In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema

by Gerrie Lim

  However, she added, “I think there is a big difference between a porn star and a prostitute. The difference, to me, is that a porn star brings fantasies to the public. We have sex with people in the industry who are professionals and we sell videos to customers who like to watch us. Bring a prostitute is about having sex with customers, for physical pleasure. Not all jobs in the sex industry are the same, just because there is sex involved.”

  Five years later, when I started work on my AVN Online “foreign girls” project, Rebecca not only readily gave me a second interview but also volunteered to put me in email contact with her friend and fellow Las Vegas resident Olivia Del Rio, the Brazilian porn star. Olivia had co-starred with Rebecca in Pure Sex Vol.1, the inaugural release from Rebecca’s own company, Lolita Entertainment. Back when that came out, in July 1999, I didn’t really know Olivia at all (I knew only of Vanessa Del Rio, a porn star from an earlier generation), so I visited her website (www.oliviadelrio.com) and was fascinated by what I saw.

  Rebecca used her site (www.rebeccalord.com) to entice members who wanted to know more about her as a person, writing lengthy, confessional thoughts, but Olivia was unabashedly different. She was into selling herself completely as a sex object, and her site even had a special section devoted to her escorting services; discerning gentlemen across the United States could book her online, at her regular rate—US$2,500 an hour.

  Having been to Brazil myself, back in 1984, I’d already been seduced by the sexually-open lifestyle which now seemed well reflected by this woman from Belo Horizonte; Olivia was five feet seven inches, 34C-26-34, and had already starred in a slew of stuff—from edgy director Thomas Zupko’s Flesh Circus to Joe D’Amato’s more pedestrian College Girl, the latter shot in Budapest and Prague, and featuring her with three studs who popped simultaneously on her face. “The fans tell me what they think of my sex performances, often in great detail,” Olivia told me of her often voluminous email inbox. “These guys ask me many questions and provide me with many suggestions. I can relax and enjoy chats with them and get wild. I’m not that different from other adult stars, but who else could murmur some Portuguese words while having sex? After meeting lots of fans at different conventions in the US, I have the feeling thet they come to my site to see something other than your usual California blondes.”

  Her unbridled energy is reflected on the site. As her “bio” page states, she likes “beautiful dicks, horny chicks, and bondage,” and her favorite fantasy is “to fuck a man’s ass.” But she had to base herself in the United States in order to secure a fan base, because “the adult entertainment scene in Brazil is pretty small. Ninety-nine percent of the movies made there are gonzos, and they don’t have really big budgets. Also, the Internet in Brazil is something for the rich people. Not many poor people can access the Internet.”

  Indeed, we sometimes forget that there are parts of the world where Internet penetration isn’t high simply because it isn’t affordable to most people. For my AVN Online story, I looked at the case of Australia, culled from a 1998 Goldman Sachs Investment Research Study—unlike some other writers in this business, I never invented statistics to impart intellectual heft—which revealed that forty-two percent of Australia’s 6.9 million households (as opposed to individuals) had computer access, and PC penetration alone stood at twenty-six percent. I was interested in Australia because I had once lived there myself, so I knew quite intimately the cultural context, and also for two other good reasons: Monica Mayhem and Jodie Moore, arguably the two most famous porn stars from Down Under. (Well, there was a third, actually—Monica and Jodie were, in my eyes, carrying the torch first lit by Cheryl Rixon, the 1979 Penthouse Pet of the Year, Australia’s first adult entertainment sex goddess, but Cheryl was before the age of home video.)

  I’d first met Monica in October 2001, in (of all places) a bowling alley in Tarzana, California, which was the location that day for a Toni English Naked Hollywood episode. The series starred Nina Hartley, Keri Windsor, Dee, and Asia Carrera, so I knew Monica was there to play a guest role. What was her part, I asked. “Well, I play a slut, basically,” she giggled, nodding at the innuendo. “But I’m just doing dialogue today. I’ve done sex already.” We hit it off immediately, and I sat down with her to do an impromptu interview which ended up as a personality profile (“Let’s Get Ready to Rumble: Monica Mayhem Shakes Up the Net,” AVN Online, April 2002).

