Ron Jeremy Thinks He and Anne Frank Have a Lot in Common, and He's Not Kidding
The final chapter in the fall and continued falling of the last A-list porn star
[This is part three in a three-part series. To read the first two chapters, start here and then go here.]
As of this writing, Ron Jeremy, the most famous (and arguably last) porn star in the world, is behind bars.
Well, not technically. The 72-year-old actor is actually in a mental health facility in California, where he’ll likely stay for the rest of his life.
In 2021, a grand jury indicted him on over 30 counts of sexual assault, including 12 counts of forcible rape, which could have resulted in 300 years in prison. But the case never went to trial because of Jeremy’s “incurable neurocognitive decline” (aka dementia).
He got off easy, which sounds like the title of one of his especially gross videos. “Ron Jeremy Gets Off Easy.” In my head, I’m already fast-forwarding.
Jeremy may have avoided the clink, but his legacy (what there was of it) has been tarnished irrevocably. And that’s probably what matters most to him. If anything in his damaged brain remembers anymore.
Not all of the stories involving his behavior are abhorrent. Some are just sad. A New York flight attendant shared a harrowing tale with the Daily Mail about visiting Jeremy at his LA condo. She was only inside for a moment to use the bathroom, but what she witnessed was disgusting, even by porn-star standards.
There were piles of trash, boxes overflowing with porn memorabilia, and a bare mattress on a floor that was “black with dirt.” Another detail sparked something in my memory. “There were plants that had grown around the table legs and into the floor,” she said.
It brought me back to the last time Jeremy invited me up to his inner sanctum. As a general rule, I tried to avoid his condo. It gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I refused to touch anything, including door handles and chairs. But during one visit, Jeremy asked me to drive him to the airport. I agreed, hoping I might get a few new stories for the book out of it.
As I waited in his living room for him to pack his bags, I noticed for the first time the sickly-looking plants. The grey vines wrapped around furniture and had seemingly grown into the floorboards.
“Your place is like Max’s bedroom,” I laughed.
Jeremy stared at me, blank-faced.
I repeated the lines I’d memorized from countless bedtime readings: “That night in Max’s room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around.”
Jeremy stared at me like I was having an aneurysm.
“Maurice Sendak? Where the Wild Things Are? You never read that book as a kid?”
He apparently hadn’t. He had no memory of it, despite my instance that it was a classic of children’s literature. “I don’t read kids’ books,” he sniffed.
As I drove Jeremy to LAX, he launched into a story about the time director John Frankenheimer hired him to do the narration for Path to War, his 2002 made-for-cable political drama chronicling the Johnson administration’s entry into Vietnam.
“John loved my voice,” he told me. “He loved the way I rapped in the outgoing message on my answering machine.”
I was barely listening. I just kept thinking about those plants, the vines wrapped around chair legs and tabletops, and Jeremy eating supper alone in his forest apartment, like a grown-up Max from Where the Wild Things Are, whose inability to separate fantasy and reality had taken him to a very dark place.
A Prickly Beast
A friend once told me that the reason so many lower- and middle-class people vote Republican—despite G.O.P. policies that are just egregiously against their own interests—is that most of them believe that they’re rich people who just haven’t made their fortunes yet. That’s how Ron Jeremy lives in the world. He’s a poor person willing to suffer abuse again and again and again because he’s certain that he’s destined for better things.
Bill Margold, the late porn actor and director who worked with Jeremy numerous times—he gave Jeremy his nickname, “the Hedgehog”—once told me something that seems like the most accurate thing ever said about Ron Jeremy: “I’ve never met anyone who’s more comfortable in his own skin and more uncomfortable in his own brain.”
It’s hard to listen to Jeremy talk about his failed attempts at a mainstream crossover without wanting to scream at him, “You’re Ron Jeremy, you stupid son of a bitch!”
Which isn’t to say that what he’s accomplished in porn is enviable. Most of what’s captured of Ron Jeremy on celluloid is nightmare-inducing. But he’s the best at it. Competitive eating is a disgusting sport that’s humiliating for everyone involved and a laughable celebration of American excess. But you probably know the name Joey Chestnut.
My mom has never seen an adult film (to the best of my knowledge). But she knows the name Ron Jeremy. Your mom probably knows his name, too.
