by Gerrie Lim
She was twenty when she fatefully met Steve Orenstein and signed with Wicked Pictures, and so much had happened since then. Her massive 592-page autobiography consigned her period with Wicked Pictures to merely the last quarter of the book. She’d also glossed over her sexual skirmishes with other celebrities, implying that Cindy Crawford had made a pass at her (which, after the book’s publication, caused Crawford to threaten a defamation suit). She got hit-on by Wesley Snipes (she merely wrote that she was actually offended by his boldness) and then recalled that Sylvester Stallone impressed her at first by not paying her much attention at all when they’d first met, at the opening of the Planet Hollywood restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand (though they met again later and he couldn’t stop staring at her breasts). Maynard James Keenan, lead singer of the rock band Tool, was apparently a huge fan—he even had a picture of her on his road case—but nothing ever transpired between them. (Jenna didn’t know who Tool were, and so turned down an opportunity to meet him.)
But, really, what strange elements persisted, that caused one person to be so impressed with another? “Why on earth is Jenna Jameson such a big star?” I’ve been asked that by so many people, who don’t understand it at all. I always explained patiently that the answer, if there even is one, is complex. It wasn’t that she was the most beautiful girl in the business or even the best sex performer. (As blondes went, I personally preferred Silvia Saint, Ava Vincent, and Janine Lindemulder.) Jenna had, simply put, the best “branding” in the business. She knew she was a commodity and applied every muscle in her lusty body towards milking that cash cow, stomping her stiletto heels on lesser minnows to achieve her goals.
But she had always been nice to me, so I put in a good word for her with our Pet Promotions office, when she asked me for help in making her a Penthouse Pet. (Jenna asked me for help? No way! I had that conversation on tape, though, and occasionally replayed it to convince myself it actually happened.) But she taught me something—to her credit, she was never ashamed to ask the right people for help, even lesser mortals like me, if it meant achieving her end-goal of superstardom. I was, subsequently, so proud of her when I saw her on the cover and centerfold of Penthouse in early 2004, the accompanying text even quoting from my own interview with her: “I made it one of my missions to get this industry accepted by the public, and I think I have been pretty successful in doing that, especially in getting it accepted by women.” Some good karma had rebounded, not that she ever needed my two cents (or, in industry terms, two fingers).
She had paved the way herself. “I have always had strong ideas about creative issues, but it was difficult to get people to listen to me when I was just an actress,” she wrote (in her own biographical sketch, in XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, by the portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders). In the giant crap shoot of the glamour game, being able to give the perfect blowjob wasn’t ever enough, and she’d known that all along. That was why, as I’d always said, I’ve seen the movies and I’ve met the girl. And the girl was infinitely and undoubtedly much more interesting.
The Ballad of Ava Vincent
So there we all were, huddled in yet another Romanesque mansion somewhere in the hills above Los Angeles. Another house with a long driveway, hidden from prying eyes, but another chance for me to ask existential question #1: How does one perform for a camera crew, jettisoning reservations about the naked body and putting genitalia not only on display but happily to work? I received an object lesson in this, on that lovely spring morning in May 2001, while covering a shoot for Fox magazine, a New York hardcore jack-off journal that paid me four figures each time I scribed “live” reportage from actual film sets.
The magnificent opus was entitled Dripping Wet #4 (initially Dripping Fucking Wet #4 but truncated to soothe the delicate sensibilities of the hotel pay-per-view market). Despite the lowbrow title, it was helmed by two of the industry’s more famous females—star-turned-producer Jill Kelly and star-turned-director Tabitha Stevens. The zany title indicated a “gonzo” flick—“reality” porn with the emphasis on sex, lots and lots of it, with what lame excuse for dialogue improvised.
