London Blues

by Anthony Frewin

  The girls were friends who had met Stephen at a pub down in Chelsea. They had been around to the mews house he has somewhere near Portland Place for another party but didn’t really know much about him. They both wanted to be models and he said he could introduce them to the right people (not me, surely?). There was an air of evasiveness about them both and a reluctance to discuss personal specifics. I let it go at that. Stephen had told them the photographs would only be sold in Scandinavia and I didn’t tell them otherwise.

  I took the negs down to Rochester and got them processed together with two sets of prints.

  Of the 144 pictures I took I ended up with 70 that I felt were good enough to show Mr Messalino. He bought 40 of them and gave me £100 which is nice work … if you can get it. When I was with him I couldn’t help thinking of Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice in the film The Entertainer which I had seen the day before. Messalino is just like a Latin equivalent of Rice, but a bit meaner perhaps.

  Veronica is lying on the bed in our room watching TV. Stephen is sitting on the sofa at the foot of the bed going through a set of photographs of Sonny and Charlie and Angela and Beverly that I’ve just handed to him. I’m standing in front of the sink with a bottle of beer playing Monk’s original 1947 recording of Round Midnight in my head. I’m also thinking about the lovely money Veronica and I made from this session (OK, she didn’t do anything this time, but she is my partner).

  Stephen is drooling over the pictures and breathing excitedly.

  ‘Tim, you are a very naughty boy … making the girls work like this. Very naughty … isn’t he, Veronica?’

  ‘He’s disgusting – really disgusting.’

  ‘Tim, Tim, Timmy. Such an imagination!’

  I’m thinking that I would like to buy a really good stereo record player. A real hi-fi job. Listen to Monk on something decent instead of this tinny little speaker on the pathetic Dansette. A couple of big speakers. A good stylus. Fill the whole room with blue notes from his piano.

  ‘You realise, Tim, that you have become precisely the sort of person the Sunday papers like to put on their front pages and expose?’

  I guess he’s right. I guess I am the sort of person they like doing over. I am a living, breathing part of the decline of the British Empire. I should wear a badge.

  ‘The News of the World might get to you first,’ says Veronica to Stephen with a chuckle.

  Stephen is a bit put out by the remark, unduly so. He says in a snappish, high-pitched voice, ‘I don’t think that will happen, dear.’

  Veronica responds in character: ‘How can we be so sure, dear?’

  ‘Because, dear, I have very influential friends.’

  ‘Pride before a fall, Stephen. The bigger your friends the quicker they’ll drop you if something goes wrong!’

  ‘Tim, I don’t know how you can live with this woman.’

  I don’t either, but it works somehow.

  Stephen continues looking through the pictures and then he has a bright idea. ‘Couldn’t you go professional, producing pictures like this?’

  If some guys have girlfriends and wives who finish their sentences for them, I’ve got a partner who not only does that but also starts the sentences as well. Without taking her eye off the TV Veronica says, ‘The money is in distributing and selling them, not in producing them … and Tim’s not got a very good business brain.’

  Stephen sighs and looks at me. I smile and say, ‘I see it really as a sort of hobby that produces the odd bit of revenue. It certainly isn’t enough to live on.’

  Veronica looks across at Stephen: ‘See, what did I tell you?’

  The third photo session took place on Friday, 18 November 1960, around at Sonny’s place in Ladbroke Grove. It was two days after Clark Gable died. The day after he died someone in Wardour Street told me the joke about this bloke going to a bar in New York and picking up this great-looking girl. Anyway, they end up back at his place and one thing leads to another and the girl goes down on the guy. Then she suddenly stops sucking him, leans back and says, ‘Clarke Gable died today.’ The guy says, ‘Yeah, I know. But carry on, he would have liked it that way.’

  Sonny had got two black girls for the session, Shirley and Lorna. They were both on the game. I started off getting a roll of lesbian stuff and then Sonny joined in and I did some threesome shots and then more stuff of Sonny with each of the girls separately. I ended up with nearly a hundred shots of which about half were good enough for presentation to Mr Messalino, the Archie Rice of the dirty book trade, as I now think of him.

  Mr Messalino ended up buying twenty only, which netted me a mere £50. Not one of my most lucrative evenings.

  ‘It’s nice stuff, but white people don’t want to see niggers doing it to each other. Niggers might want to but not enough of them come into my shops to make it worth while. White people don’t mind seeing photos of jiggabooes but there’s got to be whites there too. I’ll take a few, these twenty. They’ve got a novelty value. If I ever open a shop in Africa I’ll let you know.’

  On the way home I bought a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover which is now on sale everywhere since the jury at the Old Bailey decided it wasn’t obscene.

  It might not be obscene but it is boring. I passed it on to Veronica. The opening pages didn’t even fire me enough to search out the dirty bits.

