smell of the tobacco that had been used to disguise it (lavender-scented cachous, I seem to remember, were a favourite ploy of the ladies) that they would broach the subject with which of course they had always known they were going to be leading: discland’s most eligible bachelor girl and the man question.
‘Miss Cogan’ – a casual crossing of the legs; a rush of blood to the ears (those boiled lugs); perspiration flooding the pancake between nose and upper lip – ‘your love life seems to fascinate a lot of people. They find it strange that a good-looking girl’, etc.
‘Not so strange. I just haven’t met the right one. How can I think of marriage until …’ You can easily fill in the rest.
The unlikely truth is that, although I grew up surrounded by men who were far from shy about showing off their bodies – the boys in the chorus were tirelessly exhibitionistic, rarely bothering to close the doors of their dressing-rooms and padding around more or less a hundred-per-cent peeled – I was alarmingly vague about the male anatomy.
I had no idea what went on in the downstairs department. Really went on, I mean. I had a vague idea that something was put somewhere, but where and how was a giant mystery.
(‘Meat injection’, an expression I had overheard once or twice, was pretty graphic. But I remained ignorant as to the exact mechanics, not to mention the motivation. I didn’t even rind out what ‘B.U.R.M.A.’ or ‘E.G.Y.P.T.’ meant on envelopes until long after the war was over. When I was told they stood for ‘Be Upstairs Ready My Angel’ and ‘Eager to Grab Your Pretty Tits’ – and, worse, that ‘N.O.R.W.I.C.H.’ was code for ‘Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home’ – I blushed crimson.)
All this may seem strange – it may even seem barely credible – of somebody who by the mid-fifties would be able to count Diana Dors and an actress I later learned was known in Hollywood as the British Open, among her friends. But what you have to remember is that we’re still talking about the years of buttoned-upness and relative austerity before the lid blew off in the sixties.
I didn’t know I was living in ‘the vice capital of Europe’ in 1952, which is the year we moved to London in the interest of furthering my career (I was twenty). I hadn’t yet been introduced to the basement drinking clubs that had sprung up almost outside our front door in Kensington – Frisco’s, run by Frisco himself (‘Ah’s the biggest buck nigger in town’); the little House; Ruby Lloyd’s Maisonette. (I still didn’t drink.)
One club I had been introduced to – The Court Club in Mayfair – I visited several times without realising that the constant traffic through the curtained door at the side of the bar meant it was virtually a brothel.
I see now I was green as goose-shit. I knew Diana Dors’s husband, Dennis Hamilton. I had been to his parties and he had occasionally been to mine. But I was as shocked as anybody by the revelations about his ‘fish book’ – his directory of available knock-offs – and the two-way mirror installed in the bedroom at ‘Bel-Air’, his big house in Maidenhead, and then at his London perch in Bryanston Mews. I suspected nothing.
I had known Paul Raymond since he was Paul Quinn, touring the number-threes (which were too good for him) with a mind-reading act he’d bought from a couple of palm-readers on Clacton Pier; I’d even known him before that, when he was Geoff Carlson, a part-time drummer and full-time hawker of nail varnish and hairnets at the funfairs.
I was in a party that he took to Ciro’s the night he was fined £ 5,000 at the London Sessions for keeping a disorderly house at his Revuebar. (The mood was celebratory; in court there had apparently been talk of ‘lust’ and ‘filth’ and ‘disgustingness’ and he had been prepared for the worst.)
After dinner we moved on to the Bal Tabarin, Raymond’s club in Hanover Square, where we were
‘Miss Cogan’ – a casual crossing of the legs; a rush of blood to the ears (those boiled lugs); perspiration flooding the pancake between nose and upper lip – ‘your love life seems to fascinate a lot of people. They find it strange that a good-looking girl’, etc.
‘Not so strange. I just haven’t met the right one. How can I think of marriage until …’ You can easily fill in the rest.
The unlikely truth is that, although I grew up surrounded by men who were far from shy about showing off their bodies – the boys in the chorus were tirelessly exhibitionistic, rarely bothering to close the doors of their dressing-rooms and padding around more or less a hundred-per-cent peeled – I was alarmingly vague about the male anatomy.
I had no idea what went on in the downstairs department. Really went on, I mean. I had a vague idea that something was put somewhere, but where and how was a giant mystery.
(‘Meat injection’, an expression I had overheard once or twice, was pretty graphic. But I remained ignorant as to the exact mechanics, not to mention the motivation. I didn’t even rind out what ‘B.U.R.M.A.’ or ‘E.G.Y.P.T.’ meant on envelopes until long after the war was over. When I was told they stood for ‘Be Upstairs Ready My Angel’ and ‘Eager to Grab Your Pretty Tits’ – and, worse, that ‘N.O.R.W.I.C.H.’ was code for ‘Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home’ – I blushed crimson.)
All this may seem strange – it may even seem barely credible – of somebody who by the mid-fifties would be able to count Diana Dors and an actress I later learned was known in Hollywood as the British Open, among her friends. But what you have to remember is that we’re still talking about the years of buttoned-upness and relative austerity before the lid blew off in the sixties.
I didn’t know I was living in ‘the vice capital of Europe’ in 1952, which is the year we moved to London in the interest of furthering my career (I was twenty). I hadn’t yet been introduced to the basement drinking clubs that had sprung up almost outside our front door in Kensington – Frisco’s, run by Frisco himself (‘Ah’s the biggest buck nigger in town’); the little House; Ruby Lloyd’s Maisonette. (I still didn’t drink.)
One club I had been introduced to – The Court Club in Mayfair – I visited several times without realising that the constant traffic through the curtained door at the side of the bar meant it was virtually a brothel.
I see now I was green as goose-shit. I knew Diana Dors’s husband, Dennis Hamilton. I had been to his parties and he had occasionally been to mine. But I was as shocked as anybody by the revelations about his ‘fish book’ – his directory of available knock-offs – and the two-way mirror installed in the bedroom at ‘Bel-Air’, his big house in Maidenhead, and then at his London perch in Bryanston Mews. I suspected nothing.
I had known Paul Raymond since he was Paul Quinn, touring the number-threes (which were too good for him) with a mind-reading act he’d bought from a couple of palm-readers on Clacton Pier; I’d even known him before that, when he was Geoff Carlson, a part-time drummer and full-time hawker of nail varnish and hairnets at the funfairs.
I was in a party that he took to Ciro’s the night he was fined £ 5,000 at the London Sessions for keeping a disorderly house at his Revuebar. (The mood was celebratory; in court there had apparently been talk of ‘lust’ and ‘filth’ and ‘disgustingness’ and he had been prepared for the worst.)
After dinner we moved on to the Bal Tabarin, Raymond’s club in Hanover Square, where we were
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