The Other Hollywood (31 page)

BILL BROWN
:
Pat would just let these absurd situations develop. Like some woman would show up at my house and ask, “Is Pat here?”

I’d say, “No, Pat’s not here.”

She’d say, “Who are you?”

“I’m Bill Brown.”

She’d say, “But this is Pat Salamone’s house, isn’t it?”

I’d say, “No, this is my house. Pat doesn’t live here, but he’s here a lot. Is there anything I can do?”

She’d say, “We’re supposed to have a party here at nine o’clock.” I mean, I would try to be as polite to the person as I could. Then Pat would show up, and I’d just let it go.

But afterward I’d tell Pat, “You tell people that my house is your home, and I’m your guest, and it’s for no reason. If it was part of the operation, that would be wonderful. But it’s over—and this is just some cocktail waitress you met in Hialeah. I mean, come on?!?!”

It was insanity.

GORDON MCNEIL
:
Pat thought he was going to sit there in West Palm Beach, and everyone from the FBI would come to him with their undercover proposals, and he’d say, “Yes, that sounds good” or, “No, that sounds bad.”

And Pat would make all the decisions. This is really what he was saying to me. This is really the way he saw himself. He felt the bureau owed him.

So I said, “Pat, I feel relatively sure that the bureau will say, ‘You gotta be kidding. You’re not going to sit up there in West Palm Beach and have all these undercover agents kiss your ring all day.’”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I wanted it my way, and I tried to get it. And I pissed everybody off. I don’t know why Gordy hung in there. I don’t know why he didn’t punch me out a couple times. He should’ve just fucking decked me, you know? I guess it was because that was the other Livingston—that was Pat Salamone.

FRED SCHWARTZ
:
Once there were indictments, I asserted a lot more control. You see, it was Pat and Bruce’s case when they were investigating it, but I had to win it in court.

I might have gone too far in asserting control, and I think Pat resented that. But I have as big an ego as Pat does—and this had now become my case.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
When do things go bad with Fred Schwartz? When he won’t let me run the case, ha, ha, ha.

I went from total control to having to defer to prosecuting attorneys. I was thinking, “How can they do it better than me?”

It was gonna be my way or no way.

GORDON MCNEIL
:
Pat almost got into a fistfight with Fred Schwartz. Pat was saying, “I’m the one who’s calling the priorities on this!”

Of course, Fred told him, “Well, you may be calling the investigative priorities, but we’re calling the prosecuting priorities.”

And Pat felt he should be controlling the prosecution side, too. It was not a good situation.

FRED SCHWARTZ
:
I thought Pat was overreacting in resenting my coming into the case. But I didn’t think there was a psychological problem until a meeting I had with him in March 1980.

I was trying to push Pat to do something, and I said to Kelly, “Bill, I’d like you to sit in on this meeting.” I wasn’t physically afraid of Pat. I just felt that if there was going to be a showdown, I wanted witnesses. I wanted to have somebody there to make sure it wasn’t my ego that was causing the problem—and to verify if there really was a problem with Pat.

BILL KELLY
:
Fred Schwartz called me and said, “You better get down here. Pat and I’ve got a problem.”

FRED SCHWARTZ
:
Bill and I sat there for over an hour listening to Pat lecture me—rambling, disjointed—about how he was the case agent; how this was his responsibility; how he saved Bruce’s marriage by bringing Bruce down here; how Bruce resents him now…

BILL KELLY
:
It got to the point where Pat was physically threatening Fred Schwartz—the lead federal prosecutor in the case. Pat was about two seconds from throwing a punch at him. And Pat would’ve cleaned up on Fred because Pat was a tough little guy. So I had to get up and intervene.

Later, I said to my wife, Virginia, “This guy, we’ll never make a regular 8:15-to-5:00 agent out of him again. He’s too far gone.”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I never got a sense that my emotions were out of control. The way I looked at it, it was the other people having problems. They weren’t aware of the total picture, so if anybody had a problem, it was them. I didn’t want to hear it.

I had kept everything inside me for so long and hadn’t gotten any outside help. Because outside help was a threat to my existence.

PHIL SMITH
:
Undercover guys gotta live the role. You can’t be thinking about ten other things. And that’s the problem—the better guys get into the role, and they can’t get back out.

I mean, how are they gonna be normal again? They’re out there knockin’ around, throwin’ money around, shmoozin’ with the broads—now all of a sudden you’re gonna come back and sign in every morning? It don’t happen.

