Left: Jimi Hendrix & inset: Cynthia "Plaster Caster" Albritton
Per NYT by Mireya Navarro and Jeff Leeds, published: April 29, 2008:
The film shows a naked man who resembles Hendrix, the guitar legend who died in 1970, wearing a bandanna in his Afro, having sex with two brunettes in a dimly lighted bedroom. His full face appears on screen for only a few seconds, with his eyes closed. In other portions there are flashes of his profile. But his hands, bedecked with rings, roam large on the screen at times. The film has no audio.
Vivid, a large maker of pornographic movies that is releasing the film this week, has created a 45-minute DVD, called “Jimi Hendrix the Sex Tape,” that combines 11 minutes of sex footage with a retrospective of Hendrix’s career in the 1960s (but with none of his music included).
But the identity of the man in the film, which has circulated among Hendrix aficionados for years, is fiercely disputed by experts and former associates. And the DVD arrives on the heels of a string of hoaxes involving star look-alikes and one other dead superstar
The DVD includes commentary from two women who met Hendrix and say they believe the tape is real: Pamela Des Barres, the author of “I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie” (1987), and Cynthia Albritton, better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster. Ms. Albritton is known for doing plaster casts of the genitals of rock stars, including Hendrix in 1968. (Mr. Hirsch said both women were paid for their contributions to the video but declined to be more specific.)
“I’m 100 percent sure it’s him,” Ms. Albritton, 61, said in an interview from her home in
But Kathy Etchingham, 60, one of Hendrix’s steady girlfriends during the ’60s, said via e-mail after viewing still photos from the film at the request of a reporter: “It is not him. His face is too broad and nose and nostrils too wide for Jimi. Also the hair is too low on the forehead.”
“He would never have allowed anyone to see that,” she said in a telephone interview. “In private he was very shy and would cover up.”
The film has also been dismissed by Hendrix collectors and historians. One expert said that the rings the man in the film is wearing do not resemble any he had seen in years of studying pictures and film of Hendrix. Charles R. Cross, author of the Hendrix biography “Room Full of Mirrors” (Hyperion, 2005), encountered the film during his book research. “It doesn’t add up to Jimi,” he said.
