adonna is famous for recreating herself, but I never saw it. The woman has always been a singer/actress/borrower of culture, big into makeup and clothes and gay men and dance music — that's who she's been for twenty years! To me, Traci Lords is the real self-recreator. She's been a teen runaway and the best porn princess of all time; a cokehead and near-destroyer of the industry; then, sober, a ubiquitous small-screen actress, songstress, author and professional victim. And now she's writing and directing films.
    Traci's personality — defined by her "hunger," as she calls it, "greed" as I call it — is too huge to fit into any of the roles she takes on, both in life and on TV. As an actress, she'll say the lines someone else wrote, but all you see or hear is that hunger, shining out of the TV.

promotion

Same with her porn work. Same with her new autobiography, Underneath It All (HarperCollins), which is compelling but not particularly well written. (Traci uses not once, not twice, but three times the terrible "peeling the onion" analogy. People of the world, stop! Do not compare yourselves to onions!)
    I don't know if I got Traci to open up. I don't know if she can. She is powerfully self-centered, or perhaps just powerfully her. For someone to open up, they must be porous, and I feel like Traci is of one piece, solidly Traci Lords. She's like a steamroller: she sees what she wants, she is what she wants. I liked her. I like steamrollers, because they have so much gumption. Right now she's on a victim kick. I don't like victims, but I do like her version, because she's such a big, powerful snake of a victim. Ladies and gentlemen, Traci Lords! — Lisa Carver

Lisa Carver: The desk clerk just told me that he would connect me to your room "with great pleasure."
Traci Lords: That's great to know! So it sounds like it quieted down over there. [Earlier, Traci tried to call me and had a long conversation with my eight year old, while my one year old yelled about stuff.] How difficult it must be to have kids and a career at the same time. That's one of my biggest fears: starting a family. How do you do it?

It wasn't difficult with the first one, because he loved everybody. He was happy for me to leave him with someone, and I could take off for the weekend. But this one — she doesn't want me to leave the room, never mind the country!
Wow. You just have to become like Superwoman, huh?

Nah. You just get really bad at everything you try to do, until eventually you give up and go to the beach every day. You have no money or prestige or culture or, uh, personality. But you have a good time!
I'd start a family now, if I could just get my husband in the same room for two minutes to do it! The book tour is in week two now, but it feels like week six.

In the book, you describe how work kept you away from your first husband, Brook.
Jeff [Traci's current husband] is nothing like Brook. It's an age thing, too. We were so young in my first marriage — twenty-one. We had a great relationship and a great marriage. I don't think of divorce as failure. I only consider it a failure if you kill each other. We're still friends. My career was so important at the time that it overshadowed everything. My husband now — he's a grown-up. He's forty in September, and he's so supportive. He really celebrates me and what I'm doing; he thinks it's important. I miss him like crazy right now. I'm a real homebody. I miss my cats. I like to travel, but being away from loved ones — that part is really hard.

There are dozens of photos of you in your book, and I don't see your teeth once until you get married. So it apparently agrees with you. My favorite part of the book was when you described being hired to play Wanda in John Waters' Cry-Baby. You didn't know if you could play her sexy and smoldering! I had a similar experience. I was a teen prostitute, and then a couple of years later I was hired to be in a Hollywood movie to play basically a teen prostitute, and I couldn't do it! I was fired two weeks into shooting.
It's this whole thing of what you put on and what you choose to reveal — where it comes out.

And I was just a bad actress. But I know the feeling: you had all this sexual power, and then, when the lecherous, leering men are out of the picture, you don't know what your own sexuality is without them. Getting them aroused was your whole idea of sex. When you don't have that barometer, what are you?
Yeah. People don't realize what a huge epidemic child prostitution is right here in this country, right now. Working with Children of the Night for the last twelve years — that's an L.A.-based organization that helps children who have been victims of the sex industry — and seeing these little girls, it's heartbreaking. There's a hopelessness there, and an attitude. They look at you like, "Well, what do you know about it?" And I say, "Well, let me tell you what I know about it!"

Quote from the book: "For two years John [a former boyfriend] and I lived in a world of dinners, parties, designer clothes, and trips to Miami." What was in Miami?
Miami was just a hotspot at the time. There was New York, Los Angeles and Miami. That's where the celebrities were hanging, and when I got together with Johnny, suddenly I was in a world I'd never really been in before.

