Savannah: A Porn Icon’s Death & A Tale Of Internalized Misogyny
Shannon Wilsey used her real name for acting work. She starred in a couple cheapie horror movies during her short life—which spanned just 23 years. In one, her character’s chemistry teacher electrocutes her to death as revenge for rebuffing his sexual advances. She’s topless in the scene.
For the work Wilsey was famous for—an all-star career in pornography—she used the mononym “Savannah.” Her porn career lasted only four years, but left an indelible impression on the industry. She was one of the first Vivid Girls, and the brand’s first breakout success. Today, Vivid is one of the largest US porn companies. In 1992, she won Best New Starlet at the Adult Video News Awards (the Oscars of Porn). Ten years later, AVN ranked her the 19th greatest porn star of all time. “Every few years a porn actress comes along who raises the visibility of the entire industry … Savannah was definitely that person. And I think everyone in the industry knew it,” said photographer Ian Gittler.
Wilsey’s life ended by her own hand on July 11, 1994. The 30th anniversary of her death has attracted little notice, despite her story’s omnipresence within the Hollywood Sleaze genre. She’s been a dead, blonde cautionary tale longer than she was alive. A fallen woman who gave in to vice and paid for it with her life.
Like many women whom our society holds up as exemplars of what happens when you stray from the straight and narrow path, the real tragedy of Wilsey’s life has been obscured. “Pampered” is the first word in the LA Times headline announcing her death. Another headline describes her suicide as “[putting] an end to her life in the fast lane” and includes a quote from fellow porn actress Danyel Cheeks: “I don’t blame the industry for mistreating her.”
In reality, Wilsey’s life was no bed of roses. Her childhood was rife with neglect, poverty, and sexual abuse. Her short adulthood was defined by exploitative porn contracts, drug problems, money problems, and bad relationships. It’s hard to describe this existence as “pampered.”
Yet, there’s no question that Wilsey was difficult. “I often say she was a spoiled, Hollywood brat,” said adult film director Paul Thomas. Wilsey frequently showed up to shoots hours late and intoxicated. She had a reputation for being demanding, though her demands—as reported by E! Hollywood Story—don’t seem excessive for a top-earning star: access to her favorite makeup artist, wine in her dressing room, and a say in who would serve as her scene partner. Many of these amenities were offered to Vivid’s previous top-earning star, the now-retired Ginger Lynn Allen. It was likely Wilsey’s tone, rather than the demands themselves, that irked people. “She could be very inconsiderate and very loud in her inconsiderateness,” explained Thomas.
Like many people with traumatic childhoods, Wilsey acted out, numbed herself with drugs, and suffered from a crippling fear of abandonment. Because Wilsey was difficult and sexually active, she does not meet the popular criteria for victimhood, which is reserved for people whose stories feed into useful narratives.
The true tragedy of Wilsey’s life is not that she rejected societal mores, but that she ruthlessly embraced them. She objectified herself. She accepted that she was tits and ass to be used as men wanted. Wilsey was known to put on a sweet, childlike act for men who liked that. Other times she was a wild tigress obsessed with sex. “There was nothing she wouldn’t try or do,” said one-time boyfriend Vince Neil, lead singer of Mötley Crüe. Whatever her man wanted.
Wilsey knew her part and played it well. She couldn’t envision a life for herself beyond that of a sex object. When her physical beauty was threatened, she chose suicide. On that fateful summer night in 1994, she got into a drunken car accident that left minor lacerations on her face. Convinced (falsely) that her face was ruined, she shot herself next to her beloved white Corvette less than an hour after the crash.
RESENTMENT
I first learned of Shannon Wilsey at work. I was 20 and employed at a hellish call center, where middle-aged men threatened to kill me over a $13.99 credit card charge. My work computer had a firewall that blocked access to most sites, and this was before unlimited smartphone data was affordable. During those infuriating, brain-numbing hours, the one respite I had was Wikipedia, which blessedly had been left unblocked.
