Original subtitles

The universally celebrated Mary Millington, giving the bare facts.

As Mary once said, the punters don't know me with my clothes on.

She achieved her effects with extraordinary ease and grace.

A lush, ripe girl.

Mary, whose beautiful, passionate body opened the door to dreams.

She was unflinching in her desire to show herself off in every known sexual

attitude.

Mary's talent was in touching one's imagination.

She was subtle and smooth to her slim fingertips, and the message was, I know

what I like, and I hope you like it too.

She once said, I haven't got much upstairs, and the reply was an honest

Yes, what a lovely staircase.

Mary's sexuality was magnificent.

She became a beautiful puppet, the ideal girl.

Naughty one minute, and the next a form, innocent and wide -eyed.

She explained this paradox away with, I was born respectable, but I soon decided

I wasn't going to let that spoil my life.

Mary's business was selling sex.

Her first cinema film was Come Play With Me.

a light -hearted romp around a health farm with Mary doing the nursing.

No need to worry.

Oh, we'll sort you out. Oh, thank you very much. Thank you, thank you.

Mary was called on to simulate passion with numerous male models during her

career, few of whom attracted her.

For Mary, lying on top of a stud became largely a question of habit.

Benjamin, you are hard.

Your core muscles really need relaxing.

Yes? Oh, yes. Yes, they do, don't they? Yes, yes, yes.

Keep going, keep going.

Oh, oh, oh.

Oh!

Oh, yes, yes. Thank you, thank you very much. Oh, good.

There.

Now for irrigation.

Well, I... I thought...

I thought that was it.

Irrigation. Is it not irrigation?

Oh, no, Mr. Benjamin. Stay there. We'll sort you out.

Charming lady, charming lady.

Irrigation, irrigation.

Now this, Mr. Benjamin, is irrigation.

She soon became disenchanted with straight sex, and lesbian parts like

one satisfied her.

Safe in their dreams of the night's birds. Mary found her own promiscuity

her to make strong scenes effective.

See how the vain need the right words.

But men have never dreamed.

In her second film, her producer, David Sullivan, thought it would be amusing to

star Mary, a leading figure in the fight against censorship, as a policewoman.

But it wasn't long before she was stripping off in The Calls of Duty.

The public went for this sort of movie.

Sex with a laugh.

I know this is asking for trouble, but how do I look?

There was an element of truth in the bitch dialogue between the girls in the

film The Queen of the Blues.

I can't think why you girls are so jealous of me.

What? Us?

Jealous of who?

Of whom, dear? Whom? Why should we be jealous of you, darling?

Well, you'd all like to be Queen of the Blues in my place, wouldn't you?

You can see it's so appalling to me.

You're talking about the one I love.

Mary, why would you be such a bore?

Really. At least I don't talk to people behind their backs. Only to their...

Silly me, I nearly said faces.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, what you've all been waiting for. Your special

entertainment, the one and the only Queen of the Blues.

This was a talent lost to motion pictures.

Mary Millington found the pressures of success in the glamour industry was as

difficult to bear as the stigma of failure.

She killed herself when the threat of prison could have ruined her life.

She used these words for her own epitaph.

Sympathy from friends doesn't make up for the pain.

After life's fitful fever, she sleeps well.

It is fortunate for us...

that her talent was committed to celluloid. She is still drawing cinema

audiences everywhere, and that is a fitting testimonial to our foremost sex

goddess.

The heart of the stockbroker belt of Surrey.

Leading to the former home of Britain's leading sex star, Mary Millington.

Now, the house stands still and neglected.

A memorial to Mary.

This is the pool where the beautiful people lazed, engaged, frolicked and

indulged themselves until the darkness.

gave them the solitude they wanted.

As Mary once said, it's not the sleep of the just, you know, it's the sleep of

the just after that counts.

No fiction could do justice to her own life story.

Her dogs still pine for their mistress.

Evidence of Mary's taste for interior decoration is everywhere.

