Twiggy: Perfectly You

 

Just a wisp. Short and skinny. A boy’s haircut. Awkward poses. Lesley Hornby. A most unlikely fashion model yet perfect for a time and place that loved to smash the parapets. Who wants to be ‘normal’?

Twiggy by name and by nature. O those Margaret Keane eyes. It was her very anomality that made you notice how much fun she was, how different from steely-eyed glamazons glaring from Vogue covers. Fewer pretensions in a Britain too poor for a class war. The candor of her gaze expelled irony. We could join her at the party.

Carnaby Street. She strolls by without a watch, a purse or purpose. Up for the next laugh, celebrating her good fortune, unencumbered and unfettered, swinging now to a future so deeply in love with itself.

And of herself, she said, “I always describe her, 60s Twiggy, as my little friend who sits on my shoulder.” How wonderful to stroll the leafy lanes of life knowing that you have been, all along, indisputably, irrefutably, perfectly, you.

 

#twiggy #lesleyhornby #carnaby street #fashion #1960s #1967 #davidbailey #theboyfriend #documentart #london #davidbowie

Françoise Dorléac: A hollow man holds a flame

Considering the extent of Catherine Deneuve's fame, few people know that she had an older sister: her name was Françoise Dorléac - and she was just as beautiful as her famous soeur. Poor Françoise was to have a glamorous, brief life, making just a handful of films before her untimely death in 1967, gone at age 25 in a car crash.

Phillipe's flame from long ago

I didn't know any of this until I worked with a guy named Philippe Reux: we were partnered as 'on location' bodyguards for the film star Jean Claude Van Damme during the production of a movie called 'Maximum Risk', partly filmed in Toronto during a bitter winter.

Attempting to explain how I became Jean Claude Van Damme's lowly bodyguard occasions dark memories and general illegalities. Suffice it to say that for two weeks, it was my well-paid position to make sure that Mr. Van Damme was not harassed by his fans. I had a very quiet time.

Philippe was from Marseille, about sixty years old, white hair in a short pony tail, intensely skinny, once handsome with that peculiar Mediterranean tone of tan - light chocolate/more orange than gold. From certain angles he looked a lot like Keith Richards, especially in the early morning. Philippe chain-smoked, was excitable and chronically irritated. When we were introduced on the first day of our assignment, he just stared at me, wincing like he bit a lemon, as if he couldn't believe he was on a security detail with a man who had never killed anyone.

Sisters

He spoke English in short - often incomplete - sentences. His staccato delivery alternatively conveyed deep-seated anger, boredom or both.

Never once, in twelve days of work, did Philippe ask me about myself: in fact, part of his attraction was a self-engrossment so powerful that he barely needed to eat. I doubt if he ever knew my name.

By the second day, Philippe was more expansive, mainly because I gave him cigarettes and lobbed him banal questions. He told me that Canada was boring, and that he was "a party man. I can party. All the time. I never stop. There is no point." He really did speak like that.

Sisters in harmony

He had spent all of his life on movie sets in low-end jobs: filling a star's coffee cup, walking a producer's dog - it didn't matter to Philippe; he was there for the party. It was a haphazard career that began in 1960 on the set of Jean-Luc Godard's 'A bout de souffle' and had never really stopped. He went from film to film carrying nothing more than his toothbrush and wallet.

If you asked Philippe, 'what was Godard like?' or 'how was Brando on the set of Last Tango?' he would either just walk away or give you an elliptical answer like "A film. Just chemicals. Nothing is important."

"She had this little dog"

In fact, for a man who had spent his life on movie sets, Philippe had no interest in the medium whatsoever.

When I told him that François Truffaut was an important director and well-known in Canada, he reacted with shock, as if I had mentioned that his own brother was on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Then he immediately lost interest in the whole thing. Truly, he seemed incapable of sustaining interest in anything that wasn't attached to his body. I had come to accept him as a condescending extraterrestrial: it didn't matter where he was on planet Earth because it needed him more than he needed it.

