twenty
I feel now that if my father had known what was happening to me, he would have rescued me. But he didn’t know. And he didn’t rescue me. Then I was off again, swept away by another storm of tears, while Laurendi waited, patiently for me to calm down. What happened was that this whole line of thought had touched an even deeper sadness. It made me realize that I had passed my whole life without really coming to know my father.
How could the parent
not
know that his child was in trouble? Right now I feel so close to my own children, to Dominic and Lindsay, that if anything is ever hurting them, I’m sure I’ll know about it. And do something about it. Even now I wonder why my parents couldn’t see the hurt in my eyes. Why couldn’t they see my pain and recognize that I was in trouble?
Why didn’t they realize what was happening to their daughter?
The Flashback—
Late one afternoon, Chuck lying on the bed, cleaning his gun. A knock at the front door. My parents. A surprise visit. Chuck whispering to me, “Don’t let them in yet. Before you open the door, take off your robe. ” Me pleading, “Chuck, those are my parents out there. ” Pointing the gun at my head: “Take that robe off right now or I’ll fucking rip it off you. And if you let them know that this was my idea, I’m going to shoot you all. I mean that, babe. All three of you will be fucking dead on the, floor. ”
Naked, walking to the door, opening it. My father blushing and looking away, my mother’s mouth starting to tremble. Chuck throwing me a robe, saying, “Here, put on something decent. How could you answer a door like that? You should have clothes on in front of your own father. ”
They should have realized that “Linda Lovelace” wasn’t their daughter. All of my life they had known me as a prude. They knew I wasn’t sexy and I wasn’t sexually driven. Maybe if I had gone in for that kind of thing before, or if I had shown even some hints of that kind of personality, then I could accept their hands-off attitude. But I had always been a goody-goody, and they knew that.
And that day, as I was taking the lie detector test, I found myself wondering whether anything had really changed, whether anything was better now. I loved my father a great deal, but we weren’t talking at all; I never knew how to reach him.
My father tries to show his feelings, but it’s never through talk. Still, I know he loves me. When he came to visit me not long ago the first thing he did was build a shelf in the baby’s room. Then he helped me measure all the windows for plexiglas storm windows. And he fixed different things around the house that I didn’t know how to repair. Then he hung up a planter for me. But, as usual, we didn’t talk much. We have never talked much.
During that visit, my father and Larry started to talk. My father said that he had no idea I was ever in danger. He saw me playing out Chuck’s script and he believed it to be the truth. “If I had known Chuck was hurting Linda,” he told Larry, “I would have taken care of him then and there. I just didn’t know.”
My parents have come to visit me in my new home several times and everytime they leave, I cry. I cry so much. I’m always afraid this is going to be our last meeting. And there’s so much that hasn’t been said, so many things we haven’t been able to say to each other.
“Are you ready to go on with the test?” Laurendi asked.
“I guess so.”
After my breakdown, there were a few more questions and then Laurendi was through with me. As I left his office on the second day of testing, I didn’t bother to ask him how I did. That was because I never doubted the outcome. I knew what the truth was and I trusted Nat Laurendi and his machine. I’d like to tell you that all of the others waiting for the verdict were equally confident—but I’m afraid that wasn’t the case.
A few days later, my co-author returned to Laurendi’s office to pick up the formal report. Unable to wait, he asked Laurendi what his honest opinion was.
“She’s telling the truth.” The polygraphist illustrated with the rolled-up charts. He showed my intentionally false answers to the sample questions, causing the needles to jump dramatically all over the page.
“This part of the test is very important,” Laurendi said, “Because it shows that her past didn’t interfere with the test. She is not emotionally bankrupt; she doesn’t piss ice water; she is still a human being, regardless of all the things that happened to her in the past.”
“Is there any chance that she could be fooling the machine?”
