Adventures in the skin trade

There's no commentary here, no analysis, just thousands of quotes strung together. Legs McNeil, with journalist Jennifer Osborne and crime writer Peter Pavia, have compiled hundreds of original interviews as well as excerpts from newspapers, books, coroner's reports, FBI wiretaps, police reports and a host of other sources. The result is an artfully composed jigsaw puzzle of stories that together create a narrative history of an industry. Nearly everyone involved gets his or her say. Many of the stories are X-rated; others are mundane. The effect is unsettling and strange, overwhelming and breathtaking, and, not least, incredibly entertaining.

McNeil coauthored a similarly constructed book in 1997, "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" (along with Gillian McCain), and like that one, "The Other Hollywood" will probably be recognized as the definitive work on its subject. (For evidence, see the recent episode of "The O.C." where Marissa lounges on her bed reading "Please Kill Me," a shorthand indication that she's really into her new punk-rock girlfriend.) But "The Other Hollywood" also feels more urgent and necessary than its predecessor, mostly because porn has proved to be a more enduring phenomenon than punk, but also because the narrative here is tighter and more suspenseful.

There are some platitudes about porn stars that turn out to be mostly true. The majority of them got into films not out of some overwhelming desire to have sex on-screen but because they desperately needed money and found they didn't mind the exhibitionism so much. Many of them, especially the women, erroneously believed they could transition into "straight" films, and plenty of Hollywood folks who hung around the porn scene -- whom the porn actors called "porn marks" -- encouraged that belief. (Celeb watchers will be interested in the occasional appearances of Sammy Davis Jr., Warren Beatty and Richard Dreyfuss, among others, here.) And, yes, an awful lot of both male and female stars had family members who hit them or molested them, or, at the very least, left a deep emotional wound. As '70s porn star Serena says in a bit of honesty that is both oddly refreshing and sad, "This all stems back to, 'Daddy didn't give me enough love.' I hope I will always have that need, that drive to create."

But there are others who defy the stereotype, like Kelly Nichols, who had been doing pretty well in Hollywood when she decided she preferred porn. Or Tricia Deveraux, who grew up in a strict Roman Catholic household and left medical school to join the adult-film world. Like several other stars, including Seka and Annie Sprinkle, Deveraux found that she just really liked sex, and the porn community was a safe, supportive environment in which to explore her sexuality. And then there is the infamous Traci Lords, who as a 15-year-old runaway with a fake I.D., may or may not have conspired with the FBI to bring down the porn industry and make her fortune at the same time. Either way, she was certainly cunning; after her underage status was revealed, the only legal Lords film left on the market was one she had made herself, just after her 18th birthday, and on which she received all the profits.

But that's getting ahead of the story. Before there were these women, there were Linda Lovelace, Chuck Traynor and "Deep Throat" in 1972, which laid the groundwork for all of the events that came after. (And which, as luck would have it, has been rereleased in theaters, along with the documentary "Inside Deep Throat.") The basics here are quite well known: Traynor was Lovelace's abusive husband and manager, a "suitcase pimp" in porn parlance. Lovelace herself was and has remained something of a punch line, a clueless young woman whose only claim to fame was a supposedly remarkable blow job technique. Despite, or maybe because of, its campy ridiculousness, the film grossed over a hundred million dollars, became the first porno that was so cool people weren't ashamed to be caught seeing it (Spiro Agnew apparently caught a private screening at the White House), and launched an obscenity trial as well as a nationwide government crackdown on porn. Lovelace later divorced Traynor and denounced the film, saying she was forced to make it, joining Women Against Pornography in the '80s.

What is not so well known is that Traynor and Lovelace's relationship wasn't just abusive, it was brutally so. Traynor beat her black-and-blue off the set, yelled at her constantly and was so jealous that though he insisted she perform well enough to make him money (he took all of her pay), he would rage at the smallest suggestion that she was enjoying herself. Most accounts of Lovelace's accusations -- that Traynor threatened her with a gun, that no one in the industry stood up for her -- have been given short shrift. And here is where the exhaustive chronicling of "The Other Hollywood" becomes not just compelling but important: In the back-and-forth between the couple on the page, and with memories from other actors and crew members thrown in, it becomes clear that Lovelace might have indeed been rather flaky or dumb or, in Traynor's word, a "dingbat," but she was also so battered physically and emotionally that it is little wonder that she felt coerced. And because her co-workers saw her problem as a private matter, they stayed out of it.

McNeil spends a lot of time with Chuck and Linda, and for good reason: This is the relationship on which the porn film industry was built. Another movie might have launched what would quickly become a multibillion-dollar juggernaut, but it couldn't have been just any movie, or with any actors. It was Lovelace's deep-throating, after all, that made the film a spectacle popular enough to drag porn out of its furtive, underground hole, and it was Traynor who introduced Lovelace to porn in the first place. If to understand the industry we have to first acknowledge its beginning, then here we have it in all its shameful, tainted glory. Phone sex pioneer Leonard may never have seen coercion in the industry, but at the very start, it made room for violence, pimping and downright slavery.

Which reminds me of something else Leonard says in the book, this time directly about Lovelace: "It was her own poor, shitty choice of a companion that got her beat up. Nobody in the porn business -- that had anything to do with the film -- laid a hand on her, other than in a loving way." As anyone who has been abused can attest, you never know that you've made a shitty choice until it's done, and you can't undo it without help. Although what Leonard says may be technically true, it is also callous and wrongheaded, and exactly the kind of mentality that allows violence against women to thrive.

One could argue, and rightly, that in 1972 domestic violence wasn't a commonly understood phenomenon. But Leonard's quote comes from one of the book's original interviews, all of which were done in the past seven years, so it goes to show how deeply entrenched that view of Lovelace has remained. Nor does it change the fact that the Lovelace-Traynor relationship set a precedent for disturbingly relaxed attitudes within the industry toward coercion and violence.

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