Inside Seka - The Platinum Princess of Porn (31 page)

Before the Meese Commission. No, I am not describing the size of John Holmes.

With Kay Parker and Annette Haven in DC for the Meese Commission.

With my former co-star Richard Pacheco testifying before the Meese Commission.

In DC during the Meese hearings.

Testifying in front of the Meese Commission with Veronica Vera.

I look pretty classy when I’m testifying before Congress.

34.
Stripper

Times remained good. I was on a roll. Between the mail order business and working for
Club Magazine,
I was making a decent wage. But having stopped making films was beginning to hit me in the wallet.

In film, I started out making two, three, four hundred dollars a day. By the time I stopped, I was the highest paid actor in the business. I won’t say how much I commanded, but suffice it to say it was cushy.

I missed that dough. It was funny, though, that because of home video, almost no one knew I’d retired. If you asked people five or six years after I retired who was the biggest porn star in the world, many would still say it was me. Porn lives on a helluva long time. It’s got the half-life of uranium. And people don’t mind seeing the same film or the same scene over and over and over again. Yet, we had no residuals. My films could sell hundreds of millions of copies and be played billions and billions of times, yet I’d never see another red cent.

One day the phone rang. It was Chuck Traynor.

I knew Chuck. Everyone knew Chuck. Chuck was the guy who gave the world Linda Lovelace. He then married Marilyn Chambers, whom I got to know quite well later on, although I never actually worked with either Linda or Marilyn.

Most all the world knows
of
Chuck Traynor. Linda Lovelace wrote a scathing book about how Chuck brutalized her, forced her into porn, beat her, made her turn tricks, and literally held her prisoner. Is any of it true? I have no freaking idea. Truly, I do not. Within the industry, I heard rumors both ways, some claiming it was all gospel truth, and others claiming Linda’s tales were exaggerated beyond belief. And since I never saw any of it with my own eyes, I have no opinion whatsoever. When I got friendly with Marilyn, Chuck’s name came up but there were never any confessions similar to Linda’s, which doesn’t really mean anything one way or the other.

I did meet Linda once, although it was a surprise meeting for both of us. I was booked on a talk show — I believe it may have been The Richard Bey Show, though I could be mistaken. It was around 1988 and Linda had just written her book and was out promoting it. Me, I was simply making a TV appearance, or so I thought. I used to get calls all the time to appear, usually to discuss the adult industry. Some folks like Phil Donohue, Oprah Winfrey, and Larry King were quite kind, while others, like Morton Downey, Jr., had me on as a human punching bag. Either way, I usually got little to no prep, nor did I need it. I think pretty fast on my feet and it was never an issue of worrying they’d booked me to discuss astrophysics, though I could sure as hell discuss black holes and big bangs.

So there’s Linda Lovelace trash-talking Chuck, which was perfectly fine with me because no one really liked Chuck. But then she went after the entire industry and everyone in it, which would include me, which prompted me to fight back.

She was rambling on and on that she was forced to do everything she did on film and she had no idea what was going on, ever. I’ve heard this sort of stuff from a lot of people after they leave the business and it never fails to piss me off, particularly when I know it’s crap. I perked up and said, “If you had no idea what was going on, why did you ask Al Goldstein, the publisher of
Screw
magazine, to babysit your pets when you were filming?”

Linda snapped back, “If I knew you were going to be on this show, I wouldn’t have shown up.”

I can’t argue that I had, indeed, been sprung on her by surprise. Hell, no one told me Linda Lovelace was going to be on the same panel, either. They had us in different dressing rooms and we were even kept from each other in the green room. I suppose it was more to keep her off-balance than me, ‘cause I could care less. But I definitely struck a nerve. As it turns out, I was reaching deep into my memory for that Al Goldstein anecdote — so deep that I actually got it wrong! For which Linda should have been eternally grateful. I knew Al, and I knew he told me something about him and Linda and dogs. Seems when Linda disavowed the industry, Al found not one but two movies Linda did where she had sex with a dog. Geez! And here I was, turning down scenes with humans I didn’t like.

