September 9, 2025 • 67 mins
Candida Royalle was a 1970’s porn star who went on to found Femme Productions, the first feminist production company that made porn for women. In this episode, Kaytlin Bailey tells Candida's extraordinary story covering her art, activism, and lasting legacy. Featuring commentary from historian Jane Kamensky, whose stunning biography and archival work helped preserve Royalle’s story, this episode dives into a complex, groundbreaking figure who redefined sexual expression on her own terms.
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You can buy Candida Royalle & The Sexual Revolution by Jane Kamensky here.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome back to the Oldest Profession podcast. I'm your host, Kaytlin Bailey. And today I'm
(00:01):
going to tell you the story of Candida Royalle.
Now, Candida was a porn star from the 1970s Golden Age who went on to create Femme, a
feminist porn production company in the 1980s that focused on female fantasies and critically,
female audiences. And her extraordinarily well-documented life was preserved first by herself,
then by her friends, and finally found a home, among other feminist luminaries at the
Schlesinger Library at Harvard, as a part of their collection on women in American history.
This entire episode owes a debt of gratitude to Jane Kamensky, who's an incredible historian,
who not only acquired Candida Royalle's papers, but also wrote the first book about her life
upon which much of this episode is based. In fact, we sat down with Jane, and you'll be hearing
more from her throughout the episode.
[opening music]
Candida was born Candice Vadala in 1950 into a chaotic situation. Her parents’ marriage was
on the rocks and neither of them had very good coping skills or resources. Her biological
mother, Peggy, was originally from St. Louis. And she married Ted, a boy from the neighborhood
in Arkansas in 1940.
Now, Ted was in and out of jail, mostly for stealing cars. He had a six month stint in the Army
and he and Peggy got together shortly after his dishonorable discharge. And they were married
just long enough for Peggy to get pregnant. Peggy petitioned to dissolve the marriage in 1946
on the grounds of cruelty when their son Jimmy was only six weeks old and Ted was already
back in prison.
And that's when Peggy met Louis, a charismatic jazz drummer, in 1947, when his band was
(00:22):
touring through St. Louis. They got married unceremoniously in an office in Yonkers in 1947.
Louis was originally from Brooklyn, and his mother found the young couple at home in Long
Island shortly after their first daughter, Cynthia, was born in 1948.
The marriage was contentious from the start.
Louis was a musician and not an especially responsible one. And his family, frankly, hated
Peggy, which didn't make anything better.
Candice was born on October 15th, 1950 in Brooklyn and went by Candy from the start.
When Candy was only 18 months old, Louis gave Peggy $500 for the girls. Peggy took her son,
Jimmy, and left. Now, the divorce entitled her to regular visits with her daughters but with no
resources to travel, she never saw them again.
Louis, a single father of two girls, continued to play gigs. He moved back in with his mother in
Brooklyn who looked after the girls, but she wasn't in very good health. In fact, she had two
heart attacks while the girls were in her care. Now, the first time, the girls were split up and sent
to live with different relatives.
And the second time they were sent to a boarding school, which seems to be something out of a
Dickinson novel with its level of cruelty.
But soon enough, Louis found his second wife, Helen Duffy. He met her when she was working
as a cigarette girl, who dreamed of being a singer and she would become the girls’ stepmother.
So they got the girls out of boarding school and set up a house in Astoria, Queens after getting
married in St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1955.
Now, by all accounts, Candy was a good student, and when her older sister hit middle school,
(00:43):
the family moved again into a slightly better neighborhood in the Bronx.
And in 1963, when Candy was 12 years old, she started her first diary and she would keep up
the habit of documenting her own life for the rest of hers.
From these diaries, we know that Helen was an alcoholic and a rageaholic. We also know that
Louis’ gigs as a musician kept getting worse. He eventually started teaching music, which he
hated. And we also know that Louis became obsessed sexually with his oldest daughter,
Cynthia, starting when she was only 12. Helen worked nights at the Waldorf, leaving too much
opportunity for Louis to harass Cynthia.
At one point, he actually broke into his daughter's diary and in the margins where she described
making out with her age appropriate boyfriend, he wrote something along the lines of let's fuck.
That's when Cynthia showed her stepmother the note to explain why she was no longer
comfortable spending time with her father. But instead of helping her stepdaughters, Helen fled
to Florida.
The girls were shuttled around different family members before, at their insistence, they went
back to live with their father and soon enough, Helen returned to the family and after therapy,
decided that maybe what happened wasn't a big deal. Or maybe Cynthia was making the whole
thing up.
At this point, Freud and psychoanalysis was very popular and the image of a frigid mother and
the alluring daughter was prominent among psychoanalysts, who agreed that incest was rare.
It's not.
And for Candy, she felt jealous of all of the attention her older sister was getting, feelings that
(01:04):
she spent years working out with her own therapist.
By high school, Candy started commuting to Manhattan to attend the High School of Art and
Design in New York. She graduated in 1968. Upon graduation, she decided to continue studying
illustration at Parsons School of Design, which had connections to fashion houses in New York.
And like most of the college girls, she knew, Candy commuted from home to save money.
Now, Candy was attending college in the midst of the Sexual Revolution, and Candy started
experimenting with boys and also with drugs. She protested the war in Vietnam. She was
sexually harassed at modeling gigs. She went to Woodstock. She posed nude for the first time.
And she also started therapy as her family continued to fall apart.
Kandi also found the women's liberation movement just as feminism was gaining mainstream
momentum.
Now, she found a feminist meeting in the way that a lot of women did. Someone handed her a
flier, she went to a meeting and something clicked for her, and she formally joined the Women's
Liberation Collective of the Bronx Coalition.
This is Jane Kamensky giving more context about this period of Candida's life.
JK (01:19):
She's born in 1950, and the world for women is changing tremendously. First, sort of trying
to put the genie of professional autonomy back in the bottle after World War Two and then
around the FDA approval of the pill in 1960 and forward, a sense of opening, if not on the side
of economic equality, at least on the side of personal expression, right.
People are having more kinds of relationships, more kinds of intimate relationships, more openly
than in previous generations. As Candice comes of age, I think she knew from a very early age
that she was a person with sort of strong bodily appetites in a family that was eager to hang on
to old world ways. Right, Catholic, Catholic, ethnic family of Italian descent on her, on her
father's side.
She grew up with a strong sense of the double standard and what it meant for women and the
unfairness of “boys will be boys” attitude and the way that that constrained her at home, at
school, in various social settings.
She, like many women from her generation, started attending consciousness-raising groups,
and worked through a feminist reading list and tried to free herself from the male gaze.
Now the Women's Liberation Collective of the Bronx Coalition, like many radical feminist cells,
sort of imploding because of a combination of rigid righteousness and sexual infidelity amongst
the group. It was personal and political.
No lipstick, no long hair, no razor.
She had encountered a feminism that was very focused on a kind of correctness around
self-presentation. And she believed passionately in the kind of equality narratives she was
reading, but she wanted to express herself in the ways that she wanted. She loved red. She
(01:40):
loved vintage costumes. She loved a nipped waist. You know, she was fatphobic. She had you
know, she had Hollywood dreams including in her own presentation that took her to San
Francisco and that was the ground zero of sexual experimentation in the United States, maybe
in the world. And she sort of went through the looking glass there in ways that were thrilling and
terrifying and painful and exhilarating all at the same time.
Now, in 1971, the year before Candice got there, The New York Times Magazine called San
Francisco the porn capital of America. Now, people have been depicting sex since we started
drawing on cave walls, but hardcore films and hardcore theaters were pretty new.
Now, the Bay Area hardcore theaters were described at the time as clean, comfortable and
staffed by attractive girls and polite young men. Some theaters offered discounts to couples and
senior citizens and gave out donuts and coffee after shows. Porn in San Francisco was not only
respectable but also political. And many theater owners identified as feminist, part of the Queer
Liberation movement, and were interested in reclaiming female pleasure in San Francisco
during this time. Less than 25% of residents considered porn to be a problem, and over 75%
supported decriminalizing both prostitution and homosexuality. Why they didn't do either of
those things is anyone's guess.
1972 is also the year that Gerard Damiano’s film, Deep Throat, opened in theaters and became
a mainstream hit. The film was self-mocking, funny, and it became the nation's highest grossing
films and one of the most profitable movies in history. Linda Lovelace, the star of the show, went
on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and was on the cover of Esquire. And Deep Throat's
mainstream success created a new market for feature length hardcore films and ushered in an
(02:01):
era of porn chic.
Now, during this period, Candice rented a room in a commune in San Francisco with a revolving
door of interesting and open-minded people. She started experimenting with psychedelics, and
she also pursued sex like a religion, combining self-improvement with tantric sex and
connecting to people both physically and intellectually all around her.
Candice identified as an artist. She drew. She sang. She performed. And she actually became a
part of The Cockettes, which if you haven't heard of them, they're this amazing avant garde,
queer experimental performance troupe that pushed the boundaries of everything.
Here is Candy in her own words, talking about this period of her life:
I was part of what we call Belvedere House in in the Haight-Ashbury in the early seventies, and
we were like the New York gang. The Manhattan gang. And we were doing theater with the
Angels of Light and some of the original Cockettes. And we formed a lot of splinter groups, like
Warped Floors. I was part of White Trash Boom Boom, and we were all creative people.
