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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  Currently, I am working with Rob Clampett who is the son of Robert Clampett, the famous animator who created “Tweety Bird”. “Tweety Bird” just turned sixty-five recently. We are making a series of documentaries. Right now, we are doing men and women in the sex industry. It’s not just porn, it’s everything. We’ve got over a hundred hours now of taped interviews with porn stars, strippers, street hookers, escorts, sex surrogates, sex therapists, name almost any area of the sex world and we’ve got them. One documentary is on the women and one documentary is on the men. We’ve got dominatrix’s, and we’ve got dominants, and slaves, transgendered men and women — all kinds of people. It has been an absolutely, extraordinary journey.

  For example, the people in the BDSM community have opened their world to us and it has been remarkable. We have interviewed and gotten close to some outstanding people who really are worth an entire hour themselves. Once we’ve got the documentary finished we’re going to do spin-offs of certain people. Their stories are outrageous and some of these people are outstanding. There’s also going to be a book attached to the documentaries with a small chapter on each person. It will contain material that’s not in the film documentary, and it will contain photographs of each individual which I am taking. We’re even thinking of including a DVD with the book. It’s going to be wonderful.

  Being in the porn industry opened me up. I was a relatively small town girl. I was always a maverick, but I was also sexually repressed — that was the world I had come from. Being involved in the sex world enlightened me in every way. It allowed me to have relationships I would never have had otherwise and a life I would never have had. Listen, nothing is perfect, but my experience in this industry has been terrific.

  Penny Antine and Nancy Culp on the set of The Beverly Hillbillies.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF PENNY ANTINE

  Jamie Gillis.

  John Holmes and Kimberly Carson, The Return of Johnny Wadd. ADAM AND EVE. PHOTOGRAPHY BY KENJI

  Buck Adams. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PENNY ANTINE

  “Leena as 1940s’s babe.” PHOTOGRAPHY BY PENNY ANTINE

  “Shame” PHOTOGRAPHY BY PENNY ANTINE

  “Sweet Reunion” PHOTOGRAPHY BY PENNY ANTINE

  “Olivia” PHOTOGRAPHY BY PENNY ANTINE

  Penny Antine with Jane Hamilton and Georgina Spelvin.

  25.

  Nina Hartley

  Heart-On Girl

  PHOTO COURTESY OF NINA HARTLEY

  “A lot of my ability to be a healed person is because of sex and sexuality. It’s not just my livelihood. I’m a true believer in my desire for every person to be at home in their body.”

  — Nina Hartley

  Throughout her twenty-eight years in the X-rated film industry, Nina Hartley, with her blonde, shoulder length hair, and vibrant, blue eyes comprehensively epitomizes the term “Golden Goddess.” Leading by example as a health professional turned sex worker, turned authoritative sex educator and theorist, the tireless fifty-three year old self-titled “MILF,” openly advocates for women and men to own, understand and embrace their sexuality fearlessly and without shame. Free of religious indoctrinations she feels create a culture of fear and guilt about an individual’s inherent need to seek, explore, provide and receive sexual nourishment, Nina confessed she got into the pornographic film trade in part, so she could live out her own sexual fantasies without emotional commitment. Hartley admitted she is an attention seeker and believes the same is true of anyone who derives income as an entertainer.

  Nina Hartley was born Marie Hartman in Berkeley, California just two years after her father was terminated from his employment. During the first ten years of her childhood, Nina saw her parents struggle for survival as her father coped over the loss of his role as breadwinner while her mother worked fulltime to sustain the family of six. In an effort to keep their marriage intact and family together, Hartley’s parents dabbled in diverse spiritual outlets, finally settling upon Zen Buddhism which teaches: “life is subject to change, and disenchantment and suffering are a result of an attachment to things which are not permanent.” Guided by her communicative and expressive character, as the exceedingly bright Hartley grew older, she joined a fantasy playgroup and realized role-playing provided her with a means to exercise her demonstrative and extroverted persona that would eventually become her signature in adult movies. Hartley was transformed at seventeen years old when she watched the Mitchell Brothers’ pornographic adaptation of the erotic novel The Autobiography of a Flea (1976) on the big screen.

  During her studies to become a registered nurse at San Francisco State University, Hartley auditioned as a novice dancer at a Sutter St. club that led to work as a peep show girl, and a stripper at the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre. She graduated magna cum laude in 1985, a year after she made her show-stopping debut as “Aunt Peg’s” over eager protégé in Educating Nina (1984) produced and directed by Juliet Anderson. In addition to her extensive resumé of work in adult entertainment, Hartley played William H. Macy’s promiscuous spouse in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997).

  Over the past two decades, Nina has learned how to shrewdly combine her love for sex with business through the development of her own line of instructional videos (more than thirty-eight titles) that instruct about all regions of the sexual spectrum in a manner that is professional, fun, and educational. She published Nina’s Guide to Total Sex in 2006.

  Along with her mate of more than ten years, Ernest Greene, Hartley enjoys the domestic life, and when time allows, extracurricular sex partners, an arrangement the couple has successfully adapted to their lifestyle without compromising their union or legal partnership.

