Serena, Eros
The Next Installment is "NSFW" in the Ongoing Series of Short Stories on Mysterious, Powerful Women Who Disappeared
Editor’s Note: Just a fair warning that this next installment in Benjamin Kerstein’s extraordinary series of unforgettable women would warrant an R-rating in the film world. This is “Not Safe For Work” content here. It gets a bit raunchy and explicit at parts but not overly so and I felt the intelligent cultural themes and high-quality Kerstein prose more than justified it. We hope you enjoy this week’s story of another woman you won’t soon forget and be sure and check out the previous ones you may have missed: “Miranda, on a Night of Rain,” “Lavinia, Into Mexico,” “Sharon, in the Snow” - DMS
Today, pornography is spectacle. When Dana Metcalf, who became “Serena,” began her professional career, it was a smaller and less glamorous affair. The skin flicks of that era were not the soft-focused, gauze-lit, high-definition, surgically-enhanced, hairless things we know today. Their aesthetic was that of a ruined building or sun-blasted rock; the intercourse they depicted was ludicrous when it was not disgusting; and the performers were ugly when they were not downright repulsive. Porn was as beloved then as now, but it was not yet spectacle. It was Serena who made it so.
From the start, Dana’s beauty and charisma were never denied. It is what gave the Great Work “A Dream of Serena” and the Lost Work “The Loves of Cleopatra” the aura of the intangible. Serena embodied the tease of the ingenue, the unfathomable innocence of the nymphet, the cold and distant aura of the goddess. In another, more wholesome time, she would have been one of the young and hopeless who were scooped off the streets of Los Angeles; squired on a dozen casting couches; and then engraved, dyed, and sculpted into one of the great stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Serena was born too late for that, but she became the only movie star that the 1970s deserved. It was an age of grime and malfeasance, from the streets of Times Square to the White House itself. Not much was going well. People were unhappy and exhausted, and wondered if America was really worth the trouble. The republic was too much work. So, they felt bad. And they did what people do when they feel bad, which is to try to feel better. This meant that pleasure itself became a matter of survival. It was best to forget everything; and to enjoy oneself was to forget.
In such circumstances, it was impossible for pornography not to enter a golden age. It was the anesthetic suited to the disease. It was pleasure that induced nothing other than pleasure. In some ways, it demanded that one feel nothing. It simply was. And this was the state of man at that time in that America. The bad times simply were. There was nothing you could do about it, and why bother anyway? It was better to dissipate into the nipples and labia and testicles and buttocks and all the other constitutive elements of the body.
This was not a time for great men to rise, and none did. But there were a few women who managed to seize, if not greatness, at least celebrity. Because, like all decadent times, it was also a time of liberation. Women who in earlier ages would have been casualties of the way things were could, if they wished, make poetry of their lives. Dana Metcalf was one of them, and she did so by extraordinary means. She made a negative space for herself — just as her celebrated vagina was a negative space — so that even the millions who saw her exposed in full could never seize her in full. There are some who believe this was mere confluence. They say that the culture seized upon her almost at random and made her what it needed. I do not believe this to be the case. It was entirely willful, a conscious choice. I believe Dana knew that her decisive absence would make her a legend. She was not a stupid woman, and women who must or choose to trade on the desires of men learn very quickly how to derange those desires. They understand us as we do not understand ourselves. When such women transgress, the transgression is always calculated for maximum effect. And what greater transgression could there be, in an age of spectacle, than to disappear? It was a sin more severe than any of Dana’s carnal malfeasances. She said the ultimate no to the world: she would not allow herself to be seen. This, and this alone, is why those who love the spectacle of sin have dedicated themselves to her forever.
Dana Metcalf worked in a profession in which true identity is concealed, so her history is difficult to trace. It seems that she was originally from the Midwest. She was in New York City by late-1969 or early- 1970, likely as the cliched “country girl with big dreams” who makes her way to the big city to escape boredom. Police records show that she was arrested three times for solicitation in Times Square, but unlike many who fall into “the life,” chose not to return to the street after the third arrest — the first of the many wise choices that set her apart from her contemporaries. While she left the life, she did not fully leave the industry. She became the employee of a peep show parlor on 42nd Street, where she gave customers brief views of her vulva and made enough money at it to sustain herself.
It was around this time that she began to refer to herself as “Serena Devlin,” from which she would later drop the family name. This was the name under which she appeared in her first “loops” — the brief 8mm pornographic film strips popular in the pre-videotape era. Three of Dana’s loops survive, and they are relatively tame affairs. One involves a young couple who enjoy themselves in a woodland setting; in another they cavort on a hotel bed; and in the final loop they disport themselves on a living room sofa. The perversity advances no further than the rear entry position. The loops are, of course, aesthetically disastrous, and Dana seems bored throughout the proceedings, though on the living room couch she does for a moment flash the “upturned stare” for which she would later become famous.
The loops may be fondly remembered by some elderly onanists, but little more than that. Perhaps out of disappointment, Dana changed her profession again. By early 1972, she had taken on a more active and lucrative version of the peep shows, and worked as a stripper at several Times Square establishments, where she was successful enough to catch the eye of an important man. Danino Gianini was a Bonano family underboss with a stake in the nascent porn industry. He appears to have become infatuated with Dana at first sight, and was soon a regular customer at Red Rose, where she danced every Thursday and Saturday. Perhaps he suffered from the not-uncommon delusion of middle-aged men that strippers enjoy their company for more than money. The infatuation proved fortuitous for Dana, and it was through Gianini that she came to appear in her first “real” movie: a 70-minute feature entitled “The Girls of Greenwich Village.”
