The Porno Girls

The House Lights were just coming up after the screening of a Walt Disney movie in a Los Angeles theater, and Susannah Fields, a 19-year-old bride whose hobbies include sewing and baking bread, picked up her purse and started to leave. Suddenly she was accosted by a shout from the balcony: "Say," called the male voice, "weren't you the girl in Sexual Freedom in Denmark?"

"It happens all the time," admits Susannah, who was, indeed, one of the girls in S.F.D., a quintessential compilation of stag-reel footage shown under the banner of sex education. "I'll walk down Sunset Boulevard and some guy will stop me and say, 'Haven't I seen you in the movies?' I just look him right in the eye and say, 'Well, it depends on what kind of movies you've been watching lately.' "

Susannah Fields is just one of six stage names used by this breezy high school dropout, who in many ways is typical of the new breed of attractive young women who are appearing in a kind of film that used to be shown, in silent, scratchy black and white, at lodge smokers and in the darkened basements of private homes. Today, the same kinds of sexual intimacies are depicted in sound and living color--with an occasional soupçon of plot line--in downtown and neighborhood moviehouses across the nation.

The daughter of a Mormon bishop, Susannah ran away from home at the age of 17 to make her way in the world, but, as she describes it, "Every time I got a legitimate job, my family was able to trace me." So she answered an underground-paper ad and started modeling for short films--"You know, the kind where you lick lollipops and show your breasts." As the movies became more graphic, Susannah went along, and for the past six months has been making hard-core pornographic features--some 15 of them, to the best of her recollection.

"At first I was really embarrassed about doing it," she recalls. "But it's really a lot nicer than working a straight job. The people in the business become like your family, and since with them you already have your sex hang-ups out of the way, you can relax and be yourself." Her husband, a rock-'n'-roll musician, thinks her career is "pretty funny," but raises no objections. Susannah's father, however, believes she models wigs.

San Franciscan Mary Rexroth's father is under no illusions about what she's doing on the screen. He's the well-known poet-philosopher Kenneth Rexroth and when Mary became one of the first porn-movie queens to achieve star billing under her own name, the news predictably made headlines. "Most people won't use their own names, because they come from uptight families," she says with a shrug. "I don't. My dad was in burlesque once, and at that time, burlesque performers had a similar position in society--they were somehow set apart. So he understands. And my mother went to see one of my films and her reaction was, 'Sex can really get boring, can't it?' "

As Mary, in a simple dress, thick-lensed glasses and tousled hair, talked in the upstairs dining room of a Chinatown restaurant filled with tourists and family groups, there was little to distinguish her from a typical college English-lit student. Except, that is, for a rather spectacular cleavage. Her table companions were a Playboy staffer and Kerry Price, a 21-year-old brunette newly retired from the San Francisco porn-pix industry. Kerry explained that she'd come to San Francisco nine months before, after two years at the University of Wisconsin, where the increasingly radicalized political scene was becoming too heavy for her to take. "I'd been here only about two weeks when a guy I'd known at Wisconsin told me he'd answered an ad in the Berkeley Barb and had made an appointment for us to perform as a couple in a sex film. I said, 'You're crazy!' I had visions of some dirty old man with a camera. Then I thought, oh, what the hell, and we went and had Polaroid pictures taken with our clothes off. That was all. The whole thing seemed unreal."

A few days passed; then a director called to ask Kerry if she'd work solo. Hesitatingly, she agreed; but before the scheduled shooting, she took advantage of a theater pass, compliments of the director, and went to see a pair of sexplicit movies. Her reaction: "Me? Doing that?" Not only did she skip the filming date, she temporarily stopped answering her phone. "Then, two months later, one of the film makers called again. By that time, I felt ashamed of chickening out, that I might be missing a mind-blowing experience. So I made my first dirty movie--Just Plain Bill, it was called."

