In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema

by Gerrie Lim

  My personal favorite was Pound a Punnet, a 2004 award winner at the 11th International Erotic Film Festival in Barcelona, which utilized various London settings (Holloway Road, Colombia Road Market, Deptford Market, and Soho’s own red-light Berwick Street, where our interview took place). Its all girl/girl cast reenacted stories set in and around the open-air London markets (flower girl, fruit stall girl, fish market girl) with much expository dialogue, some of it during sex itself (which would be a no-no in American porn)—the kind of half-nervous banter that’s so peculiar yet frightfully funny in that politely bumbling English way. All that was missing was Hugh Grant.

  It made me realize that an Anna Span film worked on two simultaneous levels, both as dialectic and satire—her wry manner addressed the English social class system (or maybe just the English public school system), and so she had somehow created a porn vernacular all of her own. Less Benny Hill and more Monty Python, but only if you can imagine people from Fawlty Towers having sex, as only the English can do so well.

  Or, maybe, you’d have to be English to understand. “In order to enjoy The English Patient, one has to be both English and patient,” as the joke once went, of the Anthony Minghella film starring Ralph Fiennes, and the analogy wasn’t entirely misplaced here. Anna Span’s films were already being sold in America, in respectable numbers, though she had yet to do Vivid-style blockbuster business. Perhaps porn consumers in cities like Los Angeles lacked the jaundiced eye of smart Londoners like her, with her quirky views on things that turned well-educated people into well-intentioned perverts. I sensed I was in the minority too but with each Anna Span film I saw, I certainly felt counted in. Hers was, to me, such a fine madness.

  Scorpio Rising

  Europeans were more acutely attuned to the emotional nuances that separated love and sex, I’d always thought, since they lacked the ridiculous cultural baggage of most Americans. Erotica had been an integral part of their cultural DNA for so long. Catherine Deneuve could play a whore in Belle du Jour and remain a mainstream movie icon. Sharon Stone only became one with the help of a Dutch director named Paul Verhoeven, who convinced her to famously ditch her panties and wield an icepick in Basic Instinct, the film that made her a star overnight.

  Kyla Cole, the Penthouse Pet for March 2000, didn’t need any such persuading. Nor did she seek Hollywood stardom. She was happy enough, as a glamour model with a niche all her own.

  The director Andrew Blake first urged me to look her up. We were shooting the breeze over the phone one afternoon in early 2001 when Andrew told me he had just shot “this beautiful girl from Slovakia named Martina, who calls herself Kyla Cole.” She would go on to star in three of his films, most notably The Villa, for which she appeared totally nude on the DVD box cover, both front and back, and also performed in it one of my all-time favorite solo-girl masturbation scenes as well as some scorching girl-girl trysts with a Czech nymph named Nika Mamic. “When shooting, we didn’t have to pose, we did everything so naturally,” Kyla wrote on her website. “Believe me, she is one of the hottest girls I ever worked with … She speaks perfect Czech, English, and French. She is every man’s dream!”

  Kyla herself, of course, was well aware of how she was every man’s dream, too. When you worked mostly as a nude glamour model, who also did Andrew Blake movies, your main motivation was to be an object of fantasy and perfecting that became the ultimate goal. I had seen Kyla fleetingly, in numerous magazine layouts including Guld Rapport, a Swedish hardcore publication that I was also writing for. She’d appeared under her real name, Martina. I had actually first seen her in the December 1999 issue of Genesis, under the name Ester.

  This, amazingly, made zero impression on me at the time, simply because I was about to interview Silvia Saint, who was on the cover. Silvia was the only reason I even bought that issue and so, at the time, I pretty much ignored the rest of the magazine. Only after I’d discovered Kyla did I realize who “Ester” was; the name wasn’t Kyla’s choice, it was, in the style of most nude photo layouts, conveniently invented by the magazine. She later chose the name Kyla Cole herself, though the text accompanying her American Penthouse debut was somewhat dubious—it stated that she was from Seattle, instead of Slovakia (she has since corrected this and issued a disclaimer on her website).

