Abused by the porn industry AND her feminist saviours
Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace made porn respectable for he chattering classes. But her tragic life — now being made into two films — was a very modern morality tale
co-author of Ordeal — and others ested to Traynor’s violence and velace’s turning up with bruises on Deep Throat set on some days. hether she was forced into Deep roat or not, the feminist antirnography movement clutched s unlikely new ally to its bosom. hampioned by prominent thinkers h as Gloria Steinem and Andrea orkin, Lovelace gave lectures on ege campuses and testified convincy about the dangers of pornography government hearings. When you see the movie Deep roat, you are watching me being ed,’ she baldly told an official uiry into the sex industry in 1986. t is a crime that movie is still wing. There was a gun to my head the entire time.’ For her old friends in the business, though, she was a traitor and they sneeringly coined the term ‘Linda Syndrome’ to describe former porn stars who later try to disown their seedy careers.
But it wasn’t long before Lovelace turned on her feminist allies, too, complaining bitterly they had ‘used’ her.
‘They made a few bucks off me, just like everybody else,’ she moaned. Lovelace told friends the final insult was when Steinem did not invite her to her wedding (to David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale). Poverty and a series of health crises blighted her later years.
During a double mastectomy brought on by botched silicone injections years earlier, doctors discovered her liver wa s collapsing from hepatitis, which she had in turn contracted from a blood transfusion after a 1970 car crash. A liver transplant in 1987 left her dependent on expensive medical drugs. But her husband had lost his building business and they were living on welfare. They divorced i n 1996, with Lovelace claiming he was an alcoholic who had physically and mentally abused her and the children. After becoming a grandmother in 1998, she spent her last years living alone, working day and night to make ends meet. But she had one more ideological U-turn left. In 2001, the vociferous antiporn campaigner stripped down to sexy lingerie — aged 52 — for Leg Show, an adult magazine. ‘There’s nothing wrong with looking sexy as long as it’s done with taste,’ she said, to counter the inevitable accus ati on of hypocrisy. Friends insist she was simply desperate for cash. A year later, she was dead. Driving to a hospital appointment for kidney dialysis in April 2002, she crashed into a concrete post in Denver and was hurled through the windscreen. She suffered massive internal injuries, and after two weeks on life- support, her family gathered at her bedside and asked for the machine to be switched off. It was a sad end to a deeply troubled life. And now history has chosen to pick over Linda Lovelace’s life. The first of the two forthcoming films, Lovelace, has just finished filming.
Directed by the Oscar-winning duo Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, it stars the doe-eyed, beautiful Mamma Mia! star Amanda Seyfried as Linda (who was nothing like as pretty), James Franco, Peter Sarsgaard and Sarah Jessica Parker. The latter stepped into the role of Gloria Steinem after Demi Moore, the first choice, dropped out. Significantly, the film has the backing of Lovelace’s grownup children, Dominic and Lindsay — and of Catharine Mackinnon, a feminist lawyer who campaigned with Lovelace to ban porn films. Prof Mackinnon describes her old comrade as ‘sweet, strong, smart and real’. Her f riend and f ormer biographer Eric Danville, who has worked as a consultant on the film, told me the script takes Lovelace’s life up to the time when she renounced Deep Throat and became an antiporn crusader.
‘The film will try as much as possible to end on a positive note i n terms of Linda’s story,’ he said. How does the film portray her? ‘I have to be diplomatic here... very much as she saw herself,’ he said. ‘A victim — for want of a better word. That’s the tale that everyone really knows.’
DANVILLE h i mself remembers her as ‘very malleable and very, very trusting’, but also as ‘extremely media savvy... she knew what people wanted to hear from her’. ‘But I met her near the end of her l i f e and she was utterly disillusioned. She felt she’d been turned over by the f eminists almost more than she was by the porn industry.’ Assuming i t ever gets off the ground, the second Lovelace film, Inferno, is purportedly an adaptation of her tell-all autobiography. The actress Malin Akerman, who will play Lovelace alongside Matt Dillon as Chuck Traynor, says she has read both scripts and Inferno is darker and more lurid.
The troubled actress Lindsay Lohan was originally to play Lovelace until she was sacked.
Film publicity shots of Lohan lying semi-naked on a bed pouting at the camera while a line of faceless men started unbuckling their trousers behind her suggest Hollywood’s penchant for glamorising porn and prostitution will be given full rein.
Like Deep Throat, the true story of Linda Lovelace is neither glamorous nor uplifting — however much the film’s fans insist it is some sort of celluloid Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Perhaps it would be better, given all she went through, if this troubled woman was allowed to rest in peace.