Marilyn Chambers and the Sexual Revolution
How Procter & Gamble reacted to their spokesmodel's adult film work
Today you’re going to learn about yet another maligned woman named Marilyn. Modern society is super inconsistent when it comes to morality, as I’m sure you all know. Look, everyone’s gotta face the consequences bad decision-making, and sometimes people cross the line when it comes to taste. I have absolutely regretted outfits I’ve worn or things I’ve said.
In the 1970s, the sexual revolution was in full force. People were free to express themselves in terms of dress, behavior, and opinion in ways previous generations could not. However, when it came to women, expressing overt sensuality was a gray area, and constantly up for debate. This chapter is about a time when a line was crossed. It’s about the hypocrisy of fame, image, and how one of the first breakout stars of adult film handled the beginnings of her career.
Let’s start in the early seventies, and the beginning of the boom of the porno chic era in the United States - when people began to make a lot of money producing and starring in pornographic films. In 1972, both the hardcore sex films Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were released in theaters and audiences of all demographics were intrigued and attended these films en masse. Even when U.S. censors and the FBI tried to ban people from showing the film, mainstream Hollywood rallied to defend it. Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson were staunch advocates and even fundraised for Deep Throat star Harry Reems’s legal defense fund.
Until the early 1970s, pornography had been relegated to the shadows. If one wanted to see nude images, it was in Hugh Hefner’s softcore pages of Playboy magazine or in the more counter-cultural underground film community where you had to go to a friend’s apartment to gather round a film projector and a white wall. If the average American wanted to view any adult content, they would need to send away for a magazine subscription or postcard service. Most people were embarrassed and ashamed. No one wanted their personal information even written on a subscription in case a neighbor or spouse found out.
It’s all very quaint to think about the lengths people went to just see a naked image when our contemporary world is saturated with this stuff. Just a quick Google search yields thousands of times the amount of babe the average mid-century man had to wait days to show-up in his mailbox. Can you imagine if any of those dudes had access to the internet for the first time?
But now to the story…
In 1972, a production company based in San Francisco created a film with a $60,000 budget that would make more than $25 million called Behind the Green Door. It’s a hardcore adult film starring model Marilyn Chambers as a San Francisco socialite who is taken against her will to an Eyes Wide Shut-style sex club and loved "as she's never been loved before." It was actually shown at the Cannes Film Festival and received a standing ovation after the screening.
Behind the Green Door was a box office smash, and released wide across the United States - turns out there was an appetite for this sort of thing! It was also banned in 1973, by U.S. censors due to its hardcore content, and the filmmakers Artie and Jim Mitchell fought various legal rulings for obscenity charges for years in court.
Clearly not everyone was excited by the film, and much to the chagrin of the executives at Procter & Gamble, Marylin Chambers was their current spokesmodel for P&G’s Ivory Snow laundry detergent. The image on the box of soap is iconic because it publicized the purity of the formula while an angelic Marilyn holds a beautiful baby - the idealized image of a virtuous mother. So you’re in the world and go to see this adult film in a grungy theater, and on your way home you stop at Safeway to grab some laundry soap, and there’s Marilyn. Clearly P&G was not looking for a collaboration with the porno chic crowd, but in a rapidly evolving world, who knows what could happen!
Marilyn is such an interesting character to me. She’s got gumption! She’s from a small town in Rhode Island, extremely business-savvy, and became a major star by advocating for herself and taking risks. She also looks like Claudia Schiffer or Cybill Shepherd, so she had the privilege of natural beauty. There’s no question why Procter & Gamble cast her for the laundry detergent image or why she became so successful in film.
After this modeling gig with P&G, she moves to San Francisco, and becomes an exotic dancer to make some money. She’s living life as a sex worker and then while looking for acting jobs comes across the casting call for Behind the Green Door - “a major motion picture” as the San Francisco Chronicle ad read. She claims she didn’t realize it was an adult film at first, but she was not deterred by the content, and signed on to star for a record salary of $10,000. She also negotiated 10% of the film’s gross receipts on top of that to become the highest paid pornographic actor at the time. She was making points on the film in the way Keanu Reaves in Matrix 4 or Scarlett Johanseen in Black Widow did, but in the 1970s as a relatively unknown actress. Go Marilyn!
While she did achieve notoriety after the film premiered, she never successfully transitioned back over to mainstream movies or modeling the way she wanted to. She mainly acted in the world of erotic films and entertainment for the rest of her career, and had a great sense of humor about the unintentional Ivory Snow x Behind the Green Door collaboration. Marilyn passed away in 2009 outside of Los Angeles, and she remains an icon from the 1970s for her role in bringing adult film out of the underground.
Top Tracks
NYT in 1973: “Hard‐core” grows fashionable—and very profitable
B-Sides
Roger Ebert’s 1973 Review of Behind The Green Door
Images Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times 2009 Obituary of Marilyn Chambers