Linda Blair’s Dark Journey

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Throughout the shooting of The Exorcist and into postproduction and publicity, a half-dozen crew members would insist that Linda Blair had emerged from the experience unscathed, but barely a year after the film wrapped, she was burning rubber in the Hollywood fast lane and, before the end of the decade, she would become a teenage alcoholic, bizarrely mirroring one of the dismal TV movies she starred in after establishing Regan MacNeil as an offbeat cultural touchstone. Her brief but lurid interval in the spotlight culminated with a notorious drug bust in 1977.

“The Exorcist, for me, lasted a lifetime,” Blair told A&E.

Like Jason Miller, accosted in the streets by disturbed strangers looking for salvation, Blair suffered from her newfound fame. Wherever she went for a few years post-Exorcist, she drew attention for more than her celebrity status. “I scared thousands of people,” she told Fangoria, “and they would look at me—they would see me in a supermarket, in a clothing store—and their reaction was unbelievable. I freaked people out.”

While Blair may have inadvertently terrorized gullible shoppers, what she suffered far exceeded the average jump scare. Just as America produced thousands of lost souls convinced that they were in the grip of Satan after viewing The Exorcist, so, too, did it mass-produce ticket buyers delusional enough to believe that Linda Blair was truly some sort of diabolical entity.

“The whole devil thing never hit me,” she told Fangoria. “But because it was about the supernatural, demonology, et cetera, the types of people that were attracted to the film were pretty intense people. And I attracted a lot of weird people around me.”

Unable to differentiate between fact and fiction, those weird people not only flinched when they saw Blair in person, but some of them also sent death threats to her. When she was only fifteen, Blair had a security detail shadowing her. Then, a few years after the height of Exorcist-mania, stalkers began harassing her. “When I was eighteen, it kind of happened again and the FBI was in on it, because the man called the police and said he was going to kill me. So I lived in a hideout from that and then the drug bust came on top of it, for something I really did not do. Because of that, the paper nicely enough published my address, so the guy had my address. I’d come home at night and be so horrified. It’s just so unbelievable.”

In 1974, the gossip pages also reported that Blair was dating twenty-five-year-old Australian rock singer Rick Springfield. A few months after they were first spotted as an item, Blair and Springfield began living together in Los Angeles. At the time, Blair was fifteen, not yet old enough to meet the minimum for the age of consent, but her mother had returned to Connecticut in 1974, leaving Blair under the watch of her older sister, Deborah. “When I lived with my friend in Hollywood, mother was a little upset at first because I was only fifteen,” Blair told the New York Daily News. “But then she said there was no use trying to stand in the way of love.  I didn’t feel precocious about living with a man at that age. It was great. I never dated much in school. You know, I didn’t have boyfriends in the traditional sense. When I did date, it was in groups. So when I came to California, I went straight from living at home to living with a man.”

In an episode of Intimate Portrait on the Lifetime network, the narrative voice-over bizarrely refers to the Springfield-Blair pairing as a May-December romance when it was clearly something else. In fact, it was illegal. Springfield put his own time-capsule spin on it for an episode of Biography on A&E. “Now, probably I would have been burned at the stake, you know. But back then, it was just, ‘Oooh, that’s kind of weird,’ you know. But to us, it was very, very natural.”

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If her role as a demon-possessed child was not enough to distinguish Blair from the run-of-the-mill teen, her subsequent appearances gave her an even darker allure. The mid-1970s saw Blair develop enough negative connotations to make her a strange symbol of the prurient American id, and she achieved this unique distinction mostly in middle-class living rooms across the country.

The made-for-television movie had become a family tradition since See How They Run premiered in 1964, often bringing hot-button sociological issues to the masses, with a campy, moralistic, slapdash quality that would differentiate it, negatively, of course, from Hollywood releases. Early on, however, made-for-television productions had higher ambitions. The first film shot specifically for television had been The Killers, directed by action auteur Don Siegel and starring Lee Marvin, Ronald Reagan, Angie Dickinson, and John Cassavetes, but its high-octane violence sent executives scurrying despite the all-star cast and crew. Instead of airing on NBC as scheduled, The Killers received an unexpected theatrical run.

