Random Throat...Random Throat
Time for a jumble of this and that:
In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy...I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.
One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House....[A]fter I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than I and was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very distinguished-looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed instantly....
Linda Lovelace was born Linda Susan Boreman. She grew up in Yonkers, NY. She went to Catholic school. Her dad was an NYPD cop. Then one day, 21-year-old Linda is subathing by a Ft. Lauderdale swimming pool when she's approached by some guy. Long story short, the guy becomes her husband, gets her hooked on drugs, and pimps her out to do a bunch of stag films. Eventually Linda winds up in the most famous porno of all time.
After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir."
"Mark Felt," he said.
I began telling him about myself, that this was my last year in the Navy and I was bringing documents from Adm. Moorer's office. Felt was in no hurry to explain anything about himself or why he was there.
The story of Linda Lovelace revolves around 62 minutes of film called Deep Throat. The producers shelled out $22,500, all of it Mob money. They shot a few days in New York, and another six days in Miami. The film had been conceived and written for Linda. The director had been impressed by her ability to swallow a cock so deep that she only stopped when she bumped into the balls. Its working title was "The Doctor Makes a Housecall."
I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders....
Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter -- one of the most important in my life -- I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent....
The film quickly became a phenomenon. It was unprecedented. The FBI later estimated that Deep Throat had probably grossed at least $600 million. It was distributed by the Mob. They leaned on the theater owners, burning down a few cinemas here and there whenever somebody refused to give them their cut (50%). Not surprisingly, the gangsters kept a tight rein on the prints.
Somewhat to my astonishment, Felt was an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. He appreciated his orderliness and the way he ran the bureau with rigid procedures and an iron fist. Felt said he appreciated that Hoover arrived at the office at 6:30 each morning and everyone knew what was expected. The Nixon White House was another matter, Felt said. The political pressures were immense, he said without being specific. I believe he called it "corrupt" and sinister. Hoover, Felt and the old guard were the wall that protected the FBI, he said.
Then Frank Sinatra got ahold of a print somehow (cough, cough) and screened it in his home for party guests. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew saw it at one of Frank's parties. Sammy Davis, Jr. too. In fact, Sammy got so turned on that later he and his wife got together for a four-way with Linda and her husband.
Other celebrities were also taking in the film, including Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, and Jack Nicholson.
I kept Felt on my call list and checked in with him. He was relatively free with me but insisted that he, the FBI and the Justice Department be kept out of anything I might use indirectly or pass onto others. He was stern and strict about those rules with a booming, insistent voice. I promised, and he said that it was essential that I be careful. The only way to ensure that was to tell no one that we knew each other or talked or that I knew someone in the FBI or Justice Department. No one.
According to the manager of the New Mature World Theater, Tonight Show sidekick Ed McMahon was particularly enthusiastic. "He came with six guys and a case of Budweiser and stood out front afterward, chatting about the movie to passersby for half an hour."
A month later, on Saturday, June 17, the FBI night supervisor called Felt at home. Five men in business suits, pockets stuffed with $100 bills, and carrying eavesdropping and photographic equipment, had been arrested inside the Democrats' national headquarters at the Watergate office building about 2:30 a.m.
By 8:30 a.m. Felt was in his office at the FBI, seeking more details. About the same time, The Post's city editor woke me at home and asked me to come in to cover an unusual burglary.
Deep Throat had legitimized pornography overnight. Despite a $3 million injunction from a New York judge (which was overturned on appeal), the film kept taking in business. In all, more than ten million Americans viewed the film. And then, after all that, Linda Lovelace turned around and declared that she had been forced into doing the film.
I called Felt at the FBI, reaching him through his secretary. It would be our first talk about Watergate. He reminded me how he disliked phone calls at the office but said the Watergate burglary case was going to "heat up" for reasons he could not explain. He then hung up abruptly.
In 1980 Linda released an autobiography recounting her victimization. Her husband had forced her to perform sex on strangers. In front of a camera. With a dog. And then Deep Throat happened. It was only after she found the courage to leave her husband that she could come clean. Linda even recounted her horror story for the Meese Commission on Pornography.
I tried to call Felt, but he wouldn't take the call. I tried his home in Virginia and had no better luck. So one night I showed up at his Fairfax home. It was a plain-vanilla, perfectly kept, everything-in-its-place suburban house. His manner made me nervous. He said no more phone calls, no more visits to his home, nothing in the open.
I did not know then that in Felt's earliest days in the FBI, during World War II, he had been assigned to work on the general desk of the Espionage Section. Felt learned a great deal about German spying in the job, and after the war he spent time keeping suspected Soviet agents under surveillance.
So at his home in Virginia that summer, Felt said that if we were to talk it would have to be face to face where no one could observe us.
I said anything would be fine with me.
We would need a preplanned notification system -- a change in the environment that no one else would notice or attach any meaning to. I didn't know what he was talking about.
If you keep the drapes in your apartment closed, open them and that could signal me, he said. I could check each day or have them checked, and if they were open we could meet that night at a designated place. I liked to let the light in at times, I explained.
We needed another signal, he said, indicating that he could check my apartment regularly. He never explained how he could do this.
Feeling under some pressure, I said that I had a red cloth flag, less than a foot square -- the kind used as warnings on long truck loads -- that a girlfriend had found on the street. She had stuck it in an empty flowerpot on my apartment balcony.
Felt and I agreed that I would move the flowerpot with the flag, which usually was in the front near the railing, to the rear of the balcony if I urgently needed a meeting. This would have to be important and rare, he said sternly. The signal, he said, would mean we would meet that same night about 2 a.m. on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn.
Nobody in the adult film business bought her act. They were appalled. She had, in their minds, repudiated her past only as a ploy to gain the acceptance of the millions of Americans who hadn't seen her movies. In fact, the porn industry uses the term "Linda Syndrome" to refer to former porn stars who disavow their careers, like Traci Lords.
In 2002 Linda died in a Denver hospital after crashing her car into a concrete post.
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