Fishie?
Fishies say nothing.
You're right. Fishies don't say anything.
We don't get TV in this house. We all have computers.
My daughter and my son are three and two
and they each have their own computers
and they're lined up next to mommy's computers.
My little girl is really, really super smart.
She can use a computer really well.
She surfs around online and she uses Photoshop and Word.
She's only three years old.
She can read and write and use a computer just like an adult.
She's pretty amazing.
I didn't plan to be a single mom
or to be stuck in the middle of the desert
where I don't know anybody.
It's just of all been thrown for a loop.
So, then I said, "We got to arrest him,"
so we arrested him. And he cried like a baby, didn't he?
"I can't go back to jail!" He just cried like a baby. I said, "Okay."
I gave him the opportunity to make very small, reasonable payments.
He didn't make any of them.
I warned him if he didn't,
I'd come and take his grandma's car.
That's what he forced us to do.
The day that I took this car,
his little 87-year-old grandma or mother
was out there with her walker, watching us take her car.
It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.
But you know what? Business is business.
So, now the clay is pretty much conditioned,
it's ready to be worked with.
We're gonna give ourselves a base,
and then he will be put into action.
I would see if he can find a girlfriend
since he's gone through this radical surgical procedure
to have his penis reinstalled.
Imagine how happy he is when he wakes up
and finds out he's got a dick again.
That's a big day in a coyote's life.
And I knew that getting this opportunity
to be on a mainstream show...
I knew my whole life, once I got out to LA,
once I could get on a reality show
and get the opportunity to show people about me,
that would be the big thing I need to move mainstream.
I just need that one opportunity to get there.
No! What happens is, you're trying to put it in,
it bends. It's better if it's a solid one.
-That's reality right there. -No, I'm not kidding.
But one like this, it goes faster.
And it comes from the story of the Old Testament, the story of Hosea.
And this is kind of a modern day adaptation of that.
That's just all God.
God is amazing.
-God bless you and take care. -Thank you.
I'm definitely still growing spiritually.
I don't think you can ever quit growing.
There's always room to get closer to God
and things to learn about him,
and ways to change your life and to improve.
-It is a mess. -You're a mess.
It's a mess.
But that's the way gnocchis are. A little bit of a mess.
It's, like, a guy told me once, when he was painting me.
Is that how it was more basic and then he...
It was just a painting I did
and then one day I took it out and I just started painting
all this other stuff in there and just went in with these reds.
I don't remember what it looked like before. I can't remember.
Hard to keep a band together.
I only wanted to play with guys that I really loved playing with.
'Cause it all comes together. It's like summer theater.
"I got a barn!" "I got the instruments!"
"We'll put our own show on!"
It still has that element.
This is one of the Chinatown series.
From my hometown.
After the mill closed. I mean, pretty much closed.
What'd you get last year for your birthday
-from Aunt Lynny? -A Power Ranger suit.
You got what? No, you didn't! That was for Halloween.
You got an electric guitar.
Electric guitar.
A real electric guitar.
Why? 'Cause you told Aunt Lynny
you wanted to grow up to be a rock star.
I just see a beautiful girl and I just want to hug her.
Well, I really love this one right here.
I currently reach out to women and men
in the sex and porn industry
and I absolutely love pulling them out of the pit,
the porn industry pit.
It's 1,800 square feet
and the guest house is around 600 square feet.
That little garage area, I don't know.
It took me about a year to really get serious
about studying.
And it took me three times to pass the test,
but I did it
and here I am.
Got into real estate.
I've been in it for five years.
-For him? -Yep.
Dark and mild?
-No, he likes the dark, heavy. -Dark and heavy.
When I'm at home, I run around with no makeup on,
a pair of sweatpants, barefoot, a T-shirt,
and I'm usually out in the yard, digging
because I like to plant things. I like to grow things.
Or decorating my house.
I like to do crafty things. Like, you know, I don't--
I know I don't seem like the domestic goddess,
but I like to make things for the house
and I love to cook.
And I'm a very good cook.
I had a little bit of some bad, terrible, terrible news
this April.
I was diagnosed with stage three melanoma cancer.
So, for the past four or five months,
I've been dealing with that and on chemo.
They recommended complete dissection of the lymph nodes,
and then to be on heavy-dose interferon,
which would be intravenous,
which I'd get five times a week
for the first month and then after that,
three times a week for 11 months, for the rest of the year.
And it's been tough.
It's actually great here because...
How many porno stars live here?
There's some more coming in.
Sunset, Houston.
Taylor St. Claire just moved here.
Whatever happened to... She was really hot. I loved her.
What happened to that... God damn it.
I don't know their names. I'm bad with this.
You remember their tits. Yeah.
Oh, God, she was... That doesn't make any difference.
She was living here for a long time. She was so hot.
Racquel Darrian!
Yeah. She just moved out of town.
Yeah, she just moved out of town.
And that's the only thing I missed out on in life.
I've done pretty much everything I wanted.
I did want to have kids. Didn't have the opportunity.
Didn't meet the right woman at the right time.
So I do kind of miss out on that.
But nobody gets everything.
There's other guys that have great kids and they love every minute of it.
They kind of wish they were me, fantasy-wise,
but nobody gets everything.
AFTER PORN ENDS
I started modeling in ninth grade.
My mom put me through modeling school,
graduated from modeling school,
started doing beauty pageants
and model searches and bikini contests.
So, I was exposed
to not so much the adult industry,
but just knowing that I could make money with my body.
I had a roommate at the time that was a dancer
and she knew an agent. His name was Jim Salf.
He said, "Hey, there's a producer that saw your picture,
and he'd like you to come do a movie.
How would you like to do a movie?"
And I said, "Well, I've never done a movie before,
but sure, I could do it. No problem."
I went down and I had braids like Bo Derek at the time
and did my first scene. It was a three-way.
I had never even been with a woman.
I didn't know what to do with a woman,
I had no idea what I was doing.
But the minute those lights hit me,
I swear that was where I was supposed to be.
Everyone said, "Do it, do it, do it."
The more you do, the more money you can make
dancing on the dance circuit, the more magazines you can do,
the more you're exposed, you can...
I mean, I have a sex toy line.
"Now we want to do an action figure of you." "Okay!"
I mean, all of it was just like, "Cool!"
"Sign me up! Sure!"
I was just having a blast. I mean, there were fans
lined up for miles and miles and miles that flew...
Some people came from Poland and Berlin.
And come to think of it, when I went to Poland
to sign autographs and whatever,
when I got off the plane, I needed a bodyguard.
I mean, for a porn star
to be that big around the world,
it was unbelievable.
I felt like I was a true superstar.
People were knocking each other down.
Here's Houston!
Over the Dalai Lama in the newspaper.
I was the headliner. I mean, that's unbelievable.
I was still under contract.
I was with Metro Productions for a few years.
And they're the ones that also produced the Houston 500,
the world's biggest gang bang.
At that point, when I first signed with Metro,
it was already known going in
that I was gonna take over Jasmin St. Claire's title
and do this gang bang.
So, going into my contract with Metro,
I already knew that I was gonna be doing that.
So, I wasn't looking for things to...
"I've got to be more crazy and wild."
Honestly, it just all came to me naturally.
I mean, I had a labiaplasty,
and that was before a lot of women even knew
that they can get their labia trimmed if you have larger labia lips.
And when I did that, it was like, "Oh."
It was just a no-brainer. I'm gonna encase that in lucite
and auction it, the trimmings.
I mean, things just came to me.
I was just a publicity whore.
I was good at it.
I had invested my money.
I bought a home
as well as put a lot of money in mutual funds.
And many years ago, when the stock market went kaput,
I lost almost all my savings.
And that hurt me.
But I did still have my house that I owned in LA,
and then when things got rough, of course I sold it.
Not for financial reasons,
but when I wanted to get out of the industry.
I'm Professor of Communications Studies
and Psychology at UCLA.
I study a variety of topics,
but one of the major areas that I study is pornography.
Let's see. So, since 1984, I've done about 600 films,
about 1,000 scenes, give or take.
