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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  “Jane Roe” is the alias used by Norma McCorvey who filed a suit in the early 1970s citing that abortion laws in Texas encroached upon her constitutional right to choose to terminate her pregnancy. Dallas County District Attorney Henry Menasco Wade (who famously prosecuted Jack Ruby for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald) was the named defendant in the case. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court overturned the Texas definition of abortion law effectively making abortion legal in the United States. The Roe vs. Wade decision ruled that a woman could abort her child during the first trimester of pregnancy under her doctor’s guidance and without restrictions imposed on her or her right to privacy compromised. In an unusual twist thirty years later in 2003, Norma McCorvey (now a Christian) filed a motion in Texas to re-open her case and have the ruling overturned.

  I wasn’t so bold as to want to become a lay mid-wife, but I wanted the letters after my name to be a nurse-mid-wife. Then I realized that in our culture, sexuality is sick and sick people needed nurse’s care. I also went into pornography to heal my own sexual issues so I just needed to go and study it a lot. Being a professional performer helped me because I could compartmentalize it. I didn’t have to pretend to be in a relationship. I didn’t have to care what you think about me tomorrow.

  Nina’s liberal childhood combined with a healthy, enriched education and self-awareness through the advent of books, resource materials, and role models, set the pendulum into motion. As a young teen, Hartley first discovered adult magazines and erotic writing. She realized the sexualized world was her oyster.

  I got to be around nudist situations when I was twelve or thirteen years old and I loved it. I knew I wasn’t supposed to stare, but I was completely fascinated by all of the different bodies and by what happened to boy’s parts when they crossed their legs. When I was fourteen years old in 1973, it was the height of the sexual revolution and I knew this very swinging couple. They had a new baby, and they had a waterbed and a padded frame and a full-length mirror, and a great collection of pornography magazines underneath the bed. At fourteen, both at their home and at a used bookstore in Berkeley, I discovered written pornography and loved it! I found that certain stories appealed to me and certain activities I thought were a lot of fun, sex activities and so on. Of course, I collected my share of Playboys and I loved looking at the women. I was never traumatized by looking at pornography. I never looked at my body and said, “I don’t look like these women” because I’d also loved looking at classical art, and I recognized that even to this day I prefer a rounder more classically-shaped female. I never had the body image issues that American girls seem to have all of the time now.

  I went to a couple of orgies in the seventies before I got into porn and as much as I always wanted to be at one, I was terribly uncomfortable because the people who were at them were Americans who had been messed up by the culture and I was intellectually, extremely evolved. I was already comfortable with my sexuality and could be with other people like me. My sexuality bothered everybody. I had a lot of boyfriends who were upset that I wasn’t a monogamous person.

  Now, we have the term “polyamorous” and the gay pride movement. Today, there are workshops on polyamory and how to negotiate polyamorous relationships. It’s come a long way. Back then, in the seventies, “key” parties and wife swapping was shady. There was no word for what it was. People would call me shallow and fickle, and afraid of commitment. I just never fantasized having only one partner. This is going back to when I was eight or nine and I’d look at these after school movies with the schoolmarm having to choose between the rancher and the city boy. I never understood why she had to choose. I didn’t even know about intercourse then, but I realized that it seemed to me that she shouldn’t have to choose. I just never, ever understood that.

  I believe that some people are monogamous, and for them jealousy offers a different function. For the most part, with jealousy there is a twinge of, “Hey, I don’t like my partner doing that.” I do believe that sexual jealousy is a culturally learned emotion.

  I cured my own jealousy when I realized that jealousy is a function of insecurity and not about the person. Our feelings are never about the other person. Our feelings are always about us, about our story and our narrative. Another person acts as a trigger, a mirror, a conduit or whatever, but it’s not their fault. Their behavior doesn’t regulate my emotions. When I was twenty, I thought differently, but again, if I had been a monogamous person I would have said, “Jealousy is normal. I don’t want him doing anybody else. I have a right to my feelings.” I wasn’t monogamous and I had fantasies of multiple partners. If I hadn’t had the cultural support of me as a woman being able to have my own life on my own terms, I would have just said, “I can’t have what I want. It’s wrong. I’m too greedy. I just want too much.” I got to have the life I’ve wanted with multiple partners. I didn’t want multiple partners to be a problem with anybody. I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. I was just this way.

