The Curse of “Boyfriendinitis”

Adult Video News reported that a newcomer named Leena was so ecstatic about her heart-throb Peter North coming on her face that she left it on to show her boyfriend.

The boyfriend’s reaction was not reported, but he must have been more tolerant of his lady-love’s new career than the men described below.  These worthies are examples of that pornmaker’s headache called “boyfriendinitis.”

(Excerpts from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

Amy Rogers (with Tom Byron) in DIRTY PICTURES

I’d hired stunning, voluptuous Robin Cannes for Dirty Pictures, only to have her husband decide at the last moment that
he didn’t want his wife in pornos. (I replaced her with equally voluptuous Amy Rogers, whose boyfriend, porn actor Kevin James, was glad to see her getting work.)

At one of Joe Elliot’s casting sessions, I hired a stunning new woman with the porn name of Connie Lindstrom.  She was every man’s fantasy of a flaxen-haired Swedish goddess.  Then, before the shoot, her fiance gave her genital herpes.  Unlike most porn stars, Connie was ethical enough to refuse to pass it along to screen partners.  She limited herself to fellatio–frustrating the studs who wanted a go at her cunny.

Samantha Strong claimed she got into porn to spite her boyfriend; then she left the business to please her new one, a wealthy Israeli. He reportedly walked into South’s office with $250,000 in cash, wanting to buy up all her movies and take them off the market–he was told the task was impossible. Then Strong decided her new love had a drug problem, dropped him, and returned to porn.

Adult Video News quoted giddily sardonic Nikki Wilde’s assessment of her marriage: “I hate him! We’re still married…I hope he dies soon. You hear this, (name withheld)? I’m gonna get you, ’cause I’m a Scorpio and you fucked me over.”

AVN reported a divorce proceedings stemming from a “background” actress telling her spouse she was going to a church festival, when actually she was heading for the set of Oriental Treatment II.

One of my favorite screen ladies, whom I won’t name in the interest of preserving her domestic tranquility, married a wealthy man who demanded she leave the business–which she did. Yet, she snuck off to perform in one of Superior’s features. Maybe she was bored.

Kristara Barrington lamented, “When I come home to my boyfriend and we make love, I think of it as work almost.”

Musing over why industry love affairs were so short-term, Juliet Anderson said, “When you drive a bus ten hours a day, you don’t want to spend your vacation on a Greyhound.”

Pursuing porn’s promise of wealth, many actresses would echo Samantha Strong’s declaration upon signing a 15-picture contract with Western Visuals: “I do not have, nor do I want a personal life right now.” Alice Springs put it simply: “I don’t have a boyfriend, thank God.”

OK, so a private-life lover can sour a porn career.  What about when both partners work in porn?  Good? Bad? Disastrous?  All of the above?

___________

Next:  Screwings: On-screen and Off.  When Porn Careers Clash

 

Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 6: Lovestruck, Sunstruck and Buttboy-struck

From SKINFLICKS Chapter 12, The Goddess

Whap! Whap! Whap!

Traci had slammed Marc Wallice on his back and was slapping his face. “Come on, bigmouth!” she taunted. “Come on, bigmouth!”

I’d protested that even mild S and M was now legally risky, but Traci said Wallice needed this to get turned on. I hoped she’d miss those weakened nasal membranes.

Wallice’s erection showed why he was the ladies’ choice for anal sex; it was slim and curved. South’s rival, Reb Sawitz of the Pretty Girl International modeling agency, made sure women working with Wallice knew they were choosing comfort over safety. Reb would reach his beefy arm into a closet, pull out a magazine and slap it down on his desk. It was paper-clipped open to a full-page photo of Wallice taking an erection up his rear.

“I’m no butt-boy,” Wallice always protested. “I only did it that one time. I was twenty years old. I was broke and desperate.”

“What about the other ones Reb keeps in his closet?” I joked.

Wallice’s eyes went wide. He began to sputter.

(In 1998, actresses Tricia Devereaux and Brooke Ashley became HIV-positive after working with Wallice. [See Chapter20] )

Traci had been dreading getting naked. “I fucked up,” she said. “I fell asleep on the beach.” Her midriff was crimson. She seemed about to cry.

“Not to worry,” said Kerri, the make-up artist, who quickly turned the red into a nice, deep tan.

8:07. With four of porn’s best in action, the gods finally smiled. Traci slapped, Wallice rose (though his cheeks looked like they’d vacationed with her), and the two emcees played musical fornicators with the winners of the Erotic Olympics, Tom Byron and Cara Lott.

