The Other Hollywood (9 page)

The girls’ boyfriends, I usually found, were only interested in one thing—the money angle. If there was enough money, they’d let them do anything.

I don’t know whether I’d go so far as to say that they were pimping them off, but I knew that if the boyfriends didn’t think they could make
Playboy,
they weren’t interested in posing just for me. But if they could get in
Playboy
and make all that money, then the boyfriend was pushing them.

LENNY CAMP
:
Chuck Traynor was a pimp. Always. Most of the girls that Chuck had were not models. They were just girls, that’s all.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Chuck Traynor was really the first of the “suitcase pimps”—you know, boyfriends that become their girlfriends’ managers. Now the porn business is filled with them, but when I met Chuck, this was
new, and I just knew he had some sort of weird power and control thing—and wanted control over someone’s life for the money.

I could just see him taking advantage of a person that really had the same issues that I had—about having to have attention and being a star and all that. No one gets into this business unless you got a real need for attention. I don’t think a lot of healthy people are attracted to this industry, ha, ha, ha.

BILL KELLY
:
I had good informants in the local film processing plants, so I knew every dirty movie that was being made in South Florida.

But I didn’t know
Deep Throat
was being made here because they didn’t process it down here. They took the raw film and sent it back to New York.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Every evening, after we finished shooting for the day, Chuck and I drove the film out to the airport. It was shipped up to Butchie Peraino in New York, where it was processed and studied. And every day Butchie would call Damiano to complain. We could hear only Damiano’s side of the conversation—so I would hear Damiano yell that I was
not
too skinny, and I was
not
too flat chested, and I was
not
too amateurish.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
Linda was pretty naive in the early days. One night, after shooting, we went out for dinner, and Chuck ordered a shrimp cocktail for her, and when it came she was amazed. She didn’t know what it was. It intrigued me to think that one of the best cocksuckers in the world could be so impressed over a shrimp cocktail.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Deep Throat
itself took up only twelve days of my life—six before the cameras, another six waiting around for the sun to come out. Probably the most important thing to happen to me was a rechristening.

Gerard Damiano came up with the name Linda Lovelace for the character in his movie. There had been a BB, for Brigitte Bardot, and an MM, for Marilyn Monroe, and now he wanted an LL. In time, I came to dislike the name because of what it stood for. But the truth is this: Linda Boreman and Linda Traynor never managed to get away from Chuck. It took a Linda Lovelace to escape.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
There never was a Linda Lovelace.
I’m
Linda Lovelace. Linda Lovelace got where she got because of my brain, not because of her throat.

NEW YORK CITY
1972–1973

BILL KELLY
:
I turned out to be the dummy in the
Deep Throat
case because I didn’t know it was going on originally. I’ll take the hit on that one.

I didn’t get criticized by the FBI, but after
Deep Throat
became a cause célèbre, some of the bad guys—the other pornographers—kept trying to embarrass me. “Yeah, if you’re such a great FBI agent, Kelly, how come you didn’t even know the biggest porn film in history was being made within walking distance of your house?”

DAVE FRIEDMAN
:
Deep Throat
was like
The Blair Witch Project
of its time.

BILL KELLY
:
In 1971, an element of the Colombo family of the Mafia named the Perainos came down here to South Florida to make—for less than twenty-five thousand dollars—the first “porno chic” movie,
Deep Throat
. Their eventual gross exceeded 100 million dollars, of which they got to keep at least half.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
I never paid any attention to what the Perainos were working on around the office. So I never knew what else they were involved in. I mean, I just did what I was supposed to do, and that was it. Was I a good soldier? Yeah, ha, ha, ha. I guess so. But I don’t ever recall them going, “Shhhhhhh!”

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Chuck never told me that the Peraino family were members of organized crime. I don’t really think Chuck was too aware of it in the beginning. You know, they were just somebody who wanted to do a movie, and he had the product.

I was aware that they were a tightly knit family, ha, ha, ha. I kind of
liked the fact that they took care of each other. And I thought Mr. Anthony Peraino, Sr.—Butchie’s father—was a wonderful person.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
,
JUNE
13, 1982:
FAMILY BUSINESS
:
“Anthony Peraino, Sr., a reputed ‘made man’ (officially initiated) in the Mafia, allegedly a member of the Joseph Colombo crime family. A record of six arrests in New York—including gambling, tax evasion and homicide by auto—but no convictions. In the late 1960s, Anthony Peraino became involved in the burgeoning pornography business. He got in on the ground floor of what turned out to be organized crime’s most profitable new business venture since it got into narcotics in the 1950s.”