The view outside was to die for, a breathtaking sweep of the San Fernando Valley below. Lush foliage, more coyotes, the occasional hawk swooping down to smash and mangle a hapless squirrel. But who’s looking at the landscape? We were filming Ava Vincent, a radiantly beautiful, alabaster-skinned blonde formerly named Jewel Valmont, now at the height of her earning powers. I chatted with her before we began shooting and she disclosed that she was going to be Penthouse magazine’s Pet of the Month in the upcoming August 2001 issue, so her rates would soon be going up. The layout, by photographer Carl Wachter, had already been shot; entitled “The Best of Both Worlds,” it made much of the fact that she is proudly bisexual, and the Penthouse stamp of approval was in sync with her newfound sense of personal branding. People would think of Ava Gardner when they saw her name, and she loved that kind of old Hollywood glamour.
She’d made a name for herself already, with sizzling performances in such diverse titles as Adrenaline, Jade Goddess, Babes Illustrated #9: Cyber Sluts, Cumback Pussy #17: The Lingerie Edition, and Perfect Pink #8: Red Hot. More notably, her attractive, five-feet-five-inch, 120-pound bisexual self had snagged her the “Best All-Girl Sex Scene” trophy at the 2001 AVN Awards in Las Vegas, the “Oscars of Adult,” for her incisor-sharp starring role in director James Avalon’s acclaimed horror-porn film, Les Vampyres. Her performance elicited rave notices. AVN’s elder statesman Gene Ross described her as “the stunning Ava Vincent … although stunning doesn’t even begin to describe Vincent, who sets the screen ablaze with her ethereal beauty in this modern Gothic masterpiece.”
Ethereal beauty, that was about right. I was talking to her as she stood posing for still photos—what we call “pretty girl”—to be circulated and sold to the men’s magazines or used on video box cover art. I was some ten feet away from her, with a full-frontal view of her open vagina. She stood and preened behind a fountain of water by the swimming pool, clad only in high heels. With exquisitely manicured fingers, she parted her pert pink lips, her labial folds all wet and glistening.
Heaven in a wild flower, eternity in an hour, to quote the poet William Blake.
The still photographer, Scott Wallach, kept clicking and his motor drive hummed away as Ava changed poses without being instructed. She’d obviously done this before. This was the foreplay part of the day, a little bit of peek-a-boo before we segued to live-action camerawork inside. I love exhibitionism, so this was sometimes more interesting to me than the actual shoot to follow.
Today, however, was not going to be one of those.
Because Ava Vincent, unlike me, wasn’t contemplating William Blake. She was, a few minutes later, reclining in my favorite on-camera position: “reverse cowgirl”—porn biz jargon for “girl on top” but one where the girl straddles the guy with her back to him, thus displaying to the camera her flushed face, bare breasts and open thighs. I love seeing this sort of extroverted eroticism, especially if the girl arches her back just enough, so that her partner’s erection is penetrating her to its full length, and she maintains the intensity by humping him from up high.
“Cowgirl” itself is when the girl is on top but facing the guy, the direct opposite of conventional “missionary.” The lucky guy being straddled was Vincent’s real-life beau, John Decker. He lay on his back and mugged ecstasy for the camera, as Ava rocked her hips in tandem to his upward thrusts. Very nice.
However, most adult film actresses, if they’re honest, will confess that “reverse cowgirl” is their least favorite position to perform. It is physically very demanding—it kills your calves and murders your lower thighs, and your hands have to grip on something. It helps if there’s a table or a nightstand or something to hold onto, especially if you’re performing on a soft bed wearing high heels. The laws of physics are not negotiable when your center of gravity is at stake. In Ava Vincent’s case, she was on top of
John on the very edge of the bed, her feet on the floor. She had absolutely nothing to hold. Her hands were on both sides of him, her fingers clawing the bed sheets. She was really starting to tire quickly.
I distinctly remember two things from that scene.
The first was how her green eyes smoldered, as she looked at me while she was riding him, oozing lust incarnate. We’d just moved from new acquaintances mere minutes earlier to participants in a voyeuristic encounter. By sheer coincidence, my favorite film of hers, Hung Wankerstein, was just about to be released on May 15, 2001 (five days away; this shoot took place on May 10). It was a tribute to the B-movie genre, a porn comedy spoofing the Frankenstein legend. Ava played Inga, the oversexed Swiss milkmaid-turned-lab assistant, all Germanic vowels and Botticelli curls, who naturally got to make whoopee with the big green monster. (I kid you not, it’s the only porn movie that had me rewinding just to listen to the dialogue.)
