Pornstar

by Ian Gittler

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  COPYRIGHT © 1999 IAN GITTLER

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  Simon & Schuster and colophon

  are registered trademarks of

  Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Shawn Dahl and Ian Gittler.

  Printed in Italy.

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gittler, Ian.

  Pornstar / written and

  photographed by Ian Gittler.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Erotic films. 2. Motion

  picture actors and actresses—

  United States Biography. I. Title.

  PN1995.9.S45G58 1999

  791.43’6538—dc21 99-27281

  CIP

  ISBN 0-684-82715-8

  ISBN-13: 978-1-45165-727-2

  eISBN-13: 978-1-45166-587-1

  This book contains sexually

  explicit text and photographs.

  Contents

  September 1991

  October 1991

  July 1992

  July 11, 1994

  The Valley

  “My childhood? It didn’t last long but it was good.’

  Debi Diamond

  “Who sends the children out to war? Their parents do.”

  Bob Dylan

  Jamie Summers

  SEPTEMBER 1991

  “HELLO, THIS IS_____. YOU MIGHT KNOW ME AS JAMIE SUMMERS.”

  I don’t. The extent of my research: the video booths at Show World Center, across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street in New York; Hustler’s Erotic Film Guide; a handful of other magazines that feature stills from porn videos (black bars over insertion points); and the sex loops run on cable TV in between ads for escort services. Research by default. The name “Jamie Summers” sounds familiar, but I don’t think I know her face.

  Jamie keeps the call brief. She invites me over, this afternoon, to talk more, and possibly to do pictures. That’ll depend on how she feels.

  I wasn’t expecting a call from Jamie Summers, or anyone else. I’d already resigned myself to the fact that my trip to Los Angeles had been a bust, that Jenny Wren, the publicist at Vivid Video who had sounded so encouraging at first, forgot who I was by the next call, and then sounded all encouraging, again, once I’d explained myself all over, had done everything she could, or at least everything she planned on doing for me. Her conclusion, a lesson: These people don’t pose for pictures for free.

  I’ve never met a porn star.

  The girl who opens the door looks nervous. She’s young, “twenty-three,” she says. A thick base doesn’t conceal a broken-out complexion. Her eyes are set close together. Her clothing doesn’t reveal much about her figure. In heels, she’s no more than five-foot-five.

  Her Hollywood apartment is a classic example of postwar LA architecture: arches, elaborate crenellations, window crowns, a garden enclosed by wrought-iron gates. Inside it’s airy and spacious.

  Jamie and I sit in her living room and make awkward small talk. She says Jenny Wren—who did turn her on to what I’m trying to do—goes out with Steven Hirsch, who owns Vivid. Jamie says that at one time she went out with Steven Hirsch, too. She says Wren is an ex—porn actress.

  “She’s nice . . . but a little flaky,” Jamie says.

  I ask her stupid questions about her career, like, “You’ve had sex with Peter North?” Jamie looks at me like I’m a little strange and laughs. Obviously I’m more impressed with the whole idea of what she does for a living than she is. Jamie says she just wants to act in “real movies.” She’s surprised that anyone would give a shit about her present career. But I’m persistent so she humors me. She acts bored, though—except when she talks about this book.

  “I love those pictures you gave Jenny. I want ones like that of me.”

  Jamie says she’s going to take a shower and then I can photograph her. She drops her pants in front of me and lifts her blouse over her head as she walks toward the bathroom. Before disappearing she glances back to make sure I’ve seen her body.

  I follow her and lean in the doorway of the bathroom. She smiles. Somehow her getting naked breaks the tension. Her transformation is palpable: She seems easier, more confident; her body is how she asserts control. It’s a relief. I was worried about photographing her, worried she wouldn’t look pretty.

  I’m not here to document her acne, and Jamie telling me in the first five minutes that she’s trying to change careers, get out of the sex business, just kind of gets stored away. Jamie is a movie star—a dirty one, but still a star—and her fancy apartment, her BMW; these are things I use to confirm ideas I had coming in to this. Her looking good completes the picture.

