S1 | Ep 9: The Ghost of Shauna Grant
Once Upon a Time… In the Valley- 1,517 views
- 25 Aug 2020
We return to the Valley, and it looks a whole lot different this time around.
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13 originals. Previously on Once Upon a Time in the Valley, Nora falls in love with Troy.
Troy falls in love with Nora at nighttime to go to sleep on the sand and look at the stars and go swimming in the ocean late at night. It was just me and her. We would do everything together. Inseparable.
Nora starts nude modeling. It's a secret from Troy and the rest of Redondo Union High, but not for long.
I'm looking at all these dirty pictures on the wall that are, you know, probably a foot wide. It was clear to me right there. I said, that's your girlfriend right there. And everybody in the room said, no, it's not. I said, yes, it is. Nora, is that your girlfriend? And in that room on that day, five, 15 year olds figured out that my friend's girlfriend was a freaking dirty magazines.
Nora has nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Except, of course, the adult industry, most people at school now, I think she said, you know, I may as well see where this goes, but it's going somewhere and obviously good at it and they want me to come back and give me more money to do it. So I think the school had a lot to do with it. The people in the school nearly treated her.
I'm Lilianna, and this is Once Upon a Time in the Valley featuring Ashley West. OK, Ashleigh, strap on your seatbelt, we're going back to the valley only we're taking a different route. Last time we came by way of the one on one, this time it's Laurel Canyon Boulevard, change your perspective, change everything.
And here we are again, once more in the lime green hippie band, San Fernando Valley bound. And now for the owner of the lime green hippie van drudges, a.k.a. Roger Hayes, a.k.a. something Rogers a.k.a. Komova Bob, a.k.a. the boyfriend and then ex-boyfriend of Noah's mother, Patricia, and the man who, according to Nora, molested her and who, according to multiple individuals, took her to Jim s office for the first time. We spent the better part of a year looking for watches and then we found him and then we didn't, we missed him by a handful of weeks.
He was living not in Steubenville, where he and Patricia began dating when both were students at a local college, nor in Redondo Beach, where he and Patricia broke up and he worked as a full time engineer and Part-Time Coke dealer, but in a small town in central Florida.
Only at that moment he was living in the county jail and had been since the first of the year, we were planning to visit him in March and then came the coronavirus and our visits were suspended, even more problematic. He's legally blind, so we can't negotiate the jail email system, legally deaf as well. And he forgot to take his hearing aid when he was arrested. So we can't manage the jail phones and seriously ill from kidney polycystic disease. So he's in the jail infirmary.
Rogers is truly unreachable.
And even if you somehow did manage to reach him, you likely still couldn't, since he suffers from dementia on top of everything else. His wife, whom he met at Bible College in 1987, explains to me the circumstances behind his incarceration on New Year's Eve.
He would like to get out a gun and shoot and shoot it off in the air for celebratory fire. But this time I didn't want to be bothered. It's too hard getting him in and out the back door and then he's got to get out of the wheelchair and he can't move that much. It was around midnight and I heard a gunfire, so I was trying to take the gun away from him and he pointed it at me and and that was enough for me.
I got my bag and I left the house and went and got the sheriff.
There were three charges against charges, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, this would have been dead end city slamming headfirst into a wall of solid brick. Except Rogers is a compulsive talker.
And one of the things he talked to her compulsively about was his old girlfriend, Patricia, and Patricia's daughters. Here's again, he should have known better than to hang around with this Patricia. They met at Steubenville College. He liked to be a student. Why spend so much time in college? Made him feel good to be around young people. And I think she just wanted to get away from her husband or whatever, make a new light. It was good to her and he told me he was trying to influence her for God, show her that there would be a nice person in the world.
He liked the girls. I know one time he took them down to visit his mom in Florida so they could go to the ocean. He would take them on trips and take them to McDonald's. And he just tried to be a good father to the kids. Roger secures a job in the aerospace division of TRW Inc, located in Redondo Beach. Patricia and her brood join him a few months later, but the couple busts up. Patricia leaves Rogers for another man, Tracy in the rain.
Stay with Rogers, the Patricia deserted Rogers with a painful turn of events for him, but not according to an unexpected one. His mother was very, very tiny. She had so much trouble delivering that they pulled his head out with a forceps and they severed a nerve in his forehead to control the shape of his face. His nose curves around and his mouth curved around with the facial deformity. Probably felt that nobody could love him. His first wife, she loved somebody else.
And Patricia left him. Rogers is especially close to Norris says, nor was ashamed of her mother because they were so poor and the course was from such wealthy parents, and she was exposed to that briefly at his mother's house. She could see the the beautiful home that he came from that his parents had. Now, that much I got from what he said. Though at a certain point, he has to distance himself. The girl, she went and became a pornography star and wrote her a letter encouraging her not to go forward with the type of things that she was doing.
He said, you know, you mustn't do this. This is what God wanted for you, stuff like that. I don't know. But and then he kind of left that situation because she felt she was determined to do what she wanted to do and he knew he couldn't be around, you know, for something like that because they would blame him for this Traci Lords and her skullduggery. But a few years later says he gets pulled back in. He had a summons that he had to go back to California and appear in court.
