Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  I nodded. My God, what was I doing?

  “Doesn’t own a bra,” Andy said, looking at the bodice of my blue sheath approvingly. “Doesn’t need one.”

  Mario Parma let me schedule the shoot for the Monday before Easter, though I never told him that I wanted to do it then because I’d be out of school. One day of work turned into a second, then a third and a fourth. Two hundred dollars for four days of work! I signed the release form: “I, Gigi Frost, cede to Mr. Mario Parma the sole, exclusive, and non-conditional right to use photographs taken of me on March 26–29, 1956, for purposes of publication or in any venue he deems fit.” Two hundred dollars was a small fortune. I could use the money to get Hollywood veneers and clothes that weren’t Simone’s hand-me-downs—and who knew what else?

  I cashed his check at the Bank of America on Fairfax. Oh, the heft in my hand of twenty new and crisp and green and lovely ten-dollar bills. So I really could have saved my mother from the shop if only we’d been patient for a little longer.

  ***

  “You’ll do real good for about three months,” Crissy told me. I saw her in Andy’s office when photographers came to pick her up for location shoots or when she did a session on the premises. She was a pert redhead who just missed being really pretty by her rabbity front teeth. “They’re always interested in a new bod, but once your pictures come out in a lot of magazines, that’s the end of it.”

  “Yeah, it’s shits,” Olga said in an Eastern European accent. She was Crissy’s sidekick, and I never saw one without the other. Olga wore her hair in a single, sleek blue-black pigtail that dangled past her buttocks, but her most startling feature was her eyes: she accented both the upper and lower lids with heavy black liner, which gave her a staring-raccoon appearance. “The only jobs you get are amateurs,” she said, “and they don’t hardly never pay you more than twenty-five, thirty dollars.” She’d been with Andy’s agency for about six months.

  “You gotta watch out for them too,” Crissy said cryptically, looking not at me but at my reflection in the mirror.

  “This girl was killed a couple months ago.” Olga shook her head ominously, and the pigtail swayed in mournful agreement. “She went with amateur man to shoot in Topanga Canyon, and next thing anybody hear was they find her body, all cut up and scattered round.”

  “They never got the guy who did it,” Crissy said. She and Olga looked at each other and tittered nervously.

  “I’ll be careful.” I shrugged, hiding my horror, half-wondering too if they were just trying to scare off the competition.

  “Never let those creeps take beaver shots,” Crissy warned me, wrinkling her small nose. “They’re not supposed to, but they like to try, and then they sell them illegally.”

  I arrived at Tom Eakins’s studio early, another fifty dollars for a few hours of work. “I hear good things about you,” he said, smiling affably. “Gimme a couple minutes to set up the lights. My office doubles as a dressing room, so you can change in there.”

  As I folded my capri pants over a swivel chair, I couldn’t help seeing a note that he’d scribbled in pencil on a desk pad that stuck out from under the telephone: Gigi Frost great figure bad face. Someone must have said this to him over the phone. Bad face? I was wearing the Hollywood veneers when I went out on jobs now. It couldn’t be my teeth anymore. It was my damn nose. Did it really look that bad? I could see my profile in Tom Eakins’s three-sided mirror. Yep. It looked awful. My nose took up my whole face. I’d been ridiculous to think I could break into Hollywood with a nose like that. I had to have that nose job; I had to model long enough to be able to pay for plastic surgery.

  “How come we never get together on weekends anymore?” Simone complained when she drove me home from Tiny Naylor’s. “You got a boyfriend?”

  I’d take the plunge, I decided, with just this one thing. We sat in the car on the corner of Stanley and Oakwood, and I offered her one of my cigarettes. “I’m working a lot on the weekends. I have modeling jobs.” I lit us both up.

  “That’s terrific,” she said, clearly impressed. “In a store or what?”

  “No, for photographers. I do pinup and figure.”

  Simone turned to look at me, her huge lashes fluttering. “Pinup?” She was puzzled. “What’s ‘figure’?”

  It was too late to hold back now. “You know,” I said, “nude modeling.” I coughed in the smoky, closed car.

  “You model nude?” She stared.

  “Yes.”

