Smoke and Mirrors (20 page)

L OOKING FOR THE G IRL

I
was nineteen in 1965, in my drainpipe trousers with my hair quietly creeping down toward my collar. Every time you turned on the radio the Beatles were singing
Help!
and I wanted to be John Lennon with all the girls screaming after me, always ready with a cynical quip. That was the year I bought my first copy of
Penthouse
from a small tobacconist’s in the King’s Road. I paid my few furtive shillings and went home with it stuffed up my jumper, occasionally glancing down to see if it had burnt a hole in the fabric.

The copy has long since been thrown away, but I’ll always remember it: sedate letters about censorship; a short story by H. E. Bates and an interview with an American novelist I had never heard of; a fashion spread of mohair suits and paisley ties, all to be bought on Carnaby Street. And best of all, there were girls, of course; and best of all the girls, there was Charlotte.

Charlotte was nineteen, too.

All the girls in that long-gone magazine seemed identical with their perfect plastic flesh; not a hair out of place (you could almost smell the lacquer); smiling wholesomely at the camera while their eyes squinted at you through forest-thick eyelashes: white lipstick; white teeth, white breasts, bikini-bleached. I never gave a thought to the strange positions they had coyly arranged themselves into to avoid showing the slightest curl or shadow of pubic hair—I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at anyway. I had eyes only for their pale bottoms and breasts, their chaste but inviting come-on glances.

Then I turned the page, and I saw Charlotte. She was different from the others. Charlotte
was
sex; she wore sexuality like a translucent veil, like a heady perfume.

There were words beside the pictures, and I read them in a daze. “The entrancing Charlotte Reave is nineteen . . . a resurgent individualist and beat poet, contributor to
FAB
magazine . . .” Phrases stuck to my mind as I pored over the flat pictures: she posed and pouted in a Chelsea flat—the photographer’s, I guessed—and I knew that I needed her.

She was my age. It was fate.

Charlotte.

Charlotte was nineteen.

I bought
Penthouse
regularly after that, hoping she’d appear again. But she didn’t. Not then.

Six months later my mum found a shoebox under my bed and looked inside it. First she threw a scene, then she threw out all the magazines, finally she threw me out. The next day I got a job and a bedsit in Earl’s Court, without, all things considered, too much trouble.

My job, my first, was at an electrical shop off the Edgware Road. All I could do was change a plug, but in those days people could afford to get an electrician in to do just that. My boss told me I could learn on the job.

I lasted three weeks. My first job was a proper thrill—changing the plug on the bedside light of an English film star, who had achieved fame through his portrayal of laconic Cockney Casanovas. When I got there he was in bed with two honest-to-goodness dolly birds. I changed the plug and left—it was all very proper. I didn’t even catch a glimpse of nipple, let alone get invited to join them.

Three weeks later I got fired and lost my virginity on the same day. It was a posh place in Hampstead, empty apart from the maid, a little dark-haired woman a few years older than me. I got down on my knees to change the plug, and she climbed on a chair next to me to dust off the top of a door. I looked up: under her skirt she was wearing stockings, and suspenders, and, so help me, nothing else. I discovered what happened in the bits the pictures didn’t show you.

So I lost my cherry under a dining room table in Hampstead. You don’t see maidservants anymore. They have gone the way of the bubble car and the dinosaur.

It was afterward that I lost my job. Not even my boss, convinced as he was of my utter incompetence, believed I could have taken three hours to change a plug—and I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d spent two of the hours I’d been gone hiding underneath the dining room table when the master and mistress of the house came home unexpectedly, was I?

I got a succession of short-lived jobs after that: first as a printer, then as a typesetter, before I wound up in a little ad agency above a sandwich shop in Old Compton Street.

I carried on buying
Penthouse.
Everybody looked like an extra in “The Avengers,” but they looked like that in real life. Articles on Woody Allen and Sappho’s island, Batman and Vietnam, strippers in action wielding whips, fashion and fiction and sex.

The suits gained velvet collars, and the girls messed up their hair. Fetish was fashion. London was swinging, the magazine covers were psychedelic, and if there wasn’t acid in the drinking water, we acted as if there ought to have been.

I saw Charlotte again in 1969, long after I’d given up on her. I thought that I had forgotten what she looked like. Then one day the head of the agency dropped a
Penthouse
on my desk—there was a cigarette ad we’d placed in it that he was particularly pleased with. I was twenty-three, a rising star, running the art department as if I knew what I was doing, and sometimes I did.