I've won several dozen awards for acting and sex performances
and fan favorite and this and that.
I think I might be up this year for Best Non-Sex Role
'cause I've also moved into the occasional character part
that doesn't involve having sex.
I write about the sex industry
pretty much from the fall of 1995 until the fall of 2007.
A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film
is the name of my first book.
I've been in the adult entertainment industry
for basically 35, 36 years in every capacity.
I started as a writer, became an actor, director, agent.
And now I'm sort of the papa bear to the adult entertainment industry,
Protecting Adult Welfare, which I run,
and watch over the overaged juvenile delinquents
in what I refer to as the playpen of the damned,
which is the X-rated industry.
What we give them in the adult entertainment industry
for a brief, shiny moment,
is immortality, validation and credibility.
Every one of us,
no matter how insignificant we may think we are,
wants to be recognized at one time or another in our lives.
When you went to those conventions, they lined up at your booth
like they were getting signatures from professional athletes.
My parents divorced.
My dad took us far away from our mother, ran away with us.
He became an alcoholic.
Then I moved in with my mom
and the family relationship changed.
I felt kind of lost.
I worked a regular job
in an office for five years.
But while I was doing those things, I also found a modeling website
and I put my pictures on the website.
And then, I was still working in the office,
but people were emailing me about doing shoots.
And I thought it would be cool
to do bikini stuff or...
Even though I never really even walked around in bikinis,
I thought it would be kind of neat.
So, eventually, I did take a job doing...
They were only asking me to do nudes,
and eventually I just did it.
I went to my first shoot in a hotel room,
and it was just supposed to be topless
and it was really scary.
It was weird.
Well, ever since I got into the business,
I always got emails that said that, "You don't look quite comfortable."
And I think that it was the innocence
that attracted a lot of my fans,
is that I didn't look totally comfortable in anything I did.
Even if I was speaking, I didn't look comfortable.
I never looked confident. I wasn't very verbal.
I wasn't over the top with noises or anything.
I don't know. I just started feeling
really depressed about it, honestly.
And then I hit rock bottom, myself, emotionally,
where I got really upset
and I'd go in the bathroom and I threw a glass on the ground.
And then I was just crying, fall to the ground,
and just started pounding my wrists into the glass
and blood just started going everywhere.
I don't know. I just kind of lost that hope.
I did have a stalker.
He started off just sending me hate mail. He's an atheist.
So he was pretty much putting down what I believe in
and trying to get me to debate him.
He became obsessed with me
and developed this crush on me.
And then I told him we would never date,
"I don't know you, I don't know where you live,
you're too young," blah, blah, blah.
And he flipped out.
The thing that pushed me to the edge was that he said
he wanted to bash my head into the concrete
till my brains spilled out
and then kill my cat and stuff like that.
A few fans had emailed me the last year or so
and said they were praying for me
and that they were not looking at porn anymore.
And then I had this other guy saying, "You need to put a warning
on your website because kids can see this.
My 14-year-old son found this."
Just all kinds of people were sending me these random emails,
and of course I was always kind of sympathetic
to whatever they said,
but I was still kind of hardened, too, at the same time,
because I was like, "I can't do anything else.
This is what I'm good at. This is all that I know."
And I kind of believed it at the time.
I didn't have anybody
saying, "You're better than that."
So...
Some adult stars do "find God" and leave,
but those are people who needed to be gone anyway
and didn't have the personal strength to do it.
So they do look outside for something to help them leave.
There are plenty of people in the business
who really shouldn't be here, because they have conflict about...
If I'd been raised to be ashamed of my body
and to feel bad about men and their horrible desires,
but did porn for other reasons,
eventually, the wheels are gonna come off the bus.
I can only deny it so long. People try to deny.
They stuff their feelings with drugs and alcohol
or whatever it is.
And after six months, one year, five years,
ten years, whatever, and finally go,
"You know what? I can't do this anymore."
Because religion, especially western religion
and especially Christianity, says, "I love you,
I forgive you, you can come home now.
And I will not push you out."
And so that is incredibly powerful and incredibly potent,
to have someone finally say, "I don't shame you.
I love you. You're welcome here."
"Sign me up!"
When you're involved in this industry, you lose your humanity.
You're no longer treated as a human being
by 80% of people out there.
You're now scum.
They may want to do certain things with you.
But then you're still scum.
And they may be thrilled to have a roll in the sack with you,
but when you leave, they're gonna want to burn the sheets.
I got into porn by accident
It wasn't something I planned on doing.
Probably might have been the least likely thing
I thought I would've done.
I was singing in bands after a baseball thing didn't work out.
I knew I could sing, so I started singing in rock bands.
And of course, like all struggling musicians,
you got to make a little extra dough on the side.
Actually, my first naked job, I was a nude art model
for college art classes and stuff like that.
And I was really kind of shy but not about my body,
just about talking. I was kind of shy about talking.
"I can get naked in front of people." So, I did that.
And a couple girls in one of the classes
asked if they can take pictures of me and they did.
They came out good, they said,
"Can we send them to some magazines?"
I said, "I don't care. Do what you want." They sent 'em out.
I got a letter from Playgirl.
But High Society said they'd like to do a boy-girl thing.
I said, "All right." So, that was the first thing I ever did.
They had a woman editor. At the end of the shoot,
she goes, "I noticed you were taking care of business pretty good.
Did you ever think about doing a porn movie?
'Cause I got some connections."
I go, "I never really thought about it, no."
She goes, "Well, I can get you 250 bucks."
250 bucks, man!
1978, that was some good cash.
That's what I was making a week!
So, I said, "All right. I'll try it."
So, I did it, and guess I was good at it
'cause they kept calling me back.
And that's kind of how I got started.
I used to say it's like borrowing somebody's body to masturbate with.
"Excuse me. If you're not busy,
you mind if I jerk off in your pussy with my dick?"
It's kind of like that, which is not bad,
better than real jerking off.
Right after I started producing up-and-comers,
I get this letter in the mail and I open it up
and I see this unbelievably good-looking,
very young-looking blond girl with beautiful natural boobs,
little baby face,
and she wants to know if I can help her get in the porn biz.
Girl's name was Jenna Jameson.
I said, "Holy Christ!
If I get this girl to shoot for me, we're gonna sell some tapes.
I said, "If you don't want to do guys, I'll let you pick
whatever girl you want."
She liked girls.
So she picked this girl who I was working with that day,
who was doing her first movie, Kylie Ireland.
So Kylie and Jenna were doing their thing together
and everything was going good.
And they took a little break.
While they were lying there, I think I said something like,
"Man, Jenna, that's a tasty-looking pussy you got."
And I believe she said, "Why don't you come in and taste it?"
I went...
"Okay." I was doing the camera, but I handed it to my assistant.
"Bob, hold onto this. Start shooting."
So, I get in there and I start going down on her
and she starts squealing that little squeal that she had.
I'm guessing she's kind of liking it,
seemed like she was getting off and everything's good.
I said "Man, I am so fucking horny now.
Would you mind maybe giving me a double blow job or something?"
And they said, "Sure. We'll do that." I went, "Thank you."
And they did and it went well
and a week later she kind of called me back
and said, "You weren't so bad.
I think I could do a boy-girl scene with you."
And the rest is kind of history after that.
It's a Daddy Thing, number three.
Old Randy making a comeback! Yeah!
Still there, baby. No Viagra yet.
And, you know, it's cool.
You do your thing, you go home, you came, you relax,
but I'm an affectionate kind of guy,
and so I missed that part of it
and that's why I still like having a relationship
when it happens, you know.
And, for example, Tera Patrick, man.
Not only was she incredible in bed, but I just liked her,
and that sense of humor and that craziness,
a little bit different.
So, I hadn't dated anybody in so long.
When I met her, though, I forgot how to do it.
And I did ask her out to dinner twice.
We went out to dinner and had a good time.
But I dropped her off at her place without asking her if I could come in.
And I don't know. She might have thought it was weird.
I already had sex with her a couple of times on camera.
She might've thought it weird
that I didn't want to come up and finish the date.
But I was kind of showing her that I wasn't just there for the sex.
