by Legs McNeil
LINDA LOVELACE: The following morning, Chuck informed me that I would be making a movie with a dog. I didn’t say anything to Chuck. I knew the only time to tell him was when the other people were around. Witnesses.
There would be a beating, I knew that much, but it would be easier on me if other people were nearby. For once, the prospect of a beating was not the worst alternative. Any beating, no matter how severe, would be better than being raped by a dog.
Our destination that morning was a studio down in the East Village. A large room…the usual clutter…the double bed…the movie lights…the cameras…the director, Bob Wolfe—fat and greasy and black-haired.
ERIC EDWARDS: I always felt that Linda was enjoying everything that she did in front of the camera. I never had a feeling that she was not enjoying herself.
Even with the dog—and I was in that loop.
LINDA LOVELACE: Chuck led me back into the main room. Wolfe and his assistant were sitting behind a small table. Chuck joined them on their side of the table.
“Okay, Linda,” Wolfe said. “Why don’t you get undressed, and we’ll get on with this.”
“No.”
“I’d advise you to think that over pretty carefully,” Wolfe said.
I looked at the three men. And then I noticed that on the small table directly in front of them there was a gun, a revolver.
“Now, are you sure you don’t want to make this movie?” Wolfe asked.
“Take off your clothes, cunt,” Chuck said.
ERIC EDWARDS: There was no gun pointed to her head; there were no people around, other than Bob Wolfe and me. There was no forcing her to do anything. Chuck wasn’t even there, not on that particular set. He was more of a manager that came in to make sure everything was okay and then would leave.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: It wasn’t my film. So I wasn’t even on the set. Bob Wolfe came up with the idea. It was just these guys trying to think of new things to come up with so they could make another movie.
ERIC EDWARDS: The dog wasn’t on the set already, no, I don’t believe so. I think I just went in front of the camera with Bob, shooting, doing a scene with Linda. We finished the scene, and the plot was advanced: “Oh, okay, the boyfriend now leaves to go to work, and the doggie comes in to satisfy Linda.”
LINDA LOVELACE: As I reached up to unbutton my blouse, I knew I was surrendering. If I could have foreseen how bad it was going to be, I wouldn’t have surrendered. I would have chosen the possibility of death.
I am able to handle almost everything that has happened to me in my life—but I’m still not able to handle that day. I’ve been raped by men who were no better than animals, but this was an actual animal—and that represented a huge dividing line.
ERIC EDWARDS: After my scene with Linda, I sat on the set, and I saw this guy bring in—I’ll call him “Fido”—a greyhound, I believe. Maybe an Afghan, shaved, but it was a short-haired dog.
Thin tail.
LINDA LOVELACE: When the film began I was to be in bed with Eric Edwards, who would stay with me for just a few minutes, just long enough to seem to get me aroused, and then leave me. At that point, I was supposed to look frustrated, unsatisfied.
As Wolfe directed the action, he said, “Now look around the room…slowly…slowly…. Now you see your dog, and you go, ‘Oooooh!’ And now you look excited…. Make it look like all of a sudden you’re coming up with a brilliant idea…. That’s right, now snap your fingers.”
ERIC EDWARDS: When I saw what was happening in front of my eyes, my jaw dropped to the floor. Because Linda did something that totally blew my brains out. She immediately went down on the dog.
LINDA LOVELACE: They had the dog lick me. All that time they were telling me to smile and to laugh. I was supposed to look very excited. I was feeling nothing but acute revulsion. Even as this was happening to me, I had trouble believing it. How much time was I actually with the dog? Maybe an hour or two, but there seemed no end to it. I felt sure he would bite me.
“Okay, Linda, get down on your hands and knees. No, down on all fours. That’s right…”
ERIC EDWARDS: She just went down on the dog, got him excited, and as soon as Linda got on all fours, the dog mounted her because the dog knows that when somebody’s on all fours, bang—we know what that’s all about.
LINDA LOVELACE: It went on, without end, until Bob Wolfe’s voice came through the fog.
“Okay, we got enough,” he said. “Wow—far-out!”
“I never thought we’d get this,” his assistant said.
ERIC EDWARDS: After it was over, I could see that the dog had actually ejaculated inside of her. I could see the expression on the dog’s face. Dog pulls out, asks for her phone number, smokes a cigarette, and everything was over.
LINDA LOVELACE: When they pulled the dog away from me, I was in the deepest valley I’d ever been in, devastated, wanting only to die. I looked up and saw Chuck.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: I wasn’t there. I had come down around noontime and went out to get some apple pie at this little dumpy joint around the corner. I cut the slice of pie and I happened to see something and I turned it over—it was all moldy on the bottom, all green.
ERIC EDWARDS: Linda didn’t seem upset. No, not at all. Linda just seemed to me like a hippie, free-love chick, you know? She had the headband, beads, the whole thing. Free love was all around.
LINDA LOVELACE: Chuck was staring at me, studying me, measuring my reaction. He had to realize this was the worst moment of my life.
ERIC EDWARDS: At that particular time, everybody was trying to do dog movies. But the dogs had to be able to perform. There were several times when we would have a production scheduled, and the girl would sit back—and the dog didn’t want to have anything to do with her whatsoever.
We’d try mayonnaise, we’d try hot dogs, we’d smear stuff on her pussy, and it wouldn’t work. The dog would whimper and whine and back off.
But this particular dog that worked with Linda was a pro.
SHARON MITCHELL: They were shooting up in Carter Stevens’s studio, and I walked in and saw Linda having sex with these dogs. It didn’t look like they were forcing her to do anything. It looked like they were forcing the dogs!
I was really young and new and going up there to shoot a scene with Chuck Vincent. When I walked in there and saw that, I was like, “Okay, I’m out of here.”
They were like, “No, no, no. We’re shooting another scene in another part of the studio later in the day. You’re just here for makeup.”
But I was like, “No way, man.”
So I ran down the stairs. It scared me. It was just too weird because nobody was holding anybody anywhere. Nobody was forcing her to do anything.
BILL KELLY: Linda was making bestiality movies, and Chuck was involved in that with her. Linda even admitted it before the Attorney General’s Commission. Supposedly she made them under duress. I don’t know whether I believe her or not. Because there was more than one bestiality film. And I even knew who one of the dogs was. I think it was Bruno or something—a great, big, damn dog.
I can’t even remember the breed.
Mary Had a Little Lamb
NEW YORK CITY
1971–1972
JOHN WATERS: To me, the day porn films became legal was in 1969 when they showed Pornography in Denmark in a commercial movie theater in New York City, and it didn’t get busted. Variety will back me up on this.
I hitchhiked from Provincetown, Massachusetts, all the way to New York to see it because I knew it was historic. Pornography in Denmark got around the law because it was “a serious documentary,” right? It was supposedly “socially redeeming,” but it showed penetration. That opened the doors to other movies, like SEX U.S.A. and eventually Deep Throat.
It was a big deal because after that there was no turning back.
That’s the day exploitation films ended—the way Andy Warhol ended Abstract Expressionism in one night by that soup can, the way the Beatles ended rhythm and blues in one
night on the Ed Sullivan Show.
BUTCHIE PERAINO: I invested money in a company that went bankrupt. We then made two pictures. One was a documentary called SEX U.S.A. and the other was called This Film Is All About.…That’s right—blank.
New York papers won’t even use the word “sex” on movies like this. To give you a for instance, SEX U.S.A. in the Daily News was printed XEX U.S.A.
FRED LINCOLN: I went to work for Gerry Damiano and Butchie on a film called SEX U.S.A. Linda Boreman was in it before she was Linda Lovelace. Paul Matthews was in it, Tina Russell was in it, and Harry Reems was there—everybody that was around. Again, we just did it and walked away. It wasn’t a loop; it was a feature. Gerard Damiano did features. This was before Throat.
HARRY REEMS: SEX U.S.A. was the first interview-type thirty-five-millimeter film. It was shot in a West Side studio. We all watched one another take our clothes off. Then we went—two by two—into six or seven cubicles and there we stayed with our sexual partners while the narrator explained very pedagogically what we were doing.
