Jenna Jameson (born
Jenna Marie Massoli; April 9, 1974)
is an American entrepreneur and former pornographic actress, who has been called the world's most famous adult-entertainment performer
and "The Queen of Porn."
She started acting in erotic videos in 1993 after having worked as a stripper and glamour model.
By 1996, she had won the "top newcomer" award from each of the three
major adult movie organizations. She has since won more than 20 adult
video awards, and has been inducted into both the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) and Adult Video News (AVN) Halls of Fame.
Jameson founded the adult-entertainment company ClubJenna in 2000 with Jay Grdina,
whom she later married and divorced. Initially a single website, this
business expanded into managing similar websites of other stars and
began producing sexually explicit videos in 2001. The first such movie,
Briana Loves Jenna (with Briana Banks), was named at the 2003 AVN Awards as the best-selling and best-renting pornographic title for 2002.
By 2005, ClubJenna had revenues of US$30 million with profits estimated at half that.
Advertisements for her site and films, often bearing her picture, have towered on a 48-foot-tall billboard in New York City's Times Square. Playboy TV hosts her
Jenna's American Sex Star reality show where aspiring porn stars compete for a Club Jenna contract.
Jameson has also crossed over into mainstream pop culture,
starting with a minor role in Howard Stern's 1997 film
Private Parts. Her mainstream appearances continued with: regular appearances on
The Howard Stern Show; guest-hosting stints on E! television's
Wild On! and
Talk Soup programs; a guest-starring voice-over role in a 2001 episode of the Fox animated television sitcom
Family Guy; an award-winning voice-over role in the 2002 video game
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City; and, a guest-starring role in two episodes of the 2003 NBC television series
Mister Sterling. Her 2004 autobiography,
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, spent six weeks on
The New York Times Best Seller list.
She has also created a horror comic book with Virgin Comics entitled
Jenna Jameson's Shadow Hunter, released in February 2008. She played the female lead character in the 2008 horror-comedy
Zombie Strippers. Jameson is considering a singing/acting career on Broadway in the Tony-nominated musical
Rock of Ages.
Early life
Jenna Marie Massoli was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her father, Lawrence Massoli, is an Italian American police officer at the Las Vegas Sheriff's Department and program director for KSNV-DT. Her mother, Judith Brooke Hunt, was a Las Vegas showgirl who danced in the Folies Bergère show at the Tropicana Resort & Casino.
Her mother died of melanoma on February 20, 1976, two months prior to her daughter's second birthday.
The cancer treatments bankrupted the family and they relocated in Nevada, Arizona, and Montana, usually living in a trailer home or living with her paternal grandmother. She has an older brother, Tony.
She was a frequent entrant in beauty pageants as a child, and enrolled in ballet classes throughout her childhood.
In a featurette on the
Zombie Strippers DVD, Jameson indicates she trained in dance for fifteen years.
Jameson writes in her autobiography that in October 1990, when she
was 16 years old and while the family was living on a cattle ranch in Fromberg, Montana, she was beaten with rocks and gang raped by four boys after a football game at Fromberg High School.
The incident began after she attempted to hitchhike home, and that she
entered the car of the four boys while believing that she would be
driven to her home.
She reported being raped a second time while still 16, by "Preacher," her boyfriend Jack's biker uncle.
Preacher has denied the rape ever occurred.
Rather than tell her father, she left home and moved in with Jack in her first serious relationship.
Jack was a tattoo
artist, and gave her the first of a series of tattoos, one of which
would become her trademark tattoo, two hearts on her right buttock.
According to E!, her brother Tony, who later owned a tattoo parlor himself
added the inscription "Heart Breaker."
Early career
She tried to follow in her mother's career as a Las Vegas showgirl,
but most shows rejected her for not having the then-typical height of
5 feet 8 inches (173 cm).
She was hired at Disneyland Resort,
[1] but left after two months stating concerns over the schedule and salary schedule.
Her boyfriend Jack encouraged her to apply for jobs as a dancer,
and in 1991, though underage, she began dancing in Las Vegas strip clubs using a fake identification.
After she was rejected from the Crazy Horse Too strip club because of her orthodontia, she removed her braces with pliers and was accepted.
After six months, she was earning US$2,000 per night, before graduating from Bonanza High School.
Her first stage name as a dancer was "Jennasis",
which she later used as the name of a business that she incorporated ("Jennasis Killing Co.").
She chose the name "Jenna Jameson" to use as a model after scrolling
through the phone book for a last name that matched her first name,
before finally deciding on Jameson after the whiskey, which she is known to drink.
Besides dancing, starting later in 1991, she posed for nude photographs for photographer Suze Randall in Los Angeles, with the intention of getting into
Penthouse.
After her photos had appeared in several men's magazines under various names, she then stopped working for Randall, feeling Randall was "a shark"
who had been taking advantage of her.
While in high school, she began taking drugs—cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamine—accompanied by her brother (who was addicted to heroin
[1]) and at times her father.
Her addiction worsened during her four years with her boyfriend. She
eventually stopped eating properly and became too thin to model; Jack
left her in 1994. She weighed 76 pounds (less than 35 kilograms)
when a friend put her in a wheelchair and sent her to her father, who was then living in Redding, California, in order to detox; her father did not recognize her when she got off the plane.
