![]() In two best-selling memoirs - ''Ordeal'' (1980) and ''Out of Bondage'' (1986), which came with an introduction by Gloria Steinem - Lovelace recanted the blithe nymphomaniac image she had burnished in two earlier autobiographies. If people had looked beyond her on-screen enjoyment to the bruises on her legs, however, they would have seen a darker story. ''I did it because I love it,'' Lovelace told anyone who asked. ![]() There's been nothing like them ever before among their class of young women.'') (''The decades since the 60's have done a remarkable job of completing the sexual revolution,'' Philip Roth observed in ''The Dying Animal.'' ''This is a generation of astonishing fellators. And over time the film's popularity helped pave the way for the mass-marketing of hard-core pornography, as well as for the mainstreaming of previously outré sexual practices. She became the darling of the permissive society, moving into the Playboy mansion and appearing in a see-through dress at Ascot. ![]() Lovelace's own appeal had less to do with any extraordinary physical endowment (she was turned down for employment by Xaviera Hollander, the Happy Hooker, because her breasts were too small) than with her aura of girl-next-door availability. Although the film was smutty enough to rate a perfect 100 in Screw magazine, it managed within months of its release to cross over from the narrow universe of furtive blue-movie addicts into the wider sphere of solid-citizen types, some of whom took their girlfriends and wives to see it, perhaps for inspiration.Īn odd assortment of people and institutions registered Lovelace's groundbreaking performance: Vice President Spiro Agnew caught her film at Frank Sinatra's house, Johnny Carson invited her on the ''Tonight'' show, Nora Ephron interviewed her for Esquire and even The New York Review of Books passed judgment, declaring the movie to be ''as erotic as a tonsillectomy.'' Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used the title of her film as a coy moniker for their Watergate source, further imprinting it on the collective psyche. Without the loosening sexual mores of the late 60's and early 70's, and without the liberal elite's endorsement of the new ''porno chic,'' the success of ''Deep Throat'' would have been unthinkable. The English barrister and writer John Mortimer, writing shortly after Lovelace's death, recalled the 1970 obscenity trial over a novel called ''The Mouth.'' Addressing the novelist Margaret Drabble, a witness for the defense, the presiding judge asked why we needed oral sex when ''we've gone without it for a thousand years.'' This line of inquiry was picked up by the counsel for the defense in his speech to the jury: ''Poor his lordship! Poor, poor his lordship! Gone without oral sex for a thousand years!'' For most of the 20th century little changed. Victorian men regularly paid for the service, preferring to spare their wives the indignity of having to administer to so impure and unprocreative an urge. The history of the boudoir is a speculative one at best, but it is safe to assume that the felicities of oral sex have always been a taboo subject - at least until Monica Lewinsky rendered it suitable for prurient but high-toned dinner table conversation. Lovelace was paid $1,200, which she handed over to Traynor. Having been produced with what was, by porn standards, an astronomical budget of $25,000 (courtesy of Mob backers), the movie racked up at least $600 million in sales. Small wonder that the 62-minute XXX-rated film, shot in six days by a Brooklyn hairdresser, went on to become astonishingly lucrative. It was the stuff of which undomesticated male fantasy is made - the slavish gratification of a carnal desire that had previously been associated only with extramarital license. Having been taught by her husband and manager, Chuck Traynor, to suppress her gag reflex, Lovelace, then in her early 20's, was shown in repeated close-ups following the doctor's advice to lengths that did not seem humanly possible. His ''treatment'' called upon Lovelace to perform hitherto unimaginable feats of fellatio - the more pleasure her character wants to feel, the more oral satisfaction she has to provide. Instead, her name became synonymous with a specific kind of sword-swallowing prowess, an erotic subspecialty she made all her own in the landmark 1972 skinflick ''Deep Throat.'' You don't need to have seen a frame of the movie to be familiar with its ingenious, if ludicrous, premise: a woman is unable to achieve orgasm until a sympathetic doctor discovers that her clitoris resides in her throat. As a Catholic schoolgirl, she dreamed of becoming a flight attendant or a nun. Linda Lovelace, née Linda Boreman, was the daughter of a Yonkers policeman and a martinet of a mother.
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