The picture suffers from the usual vices of the genre, such as terrible lighting and even more terrible acting, but it nonetheless has its virtues. At times, it is an almost witty satire of the decadent hipsters of Greenwich Village. Dana plays Melanie Roth, a beret-wearing, chain-smoking, black-clad, bisexual poet who coughs out absurd verses in between bouts of nymphomania. While it is easy enough to dismiss her awkward and halting performance, it nonetheless represents the first step in Dana’s evolution as an artist. Though unskilled, pornographic performers can be artists of a kind if they bring a certain intelligence and intensity to bear on the task at hand. If they can perform in such a manner as to excite the viewer on a level beyond the simple equation of arousal, orgasm, refractory period. If they can foster a certain fascination in those who witness their acrobatics. This is not an easy task, and may be a matter of inborn genius, but if such genius exists, then Dana possessed it.
It is not inaccurate to say that Dana stalks through the picture with a certain feral charisma. She snarls out the woeful dialogue with a bare-knuckled sense of unrelenting irony, as if daring her co-stars to challenge her. She is, throughout, in control; giving nothing and demanding everything. And even at this early stage, Dana had perfected what would become her signature: the “upturned stare.” In a sense, the upturned stare was a natural gift, in that Dana had been blessed from birth with large jet-black eyes that even in non-sexual scenes appeared to bore into her co-stars and thus the viewer. But it was she alone who discovered how to deploy this gift to maximum effect. When Dana would engage in the fellatio that starts off almost every sex scene in the history of porn, she would take the penis in her mouth, close her hand around it, look up at the object of her affection, and affix her blazing pupils on him and the camera. No one who saw this stare, male or female, ever forgot it. It is, for many, the one thing about her and her films that they can never forget; and it is present here, at the very beginning. When one watches Dana’s first scene in “The Girls of Greenwich Village,” and her eyes begin to upturn, one senses that this is the only girl who could have become Serena.
“The Girls of Greenwich Village” has come to be seen as a classic only in retrospect. At the time, it went unnoticed, and Dana along with it. Her next film, “Angels of Broadway,” was something of a step down. Its story of a group of hopeful and horny young actresses who sleep their way into lead parts in a hit Broadway show is generic at best; though to her credit, Dana makes no effort to elevate the proceedings. As Tina, the bubbly ingenue determined to land a role in a revival of “Peter Pan” by fucking the director, his wife, and their girlfriend in one fell swoop, she is less enthusiastic than on her previous outing.
Perhaps her character was further from her real self than the corrosive Melanie Roth. What her performance does show, however, is Dana’s versatility. The scruffy beat poet is gone, replaced by Tina’s classic “bombshell” looks and red-lipped glamour. For the first time, moreover, the filmmakers seem to have grasped the potential of those extraordinary eyes. Melanie squinted through a cloud of cigarette smoke, but Tina’s orbs dominate every scene in which she appears; and for the first time, the camera lingers on the upturned stare, allowing the audience to sink into its obsidian depths.
“Angels of Broadway” was not a success, which is no surprise, given its poor quality. Nonetheless, the wheels of history had turned in Dana’s favor. By 1974, “Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door” had overcome the stigma on pornographic materials, and “The Devil in Miss Jones” had gotten a few good notices from otherwise puritanical critics. Several prominent obscenity cases had been resolved at a national level, and fucking had now come under the protection of the First Amendment. The industry was still largely underground, and more often than not funded by the mafia — Gianini was now a millionaire many times over — but America’s rampaging id had decided that pornography was what it wanted, and in a capitalist society, great energies are expended on giving people what they want. America had set the stage, and it was now a matter of time before Dana would find herself in the spotlight again.
It was with her next film that Dana became Serena once and for all. “A Dream of Serena” is now considered her masterpiece — though further discoveries may change this consensus — and a genuine classic of the art form. This is all the more impressive when one considers that it was Serena’s first starring role and, in many ways, her first “real” movie. Shot over four weeks rather than the two- or three-day schedule normal for pornographic films, it was lit and acted with some degree of competence, and its script was not completely ludicrous. It had what could be called a plot, and at least some plausible motivations for the fucking it depicted.
“A Dream of Serena” was, as the title implies, about dreams. It told the tale of a successful middle-aged divorce lawyer who becomes obsessed with the image of a woman he glimpses in a magazine. Night after night, this blonde goddess — played by Serena — haunts his dreams, in which the two of them couple in various athletic and acrobatic positions. Cursory subplots involve the lawyers’ wife and secretary, who enjoy the lawyer’s favors both together and separately. The greatness of the film, however, is not apparent until the final scene. Told that a woman wishes to meet with him to discuss a divorce, the lawyer is stunned to find himself face to face with the object of his desires. But no anatomical activity takes place. She tells him of her miserable life as a struggling model married to a man she does not love. One wonders for a moment if the lawyer will attempt to offer her certain consolations, but in a bout of conscience, he tells her that, in his opinion, it is best to go back and try to make it work. She leaves, and the lawyer returns to his wife. That night, he dreams of nothing at all.
