He arrived in New York with one hand in front and one behind. She only had five dollars in her pocket, but she had plenty of self-confidence. In a few years she was a millionaire and ruled the city. Chelly Wilson saw that the wave of a new industry was coming, the porn industry, and she knew how to catch it in time. His is a novel story, a Jeffrey Archer novel, which has now been taken to the cinema by Valerie Kontakos in the documentary La reina del porno, which she has just released on Filmin.
The story of Chelly, whose real name was Rachel Sereno, begins in Greece at the beginning of the 20th century. Her father was a Sephardic Jew whose family had settled in Thessaloniki. Rachel-Chelly was born in 1908. She grew up and her family found her a husband. She had two children, Daniel and Paulette, and theirs would have been a classic boring housewife story if Chelly had accepted her fate. But she had a lot of character, too much character, and that changed everything.
“I didn’t like my husband at all, he disgusted me, I didn’t want him to kiss me,” she acknowledged in an interview recorded in the 80s that The Queen of Porn collects. So she left her husband and settled in Athens with Paulette. She set up an appliance business and began to earn money. Everything was going great until the Nazis came. “We Sephardim were immediately recognized as Jews by our Spanish accent.” The lives of Chelly and her children were in danger.
You had to escape. Chelly forced Paulette to stop speaking Ladino so she wouldn’t be found out, and took her to a Christian family. “I’ll come back to look for you”, she told him and she embarked for the United States. Upon her arrival, she used her remaining five dollars to pay for the hotel and took a job as a hot dog vendor at a street stand in early 1940s New York.
But he longed for Greece and the money he earned was used to send food to his country and to produce a film against the stay of the Nazis in Greece, On the march. He needed a theater to show it so he contacted Rex Wilson, the projectionist at the Cameo theater. She soon married Wilson, with whom she had a girl, Bondi, and returned to collect her children as she had promised. She first went for Daniel, who was in Israel, and then for Paulette, who was still in Thessaloniki.
The photographs kept by the daughters and the testimonies of Paulette and Bondi provide material for the documentary La reina del porno, which also has archive images and audio to which the director has given a second life thanks to some animated images. In addition, Chelly’s grandchildren and son-in-law pass through the documentary, who do not hide the affection they felt for their original grandmother.
An absolutely atypical grandmother who lived above a porn cinema whose programming lasted 24 hours a day. The apartment was something like a commune where her husband, Chelly’s two lovers, who was gay and was one of the first lesbians to come out of the closet, shared space, and a Greek community back and forth, since the matriarch welcomed her compatriots when they arrived in the United States.
There was money, “bags full of money”, because Chelly had found the formula to make his movie theater profitable: to broadcast films like Flesh and lace (1965), the first film considered porn that was still “a racy film that today They would put it on any TV. But for New Yorkers in the 1960s, that kind of cinema was an incredible thing to see.
And Chelly’s empire grew. Other rooms joined the Cameo, Adonis, Tivoli, Venus, Lido… A ticket machine that increased its activity with the arrival of hardcore porn and gay porn. The queen of porn was not satisfied with dedicating herself to the exhibition and added to her activities the production and distribution of this type of cinema. His fortune and popularity increased.
“He played poker with actors and porn producers and mafia bosses and he opened a Greek restaurant, Mykonos, where everyone wanted to go, because the food was excellent and the party lasted until four in the morning,” remember one of his daughters. But the party ended in the early 1990s when Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York and enforced “civic cleansing” by removing prostitutes, panhandlers and junkies from the streets of downtown. A move that involved the closure of the X theaters that had made Chelly a rich and famous woman.
