Traci Lords 'How Ronald Reagan saved me from dressing like a pony for a Japanese spanking party'!
As a cultural explorer and literary sleuth, I am always on lookout for exciting developments in the world of letters—for fresh voices with “something to say.” No fooling, I am. And I believe I have discovered the contours of a new genre of nonfiction, one that has yet to receive its cultural due and perhaps never will: the tawdry porn-star memoir. As pornography’s popularity has mainstreamed out of its once mole-like existence, the porn-star memoir has graduated from cheap paperbacks released by no-name publishers to Judith Regan high-profile schlocktaculars. A genre that should be investigated with an open mind and with a dispenser of anti-bacterial wipes handy, the porn-star memoir packs the center-stage, spotlit “I” of the confessional memoir, the celebrity memoir, and the recovery memoir into one overnight kit. Each tell-all reflects the personality or absence thereof of the porn star who buckled down to bare the hidden recesses of their “inner me” to a tape recorder.
Raw Talent, by Jerry Butler, the star of such critically unclaimed features as Ali Boobie and the 40 D’s and Leave It to Cleavage, is a scattergun blast of anecdotes from an earnest goofball who compares a co-star’s vacant eyes to an “aquarium with no fish inside.”
In Lights, Camera, Sex!, Christy Canyon, whose résumé includes The Incredible Edible Christy Canyon and On Golden Blonde, reveals herself as a bouncy ding-a-ling who arrives on the scene without much schoolin’. She is mystified upon hearing co-star Traci Lords described as “a chameleon,” wondering, “Wasn’t that a flower?” No, Miss Lords was no flower; she was closer to a rampaging Venus flytrap in her jailbait prime (flashing a fake ID, she started in porn at the age of 15), chewing up platoons of men and spitting out the fish bones.
Her self-portrait, Underneath It All, is rendered in bluish pastels to convey the wise softening of a “sexual terrorist” who has made peace with her past.
Jenna Jameson’s best-seller, *How to Make Love Like a Porn Star—*a Judith Regan production—is as spangled, inflated, and high-strutting as its star’s show-horse persona. (The book also bears the sweaty paw prints of collaborator Neil Strauss, a former New York Times reviewer who is no doubt culpable for absurdly arty-farty chapter titles such as “A Liquid Prisoner Pent in Walls of Glass” and “The Gentle Closure of My Breast.”)
An oral memoir, Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne’s The Other Hollywood, also from ReganBooks, presents a choral history of porn, a mosaic of sound bites.
Put them together and a pattern emerges, a basic DNA. Each porn-star memoir is different, but all are constructed with the same building blocks:
•A DEPRIVED CHILDHOOD.
Not economically deprived, though growing up poor and being made fun of can contribute to social shame and a lack of self-worth. No, it’s emotional deprivation that sets the stage for insatiable attention-getting later on, producing the ravenous sex, drugs, fame that rocket-propels show-offs toward early flameout.
Although the mothers in porn-star memoirs tend to be ineffectual and derelict, it’s a cold, neglectful, belittling, ne’er-do-well, distant (take your pick) father that appears to be a surer indicator for a career in porn. Jerry Butler’s father was the type who always criticized—pick, pick, pick. Daddy Dearest was blind to Butler’s sensitive emoting in Roommates, an earlyish porn film that actually had something resembling plot and human psychology—no, “all he did was point out my faults.” Jenna Jameson and her brother had to raise each other after their mother’s death, Dad being too busy working and catting around: “The problem wasn’t that he didn’t care about me; it was that he didn’t know how to show it.”
Christy Canyon—she too had an emotionally AWOL dad. She flops about for the next two decades “searching for a father figure in all of the wrong people.… Any man that crossed my path was fodder for a father figure.” And she found some pretty sorry fodder.
More traumatizing and branding is childhood molestation or rape, violations that blight girls’ self-image and trust in other people (particularly men) through adolescence and beyond. Traci Lords reports being raped at the age of 10 by a 16-year-old on whom she had a crush—“he left me lying there all alone, bloody and naked in the dark.” At 16, Jenna Jameson was raped by a biker named Preacher; later, retrieving a repressed memory, she recalls a gang rape in which high-school football players took their turns and then left her for dead.
