Jamie Gillis

⚡ ALL INFORMATION CLICK HERE 👈🏻👈🏻👈🏻

Jamie Gillis
The adult film actor Jamie Gillis died ten years ago this week.
I started The Rialto Report because I wanted to show that there was much more to the world of adult films than just adult films. And Jamie was one of the best examples of that.
Jamie was one of the great performers in film history, but he was much more than that. He was a French literature graduate, a theater actor, mime artist, traveler, gambler, writer, lover of fine food, and much more. He was someone who enjoyed life and lived it to the full. I knew him well, yet every time I saw him, I discovered a new story about him.
This episode’s running time is 45 minutes.
The music playlist for this episode can be found on Spotify .
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
On April 20 th , 2008, I went over to Jamie’s house to celebrate his 65 th birthday.
He lived in a townhouse in midtown Manhattan, and his girlfriend, who owned a Mexican restaurant, cooked a meal for the two of us. Afterwards we went over to the Garden to see a boxing card. Jamie knew the promoter so we had ringside seats, and we sat down next to glittering stars such Eric Estrada, Eric Trump, and Dr Ruth.
Somehow watching two people covered in sweat, engaging in strenuous physical activity in front of us, seemed an appropriate night out to have with a porn star like Jamie Gillis. It seemed even more appropriate when I saw Dr. Ruth offering advice to Jamie. If only she knew who she was talking to, I thought.
As we left the hall, five or six kids barely into their 20s rolled towards us, a mass of uncontrolled arms, legs, beers and burgers.
I stepped to the side, but one of them stopped in his tracks, frozen to the spot. He’d seen Jamie.
Jamie looked back with a wry smile as the kid started pointing at him.
They clearly recognized him, and they probably wanted a selfie or an autograph with their porn hero, one of the greats of the adult film industry.
Then the kid shouted out: “You! I know you! You’re the one who fucked Vanessa del Rio!”
Jamie looked slightly disappointed, and then bemused. “Maybe that’s the best I could wish for,” he said as we left the building. “Because I’m definitely the one who fucked Vanessa Del Rio ”.
When we grabbed a drink afterwards, I asked Jamie about the kid’s reaction. And I asked him about how people treated him because of his adult film history.
Jamie said that it was a mixed response. The adult industry was a bubble: within it, he was well-known, respected, almost an elder statesman. And that lulled him into a false sense of security. It obscured the way that the rest of the world reacted to him. He called the rest of the world, ‘the Perfect People’, with more than a small amount of irony. The Perfect People were different. At best, they looked at him with indifference. More often they were cold and contemptuous.
I asked him when he first became aware of the way that the Perfect People looked down on him.
Jamie got a faraway look in his eyes. “When I was arrested for murder,” he said.
And then he told me the story. He didn’t talk about it much, but it changed his life and he still lived with it. It was the story of three people whose lives intersected one summer’s night: there was an aspiring supermodel, there was a famous Canadian radio and television presenter, and then there was Jamie, a renowned porn star.
It all came together June 1982 in a New York townhouse at 246 East 23 rd St. And none of them would be the same afterwards.
Let’s face it, the 1980s was the decade when America became a spoiled brat.
It was the time of ‘The Art of the Deal’, ‘Barbarians at the Gate’, and Gordon Gekko’s pumped-up mantra that ‘Greed is Good’. And lo Reaganomics begat disposable income, which begat rampant consumerism, which begat materialism, which begat the Sony Walkman, Air Jordans, and Jennifer Beals in a baggy sweatshirt.
Yes, the Greed Decade was materialistic, claustrophobic, and obsessed with escaping the past: no wonder its first major craze was Pac Man, a computer game about a character who devours dots in a maze while trying to escape ghosts.
So it was inevitable that the fashion world was similarly brash and superficial, a mess of shoulder pads, big hair, spandex, and mullets that consigned subtlety and minimalism to the past.
Amidst the plastic fakery stood Marie-Josée Saint-Antoine – and someone like Marie-Josée Saint-Antoine really stood out.
Marie-Josée was the real deal, the new kid on the block, the next big thing, and the future It Girl – all rolled into one.
