by Gerrie Lim
She loves facials, says it’s a control thing for her—it’s about her controlling the guy’s pleasure. Good point. “But I won’t do bukkake. That’s not even an enjoyment. You’re not doing anything to get the guys off. I do have my ‘crewkake’ fantasy, though.”
What’s that, I asked. “My ‘crewkake’ fantasy—all the crew know about it, you can ask most of them and they’ll go, ‘Ah, Aria’s fantasy!’ I have this fantasy about doing a scene, getting my facial, whatever, and after the camera shuts off, the entire crew stands around my body and jacks off on my body. Not my face, just on my body. From, like, the neck down.”
Has she ever done it? “No. It’s just something I fantasize about. I almost got them to do it yesterday. There’s always somebody that chickens out. The rest of the crew was going, ‘C’mon, dude!’ And I don’t want a gonzo crew. That’s like, two people. It’s got to be a big crew. Like ten or fifteen people.”
She has great etiquette—she came onto the set while the next scene was being shot to thank the crew personally, before leaving the studio for a hairdresser’s appointment.
A couple of years later, I found myself entranced by a passage from The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the memoir of the French art critic Catherine Millet, in which she documented her own true-life sexual escapades. She’d started out participating in group sex in various Parisian locales, and concluded that “what paradoxically gave me pleasure was identifying familiar feelings in unusual circumstances.”
Voila! I think I was drawn towards porn because it made for the most compelling kind of mental disconnect. After all, I was actually being paid to watch people have sex, often with multiple partners, but the point was not the scene per se but its context, based entirely on my perception. Porn is recreational sex in a protected space, which I was made privy to. And in the free-for-all nexus of connections that was the city of Los Angeles, the garden of Eden that was the San Fernando Valley provided the best kind of enclave for such complicity. The area was large enough to be anonymous, yet small enough for kindred spirits to congregate in the secret places only they knew about.
And I had access to it.
Beyond that privilege, though, it was hard work. I was always interested in detecting what commonality might exist in a host of questions: did this scene remind me of something else I’d earlier witnessed? Was I getting turned on or bored? Was that blowjob better than what I’d seen this girl do previously on film? How adept was she at taking such a big cock in her mouth? What was she doing with her hands on his shaft to make it more visually appealing to the camera? I thought about these kinds of things every time I’d walk to where the director was sitting, to stare into the little monitor that was recording what the camera was shooting. Vaginal close-ups and insertion shots never lost their fascination for me somehow, though I remembered sets where I saw clear signs of workday ennui—grips and gaffers reading paperback novels, some even sleeping and snoring away whenever the cameras weren’t on. Some people had become so desensitized.
But not me. Perhaps because I kept in mind two things.
The real objective of porn, as my friend Lily Burana (the author of the brilliant stripper memoir Strip City) told me back when she was the editor of the short-lived magazine Future Sex, is that “it should make people really want to masturbate. Because that’s where the rubber meets the road in this industry, and we can’t ever forget that.”
And, as Nina Hartley told me when I interviewed her in June 2001 for Penthouse Variations: “I think a lot of people should understand that porno movies are live-action sex cartoons. Just because a person likes a certain kind of pornography doesn’t mean he actually lives it out … You watch movies to see things you would never actually do in person.”
Sometimes, however, I spied a spectacular blowjob being enacted and was immediately led back to my own such experiences. I remembered the first time I ever came in a girl’s mouth, how she urged me onward and paused to coo with a musical timbre still resonant in my head today: “Come in my mouth, mmm, yes, mmm, I want you to come in my mouth!”
I’d seen that done on video too, countless times, but there was always something of a rush in hearing such spontaneous supplication. The New Age man in me wanted to validate her vulnerability, knowing that it took a leap of blind trust to say those words—especially to a complete stranger, even when you knew you were just playing a part for the camera. Reality existed in the form of a silky film of semen shooting down your throat, so don’t ask to shoot if you can’t stand to swallow.
Whoever said that porn degrades women has, obviously, never met that girl.
