Since the legalization of sex films in the state of California, there has been debate as to the appropriate age for a female or male to enter the erotic movie profession. Hypocritically, society appears to have greater concerns about the welfare and potential for the exploitation of young women in X-rated movies than they do young men. A given individual’s level of maturity definitely plays a factor. As a feminist who is also a porn star, Nichols made a point of clearing up misconceptions with a novel analysis of sexual performers.
I would say that having the right to use my body anyway I want to, is the ultimate in being feminine in a lot of ways. I chose to take on the profession whether I was a prostitute or a porn star. I like the porn star aspect because the guys get paid and you don’t pay the guys. There’s something when you’re a pro, the guys are paying you and I think that diminishes the male. When the males are getting paid too, you’re both on a level playing field. You both feel like you’re a part of something.
I’ve gotten together with feminists through phone calls and sitting around in discussion. Ultimately, at the end of the day, they could not disagree with me that it was about standing up and deciding what we wanted to do with our bodies instead of the government telling us what we wanted to do with our bodies, or a boyfriend telling us what to do with our bodies. We are using that judgment. Like any job description, there are going to be ones who are going to cause trouble. Often times the trouble makers like squeaky wheels, made the most amount of noise. There will be the occasional kind of situation where some pimp brought his girl in and wants her to get tested and work or there will be an abusive director, but that doesn’t last long because it’s not tolerated. We’ve never tolerated child abuse or anything, that’s a whole myth. It’s up there with the myth of fluffers. Mostly in the nineties, they were doing the scenario where how many guys can this girl fuck. They were marathon films and they literally needed tons of girls to keep the guys hard and then move on.
The term “fluffer” describes an individual on the sidelines hired to “blow” a penis in order to produce or maintain an erection in preparation for the male’s imminent ejaculation scene. Although it is no longer commonly done, fluffers have served their purpose on porn sets over the past forty years. Former adult female performer Houston reportedly had sex with over six hundred men in The World’s Biggest Gangbang 3: The Houston 500 (1999), a colossal exaggeration. According to the movie’s description, several “fluffers” were hired to keep the men hard so they could get the job done. In truth, male participants in gangbang productions are generally inflated artificially without the aid of fluffers. “Snuff” films continue to be part of the urban legend and contradiction congruous with the adult film environment. The term “snuff” cited earlier in this book is used to describe the alleged “snuffing” out of a participating actor during shooting — literally, committing homicide.
I worked for Roberta Findlay who did the film Snuff (1976). I asked her about snuff films and she said, “If that stuff existed it existed only in the hands of someone who paid to have it done and it would not be in public domain.” It’s something someone would do and then hand it off to the person who wanted to do it again and again. I think porn’s purest form would be stuff that was shot in real time using real movies of the person. I guess you have something to that effect today when people film themselves in their own home. We worked in kind of a choreographed way that made it beautiful. It was false, but it was beautiful. It had its own kind of uniqueness and it was very art deco.
Nothing Lasts Forever
In the early eighties, young Nichols had the foresight to predict the course of the future for adult entertainment once shooting on videotape took hold.
At first, video films were quite expensive. The Video and Beta was about one hundred dollars or you could go to the theatre. I was friends with all of the guys at the Pussycat Theatres, and I used to be the one girl who would sit around and drink with them and I’d tell them outright, “Guys, you’ve got to change your business because people can take the films home and no one will go to your theatre,” and no one did anything. They lost fortunes. I was just a little porn star in 1982 going, “It’s going to change guys,” and by 1984, it already had.
I think that technology pushes it where it’s supposed to go and at this point it’s kind of gotten weird and sleazy and chopped up because we’re not making movies at all anymore. Movies don’t sell at all. Why do that when you can go to a free website. There are a lot of free websites out there showing blowjobs and other things. On a free site, you can get a half hour of that and you don’t have to put any money in. That pretty much puts caterers, make-up artists, lighting people, everybody out of the business except maybe the camera guy. That isn’t as much the older guys because the older guys are used to corralling full groups of people to shoot. These younger guys come with a camera and shoot the girl who is sucking him off or somebody else, but it costs very little. There are so many girls right now. There are so many agents and so many agents have so many girls that it’s the antithesis of when I worked. There were so few of us and now there are too many of us. There was some place to put it, and now there’s no place to put it.
As a sage in her field, Kelly extolled particles of wisdom for young people coming into the fold.
I would tell kids today that there’s not that much money in it. You’d be better off doing Escort service. I’m so fucking serious. If you really want to make money on your back, get with a good Escort service. The money is not that great in porn anymore and it’s not as if anyone is going to see the evidence that you were in these films so your parents and your relatives will never see it. You’d have some longevity as an escort and you’d make more money than you would as a porn star. You work very hard as a porn star. They have the girls doing so much stuff these days. They come in and they have to do the softcore, the hardcore, the softcore stills, the hardcore shoot — cum in the face. Then they have to put all of their clothes back on and do all of the dialogue from the beginning. The girls are there for hours and hours when they actually shoot a movie. Even the parodies they’ve been shooting lately are running its course. They were kind of the thing for a while and now everyone is doing a parody.