  Her life story was already very much the stuff of porn star dreams. Originally from Brisbane, Queensland, she’d been lured to the bright lights of big-city Sydney, with dreams of being an actress. But once there, as her online bio disclosed, she “got caught up in the world of financial markets, foreign exchange tradings and futures broking.” She started out working for Westpac, an Australian bank, before joining Lloyds Bank and Commonwealth Bank. This career path eventually took her to London, where she worked in futures brokering for Salomon Smith Barney. But the free spirit in her rebelled against the regimentation of the business suit.

  “Bored to death of that world, I decided I needed to be in a job where I could choose my own hours and do what I wanted, when I wanted, and with whomever I wanted to work with,” she recalled. “I answered an ad in a newspaper for glamour models. I checked it out, decided, yeah, I can be naked. I did quite a few softcore shoots in London.”

  The turning point came in December 2000, when she graduated from modeling to stripping, at the Spearmint Rhino club in London. “One night after work, we were all getting drunk and I met one of the owners, who was American, and I dared him to fly me back to the States with him,” she told me. “Four hours later, we were on the plane to Texas—I’d gotten a free trip to America!

  “So I left everything behind and came over, totally spontaneous. I had no money, nothing at all. So I danced for one night at the Spearmint Rhino in City of Industry, and made a lot of money there. After that, I kind of got hooked up with a photographer, Hank Londoner; he shot me for everyone and anyone, Swank and Leg World and elsewhere, and then he sent me to an agent who talked me into doing videos.” Monica served her porn apprenticeship in decidedly downmarket fare—reflected in titles like Fast Times at Deep Crack High #3, The Oral Adventures of Craven Moorhead #6, and The Blowjob Adventures of Dr. Fellatio #35—before landing better parts in better films, most notably four VCA films: Portrait of a Woman, The New Girls, The Stalker, and Hysteria.

  “I think Hysteria is my strangest film to date,” she told me. “It’s about aliens possessing me and I’m just going crazy, masturbating and having sex. Porn, to me, is an easy way to make money that’s fun at the same time.” It was better than having to monitor the Dow Jones Industrial Average, no doubt. Monica and I continued to keep in touch, long after the interview appeared in print, partly because of a watershed event that sealed our friendship.

  It had to do with the story I’d written about her in AVN Online. The production of her personal website (www.monicamayhem.com) was done by a company called Pop Sex, Inc., the Internet arm of the gonzo porn production entity Shane Enterprises, which was in turn owned by my friend Jennie Grant. I’d first met Jennie when I interviewed the porn star Shane for Penthouse Variations three years earlier. Jennie was friendly enough with me to speak her mind about Monica’s comments in that AVN Online interview; she’d winced when she read the final paragraphs, in which Monica had divulged something unbecoming of a true porn star, at least in Jennie’s more business-minded view.

  “I don’t get any pleasure from penetration,” Monica admitted to me. “That doesn’t do anything for me. I’m not like most girls who say they love doggie style because they can feel it deeper. I can’t climax vaginally and that’s been my biggest trouble. Even clitorially, it’s very, very hard. I orgasm only from oral sex, masturbation or vibrators.”

  “When I’m being penetraed by a guy on-camera, I find it very easy to fake,” she added. “I get pleasure from whatever’s on the outside, like skin contact. Nothing internal. I guess it’s all part of the acting.
” Jennie, as a producer, understandably didn’t like that but I found it refreshingly candid, since some porn stars tended to exaggerate their sexual attributes. Many of them bragged that they’re built for the business because they’re easily orgasmic, so Monica was being unusually honest.

  “Don’t worry about that whole thing with Jennie,” she emailed me at the end of February 2002. “Some people are just touchy.” By this time, Monica had won the XRCO (X-Rated Critics Organization) “Starlet of the Year” award. I congratulated her, but to my surprise she wasn’t gushing with enthusiasm. “I really don’t think this award will take me anywhere,” she told me. “I haven’t had any new phone calls or anything yet, and I don’t think that people take these things too seriously in the biz. But thanks, matey.”