During this period of her life, Candice aspired to go professional as a singer and a performer,
and her peers described her as having both an amazing voice and stage presence. And she
was cast in a few roles, some of which were covered by the press. But like a lot of working
performers, she did odd jobs to make rent. She modeled for art students. She handed out fliers
in a lion costume. She sold window pane cleaner, anything to avoid a job-y job. She also
became one of the thousands of people living off the Social Security Administration's
Supplemental Security Income for the Disabled or the ATD, a program that John Waters
described as a grant from the government to continue your insane lifestyle in San Francisco.
(02:22):
Candy found herself in the midst of the gay rights movement and was hanging out with a lot of
folks from the queer counterculture. This is Candy talking about her relationship with Patrick
Cowley:
We were very close and we became lovers. I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of his rare
forays into heterosexuality. He was as exciting and passionate intimately, without being crass as
he was in his music. He was really fun. Patrick was creating in an environment that was just
bubbling with sexuality and was really hot on the whole gay rights movement.
When we all got there in the early seventies, the whole gay rights movement had just been
born. There was such a strong sense of the right to be who you are, to be a gay man, to
express yourself, to be openly out, to be openly sexual. He really was living in a hotbed of just
unbridled and very political passion.
In 1974, Candice got what she thought would be her big break. She was cast as the second
lead in The Heartbreak of Psoriasis, which was a musical production built around Divine, most
famous for her appearance in John Waters’ film Pink Flamingo, which was billed as the most
disgusting movie ever made. And it was not a porn. The Heartbreak of Psoriasis was meant to
take Divine mainstream. It had a production budget of $75,000. And these are 1970s dollars.
And Candice loved the grueling rehearsal process being part of a professional production.
The show opened on June 8th and was expected to run for ten weeks, but the show flopped so
hard that reviewers struggled to get their criticisms published in time for it to matter.
Now, most critics agreed that Candice was a promising actress and singer, but described
Divine's singing as a broken concrete-mixing machine. I mean, no disrespect to Divine and her
(02:43):
obvious genius, but this show sucked and it closed after only a few weeks and after many
apologies from the producers. No one was paid. Now, after the heartbreak of The Heartbreak of
Psoriasis, Candice started modeling for skin magazines and slowly made her way into porn.
She told her stepmother Helen all about it, and her first reaction was good for you and your
liberation, but don't tell your father.
This, of course, was Margo St. James San Francisco, and the dawn of the sex worker rights
movement in the US, sexually liberated and open minded, experimental. And so her entry into
pornography was felt very gradual and very natural. There were opportunities for erotic
performance all around her, and the line between what she was doing with the Cockettes and
making commercial porn felt thin and porous. But she started her porn career by making loops.
These are 8 to 15 minute single sex acts, which were often poorly lit with minimal plot, costume,
or production value. They were cheap to make and profitable for the people who made them,
which is the right combination of things. But they're also the bottom rung of the porn ladder.
Candice made at least seven loops in 1975, and that same year she made her first feature
length film, The Analyst.
This is a clip of Candida Royalle talking about her early experiences in porn.
Yes, I was involved in theater in San Francisco, and I was a jazz club singer and I was looking
for something more lucrative. And I went looking for cheesecake modeling and someone made
me a similar offer as to Veronica. My initial reaction was, “A porn movie?! I've never even seen
one. How dare you?” And I ended up going to watch a movie being shot and was struck by how
legitimate the whole thing was, that there was a full blown crew and directors and producers and
(03:04):
makeup people. And I said, “Wow, this isn't the sleazy kind of scene I thought it was.”
We were fortunate to come into…so I thought, Well, I'm a liberated gal and I really could use this
money. It was good money at the time.
At some point during all of this, Candice met Danny Isley, a clever, sweet, hapless boy who
would lead her down a dark path of drug addiction. Like so many women before and after her,
she looked after Danny, enabling him, paying his bills before getting ensnared herself in heroin.
Now, before Danny, Candice partied. She drank. She smoked. She did a little coke, a little angel
dust, a few Quaaludes. But heroin was a different ballgame. And after her addiction started to
spiral, she lost apartments, friends, and ended up in the hospital a couple of times after
overdosing.
And at the age of 25 and 26 years old, she hit rock bottom. She started selling drugs to offset
her habit and found a regular client, a Saudi Arabian princess named Jay, the youngest
daughter to a king with money to burn on drugs. As her life started to fall apart, she started to do
more and more porn and her talents as a performer served her well in this industry.
This was the age of porn stars, and towards the end of 1976, she landed the lead in a big
budget film called Hard Soap. Hard Soap, which paid $1,000 or several months worth of rent at
the time. And the porn press began to take notice. She attended the glittery premiere of the film
and also the Erotic Film Festival, and she began to give interviews to the recently created and
thriving magazine industry that covered porn and the performers.
The industry rewarded professionalism and despite her growing habits and chaotic love life,
Candice could be counted on to show up on time. Now, by this point, Candice was using the
(03:25):
stage name Candida Royalle, which is a character and name she initially created during her
experimental art era. And Candida’s star power and presence was undeniable. I've looked at
video and seen pictures from this era and she was absolutely stunning.
And in 1976, COYOTE asked Candida Royalle to be photographed as a VIP during the third
annual Hookers Masquerade Ball. Now, by the mid 1970s, mainstream feminists and much of
middle America had turned against pornography. There was a growing moral panic around snuff
films, which were never a thing, and Women Against Violence Against Women or WAVAWA
focused all of their feminist fury on the porn industry as a symbol of violence against women and
high profile women like Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine MacKinnon told people
that porn was violence against women.
And of course, conservative figures like then-Governor and soon-to-be President Nixon used
the moral panic around pornography to rise to power and pass a much more conservative
agenda. Now, when Candice first became introduced to feminism in 1971, the movement was
not focused on pornography. It was focused on domestic violence and access to abortion,
contraception and political issues like sexual harassment in the workplace.
But as the tide shifted, Candice felt increasingly torn between her livelihood and her politics.
And Candida was very explicit that especially as a young woman, she wasn't having a great,
empowered time as a porn performer. By this point, the pornography industry was run by the
mob, which is not a group of people who are known for their egalitarian or feminist labor
practices. However, pornography gave Candida an opportunity to perform to pay her bills and to
be financially independent. Things that she recognized were important for her personally and for
(03:46):
women generally.
[break]
With her love, life and drug habit spiraling out of control, Candida made the decision in February
of 1977 to move to L.A., in part to get away from the scene that she'd become a part of. She
actually leased a garage, which she called a cottage that was in the courtyard of a house
originally built for Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s.
And in L.A., Candida worked hard to take care of herself. She joined a gym. She went to rehab.
She took classes in voice, piano and movement and auditioned for everything. Now, around this
time, a very smart woman in the porn industry Ann Perry had become the first woman president
of the Adult Film Association of America, or the AFAA. And the Erotica Awards were her idea,
and she tapped Candida Royalle to present an award at the very first awards ceremony.
Candida, of course, was thrilled with the recognition, and Perry, for her part, encouraged
Candida to do your best, look your best, and never feel ashamed of an industry that has so
much to offer so many people. Hilariously, the straight press was bored by the three hour
Erotica Awards ceremony where nothing salacious happened but covered it anyway.
Now, while Candida was living in L.A., she returned to San Francisco often to sell drugs to Jay,
the Saudi princess, and to shoot porn. And Jay's patronage allowed Candida to take classes
and avoid getting a straight job. But she kept doing drugs, but not nearly as badly as she had
been doing them in San Francisco. In 1978, she landed a starring role in the film Hot and Saucy
Pizza Girls, which is where the pizza trope in porn comes from.
Candida learned to skate for the role, which helped establish her as a star. And while she was
(04:07):
filming the movie, Candida began a love affair with forensic psychiatrist Martin Blinder, who was
a jazz pianist and also served as the mayor of a small town in California. And soon, he became
famous for being the expert witness to suggest what became known as the Twinkie defense on
behalf of Dan White, who, of course, shot and killed the first openly gay mayor of San
Francisco, Harvey Milk, in November of 1978 that year.
That year, unfortunately, Candice also had an affair with her sister's husband shortly after her
sister gave birth. This, of course, caused a rift between the sisters that lasted for years and was
part of a pattern that began in childhood, something that Candice would ascribe to her early
jealousy at the attention that Cynthia was getting from her stepfather. But there were several
moments in their life, starting when Candice was very young, of her stealing the attention of
Cynthia's boyfriends.
Yet this is something that Candice did to both her sister and her friends for sort of her whole life.
There are stories of Candice going through chemo treatments and still commanding the kind of
sexual magnetism that made her friends nervous about her spending too much time with their
boyfriends.
In the two years after starring in Pizza Girls, Candida made more than 20 films, and porn
became her career. And it became her career just as the anti-pornography movement was
gaining real traction. Women Against Porn, or WAP, which has come to mean something else
recently, opened offices in Times Square and began giving their notorious smut tours. And this
is around the same time that Phyllis Schlafly effectively stopped the momentum behind the ERA
or the Equal Rights Amendment with her STOP campaign, which stands for Stop Taking Our
(04:28):
Privileges Again, liberals and conservatives united against porn at the expense of real progress
for women, which is like the whole takeaway message of the episode.