When the decade started, she was a 21-year-old unknown brunette from a middle-class family in Montreal, Canada. She was a happy-go-lucky, friendly kid, popular and gregarious, innocent and unaffected by the world around her. She was normal too: her middle-of-the-road life was a dime-a dozen existence with a run-of-the-mill future. She would’ve continued down any number of paths if it hadn’t been for one striking quality: she was knock-out, drag-down gorgeous. Sure, she’d always been pretty, but as she grew into an adult, she was transformed into a tall, lithe beauty that made grown men sigh. Which was a big deal, because this was the decade when physical beauty like hers could be monetized.
It was the start of the era of the super model, the new million dollar faces of the beauty industry. Forget film stars: models like Shelley Hack, Iman, and Cheryl Tiegs were the new symbols of luxury and wealth. They negotiated previously unheard-of lucrative deals with giant cosmetics companies, and they became instantly recognizable. For the first time, they endorsed products with their names, not just their faces.
So naturally Marie-Josée was curious. She wondered if she could get in on the action. And why not? People told her she was most beautiful girl in Montreal. So she picked up a few local modeling gigs, and before long she was snapped up by the prestigious Ford Model agency. There was only one catch: if she wanted to be a success, they told her she had to move out of Canada and go to New York.
The move made sense professionally, as well as personally. New York, along with Paris, was the epicenter of the universe for any aspiring model. But more than that, Marie-Josée had outgrown Montreal, and she wanted to see the world, the glamour, for herself. She was sad to leave close friends behind, after all she’d known some of them her whole life. One confidante was Paule Charbonneau who was her closest childhood girlfriend. They’d gossip about friends, boys, clothes, and parties. But New York was only an hour’s flight from her hometown, and she had every intention of nipping back to catch up with Paule between jobs.
In late 1980, she packed her bags, and arrived inManhattan. She moved into an anonymous fourth floor walk-up apartment in the Gramercy Park area, and started modeling work straight away.
Marie-Josée found instant success, appearing on the cover of tens of magazines in the first few months, and reportedly earning well over $100,000 a year. At first glance, Marie-Josée looked like a typical 1980s model with her frosted dark bouffant hair and exaggerated make-up – think Sheena Easton in Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted To Love’ video – but there was more to her than that. She had an X-Factor that could sell a product – whether it was cosmetics, clothes, or a sports car. The bigger magazine titles noticed, and the size of her gigs – and paychecks – increased. John Casablanca, the owner of Elite Models spotted her. Elite Models was a cooler, younger agency that was on the crest of a wave. Marie-Josée was offered a big money opportunity with them, and she took it. Now she was an Elite girl. This meant she was in demand socially too, attending parties where she rubbed shoulder pads with the celebrities of the day.
And so it came down to what happened in June 1982. On June 16 th , she went to a party at Xenon, a fancy nightclub that was big in New York at the time. The event was thrown by Elite Models, and it was attended by New York royalty – which in 1982 meant John Kennedy Jr, Tony Curtis, Grace Jones, and Valerie Perrine, among others. Marie-Josée danced all evening, made new friends, and picked up a few telephone numbers from admirers. She was happy with how her new life was turning out: she had a career, attention, friends and money.
After the party, she returned to her apartment at 246 East 23 rd St.
If Marie-Josée was a symbol of a wide-eyed and innocent girl-made-good in Montreal, Alain Monpetit couldn’t have been more different.
A charismatic, attractive rake of a man – ten years older than Marie-Josée when the 1980s started – Alain was already a famous television and radio personality in Quebec, Canada. Year after year he was placed on numerous ’The 10 Best Looking’ lists.
Alain just seemed to be a lucky guy: for a start, he’d been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His grandfather was Édouard Montpetit, founder of one of the faculties at the University of Montreal, and his father was a prominent judge on the Quebec Superior Court. The 1970s was an era where that kind of background could perhaps be considered uncool, but not for Alain. He was proud on his monied roots, boasting that he never had to do a real day’s work in his life. He made no excuses for not being a working-class hero. No surprise he was frequently referred to as the “poor little rich boy”.
As a teen he studied at the National Theatre School of Canada before heading to California to attend UCLA. He got experience in radio working at KMET in Los Angeles, and then ran a pirate radio station near the Canada–United States border. But by the mid-1970s, he was bored. He was aimless, kicking around, acting in theater and the odd exploitation film, such as Luigi Scattini’s The Night of the High Tide (1977). He was, by his own account, living off cigarettes, cocaine and whiskey.
But Alain was always engaging, sexy, and entertaining, and he could talk the hind legs off a donkey. When he returned to Montreal in his mid 20s, he became the host of a radio show on CKMF-FM at the start of the disco craze. It proved to be the perfect job for him: Alain was in the right place at the right time.
