by Ray Connolly
‘They haven’t understood that what has happened to women has happened on a much more fundamental level. They aren’t just being discriminated against but have been contoured by their upbringing to accept a kind of role and to be only functional, and then inefficiently, in this particular kind of role.
‘And the result is that when they opt out of that they generally acquire masculine characteristics which they patch together in a schizophrenic way with lots of feminine things as well. And the result is Barbara Castle or phenomenon of that order.’
She is already at work on her second book, a ‘more intellectual work’, she says, which is concerned with why there hasn’t been a female Mozart and the limitations of female culture. Her writing is already beginning to put strains on her relationship with the man she lives with. He didn’t get past the second page of The Female Eunuch because he thought it was a bit heavy going, and he’s upset because he thinks she’s secretly enjoying being much celebrated.
‘I wrote it as a paperback,’ she says, ‘and it will be on the station bookstalls within less than a year. But I’m beginning to think I missed my mark. John Peel keeps referring to it as “my vulgar novelette”, but I wrote a book because that’s the thing I know best. If I could have made an LP of it I would have done.’
She wishes very much she could have been a musician and is constantly to be found in the company of musicians. It was on the subject of her relationship (real, imaginary and poetically licensed) that she wrote that sensationally forthright article in Oz, which was given a very outraged full page treatment by one of the lighter Sunday newspapers. (‘The not so Nice Time girl’ ran the headline next to bare-breasted pictures of Germaine.)
She pre-empts the criticism that she has few constructive ideas to offer to replace the system of society which she condemns by admitting that she isn’t offering any rule.
‘My ideas are not unthought out,’ she insists, ‘but I don’t know what all the alternatives are so I don’t say. It would be ghastly if I’d said “Now everybody march to this drum.” Nobody has to accept what I’m saying. But I do think it’s time for some kind of change — for the enrichment of everyone’s life.’
POSTSCRIPT Of all the feminists I ever met, Germaine Greer was the only one who ever made me laugh. During our first interview, which I felt unable to offer for publication because of it’s general smuttiness, and which I now think was a gentle mickey-taking exercise on her part, I asked if there was ever a moment in the day when she wasn’t thinking about sex. She gave me the longest, most withering look I had ever encountered. ‘But of course, dear boy,’ she said, ‘I haven’t thought of it once since I’ve been talking to you.’ After her first flush of global celebration, Germaine returned to the world of academia, if that is what one can call the University of Tulsa (Oklahoma), but is now back in England where she has been completing her new book Sex and Destiny.
November 1970
Ann Summers
The remarkable thing about Ann Summers is that she takes herself so seriously. While people may snigger and smirk about her sex supermarket she remains resolutely convinced of the beneficial social services that her wares are offering.
There is nothing, she feels, that is smutty about her little shop, and when someone refers uncomplimentarily to it as the ‘porn shop on the corner’ she is cut to the quick.
Two months ago Ann Summers brought sex into the High Street when her first shop dealing solely in objects and devices specifically aimed at promoting sexual pleasure was opened at Marble Arch. Yesterday, two of her envoys flew to New York to begin plans for the setting up of a chain of stores across America, while in three weeks’ time the next Ann Summers shop will open in Britain.
Chain store sex has arrived in Britain. During the first two months of business the Marble Arch shop has well exceeded expectations. For the first week there were always queues out along the Edgware Road, and although things have quietened down now in the week, Fridays and Saturdays are very busy indeed.
It’s almost become one of the tourist attractions of London. People from all over are trekking around the place and gaping at the variety of thingummyjigs on the display counters.
‘I always wondered what the English did at the weekend,’ says the blushing proprietress. ‘I thought they went out to dinner. Now I can see they must go home to bed.’
Ann Summers is twenty-nine, and came upon the idea of opening a sex supermarket when, holidaying in Germany a couple of years ago, she came across one of the Beate Uhse shops and wandered into it out of vague interest.
