The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  *

  “John,” I tell him, “I find I’m in a terrible position.” By making things easy for me, Travolta has made things hard for me. For two decades, on and off, I have been interviewing famous people. And I have to confess that I have never interviewed anyone as generous as Travolta: generous with his time, his trouble, his attentiveness. When I came to Los Angeles to interview Brian De Palma, years ago, things went rather differently. I arrived on the set, as arranged—and he canceled. This was what Hollywood was supposed to be like. (I was delighted. The piece wrote itself.) “A journalist,” I explained, “doesn’t want to discover that John Travolta is a nice guy. That’s not a story.”

  “What gets written about me is one of the things I can’t control. So I thought I’d just put a lot into it from my end and see what happened.”

  Was this postmodernism? “Control”: was this Scientology? We had tackled Scientology the night before, during our second dinner. As interpreted by John Travolta, at least, Scientology came across as stolidly, even boringly, uncreepy: self-management on a buddy network, with an emphasis on communal therapy (but with full reliance on modern medicine). Some people are drawn to religion—and a religion is what Scientology now is, officially, tax-deductibly—not in a search for God but because they like group systems. If we read Nirad Chaudhuri we find that Hinduism, for instance, is worldly: do right by that cow, and you will get one over on your neighbor. But Scientology in its doctrines is basic survivalism. It teaches you how to pay the rent and not go crazy. “Without it,” Travolta said, “I wouldn’t have lived any longer than John Belushi.” Well, as they say—whatever works.

  The star’s trailer is a luxurious version of Buddy’s mobile home in Urban Cowboy: plush carpet, microwave, VCR. There is pizza, there is iced tea. Duly prompted, Travolta tells the story about making an emergency landing in his Gulfstream at Washington’s National Airport with his wife and child on board.

  “I had the equivalent of seven failures—contagious failures.” The talk turns technical: his “transducer rectifier” wasn’t functioning. “I claimed an Emergency over the radio. And then everything went. I had one gyro. No flaps. No reverse thrust. When I fly, I find great objectivity up there. And I found I was calm. In flying school, they give you what they call a black cockpit. So I felt I’d been there before.”

  This story sounds to me like a pretty good figure for Travolta’s career. The steep takeoff, the high altitude, the contagious failures, the black cockpit, the half-blind but eventually triumphant landing. Nonchalantly, Travolta now reveals that he has just been offered $8 million (twice his current rate) to star in a movie with Sharon Stone—“That was an hour ago.” Sharon Stone? Here in Hollywood, there are two directions you can disappear in. My protective instincts are stirred. Tony and Danny and Bud all longed for guidance. The baffled sweetness of the young Travolta’s smile I take to be real, and durable. He is also a terrifying achiever who has learned to be calm. But he does need guidance; he does need his transducer rectified. By now, of course, I am ready to offer my mentorship to John—my words of advice. Instead, I will offer them to Quentin Tarantino. All will be well. Just don’t let Travolta out of your sight.

  The New Yorker 1995

  Postscript. As it turned out, Travolta’s resurgence lacked staying power. His last really good thing was Primary Colors (1998), where he gave us a rendering of Bill Clinton (with plenty of Bubba mixed in with the charismatic Big Dog). Since then, the only strong glimmer came with a return to Elmore Leonard and Chili Palmer in Be Cool (2005). This is a pity. But it is not to be compared with the death of Jett Travolta, in 2009 (a seizure, related to his autism). Jett was sixteen.

  In Pornoland: Pussies Are Bullshit

  1. PUSSIES ARE BULLSHIT

  Pussies are bullshit. Don’t let them tell you any different.

  “Answer me something,” I said to John Stagliano, the creator of Buttman. We were stepping out of the porno home—onto the porno patio with its porno pool. This was Malibu, California. Down the slope and beyond the road lay the Pacific Ocean; but the Staglianos have no access to its porno shore. In the evening they can watch the porno sunset with its porno pink and mauve and blood orange, and then linger awhile, perhaps, under a porno moon. “Answer me something. How do you account for the emphasis, not just in your…work but in the industry in general, how do you account for the truly incredible emphasis on anal sex?”

