That night, we all dressed up and Joy took us to a club which opened at midnight. All of Cannes, it seemed, was packed into this immense place and stripped half-naked because there was no air-conditioning. I was so full of adrenaline from the E! experience and alcohol that I climbed up on the bar with Juli and Kaylan, and stripped down to my bra and bikini bottoms. Then, half a dozen random girls climbed up on the bar with us, and we all started groping each other. This was nothing unusual for the club: there were couples making out all over the dance floor, and even fucking in the stairwell.
Suddenly, I looked down and saw a black-haired waiter with a perfectly chiseled jaw staring up at me. One of the things I liked about France was that the guys were hot but the girls weren’t, so the odds were in my favor. But I was never the type of person to pick up a guy. I had never made a first move in my life. I’d just wait until a guy propositioned me, like Victor and Jack had. But I was no longer Jenna Massoli, or even Jenna Jameson. I was Jenna! with an exclamation point. So I jumped down from the bar and knocked the tray of drinks out of his hands. Looking back on it, I can’t remember whether I was just drunk and clumsy, or trying to be forceful and sexy. Probably both.
Then I raised my left leg up, rubbing it against his outer thigh, and thrust my fingers into the tangles of his hair. As he started to open his mouth and say something, I pressed my lips against his and thrust my tongue down his throat. The words died in his mouth, and he wrapped his arms around me and started kissing me back. It was the greatest feeling in the world. Here I was, a fucking porn star, and I was so excited just to be kissing some waiter.
He grabbed my hand and led me across the dance floor and through a door that led to the employee bathrooms. We stopped in the hallway and our lips met again. I massaged his back, and worked my way down to his ass. He slid his mouth down to my neck, and grabbed a handful of flesh with such force that I broke out in goose bumps.
I reached around to the front of his pants. I had to see what it felt like. His cock strained against his black pants, throbbing every time I squeezed it through the material.
“Don’t you have to get back to work?” I asked him.
“No,” he said slowly, in an adorable accent. “I don’t have to do anything.”
He cupped his hand over the front of my bikini bottoms and just left it there, letting the heat spread through me until I was dripping wet. Then he moved my bottoms aside and rubbed his middle finger against my lips until it just slipped inside. With his thumb, he worked my clit as I ground against his hand to a shuddering orgasm. I hadn’t expected to come so soon.
“Let’s take this somewhere more comfortable,” I told him.
We left the club through the employee exit, went back to my hotel room, and fucked until the sun came up. I had always heard that French men were great lovers, but between his stamina, his sensitivity, and the French phrases he kept cooing in my ear, he surpassed my expectations. I had no idea what he was saying, but it totally turned me on, even though for all I knew he could have been whispering, “You stupid American bitch.”
When it was all over, he wrapped his naked body around mine. Instantly I stiffened. I hate cuddling. When I’m hot and sweaty and sticky, the last thing I want to do is be pressed up against something else that’s hot and sweaty and sticky. I pulled away, and he looked hurt.
“How old are you?” I asked. I didn’t know anything about this guy.
He looked at me sheepishly and turned away.
“You can tell me,” I said. “It doesn’t matter now anyway.”
He muttered his answer, and my jaw hit the floor. What I’d just done was probably illegal in many parts of the world.
The next day, I met a director who gave me an extra ticket to a premiere that night. “I want to see the reaction when you walk the red carpet,” he said. I had just a few hours until the movie, so I ran through Cannes, looking for something to wear until I fell in love with a black Valentino dress that, at $3,800, cleaned me out.
I changed in the back room of the shop and took a cab to the premiere. When we pulled up outside, it was a mob scene. There were limos everywhere, and the press was packed around the red carpet like gamblers at a cockfight. My biggest fear was that no one would recognize me, or care. When I was about a quarter of the way down the carpet, someone suddenly screamed “Jenna!” and the pandemonium began. It was a moment I wanted to last forever: it felt like I had arrived.
