by Jake Brown
I did Brazil’s equivalent of the Tonight Show, called Jo Suarez, and the show’s host and audience were really nice to me, it made me feel good to be appreciated for once in my fucking life. There were a lot of photo shoots and magazine interviews too, which I could understand because I spoke Portuguese, so I answered questions in their native language, which impressed everyone as well. We also did Brazil’s version of our own video convention, but it was much nicer because you didn’t have every single piece of fucking trailer park trash there trying to talk shit to me with their two teeth. The Brazilians knew how to treat their stars. They had wine at the booth where I was signing, and put me up in my OWN ROOM at a beautiful, 5-star hotel for a week. The fan appreciation there was just really cool. When I got back from Brazil, things with Keith started to get strained, especially in that he became more and more possessive, which is a REAL turn off to any woman, that one’s just for you guys reading this. The more you try to pull a woman close to you through that, the more then push away, many times in the case of my girlfriends to where they do what I ended up doing to escape: have an affair. In my case, the fling was with the Scorpions bass player, Ralph Rickermann. We met at the Rainbow Bar and Grill one night, and things just went from there. He invited my friends and me back to his house to listen to some of his band’s new stuff. He had a really awesome house up in the hills too. Nothing happened between us that first night, but I knew it would sooner or later. The attraction was clearly there, and we hooked up a few days later. I kept both Ralph and Keith in the dark about each other, which I knew couldn’t last forever. One reason for that was Ralph constantly had people over at his house, and was always out and about when we were together and weren’t in the bedroom. It was really annoying after a while, because he loved groupies, and you can’t really date someone if you always have people around because alone time is just a requisite component to any successful relationship working — in my opinion at least. He was a social butterfly, and wasn’t really dating material because of that. I figured it was just a matter of time before word got back to Keith. I wasn’t happy, and at that point, neither had enough to really satisfy me singularly, so I guess a rationalized in a way that by dating both guys at once, they would somehow make up for one another’s deficiencies. Naturally, that strategy did NOT work in the long run, but it made for an amusing spring of dating.
In April, I shot another movie, but the next big to-do professionally came with a lunch between John T. Bone and I where he pitched me on a brilliant idea for a movie he had called Fuck Jasmin, where I would fuck my fans on-screen. It was similar to Gang Bang II in some ways, with the difference being that for this movie, now that I was established, the men having sex with me knew who I was, and it would be like I was fulfilling their personal fantasy. Naturally, I was too weak to stand up to the idea, so I went along with it, saying something like ‘Yeah sure, I guess if that’s what it takes.’ Looking back, I felt like he was treating me like a fucking hooker, but at the time, I was already so settled in that mind frame that it didn’t occur to me to say anything about whatever objections I did have at the time in my own head. We would end up doing a couple movies like that; neither film was very enjoyable, because, again, having sex with regular Joes as opposed to pros on-screen is just a different type of pressure. No one knew what they were doing, and the whole thing was just kind of thrown together.There’s just basics that a professional porn star knows — placement, stamina, how to position their faces, blocking, knowing how to fake orgasms and make it look real, etc. By the way, anyone who tells you they have real orgasms onscreen is fucking lying. Anyway, with an average fan, they get nervous because of all the lighting and direction, and it turns out to be a lot harder than they thought. Plus they are trying to act like a porn star, which makes it even funnier, because they look like total morons, and have no idea because no one has the heart to tell them. The first thing they’d lose is their confidence, and then their hard-on, and then we’d have had to start all over again with another guy. It was just a bad idea all around, and I give them all the credit in the world for trying because it was any red blooded American’s dream come true, but it was really just a waste of my time, and the audience’s ultimately.
