In all the talk of capital improvement and rising stocks, it seemed impertinent to mention coffee, but Armitage eventually slipped in a suggestion that they ask for it to be served in the screening room, and received almost total support.
The room they moved into was designed with the care evident elsewhere. It had a dual purpose, Armitage explained; although known as the screening room, it was more often used as a lounge. The low, velvet-upholstered easy chairs could be drawn together in rows to seat as many as eighty on a wet afternoon when play was impossible on the courts. He had a film library of most of the classic championship matches since the Smith-Nastase Wimbledon final of 1972. Once a film was running, an audience wouldn’t shift until championship point was played, whatever the weather did, so in the planning he hadn’t underestimated the comfort factor.
For the screening of Dr. Serafin’s film, five chairs were grouped behind a glass-topped coffee table. Dryden lingered by the door till he saw where Valenti was heading, and then moved toward the chair at the opposite end. He happened to notice that Serafin motioned Melody to the seat beside him. She gave her long skirt a twitch and slanted her legs his way, taking the cigarette he offered. “Do you suppose smoking is a forbidden activity on a tennis ranch?” she asked as she held her face toward the flame.
Dryden shook his head. “The place was built on prize money put up by the American Tobacco Company. The only objection I can think of is that these are Winstons. Keep the brand name under your finger like this and we might not be thrown out.”
She looked quite serious and then laughed. “That’s a cute idea. I’ll pour you a coffee, then I can tap you for another illicit Winston with a clear conscience. Black or white? I’m sure it’s here for us to help ourselves.”
“Black, if you please. I’m still a little muzzy from the Dow Jones Index.” But it was easier talking to Melody without Valenti at his other elbow. She was undoubtedly put there to soften him up for the hard sell, but she was doing it sweetly.
Dick Armitage handed coffee to his other guests, and asked Serafin if he wished to say a few words to introduce the film.
“No. It speaks for itself.”
So he gave a signal, and a large screen slowly unfurled on the facing wall. Apparently by the same mechanism, blinds descended at the windows.
A projector whirred, and the gray surface of the screen changed to dazzling gold.
Yellow of various intensities is often described as gold, but true gold has a translucent quality that sets it apart.
For up to ten seconds the screen and the faces of the watchers were radiant with this unique color. Then the gold began to merge into an ocher shade, and Dryden became aware that he was watching the effect of pure sunlight on a close-up of softly tanned human flesh. As a suggestion of pink tinged the surface, the gold shimmered again on myriad tiny hairs, giving it the texture of silk.
A girl’s stomach.
From the top left of the screen, as the camera zoomed out, a neatly formed navel came into frame, confirming Dryden’s supposition. He felt like applauding, the camera-work was so effective.
Across the screen appeared the single word GOLDENGIRL.
The dead-still white lettering emphasized the delicate movement of the skin.
There were no credits. The camera stayed with its subject, the just perceptible movement of the navel toward the center of the screen confirming that the shot was moving outward. At the base of the screen, the sunlight discovered a concentration of flaxen down which slowly intensified in thickness and profusion until a triangular mound of fine gold hair was defined.
A warning signal sounded in Dryden’s mind. There was nobody sharper than Dick Armitage in tennis, but off court he wasn’t noted for his powers of discrimination. What was on the screen didn’t look like an athlete training for the Olympics. It was more like the intro to a blue film. Professionally made, he conceded, but no different in kind from the skinflicks men with an eye to a fast buck had been purveying since the days of the brothers Lumière. He was no prude. While Goldengirl stayed on the screen he was as ready as the next man to enjoy her visible assets. But let anyone suggest the Dryden Agency might promote them, and he was going to sound off like Lincoln on human rights.
She was fully in frame, a tall, proud and undeniably beautiful creature, motionless against a blue background, the breeze carrying wisps of her long, blond hair round her body and against the underside of her breast, affirming its roundness. The filming was obviously done at a high altitude, for the blue was as much mountain as sky.
By degrees, the camera angle shifted to the girl’s left. It meant filming directly into the sun, so that her profile was cast into a dramatic silhouette edged with gold, reminiscent of the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, the celebrated documentary of the Nazi-staged Olympic Games of 1936. The shot into the sun is such a cliché of commercials that Dryden ought to have been squirming in his seat, but this unhurried treatment seemed to have rediscovered the heroic quality of Riefenstahl’s film.
It was odd he didn’t recognize the girl. One of his mental recreations was naming the girls in TV commercials. He reckoned he knew the face of every blonde, brunette and redhead modeling for ads across the country, if he couldn’t always recall the name. Names weren’t so important. The same girls used half a dozen different ones, and got all the work they could from knitting patterns to nude shots, so anyone with a stake in the advertising business needed to be able to spot them. It didn’t please a company chairman to open a girlie mag and see a full frontal of the same girl who sedulously applied his brand of vapor rub to her wheezing husband’s chest each night on all the major networks. It went completely against good merchandising practice, and it was Dryden’s job to see it didn’t happen; his nightmare that it might.
