ten
During our travels my breasts had started to hurt severely. Years earlier Chuck Traynor had had liquid silicone illegally pumped into them and since then the silicone had slipped, settling into no normal patterns, creating unexpected swellings and valleys. As a result, my breasts were no stranger to pain but this pain was new and sharp.
A doctor in California gave me the bad news: I was undoubtedly suffering from cancer of the breasts and he felt certain, moreover, that a biopsy would reveal that both breasts had to be removed. A second opinion, this one from a Manhattan doctor, went this way: “Congratulations. You’re pregnant.”
So I wasn’t losing a breast, I was gaining a baby. To say I was happy is to understate the case. Being a mother had always been my highest aspiration; to be both married and a mother would be even nicer. And that was now the plan.
Not that I ever thought life would be easy. Whatever income we had seen—and I can’t recall a time when we had more than $200 in our pocket at one time—came about because I was a “movie star.” I put the phrase in quotes because I couldn’t take it seriously. In my mind, and the minds of many others, Bette Davis or Susan Hayward were movie stars; Linda Lovelace was a movie freak. I thought about the movies I’d made and there’s no way I could consider myself either star or even actress.
And though life was happy, it was also confusing.
Suddenly everyone wanted to subpoena me. My lawyers told me to be wary of men carrying legal documents. Attorneys in Florida . . . the movie company in the Philippines. . . another movie company in Los Angeles—everyone had legal designs on me. This took a toll on me, and even more of a toll on the man who was to become my husband.
In order to make some sense out of our daily life, Larry had started keeping a diary by talking into a tape recorder. When I go back now and listen to those tapes, I can feel the terrible pressure he was under. This, for example, was an entry just after he learned I was pregnant.
“I hope Linda can put up with me,” he said. “I don’t know what’s what. I draw a blank. I know I’m going in a lot of different directions. I hear we’re being sued by film-makers, producers, former partners. I’m warned that the sheriff is coming. . . . This morning I woke up in a hurry because I knew I was goin’ somewhere. But then no one told me where I was going.”
No one knew. But we knew we had to go somewhere. We had to continue the escape that began when I left Chuck Traynor.
Escape had never been easy.
During the years that Chuck Traynor held me hostage, escape had been impossible. But eventually I
had
to get away. It seemed to me I was running, always running. Running from a sadistic madman; running from gangsters who had, according to printed reports, made
$300,000,000
on me; running from the accountants and lawyers and tax people and creditors and prosecutors and everyone else grabbing for a small piece of that very valuable property known as Linda Lovelace; and now, finally, running from a town I thought of as Hollyweird, a town and a business that wanted me to do only one thing: perform perversions in public.
It wasn’t easy for a Linda Lovelace to simply vanish. Our escape route took us to Long Island, Larry’s childhood home. This was not the Long Island of the movies, not the Gold Coast, not the estates of
The Great Gatsby,
not the storied land of polo ponies and yachts. We were on the run, very much on the run, and our Long Island was a world of basement apartments and lonely out-of-season beach cottages. There was no stopping for us, no rest.
But why Long Island? Why return to a cold winter, a shabby home, unemployment, the certainty of poverty?
There was only one reason and his name was Victor Yannacone.
Yannacone is a lawyer in the town of Patchogue on the South Shore of Long Island. Like his father before him, Victor specializes in workmen’s compensation and disability cases. He had represented my husband’s family in such cases in the past.
Quite often Victor Yannacone gets himself involved in much larger issues. His real love is public interest law. He was the originator of the Agent Orange cases, the lawyer primarily responsible for all those Vietnam veterans filing cases against the big chemical companies. He’s also the lawyer primarily responsible for the banning of DDT throughout this country.
Victor Yannacone specializes in representing people and things who would otherwise not have legal representation. For example, Victor is the one who represented the clams in Long Island’s Great South Bay against the polluters.
On occasion Victor tends to be flamboyant. Rather, I should say he
loves
to be flamboyant. And he definitely has a way with words. I was once thumbing through papers in his office and I saw a transcript of one of his typical cases (he was representing Colorado’s Florissant Fossil Beds against a group of home developers) and I read his summation to the jury: “Your honor, Florissant Fossil Beds are to geology, paleontology and evolution what the Rosetta Stone was to Egyptology. To sacrifice a 30-million-year-old record, written in the hand of Almighty God, to 30-year mortgages and basements in the A-frame ghettoes of the ’70s is like wrapping fish in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
At the end of that case, the courts decided to make the Florissant Fossil Beds a national monument, and it was all Victor’s doing.
