Desperately seeking Linda

Thirty years ago Deep Throat made Linda Lovelace the first porn superstar, but then she turned against the industry. In the wake of her death, and that of her brutal ex-husband and manager, Mark Kermode assesses her legacy

Who was the real Linda Lovelace? According to the pornographer and free-speech activist Larry Flynt, she was "a pioneer in the porn industry, in the truest sense of the word". For the feminist icon and anti-porn campaigner Gloria Steinem, she was "somebody who survived in the face of humiliation, disbelief and physical torture". For female-friendly porn producer Candida Royalle, she was just "a soft, sweet, hurt woman who had a very difficult and tragic life". But for former husband and manager Charles "Chuck" Traynor, the man who taught her how to "deep throat" and who transformed her into the world's first porn superstar, she was simply "pretty dumb".

For those who don't already know, Linda Lovelace (formerly Boreman, later Marchiano) was the "star" of the 1972 classic Deep Throat, an odd mixture of burlesque comedy, camp musical and hard-core screen sex, which became a national phenomenon in the United States. Bringing pornography to a mainstream, couples-based audience, Deep Throat made oral sex the subject of polite dinner-table conversation, and even lent its name to the decade's most infamous political scandal in the shape of Bernstein and Woodward's legendary Watergate informant. With no less than four autobiographies to her credit, from the sex-packed, ghost-written Seventies romp Inside Linda Lovelace, to the harrowing Eighties anti-porn tracts Ordeal and Out of Bondage, Lovelace was a cheerleader for the cinematic sex trade whose subsequent tales of brutal mistreatment threatened briefly to drive the porn industry underground once more.

As a die-hard anti-censorship campaigner, I became interested in Lovelace's story when the long-banned Deep Throat was finally granted an uncut R18 certificate in the UK in September 2000, complying with new censorship regulations which, for the first time, had created a legalised "consensual hard-core" market in Britain. But just how "consensual" was Deep Throat? After all, Lovelace had called it "an act of rape", claiming that her entire porn career had been forced upon her by Chuck through beatings and intimidation. My interest was further sparked by news that she had recently resurfaced in the unexpected company of porn-insider Eric Danville, whose book The Complete Linda Lovelace detailed (and pictured) her career from 8mm porn star to anti-porn activist with enthusiastic relish. According to popular rumour, Lovelace had been sighted at movie memorabilia conventions, signing video copies of Danville's book, and even videos of the much-hated Deep Throat. More surprisingly still, she had recently posed in lingerie for the porn magazine Legshow, and declared herself "disappointed" with the women's movement. Intrigued, the Scottish film-makers Russell Leven and Andrew Abbott and I began to make inquiries about interviewing her for a Channel Four documentary. Then in April 2002, following the second catastrophic car crash of her life (the first had brought her to the attention of Chuck Traynor), Linda Lovelace died.

In the wake of her death, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of Deep Throat, various interested parties began to wage quiet war for possession of Linda Lovelace's legacy. And although Lovelace herself was gone, there was no shortage of high-profile acquaintances (both pro- and anti-porn) willing to talk about her: from Screw magazine's Al Goldstein, who candidly told our director, "Yeah, I interviewed her, she blew me, I took pictures – when do you want to talk?"; to adult film performers and producers like Annie Sprinkle and Candida Royalle, both of whom had met and clearly liked Linda despite her industry denunciations; to anti-porn feminists like Susan Brownmiller, and Andrea Dworkin, the latter memorably labelled "the Leon Trotsky of the sex war", who had used Lovelace's testimony in a legal attempt to outlaw porn. There was also Mike McGrady, the soft-spoken journalist who had co-authored Ordeal and Out of Bondage; and former Goldstein employee Eric Danville, whose closeness with Lovelace in the final years of her life had clearly caused as much anguish to her former feminist allies as her own association with Women Against Pornography had caused her one-time porn-industry acquaintances.

