally responsible, and Marcy had lost someone she viewed as an older brother. Both of them were devastated. When I spoke to Ray years later, Ray still spoke warmly, though sadly, of his friendship with Marcy, wondering what had happened to her in the years after the scandal.

But if the fall-out from ‘Shanty Tramp’ had been a firestorm causing the lives of some of the protagonists to be affected forever, others were quietly pleased with how the film had been received. The three people behind it, producer K. Gordon Murray, director José Prieto, and writer Reuben Guberman, saw their film break out of the usual ghetto of B-movies and into the mainstream, and that meant mucho boffo at the box-office – as they probably don’t say in Cuba.

For the writer, Reuben Guberman, the question was slightly more complicated. Guberman, you may recall from the last episode, was the New Yorker, the ex-hamburger cook, drive-in restaurant manager, radio announcer, newspaper editor, and one-time political candidate, and as pleased as he was with the outraged reaction his script had elicited, deep down he had loftier aspirations to be a serious writer. Sure, he was happy to write another potboiler, but he wanted some critical admiration too. So he decided to seek redemption by writing a play, ‘Social Trip’, which would be a morality piece warning kids against the dangers of drugs. As usual, Dolores was on hand to help, and she arranged for the Merry-Go-Round Playhouse to put it on in January 1968 – with Marcy in the lead role, of course. It may have been a cynical ploy for Guberman to rehabilitate himself – but it worked. Dolores pulled strings to get the newspapers to run positive stories about how instructional and moving the play was, and many who had attacked ‘Shanty Tramp’ now came out to endorse and praise the new play.

Meanwhile, K. Gordon Murray was waiting in the wings. After ‘Shanty Tramp’, the only question he had was how could he follow it up – and produce another profitable smash hit? Murray asked, nay demanded, a new script, and so Guberman offered him something he’d written called Savages from Hell (1968). It was a biker movie about a vicious gang who pick a violent fight with a farmworker and his family. Murray liked it enough and offered it to José Prieto, by now his go-to director. José assembled a crew consisting almost exclusively of Cubanos to film it, including his best friend Rafael Remy, who did the cinematography and editing. Of course, Dolores insisted that there was a prominent role for Marcy in the cast too, alongside Cyril Poitier, brother of Sydney.

‘Savages from Hell’ was released in a blaze of publicity, with lurid posters blaring that the film “Makes the Hell’s Angels look like Boy Scouts!”. In truth, Guberman’s script was an under-cooked effort lacking the elements that had made ‘Shanty Tramp’ so enjoyably bad, and it would be his last involvement in film. The movie failed to attain the success of their previous effort, the only semi-scandal being a lawsuit from American International who sued K. Gordon Murray for imitating its biker films.

The movie was notable for one reason, however. It was Dolores’ last appearance in front of a film camera. It was a small role as a redhead at the Roadhouse bar. She was in her late 30s now, with a steady job at the bank, and happily living in her new house financed by ‘Storm Troopers U.S.A.’. She’d also just got married, and she figured it was finally time to settle down.

*

Marcy had made just two films – three if you count ‘Storm Troopers U.S.A.’ – but after she turned eighteen, she started getting more offers. The problem was they were nearly all for sex movies and Marcy was more interested in stretching her acting abilities. She had no judgement against the increasingly explicit trend in movies – after all, she knew her mother had made a career out of the early nudie-cutie films – but as Dolores kept repeating to her: “I made those films so that you don’t have to.” Also, Marcy had seen how Ray Aranha had been hounded out of theater work after the sexual shenanigans of ‘Shanty Tramp’ – and she didn’t want the same to happen to her. After she graduated high school, many of her friends on the theater scene encouraged her to go west and try her luck in Hollywood.

The Miami theater world was small, they said, and she had the attributes that could make her a star. One was a fellow Merry-Go-Round Playhouse actor, Mitch Poulos, still a character actor today having appeared in shows like ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, ‘Arrested Development’, and ‘The Office.’ Mitch was a few years younger than Marcy – and was part of the children’s theater group. He remembers Marcy as a combination of a caring older sister who’d protect him when drugs were being passed around backstage, a talented actor who he still believes could have been a star, and a beauty who looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor: “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” he said, “voluptuous, talented, elegant, and with a sweet, kind heart.”

Despite all the encouragement to leave for California, get an agent, and try her luck in the film industry, Marcy was happy in Miami and so decided to stay. Besides, the Merry-Go-Round theater director had started casting her as the lead in nearly all the company’s adult plays. Mitch Poulos remembers: “The theater played into her beauty, and they started choosing plays and roles that specifically accentuated her good looks.”

Marcy, at the Merry Go Round Playhouse

Looking through the theater records today, it’s clear that Marcy was the undoubted star of the repertory company, acting and appearing in an eclectic selection of works – often receiving glowing reviews in the newspapers.

And there were lots of plays: starting in 1968, she starred in the political work – ‘Mac Bird’; plays that were transfers from Broadway like the comedy ‘Thurber Carnival’; melodramas like ‘The Man’; ‘Madness of Lady Bright’ – where a review described her as “effective, and tightly disciplined”; ‘Oh Dad, Poor Dad’ – where the review described “beautiful Marcy Bichette, a talented character actress”; Neil Simon’s ‘Star-Spangled Girl’; the Barbra Streisand role in ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’; Spider Lady in ‘Superman’; lead roles in ‘Rashomon’; Maleficent in ‘Sleeping Beauty’; Cleopatra in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’; Mary Poppins; and Desdemona in ‘Othello’ to name but a few. Sometimes she appeared in other Miami theaters’ productions too, such as the Jane Fonda leading role in ‘Barefoot in the Park’.

Marcy, at the Merry Go Round Playhouse

For each play, Dolores was in the front row, always Marcy’s biggest cheerleader – but she was perhaps proudest when Marcy was approached by Las Mascaras, the largest Spanish-language theater group in Florida. The troupe had been started by two Cubans, Salvador Ugarte and Alfonso Cremata in 1968, specifically to keep alive the culture and traditions of Cubans who had fled to the United States. Dolores loved the troupe’s vision, and offered them her services, which included raising money for the company. Marcy starred in their production of ‘Gaslight’ at the Merry Go Round Playhouse. Marcy was a hit in the play, and she and Dolores became close friends with Ugarte and Cremata, and supporters of their work.

Dolores and Marcy, c. 1971

Marcy wasn’t overly ambitious, but she liked staying busy, and when not acting in theater productions, she continued to pursue music and modeling. She was desperate to go to Woodstock in 1969, but her father vetoed the idea, saying he was worried about the drug scene. For Marcy, it was a blow: she’d been saving up her money from the Merry Go Round and doing modeling jobs for the newspapers in which she would appear as a daily temperature girl showing the expected weather on the beach – just as Dolores had done years before.

*

By the early 1970s, the three Cuban friends, José Prieto, Gregor Sandor, and Rafael Remy, who’d escaped the island ten years earlier, were still close. Sandor had spent most of his time in California, building a successful career in film that would lead to jobs such as shooting Monte Hellman’s cult hit ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’ (1971) and Brian De Palma’s ‘Sisters’ (1972). The three amigos would get together periodically, often having reunions at Dolores and Marcy’s Miami place. Dolores would sometimes invite the rest of the Cuban contingency of filmmakers as well for a day of food and drink. She was an expansive host, serving large portions of lechon asado, ropa vieja, and arroz con pollo, with guests drinking Cuba libre, Havana Loco, and El Presidente’s late into the night.

Rafael Remy was a frequent visitor, and had become close to Marcy. He’d known her since he arrived from Cuba, and was a passionate supporter of her acting, often accompanying Dolores to watch her at the Merry Go Round Playhouse. He also encouraged her music aspirations, suggesting she write her own songs, and he found places for her to gig too. Ironically one of the venues he found for her to play regularly was Tom’s Bar, a country and western roadhouse in Davie. It was where ‘Shanty Tramp’ had been filmed – the same bar that had not allowed Ray Aranha to enter on account of his race.

It was at one of Dolores’ open house gatherings in early 1971, that Rafael suggested they all make one last film together. Rafael said he would produce and write it, José could direct it, Gregor could shoot it, all their other Cuban compadres would join the crew, and he would write a role for Marcy. Rafael said that it would be their collective swansong to the Florida scene, and it would be the strangest film anyone had ever seen. Everyone had been drinking too much that night, but they all agreed it was a great idea.

A few weeks later, when everyone had forgotten about it, Rafael shared his script for Miss Leslie’s Dolls (1973) with José, and José was shocked. Rafael had been true to his word: his vision was indeed bat-shit crazy. It told the story of a young professor and three of her students who are forced to seek refuge at an isolated farmhouse one night due to bad weather. There they encounter a transvestite who collects the bodies of biological women, with the aim of transferring her spirit into them. Or something like that. The plot read like a mash-up of ‘Psycho’ (1959), ‘Glen or Glenda’ (1953), ‘Thundercrack!’ (1975), and ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ (1975), with some ‘Scooby Doo’ thrown in for good measure.

Yes, José found it weird, but he was amused by it too. Dolores read it, and thought it was a hoot. She said she had the perfect actor for the strange drag-queen lead role of Miss Leslie: her friend Salvador Ugarte, the founder of Las Mascaras, the Spanish-language theater group with whom Marcy had worked. Rafael loved the idea and snapped Ugarte up. As always, the crew consisted mostly of Cuban expatriates.

The film shoot took place in the summer of 1971 and lasted six weeks – longer than the regular schedules for run-of-the-mill exploitation films. Marcy loved making it, and often spoke about the pleasure of working with her mother’s Cuban friends who she had grown up around.

Marcy in ‘Miss Leslie’s Dolls’ (1972)

The resulting film, that hit theaters in late 1972, is like few others. Sure, it’s clearly a low-budget production with cheap sets and stilted dialogue (Rafael Remy’s halting English still wasn’t fluent – and it shows in the script), but ‘Miss Leslie’s Dolls’ is consistently bizarre, well-shot, campy, entertaining, and unique. There are certainly highlights, one of which is Salvador Ugarte’s performance. Here was a serious theater actor dedicating his life to promoting Cuban culture, dressed as a woman in a cheap blue dress and sporting a pronounced five o’clock shadow. To matters each more incongruous, he had a dubbed female voice in the film – an unusual touch enabled by the experience that Rafael and José had had working with K. Gordon Murray’s dubbing team when they first arrived from Cuba. Marcy’s fresh-faced performance shines as always.

Marcy (in green) and Salvador Ugarte in ‘Miss Leslie’s Dolls’ (1972)

‘Miss Leslie’s Dolls’ was perhaps too unusual for its time, perhaps too unusual for any time. It received a limited release in the U.S. before being the supporting feature in a bizarre double bill with The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972) in the U.K. in 1973.

For all Marcy’s acting talent, the sad truth was that she was missing the boat. She was simply in the wrong part of the country. Few films were being made in South Florida and Marcy didn’t have an agent to follow up even if there were.

But if ‘Miss Leslie’s Dolls’ was strange, Marcy’s next and final film was even more off-the-wall. Coming off stage at the Merry Go Round one night, she was approached by two men who introduced themselves as film producers. They said they were making a South American horror film called The Swamp of the Ravens (1974) (aka ‘El pantano de los cuervos’) and wanted to fly Marcy down to Guayaquil in Ecuador, to be the female lead in their Spanish-U.S. co-production. Marcy had just gone through a relationship break-up and thought the break from Miami would do her good.

Marcy in ‘Swamp of the Ravens’

The resulting film is a disturbing tale of zombies, necrophilia, and autopsy footage. The film died a death, receiving a limited release in outposts that included Mississippi and Texas, and failed to advance Marcy’s film career. Years later, Marcy remembered little about the experience, except for the fact that she was dubbed throughout the film apart from one blood-curdling scream when she wakes on a mortuary slab. Somehow, it was a fitting but sad end to a once-promising career.

Marcy in ‘Swamp of the Ravens’

*

The Ecuador experience left Marcy feeling jaded about acting. She still loved being on a theater stage, but it had all started to feel restrictive and limiting compared to the freedom of playing music. Rafael Remy, always her trusted advisor, suggested she form her own band, so in 1973, she formed Bitter Sweet, a four-piece group, with Marcy playing acoustic guitar and keyboards, and she had her new boyfriend Chester, on bass. For the next seven years, she became a full-time touring musician, traveling up and down the state, playing gigs from Key West to Tallahassee.

The band hit the road hard: it was a relentless and thankless slog which included playing the Holiday Inn scene, performing from 8pm-2am every night. Mitch Poulos, her old acting friend from the Merry Go Round Playhouse remembers going to see her and coming away impressed with the show – and Marcy’s talent. The group would mainly play covers, with Marcy’s vocal style coming off like Linda Ronstadt.

The band became popular, and developed its own following – so they recorded some demos.

This is Marcy singing Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams recorded around 1978.

She sent the tracks off to a hot shot producer in Nashville. He replied straight away: he loved Marcy as a singer, he said, and wanted to fly her in to try out some new songs. Only snag, he wasn’t interested in the rest of the band, so Marcy turned the offer down. They were a unit, she said, and she wasn’t interested in success if it was without the guys she’d spent so much touring with.

Another time, Criteria Studios in Miami got in touch: they’d seen Marcy at one of her shows and wanted to explore working with her. That was a big deal: the Eagles had recorded half of their ‘Hotel California’ album in the studio, and bands like Black Sabbath and the Bee Gees also made hit records there. The band went over and played for the in-house producers, but it was the same story. Criteria just wanted Marcy – and she wanted her band.

Whenever the band were close enough, Dolores would come out and see them play – as would José Prieto and Rafael Remy, always supporting their quasi-adopted daughter. One show in particular was unusual – and important to Marcy: it was a show that she did especially for Rafael. It wasn’t a regular gig: the purpose of this one was to raise funds for an attorney to try and keep him out of jail. Rafael had been arrested for distributing hardcore films that he’d also been involved in making.

It seemed like the Cuban fortune teller from all those years before had been right: Rafael Remy’s film work had indeed led him into trouble and strife.

*

Tune in next time for the final episode of Chasing Butterflies: Rafael Remy’s story – and the birth of Florida hardcore.

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The post Chasing Butterflies: Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida – Part 3, Marcy Bichette’s story – Podcast 147 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Previously on Chasing Butterflies – Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida:

Manuel Conde had lived several lives even before he moved to Miami, Florida. He’d been born José Conde Samaniego in 1917 in Galicia, in northern Spain, though his family fled to Cuba after General Franco’s fascist coup d’état in the 1930s. And then, in 1959, Castro overthrew the government and enforced Communist rule over Cuba. Manuel, having already fled one dictatorship in Spain a few years earlier, took his family and fled to Miami, Florida, smuggling out a sexploitation film that he’d just made, called Girls on the Rocks.

In Miami, Manuel met Dolores Carlos. Dolores was a newly semi-famous actress and model on the local scene, having starred in (and been arrested for) a successful nudism film, Hideout in the Sun (1960) made by Doris Wishman, which she followed by appearing in a handful of other nudie cutie films.

Dolores introduced Manuel to the growing community of ex-pat Cuban filmmakers that had settled in south Florida after Castro’s coup, and together they shot a nudie short in 1961, Playgirl Models.

Dolores and Manuel arranged a meeting with Leroy Griffith, an energetic, entrepreneurial force of nature, who’d recently moved to Miami and made a name for himself by acquiring a string of theaters where he exhibited burlesque shows and then adult sex films. The three of them made a full-length feature was called Lullaby of Bareland (1964).

In 1966, Manuel and Dolores teamed up with Leroy Griffith to make a film with a decent budget – Mundo Depravados – starring Tempest Storm, one of the country’s best-known burlesque performers, and the movie was ostensibly directed by her husband Herb Jeffries, a suave and seductive film and television actor and popular jazz singer who had a large following in the African American market. ‘Mundo Depravados’ was released with eye-catching promo material – “A Sinerama of Sex and Fear!” – and is one of the most bizarrely entertaining film experiences you can have.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve tracked down and spoken to many of these people. Their overlapping personal histories reveal an untold chapter of adult film history and the hidden role that Cubans played in shaping it.

These are some of their stories. This is Chasing Butterflies, Part 2: José Prieto’s story.

