[National Post]- Thirty years ago Ron J. Hyatt was a 25-year-old actor trying to make it in New York’s theatre scene. Despite quitting his day job as a special- education teacher to pursue acting full-time, all he’d managed was the occasional bit role off-Broadway.

Hyatt wasn’t much of an actor. But he did have other gifts. And the world got to see them in the fall of 1978, after his girlfriend sent nude photographs of Hyatt to Playgirl. Soon thereafter, Hyatt was cast in his first porn film, Tigresses … and Other Maneaters. Since then, Ron Jeremy — as he began calling himself — has appeared in more than 1,700 movies, and had sex with 4,000 women. According to Adult Video News, he is the greatest star in triple-X history.

What is truly amazing is that Jeremy has done all this without letting the sleazy pathologies of his profession define his image. Despite working in an industry saturated by drugs, built on sexual exploitation and infiltrated by organized crime, Jeremy’s public persona somehow remains that of a harmless, campy pop-culture sex muppet. In recent years, he’s been cast for cameos in mainstream movies; performed stand-up comedy; starred in reality television shows; and otherwise lived the well-paid life of a famous (if decidedly B-rate) celebrity.

On top of that, the blue-chip publishing house of Harper Collins has just released his memoir, Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (working) Man in Showbiz. Not bad for a guy who — by his own count — has fellated himself in eight different movies.

When you meet Ron Jeremy — as I did over lunch at Toronto’s Park Hyatt hotel last week — you begin to understand how he gets away with this double life. Far from your standard pouting, back-waxed adult-entertainment boy-toy, Jeremy presents as a sort of pornified Joe Pesci. During his teenage years, Jeremy worked summers as a waiter in the Borscht Belt, chasing “Bungalow Bunnies” at the Concord, Green Acres and Grossinger’s, and winning fat tips from holiday diners by inflecting his conversation with Yiddish and prattling on about his ambition to become a dokter. Jeremy lives in Los Angeles now. But his stereotypically Jewish accent (which he hides in his movies), effusive comic shtick, enormous appetite and endless self-deprecation suggest his heart is still in the Catskills.

The standard take on Ron Jeremy is that his ugliness is his main professional asset: That is, he cuts the sort of squat, hairy figure that your average porn-consuming schlemiel can identify with. But I’d argue it’s his personality that’s made him such a legend.

Even if you overlook all of the sad and awful things we know about the way porn is made, the act of consuming it is inherently degrading. Pressing the play button is an admission of sexual failure: I can’t sleep with an attractive woman, so I guess I’ll watch some other guy do it. The genius of Ron Jeremy lies in the way he shoos away this subconscious knowledge by turning the whole thing into satire. The idea of this hobgoblin getting his way with pretty young things is so patently absurd, his acting style so hammy and outrageous, that it puts the viewer at ease.

Sex can never be truly postmodern: No one has ever had an ironic orgasm. Still, Ron Jeremy gives enough of a nod and a wink that the viewer feels like he’s in on the joke. “This is just one big lark,” he seems to say to the camera. “But while we’re at it, let’s at least get to the money shot.”

This quality also explains why he’s the only porn star who’s been allowed to become a true mainstream celebrity: His ironic detachment from his own industry has rendered him safe for Hollywood types who would otherwise be repelled by anyone who has sex for money.

As I discovered when I met Ron Jeremy, it isn’t just an act: He truly does believe that people take sex too seriously. Intercourse, he claims, can be treated like eating or drinking — it can be divorced entirely from human relationships and served a la carte for no other reason than personal satisfaction.

“Sex is about people enjoying themselves,” he told me over Sprite and a bowl of tomato soup last week. “I believe in emotional monogamy and sexual polygamy. I don’t see any contradiction between the two.”

I’ll admit it felt odd debating human sexuality with the star of such films as 87 and still Bangin’, Co-ed Fever and Blown Alone. But Jeremy is clearly an intelligent man who’s thought a lot about his metier. In 2006, he even toured American college campuses debating anti-porn activists on the issue of censorship.

