The next day—in terms of perception, because it was actually the same day—I got up at three in the afternoon. I still had two hours before the appointment with Hot Vision so I emptied the closet trying to choose what to wear. Delphine had slept over at my place so she was there to help, thank God, and in the end we decided on a combination of garter belts, navy blue nylon stockings, and a shimmery silk dress of the same color, an extremely light outfit that, according to Delphine, brought out my strong personality and a melancholy eroticism. The makeup session lasted forty minutes and at four-thirty exactly we went out on the landing to call the elevator, both nervous and dying of laughter. As the elevator door opened, I heard the telephone ring in the apartment. Delphine said, leave it, you’ll be late, but I said, I’ll only be two seconds, what if they’re calling to cancel or change the appointment? I opened the door and said, hello? who is it? It was the hospital. Kay had woken up.
I collapsed. I was speechless.
A mixture of fear and happiness swept through my body, like some strange contrast liquid. Delphine had come in behind me and when she saw me on the floor she screamed. After a few minutes I got my breath back. I had to make a decision. Delphine went to the Banana Café in my place and I ran to the hospital. What I had waited for for so long had just happened and now I was scared, is he all right? will he remember me? I got to the room and saw him, he had his eyes open. He looked at me and an expression of doubt came over his face, but then he said, Sabina? and burst into tears. I kneeled beside him, kissed his hand, and thanked God. He had come back, and he remembered me. He was alive. The world had started turning again for the two of us.
The first thing he asked was, why are you dressed like that? I told him that I had made myself beautiful for him, but he didn’t seem to believe me. I explained that it was by chance and that I had to bring him up to date with everything. There have been many changes, darling, things are going very well for us now, you’ll see. He still had to spend another week in the hospital, for tests, and the best thing was that there were no serious lesions in the brain. The only thing he had lost was the sense of taste; things tasted neutral, like cardboard or a blank page, that was how he described it. He could bear the fact that he couldn’t enjoy food, but what he found very sad was that he could no longer savor the taste of my body. But he was alive and remembered everything.
Gradually I told him what had happened during the year he had been absent. About my addiction and subsequent detox, and the main reason I told him all this was to dissuade him from falling victim to heroin again. He didn’t feel the need, his body was cured, but in his mind he remembered the pleasure and the sense of calm. All the same, he didn’t relapse, and after his “rebirth” he stayed clean. With time, of course, we did do other drugs, but nothing really serious. Coke, to hold up under the relentless pace of the work, and sometimes hashish to fight stress. We did, though, drink rather a lot. It’s really hard to live in this rotten world without having at least one damn vice, given how hard and inhospitable reality can be, but anyway, let me carry on with my story. Kay quickly got used to my work. Once he had gotten over the blow of that thing with Petra, which he barely remembered anyway, he started to work in the photographic department of Eve Studios, which was no longer based in that dirty building in Belleville, but had taken over a large apartment near the Opéra, almost thirteen hundred feet of studios and offices.
We left the apartment on Rue Oberkampf and moved into a more spacious, light-filled one on Rue Pascal, in the vicinity of Boulevard Arago and Place des Gobelins, which meant that on Sundays we could go to the little market on Rue de la Contrescarpe and eat oysters and drink Chablis and read the newspapers, which was one of Kay’s great pleasures. Kay had opinions and ideas on everything that happened in the world. Thanks to him, I stopped being some kind of selfish animal who only cared about acting and making money. Thanks to him and all those newspapers I became aware that the world had a lot wrong with it and that the bad things that happened to other people could happen to me one day. That was what I thought as I listened to Kay commenting on the news, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, all the victims of violence, in other words, reality in all its glory. I really took notice of what he said, but at the same time I thought to myself, it’s curious, when I was on the floor, like a fallen gladiator about to receive the fatal spear, who cared about me? Nobody, I went through that ordeal alone, and I say alone because calling my cousin Giorgetta company would be like giving a human identity to bedbugs and lice: the lice I sometimes got, in those first movies, from my partenaires on the set. The world is cruel to small things, and I was one; a weak flame that needed to be kept alive by protecting hands and could only become a substantial fire with a great deal of effort and sacrifice.
