Back in the days before every-fucking-body had cable, there were broadcast pay channels that ran recent video releases--and, late at night, after the kids were presumably asleep, edited porn.
Chicago had two such services competing for our consumer dollars: On-TV and Spectrum. Both shared space with normal UHF stations, switching over to the pay service around 7 p.m. My family never bought into either service. Hell, we didn't even get cable until later that decade, more due to Chicago's large volume of red tape (i.e., politicians with their hands out, screaming "Where's mine?") than my family's notorious lagtime in keeping apace with advances in technology.
If you adjusted your TV's "rabbit ears" just right, though, depending upon atmospheric conditions and individual skill and patience, you could get the pay programming for free--usually with intermittent sound and a distorted/fuzzy picture. Thus, for many kids my age living in Chicago in the early '80s, our first exposure to porn--and, consequently, to Marilyn Chambers.
Of course, I'd heard of her before then. Who hadn't? Like Linda Lovelace before her and Jenna Jameson after, Marilyn made her mark not just of the adult industry and its related subcultures, but on pop culture in general, mostly because she went from a straight modeling career (she appeared as the adoring mom on the Ivory Snow soap box) to hardcore (in the Mitchell Brothers' now-infamous Behind the Green Door). She tried to branch out from time to time, appearing in David Cronenberg's Rabid and a few straight-to-cable/video efforts and even tried to establish a singing career, but found her most frequent work in porn from the early '70s until the late '80s, returning to the industry sporadically after that.
Marilyn wasn't the most beautiful porn star ever, but she threw herself into each scene with abundant enthusiasm and looked like she was having fun, natural fun, which made her fun to watch, even through the blurry screen of illicitly acquired On-TV.
Sunday night, Marilyn Chambers was found dead of as-yet undetermined causes at her home in California. She was 56 years old.
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I last saw Marilyn on the A&E program City Confidential (now rerun on Biography Channel)in the episode about the death of one Mitchell brother at the hands of the other. There was something about her demeanor that didn't seem...right. She had a sort of twitch that I always associate with substance abusers. Of course, that may not have been the case. I hope it wasn't.
Rest in peace, MC.
My brother subscribed to OnTV back in the day. My family was the first on the block to do so. I remember watching movies such as "Private Benjamin", "Ordinary People", "Dressed To Kill". And I remember the "Adults Only" (that's how OnTV billed it)entertainment that began at 11:00 PM. This was the period in which I fell in love (lust, really) with Harry Reems, Eric Edwards, Paul Thomas, Joey Silvera, Jamie Gillis, et. al. Ah, my boyhood....
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