Whore Stories (24 page)

Not so fast. The more the evidence changed, the more it stayed the same. Tests concluded that both Berge and Davies died from lethal doses of cyanide, and it was also discovered that Hoffman had enrolled in courses that included discussions about the toxic effects of cyanide on the human body (test results concluded that if you put lots of cyanide in a human body, the human body dies). Furthermore, Hoffman’s boss at the massage parlor decided to come clean and related a conversation he’d had with Hoffman in which she expressed an interest in marrying Davies and killing him in Mexico on their honeymoon, then collecting on his life insurance policy. Davies had taken out three policies on himself worth $20,000 at the time of his death, and he listed Hoffman as his fiancée.

In the end, Hoffman was not charged in the death of her boyfriend Davies, whose death was ruled a suicide, but she was given a life sentence for killing Berge. The murder/suicide and its attendant tale of erotic massage and amino asses captivated the good people of Wisconsin, a folk normally preoccupied with binge drinking, cow-tipping, and mittens. But the collective memory of Barbara, the murders, and the media circus is decomposing like a corpse in the snow, while our ribald biochemist languishes in jail, no doubt wondering how her happy ending went all haywire.

JOHN HOLMES

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Porn star

CLAIM TO FAME:
A good foot of coked-up, erotic dynamite

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Los Angeles; wherever porno is made

Perhaps it’s not fair to include Johnny “The Wad” Holmes in this infamous roll call. Indeed, most of John Holmes’s evil deeds seem to have been perpetrated more out of stupidity than malice. And when you’re walking around with an (allegedly) thirteen-inch dick, it’s not inconceivable to presume much of the blood flow needed for proper mental functioning and advanced reasoning skills might be diverted away from one’s brain during times of sexual activity, which, for John Holmes, were many and oft.

Have you ever wondered who has the biggest penis in the world? The biggest vagina? Maybe you were afraid your cache of Google searches would get you fired. Lucky for you, I’ve already been axed for that, but not before gathering some interesting data. The owner of the world’s largest recorded penis is Mr. Jonah Falcon from Brooklyn, NY. Jonah’s penis is nine and a half inches flaccid and thirteen and a half inches erect, and as he announced on
The Daily Show
, he can “envelop an entire doorknob” with his foreskin. Not to be outdone, the title “Woman with the Largest Vagina” goes to a Scottish giantess named Anna Swan. Anna (1846–1888) gave birth to a baby boy whose head was 19 inches in circumference. And babies come from vaginas—so there it is.

Holmes was born John Estes in 1944 in Ashville, Ohio. His father abandoned the family when John was still a baby, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather, a violent alcoholic who John said would often arrive home after barhopping and throw up on him and the rest of the family. John eventually tired of this ceremony, and at age sixteen he drove a fist through his stepdad’s face and headed out into the world, armed with a dream and a dong he once described as “bigger than a payphone, but smaller than a Cadillac.” A photographer discovered John, or rather, John’s miraculous penis in a public restroom and the young man was soon making 8 mm porn loops and modeling for
Swedish Erotica
, using a variety of stage names to keep his identity under wraps. Holmes eventually rose up through the ranks to become the most sought-after penis in the industry. But, with fame came drugs, and with drugs came some of the worst decision making the porn industry—or any industry—has ever seen.

As the Superfreak says, “Cocaine is a hell of a drug,” and for Holmes it was no different. When the 1970s came to an end, John was drug-addled, broke, and limp but trying mightily to turn tricks in order to pay for his habit. In 1981, he even played a part—the extent of which is unknown—in the robbery of a Los Angeles drug dealer and club owner named Eddie Nash. Nash struck back with a vengeance, instructing his goons to pummel Holmes until he gave up his accomplices, which he did. The ensuing bloodbath was known as “The Wonderland Murders”; four people were bludgeoned to death at a rented house on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon. Nash may have forced Holmes to participate in the killings as an act of penance, although this was never proven.

“My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”

—Harry S. Truman, thirty-third U.S. president

What is proven is that at some point during his pornographic exploits and whoring, Holmes contracted AIDS. In the mid-1980s, still broke, under constant investigation, and a mere shell of his former self, Holmes kept the disease from everyone but his manager, who forbade him to “act” in any more movies. Undaunted, Holmes made films in Italy, neglecting to tell his costars he’d been diagnosed with AIDS. He reasoned that everyone in the porn industry would eventually succumb to the disease anyway, but that was just a convenient excuse. Holmes’s decision haunts the industry to this day. The Wad eventually died of complications from AIDS in 1988, assured a place in the hall of pornographers, prostitutes, and people with really poor judgment. Whether he was a murderer remains to be seen, but through porno reruns, long John and his lurid legacy continue to inspire, disgust, and intrigue to this day.

GERDA MUNSINGER

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Political
provocateur
; Russian spy

CLAIM TO FAME:
At the head of Canada’s first real sex scandal

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Canada/East Berlin

With Canada, you never know what you’re going to get. The country would be almost like a box of chocolates, were it not for the maple syrup lobby threatening to defenestrate anybody who dares mess with their sap. That statement wasn’t even remotely true, but that you believed it for even a second indicates exactly the kind of weird behavior we can expect from Canucks.

On March 4, 1966, when John Diefenbaker, the House of Commons Tory Opposition Leader, chastised Justice Minister Lucien Cardin for botching Canada’s National Security (from
what
or
whom
, one might ask), Cardin leapt up and snorted in that snooty French-Canadian argot that sounds a lot like a hedgehog reaching orgasm, “[Diefenbaker] is the very last person who can afford to give advice on the handling of security cases.” Cardin then beseeched Diefenbaker to “tell about his participation in the Munsinger case when he was Prime Minister!” much to the amusement to those tuned in to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the continued consternation of Canadian politicians, too cold to really give a rat’s ass in the first place.

