by Ian Gittler
Mitch takes the side stairs directly to the street. She practically dances as she walks, hopping and spinning, playful. She says hi to strangers who may or may not recognize her. The guys behind the counter at Colony Records definitely recognize her and they all try to help her find the cassettes she’s looking for, ones for her act. She calls them “baby” and “honey” and “sweetheart” and they all have big, shy smiles. Mitch makes each of them—a Nigerian, a Pakistani, and a balding Jewish guy at the register—promise to come see her show before the week is over.
Mitch sits at the bar of a dark, empty, rundown Mexican restaurant off of Seventh Avenue. She orders a glass of Kronenborg.
“I don’t do anything anymore,” she says. “I’m clean, baby, really. No dope.”
Mitch is relieved when I change the subject. I want to believe everything is “OK” even more badly than she wants me to. But her tone is more serious than before.
“Honey, I don’t think I look good enough to do pictures this week,” she says. “I look so tired. I wanna do them when I’m up, y’know? You understand, don’t you? I wanna feel good. It means a lot to me.”
SHE’S NOT LATE but it’s close.
“Five minutes, OK?” the manager says. He looks over his shoulder at the DJ booth, where three more guys in suits, older guys, are watching the exchange with solemn faces. They weren’t here before.
“No problem, baby,” Mitch says.
“Give me your music, I’ll cue it up,” he offers.
“Oh, I’ve gotta make the tape. It’ll just take a second, just a minute.”
“Your music’s not ready? Oh, Jesus.” He drags his hand from his forehead down to his chin. “What about the one from the last show?”
“No, no. I have something particular in mind,” Mitch says. “Gotta do it.”
“OK, OK. Hurry up, just move it. We can’t keep ’em waiting too long.”
He lets her pass into the dressing room, but not before shooting her a pissed-off look. Mitch hands me a beat-up Walkman, a pink Sanyo tape recorder, a tangled wire to connect them, and headphones. She marks choices on her tapes with a Sharpie, then hands me Thriller, Like a Virgin, Dirty Mind, and Tattoo You.
It’s my job to cue up her choices then copy them onto a blank cassette in the right order. The tense suit pops his head in the door every few seconds.
“What’s up? Come on, do it fast,” he says.
I tell him the tape is rewinding real slowly. He takes it out of my hand.
“What the fuck is this? Oh, shit. OK. I’ll be back in a minute.”
As he leaves again he mutters under his breath, “This is why they fuckin’ booted her ass from the Triple Treat.”
Mitch’s Show World Follies gig is a demotion. This place doesn’t get half the traffic as its flagship sibling Show World Center. The potential for Mitch to cash in on extras beyond her guarantee isn’t good.
“What’d he say?” Mitch asks, looking at me in the reflection of the dressing table mirror.
“I didn’t hear him,” I lie, and watch the tape spin to a stop.
The guy comes back. He hands me a bag of AA batteries. His receding hairline is dotted with sweat. One of the older guys leans in behind him.
“Who’s that?” the older one asks, two feet from my face.
“Uh, this guy’s making her tape,” the nervous one says.
“Tell him he’s gotta hurry it up.”
“You gotta hurry it up, OK?” he tells me.
Mitch turns around and hollers, “Please guys, get out, get out, get out! I can’t get ready for my show like this!”
The door closes, and Mitch smiles at me. I haven’t even gotten one song on to the blank cassette, but the new batteries help—a little. My shirt is stuck to my back. Mitch says to put two Michael Jackson songs on the tape and skip the Stones if it’ll make it go faster. Then the nervous suit sticks his head in.
“OK. Gimme what you got. I got a guy out here who can do it on the big system, fast.”
Mitch stands. All she has on is a red-and-black leather G-string.
“Make sure he gets it right, OK?” she tells him. “It has to be in the right order or my pace is fucked, understand?”
The door closes without a response. Mitch takes a look at me.
“You poor thing,” she says, and we both burst out laughing.
Then it’s quiet again.
“Thanks so much for coming to visit me,” Mitch says.
Mitch hugs me. That’s what it turned out to be—a visit—and the good-bye is definitive, like we won’t see each other until some unspecified future date, not again on this trip.