  “In front of men?” Her voice rose to an outraged squeak. “I think that’s terrible. Naked in front of strange men? How could you?” She tapped the cigarette out angrily in the pink-lacquer ashtray. “What about morals?”

  Morals? I knew about her and Jesse. How was what I did any worse? He’d just used her, didn’t even bother to clean up her hymen’s blood from Nick’s sheets. At least nobody touched me when I worked. And what did she know about it anyway, about anything, with her canopied bed and a million dolls left over from when she was a kid and a closet stuffed with nice clothes. I had to bite my lip to keep from lashing out; she’d been good to me. But now it was I who was angry, damn her. When she was my age she’d had braces; her father could afford them. She didn’t know a thing about the hunger I’d felt my whole life.

  “I need the money” was all I said, opening her car door. It clapped shut behind me, that substantial sound the lock of an expensive automobile makes. Neither of us said good-bye.

  Simone avoided me after that. She even stopped organizing treks to Tiny Naylor’s. Once in a while I went there with other people, but it wasn’t the same thing anymore. Sometimes in the lobby my eyes and Simone’s would meet by chance, and she’d look away. She’d been the only close girlfriend I’d ever had, and I missed her, but soon I looked away too.

  Mario Parma gave me a dozen of the pictures, and I kept some for myself and let Andy have the rest. He put them in the big black leather folio that photographers came by to check, and he said he could send me out on a shoot every day if I wanted to go. “I get a lot of requests for you. How come you can only work weekends now?” he complained.

  “Oh, you know,” I said airily. “Things. Boyfriends. Stuff.” I couldn’t tell him that I had two more months of the tenth grade to complete before I was through with school forever.

  What could I do with all the money I was making? I’d save most of it for a nose job, of course, but why shouldn’t I give my mother a little happiness? Albert never took her anywhere. “I don’t have an acting job yet,” I told her one evening as I led her by the hand into my room. I closed the door behind us. This would be our secret. “But I’ve been making money as a pinup model, like Betty Grable.” She knew who wholesome, happy Betty Grable was. I pulled a leopardskin bathing suit picture out of the envelope Mario Parma had given me. “A famous photographer took it,” I said. “He’s going to put it in a magazine.”

  My mother studied the black-and-white picture for a long time. Was she going to be upset, like Simone? “How beautiful you look,” she finally said, and ran her finger over the gloss of the bathing suit and the thighs. She turned wet eyes to me. “I used to have legs like that,” she reminisced, “and such a flat, nice belly.”

  Simone once told me her parents had taken her on her birthday to the best restaurant in Los Angeles, a place called the Café de Paris. Though I was only fifteen, I could afford it. I’d just made a hundred dollars from a Japanese photographer who did a two-day shoot with me at Paradise Cove. I’d skipped school because he said the Cove was jammed with people on the weekend and he could only hire me if I would work during the week. “I’m making a lot of money as a model,” I bragged to Rae next (omitting the figure part of it, of course), “and I want to take you and my mother out.” It would be the three of us alone again.

  “Party of three, Lil Foster’s the name,” I said over the phone when I made the reservation, remembering with nostalgia my suave, childish ordering voice when my mother and I went to restaurants in New
York.

  “Rae, you’re not supposed to pick it up, for God’s sake!” I whispered frantically. Here we were in this elegant setting, she’d ordered the T-bone steak, and she was holding it in two hands, gnawing with her front teeth like a bear. I looked sidelong to see who was watching.

  “Don’t bother me. I eat the way I eat,” my aunt grumbled, pursing her lips. She picked the T-bone up again and took a big bite, chewing defiantly.

  “Rae, please,” I begged, “they’ll make us leave.” Was the maître d’ watching? He was. His nostrils were distended in disgust. I shriveled. This wasn’t the world Rae belonged in: Why had I brought her here? But it was the world I wanted—this delicious extravagance, this luxury. Yet I needed Rae, too, and I loved her. I just had to learn to keep my worlds separate.

  “So much fat.” My aunt grimaced, dropping the cleaned-slick bone on her plate with disdain. “And they charge so much money.”

