I got this really nice letter from Eric Danville, author of "The Complete Linda Lovelace."

hi james,
it's eric danville; you (and luke, sorta, but mostly you) interviewed me on his internet show last year about the complete linda lovelace.

i just wanted to say that i read your post about linda and thought it was very cool. i particularly liked the last bit at the end about everyone in the bizness owing her at least a few minutes as she has given them a livelihood. i've always felt the same thing.



i love how people in the adult biz, especially those who didn't know her, chime in with all their (mostly misguided) opinions about why she left porn: it passed her by... yeah right. i always wonder why those people don't think that the reason she did no more porn after she did the ill-fated DT Part Two was because she didn't want to do it in the first place. and goldstein's such a class act, don'cha think? the only person in the world she hated more than chuck traynor--and that's a direct quote from her--who did more to destroy her life and flat out embarrass her than anyone else i can think of. well, i hope he likes
bending over for a year in rikers.

of course, avn still hasn't given me a call or anything about whatever they plan to do regarding linda's death (why would they call me? i mean, i only just wrote a book about her...).

as far as some of the things you wrote go:

"Linda and I never met. I'm sure she wouldn't have cared much for me anyway. I'm a pornographer. And in Linda's post-porno years, she had little use for pornographers."

not necessarily true, james. linda and i became good friends, and i'm a pornographer. she really liked dian hanson of leg show magazine too. and i had the pleasure of introducing her to candida royalle and vanessa del rio (this story's on my website if you've already read it there); she enjoyed speaking with them and they seemed to really like her as well (which wasn't hard, because she was a really, really nice gal, and a lot of fun). the occasion was a showing of a documentary about veronica vera's finishing school for a boy who want to be girls that was being held at a theater by my apartment. linda was very interested in seeing it (i think that she thought trannies are cute, like lots of gals do). before hand they showed a short docu about VV from a few years earlier with hard-core footage in it. when VV joked that the easily offended should leave, i told linda it would be okay. but she stayed and watched the whole thing, just looking away during the sex. i thought that was extremely cool; i doubt that someone in our business who found themselves trapped at a mackinnon speech would have acted nearly so civilly.

but linda was like that. we often talked pros and cons of porn. her stance had definitely softened over the years, but i think she had come to realize that women now enter the business freely thanks to the great incentive of money. and she thought that if they wanted that lifestyle, good luck to them. she was concerned about anyone being forced to do things against their will.

as far as the rest, yeah, you're absolutely right about linda being the best known--even more so than ron and jenna, and no, there won't be another as well known.

but rather than get long-winded, i'll finish by saying that I think linda would have appreciated what you said. she didn't mind meeting people in the adult biz, as long as they were nice people. that's what mattered most to her.

anyway, thanks for the nice thoughts about her, james. i hope you and i get to speak again some time, because i really enjoyed that interview.

cheers,
eric

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Available now: The Complete Linda Lovelace: A Deeper-Than-Deep Look at America's First Porn Queen! This insightful and irreverent book follows the star of Deep Throat from her rise to fame in the ’70s to her anti-porn crusades of the ’80s to her return to adult mags in 2001. Available exclusively on the Web through completelindalovelace.com

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