Ordeal (13 page)
Authors: Linda Lovelace
And so I stopped smiling. And now, whenever we shot a scene, I would hear, “Smile, Linda” and “Please smile, Linda” and “Just try one little smile, Linda.” But those smiles were harder and harder to come by. If I smiled too much, Chuck would beat me. And now I knew that no one would lift a finger to help me. The guys on the set tried to cheer me up by goofing around, but there was no longer anything to smile about.
We started doing the interior shots, many of them in homes borrowed for the movie. Now that I was completely sobered up, I could see how absurd my role in the movie was. In the movie I play some weird kind of visiting nurse. My job was to go around and make people feel better. Mostly men, needless to say.
The big scene in the movie is when Harry Reems, playing a doctor, discovers that my clitoris has been misplaced and is located in my throat. Although we tried this scene several times, we could never get it quite right. We never had any trouble with the action, only with the lines. We’d do the sex scenes just once and then we’d hear Damiano say, “That’s a take!” But when we so-called actors had a simple line or two to deliver, we’d be there for hours trying to get it right. One scene went on until four in the morning. We couldn’t figure out why one of the actresses was having such trouble with her lines until Damiano discovered that she had never learned to read.
Harry and I took turns messing up our lines in one big scene until Damiano finally lost his patience. Then the director took the unprecedented step of calling for a rehearsal. Harry and I were told to keep going over the lines until we got them right.
“It’s not so bad,” Harry was supposed to say, “You should be thankful you have a clitoris at all.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” I replied through teardrops. “How would you feel if your balls were in your ear?”
“Why then I could hear myself coming!” Harry said.
Well, on this day it was hard not to laugh. As we went over the idiotic lines time and time again, they seemed funnier and funnier. Everytime I lamented my missing clitoris —“I want to hear bells ringing, dams bursting, and rockets exploding”—we’d break up. Harry would say something like, “Tell me, Linda, exactly why is that you want to hear a dam burst?” and that would be enough to set us off.
Damiano joined our little rehearsal as Harry was examining the spot where the clitoris is normally located, and he kept finding other objects: A golden pocket watch . . . things like that. And every time he found a strange object, he would say. “Oh, my God, what have we here?”
The three of us were all laughing at that when suddenly, without anyone saying a word, we stopped and swiveled around toward Chuck who was staring at us from the other side of the large dimly lit room. His eyes seemed to burn through the darkness. The laughing died and we all froze for a long moment before returning to the scene. Chuck decided we had rehearsed the scene enough.
“I don’t see why they have to go over that again,” he said. “They’ve got the lines down now.”
“Let them be,” Damiano said. “I want them to get them cold.”
“Yeah, well how many times do they have to go over the same stuff?”
“Chuck, do me a little favor, will you?” Damiano said. “Would you go out and pick up the sandwiches? We’re about to break for lunch.”
Chuck was grumbling as he went out for the food, but he did go. And from that moment on, Chuck became Damiano’s gofer—he’d go for coffee, beer, lunch, cigarettes, practically anything that would keep him out of the way. Once Chuck was gone, Damiano would close the set so that he couldn’t return until we completed shooting the scene. This was his way of keeping Chuck and Harry Reems apart.
“You see the way they’re treating me?” Chuck would complain in private. “They don’t seem to realize that I’m the man who trained the star. I mean, who was it brought you to New York in the first place? If it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t have a fucking star, and they wouldn’t have this fucking movie. And here they are, treating me like some damn errand boy.”
It still hadn’t dawned on me that this was going to be a big movie that would someday be shown in a theater on a real movie screen.
Deep Throat
would be important to me in many ways, but I didn’t realize that then. To me it would be at once a low point and a salvation.
Deep Throat
would be important to me in many ways, but I didn’t realize that then. To me it would be at once a low point and a salvation.
As it was happening, it seemed insignificant. The film itself only took up twelve days of my life—six before the cameras, another six waiting around for the sun to come out. Probably the most important thing to happen to me was a rechristening. Damiano came up with the name Linda Lovelace for the character in his movie. There had been a BB and an MM and now he wanted an LL. In time, I came to dislike the name, Linda Lovelace, because of what it stood for. But the truth is this: Linda Boreman and Linda Traynor never managed to get away from Chuck; it took a Linda Lovelace to escape.
