X-Rated Remembrances of Porn Legend Marilyn Chambers

A Tender Moment

“A new star graces that firmament we can’t quite reach,” porn star Georgina Spelvin wrote in response to the news of her friend, 56-year-old porn legend Marilyn Chambers, nude in dozens of movies, who died Easter Sunday.

It takes a special kind of lady to make a box of soap dirty. And that lady was the one and only Golden Age porn star Marilyn Chambers, formerly the face of Ivory Soap and later the star of the X-rated classic Behind the Green Door and David Cronenberg’s fright flick Rabid.

When the wholesome, spokesmodel-esque Marilyn walked into the audition for the 1972 flesh-flick Behind the Green Door, she had already acted in the Barbara Streisand comedy The Owl and the Pussycat and the skin-filled 1971 hippie movie Together, directed by Friday the 13th’s Sean S. Cunningham.

Originally, she was to have a non-sex role in Green Door, but the Mitchell Brothers, who directed the movie and were later the subject of the biopic Rated X, talked her into doing her first hardcore scenes, leading to a career of sizzling, taboo-busting, on-screen sex acts.

And she never looked back (unless it was to reach for more lube).

After Behind the Green Door made her a household name (and cost her the cover of the Ivory Soap Box) Marilyn next appeared in The Resurrection of Eve in 1973, then returned to the world of mainstream movies with a starring role in the 1977 cult classic Rabid.

But(t) the 99.44% Pure Girl had no plans of leaving the world of adult behind, and, in 1979, Marilyn’s naked frame resurfaced, complete with a rarely seen pierced clit, in the short S&M features Never a Tender Moment and Beyond De Sade.

Filmed at the notorious O'Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, the two movies had Marilyn hanging from the ceiling and being dominated by leather-clad lesbians Erica Boyer and Tana Robinson. In between snippets of Chambers talking about acting, she gets a leather-gloved fist, a giant dildo, and a string of pool-ball-sized anal beads shoved up her back door.

The next year, Marilyn starred in her other signature porn film, Insatiable, which culminated with the star taking John Holmes’s monstrous member up her ass and then turning to the camera to say, “I need more!”

So did audiences, and they got it from Marilyn. She went on to do dozens more hardcore scenes, softcore erotica like Marilyn Chambers' Bedtime Stories and Desire, and low-budget movies like Angel of H.E.A.T.

Before she died, she had just signed on for a part in Deep Throat: The Play, and her passing prompted producer David Bertolino to recall, “she was wonderful . . . We're going into rehearsals in June, and we're shocked, we're devastated."

Everyone from extreme porn babes like Ashley Blue and Sasha Grey to crossover starlets like Traci Lords, Jenna Jameson, and Ginger Lynn Allen owes a debt of gratitude to her trail- (and tail-) blazing work.

Photographer Suze Randall says of Marilyn: “Marilyn was a sexual pioneer. She pushed the envelope with a lot of class. She would have been a gold medalist if sex was an Olympic event.”

Gold medal or no, Marilyn has a position in Mr Skin’s Hall of Fame for her lifetime (short though it was) of skin-chievements and a special place in the hearts of all her fans.