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Deeper than Inside Deep Throat
By Tyrone “Dollar” Green
New York City writer Eric Danville may have a bit of a Christ complex about him. A former managing editor at High Times, senior editor at Screw, and currently managing editor at Penthouse Forum, he has taken it upon himself to right the wrongs perpetrated against the most notorious women of the ’70s.
His exhaustively researched and highly entertaining The Complete Linda Lovelace (ordering information available at CompleteLindaLovelace.com) is the definitive tome on that most misunderstood pop-porn icon. Without his access to Lovelace, both Inside Deep Throat and Legs McNeil’s The Other Hollywood would not have been possible.
And they both suck. Unlike The Complete Linda Lovelace, which is exhaustively researched, snazzily written, and grounded in truth.
Now Danville is out to clear Patty Hearst’s good name, hard at work on The Complete Patty Hearst. But he also penned a screenplay about Lovelace that he’s shopping around and would love to see Maggie Gyllenhaal play the porno star with the amazing oral talents.
Danville has some pretty fine oral skills himself, as he proves in this exclusive interview with Sex Wrecks. He’s already set the record straight about a couple of Lovelace misconceptions, including that she was a born-again Christian and that she had a double mastectomy. In fact, her Deep Throat co-star, Harry Reems, is the born-again Christian; Lovelace was just a lapsed Catholic who had a liver transplant.
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Have you seen Inside Deep Throat?
No, I haven’t.
But you were involved in it, right?
I was interviewed for it for about an hour, hour and a half by [co-director] Fenton Baily and a bunch of his people. They asked a lot of questions about the latter part of Linda’s life and, obviously, my involvement with her and what it was like to drag her out of semi-obscurity after all those years and not a whole lot about the actual movie because that’s not my area of expertise.
Were you responsible for bringing Linda Lovelace out of retirement?
Yeah, without a doubt, I got in touch with her a bunch of years ago when the news got around that Ron Howard wanted to make [Lovelace’s autobiography] Ordeal into a movie. I was working at Screw at the time and I wanted to get a straight writing credit, so I wanted to see if I could interview her for Vanity Fair or Esquire.
I called her up and she wasn’t interested in talking to me. I was being very honest with her from the beginning. I told her I worked in porn. I worked for [founding Screw publisher Al] Goldstein. She actually answered the phone as her own secretary.
Did you recognize her voice?
I recognized her voice right away, and I called seven o’clock her time, so there’s no secretary. [Lovelace’s birth name] Linda Boreman does not have a secretary [laughs].
She keeps talking to me in the guise as her secretary and at the end goes, “I’ll pass the message on to Linda, but please don’t ever call this number again.”
Then this friend of mine suggested that I take all my interest and my research abilities and put it into a book. I work on that for a couple of years. When it’s just about done I called her up again. When I was going through [Lovelace’s second autobiography] Out of Bondage, I saw this line where she said, “All these people mention me in their books and I never know about it. It’s a shock to the system. It can be embarrassing.”
I figured what I was going to do was say, “This book is going to be done with your interview or without it, but I’d like to interview you for this book.” I told her, “I think you got screwed in the media and there’s a lot more to your story than people really understand, and in all the research that I’ve done I’ve found things to back up what you’ve said. Would you like to do an interview?”
So we made arrangements for me to go out there and meet her. She said, “Come out here, we’ll talk. If I feel comfortable with [you] then we’ll agree to do it.” She agreed to do the interview, and then she agreed to promote the thing with me and do some interviews and to do book signings. She did personal appearances on her own as Linda Lovelace again, finally. I actually did bring Linda Lovelace out of the shadows of history and back into the public limelight for about two years.
Did she like your book?
Yeah, she did like the book. She told me that she thought it was good, that I treated her fairly, which is really what she was most interested in. She never asked to see any of it beforehand. She loaned me a bunch of pictures. She was really helpful with the final stages of it. The seventh chapter is all her.
Did you get any other reactions from people that your wrote about?
The one that I really wished that I’d seen, I was interviewed for a documentary on the BBC called The Real Linda Lovelace, which they had been working on before Inside Deep Throat was being talked about. The guy who directed that, when he’s interviewing me in my apartment, we’re talking about the book and he told me about [anti-porn feminist] Andrea Dworkin, they had just interviewed her. He told me there’s a great scene in which they’re talking about my book. Linda had told [anti-porn feminist] Katherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin that she was working on this book with me, that she was giving it her OK, and they were very much against it [laughs]. This guy told me that Andrea Dworkin was practically in tears talking about how Linda said she liked the book. I said, “Oh, fuck, man! If it doesn’t make it into the [film] send me the outtake. I got to see how I made Andrea Dworkin cry!” I haven’t seen it yet, but if somebody has it out there I definitely want to get a look at it.
You also provided a lot of the source material for Legs McNeil’s book on the porn-film industry, The Other Hollywood. Did you read it?
I haven’t read it. It wasn’t so much my book, even though he did pull the weirdest things out of my book to illustrate his points. I sold him a copy of my entire archives for his use. That wasn’t an unusual situation with him, being so many people that he has to talk to, many who are dead or not willing to talk. He was buying interviews from lots of people, which he acknowledges.
All of his contacts with Linda Lovelace were because of me. He did that Court TV special, and I got a call from him one day saying, “I hear you’ve been holding out on me.” He found out I’m in touch with Linda. He said, “I’m doing this show. You got to get her to talk to me.” I got her to talk to him for considerably less than what she usually got as an interview fee.
What is it about Linda Lovelace that obsessed you to devote so much time, energy, and money to your book The Complete Linda Lovelace?
At Screw they had every issue from 1968 to the day before you were sitting there bound in these huge leather books. One of the things they would tell you was during the small downtime that you have to go back and read the old magazines and get a sense of history of the business and the magazine and find out shit about Al.
As I read more and more of it I’d come across Linda Lovelace all the time. I had a basic general interest in her anyway, because she was the most famous one that you’d hear about even before you knew what a porno movie was. I had a really good resource there, and I took that and extrapolated it out. If I saw a magazine that mentioned her I’d snatch it up.
I worked on it for three years. It’s the best story in the business. Her and [underage porn star] Traci Lords have the most fascinating stories. Linda, obviously, because she was the first one and her fame helped generate this business that makes so much money for everyone and thirty years down the line there’s still so much controversy about it. Who can’t love this story? It’s one of the best pop-culture stories period.
It transcends pornography . . .
Definitely, it’s pop-culture, it’s pornography, it’s politics, it’s women’s rights. It crosses so many lines. Plus, despite the fact that it’s got a really wide scope, the stuff that I’d have to write about was more or less finite. If I was to do the same thing about Seka or Annie Sprinkle, they did hundreds of those 8mms. If I was to track down every one of those it would take me years. But Linda did less than ten, she did eight, so it was a controllable sort of chaos and tracking down every pop-culture reference.
You could be thorough without losing your mind.
Not that I didn’t lose my mind. By the end of it I was so tense that I was actually in a wheelchair for two days. I started getting this stress thing and it all manifested in the lower part of my back. The chair in front of our computer is a wheelchair [laughs], for several different reasons, and I was so tense and so knotted up in this I’m-going-to-fail sort of a thing that I couldn’t really walk for two days. I suffer for my art now like everybody else.
You’re probably the most knowledgeable person about Linda Lovelace living today, so what’s in your book that might surprise readers?
The most surprising things in it won’t necessarily be what Linda said but what people around her said. Interviews with [Deep Throat director] Jerry Damiano, where he said that Linda would come to the set black-and-blue and he’d have to have body paint put on her to cover up the bruises. [Linda’s first husband and manager] Chuck Traynor, when several different people called, me being one of them and High Society magazine being another, asked if he beat her up, said, “Yeah, sure. I’m from the south; that’s the way we treat our women. It’s a sign of love. If your old lady’s talking back to you, you smack her around and she stops.”
The big problem with Ordeal is that she was making these accusations and not able to back them up. I was able to back them up.
That leads to my next question: After interviewing Lovelace and delving so deeply into her life, what’s your take on her accusation of abuse in the porn industry?
She never really made those accusations against the porn industry. Her accusations were always against Chuck Traynor. She found porn to be distasteful and why do people bother to watch it and it’s so disgusting. But she never leveled any accusations of physical abuse against people in the porn business. Her big complaint with the porn business is that people knew--like Jerry Damiano--that this stuff was going on and didn’t do anything to help her.
Why does a person who thinks porn is disgusting get into porn?
She didn’t do it of her own volition, which I can sort of see. When she hit the skids and wasn’t making any money she could have gone right back to it and didn’t.
It’s not an unusual story that women are forced to do things that they don’t like. Especially with the relationship that she had with Chuck--and this is one that never really gets brought up a whole lot--[Playboy Playmate] Dorothy Stratten’s relationship with [boyfriend/manager] Paul Snider that Star 80 was based on. That almost perfectly parallels Linda’s story only she doesn’t get her face blown off.
They both happened around the same time. The Dorothy Stratten thing was happening around the same time that Linda was putting out her book, so it was possible back then.
How about the dog movie?
I think that even if you do not accept the fact that she was forced into the business, I think she was at least--at the very least--horrendously mortified by having done that--whether or not she wanted to do it. That became such a bone of contention between her and Goldstein. You know Goldstein’s modus operandi for taking someone down is to basically embarrass the hell out of them and to personally attack them. He made sure that everyone in the world knew that she did this movie where she fucks a dog.
The only thing that she asked me not to do was not to print the dog picture. I told her I had no intention of doing that. I had spoken to her a couple of times about it. She always referred to it as the D-O-G movie. For the past thirty years she could not bring herself to say dog movie.
I saw her one night when we were talking about it in a hotel room in Jersey. The book was going to be done in about six months. She goes, “Do you talk about everything?” I said, “Yeah, I do.” I knew what she was talking about. I told her, “I can’t not talk about it as a journalist and writer; I have to show I know about this or I look bad.” She was like, “Yeah, I understand that.” Then she started crying and crying and crying. Finally, I put my arm around her and said, “I’m really sorry, but I have to do this.” She said, “I know. It’s been thirty years, perhaps I should start getting over it.” I was, like, yeah. You get over horrible things, but that was one thing she wasn’t allowed to forget.
When’s the last time you spoke with Linda?
The last time I saw her in person was at a convention. She had started doing some of these signing conventions on her own, and one of them was the Vamp Show that was out in Jersey. I brought her some 8x10 headshots to sign, and at that point she was selling copies of Deep Throat, signing them. She goes to me, “Oh, I finally watched it.” Because she always claimed that she never saw the whole movie. I was like, “Oh, you bitch, you always told me you’d watch it with me!” I asked her what she thought, and the only thing she said to me was, smiling, “To tell you the truth, I don’t see what the big deal was.” I was like, “All right, OK, that’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ll take your word for it.”
The last time I had spoken to her was on the phone after her kidneys had given out and she was in the hospital in Colorado, two to three months before she died. She was kind of groggy. She wasn’t feeling that well. She was in pretty failing health. She was sounding kind of down but happy to hear from me as well as some of the people she was able to meet at these conventions and such. People were calling her up and wishing her well, which I think made her happy.
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