“We were tied up,” Kristara Barrington said in Erotic X-Film Guide (June, 1985). “I was connected to Desiree Lane… All of a sudden Jamie and three other guys came in and started whipping us. I took out his dick and sucked him. And he started getting really rough, took off his belt and choked me… At first, Greg (Dark, director of the scene in New Wave Hookers ) said, ‘What are you doing? You’re hurting her.’ I said, ‘No, no, don’t stop the scene,’ because just from doing that he turned me on… He beat the shit out of me. It was great. I had bruises on my tits. You can see them in the film.”
Barrington’s quote sounds like the kind of hype porn stars spout to titillate their fans. But in more than one publication the exotic Eurasian 19-year-old from Illinois named Jamie Gillis as her favorite screen stud. He did things to her, she said, that moviemakers wouldn’t dare include in the final cut. Directors allow male performers certain liberties in getting aroused.
Mauvaise De Noire also named Gillis as a favorite screen partner. In my Chocolate Cream he repeated his Serena skit, pretending Mauvaise was a dog and he was her trainer. I cut out his cuffing her for such things as not licking fast enough.
The porn milieu is perfect for masochistic women. They can release themselves totally to the whims of directors and other models, knowing that in the controlled environment of the movie set, no genuine psycho is going to really maim or kill them. The bumps and bruises, contortions and contusions are all part of their fun.
A woman doesn’t have to be a masochist to thrive in porn but it helps. It also helps to be an athlete, a lesbian, an exhibitionist or a “crusader”—my own term for those using porn as a forum to make a sexual/social statement. But of all the different kinds of women performing in porn, those best suited to the trade are those rare ladies who enjoy every bracing minute of it.
x x x x x x
The word “nymphomaniac” is passé; too sexist, too judgmental. “Promiscuous” is still used and “sex addict” has its pop-psych adherents.
These “high-tech, new-wave sex athletes,” as Harry Reems called them, not only don’t feel abused after gang-bangs like Dallas Cowboy scrimmages, they take pride in their performance undergoing them. During a Blacks and Blondes loop, a team of studs put the tall Mill Valley sex pro, Deejay, through more gyrations than the Harlem Globetrotters do with a basketball. She made sure a dildo you could hit home runs with disappeared inside her mouth, vagina and anus. “Know what that proves?” the sinewy blonde asked. “It means I can take John Holmes all the way up to the balls in any hole of my body!” She added, “Ginger Lynn can only do that in her pussy.”
These are the ladies who try pornographers’ imaginations. The diminutive Fallon spurted “G-spot” orgasms at will. So did British carrot-top Sarah-Jane Hamilton. At Plato’s Retreat in New York, Tara Alexander went through over 80 men in a five-hour period (Midnight Blue, Volume 1), claiming she had 24 orgasms.
Sometimes directors have to say, “Enough!” After Wendy O. Williams shot ping-pong balls out of her vagina in Candy Goes to Hollywood, the future Plasmatics rock star wanted “to pop bananas out of her butt.” Director Gail Palmer declined the offer.
Miss Sharon Mitchell—as porn’s grande dame wants to be called after more than fifteen years as a performer—wouldn’t let a spent Mike Horner leave the rooftop set in All the King’s Ladies, even as the crew was packing the gear after shooting Miss M.’s forty-second status orgasmus (sustained female orgasm). She related the story of going into a theater to watch one of her films for the first time and unzipping the pants of an elderly gentleman next to her. When the startled patron saw that the lady going down on him was the same one as on the screen, he suffered a seizure. As he was being wheeled to the ambulance, he croaked, “Thank you, Miss Mitchell.”
Lilly Marlene was awesome. I’ve never seen anyone, male or female, with such a voracious sexual appetite. She was long-limbed and hard-bodied with a beautifully flared rear and high, apple breasts. Her billowing hair, dyed light blonde (pubes, too), framed angular features of sharp, Teutonic beauty. In a review of Superior’s Night Moves, AVN’s Dick Goldhaber called Lilly “the most gorgeous pussycat I have ever seen in an adult movie.”
