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Grandma Chelly was always, to us, larger than life.
- What happened? - Yes, we do.
What happened? What happened?
And she was also unusual and eccentric.
What are you doing?
She was completely the most
un-grandma person that, you know, anyone could have.
In fact, when I used to meet people for the first time
and they would ask about me and stuff like that,
and then I would mention something about my grandmother,
"She owns most of the porno theaters in New York,"
and then, of course, I would get that classic pause,
which I think I actually enjoyed, which was,
"Yeah, right. No. What does your grandmother really do?"
And I was, like, "No. That's the truth, actually."
Except for the fact that she was...
Jewish who celebrated Christmas in a porn theater,
it doesn't get any weirder than that.
Going into her apartment
was always an interesting experience.
Because we were little, we didn't really understand
that she was living over an all-male
gay pornographic movie theater.
So, here we were dressed in our little, you know,
Lord and Taylor coats and our shopping bags from Westchester.
And my mother would knock on the box office.
There was usually somebody there that she knew,
and they would buzz us in
and we'd just be in the lobby for a little bit,
and make a right and go up a very steep group of stairs
into her apartment.
And then, we were in her apartment,
and then you were in a different world.
Everything looked very golden.
It was sort of like a kitsch version of a '70s Trump,
sort of mixed in with a Greek Corinthian column mixed in.
It was all just a mélange of strangeness.
It was quite a scene.
The cast of characters that she had around her
were just like caricatures of caricatures.
You never quite knew who was a lover, who was a friend,
who was an ex, who was a future thing.
There was this cabal of Greek witches.
You know, very heavyset,
dark dressed women with deep voices, full of cigarettes.
And then, she would usually be sitting on the couch,
center stage.
She was holding court.
Like a mafia queen.
She had a very funny way of speaking.
She had this very sort of strong
kind of voice, like this, and she used to curse a lot.
It was always entertaining. It was just a show.
I mean, it was always just like a crazy family circus.
And I always got this feeling there were secrets going on,
that I had no idea what was going on.
Behind the Christmas tree,
there were all the monitors of all the porn theaters
in black and white, showing all these surveillance cameras
and things like that.
So, even that was a whole level of craziness.
We would love to watch the videos,
so we could see who was coming into the theater
and count how many men with raincoats and umbrellas.
That's how we entertained ourselves.
But you didn't understand it.
I mean, nobody, not one person,
ever explained it to us.
Nobody ever sat down and said,
"This might make you feel uncomfortable," or nothing.
It was just like, "Here you go."
Oh, my God. What we got now?
I was very prideful about her
because she was so completely unusual.
Everything you said about her
just sounded like it was made up.
QUEEN OF THE DEUCE
New York, in the 1970s,
was in a state of crisis pretty much for the whole decade.
Businesses were moving out of the city, into the suburbs.
People were leaving the city to move to the suburbs.
Although it was an incredibly dire economic situation,
it was an incredibly creative period,
marked by this incredible sense of innovation and exploration.
GAY PRIDE
NY IST RUN ADULTS FREESTYLE LOVE THE CONTEST
New York City
was very different in the 1970s.
Everything that I remember
was X-rated theaters everywhere.
You know, my mother's theaters up and down the street.
Chelly Wilson was one of the most successful Greek women
in America back then,
and this was porno movies 24 hours, I would say.
It never closed.
People just walk in one after another.
Very smart and very successful woman.
She knew what she was doing.
Chelly Wilson was a known person
on 42nd Street, also known as the Deuce.
I worked for Show World Center,
which was a sort of a landmark staple at that time.
It was actually a...
a sex emporium
that had videos
and live entertainment,
and what we call booth babies,
where there were girls inside a booth.
You couldn't touch them
because there was a piece of glass between you and them.
Chelly obviously knew about us and we knew about her.
And then, when I got to meet her, we just happened to click.
We took a liking to each other.
I admired her so much, and I think, perhaps,
that's why she took a liking to me,
because she saw the admiration I had on my face
when I would speak to her.
Well, she had the nerve to do and the foresight to do things
that I never would've thought of doing
or would've had the nerve to do.
I'm not saying that she had great,
high ideals,
but she was a force of nature,
and that was what I found fascinating.
And really, you know, as a young kid,
to see people that can be that forcible
is really inspiring because you realize, "I can do it, too."
I started out my photo career
working on hardcore porn films,
and I got the job because my ex-husband was a producer.
Herb Nitke. He made a movie called The Devil in Miss Jones.
The Devil in Miss Jones was an enormous hit.
And Herb did business with her.
I remember meeting her and just thinking
she was just larger than life.
She was powerful-looking.
She was like a ball of fire
and just incredibly engaging, like you could not not like her.
It was just something about her that was... that drew you in.
To tell you the honest truth,
I think I fell in love with Chelly,
in a way, before I ever met her daughter Bondi.
I always basically wanted to be in the theater
and that's why I came to New York.
But that's a very tough business to get into,
especially when you're trying to be a performer.
And so, I wasn't having too much luck with finding acting jobs.
So, I took a job cutting film.
A friend of mine named Sandy Johnson
had been working for Chelly.
So, he said, "I want you to meet her."
We go to the Eros, and we go up through the lobby,
and up the stairs into an apartment,
a very nice apartment.
And in the living room, holding court,
was this woman in a muumuu, half-reclined on the sofa.
And there were five or six people all talking to her,
and in front of her was a long glass coffee table
supported by two white elephants.
That was where all her papers were. That was her desk.
I said, "Who is this?" "That's Chelly Wilson.
"She makes a lot of films
and she has a lot of theaters."
I noticed some shopping bags all around the desk,
and I looked down and they were filled with cash.
And I nudged Sandy and I said, "What...
What is this?"
"That's from the theaters."
"Sandy, come over here.
Give me a kiss."
So, he did, and then, he introduced me.
"Don. Oh, Don, do you make movies?
You want to make movies for me? We can do business."
Of course, she was tremendous at business.
She just did amazing things.
I think Chelly was one of the first, if not the first,
to import homosexual films to New York City.
