Los Angeles Times: The Actress, the Producer and Their Porn Revolution

[url]http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-010602porn.story[/url]

Los Angeles Times Magazine

The Actress, the Producer and Their Porn Revolution
Steven Hirsch recognized that VCRs could bring adult movies to a new
market--couples. But first he needed a different kind of star.
By RALPH FRAMMOLINO and P.J. HUFFSTUTTER
Times Staff Writers

January 6 2002

You can say this much at least, the setting was magnificent--a seafood
restaurant at Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. San Fernando Valley
businessman Steven A. Hirsch thought it was the ideal spot for his pitch to the
blond, hazel-eyed Midwest tomboy. She loved crab legs? He promised her all she
could eat.

Ginger Lynn Allen arrived at Gladstone's restaurant in a lace dress and heels
and joined Hirsch and his girlfriend at their table. It was late 1984. They were
young, in their early 20s, and full of vigor and hope. Allen was trying to
escape a nasty childhood by becoming a movie star. Hirsch was looking for the
money and respect his father never enjoyed. He wanted to produce movies.

At that moment, neither career was one to write home about. Allen was an
actress, yes, but one who specialized in talents Hollywood doesn't put on
screen. Hirsch peddled the kind of movies she made, but they had hardly brought
him riches or respect. The industry they worked in was still very much on the
fringe.

As an overnight porn sensation, Allen knew she could earn lots of cash for a few
years before being replaced by the next wave of fresh faces. She dreamed of
jumping to Hollywood before then and had no idea what this obscure but
attractive pornography figure could offer her, other than all the crab she
wanted.

She didn't know he was planning a revolution.

Hirsch laid out his proposal. No other porn actress has ever had such a
deal--control over scripts and casting, marketing campaigns devoted exclusively
to her and a guaranteed income that included royalties and could reach six
figures.

Allen was skeptical. Hirsch had little track record as a producer. But as anyone
who knows him will vouch, Hirsch is nothing if not persuasive. He desperately
needed her help. Gradually, Allen began to believe.

-- continued --

Today, Gladstone's could put a plaque over that table where Hirsch and Allen
dined. It marks the birthplace of a new kind of porn--designer porn--and its
unrelenting march into American lives. These days, hard-core sex stars date rock
musicians, appear on album covers and dance in music videos. They gab with
shock-jock Howard Stern. Academics plumb porn for its cultural and business
significance. The Internet is flooded with come-hither Web sites. Students at
Yale hold coed "chicken and porn" parties. Annual rentals and sales of adult
videos and DVDs top $4 billion, and the industry churns out 11,000 titles each
year--more than 20 times as many as Hollywood, according to Adult Video News, an
adult industry trade magazine.

Hirsch has become so successful, and perceptions of the industry have changed so
much, that he was invited last May to address a USC business class. His muscular
frame clad in casual slacks and a crisp blue blazer, the 40-year-old executive
lectured his audience on "production value" and "market share"--terms drawn from
the same corporate lexicon as former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates and other industry titans who have shared their wisdom at
USC.

"Ten years ago I don't think I would have been asked to speak in front of that
class," Hirsch says in an interview later, adding that none of the 23
undergraduates questioned the content he sells. "We're already past the
acceptance stage, and at this point we're just talking about a business as a
business. We are nothing more than widget makers."

Those widgets have blessed Hirsch, president of Van Nuys-based Vivid Video Inc.,
with an 8,150-square-foot, $1.6-million home with an amusement park pool in a
gated community on the edge of the Santa Susana Mountains. He shares a suite at
Staples Center that costs as much as $307,000 a year. It's known as the "porn
box," because its regulars are porn heavy hitters who do a lot of business
together. They sit right up there alongside Budweiser, Fox Television and
Toyota.

Hirsch won't discuss his income, and there is no independent way to verify the
finances of his privately held companies. But he claims Vivid's revenues reached
$80 million last year, and he and two partners recently netted some $70 million
in a deal with Playboy Enterprises, according to Securities and Exchange
Commission documents and interviews. He jets to Bruce Springsteen concerts, has
several luxury cars and collects fossils in prehistoric amber. A history buff,
he also owns a lock of George Washington's hair and a death mask of Abraham
Lincoln.

Allen's life isn't as golden. She did join Hirsch's new company, then left porn
for Hollywood before returning to the land of quick money. Her relationship with
Hirsch morphed over the years from professional to personal to physical to
nobody knows what anymore. She has a life-threatening illness and auctions her
panties at strip clubs to raise tuition for a son whose paternity Hirsch refuses
to discuss.

