If anyone in North Hollywood had the courage to approach a turbo-breasted, kiddie-faced blonde in the summer of 1996, they could have been dating me. I was lonely after breaking up with Steven —not because I missed him but because I was tired of living by myself. As my star rose, it became harder to live in that tiny studio. I wanted someone to share my excitement with. And, more than that, there was the issue of safety. Not only was I afraid to order food, but my deathly fear of the parking garage wasn’t assuaged when my Corvette was broken into and thousands of dollars in clothes I had stored in the back for photo shoots were taken.

Rodney Hopkins, in the meantime, hadn’t stopped pestering me to go out with him. And since he had saved my life by taking me to the hospital, I felt a sense of obligation. My reluctance to see him again was nothing personal: there was just no chemistry. But I was lonely and grateful so I relented.

He picked me up and took me to an Italian restaurant on Ventura Boulevard. (I rarely went over the hill to Hollywood.) With the dim lighting and obsequious staff, it could have been an incredibly romantic evening. But it was, as I had feared, a night of ennui. I am a talkative person. It’s easy for me to make conversation; at the Crazy Horse I’d learned to entertain even the dullest of the species. But every time I asked Rod a question, he answered with one word. Whenever I made a joke or acted silly, he just looked at me blankly. So as dinner progressed, the awkward silences grew longer. I couldn’t wait to get away from him. When he pulled up in front of my house, I leaped out of the car and told him there was no need to walk me to the door.

Any other man would have realized there was no connection and left me alone, but Rod was either oblivious or obsessed. He continued to call me incessantly. And every now and then, if I was bored and hungry, I’d let him treat me to dinner.

Gradually, I began to grow attached to him. As he became more comfortable with me, he began to laugh at my jokes, which always gets a man big points. And it was really sweet to watch the way he reacted to me: he seemed to get such a kick out of everything I did or said. An insanely talented director, he had just started making films for Wicked, and he knew a lot about the business. So I quickly realized he could help me. Was that superficial of me? Yes. Was it unusual for me? Sadly, no.

Rod was five feet ten inches, with brown hair, a goatee, and earrings. To most people, including me, he seemed unfriendly because he never smiled, barely talked, and was unable to express himself emotionally. He didn’t seem to have a deep side, a hidden sensitivity, or an ounce of adventure and spontaneity. His shortcomings may have been due to his upbringing. He was an only child and never close to his parents. Formerly a dancer in Canada, he had since let his body go slightly. However, his male-dancer fashion sense never changed. He was always wearing a leather jacket with built-in shoulder pads that even Goodwill would have rejected.

The first movie we worked on together was Cover to Cover. I participated in everything: script writing, preproduction, wardrobe, set decorating. I was so gung-ho about the experience that I put myself in every scene, which was ridiculous. Unlike Blue Movie, Cover to Cover was not plot-driven —and it was made on one-tenth of the budget. It was all vignettes, strung together by the not-too-original motif of a librarian who fantasizes about being a character in the books she reads. So, as the librarian, I did three boy-girl scenes, three girl-girl scenes, and one solo masturbation in a two-day shoot.

We switched locations for every fantasy, and I was constantly being put into different wigs and costumes. The challenge ultimately wasn’t the acting; it was in saving my private parts. When it came time for my first boy-girl scene, Rod, of course, cast himself as my partner. His very first thrust banged my cervix wrong. I doubled over in pain, rocking and moaning and clutching myself for fifteen minutes. It took another six hours before I was ready to have sex again. I’m still not sure why the pain was so sharp —I may have been swollen from the workout I had already been through in the previous girl-girl scenes.

Even though I had made love to Rod on camera, I still wasn’t ready to do it in real life. The turning point was a film called The Wicked One, which required even more acting than Blue Movie. Throughout the shoot, Rod paid constant attention to me. He seemed to really care about how I came across on camera, and, naturally, I liked that. He had a great eye. And he even started to relax and open up a little, so he became more fun to be with.

It was one of the most perfect shoots of my career: I came in almost every scene, which is extremely rare. And I had my first three-way, with Peter North and Mark Davis. I found it unexpectedly difficult to pay attention to both guys at the same time.

I also had another three-way in the movie that came about accidentally. The scene was supposed to be just Tom Byron and Channone, a new French girl who barely spoke English. I was supposed to be bossing Tom around, telling him what to do with her. He loved it and kept looking up at me like an obedient gimp. The more he was into it, the more I got into it, until I was grabbing Channone’s ass cheeks, spreading them open, and yelling at him, “Is that all you’ve got?”

