sixteen
We were as broke as two people can be. And then, in the middle of our destitution—in November of 1976—there was a sudden, brief, temporarily blinding ray of sunshine. A Las Vegas producer managed to track us down. He wanted me to star in a legitimate play.
His offer demonstrated a certain ignorance of my past theatrical history. Though it was not a widely known fact, I had previously starred in a legitimate play in the city of Philadelphia. This happened after leaving Chuck but before meeting Larry and I had been attempting, against all odds, to be an actress. I had been asked to play a character named Babette Latouche in a bedroom farce called
Pajama Tops
and it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
For the critics there is no happier moment than when a porn star tries to keep her clothes on and play it straight. It’s like going to a shooting gallery with a howitzer. Let me illustrate by quoting William B. Collins of the Knight newspapers: “Linda Lovelace, star of the world-famous dirty movie
Deep Throat,
has carried out her threat to go on the stage. . . . A whole month of acting lessons has left her a blissful amateur . . .”
There was another review by Jonathan Takiff: “Rarely in my years of playgoing experience have I been so moved—to leave the theater—as last evening at the opening of
Pajama Tops.
” Larry Fields of the
Philadelphia Daily News
reported our closing notices:
“Pajama Tops
which brought a new bottom to the American theater—and I don’t mean Linda Lovelace’s—closed Sunday at the New Locust Theater, a week earlier than scheduled.”
What bothered me most about the reviews was their accuracy. You can understand why I was in no great rush to return to the stage. Weighed against my personal feelings, however, was the need for the Marchiano family to obtain a square meal, something we hadn’t been able to manage in recent months.
And so when a producer asked me to tour in his new play, I had only three questions. No, really four. Was there any nudity? Any sex? Any money? And: When do we start?
The one question that I never thought of asking was whether this was going to be a high-quality production or not. I knew better. I realized that no producer in his right mind would be hiring a Linda Lovelace to play Joan of Arc or Ophelia. The most I could hope for was that the script would carry more double entendres than single entendres. I was assured that there would be no nudity and no sex, that there would be nothing beyond double entendres and innuendoes. And even more important than that, there would be $2,500 a week.
This meant we couldn’t come away with less than $10,000—and that first month was just the beginning. The plan was to open at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas and then tour the show around the country for at least nine months. Hmmmm. Nine months at $2,500 a week—didn’t that came to
$90,000?
Yes, indeed!
There has never been a safe way for a Linda Lovelace to travel alone. And so Larry and I arrived in Las Vegas with our new baby and our meager belongings.
The title of my new play:
My Daughter’s Rated X.
While that kind of a title normally sends shivers down my spine, the script itself seemed harmless enough—it was an innocent little sex farce that would put no great demands on either my acting ability or my ethical standards. Besides, I kept multiplying and remultiplying nine months times four weeks times $2,500 a week and I kept coming up with: $90,000.
That windfall would end all of our financial problems.
After weeks of scrounging for cigarette butts, we were suddenly returned to the land of plenty. The Aladdin provided us with a posh two-room suite. It was arranged that all of my old celebrity clothes would be retrieved from storage—it took three long wardrobe racks just to hold the gowns. There was a full-time baby sitter for our infant son.
And the food! Oh, God, the
food
! For months we had been making do with food stamps, flour and bouillon. Now we were back in the Land of the Lobster Tail. One of my first requests was for a microwave oven in my hotel room. That way I could cook fresh food anytime the notion occurred to me, day or night.
Gone were all memories of Long Island. Gone were all images of poverty. And those first two weeks, as the producers handed over the first paychecks—oh, I just knew that everything was finally going to be all right.
And, in fact, there was only one problem with my return trip to show-business: the play closed. To be precise, the play closed exactly one week after we got there. The play that was supposed to tour the country for nine lovely months never made it out of Las Vegas and the two paychecks were not enough to cover our debts or expenses.
The idea of failure and all the predictable bad reviews—that didn’t bother me a bit. All that bothered me was being poor once again. The possibility of a return ticket to poverty had never been mentioned, never even been considered, in all of our discussions about the play. How could this have happened? The producers explained it this way: Everyone felt cheated by the fact that Linda Lovelace was wearing clothes.
Their reasoning may not have been entirely wrong. On opening night (shortly before closing night) as I was walking to my room, I was aware of a man following me. All of Victor’s warnings came flooding back at me. Who was this? Mafia? Chuck Traynor’s man? The FBI? Who?
