Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Number Eighty-Four

Sexy Little Gifts from Anthropologie

satu eau de parfum
Meaning “fairytale” in Finnish, Satu fragrances each tell a distinct story of crisp fruits, heady spices and warm florals. An Anthropologie exclusive.

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Gerber Daisy (Yellow): an airy floral blend with hints of clementine and blond wood

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Field of Freesia (Green): a smooth and clean combination of evergreen, osmanthus and freesia

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Plum Nectar (Red): plum, musk and blackberry patchouli make for a heady, sensual brew

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Vanilla Infusion (Blue): black calla lily blends with lush layers of fruit and spice for a touch of the exotic

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Anthropologie was founded in 1992 by a small group of people with a love for making things that inspire the imagination. To our delight, over the past decade we have traveled the globe, broken new ground with our catalog and web design, and most significantly of all, found customers who are our soulmates on this wondrous journey.

We carefully design and select our products with an eye for craftsmanship, the smallest details, and that certain something special that makes each item you find in our stores and website more than novelty but a personal discovery.

Our clothing, jewelry, and objects for home are always in flux. So is our world. Our hope at Anthropologie is to share with you in the breathtaking possibility of it all.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Number Eighty-Three

StockinGirl designs most of the exclusive stockings and hosiery you see in their store. You will find lots to choose from....silky fully fashioned stockings, modern printed stockings, fishnet pantyhose, thigh highs, glitter stockings, luxurious 100% silk stockings and silk lace top thigh highs, sandalfoot stockings, color RHT stockings, ultra sheer reinforced heel and toe stockings and pantyhose, whatever your hosiery desires are we probably have it in our boutique. Their store has RHT ultra sheer stockings in four different levels of sheerness from the most ultra sheer 7 denier, and up to 10 denier, 12 denier and 15 denier Nylon, depending on the degree of sheerness you are looking for. We have sheer stockings, opaque stockings, opaque tights, thigh highs and fully fashioned (seamed) hosiery in sixteen different colors!

Their fully fashioned seamed stockings are knit on original vintage hosiery machines in Europe. There are only a few machines left in the world making extraordinary quality retro style seamed stockings, they are wonderful additions to their boutique. We have classic retro seamed styles and they also have modern variations with colors like royal blue, tangerine, yellow, pink and purple.

Nylon pantyhose boutique. From seamed pantyhose to reinforced heel and toe pantyhose, otherwise known as RHT, sandalfoot pantyhose, glitter fishnet pantyhose to modern pantyhose and tights with wild prints, they have a beautiful and totally unique collection to browse through.

Wool tights, wool leggings, and cotton cable knit tights.  Fabulously warm and fashionable natural fiber tights for the colder months, both cable knit and ribbed tights available. 

Fashion leggings are all the rage in fashion magazines!  They have a variety of footless tights and printed leggings available.

Be sure to browse their lingerie department where they have silk garter belts, four strap garter belts and six strap suspender belts...you probably need something beautiful to hold up your new stockings!  They also have exquisite silk slips, bras and panties.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Number Eighty-Two

From the Janet Reger Collection, the Basque.

A limited edition of the Katrina basque and tanga in baby blue silk and soft pink lace, as worn by Keeley Hazell on the cover of her 2007 calendar.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Number Eighty-One

Sexy: Quantifiable? Bogart to the Rescue
a brilliant piece by Steff, of “Smut & Steff” (and a DGT muse).

