Seeing nothing anti-feminist about it, she entered and won the Miss Missouri pageant in 1974 and competed to be Miss America later in the year, earning an educational scholarship. Confronted outside the pageant by a woman protesting the objectification of women, Marsh shot back, “Do you want to pay for my college tuition?”
In 1975, she graduated from Stephens College, a predominately female arts school in Columbia, and began working as a dancer and actress in regional productions. From there, she moved to New York and then to LA. She accumulated some success (small parts in Broadway productions like the Cole Porter musical Happy New Year, and a role on a Henry Winkler TV pilot), but it wasn’t enough to make a career out of. By the mid-’80s, Marshall, a lifelong keeper of diaries, began to pursue writing more seriously, and made sex and the sex industry her subject. She used the name Taylor during a brief stint as a phone sex operator and added the surname Marsh as a pseudonym on a trip to Amsterdam, where she interviewed prostitutes. “Taylor was my secret, but today she is who I am,” she wrote in the 2000 book. “She is an extension of the girl from Missouri who had to create another life for herself in order to discover who she was.”
In 1994, a temp job took her to the LA Weekly, the city’s alternative paper. She eventually authored a column, “What Do You Want?” that touched on sex, relationships and even some politics. She also started the paper’s alternative personal ad section, devising language (bondage became “knotty fun”) that could get past the editors.
From there, she took a job as managing editor of Danni’s Hard Drive, the web business of porn star Danni Ashe. Marsh’s 2000 book focuses on her year at the company, on her sex research, and on Ashe, who marketed herself as the only woman alive to have been featured on the cover of JUGGS and The Wall Street Journal. “Don’t laugh at this,” Marsh told me, “but I really wanted to be the Hugh Hefner of politics.”