And I had met too many; all of them, ironically, in the days before I started covering adult entertainment. Were it not for them, I later realized, I could never have survived my time in the porn trenches, for they had taught me what I most needed to know. To be able to write about a genre like porn without metaphysically importing your own sexual past could only result in empty prose and, as Andrew Blake always reminded me, real erotica existed only in terms of the real sensibilities that one brought to it. In short, I was putting my cards on the table every time I visited a film set and committed my views to the printed page. There was just no other way.
Part Two
Damsels in Undress
Jammin’ with the Jennarator
That mythical beast called mainstream celebrityhood had somehow eluded the majority of porn stars, with the notable exception of one. People who never even watched porn asked me about her, with a curiosity bordering on admiration. They liked the fact, I think, that someone could possess her combination of guts and guile enough to make the usually unmoved masses pay her due attention.
For sure, there was only one Jenna Jameson. But who really knew why?
In the book she wrote about her life, she confessed to so many things thought unspeakable. She had transcended a screwed-up childhood, and had come to terms with having been raped when she was young. She had made good on all her promises to make a better life for herself, to the point where she has become the human interest story of our time.
In real life, however, she was actually much more interesting than her legend writ large. Sure, she did have two bodyguards, four dogs, and a revolving door of both friend and foe. And, yes, lots of girls in the business also had her assets—if surgically-enhanced, double-D breasts are any reflection of success—but few had the kind of work schedule that would leave most celebrities running ragged. Consider, for instance, how her Club Jenna website (www.clubjenna.com) posted her media schedule for the week in August 2004, celebrating the release of her infamous autobiography How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale.
On Friday, August 13, a feature story on her in Rolling Stone magazine hit the stands. On Monday, August 16, a VH-1 special aired, called Inside Out—Jenna Jameson. On Tuesday, August 17, the book came out in New York, and she did an 8.30 a.m. interview with Howard Stern and a 7 p.m. book signing at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square. On Thursday, August 19, another book signing at another Virgin Megastore, this time in Miami, Florida. The next day she found herself in Cleveland, Ohio, and the following day in Lexington, Kentucky, both book signings at Joseph-Beth Booksellers stores.
Two days later, on Monday, August 23, it’s Chicago, Illinois, and a radio interview and a book signing, then the following day in San Francisco, a book signing at the Virgin Megastore. Then two days later the much anticipated book signing in Los Angeles at the famous Book Soup on the Sunset Strip. The L.A. Weekly reported the event. “Not only was she incredibly sexy, wearing a low-cut pink blouse, but she was also incredibly nice and forthcoming,” noted the writer, Benjamin Silverton-Peel, who’d waited two and a half hours to get inside, like the rest of the crowd.
“These weren’t your stereotypical porno fans waiting for Jenna,” he added. “Far from it—consider all the young, relatively attractive women in line. In fact, we were well over 200 people, gay and straight, extreme and moderate, waiting an average of two ho
urs … Along with most everyone else, I purchased the 592-page book. I’m sure many of the people waiting in line for an autograph silently thought, ‘I’ve never read a book this big before.’”
It was particularly intriguing to me to see that three years after we’d first met—I’d interviewed Jenna in July 2001, a meeting that took three years to happen—she’d become a major star and the first from the porn world to crack the mainstream in a serious way. I remember first hearing about her in 1996, following her first year on the scene, as a contract girl with Wicked Pictures, for which she became the first newcomer to win all the top three rookie awards in the same year: “Best New Starlet” at the AVN Awards, “Starlet of the Year” from the XRCO (X-Rated Critics Organization) Awards and the “Video Vixen” award from FOXE (Fans of X-Rated Entertainment).
Additionally, she also won the AVN awards for “Best Actress” and “Best Couples Sex Scene” (with the popular male stud T.T. Boy in Michael Zen’s Blue Movie, which also won for that year’s “Best Film”). Not a bad sweep at all. In point of fact, the very first piece of press I ever read about her was in Adam Film World, a report about her XRCO “Starlet of the Year” victory. She was shown posing with her trophy, shaped like a wooden heart (nicknamed the “heart-on”) and, she “just about flew onto the stage in her eagerness to claim it.” She mugged for the cameras with the rapper Ice-T, looking every bit the newly arrived porn princess in a body-clinging silver jumpsuit.
