PURE

Stearns presents a biography of a pioneering 1970s adult-film star.

Marilyn Chambers is best known as the star of Behind the Green Door (1972) and other explicit pornographic films. In this comprehensive story of her life, the author draws on a range of material, including his own interviews with people who knew her, innumerable press clippings, and Chambers’ own extensive autobiographical writings before her death in 2009 at the age of 56 (including her 1975 memoir My Story). Chambers was born Marilyn Briggs in 1952 to a financially comfortable Connecticut family; she had two siblings, and although she lacked for nothing, her parents were emotionally distant. Stearns covers her two marriages, giving emphasis to her disastrous second marriage to her manager, Chuck Traynor, whom the author characterizes as verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive. Naturally, the book’s primary focus is its subject’s film career, which, in many ways, reached its pinnacle with the release of Behind the Green Door, which received rapturous critical praise at the Cannes Film Festival. However, she also appeared as a wholesome mother in an Ivory Snow soap advertising campaign; her New York Times obituary described the film and the campaign as “stunningly contrasting portrayals of womanhood.” Later, Chambers struggled with addiction and went through recovery. The book describes Chambers as somewhat blindsided by her fame; she’s quoted as saying that if she had it all to do over again, she wouldn’t have signed the contract for the movie that brought her celebrity. However, it allowed her to have a long career, which ended on a melancholy note: “I don’t mean to sound so bitter,” Chambers reflected later in life. “I felt like I should have never done the last movies I’ve done.”

Stearns’ passionate enthusiasm for his subject is clear on every page of this memoir, and it makes for a kinetic, page-turning reading experience. It has a cinematic quality that often makes it a compelling read, but this is undermined at times by moments of overreach. When he mentions that one of Chambers’ ancestors fought against the British in the American Revolutionary War, and then uses it as a segue to claim that the film star also “fought for freedom and independence,” some readers may roll their eyes. He also asserts that “Marilyn Chambers wasn’t just part of the sexual revolution; she was the sexual revolution,” but the women who fought that revolution in the streets, in offices, in the home, and in courtrooms may be inclined to give the actor less credit. Such creaky moments aside, Stearns does an excellent job of re-creating the everyday life of the off-camera Chambers—a smart, savvy professional who was frustrated by a pursuit of mainstream respectability that always remained just beyond her grasp. The corresponding achievements of Chambers’ professional rival, Linda Lovelace (star of the popular 1972 adult film Deep Throat), are predictably downplayed. However, Chambers’ story has never been told this well.

A heartfelt and absorbing account of one of adult cinema’s first major celebrities.