To end a skin flick on such a note of tragedy and pathos was a bold move, and while many viewers were no doubt preoccupied with other aspects of the film, the critics took notice of it. One compared it to Max Ophuls’ classic “La Ronde,” while another averred that, as an erotic drama, it was superior to “Last Tango in Paris” as both eroticism and drama. Other critics did not go quite so far, but all of them pointed to Serena as the decisive factor in its success. Film Comment obliquely compared her to Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly. Sight and Sound took notice from across the pond, and noted Serena’s skill in a dual role: first, she was tasked with the burden of being the personification of every man’s unknowable desire. She had to maintain her invulnerable distance even as every nook and cranny of her body was exposed to the camera’s merciless gaze. But then, in the film’s final scene, she had to retain some of that quality, but also appear banal, downtrodden, and sad. It was, Sight and Sound proclaimed, a tour de force performance, the best of its kind since Monroe in “The Misfits.”
The notices in the adult press were less highbrow, but just as rapturous. Screw magazine called Serena “the year’s top ball-drainer,” Playboy ruled her performance “top-class sexy,” and Penthouse decreed that she possessed “the most glamorous pussy in the world.” All, of them, however, were free to note the one thing the mainstream critics either could not perceive or could not write about: the key to Serena’s triumph, they said, was that her performance was a masterpiece of the upturned stare. Beneath her platinum blonde locks and above her crimson bee-stung lips locked around her co-star’s cock, those eyes stared up — relentless, indifferent, and intoxicating — out of the depths of our conscienceless desires. Whatever the audience wanted was to be found there in Serena’s eyes. It was a feat even the great goddesses of Hollywood had rarely accomplished.
It is fair to say that, in porn terms, “A Dream of Serena” was a smash. In one adult theater in Times Square, it played for two years to capacity houses. No one knows how much money it made, as men like Mr. Gianini do not open their books except under extreme duress, but estimates run as high as $50 million. This would have made it a major hit even by mainstream Hollywood standards, and there are credible reports that it made a great deal more. It was banned in the usual locales, of course, and three exhibitors were arrested on obscenity charges in various southern and midwestern cities, though all charges were dismissed. By and large, the film was left alone to become a pop culture phenomenon, the most successful pornographic film since “Deep Throat.”
Americans adore success, and anything that makes enough money is always believed to have at least something virtuous about it, so America’s great demos embraced the picture. Articles about it appeared in most major publications and broadcast media outlets, all of them careful to concentrate on its financial success rather than its content. Even the occasional late-night comedian cracked a joke or two about it. It became a thing that everyone knew about and talked about, and the main thing they wanted to know and talk about was Serena. But Serena refused to talk to them. She proved to be, and came to be called, “the Garbo of porn.” She gave no interviews, made no personal appearances, sat for no photos — did nothing at all. Linda Lovelace had produced two bestselling books in two years, but Serena, Lovelace’s only serious competitor, was silent. In the face of this, the press had to report something, so the silence itself became the story. The media — high, low, and pornographic — began to ponder the mystery of the Garbo of porn. Rather than tell the people what they wanted to know, the press was forced to detail the extent of our ignorance. “The mysterious bombshell of smut” one publication called her. “A sweaty enigma,” said another. “The brightest and least knowable star to rise on the blue movie firmament,” wrote a highbrow magazine.
In search of information, the press turned to those around Serena. Hawks McGee, who had been the recipient of Serena’s upturned stare several times onscreen, called her “a great gal,” but “very private,” and extolled her “open-mindedness” and “uninhibited” approach to both life and sex. Chastity Brooks, who had enjoyed a sapphic embrace with Serena in “Angels of Broadway,” told the New York Daily News that Serena was “omnisexual,” Screw magazine that “she eats great pussy,” and Time magazine that “she has an indefinable quality in person as well as onscreen.” George Doumanian, the director of “A Dream of Serena,” called her “a consummate professional” and “a real trooper” who “deserves all the acclaim she’s getting.” He noted further that he had evaluated Serena’s skills before casting her and “she’s every bit as good in real life.”
All of this may or may not have been edifying, depending on the reader, but none of it sated the appetite of a public that not only felt it had a right to know, but was determined to know. Desperate to give them something, the media decided to set off a frenzy. It seized on rumors in the pornographic press that Serena had embarked on a torrid affair with Jim Hilyard, lead singer of Pastel, a quasi-hard rock band whose latest album was holding its own against disco at the top of the charts. The rumor appears to have begun amongst the staff of the popular New York City nightclub Hype, who claimed to have witnessed Hilyard and Serena engaged in various activities in the women’s bathroom that, they said, involved the heavy use of the upturned stare. This, of course, could well be true. It was still the 1970s, AIDS was an unknown, and everybody was fucking everybody everywhere. There was no reason to see the incident as anything more than that, but it would have been impossible for the press to refrain from doing so. Pastel’s number two hit “Come Get It Girl” was on constant rotation on FM radio, and tales of theband’s debauchery gave Led Zeppelin a run for their money. While lead guitarist Harry Machin had a mystique of his own, Hilyard was the lead singer, and thus an erotic icon almost as potent as Serena. The media’s reaction to a sexual collision between Serena and Hilyard — two objects of obscure desire — could not be anything other than frenzied.
