How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

by Jameson, Jenna

  Rod was five feet ten inches, with brown hair, a goatee, and earrings. To most people, including me, he seemed unfriendly because he never smiled, barely talked, and was unable to express himself emotionally. He didn’t seem to have a deep side, a hidden sensitivity, or an ounce of adventure and spontaneity. His shortcomings may have been due to his upbringing. He was an only child and never close to his parents. Formerly a dancer in Canada, he had since let his body go slightly. However, his male-dancer fashion sense never changed. He was always wearing a leather jacket with built-in shoulder pads that even Goodwill would have rejected.

  The first movie we worked on together was Cover to Cover. I participated in everything: script writing, preproduction, wardrobe, set decorating. I was so gung-ho about the experience that I put myself in every scene, which was ridiculous. Unlike Blue Movie, Cover to Cover was not plot-driven—and it was made on one-tenth of the budget. It was all vignettes, strung together by the not-too-original motif of a librarian who fantasizes about being a character in the books she reads. So, as the librarian, I did three boy-girl scenes, three girl-girl scenes, and one solo masturbation in a two-day shoot.

  We switched locations for every fantasy, and I was constantly being put into different wigs and costumes. The challenge ultimately wasn’t the acting; it was in saving my private parts. When it came time for my first boy-girl scene, Rod, of course, cast himself as my partner. His very first thrust banged my cervix wrong. I doubled over in pain, rocking and moaning and clutching myself for fifteen minutes. It took another six hours before I was ready to have sex again. I’m still not sure why the pain was so sharp—I may have been swollen from the workout I had already been through in the previous girl-girl scenes.

  Even though I had made love to Rod on camera, I still wasn’t ready to do it in real life. The turning point was a film called The Wicked One, which required even more acting than Blue Movie. Throughout the shoot, Rod paid constant attention to me. He seemed to really care about how I came across on camera, and, naturally, I liked that. He had a great eye. And he even started to relax and open up a little, so he became more fun to be with.

  It was one of the most perfect shoots of my career: I came in almost every scene, which is extremely rare. And I had my first three-way, with Peter North and Mark Davis. I found it unexpectedly difficult to pay attention to both guys at the same time.

  I also had another three-way in the movie that came about accidentally. The scene was supposed to be just Tom Byron and Channone, a new French girl who barely spoke English. I was supposed to be bossing Tom around, telling him what to do with her. He loved it and kept looking up at me like an obedient gimp. The more he was into it, the more I got into it, until I was grabbing Channone’s ass cheeks, spreading them open, and yelling at him, “Is that all you’ve got?”

  Midway through the scene, Channone started begging me, in her cute French accent, “I want to eat your poosie.” I wasn’t supposed to have any sex in that scene but Rod didn’t stop us.

  The strangest moment, however, came in my scene with Tiffany Million. She was eating me out, and everything was great. But then suddenly, she raised her head, stuck her right boob inches away from my ding-ding, and started squeezing her breast milk into it. I was horrified. I knew she could squirt milk from her breasts on command, but I had no idea she was going to do it with me. And I certainly wasn’t prepared for what happened next: she stuck her face back between my legs and started licking her own milk up. I tried to go with it, and I probably fooled most people. But when I think back on that episode today, I still get grossed out. Ever since then, I’ve tried to avoid that kind of surprise by meeting with girls before a scene to discuss exactly what we want to do together.

  After the shoot, Rod moved into a huge five-story house in Studio City, which he rented for four thousand dollars a month with his directing partner, Greg Steele. They planned to earn the rent by leasing the place for shoots. Soon I was spending more and more nights over there. He had pursued me for so long, set me up as such a fantasy object in his mind, that when he finally got me, he never wanted to let me go.

  But, as if Cover to Cover had been an omen, sex with him was not right. He was the first man I’d dated with a Madonna-whore complex. Whenever we were together, he treated me like a princess. But in bed, the sex had to be dirty and he’d treat me like a slut, shouting obscenities and constantly trying to stick his finger up my asshole while fucking me, which is an acquired taste that I just never acquired. So, as the relationship progressed, it became harder and harder for him to fuck me, because he was caught in a double bind. It seemed like in order to get pleasure during sex, he had to humiliate the woman; but it was impossible for him to humiliate the woman he loved. The only advantage to our nearcelibacy is that I never had the baby I still wanted so badly. Since the first time I had sex with Cliff, I’d find my thoughts drifting unavoidably to motherhood every now and then. I was never sure whether it was simply a biological urge that all girls felt, or the result of never having had a normal family of my own. But even though my body was screaming for it, I knew that I wasn’t really ready—mentally, emotionally, or career-wise.

  Despite the problems, I really wanted to make our relationship work. It just made sense. Thanks to our films, Rod became the first director to sign an exclusive contract with Wicked. He was on his way up in the adult film world. I was their top contract girl, and I was heading in the same direction. So, since we were collaborating together in our movies, it just made sense to be together in real life as well. This way, I could focus entirely on my career.

