After introducing her to the star, John Leslie, DeRenzy said, "See that woman in there on the bed? Her name is Flower. As soon as I say action, I want you to walk in from this point. You just get on the bed and start eating her pussy."

"I had never been with a woman before in my life," Juliet says, "but I thought, I'm not going to tell him that. I said, 'OK.' I knew about lesbians, and whatever I was doing I did it right. She was moaning and groaning and having a good time, and I was winking at her. I'm a ham."

Juliet got so into the scene that by the time John Leslie entered to join the women, DeRenzy had to have her pulled off of Flower. Juliet and Leslie clicked. "He was really smart. We had this spontaneous dialogue, a game of who could outdo the other." Nothing shocked Juliet until DeRenzy yelled "Cut!" and explained, "We got enough of the long and medium shots and it's time for you to fake the orgasm." Since she'd already had one or two, she had no idea what DeRenzy was talking about, and she remembers Leslie asking her, "How come your pussy is so wet?"

What she thought was going to be a one-time adventure turned into a new career. You can still see the early Juliet in pictures like the classic "Taboo," sporting a pouffy blond do -- if you can find them. But the look she has kept for years, a short blond cut (now steel gray), parted on the right and swept back, began in the shorts she did for the "Swedish Erotica" series where she introduced the character of Aunt Peg.

It wasn't just her age that differentiated Juliet, it was the way she brought a persona of classic movie-broad to porn. Writing in Film Comment a few months back, Howard Hampton said her tough, no-nonsense older woman routine would be at home in the margins of any Howard Hawks movie. Anderson was something like the Joan Blondell of porn, insatiable and matter-of-fact at the same time. And because men have always preferred tough talking, unsentimental women on the screen to shrinking violets, the then largely male porn audience went wild for her.

The Aunt Peg series, collected in the features "Aunt Peg" and "Aunt Peg's Fulfillment" -- the quintessential Juliet Anderson features -- are basically one long reversal on the porn cliché of the casting couch. Peg, a successful Hollywood producer, uses the process of putting together a movie to fuck anyone she can lay her hands on. The results are often as funny as they are sexy. They are also often wildly un-p.c. In one scene she auditions a black actor for a role at her home. After she's seen him with his shirt off, she tells him she's thinking of him for another role, "the role of Jamahl" and asks would he mind taking off his pants. There follows a close-up of Juliet with a large black cock staring in her face to which she responds, "Oh yes, definitely Jamahl!"

In another scene she drags her young assistant Mike Horner off to a deserted set and proceeds to give him a blow job. There may be no way to do justice to the ribald reading of the line she gives after Horner has come sooner than she expected, or wanted, him to: "Oh, Bill! Is it over so soon?" Of course, it isn't.

Comedy is the key to Juliet's sex appeal. She took what could have potentially been a tired extended gag about the horny older woman and embraced it so fully that it came to life with the force of the most rambunctious and vibrant caricature. The elemental Juliet Anderson moment is when she's astride some porn stud or giving a blow job while, teeth bared, she laughs in delight with the pleasure of a greedy little kid who's been locked in a candy shop. "I do that in real life," she says. "I do it a lot for myself. I'm feeling good and it makes me feel good to have skin contact and be part of a joyous encounter."

The "Aunt Peg" movies make a joke out of the single-mindedness of porn, the way every setup is an excuse for sex, even making use of such farce conventions as shuttling back and forth between two lovers in two different rooms, leaving each in a state of perpetual frustration. Juliet calls Aunt Peg "my alter ego. I have never married, except that brief time to get me to Japan. I've never had children, so I've always taken charge of my life. I had to because of my health; that always motivated me. [Aunt Peg] satisfied this great need to take charge in a humorous way."

But it's Juliet's encounters with the great John Leslie, who did his own variant of a classic movie archetype, the wisecracking tough guy, that are the top of her work. Together, as in their scene in "Talk Dirty to Me," Anthony Spinelli's clever porn variation on "Of Mice and Men," they are the irresistible force and the immovable object, two people who both take charge in their sex scenes challenging each other to a game of "Can You Top This?" "Both of us know what we're doing and enjoying the hell out of the intellectual challenge and really enjoying the sex," Juliet says. "It was a rare combination. It never happened again in the adult industry."

Juliet grew disillusioned with the porn industry after she produced a movie showcasing her discovery Nina Hartley and was screwed out of the profits. Quitting the business, she moved to Northern California and ran a bed and breakfast. But she has lived near San Francisco for some years now, running her own Web site, giving lectures on sexuality at San Francisco State and USC, giving private workshops and workshops for couples that concentrate on what she calls Tender Loving Touch. That is to say, "touch as the play, not as foreplay. It shows ways to arouse, how to deeply relax, and just float in bliss."

A few years ago she also produced "Ageless Desire," a video that shows three real couples, including Juliet and her boyfriend, over 50; she is now working on the sequel. Juliet says she wanted to provide positive erotic images for older couples, to show that desire doesn't die with age. She has also revived Aunt Peg via an offer that asks "Would you like an erotic encounter with Aunt Peg and her niece? Give me a call. For generous gentlemen." Juliet explains, "I have a couple of younger women who will be my niece and we will do erotic encounters."

Despite having been inducted into the Erotic Hall of Fame a few years back, Juliet has no interest in today's porn. "I recently saw [the PBS Frontline documentary] 'American Porn.' It was so totally different than anything I experienced. We were treated nicely." When I ask her what she sees as the difference between the "golden age" of porn (the mid- to late '70s before the advent of video) and today, she answers, "Quality. It's the difference between a good mom-and-pop restaurant that really serves good food, fresh baked food, any kind of business that prides itself on quality and cares about employees, being replaced by fast food, here today gone tomorrow, cheating people. We were making money for producers, but we were having so much fun, we were having a great time, we were a family, we'd spend an entire day together, and hang out ... and the quality of shooting in 35 milimeter. They took pride in the work that they would do."

From the other side of the looking glass -- from the viewer's point of view, that is -- the decline in porn is simply a decline in sexiness. If you accept, as I said, that porn is single-minded, a continuous excuse for sex fantasies, then there is something very sexy about the fact that the "golden age" performers were not all buffed and tweezed and plucked to perfection. There was a sense of seeing real people and that led to a fantasy state of mind where anything seemed possible. Now, almost anything is possible in porn, which has, in many tapes, largely done away with plot (though, ironically, some of the best plotless work is being done by John Leslie, who delivers hardcore raunch with some sense of the old sophisticated gloss), and catering to a variety of fetishes. I won't lie and say that I don't find any of the new porn performers sexy. Porn is sexual fantasy and there's some logic to performers having the perfect, if unreal, look of fantasy objects.

But what they rarely have now is the personality that many of the golden age performers projected, and the sense of fun as opposed solely to commerce. And even then, few performers projected the personality and wit and sense of raunchy good times that Juliet Anderson did as a look of carnivorous bliss creased her face into a wide smile. A spiritual but not a religious person, she calls her life a series of "divinely guided accidents." The "accidents" that have happened to porn via the advent of video are anything but divinely inspired. It's always a sign of creeping old-fartism to start complaining that things were better way back when, but with porn it seems unavoidable. Who ever thought we'd be yearning for the good old days of fuck films?

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