‘I was intrigued,’ she says, ‘and so I went around the factory where these things were made and thought why don’t I have a shop. Then when I came back to England I found that you could buy most of these products, but had to face the embarrassment of one of those very nasty hygiene shops where nothing was ever on display, and where you’d be faced with someone of well over sixty in a less than brilliant white coat.
‘And I might say I’d want some pills — and they’d delve down under the counter and billows of dust would come up and then they’d come out with something called Staminoids or Viriloids or something like that. And it would all be very embarrassing.
‘What I want to do is to make sex completely open, to take it off the back street and place it in an entirely acceptable and hygienic form on the high streets.’
She is a surprising young woman with a career history that would make even arch feminist Helen Gurley Brown admire her.
She was, of course, brought up in a convent — where else would a lady running a sex supermarket ever be educated, indeed? ‘My parents separated when I was very young and I went to live with my granny in Cornwall. Then when I left school I took a job as a shorthand typist and eventually worked my way up to being personal secretary to the managing director of a very large company.
‘I did a shorthand course, but I didn’t learn very much. The way to get on is by learning who is important in the company and by trying to make yourself indispensable to them. When they want flowers for their wife you make sure that you’re the one to get them and that they’re the most beautiful flowers. The girl who just goes to the office and sits there will never do well. The clever girl gets the good jobs.’ And it was while she was on holiday from her job as what she describes as an ‘executive secretary’ that she made her fateful visit to Germany.
She’s the sort of lady who, one feels, might almost be at home arranging chrysanthemums in the church hall before the Mothers’ Union meeting. For lunch this week she turned up in a large, wide-brimmed hat, behind which her eyes might retreat whenever she became embarrassed. ‘Oh, Mr Connolly,’ she exclaimed at one point ‘you’ve got such naughty eyes. It’s just not fair.’
She calls all men ‘Mr’ until she’s given permission to do otherwise, she says, and she never ceases to gush like a jolly and flirty soda fountain.
No technical question one can throw at her seems to put her off balance. ‘Our best selling line,’ she says so that all can hear, ‘are the clitoral stimulants. Trade dropped slightly when we ran out of them.’
And she dodges below the beige brim as the heads at surrounding tables start turning.
She lives alone in a two-hundred-year-old cottage forty miles out of town in Kent — a place with roses growing around the doors, she says, and which was originally some sort of cow-shed, and every day she drives up to town in a Hillman Imp. (On the particular day she gave me a lift there were, on the back seat, a basket of strawberries — ‘They’re English strawberries’ — half a dozen eggs, a book called The XYZ of Love, and a small jar of a new type of cream called Love Balm, the effects of which she wasn’t quite sure about.)
‘I do adore the country,’ she insists, breathing the words out in hot italics. ‘The peace and quiet is so wonderful. On Bonfire Night I stay at home all evening. I can’t stand the sudden noises. It’s so lovely out there. If it were possible I’d have dogs but I know I wouldn’t be able to keep them, becaus
e there’s so much work to do that I often don’t get home until midnight in the week. I love dogs and horses. It would be so nice to be able to have a Great Dane or a Labrador.’
Presently there is no particular man in her life — her relationship with her co-partner, bachelor John Riseley-Pritchard, being totally related to business. ‘We do go to the ballet sometimes,’ she says, ‘but that’s because he’s the only man I’ve been able to find who doesn’t fall asleep in the ballet. He thinks it’s divine too. He really is the brains behind the business. I’m not very good at business at all.’
She has, however, had several long-lasting relationships: ‘When I was twenty-two I was going out with a sculptor who made a statue of me nude to the waist, and had it put in a Chelsea restaurant. It’s still there. I used to pose for him quite a lot.’
Despite a tendency to blush and lower her eyes at what she must consider indiscreet questioning, she’s quite happy to tell the most amazingly frank details about herself. While discussing her products she remains remote rather in the way she might be were she selling embroidery cottons.
