Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (9 page)

January, 1973

The sign on the door says “Film Productions,” and it all couldn’t seem blander. The receptionist is a plump, pleasant woman named Frances, who looks like any receptionist in any office. But this is not, Frances assures me, any office. “No way,” she says. “I used to work at the
Catholic News
. That was interesting. Then I worked at an ad agency. We had the Rheingold account and Nat ‘King’ Cole used to come in all the time. That was interesting. But
this
is
really
interesting.” This, as it happens, is the office which produced the most successful pornographic film in the short, recent history of mass-market pornographic films.
Deep Throat
, as I write, is currently in its twenty-second record-breaking week at “the mature World Theatre” on Times Square, and is thirty-seventh on the list of
Variety
’s top grossers, having so far taken in some $1,500,000. The film cost $40,000 to make, and its profits are such that Frank Yablans of Paramount Pictures, who speaks in sentences that sound suspiciously like
Variety
headlines, calls it “The
Godfather
of the sex pix.”

I am here at the offices of Film Productions because one week ago, on one of those evenings when it was
almost impossible to find a movie someone in the group had not seen, we ended up in a packed theatre watching the 7:30 show of
Deep Throat
, ended up there having read in Suzy Knickerbocker’s column that Mike Nichols had seen it three times and having heard, from friends, that it was not only the best film of its kind but actually funny.
Screw
magazine had given it 100 points on the Peter Meter. There was an interview with the star of the film, one Miss Linda Lovelace, in
Women’s Wear Daily
—“I’m just a simple girl who likes to go to swinging parties and nudist colonies,” she said—and a column by Pete Hamill in
New York
magazine. In short, there was an overwhelming amount of conversation and column space concerning the film; not to have seen it seemed somehow … derelict.

The plot of
Deep Throat
—that it has one at all is considered a breakthrough of a sort—concerns a young woman, Linda Lovelace playing herself, who cannot find sexual satisfaction through intercourse. “I want to hear bells ringing, dams bursting, rockets exploding,” she says. She goes to a doctor and he discovers that her problem is simply that her clitoris is in her throat. (Ah, yes, the famous clitoris-in-the-throat syndrome.) Once diagnosed, she embarks on an earnest program of compensatory behavior—I should say here that her abilities have mainly to do with the fact that, like circus sword-swallowers, she has learned to control her throat muscles to the point where she seems to have no gag reflex whatsoever—and before long, dams burst and rockets explode.

“I do not know what their reasonings were or why,” Lou Perry is saying, “but every top motion-picture company
in the United States has called us and asked to borrow a print for the weekend.” Perry is the producer of
Deep Throat
. He is thirty-five years old, dark-haired, a bit paunchy, and until all this began to happen he was Lou Perino. He is sitting in his office at Film Productions in the midst of what passes for a crisis in the sex-pix business: Hugh Hefner’s aide has just called to request a print of
Deep Throat
for Hefner’s personal film collection, and all the available prints are in use. “Look,” Perry is saying to a tattooed person named Vinny, who works for him, “call Fort Lee. Call Atlanta. This is a very important thing.
Playboy
is giving us a three-page spread in the February issue. We gotta find a print.” There are other things on Perry’s mind—one is an impending trial on the obscenity of the
Deep Throat
advertising; another is the forthcoming sequel,
Deep Throat II
, which is about to go into production with a $100,000 budget; and a third is the Los Angeles premiere of
Deep Throat
, to be held at the Hollywood Cat in two weeks, complete with searchlights and Linda Lovelace herself. “She’s going to do some radio interviews out there,” says Perry, “and we think maybe Johnny Carson.”

