Hard To Swallow

It was all in the gulp, and nothing could stop her but testicles. Linda Lovelace, under the tutelage of her husband Chuck Traynor, had perfected the exotic fellatio technique he had discovered in specialist Asian brothels while serving as a Marine. Using self-hypnosis, she had learned to control and suppress the involuntary gag reflex, and her thoroughly sensible approach to breathing has yet to be bettered; “As he’s coming out, take a breath”, she told Daily Girl magazine in 1973. “You need to keep taking small gulps of air to keep going.” Take that, Good Housekeeping.

Being a swinging ‘70s sort of chick, Ms. Lovelace seemed intent on teaching the world to blow. Performing with considerable relish, her sword-swallowing party piece would form the centre of the most notorious porn movie ever made, Gerard Damiano’s obviously titled Deep Throat.
In 1972, Damiano’s smut masterpiece penetrated mainstream American culture like no skin flick ever before. It was, according to Jonathan Hoberman; “A media event, a battle in the culture wars, a show business landmark.”
Watching the film now, it’s not immediately apparent why this became the case. The action (old-fashioned troilism, buggery, masturbation, ejaculation, cunnilingus, fellatio and intercourse) looks terribly quaint by modern standards; the acting is appalling; the furniture is brown and the, ahem, ‘plot’ is hardly distinguished even by the barrel-scraping lows of the genre.
Indeed, the entire movie plays rather like a hilariously bad anti-feminist joke; Linda’s star-making role sees her visiting the hirsute Dr. Young (Harry Reems) to complain that she’s “not hearing any bells ringing” during sex.
After an examination, the heavily moustached physician discovers that her clitoris is located deep down inside her throat and the only way for her to achieve orgasm is by performing ‘deep throat’ fellatio. Our medical hero quickly saves the day by whipping out his eight-inch appendage.
“How far does a girl have to go to untangle her tingle?” begged the tagline on the posters. Well, that ought to do it.
As Erica Jong has noted, it was all simply “…based on the idea that all a man had to do was put his penis down a woman’s throat and thrust and the woman (would be) as satisfied as the man. Well, guess what?”
Though this ludicrous set-up sounds considerably worse than the usual “I’m here to rummage through your lint basket” shenanigans of porn, a number of factors made Deep Throat a unique cinematic prospect at the time of its release.
Shot in two weeks for $22,000, this admittedly paltry sounding budget was well above the industry standard, and at 72 minutes duration, Deep Throat provided a lot more bang for your buck.
Until this point, rain-coated gentlemen had been kept off the streets only by the lure of short stag reels and Cassandra-wailing sex-ed films.
Discounting Russ Meyer’s harmless nudie flicks of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s (The Immoral Mr. Teas, Wild Gals Of The Naked West, Mudhoney etc), Damiano’s film was only the second feature length hardcore porn, having just been beaten to the punch by Bill Osco’s Mona in 1970.
More significantly, Deep Throat, like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, was one of several fuck-you, Hollywood-challenging, independently made crossover hits of the era embraced by fashionably radical Americans.
Linda Lovelace’s onscreen journey was widely interpreted not as a cocksucking fantasy, but as a liberating individual quest for sexual satisfaction. “Suddenly talking about Deep Throat we realised what the problem was”, wrote Blair Sobol in The Village Voice in 1972. “No one is getting laid anymore.”
And with that, porn slinked out of the back-alleys and into the essential dinner party topics of the chattering classes. Everybody had to see Deep Throat. Gregory Peck, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Truman Capote were patrons. Frank Sinatra screened it for vice president Spiro Agnew and Sammy Davis Jr. (Sammy was so impressed he promptly organised group sex involving him and his missus with Linda and her husband.) Crucially, dating couples (talk about a subtle hint) and gaggles of curious and amused women flocked to the kind of theatres previously only frequented by jizz-booth hounds.
This trans-demographic sweep saw Deep Throat take $600 million at the box-office, heralding a brief golden age of porno chic – a phrase coined by The New York Times’ Ralph Blumenthal in honour of Ms. Lovelace’s newly demi-respectable adventures.
