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ICON

Edited by Amy Scholder

Published in 2014 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Introduction copyright © 2014 Amy Scholder

Selection and compilation copyright © 2014 Amy Scholder

Individual copyrights retained by contributors.

All rights reserved.

This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing October 2014

Cover design by Drew Stevens

Text design by Suki Boynton

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Icon / edited by Amy Scholder.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-55861-866-4 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-55861-867-1 (ebook)

1. Authors, American—Biography—History and criticism. 2. Women authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Women musicians—United States—Biography. 4. Biography as a literary form. I. Scholder, Amy, editor.

PS129.I36 2014

814’.608—dc23

2014027419

for evy scholder

in loving memory

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Introduction by Amy Scholder

Mary Gaitskill on Linda Lovelace

Johanna Fateman on Andrea Dworkin

Jill Nelson on Aretha Franklin

Rick Moody on Karen Dalton

Hanne Blank on M.F.K. Fisher

Danielle Henderson on bell hooks

Justin Vivian Bond on Karen Graham

Zoe Pilger on Mary Gaitskill

Kate Zambreno on Kathy Acker

About the Editor

Also Available from Feminist Press

About Feminist Press

Introduction by Amy Scholder

On a hot day in June of 1969, I was riding in the backseat of a brown Buick Riviera, going down Interstate 5, moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles with my family. I was six years old. It was the day after Judy Garland died. As the radio announcer reported the tragedy, my mother wept in the front seat, her sense of loss palpable though incomprehensible to my sister and me, who had yet to cathect onto celebrities as loved ones—another kind of family.

We settled into our Encino home, a quiet suburb located close to town—what Los Angelenos still call the vast sprawl. Dining at a chic bistro with the promise of star sightings became a family tradition. My parents were pleased with themselves that our standard of living had risen considerably with this move. My father was dedicated to working and making money; my mother became a full-time homemaker. Stacy, my older sister, threw herself into a competitive third-grader’s social world, while I stayed at home with my mom, shy and awkward around other kids. We sat by the pool every day that first summer. It was blisteringly hot and dry.

Then, on August 9, the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent in a Benedict Canyon mansion. The next night, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca were killed in their Los Feliz home. A media frenzy ensued. While early conspiracy theories blamed the violence on organized crime, then later on a drug ring, it became increasingly evident that these crimes were committed by a cult-like group led by a charismatic leader who looked and talked like a hippie.

What captured my attention was the fact that the murders had been committed primarily by women. Images of the Manson girls were plastered on every TV broadcast and newspaper front-page for months during the 1970 trial. All but one was sentenced to life in prison. Linda Kasabian, nine months pregnant at the time of the Sharon Tate murders, had traded family secrets for her freedom.

I remember being transfixed by the Manson girls—their dirty peasant dresses hanging off their wiry frames, the Xs carved into their foreheads, the vacant expressions of their mug shots, their disruptive presence during the trial. I knew I was supposed to find them repellent, but I secretly enjoyed imagining their lives—taking drugs and having sex on a ranch in the middle of the desert or at a celebrity home in Topanga Canyon, practically in my own backyard. I was especially fascinated by Linda Kasabian, the one who saved her own life.

The Manson girls were the first public figures to make an impression on me, to make me think about the world outside suburbia. They made me realize that girls could reject the values they were raised with, that some girls went over the edge of acceptable behavior. My attraction to them was confusing, a little embarrassing. I didn’t talk about it. It felt related in some way to the other secret I kept—the one about those queer feelings I had but didn’t know how to articulate, or with whom to identify.

As I got older, I started to read books about that era—Vincent Bugliosi’s paranoid Helter Skelter, Ed Sanders’ insider-y The Family, Joan Didion’s evocative The White Album. I would look for details about the girls or their lives, hoping to make sense of my fascination. But often, when I’d scratch the surface I’d only find more surface.

Public figures easily become symbols, ideas, icons. But the fascination doesn’t diminish. What I’ve come to realize is that in looking for them, I look for myself as well. As I deepen my knowledge of the women of that era, I deepen my understanding of this formative time in my life.

