KING OF PORN’S DIRTY SECRETS
How brilliant bizman cornered Times Square sex industry while tormenting daughter who loved him
Swimming pool orgies, rampant drug use and a zonkedout prostitute breastfeeding her cat.
Welcome to the teenage world of Romola Hodas, who watched her father Marty grow from a poor nobody to become the lord of New York’s sleazy sex business in the 1970s.
In Romola’s memoir, “The Princess of 42nd Street: Surviving My Childhood as the Daughter of Times Square’s King of Porn,” the life of Marty Hodas is revealed in all its brilliance and debauchery. He owned virtually every 25-cent peep show in the city, raking in millions, while torturing and terrorizing his young daughter. Aside from routine beatings and relentless fat-shaming, Marty Hodas found disturbing ways to wreak emotional havoc on Romola, now 61.
She describes one day when, at the age of 14, Marty invited her to see him at work in his dingy Midtown office. Upon arrival, Romola watched a woman finish giving her father oral sex while he sat at his desk, get up without a word and leave.
Then, Marty rose from his chair and led his daughter to a small theater where he showed off his newest money-making plan: a live sex act featuring whips, chains and gags. Marty had his daughter sit in one of the heavily stained seats next to a bunch of porn-loving old men and watch the performance to its revolting conclusion.
As bizarre as that may seem, perhaps even stranger is how much Romola loved the man despite such treatment and much worse. She even waited until after he died in 2014 to start writing the book, saying, “I didn’t want to embarrass him.”
“Sure, I fantasized a thousand times about shoving him off a cliff, I had such a hatred for him,” Romola told the Daily News in a recent interview. “But when he was nice, he was the life of the party, making us laugh and feel loved.”
“Until I was 8, my father was terrific to me. I remember he was teaching us how to fly. Not really, but he had (her sister) Risa and I lay on our bellies and balance like that with our arms and legs out. He’d say, ‘Pretend you’re in the air.’”
The king of the peeps’ story began like so many others. A young Jewish man whose family fled the pogroms of Europe, Marty Hodas landed in Brooklyn and began hustling to make a living. Shining shoes, selling papers and laboring on a chicken farm were all part of his early years.
Things began to improve when he got a job at a company that installed gumball machines in mom-and-pop stores throughout New York.
They only took pennies, but the pennies added up to $600 a week, a fortune in the 1940s.
He used the money to expand from gumballs to cigarette and pinball machines. Those led to jukeboxes. All of them poured more money into his pockets.
But the real a-ha moment came in 1966 when he found a bunch of derelict film-loop machines in the basement of a New Jersey business. The loops, as they were called, had existed for many years before Marty Hodas came along, but he was the first to realize that if he could load them with girlie films and put them in the adult bookstores thriving in Manhattan, he’d make a mint.
The very first one went into Carpel Books in Times Square. On the first night, a line of horny guys stretched around the block. Soon all the bookstores wanted a peepshow machine, and Marty was happy to provide. Twenty-five cents at a time, Marty Hodas was getting rich, claiming at one point to rake in $30,000 a week.
From peep machines, Marty branched out. First, he made his own films to put in his machines. This, in part, was because there was too much demand and not enough porn in his early years. The public always wanted more. He soon began selling those films and others at the stores or through the mail. Beyond that, he opened a venture to fix the machines — which, because they were so heavily used, broke down all the time.
As Romola says in the book, “Dad understood and successfully implemented vertical integration of business long before the term was coined (no pun intended).”
For Romola, it was difficult to tell which Marty liked better, making money or the lifestyle his business opened up for him.
All that money funded a lavish life. At the family’s home in Malverne, L.I., he threw swinger parties full of cocaine, pot, alcohol and rampant swapping of sex partners. Much of this went on as the young Romola, her two sisters and brother wandered around watching people do lines of coke off the kitchen table and have sex everywhere, including in the kids’ bedrooms, the pool and the living room couch. Not to mention a topless working girl breastfeeding her cat.
“It was horrifying,” says Romola, whose attitude was, “Sure, have the parties if you want, but not with the kids in the house.”
During these wild parties, Romola’s mother, Paula, “was part of the action,” Romola recalls. She would get dressed up and drink vodka while playing Scrabble or some other game. “If Mom won, she usually got a piece of jewelry or something nice. If Dad won, you can guess what he got.”
When he wasn’t partying or tending to his business, Marty was often focused on viciously abusing Romola, singling her out for constant beatings and ridicule. Among the more horrific moments were those when he mocked her for being heavy. He’d force her onto a scale, and, if she was over his mandated limit, he’d beat her, make her watch as the family ate dinner and then send her to bed hungry.
All the while, he’d berate her as “the fattest girl in school. Look at you! Look at your ass.” She was just 9 years old. Her mother was of little help. A talented artist and musician, Paula was also bipolar and often dysfunctional for months at a time. There were periods when Romola would try to coax her out to change her underwear, clean her hair and wash herself.
“Her teeth would be green and she stank to high heaven,” Romola says. “I’d have to pry her out of her room to brush her teeth.”
Marty did not lavish attention on his wife, who died in 2004 at age 64, and certainly did not make much effort to help her. He was too busy feeding his own appetites, trying to avoid being killed by the Mafia or getting locked up by the authorities.
One of his major victories was turning the Colombo crime family from an enemy into a business partner. As Romola tells it, they left him alone and, in turn, he showed the Colombos how to make more money from porn than they ever had before.
There were also run-ins with the law, but Marty, whether because he was smart, slippery or a little of both, was able to avoid major time. According to Romola, he served two or three stints in jail on various financial and public nuisance convictions, but never for more than a few months at a time.
Beginning in the 1980s, the cleanup of Times Square began in earnest, with zoning laws and police crackdowns being used to push the live sex shows and peep booths out of the area. The change “scared him to death,” said Romola, as one business after another was forced to close. Eventually, so many of his sex dens were shut that he had to try other businesses, most of them unsuccessful. They included things like selling sheds to Home Depot and resoling people’s old sneakers. But Marty did find his groove again, opening up the Miami Playground in Miami, which sold porn books, featured live dancing and catered to a gay clientele. He only sold it a year or so before he died at the age of 82, after more than 20 years. Romola did marry, but she never had children. She’s focused on her own business interests, including a program to help problem drinkers called Creating Harmony/Mindful Moderation. “It has helped a lot of people, and it has helped me,” Romola laughs. Looking back, even Romola wonders where she got the strength to survive the chaos and depravity of her childhood. “I wasn’t going to be one of those people who committed suicide. I was determined to live life by my way. I guess I was born with this kind of fierceness. I wasn’t going to be defeated. I wasn’t going to be a victim of Marty Hodas,” she said. Eventually, his hard-partying life caught up with him, and Marty Hodas died in 2013 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It was a long, slow decline that Romola says was heartbreaking to watch. “My sister Risa and I went to see him; he was living in Queens then, and his skin was just hanging on him. He looked terrible. He said, ‘I love you girls’ when we left. I told Risa, you gotta get ready, Daddy is going to pass soon. He never tells me he loves me.’”