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| 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.”
