Porn’s Boyfriends From Hell

Gayle Sterling had the attributes that were in great demand: shapely body, pretty face, easy-going demeanor, long flaxen hair, and a love of sex. She wasn’t hired more often because of “Dennis,” who usually accompanied her on shoots.

He wasn’t the helpful sort of on-set mate, like Nina Hartley’s husband Dave, who’d run errands, string cables or hold pussy lights. Dennis would sit there watching, with an aura of menace. During the Chocolate Cream shoot, he lit up a joint.

“I like smoke as much as anyone,” I said, “but I have a policy against drugs on my set.”

The tall, bellicose man glared at me. I stared right back. If there was to be a contest of wills on my production, I wasn’t about to come out second. After a few tense moments, he snuffed it out.

After we wrapped, I found out why Gayle hauled Dennis along like excess baggage. She motioned me to a stairwell, away from the crew packing up equipment. Like a cop about to frisk a suspect, Gayle leaned Dennis against the rail. Chattering about how well-hung he was, she unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants. I wondered what this was all about; Dennis didn’t work in porn movies.

Then I recalled how the couple had kept telling me about their exploits swinging with third parties–both male and female. Gayle alone I might have considered, but I wanted no part of this scene. To this couple, Gayle’s porn work was part of their elaborate fantasy life.

(Excerpts from SKINFLICKS, such as above, are in italics.)

Many a porn queen has found out the hard way that the worst thing in the world to have is a boyfriend.

A common phenomenon is the beautiful porn star, who could have her choice of gentle, caring men, yet sticks with a brutal boyfriend who beats her silly. (Example: Posche Lynn’s boyfriend who bashed her head open with a vase during an argument. Reportedly, they “patched” things up.)

Many, such as adult film historian Jim Holliday, cite low self-esteem among porn ladies. Declaring he’d no longer date sex pros after “more than half a decade of romantic frustration and grief”, Dave Patrick, editor of the Bay Area sex tabloid Spectator, quoted a rock musician who’d written in to agree with Patrick’s decision: “Strippers and porn stars are a lot like rock ’n’ roll groupies. More often than not, they come from similar backgrounds of sexual and emotional abuse. They don’t have much self-esteem. Treat ’em good and they’ll walk all over you; treat ’em like shit and they’ll worship the ground you walk on.”

At lunch one day, four of us were discussing the sobbing ladies who call (porn agent Jim) South to cancel appointments due to black eyes and chipped teeth. “They’re beautiful and they’ve always had men bust ass to do them favors,” said (porn director) Richard Mailer. “So they play ’em for chumps. They only respect the dude who treats them like dirt.”

“Maybe,” I conjectured, “They find it easy to leave the responsibility for their affairs in the hands of a guy who dominates them. When they step out of line, he clouts them to establish his control. Maybe they take that for love.”

South wisely refrained from offering his own theories. He had to deal with these ladies every day and didn’t want anything he said getting back to them. But the problem of the meddlesome mate was so common that South–and others–had a word for it: “boyfriendinitis.”

Next: The Curse of “Boyfriendinitis”

Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 10: Ho’-ray for Hollywood

How do you make the transition from porn stardom to a so-called “legitimate” acting career?

You do it by posing as a poor, abused child, victimized by evil pornographers.

As Ron Jeremy wrote in Adult Video News: “Isn’t it nice that such a sweet kid can make so many career moves, make so much money, beat her IRS rap, her fake passport felony rap, and at the same time bury an entire industry! Only in Hollywood!”

Below is the conclusion of SKINFLICKS, Chapter 12: The Goddess.

To Jeremy and others with ambitions in the non-porn film world, the most grating result of the Lords affair was how it opened Hollywood to her. No longer was Traci a scarlet woman too steeped in shame for the wholesome sponsors of American television and silver screen. Now she was an innocent, a child-victim.

As usual, Traci played her role well. “At that age, you don’t really understand what you’re doing,” she said. “You don’t really understand the consequences.” She claimed that producers kept her stoned on drugs and her agent got most of the money she made.

Hollywood bought her act. Aaron Spelling was reported to have paid $100,000 for the rights to her life story. Traci appeared in the TV series’ Wiseguy, MacGyver, and Married with Children. She starred in the sci-fi / horror film Not of This World. She got roles in the feature films Fast Food, Shock ’em Dead, A Time to Die, Raw Nerve, The Object of Desire, Laser Moon and the John Waters comedies Nutty Nut and Cry Baby–which AVN editor Gene Ross called “a poetically apt title.”