  After a minimal pause and a minimal shrug Stagliano said, “Pussies are bullshit.”

  Now John was being obedient to the dictionary definition of bullshit: nonsense intended to deceive. With vaginal, Stagliano elaborated—well, here you have some chick chirruping away. And the genuinely discerning viewer (jackknifed forward in his seat) has got to be thinking: Is this for real? Or is it just bullshit?

  With anal, on the other hand, the actress is obliged to produce a different order of response: more guttural, more animal. As Stagliano quaintly but brightly puts it, “Her personality comes out.” (And her personality, after all, is what the viewer of porno is so anxious to see.) He goes on: “You want guys who can fuck really good and make the girls look more…virile.” Virile, of course, means “manly”; but once again Stagliano is using the King’s English. You want the girls to show you “their testosterone.”

  The name of Rocco Siffredi, again and again, was wistfully and reverently conjured. Siffredi, the grotesquely endowed Italian, is porno’s premier “buttbanger” or “assbuster.”

  “Rocco has far more power in this industry than any actress,” said Stagliano, pleased to be pulling one back for the boys (generally speaking, male performers are the also-rans of porno). “I was the first to shoot Rocco. Together we evolved toward rougher stuff. He started to spit on girls. A strong male-dominant thing, with women being pushed to their limit. It looks like violence but it’s not. I mean, pleasure and pain are the same thing, right? Rocco is driven by the market. What makes it in today’s marketplace is reality.”

  And assholes are reality. And pussies are bullshit.

  2. BUSH AND GORE

  There are, at present, two types of mainstream American pornography: Features and Gonzo.

  Features are sex films with some sort of resemblance to “narrative”: settings, story line, characterization. “We don’t just show you people fucking,” said a Features executive. “We show you why they’re fucking.” These movies are allegedly aimed at the “couples market.” Couples, it is asserted, want to know why people are fucking. I can give these couples a three-word answer that will hold true in every case: for the money.

  In Flashpoint (Wicked Pictures), for instance, a bunch of porno stars are dressed up as firefighters. As the film opens, we see the porno stars sliding down the pole and boarding the crimson fire truck. An exploding car, a colleague (not a porno star but an aging extra) falling in the line of duty. There follows an insanely boring funeral, which includes the whole of the Lord’s Prayer and the slow and solemn furling, by a porno star, of the American flag. Porno star Jenna grieves for the fallen extra. After returning from the funeral she finds herself alone with another porno star dressed up as a firefighter. He seeks to assuage her grief, and in return she grants him fellatio plus full intercourse. The next sex scene, which occurs about a millennium later, is also triggered by grief counseling. Here a male porno star comforts two female porno stars, one of them anally…

  After a while you begin to think that porno stars, despite being very bad at acting, are very good at acting in one particular: they can keep a straight face. But then humorlessness, universal and institutionalized humorlessness, is the lifeblood of porno.

  Films like Flashpoint go out to the video stores and, in the soft version (where the hard action is tastefully obscured by some stray object—a fireman’s hat, say, or a fireman’s boot), are sold to cable and to hotel-chain franchises, and so on. Features owes the humiliating fatuity of its conventions to an old legal precedent called the “Miller test.” Miller v. California (1
973) established that a dirty movie was obscene if it was “utterly” without social, literary, artistic, political, or scientific “value.” In juridical terms, the key word here, of course, is utterly, and millions of dollars have been spent on its definition.

  With a wife as earnest and active as Hillary, Bill Clinton could never be a true pal of porno, but he largely left it alone on First Amendment grounds. Unlike his two predecessors, who systematically harassed the industry with confiscations, multiple prosecutions, fines, jail terms. It’s a fair guess that porno never felt more gorgeously secure than when Clinton, in his second term, became in effect the porno president.

  Now porno is tensed and braced for changes. It feared Gore. It dreaded Bush. Gonzo porno is also known as “wall-to-wall.” It shows you people fucking without a care for the reason why. There are no Lord’s Prayers, no furled American flags in Gonzo. Features porno is much, much dirtier than it used to be, but Gonzo porno is gonzo, or remorselessly transgressive; and the new element is violence.

