The NY Times has become one of those pimp news sites that
wants you to subscribe just to breathe air. So I'll give you the
non-embellished Cliff Notes of a windy piece Jennifer Schuessler just did on
Candida Royalle.
Harvard’s Schlesinger Library is the nation’s leading
repository for women’s history, but in its basement vaults, carefully preserved
in a box, you can also find a rather different artifact: a costume from the
1978 porn comedy “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls.”
The movie, starring John C. Holmes as a pimp who oversees a
prostitution ring masquerading as a pizza delivery service, was history-making
as one of the earliest examples of porn with pepperoni. But the costume is at
the Schlesinger because of Candida Royalle.
Royalle, who died in 2015, was a porn star from the 1970s
golden age who moved to the other side of the camera, producing feminist
erotica that focused on female fantasies, and female audiences.
During the sex wars of the 1980s, Royalle faced off against
anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and in the
1990s, she became a godmother to sex-positive feminists.
Today, Royalle’s name may ring few bells. But her voluminous
archive is now housed at Harvard, with a trove of diaries, letters,
photographs, scrapbooks, videos and memorabilia.
Jane Kamensky, the historian, spearheaded the acquisition of
Royalle’s papers. In the new biography “Candida Royalle and the Sexual
Revolution: A History From Below,” Kamensky writes:
“She is way too critical and self-critical for many of the
sex-positive feminists. And she absolutely does not fit into an
anti-pornography box.”
Royalle’s story, Kamensky said, “shows us that we have the
wrong boxes.”
[Kamensky is a leading scholar of the American Revolution
who recently left Harvard to become president of Thomas Jefferson’s
Monticello.]
In the 1990s, as porn studies swept some corners of the
humanities, Royalle made appearances on college campuses, marveling at her
climb “from slut-drug addict to politically correct successful entrepreneur
spokeswoman."
Two months later, Kamensky was passing out business cards at
Royalle’s memorial in New York, where hundreds of guests paid tribute and
snacked on cherry tomatoes from her garden.
Royalle’s executor was Veronica Vera, a Wall Street trader
turned journalist who, since 1989, has run a downtown Manhattan outfit called
Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls.
She had become close with Royalle in 1983, after a baby
shower where she and a group of other women in the sex industry, including
Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Hart and Gloria Leonard, shut down the party dancing
together to “West Side Story.”
They started meeting regularly as Club 90, sometimes
described as the first porn star support group, which also staged self-aware
performances. When Royalle fell ill with ovarian cancer, they rallied to tend
her and her legacy.
When the Schlesinger came calling, Vera asked why the
library wanted the archive.
“That was very meaningful to me,” Vera said. “For so long,
it’s always the anti-porns that get quoted and the people that actually work in
the industry are left out.”
The Royalle papers have become an anchor for additional
sex-positive acquisitions, like the archives of Club 90’s other founding
members.
“You would take stuff out of a box and glitter would fall
all over,” Kamensky recalled. “This was not the papers of Betty Friedan.”
There was no loose glitter and no pizza, saucy or otherwise.
But there was a mannequin in a staff jacket from High Society, the pornographic
magazine for which Royalle was a columnist in the 1980s, and a trophy for
“Hottest Group Sex Scene.”
The archive includes journals she kept nearly continuously
for more than 40 years.
Born Candice Vadala in 1950, Royalle came from a Catholic
working-class family on Long Island. Her father, Louis, was a professional jazz
drummer who was given to rages. When Candice was 2, her mother left the family.
Candice never saw her again.
Her small red leatherette diary is full of entries about
girlish crushes and family fights. In an entry from September 1962, she
describes a sexual assault in a park near the family apartment.
“I had my liatard on thank God!” she wrote, misspelling
“leotard.” “It’s horrid riding in a police car!”
Candice and her sister were also preyed on by their father,
who exposed himself to them and demanded “lover” kisses. He read their diaries,
sometimes adding lewd comments and propositions — some still visible, Kamensky
notes, despite his effort to erase them.
Writing during her final illness, Royalle wondered if her
journals and photographs would “end up in junk stores & flea markets,”
where strangers would “paw at my memories without even knowing my name.”
As a girl, Royalle studied ballet and dreamed of being a
“famous dancer.” In 1972, after leaving the City College of New York, she went
to San Francisco, where she worked odd jobs and performed with troupes like the
Angels of Light.
Royalle — a name she started using in 1974 — records her
desire to make it as an artist. She dabbled in escorting and nude modeling to
pay the bills, and shot a few loops — short, blunt films that played on repeat
in X-rated arcades.
In 1975, she scored a part in “The Heartbreak of Psoriasis,”
a musical starring Divine, which she hoped would be her big break. It closed
after three performances. In her diary, she declared herself “a failure once
& for all.”
Royalle’s years in Los Angeles, where she moved in 1976
hoping to break into “real” acting, featured a brief appearance in an orgy
scene in Blake Edwards’s “10,” where she was credited as “third female sex
performer.” But mostly she made porn, ultimately appearing in nearly 50 films.
In 1984, Royalle and her new husband, the son of a Swedish
pornography producer, moved to New York where she and Laura Niemi founded Femme
Productions, with the goal of making woman-centered films intended for couples.
The venture put Royalle in collision with the rising
anti-porn feminists, who had allied with conservative politicians.
But the company struggled financially, while the mainstream
industry became, Royalle lamented, “a trash heap of over-the-top extremities of
the most violating acts.”
Kamensky quotes Royalle’s bitter frustration at Jenna
Jameson, whose 2004 tell-all, “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” reportedly sold
150,000 copies in one month.
A few years later, Royalle made notes for a memoir called
“Sexualized No More: My Journey In and Out of the Porn Business.”
“No publisher,” Kamensky writes, “wanted that book.”
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