TORONTO [Canadian Press]– It’s tea time at a downtown hotel and the afternoon sunlight casts an amber hue on an unlikely sight – porn star Ron Jeremy perched on an opulent antique chair, ready to tuck into a plate of scones and raspberry preserves while sipping on a cup of Darjeeling tea.

“Scones! I haven’t had scones in years!” Jeremy, dressed in baggy black pants and T-shirt, exclaims as he slathers his helping with jam and clotted cream at the elegant Windsor Arms Hotel.

The handful of mostly grey-haired patrons quietly enjoying dainty finger sandwiches looks on in utter disbelief as Jeremy, his cellphone frequently ringing at an ear-splitting volume, talks a mile a minute for a full hour – all the while discussing dildos, his ability to fellate himself and what he likes best in a lover. For the record, it’s “a pulse.”

It’s a fitting setting for the “The Hedgehog,” Jeremy’s nickname in the billion-dollar world of pornography where he’s revered for a work ethic that doesn’t require Viagra. If nothing else, the portly Jeremy is a serious study in contradictions.

Jeremy was raised by loving, upper-middle class Jewish parents – his father was a physicist and his mother a book editor – in the New York City borough of Queens, where he enjoyed an idyllic, uneventful childhood. There was just one thing that set him apart from other kids: he was born exceedingly well-endowed, so much so that the nurses who helped deliver him remarked upon it.

He’s still close to his immediate family, who have never been judgmental about his career choice – his brother calls during tea time, in fact, to ask his sibling what size T-shirt he wears. Not surprisingly, it’s an extra-large.

“We’re Jews, and we Jews are liberal. We don’t go for that ‘you’re going to burn in Hell,’ good and evil stuff,” says Jeremy, in town to promote his autobiography, “Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz,” as he polishes off the scone and moves on to a dish of strawberries and cream.

“They do make jokes about me being the black sheep of the family, but it’s seriously just as a joke – they’re proud of me. My father has seen my movies, or at least the scenes with dialogue,” says Jeremy, who turned 54 on Monday. “When the nookie starts, I cover his eyes. He doesn’t want to see that.”

Far from fitting the porn star stereotype of troubled young men and women who fall into pornography and soon spiral into drug abuse, Jeremy, who swears he’s never touched illicit drugs, had lots of options: he’s well-educated, was once a special education teacher and is a classically trained pianist.

He got into porn because it was fun, he says, and once an old girlfriend submitted naked photos of him to “Playgirl” magazine in the 1970s, the offers became impossible to refuse. He soon became one of the most diligent porn actors in the business, respected for his self-control and renowned, much to his embarrassment, for his ability to orally pleasure himself.

“I did it as a joke, and half of me liked it and the other half said get that damn thing out of my face,” he says of what some might argue is an enviable skill. “I was torn.”

He respects his parents’ longtime monogamous relationship – “It really worked for them, it just isn’t the lifestyle for me,” he says – even though he’s a big proponent of swinging.

Swapping partners is the secret to battling sexual boredom in a marriage, Jeremy argues, as long as both husband and wife are in agreement and some strict rules are put in place about getting too cozy with strangers. Chief among them? “Absolutely no cuddling,” Jeremy says.

As if to prove his point, he signs a copy of his book with the following inscription: “Touchy-feely isn’t cheating if it’s agreed upon, and done together as a team!”

Jeremy is also a feminist in a business accused of being outrageously sexist and demeaning to women, though his feminism has a decidedly hedonistic twist: women, he says, have as much right to sleep around as men and shouldn’t be judged any more harshly for it.

“I know a whole bunch of rock stars, and they’re pigs, they’re banging every chick that moves while they’re on the road, and yet if their women so much as glance at another guy, they freak out,” he says. “That’s ridiculous.”

And for all his bluster and non-stop chatter, it’s perhaps this revelation that most surpises: Jeremy is a softie whose heart has been broken. Not by women, but by filmmakers who have cast him in mainstream movies and then left his scenes on the cutting-room floor when the studio brass feared his presence would keep movie-goers away.

Among other films, he was chopped out of the movie “Ronin” for that very reason despite a lifetime of trying to pursue his true dream: stardom outside of the realm of pornography.

“That was very painful, and I was very upset about it,” he says as a look of genuine hurt flashes briefly across his face while he whisks away some stray scone crumbs from his moustache.

“I’m a very, very, very big baby, in fact. If I see ‘Titanic’ and Celine Dion starts to sing that song, I cry and I cry hard. I love Celine Dion, and that song just kills me.”