‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol (8 page)

I want to reiterate that I didn’t come out to L.A. to get into show business; I came out with a guy. Really, I came out West for a change of scenery, but it never entered my head that I would become an adult film star, or even start doing magazine and calendar modeling for that matter. I also want to be clear about the fact that my childhood was wonderful — it was filled with education, culture, travel, and love. Despite what Howard Stern may think, what happened to me later in life is what drove me professionally in the direction I eventually headed in getting involved with adult modeling and film. I would say it was the key thing. In terms of that too, there’s things I do and don’t regret about getting into that business. You have a lot of these young girls who don’t know any better. Believe it or not, I can count on both hands and feet three or four times over, the number of girls I have talked out of getting into the adult film business. I don’t counsel them too hard, because I can hardly counsel myself on the subject, but I try to tell them there are better things to do with their lives, and no matter how bad it seems it can only get better.

I realize that seems like generic advice, and in many ways it is, because I would estimate only about 10% of the girls who start in adult films ever gain fame on the level I did, or girls like Jenna Jameson, or Vanessa Del Rio, or so forth. Most end up back on the pole dancing, and those who were meant to stand out beyond that usually do. But I do use my story to try and ask the question — what about when you want to move onto other things? That career can come back to haunt you, it certainly has been both negative and positive for me. The biggest negative for me

has been the stereotypes and judgment I’ve gotten. I felt I was driven to that extreme by my experience with Dick just to get away from him, and look at the background I came from educationally, culturally, and financially. That shows you how bad it was for me to be driven in that direction, because it wasn’t for a lack of other opportunities. So there is an element of helplessness in it I think, especially for the 80% of those who do porn — they come from the other side of the tracks, certainly not from the background materially and culturally that I did.They either can’t do anything better with themselves, or come from abusive households. I’m too smart to be in that business, which is why a lot of people dislike me. It’s not that I feel I’m better than anyone, it’s just that they look at me that way because I used it as a stepping stone and got out. I was in that business in the moment for the money and the attention, and in the longer term, as a means to the end of doing something larger within the entertainment business. I never discerned between dancing or adult film, or magazine and calendar modeling, or even more mainstream acting from the collectibles or wrestling business I ran, they were all a means to the same end for me: to make money. I was never interested in anything beyond that, but I did pay attention to the fact that my sexuality had something unique about it to others as I started to get more known in the business.

Charlie Fry:
With Jasmin and in the case of every other star I handled, they very quickly realized they don’t want to be one of the pack — making small money. They quickly realized they want to be a star, because like many girls in the industry, they’re dealing with all kinds of negative selfimage issues, and inherent character traits that lend themselves to needing and wanting attention.That is what I played on, and Jasmin already had a negative self-image when I started working with her, and what I did was tap into what was causing them pain to essentially exploit it by directing them where to go in the business. Jasmin was definitely emotionally scarred, deep enough that she would do whatever it took to get to the top — no matter how unsavory the image she had to take on.

I found Jasmin to be extremely malleable, extremely responsive to anything that I needed for her to do. She was very motivated in the beginning, and was a natural back then at selling this outrageous image we were building for her as the world’s most controversial sex symbol. So starting out, she was very gung-ho, very motivated, she had the attitude of, ‘I want it, and I’ll do anything to get there.’

Jasmin:
Once I was back in California, Charlie had me working almost immediately in a variety of adult entertainment-related avenues that in hindsight were clearly designed to push me toward the eventual goal of film. For all his underhanded business dealings and charging me 35% of every fucking dollar I made in commissions, I will give him that he was good at what he did. One lesson I’ve learned after this many years in the business is an agent’s job is simple: to get you work. Well, Charlie kept me busy right from the beginning. First off, he had me doing feature dance gigs locally and in some cases nationally that brought me between $1800 and $2000 per week. He’d also lined me up with some calendar and magazine shoots in publications like
Penthouse
and
High Society
, which provided me with some great initial exposure. Being entrepreneurial on my own right from the start, I also landed photo layouts independently with
Hustler
and
Gallery
. Charlie got me some little vignette video pieces in a couple Playboy video specials, so it was clear to me that there was some demand for me right off the bat.

Charlie Fry:
First of all, most of the girls I dealt with had already had experience being a stripper, and Jasmin had already done some dancing, and with Jasmin, both of our interest at the time was in her becoming a feature. Because just doing porn scenes alone wasn’t where the big money was, it was out on the road in strip clubs dancing live for your film audience as a feature. She was a pro right from the jump too. I remember when we first got started I had a feature booked into Ft. Myers. We were in Ft. Lauderdale, and another girl I managed had started the gig Thursday night at the Orenthia, but had been beaten up by her boyfriend Friday during the day, badly enough that she couldn’t appear on Friday night. Jasmin at that time had done some stripping, but hadn’t danced as a feature before. I decided it would be a perfect opportunity to put Jasmin to the test and gave her a crash-course on what to do. She then borrowed a mini-van I’d let her borrow, drove to Ft. Lauderdale, literally showed up at 8 o’clock, stepped into a borrowed costume and went on stage. She pulled it off too! I think that showed me that she had a mix of talent that blended very naturally with a boldness that she displayed right from the jump. It’s this gung-ho/do anything attitude that got her as far as she did in as short a time as she’d had in the business when she became a star.

