| Constance Money | |
| Birth Name: | Susan Jensen[1] |
| Birth Date: | 30 November 1956 |
| Birth Place: | Lebanon, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Alias: | Jennifer Baker,[2] Christina Hoover |
Constance Money (born Susan Jensen; November 30, 1956)[3] is an American former adult film actress. She played the lead role of Misty Beethoven in the 1976 adult classic The Opening of Misty Beethoven.
Susan Jensen[1] [4] [5] was born in Kenmore, Washington, where she was a cheerleader and acted at Inglemoor High School; she studied psychology and sociology at Mills College in Oakland, California.[1]
After first appearing in pornographic films while in college, under the name Jennifer Baker,[1] [2] as Constance Money she played the lead role of the lowly Parisian prostitute reshaped by a sexologist to reach the top tier of her profession in Henry Paris (Radley Metzger)'s 1976 pornographic parody of Shaw's Pygmalion, The Opening of Misty Beethoven.[5] [6] She later said in an interview that she had expected it to be an R-rated movie and that the film reflected her actual sexual education during production: "Misty is a good movie because it is real."[7]
Following the film's success, she made several appearances as a porn star, including stays at the Playboy Mansion, and appeared in Playboy magazine in July 1977 in a photo feature on "The New Girls of Porn"[2] and a 1978 personal photo spread, titled "Call of the Wild", which portrayed her as leading a double life starring in adult films and running a hostelry in a remote part of Alaska.[1] Her subsequent appearances include Mary! Mary! and Obsessed (both 1977), and Taste of Money (1983),[3] her last pornographic film, which is about her return to porn after a hiatus.[7] Her co-star was frequently John Leslie, a friend with whom she lived for a while.
During shooting of Misty Beethoven, Jensen had objected to work she considered in excess of her contract and claimed damages for stolen possessions; she subsequently sued Metzger over his reuse of material shot for that film, particularly in Barbara Broadcast and Maraschino Cherry. The parties settled out of court in 1979.[2] [8] It has been reported that Metzger gave her the alias Constance Money because of her demands for money,[7] but Metzger denied it.[2]
She was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame in 1998[9] and into the XRCO Hall of Fame as a film pioneer in 2016.[10]
Encouraged by Hugh Hefner to try to cross over into mainstream film, she had a small part in Blake Edwards' 1979 film 10 and unsuccessfully sought the lead role in Frances (1982); the producers were unwilling to consider a star with a background in pornography. She retired from acting to the Pacific Northwest.