13 originals. Previously on Once Upon a Time in the Valley, we gave our three best possible answers to the question that in some ways is the engine driving this entire story, this entire podcast. Who ratted out Tracy answer theory number one, Tracy ratted out herself to save herself. She'd made a deal with the distribution company called VIP, run by Honey Webber and Sy Adler, Honey Webber and Sy Adler. They were heavy duty people.

I met with her at her home and it was kind of a weird experience because she had these two guys, they're lounging around. They looked like they were goons and she had this big snarly dog.

There was this background vibe of don't mess with us, we're bad fuckers.

But what if the rumors are true and that Tracy did those bad fuckers a bad turn by lying to them, telling them that she and Stewart DOWL, her boyfriend and business partner, had gone to France to shoot Tracy, I love you and then were too high to actually make it to set.

They didn't buy the Coke story. I imagine they threatened her pretty good. You know, you turned that movie over to us. So we're going to come after, you know, Tracy went public with her age to put the partners under too much scrutiny to carry out their threats. This was after the whole age thing came down. And of course, once the light of the law shined on the whole thing, well, the VIP people scurried away like cockroaches.

When you turn on a light answer, theory number two, Tracy ratted out herself to save herself, but for a different reason. What if, while flying back from France just after her 18th birthday, Tracy was caught carrying a false passport, an illegal narcotics? You're talking about an 18 year old girl. OK, who's using and this girl was busted. OK, she did certain things, she manipulated, she had fake I.D. that is like felony, felony, felony, felony.

You're going to prison for the rest of your life unless you do say or be whatever we want from you right now about the people that you're involved with.

OK, broke. She broke. It's a kid. She chose herself the way I see it in that moment over anybody else. In my personal opinion, in my experience, if it would have been those pornographers sitting out the other side of the coin, then they would have said, give up that girl or we're going to take you. I don't believe any one of us would not have been at risk for being thrown under the bus. OK, answer slash theory number three.

Nobody ratted out Tracy because there was no need to rat out Tracy because the FBI already knew about Tracy, the FBI, which was handling the Tracy Lawrence case, essentially the head of the FBI was Attorney General Meese. I suppose it could be a total coincidence and just know what was going on with the Tracy Lawrence case. Didn't know anything about this commission report, but I don't believe in coincidences. I certainly didn't believe there. So I assume that they were linked and that the two were handled in some respect to capitalize on the maximum serendipity of the two events.

And serendipity may be unfair because in that case, the commission folks, I mean, the attorney general had the ability to control the timing of that. I'm Lilliana, like in this is Once Upon a Time in the Valley featuring Ashley West.

OK, Ashley, I want to start this episode where we started the previous episode with Troy, the count of the last time he saw Tracy at her apartment in Redondo Beach, July 1986, two days before the FBI broke down her door. You're regressing, Lilly. I know, but I can't seem to move on. I find the scene so haunting. You have Tracy bent over that mirror, piled high with cocaine, maybe not even recognizing her own reflection.

What I wonder is, did she like what she saw? No. And yes, I think she's divided of two minds. That seems clear from how she acts with Troy. It's look what I've become. But it's also look what I've become so true in between acting frightened, freaked out and begging him not to leave her.

She's showing him her porn videos. And it's the last line of Troy's story that really gets to me. He's driving back to Oklahoma, to his self exile, and he's weeping and realizing she's lost to him. And he says, I didn't know who this person was anymore. Her name was Tracy now and Tracy.

She'll stay briefly. At the start of her career, she reverts to Noah Kuzma but only briefly. Here she is explaining why she stuck with Tracy. I thought, OK, I want to be taken seriously, so I'm going to want to go back and use my real name and then I had the double edged sword of everyone saying, well, you're lying about who you are.

She doesn't want to be accused of misrepresenting herself a valid reason, even a commendable reason. But I suspect there's also another one.

I don't really listen to this exchange between Tracy and Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in 1995. The quality of the audio is poor.

So we're going to keep this short and painless, humiliating for you. Jay asks Tracy what her real name is. Her reply.