  The first session of 1961 took place in late January, four days after John F. Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States of America. The cast was Sonny, Sonny’s prostitute friend, Shirley, a friend of Stephen’s called Nancy, an American girl, and Harry, a mate of Charlie’s from the Nag’s Head in Holloway: in other words, a black guy, a black girl, a white guy and a white girl, which gave me quite a few varied combinations. I ended up shooting some six rolls of film, a total of 216 pictures, in about four hours. On the earlier sessions I had always spent some time arranging the lighting so that I had highlights and shadows, pictures with some depth and atmosphere. Now I just bang in the lights like French Joe and shoot. Subtleties of lighting are lost on the people who buy these pictures. They just want pictures that are sharply lit and in focus. Give them what they want. They are close-up detail devotees. They want the sort of pictures that appear in medical textbooks. Anatomical high definition. Vulvas and dicks glistening with baby oil.

  There’s a limit to what two, three or four people can do together, sexually speaking, so I vary the setting and the props. I had some shots of Nancy sucking Sonny’s dick while Shirley was sitting beside her looking at an Adam Faith LP. Then I had some shots of the two of them doing it doggy style while watching television. I suppose this is all lost on the punters, the humour of it (such as it is). But then it’s just my little joke. The thing is that there is a decided tediousness now to these sessions. But then I’m only here for the money. This session was shot in a hotel room on the Bayswater Road. Veronica arranged it through the receptionist from the place who goes into her salon to have her hair done. I had to bung her £5 and the assistant manager another fiver, but it was worth it to get out of bedsits and grotty rooms. The room wasn’t grand, just a couple of armchairs, a double bed, bedside tables and a TV, but it looked like a hotel room, which was the main thing. I’ve been thinking about other locations lately, like in a train, on Hampstead Heath, on top of a bus, and others. This could add a bit of spice to the pictures.

  After the session was over I walked with Nancy down the Bayswater Road. She needed a cab to get back to Hampstead. I asked her how long she had been in London.

  ‘Six months.’

  ‘Have you got a job?’

  ‘I’m a secretary-researcher in the House of Commons.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Just temporary. An exchange scheme arranged through my old university.’

  ‘What for MPs and that?’

  ‘Yes … but don’t tell Stephen I told you that.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘He might not like it. He’s funny about who knows what …
odd.’

  ‘I won’t mention it. Do you know him well?’

  ‘A little … not well.’

  ‘Have you had an affair with him?’

  ‘No. They say he’s only interested in watching. I think he prefers other men, really.’

  ‘Is that a guess or a fact?’

  ‘A guess.’

  ‘Why did you agree to appear in the photos?’

  ‘Something different to do.’

  ‘Something different? Just for a laugh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Just a whim?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all. That’s the picture, Tim. You ask too many questions. You might get into trouble one day carrying on like this.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m in trouble already?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Is there something going on I don’t know about?’

  ‘I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Your other name and your phone number.’

  Nancy thought this was funny. She laughed. She didn’t reply.

  ‘What is your other name?’

  ‘I don’t think it would be a good thing for us to see each other again, Tim.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It wouldn’t.’

  ‘Is Nancy actually your real name?’

  ‘There’s a cab over there. I’ve got to get home.’

  Of the 216 pictures I shot I took 120 around to Mr Messalino and he bought 50 negs from me so I ended up with £125 which, minus expenses of around £75 (I’m now paying the actors £10 a session), left me with some £50. He liked the stuff but said I should now shoot some ‘flage’ material as the punters were always asking for it and the pictures he had were very old.

  ‘Tie the girl’s hands behind her back and put some lipstick lines on her arse and have that nigger standing over her with a whip … that kind of thing. But get girls who can act like it is hurting them.’

  It’s a coldish afternoon as I walk up Marylebone High Street to the coffee bar Stephen has asked me to meet him in. I find it up at the top, the Mocambo: espresso and pastries and prints of Italian seaside resorts on the wall. This is the carriage-trade end of the coffee bar world. Expensively dressed secretaries. Professional types in suits. Dean Martin records in the background.

  Stephen is sitting at the very back in a cubicle. He waves me over and orders some coffee for us both. He’s in one of his subdued manic moods again, his eyes flitting about, his hands dancing with each other.

  ‘So good to see you again, Tim. So good. Have you got some little snapshots for me?’

  I hand him the manila envelope that contains a hundred or so prints from the last session. He opens it under the table and hurriedly begins riffling through the postcard size prints.

  ‘Excellent, Tim. Very good. Who is this marvellous black lady?’

  ‘She’s from Notting Hill, or rather, Ladbroke Grove. She’s on the game.’

  ‘Does she do any governess work?’

  ‘Governess? What, teaching?’

  ‘I suppose one could say that. I rather had in mind a little of the old spanking.’

  ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask her.’

  ‘I imagine she would. These negresses are often very good at administering corporal punishment to naughty white boys. Very good. And quite merciless.’

  ‘They are?’

  ‘Indeed, they are. You might like to try it one day … if you haven’t tried it already.’

  ‘Perhaps I could ask Nancy to give me a couple of strokes?’

  ‘Nancy? Who’s Nancy?’

  ‘That American girl there you sent along.’

  ‘You mean Julia?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes. She was obviously a little shy at telling you her real name. Girls are so difficult to predict. Some of them change their names as often as they change their knickers.’

