The Other Hollywood

by Legs McNeil

  I asked, “Are you sure?”

  She goes, “Yes.”

  I asked, “Not adoption papers?”

  She said, “No, circumcision papers.” So I proceeded to sign and let them take my son. I thought he was going to a foster home for three weeks, then I called this woman up, and I said, “Well, I got my keypunch operator’s certificate; I can get a job. I’m ready to take my son,” and she started laughing hysterical on the phone. “You’ll never see him again,” she said. “Those were adoption papers, you fool, not circumcision papers.”

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Was Linda ashamed about giving up her son for adoption? No, it sorta came and went. It was somethin’ that came up; she mentioned it. I didn’t even think about it as an adoption. I thought she just gave her son to her sister. It was just somethin’ she did because she wasn’t able to take care of a child.

  LINDA LOVELACE: That’s what I wanted—a baby. Then Larry could go away. I was supporting him for a long time. A very, very long time. I think the first five years we were together, he didn’t work.

  Was I pissed? I think I was more pissed that I was married to him—but I wanted kids.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Linda came into Vegas with this play. She was gonna do her acting, and Larry Marchiano was her manager. The play was so bad—the second night, this guy comes over and says, “Jeez, I went in to see Linda Lovelace in a play.”

  I said, “Oh, yeah? How was it?”

  He said, “Well, about halfway through the play, this lady sittin’ beside me asked, ‘I wonder when Linda Lovelace is gonna come on?’ And she’d been onstage since the very opening scene.”

  I said, “She must be makin’ a big impression.”

  LINDA LOVELACE: Larry and I went to Vegas because I was in a play there: My Daughter’s Rated X. The play closed after two weeks, but we stayed in Nevada a little bit—up in the mountains.

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: Linda’s play folded—and Larry Marchiano got taken to the padded cell ward there for goin’ berserk one night. I don’t know if it was pills and booze or what, but the fireman that took him down there was a friend of mine, and he said, “Oh yeah, we were rollin’ him out in a straitjacket. He was tellin’ Linda, ‘REMEMBER, THE SHOW MUST GO ON! REMEMBER, THE SHOW MUST GO ON!’”

  LINDA LOVELACE: We went to New York and lived in his parents’ basement for a while. Then we moved to Long Island—Santa Merchas, which means “the center of more riches for the fishermen.” I think the first two years we were there we were on public assistance. One time, Larry took the rent money and flew to Ohio to see his brother. That’s when he thought people were following him.

  MIKE MCGRADY (COAUTHOR OF ORDEAL ): I was writing a column for News-day; and I heard from a lawyer in Bayshore—Victor Yanicone—that Linda Lovelace was living on welfare on Long Island. Victor—who became a mutual friend—described this tale of terrible poverty. He said that Linda was eating dog food.

  I said, “Well, there’s gotta be a story here.”

  I arranged to meet Linda in Victor’s office the first time. And she started telling me the story that she’d been brutalized and forced into everything.

  Oh yeah, I had a lot of trouble believing it at first. See, I was one of the many local columnists who had interviewed her when Deep Throat came out, and from all I could see she was a willing participant—and I had met Chuck Traynor at that time as well.

  LINDA LOVELACE: I was kinda hesitant about writing my story. But one afternoon I was sitting there watching Phil Donahue, and Susan Brown-miller made the comment, “Oh, a lot of people do pornography to get into Hollywood and become a star—just like Linda Lovelace.”

  It made me so mad that I called up Mike McGrady, and he called up Lyle Stuart, the publisher, and said, “We’re going to do a book.”

  I’d been thinking that maybe I could slip away and live a normal life, you know? But after that Donahue show, I said, “No. This isn’t right.” That’s when I made the final decision to go for it.

  MIKE MCGRADY: Linda told me that if I saw Deep Throat—which I hadn’t seen at that point—I would notice huge bruise marks over her body. I’d never heard that before, and it seemed strange to me that that would’ve escaped people’s attention. But when I saw Deep Throat I saw that her thighs were indeed black-and-blue.

  But before being totally convinced, we put Linda through two days of lie detector tests with a guy in New York, who was considered the best in the business.

