LOS ANGELES—As the NY Daily News reminded its readers today, former Lazard intern Paige Jennings is not the first person to make the leap from Wall Street to Porn Street. Veteran adult performer Lexington Steele mined that territory a long time ago, as he explained in a first-person account of his journey from finance to adult film.
"Like Paige Jennings, I started my professional career in high finance before making the move to adult entertainment," wrote the popular male performer and producer.
"Raised in northern New Jersey," he added, "I was a stock broker trainee at M S Farrell in 1993 after graduating from Syracuse University. I got my Series 7 a year later and jumped to Oppenheimer Financial in the World Trade Center.
"Once I was licensed," he continued, "it opened the door to a whole new recreational side of the industry. The guy who trained me invited me to a party in a hotel suite, and it ended up being a sex party like the ones in Wolf of Wall Street.
"It wasn't long before a bigger director from Los Angeles gave me a job and suggested I attend the annual porn industry convention in Las Vegas organized by AVN," said Steele. "He said I might be able to make it into the big leagues."
That was an understatement.
Steele adds that a lot of people have asked him why he would make such a move, considering how lucrative a career on Wall Street can be. "I tell them it's not like I was already a master of the universe," he wrote. "I was working 12 to 14 hours six days a week. I made six figures, but my quality of life wasn't commensurate."
And it's not as if his time in business did not help him in his new career. He explains, "When I decided to launch my own company in 2003, Mercenary Pictures, that's was when I really fell back on my acumen as a businessman. So many of my contacts in New York were business owners, people with employees who had to keep the lights on. I learned how to research and how to sell."
Times are different today, to be sure, but it remains to be seen if Jennings, who will perform under the name Veronica Vain, can forge as successful a career in adult as Steele certainly has.
On that score, Steele commented, "If her intentions are to start her own studio, that definitely takes a business mind, and if she's got it, she can thrive."