A decade later, Linda Blair starred in Born Innocent, a teen delinquency melodrama so coarse it lit up switchboards at NBC and launched sensitive newspaper columnists into overdrive. In her first screen appearance since The Exorcist (other than a guest spot on a game show), Blair plays Christine Parker, a serial runaway who winds up, at fourteen, sentenced to a juvenile detention center after her dysfunctional parents sign her over to the state. In the notorious centerpiece of the film, made doubly uncomfortable because of its duration, Christine is held down by her cellmates and raped with a plunger handle. Subsequent outrage from viewers forced NBC to issue defensive statements as to the sociological value of the film; even so, it excised the scene completely for future airings.

Although Blair is sexualized throughout, with a pair of strip searches, two shower scenes, and the gruesome rape, Born Innocent, despite its undeniable salaciousness and a certain amount of implausibility, is remarkably effective. As the rare prime-time downer, Born Innocent also stood out from The Wonderful World of Disney, Happy Days, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times, and The Waltons the same way Charles Manson might have stood out at a debutante ball. The documentary look solidifies the nightmare quality of Born Innocent, and the climax, which includes a scorched-earth riot and a closing scene of the now-hardened Blair joining her rapists and walking off into the distance just before the credits roll, feels almost revolutionary. No happy ending? No redemption? No mawkish speeches of the kind William Peter Blatty cherished? Nearly fifty years later, Born Innocent looks like some sort of terrible accident, one that completely blindsided a country watching the first season of Little House on the Prairie by the millions. Born Innocent seemed to say, to hell with the so-called “Family Hour.”

A ratings bonanza for NBC, Born Innocent set the template for Blair as a teen martyr to whom not just bad things happen—but very, very bad things. After a small role in the disaster spectacular Airport 1975, Blair returned to the airwaves with Sarah T.—Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (directed by Richard Donner just before his breakthrough with The Omen), another grim problem film with a title that effectively functions as a spoiler. Unlike Born Innocent, Sarah T. is less objective and far more preachy; nonetheless, Blair spends a significant amount of on-screen time suffering, and, in keeping with her sexualization, at one point, her character offers to trade her body for a bottle of liquor.

When Blair headlined another made-for-television extravaganza a year later (this time for ABC), she became a national concern. As an illiterate farm girl kidnapped by an escaped mental patient (played by Martin Sheen) in Sweet Hostage, Blair, now sixteen, seemed less typecast than the subject of some sort of cultural experiment. At the Buffalo News, Jeff Simon seemed genuinely disturbed by the Linda Blair phenomenon. “How is it possible that a teenage actress can be making a busy career out of being violated, abused, and victimized, most often in kinky circumstances?” he asked.

Other media observers and critics also began hand-wringing. “Linda Blair has become a professional victim,” wrote Bill Carter of the Baltimore Sun. The Philadelphia Inquirer referred to her as an “exhibitionist,” and the Los Angeles Times imagined that Blair was probably asking herself, “Who do you have to know to get OUT of this business?”

In 1977, when shooting began for what became known as Exorcist II: The Heretic, however, Blair had serious life-imitating-art problems to confront. By then, her eyebrow-raising relationship with Rick Springfield was over, but Blair had adopted certain hedonistic aspects of the rock ’n’ roll outlook. This included, among other indulgences, liquor. In no time, Blair became a real-life Sarah T., struggling with alcoholism and depression. She explained the extent of her dependency to Lifetime: “For me to drink whatever I could find—vodka, a quart or a bottle, whatever, I don’t know, I can’t remember—but it was enough for me to know that I could get to bed and that I would pass out.”

Although Blair would deny it, to the extent of making statements that suggested reaction formation, drugs were also a problem. In fact, her insatiable appetite for drugs scared off her latest boyfriend, Glenn Hughes, ex-bass player for English proto-metal band Deep Purple and singer/multi-instrumentalist for hard-rock road warriors Trapeze, back in America for a reunion tour. Despite having lived out the excesses of the rock era in the early 1970s and having once told NME, “I spent a million dollars on cocaine,” Hughes could not keep pace with Blair. “Like me, Linda was very addicted to cocaine,” he told Classic Rock magazine in 2011. “I was going completely off the rails, and I’d found the perfect mate to stumble along with. We shacked up in LA together. It’s incredible to tell you this, but I broke up with her because she was doing so much blow, it was getting too intense for me to be around. We’d be driving down Sunset Boulevard, she’d have an ounce of cocaine in a bag on her lap, and she’d be doing bumps through a straw. I’m thinking: ‘Any minute now they’re going to catch us; whoever they are.’ I couldn’t deal with it. A few weeks after we broke up she got busted.”