Hello, Nora. Note the grudging tone of Jane and tells her it's a nice name.

And she says, Do you think.

Come on. Do I look like Nora Koosman to you? She's kidding when she says that we're kidding on the square. I think Nora Kuzma and Born Loser seem to be to her synonymous terms. Mom and dad, a couple of nobodies raised in semi squalor, getting jerked off on and knocked up, chased out of high school by mean boy bullies.

I get the feeling that that's her view of who Nora Kuzma is.

Tracy Lawrence, on the other hand is a queen, a queen and hell maybe, but a queen nonetheless. One who rules over all she sees and takes shit from exactly nobody. And if Traci Lords has fallen so far, Tracy Lawrence has also risen so high. So the full self has become realer than the real. Yeah, jettisoning your origins and starting fresh is practically a birthright in this country. It's the pursuit of happiness, part of the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, one of our inalienable rights.

And that's the right she's exercising here.

Tracy Lawrence is part of the grand American tradition of auto. Genesis is following in the footsteps of other sublime self creations like Andrew Warhola, like Jay Gatsby, like Norma Jean Baker, like Norma Jean Baker. Most of all, Norma Jean Baker, who became Marilyn Monroe, but who started out as a nude model, same as Tracy. Tracy is Marilyn 2.0 next generation Marilyn? Hey, everyone, we wanted to take a minute to remind you that taking care of your mental health is a necessity, but it shouldn't break the bank.

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Tracy and Tom's anecdote is the big winner. She's beat the adult industry every which way, legally, financially, fame wise, in terms of public opinion and sympathy. Plus, she's poised on the brink of doing what couldn't be done crossing from the valley to Hollywood. NBC's making a movie of her life, tentative title Out of the Blue, the Traci Lorde story. And she's about to appear in a John Waters movie and marry into the John Waters family.

It's been said that a happy ending is a matter of choosing where to stop your story, which is why we stopped our story in part two right there, to give it a happy ending, to give it Tracy's idea of a happy ending. Right. An important distinction, because it's definitely not ours to us.

To me and Ashley Tracy is a porn star, which means a combination movie star, rock star, top athlete and sexual outlaw, an icon of libido and danger and rebellion.

So a porn star becoming part of the Hollywood establishment is not in our book a happy ending make.

What's more, we believe that Hollywood in 1986, at the time Tracey was knocking on its door, pleading to be let in with dead. And it was dead in large part because of the porn industry, which, thanks to VHS, was out of the shadows. In the small time porn showed Hollywood up, called Hollywood's Bluff. It did.

The thrill of the movies has always been the thrill of the illicit of seeing something you aren't supposed to see. For decades, Hollywood had dangled in front of our shining eyes the promise that we, the audience, were actually going to get our voyeuristic heart's desire, unfettered access to the keyhole. Finally, we'd be allowed to watch beautiful people doing it, only to break the promise again and again in movie after movie. And yet suckers that we were.

We fell for it every time we knew that we were never going to get what we wanted, that we were just going to get cocktail's to death. Yet we couldn't walk away because we were hooked on the hope. Our longing made us vulnerable. Only now that porn was around, we didn't have to put up with that nonsense. Porn kept its word. Porn came across, didn't feel a headache at the end of the night in movies which used to be young, dangerous, wild, free, suddenly weren't in comparison with porn.

They were middle aged, fuddy duddy, restrained Pathé and movies the stars.

At any rate, Newitt bowed down to porn stars in private, his adult star, Kelly Nichols'. The interesting thing about Hollywood was when the stars met porn stars, that was their star, that's what they were like, Oh, you're a porn star.

Oh, my God. Let me have their autograph. So that was their get off was that and that. And that's why you would have porn stars at a party and you would brag about it.

