“I never set out to be the world’s most famous pussy,” Tera Patrick said.
Tera Patrick is all over Las Vegas this week. Dueling billboards on either side of Interstate 15 advertise her presence at both a Friday party at Ivan Kane’s Forty Deuce and at Saturday’s AVN Awards. Her Friday event competes with Jenna Jameson’s.
In Van Nuys at the pink-draped Teravision offices, Evan Seinfeld is on the phone, attempting to find a Mandalay Bay employee who knows how to deal with the likes of Tera Patrick.
“Can you get me someone who knows how to treat celebrities, please?” he is saying. He wants to book extra nights at the Mandalay, because AVN has only paid for two, and she’s hosting the awards. The flustered employee quotes Seinfeld a figure.
“Any Joe Shmo can walk in off the street and get that rate,” he says.
Read more after the gap.
Tera Patrick is the biggest star in porn, period. She rattles off some of the 75 magazine covers she’s been on in 2007, including the final issue of FHM. She has traveled to 40 cities in 15 countries in the past six months. Seinfeld pipes in that Teravision was just assessed at $20 million.
And you know what? That’s not a lot of money. But in porn it’s huge, especially as the company is centered around her.
Patrick supplies a reality check vis a vis porn fame: “I know Gwyneth Paltrow has seen my pussy, but I’ve never seen hers.”
Where Patrick goes from here is uncertain, because there is no roadmap beyond where she is.
“I’m moving into semi-retirement,” she said. “I don’t want to think, ‘Am I sucking in my stomach? Did I do my glutes today?’
“I can see myself with a silver bun on my head and an armful of dogs, just hiking the Canyon.”
Patrick met Seinfeld when the latter played Aryan Nation criminal Jaz Hoyt on the HBO series “Oz”.
“I saw him on TV and I made a few calls,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for love, if you know what I mean. But he didn’t call. I thought, ‘That’s weird.’
“Usually I was the one being pursued,” she said. “Finally he called and he said he was nervous. I was in L.A., he was in New York, and we just kept talking. We fell in love over the phone.”
Before he was an actor, Seinfeld fronted the band Biohazard. It was during a Biohazard show that actor Chris Meloni of “Oz” saw Seinfeld onstage and thought he would be a good character in the prison population of the show.
“I lucked into that,” Seinfeld said. “But getting into porn was a different story.”
When Seinfeld and Patrick hooked up in 2002, they were both famous. And while musicians will welcome a porn star girlfriend, Seinfeld found the adult industry distrustful.
“I was carrying Tera’s suitcase once and somebody snapped a picture. The caption was something like ‘Evan Seinfeld: Suitcase Pimp’. I was like, ‘Hey Tera! They’re calling me a pimp!'”
“And I said, ‘It’s not what you think it means,'” Patrick said.
Seinfeld had walked into a world where a large number of women are controlled by a small number of men, and the introduction of a boyfriend into a porn star’s career usually means trouble. For women in porn with new mates, the pattern usually goes downhill from limiting the number of their male partners to working exclusively with women to dropping out of the industry altogether.
And the trap porn presents is that few in the business admit it’s easy and few outside of it can imagine it’s difficult, creating a suspicion of “outsiders” who might discover, as Seinfeld noted, that “in the adult industry all you gotta do is show up”. Then those same people think that porn should run the way any other business does, which it doesn’t.
“People were worried about me, bringing the outsider in,” Patrick said. “They said ‘She’s gonna run him over – he’s gonna break her jaw.'”
But they stayed together. They were married in Vegas on January 9, 2004 during the AVN Expo.
“It was a dozen porn people at the wedding, a dozen Hell’s Angels, and a couple of hookers who crashed the party,” Seinfeld said.
One reason porn relationships – or any relationship – are so fraught with uncertainty is that the partners are often unequal. And being in business together is even harder.
“But both of us came into this already established,” Patrick said, “And we were so appreciative of each other.”
“I spent 15 years on a band tour bus,” Seinfeld said. “I’ve been screwed and railroaded and learned business from the ground up, so with Teravision – “
” – He does so much on a daily basis – ” Patrick said.
” – No one handed us the keys and gave us Dad’s porn company.”
And where Patrick would prefer to go home at the end of the day and watch basic cable. Seinfeld says, “I’m the disco queen of the family. I’m the 14-year-old at the Danceteria. And she likes to go into her Pink Room and nest and play with her pretty things.”
When the couple go out, they need an entourage and a V.I.P. area.
“You can’t just walk into a nightclub situation with Tera,” Seinfeld said (almost wearily). “You have to rope the place off and make the entrance secure, otherwise she’s mobbed.”
The couple started Teravision in 2003 and have spun off from it Iron Cross, an imprint Seinfeld said would feature “first rate gonzo”, and Patrick’s fashion line, Mistress Couture. In addition, they have begun bringing other directors into the fold at Teravision, such as Dave Navarro.
And where the rest of the adult world is focusing on the annual AVN trade show and Awards, she and Seinfeld are treating it like a nutritious part of their delicious weekly schedule.
“We went to the Led Zeppelin show (in December),” Patrick said. “Jason (Bonham) called up and said, ‘I’m playing foor my dad’s show, do you want to come?”
Patrick’s semi-retirement is only from porn. She wants mainstream celebrity without Britney Spears’ notoriety.
“People like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan just don’t have the right people around them,” she said.
“It’s my goal to be omnipresent in the world,” she said. “I’ve never denounced being a porn star. I know couples who have made babies to me, and I’m very proud of that. I know there’s a Baby Tera out there somewhere.”
Previously: Tera’s Christmas Presence; Tera Patrick appears on Internet
See also: Tera Patrick
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