You can listen to the Prologue: Dolores Carlos’ story here, and Part 1: Manuel Conde’s story here.

With thanks to John Minson, Tom Flynn, Ronald Ziegler, Leroy Griffith, Veronica Acosta, Marcy Bichette, Mikey Bichette, Lousie ‘Bunny’ Downe, Mitch Poulos, Sheldon Schermer, Ray Aranha, Manny Samaniego, Barry Bennett, Randy Grinter, Herb Jeffries, Tempest Storm, Chester Phebus, Michael Bowen, Norman Senfeld, Richard Falcone, Lynne O’Neill, Something Weird Video, and many anonymous families and friends who have offered recollections, large and small, over the years.

This podcast is 40 minutes long.

José Prieto

*

They say timing is everything. Sometimes it’s a well-oiled, precision-calibrated clock, but other times it just kicks you in the balls.

Take José Prieto, for example. It was the late 1950s, and here was a man who’d spent his entire life waiting for that big break that would give his life meaning, that would fulfill his dreams, but fate always seemed to be a case of wrong place, wrong time, and that elusive, life-changing moment of success remained forever out of reach somewhere off on the horizon. José was a small, wiry man, consumed by nervousness, and his world-weariness hung on him a cheap, oversized suit. His head seemed constantly lowered as if trying to figure out the answer to life’s latest conundrum. Some dismissed him as dour and uncommunicative, but José had close friends who knew the truth. Guys like Greg Sandor or Rafael Remy. They’d worked with him in the Cuban movie business over the years, stuck around to get to know the real José, and found him a quiet, thoughtful, smart, and diligent man. Funny and mischievous even, especially when he’d had a few El Presidentes in him.

José Prieto was Cuban-born and Cuban-raised. He’d lived in the country’s capital, Havana, all his life: it was a city of well over one million inhabitants, but it felt like a village to him. He mixed unobtrusively with everyone, from high-level government officials to pimps, petty criminals, and low-level gangsters. It wasn’t that he was particularly affable, but more because he wasn’t considered a threat to anyone. He knew his country wasn’t perfect: it was overseen by Fulgencio Batista, an un-elected right-wing military dictator who’d taken power by force in 1952. Batista’s regime was corrupt and becoming increasingly repressive, but José was smart enough to know the secret to living a comfortable life in Cuba was to fly below the radar and avoid the attentions of the men in power. If you kept your nose clean and your wits sharp, you could navigate this world comfortably.

And so, José had become a proficient jack of all trades in the Cuban TV and film business. The 1950s was a ‘Golden Age’ for Cuban cinema: it started when many American films were screened in theaters across the country, partly due to Batista’s close ties with the U.S. government and business interests – and then continued when several American films were shot in Cuba during this time, taking advantage of the island’s proximity and exotic appeal. Suddenly local studios were established in Havana which increased local TV production. Cuba became one of the first Latin American countries to introduce television in the 1950s, which quickly became popular, producing a variety of hit shows, including comedies, soap operas, and live music programs.

In a career that had been going over 20 years, José had produced, lit, shot, even acted in tens of these productions. Most of all though, he saw himself as a director, and occasionally he got the chance to be in charge. Some of his productions had been hits, others came and went virtually unnoticed, but he ploughed on, waiting for that one opportunity that would establish himself as a major player. But the Cuban film industry, for all of its strengths, was still small compared to Hollywood or Mexico, and the big breaks never came his way.

*

And then, José’s timing changed, and he was suddenly in the right place at the right time. It started when he read that Columbia Pictures were going to shoot a major motion picture right there in Havana. Not only that, but it involved three of his favorite people: it was to be directed by Sir Carol Reed, it would star Sir Alec Guinness, and it was based on a new book by Graham Greene named Our Man in Havana.

The story was a satire that mocked the intelligence services, especially the British MI6, and their willingness to believe reports from their local informants. Alfred Hitchcock had been the early favorite to make the film, but he backed out when he couldn’t afford the film rights to the novel.

José had read and admired the novels of Graham Greene, especially ‘The Power and the Glory’ and ‘The Heart of the Matter’, and his interest in the upcoming movie production only increased when it was announced that the film’s cast would include English acting royalty, Ralph Richardson and Noël Coward, as well as American stars like Burl Ives, Maureen O’Hara, and Ernie Kovacs, to help sell the film to an American audience.

José’s opportunity came in the last weeks of 1958, when Graham Greene and Carol Reed visited Cuba. They were there to do two things – view locations and hire the local crew. When they arrived, Reed was shocked and concerned by what he saw on the streets of Havana: signs that Batista’s regime had become more vicious were everywhere, and Reed was concerned about how filming could take place against the backdrop of such violence and intimidation, after all, Greene’s book was hardly reverential to the Cuban dictator. Columbia Pictures suggested a local production manager as a solution: a real life ‘man in Havana’ who could navigate the political and logistical roadblocks.

José saw his big chance and wrote to the studio asking to be considered. He was granted an interview, and made an impassioned case: he was more than just a fixer, he said. Havana was his backyard. He knew almost everyone, and if he didn’t know someone personally, well… he knew someone who did. He was experienced in putting together a movie production, he could arrange a complex shooting schedule, and he could do everything else that you couldn’t put a price on.

Where would they find film equipment? José assured them that whatever they needed would be delivered immediately.

Where would the best production accommodation be? José would get the choice rooms in the top hotel in Havana – the famous pink and white Capri Hotel, in reality, a casino cum whorehouse, owned by the Florida mobster Santo Trafficante, Jr., which was fronted by the entertainer, George Raft.

Capri Hotel, Havana

How would they find actors, or extras for the street scenes? José would produce any number of eager locals, excited to be in a big film production.

What about the nightclub scenes… where could those be filmed? No problem, said José. He had a cousin who worked at the Tropicana, Havana’s most notorious nightclub, another location owned by the mob. What’s more, he could arrange for strippers, bartenders, and local business men to be extras in the scene as well.

The production team was impressed. José had the experience, technical knowledge, and the network of contacts that they needed. He was hired on the spot, and in the records of the production, he was given the credit of ‘Assistant Director (Cuba location scenes)’. He even found jobs on the shoot for friends like Greg Sandor and Rafael Remy. Both had good credentials, having worked in local and international productions, Remy having already been an uncredited assistant director on John Sturges ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ (1958) starring Spencer Tracy, which had shot in Havana in the summer of 1956.

And then on January 2nd 1959, the revolution happened: Fidel Castro overthrew Batista’s regime and the situation in Cuba changed overnight: military thugs carrying sub-machine guns were everywhere and wagons laden with peasants in chicken-wire cages were drawn through the streets.

Castro takes power, 1959

It was a strange time to be starting filming a satire about spying, but the news wasn’t all bad for the film production: Graham Greene had been friends with Castro since an earlier visit, and he wasn’t fazed by any new problems the coup would cause. After all, their film mocked the previous regime of Batista in an unflattering light and also condemned American and British meddling: surely Castro would welcome this prestigious film production – and appreciate the celebrities from England and the United States. The first signs were good: the new revolutionary government of Cuba gave the green light for ‘Our Man in Havana’ to be filmed in the Cuban capital, and so the production moved forwards.

But the same treatment was not applied to José. He was now treated with suspicion by the new leaders: Batista’s government had always let him do what he wanted but, bizarrely, he was now considered part of the former regime by Castro’s new government departments – and that made his new job rather more difficult.

His first task, before the film started, was to apply for work permits for everyone. This entailed taking the script to the new Ministry of Labor and justifying each cast and crew position to them. Castro’s men listened and then complained that the novel didn’t accurately portray the true brutality of the Batista regime.

Early Castro press conference, 1959

Then José received an unexpected offer. The casting director told him they needed a local to play the part of Lopez, Alec Guinness’ assistant in the movie. When José found them a selection of actors, the production team was unsatisfied. The casting director replied that the ideal person for the acting role was José himself. It was a significant part, with plenty of lines and screen time.

José wasn’t keen. He was a background kind of guy, he said. Sure he’d acted before, but he was someone who preferred to stay in the shadows. His concerns were dismissed, and Alec Guinness was rolled out to try and convince him. Guinness took him aside and told him that both of their characters were anonymous personalities, mere cogs in the bigger story, men being manipulated by the machinery of government and men in power. Guinness said that it was important that neither of them acted: they just had to “be”. In that way, José’s personality was perfect for the role. In fact, his protestations were proof that he was the right choice. José was cornered: he’d idolized Guinness since the days of ‘The Third Man’ so how could he pass up the occasion to act with the great man? He reluctantly took the role – which he did in addition to keeping the job of local assistant director.

(l-r) Alec Guinness, José Prieto

Filming started on location in Havana in March 1959 just two months after the overthrow of the Batista regime. On the second day of filming, José was approached by an official from the Minister of the Interior demanding a copy of the screenplay. José explained he’d already provided this to Ministry of Labor. That was irrelevant, he was told. Furthermore, they wanted a full translation – and, a censor would be sent to the set each day, in addition to a government observer, both of whom would shadow José and check that he was not doing anything that was “compromising the revolution.” It made José’s life more painful, especially considering that the Ministry of the Interior quickly insisted that 39 changes be made to make it appear that life during the Batista regime had been even more unfavorable.

At other times, José’s work on the movie was more comical but no less serious. Take beards for example: since Castro took over, a beard had come to represent a hero of the revolution. But one of the characters in the film – who played the role of Batista’s chief of police – had a beard. José was called in by the Castro officials and told that all beards in the cast and crew had to disappear.

Unwanted pressure didn’t just come from the new government, it came from locals too: when extras dressed up in the blue uniforms of the Batista police turned up for filming, they were attacked by angry spectators. Once again, José had to intervene to find a solution.

(l-r) José Prieto, Alec Guinness

And then José got a message from Castro himself: the leader wanted to meet the people responsible for the production: Carol Reed, Graham Greene, Noel Coward and Alec Guinness. They were invited to Castro’s bungalow for the day. This would mean losing a whole day of shooting, so José went back and, in a diplomatic fashion, told Castro’s office that it would be difficult to accommodate. It was the wrong answer: José had greatly displeased the leader. He was dispatched back to the film set with a new instruction: the request had now become a demand, and the team were told to meet with Castro the following day.

So the next day, Reed, Greene, and Coward turned up for the appointment with an uncomfortable José lurking in the background. They waited for Castro in a palace room surrounded by bearded revolutionaries who informed them that Castro would be turning up shortly. Minutes turned into hours, and José’s unease turned into terrified concern. In the end, the film team left without a meeting. Castro had made his point. Days later, on 13 May 1959, Castro did meet the film crew when he visited the set while they shot scenes at Havana’s Cathedral Square. After he posed for pictures, Castro spoke to the press saying, “Any film company can make any picture they want in Cuba. There will be no censorship in my country. You can make the film exactly as you please. Those are my orders.”

(l-r) Maureen O’Hara, Fidel Castro, Alec Guinness on the set of ‘Our Man in Havana’

Not strictly true, however. The on-set censor continued to make frequent demands to José that changes be made – in one of the nightclub scenes, for example, he felt that too much leg and breast was visible. Another time, he demanded that the whole day’s shooting footage be handed over to him for cuts to be made. But José had grown in confidence, and now he refused, standing up increasingly to the authorities, and invariably winning more battles along the way.

José did his job well in a way that few others in the world would’ve been able to do, and the film company was pleased with him. He’d done the hard, silent, behind-the-scenes tasks, delivering anything that was requested without fuss, in his usual intense, quiet, and serious manner. He earned the nickname ‘José Practical’ as a result of the calm, pragmatic way he worked.

(l-r) José Prieto, Jo Morrow, Alec Guinness

But privately, José was far from feeling calm, and his fears were growing stronger by the day. He knew he’d be protected from Castro and his generals for the duration of the filming, but what would happen after the crew packed up and went home? He’d stood up to the government heavies on countless occasions during the film shoot, but how would they treat him in the future?

At the end of seven-week shoot, José started noticing things. Friends told him they’d been approached and quizzed about him. They’d also been asked questions about his local associates on the movie, like Greg Sandor and Rafael Remy. He noticed his mail was going missing, and he wasn’t paranoid by nature, but was he imagining it or was he being followed every day when he set out to go to work?

It was too much for the veteran film man. He called his contact at Columbia Pictures and asked to have his name removed from the credits of the final version of ‘Our Man in Havana.’ He got a mixed message. They told him they could drop the ‘Assistant Director’ credit, but that the acting credit was unavoidable. After all, his face was up there on the screen for all to see. José tried putting his foot down, but he was told that the best they could do was for him to use another name. José was relieved, but, somewhere along the way, the instruction was lost, and when the film came out, the name ‘José Prieto’ was prominently displayed in the credits – just after the big-name English and American actors.

José didn’t want to hang around. In the aftermath of the film, he wanted out before he got picked up and found himself in trouble. He packed his bags, and fled the country, heading over the sea to a new life in Miami.

*

José didn’t move to Florida by himself. He was accompanied by his two main compadres in the Havana film business, Rafael Remy and Gregory Sandor. The grass looked greener on the other side of the water for all three, and so in 1961 they embarked on new lives in America. The U.S. was the center for capitalism and the center for filmmaking, right, so why not become part of the gravy train? They figured they could seek work quietly at first and earn a steady living in Florida. In fact, it was Sandor that facilitated their move as he was an American, hailing from Burbank, California.

Each of the three men wanted to continue working in the film business, but each had a different plan. The one thing they all had in common was that they wanted low profiles, to work under the radar, at least at first, with José especially fearing possible reprisals from the Cuban government.

Greg Sandor had it easiest: being an American who’d lived and worked in Cuba for years, he was the least worried. He was essentially a cameraman, who saw that his best opportunity would be in the world of commercials and industrial films.

For José and Rafael, it was more difficult. As new immigrants in the country, they headed to the Freedom Tower in Miami – the central location used by the government to process and document refugees from the Cuban Revolution that administered the Cuban Refugee Program.

Rafael Jesus Remy was always the more cavalier one. His plan for anonymity was to find film work, any film work he could, but use a variety of mildly different names to mask his participation. Sure enough, over the next years, he would be known as Jesus Remy, Gerry Remy, Ralph Remy, and many others – sometimes even his actual name Rafael Remy.

As for José, he was the fearful one. Film work was all he knew, but he’d had direct – and often confrontational – contact with Castro and his men, and so was reluctant to do anything that might draw attention to himself. He was the first of the three to find work – a lowly bellboy position in The Everglades Hotel, a popular mid-range option for business travelers in downtown Miami. It was a steep and strange decline in status for a man who was coming off being an actor and assistant director on one of the biggest motion pictures of the decade.

Everglades Hotel, Miami – late 1950s

One night the three amigos found themselves outside a tiny shopfront in Little Havana in Miami with a sign outside advertising a fortune teller. They’d had a few drinks and laughed their way into the cramped room, where each sat on an upturned fruit basket and in turn had their future explained to them by a mysterious woman adorned in scarfs and jewelry. The mystic explained she used a combination of sacred instruments, including palm nuts, pieces of coconut, and Spanish tarot cards, to see into the future. She told them solemnly that Greg Sandor would find money and respect. José would find fame and notoriety. Then she paused, as if alarmed by the reading: Rafael Remy would find trouble and strife.

Inevitably perhaps, all three of the filmmakers came into contact with Dolores Xiques, now more commonly known by her film and modeling name, Dolores Carlos. She introduced them to the Cuban expat community, a group growing larger by the day but one that was still tight-knit. At the heart of it was Dolores, the caring mother hen looking after men from a country that she’d never visited but that she felt passionately about. She’d become the connective tissue binding the community together.

Dolores became particularly close with José. It was an unlikely friendship: she was an American single mother in her early 30s, living with her teenage daughter Marcy, and was the star of scores of nudie films and men’s magazines, who had the trust of film producers, theater owners, movie directors. and crew members. He was a dour, taciturn Cuban filmmaker in his late 40s, often paranoid and fearful, struggling with having left his country so hurriedly.

