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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Former underage porn queen Traci Lords chats about how Ronald Reagan saved her life, dressing like a pony for a Japanese spanking party, and how she's helping teen girls out of the kind of life she led.
Aug 1, 2003 | The book party mob rushes the small woman and begins smacking her with light. Press photographers -- freelance, wire service, Weegee wannabes -- corner her in the back of a railroad car-narrow bar in New York. Men and women are shouting, "Traci, look at me! Traci, smile! This way, Traci, this way!" Their prey is Traci Lords, former porn star and now author.
She was born Norma Louise Kuzma and took her last name from Jack Lord, star of "Hawaii Five-O." Lords was never a choir girl, but she now holds herself like a woman from a more innocent time. Maybe a young silent movie star -- Mary Pickford crossed with Lillian Gish. Traci teases the shutterbugs by holding her new memoir, "Underneath It All," over her mouth and peering at her attackers with impish eyes. She knows the camera loves her. In publicity photos Traci Lords always appears as a radiant woman. She's too beautiful to care about her notorious past.
Almost.
Back in the Reagan era she would sprawl naked, legs akimbo, before some unshaved schlub clutching a Nikon. She'd let herself be filmed performing every form of sexual act except -- as she assures us -- anal sex. Those were pre-video days. You couldn't watch Traci in your living room with a Bud and a bag of chips. Guys had to slink into creepy movie houses, sit on sperm-stained seats with their raincoats bunched in their laps. Some of her fans turned out to be FBI agents. One night the feds busted into Lords' Hollywood pad and carried the screaming girl off to redemption. You see, the Traci Lords oeuvre -- which climaxes with the nymph being dressed in a red devil suit going down on some dude's firepole -- had been filmed when she was just 15, 16, 17 years old. "I have to thank Ed Meese [Reagan's anti-porn crusading attorney general] for saving my life," she says, speaking with both sincerity and irony.
Since her Meese redemption, Traci Lords has become a combination June Lockhart, Mother Teresa and Joan Didion. With dozens of B-movies under her belt, Lords has her own series, "First Wave," on the Sci-Fi network. She also counsels young teenagers recently escaped from porn and prostitution, now seeking refuge at Children of the Night, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization. Finally, she has written "Underneath It All," a hard-boiled memoir of Los Angeles that does for the porno industry what Joan Didion did for migraines. In one crazy passage, Lords writes:
"I stood gaping at these 'pony women' trotting around in circle. It was a bizarre spectacle. They wore tall black leather boots, black studded leather G-strings, and black bras with the nipple area cut out. One had a horse gag in her mouth. A hooded man, well over six feet tall, stood in the center of the ring, whipping their muscular asses and ordering them to 'mush, mush' as they trotted by ... A crazy laugh escaped my mouth as I glanced toward the galloping pony people nearby and wondered exactly what they had in store for me ..."
Lords spoke with Salon on the phone from her hotel room in Austin, Texas, and in person at her book party in New York.
You made your last blue movie years ago, yet you still have to account for your past in interviews, don't you?
One of the reasons I wrote "Underneath It All" is to put my past out there and clear the slate. I get so tired of reading things about myself that are just not true. Here's the Bible, if you will. After this book tour, I have no intention of reliving my past on a continual basis. [She shouts in exaggerated comic tone] "I'm kinda sick of it!" If anyone has anything left to ask, they can go read the book and get the answers.
You grew up in Hollywood. While I was reading your book I played "Hollywood Elegies" by composers Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. One of the songs reminds me of your experience: "Hollywood has taught me/ Paradise and Hell can be one city./ To those without resources/ Paradise is Hell."
Yeah. That sounds like the world to me.
Do you love California now?
I love California now. I really do. Absolutely. There are things that are kinda icky, like the smog and the traffic and the prices ...
Getting swept up in the porn industry really was a Los Angeles experience, wasn't it? They weren't making skin flicks in Dallas or Nashville, Tenn.
Beats me. I never really heard of porno before I became involved in it.
You've done several nude scenes post-porno --
That's not true, I've done one. In 1986, 1987, "Not of This Earth." It was the last time I was topless. I just felt that I really wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, and if I went down the road of B movies they'd have nothing but those kind of exploitation scenes. I just didn't want to be a topless B-movie girl. I didn't have an issue with nudity, but I wanted to do quality work. My only rule was to make each project better than the last. Fortunately I got a lot of work on television where nudity was not a requirement.
Can you draw a line between being a piece of meat in a porno movie and being an actress?
For me, when I was involved in pornography I was a child. I was 15, 16, 17, and barely 18 years old. There were a lot of things going on at the time with the drugs and the acting out, all of the anger and retaliation and that kind of aggression, there was a big difference between that time of my life and afterwards, absolutely. The line was drawn.
