These things are largely a matter of context. As we drove to the club in a taxi I felt that our get-up was ridiculously excessive, but the moment we entered the loud, low-ceilinged gloom of the club we seemed to stand out like a couple of arch conservatives. We were surrounded by wearers of ornate rubber, leather and PVC costumes that spoke only about sex. Bodies were encased and reshaped under the restraining influence of uniforms and wild fancy dress. The occasional set of bare breasts was visible, popping out of basques and through holes in rubber or leather bodysuits, and there were plenty of bare buttocks, both male and female. But little of the flesh on display was either natural or unmediated. Much of it was tattooed, and some of it was pierced. Rings and chains linked noses, nipples, ears and cheeks, and no doubt there were labia and penises that had come in for similar treatment, but they were covered – at least for the time being. All the props and paraphernalia of fetishistic sex were present and on display: whips and dildos, body harnesses, dog collars, mackintoshes; but the concentration and the diversity had a curiously diluting effect, as though one fetish cancelled out another.
Of course, one jumped to conclusions about the other people in the club. You read the costumes they had adorned themselves with and you made assumptions about whether they were gay or straight, submissive or dominant, voyeurs or exhibitionists. There was a smattering of male and female transvestism, and we saw someone in a nappy. This was undoubtedly the ‘difference’ we had been promised, but I wasn’t sure how sexual, let alone erotic, it was. I made my Pavlovian responses to the various provocations around me, but men dressed as Shirley Bassey, gay boys in rubber shorts, women being led around on dog leads; these didn’t hit the spot at all.
There was assertive, metallic music clanging through the place, but nobody was dancing. People preferred to strut and pose. Occasionally someone would stroke someone else’s arm or cheek, or even bare bottom, yet the atmosphere was oddly without erotic charge, and it wasn’t a pick-up joint as far as I could see. A few people came up and talked to us. They were friendly, and of course they were heavily dressed up, but there were no offers of sexual difference. We were simply asked whether this was the first time we’d been to Stains, and whether we were enjoying ourselves. It was simply an attempt to make new members feel welcome.
It seemed to me there were two distinct types of clientele. The first was young and glamorous, and for them this kind of dressing up was just another way of being fashionable. They were dressed more outrageously, and showed more of their exceptionally good bodies than they would have in a more ordinary nightclub, but it was still just a form of clubbing. It may have been sexy but it wasn’t sex itself. The second type, generally the older ones, the middle-aged men with their pot bellies and leather masks, carrying their enema kits, and their women, with cellulite visible between their stocking-tops and leather panties, well, you knew they were serious about things. You knew they really meant it. The two groups had nothing in common and yet there was no antagonism between them. Even if old and young, attractive and ugly, bent and straight weren’t exactly coming together, they were at least tolerating each other’s existence. They were tolerating Catherine and me too, and I didn’t think we fitted into either category.
Of course I checked out the shoes that the women around me were wearing, and you couldn’t deny that people were making an effort. There was fiercely fetishistic footwear on all sides; the usual stuff, spike highs, viciously pointed toes, platforms, straps, laces, thongs, buckles. There were boots of all lengths, from ankle to upper, upper thigh. I enjoyed it but, if anything, the effect was too strident. Compared to the devastating eroticism of the shoes Catherine was wearing, all these others seemed a little crass and obvious. Not that crassness and obviousness was necessarily out of place at Stains; take the cabaret act that started halfway through the evening.
A man of about fifty with a scrawny but tanned body, that he was showing most of, was dragged on to a small stage by two women in dominatrix gear. They wheeled out a wooden apparatus, somewhat like stocks, somewhat like a rack, strapped the poor guy into it, and started to give him a mild but theatrical going over.
An audience gathered quickly around the stage and there was a lot of cheering and encouragement, but it was the sort of crowd that gawps at a freak show, not a crowd that comes together in celebration. The most spectacular ‘torture’ inflicted on the victim involved one of the women shoving the spiked heel of her shoe into the man’s open mouth. This caused a lot of audience response, but it seemed to me to have more to do with sword swallowing than with shoe fetishism. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with sex.
