Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Periano’s doubts about Boreman, however, concerned Traynor, and at his insistence she performed her “deep-throat trick” on the producer every day during the twelve-day shoot to help ensure her and Traynor’s $2,400 gig. She wondered, “I knew that some starlets would take care of movie producers sexually, but that was before they got the role, not afterwards.”

  The Deep Throat production established its headquarters at the Voyager Inn in Biscayne, Florida, and as Boreman remembered it, the film took up a week and a half of her life. “Six before the cameras, six waiting around for the sun to come out,” she said. When she wasn’t swimming in the motel pool to “get rid of the flab,” as Traynor called it, her boyfriend was either beating her blue, which posed a problem for the film’s makeup guy, or threatening her with his arsenal of weaponry, which included a .45-caliber Walther pistol, an eight-shot automatic, and a semi-automatic machine gun. Her only friend, it seemed, was her cat, which she named Adolf Hitler in honor of the pet’s mustache-like markings on his head.

  Herbert Streicher, Boreman’s costar in the film, began work as a production assistant on Deep Throat, but around day two of the shoot Damiano promoted him to the role of onscreen doctor when another actor couldn’t get it up on cue. It’s the character of Dr. Young who discovers the clitoris in the throat of Linda Lovelace, which is what they called Boreman’s character. Damiano did not give Streicher the screen name Dr. Young; he called him Harry Reems.

  Depending on who does the talking, it was or wasn’t a happy set.

  “Chuck was an asshole,” said Streicher, “but he was hardly around for the filming. Damiano sent him away because he would get jealous of how much she was enjoying the sex. She was really into it.”

  Damiano agreed with Streicher that, contrary to what she said later, Boreman enjoyed her job in the Florida sun. “Linda needed someone to tell her what to do,” he surmised. “She was happy making the movie. Afterwards, someone told her she was unhappy making the movie. So she was unhappy making the movie. Which was not true.”

  Boreman rejected that willing-victim status. As she explained her seeming complicity, “Because it’s kind of hard to get away when there’s a gun pointed at your head. There was always a gun pointed at my head. Even when no gun could be seen, there was a gun pointed at my head.”

  And besides, as much as she may or may not have enjoyed the sex with Streicher and a few other men, life on the set of Deep Throat was an improvement of sorts. “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,” she noted.

  Streicher found it “courageous,” not to mention a public service, that someone was daring and liberated enough to make a film about oral sex. Damiano agreed: “People didn’t realize that a woman could ever have as much pleasure as a man. That why I wanted to show it.” But it was a challenge. When a man has an orgasm, there’s the proof of semen. But a woman? “That’s why I inserted the rocket footage to embellish the footage of Lovelace going down on Reems, to show the power of her orgasm,” said Damiano.

  Years later, Boreman would reject the idea that Deep Throat showed a woman’s sexual pleasure. “Suppose your balls were in your ears?” she asked an inquiring reporter.

  ON JUNE 12, LESS than six months after principal photography had completed, Deep Throat opened in Times Square at the New World. The theater took in thirty-three thousand dollars in the movie’s first week. The theater’s twenty-six-year-old manager, Bob Sumner, thought he could improve those phenomenal grosses by charging three dollars instead of five, but he soon learned that aficionados of hard-core think they’re getting soft-core if the admission isn’t at least twice that of a normal movie. He quickly raised admission back to five dollars, the going rate for hard-core, and the box office bonanza continued.

  Pornmeisters sensed the competition. “I’m really offended that films like Deep Throat are available in this city,” said Bob Guccione, whose new skin magazine, Penthouse, had just begun to make deep inroads into Playboy’s circulation of five million copies a month. Quotes like “I’m really offended,” coming from Guccione, helped keep the dew on the scandal. And soon gossip columnists were giving almost daily tallies of the many celebrities who came to Times Square to see Deep Throat, whether it be Johnny Carson, Sandy Dennis, Ben Gazzara, or Jack Nicholson. “Mike Nichols told me I just had to see it!” said Truman Capote, who deemed Linda Lovelace “charming.”

