by Legs McNeil
HENRI PACHARD: As I understand it, Laurie was in one room—fighting with one of her boyfriends—and Shauna was in another room with some coke dealer, who was sound asleep. And Shauna took the guy’s rifle, put a bullet in it, and shot herself in the head.
FILM WORLD REPORTS, MONDAY, APRIL 16, 1984: SHAUNA GRANT DEAD: “One of the top X-rated film actresses, Shauna Grant passed away last March 23rd at approximately 9:00 P.M. in Palm Springs, California. She was twenty years old, but had already established an impressive career as both a top-rated nude model as well as being an extremely popular erotic actress.”
KELLY NICHOLS: I was very freaked out. I was still caught up in that “I just talked to her!” mode. And some people were coming out with the theory that Shauna had killed herself because she hadn’t won best actress—which was just not the case at all.
HENRI PACHARD: Laurie comes up to San Francisco, broken rib and all. I put her in the movie, she did her thing, and we kept on going.
TIM CONNELLY: Laurie Smith didn’t want to stay with the rest of the cast, so she ends up staying with Kelly and I in our suite at the Miako Hotel.
So there we are, smoking PCP—Laurie wouldn’t smoke any of that—sitting in the bathtub, doing coke—and we’re all naked. We weren’t fucking; we were coke buddies.
We’re all talking and crying and ruminating about what Shauna’s death is all about. You know, why does this happen? And what does it mean?
HENRI PACHARD: Shauna wasn’t having any fun out of life. To Shauna, everything was like, “I had to do, should be, gotta do this, gotta do that”—a lot of people were pulling her in every different direction.
I don’t think she offed herself because she had to do another porn movie. I think she offed herself because she couldn’t find any drugs and then depression set in.
KELLY NICHOLS: Shauna was the first publicized porn death. There were a couple of earlier ones, but this was the biggie because porn was starting to get more accessible through the VCR. It just had tabloid written all over it. And Shauna was beautiful. She made great print.
Any time a girl dies, it’s like a little piece of us dies. It feels a little like, If we’re not careful, that could be us.
TIM CONNELLY: Shauna’s was the first death by suicide in the industry, and it really had an impact. I mean, it was like there was a huge cloud hanging in the air. Things got kind of weird.
Fast Forward
LOS ANGELES
1983
JIM SOUTH: I started Ginger Lynn. I loved Ginger, okay, but I didn’t light up with Ginger initially.
GINGER LYNN: When Jim South first asked me to make a film, he said, “Well, we want you to do commercial,” and I’m thinking toothpaste—Pearl Drops, okay? Remember the commercial where she licks her lips? Then I found out “commercial” means “sex”—commercial scenes are sex scenes.
I said, “There’s no way.”
JIM SOUTH: If the girls are reliable and dependable and, God willing, not into drugs—and if they at least study the script, and they give good “ohhs and ahhs,” and they’re sexy, then they’ll probably go far.
By the same token, if they’re two hours late, or stoned, then they’re probably not going to last long.
GINGER LYNN: I had the same stereotype image that many people did—that everyone in the industry was a hooker, a slut, and a drug addict. So I said, “I’m not that kind of a girl. I would never do that.”
Then I met this girl in Jim South’s office, and she was beautiful, intelligent, and articulate. She was wearing this long, white dress, and she was holding one of those long cigarette holders, and she was just so cool.
I said to her, “You don’t do porno, do you?”
She said, “Yeah.”
And I thought, “Well, you don’t look like that kind of a girl.”
So I took her to lunch, and I basically just asked her every question I could think of.
TIM CONNELLY: Jim South is brokering flesh. Pure and simple. From what I’ve seen, if he sees somebody who’s not interested, he tries to get them out of there as fast as humanly possible, and if they’re interested, he tries to get them as much work as possible.
GINGER LYNN: I went back into Jim South’s office and said, “I’ll do it, but I want script and cast approval, and I want a thousand dollars per scene.”
Jim South was on the floor rolling in laughter, thinking I’m a complete idiot, and he says, “You’ll never work!”
I said, “Well, these are the things that I need in order for me to feel good about what I’m doing.”
HENRI PACHARD: Women didn’t discover their power until video came along. Until then the power belonged to the director.
How much would I get paid to direct a film? Fifteen thousand dollars and up.
KELLY NICHOLS: Ginger fascinated me. She and Joanna Storm had that blond thing down. I mean, I felt sorry for the guys that even came near them. Ginger and Joanna could talk the talk—and walk the walk—and get anybody to believe anything. And they’d have no guilt about getting guys to buy them things. It was almost some kind of inborn thing—you know, “It’s my right.”
And some people can get coked and be like assholes, but Ginger was a sweetheart, always cheerful.
GINGER LYNN: I made all of these demands, and David and Svetlana—the people making the movie—agreed to all of them. I have a contract, I’m working with people that I find attractive, and then it hits me: I’ve never fucked on film. What if I’m horrible at it?
So I go back to Jim South and say, “I need to do a practice movie.”