When one teases her about the paraphernalia she sells, she insists that although she’s on no crusade, she really believes that what she’s doing is helping to make marriages and relationships happier and that all her products really do work if used correctly.
‘I’ve tried most of them myself out of curiosity,’ she says. ‘We wouldn’t sell anything which was in any way to do with a perversion.’
And who decides what is, and what is not a perversion, I ask. ‘I do.’ And her coolness is momentarily overcome with indignation.
When she first became interested in the idea her mother and stepfather (’he’s a sweetie, a real sweetie’) were a little doubtful about the venture. ‘But once I’d explained to them and shown them what it was about they understood. In fact my mother is quite enthusiastic now. When I see her at the weekends, the first thing she asks me is “how is it going?” And when I had a nasty letter a few days after we opened she was very indignant.’
She’s an elegant, well tailored sort of lady whose conversation seems to be littered with phrases like ‘when I was in Paris …,’ or ‘when I was in Rome …,’ or ‘there’s a little place just near Epinay where they serve different flavours of champagne with dinner,’ or even ‘there’s a little place called Antoine’s in Paris where they serve nothing but cheese. I adore cheese. And I love to cook …’
It’s time for her to go off to see her hairdresser. What plans has she? I ask.
‘Well, we’re planning a Christmas hamper that’s going to make Fortnum and Mason have to watch out. No more fruit cake for Aunt Edith.’
POSTSCRIPT Ann Summers certainly played the part very well. A former secretary to Dandy Kim Waterfield, she was groomed as the archetypal English rose, which was a perfect image for the launching of the porn shop on the corner. Although she severed all connections with the Ann Summers shops ten years ago her name has become a synonym for sex shops. Following a car accident she dropped out of sight in the Tunbridge Wells area in the mid-seventies.
March 1970
Patti D’Arbanville
You meet some funny folk at lunchtime in the restaurants of the King’s Road. What can they all do for a living? you ask yourself, as they gather with their age mates, like so many ostentatiously overgrown children, to chat and admire, and most of all to take part in the game of mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-aren’t-we-the-fairest-of-them-all? And somehow they all manage to look familiar. There can hardly be a soul over twenty-five from Sloane Square to World’s End — and no one seems to have any work to do. Lunchtime comes and goes and late into the afternoon the clans are still discussing what they will do today, like holiday children on a rainy afternoon, and wandering off to shop, look at the odd art gallery, or slipping away to loaf or whatever at each other’s flats …
That’s where I met Patti D’Arbanville. Go in the Casserole and ask for Patti I was told, and there was Patti and friends and Pims — and then another.
‘This is my friend, Maria,’ and she pointed to a young French girl who looked as though she had a couple of footballs shoved up her jumper, ‘… and that’s Ben,’ — who turned out to be Ben Ekland, brother of Britt, an absurdly handsome lad, who’s attracting the attention of every lady in the place.
Right away we get to talking about fetishes. ‘D’you know that one about the man with the step ladders, the canary, the umbrella, the stocking foot, the boot and the girl?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Work it out …’
And she giggles like a boy who’s just discovered smut.
Unless you’re involved in at least the peripheries of London’s sub-society of entertainment, the odds are you’ve never heard much about Patti D’Arbanville. I think it likely, however (and she fervently hopes), that you will shortly be hearing a great deal about her since she appears to possess a talent for self-publicity not short of that of Marianne Faithfull.
Chance meetings with Andy Warhol led to parts in two of his films; two dates with Mick Jagger and her name appeared (much to her annoyance, she says) in the gossip columns of several national daily newspapers, and after a brush with Cat Stevens she was what some might call immortalised in the lines of his hit song ‘Lady D’Arbanville’. ‘My Lady D’Arbanville, why do you sleep so still? I’ll wake you tomorrow, and you will be my fill.’
