San Diego Reader

The “bookstore” was a front room that had a few shelves of triple-X-rated magazines. A shaggy clerk charged me $2 admission (traded for eight machine tokens) to enter the rear room, where celluloid peep-show booths lined the perimeter and video booths ran down the center. The back of the club had an enclosed stage with narrow booth doors arranged in a semicircle around access windows. Customers entered a booth, dropped tokens or quarters into a slot, and a little hydraulic door rose to reveal one or more “totally nude” dancers on a stage. Another slot made it possible for customers to pass dollar bills to the women, who, thanks to the slight elevation of the stage, gyrated their pelvic region near the customer’s face. The windows cost $1 to open, but after around a minute, the shutter slammed shut, and it took more cash to reopen.

Behind the stage were four private-talk-show booths, where customers could solicit one-on-one performances from the ladies. A thick pane of Plexiglas separated the “dancer” on her raised mattress from the customer, whose side of the booth included a stool and a wall-mounted box of tissues. The cost here was $5 to start the show, plus whatever tips you stuck in the lady’s slot (a hole cut into the wall), with the show growing progressively raunchier based on tips. Dancer and customer communicated via boxy old phone receivers, though few dancers did much talking.

Manager Lee Bickel hired me as a clerk. The duties on my solo 5:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. shift included checking in the evening dancers, selling product, changing and maintaining the film projectors and video banks, and managing the sometimes troublesome customers. Twenty-four years old at the time, I learned from my first paycheck, signed by Edward Fonzo at Modern Bookkeeping, that I was earning just over minimum wage and working for a company based in Durand, Michigan, called Ellwest, which was the name on the store’s brass tokens. Bickel’s boss was Harry Mohney, who later gained notoriety over a $14 million tax bill and as founder of the Déjà Vu Showgirls chain of “gentleman’s clubs.”

SD PORN CHRONOLOG #1: 1966 — Harry Mohney, a projectionist at an X-rated drive-in theater in Battle Creek, Michigan, invests in a partnership with drive-in owner Floyd Bloss. They open another porn drive-in in Durand, a small town near Flint. The following year, Mohney launches a distribution hub that specializes in importing European porn films, and he hires over 200 people, becoming a major local employer. By 1973, Mohney has bought out Bloss and bought up over 100 businesses in 10 states and 20 cities, including San Diego. His string of massage parlors, X-rated theaters and drive-ins, adult bookstores, and even a topless billiard hall generate income of around $6 million a year. After divorcing his wife, Mohney moves in with 18-year-old porn star Gail Palmentier (later known as Gail Palmer) and makes ten movies with her, including the popular “Candy” series starring Carol Connors.

I soon discovered that Ellwest was part of one of the nation’s largest pornography chains, a big employer not just in Durand but all over the United States. Mohney’s Entertainment World International was the main Midwest distributor of X-rated movies; his Wonderful World of Video (previously Amber, Inc.) had a lock on West Coast distribution from its office at 6315 Hollywood Boulevard. The company had a stake in porn videos produced by Caballero Video, and Mohney was sole owner of Caribbean Films (whose corporate address was an L.A. post office box). At that time, he was already wealthy enough to co-own, with other company principals I’d later meet, several homes in La Costa. As I became more entrenched in the business, I’d see financial reports for nearby operations in the chain, such as the Eyeful in Ontario, Venus Fair in North Hollywood, and Cinema X in Bakersfield. It was stunning to see how much money was pouring into the company.

Bickel upgraded me to manager, and I began building the bookstore into more of an adult boutique, putting up new shelves for highly profitable (and ridiculous looking) rubber, leather, and novelty goods, right down to the inevitable blow-up dolls and buckets-o’-lube. We started one of the city’s first adult-video rental systems, with tapes (mostly Beta) arriving weekly from the company in Michigan. The company shipped all the chain’s stock and reorders from Variety Distributing, at 1112 North Saginaw in Durand. I wasn’t allowed to place orders with anyone else. I was supposed to keep it a secret that someone outside San Diego owned Jolar; the owner on the business license was a woman named Jackie Hagerman, and a company-owned home in La Costa was listed as her primary address, though she spent no more than a few weeks a year living there.

