Linda Lovelace: The Tragic True Story Behind Deep Throat's Most Famous Star
- 5 days ago
- 9 min read
She was paid just $1,250 to star in one of the highest-grossing films ever made, then spent the rest of her life trying to tell the world what really happened on set.
From "Miss Holy Holy" to America's Biggest Adult Film Star
Linda Susan Boreman was born on 10 January 1949 in the Bronx, New York, and she couldn't have seemed a less likely candidate for the role that would define her life. Her father, John Boreman, was a New York City police officer who was rarely home. Her mother, Dorothy, was a waitress described by Linda herself as harsh, unloving, and domineering, a woman who relied heavily on corporal punishment and strict Catholic values to raise her children.
Linda attended private Catholic schools, including Saint John the Baptist in Yonkers and Maria Regina High School, where she was known for keeping boys at a very safe distance. Her classmates nicknamed her "Miss Holy Holy" for the way she deflected any hint of sexual attention. It's a detail that feels almost cruel in retrospect.
When she was 16, the family relocated to Davie, Florida, after her father retired from the NYPD. Linda struggled to find her footing there, making few friends and living a relatively isolated life. At 19 she lost her virginity, and the following year she gave birth to her first child — a son born out of wedlock. Her mother, without Linda fully understanding what she was signing, arranged for the baby to be put up for adoption. It was the first time someone else's agenda would be used to override Linda's own choices. It wouldn't be the last.
She returned to New York City to attend computer school and try to build something resembling an independent adult life. Then a car crash changed everything. The accident left her with a lacerated liver, broken ribs, and a fractured jaw. She returned to Florida to recover at her parents' home — and while lying by a pool one afternoon, she caught the eye of a 27-year-old bar owner named Chuck Traynor.
Chuck Traynor: Charming, Then Controlling
Traynor pulled up in a sports car, offered her a cigarette, and by most accounts came across as confident and exciting — everything her sheltered upbringing hadn't been. Within weeks, the two were living together. Within months, Linda says, things had turned very dark indeed.
According to Linda's later accounts, Traynor became possessive almost immediately. She claimed he used hypnosis to expand her sexual knowledge, then began pressuring her into sex work, eventually forcing her into prostitution at gunpoint. He allegedly monitored her constantly — watching her through a hole in the bathroom door, sleeping on top of her at night, listening in on her phone calls with a pistol to hand. Linda wrote in her autobiography Ordeal that her "initiation into prostitution was a gang rape by five men, arranged by Mr. Traynor."
Traynor denied the most serious allegations, admitting he hit Linda but characterising it as part of a consensual sex game. Others who were present during the Deep Throat era gave conflicting accounts — some said they never witnessed obvious coercion, others confirmed Traynor was controlling and violent behind closed doors. Director Gerard Damiano and co-star Andrea True both acknowledged that Traynor was physically controlling towards Linda, even if they questioned the precise details of her account.
What's not disputed is that by 1971 Linda had married Traynor (she later said she felt she had no alternative) and had begun making short, silent 8mm pornographic films, known as "loops," that played at peep shows. Traynor had spotted her girl-next-door looks and recognised they could make money in the adult film industry. Linda Boreman became Linda Lovelace, and Chuck Traynor became her manager.
Deep Throat: Six Days, $25,000, and $600 Million
In late 1971, Traynor and Linda attended a swingers party where they met Gerard Damiano, a former hairdresser from New York who had been directing softcore adult features. Damiano was so struck by Linda that he vowed to write a film specifically for her. That film was Deep Throat.
The entire production was shot over just six days in January 1972, mostly in a budget Miami motel on Biscayne Boulevard, a building later converted into student accommodation for Johnson & Wales University. The total budget was $25,000, with the money coming from Louis "Butchie" Peraino, whose father Anthony Peraino was a member of the Colombo crime family. Organised crime had identified adult cinema as one of its biggest revenue streams since Prohibition, and Deep Throat would prove them right.
The film premiered at the World Theater in New York on 12 June 1972, advertised in the New York Times under the bowdlerised title Throat. Nobody predicted what happened next.