Every day, somebody somewhere sputters, “They ain’t makin’ ‘em like they usedta.” And this is true. So, there I was, watching The Maltese Falcon, thinking about what it is about Bogey that gets me hot and bothered every single goddamned time....I slowly melted as I watched Bogey; lying there on the floor, longing for a man who has that same mix of brashness and humour and sensitivity and lust and brood to step out of the shadows to a saxophone soundtrack playing behind the scenes in my life. Goddamned right they ain’t making them like they used to. They’ve never made ‘em like Bogey. It’s a fucking crime his career wasn’t longer. What makes him sexy? Scratch that. What is sexy? What is it that turns us on and keeps us revving? How do we define an idea, an intangible? For some women, it’s a guy wearing only a jock under seersucker pants. For others, it’s cracked and aged black leather paired with jeans and a wife-beater and topped with stubble (sigh). For still more, it’s that metrosexual gleam that comes from the coif and the couture. But Bogey, he had none of that. A face like a weathered horse, the man was no Errol Flynn. His voice had that gravelly vocal twang and he always had that inimitable sparkle in his eye when he grinned or leered. He oozed sexuality in a time of repression, and because he didn’t have the lustful good looks of the A-List stars, he got away with it. He was an average guy that could eyeball a woman in a way that conveyed exactly the kind of confident and daring lover you knew he’d be. You just knew he’d pin you against the wall and devour you. You knew he’d be as comfortable submitting to you as dominating you. It just showed.

There’s something about the way a man can unapologetically own a woman through his looks (or vice versa), yet offer no intimidation by ever even suggesting it’s about ownership. There’s something about expressing lust through your eyes – real, true, now-here, for-as-long-as-we-can lust. And Bogey broke the ground and set the pace for an entire legion of men who’d grow up wanting to have what he exemplified. Bogey set a new standard for sexy, something we’re still trying to figure out in this day and age of plastic surgery and air-brushing, and something we keep missing the mark of.

It’s not about the dimples, the white teeth, the hard body, the fine coif. It’s about you knowing what you want and knowing how to show it. It’s about learning how to communicate with your eyes, with your lips, with your words, with your body language. How to think something like, “I’d love to throw you down and keep you there until we’re both utterly spent and gasping in musky pools of our own sweat” and let it be read only through your eyes and the purse of your lips.

And Bogey, he had that. Throw into it the ability to adopt dozens of different smiles, the coy mannerisms of his foot shuffle, his playful body language and suggestive head tilts, the way he searched a room or his scene’s companion for changes in mood and worked with it, and that incredible focus he had in his gaze, and the guy could be 5’1 and a buck-10, and he’d still have the sex appeal of an animal. Some guys just have it, and Bogey, he did.

I’ve known a couple guys who had it, and to this day I see their faces in my mind some nights when I’m alone, or even with a man. They’re always unforgettable, those guys, but it’s that gleam in the eye you remember. Yep. There’s something about a gleam… and it’s one of the reasons leaving the lights on during sex is so fucking hot. Too many of us can’t muster that gleam outside the act itself, so leaving the lights enables you to see your lover drinking you in like that… well, mm, there’s not many images that you just want to freeze-frame forever, but that’s sure as hell one of them.

Me, I’m very conscious of how and what I emote with my eyes. There are guys who set my eyes a blazin’ and I make a point of letting that show. Those nights, I don’t even have to mention that sex is on the mind, it’s just that damned obvious. It’s not needy or desperate, it’s confident and suggestive. You don’t even have to say the words. It’s like seeing a movie with a great director pulling the strings, some things are left unsaid but are unmistakably clear in intent. It’s fucking hot, whoever’s doing it, and it’s part of what defines sexy. Knowing what you want, and being ballsy enough to show it. Or just damned well taking it (when consent is obvious).

When it comes to men, it’s a pity there aren’t more Bogeys...Or Clints. Or Newmans. Or Depps. Sure, the latter are pretty boys, but it’s more than that. They discovered sexy, what it really means, what it really is. That it’s a quality, not a look, not an image, not a brand name. It’s just a thing inside you that you learn to put on display, and it’s uniquely you, whatever it is. You find your way to that place, that confident spot, and it compensates immeasurably. It just shows.

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And Scarlett Johansson and Veronica Lake . . . . definitely!

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Number Eighty

J Su Misura

J Su Misura presents the first collaboration of Jelle P. and Master Silversmith Jon Winter, a C-Ring in its J Joy collection. 

Currently available in Silver and made-to-measure.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Number Seventy-Nine

Succès de scandale!
Wild things
Darwin Porter reveals the extraordinary story that lay behind Marlon’s Brando’s smouldering image
Adapted from Brando Unzipped by Darwin Porter

A couple of years ago many American newspapers printed a report from the Associated Press news agency that the family of the recently deceased Marlon Brando had scattered his ashes in Tahiti and in Death Valley, California.

The report continued, intriguingly: “The ashes of Brando’s late friend Wally Cox, who died in 1973, were also poured onto the desert landscape as part of the same ceremony; how Cox’s ashes were in the possession of Brando’s family was unknown.”

It is hard to credit that neither the agency nor the papers knew that Cox, a comedian, had been Brando’s long-term lover. But such was the strength of the macho heterosexual myth surrounding the actor that he had to be protected even after his death.

What the media may be excused for not knowing is that Brando not only kept his friend’s ashes for more than 30 years but, when lonely, would sometimes dine à deux with the urn, holding conversations in which he would perfectly imitate Cox’s voice. He left instructions that after his own death their ashes should be mingled and scattered together.

The media may also be excused for not knowing that Cox was only one of many men with whom Brando had liaisons. Brando was bisexual and voracious. The roles he lived off-screen were even more provocative than those he created in films.

At his peak his list of lovers read like a Who’s Who of Hollywood and beyond, including Burt Lancaster, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Rita Hayworth, Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner, Gloria Vanderbilt, Tyrone Power, Hedy Lamarr, Anna Magnani, Montgomery Clift (they once ran naked down Wall Street together for a dare), James Dean, Tallulah Bankhead, Ingrid Bergman, Edith Piaf and Doris Duke (at the time the world’s richest woman).

Yet just as the film studio publicity machines covered up the proclivities of closet gays such as Rock Hudson — another Brando lover — so they hid the extent of Brando’s excesses.

The world knew of his predilection for “dark-skinned women”, particularly Tahitian and American Indian beauties. That he had a skinny, bespectacled male lover called Wally just didn’t fit the image. Yet he once admitted that he had never been happy with a woman, adding: “If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him and we would have lived happily ever after.”

Is this the reason for Brando’s self- destructive behaviour, the boorishness and the obesity that blighted the career of a man who was hailed 50 years ago as an electrifyingly handsome and talented new star?

Exuding a sense of brooding power and bottled-up anger, the iconoclastic Brando was arguably the greatest film star of all time. He changed the way stars, both male and female, acted and even the way young men dressed. His “uniform” of blue jeans and white T-shirts became standard issue, he reigned as the male sex symbol of the 1950s.

Yet he never found a movie role he really liked, not even his two Oscar-winning performances in On the Waterfront and The Godfather. He was even disdainful of his memorable role as Stanley Kowalski, which made him famous both on Broadway and on the screen in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

During his twilight, he admitted, “I searched for, but never found, what I was looking for either on screen or off. Mine was a glamorous, turbulent life but completely unfulfilling.”

How do I know so much about Brando? I began meeting movie stars as a young boy when my mother was girl Friday to Sophie Tucker, the “last of the red hot mommas”. But I started hearing Brando’s dark secrets in my twenties when I was a neighbour and friend of Tennessee Williams, the playwright and one of Brando’s early seducers.

In the four decades since, I have been hearing further secrets from the actor’s former lovers, friends, rivals and colleagues; and I have built up a body of notes that would fill several books. This is sourced material and a rare insight behind the screen that separates the real life of an icon from the fantasy that the world is forced to feed upon.

TO EXPLAIN where all this began I have to go back to the American Midwest in the 1920s. Marlon Brando might never have become a screen legend were it not for a willowy, ash-blonde beauty called Dorothy Pennebaker Myers. Nicknamed Dodie, the daughter of a gold prospector who died when she was two, she experienced a chaotic childhood before entering into an even more chaotic marriage to an insecticide salesman called Marlon Brando Sr in Omaha, Nebraska.

From the beginning of her marriage and even after the birth of her three children, Dodie disdained child-rearing and housekeeping. She did not believe in heavy discipline for her kids but preferred that they “discover their own true natures”.

For young Marlon, born in 1924, that often “meant running wild through the town, raising hell and causing trouble”, in the words of a former Omaha neighbor, Casey Culler: “The kid was a menace. The father was always on the road with one of his whores, the mother out drunk in some cheap motor court with someone’s husband.”

