From Tom Leonard

AT HIGH school they called her ‘Miss Holy Holy’ because she wanted to become a nun and always kept the boys at arm’s length. But Linda Boreman never took her solemn vows. And as for her coyness with the opposite sex, history records that she soon got over it. As Linda Lovelace, she achieved a sexual notoriety — thanks to a film shot in a Florida hotel room — that would overshadow the rest of her unhappy life.

In 1972, she starred in Deep Throat, a phenomenally successful hardcore sex film that would make her the world’s first porn superstar, but later an unlikely feminist icon after it emerged she had effectively been raped in making it.

To an army of liberal supporters, Deep Throat and Lovelace blazed a trail for a new era of cinematic ambition and sexual freedom. For the rest of us, Deep Throat remains the painfully tawdry film which — by introducing hardcore sex into the mainstream — ushered in the infinitely more explicit internet porn that is now only a keyboard click away.

Now, the febrile debate the film sparked when it was released is about to be reignited with not one but two feature films in development about the woman at the centre of it. The question is whether Hollywood will set aside its usual desire for a happy ending and tell the real story of a deeply troubled life — one which encompassed not only porn but drug abuse and prostitution, not to mention poverty, serious illness and a horrific death? It has to be said, the omens do not look good.

Lovelace was 23 when she became an overnight sensation. Raised first in New York and then Florida, she’d had a strict Catholic upbringing with her father, a policeman, and a mother who held Tupperware parties.

But by the time she was 19, she began to rebel against the strictures of her home life, and it was at that age that she lost her virginity to a school friend. Just a year later, she was pregnant and had a baby which her mother forced her to give up for adoption. Recovering from a serious car accident soon afterwards, Lovelace became involved with Chuck Traynor, a Jaguar- driving bar owner who’d spotted her sunbathing at a local swimming pool. She was later to condemn him as violent and controlling, but Traynor soon became both her husband and her pimp.

She later also claimed he introduced her to drugs and hypnotised her to increase her sexual appetite and abilities. He had soon introduced her to prostitution and then into a string of short sex films made for peep shows.

Attractive but certainly not beautiful, Lovelace had another asset, and in 1972 Traynor pitched his wife’s unusual ability at oral sex to a fellow guest at a swingers’ party. Gerard Damiano, a f o r mer hairdresser, was looking to make a ‘humorous’ porn feature film with Mafia money.

After meeting Lovelace (whose stage name he invented), Damiano decided to call it Deep Throat and base it entirely around her.

Completed in less than a week, with all interior shots filmed in the same cheap Florida hotel r oom, t he 61-minute Deep Throat cost $30,000 to make but earned an estimated $600 million — making it the most lucrative film ever made.

OPENING in a single New York fleapit cinema, a few enthusiastic reviews and talk of ‘ porno chic’ soon led to the film being a popular topic of conversation at the city’s more fashionable dinner parties. ‘How does she do it?’ mused a writer in the New York Times.

‘The film has less to do with the manifold pleasures of sex than with physical engineering.’

An attempted official clampdown only fuelled the frenzy to see it. Celebrities including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Truman Capote joined the queue, and Frank Sinatra held private screenings in his home for guests who reportedly included Sammy Davis Jr and Vice President Spiro Agnew.

‘I thought it was about giraffes,’ quipped Bob Hope.

Deep Throat didn’t get an 18 certificate in Ireland until 2005, but an estimated ten million Americans saw the film as the Mafia distributed it around the country, burning down cinemas when owners refused to hand over half their takings.

Appalled, the Nixon administration prosecuted the film’s makers for obscenity (‘This is one throat that deserves to be cut,’ observed a judge), but Hollywood stars and free-speech campaigners rallied around the film.

Americans, they argued, had a constitutional right to watch crummy, Mob- f i nanced hardcore porn. Lovelace and Traynor were feted at Hollywood parties and became fixtures at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy

IN NEW YORK mansion. She became a household name, and during the Watergate scandal, the Washington Post reporters called their secret source Deep Throat. Revealing that she earned just $1,200 for the film, Lovelace shrugged. ‘I wasn’t paid much but now I’m known, so it’s OK,’ she said.

That dubious fame hardly lasted, though, and her two subsequent films — neither of them involving hardcore porn — flopped.

SHE became a heavy user of cocaine and amphetamines, and in 1976, after signing up to play the title role in an erotic movie, Lovelace bizarrely announced that ‘God had changed her life’. She said she would no longer pose naked and even objected to a bare-breasted statue of the Venus de Milo on the set. She had by then rid herself of Traynor, escaping his clutches one night in Las Vegas, where she was performing i n a cabaret show. Disguising herself in a wig, she jumped into the back seat of a friend’s car.

Hiding out in different hotels for weeks, Lovelace then began appearing in public in skimpy outfits everywhere from London to Las Vegas, attracting some attention but never enough to launch the mainstream film career she yearned for.

She remarried, this time to a builder named Larry Marchiano. They settled down and had two children, later moving to suburban Denver.

In 1980, with feminists increasingly attacking pornography as demeaning to women, Lovelace found a new opportunity to grab the limelight.

I n an autobiography entitled Ordeal, she claimed that Traynor had physically and mentally abused her t hroughout t heir marriage, forcing her into pornography literally at gunpoint.

Her husband had had her gangraped by five men, she said, and kept her a prisoner ‘just as much as if I was in Alcatraz’.

He would never let her out of his sight, spying through the keyhole when she was in the bathroom and listening to her telephone calls with a .45 automatic pistol pointed at her.

Traynor would use his gun again when she was filming porn scenes, she added. ‘Chuck kept a gun in his pocket and would click the trigger, letting me know what would happen if I did not look convincing,’ she said.

‘For years afterwards, I would have nightmares about the fear I felt when I heard that clicking.’

The abuse continued after the film came out, she said, as Traynor would give her the drugs she craved only if she agreed to perform her signature sex act on strangers.

Suddenly, the free thinkers who had so glibly championed Deep Throat looked a little foolish.

Quite how much Lovelace had to be coerced into the sex industry remains a moot point, with fellow porn stars insisting she was a willing collaborator. But she passed a lie detector test over her allegations — demanded by the atte Lov the Wh Thr por this Ch such Dwo colle ingly to g

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