Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  ‘I’m sure it must be a highly sexual thing, sexual and violent,’ he said. ‘You asked if it was love. I don’t think it’s love. I believe that there is affection. The audience have bought tickets because they want to see us; we are there because we like doing concerts, we like audiences. There is a rapport, a tremendous basic affection.’

  Lola looked at him. He was linking basic affection with violence and hysteria. It seemed like a very odd coupling to Lola. ‘But on top of that affection is violence,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘And on top of the violence is sex. It is a strange escalation of emotion.’

  Lola decided not to argue with him. She felt he must know a lot more about sex and violence than she did. Mick Jagger was looking at her intently. As though he wasn’t sure if she had understood what he was saying.

  He was strangely attractive, Lola thought. He certainly didn’t have the regular, symmetrical features that were usually associated with being considered handsome. He did have beautiful eyes. They were a hazel, a brown that easily changed shades. And he had a very pleasing puffiness under his eyes, as though his eyes had their own pillows. His large lips were perfectly delineated. They had a natural pout even when he was saying something serious.

  He didn’t dress with the flamboyance of some rock stars. He wasn’t wearing striped satin trousers and strange hats like his fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones. In fact he was dressed more like the London School of Economics accounting and business student he once was. He was wearing a thin navy woollen sweater with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and grey cotton trousers.

  ‘It’s a strange thing,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘You feel a tremendous energy directed at you from the audience. You feel as if they are trying to say something to you. They need something but they’re not sure what it is.’

  Lola knew that feeling of needing something. And not knowing what it was. It often made her feel scared. Or lonely.

  ‘Do you ever feel scared or lonely on stage?’ she said to Mick Jagger.

  ‘No,’ he said, looking perplexed. ‘I’m not alone on stage. I’m one-fifth of The Rolling Stones. We always have fun on stage, always have a laugh.’ He paused. ‘I was a bit scared recently,’ he said. ‘We were playing a huge stadium in Zurich, and we were on a platform thirty or forty feet above the crowd. As we walked on stage somebody jumped on my back. There were ten guys pushing and pulling me, they nearly had me over the edge. I looked down and I was frightened.’

  ‘Ten guys?’ Lola said,

  ‘Yes,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘It was frightening.’

  ‘I thought your audiences were mainly girls,’ Lola said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘In Britain, maybe, but not in other countries. In France, it’s predominantly boys who come to the concerts. In Berlin we just had a concert with twenty-thousand people. As far as we could see, they were all boys. Not a girl anywhere. Maybe it’s some sort of nineteenth-century leftover, you know, a young lady must not appear at the theatre unless correctly chaperoned. Or maybe it’s simply that the girls do not have the money that boys earn. They just don’t earn as much. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.’

  Lola found that interesting. Few people, especially men, were thinking about the disparity in income between men and women. ‘Do you think men and women should have equal pay for equal work?’ Lola said.

  ‘Of course they should,’ he said. ‘Otherwise they’ll never get anywhere. You know guys are going to get somewhere, but most women aren’t. If it sounds like I’m making an anti-feminist statement, I’m sorry, but I’m just speaking from practical experience.’

  Mick Jagger was right, Lola thought. This was not a woman’s world. It was a man’s world. Lola was one of the few females working in the rock world. The performers were mostly men, the journalists were men, the managers were men, the stagehands were men, the road crews were men. Where were the women? Some of them were go-go girls, animated decoration in nightclubs or on television. And the others were screaming in the audience or scrambling to get into the beds of one of the rock stars or their entourages.

  Linda Eastman, the talented photographer who later became Mrs Paul McCartney, was one of the few women working in the rock world. Lola had met Linda a few times. They had a mutual friend, the New York-based, Australian journalist Lillian Roxon. Linda was American and very confident. She had lots of blond hair and a wide stride. She wore reasonably short skirts. Often when she leaned back to take group photographs, whatever underwear she was wearing was completely exposed. Lola thought that Linda must have fabulous balance to be able to lean back like that.

