The New Girls of Porn

Compared with the porn stars of yesteryear, today's sex queens represent an entirely new breed of liberated lovelies who consider themselves professional performers first. They may screw onscreen as exuberantly as Linda Lovelace, Marilyn Chambers or Georgina Spelvin ever did; they may even admit to a streak of flagrant exhibitionism without becoming defensive about it, unless pressed to confess that, in many cases, their families still don't know. Which only means that the sexual revolution kindled to a blaze in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco has just reached the simmering stage in back-home towns. The current blue-movie beauties are surveyed here by Playboy Contributing Editor Bruce Williamson.

Let a Screw interviewer corner one of this year's crop of X-rated Loreleis to ask her opinion of favorite positions or penis sizes and she is apt to reward him with a cool fisheye and an empty notebook. Porn movies may not have improved much, but the girls in the orgies are upwardly mobile--beautiful, skeptical, seriously ambitious, intellectually and aesthetically together as never before. A special few are likely to insist that simulated sex is as far as they will go--they leave a film's hard-core inserts to genital stunt women, who seldom worry that maximum penetration might peg them as untouchable for a TV shampoo commercial or a role in a so-called straight movie. One wet-dream girl who goes all the way without a shred of regret is scrumptious Annette Haven, a California native who attended community college in Oregon City, studied video technology, married and divorced by the time she was 18, then settled for a while into a bisexual ménage a trois with a couple named Bonnie and Danny.

"All my life I'd wanted to be an astrophysicist," says Annette, "but we three moved down to San Francisco, where I started with nude modeling. Then we met Alex deRenzy, who was about to do a movie called Lady Freaks." Several years and some 29 features later, Annette is a jet-propelled sex symbol whose jobs may take her to L.A., New York or the Caribbean. She turned audiences on with featured roles in China Girl, Deep Tango and Autobiography of a Flea, currently plays stellar roles in V (directed by Gary Graver, who has worked as an assistant to Orson Welles), in Radley Metzger's brand-new Barbara Broadcast (Annette plays a Xaviera Hollander type who's constantly being interviewed) and in A Coming of Angels, by New York's Joel Scott, director of Sometime Sweet Susan, the first and only hard-core movie in which Screen Actors Guild members were given tacit approval to appear without fear of reprisals.

Ultrachic and articulate, Annette believes in what she's doing, with minor limitations. "I flatly refuse to do oral come shots, because I don't enjoy that. I'll let someone come on my pubes or on my rear end, though it certainly doesn't reflect reality. Anyway, doing it for the camera--and stopping every five minutes--is not all that much fun. We're still sort of stuck in the Dark Ages in sex films, compared with what could be done. I think Hollywood and the porn industry ought to be combined--and why not? Because everyone is so uptight out in Podunk, they need to loosen up about sex. The Puritan ethic is still crippling our nation. I have no desire to escape from porno; I'd just like to see sex as an integral part of the film, the way it was in Sexworld, another film I did a while back: a sci-fi thing loosely based on Westworld."

To rip off established hits, as a matter of fact, is a growing trend in hard-core as well as feature films. Joel Scott, under another name, is a young producer-director with substantial showbiz credits and a hit musical running off-Broadway. To cast A Coming of Angels, a sex-and-adventure epic patterned after television's prime-time hit Charlie's Angels, Scott went recruiting in California and came back with Annette, Lesllie Bovee (text continued on page 144) and Abigail Clayton, plus a couple of secondary performers. "I don't know why, but the West Coast has attracted much prettier women to the business," says Scott. "They don't seem to be just frustrated actresses who can't make a living. Maybe it's the whole California mentality, coming out of Berkeley. Up to now, East Coast films have been of better quality, with gorgeous West Coast girls stuck out there making lousy movies.

