Porn Valley- John Bowen is scheduled to be a guest of The Wanker Show on KSEX, www.ksexradio.com next Monday night.

Bowen, never at a loss for the colorful anecdote, was angsting over what he might say in his allotted time on the DNA-drenched couch in Burbank. Like a slugger who hasn’t picked up a bat for two years, Bowen, this morning over breakfast, was looking for the sweet spot to put the ball on. So I decided to serve up a hanging curve ball. I asked him about Samantha Strong – a name which popped up in my Gene Does Gossip column more often than periods and commas.

Bowen, himself, used to write a column for AVN online not too long ago. Can’t exactly remember how that all got started, he says, but recalls that the last piece he wrote for them wasn’t accepted. It was about Samantha Strong and the reason Bowen was given was that none of the stories were “substantiated”. Given the fact that Bowen was lead player in the Strong drama, I found it odd that his reflections on it were considered unusable. In that case, I’ll authenticate any and all stories because I know them all to be true.

Bowen says the two greatest loves of his porn life were Strong and Kendra Jade, Jade being the equivalent of Samantha Strong Lite. “Only she wasn’t as wild as Samantha,” Bowen states. “Maybe 70%.”

Bowen recalls that Strong, a Vegas resident at the time, first showed her face at a VSDA show in the Eighties and it was all set for her to make a trip to World Modeling and get started in the porn business. Bowen remembers waiting for Strong to arrive off a bus. “I grabbed her, booked her into a motel and started to negotiate a contract with her immediately,” recalls Bowen who speaks of the incidents almost in school boy-crush terms.

Over a course of a 2 1/2 year period, Bowen put Strong in a lot of movies but also remembers getting a lot of industry flak for doing so. “Nobody believed in her,” says Bowen. “I was being told not to put ‘ the fat girl ‘ in pictures. I stuck with her.” Bowen was of the same belief as I, that Strong was one of the biggest stars- if not the most manipulative- of all time. “She was magical,” Bowen thinks. I’d have to agree.

Strong was plain and simply the bad girl of porn- dating gangsters and doing things for the fuck of it and, later, having a good laugh over the fact that she got away with everything. Strong’s reputation for flaking porn shoots and dance gigs was second to none but her dealings with strip club owners was also legendary. Bowen and I talked about the time Strong was scheduled to appear at a club- maybe it was New Mexico. Her deal with the club was to have a limo at her disposal plus her fee in cash money up front. As Strong got off the plane, she took the money, fucked the limo driver on the spot and ran off with him to Mexico for a week, ignoring the gig.

Bowen then remembers another time when he drove Strong to the hospital to deliver.

“She showed up one day out of the blue, seven months pregnant,” Bowen recalls. “She got married, and, as usual, fought with the guy, left him and turned up at my doorstep.” Bowen remembers taking care of Strong over the next couple of months, massaging her body with oil to minimize the stretch marks. When Strong broke water, which was in Bowen’s bed, he rushed her to the hospital and everyone had the impression that he was the husband of the child, although Bowen remembers the biological father showing up. “He was real handsome.” Bowen even handled the adoption proceedings before the baby was born knowing full well that Strong as a mother would have been a disaster.

Another story I remember writing about was the time that Bowen got Strong an apartment along with a car with Strong walking out on the lease and taking off in a jeep of his.

“She hated being on her own,” says Bowen. So much that one night Strong dialed up on a party line and invited some guy she didn’t know to come over to her place. Then, realizing she might have fucked up by inviting a potential psycho into her midst, Strong called Bowen to take care of things. “You think the guy is going to murder me?” Strong asked when Bowen ran over to her place in the middle of the night. Bowen says he had to wait for the guy to show up so he could toss him out.

“And she could drink,” says Bowen, knowing all to well that he’d eventually have to scrape Strong off her apartment floor and toss her into a shower to sober her up. Often times Bowen would find her unconscious under a table.

“But she could have the worst hangover and still be beautiful for the shoot,” Bowen muses. “It never showed on her face. She was like Dorian Gray.”

Kendra Jade also rates a lot of Bowen stories, but Bowen saw her more as a victim of circumstances. “Kendra was the Gypsy Rose Lee- a nice girl manipulated by her step mother,” Bowen says. “Kendra was constantly pushed into doing things. Then one day she got smart and woke up.”