City Journal: The Last Porn Palace

AUGUST 3, 1984. Disco is finally and officially dead. Hair metal is in, in a big way. And the feminist movement just saw its first progress in a long time, thanks to Walter Mondale’s announcement that Geraldine Ferraro, a Congresswoman from New York, will be his running mate in the November face-off with Ronald Reagan. It is, by any measure, a truly historic moment in the free world.

But on this particular day in Philadelphia, another history-making woman, one the feminists don’t hold in quite such high esteem, is attracting onlookers at the corner of 22nd and Market streets.

Marilyn Chambers: a lanky gal with breezy blond hair, teacup-size breasts, and a tight black leather miniskirt. The same Marilyn Chambers who was once the puritanical Ivory Snow girl, before transforming into a prurient Wasp who took it all off — and had not just sex but, Oh my God! Sex with a black man! — in 1972’s Behind the Green Door, one of the first hard-core porno films widely distributed in the United States.

Chambers is in Philadelphia to promote her newest film, Insatiable II, the creatively named and ho-hum sequel to 1980’s Insatiable, one of the last great porno films, which featured a rigorous rear-entry romp with the legendarily equipped John Holmes. For this Philadelphia screening of the follow-up, Chambers is heading to the city’s premiere skin-flick palace, the Forum Theater, at 2208 Market Street.

As randy men pay $5.50 each to watch the on-screen Chambers in threesomes, twosomes, and energetic solo performances, the real-life version steps out of a long white Lincoln Continental into the thickness of Philadelphia in August. She smiles for rose-toting fans, signs autographs, and chats with Inquirer reporter Dick Polman about just-dethroned Miss America Vanessa Williams.

“I think the pageant should definitely update their moral regulations,” Chambers says. “I mean, this is the 1980s now.”

Hers is a brief appearance. It seems most of the men are too occupied with the naked Two-­Dimensional Chambers to be bothered with the clothed Actual Chambers in the Forum lobby.

Before speeding off, Chambers tells the small crowd about her investments in the blossoming videocassette business and predicts the death of the Forum and all theaters like it within a decade.

This is 1984.

WELL, HAIR METAL died off. (Sorry, Cinderella.) Vanessa Williams sold six million records. Reagan won 49 states. And Marilyn Chambers, conspicuously more bosomy than when she played the role of that insatiable debutante, ran for vice president herself in 2004.

And the Forum? Despite Chambers’s predictions, it’s still open for business, apparently surviving, if not thriving. Take a stroll to the corner of 22nd and Market today and you’ll see a large black-and-white marquee jutting out over the sidewalk:

TWO XXX ADULT HITS
EXCLUSIVE FIRST RUN
NEW SHOWS EVERY FRIDAY
AND TUESDAY