I first met Victor by accident; I was just tagging along with Larry on a visit to his office. Since Victor had always been a friend of Larry’s family, we were introduced. No problem. Victor had never seen an X-rated movie in his life and had no way of knowing who I was. However, since he spends his days looking at accident victims, Victor knew there was something wrong with me.
“Pardon me for being personal, young lady,” he said at one point. “But do you have any pains or problems with your breasts?”
I looked over at Larry quickly and he nodded his head.
“Tell him,” he said.
“I’ve been having terrible pains,” I said, “How could you tell?”
“Unfortunately, I make my living looking at sick and injured people every day. The . . . ah . . . outlines aren’t right. It looks like you’ve got more than a few lumps there. Did you ever have silicone injections?” “Yes,” I said.
“She was forced to,” Larry said.
“Well, I’m always reading the medical literature,” Victor said. “More and more I’ve been reading about silicone injections and their cancer potential. That’s especially true when they were injections, not implantations. Were these injections?”
“Yes.”
Then Victor started asking other questions. As it turned out, the silicone injections were just the beginning of my medical problems. He asked to see my legs, those poor legs that had been treated so badly by Chuck Traynor. They’ll never be right again. During that first pregnancy, one leg became swollen until it was nearly twice the size of the other. Two different times I had to be rushed 80 miles to New York Hospital in Manhattan. And today, even though I love the beach, I hate to expose my legs.
“You’ve got all the signs of thrombal phlebitis in this leg,” Victor said. “That requires treatment right away.”
During that first day, Victor picked up the phone and began calling doctors. Because of his legal interests, he knew a wide range of specialists. This meant more trips to Manhattan, more treatments, debts. I’ll never forget the look on the face of the first doctor who examined my legs.
“My God!” he said. “What happened to
you
?”
What happened to me, of course, was the awful story I would later tell in
Ordeal.
It was a story I outlined for the doctor. And later for Victor Yannacone.
I told them that a 21-year-old girl named Linda Boreman had made the movie
Deep Throat
under unimaginable duress. The personal prisoner of a sadist, I had been beaten and raped repeatedly over a period of years. I told them I had lived those years in absolute terror, the prisoner of a man who made me perform freakish stunts, who managed my career, who forced me to marry him, who handed me out to celebrities and who turned me into a fear-filled mindless slave.
Victor had never heard anything like it.
“It was so sick,” I told Victor. “He loved playing with sex games, seeing how much pain he could inflict.”
I hadn’t talked about it in a long time. No one else had really believed me and I don’t know why I was bothering to go through it again. What reason did I have for feeling that Victor might be different than the others?
“This is a story I can’t properly evaluate,” Victor said. “It’s outside my entire scope of experience. I’m a trial lawyer and I make a living measuring the truth of what people say. However, there’s no way I know how to evaluate this. I just can’t relate to the things that you’re telling me. All I know is that a social, legal and moral wrong has been done to you.”
“Can you help her?” Larry asked. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Let me think about it,” Victor said.
“Can we put these people in jail? Can we sue anyone?”
“I have to think this thing through,” Victor said. “I always tell people if there’s a social need that must be met, then there has to be a legal way to meet it. The lawyer’s job is to find that way. And, if it can’t be found, to invent it. That’s why I’ve always said that legislation is civilization’s alternative to revolution.”
Nothing happened at once.
Well, that’s not quite true. We came to Long Island and Victor and his wife, Carol, became our friends. For a long time they were our only real friends. I got to know Victor well. Dozens of times I heard him tell people, “We’re just a small, country law firm”—but that’s only half the truth. He is always jetting around the country, dividing his time between his firm’s local bread-and-butter cases and cases involving national social issues. When I think of Victor Yannacone, I think of a modern-day Don Quixote—a man looking very much like an unmade bed—always on the run, dragging a briefcase behind him, racing for one plane or another.
And this time I was the maiden in distress.
When Larry and I ran out of money, Victor was the one person we could turn to for help. He sent us money. When we were at our lowest ebb, in need of food, Victor somehow showed up with cases of College Inn bouillon and sacks of flour. Don’t ask me why this particular combination. All I know is that there are few memorable meals you can make of this but you can find a way to survive. Particularly if you like soup with dumplings.