The evening passed and it wasn’t unenjoyable. Watching people is always entertaining, and much more so when they’re so keen to be watched. And, of course, people scrutinized Catherine and me too. I’m sure nobody found me an object of any great fascination, but Catherine was much stared at and leched over. However, it was a general all-purpose kind of lechery. If someone had come up to her and offered to lick or suck her feet I would have been delighted and not surprised. But nobody did. At one point a slim, slightly camp young man with studded belts crisscrossing his chest came up and said he’d like, and I quote, ‘To give both your arseholes a tongue bath,’ and while this wasn’t either the time or the place to be offended I did think he was missing the point. We declined.
Later I was invited into a dark area of the club where a dozen or so men were lining up to spank a blindfolded woman who was bent over a leather chair. Reluctantly, and only at Catherine’s insistence, I went along and joined in, but my heart was never in it. I didn’t enjoy spanking the woman and my performance was so perfunctory that I’m sure she didn’t enjoy it very much either.
We left when another cabaret act started. Two women with shaven heads, in depressingly authentic-looking Nazi regalia, got up on stage and started licking each other’s breasts. The breast licking I enjoyed, and the shaven heads were fine, but I found the Nazi regalia too hard to take.
I emerged from the club feeling strangely illiberal. It wasn’t that I thought the membership of Stains should be prevented from enjoying, or persecuted because of, their unusual sexual preferences, but I thought they should just keep them to themselves.
When we got home Catherine and I made love, and even though Catherine kept the shoes on, and even though she ran them all over my face and body, it seemed an act of purest vanilla after what we’d seen in the club.
Then Catherine said, ‘A strange thing happened on my way to the bathroom. A man came up to me, older man, not bad looking, normal looking, and he was carrying a woman’s shoe. He handed it to me, asked would I take it into the Ladies, piss into it, fill it up and then return it to him.’
‘Are you serious?’ I asked. I hadn’t seen any man wandering around with a woman’s shoe, and it was the kind of thing I’d have noticed.
‘He was very serious,’ said Catherine.
‘What did you do?’
‘What would you have wanted me to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know.’
‘Maybe you’ll be disappointed in me. I told him he was disgusting. I said he should get a life.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He seemed to like being bad-mouthed. So I said I already had one pervert in my life and that was enough. And he said you were a very lucky man.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know I’m lucky.’
But luck can change.
Fourteen
I arrived at Catherine’s flat in the usual way. I gave a firm, sustained ring on the front doorbell, a ring that meant business. She was expecting me and she let me in immediately. I knew she would be waiting, wearing a pair of Harold’s shoes, ready for me as usual, ready to do the things that we always did. But this time there was going to be a difference. This time I wasn’t alone. This time I had a female companion: Rosemary.
Rosemary and I went back a long way. Rosemary was no beauty, not even from the ankles d
own. She was heavily built, brassy, and she was in no conceivable sense my sort of woman. But she was supremely willing to try just about anything sexual, and there had been a number of times over the years when we, she and I, had had need of each other. This was just such an occasion. Today she was wearing a black raincoat and her rather plump feet were gamely crammed into a pair of purple velvet high heels. She had considered all other clothing unnecessary.
We stepped into the building, walked briskly up the stairs to Catherine’s floor, then to her front door, which she had left open. We went inside, into the hall where Catherine was waiting. She did a double-take when she saw Rosemary, looked at her curiously, suspiciously, but she didn’t speak. I imagine I was looking both furtive and pleased with myself, while Rosemary looked around the flat and its furnishings as though she might be a prospective purchaser or perhaps a burglar.
Catherine stared hard into Rosemary’s round, painted face. For a moment she looked as though she was about to ask who this stranger was and what she was doing there, but explaining would have spoiled everything and, in any case, she was in no real doubt what was going on, or about to. I put a finger to her lips to hush her. I nodded to Rosemary and, as arranged, she shrugged the raincoat from her shoulders. She stood there naked apart from the purple velvet shoes; very white, unembarrassed, very lewd. Her breasts looked enormous, and Catherine and I could see that the colour of her pubic hair did not even remotely match that on her head.