After appearing in several pictures, Kerry says she "feels more secure, in that I've learned a lot about myself. But I quit the business, because I was getting ripped off. I had to make it with guys I wouldn't look twice at, let alone go to bed with. The final straw was the time I was supposed to do three fuck scenes in one day, and on a filthy bed at that. The least they could have done was provide clean sheets, right?"

Like most of her blue-movie contemporaries, Kerry comes from a relatively conservative background. Her father, a Midwestern educator, telephoned her in San Francisco shortly after her screen debut. "Did you find a job yet?" he asked with paternal concern.

"Yes," replied Kerry, "I'm making some films."

Unexpectedly, her father caught on immediately: "What kind of films? Pornographic?" Kerry's blurted confession led to a period of markedly cool parent-child relations.

British-born Maggie Matson, a Berkeley sex-film star, is the product of a strict Catholic (text continued on page 148) upbringing. "At one time I thought seriously of becoming a nun," she says. Lucinda Housman, who now lives in the Haight-Ashbury district and has appeared in five hard-core flicks, has an I.Q. estimated at 150 but dropped out of college in New York City because, she says, she couldn't tolerate her parents' conservatism; her father is a retired police captain and her mother a former private detective.

Although some observers feel that the new generation of porn stars is motivated partly by a desire to scandalize its elders, many young performers express serious concern that their parents might discover, and be hurt by, their activities. Even in supposedly sexually liberated Denmark, where the porn revolution began a couple of years ago, pretty Mette Lovstrand--although she's been an exotic dancer in a live-sex club--will pose only for nude stills destined for the German market, which she feels sure her parents and friends will never see. And a popular San Francisco porn-film actress goes by the pseudonym Grenda (the name of the nymphomaniac she played in Leo Productions' Straight Banana), because, she says, "I wouldn't want to put my family through hell over something so trivial." Such reservations aside, most of the young stars of what they themselves describe as "fuck-and-suck films" are refreshingly candid about their work. Obviously products of a new morality, these girls--and their husbands and boyfriends, who are frequently their co-stars--see nothing wrong in uninhibited sexual expression. One budding starlet matter-of-factly lists her hobbies as "fucking and horseback riding." If you like to do it, they reason, why not do it in front of a camera? And if you're going to do it in front of a camera, why not get paid for it?

Anna Feurstenberg, who wrote, directed and appeared in portions of the softcore Lesbian film Andromeda, points out another fringe benefit. "It makes unbeatable salon chatter," she says. "You can really score points with the hip and pseudo hip at a cocktail party by casually dropping a remark like, 'Oh, yes, I was in a porno film last month.'"

Talking about it in public can lead to problems, however, as Grenda discovered when she agreed to discuss her career on a local TV talk show. In her straight life, Grenda is a student nurse--and who should catch the program and recognize her but her school's nursing supervisor. Called on the carpet the next morning, the underground actress was politely but firmly advised that the school couldn't control her private life, but could she please exercise a bit more discretion?

Like Grenda, many pornography stars, all basically free-lancers, pursue other careers. Bavarian-born Nora Wieternik of Los Angeles illustrates children's books. Lucinda Housman leads an encounter group. Mary Rexroth, like her father, is a poet; her first slim volume, The Coffee Should Be Warm Now, has been published by Twowindows Press. In Copenhagen, 23-year-old Lisbeth Olsen works four days a week in a home for the aged; Helene Mikkelsen, who speaks six languages fluently, is an interpreter and tour guide; and Mette Lovstrand is a law student and part owner of a children's dress shop.

On the freewheeling California scene, however, making porn films is often the participants' principal means of support. Since the going wage is only about $35 for appearing in a short subject to $150 for the rarer feature-length movie, and the work is far from steady, this choice of career is hardly among the most remunerative. Why, then, do they do it? The actors--or models, as they're still called in an industry not yet free of its underground, silent, plotless ancestry--answer with surprising unanimity. They have rejected what they see as the middle-class, materialistic trap of nine to five. "I just couldn't stand to work in an office," comes the reply, with few variations.

