Smoke and Mirrors

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.