  PEOPLE, JANUARY 28, 1980: MRS. MARCHIANO CALLS HERSELF ‘A TYPICAL HOUSEWIFE’: THE WORLD KNEW HER AS LINDA LOVELACE: “What happened is told in her just published autobiography, Ordeal, a nightmarish portrayal of sexual perversion and enslavement. Between 1971 and 1973, she says she was transformed from the relatively innocent manager of a clothing boutique into a numb and brutalized sex machine who graduated from cheap street-corner tricks to celebrity bedrooms, among them Sammy Davis Jr. (Davis responds: ‘The whole thing is ludicrous.’)”

  GLORIA LEONARD: Cosmopolitan, back in the day when Gloria Steinem was still a part of it, once did a cover story of a headless woman. She was just nude from the neck down, holding flowers over her breasts—and the cover line was something like: “Erotica vs. Pornography: Do you know the difference?”

  I thought, “Here they are pooh-poohing it and making hay out of it, but they have it as their cover story. They’re selling it and exploiting it themselves! Well, I’m just doing the same thing. And who are you or any other female to consider my choice of what I want to do any less valid than your choice?” It only causes more dissension. It’s not going to unify women.

  MIKE MCGRADY: I was there when the polygraph test was being administered. We asked her questions for two days. By this time I had gathered the information from her, so we asked questions about every part of the story—every part that might be considered libelous.

  Linda passed with flying colors. Linda cannot lie—as near as I can tell—and get away with it. She’s very transparent, and during her first interviews as “Miss Deep Throat,” no one took what she was saying seriously, that she was having a wonderful time.

  So I don’t think she fooled anyone—but I didn’t see any signs at that time that she’d been beaten or tortured or anything. The story itself was horrifying, and you might’ve thought, as I did, that when you have one of the leading celebrities tell a tale of great sex and violence, it’d be easy to sell. But the truth is I was turned down by thirty-three publishers before I went back to Lyle Stuart and said, “Please publish this book.”

  GLORIA LEONARD: Marlene Willoughby, Annie Sprinkle, and I went up and protested at the Cosmo offices. Yeah, it made all the news that night—and the next day, too—in New York City.

  We had gotten the proper permit and all that. Somebody from Cosmo came down to talk to us; but we said, “No, we want an audience upstairs.” And they wouldn’t let us up. But we made our point.

  LINDA LOVELACE: When Ordeal came out, I did the Phil Donahue Show. He does that little brief interview with you before he opens it up to the audience, and the first question from the audience was from a woman who asked, “What in your childhood led you to be so promiscuous?”

  I was like, “Hello—did you hear anything that I said?”

  I was twenty years old, heading in one direction, and all of a sudden, my life’s taken away from me. Even though I got free of Traynor, here I am, a middle-aged woman, and I’m still dealing with Deep Throat.

  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, MAY 30, 1980: NOW HERE’S A SWITCH DEPT.: “Porn star Linda Lovelace will join Women Against Pornography for a demonstration here tomorrow at Seventh Avenue and Forty-eighth Street at 11:00 A.M. to protest a dirty movie. The movie? Deep Throat.”

  GLORIA LEONARD: Women Against Pornography first came about in the early eighties. They had a little storefront office in Times Square. What was their purpose then? Beats the shit out of me!

  They just thought porn degraded, defiled, and debased women—the same old stupid argument. You know, it causes crime, teaches
men not to respect women, yadda, yadda, yadda.

  LINDA LOVELACE: Some people from Women Against Pornography watched the Donahue show. And then Gloria Steinem contacted me, and she tried very hard—everybody tried real hard—to find some way that I could seek legal action. But there’s just no laws for victims in our society. Only for criminals. So we weren’t able to do too much.

  So I did a press conference with Women Against Pornography when I was eight months pregnant with my son, Lindsay. It was a rainy morning at the end of May 1980, and they had a big demonstration outside the Frisco theater where they were showing Deep Throat.

  There was a press conference afterward at the “Women Against Pornography” offices. That’s where I met Gloria Steinem and Catherine MacKinnon. And Valerie Harper—“Rhoda”—she was really fun and great. Yeah, she said she was gonna come out and have hamburgers and hot dogs, but she never did.

