Poets & Writers: “The Porn Star Who Came to Dinner”

The September/October 2010 issue of Poets & Writers magazine has an outstanding article on Mike McGrady, who co-authored Ordeal with Linda Lovelace. Some excerpts:

Linda’s tale was a harrowing journey into the depths of hell. She was raped, she was pimped, she was held hostage, and she was forced to do things that nobody would do of her own free will. There were big names involved–for example, Hugh Hefner and Sammy Davis Jr. as well as mobsters and crooked lawyers. If ever there was a story to steer clear of, this was it.

Maybe it was because my father has always sided with life’s underdogs and downtrodden that he even considered it… As a newspaperman, he was drawn to the dangerous, redemptive stories–the civil rights marches and Vietnam.

I asked my dad recently why he decided to take on Linda’s story.

“I don’t know,” he said from his leather armchair in front of a mega TV set. “I guess because she was telling the truth.”

…The whole family would be affected by my father’s choice to do this story… there was a residual shame connected to the whole thing. I was a junior at Yale in 1980 when Ordeal came out, and even the kidding from classmates never seemed good natured.

“Linda had to live with that every day of her life,” my father says. “She was a very brave woman to survive such a thing.”

…[Grady] took her seriously and spent hundreds of hours interviewing her and recording their talks. Then he did what a good reporter does: He checked and rechecked everything that was verifiable in her narrative until he was satisfied that her story was the God’s honest truth…

…the first thirty-three publishers who saw the book rejected it “quickly and emphatically and with unusual vitriol,” as my father explains…

A big part of the problem was that nobody believed Linda’s story. My father wound up paying Nat Laurendi, a famed forensic polygraphist who worked for many years in the New York City Police Department, to give Linda an eleven-hour lie detector test…

Ordeal was greeted with outright contempt and disdain by a large number of reviewers in the first wave… There had always been a lot of misogynistic anger directed at Linda, almost unnatural in its fury and defiant ignorance, and now it was directed at my father, too. His credibility and journalistic ethics were attacked…

[Gloria] Steinem saved the day. She wrote a five-page feature in Ms. Magazine about the book. She had no trouble believing Linda’s story…

[Linda] found genuine acceptance from Steinem and other feminist figures, such as the writer Susan Brownmiller, and she was able in this way to triumph over her past…

See also:

Linda Lovelace: When people see the movie Deep Throat, “they’re watching me being raped” (explicit language)
The movie Deep Throat was released in 1972. Produced for $22,500, members of the FBI estimate it has grossed anywhere from $100 million to $600 million. More than 10 million Americans have seen it. Wikipedia calls it “likely the most successful and influential pornographic film of all time.” 

Linda Lovelace starred in the movie. Later, she said she had been coerced into doing it by her husband at the time, Chuck Traynor. “Virtually every time someone watches that movie, they’re watching me being raped,” she told the Meese Commission on Pornography in 1986. Wikipedia reports, “Traynor and [director Gerard] Damiano confirmed in interviews that Traynor was extremely controlling towards Boreman [Lovelace] and also hit her on occasion. In the documentary Inside Deep Throat…it is claimed that bruises are visible on Boreman’s body in the movie.”

Many members of the porn industry were upset by Lovelace’s actions. They use the term “Linda Syndrome” to refer to former porn stars who disavow their careers. Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine, had given Deep Throat a rave review when it came out. But when Lovelace died from an auto accident in 2002, he said,

Good riddance to trash. She was a good cocksucker. She was a piece of shit. Her book Ordeal was a lying piece of shit. She was a hooker, a scumbag, a lying trollop. I’m glad Traynor taught her to suck cock. I dropped several ejaculations down her throat. I want to do a final load, so when she goes to hell my sperm will go with her.

Here are excerpts from Gloria Steinem’s introduction to Out of Bondage, Linda Lovelace’s follow-up to Ordeal

[W]e are too close to the time when even rape victims were suspected of “asking for” the crimes of humiliation and violence inflicted upon them; a time when the testimony of a victim was disbelieved unless corroborated by witnesses who had watched the crime, and a victim’s past personal life was admissable in court when the rapist’s past, even if criminal, was not.

No wonder we are still in a time when the thousands of teenage runaways, terrified women and even children who are victims of forced prostitution and pornography each year–victims who are forced to coexist and depend for their lives on their victimizers for far longer than the duration of a rapist’s attack–are accused of cooperating with their captors, even of enjoying their own humiliation, or at least of being suspect because they did not escape.

After all, millions of viewers saw Deep Throat, the first hardcore porn film to enter the popular culture, without asking whether the young woman known as “Linda Lovelace” was there of her own free will. They ignored the bruises that were visible on her body, the terror in her eyes, even the simple empathy that should cause each of us to wonder whether another human being really would enjoy humiliations and dangers that we ourselves would never tolerate…

[W]e have a First Amendment right to demonstrate against pornography, to boycott its creators and sellers, to explain that pornography is to women of all groups what Nazi literature is to Jews and Ku Klux Klan literature is to Blacks. It is as different from erotica as sex is different from rape… [E]ros means sexual love, and love implies free choice and mutual pleasure. The point is to separate sex from violence, pleasure from pain…

Get up the courage to say how you feel, to throw pornography out of your life and house at least. Educate your children in the difference between pornography and erotica, between domination and mutual choice. Support the centers that are helping women and children escape this coercion and find self-respect.

Behind the Scenes of Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace (explicit language)
Capital Video sells Deep Throatcalling it “the funniest sexually explicit romp to come along in motion picture history…”

“Marchiano traveled to campuses to speak out about her two and a half year imprisonment by her husband/manager Chuck Traynor. Linda’s speech encouraged women on the campus to protest outside the fraternity-sponsored showing of Deep Throat. She said that in this movie there are visible bruises all over her body that attest to part of her torture. The fraternity brothers’ response, was to shout out during Deep Throat: ‘Fuck her, hurt her, rip her.’ Toward the other females on the screen they screamed comments such as ‘Ugly bitch and whore.’ They chanted, ‘Bruises, Bruises, Bruises!’ continually during the film.”

Porn and a Hostile Learning Environment at M.I.T.
One example is in the dorms, where despite requests by women students that pornographic films not be shown in common living rooms, some male students insisted on their right to show the films. In two cases, a male student insisted on showing Deep Throat, a film which presents Linda “Lovelace” Marchiano, who we talked about earlier today, despite women students in the dorm telling this particular man that it was offensive to show Deep Throat since it has been documented in her books–Ordeal and Out of Bondage–that she was tortured and terrorized into [making it]. Secondly, they told him that at least one of the students who was a resident of that dormitory had been throat-raped in that particular way, and she felt particularly traumatized by the showing of that film. Despite her efforts and other women’s trying to talk to him about showing the film, he showed it anyway to a whole group of students from the dorm. As a result, she and other students lost sleep, she lost a lot of school time. The one student was a doctoral student, and felt extremely harassed. She tried to address this through the M.I.T. administration and go nowhere because they refuse to take an active stance around pornography. And then she was further harassed in that dormintory through threatening notes, etc., for trying to stop the showing of that film…

Catharine MacKinnon: Mass Media Reflexively, Subtly Protect Pornographers
Until the publication of [In Harm’s Way], the public discussion of pornography has been impoverished and deprived by often inaccurate or incomplete reports of victims’ accounts and experts’ views. Media reports of victims’ testimony at the time of the hearings themselves were often cursory, distorted, or nonexistent. Some reports by journalists covering the Minneapolis hearings were rewritten by editors to conform the testimony to the story of pornography’s harmlessness that they wanted told. Of this process, one Minneapolis reporter assigned to cover those hearings told me, in reference to the reports she filed, “I have never been so censored in my life.” Thus weakened, the victim testimony became easier to stigmatize as emotional and to dismiss as exceptional. Its representativeness has been further undermined by selective or misleading reports of expert testimony on scientific studies…

Testimony in Los Angeles: Peter Bogdanovich on Porn and Hollywood
The pornographers and their supporters are so powerful, and the connection between the pornography industry and the legitimate entertainment industry is so intimate, that directors and producers and writers and creative people of all kinds do not feel able to take a stand against pornography because they’re going to be blackmailed by legitimate studios, distribution houses, etc. Some say, “Just wait till I get this distributed, then I’ll be free to go down and tell you what I know,” or “I’m waiting to sell a TV show…” The real story is that people are intimidated out of speaking by those in power over their lives…

Testimony in Minneapolis: Prostitutes and Porn (explicit language)
It is very amazing to me what happens when a group of ex-prostitutes get together in one room and tell stories. One of the things we discovered was that the men we had serviced were very powerful men in this community. Especially interesting to us are the amounts of men involved in the media in this community that use prostitutes and pornography.


“Sex-Positive” Debate-Killing Tactics Stretch into Their Fifth Decade  
Our opponents profess extreme devotion to free speech, yet in reality many of them freely employ debate-killing tactics such as disrespect, ridicule, misrepresentation and intimidation. Tactics like these have a history in this debate that stretches back for nearly half a century. They have been effective at skewing the public dialogue over issues of love, sex, relationships and the rights of communities, even as the evidence of the harm of porn and adult enterprises piles up into a mountain.

Mary Whitehouse details this process in Whatever happened to sex?, as she helped lead a campaign in the 1960s to criticize the media in the United Kingdom…

In the event, the support was overwhelming. But what we did not bargain for, in those early days, was the speed and aplomb with which a handful of elitist media men–and women–would seek to present this public outcry as the voice of a tiny group of eccentric busybodies. Neither did we anticipate the intensity of the counter-campaign which would turn common sense into the least common of virtues, and virtue itself into an unacceptable social gaffe.

The controversy deepened and unreality increasingly prevailed. Morality was stood on its head; rationality and compassion were discarded; truth was converted into perfidy and love into a mockery. The progressively illiberal establishment of the avant garde achieved all this through a process of inverted censorship. Exclusion, ridicule, mispresentation are very effective censors, and they were applied ruthlessly to the values which, right through the centuries, had been accepted as basic to a stable and responsible society, and to the people who fought to maintain them.

The neophyliacs’ success was due, at least in part, to the deep and natural humility of the ordinary man. A humility which forbids confidence in his own instincts and judgment, especially when confronted with “better” (informed, educated, clever, even “good”) people who appear to give the seal of approval to ideas and aspects of human behavior which to him have always seemed wrong, particularly when these ideas are presented to him in his home and via a medium that appears to have the imprimatur of everything authentic…

The truth is that there was nothing at all exceptional about what we were saying–we were exchanging the currency of words and ideas which characterized the common people. We were saying what, in their terms, was an affront and what was not an affront. What was exceptional, in our whole history, was the power of that small fanatical group who were obsessed with a determination, at the very least, to become notorious; at their most sinister, to reshape the cultural and ethical values of our society, not through the extended processes of exchanged thought and experience, through trial and error, but through instant prejudiced “expertise”. It matters not whether their motivation was (and is) political or monetary. With staggeringly effective sleight of ahnd, they perpetrated the greatest confidence trick of our times. They landed blows to the body politic which it is only now beginning to appraise, let alone recover from.

The whole debate on censorship has taken place in a climate of unreality. Can one imagine anything much less real and rational than John Calder’s declaration that he “refused to believe that one can make people better or worse” and that books do not affect behaviour! Strange that, as a publisher, he had not apparently heard of the Bible, Mein Kampf or Das Kapital. And that in an Oxford University debate! The truth is that no movement, with the exception of Communism and Fascism, has practised censorship more rigidly than those who bellow, in and out of season, for the abolition of all controls. The organized lobby, with its adherents in the media, did not hesitate to suppress, particularly in television, the voices of those who hold opposing views–that is why the sixties was such an illiberal decade. Monopoly, authoritarianism, exploitation, those bogies of the “progressive” left, formed the bedrock of its own strategy. No views could be seen, heard or given publicity unless they advocated permissive humanism. The rest must be censored out by ridicule, denigration or exclusion so that the age-old mechanism by which new ideas are filtered through the sieve of experience, or refined through conflict with respected values, was sabotaged…

…[A]ny question of personal responsibility or common sense tends to get swept away in the great liberal tide of “no proof” doubts. So does all change become progress, social stability mere stagnation, laws ipso facto repressive, all faith superstition, and the riches of the past mere blockages to the liberated “now”.