Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to please my parents. Why would I want to please my parents?’

  ‘It’s possibly a natural response,’ Lola said. She didn’t know why she was so concerned about what his parents thought.

  Mick Jagger laughed. ‘I don’t want to please them,’ he said. ‘I also don’t want to displease them. Do you want to please your parents?’ he asked her.

  ‘I think I do,’ she said. ‘Although, maybe I don’t. If I really wanted to please my mother, I’d lose weight. I do plan new diets all the time.’

  ‘Your mother gets strung-out by your being heavy, does she?’ Mick Jagger said.

  ‘Strung-out would be a good way to describe how she feels about it,’ Lola said. ‘If you had any fat on you at all, in the ghetto or in the death camp, it meant you were doing something untoward to get food. The kapos and the Jewish police were always well fed, as were the Sonderkommando who pulled the bodies out of the gas chamber and loaded them onto the trolleys that went into the ovens.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Mick Jagger. ‘Untoward might not be exactly the right word.’

  Lola switched off the tape recorder. She thought she’d asked Mick Jagger everything she wanted to ask. ‘Thank you very much for the interview,’ she said. Mick Jagger walked her through the wood-panelled hallway to the front door. He opened the door and looked at Lola. ‘Would you like to meet Paul McCartney?’ he said. ‘He’ll be here at four o’ clock.’

  Lola was surprised. She hesitated. She was torn. She would really like to meet Paul McCartney. She hadn’t managed to get an interview with any of The Beatles, not that meeting Paul McCartney would mean that she would be able to arrange an interview with him. But she had an interview with Manfred Mann at four o’clock. It had taken her about twenty phone calls to arrange the interview. Manfred Mann’s ‘Semi-Detached, Suburban Mr James’ was still selling well, and ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’ was already at number four.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Lola. I’ve got an interview with Manfred Mann at four o’ clock.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Mick Jagger said.

  She knew he was referring to the fact that she could not meet Paul McCartney and not the fact that she had to interview Manfred Mann.

  ‘Thank you, again,’ she said.

  Lola’s tape recorder jammed three-quarters of the way through her interview with Manfred Mann. One of the band’s road managers was trying to fix it. Lola wasn’t too bothered. She’d got most of what she wanted from the group. She wasn’t too worried about the tape recorder, either. She had a spare one in the apartment she was sharing with an Australian rock group, The Browns. Lola didn’t know why they were called The Browns. Not one of the six Browns was named Brown, or even had brown hair, which was, statistically, against the odds.

  She had a headache. The room she and Manfred Mann were in was small and felt a bit airless. There was too much cigarette smoke and too many men in too small a space, Lola thought.

  She seemed to have been surrounded by males ever since she’d arrived in London. For a start, she was sharing an apartment with six of them. And then there were the groups she was interviewing. They were all men. In the last three weeks, she had interviewed The Kinks, The Hollies, The Small Faces and The Spencer Davis Group. There was not a female member among the lot.

  It had been a relief for Lola to see Cher. She had interviewed Cher again, briefly, at her hotel. It was for a silly new column she had to write called ‘Say Your Piece’. Pop stars made two- or three-sentence statements on half-a-dozen subjects that needed novella-length answers. Subjects like love and happiness.

  She hadn’t asked Cher about her eyelashes. And Cher hadn’t brought them up. She had complimented Lola on the green false eyelashes Lola was wearing, but didn’t ask to borrow them. Lola thought it was probably hard to ask anyone to return false eyelashes they had borrowed. But it seemed even harder to ask someone who had a wardrobe of clothes that filled an entire hotel room.

  Lola noticed that Sonny hovered around Cher as though he were her father. And Cher seemed to check with him before she answered questions. Sonny and Cher were leaving London soon. They had been on the road for a while. ‘When you finally settle down, what part of the world do you think you will live in?’ Lola had asked Cher.

