The complicated story of Linda Lovelace — soon to be 2 motion pictures.

The star of "Deep Throat" — which is the most profitable movie ever made – led a fascinating life that tracked so many of the cultural trends we lived through. Of course, she got none of the $600 million the $30,000, hour-long movie made. That had to be annoying. But she was the face (and neck) of the porn that suddenly everyone felt they could actually go see. The Nixon administration prosecuted the filmmakers for obscenity. You've got bad old Nixon coming after you. What a strange combination of glamor and squalor!

Her follow-up films flopped, and she became a heavy cocaine user in the mid-1970s, then she made the God move: "God had changed her life." When the 80s came around, she threw in her lot with the feminists:

In 1980, with feminists increasingly attacking pornography as demeaning to women, Lovelace found a new opportunity to grab the limelight.

In an autobiography entitled Ordeal, she claimed that [Chuck] Traynor had physically and mentally abused her throughout their marriage, forcing her into pornography literally at gunpoint.

Her husband had had her gang-raped by five men, she said, and kept her a prisoner ‘just as much as if I was in Alcatraz’. He would never let her out of his sight, spying through the keyhole when she was in the bathroom and listening to her telephone calls with a .45 automatic pistol pointed at her.

Traynor would use his gun again when she was filming porn scenes, she added. ‘Chuck kept a gun in his pocket and would click the trigger, letting me know what would happen if I did not look convincing,’ she said.

Pushed onward by Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, who, at the time, had the agenda of merging pornography and rape, Lovelace spoke on college campuses and at government hearings, saying things like: "When you see the movie Deep Throat, you are watching me being raped... It is a crime that movie is still showing. There was a gun to my head the entire time."

Still later, she claimed the feminists had exploited her. (Was she not the victim of the century?) She was especially outraged that she didn't get an invitation to Gloria Steinem's wedding. Then her breasts turned on her:

During a double mastectomy brought on by botched silicone injections years earlier, doctors discovered her liver was collapsing from hepatitis, which she had in turn contracted from a blood transfusion after a 1970 car crash.

A victim of medical treatments then too. She got in another car crash on the way to kidney dialysis in 2002 and died 2 weeks later.

What an awful story. Clearly, there are at least 2 ways to tell this tale. In one of the movies, Sarah Jessica Parker plays the role of Gloria Steinem. This film "has the backing of Lovelace’s grown-up children, Dominic and Lindsay — and of Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist lawyer who campaigned with Lovelace to ban porn films. Prof MacKinnon describes her old comrade as 'sweet, strong, smart and real.'" The other film is supposedly "darker," and it has Matt Dillon as Chuck Traynor.

We'll see what comes of all this. Meanwhile, click through to the article, which has some photos of Linda Lovelace through the years. Lovelace had a sad life, so maybe it's wrong to laugh, but you might have to laugh at the feminist makeover they did on her for her "Ordeal" book tour. Not that there's anything wrong with looking like that, but it's just so impossible that she came to that look on her own. So stereotypical! Quick! Deploy the aviator spectacles!