It's both shocking and shocking. The obvious porn stars are movie stars, movie stars. Of course they are, because movie stars secretly want to be porn stars. Scratch that because movie stars secretly are porn stars. Think about it practically every time a movie stars phone is hacked, outcome the erotic selfies. Why would Jennifer Lawrence send a nude photo of herself or Scarlett Johansson or Kirsten Dunst? Why did Amanda Seyfried take a picture of herself or allow a picture of her to be taken performing a sex act on her boyfriend?

These women aren't stupid or naive. They don't fail to understand the risks. So the impulse must be irresistible. It's like that promise we were talking about a minute ago. They have to keep it, even if they only keep it covertly. Tracy, though, kept it overtly. She was a porn star, not in secret, which is why she can't then be a movie star. Once you've been explicit, you can't turn around to be complicit.

Once you've been brazen, you can't turn around and be coy.

No, it doesn't work that way. And besides, the ambition to be a movie star just seems so corny, so stale. That old Hollywood doodah. Lana Turner sipping soda pop at Schwab's drugstore, getting discovered by a talent scout. We've talked quite a bit about Tracy's timing, her uncannily good it was she enters the adult business at the moment, it's exploding because of VHS. She's the centerfold for the best selling penthouse issue of all time, courtesy of the Miss America scandal.

Her 18th birthday coincides almost precisely with the dropping of the misreport. And she leaves the adult business just as it's about to go down the toilet.

But at a certain point, her timing betrays her, becomes uncannily bad. Tracey publishes her memoir right before practically the exact instant before. Porn is not just normalized and commodified, but celebrated underneath it all about the evils of the porn industry when it deigns to talk about the porn industry at all.

Really, what it wants to talk about is making it in Hollywood hits bookstores in July 2003. A handful of months later, you get the one two punch of Paris Hilton's sex tape leaked on the Internet in November 2003 and Paris Hilton's reality show, The Simple Life, premiering on Fox in December 2003, which turns Paris into the most famous person in the world, only to be supplanted all about Eve style by her quick study of an understudy, Kim Kardashian, former arranger of her closet.

By 2007, Kim will have her own sex tape and reality show.

So our biggest stars are porn stars, the amateur sex tape, a sort of DIY casting couch.

And Kim wasn't supplanted until Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in June 2015 and became not just the most famous person in the world, but the ruler of it. Donald Trump is, of course, a reality star, has been since 2004 when The Apprentice debuted.

He has also, however, a kind of porn star, not only because he made a cameo fully clothed, mercifully, in the softcore Playboy video centerfold 2000, or because he did a scene off camera, mercifully with adult actress Stormy Daniels. But because of this, according to a 2013 story in New York magazine's The Cut by Vanessa Grigoriadis, Trump was wild for Paris Hilton's sex tape and for a reason other than the obvious, writes Grigoriadis. In 2003, when Paris Hilton's sex tape was leaked on the Internet, Donald wouldn't stop talking about it, saying Paris is laughing all the way to the bank.

She's got the last laugh.

She's marvelous. Ivanka cannot believe her father was not only idolizing an airhead heiress blowing a guy on Night Vision video, but encouraging her to follow Paris's lead, end quote. You got that right. According to proprietor's, Trump was advising Ivanka, his beloved eldest daughter, to make a sex tape. Trump is a moral idiot and maybe even an idiot idiot, but he's also a conceptual genius. And he can read the cultural temper of the time better than almost anybody.

And his advice to his daughter is as astute as it is repugnant. So just as crazy is the post. Marilyn, Marilyn, she's also the preparer's. And Kim, Paris and Kim, in other words, she faces both ways, embodies the manufactured stardom of old Hollywood, as well as the personal stardom enabled by social media. She's simultaneously out of the path and ahead of her time.

And then there's Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, A Cautionary Tale, which was published in August 2004. The cautionary tale in the title is Tongue in Cheek. Since the book is anything but what the book is, is a Horatio Alger. So is set in the porn world trajectory trajectories in. Yet she's climbing that ladder of success, one depraved act at a time, says Janetta Steve Stevenson, scene of wicked pictures when she first meets him.

