Burning Desires Sex in America

Part Four

Porn Minds Its Manners

In San Francisco live the Mitchell brothers, Artie and Jim. Before the Mitchells, porn films mostly consisted of grainy loops made in New York by older producers who thought that sex just wasn't a turn-on unless it was forbidden and dirty. But the Mitchells liberated pornography. Even before they made Behind the Green Door with Marilyn Chambers in 1972, they had brought a California feel to the business. Jazz scores were mellow. Colors and sets were lush. Lovemaking flashed across the fantasy world of Seventies Northern California: rocky beaches, Victorian mansions, Marin hot tubs, even fishing boats and fields of orange poppies. Most of all, their films were fun, and fun in porn was itself a new concept. Perhaps most strange, the sex was clean and women appeared to have natural orgasms, even a measure of control.

Along with Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door is still one of the most popular erotic films of all time. It cost $60,000 to make, then a fortune for a porn movie, but has grossed $50,000,000 to $60,000,000, including bootleg versions.

Behind the Green Door showcased a 19-year-old Chambers. She would forevermore be the symbol of California pornography: the good girl gone very, very bad. She did it, and she liked it, and she asked for more. This was something new, something Seventies. For the first time, couples trooped down to the Pussycat Theater in their city and watched, mouths agape, hands in each other's laps. It was the dawn of porno chic.

"The movie was made under conditions so hot," recalls Artie Mitchell, "we just wanted to throw down the cameras at the end of each day of filming and fuck and suck our way to oblivion. Do you understand me?"

Artie has a tough little pixy face. Sometimes he is all smiles, cracking up at some insider's joke: How come it is that the biggest dicks, like the 13 inches of the late Johnny Holmes, never become truly hard? You understand the connection between the shape of a woman's mouth and the feel of her pussy? He loves his chosen field of pornography as affectionately as he loves his own mother.

Brother Jim often frightens people. His face is harder than his brother's; his eyes are smaller. He doesn't drink much these days, and he doesn't make jokes about eating pussy or why big spongy dicks never get hard. Jim's the producer, elder brother Artie is the director, and what Jim likes to talk about is money, usually big money or the sorry state of America or both, as in "The Japanese will own most of the country by the end of the Nineties; face it."

The story of the Mitchell brothers begins at a smoker in the early Sixties in Antioch, a dusty California town in the Sacramento River delta, the sort of place where hamburgers are always well done and most people's fathers work in the nearby steel mill. During the underground-film showing, one brother—nobody remembers which—turned to the other and said, "Hey, bub, an ol' boy could make himself a lot of money with these kinds of movies."

Still teenagers, the brothers began to grind out soft-core "beaver shoots" in which a woman on a bed slowly peeled off her dress and then her bra but rarely bared all. "We believed in happy endings," remembers Jim.

Their parents were shocked when they heard what their sons were up to. What did they say? "They didn't say anything," remembers Artie. "They were struck speechless."

After the huge success of Behind the Green Door, the Mitchells made Resurrection of Eve and Inside Marilyn Chambers. Then they got silly. They pumped $450,000 into an apocalyptic fantasy called Sodom and Gomorrah, far and away the most expensive porn movie of all time, the Gone with the Wind of American pornography. In the film, God is a chimpanzee who lives in an orbiting space station where the Virgin Mary floats naked in a tank of clear water, while far below on earth, the citizens of Sodom worship the back-door impostor Anu. Sodom and Gomorrah was a bomb.

So the Mitchells retired to their "live porn" palace, the O'Farrell Theater, at the corner of O'Farrell and Polk in San Francisco, a building they had painted with 50-foot murals of undersea life—salmon, dolphins, octopuses and two humpback whales mating. Inside, Japanese tourists sat reverently in the little glass booths that ringed the Ultra Room and watched teams of leathered lesbian strippers mock-maul one another to the crash of U Got the Look, by Prince; or shone long-tipped airport flashlights on the nipples of Caucasian women in the Kopenhagen Room; or experienced the thrill of Western lap-dancing—strippers twisting on their laps. The Mitchell brothers had built themselves a candy store.