  GLORIA LEONARD: Nobody really paid a whole lot of attention to Ordeal when it came out, you know, it terms of its credibility. I mean, this was a woman who never took responsibility for her own shitty choices—but instead blamed everything that happened to her in her life on porn. You know, “The devil made me do it.”

  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, JUNE 8, 1980: A STRANGE BEDFELLOW FOR THE WAR ON PORNOGRAPHY: “Linda Lovelace has been born again. She is now Linda Marchiano, a Long Island housewife, mother of a four-year-old son and due to give birth again this month. She is also the author of a book called Ordeal (Citadel Press, $10), which chronicles the two-and-a-half years she claims she spent as the virtual prisoner of her former husband, pimp-pornographer, Chuck Traynor.”

  GLORIA LEONARD: In Ordeal, Linda describes being beaten up on the set of Deep Throat. But the truth of the matter is that nobody that had anything to do with the film touched her—she was beaten up at night by Chuck Traynor in the privacy of their hotel room. It was her own poor, shitty choice of a companion that got her beat up. Nobody in the porn business—that had anything to do with the film—laid a hand on her, other than in a loving way.

  LINDA LOVELACE: The book tour was hard. It was one of those twelve cities in ten days kinda deals, you know? Fly in and get to your hotel at like 1:00 A.M., then be up at five to do a morning show and then back on the plane. You know, you’re doing like, God—I don’t know how many. I would do like eight or nine interviews in one city—and then be off again.

  Larry was with me the whole time. He wasn’t real supportive of me; he had me convinced that if I went out and got a job someone was gonna recognize me and that I was gonna get raped.

  But he was the one to get me up and going, you know? I’m a slow starter, so yeah, he would kinda get me going. But there was too much drinking.

  I mean, goddamn—I ended up having to pay for the whole alcohol bill. I think one night we drank ten bottles of Mumm Cordon Rouge. Ten bottles! Thank God it doesn’t give you a headache.

  So yeah, there were times when I drank with him because he would get mad at me if I didn’t drink, and then he’d be verbally abusive to the kids.

  GLORIA LEONARD: I thought Linda was just a wacko. I was in a green room once for a TV show in New York, and Linda was going to be on the show. She comes in looking like hell, squints her eyes, looks at me—and goes, “You’re in porn—I can tell from your eyes!”

  I’m telling you the truth, ha, ha, ha. That’s a direct quote!

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I was in England, and Sammy Davis Jr. sent me a manuscript for Ordeal. I read it, and then Hefner’s secretary called and said Hefner was kinda upset about it, ’cause Linda was talkin’ about this and that and the parties at his house.

  Did Hefner wanna sue? I mean, Hefner surely had the means and attorneys to sue. But I think he just agreed, you know; it would just be more publicity for them.

  LINDA LOVELACE: The three of us—Chuck, Sammy, myself—were in the screening room watching a porno movie. Or rather, the two men were watching the movie. I was on my knees in front of Sammy, deep-throating him while he watched the movie.

  “I really dig that,” Sammy was whispering, “I’d like to know how you do it. When are you going to teach me? When you going to show me how you do that? Hey, you think Chuck would mind?”

  “Mind?” I whispered back. “No, that’s the kind of thing he’d go for in a big way. But let me set it up for you.”

  Of course, this was definitely not the kind of thing Chuck would go for in a big way.

  “Hey, you can’t just sit there and watch,” I said to Chuck. “You just can’t sit there.”

  As I talked to Chuck, I signaled for Sammy to come over. Chuck grunted at me and shifted his weight, making it easier for me to do the job. I was the one who unzipped his trousers, but I wasn’t the one knelt in front of him.

  A minute or two went by before Chuck realized that something was different. Then, although Chuck didn’t utter a sound, his eyes were screaming for help. I just shrugged my shoulders and laughed.

  Each time that Sammy showed signs of slowing down, I kept him going with instructional encouragement. It was, ironically enough, the same instruction that Chuck had once give me.

  “No, no, Sammy,” I said, “push down a little more—he’ll like that. Yeah, that’s right. Keep going. You’re doing fine.”

