The day was April 23, 1978. Alcoholic dwarf Herve Villechaize celebrated his 35th birthday at his Los Angeles mansion with a mound of cocaine and a parade of reluctant hookers. At the same time the dignity of those girls died once and for all, life was beginning anew just over 3000 miles north.The thermometer read 3 degrees. It was unusually warm in Inuvik, located on the banks of the Mackenzie River in Canada's Northwest Territories, north of the Arctic Circle. Inside Inuvik Regional Hospital, Sam Whitney and his wife Winnie were eagerly awaiting the birth of their first child, who they had already decided would be named Jason, whether it was a boy or girl. When he was born, there was no doubt about Jason's gender. In fact, one of the nurses was so impressed that, upon seeing Jason soon after his birth, she blurted out, "That's the biggest little wee wee I've ever seen." After that, he was known amongst the nurses as "Wee Wee," a nickname that has stuck with Jason to this day.
Jason's parents were not the typical Inuvik parents. They had come to the Northwest Territories just a few months earlier. The Harvard-educated Sam was an eccentric venture capitalist, who funded projects in large part with cotton-gin money still left over from Sam's great-great-grandfather, Eli. He had funded such surprisingly successful enterprises as the Bicentennial Bastard (a smug talking doll dressed in red, white, and blue who asked "are you my daddy?" when shaken violently), the Pet Turd, and Casino Salt Lake. Sam met Winnie while at Harvard. Beautiful and well-endowed, Winnie was considered by many in the Boston/Cambridge area to be the best dancer at Tig Ol' Bitties, Cambridge's lone strip club. Sam and Winnie married in a small, yet extravagant, ceremony in the Canary Islands.
Despite Winnie's concerns, the hard-gambling Sam had come to Inuvik with the ill-fated conception of turning it into Canada's answer to Las Vegas. Sam had seen the success of Indian casinos in America and thought he could tap into what he hoped would become a burgeoning gambling market among the indigenous peoples of northwestern Canada. Drawing on Inuvik's 56 days of continuous sunlight in the summer and 30 days of continuous darkness in the winter, The Day and Night Casino was sure to attract visitors from all over the world, especially considering the pending completion of the Dempster Highway, which allowed for a straight shot from the bustling Yukon capital of Whitehorse, a mere 760 miles away. He pitched the idea to the Inuvialuit and Dene, both of whom roundly rejected the idea due to a complete lack of profit potential. Dejected, the Whitneys had to leave the Northwest Territories with nothing more than fluency in Gwich'in and Inuktitut.
The Whitney family's next stop would be the San Fernando Valley. In early 1984, after a series of horrible investments in race horses, antique spoons, the Argentine peso, and Braniff Airlines, Sam's fortune had dwindled to nearly nothing. Jason had started kindegarten, and Wanda (Jason's little sister, born in 1980), was nearing school herself. In a November 1985 interview with Club Magazine, Sam recalled, "After Braniff tanked, I figured I could fall back on my spoons, but it turns out there just isn't much of a market for stupid crap. So, I turned to what any struggling venture capitalist turns to in time of need: I started funding stag flicks."
With the money, a director, and a female starlet (Sindy Sunday), all Sam needed was a male lead. Hundreds of auditions turned up empty. Then one day, a call from Jason's kindergarten teacher changed everything. It turns out that Jason had been caught in the girls bathroom playing doctor with a sixth grader. Due to severely lax California child labor and child pornography laws, Jason became the youngest porn star of all-time.
Fame came quickly for Jason, even though he came slowly. Using the stage name Wee Wee, his films became instant hits: "Wee Wee All Over Your Face," "Wee's All Up In That Ass," "The Adventures of Wee Wee and Bagina," and "Wee Wee on Sunday." It seemed America couldn't get enough of Wee Wee. And it seemed Wee Wee couldn't get enough of America. Soon he was hanging out with a who's who of child celebrities. Parties with Danny Cooksey. Jetting to the Hamptons with Keshia Knight Pulliam. Disneyland with Emmanuel Lewis. Dinner dates with Tracey Gold. TP'ing Danny Pintauro's house with Brice Beckham. All-night coke binges with Dana Plato. Jason's life was a dream come true.