00;29;25;05
So beginning in 1979, just shortly before Candice left San Francisco and an L.A. woman
began organizing against pornography in ways that were extremely mediagenic, you know,
walking through sex districts with torches showing, you know, these were the take back the
night marches, right. A really laudable project in that women didn't feel safe on city streets at
night, right. What would it mean to claim that space?
But I think from the first, those campaigns were organized not in collaboration and co-creation
with women who were living and plying their trades and finding their worth in sexual spaces, but
against them with the idea that Candice would have run into in her Bronx feminist collective, the
idea that false consciousness, right, that any woman who disagreed was falsely conscious.
In response to the false consciousness nonsense, Candida started hanging out with a group of
folks who had come to be known as Club 90. This is Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, Jane
Hamilton, Gloria Leonard. And it's a group of women porn stars who formed a kind of support
group that would become an advocacy and art-making collective.
They started meeting every other week for dinner and named themselves after Annie Sprinkle’s
address in New York, which at the time was 90 Lexington. Obviously she's moved since then, so
don't, like, go looking for her there or something super weird. They became kind of a
porn-informed, feminist consciousness-raising group and went on to shift the industry that they
were a part of.
(04:49):
Towards the end of the 1970s, while on set for a film called That Lucky Stiff, Candice met a
young man named Per, a 20 year old son of the founder of Saga Films, the most ambitious,
prolific and longest running producer of erotic films in Scandinavia. Now, Per was raised in
Sweden and Rome. He was fresh out of military service in Sweden and already following in his
father's footsteps in the industry.
In fact, and this is kind of an awkward story, Per had recently appeared in one of his father's
films when another male performer failed to show up to set. Now, this was something that they
were hoping to keep quiet, especially from Per’s mom. But the film that he starred in was so
successful that Per had to get out of the country to avoid being recognized.
And because his father was a regular investor in American porn films, it was easy for Per to find
work, first lugging equipment around, but eventually working as an assistant director on film
sets, which is how he met Candice. They began a relationship and after five months of dating,
got married on February 29th in 1980. Now, Per was nine years Candice’s junior, and they got
married ostensibly to keep her in the country.
He'd already been deported once for carrying pornographic material into the United States,
which is a thing that can still happen to you, wildly. But they also really loved each other and
were excellent collaborators. Per’s mother, of course, did not approve of the match or her
husband's or her son's industry. I'm just going to go out on a limb there and say that probably
she was fine spending that money, though.
That same year, Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat, published her memoir, Ordeal, in 1980,
detailing the abuse that she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband and becoming a pawn of
(05:10):
the anti-pornography feminist movement. Renouncing her years as a porn performer and
blaming the industry for the domestic violence that she and so many other women suffered.
Now, the 1980s was the decade that Candida began writing. She started a column called “The
Royalle Treatment,” and she did reported pieces for publications like High Society. And her and
the Club 90 girls put together a live show called Deep Inside, which was a play on Annie
Sprinkle’s hit show, Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. And the show featured members of Club 90, all
of them porn performers telling personal stories. And the show sold out weeks in advance and
got a ton of press. People clearly wanted to know more about the people that they got to see
naked on camera.
This is also the era where there starts to be a pro-sex backlash to the anti-pornography,
anti-prostitution streak that defined mainstream feminism throughout the late 1970s. Specifically
the Barnard Conference in 1982 created the first official organized pushback against this
anti-sex agenda.
Now is around this era that Candida formed FREE or the Feminine Rights to Erotic Expression
and began to wonder in her diary whether or not the answer to the feminist critique of
pornography was actually better porn. And she asked herself the question, what if porn made
sex better for everyone instead of worse for women? That line of thinking eventually led to
Candida co-creating Femme Productions in 1984, effectively inventing feminist porn.
[break]
Candida Royalle was 30 at the time when she shifted from starring in movies to producing and
directing films for her own company. Now she defined her work as explicitly female-oriented,
(05:31):
sensuously-explicit cinema and opposed to the sort of formulaic, hardcore pornography that she
said degraded women for the pleasure of men, echoing the critiques of her feminist
contemporaries. Candida Royalle partnered with Lauren Niemi, a middle class Midwesterner
who studied video at the University of Minnesota, which was then a new art form. Her and her
partner, in addition to being driven by feminist ideals, also saw an untapped market.
By this point, the VCR had brought porn into the bedroom, and suburban housewives were the
fastest growing demographic of porn customers, and they were deeply unsatisfied with their
options as consumers. And it was Lauren who had the wild idea that porn could be feminist,
asking herself the question, what do women want to watch to get turned on?
Now, she initially pitched this idea to MTV and someone there gave her Candida’s number and
the two became equal partners starting Femme Productions in 1984 with Lauren as the
videographer, Candida as the actress-writer, and Per as the producer. They had the idea, the
connections, and with Per’s father's assistants, the startup capital. And it was a production
company that felt like a movement. And the whole team was deeply committed to treating talent
well and creating films that they were proud of.
This is Candida, in her own words, reflecting on what made femme films work:
What inspired me to make porn for women was the fact that these movies are sold based on the
women, but our sexuality was completely ignored in them. And I thought it was just high time to
make something that women could enjoy. The men that run the industry are still relatively
dinosaurs. They're not visionaries. They know money. They know bottom lines. But they really
don't understand what women want in terms of adult movies, any more than many men
(05:52):
understand what women want in bed, in their own bedrooms. And it was just realdy, the market
wasn't listening, and I was.
Their first film was appropriately titled Femme and consisted of six vignettes (05:54):
“Rock Erotica,”
Madonna-style, BDSM-themed piece; “Sales Pitch,” which featured a lesbian encounter
between a cosmetics salesgirl and a prospective customer; “TV Idol,” which was a
fantasy-come-to-life where a character from a soap opera comes out of the television to bed a
viewer. Femme focused on foreplay and afterglow, something that was wholly missing from the
more mainstream porn market. The shots were warmly lit, well framed, and the performers were
in tailored clothing, muted makeup and tasteful lingerie, and the male performers focused on
their partner. And unlike most porn films, during this era, there was no money shot. But there
was real chemistry.
Femme developed a reputation for treating their talent well. During the AIDS crisis, they were
one of the first production companies to not only insist condom use for all of their performers,
but also made real efforts to make protection look hot. Candida told a reporter for Playgirl that
she felt strongly enough about protecting my talent to now be shooting everything using
condoms.
And in November 1984, Femme debuted with two titles ready for distribution and a swanky
premiere in the Flatiron District in Manhattan. And although the mainstream press came, they
didn't cover it. And the press that grew up around the porn industry didn't quite know what to do
with this new kind of erotica and it took a while for them to find its audience. As the porn wars
heated up, Candida became a regular on talk shows defending porn and promoting Femme.
JK (06:13):
This was the early age of the daytime talk show, which loved controversy and which loved
controversy between women perhaps most of all, right, a catfight is a very telegenic thing. And
one of the, I think, most important ways that the sex wars affected Candida Royalle and the
nascent Femme Films enterprise was by putting her up as a as a witness spokesperson to go
head-to-head, toe-to-toe, nose to nose with the Dworkins and MacKinnons, with the anti-sex
wing of now and have heated debates in public spaces.
So in strange ways the sex wars made her as a media personality, I think took Femme into the
spaces that it might not have otherwise been as a cultural experiment and splashed her, you
know, beyond the talk show format and beyond the sort of debating point-counterpoint format
into a cultural entrepreneur covered in, you know, not just covered in sex magazines as she was
when the first film came out, but by 86 or 87 in the mainstream, glossy women's magazines that
were sold in the supermarkets. There was scarcely a talk show in the late eighties that she did
not grace with her presence. And she had an unbelievable, telegenic and radiogenic presence.
In 1986, Candida appeared on The Dr. Ruth Show. I don't know if all of our listeners will
remember Dr. Ruth, but I remember Dr. Ruth. She was this amazing, elderly, like, raisin-looking
woman. She was a child survivor of Auschwitz who became the country's leading TV sexologist,
and she treated Candida with the same plainspoken respect that she treated all of her guests
with.
Here is Candida, in her own words, giving an interview to Dr. Ruth about why she created
Femme and for whom:
CR (06:33):
Traditionally there’s been very little emphasis on the women's orgasms, which was one of
my beefs against the traditional movies. They had very little concern about the women's
orgasm. So very often it didn't happen.
[Dr. Ruth] So because that was not important then. Now tell me, Candida, so now what you're
doing is you are actually producing. Tell me what you're doing.
I started Femme Productions two years ago in order to put a women's voice into these
movies. I wanted to produce and direct movies that represented our fantasies, our sexuality, and
start showing people how to really equally pleasure one another.
But people who wanted to buy femme films had trouble finding them among the lower quality
and less expensive videos that were marketed to men and sold in the back room of video
stores. But Candida worked hard to promote her new brand of feminist porn. She went on The
Phil Donahue Show, going head to head against Catharine MacKinnon. She was featured in
Glamour Magazine.