I came to my door and started fumbling with the key. The door wouldn’t open and suddenly he was right up next to me.
“You’ve been unfair . . .” he began.
“What’re you talking about?” I screamed. “Keep your hands off me.”
“You’re being unfair to all of your fans,” he said. “You have no right not to take your clothes off.”
“Leave me alone.”
“You heard the lady,” Larry suddenly appeared behind him. “Leave her alone. Now.”
Larry picked up a folding chair, swung, missed my admirer but sent the chair clattering against concrete steps. Then he chased him down the stairs and away. The scariness came to a quick end. But the man’s complaint stayed in my mind. Is that all people ever wanted from me—to take my clothes off? It seemed that way.
Maybe that
was
one reason the play flopped. But an equally important reason had to be the play itself. What kind of a play would have a title like
My Daughter’s Rated
X
? And what kind of a play would open in Las Vegas? And what kind of a play would star Linda Lovelace?
The answer to these questions is the same: a dumb play.
But still, we needed it. We needed this dumb play just to stay alive. And when it fell through, Larry went beserk.
Part of this collapse had to be due to alcohol. During the previous two years, we hadn’t been drinking at all—mostly because we couldn’t afford it. When we had been able to afford it, we had enjoyed a few beers and a little wine. But in Las Vegas everything was free—we’d sit down and the drinks would just start arriving. We found ourselves drinking heavily. Each night after appearing in the play-at one or two in the morning—we’d both be wide awake and we’d take a few drinks just to get to sleep.
With the closing of the play, all the old pressures returned. How would we survive? Our first paychecks were all but gone—how would we even get enough gas money to return to Long Island and our life of poverty. My belongings had to go back to storage, a baby sitter had to be paid off and somehow we had to travel across the country.
The very morning we learned the play was to close, something happened that sent Larry spinning. It was just a minor incident in the hotel coffee shop, so minor I never learned the details. All I know is that Larry became angry about some little thing and then blew sky high.
He came to the room and he started shouting incomprehensibly at me. He grabbed me by the arms and shook me and then he pushed me up against a wall. I totally freaked out. I felt as though I were back with Chuck, facing another beating.
“Get your hands off me!”
I screamed at him. “You’re
nuts
! You’re going nuts, just get out of here and leave me alone.”
When he didn’t let go,
I
went nuts, punching him and kicking him. And then I totally lost it, hitting him in the face and clawing at him. For the first time in my life, I was defending myself. It worked. Larry backed away and stared at me as though he were trying to bring me into focus.
Larry was still in an angry daze but at least he let go of me. Then he turned his attention to the furniture. He tore the gowns from their racks and he threw a lamp against the closet door with enough force to break both. Next he broke a dresser and shattered a mirror. Then he hit the wall, managing to do sufficient damage so that we were billed by the hotel for “damages to wall.” However, while the wall was broken a little, his hand was broken a lot.
Because of all the noise, someone had called the house detectives and I was never so happy to see anyone in my life. One of the security guards was from Texas—he looked to be seven feet tall and built like a football player. Putting the handcuffs on Larry, he realized that my husband had shattered his hand and he called for a stretcher. Now Larry was in a total daze, glassy-eyed, wandering around like an amnesiac. He looked at the complete shambles of our room and rubbed his eyes with an expression that said very clearly:
Oh, hell, how did this happen?
Later, at the hospital, he calmed down while the doctor ran a few other tests. The doctor had a question for Larry.
“How long have you been an alcoholic?”
“I’m not an alcoholic,” Larry said.
“Really?” the doctor said. “Let me tell you something: I can’t even test your blood; there’s too much alcohol in it. How much do you drink a day?”
“I only drink beer,” Larry said.
“Yes, but how much beer.”
“Oh, I don’t know, quite a bit but only over the past couple of weeks.”
“How much?”
“A case a day.”
“A case a day? Well, you may still be a small-time alcoholic but I think you qualify for the general category.”
Just recently I heard Larry’s tape-recorded diary of that day. This is what he had to say: “The deal was off and Linda had to pack. Oh, God, the stuff she had. So I’m stuck in Vegas with all this shit. All this stuff. Plus the kid. I start to throw a fit. And she throws it right back at me. ‘Screw you’—all this. We’re having an argument. Suddenly I’m like an asshole. I’m like a stupid person. Yelling and screaming. Security guards coming in the front door, handcuffs, going out with a white sheet over my head—no press please—oh, it was
terrible
!”
