A flashback that’s really a flash-forward:
For the past year, I’ve been working on a podcast about Traci Lords, the San Fernando Valley (i.e. the pornography capital of the world), and what happened back in 1986, when it was revealed that Traci, then the biggest star in Adult, wasn’t one; was, legally-speaking, a child. It’s called Once Upon a Time… in the Valley. Stated simply, it’s a real-life psychological thriller and unsolved mystery. Stated gaudily, it’s the bastard off-spring of a three-way between Boogie Nights, Gone Girl and A Star Is Born.
A few weeks ago, I, along with my partner on Once Upon a Time...in the Valley, Ashley West, reached the end of the podcast’s 12-episode arc. I thought I was ready to do as Traci did, and leave the Valley behind, move on. Only then I realized: there is no moving on from the Valley. Nor for me. Not for anyone.
I'll explain.
When Traci moved on, it was to Hollywood. “By the time I was 18,” she told Inside Edition. “I had already gone through the whole thing with the X-rated films. The one thing I was certain of was that I wanted to be an actress.”
Geographically Hollywood is a short distance from the Valley—just over ten miles, a more or less straight shot across the Santa Monica Mountains. But geography is irrelevant here since Hollywood and the Valley are as much states of mind as they are physical locations. And, psychologically, the distance between the two is vast.
At the same time Traci was embarking on her journey, Ginger Lynn, a fellow Video Vixen and the closest thing Traci had to a rival in the business, was embarking on hers. In 1986, Lynn would go on her first audition for a studio project, Beverly Hills Cop II, directed by the late Tony Scott, flying high from Top Gun, the biggest-grossing movie of the year.
Recalls Lynn, “The character was a waitress, a small part. I hired a private acting coach, Al Mancini from the Beverly Hills Playhouse, and I worked on it for two weeks. I was really, really excited, and I’d worked so hard. And the first thing that Tony says to me is, ‘Can we get a nude Polaroid?’ And the first thing I say to Tony is, ‘No.’ And he goes, ‘How about a topless?’ I said, ‘No. I’m reading for the waitress.’ And I go, ‘Why don’t we just read?’ Because now I'm, like, going to cry. I'm so close to breaking down. So, I'm just going to go into this character and be funny and do what I've rehearsed. And I read it and I nail it. I do. I work hard and I know that I did a really good job. When I get done, Tony says to me, ‘Now we want you to do this like you want to fuck everybody that you've ever looked at.’ That's when the tears came, and that's when I walked out. And that was my first Hollywood audition.”
Of course it wasn’t an audition. It was a humiliation: Tony Scott, a movie-industry person, treating Ginger Lynn, a porn-industry person, as a sub-person, a non-person. Why would he do such a thing? Is it because he knew, deep down, that the porn industry was the fun-house mirror image of the movie industry, distorting and magnifying all the movie industry’s ugliest features? That the porn industry was overtly about what the movie industry was covertly about: voyeurism and commercialism, exploitation and degradation? That the porn industry was the movie industry minus the pretense and the hypocrisy?
Kelly Nichols, who started out in mainstream films (she was Jessica Lange’s body double in the 1976 remake of King Kong) before switching to adult films, says, “I mean, the whole casting-couch thing—there was more crap like that going on in straight Hollywood than in porn. Actors wanted parts so bad, and Hollywood people—directors, producers, agents—would hold that over their heads.”
Scott's contempt for Lynn—a twisted form of self-contempt, I’d argue—is evidently a widespread condition in Hollywood. Maybe that’s why no porn star has ever successfully transitioned to movie star. Lords, for example, became a working actress, with recurring roles on cultural juggernaut shows like Roseanne, Melrose Place, Will & Grace, and supporting roles in films like John Waters's cult classic Cry-Baby (1990), in which she kidded her scandalous underage past by playing high-school sexpot Wanda (“Beat it, creep”) Woodward, as well as the first of the Blade trilogy (1998) and Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008). Yet a major mainstream breakthrough proved elusive.