And maybe it wasn't a good move
'cause you leave a beautiful woman like that alone for too long,
somebody else is gonna come along and somebody else did come along.
And that was that.
She made it today. This is Tera Patrick.
Hello.
And Tera is new in the business
and hasn't even worked that often.
-Apparently. -No.
I'm just trying to pace myself right now.
One of my all-time favorites.
Most of the people who seek it out don't have means
of making that kind of money by other means.
Very few women say,
"I'm going to become a surgeon
or I'm going to become a pornography star."
This country does not raise people with a very good work ethic.
They don't know how to do anything else.
They don't know how to do retail or how to do Excel spreadsheets.
Many people who make their way to adult entertainment,
like rock 'n' roll, are not suited for 9:00 to 5:00 work.
I ran away from home at 16 and was living on the streets at 17.
Everything I owned was in two garbage bags.
My parents were saying, "I hope you just kill yourself
and make life a lot easier for the rest of us."
It was just on and on and on. So, there I was, out on the streets.
And then when I got taken in with a foster family,
I made sure that I kept finishing school with good grades
because that was gonna be my future, my ticket out of there
and then when I went to college on full academic scholarship,
I never actually went to classes.
I said, "I've got free room and board. I need to make money.
I need to get some security and stability in my life
so I don't have to turn tricks to get food to eat.
So I took up stripping. I went to all the local strip bars.
And from there, I started doing magazines in New York City.
I'd take a train to New York City on weekends and do magazines.
And then a photographer said he knew a director in California
named Bud Lee who could direct me in some movies if I wanted to do that.
So I packed up my suitcase and a teddy bear,
went out to LA,
made a movie for Bud Lee, married him, didn't come back.
The reason that I wanted to do porn,
even though I was so smart, Miss Mensa and all that,
is precisely because I wanted to stop being known as the nerd, the geek,
the one that you come over and you be nice to me
just so you can copy off of my tests.
I'd hang out with some of my misfit friends,
and they had adult magazines and they would look at them
and I would be peeking over their shoulder,
going, "I wish someone would look at me like that."
And that was just my wildest fantasy
that someone would think that I was pretty and sexy.
All my life, I'd just been the nerd and the geek.
So, it was a fantasy come true for me
that someone would want to see me on the cover of a magazine.
When I got to porn, it was like, "I get to pick
which of these good-looking guys I want to sleep with?
And you're gonna pay me for it, put me on a box cover
and give me tons of money?"
It was just a really big step up from where I was coming from.
Porn wasn't all that much of a mental challenge for me.
Standing there and saying my silly lines
just didn't take up a whole lot of my day.
Meanwhile, you got a lot of time to sit around and wait.
So I just kept myself busy
by learning every single job on the set.
I would get the grips to take me onto the grip truck
and name everything on there and teach me how to do everything
by showing up with my little grip belt, shorts and gloves
and no shirt on.
I'd ask very nicely if they'd teach me their job and they did.
And much the same way,
I learned editing, directing, producing, script writing.
Every job on the set, I've got.
If you look on IMDb, my name's got all credits next to it.
I even designed my own box covers.
What made me different was I was the first half-Asian
to become an A-list star in the business.
Before I'd started, there was the white, black and Asian girls
and each had their own separate genre and they didn't mix.
You don't put an Asian girl in a white girl movie.
It's just the way it was.
And when I came in and I was only half-Asian,
the features were soft enough that they could still put me on a cover
and I could still be a white girl or an Asian girl.
They could play me either way
or they could play me as an Indian or a gypsy or a Greek girl!
They gave me all the different roles.
So they wound up using my look as very versatile.
And so I became the first "crossover" star
from a minority.
I guess they did pretty well with me 'cause after I left Vivid,
they got Kobe Tai, who was full Asian.
So I kind of opened the door
for the minorities to become A-listers.
I hated doing live appearance.
I'm getting sweaty just looking at this picture.
Yeah. I spent all year long dreading the CES show.
I'd just keep telling myself, "They're more scared than you are."
'Cause I'd smile and say, "What's your name?"
And they'd go...
They'd just look at me.
"Okay. What's your name?"
If you see my very first interviews from when I was 19, 20 years old,
I said, "I'm gonna retire when I'm 30."
People laughed and said, "You've got it all planned out."
There really wasn't any question about it.
I had gotten married and then divorced.
And I met someone who had adult bookstores.
So I basically got my introduction
to the adult entertainment world
through working in adult bookstores
and then consequently owning adult bookstores.
And I saw the women that were doing movies at the time
and I was just amazed
because they had pimples on their rear ends,
they had on no makeup, their feet were dirty,
their hair was dirty and I thought, "My God.
This is not a really good representation of women.
I want to do that."
I had done a few magazines
and a few eight millimeter loops.
And then I came to California
and I picked up one of the free papers and there was an ad.
My family was very okay with what I did
because I did tell them what I was about to do
before I actually did anything.
I'd done a couple of photo shoots
and decided that I needed to tell my family
before it got out there
because I didn't want them finding out from someone else.
And they're like, "Well, do you think you can make money at it?
You think you can have a good career and be happy doing this?"
I said, "Yes, I do," They said, "Good. Go do it."
We had a very small community of people,
of players that we all worked with.
And we all worked with each other quite a bit.
So the community was small. We were familiar with one another.
And it's like when you have a new boyfriend
or a new girlfriend or a new husband or wife.
It takes a little while before you know
what pushes their buttons, what turns them on,
what makes them feel good.
And then it starts to become very intimate.
And you can actually have an intimate relationship
with the person you're working with on screen
and be fond of them after the movie is over.
But they're just genuinely sweet, nice people.
I was being offered parts in movies
or photo shoots or what have you
and they didn't want to pay me the amount of money I wanted.
And I said no. I just held out.
So...
And subsequently, I started stripping,
going basically across the world, stripping,
and doing photo shoots with Club magazine, predominantly.
And so people didn't see me in front of the camera,
so they thought, "Okay. She's retired."
I've been retired and come back so many times,
I can't keep track anymore.
I've also been dead a few times.
I saw an ad in the paper. It said, "Nude fun, big bucks."
And it was an audition for an X-rated movie.
Two days later, I get a call from the producer.
They want to give me a part in the movie.
I hadn't planned on that.
At the time, I had applied to the Hebrew Union seminary
in Cincinnati
where they train people to become rabbis.
So I'm trying to measure,
"Do I want to do this, or do I want to be in a porn movie?"
Because if I take the part in the porn movie
I may be cutting some of my options off for future life.
And the seminary in Cincinnati said,
"We'll take you, but the first two years
you have to go to Jerusalem and study Aramaic,"
which I would rather go to Cleveland and study their sewer system.
No interest there. So I decided I would make the porn movie.
And, in any case, the kind of rabbi I would become
would be the kind that could've made a porn movie.
And I went ahead and did the job.
I think I had to become a sex star just to come back to normal,
'cause I'd been so humiliated by being the fat kid.
I had the largest breasts in the seventh grade.
The guys would make fun of me and point at me and tease me!
You know how deep those scars go?
That's ugly shit!
Those are the people that become centerfolds!
'Cause they got something to prove.
I was lucky enough to be in the era
when they were trying to make movies where you needed to remember lines.
And I was good at that.
So, I got hired for my acting ability,
which being a good actor in porn
is like being the wisest man in the kingdom of the fools.
He promised that I could fuck you next.
He what?
Let him alone! I said, let him alone!
Get the fuck out of here!
My ankle!
I was terrible at the sex, just rotten.
I was just so traumatized by it.
But I eventually did learn how to have sex on camera.
I was on the beach in San Diego and I was by myself.
And I'm sitting there and I notice
there's a really beautiful woman laying on a towel.
And so my gaze drifts over to her.
And her boyfriend looks at me and I look away.
Then I drift back and I'm looking at her again
and the boyfriend sees me looking at her again.
"Shit."
Well, the guy gets up,
and he starts walkin' over towards me,
and I'm going, "Oh, no. Here we go. This is gonna get ugly."
And he gets close to me I'm just clenching my fist,
ready to defend myself.