Lilly’s exotic image dissolved when she spoke; her deliberate, down-home Midwest twang branded her a hick—until she’d begin to discuss the nuances of a subject like Jungian psychology. She worried endlessly about her dialogue scenes. But she could’ve spoken in tongues and still be sought after.
Tales of Lilly in heat abounded. She’d routinely exhaust fifteen men at a time and then, with hunger glaring in her usually soft eyes, grab any man who was left. Without so much as a “hello,” she’d unzip your pants and swallow you up. I was making out Lilly’s paycheck in the office of an Oakland nightclub used in Deviations when, under the desk, I felt my pants being unzipped. Lilly said she was still horny—after a long, difficult DP scene that would’ve sent most women screaming to a convent.
If I’d known Lilly before the age of AIDS, I’d have taken her up on her invitations to come over and play; her over-matched, take-my-wife-please husband didn’t seem to mind. Finally, with AIDS a growing concern, he forbade Lilly to strip at any more bachelor parties; he knew she’d end up taking on every half-way willing male on the premises.
Even sexually open women tend to recoil instinctively when a man comes on too overtly; Lilly would meet his onslaught head-on. No need for cooings, cuddling or commitments; the action itself was its own reward.
Lilly Marlene was one of a kind. But ladies who thrive best in porn have things in common with her: they, too, like the action for its own sake, taking pride in athletic performance, in a game where points are scored or deducted according to form, intensity and stamina.
It’s no coincidence that so many porn actresses have participated in rigorous physical activities. Some were “jocks”: Porsche Lynn—basketball, volleyball, school records in track (without a date for the prom, she went bowling instead); avowed tomboy Nikki Randall—softball, soccer, gymnastics; Jennifer Scott—ballet; Blondi—stock car racer and bodybuilder; Brandi Bosworth— bodybuilder (1987 Georgia state champion). Victoria Paris, Vanity and Tiffany Million were pro wrestlers.
Detroit, was a Michigan construction worker. The late Alex Jordan (suicide), who competed with girlfriends to see who could lay the most men, and Tracey Adams were both commercial divers. Rowdy as roustabouts, these ladies are more than capable of planting a punch—as Jordan did—in the faces of those who get out of line.
In the competitive world of video sex, pumping iron, nutritional supplements, physical trainers and tanning salons are as much a part of the scene as silk panties and Albolene Cream. These ladies are determined to excel at porn’s circus acts. In an AVN interview, balloon-breasted blonde lioness (“I’m a sexual beast”) Danyel Cheeks said, after deep-throating the immensely-endowed Rocco Siffredi, “I started like anyone else, choking and hitting teeth. But within a year or so, I learned how to breathe in and breathe out at one time to make everything easier. I was very determined to learn to do it after seeing Linda Lovelace in action.”
x x x x x x
Barbara Dare came running down the sidewalk barefooted, clutching a spike-heeled pump in each hand. “I wanna ride in the Corvette!” As she fumbled with the shoes and the door handle, I realized I’d been about to commit what any red-blooded American auto buff would consider an unnatural act: let one of the most beautiful women who ever bared all before a camera scrunch into a production assistant’s beat-up Falcon loaded with reflectors and camera gear instead of inviting her to settle into the black leather of my yellow Stingray. But after a morning of non-stop friction with Dare on the set of E.X., I would’ve consigned her to ride in a garbage truck—and not in the cab section.
Barbara Dare was my all-time worst directing experience. When I cast her in E.X., she was not yet a star but already acting the prima donna. With her soft auburn curls, fashion model features and near- perfect proportions, she knew she’d be in demand (she became the new sensation of 1986).
Dare began by refusing to work with anyone but Billy Dee. “What girl ever works with three people in one day?” she wanted to know. I rattled off a list of ladies who had, including Traci Lords. “But Traci likes fucking!” I knew then it would be a tough shoot.
Dare consented to a three-way with Billy Dee and a man making his porn debut, as long as everything with the new guy was simulated. I agreed to her terms; new guys usually can’t get it up anyway. But he surprised us, to Dare’s consternation. When he tried to touch her breasts, she pushed him away, afraid that if he got a full erection there’d be pressure on her to let him use it. After that debut, the new guy decided he didn’t really want a porn career after all.
