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

by Jameson, Jenna

  “Hi, Dennis, it’s Jenna. Is Gramma there?”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Hello? Dennis?”

  I listened closer, and he was crying. “Jenna,” he finally said. “Gramma is dead. She died two weeks ago.”

  “Oh no. What happened?”

  “She had ovarian cancer.”

  When he said the word cancer, it touched a self-destruct button in me and I just started bawling. I blubbered, “Thanks, bye,” and quickly hung up. I couldn’t even talk to him. And I haven’t talked to him since.

  Months later, I tried to call and the phone was disconnected. There was no forwarding number.

  I have few regrets, but one of them is not being there for my grandmother when she was sick and dying, because her pain must have been as severe as my mom’s. To this day, I still beat myself up for not calling even once in all those intervening years to say I loved her and forgave her. She probably died thinking that I hated her and abandoned her.

  After that call, I had a panic attack. I was sure that I was going to die of cancer at an early age, just like my mom. And that meant I had just a few years left to make a family of my own. I couldn’t keep escaping from the responsibility and commitment of adulthood by finding excuses to stay on the road, otherwise I’d end up no better than my father. Besides, Nikki and I were beginning to get on each other’s nerves. I was ready to haul off and punch her if she fell on me one more time onstage. It aggravated me, and it hurt—she was practically twice my size.

  So I relented and started talking to Jay more often. I had been avoiding him, because I felt that he was someone I could fall in love with. But he was there for me when I needed him, like when the bounty hunters were after my dad. We started having friendly conversations more often, and I felt a yearning to see him again. I wanted to have fun with him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted the friendship. I wanted the sex. I needed to stop hiding and settle down.

  Tommy was still on the road with Mötley Crüe, and I happened to be finishing up my tour in Vancouver when he was playing there. I went to his concert, and he sat me just out of sight behind the drum set. In the middle of “Home Sweet Home,” he turned around and pointed his drumstick at me. I felt nothing. And that was when I realized that I didn’t love him.

  He was just a fun distraction. I liked living on the edge with him, but he was in love with Pamela Anderson and always would be, no matter how much he said he hated her for putting him in jail and trying to take away the kids he loved. (Strangely, when I met Pamela a year later at the MTV Video Music Awards, she ran up to me like an old friend; when I told her that it was nice to finally meet her, she said, “Oh, we haven’t met before?”)

  Later that night, Tommy came to see me dance. While I was doing my Polaroids, he kept kissing me and hanging all over me. I don’t like guys doing that out of the club, and I certainly don’t enjoy it while I’m working. It makes me uncomfortable. To top it off, Tommy had told Howard Stern on the air that I was his new girlfriend. It was touching that, unlike most other celebrities I’d met, he wasn’t just after a clandestine one night stand that he’d deny later. But I was still incensed (as was a certain listener in Phoenix).

  It felt weird to have Tommy clinging to me all the time. I had been such a big fan of his as a teenager, but his neediness took all the mystique away. When all the people you used to idolize are hitting on you, having a crush on anyone becomes impossible—because no one is out of your league.

  I had always found it very cool, for example, that Sylvester Stallone had never hit on me at Planet Hollywood in Bangkok. But then I saw him again when I was eating with Joy at a club called Barfly in Los Angeles. He sent a bottle of wine to our table and invited us to join him. But when we did, he was so forward that it made me uncomfortable. He couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from my breasts. The next day, Joy and I ran into him with his wife or girlfriend at a Cirque du Soleil opening in Santa Monica and he shot us a look begging us to walk past like we didn’t know him.

  After that, I realized that I was turning into a person I didn’t want to be. I was acting just like my dad did when he drifted from partner to partner after my mom died, looking for some way to lighten the responsibility of life without investing any extra emotion into someone else. I didn’t want to be another girl on Tommy’s list, or the next in a long line of blond bimbos for some other star. I wanted to achieve the one thing I had always really desired, which was to have a family.

