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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  As one might have guessed, Gillis’ presence in the film doesn’t go to waste and when we flash on to the next scene, Norman has Susan at his disposal. He threatens her with a knife, cuts her undergarments, and forces her to admit she wants him to fuck her which he proceeds to do. Believably fearful as she begs for her safe release and life, Susan knows she must capitulate to Norman’s sexual demands. The final frames of the picture cleverly leave the viewer with a spine tingling reaction perplexed as to whether Harry actually used Susan as bait in order to capture a sense of realism in film.

  There was a ton of money around in porn and I made up my mind that I was just going to stay working regardless of the type of work there was. There were two things I knew I didn’t want to do: one of them was prostitution and the other one was working as a waitress. I wanted to do fucking avoid those two things. I was getting a lot of work as well. There wasn’t enough money to become a fulltime mainstream actress. I would have done it sure but back then, porn was kind of a rotten thing to do. You had to walk into a theatre to watch porn because it wasn’t on TV back then; it wasn’t even on videotape. It was really, really a shocking thing to do porn which was part of the appeal for me. It was kind of the best way to say fuck you to the Catholic Church and to the orphanage and all of the nuns, and all that nonsense, and to my parents at the same time. I was an anarchist, so it was a way to cause trouble and mayhem. It’s very funny, because at the same time I always maintained this sort of code of honor that I wouldn’t do certain things and I wouldn’t work for less than this, and so on and so forth. Those things got difficult to maintain especially toward the end when the industry was changing and I was doing drugs and things like that, but I managed to not cross that line.

  It’s interesting. My mother’s side knew, but they didn’t want to talk about it. I remember one Easter I came in wearing hot pants. They were these bright green hot pants with purple patches and stuff, and we were all sitting down and one of my uncles started screaming and yelling because I was in Hustler magazine that month. My grandmother stood up, and put her hands down on the table and said to my uncle “Well, if you weren’t jacking off to the fucking magazine you wouldn’t have found your damn fucking niece in there! Now, can we drop this fucking discussion?” No one ever said another word about it on my mother’s side of the family. It was very funny.

  Before I got fully into the business, my mom and my dad had wanted to meet everyone I was working with so I actually had a little picnic. I invited Herschel Savage and Gloria Leonard, and my mom and dad met them. They were great. They loved them, and of course, my dad really liked it because I was like his buddy like the son he never had, you know. That was very cool to him. He said, “As long as you’re doing what you want to do.” He was good with it. My mom just never brought it up. They certainly appreciated all of the expensive gifts and stuff, but I don’t think they appreciated where it came from.

  We really looked out for each other. I used to babysit for Gloria Leonard. John Leslie, Jamie Gillis, Eric Edwards [Rob Everett], John Holmes, and Herschel Savage as well — those guys were just sort of my big brothers. We were the core of the industry. We were the Air Corps, the Marines, the fucking Navy, and everything else. We were it.

  During interviews, Mitchell generally makes a point of underscoring the Mob component, particularly during the golden era of the erotic movie industry stressing that organized crime controlled a significant portion of film production and distribution through financial means. Our interview was no different.

  Back then, there was the Mafia and the movie theatres. The Mob hired all of the wonderful directors to direct us and they made sure we were very talented. They made sure we looked good and they made sure we were well rehearsed. All of us back then were very good actors and actresses who most of the time were doing something off Broadway. We were all trained in show business in general, as actors, dancers, singers, or whatever. We were all multi-talented and there were probably not more than thirty-three of us — that was the core. You know, everyone was very into portraying these characters that we portrayed. If we didn’t have a character, I don’t think half the people that were in porn could survive today. We couldn’t just turn the camera off because we really got into these roles and rehearsals, and costumes. I really loved that part of it and I miss that whole period of it all. Having said that, I didn’t shit where I ate primarily, and I didn’t date a lot of people in the industry. The first girl I think I dated in the industry was [former porn actress] Ming Toy. Ming Toy and I were very good friends and lovers for a while, and then we both discovered that we were dating the same guy. The guy was someone I had dated, believe it or not, in high school. So the three of us kind of lived together for a while, but I used to primarily like the rock and roll bad boys.

  When some of us lived in Greenwich Village, we had this wacky gynecologist who lived at the end of my street — I lived on Downing Street. She had been in a concentration camp and had obviously survived the war. She was a serious gynecologist with a very severe German accent and we would come in every once in a while, if we had something. It wasn’t often, but I think once we got scabies or something — none of us ever knew what that was, but I think it was from a film we’d worked on. Our hands and feet started itching, and we just didn’t know what to do and she said in her thick accent, “Stop fucking for a living!” I remember one time when she gave me a pap smear I saw her tattoo of having been in the concentration camp — it was very interesting, but she was always reprimanding us and she was just great. She was one of the few nonjudgmental people because usually it was, “What’s a nice girl like you?”

