by Ian Gittler
Bill Margold says the following:
“Please let this wonderful lady, this marvelously sexy creature, know how much we love her. Ladies and gentlemen, a living legend . . . NINA HARTLEY!”
As Nina Hartley makes her way to the stage, the chant erupts into applause. Margold hands her the microphone and steps aside.
Nina stands in the small area between the stage and the first row, her compact frame clad in a lime green G-string bathing suit and black pumps. She’s wearing an electric smile. The applause continues. Ten or twelve press photographers are straining for position, their flashes popping.
The star of Young Girls in Tight Jeans and Female Aggressors (among hundreds of other titles) stands before her fans, her arms at her sides, listening to the applause, taking it all in for a full two minutes before raising the microphone to speak.
Madison and one of her idols, Nina Hartley, are introduced backstage at Pure Pleasures.
Miss Sharon Mitchell
Madison and Tianna Taylor make their way back to their suite at the Tropicana after the Panty Auction.
“Thank you so much. It really means so much to me.”
Another burst of applause.
“That’s so sweet. I love you, too.” More cheers. Hartley continues: “Hey, all the ladies have been just fantastic tonight! Thank you for coming out tonight for such a great cause. Thank you, Bill. And I can’t tell you what it means to me that you guys stuck around to see me. I love it.”
Now the crowd is on its feet again.
Nina is taking questions, wedding proposals, “I love you’s” from her fans. The audience is transformed, focused. The snickering, the mean laughter is gone. Her gaze is direct, her voice clear and deliberate.
There’s an iciness about her presence, a quality in her posture that implies a limit—and because Nina’s eyes are so forgiving the men calm down. They honor that boundary. They show her respect.
The audience has finally found someone who knows why they are here, and who doesn’t hate them for it. Her eyes tell them, “It’s OK, I understand.”
A young man in the back tells Nina that his father doesn’t believe how close he’s standing to the legendary porn star, and asks if she would help convince him.
“Where is he?” she asks.
Laughter sweeps across the audience—Nina’s laughing, too—as the kid, maybe twenty-one, answers, “Right here!” and passes a cellular phone toward the stage.
“Hello, this is Nina Hartley Who am I speaking with?” Nina winks at the crowd, and now her fans are howling.
NINA HARTLEY LIKES THE IDEA OF DOING A SHOOT AT JOHN STAGLIANO’S HOUSE IN Malibu. She’s famous for her rear end and he’s famous for worshipping rear ends. The actress doesn’t have a place in Los Angeles, so we have to figure out something. I call the director. Stagliano hesitates. He’s in the middle of editing his latest Buttman video. It’s my last chance to photograph either one of them before returning to New York. Stagliano finally says yes.
“No guy turns down a chance to spend the day with Nina.”
John says this for me, or for the mythology of it. It’s been a while since he has used Nina in one of his films. He concentrates on new girls, not legends.
Stagliano sniffles preemptively and says, “I have the same cold everyone else picked up in Las Vegas.” If he can pull himself away from the editing console, he says he might pose, too.
John gives a tour before Nina arrives. Most of the living room has been converted into a ballet studio: John once had dreams of dancing professionally. One wall is mirrored and has a balance bar; the other wall is all windows with a view of a swimming pool, sun deck, and beyond that a couple more houses, then the Pacific.
Stagliano’s bedroom is sparse—a bed, a large TV, and a collection of his movies on a fireplace mantel. He lends me a copy of Buttman’s Ultimate Workout, an early feature he’s proud of, on the condition that it be returned. Recently Alexandra Quinn’s real age was exposed. The actress was underage at the time of Stagliano’s shoot, so her scenes had to be edited out of all subsequent copies of the video.
“That’s a collector’s item,” Stagliano says.
