Call of the Wild

The girl on the opposite page is Susan Jensen. She runs a combination bar, restaurant, lodge and liquor store in Alaska. She keeps the books, cooks the cheeseburgers, changes the sheets and, when the old system breaks down, puts in new plumbing with her own hands. She is a pioneer.

The girl in the two pictures to the right is Constance Money. She has made several critically acclaimed porn films in the past few years. Onscreen, she makes love, gives head and puts men in their place with her own hands. She is a pioneer.

As you may have surmised, Susan Jensen and Constance Money are one and the same woman. She told us her story in a cluttered Northern California apartment, where she was in the process of putting the separate pieces of her life together. The halls were filled with unopened boxes marked Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Alaska. A different box for each period of her life: Student. Porn star. Independent woman. The apartment was littered with books. A collection of Alaskan igloo tales. Lewis Thomas' Lives of a Cell. A paperback on the psychology of sexual aberrations. A handbook on the classification of wildflowers. Cookbooks. A July 1977 Playboy containing a picture of Constance Money. That picture caused Susan Jensen a lot of grief. The men on the oil rigs and the pilots for the local helicopter service got a bit out of hand when they discovered that they had a genuine porn star in their midst. Susan handled the situation with typical aplomb, then decided it was time to do another pictorial, to bring Constance Money and Susan Jensen face to face.

She takes a glass of wine to the living-room sofa and begins her story: "When you're a porn star, nothing else seems to matter. In Alaska, I dealt with bankers, accountants, oil-rig workers. They respected me for what I was doing. When they found out I had starred in an X-rated movie--bam! Now, if the restaurant is running out of tomatoes, it's because I'm a porn star. If the burgers are under-cooked, it's because I'm a porn star.

"The first thing you're going to ask is why I got into porn films. I grew up in a very small town in the Northwest. My family was upper middle class. Half Danish, half WASP. Do I have to tell you that I was a toad, a barnacle? Being asked to star in Misty Beethoven was a revelation, proof that I was physically acceptable to the real world. Now I feel great about myself. It's the world that occasionally acts a little crazy. A friend of mine acted in a porn movie, then got engaged. One night, she was having dinner with her fiancé when a stranger came up to them, unzipped his fly, put his erection down on the table and said to her, 'I've seen your movies.'

"I've made two full length porn films since The Opening of Misty Beethoven. At most, they have taken two or three weeks out of my life. I'm proud of the work I do in films, but that's a part-time job. I want people to see me as a full-time person and treat me accordingly.

"That's why I moved to Alaska. I'm on my own there, but I feel totally safe with my dog Taku. Of course, I also carry a gun. Sometimes you run into a wolf or a bad bear. When Ken Marcus, the Playboy photographer, came up to do the shooting, he wanted to wear the gun. One day, he and his assistant and I were walking down a beach when this big Kodiak lumbered out about a mile away. Ken took off. I suppose he'd never seen anything that big outside a zoo. So here he's the guy with the gun and he's running! Ken locked himself in the cab of the pickup." Susan recalls that episode with amused tolerance, a sentiment she doesn't extend to some of the people she has met in the sex-film business. Her experiences as a teenager led her to join a committee crusading against child porn. ("Using kids of that age deprives them of the joys of high school--groping in back seats and finding out for themselves what sex and love are all about.") By the end of the interview, we've decided Susan Jensen is at least two persons. We're reminded of something a noted wag once said about an acquaintance: "The lady has at least a dozen pasts, and what's more, they all fit."