Richard Freeman's Batteries Not Included
Inside Jennifer Welles
by Larry Tritten

X-rated movies were in their heyday in the mid and late 1970s. It was a time when they were becoming generally more and more sophisticated, with increasingly more impressive production values, and yet there was still a zestful salacity, if not a spirit of forthright raunchiness, in most of them. It was a period when the prototypical porn queens were being born, looming in their public's consciousness like briny Venuses rising full-born from salty libidinal seas.

There weren't as many of them in those days as there are now, but the ones who formed the inner circle of the leading ladies of X-rated movies were a stunning bunch—C.J. Laing, Vanessa Del Rio, Annette Haven, Serena, Desiree Cousteau, Marilyn Chambers, Georgina Spelvin, et. al. One of the strongest contenders was Jennifer Welles.

My first memory of her is from a movie called Honeypie, which was released in 1975. Honeypie was basically a collection of loops, but in this case they were all so sportively smutty that in the aggregate they added up to a classic movie. Among the highlights of Honeypie are one of the most realistic and sophisticated bondage and discipline sequences I've ever seen (with Mary Stuart, Bree Anthony, and a black actor), and an adulterous double-whammy sequence in which a housewife seduces the hired hands, that will leave an enduring impression of Terri Hall like a carnalized fossil in the loam of your memory.

Another of these sequences is the one in which Jennifer Welles plays a love-hungry woman living alone who seduces a young male neighbor. It is intelligent, sensitive, and luxuriously erotic in the best sense of Victorian pornography—designer smut in a microcosm. For the next three or four years Jennifer Welles would burn like blue radium on the X-rated movie scene before disappearing. Before departing, though, she made a film called Inside Jennifer Welles, which added her name to the pantheon of sex queens whose appeal was powerful enough to underwrite movies whose titles used their names as a selling point. Most of the top level stars made such a movie, i.e., Inside Desiree Cousteau. Inside Georgina Spelvin, Inside Seka, Inside Marilyn Chambers, Inside Annie Sprinkle, etc. These movies eased the line between sexual fantasy and reality for the audience by projecting an image in which the star's personal life was shown to be as hedonistic as all of the collective hot dreams her screen persona had theretofore inspired.

In the case of Jennifer Welles, the image posited by her showcase movie was one of a siren literally debauched and virtually nymphomaniacal. Inside Jennifer Welles reviews its star's ostensible memories of some of the highlights of her bawdy prowling through the bedrooms, backrooms, and bistros of Manhattan. In it Jennifer is portrayed at powerfully man-oriented, to the extent that other women scarcely figure in the movie. Only two other women appear in it, one of whom plays a dental assistant who Jennifer warms up before prevailing upon her to pleasure the dentist (a sequence that is frustratingly incomplete, with Jennifer leaving the office after watching them for awhile—a real oversight, because the woman, a Latin type, is a lush eyeful; but Jennifer, who directed this movie, clearly wanted to be the woman who dominates it.

The other woman in the cast is Marlene Willoughby, who was always terrific as an upper class jade—a tony lady ripe for debauchery. But here she plays a mannish lesbian who Jennifer encounters in a bar—the sight of her lovely, lissome body is obliterated by a man's suit. Jennifer has a fling with her in much the same way as one might try sushi, but she emerges from their tryst still pining for a man. Incidentally, the sequence with Jennifer and Marlene constitutes an abbreviated course in sophisticated osculation in which commonplace kissing is absolutely put to shame by the sophisticated techniques demonstrated. A kiss is not necessarily just a kiss, as the familiar lyric states.

The scarcity of women in Inside Jennifer Welles exacerbates the theme, which is that of a man's lady in heat. "I love men," Jennifer says in the narration, "all kinds of men." And, to drive the point home, she balls all kinds of them in the movie, including a hefty, unkempt character of the type who usually plays the antithesis of a lady's man.

All of this homophilia comes to a roistering climax when she takes on eight men simultaneously; then, in an outre epilogue to the sequence, caters a Chinese dinner for them, during which she goes at it with the four Oriental caterers. Steaming with seemingly unquenchable lust and tasseled with semen, she illuminates the old age male dream of a classy broad who can't get enough.

A testament to the durability of Jennifer Welles' reputation is the fact that Norman Mailer mentioned her in his novel Tough Guys Don't Dance. His protagonist says of a female character: "Now, the face of my neighbor was, like the porn star Jennifer Welles, undeniably appealing. She had a charming upturned nose and a full pout on the mouth, as spoiled and imperious as the breath of sex. Her nostrils flared, her fingernails—the Liberation could go screw itself—were scandalously well-manicured with a silver varnish to catch the silver-blue toning above her eyes. What a piece!"

And whatever happened to Jennifer Welles? The word is, that like many porn queens, she married well and split from the biz. I won't go so far as to say that they don't make them like they did in her day, but if you want evidence that the spirit of pornography was bold and free and flying its colors grandly and ostentatiously in 1977, then take a look at this movie.