"My time is past," she says. As an aging porn queen, she knows she falls into a
pathetic stereotype, but she's having no part of it. The title of the
autobiography she's working on: "I Did It. I Liked It. So What?"

-- continued --

"They'd have their fight, my father would hit my mother, and then she'd take it
out on me," Allen once said in a report prepared for federal court. "My mother
used to scream at me how ugly I was, and she'd tell me I was evil." Her mother,
Marilyn, was the illegitimate child of a prostitute and later adopted by the son
of a Baptist minister, the report says. It describes her father, Wayne, as a
former alcoholic and son of a police officer. She grew up in Rockford, Ill., a
blue-collar town 80 miles northwest of Chicago. Allen's parents separated when
she was 6, then divorced when she was 11. The next year she tried to commit
suicide by taking a dozen sleeping pills, says the report. At 13, after a
particularly brutal beating from her mother, Allen was taken in by her paternal
grandparents. Despite their care, she had an abortion, began using drugs and her
grades slipped. She also was left with an "almost addictive need for male
relationships . . . and validation," according to the report, prepared by
criminologist Sheila Balkan for a federal judge presiding over a 1990 tax fraud
case against Allen.

After graduating from Rockford West High in 1980, Allen followed her
grandparents to San Bernardino to help care for her dying grandfather. She
worked as a Musicland store manager, but money was tight. So in 1983, with a
boyfriend's encouragement, she answered an ad promising $150 for figure models.
It was run by porn talent agent Jim South in Van Nuys. Things began happening
very fast.

In September of that year, Allen posed for nude photographs, and soon she was
featured in various porn publications, including Penthouse. Next came
videos--which meant sex, with strangers, on camera. As she would later explain
in a magazine article: "The money keeps coming and you get pulled into it a
little more. Things you thought were bad at the beginning seem a little less
bad." In November, Allen agreed to appear for $800 in four 8-millimeter
loops--short subjects for peep-show booths in adult bookstores.

Back in Rockford, Wayne Allen, who had reconciled with his daughter years
before, overheard men in a bar talking about her new career. He found the loop
playing locally and demanded that the store owner give him all copies. After
Allen's third visit, the owner called police, who sent him home with a friend.
Allen called his daughter. Porn was lucrative, she replied. No one got hurt.
Besides, it was fun.

Her first adult feature, "Surrender in Paradise," was filmed in Maui. She turned
21 on location, got paid $5,150, fell in love with her leading man and began
learning truths about being a porn star. "I was making more money in two weeks
than I did in two years, and I was having great sex with someone I loved." But
when she saw her fiance for the first time on the mainland, he was wearing a
dirty shirt and spoke with a New York accent. He wasn't the man she knew. "He
stayed in character for the entire two weeks we were there." She broke the
engagement.

On screen, Allen became a sensation. In 1984, at the porn industry's first
X-Rated Critics Organization awards, she wore a yellow dress with black polka
dots from Sears, and won the veritable Triple Crown: "Best Female Performer,"

-- continued --

"Video Vixen" and "Starlet of the Year." One businessman who helped underwrite
the awards show, giving $10,000, was adult video distributor Fred Hirsch, whose
son Steven had a plan. Bill Asher, now a third partner in Vivid, says Steven
Hirsch "grew up when porn was a dirty, underground business. If he was going to
be in the business, it was going to be mainstream."

The early 1980s were pivotal for the porn industry. Upscale adults were buying
into the VCR craze, which for porn meant adult movies no longer would be limited
to "the raincoat crowd" found in adult bookstores and theaters. Steven Hirsch
was working as a national sales rep for porn distributor CalVista Video. There
he befriended the head of the catalog division, David "Dewi" James, a tall,
self-deprecating British expatriate 20 years his senior. Hirsch and James became
convinced that this emerging home market included women and couples. "That's
something we really felt strongly about, and that we went after," Hirsch
recalls.

They quit CalVista, formed Vivid Video and went in search of a star. In their
view, she had to appear wholesome enough for couples to enjoy--not like the
hardened, cold actresses traditionally found in adult movies.

"I looked like what might be your best friend's sister," Allen says. "I didn't
look like I belonged on the street corner." As William Margold, a porn actor and
industry activist, remembers: "She was comfortably pretty. She didn't have the
kind of beauty that chilled you. It warmed you. She came along at exactly the
right time."

Hirsch and James scraped together $38,000, including a $20,000 loan from Fred
Hirsch's printer, and started to work. Vivid's first video featured Allen in a
tongue-in-cheek tale about a millionaire trying to find a desirable wife for his
socially backward heir.