  My mother was holding her knife and fork with delicate fingers. I adored her for it. When she sipped from a teacup at the end of the meal, her pinkie was extended in a patrician arc. Her eyes were shiny as she looked at the plush red chairs, the velvety red wallpaper, the waiters in tuxedos. “So nice,” she breathed. “Everything so beautiful.” It didn’t really matter if Rae couldn’t appreciate it. This was something my mother and I shared, and I’d brought her pleasure, and myself too. This is what a little money could do. “Take it all in, Lilly,” my mother whispered to me, as though we were two kids who’d sneaked into a palace.

  I bought her a tiny gold Bulova wristwatch with my earnings from the next two jobs and a dozen red roses in a box covered with gold foil.

  “Where do you get so much money to waste on flowers?” Albert said, but when I invited him to come along with me and my mother to the Cocoanut Grove he did, because it was Dr. Nathan Friedman’s favorite nightclub.

  By the time summer began, I discovered that Crissy was right: I’d been modeling for three months, and once the professional photographers took all the pictures of you they thought they could sell, they looked for a fresh face. The calls at fifty dollars a day came seldom now. Of course there were still the amateurs, who walked into Andy’s agency wanting girls to shoot. The pay wasn’t so good and it might be dangerous, but still, it was work.

  “They just want to jump into the bed with you,” Olga complained again as four of us prepared in Andy’s dressing room for a group shoot.

  “It would pay a hell of a lot better than this,” Corinne said bitterly to the mirror. “I tell you, sometimes I’m tempted.”

  “I bet none of those guys even have film in cameras.” Olga snickered.

  I got my clothes off and slipped into a fuchsia lambskin modeling bikini that barely covered nipples and pubes. Was Corinne serious? Those amateur photographers were usually old men in their forties or fifties, maybe older. How could you let men like that put their hands all over you. Repulsive. I shivered, remembering Jake Mann and Falix Lieber. It was one o’clock now, and at five I’d leave with twenty dollars in my purse. Twenty dollars for four hours was still about five times what you could make behind a counter somewhere. That’s all I needed to think about right now.

  A dozen men with cameras packed the studio room, waiting to descend on us. Hungry coyotes, I thought. But Olga was wrong about none of them having film in their cameras. They looked through their lenses and snapped, and light bulbs popped incessantly as the four of us twisted and turned in various postures. One man, though, with too-black hair, a too-black pencil-thin mustache, and a sly leer that he didn’t bother to conceal, perched his Rolleiflex on a tripod and spent most of the four hours looking through the lens, his hands jiggling coins in his pockets. I worked as far away from him as I could manage because he reminded me of Sid.

  My arms and legs were shaky with fatigue as I got back into my street clothes at the end of the session; we’d had only two ten-minute breaks the whole time. When I emerged from the dressing room, I saw that the mustachioed man hadn’t yet left. He was standing in the dim hallway with Corinne, who now wore a tight, off-white knit dress, and she was telling him something that he was writing down on a matchbook cover. I passed them and then, at the door, dropped my purse to the floor and straightened a nylon, a snoop.

  “Room two-sixteen, seven o’clock.” I looked up as he addressed her barely covered bosom; then she turned from him, scurrying away on her red high heels, but not before he grabbed a pinch of buttock between his thumb and index finger. “A little appetizer.” He grinned.

  “See you soon.” She waved over her shoulder, a smile plastered on her face like greasepaint. She didn’t make eye contact or speak to me, though she passed within three inches.

  Don’t do it! I wanted to shout. But what if she said, “Why not?” or “I really need the money”? or “Maybe I like it”?

  “Bye,” I called after her, embarrassed at what I’d seen and heard.

  “Bye,” she returned weakly, still not looking up, closing the door behind her.

  Is that what happens when the big modeling jobs run out? Would that happen to Crissy and Olga? Not me. Not me.

  “How’d you like to do a location shoot with…?” Andy mentioned the name of a famous silent film star.

  I’d seen one of his movies with my mother at the Classic Silent Film Theater on Fairfax Avenue just a couple of weeks earlier. Now I’d be working with him. My mother would be so excited to hear that I’d met him in person. I’d edit the story of course. She’d reminisced, “I remember him from when I first came to this country, such a fine actor.” He’d been a boy comedian with a world-famous zany smile in an innocent face.

