I read Jenna's book a few months ago (it took me about eight hours). I read Suze's 1978 book Friday in two hours.
They have more in common than in what separates them. They both fit snugly into the porn star biography bracket.
The major differences:
* Jenna is porn's biggest star of all time. Suze is porn's biggest photographer of all time but the book stops before Suze's photography career blasts off. Suze needs a sequel.
* Cultural. Suze's book is laugh-at-the-pain British while Jenna's is Oprah-style American. There's not as much introspection and confession in Suze's work. Suze's book is a fun easy read with large sections for the wanker crowd. Jenna's book is a more challenging read and is about five times as long. She's more open about her life.
Suze's book is a laugh. Jenna bleeds.
* Generational. Suze's book was published when just being in porn was a big deal. Jenna's book comes out of an older, more accepted, industry. Suze came of age when swinging was a political statement. Few people today think of porn and swinging as part of a philosophy.
* Success. Jenna's book was a bestseller.
Suze Randall's 1978 autobiography was written by her husband Humphry Knipe.
It gives me a special thrill to read something that Holly has withheld from me for so long (about the only thing she's withheld from me):
Everything started with a tiny advertisement in a London hippy newspaper called International Times: "Attractive girls wanted for nude modelling. No experience needed. Make up to 100 pounds a day."
I was...a dedicated young nurse at St. George's, the famous London teaching hospital...
...I'd met Humphry Knipe two months previously at the dinner party given in honor of my twenty-second birthday by six roommates, all nurses at St. George's... Tall, athletic, with dark hair parted down the middle, he had a bizarre, almost devilish air about him. His gaze was unusually direct and lingering, a particularly attractive quality in men. He was also a struggling author, and as impoverished as I was. I fell instantly under his spell, and my life was destined to be profoundly changed by this man who had written a book called The Dominant Man.
Humphry had taken a few [nude] pictures of me...
...Otto Kadulka...was a Jewish writer from Budapest, Hungary...but had been forced to flee when the uprising of 1956 failed. Now he was a publisher...
[Showing Suze various photos of his nude models, Otto] leaned over the desk and whispered, "She used to suck me off under dis desk whenever she came to see me."
"Oh, really!" I said...
Ben complimented me on my figure, which cheered me up so much I immediately got into the swing of posing. ...What fun it was to be the undisputed center of attention, to hear a constant stream of flattering comments from the photographer, to have all that film used up on me!
Ben advises her to get some prints off Otto and show them to nude talent agent Vicky Porter.
Otto pays her 17 pounds for her 8.5 hours of posing.
Nude models were regarded as little better than prostitutes.
...A pin-up model, like a virgin in times past, loses most of her value once she's been done.
After a few months, I was modeling quite regularly and on paper I was making three to four times as much as I was as a night nurse. But except for the very rare cash job, I wasn't actually taking home anything. I had to wait for Vicky to get paid, while the photographers had to wait to b paid by the advertising agency, who had to wait for the client. The poor model...often had to wait six months or more...
Desperate for money, Suze talks to Humphry (who earns 120 pounds a month teaching language in the mornings) about having sex with an old man for 50 pounds. He's amused. "It'll make a great anecdote in your memoirs," he tells her.
She got smashed and the sex was all over with the fat man in five minutes.
Suze says this was her only brush with prostitution.
...[A] pinup girl is...often broke, is unashamed about nudity, and who has such an attractive body that people are prepared to pay to see it. This means that for seven sweet years, from eighteen to twenty-five, she lives continually in a state of temptation. There's the photographer who promises to make her into a star if she'll go to dinner with him. There's the business type with a secret yen for pimping who says he'll be her manager if she'll spend the weekend with him in the country talking it over. Then, of course, there's the aging married man, often more honest, who offers presents or money, and no one need ever know, if the girl will spend a couple of hours with him in a hotel room. Of course, a few girls get to like the life of a high-class call girl.
I'm annoyed by the number of "of course" expressions. If something is "of course," you should just say what it is. The book's wordy, with too many "quites" and other fillers.
Two photographers turned Suze's career around -- David Hurn and Michael Boys. She got a new agent -- Doris Lester - and got paid quicker.
