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…