• INITIATION INTO THE PORN BIZ. Almost invariably this involves a photo shoot and a go-see to Jim South’s World Modeling, porn’s premier flesh-peddling agency. Posing for nude Polaroids taken by “Tim North” (as if that pseudonym is going to fool anybody), Lords thinks about her father as her breasts are being ogled. “I pictured myself naked and spread-eagled in one of his girlie magazines. Would he love me then?” Jenna Jameson poses spread-eagled as a bold way to get her dad’s attention, aiming to appear in the sort of strokers “my father used to have around the house, like Penthouse or Hustler.” Sounds like a classy dude. Christy Canyon—who draws a vivid cartoon of South, with his cowboy duds and Dippity-do pompadour (“He looked like Howdy Doody on a real bad acid trip”)—is more forthright when she tags hostility as the driving force behind her decision to oil up for a soft-core-magazine layout. “This was the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the parents who cast me aside.… Daddy’s little girl buck naked for the world to jack off to.”
•ADOPTION OF A NEW IDENTITY. Once in the business, every porn performer must choose whether to stick with his or her given name or go incognito. John Holmes, he with the log between his legs, bore the indignity of being marketed as “Johnny Wadd.” The savvier performers shun dumb puns and single entendres to adopt showbiz handles that permit them (temporarily, at least) to lead a double life, aliases that offer the psychological escape hatch of being able to tell themselves, “It’s not ‘me’ doing those things on the set, it’s my alter ego, who just happens to share the same body and Social Security number.” In Traci Lords’s case, her porn name incorporated a multiple identity. “I took [Hawaii Five-O star] Jack Lord’s surname. In my mind, his Steve McGarrett was the perfect fantasy father. I added an ‘s’ to Lord because there were three of us: Nora (my birth name), Kristie (my fake ID name), and now Traci (the girl everyone wanted).” Paul Siederman re-invented himself as Jerry Butler in homage to the soul singer whose hit “Only the Strong Survive” he found inspirational. Jenna Massoli adopted Jameson as her last name as a rebel yell. “It was the name of a whiskey, and whiskey was rock and roll. Jenna Jameson, alcoholic, rock and roller. Right on.”
•WAR STORIES FROM THE SET. There’s no apprenticeship in porn. No boot camp for nervous recruits. You’re thrown naked into the gladiator ring to prove your mettle, and three weeks in the business gives you enough experience to accumulate quite a bushel of colorful anecdotes and pungent impressions. Three years as a porn thespian and you’re a regular Gielgud, full of lore. Jerry Butler left a trail of bad feelings with his memoir by dishing his leading ladies with less than gentlemanly discretion. Aside from the aforementioned empty aquarium, one porn gal fails to keep her personal hygiene in tip-top condition (he compares an intimate part of her to “an unclean birdcage”), and others are bitchy psychos. Paired with Ken-doll porn stalwart Peter North, Christy Canyon learns that there’s one part of his anatomy that’s strictly No Trespassing:
“Can I just tell you one thing Christy,” Deep concern set in his brown eyes. [Punctuation and proofreading are not the book’s strong points.] “It’s really the only thing you have to know about me in a sex scene.”
“Of course you can tell me.” Maybe he was going to tell me that he easily formed a crush on girls that looked like me.
“Do not touch my hair.” … He glanced in the mirror. “It takes me a long time to get my hair like this, and if anybody touches it in a sex scene, I lose all of my concentration.”
I didn’t want that on my conscience. “I promise you Peter, I will not touch your hair.”
It is more than vanity that makes Peter North a coif queen. Performance anxiety for professional penises such as North compels them to dial out any distraction that might result in the worst mortification that can befall a porn stud: an inopportune softy. Making a fanciful analogy worthy of a metaphysical poet, Jerry Butler compares erectile dysfunction to bottled-up legislation: “Sometimes your dick becomes like Congress. Even though the President puts a bill in to become law, Congress still has to vote on it. Sometimes your penis stalls on the bill.”
And the porn set is a pitiless forum. It demands that all erections be swiftly enacted.
Porn shoots are fast, pressure-cooker, and cheapskate, leaving little time to baby a
male performer suffering from what Kingsley Amis called “a crinkler.”
Christy Canyon recounts the sad tale of a rookie who gets rattled when the director barks at him like a drill sergeant: under the cruel hot lights, he—it—wilts. “Johnny tried to cover up his privates with a hand. A finger would have done the trick.” Christy administers to him as best she can, but as his shrinkage worsens, her solicitude curdles into disgust. “Suddenly I was sick of this over grown Baby-Huey.” Ditto the director, who films the rest of the scene soft-core and pays Johnny only half what he was promised, telling him he’s lucky to be getting that. Away he slinks, into obscurity, perhaps enlisting in the French Foreign Legion, where men go to forget.
