A Girl Called Jones

[Carlos The Jackass]

A Girl Called Jones

blogs.theage.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2006/08/a_girl_called_j.html

In 2001, just minutes away from starring in her first ever hardcore porn
film, ex-Penthouse Pet and Playboy model Chloe Jones was asked by a
reporter whether she had any last-minute regrets. "I'm nervous," she
replied. "Very nervous...There's a side of me that says, 'Don't do it,
you're going to feel bad about it later.' But there's a side saying, 'Go
for it, because I've done everything that leads up to this.'" Within
four years Chloe Jones was gone, her life drained by booze and pills,
her funeral paid for by charity, her passing noted by few. The Houston
Chronicle ran an obit for the green-eyed Texan blonde back on June 11,
2005, six days after her death, and the darker corners of the Internet
crackled moderately for a week or two as tossers argued the toss about
whether it was right to keep 'appreciating' her work. But the story of
Chloe Jones really ought to be told outside the dungeons of adult
entertainment. Not that it's particularly helpful, or even terribly
tragic - if anything, the end was inevitable at the starting gate.

Melinda Dee Jones was born in Silsbee, Texas, on June 17, 1975, the
youngest of three daughters. With a population of just 7000, Silsbee
boasted no less than 39 churches. But the Jones girls were never a
popular fixture at any of them, and Dee never attended. Her sisters once
heard her say she didn't believe in God.

The Jones girls had trailer trash in their blood - their grandmother, a
local beauty queen and barbiturate addict, shot herself in front of
their mother when she was young. Donna Jones might have coped better in
raising her own three girls had her husband been around to lend a hand -
on his way home from work in Louisiana one evening in 1982, he flipped
his truck and never got out. The story, told by a passenger who escaped,
is that Jones was so hungry he was cutting bread as he drove, losing
control when he dropped the knife and bent down in the cabin to pick it
up, the truck careening off a bridge and sinking into a murky river.

By all accounts, the men who took up residence in or around the family
trailer in Silsbee for the next few years were far from ideal father
figures. One was described by a family friend as a "visual pedophile"
who would spontaneously ejaculate as he watched the young Jones girls
move about the house (the other sisters deny this). And there was
another, a redneck from Lumberton whose first wife had left him for a
"nigger" and who openly watched porn films while the girls looked on in
amusement.

By the time she met a young marine called Jason David Sturrock, Melinda
Dee Jones already had a few suicide attempts on her record, a reputation
about town as a pathological liar and a bed with her name on it at the
local asylum. Not yet 14 years old, Melinda enjoyed listening to the
Cure on acid, and had just recently been released from the Beaumont
Neurological Hospital and Behavioural Centre where, she told Sturrock,
the interns had regularly pumped her with drugs and raped her. She swore
she would probably die before she was 30, just like her daddy. Going on
18 himself, and coming from a strict Baptist family, Sturrock was drawn
to the playful wickedness of the beauty he would later describe as "the
devil's handmaid".

After a stormy two-year courtship during which the young lovers
frequently torched each other's clothing in rage, Jones and Sturrock
were wed, Melinda just 16. They moved to nearby Fort Hood, where she
tried to make a go of a clerical job, the experiment ending after a few
months when she accused her employer of rape, a charge the police found
to have had no stick. Moving back in a huff to the cosy hopelessness of
Silsbee, Melinda told her husband she had secured a waitressing job at a
local dive called Team Mates. When he later discovered that Team Mates
was a strip club and Melinda more than just a waitress, he saw the
writing on the wall and filed for a divorce, which was made official in
December 1993.

In Chloe Jones folklore - most probably authored by Jones herself - the
5'6" teen beauty set off for Los Angeles naive, gullible and a little
frightened, her first bikini photo sessions notable for the trembling
model's awkwardness in the camera's eye. In fact, by the time she
started working in LA in 1994, she had been stripping for years in
various Texan clubs. Hooking up with low-level but reputable talent
agency Sterling/Winters (their books featured ageing glamour stars such
as Dynasty actress Morgan Fairchild), Melinda scored some "legit"
modeling work. She even scored a shoot with famed photographer Herb
Ritts for the December 1995 issue of Vanity Fair.

Most significantly, however, she caught the eye of a soft porn industry
always hungry for fresh faces, and so "Chloe" began appearing in
newsagent "bag jobs" all over the world, her smoky looks, remarkable
physique and curious Lolitaesque trashiness proving popular with the
"readers" (her debut cover on The Picture magazine in September 1995
broke sales records in Australia). Chloe soon began appearing
prominently in Hugh Hefner newsstand specials and she was voted
Playboy's Reader's Choice Supermodel in 1997. When she was chosen to be
the Penthouse Pet of the Month in April 1998, it appeared Chloe Jones
had arrived on the dais of adult modeling.

