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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  While thriving within a world many outsiders deem demoralizing, subversive, and even perverse, Penny’s capacity for capturing shimmers of raw beauty, elegance, and human spirit, so eloquently evidenced in her photography transcends in every thread of her work and life. She doesn’t waste moments.

  I loved doing photography and I know that I had a gift for seeing. Ten people can shoot the same thing and the photographs are all going to be different.

  There’s a saying I have tacked up in my office: “The artist doesn’t see things as they are, but as he is”. Everybody is different. We shoot according to who we are and what we are, that’s how we see things. I don’t think I’ve done my most significant work yet. In fact, I’m doing it right now. I can’t say I’ve loved every single thing I’ve written, but I’ve loved writing, I loved photography and I adored acting. Acting was my first great love. I was so young and so vulnerable. I thought I could never love anything that much again because I would never be that young and vulnerable again. As I’d mentioned, I’ve also loved singing, but I can’t do that anymore because of my Meniere’s disease.

  Antine has suffered from Meniere’s disease (named after the French Physician Prosper Meniere) for several years of her adult life. Meniere’s (aka Labyrinthitis) is an inner ear disturbance characterized by hearing loss and/or imbalance, vertigo and tinnitus (ringing of the ears). Penny wears binaural hearing devices that augment her residual auditory ability improving speech discrimination and understanding in most listening environments.

  I started buying certain costumes because I knew if I left them at the studios, they would more or less end up as a rag on the floor. I bought some things that were so outrageously beautiful, some things from the thirties and the forties. I would buy them myself and then rent them to the companies. I had respect for these garments. I still have some of them, but a lot of them I’ve sold off. I’ve pretty much sold most of my vintage clothing.

  I’ve loved every single phase of my creative life. I’ve been fortunate to have great friends who share my love of the arts, writers and actors, and directors and singers. In that sense, it’s been an outstanding ride. I’ve had an incredible life. My enrichment has mostly been interior stuff. I did make very good money for many, many years in porn. It’s not happening anymore because the industry is going down “la toilette” because of the internet. As wonderful as the internet is, in many ways it’s destroyed the entire adult industry.

  I think I was the first woman to come in and write actual scripts for the porn industry. I believe I was the first woman to do that. I was there right at the beginning of Home Video. All the major features that were made in the 1970s were written by men. I was writing for video and that was a new concept and technology. I’ve written probably five hundred or six hundred of them in the past twenty-five years. Everything from Debbie Does Dallas: The Revenge (2003), to Heart of Darkness (2003), Jekyll & Hyde (2000), The New Devil and Miss Jones (2005), to my favorite CineSex (1995) or Bobby Sox (1996) which won my first Best Screenplay award. Throat: A Cautionary Tale (2009) won Best Screenplay. If I never won a thing, I’d still have to say I loved it! I think I was responsible for boosting the quality of movies being done in the video era.

  One of Penny’s wishes during her early days, to meet Georgina Spelvin came true when she was asked to write the script for The New Devil and Miss Jones in 2005. The movie was produced by Vivid, and Spelvin, the star of the original film was asked to appear in a cameo. The New Devil in Miss Jones (directed by Paul Thomas) is definitely worth seeing and would especially be of interest to fans of the original production directed by Gerard Damiano. Antine’s excellent script is the integral ingredient that breeds life into the inner turmoil and pathos experienced by the lead character, Justine Jones, the fictional heroine embossed by Georgina Spelvin.

  In The New Devil in Miss Jones, the mousy Miss Jones (Savannah Sampson) awakens one morning to an upside-down day. It is her birthday. Justine begins to experience brief memory lapses and can’t seem to get grounded as she prepares to go to work as an editor for a successful publisher of Romance novels. Along the way, Justine is confronted by sexual imagery: anonymous people are copulating in public, in a warehouse, on tables and in chairs. Feeling like an intruder in a frightening dream, tentatively, Justine participates as a voyeur to what she consciously considers acts of indecency. The conduct excites her though, as she eventually melds in with the faces in the crowd and becomes entangled in a ménage a trois. Afterwards, Justine has remorse about what she allowed herself to become involved in, but she can’t seem to stop the fantasies (or is it reality?) from consuming her thoughts.

