LAS VEGAS—The 21st annual Legends of Erotica induction ceremony was held last Friday night at Raymond Pistol's Showgirl Video on Las Vegas Boulevard, and the Legends' founder, veteran performer/agent/advisor Bill Margold once again officiated. The erotic legends inducted this year included retired actresses Christi Lake, Long Jeanne Silver and Melissa Hill, as well as returning star Karen Summer, retired actors John Seeman and Paul Johnson (who's much better known for his photography), and current popular actor Evan Stone.
The ceremony was scheduled to start at 8 p.m., but some of the inductees were delayed getting to the venue, so the first 40 minutes were spent having those Legends present answer questions from the audience, which included such queries as "What's the highest number of orgasms you experienced during any one 24 hour period" (Stone and Margold tied with eight, Johnson claimed nine, while Hill claimed that "in my personal life, I believe seven."), as well as "What was the funniest thing that ever happened to you on a set?" (Hill recalled being on a Toni English Vivid set where she was required to kick open a door and go through it... except that the door was constructed to open inward, the wrong direction for the scene, while Jeanne Silver recalled that legendary director Carter Stevens had her playing a drug dealer who transported her drugs in her artificial leg.) A question as to whether any of the inductees had been arrested while making movies found that almost all of them had, however briefly, since most were let go without charges.
Once everyone had arrived, the actual inductions began, and Margold called to the stage retired actor Richard Pacheco to induct his long-time friends Johnson and Seeman.
"All the people who are behind me on the stage tonight are X-rated warriors; they are among the best of the best of their generation," Pacheco began. "In the field of photography, before some of you were even born, Paul Johnson was pushing both the artistic and legal boundaries of sexual art in America... As a producer and director of sex scenes, he was a sensitive soul with a talent for putting the right people together and the wisdom to stay out of their way as they created the sexual magic that has entertained millions."
For his part, Johnson told the audience how he got started in adult, and gave credit to Seeman and Pacheco as two of the first models he shot for magazine layouts, and directed them to his blog, paulsfantasy.com, to see his work.
Pacheco's description of Seeman was even more complimentary, calling him ("and that's his real name") an "actor, director, writer and producer during porn's great golden age of the 1970s and early '80s. Those in the know, know that for a significant period of time as a production manager, John Seeman was the most important porn person in all of northern California. Production companies would arrive from L.A. or New York and with one single phone call to John Seeman, they could find their actors to audition, their crews, their equipment, their locations and even their caterers. It was the fast-lane job at the very center of the industry and John Seeman made it work smoothly for a long time."
Seeman said that porn "really was my life in the '70s," and described how he relentlessly pitched himself for a job with the Mitchell Brothers—and that when he finally landed an on-camera role, he found he couldn't perform, a problem that it took him several months to cure.
"Finally, I was able to pull up fantasies that would help me," he admitted.
Melissa Hill showed up with what Margold described as "an entire armada of inductors," but in fact, it was just two: director Wesley Emerson and director/Penthouse president Kelly Holland.
Emerson noted that he'd shot Hill's first scene after she'd come to Los Angeles from the Bay Area, in which she'd "knocked it out of the park," which led him to hire her several more times.
Holland recalled her time as a director at Vivid under the name "Toni English," when she hired Hill as a replacement for an actress who'd flaked on a scene with Rocco Siffredi.
"She was terrified of Rocco Siffredi," Holland said, "but she cinched it up and she muscled through and she did a brilliant scene, and at the end of that, I walked out of the room and I said to Marci [Hirsch], 'She's really good! You should use her. Put her on the list.' And Melissa must have overheard me, because she popped her head in the room and said, 'I can do dialog too!' And I said, 'Let's put her at the top of the 'A' list."
Holland also presented Hill with a DVD of her movie Girl With the Heart-Shaped Tattoo, describing Hill's acting in it as "extraordinary."
