NYC Starlets – Part 2: Anna Ventura – An American Trilogy

2024: a new year, and an election year in the U.S. For our first report of 2024, we focus on a story that is broader than just the tale of a golden age adult film performer.

In this age of polarization and division, we look at the life and times of the family of a golden age star over a sixty year period and how they’ve dealt with the several-decade fall-out from her adult film career.

Anna Ventura was a regular model in men’s magazines in the late 1970s and early 1980s before appearing in a short sequence of adult films. The Rialto Report tried to contact her for years without success, until the beginning of 2023 when Anna and two of her grown kids got in touch. We arranged a phone call and chatted about her life, after which she agreed to do a podcast interview. First though, Anna said she wanted to get settled: she was about to move house and, on top of that, she needed to undergo knee surgery. We agreed to wait for six months, and set a date in the summer of 2023 to record the interview.

Sadly, Anna passed away before we could do the interview. This is an oral history of her life and family.

Thanks to members of Anna Ventura’s family – her twin daughters, Jackie and Kirstin, and her son, Dillon – and to two of her ex-husbands, Scott and Delbert, for sharing their memories with us. Life is complicated and messy, and it can’t have been easy to have a stranger dig into past family events and ask personal questions.

——————————————————————————————————

Prologue

It’s a bright, sunny California day, sometime in the late 1970s. A woman walks around the edge of a swimming pool. Her arms swing with a studied insouciance. She wears a sky-blue crocheted bikini, her hair is a feathered cut styled into large, bouncy curls.

It’s the brief set-up for a perfunctory X-rated loop. With minimal editing and no sound to worry about, the short film will be in a box within weeks, adorned with the woman’s pouting face, and displayed on shelves of adult book stores across the country.

The footage switches from a long shot to a close-up of the model’s face. For a split second, she breaks the fourth wall and flashes a look into the camera. Her glance meets your gaze, and makes a passing connection. For a fleeting moment, she breaks the movie illusion, tells you that this is just a performance, and reminds you that she is a real person.

But who is that real person? What life currents have led her to this hot day where she will be filmed having sex with an anonymous stud? And where will the storms of life take her next?

*

Act 1

Kirstin (daughter):

My mom’s name was Patricia Susanne Roesch. She was born in Los Angeles, June 9th, 1960 and raised in the San Fernando Valley of California.

Dillon (son):

My grandpa’s side of the family was called Roësch – they were German. When they came over to the States, they erased the two dots over the ‘e’ to become more American. The family story is that my grandpa’s father used to have slaves back in the day.

My grandma’s family name was Peritore and they were Italian. In fact, my mom’s uncle was Frankie Milano, who was the boss of the Cleveland Mafia in the 1930s.

So there was some interesting family history in our background.

Delbert (third husband):

Her family were really strict Catholic-type people – and I think she felt suffocated in that environment from an early age.

Kirstin:

She was really close with her dad, my papa. Her dad was her everything, her hero. He always tried to make life as happy as possible for her.

Jackie (daughter):

My papa was the heart of their family. He was a good man.

Dillon:

Papa worked for Boeing airplanes where he was a high-level manager overseeing airplanes.

Kirstin:

But then when it came to her mom… her mom was very stern and didn’t show her affection. So in some ways, she only had her dad.

Jackie:

Her mother and her did not have a good relationship. They fought a lot. My grandmother was very judgmental, and my mom had to fight and compete for her attention.

Dillon:

My grandparents were very different: my grandpa was a good-hearted man that would see a positive and a future in someone, and he’d help guide them. He saw something in my mom and was always there to back her up.

But her mom didn’t approve of much that my mom did, so life was difficult.

Jackie:

My mom was raised with a distant older sister named Carol, another sister who was five years older, Denise, and a younger brother, Anthony.

Anna/Patty, far left

Kirstin:

Her three siblings weren’t particularly nice to her so she didn’t have great relationships with any of them. They didn’t get along when they were young, and when they got older, they still hated each other. It wasn’t til the last few years that they really started tolerating each other. There was a lot of sibling rivalry.

With all the problems at home, I don’t think school was a highlight for her.

She loved arts and crafts. It was a secret hobby that she didn’t let many people know about. And she could draw beautifully too. She never wanted to admit it, and she didn’t do it often but if you asked her to draw a horse, my gosh, it was so realistic. One time in high school, she etched Jesus’s face into a mirror.

Dillon:

She didn’t talk that much about her childhood life with us kids. She sometimes brought up the more difficult memories, but she didn’t say much.

Jackie:

She ended up going to a private school ’cause she was picked on a lot in regular school – and then she had problems in the private school as well.

One story she told us was that she developed earlier than most girls, and one day these girls jumped her and ripped her top off to try and prove to everybody that she was ‘stuffing.’ I guess that’s what they called it. And she wasn’t.

When she got home and told her mom about it, her mom said, “Well, you should wear different clothes and not show ’em off so much.”

Kirstin:

She was really upset. Basically, her mom said, “It’s your fault if you dress provocatively. You shouldn’t dress like that.”

Since that moment, she became the outcast, the black sheep of the family. And it was like that for the rest of her life.

Dillon:

There was another terrible incident where she was mistreated by a family member. I don’t want to say much more than that.

Kirstin:

She told us all about this incident. I don’t want to go into details. The fact is that when her dad, my papa, found out about it, he had a series of heart attacks which eventually crippled him. It started when he discovered what happened to my mom.

He was gonna murder this person who mistreated her, and instead he pretty much killed himself inside. He lived that way for the rest of his life. And that must have compounded her pain because of what had happened to her.

It was a double tragedy. It was just awful.

Dillon:

In school, my mom was popular. She was beautiful and fun-loving, and people liked her.

Kirstin:

She had all the boys’ attention. The girls might’ve been jealous, her mom might’ve thought she was being provocative, but she always knew she was beautiful.