To the industry that made her show biz success possible, Traci showed no gratitude. Instead she made the most damaging claim of all: that those she had worked for knew she was a minor.

“She tells us that she was told to just get some kind of I. D.,” D.A. Reiner said. “And that was done with more a wink and a nod than any serious effort to determine what her real age was.” Was this allegation true?

With the strict penalties–forfeiture of assets, long prison terms and six figure fines–for using underaged models, pornographers run like hell from those whose age is questionable.

In the wake of the Lords mess, young-looking starlets Nikki Charm, Ali Moore and Kristara Barrington were ostracized upon the first hints of rumors that they too were underaged.

The positive long-term effect of the Lords crisis was the increased awareness within the industry that porn video’s lure of quick riches attracted sexually precocious kids. As minors, immune to prosecution, they had nothing to lose if discovered.

Pornographers could lose everything. Contending that knowledge of Traci’s age was irrelevant, Federal attorneys initiated felony prosecutions. The adult movie industry braced for battle.

x x x x x x

By the early 1980s, a bond of good faith had formed between L.A. legal authorities and sex moviemakers who’d agreed to refrain from depicting rape, scatology, hardcore S and M, bestiality, use of minors and the depiction of minors by adult performers.

Consequently, when the Lords bombshell exploded, L.A. authorities gave the adult industry a chance to escape prosecution by immediately removing all Lords products from commercial circulation. To the amazement of police and prosecutors, the gargantuan task was completed almost overnight.

Government prosecutors went ahead with their test cases, under the Federal child pornography statutes. Agent South and producers Ronald Kantor and Rupert McNee won acquittals, but the Government got a conviction against Ruby Gottesman of Xcitement Video.

Then Gottesman’s conviction was overturned, and the statute that allowed conviction without proof that the defendant knew the performer was underaged was ruled unconstitutional. The Government appealed.

In the 1990 United States v. Thomas case, the Ninth Circuit Court had ruled that even if a defendant thought that the performer in question was of legal age, the Government could obtain a conviction.

Finally, on November 29, 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Federal child porn law, while ruling that prosecutors must prove defendants had prior knowledge that a performer in question was underaged. The industry breathed a collective sigh of relief–but Rubin Gottesman didn’t; his conviction was upheld. The prosecution had presented evidence that Gottesman had sold hardcore Lords tapes to an undercover L.A. vice cop in 1987, by which time Lords’ former underaged status had become common industry knowledge.

There have been at least two more underaged actresses since the Traci Lords affair. I videotaped one of them.

Flushed with the afterglow of her sizzling debut in a Blacks and Blondes loop, a cute newcomer named Gigi (porn name Penny Nichols) gushed that she could now afford a $1500 pearlescent paint job with burgundy pinstripes for the ’69 Chevelle she’d just bought. Then she let it slip that her big concern now was passing her driver’s test.

Gigi’s mother complained to police that the girl was only 16 years old. On March 9, 1987, charges were filed against Jerome Tanner and agent Reb Sawitz. The veteran agent produced copies of a birth certificate and temporary driver’s license, which showed Gigi’s age as 19, exonerating Sawitz and Tanner under California law.

An underaged model scandal almost on the scale of the Traci Lords affair erupted in 1991, when Diane Stewart, a Canadian girl with the porn name Alexandria Quinn, appeared in over 70 videos before her 18th birthday.

Once again, tapes and magazines were frantically yanked from the market. Once again, real-appearing fake IDs precluded California prosecutions. And, once again, the industry had proven vulnerable to the deceit of a beautiful teenager.

x x x x x x

The Traci Lords scandal and the Government’s “War on Porn” did for sex movies what controversy always does. Adult tape sales soared from a wholesale value of $350 million in 1985 to almost $450 million in ’86. (With the uproar dying down in ’87, sales fell to $390 million.) It must have rankled the members of the Meese Commission to read Jerome Tanner’s taunting, “We need another report like that one.”

The industry needed another Traci Lords too–a legal one. With the entrenched copycat ethic, it was only natural to find a clone.

