GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985

by Nelson, Jill C.

  The only type of acceptance I received came from a Jesus movement in my sophomore year and I became Born Again. We used to meet in garages and have sing-alongs and meet in church parks and stuff. I got very good at quoting the bible and became kind of a leader for a while. I got five liturgies introduced that they literally still teach today at my old high school. I was involved in setting up a Christian newspaper. It made me feel like I was doing something. It started out not to be a fundamentalist group. It started to be where we’d meet in coffee shops and sing and give about testimony and stuff, and then later, while I was still in high school, I sort of glommed onto this First Baptist kids group. They were Born Again but they were like in a Junior League and they belonged in the choir. They didn’t drink or dance, but they still had a lot of elements that were in the other group and for some reason, I got more into this. Probably because I saw them all of the time and I was gaining some kind of seniority in that group, so for a while it was good. Then I properly decided myself “this is bullshit” by my senior year. I didn’t see that they were any better than the Catholics were. I sort of thought there was more behind it because they were explaining the bible, and then I realized that so much of Christian belief is how to do context thinking and it really kind of made me check out other religions. I clearly went through that religious self-questing which did lead to something else. After a while, you just kind of accept a world religion and a world God.

  I remember the first time it blew my mind. I dyed my hair and they all looked at me and thought it was a sin. I was ostracized, and I thought “Well, if that’s religion…” It was very much a wake-up call. I didn’t join the group to date guys or anything. It was a social group and it was cool for a while.

  Catholic Girls Start Much Too Late

  Kelly’s years of diverse religious influences, beginning with her early Catholicism indoctrination instilled a certain ethical code she aspired to honor. Those conditions included a self-made vow to refrain from sexual experimentation until she was late into her teen years. Once Nichols permitted herself to let her guard down, she realized her capacity to attract and seduce males. Unsure of her future, Kelly compiled a short mental list of what she didn’t want out of life.

  I made a promise to my mom that she doesn’t even know I made, but I promised her in my head that I was going to wait until I was eighteen to have sex and I did. I picked up a boy who liked Star Trek and played paddle tennis. He was twenty-two. The summer after high school I did that and got it over with; I felt I just needed to get it over with so I’d know what everybody was talking about.

  It was terrible. He was terrible. I got emotional and started crying. He looked at me as if I had five eyes and it was like, you know, someone’s first time and painful and just dumb. It didn’t stop me from doing it because I realized afterwards that it was a real power trip. If you can get a guy to stand at attention — guys really pay attention when they’re sexually interested, and all of a sudden, I realized that I could get them to pay attention to me that way. It made me embrace the power of it and made me realize what a powerful thing it was.

  I ended up with a partial scholarship to art school and I needed to pay for it, so I started to go away for about six months. I was working at a Bob’s Big Boy and I wasn’t making any money, and I was getting really tired of being used as a baby sitter at home. I knew there was more out there. Where I lived was so land-locked. Their idea of career counseling was, “What do you want to be? Do you want to be a teacher?” or “Do you want to coach?” There were no real options out there. In fact, one of the options I almost took advantage of was the Navy. They came in and gave me a test and I scored real high on it. I tried to talk my mom into letting me join the Navy! I had a few more ideas than anyone was telling me in school, but she wouldn’t let me.

  I went to art school and it was formalized. It wasn’t fine art; it was commercial art. I moved out of my house and my boyfriend at the time moved to another apartment, and he let me sublet his apartment. I just moved out overnight when I was about almost nineteen. I started looking in the Want Ads. I knew I wasn’t good at waitressing and I wasn’t good at typing. I just needed to do something so I could figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up kind of thing. I wasn’t motivated to go back to college because it kept seeming that I’d have to move back home to be able to afford it. In my little trials and perusing, I found an ad for modeling at Reb’s Sunset International. I called them up and they had me come in. Reb’s a biker kind of guy.

  Reb Sawitz, the oldest former agent in the adult business was a part-time biker and the landlord of an apartment building in 1968. Sawitz opened up his own agency, Sunset International, after he was solicited by Anton Stone and Associates and brought them out of the red. Starting in the late 1960s and throughout his time as a proprietor, Sawitz and Sunset International ran ads in local newspapers seeking nude models and talent for softcore and hardcore loops. They also hired performers for adult feature productions.

  This was around 1975. I started doing nude modeling. At first, it was just about being chased around tables by photographers but it didn’t bother me. It was kind of interesting because I had never liked my body that much. That was at first, and then I started meeting some real notable photographers who were shooting for magazines. They not only liked using me as a model, but they liked my make-up. All of a sudden, I was being paraded around as a make-up artist and doing nude shoots for Hustler and Penthouse and Swank and Genesis magazines. Then I’d do the rounds all over again. I’d collect different wigs and cut my hair differently and they just kept using me, it was great. I had a whole livelihood working as a nude model for many years and doing make-up. The modeling paid better, but the make-up was more consistent. They pay much better now than they did back then.

