Jenna Jameson

By the age of four, Jenna Jameson had already decided to become famous, and she knew how she wanted to do it. For a little girl growing up in Nevada in the 1970s, a world short on role models for women, it wasn't unrealistic, and she seemed to have a head start: she was going to be a television newsreader.
At the time her father was a producer at a Las Vegas television station. Every now and again he would let her come with him to the studio and practise reading out words from the day's news as they reeled out on the teleprompter. For eight years she was passionate about the idea. "I was really into it," she says. "And really good at it."
Then, at 12, Jameson changed her mind. What she did instead would turn her into the most successful porn star the world has ever seen, and a millionaire several times over.
Mindful of the terrible events that accompanied her start in pornography - the violence, the desertions and the drug addiction that nearly killed her - I suggest that, perhaps, being a newsreader might have been easier. "Oh, I don't know," she says. "Certainly, I have gone through my ups and downs. But there's nothing I regret. I mean, I really love the choices that I've made. That's for sure."

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Having sex for a living has made Jameson very, very famous. For more than 10 years she's been a recognisable face in a field in which enduring fame is rare; for the past five she's been better known than any of her contemporaries. And now, with the publication of her autobiography, How To Make Love Like a Porn Star, she's achieved something even more remarkable - mainstream fame.
The book - subtitled A Cautionary Tale - entered The New York Times bestseller list at number nine (and has remained there for months).
I meet Jameson in her Midtown Manhattan hotel suite. The natural beauty she's renowned for has been almost concealed beneath the generic Hollywood animated-sex-doll look: all silicone and pancake, accessorised with lip-liner and hot-pink Perspex platform heels.
Jameson's success is the result of a kind of brand recognition unprecedented in the world of "adult entertainment". In the past, porn actresses such as Linda Lovelace and Traci Lords became famous, in part, by explaining how they were coerced into a world from which they were lucky to escape.
But Jameson never wanted to trade her porn fame for anything else; she not only continues to appear in hardcore pornography, but embraces and celebrates it.
In 1995, at 21, Jameson marched into the Los Angeles offices of the then-fledgling porn video company, Wicked Pictures, and announced to the owner, "The most important thing to me right now is to become the biggest star the industry has ever seen."
In 2000, Jameson founded her own company, ClubJenna, and agreed a deal with the porn monolith Vivid to distribute her films. To date she's completed more than 80 films which exploit her aggressive bisexuality; last year's Briana Loves Jenna was the top-grossing adult film of 2003; this year the follow-up, Bella Loves Jenna, is already the biggest-selling adult video of all time.
Jameson's face - and body - have become synonymous with the image of the contemporary porn star. But for all her pride in her achievements in the industry, when I ask Jameson if anyone has ever seemed ashamed to admit they recognise her, she seems offended.
"Why?" she retorts. "How rude! I've done a lot of things [apart from] porn." But presumably there was a point when that wasn't true?
"Not really. I mean, I don't remember anybody ever going, 'Oh, I'm embarrassed to have met you.' " Jameson is not Jenna's real name - she picked it because it reminded her of a brand of Irish whiskey. She was actually born Jenna Massoli in Las Vegas in 1974. Her parents met in the early 1960s in Reno, where her mother, Judy, was a showgirl; her father, Larry, worked in a grocery store, but had served in Vietnam and ran with a crowd that included Frank Sinatra jnr and small-time gangsters.
The couple moved to Las Vegas, Larry got a job in television, and they started a family; with her elder brother, Tony, Jenna had the beginnings of a happy childhood with two devoted parents. But when she was three the family was shattered by her mother's death from melanoma. The cost of the cancer treatment bankrupted Larry and he moved into a trailer with the children. Shortly after he gave up his job in television, joined the Las Vegas Sheriff's Department and embarked on a one-man anti-corruption crusade.
The mob tried to dissuade him by attempting to kidnap his children. Jenna and Tony were put under police protection. In the end, the family left town and embarked on a series of moves.
When Larry ran out of money, they returned to Las Vegas and moved in with his mother. Emotionally incapable of family life, Larry spent all of his time at work, and Tony and Jenna were left to fend for themselves.
Shortly after beginning high school, Jenna began taking acid and cocaine with her brother; by the time she was 17, their father was taking it with them.
Did you think at the time that maybe it would have been better if your dad didn't take acid and cocaine with you and your brother?
"Ha ha ha! I still think that would've been a good thing. I had withdrawn so much that it didn't really even register. I just moved on. But I did that with a lot of things in my life. There were a lot of things that happened that would have broken anybody else. I was able to survive. That's all that really matters."
