When two weeks passed without hearing from either Dad, Tony, Selena, or Grandma, I began to worry that perhaps Tony had gotten in trouble with some drug dealers, and they had kidnapped or killed my family in retaliation. I was a wreck.
It was then that my phone rang. I scrambled to get it. The voice on the other end was a woman’s: it was Suze Randall. She had sold most of the photos from our first sessions, and wanted me to model again. I flew to L.A. for a week, and slept on Nikki’s couch. It was one of the hardest weeks of my life, because away from Vegas I was powerless to do anything about my family. I pledged to contact the police when I returned home.
However, there was a message waiting for me when I got back to Vegas. “Your dad called,” Jack wrote in a note in the kitchen. “He can’t tell you where he is. Something happened and they all had to leave. He’ll call you soon.”
It was two weeks before I heard from my father again. He called from a pay phone in South Dakota. He wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but he assured me that he and Tony had done nothing wrong. They had packed Selena and my poor grandmother into a truck and gone on the run. For all my dad’s faults, he had always seemed to be in control of his life, but now he sounded like my brother—hunted and desperate.
After that my dad started calling every few weeks, always from a new city and with a new telephone number. After a while, I stopped bothering to write down his contact information, since it was constantly changing. I couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble he and Tony had gotten themselves into.
In the meantime, I began flying back and forth to L.A., crashing with Nikki. I began a cycle of going cold turkey on the meth for photo shoots—because my small chin and blue eyes don’t mask a clenched jaw and dilated pupils very well—and getting loaded when I returned to Vegas. Because I was able to stop getting high when duty called, I thought I had everything under control.
In L.A., Nikki took me to the corner newsstand every other afternoon so I could look for pictures of myself. And, slowly, they began to appear: on the cover of Hustler, and then Cherry, and then High Society. All three were on the stands with me on the cover at the same time. I was the slut of the month. Of course, none of them mentioned Jenna Jameson. They called me Shelly or Daisy or Missy. And, though the editors had never spoken a word to me, they featured interviews in which I discussed how inordinately horny I was, how much I liked sex with anonymous strangers, and how I fantasized about inviting my girlfriends over for threesomes with my boyfriend. (Not surprisingly, the original photos I shot with Julia Parton never appeared anywhere: they were so bad that she couldn’t even sell them.)
We were usually given a huge discount on the magazines for one simple reason: Nikki’s boyfriend Buddy worked at the newsstand. They had originally met when he caught her lurking around the newsstand suspiciously, trying to work up the courage to buy her first-ever layout in a men’s magazine.
Eventually I earned enough money from dancing and modeling to move. I rented a small, high-end two-bedroom apartment in a skyscraper in Las Vegas called the Crystal Towers. It was beautiful: the foyer had black-and-white checkered tile, the bedroom was immense, and the balcony overlooked an outdoor pool. I made sure to leave a forwarding number on the old phone, just in case my dad called. I was worried I was going to lose contact with him and Tony forever.
Being totally on my own wasn’t something I had ever experienced—or was even ready for. So Jack moved in with me, of course.
Relationships are funny, because they are not logical. Instead of judging them by the facts, we assess them by our expectations. I still thought that Jack was going to change. Things had been going well that week: with the money he was making at the tattoo shop, he chipped in for the rent and some furniture. And now that I was starting to get a little famous in Vegas because of my modeling, he was proud to take me out on his arm. Besides, I didn’t know any other guys I could sleep with, do drugs with, and throw dishes at. More than that, if we were going to continue to date, I wanted him close, so that I could keep my eye on him. I didn’t trust him at all. I was still too young to know that there is no such thing as love without trust. There is only obsession and co-dependence.
Even though I made much less money modeling than stripping, I never wanted to go to the Crazy Horse anymore. I felt like I had moved beyond it and onto a new challenge. Whenever I was there, I felt lonely, empty, and often angry—so, in that respect, it was not unlike a family to me. I didn’t have any friends there besides Jennifer, whom I still really loved, though she was spending more and more time with Lester. And talking to drunk guys on a nightly basis gets old fast. Every time a guy called me a whore or a bitch, it became harder to keep my mouth shut, especially when I was trying so hard to grow an adult-sized confidence. So when I told Vinnie that I was leaving, I had no regrets. I was definitely a child of the Crazy Horse—it gave me my first taste of independence and the tools I needed to survive in the real world—but I was ready for my next lesson.
Unfortunately, that lesson came a little sooner than I expected.
Until the day they bury me, a discarded pile of flesh, bones, and silicone, I will always be answering the same question. It comes at me every time I leave the house—which is less often than you might think because, believe me, it’s not easy to tear myself away from the E! channel. Be it a man or a woman, a teenager or a grandparent, an attractive person or Bill O’Reilly, they all want to know: “So how did you start doing porn anyway?”
When someone asks an actor, a photographer, or a snowboard instructor how he or she got into the business, what they generally want to know is how to break in themselves. But in the case of my profession, what they generally want to know is what enables someone to make the decision to have sex with strangers on camera for a living. This is why the second question I get asked most commonly is whether I was beaten, abused, or suffered some sort of childhood trauma like a bump on the head or food poisoning.
