‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol (17 page)

Jenna had a show down the street that was drawing no heads because everyone was down checking us out. So at one point in the night, I guess she had to come down and see what all the hype was about, and in the process, she started to pick a fight with me, and was escorted out of the club by its owner! It was priceless. I think the club owner even told her in reply to some comment that he wouldn’t fuck her with a dildo. Jenna’s a very competitive person, BUT my mother raised me to be a shark, so she was out of her league in that department. At that point, she was still just starting out, and I was clearly the bigger star, and that just couldn’t bother her enough. I mean, we’d both basically gotten into the business around the same time, and here, nine months into my career, I was starring with Ron Jeremy — the male giant of porn — on a Billboard along Las Vegas Blvd. Jenna clearly felt she deserved to be on that Billboard and I give her props that she’s lasted in the business a long time, but I can’t help but also point out that she started getting bigger after I retired. That’s just a fact if you look at our numbers. The funny thing is I only became competitive about the whole thing after she started it, she began that rivalry. You might think it was the other way given how outspoken I was in general, but I never called anyone out specifically in my press interviews, just spoke generally of the people I worked with. Jenna was the first girl I spoke out on personally — lashed out on is probably a more accurate way to say it — but she had it coming.That was a big month for me with
Gang Bang
’s release, to the point where heading into December, my Brazilian distributor told John they wanted to fly me down there for some kind of a promotional tour.That wouldn’t happen till January of 97, but December certainly wasn’t by any means lacking in excitement. First, I met a guy named Keith at the Rainbow one night who would go on to become my next serious boyfriend, and my mother came out to visit me in Los Angeles for the first time.

Thankfully, by the time my mother arrived it was the week before Christmas, and I was done with everything business-wise for the month, so that she had no opportunity to become suspicious, still she found ways to spy on me. I remember one day I went to the grocery store, and upon my return, found my mother standing on my balcony talking to my neighbor, asking a whole bunch of questions like fucking
Cagney and Lacey
. My neighbor called me on the phone and said my mom was asking shit like what kind of people come over, if I had guys over, what time I came in, and of course, my neighbor covered me, but it was still very embarrassing. She liked Los Angeles in general, and we had a nice Christmas, we ate at this really cool seafood restaurant in Santa Monica, exchanged gifts, and did all the normal stuff families do at Christmas. She tried her best to be accepting of my decision to live in L.A., and my ‘modeling’ career, but she did give me shit about my Mazda Miata. She didn’t think it was safe, normal mother shit. I kept her away from most all of my friends, but we did eat with one of my friends Mila, who ironically was also a porn star, but as far as my mother was concerned was also a ‘model.’ She was very sweet and polite around my mom, kept it very clean, in spite of the nasty things we both did on screen, this is again an example of the fact that NOT ALL porn stars have to take their work home with them. She was very different off-screen, and my mother picked up on nothing, and would have with many of my other co-workers because of the latter fact that they couldn’t separate their business and personal lives.

On the subject of my own personal life at that point, following my mother’s return to New York, I decided it was time to take a chance and start dating again. I craved the male company- both romantically and sexually, because again guys — there’s a pronounced DIFFERENCE between the nature of the sex we have on screen and off. Well, the guy was Keith, who I’d met earlier that month through his brother, and our first date was New Year’s Eve of 1996. We went out to the Universal City Citywalk, had dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s Café; went dancing afterward and just hung out. Nothing happened the first night, in part, because it was important to me he understood I wasn’t a fucking slut or anything.

It plays to the larger importance of a guy understanding — and more importantly, accepting the difference I pointed out above — that it’s just work when the camera is on. It also helped me that Keith’s brother, T.T. Boy was also an actor in the business (and no guys, we never worked together in case you were wondering. I never would have BEEN dating his brother.) Anyway, my occupation was just something he had to accept, and not get jealous of, and not take personally. I grant you that it’s a tall order, but he seemed to be up to the task. We had a really nice time, which gave me something to be hopeful for personally, heading into 1997.