“Could she be conning me? No. She’d have to be some actress—and even if she were that good an actress, she couldn’t control her blood pressure. These are true answers, they don’t indicate any deception. Oh, here and there you’ll see emotional responses as she relives her past—but those emotional responses come as I’m asking the question, not as she’s answering. Basically, she’s just not that good an actress. She’s no Stanislavsky; she can’t control her motivations. Have I seen actresses? Yes. Have I seen conmen? Yes. Is Linda one of these? No.”
“So the test shows . . .”
“There are no reactions to indicate deception,” he said. “There is absolutely no indication of deception.”
And that’s what the six-page, single-space typewritten report said, over and over again.
The report’s bottom lines—
“Based upon the information supplied, the galleys of Ordeal, the pre-polygraph test interviews prior to each phase of the test, the analysis of the emotional reactions on the polygraph to the above critical questions and post-test conversation and interrogation of Subject, it is my professional opinion that Subject’s answers to the above critical questions were truthful. ”
twenty-one
Lyle Stuart wanted my first book-promotion appearance to be on a nationally televised program. He selected Tom Snyder’s
Tomorrow Show,
for our first stop. Another appearance would be on
Donahue.
Phil Donahue’s program is always important to anyone who has a book to sell.
Snyder would be tough. I had seen him enough times to know that he could be brutal when he didn’t believe someone. But if that show didn’t go well, I’d always have
The Donahue Show
and Donahue was such a pussycat—that would be a cinch.
Wrong.
And wrong again.
At any rate, Tom Snyder was the first hurdle. That evening, in the studio waiting for the show to begin—by coincidence, it happened to be my 31st birthday—there was a great deal of nervousness. A great deal of nervousness, but it wasn’t mine. My publisher, Lyle Stuart, was there with his top executives; so was my husband; so was my co-author; so were several lawyers who had become attached to the project. And some of them seemed very worried whether I’d be able to stand up to Tom Snyder.
Maybe I seemed a little edgy, but no one there could dream of how positive I felt. More than positive—elated. I had been waiting so long for the chance to step in front of the camera and tell my story simply and directly. This was it, my first national program, my first opportunity to tell millions of people—
millions
of people!—just what had happened and who was to blame and who was not to blame.
I knew that Tom Snyder on television could have an acid personality. Before we began, he gave me no clue as to what he thought of me or my book. It did help to see all those familiar faces there, even if they were a bit strained. For the first time in many years, it was no longer just Larry and me against the world. There were others now who were standing beside us.
Just before we went on camera, Tom Snyder exchanged a few words with me. He said a few things about one of the characters in the book, Al Goldstein, publisher of
Screw
, and he said that he thought Goldstein had become a good family man; he was always playing with his son and buying him presents. He said he was surprised to read of Goldstein’s role in my life.
That was all he said—but it was enough to send a wave of fear through me. The moment the red light went on and we were on camera, however, I began to relax. Snyder was not at all antagonistic. He had gone to the trouble of reading the entire book; he had been shocked by it; and now he was matter-of-factly, but gently, guiding me through a retelling of the story. I’d been told that most television hosts don’t have guts. But Tom Snyder had absolutely no hesitation about using the names of the famous and infamous who appeared in my book.
At one point Snyder asked me whether I felt the people connected with
Deep Throat
should be behind bars, and I said yes. I was definitely emotional and maybe overreacting; but it was a pleasure, after all those years, to finally take the offensive.
Snyder mentioned a name, and it was later to prompt the threat of a lawsuit unless there was a retraction. There was no retraction and no lawsuit.
I found myself really liking Tom Snyder. By the end of the hour I felt as though I was sitting there chatting with an old friend. He signed off by observing that I was obviously quite pregnant and he wished us “both” well.
Suddenly the waiting room was filled with smiles. No one had to say a word; I could tell from their faces that it had gone very well.
The show was taped several hours ahead of its actual airtime so Larry and I raced to get home in time to see it. But I’d been away from the limelight too long. Too many years of early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise. And perhaps the excitement of the day had been too much for me. All I know is that by the time my premiere performance began—my long-awaited debut on national television—both Larry and I had fallen asleep.
