MY ACTING CAREER

My Acting Career

In me the phenomenon of being raped by a priest at age five made me highly skilled at turning myself into totally different people. Totally.

Psychologists today call this dissociation and it’s pretty common among child molest and abuse survivors. I think that's what I did. Back in the 1950s people didn’t know about child abuse and how it affects kids or I would have been put in foster care and therapy within months of my earliest behavior.

Instead I learned to deal with the total irreality of everything by turning myself into different people.

As a result I had this uncanny ability as an actress, so from high school through college it was just a given that I was going to be an actress when I got out and I went to Pasadena Playhouse for College one year and at age 19 I was in my own apartment in Echo Park, the one I rented for 20 dollars a month.

It’s too painful to write this chapter in any detail now except to get past it.

It was 1969. I had the lead in a play in Burbank, a musical, where I sang, no wait, let me put this differently.

Jesica had the lead in Charlie Was A Lady, a very amateurish production of the Burbank Community Theater, a part she’d taken against the advice of her agent-manager. But it turned out to be a good move as both Reporter and Variety came out and panned the play but pointed out Jesica’s performance. As I said before, she really was talented. In fact it was a song, “Solitaire,” which she had convinced the director to let her sing as a blues song and it killed ---

Opening night Patricia, the older sister who was also raped by Father Horne age 5 to age 9 or so, sat with a couple friends in the front row of the audience. They then came backstage to the green room where all were celebrating. Trish came up to Jesica at her dressing table and talked a while then Trish said something to the effect of:

“I don't know why you even bother doing things like this considering who we are.”

Jesica was stunned, but went again into that remote state, what I think of now often as my Little Annie Fannie state, where I just start doing things by rote, like I’m getting my instructions from somewhere other-worldly.

She went home and next day called the director and told him to let the understudy finish the run. Then Jesica opened that same newspaper Daily Variety or maybe it was Hollywood Reporter, or both, to the classifieds where she’d found the ad for the Miss Soul Queen Los Angeles contest a few months early. This time she answered the ad for Pretty Girl International modeling agency.

By rote, like Little Annie Fannie with brains, Jesica walked into photo shoots, took off her clothes, simulated sex, had cum all over her. . . and carried on a six months or so porn movie and magazine modeling career in 1969.

Wait, I have to point out that at that point the X rating was either brand new or had not yet come about. The porn movies were all simulated sex and so I just didn't see anything wrong or weird about doing it, in fact somehow having cameras around made sense --

Yes, I was Jesica.

I don't want to go into details about all the shoots, except there were hundreds of them in those six months. Then the X rating came out or got more advanced and the photo shoots started to change. It wasn’t simulated sex any more they were starting to do it for real.

I was at a studio near Sunset and Gower and we were shooting this ridiculous orgy scene for some producers trying to be like Guccionne but not even that good. Wearing this pseudo Greek costume I jumped into this pile of people and we pointed our orifices at the camera and did all those gynechological shots that you see in porn all the time. But then as I was pretending to do something with my hands up top all of a sudden there was a guy trying to insert his real penis into my real body and I jumped up and shouted and got out of the group of people.

I shouted, “What the hell are you doing? This is supposed to be simulated sex.” And he said something like hey girl, get with it, we're doing it for real now. And he was right. In the next weeks it got so every shoot was for real sex, no more simulated sex.

I decided to pay more attention then to my real acting career. Through someone, I landed an appointment with a real agent who could get me real work, and I showed up with my little leather folder full of 11 x 14 pictures. They wanted to sign me up. They were impressed. I was going to get some real work.

Then he said, “Of course if you've been doing any of this X-rated stuff, this new magazine, 35 mm film nude stuff, we’d have to know that.”

I gulped.

He continued. “It’s no big deal. I mean if you've done a few of those jobs all you have to do is give us the names of the photographers and we'll contact them, buy the negatives. We've been doing that for a lot of ‘em coming in. . . “

He noticed that my face was getting weird.

“You have done some of the nude modeling stuff?”

I nodded.

He sent me away with instructions to bring him the names of the photographers etc but as I said earlier, there had been hundreds. Little Annie Fannie suddenly turned into Kathy-Jesica again.

I walked home that day up Vine Street and a man walked past me. The way he looked at me I knew he’d seen me in some movie, some magazine. Then everywhere I went anyone who looked at me I knew they’d seen me in one, and I freaked.

It was okay though, I found someplace to go.

Timothy Leary had a ranch in Laguna Hills/Riverside County area and a whole lot of people were going to Laguna Beach to be near him and live the life they sang about in HAIR!

I left all my clothes, and all my stuff, in this guy’s garage and packed a duffel bag with a typewriter and birth enough control pills for six months and hitchhiked to Laguna Beach to find Timothy Leary.

To be continued. . .