Heading into January of 1997, we had another AVN Awards Show to attend in Vegas, and the whole circus began again. I did Howard Stern’s radio show again, along with a new one that Kevin Du Brow was hosting, and we got off on the wrong foot, because we were both kind of standoffish with each other on the air.That can never really hurt me, because it only breeds controversy, which built buzz heading into the awards show that evening. Not surprisingly, at the awards I won ‘Best Selling Tape of the Year’ for the
Gang Bang II
movie, which had sold extremely well and put me on the map officially as an international porn star. It was really kind of funny to me, winning the award given the sham we’d pulled off in filming it, but I played along.

I guess I was having a bad radio weekend, because another show I did was Kevin Dubrow’s from
Quiet Riot
, who attempted to be funny by calling me ‘Jasmin E’claire.’ I’ll let you figure that one out for yourselves, but my retort put him back in his place when I asked him on air, ‘How do you have a full head of hair when you were bald back in the early 80s?’ We hooked up a few months later for a one-night thing and I discovered he like Corey Feldman — also had a tiny penis, so I guess if I’m Jasmin E’claire, he was packing a mini-pastry. Anyway, preceding that encounter, I called him on-the-air during an interview, and we left on good enough terms to hook up later on that year. I didn’t really care about anyone but Howard Stern, and he was nice to me, he didn’t ask me to flash my tits, so I took that as a good sign he had earned some twisted form of respect for me after seeing my movie. He also didn’t quiz me on that again, so maybe as silly as I felt that award was, it did work to further legitimize

me in his eyes. In the grand scheme of things, Stern’s show was the only one that mattered. Anyway, as the month went on, Keith and I started dating regularly. It was nice; we just did basic boyfriend/girlfriend stuff: went to dinner, hung out at his house, watched TV; went to the beach, HAD SEX, which was nice for a change. I have to admit, in spite of the stardom, it felt really nice to have just a normal relationship on a personal level for all the other sacrifices that line of work naturally brought you if you kept the two worlds separate. I still had to travel for features and what not, which was hard because I missed Keith, but it also fueled our romance because distance naturally does that to anyone.

One big trip I did have to take for work heading into February was a promotional trip to Brazil, paid for in full by Metro’s distributor. I almost didn’t go because I wasn’t feeling well at all. I had just done a gig in Miami preceding the trip in that shape, but Charlie threatened that they wouldn’t carry any of my videos down there if I didn’t do the trip, so I agreed to go in the end. It was smart on Charlie’s part to force me to go at that point because I also subconsciously didn’t want to leave Keith for that long. He brought out a different side of his personality then too that I hadn’t seen before. He was really cruel with the way he guilted me about it, but he was so cute and nice to me overall and everything that I just kind of dealt with it at first. Okay, he had a big dick too, which was also an incentive. He’d even modeled for Playgirl at one point. Once I got down to Brazil, I was happy Charlie talked me into going, because it was truly A LOT of fun in spite of the fact that I was working. It was the first time I really felt like a star, because I was in a foreign country, and people knew who I was.

I did Brazil’s equivalent of the Tonight Show, called
Jo Suarez,
and the show’s host and audience were really nice to me, it made me feel good to be appreciated for once in my fucking life. There were a lot of photo shoots and magazine interviews too, which I could understand because I spoke Portuguese, so I answered questions in their native language, which impressed everyone as well. We also did Brazil’s version of our own video convention, but it was much nicer because you didn’t have every single piece of fucking trailer park trash there trying to talk shit to me with their two teeth. The Brazilians knew how to treat their stars. They had wine at the booth where I was signing, and put me up in my OWN ROOM at a beautiful, 5-star hotel for a week. The fan appreciation there was just really cool. When I got back from Brazil, things with Keith started to get strained, especially in that he became more and more possessive, which is a REAL turn off to any woman, that one’s just for you guys reading this. The more you try to pull a woman close to you through that, the more then push away, many times in the case of my girlfriends to where they do what I ended up doing to escape: have an affair. In my case, the fling was with the Scorpions bass player, Ralph Rickermann. We met at the Rainbow Bar and Grill one night, and things just went from there. He invited my friends and me back to his house to listen to some of his band’s new stuff. He had a really awesome house up in the hills too. Nothing happened between us that first night, but I knew it would sooner or later. The attraction was clearly there, and we hooked up a few days later. I kept both Ralph and Keith in the dark about each other, which I knew couldn’t last forever. One reason for that was Ralph constantly had people over at his house, and was always out and about when we were together and weren’t in the bedroom. It was really annoying after a while, because he loved groupies, and you can’t really date someone if you always have people around because alone time is just a requisite component to any successful relationship working — in my opinion at least. He was a social butterfly, and wasn’t really dating material because of that. I figured it was just a matter of time before word got back to Keith. I wasn’t happy, and at that point, neither had enough to really satisfy me singularly, so I guess a rationalized in a way that by dating both guys at once, they would somehow make up for one another’s deficiencies. Naturally, that strategy did NOT work in the long run, but it made for an amusing spring of dating.