The Adonis...
that was a nice theater.
The Adonis Theater was one of the, sort of, premier
gay porn theaters.
It was so famous,
it became, then, a topic of a porn movie itself.
And one of the things I like about the porn movie,
it's called A Night at the Adonis,
is that it portrays the Adonis as a kind of community center.
What about that guy there? The one with all the keys.
We call him the Jingler. He's an artist at giving head.
Going to the Adonis was a time in my life
when I was trying to explore my sexuality.
I would go to have gay sex, and it was a lot of fun.
It was all about finding a place
where you can express your feelings,
express your sexuality.
I love this place.
Now, I don't think there's a room in this building
I haven't fucked in.
She named it the Adonis
after she acquired it.
Before the Adonis, it was the Tivoli.
She bought the Tivoli property from Gulf and Western.
That was really a premier theater.
I think it opened in the '20s.
She acquired the property on a very good deal
because it was a porn theater.
She was a great wheeler-dealer.
She had a lot of chutzpah.
Actually, I think she loved the deal
and making the deal
more than she ever loved what the deal finally led to.
It was fun,
but she certainly didn't care about
gathering lots of money to show off.
She was not into luxury.
She's living over a porn theater.
She could have afforded a very nice apartment,
any place in the city, but no,
didn't matter; this was home.
That was it, which is the movie theater. Yeah.
Now, they changed the inside.
They did a restaurant.
But the structure, it's the same.
She really started at the Cameo.
Then, she picked up the Tivoli, which became the Adonis.
Then, she got the Eros and the Venus.
Then, there was the Lido West,
and then there was a Lido East.
So, that's how many theaters? It's a lot of theaters.
This is the famous Cameo Theater.
That would play the X-rated movies,
for 24 hours, I don't know for how many years.
People just come in and out, in and out, in and out.
But this was the main attraction, all these lights;
this would light up the entire 44th and Eighth Avenue.
And this is where I used to work.
It was very convenient to go from one place to another.
She would call me, say, "Do this, do that."
And I would leave my job
with my boss's permission, because they were good friends.
You could never say no to Chelly;
whatever she wanted to do had to be done.
That means, "Shut up. I will pay you," and she always did.
She will call me and she will say,
"Bring me four or five cartons of cigarettes."
Means, "Has to be done now."
"Tóra." And you know, we would do what she wanted.
My sister and I always used to say,
"Mother, leave us all your boyfriends."
Because she had all these people that would do things for her,
tremendous connections in all different areas.
So, she would use them if she needed to.
She would call me just to go upstairs
and just listen to her.
"Sit down."
Okay. I'll sit down, you know?
And she would curse people
that I had no idea who she was talking about.
Not long. 20 minutes, half an hour.
Then, she open up the closet, give me a $100 bill.
"Get out of here now. Now, get the hell out."
As a matter of fact...
"Go to hell."
That was her...
She didn't mean that. I know what she meant.
Like, "It's enough." You know, I know that.
A lot of times, she was very angry.
She would try to tell you,
"You stupid idiot. You didn't do what I told you to do."
Well, she was very emotional, because she's Greek.
And so, her temper would overflow a lot
and she enjoyed that.
She really enjoyed getting into emotional explosions.
But it was a great relationship between all these people here.
We were all like brothers.
We're like family.
The Eighth Avenue was to accept the person.
If they're gay, if they're Black, white.
There was no racism at all back then.
I rather would never came back and see it like this.
Right now, I don't see any life.
I see people walking around,
but if they call this life? No.
Here she's in her glories right now.
She'd say, "I accomplished what I wanted to do."
That's exactly how she was most of the time.
Most of the time, wearing black
and holding a cigarette or a cigar.
She would rarely smile that I remember.
Even here, she's not smiling.
She never spoke about the past. No.
Her sister and her brother
were killed in the Holocaust.
In a lot of families, people never talk about it.
That's not unusual that they don't talk about the Holocaust.
It wasn't something
that, you know,
we were educated about or told about.
I didn't grow up with my mother telling me,
"You had an uncle. You had an aunt. You had grandparents."
I didn't even know I had a sister
until she came from Greece.
I had no idea that I was Jewish.
Everything was on a need-to-know basis, I guess.
That is what I do regret because,
had I really realized that and appreciated that,
I might have asked my mother many, many more questions
that I didn't ask. And I might have gotten answers,
and I might have even been very surprised
by what the answers were,
and I do regret that.
In 1983, I got Bondi to sit down with Chelly
and do an interview, because I began to feel that the memories
that she had were going to fade,
or we were going to lose them if anything happened to her,
and it was amazing.
Three. One, two, three.
Testing. One, two, three.
Tell me about the family.
The great grandfather comes from Spain.
My father, Davico Serero, went to Salonika.
SALONIKA, GREECE
Salonika, known as Thessaloniki,
had a very large Jewish population.
The language they spoke was Ladino, which is Judeo-Spanish.
That was her first language.
She learned Greek in the streets
and she learned French in school.
She was a Sephardic Jew, and they were extremely religious.
Society in Thessaloniki was very strict,
and it was very difficult for her to deal with that.
She was more expansive than that.
And she, apparently,
was a whirlwind even then, in her early days.
They called me Solomon Serero
because I was like a tomboy.
And I loved to go to the theatre.
I became president of the theatre club.
I was studying, I wanted to be a doctor.
I used to play violin, you know,
and I went to a concert.
When I took the tram
somebody entered and stepped on my foot.
He opens his mouth and says "Pardon, mademoiselle."
This son of a bitch, Moise Bourla, comes after me,
comes after me, comes after me.
And he says to my father,
"I have the honour to ask you for the hand of your daughter."
And when my father saw that he spoke French,
my father gave in to him.
He comes home and says,
"I found the man for you, you're getting married."
I said, "Papa, are you crazy? I don't know the guy!"
"We'll introduce you to the guy."
When introduced to the guy, I wanted to vomit.
He was short, he was a mess, he didn't know how to speak Greek.
So then they got me engaged.
He wanted to kiss me and I said, "You son of a bitch,
don't you put your hands on me!
