Inside Seka - The Platinum Princess of Porn (27 page)

After one of the depositions, Fred and Gary left and Mr. Shippers suddenly shot me a triumphant look. “This is a slam dunk. We have five out of five.”

I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but it still was far from over.

Mr. Shippers sent Fred’s lawyers a letter proving we had, in fact, proven the five counts. He wanted to know if they wanted to go to trial or settle out of court. I’d already invested a year and a half of my life and probably spent an easy $90,000. Back then that was a fortune, besides all the bookings I lost because of being so involved with this.

The first response we got back was they were willing to spend $2,000 to settle out of court and they wanted half the money in the escrow account. That was pretty stupid. Then they came back with another offer that was just as outrageous. By the time the third offer came I knew I had won, and knew it was in my best interest to settle rather than go through another long, drawn-out trial, which probably would have been another year. Plus, there was a lot of money in the escrow account.

They wanted to settle for $10,000. I would keep the business and all the cash in the account. At this point I felt I had been rode hard and put up wet. I was done. I took it.

I finally convinced myself I was satisfied, although deep down I wanted another five or ten pounds of flesh for what had been done to me. He had completely redone his house and driveway with the money from our business. But I felt like I had been stuck in mud this whole time. I didn’t want another year of anguish. I was content with my decision, and also vowed nobody would ever own part of me again. I could continue with my life; I had grown up once more.

The business’ name was changed to Pearl Productions, Ltd. I got the name from the late, great Janis Joplin and her first solo album,
Pearl.
As I started to piece my life back together, I heard through the grapevine that Fred and Gary were very sick. They were early AIDS cases. Nobody knew much about the disease at that time. They were in and out of the hospital with pneumonia. Both died within the year.

I can’t say I was happy Fred was dead. I knew and liked all his friends and family, and they suffered. Nobody should have to suffer that way. But I wouldn’t say it bothered me either. The visual I had in my head was of the house falling on the Wicked Witch of the West, with Dorothy — Dottie — Seka — me — watching all the Munchkins dancing around. “Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead… .”

Getting press for using RICO to get justice.

30.
A New Four-Letter Word

AIDS. Fred and Gary drove it home for me, but while they were some of the earliest cases I knew, talk of the disease was spreading like wildfire throughout the adult industry.

For those not old enough to be sexually active in the 1980s, let me take you back. Take what we know about AIDS today and imagine a time when we knew
nothing!
Absolutely nothing. In some cases less than nothing. Every day we were being pelted with new information, much of it untrue: It only happens to gay guys. You get it from toilet seats. You could get it from oral sex. You
couldn’t
get it from oral sex. Condoms protect against it. Condoms provide no protection at all. There were those saying the whole thing was a crock and it didn’t exist at all! Or that it was a massive conspiracy to kill gay people. You name it, we heard it, and by “we” I mean the adult industry. We probably heard most of it before anyone else because we had sex for a living. You’re damn right we were listening. Again though, the problem was, what do you listen
to?

We had always been into getting tested on a regular basis, but that was for the clap and herpes and things like that. We girls also kept up on pregnancy testing as well. But picture a time when there was no test for HIV or AIDS. That’s what I lived through.

Initially, it was called “the gay disease.” Did that give us all a sense of relief? No. The girls all did girl/girl scenes. Did “the gay disease” cover that, too? We didn’t know. We doubted it did, but nobody knew anything for sure.

Some of the guys were gay, believe it or not. A greater number were bi or else occasionally did “gay for pay” — straight guys who did gay porn when they needed the extra dough.

Gay guys in straight porn? Sure. Premature ejaculation is always a concern. If a gay guy can manage to get it up and keep it up, he is often a good bet to perform well. He’ll be on top of a girl, reading
Blueboy
magazine, bored out of his skull and lasting for hours. It works.

But once “the gay disease” came around, it was a witch hunt. Certain guys were shooed off sets and blacklisted. Some were gay or actively bi, while others were merely “suspected,” and that was enough to kill their careers.

Then we had our first fatalities. Some guys we swore were straight as an arrow passed away. Then some girls. Things were getting freaky. Along with these events were the ever-changing theories from the news and medical community. Everyone could get it. Or maybe we all already had it and the entire world was coming to an end. It was madness.

Some folks slept right through the whole thing. Mr. and Mrs. America, married and monogamous for decades, tended not to worry as much. But us? We were on the front lines, baby. An enraged God was gonna smite us all for our perversions. We was all gonna die.