I don’t remember much about the issue itself; all I remember is Charlotte. Hair wild and tawny, eyes provocative, smiling like she knew all the secrets of life, and she was keeping them close to her naked chest. Her name wasn’t Charlotte then, it was Melanie, or something like that. The text said that she was nineteen.

I was living with a dancer called Rachel at the time, in a flat in Camden Town. She was the best-looking, most delightful woman I’ve ever known, was Rachel. And I went home early with those pictures of Charlotte in my briefcase, and locked myself in the bathroom, and I wanked myself into a daze.

We broke up shortly after that, me and Rachel.

The ad agency boomed—everything in the sixties boomed—and in 1971 I was given the task of finding “The Face” for a clothing label. They wanted a girl who would epitomize everything sexual; who would wear their clothes as if she were about to reach up and rip them off—if some man didn’t get there first. And I knew the perfect girl: Charlotte.

I phoned
Penthouse,
who didn’t know what I was talking about, but, reluctantly, put me in touch with both of the photographers who had shot her in the past. The man at
Penthouse
didn’t seem convinced when I told them it was the same girl each time.

I got hold of the photographers, trying to find her agency.

They said she didn’t exist.

At least not in any way you could pin down, she didn’t. Sure, both of them knew the girl I meant. But as one of them told me, “Like,
weird,
” she’d come to them. They’d paid her a modeling fee and sold the pictures. No, they didn’t have any addresses for her.

I was twenty-six and a fool. I saw immediately what must be happening: I was being given the runaround. Some other ad agency had obviously signed her, was planning a big campaign around her, had paid the photographers to keep quiet. I cursed and I shouted at them over the phone. I made outrageous financial offers.

They told me to fuck off.

And the next month she was in
Penthouse.
No longer a psychedelic tease mag, it had become classier—the girls had grown pubic hair, had man-eating glints in their eyes. Men and women romped in soft focus through cornfields, pink against the gold.

Her name, said the text, was Belinda. She was an antique dealer. It was Charlotte, all right, although her hair was dark and piled in rich ringlets over her head. The text also gave her age: nineteen.

I phoned my contact at
Penthouse
and got the name of the photographer, John Felbridge. I rang him. Like the others, he claimed to know nothing about her, but by now I’d learned a lesson. Instead of shouting at him down the telephone line, I gave him a job, on a fairly sizable account, shooting a small boy eating ice cream. Felbridge was long-haired, in his late thirties, with a ratty fur coat and plimsolls that were flapping open, but a good photographer. After the shoot, I took him out for a drink, and we talked about the lousy weather, and photography, and decimal currency, and his previous work, and Charlotte.

“So you were saying you’d seen the pictures in
Penthouse?
” Felbridge said.

I nodded. We were both slightly drunk.

“I’ll tell you about that girl. You know something? She’s why I want to give up glamour work and go legit. Said her name was Belinda.”

“How did you meet her?”

“I’m getting to that, aren’t I? I thought she was from an agency, didn’t I? She knocks on the door, I think strewth! and invite her in. She said she wasn’t from an agency, she says she’s selling . . . ” He wrinkled his brow, confused. “Isn’t that odd? I’ve forgotten what she was selling. Maybe she wasn’t selling anything. I don’t know. I’ll forget me own name next.

“I knew she was something special. Asked her if she’d pose, told her it was kosher, I wasn’t just trying to get into her pants, and she agrees. Click, flash! Five rolls, just like that. As soon as we’re finished, she’s got her clothes back on, heads out the door pretty-as-you-please. ‘What about your money?’ I says to her. ‘Send it to me,’ she says, and she’s down the steps and onto the road.”

“So you
have
got her address?” I asked, trying to keep the interest out of my voice.

“No. Bugger all. I wound up setting her fee aside in case she comes back.”

I remember, in with the disappointment, wondering whether his Cockney accent was real or merely fashionable.

“But what I was leading up to is this. When the pictures came back, I knew I’d . . . well, as far as tits and fanny went, no—as far as the whole photographing women thing went—I’d done it all. She
was
women, see? I’d
done
it. No, no, let me get you one. My shout. Bloody Mary, wasn’t it? I gotter say, I’m looking forward to our future work together . . . ”

There wasn’t to be any future work.

The agency was taken over by an older, bigger firm, who wanted our accounts. They incorporated the initials of the firm into their own and kept on a few top copywriters, but they let the rest of us go.