Exactly what Perry was doing prior to entering the pornographic film business he prefers not to say, but he is perfectly willing to tell the story of his big break. “How I got into this,” he says, “is I lent—I mean, I invested money in a company that went bankrupt that was into this. We then made two pictures. One was
Sex U.S.A
. The other was called
This Film is All About
 … That’s right. Blank. The original title was going to be a four-letter word, but we realized no newspaper would take the ad. New York papers won’t even take the word ‘Sex’ on movies like this. To give you a for instance,
Sex U.S.A
. in
the
Daily News
was printed
Xex U.S.A
. Both these films were documentaries, about events that were happening, sex shows, interviews with people about what did they think about sex shows.
Sex
cost about twelve to fifteen thousand dollars. So far, it’s grossed six hundred thousand. The way
Deep Throat
came about was we decided to do another film. We didn’t want to do a documentary. There was this film,
Mona
, that we had seen. It was different. It had a story. It was done with what you would call improvisational. We thought of doing possibly the same exact thing, so we decided, let’s pick out a subject.

“To be honest about it, we couldn’t come up with anything too good. We were just going to do another
Mona
. Then, somehow, Jerry Damiano, the writer and director, he seen this girl at a party. I assume he got fixed up with her. And he came in the next day and he said as he was driving over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge he was thinking of her. What she had done was fantastic. He’s never seen anybody do like she did. So he thought, let’s make a picture about this girl.

“We started out with a fifteen-thousand-dollar picture, and then it went up to twenty-two thousand and then thirty thousand and then we said, oh the hell with it, let’s go all the way. By the time we finished, we spent forty thousand. I was very worried. How would it be accepted? Before we released it, we had a screening. Personal friends, exhibitors, sub-distributors. I tell you, I was on pins and needles as to what their reaction would be. Well, I’ve been to many X-rated movie screenings, but this picture—in the screening, when she first gives throat, four or five of the men in the audience said, ‘Hurray,’ and by the end of the sequence there were fifteen guys standing and they went into a very big applause.
At that point, we knew we had a hit on our hands.
Screw
reviewed it a week before it opened and said it was the best porn film ever made. That had a lot to do with what happened. We opened up against
Cabaret
and the sequel to
Shaft
, and we outgrossed both of them.”

It may be a terrible mistake to take
Deep Throat
and its success seriously. These things may just happen. Their success may not mean a thing. The publicity machine marches on, and all that. But I can’t help thinking that pornography that has this sort of impact must have some significance. I have seen a lot of stag films in my life—well, that’s not true; I’ve seen about five or six—and although most of them were raunchy, a few were also sweet and innocent and actually erotic.
Deep Throat
, on the other hand, is one of the most unpleasant, disturbing films I have ever seen—it is not just anti-female but anti-sexual as well. I walked into the World Theatre feeling thoroughly unshockable—after all, I can toss off phrases like “split beaver” with almost devil-may-care abandon—and I came out of the theatre a quivering fanatic. Give me the goriest Peckinpah any day. There is a scene in
Deep Throat
, for example, where a man inserts a hollow glass dildo inside Miss Lovelace, fills it with Coca-Cola, and drinks it with a surgical straw—the audience was bursting with nervous laughter, while I sat through it literally faint. All I could think about was what would happen if the glass broke. I always cringe when I read reviews of this sort—crazy feminists carrying on, criticizing nonpolitical films in political terms—but as I sat through the film I was swept away in a bromidic wave of movement rhetoric. “Demeaning to women,” I wailed as we walked away from the theatre. “Degrading to women.” I began
muttering about the clitoris backlash. The men I was with pretended they did not know me, and then, when I persisted in addressing my mutterings to them, they assured me that I was overreacting, that it was just a movie and that they hadn’t even been turned on by it. But I refused to calm down. “Look, Nora,” said one of them, playing what I suppose he thought was his trump card by appealing to my sense of humor, “there’s one thing you have to admit. The scene with the Coca-Cola was hilarious.”

Exactly what Linda Lovelace did for a living before becoming the first superstar of her kind is something she prefers not to be explicit about. She will say, though, that she is twenty-one years old, from Bryan, Texas, and that she decided to come to New York almost two years ago. She had met a man she calls J.R., a former Marine, who is now her manager and who taught her the trick of relaxing her throat muscles, and the two of them set off for the big city together. “I was just going to get a job as a topless dancer or something,” said Miss Lovelace. “I really didn’t think what happened would happen.” A few months after arriving in New York, Linda and J.R. went to a party. “J.R. met Jerry Damiano and they got to talking about what I could do,” said Miss Lovelace. “And when he saw me, he liked me and the way I looked and he got carried away. The next day he was riding to work across the Brooklyn Bridge and he decided on the whole script for the movie.”