As the day progressed, Dare made a game out of saying “no.” I told her to indulge her two-pack-a- day habit only on the outside patio. In response, she blew smoke in my face. At the end of a break, I requested her presence on the set. “As soon as I’m done with my apple,” she said, taking a slow, insolent bite. She refused to move from one side of the bed to the other for better shot framing until I moved to scoop her up and toss her there; then she scrambled to comply.
I sat staring into space, trying to make a decision. I could either spent the rest of the shoot snarling and threatening to manhandle her or I could cancel the shoot and pay everyone except Dare for a half- day. She saw I was at the breaking point. Like most seasoned bitches, Dare knew when she’d pushed too far. “You don’t seem to like my New Jersey sense of humor,” she laughed.
“If New Jersey humor means making a complete cunt out of yourself, you’re right.”
On the ride to the park where stills would be shot of Dare posing with the ’Vette, the auburn-haired beauty melted into friendliness. Fancy cars have that effect on certain kinds of women. I learned that Dare was raised in New Jersey but was born in Texas. Her father, a “Jewish dentist,” was distraught
over both her porn career and her renouncing of Judaism. She’d failed to achieve her childhood dream of being a high-fashion model, blaming her height of only five-foot-three. “I don’t want to stay in this business longer than a year,” she declared, “and when I leave, I want to have a hundred thousand dollars socked away.”
The course Barbara Dare followed was an effective roadmap to porn’s pot of gold. Starting with Pachard’s Lilith Unleashed and The Oddest Couple, Dare made enough movies—including E.X. in January, ’86—to establish who she was but not enough to be “overexposed” or “burned out” (in so many pictures that fans got tired of her). In the spring of 1986, Dare signed an “exclusive” with Select/Essex, claiming later she got $10,000 for each of the ten movies she agreed to star in for the company over a year’s time. With each release heavily promoted, Dare became the hottest star in the industry during 1986. She incorporated herself, formed a fan club, wrote for Swank magazine, and commanded top dollar on the dance circuit. Through serial exclusives (Dare re-signed with Select/Essex in 1987 and later with Vivid) she made no more than a dozen movies a year over her five-year career, staying in demand and maintaining a six-figure income. Tough and demanding, she had the chutzpah to do it her way. In many ways, she was the archetype of a certain genre of porn actresses I’ve had the hardest time working with: the Bitches.
These ladies are belligerent, always late and ignorant of their script dialogue. They are likely to have been hookers. Nevertheless, some are in great demand, with huge fan followings so they keep getting hired—especially by directors who don’t mind doing a bit of yelling.
The Bitches have certain strengths: they tend toward the lesbian end of the bi-sexual spectrum (Dare’s long-term lover was a slim, pretty brunette) and work more easily than “straight” ladies in girl-girl scenes. They are less troubled by the unpleasant aspects of boy-girl sex scenes too, because they approach the action without any of the emotional involvement that affects so many straight ladies. Analyzing the very sophisticated version of the Bitch that she played in Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone told San Francisco Examiner writer Ovid Demaris, “I never thought the character (a bi-sexual author who flashed her bare crotch to a room full of cops) really cared about sex at all. That’s why it was so easy for her to use her sexuality—it had no value.”
To these ladies, the malady of boyfriendinitis is irrelevant. “I don’t need men…” Dare told an interviewer from the lesbian magazine On Our Backs, “I need women.” They trade tales among themselves about seducing both the boyfriends of straight ladies and the girlfriends of screen studs.
