by Gerrie Lim
I don’t think she even realized I was the only one who had seen the unshot scene. And I don’t think it mattered. Great sex, even on a movie set, was about losing yourself to the moment, and I’m sure she knew that too. She felt herself coming, and didn’t care where she was. How lovely, I thought, when I watched her shudder and quake. Her eyes were both closed during the entire time the cameras were down.
A Dream Called Janine
In the wake of Jenna Jameson’s bestselling memoir, evidence abounded that porn had gone mainstream, acquiring the perverse glamour of a pseudo-sport like professional wrestling. Sure, real sports fans deemed the WWF silly, maybe even downright stupid, but what was wrong with that? Silly and stupid was the whole point, after all.
I knew so, because I had been a foot soldier in the cultural endeavour. People were suddenly asking me what I thought of the hoopla surrounding the 35mm release of Inside Deep Throat, the 2005 documentary about a legendary porn film that cultural historians now viewed as a watershed event of the 70s and a barometer of social change. Why, it was even shown in Singapore, a country where hardcore pornography remained illegal, under the guise of a truthful documentary worthy of social scrutiny. When I published my most recent book, Idol to Icon: The Creation of Celebrity Brands, which tackled the very subject of major-league stardom, many journalists in Singapore were tickled when I told them: “Don’t you think it’s ironic that Singapore has produced only one international celebrity—Annabel Chong, who happens to be a porn star?”
They all laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. What was interesting was that not one person stopped to ask me who Annabel Chong was. They all knew. And not one person stopped to ask if she was still actively involved in the business, because even if she wasn’t (and she indeed wasn’t), that was besides the point. Thanks to one infamous gangbang video, followed by one equally infamous documentary film made because of the notoriety caused by it, she had become a household name.
In some households, I wondered, did anyone remember Amber Waves? She was the porn star protagonist of the film Boogie Nights, played by Julianne Moore, whose brilliant personification of a woman tormented by her calling caught most people by the lump of their throats. Moore spoke about this role when she appeared on television’s Inside the Actor’s Studio; she recalled going to some porn shoots in order to research the role. “The thing I learned,” she said, “was that it’s positional, not emotional.”
Had anyone said anything more profound about porn than that? I think not.
It was the very starting block from which any kind of serious discussion could even take place. The ongoing success of the adult entertainment industry was predicated on one basic premise: people were willing to buy the sizzle, if not the steak, and there were good reasons why so many strippers wanted to be porn stars. Fame was like a beacon lighting up the chrome-pole night, even if many brave exhibitionists were called but few eventually chosen.
I personally met that paradigm head-on when I was assigned to write a feature about the strange confluence of porn stars and rock stars (“Porn Star Rock,” by Drew McKenzie and Jamie Selzer, Penthouse Variations, February 2001), which enabled me to indulge in a private thrill: I got to interview Janine Lindemulder, about her role best known to the public at large—as the cover girl on the 1999 hit album Enema of the State by the band Blink-182, in which she was dressed as a kinky nurse, wearing a sneer and a latex glove, ready for a rectal examination. Janine also appeared in the Blink-182 video for their song “What’s My Age Again?” which prompted mainstream attention, thanks to the album selling three million copies.
The mainstream press suddenly wanted to talk to her, but I wasn’t just hopping on the bandwagon. It was a huge kick for me because Janine was one of the first women whose onscreen presence (most notably in Andrew Blake’s classic film Hidden Obsessions) had inspired me to take a real interest in porn. She was the all-American blonde cheerleader who took the genre several steps farther than Debbie had done Dallas. The fact that she had been one of the most popular Penthouse Pets gave me direct access to her, thanks to some in-house help from our Pet Promotions department, and so they gave me her number and I simply called her at home.
She lived in La Mirada, a nondescript Southern California hamlet adjacent to Orange Country—not quite the place where porn stars were known to thrive, but such anonymity was naturally a blessing and not at all a curse—and she readily agreed to do the interview. She’d talked about Blink-182 to countless journalists already, but this was special. We were both part of the Penthouse family, so she knew I was already in her corner and wasn’t going to do a puff piece to merely help hawk the album. It was going to dig deeper, and serve to reexamine her celebrity status, from the inside looking out.
