Profile: Kandi Barbour

Aka: Andrea Beck, Linda Jean Smith
Real Name: Kandie Lou Dotson
Date of Birth: 15/02/1959
Place of Birth: Alabama, USA
Date of Death: 26/01/2012
Porn Debut: 1978


STATS
Nationality: American
Height: 5'4" / 1,63m
Measurements: 35C-24-35 / 89-64-89
Film Career: 1978-1981


RECOMMENDED MOVIES
  • Bon Appetit (1980)
  • Centerfold Fever (1981)
  • Champagne for Breakfast (1980)
  • Chopstix (1979)
  • Extremes (1981)
  • F... And Lots Of It (1980)
  • Neon Nights (1981)
  • Sizzle (1979)
  • Small Town Girls (1979)
  • Young Wild and Wonderful (1980)



When it comes to the "Where are they now?" category, Kandi's demise is one of the more heartbreaking stories. She was born in Russellville, Alabama to Albert Edens Dotson and Annie Louise McKinney. Kandi’s mother remarried a Harold Barbour sometime following 1962. Kandi apparently used her stepfathers surname Barbour following her mothers marriage to him and chose to use it for her career in porn. According to internet sources she dropped out of High School when she was about 17 and moved to Kansas - perhaps to escape her alcoholic father.

Her first exposure to pornography seems to have been in Kansas City, when her then boyfriend would occasionally take her to adult cinemas. During the mid-1970’s they both moved to San Francisco where he would "sometimes take her to the Mitchell Brothers Theatre which was right down the street from where we lived… I guess I inadvertently made a porn star out of Linda by exposing her to porn, but I didn’t get her into the business."

According to this boyfriend: "Linda would have sex at the drop of a hat, but it was mostly out of seeking acceptance… She was easy to get next to and the ultimate one-night stand! She had been dropped like a dirty pair of undies by more men than any woman I’ve ever known, so she was accustomed to being dumped. Usually after the man tried to have a conversation with her."

Around 1978 photographer Diana Hardy discovered her, and soon Kandi was appearing in virtually every adult magazine there was. With the market quickly saturated she moved on to porn films where she established herself as one of the more popular porn girls of the late-1970s and early 1980s. During this time she also became involved with legendary porn actor Jamie Gillis who apparently pushed her boundaries to the limit. "He’s so wild and violent. His favourite thing was getting me to go into porn theatres to do it with guys in the men’s room. He made me go down on every man who came in!"

By 1984 Kandi Barbour had quit the adult film industry and was working as a stripper in New York, before fading from public view altogether. Numerous stories began circulating about what became of her following her retirement. One rumour was that she died of a drug overdose in 1986. According to her old boyfriend: "She had her good qualities… It wouldn’t surprise me if she did OD. She was not a very happy camper in life and talked about death a lot when she and I were seeing each other."

In fact it turned out she was living in Hawaii. Director Carter Stevens would later recall: "The last time I saw her - actually, my wife saw her - was in Hawaii... She was living above the Club Hubba Hubba, which was a very famous strip club in Honolulu. She was living above the club and working there, and as my wife says, she had a drinking problem. She had gained a lot of weight and was living in a muumuu and never took it off.  She did have some mental problems, even at that point. She had this dysmorphic body image. She had this thing about her nose being crooked; was always talking about having her nose fixed. There was of course nothing wrong with her nose."

When Kandi's body was discovered in late January 2012, she had been living homeless on the streets of San Francisco. No cause of death was given. She was eventualy identified through finger prints which turned up on a rap sheet from January 2006. Some reports claim that her body was donated to medical science, others that she was cremated and her ashes scattered in the San Francisco Bay after a one year hold period by the San Francisco coroner’s office.


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