Harry Reems, Star of ‘Deep Throat’ Film, Dies at 65

By MARGALIT FOX  NY TIMES

Harry Reems, whose starring role in “Deep Throat” in 1972 made him America’s first bona fide male porn star — and whose life, more than most, embodied the time-honored American narrative of fame, failure and redemption — died on Tuesday in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was 65.

The cause had not been determined, but Mr. Reems had been in declining health for some years, his wife, Jeanne, said.

The arc of Mr. Reems’s life — which took him from Marine to “Deep Throat” to mendicant to successful real estate broker — came to renewed attention in 2005 with the release of “Inside Deep Throat,” a documentary about the film’s legacy for which he was interviewed on camera.

The scheduled release this July of “Lovelace,” a biographical film starring Amanda Seyfried as Linda Lovelace and Adam Brody as Mr. Reems, seems likely to ensure his continued place in public memory.

Mr. Reems, who began his career in the 1960s as a struggling stage actor, had already made dozens of pornographic films when he starred opposite Ms. Lovelace in “Deep Throat.”

But where his previous movies were mostly the obscure, short, grainy, plotless stag films known as loops, “Deep Throat,” which had set design, occasional costumes, dialogue punctuated by borscht-belt humor and an actual plot of sorts, was Cinema.

Mr. Reems played Dr. Young, a physician whose diagnostic brilliance — he locates the rare anatomical quirk that makes Ms. Lovelace’s character vastly prefer oral sex to intercourse — is matched by his capacity for tireless ministration.

“I was always the doctor,” he told New York magazine in 2005, “because I was the one that had an acting background. I would say: ‘You’re having trouble with oral sex? Well, here’s how to do it.’ Cut to a 20-minute oral-sex scene.”

“Deep Throat” quickly became an international sensation: the subject of debates, pro and con, concerning its redeeming social value, and of self-congratulatory cocktail-party chat among the intelligentsia.

It was responsible for turning Mr. Reems, with his immense black mustache and shirts, opened to the navel to reveal an almost preternaturally hirsute chest, into a one-man avatar of the ’70s.

It was also responsible for his conviction on federal conspiracy charges and, he said afterward, his descent into alcoholism, destitution and homelessness before finding faith, a happy marriage and bourgeois respectability.

Mr. Reems was born Herbert Streicher in Brooklyn on Aug. 27, 1947, into a Jewish family. (His nom du cinéma was bestowed by the director of “Deep Throat,” Gerard Damiano.) Young Herbert passed his adolescence, by his own later account, as “a shy kid with a lot of pimples and a big nose.”

After high school he enlisted in the Marine Corps, where he cultivated the strong, sinewy body that would become his calling card. In the late 1960s, after his father died, he obtained a discharge and moved to the East Village.

He acted in Off Off Broadway plays, but, needing money, took work in pornographic films. Among them were “Mondo Porno,” “The Altar of Lust” and “Erecter Sex” Parts 3 and 4.

Mr. Reems’s Schwab’s drugstore moment came after Mr. Damiano hired him to be the lighting director on “Deep Throat.” When the original male lead failed to show up for work, Mr. Reems stepped in.

For the film, which was widely reported to have grossed more than $600 million, Mr. Reems was paid about $250.

However, as he told it, there were other compensations: parties at the Playboy Mansion, hobnobbing with celebrities and fending off (or not) throngs of adoring women.

Then, one day in 1974 Mr. Reems was arrested in New York by federal agents. The next year he and 11 others, many of them organized-crime figures, were tried in federal court in Memphis on charges of conspiracy to transport obscene material across state lines. (“Deep Throat” was widely reported to have been financed by associates of the Colombo crime family.)

It was during the trial, Mr. Reems said, that he began drinking heavily.

After he and his co-defendants were found guilty in 1976 Mr. Reems became a First Amendment cause célèbre, with a string of Hollywood celebrities speaking out on his behalf.

“Today, Harry Reems; tomorrow, Helen Hayes,” Warren Beatty was reported to have declared.

Represented on appeal by Alan M. Dershowitz, Mr. Reems had his conviction set aside by a federal judge in 1977.

Mr. Reems, who made more than 100 films, went on to star in “The Devil in Miss Jones” (1973) and “Memories Within Miss Aggie” (1974), both directed by Mr. Damiano, as well as “Pleasure Cruise” (1974) and “For Your Thighs Only” (1984).

But pornography is a young man’s game, and by the mid-1980s demand for Mr. Reems had abated. By then he was adrift, drinking, by his count, two-and-a-half gallons of vodka a day.

He fetched up in Los Angeles, begging on the streets and sleeping in Dumpsters. He contemplated suicide, he said, but could not summon the nerve.

In 1989 Mr. Reems, then living in Park City, Utah, stopped drinking with the help of a 12-step program. He converted to Christianity, obtained his real estate license and married Jeanne Sterret in 1990.

Besides his wife, Mr. Reems’s survivors include a brother, Robert.

Ms. Lovelace died in 2002, at 53, of injuries sustained in a car accident; Mr. Damiano died, at 80, in 2008.

For the most part Mr. Reems led a life of contented small-town obscurity in Midway, Utah, golfing, attending church and collecting Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia. He retained the name Harry Reems, he said in interviews, as a proud emblem of an odyssey he did not regret.

There was, Mr. Reems told The Ottawa Citizen in 2005, one lingering affinity between his early career and his later one as the owner of a successful real estate brokerage.

“I’m still selling dirt,” he said.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

In Search of Energy Miracles

By JUSTIN GILLIS NY TIMES

 

 

 

At a legendary but secretive laboratory in California, Lockheed Martin is working on a plan that some employees hope might transform the world’s energy system: a practicable type of nuclear fusion.       

