Sex Is My Business (1974)

 

A bit of an info dump about the softcore loop ‘Sex Is My Business’ and the players in that story...for whatever record exists.  I rarely write about Mary Millington these days, it feels a lifetime ago since I last did so, but in the words of Badfinger “all our sins should be confessed before we carry on”.

Porn actor ‘Short Jack Gold’ remembers Sex Is My Business being filmed late on a Saturday night in 1974.  A sex shop called Lovecraft, in London’s Coventry Street was the shooting location.  Calling the shots was smut-meister general George Harrison Marks, who Short Jack Gold had worked for since 1972, after answering an advert Marks had placed for talent in Time Out magazine.  “I had seen pictures of him in some of the Kamera magazines I had squirreled away in my teenage home, so I knew exactly who he was. I have to admit to being more than a little excited” remembers SJG “It became pretty evident very early on in the interview that the increasingly louche looking GHM was drunk as a skunk. He spoke in a deep affected manner-  like an old time actor-and proceeded to tell me about his work. There was no market he said, for the usual glamour stuff. Too much competition, he moaned, and the punters wanted something stronger. I was offered a glass of something, and asked if I was interested in doing some "Blue" Not knowing what that meant precisely, and feeling the strength of the something in my glass permeating my senses, I naturally said… "yes...very".

  

Marks had been declared bankrupt at the start of the 1970s, and legally wasn’t able to run his own business.  So operated as a freelance man during the decade, selling his work to other pornographers like Russell Gay, Charlie Brown and David Sullivan.  Sex Is My Business ended up being acquired by Sullivan’s Kelerfern company, and was sold on 8mm through Sullivan’s top shelf magazines...£12 for the black and white version, £22 for it in colour.  Relations between Marks and Sullivan were not destined to end well.  The subject of Sullivan becoming a sore point for Marks, who was prone to rants about “the fat little monster who eats a box of chocolates every morning for breakfast”.  The film became a lucrative pick-up for Sullivan on account of it starring Mary Millington, whose subsequent fame through his magazines gave it obvious appeal to his readership.

The genesis of the career Millington that would become famous for had begun a few years earlier when she forwarded test shots of herself to Mayfair magazine.  Her letter was answered by veteran glamour photographer Ed Alexander (died. 2014), who saw potential in her as a nude model, giving Millington her desired foot into the door of that industry.  All the characters in that world...Ed Alexander, George Harrison Marks, Russell Gay, June Palmer...knew each other, and chances are if you impressed one, you’d get the chance to work with the others.  Ed Alexander was particularly close to Harrison Marks’ wife Toni, who tended to get on better with men than women.  Short Jack Gold has fond memories of Toni H.M, but members of Toni’s own sex have a different tale to tell.  “Toni was a strange woman.  I found her bitchy and quick to criticise the looks of other women” one of Marks’ models told me “(Toni) pointed at me and remarked that one of my breasts was slightly larger then the other.  This is normal and didn’t faze me- but it was a stupid observation”. 

Toni has a small non-sex role in Sex Is My Business, playing one of the punters milling about a sex shop.  Once Toni has departed from the screen, the sex in the eleven minute short kicks off when another customer (Short Jack Gold) accidentally drops a powerful aphrodisiac on the shop floor, rendering the staff and the punters sex crazy.  In a self-congratulatory touch, the sex shop is stocked up on Marks’ old June Palmer nudie loops, while the peep booths are playing his more recent softcore offerings like ‘Santa’s Coming’ in which SJG plays a horny Father Christmas.  Although Millington wasn’t remotely famous when Sex Is My Business was made, Marks seems to have instinctively picked up on her star quality.  She becomes the film’s main source of eroticism, whether she is making out with an afro-ed chick, or dragging a male customer to the backroom, thoughtfully turning on the CCTV system so the other customers can get an eyeful.  The most memorable use of Millington in the film is a POV shot from the customer she is straddling, which culminates in Millington practically swallowing the camera lens. 