The style of living is unconventional but not unpredictable: Many share a home with one or more roommates, sometimes in urban or rural communes. It's not uncommon for a girl to hitchhike to San Francisco every month or so from an agrarian commune back in the hills to recoup her finances with a film gig. Jill Julian, who appears in the recently released Wine God Bodies and a dozen or so other sex flicks, describes her household on the fringe of Haight-Ashbury as "a semicommune with seven people and 29 animals." Another actress, familiar to scores of stag-film fans from more than 100 reels shot over the past three years, is both housewife and mother whose husband is also an occasional porn performer. "That's how we add to our welfare income," she explains ingenuously.

Some of the girls will admit to other motivations. "Anybody who says she's doing it just for the bread is hedging a bit," says Mary Rexroth. "I must really like being watched or I wouldn't keep making films. When you're in these movies, you're suddenly a sex goddess, so you don't have to use sex as an ego trip anymore. You can just relax and enjoy it." Laureen Pierre, a bubbly former nude dancer who claims she's been fired from every club on San Francisco's Broadway for agitation among her fellow entertainers for better working conditions, has made only one blue movie--but recalls, "The excitement of having the nerve to do what I was doing turned me on." Gary James, a male performer currently much in demand in California, says, "I make the films because I'm basically lazy--and I like sex." Some girls fantasize that they're making love to the camera--or to the cameraman. Jill Julian acknowledges, "In a way, it excites me that other people are seeing me. I guess it gives me some kind of pride in my body." Male stag stars or directors are often more cynical. Says one, "Chicks do it because it's a chance to ball and get paid for it."

Many performers with serious acting ambitions see the flourishing hard-core film industry--believe it or not--as a way of getting valuable screen experience while the established studios are going through tough times. A similar thesis is espoused by the scores of cinema students who shoot sex footage as a means of getting otherwise unattainable behind-the-camera training. One San Francisco housewife, working under the name Maurinie Fellini, put herself through college by filming some 100 20-minute epics--and doing the sound on 100 more. "I applied for jobs at TV stations and regular motion-picture studios," she says, "but they weren't hiring women. Working in the underground was the only way I could really get my hands on a camera." Now graduated from school with a minor in film, she's trying to raise funds to produce a legitimate feature film.

New York's Jacquelyn Glenn, who acts as an agent for hard-core performers but limits her own work to nudie skin flicks--"I don't want them to be able to pin anything on me when I'm sixty"--finds that her willingness to strip onscreen is much in demand. "Everybody else I know in acting is starving; I'm not. But I do wish they'd give me a line to say with my clothes on." In Los Angeles, Nora Wieternik is beginning to get lines in R-rated films--enough, she feels, to enable her to refuse the kind of stag-reel roles she made while breaking into the business. Hollywood's Maria Arnold--star of the newly released Cozy Cool, a blue parody of gangster films--figures this is a stage of development in her dramatic career. "The way I see it," she says, "it's better than balling the producers off-camera. That's something I won't do."

In every conversation with these young actors, a kind of in-group moral code surfaces. Professional hookers and hard-core drug users, for example, are shunned, and few actors will engage in anal sex, bestiality or homosexual scenes between males. Female homosexuality, however, is not censured. Dr. William Simon, who spent three years at the Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana, and is now program supervisor of sociology and anthropology at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, theorizes, "All occupations develop their own morality codes. These kids are in the underbelly of the hip culture and what they are doing is an affirmation of the casualness (continued on page 248) The Porno Girls (continued from page 148) with which they believe one should deal with one's body."

