The Other Hollywood (68 page)

SETH WARSHAVSKY
:
I think it was a business decision on Pamela’s part. Whether she thought it would further her career because of the publicity the video generated around her or whether she thought that it would be beneficial for her to look like a victim, I don’t know. And to our surprise, Pamela sued us—after signing the agreement. So I never felt sorry for her.

EVAN WRIGHT
:
It’s funny: Thirty years ago, when you talked about porn stars, they were strictly these infamous figures, like Linda Lovelace.

Today, Pamela Anderson Lee is basically a porn star. Rob Lowe was a
porn star for a while. Then
Esquire
did an article a little while back where they had Jenna Jameson—a well-known porn star—posing next to her recipe for mashed potatoes.

RON JEREMY
:
Now, all of a sudden, this new tape is legal. Pam has to be behind it because Brett Michaels is very much against it. He went on the Howard Stern show saying he’s against the tape, and he’s gonna stop it, and he did. His lawyers did a court injunction and stopped the tape.

EVAN WRIGHT
:
I remember hearing this statistic, and I think it’s true: In the late 1990s, NASA did live Webcasts of the streams of images from Mars. At about that time, the Pamela Anderson Lee video was also being streamed on the Internet. And I think more people were trying to watch close-up pictures of Pamela Anderson Lee’s crotch than were watching the images of Mars.

SETH WARSHAVSKY
:
The Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee video was the largest-selling adult video in history. It was really a perfect example of porn becoming more mainstream in America.

EVAN WRIGHT
:
I think a lot of people thought Pamela Anderson Lee looked really hot.

LOS ANGELES
1998

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I won an
AVN
Award for best girl/girl scene—and I enjoyed myself a lot in that scene. Then the next day, which was my birthday, I went back to Los Angeles and got an HIV test at the Norton Clinic.

That Friday, I got a call from Jim South saying that my HIV test had come back indeterminate.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I roomed with Tommy Byron and Marc Wallice for a while in the San Fernando Valley when I first moved out here. Tommy Byron’s great. He’s very quiet and very clean. Very neat.

But Marc would sneak in and mess around in my underwear. I would open up my underwear, and it’d be all stretched out, you know? I couldn’t wear it.

I mean, I knew it was Marc’s kink, so eventually I just started buying larger underwear.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
So I ran out, got in my car, and drove to a clinic on Venice Boulevard. They opened the door and said, “We’re closed.”

I had been there before, and I said, “No, you don’t understand! My test came back indeterminate!”

All of a sudden, this really nice, big, black lady just took me in her arms and said, “It’s okay, honey. We’ll take care of you.”

And she pulled me inside and drew my blood, and they ran the ten-minute test, and it came back indeterminate again. So she called her supervisor and asked what to do.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
The Free Speech Coalition is a trade organization for adult entertainment manufacturers and producers, so they can provide
legal defense education about laws and censorship in the United States. Somehow I got elected to the board of directors. Bad place to put a newly sober loudmouth chick that just wants to help the talent. I mean, I’m definitely not going to be a winner on this board, right?

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
They drew my blood again, and they sent it out to a clinic that could do a DNA test over the weekend. Almost immediately, people were calling me and asking me if I was okay.

BILL MARGOLD
:
In 1997, I’d gotten Sharon Mitchell to be the AIDS matron—the HIV genealogist—although I’d already created the groundwork for genealogy as far back as 1993, with the first outbreak. So now Sharon Mitchell was going to be paid for doing this—which I didn’t really mind, though up to that point nobody involved with PAW (Protecting Adult Welfare) had been paid.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I quickly amassed information on what kinds of tests existed. I got information as fast as I could. I brought it back to the Free Speech Coalition board, and I said, “I need about thirteen thousand dollars to start this testing site.”

