I went back upstairs and crept into the room. Taylor was asleep. Christine sat on her bed, bathed in light from the moon and the streetlights of the parking lot.
“I fucked up,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “yes, you did. I told you. It’s okay, you have to see it to believe it.”
“I’ll never—” she said, cutting herself off. “Yeah. Sorry I pressured you.”
“Well, payback’s a mother,” I said with a laugh. “Take it from me.”
*
I auditioned on a whim, not really that invested in breaking into mainstream films. It was late 2004, and Jonathan Morgan, a fellow contract director at Wicked Pictures, told me he had seen an ad for an open audition for a movie starring Steve Carrell.
“It’s called The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” he said.
“Can’t help you there,” I joked.
“They are looking for girls comfortable with nudity to play a stripper type,” he said.
“Ding ding ding! I know that girl.”
I went down to the casting cattle call in L.A. just because I thought it would be something new to do. I read for it, playing up the comedy of the writing, and I got a callback. But when I went in for the second reading, they warned me the scene had completely changed.
“Are you comfortable with your character also doing a scene in a fake porn?” asked the very nice casting agent.
“I only have a problem with the fake part,” I joked. “Why shoot a fake porn when I can just get you the license to one of my real porns?”
“Oh, well…”
“That would actually help, because it would help sell my movie, and then you guys don’t have to shoot something extra.”
“That actually makes a whole lot of fucking sense,” said the agent.
I got the part, and they got to use Space Nuts, a sci-fi send-up I starred in, but directed and written by Jonathan, who had given me the heads-up about the part. Production started in January, and I met the director, Judd Apatow. He was incredibly polite and focused on the work, but his set was fun. It felt like an extended family, and each time I met someone new, I got the backstory on how they joined the fold. I particularly hit it off with the on-set producer Shauna Robertson, who had met Judd while executive-producing Will Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which she got because she did such an amazing job producing Elf. Shauna is this little California chick with honey-blond hair and such great energy. She’s exacting, and even if she has ten different to-dos going in her head, she has this calmness to her. There’s never a moment when she is not drawing you in with a sense of “Isn’t this cool that we get to do this?”
My second day on set, she came to me with a proposition. “There’s this new guy on set who’s known Judd for years,” she said. “He comes from television, but this is his first real role in a film. We want to prank him. You can say no—totally no big deal, but it’s going to be epic.”
“I’m in,” I said. Nothing makes me happier than pranking someone. Or doing something where the guaranteed outcome is “epic.”
“Okay,” she said, grabbing my arm with excitement. “So, he knows there’s a famous porn star on set named Stormy, and we want to tell him you’re a big fan of his from his TV show. The story is that we need you to come back to do this reshoot but you said you’d only come back if you could meet him.”
“Got it,” I said.
“You’ve insisted he go to your trailer and take a picture with you,” Shauna said. “When he gets there, we want you in a bathrobe with champagne. Be, like, super creepy.”
“I can do super creepy.”
“We had the tattoo lady on set make a fake tat to put on your boob. It’s of his face. When you make him really uncomfortable, we want you to whip out your boob and ask, ‘Do you like my tattoo?’ We’re going to have cameras up to tape the whole thing.”
“Even more in.”
“Oh, God, I love you. His name is Seth Rogen and the show you loved is Freaks and Geeks.”
Seth was hysterically awkward in the face of crazy me, and the prank went so well they made it a DVD extra on the unrated version of 40-Year-Old Virgin titled “My Date with Stormy.” Because I did that, I got to join the family. They didn’t even hold auditions for Knocked Up when they needed someone to do half-naked physical comedy with Seth and Paul Rudd. They went straight to the source. “I just remember that she was very smart and really strong and funny,” Judd told the Daily Beast in March of this year, “to the point where we kept asking her to do silly things in our movies.”
Judd was awesome, but I owe my movie education to Shauna. She let me tag along to all her sets, films such as Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Pineapple Express. She would ask if I wanted to stop by when I wasn’t working, and I probably spent a total of forty days sitting in a chair with her behind the monitor, soaking everything up like a sponge. She’ll never understand what a gift that was to me as a director. During Pineapple Express, I learned the right camera angles to convincingly shoot a fight scene. When Jonah Hill’s character flashes back to his childhood obsession with drawing dick pics in Superbad, I noted all the camera tricks they did to make it so the child actors and the dick pics were never in the same room at once! It sounds funny, but it was all this old-school trick-of-the-eye stuff that I just loved. All these things helped me grow as a filmmaker.
Shauna never asked for anything in return, except to tell me that her boyfriend Ed was a huge fan. “Do you have any new movies with you?” she would ask. Or “Can you sign this?” It got to a point that I would just show up with DVDs and glossies presigned to Ed and hope they hadn’t broken up.
They kept me around in their little family. In Pineapple Express, I played Jessica, the wife of the drug dealer played by Danny McBride. It was one the first movies he did. In the film, he references his wife who is in jail, so before production even started we had to take a ton of photos together so they could be framed about his house in the scene. Danny and I went to Echo Park in L.A. with a photographer, and I basically spent a day making out with him. They even put a bridal gown on me to fake our wedding photo. But what Danny and I loved was physical comedy. I got on his back and did a piggyback ride, then he said, “Okay, your turn.” I did it! And we shared ice cream in this very sloppy gross way and I loved every minute of it.
