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Jenna Jameson (born Jenna Marie Massoli
on April 9, 1974) is an American pornographic actress
and entrepreneur who has been called the world's most
famous porn star and "The Queen of Porn". She
started acting in erotic films in 1993 after having
worked as a stripper and glamour model. By 1996, she had
won the three top newcomer awards from pornographic film
industry organizations. She has since won more than 20
adult film awards, and has been inducted into both the
X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) and Adult Video News
(AVN) Halls of Fame.
Jameson founded pornographic entertainment company Club
Jenna in 2000, with Jay Grdina, whom she later married.
This business was initially an individual website, which
expanded into managing similar websites of other stars
and began producing pornographic films in 2001. The
first such film, Briana Loves Jenna (with Briana Banks),
was named at the 2003 AVN Awards as the best-selling and
best-renting pornographic title for 2002. By 2005, Club
Jenna had revenues of US$30 million with profits
estimated at half that. Advertisements for her site and
films, often bearing her picture, tower on a
forty-eight-foot-tall billboard in New York City's Times
Square. Playboy TV hosts her Jenna's American Sex Star
reality show where aspiring porn stars compete for a
Club Jenna contract.
Jameson is also noted for her relative success in
crossing over into mainstream celebrity, starting with a
minor role in Howard Stern's 1997 film Private Parts.
Her mainstream appearances continued with guest-hosting
E! television, an award-winning voice role in the 2002
video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and a recurring
role on the 2003 NBC television series Mister Sterling.
Her 2004 autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn
Star: A Cautionary Tale, spent six weeks on The New York
Times Best Seller list.
Early life: Jenna Marie Massoli was born on April
9, 1974 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her father is Lawrence
Massoli, an Italian-American program director for an NBC
affiliate and a police officer. Her mother was Judith
Brooke Hunt Massoli, a Las Vegas showgirl who danced in
the Folies-Bergθre show at the Tropicana Resort &
Casino. Her mother died of skin cancer on February 20,
1976, before Jenna Massoli's second birthday. The cancer
treatments bankrupted the family and they moved several
times, including living in a trailer and moving in with
her father's mother. Her father spent most of his time
at work at the Las Vegas Sheriff's Department, and she
became very close to her brother, Tony Massoli. She was
a frequent entrant in beauty pageants as a child, and
took ballet classes.
In her autobiography, Massoli writes that in October
1990, while the family was living on a cattle ranch in
Fromberg, Montana, she was beaten with rocks and gang
raped by four boys after a football game. She says she
was raped a second time, while still sixteen, by her
boyfriend Jack's biker uncle, Preacher. (Preacher has
denied this.) Rather than tell her father, she left home
and moved in with Jack in her first serious
relationship.
Jack was a tattoo artist, and gave her the first of a
series of tattoos, one which would become her trademark
tattoo, double hearts on her right buttock.According to
E!, Massoli's brother Tony, who later owned a tattoo
parlor himself, added the inscription "HEART
BREAKER".
Early career: Jenna Massoli tried to follow in
her mother's career as a Las Vegas showgirl, but most
shows rejected her for not having the required height of
5 feet 9 inches (175 cm). She was hired at the Vegas
World show, but left after two months stating that the
schedule was brutal, and the money was terrible.
Massoli's boyfriend Jack encouraged her to apply for
jobs as a stripper, and in 1991, though underage, she
began dancing in Las Vegas strip clubs using a fake I.D.
After she was rejected from the Crazy Horse Too strip
club because of the braces on her teeth, she removed
them with a pair of needle-nosed pliers and was
accepted. After six months, she was earning US$2000 per
night, before finishing high school.
Her first stage name as a stripper was
"Jennasis", a name she later used for
incorporating as "Jennasis Entertainment". She
chose the name "Jenna Jameson" to use as a
model after scrolling through the phone book for a last
name that matched her first name, before finally decided
on Jameson for Jameson Whiskey, which she drinks.
Besides dancing, starting later in 1991, she posed for
nude photographs for photographer Suze Randall in Los
Angeles, hoping to get into Penthouse magazine. Jameson
was paid $300 per day, without rights to the pictures.
After her photos had appeared in several men's magazines
under various names,Jameson stopped working for Randall,
feeling Randall was "a shark", and had been
taking advantage of her.