Deep Throat
seemed just another small chapter of my life, but I hated to see it end. Maybe nothing had really changed, not yet, and maybe I had to be involved sexually with an actor or two, but it was much better than it might otherwise have been. Two weeks of making a movie, even a pornographic movie, was better than two weeks of being a hooker. And being with other people, just listening to others talk, that was nice.
seemed just another small chapter of my life, but I hated to see it end. Maybe nothing had really changed, not yet, and maybe I had to be involved sexually with an actor or two, but it was much better than it might otherwise have been. Two weeks of making a movie, even a pornographic movie, was better than two weeks of being a hooker. And being with other people, just listening to others talk, that was nice.
Whenever Chuck was out of sight, one or another of the crew would come up and talk with me. They all said that I could make a fortune in porno movies. If I just had the right manager. And, as luck would have it, each of them had a scam: a script, a producer with money, a pet film project. It always came down to the same thing, “Baby, I can make you a star.” Maybe some people would find that flattering, but a career in dirty movies was not something that meant anything to me. Not then, not ever.
Every evening, after we finished shooting for the day, Chuck and I drove the film out to the airport. It was shipped up to Lou in New York where it was processed and studied. And every day Lou would call Damiano to complain. We could only hear Damiano’s side of the conversation—so I would hear him yell that I was
not
too skinny, and I was
not
too flat-chested, and I was
not
too amateurish.
not
too skinny, and I was
not
too flat-chested, and I was
not
too amateurish.
Damiano seemed pleased by my work. When we managed a scene in a single take, especially if it was a difficult sexual scene, he would lead the crew in applause. I always found that embarrassing. When things were going smoothly, Damiano liked to pretend that he was a regular movie director. He would say things like, “Lights, camera, action!” And, “Cut!” And, “That’s a take.” And, one day, “That’s a wrap.”
None of this fooled me. I never once thought of
Deep Throat
as a regular movie. Not a movie-movie. I’d spent my life watching actresses like Susan Hayward and Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis, and I knew these women would not be caught dead, or even half-dead, in something like
Deep Throat
. Maybe that’s why I never felt like an actress, not even with the hot lights on and the cameras grinding.
Deep Throat
as a regular movie. Not a movie-movie. I’d spent my life watching actresses like Susan Hayward and Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis, and I knew these women would not be caught dead, or even half-dead, in something like
Deep Throat
. Maybe that’s why I never felt like an actress, not even with the hot lights on and the cameras grinding.
Similarly, it was impossible to think of Harry Reems as a movie star. My idea of a real movie star was Clark Gable. I would settle for a Dustin Hoffman or an Al Pacino—they’re adorable. But Harry Reems?
Harry, like the others who do porn for a living, took himself and his job very seriously. To him, it was his livelihood. On a good week he would take home $700 in tax-free income. My feeling was simple: If someone could be involved in public sex, there was something seriously wrong with him. There were just too many questions. If he could do that much, how could you be sure he wasn’t as far-out as Chuck? As far as I could see there was only one difference between Harry and Chuck; Harry was in it for the money and Chuck was in it for weird thrills. But they were both in it.
And that was enough for me. Sometimes I feel that I’m a real prude, more of a prude than anyone I know. Whenever I hear someone talking about the sexual revolution or the new sexual freedom, I don’t look on that as progress. People who are into promiscuity—I’m sorry to say—have a problem. My feeling is this: If people can keep it between themselves and their mates, that’s just fine. But love-making should be a two-person proposition. No more, no less. It’s just nobody else’s business.
twelve
Deep Throat
—such a small slice of my life with Chuck—two weeks out of more than two years. It would be months before the film would open, more months before anyone would hear about it, still more months before the name Linda Lovelace would become known throughout the world.
—such a small slice of my life with Chuck—two weeks out of more than two years. It would be months before the film would open, more months before anyone would hear about it, still more months before the name Linda Lovelace would become known throughout the world.
