KELLY NICHOLS

Aka: Maryanne
Real Name: Marianne Walters
Date of Birth: 08/06/1956
Place of Birth: California, USA
Height: 1,65m / 5’5”
Film Career: 1979-1985, 1992-1995, 2009

Kelly Nichols was born Marianne Walters, on 8 June 1956, in West Covina in
California. “I grew up in a large Catholic family in the suburbs of L.A. in the other
Valley called San Gabriel Valley. I was the oldest and the only girl with five brothers.
My mother was very Catholic, my father was Lutheran and then he converted… I
went to a parochial school. Mum did everything she could to make sure that I could
go to parochial school and become a real good little Catholic girl. I attended catholic
school up until my freshman year and then they couldn’t afford it anymore and they
put me into a public school… My parents were happy. My dad was overworked and
my mom was pretty much Catholic and had all these kids and took care of them.”

Kelly would later admit, “when it came to sexuality, my mom never really discussed it
with me. I think she wanted me to be married before I did anything… I made a
promise to my mom… that I was going to wait until I was 18 to have sex and I did. He
was 22. The summer after high school I did that and got it over with; I felt I just
needed to get it over with so I’d know what everybody was talking about. It was
terrible.”

She eventually moved out of home when she was 19 in order to attend college. “I
ended up with a partial scholarship to art school and I needed to pay for it, so I
started to go away for about six months.”

After a series of low-paid dead-end jobs she answered an ad in The Free Press asking
 for models. The photo sessions took place
in a message parlour and would usually
end with the photographers paying the
models for sex.

“I was there for a week, just taking

pictures, not letting the guys touch me. I
wasn’t making money. The other girls were
coming away with $500 a night. So one
girl finally told me what was going on. So I
quit. But I was advanced enough that
taking my clothes off in front of guys didn’t
bother me. And I was making $50 a night
instead of $25 as a secretary.”

Kelly then answered an ad in Sunset

International for nude models that led to
“my first professional modelling jobs. Boy,
some of the doozies they threw at you!
Little girl from the suburbs and you have photographers chasing you around the
house. Craziness! But it was good training.” “They not only liked using me as a
model, but they liked my make-up. All of a sudden, I was being paraded around as a
make-up artist and doing nude shoots for Hustler and Penthouse and Swank and
Genesis magazines.” As her modelling career took off, any notion of returning to
college evaporated. She posed nude in single, girl/girl and even softcore boy/girl
shoots, eventually becoming Penthouse Pet of the Month.

“It was fun. It was very fun. Every day was a different place and I enjoyed the
photographers I was working with… I’d also joined Hal Guthru’s Agency. He was the
one who always pushed the idea that I should get my Screen Actors Guild card and
he thought I had all kinds of potential being an actor. He was the one who got me
into King Kong (1975) and he was the one that got me into Toolbox Murders (1978).”

“I was the girl who gets murdered in the bathtub in Toolbox Murders. That’s how I
got my Screen Actors Guild
card… I was getting paid for it –
but I wasn’t that excited about it
because I don’t want to be a
straight actress. Bob Veze, my
mentor, was always very
frustrated with me because he
thought I could be Demi Moore
– who came out of his studio.
But I didn’t want it that bad, and
you have to want it bad to exist
in Hollywood. You’ve got to be
willing to go to all the auditions.
I went to auditions, and I hated
them.”

“I didn’t want to fuck to get a

part. I just didn’t care that much.
Instead I’d say, ‘I don’t need the
part. Just invite me to one of
your parties – then I’ll fuck you!’ I mean the whole casting couch thing – there was
more crap like that going on in straight Hollywood than in porn. There were more
people that wanted parts so bad – and people would hold that over their heads. I had
one experience with a very famous producer. He really liked me, and it was one of
those times when I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, so I was fucking
him. He was trying to promise me things, but I told him, ‘I’m just here because I
want to be.’ The producer was trying to tell me, ‘This town sucks!’ I was like, ‘No, life
is pretty good.’ He goes, ‘I’ll show you. Just stay in the other room.’ He makes a
phone call and this little girl comes over. She stands outside his office and starts
unzipping her top. She goes in. Brings her portfolio. He talks to her then has me
come in and meet her – and then he kicks her out. He says, ‘That girl is fifteen and a
half. Her mom dropped her off and parked down the block. She was super upset
when she left because her mom wanted her to stay longer. You know why? Because
she wanted her daughter to fuck me. That’s the town you’re living in.’”
“I would have probably stayed with
acting if love hadn’t come along! I
met my first husband [Barry] and
that kind of got me all messed up and
questioning everything. He was sort
of a neurotic alcoholic with many
personalities. None of which I knew
about when I first met him. He would
shame me about the nude modelling,
but he didn’t mind taking the money.
He talked to me about marrying him,
and then he kept breaking up with
me and getting back together. He
could be violent. Then he moved to
New York City, and he called me from
there and said, ‘You’ve really got to
come out here and we can start all
over again.’ I was so missing him and
I was so hurt at the time. It was
stupid. He said, ‘I’m doing camera
work at a theatre.’”