I wiled away the hours reading the most macabre articles I could uncover. With my life as shitty as it was, I got a sick sort of comfort from articles about disasters and gruesome ends—proof that it could always be worse. Within that haze of links I encountered Shannon Wilsey, listed as Savannah (actress). Her entry was brief, cultivated from meager sources. But it stayed with me. The article’s lone image burned into my brain.
I didn’t understand why Wilsey’s life stuck with me at the time. I wolfed down hundreds of articles and very few left an impression. Now, I see it was about resentment. In my call center days, I resented women like Savannah—women who molded themselves into male fantasies. My resentment was triple-edged and beloved, a warm red veil I saw the world through. I hated traitorous women who catered to the selfish impulses of men. I hated myself for not being able to play the role of a bouncy, bubbly, thoughtless blonde. And I hated myself for wanting that role.
Wilsey’s Wikipedia picture hasn’t changed since I first saw it. It’s slightly out-of-focus and cropped at an odd angle. Her eyes are blurry. Her mouth slants into a shape that’s not quite a smile, though it’s trying to be. She wears a black push-up bra and a mesh top. Over her right shoulder is the barely visible face of a mustachioed man. To her left is a paper cup, a TV tray, and what’s possibly a PA speaker. I’m not certain when the picture was taken, but the timeline of Wilsey’s plastic surgeries tells me it’s likely from the last year of her life. During this time, she did dozens of nude dancing engagements—a last-ditch effort to stay relevant in an adult entertainment industry that was turning its back on her. It’s probable that this photo was taken backstage at one of the far-flung clubs she turned to during those last desperate months.
THE ALLURE OF SAVANNAH
Although she was known to the public as “Savannah,” in personal contexts she always used her birth name, Shannon Wilsey. The Savannah persona exemplified the Hollywood & Vine aesthetic of the late-80s and early-90s: a bleach blonde, big-breasted party girl. Her connections to the hair metal scene and its excesses went far beyond aesthetics. During her short life, Wilsey was romantically linked with a number of rock stars. Besides Neil, her paramours included David Lee Roth, Billy Idol, Slash, and Mr. Big bassist Billy Sheehan. In 1991, she crashed Sheehan’s white Corvette while blitzed out of her mind. It was an ominous dress rehearsal of her final night.
Most firsthand accounts of Wilsey’s state of mind leading up to her suicide mention that she was depressed after getting dumped by Guns’n’Roses guitarist Slash. Their relationship was typical for Wilsey, whose romantic life was defined by intense periods of intimacy followed by an unceremonious dumping. Despite enduring poor treatment, Wilsey couldn’t stand being abandoned, and would begin sleeping with the same man again if asked. Rinse and repeat. Neil, for example, dumped her in the middle of a Hawaiian vacation when she overdosed on cocaine.
Through a spokesperson, Slash has denied he ever had a relationship with Wilsey. But his own words contradict this. In 1995, Slash told the Howard Stern Show, “Savannah was a porno girl that I used to go out with. She shot herself. That was a really bad story.” He goes on to explain that, having gotten clean of drugs, he needed to be addicted to something. That something was sex. “So the next thing you know it was a major onslaught of women-chasing. And Savannah just popped up somewhere.”
The two likely dated on-and-off from 1992 until shortly before her death in 1994. In April 1992, the two had a public sexual encounter at New York’s Scrap Bar, which People described as “full-hit whoopee.” Pictures of the two canoodling around this time are easily findable online. Slash’s infidelity caused his fiancée, Renée Suran, to dump him. After Slash ended the affair and entered a self-imposed exile in Hawaii—apparently an unlucky state for Wilsey—Suran took him back. But he began sleeping with Wilsey again shortly thereafter. Slash broke it off a second time during the spring of 1994, two years into his marriage with Suran.
Wilsey was bisexual and her longest relationship may have been a fluid, friends-with-benefits one with fellow porn star Jeanna Fine, who explained: “I think when someone really did love her, she didn’t believe that that was love, you know? I don’t think she knew what love was at all.” Fine ended their relationship in late 1992 after discovering Wilsey had started using heroin again.
