13 originals. Previously on Once Upon a Time in the Valley, we took our leave of the Valley and Traci Lords went back to Redondo Beach and Tracy Lawrence when she wasn't yet, Traci Lords was still Nora Kuzma. We watched Nora transition from Midwestern bumpkin to so Cal Beach Bunny.

I saw her on the screen on the road. Her sister was there and then two other girls, kind of similar bathing suits like the French cohabitees. You just come out or whatever, but she was just the way better, like she just switched from being out here for whatever. She wasn't a great human being. And I was like, oh, five.

She's a California girl now and she loves those California boys. She was definitely game down for the crime, for whatever, you know. She was definitely sexual. Make no mistake. I mean, that part was definitely there. I mean, she had no problem with people being in the same room either. Redondo Beach is paradise for Norra. The paradise isn't perfect. There's her mother's boyfriend and her alleged molester, the man she calls Roger Hayes in her memoir.

And then there's the fact that she's in paradise.

It's still somehow on the outside the south, Redondo rich girls couldn't upscale Nora's demeanor and beauty, but she couldn't compete with them because of money and status.

I Lilliana, like and this is Once Upon a Time in the Valley featuring Ashley West. We're going to start this episode by explaining the title Marion Davies Love Button. It's a reference to the film Citizen Kane about Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper tycoon based on William Randolph Hearst. In the opening scene, Kane collapses Rosebud the word on his dying lips. Thompson, a reporter, believes it's the clue that will solve the mystery of the great man's personality.

And he spends the rest of the movie trying to find out what it means. He doesn't. But in the final frame, the audience does. Rosebud is Queensland, a symbol of lost childhood innocence? According to Hollywood lore, Rosebud is also a dirty inside joke, a pornographic inside joke. It was her pet name for the clitoris of his mistress, Marion Davies and Herman Mankiewicz. Kane screenwriter, knew this because he was a frequent guest of the couple and Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

Where are we going with all this, you might reasonably ask? Well, you remember Dean Weatherley, don't you know his memoir? Underneath it all, Dean is known as callow high school boyfriend, the one who heartlessly dumped so when she becomes pregnant with his child, then leaves a high and dry as far as paying for the abortion is concerned. Dean Weatherley, real name, Troy Madali is, we believe, the rosebud of this story. He breaks it open, breaks Nora and Tracy open.

Troy is two years ahead of Nora at Redondo Union High, and it's there that he first spots her. Here's try. In the hallway one day, I saw this most beautiful woman in the world had ever seen before. She was just drop your jaw and she had a smile, is infectious smile and just in the beautiful green eyes. And her smile is the way that she her approach on life. He was just so happy. Always bubbly, always fun, always full of laughter, like nothing ever got her down.

She was always upbeat. She was kind of reserved. If she didn't know you at first and she would like we went out in public like a place like you'd always, like, stay real close to me and hold my hand.

This sounds real, this sounds like love. Yeah, I think it is. She was very special. She didn't like her clothing, like she didn't wear revealing clothing. She didn't like guys like hooting and hollering at her all the time. Their beauty is really within and always has been. I saw her spirit is amazing. They just being around her, you can just feel it. And luckily for me, I realized that I had like just one in a bazillion is kind of weird that I knew that at that time.

This woman is like way to any woman I will ever, ever meet in my life. I agree with her.

And Norah and Troy are a real couple, like they aren't sneaking around what she was doing with my Pacino. And it isn't some casual arrangement like it was with Ricksha, their together boyfriend and girlfriend. Here's Troy on how it was between them. We didn't have jealousy between us like we would just who we were and we were just going through life and just having the most fun we fucking could because we both come from a bad, broken household like, you know, mom and dad.

They're like all the time, you know, this is like we found each other and and we just clicked and. That's just really hard to find and a lot of that is because we were a lot alike, were very hard workers and and we end up like our parents or whatever. You know, I'm sure you don't end up like your mother. I'm sure she wanted her own career and be somebody and do something, you know, like watch out world.

Here's try on how they spend their weekends, we'd ride from her house in Redondo all the way down to the beach with about three miles, and then we would skate all day long. She would be roller skating. I skateboard alongside her and then back in the day she would get tired. I put her on my handlebars and then we got like the pool noodles that form and we put on a handlebars so she could just sit up there like a perched, you know, just lean back into my shoulders everywhere we went, hooting, hollering, whistling all day like this constantly.

