Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  There’s a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood… I hadn’t exactly taken it, I’d stumbled into the current at the right moment. And it wasn’t so much a tide as a time: the ’sixties.

  The cabaret Ramage and I were watching was called Harlem Heatwave, and, seated beside him in the Pigalle in Piccadilly with the mambo music drowning all conversation, my eyes remained fixed on Fay, the girl he had pointed out to me who was my date. But I was uneasy.

  After the cabaret ended, Fay and the lissom octoroon who was Ramage’s friend joined us at the table. We drank champagne and shouted at one another above the noise. Fay was twenty-seven and a New Yorker. She was bright, sassy and she’d been around. She was fun, but I was apprehensive about what lay ahead. A showgirl, she was much more experienced in sex than myself and I knew the reputation blacks had as lovers. Blacks had rhythm; they could dance and love like living dreams. How would I shape up in comparison? At the table with Fay and the others in the Pigalle I talked and laughed and played my most engaging self, but I was as nervous as an adolescent on his first date.

  We left the club, saying goodnight to Ramage and his date. ‘Mmm … nice car,’ Fay purred, settling into the deep leather of the Jaguar’s passenger seat. At my flat she disappeared into the bathroom, then returned to pick through her bag and set out cigarette papers and a packet of something that wasn’t tobacco on the coffee table. I watched her deftly roll a joint. Lighting it, she hissed in a long deep drag. Still holding her breath, she reached out to pass it to me.

  I stared at her scarlet-tipped fingers and the slim cigarette she held out to me. This was a seminal moment. I took it with an attempt at easy nonchalance, put it to my lips and inhaled as she had. Acrid choking smoke funnelled into my lungs. A storm of coughing convulsed me, my eyes streamed with tears.

  Fay stared at me in astonishment. ‘You never done grass before?’ she demanded, incredulous. ‘Man, you white cats here sure is backward and dee-prived.’

  The alarm woke me at 6 am. Fay’s head lay on the pillow next to me, the rest of her firm dancer’s body hidden beneath the covers. I got up to make coffee, came back with two cups, ‘I have to work. Sleep, you can make breakfast and let yourself out whenever,’ I told her.

  I went to shower and to dress. Everything had gone OK, miscegenation had taken place. And miscegenation had been terrific, I thought. And so had dope, once I’d learned how not to choke on it. It made music better and sharpened the senses while liquor only blunted them; if this was ‘drugs’, I was won over. Dope was a real discovery, a watershed event in my life. Making love to Fay while high had been extraordinary. So I felt, but how had it been for her? Before I left to drive to work I sat down on the bed and overcame my hesitation to ask her. She knew the reputation of black men, was it true they were, how could I put it … more outstanding, better at sex than white men?

  Propped up against the pillows, coffee cup in hand, Fay looked bemused by my query. Her eyes went wide as a startled fawn’s. ‘Why, ah just don’t know, man,’ she said. ‘Ah just never bin with a black boy. Have you?’

  Through happy accident, James Garrett and Partners had opened its doors for business the same month that Time magazine ran its cover on Swinging London, which is said to have launched the ’sixties.

  The purpose of the company was to make TV commercials, and the partners who owned it were Jim Garrett, the director Richard Lester, both of whom I’d known at TVA, and myself – who had by now discovered he was no auteur and was happy to join the new venture. The idea was James’s who was the driving force of the company. Renting a small house in New Bond Street, we installed cutting rooms, took on the half-dozen people necessary and started work.

  Lester was a gifted director. He had an original eye and quick anarchic imagination. Commercials he made had a distinctive quality. He was in demand, and our new company’s business was good from the start.

  And meanwhile Britain had become transformed. All my life I’d known it as a place of austerity, governed by a mentality born of rationing and the virtue of going without. Now almost everything had changed – money, music, clothes … and drugs. It was another country, and it happened to be mine. I was here with a red sports car, an American Express card and a healthy and not-so-healthy urge to explore all of it.

