verything about the life of Linda Lovelace, who died Monday at age 53, was so, so sad. She had been a prostitute, a drug abuser, and the star of some of the raunchiest porn movies ever made, back when the Mafia filmed them secretly in ratty New York apartments.
She stretched her 15 minutes of fame to 30 by converting to feminism and condemning pornography as "legalized rape," but there was never much conviction in anything she said or published. And yet there was a softness to her, and a gullibility, and a desperate desire to be loved and accepted, making her seem more like a confused girl from Yonkers than the leader of the porn revolution.
She was probably as stunned as everyone else when Deep Throat became the most famous and profitable smut movie in history, especially since it was little more than a down-and-dirty stag film shot in ratty Miami motel rooms. In the context of the tens of thousands of porn movies made both before and after, it ranks pretty close to the bottom in terms of cinematography, acting, entertainment value, and just plain sexual thrills.
But Deep Throat, strange as it may seem, changed America's sexual attitudes more than anything since the first Kinsey Report in 1948.
It altered the lives of everyone associated with it. It super-charged the feminist movement. It gave the Mafia its most lucrative business since Prohibition. And it changed the nation's views of obscenity forever.
We'll never know exactly how much money it made — and continues to make — but estimates have gone as high as $600 million, which would make it one of the most successful motion pictures of any kind in any country in the history of the world.
Nations, like people, have moments when they just need to get drunk and party, and apparently something of the sort was happening in June 1972 when, at almost the same moment, the Watergate burglars broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee and Deep Throat opened at the World Theater in New York City. Deep Throat was not just a dirty movie, it was a cause, and it was so popular that most film critics were afraid to deprecate it for fear of seeming unhip.
Ed McMahon, the sidekick of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, was such a fan of the movie that he showed up with six friends and a case of beer, then stood outside the theater afterward enthusing with the public.
Frank Sinatra was one of the early audience members, along with Vice President Spiro Agnew, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, Nora Ephron, Bob Woodward, and Sammy Davis Jr., who grew so enamored of Linda Lovelace that within the year he and his wife would be having group sex with her and her husband.
Deep Throat is finally one of those movies that really can't be explained. It was simply there at a certain crazy time, and it brought out every suppressed urge of a public starved for sensation. And Linda Lovelace was the ill-equipped starry-eyed girl at the center of that vortex.
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