Nancy Pera

Nancy Pera, manager and friend of the late porn star Savannah, was our special guest (in the summer of 2001).

Nancy Pera came on.

Nancy: "I've read a few things that Luke's supposed to have written on the internet...that I was offended by. He'd written some things about girls that I know in the industry that I didn't care for. But he doesn't know that I know."

Luke: "Nancy, how did you get into the adult industry?"

Nancy: "Many years ago [around 1982], I had a bad car accident. I hadn't worked in two years. A friend of my dad's called and said that he knew somebody who needed a secretary who knew advertising... In 1984, I went to work for Cal Vista, which was owned by [Dutch Jew] Sidney Niekirk."

Luke: "Is Sidney still alive?"

Nancy: "Yes. He sold Cal Vista [to Reuben Sturman?]. But he still has freeze frame which does credits for many of the mainstream films.

"He still lives in Southern California. He used to be a race car driver. Sidney's a character."

Jim: "Luke wants to know if he was a member of the Dutch Mafia?"

Nancy: "He wouldn't admit to it if it was true."

Jim: "Cal Vista was a mob operation, right Luke?"

Nancy: "Back then everybody was mob... I worked for Reuben Sturman and they used to always like to say that the mob ran him. And I used to say, 'I thought he was the mob.' He ran the industry for years. What's the mob? It's a controlling...

"I did work for David [Sturman]. I did end up suing Sin City. They settled for [$2500] half the amount that I wanted. I went to see Reuben in prison several times. He flew me back there. He made David cough up the money to fly me back to Kentucky.

"I was so pissed off at him. The first time I saw him in Lompoc [prison in California] after they got him again, I said, 'Why didn't you leave the country?' Because I used to tell the story that he was probably going to come back as Naomi, his wife's, older sister. Go to Sweden and have one of the operations. 'Really, with your money, you could've done anything.'

"I started out as Reuben Sturman's secretary. I used to send a fax around, while he was in jail, just before his birthday, saying, 'Any of you interested parties who aren't hiding behind skirts, you could send a card.' I thought it was horrible how the industry treated him [after he was jailed.]

"After two weeks at Cal Vista, Reuben transferred me to Doc Johnson. After two weeks, Ron Braverman and I got along so well that I put in my notice. Reuben called me from Cleveland and said that he was going to create a position for me. So he created mail order. I became his mail order specialist."

Jim: "How come Ron Braverman ended up owning Doc Johnson instead of David [Sturman]?"

Nancy: "What Reuben did always was get somebody and put their name on the paper."

Jim: "A front guy."

Nancy: "He found this guy working behind the counter in Amsterdam at a sex shop named Ron Braverman and he said, 'Would you like to come to America and get rich?' He said sure. Then after Ron did his stint at Lompoc or wherever he did it, he said, 'I've done my part. Doc Johnson is mine. I'm not giving anything to Reuben.'"

Jim: "David's got to be thrilled about that. That his dad gave away a big moneymaker like Doc Johnson to some guy working behind the counter at a Dutch sex store."

Nancy: "I think they came up with 362 companies that Reuben was involved with around the world. Reuben laughed and said, 'You guys did pretty good. I'm surprised you came up with that many.'"

Luke: "What was up with that fire..."

Nancy: "Reuben was sure sorry that it hadn't burnt to the ground."

Jim: "Luke, are you insinuating 'Jewish lightning'?

"Nancy, do you think that David Sturman started up his rubber goods company just to get back at Doc Johnson?"

Luke reads from pages 371-372 of the John Heidenry book "What Wild Ecstasy":

"Some porn insiders continued to suspect that Sturman himself was cooperating with federal prosecutors to get his sentence commuted. They knew, for example, that after being captured in Anaheim, Sturman had told authorities that Doc Johnson, the crown jewel of his empire, which he had sold to partner Ron Braverman in the great 1985-88 divestiture, was his. The company was immediately closed down adn its bank account seized. Only when the authorities were shown proof that Braverman was the owner of record was the company allowed to resume business. Sturman angrily insisted that Braverman had never apid him for the purchase, but he could not prove it. Indeed, in the end nothing Sturman had to say about Doc Johnson or any of his other former holdings interested prosecutors sufficiently to get his sentence reduced.

"In September 1995 a mysterious fire nearly leveled the Doc Johnson plant in North Hollywood. Soon after, a bank in the Cayman Islands was blown up. The two events amounted to a last battle for control of what remained of Reuben Sturman's once vast empire, though the circumstances and players in the power struggle remain known only to a very few. According to insiders, three major factiosn were vying for control of the porn industry, and the retaliatory bombing targeted a place where a significant amount of one of the faction's assets resided. That bombing decisively concluded the struggle, and the three groups - one of them headquartered in Paris - agreed to divide the international porn market into three equal shares."