  We soon learn Justine is not like her co-workers. She is quiet and reserved and doesn’t mix easily. Her colleagues mock her and she retreats into her shell. Justine’s boss, Miss Devlin (Jenna Jameson), invites Justine into her office and attempts to seduce her by intimating that Justine wants to share her desires. Confused, Justine becomes upset and suddenly finds herself in the Ladies’ bathroom. She stumbles upon an attendant (Georgina Spelvin) who informs her it’s “getting late” paraphrasing the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Justine thinks to herself, “Late…for what?” Before departing from the bathroom, Justine encounters a young custodian Ted (Dick Smothers Jr.). She answers inappropriately when he tells her he cleans toilets after she asks why he is there. Ted wishes to chat with her, but she quickly brushes him off and he is left alone.

  In the next scene, Justine is outside in bright sunshine seated naked by a swimming pool. Jordan (Nick Manning), a friendly, well-built co-worker appears on the deck. Justine allows herself to fall for his charms and Jordan leads her into an extravaganza of sex, leaving her temporarily satiated. In the next scene, Justine reconnects with her boss Miss Devlin. The two women approach one another with ferocious passion as they display impressive acrobatic maneuvers.

  In her final sexual encounter, Justine indulges herself sandwiched between two males (Anthony Hardwood and Mario Rossi), and when it’s over, the clock in her head is ticking faster. She is once again face-to-face with Miss Devlin who reveals to Justine her real identity. Miss Devlin leads Justine back to the last minutes of her life, the day she took an overdose of pills and died on her living room couch. Stunned and terrified by the reality of her demise, Justine senses her fate and while trying to reconcile why she is being punished for committing an act of suicide, she learns an even more startling truth, that her “act of selfishness” also caused the death of another. On cue, Justine’s thoughts are interrupted again by the bathroom attendant who reminds her that time has indeed run out for Justine. Spelvin leads the fraught Justine down a stark, white hallway into a small room where she must live out eternity, unreciprocated in her attempt to be pleasured by Ted, the custodian she’d abruptly dismissed earlier when he had only wanted to talk.

  Savannah Samson gives a quality lead performance in this film which would have undoubtedly been a challenge considering how good Spelvin (who is tops in her cameo) was in the original. Additionally, the art direction and musical score are well matched to the material, and the sex scenes dovetail neatly within the framework of the story. The New Devil in Miss Jones picked up nine AVN awards in 2006 including Best Screenplay by Raven Touchstone and Dean Nash. Antine is proud of the success of the film, but more importantly, she is pleased to have made a new friend.

  More than twenty years after the original film was released and well into our friendship [she always says we were twins separated at birth], Georgina and I sat in my bedroom watching her interview for the 25th Anniversary version of the original DMJ which included bits of the original movie. I asked her how she felt watching it after all these years. She said, “A bit embarrassed. You know my family and all.” She was now in her early seventies with graying hair, an impish grin and a generous heart.

  “You never expected to become an icon?” I asked.

  “Hell,” she said, “I never thought anyone would ever see the movie!”

  Al
though there are far too many to give attention to here, in looking at some of Penny’s other favorite storylines it is apparent Antine is a prolific writer who is gifted at creating atmosphere. She is also meticulous with dialogue and plot. Not only that, but Penny’s actors are appreciative of her efforts as she is able to vacillate between grit and the sublime which the following film synopses exemplify: Cinesex (directed by Michael Zen and released in 1995) features popular nineties starlets Asia Carrera and Leena. The pros harness their talents, incandescent sex appeal and beauty in this story contrasting two disillusioned women pining for different realities.

  Weary of her life and her fiancé, a stripper (Asia Carrera) longs for a meaningful, romantic relationship and imagines herself as the star in one of her favorite classic Hollywood movies. Next, a tough-talking icon of the silver screen (Leena) desires to experience unbridled sex, and steps out of the celluloid to exchange places with a diehard fan. Their adulterated fantasies reach fruition when the women inhabit one another’s lives. (Alex Sanders and Steven St. Croix assume the supporting male roles.) Cinesex won Best Film, Best Art Direction and Best Screenplay at the AVN awards and was followed up by Cinesex 2 (1995) starring Asia Carerra, Lisa Ann and Kaitlyn Ashley. In 2008, the movies were released as a two-box set.