And he was real upset about it. He had to leave Bible College, so there must have been in 87 because I had known him very long at that time, he had to provide a deposition or be in court or something. She wrote him a letter. I think she told him something about she had chosen her life the way she wanted or whatever, and he had that letter that he took with him. I know that was very important. The letter apparently does the trick because no charges are ever filed against Rogers in connection with Nora, so far as he knows, I asked her straight up if she thinks Rogers could have done what Nora accused him of doing.
She says now she says that Rogers told her it was the other way around.
They said that she offered herself to him. She said that when she would like to have sex with me and he said, no, if you were 18, maybe it would be a different story. Now, he said that to me. I'm sure this isn't to suggest that we believe what Rogers said.
The idea that it was Nora who was putting the moves on him is, in our opinion, about as likely as the idea that he was an undercover cop posing as a drug dealer, as he told, and not just a drug dealer, as Nora maintains.
I think he was a dealer for marijuana. He went to work for the police for a while and they put him under cover and he helped find out drug dealers and find out drug hideouts so that they could go in and arrest them. Additionally, we have proof in the form of testimony from not just Naura, but also from Jim South, Susan Randon Humphrey Kneipe and Tom Byron, that he was far more involved in Alzado career than he let on to.
He was an active facilitator. Don't forget, it was he who told himself that Nora would end up in porn.
No, we're just reporting what he said, or rather what his wife said. He said he is, after all, a key player in Tracy's story.
Speaking of Tracy's story, and Nora is once again crazy now that we're back in the valley.
Let's get on with it. During our first trip to the Valley. We made much of the fact that in 1984, the year Tracy arrived, the adult industry was blowing up because of VHS and video cameras. It's an exciting scene as we present it, full of stupid opportunity, just waiting to be exploited by some kind of young thing. And it is an exciting scene and it is ripe for exploitation, but it's also fraught with peril, a fact we underplayed.
We made no mention, for example, of Shawna Grant, Tracy's predecessor, the beautiful blonde porn superstar from 82 to 84. Shawna Bowen. Colleen Applegate moved to California from Farmington, Minnesota, with an ambition as vague as it was grand to become famous.
Street modeling jobs were hard to come by. So she answered a newspaper ad for figure models walked into Jim s office, his adult actress, Carrie Nichols, on Shawna. She was a little girl, very vulnerable, and she knew she was a blonde in Hollywood and she loved being a model. She loved doing print work. That was the thing.
And she kind of got pulled out to do movies and she started shooting movies. Men responding to her physically was very, very satisfying. She knew she was attractive when a guy would get hard for me, it was like that, but she was never comfortable doing movies.
Adult actor and ex-husband of Kelly Nichols, Tim Connolly, met Shawna on the set of a movie shot in upstate New York. He played a rock star whose tour bus takes a wrong turn and winds up at an all girls school. She plays, of course, a schoolgirl, his tim.
It was something like January, so there was no heat in the school on top of it. And it was just she and I and a stainless steel table in the kitchen. I was like, what am I going to do is scan. I'm going to have any you know, when I pull my pants down. She made it so that it was just like the smoothest thing in the world. She just pulled me into her and just, like, got all my focus on her.
And when we were done, she said, don't leave me. They did what they normally do as soon as you're done, they throw a towel at you and everybody strikes the set and it was lunchtime, so everybody hightailed it out of there. She had me I made love to her again. You know, she said, just do it for us. And it bothered me because she wanted me to spend the night there, but I had to go home and get my shit together and I was living in Manhattan with Kelly Nichols at the time.
It was just it felt really weird. I didn't want to leave. I could tell that she was going to be damaged, you know, if she stayed in the business very long. Tim would see and not long afterwards, because Sean and Kelly were both in contention at 1984, Adult Film Association of America's Erotic Film Awards. That was the award show where we got pulled into the back room, Francis Ford Coppola was back there with John Millions trying to figure out what tie to wear.
I was like, you shot Big Wednesday, Foxx dude. And I don't want to say anything to Coldplay.
What do you say to the guy that did The Godfather? You know, you look fat.
Sean was so coked out, I don't even think she knew who Coppola was, you know, she didn't seem like anything like I'd seen her pin up for probably three to five days. I could tell she was hallucinating and having hallucinations and, you know, we were all doing coke. So how can you say, like, you know, you know, you really shouldn't do any of this.
Here, let me have another line. The next day, Shorten was supposed to go to San Francisco to star in a movie strung out on Heartsick. She asked Kelly if Kelly would take her place. Kelly agreed his Tim. The next thing we know when we go up to San Francisco, we hear that she's committed suicide. We were all really disturbed because we hadn't seen anything like that, you know? Nobody of that stature, you know what I mean, and certainly not somebody who was young and beautiful and had everything ahead of her, you know, even Savannah later on when Savannah committed suicide, people were like, well, you know, she was pretty out there and she was on a downward spiral.