“She’s a deadringer for Traci Lords,” said Jack Michaelson of Cinderella Distributing. “Barbii has the fabled Traci pout down to perfection. Everybody’s crazy about her look.”

Barbii even spoke like Traci: “I’m a perfectionist and I don’t feel comfortable looking at myself.” In less than two months, out came Introducing Barbii, Lusty Desires, Backdoor to Hollywood, Barbii’s Way, and Spend the Holidays with Barbii. Penthouse lined her up for four different spreads.

Barbii’s wasn’t the only nouveau pout. In 1987 it seemed like half the new adult video boxcovers fixed the customer with a petulant stare and the best bottom lip the cover model could manage. One actress–whose career was brief–even called herself “Staci Lords.”

The industry’s love-hate affair with Traci continued.

Surfacing a half-year after the scandal erupted was the only hardcore Traci Lords movie made after she’d turned eighteen. It was that phantom Paris production Lords and Dell had denied shooting.

Released by Caballero Distributing, the sardonically titled Traci I Love You provoked calls for a boycott, but instead became the best selling and renting adult tape of 1987. “When a statuesque French blonde named Monique uses her mouth to shove a black dildo into Traci,” wrote reviewer Thomas McMahon, “it seems like old times.”

That old warhorse Honi Webber galloped back into battle with her High Times Video release Traci’s Big Trick, which “tells the whole truth for the first time…from high school to Penthouse to her agent’s office.” Lords, played by Jaqueline Lorians, is shown having sex with “Guy Sadler” (Sy Adler) and with Honi Webber–played by slim Sharon Mitchell in a bit of casting against type.

In Traci Who?, “it’s 1991 and President Meese wants to outlaw pornography,” went Peter Keating’s December ’86 AVN review. “Traci Who? may be the only title on the adult market to exist simply so that someone could get a dig in on that wretched turncoat Traci Lords.”

The rancor lasted for years. When Lords promoted her exercise tape at the 1988 VSDA Show, AVN quoted an “industry director” as saying, “I’m surprised she wasn’t met with a chorus of Uzis.”

When I last saw Tom Byron, he was at a 1989 trade show, looking for work behind the cameras, not in front of them.

“What’s Traci up to these days?” I asked him.
Byron shrugged. “Who the hell cares?”

# # #

 

Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 9: The Split Hits the Fan

Apologies to my myriad fans, friends and followers for my week-long absence.  It’s good to be back.

Now, where were we?

Oh yes. This is the climax: the real reason for the whole Traci Lords trouble.  If she hadn’t made that one major misstep of choosing the wrong business partners in her carefully navigated porn career, she might still be revered as porn’s all-time greatest diva.

From SKINFLICKS, Chapter 12:

“Daveet, I don’t know about Traci Lords,” said Jerome Tanner. “I think she is very young.”

“Why do you think that?” I was negotiating to sell Jerry my business, and I suspected this was a ploy to beat down my price.

“Ever seen her without make-up, Daveet? She looks about thirteen.”

“Lots of ladies look young.”

Tanner leaned back under the spotlight that gave his small form dramatic presence against the dark wood paneling behind him. “Almost fifteen years I have been in this business. I have seen lots of women’s bodies. I know baby fat when I see it. And those tits. They have grown in the past year. You know why they defy gravity like that? Because gravity has not had long to work on them. I tell you, Daveet, even if Traci Lords was still available (she’d already signed her exclusive), I would not use her ever again.”

Two months later, neither would anyone else. On July 17, 1986, Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner announced that Lords had been under eighteen during her entire two-year hardcore movie career. Adult Film and Video Association attorney John Weston didn’t wait for proof. He called for the immediate removal from circulation of all Lords material. To keep the newly contraband tapes out of the hands of prosecutors, all manufacturers took them back for refunds or exchanges, though some of the movies had been on the rental market for over a year.

The biggest Lords loser I knew was a loops director trying to prove he could handle features. He’d put his life savings into a handsome 35 millimeter production. Lords was in every scene; he lost everything.

I came out unscathed. By the time three of Superior’s titles became illegal, I’d already sold them to Jerome Tanner. All I lost was $1276.50–Honi Webber never made good on her last check after her own company, HBO (Honi’s Big One-stop), and Sy Adler’s VIP (Video International Productions) were raided and forced into bankruptcy.