I remember thinking she wasn’t at all bad to look at in that va-va-voom, eager-beaver kind of way. She exuded the necessarily exuberant, porn-perfect, photogenic pulchritude attitude. I’d seen it before, and so I honestly didn’t pay her that much mind, despite her slew of awards, until her legend grew.
And grew, and grew. Bigger than anyone had expected. I began hearing many stories, from many girls. Jenna had been thrown out and banned from yet another hotel room, in yet another city. For drunken behavior. For trashing her hotel room like a petulant rock star. She had a problem with vodka. She had a problem with pills. She had a problem with punctuality.
The last was an understatement. My first interview with her didn’t happen, because she simply failed to show up. And it wasn’t just me she had stood up, either—it was an entire film crew. I was scheduled to interview her on location. Seth McCoy, her Wicked Pictures publicist, called just as I was about to get in my car, and told me Jenna wasn’t even in Los Angeles; she was in New Orleans and was refusing to get on the plane. They cancelled the shoot that day, of course. The fact that the director was Brad Armstrong, Jenna’s ex-husband, might well have been a factor. (I actually met and asked Brad about this incident some years later, and he simply nodded and shrugged. “Well, that’s Jenna,” he said.)
So, yes, yadda yadda, Jenna this, Jenna that. But where in the world was Jenna herself?
Was I sick of her yet? My editors at Penthouse Variations wanted the interview badly, since she was, after six years in the business, considered The Chosen One—queen of the prom, pageant winner incarnate, the industry’s most charming ambassasor to the outside world. Many people were asking me, when they found out about my “Cinema Blue” column, when I would be interviewing her.
Were they kidding? I myself had no idea.
There was yet another aborted attempt by Seth McCoy, this time a scheduling snafu (Jenna was in Los Angeles and suddenly available but I was not, having left town only that very week), but I was determined to get her somehow. And then, on September 26, 2000, I suddenly had a breakthrough. She’d just left Wicked Pictures and I’d managed to get her email address and wrote her, asking that we try yet again to connect, and to my amazement she emailed me back.
“Hi sweetie! Please call my assistant Linda. She will set everything up. Much easier to get things done now that I’m independent! Thanks again! Jenna.”
I nearly fell off my chair.
And that’s how I started talking to her assistant, Linda Johnson, at her new company Club Jenna, trying to get the ball rolling again.
One of the tricks to interviewing porn stars who were famous was to get them when they were newly off-contract, something that happened more often than one might expect. Many contract girls went “independent” after having been fired or having failed somehow to get their contracts renewed. Typically, most contract girls were blessed with short attention spans undercutting their disproportionatly bigger ambitions, and they usually had no loyalty to anything other their own bank accounts. Sad perhaps, but very much true. But I had timed this right, and Linda Johnson was smart, personable and helpful.
Linda warned me, however, that Jenna was one busy bee. She was furiously ramping up her new company and shooting scenes for the company website, from her new vantage point as a director. Linda hadn’t let on that, unknown to me and the rest of the adult film world, Jenna was also on the verge of a major career victory—she was about to sign a big deal with the biggest studio, Vivid Video. Jenna also scored a seven-year contract, calling for her to star in fifteen Vivid titles and to also direct others, some of which would feature herself as well. And Vivid would be the sole distributor all Club Jenna products. A win-win situation. But much of all this was under wraps.
Luckily for me her superstar status did not preclude the complete abandonment of her best known skill—performing sex in front of the camera—or else my interview with her would never have happened at all. For that’s how I eventually met her, by sheer accident.
On the morning of June 12, 2001, I showed up at The Faultline, a gay men’s leather dive in East Hollywood, where the gay director Chi Chi LaRue (of infamous drag queen fame and acclaim) was directing a Vivid movie, Where The Boys Aren’t #14, an all-girl slurpfest featuring nine Vivid girls and one “surprise guest.” That particular mystery performer was none other than Jenna, making her first appearance in a Vivid film in five years.