"Still, the over-all quality of girls in porno has risen dramatically in the past couple of years. The performers we used to settle for can no longer compete. These girls don't drink on the set or get stoned. It's a different world now and you can't hire a bunch of junkie whores trying to make a fast buck." Plugging his own flight of Angels, Scott adds, "Annette is probably the most beautiful woman ever to appear in a hard-core film. Abigail has a sweet, classy air about her that's unique among porno people, while Lesllie is one of the sexiest girls in the field, absolutely. She projects torrid sensuality on film like no one else."

Lesllie--she adopted the double L to make her name distinctive--proved her appeal last year in DeRenzy's Femmes de Sade, oiled up and grappling with three naked merchant seamen for an engine-room orgy that virtually stopped the show. Says San Francisco stud John Leslie, one of the three: "In that scene, Lesllie had me so worked up I jerked off in my car on the way home."

A tawny, green-eyed former TWA stewardess from L.A. who comes on like an early Rita Hayworth, Lesllie slowed to a stop at a New York restaurant--grappling with a simple fruit salad--fresh from a $1500-a-week stage engagement at a Manhattan burlesque house. She'd been breaking in an act that she and her boyfriend, Carl, expected to book as a team at the Las Vegas Tropicana. "I don't intend to have a small career," avows Lesllie, recalling how she'd left the airline and become a go-go dancer and stripper because the pay was better, then wriggled her way into such explicit skin flicks as Easy Alice, The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio and the recent Eruption (Barbara Stanwyck's classic Double Indemnity revisited), in which she performs some explosive sexual duets with John C. "Johnny Wadd" Holmes.

"I aspire to become a real actress and sex star," says Lesllie, who echoes Annette's criticism of the porn industry. "Carl and I are into three-ways, two girls and a guy. We have a very open relationship. But we'd go to a porno house to turn on and walk away feeling insulted. They owe the audience more. A new way to see sex. Some enlightenment, instead of all that gratuitous bondage and discipline. I've turned down more than one film that I felt was based on humiliation of women."

Abigail Clayton, a reticent New York--born beauty whose role in Angels would correspond roughly to the part played by Farrah Fawcett-Majors, has a B.A. in fine art from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and started her career as a model. "A very uptight business, modeling. Movies are fun and the people I meet in porno are interesting, nice, educated...not a bunch of hippies making movies to buy dope, as the public may think." Abigail's first film was Dixie, made three years ago, and she's less interested in stardom than in maintaining her casual San Francisco lifestyle, performing or working as a production assistant and editor with DeRenzy, caring for her baby and her old man--a student and cab driver who occasionally moonlights in blue movies.

Ranked high among the California contingent of prettier-than-thou porn queens is busy Linda Wong, a veteran of 14 films in less than two years. Jade Pussycat (with John C. Holmes and Georgina Spelvin coupled for the first time), Femmes de Sade, Easy Alice and Oriental Babysitter are just a few of the titles bolstering Linda's claim to fame. Before her debut in hard-core, which was encouraged by a boyfriend "who really got off on it," she had been a fashion-show model and student of ballet. Linda tells us that, using her real name, she also worked for a while as a bookkeeper and legal secretary in the office of San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli--a statement Belli's office refuses to confirm or deny.

Practically everyone on the hard-core scene has a nom de film as either a legal or a professional safeguard or to spare his or her family embarrassment. Liberation has its limits, as Linda learned. "I led a pretty straight life, brought up here in San Francisco, and had a closed mind about this kind of movie. But I also wanted to experience different things, test myself. Now I get fan mail from some people practically idolizing me, while a few old friends won't have anything to do with me anymore. If I get a chance, I'd like to have a career in straight films."

Turning pro sexually has been even tougher emotionally for Amber Hunt, currently nestled in a flat in Sausalito with her beau and her seven-year-old son. She was known as Bunny Ginger prior to 1975, when she wore a cottontail at Playboy's Great Gorge resort and the Century City Club in L.A.

