Publishing
Visiting fire-ladies
Paul Johnson
To liven up the end of Lent, London clasped to its cynical bosom two foreign ladies here to turn an honest penny with autobiographical traumas. Both came a cropper. Linda Lovelace, it may be remembered, was the most famous woman on earth for a week or two when her film Deep Throat was hailed by the New York critics as 'the first porn movie with class'. Later her ghosted book, Inside Linda Lovelace, was prosecuted for obscenity at the Old Bailey but acquitted, after a string of high-minded busybodies — including, be it noted, leading feminists — testified to its outstanding merits.
Linda was back again this month with a new book, Ordeal, (W.H. Allen £6.95), new husband, new surname (Marciano), new appearance Ca rather dumpy woman in blue jeans', noted Now magazine) and new philosophy CI would like to see all people who read pornography or have anything to do with it put in a mental hospital'). Far from enjoying being a porno star, as her earlier book claimed, she was — so she now asserts — forced into the dreadful trade by the ferocious threats of her previous husband, Chuck Traynor, who treated her as 'a sex slave'. She told the press: 'When a Forty-five is put to your head, it makes you do strange things. I was sexually and mentally abused. Existence became a matter of trying to stay alive'. The person she now wanted most to meet, she said, was Mrs Whitehouse.
Alas, at the Café Royal lunch thrown to introduce this reincarnated Madonna not everything went smoothly. When Beverly Hayne, features editor of Company magazine, which was giving the lunch, recounting Linda's horrifying experiences, spoke of the Lovelace body being 'used as a credit card', there were unseemly guffaws from the assembled hacks, provoking the now-demure Mrs Marciano to snap: 'I find it sad to see people getting a laugh out of this'. Later she invited questions. What, asked the Daily Express's William Hickey, a rude and objectionable fellow, had become of the dog, Rufus, described in Ordeal as a fellow-labourer in the vineyard?
This innocent-seeming query detonated an explosion of wrath from Mr Marciano, According to Campaign , 'Linda's shirtsleeved husband leapt from the top table and tore to the back of the room where the questioner was standing'. To the .`acute embarrassment' of the lunch's sponsors, he 'came within an inch' of flattening the Hickey writer, on the grounds that the question was 'tasteless', and he was by no means appeased when Hickey protested he was asking the question merely 'as a dog-lover'. Amid appeals for calm, the indignant husband was asked to 'settle his grievance outside', and Linda herself swept out saying: 'I feel sorry for all you people'.
The people one ought, perhaps, to feel sorry for are the legion of the Great and the Good 'who gave witness for Miss Lovelace in the days when she maintained that she got a lot of uplift from public fornication. It would, in fact, be interesting, if mean, to turn up the cuttings tO find out exactly who said what. No doubt to forestall such a move, one of them, Mervyn Jones, admitted in last week's Listener that. his appearance for the defence on that occasion Is not among my proudest memories'. He confessed that 'in the pub over the road' he and other defence witnesses 'agreed that the book was atrociously written and probably ghosted, but we declared in court that it had qualities of "integrity" and "candour" ... The real falsity of the situation, in the light of what we read in Ordeal, was that both prosecution and defence assumed the voracious enthusiasm claimed by Linda Lovelace to be genuine'.
Is Mr Jones — it is not quite clear from his remarks — saying that he and other witnesses committed perjury? Tut, tut! I thought that was supposed to be the prerogative of Messrs Crossman, Phillips and Bevan. The point is of more than academic interest since the prosecution, having failed against all expectation to get a conviction against Inside Linda Lovelace, threw in its hand.
According to the report of the Williams Committee on Obscenity, the authorities decided that, if the progressive Establish ment were prepared to stand up even for this sort of trash, there was no point ever again in trying to secure a conviction against a book, however dreadful. Thus is literary history made in the land of Shakespeare and Milton.
The other authoress on the publicity warpath was the minute (five foot, seven stone) Italian noise-box, Oriana Fallaci, here to launch her book about a former boy-friend, A Man, La Fallaci, often described, chiefly by herself, as 'the world's most formidable interviewer', is not taken sufficiently seriously in England, so it seems. She upbraided the procession of reporters who came to interview her ('Why do you British not read?') for the fact that only 7,000 copies of the English edition of her book had been printed, against 80,000 in Sweden. Among the sacrificial lambs sent to be eaten alive was the Observer's Sally Vincent. The Italian lady should have been warned that Miss Vincent, though quite capable herself on occasion of putting on a fierce boot-face, normally chooses to conceal behind a diffident and innocent seraphism her formidable ability to deliver a journalistic uppercut.
Whether by accident or design, Miss Vincent arrived without batteries in her taperecorder. Exasperated at such incompetence and irresponsibility, the Fallaci produced her own machine, inserted Vincent's tape and shouted into it: '1 would be grateful if you would notice the graciousness and ease with which I do all this for you'. Thereafter she took over the entire interview, asking the questions and supplying the answers to this English halfwit, while Miss Vincent sat silently taking it all in. The result was a minor masterpiece of demolitionwork, printed in last week's Observer, which I commend to all students of lissom irony. The prima donna came over loud and clear: But you have not asked me the important question. What would La Fallaci have been if La Fallaci had been born a man? That is a good question. Now this is very good for your article. I am saying that I was very lucky to have been born a woman. A woman and poor. So as to have to struggle with the nails. Perhaps if I had been born a man and rich I would have been an idiot. It is not so for women now, thanks to women like me, dammit. No, La Fallaci would not be La Fallaci if La Fallaci were a man!
And so on. Her publishers, Bodley Head, advertise the book at £6.50, adding hopefully, 'while stocks last'. They will, they will.
Previous page
