Ordeal

  Gerry Damiano became friendly with me and treated me very politely. He was hung up on one thing, the oralsex techniques that Chuck had taught me, the sword-swallowing or deep-throat trick. He had never known anyone else able to do that.

  Then, one day while driving from his apartment to his Manhattan office, Gerry Damiano had an inspiration. Chuck and I were in his office when he arrived and he couldn’t wait to tell us his big idea.

  “I was driving over the bridge when it hit me,” he said. “We’re going to do a whole film—and I mean a feature, thirty-five millimeters—about a girl who has her clit in her throat.”

  He paused to let that sink in. He seemed to be waiting for my reaction. My reaction? I was still trying to figure out what he was talking about. A girl with her clit in her throat? Could that have been what he said?

  “Hey, that’s cool,” Chuck said.

  “I’ve even got a title,” Damiano said. “Deep Throat. It came to me all at once.”

  That must have been some drive into the city. Not only had Damiano come up with the title and the plot, he had even worked out a theme song, also entitled Deep Throat. Thereafter Gerry never stopped humming that melody, and every day he added a verse or two until he came up with the song that was used in the movie. Who could ever forget those lyrics?

  Deep Throat

  Don’t row a boat

  Don’t get your goat

  That’s all she wrote

  Deep Throat

  “And, Linda,” Damiano said, “you’re the only girl for this movie.”

  “You’re talking about a feature, right?” Chuck said.

  “Thirty-five millimeters,” the director said, “and Linda will be perfect for it.”

  “You’re right there,” Chuck said. “There’s no one else on earth can do it like Linda.”

  “You know, it’s not just that.” Damiano turned thoughtful for a moment. “The most amazing thing about Linda, the truly amazing thing, is she still looks sweet and innocent. I don’t know how come, but that’s one thing I can’t buy, sweet innocence.”

  Damiano’s opinions were definitely not shared by his partner, Lou Peraino, the man who put up the money for Deep Throat. Another partner in the venture was named Phil Parisi but most of my dealings were with Damiano and Lou Peraino, who was always called Lou Perry in articles and books about the movie. If that’s what he wants—I’ll call him Lou Perry here.

  This was to be Lou’s first feature film—pornographic or otherwise—and he wanted a more traditional female star; he kept saying he wanted a blonde with big boobs. But Damiano held out for sweetness and innocence.

  “We’ve never even seen this broad talk,” Lou complained.

  “So we’ll give her a little test,” Damiano said. “We’ll see if she can talk.”

  My test for the role struck me as a strange one. Damiano asked me to recite an old nursery-school poem, Mary Had a Little Lamb.

  “What?” I said.

  “You know, ‘Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow,’ and so on.”

  So that was my screen test for Deep Throat. I stood there and recited Mary Had a Little Lamb two different ways—first a straight dramatic reading, then laughing all the way through as though it was hilarious. I guess they were testing my dramatic range as well as my voice. It seemed a peculiar selection when compared to the kind of lines I’d be asked to deliver in just a couple of weeks. But I went along with it.

  “Linda, the part is yours,” Damiano said.

  Still, Lou Perry remained unconvinced. As nearly as I could tell, the partnership between Perry and Damiano took the form of a non-stop fight. It seemed to be an equal partnership in that neither of them ever seemed to have the last word. Some of those shouting matches went on all day. As I came to understand their arrangement, Lou Perry was putting up the money and Damiano was doing the work.

  When the film started to do extremely well at the box office, Damiano was pressured out of the partnership. I read a story that said he sold his entire share in the film for $25,000. When a reporter asked him why he allowed himself to be bought out so cheaply, Damiano said, “Look, do you want me to get both my legs broken?”

  And that says more about Lou Perry than I could ever say. Lou was about forty-five years old, heavy, and sloppy. What I remember most about him was his loud mouth; he was always yelling at someone about something. And he never went anywhere without his bodyguard, Vinnie. Vinnie was some piece of work. He had worked many years for Lou’s father, Tony Peraino, and then had been assigned to his son.

  Old Tony dropped in to see his son from time to time. He came with his own small army, all wearing dark suits and trenchcoats, looking like they were trying out for an Edward G. Robinson movie. Tony had given his son the $25,000 bankroll for the movie.

  That’s why it was so important to Lou that the movie be a success. And it also explains why Lou was so critical of me. It wasn’t just that I might ruin his first film or cost him his $25,000. But worse, I might make him look bad in front of daddy.

  I will say this about Lou Perry, he never talked behind my back. Anything he had to say about me he said right to my face and generally at the top of his voice. Lou and Damiano were in nearby offices and they constantly shouted their opinions from one room to the next. Lou would point out that this was their first feature film and that their entire futures were riding on it. Damiano would say that he understood that perfectly and that’s why they should use me. Lou would shout back that he had never heard of a female star of a pornographic movie without big tits.

  “Big tits sell tickets!” he said.

  “Linda stays!” Damiano shouted back.