Someone knocks.
“Ugh, these fuckers won’t leave me alone,” Mitch whispers, then, “Door’s open!” louder, in a mock-friendly voice.
It’s not one of the suits. It’s a stripper, a house girl. She has a pretty face, big green eyes. She’s in a red sequined bathing suit with half-inch straps that cover her nipples. Her body is pale and skinny. She looks half Mitch’s age.
“Miss Mitchell ...” she starts.
“Who are you?” Mitch says, warmly.
“Uh, Sapphire, I mean y’know, that’s my stage name.”
She glances at the floor, then back at Mitch.
“I saw your last show last night,” she continues. “I just wanna tell you I think you dance really great. I think you’re really great and it’s an honor, you being here. That’s all, I mean, sorry to interrupt.”
“Aren’t you just the most darling thing,” Mitch says.
She clasps her hands around Sapphire’s waist, resting them in the small of the stripper’s back.
“You are such a sweetheart,” Mitch says. She kisses Sapphire on the lips. The kiss lingers for a second then they touch tongues. Sapphire blushes.
“I better get out there or they’re gonna kill me,” she says.
“OK, honey. I’ll see ya later after my show, OK? You’ll watch?”
Sapphire nods yes, smiles, and leaves. Mitch looks happy for a minute. “She’s a really cute kid,” Mitch says,” What a sweetheart.”
I make my way down the side stairs as the nervous one introduces “Miss Sharon Mitchell” over the distorted PA and the star takes the stage.
THERE’S AN ARTICLE ABOUT APRIL RAYNE IN INTERVIEW. IT’S CALLED “AN ACTRESS WHO Likes Taking Chances.” The article refers to April by her real name, Andrea N————, and Interview’s film critic raves about Andrea’s performance in Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, an independent feature, the film Andrea mentioned the day she posed for me in Hollywood. The film’s director says he discovered her while watching Personalities, a hard-core video. In the corner of the photo in Interview, there’s a designer credit, “Dress By Morgane Le Fay.” Then The New Yorker publishes an illustration of Andrea by Robert Risko.
Andrea’s success outside of porn and her mainstream recognition are a vindication of my original vision for this book: like, “see, these are real stars, and their lives aren’t all hopelessly negative.”
I telephone Andrea to congratulate her, but her number has been disconnected.
Tom Byron’s hasn’t.
“I hear she’s turning tricks,” he says. Tom doesn’t have a new number for Andrea. He says the last he heard, she didn’t have a place to live.
JULY 1992
“WHERE THE FUCK IS SKIP?”
Someone points to the bathroom then gets out of Savannah’s way.
Los Angeles. Every few years, a porn actress comes along whose fame raises the visibility of the entire industry. This time it’s Savannah.
Savannah’s the girl who in a tabloid interview rated all of her rock-star boyfriends’ bedroom techniques on a scale of one to ten. The most recent story is about Savannah giving Slash, the Guns n’ Roses guitarist, a blow job at Scrap Bar, a Greenwich Village metalhead hangout. Howard Stern went on and on about it, finally interrogating Slash. The rock star denied everything over his cell phone from a beach in Hawaii. He said h
e and Savannah are just friends, but since then a lot more people know Savannah’s name.
She looks heavy, bloated. She carries her large tits like they’re a burden. Her pale face looks washed out with no makeup. She doesn’t look anything like her pictures.
Savannah ignores Jamie Summers and Tom Byron, who’re laying in each other’s arms on the futon. The anal beads are on the floor nearby. No one picked them up when the crew moved on to the next setup.
Tom, Jamie, anal beads.
Paul Thomas—PT—rushes in to greet the star. The director treats Savannah like a princess, apologizing for bad directions, the distant set, for anything he can think of that’ll make her feel very, very appreciated for being here, even though she’s three hours late. He leads her to the bathroom, to Skip, the makeup artist.
Forty-five minutes later PT emerges from the house with Savannah on his arm. She’s transformed, radiant in a flimsy sundress, her blonde bangs shimmering. She looks like a totally different person, and sexy. Savannah tippy-toes along with a big smile, maybe because she knows now everything hinges on her, and she likes that. It’s forty yards from the house to where the crew is, and the whole way everyone just stares at her.