I was hanging out in New York at that time. What made you choose Miami?
He made me choose Miami! It was about him. I was with him. That's where his club was, that's where his friends were, so that's where I was. Miami is a fun city; I had a good time there. My whole relationship with Johnny was like Miami: It was ultra, ultra fast. But after a while, you get tired of the parties, the fakeness.

I have a friend who went to Miami and just never came back. Disappeared into a white cloud. Isn't Miami the primary portal for cocaine imports?
I'm not sure, but that sounds reasonable to me.

Why do you want to be an actress?
I started to act because I wanted to prove everybody wrong. I wanted to say that you can make mistakes in your life and then go on to recreate yourself. I wanted to succeed in spite of what anybody said, in spite of my past. I was determined to make a new legacy for myself. That's how it started. But then it changed around '95, '96. My music came out, and I was growing up. Then, acting became just this incredible joy — being able to express yourself. It's intoxicating; it's so much fun to be creative.

I first saw you on Melrose Place. You didn't seem part of the group. You weren't "acting" so much as swaying like a snake. You looked magnetic and evil and solitary. I couldn't take my eyes off you. I didn't even know you were "that" Traci Lords at the time. Then I found out it was Traci Lords, teen porn queen, and I felt bad when your character gratuitously took off her shirt. But then again, it was almost as if it weren't in the script. You looked like you just did it because . . . well, snakes have no use for clothes! It seemed like you were outside of the show, just driven from internal things.
That was the creation of Darren Star. Everything you just said was outlined in the script for that role.

It was a serpentine role? He asked you to play it like that?
Yeah! I was one of the leaders of the cult, and my job was to lure Sydney into this cult.

Darren Star is a genius!
He is!

I have a tiny question: Was it Madonna who tripped you at Thierry Muegler?
Ah ha ha ha ha ha. Guess who, don't sue.

I was wondering why you named some people in the book and not others.
Some of it was for legal reasons; other times, I just didn't want to give people the glory.

Do you have your GED?
No I don't. I dropped out in the tenth grade. I'm a student of the world. I read everything in sight. I'm really open and I'm really interested in what people have to say.

Do you watch public television?
Discovery Channel is my favorite.

You like the animal shows, and the microscopic creature shows?
I love those! I also like surgery shows.

Ew! I can't abide by those. You describe your porn persona as anger incarnate — as a hurt child acting out, a brat with power. I saw one of your porn movies, and I thought you came across as greedy. That same snake thing. Dangerous. What were you greedy for?
I was from a small town. I was raped when I was ten, molested from the time I was eleven, twelve years old. By the time I ran away at fifteen, I was running from something that was pretty ugly. The streets were almost welcoming, after dealing with that kind of abuse at home. By the time I ended up in porn films, I was the perfect target for that kind of exploitation, because I was hungry. I was greedy for attention. Like any child — any human, really. I wanted to be loved; I wanted to be part of a community. As twisted as it may seem, I found all that in the porn world. Whether it chewed me up and spit me out or not, I had my needs met at the time.

Attention amplified by thousands.
Absolutely. There's nothing mysterious about how or why I took the paths I did. The difference is that what I did was on film.

You say the porn world took advantage of you. I don't understand why you can forgive your mother, but not porn. You gave producers a fake ID, so they thought they were hiring a twenty-two year old. In their minds, they weren't hiring a child. But your mom — she knew you were thirteen and being ogled by her fat, old boyfriend when your tube top fell down or he pulled it down. He called your breasts "eggs," and your mom laughed! And then she went off with another boyfriend and left you with that egg-ogler, at fifteen, knowing that he was a drug dealer!
It took years for me to say to my mother, "How could you not protect me?" It took me even longer to fathom that she just didn't know what was going on. She really thought Roger ogling my "eggs" was a joke. Today, I honestly believe that. She was very reckless, and she did some things that ultimately cost me a lot. But part of my healing has been to look at my mother and say, "I love you in spite of this." As far as the porn industry goes — yes, I went in there with a fake ID. But once they did find out I was a little kid, they never said they were sorry.