I'll kill you!"
And I put my hands with my nails
and I scratched him all over.
He was so repulsive to me, the son of a bitch!
My mother always said that she got married
because her father wanted her to get married.
And she respected her father very much, but she said,
"When you die, I'm going to get divorced."
What she resented most was the fact that
it was an arranged marriage. It was not her choice.
And that's it, I got married.
And Dino was born.
And then I left him.
And you went to France?
I went to France, he took Dino.
He kidnapped Dino.
I went to France, to my aunt's.
She was not meant to be a housewife.
Let's put it that way.
She was not noikokyrá, I don't think.
My father wrote me a letter,
"Please come back, I don't feel good, I'm going to die,"
and so forth.
I said "OK".
So I came back.
In the meantime,
my husband made me go with him in order to bring Dino.
He blackmailed me.
"You are not going to see Dino if you don't stay with me."
And he took me to a hotel to go with him.
I was like a mummy, you know, he was kissing me all over.
And I wanted to kill him! Repulsive!
Every kiss he put on my body, I wanted to kill him. It was torture!
And then, you got pregnant and you had Paulette?
- Yeah. - Did you stay with him?
No, after Paulette, I just left him. I threw him out.
She got a Jewish divorce, called a "get,"
so that Moise could remarry.
Oh, this is me and my brother.
I remember.
You know what I remember about this picture?
Holding his hand,
or he's holding my hand.
I was born in Athens.
And so, the divorce was,
she would take the daughter and he will take my brother,
Daniel, and this is how we were.
My mother had a business.
I had my own store.
"ARKTOS" Rachel Serero, R. S.
I was making frigidaires, I was making stoves and everything.
I was making a lot of money.
And she complained to her secretary.
Her name was Ellie.
"What am I going to do with Paulette?"
Ellie said to her,
"Don't worry about it. We'll take Paulette.
"We'll bring you to Mama Yulia and she'll take care of her.
So, you don't have to worry about it."
I think she knew her limitations.
I think she knew, "I'm not a mother."
You know, "I can be something, but not a mother."
And then, the story goes,
or the myth goes, that a man came in the middle of the night
and scooped her up and brought her to this family.
Julia, who we used to call Yaya.
This is the way I went to Yaya's house from here.
Who is it? I don't know.
All I know, he took... They took me.
They were taking me to Yaya's.
They're in a taverna, having a good time,
and they're taking a picture of me sleeping.
I look horrible. I look like an orphan.
Look at my shoes. I have dirty feet.
Obviously, my mother told them to do it,
and whatever Chelly says, everybody does.
There was one thing my mother said to Ellie.
"Make sure that she doesn't speak Spanish
"when you take her home.
I want her to speak only Greek."
And the reason for that, I found out later,
it was because the Greek Jews had an accent.
Poland, September, 1939.
The German foe begins its ruthless march of conquest
and sets the stage for World War II.
And then the war started.
I went to see all of them
and I said, "Now look, because I know they're going to kill
all the Jews, I can get passports for you to go to America."
Because my friend was the mayor of Athens, Kotzias.
I said, "Let's go."
"What!?"
Are you crazy, Solomon Serero?
We've got so much gold here. We've got so much property.
We've got everything. We're going to leave everything and go?
"We do business with the Germans!"
So I didn't trust anybody!
I went to Mama Yulia, I said, "I'm leaving you a letter."
You're going to keep Paulette here.
Under no circumstance will you deliver Paulette to my family.
No mother, no father, no sister, to nobody!
"She stays with you until I say so."
And I left Paulette there. Four years old.
She gave me a kiss.
She says, "I'm going away. I'll be back to get you."
She took her pinky ring out and gave me her pinky ring,
and that was it, and she left.
My mother left Greece in 1939
on the Nea Hell as, the last boat that left Athens
for America before the war broke out.
It's hard to think about.
How do you leave your child...
and go to a country that you don't know anything about?
I came to the United States with five dollars in my pocket.
So I didn't know about America.
I didn't know how very difficult it was.
I don't know about that. You know?
And I met some people, Kay and Chrissy, on the boat.
So when I came out, I said "Where are we going to go?"
"We're going to go to the Rex Hotel with five dollars."
I said, "Kay, one day, you're going to be my helper."
"Are you crazy?" she says to me. I say, "I'm not crazy."
I said, "I bet you any money you're going to be my employee one day."
Mr. Yiannopoulos owns a lot of stands, you know,
with hot dogs and everything.
And the next day, he says to me, "You know something,
I want to do business with you." I said, "Okay."
So he took me with a car to Dyckman Street.
He says, "We're going to put the stand there.
It's going to cost maybe $6,000, plus merchandise.
So you give me $50 a month."
She sold hot dogs and soda, and she used to go,
"Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, 7 Up."
And I took Kay as my employee.
I said, "See? We should've made a bet.
I took you as an employee."
My job, when I was very little,
was to fill up these bags with peanuts.
I was supposed to put 13 peanuts in the bag.
She sold them for 15 cents.
And I said to my mother,
"You're cheating the people. You're charging too much."
And my mother said, "Don't be a stupid.
You have to make a profit."
My first business lesson.
Salonika is in German hands.
This was the headquarters of the Allies.
Now, this important port has been conquered by our troops
after four and a half days.
During the war,
my uncle came to Athens
to take me to Thessaloniki
so we can all be together, all the family.
Yaya, Mama Yulia, said, "No, you can't take her."
He said, "Yes. I'm her brother."
But she told him,
"Your sister told me not to give Paulette to anyone.
"Even if my mother comes out of the grave,
you don't give her to her."
As most Sephardic Jews did in Salonika,
they wanted the families to stay together.
But it saved Paulette's life that they weren't together.
The Germans were rounding up
all the Jews in Salonika
and sending them off to Auschwitz.
They took them all.
My aunts, my uncles, these friends of my mother.
I know that, in Athens,
the way that the Jewish people were treated
was a lot different than it was in Salonika,
because the clergy of the Greek Orthodox Church
was very into trying to help the Jews
and trying to keep them away from the Germans.
