movie theatre marquis announces judicial censorship of Deep Throat porn movie

I found an interesting article in the summer 1973 issue of Line & Form magazine. Excerpting several magazine interviews with the then-notorious porn actress Linda Lovelace about her controversial movie Deep Throat, the article was illustrated by photos of one of the theaters in New York City, where the film had been banned after both a very profitable run and then a subsequent adverse obscenity ruling:

Deep Throat is about a girl who fails to get satisfaction from ordinary intercourse. “I want to hear bells ringing, dams bursting, rockets exploding,” she says.

A doctor diagnoses the problem: her clitoris is in her throat, nine inches down. And the cure for her ills is, of course, fellatio. From then on bells ring and dams burst and rockets explode for Linda and whoever her lucky partner happens to be.

Not only can she take it all in, she loves it. She really convinces other people and perhaps herself as well that she has orgasms in her throat.

In more ways than one, Linda Lovelace is every man’s dream. There are other girls like her, to be sure, but probably every man has, at one time or another, wished that all girls could come that way.

Linda is also, as Richard Hill, who interviewed her for Oui, found, quite a startling personality.

He writes: It was like seeing the ingenue from Bonjour Tristesse appear to David Niven in mesh hose and garter belt. She was innocence and carnality, an All-American Next-Door Lollipop and La Belle Fellatrix. She had it all put together.

And Richard Hill followed Linda from New York to Florida, flirting, playing footsy under restaurant tables they shared with her old man. Nothing came of it but fantasy, but what a fantasy it was!

Incredible, this high school hand-holding with a girl who fucks on a large screen, he writes. Then I realize what I’ve done. I’ve idiotically and unconsciously been pursuing my part of the Linda fantasy — the All-American Lollipop — and she’s been responding that way. She’s feeding my fantasy of her, like the good little professional she is.

Good little professional that she is, Linda might have responded just as well to the Belle Fellatrix fantasy, too. More than one interviewer, though, endeavoring to get an “in-depth interview” with the star of Deep Throat, has come away less than satisfied. Richard Hill finally posed just two questions.

One was: Linda, why do you make porn flicks and how does it feel and all, you know what I mean? (Hill counts all of that as one question.)

Her response: Because I’m an exhibitionist. I dig doing it. I want everybody to see it. And I make good money.

All in all, these are good reasons for doing what she does. Making money, in itself, wouldn’t be enough, but she digs doing it and wants people to see her doing it. She not only feeds fantasies, she makes pornutopia come true.

Hill also asked: How do you do the thing with your throat?

She smiled and said, Everyone knows the answer to that one.

Not really. Linda, there are girls who’d love to know, step by step, just how it’s done.

Women’s Wear Daily, the garment industry’s trade magazine which got to Linda first, got about as far into this mystifying star as any body else has since then. She gave them this description of herself: I’m just a simple girl who likes to go to swinging parties and nudist colonies.

This simple girl is, of course, beyond feminist and anti-feminist arguments, so far beyond that the feminists themselves feel that some kind of attack is necessary, but they don’t know what to focus on.

box office placard announcing NYC theatrical closure of Deep Throat due to judicial censorship

Nora Ephron spills out her confusion in Esquire, where her whole February column is devoted to Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat: … After all, I can toss off phrases like ‘split beaver’ with almost devil-may-care abandon, and I came out of the theater a quivering fanatic. Give me the goriest Peckinpah any day.

What Nora Ephron finds particularly disturbing is a scene where Linda has a glass dildo inside her and her partner fills it with coke then drinks it. All I could think about was what would happen if the glass broke, Nora admits.

Others thought this was the high point of the film, and Linda says, Actually I think the funniest thing that happened when we were shooting was when we did that scene. They were going to shoot a little bit more, but someone said something and I started laughing and the glass dildo went flying into the air and cracked into a million pieces.

And here’s Linda Lovelace, back home in Texas with her boyfriend, describing it all to Nora Ephron who is calling from New York. Nora Ephron isn’t bitchy, she’s trying to be a good journalist and dig into the nitty-gritty so she’ll understand the Lovelace phenomenon. And she deserves credit because few of her fellow feminists bother with good journalism (or writing for men’s magazines). The exchange goes like this.

Nora: How do you feel about being recognized on the street?

Linda: It’s a kind of a goof.

And pretty soon things have been turned around.

Linda: Would you be nervous if you walked around nude and strangers saw you?

Nora: Yes.

Linda: See? I wouldn’t.

I did not expect what is happening, Nora Eprhon confesses, which is that we seem to be spending as much time talking about me and what Miss Lovelace clearly thinks of as my problems as we are about her and what I clearly think of as her problems.

Nora tries again: Why do you shave off your pubic hair in the film?

Linda: I always do. I like it.

Nora: But why do you do it?

Linda: Well, it’s kinda hot in Texas.

It goes on like this, with Linda only divulging the bare facts about herself that have already been widely publicized: She’s 21, from Texas, and it was that same boyfriend she’s still with who taught her how to do the trick with her throat.

No, she doesn’t talk about what, if anything, she did for a living before Deep Throat — I was just going to get a job as a topless dancer or something.

There’s not much here to threaten feminist idiology. What Linda threatens is, well, deeper. Nora Ephron was honest enough to confess that she felt “uptight.” And no wonder, for Linda comes on with this attitude of “I’m not hung up — life’s just a goof — what’s your problem?” She flattens feminist egos to the ground as easily as she evokes male erections, it seems.

Linda may do some good. For one thing, she really wants to help people get over their sex hangups. She doesn’t laugh at the erotically disabled, she’s sympathetic. Still, she doesn’t take the missionary slant of the sexual freedom people. She doesn’t try to make sex “holy.” She lets sex be hysterically funny, in fact, and this, along with her miraculous throat, is one of her major contributions to the porn genre. It used to be only the audience laughed.

Deep Throat gives skin flick makers something to strive for, all right. Theaters all over the country are advertising, “If you’ve seen Throat, you’ll like….” but if any other films are as good, they haven’t managed to get the publicity.

What’s more, Deep Throat elevates giving head to new status as a sex act, so that the talk about where female orgasms come from is apt to be revived. Dr. David Reuben and the clitoromaniac feminists may consider the question closed, but anyone who reads the fine print in Masters and Johnson knows that women can have real climactic spasms after as much as a brush of the breasts or the sight of a naked man. A misplaced clitoris may not be quite credible, but the orgasm through fellatio may not be such a one-sided thing as it’s usually thought to be.

At any rate, giving head ranks high in explicit erotic entertainment. The New York Erotic Film Festival opened with a live example this year, as guests stood around with their drinks in their hands and photographers kept clicking their shutters. Everybody seemed to be having fun playing voyeur. Then one man made a crack that revealed he’d seen better. “A Deep Throat she ain’t,” he said.

No, Linda Lovelace doesn’t have to be there to make her influence felt, and for better or worse, among head-givers and head-lovers her influence is going to be felt for some time.

If we judge by the uneasiness of their questions, it’s amazing how much this movie disturbed people half a century ago. Isn’t it?

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