by Gerrie Lim
“Savannah was the reason why I got into the industry,” Jenna explained. “I saw her. Before I knew of this industry, I always thought oh, it’s seedy and the girls are gross, and this and that, and then I saw Savannah. And I thought, this girl is unbelievable. She’s so beautiful. And I said, I guess it’s alright for girls to get into this industry, you know, and to be a model. And that’s the reason I got in.”
But didn’t most people know Savannah was dead and so it must be an alias?
“Yeah, but I don’t think they ever put two and two together,” Jenna replied. “They don’t ever really think about it. A lot of people know my real name because it’s printed on the Internet everywhere, so they usually try my real name. They don’t figure that I’ll check in under another star’s name.”
The story of how Jenna Massoli became Jenna Jameson, a name she picked to honor the famous Irish whiskey, is, of course, now the stuff of legend. The accolades tell only half the story. In July 2005, she topped the list as the most popular celebrity in a poll conducted by the website WomenCelebs.com, which measured popularity in terms of frequency of visits to websites dedicated to famous people, no mean feat given that the site offered links to 7,496 female celebrities. Jenna had outranked the likes of Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie, Pamela Anderson, and Hillary Duff. This was five months after Playboy magazine had named Jenna one of the world’s “25 Sexiest Celebrities” in its March issue; she was the only adult film star on the list.
And, to top it off, she even made the Forbes “Celebrity 100” list in June 2005, which included female luminaries like Madonna and Oprah Winfrey. Her company Club Jenna, the Forbes article noted, “will hit revenues of US$30 million this year, up 30 percent in a year,” and “her fans can rent her digital moan as the ringer on their cell phones and buy Jenna sex toys, action figures, and even a piece of herself, molded in soft plastic, anatomically accurate and priced to move at US$200.”
That price point was a revelation to me, since it represented a very unique value proposition. Wicked Pictures had been selling plastic replica vaginas of its contract girls starting at around US$30 each, encased in velvety-matte, attractively designed boxes with text printed and penned to tease: “ultra-real, super stretchy” and also “succently soft” with “invitingly tight, textured sleeve.” Clearly, now that she was no longer with Wicked, Jenna had clearly upped the ante and turned the tables on her former paymaster.
But enough of celebrity cheerleading; what about some of the sordid stories I had heard? Were any of them true? No, Jenna insisted, she was not habitually prone to smashing up hotel rooms, but yes, she used to have a horrendous drinking problem. She now allowed herself a glass of Merlot to calm her nerves before a shoot, but nothing stronger. If there was one thing she would like to change about herself, she told me, it would be her bad temper. Some of the legendary stories about her blowing up were true.
“I have a really bad temper,” she admitted. “I’ve always had it. It runs in my family. My father’s like that, my brother’s like that. I’m actually reading a book right now that is called Awakening the Mind, it’s Buddhist meditation and it’s really helping me.” Maybe with time, she hoped, some of the people she had pissed off would forgive her. I’d heard the complaints from an array of first-hand sources.
“Jenna was always such a bitch to me when I was never anything but nice to her,” one girl told me. “I remember one movie I did with her when she threw a fit and announced that a certain male star was not allowed to have a pop shot in a scene with her. Everyone was, like, ‘What the fuck?’ and the director argued with her about it until she finally stormed off the set because she didn’t get her way. Nobody knew why she was being such a brat.”
Teri Weigel, a former Playboy Playmate turned porn star, documented one memorable encounter with Jenna in her “Totally Teri” column, on the industry tell-all website, AVN Insider (www.avninsider.com). She recalled an evening at a strip club where she was appearing, slotted to open for Jenna, who was headlining. “I started my show with Jenna and the club owner sitting at the front of the stage. I was halfway through my first song when I took off both of my shoes, which was a trademark of my routine at the time. I thought I heard cheering coming from the front of the stage, but I was wrong—it was Jenna screaming. Then, inexplicably, she picked up a glass and shattered it on the stage, sending shards everywhere.”