Life could scarcely be more charming for the rough girl from Silsbee.
What's more, she was in love, with a young nightclub manager called
Michael Taylor. The pair were wed in 1996, and very soon they had three
children - Chloe, born in 1996, and twins Tristan and Austin in '97. The
couple were so caught up in the fast lane that it didn't seem to matter
when it was discovered their daughter belonged to another man entirely,
a passing acquaintance called Kurt Stoneking from Orange, Texas, who was
only too pleased to sign both Chloes away into Taylor's care.

Nobody remembers Chloe ever referring to a "diet" - she did what she
wanted and ate what she wanted, mostly burgers and fried chicken.
Somehow, her appearance never advertised the lifestyle, her body
snapping back into place after pregnancy. Proof of her breathtaking
looks was revealed to all when Hollywood star and notorious ladies man
Charlie Sheen allegedly sought the model's attention.

Michael Taylor said Sheen had bought Chloe's phone number from a
photographer, and called to offer her a substantial reward for a few
days in the pleasure in her company. Honourably, Sheen discussed his
intentions with Taylor, explaining he was a hopeless fan who had
purchased every magazine in which Chloe had ever appeared. He promised
to bring her back in one piece. On the big day, Sheen's people delivered
a bottle of Crown Royale for Michael as a limousine full of roses idled
in the drive.

Back in Texas, Donna Jones reacted to her daughter's newfound eminence
with motherly pride. Her youngest child had hit the big time, and the
Silsbee home became a shrine to Chloe Jones, the walls festooned with
posters and tear sheets from magazines such as Hustler and Swank.
Indeed, such welcome distractions were useful for Donna in the dark days
following her partner's suicide, and Chloe even returned home to help
police clean up the mess wrought by her stepfather's shotgun.

Chloe's flair for melodrama leant itself to movie stardom, and for a
moment in the late '90s Hollywood seemed to beckon - she landed a few
cameo spots in TV programs such as Baywatch and Diagnosis Murder. But
most scripts regularly thrown her way were X-rated, from a hardcore
industry gagging for Chloe to make the irreversible switch. Like most
"glamour" models, Chloe loudly declared that she would never make a porn
film. And there were good reasons for her to avoid the screen, silver or
otherwise.

It could be said that Chloe Jones had the perfect voice for soft porn
magazines, the husky, hungover, backyard drawl a lousy match for the
baby-doll features. But then, porn films aren't big on dialogue.

The real reason for her reluctance to do porn was her children. Though
she was known to have guzzled whisky and smoked cigars during pregnancy,
it is unanimously agreed that Chloe loved her kids and protected them
like a wildcat. Having a mother as a porn star, she thought, would bring
the little ones no good. Rumours of a looming crossover to X-rated film
became loud enough for Chloe to feel compelled to respond.

"I have not signed with a company and have no intentions of becoming a
porn star," she posted on a fan website in 2000, adding prodigiously:
"Do not believe everything you hear and only half of what you see and
you will always be on top."

At the same time, however, there were debts to be squared, as Chloe and
Michael had been on quite a spree since the first Playboy shoots. Chloe
couldn't handle the thought of staying home while Michael went back to
work - she liked the lifestyle too much. By the end of 2000, the
temptation took over. After a couple of "hard" photo shoots with Michael
(disguised under the moniker "Mike Scorpio"), Chloe finally took the
plunge in 2001, signing with New Sensations and shooting her first
hardcore porn film in September of that year.

One of the great mysteries of the porn industry is the exact location of
all the money. Speak to the svengalis and they'll tell you there is none
- they make porn films for love. The actresses will tell you the same
thing, only they're more likely to be telling the truth. For the models,
money comes in sporadic bundles of hundreds and sometimes thousands. To
become rich in the porn trade, soft or hard, one has to work solidly and
always, and such a work ethic did not come easily to Chloe. Aside from
her natural talent for distraction, her attention to business was almost
always stunted by a mounting addiction to Vicodin, a painkiller she
scoffed by the handful, swallowing up to 10 pills at a time with a small
bottle of Wild Turkey. It was something she felt she had to do to
prepare.

Things became worse when Michael Taylor declared he'd had enough of
being Mike Scorpio, and Chloe was forced to have sex with strangers.
Though she maintained her usual bulletproof exterior, forever the
loudmouth clown on set, she confided in friends that she didn't like
having sex in front of a camera and crew. There was too much fussing,
too many constraints, too many eyes watching. At times, she told her
sister Michelle, it was like submitting to gang rape, and she began to
believe it would probably be more comfortable to just do it in private,
as the prostitutes do.

One of the other myths of the X-rated movie trade is that you have to be
a porn star to have sex with one. Like many other magazine and video
models in the United States, Chloe became a porn star for hire, on the
books at escort agencies such as Nici's Girls and Adult Star Fantasies,
both of which featured a stable of big name porn stars for hire. For a
few thousand dollars, you could be Chloe Jones's squeeze for an evening,
and there was no shortage of gentlemen familiar with Chloe's work and
eager to fork out for a night they'd never forget. The money began to
roll in, but it came at a terrible cost, and one that was to come
swiftly.