Serena was still elusive in public, but Hilyard was everywhere, so the press descended on him. Whenever he could be cornered, almost every question was about Serena. He refused to make any comment whatsoever, and the two were never seen in public again. Nonetheless, the hysteria began to spread to the general public, to the point that bare-breasted young women at Pastel concerts began to wave signs that said, “Jim, I suck better than Serena.” It was clear that, unless he wanted to join Serena as a de facto recluse, Hilyard would have to say something. He or his public relations advisors decided that the issue would be addressed in a scheduled Rolling Stone cover story on Pastel. Rolling Stone’s unabashed idolatry of anyone who managed to crack the Top Ten made it attractive to a rock star desperate for a sympathetic, if not sycophantic, hearing; and a sympathetic hearing was what Hilyard received. The leather-jacketed journalist Stieg Morrison — whose real last name was not Morrison, nor his first name Stieg — began his interrogation with an apology — “I have to ask this...” — and then put his queries in the softest terms possible. “We all know what the celebrity press is like,” he said, “but is there any truth in all of this?” Hilyard said, “Serena and I have been very close at certain points.” Morrison was unable to resist a follow-up: “Is she as good as she looks?” Hilyard replied, “Let’s just say she’s a very talented young woman.”
Hilyard no doubt regretted this statement, given the explosion that followed. The pornographic press was unabashed. Penthouse, for example, proffered the headline: “Jim: She’s the Best Fuck I Ever Had!” The tabloid press was led by the New York Post, whose headline “A Very Talented Young Woman!” made the implication obvious, but nonetheless observed a certain decorum. Even the British tabloids got into the act, perhaps because of Pastel’s imminent tour of England. The Daily Mail devoted a full page to a careful anatomy of the alleged affair, such as it was, with implications of orgies, drug use, and rampages through the tight-knit circle of porn actors and actresses that would have tested the imagination of the Marquis de Sade — though it was all carefully phrased to avoid libel suits. The frenzy reached its peak three weeks later, when word got out that the alleged couple was once again at Hype, which they were not. A horde of paparazzi and obsessed fans stormed the club’s well-guarded entrance, sent customers and employees flying, and had to be ejected by a dozen bouncers.
Given the media circus, everyone expected that Serena would soon break her silence. Jim Hilyard may have been adored and desired, but Serena was, everyone agreed, the star of the show. She was the one who had spread her legs and sucked the cock. How could she be silent now, when it was clear that the entire world wanted her? But once again, she disappointed them. There was no statement, no appearance, and no answer. So, the inevitable happened: they began to turn against her. The malicious gossip was standard fare: Serena was a secret cocaine addict, a secret heroin addict, a secret member of a satanic cult. She had chosen lesbianism and sworn off men forever. She had contracted one of the social diseases that come with life in the pornographic arts — syphilis, gonorrhea, the clap, the possibilities were endless. She was plying her trade as an elite $10,000-a-night escort. She had run off with a man or a woman, or two men, or two women, or two men and a woman, or two women and a man. Then the rumors became borderline deranged, such as the urban legend that Serena had taken on the entire starting lineup of the Green Bay Packers and so destroyed her orifices that she could no longer continue in her chosen profession. Or that she hosted drug-fueled orgies at the house of an unnamed millionaire, attended by members of the global plutocracy who were members of an occult cabal that sought to impregnate the great Whore of Babylon with the seed of the Anti-Christ. But perhaps the most radical of all was the claim that she had gotten pregnant, married an amiable fellow, and now lived a quiet middle-class life in a Midwestern suburb.
In the end, Serena did not break her silence; the silence was broken for her. In early 1977, the adult and then the mainstream press began to report that the legendary adult film producer Arturo Bergsdorf would produce a multi-million-dollar pornographic epic on the life of Cleopatra, with Serena in the title role. The reaction was one of dumbfounded astonishment. Pornography’s most elusive woman would play one of the most elusive women in history. A woman so inscrutable she had been sought after by Shakespeare himself. A woman who had been personified by such equally inscrutable women as Theda Bara and Elizabeth Taylor. Moreover, Bergsdorf’s professed ambition was immense. He proclaimed that his intention was to create not only a pornographic film, but also a work of art; an epic that would, at long last, legitimize the genre in the eyes of the world. The film, he said, which was to be entitled “The Loves of Cleopatra,” would have the biggest budget, the finest costumes, the lushest scenery, the largest sets, the lushest cinematography, and the most beautiful women of any adult film ever made. Bergsdorf knew, no doubt, that no one but Serena could have played the lead role in an endeavor of such hubris.
Bergsdorf hired avant-garde filmmaker Joe Childmark as director, Playboy’s top photographer Meghan Thomas as cinematographer, the “bad boy” of the Milan fashion world Rodrigo Tannino as costume designer, and made several attempts to hire a-list actors to play supporting roles. The only one who showed any interest, it was said, was Warren Beatty, who quickly changed his mind. Hollywood legend has it that the star’s true intention was to somehow meet and bed Serena. He demanded a lunch with her as a condition of his participation, but when she rejected his advances, Beatty turned the film down. Whether true or not, the story is at least credible, as Beatty would no doubt have been shocked to discover that there are whores who cannot be bought. The blow to his ego at being rejected by a woman who had made a profession out of not rejecting anyone must have been considerable. It was later rumored that the part on offer was that of Julius Caesar, which, if true, would have given Beatty a sex scene with Serena. But perhaps he did not want to take for money what she would not give him for free. In any event, the supporting parts were filled with lesser luminaries, and the principals drawn from the adult industry.
In late 1977, production began on the island of Malta, which had been chosen as a reasonable facsimile of ancient Alexandria, with the pyramids to be added later via special effects — no one, it seems, was aware that the pyramids are not visible from Alexandria. The set was closed, which proved a miscalculation, as a ravenous press began to resort to any and all means available to fill the information vacuum, which included outright lies. Banner headlines were manufactured out of whispered asides from sources that were less than credible, and before Bergsdorf could deny them, traveled around the world as fast as print, radio, or television could carry them. Paparazzi sought to infiltrate the set by means fair and foul, but were able to snap only a few blurry photographs.