In April, I shot another movie, but the next big to-do professionally came with a lunch between John T. Bone and I where he pitched me on a brilliant idea for a movie he had called
Fuck Jasmin
, where I would fuck my fans on-screen. It was similar to
Gang Bang II
in some ways, with the difference being that for this movie, now that I was established, the men having sex with me knew who I was, and it would be like I was fulfilling their personal fantasy. Naturally, I was too weak to stand up to the idea, so I went along with it, saying something like ‘Yeah sure, I guess if that’s what it takes.’ Looking back, I felt like he was treating me like a fucking hooker, but at the time, I was already so settled in that mind frame that it didn’t occur to me to say anything about whatever objections I did have at the time in my own head. We would end up doing a couple movies like that; neither film was very enjoyable, because, again, having sex with regular Joes as opposed to pros on-screen is just a different type of pressure. No one knew what they were doing, and the whole thing was just kind of thrown together.There’s just basics that a professional porn star knows — placement, stamina, how to position their faces, blocking, knowing how to fake orgasms and make it look real, etc. By the way, anyone who tells you they have real orgasms onscreen is fucking lying. Anyway, with an average fan, they get nervous because of all the lighting and direction, and it turns out to be a lot harder than they thought. Plus they are trying to act like a porn star, which makes it even funnier, because they look like total morons, and have no idea because no one has the heart to tell them. The first thing they’d lose is their confidence, and then their hard-on, and then we’d have had to start all over again with another guy. It was just a bad idea all around, and I give them all the credit in the world for trying because it was any red blooded American’s dream come true, but it was really just a waste of my time, and the audience’s ultimately.

We were scheduled to shoot the first one in May of 1997, and another was shot later that summer.Thankfully neither sold very well; so they cut it out. But sitting back at that lunch in April, I felt really sleazy agreeing to it at all. He convinced me it was the best way to keep things fresh with my image, so I went along with it. One change professionally for me at this point was my decision to leave Metro when my contract was up to go with John T. Bone over to a new company he was starting with my manager Charlie Frey called Cream Productions.Talk about a conflict of interest: my manager being a co-owner of a company who employed me and made money off my video sales, and then in the same time also taking 35% of the pittance they did pay me. It was bullshit, and probably illegal on some level, certainly unethical. It was a bad move in the long run, not just from a business- point, but also in terms of the box covers and quality of the videos they were making. My money was the same per shoot, but the overall budgets got smaller, and checks would bounce now and then, and the short cuts they were taking just reflected in the end product. It was just a fucking disastrous nightmare, now that it’s all coming back to me. I was above it, and should have said so at the time. The pressure was almost entirely on me as well as the company’s biggest star to carry their product sales, and that wasn’t fair at all to me. All of the other girls Charlie and John recruited were newcomers, and most didn’t last more than a few movies. As the company’s flagship star, I felt I deserved more money, and used it as the perfect opportunity to force Charlie to lower his percentage to 25% from 35%, which he reluctantly agreed to. He was acting real prick, looking back in hindsight.

