Porn Chic: Regarding Linda Lovelace

Unless your stage name was Lovelace, in which case your past includes having sex with a dog and anyone over 18 can rent it for a few bucks down at the local video store.

As I prepared to meet Linda Marchiano?aka Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat?I never seriously considered watching the film, but I did read two out-of-print books she wrote in the 80s, Ordeal and Out of Bondage, which chronicle her life during the filming and the reaction she got from the public after denouncing the movie. In Ordeal she claimed her manager/husband Chuck Traynor (the charmer who, she wrote, once asked her, "Do you like donkeys?" during a car trip to Juarez, adding, "Of course there's no fucking reason why you should like donkeys. It's just that...it'd be better for you") forced her into prostitution and porn. His threat being that if she tried to run or asked anyone for help, he would kill her and then kill her family.

Many people had warned me Lovelace was a "wack job," but I'm not in the business of calling a woman who claims to have been abused a liar. I'll leave that to the rest of the world. And when I read her statement that "every time someone sees that film, they are watching me being raped," I felt no one in good conscious could view it. Also, I've never believed that sucking off a donkey is avant-garde. Some taboos are there for a reason. And often, as with the backlash against political correctness, there's nothing daring or noble in breaking them.

Lovelace had a lot to do with porn's mainstream popularity in the 70s and the notion that a woman being gangbanged to a bad soundtrack was an extension of the women's movement (being the author of your own orgasm and all that). She told the press then that she enjoyed being on camera with a penis in every orifice, and was given an award for "that actor or actress most willing to flout convention and risk worldly damnation in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment" by Harvard students. She now says she's "met some women who really genuinely hated me [for the film], because their husbands would say, 'If she can do it, why can't you?' Then they'd want their wife to have sex with five of their friends." The problem, as both porn's critics and advocates have said, is what to do when the actions and statements of a woman who played such a major role in changing people's minds about pornography are revealed to be those of not only a man, but an abusive monster. This doesn't change the fact, though, as Linda puts it, that "There are probably a lot of people who enjoy making porn."

That Lovelace appears in the January 2001 issue of the girlie mag Leg Show, after continually turning down million-dollar offers to do another Deep Throat, interested me a great deal. It seemed on the surface that she was a product of her times. In the 70s she was involved in the porn industry, and later in the 80s she did a 180 and aligned herself with antiporn feminists like Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem (who wrote the introduction to Out of Bondage). Now, in the new millennium, could it be that Lovelace had evolved into a third-waver? Had she, along with almost everyone except me apparently, decided that there's nothing saying you can't be a feminist and pose for Playboy? Had she now decided, in her own words, that this was just "a grandmother being sexy"? My question was: were those her own words?

Lovelace currently claims to feel just as used by Steinem as she was by Traynor. One thing is certain: she's definitely a "product," a term she regularly invokes to describe the way she's been treated throughout her life. For Traynor, the antiporn feminists and Leg Show, Linda Lovelace is a case in point. But what are they, really, to her?

Dian Hanson, editor of Leg Show, ex-girlfriend of R. Crumb and finger on the pulse of the fetish/girlie mag scene for more than 25 years, had been described to me as "severe," and to say I didn't care for her magazine was putting it lightly. She was also the person responsible for setting up my interview and giving me a ride (in a limo) to the Chiller Theatre Model Toy & Film Expo in New Jersey to meet with Lovelace. So as I waited outside her office last Friday, I chalked up the "severe" to the fact that she probably didn't take much shit, and knowing that whenever two aggressive women get together it always hits the fan, I prepared to assume the submissive role. I never doubted Hanson's intelligence, but after close to an hour of conversation on our way to the Sheraton Meadowlands, it turned out she and I agreed on almost everything but her magazine. Hanson considers herself "a member of the early sex-positive feminist movement." While she feels that the new generation of feminists?whom I term intellectualized sex kittens and she identifies as Sex in the City girls?appears to be in her corner, she was critical of them. Hanson feels they may present themselves as strong and well-educated at the office, but once they're in the arms of a man they "turn into a different person." The point is, she says, "I'm afraid we're slipping backwards."

When I asked why Lovelace posed for Leg Show, Hanson replied, "She'll tell you she did it for the money, and that's a big part of it." She says Lovelace enjoyed posing for the photos, has a collection of lingerie at home as well as a penchant for corsets, and since she doesn't appear nude in the magazine, sees the shots as erotica rather than pornography.

That Lovelace was appearing at the Chiller science fiction convention, where men wearing Spock ears with breasts larger than her own would be pawing at her, didn't lessen the sordidness. When Hanson and I waded through the lobby and I finally met Lovelace, she seemed as nervous and fragile as everyone else there. But once we were alone, that timidity blossomed into a sweet and, not shockingly, trusting disposition.