On the way to Jersey City to pick up our belongings, we were not alone. We had a hitchhiker with us, a sixteen-year-old runaway named Ginger. Chuck was always picking up female hitchhikers. In fact, that’s how he did most of his recruiting. I was amazed by the way Chuck would pick up a hitchhiker and ask right off, “Would you like to be a hooker?” I was even more amazed by the number of young girls who didn’t say no. Ginger was one who didn’t say no.
Ginger told us that she had left home because her father wouldn’t keep his hands to himself and her mother wouldn’t believe that story. Ginger was a tiny girl with long blonde hair, not at all pretty. Though she was only sixteen, life had toughened her face so that she would never seem sweet again. She had spent the last year on the road, crisscrossing the country and living off truck drivers. There was only one small matter separating her from being a hooker. Money.
“You’re doing that shit anyway,” Chuck said. “You might as well get paid for it.”
“Might as well,” she said.
Just before we started out trip north, Chuck fixed Ginger up with her first trick and let her keep the money. Afterwards, she sat on the edge of her bed, staring at two twenty-dollar bills, asking herself the age-old question: “How long has this been going on?”
Life continued as it had before my debut as a movie star, but with a difference. All that exposure to moviemaking had given Chuck a new ambition. Never again would he be someone else’s gofer; now he wanted to make his own movies.
On our first day back in the New York area, Chuck borrowed an eight-millimeter camera from Lou Perry. Then he made two movies starring Linda Lovelace and Ginger. One movie was called
The Foot
and the other one was
The Fist
. In addition to coming up with the original concept, the script, and the direction, Chuck also provided the camerawork. It was definitely a Chuck Traynor Production.
The Foot
and the other one was
The Fist
. In addition to coming up with the original concept, the script, and the direction, Chuck also provided the camerawork. It was definitely a Chuck Traynor Production.
The Foot
opens with a closeup shot of two feet, Ginger’s feet. They are seen walking down a city street. Then up a flight of stairs. Then into a bedroom where they are filmed beside two new feet, the feet belonging to a hooker, my feet. Chuck gave us a running explanation of the story as he ran the camera.
opens with a closeup shot of two feet, Ginger’s feet. They are seen walking down a city street. Then up a flight of stairs. Then into a bedroom where they are filmed beside two new feet, the feet belonging to a hooker, my feet. Chuck gave us a running explanation of the story as he ran the camera.
“Okay, get ready, here comes the foot,” he said. “The foot’s gonna give you twenty dollars. Let’s see that twenty dollars. Okay. Now you shake your head no, you’re telling the foot that’s not enough. Okay, so now the foot is giving you ten dollars more. You take the ten and nod your head yes. That’s right, that’s good. Okay, now the foot is gonna work its way up your leg—that’s right, let’s see a little toe action—the foot is coming up your leg now and getting you all excited. And now the foot is going to fuck you.”
Does all that sound like a joke? I wish it had been a joke. But that’s actually the movie that Chuck dreamed up and made. And when he made
The Fist
, he didn’t bother to change the plot line at all.
The Fist
, he didn’t bother to change the plot line at all.
The following day, Chuck returned the cameras and the films to Lou. He was paid $100 for each movie, enough to finance our return trip to Florida. During our last night in Jersey City, Chuck decided he was in the mood for some fun and games. Ginger had dozed off but was not yet in a sound sleep. Chuck took my left hand and placed it on Ginger’s breast.
“Whoa right there!” She was wide awake in an instant, sitting up in bed and glaring at Chuck. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? What’s this supposed to mean? You think I’m supposed to give you some free entertainment? Jesus Christ, stop being such a creep and let me get some sleep.”
Thank God it was dark. Chuck couldn’t see my smile. I didn’t like Ginger at all—I mean, she may have been the
un
sweetest girl in history—but I certainly did respect her. That night, lying there in bed, I stayed awake, wondering what would have happened if I had been the way Ginger is, if I had been that tough with Chuck from the beginning.
un
sweetest girl in history—but I certainly did respect her. That night, lying there in bed, I stayed awake, wondering what would have happened if I had been the way Ginger is, if I had been that tough with Chuck from the beginning.