TIM CONNELLY: I didn’t get Ginger at first. Ginger looked like she was right out of a Huey Lewis video. She’s the cute blond—the accessible, engaging girl that always wanted you. Except that I didn’t think that’s what you wanted in a porn star. Maybe I was wrong.
GINGER LYNN: I walk into this little apartment in Santa Monica, and Ron Jeremy is there. Now Ron is not the most attractive man I’ve ever seen, ha, ha, ha. I looked at him, and I almost left. Then I thought, “You know what? If I can do it with this guy, I can do it with anybody.”
So we did the loop—Ron was sweating and smelly and hairy and fat—and Mike Carpenter is telling me, “Lick your lips,” and when I saw the loop, I really was so exaggerated in my movements that it was hysterical.
The second loop that afternoon was with Tom Byron, and Tommy became my favorite man in adult films. He was sweet, kind, funny, sexy, hot; he had a big dick. He was just great.
TOM BYRON: Ginger Lynnnnnnn; she’s fine. I was one of the first guys to fuck her on camera. Yeaahhhh. It was goooood. Man, she was great! It was for a fucking Mike Carpenter’s The Golden Girls loop, man.
She was so perfect, man. She was like a doll. Her fuckin’ body was just flawless, and she was nasty, man. She’d fucking tongue your ass—and nobody that looked like that was nasty like that back then—you know what I mean?
GINGER LYNN: Tommy Byron was somebody I always loved to be around—sexually, socially, in any situation. We had this chemistry; we just clicked.
TOM BYRON: Ginger and I were great in the sack, and we were very friendly with each other. I mean, Ginger’s just a wonderful person, you know? And a great sexual performer. I have nothing but respect and love for her.
BILL MARGOLD: Ginger is the definition of a star. She has it. And Ginger elevates sex to a whole other level of heat because she likes what she’s doing, and she’s good at it. I have great respect for her.
GINGER LYNN: My first photo shoot was in September 1983. In December, I went to Hawaii with David and Svetlana to do Surrender in Paradise and A Little Bit of Hanky Panky.
TIM CONNELLY: Obviously I was wrong because Ginger became one of the biggest porn stars of all time.
HUMPHRY KNIPE (PHOTOGRAPHER, DIRECTOR, HUSBAND OF SUZE RANDALL): Some gals are extraordinary sexual animals. You can tell because they don’t get dry, and they don’t get sore.
I mean, these are sordid details—but there’s the gals who are put
ting K-Y Jelly on all the time, and then there’s the gals who fool around between the scenes, like Ginger Lynn—an animal, absolute animal. Ginger was a remarkable sexual athlete.
BILL MARGOLD: The three most important women in this business are Marilyn Chambers, Seka, and Ginger Lynn. They’re the most famous landmark women. They came along at exactly the right time. Chambers kicked it open with Green Door, and then Seka transformed film into first-grade video—she was really the performer who carried the seventies into the eighties. Then Ginger picked up the ball and ran with it.
KELLY NICHOLS: There’s just always some key people that stick out. Ginger packaged herself. Before, you’d go see Kelly Nichols and the rest. Now you’d buy a Ginger Lynn tape just to see Ginger Lynn.
VERONICA HART: If I’d been smart, I would have hung in through video. Because Ginger Lynn—oh man, she cleaned up. Made a bunch of money.
SHARON MITCHELL: Everybody who had a VCR had a Ginger Lynn movie. And I was in every Ginger Lynn movie—or at least all the popular ones.
TIM CONNELLY: We—the generation of adult performers who shot on film—all felt we did what we did for more than just the money or the fame. We liked what we did. We felt there was craft to it, a certain element of art to it. And talent and inspiration. We didn’t think it was just that we were beautiful, and we can fuck for a lot of money.
HENRI PACHARD: I didn’t like video. But the industry just kept moving toward video and speed and box covers, and more and more directors were getting into the business.
Well, they’d always been around, but now they were finding work. Like, “What I’d really rather do is direct” would be the thing you’d hear in the 1980s.
GLORIA LEONARD: Anybody can shoot video. Anybody. Shooting film requires great skill. You need to know how to light a set and where to put the camera. You have to know direction. I mean, at the risk of sounding like a big snob—which is perfectly fine with me—I was no longer interested when I saw what was happening to the industry. It just wasn’t the same anymore. And frankly, had it started out like that, there’s no way I would ever have participated.
TIM CONNELLY: My feeling was that if you’re going to do something really low-budget and not very professional, then I’m not the person for that job. Because at the time there were quality actors and performers in adult films—people who could carry a thirty-five-millimeter film in a theater. They could act well enough and fuck memorably enough to glue some guy to his seat. There was a certain amount of talent that would compel a consumer to want to sit there and watch something because there was no fast-forward back then.
Now you can’t even think about porno without thinking about fast-forward, which is really a testimonial for why people didn’t want to do videos.
HENRI PACHARD: When I first started shooting movies, I’d be so excited that I wouldn’t be able to sleep the night before. I’d wake up at five o’clock in the morning, and my girlfriend would say. “Honey, you can sleep another hour and a half.”
I’d say, “No, I gotta get up. I gotta study my script.”
I was so excited. Then I’d be on the set ready to just shoot my brains out, great.
