Authors: Linda Lovelace

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Linda Lovelace, #Retail, #Nonfiction

Out of Bondage (2 page)

BOOK: Out of Bondage

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two

I was getting plenty of offers but they weren’t the kind of offers I wanted. Offers like: “There’s this guy over at MGM—if you’re nice to him, he’ll be nice to you.” Offers like: “I know a vice president at Universal who will use you in a comedy and all he wants is a little deep throat.” Offers like: “All you have to do is throw in one little deep-throat scene and the producer will kick in an extra $40,000.”

No one could understand my reluctance. At this point it must have seemed as though I had nothing to lose. They explained that this was the way things had always been done in Hollywood, and after all, it’s not as though I was still a virgin.

I listened to everyone and thought it over. And the first thing I did was establish lines that I wouldn’t cross, no matter what. For example, there would be no more sex for someone else’s entertainment or benefit. No matter what the world thought of me, I had never willingly been a whore and I was not going to start now.

That was never a real temptation. I can remember at least a dozen times when
Playboy
mogul Hugh Hefner tried to set me up with himself and one of his super-bunnies. But that kind of thing was never going to be my kind of thing again.

What lines
didn’t
I draw? Well, I had completed an idiotic little R-rated movie entitled
Linda Lovelace for President
and that didn’t bother me too much. I posed for a nude spread in
Playboy
and that didn’t disturb me. Nudity was not really a big issue, not after all I’d been through. Very little mattered to me at this time. Whether I made money or not, whether I showed up for court dates or not, whether I was seen nude or not—none of that really mattered.

After Chuck’s departure, my new advisers wanted me to walk around in transparent clothing. I did what I was told. When they wanted me to go to the opening of Ascot in England in a see-through dress, it never occurred to me not to do it.

It was all carefully explained to me. Public nudity was part of my “transition process,” the gradual transition from pornography to movie stardom. After all, I couldn’t just start dressing like a nun, could I? Once you’ve lost your self-esteem, it takes quite a while to get it back. For a long time I remained a robot, doing just what my new advisers told me to do.

And so what if I wore a see-through dress That was better than being thrown into a room with a dozen men and having a dildo inserted into every opening. No, the nudity really didn’t bother me at all.

And what of the future? I hadn’t the slightest idea. I’d never had a chance to become acquainted with myself. I’d gone directly from my parents’ home to Chuck Traynor’s world of prostitution and pornography and I had no idea what made me tick.

In effect, I had never been more than a visitor in the real world, the normal workaday world. During the past few years I had done little more than practice and perfect every perversion known to this civilization. Still immature, still unable to stand on my own two feet, I had been cast out into a world I didn’t know at all.

In the year 1973, I was undoubtedly the most widely known sex star in the world. In fact, by this time I had graduated from sex symbol to sexual caricature, from national scandal to national joke. (
Playboy
even printed a full page of Linda Lovelace jokes. Example: “We suppose it’s only a matter of time before some pharmaceutical house comes out with Linda Lovelace Lovers’ Quarrel Pills—to be taken when someone you ate disagrees with you.”)

I felt like an ex-convict who has spent his entire life behind bars and one day is turned out, blinking, into the sunlight. Just that suddenly I found myself away from my captor and among people who had never experienced the terror I took for granted. I was standing there, not knowing which way to turn. I knew who I was
not
but I had no idea who I
was
—other than being confused and scared and alone.

Perhaps not quite alone. In those days I had one constant companion. Her name was Linda Lovelace—and there seemed no way for me to get rid of her. I smiled her slightly crooked smile and spoke in her soft voice and it was only natural that people would mix up the two of us. As a result of this confusion—because people thought that I was she and that she was I—I always needed protection.

I needed someone to keep the crowds away. I needed lawyers to protect me (often from other lawyers); I needed accountants to collect (and give out) my money; and I desperately needed a normal man in my life, someone to discourage the creeps, and to hold me when the nightmares came.

But Linda Lovelace was a valuable property and men could not seem to behave in a normal way around her. They wouldn’t leave her alone, not when so much easy money was within easy reach. True enough, I no longer had to perform perverted sex acts with everyone Chuck Traynor nominated. But it’s also true that I was still a long way from starring in either a remake of
Gone With the Wind
or the new
Gidget Goes Ga Ga.
As my new advisers kept telling me, it was going to be a slow process, this climb to respectability.