The tests eventually were taken and we began to learn the real cost of living with the problems of a Linda Lovelace. It turned out that during our relatively short life together, Larry had managed to develop both an ulcer and a spastic colon; when we finally were able to leave Las Vegas, driving a beat-up second-hand Volkswagen bus, he was on a heavy daily dose of prescription tranquilizers.
That and the car took care of whatever money was left. I was down to my one remaining ace in the hole. Our only source of funds now would be to hock some jewelry I had taken out of storage when I retrieved my gowns. When I took it to the pawn shop, I learned all the original stones had been removed from the jewelry and replaced by paste. A former friend had volunteered to have the jewelry cleaned for me and now I understood why. Not only cleaned but cleaned out.
seventeen
Broke again, on welfare again, back on Long Island again—it was back to square one.
Now that Victor felt my story was the truth, he was left with the question of what to do about it. The planned law suits failed to materialize, primarily because of something known as a statute of limitations. Now Victor had a second plan of attack. I would write a book.
While I knew Victor meant well, my experience with publishers told me it was going to be nowhere as simple as he made it sound. I tried to tell the truth in the past, but no publisher wanted to hear it. The people who had published my two earlier make-believe books felt that the truth was too “downbeat,” too “depressing,” too “unbelievable.”
Publishers wanted only one story—the story of the man-happy, sex-crazed, insatiable Linda Lovelace who knew no greater pleasure in life than offering oral sex to strangers. Unfortunately, that fun-loving, free-spirited, happy-go-lucky sex machine could never possibly exist, except in the minds of a few perpetual adolescents. The story of the real Linda Marchiano, a woman forced to do unspeakable acts against her will, just wouldn’t sell.
Victor approached several writers and described the project. To his surprise, but not to mine, he got the same reaction from them that he had first gotten from the lawyers: Victor, how could you be so naive?
Finally, he approached Mike McGrady who worked at
Newsday,
the Long Island newspaper. McGrady’s most recent book was the story of trading places with his wife,
The Kitchen Sink Papers—My Life as a Househusband.
At the moment he was writing a syndicated cooking column. I had to wonder what in his background would conceivably prepare him for a story such as mine.
As it turned out, he was no stranger to violence. He had covered the war in Vietnam and a book of his columns,
A Dove in Vietnam,
had won the Overseas Press Club Award for interpretive reporting. Also, he was familiar with American sexual mores. A second book,
Naked Came the Stranger,
was a best-selling group-authored spoof of the Harold Robbins-Jacqueline Susann potboilers. But I guess his most important qualification was that he agreed to meet with me and listen to my story.
During a dinner meeting, Victor outlined the story to the writer: One of his clients, barely surviving on welfare, was hiding out and trying to escape her past as a pornographic movie star. Her name: Linda Lovelace. Although McGrady was less than convinced, two aspects of the story impressed him. One was the result of the recent inquisition in Victor’s office. The other factor: Victor revealed that he had recently passed along a seven-figure offer if I would just go back and make one more pornographic movie and that I had turned it down, as I had turned down all the other offers.
The writer’s well-known Long Island attorney, Anthony Curto, advised McGrady against involvement. My tale was too unbelievable, too hard to prove, too potentially damaging to his reputation as a reporter. In the days to follow, others would give McGrady similar advice.
However, a meeting was arranged in Victor’s Patchogue office. The first thing I did was ask both lawyers to leave the room. They did so—but not without grumbling. However, I had to look at this writer without any distractions. Would he be someone I could trust? Someone I could spend a great deal of time with, someone I could open up to, someone who would get it right?
He began by asking me some general questions and then made a statement: “The one thing that’s going to bother people after this story comes out is this: Why didn’t you escape? No one will be able to understand why, in the space of two years, you weren’t able to call the police or simply run away from this man.”
“I couldn’t get away because I was a prisoner,” I said. “Just as much as if I was in Alcatraz. Chuck Traynor would never let me out of his sight. If I wanted to go to the bathroom, I had to ask permission. If the bathroom had a window, he would stand by the open door and wait for me. He hypnotized me hundreds of times, and if I resisted, he beat me. He often threatened me with a gun. He told me if I tried to get help he would kill my family. If I tried to escape, I’d be dead. I didn’t want to die.”