Our beautiful apartment on Rue Pascal became our bolt-hole. Large and silent—an increasingly rare thing in the lawless cities where we live today—it gradually filled with shelves and books, histories of the cinema and biographies of directors, my own favorite director being, of course, John Cassavetes, while Kay’s was Blake Edwards, especially his amazing Days of Wine and Roses, with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, a movie that reminded him of what he had been through and what we had both suffered. For anyone who knows Cassavetes, I have to say that being with Kay I felt like Gena Rowlands in Faces, I’m sorry, I put that in for the fans. You’ll notice that my references are to normal cinema, auteur cinema, and you may think that’s a contradiction, since I’ve devoted my life to porn. Well, my answer to that is that the cinema is not divided into good cinema and porn, but good cinema and bad cinema, period. A porn movie by Lasse Braun or Othar Bill James can be as good of its kind as a film by Kubrick of its kind, that’s my opinion, anyway. Porn has its Olympus, fantastic actors like John Holmes, who died of AIDS, but who had one of the most extraordinary penises ever captured by a camera, or Ron Jeremy, a really funny man, a man without any great qualities and rather comical-looking, but great at fucking and an exceptional actor, who even did a few things outside the porn world, a short role in Jesus Christ Superstar and another in Reindeer Games, with Ben Affleck.
I come back to what I was saying before: our apartment on Rue Pascal was filling with beautiful things and artistic friends who came and went. As I said before, Kay started to make a career for himself as the photographer for Eve Studios, which then sold his work to magazines, Hot Video or Stardust or Plaisir xxl, for good prices, sometimes for more than they paid me, which was strange, but didn’t shock me, since Kay was talented and by this stage we were sharing all our income.
One night, after a bottle and a half of gin and lemon, six hashish cigarettes and an intense session involving three of my seven bodily orifices, I made up my mind to tell him the last secret I had kept from him, in other words, my rape. I don’t know how I found the strength. I told him the story in minute detail. Kay looked at me, stunned, and said, Stef? He went to the window in silence and after a while said, he was always an idiot, trying to imitate me in everything and never succeeding. What he did to you was unspeakable, and he’ll pay for it, he and his lousy friends, I already know who they are.
The next day, much to my surprise, Kay dragged me out of bed at nine in the morning, which was early for us, and rushed me to Charles de Gaulle airport. We got on a Norwegian Air plane and two hours later we were in Oslo. We took a taxi, didn’t even drop by his family home, but went straight to a lawyer’s office, where a formal complaint for rape was drawn up. Then we went to a police station and lodged the complaint with all the requisite details. From there we went to a hotel to rest and the next day we flew back to Paris and waited for proceedings to begin.
A week later, the telephone rang and it was Stef. He had been informed of the complaint and wanted to know if his brother had gone crazy, but Kay replied, you’re the crazy one and you’re going to pay, you and your lousy friends, where do you keep your brain? in your ass? you might think more clearly if you did, you idiot, what was going through your mind to make y
ou do something like that? did you think I’d never find out? Well, you screwed up, not only did I find out but it so happens that I’m a civilized person, and I believe these things should be dealt with by the law. You’d have preferred to settle this with a couple of punches in the nose, like you do with your cronies, which just shows what an idiot you are, because this is different, this is the worst thing you can do to a person, somebody I trusted you with, and for that if nothing else they ought to put your balls between cubes of ice and puncture them with a drill. That woman thought she was safe with you and you took advantage of her weakness; now stop sniveling, don’t dare call this house again, as far as I’m concerned you’re no longer my brother. The lawyer has orders not to stop until you and the scumbags you call your friends are in prison with long sentences, far from the people you contaminate with your stupidity, if you did it once it’s because you’ve done it other times, God knows with what poor women, so I’m going to do the human race a favor, a favor that consists in giving you a kick up the ass and making sure you all go to prison for most of what remains of your useless lives, with plenty of time to just breathe, eat, and shit, which will be the noblest thing you can do. Goodbye.