Ron Jeremy has transcended the porn genre to the point where he’s become part of modern mythology. Long after you and I are forgotten, his name will live on. Roll your eyes all you want, but 200 years from now, Ron Jeremy will be vaguely remembered the same way Daniel Boone is today. People who have no idea why Daniel Boone was historically relevant—or even if he existed at all—use his name as a shorthand for American frontierism.
Ron Jeremy is the Daniel Boone of porn.
And yet, he’s miserable. His life is a Quixotic quest to become something he isn’t and never will be. Imagine if Daniel Boone had spent the better part of his life trying to prove to people that he was an amazing baker. And he really, really wasn’t. His apple pies were atrocious. His admirers kept telling him, “Please stick to frontier stuff.” So he blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap, creating access to America’s Western frontier, but the whole time he was like, “If only someone had tried my strudel.”
My happiest moments with Jeremy were when he talked about making adult films. Those stories never had a sad ending, like they invariably did when he spoke about the mainstream roles that got away.
He told me about doing porn with Phil Prince, a grindhouse director who churned out quickie smut for Times Square theaters during the 80s. Prince cast Jeremy next to actors like Alan “Spike” Adrian — who got his nickname from the unimaginable scrotal abuse he inflicted on himself — and Mila, who was known to berate her male co-stars for being “limp-dick cocksuckers.”
Jeremy’s favorite run of films was the Caught from Behind series, where he appeared in 11 of the sequels as Dr. Proctor, head of the Sphincter Clinic. “I’d do these bits where I’d pretend to lose my jewelry in her vagina,” he told me. “Or I’d be fingering her and there was a ring on my finger, and suddenly the ring would disappear. I’d look at the camera and go, ‘Oh, shit.’ Once I was wearing a watch and it disappeared up inside her, and I looked at the camera and went, ‘Oh, fuck, that was a Rolex.’”
He has a million of these stories, and they’re all horrifying. But he tells them with such glee, like Fozzie Bear trying to make an unfunny joke work, and for a brief moment you get the appeal of Ron Jeremy. Other than his giant penis, he’s profoundly untalented in every conceivable way. But he’s tenacious. His unrelenting belief in his potential, despite so much evidence to the contrary, makes him easy to root for.
Cementing His Legacy
Just before we reached the airport, Jeremy grew maudlin. We were discussing the Icelandic Phallological Museum, who’d asked Jeremy to donate his penis after his death. He declined—“I’m American-born, my dick stays here. It goes to the Smithsonian, if they want it”—but it reminded him of a story when he was asked to put his penis in wet cement for an art museum in Amsterdam.
“I’m jerking it, trying to get a boner so I can smack it in cement,” he said. “All I can hear is a baby crying upstairs in the museum. Finally I yell out, ‘Would somebody please shut that baby up?’” Ron Jeremy getting distracted by the haunting, distant cries of a baby while trying to get an erection in a basement has to be a metaphor for something, I’m just not sure what.
After the boner debacle, Jeremy went to visit the Anne Frank House. He was humbled by what he saw, but also inspired.
“Did you know she always wanted to be a writer?,” Jeremy asked me. “And now everyone in the world has read her book. If only she had lived to see that. Because that’s the big dream, right? It’s why any of us do this. We want to prove to the world that we’ve got more inside us than they realize. It’s why I do this. And Anne Frank, she almost made it, too.”
I’ve thought about that last sentence for a long time: “She almost made it, too.” What did he mean by “too”? Was the “too” just meant for emphasis, or was it a “too” that included Jeremy? As in “Anne Frank and me, we both came close to having it all.”
It startled me when he first said it, but I never got a chance to follow up. Almost immediately he moved on to another topic, another story proving that he was meant for bigger and better things.
“Did I ever tell you that I almost had a kissing scene with Kim Basinger in 9½ Weeks?” he asked, apropos of nothing. “But then somebody else got the role. I guess I wasn’t tall enough or something. I don’t know, it sounds fishy.”
Someday, Jeremy told me, he wants to know the real reason he never got cast. “It can’t be a height thing,” he grumbled. “I would have worn lifts. I would have done anything. So why not me? Why not?”
And that’s just it: Ron Jeremy is the sort of man, not as uncommon as we all might have thought a decade ago, who would do anything to get what he thinks he’s owed.