Dolores took José to see her friend K. Gordon Murray, the film producer whose company Trans-International Films bought children’s movies from Mexico and dubbed them for the domestic market. She was still trying to persuade Murray to finance nudie pictures, but apart from re-releasing a perfunctory effort called Eve or the Apple (1962), featuring nudie inserts of Dolores, she hadn’t had much luck in convincing him. He was making too much money with colorful, surreal fairytale films, like ‘Santa Claus’ (1959). But Dolores was persistent, convinced that Murray would eventually come good and move into film production, and she took many Cubans she met at the Freedom Tower to his offices at 530 Biscayne Blvd in Miami. Murray was impressed with José, especially when he recognized him from his appearance in ‘Our Man in Havana’. He found work for José on a variety of film projects, which José accepted if he could them fit in around his Everglades Hotel doorman duties.

Dolores also connected José with other filmmakers, many engaged in making South Florida nudie pictures. José became popular, willing to do a variety of jobs, invariably uncredited, often underpaid, but always skilled, professional, and useful. Just one job credited his involvement: an assistant director job for the Cuban man-of-many-hats, Frank Malagon. Malagon had set up a film studio to make films as a way of funding his anti-Castro activities, and his first feature was a nudist movie, Six She’s and a He (1963). Malagon’s partner, Richard Flink, was credited with directing the film but as neither Malagon nor Flink had much experience, it was largely directed by José himself. Many of the crew roles on the film, as with many other similar efforts at the time in Florida, were taken by expat Cubans – which made José feel at home.

In the early 1960s, in his first years in America, José worked on tens of films in an uncredited capacity. The Everglades Hotel provided him a one-room lodging in the basement of the building and he worked shifts there, so if was given enough notice, he could usually arrange to be free to work on a film set.

*

In 1966, José received a call from his old friend, Greg Sandor. Sandor had done well since they’d arrived from Cuba. He’d found cinematography work on commercials in California, as well as camera work on a few exploitation films. His recent credits included a couple of Ted V. Mikels films, ‘Dr. Sex’ (1964) and ‘One Shocking Moment’ (1965), as well as two Roger Corman produced, Monte Hellman-directed films that starred Jack Nicholson ‘The Shooting’ (1966) and ‘Ride in the Whirlwind’ (1966).

Despite his growing success, Sandor had kept ties with his Cuban countrymen in Florida, and he had an idea for José. Sandor was helping another Cuban immigrant, Guillermo Álvarez Guedes, put together a Spanish language production, Dios te salve, psiquiatra (‘God Bless You, Psychiatrist’). Sandor said to José that the time had come for them all to come back and work together again just like in the old days in Cuba. Times were changing, he said, and José should be less fearful and more ambitious, and seek better quality film jobs. Sandor also enlisted Rafael Remy for the new film, as well as other members of the Cuban community in Miami.

José took some persuading: being a bellboy for the past years had been demoralizing at first, but it had given him an easy and quiet existence. Giving that up was a risk. José sought advice from Dolores and K. Gordon Murray and both encouraged him to strike out for himself, and return to more regular film work. Murray even promised him film projects that would be funded by his company. So José accepted the job of assistant director, on condition that his on-screen credit would only refer to him as ‘Pepe Prieto.’ He took a temporary leave of absence from the Everglades Hotel for a few months to be the assistant director on the film. The management at the Everglades liked José and were understanding, but also a little skeptical: they told him they’d keep his position open for a while – just in case this film malarkey didn’t work out.

(l-r) José Prieto, Guillermo Alvarez Guedes, Gina Romand

‘Dios te salve, psiquiatra’ was a broad comedy of roaming love and Latin muchachos, and starred Gina Romand, a Cuban-born, big name in Mexican films of the time. It was a solid and bankable project, but most of all, it was a reunion of old friends: everyone returned to work for lower salaries simply because they wanted to re-connect with each other again. Talent that had been dormant for years suddenly returned to life. Dolores put together the promotional push that resulted in extensive media coverage and a big premiere. The film turned out to be a modest success in Spanish-speaking areas of the country.

Gina Romand

José’s first job after ‘Dios te salve, psiquiatra’ was a quickie, Sting of Death (1966), about a deformed man working for a marine biologist who takes revenge on the people that mock him by experimenting with a deadly jellyfish. The film was another for the studio established by Frank Malagon, for whom he’d directed the nudist movie, Six She’s and a He (1963) a few years earlier, and José still just wanted his on-screen credit to just refer to him as ‘Pepe Prieto.’

And then Dolores called. Her long-term strategy with K. Gordon Murray was finally starting to pay off: after years of trying to persuade him, she’d convinced him to fund an exploitation film. Murray insisted that the craze for nudie movies had long passed: instead, he was looking at a more topical feature, albeit something that would still appeal to the sex-and-violence drive-in audiences, and he told Dolores that he’d found the right vehicle and wanted her help. Murray was looking to make a film that would hit the jackpot – and he wanted to know if José would be interested in directing?

*

Shanty Tramp (1967) is one of the most notorious, shocking and scandalous films of the 1960s. It tells the story of a sleazy evangelist who makes a play for a small town’s local tramp, but he’s shocked when he finds that she prefers a local black man over him. Furious, he stirs up the town against the couple causing fights, murders, lynch mobs, ruined reputations, and broken homes.

So who came up with the whole concept? The incendiary script, with plenty of nudity, sex scenes, and violence thrown in, was largely written by one of K. Gordon Murray’s staff members, Reuben Guberman. Guberman was a flamboyant New Yorker – or a “fat, Jewish maverick” by his own description. He’d left New York many years before as a teenager to seek his fortune in sunny Miami, Florida, and embarked on a ridiculously varied career that included being a hamburger cook, a drive-in restaurant manager, radio announcer and producer, editor of the weekly Dade County Times-Union newspaper, and political candidate. Perhaps his most surprising career move was discovering that he had a natural gift for lip-synchronization – an essential component part for dubbing foreign films and cartoons for Murray.

When Guberman met K. Gordon Murray it was a match made in heaven. Together they invented the looping process of dubbing: this consisted of splicing short segments of dialogue from a movie into a loop, and then playing them back to the voice actor allowing them to watch the film-loop over and over and record an English language track matching the on-screen actors’ mouths as much as possible. Working for Murray in his tiny office in nearby Coral Gables which he called Soundlab Inc., Guberman’s job was to translate the original language scripts into English dialog for the voice-talent, and in many cases, he also provided some of the voices himself as well.

But by the end of mid 1960s, the market for dubbed films was waning, and both Murray and Guberman were looking for a new market: they decided that ‘Shanty Tramp’ should be their next project. Murray and Guberman had already started to put the film together and hire a number of the actors when they offered the directing gig to José. José accepted even though he was still working at the hotel: he was hungry and ready to return to the party. Being the head-strong, stubborn guy he was, his first step was to fire most of the actors who’d been offered parts, and he assembled a crew almost completely composed of Cuban expats from his Little Havana hangouts. At the heart of the new film project was his old friend Rafael Remy who ended up doing both the cinematography and editing.

‘Shanty Tramp’ credits showing the Cuban crew

If the subject matter was akin to lighting a touchpaper of controversy, the casting of the movie proved to be a forest fire. José wanted proper actors for the lead roles, not the usual untrained and inexperienced sexploitation regulars, so he turned to Dolores and asked her to find suitable principals for the film. Dolores knew all the Cuban crew workers in Miami, but her knowledge of actors – especially serious thespians – was less thorough. She had an idea though: her teenage daughter, Marcy, had recently started acting semi-professionally with the Miami Merry-Go-Round Playhouse, and Dolores – ever supportive of Marcy’s endeavors – was a regular in the audience. She’d become friends with some of actors there, and successfully approached a number of them for the main roles in ‘Shanty Tramp.’

The lead role of Daniel, the black man at the center of the film, was credited to ‘Lewis Galen’: in reality, this was Raymond Aranha, an experienced and highly-rated probation officer for the Dade Juvenile Court. In his spare time, Ray was a keen thespian, and a regular member of local theatrical troupes such as the Coconut Grove Playhouse. Ray changed his name for the purpose of the film, realizing that the movie was bound to elicit strong feelings, and he wanted to protect his promising local government career. He later commented, “I wasn’t worried about the nude scenes. That’s life. It was the interracial part that would be an issue, and I knew I was in the Deep South.”

Ray Aranha (aka ‘Lewis Galen’)

Then there was the role of Emily, the Shanty Tramp herself, the sexual temptress whose lustful feelings for Daniel cause the race riots. This role was played by ‘Lee Holland’: in reality, she was an attractive, quiet, and reserved Dade high school teacher called Eleanor Vaill. There was even a role for Vaill’s real-life husband, Otto Schlessinger, who played the part of her father.

Eleanor Vaill high school portrait

Eleanor Vaill (aka ‘Lee Holland’) in ‘Shanty Tramp’

For the role of the head of the motorcycle gang, Dolores suggested Lawrence Tobin, who had directed her daughter Marcy’s latest play at the Merry-Go-Round.

Then there were roles for extras and even they ended up being problematic: such as the vicious motorcycle gang. parts Somehow Dolores managed to convince four actual Broward County police officers to act in the film. She even got them to agree to use their police car – completely unauthorized, of course.

Lawrence Tobin (aka ‘Biker Savage’) and four Miami police officers (aka bikers)

Ironically one of the only principal people who kept their real name was José himself, who finally came out of the shadows, anglicized his name, and became ‘Joseph Prieto.’

Most of the film was shot in the tiny Empire Studios in Dania, a neighborhood twenty miles north of Miami – even though the publicity would boast, “Filmed in the heart of Georgia’s emotional-infested swamps.” Some of the exteriors were shot on location at a local bar, and just to indicate the extent of the racial climate at the time, Lawrence Tobin, who played role of the amoral head of the motorcycle gang, later recalled that the lead actor, Ray Aranha, wasn’t even allowed in the bar to shoot the scene on account of his race.

Ray Aranha and Eleanor Vaill

Over the years, I’ve tracked down and spoken to many of the people who appeared in front of camera in ‘Shanty Tramp’ or who worked behind it. I’ve been fascinated by the film, and keen to ask them for their memories. One common theme from these conversations is how clearly each of them remember the shoot – but more than that, how vividly they remember what happened next.

‘Shanty Tramp’ exploded onto the screens in June 1967. K. Gordon Murray had already told local newspapers that this was not an ordinary film event, and that he was entering it into the Cannes Film Festival. Radio and TV stations were bombarded with publicity for the film, and newspapers featured theater ads showing the poster for the film which featured artists impressions of scenes together with an explanation: “Sorry! Because of the abnormal nature of this film, we cannot use any photos in advertisements.” The ads also advised that uniformed police would be present to protect ticket buyers, and that viewers should “come early as thousands may be turned away.”

The blanket coverage in the newspapers was so extensive that the pages reserved for letters from readers was taken over by morally upright citizens writing in to complain… which of course only served to increase the film’s exposure. Sure enough, it played everywhere with playdates all over the country.

The film itself was certainly provocative. José and his Cuban crew filmed this Southern Gothic melodrama, poking every boundary and taboo and mining the material for every sleazy angle. The ‘n’ word was clearly used on several occasions in the movie, but according to several crew members, the producer Murray, writer Guberman, and director José changed their minds about leaving it in at the last minute. Using their dubbing expertise, the word was removed from the soundtrack before film prints were struck.

Attempts to tone the racial elements down though had no effect, and the outraged reaction continued. By September, the State Attorney warned any theater owners showing the movie were liable to be arrested under the state’s new obscenity law. The new statute centered around protecting juveniles from smut and violence, saying: “It is a felony to exhibit a film which exploits illicit sex or perversion or is obscene. By this we mean, lewd, filthy, lascivious, indecent, immoral, sadistic which intends to arouse lust or passion or to corrupt the morals of the youth.” As a promotional gimmick, Murray added a tear-off clip at the bottom of the newspaper ads, which read, “Teenagers! Have the Form Below Signed by Your Parent or Guardian! Sorry! You Will Not Be Admitted Without It!”

The Tropicaire Theater was one of the venues that was targeted by the state, and its manager was happy to oblige: “I’m pulling it,” he said to The Miami News. “This movie is too far out for me. Usually, these pictures don’t live up to the advance billing. But this one is for real.”

The State Attorney sent an investigator to view the picture, and his report confirmed their worst fears. It was swiftly reported in the newspapers. He wrote, “Various scenes depict prostitution, rape, incest, and even a sex orgy by a motorcycle gang. In the climax, a girl nude except for her panties is shown stabbing her father to death with repeated slashes of a butcher knife.” The investigator also noted that “the drive-in audiences were loaded with under-age viewers.”

The loud controversy was music to Murray’s ears. He declared the film was “a smashing success” at more than 1,000 theaters in the three months since its release.

Up to now, the story had been one of a scandalous movie that may or may not be obscene that was raking in dollars at the box office. But the newspapers wanted more. They wanted a scapegoat. They discovered the background of some of the main participants: they found that the African American lead male was actually a probation officer, the nude hussy anti-heroine was a school teacher, and some of the biker gangs were cops. Bingo. The news coverage for the next months was taken up by the various arguments that followed.

Dolores took the breaking news badly. After all, she’d been the movie’s casting director, and had persuaded all these people to be in the movie. For the last years, she’d taken personal pride in helping people find film jobs, but now she felt personally responsible for the scandals that were about to engulf their lives.

The police were the first to be attacked. They started by arguing that it was a lie. Then they said that any footage of the four officers cast in the film had not made the final cut and so no transgression had occurred. Finally they conceded that the policemen in question had all been fired.

Meanwhile, Eleanor Vaill, the school teacher who’d used the name Lee Holland, was nowhere to be found. It was reported that, after being fired from her school job, she’d fled to Chicago – where she disappeared and was never heard of again. Actually none of that was true: Dolores had planted that story with the newspapers as a damage limitation measure to shield the ‘Shanty Tramp’ leading lady. In reality, Vaill had voluntarily left her teaching job and she was still living in Miami. In fact, she’d become a full-time actress, and continued to appear in local theater productions, including several with Dolores’ daughter, Marcy. Vaill and her husband did eventually move back to their home town of Chicago, where they became staples of the dinner theater circuit for years to come.

As for Ray Aranha, the African American who’d used the name ‘Lewis Galen’ for the lead role of Daniel, despite being commended for his work as excellent probation officer, he was nevertheless fired for being “guilty of conduct unbecoming of an employee of the county.” The case went to an industrial tribunal with ‘Shanty Tramp’ being shown to the panel of the Personnel Board, but Ray never got his job back.

I contacted Ray years later, and he laughed remembering the events of 1967. It turned out that getting fired was the best thing that happened to him, he said: “After that, I decided to focus on the theater – acting and writing. And that changed my life for the better.” Ray went on to significant success, winning the Drama Desk Award in 1974 for Outstanding New Playwright, and then acting on Broadway, in films, and on television many times in the years that followed.

While all the hoopla was playing out in the press and in the courts, and changing people’s lives forever, what was José’s reaction? After all, this was the man who had feared his name ever appearing in the news again. José had laid low, and somehow it worked. The cover stories and features and scandal had focused on nearly every aspect and every person in the film, except for him. Miraculously, he had remained anonymous.

When the dust settled, Murray sent him a bonus from the large profits he’d earned from the film: a check for $1,000. José, normally quiet and reserved, was in the mood to celebrate, and so he called up Rafael Remy and the rest of the Cuban expats who’d made the film, and they headed to the finest restaurant in Little Havana in Miami where José paid for everyone’s food and drinks.

The previous decade had been a strange whirlwind journey for him: José had gone from being a minor player in kick-starting the Cuban film business, to a major production director and acting gig in ‘Our Man in Havana’, before escaping Communist Cuba, and now directing a controversial race-baiting sex film. It was a lot for a quiet man to bear.

But those who knew him all agreed: he’d never been happier. He was back doing what he enjoyed best. So he went to see the management at the Everglades Hotel, his home and employer for the previous five years, and told them they needed to find a new bellboy.

He was a filmmaker again.

*

Tune in next time for another story in ‘Chasing Butterflies’.

The post Chasing Butterflies: Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida – Part 2, José Prieto’s story – Podcast 146 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Previously on Chasing Butterflies – Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida:

Dolores Carlos was from a fiercely Cuban family, even though she was born in Tampa, Florida in October 1930, and never visited her country of origin. Her Cuban heritage and good looks, not to mention her patriotism, came from her father, Gus, and grandfather, Carlos, who had run the family’s cigar making business.