  She worked only with girls or by herself in all her magazine layouts and movies, and firmly believed, as she declared to me, that “I am not a porn star.” I thought that a refreshing distinction, if slightly disingenuous, but I was keen to explore the topic with her. When she visited me in Singapore in April 2005, she was wryly amused by my bestselling book about the escort business, Invisible Trade, and told me that she had turned down many such offers. She was once asked to spend a week with some guy in Hawaii, for which she would be paid US$150,000.

  “To me, that’s just being meat,” she told me. “It’s a decision I made for myself. I mean, what is the difference between a prostitute and a porn star? They both fuck for money. I choose not to be either one, even though I was offered many opportunities. I want to leave something for privacy. Why spoil sex by having it as a job?

  “And why not leave something to the viewer’s imagination?” she added, though some of her layouts hadn’t left much to mine. “If I was doing hardcore porn movies, I cannot imagine coming home to sleep with my boyfriend, because I would be thinking of it as work, that I would be working at home. So that’s why I don’t do hardcore.”

  Working with girls was “different,” she insisted. “We’re not really doing anything.” She liked girl/girl shoots because they helped her indulge her own bisexual appetites, and as long as there were no men with erect penises in sight, it wasn’t porn to her.

  I didn’t buy this distinction, and told her so.

  There was a famous girl/girl layout in Club magazine called “The Road to Lezzieville,” for instance, in which Kyla was seen with two of the most gorgeous girls in the industry, Tera Patrick and Bunny Luv, and to me it was hotter than many boy/girl layouts I’d seen. I liked it immensely and it sure was porn to me.

  Kyla laughed, and said her memories of that shoot might well be tainted by the actual experience. “I didn’t like Bunny Luv,” she said. “She was sort of the jealous type, you know. And Tera Patrick, I don’t know her at all. I just worked with her.”

  Well, making whoopee with Tera, or at least appearing to do so, wasn’t quite “working” in the manner of office colleagues huddled around the water cooler. Regardless of the methodology, though, I was quite charmed by Kyla. Perhaps it was her small-town roots—she was born and raised in Eastern Slovakia—but she struck me as exceptionally grounded. “You could say I am photogenic, you can say that it’s a gift, or whatever,” she told me. “Maybe I am just lucky. I didn’t expect to be famous in this business. It just came, so I am just living with it. I don’t have to be any more famous than I already am. This is good enough for me.”

  How winsomely humble, I thought, for one with a natural talent for exhibitionism. The official story had always been that she got into nude modeling because of a boyfriend who had nude photos of other women adorning his walls. “Yes,” she sighed. “I was dating one guy who liked to have those pictures of naked women. And, of course, you know, every girl wants to be like one of them. I first started to pose for fashion agencies and I got mainly offers to do Playboy stuff, blah blah blah, and so one day I decided to try it. And I found I could do it quite naturally. I don’t think I am any different from other women. I take my clothes off because for me it is natural.”

  But some people, I told her, might find it a bit unnatural to see explicit photography featuring a ravishing beauty like her, her glamourous looks going somewhat against the grain. In Andrew Blake’s films, for instance, she can be seen simulating masturbation for the camera. Members of her personal website (www.kylacole.net) can gain access to her extensive photo galleries, including numerous of her own vaginal and anal close-ups.

  What did she think of anti-porn activis
ts wagging the finger while her eager fans wanked happily away? Was there not a cognitive disconnect?

  “I think they can think whatever they want,” she told me. “I don’t care if they masturbate on my picture. I mean, it’s normal. Everybody masturbates. I am glad I can help them with their fantasies. Because not everybody has a woman. If I can help them with that, why not? Everybody knows that everybody is masturbating, so why not? If one of my fans doesn’t want to admit it, he doesn’t have to tell me, you know. I can imagine it. And he doesn’t have to masturbate by looking at my pictures. He can masturbate by looking at other girls, you know. Because everybody wants to see something different.