SULLEN GIRL
When questioned about her drug use, anger issues, and insecurity in relationships, Wilsey pointed to one, definitive source. She told multiple people nearly identical stories about being molested as a pre-teen.
Life had never been easy for Shannon Wilsey, even before the abuse. Her parents’ marriage fell apart when she was still an infant, and her father abandoned the family. Her mother, Pamela, left California and returned to her native Texas, where she quickly remarried a man named Mike Longoria. Wilsey believed that Longoria was her biological father until she tried to register for middle school. The school required the use of her legal name, which she discovered wasn’t Longoria, but Wilsey. That she immediately discarded the last name Longoria is telling.
The sexual abuse likely began around this time. It was also around this time that her behavioral problems emerged and her substance abuse began. By high school, she was being shuffled between relatives, including a long stint with her maternal uncle. In an interview, her uncle recounted Wilsey’s telling of the abuse: “She’d just come from home from the pool and he came back from work. And [pauses] his spouse wasn’t home ... He figured, well, she lives here, she doesn’t pay any rent. She’s gonna pay one way or the other.”
When telling this story, her uncle hesitates before saying “his spouse.” He’s clearly stopping himself from saying a phrase that’s more natural to him. Between this hesitation, the timing of the abuse, and Pamela Longoria’s complete denial that any abuse ever occurred, I suspect that Wilsey’s abuser was her stepfather. However, that is conjecture on my part.
While living with her uncle, Wilsey started hanging out at a local music venue, trying to sneak backstage and meet the bands. This is how she became involved with Gregg Allman, who was 39 years-old to Wilsey’s 16. Allman had become famous as part of the Allman Brothers Band and then infamous for his drug use and out-of-control behavior. According to his own memoir, he threatened Cher with a knife during the couple’s honeymoon. They divorced four years later in 1979.
Allman and Wilsey met in late 1986 or early 1987. He introduced the teenager to cocaine and heroin. The two soon became a couple and Wilsey left school to follow him on tour. Allman’s career was in tatters, but his fortunes would reverse with the release of his 1987 album I’m No Angel, which he was composing when he met Wilsey.
I’m No Angel contains the song “Faces Without Names.” Its lyrics go: “Of all the young girls I have known before / Believe me there's been a few / One stands out beyond the others / And lady that special one is you / And all the rest are just faces without names.” Whether Allman wrote this song for Wilsey—more likely it was written for no one—she would become one of his of many faces without names. After dating on-and-off for 18 months, Allman abruptly ended the relationship, possibly because Wilsey was pregnant. She would soon miscarry.
A few months later, the now 19 year-old rekindled her relationship with her biological father and moved in with him in Ventura, California. She took to the Southern California lifestyle like a duck to water and soon began participating in the popular pastime of bikini beauty pageants. At one, she met porn performer Racquel Darrian. Wilsey agreed to appear in one of Darrian’s films, which would be directed by mutual friend Micky Ray, who sometimes let the teenager crash at his place. After showing up high to the shoot, the studio billed her as “Silver Kane,” a reference to a heroin needle. Her career in porn had begun.
From there, producer Rex Cabo convinced her to sign with his employer Video Exclusives, a major (and notoriously seedy) player in the industry. “Once a week [Video Exclusives executives] would come in a limo and pick her up,” said Ray. “And she had to do certain things, do favors kinds of things, is the way I understood it. She just got in the car and went for a ride. Once or twice she came back in and had tears in her eyes.”
A FLOWER ON THE SIDE OF HER HEAD
Wilsey’s life had taken a dispiriting turn in the months before her suicide. Her porn career had tipped its peak. Vivid got fed up with her tantrums and tardiness and fired her. Rival big-budget studios weren’t interesting in taking on the troubled star. Wilsey was bumped down the ladder and began working with Video Exclusives again. However, the public grows tired of porn stars easily. The novelty wears off. So, to keep up public interest, Wilsey had to engage in more extreme sex acts. Meanwhile, her chronic overspending meant she had little to show for years of work. She often had to borrow money from her manager, Nancy Pera, to pay the bills.
