Jenna Jameson (born Jenna Marie Massoli on April 9, 1974 is an American entrepreneur and former pornographic actress who has been called the world's most famous porn star and "The Queen of Porn". She started acting in erotic films in 1993 after having worked as a stripper and glamour model. By 1996, she had won the three top newcomer awards from pornographic film industry organizations. She has since won more than 20 adult film awards, and has been inducted into both the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) and Adult Video News (AVN) Halls of Fame.Jameson founded pornographic entertainment
company ClubJenna in 2000 with Jay Grdina, whom she later married. Initially a single website, this business expanded into managing similar websites of other stars and began producing pornographic films in 2001. The first such film, Briana Loves Jenna (with Briana Banks), was named at the 2003 AVN Awards as the best-selling and best-renting pornographic title for 2002. By 2005, Club Jenna had revenues of US$30 million with profits estimated at half that. Advertisements for her site and films, often bearing her picture, have towered on a forty-eight-foot-tall billboard in New York City's Times Square. Playboy TV hosts her Jenna's American
Sex Star reality show where aspiring porn stars compete for a Club Jenna contract.
Jameson also crossed over into mainstream celebrity, starting with a minor role in Howard Stern's 1997 film Private Parts. Her mainstream appearances continued with appearances on The Howard Stern Show, guest-hosting Wild On! and Talk Soup on E! television, a guest voice role in a 2001 episode of the Fox animated television sitcom Family Guy, an award-winning voice role in the 2002 video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and a guest role in two episodes of the 2003 NBC television series Mister Sterling. Her 2004 autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn
Star: A Cautionary Tale, spent six weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. She has also created a horror comic book with Virgin Comics entitled Jenna Jameson's Shadow Hunter, which was released in February 2008.
Jameson was born in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her father is Lawrence Massoli, an Italian American police officer and program director for KVBC-TV. Her mother was Judith Brooke Hunt Massoli, a Las Vegas showgirl who danced in the Folies Bergère show at the Tropicana Resort & Casino. Her mother died of skin cancer on February 20, 1976, before her daughter's second birthday. The cancer treatments bankrupted the family and
they moved several times, including living in a trailer and moving in with her father's mother. Her father spent most of his time at work at the Las Vegas Sheriff's Department, and she became very close to her brother, Tony. She was a frequent entrant in beauty pageants as a child, and took ballet classes. In a featurette on the Zombie Strippers DVD, Jameson indicates she trained in dance for 15 years.
Jameson writes in her autobiography that in October 1990, while the family was living on a cattle ranch in Fromberg, Montana, she was beaten with rocks and gang raped by four boys after a football game. While still 16 she says she
Jack was a tattoo artist, and gave her the first of a series of tattoos, one which would become her trademark tattoo, two hearts on her right buttock. According to E!, her brother Tony, who later owned a tattoo parlor himself, added the inscription "Heart Breaker".
She tried to follow in her mother's career as a Las Vegas showgirl, but most shows rejected her for
not having the required height of 5 feet 8 inches (173 cm). She was hired at the Vegas World show, but left after two months stating that the schedule was brutal, and the money was terrible.
Her boyfriend Jack encouraged her to apply for jobs as a stripper, and in 1991, though underage, she began dancing in Las Vegas strip clubs using a fake I.D. After she was rejected from the Crazy Horse Too strip club because of the braces on her teeth, she removed them with a pair of needle-nose pliers and was accepted. After six months, she was earning US$2,000 per night, before finishing high school.
Her first stage name as a stripper was "Jennasis",
Besides dancing, starting later in 1991, she posed for nude photographs for photographer Suze Randall in Los Angeles, with the intention of getting into Penthouse. After her photos had appeared in several men's magazines under various names, she then stopped working for Randall, feeling Randall was "a shark" who had
been taking advantage of her.
While still in high school, she began taking drugs—cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamines—accompanied by her brother (who was addicted to heroin) and at times her father. Her addiction worsened during her four years with her boyfriend. She eventually stopped eating properly and became too thin to model; Jack left her in 1994. She weighed 76 pounds (less than 35 kilograms) when a friend put her in a wheelchair and sent her to her father, who was then living in Redding, California, in order to detox; her father did not recognize her when she got off the plane.