  Ever since I was a teenager writing in my diary, I’d wanted to be a wife and a mother. It was never something I could explain intellectually; it was simply a gut feeling, like the urge to get pregnant when I lost my virginity. Perhaps I just wanted to know what unconditional love felt like, to look into the eyes of my own baby and make his or her life wonderful in all the ways mine never was.

  When Nikki and I finally wrapped up our tour, we were just barely on speaking terms with each other. At our last show, our nerves were so frayed from exhaustion, alcohol, and drugs that we were at each other’s throats. She accused me of stealing money from her at one point, and it took every ounce of self-control I had to keep from bloodying her face with my heel again. So when we returned home, I slept for the first time in the loft instead of in bed with her.

  As I lay there alone that night, I realized that I had become a complete addict. I’d take so much Vicodin some nights that the next day I couldn’t even remember where I’d been or how I’d gotten home. My stomach ached constantly, I had dramatic mood swings, and the drug no longer gave me any sort of euphoria. I was just an aching bundle of exposed nerves.

  I recognized the path I was heading down, because I had been there before. The drug just wasn’t worth all the trouble it was causing. I needed to get it—and this whole partying-to-make-up-for-my-missed-adolescence thing—out of my system. So I just said, “No more.” Then I popped three pills and went out and partied. The next afternoon, I said “No more” again, as I did on the following afternoon and the afternoon after that. Finally I just grabbed my huge tub of white Vicodin footballs and dumped them down the toilet with the same conclusive certainty I had dumped most of the men in my life since Jack.

  For days afterward, I had the shakes and every single part of my body ached. It felt like someone had beaten me about the back, knees, and head with a truncheon. Though withdrawal can last for months, I was done in a week. And I was done with my crash diet too. Vicodin is supposed to slow down the body’s metabolism, but it seemed to have had the opposite effect on me. I was so bony I made Kate Moss look like Carnie Wilson presurgery. My lettuce-and-Power-Bar-diet was officially over.

  When my head cleared, I looked at Nikki and realized that she was beyond gone. She was bloated from drinking and partying, and wasn’t going to come out the other side anytime soon. This was largely because she had started seeing another loser guy. He had moved into the apartment, and I was tired of it. She just couldn’t stop the cycle, and I wasn’t going to let her suck me in again.

  I packed my bags, left Nikki’s house, and stayed in West Hollywood with a friend named Holt, a movie producer who I had met in Florida. I was homeless again. And my career, my life, and my environment seemed to have gone completely stale. In the process of running away from myself, I had thrown it all away. I was too old to live like this.

  I told Jay all this on the phone one day, and as soon as I mentioned that I needed to change my surroundings, he said, “I’m on my way. I’m taking you out of there.”

  He packed his dog Caesar into the back of his Range Rover, and drove in from Phoenix that day. It was so romantic; he was rescuing me. I packed one little Louis Vuitton suitcase, threw it into the backseat of his car, and never looked back. Two months later, we returned to L.A. and fetched the rest of my belongings from Nikki’s house.

  People have always told me that when you meet the person you’re supposed to be with, you’ll know right away. And Jay proved that he was the right guy every day. We were similar in
so many ways, especially our ridiculous sense of humor. On the outside, he was an arrogant jock; but on the inside, he was a wily little prankster, kind of like a perverted Bugs Bunny. He’d do things like pay our friend Duane one hundred dollars if he’d let a girl shove an Altoid up his ass and leave it there all night. (Strangely, Duane seemed to like it.) He made me laugh and feel like Jenna Massoli, and I began to lower my guard and tell him things I had never told anyone.

  I had never been with a man who was able to make me feel safe before Jay. During a short feature dancing tour, a man in his thirties started slipping me threatening letters after my shows. One night in Seattle, I woke up to the sound of him pounding on my door. I called Jay and told him that I was scared and didn’t know what to do. Within half an hour, he was on a plane to Seattle.