Breaking with industry practices, Hirsch sank most of the money into the
packaging, hiring a photographer and a Hollywood artist. Instead of a box cover
showing a collage of sex acts, Vivid's showed Allen on a beach, exposing
nothing, under the title "Ginger."

"The combination of a great box cover and young, beautiful women became Vivid's
trademark," Allen recalls. But make no mistake, the sex wasn't anything less
than hard core. The video flew off the shelves, selling an initial 6,000
copies--a huge volume at the time for adult videos. "Ginger" rocketed to the top
of the adult charts. A tamer version of the video was translated into 12
languages and sold in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. Hirsch and James set out to
make their star an icon. In return for appearing in videos exclusively for
Vivid, Allen was featured in movies more appealing to women because they had
stronger plot lines than traditional adult movies, which were often little more
than a series of sex scenes.


-- continued --

Instead of spending the money from the first movie, Hirsch and James nursed the
business along, paying themselves just $200 a week. "Ginger" soon grossed about
$700,000, which they put into a series of sequels, including "I Dream of
Ginger," "Ginger on the Rocks," "Ginger's Sex Asylum." All were intended to sear
Ginger and the Vivid brand into the minds of consumers.

For her success, Vivid paid Allen handsomely. During 1985, she received $99,014
from a combination of her monthly retainer fee, $1,000-a-day shooting premium,
paid promotional appearances and an unprecedented cut of wholesale revenues,
court records and interviews show. With other porn work that year, Allen made
$134,000 and, in 1986, pulled in $126,185, according to records of Ginger Pix
Inc., her corporation.

Those numbers were staggering for an industry where actresses are free agents
and earn, in 2002 dollars, $300 to $1,200 for each scene they perform, with no
royalties, medical coverage or pension. Career curves are short and brutal,
thanks to the constant supply of eager replacements. All that most of them can
hope for is to parlay their film work into lucrative nude dancing careers or
Internet fan sites.

But for Allen, life had never been better. The blue-collar kid bought a Porsche,
dropped $10,000 at a time on shopping sprees, took overseas vacations. "I did
what a lot of women do in the adult industry," she recalls. "You live right
here, right now, today."

The walls of Hirsch's Van Nuys office today are sleek black, matching the color
of the Oxford shirts he often wears. Chunks of ancient amber are arranged on
shelves facing his neatly kept desk. One wall features a signed photo of all
five living former U.S. presidents and documents bearing Thomas Jefferson's
stamp. A backlit awards showcase gives the room a warm glow. It holds dozens of
industry statuettes awarded for "Best Couples Sex Scene" and the like. To the
right of Hirsch's desk is a Dell computer laptop showing live shots from a nanny
cam trained on his daughter's crib at home. The mother is Hirsch's current
girlfriend, Laurie Andersen, a former sales rep for Video Team, a Chatsworth
porn producer.

Would he want his infant daughter, Alexis, to become a Vivid star? He smiles and
leans back in his overstuffed leather chair. "I would tell her to really think
that through," he says. "I would respect whatever decision she would make. And
then I would send her to medical school."

It would be the ultimate triumph for a porn dynasty that began in the early
1970s, when Wall Street tanked and Fred Hirsch gave up as a stockbroker. He
called a family conference in the living room of the Hirsches' comfortable home
in Lyndhurst, Ohio, outside Cleveland. Steven was 11 and his sister, Marci Sue,
was 14 when their parents announced that Dad would sell adult materials for
Sovereign News Corp., owned by the late Reuben Sturman. A tobacco and candy
distributor, Sturman became the nation's largest purveyor of pornography, with
reputed ties to the New York Gambino Mafia family, according to the 1986 Meese
Commission on Pornography. "My biggest concern was what I would tell my
friends," says Marci, now 42. "I had a hard time."

Their livelihood aside, the Hirsches seemed a model of family stability. Dad's
job wasn't Rotary Club material, but life was otherwise middle-class normal,
says Tony Ciulla, Steve's best friend from next door who is now manager of the
Marilyn Manson rock band. There was Little League baseball, go-cart racing and
mowing lawns or shoveling snow for money.

The Hirsch family joined the porn industry's migration to California in 1975,
and Fred Hirsch began laying plans to start his own company. But he also had to
face ghosts he left behind--obscenity charges from his work in Cleveland. In
1978, he and six others from Sovereign News were tried and acquitted.

Young Hirsch escaped ghosts of his own. He says he was picked on in Lyndhurst
because he was one of only a few Jews in his junior high school. The experience,
he says, "helped toughen me up a bit. And it helped give me the drive to succeed
because I had to prove that I was OK."