Very quickly I became Doris's star girl, which meant I lost more than anyone else when she killed herself [a year after meeting Suze].
...I'd always promised myself that if I were ever lucky enough to make it, I would never lose touch with my old friends like wicked people in fiction always do. Now I began to realize how difficult that was. I was learning the first cruel lesson of success. It didn't seem to me that with my expensive hairdos, professional makeup and fashionable clothes, I was becoming more glamorous. It seemed that my nursing friends were becoming more shabby and unkempt. It wasn't that I rammed my success down their throats, either. The problem was that they had plenty of opportunities to pay me compliments: they'd seen pictures of me in newspapers and magazines. But I really had to wrack my brains for something flattering to say about them. Also, I'd always thought that friends would applaud my success and listen eagerly while I talked about. That was so, at first. Soon, however, one unforgettable day over lunch at Miss Selfridge, a look of envy began to creep into even my closest friend's eyes as she sat listening, chin propped up by her forearm, to me blabbinb on about a modeling assignment in the south of France. It was then I realized I was on my own, that my friends of nursing days lived in another world, and that each month the gap between my world and theirs became more difficult to cross.
...On top of the financial strain was the problem of learning to live with failure. Much of my week was spent walking the streets with my modeling portfolio, going from casting to casting.
Suze spent $1000 for a Nikon camera. After six months of depression, she picked it up and learned photography, often from the men who photographed her.
She became known as "rebel cameragirl Suze," and she rode the women's lib movement to success.
I had the best gimmick in the business: a sexy girl taking pictures of sexy girls.
I also had an important secret weapon: Humphry, the power behind my throne. He was always there to kick around moneymaking ideas.
The models trusted Suze in a way they wouldn't trust a male photographer. They shot for her on spec, meaning they only got paid when she did.
Suze shot her first spread for a top Italian fashion magazine by sleeping with its old lecherous art director Sergio.
About a bisexual model, Suze says: "Alan's got a big cock and I'm a sucker for that."
"Has Humphry got a big one?"
"Yes, as long as your arm. You'll have to check it out when he gets back."
The book transitions into a Penthouse magazine-style sex scene between Suze and her model Soapy.
"You weren't lying. You do love it up the ass," Suze murmured.
After two years of photography, she sold a centerfold e and began to make good money.
I decided that [Inga, the blonde Norwegian beauty] would have to stay with me -- if I could get Humphry to agree. I'd tell him that I'd have her prancing naked in front of the camera from morning till night, and that would inspire his writing.
Suze met Alexander Wallace III, the head of Playboy's British operation. They became friendly. Suze secured a job shooting for American Playboy. She flew to Chicago with model Inga Andersson to stay with Hef.
To my private grief, Inga's room turned out to be noticeably larger than mine. In London she'd been my protege. I was the star sex photographer with articles about mei n the newspapers. She was just another model. Now the tables were turning. In Bunnyland the Playmate is queen. But I was determined not to be pushed into the background.
..."This is Christie Hefner," said Lenn [Fuller]. Immediately I realized that this was Hef's twenty-one-year-old daughter. Cautious of the girls who flocked around her father, she gave me a single, searching look, then pretended I didn't exist. "And have you met Mike Irving?; he works for Oui magazine?" Mike was tall, gawky with buck teeth, thinning grey hair, and a jovial manner.
"You're a photographer? Fantastic. Come up and see us at Oui sometime<" enthused Mike.
"Oui is a male chauvinist rag!" Christie interjected. She pointed out a cartoon in the magazine of an ass with tits tattooed onto it. "Now just look at this," she rattled on, "don't you agree this degrades women?"
I listened, highly amused, to Christie (who was later that year to join Playboy as Hefner's "special assistant") sending up Bunnyland... Eventually I got tired of hovering in the background listening to feminist prattle, and smiling mysteriously, I moved on. (pg. 95)
...Hef was one of the pallbearers at [Bobbie Arnstein's funeral], wearing a black yarmulke because Bobbie had been a Jew.