There are many web shows on the internet to create where you could get invested in characters and they’re like shows that you would see on TV, but they are on your computer. I see people doing sex web shows where you can actually track characters. There are people out there who actually care about characterization. I have a lot of fans that love my characters. There are a lot of men who want to get their rocks off and get that much more, but they just don’t want to pay that much more because the price has dropped so much. Why pay fourteen or twenty bucks for something that you can get on the computer?
Putting aside the infinite differences between the old days and the new, I wondered how Nichols might constitute the legacy of a “Golden Goddess.”
A “Golden Goddess” legacy would probably be your “Golden Goddess” on the silver screen. It’s our best memories of a group that brought something very interesting to the vernacular. Porn could be in the gutter and awful, and so could low rent movies, but you had people work hard to elevate and bring it up to a certain level where the women were photographed stunningly. They were given wonderful things to say and interact with their co-stars so that there was a reason why they would fuck and make sense. It was just the best way you could portray it. It was old fashioned and best way to portray pornography. We’ve become like Old Hollywood. It’s like the old star system where the studio would groom the actor, and he would come out of that studio and then they would push him at the movie theatres. Then television came along and that became a group of different kind of actors.
There were a lot of people acting before you had the golden star who put their footprint down. Yeah, we had very few stars. We also had a vehicle, a theatre. People would come to see a “Kelly Nichols” production. They treated us like old school. No one is r
eally standing out today. The girls who were huge in the 1990s are just scraping by. No one even knows them now.
Family Matters
I actually quit the business in late 1984-85, and I met someone in New York, literally, the night I had walked off the set. Someone had ripped off my purse. My second husband at that time was cheating on me with another girl and I just walked off with this guy. We spent three days in a hotel and I just didn’t want to come out. When I did, my second husband had kind of moved this girl into our apartment so I stayed at my girlfriends’ and just sort of decided to quit the business. I quit him, I quit the business, and then the guy I had walked off with and I had a happy little mayhem — that’s a little sponge I was using at the time as a birth control method. I got pregnant and decided to keep her. In 1986, I had my first daughter, and in 1987, I had my second daughter.
After meeting her third husband, budding screenwriter John Skipp and had two daughters (they later divorced), Kelly kept her hand in the business primarily as a make-up artist. She also appeared in sporadic non-sex or BDSM roles. According to her filmography, in 1996 Nichols also participated in a boy/girl scene with the late adult actor Jon Dough in Night of Seduction. Drawing from her reputation as a female star and skilled make-up artist, Nichols is one of the very few who kept a healthy balance between performing and other pursuits that didn’t include capitalizing on her physical assets for financial benefit.
I moved back to California in the nineties and I started back doing make-up again. I had done make-up earlier on and then I had two kids so I actually stayed quite a bit with the adult industry because they knew me. I knew I could be there in a day and I wouldn’t have to go on location. I would come home that night and it was my own people. They didn’t pay as much as working as a performer in the industry, but you’d be taking home four to five hundred dollars a day being a make-up artist which was still more than working as a bank teller. It was fine for me and for my kids.
My kids know about me. I’ve let them know that their mother was in naked pictures early on and that I was in naked movies, but you don’t give your kids valium, you don’t give them alcohol, and you don’t give them porno. You take it as it comes. There was one point when Melanie was thirteen and she had gone on Cass’ [Paley] computer or something and found out my name. She said to me “I know who you are…You’re Kelly Nichols…”
I turned around and stared at her dead in the eye and said, “Yeah, do you have a problem?” and she said, “No,” and then I turned to Mikie [my other daughter] and I said, “Mikie, you got a problem?” and she said, “No, Mommy!” That was it. Melanie has asked me a couple of questions since then and I showed her some [softcore] magazines of mine. Mikie is my little abstinent girl. She’s just very nice and she doesn’t like to hear about sex with anybody but her boyfriend, and she doesn’t even admit to that. She’s twenty-four years old and she’s just very shy. Melanie is very open. We trade porn anime and whenever I work for some of the toy companies, I’ll get her extra toys and stuff that I can bring home in a package and give to her. We have a great relationship, but it’s polar opposite. It’s funny though, no matter what your kids don’t want to be like you!
I do have a dividing line between “Kelly Nichols,” and “Marianne Walter”. When I was working in New York, my family was on the opposite side of the coast. I didn’t have kids then and I was in a relationship with someone who was a musician who later on got into the business. When I was in Manhattan working in the business, everyone called me “Kelly Nichols,” nobody called me “Marianne,” so I literally only had one name until I got out of the business. When I got out of the business, I added water to oil and had two kids so as soon as that happened I put a whole kibosh on the “Kelly” thing. I didn’t let anybody know I was a porn star at all. I was just a make-up artist.
I could tell my mom I was a make-up artist because in the early eighties when I was being “Kelly,” I was also doing a lot of make-up for MTV. I was doing some early contemporary things that were really kind of neat. I could tell her I was a make-up artist and not be lying to her face. It’s just that I didn’t tell her the whole truth. My brothers, they found out sideways in their own ways. My brother Steve is helping me work on my website right now so he has a healthy attitude about it. One of my brothers didn’t have a healthy attitude about it and my other brothers haven’t really talked to me about it. Yeah, you can’t really be in bed and be in the family.