An introvert by nature, he channeled his frustration into wrestling, a sport
known for its solitude and discipline. The family moved to a two-story home on a
winding, leafy street in Woodland Hills. Young Hirsch became co-captain of the
El Camino Real High School wrestling team, earning all-city honors in his weight
class. His father rarely missed a match.

By the time Steve graduated, in 1979, nearly a dozen production houses were
vying to reach the new VCR market. Fred Hirsch set up Adult Video Corp. in a
small storefront on Napa Street in Northridge. A bank of VCRs hummed in the back
office, churning out duplicates of master tapes. The whole family helped,
creating a peculiar bond and some awkward moments. Marci, who worked in
accounting, remembers wandering into the duplication lab and seeing her first
adult video. In walked Dad. "You have to leave," he said. "I can't watch this
with you."

She felt uncomfortable for about a month, she recalls. "And after that, we would
both be in there watching it. After a while you almost forget what you're
watching because you see it so often."

Fred Hirsch's company prospered. Between 1983 and 1985, its sales nearly
tripled, to $4.2 million, and it cleared $484,000 in profit, court records show.
The firm was a medium-sized force in the porn scene--although it since has gone
out of business.

Steven Hirsch attended business and journalism classes for two years at Cal
State Northridge and UCLA while doing a range of jobs at his father's
company--from packing tapes in the warehouse to working in sales, promotion and
accounting. Then he quit to work at CalVista and soon, he and James launched
Vivid.

There was little money in the beginning. Allen remembers Hirsch rolling pennies
with Wren to make ends meet. But once Allen's tapes became a sensation, life
changed quickly. The three of them began partying together. Allen says she found
Hirsch attractive that first time she saw him at Gladstone's, but nothing
romantic occurred between them then. Hirsch and Wren were tight, and Allen never
was at a loss for boyfriends. By her own count, she has been engaged 10 times,
and never married.

Mainstream respect is an idea that entices and eludes those in porn. Hollywood
is just over the mountains from porn's prime locale, the San Fernando Valley,
and the two worlds mix socially. But porn performers are rarely taken seriously
by the studios. They are more playmates than peers.

By 1986, Allen and Hirsch were successful financially, but Allen wanted to jump
to Hollywood. She had grown weary of making sex videos. "As I became more and
more involved with films, I used more drugs and alcohol," she would later
explain to a federal judge. "As time went on, I couldn't stand what I was doing.
I started using cocaine as a way to escape and a way to cope."

In February of 1986, Allen, age 23, quit the industry. She had been in porn for
27 months and had appeared in 69 productions, 16 of them for Vivid. It was now
or never to cross over.

She landed her first B-film part in 1988 as a rocker chick in "Dr. Alien (I Was
a Teenage Sex Mutant)." That led to a referral to B-film producer Rick Sloane,
who was looking for a lead in "Vice Academy," a police farce.

"I thought the timing was right to give her the break," Sloane says, adding that
Allen came to his attention just months after her personal and professional
rival, porn actress Traci Lords, began taking mainstream roles. Sloane gave
Allen the leading role. Impressed by her comedic timing, he wrote a sequel
around her character.

She was doing OK in Hollywood, although the money wasn't as good. She eventually
appeared in 28 mainstream productions, in roles that included a bordello
prostitute in the 1990 Western "Young Guns II"; a dying prostitute in Ken
Russell's 1991 "Whore"; a topless dancer in a 1993 Emmy-award winning episode of
"NYPD Blue"; and a recurring role in "Super Force," a short-lived kids' show.

Through the years she continued to receive royalties from Vivid and make
promotional appearances for the company. But her income dipped. She refused to
return to making adult videos, although she did start stripping to cash in on
her X-rated fame. "The high times were over and we were both strapped, so she
needed to go [nude dancing] financially," says Edward R. Holzman, Allen's
live-in boyfriend during the late 1980s and now a video producer for Playboy
Enterprises. In 1991, Allen reported making $30,000 from stripping and $25,000
from acting.

Off screen, Allen's troubles mounted. In 1990, a federal grand jury indicted her
on two counts of tax fraud. She offered a curious defense, arguing that her
judgment had been impaired by drug use in the early 1980s. Indeed, she and
Hirsch had done a lot of cocaine as Vivid rocketed to success. "We did coke in
the hotel rooms," Allen remembers. "We did coke in the limos." Hirsch also says
he had a substance abuse problem at the time. "My life was out of control," he
says. "Some of it was alcohol. Some of it was drugs. That was that."


-- continued --

As part of Allen's defense before sentencing, her attorneys hired Balkan to
review Allen's past. The criminologist said she found a woman struggling with
demons from her childhood that spilled over into her relationships--like the one
Allen struck up with actor Charlie Sheen. She met him on the Tucson set of
"Young Guns II," when Sheen visited his brother Emilio Estevez, the film's star.
Allen says they fell in love. But in Balkan's view, their relationship went
beyond those feelings. "It represented the legitimacy of being accepted by an
actor and his family in the legitimate acting world," Balkan says.

Sheen and his father, actor Martin Sheen, wrote to U.S. District Judge Ronald
S.W. Lew asking for leniency in the tax case. After an eight-day trial, a
federal jury convicted Allen in June 1991 on one count--failing to disclose
$8,580 she earned during her first few months in porn in 1983. Lew sentenced her
to probation and attached a condition: She had to give up drugs. Legal fees from
the case and her subsequent probation violations were devastating. Allen claims
those costs topped $400,000.

As Allen and Sheen dated, she nursed him through a 32-day rehab and stood by him
when he was named a regular customer of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.

Then, she says, he dumped her. Sheen declines comment today, but Allen still
claims he is "the only man I ever really loved." She blames her rejection on
porn. "People thought who I was was detrimental to his career." Allen learned
the lesson she always feared but hoped wasn't true. "You can't outlive what
you've done," says Wayne Allen, her father. "It'll be around forever."

Ginger Allen also failed to kick drugs. She had tried in 1989, entering a 30-day
rehab program at San Diego's Sunrise Center. But by "Vice Academy III" in 1991,
Sloane says, Allen had reverted to her porn diva ways. She demanded $10,000 and
a motor-home dressing room. Yet he says she habitually showed up late, flubbed
her lines and was so puffy-faced that she needed ice packs and heavy makeup.

At times, Allen would lock herself away for days on cocaine binges, according to
a federal court pre-sentencing report. In 1992, she failed a court-ordered drug
test and Lew sentenced her to 45 days in rehab.

Hirsch, too, had struggled with abuse problems. With encouragement from a
friend, porn producer Christian Mann, Hirsch checked himself into a drug rehab
center Nov. 9, 1988. He says he is clean and sober today. His partying years
aside, Hirsch's world has never been about the hedonism of Hugh Hefner's grotto
parties at the Playboy Mansion and Larry Flynt's hot-tub orgies. Vivid
executives keep an antiseptic distance from the production of what they call
"the content."

Like his father, Hirsch has hired family to work at Vivid, which now employs 135
people. His sister and father work for him, and so did his brother Brad, who
quit recently after starting a relationship with a Vivid actress.

Hirsch's brilliance, Mann says, is in finding other sources of revenue, other
outlets for his videos: Playboy Enterprises, the Internet, foreign rights and
teaming up with Doc Johnson, a leading maker of sex toys.

-- continued --

ssociates describe Hirsch as generous, driven, ethical--and controlling. "Fred
Hirsch is an affable, nice guy," says veteran porn director Bud Lee, who has
worked for both father and son. "Steve is a cunning, ruthless businessman." In
1997, for instance, Vivid scored an industry coup by landing distribution rights
for a stolen video of actress Pamela Lee Anderson having sex with her former
husband, rock musician Tommy Lee.

Paul Cambria, a Buffalo, N.Y., attorney who represents Vivid, says Hirsch has an
"uncanny ability to make the best deals I've ever seen in my life." One of those
deals occurred the year Allen left Vivid. Hirsch signed a contract to supply the
Playboy Channel with two soft-core movies a month. It was a deft maneuver.
Hirsch shot two versions of each feature. The soft-core version, heavily edited
to show milder content only, went for airing on Playboy's network. The triple X
version went to video stores under the Vivid label.

Last year, Hirsch made Vivid's biggest deal ever by selling three cable and
satellite cable TV hard-core networks back to Playboy for $70 million, plus $12
million in possible bonuses. Four years earlier, Playboy had loaned Hirsch $10
million of the $10.5 million needed to buy the hard-core Hot network, provided
the company could buy it back in the future. At the time, Playboy wanted a
toehold in the market but felt it should keep triple X content at arm's length.
Hirsch then added two more hard-core channels and his programming quickly lured
viewers from Playboy's soft-core fare. Surprised by the shift in demand, Playboy
bought back Hot--giving Hirsch and his two partners an astounding return.