  And I did. The director gave me a script, my first movie script. My total speaking part came to about five pages. I looked at the pages but I couldn’t bring myself to read them, not right away. They were the first lines I’d ever speak in front of a movie camera, and I had a pretty good idea what kind of lines they’d be. The only thing that remotely interested me was how they’d explain the clitoris in the throat. Chuck was the one who seemed excited by the script; he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t memorizing my lines that first day.

  There was one other thing that excited Chuck. The salary. Chuck was to be paid a flat $100.00 a day for my role in the movie, a total of $1,200. When Lou Perry kept criticizing me, Chuck began to panic that all that money would fall through. One day Chuck came up with a brainstorm.

  “We could get Lou to change his mind,” he told me, “if you’d just go in there and give him a blow job.”

  I was familiar with all the Hollywood legends—including some of the casting-couch stories—and I knew that some starlets would take care of movie producers sexually, but that was before they got the role, not afterwards.

  “The thing is, this guy is really down on you,” Chuck said. “He doesn’t want you no way, and you’ve got to fucking convince him that you’ll be sensational in the role. I’ll go set it up with him. When you go in there, I want you to do a real job on him. I want you to show him you’re some kind of a freak. If this doesn’t work, your ass is in trouble.”

  Chuck went into Lou’s office and the two men talked for just a couple of minutes. Then Chuck came out for me. My husband signaled for me to go into Lou’s office. The two other people in the outer office—Rose the secretary and Vinnie the bodyguard—watched me as I walked over to the door. I could feel their eyes on my back. I felt like a piece of garbage walking through the door—even worse when I came back five minutes later.

  Lou’s office was a long thin room with a long thin window. I walked in the door. He was seated at his desk, going through piles of paper. He glanced up at me for just a second and then returned to his paperwork.

  “Lock the door,” he said, not looking at me.

  I closed the door behind me and turned the lever that locked the knob. Then I walked over to Lou. He still wasn’t looking at me. His eyes remained on those precious piles of paper but he had swiveled his
chair so that his legs were no longer under his desk. He had undone his zipper.

  “C’m’on,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  I went over beside him and got down on my knees and started to work on him. As I was doing what I had to do, he went on fussing with the papers on his desk. Then he suddenly stopped, leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. His whole body stiffened, relaxed, stiffened again.

  “All right,” he said. “Get out of here now.”

  I got to my feet and walked over to the door. I hated what I was going to see on those faces in the outer office. I was garbage. Pure garbage. Then I started getting worried. Had I done it well enough? If I had done it well enough, why did he treat me like such dirt? What would he say to Chuck?

  As I walked into the outer office, I felt as though the secretary was looking at me with contempt. Chuck was staring at my face, looking for some clue. Vinnie, the bodyguard, was the only one with the grace to be looking out the window.

  At any rate, I guess it wasn’t too disappointing an experience for Lou. Because we went through the same routine every day after that. Exactly the same routine. He always greeted me with, “All right, lock the door.” He’d be ready for me and I’d do it. Then I’d hear, “All right, get out of here.”

  I don’t think it ever took him more than three or four minutes. But in that space of time he always managed to let me know that I was no more than garbage. And I’m not sure that all that effort accomplished any change in his attitude. He went right on complaining to Damiano about my physical shortcomings and saying that I was going to send his $25,000 investment down the drain.

  Nine months later, after Deep Throat had made millions of dollars, Lou became slightly nicer to me. Chuck still made me go into his office, but now Lou’s attitude was different. Now, while I was doing it, he would put his hands on my head and pat my hair and then he would say, “Ah, that was good.” Unfortunately, I never could stand it when a man put his hands on my head.

  This happened, all told, about a dozen times and each time lasted only a few minutes. Why the big rush? He seemed to be worried that his wife would come in unannounced. One day, just as I was starting to work on him, his secretary put a telephone call through. The only call allowed through was a call from his wife. Lou immediately straightened up in his chair and waved me away from him.

  “Unh, yeah, I’m kinda busy,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  He was trying to carry on a normal conversation with his wife. I don’t know how it sounded to her, but to me it was very strained. Later, after hanging up the phone, he was unable to get back in the mood.

  After a week of hanging around in New York, Damiano finally told us that they were ready to start filming the movie in Florida. We were to drive down there with Lou’s father, Tony Peraino.

  I liked old Tony much better than Lou. Tony, then in his sixties, had a dress business in Florida. I got the feeling that there wasn’t much that he hadn’t seen and done, but I got this feeling not so much from what he said as from what he did not say. He was tall, heavy-set, gray-haired, and always smiling.

  Tony did the driving and Chuck did most of the talking. Unsurprisingly, Chuck kept trying to interest the old man in me all the way to Florida. And when we stopped at a motel for the night, Chuck would invent elaborate reasons why I should go to old Tony’s room and knock on his door. This was just standard fun-and-games for Chuck but Tony wouldn’t go along with it. One morning, as we were beginning our drive south, the old man made his feelings clear on the subject. It was not a case of like son, like father.

  “I must be getting old,” Tony began. “The way the world is changing, the things young people are doing these days. It’s too much for me to understand.” For once Chuck was listening, not talking. “You know, they say a lot of things about us Italians but one thing you got to admit, Italian men do not cheat on their wives. Not as a rule, they don’t.”

