Marilyn Chambers, who was found dead in her home yesterday at the age of 56, was best known as the star of Jim and Artie Mitchell's Behind the Green Door (1972), one of the three biggest hits of the brief era of "porno chic" in the early 1970s. Where Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, had a winning, giggly anything-goes quality, and Georgina Spelvin, of The Devil in Miss Jones, stood out for her voracious level of on-screen enthusiasm, the youthful Chambers (nee' Marilyn Ann Briggs), who was twenty when Green Door was made, had what porn directors invariably claim to value above all else and seem to find once in a blue moon: a fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door, all-American cheerleader look and manner that, to the Mitchells and their audience, must have seemed to be screaming out to be defiled. In the movie, Chambers played an innocent miss who is abducted and spirited away to a sinister underground club where she spends the bulk of the film's 72-minute running time being ravished for the delectation of a masked audience; she loves it, of course.
Green Door, which would go on to make millions, was made for $60,000, with the leading lady receiving $25,000 and one percent of the gross--a very good deal for her, because the Mitchells were tough businessmen and Green Door would be one of the few hardcore porn "classics" to make money that actually wound up in the hands of the people who'd made it. The Mitchells were lucky to find Chambers, but their cup really ranneth over when they discovered that their leading lady was the recently anointed face of Ivory Snow; she could be seen, with her hair pulled back and cuddling a baby, on boxes of the detergent from coast to coast. Procter & Gamble wound up giving the movie a shot of free publicity (and taking a bath itself) by recalling all its products and advertising that featured her face, thus demonstrating that it's that 56/100% that's not pure that'll kill ya.
As you might have guessed from the accidental Ivory Snow cross-promotion, Chambers had been pursuing a career in mainstream modeling and acting when she became a porn goddess. She made her film debut with a small role in the 1970 Barbra Streisand-George Segal comedy The Owl and the Pussycat and attracted the Mitchells' attention with her work in Together (1971), a softcore "mock sex documentary" directed by Sean S. Cunnigham, who almost a decade later would cash in as the director of the first Friday the 13th movie. After Green Door, Chambers would reunite with the Mitchells for the The Resurrection of Eve (1973), but she also tried to keep her career in non-pornographic entertainment alive, with mixed success.
In 1977, Chambers became perhaps the only established hardcore star to play the leading role in a "mainstream" film by a major North American director (at least, until Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience opens) when David Cronenberg cast her in his second feature, Rabid; in keeping with the body-horror fixations of Cronenberg's early work, Chambers played a woman who, after experimental skin-graft surgery, develops a vampiric phallus beneath her arm. Years later, recalling her frame of mind in 1972, Chambers said that "I was thinking that something like Behind the Green Door had never been done before and the way our sexual revolution was traveling I really thought it was going to be a stepping stone which would further my acting career." But as the cultural climate turned more conservative, Chambers was was forced to seek out more work in hardcore films such as Insatiable (1980) and Insatiable II (1984). She spent much of the rest of her career bouncing back and forth between hardcore cinema and softcore, sexploitation flicks ranging from 1983's Angel of H.E.A.T (which I remember staring at on Showtime at the end of a long, sunburned Fourth of July) to various Cinemax late night favorites with her name in the title, even taking a writer's credit on Marilyn Chambers's Private Fantasies VI (1986). She also recorded a single, "Benihana," which went to #9 on the R & B charts in 1977.
Chambers had a daughter, McKenna Marie Taylor, born in 1991, with her third husband, Tom Taylor. (The marriage, Chambers's final one, ended in 1994.) In her later years, she took time out from her adult film career to take part in politics, but nobody's perfect. (She ran for Vice President, as the running mate of Charles Jay, in 2004 on the Personal Choice Party ticket, a quasi-libertarian party.) Her last film role was in last year's Solitaire. She received a a lifetime achievement FOXE Award in 2005. The cause of her death has not yet been determined.