In a small room at the back of the first floor, there’s a professional-looking video-editing console. Someone works on footage of Rocco Siffredi having sex with a young woman whom I don’t recognize. John lifts a slide sheet off a light table and hands me a loupe. He says he wants to show me something that “as a photographer” might interest me. The sheet is filled with close-up images of a woman’s hands spreading the cheeks of her own ass, exposing her pussy and asshole. John points to three shots in the bottom corner, the only ones where she’s covered, sort of, with a tiny string bikini.
MALIBU
Nina Hartley
John Stagliano
“One of those will probably be my next box cover,” he says, without a trace of irony. “What d’ya think?”
The doorbell rings and Nina breezes in. She hugs John and kisses him on the mouth. He tells her he’s fighting something, but Nina doesn’t act like she’s afraid of catching a cold.
Stagliano returns to his editing. Nina sits cross-legged in front of the ballet mirror nude except for a G-string, “putting on her face.” She looks like she’s in her late thirties, maybe older than her years, too. I was still in college when I first saw her in a video clip on cable TV.
Nina is a certified superstar of porn, frequently described as a legend. She has a commanding presence. Nina calls herself a radical feminist. When she says she’s thirty I avoid her eyes.
She poses for pictures behind the house, then on the upstairs deck outside John’s bedroom. Nina is kind of an earth mother, beautiful despite her not seeming to really care. She isn’t stylish. Her recent, very slight breast enlargement operation and maybe even her saying she’s thirty (if this isn’t true)—these things seem more like concessions to the business than contradictions.
Nina’s nudity is almost sexless. She doesn’t try to use her sexuality to control my perception of her, like all the younger actresses do. She’s just naked. Nina fiddles absentmindedly with the string from her tampon while I reload the camera.
Stagliano joins her by the pool. He undresses. Nina goes inside while he’s photographed. A few minutes later she joins John in front of the camera and starts kissing and fondling him. He protests weakly, is reluctant, sounds stuffed-up. He mumbles something about having a fever. Nina persists.
She begins sucking his cock. She’s on her knees. He has half a hard-on and looks weary. He goes along, managing a smile here and there. John plays with Nina’s tits. He’s still not fully hard, but Nina squishes down, gets him inside her and rides him a little.
Nina is like a mom briskly toweling off her little boy. Vigorous, upbeat. John is the resigned little boy. It’s not passionate sex. This impromptu performance may be Nina’s way of trying to remind John that she’s still viable, still a good casting decision, her way of proving a point. Does John remember what he said on the phone? He goes along, sick, maybe out of respect for her, rather than reject her in the presence of an outsider.
I go in the house as Nina climbs off John and begins sucking him again. Inside, a few minutes later, Nina has a mischievous—but still sweet—smile. John looks the way he did before the sex; just half an hour later. I hand Nina a model release form and begin explaining it to her.
“Do you have any idea how many thousands of those things Nina has signed?” John snaps.
He may not be into doing her but he wants to make sure I don’t forget Nina is a star. A legend.
JULY 11, 1994
THE TELEPHONE RINGS, LATE—OR EARLY. IT’S STILL DARK. I’M ASLEEP.
“It’s Jamie.”
Contact with Jamie Summers has been sporadic. She retired from porn and moved to Fort Lauderdale with her boyfriend, a talent scout for strip clubs. Jamie is still in touch with some of her friends from the business, like Tom Byron.
“Tommy just called me,” she say
s. “Savannah killed herself.”
“When?” I say.
“Like a couple of hours ago.”
I want to feel angry and sad but I just feel detached, and confused about how to process the information. It’s two years since I photographed her, slept with her, and a year almost to the day since the last time I interviewed Savannah, since the night she drank saki bombers at Sushi on Sunset then purple penises at Bar One with Corey Feldman, the ex—child star, at a birthday party for someone from the cast of Beverly Hills 90210. Savannah’s face was puffy and blemished; beaten up from hard living. She’d gotten a second tit job, gone real big, and it made her look more like every other porn actress. She said she was still heartbroken over Slash’s returning to his ex-girlfriend and getting married but then she grinned and mentioned she’d recently been dating Marky Mark. Savannah bragged about doing a gang-bang video. Hearing that was saddening, in a more simple way than news of her death: It meant her career was seriously in decline. Her career was all she had.