Montreal in the 1970s was a city of broken dreams, riven by demands for French-speaking separatism, a billion-dollar deficit created by the 1976 Olympics, and chronic local government financial mismanagement. Montrealers needed distractions, and so disco music became a salvation of sorts and discotheques their new cathedrals. The nightclub business boomed: as burlesque superstar Lili St Cyr noted, “Every night in Montreal is like New Year’s Eve in New York!” And if there was one thing that Alain liked, it was a party.
When Alain first joined CKMF-FM, the station was in dire straits, with low listener numbers, and even lower numbers of advertisers. But thanks to his shows, he grew the audience from under 50,000 to over 500,000, and as a result became a star. Overnight he was a flamboyant jet-setting playboy. The television channels snapped him up, and he started hosting a disco dance show on Montréal’s private French-language TV station, Télé-Métropole. There he became known for his one-off specials with disco icons such as the Village People and Amanda Lear. He even released his own disco single called ‘Dracula Disco’. The Quebecois couldn’t get enough of him, and he was dubbed the ‘King of Disco’ by the admiring Montreal media.
The irony was that Alain didn’t even like disco music. He was a child of the 1960s, and found the idea of a 15-minute dance version of a song to be vaguely ridiculous. But he rode the wave – he was an expert at taking advantage of an opportunity – and that included receiving sizable payments in cash, or piles of drugs, from club owners for spending time at their establishments.
Most nights he’d be found at the Lime Light club, the center of the Montreal disco scene, which rivaled New York’s Studio 54, attended by stars like Alice Cooper, Grace Jones, James Brown, David Bowie and Iggy Pop.
His most frequent wingman at the Lime Light was another iconic Canadian disco radio and TV personality, Douglas ‘Coco’ Leopold, who also worked for CKMF-FM. Coco was openly gay, and took the nickname because he peppered his speech with the word ‘Coco’ as a form of punctuation. Together Alain and Coco were ubiquitous on the disco scene: they were in the clubs, in demand, and in the money.
Ostensibly Alain was married – to a classical ballet dancer named Nanci Moretti, and had two children with her – but in truth he was a serial philanderer, having affairs with many other women, including a brief fling with Marie-Josée Saint-Antoine before she left for New York. One of his more serious affairs was with Paule Charbonneau, Marie-Josée’s best friend back in Montreal. Alain and Paule’s relationship was a turbulent one, characterized by frequent arguments, physical fights, and regular break-ups. Marie-Josée followed the soap opera of their love affair from a distance, and on one of her regular visits back to Quebec, she convinced Paule to break up with Alain for good.
As so it came to June 1982. Alain traveled to the US. He was visiting record companies, night clubs, investors and girlfriends. He also had some personal business to deal with.
On 17 th June 1982, he was at 246 East 23 rd Street in Manhattan.
By the 1980s, Jamie Gillis was on top of the world, though by his own admission, his world was a small one.
He was entering his second decade as a porn actor, and not just any porn actor. He was the pre-eminent fuck-thespian on the east coast, winner of various Best Actor awards – one of which he claimed he won by finishing ahead of a dog and telegraph pole. The sweaty skin flick industry had become almost unrecognizable since its early days. Gone were the anonymous films – and Jamie’s equally anonymous roles – such as The Blowhard (‘guy on rug in blue’) or Sometime Sweet Susan (‘Rapist # 1’). He’d recently starred in a string of XXX hits, including The Ecstasy Girls (1979), 800 Fantasy Lane (1979), Dracula Exotica (1981), and even had a part in the Sylvester Stallone vehicle, Nighthawks (1981).
But porn success came with a price. Such as the time when Jamie’s sister complained to him that she had to abort an amorous interlude with her boyfriend in front of their new-acquired VCR when Jamie’s smirking O-face appeared onscreen engage in explicit action in front of them. But what Jamie resented most was the social opprobrium that came with the job. Or as Jamie termed it, the far-away look of disgust in someone’s eyes the moment they learned that his living was earned by getting a hard-on on demand. For a guy who’d once envisioned a career in theater, the notoriety, not to mention contempt, that accompanied his career choice was hard to swallow.
But Jamie was pragmatic: in general, his porn perks outweighed his porn problems. He was never short of female company for example, and somehow managed to stay on good terms with his ex-girlfriends – from fellow porn actress Serena, to New York magazine food critic Gael Greene, even his first love Kathleen from a different lifetime when he was a French literature student at Columbia University in the mid 1960s.
