Whore Stories (13 page)

Born Ellen Steinberg in 1954 in Philadelphia, Annie Sprinkle never shied away from her past. In fact, her trailblazing porno film,
Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle
, which made her the “second-best selling video star of 1981,” is largely autobiographical. The film features a character named Ellen Steinberg, a shy little Jewish girl from Philly with dreams as big as her breasts. The movie follows the bashful Ellen as she grows up to be the inimitable Annie Sprinkle, exploring her sexuality with a host of talented costars, including Ron “The Hedgehog” Jeremy in one of his first roles!

In a 2000 interview with
Salon
, Sprinkle recalls “feeling ugly and wanting to be touched” as a child, and she believes these feelings were the driving force behind her entrée into porn and prostitution by her late teens. Whether it was nature or nurture, according to Annie, “Porn was exactly what I needed, and up ’til my mid-20s, I really liked being a prostitute.” That’s something you don’t hear every day, and they are strong words from the former Girl Scout, but Annie is nothing if not unconventional. “I’d do something that was so-called taboo and say ‘that doesn’t feel bad.’ It’s like growing up with a religion you end up rejecting,” she adds, although the analogy strikes me as a bit strained. This would be more like growing up with a religion you end up fisting.

Annie’s provocative one-woman show,
Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn
, is a performance and film diary that explores Sprinkle’s thirty-year odyssey of orgasms, orgies, and orifices, from her sexual awakening around the time of the sexual revolution of the sixties, to her “discovery” as a porn starlet while “fluffing” Harry Reems, and then on to her present vocation as a “modern media whore” and lecturer. Highlights from
Herstory
include the aforementioned fisting, along with golden showers (I’m serious about those Golden Shower Ritual Kits), sex with amputees and dwarves, bondage, and “rainbow showers,” which is code for barfing on people—almost anything you can think of, really.

Believe it or not, according to Sprinkle, after a while, “straight-porn directors didn’t want to work with me anymore; they said I was too kinky.” And where do we take it to when we get “too kinky”? That’s right, we take it to the “performance art” scene and join up with other horny neo-Dadaists and Fluxus artists to make avant-garde nudie flicks, author a journal on “piss-art,” and then move on to more lucrative instructional videos like
Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm
. You may think, “That’s just cashing in on the notoriety that comes with being filmed nude and drinking pee,” and you may think right.

But in 2002, Annie Sprinkle not only talked the talk, she walked the walk
and
chalked the chalk, receiving her PhD in Human Sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, in San Francisco. Prostitute. Porn Star. Provocateur. Professor. Never let it be said that Annie Sprinkle didn’t cover all the bases. But let’s just hope she covered the mattress with a tarp or something.

CALAMITY JANE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Cowgirl, but don’t call her “girl”

CLAIM TO FAME:
Pioneer badass; good with the six-shooters

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
The Wild West

Of all the picturesque figures out of Wild West lore, Calamity Jane stands out as the one who probably gave the most head. Born Martha Jane Canary Burke in 1852 in Missouri, Calamity Jane is said to have earned her epithet not by some misguided sexual escapade involving Wild Bill Hickok’s unruly moustache, but through the perception that to offend her would be to invite calamity, venereal and otherwise. Some reports claim she was given the name because of her tendency to roar “What a calamity!” when bested at poker. Nobody can say for sure. However, what we do know is that Martha Jane was a well-known, often drunk, cross-dressing tranny prostitute who was well acquainted with the vicissitudes of life for a woman on America’s frontier.

After intense scrutiny from their vantage points in various wood-paneled American libraries, professors ultimately determined that Calamity Jane was not the Indian-killing, bank-robbing gunslinger the movies and
Deadwood
have led us to believe. Even so, the woman was a character and most certainly, as you’ve likely guessed by now, a card-carrying hooker.

Described by frontiersmen Jesse Brown and A. M. Willard in their 1924
Black Hill Trails
as “nothing more than a common prostitute, drunken, disorderly and wholly devoid of any conception of morality,” Calamity Jane nevertheless possessed a humanitarian bent. In 1878 during an outbreak of smallpox in Deadwood, this scourge of polite society came through huge for the townsfolk. Jane girded up her overtaxed loins, rolled up her sleeves, downed some cocktails and proceeded to nurse the afflicted patients ceaselessly, even as other, more upstanding and God-fearing citizens stayed away claiming the plague was probably biblical and no doubt beyond their control. Also, they didn’t want to die.

Moreover, Calamity Jane lent her unique services to the United States Army at the “Three-Mile Hog Ranch,” Fort Laramie’s fabled house of ill repute. According to one lieutenant, the place was populated by “as hardened and depraved [a] set of witches as could be found on the face of the globe,” adding, “In all my experience I have never seen a lower, more beastly set of people of both sexes.”

Our Calamity Jane eventually managed to get off of her back, eschew whoring, and land on her feet in the history books, but at fifty-one she died broke and hammered in the Calloway Hotel of Terry, South Dakota. On her deathbed, she asked to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok, who, according to many sources, found her company excruciating. But, Calamity Jane got her wish.

SALLY STANFORD

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Former mayor of Sausalito, California

CLAIM TO FAME:
“Dean of San Francisco Prostitutes”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
San Francisco

You don’t survive eleven heart attacks, three decades as the grand madam of San Francisco, and a career as an elected politician without being one hardy hooker. Sally Stanford was born in Oregon in 1903. Christened Mabel Janice Busby, the precocious vixen quite understandably moved on as quickly as possible to her
nom de horizontale
, and would prove herself to be one of the most resourceful, resilient, and savvy harlots around.

At the age of sixteen young Mabel eloped with a machinating dipshit who claimed he was the grandson of Colorado’s former governor. Granted, his alleged credentials were not all that impressive, even if true, but Mabel thought she saw an opportunity, and she took it. She soon found herself caught up in a failed robbery scheme orchestrated by her dunce husband, and the judge sentenced her to two years in the Oregon State prison. Mabel, however, carried out her sentence hanging out with the warden’s wife in their house. Apparently, when Sally was taken to Salem, the warden said he had no place to care for a child and turned the young girl over to his wife, so Sally lived in the couple’s house for two years. I agree. That makes absolutely no sense, but one gets the impression things were even weirder back then, when the law was vague enough to allow for creative (but not in the Guantanamo kind of way) forms of punishment or “rehabilitation.”

Bouncing back after her brief “incarceration,” Mabel changed her name to Sally, made a handsome nickel in the speakeasy business, and invested in hotels, first in San Francisco’s shadier Tenderloin but eventually setting up shop on Nob Hill. She then quickly became the Bay City’s main madam. By all accounts Sally’s girls were refined, gorgeous, loyal, and discreet. If anyone got blitzkrieged on booze and raised a stink, Sally promptly had their ass thrown to the curb, and that would include even the likes of such luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, a notorious sot, whom she hated (by many accounts a terrible drunk and a prissy diva) and had booted for disorderly conduct.

Sally was also an early pioneer in the sphere of globalization. Nowadays that term is something of a hackneyed buzzword, but in 1945, when Sally and her girls entertained the delegates from the United Nations Organizing Conference, there was nothing “hackneyed” about her operation. In fact, according to the Pulitzer Prize–winning
San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen, “The United Nations was founded at Sally Stanford’s whorehouse.” Strong.

After suffering countless collars for the usual “lewdness” charge, Sally became weary of visits from the SFPD vice squad, and she bowed out of the game gracefully. The retired madam opened a high-profile restaurant, and eventually ran for the city council of Sausalito. She was defeated in her first five attempts, but as Sally always said, “Sinners never give up!” She won the mayoral race in 1976 on—what else?—a pro-business ticket.

In 1978, when the inevitable movie was made of her juicy autobiography,
The Lady of the House
, Sally famously dissed Dyan Cannon’s portrayal of her, saying, “She just didn’t have it in her to play me,” although Sally, always a player and a politician conceded, “I have to admit, it’s a hard act to follow.” Upon news of her death from her twelfth heart attack, all the flags in Sausalito flew at half-staff, an erectile dysfunction rarely, if ever, witnessed in Sally’s old place at 1144 Pine Street.

DEBRA MURPHREE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Stone-cold streetwalker

CLAIM TO FAME:
Brought Assemblies of God minister Jimmy Swaggart to his knees.

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
New Orleans

When the wildly popular televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was caught with a prostitute in 1988 at a dingy Travel Inn, he got on TV and wept, “I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me.” You know the drill. And while we remember Swaggart, one wonders: What happened to the prostitute? We have no idea. During the scandal in the late 1980s, the hooker Debra Murphree remarked to reporters that she might go back to live with her children in Indiana, maybe do some interior decorating. Then she posed nude for
Penthouse
. This was followed by the obligatory cyclone of tax problems faced by a $20-a-session hooker becoming a world-famous centerfold, and then, like Amelia Earhart, she disappeared. Well, not exactly like Amelia Earhart. Maybe she’s just working on wallpaper arrangements and custom nesting tables. But for a few fleeting moments at the close of the twentieth century, Debra Murphree was at the center of the media universe.

When Jimmy Swaggart’s former rival and fellow Assemblies of God minister Marvin Gorman (against whom Swaggart had earlier made a concerted effort to expose as a philandering sinner) came equipped with a telephoto lens and a private detective to the Travel Inn, he photographed Jimmy
in flagrante
with Debra, a working girl just trying to make a life for herself and her nine-year-old daughter in the unforgiving alleyways of New Orleans. A familiar face in the New Orleans trick tank, maybe a small problem with the drugs, and not the best example for her daughter, Debra Murphree nevertheless was integral in bringing down Swaggart (temporarily), and these days, well, sometimes all we can manage is to embrace our angels on their descent.

Erototalia, is the act of sexy talk. Research shows that over 70 percent of couples engage in some kind of erototalia to keep things interesting during intercourse. Well, that’s all very interesting, but what the hell do you call what passes for sweet nothings in Rev. Swaggart’s world? I’ll tell you what those are; they are “pieces of mouth diarrhea” or “coprolalia,” (the obsessive use of scatological language) and very rarely a turn on.

Murphree was born Debra Hedge and raised in Patoka, Indiana (pop. 735), where classmates, in a 1988
Dallas Morning News
article, recalled that she “went to school,” “wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities,” and once even “left town with a biker named Dick,” among other dazzling recollections. Well, things were about to change for the high school dropout and small-town girl.

At its apostolic apogee in the mid-1980s, the Swaggart Ministry was a $140 million-a-year business, taking in $500,000 every
day
. And each week, his television program,
The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast
, attracted 8 million viewers across the globe. However, for Swaggart, with smoking-gun photographs and revelations such as the ones dished out by Ms. Murphree in the pages of
Penthouse
, the pastor’s popularity began to wane. Speaking of her dalliances with Swaggart, Murphree noted:

He’d ask me if I’d ever let anyone screw my daughter when she was that young, and I said, “No, She’s only nine years old.” He asked me if she started developing [breasts] or if she had any hair down there. . . . I didn’t know what to say. I thought, “This man’s got to be sick.”

Sick is one way to put it. A loathsome pig too tainted even for the abattoir is another. After the scandal broke and Swaggart was whimpering like a simpleton, the Assemblies of God moved quickly to defrock—Swaggart’s exploits were too much even for the church of too-much. Of course, after Debra Murphree made the media rounds, she faded back into obscurity. Swaggart, on the other hand, managed to return to the limelight, coming out shamelessly for encore after frustrating encore.