Imagine you are playing a trivia game. The question: Which porn superstar was a virgin until age 19, had to be taught on the set of her first hard-core video how to masturbate and hates having her pussy eaten? Would you guess Traci Lords? You might even think the question was inaccurately worded and was really meant to be asked about television evangelists or the most sexually parched of women who launch crusades against pornography. You would not guess Traci Lords.
It’s hard to believe that Traci, whose name has become synonymous with screaming orgasm, would have to be taught anything to do with sex. Yet director Richard Mailer swears that he and the makeup girl on his video What Gets Me Hot had to take Traci aside and show her how to wank her clit before they could roll tape.
As for head, generous Traci candidly admits that she’d rather give than receive. Even though she appears in countless films and videos to be able to climax at the mere touch of tongue to glistening love button, she claims to be “probably one of the few women who hate receiving head. Believe it or not, I really don’t like it. It turns me off.
Most guys just don’t know how to do it well, I guess. I love to give head; I just don’t like to receive it. Those are the orgasms that I definitely have to fake.”
Well, 23-year-old Traci Lords may have lost her virginity only four years ago, but the Florida beach girl has more than made up for lost time-as her hordes of fans know. This sexual dynamo has sucked, fucked, moaned and groaned her way into the fantasies of porn fanciers everywhere and has emerged-in less than a year-at the top of the X-rated heap.
In this age of grind-’em out video it’s relatively easy for a girl with a pretty face, good figure and a moderate amount of sexual energy to become a star porn actress, or at least a sort of fuckstress-of-the-month.
The hard part is maintaining the position. When a girl adds intelligence, acting talent, a voice that doesn’t sound like fingernails scraping a chalkboard, glamour and tremendous sexuality to the above qualities, she can virtually write her own ticket.
Traci Lords is such a girl.
Producers clamor for her services because her name sells the product. Directors are lavish in their praise of her because she’s a dream to work with. Producer/director Gregory Dark, one of the notorious Dark Brothers, ranks Traci as one of the greatest porn queens in history. “She’s something rare in the adult film industry,” he says. “Traci is prettier than 99.9% of the girls modeling today. She’s elegant. Her body looks better today than when she started; the reverse is usually the case. Her face takes makeup extremely well. She’s totally professional. She gets her script down; she cares about what she’s doing. She’s so easy, other people are hard to work with by comparison. I almost dread working with the other top girls in the business. You never know if they’re going to show up or what they’re going to look like that day-they may have stayed up for three days. It’s awful. Traci is simply something else in this business. And she’s hot sexually. She just loves sex. In front of a camera she’s such an exhibitionist, she can’t wait to do something.”
Dark, who worked with Traci on films and videos such as New Wave Hookers and Black Throaty tells this story to illustrate Traci’s incredible sexuality. “This happened on a still shoot that I directed for HUSTLER, The Dark Bros. Devil in Miss Jones [December 1985]. We had Traci and a girl who’d done a lot of still modeling, but no movies or anything hard-core, and this new guy, Dick Rambone, who has
15 1/2 inches but was having trouble getting it up.
“Traci comes over to me and says, T’m not going to help him get it up. You think I am, don’t you?’ I said, *No. I didn’t ask you to.’ And she said, T’m not going to.’ About five minutes later she comes back, and she says, ‘It’s really fascinating, isn’t it?’ I ask, ‘What?’ ‘His dick. It’s really fascinating. I wonder how big it can get.’ I said, ‘ I don’t know. I guess it’s not going to get big at all on this shoot.’ Traci said, ‘ I bet you I can make it get up!’ So I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I can’t ask you to try.’ ‘ I just want to because it’s so fascinating she said-like his dick is this disembodied thing. That’s how she treated it, like a disembodied thing.
“Then she jumped on this guy and started sucking his weenie for, like, the next three hours. Meanwhile her pussy’s getting sopping wet-we didn’t even have to spray water on it for realism. It’s completely dripping. It was hard to handle sitting there watching her pussy drip while she’s sucking on this guy’s dick. It was all I could do not to dive in between her legs and do her. It was rough. I got a headache from the whole thing. “And this other girl was totally grossed out. She’s never seen anything like it. Here’s Traci sucking wildly on this guy’s dick, her pussy dripping, and this girl is offended. She said, ‘How can she do that? It’s completely gross and, she’s look! Look! She’s turned on!’ She thought it was the sleaziest thing she’d ever seen.”