Ava, in real life, is a 34-24-34 blonde from Northern California, a theatre arts graduate from San Joaquin Delta College who’d chucked in her US$375-a-week job managing an adult book store in Stockton after she realized how much more porn stars could earn—at least US$500 for every sex scene (each movie usually contains five or six), and US$1,000 if there’s anal sex involved, so it doesn’t take a genius to do the math. Girls like her, always in demand, will do several shoots each month and appear in several hundred videos each year. It beats flipping dead cows at McDonald’s.
The second thing I remember about that day was how the scene abruptly ended.
The main prerequisite for this profession is that you really (and they mean really) have to love sex. Because there’s going to be a lot of it, more than most people can reasonably handle, and more than most girls need if, like a surprisingly high proportion of them, they actually can’t orgasm all that easily. Faking with grimaces and groans is easy, but you also need to possess a pretty high threshold for pain.
Ava Vincent, her eyes pleading for mercy, her fingers straining to clutch the bed sheets, was on that very threshold. She gasped and moaned as John continued to thrust and the camera captured the “insertion shot”—her wet pussy clutching his cock as it slid in and out. This usually goes on for some interminable length, until the “pop shot”—when, theoretically, John slides out of her and blasts his semen into the air and onto her pubic area. Sometimes, the guy will pull out just before the magic moment and she’ll turn around and catch it on her face. Sometimes she will quickly position herself, so that the guy can shoot straight into her mouth, or let some of it dribble down her cheek. The really good girls will resume sucking till the poor guy’s been drained dry.
Ava, however, wasn’t going to let John go all the way today. Hands grasping the sheets frantically, as her knees started to buckle in pain, she let out her last agonized gasp.
“That’s it!” she screamed, to no one in particular, “I can’t do this!”
She stood up, letting John’s still-erect penis slide out of her, and promptly walked off the set. Nobody stopped her. They just shut down the cameras and lights. Tabitha called a break.
What I thought interesting was that nobody was shocked or surprised, and nobody complained. There have been shoots when a girl is a real princess and a total pain in the butt and gets told to “behave yourself like a good little whore,” which usually makes things worse. Jenna Jameson famously stormed off a set, on Michael Zen’s 1997 film Satyr (a legendary, embattled project which porn folks still discuss today with shared disbelief) when a production manager caught her sulking and told her off in such eloquent fashion; in her autobiography, Jenna remembers that she felt he had crossed the line by using the dreadful “W” word. But for the most part, these people had been on enough shoots to know when a girl’s taken it to the limit.
Either that or nobody wanted to upset Ava Vincent, since she was now an A-list porn star. And the pain must’ve been intense. She looked like she could’ve clawed someone’s eyes out.
Tabitha told me she understood, having had to perform the same kind of scene herself many times. Civilians who merely rent porn don’t know the occupational hazards. Performing oral sex is easy, and so is having a guy splatter his come all over your face, but if it gets into your eyes it will truly hurt like hell. Tabitha’s had that happen to her three times. “And two of those times,” she told me, giggling, “were Ron Jeremy.”
Jeremy, a.k.a. “The Hedgehog,” is porn’s most famous male star. I’d met and partied briefly with him, a nice-enough guy with an effusive passion for self-promotion. He was also a startling phenomenon, given the way he looks—way too fat and grotesquely hairy (hence the nickname)—and some girls also claimed him somewhat, ahem, hygiene-challenged. Not quite anyone’s idea of a typical porn stud. Not Rocco Siffredi, not even John Decker.
But therein lies the legend, because Ronnie boy represents “everyman,” a porn marketing notion writ large: if pudgy Ron Jeremy can get pussy, well, surely so can the average Joe Schmoe.