We were scheduled to shoot the first one in May of 1997, and another was shot later that summer.Thankfully neither sold very well; so they cut it out. But sitting back at that lunch in April, I felt really sleazy agreeing to it at all. He convinced me it was the best way to keep things fresh with my image, so I went along with it. One change professionally for me at this point was my decision to leave Metro when my contract was up to go with John T. Bone over to a new company he was starting with my manager Charlie Frey called Cream Productions.Talk about a conflict of interest: my manager being a co-owner of a company who employed me and made money off my video sales, and then in the same time also taking 35% of the pittance they did pay me. It was bullshit, and probably illegal on some level, certainly unethical. It was a bad move in the long run, not just from a business- point, but also in terms of the box covers and quality of the videos they were making. My money was the same per shoot, but the overall budgets got smaller, and checks would bounce now and then, and the short cuts they were taking just reflected in the end product. It was just a fucking disastrous nightmare, now that it’s all coming back to me. I was above it, and should have said so at the time. The pressure was almost entirely on me as well as the company’s biggest star to carry their product sales, and that wasn’t fair at all to me. All of the other girls Charlie and John recruited were newcomers, and most didn’t last more than a few movies. As the company’s flagship star, I felt I deserved more money, and used it as the perfect opportunity to force Charlie to lower his percentage to 25% from 35%, which he reluctantly agreed to. He was acting real prick, looking back in hindsight.
Heading into the summer of 1997, I had my second nose-job, and the plastic surgeon was a complete asshole. I remember I stayed in this really nice aftercare facility in Los Angeles after the operation was over, in a little Bungalow with its own little bathroom and whatnot. It was a smart move, because at one point I blacked out like the first night after the surgery while I was in the shower and there was someone there to find me. They had nurses that checked on you, and had I been home, I would have been alone and helpless. I was down for two weeks after the nose job, so that hurt financially a little bit, but I was back out on the road featuring by the end of June. Things were still tough financially, in spite of all the money I was making between the dancing and movies. I had to give Charlie 25% right off the top, which was still a lot of money. Pay rent, my car payment, plus I was still paying down the debt Dick had run up in my name, and that was in the thousands of dollars, so it was a trying time in spite of my finally attaining stardom. That just allowed more opportunities for me to go out and make money that someone else took out of my pocket almost as soon as it came in. I guess that is life, but it still didn’t sit right with me. Keith and I were also starting to have real problems around this point, because like every other fucking guy who lied about claiming he could ‘handle my profession,’ he was starting to pressure me to get out of porn. Well, naturally, that was the last fucking thing I wanted to hear, so it gave me refuge to steal off and be with Ralph, the Scorpions’ bassist, which obviously didn’t help Keith and I out either. Keith just couldn’t deal with what I was doing, where Ralph never brought it up one way or the other, so that was convenient also.
In truth, I was starting to tire of the whole business myself, but I knew if I’d walked away from it then, I would have been forgotten about overnight. I had worked hard to build a reputation, and while I was now famous within porn, I hadn’t yet made all the connections I would need to transition out of the business on my own terms. I was definitely starting to get burnt out though, but couldn’t really tell Keith that because he’d just use it to his advantage rather than mine. I couldn’t tell Charlie or John either, because now they were both my bosses, and had too
much invested personally in the company to lose their biggest star while Crème was still a start-up company. Anyway, I really stayed home most of June because of the operation and from being fried in general, but I had to get back to work in July just to keep my head above water financially and to stay visible. That month, John also shot the second (and thank GOD final) fan-fuck movie, and like the first one, it was just fucking awful. It was called Planet Jasmin: A Bang at the Park, and it was just ridiculous. It was a fucking nightmare gone bad. It was basically identical to the first one, and was obvious to everyone at the shoot’s conclusion that it needed to end. At that point, I was also weaning off of Ralph, at that point because I didn’t want him fucking around all over town. I didn’t like the fact that when I was with him and wanted to spend some time with him he would prefer to have these parties all the time with all these porn stars, who I had to see enough of at work as it was. It just got really annoying really quick.
