Blow for freedom

Simon Garfield had spent months researching a play about the life of Linda Lovelace when he heard news of her death last week. Here he tells how the star of Deep Throat became a cultural icon and heralded America's new era of sexual liberation

Her fame began as it ended, with a car crash. In 1970, at the age of 21, Linda Lovelace was lying on a chaise-longue outside her parents' home near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when the sun was blocked by a girlfriend and a man called Charles Traynor, a photographer and bar-owner. Lovelace was in a bikini, recuperating from an accident that had happened a few months before, when a Chrysler had hit the side of her Opel Cadet. There were bruises on her face, and scars on her body from a lacerated spleen and liver.

She was forced to take time off from her job in a local boutique. She was impressed with Traynor's confidence and sports car, and thrilled at his promise to show her a good time. They drove to his home in his Jaguar. Within a year, he had forced her to make a film that would make her famous, and almost destroy her.

This week, in the days following Lovelace's death in a road accident at the age of 53, that film, Deep Throat has once again returned to haunt her. It opened 30 years ago at a cinema in Manhattan, and was expected to go the same way as the rest of pornography: a thing of shame and degradation - even its creators thought it would close after a month with slim profits. In fact, something very different happened. Deep Throat was not only the most lucrative porn film ever made, it was one of the most profitable films in any genre, yielding around $600 million in cash receipts.

In some ways, it was a revolutionary film before its extraordinary success. Its plot was absurd, but compared to the porn movies that had preceded it, Deep Throat looked like something from Luis Bunuel. The $25,000 budget was a huge amount of money for a sex film. Before Deep Throat, most pornography came in the form of 10 minute 'loops' - badly lit stag movies featuring a hairy couple grunting on a mattress. There were a few longer efforts dressed up with dialogue and what Hollywood likes to call a dramatic arc, but they only confused an undiscerning clientele.

Gerard Damiano, a toupéed New York hairdresser in his forties who directed the film, believed he could take dirty movies to a new level. He told his friends he made porn because the film unions prevented him from making anything else (or as he once put it, 'You cannot just get a job for $3m and go out and make The Sound of Music'). He had started with those 8mm loops, and on one of them he had met Lovelace - then called Linda Boreman.

She was now 22, and had been with Chuck Traynor for a year. He introduced her to his business clients and passionless sex, and she appeared in six short movies with names such as Fist and Foot. One of them, called Dog 1, featured an Alsatian.

'You have to see this girl,' Damiano told an interviewer in the early Seventies. 'She's a beautiful, beautiful person. She was up in New York in February and she had on army boots and dungaree pants and a sloppy sweater. She looked like hell, but not to me. I saw her eyes, I saw her smile, and I said, "This is the star of my next film".'

Damiano was also impressed with what would become the Lovelace trademark - an ability to swallow more of a man's penis than anyone else he'd seen. Lovelace told him that it was a hard trick to master, but after a couple of weeks of Traynor's 'expert guidance' she managed it. As she said in her first ghostwritten memoir, 'I soon built up a flaming desire to be the best at everything.'

Damiano wrote the script for Deep Throat over a weekend. The title was his, as was the idea to add some bad jokes and visual effects. The film was to be the first intentional porn comedy, and Damiano even commissioned an original soundtrack, the most memorable song on which was 'I'd Like To Teach The World To Screw'. Before casting Lovelace, the director felt she should undergo a speaking screentest for the benefit of the producers. She recited 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'.

The film was shot in New York and Miami on Superbowl weekend. 'I keep assuming everyone knows the plot of the movie, but this is probably impossible,' Lovelace said not long after it was made. 'It's about a young girl who can't get into the sex that seems to be thrilling all her friends. She tries and tries but nothing turns her on. Her sympathetic roommate does all she can to help, including a sex marathon with every boyfriend she knows, but... nothing. The answer is finally discovered by a somewhat quackish doctor, who discovers something quite unique. The sex-troubled young lady has a misplaced clitoris.'

The doctor who found the missing clitoris, at the base of Lovelace's throat, was played by Harry Reems, a serious actor who had turned to porn when his roles in Osborne and Beckett dramas dried up.

