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This week The Rialto Report pays tribute to Gloria Leonard, who died last week, by reprising our 2013 interview with her.
This episode running time is 60 minutes.
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The Rialto Report interviewed Gloria Leonard in July 2013. Our intention was to speak for a couple of hours about the first half of her life in New York, and to return later in the year for a second interview which would cover her West Coast career.
We called her at her home in Hawaii and Gloria was in fine form. We spoke for over four hours about her upbringing in the Bronx, her life as a broker and a publicist for Johnny Carson, and her eventual move into adult films at the age of 35.
Along the way, she remembered her old friend Al Goldstein, working with Radley Metzger on The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Maraschino Cherry, her starring vehicle All About Gloria Leonard for Arthur Morowitz and Howie Farber at Distribpix, working for Carl Ruderman at High Society, her friendships with Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Hart, and Jamie Gillis, working with directors Gerard Damiano and Lenny Kirtman, fellow actors Bobby Astyr, Zebedy Colt and John Holmes, and her enduring love for Bobby Hollander.
We made tentative plans for the second interview, but unfortunately we never got around to it before the sad news of her passing last week.
Her death was covered by the New York Times here.
This was the interview that made me discover The Rialto Report, and made me an avid follower ever since.
I’ll be listening to it again now, albeit with much sadness in my heart.
Thanks for sharing Gloria’s life.
Rip to a true pioneer, a beautiful enterprising woman, a star. I am sad I have to write these words, but that’s the way it is. S.
With many comments all over the internet on Gloria’s death, how fitting just to sit back and be able to listen to the great lady in her own words.
Gloria was one of a kind.
Love the interview. Gloria was always a class act and I loves the roles she played on film. Any chance you could put up the whole 4 hours of interview if you have it?
A classic interview, one for the best. Gloria was a such an icon, we will all miss her enormously.
[…] the show also featured the very last Q&As with regal porn star turned High Society publisher Gloria Leonard and crackpot Screw magazine kingpin Al Goldstein before they each stripped off their mortal garb in […]
Gloria was all class, a mentor to and champion of myself and company during our time “in the business.”
I can remember her hosting the talk show “The Gloria Leonard Show” back in the 1980s on a now defunct cable station where she interviewed people in the adult film industry. That was the first time that I saw these people as regular artists who had something to say about their work. Great show.
She will be sorely missed.
Gloria was a big influence in my late teen and early twenties. I was raised a religious kid and not aware of the world. Gloria and her magazine open up a hole new word to me.