Behind the Green Door (1972)
By James Bontemps
Marilyn Ann Briggs was born April 22, 1952 in Providence, Rhode Island and grew up in Westport, Connecticut.
Her father tried to discourage her from pursuing a modeling career. “Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always wanted to be an actress,” Marilyn said in 1997. “I was always a performer, a junior Olympic diver, a junior Olympic gymnast. My mother always told me I was a show-off”.
During her early career as a model, her most prominent job was as the “Ivory Soap Girl” on the Ivory Snow soap flake box, posing as a mother holding a baby under the tag line “99 & 44/100% pure”.
In 1970, the 18 year old Marilyn was living in San Francisco and working to earn money as a nude dancer in clubs, although she really wanted to be a model and actress.
“It was the age of being free,” she says. “Love, Sex and Happiness. I was just a hippie chick.”
The only acting job that she got was in a low budget Sean S. Cunningham film called ‘Together’, which was also Wes Craven’s directorial debut.
In that rare film, 18 year old Marilyn shows off her outstanding Junior Olympic diving skills as she dives completely nude several times into a pool.
MARILYN BRIGGS IN ‘TOGETHER’ (1971)
Marilyn tried to get work in theater and dance groups in San Francisco, but with little success.
She saw an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle for a casting call for what was billed as a “major motion picture”. She rushed to the audition only to find it was for a pornographic film, which was to be called “Behind the Green Door”, produced, directed and written by the Mitchell Brothers and based on an anonymous short story of the same name.
Not wanting to participate in explicit and very real sex on film, Marilyn decided that by asking for an unrealistically high salary and other requirements, that the Mitchell Brothers would not hire her, but to her surprise, they called her ‘bluff’ and got her to sign a contract for the film – meeting all of her demands. At this point she took the professional name Marilyn Chambers, for which she is best known.
While Marilyn understood that the film involved sex, she did not really have any idea of what would be involved beyond the basic plot of a wealthy San Francisco socialite, Gloria Saunders (Chambers), taken against her will to an elite sex club and loved “as she’s never been loved before”.
Though she plays the central character, Chambers does not have a single word of dialogue. This made it easy for the producers to do whatever they wanted to her, and ensure that her reactions were very real.
“Each sequence was a surprise to me”, she said in 1987. “They never told me what was happening next. I just did it as it happened, and it worked.
In the scene where Johnnie Keyes is fucking her, it is so real that Marilyn actually passed out as she climaxed.
If you have never seen it, it is an absolute delight. To see such a beautiful innocent teen girl subjected to such explicit raw and real sex, on film and in front of an audience, not knowing what they were going to do to her, was incredible back then and still holds up today.
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