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By Root 891 0

not simply a couch on which couples splayed, as has been the minimalist tack since digital turned every porn director into a human fly buzzing around the room. (Andy Warhol, a forerunner in so many fields, was the pioneer of couch porn with his 1964 black-and-white silent grinder, set entirely on the old Factory’s well-ridden red couch.) And there were story lines too, however borrowed or imitative they may have been, with actual dialogue typed onto a page by human fingers, even though the actors mouthing them often sounded like hypnotic subjects dubbed into English. But what truly endowed old-school porn with a more relatable, mortal dimension were the bodies belonging to those actors on-screen, which exhibited the lumpy normalcy of our imperfect species rather than the later cloned master-race Las Vegas red-carpet ideal that would discard individual personality as if it were needless lipo. The bodies and behaviors belonged to flawed beings who had more moon than sun in their constitutions. Pre-Viagra, erections flew on a wing and a prayer. Once achieved, they didn’t look like redwoods or swollen membranes, their veiny veins competing with the veins on the actor’s forehead for aching intensity. And the women, especially the older women—there was something poignant about them, the veins in their hands, the ladylike manner in which they dressed and primped in the mirror and adjusted their lingerie just so (a single strand of pearls completing the routine), the way they tipped their chins slightly up in every dialogue exchange to make a point of their actressy dignity, this resigned determination to hold on to what they had left because in a few years it could all go. Kay Parker, Veronica Hart with her retroussé nose—they make the MILFs and cougars of today look like tramp-stamped dirigibles. One of the seventies hot mamas, Jennifer Welles, a favorite of Norman Mailer’s, was like Gena Rowlands turned experienced call girl, a blond fantasy genie-rubbed from a jar of cold cream.

In the first few years after Deep Throat introduced a deathless new phrase into the American lexicon, porn carried a New York pallor, apart from firecrackers such as Vanessa del Rio. The entire industry hadn’t wagon-trained to the West Coast to take advantage of the sunlight, advanced surgery, superior physiques, and Hollywood aura. Porn shot in New York featured aspiring actors whose peeled-apple complexions and concave torsos had the effect of making them seem smaller than life, until you saw them in the flesh and realized they were even smaller than the scale model in your head. Many of these Lee Strasberg school dropouts were furry specimens, and bushiness reigned likewise below with their female co-stars, the close-ups evoking National Geographic expeditions up the Amazon. One porn actor whom I used to see shopping at the local grocery, instantly identifiable by his caveman unibrow, was so spidery that he was usually cast as antic comedy relief, availing himself of a host of the unfunniest funny foreign accents heard to man that always sounded vaguely mad-scientist and paprika’d with Yiddish, as if he fancied himself X-rated cinema’s Sid Caesar. (Only Caesar didn’t hop from one foot to the other as if he always needed to pee.) I often wondered if that checkout-line porn actor pinched himself every night at the improbable wonder of somebody like him—a schnook—being paid to have sex with sexy younger women, or if he whined between takes about the room being too drafty, or his character’s sketchy motivation.

If this neighborhood familiar was the Elisha Cook Jr. of porn actors, one of life’s supporting players, others achieved a cult fame that didn’t radiate into universal instant recognition but accrued into landmark status in the history of porn, most notably Jamie Gillis, whose curly black hair, sardonic eyes, and pent anger were tethered to a mind-gaming deck of cunning moves that reminded one of Philip Roth if Roth had been stripped of Kafka and radio voices: Roth in the predatory raw. At his shaggiest on-screen, Gillis looked like a more intense,