When the movie started, I couldn’t even pay attention. My head was spinning. I left after fifteen minutes and found the E! crew waiting for me at my hotel. They wanted to film me at a members-only swingers club that night.
For the rest of the week, I spent my mornings autographing at the convention dungeon, my afternoons filming for E!, and then I would party until dawn, sleep for two hours, and start all over again. I couldn’t remember ever having so much fun in my life.
I swept up at the Hot D’Or Awards on my final night in Cannes, winning Best New American Starlet and Best American Actress. Afterward, I looked around the room and thought, “I did it. I’m the most popular girl here.” As shallow as it is, that’s what I thought at the time. Life was like high school, a popularity contest in a classroom as big as the world.
Mainstream fame, or at least the tantalizing possibility of it, had now entered my bloodstream. I was never the same afterward. Returning home on the airplane, swigging miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s with Juli and Kaylan, I was now one of them: I could do no wrong. And I could get away with anything, because I was Jenna! with an exclamation point. I thought I was finally finding myself, but in reality I was turning into a monster.
Laure Sinclair and me at the Hot D’Or Awards.
I was lying in bed at Steven’s apartment the night the E! Cannes special premiered. I was overwhelmed watching it. It was the first time I had accomplished anything in my adult life that didn’t involve taking off my clothes. Without even trying that hard, unlike most of the people I saw in L.A., I was on national TV. I didn’t feel like society’s dirty little secret anymore. And to be perfectly honest, I was completely enamored with the sight of my own image on television.
“Oh my God,” I kept telling Steven, “I actually look like a real star.”
Finally, he turned to me and, with derision in his voice, said, “Why do you keep saying you are a star?”
Instantly, something clicked in me.
“You selfish bastard,” I muttered. I stood up, put on my clothes, left his apartment, and never saw him again. Whether I was being shallow or not, it was one of the proudest moments of my life and he was shitting on it. I couldn’t have people around me like that anymore. I was the only person I would allow to hold me back. Nobody else.
After Cannes, my career seemed unstoppable. Every month, a new movie of mine hit the stands. And the buzz just grew louder. At every awards show—Nightmoves, XRCO FOXE—I took the top honors. It seemed as though I was on every page of AVN, which had nominated my movies in almost every category at their awards show, the most respected in the business, and even asked me to host the ceremony that year.
I knew just who I wanted to bring as my date: my father. He had left Reading, and would sporadically call me from parts unknown. He rarely gave me the phone number of where he was, and I didn’t ask. I still had no idea what kind of trouble he was in, but if the cops ever came knocking on my door, I knew I was better off without his contact information. Besides, he never seemed to call to ask me how I was doing. It was all about him: where he was and how he needed money for moving costs.
So when he called from yet another payphone somewhere in this great land of ours, I invited him to the awards show. Despite everything, I wanted my father to see me win. I wanted him to know that I was no longer a little girl who couldn’t take care of herself. I wanted him to see that I was successful and respected and admired. I wanted him to be proud of me. I wanted him to care. And perhaps I also felt that his approval would set in stone that I had made the right deci
sion getting into adult movies.
In the intervening years, I had talked to Tony every few months, which was much more than I had talked to my dad. When we were kids, Tony and I were so incredibly close. We’d talk to each other all day, compete against each other in burping contests, and live in a world of our own invention. But as my life filled with work and he focused on being a good husband and father, we grew apart. Every time we talked, we simply exchanged facts: His son, Gage, had started walking; Selena had just undergone a hysterectomy; he was bartending at TGIF’s; our grandmother had recovered from her double mastectomy, but now had throat cancer and was having an artificial esophagus put in. It was uncomfortable to speak to Tony. Everything we said seemed devoid of genuine emotion and sincerity, so I talked to him less and less. Even if it was partly my fault, because I had unfairly transferred some of my hostility for my father onto him, it hurt me so much. After all, I owed my only happy childhood memories to him.