Once, to shame his parents about their excessive beer drinking, Marlon placed all the empty bottles prominently in front of their Omaha home to shock the prohibition-supporting church-going neighbours. Even so, he was very supportive of his mother throughout her alcoholic binges. After she broke her leg while driving drunk to a secret rendezvous with a lover, eight-year-old Marlon told his older sister Jocelyn, “Dad drives her to drink.”

When sober, Dodie was usually involved in a production at the semi-professional Omaha Community Playhouse, where she was both a producer and often the lead actress. Henry Fonda always thanked Dodie for launching him into acting. He remembered lying around his home one summer in Omaha, having dropped out of university. A call came in from Dodie offering him a juvenile lead. Although the play didn’t run long, Hank stayed around.

Dodie fell in love with this shy young actor and seduced him. She promised to divorce Marlon Sr and marry Fonda right away. He turned her down, but they maintained their liaison for years to come.

Marlon’s sisters left for New York and he followed them, aged 19, to study acting while supporting himself through odd jobs such as lift operator. After discovering “too many lipstick collars” on her husband’s white shirts, Dodie headed east, too. She rented a 10-room apartment on Manhattan’s West Side and invited her children to move in with her. It quickly became an “open house” to many struggling actors of that day.

Bobby Lewis, a founder of the avant-garde Actors Studio, remembered: “People dropped in at all times of the day and night to the Brandos. Often they slept on her living room floor. And yes, fornicated there as well.”

Lewis heard a rumour that a drunken Dodie was picked up one night by two sailors and taken to a flophouse where she was repeatedly raped until Brando found out and went to rescue her.
“Through all the crap she put him through,” a close friend, Ann Hastings, said, “Marlon continued to worship his mother. He forgave her for everything. She worshipped him as well. She called him ‘that acting genius that popped out of my womb’.”

Hastings also reported that one afternoon when she dropped in on the Brandos, “I saw the strangest sight. Marlon was sitting in the sparsely furnished living room. He had on one of Dodie’s street dresses and a pair of those Joan Crawford f***-me shoes, as ankle-strap high heels were called in those days. He was fully made up, lipstick and all. He didn’t seem at all embarrassed for me to see him dressed like that.”

Hastings went on to claim that Dodie was indulging in sexual intercourse with her own son. This could be dismissed as nonsense were it not for some supporting testimony from Lewis, who said that Dodie often slept in the same bed with her son.

He added: “One night while I was alone with Marlon and Dodie in their living room, listening to classical music, they seemed to have forgotten that I was there. Although she was wearing a housecoat, fully dressed, he snuggled into her breasts as part of a nursing ritual learnt long ago. In spite of her heavy drinking, Dodie always kept that special bond with her son. It was very Oedipal. A little too Oedipal for my tastes.”

ALSO in those early times in New York there was Wally Cox, whom Brando had befriended in boyhood — when, with his horn-rimmed glasses and frail body, Wally was the type of little guy bigger boys “liked to beat the shit out of”, in the words of a former classmate.

“Sometimes Marlon would protectively put his arm around Wally on the school grounds as if to signal to the bullies that he’d beat them up if they so much as laid a hand on Wally,” recalled Eric Panken, another former classmate.

They were separated when Brando was sent away to military school but were reunited by chance years later in New York. Brando was trying in vain to persuade his sister Fran to get into a pushcart so he could race her through the traffic for fun. As if by magic, Cox suddenly appeared and got into the cart without protest. They disappeared into the traffic.

By the time Brando reappeared three days later he had become “bonded at the hip for life” with his long-lost boyhood friend. He made skinny Cox copy the tight jeans and T-shirt that were already part of the Brando image.

Lewis recalled seeing a lot of Marlon and Wally in those days: “Those two attended parties together and everybody just assumed they were a couple.” But Brando had also discovered his magnetism for women and brought them to Cox’s flat.

“It was a hell hole,” said Lewis. “There was a nasty little bedroom to the side, a kitchen where no dish was ever washed, and a living room with a battered sofa with the springs broken, and the most disgusting urine-stained mattress I’d ever seen in my life with nothing to cover it.