During our last day of work we were stationed at a side entrance of Toronto's Old City Hall, down at the bottom steps, right behind the Eaton Centre. Van Damme was inside the Hall, filming a 'prison scene'. We smoked, leaning against Van Damme's 'personal trailer' - that was never more than a few hundred meters from the great man himself.

Time crawled by. Just to raise Philippe's irritability level, I asked what in life was important to him. He squinted at me, suspicious, as if I was laying a trap. I wasn't. I just wanted to know what kept him going. He seemed so perfectly hollow.

But for the first time, Philippe looked pensive.

Beauty is an accident

It had been snowing and Philippe, who wasn't dressed for a Canadian winter, started to smack his hands together, scowling at the sky, taking it all personally.

He told me that he liked to travel and that he liked to look at beautiful women - and the best way to combine both pursuits was to work in the film business. I asked him if he pursued the starlets. He replied that it wasn't necessary; that actresses were insecure and vulnerable to flattery - and sexual conquest under such conditions is dull and void of challenge. (He really did say things like that). But beauty was another thing, he said - now that was worth pursuing.

"Okay," I said, "who is the most beautiful woman you've ever seen?"

"Do you know the name 'Françoise Dorléac'?'

"Vaguely. Wasn't she in that Polanski movie about some old guy who...."

Philippe cut me off with a sharp wave of his hand. Evidently, I had bored him with just over ten words.

Two Sisters

"She was talented," he said. "Very beautiful. Her sister was Catherine Deneuve. She died. 1967. Twenty-five years old. We worked on 'Cul-de-Sac'. We spoke. We were young. She had this little dog. I can remember her profile, her face, you know? You cannot be that close to beauty and be unchanged, undamaged. Died a few months later. Françoise. The most spectacular of them all." Philippe looked drained. "Beauty is a wonderful accident, you get it? Something in me arrived at the end."

Always another party

Philippe's eyes were frozen on an object moving farther away. I was dumbfounded that he had a capacity for sentimentality. For a moment he even looked different.

Some of the crew was beginning to exit the set, which meant that Jean Claude would soon require our tough-guy services to protect him against the surging, nonexistent mob of frenzied fans. Philippe emerged from his reverie. His face tightened and he slowly rubbed his hands together.

We began to walk up the courthouse steps to the movie set. Philippe suddenly turned to me and said, "Never stop. Always another party. You get it?" As we reached the landing, Van Damme himself rushed down, petit and feline, leapt up into his trailer and snapped shut the door.

#CatherineDeneuve #jeanclaudevandamme #lesdemoisellesderochefort #romanpolanski,#jeanlucgodard #maximumrisk,#FrançoiseDorléac #keithrichards #1960spop #film #1967 #toronto #ianmclarke #pop #culture #popular #dorleac #culdesac

Au Revoir

One Hand Clapping: Che Guevera Dominates

Che gets focused

Recently, sitting in an outdoor bar in Montezuma, Costa Rica, I met a man named Ras who claimed to have known the late revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. (Ras was no more than fifty years old, said he was Cuban and was - and hopefully still is - the town drunk). Undoubtedly he was lying. He would have told me that he'd slept with Jacqueline Kennedy if it meant my forking over a few more 'colons'. His dates were all wrong.

But I didn't care. Lying is psychotic improvisation, and good liars exude a weird charisma, stimulating on-the-spot creativity. It's to be simultaneously admired and punished.

But Ras got me thinking about Che, dead for over forty years, whose popularity was subsumed and crushed - until recently - by the shake-yer-bootie disco era - which had no time for a grumpy communist.

It was about 10 o'clock in the morning. I watched skinny, browbeaten pariah dogs sniffing their way along the main avenue. A slow parade of pale, fleshy tourists loped silently toward the beach, resigned to a fate of sunburn and diarrhea.

Ras nodded off to sleep with an unlit Derby cigarette hanging from his lips

I puffed on my Cubana and began to consider Che Guevara, and for some reason, his decapitated hands. To cut hands from a corpse for the purpose of thumbprint identification seems ghoulish - but that's what happened in Bolivia. It's as if the fourteenth century momentarily collided with the twenty-first, akin to watching funeral home operators trundle a cart by your house, yelling, "Bring out your dead!"