My Greek mother told me, she said to me,
"You're a very lucky person.
"You have two mothers,
one who's away and she's going to come and get you, and me."
You know, if Chelly hadn't
picked that family in particular,
you know, who knows what would have happened?
I'm sure there are many other good,
righteous Gentiles in Greece,
of course, but they risked their lives.
They were a wonderful family, obviously,
who made very great sacrifices
and put their own lives in danger
to have Paulette living there as an openly hidden child.
Everybody knew that I was Jewish.
That I was Jewish,
everyone knew it.
They also loved this family very much
because she was a wonderful lady,
and I guess they protected her.
And we were scared, because
if the Germans came,
they were not going to take me;
they were going to take everybody.
You had to protect yourself and everybody else,
because you say one wrong word...
And everybody was paranoid, you know?
"Where did you find the meat? Where'd you find the olive oil?"
There was no food.
I mean, it wasn't only the Jews that suffered during the war.
There was starvation in Athens. It was incredible.
It was terrible. It was awful.
Chelly was very worried about
everything that was going on in Greece.
She was making money
at the refreshment stand and sending the money to Greece,
to buy pieces of newsreel footage and cultural footage
to put together a film about Greece
in order to raise money,
to help the Greek War effort against the Germans.
So, that was Greece on the March.
She went to play her film
at the Cameo Theater, which was called the Squire.
So, she needed somebody with the projector.
Rex was a film projectionist
who came from a big theatrical family in England.
And they were also Jewish,
but they never told anyone
because there was very little work for Jews.
So, they changed their name to Wilson
and got work theatrically.
He was very clever, technically.
He knew cameras. He knew projectors.
And he was fascinated by her.
I don't know why, but he was.
This Rex Wilson was in love with me, we got married.
The guy was coming every night and lighting my cigarettes.
He gave me cigarettes.
So I married him.
It was nice, he was providing me with cigarettes.
My father was very romantic.
Love at first sight. He loved her right away.
My mother didn't speak English then,
and my dad never spoke any other language,
except for English.
They did not communicate.
Their relationship was very tumultuous.
There were tremendous fights.
My mother threw the mattress out of the window.
The neighbors would call the police
because she threw every dish in the house and glass at him.
She went to work for the Hudson Shipping Company,
and she was the liaison
for the war effort in Greece.
And I sent $100,000 in merchandise.
Rice, sugar, flour and everything else.
She was very nervous about the children, their safety.
And she was trying to get information from the Red Cross,
which she got some little bits and pieces of information
about how they were doing.
Daniel, he was stuck in Solanika.
Somebody helped him and hid him.
The war ended. The British came.
Everybody was happy.
And then, finally, we got a letter from my mother.
I found out that she was in America
and that she was coming to take me.
She was going to go and get my brother first in Palestine.
My grandmother was going to Israel to get Daniel,
who had left Greece after the war
and had joined forces in Israel.
He was in a kibbutz.
And then, he went to the Haganah.
He went to the army.
Of course, he didn't like it there.
He was miserable, miserable.
My grandmother went to Israel, again bribed someone.
There was always a bribe involved to bring him back,
because once you join the army, you couldn't just leave.
So, she had to do some negotiations.
So, she got on a boat and she got him in,
and she said to him,
"Now, we're going to Athens.
"You're going to stay in your cabin.
You don't come out from the cabin."
I had Dino stolen from Israel.
So I said to Dino, "Stay in the cabin."
So I got out of the boat.
I went to Mama Yulia. Paulette was there.
And the poor kids, I kissed them.
And I say, "You want some money for a taxi to go home?"
Because I have a big trunk...
With two feet.
With legs.
"Let me get it out and I'll come home."
And where is Dino?
He's telling the man who's watching on the boat,
"My mother brought me from Israel, and is going to take me to America."
"You were on the boat?" "Yeah."
They grabbed him to take him to Immigration!
I go to Immigration and I say,
"You come with me, we'll go to the mayor of Athens."
So I took the two people there by car.
My car with a chauffeur was waiting.
And I go to Kotzias.
"Oh, Chelly!"
So I tell the story of what happened to Dino
and the officers were crying. Everybody was crying.
And that's it! Finished!
In the meantime, Dino is already on the boat.
I let him go!
Goodbye, Dino!
A friend of mine had a ship.
It cost me $1,000 to put him downstairs.
This is the day before I left to come to America.
- This one? - Yes.
- You see this dress? - Yeah.
This dress was made out of a parachute.
Wow.
I was getting ready to go to America,
and that was a big thing.
And all my friends were, "Oh, my God.
You're going to go to America? What are you going to do?"
I used to say to them, "I'm going to be a movie star."
My mother came, so she can arrange about the papers,
the passports, when I'm going to leave,
what ship am I going to be in.
I was 12-and-a-half years old. I didn't speak English.
But when I came to the United States,
she didn't come with me; I came by myself.
When I came on the ship, everybody, you know,
we got up to see the Statue of Liberty.
And I looked down and I see all these yellow cars,
and I said, "Oh, in America, they have yellow cars."
It was the taxis.
Nobody explained anything to you.
And poor Bondi was... They were telling her,
"Paulette is coming. Paulette is coming."
What did she know who Paulette was?
And she was waiting for me to come.
She was very young. Beautiful, beautiful child.
The best day of my life was when Paulette came.
I was only four,
but I just loved her right away.
I tried to teach Bondi to speak Greek.
Paulette would teach me some Greek
and I would teach her some English.
We used to go... Eye,
nose,
mouth,
hair.
And I would say the English word.
She would say the Greek word.
She would talk to me constantly.
I didn't know what she was saying.
She was the most adorable child.
But it was very difficult for me.
I didn't want to be here.
I never unpacked my bag for months.
My mother, she understood where I came from
and she wanted me
to be here, to become
American.
She took two chairs,
and she says to me, "This is..."
"This is Greece and this is America."
If you want to be in Greece, sit in this chair.
If you want to be in America, sit in this one.
"You can't sit in both chairs."
"If you can make it five years, you'll never want to go back."
- I love this picture. - Oh, this is the best.
