Ten minutes late to Brittany Andrews' office in downtown Los Angeles, I was greeted by her assistant, Elaine- who struck me as the least "pornographic" girl I'd ever met. I liked her immediately,. Humble, with a roundish figure and a conspicuously calming presence, Elaine was reminiscent of those receptionists from '50s movies, hired by caddy bosses smart enough not to distract themselves from getting work done. Elaine confided that Brittany was running late and was on her way. Then she blushed as she offered me something to drink. Pretty soon Elaine admitted that she still lived with her parents, who had no idea what she did for a living.
Elaine offered a tour of the place and I was shown through the pink-walled upstairs with its otherwise normal-looking array of desks and computers. I met Brittany's on-staff Webmaster and a seocnd assistant. Then I was led down the stairs, to Hades, I thought, with its bare-bones talk-show set, equipment room, editing suite and, off to the side, the dungeon.
Twenty minutes later, Brittany was rhapsodizing about the dungeon. "It's not dark and dreary, like other dungeons." She is particularly fond of its silver and black futuristic design. "Most porn producers don't know shit about lighting," she said, "they don't seem to care about the aesthetics of things. They just [shoot] in somebody's living room. But, in my dungeon, even if you fuck up the lighting, it's still gonna look really cool." The dungeon, Brittany explained, has other attributes. The jail cell, otherwise known as the "cage," offers "enough space to put your hand up there and bitch slap somebody, or get your dick up in there and fuck."
I heard this and I watched Brittany's face, sort of tilting my own face at that same slight angle my loyal springer spaniel does when I speak down to her, matter-of-factly. She is a tough woman, this Brittany Andrews, a contradictory m�nage: misunderstood loner, cut-off -your-balls businesswoman, and admitted sex addict (Brittany's definition: "if you stick something in Brittany, Brittany will cum"). She's pretty, but not cute. The one thing you notice from her photos is she has dozens of looks, and is able to transform herself from photo to photo. She arrived at our interview in a conservative black pinstripe suit but wearing fetish-y pumps and a t-shirt cut so low I nearly tried to dive into her cleavage.
She has a wacky, sexy, throaty laugh that is genuine, but a bit frightening. And, with her 10 uber-successful Websites, she's been called the "Martha Stewart of porn." Trust me, she is no Martha Stewart. "I'm a fucking cunt that knows what I want and what I don't want." She is also a woman who knows her boundaries, both as a businessperson and a porn star. She's never done anal in a film, nor a facial cum shot. She was one of the first people, seven years ago, to enforce the condoms-only rule. "If I'm gonna play this game," she said, "I'm gonna do it by my rules."
She has done well by her own rules. Watching Andrews in conference with her Webmaster, it's quite clear she's the one in charge. She owns and controls her Websites, as opposed to hiring an outside company to design them. "I'm [not] begging someone to please put up a gallery once every six months because I'm one of their 210 Websites," she said. And her decision to let users into the site and "browse around and get stuck in it" seems to have paid off. "I don't do the 'tour,'" she went on. "On the free side you can peek into everything on the pay side. You get the galleries, all the thumbnails, pictures of the month. You can go into everything, kinda sorta. Then you gotta pay... "
She claims to keep her average subscriber for a year, whereas most Websites keep members for a few months at best. "I've had guys in my fan club for eight years. Why? Because I'm going out there and finding these Asian bitches - the best ones." She's also proud of a Cosmopolitan-like site she calls SuperSlutGirls.com, which is basically a porn site for straight women, with pictures and videos of guys, a "Toy of the Month," and serious articles on female sexuality, mixed in with a funny, sprightly letters section. "Women write to me: 'Hey, I'm with this younger guy. What do you think? Is it right or wrong?' And I'm like, 'Fuck that, honey, the younger the better.'"
Her sites also feature live-feed content, such as The Brittany Andrews Show, a talk show filmed in front of a studio audience. Brittany smiled mischievously when she told me: "We had Warren Cuccurullo from Duran Duran come on the show, who's recently had a molding made of his cock. Mind you, I do a strap-on series called Brittany's Bitchboys where me and my girlfriends wear strap-ons and rape men's asses. So I said to him, 'Too bad the motherfucking [molding] isn't a strap on.' He goes 'It [is].' I said, 'Oh my God, you've gotta let me rape your ass with your own fucking cock!'"