Nursing a cut leg, Weigel completed her set but then found Jenna refusing to go on stage, very much in the throes of a “childish tantrum … It must be true you can take the girl out of the trailer but you can’t take the trailer out of the girl. She was a heartless diva then, and she’s a heartless diva now.”
However, people who succeed seldom scaled the ladder in order to win popularity contests. “The thing is, you can’t get to where I am and not be a smart person,” Jenna told me. “It’s impossible.” So what if people hated her for being such a drama queen? She had a solid fan base and enough media coverage to offset the naysayers. The critics still loved her. At the 21st XRCO Awards show in June 2005, she was given the “Mainstream Adult Media Favorite” trophy and inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame. (“I’ve been in this industry for about twelve years now and that’s a long time,” Jenna purred in her acceptance speech. “I feel very humbled. This has been a long wild ride for me.” She added that she was “concentrating on building an empire for women in general in the business.”)
Earlier in the year, at the AVN Awards, the Club Jenna/Vivid co-production Bella Loves Jenna was voted “Best Video Feature,” and the “Best Couples Sex Scene” award went to Jenna and her husband Justin, for their scorching performance in the Vivid movie, The Masseuse. She had just released Virtually Jenna: The Official Video Game of Jenna Jameson (available for download at www.virtuallyjenna.com), developed for Club Jenna, Inc. by the Vancouver-based company xStream3D Multimedia, Inc., whose spokesperson Brad Abram told AVN that players “can pose her like a centerfold, dress and undress Jenna and her friends and let their imaginations control the outcome.” The company had “devised a way to simulate control of her sexual activity and even decide when she reaches a state of bliss.”
Jenna added herself: “What I like about it is that everything within the game is completely user-controllable. It’s amazingly realistic and the player gets to manage every scene change, every camera angle, every zoom, pan, or tilt of the freestyle cameras. Plus, the player gets to decide how excited I get, and can direct the action in every scene.”
That reminded me of the time I’d spoken to her in 2001, just as her interactive DVD, My Plaything: Jenna Jameson, had only been released. “Every man who sees this DVD is going to want to fuck me,” she told me proudly. “If I were a man watching it, it would be the ultimate jack-off.”
Her seven-year Vivid contract would not expire till 2007. I asked if she had ever felt overwhelmed by the mass adulation. “Yeah, I’ve won every award you can win,” she replied. “The word would have to be overwhelmed. I never expected it to take off the way that it did. When everything started to snowball, I kind of freaked out. I had mainstream offers coming in left and right. I was hosting a show for the E! Channel. I had a thousand things on my plate. And, you know, I handled it all in my stride. I tried to keep a level head and everything. You would think that it would all start settling down now, but it’s not. I kept expecting to get a break, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
“I’ve slowed down and moved behind the camera a lot, and I’ve cut down on my feature dancing, because that takes a huge chunk of my time. Now I’m concentrating on my productions and my website. I’m shooting at least three times a week and my number one worry is to keep my content current. I have live sex streaming on it, twenty-four hours, and I also do bi-weekly live chats. It’s different from doing movies because it’s for a targeted audience. I know who I’m playing to. And it’s cool, because all my members are like a club. I know every one of them, pretty much, I talk to them twice a week. So it’s really sat
isfying for me, because I know it’s my project. As long as there’s a demand I’m going to stay. I’m not one of those people that are going to want to leave while everybody’s wanting more.”
For every anecdote told about what a shrew she could be in public, there was always the perfect public face that she was very good at presenting to journalists—which might well be, of course, why she was so nice to me. In all the hours I spent with Jenna, on the set and later several times over the phone (she had given me her personal cellphone number to call), there was never once the slightest hint of the surly girl I’d heard about. “My favorite thing in the world to do is to go do interviews,” she gushed. “’Cos it’s me being me. It’s a lot easier than, you know, playing a part. I’ve done Nash Bridges, I was in three episodes, I had a lot of scenes with Don Johnson, and I’ve done a lot of acting in the mainstream, but doing interviews is my favorite. Because then it’s like I’m getting my point to people about who I am and what I represent.”
