by Lynn Barber
In 1969 Bob and Kathy moved to New York to launch Penthouse in America, and for over a year we were in the odd position of producing all the copy for the American edition from London because Bob did not yet have an editorial staff there. This meant that, for instance, I was commissioning reviews of Broadway shows and MoMA art exhibitions I would never see from American reviewers I'd never met and hoping blindly that they knew what they were talking about. It also meant that I suddenly had to learn American spelling and (more difficult) American usage – aluminum for aluminium was easy enough, and fender for bumper, gas for petrol, but their use of the word pout (to mean sulk) always caught me out, as did homely, for ill-favoured. I remember, years later, an American editor ringing to ask if I was coming to New York soon and I said no, because I was expecting a baby. She said ‘Momentarily?’ and I laughed and said, ‘Well no, it takes nine months’ – I'd forgotten that in America momentarily means soon.
(Another great advantage of this editing-for-America period was that I read an awful lot of American magazines, which stood me in good stead later, when I became an interviewer. My aspirations were always based on the sort of interviews I'd read in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Andy Warhol's Interview and the New Yorker, rather than the generally dire standard of interviews in the British press.)
One day Harry called me to his office and said, Have you got your passport? No, of course I hadn't, why would I, in North End Road? So he very kindly drove me home to collect my passport and then to the American embassy to get a visa, and I was on a plane that evening – my first ever trip to the United States. Alas, I was not going to New York but to Milwaukee, via Chicago, to deliver artwork to the printers. Usually Joe Brooks the art director did it, but on his last trip to the States he had been stopped at customs and the customs officers had seen all the Penthouse page proofs in his suitcase and said ‘We have a reader here’ and confiscated the lot. So Bob decided that I would be the best courier in future because no one would suspect me of carrying pornography.
My first few trips were just to Milwaukee, which was boring, but increasingly Bob asked me to come on to New York to collect stuff to take back to London. Often the stuff wasn't ready so I would have to wait several days in New York, which was a great chance to get to know the city. There was only one disadvantage. Bob and Kathy stayed at the Sherry-Netherland and put me up there too, which seemed the height of glamour. But they never gave me any cash. They always said, ‘Oh, put it on room service.’ But it meant I could never eat anywhere except the Sherry-Netherland and I did get thoroughly sick of their menus. With careful budgeting, and use of the subway, I could afford to visit museums and go to and fro on the Staten Island ferry, but then I'd come back and face another evening of room service. I used to spend hours on the phone to David, I was so lonely. Bob occasionally asked if I was enjoying myself and I would say, dutifully, yes thank you. Kathy never asked. Once, when I rang their room and she answered, I said it's Lynn and she sang, very sweetly, ‘Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you’ and said she'd got me a present. Oh, thank you, I said (it was nowhere near my birthday) and asked to talk to Bob. We were mid-conversation when she suddenly snatched the phone back and said, ‘You're not Lynn.’
‘Yes I am, Lynn Barber from London.’
‘Why did you say it was your birthday?’
‘I didn't – you did.’
‘Don't cheek me, dollink.’
Bob took the phone back to say, emolliently, ‘She thought you were her friend Lynn N,’ but it confirmed what I'd long suspected, that Kathy didn't even know my name.
Soon afterwards, Bob and Kathy started hiring staff in New York and producing the American edition there, so my services as a courier were no longer required. I was quite relieved, and very untempted when they asked me to come and work for them in New York. By then, I was married to David, buying a house, thinking of starting a family, so it was easy to say no. But I must say English Penthouse became very dull once Bob and Kathy moved out. It became almost like a normal magazine, with proper departments, proper deadlines – it was so well-organised it was boring. By the time I left to start a family in 1974 the whole centre of attention had shifted to New York, and London had become a mere branch office.
