Smoke and Mirrors

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.

I went back to my flat and waited for the offers of work to pour in, which they didn’t, but a friend of a girlfriend of a friend starting chatting to me late one night in a club (music by a guy I’d never heard of, name of David Bowie. He was dressed as a spaceman, the rest of his band were in silver cowboy outfits. I didn’t even listen to the songs), and the next thing you know I was managing a rock band of my own, the Diamonds of Flame. Unless you were hanging around the London club scene in the early seventies you’ll never have heard of them, although they were a very good band. Tight, lyrical. Five guys. Two of them are currently in world-league supergroups. One of them’s a plumber in Walsall; he still sends me Christmas cards. The other two have been dead for fifteen years: anonymous ODs. They went within a week of each other, and it broke up the band.

It broke me up, too. I dropped out after that—I wanted to get as far away from the city and that lifestyle as I could. I bought a small farm in Wales. I was happy there, too, with the sheep and the goats and the cabbages. I’d probably be there today if it hadn’t been for her and Penthouse.