Authors: Linda Lovelace
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Linda Lovelace, #Retail, #Nonfiction
Out of Bondage (7 page)
twelve
Victor’s heart was in the right place but everything was far too secretive, too protective. Now Larry took to vanishing for long hours every day. The man who had always been with me when I needed him was gone. And what we had now was not at all the relationship we had before.
One of the saddest aspect of this chapter of our life—let’s call it
Escape From Hollyweird
—was that Larry had to take so much abuse, simply because he was married to the woman who was once known as Linda Lovelace. Marchiano has always been a respected name on Eastern Long Island. Once it became known that Larry Marchiano had married the notorious Linda Lovelace, he couldn’t walk into a neighborhood bar without taking a ribbing—some of it good-natured, some of it not so good-natured. I had seen my husband’s temper in the past. The night he came home with a broken arm after a bar fight, I didn’t have to ask whose honor he was defending.
Escape From Hollyweird
—was that Larry had to take so much abuse, simply because he was married to the woman who was once known as Linda Lovelace. Marchiano has always been a respected name on Eastern Long Island. Once it became known that Larry Marchiano had married the notorious Linda Lovelace, he couldn’t walk into a neighborhood bar without taking a ribbing—some of it good-natured, some of it not so good-natured. I had seen my husband’s temper in the past. The night he came home with a broken arm after a bar fight, I didn’t have to ask whose honor he was defending.
The more serious injuries were internal. The strain of our situation had begun to tell. No longer were we enjoying shrimp and champagne in the grand hotels of Canada; no longer were we hopping to Rome for fun and games. And no longer could we keep the crowds at bay.
Let me tell you how famous people hide out. They hide behind walls of money. Without the money there are no walls, no protection. You are naked and your only defense then is to run. It would have taken a superman to adjust to our new life without some measure of resentment.
What was happening to Larry went beyond resentment. I don’t know the exact scientific terms. But I know things weren’t at all right with him. Before long, I
hated
Long Island. I remember the day that it struck me—at this time we were awaiting the birth of our first child—that my entire adult life had been spent behind prison bars. For years I had been the prisoner of a sadistic pimp. And now I was the prisoner of circumstance.
hated
Long Island. I remember the day that it struck me—at this time we were awaiting the birth of our first child—that my entire adult life had been spent behind prison bars. For years I had been the prisoner of a sadistic pimp. And now I was the prisoner of circumstance.
During the final months of my pregnancy with our first child, Dominic, we rented a cottage in Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island. During the summer months, this tourist and fishing village is crowded with the beautiful people who spill over from the Hamptons onto beaches that are a little less manicured. During the winter months there were seagulls and ocean storms and deserted straight highways and loneliness as we hid out, awaiting the birth.
Larry would leave early in the morning and spend the day looking for work or hobnobbing with friends from high-school days. Since we couldn’t risk my being recognized, I stayed home. It was then I started drinking. Just beer and wine. That’s what I would say to myself: Oh, it’s just beer and wine. However, I’ve never been a half-way person about anything, a person who can do something a little bit and just taper off.
There came a time when I didn’t feel the day had begun until I had that first cold beer. The beer became my companion, a friend who would help me block out all the things that made me unhappy. It may have been a measure of my unhappiness. But, whatever the reason, I was able, on occasion, to drink a whole case of beer or a gallon of wine before making dinner. Which is why I finally had to stop cold. I don’t drink today and will never drink again.
My only real company those days was my guard dog, Alice, a German Shepherd. Since I had to do something with my time, I taught myself how to cook. When you can spend eight or nine hours putting together a little supper for two people, you can wind up making some pretty exotic creations. Because of all my spare time and my new hobby, Alice started to put on weight.
And now the dream was back in full force. At the end of every day I would close my eyes and return to that rented cottage in California. The window beside my bed would be open and I would hear a small noise there. I would look up to see a man crawling in through my window. A stranger. I would lie there paralyzed with fear, unable to scream, and then I would see the other men, all five of them, surrounding my bed, staring at me. And when I awakened, after the beatings and the rapings, I would be crying uncontrollably and Larry would be rubbing my back and saying, “There, there, it’s going to be all right.”
But was it? Was it ever going to be all right? All of our lives were centered around one fact of life: We must
not
be recognized. We were in hiding. We couldn’t even have mail delivered to our home. We took out a post office box in the small village of Belle Terre and since mail would sometimes come there addressed to Linda Lovelace, my arrivals provoked some of the broadest grins imaginable.
not
be recognized. We were in hiding. We couldn’t even have mail delivered to our home. We took out a post office box in the small village of Belle Terre and since mail would sometimes come there addressed to Linda Lovelace, my arrivals provoked some of the broadest grins imaginable.