“Wally was obviously playing the role of the dutiful wife. But Marlon could never commit to anyone, much less a man. He loved his women too much.

As if to humiliate his friend, Marlon often brought his girlfriends over to Wally’s apartment to screw them. He’d take over the bedroom and make Wally sleep on that filthy mattress in the living room. Wally had to listen to the sounds of Marlon’s love-making all night. It was sadistic, really.”

Cox reacted to Brando’s new set of rules by becoming a bit of a womaniser himself and he married twice. “But if Marlon called, Wally dropped whatever he was doing and came running like a faithful puppy dog to his master,” said Lewis. “I think that Wally continued to love Marlon until he drew his last breath.”

THE other significant person to enter Brando’s life during his early years in New York was Marilyn Monroe. He mentioned fleetingly in his own memoirs that he “first met her briefly shortly after the war”, but in all of the many exhaustive reports on their lives, virtually no light has been shed on this historic first encounter between the future film god and goddess.

The only insider to offer a clue is Carlo Fiore, a Brooklyn Sicilian who became Brando’s close friend at drama school. Brando told him that he first met Marilyn at a bar in New York city in 1946. According to Fiore, he offered her $15 to come back to his rented room where he claimed they made love all night. In the morning Marilyn was gone.

Was Marilyn Monroe, for a brief period in 1946, hustling johns in New York City? It appears entirely possible. “With me, Marlon didn’t have to fantasise about encounters with broads,” Fiore said. “I could see it taking place right in front of my eyes. Often it was my broad he was scoring with. Long before he became famous he was ploughing such big names as Marlene Dietrich. Why not Marilyn? When he told me he’d screwed Marilyn in 1946, I found that completely believable. Still do.”

Lena Pepitone, Marilyn’s maid in later life, also revealed that the star had admitted to turning tricks for $15 “pocket money” in the 1940s. Marilyn herself said she had worked as a hooker on the back streets of Hollywood, but “I never took money. I only did it for food. Once I connected with a man, I’d negotiate for breakfast, lunch or dinner, depending on the time of day”.

Brando next met her some years later when both were rising stars. Details are sketchy, but Brando afterwards told both Fiore and Fred Zinnemann, the film director, the same story.

Brando said he was waiting in his car outside a Los Angeles apartment building when a beautiful woman came out and apparently mistook him for her date for the evening. She peered inside the car.

“You’re not Sammy,” she said, stepping back. “But you look familiar. You’re Marlon Brando!”

“And who might you be?” Brando asked. “Do I know you?”

“You don’t recognise me with my new hair colour,” she said. “I’m Norma Jean, but now I’m known as Marilyn Monroe. You don’t remember the time we got together in New York and you invited me back to your place?”

“That could fit a thousand encounters,” he said. “Get in the car. Perhaps you can do something to me to joggle my memory.”
She wiggled into the passenger’s seat and reached over to him as he drove off to his apartment. “I practically had three accidents before we got there,” Brando later told Zinnemann. “Since that night in New York someone had been teaching Marilyn new tricks. Maybe a lot of someones.”

The next morning, Marilyn lingered over breakfast and stayed with Marlon “for a matinee performance”. Brando kept Zinnemann up to date about his affair with Marilyn. He once told his director: “Marilyn’s studio is claiming her bust measurement is 37. However, Marilyn herself disputes that. She says her bust measurement is 38. As for me, I have a built-in tape measure in my brain. I’m never wrong about these things. I’d put her bust at 35 and I should know!”

The affair would stop and go, heating up in the mid-1950s, but never completely disappearing until her mysterious death in 1962.

“He was privy to her secrets and often gave her very good advice,” Fiore later said. “She never seemed to heed Marlon’s words but continued to call him for guidance she rarely followed.”

Perhaps the most surprising discovery about Brando’s early relationships comes from Paris. He and the teenage Brigitte Bardot spurned each other when introduced by her lover, Roger Vadim. “Brigitte was not at all dazzled by Marlon’s physique and he found her charming but no more than that,” said Vadim. Yet Brando found Coco Chanel, the ageing couturier, “the single most fascinating woman I’ve ever met”, and he seduced the tiny middle-aged singer Edith Piaf.

Not that the conquest of Piaf was easy, as Brando later told Jacques Viale, a young actor whom he also seduced. When she took him back to her apartment after lunch he made the mistake of assuming she had seduction on her mind, slipped off all his clothes and crawled into her bed.

“Who do you think I am, you bastard?” she shouted. “Some Pigalle whore? Get out of here!”

She chased him naked from the apartment and slammed the door — opening it to throw out his blue jeans but not his T-shirt or shoes. “I felt she definitely wanted to sample my noble tool,” he told Viale. “But she must have some mating ritual, the niceties with which I’m not familiar. I didn’t play it right.”

The next day, however, she sang La Vie En Rose down the telephone to him as an apology. And that night she dressed in rags and took him to Pigalle to sing incognito on the streets, as she had done before becoming famous. Brando held the cap to collect coins. They arrived home drunk at 6am and Brando put her chastely to bed.

The following night she invited him and seven nightclub dancers from the Lido to her apartment. Brando hoped for an orgy, he told Viale. But before dawn Piaf ushered the girls out of the door and invited Brando to share her bed and her small, frail body.

“She was still asleep when I left her bed in the late morning. She looked deathly pale. In fact, she didn’t even seem to be breathing.”

Friends say that women gradually became more important to Brando than men. “As he grew older, it appears that he led more or less a straight life . . . but with Marlon, you could never be sure,” said Lewis.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number Seventy-Eight

Interview: Sylvia Kristel, the world’s most famous porn star
What did life hold in store for her after Emmanuelle?
By Deborah Ross, UK Independent

I meet Sylvia Kristel – always “Emmanuelle”, even after all these years – at a bar in Amsterdam. She is there when I arrive, wearing glasses, a scarf around her neck, sitting quietly at a table reading a newspaper. Am I disappointed that she isn’t, instead, enthroned on a wicker chair wearing nothing beyond a string of pearls and, most peculiarly, knee-length socks teamed with ankle boots? No. That would be embarrassing. I introduce myself.

She is 55 now, pretty, with lovely skin. “It’s genetic. The creams I use are not expensive. Nivea is just as good. Why waste a fortune?” She lives, it turns out, above the bar, in a small rented flat where she paints ( “my last picture was a huge canvas filled with blue roses"), watches American soaps (her favourite is As The World Turns) and cooks on a Monday. “I make a big pot of pasta with vegetables and I stretch it out for the week.” We order coffee. We are here, ostensibly, to talk about her autobiography, Undressing Emmanuelle, which takes in everything from her weird childhood through to Emmanuelle and then those cocaine-fuelled, drunken years living with Ian McShane in Hollywood. I say that the thing I most want to know about Ian is this: did he ever try to sell you any antiques? He did not, she says. “But that programme, Lovejoy, was very successful, no?” They haven’t kept in touch. “He’s not the kind of man to call and check how you are.” There was a lot of anger in him, she says. “His agent once told him that if he were three inches taller he’d have as glittering a career as Sean Connery. That frustrated him. He did not get the parts he deserved.” She’s not had a great deal of luck with men, as sublime beauties rarely do, and as I should know.

Anyway, even though the title of her autobiography is what it is – hey, a girl has to make a living! – I figure she must be pretty bored of Emmanuelle by now. Christ, it was 33 years ago. What’s left to say? But that’s never stopped me before and, alas, doesn’t stop me now. I tell her I saw Emmanuelle at the Golders Green Odeon when it first came out, which was 1974, which means I must have been 13. It was on as a double bill with the film Percy’s Progress which had, as its tagline, “size doesn’t count!” even though it so does, but you don’t know that at 13, do you? Both were X-rated so we must have bunked in via the small window in the ladies at the back. (This stunt may still work but a word of warning: the Golders Green Odeon is now an old people’s home. Better to know than not.) I say that Emmanuelle was the first erotic film – or erotic anything – my friends and I had ever experienced and it blew us away. We’d never seen it before; had no idea there was even more than one way of doing it. We left so worked up that if we’d brushed up against anything – anything, even a lamppost – we’d have probably all gone off like fire hydrants. Sylvia, is this too much information? She says: “It astonishes me, this interest. When will it come to an end?” Do you mind? “Not really.” She can be quite listless. She may be more bored than she makes out but, hey, the girl’s got a book to sell!

OK, I say, what do you think it is about Emmanuelle that means people just can’t put it down? She thinks it was all about great timing. She says that due to changes in censorship regulations at the time, it was the first sex film to appear in “normal” cinemas rather than to the raincoat brigade in some seedy dive. “In a lot of countries the light went on, and that contributed very much to the success.” I say I think it might be something else, too. I tell her I re-watched it for the first time since I was 13 just before coming here today, and what struck me most was not only its gauche innocence – dodgy moustaches; atrocious dubbing; all those wonderfully ad-hoc shagathons ("pass the sugar, and let’s have a shag while we’re about it") – but also her wonderful freshness and purity. I don’t think the film would have got anywhere, I add, if the star had been some regular old porn hand with big tits. I think, Sylvia, that Sylvia Kristel made that film. She thinks there maybe something in this, yes. She re-watched it a year or so ago because Channel 4 were making a documentary about it. And? “I thought it was charming. Very innocent, like you say. I was struck by how young I looked at the time but I thought I was so adult, that I knew it all and I was going to conquer the world. Amazing. Where did this come from?” She has a son, Arthur, now in his thirties. Has he seen it? “He fell asleep. He thought it very boring.” Your mother? “She saw the film when it came on television. She said: ‘If they are showing it on television it can’t be that bad.’ And then she saw it and said: ‘Is that all?’ I said: ‘Mother, have you been imagining the worst for 20 years?’ “

Although popularly thought to be French, Sylvia is, in fact, Dutch. She was born in Utrecht where her parents owned and ran The Commerce Hotel, Station Square. Sylvia and her sister, Marianne, were brought up in Room 21, unless the hotel was full, in which case they were shifted, often in the middle of the night, to Room 22, “which was no more than a cubby hole”. She says she often used to think: “What if my mother rents room 22. Where will we go then?” Her parents were alcoholics, pretty much. She once counted how many glasses of beer her father, John, put away in a day, and stopped at 40. Her father had been the Dutch clay pigeon shooting champion but, a stubborn man, refused to wear ear protectors and went deaf. When not manning the hotel, he would disappear to the attic to whittle chess figurines. Her mother, Pete, meanwhile, was an emotionally cool woman always at the sherry. Pete? “She comes from the countryside where there is this habit of naming children after a relative, whether it is a man or a woman.”

Sylvia had no idea that drink wasn’t a feature of everybody’s life; that alcohol wasn’t like food or water. It was only when she went to boarding school for a spell at 11 that she realised this wasn’t so. “On my first night I could not sleep so I asked Sister Assassia for a cognac.” I bet that went down well. “She said: ‘You must be joking. Three Hail Mary’s and a Pater will send you to sleep just as well.’ It was the first time I had ever been refused. At the hotel, when I couldn’t sleep, I would always serve myself a cognac.” She was even practically suckled on booze. “ Before I was weaned my mother got me to sleep by putting a cognac-soaked cloth wrapped around a lump of sugar to my lips.” Sylvia would eventually have her own drink problems, needless to say.

Possibly, the defining moment of her childhood came when she was 16 and something quite staggering happened: her father returned to the hotel one day with a woman in tow whom he introduced as his next wife. He then, quite literally, ejected Pete (Pete!) and the children from the hotel. “It was as if we were staff and he had dismissed us.” They moved to a small flat. Her mother went out to work. Sylvia did return to the hotel once but the new wife refused to let her in. I think, in many ways, she has possibly yet to recover from this.