Halcyon days.

when Mary was a simple girl enjoying mundane pleasures, are recalled by

snaps.

Mary loved her Alsatians, and she was active in collecting for animal

She was inseparable from Tippi, and Reject, who was so named because he

have been put down, were it not for Mary.

It's strange to enter this house now, so still and silent, when once every room

reverberated with the sound of music and frivolity.

When Mary threw a party, it was something to be remembered.

Some girls refused to shed their mittens to earn a crust.

Mary Millington, who rose to stardom on her delectable back in hundreds of girly

magazines, became hooked on glamour, something people who are not sure of

themselves cling to.

But there is one truth.

Men chase Mary. Mary did not chase men.

When asked if she ever had anything on when she posed the picture, she replied,

yes, the record player.

In hard porn pictures, scenes like this were the prelude to orgies.

Mary recalled that she did the first one for love, and the next one for £300 a

day.

But what was Mary really like?

The truth is clouded in so many lies and innuendos.

She could be bold and shameless, and then thrusting and naive, unable to

disguise her personal sorrows and fears.

Mary realised her life as a sex symbol was short -lived.

She yearned for affection and was full of self -doubt.

It's not surprising that Mary became a tormented woman.

Mary, who hated all forms of oppression and injustice, became the whipping girl

of bureaucracy.

The pressures were building up. She was shelling out protection money one minute

and being done over the next.

Mary was trapped in a web spun by a hanger's arm, who, by way of a bonus,

introduced her to drugs.

Even her close friend didn't realise that Mary Millington was on a crash

and there was only one way out.

On August the 19th, 1979,

Mary's naked body was discovered. She died of drink and an overdose of drugs.

I can't face the thought of prison.

They said I would definitely go to Holloway and told me how bad it is

I do hope so much porn is legal one day.

They called me obscene names for being in possession of it.

And I can't go through anymore.

The tax man has finished me as well.

Please print in your magazines how much I wanted porn legalised.

But the police have beaten me.

I do hope you are luckier.

Read my arrest in which it was suggested I stole a bracelet.

I am innocent, but have stolen things from the past.

I am a kleptomaniac, but try so hard to control my illness.

I can't go on any longer.

Love to Trev, Auntie Eileen and Uncle Ted.

To John, Emmy and Teddy.

To Dave and Clayton, Sue Black and Sandra.

All my love to all animals.

Can I have all photos of Tippi and Reject with me?

All my love, Mary.

As in life, the newspapers treated her death sensationally.

Let's pretend no more, love.

Strive nor weep.

All be as before, love.

Only sleep.

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Mary was an illegitimate child.

She lived in poverty, but she didn't want for affection.

She loved her mother with an intensity she was never able to equal with another

person, man or woman.

This affection was sustained in later life, when Mary provided for her mother

during a terminal illness.

Mary never recovered from the death of her mother.

Her school days were unhappy.

She started having sex with boys when she was 15.

It was always a search for the great big impossible dream.

She entered the beauty contest and surprisingly failed to win.

Whilst a teenager, Mary got a job in a ladies' fashion shop.

They sold the sort of gear for which brevity was the soul of lingerie.

Goodness. Oh.

Do you like it? What about something just a little briefer?

Darling, you look absolutely marvellous. Let us take both, shall we?

In a unique series of recordings, made shortly before her death, Mary had no

compunction about revealing her true blue confessions.

People seem to think that because I take my clothes off for a living, I'm the

most immoral person that ever existed.

In actual fact, I'm very moral. I'm a complete split personality.

I'm very prim and proper in some ways, but...

The other side of my personality is the fact that I really must be deep down an

exhibitionist.

I hate pictures of my face.

I'm very shy and self -conscious, but from neck down, I don't mind. Not that I

like my body.

I'm flat -chested, I'd love big boobs, and I'm saving up for a food job.

I am bisexual. I do like ladies' bodies very much and find them beautiful and

attractive.