And by 1985, with her profile rising and demand for Femme Films growing, several of her films
were nominated for AVNs and topped the charts. Femme was on the cusp with a singular vision
and mission that helped her stand out in a crowded field. And from the beginning, they had a
passionate following. Even Gloria Steinem admitted that Femme Films were terrific, and
Candida actually got a spot on NBC's Today, which helped launch them into mainstream
success.
This is Candida Royalle speaking on The Sally Jessy Raphael Show in February of 1986:
My movies present joyful, healthy, loving sex. They present people equally pleasuring each
(06:54):
other. We have to try and change the industry rather than ban it.
Now, Candida began considering educational content as a new potential market for Femme
Films, especially after the Kinsey Institute requested copies of all of her material not only for
their archive but also for use in therapeutic settings.
Now, this, of course, opened up new opportunities for Femme, opportunities that favored direct
mail and other more discreet forms of distribution that helped her audience avoid the back room
of video rental stores, especially since the stores were already reluctant to stock Femme Films.
Candida really came into her power in the 1980s. Not only did she get herself off drugs, but she
was also writing more. And of course, she started her own film production company and really
took control over her own life.
At the end of the 1980s, after eight years of marriage, she was about to turn 40. Thinking about
having a baby and after years of therapy, felt very grown up. Her husband, Per, on the other
hand, was living through what Candida described as his terrible 20s. So they were just in really
different places in their lives. And towards the end of the decade, in 1989, their marriage started
to fall apart. They started cheating on each other. Then, they opened their marriage and then
finally amicably divorced. The separation was actually so amicable that Candice’s father-in-law
let her keep the money that he'd invested in Femme Films even after the marriage was over.
At this time, New York State did not allow for no-fault divorces. In fact, New York was actually
the last state to allow for no-fault divorces, which happened in 2010. So in order to get around
this, the divorce petition says officially that Per abandoned his wife and refused to return,
something that didn't sit well with either of them but allowed them to do this quickly.
(07:15):
Per didn't contest the charges and they were divorced, again, quickly and amicably in January
of 1990. Now, by this point in Candida’s life, she was a celebrity in her own right with her own
film company and a catalog of movies, huge library of clips and television appearances, and
commanded the respect of her peers. And although her marriage had ended, her chosen family,
the Club 90 girls, were stronger than ever.
Candida began speaking at universities, presenting at conferences, and commanded a level of
respect that was and still is, rare for folks in the adult entertainment world. But she was being
squeezed by both ends of the market now. At the same time, all around her HIV-AIDA was
decimating her community and technology was changing the game in porn. Now, VCRs made
Femme Productions possible, but it also created new opportunities for competitors and made it
harder for everyone to make a profit in porn.
Femme started to flounder financially, even as she became something of a feminist celebrity
among a new generation of university students and sex therapists. In fact, at one point, 400
students took a break from studying for their exams to wade through the snow to watch her
speak. She was also invited to speak at the Smithsonian Museum and universities all over the
country.
Candida was featured on HBO's Real Sex, but so was the handheld video camera, and amateur
porn began flooding the market. Now, Femme was committed to making high-quality,
expensive-to-produce, classy erotica that was competing with cheap, amateur porn on one end
and increasingly sexual Hollywood films on the other.
And this is also when the culture wars were heating up.The federal government, specifically the
(07:36):
Meese Commission, targeted many of Candida's friends, including Annie Sprinkle and Karen
Finley and other performers who used sex as a part of their performance art.
[break]
In the mid-1990s, as Candida’s friends were being dragged in front of Congress. Their NEA
funding was attacked. There was huge backlash, including Anita Hill testifying against Clarence
Thomas. And Ted Bundy had recently claimed that porn turned him into a serial killer. And all of
this energized the anti-porn movement. This is Catharine MacKinnon speaking in 1995:
Well, Andrea Dworkin and I, she's my colleague, define pornography as a practice of sex
inequality and defined as the sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and
words. That also includes a list of other very specific activities. In other words, it's defined in
terms of what it actually does. It subordinates women.
And so Candida, alongside many of her Club 90 sisters argued, amongst other things, that the
harms of censorship have historically always fallen heaviest on feminists themselves, which was
absolutely true.
After Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin succeeded in passing on anti-porn law in
Canada, t lesbian erotic magazine Bad Attitude and Andrea Dworkin’s own books, including
Pornography and Women Hating, were among the first items seized at the border.
In her capacity as the leader for Feminists for Free Expression. Candida was busy flying all over
the country, trying to rally people against censorship, lobbying against all of these anti-porn
statutes that were popping up and packing lecture halls.
But she continued to operate at a loss. And soon cyber porn made the whole business model of
(07:57):
Femme pretty unsustainable. To save her company, Candida partnered with Phil Harvey in
1995, a much larger porn distributor with the resources to underwrite her films and develop new
product lines. And in 1998, the X-rated Critics Organization inducted Candida into its Hall of
Fame as a film creator, and she was the first woman to receive such an honor. And Candida
was invited to open the three-day World Pornography Conference, co-sponsored by the Free
Speech Coalition, alongside Annie Sprinkle in 1998. She was absolutely loved and respected by
both her peers and increasingly folks in academia, politics, and psychology. She gave lectures
all over the world and in 2004 wrote a book, How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do (08:04):
Sex Advice
from a Woman Who Knows.
In 2009, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Her sister, Cynthia, and
the Club 90 girls rallied around her through surgeries and chemo. She also worked with an
investigative team, including a documentary film crew, and finally found that her mother Peggy
Thompson had died from the same form of ovarian cancer back in 1991 at the age of 62.
I think this detail is important because cancers of the reproductive cycle are often blamed on
women's lifestyle choices. And it would have been easy for Candida to blame herself for her
cancer. But the fact that her mother died from the same disease shows that it was genetic and
not her fault.
By 2015, Candice knew that she was actively dying. Veronica Vera, one of her Club 90 sisters,
moved in with her and became her executor and caretaker. Per, still friends, snuck sushi into his
ex-wife's hospital room, causing a bit of a scene, and her sister, Cynthia, came back to be with
her and she left the bulk of her estate to these women
Now, Candice kept diaries for her entire life, keeping long letters through all of the tumultuous
years in San Francisco and L.A., preserving her own archive and seemed to have a sense for
the significance of her collection. Her sister, Cynthia, found her journals first in a closet at her
cottage, and her first instinct was to destroy them. But Veronica Vera was the one that took the
bold step of preserving those journals and went so far as to find and negotiate a permanent
home for them.
Now Candy's friends adored her, and that came through at her packed memorial service at the
(08:25):
Judson Memorial Church, which is on Washington Square Park in New York City and Jane
Kamensky, the archivist at the Schlesinger Library, attended that memorial and heard about
Candida’s archive.
JK (08:28):
I heard about Candida Royalle at the moment of her untimely death. The New York Times
devoted about a half page above the fold to her passing in September of 2015, and it called her
a feminist erotica entrepreneur, feminist porn pioneer. And at the time I read that obituary, I had
just started a job as a professor of history at Harvard and the director of Radcliffe Schlesinger
Library, which holds the papers of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the records of
Women Against Pornography, extensive collections on the anti-pornography side of the sex
wars.
And as I was beginning to think about how to build collections, I wondered whether we had
anything that came out of that incredibly tumultuous period in second-wave feminism from the
perspective of sex workers, sex entrepreneurs, sex positive thinkers, and wondered in that
connection whether this Candida Royalle that The Times was talking about had kept records of
her own life.
And I spent several months investigating that question. You know, the whole world is networked.
We were two degrees of separation apart, it turned out, and wound up in November of 2015,
attending Candice Vadala's East Coast Memorial service at the Judson Memorial Church in
Lower Manhattan and getting sort of tantalizing glimpses of an archive, people speaking about
her letters, her diaries, seeing slideshows of historical photographs, her drawings.
I was drooling over this archive, though never thinking that I would study it myself, thinking that
it might be something others would study. So the materials came to Schlesinger Library in 2016
and 2017, and I made the mistake of looking inside the boxes. I was just so awestruck by what I
saw there that she told a story that we had seen from this side and from this side, but never
(08:49):
navigating through the messy middle of a real person's well-documented life.
I was also struck by the fact that often when we talk about people in the sex industries, we talk
about them from the outside in, whether that's through pleasure-seeking and pleasure-affirming
intellectuals and clients, or from moral reformers who are wagging a finger in one direction or
another and have for hundreds of years, you would probably tell me thousands of years, and
here was somebody who was speaking for herself from her girlhood through her time in
Northern California counterculture, theater, live performance, working as an actress on porn
sets in front of the camera and then in the 1980s, going behind the camera and trying to seize
the means of production for herself. So it was a story that really was not well known beyond this
inner circle of Candice's friends and admirers. And it became urgently important to me to try to
tell it.
Candice's collection itself spans about 100 boxes in pretty much every medium (09:00):
her drawings,
the things she was doing as a fashion illustrator and lifelong doodler, the letters and diaries that
I'd mentioned, all of the business records of femme production companies—so future scholars
who want to do much more than I did around the business of feminist pornography will find a
treasure trove there—thousands of photographs, email. There's a lot of born digital material in
the collection. All of these collections are open to research, and I think one of the ways in which
Candice's Club 90 sisters were sort of true to the ethic of open access, of transparency, of, you
know, a refusal of shame that you saw in early 90s projects like Sprinkle’s Public Cervix
announcement. The collections are open almost without restriction.