Neither of our two children were to be born easily. Because of all those beatings, because of all the abuse my body had taken, I had to visit a specialist in New York City. The very day Dominic was born, Larry came home to find all of our belongings scattered throughout the house. There was an eviction notice posted to our cottage door giving us three days to vacate the premises. Although I’d never revealed my identity, the notice was addressed to “Larry Marchiano and Linda Lovelace.”
Although I was depressed, I was nowhere near as depressed as I had once been. After all, I wasn’t being abused and I wasn’t being beaten and I wasn’t being forced to perform sexual acts with strangers. Except in my recurrent nightmare. Eviction? Compared to the past, eviction was a piece of cake. All that was happening to us was poverty. And I knew people could live through poverty.
My son Dominic quickly became everything to me. My existence focused in on him and, to some extent, depended on him. The very first day I had him at home, I must’ve read him five books. I shared everything with him.
And as Larry spent more and more time on the road, Dominic became my only company. I remember taking a pair of my old blue jeans and carefully cutting them into a pattern for blue jeans for Dominic. Today they’re on my young daughter’s Cabbage-Patch doll.
A very bad moment came when we were forced to go on welfare. If there had been no baby, I would never have gone through that humiliation. But there was no choice. And on some of the coldest days that winter, Larry and I and the new baby would hitchhike to the welfare office. When the welfare people discovered my true identity—which they did soon enough—they questioned my every statement and took delight in passing me from one office to another for “interviews.”
Finally, however, we got some money to live on. We were given a total of $452 a month. I found a house to rent for $250 a month. After paying for the basics—rent, electricity, car insurance, gas, heat and water—we were left with $54, which barely covered milk and diapers for the month.
What really busted our budget was the fact that both Larry and I were smoking at that time. Ridiculous, right? Obviously, we had to give up cigarettes. Nothing could be clearer. Or harder to do. With the kind of pressure we were feeling, it was easier to give up food than cigarettes. So we wound up collecting cigarette butts from ashtrays, bumming from friends, doing everything except, of course, giving them up.
Finally, though poorer than we had ever been in our lives, we at last were able to slow down and rest. Our little rented house was colored several different shades of yellow—canary yellow bricks, yellow stained shingles, yellow painted asphalt siding. The building had been assembled willy-nilly, without any thought or art or even appearance. The roof was coming up in chunks, as if the victim of some malignant disease. If so, the malignant disease was poverty.
In our new neighborhood the laundry was still hung on lines to dry. And leashed to those backyard clotheslines were barking dogs. The arrival of a stranger would set off an early warning system, barking dogs echoing from one yard to the next, one block to the next.
Several overstuffed chairs sat in our backyard, arranged there as if in the Tea Party chapter of
Alice in
Wonderland
, and they had remained there through the heat of summer, the rains of autumn and now the snows of winter. The stuffing from the furniture was scattered like tufts of tumbleweed around the backyard.
Alice in
Wonderland
, and they had remained there through the heat of summer, the rains of autumn and now the snows of winter. The stuffing from the furniture was scattered like tufts of tumbleweed around the backyard.
Previous tenants had left tools outside, a shovel here, a rake there, and by now they were rusted beyond redemption. There were piles of trash, stacks of wind-downed branches, broken toys, empty spools used for telephone wire, a roll of roofing paper, a swing set running to rust.
I walked up to a porch where the floorboards slanted back and down toward a collection of tiny rooms. The paint had chipped away from the old windows and now there were gaps. I wadded up old towels and stuck them in those gaps to keep the winter out.
thirteen
Without money and without furnishings, we moved into that little house and the first night we slept on the floor. Oh, God, that first night! That house was so filthy and we didn’t even have a mattress to put between ourselves and the floorboards.
Then we started gathering together our furniture, discards and hand-me-downs. There wasn’t a single sofa or chair that didn’t have to be covered with a sheet. The couches had broken legs and leaky stuffing. The cocktail table had no top. There was a second-hand bureau of drawers sitting in the middle of the so-called living room. Our sole wall decoration then was a magazine picture of Peter Frampton.