"I don't plan to spend the rest of my life as an X-rated actress," says Amber. "I'm wrong for it. I'm too domestic a person, and I've promised my boyfriend not to do any more films after the next few months. It's been a hassle. My family back in New York has completely disowned me ... the whole shtick."

Amber's straight screen credits include Farewell, My Lovely, with Robert Mitchum ("A small part in the brothel scene," she notes wryly), and an R film called Bare Knuckles. Neither brought her the kind of rapt attention she received, or hopes to receive, from Cry for Cindy, Sexworld, A Coming of Angels, Baby Face and her recent Fiona on Fire. The last she describes as "a take-off on Laura," with Amber, natch, in Gene Tierney's role.

If, since the debut of Marilyn Chambers, outright fuck films have produced one girl with a star mystique, it's Constance Money. Ask Jamie Gillis, generally considered the busiest and best actor in porno, who co-starred with Constance in Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven. He'll tell you: "I had quite a crush on her. She's special." And Jamie has had them all.

Adds Joel Scott: "She's definitely one of the top two in this business, a real turn-on with that girl-next-door look." A bit role in The Joy of Letting Go, followed by Misty and Mary! Mary! constitute her whole career in hard-core. But Misty, which grossed well over $1,000,000 in hard and soft versions, was the biggest sexploitation hit of 1976--1977.

Since then, Constance has reportedly raised her asking price to $800--$900 a day--considered all but prohibitive by most entrepreneurs, who pay an average of $200--$300 daily for seasoned sexual performers. Money--who detests the name invented for her by Metzger and wonders aloud whether she has waited too long to change it--flew to L.A. for a Playboy photo session from a Northern refuge so icy and remote that you need a dog sled, a Sherpa guide or a mutual friend to get through to her.

"I only do what I like," quoth Constance, enjoying a bite of breakfast and a bit of sunshine in a Sunset Boulevard coffee shop. What she likes, for the time being, is managing a lodge frequented by offshore oil riggers and roustabouts who would be perfectly cast in a Russ Meyer movie--they heave by, horny and hungry, and haven't seen a woman in weeks. No dice, fellas. Her clientele at the inn doesn't know Constance Money exists, but Constance knows who she is with crashing certainty. One of her ancestors invented the vacuum cleaner, for God's sake.

"I'm an egotist," says Constance, "and always leading a double life, which I find kind of exciting. Way back in high school, I was a cheerleader by day, dropping acid and carousing at night. I'm a swinger by nature, I guess, though I(continued on page 196)New Girls Of Porn(continued from page 144) could never get deeply involved with a man who's making sex films. Quite a few of them are robotized...and miserable in bed. John Leslie, who worked with me in Mary! Mary!, I really liked a lot, though his sexual ideas are extreme. The mentality of most male sex professionals about their performance is absurd. I've been to bed with men who can never get it up and sometimes found them fantastic. I've also been into S/M at various times.... I did two years of research on the subject when I was going to Mills College in Oakland."

To be an actress is what Constance has always wanted, she says, but the experience has not always lived up to her expectations. "I was really screwed over, I thought, during the months it took to make Misty Beethoven, even though the picture turned out pretty well for me. I wasn't charmed by Radley--I am charmed by very few men--and I felt he didn't use my full potential. Making Mary! Mary! took just a week and I had a great time, with terrific people.... I didn't go away feeling so broken down and degraded."

The odds favor that Constance will be back in films, with or without a new moniker, since her name continues to stir instant enthusiasm everywhere. "Every guy making a movie is looking for a girl like her, but they expect to get a sex-movie centerfold for $200 a day," says her friend John Leslie, a hard-working actor (Femmes de Sade, Mary! Mary!, Autobiography of a Flea, A Coming of Angels).