That picture is so wonderful.
This is the best. This is classic.
Her bathing suit didn't close up. She didn't care.
Oh, my God.
I don't think my mother
ever went back to Thessaloniki, never.
It only held bad memories for her,
very bad memories,
nothing but loss.
Only 5%
of the Jewish population survived.
To this day, I don't know what happened to my mother's mother.
One of the last times I saw my mother at home,
she looked very desolate, you know?
And I said to her, "Mother, what's wrong?"
She wouldn't tell me.
I said, "Tell me. Maybe I can help you."
Because she would always say she could help me
or anybody with whatever problems that they would have.
And, um...
And she said...
"I want to see my sister."
This was so many years later.
And I said, "No, you're right. I can't help you."
So, then she said, she went,
"Hmm. Can you bring me a Nazi, so I can shoot him?"
My sister has said that there was a time
when you could get reparations, but my mother didn't want it
because she said it was blood money.
She didn't want it because she had paid too dear
for that money, and she wouldn't take it.
I think my mother did have
survivor's guilt.
This picture, I have to know who these people are.
I'm never going to find out, am I?
I have no idea, Bondi.
I wonder if I showed pictures to everybody in Salonika,
if somebody might remember somebody.
They're all dead, Bondi.
I know.
My mother's aunt Allegra
left Salonika in 1932 to go to France.
At the end of the war,
my mother heard from Allegra that she had survived.
And the letter that my mother responded with
was found in Allegra's papers.
It is written in Ladino. Judeo-Spanish.
"My dearest Allegra.
"Oh, Allegra, just seeing your name on the envelope
"made my heart skip a beat.
"Adding one more person to the list of survivors
"fills my heart with joy.
"I can't even begin to describe the anguish I suffered
"thinking of each and every one of you.
"I spent entire nights without sleeping
"and days without eating.
"I can assure you that if it wasn't for my husband,
whom I love dearly, I would've ended up in an insane asylum."
My mother always used the expression "God bless America."
She truly felt it.
She really did love this country,
and she loved, I guess, the freedom that she had here.
And there were always strangers living with us
that she would pick up from I don't know where.
But I remember waking up
and walking over people sleeping in the dining room
and under the table, over, on top of the table,
that she would just pick up that jumped boat
and wanted to stay here,
and she was going to help them get their papers,
and she did.
Her main thing was to support the Greek people.
She played Greek films on weekends.
She had all the people in Astoria and Queens,
they would come in and see the films booked into the Cameo.
They also played at the Tivoli.
For us, back then, to work on Sunday was a sin.
Like, you know, we just had the Greek mentality.
You never work on Sunday.
And we used to go to the movies,
but she would bring all these nice films.
She certainly knew who was doing what
and who had the assets, and all of
the big Greek producers and distributors knew her
and they would ship films to her.
All the good names, she was on it.
And always a comedy and a sad.
It wasn't making a whole lot of money.
A few people had suggested, "Chelly, why don't you try
these other films?"
So, she got a few films and, all of a sudden,
the money came rolling in. "This is good!"
A lot of theaters were driven into having a product
that they could buy reasonably, if not cheap,
and get people to see, which was a very good audience.
You didn't need a lot of matrons.
They didn't go to eat candy and popcorn and stuff.
So, you had a very good audience
who paid a higher price than the general ticket admission.
She was very good at recognizing opportunities
and taking advantage of them.
Oh!
Chelly was the first person we ever sold a movie to.
It was the summer of 1965.
I was selling a movie that I had invested in.
The title was Flesh and Lace,
which, in those days, was an adult film,
which today could play regular TV in the afternoon.
Who is she?
Beverly Hill, my roommate.
It had one flash scene of a naked woman
on a bed on her stomach,
and another scene of a nightclub with a girl dancing.
It was just a nice story.
Get out of here.
Joanie, please.
I said, get out of my sight!
We needed to play it in New York and Chelly had a theater.
We made an arrangement with Chelly,
where the first $4,500 of receipts would go to Chelly,
and then, there was $600 advertising expense,
and that would be taken off the top before the $4,500.
And then, we were to get 90% of everything above that
and she would get 10% above that.
Well, about two weeks before the play date, she said,
"We need to raise the advertising $400 more."
And then, we got another call a week before to raise it.
It wound up being $6,000 before we got any money.
What we didn't know because we didn't have her experience was,
we were not just allowing her to take the first $4,500
or the first $6,000; we were guaranteeing it.
And then, we found out before the movie opened
that the theater never did $6,000,
which would be a very typical Chelly kind of deal.
But as luck would have it,
in the first week, the film did $10,000,
which was quite an accomplishment.
We broke the theater house record,
and people were coming over and patting us on the back.
It was good for her, too,
because it established a new paradigm for her theater.
That was indecent.
Honey, that's what I am. Indecent.
And that's what I've always been.
You have to understand, in 1965,
the mores of America were changing.
Obviously, there was a demand,
because if there wasn't a demand,
it would not have been successful,
and it was extremely successful, so...
It was a forbidden fruit for many years,
and now it was available, and people wanted to see it.
She made a lot of money,
and she had very many people working for her
who stayed in the apartment and they took care of her.
Plus they were cooks.
You know, they would clean the apartment, all women.
One of them, as I recall, was Machi,
and she would come up with shopping bags full of cash.
Shopping bags.
As the future came upon us, Chelly purchased theaters.
I know one of them, on Eighth Avenue,
was the Eros, and then the Venus.
She named her theaters after Greek gods, okay?
It was about making money, honey. Making money.
She used to have Friday night poker games at her apartment.
So, you go into this, like,
seedy theater lobby on Eighth Avenue,
and you go in, very steep stairway that you had to go up.
And the place is locked like a fortress,
like a steel door with a thousand locks on it.
And then, we get in and it's, like, this hugely ornate,
amazing apartment.
There was a round table
and there would be little tables,
so you could put your drink, your coffee, your ashtray.
Back then, everybody would smoke.
And she had the whole,
like, little crew of all the cool people.