  ‘We’re already settled to a degree,’ Sonny said. ‘We have our own home in California. We don’t have a family yet, but when we’ve got through some of the work that is waiting for us, we’ll have a family.’ Lola felt a bit stupid. Of course they were already settled. They weren’t sharing an apartment with six members of The Browns. Lola hoped that maybe she would be able to pluck up the courage to ask Cher to return her false eyelashes when she saw her in Los Angeles.

  The rest of Manfred Mann had packed up and left Mike d’Abo, the relatively new lead singer, to comment on some Australian records Lola had brought with her. Mike d’Abo seemed nice enough. Lola had already interviewed Paul Jones, the lead singer Mike d’Abo had replaced.

  Paul Jones was considered a bad boy. Lola couldn’t see what was so bad about him. Maybe leaving Manfred Mann to go solo was considered bad, or the fact that he was very direct. He didn’t seem to modify his thoughts to make them more palatable for public consumption. And he had plenty of thoughts.

  They had touched on the subject of education. ‘When people talk about children, they start with premises like the super-imposition of discipline from outside is necessary and good,’ Paul Jones had said. ‘And they say things like discipline has been going on for thousands of years.’ Ten minutes later he sighed and said, ‘If you want to say something, you need a whole day for a subject like education or else you end up talking in slogans.’

  Lola had said that she didn’t think Rock-Out was looking for discussions that took a whole day, although she hoped they were looking for more than slogans. She’d asked Paul Jones if when in 1962 Brian Jones had asked him to join a band that he was forming, he’d said no because he wanted to complete his Oxford degree.

  ‘No,’ he’d said. ‘I’d just auditioned to be a singer in a dance band in Slough.’ That had been the question that had led to the education discussion. It should have led to the matter of whether he regretted the decision to not join Brian Jones, as that group had gone on to become The Rolling Stones.

  ‘People say I’m conceited, and maybe I am,’ Paul Jones had volunteered. ‘I’m confident, and that can get you a reputation for being conceited. When I’m asked how the show, the concert, the film, the record is going, I answer truthfully as I don’t believe in false modesty. I say, ‘The show is going great for me.’ Then they rush off and say, ‘My God, he should have said he was humbly grateful.’ Show me the guy who says he’s humbly grateful and I know he is a hypocrite and a liar. Mind you, he’s very show business.’

  Paul Jones had just co-starred with England’s top model, Jean Shrimpton, in a movie called Privilege. Lola had asked him if he enjoyed working with Jean Shrimpton.

  ‘She’s a very warm and wonderful person with whom it was a pleasure to film,’ he said. ‘We hope to make a follow-up with Twiggy called Underprivileged.’

  It had taken Lola a moment to see what was funny about that and then she’d laughed. It had been strangely uplifting to be laughing about someone who was too thin.

  Lola knew that Mike D’Abo was the son of a London stockbroker, although she didn’t know what a stockbroker did. She knew they were mostly rich. She had had several letters from readers of Rock-Out asking if she could ask an English artist to comment on some Australian records. She’d brought five records with her for Mike D’Abo to comment on.

  An hour later, she thought she may well not be able to use any of them. It had started off on a promising note with The Bee Gees’ ‘Spicks and Specks’. ‘Absolutely first class. A beautiful song,’ Mike D’Abo had said. Things had gone rapidly downhill from there. ‘The limitation, of course, of the song,’ he said, ‘is that it is only about eight bars long, and then it goes on ov
er and over again.’

  His comments on the next four songs ranged from ‘I was incredibly bored by that record’, or ‘His singing is diabolical’, or ‘He’s got an incredible voice, unfortunately it gets a bit boring and it’s not a very good song’ to ‘I don’t like this song at all. I loathe hearing elevator, whiskey, waiter, decorator and commentator. I think it’s a filthy idea. The whole song is so ugly.’

  Lola thanked Mike D’Abo. He looked quite cheerful as though listening to what he thought were terrible records had somehow buoyed him. She briefly contemplated asking him a few more questions about himself but decided against it. She was tired. She started packing up her things, when an older woman came into the room and told Lola that there was a phone call for her in the front office.

