Whitey's Payback (11 page)

The flagship of their empire, the O’Farrell Theatre, is located in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, but its outer walls are adorned with elaborate, colorful murals depicting jungle and underwater scenes. Inside, the plush red carpets, cleanliness, and state-of-the-art lighting and sound equipment are a far cry from the dreary, sticky-floored porn parlors found in most cities.

While the performers strutted their stuff in the various showrooms downstairs, upstairs in the office, Jim, Artie, and a collection of friends and colleagues could usually be found drinking beer, shooting pool, hatching all kinds of outlaw schemes. The Mitchell brothers’ coterie included an assortment of celebrated counterculture types, such as the late Black Panther leader Huey Newton and writer Hunter S. Thompson. On the wall above his desk, Jim had a framed letter from Abbie Hoffman, thanking the brothers for their generosity during a visit to the theater in the 1970s.

A number of book ideas to document this unusual empire have been hatched, including one by Thompson, who spent almost a year at the O’Farrell ostensibly working as the night manager. (His book has yet to be published, but those close to the theater remember his months there as one of the O’Farrell’s more ribald periods.) The brothers’ circle also included Warren Hinckle, the rabble-rousing, eye-patch-wearing newspaper columnist. Hinckle figured prominently in the theater’s most celebrated bust, the 1985 arrest of Marilyn Chambers for allegedly allowing a customer the privilege of “digital” penetration during her striptease act. Over the next week, Hinckle wrote a series of articles ridiculing the police department, which had used thirteen officers and a dozen or so backups to arrest the unarmed—and unclothed—porn queen. Hinckle’s columns touched off public outrage, not at the brothers but at the police.

So I wasn’t the first journalist to be seduced by the goings-on at the theater. In mid-February, I arrived in San Francisco to spend the better part of a week with Jim and Artie, in hopes of writing a book at some point on them and their operation. Jim had read and liked
The Westies
, a book I’d written about a group of Irish gangsters in New York City. Earlier we’d talked on the phone a few times; he seemed open to the idea of my spending time there and writing about them. “I have to check this out with my brother, Artie,” he said, “but, yeah, come on out.”

The last time I saw Artie Mitchell was in the middle of the afternoon, and he was rolling a joint. Carefully. The city had been suffering through one of those periodic dry spells when the gourmet herb that grows in nearby Humboldt County had yet to be harvested. Since Artie had a reputation as something of a connoisseur, he wasn’t about to waste the last of his stash. It was a tight, lean joint.

The office at the O’Farrell Theatre, the brothers’ base of operations since the day it opened in 1969, is up a flight of stairs. In the center of the room is a pool table. An old jukebox stands against one wall. A refrigerator in the corner is usually stocked with beer, and a selection of newspaper clippings relating to the theater have been framed and hung haphazardly around the room. Most conspicuous, though, is a bank of six surveillance monitors that dominates one wall. One of the monitors constantly reveals a gathering of nude and partially clad women lounging in a dressing room down the hall.

Even though he had precious little marijuana left that afternoon, Artie passed his joint around the office without hesitation. With his scraggly brown beard and equally unkempt shoulder-length hair (a baseball cap hid the fact that he was as bald as a Kojak on top), forty-five-year-old Artie cut a raffish figure. He usually had a mischievous glint in his eyes, in keeping with his nickname, Party Artie.

Jim, on the other hand, though he possessed a gentle voice and gracious manner, seemed stern next to his brother. At forty-seven, he, too, was bald on top, but his remaining hair was neatly trimmed and starting to gray. Though he presented himself more conservatively than Artie, the family resemblance was strong. In the early years, when both wore glasses and mustaches, they looked like twins.

It was Artie who gave me an upstairs tour of the theater, gleefully taking me down hallways and around corners, past seemingly oblivious naked performers.

From the rafters, where the light and the audio technicians were positioned, we could see inside the New York Room, where a dancer shimmied her way down a long stage that reached out into the audience, a rather traditional strip act. The Ultra Room was set up like a nightclub, with customers sitting at tables in front of a semicircular stage. The curtain opened to reveal a shower, where five women hosed and fondled one another, then walked out into the audience dripping-wet. Elsewhere in the theater, in the Kopenhagen Lounge, customers sat in the dark with red flashlights, which they shone on the performers as they danced and simulated sex acts.

Back in the office, Artie reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a nonalcoholic beer. When I asked why, he replied, “They say I’m an alcoholic. They say I’ve got a problem.” He took a hit off a joint and held the smoke there in his lungs. There had been a touch of sarcasm in his voice. Jim, perhaps sensing something in his brother’s tone, suddenly excused himself from the room.

In the months before that afternoon, those acquainted with the brothers had become even more aware than usual of the tension between them. It was the worst kept secret in San Francisco. Their relationship had always been fractious—the legal trouble and other distractions inherent in their business, along with each brother’s divorces and reconciliations, saw to that. Lately, the tension centered mostly on Artie’s social habits. In late 1990 and on into this year, he had been drinking heavily and getting stoned more than ever. Jim frequently expressed his concern about Artie to his friends, and no one doubted Jim’s wish to get Artie into a rehab center for the younger brother’s own sake. But Jim had also recently begun pressuring Artie to divest himself of his share of the business. Still, no one who knew them well would have believed that their disagreements would come to a bad end. Especially not to the particular bad end that awaited them.

When I finally got Jim Mitchell to sit down and discuss the details of my book proposal, I was surprised to find that he was now reluctant. Until then he seemed to like the idea of having a book written about the place. But as I explained my plan—to chronicle a year in the life of the O’Farrell Theatre—he became increasingly more uncomfortable and distracted. “Why would we want to call attention to ourselves like that?” he finally asked, adding mysteriously, “We have secrets, things I’d rather not have aired in public.”

One week after I last saw Artie Mitchell savoring toke after toke of northern California’s finest, he died in his home in Corte Madera, shot three times. The clincher was a .22 caliber bullet that entered through his right eye and pierced his brain. One block away from the house, police stopped and arrested Jim Mitchell, who was carrying a .22 rifle and a fully loaded .38 caliber handgun. Before the week was out, Jim would be charged with the premeditated murder of his brother.

The house on Mohawk Avenue where Artie Mitchell lived and died is a white stucco ranch house with sky-blue shutters and a picket fence. From the front window, you can see Mount Tamalpais, the highest point in Marin County. It is an unassuming house in a clean, middle-class neighborhood, not what you’d expect for the home of a “porn king.” Jim Mitchell lived across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—about thirty minutes by car—in an equally nondescript house in the Sunset District.

Although their business had been successful from almost the start, Jim and Artie never strayed far from their working-class roots. They grew up in nearby Antioch, at the time a dusty village of about 7,000 people, located on the Sacramento River Delta. Their mother, Georgia Mae, who would eventually hold an interest in her sons’ business, was once a schoolteacher. Their father, who died in 1973, was a professional gambler and grifter who sometimes handled security at local card games. “We were raised to be torpedoes against the state,” Artie used to say.

When the Mitchell brothers first began producing grainy, ten-minute skin flicks, or “loops,” in the early 1960s, the porn business was nearly invisible. What little industry there was existed in New York, the domain of men whose idea of what sex films should look like had been formed decades earlier. As with nearly everything in American culture, the 1960s brought big changes. An early, unmistakable sign of change in the porn business was
Behind the Green Door
, the first and one of the most profitable feature-length (seventy-two minutes, as opposed to its quickie forebears) “erotic” films. It cost $60,000 to make—a fortune for a porn flick at the time—but is reported to have grossed $50 million to $60 million, including bootleg versions.

Along with its higher-than-usual production values, the movie brought the promise of an entirely new, young sensibility to the industry. The star was nineteen-year-old Marilyn Chambers, whose angelic features had just graced boxes of Ivory Snow. She didn’t look anything like the leather-bound prostitutes or aging vixens who populated most porn films up to that time.

A young Jim and Artie Mitchell can be seen briefly in the film as a couple of hoodlums who abduct Chambers and bring her to a plush boudoir, where she is ravished by a succession of lesbians, a black stud, and three men seated on trapezes. The movie retained the traditional slow-motion shots of ejaculating male members, but it also took the time to focus on Chambers’s seemingly genuine orgasms.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the brothers put their unorthodox stamp on film after film, including
Autobiography of a Flea
,
Resurrection of Eve
, and
Sodom and Gomorrah
, which, with a budget near $350,000, is believed to be the most expensive such movie ever made.

“The Mitchells were unique,” says Jared Rutter, former president of the now-disbanded X-rated Film Critics Association. “Their product seemed to come out of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s. There was an emphasis on actual lovemaking. It was very Bay Area. Generally, they were seen as eccentrics by the rest of the business.”

While they were filming, the division of labor between Jim and Artie was often ad hoc. Jim had taken a few film classes at San Francisco State University and seemed more interested in the creative process, so he would usually direct. Nonetheless, there were inevitable disagreements.

Former porn star George McDonald, who appeared in more than twenty movies for the Mitchells in the early 1970s, remembers an almost comic lack of professionalism, despite the brothers’ reputation for putting out a relatively polished product.

“There were a lot of sharp words on the set,” says McDonald. “Sometimes it was funny. I’d be sitting on a bed naked, waiting for a scene to begin. Jim would be on one side of me and Art would be on the other, and I’d be getting conflicting directions on what they wanted. I’m sitting there trying to get it up and keep it up and I’d say, ‘Couldn’t you guys have worked this out ahead of time?’ ”

The Mitchell brothers changed the world of pornography, but they had been outstripped by changes. Their theaters and international film distribution sideline were made all but obsolete by the widespread availability of videos. Consumer demand did not materialize for the ambitious, big-budget porn films they wanted to continue making.

Their success had brought the brothers lots of attention, but more and more it was unwanted. They were forever defending themselves against obscenity and prostitution charges, mainly in connection with the inventive live shows that came to be their theaters’ main draws. Last year, one of their most profitable movie houses, located in conservative Orange County, closed down, the victim of a relentless antiporn crusade. Although the success of their operation over the years had exceeded their wildest expectations, Jim and Artie used to laugh at newspaper accounts that estimated their worth at $50 million. In 1988, even before their Orange County theater closed, accountants set the value of the corporation at $1 million.

Their business matured into a compact enterprise that practically ran itself, leaving Jim and Artie with time for other concerns. Over the years, Artie had married three times and Jim twice, and they had nine children between them. For a while, they ran a commercial fishing venture together, and at dawn they would rise with the children and spend the day out on a trawler.

“They were two of the most normal, family-oriented guys you could ever meet,” says Susie Bright, a friend of the brothers who publishes
On Our Backs
, a San Francisco–based lesbian sex and lifestyle magazine. “Jim was like Dad; Artie was like everybody’s favorite uncle.” Bright, thirty-three, is the typical kind of bohemian character the O’Farrell Theatre has always attracted. Her perky, in-your-face sexiness, combined with her stereotype-defying manner, she believes, is precisely why the brothers were so supportive.

“The idea of a lesbian sex magazine was right up their alley,” says Bright. “It totally fit with their mission of fucking with the status quo, of doing something as pornographers that was innovative, revolutionary.”

By then, however, their role as revolutionaries was mainly in an advisory capacity. Their business had become as middle-aged as they were.

“The brothers won a lot of legal battles,” says Warren Hinckle. “They’d stayed out of jail. After the Marilyn Chambers victory, they seemed to get bored with the business. Jim started looking around for other things to occupy his days.

“And Artie? Well, Artie started looking around for a good time.”

The stories of Artie Mitchell’s wild behavior had always been part of the brother’s official legend. If he pulled out a gun and started firing around the office, well, that was just Artie. In his sober moments, he had such a charming, outlandish sense of humor that it was hard for some friends to take his darker side seriously.

But beginning in late 1990, Artie’s antics—once so rakish and infectious—developed a nasty edge. At the many lavish holiday parties the brothers would throw at the top of the theater, Artie had begun to go too far, groping women and insulting guests for no reason. An affidavit filed by one of Artie’s ex-wives during their bitter child-custody battle claimed he was “frequently under the influence with the children” and that he used cocaine, heroin, and psychedelic mushrooms. Three weeks before the shooting, Artie had walked into Maye’s Original Oyster House in the middle of the afternoon waving a loaded .38 caliber pistol.