Candida Royalle’s Fight to Fuse Feminism and Porn Movies

“Each time I know I have to go on stage soon I feel like screaming and crying,” Candice Vadala wrote in her journal in November 1980. It was Election Day, the dawning of what Ronald Reagan, the landslide victor in the presidential race, would later declare to be morning in America. But night still hung thick in the places where Vadala made her personal appearances, in embattled strip clubs in struggling industrial cities around the United States. The blinking lights on the marquee always used her professional name, Candida Royalle. She had chosen it six years before, in San Francisco, for her work in underground theater. She might have known, from her Catholic girlhood, that Candida—derived from the Latin candidus—meant white, pure. It meant what Candice meant, but it looked fancier, more upper-class, especially when paired with Royalle. “I thought it sounded like a rich French dessert,” she later wrote.

She’d worked the live-show circuit for a year or so, on and off, gigs tucked between films and romances and writing assignments. She played Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C. She played Bridgeport, Connecticut, and New York’s Times Square. The bookings lasted several days, sometimes a full week. She’d done a show in Toronto in the dead of winter, a few days before her wedding.

The contracts her agent brought her always sounded so promising, one more sign that Royalle’s name was “getting big & respected,” she wrote. The money seemed good: as much as $250 a night—about $750 in today’s money. It was more than she made by writing an article for a men’s magazine, roughly equal to her day rate for shooting a film. Sometimes, a club’s owner even paid her travel and hotel. Royalle’s “star status” also meant she could set her own limits on the circuit: “No sleazy crotch shots or anything.”

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