Chloe Jones never liked to be pushed around - she was the beauty queen
and demanded to be treated as such. But some men resented paying good
money only to find they were expected to indulge the girl's moods. She
developed a reputation for bickering with clients, falling asleep in
their faces, or sending them on bizarre errands from which they'd return
to find her gone.

One evening she pushed her luck too far, though nobody agrees on exactly
what happened. Some say she got mouthy with a client who bashed her with
his bare hands. Another story tells of an unsatisfied customer lying in
wait and beating Chloe with a baseball bat as she left a photo shoot.
Perhaps they're both true. Whatever the case, Chloe needed facial
reconstruction surgery and it changed her looks forever. Gone were the
baby-doll features, her new visage somewhat hard and weathered. For the
first time, she looked like the girl who'd lived the life of Chloe
Jones.

Michael Taylor couldn't take it any more and urged his wife to quit, but
she was too far gone ... and nobody told Chloe Jones what to do. They
separated in 2003.

Perhaps on her way home at last, Chloe booked herself as the star
attraction at the Yellow Rose strip club in Austin, Texas, one of the
clubs where she'd begun her career. Fans flocked to watch her dance,
waving money to attract her private attention, later lining up to
purchase DVDs and posters signed personally by the hometown superstar.
Hours into the evening, security guards were alerted to the VIP area,
where Chloe was found slumped over a table alone and unconscious, her
movies and posters scattered, pills spilling from her opened handbag,
her admirers having helped themselves to all of her cash and free DVDs.

A similar embarrassment occurred in July 2003, at an event thrown by
Chloe's new contract agent, Vivid Video, in the offices of Larry Flynt
Productions. Witnesses swear that Chloe threw up and passed out while
performing felatio on a guest at the party. Significantly, it is said a
"disgusted" Larry Flynt himself demanded Chloe's immediate release from
her contract. Once again, Chloe chose to respond via the internet, her
reply to the "rumours" on an adult industry bulletin board betraying a
less cautious posture than in previous years.

"So long as I am pulling in a fat-ass cheque everyone can go jerk off,"
she wrote, adding, to nobody in particular: "I'm not white trash, I'm as
down-to-earth as hell ... so go f--- yourself."

Her health deteriorating fast, Chloe Jones signed for one more film
project with her old company, New Sensations. One of the strangest porn
films ever made, You Don't Know Me follows Chloe on two weeks' location
in Brazil, the climax of which was her visit to a hospital after
collapsing from drugs and booze at 3am. She checked out the following
morning, ready for work, her stylists having to redo her make-up three
times after she fell face first into her breakfast.

Hospitalised again when she returned home, Chloe was told that her liver
had stopped functioning. She needed a transplant and was put on a
waiting list. But Chloe didn't like to wait for anything. She began
calling family and telling them she was dying, but they had heard it all
before - she had once claimed to have been diagnosed with leukemia,
publishing the sad prognosis on her website, and even her sisters had
dismissed her occasional epileptic seizures as attention-seeking
performances.

According to her mother, Chloe's last two escort clients turned her
down, one complaining of her wretched complexion, while the other
couldn't come at the unsightly bulge her infected intestines made in her
tummy.

In her final weeks, she was seen by friends in late-night bars,
threatening to fake her own death and then return victorious. She had
plans for a book, and a video like Paris Hilton's.

Chloe's last boyfriend, Chris Miguez, was the last to see her alive. It
was late in the night. They stayed in. She'd been drinking and she was
hungry. She asked him to go and get her a burger, but when he returned
she was asleep. He turned off the lights and climbed in beside her.

When he woke at dawn, he noticed Chloe had slobbered on his shoulder -
that was "not out of the ordinary". But Chloe hadn't moved all night,
and that was. He rolled over, turned on the light, and instantly saw she
looked strange. He felt for her pulse and there was none. She was still
warm. He called an ambulance. They arrived 45 minutes later, pronouncing
Chloe dead on June 4, 2005, two weeks shy of her birthday. She was 29,
just like her daddy.

There are few lessons to be taken home from the tawdry tale of Chloe
Jones. It's too easy to say porn destroyed her - in a sense, Chloe
wouldn't have existed without it, and it's unlikely the girl from the
trailer in Silsbee would have found the fame she desired any other way.
In an industry obsessed with portraying itself as "reputable", Chloe
Jones was one of the rare few to call it for what it is - a reckless,
dirty shambles that is only sometimes worth staying awake for. Like the
Sid Vicious of porn, she truly belonged in the mess, checking out before
the inevitable discovery of how little she meant to the world that
called her a star.

In 2001, on the set of her very first hardcore porn shoot, Melinda Dee
Jones was asked what sort of preparation she had undergone in order to
become Chloe Jones, porn star.

"Not much," she replied. "Hair, make-up, a camera in front of me, and I
turn into her."

As the filming came to an end, porn's newest superstar spreadeagled on a
rented Cadillac convertible, Mike Scorpio turned to the director and
asked where he wanted him to ejaculate. Respectfully, the director
replied:

"Not on the car."