“I did a girl/girl [sex] scene to get

money to go see my boyfriend Barry, in New York City. So I did not see it as a career
move. This was just something to make money, like nude modelling… But when I got
to New York, Barry didn’t look like Barry. He’d completely cut his hair, and bleached
it bright yellow. Real punk. He lived in one of those god awful apartments on 71st
and Columbus – you know, you walk in and there’s the bunk bed and a bathroom
over there and a window to jump out of – except it’s facing bricks! This is what I walk
into: Barry needed money for rent. He’s already months behind. So already I’m right
back in the pattern.”

“We go to his work. Well, the theatre he’s working at is Show World. And he’s not a
projectionist; he’s an actor on stage. And he’s been fucking Serena, who I knew when
she was a nude model… Serena was a nude model with me in Los Angeles… I used to
love to look at her because she looked like a drawing… Just gorgeous! I thought,
‘That’s what I wanna be when I grow up.’ I’d given up everything I had in L.A. to
come out to New York. I wasn’t prepared for this.”

Through her boyfriend she became involved with drugs for the first time. “When I get
to New York, I’m just with Barry. So whatever he says goes. I will follow his lead. If
he snorts it, I’ll snort it.” Barry was unstable and unpredictable at the best of times,
and with both of them high,
things reached crisis point one
night in a club. “I snorted what I
thought was coke – and that was
the end of me. Barry says I
walked away with somebody. I
don’t know; I was so angry with
him later on, but I realised he was
also under the influence. But he
should’ve protected me. I don’t
know what I expected, but I
ended up with my clothes off, in a
room apparently under the club.
Some poor guy was handing me
my clothes and trying to get me
outta there. I don’t remember any
of it. I just felt really sick and
violated and – and just awful. It
was the first time I got raped. My
pants and panties were torn; I
had to use my shirt to cover myself. I had no money. I didn’t know how to get to
where I lived… Some time in the morning, I stumbled home and sat outside the door.
Barry finally came home three hours later… He was angry with me for some reason, I
don’t know why. I was the one that got abandoned. So Barry talks me into going to
work at Show World.”
 “It wasn’t a big deal. I’d been nude in front
of the camera so many times and with
another nude male model, so it just seemed
like an extended version of that. I never felt
I had to justify my feelings about it. I didn’t
feel one way or another. I was used to being
disappointed by my boyfriend… He said, ‘If
you don’t want me to be with other girls
then be with me.’ He took me in and
introduced me to all of his friends at Show
World, and all of a sudden, it just seemed
like a job.”

“It was kinda fun working at Show World; it

was like I was in theatre. Barry was a good
actor. It was funny. He put on some little
shorts and put a collar on my neck with
chains. I wore some little Danskin spandex
thing, which would later be torn off me.
And some whips and stuff. But it was not
sex. It was just goofy stuff. They were
paying us 60 dollars a show or so, but Barry
had a friend there named Tim Connelly and
his girlfriend Helen Madigan. Helen and
Tim were doing the sex shows, and they
were cool as cucumbers… I started to feel okay after I met them; seeing another
couple that acted like all this was normal made it more normal.”

Despite the money they were making at Show World though, most of it was going on
drugs and by mid-1980 they had serious financial problems. “Barry got us thrown
out of the apartment on 71st and Columbus, so basically we were on the street. I was
paying the rent; we’d go to nice restaurants, and I’d pick up the tab. I wanted it to be
okay between us. At some point, though, I ran out of money. Then Barry heard that
somebody was gonna do a porn film (Bon Appetit, 1980). It turned out to be this
sweet little gay guy named Chuck Vincent. Chuck took a look at me and said, ‘Oh,
this is great. You’re a Penthouse Pet,’ which I had been when I was nude modelling…
And Chuck Vincent loved the fact that I could do dialogue.”