But for Winnie, that dream was a nightmare. She constantly pleaded with Sam to let Jason have a normal life. She recounted, "Being the only mom on the block whose kid was a pre-teen porn star didn't exactly get me invited to many tupperware parties. It did make for some uncomfortable 'so what's your kid up to' conversations. But Sam just wouldn't let Jason be a normal kid. We would fight all the time about it."
Things came to a head on August 3, 1986 when Winnie returned from grocery shopping to find Jason receiving oral sex from Winnie's Jazzercise instructor. It was more than Winnie could take. After a heated argument with Sam that lasted throughout the night, Winnie took Wanda and left. The two would land back in Cambridge, where Winnie got her old job back at Tig Ol' Bitties. Soon after, Winnie and Sam were divorced. Jason didn't know it, but he would never see his mother or sister again.
Jason took his mother's departure and his parents' divorce extremely hard. All of a sudden, having sex with 2 women at the same time who were almost 3 times his age wasn't enough for him. He was entering a dark stage in his life, one that very few nine-year-olds have to endure. Under Dana Plato's tutelage and watchful eye, alcohol and drugs began to take control of Jason's life. He was often late for shoots or completely missed them, and when he was there, he had all but lost his ability to pop on command. He and Plato were often seen on Venice Beach "fixing" each other syringes full of heroin. His life was crumbling, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The worst part about it was that he knew his life was collapsing. In a July 2005 interview with PMQ Magazine, Jason remembered his helplessness: "Plain and simple, I was out of hand. For Christ's sake, I was nine, and all I worried about was whether I could get drugs out of my system long enough to keep a hard-on so I could earn the paycheck that would allow me to get more drugs. It was a vicious cycle."
Just when he thought things couldn't get worse, on June 6, 1987, they did. At approximately 11pm, Jason returned to the house in Sherman Oaks that he and Sam shared. Jason was returning from a four-day party at Drew Barrymore's, and he was simply looking for his bed so he could crash. There would be no sleep for Jason that evening, however. When he returned home, all of the lights were on in the house and the stereo was blaring Faster Pussycat's self-titled debut album, but unlike what was coming from the speakers, this was no "Babylon." Sam was nowhere to be found. Worried, Jason searched the entire house, eventually finding Sam face down, floating in the pool, which Sam had made to be shaped like a giant vagina.
In the kind of ironic twist normally reserved for Hitchcock, the culprit was the very same starlet Sam had vaulted into superstardom and who Jason penetrated countless times, Sindy Sunday. It seems that Sunday was upset with Sam after he would not allow her in his films after she contracted herpes. She stormed into the house that night, begged and pleaded for another chance, and eventually threw Sam into the pool after knocking him unconscious with an oversized dildo from Sam's readily accessible prop box. Wraught with guilt, she confessed the next day.
With Winnie out of the picture, and Wanda virtually non-existent in Sam's life, Sam left the bulk of his estate, valued at over $200 million, to Jason. With nothing else to live for, Jason checked into the Betty Ford Clinic, where he was the youngest patient ever. He was finally released from the Clinic in April 1988, just days before his 10th birthday.
Armed with a king's ransom, Jason decided to leave the world of pornography behind him. At the same time, through his work, he had become very financially astute. He sacked away all but about $10,000 in high-interest bank accounts, and set out "to find himself." He knew that the only way to do this was to leave his money in the bank and earn an honest living, which he did. Over the next seven years, he would travel the world, working odd jobs each step of the way. He was a bootblack at London's Paddington Station. He served as a member of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, recording three confirmed kills. He played the role of Marcello in the Vienna Opera House's production of La Boheme. He sold fruit in a Sudanese market, scarves in Riyadh, duck at a butcher shop in Peking, and street paintings in Reykjavik of Mt. Esja, Faxafloi Bay, and Snaefellsjokull Glacier. He dealt Baccarat in Monte Carlo. He worked as a conductor on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, making the full trip from Moscow to Vladivostok three times. He was a professional surfer on Australia's Gold Coast, earning second-place at the annual Coolangatta Surf Championship. He even returned to acting, receiving non-speaking parts in Waterworld and House Party 3.