Unlike the prostitute and the stripper, who Simon says are not really sexual persons, "These kids are sexual first and professional second. They have no conception of themselves as adults in adult careers, no sense of delaying gratification for future success. They think, 'Gee, it's a fast $100 and very little sweat for me.' " Besides, says Simon, for the first time, sex-film participants have as models "very respectable actresses doing almost, but not quite, the same things, in R-rated movies. No prior generation of porno performers has had that example." Today's girls, he says, can rationalize that they're merely doing what a Hollywood superstar does--only a little more and with greater honesty. As such, they have "a fantastic basis for a moral put-down." Simon feels that the whole porn-film revolution is set in a rich ideological context wherein the actors have "a wonderful sense of detachment, in that they're faking out the squares." Mary Rexroth concurs. "There's a definite sense, in a subtly political kind of way, of 'us-against-them' in the industry," she says.

Whatever motivates sex-film stars, there's no problem in recruiting actors. Want ads glut the pages of such underground newspapers as the Berkeley Barb and Los Angeles Free Press. Neighborhood bulletin boards blossom with flip notices such as Sex-Crazed Hippies needed for fuck films or posters such as the relatively tasteful interested in film acting? Join San Francisco's most promising young film makers in exploring the new erotic film genre to express the new way of life; hip, liberated, loving. Some of the lures are more lurid: Pregnant and lactating chicks needed now for erotic filmwork. Good Bread. Work the same day you apply. Quite a change, reports longtime skin-flick director Warren St. Thomas, who recalls the days in the early Sixties when "even the strippers refused to appear barebreasted."

Steve Howe, production manager for Leo, reports, "We have hundreds of girls coming in, asking for work, but we use maybe five to ten percent of them. For one thing, there's a star syndrome building up; now we use some performers over and over again." Lowell Pickett, who heads Leo Productions, believes the girls are fascinated with the movie mystique. "There are a lot more girls who will make films with us than will pose for stills," he claims. Brothers Art and Jim Mitchell's Cinema 7 files are also filled with the names of eager applicants. "No longer," says Jim, "can we have people drop in off the street, pop onto a mattress and shoot. Six months ago, it would have been enough to have somebody come in and fuck before the camera. Now we're making 90-minute stag movies with sound and a story line; we have to have reliable people with proven ability."

Does becoming a stag star affect one's sexual responses? "Everybody asks that," Kerry Price complains. "I can't knock anybody for his curiosity about it, but answering all these questions--'What's it like?' 'Does it turn you on?'--gets to be boring, like a soft-shoe routine." It's in this area, however--the effect of performing pornography on an individual's private sexual adjustment--that the greatest diversities of opinion emerge.

Oakland's Gregg and Bobbi, married sex stars who sometimes make as many as six or seven films a week, always working together, claim their careers have had little or no effect. "Our sex life has always been pretty good," says Bobbi. Emily Smith and her boyfriend, who have been making films together for two years, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, feel it has helped increase their mutual satisfaction. "We've learned a lot of new positions," Emily reports enthusiastically. Grenda's pragmatic analysis: "I may have a sore twat after working a lot, but otherwise my career doesn't affect a private relationship."

On the darker side, New York's Helen Lang has quit the hard-core film world because, as she puts it, "As the months went by, it turned me off, until finally I couldn't come anymore." A similar dilemma was reported by Denmark's Lisbeth Olsen, who used to work in a live show with her then husband. "I became terribly frigid," she says. "Couldn't abide to have my husband touch me for weeks."

Understandably, single girls in this milieu occasionally encounter disapproval from their dates. Several report horrified reactions and offers to "save you from all this." But, as Kerry Price puts it, "I can't imagine going with a guy who doesn't think it's groovy. If a fellow's head isn't in a certain place about sex, I just don't further the relationship."

The real question, of course, is how the public--and the elected or appointed guardians of its morals--feels about the open depiction of sex. There are indications that even in traditionally liberated San Francisco, the authorities are attempting to push the pendulum back to the right of center. All 25 of the city's sex-moviehouses face the threat of refusal to be granted licenses under a strict new theater code; and the proprietor of one of the wildest of the live shows, the New Follies, has announced he's throwing in the G string to return to old-fashioned burlesque after having been busted by the vice squad 11 times in two months. "The uptights are getting desperate," says Arlene Elster, a longtime associate of Pickett's in the film business and proprietress of the Sutter Cinema, where the surroundings are deliberately understated to attract a sophisticated clientele.

