Traci Lords bio
ET
This is an attempt to collect facts about TL life. Sources do not include
the Traci Lords Book Companion. Some facts are still to be pointed out.
DATA SHEET
Real Name : Nora Louise Kuzma
Birthdate : May 7, 1968
Birthplace : Steubenville, Ohio (hometown of the late Dean Martin, a poor
town on Appalachian mountains, on the banks of Ohio River)
Father: Andrew Kuzma, an Ukrainian-American Jew, a steelworker; described
by Traci and her mother as an alcoholic; still in Steubenville in 1991.
Mother: Patricia Briceland, born 1947 in poverty with four brothers and
sisters, married at 20, a Buddhist housewife, aiming to a college degree
during Traci years in Redondo
Siblings: 3 sisters (1 younger, 2 older; another source says the contrary)
Has Appeared As: Traci Lords (stage name taken from her best friend in high
school, Traci, and her favorite actor, Jack Lord), Tracy Lords (misspelled
in Penthouse and some of her films), Kristie Elizabeth Nussman (the name of
her fake over-18y ID), Randee, Lulu, Patricia, Pammy, Debbie, Bonnie,
Helen, Bobbie, Natalie, Karla, Paula, Kristen. Traci said she was unaware
of the Tracy Lord character played by Katherine Hepburn in the Philadelphia
story.
Hair: Blond (also red)
Eyes: Green
Height: 5'7"
Measures: 36-23-36 (as told to Penthouse 1984)
Marital Status: Married to Brook Yeaton, 1990-95; living in San Fernando;
divorced in 1995, then engaged to John Enos of Melrose Place.
Hobbies : writing poetry, music and lyrics
Favorite dishes: Typical russian dishes (cooked by her mother)
Favorite Color: Black
Favorite Film: The Jungle Book
Favorite TV Show: Hawaii Five-O
Favorite TV Star: Jack Lord (of Hawaii Five-O)
Favorite actress: Katharine Hepburn
Cat's Name: Steve McGarrett (Lord's character's name in Hawaii Five-O)
Lucky Number: 13
First Masturbation: at 10 seeing a Jack Lord photo
First Adult Magazine Appearance: Model Directory 3/84 vol.2/no.11 (1 page)
First Adult Movie: What Gets Me Hot (1984 - Intropics/Island Home Video).
Said to be payed $10,000, for four days and one only sex scene with Tom
Byron, who became her boyfriend for a while. Before, Traci did an adult
loop (7min, b&w) with a solo masturbating scene for The Latent Image,
directed by Larry Caye.
Last Adult Movie: Traci I Love You (1987 - Caballero Distribution), filmed
in Cannes three days after her 18th birthday. Marylin Jess starred with
Traci in the movie: łI think she really comes. I could swear it. Traci is
really enjoying sex when she is in front of the camera. She is an
incredible exhibitionist! With me, she came, Iąm sure. From her sex,
between spasms, a little salty liqueur flown. It was delicious˛.
First Mainstream Movie: Not Of This Earth (1988 - Concorde/Miracle; MGM/UA)
First TV Appearance: Wiseguy (1988 - ABC)
Books: Traci Lords: A Perspective by Paul Hugli, Traci On Paper, The Traci
Lords Book Companion
Calenders: 1990-92
Current Manager: Juliette Green
Old Fan Club : Traci Lords Fan Club
2301 Artesia Blvd, Suite 12-224
Redondo Beach, CA 90278
BIO DETAILS:
+ Born in a little industrial village of Ohio
+ Was raped by her drunk father (said by herself, recalled in "1,000 fires"
album, the lyric "Father's field"), a fact not confirmed.
* When Traci was 12, her mother (Patricia Briceland) divorced from her
alcoholic steelworker husband, lost her job and decided to follow a new
boyfriend moving via West Virginia ("with a Greyhound, in 3 days") to
Redondo Beach, in the South Bay section of California. The family's home
was at Lawndale, a blue-collar community a mile East of Redondo Beach. Nora
was described by neighbours as a nice girl, even though "she ran with a
heavy metal crowd" and had more boyfriends than girlfriends. Most of her
high school friends knew she was carrying on a porn film career: one of
them, working at a video store, saw her on box covers of hardcore flicks.
"It was funny that she had my age and was doing that; but I never discussed
it with her".
* 1983 - After Lincoln Elementary, entered Redondo Union High School -- in
Pilot 1984 Yearbook
* She said she got pregnant at 15 the first time she had sex (consenting
sex, iuf the father's rape is true) and paid for her own abortion. A source
said she did make love with the physician to pay for abortion; another says
her father had raped her before.
* Dropped out of High School after tenth grade
+ Started serving drinks in bars with a fake ID (the same used afterwards?)
