The Domestic Life of a Porn Star

Candy Apples and her new husband, Bill Nance, live the Huntington Beach dream: pit bulls and a housegirl to watch them. But will the newly busty blonde with the sweet blue eyes ever stop taking it up the ass to pay for it all? A day in the life . . .

Do you remember that scene in Boogie Nights in which Marky Mark and his buddies go to rob the crazy coked-out guy with the lush '80s pad, his silk robe open, the powder flowing, the drugged-out Chinese houseboy wandering around throwing firecrackers, the state-of-the-art stereo booming out Night Ranger at about a million decibels? Porn star Candy Apples' life is nothing like that—except for the houseboy, who in this case is a plump, pretty, wholesome-looking 19-year-old redhead named Natalie.

Natalie has been sleeping on the couch for about two months. Her job is to watch the two pit bulls, Nigel and Cleopatra, whenever Candy and Bill want to leave the one-bedroom Huntington Beach apartment, even for a little while.

The apartment is plain. It has a barren little patio, a smallish kitchen, and a leopard-print rug over gray beach carpet to mark the sitting area. The bathroom is spotless, decorated by a couple of pretty blue candles. The only other decorations in the house—besides the Pokmon motif, the Japanese kid's cartoon to which all three say they're addicted—are the cow skull over the giant TV and a framed Tom Byron photo, inscribed, “To Candy: I wanna ram my big cock up your shithole and then make you suck it, you whore!!!” Five bent-over women, displaying their assholes and snatches like collies in heat, complete the composition. There is a desk and an ugly file cabinet with neat red folders holding her pictures, which look fantastic. Someone has arranged the video games very tidily on the entertainment center.

That compulsively clean someone was probably Candy herself—the woman Hustler's Dick Pursel describes as “the very top of the very bottom of the barrel. She can act, and she's likable, and she seems a bit smarter than most. But she'll do anything.” It seems even porn stars are subject to your mother's warnings: men only want good girls. If only they knew how very domestic she is.

Bill and Candy are friendly and fearless; Natalie is a little shier, though she warms up later, when the subject is boys. But of the three, only Bill doesn't seem to recognize that there are maybe things you don't say to a person with a note pad. We are having lunch at a Mexican restaurant around the corner. Bill has ordered the No. 5 for Candy and is telling me about her insomnia. “She has to take sleeping pills!” he exclaims so I'll understand the depth of the problem. They exchange a look. “Just Excedrin PM,” Candy clarifies—fast. She's a lot more comfortable joking about the 20 tokes it'll take her to get to sleep. Though both are faultlessly polite and friendly with me, they never look directly at the waiter or thank the busboy, who refills our waters several times.

Candy and Bill are both 26, though he looks younger, despite his goatee and tattoos of blond bondage babes (from the cover of Devil in Miss Jones 6) running down his arms. He's a little bit roly-poly, too. He does not look threatening in the slightest, even though he wears the HB bad-boy uniform. She looks a little older than 26, though not by much—29 perhaps. It's because she's so very thin. She's pretty, though not stunning. Her blue eyes are huge, and her roots are only a couple of shades ashier than her long blond hair. She has a small chin and a couple of patches of adult acne that are very skillfully covered in her sizzling promo pictures and video box covers. She is thinking about having her eyebrows tattooed on so she'll never have to draw them again. She says she's done almost 400 films.

She dresses down during the day in jeans that bag around her tiny ass, maroon Etnies from which she has removed the jingle bell that Natalie fastened—with a warning not to do it again—and a white tank top upon which is emblazoned, “I love porn.” She doesn't need a bra, although her breasts seem enormous on her ribby frame. But though they look huge, they're in fact a very reasonable 480 cc's of saline. During the day, when we flit from one tattoo shop to the next, the talk will center on many women's recent boob jobs, and numbers like 600, 650 and 700 will be tossed around. “The other night, she was looking at 'em,” Bill says, “and she goes, 'God, they look small! I want 'em bigger!'” It's shop talk. Everyone knows where everyone else got her boobs done. Almost everyone around here goes to a Dr. Nicolli. Also, there's a guy who does boobs in Tijuana, though he's certified here. That way, he doesn't have to use such an expensive anesthesiologist. Candy and Bill paid $4,550—no Tijuana for them—and are well-pleased with the result. Bill can tell you which doctor in Utah is good—they were going to go to him, but he couldn't see them in time to do her boobs before the gangbang—and which doctor isn't. “A whole lotta people got bad jobs from the one guy,” Bill tells me.