“Who’s the girl in the cowboy hat?” I asked my friend Melissa Monet, former porn star turned AVN reporter, who was also covering the shoot.
“That’s Jenna,” she replied.
I was stunned. Jenna Jameson, porn queen immaculate, was hardly the woman I imagined from her movies. She was tiny, and were it not for the cowboy hat I might have completely blinked and missed her. And, with my usual unblinking honesty, I told her so.
“Oh, everybody says that!” she laughed. “I photograph really tall, like a big girl. I have long limbs, for my size. I’m long-waisted and have really long arms and legs—they’re just shrunken! My measurements are 32D-22-33. I’ve gone down from a size 34. I’ve found that as I’ve grown older, I’ve slimmed down a bit. I’ve lost my baby fat.
“My boobs are big but my rib cage is really small. My boobs are so much bigger than they really are—they’re huge on my frame! I tour so much that I get to meet a lot of my fans in person and many of them say, ‘Oh my gosh, I thought you’d be bigger!’ They expect me to be six feet tall, when I’m only five-three. I thank the heavens above that I photograph bigger than I am, because I think that’s sexier, that kind of ‘model’ look.”
She completely disarmed me with her goofy, offbeat personality and boundless energy, all jam-packed into this petite elf with the perpetual troublemaker grin. I caught her joking with the cast and crew, jostling for position like one of the boys. At one point, she posed for a photo next to a mural on the wall, a caricature of a muscled leatherman, resembling Freddie Mercury in bondage gear. She stuck her tongue out lewdly, right against his crotch, and then gently stroked his apparent pelvic bulge with her hand. And then giggled, clearly pleased with the image she was creating. For Jenna, public visibility was numero uno, and she was going to appear as scandalous as possible.
She might’ve also thought I was going to write about that in my piece. (And, of course, I did.) Later, I watched her work. One scene from that film forever burned itself into my brain. It paired Jenna with Dasha, a tall, green-eyed, twenty-four-year-old blonde from the Czech Republic with the most awesome 34C-25-36 body. At five feet e
ight inches, she towered over Jenna but nobody watching at home would ever notice the height difference, not when Jenna engaged in some very hot and heavy petting with her while perched on a bar stool. Dasha crouched and performed cunnilingus on Jenna, and the final result on DVD was actually more engaging, particularly the final moments as the camera zoomed in on Jenna as she lay on her back on top of the bar counter, thighs open wide and neck nicely arched. Dasha, almost kneeling and with her eyes level with Jenna’s pubis, used her fingers to send Jenna into orbit.
For all the hard, fast sex she enacted, though, Jenna could get all misty-eyed, as she did during our interview when I took her down memory lane.
“My mother was a Las Vegas showgirl,” she told me, “with all the feathers. She died when I was young and from the time I was small, I wanted to be a showgirl. And so I studied dance for twelve years, and when I turned seventeen I became a showgirl. That was the highlight of my life. I was at Vegas World, at the Stratosphere Tower.”
She said that with a believable sincerity, in a tone of voice that dared anyone to doubt the romance implicit in such an ambition. In that, she was always consistent. “I wanted to get away from the craziness of L.A.,” she explained, when I asked her why she chose to live in Scottsdale, Arizona, right outside Phoenix. “Did you know that Scottsdale is ranked number one as the cleanest city in America? Here I am, Jenna Jameson, the dirtiest girl in the world living in the cleanest city in America!” She laughed maniacally.
There was a factoid I’d always wanted to confirm. Yes, Jenna nodded, she still checked into hotels under the name Savannah, her personal idol, the porn superstar who had famously committed suicide. At the height of her fame, the former Shannon Wilsey from Orange County, California, had earned US$4,000 per sex scene and US$1,000 per box cover and starred in sevety-eight movies in just four years, before putting a gun to her head in 1993. She had cut up her face quite badly in a car accident, apparently driving under the influence of something or other.