Neither Victor nor Carol had ever seen an X-rated movie. When Victor heard the name Linda Lovelace, he had only the vaguest awareness of who I was. Carol had never even heard the name before. I don’t think my celebrity status hit Victor until one day when he was calling a Manhattan doctor on my behalf and the doctor was impressed for all the wrong reasons.
“Victor, this is one case I’d
love
to handle,” he said.
“I don’t think you understand me,” Victor said. “There’s a lady in my office who’s obviously in trouble and I just want somebody to take care of her in a hurry.”
Hearing that kind of thing made me trust Victor. I was impressed by the fact that he didn’t suddenly neglect Larry for his new movie-star client. Which was just as it should be. Larry, after all, was the client long before I came into the picture. And Victor seemed to sense that our situation—total poverty just as our first child was coming into the world—was taking a severe toll on Larry.
Just how severe none of us yet realized.
eleven
Larry was falling apart. But I wasn’t paying attention. Other things filled my mind, such as making preparations for my unborn baby, eating enough and staying warm. If I hadn’t been so concerned with these things, I might have noticed the early signs.
Instead, I probably did more harm than good. Larry was becoming obsessed about my life with Chuck. He was asking more questions and seeking more details. I should have recognized this as a form of self-torture. Instead, I answered all his questions candidly and tried to tell him everything that had happened to the former Miss Linda Lovelace. Everything.
My own pain was so strong that I didn’t bother measuring the pain this was causing him. One day I found myself describing the little games Chuck devised whenever we went on a long automobile drive.
Flashback to—
A long drive from Florida to Mexico. Car games. Hiking my skirt up, spreading my legs, stopping for gas, Chuck telling the gas jockey: “And, oh, yeah, wouldja please get the windshield.” Chuck buying a steady supply of little cinnamon candies—Red Hots—and sticking a handful of them in my vagina just to watch me squirm.
Low in funds. A small town in Arkansas, Chuck pulling over in front of a haberdashery, seeing two salesmen inside, no one else. Chuck saying. “Go in there and speak to the salesmen. Tell them you’ll give them a blow job for $10. No, wait, start off with twenty. If they don’t go for that, tell them you really need the bread bad so you’ll do it for ten. That’s ten
each. ”
Chuck talking to himself then about a little detour we were going to make in Juarez. “Wait ‘til we get to Juarez,” he’d say. “Only 650 miles to Juarez,” he’d say. “Once we’re in Juarez, we’ll be able to pick up some easy money. ”
Then a new tune. “I hope you like donkeys.” Later: “Of course there’s no fucking reason you should like donkeys. It’s just that it’d be a good thing if you did like donkeys is all. It’d be better for you.” Then he starts talking about the big donkey-fucking contests in Juarez: “You’re made for this contest. I’m telling you, you’ll clean up. Shee-yit, the last chick I brought to Juarez made us three thou and she was nothin’.” And still later: “They got the medicos right there. If the bleeding gets too bad, they unstrap the chicks and give them medical assistance right on the spot. Some of those chicks are really hemorrhaging, too.” It gets so bad that I thank God when we have a car crash that prevents us from ever getting to Mexico at all.
“How could anyone get any pleasure from
that
?” Larry wanted to know.
“I don’t have any idea. The only time Chuck got any pleasure from anything was when it caused someone else a lot of pain.”
“Do you realize how sick this is?”
“Of course I realize how sick it is. I realized
then
how sick it was. It was insane. Even more insane than most of the other stuff Chuck made me do. To him this was
normal.
I mean he actually
went
for this stuff.”
“I’d like to kill that bastard,” Larry decided.
“It’s not like he’s the only one,” I said. “I mean, you got to figure someone is going to pay to see this, someone is going to get turned on by the same sick thing.”
“I mean it,” Larry said. “I’d really like to kill that bastard.”
There was something about his voice, some somber quality that caused me to glance up. His face was rigid as though an effort was required to keep his features in place. I could see uncried tears filling his eyes.
Those days Larry was still keeping a diary by talking into a cassette recorder. This is a tape from that time.
“I need all the help from all the people I can-especially from Linda—to get my feet down on the ground, and be myself, not any other interpretation, and just get things together. . . . I have a young dog. It’s an opportunity, at least for me, to identify with certain things. My understanding of the subject states that consistency with the dog—if it’s crying, you get up in the middle of the night, find out what it is, and you help the dog.