Wilsey cried on the shoulder of her loyal ex-boyfriend, comedian Pauly Shore. The pair dated for about a year and remained good friends after their breakup. It was Shore who sat by Wilsey’s bedside as she succumbed to her gunshot wound. In a tearful interview a month after her death, Shore explained Wilsey’s despair: “I knew she wanted out [of the porn business]. She said to me: ‘What do I do? I don’t know anything else.’ Her looks were semi-starting to fade—that was tough for her.”
It seems absurd to say that a 23 year-old has fading looks, but in the porn industry any woman over 25 is relegated to the MILF category. Our culture is obsessed with young women, an obsession that was even more fervent within the hair metal milieu Wilsey frequented. And it’s not just about looks. It’s about what those looks represent—moldability, gullibility, insecurity. Vince Neil sang about a sexy girl who’s “school stuff” while Aerosmith waxed poetic about the charms of young girls who are “real insecure.” The more women age into a sense of themselves, the less attractive they become.
Wilsey’s looks were already on her mind that fateful evening of July 11, 1994, as she whipped her white Corvette around Los Angeles. She'd been partying, driving on an unknown chemical plethora. It was a celebratory evening. Filming had just wrapped on the music video for “On Point,” the new single by white-boy hip hop group House Of Pain (best known for their single “Jump Around”) who were enjoying their moment of mainstream success. Wilsey was friends, and occasionally lovers, with group member Danny Boy. Filming had gone well, and Wilsey was hopeful that the shoot would create more acting opportunities. It may have felt like pressing the reset button on her career—Her first on-screen appearances were in Gregg Allman’s music videos. Sadly, she barely appears in the final cut of “On Point.” There are a couple close-ups of her in the crowd at a boxing match. Nothing more. Just one of those faces without names.
Jason Swing sat beside her in the Corvette. He was a fellow friend of Danny Boy. Together, the pair roared around the Hollywood Hills, daring fate and almost beating it. Just a block from her home, Wilsey lost control of the Corvette and glanced a tree before over-correcting and crashing through a fence.
The fence was smashed to bits, but there was only minor damage to the Corvette and its passengers. Swing’s feet had been on the dashboard and the crash slammed his legs against the windshield, but he was able to walk afterwards without issue. The car was in good enough condition that Wilsey drove the rest of the way home. However, she became hysterical about her nose, which she’d banged on the steering wheel. It’s unlikely that the damage to her face was significant. She bled only slightly from one nostril, rather than the waterfall of blood that accompanies a broken nose. But Wilsey was sure her nose was broken and she would be permanently disfigured.
Back at the house, Wilsey made a panicked call to Nancy Pera, her manager. Pera rushed out the door, but would still arrive too late. Wilsey became determined to die. She got Swing out of the house by demanding that he check out the damage to the fence. She had him take her dog with him. As soon as the two left, Wilsey retrieved a handgun she’d bought for personal protection.
Wilsey returned to the garage and laid down next to the smashed-in Corvette. That car was her pride and joy. Now it was ruined, just like her face. When a car is broken, you discard it and get a new model. The same goes for all objects, including women-objects. Wilsey was a professional. She knew her part, and arranged herself into a sexually provocative pose. Swing returned to find her “lying on the floor with her legs spread, with a 9mm gun between her legs, just looking at her car.” The situation was too much for Swing to handle alone. As he turned to leave the garage to find help, he heard the fateful pop. Wilsey had sat up, placed the gun against her temple, and pulled the trigger. “I turned over my shoulder and saw her whole body just drop to the ground.”
Horrified, Swing called 911. Pera arrived before the ambulance. She saw Wilsey, the life fading out as her halo of blood widened. “It looked like she had a big flower on the side of her head,” she said. Nine hours later Shannon Wilsey slipped out of this world.
DON’T BECOME YOUR CHARACTER
The moniker “Savannah” came from the 1987 kids’ comedy Savannah Smiles. The film had a lukewarm theatrical run, but gained a cult following after becoming a daytime cable mainstay. It’s easy to see why Wilsey was drawn to the film’s titular character: The little girl is a blonde cherub with neglectful parents who finds succor in the arms of rough, older men.