How right they were! But neither they nor I realized the climb would take a full decade. Until those first decent propositions came along, I had to take some of what was offered. This meant going to England and wearing see-through clothes. That meant going to Harvard and accepting a special award from the boys (“To that actor or actress most willing to flout convention and risk worldly damnation in the pursuit of artistic fulfillment”). That meant tackling a stage play in Philadelphia and subjecting myself to the kind of reviews, as one writer saw it, that “An Egyptian President might expect if he were playing Tel Aviv.”

And it meant going on and giving the same kind of interviews I had always given: “I think sex is beautiful. I think love is beautiful! I don’t believe in censorship at all in any way, shape or form.” However, those words were no longer ringing true. As one perceptive reporter noted, “The more you question Linda Lovelace, the more you wonder whether she really believes all the things she is saying or whether someone told her to say them. . . . It seems obvious that somebody has just put some ideas into her head.”

At that time—just after completing
Linda Lovelace for President—
I was living in a rented home in California. It was quite expensive even though a tub in the upstairs bathroom had started to poke one leg through the livingroom ceiling. My car was a leased Bentley, burgundy in color, slightly more expensive than the house. I was spending money faster than it was coming in.

This was the woman Larry Marchiano got to know in late 1973. Actually, it was our second meeting. I had met Larry several years earlier in my pre-Chuck Traynor years. I looked upon him as part of the world I had grown up in, the world that had housed me during the first twenty-one years of my life. It was a world of quiet suburban homes and Saturday football games and high school dances. It was a world where people went steady, got engaged and married and raised children and worked hard for a living.

I have to wonder what Larry Marchiano thought when he saw me again, this time as a Hollywood “star.” I know this much: His first opinion could not have been too high.

Late that year I went to Florida for legal reasons. I’ve been involved in so many court cases, I no longer remember exactly which one this was. Not that it matters much today. All that mattered about that trip was that I became reacquainted with the man who still shares my life.

three

During that Florida trip, I stayed with my parents. My X-rated career had been a source of pain and embarrassment to them. My father had once gone to see
Deep Throat.
I later heard from others that his reaction had been the logical one—he walked out of the theater and vomited. My mother may have suffered some mixed feelings; she asked me to send her photographs of myself autographed to the people at the country club where she worked.

This was something we could never talk about directly. I think maybe now, at this late date, my father might like to learn about that chapter of my life—just the other night on the phone he started asking me questions that go back to those days. He’s never been able to read
Ordeal,
but he will someday. It’s going to hurt him. He’s going to cry, I know that.

One time he did say to me, “Why didn’t you ever tell me what was going on when you and Chuck would visit us?” I had to explain that Chuck Traynor had threatened me: If I told, he’d kill my whole family and then he’d kill me.

When I saw Larry Marchiano again, I felt an immediate. . . something for him. One reason: He was so unlike most of the men I’d seen the past few years in Hollywood. He had no airs. He wore casual clothes, not a monogram in sight. At this point in his life (he’d just been laid off as an installer of television cable) he was working part-time as an apprentice plumber in Florida. He was also in the process of winding up a long relationship with another woman.

Sometimes you meet someone and it’s a nice simple: Hi-how-are-you? With someone else it can be: Oh-oh-better-watch-out. There was something definitely going on with Larry, an attraction. And my first reaction was cautious. I purposely avoided looking at him or allowing his eyes to meet my own.

What Larry saw was someone who had apparently “gone Hollywood”; I was dropping celebrity names right and left, talking a big game. But it was all bogus. He had only to ask a few questions to learn that I had little real understanding of what was going on. And the minute I started talking about my business affairs, he could see we were in the same financial boat.

Larry Marchiano’s own position in life could not have been more humble. However, though I was a movie star, an alleged author of best-selling paperbacks and an internationally known celebrity, I had no more money saved than he did. Actually, the same amount. Zero.

I needed someone trustworthy to manage my affairs. At first I had no idea that someone might be Larry, but I did sense he could be trusted. And less than a week later, I trusted him enough to ask whether he would come out to California and take charge of my business affairs. That must’ve sounded slightly more attractive than the job he held—that day he had been carrying toilets into condominiums under construction. He agreed to join me.

Why did I need someone else? Why couldn’t I handle my own affairs? For nearly three years I had someone doing crazy things to me. You don’t, after that time, suddenly start making your own decisions. I had fallen into a pattern of letting someone else decide everything about my life.

I had to get in touch with me. And at the time I didn’t feel too badly off. My life was a real improvement over what it had been. Okay, I could never turn back the clock to my days at Maria Regina High School, but I could try and get in touch with what I really felt about things.

And what I really felt from the beginning was a certainty about Larry Marchiano’s character and strength. He, however, could only be confused about me. And that made two of us.

During my brief stay in Florida, I managed to add to that confusion. Sammy Davis, Jr., happened to be there, starring in a nightclub revue. Readers of
Ordeal
will remember that Sammy Davis, Jr., had been very much a part of my life when I was Chuck Traynor’s slave.

In Chuck’s eyes, it had been a simple mathematical equation: Sammy Davis, Jr., was a big Hollywood celebrity; therefore, Sammy Davis, Jr., was to be cultivated; therefore, I was to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it.

Why would I take Larry and my family to see Sammy Davis, Jr., perform? Why would I then invite them to Sammy’s hotel suite for a post-performance party? I think it shows just how confused I was-how much I wanted someone to care about me-thinking they’d be impressed by my famous show-business friends. But—and I shouldn’t be surprised by this—just the opposite happened.

In the first place, Larry Marchiano has never been the kind of person who is impressed by superficial things. He had come to see Sammy Davis, Jr., perform-but he was not particularly happy with the crowd that gathered later for drinks in the entertainer’s suite.

Larry and I were seated together at a table and he went to get some food from the buffet. No sooner was he gone than a stranger sat down beside me and started making conversation. Larry returned with my plate and saw the stranger talking to me.

“Hey, you,” he said, “you’re sitting in my seat.”

“Pardon me?” the man said.

“You’re sitting in my seat,” Larry repeated.

The new arrival looked at Larry for a long moment and then slowly got to his feet. The room became quiet. It was a heavy silence, an electric silence, the kind of silence they feature in those E.F. Hutton television commercials. A few minutes later, that silence was explained to us.

“Didn’t you know who you were talking to?” someone asked.

“Nope,” Larry said.

“That was Joe Colombo.”

“Whoa,” I said to Larry, “maybe you should’ve said, ‘excuse me’ first.”

That was the first time I observed the part of Larry’s personality that can be abrasive. It also translates as an absolute unwillingness to be intimidated. I still don’t know whether it was foolishness or bravery, but he just didn’t seem all that impressed by Colombo’s gangster ties.

How did Larry Marchiano react to what he saw? Later he would tell me that he knew I was an adult and he didn’t feel he was there to sit in judgment on me. I wish it never happened at all, and the only reason I mention it here is to show how confused I was at the time.

While I’m making confessions, I have to admit to one other thing—again as a way of showing my state of mind at the time. This is something I really
hate
to admit. At that time I was using cocaine. Cocaine wasn’t just a sometime thing either.

I understand why people get hooked on it. Some people say they use it for sexual reasons, but I found it gave me courage. It was a courage that seemed to translate into energy. It enabled me to get up and do things. It gave me so much false confidence that pretty soon I took to hiding behind it. And without it, I was scared, scared of everything, scared of being alone. With cocaine, the people around me seemed to be my friends; not true friends, but at least there were bodies around me and I wasn’t alone.

Cocaine was just coming into its own in Hollywood. Some of the flunkies at Hefner’s had discovered they could seduce young girls by using cocaine as bait. The way they would use it was to put it into an emptied neosynepherine bottle along with water. Then while they were watching the movie, they’d give themselves a squirt in the nose every now and then. Often they would do this after they had a regular snort; some of the powder would remain in the nostril and the squirt would wash that down as an added bonus. They would also take the neosynepherine bottle on planes with them, use it whenever they liked, and no one would be the wiser.

Whenever I was taken over to Sammy Davis, Jr.’s house, there would be cocaine
and
amyl nitrites—this was Sammy’s big thing. Everything with Sammy always had to be an all-night session and he needed whatever he could get to stay awake. Amyl nitrites—how I hated them! Whenever he shoved one into my nose, I’d hold my breath.

It all seems so ironical. I finally found my freedom, finally got away, and one of the first things I did was walk into the cocaine trap.

A week after my visit to Florida, Larry Marchiano joined me in California. And my new life began.

BOOK: Out of Bondage

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