Before my father’s pending arrival and the awards show, I kept myself as busy as I could so I didn’t have to think about them. I wasn’t too worried about whether I would win, though of course it would be nice to show off for my dad. I just didn’t want to look pathetic and undeserving as a host. I felt a tremendous amount of pressure (which was probably mostly in my mind) to impress everyone. I wanted to be funny, relaxed, charismatic. I didn’t want to embarrass myself and Wicked. To this day, I still put pressure on myself to be the person that everyone wants and expects me to be.
I bought a shimmering silver midriff-exposing five-thousand-dollar outfit that I felt was befitting of a star. And I hired a makeup artist and a hairdresser, who spent six hours sticking in extensions and spritzing my hair into some kind of futuristic ponytail. In retrospect, I looked like a cross between Barbara Eden and a disco ball.
When we arrived, they whisked my dad and me backstage. The first award they announced was Best Sex Scene. And next thing I knew, the tuna eater and I were on stage accepting it. As I left the dais, the show producer pushed me back into the spotlight. I had to introduce the next presenters, who came out and announced the next award: Starlet of the Year. While they were doing that, I took the opportunity to go to the bathroom. I was up against some hard-core talent, and there was no way I was going to win.
When they called my name, I sprinted back onstage. I was overwhelmed, hugging the presenters with unwashed hands. I remembered seeing Savannah’s acceptance speech. Everyone in the industry resented her success, so she walked onstage and spoke two words: “fuck you.” For a fleeting moment, I thought about doing that, too, just because so many of the girls sitting in the audience had been so catty with me. But I chose to accept the award with dignity, and thanked Steve and Joy.
By the end of the show, everyone must have been sick of seeing me onstage. Blue Movie won Best Film of the Year, Best Editing, and Best Director, and I won for Best Boy-Girl Scene and Best Actress, which meant the most to me. Starlet of the Year was just an award for a pretty new thing, but Best Actress meant I had talent—at least in relation to everybody else. No one had swept the top awards like that in the history of the show.
Everyone kept joking around that it was the Year of Jenna. My arrogant speech to Steve Orenstein was turning into prophecy. Backstage, I overheard a couple of the other girls talking. “Oh, isn’t it so funny?” one said. “They pick her to host, and she wins all the awards.”
“I wonder how many guys she had to blow,” the other said.
In reality, I had won because I’d busted my ass. In one year, between Howard Stern and the E! Channel, I was opening doors that no one before me had. And even though they were just speaking out of jealousy, it hurt—and it still hurts when I hear people pissing on the work I’ve done.
As I sat there at the end of the night with all my awards in my lap, my head was spinning. I had come through for everyone. And just like the pageants, I had done it for myself. My dad only came to see the end result.
But this time I didn’t mind. Even though I had invited him there expressly to get his approval, I realized that I didn’t need his praise or his involvement. The success instilled a measure of confidence in me; I was finally on my way to truly being independent. It was a turning point in my relationship with my father, because in that moment I didn’t expect him to be anything more than what he was: a guy who loved me but didn’t know how to show it. Sure, he’d never learned how to be a father. But there was more to it than that. When he said how much I looked like my mother when I went onstage, I had a moment of complete clarity: it hurt him to get close to me, because I reminded him too much of the wife he had loved and lost.
After the ceremony I was too tired to celebrate. I went back to my room, shut the door, and cried. “My life is at a fucking peak,” I thought. “There’s nowhere to go from here but down.”
A strange sort of arrogance took hold of me after all the accolades. I began to think I was smarter than everybody around me, which may have been true but didn’t give me any excuse to act that way. On set, I acted as if I were the only one who knew what it took to sell movies. I knew what kind of sex to have, whom I had to work with, and how many scenes I needed to be in. And if anyone disagreed with me, I’d pull rank. I realized all I had to do was threaten to quit the movie or sic Steve Orenstein on a director, and he’d do whatever I wanted. When you are twenty-one and have the kind of power I did, you enjoy brandishing it.
