Cush Job: The Life of a Porn Stars’ Agent

By Jo Weldon

Originally Published in Creative Loafing, 1995.

All of Pete Palumbo’s friends want his job. Centerfold for magazines such as Hustler, High Society, and Cheri ask him to help them get dressed (they already know how to get naked). Penthouse pets mail him nude photos of themselves for his approval. Porn stars call him up long distance, looking to work with him. Girls who want to be any of the above strip down at his request so that he can take Polaroids of them. This is how Pete earns his living.

Pete is an egent who books feature performers into strip clubs around the country. He works for himself—his business is a Sub-S corporation. At his home office during our recent interview, he was sitting in front of the computer that holds his database of strip joint managers, centerfolds, and porn stars. The monitor was displaying Beavis and Butthead in a dazzling array of obnoxious poses. “I just had to call a girl tot ell her to grow some pubic hair for an upcoming booking,” he told me. “In the promo photos she sent me, it looked like her bikini wax had gone a bit too far for their county laws.” All in a day’s work, evidently.

Palombo got into the adult entertainment job when he was laid off from his job of 12 years. “I’d been in a band and had been hanging out in rock n roll bars forever,” he said. “The music scene and the strip scene intersect quite a bit in this town, probably in every town. I knew all these dancers who wanted to feature, and I knew all these strip joints from traveling around, and it just sort of came naturally. Now I work for myself and I make more money than Idid at my job.”

Besides booking features into clubs (for which he gets 10 percent of their weekly fees), Pete assists dancers who want to feature. He arranges for them to do shoots with known photographers for adult magazines by mailing nude Polaroids to several photographers at once. “Most of the magazines have staff photographers, but the majority of the layouts are done by freelancers.” They look at the Polaroids and decide if they want to fly the potential model out to LA or new York to shoot her. “A lot of girls come in saying they won’t do anything but Penthouse, since Penthouse pays the most and has the most prestige, but once they find otu how competitive it is, they tend to take what they can get. Plenty of dancers want to feature.”

The would-be features usually come to him. “So many dancers know what I do that I rarely have to solicit anybody. Even when I do, if the dancer I ask doesn’t want to do it, she knows a friend who does, and she’ll direct her to me because she knows I’m the real deal. Word of mouth is the key to this industry.”

Once a girl is featured in a magazine, Pete literally helps her get her act together. He tells her what club owners expect, how to do a show, and what kinds of costumes to wear. He knows DJs who can make music tapes for her shows and costumers who can make the elaborate outfits club managers want to see on the performers they’re paying $1200--$12,000 per week.

“Most girls who want to feature don’t realize how much they’ll have to spend to get started,” Pete said. “Some change their minds when they find out. Between tapes, promotional materials, props, and costumes, they should easily spend $10,000 before they hit the road.”

As for girls who want to be porn stars, Pete can approach the adult companies for them. “I recommend they go to the CES convention in Vegas first, though,” he said. “Then from there they tell me who they met, and I can advise them on who’s for real and where they should go from there.”

“Porn stars are the big moneymakers on the feature circuit now,” he added. “Clubs used to want big-busted girls, but now porn is the thing. It’s like the uglier Miss America gets, the better-looking the porn stars become.” He laughed. “You can quote me on that. Now that it’s getting more competitive, there are some gorgeous girls doing these movies.”

Why is porn so competitive, I wondered? Beginning porn actresses are paid only $150-$500 per a day’s hard work, and they don’t get to work every day. Why bother? What’s the big draw?

Well, Pete didn’t tell me which ones—professional ethics, I assume—but some porn stars on the circuit get paid as much as $15,000 per week to feature in clubs. The newer and least known often get $2500, twice the going rate for a new model. Add in tips and sales of posters and videos while on tour, and the stakes get even higher. Forget your poor little runaways being dragged into hotel rooms, drugged, and filmed on the sly—this is big business and plenty of women want a piece of it.

Pete’s first criterion for representing a feature isn’t fame, though, or even beauty. It’s attitude. He told me, “A good attitude is the most important thing in this business. They have to be prepared to work very hard for that money. They have to be able to get along with me and with club managers. If they have rotten personalities or no brains, they won’t last. And they can’t get too homesick!”

He has contact information for about 200 performers in his database and has to beo n call 24 hours a day. “Anything can happen while they’re on the road, particularly on Saturday night when the features get paid. Still the only problem that’s ever been hard for me is when a girl doesn’t show for a booking. That’s when I get yelled at. Since the clubs spend thousands to advertise these features, they get very upset. I usually have to book another girl into the club, and on short notice that puts me into non-stop overdrive till everything’s fixed.”

His biggest expense? “Phone bills, of course!”

When I told Pete that even I want his job, he laughed again. “People don’t believe what I do,” he conceded. “A lot of guys want to work with me, be my employee. I hang out on the rock n roll scene, so it seems like the ultimate to those guys. I guess they have visions of hanging out with Teri Weigel and Barbara Dare, but the truth is that I’ve worked with some of these dancers for two years, and I’ve never seen them face to face. I do almost all my work on the phone.”

Recent college graduates, take note: there are career opportunities your guidance counselor never told you about. Generation X, indeed.