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Q&A
Death of a porn star
BY CHRIS WRIGHT

She made only a handful of films, and only one of those was any good. Yet 30 years after Deep Throat, Linda Lovelace remains an icon. She is — was — the biggest porn star the world has ever seen. On Monday, Lovelace died of injuries sustained in a car crash. She was 53.

For Eric Danville, author of The Complete Linda Lovelace (Power Process Publishing, 2001), losing his friend and erotic muse to a car accident was hard to swallow. It was, he says, "such an anticlimactic way for her to go." Danville, an editor at Penthouse, spoke with the Phoenix from his New York office.

Q: Why did Deep Throat have such a huge impact?

A: When the film came out, there had been nothing like it before. It got people talking about oral sex and sexual satisfaction. It started a lot of dialogue, and it opened up a lot of doors. Also, what she did in the film was pretty amazing.

Q: Have you seen it?

A: More times than I care to count. It was the first pornographic movie I ever saw.

Q: And it’s still big.

A: Yeah. A rep of the company that owns the film told me they still print 2000 copies a week. By today’s standards it’s tame. There are only a couple of scenes with vaginal penetration.

Q: But she never made any money on the film?

A: She was paid $1200, which went to her husband/manager Chuck Traynor. So she didn’t make a dime on it. She was naive. She was very trusting of people.

Q: In early interviews, Lovelace says things like, "I’m so free! Can’t you see I love it?" Later she claimed to have been coerced into making movies by Traynor — where does the truth lie?

A: I can’t say whether she was forced. I can say that if she did do these things of her own free will, she regretted it.

Q: Was she haunted by it?

A: I think she was haunted by people bringing it up all the time. Every time Fox did an anti-porn thing they’d trot Linda out. But she didn’t wake up screaming at night. She had come to terms with it.

Q: Some of her early films — Dog Fucker — were very hard-core. Did you ever ask her about those?

A: That was something she didn’t like to talk about. For a long time she denied that thing existed. Last time I spoke to her about it, I’d never seen anyone cry like that. I could only put an arm around her and say, "It’s okay, it’s okay."

Q: Were her kids comfortable with who their mother was?

A: They were very comfortable because their mother was not Linda Lovelace; their mother was Linda Boreman. Linda Lovelace was a character in a movie. They did have a problem with kids at school: "Your mom’s a cocksucker." But they didn’t hold it against her.

Q: Lovelace went from sex kitten to anti-porn crusader. Yet many feminists still slam her. Did that upset her?

A: I don’t think Linda paid that much mind. She was pissed off about how they trotted her around for speaking engagements, and when the furor died down, nothing. She was upset that she wasn’t invited to Gloria Steinem’s wedding. She felt like she had been exploited again.

Q: Had her experiences given her a hard edge?

A: No. She was a lot a lot of fun — not the repressed, depressed ex–porn queen that everyone thought she was. She liked to go dancing. She liked roller coasters.

Q: How did she make a living?

A: She did not have steady employment. She wanted to charge me for an interview I did with her. I said I can’t do that, but I will show you how to make money being Linda Lovelace. I’m making money off this, everyone else made money on your name, so you should too. She did all right. She had a cute little place in Colorado — nothing fancy, but not a shack.

Q: Is it true she never watched Deep Throat?

A: Last time I saw Linda, she told me she finally had. I said, "So, what did you think?" She said, "To tell you the truth, I don’t see what the fuss was about." We were in a hotel room once, in Milan, and there was soft-core porn on TV. Linda looked away. She wished people didn’t have to watch stuff like that to get excited.

Issue Date: April 25 - May 2, 2002
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