Later on members of the audience were invited to stand up to say their pieces. One woman pointed out that she had gone through hard times as a child but she had enough moral fiber so that it was never necessary for her to become a . . . Linda Lovelace.
“A lot of us had this going on when we were teenagers, and we didn’t go the route you went,” she said. “How do you account for this? You talk about being a protected child and staying home and your mother wanted to know where you were . . . I didn’t just go off the deep end and say, well, you know, she wants to know where I am, therefore I’m going to be as promiscuous as I want to be, I’ll fix her.”
“What do you mean by ‘promiscuous’?” I asked. “You lost me there.”
“Being naughty and bad,” Donahue explained.
“Oh, but that was not by choice,” I had to explain all over again. “I didn’t do that as a resentment towards my parents.”
It took time, nearly the full hour, but finally I felt I was winning the audience over. By the end of the show Donahue himself had become softer and more understanding. Still, the discussion took many directions I didn’t like—the importance of parents and upbringing and childhood in all the awful things that had happened to me.
Finally, at the very end of the program, I tried to get in a brief defense of my mother.
“I want to say something here,” I blurted out. “I don’t hate my mother at all. I think there’s a very good chance that my mother was also a victim of Mr. Traynor’s because if you were looking at a white piece of paper he could convince you that it was black. And I think . . . I don’t hate my mother for not understanding.”
Putting the blame on my parents is too easy; it lets everyone else off the hook. True, many battered housewives began life as battered children. There’s surely something to the notion that childhood beatings condition people to respond to beatings received later in life. And so some people might conclude that since my mother hit me from time to time, that’s the reason I became one of history’s more famous battered women.
This theme was later picked up by the press. Some printed reports came down as hard on my mother as on Chuck Traynor. For a time this all but destroyed my relations with my parents. To read some of the stories, you’d think my mother was another Mommie Dearest—but, to me, she was but a tiny part of my strife.
Of course it’s not Donahue’s business to be either on my side or against me. But I did feel he was standing up high on some moral ground, looking down at me from a height I’d obviously never attain.
“Linda, you really were and are—but especially in the early seventies—you were quite a celebrity. Everybody talked about you. There’s always a giggle and a joke that goes with the mention . . . all conversations about you include a normal statement that comes out dirty because of the context. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“That’s an awful way for you—that’s going to follow you forever.”
Oh, God, I hoped not! Why on earth had I written the book then?
“No, I don’t think so,” I insisted. “I really don’t. I think once people realize who I really am, and that Linda Lovelace was a fictitious creation of Chuck Traynor’s, and a robot that just functioned to survive, and they get to know me and how I really am, I think a lot of it might stop. I hope so.”
“You learned a lot,” he said. “Yeah. You learned about hooking, too, didn’t you? I mean, at least you were obliged to be a prostitute?”
Maybe I was listening between the lines but what I was hearing was disapproval.
“You embarrassed some very important people in this book.”
“Well, I don’t know how you mean ‘important people.’”
“Well, okay, let me say
famous
people.”
“Well, famous people—but, you know, they’re all, in my opinion, in one way or another, just as bad as Chuck Traynor was. And they participated for their own satisfaction and didn’t do anything to try to help me.”
“But did they
know
?” he asked. “I mean, is it
fair
?”
“It sound like I picked them out because they’re important people. No. They were just a part of the ordeal that I went through.”
“Is it fair to have expected them to understand entirely the slave kind of thing you were under? I mean, they would only see you on weekends of whenever. Here’s the thing: I’m not forgiving anybody but, you know, if a guy has a couple of beers and you come in looking like you did then, I’m not forgiving it—it’s just that . . . is putting him in a book that’s going to sell a whole lot of copies necessarily a redeeming thing to do?”
It was never my intention to hurt an innocent bystander. I didn’t create their lifestyles; their lifestyles existed long before I came along and long after I left.
“Well,” I said, “I felt it was important to let everything out that happened to me. And to leave someone out because they’re important or they have a name, I didn’t think that was right, you know.”
“But you know, ” Donahue broke in, “they have families, too, and you know, and kids—do you think about this?”
“No.”
It was difficult, even in my wildest imaginings, to think of Hugh Hefner as a family man. Some of the others I mentioned in the book—the closest they ever came to a family was the Colombo family.