BILL MARGOLD
:
Almost immediately, Sharon Mitchell wants to get paid more and more and more and more.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Now, it just so happened that the Protecting Adult Welfare office had a sink—which is the only legal requirement to draw blood. And it was next to World Talent Modeling Agency. So I was given the grant—and as people were going in and out of World Modeling, I’d just grab them, draw their blood, and send them back out. They were like, “What! I’ve just been branded!” They were like cattle; they didn’t really know what hit them. But that’s the best way to start an industry standard for HIV testing.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
How did people find out? The Norton Clinic was instructed to call the agent if anything happened, so they called Jim South to have him contact me. I wish they would have contacted me first—at least give me a day to go and get the test again.

Apparently, Jim South called me from his office when there were other people there. So they knew he was calling Trish Deveraux to say that her HIV test was indeterminate. Unbelievable. He should have gone into a private room or something, you know?

Everybody was calling me: “Do you have AIDS? Are you going to die?”

I’m like, “Well, I’m waiting for another test result. Maybe it’s a false positive.”

MARC WALLICE
:
I was as big as I could be in this industry. Everywhere I went on the street, people would say, “Hey, Marc!” “You’re that guy!” I was with Elegant Angel for a year. This was my first series,
Tails of Perversity
. My first shot.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
After the first positive DNA test, I wasn’t really in denial, but I was like, “Maybe I’m really not HIV.” It was just shock: “How could this happen?” I saw everybody’s tests before I performed with them. I’d had sex with only two people outside of the adult business, and both times it was with a condom. And I don’t do drugs. So I was just sitting there thinking, “I don’t understand.”

It was after the second positive that I started thinking, “Wow, I got this.”

MARC WALLICE
:
Every film in the
Tails of Perversity
series got three and a half stars from
AVN
except the last one. It got four stars.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Nobody knew where I got it. Then rumors started spreading. I gave Sharon Mitchell a list of everyone I’d had sex with for the previous six months. She said everybody on that list had to get a DNA test to prove that they didn’t have HIV.

And the people who had been with me for less than one month before had to get a DNA test, wait a month, and get another one. So they were basically quarantined from the adult business.

MARC WALLICE
:
At Elegant Angel, we are the kings of anal sex. That’s what people want. If you can get the majority of the scenes to be anal, why would you say no?

If there’s a beautiful girl I want to see having sex, and she doesn’t do anal, that’s fine. I wouldn’t turn a beautiful girl down that doesn’t do anal over an okay-looking chick that will take it up the ass.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I felt sorry for those people. I thought,
They can’t work for a whole month because they had sex with me
. It was weird; I felt like I was now a potential infector. Nobody else became positive from me, but I still hurt those people; they were sitting at home going, “Do I have HIV? Can I ever work again?”

MARC WALLICE
:
I still give plenty before the anal ever happens. The anal just tops it off. Occasionally, like in the second to the last scene in
Tails of Perversity 4,
it’s straight anal—“Let’s not even fuck her pussy, except for the DP!”

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Most people were very sympathetic toward me. In fact, they had an industry-wide meeting at VCA about what was going to happen. Were companies going to start shooting with condoms?

In fact, I ran into Mr. Marcus there. He was one of the people quarantined because of me, and he was so nice to me.

MARC WALLICE
:
I’ve been making the best movies at Elegant Angel since Tom Byron left. I was all Patrick Collins had, until he hired Sean Michaels. I love the guy, but the truth is his movies fucking suck.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I mean, I can understand it that people were saying, “Well, maybe she’s doing drugs; maybe she’s hooking on the side.” But there was this person who said they saw me at a party shooting up heroin.

First of all, I don’t go to parties. And second, I’ve never
seen
a person shoot up heroin, let alone shoot it up myself. So I thought,
How could a person say that?

That was one of the main things that made me realize I just needed to get away. Because I knew that people were looking at me and wondering, “What did she do to get this? What did she do different from what we’re doing?”

MARC WALLICE
:
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been on a set where someone has had a test one, two, three, four days old, which is just a giveaway that they’re faking the dates. I was one day over the deadline, so I changed the date. But I did
not
fake a test.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I think I contracted HIV through Marc Wallice. Because when I looked at his test, I saw the name Mark Goldberg—which is his real name—and I saw negative for HIV next to his name. The name and the HIV screener was all I looked at.