Jamie Gillis was there,
Mickey Zaffarano,
and Herb Nitke,
and they would literally play poker all night long.
There would be money all over the place.
20s, 50s, 100s.
Those games would... You know, very high stakes
and they would go on sometimes for days.
I'm sure a lot of business went down.
And, yeah, if Mickey was there, he would pop in, I'm sure,
to do a little business.
Some of the stories I've heard, she was involved with the Mafia.
I think you had to be to be part of the pornography industry
in the '60s and '70s.
Yeah.
Yes.
They protected us.
At the poker games, she was almost always the only woman,
and she sat at the head of the table, always.
The fact that Chelly was able to hold her own
in that world of all those guys
who are all sharks in one way or another,
is beyond commendable.
I mean, what a woman.
It was all about the fun of the deal.
It was all about the fun of gambling.
The one thing I learned about gamblers,
having spent a lot of time with them,
they don't actually care about winning.
I mean, they care about winning in the moment,
but they mostly just want to keep gambling.
She loved people who knew how to talk, and get things done,
and sneak behind things, and go around things,
and she just adored people like that.
And unfortunately, she got involved with a few of them
and got taken a bit from time to time,
because they were good at it.
It was a lot of bar booth places.
"Bar booth" means the place to play dice.
She would start going over there very often,
and she lost a lot of money, I believe.
I heard from my boss, Petrópolis...
"They fleeced her yesterday."
"We took a couple hundred thousand dollars
or maybe more, maybe more."
But she wouldn't give up because whatever she lost, in one week,
she would get it back.
Not from the gambling, but from the business she had.
No matter how much she lose, everything would come back.
The porn industry focused on 42nd Street
because that's where the theaters were.
These big theaters, huge theaters,
many of them not having enough business.
And so, they would eventually move to porn,
which was the most lucrative.
In the early days,
because there was no real porn industry producing films
on a regular basis, the theaters ended up producing porn as well.
My mother and her partner then, who was Lee Pomeranz,
formed Chellee Films.
She probably thought about, well, I'll make films.
I have a theater to play them. And that, you know,
she thought this would be a good business venture.
This is the story of a silk-stocking industry.
An industry of perversion.
Scarf of Mist,
Thigh of Satin is different.
And then, ultimately, she distributed them as well.
So, it was, you know, like they did in Hollywood,
before it was broken up, where you own the theater,
you produced the film, and you distributed the film.
We made a few films
for them when I wasn't married to Bondi.
The way I got into the business
was a film called Scare Their Pants Off.
On weekends,
for three weekends, we made Scare Their Pants Off.
A film with a little nudity, but some horror also.
It was a lot like off-off-Broadway theater.
Please don't hurt me. I keep telling you.
I know what you keep telling you me!
You keep telling me we got the wrong girl
and that damn silly nonsense!
Everybody sort of hoop-skipping along
and having a good time and making these films.
They didn't pay an awful lot.
But if you made enough of them, you made a living,
and there were some good people in it.
Are we all set up for that party?
Party? Since when did you all get so civilized?
You mean orgy.
You had to have actors, so you couldn't show sex.
So, you had to have people who could act like
the sex was taking place and real.
And so, it meant acting.
It was fairly easy to cast.
What usually happened is
there were people who were around as models.
Musicians,
actors, various kinds of entertainers
who were not doing well,
and so, they would do porn for a little extra money.
What I want now is some of your ass, all right?
You're always after my ass.
I want to fill up 40 feet of screen with your ass.
In the early days,
the nudity wasn't really highly important,
and it was just basically topless if it was.
But later on, it changed a lot.
It's an industry that grew hair by hair,
one pubic hair at a time.
The public wanted as much as they could see.
Every film had a little more than the last film.
Baby...
You don't give yourself credit.
Baby, you're going overboard.
What do you think I want you to do?
Sleep with the guy?
Oh, wow.
Honey, you're crazy.
Softcore porn evolved.
So at first, you had what they called beaver,
which was just a female crotch.
And then, they moved to pickle and beaver,
which was a penis and female crotch.
And so, eventually, hardcore emerged.
And so, you had penetration.
The industry exploded until there was nothing left to see.
Hardcore pornography really emerged in 1969,
almost, like, on the dot.
I've never seen a film like this before.
Oh, it's different, all right.
Chellee was soft core. Then after that,
it led to Variety Films,
and Variety Films was Chelly and Bondi.
I didn't have much to do with the productions.
I just did the distribution.
Variety was mostly hardcore.
You know, as I got older and was a teenager,
I knew what pornography was. It was conflicting.
Pornography is a lie about women!
Why?
Pornography lies about women!
I thought of Grandma Chelly as a feminist
earlier in her life.
The pictures and the information
that I knew about her living in Greece,
owning a business,
smoking cigarettes, wearing pants,
having short hair,
lent itself to the sort of Simone de Beauvoir,
you know, idea of a feminist.
Then, when I went to college, you know,
and I'm studying feminism,
and pornography is the antithesis of feminism.
So, I thought of her as perpetuating
a very destructive view of men and women's bodies.
She never had any compunctions about any of that.
Couldn't care less about the content.
My mother would never apologize
for who she was or what she did
ever, ever, ever,
even though she grew up in a culture
where everything that she was about was wrong.
Do you have a lot of friends?
No, I-I hate men.
What?
I can't stand when a man touch me.
I knew she was gay. Nobody ever said to me,
"Your grandmother's gay."
Or, "If she's gay, why is she married to Rex Wilson?"
I mean, it was just assumed that this was her lifestyle,
this is who she was.
Happy Pride Day, y'all!
Today, you would say she was completely out,
proud of who she is.
She'd never pretended to be anybody other.
But when we were growing up,
you didn't talk as openly about who's gay, who's not gay.
You know, she had many gay male friends.
The first time
that anybody ever said anything to me,
it was at a funeral.
A friend of mine was next to me and she looks over
and she says to me, "I didn't know your mother was gay."
And I said, "Hmm."
I guess I didn't know either,
or I didn't know that everybody knew and I didn't know.
But I wasn't even really aware of it
or I just didn't want to see it, because
in those years that I grew up,
it was not something that you accepted so easily.