  I kept searching for reasons to love him. As I look back on it, I find myself going through a similar process: I’m reaching to remember the fondness and the happy times, but I keep coming up empty-handed. Everything was fine while I had my own place and independence, but soon he had to move out of his mini-mansion. It turns out his neighbors were assholes and wouldn’t let him rent the place for movie shoots, so he couldn’t afford it anymore. Instead, he rented a charming little house with a pool on Topanga and Ventura, and asked me to move in with him. I said yes.

  I always try to analyze why I fall in love with people. And usually it is for the wrong reasons. So, even though I knew something was lacking between us, we were both enjoying riding each other’s wave. When we moved in together, we made a pact that we were only going to work with each other—he as my director and me as his star. He was incredibly talented, and not just as a filmmaker. I was going to hire someone to do the drapes, and one day I returned home and discovered that he had made beautiful silk and velvet drapes himself, with wall partitions made from folded Chinese fabric. It was more beautiful than anything I could have paid for. When I had an outfit that didn’t fit right, he’d sew and mend it for me.

  For once, I was dating a guy who focused one hundred percent of his attention on me. I was confident that he loved me and, even better, he allowed me to be in charge. I learned an important thing about dating: The person who wants the least amount of commitment in a relationship is the one who holds the reins.

  One would think that after what I’d been through with Jack, I’d be a sympathetic partner. But, instead, I became just as bad as the men I had dated. I took out all of my negative experiences on him and really fucked him up, because I had nothing to lose. By the end of our first month living together, we were fighting all the time. I would insult every aspect of his masculinity and threaten to leave, because I truly did not need him.

  Whenever I said I was out of there, he would cry. And once a man cries, it’s over. Show me any weakness, and I’ll stomp all over you. I clearly wasn’t ready for a relationship: I was still living out unresolved conflicts from my past.

  Some would say that Rod was smart with his money, but at that early point in my maturity I saw it as being cheap. He drove a beat-up white van and refused to buy a new car. I constantly told him that he was going to return home one day and discover the thing burning in the driveway.

  Of
course, Rod wasn’t entirely innocent himself. He seemed to be taking out all his bad experiences with women on me as well. He had a passive-aggressive way of trying to keep me under control, and that was by playing off my insecurity. It’s a time-honored tactic among men who feel like they are dating a woman out of their league: never be impressed and always put her down. He would walk into the room when I was putting on makeup naked and say, “You can tell the first thing that’s going to go is your ass.” Or he’d tell me that the only women who turned him on were Asian girls. When I replied that I was as far from Asian as a person could get, he’d say that he was attracted to me because I had Asian eyes.

  Slowly I went from being this thriving, confident woman at the top of a new career to questioning everything about my body and myself. It was his way of getting revenge by making me as dependent on him as he was on me.

  When he was angry, he would call me a whore. And that pissed me off more than anything, because Preacher had said that word to me when he was raping me. Hearing it since—no matter who spoke it—sent bubbles of anger boiling to the surface of my skin. I told him when he first used the word, “You can call me anything you want, but do not call me a whore. It will save you a lot of pain and suffering.”

  It was a big mistake to tell him that, because now he had a button he could push whenever he wanted. Of course, he still had to suffer the consequences: I’m not by nature a violent person, but I would throw books at him and pummel him with my little fists.

  If I hadn’t really cared about him, I wouldn’t have responded to his provocations at all. So, somehow, over the course of all this madness, I must have fallen in love with him. And the more I fell in love with him, the more he pulled away and neglected me. Instead of spending time with me when he was home, he would lock himself in his room for days and write scripts.

  Eventually, our sex life dwindled to nothing—and I needed it, not just for the pleasure itself, but as reassurance of the love that we both supposedly felt for each other. It wasn’t just because of his demeaning comments and his sexual neuroses: being in business with your lover will typically squeeze the last drop of energy and passion from both of you. Some say that work is the enemy of all natural erotic impulses, that it kills off your sexual desires and channels them elsewhere. And this is doubly true when your work is sex.

  I started scrambling to save the relationship. On some level, I wanted to make it work because, professionally, we were a good team. The movies we made were some of my favorites. So, in a last-ditch effort to make the relationship work, we decided to get married. I thought we’d fall back in love—and I convinced myself that I was overemphasizing sex, that perhaps it wasn’t really that important in a relationship. So I immersed myself in planning the wedding of the century. I even bought my own wedding ring.

  In retrospect, I knew it was a mistake at the time. But I thought that the key to happiness was having a family, something I’d never really had. I always romanticized the years of my life that I couldn’t remember, the picture of bliss that the Massoli family had been before my mother died and our lives went haywire. I thought that I could build it back with Rod. I liked the idea of being married and I’d dreamed of being a mother since I was a child. After all, I was twenty-two: the same age my mother was when she married my father.

  The wedding was on December 21, 1996. It was a beautiful $45,000 affair at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. My dad flew in and met Rod for the first time before the ceremony. As I was downing my third glass of champagne, I suddenly had a moment of clarity.

  I ran out of the room and found my dad. I still had an hour left until the ceremony.

  “Dad, I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t want to marry this guy. This is a big mistake. What should I do?”

  I braced myself for some good advice, prepared to follow through on any plan of his that would save the day. What followed instead were the worst words of wisdom I have ever received in my life.