I also recall telling her that one reason why my editor had asked me to chase her down was the fact that at the time she’d come out with her own pin-up calendar, a sixteen-month bikini-and-beachwear keepsake, shot in Saint Barthelemy in the French West Indies by photographer Brad Willis. Wicked Pictures had sent my editor the calendar and she had sent it on to me.
“The reason why I did the calendar? Well, I never really thought of doing a calendar,” Jenna explained to me. “And then there was a publication that comes out—about calendars, I can’t remember the name of it—and they had a list of the top fifty calendar girls. Number one was Cindy Crawford and then there was, like, Christy Turlington and you know, all the main Sports Illustrated girls. I was number nine. And I didn’t even have a calendar out! And I was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to do a calendar!!! How can I let this opportunity pass me by?!!’”
She went to Steve Orenstein, her Wicked Pictures boss, and he agreed to let her do it. “So he flew me off to St Barts and they shot me for two weeks,” she recalled. “It was such a great experience. It was totally different from anything I had done before. And it was really, really well received by everyone. Except I had trouble getting it into big mainstream stores like Wal-Mart and stuff, you know. They don’t want to have anything to do with a porn star.”
The City of Houston, Texas, certainly didn’t either, at least not initially, when her autobiography came out. The city fathers had demanded that all copies of the book be removed from public library shelves after a complaint had been made about Jenna’s nude photos inside. In February 2005, however, the Houston authorities capitulated to the protests of the American Civil Liberties Union, after its Houston chapter argued that removal of all twelve copies of the book in the library system violated the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee and breached due process of law.
Immediately after the book was reinstated, all twelve copies were checked out and there was a forty-person waiting list.
How amusing, I thought, especially since the coy title How to Make Love Like a Porn Star didn’t tell you much about making love at all. My favorite part of the book was the section where Jenna recalled attending the red-carpet premiere of the film she’d been in, Howard Stern’s Private Parts: “Billy Corgan, Flea, Angus Young, Sting, Bon Jovi, LL Cool J, Rob Zombie, Joey Ramone—everyone I idolized was there. I was a little porn girl thrust into this world of rock superstardom … Until then, I had come to believe that I was a star. But when I met all these people, I realized I was just a niche icon, not a real celebrity. I had sex onscreen; I did some perfunctory acting. These people moved and inspired millions of people with their music. All I did was contribute to Kleenex sales.”
I liked that because it reflected my own observation that, in person, Jenna was always full of surprises. She might have done “some perfunctory acting,” but she had a knack for answering questions that was far from perfunctory. Like the obligatory porn-star views about sex positions. “My favorite position? Wow. I’m kinda weird,” Jenna replied. “I like, if you can imagine this, laying on my back with my legs together, and the guy’s legs are on either side of me. So my legs are like squished together. It’s just a lot of friction.” Uh, I asked, wasn’t that kind of difficult? No, she casually replied, “as long as he has a big dick, it doesn’t matter. As along as it’s, like, about eight inches.”
I can also still watch one of my favorite Jenna films, Wicked Weapon, and grin knowingly about the subtext in scene two, in which Jenna gave Brad Armstrong, her real-life husband at the time, a superb blowjob. It ended with him shooting his load on her face, his sperm jetting a nice white line across her upper lip. Jenna’s response was sudden anger, with pure fire in her eyes. “Why did you come on my face?” she snarled. “Why the fuck did you come on my face?!!” She pushed his cock away like a useless toy. That, I thought, might not have been in the script at all. At the time, they were already having offscreen trouble. “We were married only two months,” Jenna giggled, when I asked her about the divorce. “Can I say ‘mistake’?”
In Wicked Weapon, Jenna played a vigilante crimebuster called The Jennarator, spoofing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator while upstaging Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire—Jenna’s costume actually resembled Pambo’s kickass getup, but with an overall slicker tone and very badass helmet to boot. In her autobiography, Jenna revealed that the whole costume was her idea; she had fantasized about appearing on stage at strip clubs attired in such a jaw-dropping outfit. The film was, in my own view, essentially a B-movie spoofing itself, an act of demented genius. It had lots of zany dialogue and gave the viewer enough to focus on without detracting from the sex, especially during a spectacular orgy in a palatial mansion that most critics singled out as one of the best group scenes ever shot.
