The Other Hollywood (44 page)

LOS ANGELES
1983–1984

JIM SOUTH
:
There was a little bitty photo studio in World Modeling, where my desk is now. I was in the office next door. Kristie Nussman came in with a guy, his name was something like Rogers. She actually had a state ID with her picture on it, and a matching birth certificate.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
How do I spell my first name? It’s K-R-I-ST-I-E. But yeah, everyone calls me Krissy. And the last name is N-U-S-SM-A-N. Yeah, this is for your own. You’re not going to write any of this?

JIM SOUTH
:
So I sent Kristie into the little photo studio and told her—like we do with everyone—“Please strip your clothes. I’m going to take a couple Polaroids”—we get them started with that.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
I was twenty-one when I was a model, originally. It got a little slow—then I started nude modeling.

JIM SOUTH
:
I went back into my office. This Rogers guy, who claimed to be Kristie’s stepfather, was going on and on about how Kristie knew who Ron Jeremy was. He was sure, in almost no time, that Kristie would be doing X-rated movies. This conversation happened while Kristie was still in the studio getting dressed.

So I confirmed her age and bing-dadda-bong we were off to the races.

TOM BYRON
:
Traci was hot. She was on the cover of all the magazines—very much in demand as a print model.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
Oh yeah, I get a lot of public recognition. I mean, everywhere I go, I’m a cover girl. Even if I don’t even have a layout—they just put me on the cover to sell their magazines.

TOM BYRON
:
She was actually the centerfold of the Vanessa Williams issue of
Penthouse
. Kristie had done that before she’d done her first movie.

GINGER LYNN
:
I remember meeting Traci in the parking lot of the grocery store across from Jim South’s office. I thought she was a hooker. I never for a moment thought anything as to her age or if she was legal. She was definitely hard. Definitely—even then.

JIM SOUTH
:
Traci was very professional as a businesswoman, and to coin a Texas phrase, she was “slicker than owl shit in an okra dish.”

You ever eat boiled okra?

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
I always liked the name Traci. Then I went, like, looking up in the sky, and I went like, “Ha-ha!” and said to myself, “Ha-ha—Traci Lords.”

TOM BYRON
:
I met Traci on the set of
What Gets Me Hot
. Traci had a nonsex role—just a masturbation thing. In those days, you went from figure model to soft-core still model to movies. It was a gradual progression—they didn’t unload everything on you all at once—because it was still in the era of quasi-legality.

HUMPHRY KNIPE
:
I was working on my old, red Cadillac when I noticed this gorgeous brunette with this older guy—must have been in his fifties, gray hair, hobbling up our driveway. Her shoes were too small or something—real high heels; she could hardly walk. She was not very elegant.

TOM BYRON
:
I was the new kid on the block—kind of an up-and-comer—and I looked at her and said, “Oh my God! This girl is
gorgeous!
”

HUMPHRY KNIPE
:
After I finished with the car, I went in the house, and Suze Randall was talking to them. Except for that initial impact she had on me in those particular heels, Traci was gorgeous—baby-faced, sulky expression,
very
sulky—and she was nervous, ha, ha, ha.

Was she gonna pull this off or not?

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
I’m twenty-two. I’m five foot seven. A hundred and fifteen. The color of my hair? Chestnut brown, I guess. Measurements? Thirty-six on top. D. Waist? Twenty-four. Hips would probably be about thirty-five or thirty-six.

TOM BYRON
:
Traci comes up to me and says, “Oh, hi. Who are you?” And before I know it she’s sitting in my lap, and we’re fucking kissing, and it just blew my mind because I got this beautiful goddess all over me.

We just fucked all the time. I was in my twenties, and she had a California driver’s license that said she was Kristie Nussman and eighteen. I had no reason to doubt her.

HUMPHRY KNIPE
:
Suze and I did the initial shoot of Traci at our studio in Venice. It was policy at the time to take a picture of the girl holding her ID—so it was unmistakable that the model was connected with that ID. “Kristie Nussman” was on her birth certificate. She had California ID. So Suze took that Polaroid—and after that it was business as usual.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
What lured me into films? The money, and the fun—both. It was for a piece of ass. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I’ve had about five or six boyfriends, so I wouldn’t say one. How long do they last? Not long. About as long as instant breakfast.

HUMPHRY KNIPE
:
Traci actively promoted herself. I was not aware of any one else—besides this shadowy stepfather figure—and he disappeared very quickly off the scene. She was just a regular girl being booked through a regular agency like everybody else.

TOM BYRON
:
Traci was one of those girls who in high school would always be going off with the football jock. I couldn’t believe a girl this gorgeous was attracted to a dork like me. Because I looked real young, and I thought of myself as incredibly lucky to be in this business, you know? It was mystifying. And, I was completely infatuated with her.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
How old was I when I first started having sex? Nineteen—because I was brought up that way. Are my parents separated? They’ve been divorced since I was about four. My mom had custody. I decided to go see my dad. I lived with my dad for a while. He’s an electrician. He lives in West Virginia, and he’s real old-fashioned.

My mom had me when she was about sixteen, so she’s in her forties. She’s an airline stewardess, and she flies all over the country. I see her a lot. She comes into Los Angeles probably a couple of months out of the year. She answers my fan mail, ha, ha, ha.

TOM BYRON
:
I was too shy to ask her home that night, and I was still befuddled why this gorgeous woman was like paying attention to me. But I got her number, and we talked. We had sex the first time offscreen.

HUMPHRY KNIPE
:
Suze took Traci down to Mexico for a shoot, and, oh boy, she fucked her way around. It was, you know, anyone and everybody in the house—all night—and she’d be fresh as a daisy the next day.

