On the other side of the country, I was finishing high school that year, in Los Angeles County’s suburban San Fernando Valley, a place that I had no idea was then becoming, and would remain for several decades, the center of porn production. What I did know was that the world was lightly stitched with other people’s desires and with public settings to satisfy them in.
Her heart was getting broken repeatedly by a boyfriend who was ethereally lovely but manipulative, and addicted to heroin. To make ends meet, she started doing porn—adopting Candida Royalle as her professional name—and found that it paid better than any of her previous work. First came nude modelling, then loops , then full-length movies. She remained fond of some of the dirty movies she did in San Francisco and L.A. in the seventies.