Beyond being a deal maker, Hirsch has excelled at marketing. After Allen left
Vivid, Hirsch developed a lineup of "Vivid Girls," each presented in the same
way Ginger was packaged. "He wanted to create this star system, like old
Hollywood," says Ciulla, his lifelong friend. But Allen's heirs don't receive
the same generous compensation she did. By signing with Vivid today, an actress
makes less than the industry average of about $80,000 a year--and some Vivid
Girls make as little as $39,000 a year. But a Vivid actress typically does gain
an easier shooting schedule and a longer career. If she's also a strip club
dancer, her value on the club circuit goes up because of her association with
the Vivid promotional machine. "The girls don't have to worry about anything,"
says James, Vivid co-founder. "We handle their careers and treat them like
stars."

Hirsch's system, however, imposes controls that would have other workplaces in
revolt. After Hirsch handpicks each actress, the company dictates the cut of
their clothing and the size of their breasts and negotiates the frequency and
types of sex acts they perform, according to a typical Vivid contract obtained
by The Times.

Vivid Girls also surrender control over their screen names and the scenes they
shoot--something a mainstream actor would never relinquish. Once Vivid shoots a
scene, it has absolute control over its use, which can be staggering given the
various ways pornography is available. "We recycle a movie 10 or 25 different
ways," James says. A single scene can be spliced into various video store
movies, sold over the Internet and cable and marketed as still photos.


-- continued --

Vivid Girls, however, are not included in that continuing revenue stream. The
company no longer pays royalties because it "became too complex," James says.
For instance, Vivid Girl Dyanna Lauren received several thousand dollars for her
co-star appearance in the 1997 film "Bad Wives." Internal documents show Vivid
sold 54,639 DVD copies that, at the suggested retail price of $49.99 each, would
mean sales of $2.73 million. That doesn't count VHS tape, sales through cable
pay-per-view channels and orders on Vivid's own video-on-demand service. Had
Lauren been under a conventional Screen Actors Guild contract, she would have
received an estimated $45,000 to $261,000 extra from the DVD sales alone.
Vivid's contract wouldn't survive in the real world, say 12 labor experts
contacted by The Times. "If you dropped this document on any agent or lawyer's
desk in this town, they'd laugh and throw it away," says John Laviolette, an
entertainment lawyer who represents numerous Hollywood producers. "It's
practically slavery."

Actresses haven't challenged the contracts they are grateful to get, although
some say being a Vivid Girl isn't what it used to be. "You couldn't get me to be
a Vivid Girl again if you pointed a gun at my head," says a Vivid contract
player from the mid-1990s. "They want too much. They get everything."

Wayne Allen goes to the bedroom and comes back with a small black jewelry case.
He cracks it open. The lining says "XIV Karats Ltd., Beverly Hills." It holds a
man's gold band embedded with a line of five small diamonds. It was meant for
Steve Hirsch.

The ring is a bittersweet reminder that, in porn, sex isn't the problem. Love
is. Once a woman steps into the X-rated industry, she often closes the door on
anything resembling a normal, long-term relationship with someone outside the
industry. Ginger Allen says she knew this from the beginning. "No man wants his
lady with someone else, whether they're performing or not," she told a magazine
reviewer two years into the business. Porn stars, she added, will have--"not may
have, will have"--trouble finding love.

Allen says the greatest love of her life was Sheen. But perhaps her most
important love was her old boss. Friends for years, they became romantically
involved in the mid-1990s. Wayne Allen says Hirsch began visiting his daughter
in the evening, saying he had to be discreet. "He kept telling Ginger he was
going to have her [Wren] move out. He was going to pay her off."

Hirsch eventually did break up with Wren, and the parting was nasty, says Paul
Fishbein, publisher of the adult industry magazine AVN. Fishbein says Hirsch
gave his girlfriend a "settlement" for her work in starting Vivid. Wren declines
to comment. Hirsch's relationship with Allen thrived. Soon they were talking of
marriage and adopting children, since doctors told Allen that she could never
conceive.

In mid-1995, Allen decided to pop the question herself. She bought the gold and
diamond band as an engagement ring for Hirsch, and planned to present it to him
over a picnic lunch at the beach. But she was so excited she asked him before
they got out of the house. "He said, 'Yes,' and then I told him something that
changed his mind," she recalls. Allen won't say what that was, but her father
will: "She said, 'I'm pregnant.' He gave her the ring back."


-- continued --

Records show that on March 31, 1996, Allen gave birth to a son, Sterling Wayne
Robert Allen. The father's name is withheld on the birth certificate. Hirsch
declines to comment on his personal life or persistent reports on porn Web sites
that he is Sterling's father and pays Allen a monthly paternity allowance. "You
know you've really made it when people can print rumors about you," he says.
"I'm really not going to comment on it. I'm not going to glorify this."