Actor Tom Byron-the first to screw Traci onscreen-thinks that nobody in the business can hold a candle to her. “She’s flawless,” he says, “a perfect package. Every time I work with her, it’s like I’m in a catatonic state: Her beauty is so mesmerizing.” Byron also finds her professionalism on the set to be an inspiration, and notes that sexually she’s very flexible. “She’s very accommodating. Whatever her partners are into, she’s into also”-which Gregory Dark found out when he tried an experiment in Black Throat.
“Traci is very aggressive sexually, and it always shows,” he says. “I tried to turn the tables on her in my last video. I had Kevin James and Graig Roberts doing a tag-team fuck match with her-sort of like tag-team wrestling. They pass her back and forth between them. These guys are pretty big and have pretty big dicks; they’re both nine inches or so. I said, ‘Listen, you should fuck Traci. She needs to be fucked. Hard.’ And they proceeded to fuck this girl for the next hour and ten minutes. They fucked her silly. She was completely drenched in sweat-they all were. Those guys just wailed on her. She’s usually dominant, but she really got off on them taking over like that.”
Lawrence T. Cole, who directed Traci in Battle of the Stars, was also impressed with her beauty, poise and sexuality-particularly her sexuality. “Her energy was amazing,” he recalls. “Here she’d had sex all day on the set, then her boyfriend arrived after we were through shooting, and she fucked him all night long. They kept people in the rooms on either side of them awake they were so passionate.”
Another director who raves about her is Dave Michel, whose Sex Waves was the first movie to indicate that she could act as well as fuck. “Traci is terrific,” says Michel. “She’s the type of talent that could and would give you so much more if there were time. It’s a shame shooting schedules in this business are so tight. Any girl can go down on somebody, give a blowjob or fuck, but when you’ve got a Traci Lords in front of that camera, you just wish you could take as much time as you want and really do a lot of things with her.”
One of the things most Traci fans would really like to do with her is fuck her. Her unbridled lust and screams of ecstasy are real bone-builders. “I’ve been wild sex from day one. And I do scream,” she admits. “I’ve always been a screamer. That’s not an act. In fact, on my first video 1 tried to be quiet, but I couldn’t muffle myself. Then everyone started going, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.’ I thought. Oh, good I’m allowed to do this. I didn’t know they liked noise. I’d never seen a porn flick-how was I supposed to know?”
Natural talent like Traci’s is the stuff blue-movie legends are made of. Michel sums up the phenomenon when he states, “She’s got it, and it burns holes in the screen.”
It also translates into dollars, as many as 5,000 of which Traci has been able to command, on occasion, for a single day’s work. It’s hard to find anyone who will admit to paying this price, but everyone agrees that whatever the astronomical fee, Traci gives them their money’s worth.
Traci has always been paid top dollar. She started out at a figure most girls never work up to. (Byron remembers advising her to ask for as much money as she could get-and not take less than $1,000 per day.) No one, she says, except for biggies like Marilyn Chambers, Seka and Vanessa Del Rio earns what Traci commands. There is no other girl working today who is a contender for really big
bucks.
“If someone’s going to pay that much money, then they’ll go for the real thing. They’ll go for Vanessa or Seka; they’ll try to get me. They’ll go for Ginger Lynn.
They’re not going to spend that much money on a maybe. Producers want something definite for their money-if they’re going to pay that much.
“Angel’s very pretty, but she’s not a strong actress, and she’s just okay in sex. Sometimes she’s good; sometimes she’s not. She might be able to get $1,000 per day, but I’m way beyond that. And $1,000 a day is good money! None of the girls gets that. It’s unheard of. There’ve been maybe three girls in the past three or four years to get that: me. Ginger Lynn and Raven. No one else. Most girls, the most they can get is $850 or $900 a day. Christy Canyon raised her rate to $1,000 a day, and no one used her. She had to go back down to $750.”
Outside of Hollywood there’s probably not another industry that pays so well for what is jokingly referred to as unskilled labor. As for the idea that she’s engaged in prostitution-as the Los Angeles District Attorney would like people to believe of all porn performers-Traci laughs. “Hell, as a prostitute I wouldn’t make half the money! I’m an actress. I’m paid to act, and that’s what I do. Sometimes it’s easier than others, but that’s all it is. Acting. I could do a series of multiple orgasms, and you’d never know they were fake, and they would be. It’s all acting. When I do a sex scene, I want people to look at it and go, ‘Oooh!’ I don’t want it to be a half-assed performance. Sometimes I’m getting fucked, and I’m thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner, but you can never really tell. You can never, ever tell.”
