Linda Lovelace

Linda Susan Boreman (January 10, 1949 – April 22, 2002), better known by her stage name Linda Lovelace, became famous after starring in the 1972 hardcore porn film Deep Throat. She later became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement.

Deep Throat was notable for beginning a brief fad of porn chic; it was also the inspiration for Bob Woodward's name of his secret Watergate source, W. Mark Felt. Boreman later stated that she regretted her pornographic career and was coerced into pornography by her then-husband, Chuck Traynor.

Although she later became an advocate against pornography, Boreman is still famous for her depictions of deep throat fellatio. While she continued to use the Lovelace name in books and for other commercial purposes, she stated that she generally preferred to be called Linda Boreman.

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Biography

Childhood and teenage years

Boreman was the daughter of a policeman and a woman she claimed was strict. Her parents were Roman Catholic and Boreman attended Catholic schools, including St. John the Baptist in Yonkers, New York, and Maria Regina High School in Hartsdale, New York. In school, she was nicknamed "Miss Holy Holy" because she kept her dates at a safe distance. When Boreman was 16, the family moved to Florida.^[1] In her autobiography "Ordeal" (1980), she stated that she gave birth to a son when she was 20 years old in 1969, and that her mother put him up for adoption. Boreman said she believed that the child was being put in foster care until she was ready to care for him, and was heartbroken when she learned she would never see him again. Boreman moved to New York to start a new life in 1970. While there, she was involved in a violent car crash forcing her to undergo a blood transfusion. She moved back to Florida to recover.^[2]

Pornography career

While in Florida, recovering at her parents' place, Boreman became involved with Chuck Traynor. According to Boreman, Traynor was a violent and controlling man. Boreman said he forced her to move to New York, where he became her manager, pimp, and husband.

Boreman was soon the star in a number of hardcore "stag" short features, including a bestiality film in 1971 called Dog Fucker or Dogarama. She later denied doing this, only to have several of the 8 mm "loops" become available to prove otherwise.^[3][4]

In 1972, Boreman starred in Deep Throat, perhaps the most financially successful pornographic movie in history. In Deep Throat all her pubic hair was shaved off and she engaged in anal sex — neither was common in pornographic films of the early-1970s.

After the success of Deep Throat Boreman appeared in only two subsequent films, including an R-rated sequel to Deep Throat entitled Deep Throat Part II which flopped (she maintained in her book Ordeal that her later porn films used leftover footage from Deep Throat). She also appeared in Playboy, Bachelor, and Esquire between 1973 and 1974. Boreman attempted to break into stage and mainstream films but found it difficult to overcome the stigma of her pornographic career.

In January 1974, Boreman was arrested for possession of cocaine and amphetamines. Also that year, Boreman published two pro-pornography biographies.^{[citation needed]} In her later suit to divorce Traynor, she claimed that Traynor had forced her into pornography at gunpoint and that in Deep Throat itself, bruises from his beatings can be seen on her legs. Traynor would go on to marry and guide the career of Marilyn Chambers, another major porn star. Boreman claimed in her 1980 autobiography Ordeal that the couple's relationship was plagued by violence, rape, forced prostitution and private pornography. Some of the assertions made in her book have been challenged, but others have been verified by witnesses. Marilyn Chambers was Chuck Traynor's protégé after Boreman, and Traynor himself told Vanity Fair magazine (Marilyn Chambers' interview, with Chambers on the cover) that he thought nothing of slapping his woman if she said something he did not like. Linda stated that:

When in response to his suggestions I let him know I would not become involved in prostitution in any way and told him I intended to leave, [Traynor] beat me up physically and the constant mental abuse began. I literally became a prisoner, I was not allowed out his sight, not even to use the bathroom, where he watched me through a hole in the door. He slept on top of me at night, he listened to my telephone calls with a .45 automatic eight shot pointed at me. I was beaten physically and suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter. He undermined my ties with other people and forced me to marry him on advice from his lawyer. My initiation into prostitution was a gang rape by five men, arranged by Mr. Traynor. It was the turning point in my life. He threatened to shoot me with the pistol if I didn't go through with it. I had never experienced anal sex before and it ripped me apart. They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like garbage. I engaged in sex acts for pornography against my will to avoid being killed...The lives of my family were threatened.

[This quotation is copied from Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA 2006).

On the second commentator's track of the DVD of the documentary Inside Deep Throat, "Deep Throat 2" co-star Andrea True said that Chuck Traynor was a sadist and was disliked by the Deep Throat 2 cast. Similarly, a Deep Throat staff member who roomed next door to Boreman and Traynor during the filming of Deep Throat said that Traynor beat Boreman viciously after hours and sexually tortured her into obeying him in public.

In the book The Other Hollywood, by Legs McNeil, witnesses, including Gerard Damiano, the film's director, confirm that Traynor beat Boreman behind closed doors, but they also question her credibility. Adult film actress Gloria Leonard is quoted as saying about Boreman, "This was a woman who never took responsibility for her own [...] choices - but instead blamed everything that happened to her in her life on porn."