I mean, she would literally cause car accidents. I see cars, like forgetting to look ahead of them and just slamming the president back on the Pacific Coast Highway, more than one time just staring at her. She was so beautiful and just gorgeous.

Here's Troy on how they spend their weekdays.

I would go to her house, pick her up and take her to school. After school. We go to the beach together at nighttime to go to play on the sand and look at the stars and go swimming in the ocean late at night. Sometimes she would sleep at my house. It was just me and her inseparable.

Their inseparability is something friends tease them about.

Her nickname was Scooby and Shaggy. We were always, always together before one of us, the other wasn't far behind. Ricksha certainly notices the Scooby Shaggy act. I used to see them walking around the school holding hands the whole time. I'm not a big hand holder. That's not my angle at all. They never had a moment alone. Whenever there is in between classes or lunch or whatever, the two were together. And I always got looks lemons from them.

I walk by and they just look at me like stinko, you know.

And Troy seem old fashioned, also unjaded. Here's try some of the fondest memories I have over.

It would be Saturday morning. I would get up early as I could and bicycle over there in the rain when it didn't matter that we would sit there and watch cartoons with her sisters. They all had those pajamas with the little feet in the middle of the one pieces. Elanora up until all this happened, that's what we do on Saturday mornings.

Their sex scenes likewise unjaded.

We didn't have sex for like six months. At least she was not lying. Fuck me. Fuck me. Growing up, she was like the girl next door. Like, she wasn't like that. Right. And then we did have sex with, you know, teenage sex, you know, when I was asked to remember in the last episode, which you're talking about Noah's chameleon quality, maybe that's what's going on here, too, is more of a traditional guy.

So Noah's making herself into more of a traditional girl, or maybe she was a traditional girl, Long and Troy let her show that side of herself.

Either way, this is clearly an innocent and carefree time for her. And she doesn't have many of those. We know that what comes after is an innocent. Neither is what came before. I wondered about that. Did Noah ever bring up Steubenville with Troy? I asked him.

Actually, I guess Steubenville for her was not a good memory because she never talked about it. We never, ever talked about it. Ever. She didn't tell him about her father, about Ricky and the rape. None of that. And I'm assuming Troy is from the same neighborhood, is also not Redondo. Yeah, but that's not where he's from. From he's a transplant. Like Nora had been living in rural Northern California with his mom. And then halfway through his freshman year, he moved in with his dad in Redondo.

And maybe that's why he's a little different, because he isn't a hometown boy. Here's Mark Baxter, the ultimate hometown boy.

It was a total stud, but he was quiet, like our backyard fighting guys, you don't have to be muscular, so you just have to get into a lot of fights. If you don't get in a lot of ways and means, you don't know how to fight. There's a lot of like a kick my ass, but they just don't want to get involved with all that stuff because we're going to fight again and we're going to fight again. I'm going to show up to the house and I'm going to go to the backyard.

And a lot of us are like that. You know, backyard surfers, skater, backyard fighting type style people. Right? Troy wasn't that guy. Troy wasn't the backyard guy. Troy wasn't the skater. Troy wasn't the surfer. So because people get quiet, quiet and good and buff, they're like a sitting duck and a gators pond man at the keg parties, you know what I mean? With a bunch of hoodlums going in there. And then you go into the party with your friends and there's kind of Troy and his little buddies and a little beer or whatever.

We're flipping tables and crack and people that, you know. Mark at his North Redondo Cruz sound. Yeah, and maybe I was a little slow to cotton on to how rowdy I spent the day with Mark when he gave me that selfe tour and he was showing me Perry Park, a place where Redondo kids used to gather. And he mentioned something about mobbing dudes there, Mobeen dudes, that was the phrase mobbing dudes. And OK, as we discussed last episode s they had a code like the porn industry has a code, a jargon, a language outsiders aren't supposed to understand.

And I'm an outsider, obviously.