Frankness and openness like this sets Traci apart from most of her colleagues. The standard answer to the standard Do-you-have-an-orgasm-every-time question is, “Well, I don’t always have an orgasm, but I always enjoy myself.” But Traci’s different. She doesn’t always enjoy herself. Early in her career it was common for her to have orgasms on the set. But after she’d been in porn for a while-working almost constantly-orgasms became rarer, and she even started to hate sex. “My boyfriend would want to make love and couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to since it had been maybe a week since I’d made love to him.” Quite a turnaround for a girl who describes her sex life like this: “All my boyfriend has to do is stick it in-if I haven’t had it for a while, I’m already getting off. Ten seconds, two strokes. I like to come about three or four times. The first time is okay; the second is something. The third and fourth times are just eeeeaaahh!”
Traci’s decreased libido was a signal to slow down, perhaps to retire. She went about it in an ingenious way: She raised her day rate. “I just outpriced myself so no one could afford me anymore. Then when people started paying it, I just went, ‘Wait a minute-I should have done this long ago!'”
So she’s in a state of semiretirement.
She hasn’t made a film in eight months her choice-and is scheduled to do only one more. Bom to Be Wild, for Cinderella Distributors. After that, well, she’ll consider projects individually. Right now her ambition is to be the first porn actress to successfully cross over from hard-core films to “legitimate” modeling and movies. Not only cross over, but be a star. Distancing herself from porn over the past several months has given her a different perspective on the industry, but that’s not to say bad things have gotten much better. She’s still pissed off at the way performers are treated by the majority of producers, gets rankled over marketing techniques that mislead fans into thinking that her picture on a video box means that Traci Lords is on the tape inside, and bristles at the way porn’s easy money spoils girls into not developing or improving themselves, but just do picture after picture until they burn out.
She’s still bitter and angry about the high rate of venereal disease in porn, a topic that most actors and actresses downplay or don’t discuss at all. Diseases are quite common, she says. “VD? You can get it every other day.” Traci ought to know-she contracted clap three times in three months. “If you’re working on a film, and one person-just one person is all it takes-has VD, whether they have a lead role or just come in for one sex scene, everyone on the set will get it. Everyone. It goes from one person to the next. If one girl works with three guys, then forget it. And those three guys each work with a girl, there it is all over the movie set. And women don’t even know they have it. You can’t tell unless you go for a checkup at the time-which is what I did.”
AIDS is the latest scare. Producers are trying to protect against it through blood tests, but Traci doesn’t see it as much of a personal danger. (“I’m not making movies anymore; so I don’t give a damn.”)
Clearly, Traci’s reputation for being outspoken is well earned. It’s no secret that she’s frank, opinionated and doesn’t waste time pussyfooting around. Tact and diplomacy may not be her strongest suits,
but honesty {brutal honesty, some might say) and candor are certainly way up there.
“I can be snotty,” she says. “There’s a part of me-the Traci Lords part-that’s rude, spoiled and bitchy. But I have to protect myself. Like if I say, at 3:30 in the morning, T’m leaving after this scene whether you like it or not,’ everyone may think, What a bitch, but they’d like to do the same thing-only they can’t get away with it. I believe people should treat you better. Just because you’re an adult-film actress is no excuse for them to walk all over you and make you work 16- or 17-hour days.”
The people she likes most to work for are Cinderella Distributors (“I know I’m going to get my own way”) and Dreamland Home Video “because the quality of their pictures is very good-the scripts, the talent. They spend money. That’s why I like working for them. I know I’m going to look good in their movies. I tend to give more whenever I feel like it’s worth it. I always try hard, but sometimes you have that little burst of energy because you’re excited. It’s the same with sex scenes-if you get a guy you’re really turned on to, then it’s going to be a combination of knowing how to fake it and having real orgasms.”
What sort of privileges or treatment does she demand on a shoot? “I have to have my boyfriend on the set to fuck my nipples,” she laughs. “No. Twelve-hour turnaround: I only work 12 hours, and then I leave. Overtime. Approval of the makeup artist. Approval of who I’m going to work with. I always know who I’m going to fuck before I even go on a set.”
She prefers fucking younger men to older, does not perform anal sex on the screen. (“But,” adds Gregory Dark, “she sure likes guys to stick their tongues up her ass. In New Wave Hookers she pulled Rick Cassidy’s head into her ass and told him to lick it. That wasn’t in the script.”) She likes the challenge of a big cock-“If they’re too small, they’re too easy to swallow!” As far as dicks go, Traci thinks the best one in the business is attached to Craig Roberts, who she feels is underrated and deserving of stardom “because he’s so good-looking and talented.”
