04.14.09
99 44/100 percent pure…
Marilyn Chambers, 56, the onetime Ivory Snow model who became the star of the pornographic film “Behind the Green Door,” a salacious sensation that helped hard-core movies find a mass audience and a measure of public acceptance, was found dead April 12 at her home in Santa Clarita, Calif.
Before her career in pornographic films, Ms. Chambers was an advertising model, and her girl-next-door face appeared on boxes of Ivory Snow detergent with the slogan “99 44/100 percent pure.”
She was not aware that “Behind the Green Door” was to be a hard-core film when she answered a casting call in San Francisco. She was about to leave when the film’s producers, brothers Jim and Artie Mitchell, persuaded her to stay. She negotiated a contract for $25,000, plus a percentage of the profits, which proved lucrative when the $60,000 film ended up earning $50 million.
“I’m just your basic girl next door,” she told the London Independent newspaper in 1999. “I’m naughty and I’m nice. And I love sex. I hope I die having sex.”
Marilyn Ann Briggs was born April 22, 1952, in Providence, R.I., and grew up in Westport, Conn. She was a diver, gymnast and cheerleader in high school and appeared in commercials for Clairol and Coca-Cola. At 18, she had a small role in the Barbra Streisand film “The Owl and the Pussycat” and was working as a bottomless dancer in San Francisco when she signed up for “Behind the Green Door,” adopting the last name of Chambers.
Ms. Chambers had problems with drugs and alcohol in the 1980s but always seemed to rebound. She landed a few small parts in movies, wrote a sex column in Club, a men’s magazine, and made a semi-serious stab at public office, running as the vice presidential candidate of the Personal Choice Party in 2004.
Sigh…
S(ister Mary) Squirrel