  One day, Lola was waiting to interview Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. The group had had several hit records, including ‘Save Me’ and ‘Touch Me, Touch Me’. Lola loved the song titles, if not the songs themselves. She was sitting in the waiting area of the group’s management company offices, when the door to one of the rooms flew open. Linda Eastman came out. Lola could see Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich in the background. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Linda said. ‘They said there was a fat Australian journalist waiting and I thought it was Lillian.’

  The door to the room Linda had come from was still open. Lola knew that everyone in there had heard. ‘Wrong fat Australian journalist,’ Lola had said to Linda, in what she had hoped was a nonchalant tone. She felt humiliated and flat. And very fat. Not even her new purple false eyelashes could distract her from the fact of her fat.

  Lola could hardly remember anything about the interview with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. She remembered that they had all been polite, not the sorts to describe someone as a fat Australian journalist, especially Dave Dee, a former policeman, who had been very polite. Lola didn’t know if it was Dave Dee who had described her. Maybe being a former policeman had made him feel obliged to be more factual in his descriptions.

  ‘I don’t think you’re being anti-feminist or sexist,’ Lola said to Mick Jagger. ‘I think you’re right. It’s a boy’s world. The rock world is full of boys. Boys in bands in love with themselves and in love with being who they are.’

  Mick Jagger laughed. ‘And you’re not in love with any of them,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  She was particularly not in love with Pete Townshend of The Who. She’d had to interview The Who in their dressing-room after one of their performances. Lola was sitting on a chair adjusting her tape recorder when Keith Moon, The Who’s drummer, walked in, stood beside Lola and removed his trousers. Keith Moon’s crotch was exactly at Lola’s eye level, and uncomfortably close to her face. She concentrated on her tape recorder and pretended not to notice his hairy legs and peculiarly coloured, tight underpants.

  The Who were known as the group that hated each other. They were also known for ending their shows with a spectacular display of destruction. They smashed guitars and drumsticks and amplifiers until the stage was littered with the very expensive debris of broken musical instruments.

  ‘Are you getting along better with each other?’ Lola asked John Entwistle, the bass guitarist. She’d asked him the question because it meant she could turn away from Keith Moon and his tight underpants. ‘We get along much better now,’ said John Entwistle. ‘Sometimes we still get into a fight, but usually as a group and not against each other individually.’

  Lola was trying to come to terms with the notion of fighting as a group – did he mean that they punched each other or other people? Keith Moon and Pete Townshend did seem to have explosive tempers. Pete Townshend moved his chair closer to her and said, ‘The Who aren’t getting on any better. We’re just pretending to get on better. It’s easy to pretend. Everyone pretends. You pretend to get on with your parents, you pretend you’re happy at home because it suits you to keep living there.’

  Lola wished she hadn’t asked the question. There was something about his derisive, indifferent tone that bothered her. ‘The working atmosphere in any group is probably similar to ours,’ Pete Townshend said. ‘There’s got to be friction there. What abou
t The Kinks? They’ve got two brothers in the group. There’s always friction between brothers of any kind. The Walker Brothers. There must be friction there.’

  He’d said the name with a particularly dismissive sneer. Lola wondered what he had against The Walker Brothers. She didn’t have to ask. ‘The Walker Brothers come on stage looking fabulous and fantastic and within weeks they’re on top of the charts,’ he said. ‘Our group is really not glamorous at all. It’s one of our big problems, there’s no glamour.’ Lola thought Pete Townshend might have problems more complex than a lack of glamour. His churlish and unpleasant demeanour, for a start.

  Pete Townshend started talking about how he began smashing up his guitar on stage. Twenty minutes later he was still talking about it. Lola wanted to turn to one of the other members of The Who, but they were both sitting next to Keith Moon, who by now had also removed his shirt.

  Pete Townshend was talking about the sound he achieved by crashing his guitar into the amplifiers when he suddenly stopped talking, looked at Lola, and said, ‘The best sound you can get is Awaah.’ Or maybe he’d said ‘Uwuuh’. Lola had no idea what Awaah or Uwuuh meant. She wasn’t sure he was speaking English. It could have been Urdu.