They picked a good moment to retire. The times were about to pass them by, anyway. Within the world of porn, the Mitchells represented something playful between hard-core men and women. In the Eighties, though, relations between men and women turned tough. Women were more equal, more demanding. Men were more resentful. Porn, always a wild release, suddenly reflected the sex wars. The fun and games of the Mitchells gave way to the bitter, gouging sex of the Dark brothers. Even their name was ominous.

"Hey, I didn't set out to denigrate women," Gregg Dark tells us. "I consider men to be morons, too. Humans are animals. I do commentaries."

At the time he made his first hard-core film, Dark was a 30-year-old film school brat from Stanford who was between development deals at Home Box Office. "The adult producers were so stupidly serious. They'd call a scene beautiful when it was only a twenty-year-old girl who couldn't remember her lines for more than thirty seconds, screwing for six minutes. 'It's sooo beautiful,' the producer would say. 'Why?' I'd ask. 'Her pussy doesn't have crabs?'"

The Dark brothers represented the resurgence of New York–style porn, down and nasty. But this time, the shoots were done in L.A. and it was New Wave: bleached-blonde mohawks and scores by the Plugz. They took every sexual stereotype in America and corn-holed it. There were no real brothers, only Walter, then the thick-bodied eminence of big-time Southern California porn, and hired gun Gregg "Not My Real Name" Dark.

The Darks made a porn classic in 1986 and it was a vision of hell: The Devil in Miss Jones, Part 3. In Devil, Southern belles are damned to take on black shoeshine boys. Black women must fuck Nazis.

The Darks' films were amoral and hot at the same time, the perfect porn combination for the Eighties—crossover material, in fact, just like Green Door a decade before. Hard-core porno was chic again. The Darks made the annual "What's Hot" list in Rolling Stone and were prominently trashed in Vanity Fair, which was better than being praised.

What the Darks said about women and men in the Eighties was hardly uplifting. They went balls-out with borrowed MTV effects: hot backlighting, quick cuts, rock pacing. The emotional logic was urban Eighties, a kind of equal-opportunity degradation. Women became things, but so did men.

Artie Mitchell once visited the Dark brothers' studio and found it hilarious that on the same production line, the corporation was churning out Bible classics with titles such as Story of Jesus next to tapes of Devil in Miss Jones 3 and Black Bun Busters.

But Gregg Dark was finally frightened by his own nihilism. As the Meese commission held hearings in Los Angeles, he jumped out of porn.

"I'm thirty-four now," he tells us. "I feel like an old man. I don't even like to do nudity anymore. No brutality. Heavy feminist parts in all my films. OK, I slid into adult films for a few years, but it's the kiss of death. This is not a moral opinion. But the grand scheme of the country is against these sorts of things. Features and TV are safe. You don't hire curious directors. You hire safe people. It's hard to believe, but if they wanted to drive me out of the industry, well, they did, 'cause I never made a real wad to retire on like the Mitchells. I don't have the money to defend myself. I'd rather sell shoes than go to jail."

While Dark retreated to hard R, spouting and whining all the way like one of his never-satisfied characters, the Mitchells saw a chance for a comeback. Perhaps the Darks had gone too far. In their films, sperm sprayed around like water from a loose fire hose. Women sucked and licked and swallowed as if there were no tomorrow. Anal sex was regular fare. Like the revelers in Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death, most porn producers and performers persisted with the Darks in thinking that their dream factory was immune to contagion.

But by the middle of the Eighties, the AIDS virus had worked its way into the blood stream—and, more important, into the consciousness—of the heterosexual community. The Mitchells saw a perfect way to step back into the porn game. Why not remake Behind the Green Door as the first safe-sex porn film?

The original brain storm came from Priscilla Alexander, codirector of Coyote (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), a prostitute union. Coyote founder Margo St. James took the idea to the brothers.