  Three years later, I saw her in the July 2005 issue of Genesis, a nine-page layout with her blond hair gone, now dyed a deep red-brown. She also showed off her new tattoos—red flames on both wrists, plus a dragon on her left upper arm—none of which I’d seen before. “Yes, it is red,” she emailed me when I asked about her new hair. “I got more tattoos. The writings on my wrists are all runestones—health, success, happiness, protection from enemies, love, wealth, divinity, my sign (Pisces), my planets (Neptune and Jupiter), and on the back of my neck, the protective eye of Horus. The dragon on my left arm is from the Welsh flag, as I’m part Welsh, and the right arm is just a Celtic link with snake heads. And the flames on my wrists, well, just cause I’m on fire!”

  By that time, Monica had done more than 200 films and looked very, very hardcore after just four years in the business. Maybe it was the heavy eye make-up but there was a hardness in her eyes I hadn’t seen before, a kind of pulchritude laced with pathos, noticeably different from the fresh-faced ingenue I’d met back in the bowling alley. Something had happened to her. A certain cynicism had possibly crept in. I found it savagely arresting, even sexy. In November 2005, she told me she was still working, having just been filmed having sex in productions from Metro, Naughty America, Playboy TV and by directors Nicholas Steele, Sean Michaels, and Suze Randall. “Just everyone,” she quipped, with a sardonic shrug. “I didn’t really do much this year.”

  In retrospect, I had detected her incipient world-weariness back in April 2004, when I told her I also wanted to interview her fellow Queenslander Jodie Moore for my “foreign girls” piece, and her response wasn’t exactly sanguine. “We’ve met and hung out, but she doesn’t return phone calls, so I gave up on her as a friend,” Monica told me. But she admitted she was envious of Jodie’s signing as contract girl to Private North America, an adjunct of the European porn giant Private Media Group. “Lucky girl, hey?” she said to me. “Wish I could’ve got hooked up like that.”

  Jodie Moore, however, didn’t stay with Private for very long, even though her film The Scottish Loveknot won “Best Foreign Feature” at the 2004 AVN Awards. By the time I interviewed her in June 2003, she was already gone. She had signed a new contract with Legend Video, based in Chatsworth, and had stayed with Private for just one year. “Private wanted me to be based in Europe, but there’s nothing for me in Europe,” she told me. “I’ve made a home here in Los Angeles.”

  She’d been in the business a mere year and a half but already had a massive publicity machine going. For one thing, she had political ambitions. At the time I was interviewing her, she was running for the position of Lord Mayor of Brisbane in the March 2004 elections. She had previously run for the Australian senate—twice!—and had scored five percent of the vote the first time, slightly less the second try. Cries of “Cicciolina!” abounded, recalling Italian porn star Ilona Staller, who had run successfully for political office back in the 1980s.

  But Jodie said something very funny to me. “I don’t see myself as a celebrity,” she quipped, on her cellphone while driving home on the San Diego Freeway. “Just between you and me, sweetie, this is just porn. I’m just a porn girl. I’m not Julia Roberts.”

  Was her political drive, though, something deeper than a publicity stunt? It certainly drove traffic to her website (www.jodiemoore.com). As David Harris, her webmaster, told me, “When Jodie makes some political statement in Australia, the site really does get hammered. It was overloaded when she appeared on 60 Minutes. At the peak, we had 10,000 hits a minute.” Harris, who uploaded all of Jodie’s graphics after she’d chosen them, noted that this created an interesting schism in her fan base. Jodie had both porn fans (mostly in the United States) and political fans (mostly back home in Australia) and so, given the 19-hour time difference between Los Angeles and Brisbane, her site was never short on eyeballs. “One of the advantages of having the site in Australia,” Harris told me, “is that the two different fan bases are looking at the site at opposite times, so the load on the server is spread out a little.”

  Jodie, to me, sounded very passionate about her politics, even if some people thought her downright loony. One of her campaign platforms called for an all-nude Mardi Gras in Brisbane. “Why not? If you get elected Lord Mayor, you can do anything,” she told me. “The interest I have in politics comes from my wish to shake up the system and to have my say about the rights of those who like to make their own decisions about adult products. If you don’t try, then nothing will change.”

