Ordeal

This book features shocking revelations, controversial claims - it is Linda Lovelace's infamous third biography. The world's first international porn superstar makes a series of startling allegations in the most referred-to book ever written about the adult movie industry. When Linda Lovelace starred in 1972's "Deep Throat", she had already made several stag films under the auspices of partner and director Chuck Traynor. To her, "Throat" was just another 8mm porn movie. To the world, it was a symbol of sexual liberation and a groundbreaking landmark in cinema history - the first ever theatrically released flesh flick. The film and its starlet became household names. Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote and Bob Woodward saw it on its first run. The enthusiastic Lovelace seemed an icon of a strange kind of liberation. So, when the gleefully fellating nurse of the world's first "proper" porn movie wrote her third biography in 1980, flatly contradicting earlier claims and falling solidly in with her newfound image as a champion of women's rights and hardcore feminist, the porn world and the people who had seen "Throat" on its seemingly perpetual run through the adult cinemas of West Coast America were flabbergasted. Lovelace's claims that Traynor had coerced her into not only her role in "Deep Throat", but also her (far more hardcore and apparently just as enthusiastic) parts in his earlier underground shorts through systematic abuse, death threats and at gunpoint were met with open derision by the porn establishment and restrained glee by the puritan mainstream. Modern porn stars have gone on record to observe that the practices Lovelace claims were de rigeur for the industry she knew are non-existent: Lovelace herself further fuelled the argument by partly retracting her allegations in the admission that "Throat" revolutionised the love lives of thousands of couples, and that if this was the case, then the movie itself was "OK." The most talked-about porn memoir of all time, and a vital component in the on-running and increasingly vitriolic porno morality debate.