But I'm glad I worked at Penthouse in its chaotic early years. Apart from anything else, it was a wonderful education for me, because we were so understaffed I was involved in almost every aspect of the magazine, from ordering stationery to doing layouts to buying book extracts to finding photographic locations. Also, because the magazine was still struggling to survive financially that first year, I developed a fondness for advertisements which you rarely find among print journalists. Most journalists see advertisements as horrid unnecessary intrusions which spoil the look of their pages, but I learned at Penthouse to see them as lifesavers that would pay my salary for the next three months. When Kathy strode through the office shrieking ‘I've got Lufthansa!’ or ‘Six months of Dormeuil!’ we would crack open the (Spanish) champagne and celebrate her success. The fact that Harry then lost us the Lufthansa ad by putting it in the middle of an article about Nazi war atrocities was, I remember, the first time I ever doubted his sagacity. He said it wasn't his job to know which ads went where but I thought it should have been.
People assume that the Penthouse office must have been a hotbed of sex but it certainly wasn't when I was there. Of course there were odd trysts in the stationery cupboard but no more than you would get in any office. Both Bob and Joe Brooks were businesslike when it came to choosing Pets – I remember Bob once saying, ‘We're so successful now I don't have to seduce the girls to get them to pose.’ Joe the same: the choice of Pets was far too serious to waste on the casting couch. Maybe there were abuses lower down the hierarchy – I've heard of freelance photographers telling girls ‘Be nice to me and I'll get you into Penthouse’ – but there are slimy freelancers in every branch of journalism.
In later years, when I became respectable, I would have to defend myself from feminist attacks – How could you work for a soft-porn magazine? Very easily, as it happened. I've never had a problem with pornography. I think schoolboys and lonely old men need something to wank over and Penthouse was more tasteful than most wank mags. As for whether the Pets were exploited – I don't think they were. They were well paid and we took care to protect their identities if they requested it. We had a swap system with Lui in France, and I think a Swedish magazine as well, so that if we found a girl who didn't want to have her pictures published in England because her parents might see, we would exchange her with a French or Swedish girl who had similar reservations. Bob was always keen to find ‘virgins’ – not literally, but girls who had not done glamour modelling before. Of course they often lied and said they hadn't when they had, but this was the late 1960s, early 1970s, and quite a lot of girls were willing to strip off. If they were voted Pet of the Year, they were launched on a career, much like a Miss Britain or Miss World, and several of them went on to greater things.
But to get back to the question: was I ashamed to work for Penthouse? No – on the contrary, I am proud of it. I know it probably seems deluded now, but we really did feel that we were part of the sexual revolution, fighting a crusade against censorship. When I joined Penthouse there wasn't even a proper vocabulary for talking about sex; half the nitty-gritty was still in Latin – fellatio, cunnilingus, even ‘membrum virile’. We cheered when the Lord Chamberlain abandoned theatre censorship; we positively thrilled when underground magazines like It and Suck came out – I still remember the latter's great front page ‘Twenty Famous Fannies and How They Taste’, starting with Golda Meir. I did witness, by being there, the whole sexual revolution and the death of censorship. Of course everyone now argues that it's all gone too far but I remember the dark ages before the sexual revolution, when the fear around sex was astonishing. The only sex education we got at school was a lecture on menstruation, a lecture on reproduction in the frog and then – bewilderingly – a lecture on
venereal disease. They are so entwined my memory that I still can't see a frog without wondering if it is suffering from tertiary syphilis. So anything that helped demystify the subject, that gave people the vocabulary to talk about it, could only be a good thing – and I would include Penthouse in that.
Actually I played my own little part in the sexual revolution by briefly becoming a sex expert. It started in 1973, when things were getting boring at Penthouse so I was bashing out freelance articles for the women's magazines under a variety of different bylines – ‘Should I sleep with him before marriage?’, ‘How can I tell if he's faithful?’ Then I wrote one called ‘How to improve your man in bed’, which provoked a huge response. So when, a few weeks later, a Penthouse photographer called Amnon Bar-Tur announced that he was setting up a publishing house and did I have a book in me, I said yes, it would be called How to Improve Your Man in Bed. Amnon barely spoke English but he knew a great title when he heard it, and signed me on the spot, for £500. I thought that was a lot of money – it didn't even occur to me to ask for royalties.
