And as a writer and a journalist, I was attracted to the contradictions and the ambiguities. Needless to say, Traci’s version and the adult industry’s version were at odds. Her version of the story was a cross between a cautionary tale and a survival guide: She was an innocent victim, a 15-year-old kid who’d gotten caught in the clutches of the scummy adult industry and had made it out alive but only through sheer luck she certainly hadn’t tipped off the FBI. Naturally, I immediately went out and bought Traci’s memoir. Why was Traci Lords the wound that refused to heal for the adult industry? And who was this Traci Lords anyway, this teenager who’d single-handedly almost taken out an entire industry of hardened professionals? And the anger of both these men was still, all these years later, hot to the touch. The way they told the story was as a noir, with Traci as the ne plus ultra of femmes fatales: She’d scammed the adult industry with a fake ID had made one movie after the age of 18, a movie she owned the rights to and then she’d blown the whistle on herself to make more money and become more famous. Not for part of the lunch, for the whole lunch. Traci, and what happened 25 years ago, was the topic of conversation between these two. (This is obviously way before I was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.) One afternoon in 2012, I went to lunch in the Valley at a Hamburger Hamlet with adult veteran Bill Margold, who’d codirected Traci, and adult agent Jim South, who’d represented Traci. I broke into print by writing about Al Goldstein, founder of Screw magazine and a major figure in the adult industry in the ’70s and ’80s.

In her conversations with porn industry insiders that inspired the podcast, Anolik learned that the Lords saga was “the wound that refused to heal for the adult industry”-and also a mystery that remained, tantalizingly, unsolved.Ĭonfession: I have my own porn past. Lords was the biggest star in the porn industry for several years in the mid ’80s, until a dramatic FBI raid revealed that she had gotten her start when she was just 15, and nearly all of her films were thereby illegal. “It’s the movie industry without the pretense. “The porn industry is overtly about what the movie industry is covertly about: sex and fantasy, objectification and exploitation,” Anolik said. But for Anolik, host of the new podcast Once Upon a Time in the Valley, Hollywood and the porn industry that Lords dominated in the mid 1980s are far more closely related than either might admit. The story of Traci Lords, though, doesn’t seem like the most obvious Hollywood saga-after all, it takes place over the hills in the San Fernando Valley.

Simpson, and Eve Babitz for this magazine. “Hollywood isn’t only my beat, it’s my obsession,” said Lili Anolik, the contributing editor to Vanity Fair who has written about, among many other things, Scarlett Johansson, O.J.

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