  Nina wholeheartedly lives up to her reputation as the beloved and sexy, intellectual, iconic celebrity who gave birth to her career during the twilight hours of the adult golden age.

  With my seatbelt firmly fastened, I spoke with Nina Hartley in June 2010.

  Marie Hartman

  I was born in 1959 in Berkeley, California to parents who were politically very left of centre. Berkeley is a very family-friendly place; at least it was at that time.

  My father had been blacklisted in 1957 for being a member of the Communist party and had lost his very good, high profile, radio-hosting job in San Francisco. I have three older siblings so I was born after the fall so to speak, after my father’s fall from grace. My mother had three kids in five years, and then five years later, I was born. The others are five, seven, and nine years older than I am. There was nothing in common so I was mostly alone and alienated from a very early age.

  The first ten years of my life were spent with my parents struggling to get their footing. They had to figure out what was going on in their lives while grieving over the loss of success. My father suffered depression over losing his role as primary breadwinner. My mother was frustrated and had resentment over having to become the major breadwinner during a time when it wasn’t common for women. All the while, they were trying to keep the family together. I know they must have bickered a lot. I don’t remember fights in front of the kids, but I was lonely as a young child because my parents were very, very other focused. I grew up with a housekeeper. We had a housekeeper/nanny come in five days a week so I had non-parental care when I was very little. My mother had been born in Alabama; she’d had a housekeeper/nanny as well because that’s just what was done then. It was considered normal. I don’t know what job my father had when I was very little. They both worked, but by the time I was in first grade my father became basically, a househusband and we no longer had the housekeeper. We lived near a school and I got to walk to grade school and things like that.

  If my parents had not been so focused on survival I would have been the apple of my parents’ eyes. My mother’s biggest regret was that she couldn’t stay home and raise me. She wanted to do it right this time, she wanted to breast feed for longer and she wanted to do all of those things, so this was a real source of sadness for her.

  I’m the
most like my father, but I am a part of whatever aspects of their character and nature they have. I’m very scientific like my mother and very dreamy like my father. He was a very esoteric person and a writer while my mother had science interests. They’ve both been Buddhists for forty years which is something they discovered in trying to figure out what they were going to do. They tried everything, they tried marriage counseling, group counseling, bioenergetics, biofeedback, naked Tai Chi, guided mescaline counseling — this was the sixties in Berkeley, man. They never tried Hare Krishna thank god, but they were definitely seekers and early adopters of these early movements. My mother was also an early adopter of feminist critique theory and she was educated. They finally figured out that if they didn’t find something they could do together, the marriage was over. They didn’t really believe in divorce. They’d had a very romantic marriage that had been knocked for a loop. They found Zen and they really took to it, they liked the devotional lifestyle. My mother was typically Jewish, there’s no monastic experience in traditional Judaism. My father was very Protestant, there’s no monastic practice in Protestant religion, but they’re both very monastic people. They like the community, they like the vows, they like the devotional aspect of the life of a monk and they’ve stuck with it for forty years. In sixth months, they’ll have been married for sixty-three years.

  “Monastic” defines a devotee of a specific faith whereby its followers such as monks or nuns spend time in seclusion for the purposes of meditation or prayer. A Monastic strives to remain free of the distractions of the secular world and follows strict rules designed to assist with the daily guidance of believers. Zen Buddhists also practice formal disciplinary measures in order to seek wisdom and enlightenment.

  I myself am an Atheist, but I do understand the appeal and the value in the devotional lifestyle. Even in Atheism, you have principles that you live by. Atheism has a value system that you try to embody which is one of the things that’s kept me going all these years. It’s not just my own need and love for attention, but because I have a mission to get to talk about sex and sexuality, and sexual expression out there in the world from my own experience. It’s not just theory such as “Let’s study pornography and develop a theory about it that supports my icky feeling about it.” Most people who write about pornography have a tendency to impugn all kinds of motives that introduce hostility to pornography. Their paranoid conspiracy theories drive me insane. People don’t like to have to take personal responsibility. “We’re all victims”. There are identity politics and victim politics, but there needs to be some relaxation. My childhood does affect how I act today. However, that being said, and I am liberal, there is that personal responsibility.

  Emotionally disconnected from her older siblings and often her own parents during her childhood, Nina immersed herself inside of a world of books, music and films. As a young girl, Hartley’s mind and imagination were keen, and early on, she was able to differentiate between herself and other children creating a feeling of estrangement from her peers.

  As a child, I had a tremendous fantasy world — I wanted to go study chimpanzees. Helen Keller was an early hero. I’ve had a good Liberal Rights upbringing. I must have read Gone with the Wind twenty-two times, unfortunately. I love Revisionist History to the max — I’m into the Civil War. I love costumes and dramas. I loved The Sound of Music (1965), and I love musicals. I used to work at the Renaissance Country Fair. There was a fantasy playgroup in America called The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). Back before we knew the term “computer geeks” this was a group of people who got together to recreate Medieval England. It’s a fabulous nationwide fantasy playgroup. I grew up doing that kind of stuff on weekends. It’s a lot of fun and we’d enter tournaments. I really loved costumes and playacting from a very early age, although, I was too shy in high school to be on stage. I became a part of the costume department. I don’t love clothes that much. I’m more of a nudist, but I do love costume and theater and theatrical things. They make the kind of kinky sex I have nowadays really a lot of fun because of the costumes and role-playing, and things like that.