I want to be the biggest porn star ever and by God, she makes it happen. Jenna isn't ashamed of her porn identity. No, she revels in it. At least she did then. She has in recent years become anti porn. And her memoir was everywhere in 2004, a major cultural moment, turning her into a mainstream hit and the most improbable of role models. This is adult actress Veronica Hart.

Jenna Jamieson's book, I think, inspired tons of women to see it as a career choice, you know, and she was an exception, not the rule, but I think a lot of people were inspired to get into the business because of that.

Because of her, there was media hoopla surrounding the publication of underneath it all. Naturally, there was Tracy's is a juicy story, but the way she told it wasn't juicy. In fact, she deliberately squeezed the juice out of it. As we said in the very first episode of this podcast, she told it as a cautionary tale, a real cautionary tale, no tongue, no cheek, only the times themselves were incautious, which is, I think, why the book didn't really go anywhere.

The moment had come for an out and proud porn star or even for a half proud, half ashamed porn star, but once ablazing and fears that she emanated from within and from without nearly burning the business to the ground. And Tracey had missed it.

But back to Tracy's ambition to be a movie star, which she never quite fulfilled. It turns out the brink of crossing over was as near as she'd get.

There was no NBC TV movie with Christina Applegate or any other Asian. Cry-Baby was a commercial and financial flop, and it didn't lead to starring roles in big studio movies. Supposedly, she came close to Breathless Mahoney, Madonna's role in Dick Tracy to Jim McKenna, Sharon Stone throwing casino clothes in a Nikolo gets you a cup of coffee. I'm sure some of it is, as Trace's insisted that her porn career was held against her. She said this in an interview in 1996.

The thing is that I haven't been successful because of my past. I've been successful in spite of my past, but only some of it. The truth is on the mainstream screen, she's never made much of an impression. She's beautiful, no question. Beautiful face, beautiful refined features, beautiful figure, a cool blonde straight out of Hitchcock as far as her looks go. But her presence is oddly bland. She's a competent actress. She's certainly not a disgrace or embarrassing, yet she never catches fire, not like she apparently did on the porn screen.

Why? Why should that be? Why in Hollywood, where she just another pretty girl, what prevented her talent from translating other photographers?

Susan Randle has a theory. She was a better fucker than an actress. What do you think, Ashleigh, is it as simple as that, maybe or maybe Tracy felt it had to be as crude and simple as that, meaning it was one or the other for her to be a sex symbol or be a serious actor. And she made her choice.

Yeah, because there's a conspicuously muted quality to her sexuality in mainstream movies, even when the roll calls for sexiness. Here's cultural critic James Wolcott. They love to cast her in like deodorize where she was like the vixen, the ice baby, you know, the gal who led the guys to their doom. If it was it was interesting how when she wasn't doing sex on screen, Tracy really wasn't very sexy. I mean, in those later roles where she's in B movies, she's actually not very sexy.

She's very mannered. And what she's actually doing, regular lines of scenes with actors, she's much less interesting. And writer Pat Jordan, in his 1990 GQ profile of Tracy, written when she was only twenty one, described her as, quote, almost a. sexual and quote. I asked him what he meant by this. She wasn't sexy at all. Oh, she dressed it. You know, she dressed like Kasoulides Watts, but now she was.

That's the doctor with me at all.

This is the farthest gray imaginable from the descriptions of her we got from the adult industry. Tim Connolly saying she just smelled like sex and looked like sex. Christy Canyon saying anything at all about her. It's as if there was a switch inside Tracy. And when she moved to Hollywood, she flipped it to off. I think the fact that Tracy had porn and such contempt also helped her that she didn't care about it, that it disgusted her and made her disgusted with herself, gave her a wildness, a recklessness.

Viewers couldn't look away.

And in her memoir, Full of half truths and not quite half truths, there's a fundamental truth writing about her first porn sex scene, the one she claims in the paragraph before to have been tricked into filming.

She says, I had already given into a feeling I had never known during sex power, and with that power came pleasure. I was blind to everything around me and I wasn't acting for a camera. I was acting out. That's what porn did for me. It allowed me to release all the fury I'd felt my entire life. And that's what got me off. Freedom, peace, revenge, sex, power. I finally found a place to put my energies.