She said, “I could get any guy I wanted, but they were all just too petty for me.” [laughter]

She dated John Elway (future Hall of Famer quarterback with the Denver Broncos): they went to the same high school and were in the same year. She didn’t think much of him. Her exact words were, “He was so self-absorbed and just into football. I didn’t even want to go on a second date…” (laughs)

Scott (first husband):

She was a little wild child in high school. And then right outta high school, she went into the pages of Penthouse magazine.

———————————————————————

Act 2

Delbert:

She told me that when she turned 18, she rebelled against everything, and that’s when she took off and started doing the modeling, the films, and everything else. That started in 1978.

Fred Lincoln (adult film actor/director):

One day I was hanging out with Reb Sawitz at his office. It was the late 1970s. I knew Reb because he’d came through the business the old-fashioned way, starting out as an actor in loops – just like me – except Reb was pure California and I was a Brooklyn guy. Anyway, Reb had taken over this agency in the early days, Pretty Girl International, which provided girls to men’s magazines and X-rated films.

That day at Reb’s, this girl walks in, and our mouths just fell open. We couldn’t take our eyes off her. She walked up to us and said something like, “Hi, I’m Patty. Do you have any work for me?”

She used a cute voice, and we fell over ourselves. You could see she knew the power she had.

Jackie:

The story she told me was that she walked into an agent’s office thinking it was just a regular modeling gig, and the guy said, “All right, take your clothes off.”

She thought, “What?!”

And he’s like, “Take your clothes off.” And then she realized.

When she figured out that it was that type of modeling, she told me that she decided to go ahead with it anyways just to get back at her mother.

Kirstin:

She thought, “Screw it!” She wanted to do it as a kind of slap in the face to her mom. She did it out of vengeance.

I think she felt neglected and she wanted her mom to pay attention to her. At that stage, any type of attention was good attention. Even bad attention, that could be damaging to her, was still attention, you know?

Her mom eventually found out about the modeling work and blew up. My mom called her a whore, a slut, and things like that. It wasn’t pretty. But my mother… she moved out and left home with a smile on her face.

Dillon:

My grandpa wasn’t a fan of her work but he saw that it made my mom happy, and that’s all he wanted so he supported her.

Her mom on the other hand didn’t like it one bit. She belittled my mom because of her new lifestyle. And because she wasn’t happy about it, it just made my mom go and do it even more.

At that point, mom veered away from her parents, and that’s where she literally stopped talking to them. And that had an effect on the whole family: when I was born later, I only saw my grandma maybe two times in my life. And both times, I could definitely see how and why my mom suffered.

Delbert:

She didn’t have much to do with her mom and dad after that. In fact, the next time she saw her parents was in 2003. That was when I was married to her.

Fred Lincoln:

The thing about Patty, or rather ‘Anna Ventura’, was that she played it very cool at the beginning: she just did magazine work for the first year or more, starting with solo layouts before moving on to girl/girl spreads. She made a lot of money doing it that way. She held herself back. I don’t know if it was intentional, but it was a smart move. It meant that film directors became more and more keen to use her, and they offered her more and more money – and she kept turning them down!

Leslie Winston (adult film actress):

We did so much magazine work together. She was one of the nicest girls. So sweet and humble.

Leslie Winston and Anna Ventura

From an interview with Richard Milner (1983):

How many layouts have you done?

Thousands. All the major magazines. I’m bored with doing layouts. I’ll do ‘em once in a while. But once, I did it seven days a week.

How’d you get the name Ventura?

My first ‘Oui’ layout. They named me Anna Ventura.

You said you would never do porno (films), what made you change your mind?

The money! It took them two months to get me in (my first film) Bad Girls. They even delayed the film because they wanted me. They kept upping their prices… and eventually it sounded good.

What was it like being in ‘Bad Girls’?

I was very nervous. I got the script the day I walked on the set, and I had a leading role and had to memorize my lines. It was tough, and yet I pulled it off. I was very pleased with my performance.

Anna Ventura (right) in ‘Bad Girls’ (1981)

Fred Lincoln:

It was David (Marsh) and Svetlana who eventually got her for ‘Bad Girls’ (1981) with Michelle Bauer – and Patty was great! She was hot as hell and delivered the lines well, and everyone wanted more of her. At first, she told everyone she would only make the one film, but she relented and made several more.

Laurie Smith (adult film acrtress):

I met her on the set of Society Affairs (1982) which was one of her first films, and we clicked. I was a few years older, but we both had the same sort of issues. We were fighting against our upbringing, unwanted attention, and not enough attention! She was awesome: we partied together, traveled together, and laughed together.

Neither of us were the stars of ‘Society Affairs’ so we messed around and had a ball. We couldn’t stop laughing. She was so playful.

Anna Ventura (left) in ‘Society Affairs (1982)

Fred Lincoln:

I can’t remember the first film I used her in – it may have been Oui, Girls (1982). It was a detective story – and I needed someone who could act. I’d seen Patty in a few films, and she could act. I mean, she was no Meryl Streep, but who’d want to sleep with Meryl? (laughs) I’d pick watching Anna Ventura in a movie any day!

Jamie Gillis (adult film actor):

Anna Ventura (laughs). A beautiful girl. She was the first of the new generation of girls coming into the business at the end of the 70s. They had daddy issues and were doing it for money. That was much more satisfying to me than the hippies who had started out in the business in the early days.

Laurie Smith:

Somewhere along the way, we did a little coke together (laughs).

Jackie:

She said the modeling brought her into a whole new lifestyle. She met so many people, and did drugs with a lot of them.

Kirstin:

She picked up a drug habit, typically it was cocaine in that era for people. She wasn’t shy about anything and told us all about it. She told us she did acid, cocaine, and pot. She always said, “You gotta live your life…”

Laurie Smith:

Patty was a live wire. I struggled to keep up with her. She was so full of energy and fun. After a while, I couldn’t keep up with her and so we drifted apart, but whenever we saw each other, she was always happy and excited to see me. I wish I’d stayed in touch with her.

