The Girl From Nowhere

by Christopher Finch

  I asked Jimmy whose painting it was. He told me it was by Danny Fraser. That was a surprise. I knew Danny. He had always been a faithful, even slavish, follower of the abstract expressionists. Seems he had figured it was time to move on. He lived a couple of blocks away so I decided to pay a visit. I told Jimmy to let Murray know that I’d call him the next day.

  I rang Danny from a pay phone at the corner of Houston. He said he was working and he didn’t seem too enthusiastic about being interrupted, but I told him I had seen the painting at St. Adrian’s and knew of a collector I thought might be interested in his new work. That did the trick. It usually does.

  The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the freight elevator and into Danny’s loft was that some serious money had been spent on the place since I had been there last. The floor had been polyurethaned and the old tin ceiling restored. There was now a butcher block counter in the kitchen and a restaurant-size refrigerator. In the studio area was a half-finished painting on a monster easel—another nude—and next to it, pinned to a sheet of particleboard, was a large print of the photograph he was working from. Not Sandy Smollett this time, but a sweet-looking redhead with ankles to die for.

  Danny was cleaning his airbrush and squirting the cleaning fluid into a sink. The protective mask he wore while working dangled around his neck. A big, raw-boned Californian, he had moved east a few years earlier and had become a fixture on the downtown scene. I indicated the painting on the easel and asked how he had learned to paint like that. He told me that, back in LA, he had apprenticed as a billboard artist with Foster & Kleiser. That explained a lot.

  “Not much to see here at the moment,” he apologized. “Nick’s got a couple of canvases at the gallery, but they’ve been moving fast. This collector of yours will have to get on the waiting list.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  I had a profile I called up on occasions like this. My imaginary collector was Rupert Nordhof, a commodities trader in Chicago who was married to the heiress to a pharmaceuticals fortune. Big apartment on Lake Shore Drive, country estate on the Apple River in Wisconsin. Good eye. A couple of stunning de Koonings, a big Rauschenberg combine, and so on. I brought the whole thing to life—the Warhol Electric Chair canvas in the master bathroom, the Rothko that matched the glory of a sunrise over Lake Michigan. I had to be careful not to get carried away. Bottom line, Danny was eager to meet Rupert next time he came to town.

  He offered me a drink.

  “By the way,” I said, casual as you like, “who’s the model you used for the painting at St. Adrian’s? She looks familiar.”

  “Sandy something,” he said. “You may have seen her around. She’s a full-time model, I guess. I teach a life class at Cooper Union and that’s where I found her, which is about all I can tell you.”

  He nodded toward a six-by-six camera on a heavy tripod.

  “I shot her with the Hasselblad, trying out a lot of different lighting. She wasn’t into chitchat. Usually models like to talk, but not this one.”

  “Maybe new to the racket?”

  “No—I don’t think so. She didn’t have that uptight feel you sometimes get with girls who aren’t used to being looked at without their clothes on. In fact, she seemed almost more comfortable without them. You know—naked as nature intended.”

  “You mean like innocent?”

  “Yeah, maybe—but let me show you something.”

  Danny grinned, walked over to a table, and picked up a magazine. I could see the title—Vamp—and the girl on the cover, and knew what to expect. “Volume One, Number One,” said Danny. “Have you seen it?”