Though she doesn’t really enjoy women as sexual partners, she accepts the reality of girl/girl scenes in porn. “Business is business, and it’s as easy to work with a girl as it is with a guy-sometimes easier. You don’t have to worry about hard-ons, right? Actually, I don’t really like doing girl/girls. I can enjoy them with the right girl, but there haven’t been too many. I’ve only worked with a handful of girls. I don’t like working with Ginger Lynn. I’ve worked with her quite a few times. I don’t think I’d do another scene with her. She’s way too dominating. Christy Canyon is probably my favorite. I like her a lot. She’s pretty easy-going. Sex is fun with her, a lot of fun.
“To turn me on, a woman has to have a nice figure and be clean, very clean. I like pretty girls who don’t need a lot of makeup. I see a lot of these girls before they have makeup on, and it’s like so scary. When I see them later, I think, / know what she did look like.
“I appreciate a woman who genuinely likes women, not who’s really so much into them but who can handle having sex with a woman without saying how this is so gross, or pulling away when the director yells, ‘Cut!’ “
The secret to having a good sex scene, says Traci, is to keep playing with your partner during takes. “You have to do something like run your hands through their hair, stroke or fondle them,” she explains. “If your partner thinks you’re just doing your job, it doesn’t work as well. The chemistry isn’t as good. So you have to say things like, ‘Oh, you really turn me on. I just love the way you fuck me.’ Little things like that. Women-and men-have egos, and you have to feed them to get the best results.”
Actually, for fuck films it’s particularly important to feed the male ego, which often has a great deal to do with a cock’s ups and downs. Traci has great sympathy for actors who have to do a lot of sex scenes and are expected to maintain a 24hour hard-on.
“Getting them up gets to be difficult,” she says. “And most of the girls aren’t very good-looking; so what kind of inspiration do they have? I don’t have much of a problem though. I just play around with them and make them think I’m really into them and really want them. It’s all mental.”
The only problem she ever had on a film was with an actor who was coked-out-a common situation. “He finally got up,” she remembers, “but it took a lot of work on my part.”
What turns on the woman who spends so much time and (often) effort turning men on? Sexy eyes, guys’ buns and a nice bulge in a pair of jeans head the list. “And teasing,” she adds. “A guy who won’t just say, ‘You can have me anytime, anyplace, anywhere.’ A guy who says, ‘Well, maybe you can have me.’ That turns me on.”
Something else that Traci finds strangely erotic and arousing is watching two men kiss. “It’s just so different, it kind of turns me on, but I don’t think I want to watch two guys fuck-just kiss or touch.”
What turns her on most, however, is her ex-Marine boyfriend, Tom, an affable, blond surfer-type who’s done double duty as her bodyguard and lover for the past two years. Tom’s status as consort to the Queen of Porn automatically makes him a contender for the Luckiest Man in the World sweeps.
Lucky or not, it can’t be easy sharing the rollercoaster life of a star, no matter what part of the heavens she shines in, but he seems able to give Traci the support that she needs-and she’ll be needing plenty as she implements her plan to cross over.
Since it would be impossible to hide anyway, Traci wisely has no intentions of trying to keep her porn career a secret. Though opinion is divided as to whether being blatantly open about it from the very beginning will help or hurt, it’s almost impossible to imagine Traci being anything other than outspoken. Clearly, the girl who responds to “Who’s the best cocksucker in the business?” with an eager “Me, of course” is not going to be carting home any Nobel Prizes for secrecy.
Friends in porn, aware of Traci’s talent and steely determination, admit that it will be tough, but think that if anyone can cross over she can. Michel says, “I’d love to be the one to cross her. Her chances are absolutely fantastic. She hasn’t developed her potential because this industry doesn’t allow her to do that. Other porn stars have had minor successes in Hollywood, and Marilyn Chambers starred in two general release movies-but she wasn’t any good. Traci is different. No question about it, her best is yet to come.”
Traci thinks so too. If she encounters resistance, she plans simply to make herself a star.
“I have enough money to do what Sylvester Stallone did,” she says defiantly. “I’ll make myself a star. Why not, if no one else will let me be one? Maybe people do still think it’s somehow more okay for a man to have done an adult film than for a woman to have done them. But I don’t really care. I don’t give a damn.” Rhett Buder once said it to Scarlett O’Hara. Now Traci Lords says it to the world.
Hollywood, look out!