Growing up was complex for Dolores: she was close to her family, but she dreamed of breaking free and having a glamorous life as an actress, seduced by the silver screen and the movies of 1940s that she cut school to watch. At 17, she broke away, but found herself swapping her strict family home for married life – and being a stay-at-home mother after she gave birth to her daughter, Marcy.

The marriage ended in divorce, and Dolores needed to support herself – which she did by modeling: she modeled for Webb’s department store, newspapers, pin-up photographers and local businesses. Her career quickly took off, aided by winning beauty contests and making personal appearances at fairs, carnivals, and balls. Within no time, her pictures were appearing all over the land – even in other countries. She became close friends with a Miami model, Louise Downe, also known as Bunny, and they often worked together.

Most of all though, Dolores wanted to work in films: she introduced herself to every producer she could find and turned up at every audition, but when she turned 30 without any offers, she figured that her dream was probably not going to happen.

Then in 1958, Doris Wishman contacted her. Doris had had a career in film distribution, but following the death of her husband, had decided to make a nudist camp film, ‘Hideout in the Sun’, and wanted Dolores for the lead role. Dolores accepted with a degree of nervousness given the subject matter – and her fears were realized when Doris and Dolores were both arrested filming a nude scene on the beach in Miami, and Dolores was found guilty of indecent exposure. It was a scandal that was splashed across the newspapers and shocked her family.

For Dolores however, the arrest, and the subsequent success of the film, proved to be a watershed moment: she finally felt independent and decided to double down and move to Miami where she could pursue the new film and modeling opportunities that were now coming her way. She appeared in several more nudist camp films, countless newspaper photo spreads, and became a local celebrity, appearing on stage to introduce visiting Hollywood stars, like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis when they brought their shows to town. Her life was made even happier when she was joined by her teenage daughter Marcy, who moved to Florida to live with her.

Dolores was often accompanied on her film and modeling jobs by her friend, Bunny Downe, and together they decided to produce their own nudist movie, and so they arranged meetings with various impresarios in Miami. One of these was with K. Gordon Murray, a legendary carny entrepreneur, who was a hugely successful importer of Mexican children’s films which he would skillfully dub for the American market.

But Dolores had another outlet for her talents: on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro’s communist rebels had seized control of Havana, Cuba’s capital. Many Cubans, fearing the consequences of the new revolutionary government, fled to Miami looking for work and a new life. Among the influx were many who’d worked in Cuba’s film and television industry. Dolores’ passion for helping Cubans and her newly acquired network of film contacts was ideally suited to helping these immigrants find work in the new sex film industry in Florida.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve tracked down and spoken to many of these people. Their overlapping personal histories reveal an untold chapter of adult film history and the hidden role that Cubans played in shaping it.

These are some of their stories. This episode is Part 1: Manuel Conde’s story.

You can listen to the Prologue: Dolores Carlos’ story here.

With thanks to John Minson, Tom Flynn, Ronald Ziegler, Leroy Griffith, Veronica Acosta, Mikey Bichette, Bunny Downe, Mitch Poulos, Sheldon Schermer, Ray Aranha, Manny Samaniego, Barry Bennett, Randy Grinter, Herb Jeffries, Tempest Storm, Chester Phebus, Michael Bowen, Norman Senfeld, Richard Falcone, Lynne O’Neill, Something Weird Video, and many anonymous families and friends who have offered recollections, large and small, over the years.

This podcast is 40 minutes long.

*

Manuel Conde was an improbable playboy: at 5’6” and bald as a polished billiard ball, he wasn’t often mistaken for Tony Curtis.

What made Manuel a ladies’ man was a combination of circumstantial factors: for a start, he lived in New York in the 1940s and 50s, where he ran a successful – and glamorous – photographic business, specializing in portraits of wealthy dowagers and Cuban movie stars. You could always spot his pictures: each one was embossed in the corner with his impossibly elegant and unique imprimatur, ‘Conde of New York.’ He got his start in the business after befriending another photographer, a Jewish man Maurice Seymour, who became a mentor to him. Manuel’s business took off, and before long, his photos were ubiquitous.

‘Conde of New York’ photographic portrait

Then there was Manuel’s jet-setting lifestyle, splitting his time between Cuba and the Big Apple – in an era when both locations were the playgrounds of the rich and famous.

And finally, there was his enigmatic and mysterious background. Manuel had actually been born José Conde Samaniego in 1917 in Galicia, a fiercely independent kingdom in the north of Spain. For centuries, Galicia had pressed for self-government and for the recognition of its own unique culture, and in 1936, it finally won the right to self-determination by establishing a Statute of Autonomy. The people had got what they had wanted for generations – but this new beginning was frustrated by General Franco. His fascist coup d’état in the same year kick-started a long dictatorship throughout Spain, and so Manuel, barely twenty at the time, fled with his family to Cuba.

But by the mid 1950s, Manuel was bored of the photography business. He loved working with cameras but had grown tired of the high-maintenance prima donnas who posed for his studio portraits. He wanted to start a new career – and he wanted to make films. New York was a closed shop due to the strict unions, so he turned to the nascent film industry in Cuba where he found work as a cameraman on a variety of projects.

In 1956, he teamed up with an aspiring director, Mario Barral, and they made Cuban Confidential (aka ‘Backs Turned’). It was a drab, black and white, pseudo neo-realist drama notable only for the depiction of the pre-Castro Havana streets (“People are real…” – the disclaimer read at the beginning – “any resemblance is a happy or bitter reality.”) Manuel took a producing credit in return for taking the film back to New York with him and seeking U.S. distribution, but it was slog and he would struggle to make any progress in selling the movie in the years ahead.

Nevertheless, encouraged by the experience, Manuel established a small film studio in Havana and shot newsreels of the Cuban political situation for Movietone, the New York newsreel company. He also made an upbeat musical comedy ‘Around Cuba in 80 Minutes’ (1957), featuring entertainers who appeared at show spots on the island, such as the Tropicana in Havana. The movie premiered in 1958 in Cuba, and would later achieve a second life in the U.S. as a nostalgic view of Cuba for homesick compatriots.

Then two major events happened that turned Manuel’s life upside down: first he met Maria Maury, a woman almost twenty years his junior, who became his wife. And then, in 1959, Castro overthrew the Batista government and enforced Communist rule over Cuba. Manuel, having already fled one dictatorship in Spain a few years earlier, wasn’t in the mood to stick around and try life under the new boss. The only things keeping him in Cuba were family, which he could take with him, and his new studio film business which, under the newly-enforced trade embargos, could not be transferred to the U.S. So, to get around the restrictions and to have something to bring as a calling card, Manuel decided to make one last movie – an exciting, commercially attractive feature that he would take with him as he left Cuba behind, and that could he could sell in the U.S.

In early 1961, Conde shot a sexploitation film, Girls on the Rocks (originally titled ‘Drums of Cupid’), in a week-long shoot on the outskirts of Havana. It could have been a risky venture given the repressive nature of the new regime, but with his usual combination of charm and obstinacy, he made the film, even getting support and help from some of the communist revolutionaries.

‘Girls on the Rocks’ (1961)

But making the film was only half of the problem: the more dangerous part was getting it out of the country. In late 1961, Manuel arrived at the Havana airport to leave the island for good, with the film reels for ‘Girls on the Rocks’ as well as his comedy ‘Around Cuba in Eighty Minutes’ ready to smuggle both into the U.S.

Conde’s wife, Maria, later explained: “Manuel was flying in and out of Cuba all the time with the newsreels he shot. He had a permit to go to New York to develop color film because there were no color labs in Cuba at the time. So one day he gathered up the family and everything we could carry, and said it was time to leave.”

Not so fast, said the customs officers when they saw the film reels in Manuel’s luggage. Manuel explained that it was just newsreel footage of Castro, but the officials didn’t buy it. They insisted that he needed to leave the footage behind. Manuel called their bluff: he told them to phone Castro’s personal office and experience the dictator’s reaction when he found out that they were trying to restrict news of Castro’s achievements from reaching an international audience. The customs officers balked at the idea, reconsidered, and let Manuel leave with all his film reels. Manuel had won the battle against the dictator he despised, and when ‘Girls on the Rocks’ was eventually released in the U.S., the ads gleefully proclaimed, “Smuggled Out of Havana Right Under Castro’s Nose!”

As for the film itself, in truth, Manuel had missed the boat: the nudie cutie that he’d made wasn’t nudie or cutie enough by American standards of the early 1960s, just showing shapely girls in skimpy bikinis. The nudist films in America had already become more daring. The ads admitted as much: “The Cleanest Dirty Movie Ever Made!” they boasted.

*

Manuel Conde first met Dolores Carlos in late 1961, just after he’d arrived in Miami, accompanied by his wife Maria and son, Manuel Jr., who’d been born just weeks before they left Cuba.

Dolores quickly became friends with Manuel and his family. It was a symbiotic relationship: Dolores showed them around Miami, taking them to Cuban restaurants in Little Havana and burlesque shows in Miami Beach, and introduced them to other Cubans looking for work in the local film business. Manuel, six years older than Dolores, was like an older brother to her, and was more worldly, advising her and encouraging her career aspirations.

Dolores Carlos, photographed by Bunny Yeager

Like many of his exiled compatriots who’d worked in television or movies, Manuel considered himself a serious filmmaker. He was intent on finding work shooting documentaries or industrials and showcasing his abilities as a cinematographer, but without a readily-accessible filmography to show off, it was a tough sell to the small pool of Florida producers.

Dolores saw Manuel’s sexploitation film ‘Girls on the Rocks’ and told him about the nudist film craze in Florida. She suggested that perhaps, after documentaries, sex films were the next most authentic form of movie-making. She argued that Manuel should make another movie, an American film this time, that would act as a more up-to-date calling card, as well as a way of making some money – and that Dolores could help him put it together and could star in it as well. It was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion and Manuel was skeptical, but he relented when no other news or documentary work materialized.

The resulting nineteen-minute nudie short, Playgirl Models, shot in December 1961, was a strange hybrid. Two disparate motivational forces were at play: on the one hand, the film was supposedly titillating, featuring five nude (or semi-clad) Florida models (including Dolores and Bunny Downe, of course) shown working on cheesecake photo shoots. But rather than being intent on filming arousing footage, Manuel was more interested in demonstrating the role of the cinematographer to the viewer, showing different types of lighting equipment and explaining how various black & white effects are achieved. The film’s tagline was as accurate as it was unsexy: “A Factual Study of Glamour Lighting and Photography”

Despite Conde’s technical pretensions, ‘Playgirl Models’ was released into grindhouses in April 1962 – specifically the 79th St Art Theater, as the supporting feature for Eve or the Apple, the Dolores feature that she’d made with K. Gordon Murray. Friends recalled her pride in having two films playing in the same theaters, and she made regular appearances in the lobbies to promote the ‘Eve’/’Playgirl Models’ double bill at playdates all over Florida.

Dolores Carlos

*

In the wake of ‘Playgirl Models’, Manuel set up a production company, M.S. Conde Productions, with offices at 236 W Flagler St in Miami. One of the people that Dolores had been keen to arrange an introduction with was Leroy Griffith. Griffith was a relative newcomer to Miami, who’d been living and working there for less than a year, but he’d already become a theater mogul in the city.

Griffith was an energetic, entrepreneurial force of nature. Barely over five feet tall but, as film producer Dave Friedman recalled, “most everyone in the business may call (Leroy) ‘midget’ but he had the balls of a burglar.” In a recent interview, Griffith recalled the two pillars on which he built his business empire: “Firstly, I found theaters that were going bust. Regular, legit family theaters that were about to go under. This was because, in the 1960s, everyone was moving out of town into the suburbs… so they left behind a lot of theaters in trouble. I bought them and turned them all into burlesque places.”

“And secondly, I saw the value of concessions: popcorn, candy, drinks, t-shirts, anything you could sell in the lobby. I learned this from the very first job I had when I was a kid when I worked concessions at the Grand Burlesque Theater in St. Louis. I sold candy and trinkets to audiences before and during the intermission. At the end of the night, I noticed something strange: I’d earned more than anyone else. More than the dancers, comics, and comedians!

“I realized then that concert venues were not in the business of putting on shows. Not really: they were in the business of selling alcohol. Just like theaters were really not in the business of exhibiting films: they were in the business of selling refreshments. When you realized the value of concessions, you could really start making money.”

In 1961, Griffith visited Miami Beach and noticed the Paris Theater was for sale. He leased it, then bought it, staging burlesque shows, including many with his favorite dancer, Tempest Storm: “She was a firecracker with a dynamite stage act. We made a big profit with her every time.” Griffith’s success was controversial, and he fought off multiple legal challenges from city authorities who tried to shut the sex trade down, before deciding that South Florida would be the base for his theater business empire. Over the next years, he continued to open new venues throughout South Florida, from Broward County, north of Miami, right down to Key West in the south.

Leroy Griffith, with Britt Ekland

As his portfolio of theaters grew so did his overheads – and he was hit by the expensive staging cost of the burlesque shows. Even worse was the fact that he was getting busted all the time: “Every week they came up with a new reason,” Griffith grumbled. “They said I didn’t have the right license, or the right permits, or I hadn’t paid my taxes, or the shows were too permissive… Once I paid thousands for a license for a burlesque show, and then they told me that they’d decided burlesque was prohibited: it was constant harassment.”

So Griffith hit upon a new, more profitable business model: as he explained, “Burlesque started dying in the 1960s, so I started to switch the theaters into adult movie houses. They were cheaper to run, and the audiences couldn’t get enough of the new sex films. And then, you know, pretty soon after that… I decided to make my own movies.”

Leroy Griffith

Griffith already knew of Manuel and Dolores because he exhibited ‘Eve or the Apple’ and ‘Playgirl Models’ in his theaters across the state, so he was happy to take a meeting with them. Griffith had just produced his first effort, a nudist camp film called Bell, Bare and Beautiful (1963), directed in four days by future gore specialist, Herschell Gordon Lewis. It starred burlesque queen Virginia Bell, a frequent headliner at Griffith’s theaters. It was a crude and inept cash-in on an earlier Doris Wishman nudism-meets-burlesque vehicle, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962), but it played well in Griffith’s theaters and so he was ready to make more along the same lines.

When I spoke to him, Griffith said he was skeptical when he first met Manuel and Dolores: “A nudist broad and a Cuban without a history walk into my office pitching a sex movie? Sounds like a bad joke, right?! Damn right, I didn’t trust them! But we got to talking, and they weren’t asking for much, so we put something together.”

The deal they put together consisted of a couple of episodic short films – both to be directed by Manuel and both to feature Dolores. Griffith threw in a couple of extra sweeteners: he would make Virginia Bell available to co-star, and he also offered them the use of his Miami Beach burlesque theater as a filming location, with other interiors to be shot at Flamingo Studios just down the road.

Virginia Bell

Manuel turned over the two short films but their running time only added up to 57 minutes – barely adequate for a feature release. Dolores came to the rescue with another recent Cuban immigrant friend that she’d met at (where else?) the Freedom Tower: this one was an aspiring filmmaker called Frank Malagon.

Malagon was a colorful Cuban character, a chameleon with various identities: he was a ceaseless grifter, a benevolent con-man, and a snake oil salesman man who could sell you anything. His only problem was that couldn’t stay focused on any one venture for long: he juggled a dozen hats, but every time he caught one, another was flying off his head. Malagon had started out in public relations in pre-Castro Cuba, parlaying his large network of contacts into handling the publicity for Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana (1959) starring Alec Guinness, which had been shot in the capital. Avowedly anti-communist, Malagon fled Cuba after the revolution and settled in South Carolina, where he established himself as an outspoken critic of Castro, and the architect behind the effort to set up a symbolic alternative government, La Nacion en el Exilio (‘the Cuban Nation in Exile’). He quickly developed a high profile making several appearances on U.S. television – including the Mike Wallace Show in 1960 – to talk about what he described as the Cuban outrage. His stated plan was to connect exiled Cubans and carry out the overthrow of the Castro government.