If you enjoyed this episode, you will love Jane Kamensky's, Candida Royalle and The Sexual
Revolution, which you can find a link to that book in our show notes and of course, also on our
website. It's also available wherever you purchase books online.
[closing]
Welcome back to the Oldest Profession podcast. I'm your host, Kaytlin Bailey. And today I'm
(00:01):
going to tell you the story of Candida Royalle.
Now, Candida was a porn star from the 1970s Golden Age who went on to create Femme, a
feminist porn production company in the 1980s that focused on female fantasies and critically,
female audiences. And her extraordinarily well-documented life was preserved first by herself,
then by her friends, and finally found a home, among other feminist luminaries at the
Schlesinger Library at Harvard, as a part of their collection on women in American history.
This entire episode owes a debt of gratitude to Jane Kamensky, who's an incredible historian,
who not only acquired Candida Royalle's papers, but also wrote the first book about her life
upon which much of this episode is based. In fact, we sat down with Jane, and you'll be hearing
more from her throughout the episode.
[opening music]
Candida was born Candice Vadala in 1950 into a chaotic situation. Her parents’ marriage was
on the rocks and neither of them had very good coping skills or resources. Her biological
mother, Peggy, was originally from St. Louis. And she married Ted, a boy from the neighborhood
in Arkansas in 1940.
Now, Ted was in and out of jail, mostly for stealing cars. He had a six month stint in the Army
and he and Peggy got together shortly after his dishonorable discharge. And they were married
just long enough for Peggy to get pregnant. Peggy petitioned to dissolve the marriage in 1946
on the grounds of cruelty when their son Jimmy was only six weeks old and Ted was already
back in prison.
And that's when Peggy met Louis, a charismatic jazz drummer, in 1947, when his band was
(00:22):
touring through St. Louis. They got married unceremoniously in an office in Yonkers in 1947.
Louis was originally from Brooklyn, and his mother found the young couple at home in Long
Island shortly after their first daughter, Cynthia, was born in 1948.
The marriage was contentious from the start.
Louis was a musician and not an especially responsible one. And his family, frankly, hated
Peggy, which didn't make anything better.
Candice was born on October 15th, 1950 in Brooklyn and went by Candy from the start.
When Candy was only 18 months old, Louis gave Peggy $500 for the girls. Peggy took her son,
Jimmy, and left. Now, the divorce entitled her to regular visits with her daughters but with no
resources to travel, she never saw them again.
Louis, a single father of two girls, continued to play gigs. He moved back in with his mother in
Brooklyn who looked after the girls, but she wasn't in very good health. In fact, she had two
heart attacks while the girls were in her care. Now, the first time, the girls were split up and sent
to live with different relatives.
And the second time they were sent to a boarding school, which seems to be something out of a
Dickinson novel with its level of cruelty.
But soon enough, Louis found his second wife, Helen Duffy. He met her when she was working
as a cigarette girl, who dreamed of being a singer and she would become the girls’ stepmother.
So they got the girls out of boarding school and set up a house in Astoria, Queens after getting
married in St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1955.
Now, by all accounts, Candy was a good student, and when her older sister hit middle school,
(00:43):
the family moved again into a slightly better neighborhood in the Bronx.
And in 1963, when Candy was 12 years old, she started her first diary and she would keep up
the habit of documenting her own life for the rest of hers.
From these diaries, we know that Helen was an alcoholic and a rageaholic. We also know that
Louis’ gigs as a musician kept getting worse. He eventually started teaching music, which he
hated. And we also know that Louis became obsessed sexually with his oldest daughter,
Cynthia, starting when she was only 12. Helen worked nights at the Waldorf, leaving too much
opportunity for Louis to harass Cynthia.
At one point, he actually broke into his daughter's diary and in the margins where she described
making out with her age appropriate boyfriend, he wrote something along the lines of let's fuck.
That's when Cynthia showed her stepmother the note to explain why she was no longer
comfortable spending time with her father. But instead of helping her stepdaughters, Helen fled
to Florida.
The girls were shuttled around different family members before, at their insistence, they went
back to live with their father and soon enough, Helen returned to the family and after therapy,
decided that maybe what happened wasn't a big deal. Or maybe Cynthia was making the whole
thing up.
At this point, Freud and psychoanalysis was very popular and the image of a frigid mother and
the alluring daughter was prominent among psychoanalysts, who agreed that incest was rare.
It's not.
And for Candy, she felt jealous of all of the attention her older sister was getting, feelings that
(01:04):
she spent years working out with her own therapist.
By high school, Candy started commuting to Manhattan to attend the High School of Art and
Design in New York. She graduated in 1968. Upon graduation, she decided to continue studying
illustration at Parsons School of Design, which had connections to fashion houses in New York.
And like most of the college girls, she knew, Candy commuted from home to save money.
Now, Candy was attending college in the midst of the Sexual Revolution, and Candy started
experimenting with boys and also with drugs. She protested the war in Vietnam. She was
sexually harassed at modeling gigs. She went to Woodstock. She posed nude for the first time.
And she also started therapy as her family continued to fall apart.
Kandi also found the women's liberation movement just as feminism was gaining mainstream
momentum.
Now, she found a feminist meeting in the way that a lot of women did. Someone handed her a
flier, she went to a meeting and something clicked for her, and she formally joined the Women's
Liberation Collective of the Bronx Coalition.
This is Jane Kamensky giving more context about this period of Candida's life.
JK (01:19):
She's born in 1950, and the world for women is changing tremendously. First, sort of trying
to put the genie of professional autonomy back in the bottle after World War Two and then
around the FDA approval of the pill in 1960 and forward, a sense of opening, if not on the side
of economic equality, at least on the side of personal expression, right.
People are having more kinds of relationships, more kinds of intimate relationships, more openly
than in previous generations. As Candice comes of age, I think she knew from a very early age
that she was a person with sort of strong bodily appetites in a family that was eager to hang on
to old world ways. Right, Catholic, Catholic, ethnic family of Italian descent on her, on her
father's side.
She grew up with a strong sense of the double standard and what it meant for women and the
unfairness of “boys will be boys” attitude and the way that that constrained her at home, at
school, in various social settings.
She, like many women from her generation, started attending consciousness-raising groups,
and worked through a feminist reading list and tried to free herself from the male gaze.
Now the Women's Liberation Collective of the Bronx Coalition, like many radical feminist cells,
sort of imploding because of a combination of rigid righteousness and sexual infidelity amongst
the group. It was personal and political.
No lipstick, no long hair, no razor.
She had encountered a feminism that was very focused on a kind of correctness around
self-presentation. And she believed passionately in the kind of equality narratives she was
reading, but she wanted to express herself in the ways that she wanted. She loved red. She
(01:40):
loved vintage costumes. She loved a nipped waist. You know, she was fatphobic. She had you
know, she had Hollywood dreams including in her own presentation that took her to San
Francisco and that was the ground zero of sexual experimentation in the United States, maybe
in the world. And she sort of went through the looking glass there in ways that were thrilling and
terrifying and painful and exhilarating all at the same time.
Now, in 1971, the year before Candice got there, The New York Times Magazine called San
Francisco the porn capital of America. Now, people have been depicting sex since we started
drawing on cave walls, but hardcore films and hardcore theaters were pretty new.
Now, the Bay Area hardcore theaters were described at the time as clean, comfortable and
staffed by attractive girls and polite young men. Some theaters offered discounts to couples and
senior citizens and gave out donuts and coffee after shows. Porn in San Francisco was not only
respectable but also political. And many theater owners identified as feminist, part of the Queer
Liberation movement, and were interested in reclaiming female pleasure in San Francisco
during this time. Less than 25% of residents considered porn to be a problem, and over 75%
supported decriminalizing both prostitution and homosexuality. Why they didn't do either of
those things is anyone's guess.
1972 is also the year that Gerard Damiano’s film, Deep Throat, opened in theaters and became
a mainstream hit. The film was self-mocking, funny, and it became the nation's highest grossing
films and one of the most profitable movies in history. Linda Lovelace, the star of the show, went
on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and was on the cover of Esquire. And Deep Throat's
mainstream success created a new market for feature length hardcore films and ushered in an
(02:01):
era of porn chic.
Now, during this period, Candice rented a room in a commune in San Francisco with a revolving
door of interesting and open-minded people. She started experimenting with psychedelics, and
she also pursued sex like a religion, combining self-improvement with tantric sex and
connecting to people both physically and intellectually all around her.
Candice identified as an artist. She drew. She sang. She performed. And she actually became a
part of The Cockettes, which if you haven't heard of them, they're this amazing avant garde,
queer experimental performance troupe that pushed the boundaries of everything.
Here is Candy in her own words, talking about this period of her life:
I was part of what we call Belvedere House in in the Haight-Ashbury in the early seventies, and
we were like the New York gang. The Manhattan gang. And we were doing theater with the
Angels of Light and some of the original Cockettes. And we formed a lot of splinter groups, like
Warped Floors. I was part of White Trash Boom Boom, and we were all creative people.