"When I started in the adult industry, I didn't plan on it; it just sort of happened, in 1993," Hill said, admitting that she hadn't prepared a speech. "I remember when I was a youngster, and I had put some tapes into my dad's VCR—it was about 1980—and I remember watching those movies. They were the most amazing movies, and I just thought that they were just regular movies with people having sex in them. I didn't see them as anything different than anything else that was in any theater, and I just remember them being so funny, some of them, that when the opportunity came for me to enter the industry, those were the movies that I remember and those were the movies that I wanted to be a part of."
"When I decided to pursue the industry, I was asked what was my purpose; why would I want to?" she concluded. "The answer that I gave was because I wanted to show the world that a regular girl-next-door unaugmented female could also be sexy, and I hope that I achieved that at least a little bit. I'm very humbled and grateful to be part of this."
At this point, Margold unveiled one of the evening's surprises by giving Emerson a "Preserver of Porn" award, in part for his work in searching out and making available early adult movies and loops that had been thought lost forever.
But Holland wasn't done, as she'd been asked to induct Evan Stone also.
"Evan has been a delight to me for longer than I can even remember," she said. "At noon on a set, at 9 o'clock on a set, at midnight on a set, at 4 a.m. on a set, when we were all dragging, it was Evan who managed to just keep everybody laughing, keep everyone entertained, sometimes keep everyone frustrated because it was like, 'Okay, Evan, we got the joke. Let's do this.'"
Holland also related a story she'd heard from Stone's mother, about how when he was four years old, he'd created a flea circus, which didn't actually have any fleas in it, but he would charge kids a nickel to watch it.
Stone's acceptance speech was brief and, of course, full of humor.
"You guys did all the work; I just showed up and did porn, thank you very much, you guys who did all the work, all you guys who helped me out with my career," he said. "Herschel [Savage], thanks for all the great advice. I took it all except for 'Save your money,' so it all worked out."
Next up was Christi Lake, who was inducted by her long-time friend/lover, photographer John Allen, after Margold read a short letter from fellow actress Anita Cannibal.
"Tonight is one of the happiest nights of my adult life because I get to induct into the Legends of Erotica a very classy lady who I've known for 20 years now," he said. "She's a trail-blazing, triple-hyphenate in the adult business as a producer, director and actress... She became known for her wildly enthusiastic performances on screen; there was nothing scripted or phony about this girl."
Allen went on to describe how Lake formed her own production company, and called attention specifically to her production, Directors' Wet Dreams, which had five scenes directed by five different directors, but all starring Lake herself, and to the pro-am series she created and starred in, Fan Fuxxx. He also noted that Free Speech Coalition named her 1999's Positive Image Award winner, in part because of her lobbying efforts on behalf of the industry, and was awarded the Carnal Medal of Honor by Margold in 2005.
"My fans didn't just do the scene and then just slip away into the abyss," Lake said of her consorts in the Fan Fuxxx series (one of whom was Evan Stone). "I actually managed to stay in contact with them... The first time I was on this stage, I believe, it was after an event, after one of these, came up here, did a little dance, got a lot naked, and donated money, and it's just amazing to be back on the stage and not be naked... It's been an incredible experience being in the industry. I had so much fun; the sex was fabulous, absolutely fantastic."
Lake also mourned the lack of creativity in modern porn, then announced that rather than push one of her own body parts into the cement block that each inductee must engrave, she would instead attach a mold of her torso that she'd had done years ago when she modeled for some sex toys for Topco. (She wasn't the first this evening; Melissa Hill had pressed a pair of her glasses into the cement—and Evan Stone had briefly pressed his cock and balls into his block.)
To induct Long Jeanne Silver, Margold called on someone he described as his "heir apparent to my tenuous throne as the preeminent historian of the industry," Chicago-based fan Joe Rubin, who read a remembrance of the actress from director Carter Stevens.
Stevens recalled being introduced to Silver in a New York City bar named Bernard's, which he frequented in the '70s.
"My eyes drifted from her cute tits to her wrapped-in-leg-warmers-clad legs," Stevens wrote. "She sure didn't look like a peg-legged pirate to me. Jeanne and I got to talking, and she explained about her birth defect and her below-the-knee amputation as if it had been a wart removed from her foot rather than the whole foot being removed from her body."