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
See, I’m Italian, and my grandfather is Sicilian. He came from Mount Vernon, New York. He used to sell artichokes, and he was sort of involved with the boys. So, to me, the Perainos weren’t anything out of the ordinary. I mean, in Vegas, probably half the people you talk to are involved, you know? So I never thought of it as organized crime.

BUTCHIE PERAINO
:
By the time we finished
Deep Throat
we spent $40,000. I was very worried. How would it be accepted? Before we released it we had a screening. Personal friends, exhibitors, sub-distributors.

Well, I’ve been to many X-rated movie screenings, but this picture, when she first gives throat, four or five of the men in the audience said, “HURRAY!” and by the end of the sequence there were fifteen guys standing, and they went into a very big applause.

AL GOLDSTEIN (PUBLISHER OF
SCREW
MAGAZINE)
:
The people who owned the World Theater in New York City told me they had a great fuck film they wanted me to see. At first, they thought the title might be
The Sword Swallower,
but they were afraid newspaper advertising departments would refuse to run that title. The alternative,
Deep Throat,
seemed innocuous enough.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
When we finished that film, the Perainos objected to the title. “No one will understand it! It’s not catchy enough!”

“Don’t worry,” I told them, “
Deep Throat
will become a household word.”

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
I went to review the film, and I was suddenly confronted with Linda Lovelace on-screen. She was lovely, thin, young, and fresh. Most of the women in fuck films have pimples on their asses or are uncommonly fat. Because I have a weight problem, I like very thin women. I mean, I like them emaciated.

Deep Throat
was cute; it moved along. It had music. It had wit. But mostly it had Linda in it as a brilliant cocksucker.

NORA EPHRON (WRITER)
:
I have seen a lot of stag films in my life—well, that’s not true; I’ve seen about five or six—and although most of them were raunchy, a few were sweet and innocent and actually erotic.
Deep Throat,
on the other hand, is one of the most unpleasant, disturbing films I have ever seen—its not just antifemale, but antisexual as well.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
While I was writing my review, I couldn’t forget the cum pouring out of the corner of Linda’s mouth as she sucked Harry Reems’s cock. I got so hung on that film I got eleven hard-ons. I gave
Deep Throat
a hundred—the maximum score on the Peter-Meter, our yardstick service to readers on the erotic content of movies.

BUTCHIE PERAINO
:
Screw
magazine reviewed it a week before it opened and said it was the best porn film ever made. At that point we knew we had a hit on our hands.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
Before my review, the film opened and closed in California in four days. After my review, it quickly became a huge hit in New York, breaking house records.

DAVE FRIEDMAN
:
Look, I’m not putting Al Goldstein down. I like Al very much. But I don’t think it was his review of
Deep Throat
that made the movie so successful.

When the picture first came out, it was just another porno. I was one of the early people to play it—in Portland—and it was just another week. Wasn’t anything to write home about. Vince Miranda opened the picture in Los Angles at one of the Pussycat Theaters, and it did very ordinary business, nothing spectacular.

Okay, so it opens in New York City, and it was doing so-so business. And then Mayor Lindsay decides to crack down on pornography, and he confiscates the print. And of course the bust became big front-page news in all of the New York dailies: “MAYOR CRACKS DOWN ON DEEP THROAT.”

Well, right away, the national media gets on to it.

BILL KELLY
:
Deep Throat
opened simultaneously in three hundred theaters around the United States in 1972. I went to the first showing on Miami Beach at the Sheraton Theater with Jack Roberts from the
Miami News
. The line went all the way around the side of the theater and halfway down the next block.

Roberts wrote it up as a piece of garbage in the
News,
but the
Miami Herald
gave that piece of 59 minutes of filmed oral copulation about five million dollars’ worth of free advertising. So did almost every other liberal newspaper in the country.

DAVE FRIEDMAN
:
Finally, Sam Lake, who was running the World Theater at the time, got an injunction, and he reopened the picture, and they were lined up around the block. Because people who had never dreamed of going to see a porno movie before suddenly came out in droves. People were coming to the theater in limousines. It became de rigueur, you know—you had to see
Deep Throat
.

And out of that picture came a new phrase in the American lexicon: “porno chic.”

Naturally, Al Goldstein would take the credit for it, but if Mayor Lindsay had just let the picture alone, it would’ve been just another porno picture that came and went.

JOHN WATERS
:
Deep Throat
had this great advertising campaign—you could never get away with this now, but even the
New York Times
ran the ad: “IF YOU LIKE HEAD, YOU’LL LOVE THROAT.”

GERARD DAMIANO
:
For the first time, people weren’t embarrassed to be seen by their friends leaving a theater showing a pornographic film. In fact, in certain circles and in certain cities, it became almost a necessity to see the film in order to keep up your social status.

Businessmen were taking their clients, husbands were taking their wives, girls were taking their boyfriends. It was a film whose time had come.

HARRY REEMS
:
They all came. Mike Nichols and Truman Capote. Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s sidekick, came with six guys and a case of beer and stood out front afterward—trying to get passersby to come in.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
When Johnny Carson went to see
Deep Throat,
then it became chic.

BUNNY YEAGER
:
Movie stars would never admit to seeing pornography before
Deep Throat
.

SAMMY DAVIS JR.
:
Deep Throat
had just been released and was playing at the Pussycat Theater in Santa Monica. People were talking about it; they wanted to see it, but the Pussycat was not a place you went to. And a porn film like
Deep Throat
was not something you could order from the studios.

I told my wife, Altovise, “Let’s rent the Pussycat for a few hours one night, have it cleaned up, keep the popcorn stand open, and invite all these straight people here to go see
Deep Throat
. It would be marvelously decadent to have them sitting there seeing the big thing on the screen and then take them to the Bistro for a foie gras and Chateau Margaux kind of supper.”

We invited Suzanne Pleshette and Tommy Gallagher, the Berles, Dick and Dolly Martin, Steve and Edie, Shirley MacLaine—people who would never go to the Pussycat. I took them over in limos, which was safer than leaving your expensive paint job parked in that neighborhood.

HARRY REEMS
:
Even former vice president Spiro Agnew had a private screening at Frank Sinatra’s place in Palm Springs.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
After we got the movie finished, they all went back to New York, and we didn’t hear anything about it for a while. And then all of a sudden a phone call came from the Perainos, saying they were gonna fly us up—first class—to New York. Well, you know, being a pilot and all, I said, “They don’t fly you first class unless something’s going on here.”

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Butchie Peraino said he would pay all travel expenses if we would come up to New York and be interviewed.

When we saw Butchie, suddenly it was, “You’re looking well, Linda,” and “How’s life been treating you, Linda?” This was the same man who wanted me fired off the set because I was “ruining” his movie.

BUTCHIE PERAINO
:
Deep Throat
opened up against
Cabaret
and the sequel to
Shaft
—and we outgrossed them both.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
When we got to New York, the Perainos were trying to downplay it. The movie had opened, and suddenly Linda was a big star. She just hadn’t appeared anyplace yet, you know? And they didn’t wanna tell her that, or tell me, because they figured it’s gonna cost ’em more money—which it did.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Neither Chuck nor I could imagine why any newspaper would want to interview someone who had been in a hard-core porno movie. But neither of us knew that
Deep Throat
was being treated as something more than a routine dirty movie.

Our first official interview was with
Screw
.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
We met in a small, cold, seventeen-dollar-a-night hotel room, and it was the most difficult interview I ever conducted because Linda is really inarticulate. Chuck Traynor did most of the talking. After the interview, I said, “Listen, I’d like you to suck my cock.”

I figured Linda was just a hooker anyway, so I wasn’t embarrassed. She said fine, Chuck said, “Okay,” and she blew me.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
We had been told that since
Screw
was largely responsible for
Deep Throat
’s success, we were to be very cooperative. Whatever
Screw
wanted,
Screw
was to get.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
Here I was with the world’s greatest cocksucker, and yet it was a lonely experience. I had never fucked a woman in the mouth like that before. It seemed so hostile. I felt very alienated.

I was sweating. She was hot. But it was false because it was not spontaneous. I have an average-sized cock of about seven inches, and the fact that it disappeared down her throat interfered with my concentration.

I kept thinking: “Am I
that
small? Is she
that
good? Should I come now?”

My attention kept wandering. She was sitting on my face in a 69 position, and as I was eating her, I knew I wasn’t bringing her any pleasure. I was feeling very selfish, so I asked, “You don’t really come this way, do you?”

She said, “Yeah, I come.”

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Goldstein was a pig, but I could numb myself to that experience. It was harder to numb myself to this new phenomenon—being interviewed.

AL GOLDSTEIN
:
When it finally dawned on me that this was a nonmonetary gift from the distributors for my review, I was able to come in a detached sort of way. But it was like working. I felt like a hooker faking orgasm with a john. I left there feeling sad.