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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  COURTESY OF JODY MAXWELL

  COURTESY OF JODY MAXWELL

  COURTESY OF JODY MAXWELL

  COURTESY OF JODY MAXWELL

  Jody and actor Warren Beatty. COURTESY OF JODY MAXWELL

  COURTESY OF JODY MAXWELL

  7.

  Candida Royalle

  Femme

  PHOTO COURTESY OF CANDIDA ROYALLE

  “When I made my choice to start into production, it was a great way to embrace my name and everything I had done and just say, ‘You know what? I’m not going to run for it. I’m going to take my fame and do something I’m proud of.’ ”

  — Candida Royalle

  As the eldest daughter of a professional jazz musician who played with composer and band leader, Raymond Scott, Candida Royalle spent many of her childhood years in Brooklyn, New York, and relocated to Queens after her father remarried. Born with natural artistic ability, Royalle aspired to be a fashion illustrator and studied at the prestigious and culturally diverse High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. She later attended Parsons School of Design and the City University of New York where she enrolled in Beat Generation Poetry studies and became involved in the women’s movement. Drawn to the counterculture of the late 1960s, Royalle traveled to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and melded with political activists and avant-garde performers. In 1975, after a period of singing in jazz clubs and selling her art, Candida began freelancing as an actor in the adult entertainment industry for extra funds.

  Despite having appeared in less than fifty hardcore movies throughout her short career as a performer, Royalle’s vivacious manner, coupled with her pretty face and alluring physical attributes made her a popular item among adult fans. Her fondest memories as a performer are roles she accepted in some of the campy, light-hearted, hardcore films such as Hard Soap, Hard Soap (1977) and Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls (1979) directed by Bob Chinn. Along with some of her contemporaries such as Serena and Annette Haven, Royalle also appeared in Blake Edward’s international hit film, 10 (1979) starring Dudley Moore.

  When the 1980s arrived, along with HIV, Royalle did some soul searching and decided her talents would be better served in the area of production and directing. The conversion from motion pictures to video provided an ideal opportunity for Royalle to launch Femme Productions in 1984, an entrepreneurial venture developing adult movies for women and couples with concentration on female centric erotica. As the very first woman in a male dominated industry to have founded her own production company catering to both genders, Royalle is proud of Femme’s staying power. In recent years, Femme’s lines have expanded to include the availability of an ergonomic, erotic product, Natural Contours, designed with the sensitivities of women in mind. Additionally, the company gives generously by donating proceeds from sales of a specially crafted massage device, Petite Pink Ribbon, to Breast Cancer Action (BCAction.org).

  Broadening her extensive range of talents, Royalle, who still resides on the east coast, penned a bestselling, sex advice book titled How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do in 2006.

  I spoke with Candida Royalle in the winter of 2010.

  There was a Girl

  I grew up in the greater New York area in every borough except Staten Island. I spent the first few years of my life in a very pretty section of Brooklyn called Carroll Gardens where I later lived again. My father’s side of the family was part of a large wave of Italian immigrants who settled in Brooklyn. Italians were big on settling roots and those homes are still in the family.

  When my father remarried, we moved to Astoria, Queens, an affordable area where a lot of young couples moved to start families. It was an ethnically diverse section of New York, a mix of working and middle class families and I was happy there. My mother, wanting us to live in a “nicer” area, pushed to make a move up to a very pretty section at the northern tip of the Bronx called Riverdale. This was a much more upscale part of New York, and the fact that my dad, who made his living as a professional jazz drummer, could afford this with the help of my mother’s income as well, is quite impressive.

  Being an artistically gifted child, I went to the high school of Art & Design in Manhattan. They have a system that still exists in the greater New York area whereby any student [residing in NYC] can attend so long as they pass the artistic requirements and maintain a good academic record. I felt very fortunate to have gotten such a cultural education that enabled me to develop my talents. I later went on to attend one of the premier art colleges: Parsons School of Design, also in Manhattan.

  I know that there are people who were fortunate enough to have had very stable, happy homes — I think I was well loved but there was a lot of instability. My original birth mother left when I was eighteen months old. My father was a very complicated, difficult man who spent more time on his music than he did with the family. He was nine years older than my mother was and she was really quite something — she had had three of us by the time she was twenty-one. My mother was a very pretty girl from St. Louis, Missouri, who started young. She was half-Cherokee, and half Scottish, Irish, and British. She gave birth to me at home, natural childbirth, which was almost unheard of in 1950. He was considerably older, and I think that she probably found it difficult to be left alone with three small children all the time, including nights, which is when musicians work and when he was home, he wasn’t one who could easily communicate. He was a loner who just wanted to practice his music. She tried to leave him a few times and he would always come after her and take us all home. The last time, he finally took only my sister and me home. My half-brother was from a previous marriage.