  ‘Is there anything about her I shouldn’t know, Stephen?’

  ‘Search me, old boy.’

  ‘Like she works in the House of Commons?’

  ‘Does she? How interesting … I say, this black girl looks so fetching with the dildo strapped to her … so proud … I wouldn’t like her to surprise me from behind on a dark night, would you? That could be very, very painful!’

  Sitting here listening to Stephen and listening to Dean Martin I had an epiphany as to what it is about Stephen I don’t like. I always knew there was something about him that irritated me. Now I know what it is. The bloke is so fucking plausible … even when you know he is lying. Just so fucking plausible.

  ‘Tim, I’ve had a rather splendid idea.’

  Stephen is now piloting the conversation even further away from the subject of Nancy (alias Julia).

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Yes. Now that you are such a whiz at taking these photographs, how about taking some of chaps? You know, fellows frolicking together and doing things … like they do?’

  ‘Queer stuff? Homosexual stuff?’

  ‘I know a very rich viscount who would pay you royally indeed for some sets.’

  ‘I’m not the bloke for that. You’ll have to get someone else.’

  I finished my coffee and left. Stephen was still gazing at the pictures and smirking.

  It was a quiet, hot July Monday afternoon. Trade was slow and limited to bottles of Pepsi-Cola and strawberry milkshakes (we’d run out of chocolate and banana syrup). I’d sold three corned beef and three cheese and tomato sandwiches since lunchtime. I was leaning against the counter having a quick fag while Charlie was sitting down at a table with his feet up reading a car magazine.

  ‘See this new E-type Jag, Tim?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cruises at 100 miles an hour. Tops at 150!’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two grand … 2,000 oncers, Tim. I bet you’d like a car like this, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I guess I would.’

  ‘Well, you’ll never be able to afford one, son!’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Imagine bombing up that new motorway in this little beauty. You’d be in Birmingham in half an hour. You’d really pull the birds driving it! They’d be eating out of your trouser zip for a ride in this … slobbering all over you!’

  ‘Did you hear about Ernest Hemingway yesterday?’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Just some American writer … he blew his brains out with a 12-bore shotgun.’

  ‘That must have been a surprise for his charlady. How about you and me, Tim, half-inching one of these Jags for a joy-ride? We could be in Scotland before they noticed it was missing! Up the old A1, the wind in our hair … vroooom!’

  I was gazing down at my suede shoes and puffing on the cigarette when the door opened. I looked up and saw French Joe shuffle in and shuffle over to one of the window tables where he sat down. I had only seen him once or twice over the past couple of months. Each time he had looked the worse for wear and each time I had given him a tenner out of guilt. I know Mr Messalino would have elbowed him doing the photographs without me appearing on the scene, but I felt my presence had hastened his demise. Somebody said Joe was living in some hostel in Camden Town and earning pennies working as a pot-man in a pub on Chalk Farm Road.

  I took Joe over a cup of coffee and a corned beef sandwich and some custard cream biscuits.

  ‘Here you are, old fellow, on the house.’

  French Joe just stared ahead. His eyes were red. He was crying.

  ‘What’s up?’

  He took out a dirty handkerchief and wiped his nose and his eyes (in that order) and then turned to me and managed a half-smile. He took a bite from the sandwich and swallowed it without chewing it.

  ‘You hear the news?’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘You hear all those police cars
and sirens this morning?’

  ‘Yeah, you always do here. I don’t notice them any more.’

  ‘You should have done.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘Some tearaways went out with their shotguns … they blasted Mr Messalino out his window.’

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘Course he’s dead. He never knew what hit him.’

  ‘Christ Almighty. I don’t believe it! I saw him only last week!’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it? An audience with you ain’t going to give him immortality, is it?’

  ‘Who did it? Why?’

  ‘Everybody knows who did it except the Old Bill. Bernie Narrizano’s the bloke. He’s the boss now. He’ll take over the shops and the clubs. He’s a vicious bastard … not a gentleman like Mr Messalino. A real fucker … strong-arm stuff. Things are changing around here. This is the 1960s now. I’m still living in the 1940s. I don’t recognise it. It’s all different. The game has lost me.’

  And I’ve lost Mr Messalino and a nice little earner ….

  It was a stiflingly hot August Saturday night about a month later when there was a loud thump on the door of our room. Veronica and I were half undressed on the bed watching that old Dane Clark film, Moonrise, on the TV. Veronica wasn’t expecting anyone and nor was I. I opened the door and these two blokes who were built like brick shit-houses just walked into the room. They had evening suits on and were either on the way to some function or had just left one. They looked like bouncers, which is sort of what they are. They were marinated in cheap after-shave or cologne.

  The slimmer of the two (but still pretty big) said: ‘You Timmy Purdom?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘And who’s this?’ He nodded towards Veronica.

  ‘My girlfriend.’

  ‘Right then. Bernie asked us to come round and see you.’

  ‘Bernie?’

  ‘Mr Bernie Narrizano.’