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

by Nelson, Jill C.

  You know, I quit the business in 1985 not because I didn’t like it, but I was dating a guy who owned Paradise Visuals, a guy named Michael. You know what I was working twenty-nine out of thirty days. I really just needed a break. I never quit because I didn’t like it, I quit because I was burned out and I was in love with this guy.

  Simultaneously, at age nineteen Christy decided to enter one-on-one therapy with a trusted counselor to try to restore the broken relationship with her parents.

  My mom and I didn’t talk when I was seventeen. I had moved out and gotten into porn. I think when I was about eighteen I bumped into her and I got this surge of energy. It was like, “You fucking bitch, you kicked me out!” and I kind of got a thrill out of it. She got teary-eyed and said she knew I was working in something related to the adult industry. At the time, I remember I felt like saying, “What did you think I was going to do woman?” I had gotten into the business in `84, and we connected in `87. Then when I got back into the business in `89, she cut me off again. I worked for my dad from 1985 to 1989.

  I went to work for my dad in accounting and in the Christmas tree business, but I still had unfinished business in the porn part of my life. After I returned to films my mom cut me off again and at that point, I thought, “I can’t live my life for you guys.” I realized that the porn business meant as much to me as my blood mom and dad did. When my mother cut me off, I thought, “How could you do that?”

  I said to myself, “Well, my mom will have to be mad at me, I have to be me.” Being a part of the business provided a huge sense of family for me. I think it was two years later, my mother wrote me a letter to say, “I love you no matter what.” I wrote her back and said, “If you want to repair this then we have to go see a therapist together.” We had stuff from ten years ago at this point that we needed to talk about. She was willing and we went. Obviously, it wasn’t what we had together when I was a kid because I wasn’t a kid anymore and there was a lot of water under the bridge, but I was finally validated. It didn’t matter what I did. I was a good person. I just happened to fuck on film for a living. It wasn’t a big deal to me.

  Contract Stardom

  After Christy’s return to sex films, she re-emerged in 1989 with her own video line aptly christened Canyon Video and reaped the benefits of a sole proprietorship. Within a year, she became one of the very first and most celebrated contract girls for Vivid Entertainment signing an eight-year deal with breaks along the way during the 1990s. Canyon explained that her initial agreement with the large production company in 1990 became paramount to her status in the adult industry in terms of popularity, celebrity, fan-ship, and financial gain. She contended that Steve Hirsh and Vivid provided her with a viable opportunity for endurance and prestige in a business that has evolved into an extremely fickle field in the years since she has left. Eventually, Canyon grew to trust and admire former adult actor Paul Thomas hired by Vivid Entertainment in 1985 to direct, a few years following his stint in jail for cocaine smuggling. In one of Christy’s better than average efforts made in tandem with Vivid and Paul Thomas in the director’s chair, is the 1991 release A Portrait of Christy co-starring Rick Savage, Peter North, T. T. Boy, and Joey Silvera.

  Christy is on her game in this entertaining portrait of Christine (Canyon), a criminology student embroiled in a set-up between an ex lover with a huge debt, and a slick nightclub owner by the name of Jimmy G. (Rick Savage). Christine devises a method to pay back her ex-boyfriend’s loan by appealing to Jimmy to take her under his wing as a shadow. She informs him she’ll do whatever it takes to return the inordinate amount of debt racked up by her former lover. Feigning sincerity, Jimmy teaches Christine how to deceive others by walking her through different underhanded scenarios (sex is part of the deal), until eventually, she realizes she’s become a pawn in a game of extortion. Prior to getting revenge, Christine engages in a blazing hot three-way with Peter North and T. T. Boy that is as remarkable for Christy’s seductive talk as it is for the scorching sex. Canyon really appears to be into it, and North and T.T. Boy most definitely are. After the boys extinguish their loads, Christine returns to find Jimmy, surprising him and her ex (presumed to be dead) when she pulls out a loaded pistol. In an explosive conclusion in more ways than one, Christine handily takes care of the double-crossing dudes, keeps the millions in the briefcase, and assumes possession of the nightclub. In the role of Christine, Canyon reminds adult fans that sex films are supposed to arouse while Rick Savage does a crack job as the crusty mobster. This is a very entertaining flick.

