John Holmes (actor)

She and Edgar were married and divorced three times, as is documented by wedding certificates dated April 13, 1936, August 13, 1945, and September 12, 1947.

At the time of their first marriage in 1936, Edgar was 35 years old and divorced, while Mary was 17.

After divorcing for the third and final time, Edgar and Mary each got married one more time.

Mary changed John's surname from Estes to Holmes when he was a child.

John Curtis Holmes ( Estes; August 8, 1944 – March 13, 1988), better known as John C. Holmes or Johnny Wadd (after the lead character he portrayed in a series of related films), was an American pornographic film actor.

He ranks among the most prolific adult film performers, with documented credits for at least 573 films.

Holmes was born John Curtis Estes on August 8, 1944, in the small rural town of Ashville, Ohio, about 11 mi south of Columbus.

He was the youngest of four children born to 26-year-old Mary June (née Barton) Holmes, but the name of his father, railroad worker Carl Estes, was left blank on his birth certificate.

Mary had married Edgar Harvey Holmes, who was the father of her three older children – Dale, Edward and Anne.

When Holmes was aged 7, his mother married Harold Bowman on December 31, 1951.

Shortly afterward, Holmes and his family moved to the small town of Pataskala, Ohio, about seventeen miles east of Columbus.

Holmes recalled that Bowman was a good father until his younger half-brother David was born, at which point Bowman reportedly lost interest in his stepchildren and began neglecting them.

Holmes left home at age 15 and enlisted in the United States Army, with his mother's written permission.

He spent most of the three years of his military service in West Germany in the Signal Corps.

Holmes began his pornographic movie career in the late 1960s while he was unemployed and recovering from his collapsed lung.

He frequented a men's card playing club in Gardena where on one evening, he allegedly met a photographer while standing next to him at a men's room urinal who gave Holmes his business card, telling him that he could find work in the underground adult film business.

Upon his honorable discharge in 1963, Holmes moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked in a variety of jobs, including selling goods door-to-door and tending the vats at a Coffee Nips factory.

During his stint as an ambulance driver, Holmes met a nurse named Sharon Gebenini in December 1964.

They married on August 21, 1965, in Fort Ord, California, after Holmes turned 21.

In April 1965, Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a meatpacking warehouse in nearby Cudahy.

However, repeated exposure to the freezing air in the large walk-in freezer after being outside inhaling the desert-hot air caused him severe health problems, leading to a pneumothorax of his right lung on three occasions during the two years he worked there.

Sharon also had health problems, as during the first seventeen months of her marriage to Holmes, she miscarried three times.

"John Holmes was to the adult film industry what Elvis Presley was to rock 'n' roll. He simply was The King."

- Cinematographer Bob Vosse in the documentary Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes.

From 1969, Holmes did nude modeling for underground adult magazines as well as an occasional 'loop' or 'stag film'.

By the late 1970s, Holmes was reputed to be earning as much as $3,000 per day as a porn performer.

In 1971, Holmes' career began to take off with an adult film series built around a private investigator named Johnny Wadd, written and directed by Bob Chinn.

The success of the film Johnny Wadd created an immediate demand for follow-ups, so Chinn followed up the same year with Flesh of the Lotus. Most of the subsequent Johnny Wadd films were written and directed by Chinn and produced by the Los Angeles-based company Freeway Films.

With the success of Deep Throat (1972), Behind the Green Door (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), porn became chic even though its legality was still hotly contested.

Holmes was arrested during this time for pimping and pandering, but he avoided prison time by reputedly becoming an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).

Holmes' "handler" during his time as an informant was LAPD vice detective Thomas Blake.

Of his involvement with Holmes, Blake said, "It was a pleasure working for him."

Near the end of his life, Holmes attained notoriety for his reputed involvement in the Wonderland murders of July 1981 and eventually for his death from complications caused by AIDS in March 1988.

He was the subject of several books, a lengthy essay in Rolling Stone and two feature-length documentaries, and was the inspiration for two Hollywood movies (Boogie Nights and Wonderland).

In 1986, when Holmes applied for a passport for the first time prior to a trip to Italy, his mother reportedly provided him with the handwritten copy of his original birth certificate, which led Holmes to learn that his biological father was Carl Estes.

Holmes' mother was said to be a devout Southern Baptist and with her children regularly attended church in Millport, Ohio.

By contrast, his stepfather Edgar was an alcoholic who would come home inebriated, stumble about the house and even vomit on the children.

As a child, Holmes enjoyed a reprieve from his turbulent home life when he visited his maternal grandparents, John W. and Bessie (née Gillenwater) Barton.

Mary divorced Edgar when Holmes was a toddler and moved with her children to Columbus, where they lived in a low-income housing project with a friend of Mary's and her own two children.

The two women worked as clerks and waitresses in order to support their children.