That was how Kay spoke to his brother, and in fact, eleven months later, they were sentenced to nine years in prison and a fine of 170,000 euros, including 120,000 to me as damages. To collect the money they auctioned everything those bastards owned. My revenge was to waste it on pointless things. I bought ten Louis Vuitton purses and gave them away to the girls I worked with at Eve Studios. I bought Kay a navy blue secondhand Porsche. I bought myself a John Galliano dress. I invited Kay, Dimitros, Laura, and Petra to dinner at the Tour d’Argent. The best thing I did was give away two-hundred-euro bills to those young gypsy women you see begging on the streets with children they claim are their own. It took me four days to spend everything, until I only had a few coins left, which I threw in the Seine. And I felt liberated.
I forgot to mention that the magazine Hot Vision called me again soon afterwards about the interview, as some clips from my movies were already showing on Canal+, which gained me a few points. The interview was excellent, and we were able to include Kay’s photographs, which were of outstanding quality, and the following year, for my role in The Tsarina of Sodom, I was nominated for the Golden Hot as best actress. Kay did everything he could to find out what kind of chance I stood. Through Eve Studios he discovered that seven of the thirty-five judges would definitely vote for me, but there were at least ten who leaned toward the lead actress in a movie by Wolfgang Brothers Productions, so when we arrived at the Cannes Festival, where the prize was being awarded, we had no idea what was going to happen.
The prize show began with the best American actors and actresses in the various categories: oral orgasm, heterosexual scene, anal orgasm, etc. Some time later, with the atmosphere heating up and cameras trained on the stage, the legendary Rocco Siffredi read out the nominees for the most promising European actress. I closed my eyes and when my name was called as prizewinner a warm wind lifted me above the audience. I went up to the platform while flashbulb popped and the music from the movie Rocky played, I don’t know if you remember it, the music that plays as he runs up a flight of steps.
When I received the statuette I cried, and said, I want to thank the organizers and the judges, and I want to dedicate this award to my love, the photographer Kay Staarsed. Also to the production company who made the movie, Eve Studios, to Petra Nove and Dimitros Aulica and all the colleagues who have worked so hard to make this distinction possible. I don’t suppose that in this kind of prizegiving it’s common to have someone mention their mother, but I will, wherever you are, Mamma, and I think you’re a long way away, in Mexico, I hope you feel proud of your daughter, because today she achieved something important, both in her profession and as a woman, many thanks, I dedicate it the women of the world who have had to fight to survive.
There was an ovation, and people came and hugged me. There I was, rubbing shoulders with Jade and Jenna Jameson, with Fred Coppula and Briana Banks and Kris Kramski, my God, the jet set of porn, I could never have imagined anything like this. That night we drank so much champagne that we forgot the name of our hotel, which of course wasn’t the Hotel Martínez or anything like that, but a modest Sofitel on the outskirts of the city, but we finally remembered it the next day, when Kay, I don’t know how, managed to find the key card to our room on the floor of the Porsche.
The next important change came soon afterwards, when Eve Studios joined forces with Pussy Films, in Los Angeles, and the budgets started growing, as did the sales figures. At that point Kay and I became partners and co-owners of Eve, with a 35 percent share.
We started to make pictures in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where there are more means, and a common language, and a more open attitude to the genre. Some films we made in two versions, one commercial, the other a “cult” version, as was the case with Morgana, in which I played the lead, and which was a hit in both versions. In sales, the commercial version exceeded all expectations, and the cult version, filmed in Épinay-sur-Seine, earned me a second nomination for the Golden Hot, which I didn’t win, obviously, as it’s not the done thing for somebody who isn’t already a legend to win it too often.
