Gives good headline
With the news that Lindsay Lohan is to play Linda Lovelace in a remake of Deep Throat I fondly recall my encounter with the original in London.
It was soon after the release of the notorious film that Linda turned up in London and I was asked by John Knight’s wife Gloria if I would be interested in doing photographs for a feature on Lovelace for the News of the World. The idea was to photograph Linda and then she was to go to Royal Ascot in men’s morning dress and top hat though with just a shirt front and cravat under the coat which would pop open to reveal her topless.
I was pleasantly surprised when I met her. She was tall, quiet, and not at all the raving sex maniac that many colleagues who heard about my assignment imagined. She had a great sense of humour and we got on very well.
I photographed her at her hotel (Dorchester, I believe; memories of hotel rooms fade quickly) in various glamour situations which, as I recall, were made difficult because of numerous scars from surgery on her torso. Then on Ladies Day at Royal Ascot her Rolls Royce, registration plate PEN 15 whisked her off to the races where we let the press corps masses take over the news publicity for the daily papers. She naturally got barred from the Royal Enclosure, which was what it was all about, of course, and the publicity machine got their coverage.
I met her afterward and she seemed quite unfazed by it all. Beneath all of the notoriety, there seemed to be a very nice lady who just wanted to settle down, which she eventually did in Montauk on Long Island, NY until her death.
She did, however, return to Ascot the next day – in a Bentley this time –the registration plate? 130 LOX [Bollocks] and that, I think, is what she thought of Royal Ascot and its archaic traditions.
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