  “Mitch”

  An undeniable characteristic that attracted and sustained erotic film fans lodged in Sharon Mitchell’s camp is her androgynous appeal in tandem with her adventurous “soft butch” lesbian inclinations on camera specifically in the area of cunnilingus. The more comfortable “Mitch” (as she came to be known) became in the sex game, the more outrageous and daring were her professional and personal personas. In straight roles that were more prevalent in her novice years as a performer, or bi, “Mitch” clearly came into her own.

  When I was younger, I would play the sweet heroine parts. As I got my chops up as an actress, and as a showbiz person my talents shone through, but also my bisexuality came out big time. Porn was able to kind of hone that and make me feel that was not an issue because I couldn’t for the fucking life of me — you take a kid from the middle of New Jersey on a fucking farm — I’d wonder, “Am I gay? Am I straight?” I mean, I didn’t know and I agonized over that for a long time. Then when I got into porn films, it was like, “Oh, I’m just sexual.” It didn’t take me long to cut my hair after that!

  I was one the first girls [in sex films] to chop my hair off. I was also one of the first to start to coif their pubic hair — I would do that for all of the girls. This wasn’t as much about shaving; it was more about trimming everything so that it wouldn’t look like a lawn mower would have to do the job. I couldn’t go on the road and fit into a lot of these costumes and it just bothered me when stuff was poking out the side.

  A lot of the guys back then were gay too or bisexual. Wade Nichols [aka Dennis Parker] and I worked together, but there were not that many women he could work with. He could kind of flip me over, you know. Wade was just a doll. He was so handsome. He was like the Errol Flynn of porn. He was New York based and part of the first wave of people to get HIV. He was just a great guy. In addition to porn, we also worked on [the soap opera series] The Edge of Night together. We had done this movie called Captain Lust and the Pirate Women (1977) and he played the Errol Flynn role. He looked just like Errol Flynn and I played Sweet Anne, the heroine, and he rescued me. It was just a wonderful swashbuckler movie. We shot on a replica of “Nina the Pinta,” and “The Santa Maria” [named after explorer Christopher Columbus’s original three ships] that they got on a loan. He was just a sweet, sweet guy. At around this same time when we were paired on thi
s soap opera, he was playing a cop and I was playing a private nurse, which is the role that I played on Edge of Night. We just looked at each other and we laughed — it was just this gigantic private joke that we had. We just had the fucking giggles all day long. We could not complete a take to save our lives. It was an inside joke because we had just been fucking on a boat in the Atlantic ocean a few weeks ago, and here we are in front of the cameras at NBC, it was really fun.

  I also did other mainstream things like Tootsie (1982) and a couple of other films like Cruising (1980), but for a few exceptions, I was doing porn. In Tootsie, I was in a restaurant scene with Terri Garr, and I said, “Pass the salt.” I played a boy, a kid in Cruising who says to Al Pacino, “Oh, you’re from the Bronx, I’m from the Bronx.” It’s funny because a casting director who was a very good friend of mine — I used to get high with his secretary, she was one of the few people I ever got high with — he would put me in anything he could and when the guy got sick I happened to be working as an extra that day. He said, “Mitch can play this part!” The kid who originally had that line got sick. Louis said, “Yeah, Mitch can play the part of a guy, really. Just put a wife-beater on her, she’ll be okay!”

  Adult film roles were plentiful for Sharon and she worked hard to put forth her best effort when actualizing a character even in films with less than robust scripts. As the 1970s edged closer toward the eighties decade of social and economic change, Mitchell’s warts began to surface. Sharon Mitchell’s heroin addiction has been well documented over the years and is almost as legendary as the star herself. As a former needle junkie, Sharon is completely open about discussing the influence of drugs in her life, and how she graduated to mainlining heroin after spending most of her adulthood ingesting practically every chemical available. Although she has finally put it down for good, Mitchell ascertained “H” was the ideal remedy for the weariness and isolation she’d come to feel as a porn star, and inevitably as a stripper by the early 1980s.

  You know people always ask me, “Was it heroin that drew you into porn?” It really wasn’t about one or the other. It’s just that I was experimenting with drugs ever since I could probably walk. I had been working every night literally, so when cocaine came along it kind of helped me stay awake. Heroin was the perfect drug for me, and the good thing about it I was very careful, thank god. I never shared a needle and I was so secretive, I didn’t want anyone to know. There was nothing like heroin. There’s nothing that can compare to it before and very little since. It was something that took away any kind of anxiety or pain that was emotional or physical, or any type of chaos going in inside of my head — any type of feeling that I didn’t fit in. When I found that to go with the cocaine, I eventually dropped the cocaine.