The anger came next. One producer was supposed to have hired goons to “hang her by the tits.” Traci disappeared into the minors protection programs of the LAPD, leaving the story behind the age disclosure to the conflicting accounts reported in AVN:

“An industry source said the entire situation stemmed from a money dispute between V.I.P., T.L.C., Lords and Stuart Dell, Lords’ reported boyfriend/manager. Lords and Dell were given $25,000, a new Mercedes and $1000 a week salaries, the source said, and were sent to Paris to make a picture. But when Lords and Dell returned, the source said, they had no movie nor any of the $25,000. It was soon after an ensuing dispute that questions about Lords’ age were raised, the source said…

“Other reported causes for the raid centered on Lords’ mother, who some said turned her daughter in after hearing about the Meese Commission’s report earlier in the month.

Other sources said her mother had been handling her affairs and went to the police following a dispute with Lords over money.

(Unlikely: a stupid move for someone pimping a minor in porn.)

“However, a close associate of Lords, who wished to remain anonymous, said her mother, whose name was not available, was not involved in any way. They said Lords had been a runaway from Ohio, and that her parents had been notified of her whereabouts and were on their way to California.”

They wouldn’t have far to drive according to the Los Angeles Times: Lords was a high school student in Redondo Beach when shebegan posing nude in 1984; she moved there with her family from Steubenville, Ohio in 1982.

An unauthorized biography in the form of a comic book from Personality Comics, Inc., of Massapequa, New York, had Traci coming west with her mother who’d just divorced Traci’s alchoholic father. Traci subsequently ran away from her mother’s home in Redondo Beach, California.

All reports concurred that Traci was not Kristie Nussman, born on November 17, 1962, but Nora Kuzma, born May 7, 1968. She allegedly purchased a birth certificate and used it to get the driver’s license and passport that talent agent South showed copies of to the L.A. District Attorney’s office.

(Traci said she chose her stage name because of her childhood crush on Hawaii Five-0 star Jack Lord. [Traci Lord was the name of Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story.])

Skeptics–South included–didn’t believe Lords was really underaged. They saw the whole affair as a scam to eliminate that glut of existing Lords tapes from competing with her new releases. If that were true, the scheme backfired; Traci, too, got blown out of the business.

Was the whole thing an act of desperation? There were rumors that Traci and her lover/co-producer Stuart Dell had fabricated the story that they’d blown all the production money on cocaine while in Paris and hadn’t shot a movie there. Wanting to break away from Lord’s partners, the couple was hiding the video, hoping to market it themselves. And the partners, smelling a scam, didn’t buy the coke story; they told the couple to turn over the videotapes–or else. According to that scenario, Traci and her mother went public with her age to put the partners under too much scrutiny to carry out their threats. If that scenario were true, the strategy worked.

There was another heavyweight in the ring. The IRS wanted its share of the money Lords had made. Was the age announcement meant to save Traci from being prosecuted as an adult for tax evasion?

Whatever the reasons for it, Traci–or her adult “coaches”–used the scandal skillfully. Porn star/AVN columnist Ron Jeremy wrote, “Isn’t it nice that such a sweet kid can make so many career moves, make so much money, beat her IRS rap, her fake passport felony rap, and at the same time bury an entire industry! Only in Hollywood!”

__________________________________

Next: Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 10: Ho’-ray for Hollywood  This will be the conclusion of this sordid story.  Then we can get back to more upbeat things like sex on a flying trapeze.

 

 

Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 1: Questions

On the Larry King Show (July 14, 2003) Traci Lords made the following claims about her career in porn:

“I was stoned for about three years, from fifteen to eighteen…”

“In that three-year period, you know, I made maybe $40,000 or something.” 

KING: A picture, $40,000…

LORDS: No.

KING: Total?

LORDS: For three years, yes.

———————

Was Traci Lords a child-victim, drugged, exploited, and financially ripped off?

Or was she an opportunistic child-savant, wise beyond her years, using the porn industry as a fast-track to wealth?

Could the answer to both of these questions be “True”?

The Traci Lords story, as I saw it, had so many different facets, that trying to condense it all into a couple of blog posts would be impossible. So I have decided to post–in a series–the entire 24-page chapter from SKINFLICKS.

Instead of my usual pace of roughly one post a week, I will let no more than a couple days lapse between entries from this chapter.