In the movie, Savannah’s parents fail to notice that she’s run away and taken up with two career criminals. Although the men initially just want the reward money that’s (eventually) offered for her safe return, they end up forming a found family. The men dote on the little girl and take her on adventures. From these criminal men she gets the affection denied to her by her birth family. In the end, the men sacrifice the money and their own freedom to ensure Savannah’s safety.
At first, Wilsey maintained a healthy distance between herself and her on-screen persona. People were often surprised to find that the real Shannon Wilsey was quiet and shy. When she wasn’t with the hair metal scene, she was hanging out with a group of grown-up child actors—many of whom knew the pain of an abusive upbringing and unstable careers. In the 2021 documentary Kid 90, she appears in home movies made by former Punky Brewster star Soleil Moon Frye, alongside Corey Feldman, Sara Gilbert, Jenny Lewis, and Jonathan Brandis.
But as Wilsey’s fame and drug use grew, the relationship between herself and her persona became more complicated. Wilsey’s identity merged with her on-screen self. The more positive attention Savannah got, the more Shannon Wilsey’s real self and real feelings were shunted to the side. “She became Savannah. She became her character, who was into drugs, and needed reassurance all the time. She forgot who Shannon was,” explained Pauly Shore. “That’s the main thing in this business: Don’t become your character.”
Wilsey’s life illustrates the paradox of internalized misogyny. She accepted life as an object. She turned herself into a male fantasy both personally and professionally. Despite being treated poorly by a dozen or so famous men, she never talked to the press or did more than privately beg men to take her back. They couldn’t ask for a better “face without a name.” I think again of her picture on Wikipedia—that fixed smile, grim and crooked on her face.
Her acquiescence was a plum deal for her paramours, but Wilsey did not win by putting up with poor treatment. Instead, her humiliation grew. Her alienation from her real self increased. Vince Neil promised that the pair would buy a house and move in together, according to Jeanna Fine. But publicly, Neil has referred to their relationship as merely “party buddies.” Wilsey was burned so many times that she stopped letting people get close to her, saying repeatedly in her final months that she had “no friends.” Her repressed rage came out at inopportune and unfair times. The more she was misused in her personal life, the more intense her on-set tantrums became.
The internet is clogged with men eager to tell women they lose all value after age 25. As one commentator put it: “Social commentary written (or spoken) by a woman whose vagina is over 25 years old can be considered mostly bullshit. Null and void. And here is why. You cannot expect a woman, whose primary function is to make babies (aka attract men), to be anything but bitter or dishonest after her eggs and looks start to go.”
If it’s true that women have no value over 25, that they can only be “bitter or dishonest,” then what you are supposed to do when you’re 26? I wonder what men like this imagine should happen to older women. Likely they have no plan, because what they are expressing is not a sincere life philosophy but an attempt to humiliate women. They want women to feel the same insecurity and lack of desirability they feel.
But let’s imagine you accept this assessment of your value. You come to agree that your life has a 25-year expiration date. What should you do? Cover your hideous face and retreat to a convent in the mountains? Become an unpaid handmaiden to a teen girl who still has value? Kill yourself?
Shannon Wilsey chose the latter option. She accepted that she was nothing without her looks.
A CHARM AGAINST SNAKES
None of this is to say that porn performers are doomed to misery, or that only someone self-hating could do porn. Rather, it means that in this life what matters more than what you do is how you feel about yourself while you’re doing it. Plenty of people who live straight-laced lives loathe themselves. It’s a matter of self-respect.