Jamie Gillis:

One thing that made Anna different from the other porno girls was that she didn’t mix with the rest of the XXX crowd. She was more of a rock n’ roll chick. She told me she dated Todd Rundgren and other rockers. She had quite a group of acquaintances…

Once I was walking past a nightclub in Los Angeles, and I got pushed aside by some security guards who were escorting Rick James into the club – and Anna was on his arm! I shouted towards her: “Hey baby, it me – Jamie!”

She turned and looked, and laughed, and blew me a kiss – and then she was gone.

Anna Ventura (left) with Rick James

Fred Lincoln:

She appeared in Penthouse magazine, which in those days was a huge deal. High end, classy magazines like Penthouse and Playboy didn’t usually go near anyone who’d been in adult films. And not only that, she became friends with Bob Guccione and his wife and stayed in their mansion with them.

Anna Ventura, in Penthouse

Dillon:

She lived a party lifestyle. She was friends with Sharon Osborne, and spent time with Ozzy and Sharon a fair bit. She told me she used to hang out with bands like the Stones and did drugs with them too.

Fred Lincoln:

After she’d been making films for a year or two, I ran into her in Los Angeles and she said was restless and wanted a change, so I invited her to New York. I told her she could stay with me and Tiff (Clark). I offered her some parts in movies I had coming up. She was excited, and moved in with us in New York straight away.

George Payne (adult film actor):

I was one of the first who worked with her in New York. I think it was Devil in Miss Jones 2. She became one of my favorite people. Easy to be with, the sweetest girl. And she liked to party too.

I had a coke habit then and so we had that in common too. We became close.

Fred Lincoln:

I always admired guys like Radley Metzger. When he made a film like Misty Beethoven (1976), he flew over to Paris to shoot scenes with Jamie (Gillis). And it worked! That film looked like a million dollars.

So I copied the idea and flew over to Paris with Jamie and did the same thing for a film I made called That’s Outrageous (1983). But I went one better, and I took Joey (Silvera), Tiff, and others as well. And I wrote a part for Patty as a model who gets married to Joey in Paris in the movie – so she came along too.

We spent too much money, took too long to get organized, had all sorts of problems, and made a loss on the film… and we had a ball! It was fantastic.

From an interview with Richard Milner (1983):

On the way back from Paris, I woke up from an hour’s nap and Jamie Gillis was sitting next to me. I asked him if he was a member of the High Flyers’ Club and he said no. I initiated him! Get this, Anna Ventura initiating Jamie Gillis into something? Now that took me by surprise!

Jamie Gillis:

I remember that! When she asked me, I played the innocent and pretended I had no experience – which was a complete lie. So I let her guide me which was very enjoyable.

Beautiful girl. Whatever happened to her?

Cherry Bomb (model/Cheri magazine journalist):

I had one boyfriend that I was really crazy about. His name was Michael Kirke, and he was in this music group called The Hits. They were this amazing band just like The Cars. They were so good, and cute too! They should’ve been huge. I managed them for a while, but I eventually realized that Michael and I weren’t destined to be together, so we broke up.

But I hooked him up with Anna Ventura, this beautiful ex-Penthouse girl. I thought, “What girlfriend would do that for you? She’s so beautiful and pretty.”

Kirstin:

My mom started dating a musician guy, Mikael Kirke. Then she got engaged to him, but it fell through because apparently his mother didn’t like her. Mikael wanted to be a famous singer, so she dropped everything that she had earned so he could make a record. She basically funded that record with all of her earnings.

Fred Lincoln:

I remember her telling me how much she had spent on this LP for this guy. I was amazed that someone would do that. I kept saying to her, “Why are you giving money to a musician? They’re all the same, and they’ll leave you with nothing.” But she wouldn’t listen. She ended up with an ‘Assistant Producer’ credit on the sleeve… but not much else.

Why do women like guitarists so much? I’ve never worked it out. Maybe I’m just jealous.

Anyway, I was proved right. The record bombed.

Kirsten:

She’s on the cover, sort of lying down looking very provocative, and Mikael’s standing there holding her.

Unfortunately it flopped, but my mom kept a copy of the record. My twin sister, Jackie, has it now. My mom was very proud of it. She said something good came out of the money she made.

The Rialto Report tracked Mikael Kirke down but he declined to be interviewed for this article.

Fred Lincoln:

All of a sudden, I guess it was around 1983, Patty disappeared from the scene. It was overnight. Everyone was asking questions about what had happened to her. I heard all kinds of rumors: some said that she’d been abducted, or that she was dancing in Asia, or that she’d got married to a rich Arab.

I never found out the truth, but I hope that she’s still out there, partying and making people laugh.

Scott:

During the time when she was modeling and taking drugs, she went to Japan. She was paid to go there as an escort with a guy from Saudi. That’s how she wound up over there.

Dillon:

She told me that she stayed about two years in Japan doing more modeling. She said that it was a gorgeous country and a place I need to go and visit.

Jackie:

She loved Japan and told me so much about it. She did regular modeling and as well as pinup stuff when she was there. She told me she slept on little beds that were mats on the floor, and she insisted it was the best sleep she ever got in her life.

Kirstin:

Eventually her drug habit got too much, and she ended up returning to the U.S. and checking herself into a rehab facility. That’s what finished her modeling career. She just made the decision that it was time to step out.

And that’s where the rest of her life began, I guess.

Anna Ventura, big in Japan

From an interview with Richard Milner (1983):

Are you the kind of person that looks very different on the street from on the screen?

Extremely. In my everyday life I don’t wear makeup, and on the screen, they put the makeup on. When I’m in front of the camera then I’m a whole different person, my whole attitude changes. I know girls who are always sex bombs even when a camera’s not around – they’re still performing.

In my everyday life, it’s just me, I’m not performing for anybody.

When did you start wanting to be an actress?

I never wanted to be an actress. It just happened.

What do you want to do?

Oh, get married, have kids, and be rich. That’s it. I want to take the simple way out. Me, work – moi?

You’re not a 9 to 5 person?

Not at all, I’ve tried it, to be behind a desk and work. It bores the hell out of me, and it’s very bad pay.

Anna Ventura, at an awards ceremony in New York, 1982

———————————————————————

Act 3

Scott:

She and I first met in, of all places, a rehab center in Anaheim, California. I was coming off coke and she was coming off of everything on the scale of one to 10. So we hooked up.