The only people who declined to participate in our documentary, now part of Channel 4's Real series, were Lovelace's Deep Throat co-star Harry Reems, who at first appeared keen but then seemingly chose not to speak ill of the dead, and Playboy boss Hugh Hefner, who is depicted in spectacularly rancid terms in Ordeal, and whose office responded to our request for an interview by sending a bizarre questionnaire covering a range of issues from the colour of our eyes to our sexual preferences, which is apparently "standard issue". So, two months after Lovelace's death, we travelled to Seattle, where Mike McGrady spoke somberly of the bruises which you can indeed see on Linda's body within the flickering frames of Deep Throat; to Los Angeles, where the usually formidable Annie Sprinkle burst into tears at the thought of her heroine's tragic demise ("she changed the world"); and to New York, where Al Goldstein was unaccountably arrested just as we were preparing to interview him. "Beats me," said his assistant as the NYPD drove Al away. (Goldstein would later tell the press, "I expect to be arrested. It's my weekly athletics.")

And then, of course, there was Chuck – the supposedly monstrous creature at the centre of Ordeal, whom Linda repeatedly claimed (to a lie detector in the Seventies, to the Subcommittee in the Eighties) had held her prisoner, beating her, prostituting her and ordering her at gunpoint into the world of 8mm porn "loops" in which she was forced to have sex with animals. We finally met Chuck (who went on to marry and manage another porn star, Marilyn Chambers) in Gainesville, Florida, a scorching cesspit in mid-July which is described even by its inhabitants as "the armpit of America". Sporting a black Stetson and red-white-and-blue shirt, with a severed lasso finger and good-old-boy moustache, Chuck was the picture of amiability: grinning, good-natured and eager to please. Prior to the interview, I had asked our burly sound-man Duncan to sit (awkwardly) between me and Chuck during filming, on the basis that he might try and hit me – this being an entirely understandable response when someone asks you if you arranged to have your wife gang-raped in a Miami hotel, and then ordered her to have sex with a dog.

But there was no threat of violence; no suggestion of physical intimidation whatsoever. In fact, the most worrying thing about Chuck was his total implacability, the fact that he didn't flinch when questions were raised that would make most people weep. The only time Chuck broke my gaze was when he was responding to a question about whether he viewed all his female partners as some form of sexual property. "You wanna see Bo's tits?" he quipped, gesturing to his current glamour-model partner who immediately snapped to attention and duly displayed her wares. A brief but ghastly silence followed as three Brits tried desperately to look elsewhere, while Chuck laughed heartily at our pathetically "quaint" embarrassment.

"He was a complete villain," said Mike McGrady. "A pimp's pimp," said Andrea Dworkin. Even Larry Flynt conceded that some of what Linda had said about Chuck was probably true, a claim which Chuck himself seemed to support. "I was the dominant figure, she was the submissive figure," he shrugged. "And sometimes dominance took over. If you argue to a point, and somebody keeps pushing ya, then fists are bound to fly. I don't mind somebody putting in their two cents' worth, but I don't want them to argue with me to the point where I get upset... or violently upset. And that happened on occasion. I wasn't a nice person to be around when I got angry, but like they say, if you don't want to get into an argument with me, then don't argue with me."

Whatever the truth, it's now a matter between Lovelace, Traynor and their respective makers; a few weeks after we inter- viewed him, Chuck Traynor dropped dead at home, apparently suffering a heart-attack after a work-out with Bo. Doubtless this is the way Traynor would have wanted to go, a fitting end for a man who once allegedly pitched his story to a publisher under the title Trayning Women, and whose only reaction to the news of Lovelace's death was the thought that "she didn't have much luck with cars". Personally, having spent only four sweaty hours in Traynor's company, I am inclined to believe much, if not all, of Linda's claims about him – specifically, that he probably did terrorise her into committing acts that she would regret for the rest of her life. The irony of her story is that, much as she hated Deep Throat, that movie may well have been her salvation. As Lovelace herself observed, the fame which Deep Throat bestowed upon her eventually enabled her to break away from Traynor, taking her from the beatings he allegedly dished out in private, and perhaps even preventing her from becoming "just another dead hooker in a hotel room".

Today, Deep Throat continues to sell, having made more than £600 million in video sales and promotional material, according to one report. As for Linda Lovelace, soon to be the subject of "a major Hollywood picture", the controversy surrounding her life and death continues to thrive.

'The Real Linda Lovelace', Channel 4, 26 September, 10pm