So at first I don't. But then I start to Mark keeps talking. And it dawned on me that mobbing a dude means initiating a guy into a gang. Drunks on scapes that's the name of the gang. Doesn't sound very scary. Yeah, I know, but it is. Drunks on skates comes out of what's called peckerwoods subculture, peckerwood being a slang term for poor, white and peckerwoods. Subculture comes out of the California penal system subculture, Folsom, San Quentin, all that and is an offshoot of the Aryan Brotherhood and white power movements.

Here's Mark again.

Got to remember, like all the black gang, three lights away from us, Crenshaw's only three lights away and when they came down, is shot and killed our friends and stuff like that. And we went out there with chase dudes down in the projects and stuff like that and smash them. Those were our enemies. Crips and Bloods were our enemies, except when we were dealing in guns and drugs in those areas. Like we hate you guys, but bring the guns in.

Yikes. So more than rowdy. Yeah. And a number of these guys did hard time. I figured that out during this exchange with Mike passino, we were talking about the halcyon days of Redondo Union High.

I mean, I deal with problems with the drugs and everything, you know, I mean, it was like what was the occasional party and a weekend party and became my life. At one point I have gone to prison. I kind of like, why did you go to prison the first time? Or the dot dot dot following his the first time or conveys, I think, the free swinging fatalism of the North Redondo boys better and more succinctly than any words I could come up with in any way.

The point is there are hard nosed bunch mocho almost to the point of having a death wish. So it's not difficult to understand why Nora would gravitate to try a country boy, sweet, gentle, a bit like the way she gravitated to Tom Bowen when she first got into the adult industry.

Yeah, that's a good comparison. Both guys would, I imagine, offer a bit of relief.

Troy and I spoke over the phone before we met in person, and after that call he sent me a photo of Naura, which I'm now going to describe.

It's late afternoon, judging from the slant of the sun, nor is wearing a harder time. And you can see the strap of her backpack on her right shoulder and her hair in a Farrah Fawcett flip. She's smiling so big that her eyes are shot. And the way her head's tilted makes it seem as if the person behind the camera has just made her laugh.

Yeah, I know the photo well. You sent it to me after Troy sent it to you.

So in the days following, I found myself constantly looking at it, sneaking looks at it when I was supposed to be doing other things. You have this radiantly pretty all-American girl, faith, and it's completely open without a single secret to conceal. Yet, of course, you know that this isn't true, that it's concealing many secrets, dark ones. And you also know where it's going to wind up under a thick coat of makeup on the box cover of a porno, which adds to the poignancy, I think.

Oh, yeah. The photos poignant and plaintive and evocative and haunting. And the moment I received it. Well, that's the moment that I started to get this intense feeling of identification with Nora, with Tracy. She became real to me in a way she wasn't before. And this sense of identification grew when trying to have lunch. He's a union guy, longshoreman works nights, which is why he can meet up during the day. We go to Kincaid's, a restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf in Redondo Beach.

He has an athletic build and a handsome face and an air of a shattered old school rough-hewn masculinity like a cowboy or like a character Marlon Brando might have played in the 50s has that kind of sensitive muscularity. Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, maybe. Basically he's the strong, silent type. But you talk to him about Nora for five minutes and you know that his experience with her crushed him and maybe crushes him still. And when he speaks of her, it's with a wounded directness that's affecting.

He's probably one of the few people who really knew her. I think so, because she's so hidden, so guarded. And it's from him that I begin to get a feel for her everyday life, for her hopes and dreams, tensions and frustrations. Here's Troy and Nora's mom, Patricia.

She was always busy, always looking out for her kids, always busy, always had to go somewhere, always had to go run, do something. I always been like that to parent person. Her mom was really not around as much as I think she could have been or still during those times. I think there was some resentment there and on her younger sisters, Rachel and Grace.

We hang out at her house a lot of the time because her mom was gone working a lot so she would take care of her sisters, they were like in elementary school. So she was there a lot like making them dinner and looking out for them. They loved Nora. They can do anything that she said. They love her to death.

And Honora wanting to be anyplace but home, she never had Prater's either. So what will we do with a girl in a shower and turn the shower on the toilet and just go in there and just sit there? We call it sitting in the rain and we just sit. The point is just to be alone, to have privacy.