Also, he really enjoyed it. 'I'd end up with three teenage girls in a bed and get paid a thousand dollars to do it,' he told me when I visited him at his home in Utah recently. 'Every week the number of women grew and the number of dol lars grew.' Despite his experience, he said that he found Lovelace's skills unique, and that she was a lovely person to work with. But she was very nervous. 'In acting terms, she couldn't say a line. Gerry sensed this and guessed that her nervousness had more to do with the presence of her husband-manager Chuck than any feelings of inadequacy about her assignment. So he sent the husband on errands. With him temporarily out of the picture,' Reems recalled, 'Linda turned in a performance, to say the least.'

Damiano noted that 'she seemed to have a sado-masochistic relationship with Chuck, who constantly dominated her. He'd get mad if he saw her enjoying her work.'

Reems received $100 for his efforts, while Lovelace got $1,200, all of which passed to Traynor. The film was in the editing suite for almost three months - unheard of for this kind of project. 'I did all sorts of revolutionary things,' Damiano says. 'I had the idea that when she did eventually reach orgasm - which for her, of course, was a really big thing after all those years of trying - I'd have all these church bells going mad and shots of rockets going up and fireworks exploding. My cameraman went all over New York recording bell sounds, and I went down to the National Archives in Washington to get some rocket footage. I told them I was making an industrial film.'

The film opened in June 1972 at the New World Theatre on 49th Street, and recouped its budget within a week. The porn world liked it: Al Goldstein, the editor of Screw magazine, entitled his review 'Gulp!' and gave it 100 out of 100 on his Peter Meter (most films got about 40). And then the movie began crossing over into the wider world. This was a market that was always naturally interested in seeing other people have sex, but was reluctant to admit it. Queues began forming for every screening. Men took their wives and girlfriends, perhaps for education. Ten million Americans saw it at least once, among them many celebrities. Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew saw it at a party at Frank Sinatra's place; Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson lined up to support it against the censors. The visiting Russian national basketball team tried to see it in Albuquerque, but found the ticket price a tad steep.

Feminists clashed with free-speechers, which saw press coverage move from the arts and letters sections to the news pages. The New York Times ran editorials, uncertain whether Deep Throat was filth or art; it called the phenomenon - and the films that rushed into production on its heels - 'porno chic'. The New York Review of Books, which would have loved to have ignored it, found it couldn't; it judged the movie 'as erotic as a tonsillectomy'.

The movie opened all over the country, inviting outrage wherever it went. At the Washington Post , managing editor Howard Simons found a new name for Bob Woodward's Watergate source. And at Playboy magazine they just couldn't believe their luck: as one of its writers said in a 16-page feature, the descendants of the Puritan fathers had begun to close the gap between private and public morality, 'admitting at last that the American dream may prove expansive enough to make an inalienable right of those liberating sexual fantasies we used to conceal as smut'.

The film's estimated receipts of $600m - a figure put forward by the FBI - includes all the prints and tapes and spin-offs. It was originally made with mafia money, and the proceeds disappeared in a mafia way. As the takings went down to the Bahamas in suitcases, Damiano was asked by the New York Times how he felt about not getting rich. 'Look,' he answered, 'you want me to get both my legs broken?'

Linda Lovelace became an instant star. Endorsement opportunities were limited, but she became the subject of bumper stickers and T-shirts ('Linda Lovelace Blew My Mind'), and there was the prospect of the Linda Lovelace toy doll: wind it up and it swallows the key. She did the chat shows and the magazine interviews, including one with the screenwriter Nora Ephron for Esquire magazine.

Ephron: 'Why do you shave off your pubic hair in the film?'

Lovelace: 'I always do. I like it.'

'But why do you do it?'

'It can get kinda hot...'

'Well, I think it's weird.'

'Weird? Why?'

'Well, I don't know anyone who does that.'

'Now you do.'

Ephron decided that Deep Throat was 'one of the most unpleasant, disturbing films I have ever seen', but then wondered whether she wasn't just 'a puritanical feminist who had lost her sense of humour at a skinflick'.

Lovelace's notoriety rapidly reached Britain, though no one was allowed to see the film uncensored (62 minutes reduced to 50). She attended Ascot in a miniskirt and massive hat, and at Stonehenge she spoke of the virtues of having as much sex as possible. To be honest with you,' she announced, 'it makes me so mad that sex films are called obscene when other movies are so full of slaughter and rated so that kids can see them. What kids should learn is that sex is good, and then there wouldn't be so many neurotics in the world. I mean you're only here once, so enjoy life!'