  For me, the seventies were a good thing. They let me know that I could have the life I wanted. Jealousy was in the way of that. Jealousy was about our insecurity. That being said, if your partner is acting like a jerk, then that’s a conversation you have to have. If you can tell that they’re doing this to piss you off, then you have to have a discussion that might lead to the end of the relationship. The idea of, “You make me feel bad! You stop that.” That is three-year old behavior. For many people when their sex issues are triggered, they revert to being six year olds because that’s when our sexuality is stunted as a negative influence of their parents. “Don’t touch that. That’s your pee-pee. That’s your gadget. That’s your widget.” There is no information. It’s all very “bad”. We put the adult behavior on top of that, but when it comes to sex which is a very primal thing along with our longing for acceptance and affection, all of a sudden, presto — we’re back to how old we were when the initial trauma happened. It didn’t have to be a molestation or rape trauma; it could just be whatever bullshit your family of origin laid on you about sex and the body. Our culture places such an unrealistic expectation on romantic love. “If you love me, you’re supposed to accept me as I am.” A person can be a very reasonable, mature individual, but when she gets her snit on, suddenly, she’s five fucking years old. I don’t fuck five year olds even if they’re in the body of a twenty-five year old. It’s about personal responsibility. It’s not my job to make you feel okay. It’s my job to check in with you and find out about your fears and to make sure I don’t trigger them accidentally, but it’s not my job to do your psychotherapy.

  Feeding the Cookie Monster

  One of the books I’d read when I was a teenager was classic Victorian pornography titled The Autobiography of a Flea (1887). I loved that story. It was so much fun! I was seventeen and a senior in high school when the adult movie theatre they still had in Berkeley that is no longer there was showing The Autobiography of a Flea (1976). I thought, “Oh, my god! I’ll have to go to the movie.” I was a virgin, and I’d necked in high school and I liked all that stuff, but it was like, “Alone with a boy? Are you crazy?” You had to talk to them. I decided I was going to see the movie. One day after school, I went into the theatre thinking, “Please don’t card me.” It was 1976 and they weren’t going to card anybody. I sat down in the theater and I thought to myself, “Please no one sit next to me.” A single female in a porno theatre was like a drop of soap in greasy water. The men just moved away from me. There was a ten-foot radius clear. I wasn’t thinking it at the time, but I guess in a way I was trespassing.

  The movie had Annette Haven, John Leslie, John Holmes and Paul Thomas. I ended up doing two of the three guys later which was funny. I was sitting in the middle of the theatre, I don’t remember what scene it was but it was also a costume drama, which I loved.

  The Mitchell Brothers’ feature The Autobiography of a Flea is a porn revision of the erotic novel (written by a London lawyer, Stanislas de Rhodes) directed by (part-time c
abaret singer) Sharon McNight. Set in France, the tale is told by a flea housed within the pubic hair of the heroine Belle (Jean Jennings) who details Belle’s seduction. Belle enjoys multiple sexual encounters with the church clergy played humorously by John Leslie, John Holmes and Paul Thomas. The film delves into all of the taboo subjects of the original book with incestuous situations and satirical looks at the inequities in life.

  Watching this movie in the middle of this theater, my inner Cookie Monster looked at the screen and said, “Me want to do that!” I wasn’t expecting anything to happen, I just wanted to go and look at people parts. I wanted to see the movie because I’d read the book. Remember, I’d been into dance and musicals and theatre and the body, this had everything that I wanted. It had group nudity, it was about sex, and it was a performance. The film came out eight years before I made my first movie, but I knew then that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to start making porn the next year when I was eighteen, but I also knew that I was not emotionally prepared to be on a movie set. I waited until I was able to do it sober.

