R.I.P. Jennifer Welles (1937-2018): Podcast 3 (reprise, with a new introduction)

It’s with great sadness that The Rialto Report marks the passing of Jennifer Welles.

She passed away last Tuesday at the age of 81.

Jennifer Welles was one of the last truly old school performers. In the 1950s she was a song and dance lounge club performer, in the 1960s she was a burlesque dancer and then soft core film actress, and in the 1970s when she was 40 she became one of the superstars of hard core films in New York.

Jennifer Welles was one of the first interviews that we published on The Rialto Report, and it is by far one of the most downloaded. But rather than just re-issue the podcast, we wanted to also look back at a mystery that lay at the heart of her life for a long time.

We’ve recorded a new introduction to our podcast interview with her.

This podcast episode is 57 minutes long.

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Ashley West writes:

When I started The Rialto Report as a way of helping preserve people’s memories from the early adult film industry, I really wanted to speak with people who’d been out of the public eye for many years.

And there was no one who’d been out of the public eye more than Jennifer Welles.

Jennifer in her burlesque days, as ‘Lisa Duran’

Every day at The Rialto Report, we get people enquiring about one star or another. The emails often say that the star in question has completely disappeared.

The truth is that 99% haven’t disappeared. They’ve just stopped being part of the adult industry, they’ve gone back to working in more conventional jobs, and gradually they’ve lost contact with their old world. They don’t disappear. They just do something different.

But for 40 years Jennifer Welles really did disappear. And it was completely deliberate too.

I remember interviewing director Ron Sullivan who’d been a huge fan and close friend of Jennifer’s. He told me that in 1977, she’d gone to see him. And the purpose of her visit was to tell him that she was retiring from the adult film business. Not only that but that she was leaving New York, and cutting off all ties with everyone she knew there. In fact, she told him, she would never see him again and he should not try and contact her. Several other of her friends told me the same story.

Obviously this news was a shock to people. Everyone was sad and concerned to see her go, but she appeared determined.

And true to her word, Jennifer Welles did leave New York and she never contacted anyone from the adult film world again.

So what happened?

I found that 15 years before she left New York, she’d got married. It was the early 1960s – and she got hitched to a trumpet player called Manny Duran. I figured that if could find him, maybe he’d know something about why she disappeared so suddenly. I looked him up and found that he was still performing. In fact he was at BB King’s in New York every Tuesday. I called him up, and he invited me to a show to celebrate his 80th birthday. This was back in 2006.

Manny told me that he grew up in San Antonio, Texas and first began playing the trumpet in local mariachi bands. When he was in his teens, he heard Louis Armstrong on the radio for the first time, and it changed his life. He resolved to learn how to play like that, and so in 1956 he hitchhiked to New York to pursue a career in jazz. He had a tough start. On his first day, his trumpet and clothes were stolen, and he lived out of a car for the first year, working as a waiter at a jazz club.