GOLDEN GODDESSES: 25 LEGENDARY WOMEN OF CLASSIC EROTIC CINEMA, 1968-1985

by Nelson, Jill C.

  On another occasion after they were married, we’d be sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner and there was a new man sitting next to me. After he was introduced as Timothy Leary’s son Jack who was wanted for murder, I said, “Okay, just please don’t let him pick up the knife.”

  Just Like Starting Over

  Prolific filmmakers such as Ann Perry, who were able to prosper during the golden era boom of erotic movie making, saw the writing on the wall when video and VHS began to dominate the marketplace. Many of the larger studios were able to roll with the changing of the tides but independents such as Perry’s Evolution Enterprises decided to cut their losses and seek opportunities elsewhere. Prior to moving out of Los Angeles to Washington, Ann had a couple of decent years left and produced Ballgame in 1980 with a star-studded cast headed up by the delightful and sassy, wise-cracking Candida Royalle flanked by ample bodied actresses Lisa DeLeeuew and Connie Peterson. While speaking with Royalle about Ann Perry, Candida shared how she had appreciated that Perry was one of the few directors who allowed Candida to let her own personality to shine through in the role. Royalle acknowledged how the tone of sensuality prevalent in Ballgame foreshadowed Royalle’s future as a filmmaker emphasizing the female perspective. She is wholly respectful of the wonderful director and person that Ann is. Former Freeway Films director and AFAA co-member, Julia St. Vincent, was a friend of Ann and Joe’s and dined regularly with the Rhines and other AFAA cohorts such as Carlos and Maria Tobalina after meetings. St. Vincent recollected Ann had invited her to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the AFAA awards show held at the Hollywood Palladium in 1981. The gesture was an effective promo gag fashioned to highlight Ann’s latest film offering. When the popular Tobalina film Casanova II (starring John Holmes, Jesie St. James and Rhonda Jo Petty) was released in 1982 in which Ann played a TV reporter in a non-sex role, St. Vincent recalled how in keeping with tradition, the closely knit group of AFAA friends celebrated in grand style. Julia’s memories of Ann are that she was inclusive, caring, and always a lot of fun.

  ANN PERRY: I left the business after I decided that I would like to move from Los Angeles. I should have been smarter and I wasn’t, but I thought that I could keep my company here in Hollywood and I could move to Spokane, Washington where I was born and raised. You know what they say; you can’t go home again. My whole family was there. My mom was there — everybody. I went up to Spokane by myself and I couldn’t believe property values. Things in Los Angeles were starting to get very expensive and I went up there to an area where I was born and raised, and had gone to school where it was like Beverly Hills. I saw this incredible three-story house with an elevator. It looked like it belonged in the heart of Beverly Hills and it was a hundred and twenty-thousand dollars. I made them a low offer and they took it. Afterwards, I called Joe on the phone and I said, “You are not going to believe it. I just bought a house”. That’s what started it. Poor Joe, bless his heart, he gave up his law practice and moved to Spokane with me. We moved lock, stock and barrel. We sold our house here and I kept my company open in Hollywood. I had my editor here and I took my movieola with me. That tells you how long ago it was; I didn’t even have a flatbed, I had a movieola. My editing assistant kept the movieolas that she had down here, and I thought I could keep the momentum going.

  Yedding provided a little more insight into Ann’s decision to move and set up new operations in Washington.

  My mom’s mother in Spokane was in a serious fire and burned over ninety percent of her body. She had fallen asleep on the couch with a cigarette, and then they figured out it was an electrical problem with the heater. That’s when my mother hung up the production company and she and Joe moved back to Spokane to take care of my grandmother. They were there about seven years and Joe had to pass the state bar exam but they wouldn’t allow him in criminal law. He was married to my mom who was involved in porn, so they were living off their savings and decided to buy a movie theater. They bought this very cool old movie theater with the big balcony and big curtains, and turned it into a porn theatre. They would play all of their movies and distributed all of their films there. They started getting raided left and right and strippers would perform on weekends on stage. It was just like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. This is the late 1980s when they ran the Dishman theatre. Other people’s movies were coming in too and they began showing them as well.