“Barry and I, who are married at this point, are literally on the streets, living in a
hotel off 42nd Street… The Chuck Vincent film had a really complicated plot, so
Barry insisted that we get $4,000 up front. Chuck was very cool; he gave us the four
grand. He was going to pay me
$16,000, so we could get a fresh
start… Well, Barry flips out. All of a
sudden he gets righteous: ‘Now we
have the money; let’s split.’ He
wants to leave. It was really weird; I
still had a moral code – these
people had paid us money. They
deal with banks. They could lose
more than their asses. And we
made a promise… We ended up
having a huge fight, with him crying
on the floor screaming at me,
begging me not to do porn. So
Barry’s outta my life. He just goes
away.”

“They wanted me to be the lead… I

had no confidence left and this
helped restore it… My first sex scene was funny because they threw at me [gay porn
actor] Jack Wrangler. Jack and I are friends now, but then I didn’t know what to
expect. They’d set up the whole situation, like, ‘He’s gay, so be kind’. We were
supposed to have sex in a car. I knew I should probably get him hard, but he said,
‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it myself.’ He got himself hard and said, ‘Now, when I
say now, I want you to put your head down there, right around it, and I’ll just come
on your face.’ It was all done for me.”
Although Kelly had done a girl/girl
loop in L.A. she had never had sex
with a man in front of the camera.
Despite this, she didn’t have a
problem making the transition from
nude modelling and simulated sex at
Show World to actually fucking on
film. “When I was with a guy, I’d be
in a caretaking mode and I’d want to
make sure that he was comfortable
and that he was getting hot and off.
That’s part of my power thing with
sex. I’ve always liked the fact that
guys get hard-ons for me so that was
probably just like some complete
sexual perversion I’d create for
myself. You look at the camera and
you just tune them all out… I’m a closet exhibitionist so it was a way of showing off.”

Kelly would later admit there were other issues at work. “It’s just something as
simple as not having any sisters and not being a boy, and wanting to be one of the
boys but not having the body to be a boy. This kind of validated that I was a girl on
some level too. Instead of being a boy, my career was such that I was able to put on
lacey things and strappy heels and be sexy, and people thought I was sexy and
pretty… One of the reasons I became an X-rated star too I have to tell you, is because
the travel was fabulous. I got to go all over Europe to so many countries and I was
wined and dined, it was wonderful. I had never been out of the country before.”

With her marriage to Barry over, Kelly slipped further into drug and alcohol abuse.
Tim Connolly would later recall: “One day Helen and I were doing shows at Show
World, and Kelly Nichols came to see us – and ended up on stage with us. Kelly was
high, really high – speed or coke or PCP or something. I was really high, too; it was
one of those moments where I just thought, ‘I’m going to be in trouble later.’ Here’s
Kelly, this available woman who wants to fuck. And here’s my girlfriend, who’s really
 high and is throwing herself into the
moment because she can feel this
energy exchange between us and she
just wants to be in the middle of it
because otherwise she’s going to be
left out. I fucked Kelly onstage… Did
I fall in love with Kelly Nichols?
Absolutely, immediately! She was
the love of my life at that point.”

According to Kelly: “I’d met Tim

through Helen, who I became
friends with while I was with Barry…
I went out and hung out with them
as a couple. What I didn’t know was
that things were blowing up between
them. Tim was working hard…
Helen was partying a lot. And their
scene was quickly deteriorating… We were two lonely souls who hadn’t found
ourselves yet, and our view of life was that it was just the two of us against the world.
So Helen moved out, and I moved in.”

Drugs were an integral part of their relationship. “Angel dust was my drug of choice.
I turned Tim onto it… Then we both find out we like to fuck on it.” Despite Kelly
having become an established and extremely popular porn star by this point, money
remained a constant problem. “I’m going through this kind of weird moral quandary
because I have a girlfriend who’s hooking, and she wants to know if I want to try it.
So I try it a couple of times but I don’t like it. Tim was just like, ‘Whatever brings the
money in.’”

Despite continuing drug and alcohol problems, Kelly appeared content in her
marriage to Tim. “My first husband met me after I’d done some skin magazines.
There was always some bone of contention, some kind of jealousy happening. It
seems to happen with men in general, and I don’t blame them. It all comes down to
that, if I had to, I could always sell my body
and make money. And men – unless
they’re gay – can’t. But my second husband
[Tim Connelly] worked at Show World in a
live sex show. He has sold his body, he’s
been there. Also, he used to live with Helen
Madigan, who was a porn star for a while,
so he’s dealt with porn star trips. He was
with Helen four years before he got me…
So he got to understand that side of it.
These relationship problems happen so
often in porn. Even the nicest guy will just
at one point get jealous of your career, not
understanding it’s just a job. Now if I come
home I can tell my old man, ‘Hey, I
couldn’t believe it. Today on the set I came
with Michael Knight.’ And he’d go, ‘Really,
wow!’ I’ve never seen a man who hasn’t
been there himself able to absorb it on a
gut level.”