Eric Danville, a journalist who has covered the porn industry for nearly 20 years and who wrote The Complete Linda Lovelace in 2001, said Boreman never changed her version of events that had occurred 30 years earlier with Traynor. When Danville pitched his book proposal to Boreman, he wrote that she was overcome with emotion and saddened that he had uncovered the bestiality film, which she had initially denied making and later maintained she had been forced to star in at gunpoint. In The Other Hollywood, Eric Edwards, Boreman's co-star in the bestiality films, disputes this claim.

Boreman maintained that she received no money for appearing in Deep Throat, and that the $1,250 for her appearance was taken by Traynor.

In 1974, Boreman married Larry Marchiano and they had two children, Dominic in 1977 and Lindsey in 1980. In The Other Hollywood, Boreman painted an unflattering portrait of Marchiano, claiming that he drank to excess, verbally abused her children, and was violent with her. The couple divorced in 1996.

Family and friends reaction

Boreman's immediate family was said to have been outraged that she was involved in porn. But her sister, Barbara Boreman, suggested in one of Boreman's biographies that the family later forgave and supported her.

Anti-pornography activism

With the publication of Ordeal in 1980, Boreman joined the feminist anti-pornography movement At a press conference announcing Ordeal, she leveled many accusations against Traynor in public for the first time. She was joined by supporters Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem, and members of Women Against Pornography. She spoke out against pornography, stating that she had been abused and coerced. She spoke before feminist groups, at colleges, and before government hearings on pornography.

There was controversy over her allegations, and her objections to the pornography industry as a whole. Pornographer and writer Hart Williams coined the term “Linda Syndrome” to refer to women who leave pornography and repudiate their past career by condemning the industry.

In 1986, Boreman published Out of Bondage, another memoir focusing on her life after 1974. She testified before the 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in New York City, stating that “When you see the movie Deep Throat, you are watching me being raped. It is a crime that movie is still showing; there was a gun to my head the entire time.” Following Boreman's testimony for the Meese Commission, Boreman gave lectures on college campuses and elsewhere, decrying what she described as callous and exploitative practices in the pornography industry.

In The Other Hollywood, Boreman said she felt "used" by the anti-pornography movement. "Between Andrea Dworkin and Kitty MacKinnon, they've written so many books, and they mention my name and all that, but financially they've never helped me out. [...] They made a few bucks off me, just like everybody else."

Later career and death

Boreman contracted hepatitis from the blood transfusion in 1970 as a result of the car accident. In 1987, this required her to undergo a liver transplant.^[5] In 1996, Boreman divorced Larry Marchiano. In 2000, she was featured on the E! Entertainment Network's E! True Hollywood Story. In 2001, Boreman did a pictorial, as Linda Lovelace, for the magazine Leg Show. She contended that she did not object to this because "there's nothing wrong with looking sexy as long as it's done with taste." Subsequently, Hustler named her the "Asshole of the Month" for March 2001.

On April 3, 2002, Boreman lost control of her car, which rolled twice. She suffered massive trauma and internal injuries. On April 22, 2002 she was taken off life support and died in Denver, Colorado, aged 53. Her ex-husband, Larry Marchiano, and their two adult children Dominic and Lindsay were at the hospital when she died. She is interred at Parker Cemetery in Parker, Colorado.

Despite the fact that Deep Throat was possibly the most profitable pornographic film ever made, Lovelace died poor. Boreman stated that Traynor took the $1250 she was paid to appear in the Deep Throat. The film is said to have cost $25,000 to make. Some sources estimate the film made between $100 million and $600 million worldwide.^{[dubious – discuss]}

After-death

Boreman was the subject of a 2005 documentary, Inside Deep Throat. A film about her life, called Lovelace, starring Courtney Love, was said to be in production in 2005.^[6] However, it appears that the production was never finalized.

In September 2007, MTV News reported that Anna Faris was rushing to get a feature on Linda Lovelace in production before the Screen Writers Guild strike. Entitled Inferno, Faris claimed that she and first-time director Matthew Wilder were beginning production on the movie, with Faris playing Lovelace.^[7]

Partial filmography

• Deep Throat (1972)
• The Confessions of Linda Lovelace (1974)
• The 46th Annual Academy Awards (1974) uncredited guest
• Linda Lovelace for President (1975)
• Deep Throat Part II (1974) as Nurse Lovelace
• Linda Lovelace: The E! True Hollywood Story (2000)
• Inside Deep Throat (2005) archive footage

Books

Boreman has been the subject of five authorized biographies:

• Inside Linda Lovelace (1974) ISBN 0-902826-11-5
• The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace (1974) ISBN 0-523-00394-3
• Ordeal (1980) ISBN 0-517-42791-5
• Out of Bondage (1986) ISBN 0-425-10650-0
• The Complete Linda Lovelace (2001) ISBN 0-9705502-0-0

References