Nancy: "Wow, that is interesting."

Jim: "Who are the Paris guys? Not a big company like Canal Plus?"

Nancy: "Hot Video magazine is in Paris. They bought out European Hustler."

Jim: "Nancy, where did you work for Reuben Sturman?"

Nancy: "At Vidco, next door to Doc Johnson in North Hollywood. Then they moved us into the bigger building where Madcorp used to be... That's when he sold MagCorp to Paul Wisner."

Jim: "What did you think of the Buck Adams movie on Savannah 'Little Girl Lost'?"

Nancy: "He combined Jeanna Fine's and my role together. Her [Savannah's] last call was to him [Buck Adams?] supposedly. When I watched it, I was surprised that Rebecca Wild did as good a job as she did. Between her body language and how they dressed her, there were a couple of parts that were amazingly similar to Savannah. The body language. I started crying a couple of times."

Luke: "What did you think of the E! True Hollywood Story special on Savannah?"

Nancy: "I thought it was very good. But they pounded into my head so much that they were going by the book. They only wanted facts. They wanted everything accurate. Then I saw some things that were iffy that they presented as facts. And I called them on it. I said, 'You guys, anything that I said that was iffy, that's hearsay. You don't know for sure.' Then you put Mickey Ray on saying that Perry Ross was tied up when they found him dead."

Jim: "Nancy, do you think that porn stars back then had more drug problems than they do today?"

Nancy: "Well, everybody nowadays is AA. They're like born agains. I'm sure there are quite a few out there today who do have drug problems. I think that one of the reasons that the sex was so much hotter in the old days was that everybody was loaded on the set. They were higher than kites. Of course that didn't seem to help Savannah."

Jim: "Were you personally having a lot of hot sex?"

Nancy: "I did just fine.

"The joke was that I didn't go anywhere without my bag of toys."

Jim: "You were like Mrs. Doc Johnson."

Nancy: "I was working at VE (Video Exclusives, owned by Mark Carriere's Leisure Time)...when I got hired by Steve [Hirsch] and David [James] at Vivid."

Jim: "Did Reuben own a piece of Vivid?"

Nancy: "Steve and David used to say they wished. No, Reuben told me that Steven had called him on numerous occasions and beg him to buy David out. Please, get him away from me."

Jim: "Was Reuben [Sturman] responsible for letting all the Israelis into the business?"

Nancy: "No, it was the Jeff Steinman crowd."

Essex was sunk by the cocaine use of its owners, the Steinmans. Father Joe came from Guatemala. Married a Jewish woman with the name Steinman. Marianne Lovett of VCA worked there for 5 years as art director. Joe took a hit of coke after the 1986? AFAA awards just before entering the Hefner mansion…. Had a heartattack. Survived.

Nancy: "Did you know about the big powow they had when Noel Bloom and Jeff Steinman and Reuben and Russ Hampshire and they all agreed that they would no longer deal with the Israelis. Then the Israelis immediately pulled up a truck to the backdoor [of Jeff Steinman's businesses] and starting unloading VCRs and loading up with product. And this was after everybody had agreed they would no longer deal with Israelis.

"I heard all these nightmare stories about Savannah before directing her in a video for Adam & Eve. And she wasn't bad at all. She was there before I got there. She was nuts. I had to do shooters with her before she'd finish putting her makeup on. She would only work until five o'clock. But she did three full scenes that day.

"During the solo masturbation scene... She's lying on the couch and I'm telling her, 'The whole idea is that the camera is the guy, the viewer. And you're masturbating and you're going to tell him that you wished that he was there with you. And knowing that he is watching turns you on...' So she could go with it... So I'm sitting around the corner with the monitor and my headset on. And it is quiet. She doesn't say anything. So I yell out a line, 'I'm so glad that you are here. I wish you were with me right now.' She repeated it. Then silence. So I yelled out another line and she repeated. And this went on for three or four lines, and pretty soon she leaned towards the camera knowing that I was looking at the monitor, and she said to me, 'No more words dude.' So there were no more words. So we had a nice quiet solo masturbation with her.

"She was a character. The industry did create her. She was 15 [years old] when she met [rocker] Greg Allman. Suddenly you're with a man that's 32 years old. He's famous and rich and he's taking you around on the road. And every place you go, people listen to him and do what he says. So this is your role model. This is somebody famous. This is how you're supposed to act if you're a star. So when she got into the adult industry, she was treated as a star. So how was she supposed to act? Like a star. Like Greg Allman. And nobody told her that she was doing anything wrong for a long time. Nobody reprimanded her. They couldn't.

"It was Steven. When she would do something and something would go down, Steven would call me in and reem me up one side and down the other. Then she would come in and he'd give her money."

