Mark Leigh: Dick Longg: Sexual Saviour of the Universe

Dick S. Longg? Of course, that wasn’t his real name.

That was Harvey Pupkiss.

You got someone called Harvey Pupkiss to submit your tax return, take out an impacted wisdom tooth or perform stand-up in a New York comedy club. You didn’t get someone called Harvey Pupkiss to fuck women on camera, which is why Harvey changed his name. The ‘S’ as his middle initial? That followed in the grand tradition of Ulysses S. Grant, Harry S. Truman and Hunter S. Thompson, although in Dick’s case it stood for ‘Schlong’. The usual response on hearing this was, ‘Dick Schlong Longg? That’s a mouthful!’

And indeed it was.

As one of the best endowed, most accomplished porn stars in L.A, if not the world, Dick’s sideboard groaned under the weight of his ten Golden Clitorises, eighteen Dildos and the coveted Palme d’Orgasm — not forgetting his lifetime achievement award for oral sex, the ‘Linda’. If there was an industry award or accolade to be won, then Dick had won it. What’s more, he wasn’t ashamed of calling himself a porn star unlike many of his more pretentious colleagues who talked about being in the ‘Adult Entertainment Industry’. To Dick, this was like calling a vibrator an ‘oscillating internal cavity stimulatory device’.

Success meant he really did have it all. There was the 6,000 sq. ft. duplex apartment overlooking the San Fernando Valley complete with two hot tubs, one very hot tub and one tub the exact same temperature of amniotic fluid. He owned a lemon yellow Ferrari 430 and a midnight black Hummer H2 (with the vanity plate 'Humongous'), plus a stunning beachfront holiday home in Aruba.

But apart from all the trappings of wealth Dick enjoyed other non-financial benefits; the endless stream of lithe, busty women that came into his life as much as he came into theirs. With his reputation preceding him and his rugged good looks (think ‘Owen Wilson’ but a bit taller and without the broken nose), Dick found picking up women as simple as getting a hard-on. In his line of work beautiful women were easy to meet and generally easy, and they all seemed cast from the same mould. These were women who’d spent more time French polishing their nails than they had in full-time education; who moved their lips while they read TV Guide, and who still insisted on drawing a smiley face or flower as a dot for the letter ‘i’ (or lower case ‘j’). While they made great bed mates they couldn’t make great conversation but that didn’t bother Dick. He was more interested in what went on between the sheets than between their ears. All Dick wanted was instant gratification, not a girlfriend.

Sure, on the face of it, if this is what you want from life then porn seems like exactly the right business to be in: being paid to be filmed having sex with a wide variety of stunning women. In reality though, the novelty rapidly wears off and the whole thing quickly turns into Just Another Job. Well, maybe that’s overstating it a bit since most jobs don’t involve you being intimate with three different beautiful girls simultaneously, two of them ex-Playmates of the Year and the other a 19-year-old Ukrainian gymnast — but you get the point.

Dick had been asked about this time after time in interviews; how can he enjoy sex that must be mechanical, almost a reflex act rather than anything undertaken with great consideration, let alone passion? Dick didn’t mind this at all and had gone on record saying that unlike many celebrities, he was totally fulfilled doing what he did best. He had no interest in doing anything more worthy with his life, whether it was helping displaced Somalian refugees, campaigning to stop the deforestation of the Amazon delta or saving the white tufted orang utan. Well, with millions in the bank and an unfeasibly large sex organ, he thought, why would you?

His penis? It’s fair to say that Dick had become particularly blasé about it. To him, his endowment was, quite literally, a tool of his trade and unlike most of his rivals, he could always be relied upon to perform on cue without any artificial stimulants or aids. If you know anything about the porn industry at all, then you know the most important thing for any male performer is his ability, as they say in the business, to ‘get wood’. Dick could get wood on demand and not just your lowly balsa or ply; we’re talking about the mighty oak or majestic redwood.

His unique physiology meant he had absolutely no need for Viagra, Cialis, Stonkodextrin, ErectoMore, Whang-Gel, acupuncture, hypnosis, vacuum pumps, rubber bands or even the inflatable penile implants that several of his colleagues were rumoured to rely on. In fact, it was said that Dick’s penis was so dependable you could set your watch by it, although this would of course have been a very odd, and a considerably unhygienic thing to do.

Dick’s first paid job was in The Bitches of East Dick, a poorly-produced film in which there was an inverse relationship between the size of his fee and the size of his manhood. Dick wasn’t happy, but understood that that sort of exploitation came with the territory. He knew he had to pay his dues on the way to becoming a serious player. Within a few months he was being offered roles in better produced, better financed movies including Laying Private Ryan, Thighs Wide Shut and Schindler’s Fist, and was soon getting both a fee and a small percentage of net.

The physical demands of the job and a propensity for early burn-out meant the life of a porn star was relatively short, falling somewhere between that of a May fly and a boy band. That’s why, to maximise his future earnings Dick made the move into production; that’s where the money was.

The first films he wrote, produced and starred in were a series of porno bible exploitation films: Go Down Moses, Resurrection, The Second Coming and the most controversial of all, Mary Does Bethlehem. These caused a real stir in the market and also among the god-fearing folk of America’s mid-west. There were mass burnings of his movies in Des Moines, Wichita, Oshkosh and numerous other silly-sounding places but this, quite literally, just fanned the flames of publicity; it was especially helpful because to enable them to burn his DVDs, angry citizens had to buy them first. A combination of the earnings form this series and the fact that Dick was one of the few performers in the industry whose income didn’t disappear up his nose enabled him to buy up a small distribution business. The rest, as authors who like using clichés say, is history.

Nowadays Dick made the films he wanted to, working with the cast and crew he liked and trusted. OK, ‘liked’ was too strong a word; ‘tolerated’ was probably better. He hired them for their professional skills and ability to get the job done in time and on budget. Their personalities and egos? Well, he accepted those as well. Although ‘suffered’ would be far more appropriate.

Most people in the porn industry acted like they were serious actors. One particular girl Dick had worked with had a laughable sense of self-importance, behaving as if she was the Meryl Streep of the blow job. In reality the only thing she and her famous namesake had in common were that they’d both appeared in films called Sophie’s Choice, although one was about a concentration camp survivor and one was about a gangbang. Most directors also suffered from a similar sense of inappropriate self-worth and Dick was currently working with one of these. Ron DiBargi was a larger than life character that would never tire of telling people how he learned his craft in the film biz while working for Scorsese and Coppola. What Ron failed to tell anyone of course was that he was referring to Sal Scorsese and Mario Coppola who ran an adult movie theatre on 42 ndStreet in the late 1970s. Ron had been their projectionist.