I was vengeful, even savage in sex scenes. I was nothing short of a sexual terrorist. You can feel the aggression coming off those words, the violence. They crackle with the electrical force of a bomb. And of course, they blow all the other words in the book away. In a previous episode, we spend a bit of time on hardcore punk rock, which, as we discussed, came out of SB and which, as we also discussed, was very much male dominated.

It was huge with the North Redondo Boys. And ever since I wondered if what Tracy did in the Valley wasn't the girl version of that. Yeah. Ashley, I think you might be on to something to different forms of hardcore action, obviously, but essentially the same. Both are a kind of performance art and both are what the French call Art Brut, meaning raw art, art that's outside the mainstream art that's outside the academic tradition, art that's beneath contempt and beyond the pale art that refuses to apologize or back down ever renegade art, desperado art, gutta art and short art you can't take home to mother.

So porn is through to trace his roots. In a way, porn is North Redondo and if porn is not Madondo that makes mainstream movies sell to it under safe, nice, respectable, snobby and small minded, a little bland and yet to be aspired to. And the fact that Tracey cared so much about making good in mainstream worked against her. I think her eagerness to please rendered her cowardly, castrated or and she's not a guy to override. She was faking it basically in the camera.

Could tell she was faking it, plain and simple. True features the often weird but always true stories of strange events and unforgettable moments. Each episode explores unusual, obscure, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy stories, stories that are so bizarre that you won't believe that the real. But they are because, yeah, they're true.

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We're giving Tracy a hard time for her mainstream career, but it's not like if we could jump in a time machine, go back to 1986, we would advise her to stay in porn. No, we definitely would not. There was a poignant moment in our interview with Paul Thomas, known as Pete Pete, who started out as a straight actor, was ripped by William Morris and played Peter in Norman Jouissance 1973. Musical drama Jesus Christ Superstar is as elevated a figure as exists in the adult industry.

His pity on his reputation in the actual business.

From the very beginning, I was the scum on the top of the pond, the king of fools. I was the best of a bad lot. That was a winning awards right and left all over the place. The fact that I had enough talent and wherewithal to be signed by the best agent in Hollywood in the actual business. I was a genius. Pete is a member of the Avon Hall of Fame and the X rated Critics Hall of Fame. Plus, a lot of industry people think he's the basis for the Burt Reynolds character in Boogie Nights.

And yet this is what he said to us in our interview again in that tell tale. Second hour. I would make these films like the missiles that were allotted as well. You know, and you sit down, so a couple of times I did it, I have some of my, you know, Harvard educated friends over to watch the movie. I tell people to watch the movie. I'd give them a copy of that of some of my other erudite films.

And I said, how do you like it? Oh, the angle was great. And this is like, you know, as a friend, a doctor, lawyer, an Indian chief, whatever, you know, how do you like that? Which is I ain't always. What do you mean? What about the story of Petey? Who gives a shit about the story?

We would be at parties, you know how you, the director, let's see what you've done, let's see you done pretty well here. This one best film. I'll watch it. A good anal. I'm a talented guy. It gets lost. The the energy goes down to the lower chakra people, they don't see that. It's just the angel was great. That's that's it.

His words are funny, yet there's pathos in them.

Clearly, porn has its limitations and they're severe.

So you can't blame Tracy for wanting to get out from under them.

You can't. This, too. We were premature in signing Hollywood's death certificate in 1986. Hollywood was dying, but not dead. In fact, in 1986, Hollywood was having a great year, maybe its last great year.

Jonathan Demme is Something Wild was released in 86, as was David Cronenberg's The Fly and Michael Mann's Manhunter and David Burns. Two stories and James Cameron's Aliens and Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective British and for TV. But still and the highest cinematic achievement of the entire decade, Blue Velvet came out in 1986. It was directed by David Lynch, who is, I would argue, a pornographic director. Paul Thomas definition is, I think, to narrow the best this country has ever produced and who was also, not coincidentally, made the best ever movie about Hollywood Mulholland Drive.