  They tried to close up one night at three in the morning and this one guy wouldn’t leave the theater. Joe walked down from the camera booth and discovered the guy had died in the theater right in the chair. They had to call the coroner and it was determined that the guy had been dead for probably over twelve hours. My mother and Joe had to call the guy’s wife to pick up the car and she said, “Oh, no, my husband would never be in a porno theater.” We wondered what part of the movie he was watching when he died!

  Ann’s original goal, to keep her feet firmly planted in two states didn’t work out quite as she had expected. Her sequel to Sweet Savage unfortunately was never completed as the stress and financial burden proved to be too overwhelming.

  ANN PERRY: Right before I moved to Spokane, I shot a sequel to Sweet Savage. I shot it mainly because the first Sweet Savage was doing incredible money in Europe and particularly, in Holland, so they wanted a sequel to Sweet Savage. I rented Paramount Studios, the Paramount Ranch, and I hired a lot of people that were shooting general release movies who were in my movie. I also hired the people that were doing hardcore and I mixed them all together, and I shot a sequel to Sweet Savage. I moved to Spokane, and then I gave my reels of film to the woman that was doing the editing. I thought that she could do a good job because she had been an assistant editor on a lot of my other projects, but I discovered that it didn’t work. When I had my editing facility inside my office, I could walk back and look at what was on the movieola, and I could say, “I don’t like this. Change this. Move that”. I had such marvelous control because I wrote it and I knew what I wrote. I knew where everything was. I knew the continuity of the film from the beginning to the end. I did take one precaution and that is while I was shooting the thirty-five millimeter I was also shooting video tape. I had all my footage on videotape so that I could look at it, and I could see all my cuts. I could see everything. It still didn’t work though because I had to be in Los Angeles. I tried flying back and forth and it became incredibly expensive. I just took all the footage, all the thirty-five millimeter film, and stored it. That was the end of my sequel to Sweet Savage and that’s how I kind of got out of the business. I finished shooting it, but I never edited it.

  An effort has been put forth on the part of friends and associates to get the unreleased sequel to Sweet Savage into distribution, in 2012.

  GREG YEDDING: You know it’s a big stepping-stone for women to make a name for themselves in the adult entertainment industry. I adore and know these women and I respect everything they’ve done and gone through in their lives. I think my mother is very proud of what she did and what she achieved in the industry. She started something and then the girls just went farther with it. She never regretted it a single day in her life.

  COURTESY OF GREG YEDDING

  COURTESY OF GREG YEDDING

  Ann Perry with her mother and father. COURTESY OF GREG YEDDING

  Dial A Degenerate. HOLLYWOOD CINEMA ASSOCIATES

  The Golden Box. HOLLYWOOD CINEMA ASSOCIATES

  COURTESY OF GREG YEDDING

  Family portrait. COURTESY OF GREG YEDDING

  Joe Rhine and Ann Perry. COURTESY OF GREG YEDDING

  Left to Right: Joe, Greg and Ann. COURTESY OF GREG YEDDING.

  2.

  Barbara Mills

  Eat, Read, Live

  COURTESY OF CARLY MILLS

  “I believed my individualism to be an extension of the sixties revolution. I felt in control of my life. And I had a partner; Frank has been a great life partner.”

  — Barbara Caron Mills (1951-2010)

  Barbara Mills (nee
Caron) made her erotic film debut in 1968 and has the distinction of never having performed authentic sexual acts with males throughout her brief, but notable career. As a respected sexploitation actress, Barbara reflected on her history in adult pictures with an air of indifference and bemusement. She is known for her mesmeric thespian work in The Love Garden (1971) and Blue Money (1972), and easily stole the show riding nude horseback in Sweet Georgia (1972).