Dillon:

Our real father went into rehab in Los Angeles because of heroin. And my mom went into rehab because of cocaine. That’s where they both met, and one thing led to another, now he’s my father. For better or for worse [laughter].

Scott:

We waited a year before we got married. I knew about her past. I didn’t have any issues with it.

She was a beautiful woman. She was sociable, very friendly, fun to be around. That’s why I married her. But when the drugs and the alcohol got a hold of her, she was like Jekyll and Hyde.

Rehab worked for me. But it didn’t work for her.

Dillon:

I think they met in ’83. They got married in ’85.

Scott:

I was 30 when we married. We had to go through the rituals of the Catholic church because of her family, and she wore a big white gown. It was a $100,000, picture perfect wedding. We had 300 people there. If you saw the photo album, you’d say everything was perfect in our life. We were both sober and the world was at our feet.

And then it just catapulted straight downhill.

Kirstin:

On her wedding day, her father told her that he’d give her $10,000 to leave this man and not marry him. My grandfather was very smart [laughter].

But she went ahead with it: he was an attractive man and made some money, but I think the main attraction for her was that they had a similar problem with drugs.

He worked as a desk jockey for a company in the oil field. That’s what started their life on the road.

Jackie:

They had three girls and a boy, which is a coincidence as my mom was born into a family with three girls and a boy too. I’m second to last. I’m the twin with Kirstin – I’m younger by two minutes.

My parents didn’t live in Los Angeles for long. My dad always worked at the oil refineries, so we traveled everywhere. I’ve lived all over the U.S. We’d move into a house, stay there for a little bit, then he had to travel so we’d move again, stay there a little bit. Rinse and repeat.

Dillon:

I was born in New Hampshire and then lived in California, Florida, Texas, all over the place. It felt like there wasn’t a state we didn’t live in.

Jackie:

My mom did a variety of jobs along the way. When they were in Florida, she worked at Disney World where she was a waitress at one of the big restaurants, dressed up in a ball gown.

Kirstin:

My birth father wasn’t around a lot. Once we kids were born, my mom would stay behind, and he’d go off for a few months and come back when he felt like it, so he wasn’t a great dad.

Scott:

When Patty was sober, she was a sweetheart and an angel. But the truth was that she was a heavy, heavy drinker. She became a full-blown alcoholic; she could drink a full fifth of vodka each day without hesitation.

She also had a bad addiction to prescription medication, and would come up with a lot of so-called ailments so she could get painkillers. I don’t want to trash on a person, but a lot of the ailments that she said she had… didn’t exist.

For example, she convinced doctors that she had fibromyalgia, so they just pumped her up with morphine or hydrocodone and stuff like that. And of course, she became addicted to those medications which was her downfall. She went in and out of, I’d say, nine rehab centers for drug addiction.

She convinced our kids that she had lots of health issues, but the truth is that there were many times we had to pick her up off the floor when she was almost dying from an overdose.

Kirstin:

I was too young at the time to remember the details but my mom’s health issues were real. We all saw them with our own eyes. And they were serious issues and they continued for years.

Jackie:

My mom didn’t make her symptoms up: she had many health problems that were real.

Scott:

When I was physically with her, she was good. But I traveled all over the world for work, and pretty much as soon as I left each time, she went back to the bottle, the drugs, and the pills.

And not only that, she was a very sexually active person. And sometimes I was too, I can’t deny it [laughter]. But she would mess around sexually all the time, and I got tired of coming back home from work and finding my bank account’s empty and that she’d been seeing somebody else. Once I came back from Spain, where I did a nuclear job and I made a ton of money: I got home, and found I didn’t have enough to get a cab ride home and there was a guy in my bed.

But like I say, when she was not on alcohol or meds, she was a really nice person.

Kirstin:

Eventually we moved to Washington state and that’s where their relationship ended.

Jackie:

They had problems throughout their time together. Somewhere along the line, they decided to split up. My mom was the one who initiated the breakup, and she kept custody of us. That was in the mid 1990s; I was four at the time. After that, we only saw my dad one time a year. He lost contact with us more and more the older we got, and eventually he gave up all rights to us.

Scott:

We were together ten years but when we were separated, I was blocked from seeing my kids. Which was ironic because when we got divorced, Patty promised that I could be involved with them. And then they disappeared for nine years.

Kirstin:

I stayed in touch with my birth father for a bit. And then he moved on and married a girl, and that didn’t work either. Then he married another girl, and the story goes on.

Dillon:

I do remember seeing my father again when I was ten years old. It was in a hotel, and I was missing my mom so I was like crying and just wanted to be back with her. And he didn’t like the way that I was crying, so he put me in a closet and shut the door. And left me in there until I was done crying.

*

Kirstin:

When I was six or seven, my mom went back to school and got her bookkeeping qualification. Over the years after that, she often found work as a bookkeeper. Other times, she worked in gas stations and grocery stores. She also worked at our school for about two years as well as a teacher’s aide. And then she was a bus driver for Head Start which helped low-income kids have a good schooling – she had a Commercial Driver’s License! [laughter]. She was at her best when she was working in an educational environment.

But whatever she was doing, she always put us first. She was good like that.

Jackie:

After Scott, my mom met a guy named Carl. He wasn’t a good guy. He was a drunk and he got physical. They got married in a bar real fast.

Kirstin:

She married Carl in Washington, and they moved up to Milltown, Montana. Another bad guy. He was physically abusive towards everybody.

Jackie:

There was one horrible night I remember when we were growing up. I was young. My mom and Carl came home from a Christmas party, and they were drunk. And he was hitting her. All the kids tried to jump in. My twin sister, Jackie, got thrown into a door and hurt her jaw because her chin hit the door. I tried to get outside but he kicked the door closed. It was a big heavy wooden door. My hands were gripping the door frame, and when he kicked the door closed, it slammed on me and broke my middle fingers. Then he picked up the vacuum and threw it at my mom and jumped on top of her to strangle her with the cable. My oldest sister was upstairs, and she was trying to call for help but she couldn’t get the window open, so she smashed the window and shouted to the police outside. They kicked the door in and took Carl away.