  ‘Awaah, Awaah. You should know, because you’re Australian,’ he shouted. Lola didn’t think this was the moment to mention that maybe she wasn’t all that Australian. Maybe being born in a DP camp in Germany meant she had missed out on something basic about being Australian.

  Awaah or Uwuuh, he kept repeating. Lola didn’t have a clue about what he was trying to say. Pete Townshend was becoming more and more agitated. He got up and paced around her. ‘Awaah,’ he shouted, ‘Awaah.’

  Lola racked her brains. She’d never heard of ‘Awaah’. He said it made a good sound. That eliminated most food or drink or plants. Maybe it was an animal. Australia did have a lot of peculiarly named animals.

  About twenty minutes later, Pete Townshend had calmed down and was in the middle of a monologue on British music, British fashion and British identity, when Lola suddenly got it. She looked at him. ‘Do you mean AWA?’ She said, enunciating each letter with care. ‘AWA. Amalgamated Wireless Australasia?’

  Lola’s parents had bought a beautiful AWA radio in 1952. Lola had loved the look of it, with its curved lines and dials. On Saturday nights from the time she was eight or nine she would sit, glued to that AWA radio, listening to the latest murder-mystery thriller. Then she would be too scared to go to sleep.

  ‘Awaah, yes, awaah,’ Pete Townshend had said, and sneered. Lola didn’t think that sort of imagined pronunciation transgression warranted a sneer.

  ‘AWA,’ she repeated.

  ‘Awaah,’ he shouted, ‘that’s right. Awaah.’ He looked at her with disdain. ‘You should have known that,’ he said. Pete Townshend whined a lot and seemed to have that sneer semi-permanently smeared on his face.

  He whined about the quality of pop music. ‘There’s no quality in pop music. I was listening to a stereo recording of The Beatles in which the vocals come out of one side and the backing track comes out of the other. When you hear the backing track without the vocals, it’s lousy.’

  Lola looked at him. His features seemed to feel the pull of his personality. His nose hung low, his eyes drooped at the outer edges, his mouth curled down. Even his earlobes frowned and looked down. ‘Are you looking at my nose?’ Pete Townshend said.

  ‘No,’ said Lola. She had read that Pete Townshend had been taunted about his nose from the time he was a child.

  ‘My nose has bothered me my whole fucking life,’ he said. ‘I played the guitar to take attention away from my nose. I’m not bothered by my nose any more. In fact, I hardly think about it.’

  He didn’t sound as though he was no longer bothered about his nose, Lola thought.

  ‘His bad moods show more than most people’s,’ John Entwistle, the bass player, said to Lola. Lola thought that he had probably been trying to make her feel better.

  ‘I heard a journalist saying the other day that your sexually charged gyrations are the secret to your success,’ Lola said to Mick Jagger.

  ‘That’s utter crap,’ he said. ‘There’s no secret to anyone’s success. It’s not about a secret. It’s about doing the best you can, putting everything into it and hoping people will like it. People have to know about what you are doing, but once they know you exist and they can listen to what you’ve got to offer, they either like you or they don’t. It’s got nothing to do with having a secret.’

  ‘Do you think you’re a great singer?’ Lola said. Lola couldn’t, on the whole, tell who sang well and who didn’t. She couldn’t tell if a singer was in tune or was hitting the right notes. Despite years of forced piano lessons, she wasn’t at all musical. When she reviewed records, it was generally the lyrics or the personality of the singer she responded to more than the music.

  ‘Am I a great singer?’ Mick Jagger said. ‘No. I can hardly sing. I’m not Tom Jones or Scott Walker and I couldn’t give a fuck.’ A lot of people had it in for Scott Walker, Lola thought. Pete Townshend fumed about The Walker Brothers. And Mick Jagger wasn’t exactly sounding enamoured of them.

  ‘I’ve got nothing against Scott Walker,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘He’s a good singer. I’m not, but I like to sing. I’ve always liked to sing. I was always singing when I was a child. I used to sing around the house. I used to sing in the church choir. I loved singing.’

