Sinner Takes All: A Memoir of Love and Porn

CHAPTER 26 The Power of Tera

Working with Evan as my manager, my costar, and the CEO of my company was starting to really pay off. On a personal level, it brought us even closer together. On a business level, all of the moves that he made—from lining up my feature dancing gigs to the deal with Vivid to encouraging me to expand my sexual horizons on film—led to my big crossover year in 2006. This was the year Evan vowed to take me from top of the porn world to the mainstream world.

When I entered the adult industry, it was not my goal to become a mainstream actress or star. If that’s what I wanted to do, I would’ve gone the typical route of taking acting lessons, going in for auditions, and trying to get bit parts like every Hollywood hopeful does. But that wasn’t my quest. I’ll be honest, I just wanted to be famous and I liked to model and to be nude. Porn was satisfying. But once the idea of mainstream popularity started becoming more of a possibility, I was pretty excited at the non-adult-industry opportunities that started coming my way.

Evan’s first mission was to get me on the cover of a major mainstream magazine. Evan set his sights on FHM. It was hip and known for its sexy covers and classy spreads. He worked those FHM editors for months, letting them know what I was up to and dragging me out to every FHM party so I could network with the magazine and be seen on their red carpets. Finally, one day we got the call. They wanted to shoot me. But at first, I thought it was just another one- or two-page feature. I had no idea it would be for the cover and that I would be the only porn star to ever grace the cover of FHM! That was a huge deal.

I shot the FHM cover on January 30, 2006, at Quixote Studios in Studio City. What a way to kick off the year. About a month after the shoot, Evan got the call from the editor at FHM who told him, “Guess what? It’s going to be our July cover.” When Evan told me, I couldn’t believe it. He said FHM felt that the photos were just too good not to use—I’d have the cover plus an eight-page spread in the magazine. I went to bed that night with the biggest smile on my face and gave my husband the sex of his life as a thank-you. The FHM cover and the Playboy cover from 2002 are the two proudest moments of my career.

Even though Evan and I proved that I could be successful in life after Digital Playground, landing this cover really nailed it for me. Every little bit of mainstream success I would get, I thought of it as a big “fuck-you” to Digital, and that felt good. It further proved that I could do it on my own, and that was the best feeling ever.

I couldn’t believe how many people came out for my signings of the cover, which had the headline THE POWER OF TERA, at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square on June 19 and the Virgin Megastore at Hollywood and Highland in L.A. the next day. I’d done many signings at porn conventions and adult video stores, but I had never done a mainstream store like Virgin and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. My fans didn’t disappoint, coming out by the hundreds. To my surprise, there were a lot of fans there who didn’t know me from porn, they just knew this cover and came out for that. The FHM cover was the crossover moment of my career and really put me on the mainstream map. I ended up on their Sexiest Women in the World list that year (number 57, not bad for a porn chick!).

That one cover brought a new level of recognition, and with that my fears and anxiety increased. I didn’t feel safe doing everyday things, like shopping or getting gas, by myself. It was probably one part paranoia, one part reality. One day I was grocery shopping in my neighborhood and a guy was following me around the store. He kept his distance and didn’t make contact with me, but he was definitely following me. I left that store and went to another one and he showed up there as well. That really scared me. I’d have to call Evan to rescue me sometimes because I didn’t feel safe driving home by myself and risking this guy finding out where I lived So, Evan would sometimes come out to get me or tell me to drive around a bit to make sure no one was actually following me.

The upside, of course, was that lots of new doors were opening for me. I did a ton of mainstream TV, including E! True Hollywood Story: Rock Star Wives, VH1’s Top 40 Hottest Rockstar Girlfriends and Wives, WE’s The Secret Lives of Women, A&E’s Mindfreak, Spike TV’s Guys Choice Awards, and HBO’s porn documentary Thinking XXX, and I hosted the AVN Awards in its most pivotal year—2008, the year it finally crossed over to the mainstream by airing on Show-time for the first time.