The actual answer, which I never really realized until I started writing this book, is this:
Baby steps.
* * *
STEP ONE
Teenager wants to be a model.
REASON
Like all teenagers, she thinks she’s special.
STEP TWO
Teenager starts dating a tattoo artist and biker.
REASON
He’s older, badder, and allegedly wiser.
STEP THREE
Teenager becomes a stripper.
REASON
Work, money, and approval of boyfriend.
STEP FOUR
Teenager starts modeling nude.
REASON
It’s just like real modeling, except with stripping added in.
STEP FIVE
Teenager starts acting in soft-core all-female adult movies.
REASON
Revenge.
I knew that Jack was cheating on me. The only problem was that I hadn’t caught him yet. I staked out the tattoo shop, did drive-bys to check his whereabouts, and combed every inch of the house for telltale hairs, earring clasps, ponytail holders, and unfamiliar perfume smells. And my searches were thorough, because they were usually conducted under the influence of meth.
One night I got my chance. Jack was throwing one of his usual parties at the tattoo parlor and a tall, thick-bodied blond girl stood in the corner. Her eyes met mine and I just knew: she was the one—my rival, my enemy, my nightmare. As the night went on and the intoxication level increased, the girl kept looking at me not only like a woman sizing up her competition but also like a woman who was clearly attracted—or at least intrigued.
So when Jack went to make a beer run, I decided to befriend her. Her name was Lacey. Once I established that she knew we were dating, I set my trap.
“You know, me and my old man, we have a pretty open relationship,” I told her. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I really get off on sharing girls with him. I love watching him fuck. So, since he told me that you guys have
a little thing going on anyway, do you want to come do it with both of us?”
I wasn’t sure how she’d react. I was being so direct. But her eyes lit up and she said, “We’ve only fucked a couple of times and, yeah, it would be fun with you.”
Boom! Caught.
Now, a lesser girl would have kicked the crap out of her then and there. But I had learned the finer points of detective work from my dad. I knew that if I attacked her at the party, that would just make me look like a psycho bitch. If I waited and actually caught her in the act, however, then that would be another story.
So later in the night, I told Jack that I was attracted to Lacey and asked if we could take her home to play with. The idiot had no idea what was up and thought he could get away with fucking the other girl he was seeing right in front of me.
After the party, we brought her back to the house and all sat on the couch talking. I went to the bathroom, stayed in for a good ten minutes, and when I walked back out, Jack was still sitting on the couch. But his pants were down and she was kneeling in front of him with her top off, blowing him. I lost it. Knowing something like that is happening is one thing, but seeing it is another story altogether. My skin color must have changed from UV-lamp tan to sunstroke red. I was at the couch with her hair in my hand within a quarter second. I dragged her outside, kicked her in the stomach, and screamed, “How dare you fuck my boyfriend behind my back, you motherfucking bitch? If you ever come around here again, I’ll fucking kill you.” Then I slammed the door.
When I saw her clothes on the sofa, I realized that I had forgotten something. I opened the door, spit on her, and then slammed it again.
“You are out of your fucking mind,” Jack yelled. He was in shock. “You’re the one who invited her back here.”
“You lying son of a bitch. You’ve been fucking that girl. She told me.”
And then I broke down and started crying. “How could you do this to me?”
Jack didn’t even bother explaining. He walked to the bedroom and slammed the door. I cried so hard that night I practically dehydrated.
As time passed and the wound didn’t heal, I decided to get back at him and cheat, in my own way. In the biker and tattoo-artist community, the worst stigma a man can have is if his old lady is sleeping with someone else—and everyone knows it but him. And the best way for me to do that was on camera.
Savannah had always been someone I looked up to. Every step I took, it felt like I was being drawn inescapably in the direction her career had gone in. So I knew that adult movies were in the future, but at the same time I wasn’t necessarily ready yet. A girl really has to have her head and life together to do porn. Unfortunately, Savannah didn’t. The former Shannon Wiley, after crashing her Corvette and disfiguring her face on the way home from a night of partying, shot herself in the head. She was twenty-three years old, depressed, and in debt.
When I heard the news, it seemed incomprehensible at first that such a beautiful girl would do that to herself. But then I looked at my own life: my career was on the fast track, but my family and personal life were in the shitter. It seemed like a formula for the same kind of tragic end. With such an unstable foundation, the larger an edifice of fame you build on it, the more unwieldy it becomes—until it just collapses. There were so many things I still needed to figure out for myself.
But instead I let Jack’s cheating ways bring me into the business sooner than I anticipated. As I lay in bed each night, I imagined having this other life that he knew nothing about and couldn’t control, a secret identity that would crush him if he discovered it.
The other temptation was money: Suze paid three hundred dollars a day. By appearing in a film, I could make anywhere from two thousand dollars to six thousand dollars for just a few hours of work. That’s a lot of new purses.