  I’d heard about it, but till then a copy hadn’t crossed my path. Danny thumbed through the pages for me. America had recently discovered pubic hair. For a price, you could ogle it onstage at the Biltmore Theater, where Hair had been playing to busloads of eager suburbanites wanting to sample the Age of Aquarius. And Penthouse had just arrived, a rival for Playboy, with unretouched photographs that permitted female pudenda to be admired in all their bushy glory and variety. Bob Guccione had launched it in the UK, where pubic hair was invented, but now it was available at newsstands from Waco to Weehawken. Well, maybe not Waco. Vamp was the homegrown competition, rumored to have the backing of the secretive capitalist predator—as I fondly thought of him—Brady Kavanagh. He was a man with his fingers in so many meaty pies, from Wall Street to Hollywood, you wondered how he managed to tie his shoelaces. Probably paid someone to do it for him. Kavanagh was one of the most private public figures in America. What was known about him was that he had been born and raised in New York, in Hell’s Kitchen, a tough street kid with a head for numbers who somehow found his way to Harvard Business School, reputedly thanks to the intervention of some wealthy and influential patron. Back in New York, he established himself as one of the most cold-blooded sociopaths in the investment banking lunatic asylum. He became a specialist in hostile takeovers, a pioneer in the art of acquiring troubled industrial giants and then selling off their components at a profit, leaving behind empty shells. In short, the classic all-American success story.

  Not that making money for its own sake was the only thing that got Kavanagh’s rocks off. He had bought Bad Fruit Records just so he could produce a country-and-western album, Mayhem Along the Mekong, that extolled the exploits of US Navy SEALs in Vietnam. For an encore, he took over the venerable Magnus Studios, pouring millions into reviving the bankrupt movie company’s fortunes, and launching a theme park on its former back lot. Kavanagh had even directed a couple of movies himself. Not the kind that garner Oscar nominations. More the sort that played on 42nd Street and at redneck drive-ins—make-out flicks with titles like Orchard of Forbidden Fruit and Voodoo Blood Feud about midnight encounters between zombies and underdressed teenyboppers. The likelihood that he was the backer of Vamp was hinted at by the fact that he was the subject of an interview in the first issue. He never gave interviews and was seldom photographed, but there on page eighty-two was a full-page picture of Kavanagh, buffed and tanned beside his Bridgehampton swimming pool. This was unprecedented for the man known to the media as The Invisible Mogul because of his perceived ability to pass through brigades of paparazzi without triggering a single flashbulb.

  There were neatly trimmed triangles of thatch dotted throughout, but otherwise it was the usual mix of tits, ass, cartoons, airbrushed profiles, and feature stories that promised more than they could deliver. Finally Danny arrived at something a bit less run-of-the-mill, a portfolio of black-and-white photographs by Yari Mendelssohn. Yari was hot shit in those days, sometimes rashly compared to photographers like Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton. His work had been exhibited at MoMA and those other “leading museums” you hear about, and his name had real resonance in the fashion and glamour worlds. Yari had a reputation for charming fashion editors out of the trees, where they are said to gather, and persuading Hollywood starlets to expose that extra inch of flesh—a feat that may or may not be so difficult to accomplish.

  The portfolio consisted of a dozen pages of erotic mini dramas, like frames from some lost Luis Buñuel movie, a sequel to Belle de Jour perhaps. Beautiful and, in a couple of instances, grotesque women were captured in various states of undress. All showed at least a flash of topiary, in keeping with the new parameters of the industry. A near-naked woman crouched over a big view camera, her head hidden by a photographer’s cape, photographing herself in the mirror of a public restroom, a line of urinals reflected behind her. A blonde in stockings and a garter belt cuddled with a boa constrictor and a rabbit under a baby grand piano. A woman wearing nothing beneath an open fur coat, but holding a pistol, watched apathetically as another woman—this one in stiletto heels, a large floppy hat, and not much else—kissed a hotel bellhop. All were beautifully staged and lit, and displayed a blend of elegance and kinkiness that Yari Mendelssohn had down
pat.

  The most interesting photograph by far was on the final spread. The setting was what appeared to be the library of a very grand house, the kind that has floor-to-ceiling books the way your mother has wall-to-wall carpeting. The woman in the photo graph—there was nothing girlish about her—was sprawled in a leather-upholstered club chair in a slinky satin number, the skirt of which was hitched up just high enough to reveal the mandatory glimpse of pubic hair. She was generally disheveled. Her hair was a mess, and her dress strategically ripped to reveal one nipple. One of her wrists was fastened to a leg of the chair by a jeweled cuff and a length of fine chain. Standing beyond her, at a respectful distance, were two young women in cocktail dresses. They gazed at the woman in the chair admiringly, almost enviously, while she glowered defiantly at the camera. Her lips and chin were bloody, as if she had been slapped across the mouth.

