In 1974, Jody Maxwell was a senior at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, president of the school’s Young Republicans chapter, performing in the campus production of “Death of a Salesman” and dating Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Jan Stenerud.

A year later, she was a porn star.

Maxwell was president of the UMKC communications fraternity, which hosted a conference on morality her senior year. One of the panelists was legendary adult filmmaker Gerard Damiano, who gained notoriety as the man behind the watershed film, “Deep Throat.”

Damiano learned of Maxwell’s acting aspirations and invited her to New York City for a screen test.

“Porn sought me,” she said. “I never sought it.”

The journey she was about to take was a far cry from the country club life she had known as a scholarship student at St. Teresa’s Academy in Kansas City, Mo., and the daughter of prominent Jackson County, Mo., prosecutors. But Maxwell took the plunge. Her father even gave his blessing.

Her meteoric rise from Kansas City society to erotica legend is, in fact, straightforward and rather normal. There are no sordid tales of seedy sets, drugs or “Boogie Nights” falls from grace. Maxwell is, by all accounts, a talented and educated woman who decided to take a chance.

“I said to myself, ‘If you don’t take chances, you’ve never lived,’ ” Maxwell said in a phone interview from her home in California. In 1975, she starred in her first adult film, “Portrait,” which was written for her by Damiano.

Maxwell said that for a girl from Kansas City, her new career was a departure from life in the sleepy Midwest.

But, she said, she was no prude.

“Sex-wise, I had been married and divorced already,” Maxwell said. “I had gotten into swinging, which was prevalent in Kansas City at the time, so I was open to sex with other people.”

Still, sex in the confines of a bedroom is different from performing in front of a camera, crew, director and a cast of actors. However, Maxwell and her co-star Jamie Gillis became quick friends before they started working together.

There was another perk.

“This guy (Gillis) is hot,” she said. “He reeked of sexuality. A woman would not think twice about jumping into bed with him.”

Luckily for Maxwell, she was paid to.

But their friendship didn’t make her first sex scene any easier.

“I was extremely nervous,” she said. Director Damiano thought showcasing a unique talent that Maxwell developed would put her at ease. Maxwell said it originated unexpectedly.

One December night, she surprised her boyfriend by putting a holiday twist on oral sex.

“I burst out into song,” she remembered. She sang two verses of “Jingle Bells” to the pleasant surprise of her boyfriend.

So was born “singing and sucking,” a talent that helped earn her the title “Queen of Fellatio,” bestowed by Hustler publisher Larry Flint; it later spawned a Christmas record. Maxwell said she was still the only person Flint had interviewed for Hustler.

“Portrait” debuted to solid reviews and her career escalated. From 1974 to 1983, she made fewer than 20 films; the Internet Movie Database counts 13. Today, that number pales in comparison to such industry stars as Jenna Jameson, who has more than 100 credits to her name, or Ron Jeremy, who has appeared in more than 1,900 films. But quality, not quantity, earned Maxwell a ticket to the Erotica Hall of Fame in Las Vegas in 2006.

In 1983, Maxwell remarried, and saw a fearsome new player in the porn game: AIDS.

“It scared the hell out me,” she said. “Less and less I wanted to take chances. I was getting worn out, burned out.”

She turned her erotic film star status — she shuns the word “porn,” which she said had negative connotations — into a traveling show that was part erotica, part comedy. She met her husband, Bruce, during one of these tours.

She also became a sex columnist for several adult magazines, including Cherie, and even covered the 1984 Democratic and Republican national conventions.

Maxwell also began working for a company called Personal Services Club. She performed erotic phone calls for clients who specifically requested her.

“It was just like an acting gig,” she said, adding that she received calls from clients as varied as sports figures to University of Kansas students.

“I was very popular in Lawrence,” she said.

Maxwell left Personal Services Club in 1995, but kept detailed notes of every call she received, turning them into a book called “My Private Calls.” The book was released in early 2005 and is available on her Web site, www.jodymaxwell.com.

“I had 61 and a half notebooks, and picked out 100 calls to include in the book,” she said. “I wrote about them from beginning to end, describing callers and their conversations in lurid detail. It’s funny, it’s straight, it’s sometimes sad.”

Although “My Private Calls” features highlights from her life and career, she promises that her upcoming autobiography will devote more time to the place that shaped her sexuality and propelled her into porn: Kansas City.

