PW Talks with Traci Lords
PW spoke with Traci Lords at the offices of Book Expo America 2003, which Lords attended to promote her forthcoming autobiography, Traci Lords: Underneath It All. As we spoke, Lords, platinum glamorous in a white blouse and skirt, pecked at a lunch of nuts and seeds, while a Dateline camera crew waited for her in the adjoining room.
PW: Why did you write this book?
Traci Lords: I'm at a place in my life where I'm really happy. I've done a lot in my career that I set out to do. At the end of 2000, when I was out promoting the [TV] series First Wave, I was getting a lot of the same questions about my past, about the porn, over and over again, and I kept seeing it in print, completely distorted, taken out of context, words that I didn't say, and I thought, "You know what? It's time for me to say, 'This is what really happened to me.'" And I'm finally at a place where there's been enough distance so I can write it.
PW: So you wrote the book to set the record straight.
TL: For several reasons, that being one of them. There is a huge problem in this country with kids, with prostitution and pornography. Because I was an abused child, I wanted to shed some light on that. It's a strange position to be in, because for most of my life I've been known as a sex symbol. The media in the mid-'80s, when it all came out, named me the "Ex–Porn Queen." But that was a terrible disservice they did to the public and to me. Because the truth is they should have written, "Ex–Child Prostitute." Because that's what I was. The truth is, there was nothing sexy about what happened.
PW: How did you write the book? Did you have a coauthor?
TL: I used my Mac. No, I didn't have a co-writer, I didn't have a ghostwriter. One of the reasons I ended up at HarperCollins was because they were so behind my doing this myself. And I didn't know if I could! I've been writing for a long time, but I've written songs and short stories. You know, the first draft I started in July, and I turned it in almost two months later. I've heard that's really fast.
PW: How did you write it so quickly?
TL: I don't know how to say this eloquently so I'm just going to say it was like throwing up. It was 500 pages and it was just all over the place. My working title was Girl on Film.
PW: It's interesting to see the response of people to Traci Lords. So many still perceive you primarily as an ex–porn star. It seems you'll have to carry that all your life.
TL: I don't think it's a matter of carrying anything. As I see my life, it has given me a tremendous amount of wisdom in certain ways, and I see it as a gift, because now I can perhaps share this with somebody else. My message, to kids and to parents, is that there is a way to be loved—don't do what I did. What people think of me, and what they put on me, that's their stuff. And who am I to tell people what to think?
PW: Where do you find the inner resources to deal with these challenges?
TL: You know about "angels on both shoulders"? I have them surrounding me.
PW: What are you doing to promote the book?
TL: I'm doing some interviews. I'm doing Dateline, and I'm very interested in doing Oprah. I'm doing everything from fun, fluffy stuff like Paper Magazine to working with Children of the Night, which is a house for runaways and prostitutes who are under 18. I've known Lois [Lee, founder and director of Children of the Night] for 13 or 14 years. Right now she's got six girls. And what she does is amazing. The biggest thing that I can do for her is to be the face and the voice. If you steal a car in this country and you're 13 years old, they send you to Juvie Hall and they rehabilitate you. But if you're 13 and you're a prostitute, walking on the street, nobody rehabilitates you. Why? I hope my book is a launching pad to help change that.
PW: What are you most proud of in your life?
TL: I'm most proud of the fact that I'm still standing. That I'm still standing! And I'm not just still standing. I am, in a way, the Rocky version of my world. It really was that hard, at times.
Traci Lords: Underneath It All
Traci Elizabeth Lords. HarperCollins,
$23.95 (304p) ISBN 0-06-050820-5
Mention the author of this notable memoir to a group of men and many will grin; mention her to a group of women and many will look blank. Both responses should change during the media frenzy over this book, because readers of both sexes will learn that the story of Lords, the most notorious graduate of the porn industry, is one deserving of compassion, admiration and attention. Lords is notorious because when she ruled porn, in the mid-1980s, she was under the age of 18. Born Norma Kuzma in 1968 in Ohio, she writes, she was raised by an alcoholic father and raped at age 10 by a 16-year-old. By her early teens, Lords was hanging out with the wild crowd at school and was preyed upon by her mother's boyfriend, who arranged for her first modeling sessions, which led to her posing as a Penthouse centerfold at age 15 (she had false ID)and then to her meteoric career in porn, which crashed when the FBI stepped in and turned in her into a poster child for sex abuse. Lord's career didn't end in 1986; she's gone on to star and costar in several films and TV shows, including John Water's Cry Baby and Married with Children, and has enjoyed success as a singer. She has an amazing story to tell, and she tells it well here, without a coauthor, in prose that's bumpy at times, smooth at others, but always seemingly honest and courageous. Frank, opinionated, intelligent, drenched in emotion, this is the rare celebrity memoir that doubles as a cautionary tale, and will have readers cheering Lords on as they speed through its gritty, big souled pages. (July 8)
Forecasts: Expect high interest in this title. With vigorous promo - including a 7-city tour, Dateline, Larry King, Montel Williams, Extra - and Lords's built in fan base, sales will be brisk.
