| Linda Lovelace | |
|---|---|
| Birthdate: | January 10, 1949 |
| Birth location: | Denver, Colorado |
| Birth name: | Linda Susan Boreman |
| Date of death: | April 22, 2002 (aged 53) |
| Height: | 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) |
| Ethnicity: | Caucasian |
| Alias(es): | Linda Lovelace |
| Linda Lovelace at IMDb | |
| Linda Lovelace at IAFD | |
| Linda Lovelace at AFDB | |
Linda Susan Boreman (January 10, 1949 – April 22, 2002), better known by her stage name "Linda Lovelace", was a porn actress who was famous for her performance of deep throat fellatio in the enormously successful 1972 hardcore porn film Deep Throat. She later denounced her pornography career, claimed that she had been forced into it by her sadistic first husband and for a while became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement.
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Boreman was born in The Bronx, New York City,[1] the daughter of a policeman and a woman she claimed was strict. Her parents were Roman Catholic and Boreman attended Catholic schools, including St. John the Baptist in Yonkers, New York, and Maria Regina High School, in Hartsdale, New York. In school, she was nicknamed, "Miss Holy Holy," because she kept her dates at a safe distance.[2] When Boreman was 16, the family moved to Florida.[3]
In her 1980 autobiography, "Ordeal," she stated that she gave birth to a son in 1969 when she was 20, and that her mother put him up for adoption. Boreman said she believed that the child was being put in foster care until she was ready to care for him, and was heartbroken when she learned she would never see him again. Boreman moved back to New York to start a new life in 1970. While there, she was involved in a violent car crash forcing her to undergo a blood transfusion. She moved back to Florida to recover.[2]
While in Florida, recovering at her parents' home, Boreman became involved with Chuck Traynor. According to Boreman, Traynor was a violent and controlling man. Boreman said he forced her to move to New York, where he became her manager, pimp and husband.
Boreman was soon the star in a number of hardcore short movies. She starred in a 1971 bestiality film (titledDog Fucker or Dogarama), and later denied appearing in the film until several of the original 8 mm "loops" proved otherwise.[2][4]
In 1972, Boreman starred in Deep Throat, perhaps the most financially successful pornographic movie in history.
After Deep Throat, Lovelace appeared in only two movies, both of which were softcore: the 1974 Deep Throat II[5], an R-rated sequel to the hardcore original, and the 1975 erotic comedy, Linda Lovelace for President.[6] In her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal, Lovelace maintained that those films used leftover footage from Deep Throat. She also appeared in Playboy, Bachelor and Esquire between 1973 and 1974.
In January 1974, Lovelace was arrested for possession of cocaine and amphetamines. That same year she published two "pro-porn" biographies, Inside Linda Lovelace and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace.
Around 1976, she was slated to play the title role in the big-budget erotic movie, Laure.[7] According to the movie's producer Ovidio Assonitis, Lovelace was, "very much on drugs," at the time; she had already signed on when she suddenly decided that "God had changed her life," refused to do any nudity and even took umbrage against a statue of the Venus de Milo on the set because of its exposed breasts. She was consequently replaced by French actress Annie Belle.[8]
In her later suit to divorce Traynor, she claimed that Traynor had forced her into pornography at gunpoint and that in Deep Throat itself, bruises from his beatings can be seen on her legs. Traynor would go on to marry and guide the career of Marilyn Chambers, another major porn star. Boreman claimed in her 1980 autobiography Ordeal that the couple's relationship was plagued by violence, rape, forced prostitution and private pornography. Some of the assertions made in her book have been challenged, but others have been verified by witnesses. Marilyn Chambers was Chuck Traynor's protégé after Boreman, and Traynor himself told Vanity Fair magazine (Marilyn Chambers' interview, with Chambers on the cover) that he thought nothing of slapping his woman if she said something he did not like. Linda stated that:
When in response to his suggestions I let him know I would not become involved in prostitution in any way and told him I intended to leave, [Traynor] beat me up physically and the constant mental abuse began. I literally became a prisoner, I was not allowed out his sight, not even to use the bathroom, where he watched me through a hole in the door. He slept on top of me at night, he listened to my telephone calls with a .45 automatic eight shot pointed at me. I was beaten physically and suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter. He undermined my ties with other people and forced me to marry him on advice from his lawyer. My initiation into prostitution was a gang rape by five men, arranged by Mr. Traynor. It was the turning point in my life. He threatened to shoot me with the pistol if I didn't go through with it. I had never experienced anal sex before and it ripped me apart. They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life. I felt like garbage. I engaged in sex acts for pornography against my will to avoid being killed...The lives of my family were threatened.[9]
On the second commentator's track of the DVD of the documentary Inside Deep Throat, "Deep Throat 2" co-star Andrea True said that Chuck Traynor was a sadist and was disliked by the Deep Throat 2 cast. Similarly, a Deep Throat staff member who roomed next door to Boreman and Traynor during the filming of Deep Throat said that Traynor beat Boreman viciously after hours and sexually tortured her into obeying him in public.