Deep Throat became a cultural phenomenon. It was one of the first adult films to feature actual plot and character development, and its novelty drew an audience far beyond the usual raincoat brigade.
Mainstream celebrities queued up to see it, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Truman Capote, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra, and even Vice President Spiro Agnew were among those who reportedly attended. In its opening week at a single New York screen it set a record for pornographic films, taking over $30,000. Within six months it had made $3 million and was still ranking in Variety's top ten highest-grossing films 48 weeks after release.
Estimates of the film's total earnings vary wildly — figures as high as $600 million have been cited, though the FBI put a more conservative figure of around $100 million on verifiable theatrical receipts. The inflated estimates are partly explained by the fact that many of the cinemas showing the film were mob-connected enterprises, which Roger Ebert noted likely inflated box office figures as a money-laundering exercise.
Linda Lovelace was paid $1,250 for her role in this cultural landmark. She later maintained that even that amount was confiscated by Traynor.
The "Porno Chic" Era and Linda's Very Brief Stardom
The legal battles around Deep Throat, including police raids on cinemas and obscenity trials across multiple US states, only generated more interest in the film. In 1973, the Washington Post's managing editor Howard Simons borrowed the film's title as the code name for the anonymous Watergate whistleblower, ensuring that "Deep Throat" entered the political lexicon permanently and gave the film yet another wave of publicity.
Linda became a genuine celebrity. Hugh Hefner threw a party in her honour at the Playboy Mansion. She appeared on talk shows, showed up at the Academy Awards dressed as a Southern belle in a horse-drawn carriage, and was inducted into the Golden Age of Porn Walk of Fame in December 1973. In December of that year she also made her theatre debut in Pajama Tops in Philadelphia, which flopped badly. In 1974 she starred in Deep Throat II and published two pro-porn autobiographies — Inside Linda Lovelace and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace. She was also arrested in Las Vegas in January 1974 for possession of cocaine and amphetamines.
That same year her relationship with Traynor ended. She became involved with a producer named David Winters and starred in the comedy film Linda Lovelace for President in 1975 (featuring Micky Dolenz), but it tanked at the box office. A role in the erotic film Forever Emmanuelle fell through in 1976 when Linda, now a born-again Christian, refused to perform any nudity and objected to a statue of Venus on set. Her screen career, in total, amounted to about five hours of footage.
A Second Life, a New Identity
In 1976, Linda married Larry Marchiano, a cable installer who later ran a drywall business. They settled in Center Moriches on Long Island and had two children — Dominic, born in 1977, and Lindsay, born in 1980. For a period, motherhood gave her something that had been absent for most of her adult life: stability.
There was still her health to contend with. The blood transfusion she'd received after her 1970 car crash had not been properly screened for hepatitis, and the resulting liver damage eventually required a full transplant, which she underwent in 1987. In later years she'd also endure a double mastectomy and, towards the end of her life, was receiving dialysis treatments for kidney problems.
Marchiano's drywall business went bankrupt in 1990, and the family relocated to Colorado. The couple divorced in 1996, though they remained on good terms and Marchiano was present at her bedside when she died.
Ordeal: The Version of Events She'd Been Holding Back
In 1980, Linda published Ordeal — a book that told a completely different story from her earlier pro-porn autobiographies. She described in graphic detail the abuse she said she suffered at Traynor's hands: the beatings, the threats at gunpoint, the forced prostitution, and the psychological torture. Most strikingly, she stated that the sexual acts filmed in Deep Throat were not performed consensually — that there was, in her words, a gun pointed at her the entire time.
"When you see the movie Deep Throat," she would later tell the 1986 Meese Commission on Pornography in New York City, "you are watching me being raped. It is a crime that movie is still showing."
When asked why she appeared to be smiling on screen, she said her choice was simple: smile, or die.