FRED LINCOLN: You see, what Butchie really wanted was to make features. That’s what he always wanted—to make motion pictures. It’s kind of a sad story—here’s this mobster’s son who wants to be an auteur, you know?
That’s why Butchie picked Gerry Damiano—because I don’t think Gerry ever did loops. Butchie put up the money because he knew Gerry could make a feature.
HARRY REEMS: Gerard Damiano was a grown-up Wizard of Oz, a short, jolly, jelly bean. He had a gray goatee and a funny little toupee. He was sort of the stereotype of the second-string Hollywood director. But Gerard Damiano has been called the Mike Nichols and Ingmar Bergman of porno films.
FRED LINCOLN: Gerry was a decent guy, but he did try to rip me off for twenty-five dollars on SEX U.S.A. The budget was really tight; there wasn’t any money, so he tried to pay me seventy-five bucks a day. I said, “No way.”
I said, “Listen. Don’t fuck with me. I’ll break your fuckin’ legs.”
Then Butchie asked, “What’s goin’ on’?”
I said, “Gerry told me he was bringin’ me a hundred bucks a day. Now he wants to give me seventy-five.”
Butchie just said, “Pay him.”
BUTCHIE PERAINO: SEX U.S.A. cost about twelve to fifteen thousand dollars to make. So far it’s grossed six hundred thousand.
So we decided to do another film, but we didn’t want to do a documentary. There was this film, Mona, that we had seen. It was different. It had a story. It was what you would call “improvisational.” We thought of doing the same exact thing.
LINDA LOVELACE: Andrea True was the one that mentioned to Chuck Traynor that she knew this guy, Gerard Damiano, who was going to make a thirty-five-millimeter, big-screen pornographic movie.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: I would see Gerard Damiano coming in and outta the Perainos’ office. Yeah, I was friendly with him, but it’s like two guys that are pushin’ wheelbarrows. If one guy has been there a long time, he thinks he’s a superior wheelbarrow-pusher to the other guy. Plus he was making sixteen-millimeter films, so he’s big-time. I’m a little guy because I’m making eight-millimeter loops. Plus I swept the office, fixed the lights, went on locations, drove cars, stuff like that.
RAY PISTOL (PORN PRODUCER): Chuck and Linda came in to see Butch, and Chuck had loops underneath his arm. Chuck put one on—and it was Linda’s doggie flick. And Butch said, “We don’t do that shit here.”
Butchie threw them out of the office. This is from Butch directly. And in the anteroom, outside, Gerard Damiano was coming up the elevator as Chuck and Linda were leaving, and they started a conversation.
GERARD DAMIANO: I’d like to say something poetic, like Linda came in beauty like the night, but it’s not true. She came in wearing army boots, an old army jacket, and a wool hat pulled over her head.
LINDA LOVELACE: Yeah, that army jacket. Chuck made me look like a hippie chick. It’s not something I ever would have been caught dead in.
But compared to men like Bob Wolfe, Gerard Damiano was like Cecil B. DeMille.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: Gerard Damiano was a pretty easygoing guy. I mean, he had a little bit of an air, like I say, because he was the director of feature films. And back in the early porno days, a feature film was a “FEATURE FILM.” Gerry was working with the Perainos—he was their director. And he was a good director; he knew about shooting sixteen-millimeter, you know, reversals and two shots and one shots and all that shit.
RAY PISTOL: Chuck and Linda and Damiano hit it off and decided to go to a swingers’ club that night. And that was the night that Damiano saw Linda’s talent. He came back the next day and hit Butchie up to completely change everything around.
BUTCHIE PERAINO: To be honest about it, we couldn’t come up with anything too good. We were just going to do another Mona. Then somehow Gerry Damiano seen this girl at a party. I assume he got fixed up with her.
GERARD DAMIANO: Fortunately for Linda—and for me—I was casting for a sex insert, a short segment for a full-length movie. So I asked her if she would do it, and she said yes.
