thirty-five
All those people who terrorized me and haunted my nightmares—where are they now? It has been many months—make that years—since I’ve awakened to find those five nightmarish figures surrounding my bed. The ghosts have been exorcized and the flashbacks are rare. Finding the strength to deal with yesterday has given me the strength to deal with today.
And now, when the old villains do reappear, it is as real people, not ghosts. And once I see them as human beings, the fear dissolves.
One person who always manages to surface is Chuck Traynor.
As I mentioned earlier, Mandina is in the process of suing me for libel. The section of
Ordeal
that caused him the biggest problem was my account of being in his office when he and Chuck constructed an alibi that would explain why Chuck was found carrying bales of marijuana to his car.
Attorneys are not supposed to help construct false alibis-it’s called “suborning perjury”—and Philip J. Mandina had to demonstrate that I was lying about this incident. He needed a witness, someone who could, and would, verify his version of the story, a person who might serve as both eyewitness and character witness. Whom did he choose? None other than Chuck Traynor.
The day before taking a solemn sworn statement from Chuck, the two men met in Las Vegas and talked the whole thing over. I want you to keep in mind one thing: This is Philip J. Mandina’s serious attempt to demonstrate that he is not the kind of person who would ever “suborn perjury.”
From the beginning of his sworn testimony, Traynor suffered peculiar memory lapses. When Mandina asked him the name of the lawyer who represented him in his drug-smuggling trial, he couldn’t recall the name Carey Matthews (the convicted felon who is Mandina’s former law partner), even though Matthews also happened to be Traynor’s former commanding officer at Fort Bragg.
Another strange memory lapse came when he was describing the day that he and a confederate picked up the bales of marijuana dropped onto an empty field from an airplane piloted by a friend. (According to the alibi worked out with Mandina, the two men were scouting terrain for a parachute club’s jump zone and just happened to stumble across the marijuana.)
“We didn’t know it at the time,” Traynor swore in his deposition, “but it was a drop zone for smugglers . . . deer hunting season had opened at that particular time and there were deer hunters, and we discovered these bales of marijuana and proceeded to carry them out to the road and got arrested carrying them out to the road, and charged with smuggling.”
“Who was the gentleman who was with you at the time?” Mandina asked.
“You know, it’s been so long ago,” Traynor said, “I’m terrible about names. His name was—”
“Well, if you don’t remember—”
“I can’t remember,” he said.
Mandina then brought up the book
Ordeal
and asked Traynor whether it was a true story or not.
“Have you ever hypnotized anyone?” Mandina asked.
“Hypnotized anyone?” Chuck repeated.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“She indicates in the book that you hypnotized her. Would you comment on that?”
“Yes,” Chuck said, “I read that in the book. Hypnosis—”
“The question is, really, did you ever hypnotize her?”
“No,” Chuck said.
Why would Traynor deny that under oath? So many people know the opposite to be true. Of course, he hypnotized me. Repeatedly. In fact, Chuck told an opposite story to
Screw:
“Marilyn Chambers and I did talk at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas before the American Institute of Hypnosis. Twelve hundred doctors and they were very interested in what we did because doctors always use hypnosis negatively. . . . They would say, ‘You
do
feel it. It’s extremely pleasureable. . . . The doctors were very interested in my technique.” At that same time Chuck was asked whether he had used hypnosis on Linda Lovelace, and he said, “Oh yeah.”
Back to the Mandina-Traynor sworn statement.
“Well, first of all, she indicates from the beginning of the book throughout her relationship with you, that you kept her in fear of her life. What about that?”
“Well, it’s totally untrue,” Traynor said. “It’s kind of a joke.”
“No, never,” he said.
“Do you know of instances where Miss Lovelace was forced by you or anybody else in your company to do anything she didn’t want to do?”
Of course not. Of course I
wanted
to do that sword-swallowing routine on a half-dozen different men in
Deep Throat,
I
wanted
to have a professional sadist torture me with a hair dryer, I
wanted
to do things that no human being would ever want to do.
(Chuck provided a more accurate description of our relationship during a tape-recorded interview with
High Society
magazine: “First of all, I’m very possessive. Secondly, I’m probably a lot more physically capable of threatening people than most. Of course, if you care about somebody and if you’re involved with them in the film business and they say they are going to leave you, I think a normal reaction would be, ‘You better not or I’ll bust your ass.’