Kirstin:

Basically, Carl was in a drunken stupor and tried to kill my mom. He fractured my jaw, and broke Jackie’s fingers. So he left and she divorced him.

Delbert:

Carl ended up in jail because he’d tried to choke her. It took Patty a long time to get over what Carl did.

*

Jackie:

That was a really quick marriage. Less than a year. It was crazy.

Then she married again for a third time. That was Delbert. He’s the best man I’ve ever met in my life. One of the most amazing people in the world, and I still strive to be like him.

Delbert:

I met Patty because our kids were in the same class in high school. She lived across the highway from where we lived in Milltown, Montana. Kirstin asked me to come over and meet her mom so that she could come over and play. I was in the middle of getting a divorce myself.

Kirstin:

My mom met Delbert about three months after Carl. We had a good relationship with him.

Delbert:

Patricia and I got together, and then she moved in with me. I had a two-bedroom house at the time, and I turned it into a six-bedroom home. And then we got married and I adopted her four kids, and we were together for seven years. 1999 to 2007.

I had three kids of my own so I blended the two families together. I tried my darndest to try and keep it like my dad and mom raised me. Everybody was treated equally.

Jackie:

Delbert committed to my mom despite knowing everything that she had gone through: he loved her, and he didn’t judge.

The crazy thing was that he knew all about Anna Ventura, but he didn’t recognize she was the same person as my mom. And when she told him, he just said, “Wow.” He’s a very private person when it comes to his personal life, but he just nodded his head, flicking a cigarette, and said, “Cool.”

Delbert:

I knew of Anna Ventura, the adult film star, before I met Patricia. I even had one of the magazines that she was in but I didn’t realize that was Patricia. I didn’t put two and two together [laughter]. Patricia eventually told me. So I pulled out the magazine and showed it to her and she said, “Oh yeah, that’s me” [laughter].

I said, “Are you serious?!”

We agreed that this information did not need to get out [laughter]. I did not need my co-workers to know this, and she didn’t want everyone knowing at the time because this was a small community and everybody knew everybody. So we kept it hush-hush. Just between us. She told the kids all about her past, but she said not to say nothing to nobody.

Not that she was ashamed. She was proud of what she’d done. And that’s the way she lived her life.

Jackie:

We got a kick out her past: we’d always get on her, saying, “Mom, you’re a porn star!”

She’d say, “No, it was just nude modeling. Don’t call it that!”

We messed around with her. When we asked about it and showed her a photograph of her, she’d say “Oh, I can’t even remember doing that picture.”

But, looking at it, I could see she started to remember.

Kirstin:

She was a very open person if you asked her about her films or magazines. She’d laugh and say, “Okay, here we go!”

Obviously, we didn’t watch the films she made, but she talked to us about them and showed us some photographs. Even though her modeling career may not have started with the correct intentions, she always said it was the best part of her life. She boasted about it.

Dillon:

She told me that she was in Penthouse and Playboy – she said that was very rare to be in both.

She did have one magazine of hers that she kept under the coffee table. She was proud of that one – until my dog ripped it up. My puppy just annihilated stuff, and one day he ate this favorite magazine. It ruined my mom for a while and I felt terrible as hell.

Jackie:

Personality-wise, my mom was awesome. She was very funny. I get my sense of humor from her. We’d joke around all the time. She always found the humor in something, always young and playful.

Kirstin:

She loved going camping. We’d go for a week at a time, just up to the mount or to the lake in the mountains and pitch a tent, and just enjoy each other’s company.

Delbert:

I worked four days on, four days off so we had lots of time to be together outdoors. We’d head off to the lake and during the summertime, we’d spend time camping, boating, water skiing, tubing. We had friends that would come up and stay with us. It was great.

Dillon:

Those years after Delbert showed up, and we were living in Missoula, was the best time of my life. He was great to all of us and a good father, and to this day he’s still the man I consider my father.

We had a boat. We had a camper. We had dirt bikes. We had snowmobiles. I did motocross, and my mom got me three dirt bikes. We had everything.

Kirstin:

In her thirties, my mom ended up in hospital due to a bunch of fibroids in her uterus – and they almost caught it too late. She was bleeding constantly so they did a hysterectomy… and she suffered a cardiac arrest. She coded, but they brought her back. Then they gave her pain meds to get her through the recovery and, with her addictive personality, that’s where it just kinda all spiraled.

*

Jackie:

Delbert was really good to my mom, but the problem was that he came along at a bad time. She’d just dealt with Carl, and before that she’d been in a difficult relationship with my real dad, and so Delbert ended up coming onto the scene at the worst time of all.

She was doing all these pills, but somehow he dealt with all that stuff. I don’t know if he just dealt with it for the sake of us kids, but he was always so good to her.

Delbert:

We had a good four years together. Then she got sick, and after that she was taking a lot of pain pills, drinking a lot, and things just started to go downhill.

It was definitely tough. There were times when I’d go to work at the weekend, she’d throw wild parties at the house with the kids.

Patty didn’t seem to be trying to be an adult at the time. She wanted to be more like a teenager. Like, come on now, [chuckle] you’re a mother of four, you need to start acting like a mother.

One time, I was at work and I got a phone call at midnight. It was Jackie on the phone, and she was intoxicated, crying, wanting her daddy. I said, “Dear, I can’t come home. I’m here until 6 o’clock in the morning.”

It was frustrating for me because I had no idea what was going on at the house. There were some trying times.

Kirstin:

Then she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. So that meant more pain meds to deaden the nerves, so that she couldn’t feel the pain. It started with methadone. And then it went to hydrocodone and oxycontin. Then back to hydrocodone and gabapentin. Her pill addiction was crazy out of control.

Her relationship with Delbert was good, but she started going off the rails.

Delbert:

We ended up filing bankruptcy. I had to get rid of the camper, the boat, and lost my house. It was a shame.