  Fay reached for the joint with crimson talons. Taking a deep drag, she stretched luxuriously upon the white sofa. ‘There’s this cat, Billy, you gotta meet,’ she said from behind a cloud of smoke.

  ‘Yes?’ I asked.

  ‘Got a pad just down the street apiece from your office. He’s crazy, you’d dig him, man.’

  ‘Then ask him for Friday, I’ve got some people coming round,’ I suggested.

  ‘This cat don’t go out, the world goes to his place,’ Fay said.

  After finishing work at Garrett’s around 8 pm next day, I picked her up and we went to call on him.

  The house was in Mount Street, directly opposite the Connaught Hotel in the heart of respectable Mayfair. A middle-aged housekeeper answered the door. She didn’t look pleased to see us, but she didn’t ask who we were, either. Leading us downstairs, she showed us into a library furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs to seat a dozen or so people. All were occupied, while further guests sat or sprawled upon cushions on the floor. Their clothes ranged from business suits to hippie beads and flower-wear. Some looked wasted, as if they’d been there for days. The place was dense with marijuana fumes, yet the atmosphere was not torpid and heavy as so often among dope smokers, but charged and vibrant. And in the centre of the group stood Billy, a 35-year-old man with a lean patrician face and the bearing of a Roman emperor – an impression heightened by the fact that he was wearing nothing but a crimson blanket. Wrapped – at times revealingly – in his toga, he was haranguing the room when our arrival interrupted his flow. Abandoning what he was saying, he strolled over to welcome Fay and myself to his circle, but we were no more than a dozen words into the banalities one exchanges at such moments when I felt a thump against my leg. Glancing down, I saw that he’d plunged a hypodermic syringe into my thigh. It had been done with a quick, unaimed flick of the hand and the needle going through my trouser leg into the muscle was so fine I’d felt no prick.

  It was startling, though, and, transfixed by the needle, I didn’t dare to move my leg. ‘That’s a diabolical liberty. You do that to all your guests?’ I asked him.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he assured me cheerfully. ‘And you’ll feel just great in a few minutes.’

  Of course, he was right, my irritation vaporised and I felt terrific.

  Methedrine, by Burroughs-Wellcome. Speed is a crude name for it; it was the Perrier-Jouët of the amphetamines, compared to which sulphate was the rough Algerian red. Methedrine was magical. It made you realise your entire previous life you’d been suffering from chronic flu and only now were the person you were meant to be. It transformed you into a raconteur and wit and turned quite boring people into your very best friends. It gave you unbounded energy, a pulse rate of 200 and the certainty you could get away with anything. It made the sun sparkle on the greyest day, and the hangover following a binge could last for a whole sickening, gutted week. The cure was to take more Methedrine, of course; it existed in tablet form as well, and was readily available through Billy’s pusher.

  Apart from the Mayfair flat, Billy also had a country seat in Cornwall, where his father was Lord Lieutenant. His family was rich because they’d owned the London and Great Western Railway, which had been nationalised to form part of British Rail. The payoff was lush, and along with it Billy had received a London–Cornwall first-class return ticket in the form of a 22-carat gold plaque and valid for his lifetime.

  Billy was well educated and well read. Highly intelligent, he could have done well in any field he chose to enter. Instead he had chosen to become a drug addict. He was already quite a way down the path by the time I met him. He went out rarely, but instead he ran a salon. Its composition was mixed and broad,
sometimes very broad indeed.

  His apartment was only yards from my office, but to pick up drugs was not the only reason I went there. He had a free-ranging mind and an original view on the world. Through him certainly I acquired a drug addiction which would last for more than eight years – but also a picture.

  His large apartment had several guest bedrooms, one of which had been occupied for months by his personal portrait painter. An accomplished but improvident artist, Costa had started borrowing money from him several years before. Billy lent it generously, insisting only that Costa work it off producing portraits of his patron, views of the Cornwall house and studies of the yacht Venturer, which Billy no longer used. But Costa was a gambler and it seemed impossible for his output to catch up with his ever-mounting debt. Billy had long ago run out of original subjects and Costa, working on large canvasses, was kept busy copying family snapshots and old picture postcards.