“I just would not say to anyone involved with me professionally or emotionally, ‘Yeah, you can walk out the door anytime you want to.’ Whether I would or wouldn’t ‘bust their ass’ would depend on the particular situation. . . . I would tell her not to leave, probably forbid her to leave, just as I imagine most boyfriends or husbands or managers or pimps from the South would do.”)
Then Mandina asked him about the section of my book dealing with Sammy Davis, Jr. In
Ordeal
I had described the nights we spent with Sammy and told of the many times I was ordered to satisfy the entertainer orally.
Here’s Chuck under oath: “We went over to dinner there several times and ate with Sammy and his wife. We attended his shows in Las Vegas and New York. There was not any sexual association with any of us, you know, we were just friends.”
I imagine even Sammy would roar at
that
description. We never went to one of Sammy’s shows in New York or Las Vegas. And the rest of it is just as false.
Then Mandina asked Traynor to describe my encounters with a dog for the viewing pleasure of
Playboy
mogul Hugh Hefner. How would Chuck describe our relationship with Hefner?
“He’s an art film historian and I helped him along those lines for a few months. Again, there was never anything—Hefner, he himself, was never overly interested in her. He saw her on a couple of occasions, that’s about all there was to it.” I’m sure Hefner, that old art historian, must be smiling as he reads those words.
“Mr. Traynor,” Mandina asked at one point, “have you ever been convicted of a crime?”
“No,” he swore.
In point of fact, I have a copy of an arrest—and conviction—record for a certain Charles Traynor. But why go on? Clearly, Chuck Traynor lies about as easily—and almost as often—as he breathes.
Whenever I visit a foreign country on a book tour, I’m always asked what jail Chuck Traynor is in. When I explain that he is still free and doing what he has always done, people stare at me. How can that be? How can a human being do all of the things he has done and not be in prison?
I explain this as best I can. I explain about the statute of limitations. I say in our country a man can do almost anything he wants to his wife and the police are reluctant to intrude. I explain the difficulty in launching a lawsuit in this country unless you have a lot of money or happen to be a lawyer yourself. A poor person doesn’t have much of a chance of getting a good lawyer’s services.
Finally, I am no longer afraid of Chuck Traynor. Maybe that’s not entirely accurate. Maybe there’s just a bit of wishful thinking attached to that statement. But at least the fear is fading. I no longer look fearfully for his face when I walk down a street; I no longer expect him to confront me with his semi-automatic .45 in his flight bag.
thirty-six
I assume that Chuck Traynor and Marilyn Chambers have the same kind of relationship that we once had. (I see she has even been linked to Sammy Davis, Jr. Her quote: “I’m not romantically involved with Sammy. We’re just good friends and business partners.”)
Happily, however, these days I am far removed from their world. I only assume that it would be easier for a skunk to become a poodle than for Chuck Traynor to change his ways.
Whenever Chuck and Marilyn are being interviewed together, the reporter notices something amiss. Reporter Joyce Wadler was one writer who happened to see Chuck both with Marilyn Chambers and with myself. She emphasized the similarities while covering Marilyn Chambers’ speech at a college for the New York
Post.
This was long before
Ordeal
was published and before the public knew my true story.
“Miss Lovelace and Traynor had a very close working relationship. Miss Lovelace refused to do interviews without him. She looked at him before she answered questions. Often, she didn’t answer questions at all—Traynor answered for her.
“Yesterday, it became apparent that Miss Chambers and Traynor are also working very closely together. Chambers does not want to go anywhere without him ‘for security reasons.’ She looks at him before she answers her questions. And sometimes, fairly often, she doesn’t answer questions at all. . . .
“Then someone in the audience of 250 asked Miss Chambers what the difference was between her and Linda Lovelace, and Traynor said it was a question of direction.
“Finally a woman student attacked Traynor for answering for the entertainer.
“‘We work very close together,’ said Miss Chambers. ‘I like being dependent on men. I am an old-fashioned girl.’ ”
“Old-fashioned girl”—isn’t that pathetic? In Chuck Traynor’s vocabulary, an old-fashioned girl is one who allows herself to be pushed around and brutalized by men.