Understand porn and you understand Hollywood, understand Hollywood and you understand porn. And if Tracy hadn't forsworn porn, she wouldn't have been let into Hollywood at all. No way. Not a chance to. Byron understood this.

At that time, the world was not ready to accept an unrepentant porn star. She had to make up this this thing in order to get over the mainstream. You can say, no, I did. It was great. Blah, blah, blah. You know, I'm saying they didn't fit the narrative. Ginger Lynn also wanted mainstream only Ginger didn't forswear porn Anberlin, in her reference to wisdom, trying to convince Ginger that Ginger was not only wasting her time, but blowing an opportunity.

First, the opportunity.

A gentleman turned up at my house one day and he said, I own a club in Canada and I'm going to hire you in my club. And I said, Well, I don't dance, I'm not a dancer. And he said, You don't have to. We'll have our dancers work with you. And we all work out a show that works for everyone. I opened my first show to six hundred people and these people were pounding on the stage.

And when I used to come out on stage, they used to do this thing where they go, Amber, Amber, Amber, and they would pound the stage and they would get this whole momentum going, kind of like at a hockey game. After the show, we were looking for anything. So I went up into my dressing room and I grabbed every pair of underwear I could find. And we went down and we set up at a table and we would take a Polaroid picture and we would sell it.

We sold it to them for ten dollars and then they could buy my panties, which I would autograph put on and off right there in front of them and take the picture and the panties. And then they could buy that separately. And that's what started merchandising right there. I was making twenty five thousand dollars a week. We owned it. They feature down circuit because the people that taught me to go on stage and feature, they had this whole feature market where these beautiful girls would put on these elaborate shows in all these costumes, but they didn't have names.

And so I came in and had a draw because I had the name. So when I put the two dynamics together, it was a perfect storm.

So I came back from Canada going, oh, my God, everybody, there's a whole new industry out here. Ginger, though, didn't want to hear it ever again, my focus was not to own. The crown of the porn industry, my focus was to monetize and make money in all avenues that were available to me based on the fact that I was Anberlin know this character. This club owner, he wanted me and Ginger, and he booked me in Ginger and at the last minute Ginger called me up and said, I'm not going on the road.

You're going to have to go on your own or find somebody else, because I've decided I'm going into mainstream acting. My manager has told me that I need to distance myself from the adult or whatever, what is going on. And I was like, Ginger, do you really think they're going to give you an Oscar? You suck cock for a living.

For God's sake, girl, do you really think they're going to stand to trot you out on that stage? And she was like, I'm going to take my chance.

But Ginger didn't have a chance, did she? Just the illusion of one. Here's Ginger. My very first audition for a mainstream project was for a film called Beverly Hills Cop.

Her to the character was a waitress, and I worked on it for two weeks before I went to the audition. And I was really, really excited. And it's Tony Scott and I'm and it's Beverly Hills Cop. And I've worked so hard and I'm so excited. And the first thing that Tony says to me is, can we get a nude Polaroid? And the first thing I say to Tony is no. And he goes, well, how about a topless?

And I said, no, I'm rooting for the waitress. And and I go, why don't we just read?

Because now I'm like, I'm going to cry. I'm so close to, like, breaking down. So I'm just going to go into this character and be funny and do what I've rehearsed. And I read it. And if I can nail it, I work hard when I do stuff. And I know that I did a really good job. And when I get done, Tony says to me, we want you to do this like you want to fuck everybody that you've ever looked at.

That's when the tears came and that's when I walked out. And that was my first Hollywood audition.

So Hollywood behind closed doors is also the exploitation business. But worse, I would argue, because the exploitation is behind closed doors. And if Ginger was subjected to that kind of treatment, you know, Tracy was, too. I'm sure she played some variation of that audition scene many times.

