Porn Valley- Arrow Productions, www.xxxdeepthroat.com is scheduled to start its search for the new Linda Lovelace when the Sex Expo convenes in New York on May 19th. It’s eerie when you think about it, but Lovelace’s career began and ended with a car crash. Lovelace was killed in an automobile accident and was recovering from a near fatal one when she first met Chuck Traynor.
Lovelace was staying at her parents’ house in Ft. Lauderdale at the time. In her autobiography, Ordeal, Lovelace details how the accident occurred in New York on the Taconic State Parkway. She had been driving an Opel Cadet when an old Chrysler came skidding sideways, crashing into her. Her forehead and face hit the windshield. Part of one eye was hanging down. Her jaw was broken, and Linda’s lower front teeth were sticking through her chin. The steering wheel not only broke her ribs but lacerated her spleen and liver as well. “This was followed by a leaking intestine and peritonitis,” Lovelace writes. At the time Lovelace had been working in a boutique with the idea that she was going to start her own business.
Lovelace was in the middle of sunbathing, her scars healing, when her friend Betsy, a topless dancer who lived in Miami, introduced her to Traynor as the photographer that Betsy had been telling Lovelace about. Lovelace says her first impressions of Traynor, then 27, was that he was tall and good-looking with blond hair. “He seemed attractive to me,” she says, noting that the most attractive part of Traynor’s personality was parked in the driveway. Traynor was driving a new Jaguar XKE and seemed to have money to spend. Traynor offered her a joint and Lovelace recalls how the last time she smoked a joint in her mother’s house, her mother almost called the cops on her. Her father stopped that from happening, however. Traynor said he had to get back to Miami, that he owned a little bar called the Vegas Inn in North Miami, and invited Lovelace to tag along for the ride.
The three people crammed into the Jag and Lovelace noticed that Traynor was missing a finger. Traynor told her that it got bit off by a turtle. Apparently other stories of his life impressed her as well- that he was a former Marine as well as a pilot who owned his own private airline. Traynor also told her about some date he allegedly won with Natalie Wood while in the Corps.
Even though Traynor’s bar was a haven for the blue collar crowd, Lovelace said it was great just to be away from her parents, recalling how her mother would beat her with a belt for the most insignificant things. Her mother had the idea that Lovelace’s mind was always on boys and that’s why she would screw up. The message in Lovelace’s house was quite clear- sex was bad. One time her mother cracked her in the face when Lovelace asked what the word “fuck” meant. Lovelace also got the impression that having a period was God’s way of punishing you for sins you committed.
Lovelace was subsequently introduced to one of Traynor’s buddies, Benny, and later accepted Benny’s offer of a date. She accompanied Benny several times to Traynor’s house for pot-smoking sessions. Then, when Traynor broke up with Betsy he began coming on to Lovelace who discovered that Benny was married after a barmaid told her the story of how Benny’s wife chased him out of the house with a gun. That was all for Benny and the start of Traynor’s relationship with Lovelace.