Phenomenal sexual appetite. A very passionate girl. And fun—a load of fun.

GREG DARK (PORN DIRECTOR)
:
Traci comes over to me on the shoot with this new guy, Dick Rambone—who has fifteen and a half inches—who was having trouble getting it up.

Traci asks, “You think I’m going to help him get it up, don’t you?”

I said, “No. I didn’t ask you to.”

And she said, “I’m not going to.”

About five minutes later she comes back and asks, “It’s really fascinating, isn’t it?”

I ask, “What?”

Traci says, “His dick. I wonder how big it can get?”

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
I’ve been wild about sex from day one. And I
do
scream. I’ve always been a screamer. That’s not an act. On my first video I tried to be quiet, but I couldn’t muffle myself. Then everyone started going, “Yeah…yeah…
yeah!
” And I thought, “Oh good, I’m allowed to do this!”

I didn’t know they liked noise. I’d never seen a porn flick—how was I supposed to know?

GREG DARK
:
I said to Traci, “I don’t know how big his dick gets. I guess it’s not going to get big at all on this shoot.”

Traci said, “I bet you I can make it get up!”

So I said, “Well, I don’t know, I can’t ask you to try.”

She said, “I just want to because it’s so
fascinating.
” She said it like his dick was this disembodied thing.

JIM SOUTH
:
I got Traci
a lot
of work. The first or second shoot she did was for a guy named Lance Kincaid. And according to Lance—who only shot single-girl or simulation, where you’re just touching—Traci ended up getting on top of someone and having sex, so he had to stop the shoot.

TOM BYRON
:
The first time I had sex with Traci on-screen was during a still shoot, which turned into a hard-core scene because we were so hot for each other. It just kind of slipped in: “I’m sorry,” you know?

GREG DARK
:
Then Traci jumped on this guy and started sucking his weenie for, like, the next three hours. Meanwhile her pussy’s getting sopping wet—we didn’t even have to spray water on it for realism. It was all I
could do not to dive in between her legs and do her. It was rough. I got a headache from the whole thing.

HUMPHRY KNIPE
:
Did Traci enjoy sex? Undoubtedly. Not just having sex on-screen because there’s a certain amount of fakery that goes with that, but offscreen—you know, assistants, realtors, just about everybody.

One of our assistants told me what a great fuck she was. He said she had an amazing muscle. I was too embarrassed to ask, ha, ha, ha, “Ah, what exactly do mean?” I just thought, “Uh-huh.”

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
All my boyfriend has to do is stick it in—if I haven’t had it in a while, I’m already getting off. Ten seconds, two strokes. I like to come about three or four times. The first time is okay; the second is something. The third and the fourth are just like, “EEEEEAAAAAAHHHH!”

GREG DARK
:
Here’s Traci sucking wildly on this guy’s dick—with her pussy dripping—and the other girl there is going, “How can she do that? It’s completely gross and look—look! She’s
turned on!”
She thought it was the sleaziest thing she’d ever seen.

CHRISTY CANYON (PORN STAR)
:
Traci Lords knew more about sex than the whole porn industry put together.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
I like to see the dick in my face when it’s coming. On the face first. Oh, yeah, I like the way it pulsates before it comes. I like the big dicks.

CHRISTY CANYON
:
I didn’t have a car at the time—or it was broken, or something like that—so I was waiting for a girlfriend to pick me up at this bus stop in Hollywood when this guy pulls up in a brand-new, white Trans Am. He gets out and says, “God, you’re so pretty; you’ve got such a great body. How would you like to make a lot of money?”

I said, “I don’t even know your name!”

He said, “I’m Greg Rome,” like I should know who he is. He gave me a card from World Modeling, with Jim South’s name on it. And he goes on to say, “It’s figure modeling. There’s some nudity, but nothing else. No sex or that kind of thing.”

So I took the card and threw it somewhere in my apartment, thinking, “I’ll never call.” But I never threw the card out because I was working three different menial jobs just to get by.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
I will not be with girls that are underdeveloped. That’s one of my strong rules. I like boobs and asses and nice figures. I don’t like fat at all. I like long hair. And I favor blonds.

Why the boobs? I like the way they feel. I like to play with them.

RON JEREMY
:
Traci had the most nicest, natural tits of anybody I’ve ever seen—other than Christy Canyon. Traci’s would slope straight out. Silicone can’t do this. And then there were the nipples—big, thick, red nipples. I mean, aureolas—oh my God!

CHRISTY CANYON
:
One day I was down to five dollars in the bank. My rent, car insurance—everything was overdue—and my phone was going to be turned off. So I found the card and called the number. I worked for nine months straight after that.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
I like Ronnie Jeremy. He can fuck good. And Tommy Byron’s pretty good.

TOM BYRON
:
Traci lived in Redondo Beach, and she didn’t have a car—which, you know, was because she wasn’t old enough to fucking drive a car, I guess. I don’t know.

I would pick her up, and she would stay at my apartment in Sherman Oaks because she was booked all the time. She worked
all
the time.

HUMPHRY KNIPE
:
Traci was Suze’s good model. Suze shot twenty shoots with her, and we did about three cool movies with her.

Traci was a fun kid. She was full of life and loved attention—she loved showing off sexually and being a firecracker. You can see that in a lot of her films. She had a pretty vivid sexual life. She used to talk about things she did, the usual sort of sexual shenanigans—aircraft, sex in funny places.

TRACI LORDS (JANUARY 14, 1985)
:
Who gives the best head? In my experience, I would say, probably men. Do I get off on giving head? Yeah, but it depends on my mood. Sometimes I’m exceptional—but sometimes there’s times I don’t want to do it—and it shows.