She claimed to her own place in her own privacy, hiding out in the bathroom and turning on the shower to get a moment's peace. That story really puts you in her skin. You listen to it and you are sitting in the rain, too. You can physically feel how constrained her circumstances are, how trapped she must feel by the lack of space, by the lack of cash, or the lack of opportunity, by the obligation to look after her little sisters, by the love for her mother who try so hard but is just sort of helpless, hapless, hopeless.

So she seeks escape to the future. We talked about can we to evaluate how we could work to get a driver's license. We talked about what a cute baby we would have if we had a baby and we just thought we would be together forever, you know, and get to school and go to college. Whatever we can, we can we can lead to grow up.

Couldn't wait to grow up or to Mexico, but we're not like she would like to go somewhere, like a school somewhere.

Sometimes you just want to go somewhere far, far away. So me and her sister Lauren and her sister's boyfriend, we went down to Mexico for the weekend. We went down to Ensenada. We got horses and rode them on the beach.

Nora has her dreamy, poetic side, the side, the Krave, the last weekend below the border now and again. But there's also the hard headed, practical minded steelworker's daughter side. And that side is trying to figure out what the smart players on the lousy hand she's been dealt.

Did you ask Troy about what Mike Brasenose said, no, announcing to her eighth grade class that she wanted to be a Playboy centerfold?

Of course, I always wondered if that was a bid for attention or like a serious aspiration. Here's Troy's answer. She would ask me, like, do you think I'd be good enough for Playboy, which was kind of odd for a 15 year old to ask if she was good enough for Playboy, but what she should generally ask me, like maybe once a month, do you think I could really do Playboy article without even hesitating? Yeah, you could do it.

Like we get out of bed with no makeup on. You could do it. And she goes, Mom, would you mind if I if I did Playboy thinking she was going to do it when she was 18, I would be fucking thrilled if you did Playboy.

It wasn't, however, her only aspiration.

Playboy was the bottom of her goal. So she could have been a writer, a movie star like you just didn't stop there. It was that was just one little piece of it that for some reason she felt she was going to be famous or she knew she was going to be famous. It's just that kind of person where they saw their aura. You could just see that this person is not your normal person and that she's going to do something with her life, like really amazing to reach.

Even that bottom goal, though, is a tall task. If Nora wants to pose for Playboy, she needs a modeling portfolio and modeling portfolios cost money. She's not a South Redondo girl, so she can't just get it from her parents. She has to work for it, then she finds out she can't even do that. There was a hamburger place very close to her house and she got a job there and the owners were sexually harassing her. They get too close to her and brush up against her and stuff like that.

That made her really uncomfortable. She was crying, frustrated that, you know, because she liked working in another job, doing the same thing happened with employees and customers were just it was too much for her.

So Nora turns to her mother's ex. This acts as a man of many names. He's Roger Hayes to Nora in her memoir. He's something Rogers to a double agent, Jim s. And he's come over, Bob, to adult actor Tom Biron. Only the man of many names really just has one Rogers. Well done himself in his 80s and with the best memory of the loud cheers, try and Rogers, he didn't Redondo Beach, but he lived on the other side with TRW and all the information technology and satellite companies were, and we would go over to his house and hang out with him.

I don't know why, but they still talk him into it. He was a fan. I called my family friend.

What is no conceal from Troy to whom she actually does reveal herself? Rare for her, as we've discussed that Rogers is her molester.

Maybe she's ashamed about what happened with Rogers and doesn't want Troy to know. Or maybe she feels some complicated and fraught form of affection for Rogers and doesn't want Troy to hate him. Or maybe she believes Rogers can be useful to her and doesn't want Troy to buy her from seeing him try again. He was a nice guy, and actually I moved in with him, like after this all happened, like after high school and he was pretty smart, but he seemed a little off to me in some kind of creepy the outside kind of sleazy and perverted because he had the greasy hair, obviously hair.

And in general, I and he was like a hippie from the 70s. But I think he had her best intentions because wanted to help her. But I don't think it came out that way.

You can hear Troy's ambivalence about Rogers in his description. It's that mixture in Rogers that we talked about in the last episode. The niceness and the creepiness side by side and Troy seems is thrown by it, as Norah was. Troy says Rogers wants to help Nora. Help her with what exactly? And help her how? When Troy told that story about the last week in an incinerator with Nora and her sister Lorraine, he mentioned Lorraine's boyfriend. The boyfriend, who would later become Lorraine's husband, is named Jean.