Chapter One
The Ohio Valley
I grew up in a dirty little steel town called Steubenville, in eastern Ohio. It was one of those places where everyone was old, or just plain seemed like it. Even the kids felt the times, and the times were tough.
The streets were narrow and filled with men in Levi's with metal lunch boxes coming and going to the mills and the coal mines. It seemed like there was a railroad crossing on every other street, where coils of steel were piled up high along the tracks like giant gleaming snakes resting in the sun. It got real hot in the summertime and the dust from the mills wrapped around the people and held them firmly in their places, and the echo of coughing miners was so common you just didn't hear it.
The local bar, Lou Anne's, was always hopping. It wasn't odd to see your neighbor howling at the moon, and every now and then some of the miners would wander down for a cold one and tie their horses to the stop sign. Drinking was a hobby in that little town, and like a lot of small towns, everyone knew everyone else's business. Women had not quite yet been liberated. Husbands ruled the house, women cleaned it, and any strong female opinion was often rewarded with a fat lip. But no one thought much about that.
At seventeen years old, all my mother, Patricia, ever wanted was to escape. Born in Pennsylvania in the late 1940's, her dad took off to California and left her and her mother alone. They moved around from place to place, and after a while she had a new stepdad and two half brothers and sisters. Never fully welcomed into this second family, she found comfort and a home at her grandmother's house.
My great-grandma Harris was a little redheaded Irish woman who loved sugar-toast and drank tea all day long, no matter how hot it was. She combined a fierce sense of social justice with an almost patrician gentleness that was unusual to find in the government housing project where she lived.
The projects were cockroach-ridden matchbox-shaped dwellings inhabited by desperately poor black families who barely survived on meager monthly public assistance checks. It was a place where hungry children played in the gutters of pot-holed streets while munching on sandwiches of Wonder bread and mayonnaise they dubbed "welfare burgers."
Just a pebble's throw away down the hill was the University of Ohio, where professors drove their shiny new cars to garden fund-raisers on the campus lawn. I remember catching glimpses of white tablecloths blowing in the afternoon breeze while ladies in crisp white dresses sipped drinks from tall glasses. Every once in a while a burst of applause from the appreciative anthill of university people would enter our world. My mouth watered at the scent of cooking barbecue meat, and I longed to race down the hill and devour the mountain of food on the huge banquet tables.
But my mother explained that "people like us" don't mix with "people like those." "People like what?" I demanded, meeting the weary look of my mother, who said it was a matter of "social class." I was five years old and at the time and didn't understand why I wasn't one of the chosen few who could receive hot meals and pretty dresses. I only knew that some people had food and others didn't, and I was on the wrong side of the fence. I'd gather crab apples from my great-granny's yard and hurl them in protest toward the happy people down the hill. Although my targets were never struck, I felt justice had been served.
Great-grandma Harris lived in the first brick building at the beginning of the housing projects. There must have been fifty other little red houses, winding around like a figure eight, each one containing four units. Grandma was known by her neighbors as "the crazy white witch" because she was something of a mind reader who had a reputation for being very accurate. People didn't always like what they were told, but their fear kept grandma safe in a very dodgy neighborhood where racism was a sickening fact of life. Despite it all, my great-grandma was always light, gentle, and seemingly unaffected by her status and the people around her. My mother got a lot of love in that house, and ultimately so did I.
In 1965 the Vietnam War had cast a spell over the people of Steubenville inspiring in them a patriotic fervor. My mother was a beautiful redheaded teenager with piercing green eyes and a peaches-and-cream complexion. Though she was smart and ambitious, she found herself stuck, working in a jewelry store in a town that celebrated everything she loathed. She thought the war was immoral and said so to anyone who would listen.
An independent thinker, she didn't buy the "be a virgin, go to church, follow the establishment" routine that a lot of her friends were falling into. She liked to dance, listened to the Stones and Bob Dylan, and filled her private notebooks with poems. She played the guitar, made out with boys at the drive-in, and went roller-skating on Saturday nights. She lived her life fully, but was always hungry for a bigger bite.
The war weighed heavily on my mother's heart because it touched her like it inevitably touched everyone. She watched as her friends' brothers marched off to a foreign land and cried like everyone else did when they didn't come back. She ached to have a voice, to make a difference, and to be seen and valued. But she was dead broke and depressed at her lack of opportunities, and no matter which way she looked at it, her future appeared grim ...
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The foregoing is excerpted from Traci Lords: Underneath It All by Traci Lords. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
Imprint: HarperEntertainment; ISBN: 0060508205; On Sale: 7/8/2003; Format: Hardcover; Subformat: ; Length: ; Trimsize: 6 x 9; Pages: 304; $23.95; $36.95(CAN)
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