Traci Lords

Traci Elizabeth Lords (born Nora Louise Kuzma; May 7, 1968) is an American actress and singer. As a 15-year-old high-school dropout, she used fake identity documents to enter the sex industry, where she began appearing in pornographic magazines and films. The September 1984 edition of Penthouse featured her as its centerfold, and she went on to become one of the most sought-after pornographic actresses of the mid-1980s, appearing in an estimated 75 adult films and videos. According to her autobiography, she entered the adult film industry in October 1984, making her 16 years old at the time. In 1986, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received an anonymous tip that she had been a minor during her time in the industry. All pornographic material featuring Lords—except her last film, Traci, I Love You (1987), which had been shot two days after her 18th birthday—was removed from distribution in the United States as child pornography. Efforts to prosecute two producers and her former talent agent failed as Lords had used a stolen birth certificate to obtain a federal passport and California driver's license, thereby giving industry personnel a reasonable belief that she was over 18 at the time.

Lords subsequently enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, where she studied method acting with the intention of becoming a mainstream actress. She made her mainstream screen debut in the 1988 remake of the 1957 Roger Corman science fiction film Not of This Earth. She played Wanda Woodward in John Waters' teen comedy, Cry-Baby (1990). Her other acting credits include the television series MacGyver, Married... with Children, Tales from the Crypt, Roseanne, Melrose Place, Profiler, First Wave, Highlander: The Series, Gilmore Girls, and Will & Grace. She also appeared in films such as Skinner (1993), Virtuosity (1995), Blade (1998), Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), and Excision (2012), which earned her a Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as a Fright Meter Award and a CinEuphoria Award.

Lords pursued music in addition to her film career. After her song "Love Never Dies" was featured on the soundtrack to the film Pet Sematary Two (1992), she was signed to Radioactive Records and subsequently released her debut studio album, 1000 Fires (1995), to generally positive reviews. Despite the poor sales of the album, the lead single "Control" had moderate commercial success. It peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart and a remix was included on the soundtrack to the film Mortal Kombat (1995), which was eventually certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In 2003, Lords published her autobiography, Traci Lords: Underneath It All, which received positive reviews from critics and debuted at number 31 on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Early life

Traci Lords was born Nora Louise Kuzma on May 7, 1968, in Steubenville, Ohio, to Louis and Patricia Kuzma. Her father's parents were of Ukrainian descent, while her mother was of Irish ancestry. Louis was employed as a steelworker. Lords has one elder sister and two younger sisters. Her parents divorced when she was seven years old and Lords moved with her mother and three sisters to her great-grandmother's house. Following the divorce, her alcoholic, abusive father got partial custody. Around that same time, her mother enrolled at the College of Steubenville (now the Franciscan University of Steubenville) and became employed part-time.

When Lords was 13, she moved with her mother, her mother's new boyfriend, and sisters to Redondo Beach, California. She did not see her father for many years after. In September 1982, she began attending Redondo Union High School but dropped out at age 15 to enter the porn industry. During her early school years, Lords developed a rebellious attitude. She was angry at her mother and found a father figure in her mother's boyfriend Roger Hayes, as she calls him in her autobiography. He was a drug abuser and molested Lords in her sleep. According to Lords, this and a rape by a 16-year-old boy in school she had been seeing, which she called "the single most traumatizing thing that ever happened to me in my life", would be what eventually drove her into pornography. Lords has stated, "My damage drove me into porn. I mean, I was a little girl. And I had like all of this stuff. I'd been raped. I'd been molested. I'd been abused. I was messed up. And I was angry. And the same thing that later helped me to change my life when I was 18 and out of that world that helped me to get sober and helped me to gather the courage to go and do the work I needed to do, to look at some things in my life that were so ugly." However, in an earlier book proposal titled Out of the Blue: The Traci Lords Story, Lords made no claim of childhood sexual assault; she wrote that her father's parenting skills drove her into pornography. Lords wrote, "[H]ad you been the father I needed when I was little—and when I was not so little—there never would have been anyone named Traci Lords." Either way, after her mother broke up with Hayes due to his drug use, her mother began dating Hayes' friend. Lords refused to follow them to a new place and was left with her older sister Lorraine. Her mother and two younger sisters eventually found a new apartment.

Career

1984–1986: Pornography career

At age 15, Lords became pregnant by her high school boyfriend. Afraid of her mother's reaction, she went to Hayes for help. He arranged for her to have an abortion without her mother's knowledge. Looking for a job to get some money, she was introduced to Hayes's friend and started working for her as a babysitter. The woman offered to improve Lords's job opportunities by helping her get a fake driver's license. She provided Lords with a new birth certificate on condition that if she were ever caught, she would say that she had stolen the phony identification. Lords now had the alias Kristie Elizabeth Nussman and a new driver's license that stated she was 20 rather than 15 years old. In February 1984, she answered a newspaper advertisement for Jim South's World Modeling Talent Agency. Posing as her stepfather, Hayes drove her to the agency. After signing a contract, she began working as a nude model and appeared in magazines such as Velvet, Juggs, and Club. During August, when she was selected to model for Penthouse magazine's September 1984 15th-anniversary issue, Lords was asked to choose a stage name. According to a 1988 interview, she chose Traci—one of the popular names she had longed for growing up—and Lords, after the actor Jack Lord, since she was a fan of the television series Hawaii Five-O, in which he played Steve McGarrett. ("Tracy Lord" was also the name of Katharine Hepburn's character in the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story.)

Lords made the first of many porn movies in 1984, when she appeared in What Gets Me Hot! alongside Tom Byron, who later became her boyfriend off‑screen. She first appeared only in a non-sexual role, but it was later replaced with a hardcore scene. In her next movie, Those Young Girls, she appeared in a sex role alongside Harry Reems and Ginger Lynn. After appearing with John Leslie (an actor 23 years her senior) in the porno parody Talk Dirty to Me Part III (which won the AVN Award for the best movie), Lords was hailed as the "Princess of Porn". She became one of the highest-paid porn actresses of that time, earning more than $1,000 a day. Besides her work in porn, she also appeared in the music video for "Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'" by the heavy metal band Helix. Lords continued making more movies until late 1984 when she tried to quit the industry at age 16, but returned a few months later. Just before her 17th birthday, she met Stuart Dell, who became her boyfriend, manager, and business partner, under the pseudonym Steven (or Stephen) Cartier. Together, they formed the Traci Lords Company. Dell and Lords made a distribution deal with Sy Adler, an industry veteran who ran Vantage International, in which they would produce three movies for the company. In March 1986, the first TLC feature was released, titled Traci Takes Tokyo, which was shot in Tokyo around Christmas Day 1985. The second, Beverly Hills Copulator, was released afterwards, but the third movie, Screamer, was shelved.