Malagon even set up a film studio to make films as a way of funding his anti-Castro activities, before moving to North Miami in 1963, where he leased the former Channel 10 studio at 21st St and Biscayne Blvd, with a local builder, Dick Flink. At that point, Malagon’s passionate political intentions were somehow sidetracked in favor of low budget sex filmmaking. Malagon and Flick announced a slate of sex and horror films. Dolores encouraged Malagon to shoot a short, ‘The Super Dreams’, as their first film – and it was ‘The Super Dreams’ that Leroy Griffith added to Manuel’s other two short to create a full-length feature. It was called Lullaby of Bareland (1964), and billed as ‘3 Units of Fun!’

Malagon went on to make a couple more films using crews largely composed of Cuban talent provided by Dolores. And that was the extent of Malagon’s film career. A postscript about his colorful life however is worth adding: after the movies, Malagon set up a show-biz talent agency called ‘Shooting Stars’. Then he sold his film equipment so that he could build an anti-poverty city in South Dade County that he wanted to call ‘Youth City’. When he failed to obtain adequate funding, he moved onto a new career in hypnosis and became a mind-control doctor, eventually forming his own church in 1977 – called the Chapel of the Transformer (COTT) – which supposedly helped people find their perfect mate. In the 1980s, he switched gears again, and ran the Miss Miami Beauty pageant, before changing lanes once more to run the National AIDS Awareness Foundation. By the mid 1990s, he was working quietly as a realtor in Palm Beach. Malagon died, presumably exhausted by all his creative endeavors, aged 72, in 1999.

*

Despite the upheaval of previous years, Manuel settled well in Florida. His son Manuel Jr., born in Havana just before their departure, had been joined by a daughter born in 1963. Dolores’ daughter, Marcy, would often babysit for them. The family lived in the affluent Miami neighborhood of Coral Cables, and Manuel Jr. remembers they lived in the best house in the area, despite the fact it had barely any furniture: “Our life always seemed to be like that! I could never work out why we had the most beautiful homes… without anything in them. But he was a good father, even if he was strict: if he liked you, you were fine. if not, then you were the dog’s dick.”

Not that life had become uneventful: Manuel loved boats and invested in a motorboat with fellow Cuban friends which they used to make illicit nighttime trips back to Cuba. The principal purpose of the sorties was to rescue family and friends who were still stranded in the country – as well as bring back contraband. It was a venture that was fraught with risk – both in terms of making the crossing, and being apprehended by U.S. coastguard, or worse, the Cuban authorities. They souped up the craft so that it could outrun anyone pursuing them – but it didn’t always work. On one occasion, on the eve of another secret trip to Cuba, Manuel slept through his nighttime alarm and missed the boat’s scheduled departure time so they left without him. That night the boat disappeared, his three friends never making it back – their fate still unknown. A reminder of the potential dangers of trying to gain access to the island.

On the work front, Manuel still wanted to find work in the world of newsreel and industrials as he viewed it to be a steadier and more reliable source of income than features. He was reasonably successful – cameramen with their own equipment were always in demand – and he found work for several auto companies, such as American Motors. One notable short in particular, Shelby Goes Racing (1965), saw Manuel shooting Carroll Shelby, one of the finest sports car drivers of his generation.

*

In his spare time, Manuel could often be found at the Gayety Theater on Miami Beach, courtesy of new friend and sometime producer of his films, Leroy Griffith. Griffith admits his theaters were always at the heart of it all: “One time Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Belle Barth came into the Gayety. We had a Chinese dinner together, and then started watching the coming attractions for an X-rated film that was going to be running. For fun, we shut the sound off and the three of them – Frank, Sammy, and Belle – improvised the sexual sounds to go along with the scenes. They were all moaning and groaning and making funny noises. It was hysterical.” Dolores even managed to convince Griffith to convert one of his sex film theaters, the Dixie at 222 NE First Ave, into a Spanish language revue and film venue.

In 1963, Manuel saw burlesque star Lynne O’Neill at the Gayety Theater – and he was smitten. Not smitten in the leave-your-wife kinda way, but rather smitten in the inspired-to-make-a-film way.

Lynne O’Neill was a pneumatically-endowed blonde powerhouse, known as ‘The Original Garter Girl’ because her signature routine consisted of bestowing garters to audience members at the end of her shows – a gimmick suggested by, of all people, her mother, who accompanied her on the road. By the time Manuel first saw her, Lynne was already a veteran performer in her mid 40s, but she was still a big draw. Everyone had heard of her at that time because of a highly-publicized arrest in March 1960, when Lynne had been accused of distributing nude photographs of herself through the mail. She was convicted and served four days of a ten-day jail sentence in a case that received national media coverage.

Lynne O’Neil

Manuel figured he could capitalize on the publicity and so he approached Lynne, suggesting a nudist film, Secrets of an Uncover Model (1965). Lynne was enthusiastic. When I spoke to her years later, Lynne remembered: “Manuel was a persuasive and seductive man. He came up to me after my show, and told me that he wanted me to be the star in his new film… But, more than that, he wanted me to contribute artistically as well. I liked that. I was tired of men promising me the world and then disappearing. So, we drove around a selection of South Florida nudist camps, and he let me choose the one I was most comfortable with. You see, I was a dancer, and I had a sexy routine, but I still didn’t know anything about this nudist lifestyle. I found the nudist people to be sweet and friendly, and they invited me to play volleyball with them. I liked it and we had fun.”

Chester Phebus, frequent collaborator of Manuel in the 1960s, remembered that Manuel suggested someone different should be the director of the movie: “He offered the directing gig for ‘Secrets of an Uncover Model’ to his former mentor in the portrait photography business back in the old New York days, Maurice Seymour.

Actually, there were two Maurice Seymours. Two brothers, Maurice Zeldman and Seymour Zeldman, had left Russia in 1920 and settled in Chicago, launching their own studio in 1929 atop the St. Clair Hotel. As the brothers remembered years later, “We were in business together but combining our first names into ‘Maurice Seymour’ sounded better than Zeldman, so that’s how we named the business.” Then, after years of photographing ballet dancers, musicians, and entertainers, Seymour Zeldman legally changed his name to ‘Maurice Seymour’ and moved to New York to establish the company’s New York City studio, where years later he met Manuel Conde.

According to Chester Phebus: “Maurice was a great photographer but he had no experience in directing a feature film. Manny stepped in and made it happen.”

In truth, even Manuel couldn’t save the film: the resulting effort was a mundane account that is part travelogue set on the streets of Miami and part Lynne O’Neill stripping by the Coral Lakes Health Resort nudism camp swimming pool. It was largely unremarkable, but it did make money with playdates across the state.

By 1966, Manuel was determined to put himself on the map. He had his eye on directing two films that he hoped would make his name: The Case of the Stripping Wives (1966) and Calendar Pin-Up Girls (1966).

‘The Case of the Stripping Wives’ featured local Miami strippers – including a part for Dolores and jobs for some of her Cuban coterie. It became the focus of a high-profile obscenity case in Memphis but Manuel was untroubled, figuring that all publicity was good publicity. He was proved correct and the film was still playing dates into the 1970s.

‘Calendar Pin-Up Girls’ was a return to the didactic documentary-style nudie film more typical of Conde, depicting the behind-the-scenes process of making a girlie calendar. It took the viewer inside the Miami studio of Conde Productions – including an encounter with “M.S. Conde, nationally known photographer and technical director.” Sadly, it wasn’t the man himself as Manuel remained behind the camera, having an actor portray him, but once again Manuel found a part for his friend Dolores (as Miss September with arms bound by jewelry), as well as other models from the Florida skin-flick business.

The films were virtually one-man affairs with Manuel doing most things himself: he raised the money (invariably from Leroy Griffith), found the talent, wrote the script, shot the footage, edited it all together, and took an active role in their distribution. No matter that his wife was credited as co-director or scriptwriter (using her maiden name ‘Maria D. Maury’) or the editor was listed as ‘Sam Aniego’ (a bastardized version of Manuel’s actual second name), he took full responsibility. Manuel Jr. today says that his mother handled the admin and paperwork. In truth, both films were tame and pedestrian by 1966 standards, with limited nudity, and they didn’t set the world on fire.

Remembers Chester Phebus: “It took Manny some time to figure out how to make a sex film. It was like he was playing catch-up. That was probably because he started off with a Cuban mindset – which was years behind the U.S. in terms of sexual permissiveness. By the time he worked it out each time… the sex film business had moved on and changed again. That frustrated him. He just wanted the chance to make a film with a decent budget – and that eventually came along with Mundo Depravados.”

*

Manuel Conde’s next film, ‘Mundo Depravados’ (1966), was to prove his last in Florida. It was another for Miami theater kingpin, Leroy Griffith. According to Chester Phebus, the story behind the film was more interesting than the film itself: “The idea was hatched one night at a burlesque show at one of Leroy Griffith’s theaters. We were at the Gayety, I think. It was a big night because Tempest Storm was headlining again, and that was always a big night.”

Tempest Storm was one of the country’s best-known burlesque performers of the 1950s and 1960s, a fire-haired dame with impossible curves and an improbable past. She’d been born Annie Blanche Banks in Georgia 38 years earlier on February 29, 1928. She dropped out of school in seventh grade and at 14 was working as a waitress. Her home life was troubled so, to emancipate herself from her parents, she married a U.S. Marine. To call it a short-lived marriage would be an understatement: she had it annulled after just 24 hours.

She married again the following year – at the age of 15. This time the bridegroom was a shoe salesman from Columbus. The marriage lasted six months: “I just left one day. I just had it in my mind to go to Hollywood so I walked out.”

And so, by 1945, at the age of 17, with two marriages already behind her, Annie Blanche Banks was working In Los Angeles as an underage carhop waitress at Simon’s Drive-In. A patron suggested she find work as a chorus dancer at the Follies Theater and, so she did. Three weeks after being hired, she was promoted to the lofty position of stripper. This meant she needed a stage name. The theater manager suggested ‘Tempest Storm.’ As Annie recalled years later: “I asked her if she had any other suggestions. She said, what about ‘Sunny Day’? Ok, I said, I guess I’ll be Tempest Storm then.”

Tempest Storm

In the twenty years that followed, Tempest Storm became a genuine sensation, a regular performer at the El Rey, a burlesque theater in Oakland, California, but also at clubs across the country. She was splashed across men’s magazines and appeared in burlesque movies, such as Striptease Girl (1952) and Teaserama (1955). She married again – this time to a suitor who bought her a burlesque theater, the Capital Theater in Portland, Oregon – and then she got divorced again.

Tempest Storm

In 1959, she married Herb Jeffries, a suave and seductive film and television actor and popular jazz singer-songwriter. Herb’s life was just as startling as his new wife’s.

Herb had been born Umberto Alexander Valentino in Detroit back in 1913 – which made him 15 years older than Tempest Storm. His mother was a white Irish woman and his father, whom he never knew, was a mix of French Canadian, Italian and perhaps northern African roots. All of which meant that Jeffries was fair-skinned, a feature that attracted racism from both white and black people when he was growing up. To avoid trouble, Herb chose to be white most of the time.

In 1929, he dropped out of high school to earn a living as a singer. He had a smooth, rich voice, and he began performing in a local speakeasy where he caught the attention of Louis Armstrong. Armstrong recommended him to Erskine Tate’s orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago. The problem was that Tate fronted an all-black band, so at the audition, Herb pretended to be a black Creole from Louisiana. It worked, and he was offered a position as the featured singer three nights a week playing to black-only movie theatres. Jeffries was a big hit, and he went on to record albums for major labels aimed solidly at the black market.

Herb Jeffries, lounge singer

Herb had film ambitions too, and his first love were the western movies he’d grown up with. He resolved to create a cowboy hero geared specifically for a black audience. Though the silent era had seen a number of films starring only black actors, they had all but disappeared with the arrival of the talkies, so Herb decided to produce sound cinema’s “first all-Negro musical western.”

The problem was that many didn’t find Herb black enough. His dilemma at the time was unique: unlike many actors of color at the time who attempted ‘to pass’ as being white in an effort to broaden their commercial appeal, Jeffries had to go in the opposite direction and darken his skin with make-up in order to be a credible star in a black western. The ploy was successful, and he starred in a string of successful low-budget, so-called ‘race’ Western feature films, aimed exclusively at black audiences, such as ‘Harlem on the Prairie’ (1937) and ‘Rhythm Rodeo’ (1938). They earned him the nicknames ‘The Bronze Buckaroo’ and ‘The Sepia Singing Cowboy.’

Herb Jeffries, cowboy

Jeffries’ career in film and music flourished. And then in the late 1950s, he met and fell for Tempest Storm. It was always going to be controversial relationship: one of the nation’s biggest female sex symbols, a lascivious stripper from the deep south, engaged to a successful singer/actor from the north, who’d been marketed exclusively to an African American audience. According to the New York Times, the marriage “broke midcentury racial taboos, costing Tempest Storm work” and dimmed both their stars. This time, Jeffries faced the opposite variation of his racial problem: now, he chose to identify as white, stating that his ‘real’ name was in fact ‘Herbert Jeffrey Ball’ on an application to marry Tempest Storm in 1959. Jeffries spoke to Jet magazine, saying: “I’m not passing, I never have, I never will. For all these years I’ve been wavering about the color question on the blanks. Suddenly I decided to fill in the blank the way I look and feel. Look at my blue eyes, look at my brown hair, look at my color. What color do you see?”

In 1966, an unlikely meeting took place in Miami: Tempest Storm – the scandalous veteran stripper, Herb Jeffries – her husband and controversial mixed-race star of black films and music, Leroy Griffith – the millionaire owner of numerous burlesque theaters, adult cinemas, not to mention sex film producer, Dolores Carlos – so-called Queen of the Nudie Cuties, and Manuel Conde – the Cuban emigre’ turned adult film director.

Chester Phebus, Manuel’s friend and frequent collaborator, was there as well, and remembered the evening well: “Tempest (Storm) was getting older: she wasn’t the big star that she had once been – and part of the reason for that was that she’d married a guy, Herb Jeffries, that most people considered black. Anyway, Tempest was still a big draw, and the place was packed that night.

“Leroy suggested a film to Tempest and Herb. Leroy said he’d fund it but he wanted it to be a big film, not another nudist camp thing: a thriller with a plot and lots of characters. He wanted Tempest and Dolores to star, and he wanted Manny to direct. Herb looked pissed: he said he’d made hundreds of films and he should be the director. That annoyed Manny because he longed to make a bigger film. In the end, it was Dolores who acted as a mediator. It was always Dolores…”

Tempest Storm and Herb Jeffries sign contracts for ‘Mundo Depravados’ with Leroy Griffith (seated)

The compromise reached was that Herb would write and direct the film, and Manuel would shoot it and act as assistant director. The script that Herb Jeffries wrote, originally titled ‘Meet Me Under The Bed’, was a flimsy story of two police detectives assigned to investigate the murders of several young women at a health club. Leroy Griffith secured the presence of other people to appear in it, like Decker and Reed – a double act who’d appeared on The Dean Martin Show – as well as various of Miami’s strippers and nudie-cutie stars, including one Bunny Ware, a favorite of Griffith. Bunny’s main claim to fame was having been arrested eighteen times on consecutive nights in St Louis a few years earlier. Bunny had taken the cops to court, and won a claim of harassment on the basis that her act wasn’t obscene – just “not very good.”

Mundo Depravados was released with eye-catching promo material: “A Sexperiment in Murder – Murderously Funny – A Sinerama of Sex and Fear!”

The resulting film, well photographed by Manuel in black and white, is one of the most bizarrely entertaining film experiences you can have. Tempest Storm stars as the stripper whose coworkers are being murdered: she’s a sight to behold, her high beehive hairdo being even more difficult to believe than her acting. The collected Miami strippers offer much bumping and grinding, there are several sex scenes, and Dolores makes a touching appearance as a stripper who meets her end being stabbed by the killer in an alleyway.

Dolores Carlos, in ‘Mundo Depravados’ (1967)

When I contacted Herb Jeffries a few years ago to ask him what he remembered about ‘Mundo Depravados,’ he was full of enthusiasm for the experience though he admitted the resulting film didn’t set the world on fire: “We had a lot of fun making it,” he said. “But I wished it had done better at the box office. But if life is about having fun, then this was a crazy highlight.”