Hearing her speak this way, it's hard to imagine a young, innocent Brittany Andrews. Born 27 years ago in Milwaukee, Wisc., she'd always been a hustler. By the time she was 18 she'd managed a beauty-supply company, a day-spa, and a Hyatt Hotel restaurant. With a smile and a toss of the head, she told me: "I've been a fucking janitor, sold Cutco knives, and been a door-to-door salesman - but I can't remember what the fuck I usta sell.
When, at 19, she told her boyfriend at the time that she was thinking about dancing, Brittany said, "he fucking roared. So I said, 'Don't worry about it, baby. I have no interest whatsoever.' But then, later we were in bed [and] he was like, 'Well, y'know honey, you could make a lot of money.'" With his help she found a job. "I went to this strip club, did my 15 minutes and I came off with 60 bucks. I'm like, 'Yo, this is better than being a fucking manager.'" A month later she had given up her apartment and hit the road. She danced in Japan and in Guam. She befriended Jenna Jameson, who told her, "Girlfriend, you need to move to L.A." Within three weeks she was staying with Jenna and Nikki Tyler. Soon, she was at the top of the heap, appearing in such films as Blonde Bush, Boobtown, GoldenRod, In Your Face, and Stroke Your Cock, Watch Me Fuck.
Her transition into producing and directing was a smooth one, because, again, she knows what she wants. "I make the kind of porn I would be turned on by. I'm fetish- and niche-oriented [and] don't really care too much about mainstream porn." Her Internet company, called The Niche Bitch Network, is moving further and further from the center, into face-sitting, smothering, trampling, pissing, fisting, and spanking. "I'll put any bitch on my site."
She's passionate about what she does, and she's passionate about making a lot of money at it. Sometimes, however, working so hard has its drawbacks. "I don't really have much time [for friends]," she lamented. "I've always been a workaholic. I don't mind sitting in a hotel room somewhere doing paperwork till six in the morning and getting up and doing the same thing the next day." Apparently, she only has sex a couple of times a month, always with the same two people. "My office knows when I'm gonna get laid because it's written on the calendar."
She has a slave and a dominant - "because I'm a switch," she said. The slave picks her up at the airport, and her house has to be absolutely spotless and shined when she gets home.
"Does he clean your house?" I asked.
"He sure as hell fucking does. That bitch better be wearing his little sissy outfit with his little fucking feather-duster, fucking cleaning my motherfucking house," she answered. "The second I walk in I want my fucking feet rubbed and I want him to serve me some food and then worship my pussy and whatever else I fucking want. And if he doesn't, or even if he does, I'm still gonna rip his ass."
She declined to talk about her dominant lover. She did, however, express opinions about male dominance in general: "I want a man who's gonna have the balls to come up and talk to me and make my pussy wet.
"[Sometimes a guy will be talking to me and] my friends are like, 'That guy's hitting on you.' And I'm like 'He's talking about the fucking weather.'" She got angry and laughed at the same time. "'What's the matter, guys, you don't know the difference between chit-chatting and fucking hitting on someone?'"
What might Brittany's knight in shining armor, so to speak, have to say to her to grab her attention? She thought for a moment, smiling when she arrived at the perfect answer: "'I'm gonna take you over to the corner and rape that ass and piss on you.' That would fucking work." Then, as an afterthought: "And after he gets done doing me, he'll fucking let me rape his ass and let me dominate him for the rest of the night."
But what of the relationship between sex and love? She took the question seriously. "If you're in love with somebody, you're gonna trust that individual to be able to go farther and deeper into more sick and twisted areas."
Such as? "There's some sick and twisted things about me that I couldn't even tell you. I've got a kind of sixth sense that allows me to bring things out of people they didn't know existed. I mean, to be a really good dominant you have to be a really good submissive. Cuz it's all psychology. To be truly into bondage and S&M you have to understand the human psyche... how to take it and throw it back at people and hurt them tremendously. I won't actually [dominate] some people because I actually feel as though I could hurt them. I could mentally damage them, like make them want to kill themselves."
Apparently, according to Miss Brittany, as she likes to be called, it all comes down to repression. "On one side of the coin it's what causes all these taboos and fetishes [to be sexy]. On the opposite... I think it can be very harmful and dangerous for society."
That said, Brittany led me to the door. We covered a lot of ground and my mind was swirling. But just before I left, one of Brittany's assistants read me some of the hundreds of emails she receives each week. A guy named Steve periodically sends Brittany photographs of his erect penis. Brittany shrugged. "If I ever met him, I'd pick up the closest object, hit him and run away as fast as I could." And he would no doubt be another satisfied customer.