  Everyone went to a church or to a synagogue, even Mick Jagger, Lola thought. That thought made her feel quite deprived. There seemed to be something so cosy about belonging to a group. It was a sense of belonging, Lola thought. Lola never really felt as though she belonged. As a family, Renia, Edek and Lola seemed too decimated to be called a group. When you were part of a formal group, you were officially declared a member. Unlike families, in which your membership seemed to be more a matter of random or haphazard occurrence. Your role in a church group, or Boy Scout’s group or knitting group was clear. It all seemed straightforward, you went to meetings, people were friendly. There was order and structure and what seemed to be cohesion. There were rituals and rules and, often, food. Lola’s next-door neighbour when she was a child, Mrs Dent, was always baking apple pies or jam tarts for the church picnic, or other church functions. She was a devout Methodist. Lola often wished she could go to church with Mrs Dent and have a piece of apple pie or a jam tart.

  Lola knew being in a group wasn’t as clear-cut as it seemed. When she was twelve, she had persuaded Edek to join a school friend’s father in a game of tennis one Saturday afternoon. Edek had resisted her pleas for months. ‘Are you crazy?’ he had said. But eventually, he had relented. Lola had been elated. She had planned a tennis club. A series of tennis afternoons with her school friend Suzy and Suzy’s father Bill. ‘Bill’ was an Anglicised version of something Hungarian.

  Bill Gantner was a dark, moustached, handsome man. He was wearing white shorts, a white shirt and white tennis shoes. Edek arrived in his grey weekend trousers and a plastic parka. The match did not get off to a good start. Bill Gantner had to show Edek, who was a more than reasonable table-tennis player, how to hold the racket. Edek swung the racket violently at every ball. He ran all over the court. He sweated profusely and cursed in Yiddish.

  Apart from a series of grunts, all that could be heard from Edek’s side of the court was ‘Oy, cholera’, which could be literally translated as ‘Oh, cholera’, but really meant ‘Oh, fuck’. Edek didn’t manage to hit one ball. Play had to be suspended when Edek tripped, ripped his trousers and grazed his knee. Edek had been in a terrible mood in the car on the way home.

  ‘I am finished with such games,’ Edek had said to Lola.

  ‘Mr Bensky needs to practise,’ Lola’s friend Suzy reported her father had said. The tennis team disbanded before it had even had a chance to bond.

  ‘I also loved listening to singers on the radio or watching them on television,’ Mick Jagger said. Listening to singers on the radio or o
n television didn’t seem like the activities of someone who would grow up to be called a scruffy, rebellious, lawless, licentious bad boy.

  Nothing about Mick Jagger or his apartment was remotely scruffy. His apartment, which Lola heard he’d decorated himself, was orderly and spotless. A grey square box with lights that flickered on and off was artfully placed slightly to the left of the middle of a wooden mantelpiece. Mick Jagger saw her looking at the flickering lights.

  ‘You can’t switch them off,’ he said. ‘It’s a nothing box. I like to sit and look at it.’ Lola had no idea what a nothing box was, but sitting and looking at it seemed harmless enough.

  ‘This has got nothing to do with a nothing box, but you have been accused of being depraved,’ Lola said. ‘Are you depraved?’ Mick Jagger thought for a minute.

  ‘What constitutes depraved behaviour?’ he said. Lola was startled. She hadn’t thought about what constituted depraved behaviour in a rock star. Maybe the journalist who had called Mick Jagger depraved was envisioning a sexual orgy of some sort.

  Lola knew that the snippets that slipped out of her mother about the Gestapo forcing women to go down on their hands and knees and be raped and violated by large, well-trained SS dogs contained depraved behaviour. And the slivers of sentences about doctors infecting hundreds of men, women and children with typhus, cholera, bubonic plague or leprosy and subjecting them to whimsical, nonsensical medical experiments were also about depraved behaviour.

  Renia and Edek had a group of eight friends. They called themselves The Company. The Company went to the movies together on Saturday nights and on Sunday nights they played cards. Mostly at the Bensky’s house, as Renia, who didn’t like to play cards, usually volunteered to make supper. One Sunday night, Mrs Feldman asked Mrs Lipschitz why she looked so tired.