Linda Lovelace

Linda Susan Boreman (January 10, 1949 – April 22, 2002), better known by her stage name Linda Lovelace, was an American pornographic actress who was famous for her performance in the enormously successful 1972 hardcore porn film Deep Throat. She later denounced her pornography career and became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement.

Early life

Boreman was born in the Bronx, New York to a working-class family. She was raised in an unhappy family as the daughter of John and Dorothy Boreman. Her mother was a harsh, domineering disciplinarian, and her father was a police officer who was seldom home. She attended private Catholic schools including Saint John the Baptist (Yonkers, New York) and Maria Regina High School (Hartsdale, New York). She was nicknamed "Miss Holy Holy" in high school because she kept her dates at a safe distance. When Boreman was 16, her family moved to Florida after her father retired from the New York City police force. When she was 19, she gave birth to a child.

While living in New York, Boreman was involved in a serious car accident requiring her to undergo a blood transfusion that later led to health problems.

Pornography

While recovering at her parents' home, Boreman became involved with Chuck Traynor. According to Boreman, Traynor was violent and controlling. She said he forced her to move to New York, where he became her manager, pimp and husband.

Allegedly coerced by Traynor, Boreman was soon performing as Linda Lovelace in hardcore "loops", short 8mm silent films made for peep shows. She starred in a 1971 bestiality film titled Dog Fucker or alternately Dogarama. She later denied appearing in the film, until several of the original loops proved otherwise.

In 1972, Boreman starred in Deep Throat, in which she famously performed the film's eponymous act. The film achieved surprising and unprecedented popularity among mainstream audiences, and even a review in The New York Times.

Media career after Deep Throat

In 1974 Boreman starred in the R-rated sequel Deep Throat II, which a critic writing in Variety described as "the shoddiest of exploitation film traditions, a depressing fast buck attempt to milk a naive public".

In 1975 Boreman left Traynor for David Winters, who produced her in the 1976 film Linda Lovelace for President, which saw her on the campaign trail following a cross-country bus route mapped out in the shape of a penis, and co-starring with Mickey Dolenz. However, her career as an actress did not flourish, and her film appearances add up to only five hours of screen time. In her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal, Lovelace maintained that those films used leftover footage from Deep Throat, however, she frequently contradicted this statement. She also posed for Playboy, Bachelor, and Esquire magazines between 1973 and 1974.

During the mid-1970s she also took to smoking large quantities of marijuana combined with painkillers, but after her second marriage and the birth of her two children, she left the pornographic film business and found some happiness and stability.

In 1974, she published two "pro-porn" autobiographies, Inside Linda Lovelace and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace.

In 1976, she was chosen to play the title role in the erotic movie Laure. However, according to the producer Ovidio G. Assonitis, Lovelace was, "very much on drugs" at the time. She had already signed for the part when she decided that "God had changed her life," refused to do any nudity, and even objected to a statue of the Venus de Milo on the set because of its exposed breasts. She was replaced by French actress Annie Belle.

Charges against Chuck Traynor

In her suit to divorce Traynor, she claimed that he forced her into pornography at gunpoint, and that in Deep Throat itself, bruises from his beatings can be seen on her legs. She made the assertion that her husband "would force her to do these things by pointing an M-16 rifle at her head." Boreman claimed in her autobiography that her marriage had been plagued by violence, rape, forced prostitution, and private pornography. She wrote:

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 of 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.

Lovelace's accusations provoked mixed responses. Skeptics included Traynor, who admitted to striking Lovelace, but said it was part of a voluntary sex game. In Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne's 2005 book The Other Hollywood, several witnesses, including Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano, state Traynor beat Boreman behind closed doors, but they also question her credibility. Eric Edwards, Boreman's co-star in the dog sex films and other loops that featured Linda urinating on her sex partners, confirms her lack of credibility. According to Edwards, Boreman was a sexual "super freak" who had no boundaries and was a pathological liar. Adult-film actress Gloria Leonard is quoted as saying, "This was a woman who never took responsibility for her own [...] choices made; but instead blamed everything that happened to her in her life on porn." Corroboration for Lovelace's claim came from Andrea True, Lovelace's co-star in Deep Throat 2 who, on a commentary DVD track of the documentary Inside Deep Throat, stated that Traynor was a sadist and was disliked by the Deep Throat 2cast. Andrea Dworkin stated that the results of polygraph tests administered to Boreman support her assertions. Moreover, psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman notes that many details in Lovelace's memoir Ordeal are consistent with a diagnosis of Complex PTSD, such as Lovelace's description of a fragmented personality in the aftermath of alleged abuse.