  “Just do it,” he said. “It’s not like you’re going to be nailed to the cross. You’re getting cold feet, that’s all. If you don’t like it, you can get out of it easily.”

  Mind you, I was asking for advice from a guy who had been through five marriages.

  So I went ahead with it. The wedding would have been a fairy tale if Rod hadn’t been waiting at the end of the aisle for me. As I stood on the altar, I kept thinking that I should pretend to pass out. I’d always been told that fainting at the altar was the best way to get out of a wedding.

  The sure sign that it was more than just cold feet was that I didn’t cry once. Generally, I bawl all the time, even just watching A Wedding Story on television. Instead, I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. I felt like such a hypocrite. If you see our wedding portrait, our faces say it all: I look horrified and he couldn’t be more pleased.

  The next day we were scheduled to fly to Hawaii for our honeymoon. So I booked a room for us that night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When we checked in, we said good night and went to sleep. We didn’t even have sex. And the scary thing is I didn’t even want to.

  When we woke up on our first morning as a married couple, nothing seemed to have changed. He was shuffling his feet across the floor to the bathroom, and all I could think was, “Pick up your fucking feet, loser.”

  Perhaps if he had leaned over and kissed me and said, “Oh my God, you’re my wife,” I would have felt differently. But instead, he just asked, “Do you want anything from room service?” in his meek little voice. I wanted to smack him and say, “Speak up!” Bitterness was taking hold of me.

  The night we arrived in Hawaii, a major storm hit. It rained every day. And all Rod wanted to do was take photographs of me, because he could sell them and make money. I couldn’t stand being cooped up in the hotel with him, so I suggested going snorkeling in the rain. But the water was so murky it was like looking into a cement mixer. Then I got scared a shark would attack me and I wouldn’t see it coming, so the whole outing lasted less than half an hour.

  “So should we see a movie then?” I asked when we got back.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I really need to write this script.”

  When the rain let up one day, I agreed to a photo shoot. We hiked along the beach and set up in a mosquito-infested alcove. By the end, I was covered head to foot in bug bites.

  It was a miserable honeymoon. I spent most of the time on the phone with Joy. When New Year’s Eve rolled around, Rod and I dressed up and went downstairs to celebrate with the other hotel guests. Everyone was sixty or older. We had nobody to talk to, and God knows we had nothing to say to each other. So we went upstairs at 10 P.M. and were both fast asleep by midnight.

  By the end of the trip, I knew it was over. The only words I said to him on the way home were, “Fine. Go ahead and write another mother-fucking script. I couldn’t care less. They’re bad anyway.”

  Naturally, I only acted this way with him in private. But it was only a matter of time before it leaked into our professional life. We began to argue over every little thing on the set, which made the entire crew uncomfortable. One of us would tell the other what to do, and the other would bristle and snap back. Of course, I only had a problem when he was ordering me around, not when anyone else did.

  We tried to make each other’s jobs as hard as possible. He knew how to get me, because the most important thing to me was the way I looked on camera. And I knew how to get him, because it was so important to him for the production to run on time, especially because he’d cram an entire big-budget movie into six twenty-hour days. It soon became The War of the Roses between us.

  He would berate me in front of the crew; he would compliment the other girls but ignore me; he’d pretend not to hear me when I asked him something; he’d tell me I wasn’t smart enough to learn two lines of dialogue; and he’d chastise me for expecting to be treated like a star when I acted like a little kid.

  In return, I would spend longer in the makeup chair than I needed to. And if he
dared to poke his head into the room and ask how much longer, I’d tell the makeup artist that I needed more eyelashes or tell the hairstylist that we needed to re-wet my hair and start over.

  Making movies became a miserable experience, because my dysfunctional relationship was staring at me in the face on the other side of the camera. And sometimes, on my side of the camera. He was a great director, but he wasn’t a great performer. And since it takes two to make a good sex scene, I felt that he was fucking my career up. When your sex life is bad off camera, you can’t expect chemistry to magically come into existence on camera.

  The other problem was that he had trouble getting a hard-on. So I would do something for him I wouldn’t do for any other performer: I’d clear the set and give him a blow job until he was ready, which sometimes took so long I practically had lockjaw. In the business, we call it a slinky when someone can’t get hard while you’re giving them a blow job.

  For one film, we had arranged a three-way, with Rod, Mickey G., and myself. But Rod couldn’t get his dick firm to save his life and Mickey was like a rock, so Rod had to be dropped from the scene. It wasn’t anything personal: it was just about getting the film done. But it was a major ego blow to Rod. I took him aside and said that we could just scrap the scene.

  “I insist that you do it,” he said. “If you don’t, I’m going to be mad.”

  “Well,” I told him. “You’re going to be mad either way.”

  I did the scene. It was the first one I had done with another man since we were married. But Rod got his revenge.

  It was my first audition for a real, legitimate film. I stood outside the office with dozens of beautiful six-foot-tall blond women who could have been making much more money (and getting more parts too) in porn. Inside the office was the producer Ivan Reitman, who was auditioning actresses for the role of “the lesbian” in Howard Stern’s movie Private Parts.