On December 20, 1977, Linda Blair made global headlines when she was arrested on drug charges and linked to a nationwide cocaine ring. An army of DEA agents and local law enforcement descended on her small Cape Cod house in Wilton, Connecticut, to serve a fugitive warrant from Jacksonville, Florida. While there, officers discovered amphetamine (aka speed) on the premises, another setback for Blair, who now had a possession charge tacked onto a rap sheet that would soon include conspiracy to buy or sell cocaine.

Blair was whisked to the Court of Common Pleas in Stamford for arraignment, where she posted bail of $2,500, with a continuance date scheduled for January 18. In the meantime, Duval County (Florida) requested her extradition to Jacksonville, where the fugitive warrant had originated. In October 1977, Blair had traveled to Florida to attend the funeral of Ronnie Van Zant, lead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd, who had died in an airplane crash. As part of the rock circuit (she had dated, among other musicians, Tommy Bolin of Deep Purple, Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas, and Glenn Hughes of Trapeze and had even graced the cover of a recent issue of Circus magazine devoted to “Women in Rock”), Blair roamed through a netherworld of barbiturates, crank, coke, morphine, and quaaludes, with heroin still an occasional risk (Tim Buckley had overdosed in 1975 and Bolin in 1976, and the loss of Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison was still fresh). “At the funeral, someone suggested we do some cocaine,” Blair told the San Francisco Examiner. “I felt horrible, and dope was not on my mind. But a senator’s daughter convinced me, and we bought some coke from a couple who were also breeding basenji dogs.”

Unfortunately for Blair, it turned out the dog breeders were also part of a sprawling drug ring. “All I wanted to do was buy a dog,” she would later claim. Instead, Blair purchased cocaine at least twice from George Edward Mangum, described by the press as a cocaine wholesaler from Jacksonville, Florida.

While Blair fought extradition to Florida, her case in Connecticut proceeded. On April 17, 1978, the state dropped charges when Blair agreed to enroll in a rehab program. She exited court laughing that day, but four months later she was busted again, this time carrying two joints in her purse at Calgary International Airport.

To save her already precarious career, Blair made public statements about drug use that were, on the surface, nothing short of preposterous. “Some people may not understand, but I really don’t like them,” she wrote in the Bridgeport Telegram. “When any of my friends get involved with drugs I get upset.” If so, then her rock roll lifestyle, where nearly everyone she knew snorted, swallowed, or shot up, must have left her perpetually distressed. And the Jacksonville bust was no exception: while Blair would continue to maintain her innocence about drug use in general, her recent ex-boyfriend Teddy Hartlett and her bodyguard Steve Schiano were also part of the dragnet, charged with conspiracy to buy or sell cocaine. (Both would eventually plead guilty to lesser charges.)

After Connecticut and Florida both dropped state charges against Blair, a federal grand jury returned a sealed indictment in Jacksonville in March 1979. When testimony revealed that Blair had twice purchased cocaine in small amounts (each time one-quarter of an ounce), it was clear that what she was interested in was personal use.

Because Blair was already implicated, prosecutors might have viewed her as someone who could shine a spotlight on the drug scourge, which would only get exponentially worse in the 1980s and 1990s. Most likely, the charges against Blair were trumped-up: although it was established that she used drugs and had purchased cocaine from Mangum, the conspiracy angle suggested prosecutorial overreach. In the late 1970s, half the entertainment industry in America snorted cocaine. It was one of several adult fads produced by the “Me Decade,” along with porno chic films, wife swapping, and primal scream therapy. “The whole town of Hollywood is coked out of its head,” Robert Blake once said.

