Jenna Jameson

Jenna Jameson (born Jenna Marie Massoli; April 9, 1974) is an American entrepreneur and former pornographic actress, who has been called the world's most famous adult-entertainment performer and "The Queen of Porn." She started acting in erotic videos in 1993 after having worked as a stripper and glamour model. By 1996, she had won the "top newcomer" award from each of the three major adult movie organizations. She has since won more than 20 adult video awards, and has been inducted into both the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) and Adult Video News (AVN) Halls of Fame.

Jameson founded the adult-entertainment company ClubJenna in 2000 with Jay Grdina, whom she later married and divorced. Initially a single website, this business expanded into managing similar websites of other stars and began producing sexually explicit videos in 2001. The first such movie, 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, ClubJenna had revenues of US$30 million with profits estimated at half that. Advertisements for her site and films, often bearing her picture, have towered on a 48-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 has also crossed over into mainstream pop culture, starting with a minor role in Howard Stern's 1997 film Private Parts. Her mainstream appearances continued with: regular appearances on The Howard Stern Show; guest-hosting stints on E! television's Wild On! and Talk Soup programs; a guest-starring voice-over role in a 2001 episode of the Fox animated television sitcom Family Guy; an award-winning voice-over role in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City; and, a guest-starring role in two episodes of 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.[5] She has also created a horror comic book with Virgin Comics entitled Jenna Jameson's Shadow Hunter, released in February 2008. She played the female lead character in the 2008 horror-comedy Zombie Strippers. Jameson is considering a singing/acting career on Broadway in the Tony-nominated musical Rock of Ages.

Jenna Marie Massoli was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her father, Laurence Henry Massoli, was a police officer at the Las Vegas Sheriff's Department and program director for KSNV-DT. Her mother, Judith Brooke Hunt, was a Las Vegas showgirl who danced in the Folies Bergère show at the Tropicana Resort & Casino. Her mother died of melanoma on February 20, 1976, two months prior to her daughter's second birthday. The cancer treatments bankrupted the family and they relocated in Nevada, Arizona, and Montana, usually living in a trailer home or living with her paternal grandmother. She has an older brother, Tony. Her paternal grandfather was of Italian descent; her ancestry also includes English, German, and Northern Irish. She was a frequent entrant in beauty pageants as a child, and enrolled in ballet classes throughout her childhood. In a featurette on the Zombie Strippers DVD, Jameson indicates she trained in dance for fifteen years.

Jameson writes in her autobiography that in October 1990, when she was 16 years old and 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 at Fromberg High School. The incident began after she attempted to hitchhike home, and that she entered the car of the four boys while believing that she would be driven to her home. She reported being raped a second time while still 16, by "Preacher," her boyfriend Jack's biker uncle. Preacher has denied the rape ever occurred. 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 of which would become her trademark tattoo, two hearts on her right buttock. According to E!, her brother Tony, who later owned a tattoo parlor himself, added the inscription "Heart Breaker."

She tried to follow in her mother's career as a Las Vegas showgirl, but most shows rejected her for not having the then-typical height of 5 feet 8 inches (173 cm). She was hired at Disneyland Resort, but left after two months stating concerns over the schedule and salary schedule.

Her boyfriend Jack encouraged her to apply for jobs as a dancer, and in 1991, though underage, she began dancing in Las Vegas strip clubs using a fake identification. After she was rejected from the Crazy Horse Too strip club because of her orthodontia, she removed her braces with pliers and was accepted. After six months, she was earning US$2,000 per night, before graduating from Bonanza High School.

Her first stage name as a dancer was "Jennasis", which she later used as the name of a business that she incorporated ("Jennasis Killing Co."). 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 deciding on Jameson after the whiskey, which she is known to drink.

Besides dancing, starting later in 1991, she posed for nude photographs for photographer Suze Randall in Los Angeles, with the intention of getting into Penthouse. After her photos had appeared in several men's magazines under various names, she then stopped working for Randall, feeling Randall was "a shark" who had been taking advantage of her.
While in high school, she began taking drugs-cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamine-accompanied by her brother (who was addicted to heroin ) and at times her father. Her addiction worsened 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 did not recognize her when she got off the plane.

Pornographic film career

Jameson says that she started acting in pornographic videos in retaliation for the infidelity of her boyfriend, Jack. 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.