“Once you’ve done adult—and this is my opinion, I’d love for someone to prove me differently—you've got a black mark over your name," says adult actress Christy Canyon, a contemporary of Lords's. "There’s a slur against you. You were the girl that got naked and had sex on film. Is there anything wrong with it? No. Will mainstream think that there is? Most likely because no one’s ever really broken through huge. A few have tried—Traci, Ginger, Jenna Jameson, Sasha Grey. And they did a few little meaty roles, I’ll give them that. But they were never really accepted. It’s always like, ‘Oh, and it’s starring that porn star.’”
So Traci both did and didn’t traverse the distance, both did and didn’t make it to Hollywood. The reason for this, I suspect, is because for the movie industry to genuinely let a porn star in—all the way in—would be to, at a certain level, admit that an affinity exists between it and the porn industry. And, emotionally, psychologically, cosmically, it isn’t willing to do that. No way, no how.
That’s okay, though, because porn stars eventually got their revenge—are still getting it, in fact. This happened in the late fall/early winter of 2003, with the one-two punch of Paris Hilton’s sex tape, which hit the Internet in November, and Paris Hilton's reality show, The Simple Life, which premiered on Fox in December. Suddenly, Paris was the most famous person in the world. Famous for having sex on camera—that is, for being a porn star. And famous for being famous—that is, for being herself. Or, rather “herself,” since the self wasn’t the self at all but a performance of.
“I am not a dumb blonde. I’m just very good at pretending to be one," she recently told the New York Times while promoting the new documentary of which she is the subject, This Is Paris.
Paris would be supplanted in 2007, All About Eve-style, by her quick-study of an understudy, Kim Kardashian, former arranger of her closet, who instinctively grasped that the sex tape was a kind of D.I.Y. casting couch, and that the reality show was a kind of never-ending movie. (Well, not quite never-ending since the final season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians is set to air in early 2021.)
And Kim wasn’t supplanted until Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for president in June 2015, and, in 2016, became not just the most famous person in the world but the ruler of it. Trump is, of course, a reality star, has been since 2004 when The Apprentice made its debut on NBC. He is also, however, a porn star, or at least a demi-porn star. Because he made a cameo (fully clothed, mercifully) in the softcore Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins; and because he did a scene (off-camera, mercifully), with Stephanie Clifford, better known as adult actress Stormy Daniels.
What’s more, he reportedly advised his daughter Ivanka to consider becoming a porn star, as well. Wrote journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis in New York magazine last year: "When Paris Hilton’s sex tape was leaked on the internet, Donald wouldn’t stop talking about it, saying, ‘Paris is laughing all the way to the bank, she’s got the last laugh, she’s marvelous.’ Ivanka could not believe her father was not only idolizing an airhead heiress...but encouraging her to follow Paris’s lead." (White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham denied Grigoriadis’s account, calling it “untrue and disgusting.”)
Trump is a moral idiot and very possibly an idiot idiot, but he can read the cultural temper of the times better than just about anybody. (Or he could. The 2020 election results suggest that that reader is now on the fritz.) He understood that Paris Hilton was, at that moment, Hollywood’s brightest movie star, even if the movie she starred in wasn’t made in Hollywood, even if the movie she starred in wasn’t, properly speaking, a movie. She was still her generation’s Marilyn Monroe. Which is why his advice to Ivanka was as astute as it was repugnant.
And who is the missing link between Marilyn Monroe and Paris Hilton? Traci. She’s the post-Marilyn Marilyn, and the pre-Paris Paris. In other words, she faces both ways, embodies the manufactured stardom of Old Hollywood as well as the personalized stardom enabled by social media. She’s simultaneously out of the past and ahead of her time.
Porn stars-cum-reality stars are the new movie stars. And we all live in the Valley now.
Once Upon a Time...in the Valley is available on Apple Podcasts.
Lili Anolik is a writer based in New York City. Her latest book, the Los Angeles Times bestseller, Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A., was published by Scribner in 2019. The first season of her podcast, “Once Upon a Time… in the Valley” was on adult star Traci Lords.
