I use that word—“fuck”—because it fit the act. What I was doing then had nothing whatsoever to do with making love. In my mind there is a world of difference between fucking and making love. I think that “fuck” is an extremely ugly word and with that in mind, I use it here.
At the beginning of the movie there was none of that at all. In fact, the first day we set up the outside shots, what they called the “exteriors,” around the motel swimming pool. The mood of the previous few days carried into the actual shooting. The crew members were all in high spirits, telling jokes, playing pranks, goofing on the director and, somehow, despite all this, taking some pictures.
Something was happening to me, something strange. It had to do with the fact that no one was treating me like garbage. And maybe it was just the chemistry of being part of a group. For the first time in many months, I was thrown in with other people, other people who weren’t perverted and threatening. I became part of a group. I began to ease up.
The first scene called for me to be sitting beside the pool in a bathing suit while an actor dove into the pool, swam across it, and splashed some water on me. One of the crew members did something funny—I can no longer remember what—but everyone started laughing, and I was laughing along with the rest of them.
I was laughing along with the rest of them. And I thought my face would break. I hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in so long that my face had to carve new smile lines. That thought struck me as funny, and I laughed some more; then I just let it all come out.
We laughed a lot that first day of shooting while we were doing the poolside shots, the walking-down-the-street shots and the knocking-on-the-door shots. And no one was asking me to do anything I didn’t want to do.
That night, back in the motel room, I was still feeling fine. The entire crew was in the very next room having a party. They were drinking, smoking pot, carrying on—and the sounds of partying came clearly into our room. There was only one person who was not having a good time. Chuck. Throughout the day he had gotten more and more sullen; now he was staring across the room at me with low-burning hatred.
I had to get away from him and that intensity. I went into the bathroom, removed my makeup, and took a shower. When I went back out into the bedroom, nothing had changed. The party in the next room was still going full blast, and Chuck’s expression was the same.
“What’s the matter now?” I asked.
“You cunt!”
“What is the matter?”
“Your smile!” he said. “That fucking smile of yours. You were so busy smiling all day—well, let’s see you smile now. Why don’t you smile for me now?”
“What do you want from me? What’re you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your fucking smile. You walk around smiling all day like some idiot Mona Lisa. Smiling at the crew. Smiling at Damiano. Smiling at that asshole Reems.”
“You told me I should look like I was into it.”
“I didn’t tell you to go around smiling!” Chuck was yelling at me now, and I realized that the party sounds from the next room had stopped. “You don’t have to smile like some idiot. And laughing! What was that all about? I didn’t see anything to laugh about. Why was everyone laughing around the pool?”
“It was just something funny.”
“It was just something funny.” Chuck loved to mimic me. “What was so funny? I didn’t see anything that was funny. You think this is funny now? You cunt, you think there’s something funny going on now?”
“What’re you talking about?” Suddenly I was screaming back at him, angry, too. Oh, that was some day, the first time in many months that I had been able to feel laughter and anger. Just feeling anything again felt good. Even the anger felt good and I let it all out.
“First you yell at me because I look too sad, and now you yell at me because I’m smiling too much! Smiling too much! You ought to see a doctor, Chuck, you really ought to. Because you’re crazy.”
“I’m not the one who is going to need a doctor.”
I was going to be in for it now. Talking back to Chuck was a major offense. My only hope was the men in the next room. It had grown as quiet as a tomb in there; they had to be hearing everything that was being said. For the first time, help seemed at hand.
“And I know why you’re so mad,” I said.
“Shut up!”
“You’re mad because it’s like you’re losing some of your power.”
“Cunt!”
The first punch sent me crashing over backwards onto the bed. The minute I had said that about his losing power, I realized it was the truth. He knew it was true, too. The presence of other people diminished him and diluted my fear of him. It gave me courage.
And this is what made him go insane. Most often when Chuck beat me, it was in the manner of someone training an animal—cold-blooded and methodical and to make a point. Not this time. He went berserk. He picked me up off the bed and threw me against the wall separating us from the crew.
“Stop!” I was screaming as a way of getting the attention of the men in the next room. “Please stop! You’re hurting me!”
He tore my bathrobe off in two pieces. I wriggled away from him and went down to the floor. By this time I had learned that the best way to handle a beating was to roll myself up into a tight ball on the floor—protecting my breasts and my stomach from his boots. When I was curled up that way, most of his kicks hit me on the legs.
This happened enough so that today my legs are still a mess. Not too long ago, I went to see a doctor in New York about having the surface veins removed from my legs and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He said, “My God, what happened to you?”
Well, this was what happened to me. This beating and many others like it.
“Help!” I called out. “Oh, God, please help me! Someone, help me!”
Help did not come. Chuck was still in a frenzy, kicking hard at me with his boots while I squeezed myself into a tighter and tighter ball. I held my breath, waiting for the men in the next room to build up their courage and come to my aid. I knew they would. They knew I was in trouble. In the past I had always been surrounded by strangers, and I didn’t expect that a stranger would help. But these men were not strangers. We had just spent a long day together. We had kidded with each other, laughed at the same jokes, behaved the way friends behave with each other. Where were they? Why didn’t they come?