"Wow!" was all he had time to say as I proceeded to treat [James's] cock like a lolly, which, unlike a lolly, got warmer and bigger every time I licked it.
I boasted to Wes how I'd sucked off James and Andy.
"Here, I'll show you what I did," I volunteered.
...[W]hen it came to sex, I wanted to be the slave.
"Usually I only fancy men who dominate me," I explained with a sigh.
...The day after the orgy shooting Ed Kerr drew me aside and informed me with a smirk that I'd better go see a doctor because Andy, the assistant I'd sucked off, was being treated for the clap.
...I spent a lot of time sitting in the hall, pretending I was reading The Dominant Man, convinced someone important would ask me about the book. Wrong. On one occasion I purposely left the manuscript of Humphry's latest book next to the bowl of fruit in the great hall. I imagined that Hef's eyes, which seemed to miss nothing, would light on the title, The Divine Madness, and he would sit up reading it all night. But to my mortification it was tidied away by a butler and I had to recover it from the kitchen!
I carried a paperback edition of The Dominant Man around with me continually during those few days that Hef was in Chicago, and I was still carrying it in the morning he was due to fly back to Los Angeles.
[Suze calls Humph in London.] "I've given The Dominant Man to Hefner and now I'm going to give The Divine Madness to Normal Mailer," I told him.
..."No need for you to talk about dominance," [Norman Mailer said to Suze]. "You've got balls enough for the both of us."
..."Has success brought you more sex?" was my next one.
..."I'm the easiest lay in town," I giggled. "I'm not looking for romance but I'm game for almost anything."
..."Who wants to go anywhere with a ballbuster like Suze?" Percy [Goldstein] complained.
...[Hef] loves spending time brooding over articles about himself, and I've been told that he often whiles away the lonely early-morning hours watching videotapes of the now-defunct TV show "Playboy After Dark" which he hosted. I myself have seen him watch an old documentary about himself, sitting alone in the screening room, looking like a sleeping beauty sealed off from the world in a rose garden of nostalgia.
...Humphry often complained to me that for the first few months every visit [to the Playboy mansion] was an ordeal, that he used to break out in a cold sweat every time Hef condescended to exchange remarks with him.
"I've been ignored, cold-shouldered, and cut off more times by the entourage during a single night at the Mansion than the rest of my life put together," he told me more than once.
...But while doing my special version of the Charleston that September night, every now and then flashing a sexual lightning bolt, for perhaps five minutes I felt I was at the center of the world. Eclipsed stars stared, beauties gawked, caught off balance between delight and disapproval. Tongues froze, feet stopped. I was all the girls who'd ever danced on a table. I was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. I was a fantasy of sex and success come true. I was sexess.
...Always I felt the pressure to perform, to shock, and amaze.
"I never f--- my models unless they make the first move," [says Suze].
Hef, as usual, was torn between his love of publicity and his need for privacy.
John writes: "I'd like to know how Suze was involved with David Hurn? Did he do pin up stuff? he has a reputation as a serious docu photographer. Also like to know if she knew Colin Osman he was a pin up photographer, publisher and co-editor of Creative Camera, the only really serious photographic magazine in the UK at that time."
Suze was a fashion model as well as a nude model. She did fashion photography for David Hurn.
I interview Humphry Knipe by email:
>I'm reading Suze. It says you are prodigiously hung. True?
Was, although it's all relative.
> What happened to your book, The Divine Madness?
Still unfinished. The title comes from Plato.
>What was it about?
"Madness and genius are close allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide"(Forgot who said that.)
The book focuses on manic depressive poets, writers and prophets. The thesis is that periods of "divine" inspiration are often episodes of mania. It's a new look at the old madness/genius debate focusing on bipolars. I think you qualify.
As far as "Suze" goes the first sex scene (girl/girl) is fiction (the publisher's idea). The rest, unfortunately, is true.
>How did you feel about Suze having to sleep with people to get a layout published etc? Did that not fill you with rage?
I don't remember her sleeping with anybody for anything except personal gratification - she's not that sort of person. Except a threesome with Hefner but that was more a lark - you know "going to bed with history" and all that.