I wrote the book in two months and it sold around the world. It was a novelty at the time because sex manuals written by women were almost unknown – the only one I can think of is Marie Stopes's Married Love, which was published in 1918. Actually there were very few helpful sex manuals of any sort. Until The Joy of Sex, the field was dominated by a writer called Robert Chartham who wrote endless books called Sex Manners for Men, Sex Manners for Women, Sex Manners for Couples etc, which were all weirdly obsessed with undressing rather than sex. They had pages and pages on how to remove a woman's bra without her noticing – a pretty futile activity, I would have thought – but it was typical of what in those days was called ‘the art of seduction’. They were books for chaps who basically wanted to manoeuvre a woman into bed without her having a chance to object – not quite date rape but getting on that way.
I was tackling a more realistic problem: how to make your boyfriend a better lover without actually telling him what to do. It seems incredible in retrospect, but in those days you really couldn't say to a man, ‘This is my clitoris, here’, because many men had no idea what a clitoris was or what to do with it, and giving instructions would have been considered outrageously bossy. So my advice was to proceed as for ballroom dancing when you are partnered by some idiot with two left feet and have to somehow steer him in the right direction without appearing to lead. The whole book seems impossibly quaint now, but it was well-intentioned and quite useful for its time.
Amnon, being a photographer rather than a publisher, simply sold the manuscript on to a real publisher called Heinrich Hanau (later prosecuted for publishing Inside Linda Lovelace) and concentrated on taking my photo for the book jacket. This involved weeks of squabbling, with Amnon producing garments he considered sexy and me rejecting them. In the end I consented to wear a long silver dress and five-inch heels and recline on a chaise longue in a sophisticated manner. I also gave interviews, appeared on Call My Bluff, and wrote endless spin-off articles for the women's magazines. Poor David had to put up with his Polytechnic students asking him ‘Are you improved?’, but he took it all with good grace. The only really nasty moment was when the News of the World sent a reporter to doorstep my mother at the school where she was deputy head, to ask what she thought of my book. She was able to answer truthfully that she hadn't read it and didn't intend to.
The book sold well in England but, more importantly, went on to sell around the world. Mehr Spass Mit Mannern, Maak je man meer mans in bed, Como Mejorar al Hombre en la Cama (the Spanish edition, which had a particularly hilarious cover of a man looking suicidal while being nuzzled by a blonde). Years, decades, later I would suddenly get letters requesting Portuguese rights, or Hungarian – you could almost track the progress of sexual liberation around the world by the date each country started publishing How to Improve Your Man in Bed. And for many years afterwards, passing through foreign airports, my eye would suddenly be caught by my own name in a bookshop and I'd think, ‘Oh, I've reached Brazil, have I?’ with a little glow of pride.
Unfortunately I'd sold all the rights to Amnon so I made no money from my international bestsellerdom. But because How to Improve was such a success, I had a huge offer from Simon & Schuster in the States to publish a follow-up and this time, thank God, had the sense to get an agent. The follow-up was meant to be called How to Play Around Happily but then the publishers got cold feet and called it The Single Woman's Sex Book – an inferior title but then it was a vastly inferior book. The trouble was I'd said everything I wanted to say about sex in How to Improve Your Man in Bed, and really had nothing to add. Moreover, I was breastfeeding Rosie when I wrote it, and found it really hard to enthuse about foreplay while worrying about cracked nipples. So my career as a sex expert effectively began with my first sex book and ended with my second. But at least it tided us over financially and enabled me to give up work and start a family.