Later, I was about to shoot a DVD extra for the film, so I was in the makeup trailer reveling in the fact that some chick was curling my hair for me. James Franco was in the next chair, dressed like his complete pothead character but completely engrossed in his schoolbooks for his classes at UCLA. Shauna came running in, excited to see me. “Oh, my God, yes, you’re here,” she said. “Ed is stopping by for lunch.”
“I’m excited to finally meet him,” I said.
“No, he is going to freak out,” Shauna said. “Can you come say hi and take a picture? You can say no.”
“Bitch, please,” I said. “Yes, I can come by to take a picture with this Ed I feel like I know but have never met.”
“Okay, we’ll surprise him.”
About an hour later, Shauna comes over to get me.
“Ed’s here,” she says.
“Oh, great,” I said. I followed her around the corner and—hold up!—how is it that more than two years have gone by and no one tells me that Shauna’s Ed is Ed freaking Norton?
“Hi there,” I said.
Ed was so incredibly shy and said in the nicest, most genuine voice, “It is so nice to meet you.” He was so nice that I thought he was acting.
“Okay,” I said to Shauna. “Is your Ed here, or did you just get Ed Norton to prank me?”
“No, no, this is my Ed,” she said, giving him a hug. He is indeed. They got married and have two kids, and now that quintessential California chick lives in New York.
When I was in the news a lot this year, Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow came forward as sort of character witnesses for me in the media. “I’ve known Stormy Daniels a long time, and
I’ll be honest, she may have mentioned some of this stuff around ten years ago,” Seth recounted to Ellen DeGeneres on her show in April. “At the time, when you asked a porn star who they’ve been sleeping with and the answer was Donald Trump, it was like the least surprising thing that she could have said.”
But I am getting ahead of myself.
THREE
Okay, so did you just skip to this chapter? Quick recap for those just joining us: my life is a lot more interesting than an encounter with Donald Trump. But I get it. Still, of all the people who I had sex with, why couldn’t the world obsess over one of the hot ones?
So, let’s go back to July 13, 2006.
It was really hot for Lake Tahoe, even for July. I was sitting in the back of a golf cart at the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course, seeking shade and relief from the prattling of Jessica Drake. She and I were still contract stars for Wicked Pictures. As you know, we had history. For those of you just joining us, she slept with my boyfriend Brad behind my back, and I wanted to murder her. Little things.
Wicked had recently had a PR guy come in who was talking big about getting into some things that normally weren’t available to an adult company. One of those opportunities was sponsoring a hole at the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship at Lake Tahoe. It’s like Vegas in the Sierras, and the American Century is the casino town’s biggest event of the summer. It has a bachelor party weekend feel, except there’s no sucker getting married. Wicked’s founder, Steve Orenstein, brought me, Jessica, and another contract girl—a brunette, to keep us blondes from throttling each other. Steve was sitting in the front of the golf cart, which showed what an important trip this was for Wicked. I can count on one hand how many work events he went to.
Our job for the day was simple: Celebrities would come through, and we’d say hello and offer them water or a snack. They could take a photo if they wanted. The brunette was in the process of separating from her husband and fighting with her then boyfriend, so we had lots to talk about to pass the time. Meanwhile, Jessica went method, standing around wearing a golf glove as if she spent every weekend on the links. She was all over everyone coming through like some kind of golf geisha.
She really turned on the act when Donald Trump came through. She did everything but pull out a lace handkerchief from her bra and drop it, like, “Oh!” The rest of us got out of the cart to join them, and we rolled our eyes at Jessica so hard you’d think we were having a collective seizure. Trump was wearing a yellow polo that clung to his stomach where it tucked into his khakis. He had a red cap, a Trump crest as a placeholder for the MAGA slogan not one of us could see coming.
Back then, Trump was just a charismatic businessman and Apprentice reality star. Playing the part, he came over to shake our hands. “I’m Donald Trump,” he said, acting like he was hosting the event. “Thank you for coming today.”
Steve introduced himself as the owner of Wicked. “These are my girls,” he said, introducing Jessica and the brunette as contract stars. “And this is Stormy Daniels, contract star and contract director.”
Trump cocked his head to look at me. “Oh,” he said. “You direct? That’s very interesting.” I noticed he was looking at my face and not my breasts.
“I enjoy it,” I said, before Jessica cut in.
“Do you want me to escort you to your next hole, Mr. Trump?” Jessica said, already taking his arm to drag him off. He took a look back at me, and I could tell he was curious.
When the tournament was done for the day, Wicked had a booth set up in a gifting suite. It was a similar thing to the course, with celebrities coming through getting free stuff. The funny thing about becoming rich and famous is that that’s when people start giving you everything for free. We were giving out Wicked-branded bags with DVDs, alongside all the other sponsors handing out sunglasses and golf clubs. So, we were popular. There were lots of people there, but I was most excited to see Anthony Anderson and especially Kevin Nealon. My dream job was to be a writer for Saturday Night Live, and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were my best friends in my head.