I spoke to Dean and Facebook Messenger, Gene told me this, Naura try really hard to get work and they will not hire her. I recall lucky stars will not hire her because she was too pretty. According to the manager at that time, she got a fake I.D. that helped her with she figured a fake I.D. will help her get jobs soon. Underneath it all, she was telling the truth about Rogers, arranging for her to get that fake I.D., introducing her to the real Christy Nuzman.

The adult industry was so sure she'd swiped it. You heard Suze. Yeah. I wasn't able to talk to the real Christy Nuzman, but I was able to talk to the real Christine Desmond's mother, Gloria. It was a fast conversation. Gloria was very suspicious of me before hanging up. However, she did confirm that Christy gave nor the birth certificate that Nora. I didn't steal it. No, it needs more than a fake I.D. to get into the adult industry.

She also needs a ride. It is almost as hard to come by. Rogers will provide that as well. Here's Troy again. She wants to get serious about modeling, so she may just dress in home economics classes, get these clothes together, and then he said he could help her with that. So he took her to Hollywood. Need somebody to give her a picture, a portfolio or whatever. And we didn't have a car. No one had a car.

It isn't just that Rogers has a car. It's also where he's willing to take her in that car. The guy who's allegedly been masturbating over her since she was 11 probably doesn't think there's anything wrong with aiding and abetting her plan to become a nude model at 15. And as we've already determined, it's likely that she knew Jim Sales Figure Modeling Agency was, in fact, a nude modeling agency. To be clear, to be clearer than clear. We're not blaming Nora for what happened.

Definitely not. We're just trying to understand how it happened.

My guess as to how it happened, her ambition is key and is impelled and concentrated by her very understandable rage, rage at the limitations imposed on her by her age, her class, her gender, and, of course, rage at the abuse she suffered at the hands of men like Rogers. My guess is that she's feeling frightened, but that she acts brazen and that the act is convincing, as is her I.D. false but real in the sense that it's issued by the government.

My guess is that she thinks she's in control. After all, she's turned her abuser into her chauffeur and lackey, hasn't she, when she's really out of control? And next thing you know, it's Bobby Socks and Spiked Heels and Velvet magazine. Exactly.

But back to try the alarm bells don't sound for him initially.

So she started going on these photo shoots right. With at first they were innocent and she would show me the check and she would show me the picture if it were like a tank top and like that next to a barn or something. Right. I this is legitimate. This is cool, OK? Pretty soon, though, it's five alarm fire bells going off for him. So then she would skip school and go with him, I started out like once a week and then it was two or three times a week.

And Nora and Troy, a.k.a. Scooby and Shaggy, go from never apart to never together.

Know there's all these rumors going around. I don't know what to believe. I haven't seen her for a while. Tries in the dark, but he's about to get enlightened, remember Darren Lewis, Ashley, Nora's classmate, the one who put chalk on his hands and then slapped girls on the ass? Only he didn't do it to Nora because he thought she was too wholesome. How could I forget? Well, Darren has a story to tell and make.

Pacino is going to help him tell it.

Darren, first, I do remember most of all the day that I saw the picture on my friend's wall.

You see, the 80s really was wearing another 15 year old's bedroom and her boyfriend was in that same room with four other of us. We were smoking pot where we clearly shouldn't have been back in.

None of my friend's parents were home. They basically did whatever they wanted. And if the parents saw them doing it shouldn't give a shit anyways. I could never have dirty magazines up on my wall out of disrespect for my mother because I grew up in a house with a mom and a dad. But a lot of my friends didn't have that parental guidance like I had. And his whole room was covered in dirty magazines and they're all fully nude pictures. Now, my casino, my room was covered with high times and my uncle had a subscription to these stupid heavy metal and whatever the Pop magazine and the Surfer magazine and the Playboy magazine, there is a stack of them in the garage.

So I start tearing all the centerfold up to cover the whole room. It's like this better wallpaper than this shit.

Back to Daryn.

