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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  Talk Dirty to Me 3 (1984) cast the two young actresses alongside elite vets John Leslie and Jamie Gillis, and New Wave Hookers (1985) again showcased Lynn and Lords prior to the industry’s knowledge of any foul play opposite Jamie Gillis, Jack Baker, and Rick Cassidy along with co-stars Tom Byron, Peter North, and Steve Powers. Gillis and Baker play a couple of greasy dudes turned pimps once they put their noggins together and hire all of women they can to guaranty a steady flow of cash and pussy. Miraculously for them, all that is required is a diet of new wave rock and the girls are agreeable to doing anything in pants. In her blonde, beehive hairdo and Madonna-esque studded leather, Ginger chants, “boys, boys, boys…,” as she makes a memorable entrance. What follows is a titillating double penetration scene with “nerds” Tom Byron and Steve Powers yielding the greatest impact as Ginger doubles her pleasure. All Traci Lords’s scenes contained in movies (including New Wave Hookers) produced prior to her eighteenth birthday have apparently been demolished with augmented footage reinstated.

  It came out that Traci was underage and I was questioned in 1986. I was to testify on her behalf against all of these film producers and I refused. The U.S. attorney became involved and my attorney said, “You need to go before the Grand Jury.” I did, but I have a very bad memory. I didn’t recognize anyone. I looked at lots and lots of photos and I was unfortunately unable to help the prosecutors. Before I’d testified, they said, “If you don’t, we’ll make your life very difficult.” My grandfather always told me that one of the worst people in the world is a snitch — bottom of the barrel — scum of the earth. You know, I loved my grandfather. He was a very well respected man as well as being a cop. He made choices and decisions and he had integrity and grace. I wasn’t willing to do anything on behalf of this woman and compromise myself.

  Five years later, almost to the day, I was indicted for federally subscribing to filing a false tax return. They’d spent five years investigating me. Someone was paid one hundred thousand dollars a year to read every interview I ever did, watch every movie I ever made, look at every magazine that had hired me to do layouts. They tried to charge me with tax evasion. I’d already paid my taxes. The whole thing was over two thousand, eighty-seven dollars and two cents. I was facing six years in federal prison. I served four months and seventeen days in federal prison.

  During her 1991 trial, father and son actors Charlie Sheen (whom Ginger had been dating at the time) and Martin Sheen wrote letters to the court vouching for Lynn’s character, but to no avail. Hypocritically, Lords who demonized the adult entertainment industry in recent years, and made accusations of exploitation and worse, legally changed her birth name, Nora Louise Kuzma, to her pornographic persona Traci Elizabeth Lords obviously in an effort to bolster her earning potential.

  Jail was one of the most challenging and difficult times of my life. The things that I saw and the things that I went through in such a short period are unbelievable and I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. It was a huge growth period for me. It was frightening; it was fantastic; it was unbelievable. I walked in wearing “come fuck me” shoes, and I walked out wearing one “come fuck me” shoe and the other “fuck you” shoe.

  Dispelling the Myths

  In 1985, Ginger enjoyed top billing as the daughter of renowned psychiatrist Jeremy Lodge portrayed by Jamie Gillis in Kirdy Stevens’ Taboo 1V: The Younger Generation. The continuing drama again fleshes out the inner desires and consequences suffered when mothers seduce sons, sisters give way to attraction for brothers, and daughters entice fathers.

  Sisters Robin (Ginger Lynn) and Naomi (Karen Summers) are expelled from private girls’ school after Naomi is discovered in bed with her boyfriend. Both girls fear the wrath of their father who happens to be conducting weekly therapy sessions at his home for incest addicts. Behind Lodge’s back, his beautiful wife Alice (played by the luscious and talented Cyndee Summers) has surrendered to her repressed feelings for Dr. Lodge’s brother Billy (John Leslie), the biological father of her daughter Naomi. Alice and Billy are finally caught red-handed in the act of a sexual tryst by Lodge. Following some ugly name calling the doctor banishes Alice from their home just as the two girls arrive home from school. Naomi, whom Lodge accuses of being just like her mother, opts to leave with Alice while Robin chooses to remain at home to look after her father. Several conquests are experienced between cast members throughout (including Joey Silvera in the role of a drama coach) until eventually the psychiatrist, believing incest and infidelity are linked, finally succumbs to his lust for his loyal daughter Robin. Lynn and Gillis close out the excellent film in a passionate and naughty act of consensual coitus.

