War of the worlds
A new biography places the adult film actor of the ’70s and ’80s in the center of the war over pornography that pitted social conservatives and feminists against other feminists
Candida Royalle, born Candice Vadala, failed to achieve the celebrity of Stormy Daniels. For one thing, she never became embroiled in a sex scandal involving a US president. Even during her 1970s and ’80s porn heyday, she remained easy to overlook or ignore. Strong parallels nevertheless link the lives of these two women. Each survived childhood abuse, failed relationships, financial difficulties, and, in Royalle’s case, drug addiction. And both graduated from acting and exotic dancing to writing and directing adult films, expressing feminist agency, and, arguably, consciousness.
Capitalizing on her entanglement with Donald Trump, Daniels published “Full Disclosure” in 2018. Royalle contemplated a memoir, but never completed one. In an unlikely twist, Jane Kamensky — former director of the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and now director of Monticello/the Thomas Jefferson Foundation — has stepped in to fill that gap.
The result, “Candida Royalle & the Sexual Revolution,” is a frank and unexpectedly lively biography. The book’s virtues include its melding of history with diaristic intimacy and clever, often incandescent prose. (One annoyance is multiple copy editing errors, among them a reference to the National Organization of — instead of “for” — Women and a citation sourced to the Philadelphia Enquirer, rather than Inquirer.)
An award-winning historian of early America, Kamensky mines Royalle’s personal journals, drawings, letters, and other materials — an ar
chive that she acquired for the Schlesinger Library after Royalle’s death in 2015. Kamensky also was able to interview many of Royalle’s survivors, including her sister, her half-brother, and her ex-husband, longtime friend and business partner Per Sjöstedt.
While Royalle wasn’t a media icon, the book’s subtitle, “A History from Below,” seems to understate her prominence. In Kamensky’s telling, Royalle positioned herself in the thick of the so-called sex wars, the fight over pornography that roiled both second-wave feminism and the larger political culture.
Royalle cofounded Femme Productions, a feminist-leaning adult-film company, and also a group called Feminists for Free Expression. She was friends with leading sex-positive figures of her day, including the performing artist Annie Sprinkle. Her death, at 64, of ovarian cancer, occasioned bicoastal memorials and a New York Times obituary that described her as a “self-styled feminist filmmaker.”
The text makes claims for her cultural importance. “Her life, despite or indeed because of its extremes — its literal bareness — embodies both the promise and the perils of her times, and their aftermath,” Kamensky writes. Through the prism of Royalle’s life story, Kamensky aims to relate no less than “a whole new history … of the so-called sexual revolution,” with its complex currents of reaction and counter-reaction.
The battle lines grow murky, even if Kamensky limns them with precision and dispassion. In fact, the most interesting parts of the book are the most purely personal.
Kamensky’s account of Royalle’s childhood, in New York City and environs, is especially riveting. Her mother, the former Peggy Thompson Hume, abandoned the family when Candice was less than 2 years old, and neither Candice nor her older sister, who’s referred to alternately as Cynthia, Cinthea, and Cindi, would ever see her again. Peggy, it seems, had ample reason to escape, even at such a brutal cost. Her husband, Louis Vadala, a jazz musician, was physically abusive, according to Jimmy Hume, Peggy’s son from her first marriage.
Louis Vadala’s second wife, Helen Duffy, wasn’t happy either. She turned moody and violent toward her stepdaughters, and she, too, would eventually leave. One trigger for her departure was her husband’s incestuous fixation on Cynthia. (Why, Candice wondered, wasn’t it her?) Years later Vadala would be convicted of sexually molesting a 6-year-old girl. Royalle’s troubled family life no doubt shadowed her later romantic relationships, with men and occasional women.
Along with beauty and an effervescent personality, Royalle seems to have possessed at least modest gifts as an artist, singer, and dancer. But they weren’t singular enough to ensure mainstream success.
Kamensky calls her “an instinctive feminist,” and notes that she joined a feminist collective in New York. But, after moving to San Francisco and then Los Angeles, Royalle defaulted to acting in sexually explicit films to pay the bills. “She had chosen badly, and from a limited field of options,” Kamensky says. Disastrous love affairs, multiple casual liaisons, and heavy drug use followed.
Royalle’s hardcore catalog included such titles as “Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls” and “Ultra Flesh.” In time, she would condemn the industry for producing what she called “feelingless mechanical crap.”
Her vision for Femme, launched in 1984, was to make erotic films more appealing to women and couples. Foreplay got a boost. With AIDs spreading, the films highlighted safer sex practices. There were grateful fans, awards, media attention. But, by the 1990s, the industry was rocked by technological upheavals — the rise of amateur videos and online content — and Royalle’s filmmaking enterprise foundered.
Efforts to ban pornography had allied evangelicals and other social conservatives with feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who saw porn as degrading and dangerous to women. Porn’s defenders included sex-positive feminists and civil libertarians. Royalle tried to bridge the divide. “She rejected both the victimology and the criminology of anti-pornography,” Kamensky writes. “But she also knew, and sometimes spoke to, the darker sides of the sex industry…”
Kamensky takes us deep into these battles, and up to the present, arguing that the rise of the #MeToo movement has reignited the sex wars. She also touches on how changing sexual attitudes, from puritanical strictures to normative libertinism, have affected women’s personal choices and psyches. Royalle’s diaries show her wrestling with the relationship between sex and love: Was it liberation to sunder the two? Or a victory to insist on lashing them together?
Kamensky’s own take is that both sides in the sex wars were wrong. “Neither fully captured the complexities of pleasure or danger, let alone of women’s full humanity,” she writes. Royalle’s life, as she sees it, was a quest to navigate those complexities, raising issues that transcend the labyrinthine politics of porn, and still resonate today.