The three of us went into the bedroom and there proceeded to do everything we wanted to and could possibly think of. I suppose a certain amount of it might be considered predictable. The combination of mouths, organs, fluids, feet and shoes are, inevitably, limited. However much one strives to be inventive there are only so many options, so many possibilities. Nevertheless we achieved a number of combinations and conjunctions that I, at least, had never managed before.
It was a long session, hot and exhausting. When it was all over, when Rosemary had put her raincoat on again and gone, she left her shoes behind as a sort of souvenir, and suffice it to say that they were thoroughly sodden with both male and female juices.
Catherine and I lay together feeling emptied, carved out. It seemed to me there was nothing to be said about what we’d done, no room and no reason for discussion. But Catherine said, ‘I think that may have been too much.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘I think that may have been a “this far and no further.” ’
Catherine turned away from me slightly, gathered herself to herself.
‘That was the most obscene stuff I’ve ever done,’ she continued. ‘It was more obscene than anything I would ever have imagined myself capable of doing.’
I had not been consciously testing Catherine. I had not been pushing at limits, extending boundaries, seeing how far we could go, how far I could take her with me. Yet I was sensible enough to realize that bringing Rosemary along to participate in our sex life was some new high-water mark. I could understand that someone might think this episode had been conceived of as an act of transgression, of desecration, a conscious smashing of the rules, but I hadn’t imagined that Catherine would be that someone.
‘Is that such a bad thing?’ I asked.
‘I think it may be,’ she said.
‘I don’t see what the problem is,’ I said. ‘You certainly looked like you were enjoying yourself.’
‘Of course I looked like I was enjoying myself. I was enjoying myself. That’s what the problem is. That’s why I think it may have been too much. I think I may have gone too far.’
At the time I thought she was exaggerating, and I didn’t believe her; but I should have.
Fifteen
There is one woman whose feet I really would like to see, or to have seen. Her name is Marjorie Howard and her feet are something of a legend. In the 1920s, D.W. Griffith, who was apparently something of a foot man himself, got together with the legendary shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo and ran a competition to find the most beautiful feet in Hollywood. The first prize was to be a six-month film contract and runners-up got shoes made by Ferragamo. Marjorie Howard is the woman who won the contest. Both she and her feet are now lost to history, but second prize went to the then unknown Joan Crawford. She was trying desperately to break into the movies, and entering a beauty contest for feet must have seemed as good a way as any other.
Now, I’ve seen photographs of Joan Crawford’s feet, or, at least, photographs of Joan Crawford in which her feet appear, and I’d have to say they were not really prize-winning feet. There are no obvious deformities, the toes are nice and straight, they appear well looked after, but they’re a little fleshy for my tastes, and the big toes are a little on the bulbous side. OK, so I know that beauty contests are an insult to womanhood and, at the very least, highly subjective, and perhaps I wouldn’t have adored Marjorie Howard’s feet, but I’d like to have had the chance.
As a matter of fact, if you read Ferragamo’s autobiography, Shoemaker of Dreams, he says he preferred Joan Crawford’s feet, anyway, but I’m not sure Ferragamo is a man you can always trust. He says the Duchess of Windsor and Susan Hayward both had perfect feet. He says Alicia Markova’s feet were ‘strong and lovely and startling.’ He says Mary Pickford’s feet were ‘lovely’. Greta Garbo’s feet were just ‘beautiful’, while Marlene Dietrich, he says, was the possessor of ‘the most beautiful feet in the world.’
I guess that if you were a great shoemaker then you’d tend to attract women with wonderful feet, but I suspect that Ferragamo was a bit of a flatterer. If you were rich enough to be able to afford a pair of his shoes, then he’d be happy to say you had beautiful feet too. He made shoes for Clara Petacci and Eva Braun but he doesn’t tell us much about what their feet were like.