HARRY REEMS: I was doing some loops for Gerry that summer and working behind the camera with him a little. One morning he called me and asked me if I’d be able to show up that day to do some shorts.
When I got there, he said, “You’re going to do an anal scene with Linda.”
This was my introduction to Linda Lovelace.
But that morning she was very nervous. She acted like a complete beginner. Gerry soon guessed that her nervousness had more to do with the presence of her husband/manager, than any feelings of inadequacy about her assignment. When he made that discovery, he sent the husband on errands. With Chuck temporarily out of the picture, Linda relaxed and turned in a performance, to say the least.
GERARD DAMIANO: I met Linda on Wednesday and did the insert on Thursday. And it was when she did the insert that I realized the talent that she had.
HARRY REEMS: Gerry convinced Linda that she should do her best because this would be a cut or two above the run-of-the-mill loop. In the loop, Linda played a nurse, and I was the patient. I’m shown in bed wearing some crazy underwear with hearts and flowers. My cock is wrapped up in bandages with a bow at the tip. My nurse pats my bandaged member, which is in an enlarged and inflamed state.
“No,” I protest. “It hurts.”
My nurse won’t be dissuaded. Off comes the bandage, and nursie is soon applying oral therapy to the ailing organ.
LINDA LOVELACE: It’s impossible to perform the act unless there’s a straight line from mouth to throat—like a sword swallower. So how could we arrange it? We tried every conceivable way until we at last found the proper position for the camera to catch it all. It amounted to a kind of 69 position, with my body kind of flat against Harry’s chest. I struggled at first—but it began to work and work well. When I felt him straining, I had to put his throbbing cock all the way down.
HARRY REEMS: I knew the anal scene was coming up so I asked Linda, “Would you like some K-Y Jelly or something?”
“No, no,” Linda panted, “Just let me give you some more head.”
Giving more head she became frantic—her tongue and lips were everywhere. Then I felt the muscles in the back of her throat opening up. Her head lowered over me. Suddenly I could feel my cock go right into her throat. I couldn’t believe she ate the whole thing! My cock and balls and half my pubic bush were all engulfed in that cavernous, deep throat.
GERARD DAMIANO: Linda knocked me out the minute she started going down on Harry, doing her Deep Throat thing. Harry was very heavily endowed. I had never seen anybody take a cock that deep before.
HARRY REEMS: It was a frightening sensation. My first thought was, “Will she bring me back alive?”
But she kept going up and down all the way. The muscle in her throat was relaxed. Her breathing got noisier and noisier. She started to drip from her nose and over her chin. She let out animal shrieks.
“Okay, I’m r
eady,” she finally gasped.
Her cunt and anal passage were both sopping wet. Gerry’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets and the cameraman’s jaw brushed his shoes. I think all of us there knew we were present at a significant moment in sexual history.
I fell instantly—though briefly—in love with Linda. We balled our brains out and fucked every which way.
That loop was eventually inserted in Deep Throat.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: Gerry Damiano wasn’t the first person to see Linda give deep throat, no. She did deep throat people in the early loops. But obviously nobody realized that this was a really unusual talent. Gerry was the first one to take it seriously. I mean, I didn’t realize the power of it because I had lived with it all my life.
GERARD DAMIANO: In selling her attributes, Chuck probably mentioned she could take a large amount of cock. But, again, it was very hard then to describe it. I’m sure he wasn’t aware of what he had there; if he was, Chuck has proven himself to be enough of a businessman over the years that he would have handled things a lot differently.
BUTCHIE PERAINO: Gerry came in the next day and said that as he was driving over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, he was thinking of Linda. What she had done was fantastic. He’d never seen anybody do like she did. So he thought, let’s make a picture about this girl.
GERARD DAMIANO: I was so knocked out over what Linda did that I went home and wrote Deep Throat over the weekend. Linda was doing something that defied description. You have to understand, at the time there was no such expression as “deep throat.” I invented it. Now it’s sort of a byword; you think, “Wow, I wonder if that girl can give deep throat?”