Since arriving in Montezuma, I'd seen at lot of 'Che' T-shirts, depicting his most famous pose, where he appears to be Jesus Christ with attitude. I had also noticed the same image tattooed onto a few arms and backs.

In fact, Che is on a plethora of junk - lighters, beer, vodka, key chains, and bottle openers - maximum capitalism. Poor guy, the most committed communist of them all, flogged on trinkets for the much-cherished U.S. dollar. In fact, Cuba itself has grown a multi-million dollar Che trinket industry. The irony is indigestible.

So how did Che get marketable while other revolutionary-types have been roasted on the pyre of yesteryear?

He did the Marketing Time Warp, jumping more than a generation of obsolescence to settle as a mega star in the pantheon of 'Dead Pop Icons', along side people like Jim Morrison, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.

Brainiac scientist Stephen Hawking points out that time travel is indeed possible, but only into the future, and then with terrible consequences. So it seems.

At first, Che was promoted underground. From about 1969 to 1972, two posters dominated the walls of university dormitories - those of Che Guevara and 'Easy Rider' - the one where Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are trucking down a desert road. Both posters extol the same thing - the triumph of individualism over 'the system'.

In the movie, Fonda and Hopper meet death on the wrong end of a shotgun. As for Che, in October 1967, failing to stir Bolivian peasants in a revolt, he was captured in the jungle by the arm, and after some routine humiliation received nine bullets in the gut. It later came to light that the CIA, for all intents, pulled the trigger (and just when I was getting to like those guys!).

It took 40 years for Che to become unreal enough to market. He had to be 'disengaged' from his Mao-style communism; he had to be sheltered from the executions that he conducted against his foes; he had to sanitized, neutered, and airbrushed.

Let the Marketing begin

Yup, the marketing people finally got to Che and gave it to him good. But they didn't get all of him; they never really got his hands. It's tough to get a promotional angle on decapitated body parts. The best you can do is buddy up to the Vatican and try to spin the hands as true 'relics'. But the Catholic Church is more vicious and wary than a wounded ferret, especially where communists are concerned.

So the promoters just kept to Che's face - the face that launched a billion t-shirts.

In November 1995, a retired Bolivian general revealed the exact whereabouts of Che's remains, along with other rebels of Guevara's hapless army. A group of experts disinterred the bodies, and sure enough they found Che, but they didn't find his hands.

No, Jorge Suarez, a Bolivian journalist, had kept Che's hands under the floorboards of his house.

Bolivia's minister of the interior gave Suarez the hands eight days after Che's death. The CIA had confirmed the thumbprints were Che's, and the Bolivian government wanted the hands cremated. But the minister thought differently. He told Suarez to hide the hands - and so he did for two years. The hands were finally smuggled back to Cuba in 1969.

In July 1997, Che finally came back to Cuba. His remains, together with those of his fallen pals, were shipped to Havana, held in small coffins.

As for the hands, they currently float in formaldehyde, encased in a jar, somewhere within the Palace of the Revolution. A few visiting dignitaries say they have seen the hands: permission for a viewing must come from the big brass. It likely won't be long before they determine a ticket price for public display.

What abou the film 'The Motorcycle Diaries' based on a journal that Che kept of his 1952 rumble through South American on the back of a Norton 500. The reviews are good. Dare I say two thumbs up? Yes, Che is cool again.

Still, I think about those ghostly hands, with nails still holding the jungle dirt, uncorrupted, corporeal integrity - and fancy that one day they muster the strength to smash the glass and grab the neck of some chunky dignitary, standing by the jar in his Che t-shirt, slurping a Che beer, dangling a Che key chain from his wide-bottom Dockers.

Anyway, the beauty of money is that it never discriminates and knows no irony. It equates a dead revolutionary with Donald Trump's hairspray bill. It's all dollars, it's timeless and applause is given to him with the thickest wallet. Though Che Guevara has two hands, he'll never clap again.