Pardon the interruption, but Savannah, real name Shannon Wilsey was Tracy's successor, the beautiful blonde porn superstar of the early 90s. Back to Tim with Shauna. The idea would be to get somebody like her and shoot her out, you know, just completely shoot her nonstop for 30 days because you could get that much work out of her. And there were that many movies being shot. And then they start thinking they're a star after that, except they're not because they're shot out.
So now everybody's got a movie on you.
They don't need you anymore. And right when the girls start thinking, well, now there's superstar there.
Done, you know. And she wasn't equipped for that. She didn't he wasn't prepared for it, she didn't know what to think about it. Nobody was looking out for. I think it's worth noting how Shauna killed herself gun to the head. She was 20 years old. This isn't taking pills, this isn't gentle or passive. This isn't something you can misconstrue, like maybe she meant to do it. Maybe it was an accident. This is an aggressive, purposeful act, the very definition of self destructive.
Also worth noting, Savannah killed herself the same way and she was just 23. These two suicides by gunshot give you an idea of how emotionally precarious Tracy's situation is. The girl in front of her didn't make it out of the business alive, and neither will the girl behind her. We wanted to take a moment from the show to once again talk about our friends that express VPN. Now we know that none of you watch porn, but just in case you have any friends that do, you'll want to pay attention to this.
With everything going on in the world, governments have increased their surveillance. They're using your devices to track your location movements and in many countries, your Internet activity. You don't want to be literally caught with your pants down. And one of the best ways to keep your online browsing activity private is by using Express VPN. When you use Express DPN, your Internet connection is rerouted through a secure encrypted server so you can surf the web anonymously without anyone looking over your shoulder.
You may think you're safe just using incognito mode on your browser, but even then your Internet provider can still see every single website you visit, including the ones with that video you watch just that one time. And if you live on campus or use a shared Wi-Fi, your network admin can similarly see every site you visit. Scary, right? That's why I use Express VPN whenever I go online and I recommend all of you do the same without express VPN.
You're giving people a free license to peek over your shoulder and see all the freaky shit you're looking at. So protect your privacy today and get three months of express DPN for free. Visit Express VPN dot com slash the valley. That's Exper sbp mn dot com. Slash the valley for three months free with a one year package visit express VPN dotcom. Slash the valley to learn more. We've been talking about Shawna Grant, the ghost of the adult world, Shawna, is the specter of the special devastation that may be the fate of the female porn star.
Now we want to talk about the angel of another porn star, Ginger Lynn. We're going to revisit the story Ginger told about how and why she decided to make the move from nude modeling to porn. We got it from her and she's given it to a number of other people.
I've heard at least half a dozen versions of this story in different interviews. It's the one about the girl and Jim s office who is so poised and elegant and sophisticated that she shattered Ginger's preconceived notions about what a porn star was or could be the girl who is smoking a cigarette out of a holder like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, the girl in the white dress. Ginger can't remember this girl's name, we pressed her on it, but it didn't do any good.
Still, it shouldn't be hard to figure out her identity. Ginger said the girl was earning one thousand dollars per scene. There were very few performers commanding that price in 1983.
Annette Haven, Saker, maybe Liza Delio, only it's not any of them because we ran those names past Ginger, our theory for why this is the girl and why it doesn't exist. This isn't to say we think Ginger is lying. Nothing like that. Nothing calculated or intentionally deceitful. But what of the story is a half true story that got embellished over the years turned into a myth. This angel of sex and beauty and pornography, dressed in burning white, beckoning ginger across the line is a story Ginger tells us about her early porn days, a grimy, grubby, upsetting story that doesn't sound remotely embellished.
The sounds all too real.
This is one of the my bad memories, I remember there was a girl that the taxicab had pulled up and she was passed out and somebody had to come down from Jim's office and bring her back up.
And she had done some film of some sort. And, you know, they couldn't revive her kind of thing. And I'm just going back because that's what I thought porn was.
Bidstrup bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism. So the mid 80s porn world isn't all frisky fun, a band of irrepressibly randee rebels thumbing their noses and other body parts of the stuff Schertz of the world. It's other things, too. And as other things are dark, adult actress Sharon Mitchell, for instance, is probably right, which says that the mob guys hanging around the porn sets in L.A. are typically the dumb cousins of the New York mob guys.
But who systemise can't be scary. Remember Ruby Glassman, the adult distributor who went to prison for selling treacy's tapes after her true age was revealed?
This is Gail Holland, a reporter who covered Godson's Trial Guardsman's business, which at that time, and I believe this is documented in the L.A. Times, was kind of had this kind of two bit mafia thing. And his business was burned down and his 27 year old son was later found beaten to death and wrapped up in something in the trunk of a rental car. Those things happened, I believe, after Tracy was involved. But I do think his operation touched on violent incidents.
I believe they were remote, shadowy figures in the porn landscape and the treacy's sometimes felt menaced by them. But I'm not sure I buy what Tracy's mother said when she testified on his behalf at Ruby's trial that Tracy never went to the cops because she feared reprisal from the mob.
Speaking of buying things and not buying things, I buy that the adult industry people we interviewed genuinely did not know that Tracy was underage.
You repeating yourself, Lilly, you said this in an earlier episode. Hang on. Let me finish. I buy that the adult industry people we interviewed genuinely did not know that Tracy was underage. But I also buy that adult industry people in general tried to get away with what they could, meaning if a girl presented a pretty OK, pretty good fake ID, they let her in, whether they believe it or not. After all, Tracy was hardly the only young one in the business.
Here's Tim Connolly. I don't want to name names because you're waiting to come back at you, a lot of girls who are under age. It wasn't that surprising.
You know, I had a couple girls say to me, like, you know, I was like, wow, how old are you? Oh, I'm 16 and a half. There I am. You know, we're starting a sex scene and they tell you that, what are you going to do? You're going to stop everything. Because what will happen is you would get fired because there's a good chance the director knew and whether he did or whether he didn't, it wasn't going to stop filming.
It might cost you your job. It seems shocking. Now, back then, it was not that unusual.
So basically, the adult industry didn't care if the girl was underage, so long as no one could prove it knew she was underage. Yes, plausible deniability is what it was after, not moral absolution. And by the way, aren't those underage suspicions the whole point or at least a large point of the adult industry? Absolutely. The notion of barely legal is you could argue the engine that drives the adult industry, as Tracy understands better than anyone. Think about it.
She's a statutory young girl who pretends to be a legally permissible young woman so she can play a statutorily young girl. There are a lot of naughty schoolgirls on that adult resumé of hers. But back to plausible deniability.
Let's talk about that electric moment we had with adult actor director Paul Thomas, known as Petey.
So actually, we both spent a lot of time interviewing people, which is why we both understand the rhythms and nuances of these encounters, the unspoken power struggles going on, the seductions encounter seductions. People come to you with prepared material. It's stories they've told a million times, grooved, honed canned stories that reflect how they see themselves or how they wish to be seen.
And this isn't the material you want. This is the barrier to the material you want. So what you try to do is keep the interview going until the person gets tired or bored or swept up in a memory or a story and lets the barrier drop, starts talking and fresh, spontaneous ways.
When we interviewed Petey, we asked him early on what he felt his obligations were to the young women who are considering becoming performers.
After all, he'd been a star adult performer and had become a star.
Adult director was a major figure. Here's his answer. We went out of our way to make sure that girls were healthy, that they stayed healthy and more than that, that the girls knew what they were doing. I had a thousand conversations with girls, you know what you're doing. You realize that you're never going to run for mayor of your town. Please consider this effect of this on your life. I spoke with great knowledge. My decision to do pornography had a huge effect in my life.
As Paul explained it to us, he was giving these young women an opportunity to reconsider a last chance to turn back. In other words, he was behaving like a model born citizen, scrupulously not exploitive, almost like a standard parent. Then somehow in the second or third hour of the interview, a conversation circled back.
We again asked Petey what he felt his obligations were to the young women who were considering becoming performers, citizens of this time. I wouldn't diagnose the personalities as far as she'll be fine and she won't, I just try to let them know what they're up against, what's going to happen, and made them responsible for themselves. And without a doubt, I saw girls and men who had no business being in such a crazy environment, no business at all. They weren't going to be able to handle it was going to ruin their psyches.
But we would always air on the side. Paul pauses here and stretches out the pause and we wait for him to close and the inevitable of caution to tell us that the industry was ultra conscientious about warning unsuitable people away, because that's more or less the party line. What we've been hearing from adult industry people since we started interviewing them for this project, and obviously part knows that we're expecting of caution because he flashes a devilish grin before saying of whatever suited us best.
We wouldn't air on the side of caution, that's for damn sure. If we heard on the side of caution, we probably would have turned half the people away. You're about to engage in hardcore sexual action and it's going to be with you for the rest of your life. And it could be thrown in your face by a priest, a husband, a child. It's definitely going to make it more difficult for you to achieve certain goals in your life.
You need to be aware of that. What? I actually say that to people. No, no, no, Tracy is 16 years old when she first engages in hardcore sexual action on camera. It's for What Gets Me Hot, directed by Dick Miller, costarring Tom Byron. We're going to hear now from a production assistant on that movie.
This man has gone on to have a successful career in mainstream Hollywood and is requesting that we not use his real name. We'll call him Patrick. One of the first things I did is when Tracy showed up, they asked me to take a Polaroid of her holding her her documentation up to the camera and took the picture, put it on the release and gave it to Dick for his files and stuff like that. I had no inkling of the fact that it was all fake and was a regular California driver's license, as far as I could tell.
Tracy, according to Patrick, gave no indication that she was a first timer. Chooka, supremely 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 wasn't on, you know, she wanted to be in the business. She wanted to be a star, and she wanted people to pay attention to her.
And yet she did give an indication, unless she was very selective about Patrick again after the scenes were over.
That's when we heard the story that the makeup artist told us that she was looking at the script and she saw the scene of the masturbation scene and she expressed to the makeup artist she didn't quite know what she was supposed to do. So the makeup artist took her in the back room and pondered how to do it. And she came out with my camera and nobody figured it out until afterwards. I think the performance. So she looked after her all the way around.
It's a crazy kind of savoir faire. She displayed improvising so effectively that the entire crew, the makeup woman notwithstanding, fell for it.
And I'm assuming Patrick doesn't recall Tracy getting coerced or tricked into doing a sex scene with Tom Bowman, as she claimed in her memoir. No, he doesn't. But he does have two very interesting memories about that Tracey time sex scene. The first is that it wasn't written into the script. He is. And why that?
So my understanding was that she would agree to do a certain scene, but she just wanted to feel comfortable on the set and everything like that. So it was kind of a foregone conclusion that she would do it, but just not necessarily put it down in black and white and have her face it when she walked in, get through the first scene and then after that, think about doing the other scene, say what you will about Dick. He wasn't the kind of person that would ambush someone to do something like that.
So it was understood that that would be probably the direction that things would go. But he if it didn't, he wasn't going to force or put her in a bad position. You know, he he just wasn't that kind of guy. That tracks Tracy was being coerced into this, seduced almost Dick would have been very careful not to frighten her off. The second interesting memory Patrick shared is that it was always going to be a Tracy Tom sex scene, meaning Tom, who, according to Tracy's memoir, was a stranger to her at the time of What Gets Me Heart is the only performer she'd work with.
And she very easily could have worked with Sean Taylor or Mark Wallace. The other two male leads in the movie.
Patrick, again, it was, I think, at the beginning of the dating and I don't know how she met or anything like that, but Tom Byron was pretty enthusiastic. And actually, I believe part of the deal was that she wanted to be in the scene with Tom Byron as well to. Ashleigh, this feels in a way like a continuation of the story that Troy Madeley, Tracy's high school sweetheart, told at the end of last episode, Tracy, already a nude model, picks him up at his house in a limo, takes them to dinner, and then tries to get his dad to sign a contract on his behalf.
And Troy and I both thought that the contract was probably for a hardcore modeling job like she was about to get into hardcore modeling, was scared to do it by herself, wanted to do it with somebody she trusted. Troy's dad, as we know, refuse. So my guess is she turned to Tom, a young guy, a sweet guy, a guy who was a bit like Troy. It makes sense. And while Tom is her porn boyfriend, she also has a real world boyfriend.
Tommy, though perhaps the more apropos term for Tommy is an adult, one suitcase, a pimp, a combination boyfriend, manager, pimp.
I don't know if Tommy qualifies as a suitcase pimp, since he definitely isn't Tracy's manager, but he does live off her. This is what Jean, the boyfriend and later husband of Tracy's older sister, Lorraine, has to say about Tommy over Facebook Messenger Tommy, the abusive boyfriend with money hungry. I called him once a miserable parasite. He was likely going to kill me since he was an ex Marine. I strongly believe he played the biggest part honora being exploited.
He was, in my opinion, more like a pimp. And Tracy, who never breaks cover with the adult industry, must break cover with him. It's probably impossible not to, since they live together. Here's tommyrot, she just like commiserating about this guy, you know, and this like. As you know, this guy and Barbara and she was very happy with him and and I said, you don't have to worry about this guy, you know, come stay with me if you need to get away from.
And she said something like, I can't, you know too much about me. He he's holding something over my head or words to that effect.
This gives us some insight into how isolated Tracy must be. She's in the adult world, which is estranged from the regular world. She's sharing her bed with an enemy, someone who's possibly blackmailing her or extorting her. She's alienated from her blood family. She's alienated from Troy and her North Redondo family. And the adult industry can't become her new family because she has to lie to it constantly and about everything or risk exposure.
Christy Kanyon picks up on this, if only in retrospect.
Tracy, to my knowledge, except I hear, you know, when she was living or whatever with Tom and didn't really associate with people outside, you know, outside of making films, I think she really kept to herself.
I mean, what a lie she was caring for two and a half years. That's a that's a feat. As we said back in episode three, there was one adult industry person, Tracy allowed herself to get close to, not close enough to be fully honest with, but still close, says Randall. She didn't like most women because they were competitive with her, but we got on really well, I suppose I'm more like a man and a. Suze is or was a professional beauty, a successful model, both fashion and nude, and her appearance and manner are certainly feminine.
But I think I know what she means when she says she's more like a man. She's direct and assertive in a way that tends to be perceived as masculine.
And I'm sure Tracy was responsive to this, the kind of cocksure energy that Suze projects. Plus her camera's eye is lascivious. She's a female with a male gaze. Suze would have served as a role model to, I suspect.
Oh, yeah.
Unlike Tracy's mother, Suze was a woman who knew how to operate in a man's world, a woman who dominated in her career, a woman who was nobody's fool or victim, and with a stable marriage to a devoted mate who supported her professionally and allowed her freedom. Here's her husband, Humphrey Kneipe, on how that aspect of his marriage to Soos worked.
That was never possessive. So she did have the occasional extra marital fling, so to speak. I didn't particularly care. I just wanted the best for her, really. She was very jealous of what I did. So kind of one sided. A funny little exchange, my attention snagged on, so we were at the ranch with Susan Humphrey, Suze was talking about Tracy. She came on to your husband, your boyfriend, she came on to every male that was around, so who would think that she was under age, which prompted me to turn to Humphrey.
Did she come on to you? I mean, what was she like? She didn't come on to me either. There, Tracy, who apparently rarely exercise sexual restraint, exercise sexual restraint with Humphrey, has to be a tribute to her feeling forces. And as soon as the scandal broke in July of 86, Tracy severed all ties to the adult industry quickly and completely, except for one to Soos that I would free, then break. Took a while, though, she even actually visited me in hospital after losing my third one.
I was born, that would have been in October of 86, Soos continues. We drifted apart. I loved her.
I mean, it's a shame that she had to sort of pretend that she had been seduced into this. That's when I when she started changing her story. That's when I, you know, I just backed off. You know, she's just doing this for try and get ahead in the real world. And good for her. But it's not honest.
Susan is so sort of cheerfully Hard-Boiled that she's not going to get mushy about Tracy with us, but you can tell that there was real emotion between them, real warmth, and that she's bothered by what Tracy did or what she thinks Tracy did. Actually, the warmth surprises me. I can't picture Tracy paying a visit to the maternity ward.
Yet there are hints that Tracy's front is just that.
A our producer, David Blander, than David Jennings tells a story about an onset interaction he witnessed between Tracy and co-star Mark Wallace.
In the movie, in the script, he makes a pass at her and she sets him down, and she did that so brutally that after the thing was over, Mark Wallace is sitting there kind of stunned and she puts her hand on his arm, says, what a bitch.
It's that story which she told about Tracy bumming cigarettes and not inhaling all over again. It's as if she's inside the roll and outside the roll at the same time is playing the part of the bad girl with Wreck of the Bitch with Mark. But that's not really her. I don't know if this is related. And it's something I'm probably sensitive to because I'm a woman, but I notice that the guys who work with Tracy, who are more laid back guys like Tom Birhan ability Mark Wallace, it sounds like get along great with her.
The non laid back guys, though, have a problem. And it's the reason why this is the pre Viagra era.
Right. So male porn performers are true studs, studs in a non figurative sense, actual literal studs and is a stud. Basically, she has ovaries like Tim Connolly says, and she issues an unspoken challenge to every man she meets. And some of these men, I think, are so offended by it or so threatened by it if they feel the need to wipe the floor with her. Paul Thomas and Tim Connolly to dyed in the wool Alfa's for a bit into this camp and with us both men, at least initially, go out of their way to let us know how unbottled over they were by Tracy, who not knocked out Paul casually dismissive.
I wouldn't call it gorgeous, just cute when she was with a guy she felt was deserving of her. She was very nice, but I saw her mistreat. Man, she could very be very short with people who she thought weren't as cool as she was. You know, and I was cooler than she was, and she knew that, so she was obsessed with me. Tim is more pointed in his put down. Tracy was really calculating, which is some of the girls said that it was sort of distasteful when you'd see that in them because that was what we used to call the cash register cunt.
She was just all about whatever they could do to make money. And it's like a street hooker, you know, is going to take it for every dime she can get out of you. Tracy was just like you could see, like the wheels turning in her head. I don't like somebody to tell me how beautiful they are, even if they are really beautiful. And I didn't see her as being beautiful because I saw that snotty kid that thinks they're better than everybody.
And any guy who's going to come across a girl that thinks she's better than them and starts talking down to you. You want to just up you want to do something.
You want to make her fall on her face.
Paul is all about Ginger, which makes sense. Ginger isn't a pushover by any stretch. She's a sport. So accommodate a guy, help him out is on his side. And earlier in this episode, we heard Tim rhapsodize about poor Donna Grant, who is feminine, frailty personified. And yet both Paul and Tim in the second hour of the interview, which I now think of as the hour of truth came around on Tracy, Tim's reversal was more striking.
So we're going to pay special attention to it. I didn't like her.
I didn't think her tits were that nice. I didn't think her personality was that nice. But when I saw the rushes, I'd be like, holy shit, I mean, because the camera loved her, there was something that happened. It was a phenomena, you know, she knew exactly what she was doing.
She knew all the angles. She knew how to block. She was very keenly aware of all of her light. She could find the light. You know, some girls could never find that. You could put people in the light and just step out of it right away, you know? And she was really good at sucking focus, which is like a cardinal sin in film except in the porno industry. That's the mark of a budding superstar. I mean, that's the ultimate masturbatory fantasy is like, you know, if that's the girl you're looking at, she's going to force you to look at her because she knows she's got you.
And it always seemed like this scene would become her scene when you shot her and it would be done when she was done instead of when the guy was going, oh, hey, man, give me a call.
You know, hey, I'm going to go. I'm going to go.
It wasn't that way with Tracy. It was just like you are now in Tracy's world. And that was part of her magic.
I think, you know, when Tim finished delivering this monologue, this Aria, this Pyon, whatever you want to call it, I wanted to stand up and applaud is such a beautiful, sensitive description of Tracy. I mean, it verges on the poetic.
And this from the guy who called to a cash register cunt 50 minutes before Tracy has trouble, too, with alpha females, namely Ginger Lynn. Ginger in our interview, follow the pattern set by Paul and Tim. At first she was derisive of Tracy.
It's almost obligatory. We did, to the best of my memory, five films together, and I couldn't tell you one thing about the sex that we had together.
I truly just factor there was no emotion, there was no dance, there was no lost.
It was more of a little power play than a turn on. Like in I. I'm doing you first.
No, I'm very new first. But you just see it was just it wasn't easy.
And then the interview progressed and her memory improved. Now that's not right.
It isn't that her memory improved. It started unclenched. She let herself remember. And because there was this thing between Tracey and I, our scenes were really good. There was a one upmanship there.
And I was going to fuck better than her and she was going to fuck better than me. The passion was was more, you know, like two punks didn't like each other. But when you're watching the scenes, you know, where that where that passion is coming from, you don't know what it is.
And it's that antagonism that makes their scenes ignite.
According to cultural critic James Wolcott, Ginger learned she had the same sense of attack in a scene that Tracey did. She was going to give as good as she got. I mean, the thing is, there's there's sex scenes. We're like cat fights, you know, and, you know, male audiences, not cat fights, any women audience do to do. But it's much more interesting to look at them when they would put in a lesbian scene in a in a porn film.
And it would be like a lyrical interlude, you know, and for all her purported loathing of Tracey, Ginger, of course, costs Tracey as a fellow lead in those young girls, which suggests that at least before the IRS gets involved, followed by the lawyers, the courts, the prison system, the dislike is shallow professional rivalry and little more professional rivalry is maybe even too puffed up a term for what's going on between them.
I think a lot of it is just adolescent snottiness. Here's adult actress Anberlin. It was like, you know, siblings, when they are just at each other the whole day, the whole week, the whole you can't get in the car with them. They can't sit next to each other.
This is the kind of thing that it was Ginger would say to me, you know, you can't be friends with Tracy. We were just kids.
We were 18 and 19 years old at the time, you know, and Tracy has bigger problems on our hands than Ginger. When she finally unloads her suitcase, pimp Tommy is only to pick up another Stuart Dell. Stuart, in part two comes off as Mr. Hollywood, suave and confident as an operator.
In short, and a popular theory in the industry is that Stuart masterminded the whole con, either ratted out Tracy or got Tracy to rat out herself. Because don't forget, Stewart is the co-owner of Tracy's company TLC. Financially, he stood to benefit from the scandal as much as she did his job himself.
Oh, I think Tracy and her boyfriend can add together, but it turns out Stewart just looks the part of an operator, really. He's a pretender par fishpond, founder of the adult trade magazine. Even on Stewart.
I remember Stewart Dell. You know, the adult business is a vast wasteland of ne'er do well, of con men, of scammers, of guys, that we're going to change the adult business and we're gone in a year. It's a wasteland of those people. And I think he's just one of those guys. Paul's Roughan Stewart does not quite rough enough, as we both think, a lot of hours and days into looking for Stewart. It was you who finally picked up his scent.
I almost didn't. The trail went cold in 2010. I was starting to think Stewart was among the departed. But then I located a family member. This man roared with laughter when I said I was looking for Stewart and why, he told me that the reason Stewart disappeared in 2010 is because 2010 is when Stewart was arrested for what?
According to this family member who didn't want to go on the record or be identified beyond family member. Stewart robbed a local liquor store where he was a regular customer in a homemade mask. Then he came back to the store the same day, the same day, and tried to spend the money he'd just taken. The owner of the store called the cops. I wasn't able to confirm the specific details of the robbery.
I did, however, find court records filed on October the 19th, 2010. The state, the Stewart Nelson Dela.
The second was charged with felony kidnapping to commit robbery, felony robbery, felony criminal threats and felony false imprisonment for kidnapping.
Criminal threats and false imprisonment charges were all dismissed. He pled no contest to the robbery charge, though, and was sentenced to two years in state prison.
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That's the Valley and talks with dotcom. And. So adult industry people balk at Tracy's claim that her two and a half years in porn is one giant blackout for her because she was so blitzed on drugs, they insist that during her time in the business, she was a cool and competent professional and very sober.
And I believe that's probably true for most of the time she was in the business in those last few months.
However, I think Coke did become a problem. Here's Tom Byron.
I do remember the last time I was with Tracey. It was the Vegas CBS show, and I ended up hooking up with her in like, you know, Stuart was in the other room sleeping in. And it was actually the only time I ever did Coke with Tracy was was then.
Yeah, January of 86. And we end up having sex on the floor.
And there is a relationship between drugs and porn stardom. It's mutually dependent. It's mutually destructive.
Here's Sharon Mitchell.
I mean, being someone that was bold enough to say, hey, I'm a porn star, I wore my image like a gunslinger. Where's her gun? I had to you had to be confident and seamless, comfortable, sexy, appealing and very generous with your socks. You had to be all of that. You betcha. I was fucking proud and and seamless, but inside he was a little insecure. But I really didn't give myself a chance to feel insecure because that's what drugs were for and that's what work was for.