"Oh sure, I still lose jobs because of the 'L.L.' thing," she told me (her preferred method for alluding to the Lovelace era being via initials). "I lost one job just before I came here, and it wasn't because of my performance at work. Even after I left, my name was still on the wall for best customer service representative."

That's when she got in touch with Eric Danville of Penthouse. He had tracked her down in hopes of interviewing her for a book he was working on, The Complete Linda Lovelace. After numerous rejections, he won her trust, became her friend and introduced her to Hanson.

"I'd been talking with Eric a lot, and he was saying that I shouldn't have to work another day in my life. That I should be getting some of what everybody else was getting [from Linda Lovelace]." Back when Lovelace became chummy with feminists like Steinem, she says, they encouraged her not to fight for her share of the money Traynor and others were making off Deep Throat. "They said it was dirty money. I'm probably going to be disowned when Kitty [MacKinnon] sees this," she says, pointing to a copy of Leg Show. "But, hey, I'm hungry. I've been hungry. And it's not a good feeling...

"I don't care for what's in the magazine," she admits. "It's not my cup of tea. But I got paid for it, and I look good. Financially, [the antiporn feminists] gave me nothing. You mention my name in a book, why not throw a couple of grand my way? If you're doing a lecture tour, say, 'I don't speak unless Linda speaks.' Of course Kitty MacKinnon has tried very, very hard to get the civil rights ordinance passed," she continued, referring to the legislation MacKinnon and Dworkin drafted that would make people involved in producing porn responsible for crimes committed by men under its influence, "and is still working tremendously to get people like me rights as a human being."

I asked Lovelace what it was like to hang out in the mansion with the loathsome Hugh Hefner, reminding her of a passage from Ordeal in which "Chuck [Traynor] could hardly wait for the next favor he was going to do for his pal Hef. He was going to show the publisher something he had always wanted to see...a real live woman making love to a real live dog." Luckily for Lovelace, the dog backed out, at which point Hef deadpans, "You know, Lila's been having the same problem," alluding to one of his young concubines.

"I thought it was sad," she tells me. "They'd have different nights?like orgy night or movie night. And I always thought, if this is so good for everybody else's little girl, Hef, how come when Chrissy is there we have backgammon night?"

It was time for Lovelace to go sign autographs and sell L.L. memorabilia. I left her among a stack of old Playboy issues and faded teddies.

?

I imagine fame is a lot like my trip to meet Linda Lovelace?you go there in a limo, and come back on a New Jersey Transit bus. So why was she back for more? Some will see her as an opportunist. A weak woman who treads water until she comes across the next human buoy. That seems partly true, although Hanson told me when we met, "There are enough weak women in the world today," and I don't think she'd willingly promote one more.

I believe Lovelace would not only rather not have appeared in Leg Show, but probably never wants to be in the spotlight again. More than once she mentioned the boutique she was on the verge of buying in her early 20s, until she was in a car accident, had to move back home with her parents and got involved with Traynor. "Just recently I got in touch with my first boyfriend," she smiled. "I went to visit him and saw some old friends, and remembered the way I was before I met Traynor. I realized, 'Hey, I really was a human being.'"

For all its long-term impact, her porn career only lasted three and a half weeks, and was filled with abuse that still causes her to "sit down and cry all day sometimes." But ever since, one way or the other, she's made a living off it, and after 28 years she's discovered that her initials, as far as the public and future employers go, will always be L.L. She's a woman who can't afford ideology, yet she's turned down enough money to set both herself and her family up for life. I believe her when she says she sees nothing wrong with her Leg Show spread. But appearing in the magazine was a compromise.

Hanson and Danville, who, Linda insists, "have been good to me, and that's more important than what they do or what they represent," are helping Linda to set up her own website, www.lindalovelace.net. "People say, you know, Linda, get over it. But I don't have any option here. I can't walk away. So now I'm at the point where it's out there, I can't change it. Yes, I was beaten into it, but it happened. And now I want to take advantage of it. I want the website to be a place where women who've been in the same boat can share their experiences."

She wants to use the website to promote her philosophy on porn. She'll talk about the studies that show pornography makes young men more callous and detached. She'll explain that she's not pro-censorship, she's antiporn. To her that means wishing people didn't need pornography to get off; that sex is a beautiful, healthy, private affair between two people, face to face. But she promises the website (which, if all goes well, will be launched in the next few months), will be an open forum on pornography, where anyone can type in their opinions.

Hanson called a few days after the interview to say that there was a huge response to Lovelace at the convention, "both from women who read and identified with Ordeal and people who'd been fans of the movie." That bodes well for Lovelace's next venture. "My relationship with feminism has never been one-sided," she wrote in Out of Bondage. "They use me to show what happens when an innocent person is dragged down into the pornographic sewer. And at the same time they deliver the message I want delivered?there is a way out." Here's hoping she doesn't stop trying to find it.