While still in high school, Jameson began taking drugs
cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamines accompanied
by her brother (who was addicted to heroin) and at times
her father. Her addiction became worse during her four
years with her boyfriend. She eventually stopped eating
properly and became too thin to model; Jack left her in
1994. She weighed 76 pounds (less than 35 kilograms)
when a friend put her in a wheelchair and sent her to
her father, who was then living in Redding, California,
in order to detox; her father didn't recognize her when
she got off the plane.
Pornographic film career: Jameson says that she
started acting in pornographic films in revenge for her
boyfriend, Jack, cheating on her.She first appeared in
an erotic film in 1993, a non-explicit softcore movie by
Andrew Blake, with girlfriend Nikki Tyler, whom she had
met modeling for Suze Randall. Her first pornographic
movie scenes were filmed by Randy West and appeared in
1994's Up and Cummers 10 and Up and Cummers 11. She
quickly achieved notice and appeared in several other
pornographic films while still living in Las Vegas.
Jameson got her first breast implants on July 28, 1994,
to enhance her stripping and movie careers. By 2004, she
had had 2 sets of breast implants, and a chin implant.
Jameson's first pornographic film appearances were
female only lesbian scenes. She says: "Girl-on-girl
was easy and natural. Then they offered me lots of money
to do boy-girl." Her first heterosexual scene was
in Up and Cummers 11 (1994).At the beginning of her
career, she promised herself never to do anal sex or
double penetration scenes on film. She has also never
done any interracial sex scenes with men. Instead, her
"signature move" was oral sex, lubricated with
plenty of saliva.
In 1994, after overcoming her addiction by spending
several weeks with her father and grandmother, Jameson
relocated to Los Angeles to live with Nikki Tyler. She
started modeling again, and in 1995 got her father's
blessing to make a career out of pornographic films. Her
first movie after that was Silk Stockings.[34] Later in
1995, Wicked Pictures, a then small pornographic film
production company, signed her to an exclusive contract.
She remembers telling Wicked Pictures founder Steve
Orenstein: The most important thing to me right now
is to become the biggest star the industry has ever
seen.
The contract earned Jameson US$6,000 for each of eight
movies in her first year. Her first big-budget
production was Blue Movie (1995), where she played a
reporter investigating a porn set; it won multiple AVN
Awards. In 1996, Jameson won top awards from three major
industry organizations, the XRCO Best New Starlet award,
the AVN Best New Starlet Award, and the Fans of X-Rated
Entertainment (FOXE) Video Vixen award. She was the
first entertainer to win all three awards. A stream of
other awards followed.
By 2001, Jameson earned $60,000 for a day and a half of
filming a single DVD, and $8,000 per night dancing at
strip clubs. She tried to restrict herself to five films
per year and two weeks of dancing per month. Her husband
Jay Grdina has said that she earned as much as $25,000
per night dancing.
Since November 2005, she has been the host of Playboy
TV's Jenna's American Sex Star, where prospective porn
stars compete in sexual performances for a contract with
her company, Club Jenna. Winners of the contracts for
the first two years were Brea Bennett and Roxy Jezel.
In August 2007, Jameson had her implants removed; she
also said she was finished with appearing on camera in
pornographic films, though she would continue running
ClubJenna.
Autobiography: Jameson's autobiography, How to
Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale was
published August 17, 2004. It was co-written with Neil
Strauss, a contributor to The New York Times and Rolling
Stone, and published by ReganBooks, a division of
HarperCollins. It was an instant best-seller, spending
six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. The
autobiography also won the 2004 "Mainstream's Adult
Media Favorite" XRCO award in a tie with Seymore
Butts's Family Business TV series. It was translated
into German as Pornostar. Die Autobiographie in November
2005, and Spanish as Como Hacer El Amor Igual Que Una
Estrella Del Porno in January 2006.
The almost 600-page book covers her early career from
her beginning in show business living with her tattoo
artist boyfriend, through receiving the Hot D'Or award
at Cannes, and wedding pictures from her second
marriage. It does not omit sordid details, telling of
her two rapes, drug addictions, an unhappy first
marriage, and numerous affairs with men and women. The
first-person narrative is broken up by personal photos,
childhood diary entries, family interviews, movie
scripts, and comic panels.
The autobiography publisher, Judith Regan, also served
as executive producer of a tie-in television news
special, Jenna Jameson's Confessions, airing on VH1 on
August 16, 2004, one day before the book's launch. But
all did not go smoothly for their further relations, as
in April 2005, ReganBooks and Jameson filed lawsuits
against each other. The point of contention was a
proposed reality show about Jameson's everyday life,
discussed between her husband, Jay Grdina, and the
A&E Network.