Also in 2006 we appeared on VH1’s show SuperGroup, which featured a bunch of musicians getting together to form a band, write a song, and play a show. Evan was invited to participate, along with such legends as Jason Bonham and Ted Nugent; one of my favorite singers ever, Sebastian Bach of Skid Row; as well as Scott Ian from Anthrax, which was the closest in genre to Evan’s band, Biohazard. The show shot for about two weeks at an extravagant mansion in Las Vegas.

One week the wives were invited, and Scott’s wife (and Meat Loaf’s daughter), Pearl, greeted me with a big hello. I gave her an even bigger hug, and the two of us became close pals. Pearl’s a very touchy-feely, huggy, warm-spirited girl, who would always greet Evan and me with a sweet kiss on the lips. We didn’t think anything of it, of course, until one night Pearl was a little buzzed and said to me, “Scott doesn’t want me to have sex with you.”

I just thought to myself, “Hmmm. Why on Earth would she say that?” At the time I was really confused and thought, well, I guess everyone thinks that since I’m a porn star that I’m out to fuck them. Pearl and I are good friends; I respect her a lot as a woman for all she’s accomplished, and not only do I think she is beautiful and talented, but she and Scott have been good friends and supporters of me.

When it came to Sebastian and his wife, Maria, though, things steamed up big-time. Sebastian and I hit it off immediately over our shared love of smoking weed. He caught me trying to roll a joint one day and laughed at my poor form. “Here, let me show you how to do that right,” he said, as he took the rolling paper and some weed and rolled the perfect joint. I was a huge ’80s rock fan when I was a teen and drooled over Sebastian’s photos in rock magazines, so I felt like a schoolgirl every time we hung out. Sebastian was so funny about smoking. He didn’t care if the VH1 cameras caught him; he only cared if Ted Nugent caught him. I think he looked up to Ted like a father figure because his own dad had passed away. He would get really paranoid of Ted finding out. (I guess now he’ll know. Sorry, Sebastian.)

Sebastian’s wife, Maria, was super hot, and there was a lot of innocent sexual energy between Evan and me and Sebastian and Maria. We decided to do something about all that energy. Not a foursome, though we came close! Instead, we decided to do a very sexy photo shoot of Maria and me for our husbands. It was our little treat for them. One of Evan’s many talents is his photographic work, and over the years, he’s photographed me many times. So he grabbed his photo equipment, even found someone to be his photo assistant, and set up a sizzling shoot in the room we were staying in. We had the best room in the house. It was a round room with hand-painted dragons on the walls, a round bed in the center, and a badass custom motorcycle for adornment… perfect for a photo shoot.

Sebastian was hilarious during the shoot. He kept making these noises because he was so excited to see his wife half-naked with another woman. But at the same time, he couldn’t stop directing her and it seemed to make her nervous. I’ll never forget when Maria laid me back on the bike and we were face to face. If it weren’t for Sebastian and his big mouth interrupting the moment, who knows what would’ve happened. Well, I know what would’ve happened.

It wasn’t all sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll during SuperGroup, though. Evan and I had our romantic moments too. One night, Evan told me to be ready in twenty minutes because the show’s limo would be taking us somewhere. We really abused our limo privileges during that shoot. I assumed we were going to dinner or a strip club, as per usual. But instead, we pulled up to a wedding chapel, and the second I saw the chapel sign, I started to cry.

“Again?” I said to Evan, being that this would be the third time we renewed our vows.

“Yep, again,” he said.

Our theory on getting married over and over again was this: You don’t go to the gym just once and stay fit for life. So, why commit yourself to each other just once in your life? Renewing our vows and recommitting ourselves to each other is like maintenance for our marriage. It’s constant work and needs constant reaffirmations. So, we said our “I Do’s” in front of an Elvis Presley impersonator and the VH1 crew, and I felt giddy like a new bride all over again. We hopped back in the limo, closed the partition, and made love like newlyweds once again.