  I don’t mean to be wishy-washy, but I think that the eighties are such an important part of my life. That’s what solidified my name out there. It made me who I am. Jump to the nineties. I think being a Vivid Girl contract star was equally as important, but in a different way. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. They were both hugely important and had big impacts on me as a person, me as a porn star, and me as someone down the road when I ended up quitting the films altogether. They both are such a huge part of my life.

  It gave me complete acceptance that I was at the top of my game of my chosen road. Ginger will never say she was a contract girl. In my nineties era at Vivid, the crème of the crop during the eight years I was there were Hyapatia Lee, Jamie Summers, Raquel Darien, and Savannah — bless her heart up above. Jennifer Stewart was short-lived, but very popular for her little time in the business — and Janine. There were some great girls in the nineties because I was there for so long I was able to know them. Barbara Dare was also a Vivid contract star, but she quit right when I got on board.

  Hyapatia Lee (aka Victoria Lynch) is one of the first known Native American women to have worked as an erotic actor in the hardcore adult video business next to Jeanette Littledove. Lee’s biography states that her mental health issues namely “dissociative identity disorder,” enabled her to perform sex on-camera under the guise of one of her “personalities.” In 1993, Lee left the business, and in 1998, her fans were astonished to learn she had died from diabetes. It is believed Lee staged the hoax hoping to seek financial gain from anticipated increased sales of her movies.

  Savannah (born Shannon Wilsey) is perhaps the female James Dean of her generation and genre. As an adult star, Savannah was one of the most dominant and popular adult actresses of the video-age during her short term between the years 1990-1994. She was also famous for her reckless activities on and off the porn set, and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after surviving a car crash at age twenty-four. Two years prior to her death, Steve Hirsh and Vivid Entertainment handed Savannah her walking papers due to erratic and unpredictable behavior.

  Steve Hirsch is such an amazing person. We signed a contract in 1990 for one year and it was all on honor and trust. The contract was three pages long. To this day, I love Steve Hirsch. I truly love him. Again, going from Jim South to Steve Hirsch to Playboy Radio, I have been spoon fed and coddled for the entire time. When I danced on the road for nine years, one bodyguard traveled with me on every single trip. He didn’t miss one trip because I treated him as an equal. I continued dancing for about three years after I left Vivid, but I always knew he was my right hand and my left hand. Clubs provided bodyguards, but he was my sanity on the road. If I stayed at the Radisson so did he. If I stayed at the Sheraton so did he. I would fly first class, if the businesses had money so did he. One time our flight got cancelled and we got on another flight and they only had one first class. I said, “Okay Joe, I’m taking first class, but at meal time we’ll switch because I know you want the good food.” I respected him and I knew that I needed him. I could have gotten any flunky to do it but I wanted that man at my side.

  Despite working a full schedule in the early 1990s while under contract to Vivid and on the road as an exotic dancer, amazingly, Canyon found time to earn a post-secondary Marketing degree which became a necessary asset as a bankable star in her profession.

  I kept my adult career separate from my other career. I went
to college in 1990 to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. I got an AA in Marketing. It was a nice experience, not because it was college, but it was so great because I went on Mondays and Tuesdays and then I’d go on the road dancing. I’d take a red eye on Tuesday night, go strip for a couple of days, come back on Sunday and be back in school on Monday. It kept me balanced and kept my head sane. I always knew I needed two separate lives because if I got engulfed in just the porno life it wasn’t going to be a good thing. No matter how much I loved it, it’s too intense to live that life all the time and it’s not my whole life. I have other talents too. Not that I ever did anything with my Marketing career except that I learned how to market myself.

  Intolerance

  When asked what it meant to be a Feminist, or about notorious tarnished female performers such as Linda Lovelace or Traci Lords, Christy articulated her thoughts at a rapid fire pace.

