Array Seka - Inside Seka

I looked at John and said, “Well, that’s his name, isn’t it?”

Meese sat up rigidly in his chair looking startled, like I had offended him. I brought up Gone With The Wind and commented on the scene where Rhett Butler broke the bedroom door down and ravished Scarlett. Just because you didn’t see the actual act, didn’t he rape her? All you saw was her face going “No, no, no…” but her body was saying “Yes, yes, yes…” This was a critically acclaimed classic film, but I didn’t see anyone attacking it because it had a rape scene in it.

He didn’t respond. I tasted victory. He was speechless.

I was pretty much dismissed after that. They hadn’t gotten what they wanted from me. The anti-porn people never did and never will.

There was a ton of press after this and much of it portrayed me positively as someone who didn’t back down. In fact, I don’t remember a negative word written about me in particular.

The Meese Report ultimately met with much controversy. It was criticized by some of the experts whose research was utilized. They claimed their results were distorted and were incongruent with the final report. Some believe Meese minimized evidence indicating pornography is not dangerous, and others regard the commission members as a pre-selected cohort of anti-pornography zealots. The report was criticized by many inside and outside the pornography industry, calling it biased, incredible, and inaccurate. Ultimately Meese himself, as well as other members of the commission, such as Father Bruce Ritter, met with personal scandals.

Meanwhile, this little country girl had taken on the U.S. government and stood her ground, taking on the big boys. I walked down those halls of justice and felt like David. Goliath had been slain.

Times remained good. I was on a roll. Between the mail order business and working for Club Magazine, I was making a decent wage. But having stopped making films was beginning to hit me in the wallet.

In film, I started out making two, three, four hundred dollars a day. By the time I stopped, I was the highest paid actor in the business. I won’t say how much I commanded, but suffice it to say it was cushy.

I missed that dough. It was funny, though, that because of home video, almost no one knew I’d retired. If you asked people five or six years after I retired who was the biggest porn star in the world, many would still say it was me. Porn lives on a helluva long time. It’s got the half-life of uranium. And people don’t mind seeing the same film or the same scene over and over and over again. Yet, we had no residuals. My films could sell hundreds of millions of copies and be played billions and billions of times, yet I’d never see another red cent.

One day the phone rang. It was Chuck Traynor.

I knew Chuck. Everyone knew Chuck. Chuck was the guy who gave the world Linda Lovelace. He then married Marilyn Chambers, whom I got to know quite well later on, although I never actually worked with either Linda or Marilyn.

Most all the world knows of Chuck Traynor. Linda Lovelace wrote a scathing book about how Chuck brutalized her, forced her into porn, beat her, made her turn tricks, and literally held her prisoner. Is any of it true? I have no freaking idea. Truly, I do not. Within the industry, I heard rumors both ways, some claiming it was all gospel truth, and others claiming Linda’s tales were exaggerated beyond belief. And since I never saw any of it with my own eyes, I have no opinion whatsoever. When I got friendly with Marilyn, Chuck’s name came up but there were never any confessions similar to Linda’s, which doesn’t really mean anything one way or the other.

I did meet Linda once, although it was a surprise meeting for both of us. I was booked on a talk show — I believe it may have been The Richard Bey Show, though I could be mistaken. It was around 1988 and Linda had just written her book and was out promoting it. Me, I was simply making a TV appearance, or so I thought. I used to get calls all the time to appear, usually to discuss the adult industry. Some folks like Phil Donohue, Oprah Winfrey, and Larry King were quite kind, while others, like Morton Downey, Jr., had me on as a human punching bag. Either way, I usually got little to no prep, nor did I need it. I think pretty fast on my feet and it was never an issue of worrying they’d booked me to discuss astrophysics, though I could sure as hell discuss black holes and big bangs.

So there’s Linda Lovelace trash-talking Chuck, which was perfectly fine with me because no one really liked Chuck. But then she went after the entire industry and everyone in it, which would include me, which prompted me to fight back.

She was rambling on and on that she was forced to do everything she did on film and she had no idea what was going on, ever. I’ve heard this sort of stuff from a lot of people after they leave the business and it never fails to piss me off, particularly when I know it’s crap. I perked up and said, “If you had no idea what was going on, why did you ask Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine, to babysit your pets when you were filming?”

Linda snapped back, “If I knew you were going to be on this show, I wouldn’t have shown up.”

I can’t argue that I had, indeed, been sprung on her by surprise. Hell, no one told me Linda Lovelace was going to be on the same panel, either. They had us in different dressing rooms and we were even kept from each other in the green room. I suppose it was more to keep her off-balance than me, ‘cause I could care less. But I definitely struck a nerve. As it turns out, I was reaching deep into my memory for that Al Goldstein anecdote — so deep that I actually got it wrong! For which Linda should have been eternally grateful. I knew Al, and I knew he told me something about him and Linda and dogs. Seems when Linda disavowed the industry, Al found not one but two movies Linda did where she had sex with a dog. Geez! And here I was, turning down scenes with humans I didn’t like.

So Chuck Traynor calls me. By this time, he’s divorced from Marilyn Chambers as well and now, according to him, he’s married to some stripper named “Bo,” like Bo Derek. I don’t know Bo from Bo Diddley, but whatever. Traynor tells me I could make tons of money stripping. I blurted out a loud laugh. To me, strippers were dancers. I’m no dancer. I mean, I could dance at a wedding reception or a crowded nightclub, but I was not a skilled pole dancer.