Goldengirl wasn’t in any of the agency catalogues, he was certain. It was not a face you could forget. There was an elegance to it, a dignity in repose, a marvelous tragic quality about the eyes and mouth that film men would have pawned their Oscars to get under contract.
As he watched the camera’s movement around her, he marveled that a girl so stunning had been ignored by the media. He half-expected some blemish to appear in shot and account for it, scar tissue or a grotesque birthmark.
She was flawless.
The camera had panned completely around her to the position of the opening shot and was zooming in again for a repeat of the close-up, with the navel traveling across the screen like a scarab traversing the desert. When it reached the point where the title had been superimposed before, it stopped.
Expecting a cut to one of the standard postures in the erotic repertoire, Dryden was unprepared, to say the least, when a set of tabulated statistics appeared against the gold background.
The shot moved out, dissolving into a second sequence which made it clear, if the statistics had not, how tall she was. Till now, there had been nothing in frame to compare her with. Here she was indoors, in a gym, and she was not alone. Beside her, at the level of her shoulder, stood a man in a white coat holding a pen: Dr. Serafin.
His voice came over on the soundtrack, Dryden’s first opportunity of hearing it in more than a few terse words. The accent was American, with a trace of central Europe in the clipping of consonants.
“I want to invite you to look carefully at this young woman, for as well as being singularly attractive, she is one of the most interesting subjects physiologically who has ever appeared on film. This begins to become apparent if we examine her by means of radiography.”
A full-length X-ray was superimposed on the screen, so that the doctor appeared to be standing beside the girl one moment, her skeleton the next.
“You will see that although she is remarkably tall for a woman at one meter eighty-eight, and one would expect to somatotype her as an ectomorph according to the Sheldon classification, her upper development is unquestionably in the mesomorph range. Notice particularly the width of the shoulders and thorax. The facility of
a larger-than-average rib cage allows, of course, for increased lung capacity. An individual’s aerobic capacity, which we define as the maximum amount of oxygen that can be absorbed, transported and used per minute of sustained work, depends on the size of the lungs and heart, the amount and hemoglobin content of the blood, and the mass of muscle tissue. If we now examine the muscular formation” — the skeleton dissolved into the more pleasing image of Goldengirl fully fleshed — “we see that she possesses the well-muscled thighs and calves of women many centimeters shorter in height. The traditional criteria of beauty in women — the relative sizes of bust, waist and hips — are, I would say, in a pleasing ratio, while the back and buttocks — if you would kindly turn round, my dear — have the classic appearance” — he made parabolas in the air with his pen — “of the female form.”
Dryden took a check on the rest of the audience. Valenti was biting the end of an unlighted cigar, and Armitage was leaning forward, with his chin supported by his right fist. Melody blew a small cloud of smoke at the screen.
“It is a well-documented fact,” Dr. Serafin continued, “that during the last hundred years there has been a tendency for children to reach the age of puberty earlier, grow taller and develop better physiques than their forebears. The trend in linear growth is about one centimeter per decade in the United States and Western Europe. Of course, I am speaking of the average. Already you will find some girls as tall as this one — taller, indeed. You are most unlikely to find one with a comparable physical capacity, and I speak with an experience of forty years of anthropometry. If the trend I described continues, we may expect our idealized woman of the twenty-first century to look like this, with the physiological advantages, the deeper chest, greater lung power, stronger cardiovascular system and muscular development to match her stature. Turn around, my dear. In short, this girl is eugenically thirty or forty years ahead of her time. And that, as you shall shortly see, has some interesting implications.”
The film cut to a shot of the girl in a gold leotard — they knew how to implant their message — standing beside a set of weights.
“These are training weights of forty kilos normally used by male athletes,” explained the doctor. “She will now give a short demonstration of her agility. This is not in any sense a test of her strength. I should merely like you to observe the fluidity and ease of her movements.”
She crouched at the weight and completed the power-clean movement with smooth control, repeating it nine times, followed by similar repetitions of bicep curls, half squats and bench presses.
“Her pulse rate, if I took it,” said Dr. Serafin when the girl had finished and stood breathing deeply but evenly at his side, “would have increased to over one hundred and fifty beats per minute during this exercise, but will return to its normal fifty within two minutes. I have undertaken an extensive program of tests and measurements with her over many months, using as a basis statistical data obtained from the Stanford Physical Performance Research Laboratory, the Harvard Physical Fitness Index, the Soviet GTO Mass Fitness Program and the Freiburg Institute of West Germany, and I am able to tell you with authority that this young woman’s performances place her in the top two or three per cent of women, irrespective of age, in each of the tests.” Dr. Serafin made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “But physiological data are of consequence only to physiologists. An electrocardiograph is capable of exciting me, but I cannot expect it to stir the imaginations of men and women at large. No, there are other tests of physical capacity, rather less precise than the measurements we carry out in the laboratory, but sufficiently validated by mass participation over many years to establish criteria. I refer, of course, to popular sports. Measurable sports. In particular, track and field athletics. Here we have a mass of evidence of the ultimate achievements of men and women in a number of physical activities. Sports journals are filled each year with details of thousands of athletic performances from all over the world.
