The Other Hollywood (43 page)

NEW YORK CITY
1983–1984

CANDIDA ROYALLE (PORN STAR)
:
I was a feminist before I was a porn star. It happened after high school. I had moved in with my older sister in the Bronx, and I had to get a job to support myself. I had been forced to take typing in high school, so I went and interviewed for this job as a private secretary for one of those young, up-and-coming executives—who was all of twenty-four at the time—and I got the job.

VERONICA VERA (PORN STAR)
:
I had always wanted to write, and I had come to New York and interviewed at various publishing houses. But I couldn’t type, and you had to know how to type.

So I wound up on Wall Street. And after working on Wall Street for a bunch of years, I decided that I was either going to write or forget my fantasy to be a writer.

But the only person that I knew who was making a living as a writer was editing
Penthouse Variations
.

CANDIDA ROYALLE
:
It was such a learning experience because I was the least qualified of all the women who’d applied. I really learned what sexual harassment was, only we didn’t have a name for it back then.

VERONICA VERA
:
Through writing an article for
Variations,
I met Marco Vassi, a fabulous erotic writer, and he and I became lovers for a short while. I said I wanted to learn about S and M, so he took me to Woodstock with him to visit Charles Gatewood. That’s where I met Annie Sprinkle.

Annie had just come back from Europe with a whole bunch of
European pornography, and she said, “Look what I brought!” And it was just this shower of full-color, glossy, very expensively printed magazines.

Annie and I hit it off immediately.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
Veronica Hart and I were in this movie,
Pandora’s Mirror
, that was shot at the Hellfire Club. I wasn’t very good, but Veronica was very good—
and
she was pregnant.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
When we found out Veronica Hart was pregnant, Annie and I both decided we’d, you know, do the baby shower thing.

CANDIDA ROYALLE
:
Club 90 really came out of a baby shower that we threw for Veronica Hart. All kinds of women came, but by the end of it all Veronica’s straight friends had left, and the ones who stayed were all porn girls. Porn stars. And we had the best time.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
It wasn’t really until the baby shower that I ever really hung out with these big stars. See, a lot of times I’d be in a movie with someone, but I’d never meet them because our scenes were shot at different times.

It was kind of like that with Veronica. She was the big star. Yeah, big, big,
big
star. She was very loved.

VERONICA VERA
:
It was just like a regular shower, except we had this body builder in a bikini. But then as the shower was just winding down, somebody put on the soundtrack to
West Side Story,
and everybody—all these frustrated ballerinas and girls who’d gone to tap-dancing school—started dancing around, and that’s when we realized, “Oh, we have a lot in common here!”

CANDIDA ROYALLE
:
It was like we were fourteen. We were singing songs from
West Side Story
and having such a wonderful time together. And then we thought, “We should do this more often.” So we decided to start meeting regularly.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
It occurred to me—having already been a veteran of some therapy—that women in this business have problems that are truly unique unto this occupation. It’s not like being a hooker; it’s not like anything else. Keep in mind that this was the era of filmmaking; video wasn’t even a blip on the radar yet. And none of us ever dreamed that our films would be ultimately preserved for posterity.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
I was having a problem being a prostitute. At a certain point I would be with a client and just burst out crying, you know? So I stopped. I felt like I needed to do something else with my life—and yet I
was still kind of addicted to the money and the sex and the people and the attention.

It was a really hard transition. It was also about not being the young party girl anymore. I was starting to get more serious. All my friends from Panama were all doing amazing things, and I thought, “Well, I can’t be a prostitute forever.”

GLORIA LEONARD
:
We met at least once a month. We had meetings at other people’s houses, sometimes mine, sometimes Veronica’s. But the meetings seemed to be most comfortable at Annie’s—at her old address at 90 Lexington Avenue. Hence, Club 90.

I mean, I still maintained a circle of friends who were not in the adult business. I still went to the theater. I still listened to jazz. I had a life. I had a daughter to raise.

ANNIE SPRINKLE
:
I really needed a support group, and Veronica was pregnant, and she was going through changes. We were all going through changes.

VERONICA HART
:
Show business is not kind to aging women. If you’ve been a sexpot all of your life—or known for that—it’s very difficult when you start getting into your forties and fifties. It kills you. If they haven’t cultivated anything else, boy, it’s easy to get bitter. Mean
and
bitter.

CANDIDA ROYALLE
:
I had joined the Women’s Liberation Movement before porn because after experiences with men in the workplace, I started to get really angry about things.

But I left the women’s movement because it was getting split up—and that whole lesbian-feminism was coming in—what eventually turned into the Dworkinites and the MacKinnonites. Antisexuality—I mean, that’s just not for me.

KELLY NICHOLS
:
I mean, when you first meet a guy, how do you tell him you’re a porn star? But you have to—eventually. And it has to be before it’s gone too far, or they feel bamboozled. There has to be a fine timing, between where they just look at your tits and look at you as a slut—and where they think of you as a person. And if you really like them, it changes the dynamics, and it’s really strange. You’re just marked for life.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
I always had to make my own way. I never got any financial help. I mean, I raised my daughter alone. I never got a dime in child support. If I didn’t work, we didn’t eat.

VERONICA HART
:
When I went on
Phil Donahue,
we were supposed to talk
about life after porn—but of course we didn’t talk about life after porn; we talked about porn. The media only wants to portray us as victims. They want sensationalism and ratings, period.

CANDIDA ROYALLE
:
At the time, there was a woman named E. Jean Caroll, who was doing a big piece for
Playgirl
—when
Playgirl
was still a decent magazine out on the West Coast.