  Lola wondered who it could be. She knew very few people in London. She couldn’t think of anyone who knew exactly where she was. She knew it couldn’t be Renia or Edek. They barely had any idea of what it was that she was doing, let alone where she was on a daily basis. Maybe it was the Australian photographer she worked with. She had given him all the contact details for the interview she was doing.

  She picked up the phone. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘This is Lola Bensky.’ Every time she said that, Lola thought of herself scrambling as a three-year-old to get up on the stool that was kept near the phone on the wall in their house in North Carlton. ‘This is little Lola,’ she would say. She couldn’t say that now. She tugged at her dress, which had ridden up a bit.

  ‘Hello,’ she said again.

  ‘Hi, this is Mick,’ a voice said.

  ‘Mick?’ she said.

  ‘Mick Jagger,’ the voice said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Lola. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Paul is still here, and he’ll be here for another couple of hours,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘A few other people are coming over. Would you like to come over?’ Lola didn’t know what to say. She was not expecting this.

  ‘How many people are coming?’ she said.

  ‘Three others,’ he said. It’s just for an hour or two. I have to be back at the studio at eight o’ clock.’

  Lola didn’t really want to go. She was tired. It had been a long day. In between interviewing Mick Jagger and Manfred Mann, she had had to find out which bank her salary had been sent to. It seemed to arrive at a different bank every month. No one at Rock-Out seemed to know why, or how to trace it.

  She thought about Mick Jagger’s invitation. She really should go. How many people got calls from Mick Jagger asking if they’d like to come over and meet Paul McCartney?

  ‘Oh, okay,’ she said to Mick Jagger, and realised that she had sounded a little half-hearted.

  ‘So, you are going to join us?’ Mick Jagger said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and then added, ‘thank you,’ in an effort to sound more enthusiastic.

  ‘I’ll send a car around to pick you up,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘It should be there in fifteen minutes. Does that suit you?’

  ‘That would be great,’ Lola said.

  She hoped that it wasn’t a Rolls-Royce. She had been picked up in a Rolls-Royce by one of The Shadows, Cliff Richard’s backing group. He had told her that one of his children had had the top of one of their fingers cut off by the electric windows. Lola had never seen an electric window in a car and had made a mental note to avoid Rolls-Royces. She had wondered at the time if the top of the finger being cut off had been some sort of punishment for driving a car that cost more than most people’s houses. She had had to remind herself that there was no God and, therefore, not only was it impossible for God to help people, he also couldn’t dole out punishments.

  She looked at her watch. There was definitely not enough time to diet before meeting Paul McCartney. She wondered if Mick Jagger had asked the receptionist if he could speak to the fat Australian journalist. That thought made her cringe.

  3

  One of the first things Lola noticed about New York was that there were no miniskirts and no Rolls-Royces. ‘If you sometimes think that we in Australia are behind the times, one trip to New York will put that notion in perspective,’ Lola had written in a letter to the readers of Rock-Out. ‘You can walk around all day and not see one miniskirt,’ she wrote. ‘All the fashions are years behind. Stiletto heels are still in. The scene really is square.’

  Two days later, she’d seen the shallowness of her statement. New York wasn’t behind. It was different. Unlike London, it was hard to detect who was very wealthy and who was relatively poor. There was a uniformity to the clothing. And to the cars. Huge wealth wasn’t on display. Certainly not below Thirty-first Street, where Lola was staying at the Horwood Hotel.

  The Horwood Hotel was seedy. Friends of friends of Renia and Edek knew the owner. Lola met the owner, Abe, a fat, sweaty man with what looked like a mustard stain down the front of his shirt. He bought Lola an orange juice and gave her a five-per-cent discount on the room.

  Everything in the sparsely furnished room looked dirty. The corpses of half-a-dozen cockroaches were scattered across the once beige carpet, which now had a greasy sheen so thick it looked slippery. Everything in the room looked dead.