  A couple of years after entering the adult business and with dozens of performances under her belt, Ginger suddenly found herself on the fast track to self-destruction. She discovered a trusted friend in renowned, erotic photographer, Suze Randall. Eventually, Lynn spent time in a drug rehabilitation and treatment facility and began to accept offers for low budget, mainstream film work. It is Ginger’s belief that at the very least, the adult entertainment industry is merely a mirror image of mainstream Hollywood with similar baggage and toxicity. The microscope is magnified more intently upon the sex industry.

  1984 and 1985 is right after my parents found out I had started doing adult films. I was disowned. My father took my grandmother down to watch my porn. It was brutal; it was very difficult. It took a couple of years for us to reestablish our relationship which became stronger. The whole trauma, the drama, the tragedy of my family discovering what I did was terrible. I love my family and they essentially disowned me.

  I went on a downward spiral for about two or three weeks. Suze Randall is someone who had always been involved with her girls’ lives. She cared about them. Suze Randall is unlike any other woman, ever. I believe she’s the first photographer to shoot her own photos of pubic hair. She was integral in my career, and she is the person who introduced me to Seka. Jane Hamilton is another wonderful woman, director, friend, and porn star. Suze heard I wasn’t doing well and that I’d been doing cocaine for about three weeks straight and she drove to my house. It was at the top of a mountain — one road in and one road out to get to it, and she just came over. She’d brought a joint and smoked it with me, and said, “Get your shit together now.” She told me to incorporate.

  She sat me down and said to me, “You’re really someone special and you’re going to throw it all away if you live through this.” She saved my life and helped me to become the woman that I am today. Suze is the woman that I admire and I respect the most in this industry.

  Recognized as the world’s foremost prolific erotic photographer for over thirty years, Suze Randall began her career as a nurse and midwife at a London hospital where she worked until the late 1960s. When she attracted press attention by photographing fashion models including supermodel Jerry Hall, Randall’s brilliant, stylish portraits afforded her employment as the only female staff photographer for Playboy magazine for two years. After leaving Playboy, Larry Flynt snapped Suze up to shoot for Hustler Magazine. Randall believes her personal technique was crafted by her years spent with Hustler as she learned to perfect her artistic flavor and style by utilizing creative posing and lighting. From there, Suze worked freelance for prestigious adult magazines such as Penthouse enabling her freedom to capture her female subjects in exquisite settings. Throughout her career, Randall has guest appeared on numerous radio and television shows; she has been profiled in Vanity Fair and in the esteemed Photo District News. In 2004 after a ten-year hiatus, Randall launched a DVD line featuring photographs highlighted by her trademark erotic intensity. Her highly successful video website www.suzevideo.com offers everything from erotic mini features to documentary footage. Additionally, an impressive and extensive library of Randall’s finest work encapsulating over ten thousand of her striking images is available at her website www.suze.net. Currently working as a freelance photographer, Suze kindly contributed some of the exceptional pictures
observed in this book. It is Randall’s belief that her unique approach to photography helped her girls to look and feel beautiful. She said, “I love the erotic art medium. Beauty and sexuality are powerful. I enjoy empowering my models, helping them shed their self-doubt, watching them blossom.”

  After Suze left, I wrote a fourteen-page letter to my father. He cried and I cried, and not long after, I did my very first AVN [Adult Video News] show, my very first Consumers Electronics Show [CES]. One of my favorite photos is of me wearing my Sears dress in Rockford, Illinois where I was selling donuts. I signed autographs at the CES wearing the same dress with my dad standing next to me.