Midway through the scene, Channone started begging me, in her cute French accent, “I want to eat your poosie.” I wasn’t supposed to have any sex in that scene but Rod didn’t stop us.

The strangest moment, however, came in my scene with Tiffany Million. She was eating me out, and everything was great. But then suddenly, she raised her head, stuck her right boob inches away from my ding-ding, and started squeezing her breast milk into it. I was horrified. I knew she could squirt milk from her breasts on command, but I had no idea she was going to do it with me. And I certainly wasn’t prepared for what happened next: she stuck her face back between my legs and started licking her own milk up. I tried to go with it, and I probably fooled most people. But when I think back on that episode today, I still get grossed out. Ever since then, I’ve tried to avoid that kind of surprise by meeting with girls before a scene to discuss exactly what we want to do together.

After the shoot, Rod moved into a huge five-story house in Studio City, which he rented for four thousand dollars a month with his directing partner, Greg Steele. They planned to earn the rent by leasing the place for shoots. Soon I was spending more and more nights over there. He had pursued me for so long, set me up as such a fantasy object in his mind, that when he finally got me, he never wanted to let me go.

But, as if Cover to Cover had been an omen, sex with him was not right. He was the first man I’d dated with a Madonna-whore complex. Whenever we were together, he treated me like a princess. But in bed, the sex had to be dirty and he’d treat me like a slut, shouting obscenities and constantly trying to stick his finger up my asshole while fucking me, which is an acquired taste that I just never acquired. So, as the relationship progressed, it became harder and harder for him to fuck me, because he was caught in a double bind. It seemed like in order to get pleasure during sex, he had to humiliate the woman; but it was impossible for him to humiliate the woman he loved. The only advantage to our nearcelibacy is that I never had the baby I still wanted so badly. Since the first time I had sex with Cliff, I’d find my thoughts drifting unavoidably to motherhood every now and then. I was never sure whether it was simply a biological urge that all girls felt, or the result of never having had a normal family of my own. But even though my body was screaming for it, I knew that I wasn’t really ready —mentally, emotionally, or career-wise.

Despite the problems, I really wanted to make our relationship work. It just made sense. Thanks to our films, Rod became the first director to sign an exclusive contract with Wicked. He was on his way up in the adult film world. I was their top contract girl, and I was heading in the same direction. So, since we were collaborating together in our movies, it just made sense to be together in real life as well. This way, I could focus entirely on my career.

I kept searching for reasons to love him. As I look back on it, I find myself going through a similar process: I’m reaching to remember the fondness and the happy times, but I keep coming up empty-handed. Everything was fine while I had my own place and independence, but soon he had to move out of his mini-mansion. It turns out his neighbors were assholes and wouldn’t let him rent the place for movie shoots, so he couldn’t afford it anymore. Instead, he rented a charming little house with a pool on Topanga and Ventura, and asked me to move in with him. I said yes.

I always try to analyze why I fall in love with people. And usually it is for the wrong reasons. So, even though I knew something was lacking between us, we were both enjoying riding each other’s wave. When we moved in together, we made a pact that we were only going to work with each other —he as my director and me as his star. He was incredibly talented, and not just as a filmmaker. I was going to hire someone to do the drapes, and one day I returned home and discovered that he had made beautiful silk and velvet drapes himself, with wall partitions made from folded Chinese fabric. It was more beautiful than anything I could have paid for. When I had an outfit that didn’t fit right, he’d sew and mend it for me.

For once, I was dating a guy who focused one hundred percent of his attention on me. I was confident that he loved me and, even better, he allowed me to be in charge. I learned an important thing about dating: The person who wants the least amount of commitment in a relationship is the one who holds the reins.

One would think that after what I’d been through with Jack, I’d be a sympathetic partner. But, instead, I became just as bad as the men I had dated. I took out all of my negative experiences on him and really fucked him up, because I had nothing to lose. By the end of our first month living together, we were fighting all the time. I would insult every aspect of his masculinity and threaten to leave, because I truly did not need him.

Whenever I said I was out of there, he would cry. And once a man cries, it’s over. Show me any weakness, and I’ll stomp all over you. I clearly wasn’t ready for a relationship: I was still living out unresolved conflicts from my past.