Of her first pornographic movie, Randy West said "Jenna contacted me and said she wanted to get into the XXX business, but her agent didn't want her to do porn. A month later I'm on a shoot in Woodland Hills [a San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles], and there's Jenna. She said she wanted to get into the business, despite what her agent said. I told her if you want to just do a girl/girl scene, we can do that. She said she wanted to work with Kylie Ireland, so I set it up. When the sex started, she just fucking rocked! I knew Jenna was special right off the bat. I figured she'd be the next Ginger Lynn, but nobody had any idea she was going to be as big as she turned out to be. Jenna told me when we first met that she was going to be a star."

Jameson got her first breast implants on July 28, 1994, to enhance her stripping and movie careers. By 2004, she had had two different sets of breast implants and a chin implant.

Jameson's first pornographic film appearances were lesbian scenes (a common way that female performers ease into the business). 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 that she would never do anal sex or double penetration scenes on film. Instead, her "signature move" was oral sex, lubricated with saliva. She has also never done any interracial sex scenes with men (despite that category's runaway popularity during 2000s). When asked about this on The Howard Stern Show on February 8, 2008, she said that she was not necessarily opposed to doing so; rather, "it never really came up", as there were few black men working in porn when she started, and none of them worked [exclusively] for the same company [as] she did.

In 1994, after overcoming her drug addiction by spending several weeks with her father and grandmother, Jameson relocated to Los Angeles to live with Nikki Tyler. Her first movie after that was Silk Stockings. 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, ClubJenna. Winners of the contracts for the first two years were Brea Bennett and Roxy Jezel.

In August 2007, Jameson had her breast implants removed, reducing her from a D to a C cup; she also said she was finished with appearing on camera in pornographic films, though she would continue running ClubJenna, which was grossing $30 million per year . In January 2008, Jameson confirmed she is retiring from pornographic performances and has since said that she "won't even do a Maxim cover."

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 bestseller, 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 Cómo Hacer El Amor Igual Que Una Estrella Porno in January 2006.

The book covers her early career from her beginning in show business living with her tattoo artist boyfriend, through receiving the Pornographic Hot d'Or award at Cannes, and wedding pictures from her second marriage. It does not omit sordid details, describing 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.

In January 2007, Jameson was reported in talks with producers on turning the autobiography into a movie. In March 2007, Jameson was reportedly missing meetings with producers, thus endangering the movie, due to problems with a recent vaginoplasty.

Business

Jameson and Grdina formed ClubJenna 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 multimedia pornographic entertainment, first by administering other porn stars' websites, 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 with 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 with one day for other pornographic films.

In a January, 2009 interview with William Shatner on Shatner's Raw Nerve, Jameson said she came close to buying Penthouse magazine when publisher Bob Guccione filed for Chapter 11 reorganization of his business (which occurred in August, 2003), but was thwarted when someone else swooped in and bought up all the stock. New York Magazine's Intelligencer quoted a source from Penthouse as saying "I'm sure she is considering it", adding that Jameson was to be cover girl in January, 2004 - and "it's a really wild-looking shoot, even for a porn star."

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 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 about half that.

Jameson also capitalized on merchandising herself. Since May 2003, she has been appearing on a 48-foot (15 m) 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 King V 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 criticized as "obscene" by Morality in Media.

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 group of business investors that included Jameson purchased Babes Cabaret, a strip club in Scottsdale, Arizona, intending to make it the first foray of ClubJenna 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 ClubJenna 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. 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 instead acted as commentator.

On June 22, 2006, Playboy announced that it had bought ClubJenna Inc., along with an agreement to have both Jameson and Grdina stay on as contracted executives. Playboy CEO Christie 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 revenue earned by Patrick's website, clubtera.com.