  It was fun. It was very fun. Every day was a different place and I enjoyed the photographers I was working with. It was challenging. I was very good at what I was doing, and I was learning the whole time. The more faces you have in front of you, you keep trying and you just keep learning things. I would apply what I had learned in Art School or what I had learned as an artist. It also made me feel that I wasn’t dependent upon the nude modeling so much. I’d also joined Hal Guthu’s Agency. He was the one who always pushed the idea that I should get my SAG card and he thought I had all kinds of potential being an actor. He was the one who got me into King Kong (1975) and he was the one who got me into Toolbox Murders (1978).I was a straight actress also. A straight actress and a porn star!

  Talent scout, Hal Guthu, who had an eye for spotting raw acting ability in Nichols and others, saw his instincts actualized when Kelly started to pick up work in mainstream films and “slasher” pictures. In King Kong (1975), she was hired to play Jessica Lange’s stunt double, a grueling eight month shoot that also starred Jeff Bridges and Charles Grodin.

  I also got a lot of non-SAG parts in screamers [films]. I have about seven credits in SAG films but the rest were low budget, softcore, horror films where we’d just get chopped up and run around. That’s where I became known as the “Scream Queen”. It’s fun because I can go to conventions and people still know me as “Marianne Walter, the Scream Queen,” and they want my autograph as “Marianne Walter”. Then some of them will come and say, “Are you also Kelly Nichols?” I’ll say, “Yes.”

  I saw myself actually die on screen before I saw myself in a porn movie which is kind of strange. In The Toolbox Murders, Cameron Mitchell breaks in. I’m taking a bath, and I’m masturbating a little bit and I have bubbles all over me. He comes in and I jump past him, and he chases me around the room and then he shoots me. We have dialogue for about ten seconds and then I run out and he shoots me and I die. I die in this chair with my eyes wide open and he puts this veil over my eyes. It’s horrible! That’s the first time that I saw something graphic of myself, really blown up.

  In the visually gruesome story, the perpetrator played by Cameron Mitchell in The Toolbox Murders wears a ski mask and wie
lds a collection of carpentry tools leaving a trail of dead females in his wake after a torturous rampage. In her portrayal as Dee Ann one of the stalker’s victims, Kelly’s presence in the exploitative horror picture considered by many critics to be mediocre in its genre left an enduring impression on slasher and porn fans alike. Nichols (as Marianne Walter) and Mitchell (in a non-sex role) later appeared in director Anthony Spinelli’s Dixie Ray, Hollywood Star (1983) starring Lisa DeLeeuw and John Leslie as a private investigator.

  I would have probably stayed with acting if love hadn’t come along! I met my first husband and that kind of got me all messed up and questioning everything. He was sort of a neurotic alcoholic with many personalities. None of which I knew about when I first met him. He would shame me about the nude modeling, but he wouldn’t mind taking the money. He talked to me about marrying him, and then he kept breaking up with me and getting back together. He could be violent. Then he moved to New York City, and called me from there and said, “You’ve really got to come out here and we can start all over again.” I was so missing him and I was so hurt at that time. It was stupid. He said, “I’m doing camera work at a theater.” I literally sold everything that I had, my car and everything. I did a couple of back-to-back magazine shoots and jumped on a plane, got there and found out he was working at Show World in New York. He was not operating a camera; he was actually operating on stage with another girl. I’d sold everything so I was stuck there.

  Show World, the former adult emporium in New York City formerly located at 42nd and 8th Street operated in its prime years between 1975 and 1995 during an era where live sex shows (and peep shows) were the order of the day. In 1995, a zoning ordinance passed by City Council restricted adult theatre owners from operating in the heart of the world class city forcing Show World to eventually close down in 2001. The mezzanine has since been replaced by the Laugh Factory, and the one time upstairs theatre was leased to an off-off Broadway company in 1998. Young Marianne Walter, who ventured solo to New York City to hook up with her boyfriend in the late 1970s, accommodated his wishes by becoming his new stage partner at Show World

  It wasn’t a big deal. I’d been nude in front of the camera so many times and with another nude male model, so it just seemed like an extended version of that. I never felt I had to justify my feelings about it, I didn’t really feel one way or another. I was used to being disappointed by my boyfriend. I was disappointed in him because he was the one who was always coming down on me for being in sexual situations because of what I did for a living, and there he is on stage. He said, “If you don’t want me to be with other girls then be with me.” He took me in and introduced me to all of his friends at Show World, and all of a sudden, it just seemed like a job. He got me to come on stage and do things for Show World with him various times. It was kind of a little naked lesbian community! You got to make up your own story and script it and go on stage. Find someone to fuck, get off, and then do it five more times that day. It was interesting. It was during that time that he introduced me to [director] Chuck Vincent, who was my Svengali: the one who first got me into the films. “Kelly Nichols” was created and then it took off! That’s how I got into porn. If I hadn’t been in New York, I would not have gotten into porn because it was just too illegal in L.A. at that time.

  Opening Up

  You’re probably more aware of your feelings as a sex performer, but I still think that just by being a nude model and the way you are a nude model you are opened up. You’re not just nude modeling, you are “opening up”. In a gynecological way, you’re opening up. If you can do that and pretend you’re looking up at the sky or the sun, and just go off in that place in your head, you can pretty much do anything past that. You can have anybody shove anything into you or do anything, because it really is you in your own imagination.

