| FULL DISCLOSURE Stormy Daniels with Kevin Carr O'Leary New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-250-20556-8 | ||||
| ISBN 1-250-20556-5 | 270pp. | HC | $27.99 | |
Stephanie Ann Gregory began life expected to be a boy. Her father Bill, an architectural engineer, traveled a lot for work; when Stephanie began school, his wife Sheila stayed at their home in Baton Rouge with her. About three years later, Bill announced he was leaving Sheila, and she went to pot. So, according to Stephanie, did the neighborhood. As a father, Bill was always remote, but Stephanie adored him. When he left, she stowed away in his truck. He brought her back. Eventually she would visit Bill and Susan in Philadelphia, enjoying a week or so of clean clothes and a smoke-free environment.
After Dad, my mom dated this parade of horrible guys. It was like if someone mentioned a guy, her first question was, "Is he a loser? Yeah? Sold." None of them came on to me, which I know is what people assume happened to adult actresses to "damage them" as children. No, they were just losers. – Page 21 |
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I could not have imagined students in middle or high school wearing tongue studs or tattoos, much less doing drugs or carrying guns to class. And while I knew that marriages broke up, sometimes acrimoniously, I would have had trouble accepting that abuse like Stephanie Ann Gregory endured in her childhood was as common as it is.3 As I note below, she tells the story, with characteristic bravado, on pages 26-31. You should read it for yourself, to avoid missing some nuance I might have left out.
I find her abrupt capitulation to Trump very odd, and at the same time sadly typical. It gives me cause to wonder whether her father's aloofness and ultimate desertion had any influence on her, in childhood or later life. I remember that Richard Feynman wrote in What Do You Care What Other People Think? how he could bed some women by first disrespecting them. And Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible tells how the girls growing up without fathers in the Russian hinterlands come to Moscow to learn to be golddiggers. Not a few of them evidently commit suicide.
Stormy Daniels is certainly no golddigger, and shows no hint of wanting to end her life. Indeed, she has overcome the storms of her life in ways that give a good many people with "conventional" upbringings reason for envy. Still, the abrupt transition from Trump sitting on the bed in the penthouse to him lying naked atop her is disconcerting. It hints at essential details left out, and beyond that at hidden psychological fracture points. But enough armchair psychoanalysis. This is a woman about whom I really know very little; certainly far less than I know about Trump, who has been thrusting himself into the public eye, like a splinter, for decades.
The sexual assaults came later. When she was nine, she writes, she found that a friend she calls Vanessa was being raped by a forty-something man who lived in the house next door to Vanessa's. In order to protect the younger, more fragile girl, Stephanie interposed herself1 — enduring the mistreatment for a period of two years.2
Subsequent sexual encounters were more normal, with boys at or near her own age. And there were the usual trials of youth: being ignored and mistrusted by adults. There's nothing very unusual about Stephanie's childhood, except perhaps the fact that she escaped it with so little damage.
Her father eventually broke up with Susan and faded from his daughter's life. Her mother's fights with her stepfather escalated to the point that he fired a shotgun in the house. Stephanie moved out the next day. There followed a lot of improvisation as she learned to live on her own and master the techniques of stripping. One thing led to another, she tells us at length, until she was a woman of repute in Los Angeles, writing and directing adult films as well as appearing in them.
Which brings us to Chapter Three and Donald Trump: the reason this book exists. She describes their 2006 encounter in a curious way. I can summarize it thus: She sat for three hours with Trump in his penthouse suite, without the dinner he had promised. They talked about various things, among them her possible appearance on The Apprentice — which she greatly desired but expected would not be allowed by NBC (it wasn't.) She finally went to the bathroom and came out to find Trump sitting on the bed. The next words tell of him lying naked on top of her. This is in stark contrast to her reaction when he first appeared wearing black silk pajamas like a portly Hugh Hefner. Here is a much-Bowdlerized excerpt.
I came out and he was dead ahead on the bed. He was perched on the edge, like he had tried out different poses. A poor attempt at looking powerful. He had taken off the suit, and was down to his white briefs, a white V-neck, and socks. I had the sense of a vacuum taking all the air out of the room, and me deflating with it. I sighed inwardly, keenly aware of two thoughts in that one moment. There was the simple Oh, fuck. Here we go. But there was also a much more complex, sad feeling that none of what he said was true. He didn't respect me. Everything he said to me was bullshit. *
* * So, here we go. It was an out-of-body experience. I was lying down on the bed with him on top of me, naked. – Pages 127-128 |
The rest you can read for yourself; it continues through page 131. She describes the action, and Trump's natural equipment, in graphic terms — and disparaging ones. She describes the surprisingly banal aftermath. No Hollywood histrionics here. I find her abrupt capitulation very odd, and at the same time sadly typical. I discuss this briefly in the sidebar.
The book was written to answer some essential questions, and — except for why she let Trump touch her — the answers are there. She took the hush money because she needed money and wanted, if I may borrow a phrase, to stop the insanity. (Over 38 percent of it, by the way, went to the people who negotiated the deal.) She came forward when the story began to leak to get the honest version out there — and I think it is the honest version, as far as it goes.
Mysteries remain. She has no clue to the identity of the man who threatened her and her daughter in the parking lot of the building she went to for post-pregnancy fitness classes; his identity and who sent him will probably never be known. But she fills in enough of the picture on the "David Dennison-Peggy Peterson" charade to give a sense of satisfaction.
As a memoir, the book is quite remarkable: the testament of a woman who's passed through a great many storms and emerged a winner. Say what you will about her profession; like prostitution,4 it would not exist without the hordes of ordinary men who support it and make it so lucrative.
As literature, Stormy's work is not so remarkable. The sequence is chaotic, jumping back and forth in time. Large parts of it are about her rise in the world of adult entertainment, her peripatetic pursuit of rock bands, and her eventual motherhood. There is crude language and frank discussion of physicality, because that goes with the territory. There are a few lapses of logic, but I found no grammatical errors. The book has no index, so I don't consider it a keeper. But there's much in it that's worth reading. Stormy's tale of delivering her daughter is worth the price of the book. The tale of the Lake Tahoe tryst with Trump is the least of it, in my opinion.
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