Absolute Mayhem (8 page)

Somehow, during this hectic period of my life,
Craven and I found ourselves driving to Las Vegas to get
married. Bella and Craven's best friend, Dez, were in the
car with us, and they were going to be our bridesmaid
and best man. Craven was at the wheel and I was sitting
behind – we'd had a big fight just before we left , and
he'd refused to let me, his future bride, sit next to him
in the car en route to our wedding! (Hmm. Was that an
omen or what?)

Let me say now, with the wisdom of hindsight, that
I think getting married on a whim is a bit insane, to say
the least. (I don't recall being on drugs at that point, but
I did start up again after I got married.) As strange as
it may sound, we had made the decision a whole two
weeks before heading out to Vegas. I remember thinking
to myself, 'Is this really a good idea?' But then I decided
to do it anyway, thinking what harm could it do. (I could
always get a divorce if things didn't work out, right?) So
we got married at the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel,
which I had pre-booked. I rented a beautiful dress, and
Craven rented a tuxedo. And Bella looked ravishing as
my bridesmaid, as she always did.

When we got back to LA after the wedding, I was still
living with Bella, as Craven and I hadn't yet found a place
together. But Bella then let another porn star move in
with us and that completely fucked up my whole friendship
with her. This girl (who will remain nameless) was
obsessed with Bella and she was jealous of me and
my career. She would monopolise Bella's time, and they
excluded me to do their own thing together, oft en
walking out and slamming the door without even saying
goodbye. In the end, I couldn't stand it any more, and it
was a great relief when I moved in with Craven. Bella
and I never made up after that whole incident, which is
a real shame because she was such a good friend.

And so began my period of domestic bliss with
Craven. Ha! To cut a woefully long story mercifully
short, my marriage was a two-and-a-half year disaster.
It led to me nearly ruining my career during what was
to have been my peak time, shortly after I got my boobs
enlarged in 2002. And I would much rather talk about
my boobs than talk about my ex-husband, so I hope you
will bear with me here.

Ever since I'd stopped growing at 16, I had wanted
bigger breasts. So in LA, as soon as I finally had plenty of
money to spend, I asked around and talked to a few girls
in the business who had nice boobs. Among the famous
porn stars, Jill Kelly had my favourite set of boobs, so
I decided to go to her surgeon, Dr Fischer (who is now
on the TV show
Extreme Makeover
). I was able to afford
being out of work for a couple of months, so I stayed
completely sober for the first month, got my boobs
done and continued staying sober during the month-long
recovery period. (Then I made up for lost time and
partied hard on New Year's Eve!)

Looking back, I can say it was the scariest, most
painful experience I've ever had. It was scary being put
under anaesthesia, and it was painful from the minute
I woke up. All I remember is coming out of surgery,
hearing the nurses but not being able to see them yet,
and then figuring out that what they were saying
was, 'Stop kicking, you'll cause bleeding!' I was kicking
around, trying to wake up. Then I opened my eyes and
said, 'Is it done yet?' Apparently, I didn't notice the huge
mountain on my chest, not until the pain kicked in and
I had to have more morphine, which knocked me out
again. The swelling takes a long time to go down, and
then your boobs don't really drop for about a year –
that's when they start looking more natural. And, as the
years go by, your boobs tend to look smaller than they
first appeared, but I'm very proud of them now. That
was my one and only boob job.

My bigger chest immediately made me feel way more
confident with myself, and I really had a great time going
shopping for a change. It felt so awesome to walk into
Victoria's Secret knowing I was able to buy a D-cup bra!
And I could pretty much wear any kind of top, whereas
when I had small boobs I had the worst time trying to
find tops that made me feel sexy. Now I felt like more of
a woman.

Armed with my new self-confidence, I started feature-dancing
that year, and I eventually got more gigs than
I could handle. I made a ton of money. Feature-dancing
is when a stripper gets paid per show to be the headline
act at a gentlemen's club. Usually, this girl is a porn star,
and her name and celebrity will draw more customers
to the club. A feature dancer will always put on a much
more elaborate show than a regular dancer – with big,
expensive costumes, props, games, merchandise and
other stuff . I was dancing my ass off in the strip clubs
across the country.