  Throat: A Cautionary Tale (directed by Paul Thomas) stars the mysterious beauty Sasha Grey as Julie Garrett in this reprisal of the original Gerard Damiano film Deep Throat (1972). When the film opens, Julie’s dead body is being examined by a mystified coroner. He discovers rolled up bills contained within a condom inserted inside of her vagina. Detectives Joe Gillette (Tom Byron) and Byrd Smith (Penny Flame) attempt to piece together the final weeks leading up to Julie’s death. Through flashbacks, we discover Julie was born with an unusual congenital defect — her clitoris is in her throat. The story backtracks through Julie’s life, and we learn she had capitalized upon her oddity in order to support herself and her aspiring suitcase pimp boyfriend. Julie’s initial paid sexual engagements begin in a sleazy peep show theatre catering to a handful of lonely male souls (Herschel Savage is great in a cameo as Jacob King, a Hasidic Jew). She is taught by a fellow performer Lane (Aliana Love) how to use her rare gift by deep-throating dildos the size of a baby’s arm for practice. Soon, Julie becomes addicted to the deep throat technique and for the first time in her life, she is able to achieve a climax in her tonsils rather than between her legs. Strong-armed by her boyfriend, Julie graduates to blowing strange men, one-by-one, in a trailer until she is rescued by a seemingly concerned promoter Danny Quinn (Evan Stone) as he informs her point blank, “You don’t have to do this, you know.” Julie takes up with Quinn at his Southern California residence and he treats her like a queen until he realizes the cash cow he has in his midst. Quinn signs Julie up to star in her first porn film with the “biggest” male star in the business Dante DeMarco (played by muscle bound/steroid fueled Lee Stone). Julie is not agreeable to the proposition, and angrily, she lets Quinn know but the deal is already inked. Reluctantly, Julie makes her way onto the set and begins to perform fellatio on DeMarco. The sequences of events that transpire from this climactic point are disturbing and tragic, begging one to question if Antine’s refined script is a partial commentary on the pitfalls of the adult industry, or simply an example of what can happen when one becomes addicted to the pleasure centers in the brain. What stands out in this story is the capacity of disconnect exhibited between the actors during sex. It’s hard to discern if the disassociation is intentional to further enhance the moral of the plot, or if this is typical behavior in today’s brand of porn. In and amidst the expletives exclaimed during every orgasm, most of the actors appear robotic and even bored. On the plus side, Grey is a beautiful young woman and a fine actor uncovering a kind of curious Mona Lisa smile at times during her performance.

  Early in 2011, Sasha Grey announced on her Facebook page she was leaving the adult business for other pursuits. Penny Flame (Flame now goes by her real name, Jennifer Ketcham) who played the troubled alcoholic detective in the story’s subplot, has also left the business. Apparently, Flame is a very good writer as can be observed on a blog she has written for a while. Throat: A Cautionary Tale cleaned up at the 2010 AVN awards with Best Screenplay award going to Antine.

  Early on, I didn’t know that anybody even knew who I was other than the people I was working with. I was in the business for three years, sitting at home, doing my thing, and working quietly on the sets with my people. I was never a publicity seeker. I was at an XRCO Award Show and I think it was the second or third year I was in the business, I was walking down the hallway and a guy came up to me and said, “You’re Raven Touchstone, aren’t you?’

  I said, “Yes, I am.”

  He said, “I was in a movie you wrote and I have to thank you for the role you wrote for me. I loved playing that role.” I was absolutely floored.

  “Well, thank you so much,” I said. Then I went into the Ladies room and a girl came up to me and said, “You’re Raven Touchstone, aren’t you?’

  I said, “Yes, I am!” I couldn’t believe it! Then it happened a third time that night. It was at that point that I realized I had a career. One night during one of those events the kids out in the audience all just stood up, and screamed and cheered for me and I was just so touched by that. Everybody in my personal world knows what I do. I’ve never been secretive about it.