Trump came through with a bodyguard and once again, Jessica was all over him. I hung back, but he zeroed in on me. “Ohh, it’s the director,” he said. “That’s really fascinating.” We took a photo, and I know everyone has made a big deal of that picture, but I have that same one with twenty other celebrities that day. Trump kept going and I didn’t think anything of it.
And then his bodyguard came back. He was in his late forties, mostly bald except for a wisp of close-cropped light hair up top. “Mr. Trump wants to know if you can have dinner with him tonight,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what to say. Steve, my boss, overheard and stepped over. “Here’s my card,” Steve said.
The bodyguard took it, but he kept looking at me. “My name is Keith Schiller,” he said, and he gave me his number before asking for mine. “I’ll be in touch later if you are interested.”
I wasn’t. Back in my room, I called the guy I was casually dating, Mike Moz. He was working as a publicist at the time.
“You’ll never guess what happened,” I said.
“You killed Jessica and threw her in Lake Tahoe,” Moz said, deadpan.
“No, but I want to. Donald Trump wants to have dinner with me.”
That got Moz’s attention. “Well, are you gonna go?”
“No,” I said. This wasn’t for Mike’s benefit. It really didn’t even seem like an option.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You have to go.” Moz was very career focused and was always telling me about the importance of relationships in business and how it’s all about who you know. “It’s a great opportunity for you. Just think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
“I’m supposed to have dinner with Steve and Jessica,” I said. Steve was taking us out to eat, and then we were all going to a silent auction.
“You don’t want to go to that.”
“Well, I’ll see if he calls,” I said, “because I don’t care if I do or not.”
What’s funny is that sex never once entered my mind. Call me naïve, but he was one of the few straight guys—hell, any guy—who didn’t immediately stare at my tits. Plus, he seemed really struck by the fact that I was a director. And I certainly didn’t think he was asking me there as an escort. I never thought in that frame of mind because I wasn’t an escort. And the girls that did it hid it, because Wicked had a strong policy against escorting.
I was hoping there would be no call and I would just have the decision made for me. But then Keith called.
“Mr. Trump wants to know,” he said, so polite, “if you are interested in dinner tonight.”
“Okay,” I said.
He said we’d meet where Trump was staying, the Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino. “Do you want me to send a car?”
“I’m okay,” I said. I’d been stuck on the golf course and in the gifting suite. It would be nice to walk. I had only brought one dress for the trip, my favorite. It was a little gold dress, and I loved it because I looked good in it and it was comfy like a T-shirt, with no straps to dig in. I called Steve as I put on a pair of gold strappy heels.
“I’m not going to go to dinner with you guys tonight,” I said.
“Oh, really,” he said, with something lascivious in his voice. “Why is that?”
“I’m having dinner with Donald Trump.”
“Okay,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he said it that way because it sounded absurd or if he anticipated something I didn’t.
The sun was starting to set as I started the walk over to the Harrah’s hotel. As I passed a tattoo parlor, I heard a voice yell from inside.
“Stormy?”
“What the…,” I said, reeling. Alana Evans, who is also an adult actress, came running out of the tattoo parlor. I didn’t know her well, but she was my downstairs neighbor in L.A. It was weird for both of us to see each other out of context.
“Are you here for the golf tournament?” I asked
.
“No,” she said, brushing back her long blond hair. “I’m actually just babysitting Cindy right now.” Cindy Crawford—the adult actress, not the supermodel—was inside getting a new tattoo on her back. She looked at my gold dress and asked in her flat California accent, “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to have dinner,” I said, “with Donald Trump.”
“Oh, sure you are.”
Looking back on the conversation, I realize she 100 percent thought that I was meeting a client and that she had busted me. Having dinner with Donald Trump sounded that far-fetched.
“No, I really am,” I said. “Wicked is at the celebrity golf tournament. I met him and he wants to have dinner.”
“I bet he does.”
“Come with me,” I said.
“Well, I can’t,” Alana said, looking back at Cindy.
“Maybe if I call you, you can get out of it.”
“Oh, yeah, have Mr. Trump call me.”
She totally didn’t believe me, I thought as I walked on into the sunset. Little Red Riding Hood in strappy gold heels.
*
I called Keith’s number when I got to Harrah’s, assuming Trump would come down to the lobby and then we would go to dinner wherever he had chosen.
“Come on up,” said Keith. “It’s the penthouse.”
This wasn’t a red flag. I had been around enough celebrities to know sometimes they liked to show off and pull out the whole butler-and-personal-chef routine. Maybe dinner would just be upstairs.
When the elevator opened on the top floor, the penthouse was the only room on the floor. There was a huge marble foyer with a checkerboard pattern of black and white. Keith was there, guarding a giant set of double doors, with one slightly cracked.
“It’s so nice to see you,” he said. He waved a hand at the door for me to enter, and I paused.
“Go on in,” he said.
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