  Chuck Traynor—his mother was a Traino—was completely quiet now. I had never heard anyone lecture Chuck on anything, and this was beginning to sound very much like a lecture.

  “You know why that’s so?” the old man went right along, driving as smoothly as he was talking. “I’ll tell you why this is so. It’s because an Italian man, when he gets a good woman he don’t want to lose her. Me, I personally wouldn’t take a chance like that, if you follow what I’m saying.”

  We were both following what he was saying. And he didn’t have to say any more than that. Chuck immediately stopped trying to push me on to the old man. I kept thinking of the contrasts between the two Perainos—old Tony stopping Chuck before he could even get started; the son, sitting in his office chair, unzippered, waiting.

  I don’t think I’m kidding myself about Tony Peraino. I’m not claiming he never did anything wrong. After all, he was supplying the money for making the movie. And he knew what kind of movie it was going to be. But at least he had some values, some code of behavior. If I were to judge by the kind of people I’d been meeting, any values at all qualified a person for the priesthood.

  Old Tony reminded me that not everyone in the world was like Chuck. I needed that reminder from time to time. I always had difficulty turning to other people for help; I imagined they’d all turn out like Chuck. Even now, several years after the fact, I get the feeling—and I can be walking down a quiet street in a sleepy village when it hits me—that there is something of Chuck Traynor in everyone.

  Back then I had hardly any feelings left. If Chuck told me to go and do something, no matter how unspeakable, I went and did it. Things like that meant less and less to me. I believed without question that there was no alternative, no choice, no escape. I did a great many things with no feeling at all.

  So when Chuck told me we were going to make the movie, I knew we were going to make the movie. To me, Deep Throat was just another eight-millimeter movie, only longer. I wasn’t looking forward to it. It was the next thing to do and it would have to be done.

  Chuck was nowhere near as complacent as I was. He saw Deep Throat as a big step up, a chance to prove himself. Since we arrived in Miami several days ahead of the rest of the cast, he decided that he was going to coach me for my role in the movie. The movie company put us up at a motel on Biscayne Boulevard, unfortunately a motel with an Olympic-sized swimming pool. I say “unfortunately” because every day Chuck had me out in that swimming pool doing laps for hours at a time. I’ve never been much of a swimmer, mostly because I tend to fill up with water rather rapidly, but Chuck saw this as a challenge. As I splashed slowly from one end of the pool to the other, Chuck paced along the side of the pool, shouting instructions and criticism, just as though he were training me for the Olympics, not for an appearance in a porno movie.

  After our training sessions, Chuck would try to impress upon me the importance of Deep Throat to our lives. This was about as close as we ever came to having a conversation.

  “We’re getting rid of the flab,” he said one day. “These people don’t want flabby people in their movie.”

  “Okay.”

  “What you don’t fucking realize is that this is the best thing ever happened to you. Not just the bread. It’s—there could be other movies after this one. Bigger movies. This is our big fucking break and you better fucking see that. And this time you better look like you’re into it. Just this once would you mind trying?”

  “Okay.”

  “You know something else?” he said. “This is the biggest thing I’ve ever pulled off. Think about it. Where would you be without me? Without me, you’d never have learned a fucking thing. You look at it that way, I’m the one who taught you everything. I’m responsible for all this.”

  “Yes, Chuck.”

  eleven

  When the cast and crew arrived from New York several days later, we all made our headquarters at the Voyager Inn on Biscayne Boulevard. The crew consisted of Norman, the sound man; Juan, the cameraman; Harry, the gaffer, and several others
. The “actors” consisted of two men and two women from New York, some others from Florida and, to be sure, Harry Reems.

  I continued to get along with Harry just fine. One reason Harry Reems became a porn superstar—I suppose the male superstar of pornographic movies—is that he appears to be fairly intelligent and he has a good sense of humor. Harry’s strongest appeal to me, however, was the fact that Chuck did not like him at all.

  Chuck constantly referred to Harry Reems as “that asshole,” and Harry pretended that Chuck did not exist. Every time Harry had a chance to speak with me alone, he’d tell me he could make me a star, that I should join him in making bigger and better porno movies. The implication was always there: Harry would take care of everything once I got myself away from you-know-who.

  In the days before the actual shooting, I worked harder than I ever had before in my life. Whenever Chuck let me stop swimming, he had me memorizing the script. Memorizing my lines was not a particularly difficult feat. The movie opened with my looking for my girlfriend. I think my first line was about as complicated as, “Helen?” In Deep Throat the lines were strictly secondary to the action; what made the movie successful was not what was said, but what we did.

  That first day of shooting, everyone was in a good mood. Director Gerry Damiano was happy to be away from his shouting matches with Lou Perry. He spent much of each day constructing new verses for the Deep Throat theme song, and he was so light-hearted and full of energy that his mood became contagious.

  For the first time in many months I began to feel better. It had been a cold and dreary January in New York, but it was warm in Florida. Now, with the movie being shot, Chuck wasn’t able to get me involved in any of his other ventures or adventures. Sure, I was still his personal prisoner, but I was only going to have to fuck one person, Harry Reems.