Suddenly no one in the suburbs felt safe anymore, especially in Los Angeles. My mother and I continued to sit by the pool every day, but her pleasure that summer was mitigated by fear. Perhaps she was uneasy, gripped with anxiety about the changes that were occurring in and around our lives. I absorbed the sense that nothing could protect us, but I was also drawn to the world that was dangerous and swirling out of control.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, wrote Joan Didion at the beginning of The White Album, in which, among many stories, Didion tells hers about getting to know Linda Kasabian. For Didion, the late 1960s was a time when the imposition of a narrative line that could once make sense of the world started to fall apart. All her expectations for order had imploded. It was a time when violence entered people’s lives in the form of the Manson murders, the Vietnam War, assassinations, and politically motivated bombings in major cities on a weekly basis. I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, Didion wrote.

Having grown up in the 1970s, I never expect things to line up in a narrative that makes sense of the world. Nonetheless I search for meaning, and often I construct that meaning through the stories of other people. I frame my own story by the icons who have pervaded my consciousness at crucial times in my life. There’s some affinity, challenge, desire that underlies my fascination. It’s not always clear to me why I’m drawn to particular public figures, but I’m learning to find pleasure in that uncertainty.

A few years ago I spent an evening with Elizabeth Wurtzel, who is perhaps best known for writing books and essays about herself. It was my first time meeting her, and I was hoping to talk about working together on something for the Feminist Press. I have not seen or spoken with her since, but a conversation we had that evening stayed with me. Elizabeth told me a story about a book she never wrote.

A corporate publisher was planning a series of short biographies by famous writers, and they asked her to propose a subject. She wanted to write about Amy Winehouse. Apparently the publisher was not interested. Elizabeth didn’t say exactly why they turned her down, but just that it wasn’t going to happen because Amy Winehouse was not the kind of subject they had in mind.

I was immediately drawn to this idea. Not only because I couldn’t stop thinking about Amy Winehouse, who had died just a short time before this meeting. But also because I sensed that Elizabeth would tell her own story in a different way by writing about Amy Winehouse, and I wanted to know Elizabeth better. I told her that I would love to publish such a work. She shrugged and changed the subject. A bit later, I circled back to the topic, and she agreed, it would have been a great project. She already had a title: You Know I’m No Good.

We had planned to meet at a restaurant but instead had met at a Mercer Street loft she was renting. We drank wine as we talked and listened to records. After awhile, she seemed more interested in the music than the conversation, so I suggested we listen to Winehouse’s Back to Black.

I don’t have it, she said.

She only had the one song, You Know I’m No Good. That’s the only music by Amy Winehouse she was listening to. That’s apparently all she needed to know.

I began to imagine how other writers might respond, given the chance to write about their icons, and asked some of my favorites to contribute to this book. The answers were totally unpredictable. I am stunned by the emotional intensity they have each brought to this project. I’ve always thought that the weirdest thing about celebrity culture is the level of intimacy we feel with people we don’t know. These contributors explore the depths of such haunted relationships with disarming grace, and in the process, reveal themselves.

Mary Gaitskill

on

Linda Lovelace

Icon of freedom, innocent carnality; icon of brokenness, and confusion; icon of a wound turned into or disguised as pleasure-source; icon of sexual victimization, sexual power, irreconcilable oppositions; icon of 1970s America; icon of Everywoman. And just another skinny white girl with average looks and a little flat voice, a type you barely notice even if some version of her is everywhere.

I saw Linda Lovelace¹ in Deep Throat because my boyfriend was the projectionist at a hippie film co-op. It was 1972 and I was seventeen. My boyfriend was twenty-five and neither of us was interested in porn which we thought of as a corny old-person thing. But Deep Throat, an X-rated comedy about a woman whose clitoris is in her throat, was supposed to be something different, and we were curious, then won over by the film’s dirty goofballery. She just seemed to like it so much, said my boyfriend, and his voice was not salacious as much as tickled. I liked it too, it was funny—but liking and arousal are very different. I wasn’t excited by Deep Throat, and the only thing I could really remember about it afterward was Lovelace’s sweet smile and the strange expression in her eyes, a look that I could not define and still can’t, a look that was not happy yet that seemed to go with her smile.

I was however wildly excited by the next movie I saw at the co-op, a film that on the face of it has nothing in common with Deep Throat, but which remains, in my imagination, weirdly linked with the porn comedy; it was Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, an emotionally stunning silent film made in 1928 about the persecution, psychological torture, and death of an inexplicably, helplessly powerful nineteen-year-old girl. I’m sure it sounds ridiculously arty, but trust me, my reaction was not artistic. I was horrified by this film, but also moved and so aroused that I was embarrassed to be in public, even in the dark. I don’t like images of persecution or death or torture, but liking was irrelevant; Passion demanded a powerful response and my body gave it.