(Cara got her stage name from a producer who observed that she really does “care a lot.” The slim, blonde pixie, still looking teenaged after ten years in the sex trade, was a woman of many hustles. Impressed by the intensity she put into the action, I joked, “We got so turned on watching you that now the whole crew wants some.”

“You know,” Cara said hopefully, “I give group rates.”)

x x x x x x

8:42. The crew rolled up the blue backdrop to reveal the living room set behind it. No slowdown. No lost hard-ons. A whole new scene for a different movie. But just when I thought we were going to breeze to the finish, that damned sunburn beneath the cosmetic tan began to peel. Traci was mortified. She pulled off flaps of skin as soon as they came loose.

“Traci don’t!” Kerri exclaimed. “I can’t match the skin underneath.” But Traci continued picking at it, and Kerri’s frantic cover-ups looked like skin grafts by med school dropouts.

Joe Farmer had a suggestion. “Instead of this blotchy look, why don’t we let it look like what it really is: peeling sunburn?”

Kerri washed off the make-up. The only one unhappy with the result was Traci. “I look like shit! And I never look bad in my movies.”

She wanted to do her remaining sex lying on her stomach. I wanted “reverse cowgirl” (straddling the man, facing away from him) and “spoon”(lying on her side, her back to the man). These are the best positions for showing off a gorgeous body.

“But I look best on my stomach. This snakeskin is gross!”

“It’s fine. C’mon, let’s do it.”

“IT LOOKS UGLY!”

“C’mon, Traci. We’re wasting time. Let’s do it.”

Traci glared at me. I had a sudden fear she was about to explode.

“C’mon, Traci…please?” A time-honored porn directing technique was begging. I didn’t want a power struggle at 9:05 PM. Traci must’ve been thinking the same thing. “OK,” she said stiffly. “It’s your movie.”

This scene was to be an erotic climax. It required energy and rapport between Tom and Traci surpassing that of previous scenes. But now, I was afraid her performance would be stilted and mechanical.

Tom Byron to the rescue. He’d been like a schoolboy waiting for a last dance with the prom queen. And he did what a porn stud is never expected to do. He didn’t just fuck Traci; he made love to her. He knew exactly how she liked to be kissed, nuzzled, touched and tongued. He knew how to angle his entry, to time his thrusts to hers, to keep brushing his fingers on her clitoris though his shoulder looked like it would pop out of its socket. He didn’t shut his eyes to enter his own fantasyland; his concentration was always on her.

Traci became oblivious to her “snakeskin.” The Love Call built up, then caught inside her, coming out in bits and bursts. Byron grabbed Traci’s hips and gave a final series of fast strokes. Traci screamed her climax, then settled back into his arms. Byron pressed his face into her neck. I let the shot hold long.

Finally, Byron opened his eyes, blinked, and asked, “Do we have anything else?”

“Yes. Your come shot.”

“Oh, yeah!” An unlikely oversight for a veteran stud.

After Byron did his professional duty, the couple embraced, their hair and arms hiding their features. I let them have their private moment, shutting out the lights and cameras.

“OK…great…Cut.”

Traci immediately sprang up. In a moment, she was on the phone to a cab dispatcher. “I need to be out of here in fifteen minutes! My plane leaves at 10:30!”

Actually, it left at 11. I thought she was just rushing the cabbie, but her next call got her an earlier flight. All that worry about time, and she’d leave a half hour early.

Traci snatched up her $1200 cash, scribbled “Kristie E Nussman” on the model release, and pulled on some jeans, all in one continuous motion.

The cabbie honked and the most competent, mature and sophisticated 22 year old I’d ever met hurried off into the night. If someone had told me she was only l6, I’d have answered, “You better stay out of Marc Wallice’s stash.”

______________________

Next: Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 7: Overexposed

Starlets or Harlots? Part 1: How Video created Teenage Tycoons

The cocaine being snorted by the starlets gathered in the restroom at the 1986 Winter CES Show didn’t bother Alana, Superior’s receptionist/Jill-of-all-trades…What offended her was that the ladies were discussing the most efficient way to divide up the spaces in their hotel suites, so they could turn the maximum number of tricks that evening with customers they met during the show.
“Most of the girls here were in on it,” Alana exclaimed when she returned to the Superior Video booth. “I thought they were supposed to be actresses, not tawdry little whores!”