——————————

Chapter 12

THE GODDESS
1986 – 1990s

“She’s perfect,” sighed lovestruck stud Tom Byron. “I mean, every girl in this business has some kind of flaw. Like she might be a bitch, or does too much coke, or has a saggy ass–something. But Traci…she doesn’t have a single fault. She’s perfect in every way.”

Except two. For one thing, she didn’t have a smile. Something in her cheek lines made it almost a sneer–a “snile.” Traci Lords’ second flaw was much worse; it nearly destroyed an industry. It caused busts, bankruptcies and losses in the millions. It brought a Federal push to throw most of America’s adult movie producers in prison.

It was commercial pornography’s worst scandal and it came at the worst possible time: with Attorney General Ed Meese urging anti-porn activism and the industry mired in the “Smut Glut.”

The news that porn’s top star was underaged “went through the industry like a plague through the Middle Ages,” said Adult Film and Video Association attorney John Weston. There was a scramble to remove hundreds of thousands of videotapes, films and magazines from circulation before the police could pounce on them.

“Coming as it does on the heels of the Meese Report,” Weston said, “it’s hard to believe the two are not related.”

“Talk about timing,” wrote Mitchell Brothers star Missy Manners in her Spectator column, “I’m not so sure it’s just a coincidence.”

For the Meese Commission, it was “proof” of their contention that child porn was a major part of the commercial industry.

Under Federal law, anyone connected with a Traci Lords shoot was guilty of a felony. Hundreds of grips, gofers and gaffers, as well as producers, directors, agents, writers, make-up artists and caterers faced long prison terms, loss of assets, and fines guaranteed to keep them poor for life.

“If the Traci Lords case is lost,” Weston said, “with the strictest liability of the law enforced, the government would then have the power to wipe out the industry.”

Was the industry at fault? Could a fifteen year old girl rise to the top of the porn world without anyone suspecting her true age? Was she sophisticated enough to bamboozle Penthouse, the U.S. Government, and the entire porn industry? To spend two years dashing from set to set, yet find time to invest her earnings wisely enough to be “set for life?” To beat alleged IRS and forged passport felony violations? And, finally, to parlay the age fiasco into Hollywood success?

Questions about adult “advisors” knowingly promoting a minor in porn went unanswered. Was she really a runaway from Ohio whose mother turned her in after seeing her picture in a TV special on the Meese Report? Or did she live in Redondo Beach with her mother who secretly managed her career?

Industry skeptics, including her agent Jim South, didn’t believe she was really underaged. They saw the whole thing as a ploy to prevent all existing Traci Lords tapes from competing with the products of her new company (shot after she supposedly turned eighteen).

What is the real Traci Lords story?

I caught a glimpse of it: My experience directing Lords and my trade with her business partners reveal a saga of mutual exploitation, of a driven, ambitious beauty hell-bent on getting rich, and of those who misused her and forced a devastating showdown.

——————-

Next: Lords, Lies and Videotape Part 2: A Star is Porn

(I will post no photos of Lords because her signature on release forms are not legal, since she was allegedly a minor using a false ID.)

 

 

 

 

Starlets or Harlots Part 2: The Perils of Porn Stardom

Mauvaise de Noire, Billy Dee and Lisa DeLeeuw

Lisa DeLeeuw described one of her worst experiences.  Working for Svetlana (“Sweatlana”) Marsh, spending 20-hour days shivering in an unheated sound stage, living on “stale donuts, coffee and hot dogs,” the voluptuous redhead came down with a bad cold and conjunctivitis—“pink eye.”  (Passages from SKINFLICKS: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry are in italics.)
By the fifth day, “I just couldn’t go on like that. All of a sudden, I passed out. For half an hour. When I came to, Svetlana says, ‘You just sit there in the corner…you’re background. Fine.
“Well, I’m doing that and all of a sudden Jamie (Gillis) comes over and decides to pull me into the scene, grabbing my arms and yanking me in.  So I’m playing the scene and Jamie has this stupid cattle whip that he’s holding in the middle so the handle is on one end and the cat-o’-nine-tails on the other. And he’s slinging it like a double pendulum and he catches me—WHACK—right across the bridge of my nose, which he breaks.  I just freaked!  I blew up and grabbed the whip and started yelling, ‘I’m gonna kill you!’ And the cameraman is up above us on a beam, and he goes, ‘Oh, this is great! Keep goin’!’”