To Dare, screen sex was strictly an acting job, but one she took pride in—winning the 1988 AVN Best Actress award for her role in the Vivid feature The Naked Stranger. She could snap from her brittle, businesslike self to a gushy screen persona convincing enough to inspire the Talk Radio monologist Eric Bogosian to write in Esquire, “Barbara Dare, in her effusive, bubbling orgasmic womanhood, is the purest antidote to pin-headed porno haters, Left and Right.” Regardless of the demand for the actress, I told her agent Jim South, “Jim, if I ever shoot Barbara Dare again, it won’t be with a camera.”
x x x x x x
A supremely successful Bitch, whose career lasted much longer than Dare’s half-dozen years, was Amber Lynn. I used to wonder why this second of the “Lynn line” was so popular with fans despite her indifferent screen performances and reputation as an irresponsible, foul-mouthed slut. Something about Amber’s appeal went beyond her physical attributes of shapely body, explosion of blonde hair, and prettily pugnacious, jutting jaw (a characteristic not so prettily shared with her brother, porn stud
Buck Adams).
I saw the Amber Lynn mystique close up on Pachard’s Harlem Candy shoot. In the scene, the “Goddess Amber” materializes in front of a window to offer Herschel Savage her divine wisdom. Standing on a chair hidden behind a couch, Amber revved herself up for the scene, rubbing her clitoris. On “action,” she vaulted the couch with the ease of an athlete and sashayed with the insolent grace of a jungle cat over to where Savage sat. She slid in next to him and her toes dug into the rug like outstretched claws. Those few seconds of action bristled with her electric physicality.
I tried to see her as a fan would: the hedonist, whose parties in her beachfront home were legendary; the exhibitionist, flushed with excitement at a CES show after Chicago’s famed wind had blown up her skirt, mesmerizing a construction crew with a flash of her bare bottom; the thrill jockey, hustling in late for a convention appearance after an all-night romp through Vegas, with yesterday’s make-up looking like a death-mask; the brat-goddess, bipping off to chat with a girlfriend, ignoring a long line of fans waiting for her autograph. Her admirers watched Amber strut through life with philistine insolence that enhanced her bad-girl image as a hardcore, white-trash, juvenile delinquent.
After her impressive entrance in the Harlem Candy scene, Amber had nothing to say: she didn’t know her lines. But she had an excuse: “You shouldn’t give someone a script the day before shooting.”
“Honey,” said Pachard. “The script was waiting for you at Jim South’s office for a whole week.” Amber wrinkled her nose. “I don’t go there any more.”
“I wanted to deliver it to your house,” the production manager said, “but you were never home.” I volunteered for the task of taping Amber’s dialogue into the pages of a Hustler magazine, which she would appear to be idly perusing during her conversation with Savage. As they waited for me to finish, Amber, Pachard and the crew recounted one of the director’s wilder toilet scenes, shot in an artist’s studio-loft. “We fuckin’ trashed the place!” Amber crowed. I glanced up at her and was startled by the ferocity in her eyes.
There was another actress on Pachard’s shoot that day who’d also just received her script. Shanna McCullough, available due to a cancelled production, had been recruited as a last-minute replacement for a no-show. Though she had only minutes to study her dialogue, Shanna didn’t botch a single line. One of the classiest ladies ever to grace the set of any rating of movie, Shanna McCullough exemplified the genre of actress totally opposite the Bitches. If it were possible, the only ladies I’d ever hire would be the ones I called the “Sweethearts.”
x x x x x x
A buzz went through the audience. The singer on the stage had stopped singing but her voice was still pumping through the big speakers.
It was the sixth take (so the two cameras could record all possible angles) of the four-girl rock band’s opening number, “We’re the Deviations.” The “singer,” Shanna McCullough, had been lip- syncing to a recorded professional’s voice so well that, until she stopped mid-song to point out that the audio operator had lined up the wrong take, the audience had thought she really was doing the singing. Realizing that this lady—a porno actress, no less—was giving a remarkable performance, they burst into applause.
It seemed a big risk, casting a first-timer in the lead role of my most expensive production. But when I met Shanna at a Joe Elliot casting session, I’d had a hunch this was one special lady. The redhead with creamy alabaster skin and luminous eyes was a professional actress, starring every
Saturday night in a Berkeley stage production of The Rocky Horror Show.
Shanna and her husband were swing-party enthusiasts. In her early 20’s, the East Bay sophisticate had a wardrobe of kinky outfits and an eight-foot boa constrictor that would later crawl all over her