In the book The Other Hollywood, by Legs McNeil, witnesses, including Gerard Damiano, the film's director, confirm that Traynor beat Boreman behind closed doors, but they also question her credibility. Adult film actress Gloria Leonard is quoted as saying about Boreman, "This was a woman who never took responsibility for her own [...] choices—but instead blamed everything that happened to her in her life on porn."
Eric Danville, a journalist who has covered the porn industry for nearly 20 years and who wrote The Complete Linda Lovelace in 2001, said Boreman never changed her version of events that had occurred 30 years earlier with Traynor. When Danville pitched his book proposal to Boreman, he wrote that she was overcome with emotion and saddened that he had uncovered the bestiality film, which she had initially denied making and later maintained she had been forced to star in at gunpoint. In The Other Hollywood, Eric Edwards, Boreman's co-star in the bestiality films, disputes this claim.
Boreman maintained that she received no money for appearing in Deep Throat, and that the $1,250 for her appearance was taken by Traynor. In 1979 Boreman retained Victor Yannacone, a controversial attorney more frequently associated with environmental lawsuits, to sue for a portion of the several hundred million dollars the film had earned. The suit was dismissed without trial by the Nassau County Supreme Court in Mineola, New York and was never appealed.
In 1974, Boreman married Larry Marchiano and they had two children, a son, Dominic, in 1977, and a daughter, Lindsey, in 1980. As quoted in, The Other Hollywood, Boreman painted an unflattering portrait of Marchiano, claiming that he drank to excess, verbally abused her children and was violent with her. The couple divorced in 1996.
Boreman's immediate family was said to have been outraged that she was involved in porn. But her sister, Barbara Boreman, suggested in one of Boreman's biographies that the family later forgave and supported her.
With the publication of Ordeal in 1980, Boreman joined the feminist anti-pornography movement. At a press conference announcing Ordeal, she leveled many accusations against Traynor in public for the first time. She was joined by supporters Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem, and members of Women Against Pornography. She spoke out against pornography, stating that she had been abused and coerced. She spoke before feminist groups, at colleges, and before government hearings on pornography.
There was controversy over her allegations, and her objections to the pornography industry as a whole. Pornographer and writer Hart Williams coined the term “Linda Syndrome” to refer to women who leave pornography and repudiate their past career by condemning the industry.
In 1986, Boreman published Out of Bondage, another memoir focusing on her life after 1974. She testified before the 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in New York City, stating that “When you see the movie Deep Throat, you are watching me being raped. It is a crime that movie is still showing; there was a gun to my head the entire time.” Following Boreman's testimony for the Meese Commission, Boreman gave lectures on college campuses and elsewhere, decrying what she described as callous and exploitative practices in the pornography industry.
In The Other Hollywood, Boreman said she felt "used" by the anti-pornography movement. "Between Andrea Dworkin and Kitty MacKinnon, they've written so many books, and they mention my name and all that, but financially they've never helped me out. [...] They made a few bucks off me, just like everybody else."
Boreman contracted hepatitis from the blood transfusion she received after her 1970 car accident, and underwent a liver transplant in 1987. [10] In 1996, Boreman divorced Larry Marchiano. In 2000, she was featured on the E! Entertainment Network's E! True Hollywood Story. In 2001, Boreman did a pictorial, as Linda Lovelace, for the magazine Leg Show. She contended that she did not object to this because "there's nothing wrong with looking sexy as long as it's done with taste." Subsequently, Hustler named her the "Asshole of the Month" for March 2001.
On April 3, 2002, Boreman was driving when she lost control of her car, which rolled twice. She suffered massive trauma and internal injuries. On April 22, 2002 she was taken off life support and died in Denver, Colorado, aged 53. Her ex-husband, Larry Marchiano, and their two adult children Dominic and Lindsay were at the hospital when she died. She is interred at Parker Cemetery in Parker, Colorado.
Although she had been the star of the most profitable pornographic movie of all time, Boreman died poor.
Boreman was at the focus of a 2005 documentary, Inside Deep Throat.
Plans from 2005 for a biopic entitled "Lovelace" and starring Courtney Love seem to have fallen flat[11]. Likewise, comedian Anna Faris was rumored to have been involved in the production of a similar movie entitled "Inferno" in 2007, which so far has failed to materialize[12][13].
In 2008, "Lovelace: A Rock Opera", based on two of Boreman's four autobiographies, debuted at the Hayworth Theater in Los Angeles. The score and libretto were written by Anna Waronker of the 1990s rock group that dog, and Charlotte Caffey of the '80s girl group, the Go-Go's.
Boreman has been the subject of five authorized biographies:
Other books: