ten
Like many other American high-school girls, I worshipped the movie stars. The faces of Clint Eastwood and Elvis and Clark Gable looked down at me from my bedroom walls. There was no way I would miss a Susan Hayward movie. I hungrily read the fan magazine legends and fables. I believed them. I just
knew
that Lana Turner was discovered while sitting on a soda-fountain stool in Hollywood.
My own movie career didn’t follow the typical Hollywood patterns. Consider, for example, the way I was discovered. Not at some soda-fountain. I was spotted in one of those miserable eight-millimeter porno epics.
My discoverer was Gerard Damiano, later notorious as the director of
Deep Throat
and
The Devil in Miss Jones.
Damiano had seen me in an eight-millimeter movie and then hired me to be in some of his own. Believe it or not, this was a giant step up. Compared to men like Bob Wolf, Gerry Damiano was Cecil B. De Mille.
Both Wolf and Damiano made porn, but there was a difference. While Wolf worked with one other man, Damiano used a crew of six. Damiano paid Chuck $75.00 for my services, as opposed to the $50.00 that the other eight-millimeter moguls offered. The major difference: I had the feeling that Damiano might actually have film in his camera.
More often than not, people like Wolf began and ended their movies in the same bed. With them there was never such a thing as a change of costume or even, for that matter, a costume. With Damiano the actors began fully clothed and slowly got undressed; they might even move from one room to another. After that, however, they all followed the same basic script. It all came down to the same stuff, but the mood was different. At least no one was urinating on anyone.
Since this was the Christmas season—the Christmas just before my twenty-second birthday—Gerard Damiano was using a holiday backdrop for his movies. They were shot with Christmas trees and Christmas gifts, and there was one scene where we carried Christmas candles. All very sentimental.
My new co-star, Harry Reems, the man who became
the
porn superstar, was a close friend of Damiano’s. Before sharing the billing in
Deep Throat,
Harry and I had already done one eight-millimeter together. Harry was playing a very sick man, and I was portraying a nurse in a mini-uniform. Whenever I bent over to give him his medicine, my backside was sticking out. Then when I took the covers away from Harry, his thing was all wrapped up in bandages and gauze. That was the way it began. It ended, of course, with a miracle cure. This short film clip was later inserted, without much logic or explanation, into the middle of
Deep Throat
.
Chuck didn’t like Harry Reems at all. I assumed this was because Harry was young and good-looking. When I saw how upset Chuck was, I decided I would pretend to enjoy it with Harry. When Damiano was through filming, Chuck could hardly wait to get me alone.
“What the fuck do you call that?” he snapped.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t try and tell me you weren’t really into that,” he said. “You were
too
fucking into it, if you ask me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chuck.” All innocence. “You’re always going around telling me that I’m not freaky enough and that I should get into it more. What do you want from me?”
After that first film, Harry Reems became an ally. Harry has a very good sense of humor—but he was really interested in only one thing, making dirty movies. He was always taking me to one side and telling me that I could make a fortune in porno; he told me that he could arrange a whole lot of eight-millimeter work. All this attention was driving Chuck crazy.
Gerry Damiano became friendly with me and treated me very politely. He was hung up on one thing, the oral-sex techniques that Chuck had taught me, the sword-swallowing or deep-throat trick. He had never known anyone else able to do that.
Then, one day while driving from his apartment to his Manhattan office, Gerry Damiano had an inspiration. Chuck and I were in his office when he arrived and he couldn’t wait to tell us his big idea.
“I was driving over the bridge when it hit me,” he said. “We’re going to do a whole film—and I mean a feature, thirty-five millimeters—about a girl who has her clit in her throat.”
He paused to let that sink in. He seemed to be waiting for my reaction. My
reaction?
I was still trying to figure out what he was talking about. A girl with her clit in her throat? Could that have been what he said?
“Hey, that’s cool,” Chuck said.
“I’ve even got a title,” Damiano said. “
Deep Throat
. It came to me all at once.”
That must have been some drive into the city. Not only had Damiano come up with the title and the plot, he had even worked out a theme song, also entitled
Deep Throat
. Thereafter Gerry never stopped humming that melody, and every day he added a verse or two until he came up with the song that was used in the movie. Who could ever forget those lyrics?
Deep Throat
Don’t row a boat
Don’t get your goat
That’s all she wrote
Deep Throat
“And, Linda,” Damiano said, “you’re the only girl for this movie.”
“You’re talking about a feature, right?” Chuck said.
“Thirty-five millimeters,” the director said, “and Linda will be perfect for it.”
“You’re right there,” Chuck said. “There’s no one else on earth can do it like Linda.”
“You know, it’s not just that.” Damiano turned thoughtful for a moment. “The most amazing thing about Linda, the truly amazing thing, is she still looks sweet and innocent. I don’t know how come, but that’s one thing I can’t buy, sweet innocence.”
Damiano’s opinions were definitely not shared by his partner, Lou Peraino, the man who put up the money for
Deep Throat
. Another partner in the venture was named Phil Parisi but most of my dealings were with Damiano and Lou Peraino, who was always called Lou Perry in articles and books about the movie. If that’s what he wants—I’ll call him Lou Perry here.
This was to be Lou’s first feature film—pornographic or otherwise—and he wanted a more traditional female star; he kept saying he wanted a blonde with big boobs. But Damiano held out for sweetness and innocence.
“We’ve never even seen this broad talk,” Lou complained.
“So we’ll give her a little test,” Damiano said. “We’ll see if she can talk.”
My test for the role struck me as a strange one. Damiano asked me to recite an old nursery-school poem,
Mary Had a Little Lamb
.
