Review by Booklist Review
Candice Vadala, better known as Candida Royalle, was a feminist. She was also a "porn queen," a writer, founder of porn production company Femme (which specialized in female pleasure), and much more. In this biography of Vadala, as well as the postwar American culture that bore her and the late twentieth-century culture wars that she helped shape, Harvard historian Kamensky (A Revolution in Color, 2016) traces the full arc of her subject's life, from a childhood rife with tumult and abuse to her 2015 death from cancer. Vadala's journals and notes towards an unfinished memoir supply insight into how she lived and understood various experiences, including her first time dropping acid and how she rationalized her "self-prostitution" in skin flicks. Following Vadala's lead, Kamensky's biography refuses the binary between a pleasure-driven feminism and a victim-driven one to show how sex work and its cultures can be both liberating and oppressive. As Vadala said shortly before she died, "the so-called sexual revolution" gave women "the right to say yes, but kind of took away our right to say no."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Harvard historian Kamensky (A Revolution in Color) delivers a powerful portrait of the "profoundly uniquely 20th century life" of erotic film star Candida Royalle (1950--2015), née Candice Vadala. Raised in Riverdale, an upscale Bronx neighborhood, by her father (a sex offender) and stepmother (after her mother abandoned the family), Royalle came of age in the era of the pill, women's liberation, psychedelics, psychoanalysis, and "the world that made Deep Throat, and that Deep Throat made in turn." After dropping out of college, she joined a boyfriend in San Francisco, where she "felt herself blossoming into a performer." She took odd jobs until she discovered nude modeling (and heroin), which led to adult films and a brush with Hollywood as an extra in the orgy scene of Blake Edwards's feature film 10. In 1980, she married a fellow porn star as the adult film industry took off thanks to the introduction of the VCR and cable TV. Soon after, Royalle's byline "began appearing in the sex press" and she cofounded Femme Productions, a feminist and sex-positive porn production company. Drawing from Royalle's private archives at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Kamensky utilizes her subject's long career in the sex industry, including pioneering work producing erotic safe-sex education videos, as a window into the AIDS epidemic and the feminist movement. It's a captivating biography of a major figure of the sexual revolution. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Behind the pornography nom de plume Candida Royalle was Candice Vadala (1950--2015). Working extensively with Vadala's diaries, historian Kamensky (A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley) sets the porn actress and producer's life and career in parallel with the wider events of '60s and '70s counterculture, second-wave feminism, the anti-pornography crusade, and the changing landscape of pornography itself. Born in post-World War II New York, Vadala survived familial abuse and substance-use disorder. In the 1970s, social and political upheavals spurred a young Vadala to head for California, where she began working as an pornography performer--and eventually as Candida. By the 1980s, she had moved from acting to creating pornographic films and established Femme Productions, which she launched to make erotic movies that would appeal to women and align with her feminist ideals; she always tried to reconcile her values with her career, Kamensky argues. This in-depth biography makes a good argument that Vadala is an unsung history maker. VERDICT For readers interested in works about feminism and sex in the late 20th century or in biographies of historically overlooked women.--Kathleen McCallister
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