ONE DAY IN 2006, we got a call from the producers of Will Ferrell’s movie Blades of Glory. His character in the movie is this washed-up ice-skating pro who is trying to make a comeback and part of his backstory was that he did a porn movie that won an AVN award called The Iceman Cometh. The producers were looking for two porn stars to pose with Will for a fake DVD box cover of the movie. When they called me I was thrilled and said yes immediately. They asked me who I thought should be the second girl for the shoot and I chose Stormy Daniels because we were friends and had worked together before.

Apparently, the reason they set up the shoot on a Sunday was because the producer Patrick Esposito said that people at Paramount might be uptight about having porn chicks on the lot. It was a pretty intense set. Porn shoots are so low-key, but this was very high-energy and very Hollywood. You’d hear on the walkie-talkies, “Tera and Stormy are coming out of their dressing room.” “Tera and Stormy are walking.” “Go for Patrick.” It was so funny.

All of a sudden, we look around and there are hundreds of people looking on. Patrick told us it was 450 people to be exact, which was just about everyone who worked for or at Paramount. So much for keeping it quiet on a Sunday afternoon! The director said he’d never seen anything like this before. It was flattering.

The shoot was fun. We posed in fur bikinis with huge furry boots, looking like sexy cavewomen. When I first met Will, I was shocked at how much makeup he had on. I thought porn makeup was heavy, but it was nothing compared to movie makeup. We said our hellos to Will, and he got right down to business: “Awesome, ladies. Let’s get to work.” Stormy and I were on either side of Will, straddling his legs as he stood there, legs spread wide, making funny faces and cracking us up. He really has a way of contorting his face to fit the goofy character perfectly. I’ve never had someone make me laugh out loud without uttering a word like Will Ferrell did. He was hilarious.

From the Blades of Glory shoot

“Grab Tera’s hair,” the director told Will, who, by the way, could not have been nicer.

Will takes a handful of my hair and picks it up like he’s picking up a butterfly or something.

I told him, “No, grab it harder.” I love getting my hair pulled, so I thought I’d have some fun with Will.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“No, really, it’s OK,” I insisted.

So he grabs my hair again and it’s still gentle as hell. So, Stormy gets in on the action: “Grab it, Will! Grab it harder!”

Will still wouldn’t grab it harder. He kept saying, “No, no, I don’t want to.” Everyone’s yelling, “Grab it harder!” He must have thought we were crazy. He was such a gentleman and very kind. But damn him for not yanking on my hair!

One of my favorite opportunities in 2006, though, was being on the animated show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which airs on The Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. I always wanted someone to make me into a cartoon. I mean, who doesn’t want to be animated, right? The funniest part is that in the show they had me in a tiny blue bikini on all fours, eating a corn dog!

When I got to the voice-over studio to tape my lines, there was a hot dog sitting on the console next to my headphones. Hmmm. That’s odd, I thought. Maybe someone left their lunch in the booth. “Oh, that hot dog is for you,” the director said.

“Huh?”

“Yeah, the scene calls for you to be eating a corn dog while you’re talking, but we could’t find one so we got you this hot dog to eat while you’re reading your lines,” he said.

Hmmm. Was this just a cheap ruse to get a porn star to eat a hot dog in front of them? Nope. The script really did have me chowing down. “OK. I don’t eat hot dogs, but I’ll give it a whirl,” I said. So, down the hatch it went. I never actually watched the episode I was on until three years later, and I have to say, I cracked up over how they had me on all fours throughout the entire thing. It was hilarious. And of course, the video of me eating the hot dog made it onto YouTube and the DVD release. The episode, titled “Grim Reaper Gutters,” aired on November 19, 2006.