The guy's a monster. I'm gonna get killed. I know it.
And he leans in and he says, "Were you in Insatiable?"
And I went, "Yes! Yes!"
I was so happy that he recognized me from the movie business
and he wasn't gonna kick my ass.
It was a true delight.
We became friends at that point.
I hadn't told my parents I was doing this.
I told them I was doing commercials
and low-budget nothing, blah, blah, blah.
I knew that they weren't gonna be...
I didn't suspect
they would be very approving of this kind of stuff.
I made the original call,
prepared to become the black sheep of the family.
It didn't happen.
I'm sure they were less than thrilled.
When my mother would be at the grocery store the next day
and they say, "Good to see you. How you doing? What's going on?"
"Well! My son, the doctor, is coming back from Israel,
and my other son, he makes shmackle movies in California!"
Well, I think people may have a negative reaction
to someone who's a porn star for a combination of reasons.
One is, somebody who seems to indiscriminately be willing
to sleep with anyone, whether it's on film or not,
is, no matter what people say,
still not somebody who's particularly admired,
and, again, may pose a threat to many relationships.
It is legal work, but it's fucking.
With pictures.
People say, "You should go into politics."
"There's too many pictures of me with dicks in my ass."
It's not going to happen.
It happened by happenstance.
I came up with some friends,
and I went to a club called the Rainbow.
And I met there Althea Flynt, the wife of Larry Flynt,
and a photographer that she had in tow.
And they approached me and invited me to their table
and asked me if I wanted to go to a club and have some drinks.
And I did.
And she was doing an interview for Sting,
and we were up there, looking to meet some rock stars.
We were just girls, doing our thing.
And she took us in her black limo
that had this "think pink" on the license plate
and I think it was a naked lady on the side of it.
And I was so impressed by that.
She said, "What do you do?" I said, "I'm a model."
And she said, "Wow! I own Hustler magazine,
and we're gonna put you in Hustler."
So, that was that.
I went into Hustler and started doing magazines.
My brother found out
and he had tried to talk me into it many times
because everybody always said, "Buck, can you get your sister
to do a movie? Oh, my God!"
And we never worked together on set,
but we always championed each other's careers.
And so my brother said to me, "I want you to do a movie."
And he set it up with Sin City.
It was actually done for Sin City and it was called Babewatch.
It was for my brother's Babewatch series.
He said, "If you're gonna do movies for anybody,
you have to do one for me, sis."
So I said, "Okay. I will."
And the sex was real.
You'd say, "How do you want the blow job?"
And they'd say, "How do you like the blow job?"
And that would be it. We would build off of that.
I was the kind of person who lived a life of excess
and people would invite me to parties.
And they would think, "If I offer her some party tools,
I'm gonna wind up getting laid all night
by this beautiful porn star."
Then as my addiction went through another door,
they'd hand me the bag of coke
and I'd wind up in the bathroom all night.
You wouldn't be able to drag me out of the bathroom.
And I'd be like, "Don't touch me!"
And all of my life started to kind of spiral.
I wound up getting arrested on the highway,
and the police knew exactly who I was when I got arrested
and they wanted to make an example of me with the court system.
They knew that I was a big porn star.
And the gig was up. And I had to face it.
It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me
when I look back on it now
because it really brought me into reality.
For the women, they're much more damned by society
because no matter how sanctified they are,
they're still considered to be whores.
And it's getting worse and worse
because a lot of them have turned to what I am vehemently opposed to,
the escort services, to further their career.
In many ways, it has a dehumanizing quality
because what you're responding to are a set of physical cues.
You are responding to the body
and you're responding to the sexual acts per se
in a way that is quite animalistic.
And having a more full depiction of the person
may even detract from the ability to use it
purely as masturbatory or other kind of sexual stimulation.
You can take every other category, every other idea, every other thought.
Basically happiness and success in life all boils down to
what are the quality of your bonds with other people?
Having anything to do with the adult industry
hacks away those bonds.
So you're isolated, alienated, pushed away to the margins,
and not treated as a human being.
That's a recipe for disaster, for me and for anyone else.
When I was in college, a couple of us worked at Hooters.
So, I loved doing that.
A lot of the girls at Hooters were telling me
how I'd make a lot of money stripping.
I had a boyfriend in college...
I went with him and his friends to a strip club one night.
They always used to go watch amateur night.
He's like, "I think you could beat these girls at amateur night."
So I entered and I won. I got first place out of 12 girls
in the amateur contest
and I got $500.
So, I was like, "This is a really cool job.
I get to drink and dance and make money.
This is way better than anything else."
When I was 21, I used to watch a lot of the Cinemax movies.
So I went to Blockbuster
and I got the address off the box of a Cinemax movie
and I mailed some Polaroids of myself and a few headshots I had taken,
and just pictures and I mailed it.
I wrote a letter about how I think I'd really like to be in the movies.
I heard nothing. Then three months later,
I got a call from Playboy.
I pretty much came into this industry thinking, "Okay.
I'm going to somehow be one of the most well-known porn stars ever."
I wouldn't wanna just be another girl that was around for two years
and then have to go be a hooker.
After I did the Playboy thing, I shot for Hustler.
The next month, I came out to LA.
Within three weeks after shooting for Hustler,
his wife and his daughter told me how much they loved me
and they ended up taking me on the Larry Flynt freedom tour.
They chose four girls to go with Larry Flynt
to different Hustler stores and they chose me.
And then my very first AVN show,
Hustler chose me to sign at their booth.
They don't have contract girls. They pick girls.
A month later, there was a Magic convention,
which is a clothing convention
and Hustler was launching their clothing.
Hustler had chosen me to model their clothing
and they made pictures of me modeling it.
So, I really didn't think about life after porn
because I just couldn't believe how all these things kept happening.
The things that happened to me as a new girl in porn
don't happen to most new girls.
I met Larry Flynt
pretty much my second month in the business.
So, I didn't think about life after.
I just always said I'm gonna get married and have kids.
I used to say by 27.
Now I say I want to get married by 30 and have kids by 32.
When I was married, I only did girl-girl.
I left my husband and did boy-girl.
When I got back with my husband I only did girl-girl again.
We split up, I did boy-girl.
Then I took a hiatus for about six, seven months
and didn't shoot anything and that's when I met this guy,
who ended up becoming my fiancé but we were dating,
and I didn't do boy-girl for the first six months.
Then he said, "Don't you think you should go get a new porn contract
because that's extra income we can have every month?"
I was like, "You want me to have sex with other guys?"
He was like, "It's only six times a year you're gonna do it
and it's with a condom." I said, "Okay."
Of course, two days before the movie, he said,
"I don't want you having sex with other guys."
-Let go of me! -Your derrière may be pretty,
but that don't mean it's bulwark from a propitious lashing.
Every two and a half months, I'd have to shoot a boy-girl scene.
Usually around two days before, he'd start being really mean to me
and calling me names
even though he wanted me to do the movies.
When I'd go to shoot the movie,
he'd go with his friends and get really drunk.
Then he usually wouldn't kiss me or anything for two days later
and when my check would come in, he's like,
"That's mine since I let you have sex with other people."
And then when I would be asleep, I'd hear him watching my movies.
'Cause he would go and put it in slow motion
to make sure the guy wore a condom and I wasn't lying about it.
Let's see. The most I ever made in a month
was probably when I was running for governor
because my website was making around 20,000 a month
and my online store selling T-shirts and buttons
made about 10,000 to 15,000 a month.
I felt really bad 'cause I didn't have time to mail 'em all.
So I just ended up not mailing people their orders.
I feel really bad about that.
And then my contract was 6,000 a month
and I was feature dancing.
At that time, feature dancing used to pay a lot more.
It was like 6,000 for three weeks.
I don't know how much that is. Maybe 50,000, 60,000 in a month.
And then I won a game show around that same time.
On the game show "Who Wants to Be Governor of California" I won another 21,000.
That was great.
I guess the most in a year would probably be around $300,000.
I didn't think I was set for life. I always joked with everyone
that I'm either going to just make a lot of money
or worst-case scenario, I'll marry a rich person.