[

The gangbang? Candy is the new record holder, taking the title from Houston in October, with 742 men penetrating her in one way or another. Last I had heard, Annabelle Chong had the record, but apparently there've been five or six new world champions since. “I wasn't even sore!” Candy exclaims, her voice low and loud. “They stick it in, it counts. Head counts. Guys literally came up, put it in for two seconds, and got pulled off for the next guy. Normally, they would have had a little more time, but because the fire marshal was there . . .”

Bill breaks in. He always talks in exclamations. “The guy got the wrong permits! We were supposed to get married at the gangbang, but because the cops broke it up, we couldn't! There were, like, 30 cop cars! She ran into the makeup room and put her clothes on, and two huge bodyguards ran her down the stairs and into the limo!”

Candy and Bill got married in her parents' back yard instead, with a simple Hawaiian theme. Bill's grandparents and most of his aunts and uncles boycotted the wedding. They knew what she did, she says, and loved her anyway, until friends and neighbors saw her on Howard Stern. “Howard was wonderful to me,” Candy says wistfully. “He was so nice! I didn't have to get naked; he didn't ask to see my boobs or anything!”

The publicity they could not forgive. But crowned in orchids, she looked lovely.

Together a little more than a year, though they've known each other for 10, the two are homebodies. Candy says she likes being domestic, and I believe her. Later, she will dawdle for an hour in the bathroom getting ready to go out, but when she's done, everything will have been returned to its proper place. You wouldn't even know she'd been in there. She likes to cook, she says. Bill and Natalie both exclaim what a good cook she is. What in her repertoire does Bill like best? He thinks about it for a second before his eyes light up, and he says, “She makes really good nachos!”

“Everything she makes is good,” contends Natalie.

They smoke tons of dope, but they only party three or four times a year—”at the most!” says Bill. “That's the reason we moved from LA back to Huntington! The tweaking! You get caught up in that whole LA party scene. Every night, someone has an orgy. Girls on sets will lock themselves in the bathroom and smoke crack.”

“I have a friend who couldn't work anywhere that wasn't in the vicinity of a methadone clinic,” Candy says. “These girls have stick bodies, no butts and huge fake boobs. It's not healthy.” But Candy and Bill will tell a tattoo-artist friend later that day that they're thinking of moving back to the Valley. “You can get a five-bedroom house, with a pool and Jacuzzi, on an acre of land, for $1,200 per month,” Bill will say. He will not mention the party scene.

Some porn stars, oddly, live in Irvine and Mission Viejo. But most stick to Huntington Beach: out of only about 300 to 500 people working in porn at any one time, Shelby and Pat Myne, Regan Starr, Dayton Rains, and Billy Glide, among others, live here. But Dayton has been off the radar for a while.

“People just disappear,” Bill says. “She flaked on our bachelor party, flaked on our wedding, and we haven't heard from her since. Her number's disconnected. . . .”

“We used to talk to her every day,” Candy says sadly.

Nonetheless, Huntington Beach is the perfect antidote to the outside world's condemnation. A caller to a radio program may scream at her, “You're a whore! You're a whore!” But around here, she's well-insulated. Porn stars are at the top of the local entertainment heap, and Candy can deflect the screaming with a well-defended speech about “personal preference.”

Go ahead. Tell her that most women feel porn stars give men license to look at all women as just three-holed fuckdolls. Candy will deftly announce, “I'm almost always the aggressor! How can that be demeaning or degrading to women?”

[

And around Huntington Beach, people buy it. Porn stars are sought after to give clubs more juice—Club Rubber alone sometimes feels as if it has more porn stars than paying customers, and in fact that's where Bill and Candy had their joint bachelor party. Bands like (hed)pe flaunt porn stars and strippers as arm candy. Daimon's sushi bar, in nearby Sunset Beach, is known and loved for its porn-star clientele. Just try getting up to the sushi bar on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night. You can't swing a raw fish without smacking a plastic breast.

Back at their apartment, the neighbor kid is hanging out front with Natalie. He is drinking a tall Bud from a paper bag. “Nobody's really at work around here,” Candy explains. “Everyone's home.”