I told the story in broad outline and he stopped me here and there to ask a question of a general nature. As I was studying him, he was studying me. In fact, I could tell that he was judging me more than he was judging my story. At one point—I was again talking about being raped by five men in a motel room—he seemed to react very strongly.
“Whoa,” I said to him. “You know something, I don’t know if you’re ready to hear a story like this.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “It’s just that it’s going to take some getting used to.”
He told me not to pull any punches. He said that he’d covered the war in Vietnam, the march on Selma, the police riots in Chicago—he didn’t think there was much that would shock him now. So I went through it all, still in general terms—beginning with the day Chuck had me pose for still photographs with another girl, and carrying him through the making of
Deep Throat
and, finally, the escape. And then he had a question, another question I was going to hear over and over again.
“You mean you went through all this sexual stuff and didn’t get any pleasure out of it? None at all?”
“When it was happening, I had tears in my eyes. I felt disgusted and degraded. I was scared to death. I didn’t want to do it, not any of it. I
had
to do it. And if I didn’t look like I was enjoying it, I’d get beat up. I’d get a kick here and another kick there and then there’d be a gun pointed at my head. And finally it became like this: The faster I did it, the faster I could get it over with. So I learned to look like I was enjoying it so it would come to a quicker end.”
I could tell that Mike McGrady began to believe me that first day and I knew we could get along. Later he told me that after more than 20 years as a reporter, he has learned to trust his instincts. His instincts told him that I wasn’t lying. Now, after two years and hundreds of hours of tape-recorded talk, he knows I don’t tell lies.
Over the next few weeks we met a dozen times and I told my story in greater detail than I ever had before. It was painful but valuable. As I retraced those worst days of my life, I learned things about myself. One thing I learned: it really
wasn’t
my fault, any more than a hit-and-run victim can be blamed for his accident. Telling it was a kind of therapy. Each time I dragged up one of the horror stories from my past and looked at it from every angle, I could start to get it out of my system. As our meetings would come to an end, there would be tears in both of our eyes.
Time and time again, I would watch my co-author go into a state of shock as I described one freaky incident or another. Sometimes I’d have to slow down and let it all sink in before going on. There were other times when he would surprise me by roaring with laughter. Generally this would happen when he realized that Linda Lovelace, the queen of all sexual freaks in the eyes of the rest of the world, was in reality just a normal housewife with middle-class aspirations. I’ll never forget the way he laughed when we got on the subject of marital infidelity.
“Tell me this,” I said to him, “why do so many husbands feel the need to cheat on their wives? What kind of a country are we living in anyway?”
After a while, the very act of talking felt good. It was the only time I’ve ever sat down and told the entire story—all of it, all the ugliness, all the brutality. I’m not sure the experience was equally rewarding for my co-author. He later told me that he capped off each of our visits with a trip to a local saloon where he would down a couple of martinis just to get into a better frame of mind before going home.
I found that by talking through an incident, I could get rid of it. Whatever I described, it became less ominous, less important. By going over the details, I could understand better how things had come down and exactly what my role had been.
“Linda,” my co-author asked me one day, “why do you want to write this book? Is it just the money?”
“Because I want people to know the truth,” I told him. “Because I have a little boy and some day he’ll be going to school and he’s going to hear stories about his mother. I want him to always know what the truth is.”
“And you’re sure you want to go through all this?”
“Eventually it all has to come out. The sooner the better.”
For the first time nothing stood between me and my past. I was finally discovering what were truly the worst moments in my life. I never knew how much I had been hurt at a sado-masochistic party Chuck took me to until I was forced to relive the experience. I had been so rigid, so protective of some of the worst memories. They had been blocked and now they came out in a flood.
“This girl was a friend of Chuck’s,” I was remembering. “She was a hooker but she was an ‘S & M’ hooker. One night he took me over there, You know, just once I’d think he was gonna take me somewhere and see normal people—but that never happened. This hooker was into whips and things. There were stuffed animals, stuffed leather animals, whips and hair blower.”
“A hair-blower?”
“I remember a hair-blower on hot.”
Oh, God! A single detail like that released a flood of new details; the details caused me to remember what happened, then what was said. And finally what was felt. And by the end of a session describing what I thought was a half forgotten sado-masochistic party, I’d be crying, in actual physical pain, and my co-author would be in a state of shock.