The turning point for Kelly came when

Seka exploded onto the porn scene. “We were all amazed with Seka, this new girl who
was starting to make loops. She was the first woman who had an inkling of what a
woman’s career could be in pornography. The rest of us were little round pegs not
fitting into square holes because we never looked at what we were doing as a job; it
was just a passage to something else. We were just doing this until we figured out
what we were gonna do next.”

“I started to get hold of my life. After Games Women Play (1981) I had to be in a real
good film, and Roommates (1981) put me right up there.” Roommates, also directed
by Vincent, became her favourite and perhaps most famous film. In his analysis of
the industry David Flint writes: “Roommates was a hugely ambitious soap opera,
with Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart and Kelly Nichols as the main characters whose
lives are explored throughout the film… Roommates is the ideal film to show to
anyone who doubts the artistic potential of the adult film genre. Take away the sex,
and this film would still stand up as a fine dramatic piece, with excellent
performances from the leads, a strong story and slick production qualities…
Intended as a crossover film,
Roommates did manage to play
some mainstream cinemas, and was
reviewed by mainstream critics –
something that had generally ceased
to happen since the heady days of
the early Seventies.”

Around 1982 Kelly and Tim split up

and she moved in with her friend
and fellow porn star, Samantha Fox.
Samantha would later recall: “She
was a really good roommate… We
used to work out together, and one
of the fun things we did, we used to
have [porn actor] George Payne
come over and give us massages,
and he had this one trick: he would strap a Hitachi vibrator under his jaw, had a
chin-strap running around his head, and then we would lay down side-by-side and
he would give us head, and we would make comments – ‘That’s pretty good’ – like
commenting on his new invention.” The two of them acquired party-girl reputations
within the industry, and their alcohol and sex fuelled lifestyle became legendary.
“We’d look at each other at the end of the night and hop into bed together, and the
guys couldn’t keep up with us!”

Despite her growing success within the industry though, Kelly always had issues with
her fame as a porn star. “I didn’t know I had a pretty face and I hated my body. So
how could I think I was a porn star, making my body naked and putting on make-up
and being called beautiful? I go though binge-purge periods, generally in conjunction
with certain things I do. For example, around the time I made The Mistress (1982) I
had just had several horrible things happen to me, and I put on weight. This was
around the time I joined the Marines. I went through the physical and got accepted.
That’s what Chuck Vincent wrote Puss ‘N’ Boots (1983) about. He owned the title but
never had a story to go with it, so when he heard about my joining the Marines, he
flipped and decided to do this film. I was so freaked out that I needed something
from the outside to tell me what to do. My parents weren’t around and I was
emotionally paralysed, incapable of handling my own life. All sorts of weird stuff had
happened to me – a bad relationship, a horrible abortion, an attack on my house. It
had nothing to do with the business. It was that my own life was not formulated in
anyway I could recognise… I’d go to shoots and drink because I needed to feel calm. I
think 25 was a watermark year, because you’re a quarter of a century old, and you
think, ‘What do I do when I grow up? In five years I’ll be 30, and people aren’t going
to tolerate this.’”

Kelly’s stint in the Marines didn’t last and she soon returned to the adult industry.
Between 1983-1985 she starred in over 25 porn films and a number of mainstream B’
movies. According to Kelly the hardest part of being a porn star was the effect it had
on her private life. “When you first meet a guy, how do you tell him you’re a porn
star? But you have to – eventually. And it has to be before it’s gone too far, or they
feel bamboozled. There has to be a fine timing, between where they just look at your
tits and look at you as a slut – and where they think of you as a person. And if you
really like them, it changes the dynamics, and it’s really strange. You’re just marked
for life.”

“I actually quit the business in late 1984-85, and I met someone in New York,
literally, the night I had walked off the set. Someone had ripped off my purse. My
second husband at that time was cheating on me with another girl and I just walked
off with this guy. We spent three days
in a hotel and I just didn’t want to
come out. When I did, my second
husband had kind of moved this girl
into our apartment so I stayed at my
girlfriend’s and just sort of decided to
quit the business. I quit him, I quit the
business, and then the guy I had
walked off with and I had a happy little
mayhem… I got pregnant and decided
to keep her. In 1986, I had my first
daughter, and in 1987, I had my
second daughter.”