So Chuck Traynor calls me. By this time, he’s divorced from Marilyn Chambers as well and now, according to him, he’s married to some stripper named “Bo,” like Bo Derek. I don’t know Bo from Bo Diddley, but whatever. Traynor tells me I could make tons of money stripping. I blurted out a loud laugh. To me, strippers were dancers. I’m no dancer. I mean, I could dance at a wedding reception or a crowded nightclub, but I was not a skilled pole dancer.

Chuck kept pushing. More and more strip clubs were opening. Adult film stars were being asked to headline. It wouldn’t be like regular strip club action where I’d be working the pole with half a dozen other girls and hustling lap dances. It would be like a stage show and I would be the feature attraction. No, check that. He wanted me to be the opening act for his new wife, Bo.

Opening act?? Moi?? And again, who the fuck was “Bo”? I knew Chuck was a hustler and I realized he was trying to hustle me.

“Chuck, I never heard of any ‘Bo,’ and unless she’s the real Bo Derek, she ain’t headlining over me. You know and I know if I show up, everyone in the audience will have paid to see me, not some no-name.”

This went on and on and Chuck was persistent, even when I called him on his bullshit. He got down to talking numbers. I thought for a moment, and then came out with the most outrageous price I could conjure up. The point is, I really didn’t want to do this. I’m not a dancer, and even if I could learn how to do it, I didn’t know if I even wanted to. So I handled the negotiation as I did at the end of my film career. Since I didn’t really want to do it anymore, I asked for the sun, the moon, and the stars, expecting to be turned down.

Chuck said, “Okay.”

Shit. Now I had to do it. Off I went to beautiful Rochester, New York. I was goin’ on the road.

When I got to Rochester, I met Bo. She was stunning. She looked nothing like Bo Derek — she was a dark-haired beauty with a killer bod and was younger than me. I hated her. Ha! Worse yet, she could dance. Boy, could she dance! She really was a star-attraction-level dancer, but no one knew her yet. But they knew Seka and that’s what sold the tickets, just as I predicted.

Chuck booked me to be the featured performer-of-the-week at a number of venues and we drew big crowds, filling the house each show. They wanted six shows a day, but I demanded no more than four, as each set was about twenty minutes and it was grueling work.

I had steamer trunks full of costumes and gimmicks and I’d get enough bookings to be on the road for two to three months at a time. I had elaborate costumes made. There were huge capes with my name written out in my handwriting with bulbs that lit up. I had a top hat and tails that were mirrored to go with the songs. My tapes were also custom made to go with each of my outfits. The set would start out with
Singin’ in the Rain,
with my umbrella lit up and flashing underneath, which would lead right into
It’s Raining Men.
I also had flash paper that made sparks of fire for two seconds, along with a magic cane that expanded when you held it a certain way.

I began doing a comedy act before the show. I would come out unannounced, dressed as an old woman, sort of like a white Moms Mabley. Guys wouldn’t know it was me at first. I’d tell dirty jokes and stories, making fun of this slutty girl, Seka, they’d all paid to see. It was a riot. I swear, I was doing everything in my power to entertain them and distract them from noticing I couldn’t dance a lick. I could strut my stuff. I was a showman. I did everything I could think of to dazzle them with flash.

When I first started, it felt incredibly weird to take my clothes off on stage. The guys would hoot and holler and I felt very bashful and would almost want to crawl under the stage. Odd, I know. But it was so different from doing movies. On set, I would be around eight or ten people at most, all of whom I knew, some quite well. On stage, I didn’t know any of those people. And the people from my movie days wouldn’t clap and shout when I dropped my drawers.

It was kind of cool to work in these big, big places. They’d hold two or three hundred people, with a mob standing outside for the next show. After each set there would be a designated area cordoned off for guys to take pictures with me. There were times when they’d have to actually cut the line so I could get ready for the next show. After my performance, I’d go back and finish the pictures of those I didn’t have time for the first go-round, and there would already be new people coming. It was a really good feeling to know I had that many fans.