The pornographic press fared slightly better, as Bergsdorf, with his usual flair for publicity, began to leak production stills to them. Perhaps to his surprise, they became an indelible part of Serena’s legend. The first featured Serena, now a brunette, in a classic pharaonic pose wearing nothing but an Egyptian royal headdress. The image gained considerable attention, in part because it showed that Serena had followed Linda Lovelace as one of the first adult actresses to completely shave her pubic hair. But this was mere gimmickry. There was a second, more ephemeral factor, which was the regal quality Serena projected. No one, the porn world least of all, expected her to display such natural and inherent dignity. As soon as one’s gaze moved on from her bare pubis and erect nipples, one was struck by her jutted chin, stern and solemn countenance, arms that hung firm and straight at her sides, and a sense throughout of defiant and fearless pride, a coiled strength that no one had imagined she possessed. In that single image, people felt, Serena had captured the essence of the ancient queen, and the pornographic elements — her exposed breasts and labial slit — only enhanced the effect.
The second image came a month later. It was less provocative and more perverse than its predecessor, and became, in the minds of many, the image of Serena. It was a depiction of Cleopatra’s famous death scene. Serena was bare-breasted, though a raised arm covered her right nipple. Her head was bowed to the left side, and in her arms, she cradled a snake, whose jaws were firmly attached to her left nipple. But she did not so much hold the snake as cradle it, as if it were her suckling infant and not the venomous instrument of her death. The look on her face was serene and beatific — the face of a woman dying of motherhood without terror or regret.
The choice to disseminate this image is inexplicable, but it was an inadvertent stroke of genius. With its plethora of psychological implications, its overall effect was one of profound disturbance. It touched on the Oedipal fantasies and nightmares shared by almost every man in the world, and yet was, on some level, sexy. “The Snake-Woman Photo” became shorthand to Serena enthusiasts, connoisseurs of pornography, and students of 1970s culture in general. It burrowed itself deep into the masculine psyche, with its combination of the maternal, the morbid, and the pornographic. Something in the American male wanted this. They wanted to possess, murder, and be nourished by Serena all at the same time. This inscrutable and uncanny effect did not pass without comment. The feminist Germaine Greer proclaimed that it heralded a new genre she called “death pornography.” Porn, she said, had pushed the envelope of eroticism as far as it could go. The only novelty left was death, and thus violence and murder would now be as common a subject for prurient interest as conjoining organs. Social critic Susan Sontag went a step further, and called the image “a great work of art, encapsulating in simultaneous montage the tripartite anxieties of the masculine gaze.” As if on cue, Andy Warhol silk-screened the image, and prints commanded high prices at rarified New York galleries.
Bergsdorf appears to have been as mystified as anyone else by the success of the Snake-Woman Photo. He was smart enough to know that he had to exploit the opportunity it presented, but his follow-up was less than impressive. He seems to have thought that if less had proved to be more, than more would also prove to be more. The photo Bergsdorf rushed out to various adult publications showed a nude Serena, again in her royal headdress, lying face-down on an elaborate bedspread in a room whose walls were covered with hieroglyphs. Her face was heavily made up to resemble depictions of queens on Egyptian monuments. She gazed backward over her shoulder at the camera, and her thighs and buttocks gleamed with oil. One leg was drawn up, exposing her pink labia and prominent clitoris. After the deep iconography of the Snake-Woman Photo, the overall impression was one of banality. It could have been any photo of any pinup girl anywhere in the world.
There are possible explanations for Bergsdorf’s miscalculation. For example, due to whatever paranoias he had developed over years in a paranoid industry, he may have wanted to reassure the public that, yes, this was a skin flick, and snake or not, we were going to see as much of Serena as we had before. If so, then as is often the case with successful men, Bergsdorf had learned nothing from his success. He failed to comprehend the depths he had plumbed with the Snake-Woman Photo. It required a depth psychology that, as a man of money, was beyond his capabilities. A veteran of an exploitative industry in which the camera reduces its subjects down to their most basic biological attributes, Bergsdorf could not understand that the Snake-Woman Photo had, by contrast, made Serena into something more. The people no longer loved her just for her anatomy. They loved her now because she had become a fetish in the literal sense of the word, an object that reached into the chthonic recesses of the psyche. Bergsdorf did not know it, but he had created a kind of monster. Serena belonged to the world now, and not to him.
Bergsdorf’s unintentional rebuke of the public may have contributed to the media’s slow turn against “The Loves of Cleopatra.” As the shooting dragged on past its 70-day production schedule with no end in sight, both the adult and mainstream press began to publish stories about general mayhem on the Malta set. Considerable attention was focused on Childmark, who was already notorious for his eccentricities, which included a pet leopard and a tendency to wear black fur coats in unsuitable weather. The director, it was said, had gone half mad with the money and manpower at his disposal, which far outstripped those of his previous low-budget productions: He ordered the massive set of Cleopatra’s throne room torn down and rebuilt three times; kept 1,000 extras in full Roman battle armor in the blazing sun for hours, until three of them collapsed of heat stroke; spent $5,000 per week on champagne; demanded in excess of 30 takes for every shot; and had abused his assistants so badly that they resigned en masse and had to be replaced at considerable expense.