I managed to stir myself toward the end of the show, waking for a minute or two, just long enough to see whether I looked all right, but this was one night I went to sleep without a care in the world.
After that there were many television interviews, and some of them were excellent. One of the best was a young man named Gene Taylor in Detroit. Before I came onto his show, he had gone to the trouble of making still photographs from
Deep Throat,
photographs that showed the bruises all over my body. Before we began talking, he showed those photos on camera. After the show, on learning that Larry and I had run out of money, he reached into his pocket and lent us a hundred dollars.
Another memorable show was a Chicago interview conducted by a psychiatrist. It turned out that he had specialized in treating boys and girls who were youthful victims of pornography. As the program came to an end, he told me there was only one major difference between my story and hundreds of other stories he knew about—my story had a happy ending; I was alive and free.
He told me that many of the women who were trapped in the pornography underworld wound up in alleyways with their arms marked by needles; the police would then assume they were prostitutes who had overdosed when, in reality, they might be young girls who had been used by pornographers and pimps and then junked.
And, of course, there were low spots as well. I remember one radio show where the host seemed both understanding and sympathetic. Then, during the commercial break, his attitude changed completely; he tried to make it sound as though we were accomplices playing a little joke on the public. He turned to me and said, “Do you know what my favorite line in
Deep Throat
is? It’s really become a classic. That’s where the girl says, ‘Do you mind if I smoke while you’re eating?”
Larry looked up at that. I knew my husband well enough to realize that another interview had just come to an early end. The commercial was still playing as Larry got to his feet.
“Linda, are you about done here?” he said. “We’ve heard about enough of this bullshit.”
“This show’s not over,” the interviewer said.
“You think not?” Larry said. “Come on, Linda. If this guy’s got any more questions, he can answer them himself.”
The lowest spot of all was a television interview conducted in New York by Stanley Siegel.
Before that show began, the producer took me aside and asked me what I wanted to talk about and what I didn’t want to talk about. I told her the things that bothered me the most. And then I began to relax under the misapprehension that this would be a gentle and polite interview.
“What does it feel like to have sex with five men at the same time?” I was asked.
I may not have the exact wording and I can no longer remember my answer. But I went into an immediate state of shock; it seemed almost as bad as the days when I was being beaten. I looked over at Larry; his face was frozen. Later, when we talked it over, we discovered we had both felt the same emotions. My instinct was to get up and walk off the stage without another word. But at the same time I was plagued by doubts: Was that allowed? What would happen to the show? Would I be letting down my publisher and my co-author?
The questions go no better. Stanley Siegel went after sensation for sensation’s sake. I kept thinking that I had to get out of there, away from him, but I didn’t know what to do, or what to say. Today, it would be different. Today I would get up, spit in his face and storm away.
Finally, after he dredged up all the muck he could think of, the interview came to an end. As the show’s final commercial was being played, he turned to Larry and said, “How do you think it went?”
“It sucks,” Larry said, using a word he understandably reserved for only the worst offenses. It was not difficult for Siegel to see how upset I was. But then, you didn’t have to be terribly perceptive to observe that I was weeping.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“If you’re really sorry,” Larry said, “let’s do it over.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” he said.
As Siegel walked away, the producer who had asked the pre-show questions, apologized for his performance: “I can’t understand it, he wasn’t supposed to ask any of those things.”
As we drove home from Manhattan that day, we realized that we were on unfamiliar turf. We knew so little about the world of television and television interviewers, what was allowed or not allowed.
However, if anyone came to our home and spoke to me the way Stanley Siegel had just done, he would be carried out. I didn’t know then that the producer was as disturbed as I was. She called Lyle Stuart and said, “Immediately after the show, I told him, ‘Stanley, you’re a pig. We can’t use this tape. You look and sound like a dirty old man.’ ”
There were other bad interviewers—some of them cynical and hostile—but none bothered me so much as Siegel. Most of the time I could see a negative attitude as a challenge. Maybe I would be able to open their eyes to other possibilities.