  Two Jil Sander advertisements Jamie cut out of a magazine are taped to the inside of her closet door. She rummages through dozens of pairs of shoes, all kinds of dresses, bustiers, boas. Stripper things in every color share overflowing shelves with designer stuff from stores on Rodeo Drive. Jamie wets her hair once more then we walk out through her garden and find an alley around the corner of the building.

  Jamie’s left eye flickers, a nervous tick or something. She jokes about it, then takes a couple of deep breaths. She flares her nostrils for a second, tries to focus, to make it stop, and it makes her look like a bad girl, almost evil. Images of abused pets pop into my head. I prefer the idea of Jamie as the pretty, happy daughter of an LA physician—“My dad’s a great guy,” she says—who just happens to be a porn star. Jamie breathes deeply, relaxes, and we continue. A Mexican couple watch from behind a screen window.

  “I think that’s my super,” Jamie says.

  She lights a Marlboro 100.

  IN HER BEDROOM, Jamie stands in front of a bureau mirror combing her hair. Herb Ritts’s Men/Women, in the hard-shell dust jacket, rests on the headboard of her queen-size bed. She walks over to the window, turns, and looks at me from across the room. There’s a poster of Marilyn Monroe on the wall behind her, a potted tree in the corner.

  “You have a girlfriend,” she says.

  I ask Jamie if she has a boyfriend.

  “Kind of. I mean there’s a guy who kind of takes care of me. He’s older, not really a boyfriend. There was someone else recently, too, you know, an actual boyfriend, or potential boyfriend. When I told him I’m ‘Jamie Summers’ it freaked him out, I think. He’s only called once since then. I’m not sure what’s gonna happen with that. I’ve been there before, y’know?” She pauses. “I’ve been hurt, too.”

  Jamie smiles, then looks at the floor as the smile goes away. She sits on the corner of the bed.

  A key turns in the front door.

  “That’s Steven,” Jamie says. “He’s like my roommate, I guess.”

  Steven, a slight, handsome, gay twenty-one-year-old sometime film student, is Jamie’s assistant/roadie/sycophant/friend. He lives in a second bedroom, off the kitchen. Jamie supports him. She takes Steven with her on dance tours. He carries her bags, “watches over me.” Steven is impressed with my pictures, too, or at least with the magazines that have published them. I think if Jamie had any reservations, her seeing Steven’s reaction helps.

  “I bet————would do photos,” she says, excited. “She used to be called Careena Collins. She got out, y’know, of the business, and started law school. You’d really like her, though. She’s really cool. She’s into bondage and stuff like that.

  �
�And you have to meet Tommy, too” Jamie says. “Y’know, Tom Byron. He lives with Jeanna Fine and her boyfriend, Sikki Nixx. They’re all gonna think you’re so cool.”

  Jamie Summers is on my side. That feels cool.

  I DISCOVERED SEX IN AN ERA WHEN FUCKING WAS A WAY OF EXPRESSING FREEDOM.

  I was a child of that movement, its poster boy. Remember those old pictures of the Stones? I’m not saying Annie Leibovitz fucked her subjects but God her photographs made it look like she had and that was always the myth—that she was part of it somehow, and that we, as viewers, had access into a world of renegade sexuality through her participation. And of course the music could withstand that subtext; it had inspired it. Mick and Keith once lashed tongues on national television. As a teenager that meant something to me. It still does.

  Then there was the tragedy of AIDS. Homophobia and misogyny were acknowledged aspects of white American youths appropriation of rap and heavy metal. The sexual arena became a different kind of proving ground for young people. Promiscuity was about self-destruction, disaffection, and violence—not liberation.

  A friend suggested I do a book about rock stars. “Since you’re a musician, too,” she said. But I couldn’t get it up for that, couldn’t think of an angle that interested me. My rock heroes had already been photographed. And as a fledgling commercial photographer I’d had a taste of what it was like shooting bands for magazines. There was always some publicist pointing at a watch. Serious pictures don’t happen that way.