  Gradually, I began to get comfortable with Jay, to love the little things like the way he’d tiptoe around the house in the morning trying not to wake me or begrudgingly let me do emasculating things to him like plucking his eyebrows and giving him facials.

  The only problem was that I wasn’t comfortable being comfortable. It wasn’t a feeling that had been part of my reality in the past. Since Jack, I’d been emotionally incapable of settling down with someone and letting my guard down, because it meant giving someone the opportunity to have the upper hand over me. Yet my entire hopes and dreams rested on settling down and having a family. So with everything going so well with Jay, I was determined to break my own cycle. It proved to be a lot harder than withdrawing from Vicodin, because running away was a habit that had been reinforced for so many more years.

  So I began to question and doubt things, which was poison to the relationship. Jay is a dominant man. It’s the only way he knows how to act. So every time he tried to control me in any way, I pulled away by instinct. One of our more unfortunate similarities is that we both have a fierce temper—he’s an aggressive German and I’m a hotheaded Italian—so our happiness slowly became punctuated by fights. And after every fight, I’d leave him. It was a trait I’d inherited from my father: when in doubt, pack your bags and go.

  But Jay never called and begged for me to come back like every other man. Instead, he’d change the locks on me. If I was gone for more than a few weeks, he’d have someone find me and try to talk me into coming back, because for some shady reason he knew people in every state. We loved each other, but we were completely devoid of the communication skills that could solve our problems.

  Eventually, a friend of ours named Gary intervened. He checked us both into a hotel around the corner from Jay’s house, and counseled us for three days straight. To make the relationship work, he told me, I needed to stop trying to make every guy I dated compensate for all the love my father and Jack had never given me. I needed to be less needy. I needed to accept his status as the alpha male of the house—or at least pretend to. Most importantly, I needed to realize that running away every time we fought over something trivial was not a constructive way of getting attention.

  At the same time, he told Jay to start listening to me more, to apologize when he was wrong, to offer me some semblance of emotional stability, and to find a way to compromise on our differences of opinion—all without losing what he thought of as his power. I suppose almost every problem in a relationship, whether it be romantic, political, or creative, comes down to power—who has it and who wants it. I came away from the meeting with the realization that I needed to be with someone who was as dominant as he was, but who also had my best interests at heart. And that person was Jay. He had everything I wanted in a male, except maybe sensitivity.

  We went through a small period of paradise after the intervention. In fact, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Fooling around in public places became our favorite pastime. We had sex in the middle of the day in the crowded pool of the Delano hotel in Miami, in the changing rooms at Victoria’s Secret in Beverly Hills, and in a dozen restaurants, from Bed in Miami to Balthazar in New York.

  As my relationship with Jay deepened, Wicked began slipping farther away. Beyond Joy’s friendship, I didn’t feel like the company was in my corner anymore. Steve, who had married Joy’s sister, was juggling so many contract girls that he hardly had time to return my calls or ask permission for anything he was doing that involved my name.

  The tipping point came when Steve hired a guy to take care of the websites he owned, which included my site. The guy kept calling and asking for my social security number, my conversion rates, my retention, and other pieces of financial information that were none of his business. I constantly told Steve that I didn’t trust this guy, but Steve didn’t do a thing. I did some number-crunching with Jay, and nothing seemed to add up correctly. It was clear to us by then that the Internet was not just about promotion, but potentially a massive source of profit—when it comes to early adapters, the porn industry always gets to new technology first. So I made one last try to reach Steve.

  “He’s ripping me off and he’s ripping you off,” I told him. “I’ve helped build this company on my back. And maybe I could tolerate it if the money was going to you, because you worked your ass off to make me who I am. But I will not stand by and watch this chintzy-ass motherfucker get rich off me.”