The next morning we began our drive south. We drove as far as North Carolina where we stopped to visit Chuck’s mother. When I heard we were going to stay with her for a couple of days, I was wondering whether she would be any help in getting her son off my back.
It didn’t take me long to realize that she wouldn’t be my ally. Chuck was the apple of her eye; he could do no wrong. Chuck’s mother was fiftyish, black-haired, and heavily made up: She favored pale blue eye shadow and black drawn-on eyebrows. She told us stories going back to the time when Chuck was a little boy and she had left his father. She said that at that time she had been friends with some of that era’s most notorious mobsters. She called herself a “flower lady” and explained that she had had a florist shop that was used as a front. Although she had been the special friend of one man in particular, she had escorted others as well. And, in fact, she had been too busy to bring up Chuck herself so her parents had adopted him. He had been raised by his grandparents.
I wondered whether this didn’t explain a lot about Chuck’s attitude toward women. I’m no shrink but it was obvious that he hated women. Did it all begin as a deep resentment toward his mother and the way she was living her life? Maybe the brutality he directed toward me was something he would rather have directed toward his mother. All the time he was forcing me to do perverted and weird things, all those unnatural acts, was he just evening an old score against his mother?
Of course, none of this was visible. When he was with his mother, Chuck became the perfect gentleman. As long as we were under her roof, he was even polite to me. His mother was obviously crazy about her son. She was proud of his having been a Marine, a pilot, and a man in business for himself. She would just ignore it when she learned something less than perfect about her Chucky-poo.
So, for the couple of days that Chuck played the role of good son, I just relaxed, Ginger, however, was getting restless, anxious to get back to Florida. One morning, Chuck dragged us out to wash the car. Chuck went outside and watched us work for a while. But Chuck, the World’s Greatest Expert on Practically Everything, could never watch anyone do anything without offering advice. He decided to give Ginger the full benefit of his car-washing experience.
“Hey, that’s no way to do that,” he said. “You shouldn’t be doing those short, straight strokes.”
“Get off my case, willya?”
“I’m serious,” Chuck said. “When you wash a car, you should make like small circles.”
“Really?” Ginger dropped the sponge on the driveway. “Well, fuck you!”
Before walking away, she took the bucket of soapy water and splashed it over the car. She walked into the house. And when she came back out, she was carrying her jacket and her suitcase. She was followed by Chuck’s mother who was frantic.
“Your little friend is leaving,” Chuck’s mother said. “That poor little girl—what’s going to happen to her if she’s picked up by some tough guys.”
“Well, they’ll learn what tough is,” Chuck said. “Nothing’s ever going to happen to that chick that she can’t handle. Take it from me, that’s one little girl knows just what to do.”
Yes, she did! That was the last we saw of Ginger and I couldn’t help being envious of her. I don’t know what life has offered her since that day in North Carolina—probably not much—but if she’s reading these words, I’d like to tell her she did the right thing.
Thoughts of Ginger and her casual “fuck-you” farewell ate at me all the way to Florida. There she was, still a kid, no bigger than a splinter, and she was able to just walk away. Why couldn’t I? For almost two years I had been Chuck Traynor’s prisoner.
And in that time I had changed: no longer did Chuck have to stand guard over me every minute of the day. Maybe I wasn’t exactly a prisoner anymore; maybe I had become a trustee. I was breathing and sleeping and eating but I was no more alive than a zombie. The encounter with Ginger seemed to wake me up, and once again I began to think about escape.
It was the summer of ’72 and Chuck and I were back at square one, in Miami, with me working as a hooker and his staring at me through a peephole in the wall. Once again he was trusting me enough so that I could take outside jobs in hotels and apartments.
And why shouldn’t he trust me? I was causing him no trouble. After a year of working as a hooker, I still refused to look at myself as a hooker. It was, after all, survival, my only means of staying alive. And that’s how I accepted it: as life, but not livelihood. And only very gradually did it become an occupation. It was always degrading and dirty but, in time, it lost much of its terror. I was a hooker the way someone else might be a cashier in a supermarket or a laborer on an assemblyline; not enjoying any of it, but doing it to stay alive. My body did the work, not my mind and heart. If I was a hooker in fact, I was never a hooker in spirit. I was doing it but I was not into it. Looking back now, I feel that it was some other person—that was not me.
