For Goodness' Seka

The Chicago porn queen ties the knot

HTERE is Seka, the Platinum Princess of Pom, the Marilyn Monroe of Erotica, sniffling and dripping. Seka has a cold. She has been in bed with chopped liver and chicken soup for days now, trying to recuperate. Her all-gray Chicago apartment, which she shares with two gray cockatiels named Disco and Theque (as in discotheque), is warm and airless. I have been sitting at Seka's desk, perusing her clippings, most of them from glossy skin sheets. There isn't much to read. Photographs abound, however, and feature the impossibly blonde contortionist engaged in a numbing array of imaginative acts. For years, she has proudly claimed to be the only platinum-haired performer in adult films, even though dark roots occasionally showed in her earlier work. The first thing I decide to ask her is whether she is naturally blonde. She snorts and says coyly, "Now, darling, do you think I'm going to tell you that?"

Seka, pronounced "saycah," is not her real name. She chose the pseudonym, which is Yugoslavian for "sweetie," after a lawyer informed her that people whose names include the letter k tend to succeed. Her friends call her Dottie. Her accountants call her often. In the adult-entertainment industry, Seka is a megastar, a box-office bombshell who gives good receipts and takes home chunky percentage points.

Her popularity in the booming home-video market is unparalleled, leaving in the dust both Linda {Deep Throat) Lovelace, who is now born-again, and Marilyn {Behind the Green Door) Chambers, who has done only six erotic films. Seka has lost count of her output, but guesses that her ten-year filmography boasts more than thirty dirty titles. Among them: Inside Seka, Lust at First Bite, Exhausted, and the as-yet-unre\eased Sunny Days, her first film in three years. Her reason for the hiatus: "I was getting overexposed."

She was bom, according to her press release, thirty years ago in rural Radford,

Virginia, and raised primly. She claims to have had her first sexual experience on her wedding night; she was eighteen. That marriage ended quickly, and soon after, while working in an adult bookstore, she became smitten with smut and smelled opportunity. "Just looking at some of the women in the business, I thought, My God, if those girls can do it, I can do it twice as good and make a bloody fortune!" The rest is histrionics. And hygiene.

Phil Donahue once asked her what aspect of her work she found most difficult. "The acting," she replied.

She concedes to me that she used to be a "horrible actress" before enrolling in drama and diction courses, where she shed her gooey southern drawl and acquired a harsh Chicago twang. "No pun intended," she twinkles, "but it's all in the placement of the tongue. ' ' I wonder if she has considered using pom as a stepping-stone to slip into the Hollywood mainstream. "Never," she asserts, mentioning that she turned down a role in The Cotton Club. "At least in my industry the casting couch is on the screen. In the other, socalled legitimate industry, it's behind the screen, and you're lucky if you ever get off the couch. You usually end up under it."

Seka is a closet capitalist. She lives in Chicago, she says, because it is the mail-order capital of the world. Her line of Sekarelated products, which she sells out of her apartment—indeed, out of a closet—grosses six figures per year. Her inventory, which she ticks off for me, ranges from coffee mugs and

massage oils (Seka's Love Butter) to inflatable dolls (with ' 'all the bare necessities") and used panties ("our biggest seller"). "I maintain a level of class and taste with my products," says Seka, dabbing her runny nose with a Kleenex. "I want them to be products a businessman would not be embarrassed to put on his desk."

She is very big with businessmen, and late this month will marry one. His name is L. William Montgomery III, and he is a vice president of the button-down Drexel Burnham Lambert stock-brokerage firm and a member of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Seka describes him as "a threepiece-suiter . . .a very sweet, down-to-earth, caring, intelligent man." They were introduced by her publicist, and they will be wed in Chicago by Seka's uncle, a Southern Baptist minister who has never condoned his niece's calling, but, as she puts it, "knows I'm anO.K. kid."

I cannot refrain from asking

about her wedding gown. "Obviously, it's not white," she laughs. "You can't be thirty years old and getting married for the second time wearing white—no matter what you do fora living." Instead, she says, she will opt for something pink, a choice that will no doubt strike her most ardent admirers as being infinitely more appropriate, all things considered.

Bill Zehme