* Began her trip to cocaine addiction, she says when she was 15. This fact
is strongly denied by other porn stars and witnesses, like Bill Margold.
He, an adult-video actor and screenwriter responsible for such Lords
classics as Portrait of Lust and New Wave Hookers, remembers the time Traci
was having sex with porn star Jamie Gillis. "When the camera went off,"
says Margold, "Tracie was still fucking Jamie, while screaming 'Come on,
Mama wants it hotter!' She had the sexual perniciousness of a 40-year-old.
Still, she was exceptionally mechanical. Like a cash register. She
never gave too much onscreen."
South adds about Traci in cocaine: "Is that what she's claiming now?"
says Jim South, the man who introduced Traci to the adult-video world.
"That's an absolute lie. I never saw the girl take drugs. I woulda got
complaints. She was always a responsible
businesswoman".
* Ran away from home during 1985 fall, when her porn career was in full
swing. Choose an apartment few miles away, at Rancho Palos Verdes, an
affluent community.
* Inducted by a 40-plus year old friend, who told people he was her
stepfather, replied to an ad in the LA Times - another source says she was
contacted by Jim South while sunbathing at Malibu beach - and, after a test
nude session with Polaroids, signed in early Spring 1984 with the World
Modelling Agency of Jim South in Sherman Oaks under the name Kristie
Elizabeth Nussman, a very real person, born November 17, 1962 in a Santa
Monica hospital: she produced both a birth certificate and a driver
license. The accompanying "stepfather" assured South: "This girl will do
anything you want in porn movies".
+ South interview:
The first modeling shoot South arranged for Nora/ Kristie involved
simulated sex acts. "The photographer had to stop the shoot," South
remembers, "because she went beyond simulation. Whenever she came
into my office, she always grabbed my face in her hands and stuck nine
inches of tongue down my throat. She came on to anyone. Still, you
could tell right off she was using sex as a vehicle to get what she
wanted. When she began making X-rated videos, she'd come into my
office after a shoot and laugh at the male actors who thought they'd
made her climax four times. ŚI fooled them, Jim,' she'd say. She was
all business. The smartest girl I've ever seen. That girl was an
adult at 10. I mean, she was slicker than owl shit in an okra dish."
South, born 1928, has a droopy bandito mustache and a thick southern
drawl. He likes to refer to himself as a staunch Reagan conservative.
Much of his business entailed channeling young women from nude
modeling into X-rated movies, and he got Nora into her first pom film.
By then, she had dropped "Kristie" and had acquired another
name--Traci Lords.
+ Traci says:
"I started doing this to earn some money, but I have to fuck with
creeps to get more photo sessions. Soon, I decided that it was
better to fuck every day with handsome guys in front of a camera
and get paid for it, without any kind of intermediation"
+ Appeared on Velvet in her first nude modelling shoot on a magazine, on
July 84.
* Changed her name to Traci Lords.
- Jerry Butler says he beat off incessantly to her image.
"I'd never seen a prettier pinup, but in real life Traci was another cup
of tea. When I met her, I wasn't impressed. Traci was hyped so well
because she had the innocent girl-next-door quality that porno companies
loved. The girl most likely not to do it. Porky and lazy, her balloon tits
didn't do much for me. Then she started to make these orgasmic sounds -
before I even pulled down my zipper. It was like fucking a voice-over."
(Jerry Butler)
By contrast, Susie Bright offers this view: "The reason Traci Lords made
such a splash in X-rated cinema is that she made great responsive sex
noises when was getting fucked."
Butler:
"Traci's a sexual billboard. Billboards look expensive and expansive.
They demonstrate, but they never move or feel. Like Shauna Grant, Traci
mastered that cliched sexy look for the camera."
Writer Pat Jordan:
"She was a baby-fat brunette child-woman whose eyes glanced sideways at
the camera and whose hands shook as she performed her sex acts." (GQ 4/90)
"Traci Lords sat naked on the couch where that cat is now," Bill Margold
told to Luke Ford. "It was 1985 and my wife Drea and I were going to do a
movie called Portrait of Lust.
"I said to Drea that there's something wrong with this girl. She sat there
looking like a lump, a wet looking, unformed lump".
"She wasn't formed properly. She had these conical tits, baby fat and the
dullest look I have ever seen on a female. And I couldn't put together
that this was an underage female.
"If I had caught her, think of the misery that I could've prevented.
"I keep reliving that day. Obviously, something stopped me from asking her
if she was under 18.
"Maybe the hell-bent rush to disaster mentality of the industry, maybe its
deathwish, exists within me as well."
Christy Canyon, porno star.