Yeah, I'm looking at all these dirty pictures on the wall that are probably a foot wide. It was clear to me right there that that's your girlfriend right there. Everybody in the room said, no, it's not like. Yes, it is Norriss, but that's your girlfriend. And in that room on that day, five 15 year olds figured out that my friend's girlfriend was freaking dirty magazines. My friend was totally devastated, so it ruined him.

I asked Darren if he and his friends told other people at school.

Oh, yeah. That was like the most exciting thing that could ever happen to us. I mean, did everybody know after we got done with dad?

Darren doesn't, however, say a word to Norra.

I never confronted her, but I know that she just kind of moved out of school, just kind of went out on her own. After our sophomore year, we did some god awful things in high school. There were a couple other girls that had to quit high school that we found out had venereal diseases because we also had friends that worked in the Redondo Beach Free Clinic. But we didn't live by the same standards as the kids today that aren't allowed to say what things really are.

You know, they sugarcoat everything. And if you call a terrorist a marshmallow, nobody's going to be afraid of a marshmallow, you know? We call things the way they were, that's just brutal. I know for Nora, for those poor girls with STDs and for Troy, who is indeed devastated.

Yeah, everybody was whispering, commenting and giggling behind my back. And, you know, it just got really weird. I didn't know what was going on at that point. My whole world was just blown out, you know? And then she told me she was pregnant. So I was working. So I had a little hesitation about it was minor, but I gave her the money for that in her book. So they didn't give her money, which is bullshit.

Actually, she doesn't say he didn't give her the money. She says he didn't give her the money until after the procedure and only when she threatened to tell his parents. But his point is taken. Not only did he give her the money, he gave her the money, even though he wasn't sure the baby was his.

He's also disputing her timeline, and that's important in her memoir. It's also neat and clear cut. Here's the sequence. According to underneath it all, she gets pregnant by her one true love. Her one true love abandons her, leaving her not just emotionally bereft, but financially bereft as well. Since she has no way of paying for the abortion, she is thus doubly vulnerable to the predations of the porn industry in real life. At least as Troy remembers it, everything is all jumbled up and murky.

Here's the sequence. According to Troy, she gets into nude modeling, becomes alienated from him, probably because she's never around and because she's keeping secrets and feeling guilty about the secret. Then comes the pregnancy.

I hadn't seen her for probably three weeks.

She was MIA from school and rumors were going around. You know, she's fucking three guys. Some make a porno then. This is crazy stuff. What is coming out of everybody on high school? No one story turns into another story, but something was definitely up. And then she wanted money for an abortion. So we're supposed to meet at the corner store at lunchtime and all the early and like half the football team is sitting there in the corner right there and they see me and they started saying, hey, I got a girl.

There's no point. I want her to go over the slut. Haha, I go, there was like one hundred eighty two dollars and then she pulls up in a car, forgot who she was with and I walk up to the car, gave her one hundred eighty dollars and I said, you know, can I go with you to let me go with you. She no I got a ride. I got a ride. And then as I'm talking to her, the football team is still like if I could fly or whatever.

And I can imagine her rolling up there and seeing me and seeing the football team laughing and thinking that I'm laughing with them. I couldn't be laughing. Any normal person would not be laughing at that. And the way she tells it, once she gets her revenge on Troy by forcing him to cough up, she's through with him, he disappears from the story, never to be heard from again. Yeah, in real life, Troy does not disappear.

We'll get to that. But first, Norah. So as Darren said, Nora drops out of Redondo UNin High. She's still the talk of it, though, when her issue of Penthouse, the September 1984 issue hits stands at the tail end of summer. Here's her old rival, Tania Dooley. Me and my girlfriends are roller skating, and we went into, you know, they call them liquor stores in California, we went in there to get candy or whatever, and they had the penthouse, I think it was Penthouse.

My boyfriend would cheat on me with this girl. And then all of a sudden now I'm looking at her in a magazine naked and it just didn't sit well. Even that cheating boyfriend, Mike Pacino sees it Karuk at the time that some summer thing where they go to Hawaii, right. My friend was the Rasta man. He's dead now, but he sold the weed to these guys at that place, Kyra. The Supreme Court in the morning. He's like, oh, we're going, you want to go or whatever.