Jameson says she was a weird-looking child with an out-of-proportion body. "I was short, but with these long legs."
But by the time she was 16 - when Larry moved the family to a cattle ranch in Fromberg, Montana - she had filled out in a way that attracted attention. She had also begun dressing to make the most of her new body, in the briefest, tightest clothes she could find.
And while that was fine in Las Vegas, the other girls in the tiny Midwestern town didn't like the way their boyfriends looked at the new arrival. The beatings she sustained at their hands persuaded her to make friends elsewhere. Which is why, after a football game one day at the beginning of October 1990, she found herself hitching a ride home in a pick-up truck with four boys from a neighbouring school's team. It was a mistake: they took the truck down a dirt road and gang-raped her.
In her book she describes the events in harrowing detail: how they repeatedly knocked her unconscious and when she came to hours later - covered in insect bites, her clothes in tatters, her head resting in a puddle of her own blood - she realised that they had left her for dead.
Has she ever been tempted to have the boys tracked down?
"No. No - I wouldn't want to have to go through any kind of details about that. Writing the book was enough for me - I had closed off that part of my life. And I certainly don't ever want to go back there. The only reason I did it for the book was because I thought it was important for people to know the real me. So I don't think that I would ever try to prosecute them.
"And to tell you the truth I wouldn't even know who they were. I mean, I was so messed up by them I have no idea what they looked like. I can't remember."
Jameson is determined not to be perceived as a victim - or, more importantly, as a woman who became a porn star because of the terrible things that have happened to her.
"Was I in this business because I was victimised or because I wanted to succeed at something?" she writes of the gang-rape in the book. "I examined it from every angle I could, and every time came to the same conclusion: that it didn't make a shred of difference. It occurred too late in my development to be formative. Whether it had happened or not, I still would have become a porn star. I've been to enough therapists to know that."
But Jameson was raped a second time, when she was still only 16 - this time by the biker uncle of her first long-term boyfriend, a Vegas tattooist named Jack. She left home immediately afterwards, moved in with Jack and, after a brief stint as a showgirl, successfully auditioned to become a stripper at the Crazy Horse Too, where she made thousands of dollars a night.
She was attending high school at the time. It was in the Crazy Horse that Jameson was spotted by a scout for pornographic photo shoots, which led to her having sex on film for the first time. She was 19 when Up and Cummers 11 was released, and she became an immediate sensation in the small world of the porn industry. She left the Crazy Horse and the following year bought implants to enhance her already-large breasts to the absurd size expected of porn stars.
But there was another problem: in the four years that she had lived with her drug-addicted boyfriend, Jameson had acquired a devastating crystal methamphetamine habit. It stopped her from working and, eventually, eating properly.
Jack left her and it was a friend who eventually rescued her, when she weighed less than 40 kilograms, sending her back to her father in a wheelchair to recuperate. After weeks, Jameson regained the strength to go back to work.
She left Las Vegas for Los Angeles and soon after signed the contract with Wicked Pictures. The prudent deal she cut there, and her control of the number of films she made and the sex acts she agreed to commit in front of the camera, would be the beginning of Jameson's branding.
By 1998 she had become the biggest porn star in the world; last year she married her second husband, Jay Grdina (her first was a porn director called Rod). Grdina is the only man with whom she now has sex on film, and they live together in a big house in cosily conservative Scottsdale, Arizona.
Having sex for a living has made Jameson very rich. ClubJenna Inc is privately owned, so its financial details are hard to come by. But the company's annual turnover - including its subscription-only website, video productions, merchandising and lines of sex toys - is estimated at between $US5 million ($6.45 million) and $US15 million. Lately, Jameson has been thinking about retirement. It isn't age, she says. More pressingly, she and Jay are trying to start a family - and as soon as she gets pregnant, she says, she'll stop making films. In preparation for this, Jameson and Grdina have shot a stockpile of sex scenes - enough to keep the brand going for years. And for dedicated fans, there are ClubJenna mugs, calendars, T-shirts; there are vibrators; and there is Jenna's Vagina and Ass, a life-size moulded replica.
Jameson made sure that both this and the life-size Jenna Jameson "love doll" are anatomically accurate: "They put plaster all over me. It was the most ridiculous thing you've seen in your life. They moulded my entire body." At this, Jameson pauses and places her hand on her forehead. "God!" she exclaims, and then, in the tone of the tortured artist: "The things I have to do for my craft!"

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in London's Telegraph Magazine.
Copyright © 2013 : http://www.smh.com.au/news/Books/A-life-of-ups-and-downs/2004/12/03/1101923326974.html