Allen remains bitter about the breakup. Success has spoiled Hirsch, she says.
"Steven went from a really sweet, assertive nice young guy to very calculating,"
she says. "I think that when you go from a person who rolls pennies to start
your company to being a millionaire or billionaire, you treat people
differently. You forget where you came from, and who you are and who was there
for you."

Hirsch is in front of that class of business students at USC. He spends more
than an hour outlining the details of running a business in the skin trade.
Students scribble notes as Hirsch talks about vertical integration, buy rates,
production value. There is one term he refuses to utter--the P word.
"Pornography has always been a bad word and we're not about bad words," Hirsch
would explain later. "We're about making money."

As he finishes his lecture, the students applaud politely. His presentation was
impressive, says Brian Francis Linhart, a business administration major. "I
never knew porn could be so cool." But instructor Scott Wyant appears to have
second thoughts about his decision to invite Hirsch. When asked about it by a
reporter, he says he sees no "upside" to discussing it. "Think about it," he
says. "A pornographer. At USC."

A few weeks later in Chicago, Ginger Allen is getting ready to take the stage of
the Admiral Theater, a strip joint in a tired neighborhood on the west side. It
is a Wednesday and the first of 11 shows Allen is booked to headline through the
weekend. The announcer urges the 21 middle-aged men and one woman in the
audience to sit by the chest-high stage--within easy tipping distance. Fog from
dry ice shoots up from the stage, which is flanked by two huge mock hieroglyphic
bookends of nude women. Backstage, Allen is praying to a god she says is
forgiving and watches over her in this environment.

The sound system blares "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Then to the throbbing bass of
"Sweet Emotions," Allen appears out of the fog wearing a sheer robe and high
spiked heels. She gyrates, clamps her legs around the ears of some stage-side
patrons, dances and rolls on the floor. She giggles and gives everyone a kiss.

After her third number, she takes a mike, chats up the house and announces: "I'm
going to auction off my panties. Every penny of my panty money goes to my son's
college fund." A Florida man years ago paid more than $1,000 for a pair, she
says. This night, however, the bidding starts at $10, rises slowly and settles
at $45. "Looks like my son's going to community college," she says.


-- continued --

If she had her way, Allen would not be stripping. "I've definitely made
mistakes. Had I saved my money a long time ago, I'd be in a very sweet
position." At 39, the single mother of a 5-year-old finds herself battling time
and the law of diminishing returns. For a while, the combination of mainstream
entertainment work and tours on the strip circuit underwrote her
upper-middle-class lifestyle, one beyond the expectations for a
high-school-educated clerk from Rockford. She managed to buy a Lexus SUV and a
6,600-square-foot home with seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms for $580,000 in
Woodland Hills.

Then the mainstream work dried up three years ago. So did the big crowds on the
nude dance circuit. In a market flooded with porn-star strippers, Allen finds
herself competing for half her normal appearance fee to strip for uninspired
audiences. "Everybody's been inundated with sex and nudity, it's not exciting
anymore," she says. "So my income has drastically changed because of too much
sex."

Allen says she has refinanced her house twice in five years to pull out equity,
but faced with a $5,500 monthly mortgage and other bills, she recently decided
to go back to porn. Charles Clay, her Hollywood agent for 14 years, says he
warned her it would hurt her prospects for mainstream roles. She called Hirsch
first. "His response was, 'Come back to us after you get your best offer,' " she
says. "It was kind of a little slap in the face." Hirsch says Allen made the
decision to look elsewhere. "We wished her well and still do."

Allen eventually made a deal with rival VCA, another San Fernando Valley adult
production house, for less than her asking price of $100,000. Directed by a
friend, former porn actress Jane Hamilton, Allen ended a 13-year absence from
hard-core videos by starring in comeback movies, "Torn," "White Lightning" and
"New Wave Hookers 6."

She turned to VCA again in mid-2000 after routine medical tests showed she had
an illness, says Hamilton, who acted in porn under the name Veronica Hart.
Hamilton says Allen tracked her down via telephone during a trade show to see if
she could make yet another film. "She said, 'Jane, I found out some bad news. I
don't know how much longer I'll be able to make movies,' " Hamilton says. "I
know she has cancer. I know where it's located. But as far as speaking the
words, she doesn't actually speak the words."

Allen declines to confirm her illness. "I don't want to jinx myself," she says.
She emphatically maintains it is not HIV and volunteers that she survived
cervical cancer 10 years ago. Her father says he and his daughter do not discuss
the illness in detail. "We just leave well enough alone. We know that she's
ill."

Her illness was apparent during the filming of her fourth comeback video at VCA,
"Taken."