John Holmes’ death hit me particularly hard. John and I did so many scenes together. We were paired together as often as Tracy and Hepburn. But John’s death left as many questions as answers. We all knew he did drugs, but which ones? When? How much? Did he use needles? Most of us didn’t think he did. I never partied with any of the other actors in the industry, so as well as I knew John, a lot of those tales were just secondhand stories to me. I didn’t know what to believe. And he went so fast. That was the part that freaked me out the most. It made me wonder — and to a degree it still makes me wonder — if it was even AIDS at all. I’m not saying AIDS doesn’t exist, but for most people the incubation period is fairly long and the painful slide to nothingness horrifically drawn out. John seemed to go in a matter of weeks. How was that so?

But worst for me was realizing how often I’d been with John. And some of the others who died — the girls, too. Now if someone screened a movie I was in and I saw John or one of the others, it was like watching a horror film, like I was watching the prediction of my own death.

I started turning away jobs. A lot of us did. Others, on the other hand, were in denial. There was so much misinformation that if you were the eternal optimist, you could con yourself into blocking out the bad news and clinging somehow to the reports that the whole thing wasn’t as bad as it seemed and it only happened to “other kinds of people.” Some thought since we all knew each other so well, we were in a protective little bubble. But most of us had been with at least one person from the business who had it, so how was that theory supposed to make any sense? There were also the “death wish” people who claimed they simply didn’t give a shit; life was a crapshoot anyway and any of us could walk outside and get hit by a drunk driver on the way to the corner store.

Me? I wanted to live. The idea of condoms protecting you from infection started to gain more and more traction. But the powers that be who ran the industry tried a few films with guys wearing condoms and the feedback wasn’t positive. By and large, guys didn’t like to wear those — guys in the audience, I mean. After the Pill came out, every girl was on it and condoms gathered dust on pharmacy shelves. Most guys in mainstream America got used to going bareback and they liked it. Watching pornos with woodsmen in rubbers was a buzzkill for them. Most non-industry folks were less paranoid and scared than we were, so they really didn’t want to start using them.

Another strange thing was that as more people became aware of AIDS, the more XXX product they wanted. Masturbation went up! No one ever got AIDS from jerking off, so bring on the porno and have yourself a safe sex party! The disease was cutting into the amount of new product being produced since it was cutting into the acting pool, but all our old stuff was being converted to Beta and VHS and people were watching it at home. In the eighties, everyone went out and bought a home video system. Gone were the red carpet premieres. Adult movie theaters began closing. Who wanted to be harassed by local cops for jerking it in a public theater when you could watch our stuff in the privacy of your own home? Of course, we actors saw none of the new profits. We got paid to work on that film one, two, three, four years ago, and the fact that now it was playing in half the bedrooms in America didn’t make us one thin dime. Even when we tried negotiating for a piece of “the back end” — a percentage of the video sales — we never saw a penny. Creative accounting. None of us had the cash to take those guys to court to prove we were owed more money, so our only option was to keep working or get a job waxing cars.

With the advent of home video, the industry expanded. More new girls and guys came in. When people like me and others started turning down jobs, even more came in. Those of us who took a tiny bit of false comfort in the fact we were a little community of actors who all knew each other and who we’d all been with, had that thrown out the window. We’d show up on set and we knew no one — it was all newbies. Fresh meat. People who could have been carrying any damn disease.

But I was still Seka. I was still a star. It wasn’t an ego thing; it was a business thing, period. Like any other company in America, I knew how my stock was doing on the market.

I got more demanding. If I was going to risk my life, I was damn sure going to die rich. I haggled with people like crazy. I was asking for fees no other porn actor had ever asked for before. And I was getting it. As soon as I’d get it, I’d ask for even more the next time.

But I was playing with fire and I knew it. Not only did I start asking for ridiculously high fees, I coupled that with demands for my personal choice of co-stars. That worked pretty well, since the people I wanted were also big names who had been on the scene a while and had nice-sized followings as well.

But then I took it too far — or exactly as far as I should have, depending upon how you look at it. Not only did I jack up my fee and demand final casting, I also insisted everyone wear condoms. It was a Mexican standoff. The industry and I had a gun on one another and someone was going to blink. I’d been winning these battles for a while now, but it was finally time for the ol’ gunslinger to get it right in the heart.

They turned me down. I’d set the bar too high. But you only do that if you know you can afford it. Affording it had nothing to do with money in the bank, though, at least for me. Affording it meant I was sick and tired of playing Russian Roulette. I wasn’t going to budge on the condom issue, which was now even more important to me than the money and the casting. And if I didn’t get my way, I was more than happy to walk away from it all.

When they finally said no, I was still on the top of the porn world. I was still box office gold. But if it didn’t matter to them, it didn’t matter to me. I’d walked off jobs before and now I was ready to do it again. I never knew where I was going when I did it in my early days, and I had no idea where I was heading now. But it didn’t matter. I was getting out alive.

Some of my
Club Magazine
shots from the 1980’s, courtesy of photographer extraordinaire Suze Randell.