Anyway, in 1980, when Linda Lovelace wrote a book (with journalist Mike McGrady) about her experience called Ordeal, then joined Catharine MacKinnon’s antiporn movement, I fleetingly remembered her sweet, strange-eyed smile, and how different it seemed from the woman claiming that anyone who watched Deep Throat was watching her being raped. I was vaguely sad but not that surprised; it seemed just one more piece of senseless effluvia flying past.

Fast-forward to 2012, when not one but two mainstream biopics about Linda Lovelace were being made at the same time, I learned of these films because of a brief involvement with a guy who had some vague connection with one of the films as well as very strong opinions on its subject. He felt nothing but contempt for Lovelace, whom he described as a deeply stupid liar who refused to take responsibility for any of her actions, including her participation in pre-Throat porn loops, particularly one in which she enthusiastically received a dog. He told me that in Ordeal she claimed, among other things, that she was forced by her husband/pimp, Chuck Traynor, to do the dog, but that everyone knew it was a lie, that she was into it, that is, she liked it.

This was all news to me, but I shrugged and said, I don’t blame her. We’ve all done things that, while not embarrassing in our own private self-scape, would be embarrassing if projected on a public movie screen. Besides she had kids. If you had kids, would you want to talk about dog-fucking with them? My friend said she turned on Women Against Pornography and said they used her too. I said, they probably did; those women are bonkers. He came back, but then she posed for a magazine called Leg Show, to which I said, so what, that’s not really porn and she probably needed the money. We changed the subject and broke up later that night.

But the conversation made me care about Linda Lovelace in a way I previously had not, and made me want to defend her. It also made me curious. Lovelace and her husband/pimp Chuck Traynor are dead (both in 2002), as is Deep Throat director Gerry Damiano and Lovelace’s costar Harry Reems, so why was a grown man talking like a school-yard bully about her ten years later? Why was her story suddenly of such pop-cultural interest that forty-plus years after Deep Throat, two mainstream film companies wanted to tell it?

When the biopic titled Lovelace came out the following year (the other, Inferno, floundered and was killed), I saw it and became something more than curious. Lovelace is a candy-colored, feel-good story of a nice girl forced into porn by an abusive husband, who nonetheless blooms with the attention of celebrities like Hugh Hefner, is redeemed by feminism, is accepted by her family, gets married, and starts a family of her own. Critics and viewers responded tepidly, but to me the bowdlerization was even more obnoxious than my former friend’s contempt. Why, after more than forty years, were people so insistently sanitizing and simplifying this story?

I suppose I shouldn’t have wondered. Deep Throat was an extreme phenomenon that, whimsically and unselfconsciously, confirmed and challenged the status quo of masculine privilege by creating a fantasy world of blowjobs that gave pride of place to female orgasm. This preposterous polarity was heightened by the film’s combination of high and low (in terms of register or pitch), the way it put together silliness and lightness of spirit with the florid id-imagery of porn, especially the image of its star, an appealing girl happily splitting her pretty face to get hairy dick impossibly far down her throat. Made in six days for $45,500, with sitcom dialogue and a kooky soundtrack, the film grossed $50 million: Screw’s Al Goldstein fell in love, the mafia made a killing (literally), President Nixon condemned it, New York Mayor Lindsay banned it, and the glitterati lined up to see it, including Jack Nicholson, Truman Capote, Liz Taylor, and Jackie O. Harry Reems was arrested and eventually did time for obscenity; Linda Lovelace became an international celebrity.

She may’ve been average-looking, but (in addition to her famous erotic trick and her ardent way with it) Lovelace projected the perverse charm of innocence soiled but blithely so, a fragile, playful persona that was uniquely, darkly radiant, dirty and ethereal both. She appeared at a time that is hard to imagine now, when porn has become normalized and commodified to the point that middle-class teenagers might sport license plates that read

PORN STAR

and actual porn stars are featured in mainstream news websites. Nineteen seventy-two was a transitional time, both libertine and innocent in every direction, with traditional values asserted as aggressively as they were rebelled against. It was a time when many people must’ve found it wonderful to see a sweet-faced young woman with a touchingly delicate figure and a girly voice swallowing throbbin’ gristle till her nose ran, yet whom you could watch without feeling nasty because she liked it so much. The 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat includes footage of a press conference at which Lovelace appears in a long, pale gown with a rose in her teeth; she looks anything but average. She is beautiful, puckishly so, and surrounded by absolutely gaga men who look as if they are witnessing the arrival of a woman riding in