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Can a hard-core performer really cross the tracks separating legitimate showbiz from that nether world of raunch still sneered at--covertly, if not openly--as the wrong side of town? Maybe. Linda Lovelace failed in soft-core and was critically bombarded for doing a play in Las Vegas. Marilyn Chambers, with a new record in release, has emerged as a corporation, selling shares in her future--and her plans to make a nonsex movie have been realized in Rabid, a Canadian sci-fi shocker. Andrea True, a veteran New York porn actress, topped the charts last year with a disco hit titled More, More, More, which was probably more a fluke than a direct result of her experience as a sex star.

The highly celebrated case of Harry Reems, convicted by a Memphis jury on obscenity-conspiracy charges, may be a better case in point. Partly because he's been preoccupied with his legal difficulties, Reems hasn't made a sex film in nearly two years. Now that his legal hassles have subsided--the original Memphis verdict was overturned and the new Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, W. J. Michael Cody, decided not to reprosecute Reems--his next project will probably be Robert Stigwood's screen version of the Broadway hit Grease, to start shooting this summer. "It's not that I don't want to do porno again," says Reems. "In many ways, I miss it, being the horny devil I am.

"As an added incentive, porno is proving to be a vehicle for moving on to better things. That's why you find more credible and talented people, without inhibitions, going into films. Back in 1970, I was practically the only person in the business who had a photo, a résumé and some legitimate acting background."

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In 1977, the once immutable laws of porno itself are bending a lot. Emmanuelle brought a touch of respectability as well as phenomenal profits to the X rating, attracting a broader audience and making an established international star of Dutch-born Sylvia Kristel. Here, such budding starlets as Kris DeBell in Alice in Wonderland, Harlee McBride in Young Lady Chatterley and Raven De La Croix--whose monumental cleavage adorned Russ Meyer's UP!--are living, full-fleshed proof that appearing in an X movie need not condemn a girl to languish forever in cinema's sexual ghetto.

There's further proof in the thriving career of Catharine Burgess, unknown until she starred in producer-director Jonas Middleton's Through the Looking Glass, another of last year's smash hits in hard-core (playing soft, however, in U. S. and European locations where community standards offer no alternative). A sumptuous blonde who coveted the role of a narcissistic heiress who has intercourse with a fiend from hell (Jamie Gillis), Catharine refused to do explicit sex scenes but got the part, anyway. She didn't realize until five days before the film opened that a stand-in (or lay-in, if you prefer) would provide graphic sexual inserts. "When they told me about it, I cried. Those weren't even my hands in the masturbation sequence!"

Today, Catharine voices no complaints. Her hands, face and figure--nude and clothed--have appeared in straight feature films, TV soap opera, commercials, fashion spreads and Vogue. "I see no necessity for actual sex on-camera," she says. "If you're cast as a murderer and given a gun, you don't really draw blood, do you? Isn't that what acting is all about?" A trained stage actress who had studied for five years and worked the usual summer-stock, dinner-theater circuit before Looking Glass fixed her image, Catharine came to show business from a solid Westchester background and was winning professional ski races while still in her teens.

"I went through a lot of changes because of this movie, with my family and one or two lovers I had at the time," Catharine says. "I was married in the beginning, too, but got rid of him fast...he was very uptight about my appearing nude. Looking Glass finally turned out to be the best experience of my life. It's been my calling card." Signed with a major talent agency as Catharine Erhardt, the newest and truest of several names (e.g., Catherine Earnshaw, Carey Lacy) she has tried from time to time, she has done a PG film called Davey, an R-rated feature titled Cinderella 2000 ("I have a knack for getting myself involved in perverse fairy tales") and is slated to appear in Death Farm, playing a high-fashion model at the mercy of a homicidal maniac.

Mary Mendum, a delectable honey blonde whose name never changes, already has an impressive list of stage and screen credits that many a porn star might envy. She played in Hair with companies in New York, L.A. and Chicago. On Broadway, "wearing pasties and a G string for the whole first act," she appeared opposite Cliff Gorman as a replacement for the Honey Bruce role in Lenny. Then came movies, including Groove Tube and The Super Cops. Mary has since become a frequent transatlantic commuter, making 25 soft-core sex films all over Europe and the U. S. Generally paid well above the scale for performers in porno, she has been offered up to $1500 a day to make hard-core films, but so far, her answer hasn't gone beyond maybe.