Dillon:

We ended up moving out to Arizona because we thought the warmer temperature would help out my mom’s conditions.

Delbert:

It turned out to be a bad move. When we moved down there, Patty had a job but it turned out it wasn’t enough to make the payments on the house that we had rented. So we were evicted and lost that house, and we had our little minivan repossessed. I didn’t know where the money was going, but it wasn’t going where it should. We went from a house to a motel.

Every now and then Patty and I would get into a fight: sometimes she’d tell me not to interfere with her kids because I wasn’t their biological parent, so I felt pushed away.

Kirstin:

By this time, she was definitely an alcoholic. White Zinfandel or vodka were her drinks of choice, but she’d drink whatever she could get her hands on. I guess we just got used to her behavior after a while because it became part of the fabric of each day, but there were still many incidents that I remember.

This one day, my brother was just so tired of it all that he hid her prescription. Holy hell. That was the worst day of our lives [laughter]. She was angry, angry, angry. She freaked out to the point where it scared us all. My brother capitulated and told her where he’d put her pills. But she was desperate, I guess.

Jackie:

My mom and I would fight a lot. There was a time in Arizona that I had to call the police because she was drunk and on her pills. I was 15, 16 years old and getting ready for work, and she came into the bathroom, grabbing a big old butcher knife, and threw it as hard as she could into the tub, and said, “Just kill me.”

I looked at her and said, “Are you crazy?”

I called the cops, and when they finally showed up, I showed them the knife, and said, “Look, she’s unstable. Please take her away.” But they didn’t do anything.

Another time, they came and took her to a psych ward for two days.

At that point, she was in denial of her addictions, and so she didn’t even try and get help.

Kirstin:

When my mom was sober, she was top notch. The best mother anybody could ask for. She’d teach us how to cook and she kept a happy house. She made us feel like a real family. But then her addictions would take hold.

Delbert:

It came to a head when there was a fight involving the girls and their boyfriends. There were punches thrown so I got Jackie down on the floor, held her down, until I thought she was calmed down… and then she punched me in the eye. So I slapped her and told her, “Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

Well, the next day I ended up in jail for 12 hours. Jackie went to school and they saw a bruise on her cheek, and… they accused me of abusing my daughter.

I had to plead my case and they were gonna charge me with a felony. And after that ordeal was done and everything calmed down, I decided to exit Arizona peacefully. I left Patricia and the kids behind. I felt that if I didn’t leave, then it was going to escalate into something that I didn’t want. And I wanted to leave and not have that happen. I couldn’t handle it no more. And I didn’t want to end up in jail again.

Patricia was upset when I left. She told me that she’d go to counseling, and she’d do this and do that.

I said, “We’ve already been through this. You won’t do what they’re asking to be done, because you don’t think that there’s a problem.”

Jackie:

Delbert packed up in the middle of the night and left. He called me and said, “Hey kiddo, I’m leaving.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

And he told me. He said it was her drinking. He just couldn’t cope anymore. So he moved to Montana and they got divorced. And even though we weren’t his birth kids, he willingly paid child support.

I love my mom to death, but there’s some things she did that I didn’t approve of. She just didn’t treat Delbert right. She was mean. And then she’d try and come up with every reason to justify what she did to him.

Kirstin:

I’m not going to lie: it wasn’t the best childhood, but she always had a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs and clothes on our backs. And despite all her battles, she always found a way of showing her love.

But it’s also true: my mom’s issues affected me: I rebelled. I became a mom at 16.

Let me tell you, the day when she found out I was pregnant really sucked… I swear I still have the lump on my head from that day. She told me she wanted me to abort, but when I told her I wasn’t going to, she accepted it. She stood by me through the whole thing.

And then after my daughter was born, I called her crying one day, and she said, “I know it’s tough, but I know a family who wants to adopt. What do you think?”

I told her I wasn’t going to consider the idea. That was the last time it was ever brought up. And after that, she always supported me and said it was the best decision I’d ever made.

Jackie:

We did have a tough upbringing. My mom did have a pill problem, and my mom did have an alcohol problem. We saw a lot of that growing up ourselves. But she would always try and find the light in everything that happened.

And she was always so funny to be around. There was no one like her.

But don’t get me wrong. She did get on my nerves a lot.

Kirstin:

I remember one day I worked really hard, and I got the best tip of my life. It was a $100 bill. My mother called and says, “I need my prescription, do you have any money?”

I said, “Yeah, you know I do. Bring me the receipt though.”

She told me her prescription cost $75, so I gave her the $100.When I got the receipt, I saw her prescription was only $5, and she blew the rest of the $100 on vodka.

That was my breaking point. I told her I was leaving. She called the police, and the police told me that, because of my age, my child legally belonged to my mom… so if I left, I’d have to leave my daughter with her. So I went back in the house and waited for her to pass out. Then I gathered up my daughter, and my twin Jackie and I left and headed for Montana.

Jackie:

We jumped ship. We got on a flight and headed to Missoula, Montana where my dad, Delbert, had gone.

Delbert:

The girls decided that they’d had enough. It was about a year after I’d left. I got a phone call and they told me that they were in Montana. And I said, “You’re what!?”

“We’re on our way to you.”

“Does your mother know?”

“No, she doesn’t know.”

Kirstin:

My dad told us he was living in Golva, a tiny town in North Dakota, so he drove over to get us. We moved in with him and lived there.

*

Dillon:

Out of everybody in the family, I was the only one that stood by my mom’s side throughout everything.

My sisters, they all left when they were 16 to be with Delbert, and that’s when it was just me and my mom.

I dealt with it good at the beginning. The first few weeks were okay, but she was getting sicker.

One time when I was 14, my mom needed to be rushed to the hospital. I’d never driven and I was too young to even have my license but I hopped in the car and drove her to the hospital. That was my driving lesson. That’s what life was like for us. Once or twice, she needed to be checked in because she had thoughts of suicide. That was stressful.

I wanted to make money to help my mom, so I lied about my age to Taco Bell when I was 14 and they hired me. I just wanted to make a paycheck and give it to my mom so we could pay our bills.