For the love of back bacon
, the House seemed to be thinking,
Okay, we give up—what’s the Munsinger case?
The atmosphere in the chamber turned awkward and icy. So what
was
the Munsinger case that got JM Cardin in such an exasperated state and nearly brought down the sitting government? Well, gather around the fire, y’all. . . . It all started with a prostitute named Gerda Munsinger.

Gerda was born in Germany in 1929, where she was briefly married to an American serviceman. After immigrating to Canada in 1955, Munsinger slogged through a number of temporary jobs, eventually finding a more permanent position as a waitress and hostess at the Chez Paree nightclub. According to the CBC, it was at the Chez Paree that Gerda came into contact with, and then advanced to the bedrooms of, some of Canada’s most prominent politicians, including members of parliament and Defense Minister Pierre Sévigny.

History is fraught with legendary cover-ups. But one cover-up they
don’t
tell you about took place in New Guinea during the early 1970s: Operation Penis Gourd. Its mission? Covering up the Dani tribe with clothes. The Dani were a “Stone-Age” people, according to some members of the Indonesian government, and needed to be civilized. According to an article in
The
Economist
:

Jogging shorts and dresses were airlifted to the Baliem Valley in central Irian Jaya and distributed to the natives. An American missionary present at one distribution recalls that next day men were wearing the shorts on their heads and women were using the dresses as shoulder bags.

Operation Penis Gourd, as you may have divined, was a fantastic failure. The Dani remain mostly nude to this day, although in reality, it was the Indonesian government who were caught with their pants down.

Canada’s first sex scandal was launched, but somewhere along the way, they lost Gerda. It turns out she was quietly deported back to East Berlin in 1961. But never mind that. In 1966, when the scandal broke, Cold War paranoia was still acute, so any mention of spying was enough to make even a silly government like the one Canadians mounted crumble and fall. Beware! Communists are coming for our comedians, our moose, and our hockey skills!

In fact, then prime minister Lester Pearson was so eager to close the books on the Munsinger “spying” case that he had a go at deflecting the issue by turning the discourse to Canada’s death penalty. The debates on this perennial topic, unlike the discussions surrounding the Munsinger investigation, were heated but progressive, and would ultimately lead to Canada’s abolition of the death penalty. Rumors circulated that Munsinger was dead, although she was eventually found by a reporter for the
Toronto Star
who claimed Gerda was very much alive, eager to clear her name, and hanging out in Munich. But, as these things go, Gerda’s fifteen minutes were up, and in a truly postmodern Warholian twist, she wasn’t even there to enjoy it. The Canadian government established a Royal Commission that ultimately found neither a security breach nor evidence of any crime committed.

In one of those brilliant Canadacentric instances where you’re not sure if they’re kidding, serious, or just French, Charles Lynch, Bureau Chief of the Southam News agency at the time of the scandal, held out hope that the “Munsinger Affair” might serve to ramp up Canada’s “dull and unexciting” image and spur large numbers of tourists to attend Expo ’67. And, by golly, it came to pass. Canada played host to the most widely attended World’s Fair in history to date. Gerda died in Munich, for real this time, in 1998.

MATA HARI

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Exotic dancer; ineffectual spy

CLAIM TO FAME:
The original femme fatale; executed by firing squad for espionage

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
The Netherlands; France; Germany

Born in 1876 in the Netherlands, Mata Hari (née Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) is more famous for being executed as a German double agent during World War I than for anything else, but she is of particular interest as a whoretesan. After answering an ad placed in a Dutch newspaper by a man seeking a wife, an intrepid young Margaretha left home with her new husband and settled in Indonesia.

Her husband, a captain in the Dutch Colonial Army, turned out to be an alcoholic dolt who beat her brutally and often. He also kept a second wife, and he fooled around with various other women native to Java. When Margaretha had had enough, she again flung herself to the four winds, and one of those winds blew her into a dance company, where she adopted the stage name Mata Hari.

There may have been a small mix-up. Prior to her arrest in France, Mata Hari maintained that she
had
in fact been in the employ of France as a spy in German-occupied Belgium, where she met with a German consul to give him bogus documents—no harm, no foul, n’est-ce pas? It’s curious, then, that Mata Hari, perhaps in a fit of confused allegiances and/or nudity, failed to inform her French spymasters of this bit of freelance espionage and double-agentry. I mean, come on. It’s the cardinal rule of espionage and prostitution: Never double-book.

Mata Hari’s reputation grew as a dancer and as one who wasn’t afraid to take it off if the price was right. Her act eventually took Europe by storm, and she became the in-demand doxy to a number of famous politicians and to royalty, including, it’s been rumored, the Crown Prince of Germany. As for her career choices, she is unapologetic, as quoted in
The True Life Fiction of Mata Hari
:

I took the train to Paris without money and without clothes. There, as a last resort and thanks to my female charms, I was able to survive. That I slept with other men is true; that I posed for sculptures is true; that I danced in the opera at Monte Carlo is true. It would be too far beneath me and too cowardly to defend myself against such actions I have taken.

Since the Netherlands was neutral during the Great War, Mata Hari was able to travel freely all over the world, shaking her equal opportunity moneymaker, much to the chagrin of Allied authorities, who suspected her of being a German spy. Eventually, Mata Hari found herself hoisted by her own leotard. In Paris, French and British intelligence intercepted a series of “secret” transmissions that resulted in the exotic dancer’s arrest, as Mata Hari may have been a little too eager to please the epaulet-wearing military set. Always a sucker for a man in uniform, Mata Hari once quipped: