And that was enough for me. Sometimes I feel that I’m a real prude, more of a prude than anyone I know. Whenever I hear someone talking about the sexual revolution or the new sexual freedom, I don’t look on that as progress. People who are into promiscuity—I’m sorry to say—have a problem. My feeling is this: If people can keep it between themselves and their mates, that’s just fine. But love-making should be a two-person proposition. No more, no less. It’s just nobody else’s business.
twelve
Deep Throat—such a small slice of my life with Chuck—two weeks out of more than two years. It would be months before the film would open, more months before anyone would hear about it, still more months before the name Linda Lovelace would become known throughout the world.
On the way to Jersey City to pick up our belongings, we were not alone. We had a hitchhiker with us, a sixteen-year-old runaway named Ginger. Chuck was always picking up female hitchhikers. In fact, that’s how he did most of his recruiting. I was amazed by the way Chuck would pick up a hitchhiker and ask right off, “Would you like to be a hooker?” I was even more amazed by the number of young girls who didn’t say no. Ginger was one who didn’t say no.
Ginger told us that she had left home because her father wouldn’t keep his hands to himself and her mother wouldn’t believe that story. Ginger was a tiny girl with long blonde hair, not at all pretty. Though she was only sixteen, life had toughened her face so that she would never seem sweet again. She had spent the last year on the road, crisscrossing the country and living off truck drivers. There was only one small matter separating her from being a hooker. Money.
“You’re doing that shit anyway,” Chuck said. “You might as well get paid for it.”
“Might as well,” she said.
Just before we started out trip north, Chuck fixed Ginger up with her first trick and let her keep the money. Afterwards, she sat on the edge of her bed, staring at two twenty-dollar bills, asking herself the age-old question: “How long has this been going on?”
Life continued as it had before my debut as a movie star, but with a difference. All that exposure to moviemaking had given Chuck a new ambition. Never again would he be someone else’s gofer; now he wanted to make his own movies.
On our first day back in the New York area, Chuck borrowed an eight-millimeter camera from Lou Perry. Then he made two movies starring Linda Lovelace and Ginger. One movie was called The Foot and the other one was The Fist. In addition to coming up with the original concept, the script, and the direction, Chuck also provided the camerawork. It was definitely a Chuck Traynor Production.
The Foot opens with a closeup shot of two feet, Ginger’s feet. They are seen walking down a city street. Then up a flight of stairs. Then into a bedroom where they are filmed beside two new feet, the feet belonging to a hooker, my feet. Chuck gave us a running explanation of the story as he ran the camera.
“Okay, get ready, here comes the foot,” he said. “The foot’s gonna give you twenty dollars. Let’s see that twenty dollars. Okay. Now you shake your head no, you’re telling the foot that’s not enough. Okay, so now the foot is giving you ten dollars more. You take the ten and nod your head yes. That’s right, that’s good. Okay, now the foot is gonna work its way up your leg—that’s right, let’s see a little toe action—the foot is coming up your leg now and getting you all excited. And now the foot is going to fuck you.”
Does all that sound like a joke? I wish it had been a joke. But that’s actually the movie that Chuck dreamed up and made. And when he made The Fist, he didn’t bother to change the plot line at all.
The following day, Chuck returned the cameras and the films to Lou. He was paid $100 for each movie, enough to finance our return trip to Florida. During our last night in Jersey City, Chuck decided he was in the mood for some fun and games. Ginger had dozed off but was not yet in a sound sleep. Chuck took my left hand and placed it on Ginger’s breast.
“Whoa right there!” She was wide awake in an instant, sitting up in bed and glaring at Chuck. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? What’s this supposed to mean? You think I’m supposed to give you some free entertainment? Jesus Christ, stop being such a creep and let me get some sleep.”
Thank God it was dark. Chuck couldn’t see my smile. I didn’t like Ginger at all—I mean, she may have been the unsweetest girl in history—but I certainly did respect her. That night, lying there in bed, I stayed awake, wondering what would have happened if I had been the way Ginger is, if I had been that tough with Chuck from the beginning.
The next morning we began our drive south. We drove as far as North Carolina where we stopped to visit Chuck’s mother. When I heard we were going to stay with her for a couple of days, I was wondering whether she would be any help in getting her son off my back.
It didn’t take me long to realize that she wouldn’t be my ally. Chuck was the apple of her eye; he could do no wrong. Chuck’s mother was fiftyish, black-haired, and heavily made up: She favored pale blue eye shadow and black drawn-on eyebrows. She told us stories going back to the time when Chuck was a little boy and she had left his father. She said that at that time she had been friends with some of that era’s most notorious mobsters. She called herself a “flower lady” and explained that she had had a florist shop that was used as a front. Although she had been the special friend of one man in particular, she had escorted others as well. And, in fact, she had been too busy to bring up Chuck herself so her parents had adopted him. He had been raised by his grandparents.
I wondered whether this didn’t explain a lot about Chuck’s attitude toward women. I’m no shrink but it was obvious that he hated women. Did it all begin as a deep resentment toward his mother and the way she was living her life? Maybe the brutality he directed toward me was something he would rather have directed toward his mother. All the time he was forcing me to do perverted and weird things, all those unnatural acts, was he just evening an old score against his mother?