Some would say that Rod was smart with his money, but at that early point in my maturity I saw it as being cheap. He drove a beat-up white van and refused to buy a new car. I constantly told him that he was going to return home one day and discover the thing burning in the driveway.

Of course, Rod wasn’t entirely innocent himself. He seemed to be taking out all his bad experiences with women on me as well. He had a passive-aggressive way of trying to keep me under control, and that was by playing off my insecurity. It’s a time-honored tactic among men who feel like they are dating a woman out of their league: never be impressed and always put her down. He would walk into the room when I was putting on makeup naked and say, “You can tell the first thing that’s going to go is your ass.” Or he’d tell me that the only women who turned him on were Asian girls. When I replied that I was as far from Asian as a person could get, he’d say that he was attracted to me because I had Asian eyes.

Slowly I went from being this thriving, confident woman at the top of a new career to questioning everything about my body and myself. It was his way of getting revenge by making me as dependent on him as he was on me.

When he was angry, he would call me a whore. And that pissed me off more than anything, because Preacher had said that word to me when he was raping me. Hearing it since —no matter who spoke it— sent bubbles of anger boiling to the surface of my skin. I told him when he first used the word, “You can call me anything you want, but do not call me a whore. It will save you a lot of pain and suffering.”

It was a big mistake to tell him that, because now he had a button he could push whenever he wanted. Of course, he still had to suffer the consequences: I’m not by nature a violent person, but I would throw books at him and pummel him with my little fists.

If I hadn’t really cared about him, I wouldn’t have responded to his provocations at all. So, somehow, over the course of all this madness, I must have fallen in love with him. And the more I fell in love with him, the more he pulled away and neglected me. Instead of spending time with me when he was home, he would lock himself in his room for days and write scripts.

Eventually, our sex life dwindled to nothing —and I needed it, not just for the pleasure itself, but as reassurance of the love that we both supposedly felt for each other. It wasn’t just because of his demeaning comments and his sexual neuroses: being in business with your lover will typically squeeze the last drop of energy and passion from both of you. Some say that work is the enemy of all natural erotic impulses, that it kills off your sexual desires and channels them elsewhere. And this is doubly true when your work is sex.

I started scrambling to save the relationship. On some level, I wanted to make it work because, professionally, we were a good team. The movies we made were some of my favorites. So, in a last-ditch effort to make the relationship work, we decided to get married. I thought we’d fall back in love —and I convinced myself that I was overemphasizing sex, that perhaps it wasn’t really that important in a relationship. So I immersed myself in planning the wedding of the century. I even bought my own wedding ring.

In retrospect, I knew it was a mistake at the time. But I thought that the key to happiness was having a family, something I’d never really had. I always romanticized the years of my life that I couldn’t remember, the picture of bliss that the Massoli family had been before my mother died and our lives went haywire. I thought that I could build it back with Rod. I liked the idea of being married and I’d dreamed of being a mother since I was a child. After all, I was twenty-two: the same age my mother was when she married my father.

The wedding was on December 21, 1996. It was a beautiful $45,000 affair at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. My dad flew in and met Rod for the first time before the ceremony. As I was downing my third glass of champagne, I suddenly had a moment of clarity.

I ran out of the room and found my dad. I still had an hour left until the ceremony.

“Dad, I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t want to marry this guy. This is a big mistake. What should I do?”

I braced myself for some good advice, prepared to follow through on any plan of his that would save the day. What followed instead were the worst words of wisdom I have ever received in my life.

“Just do it,” he said. “It’s not like you’re going to be nailed to the cross. You’re getting cold feet, that’s all. If you don’t like it, you can get out of it easily.”

Mind you, I was asking for advice from a guy who had been through five marriages.

So I went ahead with it. The wedding would have been a fairy tale if Rod hadn’t been waiting at the end of the aisle for me. As I stood on the altar, I kept thinking that I should pretend to pass out. I’d always been told that fainting at the altar was the best way to get out of a wedding.

The sure sign that it was more than just cold feet was that I didn’t cry once. Generally, I bawl all the time, even just watching A Wedding Story on television. Instead, I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. I felt like such a hypocrite. If you see our wedding portrait, our faces say it all: I look horrified and he couldn’t be more pleased.

The next day we were scheduled to fly to Hawaii for our honeymoon. So I booked a room for us that night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When we checked in, we said good night and went to sleep. We didn’t even have sex. And the scary thing is I didn’t even want to.