Other aspects of the production were not exempt. Public anger was aroused by the story that seven camels imported from Cairo had been so neglected and abused that six of them died. The crew was paid sporadically or not at all, as Bergsdorf jetted around the world seeking to raise more funds to cover the bloated budget. There had been at least two walkouts as a result, and probably more. One disgruntled crew member out for revenge spiked Childmark’s champagne with LSD. In the adult press, the tales were considerably more lurid, and concentrated on the physical excesses required by an “epic” porn production. In one scene, an actress’ anus was torn so badly that she had to be hospitalized and shooting halted for a week. The male actors, required to perform in take after multiple take, found erections increasingly difficult to maintain, which caused Childmark no end of frustration, especially when they blamed the problem on the time he took to adjust the lighting. And, it was said, Serena herself was becoming that terrible thing known as difficult. She refused to perform certain acts, demanded the right to approve her sex partners, undermined any actress who threatened to steal the show, and refused to come out of her trailer for days when anything displeased her.
It was the highbrow press, however, that did what the porno mags and tabloids could not, which was to destroy the film. In late 1977, the New York Times published the results of an investigation into Bergsdorf’s finances. The bulk of the film’s budget, the Times reported, came via a holding company based in the Cayman Islands that was managed by a Marseilles shipping concern. That concern was one of the innumerable shell companies operated by the Corsican mafia to launder the proceeds of the heroin trade. The report was denied by all involved, especially Bergsdorf, who called it a conspiracy by reactionary forces in the United States to destroy the porn industry and with it freedom of speech. The Marseilles shipping concern and its holding company closed up shop overnight, with all assets liquidated and dispatched to unknown locations. When investigators prompted by the Times story launched their inquiry, they found nothing whatsoever. The money men had disappeared without a trace. This left the investigators with only one viable target in what the media was now calling “The Cleopatra Affair” — Bergsdorf himself. The IRS, the SEC, and the FBI all descended on the hapless producer and began combing through every aspect of his business affairs. Since everyone in the film industry, adult or otherwise, has done something underhanded at some point, there was little doubt that they would find a prosecutable offense.
In the midst of this sudden chaos, the shooting of “The Loves of Cleopatra” wrapped, and Bergsdorf and Childmark repaired to Los Angeles with hundreds of hours of footage. Despite the Cleopatra Affair, many in Hollywood believed that Bergsdorf had once again “pulled it off.” It was quite possible, they believed, that the greatest adult film ever made might emerge out of the wreckage. At the very least, based on the images already issued, Serena would be something like a revelation. Those few who saw — or claimed to have seen — some of the footage said that it was indeed extraordinary. In particular, they whispered of a climactic orgy scene in which, just before she takes the asp to her bare breast, Cleopatra makes one final defiant gesture to the gods. Surrounded by her male servants and courtiers, she takes them all on one by one in every orifice, often simultaneously, and ends so drenched in semen that her entire body glistens in the gossamer lighting. She then submits to death and fate. The sequence had been shot from every conceivable angle, with a multitude of different lenses and frame speeds, and if properly edited together, could stand as not only the greatest sex scene ever filmed, but one of the greatest scenes of any kind in cinema history.
This triumph appeared to be within Bergsdorf’s grasp until September 1978. On a Monday, he missed two appointments with what remained of his financiers. That night, he did not return home. On Tuesday, he failed to appear at his offices. By Wednesday, his loyal secretary was worried. By Thursday she was frantic. A missing persons report was filed on Friday. Early the following Monday, the FBI raided Bergsdorf’s offices. A day after that, the Bureau announced that an arrest warrant had been issued for Bergsdorf on multiple charges of financial malfeasance, including fraud, embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, and violations of the RICO statute. At the end of the week, with Bergsdorf still nowhere to be found, Interpol was contacted and an international warrant issued. Two days later, a court order seized all of Bergsdorf’s assets, which included the footage shot for “The Loves of Cleopatra.”
The entertainment world was astounded, and soon divided into two camps. One was convinced that Bergsdorf’s legendary talent for maneuvering on the edge of legality had at last caught up with him, and his arrest, conviction, and incarceration were now imminent. The other camp held true to its faith in the producer. They believed that Bergsdorf was smarter than any of the authorities on his trail, and would have planned his escape years in advance. He was long gone, they said, never to be seen again.
Both sides turned out to be wrong. On October 5, 1978, Arturo Bergsdorf was found at the bottom of a shallow ravine a mile outside Beverly Hills. He had been shot five times in the back of the head with a large-caliber weapon, which forced investigators to rely on dental records for identification. Ligature marks on the arms and legs showed he had been held prisoner for at least a day before his death, and evidence at the scene led the authorities to conclude that he had been killed elsewhere, driven to the site, and thrown into the gully. A massive local, state, and federal investigation ensued, every detail of which was devoured by a ravenous media. But with all the various agencies working against each other and a paucity of physical evidence to work with, little progress was made. Soon enough, stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis gripped the nation’s attention, and the case fell out of the headlines. It was closed in late 1981. Internal FBI memos indicate that the Bureau had concluded the guilty parties were Corsican gangsters Michel Cardonne and Patrice Laval, both high-ranking members of the Unione Corse. But both men were safely on French territory, and France is well-known for its reluctance to extradite its citizens. Nothing, the Bureau decided, could be done.