Oh, yeah. Without a doubt. Unlike Ginger, unlike Tracy, much like Amber, Christie Kenyon accepted the limitations of porn and operated within them. And it worked for her.

We know it worked for her because we interviewed her at her house in the hills. And that house is spectacular. Christie is so sunny, so bouncy, such a true blue California girl that it takes a while to see what a tough cookie she is. She even more than Amber is the realest of this group, the pragmatist, the one who takes the measure of things. Part of the reason that that story Ginger just told about Tony Scott is so painful to listen to is because Ginger, for all her moxie and spunk, is vulnerable.

She's open and impulsive. That's her nature. Christie is just as friendly, but she's not as vulnerable. She doesn't have romantic ideas about people in the world that offers her some protection. And she's ambitious, but not in the way that Tracy and Ginger are ambitious. They took it seriously. They both had aspirations of being a mainstream star after this, and they'll both say they wanted to be movie stars. I want to be I didn't care. To me, it was no big deal.

I was just there having fun making my six hundred dollars. I had no aspirations to do anything outside of making porn. I knew I couldn't act. I knew I was in the perfect pond. It was made for me. And here she is on why a mainstream crossover is next to impossible. Once you have done adult, and this is my opinion, I'd love for someone to prove me differently, but I personally think that once you have done adult, you've got a black mark over your name, there's a slur against you.

You were the girl that got naked and had sex on film. Is there anything wrong with it? No. Will mainstream think that there is most likely because no one's ever really broken through huge. A few have tried. Ginger Lynn, of course. Tracy Lords. Jenna Jamison. Sasha Grey. But they didn't make it huge, they did a few little some meaty roles, I'll give them that. They've done mainstream stuff, but no one's really broken through and been accepted.

They never became like whoever the stars are these days, they never became an Angelina Jolie or whoever the names are.

They were always like, oh, and it's starring that porn star. And you know what? That's I think just the way it goes.

Sadly, the adult figure of Tracy Zeira, who debatably achieved the most mainstream success, wasn't a performer. It was a director. Great dog, the man behind Tracy's most famous porno, New-wave Hookers. In the 90s, Greg reinvented himself as a director of music videos specializing in You Won't Believe This, the bubblegum princesses. Yes, Greg directed a Britney Spears video from the Bottom of My Broken Heart to Mandy Moore Videos So Real and Walk Me Home, as well as a video for Leslie Carter, younger sister of Backstreet Boy Nick Carter.

Leslie's song was called Like, Wow. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that Britney Spears, a superstar at 16 because of the song Baby One More Time, and it's video featuring her in a schoolgirl outfit, pigtails and thigh highs is a Traci Lords who slipped past the censors and underage porn star masquerading as a teen pop star. A quick duck helped her do it.

Chris is right, of course, about movie stardom, alluding Tracy. But let's give Tracy her due. She did become a working actress a serious achievement with recurring roles on cultural juggernaut shows like Married with Children Roseanne and Melrose Place, supporting roles in major motion picture type movies like Blade and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Her career has been a success, if not an outand out triumph. That she accomplished as much as she did is a testament to her iron will.

In a 1996 interview, she said this, and I'm very proud of the fact that I put it behind me that I could be eighteen years old and say, No, I'm not a bimbo, no, no one. And no, I don't buy that I'm an outcast or a loser for the rest of my life because of something I did when I was a kid.

Good for her. I mean that sincerely. And while her first marriage to Brooke Yaeger, John Waters godson fizzled out after a few years, her second marriage to steelworker Jeff Gruenwald, a union man like a dad like Troy, has endured. Tracy and Jeff even have a child, a son who appeared with Tracy and Jeff on season four of Celebrity Wife Swap. Tracy swapped with Jackie. Hurry in case you're curious.

OK, so we're going to end part three, not as we ended part two with happily ever after, since there's no such thing but with ambiguously everafter sense. Hey, that's life and how it goes once again. Kristy Kanyon. We were all friends with Johnny Ramone in the 90s and he was married, never kissed him nothing. And he loved the 80s girls. He loved Ginger and Tracy and me. And he would come and see me at strip clubs.

