NEW YORK -- Following the screening here last week of "Inside Deep Throat," the documentary about the making of the 1972 porn classic, some people were asked to stand, and the audience applauded them. One of them was Harry Reems, the male lead of the movie, who became a pitiful alcoholic, destitute and homeless, but who later embraced Christianity and now sells real estate in Utah. The audience applauded and so did I until it occurred to me that I had no idea what I was applauding. Was it his performance in the film or his conversion to Christianity or his success in real estate or his triumph over alcoholism, or merely that he was present and that we, like some studio audience, had been cued to clap like trained seals? Someone, please, throw us a fish.
"Deep Throat" was no ordinary porn movie. Among other things, it was made for $25,000 and grossed something like $600 million, which is not the sort of return you're going to get from your average mutual fund. It was the "Gone With the Wind" of porn, promoted heavily by a repressive federal government, which turned it into a bonanza -- the dumbest thing Richard Nixon ever did, with the possible exception of the secret bombing of Cambodia, and Watergate.
The documentary concentrates a good deal on the making of "Deep Throat" and how the Mafia eventually took over its distribution. It also briefly tells the sad tale of its female star, Linda Lovelace, who lived a miserable apres-movie life. Later, she claimed that she was bullied into doing the movie, physically threatened and brainwashed by her husband-manager, Chuck Traynor, and that every sex scene in the movie was essentially a rape. For a time, Lovelace was Exhibit A in the feminist anti-porn crusade. She died in 2002 of injuries sustained in a car accident.
Before her death, though, Lovelace returned to porn -- soft-core, it appears -- essentially repudiating her repudiation of "Deep Throat." But she was sick with cancer and flat broke and I bet that for some cash she would have eaten glass. Her recantation of her recantation means nothing. Lovelace was just like some broken-down club fighter, trying to get one more bout for milk money or rent or even a pint of vodka. It's always sad.
But Harry Reems would seem to defy the odds. His story does not end sadly but with a smile and the vivid Utah mountains in the background and the strong suggestion that the past has been buried. I wonder. After all, there he was, in the audience and at the party afterward, having been paid "handsomely," he said in an e-mail, to come to New York for the promotion of a film that once made him famous and, for a brief time, was doing so again. Maybe, he earlier told Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, he could act again.
What is repellent about pornography, we are always told, is that it depicts sex unconnected from love. And what is repellent about celebrity is that it often represents fame unconnected to achievement. People want to be famous. They do not necessarily have to be famous for something -- although that is always to be preferred -- but no matter what, they want to be famous. Fame provides meaning, supposedly, to meaningless lives. Fame is rocket fuel -- VROOM! and you're up and over the mundane -- and because this is America it will make you rich and therefore happy, or so it is almost universally believed.
I know "Deep Throat" was porn, and I know "Inside Deep Throat" is about the cultural importance of that film, but to me it's just another sad story about the lure of fame -- more boxers on the way to Palookaville, more basketball players used and discarded before they can make a buck, more actors ending their career by botching the beginning, thinking all fame is the same.
Lovelace thought she had struck it rich and so did Reems, who got $250 for the movie. They were incredibly famous, more famous maybe than the next "American Idol" or the worm-eater on some reality show or the cop who gets up at 2 in the morning in the West to briefly appear on the "Today" show in the East. Reems and Lovelace thought that Big Things would follow -- they say so in the film -- -- but what followed was ignominy and poverty, a celebrity so hollow it nearly consumed them both.
In the e-mail, Reems said his New York appearance was "probably the last time I will be in the public eye. I have no illusions of grandeur."
If so, I can applaud that.
cohenr@washpost.com