The preceding, from SKINFLICKS, introduces chapters about the new breed of porn queens who seized the opportunity to make big money during porn’s video revolution. Theirs was a hothouse world of fierce competition, of sex coaches and “porno stage mothers”; of compulsive plastic surgery and multiple breast enlargements; a world where 19-year-olds became cottage industry corporations.  Before video, none of this was possible. (Note: passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

In 1981, before the video revolution took off, Veronica Hart, “the Audrey Hepburn of porn,” lamented in a Playboy interview, “I think I’ll have worked a year before any of my movies are out—there’s such a backlog of films that you sometimes have to wait eight months for a theater date.  Then I’ll work another year before anyone really knows me.”
In contrast, videos arrived in stores the same month they were shot, and new women could rocket to stardom in weeks.  Or sooner: CDI’s Traci Lords clone Barbi and Vidway’s Heather Hunter, promoted at trade shows, became mini-celebrities before they appeared in a single feature!
The enormous volume of video productions meant an attractive newcomer could work non-stop for months on end. In 1981, Veronica Hart worked in only eleven features during a nine-month period; a decade later, lovely English blonde Taylor Wane starred in over 80 videos in the same length of time.
A performer’s videos built her a nationwide base of fans who’d pay to see her on the dance circuit. As a featured act, she could make five to ten thousand for a week’s engagement. Established top-draw Amber Lynn could command up to $24,000 for a week of naked prancing.  
Two other factors merged with the fast-track video scene to bring women flocking to agent Jim South’s Van Nuys studio: a Reaganomics-era poverty rate 27 percent higher in 1988 than in 1970 and the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1970s that freed a generation of girls from the constraints of the past.  A 1988 federal survey concluded that 51.9% of young women aged 15-19 had premarital sex—up from 28.6% in 1970.  In AVN interviews, Ginger Lynn said she had sex “ten times a day” at age 13…a sweet-faced blonde from rural North Carolina told me in South’s offices that she was 13 when her mother recommended anal intercourse as “hillbilly birth control.”
Striving to increase their marketability, women became what director Greg Dark called “plastic surgery junkies.” Nips and tucks and nose jobs were only the beginning. Multiple breast enhancements gave Beverlee Hills (formerly Gina Gianetti) a 60-inch chest and Wendy Whoppers claimed her basketball-sized bumpers measured 81 inches.  Lynn LeMay…grabbed my hands and shoved them into her breasts. “Don’t they feel natural?” she enthused.  She bubbled on about the slits in her armpits where the silicone gels were slipped in being almost invisible. “Not bad for only $5000, huh?” Conducting my own assessment, I agreed that the added material was delectably soft.

Stardom opened the door to other hustles. Like mainstream stars, they hired publicists, went on autograph junkets, booked talk shows, and invented “exposes” for Hard Copy and A Current Affair.  They formed fan clubs, set up 900-numbers and appeared on baseball-type playing cards. Via mail order, they sold autographed photos, tapes, newsletters and the ever-popular “unwashed” panties. (A lady who requested anonymity told me she kept up with the demand for her used undies by recruiting girlfriends to “break in” new pairs.)

Seeing the money their daughters were making, mothers wanted in on the action. Moms played roles in the careers of Jamie Summers, Sabrina Dawn, Tami Lee Curtis, and—tragically—in the death of Megan Leigh, which was either a suicide or a murder, depending upon who you ask.  (Fathers were less enthused with the idea of their daughters being porn stars.  One pissed-off papa with mob ties threatened to have agent Jim South killed, until a porn mogul, with even stronger underworld ties, dissuaded the mad dad.)

Taking advantage of these competitive starlets, pornographers pushed them to their limits—and beyond.  A self-described “total emotional, mental and physical wreck,” Nina Alexander suffered a breakdown. Taylor Wane spent two weeks “in a sick-bed…covered with bruises.” Self-acknowledged “nymphomaniac” Mai Lin, whose porn career lasted from the mid-‘70s to the mid-‘80s, said it took her three years to fully recuperate from a rectal injury.  In a 1989 issue of Erotic Film Guide, veteran pornographer Bill Margold said that under current working conditions “the women will be literally screwed to death. It’s the worst kind of burnout…”

My next entry (Starlets or Harlots? Part 2) will detail the casualties, including suicides, among video-era women. Topics will include drugs, obsessed fans, disease, social ostracism and the phenomenon known to pornographers as “boyfriendinitis.”

Part 3 will deal with those who enjoyed successful porn queen careers, showing what it took to survive the pitfalls.  I will discuss my all-time favorites, such as Nina Hartley, Shanna McCullough and Lilly Marlene.  I’ll also include my worst directing experience ever, with a woman who became one of the biggest stars of the late 1980s.