“I did not know the guys in the band,” she told me. “I just got a phone call from Vivid one afternoon saying that the project had come about. I was a little hesitant, because I didn’t understand it. I think I remember seeing a lot of girls on record covers during the 80s so it seemed like a throwback to an 80s-type gimmick thing.
“But then, when I heard the music and then my son said he was a big Blink-182 fan, I agreed to do it. So, of course, now I’m the coolest mom on the block! Kids come up and want me to sign their CDs, and I get the biggest kick out of that. It has turned out to be one of the biggest highlights of my career.”
The album cover idea was midwifed by Vivid’s then-publicist Brian Gross, whom I’d known at his previous job; he’s been a publicist at Elektra Records, and so used his record company expertise to full advantage. “Fans of Janine want to have everything she does,” Gross explained, on VH-1’s Rankin File show. “When they see her on the cover of a record, they have to have it.” Janine’s newfound mainstream fame drove a stake into the heart of conservative America and helped pave the way for the casual acceptance of porn today. “Blink-182 made it possible for younger fans to make the connection,” Janine told me. “People do look at porn differently now, and I think it has become less taboo.”
Or, as Annabel Chong herself told me, “Janine Lindemulder is the new Jimi Hendrix, and porn is the new rock & roll.”
It many ways, it was the apex of a trajectory that had begun a long time ago, and it signaled how public knowledge of porn had trickled down through the years. Janine, to begin with, had the right look. She was a brown-eyed blonde born in 1968, all of five feet eight inches and 128 pounds, and a photo-friendly 35-24-36. As a departure from the norm, Janine Lindemulder was actually her real name (she is Dutch-American). While working as a stripper on the bachelor party circuit, she’d posed for Penthouse and become the December 1987 Pet of the Month centerfold, which led to her appearing in several Penthouse videos—somewhat cheesy, softcore titles like Ready to Ride and Women In and Out of Uniform, and the Andrew Blake-directed Satin and Lace.
With Blake came the vital, fateful connection; in August 1992, she worked with him again on his classic film, Hidden Obsessions, which received rave reviews for one particular scene, still talked about to this very day. It starred a winsome threesome: Janine, her regular girl-girl partner Julia Ann, and a dildo made of ice.
“Howard Stern called it Frosty the Penis,” Blake had told me, chuckling. “Janine was very business-like and very professional. I picked her because she’s very attractive. It’s too bad we weren’t able to connect more, but that’s the way it was.” Janine confirmed to me that theirs was an enjoyable relationship, though they certainly went their separate ways after shooting. She told me she was grateful to Blake for helping her get started.
“Well, she did a lot for me too,” Blake quipped. It was an understatement, since Hidden Obsessions instantly became a porn classic and got his own career rolling. It won three notable AVN Awards, for “Best Cinematography,” “1992’s Best Selling Tape,” and, for that ice dildo sequence, the “Best All-Girl Sex Scene.” Janine, additionally, won “Best Actress” at the Hot D’Or awards in Cannes. As a direct result of the huge suc
cess of Hidden Obsessions, Vivid signed her to a contract.
She then teamed up with Julia Ann to dance on the road as a duo, known as Blondage, wreaking havoc in strip clubs across America. They dripped hot wax on each other and performed acts deftly skirting the fine line between permissible raunch and the other kind (the one that gets performers thrown out of clubs). One of their rowdier sequences saw Janine grabbing Julia Ann’s hair and dragging her around the floor on all fours. The famous ice dildo scene was immortalized again on video by director Toni English in Blondage: The Movie. “The thrill of the cold when we take turns rubbing and probing one another with it is incredible,” Janine reminisced in Club magazine. “I love the feel of it melting all over our bodies, and using the frozen cock to drip droplets of water onto Julia Ann’s pussy, that I naturally just have to lap it up.”