  Lola wondered if being in a room so stripped of all human comforts made you closer to God. Why was she thinking about God? She didn’t believe in God. Anyway, if a prerequisite for closeness to God was a lack of amenities, her parents, as death-camp inmates, would have qualified as God’s best friends. The other inhabitants of the Horwood Hotel, a ragtag group of moth-eaten men, didn’t look particularly close to God. Lola decided to get God out of her head and spend as little time as she could in her hotel room.

  Lola was walking down MacDougal Street when she realised she was beginning to feel more in tune with New York. She could feel the intellectual heft in the city. The conversation in cafes and clubs was about politics and art. No one was talking about the latest fashions.

  New York was a heated city. Heated by passion and purpose. Nothing much was prettied up or hidden. The yellow cabs that had traversed the streets had often seen better days. The spring seemed to have gone out of the upholstery in most of the passenger seats, and the cars’ suspension systems, more often than not, were shot.

  New Yorkers were not afraid of a few rough edges and were certainly not afraid to express an opinion or ask a question. ‘Why are you fat?’ a woman on Fifth Avenue had said to Lola yesterday. Lola had stopped in shock. She had only been in New York for five days. She tried to think of an answer that had a degree of complexity. Before she could come up with anything, the woman said, ‘You eat too much.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ Lola said, and hurriedly walked on.

  ‘You’ve got a very pretty face,’ the woman called out after her.

  Lola tried to take her mind off the fact that a perfect stranger had felt compelled to tell her that she was eating too much. She should have suggested that the woman speak to Renia. They could have had a very long and satisfying conversation.

  Lola had to buy some tapes for her tape recorder. She was hoping to interview Jim Morrison of The Doors. The Doors were not yet internationally well known, but the talk in the rock world was that they soon would be.

  Lola did have an interview arranged with The Young Rascals, whose hit record, ‘How Can I Be Sure’, she had reviewed for Rock-Out. She was very taken with the indecision in the title and had given the record a rave review.

  She had also organised to interview The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hit, ‘Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind’, Lola had also reviewed well. At the moment, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City’ seemed to be on the airwaves all the time. The song’s lyrics about summer making your neck dirty and gritty made even more sense now that Lola was in New York.

  It was hot. And humid. And crowded. The heat and the humidity and the density of the population gave downtown New York a thin coating of something less than wholesome. Uptown, everything looked swanky and polished, but downtown things looked a bit tarnished and burnished. Lola
liked this semi-rundown, demi-matte world, with its whiff of crime and other times.

  It reminded her in a strange way of the world of the vaudeville shows she used to go to with Edek. Edek used to take Lola out on Saturday afternoons, when she was younger, to give Renia a break. Edek sometimes took Lola to the Melbourne Zoo. He would buy her a long ribbon of tickets for rides on the elephant. Edek would sit in the rotunda and read his detective-fiction books, while Lola, who always sat as close to the elephant’s head as she could, rode round and round on the elephant. Up high, with the elephant’s ears flapping close to her arms, Lola used to feel on top of the world. At that height, everything looked so promising. Every now and then when the rides were over, Lola used to find Edek, who was working double shifts in the factory, fast asleep in the rotunda.

  Sometimes they would do boring things like drop off piecework to half-a-dozen women, mostly in the outer suburbs, who sat at home and hemmed hemlines, sewed in sleeves and added pockets to various garments that the factory Edek also worked for produced. But once a month, from the time Lola was eleven or twelve, they would go to the two p.m. matinee at the Tivoli Theatre in Bourke Street, Melbourne.

  The program was always a mix of singers, jugglers, magicians, dancers, hypnotists, comedians and strippers. And Lola and Edek always sat in the second or third row from the front. Just the scent of the theatre was exhilarating to Lola. She wanted to submerge herself in that heavy perfume of pancake make-up and high heels.

  If a hypnotist or magician needed a volunteer from the audience, Edek was the first to jump to his feet. He laughed so hard at the comedians that they always played to him. And he clapped louder than anyone else at the dancers.

  The dancers didn’t do that much dancing. They were weighted down with feather-and-glitter headdresses, but at least once during every show they did the cancan or another choreographed number. Edek would clap so hard that Lola thought his hands must hurt.