Whoever had assembled this ramshackle collection of rooms had also thought to build a small windowed nook just off the kitchen and that became my retreat. I suppose it was originally planned as a dining alcove. I painted this room the brightest yellow I could find and filled it with plants, dozens of green plants hanging down from the ceiling, growing up from the floor and sprouting from table surfaces. By closing my eyes until they were just a slit, I could imagine I was sitting in a far off forest glade, leading a far better life.
We were able to make little improvements. I knew that it would never be my dream home but at least I could make it more than a shack. You’d be surprised to learn what flowers can do. I planted flowers everywhere, inside and out, making sure there would be some during every part of the year. And there was even a huge wooden chest on the porch where Dominic could put his toys at the end of day.
When you’re poor, really poor, so much of your life comes down to a car. Ironically, during our first months on Long Island, as the last of our money was disappearing, we were driving . . . a new Bentley, our last tie to Hollyweird.
The Bentley had been leased during the brief period in California when money was a river flowing through our lives. But there’s a catch to a car like that. Every small mechanical repair is a major expense; and when you say you can’t pay hundreds of dollars for a new windshield wiper or a replacement ashtray, the mechanic looks at the car and you can almost
hear
him thinking: Oh, yeah, sure, tell me about it.
hear
him thinking: Oh, yeah, sure, tell me about it.
About the only time I remember going for a drive in the Bentley, I was stopped by a cop who wanted to know what a car like this was doing in a run-down neighborhood. Well, whatever it was doing, it wasn’t doing it for long. One day we called up the leasing company and told them to come and get their car.
Larry was doing whatever was available, picking up a day’s wages here and a day’s wages there. We managed to buy an old bomb of an Oldsmobile—it set us back $150 just to get it working, and that was more than the purchase price had been. The car ran a couple of days and sputtered out; when we went looking for the mechanic who had “fixed” it, he had disappeared. That’s what I always think of when I think of hard times—cars that don’t run and mechanics who do.
Times were bad but they had been worse. Now, when I look back at hard times, I feel we may have needed them. We may have needed the worst trip possible, something to take us down from the California attitudes. We needed to get over the Bentley and all the rest of it.
And let me tell you the major lesson I was learning about poverty: Poverty is easier than brutality. For one thing, poverty has its humorous aspects and brutality does not.
You can imagine how we felt when we went to our Belle Terre post office and found a letter from a Hollywood producer. The producer would say he was surprised I had disappeared from public view. And he felt the public would welcome a chance to see Linda Lovelace return in a brand new movie. And the pay would be incredible; offers ranged between $100,000 and a million. (One offer went to more than a million, this to be deposited in a Swiss bank account.) And all I had to do was what I had done before in
Deep Throat.
What I knew, and they didn’t, was that there would have been a major difference this time. This time, no one would have been forcing me. This time, if I acted in a dirty movie, I would be doing it out of need and greed.
Deep Throat.
What I knew, and they didn’t, was that there would have been a major difference this time. This time, no one would have been forcing me. This time, if I acted in a dirty movie, I would be doing it out of need and greed.
And this time I had a choice.
My ambitions and dreams were not lofty ones at all. I wanted my husband Larry to get a job—any old job at all would do just fine, any nine-to-five job that would pay enough money to take us off welfare. I wanted my child—or children, if that should be the case—to live in a warm home and have a chance to go to school without being bothered. I wanted everyone to be warm; Dominic, my baby boy, seemed to be losing the hearing in one of his ears and I thought it might have been because of the cold. When we had to take him to the doctor, the only way we could get there was by hitch-hiking.
A job. A warm home. Kids. Some peace and quiet. Just a few years ago these modest goals seemed way out of reach. And there was one other goal. I wanted Larry to calm down, to go back and be himself again.
It’s funny, as I go over my diary, I can see clearly that Larry was falling apart under the pressure. However, maybe even if I’d understood what was happening, I wouldn’ have been able to help.
Here’s a typical note from that time—
Today is Tuesday. Larry has been drinking constantly and doing his “Humanitarian Act” of helping others. He comes home tired after a couple of beers. He said I was yelling at him. Last night he came home at 9 p.m., left at 10 p.m., not home until 5 a.m. and left at 6 a.m. Sunday he left at 6:30 p.m. and came home at 3:30 a.m. Saturday he left at 11 a.m. and home at 4:30 a.m. A beer each day. A couple today.
What is he avoiding?
He has not slept since last Wednesday and that was only 3:30 a.m. to 7 a.m.
I should have realized Larry was in real trouble. But I was so caught up in the business of day-by-day survival I didn’t recognize what was happening before my eyes.
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