Most girls get their first experience in gonzo films—in which they’re taken to a crappy studio apartment in Mission Hills and penetrated in every hole possible by some abusive asshole who thinks her name is Bitch. And these girls, some of whom have the potential to become major stars in the industry, go home afterward and pledge never to do it again because it was such a terrible experience. But, unfortunately, they can’t take that experience back, so they live the rest of their days in fear that their relatives, their co-workers, or their children will find out, which they inevitably do.
That could have happened to me. Fortunately, I decided to start slow. First, I experimented by doing a couple scenes for a company called Sin City in Vegas. All I had to do was basically pose for photographs in front of a moving camera instead of a still one. Since it was so easy, I decided to take the next baby step up: to soft-core, for which I didn’t even have to spread and show pink. I had no problem showing my outside, but exposing my insides still seemed kind of gross. To this day, I still can’t watch my own sex scenes.
The most prestigious soft-core director at that time was Andrew Blake, one of the few visionaries in the genre of titillation. He is an obsessive artist with lush Helmut Newton—inspired cinematography and beautiful girls, mostly top-of-the-line Penthouse Pets with natural boobs. He had also filmed with Savannah. So of course that’s who I wanted to work for, despite the fact that he liked more curvy, sophisticated women. However, not one to get discouraged by slim margins of success, I told Julia Parton that I wanted to be in an Andrew Blake film. Julia had kindly allowed me to make her phone number my business line, so that Jack didn’t find out what I was doing.
“I’ve got Andrew’s number,” she said. “Do you want me to call him?”
“No, that’s okay,” I told her. “I’ll call him.” By now, I knew a few things about marketing myself, especially to guys.
I phoned him the next day and said right away, “Hi, my name’s Jenna Jameson. I would really really love to be in one of your films.”
He didn’t hang up on me.
“I know who you are,” he replied. “I’ve seen one of your layouts.”
I gave him my résumé anyway.
“I’ll tell you what,” he finally said. “I’m shooting in a couple of weeks with Kaylan Nicole, Celeste, and Julia Ann. Maybe that’s something you would like to do?”
I was such a dreamer that I was actually disappointed. When I heard the names of all those top girls, I realized that I wouldn’t be the star.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m in.”
“Would you be willing to do girl-girl?”
I didn’t mind that. I just didn’t want to be stuck having to get intimate with some drug-addled basket case. So I asked, “Can I pick the girl?”
“Who do you have in mind?”
I knew exactly who I wanted: Nikki Tyler.
“Let me look into it,” he said, “and I’ll call you back.”
The next week, Nikki was approved and I was on the plane to L.A. once more. I had only worked with Suze before, where there was one makeup artist and you had to pick your clothes from her closet. But Andrew Blake’s production was huge, with two makeup artists, a stylist, and half a dozen trailers. When I walked onto the set, everyone looked at me funny. I couldn’t tell why. I climbed into the honey wagon and saw, in the front seat, a girl with black hair. She was slouched in her chair and so trashed that she couldn’t even keep her head up. It was the first time I’d seen a girl in the industry who had let herself get that fucked up.
Nikki hadn’t arrived yet, so I kept to myself. When it was my turn for makeup, I sat in the chair for what seemed like hours. The makeup artist was having so much trouble with me—putting on a new face, inspecting it, and then taking it off. Finally, I worked up the courage to ask him what was going on.
“Honey,” he said. “Let’s just say you’re a challenge. And I mean that in the best possible way, sweetheart.”
“I’m a big girl,” I told him. “You can be blunt.”
“You look like you’re twelve, darling,” he said. “I mean, a couple of the girls here thought someone had brought their daughter to the set.”
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br /> He finally solved the problem, at least in his mind, by painting black makeup all around my eyes, so that I looked like a chicken in a Lone Ranger mask. Then he curled my hair into a twenties flapper ’do, and I was ready.
Nikki soon arrived and gushed, “Hi baby! How’s my little girl?” And suddenly everything was good. I sat and wrote in my day planner as they worked on her. The ever-motherly Nikki brought a pedicure kit to the set, so since they were behind schedule—which I’d come to learn is nothing unusual—Nikki sat at my feet and gave me a pedicure. Every other person on the set looked at us like we were monkeys picking the bugs out of each other’s fur.
When we broke for lunch, I made a beeline for the fruit table. As I was inspecting the bananas like a good monkey, a tall, thin, beautiful brunette walked up to me. It was Shauna Ryan, a Penthouse Pet and clearly the alpha female of the tribe. She looked me up and down and then sneered, “How old are you? Eleven?”
I turned and looked up at her and said, “A few decades younger than you.” Then I went back to my bananas.
The strange thing about bullies is that if you take their abuse, it never ends. But once you get the balls to stand up to them, they respect you and move on to a weaker target. I never heard a bitchy word from her again. It was that easy—and that difficult.
After lunch, it was time for my scene. When I took my clothes off, Andrew Blake stepped out from behind his Bolex camera and gasped, “Wow! What a body! You have beautiful boobs!” If a guy in a strip club said that I’d think he was a creep, but coming from a director and authority figure it was the best compliment in the world. Since the scene was soft-core, we couldn’t touch each other’s private parts, so it was hard to really get into it. In fact, it sucked.
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale Page 9