by Jake Brown
Charlie Fry: Before Jasmin, a star named Annabel Chong had done the gangbang, and she was nice and everything, but she wasn’t really as exotic as Jasmin. Starting out, one of our bigger challenges was her ethnicity, because at that time in particular the popular trend among porn stars was to be blonde-haired and blue-eyed, which I saw as something we could use to our advantage to single her out. In terms of things that were unappealing to her, girl-girl scenes come chiefly to mind — she didn’t want to do them. She felt that was the wrong image to portray, and wanted to be known as a girl who fucks guys, and had a good mind as to ‘what is going to make guys want me.’ And were talking about creating a brandname star from nothing, and where it normally take years and years and years, within a year and a half Jasmin was a known brand name. Most importantly, we were doing this with zero budget for advertising, zero budget for public relations, and I had to count on Jasmin to be a willing participant in whatever crazy idea I might come up with — including what turned out to be The World’s Greatest Gang Bang.
Jasmin: Charlie and I had both agreed we needed to develop some kind of niche for me to have any chance of pushing the boundaries that would single me out. So this was right prior to a huge round of press we had lined up to more or less introduce me as a new starlet in the world of porn, and the timing was perfect for what we had in mind. Basically, we came up with a strategy wherein whenever an interviewer would ask me a question about my future plans, I would bring it up, the fact that I was going to top the girl who had done 251 guys in 24 hours. So sure enough, starting with Excitement Magazine and then with all these other publications, I kept plugging it and plugging it, to the point where we were actually creating a buzz out of nothing. Then to elevate things even further, Charlie arranged for me to go on Jerry Springer for a second time, and I announced on the show that I was going for 300 guys in 24 hours. So next we brought the idea to John T. Bone at Metro and they jumped all over it. And Metro had basically signed me up to do 12 movies, so we collectively came up with this strategy wherein we would build up to the main event so to speak later in the year. As we began shaping the direction of my career, add to the extreme nature of my brand of porn, Charlie and John T. Bone both wanted to capitalize on the fact that I was this. As they put it — beautiful and exotic looking girl doing hard core, and at the time, there wasn’t any of that going on. I had an instant niche we could build off of, because we were almost inventing the market as we went along. For instance, the fact that I had lost my anal virginity on camera in my next movie lent kind of a purity to my image, as we began building it in the press. I made it sound sexy in print, but in truth, I’d been scared shitless, pardon the pun. So going forth, that became a signature of my scenes, the fact that I did anal, hard core, whatever would push the boundaries a little at a time. By our estimation, in doing so, those boundaries were bound to SNAP and break open a whole new brand of porn when I finally got to the World’s Greatest Gang Bang II, as John had officially branded it. We looked at it in a sexual metaphor — like a build up leading to a massive climax over 24 hours that would change the modern landscape of porn forever after.
Part V ii
Fame at Any Cost
The way we had plotted it, I was under contract with Metro to do 12 films, and we targeted the 8th film as the Money Shot so to speak. We were building my public persona in real time with the shooting of these films. So every month that I would shoot a new film, the scene I’d shot a previous month or so back was coming out. There was always a big promotional junket of photo shoots and interviews to accompany its release. The timing couldn’t have been more ideal, because with each film’s release, I just kept plugging and building hype for the ‘World’s Greatest Gang Bang’ thing, like getting everyone hotter and hotter and more worked up for it. I shot my second film in late October, in a Castle in the Hollywood Hills somewhere, a literal castle like Phil Spector’s. This shoot had me especially nervous because I was scheduled (that sounds funny now) to lose my anal virginity on screen that day, and had to undergo an enema prior to starting the scene. It was almost funny, because you walked on set, and there was like this table set up with coffee and donuts, and then someone on the technical side calls me over to get my enema done.
Worse still to my having to have anal sex for the first time in my life on screen, the scene was what they refer to in industry jargon as a ‘DP’ scene, or DOUBLE PENETRATION. So, in the same day, I lost my anal virginity on screen — which was painful to me, but I am sure looked sexy to all the sick fucks that eventually bought the thing — and was scheduled to have two men inside me at the same time to boot.They weren’t fucking around when they used the term ‘hard core,’and so for my first scene that day, they really threw me into the deep end of the pool. I was working with two actors — Dave Hardman and Rick Masters — and John T. Bone was directing again. I guess that made me feel a little more at ease, but not much. The scene was shot on a yellow Mazda MIATA outside with
89 the Castle as the backdrop, and losing my anal virginity on camera hurt like a bitch, but I didn’t just have to act like it didn’t, I had to look like I was enjoying it. It was really torturous in a way, looking back on it now. I kept thinking in my head, ‘This sucks, this sucks,’ and I just wanted to get it done and over with, and the feeling was almost confusing. It was almost like one of those movie scenes where the woman is being fucked for the first time and doesn’t look exactly sure by her facial expressions how she’s feeling about it. It felt like that in my head, but worse, because I wasn’t confused at all about how bad it hurt, and I couldn’t give any hint in my own facial expressions to that fact.