The only people I've heard trashing my book are people from the porn industry, and I don't find that terribly surprising. They're selling sex, and they're selling ecstasy. And I'm saying, "Let's take the veil off and see what's really going on here." The porn industry wants you to think these girls really love what they're doing, that it's a lot of fun and they're making a lot of money and they're happy. My experience was different.

I think it's interesting that people keep on asking me if I'm sorry for presenting a fake ID as a fifteen year old, but no one has ever asked the porn industry if they're sorry — whether they knew at the time or they didn't know — that this happened to a young girl.

I've been reading up on your press, much of which calls you conniving. I think one of the conundrums people have about you is that you were a fifteen year old in charge of her life.
There it is. A fifteen year old in charge of her life? Please. Who would do that well?

Well, nobody. But you want that so bad when you're a teenager — you want power and self-determination. Maybe you never get over being denied it. And that might be why people keep referring to you as an "ex-teen porn queen" — there are tons of actresses; why should anyone care that you're an actress? It's such a deep fantasy to be a powerful teenager, and you were. You had a car, you had cash, you had coke, you made your own hours. You had adult glamour with a teen's fresh face to carry it. I think that, inside our dark psyches, people are overwhelmed with greed for that.
How anyone could think of it as really glamorous, after reading what it was really like, is beyond me. I understand what you're saying, but to me, it's just so evident. How could it not be soulless? How could it not be painful? How could it be anything that might be considered glamorous? Come on, there's nothing sexy about a kid in pain.

No, of course, that's sad. But porn in itself is simply sex on film. It's not good or evil. You had such a hot appearance that it confused people. They get mad at you. You weren't supposed to be human.
Once people knew I was a kid, and they kept watching . . . If people find that sexy and glamorous, then where are we, as a society, going? As a mother, that must horrify you.

It does. Have you thought about what kind of mother you would be?
You know, I hate it when people that don't have kids talk about how they would be a parent. How can you be in every place at all time? But believe me, I've thought a lot about this. I think you have to instill trust in your children — make sure they know they can come to you, that they're loved and valued and that they don't have to put up with this crap.

When you had sex in the years after your porn career, would you look at the guy and wonder if he was superimposing images of "you" onto you?
In my book, I didn't talk about sleeping with Ken Wahl because I wanted to brag about sleeping with a star. I did it because he was the first man after porn — the first civilian — I had sex with. And it was exactly like your question. I was thinking, "What does he think? What does this mean? Would he take me home to meet his mother? Does he think I'm a bad girl?" It made me cautious. From my early twenties on, I was a serial monogamist. Before that, God knows I experimented. But afterward, the appeal [of promiscuity] was zilch. I got married at twenty-one. I never played the field. But I love sex; I have great sex in my marriage, and I'm glad to.

I think in 1994, Marilyn Manson said he was going out with you.
We never dated! I've gone to his shows, and then he wrote about me in his book. There was the infamous bubble-bath story — which made me laugh. I know Brian has his fantasies . . .

I don't know the bubble-bath story.
I haven't read his autobiography, but people tell me that he tells a story about me giving him a bubble bath after a show. And I thought, wow, out of all the things he could have said he'd done with me, his fantasy is that I gave him a sponge bath! Nurse Lords! I thought it was sweet and pretty respectful. I was given credit for sort of cleaning him up a little.

What's next for you?
I sold my first piece of nonfiction a couple of weeks ago — a piece called "Gone Fishing." I wrote my first film, and it was just accepted into the Fox Search Lab. So I'm going to direct it, probably at the end of this year. They told me this Friday. Sometimes, it's frustrating to be an actor: you're always saying somebody else's words, playing somebody else's role, and not having any control over how it comes out. You think you're getting into a project one way, and it turns into something else. I would love to continue acting, though. I have that hunger. My work with children is really important to me. And I'd love to start a family, being thirty-five years old — God willing and the creek don't rise.

Well, best of luck to you.
To you, too. You're already very lucky.  n°  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Lisa Carver is the author of the books Dancing Queen, Rollerderby, The Lisa Diaries and Drugs Are Nice. She's written for Hustler, Index, Icon, Feed, Newsday and Playboy, among others. She lives in New Hampshire.

©2003 Lisa Carver and Nerve.com.