When a woman enters porn she faces two kinds of challenges: those on the set and those away from it.  On the set, a porn starlet quickly learns that what the male wants is gospel.  If she interrupts a scene because her leg is cramping, she risks causing a lost erection.  If it can’t be retrieved, the blame is hers. Once the stud has delivered, the director wants to hurry on to the next scene, regardless of how turned on an actress might be.  (Rather than be left high and wet, stars like Annette Haven and Lilly Marlene recruited crew members to help them “finish up.”)  Then there are the directors whose grandiose visions of sizzling sex push women beyond their limits.

“Whatever your natural inclinations are, they play on them,” said an anonymous actress in a 1980 Adam Film World interview.  The graphic details she added are recounted in SKINFLICKS.  Serena’s forced retirement came after a shoot that almost killed her. After a filmed contest to see if she could handle more men than Mai Lin, Serena not only took on more than forty studs but also their microbes. “My doctor said the germs ganged up,” Serena told me. “My belly swelled up like I was pregnant.” Delirious from septic shock, she spent months hospitalized with severe pelvic inflammatory disease…The filmmaker didn’t even send a get-well card.

After enough unpleasant surprises, actresses come to regard all directors as exploiters. Some play the game of balking at every request and negotiating every detail.  And directors come to expect actresses to be lazy whores, out to get maximum dollar for minimal effort…”The nicer you treat the performers,” observed porn historian Holliday, “the more likely they are to shit on you.”

New ladies were afraid to balk at pornographer’s directions for fear of being called “difficult.” Compounding the physical rigors were the non-stop months of serial 14-hour days needed to build a six-figure nest egg.  In Adult Video News, director Bruce Seven complained, “By the time they get to me, a lot of the performers are half-dead from overwork.” He followed that statement with a graphic description of what he meant.

One way for ladies to cope with the demands was through cocaine, which became epidemic in the frenzy of video shoots during the 1980s. Stressed-out actresses often find that on a porn set, things do go better with coke, at first.  It dulls pain, creates euphoria, gives a feeling of boundless energy, and—many ladies claim—makes them horny.  They can work longer hours, earn more money, and chase off all the bad feelings waiting in ambush after the action ends.

The poster girl for cocaine addiction was the late Shauna Grant. Her whispered nickname “Applecoke” was a play on her real surname, Applegate.  Whether her death was a suicide, as porn critics claim, or murder by drug dealers, hers was a worst-case scenario of life away from the porn set, where a whole new world of challenges awaited.

Kristara Barrington said former high school friends in Illinois now called her a slut.  On finding out Ginger Lynn was a porn star, her bank manager stopped treating her as a respected customer and even refused to validate her parking.  Locals pasted sex magazine photos of Shauna Grant on her former high school locker.  Relatives and spouses of porn stars become resigned to receiving anonymous packages with hate messages scrawled on pictures of the star.  I delivered a script to Lilly Marlene and was reviewing its highlights with her when something crashed against the back door.  “It’s those kids again,” she sighed.  They’d bang on the door and leave obscene messages.

If porn haters weren’t bad enough, there were the porn lovers. Lisa DeLeeuw described her first unplanned public encounter with porn fans. “I was in the frozen food section.  I’m trying to decide whether it will be fish sticks tonight or pizza, and suddenly some little Jewish guy comes running up and goes, ‘Oh, I saw you last night on the video.  You were fucking Jamie Gillis!’ And all these little old Jewish ladies—the store is right in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood, Ralph’s Market on Sunset—they all drop their matzo balls and go ‘What?’ And they follow me all around the store and I hear, ‘Oh, I really like you!’ ‘I watch you very week!’” Those were the nice fans.  There was also the kind that the late porn historian Jim Holliday called “the Toad Patrol.”

Porn fame meant gross encounters of the worst kind: Grandpa (Al Lewis) Munster posing for photos at a trade show and–to quote AVN—“goosing the smut starlets.”  An inmate sent Debi Diamond a plastic baggie of semen.  Someone posing as a cop called porn companies, trying to get the address of Kelly O’Dell…these fans stalk starlets from one club date to the next, steal their purses at trade shows, whisper lewd comments as they sign autographs, grab flesh and later brag to their friends that they actually bedded the star they hunger after. Who’s to disprove them?