In all fairness, Craven can't take full responsibility for
the problems in my movie career. It's true that I worked
condom-only after we were married, and I lost a lot of
work because of it – people don't want to shoot condoms.
We did have some kind of co-dependence thing going
on, though, which was sometimes indirectly detrimental
to me. There were a couple of times, for instance, when
Craven didn't like who I was working with – meaning,
he didn't like me fucking certain guys – so I acquiesced
and didn't do those shoots. He once insisted that I come
out to some stupid car show with him, so I had to cancel
work. Then, there was our constant fighting, which sometimes
led me to cancel shoots too.

When I was going through all of this emotional
turbulence, I would sometimes turn to cocaine to numb
the pain. I wanted to kick the habit, though, and I went
through a stage when I would have it in my possession
for months at a time and not even touch it. I thought
I had it under control, but I was just about to enter
another period of partying.

Marriage, clearly, wasn't quite the panacea I had
hoped for. Eventually, in December 2003, we split up
and Craven moved out. It wasn't all doom and gloom,
because it had been on the cards for ages, and a room
in my house that I'd been renting out became vacant
not too long after, and Jay Allan, my good friend and
favourite photographer, moved in. Let the good times
roll! Boy, we had some great house parties.

People have asked me what I think, in retrospect,
is the most important lesson I learned about
making the transition from modelling to movies. Sometimes,
I'm not sure how to answer that. The thing is, I
do love modelling and I wish I could have done more
mainstream magazine layouts, such as
Maxim
or
FHM
.

Actually, if I hadn't done hardcore, I could have tried
out for
Playboy
magazine, which would have probably
launched a whole different career for me. Perhaps it
would have led me to mainstream acting and modelling,
which is what I really wanted. But
Playboy
likes to deploy
its famous 'girl next door' branding, and usually doesn't
use us 'girls gone bad' hardcore models. This helps to
distinguish it from its main competitor,
Penthouse
,
which uses adult film stars a great deal in pictorials and
centrefolds (and which I've appeared in loads). The one
time
Playboy
made a notable exception was in its March
2002 issue, when they did a cover story and pictorial on
'The Women of Porn' and they had three Vivid Video
contract girls (Tera Patrick, Kira Kener and Dasha) on
the cover. Things could have been different, I guess, but
being a Pisces I'm oft en too hasty with my decisions,
and that's always been my biggest problem. In so many
ways, I am my own worst enemy.

That's not to say that I'm not grateful for how quickly
I was able to make an impact on the porn industry. This
might have been because I was one of the few Australian
girls shooting porn in the US, a market where very few
non-American girls were being employed. There were
the Aussies Jodie Moore and Bobbi Barrington, too,
but they were only just coming into the industry
around the same time as me.

The path I took was to base myself in Southern California
and work my ass off , whereas Jodie wanted to
be the number-one Aussie porn star so bad that she
ran for a seat in the Queensland parliament in 2001
and the Australian senate in 2004 – which, if you ask
me, is an easy way to get famous. She can't have realistically
believed that she'd be voted in. From what I'vet
witnessed, when girls in our industry do these kinds of
things, it's seen by most people as a publicity stunt. As a
result, people lose respect for girls like us. But Jodie was
clearly of another school of thought – any publicity is
good publicity, right? And as for Bobbi Barrington, she
made a small splash doing 'gonzo' porn and did well for
a while, although she seems to have vanished from the
scene almost as quickly as she came in. I have no idea
where she is today.

Gonzo, by the way, is a sub-genre of hardcore porn
that's half-improvised theatre, half-reality TV, whereby
performers work without a script and have to make
stuff up as they go along, including the sex, which oft en
doesn't have a director calling fixed positions. Usually,
it is shot cheaply with a very small crew, oft en a single
cameraman with a hand-held camera. The resulting
'amateur' effect is part of its appeal, as is the 'shock
value' of performers having spontaneous sex with real
people suddenly roped into scenes. The creation of
gonzo porn is oft en credited to the famous director
John Stagliano.