He noted that Silver had moved into his house, which served as a way station for out-of-town actresses, "and in short order, became the den mother to all the other casual occupants... In an amazingly short time, she became like family; she became like a little sister to me, and I a big brother to her."
"I wish Mal was here; I'd give him a big hug," Silver said, using Stevens' real first name. "There's quite a few people I wish were here: Peter Wolf, Mal, Freddy [Lincoln]—I miss them a lot. Jamie [Gillis] and so many people who have passed."
Silver recognized several of her old and new friends who were in the audience, then said, "I'm shocked to be here. I disappeared literally 30 years out of the business, while raising my daughter, let her go through college, and I decided once she was in college, that it was time for me to go check the internet, and was shocked, because of course back then we didn't think about internet and stuff following us, and there I was with a Wikipedia page and my daughter, who kept asking me all the time why I had all these fancy costumes from dancing burlesque. I told her, 'Mommy was a stripper; she danced burlesque.' So one time, she decided to go online and look up 'one-legged stripper,' and she gives me this phone call and she goes, 'Mom?' 'Yes?' 'Have you ever heard of Long Jeanne Silver?' I hung up the phone. I called her back and said, 'You had to go there, didn't you?' She goes, 'But mom, you have a Wikipedia page! That's fucking awesome!' So that made it easier for me to transition and go back in, reconnecting with my friends and coming out."
Following the evening's apparent new tradition, Silver signed and pressed one of her artificial legs into the concrete.
The final inductee was '70s/'80s star Karen Summer, who was inducted by her paramour, Big Cat Daddy.
Describing Summer as someone who had been "born into the Hollywood industry," Daddy traced her career as a bit performer in Dukes of Hazzard and Fast Times at Ridgemont High until she was "discovered" by agent Jim South, and noted that one of her first films was Shades of Ecstasy, written by Margold.
"In the year and a half that I've known her, and the nine months she's slipped back into the business, it's been my pleasure to be by her side as she's reconnected with friends like Nina Hartley, Ginger Lynn and Amber, who by the way, for those who don't know, she is responsible for Amber Lynn's skills orally on film," Daddy said. "She is also the first woman that Nina Hartley did a girl/girl scene with, which also happened to be the first film that Aunt Peg [Juliet Anderson] directed."
Daddy traced how Summer returned to the industry, fueled in part by their having Googled Summer and found that she was considered an '80s icon of the industry, which led to their attending the 2014 XRCO Awards—and the rest is (hopefully) history.
"I just don't know what to say," Summer stumbled. "I'm looking at these walls [which were covered with performers' autographs] and I'm like, 'Ohmigod, Ohmigod, I know you and I know you and I know you,' and I come from the same time as these gentlemen, you know what I mean? I started in the summer of '82; Karen Summer. And these ladies, I don't even know them but I'm honored to meet them and to learn where this industry has gone. I started on film, and it was like a real big deal when we were going to VHS and Beta, and I had no idea, and I didn't leave for any other reason excepting that I landed in Florida and went, 'You know, I'm really tired. Maybe I'll take a little rest,' because I'd been on the road feature-dancing at the time, and I got carried away; I had to go. You know, you do this [acting in adult] so I can't watch it. I did it, I'd watch it, and I was too critical, and I can't watch it for what it's worth, but I can watch the older stuff from the '80s with the people that I know, that I love, that I had the opportunity to work with. I'm so honored. Thank you, Papa Bear [Margold]; he was the first call I made, and he was, 'Where the fuck have you been, kid? I wasn't gonna look for you but I'm glad you're home.' And I'm back, and I've been honored to meet all the people that came after me, to get to run into some of the friends I knew back then, to be a part of this, thank you, thank you."
The ceremony lasted nearly four hours, much of the time having been taken up with the inductees leaving their marks (and, sometimes, personal items) in the cement blocks that grace the several walls of Showgirl Video—but Legends of Erotica is perhaps the one adult industry get-together that truly celebrates the industry as an industry, and each edition of it only leaves classic porn fans hungry for more.
Pictured, l-r: Evan Stone, Karen Summer, Long Jeanne Silver, Christi Lake, Melissa Hill, John Seeman, Paul Johnson.