  “Basically, I don’t care what people think. They can think whatever they want. For me, it is important that I know what I am doing, and that people know exactly what I am doing. Whatever other people may think, I will never, never, ever change just because it’s their opinion.” And what of those who put her on a pedestal, who see her as a living goddess or the embodiment of their dreams? “I don’t think too much about that,” she laughed. “It’s their life and how they see it. It’s okay. If they want to see me as their sex icon, why not?”

  Over the course of her week’s stay in Singapore, I saw her nonchalantly test that maxim. One afternoon, we walked through Chinatown and several people stopped to stare at her. An old Chinese medicine shop proprietor, resembling Yoda, stopped reading his newspaper to ogle Kyla. She was wearing a blouse cut quite low, and it didn’t help that the sweltering tropical heat kept her exposed valley covered in a film of sweat, the glistening moisture reflecting light quite sinfully.

  Many Chinese men, wherever we went, immediately turned their heads. I stopped to ask Kyla if she was aware of their stares. “Yes,” she replied, beaming. “I hope they got a good look.”

  The year before, I’d interviewed her for an AVN Online feature expressly about her, in which she’d said she saw no difference between her American and European fans, except “that Europeans are better at geography.” Her tongue was invisibly in cheek, as always, and she knew what men wanted and was pleased to provide, so long as her own parameters were met. In the end, did it even matter whether people chose to call her a porn star or a glamour model, or whatever moniker best bespoke her kind of celebrity branding? Hanging out with Kyla helped me to reinvestigate such ideas in my head, setting into motion the process of questioning once more the very things I found erotic.

  And, unquestionably, I liked her kind of eroticism. Maybe it was because she wasn’t American, and living as she did in the Czech Republic had imprinted her with their ineffable romanticism, the kind marked by the quiet intensity of a Dvorak symphony. When she parted company with me in Singapore, I told her it was such a pleasure getting to actually meet her, because I’d previously only had certain images in my head from looking at her photos, like we all do with the celebrities we admire from afar. “Well, I am glad I have not disappointed you,” she laughed. “You know, everybody has to decide for themselves if it is a good idea to meet the girl that you are seeing in the picture. Because sometimes you can get disappointed. And so, the question is always about how you look in those pictures.”

  I’d seen past her beguiling 36C-24-36 figure and I liked how she had the nerve to see herself as nothing special, even if it was really only a bluff. (As Paul McCartney once said of his own fame as a Beatle, “It’s all a bluff, really. Muhammad Ali told everyone he was the greatest, but did he really believe it?”.) Glamour can be such a con job, after all. For example, Kyla confided in me her own shock at being conferred the coveted status of Penthouse Pet. “When I appeared in Penthouse, I didn’t even know I was on the cover. Nobody told me. I knew that I was shooting for them but I was expecting that they would call me, or somebody from the magazine would let me know and send me my Penthouse key, or something. They did nothing at all. I found out by myself—I was there and saw myself on the cover of Penthouse magazine! I called them and I got my key and everything. They didn’t call me.”

  All Penthouse Pets are given pendants with the famous Penthouse key logo, as a keepsake, but imagine having to actually ask for yours. Was this the fault of the magazine? Perhaps she hadn’t left her forwarding address? Or did they send her the Penthouse key but, in typical Eastern European fashion, it had somehow been “lost” (read stolen) in the mail?

  Shortly after, she appeared in Playboy as well, in a pictorial saluting that year’s Olympic games. “I had two pictures or something, there were a few models. If I had never started in this business, I would not have been able to get the work opportunities so that’s why I am thankful for this. Not just doing the movies but traveling, doing commercials, meeting new people.” In the February 2006 issue of FHM (UK edition), she was voted the top adult entertainer. But she also told me she was reassessing her career; she had done so many photo shoots, they were all starting to blur. There wasn’t even a single, particular favorite layout she could cite. “I know that I cannot be a fashion model, for sure, and I don’t think that I can look like a fashion model. Fashion models are tiny and taller and they don’t have breasts, so I never considered that I could be successful in the fashion business. So I am happy where I am. I am happy that I know where my work is. I will give modeling another year, and then decide what to do next.”