“Certain athletic activities hold no interest for our present inquiry. Jumping and throwing, for example, now require sophisticated techniques that have raised the standard of performance, but destroyed the purity of the events as simple physiological measures. It takes at least three years of intensive coaching and training to bring a high jumper to the limit of his potential, and anyone who has observed a — what is the expression? — Fosbury Flop cannot conceivably classify it as a useful physiological test.
“Fortunately, there are still events in which the activity is relatively unencumbered by coaching techniques, of which running over short distances is the obvious example. Yes, you may rightly point out that the start of a sprint race is a technical trick with some influence on the total performance, and I concede that. I am also aware that coaching manuals are filled with complicated information on details of stride length, knee lift, posture and so on, but I put it to you that running at the fastest speed of which one is capable is really a basic and natural exercise. In the last fifty years, the world record for one hundred meters for men has been improved by less than half a second, and that may be due as much to advances in shoe design and track surfaces as to coaching techniques.”
Here the film returned to an outdoor setting. Dr. Serafin was standing beside a stretch of running track, drawing the hair back from his forehead against a slight breeze.
“So it is instructive,” he resumed, “to see what our eugenically precocious young woman can achieve as a runner. I should tell you here that at no time in her life has she taken part in competitive athletics. You will not find her name in any of those voluminous statistical manuals. First, let us see her running freely, without regard to any athletic event, simply enjoying the experience of moving at speed.”
Goldengirl was wearing a tracksuit in this shot, a white singlet and the predictable gold silk shorts, but she was barefoot. She was running easily and evenly along the track, her hair springing on her shoulders. Her movement gave the exciting impression of power in reserve, long legs stretching over the track, arms swinging effortlessly in the same rhythm. Whatever Serafin was trying to prove, this girl in motion was superb, an expression of physical well-being that lifted the spirit like the opening bars of a great concerto.
Then Dryden felt his right foot press against the carpet in a reflex movement, as if stepping on the accelerator of his SSK. The girl was powering herself to a faster rate, smooth and controlled as automatic transmission, her hair rippling behind her in a shock of gold, arms pumping in piston-rod precision, legs consuming the track. The background was a blur as the camera panned with her burst of speed for perhaps five seconds, when she slipped into a slower gear and trotted up to Dr. Serafin’s side.
The interesting thing was that in spite of the assurance that this was a run for pure enjoyment, the girl’s face gave no hint of elation, even of satisfaction. She looked, as she had through the film, detached and devoid of emotion of any sort.
The doctor was speaking again: “Now that she has warmed up, let us invite her to run one hundred meters. Put on your spikes for this, my dear. I shall start her from this end of the track and she will be electronically timed as she passes the line at the end of the straight.” He paused for Goldengirl to lace up her spikes. “Are you ready now? Then go to the center lane and wait for my instructions.” He picked up a starting pistol from which a lead trailed. “On your mark.”
She approached the starting line and got into the crouch position. Without starting blocks she was handicapped already.
“Set.”
She raised her hips and leaned forward over her fingers, her arms not straight as was usual, but bent slightly at the elbows, bearing the weight of her trunk, ready to use their strength to produce a more powerful impetus.
The gun cracked, and she was in motion, her body angled unusually low to the track for the first thirty meters or more. The transition from photographic stillness to rapid sprinting was dramatic, but less thrilling to Dryden than the surge of acceleration in her first free ru
n. Yet the crispness of her running, even without opposition to measure her by, was demonstrated beyond question. Here was a marvelous athletic talent.
She crossed the line, eased down, stopped, put her hands on her knees and drew breath, repaying the oxygen debt she had incurred.
Dr. Serafin appeared in shot again. “The electronic timing gives us eleven point seventeen seconds. If achieved in competition, that would rank her in the top half-dozen women sprinters of the world this year. It is right to mention that this film was made at an altitude of six thousand feet and that the thinner air is advantageous to sprinters. Against that, one might set the absence of starting blocks and, of course, competition. If I state that in Mexico City in 1968, at an altitude of seventy-five hundred feet, Miss Wyomia Tyus, of the United States, set the Olympic Record at exactly eleven seconds, it puts this time in perspective.
“Allow me to conclude with a simple mathematical observation. If you study the heights of the world’s leading twenty-five women sprinters, you will find that the average is one hundred seventy-two point three centimeters, almost sixteen centimeters less than the young woman you have just seen. Now, it is a fact that the maximum force a muscle can produce is proportional to its cross-sectional area. If, as I contend, her muscularity is in direct proportion to her height, and the ratio between the average height and hers is called r, then the ratio between any two corresponding areas of muscle will be r2, as will the maximum forces those muscles can produce. The ratio between our young woman’s height and the average is one point zero nine to one; the ratio of muscular strength is correspondingly one point nineteen to one. In other words, she is nine per cent taller than the average of the world’s best, and her muscular strength is greater by as much as nineteen per cent.” Serafin spread out his hands. “You may begin to understand why we have called her Goldengirl.”
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