Spotlight on Seka: "The Platinum Princess"

Seka: Courtesy of Worth Mentioning Public Relations

Continuing with spotlight excerpts from Golden Goddesses, I am pleased to post select segments from my profile on Seka, one of the most beautiful and influential women in the history of erotic cinema. Seka's participation in Goddesses holds special significance for me because she was the first interview I conducted and she is responsible for introducing me to some of the other women and legends featured in the book. With gratitude, I thank you Seka, once again, for being instrumental in helping me to ignite this project.

     Dorothiea Patton hails from the state of Virginia where she is the daughter of industrious blue-collar parents and one of a multitude of relatives. As a child, “Dottie” was a rough and tumble tomboy who reveled in wide-open spaces examining bugs or pulling mischievous pranks with siblings and various cousins. A plain-looking girl in her adolescent years, by the time she was sixteen, Dottie had transformed into a beautiful young woman and won her first beauty pageant while still in high school.
     Marriage at eighteen provided a means to independence and freedom, but Dottie quickly discovered she was not destined for a life of bare feet and a succession of pregnancies. After she and her first husband parted company, Dottie began dating a man who owned several adult bookstores showing eight-millimeter loops. Appalled by how unkempt some of the early female performers appeared, she decided she could present a more aesthetically appealing package for consumers and set about to prove it.

     “I met my first husband while I had a job selling shoes. He played pool across the street all the time and he was eleven or twelve years older than I was. He was 6’6” or 6’7,” and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really tall guy and he goes in and drinks beer and plays pool! He’s a bad boy! I think I’m interested in that!’ The person I was dating at the time was from the same church that I went to and he was shorter than I am. Everyone always wants the taboo. Anything that you can’t have, you want, because if you can have it, then there’s no challenge to it." 

     After I got married, my husband wanted kids and I said, 'No, I’m not having kids, at least not now.' It was about, 'Well, we need to start having children,' and I’m like, 'No, no, no.’ That was probably what broke the marriage apart. He was sort of demanding that I have children and his parents wanted children and I said, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ That’s the worst thing you can say to me is, ‘You have to do that,' because I’m going to do everything in my power not to do it. I’m very defiant! I was still a baby. I was only eighteen. Really, the reason I got married was to get out of the house because I knew there was more out there than just the various minute parts that I had already experienced. That’s another reason why I probably got divorced too. I had started to listen to rock and roll music – you know, the devil’s workshop – bad girl – and I’d had sex for the first time. It wasn’t until the day after I got married that I had sex the first time. I didn’t even have sex on my wedding night because I was scared to death and I locked myself in the bathroom. Suddenly, it was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I was like, ‘Wow! This could be fun! I think I need to be single!’”

     “I think most people know that I owned six or seven adult bookstores at one time after separating from my first husband. That was eight-millimeter films. You had the peep shows at the back that were the quarter machines. The way that I had my store set up, I could see all the way down the back so I could see all the projectors running. I’d never really watched adult films before. I wasn’t offended by it – just didn’t know that much about it.”

     "The platinum hair was a mistake. In the beginning, I just wanted a few streaks of blonde in my hair and when the lady finished it was pretty much all white. I was devastated. Afterwards, I thought, ‘Hmmm… I like this. Maybe God messed up.’ After all, there’s the avocado and the platypus. I think that maybe he forgot to add the blonde hair for me. This was somewhere around 1975, 1976.”

     “The first time that I said, ‘No, I’m not doing that’ happened in Dracula Sucks. There was a particular actor, who decided that he wanted to work with me before John [Holmes] got to work with me and he wrote a scene in. It was the first feature film for me and I was scared to death. The scene he’d written wasn’t in the script and I said, ‘I’m not working with you.’ It was a very demeaning thing that he wanted to do and he got a little nutty and said, ‘Oh, you’ll never work again.'

     I said, ‘I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me.’ He finally pissed me off enough that I took off my shoe and I winged it at his head, and told him to go fuck himself and walked out. The shoe was a Saddle Oxford and they weighed about five pounds apiece. They were huge, they were heavy, and I was glad because I really wanted to hit this person in the head with the shoe and I walked off the set. I would not work with this person until he apologized to me on set. I didn’t do the scene and they finally took it out of the script. He pouted for two or three days about it. He refused to work with me because he thought it was going to hurt me, but as most of us know, the women are the ones that draw people to watch these movies more so than the men do. Finally, he had to apologize before I would ever work with him.

     “I liked John Holmes, Jamie Gillis, Mike Ranger and Randy West. What I liked about John is that he was respectful of me. He always treated me very kindly and he treated me like a lady. So did Jamie Gillis. There was something intriguing, and dark, and kind of sinister, sexy about Jamie. Mike Ranger was just like the All-American California boy. Cute, very cute, and very nicely built. He knew how to use everything he had. I liked Randy West just because he’s Randy and he’s gorgeous. He looks better now than he did before. I also liked working with Serena, Kay Parker, and Jesie St. James. I enjoyed working with Jesie St. James because she was easy. She was easy going; she wasn’t a prima donna. She wasn’t prissy or “I’m the star here; I’ve been here longer than you have.” She treated everyone equally and so did Kay Parker. Serena was interesting. She was very quirky—hippie-ish. She liked everybody and she was very kind, and still is very kind. She’s just a very sweet human being. I absolutely love Veronica Hart. She’s my all-time favorite person in the business—Veronica and Kay. I think that’s a good line-up of people."

     "The old saying goes, ‘There’s a new one at the bus stop every day that has run away.’ There were a lot of runaways back then, too, but the people I worked with weren’t like that. We were just a small group of people. Little did we know that they needed us more than we needed them; we were already established and helped build their inventory and their empires.”