(26/32) “I could bring home $3000 a week if I was working the...

(26/32) “I could bring home $3000 a week if I was working the road. That was real money. Only the porn stars were making more than that, because nothing draws a crowd like having your face in a movie or magazine. In the 1970’s, the biggest porn star around was Gloria Leonard. She was like the Meryl Streep of porno. I used to work with her a lot. Whenever she had a new movie screening at Show World, I’d go along with her to warm up the crowd. But Gloria wasn’t just a famous actress. She was the publisher of High Society, which was one of the biggest adult magazines going back then. Gloria was always trying to convince me to do a spread in her magazine, but I kept saying ‘no.’ Those shoots were full nude. But Gloria and I became good friends because she loved listening to my stories. One day we were laughing about something that happened, and she tells me: ‘You’d make a lot more money if you wrote for me.’ I told her: ‘C’mon Gloria.  It’s all an act.  My sex life is boring.  There’s nothing to write about.’  That’s when she leaned in real close, and whispered: ‘It doesn’t matter.  Just make it up.’  I went home that night and started typing. And when I showed Gloria what I wrote, she agreed to give me a column every other month.  We called it Tattletales From Tanqueray.  The pay was $500, and it only had to be two pages. The writing part took me forever because I’d failed typing class three times.  But the ideas came easy.  All I did was take a regular situation, and make it X-rated.  I pretended like I was having sex everywhere: grocery stores, movie theaters, the DMV. I even wrote about having sex in prison. And people believed I was actually doing that shit. Gloria published everything I wrote. She said I was the only writer that they never had to edit. I still wouldn’t let her put my picture in there, just the headshot. But it didn’t matter. Because everybody read High Society.  You couldn’t buy that type of publicity.  And after the first issues came out, I was like famous.  Gloria would send boxes of the latest issue to all of my gigs.  Guys would be lining up on the street to get a signature. And my salary went up, big time.”
The Tanqueray Trust: https://bit.ly/2ZUjifW