During this period of her life, Candice aspired to go professional as a singer and a performer,
and her peers described her as having both an amazing voice and stage presence. And she
was cast in a few roles, some of which were covered by the press. But like a lot of working
performers, she did odd jobs to make rent. She modeled for art students. She handed out fliers
in a lion costume. She sold window pane cleaner, anything to avoid a job-y job. She also
became one of the thousands of people living off the Social Security Administration's
Supplemental Security Income for the Disabled or the ATD, a program that John Waters
described as a grant from the government to continue your insane lifestyle in San Francisco.
(02:22):
Candy found herself in the midst of the gay rights movement and was hanging out with a lot of
folks from the queer counterculture. This is Candy talking about her relationship with Patrick
Cowley:
We were very close and we became lovers. I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of his rare
forays into heterosexuality. He was as exciting and passionate intimately, without being crass as
he was in his music. He was really fun. Patrick was creating in an environment that was just
bubbling with sexuality and was really hot on the whole gay rights movement.
When we all got there in the early seventies, the whole gay rights movement had just been
born. There was such a strong sense of the right to be who you are, to be a gay man, to
express yourself, to be openly out, to be openly sexual. He really was living in a hotbed of just
unbridled and very political passion.
In 1974, Candice got what she thought would be her big break. She was cast as the second
lead in The Heartbreak of Psoriasis, which was a musical production built around Divine, most
famous for her appearance in John Waters’ film Pink Flamingo, which was billed as the most
disgusting movie ever made. And it was not a porn. The Heartbreak of Psoriasis was meant to
take Divine mainstream. It had a production budget of $75,000. And these are 1970s dollars.
And Candice loved the grueling rehearsal process being part of a professional production.
The show opened on June 8th and was expected to run for ten weeks, but the show flopped so
hard that reviewers struggled to get their criticisms published in time for it to matter.
Now, most critics agreed that Candice was a promising actress and singer, but described
Divine's singing as a broken concrete-mixing machine. I mean, no disrespect to Divine and her
(02:43):
obvious genius, but this show sucked and it closed after only a few weeks and after many
apologies from the producers. No one was paid. Now, after the heartbreak of The Heartbreak of
Psoriasis, Candice started modeling for skin magazines and slowly made her way into porn.
She told her stepmother Helen all about it, and her first reaction was good for you and your
liberation, but don't tell your father.
This, of course, was Margo St. James San Francisco, and the dawn of the sex worker rights
movement in the US, sexually liberated and open minded, experimental. And so her entry into
pornography was felt very gradual and very natural. There were opportunities for erotic
performance all around her, and the line between what she was doing with the Cockettes and
making commercial porn felt thin and porous. But she started her porn career by making loops.
These are 8 to 15 minute single sex acts, which were often poorly lit with minimal plot, costume,
or production value. They were cheap to make and profitable for the people who made them,
which is the right combination of things. But they're also the bottom rung of the porn ladder.
Candice made at least seven loops in 1975, and that same year she made her first feature
length film, The Analyst.
This is a clip of Candida Royalle talking about her early experiences in porn.
Yes, I was involved in theater in San Francisco, and I was a jazz club singer and I was looking
for something more lucrative. And I went looking for cheesecake modeling and someone made
me a similar offer as to Veronica. My initial reaction was, “A porn movie?! I've never even seen
one. How dare you?” And I ended up going to watch a movie being shot and was struck by how
legitimate the whole thing was, that there was a full blown crew and directors and producers and
(03:04):
makeup people. And I said, “Wow, this isn't the sleazy kind of scene I thought it was.”
We were fortunate to come into…so I thought, Well, I'm a liberated gal and I really could use this
money. It was good money at the time.
At some point during all of this, Candice met Danny Isley, a clever, sweet, hapless boy who
would lead her down a dark path of drug addiction. Like so many women before and after her,
she looked after Danny, enabling him, paying his bills before getting ensnared herself in heroin.
Now, before Danny, Candice partied. She drank. She smoked. She did a little coke, a little angel
dust, a few Quaaludes. But heroin was a different ballgame. And after her addiction started to
spiral, she lost apartments, friends, and ended up in the hospital a couple of times after
overdosing.
And at the age of 25 and 26 years old, she hit rock bottom. She started selling drugs to offset
her habit and found a regular client, a Saudi Arabian princess named Jay, the youngest
daughter to a king with money to burn on drugs. As her life started to fall apart, she started to do
more and more porn and her talents as a performer served her well in this industry.
This was the age of porn stars, and towards the end of 1976, she landed the lead in a big
budget film called Hard Soap. Hard Soap, which paid $1,000 or several months worth of rent at
the time. And the porn press began to take notice. She attended the glittery premiere of the film
and also the Erotic Film Festival, and she began to give interviews to the recently created and
thriving magazine industry that covered porn and the performers.
The industry rewarded professionalism and despite her growing habits and chaotic love life,
Candice could be counted on to show up on time. Now, by this point, Candice was using the
(03:25):
stage name Candida Royalle, which is a character and name she initially created during her
experimental art era. And Candida’s star power and presence was undeniable. I've looked at
video and seen pictures from this era and she was absolutely stunning.
And in 1976, COYOTE asked Candida Royalle to be photographed as a VIP during the third
annual Hookers Masquerade Ball. Now, by the mid 1970s, mainstream feminists and much of
middle America had turned against pornography. There was a growing moral panic around snuff
films, which were never a thing, and Women Against Violence Against Women or WAVAWA
focused all of their feminist fury on the porn industry as a symbol of violence against women and
high profile women like Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine MacKinnon told people
that porn was violence against women.
And of course, conservative figures like then-Governor and soon-to-be President Nixon used
the moral panic around pornography to rise to power and pass a much more conservative
agenda. Now, when Candice first became introduced to feminism in 1971, the movement was
not focused on pornography. It was focused on domestic violence and access to abortion,
contraception and political issues like sexual harassment in the workplace.
But as the tide shifted, Candice felt increasingly torn between her livelihood and her politics.
And Candida was very explicit that especially as a young woman, she wasn't having a great,
empowered time as a porn performer. By this point, the pornography industry was run by the
mob, which is not a group of people who are known for their egalitarian or feminist labor
practices. However, pornography gave Candida an opportunity to perform to pay her bills and to
be financially independent. Things that she recognized were important for her personally and for
(03:46):
women generally.
[break]
With her love, life and drug habit spiraling out of control, Candida made the decision in February
of 1977 to move to L.A., in part to get away from the scene that she'd become a part of. She
actually leased a garage, which she called a cottage that was in the courtyard of a house
originally built for Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s.
And in L.A., Candida worked hard to take care of herself. She joined a gym. She went to rehab.
She took classes in voice, piano and movement and auditioned for everything. Now, around this
time, a very smart woman in the porn industry Ann Perry had become the first woman president
of the Adult Film Association of America, or the AFAA. And the Erotica Awards were her idea,
and she tapped Candida Royalle to present an award at the very first awards ceremony.
Candida, of course, was thrilled with the recognition, and Perry, for her part, encouraged
Candida to do your best, look your best, and never feel ashamed of an industry that has so
much to offer so many people. Hilariously, the straight press was bored by the three hour
Erotica Awards ceremony where nothing salacious happened but covered it anyway.
Now, while Candida was living in L.A., she returned to San Francisco often to sell drugs to Jay,
the Saudi princess, and to shoot porn. And Jay's patronage allowed Candida to take classes
and avoid getting a straight job. But she kept doing drugs, but not nearly as badly as she had
been doing them in San Francisco. In 1978, she landed a starring role in the film Hot and Saucy
Pizza Girls, which is where the pizza trope in porn comes from.
Candida learned to skate for the role, which helped establish her as a star. And while she was
(04:07):
filming the movie, Candida began a love affair with forensic psychiatrist Martin Blinder, who was
a jazz pianist and also served as the mayor of a small town in California. And soon, he became
famous for being the expert witness to suggest what became known as the Twinkie defense on
behalf of Dan White, who, of course, shot and killed the first openly gay mayor of San
Francisco, Harvey Milk, in November of 1978 that year.
That year, unfortunately, Candice also had an affair with her sister's husband shortly after her
sister gave birth. This, of course, caused a rift between the sisters that lasted for years and was
part of a pattern that began in childhood, something that Candice would ascribe to her early
jealousy at the attention that Cynthia was getting from her stepfather. But there were several
moments in their life, starting when Candice was very young, of her stealing the attention of
Cynthia's boyfriends.
Yet this is something that Candice did to both her sister and her friends for sort of her whole life.
There are stories of Candice going through chemo treatments and still commanding the kind of
sexual magnetism that made her friends nervous about her spending too much time with their
boyfriends.
In the two years after starring in Pizza Girls, Candida made more than 20 films, and porn
became her career. And it became her career just as the anti-pornography movement was
gaining real traction. Women Against Porn, or WAP, which has come to mean something else
recently, opened offices in Times Square and began giving their notorious smut tours. And this
is around the same time that Phyllis Schlafly effectively stopped the momentum behind the ERA
or the Equal Rights Amendment with her STOP campaign, which stands for Stop Taking Our
(04:28):
Privileges Again, liberals and conservatives united against porn at the expense of real progress
for women, which is like the whole takeaway message of the episode.