So how many of these guys do you recover? How many of them ever go back to being a regular agent? Nah. You lose ’em. It’s a fact of life.

FRED SCHWARTZ
:
After the meeting with Pat, I looked at Kelly and said, “Bill, I think Pat really has significant problems. I’d like to talk to you and Bruce and see what we can do.”

I think the bottom line was that it would be best for me to be the one to talk to Gordy McNeil and Art Nehrbass. It’s not something you do lightly—you don’t go to a SAC [Special Agent in Charge] and say you think an agent you’ve been working with for two-and-a-half-years has psychological problems. But I went to them and said, “Let’s at least have Pat evaluated.”

GORDON MCNEIL
:
I wrote a communication to Washington saying that Pat Livingston did not appear to be functioning normally after the MIPORN operation came to an end. I wrote that he had delusions of grandeur—he thought he was going to be elevated to some lofty position in the bureau—and that he was just acting strange. I was basically asking for the authority to get a psychiatric evaluation of Pat Livingston.

But because I didn’t want Pat to get suspicious, I had Bruce Ellavsky evaluated, too. And Bruce was mad as hell at me.

So I said, “Bruce, I know you appear to be absolutely, totally normal at this point. But just do me a favor and get an evaluation too, so Livingston doesn’t think we’re singling him out.”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Art Nehrbass and Gordon McNeil sent me to a psychiatrist named Dr. Balasini in Miami. It was presented to me as just a normal thing to do after an undercover operation. I wasn’t advised by either one of them that they saw a problem on my part. As a matter of fact, it was set up that Bruce went along to make it look like a normal practice.

I was very reluctant to go to the psychiatrist because I thought that would be a threat to my career. The bureau—more so than the banking industry or the other professions—just doesn’t accept mistakes. You can’t have a flaw.

But I did see Dr. Balasini and basically told him what he wanted to hear.

FRED SCHWARTZ
:
The psychiatrist said that Pat was fine. I know Pat fooled him, but Pat’s behavior changed after he went to the psychiatrist. There wasn’t overt antagonism. There wasn’t resistance. There wasn’t that fight for control. It was almost as if he was saying, “I see you have the weapons to hurt me. Therefore, to hell with it; I’ll do what I have to do.”

PAM ELLAVSKY
:
Pat wanted to keep going out every night, and Bruce would say, “There’s nothing to go out for.”

Pat would say, “Oh, yes there is. We’re going to do this, and we’re going to do that….”

And Bruce would say, “No, Pat, it’s over. I’m not going.”

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
I went to the SAC and told him I didn’t think Pat should ever work undercover again. I mean, even after the case ended Pat continued to use his undercover name.

BILL BROWN
:
We were driving up to Mr. Laff’s restaurant—where Pat was still introducing himself as Salamone—and Pat was telling me, “I want to get divorced from Vickie. I want custody of my kids. I want to be an undercover agent. I want to go to Las Vegas and gamble.”

I said, “Pat, do you realize how preposterous what you just said is? I know you love your children, but you’re not home long enough to take care of a cat, let alone a child.”

VICKIE LIVINGSTON (PAT LIVINGSTON’S WIFE)
:
About a month after the indictments came down, Pat was real nice to me all of a sudden. I couldn’t understand why he was being so cooperative.

BILL BROWN
:
I said it in a nice way, but I said, “Pat, you are exhibiting the classic symptoms of a person who is neurotic. You think, act, and behave in a dissimilar manner. You probably don’t realize what you’re doing, but you need professional help, and I wish you’d go see a psychiatrist.”

VICKIE LIVINGSTON
:
What led me to let Pat come back? I don’t know. He came over on Derby Day—the first weekend in May—and said he’d made a big mistake and that he wanted to come back. It was a couple of days before we were going for our final divorce. I just didn’t know what to do. I was really torn. I said, “You’ve got to be crazy. I can’t believe how you’ve thrown me these curves.”

I was just really confused. Pat was calling me at work and begging me—calling me all hours of the night.

PAM ELLAVSKY
:
They were about three days away from their divorce when Pat crawled back to Vickie on his hands and knees. I mean, you just never knew what Pat was going to do next—there was just so much conniving that went on. Pat seemed not to want to intentionally hurt Vickie, but he was constantly hurting her anyway. He never told the truth. And I saw her suffer.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I knew it was a loveless marriage, but hey, that’s okay. I tried to keep the marriage together for the kids. I was going back to Vickie because I had the two best boys in the world. I could have transferred anywhere in the country, but Vickie wanted Louisville because her family was there. So I let her pick Louisville.

VICKIE LIVINGSTON
:
Pat was using moving to Louisville as a way to lure me back.

I didn’t get back together with him because that’s what I wanted. I told him flat out that I didn’t love him, but I felt I owed it to the kids to see what would happen.

I thought, “What do I have to lose? I’m planning to move to Louisville anyway. If it works out, fine, and if it doesn’t, I’m where I want to be.”

PAM ELLAVSKY
:
Vickie told Pat, “Okay, you transfer us to Louisville, and you can come home.” And that was it. We never spoke again.

BILL KELLY
:
Pat and Bruce were praised as the heroes of the whole operation, and they were. They lived in constant danger for a long time. They were both given transfers out of Miami, where naturally they were still in danger. Livingston was transferred to Louisville at the request of his wife. Ellavsky went to Boston.

PAM ELLAVSKY
:
We were all on the same bowling team together, and we just couldn’t talk anymore. Vickie just couldn’t face me. She couldn’t look me in the eye.

VICKIE LIVINGSTON
:
The weekend we moved to Louisville I was standing outside a church in tears. Bill Brown had said, “He’ll never make the transition back to the real world.”

I knew he was never again going be the man that I married; I knew in my heart that he would never make it back.

Then, that night, Pat said he was going back undercover. I was furious. I said, “We’re not even here two days, and you’re going back undercover? My God, what have I gotten myself into?”

MIAMI/LONDON/LONG ISLAND
1980

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Larry Marchiano was going out with my sister, and I went to Florida for a deposition, and I just started talking to Larry. So then Larry came out to California. And it was a bad choice I made there. When I was getting married to him, I’m like, “Wait a second, can I have my baby and be without you?”

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Linda moved out to Long Island and re-associated herself with Larry Marchiano, who is the father of her first kid.

Linda had been with him before me, that’s how I knew about it. I had a Polaroid picture of ’em. Linda must’ve been fifteen, sixteen, when she met him. I don’t know how they met. I don’t know if he went to high school with her. I just remember the name, and when I was doin’ the E! Channel thing, the guy said, “Yeah, she just broke up with Marchiano, her husband.”

I asked, “Marchiano?
Larry
Marchiano?”

He said, “Yeah.”

I said, “The guy she fucked before she fucked me, you know?”

He said, “Really?”

I said, “Yeah.”

He couldn’t understand how she bullshitted about that because she said the son was really the sister’s, I guess.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
When I first got pregnant, I was sixteen. I was in New York, but I went to Florida because my oldest sister, Barbara, said I couldn’t stay with her because she didn’t want her daughters to see me in that condition.

So I went to a Children’s Home Society in Florida. I was going to give him up to a foster home until I could produce on my own. I went to school to become a keypunch operator. In the hospital, five hours after the baby was born, they brought me papers to sign. I was in such a fog—they doped me up so much—I could hardly talk and could hardly see. My mother said, “These are circumcision papers.”

I asked, “Are you sure?”

She goes, “Yes.”

I asked, “Not adoption papers?”

She said, “No, circumcision papers.” So I proceeded to sign and let them take my son. I thought he was going to a foster home for three weeks, then I called this woman up, and I said, “Well, I got my keypunch operator’s certificate; I can get a job. I’m ready to take my son,” and she started laughing hysterical on the phone. “You’ll never see him again,” she said. “Those were adoption papers, you fool, not circumcision papers.”

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Was Linda ashamed about giving up her son for adoption? No, it sorta came and went. It was somethin’ that came up; she mentioned it. I didn’t even think about it as an adoption. I thought she just gave her son to her sister. It was just somethin’ she did because she wasn’t able to take care of a child.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
That’s what I wanted—a baby. Then Larry could go away. I was supporting him for a long time. A very, very long time. I think the first five years we were together, he didn’t work.

Was I pissed? I think I was more pissed that I was married to him—but I wanted kids.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Linda came into Vegas with this play. She was gonna do her acting, and Larry Marchiano was her manager. The play was so bad—the second night, this guy comes over and says, “Jeez, I went in to see Linda Lovelace in a play.”

I said, “Oh, yeah? How was it?”

He said, “Well, about halfway through the play, this lady sittin’ beside me asked, ‘I wonder when Linda Lovelace is gonna come on?’ And she’d been onstage since the very opening scene.”

I said, “She must be makin’ a big impression.”

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Larry and I went to Vegas because I was in a play there:
My Daughter’s Rated X
. The play closed after two weeks, but we stayed in Nevada a little bit—up in the mountains.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Linda’s play folded—and Larry Marchiano got taken to the padded cell ward there for goin’ berserk one night. I don’t know if it
was pills and booze or what, but the fireman that took him down there was a friend of mine, and he said, “Oh yeah, we were rollin’ him out in a straitjacket. He was tellin’ Linda, ‘REMEMBER, THE SHOW MUST GO ON! REMEMBER, THE SHOW MUST GO ON!’”

LINDA LOVELACE
:
We went to New York and lived in his parents’ basement for a while. Then we moved to Long Island—Santa Merchas, which means “the center of more riches for the fishermen.” I think the first two years we were there we were on public assistance. One time, Larry took the rent money and flew to Ohio to see his brother. That’s when he thought people were following him.

MIKE MCGRADY (COAUTHOR OF
ORDEAL
)
:
I was writing a column for
News-day
; and I heard from a lawyer in Bayshore—Victor Yanicone—that Linda Lovelace was living on welfare on Long Island. Victor—who became a mutual friend—described this tale of terrible poverty. He said that Linda was eating dog food.

I said, “Well, there’s gotta be a story here.”

I arranged to meet Linda in Victor’s office the first time. And she started telling me the story that she’d been brutalized and forced into everything.

Oh yeah, I had a lot of trouble believing it at first. See, I was one of the many local columnists who had interviewed her when
Deep Throat
came out, and from all I could see she was a willing participant—and I had met Chuck Traynor at that time as well.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
I was kinda hesitant about writing my story. But one afternoon I was sitting there watching Phil Donahue, and Susan Brown-miller made the comment, “Oh, a lot of people do pornography to get into Hollywood and become a star—just like Linda Lovelace.”

It made me so mad that I called up Mike McGrady, and he called up Lyle Stuart, the publisher, and said, “We’re going to do a book.”

I’d been thinking that maybe I could slip away and live a normal life, you know? But after that
Donahue
show, I said, “No. This isn’t right.” That’s when I made the final decision to go for it.

MIKE MCGRADY
:
Linda told me that if I saw
Deep Throat
—which I hadn’t seen at that point—I would notice huge bruise marks over her body. I’d never heard that before, and it seemed strange to me that that would’ve escaped people’s attention. But when I saw
Deep Throat
I saw that her thighs were indeed black-and-blue.

But before being totally convinced, we put Linda through two days of lie detector tests with a guy in New York, who was considered the best in the business.

PEOPLE,
JANUARY 28, 1980: MRS. MARCHIANO CALLS HERSELF ‘A TYPICAL HOUSEWIFE’: THE WORLD KNEW HER AS LINDA LOVELACE
:
“What happened is told in her just published autobiography,
Ordeal,
a nightmarish portrayal of sexual perversion and enslavement. Between 1971 and 1973, she says she was transformed from the relatively innocent manager of a clothing boutique into a numb and brutalized sex machine who graduated from cheap street-corner tricks to celebrity bedrooms, among them Sammy Davis Jr. (Davis responds: ‘The whole thing is ludicrous.’)”

GLORIA LEONARD
:
Cosmopolitan,
back in the day when Gloria Steinem was still a part of it, once did a cover story of a headless woman. She was just nude from the neck down, holding flowers over her breasts—and the cover line was something like: “Erotica vs. Pornography: Do you know the difference?”

I thought, “Here they are pooh-poohing it and making hay out of it, but they have it as their cover story. They’re selling it and exploiting it themselves! Well, I’m just doing the same thing. And who are you or any other female to consider my choice of what I want to do any less valid than your choice?” It only causes more dissension. It’s not going to unify women.

MIKE MCGRADY
:
I was there when the polygraph test was being administered. We asked her questions for two days. By this time I had gathered the information from her, so we asked questions about every part of the story—every part that might be considered libelous.

Linda passed with flying colors. Linda cannot lie—as near as I can tell—and get away with it. She’s very transparent, and during her first interviews as “Miss Deep Throat,” no one took what she was saying seriously, that she was having a wonderful time.

So I don’t think she fooled anyone—but I didn’t see any signs at that time that she’d been beaten or tortured or anything. The story itself was horrifying, and you might’ve thought, as I did, that when you have one of the leading celebrities tell a tale of great sex and violence, it’d be easy to sell. But the truth is I was turned down by thirty-three publishers before I went back to Lyle Stuart and said, “Please publish this book.”

GLORIA LEONARD
:
Marlene Willoughby, Annie Sprinkle, and I went up and protested at the
Cosmo
offices. Yeah, it made all the news that night—and the next day, too—in New York City.

We had gotten the proper permit and all that. Somebody from
Cosmo
came down to talk to us; but we said, “No, we want an audience upstairs.” And they wouldn’t let us up. But we made our point.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
When
Ordeal
came out, I did the
Phil Donahue Show.
He does that little brief interview with you before he opens it up to the audi
ence, and the first question from the audience was from a woman who asked, “What in your childhood led you to be so promiscuous?”

I was like, “Hello—did you hear anything that I said?”

I was twenty years old, heading in one direction, and all of a sudden, my life’s taken away from me. Even though I got free of Traynor, here I am, a middle-aged woman, and I’m still dealing with
Deep Throat
.

NEW YORK
DAILY NEWS,
MAY 30, 1980: NOW HERE’S A SWITCH DEPT.
:
“Porn star Linda Lovelace will join Women Against Pornography for a demonstration here tomorrow at Seventh Avenue and Forty-eighth Street at 11:00
A.M
. to protest a dirty movie. The movie?
Deep Throat
.”

GLORIA LEONARD
:
Women Against Pornography first came about in the early eighties. They had a little storefront office in Times Square. What was their purpose then? Beats the shit out of me!

They just thought porn degraded, defiled, and debased women—the same old stupid argument. You know, it causes crime, teaches men not to respect women, yadda, yadda, yadda.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Some people from Women Against Pornography watched the
Donahue
show. And then Gloria Steinem contacted me, and she tried very hard—everybody tried real hard—to find some way that I could seek legal action. But there’s just no laws for victims in our society. Only for criminals. So we weren’t able to do too much.

So I did a press conference with Women Against Pornography when I was eight months pregnant with my son, Lindsay. It was a rainy morning at the end of May 1980, and they had a big demonstration outside the Frisco theater where they were showing
Deep Throat
.

There was a press conference afterward at the “Women Against Pornography” offices. That’s where I met Gloria Steinem and Catherine MacKinnon. And Valerie Harper—“Rhoda”—she was really fun and great. Yeah, she said she was gonna come out and have hamburgers and hot dogs, but she never did.

GLORIA LEONARD
:
Nobody really paid a whole lot of attention to
Ordeal
when it came out, you know, it terms of its credibility. I mean, this was a woman who never took responsibility for her own shitty choices—but instead blamed everything that happened to her in her life on porn. You know, “The devil made me do it.”

NEW YORK
DAILY NEWS,
JUNE 8, 1980: A STRANGE BEDFELLOW FOR THE WAR ON PORNOGRAPHY
:
“Linda Lovelace has been born again. She is now Linda Marchiano, a Long Island housewife, mother of a four-year-old son and due to give birth again this month. She is also the author of a book called
Ordeal
(Citadel Press, $10), which chronicles the two-and-a-half years she claims she spent as the virtual prisoner of her former husband, pimp-pornographer, Chuck Traynor.”

GLORIA LEONARD
:
In
Ordeal,
Linda describes being beaten up on the set of
Deep Throat
. But the truth of the matter is that nobody that had anything to do with the film touched her—she was beaten up at night by Chuck Traynor in the privacy of their hotel room. It was her own poor, shitty choice of a companion that got her beat up. Nobody in the porn business—that had anything to do with the film—laid a hand on her, other than in a loving way.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
The book tour was hard. It was one of those twelve cities in ten days kinda deals, you know? Fly in and get to your hotel at like 1:00
A.M
., then be up at five to do a morning show and then back on the plane. You know, you’re doing like, God—I don’t know how many. I would do like eight or nine interviews in one city—and then be off again.

Larry was with me the whole time. He wasn’t real supportive of me; he had me convinced that if I went out and got a job someone was gonna recognize me and that I was gonna get raped.

But he was the one to get me up and going, you know? I’m a slow starter, so yeah, he would kinda get me going. But there was too much drinking.

I mean, goddamn—I ended up having to pay for the whole alcohol bill. I think one night we drank ten bottles of Mumm Cordon Rouge. Ten bottles! Thank God it doesn’t give you a headache.