  Even housewives from the boroughs started making the Wednesday matinee trek to the New World. “Once it broke in the society columns, it was OK to go,” said Variety’s film critic Addison Verrill.

  Pauline Kael wanted to review Deep Throat for The New Yorker. She’d paid to see the film with her friend Charles Simmons, an editor at the New York Times Book Review, who told her he’d never seen a porn film before. “You lost your cherry on a good one,” Kael told him. Her good opinion of Deep Throat, however, never made it into print. Kael’s editor at The New Yorker, the prudish William Shawn, refused to have pornography reviewed in his magazine.

  Overall, female moviegoers were not pleased—at least those who wrote for major publications. Ellen Willis of the New York Review of Books called Deep Throat “as erotic as a tonsillectomy.” Nora Ephron in Esquire called it “one of the most unpleasant, disturbing films I have ever seen. It is not just anti-female, but anti-sex as well.” She went on to wonder if she was “a puritanical feminist who had lost her sense of humor at a skin flick.” Or as famed attorney Alan Dershowitz explained it, “In the 1970s, the worst censors in the country suddenly became the feminists.”

  The media did their best to promote that truism. The feminist war on pornography made good copy; reports on reproductive rights, equal pay, and day-care access did not and were essentially ignored.

  As soon as Deep Throat looked to be a runaway hit, Damiano sold out his share for only twenty thousand dollars to Lou Periano, the original moneyman. On why he decided to sell out for such a lowball figure just when the film’s weekly grosses were skyrocketing, Damiano explained, “Look, you want me to get both my legs broken?”

  Periano would later claim there was nothing shady going on. “My father may have been in the mob. My uncle may have been. But even the government says that I wasn’t. They called me ‘an associate,’ ” he said.

  Yes, the government. “The government became the driving force behind the [film’s] public relations,” said Alan Dershowitz.

  The NYPD, at the instigation of the Times Square Development Council, raided Deep Throat during its premiere summer run in Times Square, and Criminal Court Judge Ernst Rosenberger had the film seized on August 18. It was all part of Mayor John Lindsay’s “Clean Up Times Square” campaign. Periano and the New World theater hired as their defense attorney Herbert Kassner, who volleyed back, “If it was pornography, they could prosecute in a diligent manner. They wouldn’t have to come around in hordes of fifty and take signs out of windows and act like the Gestapo of old.”

  Gestapo of old or new, it didn’t matter. At least that first summer. Since the good judge failed to give the theater owner a hearing, Deep Throat quickly returned home to the New World, where its fame only grew, fueled by reports like the one in New York magazine, which held forth that “the whole issue is now before the United States Supreme Court, which must decide whether a judge alone can see a film and decide it is obscene without giving the theater owner a hearing.”

  No, said the Supreme Court, giving thousands of other moviegoers time to jam the New World to make up their own mind.

  While Deep Throat was subsequently banned in twenty-three states, it continued to open elsewhere and prosper, as did a new and equally graphic how-to sex manual. Since he’d studied medicine and anatomy back in London, Dr. Alex Comfort already knew that the clitoris did not call the throat its home. But there among the chaparral and hot tubs of the Sandstone retreat in Topanga Canyon, California, Comfort did learn
a few new things regarding group sex and bondage, and he put these teachings into The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide. Just as sales for Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex began to recede, Comfort’s manual took its place, spending no fewer than seventy weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

  CANDY DARLING AND HOLLY WOODLAWN walked off Park Avenue South and into Max’s Kansas City, bummed that neither Paul Morrissey nor Andy Warhol had the decency to invite them to the premiere of their new film, Heat, about a former child actor who beds an old Hollywood star, played by Sylvia Miles, to jump-start his movie career. As usual, the movie starred Joe Dallesandro, and as usual he played a hustler.