  I’m very intellectual and I like music, but, I was not music talent in high school. I still don’t play my iPod. I can’t work and have music on in the background. Music means something more to me than noise. I can’t think with words so if I have to listen to it, and if I try to think with words, it’s just distracting. I never have music playing here in the house when we are just hanging out or anything like that. I’m a jazz fan and I love dance: modern, jazz, tap, ballroom. I never did ballet. I have the wrong body style for it. I was not competitive. Sports or team sports did not compel me at all. I’ve never been competitive in a way that my blood races and my heart rate will go up at the idea of beating somebody. It doesn’t interest me at all. I’ve not come to like sports as a spectator, although I’ve grown to like American football and basketball. I like watching golf, but I don’t have that individual competitive drive.

  By the time I was ten, my father said I came home from school one day and said, “I’m an oddball.” I knew by eight that I was not like other kids. I felt very alienated from them. I don’t know why I felt alienated. I realize now that I was a queer child, but I wasn’t gay. I don’t know how many gay folks you talk to who know by first grade that this is who they are. They spend the next fifteen years getting okay with it before they come out of the closet and tell their parents. I wasn’t gay, but I knew I wasn’t like other kids. It had nothing to do with sex, because I wasn’t having sex, I was ten. I was interested in sexuality already at age ten. At that point, it was about plumbing. How does it work? What’s it called and where’s it located, that kind of thing. It wasn’t about how sex pertained to me personally, but it was about sex as a concept.

  I made out in high school at the theater wrap parties, but I didn’t have intercourse until I was eighteen. If I’d had better social skills, I would certainly have been doing fellatio and hand jobs sooner. I was interested in boys. I would have liked to have done it with girls too because by the time I was twelve I was interested in girls, and by the time I was fourteen, I realized I was a bi-sexual person. That was the good thing about living in the seventies and Berkeley because early on, I had labels for these desires that I had. Because I wasn’t raised religiously, I had no shame or guilt. It’s like being Jewish. Terms like, “hell,” “sin,” “damnation” were not part of my language. I never had a moment where I wondered what was wrong with me. I thought, “Okay, here’s a label and there are other people out there who are like me! I need to go and find them.” It took me a long time to find them, but I realized there are a lot of people out there who are like me and we are now finding each other. I definitely was not an early adopter when it came to sex. I didn’t know how to be alone with anybody.

  “Why sex, why not the violin?”

  I wondered if Nina attributed her home environment as part of the reason why she sought affirmation through her unusual career choice, despite alternative and easier paths she could have chosen given her superior intellect and knowledge.

  Certainly, nature versus nurture is relevant and what part of our environment triggers certain responses located within our genes to express themselves. I was a very thinking child. Our family had a relatively high IQ. Values, inquiry, examination and those kinds of things were a part of my growing up. I’ve often said that if I hadn’t been so exhibitionistic, and if I wasn’t considered attractive enough to be an exhibitionist, I would have been a mid-wife and very active on the weekends. It turned out that having a camera present coincided with the fact that people considered me pretty enough to pay me to do this. I don’t know why sexuality became my thing. My father asked me, “Why sex, why not the violin?” I clearly was designed to study one thing my whole life. It could have been studying bacterium in a laboratory, it could have been studying gorillas in the Congo, it could have been pottery in Japan, or it could have been anything for all of these years. It turned out for me t
o be sexuality, both as an interest for my own needs, and as a health professional. I tend to say I’m a scientist and that is a constant. Pornography is my laboratory and I’ve had a steady stream of subjects.

  There are a lot of people who get into porn who don’t have these ideas. They are needy and aren’t all positively affected by their experiences in porn, but there are also people coming into porn who are victims of American culture. They are usually Gentile and Christian denomination, so they’re not only coming into porn with their own issues, but they have that entire cultural guilt, sin, shame, damnation, hell element that has them conflicted about their sexuality. I grew up in the seventies and I don’t have a conflict about my sexuality because the seventies manifesto told women that we have the right to live our lives the way we wanted it — to do it in a responsible manner and take responsibility for your orgasms. There is no “knight in shining armor”. Learn how to give yourself orgasms. Learn how to give pelvic exams oneself — you know — consciousness-raising groups.

  I was fourteen when Roe vs. Wade was decided. I knew to my core how important that was that if women do not control fertility there is absolutely no way we can be equal which is why I wanted to be a mid-wife. It’s why I wanted to deal with women’s issues and women’s bodies. I’m still terribly interested. If I’d become a mid-wife I’d now be the nation’s foremost authority on water births. That’s what I would have wanted to do.