Yet interviewing him is a surreal experience. For one thing, he tends to go off on lurid (and entirely unprintable) comic tangents until his manager jumps in and tells him to shut up. Second, he likes to turn the tables on his interviewers by drawing them into his steamy hypotheticals, a tactic that instantly made me feel like I was in some kind of surreal sex-counselling session.

“Let’s be honest –people get bored,” he said, sizing me up as a repressed monogamous type in need of a gold chain and a night out on the town. “Most marriages would last a lot longer if people could fool around. A man needs variety. A woman needs variety. What’s wrong with finding another couple and exchanging partners?”

“Because people are more complicated than that,” I told him, playing my assigned role as straight man. “Because most humans can’t compartmentalize lust and love the way you do.”

It seemed like a fair point. But Jeremy went slightly bananas.

“So what you’re saying is that a woman could be having the greatest sex of her life — orgasm after orgasm … but she won’t enjoy it because she’s not in looooove?” he taunted. “Is that what you’re saying? That’s bulls–t!”

We were attracting glances from other tables, and I was anxious to move on. I nodded and cleared my throat, looking down at my notepad to review the other questions I’d prepared.

But Jeremy was just warming up. He returned to the same hypothetical several times over — each time heaping on the woman more obscene and unnatural rhapsodies. People were staring now — confused about this angry man wearing a bright green “sex hound” T-shirt, preaching the gospel of porn in the middle of a shi-shi restaurant.

The rant ended only when Jeremy’s Black- Berry-addicted agent roused himself from his go-bot and announced that his client was needed at a local radio station. We scuttled out of the restaurant and said our goodbyes in the lobby.

As I left, I thought about Jeremy’s book, especially one particular story he tells about Plato’s Retreat, an anything-goes 1970s-era Manhattan swinger’s club.

“A married man approached me and asked if I’d be willing to have sex with his wife,” Jeremy writes. “‘It’s her birthday,’ he explained, ‘and I want to get her something special’ As I had sex with her, the husband sat next to us and held her hand … He was just enjoying her pleasure … His [manhood] was on the small side, and I was going places that he couldn’t begin to reach. Jealousy wasn’t a factor for them. They knew that I wasn’t a threat to their marital vows. I was nothing more than a prop. She didn’t even make eye contact with me. She just gazed at her husband, and if you could’ve seen the look on their faces, filled with so much gratitude, and mutual appreciation and unmitigated love, it would’ve broken your heart.”

Amid all the bacchanalia described in Jeremy’s book, this preposterous porn-land fairy tale stuck in my mind. Better than anything else I have ever read, it captures in a nutshell the foundational myth of the free-love movement — the naive idea that promiscuity and sex addiction, done right, can somehow improve relationships rather than destroy them. Most of us –including even most pornographers, I imagine –instinctively realize this for the nonsense it is: Whatever Jeremy has witnessed among the self-selected swingers who populate the porn industry and carnal lairs such as Plato’s Retreat, there can only be one man in a thousand who could look on in a spirit of “unmitigated love” as his spouse committed adultery.

Jeremy, apparently, is that one man. In a perverse way, I suppose he deserves credit for moral honesty: He is no cynical porn peddler, but rather a true believer in the restorative qualities of promiscuous sex.

Unfortunately, true belief doesn’t get you very far if you can’t convert your own woman. Jeremy’s swinging, I’ve learned, has earned him a lonely life: By his own admission, every mate he’s ever had (except one) has dumped him on account of his refusal to stay faithful.

“It’s odd to think there was a time when [a single] girl might’ve been enough to make me happy,” he writes wistfully of his first love, Mandy.

“All I wanted was to sit on the cold floor of a dark and abandoned school, [cuddling with Mandy] and count[ing] the pretend stars on the ceiling tiles.”

It’s hard for me to believe that, for all his proud porn philosophizing and 4,000 women, Jeremy wasn’t a lot happier when he had just one.