  In the years before she became an adult entertainment star, Hartley was a college student and found employment part-time in a club as a stripper to help lessen the financial burden of working toward a career in nursing. With very limited experience as a feature dancer, the young apprentice picked up a few invaluable pointers from the experts.

  I ran into a friend on the bus to school and she said she was dancing at this one place, and I said, “Really? That’s cool. I didn’t even know that existed.” Then I went to the Sutter St. Cinema and did Amateur Night. It was also Amateur Photography Night. Guys could pay their ten bucks to get in and take pictures of the dancers. I was terribly excited that finally seven years after my first fantasy of doing this, I was going to be on stage! I got a cheesy costume — I didn’t know anything about music. I didn’t know anything about make-up and I wasn’t even shaving my legs yet because I wasn’t a leg shaver. I knew very little about feminine display and feminine dress, but I went into the dressing room with these women and I was terrified because they clearly were professionals. They were slapping on their bracelets and yakking with each other. They were confident and completely unfazed. They were all ringers: because they were there for the fifty bucks they got to show up and compete. They weren’t going to win. I ended up winning because I was the only amateur. I saw some pictures from that day. I won and I got a job as a peep show girl where they were doing girl-girl shows. It was everything I wanted. I got some girl-girl action which is another reason why I got into porn because that’s where the naked women were. People were watching, but they were behind a window so I couldn’t actually see them. I got very comfortable with everything in a great environment. This is before I worked for the Mitchell Brothers and danced proper as a stripper. It was another year and a half before I graduated. I did a dildo show, and live, hardcore, girl-girl which was fun and it was great. It was actually fabulous. I did my first movie in my junior year. When I graduated in `85, I went into movies full time.

  A few years prior to Nina’s unveiling in adult films, at the age of nineteen, Hartley met and married her first husband David. The couple soon added a third party to the union, an anti-censorship feminist and activist (and member of Feminists for Free Expression) by the name of Bobby Lilly. Lilly and David had actually been involved prior to Hartley and David’s meeting. In an interview Hartley gave to Sheldon Ranz several years ago, she stated when the small group was still in full swing; Nina believed the threesome worked because of the stability, support, and perspective of objectivity that three can lend to a relationship. Hartley used the examples of a tricycle and a tripod as a simile to illustrate the security of three points in a ménage a trios. The triad apparently continued for twenty years before the group had a parting of the ways. Hartley no longer discusses the threesome or the situation since the termination of the relationship.

  Buoyed by freedom from religious guilt, Nina claimed she was able to competently launch a career in adult movies with a crystal clear conscience about what she was doing. In her first feature film Educating Nina (1984) the nubile Nina Hartley made her debut along with her most remarkable asset, her rear end. Nina was escorted into the genre of erotic movies as a protégé under the guardianship of the classic golden age MILF, Aunt Peg, much to the delight of discerning spectators.

  My husband at the time ran into Juliet [Anderson] at a grocery store and got her card. We sent her pictures and she put me in my first movie. She was a very interesting person and it was just very, very sad to learn of her recent death. Without “Aunt Peg,” I don’t know what would have happened. We’d already met a couple of agents, but eeewweeeoooo. I thought, “I guess I’m not going to get to do it.” I didn’t want to work for creepy guys. It was like Central Casting Agents, blah. Aunt Peg was a nice middle class woman, and well educated, so it was great.

  Educating Nina

  Educating Nina was my first movie in 1984. Looking for Lust in all the Right Places (1984) was also one of the first ten features [I did] shot on film, certainly. Shauna Grant had killed herself two weeks prior to my first movie in March of 1984.