Second Chances
Early in 2009, Nichols made a brief comeback as a performer after a purported twenty-five year hiatus opposite the sexy male star Tom Byron in Seasoned Players 8. After initiating his adult career in 1982, Byron had a reputation in the late 1980s as a rocker before returning to the business as a performer, and eventually, a director. Kelly’s calculated reunion was seamless as she rekindled her onscreen relationship with her long time friend. The result is ebullient as the hyped film touted that Nichols’ return to movies would contain a surprise “first” for fans of the popular erotic performer.
Tommy Byron asked if I would do it and I was wondering if I could do it so it was kind of a personal thing. The money was good. It wasn’t that, it was just that I wanted to be in the right frame of mind. I wanted to do it sober and I wanted to look as good as I could. I did it, and I had a lot of fun doing it. It was just Tommy and this cameraman. It was great. I felt I was in good shape. The guy who was handling the camera was a sweetheart. I’d known Tommy for a long time and I shot with him once when he first got into the business. He’s sober now and he’s in his own house, it’s a beautiful house.
He totally took care of me — he took control of the whole experience. It was as if I’d never stopped performing. I was so comfortable and he got me into a new position I really liked. I thought, “This is good! I like this!” It was called the “lazy cowgirl”. It looks like I did all the work, but he did all the work and it was really, really fun. It was one of his best sellers so I got strokes in the department of fans. They loved it. That’s all I need to do. I feel for a woman my age to do guys is like taking two steps backwards. It’s kind of pathetic. I don’t mind playing around with pretty girls and stuff as long as they’re over twenty-five. I don’t mind talking to the fans either, but there’s no need to prove myself by doing guys anymore. I have a boyfriend and that’s fine.
Kelly and Tom Byron open their scene together in Seasoned Players 8 by recollecting their previous on-camera encounter. Nichols recalled they had first met in New York, and that during vaginal intercourse she had appreciated Byron’s assurance he would be gentle. Casual teasing and laughter preceding the film’s sexual interaction creates a fun and light atmosphere. Kelly doesn’t completely disrobe, but peels down to her lingerie with her plaid skirt pushed up to her thighs revealing a small, thin ring pierced through her clitoris. Soon enough, after giving rigorous attention to Byron’s erect penis, Tom moves Nichols into a cowgirl position. When he finally ejaculates, it’s reminiscent of the fountain show in front of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas proving that during her twenty-five year absence as an adult star, Kelly hasn’t lost her touch.
What I’ve been doing for the last ten years is content work with other girls. They’ll come over and my boyfriend will attend to the two of us and we’ll just play with each other and then she’ll keep the content and I’ll keep the content. I have a bunch of it saved up that I’ve literally done. I might do some live talks, but I don’t want to work that hard, honestly. I’ll just do the occasional content thing and see if that’ll make a difference because there are a lot of classic fans out there. I’m actually working on two websites that I’m going to be on, but the only thing I’m going to do on it is just girls or me. I just got hired today to work with someone who is doing a show for Showtime. He wants certain porn stars to be on the show with him and then they’ll sort of play and he’ll comment on it while they’re playing. Then he’ll talk about it afterwards.
I asked Kelly about her experiences with alco
hol addiction, something she has officially addressed in interviews and has no qualms about discussing. Nichols works at staying healthy and whole with the aid of her personal sponsor.
Actually, drinking was a problem when I was quitting doing adult work because I wasn’t having fun and it had all gone to video. I felt I was just doing it by rote, and I was unhappy in my relationship so as I mentioned when I quit my relationship, I quit the adult. I’d have to say that some of the last shoots I don’t remember doing because I was just drinking waiting to go on. It was not a good place for me to be at that point in Manhattan doing porn.
I go in and out of sobriety. I’m mostly sober and then I’ll have a bad whatever and have to call up somebody to get me back on track again. That has been interesting. But I’m not drinking because the work is going bad and I’m not freaking out because I’m doing more work on my website, so I’m waiting for the next shoe to fall to make me feel like I need a drink again!
I like to work out. I like to read. I’m going to be learning how to use a computer better because I’m going to be loading up these two websites of mine. I’ve been studying to be an Herbalist seriously for a long time and Homeopathic Sciences. At some point, I’d like to do something with it. I’d like to get to a place where I’m not worrying about money so that I can actually go to school and figure out what I want. I’d like to take nutrition courses and find some kind of Homeopathic place I could go into. I still have quite a few years left and it’s something that fascinates me, it really does.
I like to hang out with my daughters. My twenty-four year old daughter lives with me. My other daughter is twenty-five and she lives around the corner. The one who lives with me is going to be moving out in January and the other one is talking about moving in with her father. He and I are still friends. He lives in Eagle Rock, [California] so they’ll be in the same state. I’m probably not going to stay here in Thousand Oaks. I have a boyfriend of nine years and he lives in Redondo Beach so I might get a place at least by him. It’s too white man out here where I live now. It’s not integrated enough.
GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985 Page 59