Hi, ma!
Today, it's like, whatever.
The sky is blue. You're gay.
It's, like, no big deal.
Noni and Eva did live with us.
This was her other family.
Eva was the opera singer from Greece.
Machi and Angela were friends
who came to live with her at various times.
They were all gay.
They would clean, they would cook,
and they were always there.
- Hi, Angela. - Hi, honey.
Rexy, she definitely had a very interesting
and loving relationship with for a very long time.
Even when she started living with Eva and Noni,
Rexy was still there and he was still a part of the family,
as long as he wanted to be.
Eventually, he felt dispossessed
and moved himself to Puerto Rico.
But when he came back, he was always welcomed.
He was always taken care of.
He was going blind, and she took care of him.
Her first husband Moise became a friend of hers,
and they would write letters back and forth in French.
I think she lived for the family,
and that included the extended family.
At the time...
It was late '60s, I believe. Yes, late '60s.
And Chelly Wilson decided to open up a Greek restaurant.
She opened up the place called Mykonos,
and she had the right person to run the place,
Noni Kanjaraki.
She would have her lover, Noni, singing there,
who was a sort of opera singer.
Gravelly, six packs of cigarettes a day kind of singer.
Very nice voice.
So, it was strange going to the house and seeing Noni
in a sort of, like, nightgown,
walking around with her cigarettes and so forth.
And then, like, at that night, she would be in this restaurant,
singing and be all glamored up
in this sort of kitsch sequin thing.
The Mykonos opened
basically for Noni to have a place to sing,
and for them to have a place of their own.
It was going to be, like, a little boîte in the beginning,
and then, it ended up being a full-blown restaurant.
THEW GREEKS HAVE A WORD FOR FUN-DINING
It was very lively.
My sister worked there as a hostess.
That was the place to be
and the place to stay till 4:00 in the morning.
STANDING ROOM ONLY RESTAURANT
MYKONOS (N.Y.) IS GREECE TRANSPLANTED TO NEW WORLD
ACCORDING TO MRS. CHELLY WILSON, NOBODY EVER WANTS TO LEAVE MYKONOS!
The food was fabulous.
Vassilis Photopoulos did the design of the restaurant.
Beautiful murals.
Vassilis had won the Academy Award for Zorba the Greek
for the Art Direction.
Handsome, handsome guy.
Bondi used to be... Oh, she loved him.
I met a lot of Greek stars and American stars.
Yul Brynner.
Jackie with Onassis came.
Shirley MacLaine.
Bobby Kennedy.
Rod Steiger.
Everybody went to Mykonos.
She did the smartest thing. She brought in a pelican.
Yes, she did.
She brought the mayor, with the pelican
from the island of Mykonos.
PETER PELICAN'S BEAK IS FULL OF GOOD WILL
Over there, the pelican is considered to be
a bird of peace.
And he is here as a peace... As a symbol of peace to the world.
And everybody came to see the pelican.
It was lined out the door to come have dinner,
and this was constant for about a year or two, like, nonstop.
You would see only limousines outside just to see
the pelican.
It was a very fun place to go.
And then, we had Bondi's wedding there,
which was beautiful.
The place was full of flowers.
My mother had built a floral...
It was almost like a huppah
that a Jewish couple would get married under.
PRESENTING DON WALTERS AND BONDI WILSON
STRICTLY X RATED PREFORMANCE
We were opening a new film at the time
that I was getting married and I was very, very busy.
So, I didn't really have that much to do
with what happened at my wedding.
My mother wasn't that interested in business
because Mykonos was going on.
So, she was more interested in the restaurant
than she was in the films.
So, I was doing all of the work.
In the early '70s,
it was a very exciting but fraught time.
There were all kinds of legal implications.
Hardcore never became legal.
A community could ban,
in its local area, certain kinds of porn,
if it didn't satisfy what they call community standards.
The federal government was prosecuting people
and a lot of people were getting busted.
DA MOVES TO SEIZE "MISS JONES"
HERBERT NITKE CHARGED WITH OBSCENITY
Herb, my ex-husband, was charged with obscenity
three different times; major cases,
like serious, you will go to jail,
felony kind of cases.
Bondi was not real keen about the possibilities
of getting harassed or arrested running a distribution company.
She was good at running a distribution company,
but she didn't like the fact
that the FBI might wander in and harass her.
It wasn't until the business
got a little more dangerous that it got more difficult.
And for me, it got most difficult
when I got arrested
for distributing a film, Illusions of a Lady.
Yes. You really are quite lovely.
The indictment was on interstate shipment
of obscene material
and conspiracy against the United States.
So, I felt very threatened
and I felt she didn't really understand it.
"Everything's going to be okay, darling.
Everything's going to be okay."
In the meantime, it was a felony charge.
It was... I was arrested by the FBI.
I mean, it was not everything is okay.
I had to go to trial in New Orleans.
And I had been told, too, that I could plead nolo contendere,
and I wouldn't have to worry about a trial or anything else.
And I said, "No. I didn't do anything wrong."
"I'm going to fight this all the way down.
I'm not copping any plea."
I apparently have a tic I wasn't aware of,
which is I giggle.
So, every time they would ask me a question, I giggled.
My husband believes that's why I didn't get convicted...
because I was too stupid.
So, we all got off, which was wonderful.
Of course, they asked the jury why,
and the jury, which was mostly women,
they said because the Obscenity Law said
"current community standards,"
and they said, "They make these films down here in the Quarter."
So, that was it.
Current community standards, it wasn't violating anything.
So, that was the end of that.
Basically, things are changing and I think Hair, Oh! Calcutta!,
when you have a Paramount movie
such as Tropic of Cancer using words like "fuck"
and showing a bush, it would indicate
that the American public is maturing.
I lived on 45th Street,
right across from the theater. It was wonderful,
but the building was full of prostitutes.
The porn industry was very closely associated
with other kinds of sex work,
prostitution,
striptease,
and in New York City that was centered at Times Square.
I mean, try to understand, 42nd Street,
you had a lot of blood banks.