  Word had gotten back to Holly and Candy that Andy was no longer into chicks with dicks, which made them wonder why Morrissey had cast Andrea Feldman, aka Andy Feldman, to play Sylvia Miles’s daughter in the film.

  Feldman also didn’t get invited to the Heat premiere. But no one could hold that snub against the movie’s makers. Two months earlier, Andrea asked a few ex-boyfriends to her parents’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. And with a Bible in one hand and a crucifix in the other, she told the assemblage that this was her “final starring role” and jumped out the window.

  Maybe that’s why Andy wasn’t into chicks with dicks. Or maybe he just wasn’t into chicks, period, after the Valerie Solanas episode.

  Despite their Heat disappointment, Candy and Holly had good news nonetheless that autumn day when they walked into the back room at Max’s and saw friends. “Lou Reed wrote a song about me!” Candy bragged.

  “Pig’s eye, Lou Reed wrote a song about you,” replied a friend.

  “Okay, Mr. Wiseguy, I’ll show you,” said Candy. She asked for a quarter. She never had any money. Someone gave her a quarter, and Candy walked over to the jukebox, put in the money, and hit some keys. The music came on. It sure sounded like Lou Reed singing, “Hey Babe, take a walk on the wild side.”

  Candy Darling could not have been happier, even if she did have to share the song with Holly Woodlawn and Joe Dallesandro, who’d also been immortalized by Lou Reed. Candy’s fame from the song, however, proved the most ephemeral. When RCA released the “Walk on the Wild Side” single from Reed’s album Transformer, the label cut the Candy Darling reference due to its implications of oral sex: “But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head.”

  Coincidentally, Heat was also much less bold than Paul Morrissey’s previous movies. He didn’t show Joe Dallesandro’s penis this time around, as he’d done in Flesh and Trash.

  “I was naked enough in Heat,” Dallesandro surmised, especially with regard to his costars Sylvia Miles and Pat Ast. “They’re not the kind of women you want to get naked with in bed,” he explained.

  Neither was he terribly impressed with the Lou Reed song. “Paul Morrissey asked him to write it,” said Dallesandro. “Lou Reed didn’t know me. He watched some movies and wrote about the characters that Candy, Holly, and I played, that’s all.”

  Morrissey, again, deserved full credit. And the New York Times agreed, reporting, “He did more than anyone to create the image of the Warhol world as a nonstop festival of sleaze, drugs and moral squalor.”

  Morrissey, for his part, was in full agreement.

  “I did those films one hundred percent myself,” Morrissey said years later. “Andy Warhol was a total vacuum. He just stood there like an even bigger idiot than he was. I put his name on [the films] as a presenter. That’s all he wanted was to have his name in the paper. He couldn’t read anything. He just saw his name. I made the mistake of putting his name on them. Everything was done by me.”

  Not that it was a mistake. “Paul thought those films would be shown in museums forever,” said Dallesandro, “because Warhol was an artist.”

  THAT OCTOBER, THE CONTINUING notoriety of Deep Throat played into United Artists’ unusual release of its new sex-saturated film. As the Village Voice film critic Andrew Sarris observed, “Adding to the [Deep Throat] ferment was the almost simultaneous furor around Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, in which Marlon Brando simulated forcing a buttery substance down the anus of the writhing and nude Maria Schneider.”

  United Artists’ David Picker knew he couldn’t open a film like Last Tango in Italy, Bertolucci’s home country, where it would almost certainly run into censorship problems. Instead, the studio decided to brand Last Tango as an “art film” by holding just one screening at a prestigious film festival. Cannes was nearly a year away, in May 1973. The closest major event was the New York Film Festival. United Artists would debut the film there on October 14.

  It was the hottest ticket in town, and Picker and Bertolucci could not have been more pleased at the reception in Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Andrew Sarris sat a few rows back from The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. “I could hear her gasping—in shock or ecstasy. I couldn’t tell,” he reported. Bertolucci fans yelled bravo, prudes simply left in a huff, and Kael let everyone within earshot know that she’d just witnessed a movie “breakthrough.”