This was going to be the chance to finally tell the world what we were really like—not just this simple bimbette-victim piece. So she interviewed Veronica Hart, myself, Tiffany Clark, Annie Sprinkle, and Kelly Nichols.

We devoted a lot of time to E. Jean Caroll. We devoted an entire day to this beautiful photo shoot, with us all dressed up in Gibson Girl outfits, and we all gave her very long interviews.

Then, when the issue came out, the one she focused on the most was Tiffany Clark—because Tiffany most fit what people expected the porn star image to be. I mean, bless her heart, Tiffany’s a very sweet girl, but she was probably the least clever and the most fucked-up. Definitely the most troubled.

Before the article came out, E. Jean Caroll would call me up for advice on men. She was really perplexed about how to give a good blow job.

So I really gave it to her in a letter. I was like, “You wasted our time. You lied to us. You did the same old crap—just feed the public what they want to hear about the typical porn star.”

I said, “The next time you want to learn how to give a blow job, watch one of our movies!”

That’s when I got a letter from something called Franklin Furnace. They were going to put on this big two-day show—with an installation called “Could There Be a Feminist Porn?”

So I went to the group and said, “This is our opportunity. No one can take this away from us now. Let’s tell the world who we really are and what we’re really about.”

So we all decided that what we would do was a reenactment of one of our support group meetings.

VERONICA VERA
:
So we did this show called
Deep Inside Porn Stars
in early 1984—it was a dramatization of Club 90. We did it at a festival called “Carnival Knowledge.” The festival invited all these women to answer the question “Is there a feminist pornography?” It was held at the Franklin Furnace, which at the time was like one of the cradles for performance art in New York.

KELLY NICHOLS
:
For an hour, we gave the public one of our Club 90 meet
ings. It was so much fun. We came in dressed in grungy clothes, and underneath we had all the porn gear. And we’d talk.

Like Veronica Hart rolled in a stroller, acting like she was feeding the kids. We said, “What’s up, Veronica?” And we got coffee for each other and made it like a coffee klatsch kind of thing. And then the lights would go down, and one by one we’d get up and do some little something that described ourselves.

I had a slide show where I started off with one of the pieces you see in
Cosmo
—where they have the person with the blank face—and then the next slide is like dots of makeup, and then it just goes on.

So by the end of my little spiel, I’m in full makeup. I basically just described what I felt: “Porn has been veddy, veddy good to me. I enjoy it. I love hiding behind it. It’s been a place for me to wait and figure out what I want to do when I grow up.”

Veronica Vera gave a slide show of all of her travels around the world—you know, she was in Egypt on a camel, and she’d talk about it. And every time the lights went back on, we’d go back to our talk about day-to-day.

Then we had Susie Nero—who looked like an R. Crumb drawing—big legs, big girl—and she just got up, turned to the audience, and goes, “I don’t have a lot to say. All I know is that someday I’m going to marry an Italian and have a lot of babies. And what I do is dance, and I’m gonna show you.”

Then she hit the music, and she did a great striptease for everybody. She was pure, simple, to the point. That was her moment—it was great.

Annie broke your heart—she had so much inside her—this little suburbanized girl from the Valley growing up as “Ellen.” She did this whole number about “Ellen versus Annie.”

She’d say, “Ellen likes cards with puppies. Annie likes the Hellfire Club. Ellen likes to make money. Annie likes to spend it. Ellen likes to take pictures. Annie likes pictures taken of her.”

Annie’s splits start getting weirder and weirder. At the very end of her whole diatribe, tears are rolling down her face, and she’s saying what Annie wants and what Ellen wants, and they’re just so diametrically opposed—and you hear sniffling from the audience.

It was so powerful.

We all had glasses on, we had sweats on, and we just had all this clothing underneath, and every time the lights went down, a piece would come off. You’d have Annie sitting there with a sweatshirt and a tiara. Our tennis shoes would come off and heels would go on. So we became what people expected us to become—by the end we were porn stars.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
We were actually recruited by a Broadway producer to “kick it up a notch,” as they say.

VERONICA HART
:
Joe Cates came to us and basically wanted to buy the idea of
Deep Inside Porn Stars
, but we didn’t want to give up creative control of it.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
It came down to where the producers thought we were stupid porn bimbos, and they could rob us blind for the rights—and the writing of it—and the talent of it. We figured, split five ways, it was not a worthwhile venture. So we never moved forward.

VERONICA VERA
:
As Club 90 got more serious and began to meet on a regular basis, Kelly Nichols, Sue Nero, and Sharon Mitchell dropped out. Those three were still making movies.

VERONICA HART
:
Susie Nero and Kelly Nichols stopped coming to the meetings. At that time in their lives, I think it was too much of a commitment—and people were really trying to get down and deal with their shit, and I don’t think they were in for that.

KELLY NICHOLS
:
I was working. So sometimes I would be on the East Coast or the West Coast and not be able to make meetings—and there would be harsh feelings because I didn’t attend the meeting. It’s like, “Sorry! I’m doing what we’re talking about,” you know?

VERONICA VERA
:
That was kind of the big difference between us. The rest of us weren’t really making movies. And so they were still kind of living “the porn star lifestyle” and partying hard. I guess that was a little different from where we were coming from. Maybe we seemed like old fogies to them, ha, ha, ha. We weren’t so much the party animals, but they were.

So they dropped out of Club 90 during that first year, and the rest of us continued—and have continued it for almost twenty years. We’re still meeting online.