  Shortly after turning seventeen, Barbara left her home in Massachusetts and ventured to Venice Beach, California. In the late sixties, she established permanent roots there along with her husband of more than forty years, Frank Mills. Drawn to its bohemian vibe and idiosyncratic lifestyle, Mills flourished in the relaxed beach community and continued to develop her artistic skills while accepting occasional work doing nude modeling and acting. With her long brunette mane and classic appeal, Barbara considered her employment in adult films a stepping-stone which enabled her to pay the bills so she could focus on her primary love, painting. When Mills quit acting after her first child was born in 1972, she was hired to do make-up for occasional adult productions while Frank worked as a camera and lighting man.

  With beguiling charm, Barbara fondly reminisced about the cherished friends she met during her years in adult entertainment and valued the charm of the era in which she worked. She believed in doing what was required in order to be happy. Along with Frank, Barbara chartered her life in a way that afforded the couple to embrace several memorable opportunities together. As a woman respectful of all living things, over the years, Barbara fostered her spiritual side and became a non-denominational ordained minister. She married five couples on Pomona near Venice Beach before leaving southern California upon her retirement.

  In 2009, Barbara and Frank moved to Thailand to be closer to their son Nigel and his family while retaining a close relationship with their daughter Carly, a painter and wardrobe designer residing in Venice Beach. Since leaving the United States, Mills fully immersed herself in Koh Samui’s island culture and felt at home within its tropical beauty.

  On December 15, 2010, at fifty-nine years old, Barbara Caron Mills passed away peacefully at her “spa” home surrounded by Frank and her loved ones. Following the death of her mother, Barbara’s daughter Carly Mills agreed to be interviewed for this book which appears later in this chapter.

  I interviewed Barbara Mills in the summer of 2010 while she and Frank visited with Carly in Venice.

  She Was Just Seventeen

  I grew up in a small town, Oxford, Massachusetts. I had a brother that was two years younger and a sister who was nine years younger. I remember when my parents brought my brother in from the hospital; they hadn’t told me they were pregnant and I remember being angry. I was really pissed off. I was a twenty-four month old.

  We lost our parents young. Our dad died in 1962 and our mother died in 1969. My dad was in a car accident; he was only thirty-three and it was very sad. He was on his way home from work on a rainy night. I was eleven when my dad died and my mother was useless. I was pretty much a house mommy for a while. I wasn’t that good at it. I changed my sister’s diapers, but you wouldn’t know that today. They had pins back then. It was the time where it wasn’t cool to be a widow and it was all couples but my mother had a couple of other widowed friends so they had a little club. They had very little support. It was nothing like they have today. My mother was never able to work after my dad died and my sister was only two. Her heart just wasn’t in it. She got Workmen’s Compensation through my dad’s work and we lived off of that and social security. Seven years later, my mother had a cerebral hemorrhage. Their deaths were both sudden so it kind of put you in a cocoon of shell shock. I’m sad that my parents never got to meet my kids.

  I was head cheerleader in high school and co-head cheerleader. My interests were mainly reading, but I was a bookaholic and I enjoyed painting. I started painting in oils when I was about ten. My friends have suffered from oils, especially as they get older due to the toxins. Over the years, I’ve switched to acrylic. Acrylics have evolved into a space where you can get any viscosity, any hue you want. I painted at home when I was growing up.

  My Uncle Homer really was a role model for me as an artist when I was young. Homer Gunn was his name and he was pretty well known on the East Coast. He’s the one who bought me my first set of oils and encouraged me to paint. My Aunt Maxine, a teacher, was also very inspirational and still is to me. I just came back from visiting her.

  Homer Gunn, a cubist bronze sculptor, studied at Rhode Island School of Design from 1938-1941 and taught between 1941-1957. He was the resident sculptor at Deerfield Academy in Western Massachusetts from 1957-1969. Due to the abstract form of his impressive collection of work that positions triangles at slight angles yet bears no distinctive definition, Gunn’s pieces have been compared to specific works of distinguished conceptual artists such as Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.

  I was depressed during my teen years. I used to do murals all over my walls and my mother was okay with it, but I did one painting that was backlit and you know how sixteen year olds are. I had a girl’s figure hanging in the doorway. I ended up painting over it, of course.