  I never understood the true definition of the word “feminist” — the women who burned their bras and so on. I always looked at the feminist movement as something I never fully understood. Parts of it I like — equal pay for equal work, but I’m also feminine. I happen to like my bras and I paid damn good money for them so I’m not about to burn them! There are things about the feminist movement that I don’t like. You always hear that they say porn takes advantage of girls. I believe Linda Lovelace jumped on that bandwagon after she got out of the business. I don’t believe in that part about feminism, but what I know about the feminist movement is that there are parts I get with respect to equal rights, but I’d also like the right to make a porno.

  Traci Lords is very anti-porn. She’s kind of a trip — a real wacko. I personally don’t care what she did; it didn’t affect me. If anything, Lords being underage at the time of filming made my films more valuable because so much of my stuff was with her, but I just don’t like her hypocrisy. She left the business and then kept the [stage] name Traci Lords. That’s not your birth name woman! Hypocrisy is my number one pet peeve. People who complain about other people, be it their race or sexual preferences, whatever, it’s because they’re trying to hide something.

  Back to the feminist question: I’d like a guy to open my door, but again, I’d like to have the right to decide whether I should fuck on film or not. As God is my witness, not that I believe in that religious bullshit, but as Mother Nature or whoever is watching out for us up there as my witness, I have never been taken advantage of as a woman. Granted, I may have made X amount of money to do a film for Vivid while the owner made XXX amount of money from that same film. I had a right not to be a Vivid Girl. I also had a right to get off my Armenian ass and produce, direct, star, and distribute films, but I didn’t want to do it all. No one took advantage of me so that part of the feminist mumbo-jumbo I don’t believe in.

  Canyon’s opinion about those who assume the role of another person’s keeper triggered an arc of emotions pertaining to a variety of topics.

  I don’t like it when people try to tell other people how to live their lives. Who has the right to tell a woman she can’t have an abortion — or these losers who sit outside of the jail when they’re going to put to death a murderer? Put a bullet in his head already. Maybe that’s the Armenian in me but I’m a firm believer in Capital Punishment in certain cases when there is no shadow of a doubt. Criminals are never going to be rehabilitated. Some people might be born with mental issues, but I think a lot of it is childhood related, and a lot of it is abuse in the household. I don’t know how they fix that, I just know that a guy that has raped children many times — cut his fucking dick off. You want to live. Great, but you just won’t have a dick anymore. As a mom, if I knew a child molester, I’d flip out. “Get yourself off my street.” Put them all on an island. Some people have lost the right to be around civilization. I just have no patience for that. Granted, some of them are mentally ill, as I’ve realized with my mom’s mental illnesses. She has a problem, I mean, this woman freaked. She was insane and was put into lock down a couple of years ago.

  Garden Variety Porn

  Canyon doesn’t consider that the women of today who work in porn have attained anything remotely close to the same stratosphere she and her generation did, and the ones preceding her in terms of credibility, finesse, and duration. Moreover, Christy doesn’t foresee a promising future for the young females and men of today who aspire to be “Porn Stars.”

  Revolutionary women in the adult business like Marilyn Chambers and Gloria Leonard who successfully opposed some of the anti-porn advocates such as Catharine MacKinnon are examples of women Christy admires and respects.