Her claims provoked sharply divided responses. Andrea Dworkin reported that polygraph tests supported Linda's account. Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman noted that details in Ordeal were consistent with a diagnosis of complex PTSD, including the fragmented sense of self that Linda described. Andrea True, her Deep Throat II co-star, backed her up, saying Traynor was a sadist who was widely disliked on set, and Linda's own sister Barbara later said in an interview that she was disappointed Traynor died before she could kill him.
But other colleagues were more sceptical. Adult film actress Gloria Leonard was quoted suggesting Linda never took responsibility for her own choices. Eric Edwards, who worked with her on several early films, characterised her as a willing participant and questioned her credibility. The cameraman who shot the 1969 bestiality film Linda had initially denied appearing in said she was a cooperative performer with no coercion evident.
The truth probably lives somewhere complicated, and the passage of time hasn't made it easier to locate.
Anti-Porn Activist, Then Back at the Conventions
After Ordeal, Linda became a prominent voice in the anti-pornography movement, joining forces with feminist activists including Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and members of Women Against Pornography. She spoke at colleges, appeared before government hearings, and published a second memoir, Out of Bondage, in 1986.
She later distanced herself from some of those alliances, saying she eventually felt she was being used by the anti-porn movement for its own agenda, just as she'd been used by everyone else in her life.
By the late 1990s, following her divorce from Marchiano and facing serious financial pressure, she was back on the porn convention circuit — signing copies of Deep Throat and meeting fans. It looked, to many observers, like a painful irony. But in a 1997 interview she pushed back on that reading: "I look in the mirror and I look the happiest I've ever looked in my entire life. I'm not ashamed of my past or sad about it. I look in the mirror and I know that I've survived."
The Final Crash
On 3 April 2002, Linda was driving to a dialysis appointment in Denver when she was involved in a serious car accident. She sustained massive internal injuries. For almost three weeks doctors worked to save her. On 22 April 2002, with Larry Marchiano and their two adult children at her bedside, she was taken off life support. She was 53 years old.
She was interred at Parker Cemetery in Parker, Colorado.
Chuck Traynor, the man at the centre of so much of her story, died later that same year, on 22 July 2002.
What She Left Behind
The legacy of Linda Boreman, and the arguments about who she really was and what really happened on the set of a cheap Florida motel in January 1972, has never fully settled.
The computer processing coordination system "Linda" was named after her stage name, itself an homage to Ada Lovelace. The 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat explored her story. A rock musical, Lovelace, debuted in Los Angeles in 2008 with music co-written by Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go's. The 2013 biopic Lovelace, starring Amanda Seyfried and Peter Sarsgaard, gave her story mainstream cinematic treatment, drawing largely positive reviews even as it failed at the box office.
What's clear is that Linda Boreman spent her 53 years being defined, exploited, and narrated by other people — her mother, Traynor, the porn industry, the anti-porn movement, journalists, and filmmakers. Her four autobiographies tell four versions of the same life, which may say more about the conditions she was living under when she wrote them than about any inconsistency in her character.
She wanted, above almost everything else, to be believed. Whether history has granted her that is still, uncomfortably, up for debate.
Biography.com — Linda Lovelace: https://www.biography.com/actors/linda-lovelace
Denver Westword — Remembering Linda Lovelace: https://www.westword.com/news/remembering-linda-lovelace-the-deep-throat-star-who-became-a-denver-housewife-14271080
IMDb — Linda Lovelace biography: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001483/bio/
CBS News — Linda Lovelace Dies (April 23, 2002): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/linda-lovelace-dies/
Boreman, Linda. Ordeal. Citadel Press, 1980.
Boreman, Linda. Out of Bondage. Lyle Stuart, 1986.
McNeil, Legs, and Jennifer Osborne. The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. ReganBooks, 2005.
Danville, Eric. The Complete Linda Lovelace. Headpress, 2001.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. BasicBooks, 1992. (Referenced in relation to Linda Lovelace's symptoms)
Steinem, Gloria. "The Real Linda Lovelace." Ms. Magazine, 1980.
Article prepared for the NSFW section of Utterlyinteresting.com. All factual claims are sourced and attributable. Content contains references to sexual abuse, coercion, and adult themes — appropriate for a mature general readership.
