By JARED STEARNS (Headpress; 2024)
The late Marilyn Briggs (1952-2009), who’s better known as Marilyn Chambers, was one of the most noteworthy performers to emerge from the porno movie renaissance of the 1970s, and PURE: THE SEXUAL REVOLUTIONS OF MARILYN CHAMBERS provides a worthy epitaph.
Marilyn Chambers stood out in the porno landscape due to her movie star good looks and the fact that she delivered an absolutely scorching performance in BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR (1972), one of the seminal porno films of the 1970s. Yet she also achieved fame (of a sort) as the face of Ivory Soap, with its iconic “99 & 44/100% pure” tagline. That “blazing hot and pure as the driven snow” dynamic is illuminated by an anecdote related in the prologue, describing a botched audition for the 1979 Paul Schrader film HARDCORE that concluded with Chambers, who was up for the role of a porn star, getting rejected for being “too wholesome.”
BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR (Trailer)
Raised in Westport, CT, Chambers, like many a porn actor, sought to become a serious actress. Her casting in BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR apparently came about by accident, with Chambers turning up at a San Francisco casting call unaware of the project’s true nature. She allowed herself to be talked into appearing in the film by its creators Artie and Jim Mitchell, who used her Ivory Soap Girl status to boost publicity.
A second Mitchell brothers porno epic, RESURRECTION OF EVE (1973), followed, after which Chambers attached herself to Chuck Traynor (1937-2002). Traynor was rendered notorious by his ex-wife Linda Lovelace, famous for DEEP THROAT (1972), which was released around the same time as BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR. In 1980 Lovelace released the lurid tell-all ORDEAL, in which she claimed Traynor was abusive and forced her into prostitution—claims that adversely affected the career of Marilyn Chambers, as she married Traynor in 1975. Based on what’s revealed in these pages, it’s clear that Lovelace’s characterization of Traynor as an abusive lout was not entirely inaccurate.
The Traynor-Chambers marriage displayed all the signs of an abusive dynamic, with Traynor exerting absolute control over all aspects of his wife’s existence and she claiming to appreciate hid authoritative bent, informing a reporter that “I need to be dominated by a man.” They divorced in 1985, but Chambers apparently “never wavered in her reverence for Chuck, even after his death.”
Getting back to Chambers’ accomplishments, she managed something very few other porno actresses then or now have achieved: she made a mark in legit cinema. Chambers may not have appeared in HARDCORE, but she did headline David Cronenberg’s RABID (1997) and the cult film ANGEL OF H.E.A.T. (1985) in addition to working with the legendary Nicolas Ray on a never-made late 1970s feature called CITY BLUES.
MARILYN CHAMBERS CLIPS FROM “RABID”
Her final years, unfortunately, were bleak ones, with drug abuse, stripping, two arrests and an ill-fated flirtation with politics in the 2000s. She died of a brain aneurysm at age 56, ironically with “no evidence of drug or alcohol toxicity.”
First-time biographer Jared Stearns made an excellent debut with this book. The research is thorough, and the highlights of Marilyn Chambers’s life are covered without any judgmental or moralistic excess (rendering PURE a definite outlier amid most modern-day biographies). Stearns tells it like it is, and in a manner Marilyn Chambers herself would have likely appreciated.