“What?” I said.
“You know, ‘Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow,’ and so on.”
So that was my screen test for
Deep Throat
. I stood there and recited
Mary Had a Little Lamb
two different ways—first a straight dramatic reading, then laughing all the way through as though it was hilarious. I guess they were testing my dramatic range as well as my voice. It seemed a peculiar selection when compared to the kind of lines I’d be asked to deliver in just a couple of weeks. But I went along with it.
“Linda, the part is yours,” Damiano said.
Still, Lou Perry remained unconvinced. As nearly as I could tell, the partnership between Perry and Damiano took the form of a non-stop fight. It seemed to be an equal partnership in that neither of them ever seemed to have the last word. Some of those shouting matches went on all day. As I came to understand their arrangement, Lou Perry was putting up the money and Damiano was doing the work.
When the film started to do extremely well at the box office, Damiano was pressured out of the partnership. I read a story that said he sold his entire share in the film for $25,000. When a reporter asked him why he allowed himself to be bought out so cheaply, Damiano said, “Look, do you want me to get both my legs broken?”
And that says more about Lou Perry than I could ever say. Lou was about forty-five years old, heavy, and sloppy. What I remember most about him was his loud mouth; he was always yelling at someone about something. And he never went anywhere without his bodyguard, Vinnie. Vinnie was some piece of work. He had worked many years for Lou’s father, Tony Peraino, and then had been assigned to his son.
Old Tony dropped in to see his son from time to time. He came with his own small army, all wearing dark suits and trenchcoats, looking like they were trying out for an Edward G. Robinson movie. Tony had given his son the $25,000 bankroll for the movie.
That’s why it was so important to Lou that the movie be a success. And it also explains why Lou was so critical of me. It wasn’t just that I might ruin his first film or cost him his $25,000. But worse, I might make him look bad in front of daddy.
I will say this about Lou Perry, he never talked behind my back. Anything he had to say about me he said right to my face and generally at the top of his voice. Lou and Damiano were in nearby offices and they constantly shouted their opinions from one room to the next. Lou would point out that this was their first feature film and that their entire futures were riding on it. Damiano would say that he understood that perfectly and that’s why they should use me. Lou would shout back that he had never heard of a female star of a pornographic movie without big tits.
“Big tits sell tickets!” he said.
“Linda stays!” Damiano shouted back.
And I did. The director gave me a script, my first movie script. My total speaking part came to about five pages. I looked at the pages but I couldn’t bring myself to read them, not right away. They were the first lines I’d ever speak in front of a movie camera, and I had a pretty good idea what kind of lines they’d be. The only thing that remotely interested me was how they’d explain the clitoris in the throat. Chuck was the one who seemed excited by the script; he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t memorizing my lines that first day.
There was one other thing that excited Chuck. The salary. Chuck was to be paid a flat $100.00 a day for my role in the movie, a total of $1,200. When Lou Perry kept criticizing me, Chuck began to panic that all that money would fall through. One day Chuck came up with a brainstorm.
“We could get Lou to change his mind,” he told me, “if you’d just go in there and give him a blow job.”
I was familiar with all the Hollywood legends—including some of the casting-couch stories—and I knew that some starlets would take care of movie producers sexually, but that was
before
they got the role, not afterwards.
“The thing is, this guy is really down on you,” Chuck said. “He doesn’t want you no way, and you’ve got to fucking convince him that you’ll be sensational in the role. I’ll go set it up with him. When you go in there, I want you to do a real job on him. I want you to show him you’re some kind of a freak. If this doesn’t work, your ass is in trouble.”
Chuck went into Lou’s office and the two men talked for just a couple of minutes. Then Chuck came out for me. My husband signaled for me to go into Lou’s office. The two other people in the outer office—Rose the secretary and Vinnie the bodyguard—watched me as I walked over to the door. I could feel their eyes on my back. I felt like a piece of garbage walking through the door—even worse when I came back five minutes later.
Lou’s office was a long thin room with a long thin window. I walked in the door. He was seated at his desk, going through piles of paper. He glanced up at me for just a second and then returned to his paperwork.
“Lock the door,” he said, not looking at me.
I closed the door behind me and turned the lever that locked the knob. Then I walked over to Lou. He still wasn’t looking at me. His eyes remained on those precious piles of paper but he had swiveled his chair so that his legs were no longer under his desk. He had undone his zipper.
“C’m’on,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
I went over beside him and got down on my knees and started to work on him. As I was doing what I had to do, he went on fussing with the papers on his desk. Then he suddenly stopped, leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. His whole body stiffened, relaxed, stiffened again.
“All right,” he said. “Get out of here now.”
I got to my feet and walked over to the door. I hated what I was going to see on those faces in the outer office. I was garbage. Pure garbage. Then I started getting worried. Had I done it well enough? If I had done it well enough, why did he treat me like such dirt? What would he say to Chuck?
As I walked into the outer office, I felt as though the secretary was looking at me with contempt. Chuck was staring at my face, looking for some clue. Vinnie, the bodyguard, was the only one with the grace to be looking out the window.
At any rate, I guess it wasn’t too disappointing an experience for Lou. Because we went through the same routine every day after that. Exactly the same routine. He always greeted me with, “All right, lock the door.” He’d be ready for me and I’d do it. Then I’d hear, “All right, get out of here.”
I don’t think it ever took him more than three or four minutes. But in that space of time he always managed to let me know that I was no more than garbage. And I’m not sure that all that effort accomplished any change in his attitude. He went right on complaining to Damiano about my physical shortcomings and saying that I was going to send his $25,000 investment down the drain.