ReganBooks maintained that any A&E
deal was a breach of Jameson's contract, which indicated
that ReganBooks had a stake in the profits generated by
both the special based on her memoir and a reality-based
series, as well as "any similar projects".
Jameson's suit claimed that the A&E deal preceded
the ReganBooks contract. The reality series had still
not materialized, and the lawsuit was still being
discussed, when Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins
on December 15, 2006 over an unrelated controversy.
In January of 2007, Jameson was reported in talks with
producers on turning the autobiography into a movie,
with Scarlett Johansson to play Jameson. In March of
2007, Jameson was reportedly missing meetings with
producers, thus endangering the movie, due to problems
with a recent vaginoplasty.
Relationships: Jameson has stated that she is
bisexual, and that she has slept with 100 women and 30
men off-screen in her life. She has stated the best
relationship she ever had was her lesbian love affair
with porn actress Nikki Tyler, which she documents in
her autobiography. They lived together at the start of
her porn career and again before her second marriage.
Famous male boyfriends discussed in her autobiography
include Marilyn Manson and Tommy Lee.
On December 20, 1996, Jameson married porn star Brad
Armstrong (real name Rodney Hopkins). They were together
for only ten weeks, informally separating in March 1997,
though continuing to act together in pornographic films.
They legally separated and divorced in March 2001.
In the summer of 1998, Jameson met former pornographic
studio owner Jay Grdina (born John G. Grdina), scion of
a wealthy cattle-ranching family, who had entered
pornographic film production after college. Since 1998,
he has been Jameson's only on-screen male sex partner,
acting under the name Justin Sterling. They were engaged
in December of 2000 before her divorce from Hopkins
and married June 22, 2003 in a Roman Catholic-style
ceremony. They unsuccessfully tried to have children
since mid-2004, and Jameson planned to retire from
acting in pornographic movies permanently after having
their first child. The couple resided in Scottsdale,
Arizona, in a 6,700-square-foot Spanish-style palace,
bought for $2 million in 2002.
In November of 2004, Jameson was diagnosed with skin
cancer. Though surgery successfully removed the cancer,
she miscarried shortly after the diagnosis, possibly due
to stress. She was unable to get pregnant again, even
with in vitro fertilization. Jameson said the in vitro
process "wasn't a good thing for me"; she
gained weight and did not get pregnant. According to
Jameson, the stress of the cancer and then being unable
to conceive resulted in the collapse of her marriage.
In August 2006, Star magazine and TMZ.com confirmed with
Jameson's publicist that she and Grdina had separated,
and that Jameson was dating musician Dave Navarro. A
more serious relationship seems to be with mixed martial
artist and former UFC champion Tito Ortiz. Ortiz
cancelled a November 12, 2006 appearance as the guest of
honor at the United States Marine Corps birthday ball at
the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, when
the Corps refused to let him bring Jameson as his guest.
On November 30, 2006, in an interview on The Howard
Stern Show, Ortiz stated that he is in love with
Jameson, that she is no longer acting in pornography,
and that they are in a monogamous relationship. On
December 12, 2006, Jameson filed for divorce from
Grdina.
In March 2007, Jameson blamed her anemic and gaunt
appearance at the AVN Awards on the harsh divorce
proceedings.
Business: Jameson and Grdina formed Club Jenna as
an Internet pornography company in 2000. ClubJenna.com
was one of the first pornographic sites to provide more
than pictures and videos; it provided explicit diaries,
relationship advice, and even stock tips to paid
members. The site reportedly was profitable in its third
week. The business later diversified into multi-media
pornographic entertainment, first by administering other
porn stars' web sites, then, in 2001, by production of
pornographic films.
Early Club Jenna films starred Jameson herself, limiting
herself to on-screen sex with other women or with
Grdina, who appeared as Justin Sterling. The first
ClubJenna film, Briana Loves Jenna (2001), co-produced
with Vivid, cost US$280,000 to make, and grossed over $1
million in its first year. It was the best selling and
best renting pornographic title of its year, winning
twin AVN Awards. It was marketed as "Jenna. Her
first boy/girl scene in over 2 years." referring to
Jameson's abstention from heterosexual on-film
intercourse. Grdina has said that Jameson's films
averaged sales of 100,000 copies, compared to
run-of-the-mill pornographic films, which did well to
sell 5,000. On the other hand, he also said that their
films took up to twelve days to film, compared to one
day for other pornographic films.