Savannah sits in a hammock, waiting. PT promises (“I promise, promise, promise”) it’ll only be a minute more. Everyone’s busy, so she’s just sitting there by herself.
“Hey, can I take your picture?” I ask. Savannah nods and lies back in the hammock. She spreads her legs, no panties.
After two or three clicks she says, “Who are you?” Savannah sounds like a curious adolescent, a little kid, a girl from the Valley. Her voice, her attitude, the way she looks now, are all designed to be a turn-on. She just assumes she turns everyone on.
Savannah doesn’t wait for an answer. PT helps her out of the hammock and walks her to a red fifties Chevy pickup parked right outside the gates of the property. Jamie is leaning against the cab. PT introduces the two actresses.
Jamie gets behind the wheel of the pickup; Savannah sits next to her in the passenger seat. Jim Waters, the cameraman, shoots the girls pulling out as an actor named Marc Wallice chases the truck. They run through it three or four times. Each time Marc is left in a cloud of dust as the truck disappears around a bend.
PT is satisfied. The pickup is parked around the bend and down the road fifty yards. Two PAs carry a twin-size mattress from the house and lay it in the truck bed. The AD remarks that they should’ve put the mattress in the truck when it was parked by the house. The two PAs stare at him with blank expressions. Their day is twelve hours old.
The view off the edge of the road, a cliff, is breathtaking. The sun is setting over a series of jagged mountains that lead to the Pacific. The light is yellow, glowing, and intense. Movie-star light.
The bright-red truck and the two bleached-blonde California girls climbing into the back look glamorous, in a late-night cable kind of way. They’re here to do dirty stuff, but the whole thing has an airbrushed feel to it. It’s my first day on the set of a porn movie and this works, this benign vision is all the reconfirmation I need that doing a book of Interview-style portraits of porn stars is a conscionable pursuit.
Jamie and Savannah kiss and touch each other’s breasts, half-undressed. Skip steps in to touch up Savannah’s face. Waters shoots standing, circling the back of the truck. Ron Vogel shoots stills. PT cues Marc to join the girls. The actor hops in, shirtless. PT stays fifty feet back. Despite running shorts, nonbrand-name sneakers, and tube socks pulled up near his knees, the handsome director looks successful, has that kind of aura. He was once a porn star, too. PT has a blissful expression.
“I really love what I do,” he says. “I really love making movies. I really love it.” PT gestures at the vista and the actors with a sweeping motion of his arm.
Savannah kneels. She opens Marc’s Levi’s and puts his dick in her mouth. She looks pretty, and bored, doing it. Savannah and Jamie take turns. The actors spend seven or eight minutes trying different positions before arriving at the final setup.
Jamie stands with her back against the truck cab, while Savannah is on all fours with her face pressed into Jamie’s crotch. Marc is on his knees behind Savannah. Every few seconds Marc stops moving, pulls out, smacks his erection with the backs of two or three fingers. A couple of times he even smacks himself in the face, all to keep from coming. No one laughs.
PT calls out, “Whenever you’re ready, Marc.”
“OK. Here goes,” Marc says.
He checks to make sure Waters is on him, pulls out, and stands. Marc’s arms are at his sides as he comes on Savannah’s ass and back. He strokes himself once or twice and the orgasm is over.
PT says, “Cut. Thank you.”
The girls are handed towels.
“THAT WAS FUN,” Jamie tells Savannah.
They’re in the bathroom, at the makeup table.
“Yeah,” Savannah says. “It would’ve been even more fun without Marc.”
She smiles at Jamie.
“Definitely” Jamie says.
Marc steps into the bathroom and directly into the shower. The girls both giggle then finish packing their stuff into identical flowery, embroidered duffels monogrammed with their real initials. Porn-star bags.
SAVANNAH PULLS INTO THE PARKING LOT OF GLADSTONE’S IN A RED MIATA, TOP DOWN, forty-five minutes late. She’s changed her mind about doing pictures several times in the four days since Sleeping Beauties.
“Now, where are you taking me?” she says.
I say, “Paradise Cove.”