  The pre-Nirvana music business had developed as homogenized a corporate identity as fast food. Image control had reemerged as a celebrity status symbol. In a way porn stars were an anachronism. The life I imagined them living was one more related to my sense of what “rock & roll” meant than anything I could see on the pages of Rolling Stone.

  Fucking on film was very rock & roll.

  I figured once the porn stars met me and saw that I could identify with them—or with what I thought they stood for—access wouldn’t be a problem. They’d enjoy the attention. They were real movie stars, but ones that Herb Ritts hadn’t already photographed. Jack Nicholson’s smile through a magnifying glass. Madonna, cross-eyed, wearing Mickey Mouse ears. In two images Herb Ritts summed up America’s collective preoccupation with larger-than-life fame and fortune. But the eighties were over. PORNSTAR would be my response, sort of the inverse version of the eighties celebrity coffee-table book. Instead of beloved icons, I would glorify reviled (or at least only secretly admired) ones.

  I was addressing letters to porn-star fan clubs before taking the time to think it through. A celebrity coffee-table book about porn stars; that was it, that’s what I was doing. I dismissed any suggestion that there might be unhealthy pathologies at work in these people’s lives. I didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to know. That’s not what my book would be about.

  It didn’t occur to me that in the name of my one-man crusade to vindicate American sexuality (in the shadow of Madonna’s one-woman crusade), my desire to glorify the porn stars’ lives might really be motivated by a need to in some way validate my own. All I knew was PORNSTAR could be the first cool picture book by an openly straight guy to come along in years.

  Fucking was, in my mind, in the summer of 1991, as a guy in his late twenties, still the essence of rock & roll. Sexuality was a stance, an attitude, at the core of how I saw myself, and how I wanted to be experienced by others.

  OCTOBER 1991

  DAY ONE OF MY SECOND TRIP TO LOS ANGELES. JEANNA FINE SAYS IF I WANT TO MEET her it’ll have to be this weekend, in San Francisco. After that it’s more dance engagements, she says, a minitour. It’s a test, like if I’m willing to travel to meet her then she’ll take me seriously.

  I try to reach Nina Hartley to see if I can meet her while I’m up there. Nina calls from a hotel in Detroit and says she doesn’t have time to shoot but hopes we can at least meet at the Exotic Erotic Ball, a San Francisco Halloween party. That’s the only night she’ll be in town. Jamie Summers is away, too, dancing at a military base in Guam. Her gig was a last-minute thing. So for now Jeanna Fine is it.

  Highway Five is a two-lane blacktop, hundred-mile-an-hour straightaway from LA to San Francisco.

  The sky is dark. It’s been raining on and off all day. Jeanna’s here for the Exotic Erotic Ball, too. She decided to come a couple of days early to make an in-store appearance at a video retail outlet and do a few shifts in the jack-off booths of a local sex parlor.

  “Doing the booths gets me off. . . it’s a power trip,” she says.

  JEANNA IS in the hotel bar. I introduce myself. We shake and Jeanna holds on to my hand with both of hers and stares into my eyes. There’s a smudge of red lipstick on one of her front teeth. She catches me looking at her mouth, grins, licks it. I blush, fluster. Her boyfriend, Sikki Nixx, is waiting upstairs. Jeanna senses my hesitation and her vibe changes: Her available sex goddess veneer disappears like the flick of a switch. The next ten minutes are spent trailing her around the hotel lobby as she runs a series of errands and acts annoyed with everyone who tries to help her.

  Jeanna has modified her image—from flat-chested, spiky platinum blonde to jet-black hair and an explosive tit job. She says she was retired from porn, that she worked for Todd Rundgren for two years.

  “I didn’t wanna come back and be the same ditzy kid all over again,” Jeanna says in the elevator. “This is me now.”

  Their room is a mess. Garters, feather boas, whips, stripper clothing and accessories, wet towels, fan-club flyers are all strewn around. A room-service cart with their half-eaten breakfast.

  Jeanna introduces her skinny, pierced, tattooed boyfriend. Sikki is twenty-one and cute, not scary like in Bad News Brat, a tape Jamie gave me. He has stringy, long hair, and he’s handsome, in a junkie-rocker way. He talks like a burnout, but a really friendly one.

