Thursday, 17th September pm, Box Canyon: the Happily-Married Porn Stars
Mike’s personal project for LA was to get a pornstar couple. So while I was running around trying to get celebs and experts, Mike was conversing endlessly with representatives of Porn Central, the San Fernando Valley. Elation gleamed in my husband’s eyes when he found a porn couple who have been happily married for 13 years.
What a couple they are! Nicki is the same age as me, 29, and Josh is a little older at 33. The two of them are high school sweethearts. They grew up in smalltown Florida, got married when Nicki was 17, had their boys and settled down to live happily. A few years later, they went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with a group of friends. They had a fairly debaucherous time and when they got back, one of Nicki’s friend suggested that she supplement her nurse’s income with some stripping at a club. This she did, and really enjoyed it. She’d work the weekends and earn more in one weekend than her entire monthly salary as a nurse. So she 
jacked in her nursing job and started to do it properly. The clients loved her, and she and Josh decided to make some amateur videos of her (now worth thousands!) which she could sell to the clients for $20 at the end of her encounters. They cost Josh $1 to make and they were selling like hot buns, so to speak. She was doing so well at this that someone in the porn industry saw the videos and asked her to come out to the world’s porn capital, San Fernando Valley, to make a movie. She did, it went very well and now she’s one of the biggest stars in the porn industry. Josh is a porn director – he occasionally performs, but prefers to be behind the camera.
So, LOADS to learn from these two about handling jealousy, the difference between physical and emotional love, and how to keep our sex life spicy…
Nicki is one of the loveliest, sweetest women that we’ve met on this trip. She’s a doting mother, a loving wife and a keen horserider – so we met at her stables where she keeps two horses. The extraordinary thing for me (given that Mike had pretty much surrendered all powers of objectivity at the door…) was that she as so lovely, had such a laugh with her husband, and to all intents and purposes was so normal. Granted, her boobs were the size of babies’ heads, and something funny and distracting was happening with a big nipple – but she was someone I would genuinely be friends with.
In 2006, she was diagnosed with leukaemia. Really really serious leukaemia. She ended up spending 10 months in hospital, during which time one of her sons turned 9 and she was only able to touch him through a plastic bubble which she was forced to live in. Josh had to go back to performing, so Nicki talked about how hard it was to be very very ill, and to have Josh come in to visit her in hospital knowing that he had had sex with other women – in order to pay the hospital bills. What an amazing couple to come through that. She said that was the hardest time for her. Josh equally could see how heartbreaking it was for her, but found himself with no options. The one thing they did say was how amazing the porn community were: porn stars babysat the kids as Josh came to visit Nicki daily, they rallied around to raise money for the cause, and now are very supportive of the charity which she has set up. They even had a star-studded event at the Playboy Mansion to raise funds for her.
In terms of what we learnt from this couple ourselves – Mike learnt that porn stars are real people, I learnt that pretty much anything is possible if you are able to laugh with your partner. Nicki and Josh laughed their way through the interview – they had a great, secure dynamic – which I suppose you have to have for a marriage to survive in an industry like the porn industry (it’s very very rare that relationships survive in it).
(Nicki has a nightly show on Playboy radio: http://www.playboy.com/world-of-playboy/radio/)