  Steve didn’t back me. He just let it go. The guy will not confront anyone. Between the website and the new girls who kept streaming into the company, things were getting uncomfortable at Wicked. They now had eight contract girls, only two less than Vivid.

  And so, like most of my relationships, as soon as I saw the warning signs, I decided to leave before something worse happened. Over the years, I had noticed that women in the adult industry didn’t seem to be valued. The stars were just disposable products with a shelf life of a few years. If women wanted any respect—especially in an industry built on their objectification—they needed to be more than just a pretty face on a box cover. Every big adult company was run by a man. I was talking with Jay about it, and we realized that there was absolutely no reason I had to work for anyone else once I left Wicked. I could blaze a path I had seen no other woman take and start a successful company of my own. I could run my own website, produce my own content, call my own shots. I could be not just a porn star, but a porn CEO.

  However, before even attempting the potential nightmare of starting a business, I wanted to leave Wicked with dignity, because they had done so much for me and, until recently, never even came close to betraying me.

  So I met with Steve. He sat at his desk as he had five years earlier, obscured behind disorderly stacks of paper. He didn’t seem to have aged a day. His eyes twinkled no less brightly and blinked no less nervously.

  I told Steve that I loved him and appreciated everything he had done for me. But it was time for me to leave the nest and see if I could better myself.

  The last words I said to him were, “I’d like your blessing.”

  And he said, “Jenna, I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to ever feel like you are being forced to do something against your will. So go and do your thing.”

  I hugged him, knocking half the papers off his desk in the process, and turned to leave the office.

  “But remember,” he said before I reached the door. “You still owe me one more movie.”

  I wasn’t just leaving a company, I was losing my best friends. Joy and I managed to remain close, but Steve and I never talk anymore. It breaks my heart, and I know it breaks his heart, too.

  Since it was Wicked’s last chance to cash in on me, they decided to make my final film their biggest budget production ever. It was called Dreamquest, a special-effects-laden Chronicles of Narnia–style adventure tale (minus the biblical allegories) about a woman’s quest to save male fantasy. It was to be helmed, of course, by my ex-husband, Rod.

  People always wonder if it’s hard for me to sleep with guys I don’t love on screen. The truth is that it’s hardest on the guys I’m dating. I can rationalize the sex if I have to because it’s work and I can disconnect mysel
f. But there are few guys who can handle imagining—and knowing that other people are seeing—another man inside the person that they love, pumping away as she screams the exact same screams they hear in the bedroom with her. Thus, the challenge for me in having sex on camera is the rare instance when I know that, because of it, someone I love may be suffering.

  And so it was that my brief period of domestic tranquillity came to an abrupt end. All hell broke loose. Jay was so adamant about me not sleeping with anyone on screen that he made Jordan seem like a swinger in comparison. A side came out of him that I had never seen before. He even took my picture out of the frame on his nightstand and replaced it with a photo of Chasey Lain.

  One day, as we were driving to dinner in his Range Rover, he had me so wound up that I kicked the front windshield with my shoe hard enough that the glass shattered. I’ve always been a kicker, and in that period with Jay I also put my foot through a TV set and a screen door. I was constantly smashing stuff. The only problem was that it was usually my stuff.

  Stomping out of the house after one of our fights over the movie, I returned to discover that Jay had changed the security code on the gates. I took off my heels, climbed over the fence, and ran half a mile up to the front door, but my key wouldn’t go in the lock. He had poured liquid cement in it. I called him on my cell phone, demanding that he let me in so I could get my clothes and leave his ass for good.

  He refused and threatened to kill my dogs and burn my clothes. Then he threw everything I owned into boxes, destroying most of my dresses in the process, and left them in the driveway. I gathered my things and flew to Los Angeles.

  I wished so badly that I hadn’t procrastinated on that last movie, and had just filmed it while I was on the road with Nikki. But I was stuck. After all these years and all these movies, it was supposed to get easier, not harder. When I was in my hotel room waiting to start shooting, Jay called.