  Compared to her boyfriend, Jeanna is bouncing off the walls, speedy. Sometimes she smiles at Sikki and holds his hand, but she addresses him with impatient snaps. Her in-store appearance is in two hours, and Jeanna made Sikki in charge of getting her ready. Bad decision. He’s lying back against the headboard breaking apart another bud to stuff in his pipe while she does her face.

  Jeanna examines herself in the bathroom mirror. She tries to cover five stitches on her hairline with makeup. She’s worried they’ll show up in the photos.

  “During my closing number I get on my knees and swing my hair around and around.” She kind of demonstrates, whipping some toiletries. “The last show in Chicago I banged my head on the stage.”

  Jeanna Fine and her boyfriend, Sikki Nixx.

  She looks for a reaction, even squints, like she’s waiting for the laugh so she can go off on me, but I don’t, and she’s satisfied.

  “I rocked that place,” she concludes.

  Jeanna has thick, tough hands.

  Someone knocks. Jeanna goes to the door. A maid enters, a black woman in her fifties.

  “Whew girl, you have something else!” the maid says, staring at Jeanna’s chest.

  “I’ll tell my doctor you like his work,” Jeanna deadpans.

  “Those aren’t real?” the maid says. “Can I see? I’ve never seen that before.”

  Jeanna brightens. “Sure you can, honey.” She smiles, pulling her top down. “You can touch them. Don’t be shy.”

  The maid raises her hands to Jeanna’s tits. She squeezes two times gently, then more aggressively on the third and fourth. “Wow” is all she says, smiling, looking at Sikki then me like she’s amazed.

  This is a picture, of course, but I realize too late, fumbling for my camera, not quick enough. The maid is happy to wait and pose for a shot but I missed the squeeze.

  Jeanna comes over to me.

  “Feel,” she says, all serious. It’s an order.

  I do what she says. Sikki watches from the bed. He doesn’t seem to care. Jeanna keeps staring at my eyes. I squeeze. They’re heavy, dense, big. Up close the scars around Jeanna�
�s nipples are severe. They look chewed up. One is pierced. She’s had three operations already. I cop a clinical, removed feel. The whole thing probably lasts an excruciatingly long three seconds. Then Jeanna turns away, back to the maid.

  The maid sees a dildo sticking out of the panty pocket of an open suitcase. The porn star is on a roll. Jeanna bends down, grabs it, licks the end, then pushes the head of the fat, eight-inch rubber dick past her lips and down her throat. The entire thing disappears. Jeanna offers the maid a tight, close-lipped smile and a wink before opening her mouth and letting the dildo pop out, her eyes watering. Sikki has a surprised smile on his face.

  “No one can deep throat like I can,” Jeanna says. “Ask anyone.”

  Jeanna and the maid hug. The second she’s gone Jeanna’s edginess returns. She’s annoyed. She berates Sikki for not getting it together. Sikki is passive—he agrees with Jeanna. Jeanna surveys the mess, deals with the phone. She ignores me until she sees me pick up the camera, then pulls her tits out again and continues what she’s doing.

  “The maid said she’d come back later,” Sikki says, reassuring her.

  I know a rock star who lives in New York. Anyone who spends any time around him, including me, ends up working, or at least thinking, on his behalf, toward his end, his goals. It’s all about him. It’s like that in Jeanna’s room. Even I’ve been recruited—when Jeanna asks, I tell her a red boa looks better than a blue one.

  JEANNA CROSSES the street, struts, shows off her tits. Pedestrians pass in every direction. She acts like a porn star in front of a camera, as opposed to acting like a porn star in a messy hotel room. Jeanna concentrates on the camera, connects. She sends out practiced “fuck me” messages with her mouth, eyes, and posture. Sikki joins her, in wraparound shades, plays the straight man, ogles her chest with an ear to ear grin.

  Sikki and Jeanna embrace. They gaze into each other’s eyes, then kiss. The kiss lasts. For a couple of seconds their attraction seems romantic.