In 1972, the year of the Watergate break-in, a hard-core pornographic film opened at the New Mature World Theater in New York City. The working title of the movie had been “The Doctor Makes a Housecall.” But its producer, Jerry Damiano, re-titled it “Deep Throat.” Journalism and sexual culture in America have never been the same.
The revelation that Mark Felt was Bob Woodward’s “Deep Throat” has solved an intriguing 30-year mystery in the political and press culture of Washington, D.C. It has unearthed dozens of surviving Watergate figures, the political corpse of Richard Nixon, and ancient arguments about the value of anonymous sources.
But as this part of the story plays out, let’s not forget the movie that gave it a name. No, not “All The President’s Men,” but “Deep Throat,” featuring porn’s first superstar, Linda Lovelace. Three decades after the “Woodstein” phenomenon romanticized investigative reporting, the credibility of anonymous sources continues to fade. In those same 30 years, pornography has transformed America.
With few exceptions, journalism has not told the story of this transformation well. In a sexualized culture, straight reporting seems dull, a vestige of a repressed era rather than of a recklessly creative one. Distracted and over-stimulated, the young continue to ignore us. Blame it on Deep Throat.
Before the making of “Deep Throat,” pornography was a small-time operation, the work of mobsters armed with 8mm cameras, capturing crude grainy images in five-minute “loops” to be viewed at stag parties. Now, it is a multi-billion dollar international industry, no longer the sole province of the Mafia, but now the lucrative work of giant hotel chains, cable companies, and internet providers.
I watched “Deep Throat” in 1978 with two other reporters in an old Clearwater, Florida gas station that had been converted into a shabby porn theater. We were dressed in suits, and the proprietor looked shaken when we approached. He might have thought we were the FBI.
Today any 16-year-old boy – or girl – can boot up images even more graphic than those acted out in a Miami motel by Linda Susan Boreman, the real name of the woman whose exotic talents transformed oral sexuality into a national obsession. Enabled by cable television, the VCR, the Internet, in-room hotel movies, e-mail and SPAM, pornography has become more readily available, the viewing of it more routine, the taboos against it fewer and fewer, and the definitions of deviant behavior looser and looser.
The road from “Deep Throat” leads, as it turns out, not just into the Nixon White House, but into the Clinton White House, where Monica Lewinsky could make use of her “presidential kneepads,” and where she could – along with the president – offer the case that oral sex wasn’t really sexual relations at all. It was just “fooling around,” hooking up, friends with benefits. Seinfeld devoted an episode to it. Oprah expressed concern about middle school girls servicing their little boyfriends.
Here is how Deep Throat is introduced in the book version of “All The President’s Men”:
Woodward had a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at CRP [Committee to Re-elect the President, known as ‘Creep’] as well as at the White House. His identity was unknown to anyone else. He could be contacted only on very important occasions. Woodward had promised he would never identify him or his position to anyone. Further, he had agreed never to quote the man, even as an anonymous source. Their discussions would be only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and to add some perspective.
In newspaper terminology, this meant the discussions were on “deep background.” Woodward explained the arrangement to managing editor Howard Simons one day. He had taken to calling the source “my friend,” but Simons dubbed him “Deep Throat,” the title of a celebrated pornographic movie. The name stuck.
The language is instructive. Woodward and Bernstein do not describe the movie “Deep Throat” as “notorious” or “controversial” or even “surprisingly popular,” but as “celebrated.” Even those of us who lived through the Watergate era may have forgotten how a shabby 62-minute reel of film became “celebrated.”
Nora Ephron, who would one day marry Carl Bernstein, devoted her February 1973 column in Esquire to the movie, which she found disturbing. To her amazement, “Deep Throat, as I write, is currently in its twenty-second record-breaking week…on Times Square, and is thirty-seventh on the list of Variety’s top grossers, having so far taken in some $1,500,000.” According to inexact estimates, that number would one day top $600 million.
The week the movie opened in New York, according to its producer, it outgrossed “Cabaret” and the sequel to “Shaft.” But who was going to see it? Accounts from the day include such fans as Mike Nichols, Ed McMahon, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, Spiro Agnew, and Sammy Davis Jr. Celebrity attention began to shove pornography towards the mainstream. Linda Lovelace would be interviewed by Johnny Carson. And the grandfatherly managing editor of The Post, Howard Simons, would mischievously conjure the title to describe the man who turned out to be second in command at the FBI.
Thirty years after this moment in journalism history, thirty years after the red flag in the flowerpot, thirty years after the clandestine meetings in the parking garage, the use of anonymous sources by journalists has never been in worse repute. We’ve come a long way from that earlier standard set by Felt and Woodstein.
Recent scandals such as Rathergate and Korangate have taken their toll. While the culture of anonymity persists in Washington – and will always require the use of some anonymous sources – many newspapers have banned them except in extreme cases. Many editors – including the current editor of the Washington Post — would now require Woodward to reveal to an editor the name of his source. If Watergate happened today, Mark Felt might hold a news conference and then wind up with his own talk show.
But even as news anonymity has fallen into disrepute, the culture of pornography seems more and more ascendant. Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson become more popular after their private sex videos are made public. Howard Stern turns morning radio into a parade of sexual exhibitionists. Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ flashes the world during the Super Bowl. The raunchy lyrics of hip-hop songs are performed against the backdrop of sexually explicit music videos. The swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated gets nuder and nuder. And the big hotels and big media companies get richer and richer.
There’s a backlash against the pornographication of America, but let’s not mistake it for a fair fight. The FCC, the religious right, certain feminists, advocates of parental control are waging war against sexual culture but it is the battle of a tiny dam against a raging river.
Linda Lovelace died in 2002 at the age of 53, the end of a troubled life that involved prostitution, pornography, drug abuse, three failed marriages, a double mastectomy, a liver transplant, and two terrible automobile accidents, the second of which took her life. She wrote not one, but four autobiographies. The first two celebrated her sexual prowess. The last two claimed that she was the ultimate victim of exploitation and rape. In the final acts of her life, she became a born-again Christian and a cautionary tale for the evils of pornography.
“Deep Throat, strange as it may seem, changed America’s sexual attitudes more than anything since the first Kinsey Report in 1948,” argues movie critic Joe Bob Briggs.
In the struggle between the libertine and Puritan cultures in America, Linda Lovelace managed to embody them both. Thirty years from now, when the name of Mark Felt is a footnote, the legacy of the real Deep Throat will carry on, for better and for worse. Will journalists figure out how to cover the consequences of that sexual legacy, now and into the future? Can we even imagine a future where a distracted and over-stimulated society leaves room for the consumption of straight reporting and serious news?