"I would never imagine that she was under age. That girl knew more
about sex than the whole porno industry. I knew she was a liar,
she never told the same thing in the same way but no one could
imagine that she was hiding clues. I suppose that everyone thought
that she didn't want her parents to get her. She was so funny. We
went out sometimes, but she never invited you to her home, and she
never spoke about her family. Sometimes, she could become a little
unfriendly. You couldn't phone her at two o'clock in the morning
to tell her a problem. Traci and me were as good of friends as we
could be in this industry, in this ambient, which, in fact, is not
too much."
+ Performed in her first hardcore movie, What Gets me Hot, in Fall 84. One
source says that Traci didn't do harcore in the first release, a scene was
added afterwards. That's doubtful, anyway. The same source lists Those
Young Girls as her first real hardcore: producers were Kantor and McNee for
Paradise Visuals. If so: the first porn scene was with Harry Reems, the
first girl/girl with Ginger Lynn, who is credited in the movie also as
story writer (The movie recalls the story of a country girl, Ginger, who
aims to meet again her famous firend of younger times, Traci, who in the
meanwhile became a movie star).
+ In the Fall of 85 Traci hooked up with Stewart Dell,a not yet 30 year old
man involved in various minor video companies. In January 86 both formed
the Traci Lords Company: Dell used the name Cartier. The goal was to do
something like Ginger Lynn had done with her line of videos and gadgets.
The first produced video was Traci Takes Tokyo released in March 1986. Then
they released Beverly Hills Copulator just before the scandal (some sources
say in June but if the FBI rally happened in May, itąs impossible, unless
distributors were still unaware of investigation); another movie,
apparently titled Screamer, was never released with this name. A title from
Caballero, Traci, I love you, appeared afterwards: it is the only
legitimate porn movie shoot by Traci, in France, apparently around her 18th
birthday, (3 days after, says a source), in May.
+ A female executive in porn owns Traci memorabilia including a flier for
the video Those Young Girls that Traci Lords signed. She Xed out Harry
Reems photo and wrote over it "Asshole". On John Holmes she wrote "Dick"
and on Ginger Lynn "Bitch No Tits". Traci signed the flier "Traci Lords #1
Star. On a Ginger Lynn poster, Traci wrote over Ginger's photo "I don't do
Neggers or anal."
* Lived at the corner of Catalina and Garnet in Redondo Beach when the FBI
raided her apartment, a Saturday in May 1986. The rally was origined by an
anonymous tip to the Los Angeles District Attorney. Among people accused of
the tip was also pornstar Stacey Donovan. Further investigation was done:
on July 11, investigators raided offices of Vantage's Sun Valley, a
duplicating and distribution partner of Traci Lords Company owned by Sy
Adler, an industry veteran, who had co=produced and payed in advance part
of Traci I love you movie. On mid July, the story hit the media. Traci, who
had appeared in about 100 flicks, claimed being used by porn industry while
addicted to drugs. Some denied. "I met her on the set of Sex 5th Avenue in
1985," says actor Paul Thomas, who was 35 to her 16. "She was as cute as
can be. A nasty little girl who enjoyed being bad. I just wanted to fuck
her". And adds: "She was one of the few actresses who wouldn't stop having
sex after the camera was off. She wanted to show she could fuck just as
good as porn stars like me, which was okay with me."
+ Traci was charged of minor subpoenas, even if she used a fake ID to go
abroad, a federal felony; but two film-makers, Ronald Kantor and Rupert
McNee, were charged under the Federal Child Protection Act for using a
minor in sex films. They successfully claimed they were unaware of Traci's
real age. Jim South, owner of the Modelling Agency, has pleaded guilty to
similar charges (inducting a minor to show up in nude modelling), pending
the outcome of the producers' case. South spent 25,000 US dollars to avoid
jail. Rubin Gottesman, owner of X-Citement Video, Inc., distributor of some
early Traci movies. was arrested and condemned, convicted in 1989 on three
counts of distributing child pornography and sentenced to one year in
prison and 3 on probation. Nora's mother testified at Gottesman's trial.
Gottesman was asked by FBI covered agents to provide Traci Lords videos
specifically made before her 18th birthday. Gottesman agreed and was
arrested. Gottesman placed an appeal to Ninth Circuit Court and his point
(łthe law doesnąt require that the distributor knew the material involved
the minor˛) was accepted. The case was sent to US Supreme Court: this one
reversed the decision of Ninth Circuit Court, on Nov. 29, 1,994, and
Gottesman began serving his 12-year sentence.
+ Traci I love you was released after a negociation between president of
Caballero Al Bloom and the couple Traci-Dell: an undisclosed amount of
money was offered by Caballero, some say 300,000 US dollars. The movie was
the top seller for XXX industry in 1987.
+ In the following two years, Traci refused any comment, apart a
Fox-produced Tv program (an interview in "A current affair") where she was
very soft, skirting the crucial questions. She said she joined the
Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, but it didn't much help to go away from
drugs.
