all around the house. It was idyllic. Assie was thirty-one, and I was twenty-one. I was having sex until it was coming out of my ears.
MARILYN CHAMBERS : I got the job, and I was just ecstatic. I thought, “Wow, this is cool. Here was this box that was totally antiquated, like from the fifties—and they’re updating the box cover photo with me!”
HARRY REEMS : When we got back to New York from Atlantic City, it was not the same between Assie and me.
She was doing a two-week gig at a burlesque theater on West Forty-seventh Street and the crime and grime of New York had gotten to her. She wanted to go back to Puerto Rico, to her family, and maybe open a beauty parlor there.
So Assie went back to Puerto Rico, while I poured over the casting notices in Backstage and Show Business . I landed a twenty-five-dollar-a-week job and an Equity contract playing in a weird thing called Spirit Orgasmics at Cafe La Mama in the East Village. It was a bomb.
“Fuck it,” I told my roommate. “I’m going to Puerto Rico.”
MARILYN CHAMBERS : When I went to shoot the picture for Ivory Snow, one of the photographers was this really old, old ancient man. And they had the baby for me to hold, and when you shoot children, they can only work for a certain amount of time. Then they have to sleep. So when the baby’s down sleeping, this old guy was chasing me around the dressing room, trying to get into my pants.
SHARON MITCHELL : I got married at seventeen. Larry Kipp. I met him, and he was a crazy guy. My family threw me an incredible wedding, and I thought, “Well, this really sucks!”
I went to my wedding only because I felt bad about my family spending all this money.
But they said, “Fuck it. If you’re not happy, we’ll kill him.” My dad had done something to a boyfriend who’d hit me once—he threw him in jail forever.
I said, “No, Daddy, don’t kill Larry.”
HARRY REEMS : When I got to Puerto Rico, Assie said, “Go back home. It won’t work. I’m ten years older. We come from two different worlds.”
Then we fucked.
Then she said, “Stay.”
So I faked my way into a job teaching scuba diving at La Concha Hotel, though I had never scuba dived in my life. I went to the library and read up on it the weekend before I started work. During the first two or three months I taught some two hundred people how to scuba dive, without once putting the tanks on my back.
MARILYN CHAMBERS : That old Ivory Snow photographer was disgusting. It was gross—this seventy-year-old guy right on me!
I mean, I was running around, going, “What are you doing?! Get out of here!”
After we shot the box, they told me it was going to take about two years to get my picture on the new one.
I said, “Whatever.”
HARRY REEMS : It was high season in Puerto Rico—and open season. Suddenly a whole Disneyland of vacationing goodies materialized: Hank Aaron; and Mike Seiderhaud, the champion water-skier; and Tom Weiskoff, the winner of the Golf Open came down to shoot some Wheaties commercials.
And one of the local talent agents got me into the act. In the water-skiing commercial, Mike Seiderhaud was supposed to fall. I was the one who stood in for him and took the fall.
But I had a double role in that commercial. After that spill, I could be seen close-up in the stands, yelling, “HEY, SEIDERHAUD, YOU DIDN’T EAT YOUR WHEATIES!”
I made it into the Hank Aaron commercial, too. When Aaron slices the air, I was in the stands booing and yelling, “HEY, AARON, YOU DIDN’T EAT YOUR WHEATIES!”
FRED LINCOLN (PORN STAR/PORN DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER) : That’s how I got into porn—doing television commercials. See, me and this guy Paul Matthews were doing a Benson & Hedges commercial together. It was the one where I’m sitting on a float in the pool, smoking a Benson & Hedges, and I turn around and look at a girl in a bikini and the cigarette blows up the float, and I fall in the water. It was about,