‘Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers’
By Jared Stearns
Head Press, 348 pages

Jared Stearns begins his story as perhaps no biography has begun before: “Numerous publishers turned down this book.” Sex supposedly sells, he observes, but the word “‘porn’ immediately triggers conscious and unconscious opinions and feelings.”

Marilyn Chambers, brought up in a proper Connecticut middle class home, scandalized her family by doing hard-core sex films, becoming a porn star in “The Green Door,” a film that rivaled in importance and popularity “Deep Throat,” which made Linda Lovelace famous enough to be joked about by Johnny Carson on late-night television.

Chambers was the better actress, and what she did — she wanted everyone to know — was acting. She approached her roles with the same dedication, sincerity, and skill that she wanted to bring to mainstream filmmaking. Mr. Stearns shows that on film sets, Chambers, along with other members of the cast, crew, and producers, were professionals doing a job. The biographer describes her performances in carefully wrought prose attentive to the particulars of the actress’s work.

Chambers was beautiful, athletic, and savvy, often getting a percentage of her films, though this did not prevent much of her work from being exploited in ways she could not control or profit from. For all of her shrewdness, she could not resist an attachment to abusive men — who spent her money and treated her as virtually their slave. 

There was something pure about Chambers in face, body, and manner. That is why hard-core filmmakers at San Francisco wanted her to be their star. She looked wholesome — so wholesome, in fact, that she could not get the role of a porn star in “Hardcore,” written and directed by Paul Schrader, because she seemed too clean-looking when she appeared at the casting call. In short, the girl-next-door look did not fit the filmmaker’s stereotype of a porn star.

Chambers never overcame her porn star status, even though she had some notable successes on the so-called legitimate stage, singing and dancing as well. She succumbed to drinking and drug taking but seemed always on the verge of turning a tawdry story into a triumph. Mr. Stearns is quietly effective by concentrating on her promise and plight as an actress. The result is that I rooted for her: I felt, as she did, that at any moment she might just be taken for a serious actress capable of a wide range of roles.

Mr. Stearns is equally effective in showing that Chambers had a life outside of her movie work, helping others less fortunate than her, and becoming a mother whose daughter not only cooperated with the biographer but was able to offer insightful testimony about Chambers as a loving parent, no matter her lapses.

So rather than writing a biography about the downfall of a star or the degradation of a woman who once was famous, we have, on the contrary, the story of a woman of nobility, and, yes, a pureness that made her the right choice — before her porn fame — to be the Procter & Gamble face and figure on the Ivory Snow box.

Chambers had an extraordinary work ethic, and a democratic ethos that is enormously appealing. When she was down and out, she offered to clean her neighbors’ homes and seems not to have felt any shame in the job at all.  

To put it another way: What is there not to like about Marilyn Chambers?  She took people as they were, allowing fans to touch and even fondle her. Of course, she knew that some women and men would find such behavior disgusting. For her, though, it was part of the harmless fantasy her films had excited.

I’m reminded of a mother in a restaurant who said to her wayward child: “You’re not touching anything, are you?” We learn early on what we are not supposed to touch — a lesson Marilyn Chambers chose not to absorb.  Was she led astray by impulses that others choose to check? Sure. Yet to deny that she satisfied and even liberated people in ways that went beyond sex is also a lesson that this book — without preaching — shows to be true.

Mr. Rollyson is the host of a podcast, “A Life in Biography.”