TETLEY BITTER PIN-UP WHO BECAME A PORN QUEEN
Calendar model Gail Thackray moved from Yorkshire to Hollywood after landing a part in Baywatch. There she branched out into adult magazines and made millions in the phone sex business, she tells PETER SHERIDAN
CHEERS: Gail worked for Tetley
IT IS raining hard in Hollywood and the café opposite the movie studio is packed with weather-beaten customers wrapped in coats and hats, umbrellas dripping at their feet. Their hands are wrapped around steaming mugs of coffee, but their food is momentarily forgotten as all eyes turn to the woman who steps through the glass door.
Her mane of honey blonde hair bounces as if in a shampoo commercial, and a Colgate smile illuminates her tanned face. All eyes focus on the painted-on leggings that hug her 35-inch hips, before curving past her 25-inch waist, and come to rest below the 34DD bust bursting to escape her pale yellow polo-neck sweater. She is, as Raymond Chandler once said, a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
Gail Thackray was a British pinup who became the porn queen of America, partied with Hollywood stars and built a £40million business empire. But she wants to make one thing perfectly clear, as she sits down cradling a cup of English Breakfast tea: “I'm not a porn star, and I have never been a porn star.”
Despite her baby blue eyes, dimpled cheeks, blonde waves cascading halfway down her back and her pneumatic figure tipped into sleek black boots, Thackray prefers to think of herself as a Yorkshire lass who went to Hollywood and made good. Admittedly she was in business with the Mafia, pioneered internet porn, had her mother record phone sex messages, and made her fortune by amassing the world's biggest library of nude photos – but that's what makes her new tell-all book so entertaining.
RUNNING With Wolves: A Woman's Memoir Of Sex, Scandal And Seduction sees Thackray lift the lid on the sexcesses of Hollywood and the steamier reaches of the worldwide web. “I must be doing something right, because I've had death threats, and six people suing to stop the book's publication so far,” laughs a woman, who at 54 could still fill out the bikinis she once modelled in Britain for Tetley's Bitter and Vladivar vodka calendars. “I'm putting my life on the line with this book.”
It's Hollywood stars who would rather see the book disappear. “People assume the porn business is filled with horrible con men abusing women, but they only cared about money,” she says. “Hollywood was far worse and I know where the skeletons are hidden. The casting couch was everywhere. Producers expect you to sleep with them, and there are 20 girls behind you begging to sleep with the producer to win the role.
“Now I kick myself for refusing to sleep with producers, because I was offered some films that could have made me a superstar,” says Thackray, a twice-divorced mother of three, who arrived in Hollywood in 1984, and collected scandal and secrets along the way. “When I was producing adult films I'd have Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss's boyfriend, actor Tom Sizemore, often come to the set to watch the filming, and he'd bring Jack Nicholson and Charlie Sheen and other stars. They enjoyed watching porn get made, and enjoyed the girls too – though I never slept with them.
“Movie action hero Steven Seagal famously had bus-loads of girls shipped in to his film set every day to party with him – and girls were lining up for the chance.
“I produced a sex tape with one Hollywood celebrity – I can't say who – at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood in the suite where John Belushi had died, but my star overdosed too and nearly died. I couldn't call an ambulance because he was on probation and supposed to be drug-free. Thankfully he pulled through.”
She adds: “There's a famous billionaire Hollywood mogul whose wife posed for sexy shots and recorded phone sex ads for me before they married. When the couple divorced his family tried to buy the photos to discredit her – but I wouldn't sell. I worked for Hugh Hefner's Playboy and for Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, and partied with both. I remember an orgy at the Playboy Mansion one night, with Hef naked in his room and 10 girls taking turns entertaining him. Crazy times!” Thackray was born in Batley, near Leeds, the daughter of an entrepreneur and a Boots pharmacist. She attended Batley Girls Grammar School and briefly Cambridge University, until her modelling career took off. She appeared as a pin-up in calendars and topless in national newspapers, before travelling to Hollywood for a two-week assignment – and never left.
Apart from her role in Baywatch, Thackray appeared in more than 40 B-movies with such dubious titles as Hard To Die, Sorority House Massacre II, Nudity Required and Cellblock Sisters. “I was a B-movie scream queen,” she says with pride. Thackray was dating a photographer when inspiration struck. “He had taken some nude shots of a model and threw away the photos that weren't his favourites,” she recalls. “I fished them out of the trash and asked if I could try selling them. I got £24,0000, and realised there's a great business in this. I began paying photographers for their nude photos and I owned the copyright, and eventually amassed a library of 1.5 million nudes, which I sold to adult magazines. When the internet began taking off in 1993, I had the world's biggest library of nude images, and licensed them at £70 an image. I made a fortune. My company was soon valued at £40million.”
She branched out into publishing adult magazines and producing XX-rated films, so perhaps it is not surprising that Thackray attracted the interest of the Mafia. “Some New York investors came to me looking to expand their phone sex business, and I helped them negotiate ad space in adult magazines,” she says, little knowing they were linked to the Gambino crime family. “I didn't realise they were mobsters. I grew their business, and found myself in charge of producing their phone sex taped messages and launching their business across Europe. The phone sex business proved a gold mine, earning over £40 million a month.
“They had live girls and prerecorded chats. But it got dangerous. A rival mob put out a hit on me for encroaching on their territory. Thankfully I had protection and I'm still here. Then I got into a dispute with the mob over money, and fell