Before then I wouldn’t have yelled at Chuck and I wouldn’t have screamed for help. That would always mean a worse beating for me. But on this day, I was willing to take that chance. But no one came. The beating went on until Chuck finally got physically tired and stopped.
After the beating, I lay curled on the floor while Chuck turned on the television set. I wanted to get up and go back into the hot shower, but I knew I’d have to ask permission first. And I wasn’t up to that. As I lay there on the floor, Chuck was walking around, whistling, feeling chipper, back in control. Finally, I surrendered.
“Chuck, can I go to bed now?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”
I dragged myself over to the bed and fell into it. Chuck was watching a war movie. There were still no sounds from the next room. I guess my screaming must’ve ruined their party. There were at least a half-dozen of them. They could have handled Chuck. But no. No one did anything until the next day. And then what they did was to try to conceal my bruises.
The next morning, I went into the motel cafeteria for breakfast. I was wearing shorts and large bruise marks had already formed on my legs. Chuck was making a phone call when Gerry Damiano came over to speak to me. His eyes went right to my legs.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” he said. “What’s that all about?”
“What?”
“Those bruises all over your legs, what’re they all about?”
“They’re just bruises. I can’t talk about them.”
“Well, I can,” he said. “Those bruises happen to be very importa
nt to me. We’ll do what we can to cover them up, but they’ll show up in the movie. I mean, one reason you got this job—believe it or not, Linda, this is the main reason —is that you looked so fresh and young. So innocent. How innocent are you going to look with those marks all over your body?”
“I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“But what brought it about? I wouldn’t have guessed that Chuck was going to turn into the jealous type.”
“That’s not it. It’s not because he’s jealous.”
“Well, we better be sure about that,” Damiano said. “If he is jealous, what’s he going to be like later on when the scenes are coming down between you and Harry?”
“I don’t think he’ll do anything else,” I said. “He doesn’t care what anyone else does to me. I think the reason he beat me up was I was having too good a time. He says I was smiling too much.”
“I’m not sure I follow that.”
“If you ever figure it out, explain it to me.”
When I got to the set, I could feel the difference in mood. No more jokes. No one seemed able to look me in the eyes. One of the other girls on the set had makeup with her and together we painted over the bruises. But the camouflage was not perfect. If you saw the movie, you must have seen the huge black-and-blue marks on my thighs and legs.
Later that morning Damiano sent us out to buy a nurse’s uniform. As the director was giving Chuck the instructions, I was joined by Norman, the sound man. Norman was quiet and shy and always seemed to be hiding out behind his sunglasses. He started speaking to me out of the side of his mouth, rapidly, his eyes on Chuck all the time.
“Look, Linda, we had no idea how bad it is.”
“You didn’t?”
“If you need help, just let me know. I mean, if there’s anything any of us can do, just give us a signal.”
“What can anyone do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We could help.” He sped up the talk as he saw Chuck and Damiano winding up their conversation. “I mean it, just let us know. We heard what was going on last night. And I just want you to know I’m here.”
I could see that much. He was here. I didn’t say a word but I know what I was thinking: sure, you’re here now but where were you last night? Where were you when you were needed? Where was anyone? It was nice, and it may have been brave of him to offer help, but it was too late; the corpse was being thrown a lifesaver. It was an offer that couldn’t be accepted, because it was an offer that couldn’t be trusted. He was just saying words with nothing behind them.
Does that sound too hard? Maybe so. But I am tough on people. Most people don’t know how hard I judge them because I don’t say anything. All I do is cross them off the list. Forever. These men had their chance to help me and they didn’t respond. If someone is your friend—really your friend—they don’t let a chance like that pass by. When someone needs help, that’s the time to help. Not the next day. Not when it’s safe.
And so I stopped smiling. And now, whenever we shot a scene, I would hear, “Smile, Linda” and “Please smile, Linda” and “Just try one little smile, Linda.” But those smiles were harder and harder to come by. If I smiled too much, Chuck would beat me. And now I knew that no one would lift a finger to help me. The guys on the set tried to cheer me up by goofing around, but there was no longer anything to smile about.
We started doing the interior shots, many of them in homes borrowed for the movie. Now that I was completely sobered up, I could see how absurd my role in the movie was. In the movie I play some weird kind of visiting nurse. My job was to go around and make people feel better. Mostly men, needless to say.
The big scene in the movie is when Harry Reems, playing a doctor, discovers that my clitoris has been misplaced and is located in my throat. Although we tried this scene several times, we could never get it quite right. We never had any trouble with the action, only with the lines. We’d do the sex scenes just once and then we’d hear Damiano say, “That’s a take!” But when we so-called actors had a simple line or two to deliver, we’d be there for hours trying to get it right. One scene went on until four in the morning. We couldn’t figure out why one of the actresses was having such trouble with her lines until Damiano discovered that she had never learned to read.
Harry and I took turns messing up our lines in one big scene until Damiano finally lost his patience. Then the director took the unprecedented step of calling for a rehearsal. Harry and I were told to keep going over the lines until we got them right.