  This photo hinted at a richer and darker narrative than the others; it seemed to be snipped from a story in which the clues enabled the viewer to interpret the incident portrayed in contradictory ways. It was possible to see the woman in the chair as a victim, or as someone who was doing her own thing and didn’t give a fuck what anybody else thought. The respectful expressions of the witnesses in the library seemed to suggest the latter. The brazenness of the protagonist’s expression as she stared disdainfully at the camera put the observer in the position of feeling like the object of her contempt.

  “You recognize her, of course,” said Danny.

  For a few moments, I thought I must be mistaken—this could not possibly be the girl in the white dress, the artless-seeming creature I had encountered earlier in such melodramatic circumstances. Danny’s painting I could figure, but this was something else again. There was a chance resemblance, but that was all, surely? The more I looked at the picture, though, the more certain I was that this was Sandy Smollett. I found that radically hard to get my head around.

  “Something, huh?” said Danny.

  I didn’t disagree.

  When I hit the night air, I realized how tired I was, so I grabbed a taxi and rode home to 12th Street, stopping on the way to buy a copy of Vamp.

  I looked up Yari Mendelssohn in my Rolodex and called his home number. No luck. I gave his studio a shot. Bingo. I told him I had something I wanted to talk about. He said he’d be there till at least midnight. After a beer, I fell asleep with the television on. As I slept, the Miracle Mets triumphed over and over onscreen, Tommie Agee and Ed Kranepool smacking the ball out of the park a hundred times. The Mets permeated my dreams till I began to believe that I’d been there at Shea instead of sitting in a bar with a woman with an incipient case of split personalities.

  I was woken by the phone. It was her. She apologized for ditching me at the Band Box and sticking me with the tab. I told her it happened to me all the time. She said she needed to talk some more. After what I’d discovered since that afternoon, I wanted to talk some more too. I told her to name a time and a place.

  “I don’t get off till two,” she said apologetically.

  I said that would be fine.

  “Do you know the Cheyenne Diner?” she asked. “The one by the big post office?”

  I told her I did.

  “I’ll be there at two thirty.”

  I said I’d be waiting. I didn’t mention Danny’s painting or Yari’s photograph or anything else that might give cause for second thoughts.

  Yari Mendelssohn was a serial victim of extortion schemes. I don’t know what drew blackmailers to him, but it was like house flies to schmaltz. I had helped him out with one such episode involving an intern named Lenny, who he had ostensibly picked up “to organize his slides.” Well, that was for starters. Mostly Yari fucked girls but, as he told me at the time, he enjoyed a varied diet.

  “You know, man, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, right? Love the one you’re with, right, babe? You are who you eat, right? I mean, it’s not a crime, luv.”

  The problem was that it was a crime at the time, and while Yari was enjoying his varied diet one evening, after doing a couple of lines of coke and who knows what else, Lenny snapped a batch of pictures that had the potential to land Yari in the slammer. But Lenny was not threatening to give the photographs to the cops or send them to the Post. If Yari didn’t pay up, he warned, he was going to show them to Yari’s mother.

  “Sami will kill me,” Yari had told me, almost in tears. “You can’t be both a faigeleh and a mensch—that’s her theory. It’s cool to hang out with fags, but not to be one.”

  I suspected his real concern was that if it got out that he liked to get blown by boys in Y-fronts, it wouldn’t sit well with the dudes who bought his pictures of girls in Y-fronts. Things like that mattered back then. I mean, you had to draw the line somewhere, right, luv? In any case, I paid Lenny a visit and painted a picture of what a nice-looking boy like him could expect in an upstate correctional facility where his undoubted talents would only take him so far. He laughed in my face. When I demanded the pictures, he told me I’d better talk to Sami Mendelssohn. It turned out Lenny had followed through on his threat and had already shown her the pictures. I guess he was playing both sides against the middle—someone was going to cough up the bread. Sami had paid him off on the condition that he would keep his mouth shut. I called Mrs. Mendelssohn to confirm Lenny’s story and she granted me a brief audience in her Park Avenue apartment. A regal figure in schmatter by Balenciaga, she gave me the photographs to return to Yari.