I like looking at pictures myself of couples and various sexual positions.

I think it's a real turn -on.

Mary had a deep and meaningful relationship with Cathy, who remained

her until the end of her life.

We did lots of jobs together and frankly got on very well.

She was always great fun to be with.

At the end of a modelling session, when everybody tends to get rather tense, it

was very nice to have a meal with Mary and spend the evening with her because

she did have that effect on people.

She was extremely relaxing and so light -hearted.

It was just really lovely to be with her.

And I think that the thing that most people will remember Mary for is her

kindness. She was an extremely kind and loyal person.

And, well, you know, I just can't believe that she's gone. I can't believe

not here.

A photographer stopped me one day and said, could he take a photo, which I

highly amusing, and said that no one in the world would want a 4 foot 11 model.

And I said, I just wish you luck with selling the photos, which he managed to

do. I was amazed, and he booked me again and again.

I could only do nude modelling because of being so small. There was no way I

could ever do fashion modelling.

Then I found...

I'd come to the end of my short career. They wanted a new face.

But I found that I could carry on if I took stronger pictures.

I didn't have anything against doing the stronger pictures at all because I

believe in bodies being for looking at and nothing obscene about them

whatsoever.

One of the most articulate spokesmen for the legalisation of porn tells how he

encountered Mary.

His name, John Lindsay.

I took her into the studio and I explained to her that as she was so

young looking, etc, what sort of model was she interested in doing.

She first said that she was interested in teenage fashion work, so I got her

some work for a magazine.

As a result of the stills, I was approached by a Swedish producer and I

Mary if she was willing to do some sex film work.

I told her, I said, it's explicitly the real thing, no faking.

Mary was more than happy to do it. She was very popular, and I think you all

know the results. Her career zoomed onwards.

What did Mary recall about her first blue film?

That was a thick comedy, and it was very popular.

The sex act is beautiful, but it's considered dirty because it's kept

underground the whole time and not allowed to be shown. If you were given

freedom of choice, then there wouldn't be the blue movie cinemas springing up

all over the country. They would be on proper large cinemas where the public

could go and see an explicit movie if they felt they wanted to.

But they should have the choice to be able to do so.

As Mary's epitaph, I would regard her today as a modern -day Marilyn Monroe.

In Marilyn's time, the wind blew her skirt up and showed her white knickers

turned 20 million men on.

24, 5, 30 years later, however long ago it is, Mary, she showed more than her

knickers. She took them off and removed everything and turned another 20 or 40

million men on. So that's the epitaph I would leave her with.

Soho, the spiritual home of pornography in all its forms.

To the liberated an oasis of naughtiness.

To the Puritans, a boil on the buttocks of London.

The porn business is thriving.

The most powerful entrepreneur in this field, who sells over 800 ,000 magazines

a month, is David Sullivan.

Mary was his favourite cover girl.

Sullivan, a financial wizard, became her mentor.

You get an extra fee at the cover girl, and so of course I like to do as many

cover shots as possible.

The good thing is there's no tax on magazines at the moment or books. I know

government would love to do it, but then they'd have to tax the Bible, so I

think we're safe there.

To me, Mary Millington was my very dear and very best friend.

She'll be greatly missed by myself and by many thousands of fans throughout the

country. She was probably the finest model and finest actress that this

ever produced.

Without doubt...

In a few years' time, had she lived, she would have been internationally

recognised as this.

I will greatly miss her, and we know from the many thousands of letters we've

had from her public and her readers that she will be missed by the readers of

all the magazines she appeared in.

It is absolutely tragic that someone so young, so beautiful, that had so much

going for her should be driven to such a horrible death by this pressure of the

tax and the police.

It's more like Russia than England in 1980.

I was completely cut up for many, many weeks after her death.

And shaken, there's sort of no answer.

I miss her now.

I think we all miss her.

I only wish we had more to remember her by.