“Where we live,” Bill says, “you're either a stripper or a drug dealer or you own a clothing company.”

“I know a lot of girls who are 18, and their dream is to become a stripper,” Candy says. “[Costa Mesa-based clothing company] Black Flys are gods down here; they made the whole scene in this area. Everyone's a snowboarder or a skater, and they get everything for free, and that's all they need.” She continues with a point I have never heard raised, and I'm surprised: “Plus, I think it's hard around here to get a real job.”

The scene is incredibly Peter Pan, or for those of you who saw it, Marie Baie des Anges. In that film, two very bad and very beautiful children fall in love in the woodsy paradise of the French Mediterranean. No parents are ever in evidence. In Candy's case, though, parents are in evidence: Candy's parents, both retired, and married—to each other!—for 35 years, talk to her almost daily.

She was living at home when she started making movies at 19. Her parents knew she worked for a porn-production company, but once they realized she was also starring, they made her move out. “I didn't talk to them for, like, a year,” Candy says. “But now they realize I'm stable and paying my own bills and stuff.”

I ask how much she makes. She says she gets up to $2,000 per scene and works 10 to 20 days per month. But if she's making, say, $200,000 per year, I don't see any evidence of it in their modest apartment.

“The first four years, she probably made a million dollars,” says Bill. “But you spend it as fast as you make it. If you make $1,000, you'll spend it because you're thinking, 'I can make another thousand tomorrow.' Clothes. Partying.”

“I'd have five guys living with me,” Candy says, “and I wouldn't necessarily be sleeping with them, but I'd be home so I'd want them to be home, for company.”

“So she's getting six people's bills . . . ,” Bill says.

Now she gets three people's bills. She's restoring their credit, she says. And saving for the future? “Yes,” Candy says shortly.

Around 1 p.m. on a Friday, bowls are smoked. Candy, after much puttering, finally finds the earrings she took out of her nipples; she wants to stretch her earlobes with them. Then it's off to Newport Tattoo on the Balboa Peninsula. Next door to the tattoo parlor, people are hanging around outside a bar, smoking. A truck is parked out front; two boxers sit quietly inside, waiting for their master. After the piercer, a friend of theirs whom they haven't seen for a while, stretches Candy's ears and puts new balls on Bill's earrings, Bill hands him a $20. He always carries the money, although Candy is the one who makes it, and I think to myself that she's smart. She'll never let him feel like less of a man. He is lover, chauffeur and baby-sitter in one. She pays the bills and likes anal. In the year they've been together, they've spent three days apart: when Keith Richards, “who is a really big fan,” flew her to Vegas for a Stones video shoot. How often do Candy and Bill have sex? Every day. “I pout if I don't get it every day,” Bill says, laughing. “He wakes me up at 5:30 in the morning,” Candy grumbles good-naturedly. But she loves him, and aside from her job and those 742 men, she sleeps only with him.

At 4 p.m., Bill and Candy go to their friend Jimmy's house. He is adding flowers and vines to the “Porn Star” tattooed on her lower back. She winces the whole time. “This one fucking kills,” she says. She has a fairy on her neck and tattoos above both breasts. But the lower back hurts like hell. By about 7:30, Jimmy is done. From then on, Candy will greet everyone they see with, “My back hurts sooo bad!” She is excited about her tattoo, and they will spend 20 minutes at a time discussing it before a few moments of silence. Then they will discuss it some more.

[

We go over to Candy's friend Pilar's to pick up the pants she borrowed, and Candy insists that I sit in front. She swears she likes the back seat, and I don't know if she's just being polite to a guest or if she maybe likes the feeling that she's being chauffeured. Then it's back to the apartment again. Bill's little sister is there, hanging out with her best friend: Natalie.

While Candy gets ready to go out, we watch Greed. One team answers that “com” in “dot-com” stands for “communications.” No $100,000 for you! Bill talks about his tattoo some more and then recounts to Natalie and his sister tonight's Blind Date episode, which included a chick getting finger banged in a taxicab. We all discuss the merits of the show, which wanted to pay Candy $400 to appear. “Why would I want to do that?” she asks. “I'm married.”