  I became lonely for two reasons: I was a career porn star and that’s what I was. Pretty much everything legitimate had dropped off. I did a lot of adult films, but I would go out on the road dancing because you just can’t do that to your body. You can’t work in porn every day for months at a time. It’s exhausting and it’s just not healthy. I’d go out on the road for a while, and give myself a break and come back. The burlesque gave me a nice porthole to rest my other body parts and just stay toned and stay in good shape and obtain a fan base — all that good stuff. When I started stripping, I think I was one of the first strippers on tour that had been in porn. I featured when I was in New York City at one of those legendary burlesque theatres when they still had a fucking band. I co-featured with [renowned burlesque stripper] Tempest Storm for Christ-sakes. The dance training that I had was [American dancer and choreographer] Martha Graham. Martha Graham and [modern dancer] Isadora Duncan had always been idols growing up as a child. I got into it almost as soon as I hit New York, just taking classes. I think I did a six-month tour at one point. I had become very good at dancing. Anyway, when I was a stripper it was very funny because they had that bump and grind thing, and I just didn’t have the fucking body. I didn’t know how to dance in high heels because I hadn’t really learned, so it was really kind of difficult to do what they were doing. I remember one of them came up to me and said, “You know kid, it’s not really about doing exactly what we do. If you have your own style it’s all about how you take your clothes off.” She really gave me the go ahead, and taught me the art of burlesque and strip tease, and how to make a twenty-five minute feature show a show, using gimmicks and gags and dance steps. She really taught me that. I was able to go out on the road probably for about eighteen years, I’d say. Today, doing porn is a stepping-stone toward prostitution as it used to be for women who wanted to get into the feature stripping business.

  While juggling porn with feature dancing and other activities, Mitch’s drug habit, although well concealed at first, strained her relationships with the close dependable friends she fostered in the business. In denial, she kept herself distanced from the group by multi-tasking. Sharon continued using heroin well into the eighties, and for a large portion of the nineties decades. I queried Mitchell about the famed Club 90 group and wondered why she was not a lasting member of the core infrastructure of girlfriends, with whom she had come to trust and admire.

  You know my favorite female co-stars are all of my best friends Veronica Hart, Kelly Nichols, Samantha Fox, Vanessa del Rio, Marlene Willoughby, Long Jean Silver, and Candida Royalle. I’ve always loved Candice. She’s the most intellectual one out of the gang, and Gloria Leonard, of course. We were all very good friends, very close pals. Annie Sprinkle is my friend and neighbor to this day — she lives in the next Valley.

  There’s a reason I wasn’t a part of Club 90, I think. No one ever said it but there was a reason, there was a distinct reason. There was a bit of time there toward the end of New York I was on the road a lot and I was going back and forth to San Francisco quite a bit. I had also started directing a little bit here and there, and they were two hundred and fifty thousand dollar budgets. [Former adult actor and director] Fred Lincoln would help me. He was just great and he was also a wonderful mentor for me growing up in the industry but drugs became extremely prevalent.

  I’d gotten into the drug scene very quick and I think it made them all nervous. This is probably in the late 1970s-early 1980s. I think I left New York for good in 1982- `83. It’s kind of cloudy though because there are an awful lot of drugs. I don’t think anyone knew really that I made such a gigantic transition from the cocaine to the heroin. I’d lost a lot of weight and I believe it became kind of apparent that they were extremely worried about me. I kind of hid from them socially. I was embarrassed, and I think somebody mentioned something to me. I don’t remember who it was, it might have been Annie, it might have been Gloria, I don’t remember, but then I felt very upset.

  I eventually put the weight back on and I realized that I had to be very careful because my body was what I was selling, and I did look like shit. That became the beginning of really building a persona around my career and around my drug addiction. I kind of created this persona of “Miss Sharon Mitchell,” and took care of everything — any havoc that I wreaked the night before, staying up all night or going into a bad neighborhood to cop drugs and maybe getting into a little bit of trouble, I could fix with a connection or money or whatever. I really kind of grew into protecting myself, but it was extremely, extremely lonely.

  One thing leads to another

  By the mid-1980s, it was obvious to everyone involved in the pornographic picture industry the conversion from shooting sex on film to videotape was highly successful, and immediately began to yield massive profits despite what many believed was inferior quality. Most of all, the video trend enabled consumers to enjoy pornographic films privately within the comfort of their own homes. After adult theaters were forced to close down, video stores sprung up and flourished as special designated “adult” sections were located generally toward the back of the stores, often behind a curtain segregating mainstream movies from X-rated.

  In 1982, Mitchell unfastened her masculine side again in
Every Which Way She Can as Randy Often, the ass-kicking cowgirl befitted with short hair, a bandana, a studded leather belt and skin-tight designer jeans. Mitch appeared to be right at home as a tough talking chick who lays down the ground rules to Herschel Savage prior to making out in his car. When accosted by wannabe bikers (Paul Thomas and Joey Silvera) after the fact, Randy gives in to a little head but then outsmarts the wise guys when she flashes a blade. Serena adds spice to the lean plot by performing a great strip tease routine followed by some full saddle gyrating down at the local watering hole.

  Leading up to 1988, the atmosphere in the city of Los Angeles was as hot as ever as zealous vice-cops re-doubled their attempts to bust adult movie producers and actors while studios and performers continued taking risks. Mitch’s obstinate nature and loathing for authority and the system won out as laws preventing the production of sex films in the State of California were about to change.