I sent Chester Phebus a copy of the film, and he watched it for the first time in fifty years. It made him nostalgic for the old days too, and he remembered they were all disappointed the film wasn’t a bigger hit.

Chester believed that perhaps part of the problem was that Tempest Storm and Herb Jeffries’ marriage was coming to an end, and their relationship on set was frosty: “Herb had his mind on other things – mostly the strippers and so Manny ended up directing most of the movie himself, but never got any of the credit.”

I also contacted Tempest Storm before she passed to ask about her memories of the movie, but she recalled little: “Herb and I were finishing our thing, so it wasn’t the happiest time. When we first got married, he adored and idolized me. Of course, I warned him that being married to a burlesque star like me would be difficult. I had a lot of attention from men who came to see my show, and I saw that many of my boyfriends found that difficult to deal with. Herb said he could handle it. But then we got married, and all of a sudden, he wanted me to wear conservative dresses covering every part of my body. Same old story, I guess.”

As for Manuel, Mundo Depravados proved to be the end of his Florida adventure. After a life that had started in Spain before moving onto adventures in New York and then Cuba, Manuel was ready for a new start. He’d had a good time in Florida amongst the Cubans, and the lessons he’d learned in Miami would be useful to him in the next stage of his career. But now, just as he’d done in Cuba, he packed his bags and told his family they were moving west again. Their next stop was Hollywood.

As for Dolores and Leroy Griffith, they were ready for the next Cuban chapter of their lives.

*

Tune in next time for the story of another of the Cuban Immigrants.

The post Chasing Butterflies: Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida – Part 1, Manuel Conde’s story – Podcast 145 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Cuba may only be 90 miles from the southern tip of the United States – a leisurely boat trip on a calm day – but since the 1950s, the island has seemed part of a distant world, too many communist miles away.

It wasn’t always the case. For years, Cuba was almost an extension of America, almost another star on its star-spangled banner. Links between the two countries dated back to when the Cuban cigar industry first arrived in Florida in the 1830s, and Hispanic communities developed in Miami as impoverished Cubans emigrated, dissatisfied with Cuba’s poor economy, a high poverty rate, and the various military dictatorships. Cuban tourists followed and soon the city became home to a variety of Spanish language amenities.

And then on January 1, 1959, everything changed: Fidel Castro’s communist rebels seized control of Havana, Cuba’s capital. The new dictatorship reduced American influence on the island and, by the early 1960s, had seized all American-owned property in Cuba. The United States responded with an embargo restricting commerce between the two countries, which is still in place today.

Many Cubans, fearing the consequences of Castro’s new revolutionary government, fled to the nearest part of America, the state of Florida, and that influx of people changed Miami: before the revolution, just 10,000 Cubans lived there, but three years later, in October 1962, nearly 250,000 more Cubans had arrived, and that number would grow to over 1,000,000 by the 1990s.

Many of the new arrivals had been professionals and tradesmen back in Cuba, and they arrived in Florida looking to continue to work in their chosen fields as doctors, lawyers, auto-workers, and manual laborers.

And then there were those who’d worked in Cuba’s film and television industry.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve tracked down and spoken to many Cubans who worked in the Florida film business in the 1960s and 1970s, people who made their home and careers there after escaping their home country. Their accounts uncover a Rashomon collection of overlapping personal histories that reveal an untold chapter of adult film and the hidden role that Cubans played in shaping it.

These are some of their stories. This is Chasing Butterflies: Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida. This is Dolores Carlos‘ story.

With thanks to John Minson, Tom Flynn, Ronald Ziegler, Veronica Acosta, Mikey Bichette, Bunny Downe, Mitch Poulos, Sheldon Schermer, Ray Aranha, Barry Bennett, Randy Grinter, Michael Bowen, Norman Senfeld, Richard Falcone, Something Weird Video (nearly all films mentioned in this series have been found with them), and many anonymous families and friends who have offered recollections, large and small, over the years.

This podcast is 41 minutes long.

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Every time Dolores Rose went to the weekly women’s group at the Opa Locka Community Center near Miami, she made sure she dressed well. She’d have her hair piled high, a string of fake pearls around her neck, high-heeled espadrilles, and she could still fit into her powder blue cigarette pants. Sure, she was the wrong side of 60, and she knew that being old was mandatory, but looking old was optional. This was no God’s waiting room for her, this was her time to shine.

This week’s gathering was more special than usual for Dolores. Each meeting was turned over to a different woman who’d make a presentation to the rest of the group about something of general interest. Pie-baking, bird-watching, bee-keeping, flower-arranging, that sort of thing. Sometimes the only really interesting part was when the discussion was derailed by the profane, never-ending questions that came from an elderly Jewish woman named Freida.

This week was Dolores’ turn to present.

She steadied herself at the front of the noisy group, and took a breath.

“I wanted to tell you about a long time ago,” she said, “when I was a big star in sex films.”

A silence descended on the room like a thick wet blanket.

Frieda whispered loudly, “Holy shit. Did I come to the right meeting?”

*

Dolores Xiques was Cuban through and through.

No matter that she was born in Tampa, Florida in October 1930, and never even visited her country of origin. Her Cuban heritage and looks, not to mention her patriotism, all came from her father, Gus Xiques, a fervently passionate Cuban, though ironically, he too was a Floridian, born in Monroe County in 1899.

Gus was a cigar maker who’d inherited the family business from his father Carlos. He raised a family of four in northern Florida by himself after his Cuban wife passed, and Dolores was his youngest child. He was a strict, hard-working man, and top of his belief hierarchy was loyalty to their country of origin and to their fellow Cubans. Not just any Cubans, but American-Cubans. Gus taught each of his children that all Cuban immigrants had endured a common journey, a mutual struggle, and they could collectively survive in America only if they helped each other out. Supporting fellow Cubans should always be a priority in their lives.

Dolores’ family was a tight-knit one (papi Gus re-married after Dolores’ mother died – to another Cuban woman, of course), and Dolores grew particularly close to her grandfather, Carlos, a one-time cigar-maker from Camaguey, Cuba, who’d emigrated to Key West, Florida back in September 1886.

Gus and his family lived at 3405 Green St, Tampa, and Dolores attended nearby Jefferson High School where most of the students were Hispanic or black, drawn from the adjacent Latino communities of Ybor City and West Tampa.

Records suggest that Dolores did well in school – her grades were better than most, and she was pretty and popular. But family members say that, as she grew into her teens, she longed to step outside of the strict confines of her Latina family. Against her father’s wishes, she’d sneak out of school, often ending up in movie theaters, where she’d gaze at her idols, Jean Harlow and Rita Hayworth, and craved a more independent and glamorous life. In school, she joined theater, music, and dance groups but somehow it didn’t feel enough. She wanted more. Her ticket out came in 1947 when she was 17, in the form of Maurice Bichette, a dashing and handsome New Yorker from Orangeburg, ten years her senior.

Dolores Carlos – aged 18

Maurice had a mildly checkered past: he had three kids from a previous marriage, was in the middle of a divorce, and had picked up a couple of arrests for reckless driving that would eventually lead to losing his license. Seeking a fresh start, he’d moved down to St Petersburg where he found work with the Clear-View Venetian Blind Company. He had a few goals: he was looking to stay straight, get a job, settle down – and part of that whole equation entailed finding a wife.

It was a whirlwind romance: Dolores and Maurice announced their engagement just months after meeting, and tied the knot on May 9th, 1948, settling in St Petersburg at 4465 Crestwood Drive North. The engagement announcement in the newspaper featured a close-up portrait of Dolores with a flower in her hair – looking like her idol, Margarita Cansino, the actress of Spanish descent who became a huge star after changing her name to Rita Hayworth.

Dolores and Maurice were both good kids: their problem was that they just weren’t good for each other, and cracks in their relationship appeared quickly. Part of the issue was age-related: Dolores graduated high school the same month as their wedding, Maurice was her first boyfriend, and she was just looking to leaving her strict family home and enjoying greater freedoms. She wanted to experience racy, swashbuckling adventures like those described by her grandfather Carlos. Maurice on other hand, trying to correct the errors of youth, was looking for a quieter, more settled life.

For a time, they made it work: they fixed up their new home, took vacations down in Miami, and in August 1950, Dolores gave birth to their daughter, Marcelle Denise Bichette, who quickly became known as Marcy. It was a life-changing moment for both of them and baby Marcy became the center of their worlds. Over the next decades, no matter what else was going on in each of their lives, Marcy would always be their first priority.

Dolores, Maurice, and Marcy, 1954

Dolores and Marcy, 1955

Dolores loved being a mother and doted on Marcy, but the realization was already dawning on her: had she had just swapped one set of restrictions for another? She was barely 20 years old, without a job, and now she was stuck at home with a new-born and daily chores. Housework can’t kill you, sure, but why take the chance? Had her dreams of being someone been crushed before she’d even begun? Arguments sparked between the couple: love may be blind but marriage was a real eye-opener for her. Dolores’ loneliness was made worse when she lost her beloved grandfather Carlos and then her stepmother within a year of Marcy’s birth.

Dolores, headstrong and determined as her father had taught her, decided she needed a career.

Dolores and Marcy, 1957

*

In early 1953, Dolores sent off her resumé to Webb’s City in St Petersburg.

Webb’s was a one-stop department store covering ten city blocks. It was a precursor to Walmart, with 77 departments, 1,700 employees, and the slogan, “There’ll be no more hoppin’ around the town a-shoppin’. But instead of applying for one of Webb’s many sales assistant roles, Dolores had her eye on something more exciting: she wanted to be a model for them. Webb’s had historically been associated with elderly citizens keen to spend their pension money, but top management had recently decided they needed to change and appeal to a younger crowd, and so they started a model training program for girls between 15 to 20 years of age.

Dolores faced resistance from all sides: for a start she was already 23, her father, Gus, didn’t deem modeling to be a respectable occupation, and husband Maurice said it was a distraction from her duties as a mother. Furthermore, Webb’s model program was already over-subscribed. And then there was the fact that, well… Dolores wasn’t white, and Webb’s had always had a little racism problem. Sure, it was true that Webb’s would hire non-whites at a time when other businesses in St. Petersburg would not, but it was also the case that the non-white hires were used in positions that were less visible, and they weren’t permitted to eat at the lunch counter, and they weren’t eligible for promotion. This racial glass ceiling and discrimination at Webb’s would later become the focus of Civil Rights sit-ins and controversies during the 1960s.

But Dolores was determined and resourceful: she colored her black Cuban hair red, knocked four years off her age, stuck her thumb in the air, and hitched a ride to the store for an interview. She told no one what she was doing. Her application was a success, and much to the regret of husband and father, she was selected for Webb’s training program for teenage models. She figured she could keep her real age a secret, but then the local newspaper took her picture and published it under the heading ‘Teen Takes Fashion Spotlight’. Her father Gus and husband Maurice saw it and gave her hell.

But Dolores loved the opportunity, and when the training finished, she took a job in the store modeling clothes and swimwear. No one knew she was overage still, so she did modeling catwalks for teenage models, such as the annual Swim Party on the roof garden of Webb’s. Then at one of the events, she was spotted by a beauty contest organizer who learned that she was married, and invited her to represent St Petersburg in the Mrs. Florida contest – strictly for married housewives – that was run by the Palmetto Junior Chamber of Commerce. The event took place in August 1953 with 48 entrants from across the state – and Dolores was billed simply as ‘Mrs. Maurice Bichette.’ And if you ever thought that simple beauty contests were perhaps a little sexist, this one was rather more so: sure, it consisted of parading in the usual swimwear and evening clothes, but models also had to demonstrate housewifely skills such as sewing, cleaning, cooking, and child-raising, which accounted for 50% of the total score. In fact, Dolores was pictured in the newspapers showing her bed-making ability. She didn’t win the contest – which was a desperate shame as one of the prizes was a vacuum cleaner – but it wasn’t all in vain: her skeptical husband Maurice won the side competition to find the best-looking husband.

But happy moments like this between Dolores and Maurice were becoming less frequent, their arguments were becoming more heated, and in 1954, they decided on a trial separation. For the first time in her life, Dolores was on her own.

Dolores and Marcy, 1957

*

After the separation, both Dolores and Maurice both wanted custody of Marcy, so they agreed to share time with her. Dolores still had her job at Webb’s and she took care of Marcy on weekends. But money was short, so she took on new work as a dance instructor and did freelance modeling jobs across the St Petersburg and Tampa areas. She was attractive, and her eclectic portfolio of work started appearing in newspapers across Florida in different contexts: she was the daily ‘sunshine girl’ (typically posing with a giant thermometer to indicate that day’s temperature), she was elected as ‘Queen of Photography’ by the Central Florida Camera Club, posed for Bow Tie Week (nude with a couple of giant bow ties ensuring her modesty), she entered (and won) beauty pageants, and was selected by Coca-Cola to be on their float at the huge King Gasparilla Pirate Parade. She was surprised by her own success: her pictures were being published all over the country – even making it into the Daily Mirror newspaper in England, which, at the time, claimed it had the largest daily circulation in the world. All were tongue-in-cheek, slightly suggestive pictures, while still remaining innocent – and Dolores’ age was typically given as three or four years younger than she actually was. She’d figured out that the secret of staying young was to live honestly, eat slowly, and but most of all, lie about your age.

Dolores’ modeling career was taking off at the same time that any remnants of her relationship with Maurice were fizzling out. Attempts to reconcile had failed, and tension between the two grew as Dolores’ life became more glamorous and Maurice became increasingly disapproving.

In early 1956, they filed for divorce, and the following year, Maurice re-married. For Dolores, the final breakdown of her marriage was her cue to shoot for the big time. As much as she enjoyed the modeling though, she dreamed of making it in the film industry, and for that to happen, she knew she’d have to move to Miami, the only significant center for film production in the state. The problem was that moving to Miami – 280 miles and at least a four-hour drive away from St Petersburg – meant giving up day-to-day custody of six-year-old Marcy. It was a heart-breaking prospect and one she didn’t take lightly. After agonizing for weeks, she decided to give it a try.

In 1956, Dolores drove down to Miami. It was a new start which was exciting, but she had the support of precisely no-one. She decided she needed a new name to re-launch her modeling career, after all ‘Dolores Xiques’ was as unpronounceable as ‘Dolores Bichette’ was inaccurate. Despite her father’s disapproval, she opted for ‘Dolores Carlos’ thus honoring her Cuban grandfather, Carlos, whose struggles had inspired her independence.

In Miami, her successful modeling resumé from St Petersburg and Tampa opened doors and she found regular work with newspapers and companies like the Roosevelt Theater on Miami Beach. Her modeling career thrived, and she won several more beauty contests, including being chosen as the Miami Beach Police Benevolent Association Queen (even though she picked up a parking ticket from a motorcycle patrolman during the crowning ceremony) and was elected Queen of the Police and Firemen’s Ball held at the Miami Beach Kennel Club.

Finding film work however, which was what she really wanted, was more difficult. Dolores pounded the streets, turning up at every filmmaker’s studio in the southern Florida area. The results? Nada. Tens of auditions came and went without success. Her father suggested she connect with the small community of Cuban filmmakers in Miami – but that yielded nothing either.

Another type of work was on offer though: pin-up photography for men’s magazines. Typically topless photo shoots, sometime nude, taken on the beaches, by the pools, and in the boudoirs of Miami mansions. Dolores accepted a few of the jobs, but turned most down, fearing salacious photos might kill her film prospects. Besides, she found some of the photographers to be sleazy and predatory.

And then she met Louise ‘Bunny’ Downe, a Miami-based model, whose aspirations mirrored her own. Downe was seven years younger than Dolores but was a woman in a hurry: she’d graduated from the local Coral Gables High School in 1955 and enrolled in the University of Miami where, in her sophomore year, she’d had immediate success on the beauty pageant scene, winning the Miss West Miami Beauty Contest, runner up in the Miss Firecracker contest, and competing for the Miss Miami title. By 1957, Downe was working as a model and had set up her own modeling agency. And like Dolores, Downe had married young and unhappily: in Downe’s case, a short-lived relationship with a fellow student that would end in 1959. Dolores and Bunny Downe formed a close friendship that would last for years.