That's what I always said.
No one comes into this business
to want to be normal on the back end of it.
Nobody thinks that it's gonna end.
You jump on a merry-go-round, you hope the ride never ends.
I don't think many of them can spell "future."
I don't think they did this as a short-term investment
in their own future, but they burned out.
Hookers are hookers. Hookers are people
who are looking for a quick buck with the least amount of effort,
so they turn tricks.
And being a porn star
is just the world's oldest profession.
So...
It's not that complicated.
Reality is hard. A lot of people blame the industry for their problems
but then they get out in the real world
and find lots of problems in the real world, too.
I grew up in Pennsylvania in the steel-mill towns.
Worked in the steel mills. I drove cabs.
It was sort of typical things people do.
There I did some illustrations for magazines in New York
and eventually started playing music.
Did that for a while.
Then I came out to California
and ended up getting into dirty movies.
Just met some people. I was gonna do a photo spread,
some photography of some girls who were in the business.
I had an idea I would do a photo shoot of them and then a little interview.
And some people I knew from illustrating magazines
in New York said, "We'll see what you come up with.
If it's good, we'll pay you."
So I met these two girls,
and before I knew it, I was in the movies!
So that's sort of how that started.
But when I was working, it wasn't like it is today.
I'd maybe work 40 days a year
and maybe 15 to 20 days were sex days.
And today they work every day of the week, maybe twice a day.
Viagra, shooting up their cocks and stuff like that.
They're ruining their sex life for the rest of their lives.
I just think there's too much going on,
just your personal appetite of it.
If you're working as a performer and you're working that much,
sex loses its mystery in a sense.
I remember being turned on to a point sometimes,
certain situations, where I would actually shake.
I'm sure everybody's been in that situation.
I hate to see that go away.
I remember one time my dad picked me up from the airport.
I was coming in for the holidays.
My pictures were in Hustler magazine.
They were about a movie.
And I think I was giving some girl head.
And my father says, "I saw that picture in Hustler."
I said, "Yeah.
Wasn't so good of a picture."
And that's all that was said.
It was not something I wanted to expose them to
because it's embarrassing for them.
We were so proud of what we did in some of these movies we did
that got really big play,
that I actually took her to screenings.
We had these screenings in these theaters.
I'm taking my wife there,
watching me have sex with these people.
And she was...
It was difficult for her,
but she appreciated the work we were doing.
But after one or two times we did that,
I said, "Hey, can we not do this no more?"
She didn't want to see any pictures of me or anything.
Although she understood what I was doing
and knew it was the thing that was not gonna be a situation.
Can I ask you something?
Those cops, they're hung pretty good, huh?
Bet they ain't got what I got.
Nobody's got what I got.
So, yeah, I'd like to retire and paint.
I had a game plan.
I saved some money, but I wasn't that good.
No...
I didn't make that much money, though.
What did I make? I didn't work that much.
You talking about saving money when he was acting?
He just didn't have any bills.
I didn't have any bills. See? I told you.
Then he got me!
-Then she showed up! -I'm high maintenance, baby.
Then she showed up.
Even if it's not particularly glamorous that day,
you go to work and you get fussed over
and if it's a big enough production, there's a makeup artist there,
and there's attention for people who like attention.
And then they get paid the very same day!
Now, my great friend, Lee Carroll, once said,
"As long as you got a cunt, you'll never starve."
But there's a danger to that because it wears on your mind.
My parents didn't take an interest in my life
and I was also sexually abused at nine years old.
I had a teenage boy and his sister, who was my classmate,
introduce me to sexuality for the first time in my life,
and it horrified me.
As soon as I barely graduated high school,
which I had to cheat my way through,
my dad came to me and said, "Listen, you're out of the house,"
and literally kicked me out on the street with no food, no money.
And so I'm literally sitting out on the curb on Sherman Way.
That big, tough, rebellious teenager was bawling her eyes out.
And all of a sudden, this beautiful black man
came over to me and says, "Are you all right?
What's wrong? Why are you crying, sweetheart?"
"I have no money and no food and my dad kicked me out."
He put his arm around me and I still to this day
can tell you what that embrace felt like.
He just said, "Baby, I can help you."
And I thought, "Jesus has come to rescue me."
I really thought he was gonna help me.
He said, "There's a man in the apartment complex
who would love to make love to you."
He lured me in. I went, "You mean have sex?"
He goes, "Yes, but he's really gentle, really nice,
and you'll get $35."
So, here I am, a single mother.
I've done prostitution and stripping now for six years,
I've been at gunpoint, I've had stalkers try and kill me,
cops try and bust me.
I've been in the mafia, basically, for six years.
So, someone came to me, says, "Girl, why don't you do porn?"
I said, "Porn? What's that?"
It was a lot worse than prostitution.
There's a whole crew around.
They're all stroking themselves, going...
It was just totally degrading, and I went, "Oh, my gosh.
This is really bad.
And then all of a sudden, I can't explain it,
but all the rage I ever felt from what my parents did,
from childhood,
from all the things that men abused me with in prostitution
I just let it out on the screen.
He just said, "Roll it."
Here I am, the newbie, but I took over the entire scene.
It was weird. I just went...
"I'm Roxy, the porn star!"
I was pissed!
But at the end of the scene, it just ended
and I had bodily fluids on my face.
And they went, "Here's a rag," and just threw it at me.
And I just grabbed the rag and went...
And I didn't want them to see me cry
so I just turned my face and was like, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Don't cry. Shelley, don't cry."
Then now, all of a sudden, I'm involved doing
anal gang bangs with five or six different performers
and I'm thinking, "Oh, my God."
Now I'm bringing big jugs of vodka!
Everyone's egging you on, saying, "No, girl, we love you.
We're your family now. You're awesome."
And there is a family atmosphere that they offer.
Porn star karaoke, everybody hangs out at the same parties.
"Girl, I love you!" Everyone's very affectionate.
And the reason why they're so affectionate is because that's their family.
Especially in my day, we were outcasts.
In fact, I still have scars from suicide attempts.
And I...
I said, "I don't care. I don't wanna live anymore."
And I took 30 prescription pills.
And I didn't die but I knew I wanted out. Bad.
And I remember crying to God,
drunk off my ass on Jack Daniel's,
thinking, "If you get me out of this, I'll serve you with my whole life,
I swear to God, I'll do whatever you want!
Just get me out of this."
People who are well-adjusted
and have good life skills and who are doing something
meaningful and constructive with their lives,
they're not in the industry to begin with.
So, the people who are in the industry
are really broken, twisted souls without a lot of great job skills.
And they're turbulent souls.
So, they're always gonna be twisting and turning in the wind.
We'd spent a lot of time in church.
I actually convinced my mom to send me to Christian school
when I was 14
and she found a way to gather up the funds and I went
and I was very involved in my church, without her.
It was me and my friends, and that was how I grew up.
That all changed when I was 16.
I spent the night at a girlfriend's house,
and she was a teenage mom and married,
and her husband drugged me with acid.
And at that time, I hadn't even stayed up past 10:00.
So I wasn't really well-versed in the drug world.
And that changed everything for me.
I did the best I could to graduate high school
as fast as I could and move out. I was out of the house by 17.
I knew some people in the industry and I hung out with them.
And I'm still friends with them now.
I don't blame them for hanging out with me when I was young
'cause they were young, too, so...
Met a few porn stars
and just fell in love with them.
I hung out with them until I was over 18,
did my first movie.
And it was on from there.
Well, the first year that I was in the adult industry
and was doing movies,
I worked for every company under the sun.
The dirtiest of the dirtiest gonzo companies
that do crazy stuff.
I worked for anybody I could to make a buck.
I told my mom and she flipped out.
She wasn't happy about it but eventually,
when I formed a career and I signed with Vivid
and the pictures were prettier
and the footage was less disgusting,
she came to terms.
What's she gonna do? It is what it is.
Being a Vivid girl is...
It's what every adult industry actress wants to be.
Vivid's the biggest, best,
and most well-known company in the world.
They have the most beautiful girls, the best photographers.