Bobbi did a scene in a 2001 VCA Pictures production
in which I had the leading role,
Portrait of a Woman
.
Bobbi's appeal was obvious, since she was a big-breasted
blonde who totally fit the preferred porn-star stereotype.
We once did a photo shoot together for the
photographer Suze Randall, in which I dominated her. I
was dressed up as a 1940s Mafi a chick. It was a smokin'
hot layout, but I'm not sure where it ended up. I would
have loved to have seen that magazine. We don't always
know where our shoots end up, unless we want to spend
time at news-stands looking at porno magazines, hoping
to see ourselves on the cover! I don't do that, of course,
and usually find out which magazines I'm in through
my fans telling me.

As I've said, posing for magazines was one of my
favourite things to do at first. I particularly loved posing
for Suze Randall, for whom I probably did at least
20 layouts. Suze is hysterical. She's British, a great
photographer and was originally a
Playboy
model. She
was always really loud during photo shoots. She would
say funny things like, 'Spread your legs, you lazy sheila!'
or, 'Point your toes, bitch!' It was (and still is) rare to
have a female photographer shoot you in this business.
The other female photographer whom I really liked
is Robbye Bentley. She is a really crazy character too.
Robbye did a lot of my early shoots in 2000 and 2001
(before moving into directing porn films, as you've seen
at the start of this book). I loved posing for her.

Among the female movie directors, I really like Kelly
Holland. Kelly is just really cool and laid-back. She's very
easy to work with, knows what she wants and gets great
results. I remember having her as a cinematographer
during the shoots I did with VCA, and then eventually
she became a director. She hails from Dallas, Texas,
and was at first a mainstream actress with a trained
theatrical background and then became a mainstream
documentary director before she moved to shooting
porn. (She has actually done serious documentaries,
for her company Art Attack Productions, on a variety
of fascinating subjects, including two she shot in Latin
America about military coups and the fanaticism of
soccer fans – a whole world away from porn!) Kelly
got the break of her career when Vivid Video hired her
to direct movies, which she did for seven years under
the name Toni English. She then directed for another
big porn company, Adam & Eve, under the same name
before working under her real name in 2004 at Playgirl.
('I started directing under my name with Playgirl
because I couldn't tell women to "claim their sexuality"
and then work under a pseudonym,' she said.) She
moved to Penthouse in 2005 and became its head of
production before assuming her current position as
president of Penthouse Studios.

I like both Kelly and Suze not because they're women
who are successful in what has always been a male-dominated
business but because they're both very good
at what they do, period. I see no reason why a woman
can't deliver the goods from behind the camera as well
as any man.

As far as other porn stars go, I've always thought
Shayla LaVeaux was awesome, and the way she is still
performing for the camera after the age of 35 is inspiring.
I love Shayla's attitude, since she's so friendly and
down to earth and never seems to let anything get to
her head. But as a whole, I can truthfully say that no one
inspired me to get into the business. I didn't know any
names before coming in. Afterwards, I watched some of
Jill Kelly's scenes and got to know her, and she gave me
some good advice – including the breast-surgeon tip-off
– which helped me a lot. In some ways, I wanted to be
like Jill. I just thought she was so hot! When she walked
into a room, you could feel her sexy energy. I learned
from Jill that sexual energy is contagious.

In an interview I gave in 2006 to
Eve
, a mainstream
women's magazine in London, I said that the most
important technique that all aspiring porn stars need
to learn is 'to open your legs so the camera can see the
sex'. It's actually a lot harder than it seems. It's more
than spreading your own lips with your hand. It means
opening up your angle to the camera when you're
having sex so the viewers can see the 'hardcore' at all
times – knowing how to keep your thighs spread no
matter what position you're holding, so that the camera
can see the guy's penis penetrating you (if that's what's
going on). To do this, you have to be constantly aware
of where the camera is in relation to the heart of the
action – and nobody ever has to consider this when
they're having sex at home!

In porn, you have to learn to expose your body in
ways most women would be too shy to actually do but
which, if they're honest with themselves, they might
well fantasise about. I think we do fulfill a vicarious need
for women who enjoy watching our movies. So, over
the first couple of years in the business, I developed a
pro fessional skill set, in the same way that Maria Sharapova
works on her serve and her backhand. I eventually
just got used to these new ways of having sex, and I
became more fl exible after doing it for a while, especially
from so many photo shoots where I needed to hold the
positions. I well and truly lost my porn virginity.