Downe was well-connected and found more modeling work for Bunny, but Dolores had her heart set on movies. In late 1957, with film-work non-existent, Dolores decided to give up and return to St Petersburg. At least there she could see more of Marcy, and she had the promise of weekend modeling work at the St Petersburg Art Studio.

She was approaching 30, and her dream of finding success as a film star was looking less likely by the day.

*

In 1957, the same year Dolores was leaving Miami and returning to St Petersburg, another woman in Florida was at a crossroads in her life and she too was considering her options. Doris Wishman was a tiny, energetic, feisty dame in her early 40s, dealing with the premature death of her second husband from a heart attack. She’d been in the film business in New York since the early 1940s when she began working for her cousin, an independent film distributor who handled foreign and independently-produced movies made outside the Hollywood system. Over the next decade, Doris had developed good experience in the distribution business and built an extensive network of contacts with exhibitors.

After her husband’s passing, Doris moved down to Florida to be with relatives, and was looking for an activity that would help her deal with her grief, not to mention an opportunity to make some bucks.

For the first time in her life, Doris decided she wanted to make a film: she had no experience but she’d seen so many low budget films, she figured how hard could it be? Specifically, she was inspired by the success of one film in particular: Garden of Eden (1954), the first film about nudism that had been shot in color. The film was racy and daring in that it showed partial nudity, but it managed to get away with it because the courts had ruled that representations of nudity within the context of nudism could not be considered obscene. Why? Well, because nudism was a lifestyle choice associated with health and fitness, which meant that, by definition, nudists had no prurient interest in nudity. Besides, nudism was considered a serious business at this time: several Florida counties had brought in regulations that required nudists to obtain a permit – and a permit required two character statements from a pastor, priest, or a respectable member of the community. So nudism was wholesome, and the film ‘Garden of Eden’ had been made to capitalize on this – and it worked. Though many court cases were brought against the movie, the producer won most of them and the film benefited from the ensuing publicity and made a big profit.

Doris had had a small role in the distribution of ‘Garden of Eden’ so had witnessed the film’s success first-hand. She decided that it provided her with an ideal template. First, to make her own nudist film, she needed money, and she estimated the total budget to be in the region of $10,000. So she raised funds from family members, specifically her sister, and started shooting Hideout in the Sun, in Tampa and Dania in 1957.

So far, so good. But then the problems started. Predictably the first issue Doris encountered was her own inexperience as a filmmaker. The initial footage she shot was too explicit, showing genitals in too much detail for a 1950s film, and so it had to be scrapped. Doris had to start again, so she went back to the same family members and raised another $10,000 for a re-shoot.

Doris Wishman

*

Summer 1958. Dolores was working at the St Petersburg Art Studio when she got a call from Doris. Doris had heard about Dolores from her friend Bunny Downe’s modeling agency in Miami. Doris and Dolores met up, and Doris offered her the lead role in her nudist film. A friend of Dolores still remembers her initial conflicted reaction: she was excited to be finally offered a role in a feature film, but a little concerned about the nudity – not because of the nudity per se but because of the possible impact that it could have on her daughter Marcy as well as any potential future film work. Dolores eventually accepted – largely because Doris appeared to be less sleazy than some of the other characters that had offered her nude work previously.

In October 1958, Dolores went down to Miami to shoot footage for ‘Hideout in the Sun.’ One sequence was shot in the sea on a portion of North Miami Beach by Charleston St. There were four people filming that day: there was Doris, Dolores, the cameraman Lazarus (Larry) Wolk (who ended up being credited as the director of the film), and the male lead Marvin Bauer. By day, Bauer was a realtor who had a sneaky sideline renting out his client’s empty houses to pin-up photographers. Bauer, fearful that these clients would hear about his film appearance, would use the name ‘Earl Bauer’ in the film’s credits.

But there was a fifth person there as well that day: William Callahan, a patrolman in the Miami Police Department, who, unbeknownst to the other four, was hiding in the nearby bushes watching the action unfold. In his subsequent report, he described observing the filmmakers for eight minutes. Eight minutes of voyeurism, presumably because he had to make sure he knew exactly what was taking place.

Callahan’s report stated that he saw Dolores “in her birthday suit.” Not just that, but she was “cavorting in her birthday suit.” Callahan’s report elaborated that Dolores was first filmed walking down the beach before writhing in the surf while Bauer looked down on her. After witnessing that, Callahan jumped out of his hiding place and arrested all four of them: Dolores was booked for indecent exposure, the other three for being disorderly. They were all ordered to appear in court the following day. Each of them gave Miami addresses except for Dolores who provided her Tampa home location, and each posted $50 bonds and were released after vigorous protests. Needless to say, the footage Doris shot was confiscated as evidence.

Doris fought back: she insisted that it was a legitimate production on behalf of WICA Productions, who intended to sell the film to “the biggest companies.” She explained that none of it was pornographic, and that the plot was actually about two gangsters who hold up a bank and kidnap a female nudist. The nudist then takes them to her cabin, falls in love with one of them, who reforms, and turns his buddy in. What could be more normal than that, she said?

But whatever public statements Doris was issuing to minimize the event, the newspapers were interested in another part of the story, and they jumped on it like a dog on a dropped steak. What titillated them was evident by their headlines: “Nude Beauty Queen is Arrested Making Movie Scene on Beach” and “’Movie Queen’ Caught Frolicking on Beach” and “Police Eclipse a Rising Star.” One article described how Dolores was picked up “as she lay in the surf, allowing waves to wash over her shapely, unclothed form.”

Dolores had finally achieved her dream of being on the cover of newspapers for being a movie star – it just wasn’t the way she’d always dreamed that it would be. She told the newspapers that it was her first film experience after a long and successful career as a model. She was surprised by the arrest, she said. She told them that the first thing she’d done after the arrest was to show the cops the Miami Beach Police card that she’d been given the previous year when they’d made her the Queen of the local Benevolent Association, but it cut her no slack. The extensive newspaper coverage soon reached her ex-husband and family, and her friends still remembered the ensuing uproar and scandal.

Of course, the cops rushed to develop the footage, and then took a look for themselves. In the end, the accused were found guilty, fined $50 each, and released. It proved a sobering experience for Marvin Bauer, the leading man, who vowed never to do anything connected to nudie films or pin-ups again.

Dolores, however, was surprised by her own reaction: on the one hand, she was a single mother with a successful career as a model who dreamed of being a movie star – but now she’d been arrested for indecent exposure, risked everything she had worked for, and caused a whole mess of embarrassment to her family. And yet, there was something that excited her too. Not so much the sexual side of the story, but more that it provided evidence that she was in some strange way finally independent. She felt seen. And she was going to be in a real movie. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, or something like that. So Dolores doubled down, stepped on the gas, and ignored the rear view mirror.

Most of the rest of the shooting for ‘Hideout’ took place in 1959 in a private residence on one of the islands on the causeway to Miami Beach that doubled as a nudist camp for the film. (The film’s credits claimed it was a genuine nudist camp in order to give the film legitimacy.)

In the years since the film was made, it has been claimed that no genuine nudists actually featured in the film, but in fact, several people cast in ‘Hideout’ were in fact paid-up members of naturist clubs. One was a photographer friend of Dolores, Richard Falcone. Falcone was an Italian property developer, bodybuilder, and part-owner of a nudist colony in Pasco County in Tampa, who’d founded the Sunshine Beach Naturist Club. Falcone had become friends with her when he’d taken modeling pictures of Dolores for her portfolio. He appeared as ‘Dick Falcon’ in ‘Hideout’, and he recruited several of his nudist friends to appear in the film.

The first public showing of ‘Hideout in the Sun’ took place at the Variety Theater in Miami in January 1960 – advertised as ‘Filmed in Eastman Color and Nuderama.’ The newspaper ads boasted praise from the New York Times (“the best of the newest nude films”) and the invitation that “If you never see another nudist film in your life… you must see ‘Hideout in the Sun.’” Dolores loved the attention which made her feel like a genuine movie star at last, and she made personal appearances to promote it in Miami and then Tampa when the film was released more extensively later in the year.

*

With Dolores spending more time in Miami, she decided – once again – to move south in order to pursue film opportunities arising from ‘Hideout in the Sun.’ She took a small apartment at 1860 NW 1st St in Miami. It was in a rough, undesirable area, but Dolores made friends with the small Cuban ex-pat community and spent most of her spare time down on Calle Ocho or Domino Park in Little Havana, the Miami neighborhood home to many Cuban exiles. Her father was impressed with her new circle of friends and visited her more frequently insisting that they meet and hang out with the Cubanos. Dolores was pleased to finally be where the action was – and exhilarated with the increased interest coming her way.

But soon after, there was another person living with Dolores: Dolores had continued sharing custody of Marcy with Maurice whenever she could, but when Marcy was ten, it became clear that life with her father was not working out as planned so Marcy moved down to Miami and moved in with Dolores. Dolores was over the moon: sure, it made her everyday life more complicated, but she relished the chance to live with her daughter in her small apartment. They both loved the new arrangement. Dolores scheduled her modeling and photo shoots around taking care of her daughter, and Marcy enjoyed living with her glamorous mother. Family members recall Marcy spending hours happily chasing butterflies in the backyard and playing with worms in the ground.

Dolores and Marcy, 1962

For the first time, money wasn’t a problem for Dolores: magazine work was booming for her, with offers pouring in as she became an unofficial pin-up queen for nudists. She was assisted by her friend, Bunny Downe, who was also cashing in on the up-tick in pin-up work. Starting in June 1960, and then again in August and September 1960, Dolores posed for Bunny Yeager, the Miami-based pin-up photographer who’d worked with Bettie Page in the 1950s.

Bunny Yeager’s folder for Dolores

Dolores’ release for Bunny Yeager work

In addition to modeling, Dolores was featuring more regularly in the local newspapers. One report pictured her “atop a snazzy convertible representing one Miami VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) outfit in a skin-tight leopard-skin. She is a movie-star in adults-only nudist camp films.” She made a much-anticipated appearance at the Artists and Models Ball where she wore a gown reported as having “only sides – no front or back” and won a trophy for being the “Girl Most Likely to Enslave an Artist.” As a result of her growing celebrity, Dolores was often invited to be a featured guest around town to introduce celebrities on stage when they brought their acts to Miami. These included stars like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Dinah Shore, Eddie Fisher, and Jane Russell.

And Dolores was offered more film work – in particular, in nudist films that were suddenly plentiful, cashing in on the success of ‘Hideout in the Sun’. One of the first was in 1961, Pagan Island, when Bunny Yeager assembled a group of models that included Dolores and her friend, Bunny Downe. The film’s director, Barry Mahon, later remembered how Yeager opened doors for him: “A lot of girls wouldn’t do it for a male photographer. (Yeager) was a good photographer alright, but she was getting the best girls simply because the other photographers were all lechers! So I got her to call up all these girls, and that meant I had a real stable of good looking girls out of Playboy magazine.”

After ‘Pagan Island’, there were a couple of Doris Wishman nudie-cutie follow-ups, Diary of a Nudist (1961) and Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962), both featuring Dolores and Bunny again – in fact, the two of them would go on to appear in twelve movies together. Ronald Ziegler, a friend of Dolores from her Tampa modeling days, remembered the scene: “Dolores and Bunny were at the center of this new movie-making movement that produced all these topless, nudist camp films. The movies may seem tame by today’s standards, but back then, everyone was getting excited by them – and they made a lot of money. Both girls were pretty, and always had film or modeling work lined up, but their real talent was in connecting people and making things happen. They both had an energy and a desire that didn’t stop – and people gravitated to them.”

Dolores got Ronald Ziegler a role in Doris Wishman’s ‘Diary of a Nudist’ (1961). They had fun so she encouraged him to write a script of his own. As Ziegler remembered, “It was a comedy called ‘Not a Stitch,’ and Dolores and Bunny wanted to produce it. They just needed funding but didn’t know where to turn to. Back in 1961, there was a guy called Silver Dollar Jake who was on the scene. He was a larger-than-life character in Miami, so someone put them in touch with him.”

‘Silver Dollar Jake’, less prosaically born as Jacob Schreiber, was a wealthy, retired Detroit theater owner who lived on Palm Island in Miami Beach. Jake didn’t have much to do when he stopped working so he spent his time driving his outlandishly decorated Cadillac around South Florida, with an eight-inch cigar in his mouth and a pet macaw on his shoulder, promoting causes such as blood drives or the sale of War Bonds. Above all, he liked to flaunt his wealth so he’d throw out silver dollars to passersby.

Silver Dollar Jake

Ronald Ziegler remembered him well: “Dolores went to see him one day. Jake liked the idea of funding this nudie movie, almost as much as he loved Dolores. He chased her all over town for weeks, and she chased him to get funding. We had meetings and meetings, and it seemed as if Silver Dollar Jake was going to give us all the funding, but when Dolores turned down his romantic advances, his promises came to nothing.” So Ziegler remembers that Dolores and Bunny started again, and pitched their idea to other producers.

One of them was K. Gordon Murray.

Kenneth Gordon Murray was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1922. Son of a funeral director, he spent much of his childhood with performers from visiting circus productions who settled in Bloomington for the winter.

Much of Murray’s background is colorful to the point of defying belief: by the age of 20, he’d earned a small fortune by driving the family hearse for local funerals, worked as a casting assistant for MGM where he hired munchkins for ‘The Wizard of Oz’, purchased a decrepit carnival which he renamed ‘United Liberty Shows’ billing himself as ‘The Youngest Show Owner in all of Show Business’, and started a movie theatre construction firm with his father.

In his mid 20s, Murray decided to try his luck in Hollywood working for Cecil B. DeMille on the movie ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ (1952), but he didn’t adapt well to being a small fish in a big pond so he moved to Miami, Florida, where he formed K. Gordon Murray Productions. After a couple of years of dabbling in low-grade exploitation films (including the re-release of a forgotten 1949 religious epic, ‘The Prince of Peace’), he hit paydirt: in 1959, Murray released an Italian melodrama called Il Momento Più Bello, starring Italian acting legend Marcello Mastroianni. So far, so unremarkable, except that Murray then inserted footage of a doctor hawking sex manuals – and several minutes of grisly, cheaply shot footage showing the birth of twins. (Unsurprisingly, when Mastroianni found out, he sued to have his name removed from the credits.) It was a jarring, exploitative move, but also a highly successful one, aided by an aggressive, salacious promotional campaign. I spoke to a Murray collaborator, Sheldon Schermer, who remembered, “Murray will best be remembered for other films, but make no mistake, this was the one that made him rich. Very rich, in fact. And it wasn’t just the film’s box office: Murray knew the value of merchandise long before other people. He had sex booklets for sale at the refreshment stand in the lobby which people queued up to buy. Whichever direction you looked, he was making money hand over fist.”

By the early 1960s, Murray’s Trans-International Films Inc operated out of impressive offices at 530 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, where Murray had flip-flopped into a new business model: buying children’s movies from Mexico and dubbing them for the domestic market. Gone were the graphic, bloody, baby inserts, now replaced by a string of colorful, surreal fairytale films, like Santa (1960), which became huge money makers.

When Dolores turned up at his office on Biscayne Blvd in 1961 looking for a producer for her nudist movie, Murray was all ears. As his secretary, Veronica Acosta, remembered: “Mr. Murray was always looking for opportunities to distribute movies that weren’t on the radar of the big film companies – and he was well aware of the success of the nudist pictures. Everyone was. And he knew Dolores too as she was on posters and in the newspapers. Despite his big success, Mr. Murray loved that a beautiful woman, like Dolores, had come to him to propose an idea. He liked Dolores, and the feeling was mutual.”

Murray listened to Dolores but explained that he wasn’t ready to finance new movies, rather he preferred to buy existing ones cheaply from other countries. Acosta remembers: “Dolores was persistent and adamant: she told him that the market for nudist films was hot, and that he should take advantage – now!”

In the end, Murray and Dolores struck a compromise of sorts: Murray would re-release a tame five-year-old burlesque film called Naughty New York (1957), which he would rename Eve or the Apple (1962). And to differentiate it from the earlier film, he would shoot an additional nudie insert featuring Dolores and Bunny Downe. The movie premiered in April 1962 at the 79th St Art Theater, where it was billed as “An Intimate, and Slightly Shocking Fun Fest.” The poster claimed, “Bring your seat belts… This one takes off – and we really mean ‘takes off’!”