They have the best press.
And...
Yeah, it's a high-class slew of girls, I would think.
Of course, it's as high-class as it's gonna get.
It's a steady income.
So, I don't know if I necessarily thought
I was better than anybody else,
but I knew I was getting the press that I wanted.
So, I was happy.
I took my movies very seriously.
I studied my scripts.
Half the time I wasn't stoned when I did the dialog,
but I took my acting very seriously because it was the only time
I was ever gonna get to do any acting!
So, I took it seriously, and I loved it!
And I thought I was good at it
but it just sounds so cliché for me to say
I took the acting in my porno movie seriously.
But I did.
And that was my favorite part, was the acting.
And sometimes the sex.
You can use drugs and party and drink no matter what career choice you have,
but...
Yes, you're opened up to the party lifestyle a lot more.
You hang out with rock stars,
there's always porn parties to go to.
Me, struggling as an addict,
of course took advantage of everything that was there,
all of the alcohol, all of the drugs,
I did 'em all!
It's not a safe business to be in if you want to stay clean.
It's not safe.
I'm not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me
but I had an extremely tough childhood
and I think I got very lost for many years.
I didn't know who I was, like many people.
I had a very warped understanding of what love was.
And I think because of a lack of love in my life
or an inability to determine what love really is,
I saw sexual attention as love.
When you've suffered a lot of sexual abuse in your life,
it's understandable, I think, why you would feel that way.
Trying to tell you at what point I made the decision
to be Tiffany Million is not something I could answer, really,
in just one neat sentence.
It's kind of a combination of things.
Essentially, the whole reason
that I even got into that business to begin with
was because I was a single mother, like many people.
And I was living in southern California,
I had no family, I didn't know that many people,
her father wasn't helping me with her
and it was pretty scary being a single parent, honestly.
And so, I figured I had a choice.
I could work eight hours a day
and commute an hour or two each way on the freeway
to make $7, $8 an hour
only to pay out half of that in taxes and childcare,
my daughter's with heaven knows who during the day,
or I could reenter the adult entertainment industry
'cause I'd been a stripper years before.
'Cause I'd always been kind of a fan of adult films,
and so many times I had looked at those movies and I'd thought,
"Man, you know what? I could do that and I could do it better,"
I thought, "Why not?"
I didn't have a man in my life anymore,
I left her father. And I definitely needed the money.
But, really, it just afforded me a way
to work as little as possible to get as much money as I could
to be with my daughter 'cause that's all I really wanted.
I wanted my daughter to have a great life
and a safe home in a good neighborhood with good childcare,
and I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could.
And working in the adult film industry allowed me
to work a day or two a week
and be with my daughter the rest of the week
and make more money than people that worked five days a week,
eight hours a day.
What you do in porn films is not sex.
I know you're being penetrated, but it's like this.
That's what it feels like.
It's just something occupying a chasm in your body, really.
It's like this.
That's what it might as well be.
There's no emotion there. There's no feeling.
I got to tell you this funny little story.
I would have so many fans come up to me at autograph signings
and tell me that I was their favorite porn star
because all the other girls were faking it
and I was the one that they knew was for real.
"And I can tell when a woman's faking it."
And I'd be laughing!
Watch my face. Watch my face.
'Cause I'd be like...
I'm the biggest damn faker you ever met!
Man, I'm good. That's why I get paid the big bucks.
Even when I was in the business,
I didn't partake of all of the extraneous activities.
I think I went to several parties
only because there was free food and booze.
I would go and eat and stuff, everybody'd go to the after-parties,
and I'd be like, "I'm going home, going to bed."
I've always been early to bed, early to rise.
I never wanted to be a part of that scene.
Even when I was working in the movies,
I always kind of felt like a fly on the wall.
I know my body was involved 'cause obviously I was there,
but I always had this strange feeling, this surreal feeling of disconnect,
like I was up here looking down.
When my father died in '94, he left me a whole bunch of money
and I suddenly realized that I'm free.
"I don't have to be here anymore." And I walked away and that was it.
No one puts a gun to anybody's head to do this.
If you're not warned about what's gonna happen,
the person who didn't warn you is the one who's guilty,
but they're doing it for the one thing that they cannot deny,
that absolute death wish for the recognition,
validation and credibility.
And they're welcome to it,
but eventually their past will catch up to them
and they have to be aware of the fact that X is forever.
When I got into the business, I did have a goal.
It was my "cracked out" goal.
But I did have a goal to be out and retired,
26. At the latest, 27.
And I was out by 24.
I didn't leave the business because I wanted to.
I left the business 'cause I felt I had to,
that it was the right thing to do.
On November 4th, 1984,
was the first headline in the San Francisco Chronicle,
regarding the heterosexual transmission of AIDS.
A good friend of mine who was a mathematician
had read the same article I did
and he came over to my house in the afternoon and said,
"I've done some calculations based on the numbers
reported here in the story
and you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I want you to stop."
I had three jobs lined up for December.
My wife said, "I don't want you to do them."
I thought, "They're just trying to sell newspapers.
That's what newspapers do. They scare you.
And so I don't think the danger is that real
and I'm gonna go ahead and do these jobs."
So I went off and I did the three jobs.
When I came home and we're about to go to bed that night,
she said to me, "Do you think we should?"
"'Should'? Should, what? Have sex?"
"Yeah. Do you think we should have sex?"
And I said, "What are you talking about?"
And she said... I can quote you verbatim,
I remembered this all this time.
She said, "Don't you think it would be prudent
if one of us remained alive
to raise the kids?"
That was the brick wall.
Somebody had offered me a DVD deal,
I knew CDs and laser discs didn't do good.
I thought, "This DVD thing, whatever it is,
won't replace videos."
So I signed it without having a lawyer look at it
and by the time DVDs started taking over from videos,
I looked at the contract and found out
not only do they have my DVD rights, they also had Internet rights,
and the company wasn't very good.
And once I realized I wasn't gonna make much money,
I stayed with Evil Angel, my distributor, as long as I could.
When they stopped doing videos, that was it.
The ones that do well are out because they want to be out,
not because they had to get out.
And they have made their peace with what they did,
and that shows in their bearing
and the way that they are in the world.
The money that I did save up went really quick.
And then I was just scraping by.
And it was the Christian community
that really came alongside me and helped me out.
There'd be times when I didn't know how I was gonna pay my rent
and somebody...
It was just people I don't even know,
just people who have read my story, who wanted to help.
When I left the business, I sold my house in Los Angeles.
First, I retired,
and then I decided, "I need to get out of LA."
I needed to get out of LA.
Everywhere I went, McDonald's drive-through,
nightclubs, the movie theater, the park,
Universal Studios.
I mean, you name it, I could not go anywhere.
I don't know how these big celebrities deal with it all.
They have to have bodyguards, of course, and stuff like that
'cause I did not have bodyguards and I could not handle it.
Is it possible to lead a normal life after you get out of it?
This is forever.
This is the scarlet letter. It never goes away.
You'll be dealing with the implications of this forever.
What tends to happen is that it isolates you.
And so you develop a fear
of being rejected again and again and again.
And so you put up walls between you and other people,
and you isolate yourself and you don't join communities.
And when you're isolated, you're less likely to suffer rejection
but you're also isolated and living on the edge.
So you can never get away from this. There's no solution.
To go from being a movie star
to Zippy the Pinhead overnight,
was just devastating to my ego.
If you're looking for a long career in the porn business,
you're probably looking in the wrong place.
The average girl might be good for two years.
Two to three years tops for the average girl.
If you're lucky and you're one of the few superstars,
not very many of those, then you get six, seven years,
eight years.
And if you play your cards right
and do your financial thing right,
then you can make some money and set yourself up.
Overall, I guess I'm happy I did it.
The only thing I don't like is that...
The main thing I really wanted to do is act and be in comedies and TV
and I feel like it holds me back.
But I don't know if I'd have just stuck with the normal route
if I would've ended up making it to TV at all.
I'd probably still be in Florida, going to castings,
I never maybe would have come out here.
I've gotten to do lots of Cinemax movies which are really fun, too.