In 2004, the Club Jenna films expanded to starring other
actresses without Jameson Krystal Steal, Jesse
Capelli, McKenzie Lee, Ashton Moore and Sophia Rossi
as Jameson stepped back from starring roles. In 2005,
Jameson directed her first film, The Provocateur,
released as Jenna's Provocateur in September of 2006.
The films were distributed and marketed by Vivid
Entertainment, which Forbes magazine once called
"the world's largest adult film company." They
made up a third of ClubJenna's revenues, but over half
of the profits.
Club Jenna was run as a family business, with Grdina's
sister, Kris, as Vice President in charge of
merchandising. In 2005, Club Jenna had estimated
revenues of $30 million, with profits of approximately
half that.
Merchandising capitalized on Jameson herself. Since May
2003, she has been appearing on a 48 foot tall billboard
in New York City's Times Square promoting her web site
and movies. The first advertisement displayed her
wearing only a thong and read "Who Says They
Cleaned Up Times Square?" There is a line of sex
toys licensed to Doc Johnson, and an "anatomically
correct" Jenna Jameson action figure.
She stars in her own sex simulation video game,
Virtually Jenna, in which the goal is to bring a 3D
model of her to orgasm. Jackson Guitars made a limited
series of Rhoads guitars with Jameson's likeness.
Y-Tell, ClubJenna's wireless company, sells Jenna
Jameson "moan tones" (telephone ringtones),
chat services, and games in partnerships with 20
carriers around the world, mostly in Europe and South
America.
In 2006, New York City-based Wicked Cow Entertainment
started to expand her brand to barware, perfume,
handbags, lingerie, and footwear, sold through high end
retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Colette boutiques.
Her prominent merchandising and mainstream media
coverage has been criticised as "obscene" by
Morality in Media.
Club Jenna kept diversifying. In August 2005, Club Jenna
launched Club Thrust, an interactive website for
Jameson's gay male fans, which includes videos,
galleries, sex advice, gossip, and downloads. The
director of webmaster relations for Club Jenna said the
straight site had always had a lot of gay traffic. By
2006, Club Jenna administered more than 150 official
sites for other adult entertainment industry stars.
In August 2005, a partnership that included Jameson
purchased Babes Cabaret, a strip club in Scottsdale,
Arizona, intending to make it the first foray of Club
Jenna into live entertainment. Soon after the purchase
attracted attention, the Scottsdale City Council
proposed a new ordinance banning nudity at
adult-entertainment venues and requiring a four-foot
divider restricting contact with dancers. Such a divider
would have also effectively banned lap dances, the
dancers' main source of revenue. Jameson argued strongly
against the ordinance, and helped organize a petition
against it. On September 12, 2006, in a referendum on
the ordinance, voters struck down the stricter rules,
allowing the club to continue to operate as before.
On February 3, 2006, Jameson hosted a "Vivid Club
Jenna Super Bowl Party" with several other Club
Jenna and Vivid Girls at the Zoo Club in Detroit,
Michigan for a $500 to $1,000 ticket price. It featured
a lingerie show, but no planned nudity or sex acts.[79]
When first announced, the party caused controversy with
the National Football League, which did not sanction
this as an official Super Bowl event. For 2007, Jameson
signed up to play quarterback in the Lingerie Bowl, but
retired due to her insurance company's damage concerns.
She will instead act as commentator.
On June 22, 2006, Playboy Enterprises Inc. announced the
acquisition of Club Jenna Inc., in conjunction with
personal service agreements by both Jameson and Grdina.
Playboy CEO Christine Hefner said that she expected to
rapidly ramp up film production, producing about 30
features in the first year, and will expand the way they
are sold, not only as DVDs but through TV channels,
video-on-demand services and mobile phones. On November
1, 2006, Playboy renamed one of the Spice Network's
pay-per-view channels from The Hot Network to ClubJenna.
In April 2007, Tera Patrick and her production company
Teravision filed a lawsuit against Jameson and Playboy
Enterprises for failing to properly account for and pay
royalties on monies earned by Patrick's website
clubtera.com.
Mainstream appearances: Jameson is also known for
relative success outside pornography, and even bringing
pornography itself closer to the mainstream. She has
said: "I've always embraced my hard-core roots, but
becoming a household name was an important thing to
me."