“But if you assume other responsibilities which make yourself conflicted with knowledge, all right, that’s messing with yourself, and doing what you should be doing because you’re too tired, you’re too worried about too many other things, so you’re carrying too heavy a loan and you can’t even take care of the simple load that makes you happy and able to carry the whole load. So, I’m upset with myself for short-temperedness in the last couple of days. And I’m gonna mellow out, with the help of my old lady, because I really feel it’s important. I’m tired of excuses.”
I must have come into the room at that moment because my voice suddenly interrupts his chaotic thoughts with: “
What
are you saying?”
Victor, meanwhile, was considering a series of legal actions on my behalf. He learned the identity of the men behind
Deep Throat
—they were either mobsters or men with mob connections—and he warned us that our lives could now be in real danger. Warnings like these added to Larry’s burden. We became as secretive as people in a spy movie, always checking to see whether we were being followed, worried that our phone (when we could afford a phone) might be tapped.
Sometimes all of this seemed silly to me. But I figured Victor knew things we didn’t. I knew those mob ties were not at all make-believe. When the FBI ran a nationwide sweep of pornographers, they arrested Lou Peraino, the producer of
Deep Throat,
and one of the men Chuck forced me to have sex with regularly. The FBI identified him at that time as a member of the Colombo mob family.
At the time we were getting calls from a Larry Parrish in Memphis; Parrish was an Assistant US Attorney who was prosecuting the producers of
Deep Throat
for transporting obscene materials across state lines. He wanted us to come to Memphis for the trial and my husband called him in Memphis.
“If Chuck Traynor will be there, Linda will not be there,” he said.
“I want Linda here,” the prosecutor said. “And if I want her here bad enough, there are always ways we can find her.”
That, too, became a cause for concern, someone else to hide out from. There was quite a list by now. It was Victor’s notion to launch lawsuits against all those who imprisoned me, had a hand in imprisoning me or profited from my imprisonment. While he prepared these cases, Victor wanted us out of the public eye, out of harm’s way.
We went into hiding. We spent two weeks in one dingy motel room, two weeks in another that was even dingier. And then, as the last of our money ran out, we shared the living room of a friend, then the basement of Larry’s brother’s apartment, finally a rented cottage out in Montauk and a second one in the former whaling village of Port Jefferson.
The very act of going into hiding made the dangers seem real. Today I don’t know whether we were in jeopardy from anyone. But it
felt
as though we were. How reclusive were we? We lived in our Port Jefferson home for four months before I first saw the road leading out of town.
The real risk was being recognized. There was always the chance that I would be noticed by the countergirl in the deli, the boy collecting for the newspaper, the fan at a high school basketball game. Recognition—the raised eyebrow, the sudden smile, the sideways glance, the stage whisper-was enought to cause us to pack our bags and run.
Why did we have to move? Let me tell you what would happen after being recognized. Within hours, the first visitors arrive. They might be creeps or degenerates or just curiosity-seekers. But they would drive slowly past the house, stop 50 or 100 feet up the road, sit there with their motors growling, mustering up courage and then . . . finally . . .
doing it.
Walking up to the front door, knocking timidly, and when they got no response, knocking more loudly, as if somehow it was their
right
to be there.
Then would come the cars with the reporters and the photographers, maybe even a television van or two, circling the block, taking pictures of the house, knocking before going on and speaking to the next-door neighbors, the man in the deli, the bartender at the tavern. Asking—and, at the same time, telling—all about Linda Lovelace.
And so we would have to move. Again. Larry would have to give up his job. Again. And we would be forced to go down to the welfare office. Again.
The pressure on Larry was incredible. And of course it changed him. He was becoming a Larry I had never seen before, one I never want to see again. At times it reminded me of one of those science-fiction movies where someone from another planet inhabits the body of the person you love. He was no longer the Larry I had fallen in love with.
I can still play his diary-cassette today and hear the pain in his voice back then:
“We’re here for one month. Near the end of September we’re supposed to be needed in Florida for litigation. Financial security has been established for our needs through October. November comes time of payment. Which also comes time of new bills. Which also comes time of new lawyers. And a whole lot of other things. I’m back in New York and I’m reminded that I hate it.”