Even since I was a teenage boy, and amassed a huge collection of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, with Milton Greene’s various coffee table books featured as a crucial treasure, I have been a fan of the legendary photographer’s work that spanned throughout the 1950s and 60s. Yet, I did not know that he once took pictures of would-be movie queen and porn star Linda Lovelace. The never-seen-before color photographs of Linda at the age of 24 will go on show at the Museum of Sex in New York. Taken in 1973, and despite the subject, and explicitness, the photos are curiously devoid of eroticism. I can not help but to compare them with the ones taken by Greene, during his intense friendship with Marilyn, from about 1953 to 1956. By contrast, those images are still alive with a fresh exuberance of an untainted beauty that is most obviously lacking in the tired and desperate energy which surrounds those Greene did with Linda. And, although Marilyn had already seen her fair share of greed and sexual exploitation, almost 30 years still stood between those portraits and the ones of the “Deep-Throat” star. Most specifically, the advent of porn was the single item that bridged the two women. And, the ravages of hard-core, the sexual revolution, and the introduction of care-free sex is all over Linda‘s face. It’s eerily similar to the sad and hopeless photo session of Lindsay Lohan, published in “Playboy,” that shot for shot tried to recreate Marilyn’s famous red velvet nude calendar, some of the Greene photos, and others that were done by fellow photographer Bert Stern just before Marilyn’s death in 1962. At 25, she looked older than Marilyn did at 36. Lindsay is hard and unpleasant; a bad caricature of washed-up actress Alexandra Del Lago from “Sweet Bird of Youth.” She seems to have graduated from ingénue to middle-aged character actress, without ever becoming a leading lady, about 20 years too soon. Unlike Marilyn’s life, that had its mix of dizzying highs and dramatic lows, its all just down-beat, depressing, and squalid. For, we now live in a hyper-fast reality where starlets appear burned-out at 18, top celebrities routinely, and strategically, go naked, and porn determines desire. The mystery is gone. Innocence has become a thing of the past.