Six new Legends of Erotica were inducted into the Wall of Fame at Showgirls Video last night. It was the latest installment of Bill Margold’s annual immortality rite. Minka, Ruby, Serena and Taylor Wane were the ladies, Sean Michaels and Herschel Savage the gents.
As the ritual is structured, each honoree is inducted by a person or persons of his choice, and then hands, feet or other body parts are immersed in a block of cement, which joins the others, framed, on the walls of Showgirls.
Margold was aided as master of ceremonies by ultra-legend Nina Hartley, who held the stage as the ladies waited for the late-coming gents. “Waitin’ for wood as usual,” she quipped.
Several other stars showed up to lend moral support, including previously inducted “Legends” Angel Kelly and Cara Lott, Mr. Marcus, and vivacious newcomer Sunny Lane, who said, “I’m just in, like, awe right now” to be on stage with so many illustrious predecessors.
The glamorous Wane, gazongas popping out of an extra-low top, was inducted by Genesis editor Dan Davis, and Laurien, her husband of 15 years, who described her as “a wonderful person, inside and out.”
She said she started performing in 1989 and directed her first feature the following year. “I’ve been directing for 16 years,” she said. “Nobody knows how much input I had into my own career.”
Red-haired Ruby, quite visibly pregnant, was inducted by her husband Will and a friend, Miss Mona Lisa, who described her as “the dirtiest girl I ever met in my life.” She met Will in a North Carolina strip club and they’ve been married for two and a half years. “I had a really wonderful time in movies,” she said. “I had the appetite for it. I’m living proof that there is life after porn—a happy one.”
Margold cited the fact that she was the first porn star of note to put in time at Nevada’s Bunny Ranch. “She gave the adult performer another future after making films,” he said.
Minka, with her incredible soccer-ball breasts—55Kks—was inducted by Hank, her husband of many years, who revealed that she had been a junior tennis champion in her native Korea before turning to modeling. Years later, her enormously popular website was the first to feature a single model.
The mostly male crowd at Showgirls went wild when Minka immersed her “supertankers” in cement.
Hartley took care of inducting both men. She first met Michaels on a John Leslie set in Bodega Bay in 1989. She described him as “a wonderfully soft-spoken gentleman, the Sidney Poitier of porn.” The elegant Michaels thanked his family and said, “My whole thing from the beginning was, No Color Lines.”
“There are men who fuck women and men who love women,” Hartley said about Michaels, and applied that remark also to Savage. She also called him one of the few performers who “can act with a hard-on.” On his own behalf, Michaels said, “My career is of somebody who really loves to be with women.”
Margold saved Serena till last. She was the evening’s prize catch, one of the earliest and most popular West Coast porn stars, who stole hearts in the mid-1970s, retired after barely a decade and vanished from public view for over 20 years.
Margold described her as “the flower child of porn.” In middle age, she is still lovely. Her breasts, which she bared along with her bush, look much the same now as they do in the memories of countless fans. She was inducted by her younger sister who said it took her awhile to realize that the girl she once considered a “slut” was in fact an icon. “She is an artist, a poet, a writer. I love my sister,” she said, and that sentiment was shared by the audience at Showgirls .
Margold also inducted, posthumously, another true legend, Shauna Grant.
A curious footnote to the event was the presence of once-notorious John Wayne Bobbitt as one of the men lugging the cement blocks to the stage. When Margold asked him to sign the wall behind the stage, he responded with his name and an elaborate drawing of a knife dripping blood.