Awards

- 1995 The X-Rated Critics Organization XRCO Award for Starlet of the Year (presented in 1996)
- 1996 Hot D'Or Best New American Starlet, Best American Actress
- 1996 AVN Best New Starlet Award, AVN Awards for Best Actress (Video) - Wicked One, Best Couples Sex Scene (Film) - Blue Movie (with T.T. Boy)
- 1996 Fans of X-Rated Entertainment (FOXE) Video Vixen
- 1997 AVN Award for Best Couples Sex Scene (Film) - Jenna Loves Rocco (with Rocco Siffredi), Best Couples Sex Scene (Video) - Conquest (with Vince Vouyer)
- 1997 Hot D'Or for Best American Actress
- 1997 FOXE Female Fan Favorite
- 1998 AVN Award for Best All-Girl Sex Scene (Film) - Satyr (with Missy)
- 1998 Hot D'Or for Best American Actress - Sexe de Feu, Coeur de Glace
- 1998 FOXE Female Fan Favorite
- 1999 Hot D'Or for Best American Movie - Flashpoint
- 2003 AVN Award for Best All-Girl Sex Scene (Video) - I Dream of Jenna (with Autumn and Nikita Denise)
- 2003 G-Phoria Award for Best Female Voice Performance - Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
- 2003 XRCO Award for Best Girl/Girl scene - My Plaything: Jenna Jameson 2 (with Carmen Luvana) (presented August 19, 2004)
- 2004 AVN Award for Best Interactive DVD - My Plaything: Jenna Jameson 2 (Digital Sin)
- 2004 XRCO Hall of Fame, XRCO Award for Mainstream's Adult Media Favorite - for How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale (tied with Seymore Butts for Family Business) (presented June 2, 2005)
- 2005 AVN Award for Best Actress (Film) - The Masseuse, Best All-Girl Sex Scene (Film) - The Masseuse (with Savanna Samson), Best Couples Sex Scene (Film) - The Masseuse (with Justin Sterling)
- 2006 AVN Hall of Fame, AVN Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Film) - The New Devil in Miss Jones, Best All-Girl Sex Scene (Film) - The New Devil in Miss Jones (with Savanna Samson), Crossover Star of the Year
- 2006 F.A.M.E. Awards for Hottest Body, and Favorite Adult Actress
- 2006 XBIZ Award Businesswoman of the Year
- 2007 AVN Award for Crossover Star of the Year
- 2007 F.A.M.E. Award for Favorite Performer of All Time

Personal life

While Jameson has stated in the past that she is bisexual, and that she has had sex with 100 women and 30 men off-screen in her life, she has also stated she is "totally hetero." She has stated the best relationship she ever had was her lesbian relationship 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 boyfriends discussed in her autobiography include Marilyn Manson and Tommy Lee.

On December 20, 1996, Jameson married porn star/Wicked Pictures director Brad Armstrong (real name Rodney Hopkins). The marriage lasted just 10 weeks. Although they informally separated in March 1997, she remained contractually obligated to work on Wicked Pictures projects involving both of them. They legally separated and divorced in March 2001, after Brad discovered her sexual affair with Jorge Araya Montoya (whom she met in a visit to Costa Rica).

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. From 1998 until Jameson's retirement, Grdina was Jameson's only on-screen male sex partner, acting under the name Justin Sterling. They were engaged in December 2000, well before her divorce from Armstrong/Hopkins, and married June 22, 2003. They tried to have children from mid-2004 onwards, as Jameson had planned to retire from adult entertainment upon becoming a mother. The couple resided in Scottsdale, Arizona, in a 6,700-square-foot (620 m2) Spanish-style mansion, bought for $2 million in 2002.

In November 2004, Jameson was diagnosed with skin cancer. Though surgery removed it, she miscarried shortly after the diagnosis. She was unable to conceive 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 stresses of the cancer plus infertility led to her marriage's collapse. In August 2006, Star magazine and TMZ.com confirmed with Jameson's publicist that she and Grdina had separated.

In October 2006, it was reported that Jameson began dating mixed martial artist and former UFC champion Tito Ortiz, whom she met on Myspace. 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 was in love with Jameson, that she was no longer acting in pornography, and that they were in a monogamous relationship. On December 12, 2006, Jameson filed for divorce from Grdina. She introduced Ortiz and talked about their relationship at the 2008 AVN Adult Movie Awards while she was presenting an award. She also made brief appearances on two episodes of The Celebrity Apprentice to help Ortiz on the tasks assigned in those episodes.

Jameson announced in August 2008 that she and Ortiz were expecting twins in April 2009. On March 16, 2009, Jameson gave birth to twin boys, Jesse Jameson and Journey Jette.
On April 26, 2010, Ortiz was arrested for felony domestic abuse at the couple's Huntington Beach, California home. Jameson was photographed afterward that day with a bandaged arm, amid accusations by both parties against each other, with Ortiz accusing Jameson of being erratic and addicted to OxyContin, while she alleged that he was abusive. Since the incident occurred, both parties have recanted these allegations that were made toward one another, though as of April 29, 2010, the investigation by the police department remains open.