Then I remember getting out of bed and thinking, “Oh God, I have to shoot a movie today? And I’ve got one day to do it in?”
And that very same morning, there’d be some kid half my age hopping out of bed, saying, “I’m shooting a video today, and I’ve got all day to do it.”
And his perception made him the better director that day. I was beat before I even got out of bed. That’s when I started to realize: Times change.
VERONICA HART: People made so much money in the beginning of video. They were selling those tapes for $79.95, you know? I mean, it was BIG MONEY!
ED DEROO (PORNOGRAPHER): The turning point came in 1982, when it finally went all video. I missed film tremendously. Film had soul; video has nothing. Video’s just a way of making money. It flows like water, but film had a texture, a feeling, something you could grab onto and feel.
But when we started selling video we went from making just under a million to around ten million dollars in two years. It was scary—particularly because I had a goddamn FBI agent telling me, “If you buy a Mercedes or a Rolls Royce, we’re gonna come after you.”
Once I saw the money rolling in, it scared the hell out of me—because now I was a target. I wasn’t just some small person trying to make a living anymore—I actually became a big company.
So in that period I had a lot of paranoia.
TIM CONNELLY: At the dawn of video, people started shooting adult movies on tape and then selling them as films. The production costs became a tenth of making a film, and they pushed out the same number of copies, raking in huge profits. Instant millionaires.
GLORIA LEONARD: After the advent of video, the types of girls that got into the business changed. I started calling them “The Stepford Sluts.” They talked alike, their hair, their tits—there was a so-called line drawn in the sand. I won’t say it lowered the bar in terms of talent because there were still some pretty decent girls around. But for the most part, it attracted a different kind of performer.
KELLY NICHOLS: Ginger had really good PR. Some performers have a really healthy interaction with their fans—I’m a combination of shy and embarrassed for them—but Ginger expects adoration and gives back blessings. Which is GREAT! The fans love that. They’re basically a lot of submissives out there, okay?
GLORIA LEONARD: I don’t know that Ginger was so much the jumping-off point for the change in porn, as much as video was. Because Ginger was, and is, in my opinion, a good little actress. She was a hot number on the screen, and she was something, you know? As opposed to some of these girls today who get these contracts, who, as far as I’m concerned, are less than mediocre.
TIM CONNELLY: One of the things that was really talked about at the time was the concept of the “Video Vixen”—a girl who appears in videos and has got sort of a style comes across as incredibly telegenic. And Ginger Lynn is the quintessential “Me Generation” porn star, you know?
It was all about ME—“I’m beautiful and I fuck and I’m great and I’m hot and I love it and I want it and it’s not about the money—but I’m rich and successful.”
And that’s appealing. Who would not want that? Who would not want somebody like that?
Club 90
NEW YORK CITY
1983–1984
CANDIDA ROYALLE (PORN STAR): I was a feminist before I was a porn star. It happened after high school. I had moved in with my older sister in the Bronx, and I had to get a job to support myself. I had been forced to take typing in high school, so I went and interviewed for this job as a private secretary for one of those young, up-and-coming executives—who was all of twenty-four at the time—and I got the job.
VERONICA VERA (PORN STAR): I had always wanted to write, and I had come to New York and interviewed at various publishing houses. But I couldn’t type, and you had to know how to type.
So I wound up on Wall Street. And after working on Wall Street for a bunch of years, I decided that I was either going to write or forget my fantasy to be a writer.
But the only person that I knew who was making a living as a writer was editing Penthouse Variations.
CANDIDA ROYALLE: It was such a learning experience because I was the least qualified of all the women who’d applied. I really learned what sexual harassment was, only we didn’t have a name for it back then.
VERONICA VERA: Through writing an article for Variations, I met Marco Vassi, a fabulous erotic writer, and he and I became lovers for a short while. I said I wanted to learn about S and M, so he took me to Woodstock with him to visit Charles Gatewood. That’s where I met Annie Sprinkle.
Annie had just come back from Europe with a whole bunch of European pornography, and she said, “Look what I brought!” And it was just this shower of full-color, glossy, very expensively printed magazines.
Annie and I hit it off immediately.
GLORIA LEONARD: When we found out Veronica Hart was pregnant, Annie and I both decided we’d, you know, do the baby shower thing.
CANDIDA ROYALLE: Club 90 really came out of a baby shower that we threw for Veronica Hart. All kinds of women came, but by the end of it all Veronica’s straight friends had left, and the ones who stayed were all porn girls. Porn stars. And we had the best time.
ANNIE SPRINKLE: It wasn’t really until the baby shower that I ever really hung out with these big stars. See, a lot of times I’d be in a movie with someone, but I’d never meet them because our scenes were shot at different times.
It was kind of like that with Veronica. She was the big star. Yeah, big, big, big star. She was very loved.
VERONICA VERA: It was just like a regular shower, except we had this body builder in a bikini. But then as the shower was just winding down, somebody put on the soundtrack to West Side Story, and everybody—all these frustrated ballerinas and girls who’d gone to tap-dancing school—started dancing around, and that’s when we realized, “Oh, we have a lot in common here!”