Her new fame had an unexpected effect. She grew a little in confidence and independence, and she earned some time away from her domineering manager, who had also become her husband. But it was his idea that she sign up for Deep Throat II and a confessional stage show. Lovelace was keener on her non-porn political parody called Linda Lovelace For President.

Harry Reems also enjoyed a boost to his career, and became the most in-demand leading man in a burgeoning industry. For a while the pair were the subject of an hysterical obscenity trial in New York, involving a frantic array of academic 'sexperts' and psychoanalysts and film historians. Was Deep Throat corrupting? Was it believable that a woman could have such a misplaced sexual organ?

One prominent witness argued that the film was great for women. Edward J. Hornick, a member of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine, the Psychoanalytic Association and the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, claimed that most movies in his lifetime had mainly devoted themselves to the sexual exploitation of women by men, and the pleasure of the man was seen as paramount. 'But in this film the central theme has to do with a young woman and the importance of her finding orgastic pleasure for herself. I think that theme can stand very frequent restatement.' He also restated that Deep Throat was a situation comedy.

Nine months after the film opened in Manhattan, Judge Joel Tyler ruled that Deep Throat had no redeeming social value whatsoever, banned it, and fined the New World Theatre $3m. On the afternoon of the judgment, the theatre put a new message on its answerphone: 'We've only lost the battle, not the war, and we'll try to bring it back as soon as possible. In its place we are showing Dark Dreams, a film renowned for its occult eroticism...' On the marquee above its box office, the theatre announced: 'Judge Cuts Throat, World Mourns'.

The theatre was correct: the war was raging. Within a few months Deep Throat was not the only movie to have caught the tide of sexual upheaval. Several directors were keen to bring better writing and higher production values to sex films. By doing this, they argued, sex became a celebration not a guilty secret. If they did anything, they suggested, sex movies should encourage more adults - men and women both, for this was the key - to free their libidos. They were only doing on celluloid what the Sixties revolution had facilitated in real life.

Playboy magazine concurred, of course. 'In several respects, the porn scene of 1973 is strikingly reminiscent of Hollywood during that pioneer era when making any sort of movie was considered disreputable,' it claimed, 'when actors, writers and directors cranked out primitive two-reelers under assumed names, lest their colleagues in legitimate theatre or publishing circles accuse them of prostitution.' This mood changed with the emergence of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, true artistry blooming amid the mediocrity. Playboy stopped short of calling Linda Lovelace the Mary Pickford of her day.

And that would have been that - a peculiar, tragi-comic cultural watershed - had not its aftermath proved so devastating. Eight years after Deep Throat was released, at a time when pornography was being made exclusively for video owners, Linda Lovelace published a book called Ordeal. She had struggled free from Chuck Traynor and had a child with her new partner Larry Marchiano. With some help from the journalist Mike McGrady, she considered it timely to tell the real story of her life.

I became personally interested in Deep Throat at this point, when the story moved into the realms of the public confessional. I started gathering material on the film and its aftershocks, though I wasn't aware that it would one day form the basis of a play.

It was the first porn film I'd seen, an uncensored version on VHS courtesy of a brother of a girlfriend. Intriguingly, the film still had its unisex appeal, for my girlfriend watched it too, eager to see what the fuss was about. It was great for about 20 minutes, and we laughed nervously at its preposterousness, but after that it just became a meat market. Of course, by then we already knew some of the truth behind its making.

Unlike two earlier autobiographies, Ordeal was not a titillating affair, and the liberation Lovelace talked about was not sexual but deeply personal. Chuck Traynor was not her 'creator' as she had previously announced, but her abuser. She claimed that she had made Deep Throat under threat of physical harm, and explained that Traynor would use guns and knives to get his way. There was also a confession that some found ironic: on the set of the movie, Lovelace felt less threatened than she had before; the movie people were a creative family, and she drew strength from her new relationships. Traynor observed this, and would double his beatings.