  She also wanted to start an Australian union for strippers and sex workers (despite having heard all the reasons why this notion has failed everywhere) and was equally effusive about her “celebrity branding” as an Australian. “I think more Americans now want to see Australian stuff,” she said. “There are things that make us kind of exotic, like the Australian accent and the fact that we’re the only country in the world that eats Vegemite. I got into this business because there are no adult movie stars in Australia. I was a stripper for six years and then, one day someone said to me, ‘How come there aren’t any porn stars in Australia?’ That’s when I decided to do films. In Australia, there are production companies but they’re only little ones, nothing on the size of Vivid or Wicked. I think that the more I get involved with politics, the more people will get to know about porn stars.

  “Now, people are fascinated about us. We have a Sexpo convention in Australia now. When I went there last February, it was so overwhelming because it was held in Brisbane, my hometown, and so many people came out to see me. You have no idea how that made me feel. It felt so warm inside. It made me realize that Australia will always be my home. My fans in Australia usually email me to say things like, ‘It’s great, what you’re doing,’ and ‘I remember when you were living in Woodridge, I remember when you were just stripping.’ I get a lot of emails from girls who say, ‘I wish I could be as wild as you.’ I’m lost for words when I read that!”

  I think a universal emotion was being echoed there. Our search for erotic ecstasy can often become entwined with our capacity of human empathy. The most memorable object lesson for me, in this light, was when I asked Rebecca Lord about the fact that she had been married to the same man for all the time she’d been a porn star.

  “I’ve been married for almost ten years now,” she told me, “I think people should remember that marriage is not only about sex. It’s a big part of it, but it’s not everything. It’s also about love. And we don’t have much love in the porn industry.”

  Czeching in at the Hotel California

  For reasons I’ve never completely understood, all my favorite porn stars hail from the same part of the world, even though they have names that aren’t Eastern European at all. Like Monica Sweetheart, Regina Hall, Daniella Rush, Wanda Curtis, Dominica Leoni, and the late Lea De Mae (who died from brain cancer in her native Prague, in December 2004; she’d signed a large poster for me, which I’ll never sell on eBay).

  But I know of an old Czech proverb that applies: “If the Devil is unable to do a job, he substitutes a woman.” Because, of all the women on that chiseled-cheeked firmament, there is one who has always been the one: Silvia Saint.

  If it’s true that you can uncover the mys
tique of porn stars from simply telling one story, hers is the one to tell.

  I first saw Silvia in October 1998, on the cover of American Penthouse, after she’d been crowned her native Czech Penthouse Pet of the Year in 1997 and won her first AVN Award the same year for “Best Tease Performance” (in a film called Fresh Meat #4), and also scored the 1997 “People’s Choice Adult Award” for “Best Newcomer.” By the time I got round to meeting her, she was everywhere, a new media darling, dangerously so. She would come to Los Angeles and find herself booked for three straight weeks. Critics and fans were calling her the new queen of porn, especially after she’s sizzled up the screen in director Nic Cramer’s Looker, his film noir porn homage which won the AVN “Best Film” award of 1999.

  She had only one scene in that film, but what a scene. She played a hooker who services a police detective played by her current beau, the Turkish-German stud Hakan Serbes. I had never seen any girl rock and swivel her hips so sensuously, as the camera held on her open thighs in reverse-cowgirl position, her lusciously pink vaginal lips firmly clamping his erection, and her mouth open in a come-hither, come-quickly half-sneer. But it was the way she rocked and swiveled that blew my mind. I couldn’t get that one out of my head for days on end.

  “Jack Remy, my cinematographer, said that her scene in Looker was the single best sex scene he’d shot in his twenty-year career,” Nic gushed. “Silvia Saint is arguably the most beautiful woman I have had the pleasure to aim a camera lens at. She oozes sex. The fact that she’s demure, very intelligent, charmingly friendly and always approachable makes her an absolute treasure.”