  CHUCK TRAYNOR: I called Sammy back and said, “Sam, this is a fuckin’ joke. Other than the fact that she’s talkin’ about you and I havin’ sex or somethin’—well, I guess we’ll have to get married now—but just forget about it.”

  Sammy and I never had sex.

  Sammy said, “I don’t know where any of this shit came from. You think we should sue ’em?”

  I said, “No because if we sue ’em, it’s gonna go into litigation—that’s publicity. Think about that. That book could be in litigation for years—and sell millions and millions of copies. And we ain’t gettin’ a penny.”

  I said, “If they wanna make a deal with us, fine, you know. But if they’re gonna play this game, let ’em play it. I don’t give a shit.”

  PEOPLE, JANUARY 28, 1980: MRS. MARCHIANO CALLS HERSELF ‘A TYPICAL HOUSEWIFE’: THE WORLD KNEW HER AS LINDA LOVELACE: “‘Little by little I found out what pornography meant,’ recalls Larry [Marchiano], 32. A construction worker, he was shown a still photo from one of Linda’s gamiest eight-millimeter films by a coworker one day on the job.

  ‘I turned around,’ he says, ‘and walked I don’t know how many miles that day.’ For a time he was plagued by the predictable taunts, but he says he has learned ‘to care only about Linda and not so much other people.’

  For her, that support has been crucial.”

  LINDA LOVELACE: Larry would go, “Oh, I’m gonna go look for a job.” You know, “Yeah, right.” He would leave first thing in the morning and not come home until after midnight. So my world was my children.

  You know, all the kids in the neighborhood were always in my yard. I got pieces of wood, and they would make street names after themselves—and we built huts and dug holes in like hidden shacks, you know? I was always doing stuff like that with the kids, and I was happy.

  PEOPLE, JANUARY 28, 1980: MRS. MARCHIANO CALLS HERSELF ‘A TYPICAL HOUSEWIFE’: THE WORLD KNEW HER AS LINDA LOVELACE: “‘I thank God I can be with my husband and trust him,’ Linda says. ‘He is the only human being I had met who wasn’t strange or didn’t get into some sexual problem.’”

  LINDA LOVELACE: Larry took our son out one time and instead of changing his diaper, he went to three friends’ houses; the mothers weren’t around. So he took Dominick to the emergency room and said to them, “There’s a problem down here.”

  The nurse took the diaper off, said, “Oh, great” and took care of it.

  I mean, what’s so hard about changing a diaper?

  In some ways, yeah, Larry was a bit like Chuck. But then again, no. Larry wasn’t into pushing me into that kind of thing and making me go for that kind of a lifestyle. But he was very jealous. I really didn’t have any friends.

  PEOPLE, JANUARY 28, 1980:
MRS. MARCHIANO CALLS HERSELF ‘A TYPICAL HOUSEWIFE’: THE WORLD KNEW HER AS LINDA LOVELACE: “Linda still fears retribution from Chuck Traynor—especially in the predawn hours after Larry has gone to work—and she complains of chronic insomnia. Her financial situation is precarious; she and Larry rely partially on welfare.”

  LINDA LOVELACE: One night we came home, and Lindsay had some friends over, and one of the kid’s cars was like a little bit on our next door neighbor’s driveway. Larry had told the kids, “Don’t block anybody’s driveway.”

  Larry was drunk, of course. So he totally flipped out and tried to beat this sixteen-year-old kid up, trying to yank him out. The kid was like, “Mr. Marchiano, I’m sorry. Let me just go move my car.”

  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, JUNE 8, 1981: LIZ SMITH, PEOPLE ARE TALKING: “The party at London’s Cafe Royal for Linda Lovelace and her book Ordeal ended in a ruckus. When reporter Paul Pickering asked Linda a very nasty question about her past, the Deep Throat star’s husband, Larry Marchiano, punched him out. (Maybe Larry should change his name to Rocky.)”

  LINDA LOVELACE: The kid was scared. Larry ripped the chain that he had around his neck, you know, ripped the buttons on his shirt. And I’m like, “Hey, you know, chill here.”

  So we’re back in the house, and I’m telling Larry to chill out, and he shoved me. I fell back on the stairs and did something to my thumb—bruised it severely, but it didn’t break. So the cops take him away for domestic violence, and then the state picks it up.