Linda Lovelace (born Linda Susan Boreman; January 10, 1949 – April 22, 2002) was an American actress who became famous for her performance in the 1972 hardcore film Deep Throat. She later spoke out about the fact that her abusive husband, Chuck Traynor, had threatened and coerced her into participation, saying that "if you watch the movie, you are watching me get raped." In her autobiography Ordeal, she described what took place behind the scenes. She later became a born-again Christian and a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement.
Boreman was born on January 10, 1949, in The Bronx, New York, into a working-class family. She described her upbringing in an unhappy family, as the daughter of John Boreman, a police officer who was seldom home, and Dorothy Boreman (née Tragney), a waitress who was harsh, unloving, and domineering. She attended private Catholic schools, including Saint John the Baptist (Yonkers, New York) and Maria Regina High School. Linda was nicknamed "Miss Holy Holy" in high school because she kept her dates at a safe distance to avoid sexual activity. When Boreman was 16, her family moved to Davie, Florida, after her father retired from the New York City Police Department.
At the age of 20, she gave birth to her first child born out of wedlock, whom her mother tricked her into putting up for adoption. Shortly afterwards, she returned to New York City to live and go to computer school. There, she was in a car crash, sustaining injuries that were serious enough to require her to undergo a blood transfusion. The transfused blood had not been properly screened for hepatitis contamination, which caused her to need a liver transplant 18 years later.
While recovering at the home of her parents, Boreman met and became involved with Chuck Traynor. According to Boreman, Traynor was charming and attentive at first, then became violent and abusive. She said he forced her to move to New York, where he became her manager, pimp, and husband.
Allegedly coerced by Traynor, Boreman was soon performing as Linda Lovelace in hardcore "loops", short 8 mm silent films made for peep shows.
Boreman starred in a 1969 bestiality film titled Dogarama (also known as Dog 1, Dog Fucker and Dog-a-Rama). She later denied having appeared in the film until several of the original loops proved otherwise. In 2013, Larry Revene, the cameraman who actually shot the film, spoke about it for the first time, during which he asserted that Boreman was a willing participant and that no coercion took place. Porn star Eric Edwards, who was present for the shoot, has similarly claimed there was no obvious coercion going on and that Boreman appeared to be a cooperative performer.
In 1971, Boreman also starred in the golden shower film titled Piss Orgy.
In 1972, Boreman starred in Deep Throat, in which she performed deep-throating. The film achieved surprising and unprecedented popularity among mainstream audiences and even a review in the New York Times. It played several times daily for over ten years at theaters in the Pussycat Theater chain, where Boreman did promotions, including leaving her hand and footprints in the concrete sidewalk outside the Hollywood Pussycat. The movie later became one of the first, and highest-grossing, X-rated videotape releases. While Deep Throat grossed over $600 million, Boreman was paid only $1,250, which was later confiscated by her husband Traynor.
On December 20, 1973, she was inducted into the Golden Age of Porn Walk of Fame.
Media career after Deep Throat
In December 1973, Boreman made her theater debut in Pajama Tops at the Locust Theatre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The production suffered disappointing box office performance, which led it to close early, and Boreman's performance was panned.
In 1974, Boreman starred in the R-rated sequel, Deep Throat II, which was not as well received as the original had been; one critic, writing in Variety, described it as "the shoddiest of exploitation film traditions, a depressing fast buck attempt to milk a naïve public." That same year, she published two "pro-porn" autobiographies, Inside Linda Lovelace and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace. She also posed for Playboy, Bachelor, and Esquire between 1973 and 1974.
In 1975, Boreman left Traynor for David Winters, the producer of her 1975 film Linda Lovelace for President, which co-starred Micky Dolenz. The film showed her on the campaign trail following a cross-country bus route mapped out in the shape of a penis. However, her career as an actress failed to flourish, and her film appearances add up to five hours of screen time. In her 1980 autobiography Ordeal, Lovelace maintained that those films used leftover footage from Deep Throat; however, she frequently contradicted this statement.
During the mid-1970s, she took to smoking large quantities of marijuana combined with painkillers, and after her second marriage and the birth of her two children, she left the pornographic film business.
In 1976, she was chosen to play the title role in the erotic movie Forever Emmanuelle (also known as Laure). However, according to the producer Ovidio G. Assonitis, Lovelace was "very much on drugs" at the time. She had already signed for the part when she avowed that "God had changed [her] life", refused to do any nudity, and even objected to a statue of the Venus de Milo on the set because of its exposed breasts. She was replaced by French actress Annie Belle.
In January 1977, she briefly returned to theater acting in a Las Vegas production of My Daughter's Rated X, but the show closed early and her acting performance was criticized.
In her suit to divorce Traynor, she alleged that he forced her into pornography at gunpoint and that in Deep Throat bruises from his beatings can be seen on her legs. She alleged that her husband "would force her to do these things by pointing a rifle at her head." Boreman said in her autobiography that her marriage had been plagued by violence, rape, forced prostitution and private pornography. She wrote in Ordeal:
When in response to his suggestions I let him know I would not become involved in prostitution in any way and told him I intended to leave, [Traynor] beat me and the constant mental abuse began. I literally became a prisoner, I was not allowed out of his sight, not even to use the bathroom, where he watched me through a hole in the door. He slept on top of me at night, he listened to my telephone calls with a .45 automatic eight shot pointed at me. I suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter. He undermined my ties with other people and forced me to marry him on advice from his lawyer.