Kisses met Chyna when the latter first visited the Bunny Ranch, where she often sought refuge. "One of my fondest memories was Chyna reciting poetry while high on downers," Hof told me in a phone interview. "It was funny, but very sad." Hof had initially invited Chyna to his brothel following her 2002 Celebrity Boxing Match to teach his girls how to wrestle, "a very popular fetish." The hookers would meet Chyna at the Bunny Ranch gym, where she taught them that the most important lesson was to oil up. That way, the men couldn't latch onto them, and the girls could slither away before coming back to grab their clients' cocks (and win the match). Chyna learned the trick as a wrestler, regularly leaning below tall men and punching their testicles in a move fans referred to as "Chyna's low blows."Chyna began staying at the Ranch for days, spending afternoons sprawled on red velvet couches gossiping with everyone. "She was an empowering woman," Kisses said through tears. "She's the opposite of everything I am. I'm a very gentle, careful person. Her strength magnetized me."Hof, though, believes Chyna's interior was the opposite of her warrior image. "[She was] more sensitive than anybody I ever knew," Hof says. "I've seen her crying over things that people would say about her: that she was manly, that she was a transvestite—just terrible things that they would say about her, because she was a bigger girl and was in such good shape," Hof said, also tearing up. "She would break down over that. She's not as tough on the inside as she was on the outside."Read more: The Undying Love Story of Spencer and Heidi Pratt
Chyna's only safety net was that her WWF departure coincided with the rise of reality TV and celebrity porn. In 2002, she modeled for Playboy a second time and appeared on an episode of Celebrity Boxing, fighting Joey Buttafucco, the Long Island car repairman whose teenage mistress shot his wife in the 1990s. From 2003 to 2005, she dated—and, according to him, abused drugs with—former WWF wrestler Sean Waltman, who performed under the name X-Pac. In a 2015 interview with Jim Norton, Chyna described their relationship as tumultuous (though she denied using drugs with him). She accused Waltman of raping her and selling a homemade porn tape called 1 Night in Chyna to Vivid Entertainment, the company that released Paris Hilton's 1 Night in Paris, without her permission in 2004. (Waltman did not return Broadly's request for comment; he has repeatedly denied Chyna's accusations and claimed he has proof Chyna consented to the release of the porn video.) On January 1, 2005, authorities arrested her on domestic violence charges after she allegedly beat him. "She [sic] assualted me struck me in the head and face countless times after getting back from the Playboy Mansion," Waltman wrote on his website at the time. "There were several witnesses to her behavior, including Jeff Meacham from The Extreme Mayhem Show, and unfortunately my two children witnessed and heard all of this. She was released today once again having to suffer no consequences for her behavior."She was doing stuff that only guys were doing at the time, and that I don't believe any female has done since.
Whether all this is true has been debated. A source close to Chyna describes Chyna as erratic during the writing of the book, and LaQue has denied some of Chyna's accusations. "When it first came out, I thought she was crazy," LaQue says. "I didn't throw her out. She left of her own accord. There were a lot of other things in there that she said, or whoever wrote it said, that weren't true."But the book also contained things that were true, according to LaQue. Their home was "dysfunctional," and a passage that describes Chyna's father, who was an alcoholic, stabbing LaQue is also accurate.When LaQue reached out to Chyna in 2013, she believed her daughter was trying to escape the Chyna persona and return to being Joanie Laurer, the woman she was before wrestling, before drugs. LaQue did not know Chyna was also sending emails to Steven Hirsch, the porn mogul whose company, Vivid Entertainment, produced Chyna's porn videos. "I'm a little cray-cray, yes, but I am a woman hear me roar," Chyna writes in one of several emails to Hirsch. "It's not going so well lol. It's so weird in Japan. I really get it, but I don't get it at the same time. They are very forward and strange… On the other hand, I feel like my skin is beautiful, my figure is feminine and pretty, [and] I look good right now, OK? I do. Let's talk: What's the next step? Can we talk money? I need to know. I want to be a beautiful porn star."
Chyna's friends believe she wanted to perform in porn both for the cash and because she craved men's acceptance. WWF fans' verbal abuse had convinced her she looked like a monster, something closer to King Kong than a wonder of the world. "People were very mean," says the porn star Mary Carey, a close friend. "For every 40 nice comments, there was that person who would say something like, 'You have a penis.' That would really bother her."Chyna did not grasp how her look had influenced pop culture. In a deleted scene from Amy, the Oscar-winning documentary about Amy Winehouse, the late singer begs her manager to let her eat at the WWE-themed restaurant The World because she loved Chyna. "The superstars get there, and they get drunk, and they buy people drinks," Winehouse says in the scene. "Chyna's been there!""I would say that she was the first person I ever saw that made me think that bodies are not all the same," Lilyana, a trans woman who idolized Chyna as a teenager, says. "I think that was influential in terms of my sexuality, in terms of realizing that different body types could be sexy, could be powerful."Carey believes Chyna didn't understand the power of her appearance—she thought she needed to look like a porn star to be beautiful and feminine. "She liked that I was kind of a sex symbol in a way, because I think that's something she wanted," Carey says. "She wanted to be considered sexy, and she just didn't see it sometimes." Hof also wishes Chyna had accepted that her athletic body turned men on. "She was sexy!" he says. "Her wrestling persona turned people on. She had a level of celebrity."For every 40 nice comments, there was that person who would say something like, 'You have a penis.' That would really bother her.