  My father expressed sadness later on in his life when we talked about it because he had loved my half-brother a lot. While he couldn’t very well take him from her, he didn’t feel he could leave my sister and me with her. She was a young woman with three children, and while he would have supported us, he feared she would take us back to St Louis and he’d never see us or be able to check up on us. I think that it was a very difficult thing for him to have taken us from her and he apologized to me for that later on. I look back at that now as a grown woman, and I can only imagine the turmoil and the difficulty they both went through. He took us home to his mother, my grandmother, in Carroll Gardens. We went to Grandma’s and that was a good thing because she was very loving and affectionate. We had a lot of relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, but it was also unstable for me. At that age, you need to know Mommy is there and I used to call my different aunts “Mommy”. It was particularly difficult when my grandmother got ill and my sister and I were farmed out to different relatives, even foster homes a couple of times. This was particularly traumatic for me.

  My father wanted to find another wife. He was a jazz musician through and through. He did not do the conventional fatherly things and he really needed a woman to help raise his daughters. My stepmother came along and she fell in love with my sister and me — especially me. We really bonded and I needed a mother. When I was four and a half, he remarried and we all moved to Astoria, Queens. The stability was good, but my parents didn’t have a loving marriage and they lived a fast life. They both worked in top nightclubs and hotels — he was in the house band at the Waldorf Astoria, and Tavern on the Green where they had actually met. They were responsible; there was always food on the table, but they lived hard and there was too much alcohol, too much fighting, and it was an extremely challenging childhood. On the one hand, I was loved and I took part in all the traditional hallmarks of a good middle class childhood for that time. I was a Brownie and a Girl Scout and I took dance lessons, and I had a lot of friends. I was actually a very good kid. I wasn’t difficult; I was sweet and really didn’t get into trouble, but it was not a particularly happy home life. It got worse over the years. Luckily, we spent a lot of time — weekends and holidays at my grandmother’s in Brooklyn, being with all the relatives and cousins — that was a good refuge for my sister and me.

  I understand that my mother came to se
e us a couple of times, but she probably went back to St. Louis. My assumption was always that for a woman to give up her children that way she probably needed to put a wall around her heart and that was it. It was certainly fodder for therapy for me. Over the years, my sister and I made a few feeble attempts, once the internet was around, to find her. I know that if I gave someone the information some investigation could be done to find her or my half-brother if they’re still alive, but for some reason, I’ve not had a great impetus to do it. I think there’s probably some resentment. She would certainly be able to find us because we still have our family name. I think there’s also some fear. There were times, especially after I got involved with the adult industry where I thought, “What would she think of me?” “Would she judge me?” How horrible would that be? I don’t know what she would be like. I don’t know what my half-brother would be like. I’ve kind of accepted it, and I think that I’ve accepted my stepmother for being my mother and that was it. Of course, I’m curious, and I would have loved to have heard from her mouth how she could just walk away from two baby girls. Again, she was young — she was only twenty-two years old at the time, and I know what I was like at twenty-two. It’d be horrible to be saddled with three children and with a husband that you don’t want to live with. I don’t know what I would do in that situation.

  I was very creative as a child. Both my sister and I were drawing as soon as we could hold a pencil. We were also both musically inclined, like our father, and even my stepmother was a great singer so we sang a lot. I was always singing, and dancing, and performing, and I spent a lot of time alone so I really learned how to entertain myself. I used to go up to my grandmother’s bedroom where she had a closet full of beautiful dresses and petticoats from when she was a young woman and had loved to dance. I can still see myself putting on all her clothes and petticoats and dancing before the mirror or at home, putting on records and singing along. We used to do the typical thing: puppet shows for the neighborhood kids. My sister and I loved animals. We were brought up with a real respect for life. My father would bring injured animals home when we were little so we got an early education. I used to have tanks with chameleons, and turtles, and frogs, and I’d create different environments for them. I loved drawing glamorous women wearing beautiful gowns. I had tons of cutout dolls so it was easy to draw the clothes and cut them out. I had a Barbie doll with a red bouffant hairdo and a fabulous wardrobe with a glamorous career. She and a handsome boyfriend named Ken, of course, and a sports car! My sister and I had a globe that we would spin and wherever our fingers landed would be where our Barbie dolls would go on their next trip. The funny thing is it said a lot about the kind of person I wanted to be. My Barbie was a career woman with a great wardrobe, and a handsome boyfriend, and a penchant for traveling. Essentially, that’s who I became.

  Verve

  I began dance training when I was ten and danced and sang in school choruses and shows, so I had a lot of things that I loved to do. I was never bored and never without plenty of ways to entertain myself. I always had a lot of girlfriends that I hung out with, and while I remained quite innocent until the age of eighteen, I loved boys and was quite the little flirt.

  I would say that my [paternal] grandmother was, in some ways, a role model for me. She was brought here from Italy at the age of two — I think it was in 1900. Like so many young women in those days, she longed to be a schoolteacher. She was a very gifted self-taught pianist. When she was very young, a music teacher begged her father to let her give my grandmother free lessons but he wouldn’t. He pulled her out of school in the sixth grade to help support their large family. I believe she never forgave him for that. She was a very smart young woman with many gifts who was forced to become a milliner in a factory. This left her with a lot of bitterness, but the amazing thing was that she learned how to invest in the stock market and accumulated an impressive portfolio of stocks and bonds. Ultimately, she owned and bought her own home in what became a prestigious area now known as Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn. My parents, on the other hand, were clueless about investing and saving for the future. It was definitely my grandmother who was my role model in terms of being a financially independent woman and learning how to invest and take care of myself.