Eric Danville, a journalist who covered the porn industry for nearly 20 years and 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 told Boreman of his book proposal, he said she was overcome with emotion and saddened he had uncovered the bestiality film, which she had initially denied making and later maintained she had been forced to star in at gunpoint.

Boreman maintained she received no money for Deep Throat, and that the $1,250 payment for her appearance was taken by Traynor.

Marchiano marriage

In 1974, Boreman married Larry Marchiano, a cable installer who later owned a dry wall business. They had two children: Dominic, in 1977, and Lindsay, in 1980. They lived in a small town in Long Island called Center Moriches. Linda was going through a liver transplant at this time. For a while, marriage and particularly motherhood brought her some stability and happiness. In 1990, Larry's business went bankrupt and the family moved to Colorado.

In The Other Hollywood, Boreman painted a largely unflattering picture of Marchiano, claiming he drank to excess, verbally abused her children, and was occasionally violent with her. They divorced in 1996. However, the divorce was civil and they remained in contact with each other for the remainder of her life.

Anti-pornography activism

With the publication of Ordeal in 1980, Boreman joined the feminist anti-pornography movement. At a press conference announcing Ordeal, she leveled many of the above-noted 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. Boreman 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.

In 1986, Boreman published Out of Bondage, a memoir focusing on her life after 1974. She testified before the 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in New York City, stating, "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, she gave lectures on college campuses, 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. When I showed up with them for speaking engagements, I'd always get five hundred dollars or so. But I know they made a few bucks off me, just like everybody else."

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.

Last years

Boreman contracted hepatitis from the blood transfusion she received after her 1970 car accident. She underwent a liver transplant in 1987. In 2000, she was featured on E! True Hollywood Story. The following year she did a pictorial as Linda Lovelace for the magazine Leg Show. She said she did not object to the magazine shoot because "there's nothing wrong with looking sexy as long as it's done with taste."

On April 3, 2002, Boreman was involved in yet another serious automobile accident, suffering massive trauma and internal injuries. On April 22, 2002, she was taken off life support and died in Denver, Colorado, at the age of 53. Marchiano and their two children were present when she died. Boreman was interred at Parker Cemetery in Parker, Colorado.

Legacy

The coordination system Linda was named after Linda Lovelace as a play on words because of the programming language Ada, which was named after computer pioneer Ada Lovelace.

Boreman's participation in Deep Throat was among the topics explored in the 2005 documentary, Inside Deep Throat.

Indie pop singer/songwriter Marc with a C released a 2008 album entitled Linda Lovelace for President, which contained a song of the same name.

In 2008, Lovelace: A Rock Musical, 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-Gos.

As of 2011, two biographical films on Boreman are scheduled to begin production. The first, entitled Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story, starring Malin Åkerman, was scheduled to be directed by Matthew Wilder and produced by Chris Hanley and to begin filming in early 2011. The second, titled Lovelace, is filming as of January 2012, with Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman directing, Amanda Seyfried as Lovelace, and Peter Sarsgaard as Chuck Traynor. Also starring are Eric Roberts, Sharon Stone, Wes Bentley, Chris Noth and Sarah Jessica Parker as Gloria Steinem. The film "Lovelace" was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in January 2013.

Tina Yothers, who was a child actress on Family Ties, was cast as Lovelace in Lovelace: The Musical.

Partial filmography

• Dogarama (1971)
• Sex for Sale (short) (uncredited) (1971)
• Peeverted (short) (1971)
• Knothole (short) (1971)
• Gomorrahy (short) (uncredited) (1972)
• Deep Throat (1972)
• The Confessions of Linda Lovelace (1974)
• Deep Throat Part II (1974) as Nurse Lovelace
• Linda Lovelace for President (1975)

Books

Boreman has been the subject of five biographies, four authored or co-authored by her:

• Inside Linda Lovelace (1974), Linda Lovelace, ISBN 0-902826-11-5
• The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace (1974), Linda Lovelace, ISBN 0-523-00394-3
• Ordeal (1980), Linda Lovelace and Mike McGrady, ISBN 0-517-42791-5
• Out of Bondage (1986), Linda Lovelace and Mike McGrady, ISBN 0-425-10650-0
• The Complete Linda Lovelace (2001), Eric Danville, ISBN 0-9705502-0-0

Other books:

• Jack Stevenson (ed): Fleshpot – Cinema's Sexual Myth Makers & Taboo Breakers (Headpress, England 2000): Features an interview with her.