>The book says she had to sleep with this Italian guy Sergio to get a photo spread in a fashion magazine...and when you guys were broke, she had to sleep with some old fat guy for 50 pounds (arranged by Doris).
Ah yea, Sergio and the fat guy, forgotten about that. Didn't know either. I kind of her encouraged her on the second incident - when she told me a girlfriend had a trick going in Mayfair I said why not, try anything once - seemed kind of kinky at the time (this was the anything-goes 60's, after all). I think prostitution is pretty sad - much worse than porn. At least in porn you usually get to choose your partner and you don't get any fat hairy guys. Except Ron Jeremy.
Pushing My Luck With Holly Randall, Jenna Jameson
5/17/06
I don't like to ask people for things aside from interviews, but my new friend Cam pushed me to put together my best work for a book. There are chapters on Jenna and Holly.
I got Holly to give me some pictures which she emailed me in .tif format.
Once I'd gotten my photos, I risked overstepping my boundaries.
To give the following context, remember that Jenna said in her autobiography that Suze exploited her.
Holly, the eldest child, is hyper-protective of her family. I remember five months ago, after she read my memoir, she was convinced that I was out to destroy the industry (that she dare not show it to her parents) and that she couldn't have any part of that and she was exhausted from all the flak she took from being associated with me...
HollyRandall: did you get all the files you needed?
Luke: umm, do you have one of jenna j?
HollyRandall: oh crap
HollyRandall: why don't you get one from her?
HollyRandall: mine are so old
Luke: ok
HollyRandall: seriously she looks nothing like how she looks now
HollyRandall: in what we've shot of her
Luke: ok
HollyRandall: it was all pre-chin job
HollyRandall: hey have you heard of this new Mark Spiegler girl, Sasha
Gray?
HollyRandall: i'm surprised there isn't a post about her on XPT, she's
all the rage
Luke: yeah, i did a story on her 2 weeks ago
Luke: did you meet her?
HollyRandall: we shot her
Luke: is she ok?
Luke: serious?
Luke: ER?
HollyRandall: hahah very funny
Luke: she's the new Maya
Hills [the last 18-year old Holly was excited about because she was
doing porn and was beautiful yet she had her life together and Holly said
she was going to have this terrific porn-enhanced future, that porn was
a stepping stone to greatness for her, and I said to myself, oh please]
HollyRandall: oh please don't go there
Luke: Jenna replies: Depends on what your going to write about me…lol
J
Luke: I knew she's say that.
HollyRandall: yeah well maybe she should think about what she writes about
other people too
Luke: may i quote that? [garble]
HollyRandall: what the hell is that?
HollyRandall: sanskrit?
Luke: I was trying to say, may I quote that? the type went screwey
Luke: you don't know ancient middle eastern languages
Luke: I could never stand your ignorance!
I reply to Jenna:
I did an interview yesterday with Max magazine from France and I said that you had always treated me very nicely, even when I had stuff in my column that was mean. That you understood my job better than any porn star. But yeah, I'm going to revisit that dramatic '99 roadie interview and your response with Nikki Tyler so I understand if you don't want to send along a picture.
Jenna responds: "OY VEY.
"In response to Holly’s barb -- I understand being protective of your mom. But I spoke the truth. Period. I was 18 and knew NOTHING about the industry. I would expect someone with your mother experience and the fact that she is a woman, to be less of a shark. Sorry, I tend to speak my mind."
Holly is like a mother bear looking after her cubs, only her cubs are her parents (in addition to her siblings and her friends).
"Totally understandable."
Former Hustler magazine Editor Allan MacDonell painted the same view of Suze as Jenna and Tera Patrick.
Let's be real folks. Porn is all about pimps and hos (I don't exempt myself from this critique). If you're in the biz, you're either a pimp or a ho. If you're a pimp (photographer), you try to squeeze as much as possible from the talent and pay them as little as possible. If you're a ho, you try to get as much money as possible for as little effort as possible.