The night after interviewing Savannah, I saw Madison at an art opening on Santa Monica Boulevard. Madison hadn’t spoken to me in a year, not since storming out of my Greenwich Village apartment after receiving what may’ve been the only truly nonsexual hug I’d ever given a porn chick. The night of the art opening she looked wasted too, like Savannah.
Most of the stars I’d been photographing were fucked up, or fucking up. Most had hinted at their revulsion with selling their bodies for a living. I’d shrugged it off but it was finally getting through. The heroin or booze or whatever they were using—even the sex itself—that was a symptom; they were numbing themselves. And my hanging around with them was a way of numbing myself, or trying to, a way of remaining safely alone. I still identified strongly with the porn stars, but as I began to learn more about them, it became less clear to me why.
I’d avoided asking about their childhoods, except for a few instances in which I’d questioned them, reluctantly, in a way that must’ve come off like I didn’t really want to know. I didn’t—I knew it would complicate things. Keeping it on a surface level worked. The girls protected me or my image of them by saying, “No, I wasn’t abused.” I needed to hear that. But I didn’t believe them anymore. It took me far longer than most. Half of the women I knew outside of porn had been sexually abused as little girls, so it only stood to reason that the statistics might apply in porn as well. One study of the general population claimed it was two out of three. The puzzling refrain I’d begun hearing from porn outsiders: “There are plenty of people with histories of sexual abuse who didn’t grow up to be porn stars.” That’s missing the point: The ones who did become sex workers were abused. All of them, that’s my guess.
A woman who is taught as a little girl to barter with her sexuality, taught the value of that—by a sexually abusive parent, relative, neighbor, baby-sitter, teacher—who then goes on to live her life with that lesson as a foundation gets pretty good—expert—at being a turn-on, despite how fucked up that sounds. The abuse is what cut them out for this job in the first place. And knowing they were fucked up didn’t make the porn actresses less of a turn-on to me. That was why they turned me on. I wasn’t ready to be close with anyone. Flesh was my way of filling—or at least disguising—that void.
DOMINIQUE SIMONE wanted to see the pictures I’d done of her, and I was interested in seeing her again. We flirted over the phone, but the people I was staying with had one rule: No porn stars in their house. Dominique said she was living out of her suitcase, that she was currently “in between” places to live, so our meeting never happened.
Sharon Mitchell said she’d finally kicked heroin—after sixteen years—and looked like she had, but Mitch’s run-down apartment building in the Valley was disheartening. A grimy, sunburned janitor lay asleep next to an empty swimming pool. I wondered if all the young porn girls would end up in places like that. A Mexican woman and her four-year-old daughter stood in the hallway staring silently through a screen door as Mitch, weathered but beautiful, posed for pictures in her tiny living room. I was determined to prove to the world that Mitch was beautiful. I hadn’t let go of that goal. But a bondage shoot the next day nixed any possibility of my perpetuating my shallow illusions.
In a smoky living room, Mitch, the fortysomething porn star, paddled the ass of a roped-up and gagged young actress while the girl’s boyfriend, in another room, sat in front of his computer screen with an electric guitar in his lap. There’s always a humorous component to these stories, but the scene in that house, three doors north of bustling, sunny Melrose Boulevard, was an undeniably depressing way to spend the last Saturday afternoon of that short trip to Los Angeles.
RATHER THAN PURSUING this book—rather than facing the fact that a happy, tidy book about this sad subculture would be impossible—I retreated into my life in New York for a whole year, only occasionally making visits to Show World to say hi to porn stars I knew, or more likely, to get a small dose of titillation, a fix. Those encounters were depressing, too.