  A few days later, in The New Yorker, she reported on what she’d seen on October 14, 1972:

  “That date should become a landmark in movie history—comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le sacre du printemps was first performed—in music history.” She went on to explain, “This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating. . . . Brando and Bertolucci have altered the face of an art form.”

  Detractors of Kael, and she had many in the New York film critics community, gossiped that Kael’s review was an act of politics, that she had always been a major supporter of Bertolucci, and had set out to write a review that would prevent any censor from tampering with it. Kael always denied the political aspects of her review. But there was no denying her review’s impact. “She single-handedly rescued the film from any dismissive puritanical condemnation,” said Sarris.

  The Italians didn’t get that memo.

  Last Tango in Paris was an immediate box-office sensation in Bertolucci’s native country, especially in Rome. But up north in Bologna, it created the kind of sensation that moviemakers generally try to avoid.

  The Bologna lawmakers slapped Last Tango with an obscenity charge that claimed the movie was “permeated by scurrilous language—with crude, repulsive, naturalistic and even unnatural representation of carnal union, with continued and complacent scenes, descriptions and exhibitions of masturbation, libidinous acts and lewd nudity.”

  Bertolucci replied in kind. “The text of the court accusation is a pornographic document,” he said.

  Bertolucci, Brando, and Schneider were each threatened with an eight-month prison sentence, and United Artists immediately withdrew the film from distribution throughout Italy.

  Paris was a different story. There, the film continued to do gangbuster business.

  PAT LOUD MADE A few visits to New York City to see the edited version of An American Family. Her estranged husband, Bill, made just one trip—to check out episode nine, in which Pat tells him to find another place to spend the night, as well as the rest of his life. Bill asked Craig Gilbert if a couple of lines could be cut. Gilbert agreed. But it was clear to both Pat and Bill: They didn’t have final approval of the edit. Their visits were courtesy calls at best, because when Pat had a major problem—like she did with the title sequence—she didn’t get her way.

  Pat hated how the title words An American Family developed spidery cracks, as if they were ready to shatter into pieces. Or, as she described it, “cracked, like china breaking.” She felt it was too strong an editorial comment. And besides, the Louds were still a family. She objected to the graphics not once but twice. On her second visit to New York City, Gilbert didn’t verbally respond to her objections. He simply put his hand over her eyes when the logo splintered onscreen. In other words, she came, she saw, she lost.

  That autumn, the Louds didn’t hear much about the series or think much about it, except for the family’s seventeen-ye
ar-old son, Grant, who hoped that the show would help launch his new rock band, which the documentary showcased in a couple of episodes.

  In December, WNET invited Lance Loud to represent his family at the premiere screening of An American Family. It took place at no less a prestigious venue than the Museum of Modern Art, and Lance dressed to impress in his best David Bowie/Ziggie Stardust gender-bending attire. He had been hired by Gilbert to help with the editing and do some voice-over narration, and so he thought he knew what to expect. There would be no surprises, he thought.

  At the museum, a publicist’s flunky handed him the glossy press kit. Lance immediately recognized the cover image as a recent portrait of the Loud family, one that they had used for a Christmas card—only it was different. The family photograph no longer looked so festive, because the image had been scorched at the edges and there were big cracks drawn on it to separate each of the seven Louds.

  Lance phoned his mother as soon as he returned home from MoMA that night. “You won’t believe it!” he began. He not only described the doctored family portrait; he read the entire press release, which contained profiles of each of the twelve episodes. The family had trusted Craig Gilbert and WNET. This was public television—no commercials, no promos, no hype. Lance began reading from the press release: “The breakdown of communications so striking in the Loud family is perhaps a typically American disease, the result of disproportionate emphasis on maintaining surfaces, keeping cool. These people touch without meeting, meet without touching.”

  By the time he finished reading, Pat wanted to kill Craig Gilbert and the whole cabal at WNET. “I knew that everybody in the business who hadn’t seen the series would simply lift things from that piece and use them as their own,” she believed.