  I had just moved into a new flat. While I was visiting Billy one evening, he asked how it was. ‘Depressing,’ I told him. ‘Modern empty space with nothing in it. I have to get furniture and paintings for the walls.’

  ‘I’ll give you a painting,’ he offered. ‘That one – if you don’t mind it being of me?’

  On the contrary, I told him. Of the several portraits of him by Costa, it was the one I liked best, a night seascape with Billy on the deck of Venturer, wearing a striped blazer and yachting cap. I said I would love to have it, but if he really wished to give it me I wanted to take it with me when I left. Billy’s periods of manic exhilaration each lasted seventy-two hours or longer, at the end of which the salon was sent packing and he would retire with a carton of milk and a bowl of sleeping pills. The house would be closed tight as a drum, the telephone disconnected, the housekeeper thankfully answering no knock, the master abed. The painting was large and it would be difficult to get into a taxi, but obtaining it later would be impossible.

  Billy was studying the portrait critically, as though examining it for the first time. ‘No, you can’t have it now,’ he said.

  I knew where I would hang it, I could see it in place. ‘Either I take it with me now or I don’t want it,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh very well,’ he said, exasperated but expansive. ‘Take it now, if you must, but that get-up looks ridiculous. I want to send Costa round to change my clothes.’

  And a few days later he did so. The painting of him hangs on the wall opposite me as I write. Grasping the rigging, he stands on the deck of his black-sailed schooner, hair streaming in the wind and head raised to confront the gale which has flipped back the corner of his fur-collared cloak to expose its crimson lining, the clothes he has chosen to dress in for posterity.

  ‘Here’s an idea,’ said Kim Waterfield as he navigated his Bentley Continental slowly down the King’s Road one sunny October afternoon. ‘Let’s do something together.’

  An amusing, good-looking man, he was a leader of the Chelsea set and the greatest fun, for he seemed to take nothing in life entirely seriously, including himself. But he shared with Lord Byron a reputation of being dangerous to know, so I was wary. ‘I don’t want to go into business or anything,’ I said.

  He looked hurt. ‘I was going to suggest we throw a really spectacular party. As co-hosts,’ he added.

  ‘Oh, I think that’s a fine idea,’ I replied.

  He brightened immediately and made a call to his PA. It was the first car telephone I’d ever seen. It worked through a radio link and had no number but a call-sign instead. I was very impressed. A few years before, while engaged to Barbara, daughter of Jack Warner the Hollywood mogul, he’d been found guilty in absentia for allegedly robbing Warner’s Cap d’Antibes villa of some papers. Kim was extradited in 1960 following escape from arrest in Tangier, where he had a night-club and water-ski school, and sent to France to serve a four-year sentence. He obtained release after only a year following the still-unexplained intervention of Warner (who also waived £25,000 damages awarded by the Court). By the date we were cruising the King’s Road in his Bentley Kim had more than recovered from this French reversal, and was back in business and enviably rich.

  My own approach to throwing a party was haphazard, Kim’s was not. In the several meetings necessary to discuss the arrangements for our joint bash he revealed himself to be a perfectionist. ‘No, the champagne has to be Roederer Cristal,’ he insisted. ‘Masses of flowers of course – it will take a day to dress the house. We’ll need a very pretty waitress in uniform and a butler – another girl for coats. As to the guest list … everyone has to be pretty, witty or rich. It does cheer everyone up so.’

  I protested, but he was adamant on the rule and by now I knew him to be highly selective – young women must be slim, beautiful and over 5’ 8”. ‘On the celebrities – I’ll do Peter Sellers and Diana Dors and Linda Christian, and I can deliver Bob Hope,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t he frightfully old?’ I asked.

  ‘Frightfully, and his manager’s even older, they’ve only got half a used heart between them. They’re at the Savoy, I’ll get Samantha Eggar to bring them.’

  Mindful of his diktat, I went through my address book and sent my own invitations: Alex Howard, Ivor and Natassia Mottran, Shirley Were … Not everyone accepted; Fisher was in East Africa looking for moths, Nigel Broackes said he couldn’t possibly attend – the party sounded far too modish, louche and racy for him.

  Sixty guests were invited to the event, over 200 came. My date was Tania Edye, a model whose photograph I’d first seen in Time Magazine in that seminal article on London. She had invited her 17-year-old brother Anthony, who only the day before had left Harrow. ‘Will there be girls there?’ he enquired eagerly. He’d passed his last four years in homosexual confinement, women were an unknown race to him.

  The party was immensely crowded, hugely successful. Kim’s house became so crammed, that near midnight, I grew aware that the 200-year-old building was quivering, its wooden floors vibrating with the weight of so many people; a fine rain of plaster was drifting from the ceilings to dust the guests beneath. Dr Stephen Ward, whom I’d known for years, came with two girls in tow, introducing them to Tania, Anthony and myself: Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler.

  Keeler was dark, beautiful, quiet and composed; Mandy Rice-Davies blonde and bubbly, giving lip good as she got. She was particularly nice to Anthony, who appeared awkward and badly dressed in his schoolboy clothes in such fashionable company.

  Not until the next day did I hear how the night ended for him. On leaving the party, he’d gone back with Mandy to Ward’s mews house. There she had expertly and imaginatively relieved him of his virginity. He enjoyed the experience enormously, but in the morning over breakfast was mortified to learn that so too had Christine Keeler and Stephen Ward, who’d watched the event with keen pleasure through a twoway mirror. They assured him his performance had been admirable.

  Meanwhile, at the house in Chelsea the party degenerated as all good parties should. Peter Sellers grew increasingly jumpy and paranoid, Bob Hope’s elderly manager became overcome and had to be escorted back to the Savoy, but the revel was still kicking when Tania and I left. We found ourselves in the street with Linda Christian and Edmund Purdom, the four of us looking for a taxi. They were Kim’s guests; I’d met neither of them before, though I’d seen Purdom in Hollywood costume epics, while she was better known for her off-screen romances, widely reported in the press. Before Purdom she’d been married to Tyrone Power, both actors separately described as ‘the most beautiful man in the world’. She was quite something herself, I thought.

  Now the four of us stood forlorn in the empty street. No taxi passed, there seemed no reason one would ever pass. ‘We could try to make it to my apartment,’ I suggested.

  It lay a quarter of a mile away. Linda grasped my arm and swayed along beside me in high-heeled shoes. I felt I knew her; I’d seen her films through my adolescence and fantasised about her while still at school. She was a few years over her best now
, and a little overweight, but there was a ripe magnificence about her. She had a screen-siren sexiness – a swagger and a boldness that said she could drink with the boys and screw with the boys and do anything she damn well wanted.

  In the early light our little group made it for 200 yards through the deserted streets before Linda came to a determined halt. ‘Fuck this,’ she said and sat down abruptly on the steps of a house. We stood around her irresolute. The streets were empty of all traffic and no one knew what to do. The exhilaration of the party drained away, we felt tired and hopeless.

  And then – what happened next demonstrated that Fate really does exist. For at that moment there hove into view its instrument and servant. Around the corner appeared a rubbish cart pushed by a burly young dustman. Trundling the cart before him, he plodded towards us in the flat misty light. At the sight, Linda rose from the steps, drew herself to her full height, flicked back her hair. Majestically she swept to the kerb and hailed him. He stopped, he stared. He recognised her, and his mouth fell open. With perfect poise she mounted his vehicle and took her place, proud and straight-backed upon it, head raised high, giving her best profile. The rest of us followed in her train as she rode it to her destination like a queen.

  Back at my apartment the curtains were drawn and the lights low. I fixed drinks and put on a Stones record. A little later, as I was freshening Linda’s glass and my own, I became aware that we were alone. Linda was seated on a sofa at the far side of the room. ‘You queer?’ she called over to me.

  ‘Why no, actually,’ I told her.

  ‘Then come here,’ she said.

  The ’sixties was another country. People misbehaved differently there.