Although Arlene has expressed a determination to carry on a legal fight against every attempt at suppression, film maker Alex De Renzy--whose trail-blazing Pornography in Denmark, in a very real sense, started it all--claims he's giving up. "It's really a hassle," he says. "I got busted 17 times in six months. We always won, but I'm tired of being in court, defending myself as if I were some kind of a gangster carrying a pistol or something." De Renzy, who maintains he'd rather be known now as a documentary producer than a sex-film magnate, is currently exploring what he hopes will be greener pastures. His latest film, Weed, is a study of the marijuana trade filmed on location in Mexico, Nepal and Southeast Asia.

Miss Elster, Pickett, the Mitchell brothers and other Bay Area sex-film merchants, however, are hanging in, convinced that their cause will win. "There's been a change in public attitude," says Pickett. "More and more people are supporting our movies. The sexploitation audience is dying off; Hollywood is hitting the sexploiters from the right and we're getting them from the left." Audiences now include women, who it was once thought weren't interested in visual erotica; Pickett believes one reason for this change is that the new genre of hardcore cinema shows women having fun. "The old-time stag movie exploited women," he says. "We show them saying yes and saying no, in active and passive roles, and enjoying themselves--coming to climax."

Jim Mitchell also sees a broader base of box-office appeal for his films. "Hardcore sex has been around for a couple of years, and the public can see that people don't grow warts or get raped on the streets as a result of watching it. Now we don't get just middle-aged men coming to our theater [the O'Farrell]. We have the place filled with couples. Last week we grossed a record $12,000--pretty good for a 200-seat theater." Mitchell's theory of public support seems to be borne out by the facts; when San Francisco's Board of Permit Appeals attempted to deny the O'Farrell a theater permit, attorney Michael Kennedy presented petitions bearing 382 signatures from neighbors of the moviehouse, stating that the establishment posed no threat to the morality of the district.

The moviemakers and exhibitors may feel their audiences have shed the dirty-old-man image, but their stars retain that mental stereotype. Jacquelyn Glenn visualizes her audience as "a bunch of potential sex deviates who are afraid to go out on the streets, so they hide in theaters." Helen Lang recoils: "They're terrible, gross men jacking off in the theater. The management should rent overcoats at the door." Even the usually philosophical Miss Rexroth hoots, "I'd crack up if I thought about the audience--guys sitting with newspapers on their laps for 15 minutes. But I suppose the films do help some people--a kind of happiness comes across." Grenda's diagnosis is that her fans are "middle-class married businessmen who are jealous of the youth scene."

Perhaps one reason the performers and the exhibitors differ so widely on this subject is that, almost without exception, the stars never go to see their own pictures. "It's emasculating, in a funny way, to have to pay five dollars to see people have sex," says young director Jann Burner. Miss Price agrees: "If I had five dollars, I'd spend it on a good movie." Still another participant expressed surprise: "Who would want to pay to watch me ball? That's like paying to get into a good restaurant to watch somebody else eat a hearty meal."

It's anybody's guess whether the porno wave has really crested and a return to puritanism is waiting in the wings, as some observers of the San Francisco scene fear--and others cheer. De Renzy thinks there will be a decline in clinically explicit films in which the camera hovers four inches away from plunging organs and pulsating orifices. "My own objective always was to make a horny movie," he says. "But who gets turned on by floodlights on somebody's asshole?" He is convinced that sex will continue to be big box office--but for Hollywood, not for the porn trade. "Big film companies may advertise a production as a murder mystery, but a lot of the zing in it will be provided by more sex," he predicts. "It will be as tasteful as the public requires it to be--no more, no less." Which, of course, is the way it's always been.