However, in March 1998, she came to mainstream attention in a way she hadn’t intended. A home video of her having sex with Vince Neil, the lead singer of the band Motley Crue, began circulating on the Internet and then made its way into video stores. Janine and Vince Neil: Hardcore and Uncensored, made the news in the footsteps of the more famous Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee home video. It had been shot while she was vacationing in Hawaii with Neil, and no one claimed responsibility for the leak.
“I don’t mind talking about it,” she said, after I’d gingerly brought up the subject. This was July 2000, two years later, and she’d come to terms with it. “While it all went down, I was very hurt and bitter. It did come as a shock. I had forgotten about that video. When we walked away from that whole Hawaii vacation, I didn’t think twice that that would ever get out and about.
“And it sure did. I’m not one to hold grudges. It was what it was and, at this point, it hasn’t affected my life in such a horrible, negative way. It’s really no big deal. The only thing is that I feel like I was a little betrayed. It’s very possible that Vince is innocent in this whole thing too. There was a time when I was sure he was the one that put it out. But I don’t have proof of that. I don’t know who did it, or how it got out. I sure would like to know.”
The sex itself she had no problems with. “It was a fantastic vacation. People ask who was behind the camera and, most of the time, it was me. Unless I propped it up on the dresser or something. It was myself and one of my best girlfriends and Vince. And Vince can be a real party animal. It was an experience that I look back on fondly. Just like you see in the video, it was fun.”
Well, it did set the stage for a certain hotel heiress to claim her fame ticket (The now better-known Paris Hilton home video actually won the “Best Selling DVD” trophy at the 2005 AVN Awards). And, more relevent to porn fans, it busted the Janine Lindemulder mythology—for not having sex with men onscreen. I personally liked her for the way she sensually dominated women onscreen and had always accepted that as part of her “branding,” but Janine later explained that she was then married to a jealous husband who had insisted on her performing with girls only.
They finally divorced after eight years, and she then married again in 2002—another tragic mistake, this time to the famous custom motorcycle builder Jesse James (who, in 2005, married the squeaky-clean Hollywood actress Sandra Bullock!)—and it was a turn of events that precipitated her new decision to emerge from yet another “retirement” phase with fresh resolve: she would have sex with men on-camera for the first time, starting with the film Maneater in 2004, and then the big-budget Emperor in 2005. The latter paired her with the Italian male star Rocco Siffredi, in his last role before retiring after eighteen years as a working stud. (The production, shot in Los Angeles and Budapest, did not go well for the two, who fought over Siffredi’s refusal to use a condom and Janine’s ensuing refusal to do scenes with him.)
However, of all the things I had talked to Janine about in the course of our long interview, two things stood out.
The first was when I asked about her well-known association with rock musicians. The Vince Neil connection was an obvious set-up, the cynics might have postulated, since she had appeared previously in a Motley Crue video. “I’ve definitely been with my share of musicians,” she told me. “But I can’t name names. I’m pretty modest when it comes to that stuff. I’m not a kiss-and-tell type of person.
“For a good portion of my twenties, I was a little wild one and I’ve been on my share of tour buses. But I’ve never really acted anything out in a gnarly-slut way. It’s not fulfulling for me. I’ve had my menage a trois and stuff like that, but they were very spiritual, in a way. I’m not one to get wasted and go do something really gnarly and nasty and forget about it. For me, personally, that would really take a toll on my heart and head.”
And that was basically all she’d say about that. I got no good rock groupie stories out of her. Damn. But the second thing I recalled with exceptional fondness from the interview was even better. I did get her to confess to a secret sexual fetish.
It started with my asking her about the nurse uniform idea, the way she appeared in the Blink-182 album package. “That was their thing,” she replied. “I think originally I was supposed to be a teacher. They called me and they asked me to dress like a sexy school teacher. Kind of ironic, being that I want to be a teacher. But once I got there for the shoot, they informed me that they wanted me to be a nurse. It was kinky, and fun, for me.”
