EDITOR’S NOTE: Breakfast In Bed was on USA Up All Night on July 8 and December 10, 1994; October 21, 1995; March 29, 1996.

Marilyn Chambers was born into a middle-class family in Rhode Island; she started skipping school at sixteen to move to New York City and try out for movies. That’s how she ended up in The Owl and the Pussycat as Evelyn Lang. She’d later — infamously — be one of the 99 & 44/100% pure Ivory Snow girls before being in Sean S. Cunningham’s Together and starting to be a dancer. She then answered an ad from the Mitchell Brothers and pitched that if everyone was tested and that she got a major payday and 10% of the profits, she’d be in a sex film.

Behind the Green Door is one of the three biggest movies of porno chic, along with The Devil In Ms. Jones and Deep Throat. Despite performing sex on screen — she was the first to do an interracial scene in mainstream pornography — Chambers became known as the wholesome all-American girl next door. At some point, she had a falling out with the brothers and began a relationship with Linda Lovelace’s ex, Chuck Traynor. After a few years, they reunited to make two BDSM films, Beyond de Sade and Never a Tender Moment. 

She struggled to break into the mainstream. Nicholas Rey said that she’d “eventually be able to handle anything that the young Katie Hepburn or Bette Davis could,” but he died before he could film the movie he had in mind with her. Often, she was brought into auditions just so actors could meet the porn star in person. Or when it came to Hardcore, they thought she looked too innocent to be someone who had sex on film.

She had better luck with Rabid and Croenenberg; she also released the disco single “Benihana” and achieved some success in Las Vegas, performing in several plays. She also wrote several books, including My Story, Xaviera Meets Marilyn Chambers, Sensual Secrets, and  The Illustrated Kama Sutra.

But by 1980, she was back in adult, making the huge home video success Insatiable and had her own line of videos, Marilyn Chambers’ Private Fantasies. A fear of AIDS — and an 1985 arrest for trumped up sex worker charges — got her out of adult and back to making the kind of movies — Bedtime Stories, Breakfast In Bed, The Marilyn Diaries, Party Girls, New York Nights — that were perfect for USA Up All Night.

She made yet another porn comeback in the Veronica Hart-directed Still Insatiable, Dark Chambers and Edge Play.  Plus, Chambers ran for vice president on the Personal Choice Party ticket, a libertarian political party, in 2004 and 2008. Sadly, she died before her 57th birthday from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by an aneurysm related to heart disease.

Ernest G. Sauer (also known as Eric Drake) directed this, as he did many of her later softcore films. It was written by Don Shiffrin and Gary P. Conner. It’s a basic softcore story: Chambers is Marilyn Valentine, an actress who suddenly inherits a hotel that she decides to renovate instead of continuing to act. After all, her manager took all her money! Soon, it becomes a house of ill repute, but one perfect for honeymoons.

The same song plays over and over. Chambers is charming, and everyone eventually makes love, as you’d expect from a Cinemax After Dark movie. Or USA Up All Night, edited to remove all nudity. This, without the breasts, is like pizza with no toppings, cheese, or sauce, but you know, not everyone’s parents were wealthy enough to afford pay channels.

You can watch an edited version of this on YouTube.