Some 900 miles to the north, Bill Gates and another Microsoft veteran, Nathan Myhrvold, have poured millions into a company developing a fission reactor that could run on today’s nuclear waste.

And on the far side of the world, China has seized on discarded American research to pursue a safer reactor based on an abundant element called thorium.

Beyond the question of whether they will work, these ambitious schemes pose a larger issue: How much faith should we, as a society, put in the idea of a big technological fix to save the world from climate change?

A lot of smart people are coming to see the energy problem as the defining challenge of the 21st century. We have to supply power and transportation to an eventual population of 10 billion people who deserve decent lives, and we have to do it while limiting the emissions that threaten our collective future.

Yet we have already poured so much carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere that huge, threatening changes to the world’s climate appear to be inevitable. And instead of slowing down, emissions are speeding up as billions of once-destitute people claw their way out of poverty, powered by fossil fuels.

Many environmentalists believe that wind and solar power can be scaled to meet the rising demand, especially if coupled with aggressive efforts to cut waste. But a lot of energy analysts have crunched the numbers and concluded that today’s renewables, important as they are, cannot get us even halfway there.

“We need energy miracles,” Mr. Gates said in a speech three years ago introducing his approach, embodied in a company called TerraPower.

A variety of new technologies might help. Bright young folks in American universities are working on better ways to store electricity, which could solve many of the problems associated with renewable power. Work has even begun on futuristic technologies that might cheaply pull carbon dioxide out of the air.

But because of the pressing need for thousands of large generating stations that emit no carbon dioxide while providing electricity day and night, many technologists keep returning to potential improvements in nuclear power.

After all, despite its many problems, it is the one low-carbon energy source that we know can work on a very large scale. France gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors.

Perhaps Mr. Gates can find a way forward. He is the world’s second-richest man and surely the premier American technologist of the era, following the death of Steve Jobs.

His partner in TerraPower is Mr. Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. Adept in geophysics, space physics, mathematics, economics, paleontology and gastronomy, Mr. Myhrvold is the man behind a $600 cookbook called “Modernist Cuisine” and a slew of other wildly inventive projects.

Their plan is to build something called a traveling wave reactor. In principle, it could operate safely for a half-century or more without refueling, and could run on material that has been discarded from today’s reactors as hazardous waste, solving several problems at once.

They have persuaded an energy veteran, John Gilleland, to run the company; he employs about 60 people and is laying plans to build a prototype reactor.

“We sensed that nuclear had not been pushed in an innovative sense for some time,” Mr. Gilleland said. “No one had taken 21st-century technology and modeling capabilities and just sort of started over.”

Their method, like that of existing reactors, is based on fission, or splitting heavy atoms, then using the resulting heat to spin turbines and make electricity.

Lockheed Martin is pursuing a more difficult course: fusion. It involves fusing hydrogen variants into heavier elements, similar to the reaction that powers the sun.

The company will not say much about the program under way at its legendary Skunk Works facility in California, which developed the U-2 spy plane. But in a videotaped speech this year, a leader of the program, Charles Chase, suggested it was aiming for small, modular fusion reactors that could be built in factories.

Mr. Chase and his colleagues face long odds: 60 years of research on fusion has produced more disappointment than progress. “There’s really only one guarantee, and that’s if we don’t try, nothing is going to happen,” Mr. Chase said in his talk.

Among the new nuclear approaches, fission reactors based on thorium are especially intriguing, offering potentially huge safety advantages. The basic concepts were proved in research by the American nuclear establishment in the 1960s, but the idea was ultimately abandoned by the Nixon administration in favor of a riskier approach called breeder reactors, which turned into an $8 billion black hole.

An engineer in Alabama, Kirk Sorensen, has helped excavate the old thorium work and founded his own tiny company, Flibe Energy, to push it forward. But it will surprise no one to hear that China is ahead of the United States on this, with hundreds of engineers working on thorium reactors.

“They’re doing laps around the track, and we haven’t even decided if we’re going to lace up our shoes,” Mr. Sorensen said.

Yet not even the speedy Chinese are likely to get a sizable reactor built before the 2020s, and that is true for the other nuclear projects as well. So even if these technologies prove to work, it would not be surprising to see the timeline for widespread deployment slip to the 2030s or the 2040s. And climate scientists tell us it would be folly to wait that long to start tackling the emissions problem.

Two approaches to the issue — spending money on the technologies we have now, or investing in future breakthroughs — are sometimes portrayed as conflicting. In reality, that is a false dichotomy. The smartest experts say we have to pursue both tracks at once, and much more aggressively than we have been doing.

An ambitious national climate policy, anchored by a stiff price on carbon dioxide emissions, would serve both goals at once. In the short run, it would hasten a trend of supplanting coal-burning power plants with natural gas plants, which emit less carbon dioxide. It would drive investment into current low-carbon technologies like wind and solar power that, while not efficient enough, are steadily improving.

And it would also raise the economic rewards for developing new technologies that could disrupt and displace the ones of today. These might be new-age nuclear reactors, vastly improved solar cells, or something entirely unforeseen.

In effect, our national policy now is to sit on our hands hoping for energy miracles, without doing much to call them forth. While we dawdle, maybe the Chinese will develop a nice business selling us thorium reactors based on our old designs. For communists, they do have an entrepreneurial bent. 

But surely we would all feel better about the future if the full creative power of American capitalism were unleashed on the climate problem.

This week Justin Gillis, an environment reporter at The Times, begins a monthly column exploring the challenges posed by climate change.