“I’m going to Kansas City/Kansas City, here I come/They got a crazy way of lovin’ there/and I’m gonna get me some”

— “Kansas City” by Wilbert Harrison

For a modest city, replete with folksy Midwestern charm, Kansas City doesn’t strike most people as a place to explore their sexuality. But, if Maxwell’s experience is any indication, Cowtown is a swinging town, or at least it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Her column for Cherie was called “Kansas City Stark,” and it explored some of the less publicized activities in Kansas City. The Steamboat Arabia, it was not.

‘The Spirit of ’76’ was a swingers club in Kansas City which Maxwell came across while doing investigative reporting for Cherie. “The first event I went to was at the Ramada Inn in Hickman Mills. There were hundreds of people there.”

She describes the scene as a sexual circus, with open doors beckoning passers-by into hotel rooms, naked men and women posing in doorways and, on more than one occasion, people recognizing and propositioning her. At least one unwitting guest was mistakenly put on a floor reserved specifically for Spirit of ’76 members.

Another gathering took place in the clubhouse of Brookridge Country Club in Overland Park. Maxwell said the group was generally well educated, and included some well-known Kansas Citians, though she declined to name them.

Ron Jeremy, who co-starred with Maxwell in 1981’s “A Girl’s Best Friend”, has his own theories about how Kansas City may have shaped Maxwell’s career.

“There’s a giant Ron Jeremy penis in the middle of Kansas City,” he said jokingly.

Jeremy, whose endowment is legend in the porn world, told The Kansan that he once flew over downtown Kansas City and saw Liberty Memorial from above, and thought, “Hey, they made a giant mold of me!”

In all seriousness, however, he said Maxwell was humble in an industry that is fraught with prima donnas. Kansas City, he said, was once home to the Dove Theater, a movie house for porn, which Jeremy called “the nicest theater in the business.”

Today, the Dove is Bazooka’s Showgirls; Jeremy described the theater as classy, neat and clean — words not always associated with erotica. So perhaps Kansas City’s naughty schoolgirl image — naïve on the surface, mischievous below — helped shape Maxwell’s persona.

A helping hand

Maxwell has a laundry list of porn stars she calls her favorites, including: Gillis, Rod Dumont (“A heck of an actor. A heck of a stud.”), Samantha Fox and Jeremy.

Jeremy wasn’t always the porn superstar he is today. At one point, he was an unknown New York schoolteacher who worked hard to gain recognition.

“He wanted so much to make porn that he’d show off his special talent,” self-fellatio, recalled Maxwell.

But Maxwell said she pushed him to demand more work and money, accelerating his career and helping establish him as porn royalty.

Maxwell has been married for nearly 24 years, and she’s proud of her achievements. It is an unlikely career path for the child of Kansas City socialites, who grew up on the Country Club Plaza and was once a White House guest of President Nixon.

She met her husband, Bruce, while she was touring with her stage show. She impressed him off the bat.

“What struck me the most was how smart she was and how she knew about what was going on in the world, more than any of the other people that I knew at the time,” he said. “I was entranced and pretty much just listened to world according to Jody for most of our first meeting.”

He’s still pretty entranced: “I thank her and my lucky stars every day for her finding me in the crowd.”

Her current career is an even more unlikely diversion, at least for a former porn star: She’s a substitute teacher in northern California

(Maxwell uses her married name as a teacher. To protect her career, she and her husband declined to give The Kansan their surnames). She also continues to foster her love of writing by editing manuscripts for a publishing house.

Jeremy, who was a teacher before he entered the porn industry, said Maxwell’s acting experience could make her a more exuberant educator.

“Performing makes you a better teacher,” Jeremy said. “The best teachers make you want to listen, want to learn ... they make everything entertaining.”

Bruce agreed, saying, “I think that being in the entertainment business is pretty much like saying that you’re in the people business. You learn to recognize the signs of what others are thinking or feeling while interacting with you.

“And lets face it; she’s not going to be offended by someone calling a spade a spade.”

Although she is open about her past, it’s not something Maxwell dwells upon. She has more important things to think about today. As a teacher, she can create deeper impressions than any skin flick.

“People have told me I’ve turned kids’ lives around,” Maxwell said.

And although Jeremy has not remained close in touch with Maxwell, he’s pleased to hear she’s doing well.

“There should be more happy endings in porn.”

— Edited by Dianne Smith