The Wonderland Murders

Dressed in hip-huggers, with his shirt unbuttoned to expose a bony chest, 'Johnny Wadd' looked more like a cheap imitation of a Las Vegas lounge singer than a classy Sherlock Holmes. He chewed bubblegum on camera and bungled his lines. But none of this mattered, of course — the Wadd flicks weren't really about winning Oscars, they were about showcasing Holmes' assets. 

Nevertheless, this was back in the days when the nascent porn industry believed it was making art, not smut, and directors wanted their theatre pornographique to have a cohesive plotline in addition to frenetic humping.

Deep Throat & Devil Movies

Producing porn in the early '70s was still a felony. In 1972, the movie Deep Throat was ruled obscene and shut down in theaters around the country. In 1973, Holmes was arrested on location and charged with pimping and pandering. He called Sharon to bail him out, but she didn't have the money, so he struck a deal with the LAPD: He'd keep the department abreast of the goings-on at local porn sets, and the department would keep him out of jail, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Making pornography was hard work, but Holmes bragged to Hustler that he was a natural for the job:

"I can keep an erection almost indefinitely. In a porno movie, a four-minute sex scene on the screen means that I have maintained an erection for the five hours it took to shoot it, dripping sweat under klieg lights hot enough to drive the temperature on a set up to 104 degrees. I can also keep an erection straddling a girl at the edge of a cliff, looking down at 300 feet of nothing, with my knees bleeding from the sandstone surface. I come on cue." 

Holmes bragged to the magazine in a 1983 interview that he'd had sex with some 14,000 women, including tricks ranging from 35 to 60 years old who paid him handsomely for his services.

"Twelve of these women, all married and with the approval of their husbands, are mothers of children I have sired — each for a large fee."

What is true is that in his prime, the 'The Sultan of Smut' made over 2,000 pornos and commanded $3,000 a day to have sex on-camera.

At his nadir, he smoked away roughly the same amount in freebase cocaine.