And that's what it is. When you create an image, you really don't get to own yourself. You get to just perpetuate yourself for others.
And at a certain point, you O.D. on both the drugs and the porn stardom.
Just ask Anberlin. It was a lot of cocaine in the 80s. I don't think that it was being given to me to manipulate me more than it was being given to me because I was hot and famous.
People would hand me bags of dope. I would walk into parties, you know, back in the day, and they would hand me a half an ounce of the best blow you had just to come to the party here, go share this with the girls and we run into the bathroom and be like, yeah, get out the mayor, because this was a life we live. But this was the life we chose, OK? It wasn't rape. It wasn't unwilling.
I loved it until one day when the wheels came off the wagon for me and I, I couldn't I couldn't sustain it anymore. It was killing me.
By the end of her stint in porn, I don't believe Tracy could sustain it anymore either. Here's Troy Madeley. I've seen her once since all this happened, and that was two days before the FBI kicked her door down. I had to get out of town right after high school, I just got out of here because of this whole thing, I went to Oklahoma to go to school. But in July 1986, he's back. OK, so I was in California visiting my dad and friends like I did every summer from school in Oklahoma, and it was my last day there.
I was just cruise around my own business and I drive past the poop deck and has all these big windows. You sit there and having a cheap beer or whatever, and I hear my name being called out. Try, try. Nor comes running out just out of the blue. I haven't seen her in a year and she just runs up to me like it was yesterday and says, get me out of here. And then she just jumps off my hand of artists, go, go, go.
And she's looking behind her for somebody. So she left somebody in the back and she sat on the handlebars and it's a hot ass summer Friday weekend, like for July or something. And the beach is just packed. And we get to 17th Street where all the surfer guys hang out. So they go by 17th Street. I hear crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. And she's got LaVena waiting. Who is this person? Crazy. Who is this person on my handlebars now?
This is not Laura. I wanna go swim. I put the bike on a bike rack and we start walking out towards the water. And mind you, the beach is packed with tourists, families, lot of little kids running around. So we get halfway to the water and she starts taking off her bikini top and then she starts running to the beach like she's like just doesn't give a flying fuck where she is. This is the weirdest thing because annoying her like all those years and then did not see her for a year and who has she has become the moms are like taking a little kid and putting towels over their head and just ripping her a new one.
But she was so gorgeous. At first I was like, what the fuck is she doing? And I go, and then it's like going like slow motion. I go, Oh my God, I hope the world is ready for this. She was I just started by just happy as can be, not a care in the world. Like she was like I'm just free and I am I am me. I here I am.
It's a joyous day and Tracy doesn't want it to end. She invites Troy back to her place. The penthouse right there on one hundred ninety thousand Catalina, and it's this top penthouse with an ocean view all around, and there's no furniture in this place, no French at all. But he had a bed. We didn't have, like, regular furniture. Most people have. So we're sitting there, Indian style. And he says, Would you like to see my Tepes?
She I got them all right here, I might have stood up and just glanced at them, but I didn't like the VCR or whatever, but she was very proud of them, very proud that she was somebody that, like she was famous out like, look at me and somebody.
So then we're sitting cross-legged on caecilians movies and she's really scared and nervous. And she asked me what I have to go back. And I said, I have to go back in the morning. I was in the night and I said, sure. So we laid in our bed and snuggled and we didn't have sex. I remember that. And she was just so scared she didn't want me to leave. She asked why I had to go that way.
The next day she would take care of me and she was very alone and afraid to be in that house by herself or whatever. It was just her situation, but she just wanted somebody to hold her. So I held it all night and in the morning I had to go. And she's like, No, I'm going. I don't go. And then comes a phone call from Stuart.
And then in the morning the phone rang and she. Oh, shit, you got to go. You got to go. And she's like a different person. I think it was Stuart. Like that was who it was for sure. Troy doesn't want to leave her, but she's pushing him out the door. I was just crying all the way back to Oklahoma thinking it was going to happen to her because you always hear about this girl getting killed and raped or whatever in a second, you know, like just what is going to happen to her now that she's spinning out of control.
I she was doing cocaine. She has been Fumiya on the floor. Deep down. She was the scared little girl that I knew. But on the outside, she was just bigger than life. And she would, you know, a new name. And she had money and she had this place that I was and she was just so young. Still, that's a long drive. So I almost turned around a couple of times. But I go, where am I going to sit into all this guy?
You know, who this person was or her name was Tracy.
Now you can feel and Troy's description the death of something or rather of someone. Nora Kuzma. Next time on Once Upon a Time in the Valley, this girl was busted. OK, she did certain things. She manipulated, she had fake ID that is like felony, felony, felony, felony. You're going 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 on 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.
This has been a presentation of C 13 originals, a division of Caden's 13 executive produced by Chris Corcoran and me Analects, 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 and Coordination by Sean Cherry and Terrence Mallon. Bowen Field Recording by Rich Burner Artwork, Marketing and PR by Kurt Courtney, Josephine Francis and Hilary Chef. Once upon a Time in the Valley is hosted by me and Ashley West. Thanks for listening.