Female performers harbor their own existential dread: the revolting prospect of working with (worse, under) Ron Jeremy. A roly-poly, well-endowed veteran of the porn scene and the subject of the recent documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, he is fondly nicknamed “the Hedgehog.” But there are those who fail to see the sexual charm of a human-size hedgehog, endowed or not. He’s never quite mastered even the Neanderthal rudiments of grooming and etiquette, compelling some actresses to apply motivational psychology to get themselves through the ordeal. Making her first porn loop, Ginger Lynn realizes that Jeremy will be her inaugural partner.
“I looked at him, and I almost left. Then I thought, ‘You know what? If I can do it with this guy, I can do it with anybody.’”
On Christy Canyon’s first shoot, she’s agog at the sight of “the hairiest set of butt-cheeks I had ever seen.” Hairy-butt-cheeks turns around, and it’s Jeremy, guarding the buffet table against poachers. No one had the specter of His Hairiness lodged deeper in her haunted head than Traci Lords, who psychs herself for a lesbian grudge match with Ginger Lynn by telling herself, Hey, it still beats having to service a “fleshy hairball” like Ron Jeremy. Later, suffering a combination jet-lag and porn-withdrawal hallucinatory spiral, Lords is pitchforked in her dreams by detachable body parts. “I saw dicks everywhere—dicks and fat faces and beady, Ron Jeremy eyes. It made me crazy.”
•HOLLYWOOD-MOVIE-STAR CAMEO APPEARANCES.
Like Andy Warhol’s Factory, the porn industry is a parodist, parasitic, yet homage-paying mimicry of the Hollywood studio system, with its own auteurs, A-list contract players, hype machines, mythomania, etc. The twin kingdoms of Hollywood and the Valley (the San Fernando Valley, where most West Coast porn blossoms) overlap, and fraternization is the result.
The late Sammy Davis Jr. was an avid, hands-on porn fan, helping himself to Linda Lovelace and partying with Marilyn Chambers. Nicolas Cage was a familiar face at the strip club where Jenna Jameson worked the pole, his distinct aroma (“kind of like the distilled sweat of homeless people”) arriving before he did.
Pauly Shore had an on-and-off relationship with porn princess Savannah, who once declared on the set, “Pauly and I share the same brain,” to which someone quipped, “Well, who’s using it now?”
Savannah later committed suicide, shooting herself in the head with a Beretta after a car accident that would have scarred her ice-white face and with it her ability to make a porn living. The aftermath of her death ushers us to the next staple of the porn-star memoir.
•THE CAUTIONARY TALE UNHEEDED.
The porn scene has a grievous casualty list of stars who met early demise through drugs, depression, or consorting with dealers, gangsters, Vegas vultures, “suitcase pimps” (boyfriends of female porn stars who become their managers, gofers, and hustlers), and other chin-stubble lowlifes. John Holmes—whose eyewitnessing of a drug-related multiple homicide inspired the movies Boogie Nights and Wonderland—died of AIDS, as have a number of lesser-knowns. Preceding Savannah, Shauna Grant, a creamy export from Minnesota, put a gun to her head. As did Cal Jammer, whose meltdown became the dramatic core of Susan Faludi’s chapter on porn in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.
It can’t be said these tragedies, despite their immediate shock effect, scared anyone straight in the porn community. Crack pipes continued to be lit. As in rock ‘n’ roll, where some traditionalists still subscribe to the “live fast, die young, and leave behind a beautiful corpse” philosophy, no one in porn ever really seems to be deterred by someone else’s downfall. The burned-out Holmes was written off as a dead man walking long before he finally timbered over. Savannah was so widely detested for her prima-donna antics that pornsters were celebrating—“Ding Dong! The Witch is dead”—even before her last breath left her.
Reading these memoirs and the collective testimonies in The Other Hollywood, I’m amazed that the casualty toll from drugs and AIDS isn’t sky-higher, given the reckless and wanton ingestion on the part of nearly everyone testifying. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, crack, and crystal meth blaze through porn workers’ bodies, burning through nearly every dollar they make. As Jerry Butler, who inhaled most of his porn proceeds, perceptively notes, “When you make a dirty dollar, you spend it fast.” Drugs damage their immune systems and bi-polarize their moods, spiking the highs higher and the lows lower. Unlike in the music biz, the rationale can’t be flown that drugs spur creativity and fling open the doors of perception into lightning dimensions. No, the purpose of high-powered drugs for most porn performers is to numb themselves, enabling them to blur fast-forward through the punishment they’re putting their bodies through so that their minds can’t catch up with the consequences until much later, assuming they live that long.
Most do. It is a testament to human resilience that most porn performers manage to conserve enough flickering filaments of self-preservation to pull out of the kamikaze dive before fatal impact, kick their drug jones, and level off to re-enter civilian life, mend broken bonds, and end their memoirs on an uplifting church chord. The fade-out chapter of the typical porn-star memoir is the rosy glow of …
• TENDER MERCIES AND RECONCILIATION.
