1972: The Pill available to unmarried women in all states
March 22, 1972: The U.S. Senate adopts the Equal Rights Amendment
June 12, 1972: Deep Throat opens at New York’s World Theater
June 17, 1972: Five burglars arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate hotel
January 11, 1973: First broadcast of An American Family on PBS
May 17, 1973: First broadcast of Watergate hearings
Linda Lovelace: January 10, 1949–April 22, 2002
Ordeal, the third of four autobiographies of Deep Throat porn star Linda Boreman (Lovelace), isn’t interesting because it’s a good book, a tragic one, or even an arousing one. Published in 1980, it’s interesting as an artifact of early feminism, just like Deep Throat in 1972, and because, again like Deep Throat, it raises endless questions about sincerity, pleasure, the public and the private, questions that floated in the air just a year later during the Watergate hearings, questions that still shape our culture.
Lovelace’s voice is the studiously bland voice we hear every day from politicians, in the smuggest of op-eds, in the passive-aggressive niceness of airline employees. Hypocrisy has always been with us, but the mimicking of the colorless tone of down-to- earth “good folks,” of what was once called Middle America, seems to have become prevalent after World War II. It was diagnosed in the earnest realist novels of the 1950s, and parodied in Catch-22, Mad magazine, and The Graduate (“Plastics!”).
The deliberate impersonation of a blameless dailiness might have been an artifact of television, television commercials, and the televising of political oratory. All of this created a national speech, a national jargon, broader and more impersonal than the regional accents of radio, and it also allowed the audience to see how facial expressions and words played with and against each other. It is much easier to lie with your voice when your face is hidden, or to lie with your face when you don’t talk. (Deep Throat, like most porn films, is light on dialogue.)
When Lovelace discusses the injuries of her past, her voice has an almost autistic blankness: “My mother has always been very emotional toward me. When I was four years old, she started beating me—first with a belt, later with the buckle of the belt.” Is that “very emotional” a reflection of Lovelace’s inability or unwillingness to understand her own history? Is it a defense against the sadness that must underlie such a memory, if true? Ordeal might have been a very sad book, but intentionally or not, it is not. Or is “very emotional” a sly understatement, allowing the reader to draw the connection between Linda’s abuse by her mother and her choice to stay for years with her abusive husband and Svengali, Chuck Traynor?
Consider this bit of Linda’s backstory: “I don’t want to pretend that I was always Miss Holy-Holy. I fell in love once or twice; I lost my virginity at age nineteen, and when I was twenty, I gave birth to an illegitimate child that my mother put out for adoption.”
“An illegitimate child.” She doesn’t even say whether it was a boy or girl—the important thing is that it was “illegitimate.” Her mother put it out for adoption? I was under the impression that the child’s mother’s consent is necessary, not the grandmother’s. Linda has no agency here. “My only honest conversations those days were with God,” she says of her initial time with Traynor, but the question of how honest she is with herself, or us, comes up throughout her book.
Discussing sex, Lovelace blends false modesty and coyness, like the tan lines on the otherwise overexposed bodies of porn stars. Chuck Traynor may well have abused her, but Lovelace had a foot in the world he lived in before they met, through her high school best friend, Betsy, a “topless dancer.”
Lovelace’s ghostwriter for Ordeal, Mike McGrady, was an Eastern establishment journalist—Yale, the army, Newsday—whose Naked Came a Stranger, a parody of a sex novel, was a best seller in 1969. A year later, he published his self-exposé: Stranger than Naked; or, How to Write Dirty Books for Fun and Profit; A Manual. Linda did something similar. In 1974 she published her first autobiography, Inside Linda Lovelace, portraying herself as a sex addict who participated willingly in the porn world. In Ordeal she calls Inside Linda Lovelace “a pack of lies” and says it was written by Chuck Traynor. Ordeal doesn’t mention a second, 1974 autobiography, The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace, which was put together by the man who became her producer and lover after she left Traynor; he seems to have been gay, but beat her anyway at the end. Not to mention that in 1986 Linda published a fourth autobiography, Out of Bondage, also cowritten with Mike McGrady. The issues become murkier still when you consider that Out of Bondage was published by Lyle Stuart, a division of Kensington Books, while The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace was published by Pinnacle Books, also a division of Kensington.
Why would a woman who wanted to distance herself from an earlier, false autobiography choose a collaborator with McGrady’s history of hoax? Did she choose McGrady precisely in order to tantalize the reader with questions about truth? Or was he the best she could find—damaged goods, like herself? Or was Ordeal his idea, inspired by his own history of spoof and confession? These questions are emblematic of the early 1970s, when the first hearings on a possible presidential impeachment in American history were televised, and when the first reality TV show—An American Family—aired.