I gained so much more recognition from all of these endeavors, which felt fantastic. But more important, I made my family proud. Sure, they had accepted my life in porn, but it wasn’t exactly something they could brag about to their friends and coworkers. With the work I did in 2006 and beyond, they finally had some PG-13 things they could hold up and say, “This is my daughter!” Every time I’d get on a VH1 show or E! or in the news, they’d call up all their friends and say, “There’s Linda!” Fans have asked me in the past if my family watched my work. And I just have to laugh. Yeah, right. We have Tera Patrick movie nights and eat popcorn while watching my porn. But now there are actually shows we can watch together and be proud of. It felt great that my family could finally participate in my success.

Of course, all this helped my mental state. My “crazy Tera” episodes were few and far between. I was feeling great about my career, happy, and really satisfied and rewarded for working so hard all these years. I finally got to a place where I didn’t have to work as much and I could pick and choose what projects I wanted to do. And we did it our way. Evan was kicking ass as my manager, and I was happy not just for myself, but also for him. It was hard for naysayers to put him down at this point. Just three years before, I was suicidal and now we were able to have the last laugh. I’d been dragged through so much shit, and we came out smelling like roses.

Being happy in my marriage and career also helped me with my family affairs. But what especially helped was being close with Evan’s family. I didn’t grow up with that close-knit family unit and I’ve had an inconsistent relationship with my father over the years; a long-distance one with my sister Debby; and no relationship with my mother until 2009. So when the Seinfelds welcomed me with open arms, I accepted their love and let them be my family. Evan was lucky to have a mother and father still together after all these years.

I think they accepted me because they saw how in love Evan and I were and how much I cared about Evan’s son, Sammy. And they respected me as a successful businesswoman. Evan says that he grew closer to his parents after we got together because it showed them that he finally was settling down in life. I learned how to be the perfect wife from Lois, Evan’s mom. That was always one of my goals in life, to be a housewife in addition to a porn star. And Lois and Ira were very instrumental in bringing that side of my personality out and helping me achieve that personal goal. I learned how to cook Jewish foods, such as latkes. My favorite vacations were visiting them in Boynton Beach. I’d play shuffleboard and shop at the 99-cent store with Lois and visit museums with Ira. And they would always treat me as if I was just a normal housewife. It settled my heart.

The culmination of the year for us would be what the Seinfelds call “Fake Hanukkah.” Evan’s parents are “snow birds.” They stay in Florida in the winter and fly up to visit the rest of the family in New York in the warmer months. So instead of celebrating Hanukkah in the dead of the December winter, we’d celebrate it on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, because it wasn’t as cold and it was the latest the whole family would stay in New York. The entire family would be there, and we’d cook a huge Jewish meal with latkes, chopped liver, tongue, and corned beef. Everyone would be shouting at one another in good fun. We even had a dreidel, and would light the menorah together. It was your typical big, loud, Jewish family dinner, and I just loved it. Even though it wasn’t at the year’s end, it completed the year for us.

I also love being a stepmother to Sammy, who was just six years old when I met Evan. He’s fifteen years old now. Sammy is such a good kid, and I took to him immediately. He called me “Twear” when we first met, and he still says that today. Between 2003 and 2008, Evan and I were bicoastal, commuting back and forth from Los Angeles to New York to see Sammy on weekends. (Evan had partial custody—Elena had him weekdays and Evan had him weekends.) It was quite the commute for a weekend because not only did we fly for six hours cross-country, we also had to fight rush-hour Friday traffic in New York to get from our place to where Sammy lived with his mother. But I couldn’t wait to do it each time.

I’d make him breakfast every morning and we’d watch SpongeBob SquarePants marathons when he was a kid and play video games together as he got older. I’d take him shopping at the mall, teach him how to spike his hair with gel, and just hang out and chill. When I appeared in the game Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood and became a special producer for Saints Row 2, I scored big points with him because it was something he could show off to his friends. He even got to test drive Saints Row 2 a few months before it was released and was thrilled about that. Once he got older, we’d fly him to L.A. for weekends, and he once told us that he doesn’t tell his friends about his jet-set lifestyle because they wouldn’t believe him.