So getting into the first scene, both of these guys are inside me, and it’s the full extreme, everything that you can imagine in terms of hard core, and it fucking hurt. They were as gentle as they could be, but they had to do all these cum shots on my face and by that point I was thinking from the outside in about it, so I knew what to expect. It was still disgusting though, but the best piece of advice I could ever give to a rising porn actress is to desensitize yourself as quickly as possible, because blowing on a girl’s face is as common as blowing your nose. It’s just a job requirement. It was good that I’d reached that headspace too because on top of it all, there was this fucking adult film media there. They were all covering the girl who was going to eventually break this world record with the Gang Bang thing, so this was just part of the build-up Charlie and John had arranged. So I felt this MASSIVE extra pressure with the media present, but I also thought that helped me as a performer, as well as in terms of the glamorous side of the business, which I really craved at that time in my life in terms of my ego. Anyway, after the first scene finished, I took a HUGE shower and headed home.
Even though I was clean from the dirtiness of the day, emotionally as I was driving home I felt like I’d stepped on all my morals. I was like ‘God, okay, what the fuck did I just do?’I mean in terms of how my mother had raised me, and the kind of home I had come from. Many of the girls who work in this business are already desensitized to it all by the time they start shooting because they came from the opposite kind of home I did. In the same time, my mother was so fucked-up with me where it came to men, coupled with what I’d been through first with Dick and then Kurt in terms of the abuse, in a way I was driven toward it to get back at all of them. Mainly at the men who had mistreated me, but it’s like I completely gave up my morals in the process. It was funny, but it didn’t really hit home with me that I was doing this in part to get back at those guys until I was in Florida a week or so later, doing a shoot for Playboy, and once again promoting my forthcoming Gang Bang special. After the shoot, one of the tech guys who’d been listening to me talk to the press about how big and outrageous this was going to be was driving me to the airport, and he said ‘Gosh, someone must have really hurt you.’ He was 100% correct, and it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. It was an important realization personally for me to have because you block so much out to get into
the right mental headspace to do porn to begin with. A lot of girls who get into this, they don’t actually know what they’re getting into psychologically, because its very much escapism for them, but at the same time, you’re fully conscious of what’s going on while you’re filming. It can leave a lot to be explained to oneself later on if you’re not clear ahead of time with yourself why you’re doing it. Knowing I was punishing Dick and Kurt just made me feel in a way that much more ambitious. To me, it was both to become famous, but also for the emotional torture I could inflict on them both in the process. I felt like I had been emotionally raped by both of these assholes, so I was in a pretty cold place where it came to feeling anything toward anyone one way or another.
My personal life around this time was free completely of Kurt, and I had done some dating, but largely had kept my mind focused on work. The previous summer, even before I’d shot Hell Fire, I’d hung out with Ron Jeremy a bit socially as friends, which was educational at least. He was basically a walking example of what John T. Bone had been talking about in terms of how people in the business use whoever they can to climb, and I have to admit I was surprised to see it happen with someone of Ron Jeremy’s stature. Basically, he would go out and pick up some girl who was new to town, green to the ways of Hollywood, and then introduce her to one of his mainstream director friends. His intention ultimately would be for the girl to sleep with the director and for Ron then in turn to get a mainstream movie part or cameo, which raised his profile that much more.There is a ceiling on porn stardom, and I saw that for the first and last time I needed to see it with Ron Jeremy, who at the time was considered a giant in the business. My grandmother had heard the name Ron Jeremy, so he was famous in the mainstream, but that wasn’t enough to keep him relevant. I guess he and I had that ambition in common, in that we were both always looking for ways to advance ourselves outside the box of porn. It also didn’t hurt me locally around the L.A. social scene to be seen with a legend like Ron Jeremy. One mainstream ‘star’ of sorts I met through Ron during that summer was Corey Feldman. Corey liked mainstream girls because they were tested regularly, and I did sleep with him once, and I’m not revealing anything new here because I said it on Stern, but he was AWFUL. On top of that, when I was on the air with Howard, I went onto talk about how small his penis was, which was in retaliation for the fact that he basically blew me off after we went to bed together. Anyway, I feel like I got him back satisfactorily, so it’s no big deal to me at this point.