Self-respect is the antithesis of internalized misogyny. To have it, you must excise the cancerous material that is misogyny, an internal disease whose spread can be stopped, though scars will remain. No one can give you self-respect: It’s created by one’s internal orientation rather than external validation. Or, as Joan Didion put it, “There is a common superstition that ‘self-respect’ is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”
There is someone whose life is the mirror image of Wilsey’s. They have twinned biographies—bad childhoods, migrations to Hollywood, illustrious porn careers, famous boyfriends, drug and money problems. But life unspooled very differently for these two women. The difference in their fates boils down, in part, to self-respect. In 1985, a Midwestern redhead won the same AVN award for Best New Starlet that Wilsey would win seven years later. Her name was Ginger Lynn Allen.
Allen was a rising star when she was wooed by producer Steve Hirsch to join a plucky outfit he’d started called Vivid Entertainment. Allen would make Vivid a major studio. Like Wilsey, Allen became addicted to cocaine during her time in the industry. She also dated famous men, though her tastes tended toward movie stars. Her roster of ex-boyfriends included Charlie Sheen and George Clooney.
But Allen chose a very different path. She retired at the top of her career, just a year after her AVN win. When she quit porn, she had no idea where she would go next or if she could get the mainstream acting roles she dreamed of. It didn’t matter. She leapt because she knew she couldn’t stay. “You have to be in the right space [to do porn]. You really need to enjoy what you’re doing—love it, laugh, live it,” explained Allen in 2022. “There was nothing that happened, no significant incident or moment. It was just [that] I woke up and said ‘I’m done’ … I didn’t want it to mess with my head … The day that I decided I would no longer enjoy it, I quit.”
Post-porn, Allen got off drugs and started getting small parts in mainstream movies, though ones of the cheap and lurid variety. Whereas Wilsey was so embarrassed by the lukewarm reception to her first mainstream forays that she gave up, Allen kept going. Over time, she developed a healthy resume and became a frequent collaborator of Rob Zombie’s, appearing in his films The Devil’s Rejects and 31. Acting wasn’t her only endeavor, either. She became an accomplished martial artist and painter.
Allen gained significant weight after leaving porn, leading to brutal attacks on her appearance. These she shrugged off as well. In a true fuck-you move, she has occasionally returned to porn with her bigger body. It’s also fueled her art. Describing a painting of hers called My Big Giant Ass in a 2019 interview with Popgeeks, she laughed about her weight, “I gained 36 pounds in [the] 28 days since my last weigh-in. My thyroid went out, so all of a sudden I had this big, giant curvy ass (laughing), and I had a chick moment where I’m like, ‘Alright, I’m going to own it. I’ve got this big booty right now. I’m going to put it on canvas.’”
It’s impossible as an outsider—and even as an insider—to say why Allen thrived when Wilsey didn’t. The machinations of the heart and mind are too complicated for simple explanations. But it’s apparent that Allen rolls with the punches. And she’s able to roll because there’s a steady sense of self-respect at her center. She has done what makes her her happy, regardless of the reaction, even when popular opinion would posit that she’s doing opposite of self-respect (i.e., starring in porn). When something she excelled at stopped making her happy, she quit.
Wilsey, for all the complicated reasons that live in the minds of so many traumatized people, was unable to hear that little voice telling her to get out. Or rather, her need for approval drowned it out. Both friends and lovers described her deep insecurity and constant need for reassurance. The tangible proof that she was desirable made it hard to quit porn, despite her desire to move on: “Using sex for money, that wasn’t what she was about,” explained director Micky Ray. “She was more into fame and being popular.” The more her identity melded with her on-screen persona, the harder it became to disentangle herself from an industry that was making her miserable and pushing her out.
As a woman, there are always voices telling you that your worth is locked up in men’s estimation of you. Your job is to let that go. This also means you have to give up on your fantasy self, the one who checks off all the societal boxes. This letting go is truly a life’s work because the bullshit will never stop. While researching this essay, I was bombarded with ads for lip fillers, dieting apps, herbal cure-alls, and push-up bras. One liposuction ad began by addressing me with, “hey bestie!” Sorry ad lady, you’re not my bestie. You’re my enemy.
Let me say it plainly: You will never fix all your alleged flaws, and the attempt will suck the joy from your life. Much better to laugh and paint your big fat ass, succulent like a ripe peach dripping with the juice of life.