All those things I've gotten to do because of, probably, the porn.
So, overall, I guess I'm happy I did it.
Part of the reason we're here in Utah is because porn is illegal here.
So it really helps keep me from being recognized.
That and the 40 extra pounds I gained!
But now that I'm losing that weight...
Well, I also cut off my hair so that helps, too.
Everyone's been really cool if they find out who I am.
They've been really good about it.
When I took Catty to her new daycare
and they asked if I had reference names
for who to call if something happens to Catty,
I said, "I don't know anybody here. Sorry."
She thought that was a little suspicious
and so she looked me up online.
I had given her the name "Asia Lemon."
From that name she managed to figure out who I was.
So the next day, she goes, "I did a little googling on you."
And I was like...
Miss Mormon mommy of four who did a little googling on Asia.
I was like, "So, you still gonna watch my kid?"
Unfortunately...
One of the reasons Vince Neil has me playing his charity tournament
for his daughter, for children's cancer and stuff,
and I played in the country...
Academy of Country Music Awards charity tournament this year
and a few other charity tournaments 'cause it's one of the only ways
that porn people can give to charities.
Unfortunately, in this hypocritical world,
a lot of charities don't want to accept money
from people that are in the sex business.
"The sex business. We can't do that."
Politicians, on the other hand, who make us look clean as hell,
no problem taking their money.
Unscrupulous businessmen ripping everybody off, no problem.
But because we have a little sex once in a while,
"No, can't do you," and that pissed me off.
I had one interesting moment in baseball
with my son in Little League.
I had told nobody about my career.
One day, the manager, who was this big black guy,
he was a Stanford graduate,
he comes up to me and he goes, "Gonna be some trouble today."
And I said, "What do you mean?"
He says, "One of the mothers knows who you are."
He looks at me and says, "I knew who you were
the minute you came on the field.
I'll tell you the truth.
Anybody that's been in Nina Hartley's booty is okay with me."
He said, "I will take care of this." And he did.
Mensa's a high IQ society.
You have to have an IQ in the top 2% to get in.
I got in with a notarized copy of my SAT scores.
Mensa didn't want to link to my website,
even though they link to all the members' websites
because of who I was, an adult star.
So that was their excuse,
and so I made them a special little web page of Asia,
just happy Asia with college pictures
and smiling Asia and just innocent stuff
and it's two pages.
So, that's where Mensa links to now instead of my regular site.
And they finally acknowledged me in their Mensa celebrity issue,
which was a really big moment for me. That was cool.
-Wait, how do you say it? -Unprecedented.
Unprecedented? It sounds weird.
Okay.
I've done something unprecedented
that nobody else in the adult industry has ever done.
And that was running for governor of California, actually two times.
And it was amazing, When I first started out,
the owner of my company and I thought
that it was gonna be just a little fun joke,
see if I could get some press, maybe get on avn.com.
So when I went down to the courthouse to get my paperwork.
Howard Stern Show sent a camera crew down,
Channel 7, Channel 5, all the news shows showed up.
Associated Press, Reuters.
That's when we are like, "I got to get on that ballot
because this is gonna be huge."
I'm going to get rid of the car tax
and put a tax on breast implants instead.
I will legalize gay marriage.
I will make sure everyone who files for unemployment
gets jury duty.
In other words, California, I'll be a kickass governor.
So vote for me, Mary Carey, on October 7th.
Of course, some of my platforms were very tongue in cheek and funny
but when I was getting towards the end of it,
I realized that I really wanted to make a difference
and I felt like I really was making a difference
because I was getting a lot of people
who normally wouldn't follow politics to follow because of me.
And then I was like, "What if I win?"
But coming in tenth place is pretty amazing out of 132 people.
When I was 18 years old,
I went to real estate school.
Just everything about real estate, I just really liked.
So I figured that I would always do something with that.
I was working for a builder,
a home builder here,
and Corporate came to my community
and shut the doors and said, "We need to talk to you.
Someone recognized you. We know who you are
and you are too recognizable
and we're too conservative of a company,
and we're gonna have to let you go."
That was a week before I got diagnosed with cancer.
The ones that got out of this business
and now are being blighted by the society that jacked off to them,
the society are the ones that's guilty for that.
They're damning them for something that gave them pleasure,
but they refuse to admit that they got the pleasure from them.
That's a very, very sad state of affairs.
I was starting to direct,
and I was hired a couple months later
to go to Germany to work.
I'd make about eight grand or something,
work eight days or something.
And I didn't want to do this anymore at this time. I didn't wanna do it.
So I left, said goodbye to her, stood in line two hours,
and as I'm going, I'm saying, "I don't want to go."
And it built up and built up until I finally got to the point of where,
"May I help you?" they said, the ticket counter.
I said, "No, I'm not going."
I took my bags, I call up Kathleen,
and I said, "Baby, I'm coming home. I don't want to go to Europe."
I'm thinking about the trip and I don't want to do this.
I want to stay home with her.
So, that was pretty much the last thing I did.
And, really what got me out of it was my husband
because, when I met Ron,
he had no idea who I used to be.
Ron loved me for me.
And he could have had a much younger woman,
could've had a much better-looking woman,
could've had a woman with a lot more money,
but he fell in love with me.
He didn't know anything about that part of me.
And the fact that he accepted me for who I was
and loved me for who I was,
taught me how to love me.
Really. And his love for me has reconnected me
with the person that I was before I ever did any of this crap.
All of a sudden, Mr. Right came into my life,
and I hated him when I first met him.
His whole life he was raised in Christian school.
He went to the same school, the same kids,
from kindergarten to twelfth grade.
He was Most Valuable Player, he did sports,
his mom had all these trophies.
She has a book this thick just on newspaper clippings on him.
So I was jealous already. I hated his guts.
He would knock on my door
and I'd answer and go, "What do you want?"
He goes, "I'm here to clean your house."
I'd be like, "What are you doing?" He goes, "You're filthy."
'Cause I didn't cook and I didn't clean
and I was falling apart.
So he literally cleaned my whole house with rags, for me,
and I just stopped working.
Didn't want to prostitute and lie anymore,
and we just hit it off and the next thing you know,
we're snorting meth and next thing you know,
we're reading the Bible together.
We're like, "Dude! Did you see how God used Joshua
to conquer all those cities, dude?"
And he'd be like, "Yeah..."
We were just so into the Bible!
And we realized that he had went to Christian school
his whole life and was a pastor's son,
so he had a really great Christian foundation,
and I didn't as much as him but he was so sweet.
He never once pursued me sexually.
So we ended up getting married on Valentine's Day, 1995.
I met my husband in a pool in Hollywood, Florida,
at the Diplomat Hotel.
And he was married at the time,
and I had a boyfriend at the time.
And he was in the middle of splitting up,
and I was kind of done with that
little tryst,
and I told him I was in the middle of putting a web page together,
and he said, "Okay,"
and it had to be maybe three months after I got my first website up
that I got an email from him.
We went out once. That was it.
We haven't been apart since.
My husband died in a car accident driving home from Las Vegas.
I had asked him not to do this whole gig, actually.
I was eight months pregnant,
I didn't want him away from me that long,
and he's like, "I got to do it." He cut it down to two days,
so he was really happy coming home on the second day
that he was all done with this and he came racing home
to be with his pregnant wife and he flipped the jeep
and didn't ever make it home.
Suddenly, he's gone, and now here I am,
got no more income coming in and all these bills to pay
and it was just one thing on top of another.
So I put up a plea on my website asking for donations.
I didn't know what else to do.
No insurance, no money, bills.
My fans donated enormous amounts of money.
The kids were completely spoiled. They got toys and books and presents
and stuff with pictures on it. It was unbelievable.
It made me cry all the time when I'd open all the mail
from all these people I'd never met
and it was just really wonderful how the fans turned out to help me
because I'd been online for ten years. They'd watched me grow up,
I'd never asked for anything before.
I needed help, and they helped me.
I faced those up and downs in life many, many times,
certainly with my real estate practice
and when the market dropped in real estate,
and now that the market is dropping all the way across the board,
the country is in crisis. Our whole country is in crisis.