Radley Metzger's The Image teamed Mary with male model Carl Parker (the macho Silva Thins man on TV several seasons ago) in a flashy S/M film that was occasionally shown with hard-core inserts. She also made a European hard-core flick called Felicia, yet doggedly clings to her status as an actress who works only soft and is not responsible for the raunchy stuff spliced in afterward. Where one stands on the rather narrow line between what distinguishes hard from soft is often a matter of opinion, however, and Mary readily acknowledges doing an oral-sex sequence with Parker. "It was just hard work but with no come shot, on my knees for two weeks doing take after take. All things being equal, I'd rather do the sex myself than have them adding inserts. It doesn't bother me morally. It's just a delicate subject professionally. I'd do anything--with a good script and a director I could trust, I'd probably jump out of a moving car if he asked me to. I just wish that Claude Lelouch, for example, would direct a real sex film and put me in it. If it were something like A Man and a Woman, I'd jump at the chance. There's a fabulous, unrealized potential in erotic films, and I love the way Lelouch handles women on the screen."

Mary notes an objection raised by nearly every actress already active on the hard-core scene--the sly, contemptuous attitude of film crews and casting people toward female performers in sex movies. "There's not the same stigma applied to men. A guy can go and do an Ultra Brite commercial after making a hard-core film and nobody cares. It's a double standard."

Sweden's Maria Lynn (also known as Marie Forsa) is another daisy-fresh sex star who denies doing hard-core, at least for home consumption, though she has appeared in Flossie, Justine & Juliette and Bel Ami (the last two co-starring Harry Reems) and subsequently starred in Molly, based on Defoe's Moll Flanders. Once introduced to the press as "Europe's Linda Lovelace," Maria would prefer to be known as Scandinavia's Julie Christie: "The most beautiful, erotic love scene I ever saw was hers with Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now." Hardly stigmatized among freethinking Swedes for her sex-film work, Maria moved on from sexploitation to stage roles with her country's distinguished Royal Dramatic Theatre and feels the past pinching her only when she travels abroad: "The minute you tell someone you're an actress and Swedish, he says: 'Hello, my name is So-and-so; let's go home and fuck.'"

In England, where sex films are generally softer than plum pudding, Heather Deeley (whose Diversions played here this year) is one of the few active hard-core actresses. France's porno boom, blighted by restrictive tax laws in the past year or so, continues to produce an occasional item for export, such as Pussy Talk and Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street (known over there as La Grande Baise, or The Big Fuck), both starring Penelope Lamour. Kinky Ladies also starred Dawn Cummings, a leggy and winsome U. S. expatriate who went to Europe for a lark and wound up in swinging Amsterdam, swinging hard. Dawn worked for a couple of hotsy magazines, appeared in two Lasse Braun films, French Blue and Sensations, then took off for Paris.

"With my boyfriend--who calls himself Bent Weed in movies--I did some real porno scenes in Spermula, because the French girls refused. Later, the scenes were taken out. We're both back in the States now, living a pretty free life, spending the money we earned and just biding our time."

A whole gallery of striking new faces shows up regularly on the porn circuit, many of them worth more than a second look. As always, there are some who do it simply for bread, others in search of a steppingstone, few, if any, because they love making love. In fact, nine out of ten porno actresses look upon filmed sex as pure performance and say that they seldom, if ever, reach orgasm oncamera.

"If a guy doesn't turn you on at all, that's acting," says Susan McBain, star of Odyssey, Gerard (Deep Throat) Damiano's newest picture. Susan also did Rollerbabies and has had smaller roles in Heat Wave, A Coming of Angels and Metzger's as yet unreleased Maraschino Cherries.