Dolores and Bunny agreed to tag-team to help promote the film, and the theater arranged for ‘Camera Parties’ to take place in the lobby, where fans could take their own pictures of her (“At 2.30pm and 7.30pm: She appears twice daily in her swimsuit! Take your own pin-ups or have your own picture taken with lovely ‘Eve.’”). Similar events took place when the film played in Tampa and in St Petersburg – this time with Bunny Downe appearing in person. Reviews of Dolores were glowing – “Miss Carlos wears mostly just nail polish,” read one – but despite the salacious publicity, the release was a rare misfire for Murray and made little money.

It was an unsatisfactory outcome for Dolores in the short term, but she was undeterred, convinced that K. Gordon Murray would eventually come good and move into film production, so she stayed friends with him and they continued to meet up regularly. As secretary Veronica Acosta remembered: “Mr. Murray and Dolores were a good match, and there were brief rumors of a romance. He was a friendly extrovert, and she was vivacious and passionate. She was a regular visitor to the offices.”

Acosta also remembered another important detail: “I liked Dolores because, from the beginning, she was the one who started bringing in the Cubans.” The Cubans that Acosta referred to came from the Freedom Tower, an imposing building which, at 600 Biscayne Boulevard, was next door to the offices of K. Gordon Murray Productions. The building was the epicenter for new Cuban immigrants in the United States as it was the central location used by the government to process and document refugees from the Cuban Revolution and to provide medical and dental services for them under President John F. Kennedy’s enactment of the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962.

At first, Dolores first went to the Freedom Tower in the early 1960s because the building was a convenient stop-off on her way to visit K. Gordon Murray’s offices, but soon it became a regular place for her to go. Dolores had two reasons for going to the Freedom Tower: firstly, she wanted to offer solidarity to her fellow Cuban workers in line with her father’s patriotic wishes, but equally important was that she was looking for film talent freshly arrived in the country. And it worked: she soon befriended a variety of Cuban filmmakers and took many of them to meet Murray where she sung their praises and encouraged him to hire them. As Sheldon Schermer remembered, “These Cuban immigrants would arrive in the U.S., go to the Tower, get registered, and then emerge looking for work. Half of them ended up in Murray’s offices because of Dolores!”

Murray liked what he saw: a substantial number of cheap, experienced, eager-to-work, non-union personnel who could be used on new film projects. Schermer added, “These folks were industrious, creative people: actors, directors, technicians, designers, etc. They were talented, and just wanted to be able to continue their craft outside of their home country where everyday life had become problematic.”

Suddenly Dolores’ small community of friends from the Cuban film industry multiplied as more of them arrived in Miami escaping from Castro’s regime, and Dolores emerged as the center of the group, the person best able to connect them to film productions in the area. It was a far cry from her days as a film-struck teen in a restrictive, old-fashioned Cuban family, and then being a married stay-at-home housewife with a young daughter. She was now in a rare position: a woman who had a career in front of the camera and was well-respected behind the scenes as well.

But Dolores wanted more: acting in films was now her day job, while setting Cubans up with potential employers like K. Gordon Murray was her mission. Men like Manuel Conde, Jose Prieto, and Rafael Remy.

For Dolores her life was finally beginning. She remembered her grandfather repeating a Cuban saying to her: The sun rises for everyone.

Dolores, by Bunny Yeager

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Next time: the story of one of those Cuban Immigrants.

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The post Chasing Butterflies: Stories of Cubans in Exploitation-Era Florida – Prologue, Dolores Carlos’ story – Podcast 144 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

A few years ago, I was researching an article for The Rialto Report when I came across a 1980 radio program from WBAI, a popular New York City station that specialized in progressive and alternative voices at the time. This particular show featured a prostitute named Iris De La Cruz.

Iris wasn’t directly connected to the adult film scene in New York at the time – though she was friends with several of the adult performers – but I knew of her because she wrote for men’s magazines like Cheri, Partner, and Eros. Her monthly columns were an eye-opening account of her life working as a street prostitute, and this edition of the WBAI show was more of the same, with Iris talking about her experiences and then taking questions from callers to the station.

But the reason that I found this show compelling wasn’t just Iris’ connection to the sex business in New York in the 1970s. No, what was startling, jaw-dropping even, was that Iris had brought a guest onto the show, her ten-year-old daughter, Melissa, and was interviewing her in a completely unfiltered way about what she thought of Iris’s street-walking job.

Even for a program from 40 years ago on a counter-cultural station like WBAI, it still makes for a surprising, engrossing, but sometimes jarring, listening experience. In the current age of debate around parental controls, book bans, and school curricula, this frank, public discussion of sex work between a mother and young daughter is an exchange that probably wouldn’t, and couldn’t, happen today.

I listened back to the show several times – and each time, the same questions came into my head. 

Who was Iris De La Cruz, and why did she expose her daughter to a potentially traumatic experience at such a young age

Who was Melissa, her daughter, and what did she make of this – would she even remember it today, or did it actually have any lasting effects?

And then, what happened to this mother and daughter in the years after this show was recorded – after all, Iris would likely be in her 70s today, and Melissa in her 50s.

I wanted to find what happened to both of them.

This is April Hall. And this is Iris and Melissa’s story.

This episode’s running time is 61 minutes.

Many thanks to Melissa De La Cruz for her participation and kindness.

Thank you to Veronica Vera for Scarlet Harlot and Aphrodite Awards photos. Visit Veronica’s site for more on New York’s world of sex work, art, and activism.

We never ask you for money or accept any advertisements for what we do, but if this story means something to you, we’d love it if you went to the Iris House website and considered making a donation, however small. We’re not associated with them in any way, but they do such good work and well… we know that Iris would be grateful to you. Thanks so much.

Jean Powell, P.O.N.Y. spokesperson before Iris de la Cruz

Iris defending surge pricing

Prostitutes of New York (P.O.N.Y.) newsletter

Sex worker rights activity Scarlet Harlot protesting down by Wall Street in downtown NYC

Aphrodite Awards hosted by Annie Sprinkle (middle) with Iris de la Cruz to her right

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The opening of Iris House by Melissa de la Cruz and her grandmother in honor of her mother Iris

Early photo of Melissa and her grandmother, Iris’ mother Beverly Rotter

Iris House carrying Iris’ legacy today

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The post Iris De La Cruz – And Her Daughter Melissa: Street Walking Blues – Podcast 143 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Howard Ziehm, the pioneering adult film director, theater owner, author, polymath, and friend of The Rialto Report died last week in California.

Over the years, I visited Howard on several occasions at his beautiful hill-top house in Malibu in California – “It’s the home that porn built”, he would joke. And he was right: Howard had enjoyed a long career making and exhibiting adult films, and in his last years, he enjoyed a happy, comfortable, and well-deserved retirement.

Ten years ago, he even wrote a lengthy autobiography, ‘Take Your Shame and Shove It: My Wild Journey Through the Mysterious Sexual Cosmos’ in which he told the eventful and entertaining story of his life.

The irony was that when I met up with him, we ended up talking about everything except his adult film past: he always wanted to show me his collection of classic cartoons depicting golf scenes – he’d published a book of favorites which featured a foreword by Bob Hope, and I wanted to talk about his experience playing music and managing folk clubs in heyday of the 1960s. Not that Howard was stuck in the past – quite the opposite: he was keen to talk about politics, culture, and technology innovations.

On one of the last times that I saw him, I asked him what he thought about the state of the adult film industry today, and the new developments in AI,   streaming porn, webcams, cam girls, and live interactive sites like Chaturbate. He was enthusiastic: “These instant, intimate interactions are like going back to the beginning of the sex film business,” he said. “Except that now you can enjoy it all in your own home.”

I asked him if he ever logged on to any of these sites.

“Of course, I do!” he laughed. “Every day! Except I don’t like to pay. After everything I’ve done to help create this adult film industry over many decades, after all the risks I took and the court cases I had to fight, I figure… I should get some things for free, right?”

This episode’s running time is 102 minutes.

Make no mistakes about it, Howard Ziehm is one of the people who invented the adult film industry.

He was there taking still photos for adult bookstores in the 1960s – when the most you could reveal was a girl in her underwear. He made some of the first color loops – when all you could show was the subject writhing on a mattress by herself.

And then in 1970, as the market finally demanded hardcore, he made the groundbreaking ‘Mona: The Virgin Nymph’.

Time magazine called it the ‘The Jazz Singer’ (1927) of fuck films. Variety called it “the long-awaited link between the stag loops and conventional theatrical fare” and it was listed it their annual Top 50 grossing films – the first pornographic film to feature. And it was the first nationally released 35mm adult feature film to play in actual movie theaters.

In short, it was the blueprint for the 1970s porno chic hits that followed.

Howard went onto make many more adult films over the next decade, including ‘Flesh Gordon’ (1974), a science fiction adventure comedy erotic spoof of the Flash Gordon serials from the 1930s.

So who was the mysterious Howard Ziehm behind these films?

Fortunately he’s finally completed his autobiography which The Rialto Report is assisting Howard to publish shortly. And it’s a hell of read. It’s a huge, entertaining, and riveting book that names names, settles scores, and tells truths. It’s also one of the best biographies you’ll read about anyone in the film industry.

And it turns out here was someone who was going to be a theoretical physicist, owned one of the most successful clubs of the 1960s folk scene, worked as a nude model, had a drug running scheme importing marijuana across the border into the US, played guitar in a Los Angeles band called Father Plotsky and the Umbilical Cord – and all that before he ever even thought of making a porn film.

Today we’re joined by Howard Ziehm to talk about his surprising life leading up to the film ‘Flesh Gordon’. It’s quite a ride.

Japanese one sheet for ‘Hollywood Blue’ (1970)

Newspaper ad for ‘Harlot’ (1971) (using an alternative name)

Newspaper ad for ‘Harlot’ (1971) (using an alternative name)

The post R.I.P. Howard Ziehm: Mona… (and marijuana, music, and M.I.T.) – Podcast Reprise appeared first on The Rialto Report.

By the mid 1990s, Dian Hanson could’ve been forgiven for thinking that she’d finally made it – and that nothing was going to derail her career in magazine publishing that had started two decades earlier.

She’d had an improbable and volatile journey, from a troubled upbringing and difficult marriage, to working as a nurse in rural Pennsylvania, before somehow launching an explicit men’s magazine called Puritan for the mob in New York. There followed a succession of writing, publishing, and editing jobs on men’s magazines whose titles eloquently reveal their sexual content: Hooker, Expose’, Partner, Adult Cinema Review, and Juggs, to name a few.

Her greatest triumph was Leg Show magazine – which Dian turned into a high-selling juggernaut. It was a match made in heaven: Dian, long fascinated and deeply compassionate about sexual quirks and fetish, an audience that was crying out for a more intimate connection with their magazine, and a publisher, George Mavety, who gave Dian near-complete creative control.

But then just as everything seemed to be working out perfectly, the internet happened – crippling the sex magazine business. To make matters worse, her employer, George Mavety, died. The good times were suddenly retreating in the rear-view mirror.

In this final episode of the series, Dian talks about what happened next, and how she re-invented herself with Taschen books. It’s a story that includes characters as diverse as Linda Lovelace, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Crumb, transvestite model Kim Christy and transsexual porn star Sulka, Vanessa Del Rio, and many more.

You can listen to the Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, and Episode 3 here.

This podcast is 52 minutes long.

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Dian in ‘Crumb‘ documentary, 1991

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Photo for Crumb portrait

R. Crumb portrait

Dian standing on Leg Show reader, 1995

New York, 2000

Dian and Larry Flynt event, 2008

With Liz Earls of ‘Days of the Cougar’ book, 2011

Explaining porn at Los Angeles Public Library, c. 2012

With ‘The Art of Pin Up’, 2015

In Dian’s Taschen office in Hollywood, 2018

Dian with boyfriend Daniel, Christmas 2019

Naomi Campbell party, 2020

Onstage with Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Geffen Theater, Los Angeles, 2023

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The post Dian Hanson – Chronicles, Part 4: The Taschen Years – Podcast 142 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

In the first part of ‘Dian Hanson, Chronicles,’ Dian spoke of her upbringing in the northwest United States, an often shocking family life with a difficult and frightening father – who just happened to be the supreme grand master of a sex-magic cult. It was  a difficult childhood that included bullying, sexual assault, and running away from home, culminating in an unhappy marriage to a transvestite which ended after her troubled and abusive husband forced them to put their daughter up for adoption.

One of the few highlights and true interests from her teen years was Dian’s discovery of sexuality and pornography – thanks in part to the work of the psychologist Krafft-Ebbing and the growing permissiveness in the country, as exemplified by the publication of the strangely titillating Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.

In the second episode of our series, we heard how Dian got divorced and moved on with her life by finding work as a nurse in Pennsylvania – despite lacking any formal training – before starting a hardcore magazine, Puritan, with a boyfriend – despite not having had any experience in publishing. Dian liked the sex magazine work much more than she liked her boyfriend, so she ditched him and went on to partner with Peter Wolff, an eccentric veteran of the New York sex publication scene. Together they helmed popular titles such as Partner, Adult Cinema Review, and Oui, and though the pair were alternately and repeatedly feted and then fired, they developed a template for a new type of publication: a men’s magazine that would be guided by the desires of the readers.

Episode 3 is about the 1980s and 1990s – and how Dian’s career continued in the ever-expanding and competitive world of sex publications.

You can listen to the Episode 1 here and Episode 2 here.

This podcast is 51 minutes long.

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Standing on Fakir Musafar, Partner magazine, 1982

Dian Hanson, 1982

Dian with George Mavety, c. 1988

Dian, with Rick Savage, c.1992

Leg Show column photo, c. 1994

With Juggs managing editor Matthew Licht, 1995

Leg Show column photo, c. 1997

In Yoxford, England, c. 1997

With Rose Bailey, Leg Show

Leg Show, 1999

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The post Dian Hanson – Chronicles, Part 3: Going Solo – Podcast 141 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Dian Hanson is a unique figure from the world of men’s magazines in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, a world that overlapped strongly with the adult film business.

Last time, in the first episode of this podcast series, we heard about her surprising, and often shocking, upbringing: a hippie and high school dropout from Seattle, her father was supreme grand master in a sex-magic cult, and a childhood that included being bullied, sexually assaulted, running away from home, even being considered by her parents as a possible partner for a much older friend-of-the family who just happened to be a pedophile.

By 20, Dian had developed a passionate and life-long interest in pornography – thanks to three unlikely sources: the work of psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, the publication of the bizarre Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and the appearance of the first sex films that had started to be shown in theaters. But paradoxically, by her late teens, Dian found herself a world away from all these stimuli – as an unhappily married wife, pregnant, and living in rural Mississippi.

In this episode, we hear how Dian recovered from that difficult, not to mention tragic, marriage and found her way into the burgeoning men’s magazine business in New York – albeit through an abusive boyfriend. Quick note: Dian asked that we don’t refer to this ex by his given name, but rather call him “he who shall not be named”. Obviously, I respected that choice.

Dian talks about the first magazine she worked on – the mob-financed Puritan – a trailblazing, still legendary publication, that was the first hardcore magazine aimed at the newsstands in America. After that came Dian’s partnership with Peter Wolff – a similarly important character in magazine history. For years, the pair of them tore through a host of New York adult titles leaving a trail of both success and bewildered confusion behind them, as they pioneered the trend for reader-contributed magazines. Along the way, she crossed paths with people like adult film actors Vanessa del Rio, Ron Jeremy, and Marc Stevens, highbrow art-world darlings like Robert Mapplethorpe and Gay Talese, and low level mob bosses like Robert DiBernardo.

You can listen to the previous episode here.

This podcast is 75 minutes long.

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Dian with a model, 1979

Dian, on her wedding day, 1980

Dian with Vanessa del Rio, 1980

On a Partner shoot, 1981

Dian, 1981

With Long Jeanne Silver, Toni Rose, and another in 1981

With Lisa DeLeeuw and a mobster, backstage at Show World, 1982

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The post Dian Hanson – Chronicles, Part 2: The Peter Wolff Years – Podcast 140 appeared first on The Rialto Report.