Out of Bondage (24 page)

BOOK: Out of Bondage

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Hugh Hefner, publisher of
Playboy,
has also had his bad moments. Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich’s book about the murder of former Playmate-of-the-Year Dorothy Stratton (
The Killing of the Unicorn
) examined Hefner’s role in Stratton’s life.

Shortly thereafter Hefner suffered a mild stroke, a stroke he blamed on the stress created by Bogdanovich’s book. He seems to have recovered and recent statements indicate that the
Playboy
publisher has undertaken a serious reappraisal of his life; I hope this is true. He recently began work on his own life story, so we’ll know more then.

And, finally, Linda Lovelace—where is
she
today?

Nowhere. Linda Lovelace seems finally to have been put out of her misery. And Linda Marchiano has a much keener understanding of who she is, where she is and where she is going.

No longer do I suffer through my old nightmare, the one where five faceless strangers appear around my bed. My nightmares now are standard nightmares,
normal
nightmares, nightmares
anyone
might have.

What causes fear? I think it’s the unknown. For much of my life I didn’t know who I was. And maybe that was the reason for much of the fear.

What has caused me to define myself? Life itself defines you, tells you who and what you are. Being the wife of a decent and hard-working man helps define me. Being the mother to two loving and good children helps define me, too. Fitting into a community, being a good neighbor, being involved with my children’s education—this is all part of the picture of my life now, all part of my new family album.

thirty-nine

Sometimes I even forget to be afraid. The other day, I heard a noise out in the backyard. As I came out to the yard, a man—a stranger—was just rounding the corner of our house. I snapped at him: “Who are you and what do you want?” and only then did I stop to wonder why my Doberman guard dog was being unnaturally quiet. However, he quickly produced his credentials; he was from the Internal Revenue Service and apologized for the intrusion. This, too, is a sign of normality. Nothing strikes more fear in our hearts these days than a visit from the IRS.

Old fears are not completely gone and probably never will be. Not as long as certain people are free to walk the streets. However, no longer does the fear paralyze me. It causes me to speak up, to fight back, to protect myself.

As I’ve come to know myself, others have, too. Writing
Ordeal
was like coming out of the closet, finally exposing myself. My neighbors would now know that I had been Linda Lovelace—
the
Linda Lovelace—and how would they react to that?

Would they ask us to leave the community? Would the old cycle start again? The Marchianos had finally found a place they could fit in; would Linda Lovelace ruin that? This time it didn’t work out that way. I know everyone on the block and they’ve all offered us a warm handshake and a nice hello. Our next-door neighbors, Born Again Christians, kept their distance for many months when we first moved here. They didn’t know whether we’d be okay or not. It took a while but I guess we passed their tests, because now we’re friends.

Knowing that I have the support of my neighbors helps keep the fear at arm’s length. Larry, too, feels much safer. If there were any incidents with the neighbors, that would be different. But the whole town seems to like me and I return the feeling.

And part of my security comes from my children. I’m so proud of them. Dominic is a regular take-charge guy, very responsible. And my daughter Lindsay just amazes me. She could be struggling to climb a tree and if you go to help her, she pushes you away. She’s as independent as a person can be. Which reminds me: I’ve got to write Gloria a letter because I give her a lot of credit for that. The big danger in raising a child is that you’ll make them overly dependent on someone else, even their parents.

What do I want for my kids more than anything else? Common sense. Intelligence. Decency. (Oh, I guess I wouldn’t mind it very much if my daughter married an Arabian oil magnate so that she could take care of her mother and her father in their old age—sorry about that, Gloria.)

When you stop to think about it, I was raised in a way that almost guaranteed I’d never be independent. Now a major part of my life—it’s a strong enough feeling to be almost religious with me—has to do with independence. Oh, I’m still a traditionalist. No one celebrates a holiday—a birthday, Christmas, Easter—with more enthusiasm than I do.

Religion? I concluded my last book on a religious note and that led many people to ask whether I was a Born Again Christian. Well, I’m a free human being now so I was born again and I do believe in God. To me, that’s enough. He and I have been talking for a long time, a long time by ourselves, and I wouldn’t want to do any preaching to anyone else. After all, I don’t much care for it when someone preaches at me. If you’ve got something that works for you, that’s fine—keep it. I’ve got something that works for me; I’ll keep that.

And much of my strength comes from Larry. We’ve aged a bit but then, we’ve gone through quite a bit. Still, the love is there. My attitude toward man-woman relationships remains traditional. Once my whole dream was to get married, have a home and have children—period. That’s still important to me and I’m happy with the way things are right now.

However, happy homemaker is just part of the picture. While a typical day might include driving the children to school; it might also include a visit to a nearby college to deliver a lecture. My husband goes off to work and does his nine-to-five thing—whether it’s putting in insulation, spackling walls or installing television cable—and I take care of the two children.

However, there have been some changes. In the first place, I refuse to be totally dependent on anyone else. The way I avoid it is to make sure my role at home doesn’t become unimportant or trivial.

