maurycy
24.04.02, 08:34
Linda Lovelace, who has died aged 53 as a result of injuries sustained in a car
crash, was both the best and worst advertisement for pornography. As the star
of Deep Throat (1972), she helped make porn "chic." For a little while after
its release, the dirty movie ceased to exist, while the triple-X adult feature
provided a night out for swinging couples.
Yet only eight years later, in her third autobiography, Ordeal, Lovelace
claimed she had been hypnotised, beaten and threatened at gunpoint to have sex
in front of the cameras - and she spent the rest of her life campaigning
against pornography. She also claimed that two earlier autobiographies, The
Intimate Diary Of Linda Lovelace and Inside Linda Lovelace - in which she made
statements like "I live for sex" - had been fabricated by ghost-writers.
As for the facts, it is generally accepted that she was born Linda Boreman, the
daughter of a New York policeman, in the Bronx, and had an unhappy home life.
After leaving school, she may have worked in a boutique and as a photographer.
In 1970, she met Charles "Chuck" Traynor, a pornographer who made "loops",
short 8mm films, sold and shown illegally. Lovelace appeared in at least eight,
the most notorious of which showed her having sex with a dog. She and Traynor
married.
Deep Throat was not the first hardcore feature film to test New York's
obscenity laws, and it is technically and artistically of very poor quality.
But it had a relatively big budget of $24,000, and a lot of publicity.
Lovelace, quite pretty, but thin and angular - and nothing like the pouting,
big-breasted Playboy models that American men have always preferred - plays a
woman who, because her clitoris is in her throat, can only find satisfaction
through oral sex, something she appears to do with enthusiasm.
Somewhat surprisingly, the reviews praised the film's style and humour, and
soon New York society began to patronise the World cinema, a grind-house near
Times Square. By 1973, the title was so well known that a Washington Post
editor used it as a pseudonym for a Watergate informer.
Lovelace appeared in three more films: the inevitable Deep Throat Part II
(1974); then Linda Lovelace Meets Miss Jones (1975), opposite another porn
superstar, Georgina Spelvin; and, finally, Linda Lovelace For President (1975),
an unsuccessful soft core comedy. Although Deep Throat was shown widely in
unlicensed premises in Britain, it did not get a British Board of Film
Classification certificate until 2000.
It was after she divorced Traynor, who married Marilyn Chambers, a more
conventional porn beauty, that Lovelace claimed she had been forced into
pornography. The press was generally sceptical but, although she named names,
nobody sued. She later became a star attraction again, but at events organised
by Women Against Pornography, and, in 1984, she testified at hearings of the
Meese Commission, established by President Reagan to investigate the effects of
pornography on women and children.
Yet another autobiography, Out of Bondage (1986), made more rumours official,
notably that "one of New York's five Mafia families" had profited from the
success of Deep Throat. Exactly by how much is still not known: the most quoted
amount is $600m, but many reports put the true figure in excess of the $750m
earned by Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, officially the world's most
successful film.
In Out Of Bondage, Lovelace also claimed that she had contracted hepatitis from
a contaminated blood transfusion, and breast cancer from silicone implants that
Traynor had demanded. Certainly, in her last television interview last year,
she looked almost unrecognisable, and was barely able to speak.
Based in Denver, Colorado, since 1990, she is survived by her second husband,
Larry Marchiano, and their two children.
Linda Lovelace (Linda Susan Boreman), actor, born January 10 1949; died April
22 2002