And he said once, yeah, Linda, my wife and I know Tracy. And once I said to her, Oh, I love Kristy Kanyon. And she looked at him, he said, Kristy, it was the weirdest thing. She looked at him and said, who? And he said, Christy Kanyon. I don't know who that is. And he said, Kristie, it dawned on me she obviously knew who you were, but she had to go again with that whole in denial.

I was on drugs and I thought, wow, bitch, you know, how could you not?

But in again, it was that whole, you know, preserving herself. And woe is me. I was the victim. But Tracy, I know, you know, was because in the late 80s when I was working for my dad, everything she had come out there. I was at the Beverly Center and I saw her. I mean, I'm going back to like nineteen eighty seven. And I was like, Tracy, and she didn't turn. I was like Nora Shinton.

I was like, whatever other name was Christine doesn't. And finally she turned around. I'm like and she and we hope like she knew who I was at the fucking mall. So I know, you know, when Johnny Ramone asked you. I don't remember much, it was very short, like a snippet of my memory, and she was buying a dress for an occasion.

She was going to and I don't remember what and I remember her saying something like, yeah, it used to be like one sex scene and I could buy this dress, meaning like she had to work a lot now to pay for that one dress.

And I don't remember how it went, but I remember we're laughing about the business and then I have never seen her since. And it was fun seeing her and she was adorable, you know, and again, I have no feelings, you know, ill feelings that she lied about everything didn't hurt me. But but I remember just like thinking I remember seeing you at the mall and you were cute and we were kind of laughing about it. Do you know what I mean?

It's a lovely moment that you share no amnesia, no ill will or rancor. They've both survived a brutal industry and their own wild years and with their spirits and senses of humor intact. And how great and maybe no more needs to be said on the subject. Well, maybe just a little more. Yeah, maybe just a little next time on the epilogue episode of Once Upon a Time in the Valley. As it turns out, underneath it all is Tracy's second memoir.

There's a first it's from the late 80s and it's called Out of the Blue The Traci Lords story, the same title, as you might recall, as the TV movie of her life NBC was supposed to make out of the blue was, as far as we know, never written, but a detailed proposal for Out of the Blue was written. And it was sent to us last week by a listener of this podcast who's been holding on to it for some 30 odd years.

I was obviously extremely keen when we got our hands on that. Never before heard twice the interview from 1985, the one we played in Episode 10 because it gave us porn. Evan Tracey. It allowed us to hear what she sounded like, how she was thinking, what she was thinking, the plan she was making during her adult career.

And of course, we already knew what established Hollywood Evan Tracey sounded like, because underneath it all, excuse me if I sound overexcited here, but this proposal is to me the missing piece. It's Tracey. Just after she left the industry, when the experience was still fresh, when her emotions were still raw and she had a co-writer on it. Typically, we would sit on the couch in the living room, so we would sit there under the skylight and talk and talk and talk.

I would ask questions. She would answer them. She'd go off on long, which sometimes her voice would break issue, which I don't really play with. You just get tears in her eyes. She found herself wondering in a world where she was one day she would have sex with three men, the next day with a woman, and then there'd be a masturbation scene. And I love women who are like men. What am I doing? Who am I?

And is gradually getting darker and darker and darker. And finally, when I had to turn later, that was which usually left.

Let's try to fit that missing piece into our almost completed puzzle. This has been a presentation of C 13 originals, a division of Caden's 13 executive produced by Chris Corcoran and me, Anderlecht, directed by Zach Levitt, created and written by me, produced by Ashley West, edited and mastered by Chris Bazil, Bill Schulz, Harry Kraul and Ian Mott. Theme Music and Original Score by Joe Goodman. Production Engineering Incoordination by Sean Cherry and Terence Mallon. Bowen Field Recording by Rich Ferner Artwork Marketing and PR by Kurt Courtney, Josephine and Frances and Hilary.

Chef Once upon a Time in the Valley is hosted by me and Ashley W. Thanks for listening.