  When I was with a guy, I’d be in a caretaking mode and I’d want to make sure that he was comfortable and that he was getting hot and off. That’s part of my power thing with sex. I’ve always liked the fact that guys get hard-ons for me so that was probably just like some complete sexual perversion I’d create for myself. You look at the camera and the lighting person and you just tune them all out.

  Early on, I actually did more critiquing of myself to determine whether it seemed natural rather than giving the appearance of reading off of a script. Then the next thing was, “How does my body look?” I’m very critical of my body. So I’m not even thinking about the sexuality or the act. Apparently, I’m good because I make terrified faces and terrified faces depict orgasm. You just go, “Ah!” Ah!” Ah!” like you’re going to explode! Oh, my god! People give you awards for it! It was later on I’d get letters from jail that these guys would write in crayon, and they’d say how much they enjoyed my work. You didn’t realize whom you might be influencing. It’s never a bad thing; it’s just that you’re in an insular kind of situation. When you were doing film, you didn’t realize how few performers there were. That was pornography; it was distributed all over the world. There were only a handful of us so everybody saw the few of us.

  Kelly validated the presumption that a vast number of adult entertainers felt encumbered by social protocol and values embedded in traditional religious denominations and that working in pornographic films helped them to break free. In fact, it’s not as transparent as that.

  I’ve often thought about that and I think that I am a closet exhibitionist. I’m a closet exhibitionist so it was a way of showing off as a ham. Whenever I was a thespian, I was always a ham. It was a way of showing off. It was also a way of getting a dollar value out of a body that I personally didn’t think was all that great. If someone was willing to pay a great deal of money to look at me, to me, that was concrete evidence that my body was good enough. They were paying for it so that threw me for a loop that my body was okay because I never really liked my body that much. That was a part of it. Some of it could have also been a “fuck you” to my mom and all of the Catholicism I was raised with. It’s funny, because when I was working most of the girls were Catholic and most of the boys were Jewish.

  It’s just something as simple as not having any sisters and not being a boy, and wanting to be one of the boys but not having the body to be a boy. This kind of validated that I was a girl on some level too. Instead of being a boy, my career was such that I was able to put on lacey things and strappy heels and be sexy, and people thought I was sexy and pretty and that was a good part of it too. As far as my facial features go, I have been told I have marble eyes. I get the cross that I look like Susan Sarandon and when I smile, I look like Goldie Hawn. I wasn’t against opening myself up wide, so I did put on lingerie, and put on make-up, and put on pretty faces and had people tell me how pretty I was. Many people have a job description where two thirds of the job they like and one third they don’t. So, two thirds of my job I really liked and the one third? Well, okay, I’ll just factor it out.

  It was seamless in the beginning of my adult career because Chuck [Vincent] is gay. I’m talking about a man who is like an older uncle who is gay. I was introduced to him by my ex-husband who would normally flip out about something like that but he introduced me. Chuck promised him a part too, but he was looking for a brand new girl to create a new identity with and take her to Europe and pay her “X” amount of money.

  Michigan born Chuck Vincent began his career in entertainment as a stage manager and director in regional theatre prior to helming his own production company, Platinum Pictures, in New York in the early 1970s.

  One of the reasons I became an X-rated star too I have to tell you, is because the travel was fabulous. I got to go all over Europe to so many countries and I was wined and dined, it was just wonderful. I had never been outside of the country before. We were broke in New York and it was like, “okay”. It was fabulous! Chuck liked the fact that I had been in Penthouse a couple of times and that I presented myself well, and that I could memorize dialogue because his films contained a lot of dialogue. We just ki
nd of all agreed on it.

  Nichols’ first experience in a sex film was positive which made it easy for her to continue to accept offers and keep working.

  I was offered my first venture starring in Europe where they did all of the exterior stuff, and then we went back to America where we spent two weeks shooting the hardcore which I did with Jack Wrangler who is gay. My first sex scene on camera was with a gay man and I had no idea until right before our scene. I was supposed to give him a blowjob in the car, and I was walking over to the car and someone said, “You do know he’s gay.”

  I’m like, “Oh, man!”

  Vincent’s Bon Appetit (1980) introduced Nichols in the title role as Faith, an uneducated caterer stuck in a rut with an out of work boyfriend (Roger Caine). On a whim, she is retained for $250 thousand dollars by a “high society” Cougar (Gloria Leonard) to bed the world’s best lovers in fifty days and provide a full report. Faith’s assigned photographer (Randy West, with whom Nichols had apparently enjoyed a brief affair) must accompany Faith and document the proof — which he does with reluctance at first. Nichols is outstanding as “Faith” particularly when pretending to be a model posing for an artist (Ron Hudd) who becomes completely unglued by her seductive banter until he has no choice but to cave to the pressure in his jeans. Equally enchanting are Kelly and West; they network with one another smoothly when out of bed and with sexual enthusiasm when under the covers. Kelly’s scene with Jack Wrangler (playing a Hollywood celebrity) is brief and appears towards the end of the film. Considering this was Nichols’ debut hardcore feature, she is remarkably loose and relaxed with all of her conquests.