Fallen icons of adult entertainment

From left: Juliet “Aunt Peg” Anderson, Ron Jeremy, and Veronica Hart, A Girl’s Best Friend, Henri Pachard, 1981

I saw in mid-February that Jamie Gillis, one of the more idio­syn­crat­ic per­formers of the putat­ive golden age of American porn, died of melan­oma that month. I felt kind of bad; I had been pretty unkind to the guy in a post I wrote back in the “In The Company of Glenn” days, about the mul­tiple porn cameos in Frankenheimer’s 52 Pick Up. I later went on to invoke, and quote, the man in my role as The Erotic Connoisseur in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, cit­ing the descrip­tion “the nadir of pas­sion” from Radley Metzger’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven and apply­ing it to GFE’s Chelsea/Christine, played by Sasha Grey. 

Almost a month pri­or to Gillis’ passing, Juliet Anderson, who also went by a nom de porn “Aunt Peg,” died at age 71. She was an unusu­al indi­vidu­al even by the stand­ards of the industry she worked in, hav­ing entered said industry at a rel­at­ively advanced age—she was 39 when she made her first fea­ture, Alex DeRenzy’s Pretty Peaches. Her Wikipedia bio cites praise of her work from well-respected crit­ics Charles Taylor and Howard Hampton. I can go those fel­lows at least one better—I actu­ally worked with the woman.

No, not that way. In the sum­mer of 1980 I was a pro­duc­tion assist­ant on a New-York-shot porno pic­ture then titled The Family Jewels. This was the era, ele­gized some­what in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, in which the porno-chic eth­os was bring­ing a cer­tain legit­im­acy to the erot­ic enter­tain­ment field, and this pic­ture, pro­duced by Bob Sumner with an uncred­ited assist by Chuck Vincent and fin­anced (the budget was $150,000) by interests loc­ated in, I was told, Kansas City, the pic­ture was being shot with Panavision cam­er­as and soli­cited its extras from the NYU Drama Department. The story was about a pair of mother-and-son jew­el thieves (and you know where that’s going to lead by the end of the pic­ture, no?) played by Anderson and a pre-hedgehog Ron Jeremy, the lat­ter being still young and some­what sleek and bear­ing a kind of Gene Wilder/Joe Namath vibe. He was just as delu­sion­al then as he is por­trayed as in the latter-day doc about him, 2001’s Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy.

The shoot was quite an inter­est­ing exper­i­ence that I intend to write about in more detail as soon as someone drops a sack of money in my lap. There’s one anec­dote in par­tic­u­lar involving Jeremy that David Foster Wallace was so enam­ored of that he said if I did­n’t pub­lish it, he would. I have been did­dling around with some kind of piece about it, and I had inten­ded to con­tact Anderson, who recently had been work­ing as a rela­tion­ship counsel­er and free speech advoc­ate, among oth­er things, and nev­er did. That’ll teach me.

She was a lot of fun. The Family Jewels, to be retitled A Girl’s Best Friend for release, was a bit of a homage to the caper com­ed­ies of a bygone era (I ima­gine that it was her turn in this pic­ture that, at least in part, inspired Taylor to dub her “the Joan Blondell of porn”), and I remem­ber Anderson really enjoy­ing the frilly semi-period cos­tumes, includ­ing linger­ie, the part had her wear­ing. The California girl was also enam­ored of New York City night­life. We shot one week in Manhattan and one week in a man­sion in Connecticut, and I remem­ber one morn­ing get­ting a ride out to the loc­a­tion in a limo with her, she being a tad hun­gov­er but really rhaps­od­iz­ing about the disco round she’d been on the night before. 

While wait­ing for her call to the set she would absorb her­self in Joan Didion’s The White Album. I’d hang out with her in between put­ting up or tak­ing down reflect­ors and/or track.(Sometimes, if I’d pass her while car­ry­ing such a piece of equip­ment, and shirtless—don’t gag, I weighed 190 pounds at six foot four back then, and it was a very hot summer—she’d give me a friendly twist in a semi-intimate area.) Knowing I was a col­lege boy and a bud­ding journ­al­ist, she would some­times read aloud a pas­sage to me for our mutu­al delect­a­tion, and we’d dis­cuss lit­er­at­ure. The porn tal­ent pool of the late ’70s-early ’80s was, as you might infer, a little dif­fer­ent then than it is now. On the shoot, per­formers such as Bobbie Astyr and R. Bolla would help each oth­er out with the Times’ cross­word puzzle at lunch break. The new breed on this set was rep­res­en­ted by Jeremy, an outer-buroughs fel­low with stars in his eyes but not a hel­luva lot of intel­lec­tu­al aptitude, and Veronica Hart, whose first film it was, and who came off as both nervous and petu­lant. At the con­clu­sion of the shoot, a prac­tic­al joke was played on dir­ect­or Henri Pachard, né Ron Sullivan: Anderson, cam­er­as rolling, went down on the affable helmer for the bloop­er reel as it were. Different times, indeed. (Sullivan him­self died of can­cer in the fall of 2008. A trib­ute video inten­ded as a bene­fit for him, to help pay for his med­ic­al expenses, turned out, a source told me, to be some­thing of a typ­ic­al porn-industry cock-up, as it were; and it did­n’t see release until sum­mer of 2009, with pro­ceeds going to his family.)

Hart went on to dir­ect­ing, although she’s dropped off the radar in recent years; she had a cameo in Boogie Nights, as the judge who turns down Amber’s child cus­tody bid. 

Ron Jeremy has­n’t kept his looks, such as they were, nearly as well…