  My grandmother also had a tremendous effect on me in terms of the delight she took in music and dancing. She had a great collection of 78’s along with her old 78 player, and she’d put them on and dance for us and dance for me and my friends and showed us the old dance steps. She’d play the piano and get us to sing with her. At night, she would put on the TV and watch old black and white movies from the thirties, forties, and fifties, and my sister and I would stay up late watching them with her. She didn’t care if we sat up and watched movies late into the night since it was always weekends or holidays when we didn’t have to get up for school. I was brought up on a diet of glamorous women who sang, and danced, and looked fabulous, and had great wardrobes. To this day, I love those old movies! What a spirit my grandmother had!

  On the other hand, because my dad was so independent minded — he always taught us to think for ourselves — I eventually developed a taste for people who dared to be different, and to be who they are and not feel the need to conform; people who didn’t follow the rules just because someone told you to. I remember dressing up at the age of thirteen like a beatnik as my Halloween costume. It was adorable. I was a skinny little thing and completely flat chested. I dressed all in black and had this little short, bobbed haircut. I wanted to be one of those people who spoke for themselves and dared to live by their own rules. Apparently, that really stuck. I would say I didn’t have any exact role models, but I admired people who thought for themselves and lived life on their own terms.

  As a young, budding, artistic female, Candida received affirmation of her prodigious skills when she later was accepted at Art College. Parsons School of Design in New York City continues to enjoy global recognition as a leader and trendsetter in the world of innovative art, fashion and design.

  I went to Parsons School of Design, one of the foremost private art colleges right in Manhattan for a year until I lost interest in becoming a fashion illustrator. Then I moved out on my own. I worked for a year to support myself until I found a way to go back to college and attended CCNY [City College of New York] for about a year and a half. I majored in psychology and minored in art. CCNY’s campus is actually in Harlem, and has some amazing professors. I studied poetry while I was there with one of the original Beat Poets, Joel Oppenheimer.

  I was very fortunate to grow up and be educated in New York City. We have a system here that allows students to audition for specialized high schools in the arts and sciences. It doesn’t matter whether or not your family has money. Talent, good grades, and a commitment to your art is all that is required. I loved my years at Art & Design, and going to high school right in the heart of Manhattan. I got into the women’s movement in college. That was a big turning point for me.

  Conversely, as a late bloomer, and as an attractive teenage girl, Candida was ill prepared for the onslaught of attention she received from males of all ages which serendipitously happened to coincide with the second wave of feminist ideology.

  I was a late developer and a very skinny little girl — I didn’t even need a bra until I was nearly fourteen. I so wanted to be shapely, but by the time I started blossoming in to a curvaceous little thing the whole “Twiggy” look came in to style, and suddenly, it was all the rage to be skinny and flat chested! I eventually became this very pretty, shapely girl, but suddenly, all of these grown men started coming on to me! They see a beautiful, young, blossoming, sixteen, seventeen or eighteen-year old girl walking down the street and these guys just lost it. I had so many men coming on to me and trying to get over on me. Finally, the guy that I worked part-time for in an exclusive Manhattan tennis club, a former Olympic champion from Hungary, assaulted me in his office. I had to threaten to scream in order to get him to let go of me and I had
to leave the job. Things like this were starting to happen left and right. My boss I had worked for in this up and coming company called Ticketron before I went back to college, demanded that I kiss him goodnight every night. In those days, we didn’t have laws against that kind of thing so I felt kind of like, “Oh, I guess I have to kiss him every day in order to keep my job!” All of these experiences politicized me. I became a staunch feminist at nineteen.

  The feminist movement was wonderful. It gave my life tremendous depth and meaning. I learned an awful lot and I’ve always gotten along great with women, so this was a very big part of my formative years. When I was twenty-one, I left New York City and went to San Francisco. I got in with a group of very avant-garde San Francisco people, many of whom were part of the big gay rights movement that was happening in the early seventies.

  I had gone to San Francisco about a year before with my first boyfriend — we were there for just a few days and I fell in love with it. That had to have been about 1969. I always knew I wanted to come back and I was really fed up with New York, I didn’t want to be in New York any more so I went to the house that my [former boyfriend] was staying at, even though he and I had broken up by then. It was a house in Haight-Ashbury and I really clicked with them. I felt that I had arrived. I was “home”. It was everything you’d heard about. It was a blend of hippies, freaks, gay rights activists, and avant-garde performers — a real hybrid. It was wonderful — a lot of drug experimentation I have to say, but that’s what was going on then: free concerts in Golden Gate Park and lots of dancing so it was a wonderful, creative, joyful period. I started performing with some of the original Cockettes, and Angels of Light and it was wonderful.