Finally, the show was over and Phil Donahue was walking away. Larry, standing in the wings, called out to the famous television host.
“Hey,
you
!”
“What?” Donahue asked.
“I want to talk to you.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Why’d you do that?” Larry wasn’t lowering his voice. “Why’d you defend those people and hurt my wife?”
“That’s not my business,” Donahue said, “That’s between them and their psychiatrists.”
Then he walked away. And the show—the most important show I would do—was over. And while I will always feel badly about some parts of it, I know that viewers saw it as an interesting hour of give and take. Oh, maybe I took more than I gave—but this was what I had been waiting for, the opportunity to tell my story to the widest possible audience.
If I could judge by the studio audience, I seemed to have some impact. One of the women there stood up and said that she had been bothered when she came into the auditorium that morning and learned that the guest for the day was . . . Linda Lovelace.
“But I’m really enjoying this,” she said. “I have to admit that I’m afraid when I heard who was going to be the guest, I thought, ‘Oh, dear!’ You’re just a lovely lady, and thank you for being here.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said. “I feel the same way. I would never want to meet Linda Lovelace either.”
There was one other question that didn’t mean as much to me at that moment but would mean a great deal to me as time went on. A woman stood up and said, “Other women are involved in probably doing things against their will—isn’t this a feminist question? What are they . . . what is the feminist movement, or any feminist organization-are
they
involved in helping these women?”
“I really don’t know too much about that.”
That was understating the case.
But I was to learn.
Because
The Phil Donahue Show
—good in parts, bad in parts—was by far the most important thing to happen to me or to my book. Wherever that show played in the weeks that followed,
Ordeal
was sure to sell out. And by the time the show had run its course around the country, the book was on every best-seller list in America.
And there were two other results of that telecast that was of even greater importance to me.
One: Gloria Steinem happened to be watching.
Two: And so was a woman named Patricia. That’s the name she signed to a postcard she sent me that I still keep in my bedroom under a statue of the Blessed Mother: “Dear Linda. Thank you. I got out. Your interview with Donahue was wonderful for me. Again, thank you.”
twenty-two
People may think being on a publicity tour is a glamorous experience but that’s not the way it works out. I was pregnant and tired and hounded by old demons that the questions kept reawakening. Sometimes I reacted badly. As when I would land in a strange town and find that the hotel didn’t have a reservation for me. Or come into an airport and have to wait two or three hours for a car to arrive. Or be unable to eat at a restaurant because my picture was in all the local newspapers.
After weeks on tour, I began to feel the pressure. Larry, on the other hand, was settling down. It may have been the fact that I was being taken seriously by most of the interviewers; or it may have been the lithium. Whatever the reason, it was a welcome change. The irony was that as Larry returned to his old self, I became unglued.
The climax came one night near the end of the tour. It was 4 a.m. and I was in Manhattan, alone on a deserted city street. I stopped at a public telephone and dialed Mike McGrady’s home number. He awakened from a deep sleep and heard a voice right out of
The Exorcist
.
“Mike? Mike! I’m so frightened! He’s coming after me! He’s looking for me everywhere!”
“Who
is
this?”
“It’s Linda—I need help, oh, God, I need help!”
“Linda, calm down,” he said, coming fully awake. “Just calm down. Calm down and tell me what’s going on.”
“Chuck is chasing me,” I said. “Chuck is trying to kill me.”
“
Chuck
? Where is he now?”
“He’s just up the street. He’s been after me for hours. He’s calling for me. He’s looking everywhere. I’m hiding in this phone booth. I’m so frightened.”
“Linda, where’s Larry? Did you call the cops?”
“Mike, you’ve got to help me—what can I do?”
“Linda, I’m a hundred miles away. Tell me where you are. What street are you on? Listen now. You have to get out of there. You’re got to get a policeman—
did
you call the cops?”
“They said they’re on their way. Oh, I can see him—Chuck’s just up the block. He’s looking for me.”
“Linda, tell me where you are—what’s the address there?—I’ll call the cops, too.”
“Oh, God, Mike, he’s
here
! I—”
And that’s all my co-author heard, the end of a call that would keep him awake the rest of the night. I turned to face my attacker. Chuck was now almost upon me.
