Jeanna Fine passed away last month.

If you’re a regular listener to The Rialto Report, you’ll know that we like to interview a person from a different angle. It’s a more intimate and personal exploration, rather than just revisiting someone’s fleeting moments on camera. And it can be a challenge to convince someone to open up in that way.

Sometimes it’s quick and easy to persuade a person to talk, but many others are more difficult: some interviews have simply ended up being off the record, or subjects changed their minds after finishing the conversation. A few decided that their interview shouldn’t be released until after they pass, while others just weren’t very interesting.

And then there was my interview with Jeanna Fine.

We’d originally contacted her for all the usual Rialto Report reasons: Jeanna had been one of the adult industry’s biggest, and longest lasting, A-list stars, and I was keen to hear her personal story. She’d first appeared in X-rated films in the mid 1980s – getting her name supposedly when Barbara Dare told her that Jeanna looked so fine. It was the tail period of the so-called ‘golden age’, just as the business was changing into a more corporate, studio-driven, rinse-and-repeat video industry.

But there was nothing standard about Jeanna. She stood out from pack, fiercely individual, different from many other identikit, girl-next door performers, with her short platinum-blond spiky punk hair, or later, long dark hair that turned her into a scowling femme fatale. She was androgenous, full of confrontational attitude – and her scenes bristled with a bad-ass aggression. And Jeanna’s rebellious streak didn’t seem confined to her appearance, and the word was that she would turn up to shoots when and where she felt like it, and sometimes not at all. Sometimes she made scores of films in a matter of weeks, and then disappeared for months, even years. She had a long-term, and volatile, relationship with fellow actress Savannah. Jeanna eventually walked away from it – just before Savannah killed herself. On one of her breaks from the world of X, she got married and had a son, only to return to making films a few years later. Her on/off career continued into the 2000s.

But, and there’s always a but, I wanted to know more about the woman behind the strong, confident, and forthright exterior, this character so full of piss and vinegar. I sensed a vulnerability, that her glamorous life in front of the camera perhaps masked secrets that were a world away from adult films. In short, who was the woman that created Jeanna Fine?

So I reached out to her, and over the next 10 years, we became friends and confidants through a series of conversations, phone calls, emails, and texts.

When we first spoke, she’d been living a rural life in upstate New York for over a decade, and was experiencing something of an existential crisis. She was at a crossroads in her life: she’d experienced recent tragedies – the suicides of both her husband and brother, she was empty-nester, and she was trying to figure out what she should do next.

Intriguingly, she decided to emerge from anonymity and return to the X-rated industry. She turned up at an adult fan convention, she’d set up a Twitter account (as it was back then), and had a friend show her how she could earn money with a web-cam.

But the return to the sex industry was problematic, and I could see that she hadn’t expected the extent of the emotions, the old secrets and lies, that this new direction was bringing back to the surface. What was being stirred in her past, I wondered? Jeanna insisted that she was keen to do the interview – she announced it on Twitter – but I was worried that she was feeling fragile. This podcast is the result of that conversation.

With big thanks to Patrick Kindlon and Self Defense Family – for the wonderful monologue, and to Steven Morowitz and Melusine – for the Video-X-Pix photographs.

This podcast is 52 minutes long.

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Jeanna Fine – Video-X-Pix photos