-- continued --

Hamilton says she was forced to stop production at one point. "She finished with
a scene and was throwing up and it was obvious that we weren't going to push
on." Allen asked for work again in July because she couldn't pay her medical
bills, Hamilton says. VCA used her in a one-day shoot for a scene in a movie
starring Ashlyn Gere. "I could get a girl who would do the same scene for a lot
less money, but she is having a tough time," Hamilton says. Allen also picked up
temporary part-time work as a director and emcee for a porn Web site run by Suze
Randall, the former Playboy photographer who took the first nude test photos of
Allen in 1983.

Allen has tried to sell her house and continues nude dancing, against her
doctor's wishes, she says. In Chicago, she earned $550 a show, about half the
rate the Admiral pays top stars. She attends AA three to five times a week,
making friends "not because I'm Ginger Lynn, not because of something they want
from me, but because of who I am. I have people that I help to stay sober."

At home she is an attentive mother to a son who knows nothing of his mom's
career. For the Fourth of July, she baked red, white and blue cupcakes and bread
for his preschool class. For now, all he needs to know is that she signs
autographs for fans. A further explanation will come later and go something like
this, she says: When people want to laugh, they watch comedies. When they want
to cry, they watch dramas. When they want to be frightened, they watch horror
movies. And when they want to feel good, they watch grown-up movies--like Mommy
made.

"I really don't want to be pitied," Allen says. "I've made my choices in my
life. I put myself in this position. I am the one who is going to have to get
myself out of it. I've been very fortunate. Most girls don't have the career
that I've been fortunate enough to have. They don't have a shelf life of 18
years."

Allen occasionally still receives royalties from her Vivid videos. But they're
intermittent. She says it is up to her to call if she's due royalty money from
the company. She telephones Hirsch directly. Usually, she says, he takes her
call.

___


Times staff writers Ralph Frammolino and P.J. Huffstutter are business reporters
who cover entertainment and technology. Frammolino last wrote for the magazine
about union activist David Koff. Huffstutter's most recent piece was about
Microsoft's new X-Box video game console. Times researchers Penny Love and Nona
Yates contributed to this report.

For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com/rights

Man, I like porn and all, but how can you post that long thing without a couple of hottie pictures thrown in from time to time to serve as a diversion? he he

I ate dinner at Gladstones once.  Back in '76 i think it was.

And your point of all of this is....

That was a fascinating article.

My question, also.  Also, way toooooooooooooo long.

I have seen Ginger Lynn in action.  Whoo boy!

Yes it was.

I was a little surprised about Ginger grossing-out over $700,000.

[smoke]

I posted this thread on porn because I think that is fascinating how the industry really works.  It is one of the few industries in Calif that is growing by leaps and bounds and was not affected by any recession. if you read the article. And it is centered in the San Fernando Valley just 10 miles north of L.A.  One reason is that there are many technical people available working in both porn and the mainstream movie business.

LARRYG - What do you expect on a firearm board a lot of pictures? I don't remember any pictures in the book "the Lord of the Rings." This precisely the reason I read(look at Playboy) Playboy, for the pictures.

Are you trying to tell us that you think making a living as a porn star is a viable option to a real job when you get laid off?  Was this article meant to foreshadow a revelation that your name is in fact Cuntlord and that you've been fucking nasty porn chicks?  

Just wondering.

[|)]ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZz!

"He called a family conference in the living room of the Hirsches' comfortable home
in Lyndhurst, Ohio, outside Cleveland."


Wow, these guys were my neighbors!

Just think of it, I could have been a star!! [}:D]

I'm Buck Naked.[:P]

Damn, that's too bad about Ginger.  She's my age.  I remember back when she was at the top,  she was the most awesome woman in porn. Now she has cancer?  And a 5 year-old son.

What the article illustrates, though, is that the people in porn are generally screwed up going in, and sure as hell don't get any better.  Porn tends to destroy the female "stars", and there are always ten more just like 'em waiting in the wings.  The people who run it are basically predators, and the starlets are willing victims.  

Oh well.  Interesting article.  I, at least, thank you for bringing it up.

Gee warlord (a.k.a pornlord),

I was wondering what line of work you got into after you were laid off last year. Now I know.... [}:D]

If I were younger, I would've give it some serious thought; but alas, I'm too old these types of shenigans.

Good post.

Three things I'd like to see:

- Work-friendly picture of Ginger's face to see if I recognize it.

- What ever happened to other porn stars like Kay Parker et al.

- What is the AIDs death rate among porn stars?

Thanks,

BTT to see if I can get my questions (see post above) answered.

thanks,

Merlin