Jasmin:
Because of my ethnic make-up and darker complexion, I also had a unique appeal that made me a bit more exotic to the generic white girls who dominated the business at the time I was beginning to enter that world. As the weeks wore on heading into the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996, the more money I made and the more attention I got, the more I also began to see where I had something unique to offer. Things truly changed when Charlie got me onto the
Jerry Springer Show
, offering me national exposure for the first time and showing me its implied potential. While the magazine shoots and feature dance spots were great, I wasn’t able to properly expose (pardon the pun) myself to maximizing my money making potential without the component of video stardom, which was a norm for any high-profile dancer on that circuit. It was just a fact of the business, and I could already see from the differentials in what I could charge versus someone like Tiffany Lords, who Charlie also managed at the time. As a manager, Charlie also had a subtle but ever-present way of controlling every situation he was in that made me afraid to question him. He was very convincing, and he used basic dollars and sense in my case to secure my agreement to give adult film a shot. He didn’t appeal to the glamour of it with me, because he knew I was a businesswoman, unlike most of his dim-witted clientele. He also told me he knew he could make me a huge star. I believed him once he explained the demographics of porn and where he thought I would fit in as something different.

Charlie Fry:
I would basically just lay out what I called an ‘If / Then’ statement. Wherein I said, ‘If you want to be a big feature star and don’t want to spend years building up your reputation, then here are the choices of what you have to do. You can go out and fuck a Senator or Governor and get caught; you can become a major porn star by doing something outrageous; marry or get caught with some celebrity — but those are all flash in the pan type things. If you really want to see the big money — which is really what the premise was in feature dancing, you need to have the infamy.’ And from my memory, she was into it: she wanted the money, the fame, to change from an unknown to becoming a name in the business.

Jasmin:
To me, that meant that much more money and the catalyst actually came one day when we were discussing features and the fact that they grossed more when the dancer was also an adult film star. They were the ones who could command the most, and he made it sound like that was something to consider. The other porn star he managed at the time, Tiffany Lords at the time, who had co-starred in a John Wayne Bobbit movie, had gotten a good bit of media attention from it, so I saw the exposure factor was naturally much higher. While I had Charlie talking in one ear, I had had Kurt talking in the other prior to our break up about how much the feature dancers made when they also had film going on. Once I’d agreed, he sent me to a company called Blue Coyote Productions, that he’d worked with in the past, and they had me in mind for a single-scene that would pay me $800, plus another $500 for a photo shoot they would do on-site. So it was $1300 for a day’s work, which was basically two-thirds of what I was used to making in a week dancing. I also was thinking in my mind about the fact that doing this would raise my feature rates, so I kept my eye on the money, and suffered through whatever inevitable anxiety I was feeling my first day on the set.

My first day on the set of my first scene fell on a spring afternoon in April of 1995. I was supposed to go down the night before and had no car to speak of, so the company had to arrange a ride for me. Anyway, getting down to Palm Springs, I had actually been chauffeured — so to speak — by my actual
CO-STAR
, Peter North, who I had never heard of before. I actually even confused him with another porn star named Randy Spears, so you can imagine the look on my face when he showed up at my apartment to pick me up. My naivety would come back in my face BIG TIME later that day — and I’m not speaking figuratively — but on the drive down, I was just obviously nervous. You could read it on my face like I was wearing a sign that said ‘new girl’across my forehead, and in truth, I had only ever seen one porn movie before in my life. Anyway, I was happy we were shooting in Palm Springs, because it’s a very relaxed resort town about two hours outside of L.A. and is designed to calm, which I needed badly by the time we pulled up to the Palm Desert Springs Resort. The confusion about my co-star had been shared by the company producing the video and when we arrived, Randy Spears’ picture was up on the wall instead of Peter’s. To boot, even though we were shooting at a really nice resort hotel, they had put me up at the Motel 6, fulfilling Charlie’s ‘Deluxe Accommodations’promise! At least Peter took me out to dinner the night before at Tony Roma’s, which was nice of him. I guess he could see I was nervous and wanted me to feel more comfortable with him the next day, and soon enough I would see why.

So lying in bed that night, with the next morning and all that was to come hanging over me, I was trying to review any and all advice I’d gotten over the past spring and summer, from dancers who’d done film to Charlie to people who worked at video companies. Later on, the director who I worked for on my rise to stardom, John T. Bone’s had the best advice to keep work and business separate, which was more general, a few specifics I had picked up from visiting a couple sets were as follows:

Most of the men who actually fucked on screen weren’t that good looking, which had been a big revelation to me until you considered the stamina factor. In that average-looking guys statistically had an easier time keeping it up for the amount of time it took to shoot one of these scenes, which could run several hours at a minimum. Some of the men I worked with even used DICK injections to stay hard. I never helped a guy off-screen to stay hard, because it’s his job; he’s getting paid to be a performer. Part of his job is to keep a hard-on. So on screen, when the camera’s rolling, I did whatever I had to do, but off-camera, never. On top of that, most of the viewers of these movies were average looking men, and John had once explained that from a marketing point of view, we wanted our target audience to feel like they were right there in the room fucking us. The men were ornamental, as most times it was the women who were the focal point — i.e. stars of the movie and fantasy, so those two points added up nicely in my mind because it made me more the star and my male counterpart on screen more like my driver.

The fact that the men I had to work with on screen were average looking made it easier to not be tempted to date them off-set, because they weren’t hot. To amplify that point, I had met Ron Jeremy on one of the sets I’d visited, and I noted both that I didn’t find him attractive in the least, and he could stay hard forever. He was a very nice guy though, but I never worked with him.

One of the most practical pieces of advice I suppose I got was from another porn star named Misty Rain, who I met at a feature once on the road. I befriended her, and she gave me some simple words of wisdom: Have a glass of wine or two before your scene, because it will help massively to relax you. John was very strict about people not drinking on set, so it had to be discrete, but that definitely helped to relax my nerves a bit. You just had to be careful not to get outright drunk because eventually you’d pass out on set. So with all this swirling through my mind, I felt a little bit woozy and fell thankfully to sleep.