  The Best of the Best

  Inside Penny’s North Hollywood home is a wonderful assortment of esoteric pieces, pictures and posters duly representative of her contrasting tastes, her spirited nature and varied passions. In the front hallway hangs a framed photograph Antine shot of Hollywood couple Roy Rogers and Dale Evans holding hands back in the 1960s when she was a part of their circle of friends. In the summer of 2011, I was invited to a girls’ lunch in Penny’s home along with Georgina Spelvin and Veronica Hart. It was a treat to be privy to the valued friendship and mutual respect shared by these very unique, unorthodox women while engaged in conversation around the kitchen table. Afterwards, Penny brought us to a converted guest house behind her patio to reveal the treasure trove of garments and costumes she has collected, not only from her years of experience as a costumer, but as a fan of beautiful fabrics and designs. It is Penny’s belief that inside or outside of porn, life is what you make it as she shared some proud and poignant Kodak memories.

  Every five years I throw a birthday party for myself which I plan as a reunion for many of my old friends. Most of them know each other and we all have history together. Usually, the friends from Los Angeles show up, but the ones who moved away do not. This year I threw my “every-five-year party/reunion” and everybody came. My girlfriend Pat who has been close to me since we were nine years old and who was a roommate, both in New York and L.A., came down from Northern California. My darling friend Pamela, my roommate when she was nineteen and I was twenty-one years old and who is now a major archaeologist in this country, came in From Pennsylvania. My Southern Belle girlfriend Lucy came in from New Orleans. My closest male friend in the world, Ted Kristian, along with his lover Allan and our friend Carol, all came up from Palm Springs. Gail and Erwin Flacks and Su Ann Bamer, another past roommate, came from Las Vegas. The rest live nearby. All thirty-three of them, friends from my childhood, from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, some of them the great loves of my life were all here to honor and renew our friendships. After a long evening of eating and schmoozing, I sat them all down in the living room, and starting with the one I had known the longest, told them all how I had met each one and how they were connected to each other. I told funny stories about them and some of them told some about me! It was one of the most extraordinary evenings I’ve ever experienced: with love and joy, and gratitude. I’m the luckiest woman in the world to have such friends.

  Over twenty years ago, several of my friends and I organized an intervention for an alcoholic girlfriend of ours. Eleven of us had gone through our paces the day before with the in
terventionist, and now we were facing the actual event. It was a frightening prospect for us to take over the responsibilities of her life, including her nine-year old son if indeed she agreed to go to the Betty Ford for thirty days which had already been arranged for her. We formed a circle, held hands, and then a great “whoop” came out of us all as our clasped hands came up in the air in the center of the circle. It was a whoop of anxiety and of hope. Later that night after we had done the intervention and had all gone out to dinner together, we’d taken her to say goodbye to her young son. After we’d all hugged her with tears soaking our faces, we stood in a group, waving goodbye as her sister and another friend drove her down to Palm Springs to the Betty Ford Center. That experience was a Kodak moment I will never forget. She has been sober now for over twenty years and she was one of the thirty-three at my party this year. Moments like these, I consider the “Kodak moments of my life”. Have I had any of these moments in my life in porn? Of course, I have. Holding Ron Sullivan just weeks before his death and knowing I was losing a close friend who was losing his life — that was a Kodak moment for me.

  Back in the late 1980s, I went to Paris to do a shoot. Ron Sullivan was directing and on one of our days off, I took some of the girls, Barbara Dare and Bionca to The Louvre just for the experience of it all. At one point, Bionca drifted away from us. I found her standing before a huge painting, her eyes wide; tears running down her face because a little child in that painting spoke to her soul and touched her heart. That was a Kodak moment for me. Climbing up to Quasimodo’s gargoyles with Rick Savage, and standing out there looking at the sun setting on all of Paris — my god, what a moment that one was. Sleeping in a broom closet in the hunting manor where we all stayed in Tours outside of Paris because Ron’s snoring was causing the plaster to fall on my head. Yep, that was a Kodak moment. Getting my first AVN nomination and my first Best Screenplay awards — there are so many moments.