“The Loves of Cleopatra” fared no better. A new and more conservative era had dawned, transgression no longer possessed the frisson of rebellion, and porn was once again reviled. The press wasted little ink on the possible whereabouts of the seized footage; and with Bergsdorf gone, there was no one to seek after it. The deceased producer had angry creditors aplenty, but most assumed that the film was a forfeited asset and wrote off their investment against tax. They no longer wished to be associated with pornography in any case. Many believed that the film was in possession of the highest bidder, but the footage was never publicly auctioned, and there are no records of its sale. It is possible that the footage is stored in a vault owned by an unknown billionaire, but if so, there is no evidence of it.
The principles did not relish speaking about the film to the press. Childmark, for example, would refer to it as “lost,” deny all knowledge of its whereabouts, and call it “the greatest failure of my career, the one thing I’m not proud of.” He never worked on such an epic scale again. In its own modest way, however, the underground was at work, and it came to believe that Childmark had not told the entire truth. As early as 1981, rumors were rife in Hollywood that the director had, in fact, made away with a completed workprint of his director’s cut before federal agents arrived to seize the footage. By 1982-83, more and more people claimed, if not to have seen the workprint, at least to have seen parts of it. In particular, quite a few said they had been shown a 45-minute rough cut of the final orgy scene. Recollections varied, but they all testified to its opulence and the athleticism of Serena’s performance. Never, the cruder among them said, had they seen so many dicks in so few holes.
In a Rolling Stone feature story by the indefatigable Stieg Morrison, an unnamed source described as a “major Hollywood player” claimed to possess a Betamax copy of the workprint. Morrison was careful to note that the source had not shown him the video itself, but the source’s descriptions were detailed and graphic. Despite the poor quality of the image, the source said, the aesthetic quality of the production was obvious — the pinnacle of Childmark’s career. It was, without doubt, a genuine epic, made with care and skill. But the standout, he said, was Serena. Resplendent as the ancient queen, her understated performance was not just sexy, it was beautiful. He cited an oral sex scene between Cleopatra and a well-endowed Julius Caesar in which the upturned stare was used to great effect, and an initial encounter between the queen and Marc Antony that succeeded in making even the missionary position appear forbidden and daring. Of the final orgy scene, he was unequivocal: it did for sex what the final scene of “Bonnie and Clyde” did for violence. Had the film been completed and released, cinema would never have been the same.
But the source also cited several non-erotic scenes of particular quality. There were moments between Cleopatra and Caesarion, her son by Caesar, which were profoundly affecting in their depiction of chaste maternal love, something alien to previous pornographic films. And the spectacular orgy was followed up by Cleopatra’s death scene, in which she weeps silent tears over the death of Antony as the asp clasps itself to her breast. One left the film as moved by the tragedy of the ancient queen as sexually aroused by her beauty. In short, the source said, “The Loves of Cleopatra” was — or could have been — something like a masterpiece, a milestone in American cinema, if it could only be seen. When Morrison remarked that this was a tragedy, the producer agreed, but added that there was a silver lining: the bootleg video had been circulating in Hollywood for long enough that thievery and imitation were inevitable. Through this shadow influence, cinema would eventually catch up to “The Loves of Cleopatra.”
Published under the title “Porn’s Unknown Masterpiece?” the article caused a small sensation in entertainment circles and Serena’s burgeoning fan base. As a result, a movement began that lobbied for the film’s completion and release. Childmark dismissed the idea. He did not know where the film was located and denied that the workprint existed. The tales of “The Loves of Cleopatra,” he said, were urban legends at best and outright lies at worst. Morrison had been had. After all, Childmark noted, the journalist had never been shown the supposed video. Everything was hearsay and secondhand; nothing had been verified. The film, Childmark asserted, was gone. Perhaps, in the end, he preferred it that way.
The fans were not deterred. One by one they sought out the principals and demanded answers when there were none to give. Crew and cast alike denied all knowledge of the workprint’s existence, or even where the film itself might be found. And Serena, once again, chose to maintain her silence, which was a source of endless frustration. The fans assumed that she and she alone could divulge the secrets of the film and its ultimate fate. She was, after all, the one who actually performed the film’s most notorious scene. She had been there from the beginning and stayed after the end. If anyone knew, it was she. And people once again demanded information. They wanted the details, gory or otherwise, and were determined to get them. Fans scoured the adult industry; interviewed friends, producers, directors, co-stars, and agents; searched through address and phone books; even ferreted out a man believed to be Serena’s dentist; but they found nothing. Where Serena had been, there was now a yawning, inexplicable void. No one seemed to know where she was or what she had been doing since the demise of “The Loves of Cleopatra.”
At first, this was not considered an ominous development. The porn industry had always been shadowy, with its endless list of assumed names, anonymous financing, and suspected — and more than suspected — mob connections. It was not unusual for a porn star to go off the grid, and most assumed Serena would be back once she missed the attention or ran out of money. And after all, Serena had just been through a strenuous ordeal. She had created what was believed to be her masterpiece only to see it torn away at the last moment and its producer murdered. Perhaps she just wanted a brief escape, to “get away for a while.” As time went on, however, and 1984 crept in, and then 1985 and 1986, people began to suspect that something else might have happened. Perhaps something very sinister indeed.