Susan's meteoric but inevitable rise on the sex scene is attributed by Damiano's ace cinematographer Joao Fernandes (usually credited as Harry Flecks but out of hiding now "because there's nothing to hide, no one to hide from") to an elusive kind of sensuality she projects onscreen: "Susan has a very mellow, attractive, womanly quality, something in her face that just reads on film. She comes through, for me, as much more exciting and seductive than many conventionally gorgeous girls."

Jean Jennings, starred in the Mitchell brothers' droll Autobiography of a Flea, is a fetching Florida-bred blonde who created a stir in Defiance several seasons ago but seems ambivalent about her perennially promising career as a porno star. "In this field, man, I am the queen, I'm number one," says Jean with emphasis. "But this field is shit, like most of the people behind it...and I don't have to tell you who they are." Her veiled reference to Mob influence in pornography is called "a myth" by Joel Scott, at least in its effect on independent film makers, though it's hardly news that there is some gang involvement in distribution, theater operation and mail-order films.

Bad vibes of another nature disturb Jeanine Dalton, a 21-year-old native of Georgia who went to New York to be a country-rock singer and so far has had to settle for dancing in burlesque houses and performing in two hard-core flicks, Peach Fuzz and Sweet Cakes. Jeanine insists she's through making fuck films: "I don't like doing strange, kinky things...with cucumbers, for instance."

Two other performers in Sweet Cakes, Brooke and Taylor Young, are identical twins whose incestuous lesbian love scenes briefly became the industry's hottest specialty act. The twins spoiled everyone's fun by abruptly retreating to Florida because one sister (it was impossible to tell which) decided to go back to her job as an airline stewardess.

Tyna Lynn, a psychology major at Morris County College in New Jersey, starred in Jail Bait after answering an ad in a trade paper. At 20, Austrian-born Tyna was trained for ballet and took the hard-core gig simply to gain experience. Did it bother her? "Why should it?" asks Tyna. "My boyfriend had mixed feelings and, frankly, I'd rather have been in A Chorus Line. But performing in front of one little camera was no sweat. After all, I've toured all over the country in Giselle and The Nutcracker."

California still appears to be the ideal spot for a girl getting her act together sexually. Especially for a girl like Laurien Dominique (billed as Dorothy Newkirk when she appeared in 3-D Starlets), who plays the principal role in Hard Soap, Hard Soap, a hard-core comedy that bears some resemblance to television's phenomenal Mary Hartman. Laurien insists she has serious acting aspirations but is currently at ease in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. "I lie around under waterfalls all day or paint surrealistic acrylics on Masonite. And I just came back from the Virgin Islands, swept away by a Texas millionaire who's 28, devilishly handsome, very intelligent...and very gay. I always fall in love with gay men and usually end up raping and converting them."

Living a completely different lifestyle is Serena BlaqueLord, a Oui pictorial subject and calendar girl, who shares with her man and their baby daughter a ramshackle cabin without heat, hot water or electricity in Northern California, 30 miles from the nearest town. Serena can be seen in Sweet Cakes, Honeypie and roughly three dozen other movies.

"Loops, soft-core, hard-core. I can't think of anything I haven't done, or simulated, though I don't like 'sim' stuff, because it's not real," says Serena, verbally tripping out during a visit to L.A. "I'm a total exhibitionist. I had dreams about being a stripper when I was only four years old. Right now, I'm into bloodlines, heredity and babies--trying to get pregnant with my old man's best friend. As an artist--and usually that's how I think of myself--I paint abstract, erotic stuff. I'm a very sexually oriented person, which I blame on my Scorpio rising. That's why I love doing porno. It's the people's art. Not everyone is into grass or rock music, but one way or another, practically anyone can get high on sex."

Right on. That sums up the message from Serena and her lusty sorority--porno's beautiful, outspoken, spirited new women who will, at least by their own accounts, either love it or leave it or change it, and make it grow into something better than ever.

"'I've been to bed with men who can never get it up and sometimes found them fantastic. I've also been into S/M.' "