The world of XXX had blown the lid off any remaining hopes I had of using it to validate my own ideas in support of a lifestyle with sexual adventurism as its core. Sex had ceased to be a viable refuge. I was discovering how fragile the emotional landscape of my own sexuality was and beginning, for the first time, to see that the most prolific, single-mindedly sexually active period of my life was also my loneliest and most unhappy. My sexuality had always been like a badge or a shield, like someone else might cover himself with tattoos; my identity. An “honest” or “revealing” posture is an extremely effective way of keeping people at a distance: sexuality as self-defense, as a weapon, as a way of fending humans off, dodging vulnerability. It took a serious adjustment to first accept that that wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore, to acknowledge that it was a front, an armor against any threat of intimacy—I’d been starving myself—and then decide how, if at all, I could proceed with this book.
I was deflated but in a way relieved. There was a feeling of liberation in relinquishing, in no longer having the burden of trying to manipulate or temper the evidence to fit my narrow thesis. No porn star ever asked me to manipulate anything. If I were to go out to Los Angeles again, it would be with a less specific agenda. Ugliness, or beauty, would have to stand on its own legs.
I’d used the few porn sets I’d already visited as a way to meet and then shoot more stars. The action—what they were actually doing there—was peripheral, something I’d shied away from, successfully avoided. I was ready to explore it. If there was truth or meaning in any of this, it would be found in the sex.
Yesterday morning, full of anticipatory dread but also hopeful that the trip might somehow still be a turn-on—an escape—I cashed in my frequent-flyer miles. I secured a ticket to Los Angeles and chose a departure date—less than a week away—that left no time for backing out.
Then came Jamie’s call.
SAVANNAH’S SUICIDE plays bigger in the LA papers than it does in New York. She was out partying with a kid who works for the band House of Pain. Late that night she crashed her Corvette into a fence near her house. She wasn’t seriously injured but her face was bloodied. She called her manager in a frenzied state. While the House of Pain kid was downstairs assessing the damage to her car, Savannah shot herself in the head.
The beautiful Miss Sharon Mitchell.
The porn industry tries to defend itself, arguing that Savannah was unhappy before she got into the business and that there are lots of happy people working in porn. With my help, Rolling Stone, then GQ and Esquire jump on the story, sending reporters to the San Fernando Valley within days. The press thinks Savannah’s death is somehow emblematic of the porn world. That idea isn’t something I let in easily but it does resonate, especially because of the timing.
“HEY. NOW YOU HAVE two in memoriams,” Tom Byron says.
I ask what he means.
“Well, Savannah and Andrea—April Rayne. She OD’d like a month ago. No one wrote abo
ut that. Anyway, I’ll see ya later.”
THE VALLEY
TOM BYRON IS RENTING OUT HIS NEW HOUSE ON BALBOA, IN THE VALLEY, FOR PORN shoots. Melanie Moore, a retired porn actress and today’s production coordinator, calls Joey Silvera to let him know it’s time to shoot his scene. Ten minutes pass and the actor shows up. He’s taller in person, and he looks younger. He smells good, clean. He’s shy but he has a presence, charisma. The room is buzzing as soon as he arrives. Galatea offers, only half joking, to be Joey’s fluffer—to keep him hard during breaks. It sounds rehearsed, like something her agent told her to do. Joey Silvera has been acting in porn movies since 1974 but he’s still overwhelmed by all the attention. He ignores Galatea’s comment, looking at his feet as he quietly speaks.
“Where are we shooting?” he asks Melanie.
“In Tommy’s bedroom,” she says.
Joey asks if everything is ready, then goes upstairs. Melissa Monet is already up there with Ron Sullivan and his crew. Melissa is a thirty-year-old New Yorker. This will be the second scene of her two-week-old career.
Ron introduces the actors. Within seconds they’re sprawled across the comforter. Their contact is gentle and affectionate.
Joey Silvera and Melissa Monet
Shooting loops—sex-only footage—at Tom Byron’s house.
Following pages: In a classic slice of porn Americana, Ron, the director, and Galatea, a new girl, flirt unabashedly and with clear intent while actor Goldie readies himself for the scene’s finale.
“I’m ready when you are, Joey,” Ron says. Then, “Shit.”