So did she have any sexual fantasies involving the medical profession? “I think I’ve talked about it more than I’ve actually lived it out, though it has been a topic of sexual conversation, that’s for sure,” she admitted. “I do start to sweat every time I go into the gynaecologist.” She stopped, and started giggling. “In a good way.”
I asked her to explain.
She started blushing.
“Oh my gosh, now you’re making me blush! It’s just—I must be getting too old because now I blush real easy. I don’t know, it’s just one of those things—”
She paused again, and I tried to help.
“You mean, like fantasies of being strapped down, onto chairs maybe?”
“A dentist’s chair, or anything to do with dental or doctors, I think.” She kept giggling, and blushing even more. “I think it’s all right up my alley.” She disssolved into another giggling fit, and stopped me when I started to get into gynaecological descriptions based on what I’d seen of her own lovely anatomy. “Have mercy!” she cried.
Me, make a porn star blush? That was certainly a first.
Even famous sex workers, I realized, had their deeply held personal demons, usually kept from public scrutiny. And how little her adoring public actually knew.
Janine had actually made inroads into mainstream fame a couple of years back. GQ magazine in its August 1997 issue had done a feature on her entitled, “The Sex Worker Next Door.” It described her as a “golly-gosh-darn-it Breck girl, a honey-haired, high-cheekboned native Californian who’d look as natural wearing a Laura Ashley sundress and running through a field of high corn as she does with a fifteen-inch dildo, sodomizing one of her pals on a pool table.”
That interview was a companion piece to a larger article, “The Porning of America” by GQ senior writer Lucy Kaylin, about porn as a hip-and-happening genre. Jenna Jameson was then only two years in the business (and a whole seven years before her bestselling book) and Janine was already a trailblazer.
Kaylin concluded that “porn is a $10 billion industry deeply embedded in American life” and “a large part of porn’s move to the mainstream has involved the prettying up of this historically lurid form of entertainment … To that end, porn-video companies are strategically marketing their products to better-heeled yuppie couples (an approach that seems to be working: according to Adult Video News, 665 million hardcore movies were rented last year—up from 75 million a decade before). Vivid Video, for instance, hired an art director and a publicist from outside the business to give the company and its products a ‘classier’ look. It’s also signing porn actresses to exclusive contracts and hooking them up w
ith corporate sponsors … The plan is to humanize the actresses, make them seem more like happy, responsible stars, as opposed to the drug-addicted meat they were treated as back in porn’s outlaw adolescence.”
Janine seemed very humanized indeed, and always looked happy. Her biggest contribution to modern pop culture, in my own assessment, lay in enabling the world to see the sparkling visage of the Vivid Girl. Even The Economist devoted an article to Vivid (in its August 14, 1999 issue, cleverly entitled “Branded Flesh”) which noted that “Vivid Girls command a premium on the stripping circuit, earning anywhere between $5,000 and $20,000 a week … Every porn girl harbors a secret dream of crossing into the mainstream world; her chances of doing so, though pretty small, are probably higher with Vivid than anywhere else.”
I remember the very first time I walked into the offices of Vivid Video. There were no naked women banging away in rooms or corridors, and nothing of the sort that some people outside the business might imagine. No, Vivid reminded me of the corporate offices of Playboy and Penthouse, both of which I’d already spent much time in, only actually more mundane. Vivid then housed itself in a nondescript red-brick building on a quiet residential street in Van Nuys, a distinctly middle-to-lower class suburb of the San Fernando Valley, so discreetly tucked away that I got lost looking for it the first time.
I even remember the first time I sat in the office of Brad Hirsch, the company’s then Director of Marketing (and the younger brother of Vivid boss Steven Hirsch). He had a huge Black Sabbath poster on the wall and hardly anything on his desk except a small stack of work files. No video tapes, no sex toys, nothing even remotely close to controversial. This was just a business like any other business. He spent most of the meeting telling me of his passion for Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath, and we talked about the new projects of the Vivid Girls only at the end of our discussion.