All of this gave Jason a deep appreciation for hard work. He returned to the States in 1995 and took up residence in Richmond, Indiana. He yearned to be known for something outside of porn, so he took his GED, SAT, and ACT, and applied to several colleges. Wanting to attend a school in the Midwest with at least five NCAA titles in both basketball and men's swimming, he settled on Indiana University, enrolling as a freshman in the fall of 1996.
It was at IU where he would join what many in the field consider the greatest fraternity class of all-time: The Sigma class of the Alpha Psi chapter of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity
(shown here after taking home yet another "Best Class" award at the National Interfraternity Council Awards Ceremony). It was also at IU where he would meet the love of his life, Lesli Mayl. Leslie was fairly well-known around Bloomington as the Nico part in Lady Godiva's Operation, the state of Indiana's only Velvet Undergound tribute band. After catching a show in which Leslie performed a particularly haunting version of "Femme Fatale," it was love at first sight for Jason.His courtship of Lesli was not easy at first. She was dating Dirk Sherman, the lead singer of Dream Police, Indiana's second-most popular Cheap Trick tribute band behind Surrender. Even then, though, she saw something in Jason. Whether it was his charming wit, his soft blue eyes, or his tales of "slitting the throats of those Contra bastards," Lesli was becoming more and more drawn to Jason. After she found Dirk in bed with Sheila Jones, bassist for Shy Boy, southern Indiana's third-most popular Bananarama tribute band (behind Cruel Summer and Venus), that was enough of an excuse to let her do what she had secretly been longing to do: run, run, run to Jason's outstretched arms and never look back.
That she did. Both graduated with degrees in English and Social Work. After graduation, they co-authored a series of wildly successful, off-the-wall self-help books, including: "Fuck Yourself Thin," "'You're the Best Around': What 'Karate Kid' Can Teach You About You," "Marrying Up, Running a Marathon, and Other Things You Can't Do If You're Morbidly Obese," "'Get These Spiders Off of Me!': Ridding Yourself of LSD," and "I'll Bet You $500 You Can Stop Gambling."
In July 2004, Jason and Lesli got married at a lavish ceremony at a small Centerville, Ohio castle left over from the reign of Edward III. Among guests at the reception were the drummer from No Doubt, Richard Marx's manager, and former Philadelphia Eagle Seth Joyner.
The couple resides in Richmond, Indiana, where they run Joe's Pizza, which is, as Jason described, "the techno-pagan pizza joint in Richmond." When they're not busy serving pizza to Wiccans while listening to Alice Deejay, Jason and Lesli enjoy playing rugby, making fun of legless high school football players on Jason's blog, and funding genetic research that they hope will one day result in a domesticated, rideable bird.
Here are some of things you might not know about Jason:
Favorite football player of all-time: Earl Campbell
Favorite David Letterman alias: Earl Hofert
Favorite basketball player of all-time: Earl Boykins
Favorite stop on the London Underground: Earl's Court
Favorite Indiana University quarterback who never played a down in college, despite being the Indiana high school record holder for passing yards: Earl Haniford
Favorite former Colorado State football coach: Earle Bruce
Favorite Supreme Court justice of all-time: Earl Warren
Favorite constitutional law plaintiff: Clarence Earl Gideon (his victory assured that state courts had to provide lawyers for criminal defendants who were unable to afford their own)
Favorite Baltimore Orioles manager of all-time: Earl Weaver
Favorite actor of all-time: James Earl Jones
Favorite rapper: DMX (real name - Earl Simmons)
Favorite Lady Byng Trophy winner of all-time: Earl Reibel
Farovite song: "Duke of Earl"
Favorite TV show: "My Name is Earl"
Favorite English nobility title: Earl
Favorite 1920s film stunt pilot: Earl Robinson
Favorite male name starting with an "E": Eddie
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