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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  I tell you, I’ve been in a position where I couldn’t get laid to save my soul. The last time I was in one of those moods and I went to go out, I wanted to go dancing. I couldn’t get into the place that I wanted to get into and I wasn’t going to stand in line and wait. I went to a bar and this young kid kind of next to me — I wasn’t trying to pick up a kid, but I was out trying to dance and have fun. He looked at me and said, “Yeah, I can kind of see how you might have been good-looking once.” It’s called “aging”. I’m lucky because I’ve got a lot of people who say nice things to me. To be honest with you, I think way too much emphasis has been put on sexuality. I think that if we had a healthy society we wouldn’t focus so much on it, but I just wish that everybody got five hugs a day from somebody. I believe it would calm down the world and I think we’d have fewer wars and we’d have less everything. People get so uptight over sex.

  Relax, It’s Just Sex & Sex 101

  “You can’t leave a footprint that lasts if you’re always walking on tiptoe.”

  — MARION BLAKEY

  When asked to speak about the legacy she has behind for classic film fans, Jane is frank about her distinguishable contributions to the adult industry.

  My legacy is that I was the girl-next-door that you would be able to have a shot. I definitely wasn’t a pity case. I don’t think I was the most gorgeous and I don’t think I was the sexiest, but people liked me because I was a regular person. I like myself more now. Some people want to get back to another time or they want to have a do-over and be back in school. Oh my god, I’d never want to do that again. I’ve had more than enough of everything. I think I was able to show that smart, intelligent women choose this type of profession and again, being the type of woman or person that most people wouldn’t think would be involved in adult, I believe that’s what our legacy is. I think society tends to dismiss us as a bunch of bimbos who can’t put a sentence together so I feel that’s the deal. My legacy is also that I tried to make films that depict sex in a realistic way. That’s what I tried to do.

  When I met Jane during a girls’ lunch at Penny Antine’s home in North Hollywood in the summer of 2011, it was evident from her friendly, easy-going nature that can become impassioned depending upon the discussion at the table — she is the quintessential girl next door. Pleased to reveal that day she recently found love again with her high school sweetheart Stan, Hamilton continues to keep the wheels in motion while setting aside time for life’s fundamentals, not to mention primal urges.

  Apart from my work, I like to care of my animals. It used to be working on my house, but I’m so sick to death of that. I don’t want to do it anymore. I love to read, I love to make movies. I love to talk to my kids and my family. I have a big social circle as far as gals I e-mail [including Club 90 friends]. I hang out with very few people. I’m very much a homebody. I will go out, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a recluse, but I’m not a real partier. I’m happy to be home with a few friends. That’s who I like to be around and my family. What I’m very proud of most are my two sons. All this other stuff is work. I’m proud of my family, I’m proud of my sister. I’m proud of my family, and my little kitty; that’s what really counts.

  What I like to do more than anything is to connect with people. That can be on a friend basis and it can certainly be sexual. What I like to do in my spare time is I like to still make love and get close to people and share intimacy. That is so important to me. That was one of my goals when I got in the business: that I would be able to come out of this business and still enjoy my sexuality and making love. Thank god, I’ve been able to do that.

  In 1956. COURTESY OF JANE HAMILTON

  COURTESY OF JANE HAMILTON

  Jane Hamilton and her boyfriend Stan.

  COURTESY OF JANE HAMILTON

  “Veronica Hart.” COURTESY OF JANE HAMILTON

  Amanda by Night. CABALLERO HOME VIDEO

  COURTESY OF JANE HAMILTON

  Jane Hamilton, Michael, and their young family, 1980s.

  Jane Hamilton in Boogie Nights. NEW LINE HOME VIDEO

  COURTESY OF JANE HAMILTON

  COURTESY OF WORTH MENTIONING PUBLIC RELATIONS

  19.

  Julia St. Vincent

  From Exhausted to Boogie Nights

  COURTESY OF JULIA ST. VINCENT

  “When I made Exhausted people said it was just a fluke and in a way, it was just a fluke. It really was a case of being in the right place at the right time to make a film. It was kind of incredible that it went as far as it did. That film grossed overa million dollars in 1982.”

  — Julia St. Vincent

  When filmmaker Julia St. Vincent decided to direct the first erotic documentary about legendary porn star John Holmes in 1980, she never imagined her movie would become the inspiration for Boogie Nights, the critically acclaimed motion picture that enlightened mainstream audiences about the hardcore film industry during its glorified golden era.

  In the early 1970s during summer breaks from secondary school while living just outside of San Diego, the teenaged St. Vincent left her family home to work part time as a filing clerk, and eventually, became the bookkeeper for Freeway Films, an independent Los Angeles adult company owned by her uncle Armand Atamian. Atamian, known primarily for the success of the Johnny Wadd dynasty was an enterprising and ingratiating figure in the 1970s adult entertainment scene. Along with partners Lee Frost and Bob Cresse, he produced sexploitation films in the 1960s, prior to realizing his niche in hardcore pursuits. Atamian passed away suddenly in 1980 leaving his niece to assume full control of business operations. Faced with the task of ensuring Freeway’s survival, St. Vincent shrewdly took stock of the company’s greatest resource and prepared to produce and direct an original documentary featuring Holmes. The result, Exhausted: John C. Holmes, The Real Story (1981) combined interviews with the star and people on the street, interspersed with Johnny Wadd film footage and an original title song written and performed by St. Vincent. The film’s New York release in the fall of 1981 synchronized with the sudden disappearance of Holmes on the run from the law due to his connection to four unsolved murders in Laurel Canyon the previous summer.