The argument against David Sullivan was that Mary was hounded because she was

suspected of contravening the law, not because she was a pornographic model.

and a notorious woman.

I saved the money I made from modelling, and as I was so interested in sex, I

bought a sex shop.

It's a myth about the Dirty Raincoat Brigade. They really don't exist.

Customers aren't dragged in. They come in because they want to come in. They

want to buy stronger material and they want to be able to take it away and read

it in the privacy of their own homes.

They should have the right to do that.

There are hundreds of thousands of very lonely men.

They've got no chance at all of ever picking up a girl, but they can buy sexy

magazines and...

take them home and masturbate while they look at the picture which gives them

the relief which I feel they need.

I do think we could show different positions of intercourse and

tastefully done it would help a lot of wives who are not frigid but

getting into a rut and saying, oh dear, I've got a headache or I think you're

becoming a sex maniac to their husbands. If they could look at photographs of

different positions and think, should we try it? And they do. Their sex life

improves enormously.

And with their problems, I found that I could write short stories and the

publishers bought the short stories.

Then I did more and more pictures.

And it progressed from there.

I wrote a little article in one magazine that I owned a sex shop and from that

moment on I was inundated with about a thousand letters a week.

I've had lots of obscene phone calls and when someone rings up and says, what

colour knickers have you got on? I say, oh, I've got a sex shop. If you would

like to come and visit me, I can discuss anything you would like to discuss in

the shop.

And I find they talk to me and they say, oh, what hour are you open? And they

forget that it was an obscene call to start with.

I really do try to help anyone with any problems, but I always point out I'm in

no way qualified and it's only my way of life. I'm very easygoing and liberal

and I think that we should help people that do have problems in as many ways as

possible, even if it's with illustrations and sexy stories to go

In my fight against censorship, I was carted off to Scotland Yard where I was

told, how could I possibly do these disgusting things, to which I made no

at all and carried on.

One of the key figures.

In producing a sex magazine is the stills man.

Rex Peters knows the score.

That's

beautiful.

Move around a little. That's it.

A little bit straighter.

Yeah,

that's fine.

To me, the human body is beautiful.

I don't find anything wrong with posing in nude, even though, as I say, I don't

particularly like my own body.

OK, that's amazing.

OK, Natalie, look at me.

Yep. OK.

Slightly down.

Very slowly.

Body down.

Yeah, that's nice.

And again.

I don't own one photograph of myself I've got millions of my dogs and pets

my passport photo is one where I nipped in a tube station place and didn't even

dare look at that I keep

saying I'm not ambitious but it is there somewhere and when I was

modelling I thought that the new face would come along and There would be

nothing left for me to do.

Well, she was a very

friendly person. I think this came over in her pictures to a great extent.

She knew what the customers wanted. She knew how to portray her sexuality.

Over the years, I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of girls. She was

undoubtedly one of the best models I've worked with.

I think her major appeal...

was the lovely body and also the lovely, warm personality that came over, not

only in her pictures, but to the people who had met her, came over tremendously,

very, very strongly.

She could pose naturally in front of the camera for one hour or five hours. She

was one of the few models, I think, that I've worked with who turned up for

every job fully made up and fully prepared.

Very naturally sexual girl.

Right, girls, let's get back to work.

Makeup!

We were allowed to do pictures showing pubic hair, but then the public wanted

more and more all the time. So we then started to pose where our legs were

spread apart and you could see the vaginal lip.

But stronger pictures from then were using instruments.

It seemed illegal to use a man's penis, which I could never understand, but we

could use objects.

that I really am regarded as a scarlet woman or a harlot.

If you actually look at the pictures, they are censored to a certain extent.

You don't see oral sex and you don't see intercourse.

But you do see girls holding themselves open. That's legal.

But the minute a man comes near, it's illegal.

And we're now in the common market where pornography is accepted as part

of life and you can buy magazines on any subject to do with sex.

Nothing at all has been starved out, as we call it, in the business.