00;29;25;05
So beginning in 1979, just shortly before Candice left San Francisco and an L.A. woman
began organizing against pornography in ways that were extremely mediagenic, you know,
walking through sex districts with torches showing, you know, these were the take back the
night marches, right. A really laudable project in that women didn't feel safe on city streets at
night, right. What would it mean to claim that space?
But I think from the first, those campaigns were organized not in collaboration and co-creation
with women who were living and plying their trades and finding their worth in sexual spaces, but
against them with the idea that Candice would have run into in her Bronx feminist collective, the
idea that false consciousness, right, that any woman who disagreed was falsely conscious.
In response to the false consciousness nonsense, Candida started hanging out with a group of
folks who had come to be known as Club 90. This is Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, Jane
Hamilton, Gloria Leonard. And it's a group of women porn stars who formed a kind of support
group that would become an advocacy and art-making collective.
They started meeting every other week for dinner and named themselves after Annie Sprinkle’s
address in New York, which at the time was 90 Lexington. Obviously she's moved since then, so
don't, like, go looking for her there or something super weird. They became kind of a
porn-informed, feminist consciousness-raising group and went on to shift the industry that they
were a part of.
(04:49):
Towards the end of the 1970s, while on set for a film called That Lucky Stiff, Candice met a
young man named Per, a 20 year old son of the founder of Saga Films, the most ambitious,
prolific and longest running producer of erotic films in Scandinavia. Now, Per was raised in
Sweden and Rome. He was fresh out of military service in Sweden and already following in his
father's footsteps in the industry.
In fact, and this is kind of an awkward story, Per had recently appeared in one of his father's
films when another male performer failed to show up to set. Now, this was something that they
were hoping to keep quiet, especially from Per’s mom. But the film that he starred in was so
successful that Per had to get out of the country to avoid being recognized.
And because his father was a regular investor in American porn films, it was easy for Per to find
work, first lugging equipment around, but eventually working as an assistant director on film
sets, which is how he met Candice. They began a relationship and after five months of dating,
got married on February 29th in 1980. Now, Per was nine years Candice’s junior, and they got
married ostensibly to keep her in the country.
He'd already been deported once for carrying pornographic material into the United States,
which is a thing that can still happen to you, wildly. But they also really loved each other and
were excellent collaborators. Per’s mother, of course, did not approve of the match or her
husband's or her son's industry. I'm just going to go out on a limb there and say that probably
she was fine spending that money, though.
That same year, Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat, published her memoir, Ordeal, in 1980,
detailing the abuse that she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband and becoming a pawn of
(05:10):
the anti-pornography feminist movement. Renouncing her years as a porn performer and
blaming the industry for the domestic violence that she and so many other women suffered.
Now, the 1980s was the decade that Candida began writing. She started a column called “The
Royalle Treatment,” and she did reported pieces for publications like High Society. And her and
the Club 90 girls put together a live show called Deep Inside, which was a play on Annie
Sprinkle’s hit show, Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. And the show featured members of Club 90, all
of them porn performers telling personal stories. And the show sold out weeks in advance and
got a ton of press. People clearly wanted to know more about the people that they got to see
naked on camera.
This is also the era where there starts to be a pro-sex backlash to the anti-pornography,
anti-prostitution streak that defined mainstream feminism throughout the late 1970s. Specifically
the Barnard Conference in 1982 created the first official organized pushback against this
anti-sex agenda.
Now is around this era that Candida formed FREE or the Feminine Rights to Erotic Expression
and began to wonder in her diary whether or not the answer to the feminist critique of
pornography was actually better porn. And she asked herself the question, what if porn made
sex better for everyone instead of worse for women? That line of thinking eventually led to
Candida co-creating Femme Productions in 1984, effectively inventing feminist porn.
[break]
Candida Royalle was 30 at the time when she shifted from starring in movies to producing and
directing films for her own company. Now she defined her work as explicitly female-oriented,
(05:31):
sensuously-explicit cinema and opposed to the sort of formulaic, hardcore pornography that she
said degraded women for the pleasure of men, echoing the critiques of her feminist
contemporaries. Candida Royalle partnered with Lauren Niemi, a middle class Midwesterner
who studied video at the University of Minnesota, which was then a new art form. Her and her
partner, in addition to being driven by feminist ideals, also saw an untapped market.
By this point, the VCR had brought porn into the bedroom, and suburban housewives were the
fastest growing demographic of porn customers, and they were deeply unsatisfied with their
options as consumers. And it was Lauren who had the wild idea that porn could be feminist,
asking herself the question, what do women want to watch to get turned on?
Now, she initially pitched this idea to MTV and someone there gave her Candida’s number and
the two became equal partners starting Femme Productions in 1984 with Lauren as the
videographer, Candida as the actress-writer, and Per as the producer. They had the idea, the
connections, and with Per’s father's assistants, the startup capital. And it was a production
company that felt like a movement. And the whole team was deeply committed to treating talent
well and creating films that they were proud of.
This is Candida, in her own words, reflecting on what made femme films work:
What inspired me to make porn for women was the fact that these movies are sold based on the
women, but our sexuality was completely ignored in them. And I thought it was just high time to
make something that women could enjoy. The men that run the industry are still relatively
dinosaurs. They're not visionaries. They know money. They know bottom lines. But they really
don't understand what women want in terms of adult movies, any more than many men
(05:52):
understand what women want in bed, in their own bedrooms. And it was just realdy, the market
wasn't listening, and I was.
Their first film was appropriately titled Femme and consisted of six vignettes (05:54):
“Rock Erotica,”
Madonna-style, BDSM-themed piece; “Sales Pitch,” which featured a lesbian encounter
between a cosmetics salesgirl and a prospective customer; “TV Idol,” which was a
fantasy-come-to-life where a character from a soap opera comes out of the television to bed a
viewer. Femme focused on foreplay and afterglow, something that was wholly missing from the
more mainstream porn market. The shots were warmly lit, well framed, and the performers were
in tailored clothing, muted makeup and tasteful lingerie, and the male performers focused on
their partner. And unlike most porn films, during this era, there was no money shot. But there
was real chemistry.
Femme developed a reputation for treating their talent well. During the AIDS crisis, they were
one of the first production companies to not only insist condom use for all of their performers,
but also made real efforts to make protection look hot. Candida told a reporter for Playgirl that
she felt strongly enough about protecting my talent to now be shooting everything using
condoms.
And in November 1984, Femme debuted with two titles ready for distribution and a swanky
premiere in the Flatiron District in Manhattan. And although the mainstream press came, they
didn't cover it. And the press that grew up around the porn industry didn't quite know what to do
with this new kind of erotica and it took a while for them to find its audience. As the porn wars
heated up, Candida became a regular on talk shows defending porn and promoting Femme.
JK (06:13):
This was the early age of the daytime talk show, which loved controversy and which loved
controversy between women perhaps most of all, right, a catfight is a very telegenic thing. And
one of the, I think, most important ways that the sex wars affected Candida Royalle and the
nascent Femme Films enterprise was by putting her up as a as a witness spokesperson to go
head-to-head, toe-to-toe, nose to nose with the Dworkins and MacKinnons, with the anti-sex
wing of now and have heated debates in public spaces.
So in strange ways the sex wars made her as a media personality, I think took Femme into the
spaces that it might not have otherwise been as a cultural experiment and splashed her, you
know, beyond the talk show format and beyond the sort of debating point-counterpoint format
into a cultural entrepreneur covered in, you know, not just covered in sex magazines as she was
when the first film came out, but by 86 or 87 in the mainstream, glossy women's magazines that
were sold in the supermarkets. There was scarcely a talk show in the late eighties that she did
not grace with her presence. And she had an unbelievable, telegenic and radiogenic presence.
In 1986, Candida appeared on The Dr. Ruth Show. I don't know if all of our listeners will
remember Dr. Ruth, but I remember Dr. Ruth. She was this amazing, elderly, like, raisin-looking
woman. She was a child survivor of Auschwitz who became the country's leading TV sexologist,
and she treated Candida with the same plainspoken respect that she treated all of her guests
with.
Here is Candida, in her own words, giving an interview to Dr. Ruth about why she created
Femme and for whom:
CR (06:33):
Traditionally there’s been very little emphasis on the women's orgasms, which was one of
my beefs against the traditional movies. They had very little concern about the women's
orgasm. So very often it didn't happen.
[Dr. Ruth] So because that was not important then. Now tell me, Candida, so now what you're
doing is you are actually producing. Tell me what you're doing.
I started Femme Productions two years ago in order to put a women's voice into these
movies. I wanted to produce and direct movies that represented our fantasies, our sexuality, and
start showing people how to really equally pleasure one another.
But people who wanted to buy femme films had trouble finding them among the lower quality
and less expensive videos that were marketed to men and sold in the back room of video
stores. But Candida worked hard to promote her new brand of feminist porn. She went on The
Phil Donahue Show, going head to head against Catharine MacKinnon. She was featured in
Glamour Magazine.
And by 1985, with her profile rising and demand for Femme Films growing, several of her films
were nominated for AVNs and topped the charts. Femme was on the cusp with a singular vision
and mission that helped her stand out in a crowded field. And from the beginning, they had a
passionate following. Even Gloria Steinem admitted that Femme Films were terrific, and
Candida actually got a spot on NBC's Today, which helped launch them into mainstream
success.