As the interviews continued and I was exposed to every possible question, the main problem became one of repetition. How do you avoid sounding like a broken record when you’re always giving the same answers to the same questions?
And the questions were always the same. “How come you couldn’t get away?” and “Why didn’t you call the police?” and “How is Chuck Traynor doing now?” and “If you were telling the truth, how come he’s not is jail?” A funny thing had happened. Although this had been a story I was dying to tell, the repetition was killing the good feelings. Flying from one city to the next, speaking to faces that blurred together into a composite interviewer, I began to hate the sound of my voice telling the same story at every whistlestop.
The interview of greatest importance was
The Donahue Show.
I felt pressure—but no real fear. If tough Tom Snyder was gentle, there was certainly no reason to be alarmed by Phil Donahue—he was gentle to start with. However, as soon as we went on the air, I sensed that something was not . . . quite . . . right. Donahue was reserved and cool, maybe even a bit standoffish.
“Let’s begin by taking a survey,” he greeted his audience. “First, how many here know who Linda Lovelace is? You have to . . .”
Applause interrupted him.
“How many think it’s all right for her to write her book and tell her story and . . .?”
More applause.
“You really think it’s all right?” he said. “How many think it’s an effort just to make money?”
Applause.
Donahue was leading the audience the way a conductor leads an orchestra. Anyone who watches the
The Donahue Show
knows the audience follows his leads very closely. It’s no secret that his audience—and, in fact, most women in America—love Phil Donahue. And whenever he begins a new line of thought, his audience picks up on it quickly.
And then he turned to me.
“You know, thinking of you with a bungalow and a vegetable garden and a white picket is just a killer; you know what I mean.”
“I love it,” I said. “I really do.”
“I know. But, my dear, you’ve lived on two different planets now.”
“Yeah, well, actually, that wasn’t me back then,” I said. “This is me now. I finally can be myself, you know, and I have everything I’ve wanted.”
“Sure. How did you get involved with all that stuff? I mean, how could a nice girl like you—how do you answer that?”
I answered it the way I had answered it in the book. The way a nice girl like me gets caught up in Linda Lovelace’s life is through sheer brute force. I went over that again—how I’d been beaten and imprisoned and threatened; how I’d been forced to live out the most extreme sexual fantasies that a sick mind could invent; how I had lived more than two years in the close company of death, worried about both my life and the lives of my parents.
Donahue seemed to wonder whether all this was a voluntary act on my part, whether I had
willingly
given up my freedom.
“Apparently,” Donahue observed, “there are a lot of young women who are similarly trapped by Jim Jones kinds of people. I’m not for a minute attempting to equate anybody with that personality in Guyana, but the circumstances of being emotionally attached to a person, even one who knocks you around, is apparently—it exists in a number of places in this country . . . Is there anything about the way you were raised, in your view, that made you vulnerable to this?”
“Well, I was very naive,” I said. “I knew nothing about sex. I had no—you know, my mother and father never talked to me about it. I think if I had known a little more, possibly—but that’s hard. I don’t think there’s any real way to warn somebody about a Chuck Traynor.”
“But you did not feel close to your parents, did you?”
“No, there wasn’t that total closeness. We were very close until I was about 16, and then we started to drift apart. My father and I were always very close, but that had to end.”
“Yeah, but I mean—all right, this is very amateur analysis, but see . . . one of the things, one of the really valuable things about talking to you is it might help us figure out how to make sure our kids don’t get . . .”
He kept going deeper and deeper into the way I’d been raised. The difficulty in communicating with my parents. Their strictness. Someone had to be blamed for what had happened to me and apparently he had decided to fix blame on my parents. It seemed to me that the blame belonged to my captor, Chuck Traynor, and to all the men who bought me and rented me and used me and abused me.