The second day of the shoot for my second movie was something entirely different from the first in that it was an orgy scene. That one scared me more than anal had because it was a different situation entirely, but I was working with one of the two guys I had the day before, so that was cool. Ron Jeremy was there too, and was actually told to stay away from me, which was funny because he kept trying to inject himself into the scene. Anyway, there were 4 people involved in the orgy scene, and I was very uncomfortable with being with a woman sexually, more so than I’d ever felt about being with a strange guy. Most of the scene was improvised too, rather than staged, and I’d insisted on seeing everyone’s AIDS tests before shooting started. The whole thing took about two and a half hours to do and of course at the end, the guys all blew in our faces again, which was just fucking vile to me. When you think about it now, it’s really fucking vile, and you’re supposed to act like you want it. So then when I finished the scene and went to shower, there was already one of the chicks from the scene in there with one of the guys, fucking again! I just showered in a different room, left and went home, and was just happy to be done with the whole thing. Plus I had the box cover shoot the next day, which I really always enjoyed in contrast to the shoots, it was always a lot light fair, and I got paid for everything at the conclusion of the shoot.
My featuring during this time period had started to pick up a lot too, validating Charlie’s claim that my exposure — and therein my rates — would skyrocket. When I was home in between dates, I made the stupid mistake of allowing Kurt back into my life. He’d pulled his dick out of a gay dude’s ass long enough to think he was straight again, and for a minute actually had me convinced that he had changed. As the fall wore on, I’d started re-engaging my mother in letters as well, telling her I was modeling out West, which I suppose was true in a sense. I was also doing small shoots for this magazine or that, and I was starting to quickly realize what a mistake I had made on one hand agreeing to give Charlie, my manager, 35% of everything I made. That meant if I made $5000, he got $1750, if I made $500, he got $175. His rationale anytime I attempted to bring it up to him was the same old swindler-logic that boxing managers had used on fighters for years, justifying 50% commissions by arguing that ‘50% of anything is 50% more than you had in your pockets before you signed with me.’
To boot, as my new management would point out to me in later years, there was no back-end for me built into the structure of my deal with Metro for video sales at the time I had first signed, no residual whatsoever. I would build a business out of merchandise sales that has lasted to date, but would never see a dime in royalties from the sale of my movies, no matter how many years they went onto sell beyond my prime. The point of revealing all this is to give you perspective on how hard I had to keep working, outside of the movies that I shot, to maintain any decent standard of living. Much like a musician who makes most of their money touring rather than off album sales, I was on the road arguably half the year, if not more. Every night, every stage I was out sweating on, dancing my ass off for hours at a time, Charlie got a piece of everything — except my tips, of course (wink, wink.) That would have been like asking a waitress to declare her tips on a tax form. I worked just as hard, in spite of the glamorous image you might have had in your mind.
Very few porn stars ever attain the national — or even international — mainstream status that stars like Jenna Jameson or I did. Howard Stern helped, but I learned right from the jump off that you had to keep working and working to keep yourself out there and visible, in as many mediums at once as possible. This meant building up a following on the road at club gigs, selling as many signed Polaroid photos as I could after shows and video stock if I had it. In the beginning, because I was still so new, I had to rely primarily on Polaroids for merchandise, but I sold them for $30 a pop, and sometimes I sold hundreds. That was revenue I was also able to keep out of Charlie’s greedy clutches, but again I had to hustle twice as hard to sell as many of those as possible to try and make up for the 35% he was taking out of my ass. The whole mountain of bullshit that it seemed women had to go through in that business really pissed me off, and I made sure to mouth off about it at every opportunity in press interviews. I wasn’t just mad at the smut merchants that were ripping us off from the management and corporate side. I was equally as pissed at the actors and actresses for accepting this kind of financial rape as a norm. So that there was no one standing up for any kind of change besides myself. I lashed out a lot at the actors because I felt they had a role to play in keeping us down collectively, but I also had to be careful not to piss off the establishment. I had to keep them hot in the same time that I was going off, but my tongue was always sharp.
To boot, as the fall wore on, in every one these same interviews and appearances, I was busy promoting my World’s Greatest Gang Bang movie coming in the later spring of 1996. One really cool thing that happened for me professionally in the later fall of 1995 was my traveling to San Diego to meet with a comic artist named Dave about a comic book Metro had commissioned him to design — STARRING ME!!! It was a mix of fact and fiction designed around my ‘Jasmin St. Claire’ persona, but it was definitely the first thing that authentically made me feel like a star. Titled Porn Star Fantasies, I was on the cover, and he and I collaboratively created the story and dialogue inside.The girl who drew me for the cover was named FAUVE, and I couldn’t have come out looking cooler. She was very talented. I thought it was really cool that I had my own comic book, albeit one that
most kids would have to hide under their pillow from Mom and Dad. I’ll bet you plenty of those same parents had my videos stuck under their mattresses though. It amused me to think I was playing such an integral part in the carnival that was male adolescence, whether you were reading my comic book or more likely, watching me on screen staring in the first porn you ever watched with your playground friends after school one day. It motivated me to elevate myself to the top of the game as fast as I could, and what would soon become dubbed the World’s Greatest Gang Bang II was my shot.