Eventually, after numerous court appearances, Blair would plead guilty to conspiracy to possess cocaine, a federal misdemeanor, and a significant downgrade from the original charge of intent to distribute. In June 1979, U.S. District Judge Howell W. Melton sentenced her to three years of probation and ordered her to perform community outreach. Blair was also fined $5,000.

At around the same time as her legal ordeal began, Blair saw Exorcist II: The Heretic bomb in theaters, damaging her hopes of a future beyond sensationalized TV appearances. Directed by John Boorman, who had distinguished himself with the modernist noir Point Blank and the harrowing blockbuster Deliverance, Exorcist II was one of the great follies in Hollywood. Its initial reception from opening weekend viewers (which included uproarious laughter and debris hurled at the screen) so disturbed Warner Bros. that Boorman raced back to Hollywood to reedit the film and shoot new scenes in hopes of salvaging the international box office. Nothing, however, could be done to improve such absurdity.

After her plea deal, Blair returned to the screen in Roller Boogie, produced by Brooklyn huckster Irwin Yablans to exploit the twin fads of disco and roller skating. A minor hit, Roller Boogie was the last time Blair would star in anything even remotely resembling a mainstream release until 1990 when she spoofed her role as Regan MacNeil for the Carolco film Repossessed.

Her projects were notable for alternating between pure exploitation and sheer ineptitude, with a few films shelved before achieving delayed release and others so fringe that they were ignored when they opened. Savage Island, for example, was a grind-house cheapie that almost defies description: It is three different films cobbled together to produce one seventy-nine-minute adventure in sleazoid trash. After cutting and pasting parts of two existing Italian torture fests (Escape from Hell and Orinoco: Prison of Sex, both from 1980), the producers asked Blair to appear, with a machine gun, for a prologue and a bloody ending that totaled one reel of screen time. “A job is a job,” Blair told the Los Angeles Times, reflecting a pragmatic worldview that jibed with her general indifference toward acting.

By the mid-1980s, the arrival of VHS created the direct-to-video market, which fed the insatiable hunger for fringe trash. And Linda Blair would eventually star in several B vehicles throughout the decade. Often, she would appear nude in them, producers exploiting the on-screen notoriety she had developed as a teen in the 1970s. Blair was naked in fairly graphic scenes in Chained Heat, Red Heat, and Savage Streets, while partial nudity figures in both Night Patrol and Bedroom Eyes II.

In a 1987 interview with Fangoria, Blair, still only twenty-eight, looked back with acrimony—not professional detachment—over some of her roles. “I personally hate Chained Heat,” she said, about the outré women-in-prison quickie co-starring Sybil Danning. “I’ve never even watched the whole thing. It made good money, but it was a piece of trash. To this day the problem with my career is that this film keeps playing and producers don’t want to hire me because of it. Chained Heat has actually ruined my career. Plus, it was not the movie I signed to do. I signed to do a totally different movie that was made and it’s a really big problem in my life. Wow, was I unprotected.”

In an interview with Deep Red magazine, Blair expanded on her charges of exploitation. “The script they gave me for Chained Heat was nothing like the script that we ended shooting. The movie became a T&A film. I cried more than you’ll ever know, but there was nothing I could do. I had already been paid. managers weren’t there to support me. It was awful; it was a case of either take my top off in the shower or get sued. I can’t tell you that this is a great business. People can be really mean.”

Still, Blair was a survivor. She spent the next two decades or so as what might be uncharitably called a D-list celebrity, starring in direct-to-video foolishness, making guest appearances on countless television shows, popping up, somehow, in a pair of Australian cheapies, becoming a regular on the Hollywood Squares, and then, finally, enjoying a steady gig as the host of Scariest Places on Earth, a ghost-hunting show that aired on cable for several years. But there has never been anything uncharitable about Blair, whose philanthropic pursuits (ranging from environmental causes to rescuing dogs) are a far cry from her early post-Exorcist life when she faced the strange results of a strange celebrity profile: “How would you like it,” she once asked, “if every day, everywhere you go, someone would ask: Spin your head or throw up?”

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From THE DEVIL INSIDE: THE DARK LEGACY OF THE EXORCIST by Carlos Acevedo. Copyright ©2023 by Carlos Acevedo. Reprinted by permission of the Hamilcar Publications. 

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