Jennifer SwannJessie Andrews was a 17-year-old American Apparel salesgirl in Miami Beach when company founder Dov Charney, impressed with her abilities, hired her to instruct the other area employees. She later began modeling for the company and then, at 18, was recruited by elite porn agent Mark Spiegler, who manages high-profile adult stars, including former client Sasha Grey.
By 2012 Andrews was so successful in that industry that the AVN Awards named her best actress for her title role in Portrait of a Call Girl, which finds her engaging in a six–person “blowbang,” bondage, sadomasochism and all.
Now 21, Andrews has dirty-blonde hair and wears little makeup. She's comfortable in backward baseball caps and yoga pants, despite the leather gloves and thigh-high boots she wears in the above-mentioned film. Believe it or not, in person she comes across as an innocent, well-mannered, down-to-earth girl.
“I don't [even] like to put the middle finger up,” she says, lounging today in a strapless American Apparel jumpsuit in her friend's downtown L.A. loft, just across the street from her own. “I'm really weird. Even in movies and stuff, I really don't like to curse too much.”
Her nice-girl image is all part of her brand, which she's been crafting and promoting on her self-titled Tumblr ever since launching it in 2010, back when she was still a chubby-cheeked, bleach-blonde Miami teenager. Nowadays she's scaling back the porn work — only girl-on-girl — and is working to build fashion and music businesses.
Andrews has a line of handmade, dainty gold chains, a women's streetwear collection in collaboration with U.K.-based clothing designers Hype, her own brand of condoms and a line of sex toys through manufacturer Doc Johnson. (Her artificial vagina is called the All American Pussy.)
She's also a DJ, responsible for an online music compilation called The Girlfriend Mix, in which she and other female DJs join forces to create original sets. Available for free on Soundcloud, the house- and disco-heavy mixes have each been played upward of 30,000 times.
All of these ventures are helping her diversify her brand and give her career a shelf life. After all, everyone knows porn careers are short — or, at least, everyone should. “[Spiegler] always tells girls, 'You need to do something else [besides porn]. And mostly everyone doesn't listen. But I listen,” Andrews says.
It helps that she rarely hangs out with other porn actors, she's never done drugs and she doesn't drink. (She's says she's allergic to alcohol, owing to her father's Chinese ancestry.) She's also a bit of a control freak. Even though she's single, she rarely posts photos of her guy friends, because she believes her fans fantasize about her being “a single girl living the life with her girlfriends.”
Andrews' fantasy, meanwhile, is to be her own boss. And she's doing it. “I don't think I ever want to go back,” she says. Sales jobs in her future? Not likely.
href=”https://www.laweekly.com/microsites/people-2013/” target=”_blank”>One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.
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