And he also made shoes for Pola Negri. I have read (in her obituary actually) that she was the first actress ever to paint her toenails. This seems unlikely to me. Surely civilization didn’t need so many millennia to invent such an apparently obvious cosmetic effect. But I’m in no position to argue, and I’ve never seen a close-up of Pola Negri’s bare feet any more than I’ve seen those of Marjorie Howard, but I’d like to think that a woman who invented toenail painting must have had good feet, or at least good toenails.
The world of movies and movie stars is a strange one where feet are concerned. Movie stars are almost always beautiful. Their faces and bodies are whipped into shape by experts: makeup artists, personal trainers, plastic surgeons; and, although I’m sure their feet aren’t entirely neglected, they’re not the things by which stars are rated and judged, except by me.
Actresses are photographed the whole time. You can buy whole books of photographs of Marilyn Monroe or Charlotte Rampling or Rita Hayworth or Madonna. When we look at these photographs, even if we look with whole-hearted admiration and approval, we are still subjecting these women to intense critical scrutiny. I just happen to scrutinize the feet rather than anything else.
Having browsed through a number of books on Marilyn Monroe I’ve found that her feet have left me curiously unmoved. In lots of ways this is a pity. Her wiggle may or may not have been caused by the high heels she wore (some say it was because of an ankle deformity), and she did allegedly once say, ‘It was the high heel that gave a big lift to my career.’ Her feet are nice enough, but they’re curiously wholesome and unsexy, and her choice of shoes, or at least the shoes she was forced to wear in films, was poor. For example, in that scene from The Seven Year Itch where her skirt blows up, the legs are great and the skirt is great, the cleavage and the face are great, but she’s wearing some dreary white open sandals that do nothing for her or for me.
Helen Mirren is an actress who shot up in my estimation when, a long time ago now, I read an article in which she confessed to having a thing about shoes. The article, needless to say, is given pride of place in the archive, and I can quote it from memory. ‘I can’t seem to throw them away,’ she says. ‘No matter how battered and worn they might be
. I go into a shop to buy something sensible to wear to rehearsals and come out clutching a pair of stilettos.’ Then she talks about her latest acquisition, a pair of black court shoes from Seditionaries with studs embedded in the heels, and says, ‘They really worry people, you know. I think that is a mark of an exceptional pair of shoes.’ How true that is. The article is illustrated with Helen lying on her stomach on a glass table surrounded by shoes. Lord have mercy.
Here is Britt Ekland in her book Sensual Beauty and How to Achieve It:
I believe a good-looking foot is as important as a good-looking hand. I’m not saying there is necessarily anything very sensual about feet, [Shame on you, Britt!] but after all they have been known to touch a man’s lips, and obviously in the dark the poor soul isn’t going to know what he’s reaching for, so it’s really up to you. If that’s the kind of intimate relationship you have, you have to keep your feet lovable.
I’m not sure whether it’s Britt’s dodgy grasp of English or her lack of a good ghost writer that makes this paragraph so impenetrable, but you sort of know what she means, and at least she seems to have some inkling of what foot sex is about. Britt, I would say, on the evidence of the photographs in Sensual Beauty, has feet you definitely wouldn’t kick out of bed. In some of the photographs they look a touch wrinkled, the little toenail is slightly gnarled and shapeless, but hey, the photographs are blown up pretty large. How many feet could bear that close an inspection? Well, Catherine’s could, of course, but not so many others.
Again, although Britt is usually happy to get her kit off, I’m pretty sure that her feet have never actually figured large in a movie. I’m not absolutely sure because I haven’t seen her entire oeuvre, and frankly I don’t want to. I’m not a complete idiot. I wouldn’t go to see a movie simply in the hope of seeing Britt Ekland’s feet, or anyone else’s, and I’m perfectly happy to see a film that has no feet in it at all. But if I’m sitting there in the dark watching a movie and suddenly there is some element of pedic sexuality, if an actress walks across the frame in high heels, or is given a foot massage by her lover or goes into a shoe shop or gets a pedicure, then it does tend to swamp my response to the rest of the film.
Footsucker Page 9