  Hartley’s induction to the X-rated industry in Educating Nina (1984), a movie that was influenced by another Hollywood hit film Educating Rita (1983) starring Michael Caine and Julie Walters, turned out to be a big-league effort on the part of Nina for her first time to the plate. Hartley adopted the role of a young, ebullient drama student with an imaginative idea for her term paper on the relationship between individual’s sex lives and their fantasies. She suggests to her classmates they act out various sexual fantasies submitted by audience members in attendance at a live sex demonstration. Appearing in two unforgettable expositions, Nina effortlessly gears up for some girl-on-girl combat with Karen Summers, and then cruises into pleasure seeking merriment with male stripper Billy Dee as the young attractive couple grind it out. Lili Marlene, Mike Horner and others help keep the feature lively until the closing scene where the sensuous roundup is punctuated by director Juliet Anderson, Lili Marlene and Dan T. Mann. Hartley flaunts playful spontaneity, personal style and star quality in this preliminary submission emphasizing the point that young Nina is well educated indeed.

  When my first picture was made in 1984, film was dying a brutal death. I was probably only in ten that were shot on film, so I was the overlap. Now, I did work with all of the performers. Back in the day, I worked with John Leslie and Joey Silvera and Billy Dee and Jamie Gillis, and all of the holdover men from the golden age. I worked once or twice with Colleen Brennan [in two 1986 productions, Lady by Night and Getting Personal], and I worked one time with Vanessa Del Rio [Play Me Again, Vanessa] in 1984-85. I did one movie [Beyond Desire, 1986] with Seka [and Francois Papillion] when I was “Who the hell is she?” They put me in a black wig because I guess there could only be one blonde woman in the scene.

  Seka is a real pistol. She’s only a few years older than I am, but when I met her, she seemed infinitely older because I was this naïve, college town kid and she’d had a real life for lack of a better word. There was no fluff about her. She was all business. Even today, you won’t get a picture of her free. I say, “You go girl”. Good for her. She knows what it is she’s selling. She’s had a harder life than some of us have and she’s learned her lesson. Now she has a new husband and a nice life so I say, “Good for her.” She still makes money being “Seka,” which I think is amazing.

  All of my experiences in adult films have been positive. Even situations where other people have said, “Oh, my god, they were horrible assholes. I really did not want to be there,” things that other people would be upset over, I didn’t even notice. Different people have different things that bug them. Again, my not having religion to give me grief about sin and damnation, I’m sure that is the primary reason why I’ve done so well here. I see what the business does to people and it just cripples them. I look at them and think, “Poor guy. There’s nobody in the sky. It’s okay
.”

  It’s interesting, in San Francisco, even before I got into the industry, it was never a problem to make sex films. L.A. absolutely, until 1988 before the Freeman decision, actively chased people around. You’d plan to make a movie, you’d meet in the parking lot and all get in the van and go somewhere else. It was really cat and mouse and they still managed to bust enough sets that there definitely was a climate of fear and of nervousness. They didn’t want to arrest anybody; they wanted to terrorize them which they did. They wanted to terrorize the performers especially women into giving up the names of the people who had hired them. They threatened to charge them with prostitution and tell their family. You’re talking about eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year old women. One woman did actually turn in states evidence to get Hal Freeman which is what started that whole chain reaction. He just said, “No, I’m not going to take this.” On one hand, it was legal to make porn so we’d buy permits, and if a police officer came to the front door and said “I’m sorry,” if they started to complain, as long as we had the windows covered and the permit to show him, he had to go away. He couldn’t come onto the set to bother anybody. That’s definitely a positive.

  It’s not entirely true that San Francisco’s vice squad didn’t make arrests or charge filmmakers and actors with obscenity and other offenses pertaining to the production of pornographic films prior to the Freeman decision. During the 1970s, the Mitchell Brothers were arrested in several instances, as were headliners such as Marilyn Chambers who appeared frequently at the O’Farrell Theatre. Often, police and/or proprietors of hotels or rental properties where films were made would look the other way. Former director Bob Chinn recently mentioned many of the sex scenes for his seventies films were shot at the Holiday Inn located at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf and the non-sex scenes were shot in Los Angeles. The crew would generally film late at night which resulted in exceedingly high electricity bills for the hotel. Eventually, after the manager of the Holiday Inn caught on as to the exact nature of Chinn’s business, Bob was asked to leave along with his cast and crew. They were not welcomed back.