In some ways, though, I liked Jenna’s previous film Dangerous Tides better, mainly because the sex was more intense and terrifically torrid, even as the story went somewhat awry (who could believe such a contrived tale, about swingers on a ship invaded by terrorists?). I didn’t really care for the much-hyped Flashpoint, the AVN “Editor’s Choice” for June 1998, a film that lost itself amid firemen and arson, drownings and suicides, ax fights and car explosions. The real pyromania, for me, was a sizzling bathroom scene in which Jenna took on the equally wild Brittany Andrews. (And, to be sure, it must be a bad movie if a lesbian scene was the only thing I remember about it.)
Wicked Pictures cannily packaged these films as blatant vehicles for Jenna (or rather, for the more important “Jenna Jameson legend”), and in all fairness they did it very well. It was easy to understand why Dream Quest, Jenna’s last film for them, was the biggest seller ever, after they’d marketed the hell out of it. However, in an exposé of her falling out with Wicked, in the December 2000 issue of AVN, Jenna revealed why they had parted company right after Dream Quest. Many saw it as an ironic move, since the reviews had raved about how the film had successfully fused science fiction and medieval fantasy with porn. But what they saw as a career peak, Jenna saw as merely another career move—and a way of turning crisis into opportunity.
For this was the big turning point, it would turn out, marking her unequivocal transition from contract girl to diva superstar.
She was incensed because Wicked owner Steve Orenstein had sold and licensed JennaVision, an Internet entity she’d helped set up, to various third parties behind her back. He was, she alleged, “selling it to everyone who wants it, so they’re going to be flooding the market with me and making the money and I’m getting absolutely nothing. The biggest thing is not even the money. It’s just the fact that I feel like they betrayed me … I called him and left him a message about this, saying you want me to bend over for you to fuck me a little harder?”
What Orenstein clearly underestimated was Jenna’s ability to control her career. In an interview she did at around the same time, quoted in the now-defunct XPlicit magazine, she summarized her celebrity ethos: “I realized early on that the more you keep yourself in demand, the
more famous you’ll get. If you flood the market with yourself, people get sick of you.” Ever so brilliantly then, she decided not to get mad but to get even. She created her own company Club Jenna and used it as leverage to structure a deal with Wicked’s biggest competitor, Vivid. Just so she could stick it to them real good. She wasn’t going to bend over and keel like a whimpering slut. Real life wasn’t the movies.
And, to add insult to injury, she also signed a contract with Elite Model Management in September 2004, for “fashion endorsements, appearances, and editorial.” Conor Kennedy, Elite’s creative director, proclaimed that “the era of the supermodel is over. Photographers are looking for stars with personality and charisma, and Jenna is an icon.”
A porn star as an Elite model? There was a time when such a thing would be laughed at. I recall talking to the person who had first “discovered” Jenna—the director Andrew Blake, who had shot Jenna’s first feature: Fantasy Woman, which he directed in 1994 for Adam & Eve (now a collector’s item, since it was never widely released on video). “Jenna was just a centerfold model, a print magazine model, at the time,” Blake had told me. “She was pretty much the girl next door. I didn’t look at her and think she would be a big star someday. She was the one who reinvented herself. I can’t take any credit for that.”
Jenna laughed when I told her that. “He must have thought I was this meek little mouse. I didn’t say two words that whole time. I was just so shy. I’m sure he was probably thinking, ‘Who is this girl?!!’ And I remember there was a girl there, her name was Seana Ryan, a Penthouse Pet. I was eighteen years old. She looked at me with this weird face and said, ‘Are you old enough to be here?!!’ I looked like a baby at that time! That totally stuck in my head and I was so intimidated by all these girls, you know. I had no idea what I was doing.”