Morgana is the story of a young woman with mental powers that allow her to put ideas into the minds of men. She seduces them and does as she pleases with them, but although this seems just an enjoyable game at first, it gradually turns into something more dangerous. Morgana has a sister, Jessica, who has always been her rival and competed with her in everything. When they were younger, Jessica had better marks, men always fell in love with Jessica, treated her better, and although outwardly Morgana hadn’t minded it had made her suffer. There is nothing worse than competition between women, especially if they are sisters. So when Morgana becomes aware of her powers she’s happy, because it means she can stand out, but once she has gotten past that and starts to remember how bitter she felt as a teenager because of Jessica, she decides to plant in a particular man the desire to kill her. And that’s what she does. The strongest scenes are when we see Jessica being penetrated from behind by her murderer while her partner penetrates her from in front and two illegal immigrants from Liberia and Burkina Faso give the murderer a double anal fisting. I don’t know if any of you have seen Morgana, but I can assure you that the tension achieved in those scenes is incredible, when Jessica is penetrated by her murderer and on the other side of a two-way mirror Morgana watches everything with her lover. She is so excited at seeing her sister sodomized by a man obsessed with the idea of killing her, that she straddles her lover’s penis and they perform a truly amazing scene on the table.
This film made me feel that we ought to do more daring things, to innovate, and it was it this point that we met Kim Ji Lu, a screenwriter who had been fired by an American studio for writing things that were too complicated. For us, that was an excellent calling card, and we immediately started reading his screenplays. They were fantastic. There were sci-fi stories, westerns, comedies. We invited him to Paris and when he arrived we were amazed to see that he was really obese, at least 330 pounds, bald, with an ugly ponytail, and wearing a Hawaiian shirt that showed the sun rising over the Pacific. The type of person who doesn’t exist in Europe. Kim was an eloquent speaker. He told us about his origins in Asian cinema and his love of Wong Kar Wai and Kim Ki-Duk, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, and Takeshi Kitano. His literary influences included Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and the poetry of e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, and he also admired the techno-erotic paintings and images of H. R. Giger. Anyway, no sooner had he arrived than we spent a whole night listening to him, drinking martinis that he made himself, astonished by how highly cultured he was.
The first thing we did together was a really impressive piece called Vaginaland. It begins with a huge close-up of my cunt, filling the whole screen, which is then penetrated by a penis and as it does so turns into a curtai
n that opens and begins the story. The action takes place in a kingdom situated inside the vagina, where everyone worships the goddess V. and makes ritual sacrifices to her, which consist of outrageous orgies. Every inhabitant of Vaginaland has to offer at least one orgasm a day to the goddess V., and those who don’t are punished and sent to hell. And where is this hell? Again there is a full-screen shot of my vagina, but this time my body turns and what we see in close-up is my anus, which again is penetrated by a penis. This takes us into Anusland, the Country of the Damned.
Those who don’t do their duty in Vaginaland are sent to Anusland. It’s a change of atmosphere or, as Kim Ji Lu put it, a new solar system around a black star, where the objective is to conceal, to plunge everything into darkness. But the queens of both systems decide to fight each other. There is a final battle in which all the women soldiers are possessed in DP, and peace is declared in the absence of a winner.
We shot the movie and it was a critical hit in Europe, which brought Eve Studios some much-needed prestige. In the United States, we shot a lighter, comic version that lived up to our financial expectations. But the important thing was the prestige that Vaginaland brought both us and Kim Ji Lu. One funny thing about that was that many people, seeing the two names, assumed that Kay and Kim were brothers or at least from the same city, an assumption that could only provoke laughter if you saw them together, one huge, with his platinum-plated dark glasses and his palm-tree shirts, and the other thin and discreet, dressed in gray or black. Anyway, that was my little family, and the truth is that business was prospering. One afternoon Kay called me into his office and showed me a bank statement. I could hardly believe it, we had a million euros. It was the first time in my life I had seen that amount, and it was mine, or rather, ours.
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