This fleeting cultural moment is chronicled by Inside Deep Throat, a fascinating new documentary from filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.
In suitably breathless style, the film charts Deep Throat’s rise from the back-street grind house to the Supreme Court where it became the focus of a national sweaty struggle over pornography and censorship. Good talking-head is provided for the occasion by the protagonists (director Damiano, Lovelace’s surviving relatives and Reems, all now sporting high-waisted pants) plus a series of cultural commentators, wags and interested parties including Camille Paglia, Gore Vidal, the fabulous American movie director John Waters, Erica Jong, Hugh Hefner and Cosmopolitan’s cat-lady in residence, Helen Gurley Brown, who – just in case your mother neglected to tell you so – advises that ejaculate is good for the complexion.
But just how is it that a trashy hour-long movie featuring a mere seven blow-jobs came to dominate so, when Mona – another hardcore fellatio comedy – simply disappeared from the, erm, artistic landscape two years earlier?
“That is very strange”, admits director Bailey. “Mona is a fascinating film. I think it’s because Mona is funny in places, but it’s not a full comedy in the way of Deep Throat. I think that’s what made the connection with audiences and crucially, that’s what gave them permission to go and see it. It does have a certain Carry On aspect. Harry Reems’ performance alone is part Sid James and part Kenneth Williams.”
Not everyone got the joke. A newly elected Richard Nixon was rather less enamoured with the movie than his vice-president and promptly declared War On Porn. (Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein would later archly name their Watergate source after the film). Deep Throat was investigated by the FBI and banned in 23 states. Even in liberal New York, the film found itself banned by Judge Tyler, who like Mrs Thatcher during the first AIDS awareness campaign, needed to have out-there concepts like oral sex and clitoral orgasm explained to him.
His disgusted summation famously concluded with the words: “This is one throat that needs to be cut.”
For a time this merely served to turn Deep Throat from an event movie into a cause celebre. The New York ruling was overturned on appeal, and Linda Lovelace was embraced as the icon of a new age of sexual anarchy.
Watching director Gerard Damiano’s testimony for Inside Deep Throat, it’s clear that he still genuinely believes himself a great liberator thwarted by squares and industry greed. Certainly, the video revolution and subsequent explosion of cheap and easy VHS quickies left little room for wannabe porn auteurs such as he.
“Clearly, at the beginning, there was a feeling that there was ideological revolution in the works” explains Bailey. “At some level, Deep Throat the movie and Deep Throat the Watergate source are the same thing. Deep Throat was a secret source, an outlaw voice speaking out against hypocrisy and corruption. And that’s what Deep Throat the movie was. An outrageous voice speaking up not just for sexual freedom, but also freedom of expression. But it was quickly realised that there was a lot of money to be made. At that point the ideology went out the window in favour of cash.”
Viewed from this early romantic perspective, the Deep Throat story plays like a Boogie Nights fable – an independent filmmaker-orientated industry corrupted by the nefarious grasp of capitalism. But enthusiasm for hardcore was deflated once it emerged that the entire enterprise had been financed by notorious New York mob-lords, the Peraino brothers. While the outfit had other cinematic interests – their production and distribution company Bryanston Pictures scored hits throughout the ‘70s with Dark Star, Andy Warhol’s Dracula, Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Enter The Dragon – Deep Throat saw the family take their avaricious business practises to an entire new level of leg-breaking. Theatre owners playing the movie were required to surrender all profits, and even now, there’s no trace of the $600 million made in box-office receipts.
“We’ll never know about the money,” says Bailey. “As you see in the film, people are still reluctant to talk about that on camera. With Deep Throat, because you’re dealing with an underground operation, you have a long line of people skimming off the top. It’s like those scenes in Casino; eventually the skimming leaves nothing. The money certainly didn’t go to Gerard Damiano or Linda Lovelace and even some of the mobsters died penniless. It just evaporated in the laundering process.”
Undoubtedly however, the greatest challenge to the explosion of porn-chic came from the recently mobilised feminist movement. “Feminism was definitely the biggest factor in the change in public opinion”, says Bailey. “And I do think the feminists had a really good point. It’s all very well that people are running around and breaking taboos and feeling liberated. That’s great, but women are entitled to turn around and say; well, that’s not great for me or great for us.”