Any other approach to porn doesn't last, so it doesn't matter. The only reason to be in this business is money (and attention and immortality). There's no nobility in producing porn. All you do is exploit the basest human emotions by preying on the weak and getting them to do things that will forever hurt them and those who care about them. To make or do porn is to wreak havoc on the vulnerable (I've wreaked plenty of havoc on the vulnerable through my gossipmongering so I am not saying I am better than the people I write about). See what happened to that teacher Tericka Dye (ex-porn star Rikki Andersin) who can never hold her head up in polite society again (without an extraordinary amount of fortitude and accomplishment on her part and unusual forgiveness by those around her).
A friend of mine who is a pornographer responded to Rikki's plight thus: "I've sold a lot of copies of Wet Cum Shots 6 that she stars in. I doubt she'll be able to get a job anywhere. She may as well just set up a webcam and just masturbate online for Steamray."
Yay for porn and for the way it empowers women!
See what happened to Brandy Alexandre and her job at Forest Lawn.
Jenna's book was gentle on the industry. She was far tougher on herself than on porn. That girl went through hell (much of it, after she was 18, of her own creation).
I haven't read Suze's book Suze (written by her husband Humphry and published in 1977) but from all indications (Suze and Humph were kicked out of the Playboy circle because of it and suffered other indignities) Jenna was no more harsh towards her early employer and friend Suze than Suze was to her early employer and friend Hugh Hefner.
The big difference is that Jenna's book was a bestseller and Suze's wasn't. Jenna became a mainstream celebrity. Suze didn't.
On page 180, Allan MacDonell writes about Suze Randall:
Randi Dench had spawned her ambitions during London's swinging '60s and had flirted and f---ed at the fringes of '70s celebrity. Her autobiography, long out of print, had named names and dimensions. Dench's blab-all tome had alienated her men's-sophisticate benefactors, and she'd been reduced to shooting for magazines lesser than Hustler. I complimented Randi on her test shots and warned her not to bug Eleanor about a perceived increase in bra size. Dench, mindful of her reputation for bawdy exuberance, had immediately accosted Eleanor in an open workplace and bellowed, "Come on, Eleanor baby, don't be bashful. Show us those new tits!" This act had been cited as proof that I had created a hostile, sexually harassing atmosphere.
I knew something about how Randi's attentions must have made Eleanor feel. About a year and a half earlier, we had all three scouted prospective models at a world series of exotic dancers in Toronto, Canada. Randi had been drinking heavily, in her defense, but I had not, and her continual groping of my crotch and struggling to unbuckle my trousers while in crowded coffee shops had caused me no small amount of awkward emotions, much to Eleanor's delight.
On page 239, Allan writes:
All the skin photographers I met reinforced the prejudice that theirs, more than any other, is a craft of deception. The girls are fooled into believing they are receiving free money. The viewer is duped into believing the photographer has captured the girl in a moment of ecstasy. One photo shoot visit too many ruins the illusions. Afterward, you look at a "nude glamour" shot, and you see a strained expression held for the duration of a camera click. If you are not careful, your cynicism penetrates beyond the illusions of the photo layouts, and nothing in real life seems authentic anymore.
Kami Andrews writes me: "I've felt that so many times and not had the words for it. I wish I could express myself like that."
On page 101 of her book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, Jenna Jameson begins:
...And because Suze was a woman and spoke in a charming British accent, she could get away with saying things that I would have wanted to strangle most guys for.
...To keep all of my body in focus and in the light, I had to bend and contort into all sorts of unnatural positions that were supposed to look effortless, just as I had at my shoot with Julia [Parton]. But this time, I had to hold the positions much longer and wait for them to meter the light, take a Polaroid, and check the light again before they even started shooting. I was so out of shape from my unhealthy lifestyle that my knees would suddenly start knocking during a pose or my lower back would spasm when I arched it for too long. But I knew that if I moved even an inch, they'd be pissed because they would have to remeter the light; and all the other girls, who were posing so effortlessly, would be annoyed. I really wanted to please Suze, so I was willing to hold my knees over my head for twenty minutes straight, until my spine felt like it was going to snap.
...We had no permits to shoot there, so Suze blocked us from the beach dwellers with big white sheets. For the shoot, she wanted us to pour oil on each other. As we were doing that, she asked Erin to pour some directly on my ding-ding. I pulled back.