Everything that has happened to Linda Lovelace since then is kind of a goof. Making the film was kind of a goof. Its success is kind of a goof. Being recognized in public is kind of a goof. “I totally enjoyed myself making
the movie and all of a sudden I’m what they call a superstar,” she says. “It’s kind of a goof.” I am talking to Miss Lovelace long distance—she is living in Texas with J.R.—and we are having a conversation that leaves something to be desired. For instance, Linda Lovelace’s idea of candor is to insist that her name really is Linda Lovelace, and her idea of a clever response to the question of whether she has any idiosyncrasies is to say, “I swallow well.” As if all this were not enough, it turns out that Linda Lovelace thinks the scene with the Coca-Cola and glass dildo was even funnier than my friend thinks it is. “Actually,” she says, “I think the funniest thing that happened when we were shooting was when we did that scene. They were going to shoot a little bit more, but someone said something and I started laughing and the glass dildo went flying into the air and cracked into a million pieces.” I am not sure what I expected from this interview—I honestly did not expect Linda Lovelace to be Jane Fonda in
Klute
, nor did I think that she would, as a result of our conversation, see the light and leave the pornographic film business forever. On the other hand, I did not expect what is happening, which is that we seem to be spending as much time talking about me and what Miss Lovelace clearly thinks of as my problems as we are about her and what I clearly think of as her problems. As in this exchange:

“How do you feel about being recognized on the street?” I ask.

“It’s kind of a goof,” she says.

“But,” I say, “Lou Perry told me that it made you a little nervous.”

“Why should it make me nervous?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I might be nervous if someone
recognized me as the star of a pornographic film. Especially in the Times Square area.”

“Would you be nervous,” she asks, “if you walked around nude and strangers saw you?”

“Yes.”

“See? I wouldn’t.”

Or in this exchange:

“Why do you shave off your pubic hair in the film?” I ask.

“I always do,” Linda Lovelace replies. “I like it.”

“But why do you do it?”

“Well,” she says, “it’s kinda hot in Texas.”

That stops me for a second. “Well,” I say, “I think it’s weird.”

“Weird? Why?”

“Well, I don’t know anyone who does that.”

“Now you do,” says Linda Lovelace.

“I don’t have any inhibitions about sex,” she says. “I just hope that everybody who goes to see the film enjoys it and maybe learns something from it.” Like what? “I don’t know. Enjoys their sex life better. Maybe loses some of their inhibitions.” In the meantime, Linda Lovelace is about to make the sequel. She is under exclusive contract to Film Productions and receives $250 a week when she isn’t working and $10,000 plus a piece of the profits for the next film. Does she want to make regular films as well as pornographic films? “Look,” she says, “you make a separation between movies and this kind of movie. To me, it’s just a movie, like all other movies. Only it has some much better things in it.” Like what? “Like me,” says Linda Lovelace.

And there we are. Linda Lovelace, “just a simple girl who likes to go to swinging parties and nudist colonies.”
And me, a hung-up, uptight, middle-class, inhibited, possibly puritanical feminist who lost her sense of humor at a skin flick. It’s not exactly the self-image I had in mind, but I can handle it.

February, 1973

I try to remember exactly what the lie was that I made up to tell friends a year ago, when I joined a consciousness-raising group. They would ask me why I had done it, why I had gotten into something like that—a group, an actual organized activity—and I think what I tended to reply was that I didn’t see how I could write about women and the women’s movement
without
joining a group. Consciousness-raising, according to all the literature, is fundamental to the women’s movement and the feminist experience, blah blah blah; it seemed important to me to find out just what the process was about. I said all this as if I were joining something educational, or something that was going to happen to me, as opposed to something I would actively participate in. The disinterested observer, and all that. As I say, this was a lie. The real reason I joined had to do with my marriage.