LAS VEGAS—Adult entertainment—porn—is usually thought of as a young industry, but there's one annual event that caters to the old-timers: Bill Margold's Legends of Erotica. The average age of the crowd that gathered at Showgirl Video on Las Vegas Boulevard on Friday night appeared to be about 50—and if one excluded returning Golden Age star Joanna Storm's two daughters from the mix, it might have been a couple of years older.
The walls of the main room at Showgirl Video are lined with the cement castings of the hands, tits and asses of Legends inductees past, including some of the greats and near-greats of XXX, such as Victoria Paris, Eric Edwards, Bunny Bleu, Randy West and about three dozen others, collected since the show's founding in the mid-'90s.
Scheduled to be inducted this evening were Storm, Roxanne Hall, Peter North, Cleopatra of the Nile and Kylie Ireland (designated by the late director Jim Holliday as his "Shamrock Angel"), and special tributes were to be paid to previous inductee Marilyn Chambers, who died this past summer, as well as Golden Age star Shauna Grant, who committed suicide after filming less than 30 movies.
The event can best be described as informal, with Master of Ceremonies Margold encouraging the audience to ask questions of the stars, claiming, "You can't, I believe, embarrass an adult performer, so ask them whatever you want."
Certainly, Joanna Storm fit that description, flashing her lace-pantied pussy and unveiling her ample tits several times to the crowd which at the beginning numbered about 40, but which doubled in size by the evening's end.
The audience's questions were varied, with several inquiring about Storm's pre-adult history—"I danced and sucked a lot of cock," she admitted—and about what is perhaps her most famous role, as the blind girl in Cecil Howard's Firestorm, which she said was her most challenging.
Storm dominated the early questioning, noting that she only found out that she was a "legend" after her daughters, having found references to her online, came to her and asked, "Mom, did you know you're a legendary porn star?"
More recently, Storm has returned to performing, having worked within the past few months for Naughty America, Reality Kings and several other companies, though she said that she would prefer to play characters with more substance—and that if she couldn't get such parts, she would probably retire again. On the other hand, her two daughters that were present, Lana and Dani, who currently work as strippers, intimated that they might at some point follow their mom into XXX—and also intimated that mom had told them early on much of what they needed to know about sex. (Storm, who's divorced, also has a third daughter who couldn't be present this evening.)
Cleopatra was the second-most forthcoming performer on the stage. The Egyptian-Australian beauty, who has bachelor's degrees in both economics and business administration, only worked briefly in XXX, doing solo and girl/girl scenes, but she's been extremely popular both on the dance circuit and the internet, having recently launched an online "reality" show, "House of Cleopatra."
Kylie Ireland told the crowd that the first time it hit home to her that she was a "star" was at the 1995 Hot D'Or awards, when she and Jenna Jameson, also a fairly new performer at the time, were so besieged by the crowd of fans that they needed to be escorted into the award show in the midst of a phalanx of security guards, who surrounded the women, linked arms in a circle and pushed through the throng.
And as for the legends whose imprints lined the walls of the room, "These are the girls that I watched when I was first watching porn," Ireland noted.
Ireland also called up on stage one of her favorite submissives, the legendary Debi Diamond, whom Ireland required to crawl around on her hands and knees, and later to reveal some of her most intimate secrets as Kylie pressed her pierced nipples into the cement slab.
Roxanne Hall was the least forthcoming of the inductees, even as her fellow stars tried to drag some career recollections from her—this author reminded her that she'd once served as a fluffer at her friend Nici Sterling's gangbang in the mid-'90s, but even then, no further details were revealed. Hall did, however, urge the audience to assess her sexual abilities by comparing her first XXX performance (in Buttman's Bouncy British Babes) with her last... the name of which movie she couldn't remember.
Peter North, who'd been scheduled to be the first inductee, had had trouble getting a flight out of Orange County, and arrived at about 10:30, just as the festivities were winding down. AVN was unable to stay for his induction, due to prior commitments.
In general, the evening was fairly free-form, and one never knew what would happen next. For instance, legendary star and director Veronica Hart was in the audience to support the Marilyn Chambers tribute, as were Marilyn's best friend Peggy McGinn and her husband, and the producer of an upcoming documentary on Marilyn, Valerie Gobos. It was here that Hart announced that she would be directing the documentary. Also in the audicnce was David Bertolino, producer of the upcoming Broadway tribute to Linda Lovelace, in which Marilyn had been signed to play a role before her untimely death.
"She [Marilyn] aced her reading," Bertolino recalled, terming her death "a real tragedy."
Also taking the stage at one point was past inductee Lynn Lemay and friend (and returning star) Rachel Love.
Perhaps one of the evening's biggest surprises was that Margold had unearthed a record album by the Sporting Bachelors, whose main claim to fame may have been putting Joanna Storm's photo prominently on the album cover ... and naming the album Love Letters to Joanna.
All in all, it was a hell of an evening ... and Margold urged attendees to mark their calendars for next year's show, where he said one of the inductees would be Barbara Dare.