"I first approached them when the Meese porn-commission hearings were being held in L.A. I said, 'You guys should take the offensive here before they shut you down. Show that you're responsible citizens—help men get over their prejudices against rubbers. Make it smart and sexy to wear them.'"

The Mitchells liked the idea of staving off the porn hunters by wrapping themselves in the hygienic flag. They had been in and out of court since they had entered the business, so they were always looking for ways to protect themselves legally. It would be harder to sue the new paragons of promiscuous virtue. Besides, to the brothers, the project looked like big fun, and the Mitchells like fun.

Not that they didn't think it was a bit of a gamble. "A lot of men believe wearing a rubber is like wearing a raincoat in the shower," said Artie Mitchell just before the remake was released.

"There was resistance to the first Green Door, also," added Jim Mitchell in his softgrowl. "But we've never been dictated to by the market. If we were, we'd be like all the other scum-bags in the industry."

The set of the film was both a tight ship and a typically eccentric Mitchell production. We'll let Susie Bright tell the story. Bright is a character for the Eighties. Tall and strongly built, 29 years old, she is the editor of On Our Backs, a journal of lesbian eroticism. Her mien often switches from reference librarian to charming firebrand, from shy and polite to sexy and animated. Her glasses are thick and old-fashioned. Her hair hangs to her softly rounded shoulders or is tucked away in a bun.

Bright, who was intrigued by the fact that nearly all of the actors in the safe-sex orgy scene would be amateurs, decided to try out. She went to the filming with two friends, Fanny Fatale, who was a dancer at the O'Farrell Theater, and Vanessa. Once they were seated at their table and the other orgy extras were seated at theirs, director Sharon McKnight shouted out, "Raise your hand if at any time you believe you are not having safe sex. The staff will now be handing out a bag of condoms, surgical rubber gloves, dental dams and nonoxynol-nine lubricant. No penis will be touched without a rubber on. No fingers will get stinky without a rubber glove. All pussies must be covered with a dental dam before they are licked. I want to be able to smell your lubricant a yard away. Is that clear?"

It was five hours before the cameramen reached Bright's table. Her friend Fatale worked on her tax forms while the other porn hopefuls in the room orgied on cue. Finally, the overhead videocam zoomed in on their table.

Bright describes the scene:

"We rehearsed like a last-minute addition to The Gong Show. When the floor camera rolled into our view and Fanny hiked her hips above the table, I realized that I was probably the only woman in the room who had not properly clipped and pruned her pubes. There was no time to regret that now, however.

"So I fished around in what the Mitchells called our safe-sex kit and pulled out a dental dam. This sucker was like a file card and thick as glass! It was supposed to be the equivalent of a condom. I thought, Isn't that just like an all-male group of safe-sex experts? They had chosen the ultimate barrier to cunnilingus. You could have blindfolded someone with this wad of rubber. But Fanny was getting into it, serving up some impressive Method moans, arching her back like a fish. I laid the dam over her pussy and took a tentative plastic lick. When Vanessa rolled her eyes, I became extremely annoyed. You could say my Amazon imagination went into overdrive. Nobody was about to destroy my (continued on page 170)Burning Desires(continued from page 118) moment of glory with a strip of wallpaper. I don't know what I thought, but I knew I had to do something raunchy and safe at the same time, and very quickly. So I twirled the dental dam into a nice little rubber cone and started flossing Fanny's clit. I may have been dreaming, but I think she raised her hips toward me. So I began to play her like a cello. The latex bow hummed to and fro between her little pink clit and her labia. Real safe sex and hot, too. I was ready to latex every pussy in the room."

The porn of the Eighties was becoming a very strange slice of ginger, indeed.

After the sequel was released, Jim Mitchell bragged that it would make other porn films "obsolete." And if those other porn producers didn't like that, "tough shit. It's a whole new sexual world out there, and they're going to have to change with the times."