Later, I saw a test from 1997, the same period when I worked with him—and it said he was a forty-four-year-old female named Mark Goldberg who was negative for HIV.

Marc Wallice was thirty-nine and a male.

BILL MARGOLD
:
With the outbreaks in 1998, Sharon Mitchell assumes command of the HIV testing. Then she decides that the world isn’t big enough for the both of us and figures she’ll squeeze me out of PAW—or at least remove me from the medical parts of PAW. Which, if I had capitulated, would have gutted me.

So I just decided to squeeze her out, by giving her an organization called AIM: Adult Industry Medical. I created it spontaneously. I told her,
Now you have your own business
. Emphasis on the word
business
. And more power to her.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I worked for John Bond two different times—with Marc Wallice—in two weeks. So it was definitely one of those times. Most likely it was the second time: It was anal both times, but the first time was a facial. The second time he came on my ass after the anal sex.

So I thought, two to one, Marc had HIV at that point, came on my ass, and some of it got into my body.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Every time someone would come up positive, we’d sit in a room and argue for three hours. After a couple of months we finally figured on a standard, and we implemented it through the Protecting Adult Welfare and the Free Speech Coalition.

That was when I started to lay the groundwork for my Adult Industry Medical connections.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
When Sharon Mitchell got my list, she went through it and supposedly everybody on it tested negative. I found out later that Marc Wallice had never gone in to get a test. He had called her and said, “Oh, no, I got a test. I’m fine.”

For some reason I’ll never understand, Sharon Mitchell apparently trusted Marc. She said, “Oh, okay, no problem.” And she called me and said, “Everyone you’ve worked with is negative.”

I was like, “Okay. Then where’d I get it from?”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Tricia Deveraux came up positive on January 7, 1998. So we pushed away all the boxes and had an industry-wide meeting at VCA. I brought in some educators from around the local area, some doctors, people from UCLA and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, and we decided that PCR-DNA was the best way to monitor for HIV.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Then Brooke Ashley came up positive, and she turned in a list, and again Marc Wallice was on the phone saying, “No, I’m negative.”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Marc Wallice was HIV positive, and he was so ashamed that he went to any length to hide it. He went to anonymous testing centers—and at that time people were getting the ELISA test intermittently, like once a year, or every six months.

MARC WALLICE
:
Why did I prefer the clinic on San Fernando Road? Because it cost five dollars.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
PCR-DNA is the best test because it will not hide a positive reading if someone’s on medication. Whereas it would on the ELISA RNA test—which is why we don’t use that. The ELISA test is the antibody test, which has such a long window period.

There’s too many partners—we found that out with Trish—that can be exposed in the six months that it takes to determine if there’s antibodies to HIV. PCR-DNA tests are for the actual DNA of the actual HIV virus itself.

MARC WALLICE
:
Sharon Mitchell checked the code number of the March 1998 ELISA test, and it checked out. She called the lab. It matched. So it was not a faked test.

I gave PAW my last six or seven tests. One of them listed my age as forty-nine; some say thirty-seven, others thirty-eight, thirty-six. I never tell them my age.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Then, within another two months, there was Kimberly Jade and a Hungarian girl named Caroline. And they all turned in lists, and Marc Wallice was on all of them.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
When Trish stepped up and gave me her list, I was in the right place at the right time to actually do something. It really became more and more clear as the fifth and sixth girl got HIV. The one common denominator name on all of their partner lists—that hadn’t been tested, and had been indeed actively avoiding tests—was Marc Wallice.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Eventually people started saying, “Well, where’s Marc’s DNA test?” And they asked Marc to go to AIM and get one, but he didn’t want to.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I thought to myself, “My God, what has this fucking society done to impact such shame on someone that they have to consider this diagnosis different from cancer?”

My thought was not, “What an evil son of a bitch.” It was, “What the fuck can I do to make this different? What can I do to make my part of the world a little more functional, and a little more clear, and level the playing field?”

MARC WALLICE
:
I was doing great. Producing, directing, making more money than I’d ever made acting. The reason I stopped was that Patrick Collins started insisting that I get all these tests.