It was a brave confession, and the book was a big seller, but some found it hard to believe that the woman they had seen - smiling, uncomplaining, eager for new challenges - had been living with fear for so long. Lovelace passed a lie detector test before the book was published, and no one sued (or at least not successfully). 'I can understand why some people have such trouble accepting the truth,' Lovelace wrote. 'When I was younger, when I heard about a woman being raped, my secret feeling was, that could never happen to me. I would never permit it to happen. Now I realise that can be about as meaningful as saying I won't permit an avalanche.'

Chuck Traynor admitted to an uncontrollable temper, but claimed that much of the book was exaggerated, and that he had happily granted Lovelace a divorce. But by then he had met a new protégé, the porn star Marilyn Chambers. 'Marilyn's got what Linda never had,' he said. 'Talent.'

Lovelace retired to a quiet life with her family on Long Island, and told visitors she was happiest when she was hoovering. Most of the locals just came to know her as Linda Marchiano. But she also took on the role of a campaigner, appearing at congressional hearings on pornography, and speaking out at public debates. She was championed by Susan Brownmiller and Gloria Steinem, and her days as a feminist icon are detailed in her 1986 book Out of Bondage. At the end of the book she vowed to carry on telling her story at college campuses throughout the country, and this she did, despite failing health brought on by silicone breast implants and liver disease.

Her Deep Throat co-star has undergone a transformation of his own. Harry Reems set up a real estate office in Park City, Utah, a former silver-mining town turned upmarket skiing resort, and the home of the Sundance Film Festival. Reems arrived there in 1989, drunk. By then he calculated he had been in several hundred porn films, and briefly joined Hugh Hefner at his Playboy mansion in California. But he had become an alcoholic, and after several arrests for violent behaviour resolved to join a 12-step recovery programme. 'I made little on Deep Throat,' he said at his home beneath the Deer Valley mountain range. 'But subsequently I was paid thousands of dollars a day just to have my name on the title credits.' He tried getting back into straight acting, but with little success. 'These movies seemed to be the only thing. As my life progressed, so did my alcoholism. I never really developed close friends or loved ones. I developed two ulcers, chronic pancreatitis, a diseased liver...'

The recovery programme made him realise that he 'was not the ruler of the universe'. He became an active member of his local Methodist church, where he discovered his mission to rescue people from the gutter the way he was rescued himself. When I saw him a few years ago he was relieved to report that, unlike many of his film colleagues, he had not contracted HIV. Today, his property business is thriving, and he has not touched alcohol for 13 years.

Linda and Larry Marchiano divorced a few years ago after 22 years together, but they remained close. Her two children are adults now, with kids of their own. Not long before she was involved in her second serious car accident four weeks ago (the life-support was turned off on Monday), she had been gathering material for a special Linda Lovelace memorabilia display for the opening show at Manhattan's Museum of Sex, due to open this September. And there had been talk of a movie of her life. The director Ron Howard had been lined up for it a while ago, but moved on to A Beautiful Mind.

Brian Grazer, producer of A Beautiful Mind, is still keen, but recently said that he hadn't yet found the right star. 'I want to trash up a really wholesome girl,' he said. The magazine Entertainment Weekly suggested Meg Ryan.

Is there a moral to this story? Beyond the fact that participating in pornography can make you desperately unhappy, and that some relationships can be ghastly, there is this: in the United States, fame may be both your most destructive demon and your most powerful weapon. Once the success and notoriety of Deep Throat had given her the opportunity to break free from her abuser, Lovelace was able to generate some income from speaking engagements. Although earning money was never the sole object of these inspiring events, it was always an issue in her life, especially after her husband's business failed and her health deteriorated.

In her last year, her resolve softened. She appeared on the cover of Leg Show magazine in silver bodice and boots and the tag-line 'Linda Lovelace Now', and held public signing sessions, where, for a few dollars a time, she put her name to photographs and merchandise she disliked. She signed publicity photographs for 'Linda Lovelace for President', and also T-shirts with the slogan 'I Made Linda Lovelace Gag'. On most things she wrote 'Love Ya!' and put kisses beneath. When lifelong fans asked politely, she agreed to sign Deep Throat videos and posters. We should regard this as another of her many survivals.

Deep Throat Live on Stage by Simon Garfield will be staged at the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms in August