Barry Koltnow write on www.ocregister.com: My career started in porn.

No, wait, let me rephrase that.

Porn gave me my start in show business.

That’s not right, either.

The truth is that the late adult film star Marilyn Chambers was my first celebrity interview. The porn pioneer died this week at 56. Her body was discovered by her 17-year-old daughter in their Canyon Country home. News of her death reminded me of that interview so long ago.

It was Marilyn who started me on this path, and she got me off to a promising start.

“Do you want to do this interview in the nude or with clothes?” her then-husband and manager asked me on the phone the day before the interview.

I panicked. I thought he meant that I would have to be naked, so I immediately opted for the latter.

It turns out that, as a gimmick, she had appeared sans clothes for several radio interviews during her national book tour.

When we met, she thanked me for not forcing her to be naked, a promotional stunt I suspected was concocted by her husband, whom she later divorced.

On my way to the interview in a quaint Beverly Hills hotel, I was nervous, partially because it was my first celebrity interview, but also because of Marilyn’s growing notoriety.

It must be hard to imagine now, but she was quite famous in her prime, and I’m not just talking about porn fame.

She was the first attractive face put on an often ugly industry.

After the world learned that she was the baby model on the Ivory Soap boxes in your neighborhood supermarkets, there was a lot of curiosity about her. Although Linda Lovelace of “Deep Throat” fame was just as well-known, it was Marilyn’s beautiful face and blond hair that intrigued people. She was as responsible as anyone for bringing a measure of mainstream respectability to the porn business, and she made it acceptable for couples to rent a XXX video.

On the elevator ride up to her hotel suite, my entire sex life flashed before my eyes.

The really sad part was that she was staying on the third floor. I was a young reporter and didn’t have much of a sex life to flash by, I guess.

She answered the door in a sheer blouse with nothing underneath. I suppose that this is what she meant by an interview with clothes.

Marilyn really spoiled me as a celebrity interviewer.

First, I assumed that all my interviews would be this provocative. They weren’t.

Second, she not only was a receptive and lively interview subject, but we actually struck up a friendship that lasted a couple of years.

We discovered a common interest in kidney stones. Did you expect something a bit more salacious?

We both had suffered from stones in the previous year, and we laughed as we compared war stories.

At the end of the interview, we exchanged telephone numbers, and we did speak on occasion.

I’ll never forget getting those messages from my wife.

“Hi, honey, how was your day at work? Oh, Marilyn Chambers called for you.”

Our telephone conversations were pretty ordinary, but every once in a while she would dish on some of the biggest names in the porn industry.

Years later, after a screening of the Mark Wahlberg film “Boogie Nights,” I casually mentioned to the friends who had accompanied me some behind-the-scenes gossip about the movie’s subject, the late porn star John Holmes. The friends laughed, and then said incredulously: “How could you possibly know something like that?”

My wife turned around in the car, rolled her eyes, and said: “Marilyn Chambers told him. They’re best buddies.”

Those friends never again doubted anything I ever said about Hollywood.

Marilyn broke big with the 1972 porn classic “Behind the Green Door,” and later starred in “Resurrection of Eve” and “Insatiable.” She dropped out of the porn industry for years, and then made a comeback. But she also appeared in a number of mainstream movies (Barbra Streisand’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” to name just one), and is considered porn’s first crossover star. She once was quoted as saying she had appeared in more R-rated movies than X-rated movies, although few people knew that.

We lost touch after a couple of years, for no reason other than we simply lost touch.

Apparently, she married and divorced two more times, but reportedly was happy.

I was saddened to hear of her death. I always thought fondly of the actress.

Whenever I am faced with an uncooperative or surly celebrity, I remember how gentle Marilyn was with a novice interviewer.

I also never forgot that question: “Do you want to do this interview in the nude or with clothes?”

I keep waiting for someone else to ask.