•

In our files is a picture of Missy Manners, the star of Behind the Green Door: The Sequel, with Senator Orrin Hatch, the conservative and powerful Reagan stalwart from Utah. The date is 1981. Senator Hatch looks like a sincere game-show host. Missy, 19 years old and Hatch's Senate intern, looks like an ungainly goof-bug in an oversized sports coat and sweater, high collar and bow tie. Her frowzy hair is clipped behind her ears. Her grin says, Aw, shucks.

Four years before she made the Green Door sequel, Missy became a model and a dancer at the O'Farrell Theater, as well as girlfriend to the boss, Artie Mitchell. Hers is one of the stranger political transformations of the times, at least at first glance.

Recalls Manners, "I remember very clearly walking out of the O'Farrell Theater after the filming was over and feeling, Did that really happen to me? I'd had sex with ten people that day. I thought, What's my sex life going to be after this? How jaded am I going to get? Oh, God, am I going to have to do little dogs or goats or girls?"

Missy's real name is Elisa Florez. Her father is John Florez, who is the former Chief of Staff of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee and has served as a White House consultant and Reagan appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Missy herself worked as a staff aide for the Republican National Committee.

"I'm not sure my dad and Senator Hatch saw the movie," she tells us. "I know they had a discussion with a reporter to find out what happened. They wanted to know, 'Did she take off her clothes?' The reporter said, 'Oh, yeah, she took off her clothes!' Then there was this pause. What do you say—'Uh, yeah, your daughter just made a porno movie. I saw her fuck six guys wearing goat costumes; she was really great'?

"I knew I wanted to do Green Door. If you really want to know, I get off ten times more than most women do. I'm not one of those people into orgasm retention, like one a year. I could have ten great ones in a day and not feel guilty.

"The way I look at it," explains Missy in her firm, high voice, "I'm still a good Republican. I worked hard to get Reagan elected, twice. I consider myself the Pat Robertson of porn. This is my fight for individual rights." She throws back her head and laughs. "Once I was a freedom fighter. Now I'm a freedom fucker."

This morning, the freedom fucker is behind the wheel of Artie Mitchell's long white Mercedes 500 SEL. Mitchell points out that with a flick of a switch, he can "toast our buns" with the special heaters inserted under the seats. "You know the difference between a Mercedes and a Rolls-Royce?" he asks from the passenger seat. "In a Mercedes, you have to take off the girl's panties. In a Rolls-Royce, she takes off her own."

"Oh, Artie!" protests Missy.

It is nine a.m. in Berkeley, and the fog is still on the ground. We are on our way to Sacramento. The California Senate Judiciary Committee wants to tighten significantly the state's operating definition of obscenity. In the year since the Green Door sequel has appeared, Missy Manners has become America's unofficial spokesperson for safe sex (and lots of it), and she wants to testify against the bill.

Missy is wearing little black slippers with the face of a cat outlined on them in rhine-stones and an electric-blue silk dress that fits her like a sheath, except around her breasts, where it is open like a robe.

Artie Mitchell is dressed down for the occasion, as he is for most: old blue jeans, lace-up lumberjack boots, gray-and-red wool socks and a T-shirt from the skateboard magazine Thrasher that shows a human skull with a snake wrapped around it. On his tight bald head is a Rommel desert hat that he ordered through Soldier of Fortune magazine; and at the crown of the hat is a little brass pin in the shape of an old-fashioned movie camera.

Between the leather seats, front and back, always moving, is Mr. T. Mr. T is a dog, a tiny teacup poodle the size of two fists. It is as white as the color of the car's carpeting.

Mitchell swigs a couple of morning beers and puffs on the butt of a joint. Pretty soon, he is dancing away in his seat to the oldies blasting from the marvelous speakers—Ain't That a Shame, by Fats Domino, and You've Got a Friend in Jesus, by Norman Greenbaum. Accidentally, his foot taps down on Mr. T, and Mr. T lets out an incredibly loud scream for a cup of fur.