“Get away from me,” I snarled at him. “Don’t you dare touch me!”
“What’re you talking about?” he said. “C’mon honey, take it easy now.”
“Leave me alone, Chuck. The cops will be here any second.”
“I’m
not
Chuck,” he said. “It’s me. It’s Larry. Come on, Linda, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. We’ve got to go back to the hotel room now. We both need a good night’s sleep.”
Blame it on the pressures of the tour. I don’t know exactly what happened and I don’t know why it happened. But for four hours I became convinced that Larry was Chuck, and that my life was again in danger.
There were too many pressures on me. When people question your honesty every day of your life, you begin to wonder what is and what isn’t real. If anyone had seen me on this craziest of nights, I would have lost all credibility.
The next morning, back in the hotel room, I woke up alone. Larry was sleeping on the couch on the other side of the room. I had a small hangover and some vague memories of running down city streets in my bare feet.
“Larry,” I called over to him, “why are you sleeping on the couch?”
“Huh?” he said. “You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
All I could remember was tripping on the sidewalk about midnight. Larry filled in some of the spaces. After falling, I started calling my husband “Chuck” and running from him. I spent the pre-dawn hours playing hide-and-seek through the streets of Manhattan. I was shocked to learn that I’d telephoned the police and my co-author.
Okay, it was just one incident. I could accept that. I decided not to let it bother me so much. And it didn’t. I went on with the tour and then—
pow
!—it happened again. Twice. Different circumstances, different people, different surroundings—but again I was calling my husband “Chuck” and running from him.
A touch of paranoia? Perhaps. It was as if I had traded places with Larry. There are still times when I don’t trust anyone at all, times when I feel that everyone is out to get me. Maybe that’s understandable. But what seems to trigger it is alcohol; on each occasion when there’s been an incident, there was quite a bit of wine to drink beforehand. That’s another reason I no longer drink.
The oddest thing is that I was no longer so afraid of Chuck. My feeling about Chuck is that he probably didn’t mind
Ordeal
at all; he’d see that as some kind of advertisement.
As I went around the country telling my story to both television and print reporters, the stress mounted. Linda Lovelace had always been fair game and an easy target. And since the press had long ago made up its mind about me, I had my work cut out for me.
It could not have seemed simpler. I just had to explain to the press flat-out that there were
two
Lindas; one was a lie, one was the truth.
The lie, needless to say, was the Linda Lovelace who appeared in
Deep Throat
and books like
Inside Linda Lovelace
. The lie was the girl with a clitoris in her throat. The lie was the insatiable 21-year-old girl who only lived to give pleasure to men, whose sole pleasure, in fact, was the amount of pleasure she was able to provide. But why on earth would anyone have to point out that this was a lie? What kind of person could possible see this fantasy as truth in the first place?
The truth, unfortunately, was not nearly so exciting. More logical, more ordinary, more sane—but not so exciting. The truth was: Linda Marchiano, a 31-year-old woman, married, pregnant with her second child, spending all of her energy scraping by, trying to keep her family together, trying to make ends meet. The truth was: a woman who wanted only the simplest things—a family who loves her and is loved by her, a small home, a garden.
Who could ever imagine that the press would scoff at aspirations this modest?
Now that the experience is over, there are two things I don’t understand, two things I’ll never understand.
One is the way the press swallowed such a self-evident he.
Two is the great difficulty it had accepting an equally obvious truth.
And now I’m talking about
all
segments of the press—the book publishers who gave us such a hard time, the television giants, the newspaper reporters, the magazine interviewers, everyone right down to, and including, the phone-in disk jockeys from Tucson and Albuquerque.
At the beginning of my post-
Ordeal
ordeal, I had two pieces of evidence. First, myself. I was willing to go anywhere and answer any questions. I’ve learned that people who have a chance to see me as I’m telling my story are generally won over. (Not all of them, to be sure, but most of them.) Secondly, I had the book. The book was as ugly, as horrifying, as sordid as the experience itself had been. Nothing—none of the grotesque details, none of the famous names—had been changed. It was all there, all hanging out. I didn’t think anyone could read that whole book and still feel I was telling a lie.