In fact he turned to Kathleen in 1982, when he found himself briefly homeless. Kathleen’s mother had just passed away, and she was living alone in a Manhattan apartment. Jamie made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: he’d pay her full rent in return for the pleasure of sleeping on the fold-out couch in her living room which he’d turn back into a couch every day. Kathleen worked during the day, meaning that Jamie had privacy to indulge in his twin passions: entertaining female company on the couch, usually his new girlfriend Vallerie, and betting his dwindling porn earnings gambling on horses.
Jamie’s church was the racetrack, his Jesus was Len Ragozin , and his bible was The Sheets. Ragozin was a fellow New Yorker who Jamie knew – a Marxist, anti-war, Harvard grad with an IQ of 180, who published a daily newsletter, The Sheets, a handicapping tool prized by serious players. It cost a steep $30 a day, but Jamie swore by it, and went to sleep with it every night, studying the next day’s races, and formulating a winning gambling strategy. It mattered not a bit: next day came, and Jamie consistently lost a bundle.
So each night, he’d return, penniless again, to the fold-out couch at Kath’s apartment at 246 East 23 rd Street.
246 East 23 rd Street. June 17 th , 1982. The lives of Marie-Josée Saint-Antoine, Alain Montpetit, and Jamie Gillis coincide.
Jamie knew Marie-Josée because she lived in one of the other apartments in the building. They exchanged the occasional pleasantry when they ran into each other. Jamie liked her. He didn’t much know her, but he liked her. He thought she was high-class and gorgeous obviously, so of course he liked her. Marie-Josée once told him she’d just broken up with her boyfriend. She said solemnly, “I am too young to be unhappy.” Jamie and Kathleen smiled when they repeated the story.
Alain knew Marie-Josée from the Montreal scene. They’d hardly been in touch since their brief fling, but Alain followed her modeling success through his on-off lover, Marie-Josée’s best friend Paule Charbonneau. When Alain found out that Marie-Josée had encouraged Paule to break off from Alain, he decided to stop by and visit her during his US trip to try and win over her support.
On the evening of June 17 th , 1982, Jamie returned from the New Jersey racetrack, and walked into the apartment building. He noticed a message in French taped on Marie-Josée’s mailbox. Then he noticed a pair of women’s white high-heeled shoes in the hallway.
That evening, Jamie mentioned the shoes to his girlfriend and Kathleen. They decided to go upstairs and ask Marie-Josée if the shoes were hers.
They found her door slightly ajar. When Jamie pushed the door open, he saw Marie-Josée sitting up against a wall. She was wearing blue jeans and a gray-and-white blouse but had no shoes on. She was bruised around the face, and she’d been stabbed several times in the chest: she was clearly dead.
Jamie and Kathleen called the police, and Jamie retrieved the message taped to Marie-Josée’s mailbox. The note was from someone saying they’d stopped by to see her but she didn’t appear to be home. In was written in French, which Jamie translated for the cops. Kathleen remained calm, but Jamie became excited when he figured out a theory: the note said “personne” was home. This meant “nobody”. “Nobody” or “No body”. This was significant he argued. Perhaps the person who wrote the note was the killer – and this person was trying to suggest that there was “no body” when he was there. And perhaps this person was an ex-boyfriend?
The cops were amused by Jamie’s idea – and took him in for questioning.
The murder made splashy front page headlines in the city’s tabloid rags, the Daily News and the New York Post. Even the serious New York Times covered it in detail. The crime captured the public imagination: a beautiful model killed in her own home in the heart of the city. Just after she’d partied with the stars, no less.
‘Model Is Found Fatally Stabbed On East 23 rd St’, New York Times, June 19 th 1982:
Inspector Joseph G. DeMartino of the Manhattan Detective Area said that it did not appear that the woman, Marie Josee Saint-Antoine, had been killed during a robbery or burglary. ”There were no signs of a forced entry and the apartment was not ransacked,” he said. There were also, he added, no indications that she had been sexually molested.
The murder weapon was not found, detectives said.
Elite Models issued a statement singing her praises: “Everyone here loved her. She was just a bright wonderful person and all of us at Elite felt great warmth and affection for her.”
Under pressure to crack th
Atk Latina
Perfect Nude Blondes
Pump Cunt