For a time, she cleaned herself up, and went to college and qualified as a medical coder and biller: she was phenomenal and finished top of her class, like valedictorian.

But then when I was 17, my mom started going really hard into her pills and her drink as well. I’d walk out into the living room and she was passed out on the couch with a bottle of vodka half-drunk next to her. It got so bad that that I knew I had to do something drastic. I contacted Child Protection Services because I knew that the only way for her to get better was if she didn’t have to worry about me. I called CPS and they put me into foster care.

Honestly, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. And I’ve had some difficult decisions. But nothing matches up to taking myself away from my mom. I knew it would hurt me to leave my mom, but I knew it would hurt my mom more if I stayed.

*

Delbert:

When the twins arrived, they lived with me for six months. I enrolled them in school because I wanted them to get their high school education. And it didn’t take long for their mother to find out where they were. And then Jackie and I had to fly back to Arizona so I could go to court to get custody of the two girls.

Jackie:

A few years after we left, we were all growed up, and my mom was more or less homeless. I can’t remember how she made it up to North Dakota, but she found us, and moved up to where we were living in North Dakota.

Dillon:

I got out of foster care when I was 19 and I went up to Beach, North Dakota. That is where they were living at the time. So, once again, everybody was together again.

Kirstin:

Our older sister decided to get married, and we were trying to figure out who was going to walk my mom down the aisle to her seat, and Delbert said he’d be honored. So he walked her down the aisle, and it just blossomed into another relationship.

Jackie:

She and Delbert had gone through their divorce, but next thing you know, they got back together. My dad refused to get married again but they still ended up getting back together.

Delbert:

Patricia and I had started talking again. We were speaking on the phone. We had talked for three or four months before she moved back here. And my plan was for her to move into an apartment building that’s across the road from me that is a low-income building. I wanted her to rent a room over there, and then we would go out on dates and see how it was going to work.

Instead of her doing that, she moved right in with me.

Jackie:

At the beginning my mom was still drinking and doing the pills. It wasn’t pretty. I remember she’d sometimes fall asleep behind the wheel, and us kids would freak out.

One time, she came home from the doctor’s office and when my dad came home from work, she was passed out in the front seat, foot on the brakes, still in gear. If her foot would’ve slipped off the brakes, she’d’ve wrecked it. My mom was in a bad state.

But at least when she settled in North Dakota with us, she finally realized she had an issue, at least with the medication. She found a doctor that helped her get off a lot of her medications. And the drinking came to a stop too.

I had a different mom for a time. She was great again.

Kirstin:

The sad thing was that my mom’s health problems were getting worse. First, she got lupus anticoagulation. So there were more meds for that. And then she started going into kidney failure. And so there were pain pills for that. And then she started going into heart failure and there were pills for that.

Jackie:

She had the arthritis, lupus, fibromyalgia, intestinal issues, and more. I’m not sure about our family history – we were raised not to know anybody in our family: I know we have arthritis, high blood pressure, stuff like that, but I haven’t heard of anybody else with all the issues that she had. It was terrible how much she had to bear.

Dillon:

She had fibromyalgia, lupus of the blood, she had two pinhole needles in her left ventricle of her heart, and it goes on and on. It’s just insane.

Jackie:

It took its toll on her relationships. My mom and Delbert lasted a good couple of years, and then they separated again.

Delbert:

For a while, everything was going good with us. And then, with all the health issues she had, she started drinking more. It became a regular habit to where she was drinking way more than she should. I thought, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what I want.”

Dillon:

I think Delbert left a second time because of the way that my mom was overdoing her meds. She wasn’t where she needed to be mentally. He tried to help get her on the right track, but she just did her own thing and ended up taking more than what she needed to. That’s when Delbert was done. He didn’t lose the love for her, he just lost the respect.

Delbert:

After we split up the second time we didn’t speak often. It was very sporadic. Only once maybe, I am guessing two times the most in the next years.

Kirstin:

My relationship with my mom still gave me massive amounts of anxiety. I just couldn’t deal with it. That’s why I had left when I was 16. I just couldn’t do it. This time, I disappeared again and moved down to Wyoming – and I’ve been here ever since. I just felt I’d have a better relationship with her at a distance.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want it to sound like my mom and I didn’t get along. We did. I just couldn’t do it for very long. I had to know my boundaries: I knew that the long distance was healthy in some ways.

Dillon:

After she split with Delbert, me and my mom moved down to Douglas, Wyoming, because my sister Kirstin was living in Casper at the time. I was 19 and I got addicted to methamphetamine. I was doing bad: I was selling and trading stuff out of our house. And my mom was on her 22 different kinds of medication. They kept throwing more medication at her because nobody could tell what was wrong with her. It wasn’t a healthy situation, We had some ups and downs, some bad argument, throwing stuff, and so on.

But she helped me overcome my meth habit because she realized where I was going with the drugs. She used her experience with drugs to help me out with my life. It was tough: I quit meth after being on it for two years, just cold turkey. It was one of the hardest things, but I couldn’t have done it without her.

*

Delbert:

Patty saw her mother for the first time in years just before her father passed away. Her dad had had a stroke and he was in a wheelchair and could only just mumble words, he couldn’t really talk.

Her mom was really standoffish. Patty talked to her, but there was no hug or anything.

Jackie:

Growing up, we didn’t have much contact with my mom’s side of the family. I didn’t know much about my grandfather because of his stroke as he couldn’t talk anymore. But I felt like he knew what we were saying to him. He was there, he was present. He just couldn’t figure out how to make his words.

Kirstin:

I loved my grandfather so much. Even though he couldn’t talk, I still called and told him about our day and things like that.

My last interaction with him, he tried to talk, but it was as if he was baby-babbling. When we were leaving, he was pushing everybody else out the door, but he held onto me and said, “No, you stay” [laughter].

When my papa passed away, I was all ready to head down to his funeral. But my grandmother told me that I wasn’t allowed to go because I was a teenage mom. So I got a taste of what my mother had had to deal with when she was young.