Meanwhile, on the Keith front, it had gotten so bad that he would do shit like take me out to nice places to eat dinner, sit across from me telling me how great I was, and then in front of me drool over all these other women. Or he would go on and on about his ex-girlfriends, as if that was something any woman would ever want to hear about from her man? Then he started starting fights with me all the time over my ‘porn friends’ hanging out, then the fucking hypocrite went to his own porn shoots and fucked the girls he was modeling with, but he claimed it wasn’t cheating because it was work. You fuck in movies, not on the sets of photo shoots — did he forget I was a fucking model too? I was too far into it now to quit, and his betrayals gave me no further motivation to consider it. If anything, this made me angrier because he more than anyone else should have understood the dynamics of it. You see I was too far into the game to turn back. I had everything; fame, interviews, publicity. It’s all that represented independence to me at that point in my life. I was suffocated enough anyway by the fact that I was Charlie and John’s main star at the new company, and so the last thing I needed was to feel controlled at ALL by my boyfriend. Well, the same day of this one particularly nasty fight we’d had where I’d thrown him out of my apartment, I was I was on the phone with my travel agent Elizabeth, going over an airline ticket itinerary for a feature I had coming up. Anyway, while talking with her in my kitchen, I suddenly get this instinct to turn around, and standing in my fucking living room is Keith. He’d climbed up two stories onto the balcony in broad daylight like a fucking burglar, and was now beginning to walk toward me in a manner I found extremely threatening. So from my kitchen I started screaming and throwing knives at him, whatever metal objects I could get my hands on that I thought would hurt him. While all this was going on, I still had Elizabeth on the phone, who called the police for me on her cell while she kept me on the phone. Keith is yelling at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ and people outside the apartment could hear him, all around Marina Del Rey. Anyway, I managed to keep him at bay till the cops arrived a few minutes later. Of course, they immediately got the picture, and once I made clear I did NOT want Keith there, and he refused even then to leave in front of the L.A.P.D., insisting he wanted to ‘talk.’ I was turned on by this and it made for great, hot sex later. Neither of us pressed charges. Ultimately, I ended up forgiving him and taking him back, but I knew things were doomed to end at some point. I just needed someone in that moment, and probably fooled myself like all women do on some level in thinking I could make things better between us.
As the summer came toward a close, things weren’t much better at Crème. I was bored, John had me doing the hard core, boy/girl anal scenes, which was my bread and butter as a porn star, but he wanted me to develop an even bitchier attitude as part of my larger public persona as Jasmin. I thought I was already hard core enough, but I suppose I felt motivated to continue to stand out on some level because all around me, Charlie and John were bringing in all these clone chicks who were riding my coattails on the way to the top. The problem was they weren’t stars, and therein only cluttered my movies but made me stand out that much more in another way, so it worked in reverse of what both John and Charlie had been hoping. I think over all, I was just really over the whole thing, and had no enthusiasm for it anymore. I mean how could I? How could I top the gang bang movie? Whenever I bitched about these hack bitches like Kendra Jade sharing my screen time, John would say I was jealous, but I was right: how could he or Charlie focus on me with all these other girls as clients? Moreover, it was an inherent conflict of interest that Charlie was acting both as my manager and employer as part owner of the company because he had no incentive to push for me to get other projects and opportunities outside of the confines of Crème. This meant he couldn’t shop me to Vivid or any competitors because they were HIS competitors and that put me at a great disadvantage looking back.