In the SKINFLICKS account of Juliet Anderson’s premier party for Educating Nina, a drunken neighbor, braying for sex, kept returning after being turned away,.  I finally told him that one of the guests was a former Green Beret interrogator who would subject him to “…involuntary unleashing of bladder and bowel functions.”  That statement made him stay home; he turned out to be innocuous. More diabolical was a rock band whose album Love Letters to Joanna Storm included the romantic .38 Caliber Kiss. The band kept pestering porn people to give them Ms. Storm’s address.

Having ruminated over the nature of porn fans, I came to the following conclusion:  There are contradictions in the American male’s attitude toward the porno queen: his frustrated lust for her versus his impulse to condemn her; his desire to meet her and impress her versus his fear of her scorn for his inadequacies.  He hides his conflicts behind rough, macho swagger.

Porn fans can be avoided (or at least relegated to limited exposure), but there are some people whom porn princesses can’t escape: their significant others.  Porn agent Jim South described a malady he called “boyfriendinitis.” Its sobbing victims would call him to cancel shoots due to black eyes and chipped teeth.  A rock musician, quoted in the Bay Area magazine, Spectator, said, “Strippers and porn stars are a lot like rock n’ roll groupies…They don’t have a lot of self-esteem.  Treat ‘em good and they’ll walk all over you; treat ‘em like shit and they’ll worship the ground you walk on.”  His statement notwithstanding, there’s a simpler reason for “boyfriendinitis” violence.

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, Juliet Anderson said, “When you drive a bus ten hours a day, you don’t want to spend your vacation on a Greyhound.”  Picture the poor boyfriend, squirming with desire while waiting for his porn queen girlfriend to return from work. He can’t understand why his exhausted lover won’t give him the attention he thinks he deserves.  Not noted for their compassionate sensitivity, porn stars’ boyfriends often react with fists.

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.”

Most ladies find X-rated stardom a lonely road, strewn with broken relationships, leering fans, hostile media, angry relatives, menacing cops, back-stabbing competitors and exploitive agents, managers and producers.  They suffer the smirks, snickers, and sermons of a society quick to condemn, slow to forget. Behind their tough-girl act of demands, tantrums, vendettas and lawsuits, many of these “prima donnas,” barely into adulthood are terrified.

Not surprisingly, many porn actresses decided to give up on a lucrative career. On page 20 of the September ’84 issue of Adult Video News, Desiree Lane was hailed as a new starlet with “the potential to become the new Seka”; on page 22 of the same issue, Ron Jeremy’s column announced her retirement.  Adult Video News sarcastically noted the comings and goings: “Samantha Strong…saw agents and producers, got booked solid, then decided to quit every other month.” “Erica Boyer, from all reports, has met another guy and is out of the biz once again. Gentlemen place your bets.”

Leaving the business behind becomes especially frustrating when women find that a past porn career becomes like a stink that won’t wash off.  After dating Michael (“Batman”) Keaton for two years, Serena Robinson told him of her past porn career as “Rachel Ryan.”  Keaton subsequently dumped her.  There are ongoing debates about whether Megan Leigh and Alex Jordan actually committed suicide. Was Leigh shot to death?  Was Jordan’s hanging an autoerotic experiment gone wrong?   One thing both had in common was that they were soured on porn.  There is no question that superstar Savannah (Shannon Wilsey) killed herself.  The temperamental porn queen (Her infamous shoot-stopping declaration: “I’m on break—NOW!”) known for romps with rock stars, Slash and Axl Rose, was being hounded by the IRS. She had wanted to break into “legit” show business like Traci Lords (who used her “child victim” plea) had done, but feared her porn career prevented that.  On July 11, 1995, her drunken ride in her Corvette ended in a crash. Then, in the garage of the Universal City home she had paid cash for, Savannah put a 9-millimeter slug through her head.

Despite the potholes in porn’s road to riches there are women who prospered in porn, proud of their careers.   Part 3 of Starlets or Harlots? will examine what it takes for success without apologies.  I will discuss my all-time favorites, such as Nina Hartley, Shanna McCullough and Lilly Marlene.  I’ll include my worst directing experience ever, with a woman who became one of the biggest stars of the late 1980s.