And all the time it's kept underground, there will be a terrific demand.

I want to make it legal so that the few people that need it can buy it. A year

ago, I thought things were getting easier.

But then we got the recession in this country, and whenever there's a

porn is clamped down upon as the first thing that must be kept underground.

Alfie, up a little bit, darling. Yeah, that's beautiful.

That's fine. That's okay, that's fine.

Come round the back a bit, Alfie. Can you? Yeah, round the back.

So you bring yourself in.

As

Mary's fame

grew, so did her circle of acquaintances.

She made personal appearances, which gave the fans a chance to meet her.

It was all part of the process of selling Mary, and it paid dividends at

office.

Heaven.

London's premier gay disco has a bar, a restaurant, and on the dance floor, the

occasionally abandoned and deviant behaviour has become part of our

society, so passionately advocated by Mary Millington.

For one night a week, there's a midnight club in which the straights meet the

gays.

And it's often the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

A man who owns numerous sex cinemas has chosen to continue Mary Millington's

battle for reforms of the laws of censorship.

He is Tom Hayes. We believe very strongly that the general public should

be able to see pornography, excluding animals and children, in any

theatre they wanted to, provided that they knew exactly what they were going

see. Well, Mary became famous.

And at the same time as becoming famous, she was under a lot of pressure, you

can say harassment, from the police and from the Inland Revenue.

And together, all these facts led to her taking drugs in a mild way.

I put this down to her not having a strong shoulder to lean on, a shoulder

she afforded to other people such as myself.

Mary was ahead of her time.

Months after her death, heaven opened and became a fun place, the best

locale around.

Mary would have loved the place, for once she would have been herself.

Mary Millington has become big business.

She created an enormous groundswell of sexuality.

It was necessary to keep her name in circulation, and she featured in many

bizarre stories.

For one, going topless to number ten, she was fined and bound over to keep the

peace.

To support the myth... Tales of wild lust were circulated. Rumours about

sexual peccadilloes were given a raunchy persona and made her national news.

After a celebrated trial at the Old Bailey, Mary was acquitted and

faced the press and gave comments which were widely reported.

Mary made numerous personal appearances.

Crowds of admirers were always there to greet her, and not surprisingly, cinema

managers welcomed Mary's visit.

Films made a fortune, and as a spin -off, the magazines sold in their tens

thousands.

It's never easy for an actress to get in the mood for a take, and Mary was no

exception.

21, take 3.

814, take 2.

Action.

Come on, baby.

Love is for sharing.

If you want to enjoy it properly, you have to give and take.

Here, let me show you.

I was Mary Millington's last leading man in Queen of the Blues, and I was also

her publicist. I would say, above anything else, she was a very shrewd

businesswoman, and her shop and her cinema meant more to her than anything

She was always after making money.

She had her nose altered by plastic surgery, she had her teeth capped, but

was always in the game of selling sex and also knowing exactly what turns the

average man on.

As a screen actress, I think she was very good indeed.

She got to the set on time, she was liberated in front of the camera, and

delivered the goods.

Funnily enough, Mary, all over the country, was pursued by men, some of

unknown, some of them famous.

She always put a charge on this friendship, but I can tell you for sure

always gave value for money.

Come play with me.

Mary's first film has had a run of four years in London.

and has broken all known records in the history of the British cinema.

As the law stands, it's necessary to be a club member of a sex cinema to see

stronger films. Thank you, sir.

Like the sign there? Thank you.

Thank you very much. Enjoy the show.

The public still queue outside cinemas where Mary Millington's films are

playing.

The tourists, who are lured in by the posters, find they have hit on a new

experience.

The lascivious, mysterious Mary.

She created the myth, and that is ineffaceable.

I'm only half sexy.

Half of me is very sexy, and the other half is quite prim and proper.

So I'm only half as sexy.

If I can help in any way.

relieve tension in any frustrated men, I'm very pleased to be able to do so.