But after watching me for a while from the sidelines, Steve pulled me aside. “You have to understand, Jenna,” he said. “You are in the spotlight. You are the spokesperson for this industry. A lot of people look up to you, so you have to watch what you say. I’m not asking you to change the person that you are, but just think before you talk.”
I suppose the last thing one would expect on becoming a porn star is a lecture on how to be a role model, but that’s exactly what Steve Orenstein gave me. And he was right. I’m already doing something that can put women in a bad light, I realized, so it’s particularly important to hold myself to a higher standard of behavior than other women.
With Larry Flynt.
The opportunity to live up to that resolution came days later. After the AVN Awards and all the mainstream exposure, everyone wanted to interview me, even people who had passed on the offer before. One of them was Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine, who was writing for Penthouse at the time. Joy set up something after the awards show, and Goldstein came by to introduce himself. He’s an obese, greasy, slovenly man, and was very touchy-feely with both of us. When he discussed the interview, he seemed to be dropping hints about going on a date or getting sexual favors from me in exchange for the article. He didn’t say it explicitly, but it’s the feeling that Joy and I got. As he walked away, Joy and I looked at each other and said, “No way.” If any journalist makes me feel uncomfortable or shows any disrespect, I’ll cancel the interview. In this business, you get to see all the double standards that women are held to in society, and it is important to keep from perpetuating them. One way is by refusing to allow anyone to disrespect you.
Goldstein never forgave us for canceling the interview. And so I made my first enemy in the business. He published a screed against Joy and me on the front page of Screw, accusing us of practically every offense imaginable—and a few that were unimaginable. He even attacked my family. That was a turning point because up until then, I could do no wrong. I was the golden girl of the industry. When I read that story, I was heartbroken. I wanted to give up and quit the business.
It went beyond just Al Goldstein. I had become the main attraction in this whole circus, and it was taking a much bigger toll on my life than I realized.
If anyone in North Hollywood had the courage to approach a turbo-breasted, kiddie-faced blonde in the summer of 1996, they could have been dating me. I was lonely after breaking up with Steven—not because I missed him but because I was tired of living by myself. As my star rose, it became harder to live in that tiny studio. I wanted someo
ne to share my excitement with. And, more than that, there was the issue of safety. Not only was I afraid to order food, but my deathly fear of the parking garage wasn’t assuaged when my Corvette was broken into and thousands of dollars in clothes I had stored in the back for photo shoots were taken.
Rodney Hopkins, in the meantime, hadn’t stopped pestering me to go out with him. And since he had saved my life by taking me to the hospital, I felt a sense of obligation. My reluctance to see him again was nothing personal: there was just no chemistry. But I was lonely and grateful so I relented.
He picked me up and took me to an Italian restaurant on Ventura Boulevard. (I rarely went over the hill to Hollywood.) With the dim lighting and obsequious staff, it could have been an incredibly romantic evening. But it was, as I had feared, a night of ennui. I am a talkative person. It’s easy for me to make conversation; at the Crazy Horse I’d learned to entertain even the dullest of the species. But every time I asked Rod a question, he answered with one word. Whenever I made a joke or acted silly, he just looked at me blankly. So as dinner progressed, the awkward silences grew longer. I couldn’t wait to get away from him. When he pulled up in front of my house, I leaped out of the car and told him there was no need to walk me to the door.
Any other man would have realized there was no connection and left me alone, but Rod was either oblivious or obsessed. He continued to call me incessantly. And every now and then, if I was bored and hungry, I’d let him treat me to dinner.
Gradually, I began to grow attached to him. As he became more comfortable with me, he began to laugh at my jokes, which always gets a man big points. And it was really sweet to watch the way he reacted to me: he seemed to get such a kick out of everything I did or said. An insanely talented director, he had just started making films for Wicked, and he knew a lot about the business. So I quickly realized he could help me. Was that superficial of me? Yes. Was it unusual for me? Sadly, no.
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale Page 26