+ On the run from the various problems that came from being revealed as an
underage porn star in the USA, Traci got it away from all for while, in the
UK. It was during that brief period (circa 1987) that she supposedly
acquired a taste for electronic dance music in the clubs of South London,
which would influence her later music career. More importantly, she
started turning up in various magazine shoots under assumed names. Most
famously, she landed the contract to be the Lambs Navy Rum Calendar girl
(which was quite a big deal over here at the time) under the name of Kristy
Jane. In a pictorial shoot from Penthouse,UK, she posed as a 21 year old
antiques dealer from Plymouth - UK's Plymouth, that is - named Patricia.
* Took voice and ballet lesson, and trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute
in Hollywood.
* 1988 - Her new agent, Don Gerler, sent her to an audition with John
Wynorski, a Roger Corman B-movie disciple. She won the part and starred in
Roger Corman's factory (actual director was Wynorski) remake "Not of This
Earth", performing her only nude scene in a mainstream movie to date,
pretending she had done it only becAuse her partner was her boyfriend at
that time. Refused Wynorski's second offer because it included nudity.
+ 1989 - Met Brook Yeaton, a 22 year old propmaster, on the "Cry Baby" set.
* Married Brook Yeaton on Sept 29, 1990 in a traditional Catholic ceremony.
She was baptized by the same director of Cry Baby, Rev. John Waters of the
Universal Church (the only baptism Waters ever made, for a mere $6).
+ Traci has done some castings of Hollywood big-hype films like Dick Tracy,
Cool World, Dracula, Casino...). On the casting of "Casino" she met Robert
DeNiro:
"Someone introduced me to Robert DeNiro, and he got embarrased, he
was so red...It was so amazing...."
+ 1995 - Divorced from Yeaton. Radioactive records releases her first
album, "1,000 fires", a techno-dance compilation, done in London (Traci
spent six months living in Hampstead). One single, "Control", written by
her with Ben Watkins, reaches Billboard 2nd place in February and is
featured in the movie "Mortal Combat", rewarded with a double platinum On
1997, Nbc will use another tune, "Good Evil", to promote miniseries
"Profiler", with Traci as co-starring in.
+ 1996 - Became engaged with John Enos, who appears on film "Bullet"..
+ For "five years" she has worked with Children of the Night, a Los
Angeles-based organization that helps runaways.
+ 1997 Left John Enos. Sings in several albums like "Little Baby Nothing"
by the Manic Street Preachers and "Somebody to love" by the Ramones.
+ Her first single of second album is due now, still with Radioactive.
Album will be released in May.
Updates and/or corrections warmly welcome.
ET
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dupas
I'm kinda curious why you never contacted me about contributing all
this information to the ongoing construction of the FAQ. I've been
working on this thing for a long time and now when I post it next week
it's gonna look like I just copied your info this weekend. Wish you
had considered collaborating...
dupas
ton...@webtv.net
Traci did indeed break up with John Enos and now dates the black head
writer of Profiler since the beginning of the show. I don't know his
name. She was to only be in approx. 15 episodes of the show and if you
count them up I guess her time is almost up. By shluping the head writer
on the show atleast she got good dialogue out of it. Go girl!
I saw on Later her talking about her "role" in Blade . Her role
consists of 3 lines and one gory scene in which she kind of an extra. I
don't know why she would present this otherwise - I guess she feels she
must embellish her parts for some reason. She talks as if she's
co-starring with Wesley.
NOTE: What did you think of the way she looked on the show or just
looks in general now? and would you be a fan of her's if you only saw
her today for the first time?.. anyone?
E! entertainment channel is doing a story of her life; I.E. Corey
Feldman, River Phoenix -style. So watch for that coming up.
---Where can I get the Traci Lords book companion? Is this the same as "
Traci Lords...A perspective? Is the companion new?---
Oh, she was not raped by her father and has never said that. The only
abuse she recieved is the kind most young pretty girls recieve - you
know, the ones who don't get into porn. I'm not belittling date rape and
molestations but the girl was a "wild card" that's all and most of this
group knows this is no "little girl lost" . Her 3 sisters (1 older, 2
younger) all are perfectly "normal" and don't know what Nora's problem
was besides exhibtionistic.
P.S. little bird around town says the destructive
behavior of the past is in full gear now.
ET
In article <354d5a3f...@news.mindspring.com>, dupa...@mindspring.com
(dupas) wrote:
I hope the fact i posted all the material you have seen is considered a
sort of collaboration. Unfortunately, until a few days, I hadn't a reliable
server and lost a lot of discussion and/or images of this newsgroup. Please
feel free to ask for any info I can supply from this moment on. Sorry for
any inconvenience. I really want to copperate to a finalized FAQ.
ET