Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below

"Sure. She became an internationally recognised pornography star, but she started out life as a pretty conventional teenager from Long Island. Jane Kamensky had access to her diaries, and they make for fascinating reading. As a teenager, she was drawing fashion, writing ‘I love so-and-so,’ mostly interested in fashion and boys. A very exuberant individual. She was from a fairly conventional background, but from the moment she left home she threw herself into art. She went to art school—this was the late 1960s New York, so there was a lot going on. Then, like many people did at that point in their lives in that era, she got in a car with three other women and drove to San Francisco, hit it right at the moment where things were really blowing up there. She did pretty much everything you could do there, and did it with a lot of creativity. She enrolled in art classes, experimented with a lot of drugs, had a lot of sexual partners, lived in a commune—lived, in some ways, a fairly ragged life—and found she could make money working in sexually explicit films. “I do feel that biographies are a great way of seeing history: through the eyes of an individual” That’s how her career in pornography started. Unlike a lot of people who worked in the industry—although everything I know about porn, I learned from this book, so I should try not to make generalisations—she developed a real desire to make porn that would appeal to women, that would tap into female fantasies. She considered most porn to be very male-oriented and pretty brutal. So that’s what she did. She approached it first from the viewpoint of an actor, and eventually became a producer. She was a very attractive woman, and evolved again into a kind of spokesperson for porn in an era where a lot of people were really objecting to its proliferation. Everybody from right-wing politicians to a pretty potent strain of the feminist movement was saying that porn was exploitative of and dangerous to women. So she wound up on talk shows, testified at government hearings, that sort of thing. She never had a lot of success as a businessperson, and the end of her life was hard. I think she ended up feeling she hadn’t achieved her potential. She died of cancer pretty young. I guess if Kamensky hadn’t come along people might have forgotten all about her. But Kamensky—who is a professor emerita at Harvard and is now the president of The Thomas Jefferson Foundation—got access to all the Candida Royalle papers donated to the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, which studies women in their evolution in this country. Then she wrote this book. I personally got a lot out of this book, because Candida Royalle and I were almost the same age. Kamensky does a great job resurrecting the tumult of the times we grew up in. I really, really loved that. But it was sad to have to watch her as she waged some painful personal battles. Yes, I agree."