“It’s not so bad,” Harry was supposed to say, “You should be thankful you have a clitoris at all.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” I replied through teardrops. “How would you feel if your balls were in your ear?”
“Why then I could hear myself coming!” Harry said.
Well, on this day it was hard not to laugh. As we went over the idiotic lines time and time again, they seemed funnier and funnier. Everytime I lamented my missing clitoris —“I want to hear bells ringing, dams bursting, and rockets exploding”—we’d break up. Harry would say something like, “Tell me, Linda, exactly why is that you want to hear a dam burst?” and that would be enough to set us off.
Damiano joined our little rehearsal as Harry was examining the spot where the clitoris is normally located, and he kept finding other objects: A golden pocket watch … things like that. And every time he found a strange object, he would say. “Oh, my God, what have we here?”
The three of us were all laughing at that when suddenly, without anyone saying a word, we stopped and swiveled around toward Chuck who was staring at us from the other side of the large dimly lit room. His eyes seemed to burn through the darkness. The laughing died and we all froze for a long moment before returning to the scene. Chuck decided we had rehearsed the scene enough.
“I don’t see why they have to go over that again,” he said. “They’ve got the lines down now.”
“Let them be,” Damiano said. “I want them to get them cold.”
“Yeah, well how many times do they have to go over the same stuff?”
“Chuck, do me a little favor, will you?” Damiano said. “Would you go out and pick up the sandwiches? We’re about to break for lunch.”
Chuck was grumbling as he went out for the food, but he did go. And from that moment on, Chuck became Damiano’s gofer—he’d go for coffee, beer, lunch, cigarettes, practically anything that would keep him out of the way. Once Chuck was gone, Damiano would close the set so that he couldn’t return until we completed shooting the scene. This was his way of keeping Chuck and Harry Reems apart.
“You see the way they’re treating me?” Chuck would complain in private. “They don’t seem to realize that I’m the man who trained the star. I mean, who was it brought you to New York in the first place? If it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t have a fucking star, and they wouldn’t have this fucking movie. And here they are, treating me like some damn errand boy.”
It still hadn’t dawned on me that this was going to be a big movie that would someday be shown in a theater on a real movie screen. Deep Throat would be important to me in many ways, but I didn’t realize that then. To me it would be at once a low point and a salvation.
As it was happening, it seemed insignificant. The film itself only took up twelve days of my life—six before the cameras, another six waiting around for the sun to come out. Probably the most important thing to happen to me was a rechristening. Damiano came up with the name Linda Lovelace for the character in his movie. There had been a BB and an MM and now he wanted an LL. In time, I came to dislike the name, Linda Lovelace, because of what it stood for. But the truth is this: Linda Boreman and Linda Traynor never managed to get away from Chuck; it took a Linda Lovelace to escape.
Deep Throat seemed just another small chapter of my life, but I hated to see it end. Maybe nothing had really changed, not yet, and maybe I had to be involved sexually with an actor or two, but it was much better than it might otherwise
have been. 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.
Whenever Chuck was out of sight, one or another of the crew would come up and talk with me. They all said that I could make a fortune in porno movies. If I just had the right manager. And, as luck would have it, each of them had a scam: a script, a producer with money, a pet film project. It always came down to the same thing, “Baby, I can make you a star.” Maybe some people would find that flattering, but a career in dirty movies was not something that meant anything to me. Not then, not ever.
Every evening, after we finished shooting for the day, Chuck and I drove the film out to the airport. It was shipped up to Lou in New York where it was processed and studied. And every day Lou would call Damiano to complain. We could only hear Damiano’s side of the conversation—so I would hear him yell that I was not too skinny, and I was not too flat-chested, and I was not too amateurish.
Damiano seemed pleased by my work. When we managed a scene in a single take, especially if it was a difficult sexual scene, he would lead the crew in applause. I always found that embarrassing. When things were going smoothly, Damiano liked to pretend that he was a regular movie director. He would say things like, “Lights, camera, action!” And, “Cut!” And, “That’s a take.” And, one day, “That’s a wrap.”
None of this fooled me. I never once thought of Deep Throat as a regular movie. Not a movie-movie. I’d spent my life watching actresses like Susan Hayward and Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis, and I knew these women would not be caught dead, or even half-dead, in something like Deep Throat. Maybe that’s why I never felt like an actress, not even with the hot lights on and the cameras grinding.
Similarly, it was impossible to think of Harry Reems as a movie star. My idea of a real movie star was Clark Gable. I would settle for a Dustin Hoffman or an Al Pacino—they’re adorable. But Harry Reems?
Harry, like the others who do porn for a living, took himself and his job very seriously. To him, it was his livelihood. On a good week he would take home $700 in tax-free income. My feeling was simple: If someone could be involved in public sex, there was something seriously wrong with him. There were just too many questions. If he could do that much, how could you be sure he wasn’t as far-out as Chuck? As far as I could see there was only one difference between Harry and Chuck; Harry was in it for the money and Chuck was in it for weird thrills. But they were both in it.
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