The wave of anti-porn protests were given considerable weight by the subsequent testimony of Linda Lovelace. In the immediate aftermath of Deep Throat, she enjoyed a brief flirtation with celebrity, starring astride John Holmes in Exotic French Fantasies and later attempting to crack the Hollywood soft core scene with the 1976 sex comedy, Linda Lovelace For President.
Always a safe-bet for an insatiable all-American girl quip (“If I had a favourite drink, it would be a sperm cocktail,” she simpered to Al Goldstein during an interview in 1973) she sounded very different once she escaped the clutches of her manager-husband Chuck Traynor.
It transpired that her participation in Deep Throat and countless other movies – including the notorious Dogarama in which she was raped by a canine – had been entirely involuntary.
Her 1980 memoir Ordeal would detail relentless and coercive beatings, and she spent most of the late ‘70s campaigning against pornography alongside Gloria Steinem.
The industry was enraged; to this day, turncoat porn stars such as Traci Lords are said to suffer from ‘Linda Syndrome’. Following Linda’s fatal car accident in 2002, former colleague Al Goldstein – who once received a blow-job from her (at Chuck’s behest of course) while he conducted an interview for Screw magazine – declared “Good riddance to bad trash. She was a hooker, a scumbag, a lying trollop. I’m glad Traynor taught her how to suck cock. I dropped several ejaculations down her throat and I wish I could do a final load so when she goes to hell, my sperm will go with her.”
Such unpleasant former-associates do little to discredit the damning testimony she gave before the Meece Commission on Pornography in 1986. “When you are watching Deep Throat”, she claimed, “you are watching me being raped over and over and over again.”
Famously, the Lovelace story took a further odd turn when, a year before her death, the then impoverished 52 year-old appeared in lingerie on the cover of Leg Show magazine and toured the cine-convention circuit signing copies of her breakthrough movie. Still, even porn magnate Larry Flynt, who named her Hustler’s Asshole Of The Month following this late sea change, doesn‘t dispute her account of life with Chuck Traynor.
While Inside Deep Throat is rather more concerned with cultural history than the sordid details of Linda Lovelace’s crushed existence, her ordeal hangs over the documentary. At one point, the directors’ zoom-in footage of Deep Throat to reveals multi-coloured bruises. “I have no doubts about her story,” says Bailey. “She was under the influence of a violent svengali. I think though, that the primary issue is one of domestic abuse rather than pornography per se. It’s particularly disturbing in her case because at that time, we had neither the resources, or even the language to discuss spousal abuse.
“As for her later turnaround, I respect the fact that you‘re allowed to change your mind over the course of your life. It‘s telling that she watched the film just before she died and called a friend up to ask what the big deal was in the first place. So she herself ended with a question about Deep Throat.”
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Inside Deep Throat and, indeed, the movie that inspired it, is how neatly it encapsulates the Great Liberal Pornography Problem.
Even those prepared to defend Hustler’s freedoms of expression to the death can only balk at the horrid actuality of the industry.
“That is a conundrum,” agrees Bailey. “While we were careful not to make a pro-pornography film, we do echo Gerard Damiano’s question: why can’t sex be a legitimate part of the cinema experience? This is especially pertinent to the United States, where sex has been completely trivialised by advertising. It’s used to sell everything, it‘s available at the click of a button on-line, and yet, you can't either represent and discuss sexuality – I don’t necessarily mean in a pornographic way, but just in an adult sense – in the mainstream media. In 1972, people were discussing a hardcore film, now Janet Jackson‘s nipple sends shockwaves.”
He admits, though, that whatever this model of cinematic sexuality may be, Deep Throat ain’t it. “To be honest, we weren’t all that comfortable when we had to sit down to do our research. We had some friends over around Christmas and we put it on and found it really odd. It’s part of our culture that pornography is consumed when you’re alone and anyway, it’s not a very good film. We had to turn it off in the end. It was a bit icky to tell the truth.”
In every possible sense.

Inside Deep Throat is released on July 8. Read Hot Press' review here