  3. TEMPTRESS AND JONATHAN MORGAN

  I had lunch with Temptress (Features). I had lunch with Chloe (Gonzo). And the next day I joined Chloe on the set of Welcum to Chloeville.

  My lunch with Temptress was a relatively sedate affair. At first I was reminded of the time I interviewed Penny Baker, a Playboy Playmate of the Year: within a minute I had run out of questions. Temptress, like Penny, seemed to be inhibited by the presence of a company executive—in this case Steve Orenstein of Wicked Pictures, for which she is a contract player. But Temptress loosened up.

  “Tell me, Temptress,” I said (having apologized for the corniness and awkwardness of my inquiry), “what won’t you do?”

  “I won’t do anal,” said Temptress. “They keep trying to coax me into it. You know: ‘Just a finger or a tongue. Or just a little bit: just the tip.’ But I won’t. I used not to do facials, but I do them now.”

  Temptress is not talking about beauty treatments. She is talking about the destination of what is variously referred to as the “pop shot” or the “money shot”: the ejaculation of the male.

  “What happens,” I asked, “when a costar can’t get hard?”

  The “wilt” used to be the nemesis of porno. A penile no-show could make the difference between profit and loss. But the situation has been changed, I was told, thanks to Viagra. On Viagra, the actor performs forty-five minutes behind schedule, with a flushed face and a headache. “You also lose a dimension,” John Stagliano would explain. “The guy’s fucking without being aroused!” He’s just “showing off”—and pretty soon you’re back to bullshit.

  Another thing with Viagra is that the guy can have a problem with the pop shot, thus endangering the facial.

  “What do you do then, Temptress?”

  “They give you a gulp of piña colada mix. The cock’s in your mouth and you let it like ooze out around it.”

  Physically Temptress reminded me of a sophomore gussied up for a ball. She didn’t sound shy, but she looked it. With her long straight hair frequently steered over her shoulders by her slow-moving hands, with her face unglazed by cosmetics, with her gently narrowed eyes, she exuded what Philip Larkin called the “strength and pain / Of being young.” I asked about her history and she told me something of it. And there was strength and there was pain (and there was certainly youth: Temptress is twenty-one).

  “But I don’t want you to write about that. And could you not mention my real name?…I don’t have relationships anymore. They make life unstable. The only sex I have is the sex on-screen.”

  Temptress is one of the lucky ones. She’s a star. After lunch I went to Wicked Pictures and had a talk with Jonathan Morgan (performer turned director) in a computerized cutting room while he edited his latest Feature, a fantastically unfunny comedy called Inside Porn.

  “Ah,” said Jonathan. “Now here we have a double anal.”

  A double anal is not to be confused with a DP (double penetration: anal and vaginal delivered simultaneously by a two-man team). A double anal is a double anal. And there have been triple anals, too.

  “The girls could be graded like A, B, and C,” said Jonathan. “The A is the chick on the box cover. She has the power. So she’ll show up late or not at all. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them do that.” He gestured at the screen and said, “Here you have a borderline A-B doing a double anal. Directors will remember that. She’ll get phone calls. For a double anal you’d usually expect a B or a C. They have to do the dirty stuff or they won’t get a phone call. You’ve had a kid, you’ve got some stretch marks—so you’re out there doing double anal.

  “Some girls are used up in nine months or a year. An eighteen-year-old, sweet young thing, signs with an agency, makes five films in her first week. Five directors, five actors, five times five: she gets phone calls. A hundred movies in four months. She’s not a fresh face anymore. Her price slips and she stops getting phone calls. Then it’s, ‘Okay, will you do anal? Will you do gang bangs?’ Then they’re used up. They can’t even get a phone call. The market forces of this industry use them up. It just uses them up.”

  I thanked Jonathan for his candor. But he wasn’t as candid as Chloe. We met in the lobby of my hotel and we strolled out to her Mustang.

  “See that?”

  The number plate said: STR82NL.

  “Straight to anal,” said Chloe.

  And she hadn’t even got started.

  Chloe was gonzo. She gave me the truth.

