You’ve probably never heard of Chelly Wilson. I hadn’t until I watched Valerie Kontakos’ intriguing, partly animated documentary, Queen of the Deuce, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 3.
A Greek Jewish woman from the city of Thessaloniki who immigrated to the United States prior to World War II, she was a very unusual, even eccentric, figure.
A caring mother and a canny entrepreneur, she was the improbable owner of the largest chain of porn theaters in New York City from the 1960s to the 1990s. All named after Greek gods, they were fabulously successful and earned Wilson, a wheeler dealer, a fortune before they were closed down by the city in the name of morality.
Kontakos traces the arc of her life from Thessaloniki, whose venerable Jewish community was virtually wiped out by the Nazis, to New York City, where she picked herself up and prevailed against all odds.
People who knew Wilson were usually in awe, describing her as a force of nature, a ball of fire, and incredibly engaging. “Everything said about her seemed like it was made up,” says her grandson with a smile on his face.
Although she could be talkative, she never spoke about her past. In 1983, however, she was persuaded to record her memories of Thessaloniki on a tape recorder.
A Sephardic Jew born as Rachel Serrero, she spent her formative years in a cosmopolitan town which had been ruled by the Ottoman Turks until just after World War I. Her mother tongue was Latino, the lingua franca of Sephardim in the Balkans. She learned Greek on the streets.
She aspired to be a doctor, but her father forced her into a loveless marriage which soon disintegrated, but which produced a son, Daniel, and a daughter, Paulette.
She left Greece on the last boat bound for the United States before the outbreak of the war. She entrusted Paulette in the care of a Christian neighbor. Her ex-husband and son went to Palestine.
Arriving in New York City with only $5, she eked out a living selling hot dogs and cold beverages from a refreshment stand. Later, he worked for a shipping company.
As she struggled to adjust herself to America, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki faced mortal danger from the Nazi occupation force. Nearly all its Jewish residents were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland and murdered there. Her brother and sister were among the victims.
By one estimate, only five percent of Thessaloniki’s Jewish inhabitants survived, including Paulette, whom she reclaimed after the war.
Her second marriage, to a British Jew named Rex Wilson who had anglicized his surname, was tumultuous.
Adept at recognizing a good opportunity, she opened a soft-core porn theater in the vicinity of Times Square in the 1960s. Before the age of the internet, these theaters were quite popular and lucrative for their proprietors. By the 1970s, porn theaters in New York had acquired hardcore movies.
She may have had connections to the mafia, but this allegation is unproven.
One of the first New Yorkers to import gay porn films, Wilson expanded into the production and distribution of pornographic movies. She was never ashamed of her shady business.
She also operated a Greek restaurant, which enjoyed a great deal of popularity.
With New York cracking down on porn theaters, Wilson closed her film production company in the 1980s and her theaters a decade later. At last count, only two porn theaters remain in the city today.
Wilson, a larger-than-life person who died in 1994, was the kind of flamboyant personality to whom the legendary journalist Damon Runyon would have been drawn. Kontakos did not personally know Wilson, but her biopic establishes her as an emblematic New York City character.