Savannah had always been someone I looked up to. Every step I took, it felt like I was being drawn inescapably in the direction her career had gone in. So I knew that adult movies were in the future, but at the same time I wasn’t necessarily ready yet. A girl really has to have her head and life together to do porn. Unfortunately, Savannah didn’t. The former Shannon Wiley, after crashing her Corvette and disfiguring her face on the way home from a night of partying, shot herself in the head. She was twenty-three years old, depressed, and in debt.
When I heard the news, it seemed incomprehensible at first that such a beautiful girl would do that to herself. But then I looked at my own life: my career was on the fast track, but my family and personal life were in the shitter. It seemed like a formula for the same kind of tragic end. With such an unstable foundation, the larger an edifice of fame you build on it, the more unwieldy it becomes —until it just collapses. There were so many things I still needed to figure out for myself.
But instead I let Jack’s cheating ways bring me into the business sooner than I anticipated. As I lay in bed each night, I imagined having this other life that he knew nothing about and couldn’t control, a secret identity that would crush him if he discovered it.
The other temptation was money: Suze paid three hundred dollars a day. By appearing in a film, I could make anywhere from two thousand dollars to six thousand dollars for just a few hours of work. That’s a lot of new purses.
Most girls get their first experience in gonzo films —in which they’re taken to a crappy studio apartment in Mission Hills and penetrated in every hole possible by some abusive asshole who thinks her name is Bitch. And these girls, some of whom have the potential to become major stars in the industry, go home afterward and pledge never to do it again because it was such a terrible experience. But, unfortunately, they can’t take that experience back, so they live the rest of their days in fear that their relatives, their co-workers, or their children will find out, which they inevitably do.
That could have happened to me. Fortunately, I decided to start slow. First, I experimented by doing a couple scenes for a company called Sin City in Vegas. All I had to do was basically pose for photographs in front of a moving camera instead of a still one. Since it was so easy, I decided to take the next baby step up: to soft-core, for which I didn’t even have to spread and show pink. I had no problem showing my outside, but exposing my insides still seemed kind of gross. To this day, I still can’t watch my own sex scenes.
The most prestigious soft-core director at that time was Andrew Blake, one of the few visionaries in the genre of titillation. He is an obsessive artist with lush Helmut Newton —inspired cinematography and beautiful girls, mostly top-of-the-line Penthouse Pets with natural boobs. He had also filmed with Savannah. So of course that’s who I wanted to work for, despite the fact that he liked more curvy, sophisticated women. However, not one to get discouraged by slim margins of success, I told Julia Parton that I wanted to be in an Andrew Blake film. Julia had kindly allowed me to make her phone number my business line, so that Jack didn’t find out what I was doing.
“I’ve got Andrew’s number,” she said. “Do you want me to call him?”
“No, that’s okay,” I told her. “I’ll call him.” By now, I knew a few things about marketing myself, especially to guys.
I phoned him the next day and said right away, “Hi, my name’s Jenna Jameson. I would really really love to be in one of your films.”
He didn’t hang up on me.
“I know who you are,” he replied. “I’ve seen one of your layouts.”
I gave him my résumé anyway.
“I’ll tell you what,” he finally said. “I’m shooting in a couple of weeks with Kaylan Nicole, Celeste, and Julia Ann. Maybe that’s something you would like to do?”
I was such a dreamer that I was actually disappointed. When I heard the names of all those top girls, I realized that I wouldn’t be the star.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m in.”
“Would you be willing to do girl-girl?”
I didn’t mind that. I just didn’t want to be stuck having to get intimate with some drug-addled basket case. So I asked, “Can I pick the girl?”
“Who do you have in mind?”
I knew exactly who I wanted: Nikki Tyler.
“Let me look into it,” he said, “and I’ll call you back.”