"Artie!" screams Missy.

Mitchell puts down the joint and lights up a cigarette.

"You can fuck up your own lungs, Artie, but don't fuck up Mr. T's."

"Life is hard," replies Mitchell. More than once today, he will expand on this theme: "Life is hard for a couple of old pornographers like Jim and me. We're burned-out old men. Our time in porn is done. I wish I knew where all the money went. Just two old pornographers...living alone—with nine children...and a Brazilian maid."

Sometimes it seems that the Mitchell brothers have gotten where they are as much for their developed sense of humor as for their sense of depravity. Artie's claim about the money has been debated by the IRS, but it is true that the brothers live together in a large house in a wealthy suburb across the bay from San Francisco with the nine children of their four previous marriages, and some order is kept by a South American maid.

We arrive in Sacramento before noon. Mitchell saunters forth from the Mercedes. His needs are primitive. He looks up at the capitol dome only a few yards away. Beside the building is a block of lilac bushes. He decides to mosey through them and relieve himself of most of the beers. When he parts the bushes again, his hand is still on his zipper, but his mind has turned to Missy's upcoming testimony.

"Tell 'em lies, Missy, but only to save lives."

"Freedom fuckers!" says Missy, laughing.

On the way to the senate offices, we walk up a long sidewalk between two cement-pillared buildings. Mitchell waves his hands like Lincoln and shouts out the inscriptions on the cornices. Into The Highlands of the mind is written across one cornice. "Yes!" he says. Bring me men to Match my mountains is chiseled across the other. "That's it!" he shouts once more. "Men to match your mountains, Missy! "That's your slogan!" Clearly, the pornographers are ready to meet the assemblymen.

The large chamber where the Assembly Committee on Public Safety is meeting is packed with reporters, profamily lobbyists and state bureaucrats, all bored and hoping for a circus. Senator Wadie Deddeh brings forth his anti-obscenity motion. Deddeh is a Persian-born Christian who represents an important part of the Central Valley. Essentially, he wants to tighten the definition of obscenity so that material such as Behind the Green Door: The Sequel or, for that matter, the Jack Nicholson–Ann-Margret film Carnal Knowledge could be found legally objectionable.

"When are we going to grow up," Deddeh says, "and realize that people who invoke the First Amendment are, in fact, preying on the minds of the young? I pray to God that history will record our votes."

And then it is Missy's turn.

"My name is Missy Florez, though I believe that many of you legislators may know me as Missy Manners." She pauses and looks each of the men in the eye. "Missy Manners, the star of Behind the Green Door: The Sequel, which is a safe-sex video. You live in a world where political survival is paramount, but I live in a world of life and death, where survival itself is at stake. I think you could say"—and here Manners treads water for her big line—"that I have a hands-on perspective about safe sex."

The room is silent, and then, of course, the audience begins to laugh. The legislators stare down at their yellow legal pads and do not laugh. Missy immediately begins to pass out copies of Behind the Green Door: The Sequel.

"I would like to put this safe-sex video on the record," she says.

"No way!" answers a young blond assemblyman from San Diego.

Missy waves the video above the heads of the committee members like a hussy goddess. They do not appreciate this.

"Obscene video cassettes such as this woman's are worse than pornographic cinemas, because they can be taken home and shown to minors," says an assemblyman.

"You don't want my video?" asks Missy, pretending to be hurt. She is taking control, beginning to enjoy the spectacle.

"No, ma'am," says the careful Deddeh. He stares at the shrink-wrapped box as if it were slathered with the AIDS virus. The Reality—The Fantasy—The Sensuality, promises the cover. In the photo, Missy is without a bra under a white T-shirt. Her brown nipples stand at attention, and she is smiling like a rebellious Republican.

And then it is over. Missy drops her video into her aluminum power briefcase and shrugs and her large breasts shake. The committee chairman bangs the gavel.