"I'd rather not do that," I said. "It'll get infected."
"Fine," Suze sighed.
...Though she is a great person and a talented photographer, Suze, I soon realized, is also a shark. Her specialty is naive young girls -- much like myself -- who are so happy to have a modeling opportunity that they'll do anything. Once she sank her teeth into me, she didn't let go. She shot me until I was half dead.
The pay was three hundred dollars a day, but sometimes she'd cram three different photo shoots into a day. And I had no idea how much she was getting paid for the photos or how many magazines she was selling them to. I was only supposed to be in L.A. for two days, but she kept me for a week, shooting nonstop.
...But I began to feel like Suze was taking advantage of me. My pictures appeared in every sex ad and foreign nudie magazine imaginable. And since I'd signed away the rights, she was raking in all the money. Whenever I asked her for a few chromes for a promo shot or to make a modeling book, she'd refuse. I'd ask her instead to shoot an extra roll for me at our next session instead, and she'd say she couldn't. She made her living off enthusiastic new girls like myself, and I understood that and was grateful to her for making me an international cover girl. But there was a bigger problem -- she was stringing me along, telling me that each shoot we did just might be a centerfold in Penthouse. However, nothing we did ever appeared there, and that had been my dream from day one. And with every picture of mine that was published somewhere else, my chances of ever being a Penthouse Pet plummeted lower and lower.
So I added Suze to my mental shitlist of people I could not trust and decided to stop working with her. (pg. 172)
Last October, Holly called me spewing with rage over this passage by Tera Patrick in the book Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography:
I lived at Suze Randall's home for a while, and while she wasn't busy hitting on me she was getting me published in every magazine imaginable. In retrospect, she probably paid for tha thouse off the pictures she shot of me...
Holly gave me my copy of the book Naked Ambition. She inscribed it: "To Luke - For your reading pleasure and assured scathing criticism. Love [I can't read the name but I assume it is Holly]."
Holly noted her mom was in her fifties when she met Tera and unlikely to hit on her. And that Tera's pictures would pay for no more than a few square feet of her parents Malibu ranch.
HollyRandall: I just can't believe she blamed my mom for not getting
into Penthouse-- that's what made me mad
HollyRandall: it just makes no sense-- if she was such a shark then why
wouldn't she want to sell Jenna to a magazine that would pay her the most
amount of money?
HollyRandall: why would my mom deliberately keep her out of Penthouse?
HollyRandall: it was the fact that Bob [Guccione] didn't like Jenna's
look at the time, and that's the final word-- my mom did everything she
could to get Jenna in Penthouse
HollyRandall: it was the Penthouse accusation that pissed me off, because
it was totally untrue
HollyRandall: look no one is on Jenna's level, and i admire her for getting
where she is
HollyRandall: but whether or not she was aware of the Penthouse issue,
the fact is that it's not true, and it's in print forever and everyone
who reads that will think the wrong thing about my mom
HollyRandall: I'm glad she understands I'm protective of my family, I'm
sure in my situation she'd feel the same way
Jenna didn't blame Suze for not getting into Penthouse. She blamed Suze for leading her along, telling her that this next shoot just might get her into Penthouse. Jenna blamed Suze for taking advantage of her naivety. Jenna blamed Suze for leading her on.
Holly takes after her mother. She's generous and charming but makes a lot of promises that she not only does not keep, but claims to have no memory of ever making. Some of this trait is probably endemic to photographers who prey on the dreams of models.
As Holly told me after one of my protestations of love, "I need someone more stable than you and you need someone more stable than me."
Suze And Jealousy
I email Suze Randall's husband and Holly's dad Humphry Knipe: "How come you and Suze weren't racked by jealousy during your swinging youth while so many seem susceptible to that green-eyed monster?"
Humphry replies: "She was jealous all right - poured a bucket of cold over me one time when I was doing it with one of her girlfriends. Quite a shock. I encouraged her in her philanderings - believed it would build character, which it did."
Luke: "That is hilarious. But seriously, how does philandering build character?"
Humphry replies: "Got her to meet a better class of person, of course."