Doing reverse-cowgirl, for example, is a great leg
workout and fantastic for cardio. It's a porn position
where the guy lies down fl at on his back and the girl
gets on top but facing away from him. This is considered
a good camera shot for obvious reasons: she's facing the
camera with her legs spread apart, so viewers can see
the total full-frontal exposure, what we call the 'insertion
shot', of his erect penis going in and out of her
open vagina.

Yoga really helps, too: it tones the body and makes
you look good. I have no problem spreading for the
camera these days. It just happens naturally, because
I instinctively know I have to open up for the light.
If I see darkness down there, I find the light – pretty
crazy, huh?

I'm sure there are women who must think I'm a
lunatic, because there's just no way in hell they could
ever imagine themselves doing what I do for a living.
I can understand them not wanting people to watch
them have sex, but I guess that's where the actress side
of me comes into play. You really do have to be a good
actress. At first, I felt very uncomfortable with the idea
of people watching, but then I thought, 'Wait, I'm an
actress. I'm not just having sex in front of the camera,
I'm performing!' So I think about my performance
and how I'm reacting, and it's always great when you
actually enjoy working with someone. You kind of get
lost in that moment and forget about everyone around
you, until the director yells out 'Cut!' or 'Next position!'
– usually just as you're about to cum for real. I hate it
when that happens!

The other thing that's hard to explain to anyone who
hasn't worked in this industry is how demanding it can
be physically and how it can affect your domestic life.
When I was married to Craven and shooting a lot, I was
always sore and I didn't want to have sex off -camera,
because I didn't want to be in pain shooting the next
day. So the balance was tough. It was a good thing he
loved blow jobs!

The thing about our relationship was that Craven was
primarily not a performer but a camera guy, someone
who shot stuff and was graduating to directing gonzo
porn. Craven already had his own blow-job series, called
The Oral Adventures of Craven Moorehead
, and he had
appeared in a couple of scenes elsewhere in the past. By
the time he got round to directing me, our relationship
was pretty dead anyway, so I didn't much care about
fucking someone in front of him. We did perform one
blow-job scene together and a sex scene with another
girl, so I can't say that counts as jointly performing all
that much. Really, it was just another job to both of us.

One of my favourite films from my early years of porn
was
Sweet Sounds
, directed by Nicholas Steele. I was the
lead in this 2003 movie, which received several five-star
reviews. It was about a singer trying to get her big
break, and the song they had me sing in it was a ballad,
which they wouldn't let me sing the way I wanted to but
it ended up sounding great anyway. I did three hot sex
scenes and a lot of actual acting, and the most notable
scene features me and Cheyne Collins on a rooft op in
downtown LA at night, in the middle of winter – it was
freezing and we were exhausted by the time we had to
have sex, but it looked so hot. I always loved shooting
with Cheyne – he's good-looking, very cool and easy to
work with. (And he has a perfect cock – not too big,
and not too small. Give me the average-sized ones
any time!
^*
)

^*
By average here, I mean average for porn, not for normal life,
as in around six to eight inches.

That same year, 2003, I got my first writing credit on
a movie, which was a huge deal for me. The movie was
Witch Coven College
and it was directed by the late, great
Jim Holliday for VCA. It was basically a spoof about
witches teaching college girls a few tricks, although it
was pure fantasy and nothing truly of a Wiccan nature.
But it was so much fun to shoot. We had 'magic dust' that
made people automatically have sex, so it was intended
as comedy, just like all of Jim's movies. There were a lot
of hot chicks, a lot of toe-sucking, butt-licking, anal and
girl–girl scenes. I wrote the script around Jim's sense
of humour, and he loved it. Of course, he would add
his own words and phrases, which he always enjoyed
doing. I still think of this movie as my way of paying
homage to him.

Jim was such a treasure and we worked together for
several years, until he died in December 2004. He used
to call me one of his 'angels', which is a term of endearment
that he used for the top girls who appeared in his
movies. Among those top girls were Jill Kelly, Shayla
LaVeaux and Felecia, so of course I was honoured to be
included in that company. Eventually, he started to call
me his number-one angel (replacing my idol Jill Kelly),
and as I was the only one of his angels who didn't do
anal that was a great honour for me.

Jim always liked to put me in the middle of the box-covers
and almost always had me as the lead girl. And
when I decided I was quitting the business, right at the
peak of my career, Jim would pay me just to walk around
in one of his movies and have me show off my butt!