Charlie Fry: I don’t know if I agree with her depiction of the Jasmin clones. At her peak, Jasmin definitely had imitators. In fact, we had to send a cease-and-desist letter to one club feature dancer who was using Jade St. Claire with a very similar look to Jasmin. It was obvious she was trying to ride off Jasmin’s name — there are a lot out there that were based off of Jasmin’s name and look. My opinion is that once I did go onto the
162 what the hell was i thinking?!! next girl, Jasmin got jealous because she’d lost the attention and positive male feedback that she craved. Because of her negative self image, which came in her case NOT from the dominant male figure in her life, but the dominant FEMALE figure, being her mother. I think by playing the role I did in making her a star as quickly as I did, she came to rely on that positive male feedback from me, and in general. So part of our fall-out came when I started looking to create the next star, like Kendra Jade, which is how I kept commissions coming in, but she perceived it as something where I lost interest in her and creating situations which kept her at the pinnacle of the porn world. In my defense, she had started getting more heavily involved in wrestling, which was not my forte, and as a result, I think we grew even further apart as her interest in adult film waned. I think its remarkable she kept her brand name alive in other commercial realms, be it wrestling or the music industry, but there wasn’t much more I could do for her after she lost her passion for porn.
Jasmin: Charlie was just taking complete advantage of me wherever he could at that point — he even tried to get me to do a club date for free that I’d blown off a few months back. It was laughable, but showed how little value he actually put on me. I had July off from shooting any movies, which was a nice break. I’d actually made a couple girlfriends, as I like to joke, one — my friend Dawn, was a co-star, and the other-this gay make-up guy named Sean — was very sweet, he’s so much fun to dress up with and go out. Like he’d come over to my place. He’d come dress me up and do my hair and makeup. And we’d go over to his place, he’d put something on and we’d sneak out and go dancing. It was so much fun. We go to department stores, and it was always a funny experience because we’d go to the makeup counters and fuck with the make-up people working there. He’d like borrow their eye-shadow right there and he’d do my makeup right there. He’s a natural. I was very fortunate to have him — personally and professionally — because he knew hair and makeup. He made some people who really needed it — like Kendra Jade — look great. We went to another dumb convention in Vegas whose name I honestly don’t remember. The most memorable event from that weekend was my breaking my own rule by hooking up for a one-night stand with this hot piece of ass porn star named John Doe, which was not typical of me. He’d come up to me that day during a booth signing and asked me out that night for drinks and I thought he was cute — big, tall guy, really kind of cute. So we went out for drinks, and he was a complete gentleman for a change.
I don’t know if he was just so good that I was on cloud nine, or if the experience just really cleared my head. Once I was back in L.A., one thing I had taken full charge of in my life was getting Keith out of it entirely, only to replace hi
m with a full-fledged male porn star named Earl Slate. I’d met him during the shoot for my August movie Ridden Hard and Put Away Wet, which was a one-off I did for Metro. Earl wasn’t a star on that film, but was visiting the Metro set, and we just hit it off immediately. His real name was Anthony Stern. He seemed nice, was in shape, was COLLEGE-EDUCATED — a definite exception to the norm — and seemed like he had it together, too. He was doing another business on the side, some dental thing, and I found it attractive that he had something else going on outside of porn.That was how I thought — to the future — so it was refreshing to find someone else in the same mindset. He was also in some kind of AA-type substance abuse recovery program, which spelled out responsibility to me, so that was a plus too. We started dating in August, and had actually had our first sexual encounter together on a movie, which was tricky, because it’s such a gray area once you begin making it personal. At first, we had that agreement that when it’s off camera it is play, when it on camera it’s work. It’s really hard, because I look back at it and you can’t really. It’s hard to share those emotions with other people. It’s a really fucked up thing to do. I knew it wasn’t it right. Deep down, I fucking knew it wasn’t right. But it was the only one I thought I could deal with by doing that. He was the same way; he didn’t care. Eventually, as I started to fall for him, it would bother me that he was leaving my bed to fuck other women, but I didn’t ever say much about it, but it did bother me. You know, at the time he was the only person I could really go out with, because of what I doing, too. At first, I didn’t feel one way or another about it, and I had gotten busy again — I went back on Springer’s show in September — and between my signings, features, movie shoots, and just living life with him in between all those commitments, there wasn’t time to think about it. I know what I was hoping it would become in time, I was hoping he would grow to care enough about me that it would occur to him on his own to quit. That’s obviously the hope anyone on a human level has about someone they share their life with.