In 1995, Jameson sent photos of herself to radio host
Howard Stern. She became a regular guest on his show,
appearing more than 30 times, and played the role of
"Mandy", the "First Nude Woman on
Radio", in Stern's semi-autobiographical 1997 film
Private Parts. This film appearance was the beginning of
a series of roles outside pornography. In 1997, Jameson
made an appearance for an Extreme Championship Wrestling
PPV, Hardcore Heaven '97 as the valet for the Dudley
family, another appearance at ECW Living Dangerously on
March 1, 1998, followed by a few months where she was
the ECW interviewer. In 1998, she filmed a vignette with
Val Venis, a character in the WWF. In the late 1990s,
Jameson guest hosted several episodes of the E! cable
television series travel show Wild On!, appearing
scantily clad in tropical locations.
Jameson voiced an animated version of herself in a July
2001 episode of Family Guy entitled "Brian Does
Hollywood". Her character wins an award for acting
in a porn film directed by Brian Griffin (the dog), and
at the close of the episode she is kidnapped and taken
home by Peter Griffin. In 2002, Jenna Jameson and Ron
Jeremy played themselves in Comedy Central's first
feature television movie Porn 'n Chicken, in the roles
of speakers for a pornography viewing club. Also in
2002, she appeared in two video games, most notably
voicing Candy Suxxx in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
Her character begins as a prostitute, but goes on to
success as a pornographic actress and is displayed on
several billboards within the game. Her performance won
the 2003 G-Phoria "Best Live Action/Voice
Performance Award - Female". She also provided both
the appearance and the voice for "Daisy", a
secret playable character for the video game Tony Hawk's
Pro Skater 4, who performs provocative tricks with her
clothing and skateboard. In 2003, Jameson appeared in
two episodes of the NBC prime time television show
Mister Sterling as the girlfriend of a political
financier.
Some of her mainstream appearances sparked controversy.
An interview with Jenna Jameson contained in the 1999
Abercrombie & Fitch A&F Quarterly was part of
the motivation for Michigan Attorney General Jennifer
Granholm and Illinois Lieutenant Governor Corinne Wood
to speak out against the hybrid magazine-catalog. The
campaign was joined by parents and Christian
conservative groups, and got the Quarterly removed from
shelves and eventually canceled in 2003.
In November 2001, the venerable Oxford Union debating
society invited Jameson to come to London to argue
against the proposition "The House Believes that
Porn is Harmful." She wrote in her diary at the
time, "I feel like I am going to be out of my
element, but, I could never pass this chance up... it's
a once in a lifetime thing." In the end, her side
won the debate 204 to 27.
In February 2003, Pony International planned to feature
her as one of several porn stars in advertisements for
athletic shoes. This was attacked by Bill O'Reilly of
Fox News in an editorial called "Using
Quasi-Prostitutes to Sell Sneakers", calling porn
stars inappropriate role models for teens. In response,
The Harvard Crimson proposed a boycott of O'Reilly and
Fox News. Jameson herself fought back with a sarcastic
email to the show, writing:
I hope Bill understands the difference between a porn
star and a hooker. I assume he has done some research on
the subject because he requested some of my videos after
we finished taping my appearance. I imagine he wanted
them for professional reasons.
However, these were minor appearances on the fringes of
the mainstream. It was the 2004 success of her
autobiography that truly brought her the mass-market
fame she wanted. In a few months, she was interviewed on
NBC, CNBC, Fox News, and CNN, and the book was reviewed
by The New York Times, Reuters, and other respected
outlets.
Samhain, a 2002 low budget horror film in which she
starred with other pornographic actresses including
Ginger Lynn Allen, had sat unreleased until 2005, when
it was re-cut and released as Evil Breed: The Legend of
Samhain, with her featured prominently. She has another
minor horror film role in Sin-Jin Smyth, delayed from
release in late 2006, and a starring role in the comedy
horror film Zombie Strippers, due to be released in
2008. In February 2006, Comedy Central announced plans
to feature Jameson as "P-Whip", in a starring
role in its first animated mobile phone series, Samurai
Love God. Mediaweek called her the biggest name attached
to the project.
In April 2006, Jameson was the star of a Video Podcast
ad for Adidas (a larger sporting goods company than
Pony), advertising Adicolor shoes by playing a
provocative game of whack a mole; O'Reilly did not make
an editorial. In July 2006, Jenna Jameson became the
first pornographic actress to have a wax model at Madame
Tussauds (in the Las Vegas museum). |
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