  “Just don’t tell him I’m aware of these,” she said. “He’s always been very sensitive. This is strictly between you and me. You tell him you got the pictures back from that fellow Lenny any way you like and that’ll be the end of the story.”

  That fiasco had put me on Yari’s OK list, so I was usually welcome at his studio—a deconsecrated church way west in Chelsea. A little after eleven o’clock I found him there, in a side room with Gothic windows, checking equipment for an upcoming shoot.

  “Tomorrow morning we’re on a plane to Haiti,” he told me, “so here I am in the vestry getting vested.”

  “This is where the choir boys come to get buggered?” I asked.

  “We don’t talk about that anymore,” he said. “I’m seeing a lovely model from Ethiopia these days—Sharome.”

  “Sami must be happy about that.”

  “Maybe not. I guess you didn’t hear about my father’s taste for dark meat.”

  Yari’s father had been a prominent lawyer who was gunned down one sunny Sabbath shortly after leaving the Millinery Center Synagogue on 6th Avenue. No shooter was ever caught, but Mendelssohn senior’s reputation for enjoying a connection to the mob was posthumously enhanced. The rumored link included a Havana angle, before Fidel schmutzed things up, so maybe that was where the dark meat came in. As for Yari, he enjoyed letting people imagine he might have retained a family link to organized crime. He was on schmoozing terms with known mobsters and, famously, had once shot a spread of revealing photographs of one capo’s comare, which led to the capo’s old lady arranging for a rattlesnake to be delivered to the girlfriend’s boudoir in a shoebox from Bendel’s.

  Yari was costumed in the rich hippie drag that was his uniform of the moment—a thrift-store vest over a hand-embroidered Pierre Cardin shirt, vintage Wranglers spattered with paint and artfully ripped at the knee, and dopey red velvet slippers from somewhere east of Suez. There was a lot of jewelry in the mix too, including a heavy gold chain around his neck from which dangled a ceramic yin-yang medallion the size of a beer mat. If you could overlook the trendy threads, you would see that Yari was a striking dude in his forties, fashionably lean, with a Hamptons tan and a face that was all bone structure. His eyes were almost purple and he wore his prematurely silver hair in a ponytail. Think Hugh Hefner gone native in Nepal.

  “What can I do for you, hon?” he asked, passing me a fatty that had been smoldering in an art de
co ashtray on his desk.

  “I just saw the spread you shot for Vamp.”

  “Yeah? You like?”

  He flashed the big, cosmetic smile that had fashion editors from Madison Avenue to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré peeing in their French-cut panties.

  “It’s cool, but I wanted to ask you about one of the models.”

  “Which one, luv?”

  “The one in the armchair who’s been punched in the mouth by a makeup artist.”

  “Sandy? She’s something, huh?”

  “What’s her story?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  He had suddenly clammed up.

  “Curiosity,” I told him.

  “I won’t go to the cliché,” he said, “but if you’re interested in Sandy the way I think you might be, then forget it. She’s forbidden fruit.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He asked again. “Why do you want to know?”

  I gave him a shorthand version of what had happened in Little Italy, and how I had come across Danny’s painting at St. Adrian’s. I carefully left out the fact that I had a date to meet Sandy Smollett in a couple of hours.

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” he said.

  I wished I could have believed him.

  “As you seem to be aware,” he began, “her name is Sandy Smollett. She’s a stripper who works at one of Joey Garofolo’s joints. Aladdin’s Alibi.”

  “That’s Joey ‘the Shiv’?”

  “Yeah—but don’t be fooled by that nickname. He hasn’t sliced up anybody in years. He has other people to do it for him now.”