Kelly’s third husband, and father of

her daughters, was budding
screenwriter John Skipp with whom
she settled in rural Pennsylvania.
“Samantha Fox is like me,” she would
later say. “We’re both excess people. I’ve had a bout with drugs. Samantha did too.
You have to find a substitute. For me it was having a base. I finally found someone –
my husband – who could totally complement me, give me the strokes that I need in
certain areas and push me in others. I come from a big family, so I found that I need
people around me. When I was single I’d seek company but it wasn’t always the right
kind.”

Kelly and John later moved in Los Angeles in the late 1980’s when his screenwriting
career began to take off with films such as Nightmare on Elm Street 4. Their
marriage didn’t last though, and she eventually divorced for the third time. In 1992
she returned to adult films and over the next few years starred in a number of
bondage and domination movies. She eventually quit in 1995, reverted to her real
name and became romantically involved with pornographer Wesley Emerson. She
then spent the next 14 years working as a make-up artist for adult and mainstream
productions.

In 2010 she would say, “When I got out

of the business… I didn’t let anybody
know I was a porn star at all. I was just a
make-up artist. I could tell my mom I
was a make-up artist because in the
early 1980s when I was being ‘Kelly’, I
was also doing a lot of make-up for
MTV…. It’s just that I didn’t tell her the
whole truth. My brothers, they found out
sideways in their own ways. My brother
Steve is helping me work on my website
right now so he has a healthy attitude
about it. One of my brothers didn’t have
a healthy attitude about it and my other
brothers haven’t really talked to me
about it.”

“My kids know about me. I’ve let them know that their mother was in naked pictures
early on and that I was in naked movies, but you don’t give your kids valium, you
don’t give your kids alcohol, and you don’t give them porno. You take it as it comes.
There was one point when Melanie was 13 and she had gone on the computer or
something and found out my name. She said to me, ‘I know who you are… You’re
Kelly Nichols!’ I turned around and starred her dead in the eye and said, ‘Yeah, do
you have a problem?’ and she said ‘No,’ and then I turned to Mikie [my other
daughter] and I said, ‘Mikie, you got a problem?’ and she said ‘No, Mommy!’ That
was it… We have a great relationship, but it’s polar opposite. It’s funny though, no
matter what your kids don’t want to be like you.”
In early 2009 Kelly Nichols made a
brief comeback to porn. “Tommy
Byron asked if I would do it and I was
wondering if I could do it so it was
kind of a personal thing. The money
was good. It wasn’t that, it was just
that I wanted to be in the right frame
of mind. I wanted to do it sober and I
wanted to look as good as I could. I
did it, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
it was just Tommy and his
cameraman. It was great… It was as
if I had never stopped performing. It
was so comfortable… That’s all I need
to do. I feel for a woman my age to do
guys is like taking two steps
backwards. It’s kind of pathetic. I don’t mind playing with pretty girls and stuff as
long as they’re over 25… but there’s no need to prove myself by doing guys anymore.
I have a boyfriend and that’s fine.”

Kelly Nichols appeared in some of the best adult films of the early 1980s. Apart from
the classics Roommates (1981) and In Love (1983), she also starred in Games
Women Play (1981), The Mistress (1982), Society Affairs (1983), Puss ‘N’ Boots
(1983), Public Affairs (1983) and Great Sexpectations (1984). Nevertheless, despite
being one of the most popular starlets of her time, drug and alcohol problems, along
with general mismanagement, meant that she wasn’t selective with her roles. This is
something she acknowledged at the time. “If you want to last in this business more
than five years, do not do what I am doing. Do not cash in… If you want to last ten
years, do not party heavy. Space out the films. Otherwise, you’re going to overdose
the public. I learned that working with magazines. Guys do not want to jerk off all the
time to the same girl.”

Despite her often-turbulent time as a porn star, Kelly claims she has no regrets and
always considered herself a feminist. “The
outside world has somewhat of an
interesting view of porn sets and that the
girls are being mishandled, but they’re
actually not. Unlike what Linda Lovelace
was saying, we do control a lot as far as the
actual work environment. We don’t have a
gun to our heads… I would say that having
the right to use my body anyway I want to, is
the ultimate in being feminine in a lot of
ways. I chose to take on the profession
whether I was a prostitute or a porn star.”

“The industry has given me the best clarity

I’ve ever had. I have a street sense I never
had before. I have a home base and money
in the bank. And I have an insight into my
own sexuality that, considering my
repressive background, I never could have
had otherwise. This industry which has
made so many people crazy has made me
sane.”

By Gfox_2000