  “He likes to shoot at this big old house in the Hollywood Hills,” Andy mentioned. “Fifty bucks for a couple hours, and you don’t even have to sign a release because he doesn’t sell the pictures.”

  “That’s Harry Houdini’s old mansion,” Crissy said. “It’s so much fun. I’ve been there lots of times with amateurs.”

  The Silent Film Star was no longer the thin, bespectacled goof of the silver screen. His weight had increased by probably half, most of it around his abdomen, which was bisected by a tight belt with a big silver buckle that displayed a cougar rearing up on its hind legs, its teeth chomping the air. He’d lost two fingers on his left hand; and on the thumb and index finger of the other he wore large silver and turquoise rings.

  “Pleased to meet you, Gigi Frost.” His zany smile hadn’t changed, and he was still illustrious enough to make me mute with shyness.

  “My mother really admires you” was on the tip of my flustered tongue to say, but that would make me sound like a kid. “Happy to meet you,” I said instead, with knocking heart.

  We drove north into the hills, to an area of mansions as lavish as those I’d seen in Beverly Hills so long ago. But now I was in the presence of real Hollywood royalty; I’d come a huge distance.

  The old Harry Houdini mansion—if that’s what it was—looked like a gray stone castle, with turrets and moats and an expanse of green that went on forever. The Silent Film Star took three cameras from the trunk of his long Cadillac and slung them over a shoulder. “All set.” I followed him up white marble stairs, gulping for air. I’d never been inside such a place. It made Simone’s mansion look like Fanny’s furnished room.

  A maid, her black uniform covered by a crisp white apron, answered the mellifluous chimes, greeting the Silent Film Star by name. “Would you like the west room again, sir?” she asked discreetly, never looking at me. I could see the high sheen of the black oak floors that bordered the dark, intricate oriental carpets. Such gorgeousness! A huge ivory statue of a unicorn stood on the floor next to the bright brass double-door entry.

  “No, no, we’re here for a shoot today,” he said brusquely.

  “Oh, of course,” she whispered, glancing at his cameras now. “So sorry.”

  A man in a white suit and a girl in a tight black dress came out of nowhere and walked down a winding, highly polished sta
ircase. “You can go round the house, if you like,” the maid said, ushering us out awkwardly, and now I knew for certain this was the kind of house I’d heard Olga and the others snicker about.

  But the Silent Film Star had brought cameras. Surely it was all right. “I know the way,” he said, clearly displeased with the maid. “I just wanted to let you know we’re here.” He led me by the arm through the iron gate. “Dumb cluck,” he grumbled. “Didn’t she see my gear?”

  In the grand, manicured garden, I slipped out of my sheath and my underwear while he readied the cameras. Then I posed, kissing mossy iron satyrs that leered hungrily and reached with muscled arms. I embraced nymphs, naked like me, that simpered with concrete mouths. I sprawled beneath a fountain that spouted from the big marble lips of four turbaned giants. I could smell gardenias everywhere, and the sun shone, strong and seductive, on my bare skin. How I loved the grandeur of the place! I worked hard for him, anxious to please, and he shot alternately with each of his three cameras. But images of what I’d seen in the house kept playing in my mind. What had the maid thought? Of course I knew—that we were there for what Corinne had talked about. What had the man in the white suit and the girl done together? As I kissed and embraced and sprawled, I kept seeing their twisting naked limbs and his hands all over her. I couldn’t turn the vision off. Did she like it?

  At one point in the session the Silent Film Star lifted my arm for a pose, and his hand brushed against my breast—an accident maybe, but I remembered Sid and shifted quickly. “I can do it,” I cried, taking the pose he wanted. He frowned. But overall he seemed pleased with my work. “Very artistic,” he said, smiling from time to time at a pose I’d strike and snapping away. He’d taken his suit jacket off, and I could see the wet rings of perspiration on the underarms of his shirt. “That’s fifteen rolls,” he said, wrapping up after three hours.

  “This is an incredible setting,” I ventured, once dressed. I hadn’t dared to utter much before other than “Is this pose all right?”