It was an odd job. Bouncer skills came in handy, particularly when drunk guys tried climbing over the booth walls to get at the ladies. I also had to deal with dancers’ angry boyfriends and husbands, ejecting several and signing more than one police report. I caught shoplifters, and I tell you, it’s hard not to laugh out loud when you catch a bald guy wearing a Freak Brothers T-shirt slipping a pocket rocket into his bumpy pants. I doubled up the janitorial shifts to have guys constantly cleaning and mopping the peep-show booths (truly among the world’s worst jobs). I had to acknowledge that I had one weird gig.

It got weirder after Lee Bickel took a vacation from which he never returned. The company told me he quit. Bickel told me he was fired. I know he threatened a lawsuit and received a sizable settlement. I remained friends with him until he passed away a couple of years later from AIDS-related illnesses. He had been diagnosed just before he vanished from the tiny manager’s office alongside Jolar’s front desk. I was covering Bickel’s shifts when “owner” Jackie Hagerman flew in from the main office in Durand and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Hagerman — a tiny, hyperactive, tough-as-nails Asian woman once described by a colleague as “Yokoesque” — offered me $1000 a week to manage the Jolar Cinema. Right away, I took the word “cinema” off the front sign and redesigned it to read “Jolar — Live Nude Dancers,” since the dancers weren’t even hinted at on the old signage. Over the next 30 days, the weekend bank deposit increased from about $9000 to a little over $12,000, mostly on the strength of the bright new sign, advertising in local military papers (with a coupon for a “free nudie show,” actually a handful of extra booth tokens), and growing video-rental revenue as we expanded to take credit card and check deposits.

Another project was replacing the creaky old film projectors with video decks and oversized TV screens. I rebuilt the dancers’ stage, installing flashing built-in lights on the floor and ceiling. We revamped the private-talk-show booths, decorating each with a different theme: a tropical jungle, a collegiate bedroom, an Asian boudoir, and a “kinky” room where the dancer could sit in a leather stirrup seat suspended by heavy-duty chains. Comical illustrated signs on booth doors now proclaimed these “Sexual Therapy Consultation Rooms.” I kept the wall-mounted tissue boxes.

SD PORN CHRONOLOG #2: Jolar opens in September 1978 on Broadway downtown, with A. Dale Manicom listed in articles of incorporation as owner of the “local” company set up to manage the club. Federal authorities later accuse real owner Harry Mohney of using trusts and corporations to conceal his business interests and to avoid taxes. 1980: The Gaslamp Quarter’s 16-block area contains around 30 adult bookstores, movie houses, and porn shops. Summer 1983: Jolar relocates to a former furniture store in the College Area on University Avenue, next to an Amvets secondhand shop.

I went on a firing spree, weeding out dancers who were full-blown drug addicts or evincing other unreliable behavior (including two I caught prostituting in booths). Firing the reprobates cut the staff in half; the remaining dozen women saw their daily tips increase. At that time, they weren’t paid a salary. Women kept their cash tips, while Jolar kept the money from the machines operating the stage and private-booth shutters. When Jackie saw how much money the dancers were making, she installed lockboxes over the slots where the customers dropped the dancers’ tips, and the tips were split 50-50 with the woman at the end of the shift. I was instructed to fire anyone caught taking a cash tip in her hand.

One reason Jolar paid me so well was that I was legally responsible for anything that happened. If a dancer was arrested for prostitution or for having drugs on the premises, I’d go to jail, too. You can believe I ran a tight ship. Bickel had installed a video-surveillance system that covered the stage and dancers’ dressing room, while wiretaps allowed us to monitor the conversations going on in private-talk-show booths. The eavesdropping was intended to ensure that the girls weren’t turning tricks or buying or selling drugs.

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