Prostitution, like any other occupation, becomes a matter of routines and rituals. There was always a bad moment or two at the beginning—a hooker can never know what lies on the other side of a closed door—but there was a steadily diminishing sense of horror about the rest of it.
It’s hard for me to look back and think of myself as a hooker. But if you sort letters for a year-and-a-half in the post office, then you’re a mailman. You do it, and you do it, and you do it; then you become it.
Always I was sustained by the hope that this life would be temporary. It could not possibly go on forever. One day it would be all over. But that day seemed no nearer.
Just as I could never accept the thought of myself as a hooker, I never looked at myself as Mrs. Charles Traynor. That, too, was unreal. Chuck would talk about us as being married—he was my “old man” and I was his “old lady”—but that meant nothing to me. If you ever heard him talk about marriage, you’d have to wonder what kind of woman would want to be his wife.
“A woman is supposed to do everything for her husband,” Chuck once told me. “Everything. That’s the whole setup. If I’m ever sent to prison, you will do everything to get me out of jail. I would expect you to fuck everyone and everything to help me. That’s what a wife does.”
So I was back then, living up to Chuck’s concept of perfect womanhood, fucking everyone and everything to help her husband. But he began to relax his vigilance, and I began to look for ways out once again.
During one of my outside jobs, I had a few minutes alone with a telephone. I called my old friend, Betsy, and asked her to help me get away from Chuck. She said she’d do whatever I wanted. I told her that I was going to be doing a trick at a new Howard Johnson’s motel the following night at eight and there might be a way to escape then. Betsy said she’d be waiting in a car in front of the motel.
I had trouble getting to sleep that night, and the next morning I was all jitters. Chuck noticed that my behavior wasn’t normal.
“We’re going to cancel tonight,” he said. “You look like hell.”
“Good,” I said. “I need the rest.”
Chuck’s decision to cancel an appointment was not at all unusual. Quite often he cancelled at the last minute. I think this was just another way to keep me off balance. And although I died a little inside when he decided to cancel, I played it cool.
“Since I’m not going out tonight, I think I’ll wash my hair.”
“Just a damn minute,” he said. “Let me think about this.”
I can guess what he was thinking about. He was thinking about giving up a $45.00 trick. If it had only been a $25.00 trick, I would have spent the day shampooing my hair.
“Forget it,” he said. “We’re going.”
The rest of the day I concentrated on doing nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that would arouse new suspicions. I wondered if he could hear my racing heart. That night, just before eight o’clock, we pulled up in front of the entrance to the Howard Johnson’s. Chuck left the car there, its motor running, and went with me into the lobby. He watched me walk over and go into a waiting elevator. I pushed the button to the correct floor, rode up, stepped off.
Timing would be everything. I imagined Chuck watching the elevator indicator lights, waiting a few minutes and then going out to park his car in the huge parking lot before returning to the lobby where he would wait for me. As the elevator was summoned elsewhere, I waited in the hallway. And then I pushed the button, stepped aboard and took the elevator down to the lobby.
The elevator doors opened and I hesitated a second before stepping out. Standing at the back of the empty car, I looked out to see whether Chuck was in the lobby. It seemed empty. I had just a couple of minutes, and I moved quickly out of the elevator and out of the building and around to the other side.
A car was there, its parking lights turned on. Betsy was there with a young man named Don whom she had been living with. No sooner was I in the car than he pulled away. And as we drove to their house, I told them the story. Everything.
“I was guessing something like that,” Betsy said. “I saw one of those movies you made up in New York, the one with the dog. I told Don that you weren’t like that, that that wasn’t something you’d ever do willingly.”
Other books
A Love So Deep by Suzetta Perkins
Moon Bound (Glorious Darkness Book 1) by UNKNOWN
Wish You Were Here by Tom Holt
Running Hot by Helenkay Dimon
The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell
My Brown-Eyed Earl by Anna Bennett
A Sense of the Infinite by Hilary T. Smith
The Savage Marquess by M.C. Beaton
The Hawkshead Hostage by Rebecca Tope
Who Buries the Dead by C. S. Harris