It was a tough, tough area.
It was also a very violent period, lots of drug use.
No!
You would see people,
I mean, ripping chains off people's necks.
It was terrible.
It was scary.
Nowhere, for $1, nowhere, change, waters.
I take change, credit cards, phone numbers and everything.
Check out, check it out, check it out.
I was in Vietnam.
I was more afraid of walking down 42nd Street at that time
than I was in Vietnam.
It seemed dark.
"FOR GOD'S SAKE, GET OUT!"
Quiet on the set, please. Please, quiet.
We're going to go for a sound take.
Chelly! Chelly, darling!
You want for posterity, that means the future,
to have your photo up?
We'll play it at The Adonis before every show.
We stopped making films sometime in the '80s,
and then the theaters ultimately closed
in the '90s, with Giuliani.
Giuliani was our nemesis.
He came after us with a vengeance.
A huge urban renewal project
has closed many porno-related businesses,
and big business,
like Disney and Sony, have invested millions.
Most of the people in New York city
would like to ban sex shops, porn shops,
do away with them completely.
Nowadays,
I think there are two porn theaters left in New York City.
One is out in Queens.
Yeah, we're constantly looking for, like, the last,
the last porn theater.
WHAT A GREAT 35 YEARS GOOD BYE FRIENDS
Once Giuliani came and closed all of the theaters,
Grandma Chelly had to make an adjustment.
She had investments in real estate.
I know that a lot of people
were going to her for money,
and I always felt that I didn't want to go
and hang out with her because sometimes she would say,
"Are you okay with money? Do you need some money?"
And she would shove, you know,
hundreds or whatever it is, in my pocket,
and it made me feel weird.
And I was, like, "I don't want to visit her
if I'm going to get money, you know, each time,"
because I got kind of freaked out by it.
I know it sounds strange, but it just made me too weirded out.
You know?
It's like I didn't want to have that relationship with her.
And I think there was a time she tried to give me a building,
but my father talked her out of it.
Thank God. What would I do with a brownstone in New York?
Anyway...
- Sorry. - Yeah.
But she was very happy that I was in film.
She did finance my first real attempt at being a filmmaker,
which was sort of like this supernatural vampire thriller,
which took place in the theater that she owned
or the abandoned theater that she owned, the Adonis.
I said to myself, "This is a haunted mansion."
For me, it was like
the porn version of the Chronicles of Narnia.
It's just... Just everything was weird.
So, I said, "Okay, well, what do you do with a place like this?
You make a vampire movie."
Sweetie, you don't know
the first thing about being a detective.
So, I wrote a movie called Gargoyle and Goblin.
Turn him to stone.
And I had free run of the place, and we shot in 16 millimeter,
and I showed her all the footage.
She had a pretty good laugh at it.
To Chelly.
Chelly!
To Nikki.
Honestly, I think she was probably
the only member of my family that I really admired,
mostly because I knew where she came from
and how she built this empire essentially on just being gutsy.
She was a businesswoman
and she was very good at what she did,
from selling chestnuts
to buying, you know, property in New York
that was worth a fortune.
She did very well.
Oh, my God!
Because there was always a plan.
You might not have known what it was, but she had a plan.
As I started to get older and know more about the story
of my mother and how she survived
and what my grandmother did on behest of her family,
I started to see her picture in a larger way.
There's something
that I feel that I owe to her,
my grandmother.
She might not have thought
that what she was doing was an act of resistance,
by coming to United States and leaving my mother, but it was.
I think she had an invincibility sort of idea about herself.
And then, as she got older,
I think she realized that, you know, she has limitations, too.
What is it?
Oh!
Later in her life, she started to get sicker.
You know, she had many heart attacks.
She was a chain-smoker for many years.
She quit smoking, but, you know,
I think she survived five heart attacks, if not more.
And I think she then became scared.
I hope it's going to fit you, Ma.
You know, she loved life so much.
Because if it doesn't fit...
It fits.
How was your birthday?
Good. Very good, very good.
- Good. - The best.
Terrific.
When Grandma Chelly was dying,
she had the forethought to write this letter.
She made the shopping list for what she wanted Bondi
and my mother to buy to eat at her funeral,
and we had to follow it to the T.
Spinach pie,
pickles, whitefish,
Nova Scotia, mustard, everything.
Olives, baklava.
Huevos haminados, those eggs they made in Salonika.
She said, "I want you to eat this food."
"I want you to enjoy it. I want you to toast me.
"And I want you to know
that I am with God and I have no regrets."
That was a very nice gift
that she gave to all of us, to say that.
We used to joke that she died on Thanksgiving,
so that she would see us with all the food.
And so, when we had Thanksgiving just two days ago,
even my mother and Bondi were, like, "Yes, mother.
Here, we're taking pictures of the food."
Those things in life were important to her.
Food, survival.
You claim your space. You are who you are.
While you're here now, you're going to enjoy yourself
and make the best out of everything.
NEW JERSEY
Why am I building this?
I feel like I'm possessed.
I have wanted to build this since I was 16 years old.
So, at a certain point, I said,
"Okay, I'll build this whole thing
and the story will come to me."
Sort of like Game of Thrones meets Private Ryan, in space.
I'm going to roll this puppy
into a studio and shoot a movie.
Also, I'm very kind of proud of the fact that, somehow,
this lineage of film making has continued throughout.
I can't imagine Chelly divorced from movies at all.
So, for me, it just kept in line with the family.
Oh, she would love to see this.
I think she would get a real kick out of it.
I think that definitely being raised in that family,
the weirdness of it
made me numb to everybody else's reality.
It was always like being in another world.
So, with that kind of a life upbringing,
I don't think I had any choice.
When I see what people do with their lives as a daily grind,
you know, you wake up, you have your, whatever breakfast,
you go nine hours a day, whatever,
I look at that like science fiction;
I don't know how anyone does that.
And that might sound incredibly spoiled
or entitled or whatever it is.
But I mean, if you're not here to create something,
or to give someone else escapism, or have a message,
or do something, then what are you doing?
QUEEN OF THE DEUCE