  4. EXTREME PRODUCTIONS: KHAN TUSION AND MAX HARDCORE

  A single issue of Adult Video News (April 2000) yields the following.

  Last October porno star Vivian Valentine attended the XXX-Treme Adults Only vacation in Mexico sporting the black eye she copped from Jon Dough in Rough Sex (Anabolic Video). “I have no regrets or bad feelings about it,” said Vivian.

  Regan Starr, who worked on the second film in this “line,” Rough Sex 2, had a different take. “I got the shit kicked out of me,” she said. “I was told before the video—and they said this very proudly, mind you—that in this line most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad….I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. You can hear me say, ‘Turn the fucking camera off,’ and they kept going.” The director of the Rough Sex series (now discontinued), who goes by the name of Khan Tusion, protests his innocence. “Regan Starr,” Tusion claims, “categorically misstates what occurred.”

  If you don’t like Khan Tusion, you won’t like Max Hardcore. AVN’s regular “On the Set” column carries a cheerfully scandalized account of the making of Hollywood Hardcore 13. In this scene, actor-director Hardcore is having rough sex with Cloey Adams, who is pretending to be underage. “If you’re a good girl, I’ll take you to McDonald’s later and get you a Happy Meal.” Hardcore then “proceeds to piss in her mouth.” Addressing the camera, Cloey Adams says, “What do you think of your little princess now, Daddy?” Nor is Hardcore done with her. “Turning to the crew, he calmly says, ‘I’ll need a speculum and a hose.’…One of Max’s favorite tricks is to stretch a girl’s asshole with a speculum, then piss into her open gape and make her suck out his own piss with a hose. Ain’t that romantic?”

  Now, American porno (and how could it be otherwise?) is market-driven. We can see what the above tells us about porno. But what does it tell us about America? And if America is more like a world than a country, what does it tell us about the world?

  • The average American spends four hours and fifty-one minutes of every day watching porno (video and Internet).

  • The average nonhomeowning American male spends more on porno than he spends on his rent.

  • Porno accounts for 43.5 percent of the US gross domestic product.

  Like pussies, the above statistics are bullshit. I made them up. But the true figures are similarly wild, similarly dizzying, similarly through-the-roof. This isn’t bullshit:

  • Porno is far bigger
than rock music and far bigger than Hollywood.

  • Americans spend more on strip clubs than they spend on theater, opera, ballet, jazz, and classical concerts combined.

  • In 1975 the total retail value of all the hard-core porno in America was estimated at $5 to $10 million. Last year Americans spent $8 billion on mediated sex.

  Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: Banish porno, and you banish all the world.

  5. CHLOE

  “I have herpes,” said Chloe as she drove me to a smoker-friendly bar. “After you’ve been in this business for a while, you have herpes. Everyone has herpes. On the set sometimes you’ll say to a guy, ‘What’s this?’ And he’ll say, ‘What’s what? That? It’s a fuck spot.’ And it may well be a fuck spot, you know, a fuck sore, what with all the traffic. But it’s more likely to be a herpes sore, and that guy shouldn’t be working. My movies are all-condom, but condoms won’t protect you from herpes. They don’t cover the base. Sometimes when you’re doing girl-girl you’ll say, ‘Honey, I think you should go and see someone.’ It can be a very stinky scene down there. I’ll send her to a porno-friendly doctor (the others treat you like shit) and she’ll come out holding her Flagyl prescription with multiple refills.”

  Chloe is twenty-six. For ten years she trained as a ballerina; then, at seventeen, she got into drugs, mostly speed (“I’d fuck for like seventy-two hours”); at twenty she started shooting up heroin and was already in the industry by the time she quit, over two years ago. Chloe has fair, fine red hair and a warm and clever face. She has a ballerina’s body: strong legs, a full muscular backside, and—

  “And no tits. It’s true that some Features companies urge the girls to have implants and offer to pay for it. On the road [i.e., stripping] girls used to boast about the cubic capacity of their tit jobs. ‘I’ve got 840s.’ ‘I’ve got 1220s.’ One of them turned to me and said, ‘Get tits or just suck cock.’ I’d rather just suck cock. I really would.”