Of course, none of this was visible. When he was with his mother, Chuck became the perfect gentleman. As long as we were under her roof, he was even polite to me. His mother was obviously crazy about her son. She was proud of his having been a Marine, a pilot, and a man in business for himself. She would just ignore it when she learned something less than perfect about her Chucky-poo.
So, for the couple of days that Chuck played the role of good son, I just relaxed, Ginger, however, was getting restless, anxious to get back to Florida. One morning, Chuck dragged us out to wash the car. Chuck went outside and watched us work for a while. But Chuck, the World’s Greatest Expert on Practically Everything, could never watch anyone do anything without offering advice. He decided to give Ginger the full benefit of his car-washing experience.
“Hey, that’s no way to do that,” he said. “You shouldn’t be doing those short, straight strokes.”
“Get off my case, willya?”
“I’m serious,” Chuck said. “When you wash a car, you should make like small circles.”
“Really?” Ginger dropped the sponge on the driveway. “Well, fuck you!”
Before walking away, she took the bucket of soapy water and splashed it over the car. She walked into the house. And when she came back out, she was carrying her jacket and her suitcase. She was followed by Chuck’s mother who was frantic.
“Your little friend is leaving,” Chuck’s mother said. “That poor little girl—what’s going to happen to her if she’s picked up by some tough guys.”
“Well, they’ll learn what tough is,” Chuck said. “Nothing’s ever going to happen to that chick that she can’t handle. Take it from me, that’s one little girl knows just what to do.”
Yes, she did! That was the last we saw of Ginger and I couldn’t help being envious of her. I don’t know what life has offered her since that day in North Carolina—probably not much—but if she’s reading these words, I’d like to tell her she did the right thing.
Thoughts of Ginger and her c
asual “fuck-you” farewell ate at me all the way to Florida. There she was, still a kid, no bigger than a splinter, and she was able to just walk away. Why couldn’t I? For almost two years I had been Chuck Traynor’s prisoner.
And in that time I had changed: no longer did Chuck have to stand guard over me every minute of the day. Maybe I wasn’t exactly a prisoner anymore; maybe I had become a trustee. I was breathing and sleeping and eating but I was no more alive than a zombie. The encounter with Ginger seemed to wake me up, and once again I began to think about escape.
It was the summer of ’72 and Chuck and I were back at square one, in Miami, with me working as a hooker and his staring at me through a peephole in the wall. Once again he was trusting me enough so that I could take outside jobs in hotels and apartments.
And why shouldn’t he trust me? I was causing him no trouble. After a year of working as a hooker, I still refused to look at myself as a hooker. It was, after all, survival, my only means of staying alive. And that’s how I accepted it: as life, but not livelihood. And only very gradually did it become an occupation. It was always degrading and dirty but, in time, it lost much of its terror. I was a hooker the way someone else might be a cashier in a supermarket or a laborer on an assemblyline; not enjoying any of it, but doing it to stay alive. My body did the work, not my mind and heart. If I was a hooker in fact, I was never a hooker in spirit. I was doing it but I was not into it. Looking back now, I feel that it was some other person—that was not me.
Prostitution, like any other occupation, becomes a matter of routines and rituals. There was always a bad moment or two at the beginning—a hooker can never know what lies on the other side of a closed door—but there was a steadily diminishing sense of horror about the rest of it.
It’s hard for me to look back and think of myself as a hooker. But if you sort letters for a year-and-a-half in the post office, then you’re a mailman. You do it, and you do it, and you do it; then you become it.
Always I was sustained by the hope that this life would be temporary. It could not possibly go on forever. One day it would be all over. But that day seemed no nearer.
Just as I could never accept the thought of myself as a hooker, I never looked at myself as Mrs. Charles Traynor. That, too, was unreal. Chuck would talk about us as being married—he was my “old man” and I was his “old lady”—but that meant nothing to me. If you ever heard him talk about marriage, you’d have to wonder what kind of woman would want to be his wife.
“A woman is supposed to do everything for her husband,” Chuck once told me. “Everything. That’s the whole setup. If I’m ever sent to prison, you will do everything to get me out of jail. I would expect you to fuck everyone and everything to help me. That’s what a wife does.”
So I was back then, living up to Chuck’s concept of perfect womanhood, fucking everyone and everything to help her husband. But he began to relax his vigilance, and I began to look for ways out once again.
During one of my outside jobs, I had a few minutes alone with a telephone. I called my old friend, Betsy, and asked her to help me get away from Chuck. She said she’d do whatever I wanted. I told her that I was going to be doing a trick at a new Howard Johnson’s motel the following night at eight and there might be a way to escape then. Betsy said she’d be waiting in a car in front of the motel.
I had trouble getting to sleep that night, and the next morning I was all jitters. Chuck noticed that my behavior wasn’t normal.
“We’re going to cancel tonight,” he said. “You look like hell.”
“Good,” I said. “I need the rest.”
Chuck’s decision to cancel an appointment was not at all unusual. Quite often he cancelled at the last minute. I think this was just another way to keep me off balance. And although I died a little inside when he decided to cancel, I played it cool.