Candy appears in the living room with two tops: one is a maroon push-up number, which she's currently modeling, and the other is a fuzzy, lime-green teeny tube top. “What do you think, babe?” she asks her husband. We all agree that the green will look marvelous in the black light at the Tap House. She puts it on, and I realize the maroon number wasn't pushing her up at all. Her breasts were doing that all by themselves.

The three of us head to the Tap House; we are on the list, thanks to Bill and Candy. Once inside, I spot Bear, a bouncer I know from Club 369, and am quickly passed six drink tickets. It's the most natural thing in the world to immediately hand the tickets to Bill to hold. I seem to be channeling Candy: the man should be in charge of the drinks.

Candy dances a bit but mostly stands next to her husband while he chats with their friends. When the rose girl appears, everyone pretends not to see her—it's the only way you can deal with a rose girl, really—except for Bill. He buys a pink rose for his sweetheart and a white one for me. They both really are very thoughtful. Outside, we see local promoter extraordinaire Altan. This is who Candy meant when she said she was engaged as a teen to a man she'd been with for five years. But he cheated on her, she said, so she started sleeping with all his friends. Then she got into the business. She really likes having sex with midgets. “I just think they're so cute,” she says.

After a while, I head home, two of Candy's films on the seat beside me. In one, Candy looks gorgeous, thick black-framed glasses giving her the librarian look. In the other, Trixxx—a pretty high-budget takeoff of Keanu Reeves' Matrix—she accommodates two giant, condomless cocks at once, one in her ass and the other in her pussy, which is shaved like a child's. One man chokes her until her face turns red. Although she has told me flatly that she doesn't come at work —only with her Bill—she groans as though she's being slaughtered, then gets on her knees and frenetically moves her mouth from one man to the other. She looks like a madwoman. When she spits out their come, her eyes rolling back in her head, it looks as though she's rabid. She is not worried about AIDS in the slightest, she says. Everyone gets tested once a month. I turn it off.

And what about Natalie? She's going to get a tattoo with her baby daughter's name. She has no plans for the future. Bill and Candy give her pocket money for cigarettes, though surprisingly neither of them smokes. Bill and Candy don't like her boyfriend. One morning, they tell me, she was throwing up because she'd gotten really drunk and didn't usually drink at all. On the phone, her boyfriend asked her if she was pregnant. “Maybe,” she answered, to which he responded, “I don't think we should see each other anymore.” And hung up. “He gets mad at her if she doesn't answer the phone fast enough,” Candy says disbelievingly—and before we had gone to the Tap House, he called. Natalie's first words to him were, “I was outside, smoking!” A look passed between Candy and Bill. “She didn't answer the phone fast enough,” Candy confirmed. In the same phone call, Natalie and her boyfriend argued about whether she could go see him or not. She tells us what transpired. “I told him, 'I even had an offer to baby-sit for 15 bucks and a ride out there. But I have to stay here.' And he's saying I'm not making him a priority!” Bill and Candy do not take the hint to give her the night off from dog-watching.

[

Bill thinks Natalie should get into the business. “She's a free-love girl. I'm going, 'Dude! If you're gonna do that, you might as well get paid for it!'” Candy says Natalie is going to go on the set with her next week. “She says she wants to get into movies,” Candy says noncommittally. Candy doesn't seem to be pushing her too hard, and I suspect that Natalie is just saying she wants to get into movies so Bill and Candy will be happy—like when she said, “Shit! We missed Pokmon today! And I even thought about it at 1:18. I looked at the clock, and thought, 'Oh, good! We still have 45 minutes!'” The whole thing sounds rehearsed, and I suspect she only likes Pokmon so she and Candy and Bill will have an additional bond. Natalie seems to have a major crush on the neighbor kid's friend, whom she breathlessly describes as “the really, really cute one.” He's okay-looking, but when I point that out, she immediately agrees with me. “He's got a bad attitude about women,” she says, changing from admirer to mild critic. “He lives in a rehab. He's almost 30, like, 27 or something!” Old.

Candy and Bill say everyone in porn—Candy excluded—has a story. Molested, abused, something. But Candy's parents were wonderful and very normal, they say. Should anyone be looking for a perfect porn queen, though, one with low enough self-esteem to think the alcoholic neighbor's friend is the epitome of manliness, Natalie would be the $64,000 answer.