Ever cynical, Artie Mitchell has skipped the hearing in favor of more beers at a nearby bar. But afterward, outside, he is sweetly encouraging: "Gotta rat-fuck those guys, Missy! It's the only way."

Missy is on a roll. She wonders if we should stay another hour or two in order to crash a Pat Robertson reception. She and Mitchell debate whether Robertson wears nylon panties. "Let's go home," says Mitchell. "I'm already a member of the Lord Club: Let Oral Roberts Die."

Missy drives. Mitchell fires up another joint. At a red light on the way to the freeway, a thin little woman with straw-red hair gawks at us from the sidewalk. A black Harley-Davidson T-shirt is stretched across her bony ribs.

"Hey, momma!" shouts Mitchell. He whistles.

"Women do not like to be whistled at, Arthur," says Missy.

"Hey, Missy," says Mitchell, "I'll suck little titties if I have to."

The woman with the green-apple breasts leers at Mitchell, and he returns the leer.

Missy floors the Mercedes. On the drive back to San Francisco, she grows more jealous. Mitchell begins to talk of the time he served as a fluff boy for Ginger Lynn and, almost, for Traci Lords. It is a story he will tell in more detail later—without Missy.

Artie and Jim Mitchell were filming The Grafenberg Spot around a swimming pool. It was seven in the morning, the beginning of the shoot, and Artie was meeting star Ginger Lynn for the first time. Over coffee and doughnuts, Lynn told Mitchell that she might require a fluff boy. Now, thought Mitchell, porn producers often employ fluff girls to keep the men hard between takes, but this was the first request he'd ever heard of for a fluff boy. Porn had, indeed, changed in the Eighties. And Lynn was then the queen of adult films, a tongue-between-the-lips blonde. So he answered, all gallant, "I'll be your fluff boy."

As Mitchell recalls, Lynn and co-star Harry Reems, who had been the male star of Deep Throat, were inside on a large bed, waiting for the crew to set up. A fluff girl who had a yen for Reems began to service him. Lynn motioned to Artie. "I think, Mr. Mitchell, I could use that fluff boy now."

Mitchell was on the spot, prince of his own jaded world. Photographers from Hustler magazine were there, and his own crew was staring.

"It was a profile in courage. Had to rise to the occasion. Got down on my little bony knees, licked my lips and just turned into the human vibrator. Vrroomm! Vrroomm! Vrroomm! Sweet Jesus, but Ginger had a nice little clitoris!" Mitchell shakes his head. "Life is hard."

The next day, Mitchell drove to Half Moon Bay to film a scene with Traci Lords, the notorious underage porn star of the Dark brothers' video New Wave Hookers. She was 16 at the time. ("She claimed to be eighteen," insists Mitchell.) Mitchell had never met Lords, who was in her dressing room when he arrived. She was putting on her lipstick.

"I hear you really know how to eat out, Artie."

"Traci Lords's first words to me!" says Mitchell, laughing, his mouth goofy, his eyes hard.

Missy Manners hates these stories.

It was an on-again, off-again relationship between this safe-sex Republican porn star and the co-king of American pornography, a relationship that eventually would turn more off than on. Mitchell and Manners were birds of a feather in a unique American forest. Both are serious fuckaholics, yet each is intelligent and ferociously independent, as well as politically shrewd. And they are outlaws. Missy has exploded her bridges. Mitchell was born with fewer limits than the rest of us. They were a match.

But Mitchell and Missy were also a volatile mix. She craves the respectability of being somebody. She wants to influence events. Mitchell is old and unchangeable, an outlaw of excess with a mercurial temper, saved, perhaps, by his sense of humor. "Artie is the funniest man I've ever known," Missy once said.

Then there was the little matter of jealousy. The green-eyed monster follows different rules in a world of safe-sex orgies and live sex shows. Playing around was assumed by both parties. But each got very angry if he thought the other might be growing serious about someone else.

It was all crazy, a wild, true love affair. Yet it made perfect sense. Artie Mitchell and Missy Manners are at once very different from you and me, and not so different at all.