  You know, even though I’ve had my bouts with drugs and alcohol, I never want to miss anything. A lot of people do drugs to zone out or be mental midgets and not be aware of what’s going on. Alcohol will do that to me, but the drug that always called to me more than any other was cocaine. Part of that is due to growing up in Los Angeles being in the entertainment industry, going to the Playboy Mansion, being on porn sets and being involved in mainstream Hollywood as well as adult. I did many more drugs with mainstream actors than I ever did with porn actors, by far. It’s not even close.

  One of the things they told me during one of my stints in rehab is that people with my chemical make-up or imbalance that have the energy level that I do often times choose cocaine as their drug of choice. The way most people feel on cocaine is my natural state. It almost balanced me. Today, I will drink socially, but I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke pot. I can’t remember the last time that I did a drug, but I will always be an addict. I will always be an alcoholic and I will always have that gene or desire that will never go away. It’s my disease and it will always be there.

  I find that balance is the key to my life today. Moderation is okay and at this point and in my living with the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction, I need to balance. Any drug addict or alcoholic out there reading this book will tell you if you’re an alcoholic or an addict, you can never drink or do drugs again. I’m not an idiot. I know the rules but I’ve never played by them.

  The abusive nature of many of our childhoods is not exclusive to the adult entertainment industry. I think that many, if not most actors or entertainers performers and musicians have come from abusive backgrounds whether it is verbal or whether it is physical. Something dysfunctional in our childhoods prompted us and that applies to anyone in the entertainment industry — mainstream and otherwise. They are people who have the need to be loved, wanted, admired — they want to be somebody else. I wish that people would not point the finger only at this part of the industry. I know my story. I’ve told it before, but every time I tell it and I think back and hear myself saying it, somehow it sounds like I’m a victim when I see myself as a survivor. I just hate to perpetuate the image. I’ve exploited myself. Have I allowed other people to do so? Not without it being my decision. No one has forced me to do anything without me being a part of it.

  It’s much easier for me to be “Ginger Lynn” than to be “Ginger Allen”. If I’m pretending to be somebody else, or if I’m taking one piece of my personality, one piece of that entire pie that is uninhibited and I’m showing you that part, that’s easy. It’s showing you the whole pie that’s hard for me. I don’t think that’s exclusive by any means to the adult entertainment industry. You know, I was with Charlie Sheen for five years and if you were to go through his family history, there is the shit and the secrets that don’t come out. Many people have the same and some more so in the entertainment industry.

  Falling in Love

  In the winter of 2011, Charlie Sheen was fired from his mega hit TV show Two and a Half Men after going on a verbal rampage to the media where he publicly criticized executive producer Chuck Lorre and Warner Brothers for preventing his work continuance following a short rehab stint in his home. The rehabilitation resulted from a three-day party binge in January 2011 in Sheen’s mansion which sent him to hospital with severe abdominal pains. Lorre and company resumed the fall 2011 season after hiring (That `70s Show) actor Ashton Kutcher as a replacement for Sheen, while CBS reached a settlement with Sheen in September 2011 granting the actor an immediate $25 million dollar payout and $100 million over the next ten years in syndication. Sheen will star in a new tailored made HBO show slated to air in the fall of 2012 titled Anger Management after the film by the same name. In March 2011, Los Angeles Times reported Ginger Lynn was auctioning off several personal items given to her by Sheen during their five-year relationship in the early 1990s. The two met on a film set that starred Sheen’s older brother, Emilio Estevez. Apparently, Charlie had been a long time fan of Ginger.

  In addition to doing adult work, I’ve done many things outside of the porn industry and of course, dating Charlie Sheen and all of the mainstream things that I did. I’ve never been one to mince words. I speak my mind. I have no problem doing that, but I do get myself into trouble. I met Charlie Sheen on the set of Young Guns II (1990). Charlie wasn’t in it, but he came there to meet me. When I came back from that set, I sold the house and bought another house, and started dating Charlie. As I’d mentioned, Charlie and I were together nearly five years. Everything was fabulous. Here was an actor who was secure and would let me do what I want. He’s a bad boy and he doesn’t answer to anybody. Then there was the evening where he’d just gotten so much flack from his parents, and from his agent, and from his manager that without going into too much detail, basically, Charlie had arranged for me to fake my death, change my face and my hair. He had a surgeon already set up. He was crying, asking me to marry him and telling me how much he loved me except no one could know. I would have to fake my own death. I almost did it if it weren’t for the love for my family. He had a fake ID and the whole thing ready so that he could still be with me, but not have to deal with the outside pressure. Here’s a man who had found that balance and who could deal with it in every way, and then you had the family.