  I had known Gloria’s husband, Bobby Hollander. We’re all kind of intermingled. I know pretty much all of the old-timers. These new girls come on the radio show and then they’ll come back again six months later and I’m like, “Oh, have we interviewed her before?” They don’t make an impression on me like the old-timers do. They really don’t. They have no distinguishing qualities. They’re cute with perfect bodies and fake boobies and that’s all fine and great, but they don’t stick out in my mind once they leave the show. I’m looking at them and I think, “Woman, if you can make a porno, anyone can.” I don’t know if you want to publish this, but a lot of the girls are sort of like street urchins. Well, in reality they are one cut above a streetwalker. The last couple of years a lot of them got into the business to make a name so that they can call themselves a “porn star,” even though I don’t consider them a “porn star”. They’re a “porn hole”. You’re not stars. Who the hell are you after doing three scenes to call yourself a star? They do it so they can build up a clientele list so they can hook on the side. It is true. I’m not talking about the New Sensation contract girls or the Wicked, or the Vivid Girls. I’m talking about the girl who does the double anal scene for five hundred dollars. There is the garden-variety girl who gets into it, has the face that can stop a clock, but she’ll do anything. I think Jenna Jameson and Terra Patrick were truly the last of the superstars. A few are filtering in like Tori Black I suppose, but she won’t be a superstar. In a few years, no one’s going to know Tori Black in the way people know Tori Welles.

  Possessing beautiful and dramatic characteristics, Tori Welles began working in pornographic movies in the late 1980s and had a ten-year run before marrying an adult director (Paul Norman) and giving birth to two children. Like Canyon, Welles was a Vivid Girl and one of the best known throughout the duration of her career.

  With respect to pecking order, Sasha Grey, one of the most popular girls the adult movie industry has produced in the last five years, managed to cross over the proverbial line into mainstream work with recurring guest spots on HBO and other networks albeit, in type-cast roles. Most notably, Grey played the porn star girlfriend of Hollywood superstar, action hero Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) on the program Entourage in the 2010 season. Grey was also cast as a high-class call girl in the 2009 Steven Soderbergh film The Girlfriend Experience. Since leaving the pornographic business, Sasha was recently criticized by parents for her participation in a reading program for American schoolchildren.

  Sasha Grey has been on our radio show. She’s a very pretty girl, I’ve give her that. I’ve never seen her work so I don’t know her acting abilities, but she’s not going to be a superstar, not in my opinion. She’s as big as she’s going to get in this day and age. The mystique is gone. It’s so in your face now which is good I guess, but they don’t know the star system the way they used to. There are way too many girls and the companies can’t afford to promote the girls the way they used to do. The internet has definitely helped a lot of people, but the porn business like the music business has been hurt by it. Everything’s watered down. It’s certainly more acceptable and mainstream, but I think another huge thing is the money is not there anymore. Not that we made a lot, don’t get me wrong, but the production money was there. You had a five day shoot with Vivid. You had cool locations.

  I’ve noticed on my show that when I s
tarted five to six years ago, I’d ask the girls how many films they’d done and finally after a couple of times one of them said to me, “Christy, what are you talking about films? I don’t do films I do scenes.”

  I said, “Oh my god, you girls don’t do films anymore.” With the exception of the top three companies, there are no films. It’s about how many scenes you have done. You show up, you get stuck in a hole with three or four dicks, and you’re out of there. To me that is the huge difference. The glamour of it is gone. It wasn’t mainstream back then, but they had make-up, they had hair, they had scripts, and they had catering. Now I think the girls do their hair and make-up so the production has gone downhill compared to what I was used to. Maybe the girls like it, I don’t know. I’m just glad I had a nice little production behind me. I liked getting there at eight am in the morning and doing hair and make-up. Doing your first scene, taking a lunch break, chat, do another scene and take a dinner break. It was just like a real set with some sex mixed in. I came from the superstar era of porn. Just like the 1990s had superstar models. There aren’t superstar models anymore the way we had in the seventies, eighties, and nineties like Claudia Schiffer, and Linda Evangelista, and Cheryl Tiegs. That was the era of a true superstar. I made a huge impression, but in fifty years, no one’s going to know me because all of the performers will be dead.

  Comeback

  Christy Canyon left the business again in 1993 before returning in 1995 and reconnected with Vivid. She continued the same trend juggling films with her dancing career and said she retired from the road for good in 2001. For a short time, Christy directed a few movies for Paradise Visuals, the company that had been the genesis of her start in films. Canyon has a list of approximately two hundred movies (including compilations) containing scenes in which she appeared throughout her feature movie career.