And I'm sure he's like pretty much paid and everything. And we were both like looking at one of those ABC stores. It was weird because I remember we were just walking by old magazines, everything. It wasn't her on the front. She was in the centerfold. No, no, wait. It is at her. I don't even know who Tracy Lords was, you know? I mean, I think you looked at me and I was like, whoa, dude.

Like, that's I was almost like, unreal. I was tripping or what. We were just like, well, we know where she took off to.

And yet, amazingly, shockingly, almost unbelievably, Nora hasn't taken off at all. She's no longer living with her mom and sisters in Redondo, but she's still in South Bay. She's got a place in Lawndale, just one town over with her new boyfriend, Tommy, the Awale Marine, with a violent streak and no job. Here's try.

When the house came out first, my heart just dropped, but part of me goes, fuck, yeah, you did it. Like, I can get it, you know?

Mostly, though, he's not like, fuck. Yeah, mostly he's distraught.

Since I was 16, I worked at this bike shop almost as much as I behind to put that on a strander.

A quick parenthetical. The poop deck is a local bar. Mike Baxter pointed it out to me on our tour, and it's a stone's throw from Hermosa Cyclorama.

And then once no matter in the penthouse, you know, especially they will go party celebrate in the public. It would be Tony and it would be her and they would be having parties with our community to sign the books, everybody stuff and dance around.

Yeah, Nora and Tommy are not just heard in South Bay. They're seen to. Mike Brasenose, now back from Hawaii, has a sighting. Can a white Corvette, this was before anybody had cars, it was the white Ford went around the trend, around the tires sticking up, and I don't know what year that is exactly, but it was newer, was newer than anybody else. Maybe she stuck out when he saw that car around. It wasn't like that.

Everybody had those. There was an older dude later on that I saw a beauty and she already even was driving with there in the car in the white Corvette. The Nora and Tommy sightings aren't all at a distance either. Nora decides for whatever reason to compete in the Hosie Squaresville bikini contest in Hermosa Beach. Mark Baxter remembers. It was Chick magazine, Cheree magazine, penthouse, she just got her name, like her name just changed and it was like 20 of us down to the way things were out.

And, you know, we're all, oh, my gosh, she gets out of a Corvette with this dude. That's like wearing Speedos is a frickin muscle. And, you know, we're all clowns. You don't even know where you've been.

It's an ugly scene and it gets uglier. Mike Pacino is also there. That day she came out like somebody sad remarks say I got her picture of her on my wall or some shit like that. And they brought her up. And it was like almost like a situation where people are like yelling and shit. This was like later on and I was trying to find her like, what the fuck you that's but you're not you don't want to talk or whatever happened again.

She said you guys are just a bunch of like losers or lambs or whatever. I mean, I never said anything bad about anything, really. It's remarkable, really, that Noah, who is now Tracy, would show up at an event like this in South Bay. You'd think that you'd want to avoid the game. I mean, she was ashamed enough of the nude modeling, but she left school when Darren and his friends outed her. But perhaps Penthouse changes things.

Penthouse is in another league from Chic magazine, and Sherry magazine is nudity. But it's also a big deal. Everybody knows Penthouse. And it's the Vanessa Williams issue, the issue the entire world is talking about it. So it could be she isn't ashamed anymore and she has that Corvette for a drop out and runaway. She's doing very well. She probably wants to show off a little. But I think something deeper is going on here as well. Something more pathological.

The way she yelled at Mike Pacino, she was in pain. She must have been hurt, like deeply hurt, by the way. Her friends reacted, felt betrayed by them. And Mark and Mike obviously sense that hurt because Mike seems protective and Mike concerned. Yeah, tender in their gruff, tough guy with. So somehow news of what Nora's doing hasn't yet reached her family, which is just possible because according to Jeanne, Lorraine is now living with him in Torrance and Rachel and Grace are still kids and Patricia works all the time.

Jean said this to me over Facebook Messenger all along. We thought she was doing J.C. Penney catalogs. Try isn't Nora's boyfriend anymore, but he still cares at all. The rain in the rain told her mom that she was doing these magazines. The mom had no clue in the rain, had no clue. And then a couple days later, I'm walking home from the beach of this hill at my dad's house and then pulls up next to me. And Tommy, you know, he was tall, so the little guy, muscular, sandy, blond hair, real boisterous, sketchy, sketchy, sketchy to his jumper is just off.