  I had come to visit California on my own when I was seventeen. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I had been in high school and I’d always gotten good grades, and my grades had been slipping. Everybody was doing drugs then. It was easy to get pot and I did acid up until maybe 1968, but I was never in love with the stuff. I loved cheerleading and the last thing I did was turn in my basketball cheerleading uniform. I had looked up California in the World Book Encyclopedia and came out here. It was February 1968 and I had just turned seventeen. Luckily, I ended up on Venice Beach which at the time and still is, very calm. It was calmer though at that time.

  California Dreamin’

  Barbara didn’t have friends or relatives living in Southern California when she first struck off for the gold coast, but she was able to navigate her way out to the ocean.

  I asked the taxi driver to take me to the YWCA. I was alone at the time and it was located at the 6th Street and Hoover in downtown L.A. He said, “Most people go to Hollywood.”

  I said, “Oh really? I forgot that was near here!” I said, “Just take me to the YWCA and I’ll find my way around.” The next day I was in for a big surprise because downtown L.A. was horrible at the time. Some guy asked me if I wanted a ride and I said, “Okay, but just drop me at the beach.” He dropped me at the beach and he tried to put the moves on me, but I told him I was way too young. I met some people on the beach and they helped me to find an apartment. Apartments were very cheap back then. This apartment was eighty dollars a month.

  Venice Beach has always been an artistic community ever since its conception. Being that most of the streets were canals when they first built the city, and then it was the Gay Nineties, and the Roaring Twenties, and bathing beauties and muscle beaches started. It was crazy. There were a lot of poets: Ginsberg and artist Laura Lee Zanghetti lived down here and it evolved, but it has always stayed bohemian. Venice Beach has always been a very comfortable place to live. It’s cold sometimes with the wind coming in off of the Pacific, but other than that, it’s a good place to be.

  Venice Beach, California was founded by tobacco millionaire Abbot Kinney at the turn of the 20th Century and converted into a beach resort town boasting more than two miles of oceanfront property. The beatific canals ensconced within its esthetic neighborhood and modeled after those in Venice, Italy, feature some properties containing gondolas. Topping it off, the canals are offset by the sparkling white coastline shouldering a bevy of athletic and entrepreneurial activity along the boardwalk. In conjunction with San Francisco, in the 1950s, Venice became a haven for the Beat Movement. Since the 1960s youth reform, Venice Beach has grown into an eclectic artistic community where an array of pop figures, artists, and celebrities such as Jim Morrison, Dennis Hopper, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Angelica Huston, Robert Downey Jr., and
many others have resided or currently own properties in and amongst the trendy promenade.

  I worked at Woolworth’s behind the soda fountain. It was horrible. I was just a messed up kid and I knew I had to go back to Massachusetts. I told my mother I wanted to come back. She was worried about me even though she let me go and we decided I was going to go to hairdressing school, so that’s what I did. I was back at home until she died in March. At that point, things got crazy. My grandparents were too old to take care of us. We were very close to my grandparents [my mother’s parents]. My father’s parents died young, when I was a baby, so I never really got to know them. My aunt and uncle were almost at the point of being too old to take care of us at the time, so they hired a housekeeper.

  After Barbara’s mother passed away, Barbara traveled to New York City where she became involved in modeling and dated an up and coming rock star — a drummer. In 1969, after the better part of a year, Mills debated between a departure to Woodstock or to Los Angeles to become an actor. She decided upon the latter. At the time, Barbara lived with a man who eventually tried to set her up with her future husband, Franklin Mills.

  Then I found out I was pregnant. I came back here to California looking for an abortion, actually. Abortion was kind of legal at that point. It wasn’t actually legal, but there were some experienced people performing them. I had the abortion because of all of those stories about drugs use and how they can harm the unborn fetus. Two years previously, I’d done drugs; it probably wouldn’t have harmed the child, but on top of that, I was in no position to take care of a child anyway. If I had to redo it, I probably would have kept it.