“Since I’m not going out tonight, I think I’ll wash my hair.”
“Just a damn minute,” he said. “Let me think about this.”
I can guess what he was thinking about. He was thinking about giving up a $45.00 trick. If it had only been a $25.00 trick, I would have spent the day shampooing my hair.
“Forget it,” he said. “We’re going.”
The rest of the day I concentrated on doing nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that would arouse new suspicions. I wondered if he could hear my racing heart. That night, just before eight o’clock, we pulled up in front of the entrance to the Howard Johnson’s. Chuck left the car there, its motor running, and went with me into the lobby. He watched me walk over and go into a waiting elevator. I pushed the button to the correct floor, rode up, stepped off.
Timing would be everything. I imagined Chuck watching the elevator indicator lights, waiting a few minutes and then going out to park his car in the huge parking lot before returning to the lobby where he would wait for me. As the elevator was summoned elsewhere, I waited in the hallway. And then I pushed the button, stepped aboard and took the elevator down to the lobby.
The elevator doors opened and I hesitated a second before stepping out. Standing at the back of the empty car, I looked out to see whether Chuck was in the lobby. It seemed empty. I had just a couple of minutes, and I moved quickly out of the elevator and out of the building and around to the other side.
A car was there, its parking lights turned on. Betsy was there with a young man named Don whom she had been living with. No sooner was I in the car than he pulled away. And as we drove to their house, I told them the story. Everything.
“I was guessing something like that,” Betsy said. “I saw one of those movies you made up in New York, the one with the dog. I told Don that you weren’t like that, that that wasn’t something you’d ever do willingly.”
“I guess you were right about that,” Don said.
“We tried to find out more,” Betsy said. “We went out to the country club where your mother is working. We told her that we thought something was wrong and that you needed some help.”
As we drove toward their home, I was in terrible emotional turmoil. Later Betsy told me I acted as though I was drugged and that it took several days before I responded to things in a normal way. Maybe that was just the fear hanging on. I felt no happiness and no relief. Not yet. At nine o’clock Chuck would go upstairs to get me. I imagined the scene, the trick explaining to Chuck that I had never shown. What would happen next?
“You can count on us for anything,” Betsy said. “For any help you need. You’ll never have to go back to Chuck again.”
“I’ve learned one thing,” I said. “Chuck’s not going to let me get away this easily.”
Betsy’s house inspired no confidence. They lived an hour outside Miami in a lower middle-class development, small connected homes with tiny yards. She and Don had rented their home from the leader of a local motorcycle gang. The furnishings reflected the kind of taste I was anxious to escape.
The bedroom had mirrored ceilings, a waterbed, a framed photograph of Betsy wearing a “Merry Widow” corset. When I saw the movie projector stationed beside the bed, I couldn’t help but think that Betsy and Don had probably been watching me while they were in bed together. It made me very uneasy.
It’s odd but looking back on this escape, it seems to me that it all took place within a day or two. But Betsy tells me that I was with her, away from Chuck, for nearly a week. She also tells me that when Chuck figured out where I was, he called every few hours. At first he was polite and even contrite. He told her that we had a “misuderstanding” and that we just had to talk things out.
I didn’t speak to Chuck myself for several days. During those days, according to Betsy, I behaved like someone coming out of a deep sleep. She said that at first she was concerned that something had happened to my brain, but that I was my old self by the end of the week. She said she knew that I was going to be all right when I started cleaning the house for them and scrubbing the floors. Nothing makes me happier than cleaning a house.
I
told Betsy that I would speak to Chuck the next time he called. When the phone rang, she was reluctant to give me the receiver.
“It’s Chuck,” she said, “and he does want to talk with you. But, Linda, you don’t have to talk with him at all if you don’t want to. I mean that.”
I knew I would have to talk with Chuck eventually anyway. However, I was totally unprepared for what I heard.
“Linda, I love you and I need you,” Chuck said.
“What?”
“Linda, you are my wife and I’m your husband. We are fucking married! And there is no way we should be apart. Now I know things have not been fucking perfect for you—I can admit that. But there is no way that I’m going to take this shit from you. Now you just make your little goodbyes there and get yourself packed up because I am coming over to get you and that is that!”
“I’m not coming back, Chuck.”
It was amazing how much effort that one line took. Chuck filled my heart with terror. Even when he was trying to sweet-talk me—believe it or not, that was sweet talk—he generated nothing but fear.
“You are my old lady,” he said, “and we got us a piece of paper that says we will not split until death do us part. Now all I’m saying is for us to get back together. If you got some fucking complaints, we can work these things out. We can fucking talk about them. But first we got to get our shit together.”
“No, Chuck.”
“No? No! What is this no? Is this a word a wife uses to a husband?”
I hung up the phone then.
Chuck made one other attempt to be “reasonable.” He delivered a letter to the house, and in that letter he promised to mend his ways; he would put up new drapes at home and take care of “all the other little things” that had been bothering me. And then the sweet talk, such as it was, came to an end. It ended officially with another phone call.
Ordeal Page 13