The next week, Nikki was approved and I was on the plane to L.A. once more. I had only worked with Suze before, where there was one makeup artist and you had to pick your clothes from her closet. But Andrew Blake’s production was huge, with two makeup artists, a stylist, and half a dozen trailers. When I walked onto the set, everyone looked at me funny. I couldn’t tell why. I climbed into the honey wagon and saw, in the front seat, a girl with black hair. She was slouched in her chair and so trashed that she couldn’t even keep her head up. It was the first time I’d seen a girl in the industry who had let herself get that fucked up.
Nikki hadn’t arrived yet, so I kept to myself. When it was my turn for makeup, I sat in the chair for what seemed like hours. The makeup artist was having so much trouble with me —putting on a new face, inspecting it, and then taking it off. Finally, I worked up the courage to ask him what was going on.
“Honey,” he said. “Let’s just say you’re a challenge. And I mean that in the best possible way, sweetheart.”
“I’m a big girl,” I told him. “You can be blunt.”
“You look like you’re twelve, darling,” he said. “I mean, a couple of the girls here thought someone had brought their daughter to the set.”
He finally solved the problem, at least in his mind, by painting black makeup all around my eyes, so that I looked like a chicken in a Lone Ranger mask. Then he curled my hair into a twenties flapper ’do, and I was ready.
Nikki soon arrived and gushed, “Hi baby! How’s my little girl?” And suddenly everything was good. I sat and wrote in my day planner as they worked on her. The ever-motherly Nikki brought a pedicure kit to the set, so since they were behind schedule —which I’d come to learn is nothing unusual— Nikki sat at my feet and gave me a pedicure. Every other person on the set looked at us like we were monkeys picking the bugs out of each other’s fur.
When we broke for lunch, I made a beeline for the fruit table. As I was inspecting the bananas like a good monkey, a tall, thin, beautiful brunette walked up to me. It was Shauna Ryan, a Penthouse Pet and clearly the alpha female of the tribe. She looked me up and down and then sneered, “How old are you? Eleven?”
I turned and looked up at her and said, “A few decades younger than you.” Then I went back to my bananas.
The strange thing about bullies is that if you take their abuse, it never ends. But once you get the balls to stand up to them, they respect you and move on to a weaker target. I never heard a bitchy word from her again. It was that easy —and that difficult.
After lunch, it was time for my scene. When I took my clothes off, Andrew Blake stepped out from behind his Bolex camera and gasped, “Wow! What a body! You have beautiful boobs!” If a guy in a strip club said that I’d think he was a creep, but coming from a director and authority figure it was the best compliment in the world. Since the scene was soft-core, we couldn’t touch each other’s private parts, so it was hard to really get into it. In fact, it sucked.
Andrew kept moving us to different locations. By the time we were at the fourth, in front of an artificial waterfall, Nikki and I had so much pent-up libido that our inner thighs were turning blue. For the shot, my back was to her and she was supposed to lean over me, kiss my neck, and pretend like she was fingering me. My front was not visible from the camera’s point of view, so Nikki started gently rubbing my clit as the Bolex whirred and clicked. The sound of it was so comforting and reassuring. I closed my eyes and just imagined being a twenties actress making her silent screen debut in Hollywood. Suddenly, my body began to shudder and my knees buckled. I arched my back and a soft moan escaped from my lips. I was coming.
I opened my eyes and Andrew was just sitting there, watching us with a big smile on his face. We had gotten totally lost in the moment, and I’m sure it was rare for him to capture authentic sex on a soft-core shoot. That is, if the camera was actually still rolling.
On the plane home, I was ecstatic. Moviemaking was so simple and fun. And I was sure that Andrew Blake loved me. At least, he loved my body and breasts, and we gave him a real performance. But he never called me again. I suppose his type of girl was dark-haired, shapely, and looked like she was old enough to vote. Even in interviews to this day, he says that I was meek, that nothing stood out about me, and that he didn’t think I was going to make it in the business. And I have to give him points for his honesty, because almost anyone else would try to take credit for discovering someone.
It was disappointing not to hear from him, because I was so enthralled with the experience —and the end result. The scene looked beautiful, with grainy black-and-white footage of the orgasm. Seems the camera was still rolling.