  Everybody loved him on Two and a Half Men. It’s so Charlie. The Charlie that I knew, that I dated, that I was involved with from 1990 until 1995 is not the Charlie that I know today. The Charlie that I met and that I consider my one and only true love is the one that I knew when I was with him. Absolutely, there is no doubt.

  I don’t want to go into a lot of detail about it, but we started dating on February 13, 1990 and publicly stopped in 1992. We continued to see each other until June of `95. That will all come out in How to Meet a Boy and fall in Love which is the book that I’m working on right now. I knew Charlie to be a very good man, and I dated him throughout some of the most difficult times of his life, some of the most publicly disgraceful things. There were so many judgments made about many things, and again, the sensationalism. Nobody knew the person. Nobody knew what was really going on.

  He will always be very, very special to me. The times that we had together, the things that we did together, the places we went, the feelings we shared — he’s just always going to be with me. I’m embarrassed to say this but I still dream about him. He’s still deep, deep in my heart and my soul. There was a bond and understanding, and a friendship and a passion that we had that I’ve never had with anyone prior to or since. I could finish his sentences. I knew what he was thinking. I still feel him even though haven’t seen one another since my son was born. Between Charlie, my father, and my grandfather, they are the three men that I will always hold up as standards for any other man.

  In a quote from the L.A. Times, article which appeared in the March 7, 2011 publication, Ginger was insistent that Sheen was not verbally or physically abusive toward her during their years together and she wished him well.

  “I do want him to be healthy and happy,” Lynn said during an interview last week.

  “We all have demons. We all fight them,” she added, alluding to Sheen’s well-publicized drug history and tangles with his bosses. “We fall down, we get back up. I’ve done it. Everyone I know has done it. It seems to me, without knowing any details that
right now, Charlie is going take a little different course. Hopefully, he’ll rise again; he’ll be like the phoenix.”

  Ginger Lynn Turns the Page

  I cannot choose one thing in my career as my favorite because there are so many different things that make me excited. If I did, I’d have to choose something that makes me most proud.

  Although she has accumulated many honorable nominations and awards over the years as a celebrated adult film starlet, Ginger believes her credible acting parts in television and movie projects unrelated to her erotic work are equally worthy. In 1993, Ginger turned in an admirable performance in the “B” Hollywood lesbian themed movie Bound and Gagged: A Love Story co-starring Karen Black. The movie is considered Lynn’s best porn-free outing. When the hard rock metal group Metallica solicited her in 1998 for a starring role in their music video cover of the successful Bob Seger song “Turn the Page,” Ginger wasn’t interested at first. Eventually, she was won over by the extremely sensitive nature of the material. It is difficult to take your eyes off of her in the powerful piece.

  I was on the road with my entourage. I had a mainstream agent and have been part of the SAG since 1986. I’ve done more mainstream work at this point in my career than I had adult. Most people don’t know that since my mainstream films aren’t publicized with me being in them. My theatrical agent called me and said, “Metallica’s doing a video and they’d like you to be a part of it.” I thought, “I’m more Aerosmith. I’m into Zeppelin. I’m AC/DC; I’m not Metallica.” I’m not a heavy metal girl and never really have been. I had done a video for Styx a few years prior to that for Tommy Shaw. I just didn’t want to be the bimbo. I didn’t really know what they wanted except that they were a heavy metal band and they wanted “Ginger Lynn” to be in the video. I thought, “Enough,” and I said, “No”. My agent called several times and every time I would say, “No”.