This is Candida Royalle speaking on The Sally Jessy Raphael Show in February of 1986:
My movies present joyful, healthy, loving sex. They present people equally pleasuring each
(06:54):
other. We have to try and change the industry rather than ban it.
Now, Candida began considering educational content as a new potential market for Femme
Films, especially after the Kinsey Institute requested copies of all of her material not only for
their archive but also for use in therapeutic settings.
Now, this, of course, opened up new opportunities for Femme, opportunities that favored direct
mail and other more discreet forms of distribution that helped her audience avoid the back room
of video rental stores, especially since the stores were already reluctant to stock Femme Films.
Candida really came into her power in the 1980s. Not only did she get herself off drugs, but she
was also writing more. And of course, she started her own film production company and really
took control over her own life.
At the end of the 1980s, after eight years of marriage, she was about to turn 40. Thinking about
having a baby and after years of therapy, felt very grown up. Her husband, Per, on the other
hand, was living through what Candida described as his terrible 20s. So they were just in really
different places in their lives. And towards the end of the decade, in 1989, their marriage started
to fall apart. They started cheating on each other. Then, they opened their marriage and then
finally amicably divorced. The separation was actually so amicable that Candice’s father-in-law
let her keep the money that he'd invested in Femme Films even after the marriage was over.
At this time, New York State did not allow for no-fault divorces. In fact, New York was actually
the last state to allow for no-fault divorces, which happened in 2010. So in order to get around
this, the divorce petition says officially that Per abandoned his wife and refused to return,
something that didn't sit well with either of them but allowed them to do this quickly.
(07:15):
Per didn't contest the charges and they were divorced, again, quickly and amicably in January
of 1990. Now, by this point in Candida’s life, she was a celebrity in her own right with her own
film company and a catalog of movies, huge library of clips and television appearances, and
commanded the respect of her peers. And although her marriage had ended, her chosen family,
the Club 90 girls, were stronger than ever.
Candida began speaking at universities, presenting at conferences, and commanded a level of
respect that was and still is, rare for folks in the adult entertainment world. But she was being
squeezed by both ends of the market now. At the same time, all around her HIV-AIDA was
decimating her community and technology was changing the game in porn. Now, VCRs made
Femme Productions possible, but it also created new opportunities for competitors and made it
harder for everyone to make a profit in porn.
Femme started to flounder financially, even as she became something of a feminist celebrity
among a new generation of university students and sex therapists. In fact, at one point, 400
students took a break from studying for their exams to wade through the snow to watch her
speak. She was also invited to speak at the Smithsonian Museum and universities all over the
country.
Candida was featured on HBO's Real Sex, but so was the handheld video camera, and amateur
porn began flooding the market. Now, Femme was committed to making high-quality,
expensive-to-produce, classy erotica that was competing with cheap, amateur porn on one end
and increasingly sexual Hollywood films on the other.
And this is also when the culture wars were heating up.The federal government, specifically the
(07:36):
Meese Commission, targeted many of Candida's friends, including Annie Sprinkle and Karen
Finley and other performers who used sex as a part of their performance art.
[break]
In the mid-1990s, as Candida’s friends were being dragged in front of Congress. Their NEA
funding was attacked. There was huge backlash, including Anita Hill testifying against Clarence
Thomas. And Ted Bundy had recently claimed that porn turned him into a serial killer. And all of
this energized the anti-porn movement. This is Catharine MacKinnon speaking in 1995:
Well, Andrea Dworkin and I, she's my colleague, define pornography as a practice of sex
inequality and defined as the sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and
words. That also includes a list of other very specific activities. In other words, it's defined in
terms of what it actually does. It subordinates women.
And so Candida, alongside many of her Club 90 sisters argued, amongst other things, that the
harms of censorship have historically always fallen heaviest on feminists themselves, which was
absolutely true.
After Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin succeeded in passing on anti-porn law in
Canada, t lesbian erotic magazine Bad Attitude and Andrea Dworkin’s own books, including
Pornography and Women Hating, were among the first items seized at the border.
In her capacity as the leader for Feminists for Free Expression. Candida was busy flying all over
the country, trying to rally people against censorship, lobbying against all of these anti-porn
statutes that were popping up and packing lecture halls.
But she continued to operate at a loss. And soon cyber porn made the whole business model of
(07:57):
Femme pretty unsustainable. To save her company, Candida partnered with Phil Harvey in
1995, a much larger porn distributor with the resources to underwrite her films and develop new
product lines. And in 1998, the X-rated Critics Organization inducted Candida into its Hall of
Fame as a film creator, and she was the first woman to receive such an honor. And Candida
was invited to open the three-day World Pornography Conference, co-sponsored by the Free
Speech Coalition, alongside Annie Sprinkle in 1998. She was absolutely loved and respected by
both her peers and increasingly folks in academia, politics, and psychology. She gave lectures
all over the world and in 2004 wrote a book, How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do (08:04):
Sex Advice
from a Woman Who Knows.
In 2009, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Her sister, Cynthia, and
the Club 90 girls rallied around her through surgeries and chemo. She also worked with an
investigative team, including a documentary film crew, and finally found that her mother Peggy
Thompson had died from the same form of ovarian cancer back in 1991 at the age of 62.
I think this detail is important because cancers of the reproductive cycle are often blamed on
women's lifestyle choices. And it would have been easy for Candida to blame herself for her
cancer. But the fact that her mother died from the same disease shows that it was genetic and
not her fault.
By 2015, Candice knew that she was actively dying. Veronica Vera, one of her Club 90 sisters,
moved in with her and became her executor and caretaker. Per, still friends, snuck sushi into his
ex-wife's hospital room, causing a bit of a scene, and her sister, Cynthia, came back to be with
her and she left the bulk of her estate to these women
Now, Candice kept diaries for her entire life, keeping long letters through all of the tumultuous
years in San Francisco and L.A., preserving her own archive and seemed to have a sense for
the significance of her collection. Her sister, Cynthia, found her journals first in a closet at her
cottage, and her first instinct was to destroy them. But Veronica Vera was the one that took the
bold step of preserving those journals and went so far as to find and negotiate a permanent
home for them.
Now Candy's friends adored her, and that came through at her packed memorial service at the
(08:25):
Judson Memorial Church, which is on Washington Square Park in New York City and Jane
Kamensky, the archivist at the Schlesinger Library, attended that memorial and heard about
Candida’s archive.
JK (08:28):
I heard about Candida Royalle at the moment of her untimely death. The New York Times
devoted about a half page above the fold to her passing in September of 2015, and it called her
a feminist erotica entrepreneur, feminist porn pioneer. And at the time I read that obituary, I had
just started a job as a professor of history at Harvard and the director of Radcliffe Schlesinger
Library, which holds the papers of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the records of
Women Against Pornography, extensive collections on the anti-pornography side of the sex
wars.
And as I was beginning to think about how to build collections, I wondered whether we had
anything that came out of that incredibly tumultuous period in second-wave feminism from the
perspective of sex workers, sex entrepreneurs, sex positive thinkers, and wondered in that
connection whether this Candida Royalle that The Times was talking about had kept records of
her own life.
And I spent several months investigating that question. You know, the whole world is networked.
We were two degrees of separation apart, it turned out, and wound up in November of 2015,
attending Candice Vadala's East Coast Memorial service at the Judson Memorial Church in
Lower Manhattan and getting sort of tantalizing glimpses of an archive, people speaking about
her letters, her diaries, seeing slideshows of historical photographs, her drawings.
I was drooling over this archive, though never thinking that I would study it myself, thinking that
it might be something others would study. So the materials came to Schlesinger Library in 2016
and 2017, and I made the mistake of looking inside the boxes. I was just so awestruck by what I
saw there that she told a story that we had seen from this side and from this side, but never
(08:49):
navigating through the messy middle of a real person's well-documented life.
I was also struck by the fact that often when we talk about people in the sex industries, we talk
about them from the outside in, whether that's through pleasure-seeking and pleasure-affirming
intellectuals and clients, or from moral reformers who are wagging a finger in one direction or
another and have for hundreds of years, you would probably tell me thousands of years, and
here was somebody who was speaking for herself from her girlhood through her time in
Northern California counterculture, theater, live performance, working as an actress on porn
sets in front of the camera and then in the 1980s, going behind the camera and trying to seize
the means of production for herself. So it was a story that really was not well known beyond this
inner circle of Candice's friends and admirers. And it became urgently important to me to try to
tell it.
Candice's collection itself spans about 100 boxes in pretty much every medium (09:00):
her drawings,
the things she was doing as a fashion illustrator and lifelong doodler, the letters and diaries that
I'd mentioned, all of the business records of femme production companies—so future scholars
who want to do much more than I did around the business of feminist pornography will find a
treasure trove there—thousands of photographs, email. There's a lot of born digital material in
the collection. All of these collections are open to research, and I think one of the ways in which
Candice's Club 90 sisters were sort of true to the ethic of open access, of transparency, of, you
know, a refusal of shame that you saw in early 90s projects like Sprinkle’s Public Cervix
announcement. The collections are open almost without restriction.
If you enjoyed this episode, you will love Jane Kamensky's, Candida Royalle and The Sexual
Revolution, which you can find a link to that book in our show notes and of course, also on our
website. It's also available wherever you purchase books online.
[closing]
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