One of the things people ask about my friendship with Linda is what she thought of me being a pornographer. To tell the truth, she wasn’t too thrilled with it; once she told me I seemed like a smart guy and wondered why I hadn’t gone into something more respectable. I told her that I loved the business, it wasn’t the same as when she was involved, and I certainly wasn’t interested in working for The New York Times. I’ve always been proud that she agreed I wasn’t the stereotypical cigar-chomping, gold-chain-wearing, mob-connected “pornographer” she encountered in the early ’70s. I also like to think she saw I was hardly the kind of woman-hating, domestic-abusing, pud-whacking misogynist bastard that she railed against in the ’80s as spokesthing for Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine Mackinnon.
One of the things people criticize about my friendship with Linda is that it was just that: a friendship, whereas I should have remained professionally and personally distant from her in order to more objectively investigate her story.
Well, yes and no.
First, I don’t like being told what to do, especially when it comes to writing.
Second, after more than three years of research, gathering sources, reading them objectively and making my own informed decision before meeting Linda, I came to the conclusion there was something to her claims that, at the very least, she was being beaten by Chuck Traynor. Prime among those sources were two interviews in, ironically enough, Screw magazine: Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano’s comments that yes, he did see evidence of abuse on the set of Deep Throat and Chuck Traynor’s own comments about how he kept his women in line. (I discuss that in greater detail in The Complete Linda Lovelace than I will here. Hint, hint.)
Third, I liked her. She was a nice lady—who was more than a little difficult to deal with at times. Like most women, she appreciated being complimented. There were times when I’d show her a piece of my Lovelace memorabilia—or when she showed me hers—and I’d say, “God, that picture’s so hot!” or “Wow, you look beautiful there!” This includes old, long-forgotten porn mags, one in particular a hardcore publication that showed her in action with Chuck Traynor. Far from curling up in a corner and screaming, “Noooo! You’re raping me ag-a-a-a-in!” she’d take what I said in the spirit in which it was given, answering with a smile or a friendly touch on the shoulder.
When we were at photographer Warren Tang’s studio for Linda’s Leg Show magazine shoot, I told her that I’d just seen a tape of the Charlie Sheen/Emilio Estevez Mitchell Brothers biopic X-Rated after it appeared on Showtime. I told her that the broadcast also had Marilyn Chambers offering comments after the film. The first thing Linda asked me was how Marilyn looked. I said she looked fine, maybe a little heavier than during her heyday, but she looked fine. Linda’s answer? A crinkle of the nose, a quick grin and a whispered, “I was always better looking than she was, anyway!”
I had to agree, and I told her so.
If there’s one thing I learned after lots of personal interaction with Linda Boreman, it’s that after all she’d experienced, she was a woman. She didn’t hate men, she didn’t hate sex, and she didn’t hate giving head, even after her life in prostitution and pornography. She loved men. She loved sex. And she loved giving head. She told me as much. As far as I could tell, what she didn’t love—aside from the commercialization of sex—was being ridiculed or insulted about loving men, sex and giving head.
Once she told me about a comment her ex-husband Larry Marchiano had made about her: That she gave the best head in the world. Ordinarily not a bad thing to hear, except that he made the comment to a member of their own family (whom I won’t name). The comment didn’t seem to upset Linda because of its validity; she knew the statement was true (she told me as much on that topic, too). She seemed hurt by its crassness, especially considering the person to whom the comment was made.
More than anything, Linda Boreman—whether you see her as a world-class cocksucking machine turned opportunistic anti-porn zealot or a demonized rape victim created by a psychopathic misogynist and exploited by America’s criminal underworld—wanted to be respected. . . . by her husband, her children, her friends, and the public that projected any number of its own fantasies onto her and her claims.
And I could never have seen that side of the story if we hadn’t become friends.