There was an odd postscript to my Penthouse years. In 1983, when I was still fairly new on the Sunday Express magazine, the editor Ron Hall decided to do a series on ‘the new millionaires’ – new in the sense that they were not besuited City types – and suggested that I should interview Bob Guccione. So I wrote to him in New York and got an instant yes. Bob was then probably at the height of his success. Penthouse was regularly selling over three million a month (and would achieve five million when it had Miss America on the cover in 1984) and had overtaken Playboy in news-stand sales. Moreover the sci-fi magazine Omni, which Kathy launched in 1979, was doing well, especially in Japan, though it never attained its one-million circulation target. In 1982 Forbes Magazine put Bob's net worth at $400 million. He had bought a mansion on the Upper East Side that was supposed to be the largest private house in Manhattan, and he had begun to amass his ‘museum-quality’ collection of Impressionist and Modern artworks. He had come good even perhaps beyond his wildest dreams and Kathy was still by his side.
I wanted to laugh when I saw the house – it was the purest Citizen Kane. You walked down a long marble hall with a ‘Roman-style’ swimming pool with pillars and mosaics to your right, till you came to a reception area covered with gloomy Old Masters – a Pietà, a Deposition from the Cross – and a wall of sixteenth-century linenfold panelling that swung away at the touch of a button to reveal a cinema screen. Downstairs in the basement was the gym and a catering kitchen and a security bunker with battalions of security goons watching CCTV screens. The whole house was infested with giant dogs, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, which belonged to Kathy. She gave me a guided tour later, pointing out her ‘24-carat gold mosaic step-in whirlpool tub’ and all the loos and washbasins ‘carved out of one solid block of finest Italian Carrara marble’. She looked exactly the same as I remembered her and still called me ‘dollink’.
Bob was wearing his usual absurd clothes – powder-blue suede trousers, silk baseball jacket unzipped to reveal his tons of medallions – but he'd had his hair woven or something. Also – amazingly – he had stopped smoking and even been on holiday for the first time in his life, and started to sleep normal hours. He seemed relaxed, happy, and very keen to show me his art collection – a lovely Degas of a girl drying herself after a bath, a pink-period Picasso, a Matisse, Rouault, Chagall, Vlaminck, Renoir. When he was a boy, he said, he had a book on French Impressionist art and whenever he saw one of the paintings illustrated in that book for sale, he tried to buy it. He was hurt when I asked if they were genuine, and showed me all the auction catalogues with the prices scribbled in, and told me I could speak to his dealer – he had someone out bidding for a Rouault at that moment.
But then he started talking about his other projects – building a casino-hotel complex in Atlantic City in order to fund his atomic fusion plant. His what? Apparently he had a team of scientists in San Diego working to design an atomic fusion plant that, if successful, would revolutionise the energy industry overnight. But he needed to fund it with the income from his Atlantic City casin
o which wasn't yet built. It was held up for years by an FBI investigation into his supposed Mafia connections – they eventually cleared him of any involvement and granted a gaming licence, but meanwhile the half-built casino had already gobbled up $74 million of his own money. I thought the scheme sounded mad at the time, but on the other hand Bob's schemes always sounded mad – perhaps it would work. But in the event it was these grands projets that were to be his downfall.
The interview is etched in my memory not only because it was the last time I saw Bob and Kathy, but also because it was the first time I ‘found myself’ as a writer and started developing my own style. The visit was also memorable because Joe Brooks, the art editor from London who'd moved to New York with Bob and Kathy, took me out to lunch and at the end ran his hand down my cheek and said ‘Do you want to have sex?’ ‘No thank you, Joe,’ I said politely. ‘Sure? OLDC?’ [On location doesn't count – a well-worn line in film and media circles.] ‘Yes, absolutely sure, thank you, though it's very kind of you to ask.’ I was not being ironic. Joe Brooks was a famously expert lover, the Warren Beatty of the magazine world, whereas I was a rather frayed Finsbury Park mother, whose figure even at its best had never come up to Penthouse standards. So it was kind of him to ask. But I also found it easy to say no.