  So, the Penthouse key, the Playboy pictorials, the Andrew Blake movies, and a personal website blessed with regular membership renewals—weren’t those real testimonies to achievement for any girl in the erotica arena? It may seem an unusual form of validation, but her fans still bought her used panties online, at US$50 a pop, and they also ordered customized videos of her posing or dancing only for them, at a minumum charge of US$200 for a ten-minute clip.

  A French fan sent her an unusual birthday present in 2002, when she turned twenty-four, through the International Star Registry (the organization responsible for naming stars), he had an actual star named in her honor, located in the Scorpio constellation, her astrological sign. So that her name, as he told her, “will forever be engraved in the sky.” Talk about star-gazing, and star-worship.

  I’d always thought, however, that the real measure of a sex icon lay in the way she handled erotic fame, since, unlike normal people, her nudity was really a uniform she wore to work. “When I look at my photos, I see someone else, not me,” Kyla said. “When I meet my fans, I find that there are so many of them and everybody is different. Some of them are nervous, some of them are okay, some of them are shaking and they don’t know what to say. They are very shy.

  “I am always laughing, because they don’t have to be nervous, they don’t have to be so shy.” She looked me right in the eyes, half-winking, and smiled that lovely Slavic smile.

  “I am just the girl next door.”

  International Relations

  When you’ve watched too much American porn, you can forget that there are other ways, other perspectives, that can make the super-slick, mass-marketed products of American companies seem hollow. I once wrote a piece for AVN Online, which became the cover story of its April 2004 issue, called “Foreign Affair” which dealt with the porn industry’s non-American girls (since “foreign” equates with non-American in America, however weird that sounds) and how they used their personal websites to further the cause of their own celebrity branding. The genesis of that project actually stemmed from an October 1999 interview I did with the French porn star Rebecca Lord, the long-term impact of which, of course, I had no inkling of at the time.

  We met to talk at, of all places, a Starbucks in Encino, California, sitting outside in the sunshine because Rebecca, effusively Parisian, was a chain smoker. She told me her personal theory about the differences between Europeans and Americans. “We are less puritan in Europe and more open-minded. If you go to the beaches in Europe, everybody’s topless and nobody’s watching people’s breasts. It’s natural. Here in America, if you go topless you know that everybody will watch you and it’s like a bad thing, like it’s illegal. People
are more against violence in Europe and more for the erotic. Look at Hollywood movies and how they will cut parts with nudity and yet they leave all the violent parts alone. In Europe, the same movie will come out and they will cut the violence and leave the nudity. I think that explains a lot.

  “The industry is very small in Europe. Because there is less need for people. Because people are more open-minded, and so they have less need for porn. What people here go through is the opposite of Europe. There is more repression, so there is more need. The same situation applies to drugs. Because when you make drugs illegal, people will actually buy drugs and use them. If drugs were legal, there would be fewer people who would need them. It’s exactly the same thing with sex. The industry is not working that well in Europe. Most of it is small amateur companies. In France, there are only three big professional companies, and that’s it. I think that’s why the porn industry in America works so well. Because more people are sexually frustrated.”

  One of my favorite examples of this was a box cover of Rebecca’s, a four-hour compilation tape that Sin City strung together as a “greatest hits” showcase, called French Kiss. On the cover, Rebecca wore rubber fetish gloves and stockings, with the accompanying slogan: “French fries. French toast, French tart.” On the back of the box were a dozen stills and only a one-sentence blurb: “Tastier than a cream-filled croissant.” Rebecca, like me, found it piquantly funny. Her chosen career was not merely a job to her, after all, but a vocation and she had a sense of humor to match its uniqueness. “I like to think of myself as the Mother Theresa for sex,” she told me, deadpan serious. “I think being a porn actress is a great job, because we bring fantasies to people. We bring happiness to people, to couples as well as to lonely guys, to old guys, or handicapped people who can’t have sex anymore, or to normal people like you and me.”