That’s why I handle the money. Larry comes home after a tough week’s work and he hands me his pay. I deposit the money, write the checks, pay the bills and watch where every penny goes. It’s possible that until now I wasn’t ready for this. Before meeting Larry, I didn’t want to
know
about handling money.

One snapshot you
won’t
see in the Marchiano family album is the picture of my husband Larry, wearing an apron, in the kitchen doing the cooking. I know mine isn’t a very “liberated” attitude, and maybe all husbands
should
help with the cooking—but whenever he goes near the kitchen he makes a mess. Really.

And right over there you’ll see a picture of me
not
vacuuming the house every day. I’m still pretty much of a homebody, a person who likes the home to be neat and clean. but I’ve learned that there’s a pricetag on that kind of thing and sometimes it’s more than I care to pay. Reviewers had fun with the part of my last book where I said that I could be happy just vacuuming my home. Well, that was the truth. Then.

My whole attitude toward man-woman relationships has changed. I think of my neighbor and friend, Francine, who has five small children. Her husband Fred works very long hours, lives a limited life and expects her to do the same. I tried to get her to join a school group with me, and Fred wouldn’t let her go. I was shocked. I even did something I don’t usually do; I butted in. I asked Francine this: What right does he have
not
to let her go? What right does any man have?

“Oh, you know Fred,” she told me, “he’s just a typical old-fashioned husband—he has a wife and a nice family and a home and he goes out and works for them and the wife stays in the home.”

“In time that’ll change,” I predicted.

“I wonder,” she said.

And so do I. The way things now are, she’ll never find out who she is. Not really. She’s being kept like a child, like a prisoner. And I can see this possibly going on the rest of her life. There’s only one way she exists; she exists in relationship to another person. And to me that’s the same as being in bondage.

I don’t call myself a feminist because I don’t like labels. However, I did and do support the Equal Rights Amendment. All that says is that people should be equal under the law. I’ve always felt men and women should be treated the same. Maybe it seems silly to need a law to spell that out but, believe me, it
does
have to be spelled out in the law. Otherwise, some men will never admit that women are their equals.

Larry’s not like that. Since our darkest days together, he has mellowed out considerably. Deep down, Larry will always have enormous resentment. Almost all of it is directed against the men who kept me prisoner and profited from my imprisonment. But some, I suspect, is directed at me; very few men could adjust to sharing life with a woman who has gone through as much as I have.

Larry is a macho man; he has strong opinions and he’s quick to act on them. But living with me, living through these experiences, has been an education for both of us. He may be macho but he calls himself a feminist—and he is.

And as long as I’ve been bringing up snapshots from the family album, here’s the one I’ve been saving for last. This is a recent picture, one that makes me extraordinarily proud. One that makes me feel truly . . . out of bondage.

You would see me in this one surrounded by United States Senators. Just this past September I was called to testify before The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice when it was holding hearings on pornography. The official title:
Effect of Pornography on Women and Children.

I know I wasn’t the committee’s most intellectual or well-informed witness—but apparently I was able to fill in some gaps for them. I could tell them what it was like to be caught in the pornographic web. I didn’t speak as an educated person but as a victim and survivor.

As I testified—as I realized where I was speaking—I became very emotional. Never before had I been this close to the power to do good, the power to expose pornography. And although I was testifying about my most awful experiences, although I was describing a life of total degredation, I never felt better.

“We have gone from the acceptability of
Deep Throat
in 1972, to child pornography, to snuff movies, and the mutilation of women in 1983 in Arizona, to the sexual abuse of young children in our day care centers, by city employees in the city of New York. My question is: What is next?”

Then it was time to answer to committee’s questions.

“So your basic point is that
Deep Throat
got $600 million and you got a lot of bruises?” Senator Specter asked.

“That is
not
the main point,” I said. “The main point is that they took a human being and through pain and degredation and beatings and constant threats, forced me to do something that I never would have become involved in, had it not been for a .45 put to my head.”

“And what is your response,” the senator asked, “to those who say that the movies like
Deep Throat
ought to be permitted to be shown, under the Constitutional protection of the First Amendment?”

“And what about
my
First Amendment rights?” The Senate of the United States may not be the best place to express anger or emotion but I was both angry and emotional. “What about my rights as a human being? You know, it is not fair. Like I said before, everytime someone watches that film, they are watching me being raped, and I am trying to teach my children good, and then they turn around and see that I was raped, I was beaten, and that film is still allowed to be shown, and people are still making money off of it, and my family and my children and I are suffering because of it. It is not fair. It’s is inhumane.”

Giving testimony—perhaps that is what my life is all about now. This book is part of that testimony. I’ve been invited to speak to another Congressional committee—and I’ll be proud to be there. Over the next few years I intend to take my testimony to college campuses and towns across the country; anywhere people are concerned about pornography and what it is doing to us.

And I expect my message will be the same simple one that it is now.

Don’t believe it when they tell you pornography is a “victimless crime.”

I was one of its victims.

I’m not any more.

BOOK: Out of Bondage

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