Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow Porn Star, Dead at 56

The collision of phrases like “hotel heiress” and “wholesome model” with “sex video” can make a nonentity a media sensation. Three decades before Paris Hilton, Chambers became just that, as an Ivory Snow model who headlined the hard-core porno film Behind the Green Door. She sustained that golden notoriety for more than three decades, until she was found dead on April 12 in her Los Angeles mobile home at the age of 56.

In the early-’70s surge of porno chic, when Deep Throat lured millions of moviegoers into watching people having sex onscreen, Chambers’ handsome, healthy 99 44/100% prurient image gave porn a fresh suburban face. If someone like her could be in XXX cinema, the mass audience figured, maybe it wasn’t so scuzzy after all.

A midlevel model and aspiring actress, Chambers told Green Door’s directors, Jim and Artie Mitchell, she’d make the film only if she were paid $25,000–a royal sum in the porno world–and a percentage of the gross. The movie was a hit, and Chambers became the Marilyn of her day.

In her early fame, she published an autobiography, appeared on college panels to discuss eroticism and starred in David Cronenberg’s 1977 Rabid as the carrier in a sexual pandemic. When porn moved to video, Chambers went with it, frolicking in hard- and soft-core epics into her 50s.

In 2004, she ran for Vice President with the Personal Choice Party–an apt affiliation for the woman who had revealed her most intimate sexual choices to two generations of eager voyeurs.