Jim: "Things really haven't changed in the porn business, Nancy. We still neglect to tell porn stars that they're not really stars."

Nancy: "Or even to say that you can't do this. If there's somebody that's making us a lot of money, and we happen to be fooling around in the tool shed, then you just let everything slide by and take it out on everybody else. Until you get to the point where you've made enough money with them, or they've maybe cut you off from sex or something..."

Luke wonders: "Is Nancy Pera inferring that Steve Hirsch was fooling around with Savannah, and decided to drop her because she'd cut him off from sex?"

Nancy: "Then you let them go. You don't warn them. You don't tell them that they are doing anything wrong. It's just sad. That's what happened to Savannah. She didn't know where she was at. That what she was doing was so terribly wrong. Steve would tell her that she could leave early if Slash was in town. Then PT [Paul Thomas] would go ballistic. And I wouldn't blame him. But Steven had ok'd it."

Jim: "Were Savannah and Buck Adams an item for a while?"

Nancy: "No."

Jim: "He told me that."

Nancy: "Of course he would tell you that. Everybody I talked to said that they were a hot item with Savannah. That they were her best friend.

"People say that I was Savannah's manager. That was a fluke. After Vivid let us both go, people would call Vivid saying, 'We've got something for Savannah. How do we get a hold of her?' And they would give them my number. And that's how it progressed. I would call her and she'd say, 'Tell them no, or tell them this," and I would be a go-between. Then she started dragging me to all these meetings. And I had to stop by the shoots."

Jim: "Did Savannah give you a piece for being her manager?"

Nancy: "No."

Jim: "So you didn't make any money off being her manager?"

Nancy: "Not per se. I felt very maternal towards her. I really cared about her. I've never had any children and I am that kind of a girl. That's why I am not in the 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.'"

Nancy says that she made her small claims court settlement with Sin City with General Manager Mickey Blank, who also settled with Rebecca Lord, says Jim.

Jim: "They supposedly offered her a contract... Kylie Ireland and Mickey went to Judge Lord. Sin City made a contract girl deal with Kaitlyn Ashley, Rebecca Lord and Kylie Ireland. Then they never fulfilled on their deal, according to the girls. Rebecca took them to Small Claims Court. They settled. Kylie took them to Judge Judy and won."

Nancy: "I dated Mickey [Blank] for a while. I was crazy about him... He was trying to do the best he could to help me but he also knew that David [Sturman] would try to screw me royally any way he could. When David wouldn't pay my full commission, I knew that I was getting screwed.

"Vivid said they let me go because I had poor work habits...

"I'd rather work at McDonalds than work for these [porn] people.

"When Steven got off drugs and alcohol, his addiction became money."

Luke: "Nancy, why did you and Savannah get along so well?"

Nancy: "I wasn't jealous of her. I wasn't obsessed with her. I didn't have any preconceived notions of her. And I wasn't worried about her stealing my boyfriend. Or taking away from my stardom. Because I was nice to her. Savannah wanted to be loved. Savannah wanted people to like her so badly and nobody did. They used her.

"Girlfriends would just use her. And she would just give and give. Buy them presents. Shower them with gifts. She wanted girlfriends so bad. It was pitiful. I would cry sometimes. She would come over here at 3AM hysterical because some girl she'd been out with would say, 'You're nothing but a dirty lousy porn whore.' Just call her all kinds of names.

"This one girl [nude model Julie Smith] I'm thinking of, Savannah spent $3000 on clothes for her birthday and this girl just treated her terrible. And Savannah was just crazy about her. Four or five weeks before the tragedy, she told Savannah one night, 'Why don't you just kill yourself? I'm just sick of this. I'm sick of you and I'm sick of what you do and who you are. You're just a porn slut...' Savannah came over that night hysterical too."

Jim: "It's always sad when somebody calls a porn slut a porn slut."

Nancy: "And Savannah had spent all this money on her for her birthday. And lent her $2000 to move into this house in the Hollywood Hills. And then Savannah goes dancing. And when Savannah comes back, this kid she'd been hanging out named Shawn had moved in with Julie. And they wouldn't even talk to her. They wouldn't even take her phone calls. They just cut her off. And she was just devastated.

"Vivid threw us together. Steven would say, 'Watch out for her. Make sure she's ok at the show.' I had to go everywhere with her. I was the only one who could put up with her. I was always there."

Luke: "Did you ever try to get her into detox or therapy?"

Nancy: "We talked about it. She said she was saving her money for rehab but that never happened. Finally, she said, OK, I'm going to kick. And in September of 1993, she kicked [heroin]. She was a total basketcase. She probably took one hundred Valiums if she took one that week. I was to the point where I was giving her aspirin and vitamins and saying they were sleeping pills. She kept saying, 'I need something.' But on the seventh day she rose, took a shower and got dressed, and she never put a needle in her arm again.