In actual fact Patti D’Arbanville isn’t a lady in that sense at all. Her father is a bartender in New York and she was brought up mainly in Greenwich Village, apparently spending the most formative years of her life sitting in a club called Max’s Kansas City. Now nineteen, she appears to have been grown up for six years — almost since she began her first love affair on her thirteenth birthday. ‘I was,’ she likes to say, ‘a child until I was four.
‘One time when I was a baby my parents moved down to Miami to live, and they put me in the bottom of a closet to sleep. When they took me out the next morning they found that I’d been sleeping on a nest of scorpions, so my dad just took us all back to New York and he went back to being a bartender.
‘When I was four I was an Ivory Soap Baby for commercials, and I used to sit in the bathtub and say “Get Some Today”. And then when I was eight I was in a film made as a university project. Yes, you could say my face has always been my fortune — no, not so much my body. My legs are all right, but I’ve got no breasts, no waist and a little boy’s ass.’
Her breasts are, actually, like press-studs, and from time to time while our photographer Roy Jones is taking his pictures she gives them a disparaging tug.
She seems to be the sort of girl who just happens to be always in the right place at the right time. At thirteen she bumped into Andy Warhol in Max’s and he asked her if she’d appear in one of his films. Her parents wouldn’t allow it but a year or so later she appeared in Flesh. Then another night at Max’s the casting director of Midnight Cowboy gave her a small part in the orgy scene. She was about fifteen then.
Talk to her for a while and you discover that her acquaintances and the list of people who’ve helped her reads like a Who’s Who of the trendy sixties.
‘One night I was dancing at Max’s — I’m insane about dancing — when this guy called Antonio kept staring at me. He was a fashion artist and wanted to draw me, and the boy I was with thought it would be a good way to get money as he didn’t work. I was working at a boutique and supporting him. Antonio drew me a lot, and took me to Richard Avedon to do some photographic tests. I fell in love with Antonio and my other boyfriend left.
‘So I worked for a while as a model, although I’m only five foot four and a half inches and my portfolio was bigger than I was, and then I met Bert Stern and did a commercial for hair colouring in California. I wanted to come to Europe and Vogue sent me to the Paris Collections, but I never worked once so I came to London and telephoned a man I knew.’
To cut a long story short she fell on her feet and found herself living with
a girlfriend in the flat of a film director.
By this time we were sitting in the opulence of this amazing Belgravia flat which she and Maria are sharing. They don’t own it but have been lent it while a film executive friend is out of town, all three bathrooms and deluxe everything, and we’re drinking wine. Patti has taken her cap off and for a full hour she fiddles with her hair — going through her expressions bit — the little girl and the baby face angel.
Life magazine photographed her earlier in the day for a feature on shorts and she hasn’t yet changed. She’s devastatingly pretty, and very confident about the way she looks.
‘I only look in the mirror when I have to squeeze my pimples. I’ll squeeze yours, too, if you like.’
She puts on a Dionne Warwicke record, and then changes it for the Rolling Stones’ ‘Stray Cat Blues’ — a song about a girl who goes with the boys in the band. ‘Does your mother know you scratch like that, Does she know you scratch my back,’ sings Mick Jagger.
Yes, a lot of her friends are rich, she says. ‘But I don’t take advantage of the fact that they’ve got a lot of money. I’ve always lived beyond my means, which makes me go out and earn the money. But for the last six months I haven’t had to pay for anywhere to stay.
‘When I first came to live in London I worked as a model and eventually I got a flat with a friend. We were both working hard and making money and running around London, but finally we almost got into a lot of trouble because we couldn’t pay the rent. We were spending so much on clothes. But then I was asked to be in a film in France, La Maison, and I went over there to learn French. I played an innocent seventeen-year-old girl — well, a normal seventeen-year-old girl.’
While she was there she also worked on another Warhol movie, L’Amour, agreed to make a record for a record company — who then paid for the hospital fees for her to have a wart removed from her arm — and met film actor Helmut Berger, who is the current man in her life.