Potylo had no documentary experience, but he recommended his friend Erik Angra, an up-and-coming documentarian who had directed a number of shorts as well as edited a Ken Burns movie. (Angra also served as a cinematographer for two episodes of VICE, an HBO program produced by VICE Media, which also owns Broadly.) In person, Angra comes off as a serious filmmaker, not exactly the type who would hang out with internet comedians and washed-up former professional wrestlers. He keeps a trimmed brown beard and will often tilt conversations towards international politics. He says he didn't "give a shit about wrestling," but he knew about Chyna because he grew up in New Hampshire, near where Chyna had lived with Levesque.She invented a new kind of thing for men to be attracted to, or at least made it acceptable to be attracted to a muscular, strong woman.
"She was like, oh, [it's] Rohypnol," Angra says. "She was also on Valium and on Ambien—that's a lot. Nobody needs to be on that many drugs."When the road trip stopped in Las Vegas, Chyna insisted on partying at the Palms, a hotel and casino off the strip. More than a decade earlier, when Chyna still competed in the WWF, the Palms had been considered the hottest nightspot in Vegas. The Real World: Las Vegas cast lived in the hotel, Britney Spears performed a failed comeback performance at the 2007 MTV VMAs in the hotel's theater, and Hugh Hefner and Holly Madison partied in a Palms penthouse on episodes of The Girls Next Door. Now, though, Madison is married to the founder of Electric Daisy Carnival, and young people drink on the strip at the Cosmopolitan. The Palms is a relic of the early 2000s—and Chyna loved it."The was such a terrible place," Angra recalls. "She was talking about how it used to be, and I think, in her mind, she was in that used-to-be place."She asked Angra to party with her, and he agreed. "This was all off camera, and I'm prescribed Klonopin myself," Angra says. "I ended up taking some pills with her, I guess, and then we went out and partied." Chyna bragged to him that a decade earlier at the Palms, she'd had five bodyguards. He says she ran around the hotel telling people, "I'm Chyna—don't you know who I am?"Read more: This Is How Paris Hilton Fooled the Entire United States of America
In October of 2015, Angra says the WWE contacted him, offering to pay for Chyna's rehab. He pitched the idea to Anzaldo, making clear he would not film her time in a clinic. Anzaldo turned him down. "He said she would never go, which might have been true because she was very paranoid about the WWE," Angra says. "She thought they would kidnap her and put her in the woods, and she would never come back. I don't know if [Anzaldo] told her about [the offer from the WWE], but he basically told me there wasn't time on the schedule for it and they had to do [a filming of an episode of the reality TV show] Botched."There was a part of her that became that diva. She wanted to be a star. It was intoxicating for her.
Anzaldo was filming when he barged into Chyna's apartment and found her dead in her bedroom. Although he called her famous friends, he did not call her mother, which upset LaQue. She learned of Chyna's death from her son, Sonny, and called Anzaldo herself.He asked her to attend an elaborate memorial. LaQue told him she would not go because of the cameras she assumed he would invite, and because she believed she would be too emotional.LaQue signed a document allowing Anzaldo to collect Chyna's belongings and use some of Chyna's remaining money to pay for the memorial. "I am not a woman of considerable means," LaQue writes. "I request that Anthony and any party [whom] he may be contracting for these services bear cost in mind in making these decisions so there will be no undue financial burden on me." Afterwards, LaQue claims, he was to send LaQue all that remained of Chyna's belongings and money; since Chyna didn't have a will, under California law LaQue should have been her benefactor. Anzaldo says he has refused to ship the items, claiming LaQue needs to come and get her daughter's possessions herself.Don't ever be famous if you're a woman.
A few weeks after the memorial, LaQue says she received a cardboard box in the mail. "I got a box of her ashes," LaQue says. "I mean, c'mon!" Later, she watched a video of the memorial and learned that Anzaldo was auctioning off Chyna's belongings online for his alleged charity. LaQue never gave him permission to sell Chyna's possessions, so in October, after crowd-sourcing legal funds, she took Anzaldo to court. He did not show up. A judge granted LaQue the right to be the executor of Chyna's estate."I have requested that Anthony turn over Chyna's/Joanie's personal affects and clothing (which Anthony sent me pictures of) and her papers and records through my attorney, but Anthony has not complied," LaQue says in an email. "So I am now forced to pursue my legal remedies in court due to Anthony's lack of compliance."When I asked LaQue if she wishes Chyna had never pursued a wrestling career, she said yes. "I admire her for being as strong as she was, but from what I've been able to determine, I think that she might've gotten the shaft. I think that when you become a celebrity like that and get into a world like that, it makes it harder and harder for you to not get stressed out." In retrospect, Chyna's athletic glory looks like a short calm during a lifetime of chaos, a brief downpour in the middle of a decades-long drought. She changed the world, but her trailblazing career came with a deep personal price that, so far, has erased her accomplishments.It seems Chyna would have agreed with her mom. A few weeks before Chyna died, she met with Angra one last time. He asked her about her life: her relationship with her mother, her time in the WWF, her last 15 years. At the end of the interview, Angra asked if she would do it all over again. Chyna began to cry."Don't ever be famous if you're a woman," Angra says she told him. "Go be a doctor or a lawyer, go marry a rich guy. Just don't get famous, because they will destroy you."Read more: Inside Chyna's Beautiful, Surreal Memorial