And then Naugatuck and he said, I kick your ass if mom or dad is Dolorean and not only fucked up your daughter and kick his ass kicking ass, but he starts bouncing around like he's going to give his blows bouncing around, bounce around, jump up and down. And she steps in between us, says no, no, this is get out here. Let's just go. It's not worth it. This is go. So you're out of our left.

If Troy can't leave Nora alone now, Nora can't seem to leave Troy alone either. A short time later, she shows up at his father's house unannounced.

Well, I haven't spoken to her for a couple of weeks and my step mom goes, there's a little outside, but I think it's more so she comes up and she's all dressed up because she's coming from a shoot photo shoot and she has roses, some flowers for me. And then she has to take us out to dinner and we can go in the limo. And then she breaks out her face, Lawnside and orders a margarita. And then she had a contract from my dad to sign on.

Exactly. Sure. What it was. But it sounds to me like it was something that she didn't want to do by herself. Like, did you have anybody that you could do it with you? And she said, yeah, you don't need me.

What was the contract for you to Troy? He doesn't know, but he and I actually spent a lot of time speculating on it. We think that Nawara was about to make the move into hardcore modeling and was afraid to make it alone. She want to try to come with her. If she doesn't want to have hardcore sex in front of a camera, though, she doesn't have to, but maybe she thinks she does. Here's Troy. And what might have caused her to arrive at such a conclusion?

She did this sharing magazine or whatever, and then thinking no one would find out about it because of social media back then. But someone found out about it at school and they just ridiculed her, ridiculed her hard.

That would be her worst nightmare. Like to have her peers making fun of her. And that's what she got. She was for is she's a whore. And she took it hard. One of the most things that upset her was how everyone in high school turned their back to her and called her names and all that. She was really, really hurt her a lot.

I asked Troy if he did the same. I guess in some ways I kind of turned my back to her. I mean, I didn't quite hear those names and stuff that obviously was a little taken aback. I was kind of in and out. And now sometimes after for her, sometimes I just turn my back to her because I was 17. I didn't know what was going on in that world. My dad was just like, dude, this is not good.

And then most the people at school now and think she said, you know, I may as well see where this goes, but it's going somewhere and obviously really good at it. And they want me to come back and give me more money to do it.

That sounds plausible to me, Ashleigh. Jim told us that when she started, she only wanted to do magazines. It was Rogers who said to Jim once Nora was out of the room that she'd end up doing porn. Porn obviously wasn't in her game plan.

But the plan changed when everyone she knew found out all her classmates were. They treated her like scum and her friends were her family, you know, so like I said, she must have felt as if she'd crossed the point of no return with the nude modeling and that she might as well go all the way. And the transition from nude modeling to hardcore modeling is a significant one. Basically, there's nothing separating her from movies now. Right. So the wining and dining of Troy and his father and stepmother was likely her attempt to stave off the fall into the abyss of radically impersonal sex.

I asked Troy what his dad's response was when she produced the contract to sign.

He said, Oh, hell no. Nora, say hi to the abyss.

Next time on Once Upon a Time in the Valley. She is extremely confident, she was extremely wanted to make a good impression. She was extremely willing to be perceived as doing a good job. I kind of got the feeling like even though she was in, you know, she wanted to be in the business, she wanted to be a star, and she wanted people to pay attention to her after the scenes were over.

That's when we heard that she was looking at the script and she saw that masturbation scene and she expressed to that makeup artist. She didn't quite know what she was forced to do. So the makeup artist took her in the back room and taught her how to do it. And she came up with my camera and nobody figured it out until after one performance. So she looked like a pro all the way around.

This has been a presentation of C 13 originals, a division of Caden's 13 executive produced by Chris Corcoran and me, Lily and Alec, directed by Zach Levitt, created and written by me, produced by Ashley West, edited and mastered by Chris Bazil, Bill Schulz, Harry Craughwell and Ian Mott. Theme Music and Original Score by John Goodman. Production, Engineering and Coordination by Terry and Terence Malenko Field Recording. I read Ferner Artwork, Marketing and PR by Kurt, Courtney, Josephine and Francis and Hillary.

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