*

Dillon:

My mom got together with her last husband, Paul, because she was lonely. She kept telling me how she felt alone and vulnerable. And that’s where Paul came in. In the beginning he was great. And then after they got married, everything just went down to crap – as usual.

Jackie:

When my mom met, Paul, she started drinking again. Nothing too crazy this time, however. This time, my mom handled herself better. She did drink daily, but she didn’t act any type of crazy. I was happy about that: I was proud of her, and I made sure I told her how proud I was of her.

She was happy as she could be to hear that.

Dillon:

She got real political as well, and she did not hold her tongue – not ever. She was a diehard Republican, and anytime you talked to her, she’d always brings Trump up ’cause she just loved him and everything that he’d done. Oh God, you couldn’t argue with her. I seen people try, but she would kill them with her opinions. Literally wring them out.

That was one thing I admired about her: she had a voice. And she wouldn’t care what anybody said about her, she would just come back and fight her corner every time. Don’t get me wrong, she loved everybody and she got along with everybody, but she had a big voice.

Jackie:

Over recent years, she had a bunch of little jobs. She did a lot of gas station clerk stuff just to bring in a small amount of money. With her being sick, she filed for Social Security as well.

Kirstin:

She loved Harleys. She was a biker. She never had one of her own. She always said that she just wanted to be the bitch that rode on back.

The funny thing was that her husbands… they weren’t bikers either… At least not until she married them! Then they had to get into motorbikes. They didn’t have a choice. My dad, Delbert, he didn’t have a bike and he wasn’t really into it, but one day he came home with a Harley and my mom was on the back grinning. Same thing with Paul. She had a way of getting what she wanted!

She was creative. She liked to make Easter hats for little girls. She’d get palm leaf hats and she would glue flowers and leaves on them, and they were so pretty.

Dillon and Patty

———————————————————————————————————

Epilogue

Kirstin:

My mom decided to move to Tennessee because my sister Jackie lives in Jackson, Georgia, and she wanted to be closer to her.

Jackie:

She’d already had hip replacement, and in 2023, she had to have knee replacement surgery as well.

She was still suffering with her health, and there was always something going on. I could never believe how much she was going through. Sometimes I asked myself, “Did she tell me this was going on and I just didn’t pay attention, or did I not even know about it?”

Kirstin:

I’ve called her about twice a month, but now I feel I should have given her more time. I beat myself up about that.

I could always count on her. I broke my elbow last summer. And I called her and said, “Mom, I don’t want to be alone for the surgery.” And she came down straight away. If any of her kids needed her to be there, she was there.

I opened my own business recently, and… people suck. I had somebody jump down my throat over a deal which upset me, so I messaged our family group chat, just telling everybody how I was suffering. My mom called me back straight away to make sure I was okay. I missed her call so she left a voicemail. That was the last I heard from her.

Jackie:

Her hip surgery went well and she was working her way through the recovery.

Kirstin:

When she moved down to Tennessee, she couldn’t find a pain management doctor, so she started chewing eight to ten 500 mg ibuprofen every three hours. And they just kinda ate everything up inside her. They always say those are harsh on the stomach lining, don’t they?

Jackie:

The last time I saw her was the Fourth of July, and she seemed fine. I spoke with her every day.

I went to get her to pick her up to come spend the week with me. When I got up there, Paul told me she’d been throwing up blood. He said, “You don’t wanna go in there.”

I said, “I need to clean it up for my mom.”

It was bad. The floor, the bed was covered in blood. I’m pretty sure I picked up chunks of her stomach.

Kirsten:

She passed on August 4th. She had just turned 63. The official reason was upper gastro-intestinal bleed and peptic ulcer disease. The tragedy was that there is only a 10% mortality rate for that – but she never got it checked out by a doctor until it was too late. She was stubborn and she wasn’t good at going to doctors.

Delbert:

When Patty died, it was unexpected. I could not believe that she had passed. And especially the way that she had passed. It kind of blew me away when that happened. What surprised me most was that her husband didn’t put more effort into getting her help. She was stubborn and didn’t always go to see doctors of her own will, so she needed somebody to help her.

I remember when she and I were together and she pulled a stunt up once in Milltown. But I didn’t give her the choice. I just loaded her up and took her to the hospital. I wish someone had done the same thing. She might still be alive today.

It’s really sad that it ended up this way.

Dillon:

She battled her demons, but I wish she’d have communicated more and let us help her out. But she just couldn’t beat the battle that she was fighting. And it sucks because it’d be nice to have her still around. She died way too soon.

Jackie:

The coroner said that they can tell by the look on someone’s face when they pass whether they were in pain or not, and he said she looked peaceful. She wasn’t in pain.

Scott:

I was sad when I heard. It was the rise and fall of a really nice person that I lost many years ago.

Delbert:

When I first met her, she was a go-getter. She knew what she was looking for, and she’d go after it.

One way or another she was gonna get what she was after. She lost that along the way somehow, and that makes sad. Maybe we all lose that along the way…

Jackie:

I have so much love for her. Yes, I was rebellious, and yes, we often clashed. And she may have not been the best parent. But that was still my mom. She raised us alone for long periods… on top of the terrible issues she had to deal with. She tried her best. And it must have been so difficult with all those health problems.

Delbert:

Kirstin said to me recently that during the last two years of her life, she actually started being an actual mother. Before that, she was trying to be their friend. I was happy to hear that.

Dillon:

She was an amazing woman, a phenomenal woman with a great heart, that would give the shirt off her back for anybody in need. I couldn’t have been even more proud of her.

Kirstin:

When I think back to how my mom was, I just remember the love she gave us. You can’t ask for anything more than that.

Dillon:

When I got married, I wore a World War II uniform. I did that because I resembled her dad when he was in the military: in fact, he and I look identical. So I wore the outfit because it was liking brining her dad back to life for the wedding. She liked that. That’s how I remember her.

From an interview with Richard Milner (1983):

What do you want to do?

Oh, get married, have kids, and be rich. That’s it. I want to take the simple way out. Me, work – moi?

*

*