“He’s a hero to regular guys everywhere,” porn legend Nina Hartley once told me, having fucked him enough times to know. “A girl should not consider herself a porn actress if she’s never done Ron Jeremy. You gotta do it. It’s like paying your dues, it’s like working your way up.” So many stories have been spread that I had heard of how he prowls nightclubs after shoots just so she can score more pussy, as if “work” alone wasn’t enough. One girl told me she “gave Ron a blowjob out of pity.” Some guys have all the luck.
Tabitha Stevens, of course, wasn’t legendary in the way of Jenna Jameson, but she was in so many ways the archetypal American porn star, having risen through the ranks as a Las Vegas stripper before performing sex on video in 1995. Ten years later, in May 2005, she would achieve a rare form of notoriety when the news broke that she was about to be seen in Cathouse, the HBO documentary series about the lives of the girls at Nevada’s Moonlite Bunnyranch, no ordinary chicken shack thanks to its reputation for having porn stars on duty right in the house. Tabitha’s role, however, was a highly unique one: as AVN reported, the show’s new season “features Tabitha Stevens conducting a cock-sucking class for the Bunnyranch girls.”
Blessed with a slight overbite, which made her fellatio skills visually pleasing on film, Tabitha was now being employed to teach the regular working girls how to blow. What greater validation than to be asked to teach what one does best? “I love doing oral,” she told me, grinning. “I’m really awesome at it.” No false modesty from this girl.
We had first met a few months earlier, on the set of a Michael Zen film called Coming of Age, in which she played a willowy blonde named Jennifer, who had “only been with one man before” and was about to change her life in one hot night of sexual experimentation. The role was an apt metaphor, since Tabitha had once been a working mainstream actress with a real SAG card. “I worked for a company called Capcom, I did a video called Street Fighter and I did SEGA TV commercials, and I toured the country for a year and a half, and then I did a bunch of features and it was wearing me out,” she recalled. I was interviewing her while we waited for Ava to cool off outside.
“And I called Larry at Hustler. And from Hustler, I went to Vivid. I was married at the time and I wasn’t happy in my relationship. There wasn’t any sex and I wanted to see what it was like. I asked my husband if it was okay, and he said okay. And I called my parents the night before my first movie, and asked if they were going to have any problems with it. I asked my sister, I asked my grandmother, I asked my brother.
“And they said, ‘It’s your life, whatever you want to do,’ they were very supportive about it. I come from a really good family. I wanted to try something for myself. I didn’t want to be an extension of somebody else’s life. That first movie was Rolling Thunder, with Racquel Darrian, a Vivid film directed by Paul Thomas. My first scene was with Bobby Vitale, and it was my first scene ever, a boy/girl, and it went fine. I did the scene and then right after that, I divorced my husband. I didn’t think th
at it was fair to him, that I would be doing porn, because I’m having sex with all these people.”
She was done with her third marriage now, having survived a recent tragedy. “I was pregnant with my last husband and we lost the child. After that, things just went downhill and we’re divorced now.” Her hair was also her natural brunette again after a peroxide-blond stage, and since she was also performing in her own film she wore only a short blue slip with nothing underneath. Sitting in the director’s chair when the cameras were rolling, she liked to draw her knees upwards so she could curl her arms around them, seemingly oblivious to the fact that her wispy brown hairs and exposed vulva were open to view. Only on a porn set could such nonchalance seem so natural, though I couldn’t help but ask if such exhibitionism came so easily to her.
“Oh totally,” she replied, “I’ve been like this my whole life. Always, always. Even in the winter time, when I was younger, I’d walk around the house naked. Even now, I try not to wear underwear. I’ll wear something see-through if I’m going to someplace nice. I don’t want people to freak out too much. People know. People recognize me.”
Then she told me her fondest memory of being spotted in public. “My sister and I went out, we took her kids with us, and we went to a Wendy’s. She went up to order our drinks while I stayed at the table with her kids. And the guy says to her, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Just tell Tabitha I said hi.’
“The guy at the Wendy’s knew who I was!” She shook her head, giggling. So did she make conversation with the eagle-eyed waiter? “Yeah, it was funny. I went and said hello and told him, ‘Next time I come in, I’ll bring you one of my movies or something.’ And he was, like, ‘Oh my God!’ He was pretty happy.”