  Inspired and influenced by St. Vincent’s conception and subject, in 1997 director Paul Thomas Anderson introduced the world to Boogie Nights featuring pornographic film characters Dirk Diggler (Mark Walhberg) and Amber Wave (Julianne Moore), both composites of Holmes and St. Vincent along with other notable players fashioned after actual industry personalities. Impressed by Anderson’s fastidious attention to detail, Julia acknowledged Anderson’s homage to her own successful cinematic effort, yet she is reticent about the intimation that Exhausted is her legacy.

  St. Vincent has lived many lives since planning her exit strategy from Freeway Films and the shadows of the adult entertainment industry just a couple of years prior to marrying and giving birth to two children in the mid-eighties. Still guided by her entrepreneurial rock ‘n roll spirit, Julia reaps the benefits from a profitable business and keeps her finger on the pulse of the latest trends to penetrate modern culture. Characterized by her raucous sense of humor tempered by subtle sensuality, St. Vincent continues to reside in balmy Southern California and wouldn’t have it any other way.

  I interviewed Julia St. Vincent in the fall of 2010.

  Sweet Captive

  I was born in a small naval hospital outside of Boston, Massachusetts in the 1950s. My dad was in the Navy and I’m the youngest of three girls. We moved when I was four years old to California and I grew up in a little suburban town outside of San Diego. After we moved to Southern California, we bought our house for sixteen dollars. Back then, you could buy a house on the Navy fund for nothing. They put sixteen bucks down and bought this house and I think my dad was deployed or whatever and it wasn’t long before my dad was gone. I don’t really remember him being there. My stepfather was in the picture before my mom divorced my father. She met him at the store. I believe he was a manager and she worked at n
ight, but at one time, she also had a job during the day. We didn’t have a lot of money. This was a single parent household pretty much. It was a military household where the father is never there. Anyway, she would come home after working at the bank at night and since everybody was in school except me, I had to sit by her bed while she slept all day. I guess I played with dolls. I played with whatever I could, books and toys. I just played by the bed. To this day, she tells me what a good kid I was because I would sit for hours. I said, “Okay, I sat for hours and now look at me, I’m a total loner.” My sister is two years older than I am and would have been in kindergarten or first grade, so I guess I sat there until noon or three in the afternoon. I remember that my sisters and I were close up until I was about ten. They were both older than I was so they were off doing important things older kids do. I think my mom remarried when I was about five or six.

  My stepfather was ridiculous. He was a cowboy and his parents were Germans from Michigan. I didn’t know at the time he was a cowboy. I didn’t realize this until I was into my late thirties when it hit me one day, “Oh my god, these are songs my dad was listening to”. Then, I suddenly remembered that he wore a cowboy hat and I realized that he was a cowboy. Even for those days, he had a vintage truck that he would fix up and it had the wood rails. Eventually, he owned a gas station and there was a farm across the road from it. I remember at one time, he had a bunch of goats and all of them died but one. One of the goats was all screwed up so they gave it to us to nurse which was kind of silly because we weren’t allowed to have animals in the house. All of our animals lived outside in the freezing cold. California isn’t that cold but they could have died from the chill. I used to walk that goat on the leash, but he didn’t last very long. It was only about six to eight months. We had a Cocker Spaniel, too.

  It was a regular family, but my stepfather was very strict and my sisters were always getting in trouble. I was always taking the blame. He was abusive with his punishment, but in those days it wasn’t necessarily considered that bad. My mom used to chase us around with ping-pong paddles to try and spank us so we used to break the handles off of them. She used a hairbrush and he used a belt, but that’s just the way it was. Up until the time we were teenagers it was a pretty normal but strict house. I remember him staring at me from the other side of the table and I was nervous because you could get into trouble for stupid little things. You had to wipe your mouth and say, “excuse me” and do all of the things that perfect people with a lot of class had to do, but we lived in the suburbs we didn’t live in Beverly Hills. There was a lot of dysfunction in the families around us too. I think a lot of people there were military families. We were middle class people. We were on the lower spectrum of middle class.

  I loved school. I was a good student. There were five or six of us kids who hung out together in the early years. I was good until about puberty and then stuff went the other way. Up until then I was very happy, and had a lot of friends and had a lot of fun. There was dysfunction but it wasn’t the whole highlight of my day.