It would be really easy for me right now
to want to re-investigate porn.
I definitely want to have kids.
I was actually very depressed recently
because I'm realizing that I'm 28 years old
and I'm not married and I have no kids.
And I really want kids.
And I'd like to have at least two, maybe three
because being an only child, I always wished I had a sibling.
I still wish I had a brother or sister.
That's something I've always wanted.
I have a gorgeous family.
My son is amazing. He's my angel.
My daughter is the best thing that ever happened to me.
She saved my life.
I want my daughter to have a completely different life.
I want her to go to college, is number one.
She's a great student. She's a track star.
She's had to deal with my porn life.
She hates it.
She's embarrassed of it.
She doesn't want me to go to her track meets
because she feels someone would recognize me.
We're going to church now.
I go to church and I have a strong faith
and I have changed my life.
And I want for her everything that...
I don't want her to ever have to experience what I experienced.
In the moment? Thank you.
For being who you are.
'Cause you're a pretty cool dude.
-Can I get that in writing? -Sure!
I'll give it to you in writing.
You're welcome.
It's interesting. What I'm sitting here, thinking is,
"I wonder how many other people out there
can have this kind of conversation with their parents?"
Most people can't think about their parents having sex
or especially fucking somebody other than their mother.
That alone would irritate a lot of children,
but it's very normalized
in that sex is a goody that should be enjoyed.
When you can differentiate between sex and love
and everything that happens in between,
it's a huge gift that you can give yourself
and lovers and partners and friends and family.
And I'm grateful that that's my world.
I'm impressed.
She is my role model. She is my hero.
And I think I've learned a lot from my mom.
She's gone through a lot and I even tell people
that she's my hero and she's my role model.
She's just like, "Whatever. I did it for my daughter."
And now she's doing what she wants. She owns her own business
and no matter how many people talk down about her,
she still does what she wants to do and she's successful at it.
So I guess she's just a good example of,
don't let other people bring you down. Just keep doing what you're doing
and you'll be successful in what you want to do.
So. I'm very proud of you, just so you know that.
Please don't start crying 'cause then I'll start crying.
I'm not gonna cry!
I will start crying.
Since my husband died, there wasn't a lot for me to look forward to,
so it's kind of nice to have that.
Mom, your husband died?
Daddy. Where's Daddy?
-Where's Daddy? -Up in the clouds.
There comes a point in our life when family becomes first,
and the answer to the question.
It just doesn't even take a beat.
Sometimes...
We have the opportunity to see our friends and family.
I think Chuck would really appreciate
that we're here today.
There was something uniquely vital about Buck Adams
that could brighten up the darkest moment
and put a grin on the face of the bleakest situation.
With a body that appeared to be hewn from a granite block of cement
and an intensity that provided his fans with vicarious sustenance,
Buck Adams will always be remembered
as the guy who got it up when it counted.
Like I said,
if you knew it was gonna happen,
what would you have said?
And you don't always get that chance.
But right now in my life, I regret doing porn.
I regret doing porn
and I never thought, ever,
that I would be who I became,
Houston.
I never thought I would be so big and so recognizable
and I just never thought it'd turn into what it did for me.
And God just says, "Shelley, I'm telling you,
you need to trust me.
I've got something better for you. I love you.
I didn't save your ass all these years not to give you something better."
Well, looking back,
honestly, I can't really go on my computer
and look at stuff that I used to do anymore.
It just makes me... I'm so different.
I feel so different now, where I am in life.
It's really hard for me to believe that I was that girl.
So, yes, it has changed me. For the better, I believe.
The porn business has afforded me a very comfortable life.
It has allowed me to educate myself in ways
that I probably wouldn't have been able to do before.
It's enabled me to travel all over the world,
and meet new and interesting people.
And it's allowed me to have the cojones,
if you will, to try new and exciting things
that I probably wouldn't have done before,
I would have been afraid to do.
I have no fear to do anything.
Because as people, we have to fully and freely accept ourself
for everything we are and we're not
because if we compartmentalize, we're never a whole self.
Especially in relationships,
we don't get to bring our whole self.
What I am afraid of the most is because I've lasted so long
and this industry is now heading toward its fourth decade
of presence on this earth,
that the people who created this business,
the Eric Edwardses, the Jamie Gillises,
the John Leslies, the great pioneers of this business,
are not gonna be with us forever
and I hope to be around long enough to honor them,
but I don't want to do it fast and furiously
because when they start to fall by the wayside,
somebody's gonna have to remember them.
It's based on a line that, "There is no future
if in the present we fail to pay homage to the past."
But a lot of them are now in their fifties and sixties,
some of them in their seventies,
and somebody is going to have to be there to tell their stories.
Eventually this woman is gonna say...
And then when you're 85 and you can't walk no more
and you're in a wheelchair, she's gonna say,
"You remember when you wanted to have sex all day?
Yeah, what do you mean, You want what?
What do you want?
No, no, no, now I'm getting back at you."
I miss many things about the business,
but I guess the clearest way to say it concisely would be...
The biblical phrase occurs to me,
"When I was a child, I spake as a child,
and when I was a man, I put away childish things."
I'm trying to think of Joe Namath.
Joe, do you miss football?
Sure he does, but he can't play like he used to.
He's 65 years old now.
I'm in the same place.
Am I happy I did porn? Yeah.
I really don't have too many regrets
'cause so much stuff came out of it that was positive.
I got to travel around the world,
met a lot of interesting people,
I'm way over my quota sexually.
I think people ask me and I guess the estimate's
I've been with 3,000 women or something like that.
Most of them were awesome to work with.
Still friends with a lot of 'em.
So, yeah, overall, it was a hell of an experience.
Essentially I am living my life right now
the way I want to live it for the rest of my life.
I want to die doing what I'm doing right now.
How many people can say that?
I live here and I have a place that I love this much.
I think I'm as lucky as anybody could be on earth.
I don't know what the hell to ask for.
I'm happy.
I'm not in a dark place.
I'm not suicidal. I'm not doing drugs.
I'm not self-destructive.
But the last two years has been a journey,
'cause I was very self-destructive before.
I'm not saying it changed overnight.
I still have self-destructive thoughts,
but I'm just in a healthier place all around.
You hear some people we talk to who are leading normal lives
and are doing pretty good. How the hell would you really know?
How would you know what really goes on in their life at 2:00 a.m.?
The torment... How would you know?
Are they gonna tell you about all the times
they've been rejected and isolated
and the horror and the shame that their children confront
and that their spouses confront
and the shame that they've put their families through
and the relationships that have been permanently broken?
All the burned bridges behind them because they've done sex work.
Most families aren't proud when their daughters become hookers.
I think the difference
between me and the other girls in the industry
was that I really enjoyed being there and not just the sex.
I used it to better myself as a person.
I never let the industry take advantage of me in any way.
I always took advantage of the industry.
I made phenomenal amounts of money,
I produced movies, I wrote movies, I starred in them.
People were paying me hundreds of dollars an hour
to sign autographs? I'm with this!
The other girls leave with a bad taste in their mouth.
I have nothing but good memories when I look back.
If I wanted to go back into porn, I could get a contract in any company
and still just do straight boy-girl scenes.
When I'm 32, if I want to go back to porn
because I'm really broke, let's say, hopefully it won't happen,
I'd tell a porn company,
"I'm gonna come back and do two guys and do anal."
If I'm 35 and broke, I need to do porn,
I'll tell 'em I'll do a black guy.
There isn't that much of a future after the X-rated industry
because somehow, somewhere, somebody will find you.
The famous line I used to say to anybody walking into my office
when I ran the biggest agency, "What are you gonna do
ten years from now when your kid brings home a magazine
with you laying in the middle of it with a candle shoved up your ass?
You gonna tell 'em you were playing the part of a birthday cake?"
It doesn't go away.
My husband and my son changed my life.
And my son saved my life.
And looking at him every day
reminds me how precious life is
and how throwing it away on drugs and alcohol
and just the stupid crap that's out there...
God, it's just so not worth it.