UK- SPRAWLED out in a stretch limo Ron Jeremy, the biggest male porn star in the world, is telling me the secret of his success.
“Waal,” he says in his laid-back Californian accent, “it sure ain’t rocket science. I hide the bacon, squeeze the weasel, shoot the sherbet, and then the girl says, ‘Thank you’, and then I go off home.”
Simple, eh? Makes you wonder why more blokes aren’t doing it. Many have tried, few have made it. Nobody has come even close to Big Ron – and there is a good reason for this.
In the McDonald’s that is life, Ron is supersize with large fries. As the man himself puts it: “They’re going to make a biopic about my career. Robert De Niro’s going to play me and Danny De Vito will play my d**k.”
If that film ever gets made, it will have one hell of a cast. In the 27 years he’s been a porn star, Ron has had sex with more than 5,000 women. Just think about it…that’s 2,000 more than Leyton Orient got for their last home game.
That kind of sexual athleticism requires dedication and stamina. What it doesn’t require is Viagra, at least in Ron’s case. He may have just turned 52, but he has never had to resort to that little blue pill.
You’d think that after slaving away making porn, what he’d like to do with his evenings is settle down with a book and a cup of Horlicks. Not a bit of it. He likes sex – in fact he’s mad about it – and it’s an odd night which doesn’t find him in bed with a girl half his age.
“Be honest,” he says, “what guy doesn’t like to go to bed with good-looking girls? But I’ve seen some changes. When I was a kid, after a one-night stand it was the guy who said, ‘That was great, see ya’. Now it’s the other way round – women call the shots.”
Making a living out of sex is a demanding career, and as our limo edges through the London traffic, Ron nods off from time to time. But I forgive him. He is, after all, a legend of the leg-over. What his fellow contestants in the new Five reality TVshow The Farm will make of him when he joins them tomorrow goodness only knows…
Ron is the Elder Statesman of porn – the equivalent of Sir Donald Sinden in the straight theatre, although I doubt you’d find such productions as The Good The Bad And The D-Cups or Throbbin Hood in Sir Donald’s CV.
Ron gets nostalgic for a while, comparing porn then with porn now.
“It’s all mechanical these days. The only dialogue is, ‘Wouldya like a cup of coffee?’ and then it’s wham-bam, wham-bam. In the old days, there was more plot, more fun. I used to get told off for cracking jokes. They’d say, ‘Ron, when the nookie starts, you’ve got to stop laughing’. I’d get up to all sorts of tricks. Like, I’d be having sex with a girl and I’d produce a tourist map of the Grand Canyon and start studying it. I was once making it with a girl on a yacht and she was seasick all the way through. The camera didn’t stop turning. They just re-shot her facial expressions. The public never knew.” You could never accuse Ron of not having staying power…even though his tummy is now not so much a six-pack as a 24-bottle carry-out. “I’m the living hope for every man ,” he says. “If I can get lucky, anyone can get lucky.” Yet women can’t get enough of him. And women, he says, are in control of porn. They’re the stars viewers want to see. “I’m just a prop.” His favourite position is “any one where the girl screams, ‘Yesss’.”
One-liners like this have made Ron a star, and that is why we’re on the road today – he’s off to address the Oxford University Union, the debating chamber that has listened to the likes of Sir Winston Churchill and the Dalai Lama. By the time our limo comes to a halt amid the dreaming spires, a queue has formed. He is, one student says, “bigger than Einstein”.
“Everything I’ve done,” he tells them, “you’ve done. The only difference is, I do it in front of a camera.”
When one student shouts, “Show us your c**k,” he fumbles in his trousers and produces a brightly-coloured toy rooster made out of felt. The real thing, in all its magnitude, is the stuff of myth and legend. “I first knew it was bigger than the average,” he says, “when my first girlfriend told me so.”
And it was a girlfriend who set him off on a career in porn. She sent a nude picture of him to Playgirl and jeez, the movie producers said, this guy really measures up.
It’s late now and we’re on the way home. The long car bears Ron and me and a bizarre cast of characters. There’s an actress from the Rocky Horror Show. There’s Ciro, owner of a chain of pizza restaurants Ron patronises. And there’s Natalie, a 29-year-old brunette Ron met when she was a barmaid in Las Vegas and who is, she says, his platonic love.
You can tell they care for each other, so I play matchmaker. You ought to get together with Natalie, I tell Ron. “Hey Nat,” he yells across the car. “This guy says we should get married. Do it for the turtle and the rat.” They’re his pets.
I doubt it will happen, but then again, you never know. A porn star can fall in love. Ron has – five times. He counts them on his fingers: Margie…Alice…Tricia…Venice… Natalie. None of them, so far, has come to anything permanent. Ron wants to settle down, have children. “I love kids. But my work makes it hard. Emotionally I’m monogamous, physically less so. And then there’s the travel. I’m never home.” He pauses: “Sex is easy… it’s love that’s difficult.”
“Five thousand women…” I keep repeating. Me and Ron nod off – his head on my shoulder. His last, slumbering words are: “Yeah…bring on the five thousand and first.” Then, with a little smile, he’s off into dreamland.