Once again, it was Stieg Morrison and Rolling Stone that seized on the story, as they continued their long love affair with Serena. “The Disappearing Porn Star?” published in late 1986, caused an immediate sensation in fan circles. Based on dozens of interviews, most of them with anonymous sources, the article concluded that not only had Serena not been seen in public since mid-1982, but had not been seen at all since early November of that same year — not long after Bergsdorf’s body was found. The last confirmed sighting was at the home of fellow pornographic actress Gina Meadows, with whom Serena had shared several lesbian scenes. Serena visited sometime in the early evening. Serena, said Meadows, seemed in good spirits, though she was saddened by Bergsdorf’s murder. The two women drank half a bottle a wine and snorted cocaine. Around 11:30 pm, they had sex, after which Serena showered and left around 1 am. At the door, said Meadows, Serena hugged her for what seemed an unusually long time and then said, “You know, you were always the one I loved.” Meadows was unsure how to respond, and before she could, Serena had disappeared into the night. Asked what she thought it all meant, Meadows replied,“Maybe she just wanted me to know, in case she wouldn’t have another chance to tell me.” Based on this and other evidence, the article concluded that Serena’s absence from the public eye was definitely not coincidental. She had decided to disappear or been made to disappear. The article outlined several possible scenarios; the most sensational of which, of course, was that Serena had been murdered by Cardonne and Laval. The article admitted that there was no evidence of this — in particular, no body — but it was a plausible scenario, perhaps the most plausible under the circumstances. Whether voluntary or not, the article concluded, Serena’s disappearance demanded official investigation.
Bowing to public pressure, the LAPD launched a two-month inquiry. Police interviewed many of the article’s sources and conducted several searches, which included the area where Bergsdorf’s body was found. In early 1987, however, the investigation was closed. There was no evidence of foul play, the police said, that a crime had been committed. If Serena had disappeared, she had chosen to disappear, which was her right. No further inquiries would be made. This should have settled the issue, but it did not. As the years passed and Serena’s absence loomed ever larger in the minds of her fans, a genuine subculture began to take shape: they were stalkers after a shadow, for whom the Snake Woman Photo was not only the perfect image of Serena, but the confluence of all their desires. To them, the ephemeral, never-completed “Loves of Cleopatra” was a holy grail. Vaults and archives were searched, Freedom of Information Act requests filed, thousands of pages of documents read, hundreds of photographs blown up and examined. The fans hoped to find either the film or Serena herself, but the search became more and more Quixotic as time went on. For all their efforts, there was no sign of Serena or a single frame of her lost masterpiece. Into this vacuum rushed almost everything: vast fantasies of the regal, the debased, and the erotic — mother, whore, queen, priestess. The infinite possibilities have now captured three generations, and a fourth has shown symptoms of the disease. To them, sex itself has become Serena.
This unquiet emptiness continued undisturbed until 2002, when webmaster Howard Beaumont of snakewoman.tv announced that he had found her. That October, he posted the transcript of a two-part interview with an anonymous woman who claimed to be Serena. Beaumont admitted that he could not confirm her story, but in his opinion, no one except Serena could have known so much about Serena. The woman detailed her early life as a teenage runaway from Ohio; her time on the New York streets when she worked as a prostitute to survive; her graduation to the peep shows and strip clubs; her cinematic debut as the bisexual beatnik in “The Girls of Greenwich Village,” which she called her favorite role; her brief reign as a blonde bombshell, inspired, she said, by Jayne Mansfield, and not Marilyn Monroe; and finally, the long and bloody saga of “The Loves of Cleopatra.”
During shooting, she said, “The Loves of Cleopatra” had indeed felt like a masterpiece, though the work itself was relentless. She declined to discuss the final orgy scene, saying only, “It was very intense for me.” The film’s demise had soured her on the industry for good, she explained, and she decided to return to the Midwest. As to whether the workprint of “Loves of Cleopatra” actually existed, she remarked, “It’s possible, but I’ve never seen it. And I think I would have, if it did exist. After all, I was the star of the damn thing.” Beaumont noted that she was adored by several generations of fans. “I guess I really did something,” she responded, as if it had occurred to her for the first time. Nonetheless, she said, she had left it all behind, and had no regrets. What she wanted now was to be left alone. She asked that there be no more attempts to locate her. “I love you all,” she said, “but please let me have my life.” The fans have her movies and they should be content with that, she asserted. After all, she was no longer young and beautiful, and even if she were, she was no longer the same person. “If you did find me,” she said, “you’d be disappointed. I’m the biggest square in the world now.” With that, Serena disappeared for good. It was, perhaps, in that moment that Serena — if it was Serena — once and for all became the Garbo of porn.
For the most part, her request — if it was her request — has been honored. The fans turned to nostalgia rather than mystery as the object of their obsession. They wanted, after all, the Snake-Woman, the whore-queen, not the Midwestern housewife. They came to be content with masturbatory fantasy and not the banal truth. They accepted that “Serena” was and always had been a shade, a false name that Dana Metcalf had adopted but never quite became. The woman who asked only to be left alone was irrelevant to their desires, and they at last understood the implications of this. They decided to leave her alone.
The obsession with Serena remains, of course, and has in some ways become even more intense. As the world’s vast unconscious is saturated with infinite porn, with the ubiquity of conjoining organs, Serena’s orifice has become a kind of sacred object. Her anatomy is now poetry. It flies higher, into more rarified realms, than the parade of anonymous snatches that course across the cyber-ether. This serves to make Serena’s aura of mystery ever more potent as each year goes by. Her thousands, perhaps millions of lovers know only that she is the end of all desires, and this alone has proved to be enough. As for Dana Metcalf, they have chosen to treat her kindly. Wherever she might be today, they wish her well.
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