“You follow me,” she says.
Savannah pulls out before I start my car, turns left, and heads north on One. She drives too fast, passes everything in her way. She’s six or seven cars ahead. The entrance to the beach is twenty minutes past Malibu Colony. Savannah is tapping her pink fingernails on her steering wheel as I pull alongside the Miata. I go ahead and pay the attendant for both cars; forty dollars. Two large white trucks are parked at the edge of the lot.
Savannah is annoyed. I carry her embroidered, monogrammed duffel along with my camera bag. The beach is a series of alcoves at the base of the cliffs. There’s a film crew in the first alcove.
A PA recognizes Savannah as she passes. He smiles knowingly. JENNY GARTH is stenciled on a tall director’s chair. They’re shooting an episode of Beverly Hills 90210.
Past the production the beach is empty. We walk a couple hundred yards and stop at a surfer hut fashioned out of palm leaves and bamboo. It looks like something from Gilligan’s Island. There’s a rusted lounge chair. The sand is littered with cigarette butts.
When the camera is on her Savannah acts friendly, seductive. When it isn’t she acts like a spoiled kid. Savannah goes through a series of well-rehearsed stock pinup poses. She acts like a star, and dresses like one. She makes a pretty strong case for her stardom, despite forcing it.
PARADISE COVE
Savannah
After a couple of outfits Savannah strips and walks into the surf nude. I follow shooting, up to my knees in foamy water. The gaudy jewelry and rocked-out costumes are gone. For the first time Savannah looks really girlish, innocent even. She smiles like a little girl—and not like she’s pretending to be one.
A skinny, sun-bleached surfer dude wearing a wet suit walks in our direction carrying a board under his arm. Savannah covers her breasts. Her pussy is still exposed. He looks at the sand, does his best to avoid looking at Savannah. She walks up to him.
“You’re Savannah right?” he says. “My brother talks about you a lot.”
She nods, smiling. The surfer can’t seem to wipe the big, goofy grin off his face. Savannah looks like she takes pleasure in the effect her presence—her stardom, not necessarily her nakedness—has on the kid. I ask him to pose for a picture with her. Savannah puts her arm around the surfer’s waist. She doesn’t say anything, just smiles. He thanks her—she nods once more—then he walks away, down the beach and around the bend toward the parking lot, past
the 90210 crew, with a story to tell his brother.
It’s almost six. The sun has shifted over the cliffs. We follow a path up one of the steep inclines. The last rays blast past Savannah and over the sea. It’s a glorious view. Savannah looks hopeful basking in the sun, but anyone would. Her bleached hair sparkles. She crouches at the edge of the cliff with the ocean behind her—a California dream girl.
Savannah can barely stand in her platform shoes. I lift her up in my arms and carry her back to her towel and bag. Savannah laughs as she pulls her silver panties over my head.
There’s still light hitting the top of the hill, so I follow Savannah, who is now wearing my shirt, up a crude little path. She lays down on her back in the dirt and spreads her legs wide. Her expression is hard, raunchy. She plays with herself, and stares me down. The come-on takes me by surprise. I can’t tell if it’s for the camera or for me.
“Do you want to fuck me?” I ask, not as an offer but because I really want to know.
Savannah nods affirmative. She has a wicked grin.
Suddenly there are voices coming from further up the path. Savannah covers herself, stands up, annoyed, and walks back down the hill.
A woman and her maybe five-year-old daughter make their way down the path a few seconds later. The woman looks like a mom from the fifties. She offers a weak, perfunctory smile. Savannah is in panties. The mom shuttles her daughter past, down the path to the beach. The girl looks over her shoulder at Savannah as her mom pulls her around a bend and they disappear.
“What’s she got stuck up her ass?” Savannah says, then adds, “Cute little girl.”
Savannah changes back into the dress she wore to the shoot, a ruffled flowery thing. I pick up her bag and we start back to the parking lot.
“I better be getting dinner at Gladstone’s out of this,” Savannah says.
As she passes the 90210 crew, the same PA who had noticed Savannah before whispers something to another tech, and the two laugh. Savannah must know they’re laughing about her, or at her, but she doesn’t let on.