This is the most life-affirming part of the porn memoir and the most reliably boring, since cracking up one’s life always makes for more eventful narrative than patching the pieces back together and reciting the valuable lessons one has learned. The wild child, tamed and somewhat chastened, returns to the fold, discovers cozy domesticity, and that’s the cue for a round of tearful hugs.
Jenna Jameson reconciles with her pop and with her estranged brother, whom she had blackballed from her life for stealing her crystal meth.
.
Christy Canyon, whose career disgusted her parents, finally makes peace with dear old horny dad, reaching out to him as he lies in a medicated haze in a hospital bed.
In return, he asks if she knows porn star Nina Hartley. Yes, she’s nice, Canyon says.
“She has the nicest hind quarters I’ve ever seen,” muses Dad before dropping off again into snoring dreamland.
Father-daughter chats are different in porn.
To illustrate that a porn career needn’t preclude storybook romance and matrimony, Jameson’s, Canyon’s, and Lords’s memoirs feature photos of the subjects snuggling with their wonderful lambie-pie husbands. Leave it to Jerry Butler to pee on the parade.
At the end of Raw Talent,
he serenades his wife with sweet words and kisses the porn business good-bye to dedicate himself to being a good family man. But in the revised edition, a few pages later, he sheepishly confesses, “I’m back in porno.” It’s an addiction he can’t kick, and he has no illusions about the roadkill the addiction leaves in its wake: “You see underpaid, overworked girls who are doing anal, and a lot of them are being coerced into it—nobody’s actually being pistol whipped—people pistol whip themselves [his italics]—they are victims of their own carelessness, and self-aggression, and excuses.”
In a different sense, though, women are being pistol-whipped in porn, smacked senseless. Mistreated worse than they were when Butler was writing. In terms of production techniques, two years mark key inflection points in porn. The first was 1982, when X-rated producers abandoned celluloid for videotape. The other pivotal year was 1998, when Viagra was introduced. Performance anxiety, begone!—as porn males were able to mount and wield what’s known in the trade as “Redi-Wood.” True, it drains porn studs of animation (the telltale signs of a Viagra clone being, according to a 2001 article in the Los Angeles Times, a flushed-red face and a glazed expression), but they’re not hired to sparkle. The job they hired on to do doesn’t require subtlety, and Viagra converts their business end into a blunt object. The psychological relief and staying power afforded porn men by Viagra has resulted in a grueling strain on porn women, whose bodies are pounded by battering rams in scenes that can drag on near-forever. Couple this with anal sex’s no longer being a specialty in a porn career (as it was during the 70s) but the marauding norm, and the wear and tear on the body amounts to consensual rape. Porn actresses are getting more routinely roughed up than ever on-camera. Even oral sex has become invasive.
One of the stronger trends in porn is the choking-gagging throat-jamming of the actresses by these Viagra sluggers, and “money shots” culminating in semen swallowing, sometimes from multiple donors. The porn actress as sink drain. Or spittoon.
This isn’t to propose that porn be criminalized and put to the crusader’s sword, only that it not be sentimentalized and glamorized, lionized as an exalted ski jump into diamond riches and personal empowerment. There are lots of other professions, vocations, and avenues for self-expression that don’t entail having your butt pounded like Omaha Beach by relative strangers.
I suspect the reason The Other Hollywood didn’t enjoy the strong sales and critical hoo-ha of How to Make Love Like a Porn Star is that it chipped away the silver finish and showed the layers of grime and mobster influence in the industry, the cruddy accretion. You finish the book in need of a Karen Silkwood power shower. But precisely because Jameson’s book made the bigger noise, it has established the template for porn-star exposés queuing for takeoff. Porn star Sunset Thomas just announced the forthcoming publication of her life story, in which, according to her online press release, “she welcomes the reader behind the scenes of her most notorious adult films and into the alternately seedy and posh gentlemen’s clubs where she headlines.” (The posh ones serve free peanuts.) “She is unstinting in her account of the industry’s harsh realities, but takes personal responsibility for all of her decisions, and traces her progress from naïve co-dependent to mother and, finally, to savvy business woman in full control of her destiny.” Yeah, right. Well, at least she’s got a catchy title for the book, one that could serve as a bumper sticker for the entire genre and as the proud emblem for our Paris Hiltonized celebrity culture: American Whore.
James Wolcott, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, monitors the Zeitgeist on his popular blog, jameswolcott.com. His most recent book is Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants (Miramax).
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