And that business about liking to be dependent on men—these days that really bothers me. If I were not so dependent on men, if I had not been such a dependent personality, I might have avoided ever meeting a Chuck Traynor. I don’t think anyone should be totally dependent on anyone.
But I had been brought up to believe that I was supposed to have a man around and a man was supposed to take care of me. A man was something to cling to, to identify with, to obey. Now I know different. You have to be an individual first and then if you want someone else around, fine.
My biggest mistake—until recently, really—was letting whatever man I happened to be near make all the decisions, no matter how bad those decisions were. And there’s a reason for that. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get in touch with myself. And so long as the man wasn’t beating me, wasn’t handing me around to his friends, I would happily let him make all the decisions. Some of these decisions eventually cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If Marilyn Chambers is reliving my experience, how can anyone help her? I don’t know. One who tried to help was (unsurprisingly) Gloria Steinem. Concerned about Marilyn’s safety, Gloria sent her a message that help was available. The message was carried by Seattle
Times
columnist Erik Lacitis.
When Marilyn Chambers heard about Gloria Steinem’s offer to help, she laughed: “Well, you can tell Gloria Steinem that I am a totally healthy human being. Linda Lovelace is full of it. I am not scripted in anything to say. People like Gloria Steinem ought to use their vibrators a lot more, especially if they’re so damned frustrated sexually.”
Lacitis then asked whether it was true that Chuck Traynor was always hovering around her.
“No!” Marilyn Chambers said, then cited an example of her independence. “He left for a couple of hours the other day. . .”
Then, with Traynor present, Lacitis repeated a series of questions that Gloria Steinem wanted answered.
Q—Was Chuck Traynor acting as a pimp? Does he now or did he possess guns? Does he threaten people with guns?
Traynor’s answer: “I have never acted as a pimp. I am a gun collector, I have quite a large collection. . . . I don’t threaten people with guns.” (When
High Society
asked, “Were you ever a pimp? Did you ever have women fucking and you get a piece of the action?”, he had a different answer: “Yeah, I had a business like that at one time.”)
Q—Why is Chuck Traynor always making a living off another person who happens to be a woman? Why doesn’t he work on his own?
Traynor’s answer: “I don’t make a living off anybody. I create women. Linda Lovelace, when I met her, was making nothing. My job as a manager is to manage female sex stars. If I stop managing them, they stop making money.”
Q—What about the incident quoted by columnist Larry Fields, the time Marilyn had to ask for permission to go to the bathroom and you refused to give her permission?
Chambers’s answer: “First of all, Larry Fields, or whatever his name is, is a hypothetical name
[which should come as a surprise to Larry Fields
]. I’ve never had an interview with anybody like that in Philadelphia. . . . Anyway, if Chuck ever said it, it’s because I had to go onstage soon, and I should have been smart enough to go to the bathroom before. I deserved it. . . . I personally enjoy being submissive. I don’t ever want to stand up to a man like Gloria Steinem does. I enjoy a guy who is the boss.”
Q—Would Marilyn Chambers allow Gloria Steinem to interview her alone?
Chambers’ answer: “I’d never do anything without Chuck around. I don’t feel safe around someone like Gloria Steinem. How do I know that she’s not going to kidnap and take me away? I think that her problem is that a lot of these women libbers are too ugly to even get a man who’d want to be in charge of them.”
Q—How would she describe Chuck Traynor?
Chambers’ answer: “You know, Chuck is pictured as this creepy guy. He’s not. He’s one of the nicest men I’ve ever met in my life. . . . Do you know that I can’t pick out what kind of clothes to wear for an interview? Chuck himself picked out these clothes. . . . I rely on Chuck for everything, absolutely everything at all. I know that I need it. I know that I am not really good on my own. I need Chuck. I need guidance.”
There is a kicker to this series of events. In a subsequent interview with a men’s magazine, Marilyn Chambers referred to the Lacitis interview. She said that the notion that she might be a prisoner was absurd; that, in fact, the message from Steinem had been delivered to her with Chuck Traynor gone; that, moreover, he hadn’t been with her for several days; that, in truth, she was on her own. Which would have been interesting if true; however, Traynor was in the very next room when Lacitis delivered the message and he joined them immediately.
The relationship between Chambers and Traynor is clearly one of total dependency—whether that dependency is maintained through brute force we won’t know until the two of them are apart.