Heading into the summer of 1997, I had my second nose-job, and the plastic surgeon was a complete asshole. I remember I stayed in this really nice aftercare facility in Los Angeles after the operation was over, in a little Bungalow with its own little bathroom and whatnot. It was a smart move, because at one point I blacked out like the first night after the surgery while I was in the shower and there was someone there to find me. They had nurses that checked on you, and had I been home, I would have been alone and helpless. I was down for two weeks after the nose job, so that hurt financially a little bit, but I was back out on the road featuring by the end of June. Things were still tough financially, in spite of all the money I was making between the dancing and movies. I had to give Charlie 25% right off the top, which was still a lot of money. Pay rent, my car payment, plus I was still paying down the debt Dick had run up in my name, and that was in the thousands of dollars, so it was a trying time in spite of my finally attaining stardom. That just allowed more opportunities for me to go out and make money that someone else took out of my pocket almost as soon as it came in. I guess that is life, but it still didn’t sit right with me. Keith and I were also starting to have real problems around this point, because like every other fucking guy who lied about claiming he could ‘handle my profession,’ he was starting to pressure me to get out of porn. Well, naturally, that was the last fucking thing I wanted to hear, so it gave me refuge to steal off and be with Ralph, the Scorpions’ bassist, which obviously didn’t help Keith and I out either. Keith just couldn’t deal with what I was doing, where Ralph never brought it up one way or the other, so that was convenient also.

In truth, I was starting to tire of the whole business myself, but I knew if I’d walked away from it then, I would have been forgotten about overnight. I had worked hard to build a reputation, and while I was now famous within porn, I hadn’t yet made all the connections I would need to transition out of the business on my own terms. I was definitely starting to get burnt out though, but couldn’t really tell Keith that because he’d just use it to his advantage rather than mine. I couldn’t tell Charlie or John either, because now they were both my bosses, and had too much invested personally in the company to lose their biggest star while Crème was still a start-up company. Anyway, I really stayed home most of June because of the operation and from being fried in general, but I had to get back to work in July just to keep my head above water financially and to stay visible. That month, John also shot the second (and thank GOD final) fan-fuck movie, and like the first one, it was just fucking awful. It was called
Planet Jasmin: A Bang at the Park
, and it was just ridiculous. It was a fucking nightmare gone bad. It was basically identical to the first one, and was obvious to everyone at the shoot’s conclusion that it needed to end. At that point, I was also weaning off of Ralph, at that point because I didn’t want him fucking around all over town. I didn’t like the fact that when I was with him and wanted to spend some time with him he would prefer to have these parties all the time with all these porn stars, who I had to see enough of at work as it was. It just got really annoying really quick.

Meanwhile, on the Keith front, it had gotten so bad that he would do shit like take me out to nice places to eat dinner, sit across from me telling me how great I was, and then in front of me drool over all these other women. Or he would go on and on about his ex-girlfriends, as if that was something any woman would ever want to hear about from her man? Then he started starting fights with me all the time over my ‘porn friends’ hanging out, then the fucking hypocrite went to his own porn shoots and fucked the girls he was modeling with, but he claimed it wasn’t cheating because it was work. You fuck in movies, not on the sets of photo shoots — did he forget I was a fucking model too? I was too far into it now to quit, and his betrayals gave me no further motivation to consider it. If anything, this made me angrier because he more than anyone else should have understood the dynamics of it. You see I was too far into the game to turn back. I had everything; fame, interviews, publicity. It’s all that represented independence to me at that point in my life. I was suffocated enough anyway by the fact that I was Charlie and John’s main star at the new company, and so the last thing I needed was to feel controlled at ALL by my boyfriend. Well, the same day of this one particularly nasty fight we’d had where I’d thrown him out of my apartment, I was I was on the phone with my travel agent Elizabeth, going over an airline ticket itinerary for a feature I had coming up. Anyway, while talking with her in my kitchen, I suddenly get this instinct to turn around, and standing in my fucking living room is Keith. He’d climbed up two stories onto the balcony in broad daylight like a fucking burglar, and was now beginning to walk toward me in a manner I found extremely threatening. So from my kitchen I started screaming and throwing knives at him, whatever metal objects I could get my hands on that I thought would hurt him. While all this was going on, I still had Elizabeth on the phone, who called the police for me on her cell while she kept me on the phone. Keith is yelling at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ and people outside the apartment could hear him, all around Marina Del Rey. Anyway, I managed to keep him at bay till the cops arrived a few minutes later. Of course, they immediately got the picture, and once I made clear I did NOT want Keith there, and he refused even then to leave in front of the L.A.P.D., insisting he wanted to ‘talk.’ I was turned on by this and it made for great, hot sex later. Neither of us pressed charges. Ultimately, I ended up forgiving him and taking him back, but I knew things were doomed to end at some point. I just needed someone in that moment, and probably fooled myself like all women do on some level in thinking I could make things better between us.