"That last six months [1994] was so cruel to her. She started drinking heavily and doing coke again and pills. I had her have her wisdom teeth pulled because they were driving her crazy. She got on Vicodan and that was when she started spiraling down.

"Bad things kept happening to her. People kept lying to her. Like the Hot D'Or Awards in January of 1994. They flew her over. She was nominated for Best Actress for Cinderella. The night before the awards ceremony, even though it was closed, they let her know that she didn't win. And her logic, she kept saying before she left, 'Why would they invite me and pay for everything if I didn't win? Because they're not paying for any of the Vivid girls who are also nominated. Steven's paying for them.'

"Later on we were told by an insider at Hot Video that she did win but it was a bought award.

"The Hot Video people came to her that same night to say they weren't going to pay for her food and beverage. So she didn't have any money at that time. She called me hysterical. So I sent faxes [to people at Hot Video]. And Serge said, you know how much she can drink.

"When the camera came out, it didn't matter if she was hysterical or mad, whatever, she would stop and pose. They talked her into going out in front of the Eiffel Tower and showing her tits. And it was cold. And midnight.

"I keep reading about her begging at Vivid to take her back. The real story is that they owed her back royalties. She dictated and I typed up a letter and we sent it to Steven. We never heard back. Finally, after numerous phone calls, she got an appointment with Steve. She came running over here immediately afterwards all jazzed up. 'Oh Steven's saying that he's thinking of using me in an Alice in Wonderland spinoff. This is so exciting.' And I said, 'Savannah, don't get your hopes up. He's probably trying to change the subject. What did he say about the royalties? 'Oh, he said that they don't owe me anything. When they fired me, the contract ended, and that's over. They don't owe me anything for the royalties. But he gave me $10,000 cash.'

"So I looked at her and said, 'Well, if Steven, and knowing how Steven is, if Steven gave you $10,000 cash to get your mind off the royalties, he probably owes you $100,000.

"Why would he dange this Alice in Wonderland thing in front of her? He's manipulative. He's done it to me. That's why he's a good salesman. He knows how to work people. And I like Steven. And I respect him for what he's good at."

Jim: "Don't you think it's funny when these porn guys dangle one of these movies in front of the girls and the girls look at it like it is a real movie. 'Oh, it's an Alice in Wonderland thing.' It's not a real movie. It's a porno."

Nancy: "These girls... This is the world they've gotten into."

Jim: "They start confusing reality. They're not going to play Alice in Alice in Wonderland. They're going to be a girl who gets f---ed a couple of times in a movie with Alice in Wonderland costumes on. Because there are guys out there who will jerk off to that."

Nancy: "This is their world. Their little realm. And they get awards for these things. It's a culture. And in that world, it is a real movie."

Jim: "To them, they're Julia Roberts and they're about to do Erin Brokovitch. Even though there's only six lines of dialogue."

Nancy: "Savannah was Cinderella. They get to put the costumes on. They get the makeup on. They get people fluttering around them."

Jim: "Like it's a big deal. When they're going into the awards, and they walk down that long aisle to the show. There's hundreds of fans clicking photographs. And they're really hoping that someone will flash a tit. They think they're stars."

Nancy: "They're treated like stars. They get signed to contracts."

Jim: "Contracts that half the time they don't live up to."

Nancy: "They get special privileges. Like VE paid the lease on Savannah's apartment. And rented her a Mustang convertible and paid the insurance. They're being kept nicely. And the rock n'roll stars are all over them."

Jim: "Because they figure that they can perform fellatio better than the average girl."

Nancy: "Plus it's the status."

Jim: "Wearing blonde jewelry. These girls aren't groupies. They're accessories. They're a fashion statement."

Nancy: "I've always been naive. I blunder through the world and get beat up. I prefer to stay naive because to face it all the time is too painful to me.

"With Savannah, after that night [when Savannah shot herself], I couldn't face that reality for a year. I pretended that she was on the road dancing."

Luke: "Did you see any evidence of organized crime in the industry?"

Nancy: "No, but I saw a lot of feds. When I worked for Reuben, they were everywhere. They just followed him around.

"I know that at Vidco, I'd go out at lunch and there would be all these stretch limos parked in the parking lot. I don't know if I should mention the names of any New York people... The Rothsteins, Teddy [Star Distributors] and Marty and his son Frank [Coast to Coast]. Supposedly they're connected."

Luke: "Did you know Walter Gernert?"

Nancy: "Oh yes. Reuben tried to get me involved in a scheme to get him broken out of jail. I had to write Walter and he sent me $10,000 and I kept telling Reuben that I was going to be in jail and he [Walter] was still going to be in jail. And that this was not a good thing for me to be involved in."