For many years Sex Is My Business remained a mystery title in the Millington filmography.  In the early 1980s David Sullivan is said to have junked all his physical copies of the film when its commercial value ran dry and video largely supplanted the 8mm market. A similar fate befell the theatrical trailers to the softcore feature films Sullivan produced, with only the trailer for ‘Come Play with Me’ having since resurfaced.   Around 2008, I was in touch with a film collector who owned some terrifically rare British erotica from the early days of VHS.  Generous with his collection, it was through him I got to see the BBFC banned ‘Precious Jewels’, the Stanley Long rarity ‘It Could Happen To You’, and the Shelagh Harrison big bust fetish video ‘Erotic Images’.  The really intriguing part of his collection though was a Super 8mm film with the handwritten label ‘Sex Shop starring Mary Millington’.  He had gotten this as part of a deal several years before, but not owning a projector, never had the chance to check it out.  After a bit of nudging from yours truly, he sent it off to be transferred to DVD by an online company who I knew to be discreet and willing to work on adult material, having previously used them myself to have Marks’ mad doctor themed 8mm softcore short ‘Dolly Mixture’ transferred to disc.  Seeing Marks’ name on the resultant 8mm to DVD transfer of Sex Is My Business came as quite the surprise, given that prior thinking had it that John Lindsay was the film’s director and Marks had claimed to never have worked with Millington outside of Come Play With Me.  Marks’ directorial hand is all over Sex Is My Business however, quite literally, as he manages to get his hand into shot whilst giving camera directions during the exterior footage of Coventry Street.  The 2008 transfer of Sex Is My Business was adequate, but when Come Play with Me was being prepared for a bells and whistles DVD release in 2010, I was asked to provide contact details for the owner of the Super 8mm copy of Sex Is My Business.  In order that a second, more professional transfer could be made and included as a DVD extra.  Thus, a superior copy of Sex Is My Business was able to rise from the ashes of yesterday’s pornography. 

Toni and George Harrison Marks were living apart by the end of the 1970s.  In March 1977, George found himself in court, charged with assaulting Toni, and he eventually left the St. John’s Wood apartment they shared together.  After the separation, Toni decided to muscle in on George’s business, and along with her new boyfriend Arthur, began making softcore loops –intended for the 8mm market- at the St. John’s Wood place.  Short Jack Gold starred in one, opposite Shelagh Harrison who had a day job working as a secretary at ITN, where she is said to have set a famous newsreader up on dates with Page 3 girls.  During the filming of the loops Toni seemed delusional, claiming these would lead her to an important film directing career.  Toni’s catty nature soon pissed off the other women involved in the loops.  “To be frank, I disliked her” remembered one “I thought that Toni fancied herself as a woman who could manipulate others and scare them into working as slaves.  The film I did with Toni was the first and the last.  Her attitude and manner of talking to others was unpleasant”.  As far as anyone knows, Toni and Arthur’s softcore loops never saw the light of day, and it is believed she subsequently emigrated to Australia. 

George Harrison Marks worked with Mary Millington on at least two other occasions outside of Come Play with Me and Sex Is My Business.  Prior to splitting up with Toni, he’d photographed an explicit, inter-racial lesbian photo shoot featuring Millington and her Afro-ed Sex Is My Business co-star at the St John’s Wood apartment (there may also be a film to accompany that shoot called ‘Blonde on Black’ but nobody has been able to trace that one).

In early 1979, right towards the end of her life, Millington and Marks were thrown together one more time.  By 1979, Millington had achieved fame and was no longer appearing in porn loops.  She and her hubby had taken up residence at a six-bedroom house in Surrey that Millington claimed to own... a claim that has been disputed in some quarters.  In her will Millington left £23, 521.  A tidy sum by the standards of the late 1970s, but not enough to have owned a six-bedroom house in Surrey, the two sex shops that she and her husband ran and the Villa in Fuengirola that she also claimed to own.  The numbers just don’t add up there.  In 1987, The Sunday Sport reported that Millington’s financial affairs were still being investigated by the Inland Revenue, eight years after she had died.  The article claimed Millington had been aided by “plenty of advice from the business tycoons she gave her favours to” and complimented the deceased on “having a real head for business”.

The exclusive Surrey address, which Millington would ultimately die in, was used for sex related business on several occasions.  In 1979, Euro loop company Color Climax hired the premises, employing Marks to shoot a hardcore loop there, the charmingly titled ‘Cockpit Cunts’ sometimes known under the more polite title ‘The Aviator’.  Short Jack Gold stars as a lucky bloke who knocks on the door of chez Millington, and ends up in a four person orgy that takes place in the bedroom, and on the very bed, that Millington committed suicide in a few months later.  SJG remembered Millington being “in and out of the house during the day when we were there”, but seemed disinterested in what was going on, having presumably seen enough people having sex for one lifetime.  Harrison Marks was deeply affected by Millington’s death, according to his girlfriend at the time, he spent the day venting his spleen over the taxmen he believed had sadistically hounded Millington to death, as well as reopening old wounds over he who eats chocolate for breakfast.  A deeply superstitious man, it’s likely Marks interpreted Millington killing herself in a room he’d filmed at a few months earlier as bad karma.  After Cockpit Cunts, Marks never worked in hardcore porn again, instead focusing all of his attention on spanking videos and magazines.  Sex, at least in the conventional sense, was no longer his business, but his years in hardcore, dealings with Sullivan and the death of Millington all left a bad taste in Marks’ mouth that not even his superhuman consumption of alcohol could wash away.