  I sang when I was a little girl and I played the violin. I played violin in the school band in elementary school. I wouldn’t try to do it nowadays! I got into trouble in kindergarten for singing opera. I was put in the corner for about an hour for singing opera. Nowadays, they would put a person on YouTube and you’d be famous for a week. At that time, you weren’t supposed to sing opera because you were supposed to sing like a little kid. My mom sang opera at the house so I would sing along with her. We would sing harmonies in my house. My sisters and I learned the harmonies and we sang all of the Christmas carols. It was okay, but I was a tomboy and I liked to run around with the neighborhood boys.

  All in the Family

  My family heritage is Armenian so they were immigrants. My grandmother and her husband worked for years in the shoe factory. They didn’t have any money, but they ended up raising kids who had college degrees and they were enterprising kids. For having come from that background, to do as well as they did — they all died with money. They weren’t hurting for anything.

  My uncles came to all of our Christmas dinners that were at our house. Often my grandmother or my grandfather would come and stay with us for a period. I’m not sure why that was, but everyone seemed to end up at our house. My mom would cook dinner and my uncles didn’t like each other; they would fight and argue and they were also a little perverted, but at the time what did I know about that? I didn’t know. There were signals when they chased us around and grabbed us. Just little signals like that, but it was a totally accepted thing. My mom didn’t realize or think it was a problem. These were her brothers and I guess she just thought they were uncles who were being silly. They used to argue and my Uncle Armand used to tell hilarious jokes, but they were inappropriate jokes. My mother would ask if he was pregnant because he was fat and he would say something like, “Yeah, I’m going to have a baby elephant, do you want to see his trunk?” You know inappropriate comments in front of a little kid. My mom would shut them up and then they would act normal. They would always be at our house for the holidays.

  Julia recalled that in the 1960s, her uncles became affiliated with the adult entertainment business in New York and Los Angeles. Her Uncle Armand’s first joint production came a few years later.

  I remember my Uncle Armand was an engineer at Litton Industries [specializing in electronics and early computers] which was a big company back then, and my other Uncle Gil — I’m not sure how but he got involved in pornography and ran sixteen millimeter films, eight and sixteen millimeters through New York. He had theaters there where he would run these films and he’d go through the alleys or whatever and deliver them. He earned a ton of money from doing this illicit activity and he was a millionaire. Gil owned a huge home that had eleven rooms with a pool and a sauna room, and it was out in the country outside of Boston. My other uncle was an engineer too, but Armand ended up getting involved here in L.A. making the films. He had a friend out here that he probably met through his brother Gil. So it was kind of family helping other family members to get involved in this business. I will say this; they were all a little perverted. They were very inappropriate around us girls, yet no one realized it, no one knew that. When I visited Gil back east, he would do sinister little things that were totally improper.

  Slaves in Cages

  Armand was involved in film production with his associates before he had his own company. He was involved with sexploitation producer Bob Cresse. That’s where Armand got started, with Bob and director Lee Frost. They were all buddies. Gil had been involved first and he knew people — it’s likely that he came out and they went to the racetrack or whatever. Armand met these guys, quit his job and started doing those kinds of films.

  My sister, who was a natural born artist, designed the posters for the movies. It would have been the late 1960s. My uncle had her put together some posters and logos at first. We knew what they were doing, but we didn’t see the movies or anything. They were just bad words on paper and they weren’t that bad. The cast had some women who looked kind of like hookers. We knew that, but we didn’t see any nude people.

  The first company was UTA [United Theatrical Amusement] and the second company was Phoenix. The office was two rooms in an apartment. That’s where they did all the mysterious stuff because UTA was a legitimate company. Phoenix would have been around 1970, and it was actually more of a company on the books. They had UTA and then they had Phoenix that produced the sleazy movies that Bob Cresse made. UTA was built to distribute Cresse’s movies and Dave Friedman’s movies, and then they got a few other people on board and distributed their movies too. Armand was the guy who was responsible for all of the posters and the trailers and all the one sheets and theatre cards that go in the poster holders in the front of the theaters. He shipped all that stuff out for those guys. It was his original job. Armand used to distribute all of the things that Dave and Bob Cresse were making, and a couple of other porn people of that genre
of porn. Their friend Lee Frost also got work in the legitimate end of things. He would be making regular films and then come over and help Armand and Dave make the sleazy films because that was his little voyeur thing. Armand had actually acted in a film called The Animal (1968), but again, what he did for the most part was theatrical distribution. He would ship the films out and then get them back, and ship them out to the next guy. He ran them like that.

  Bob Cresse seemed to have had somewhat of a specious reputation: Once while out walking his dog, he (and his dog) was shot in the stomach by police while assisting a woman in an alley he believed had been mugged.

  The first film Armand made was Slaves in Cages (1971). For those who know anything about that genre it was relatively abusive toward women, and weird, dark stuff. Nowadays, people tend to make it seem like the exploitation era was fun, but in reality, it was kind of dark. It was kind of a sick little thing — guys beating off, peeping Toms, and there was murder and rape and all kinds of stuff going on in those movies. Because they had such low budgets, they didn’t show too much and didn’t mix too much violence with it. I guess that would get have gotten people busted a little bit quicker.