I wonder when she realised she was beautiful. She doesn’t know, she says. Then again, she was always looking at herself in the mirror. Her mother thought her horribly vain, as did her grandmother, who would cover the mirrors with newspaper. And what was your grandmother’s name? Roger? Dave? “ No! Marie!” She thinks she probably had some idea at 17, when a man rushed up to her in the street and said: ‘Thank you. Just looking at you has made me happy.’” If you could somehow be reborn, I ask, would you choose to come back as beautiful or not beautiful? Both can dictate a life, after all. Which would you pick? She thinks for a while then says: “I would now rather be very healthy and strong as a horse but it is nice to be attractive.” In recent years, her health has not been so good. She’s had run-ins with cancer twice (throat, lung). The radiation treatment scorched her neck – hence the scarf – and as for the chemotherapy: “It sends you into the menopause immediately and you put on weight – fast, wow! I’ve gained 20 pounds easily. I have to go up four flights of stairs to my flat and it is like carrying two suitcases! I am not going to be cast any more for my body, I am sure.” She says this matter-of-factly, without any self-pity. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It sometimes feels as if she simply doesn’t have enough energy left to muster up any feelings at all.

When she left school she became a secretary, a waitress, then posed for a photographer in Utrecht and became a model. She won two beauty titles: first Miss TV Holland, then Miss TV Europe. She writes in the book that when she was crowned Miss TV Europe – by Katie Boyle, at a ceremony in London – her first thought was: “I want my father to see me, to see this exquisite bird he let escape.” That is quite sad, I think. I put it to her that maybe she’s been looking for her father in her relationships with men ever since. A cliché, I know, but it doesn’t mean it might not be true. After all, her first proper boyfriend, Hugo Claus (father of Arthur) was a Dutch writer who was 24 years her senior. She says: “Was I looking for a father? Maybe in my subconscious I was, but Hugo was not a father figure, he was a great lover. He was older, that is true, but he was very boyish and athletic and did karate every day.”

Hugo encouraged her to become an actress, and to audition for Emmanuelle. In the book, she describes the audition like this: “I am wearing a lingerie-type dress with delicate shoulder straps; it reaches half way down my thighs. I sit down and smile. I am 20 years old with all the nerve of that age, all the desire to conquer. I take advantage of a boring question about my education to roll my shoulder slowly forward until one strap falls, then the other. I carry on talking. The slightly cold air stiffens my breasts. My apparent relaxation gives the impression that my body is still dressed, although it is right here, in front of them, exposed, naked. The panel is bowled over; some of them even have the tips of their tongues hanging out...” I say that I once did that for a job and you know what? Didn’t get anywhere. Thrown out the door, I was. Not a single tongue hung out. She laughs. But such courage, Sylvia! Yes, and you know what? “It was weird, because I am actually quite prudish.”

She imagined that Emmanuelle would never be passed by the censors, would never get released, but thought that as it was going to be filmed in Thailand she and Hugo might as well get a free holiday out of it. She says that when it first opened in Paris and she saw the huge queue outside the La Triumph cinema on the Champs-Élysées she was absolutely staggered. Further, it carried on “playing in that same cinema for 13 years”. She became a big star. Huge! It was champagne and entourages and Mercedes cars… Did it go to her head? You bet. Her biggest mistake was leaving Hugo for Ian McShane, whom she’d met on the set of The Fifth Musketeer. “ That’s the dumbest thing I ever did,” she says. He offered to take her to Hollywood and she was keen. “I thought Hollywood was waiting for me. It was not.” The movies she made there were lacklustre “and I had to fight to keep my clothes on”. Her relationship with Ian was volatile. They fought and threw things a lot. They drank and did cocaine. She attended many A-list parties “where I would snort, drink, slip on my silk-lined Chanel clothes and fall over”. She got pregnant but fell and lost the baby. Her wake-up call came when a doctor told her that her liver was shot and her accountant told her to choose between keeping her house or keeping at the cocaine. She could not afford both. She chose the house. It took her six years, she says, to stop thinking about cocaine.

But, alas, the house still wasn’t safe. In 1986 she married Philippe Blot, a dreamer who believed himself to be Orson Welles. He persuaded her to finance his films. One film was so bad it only played for six days and was described by a critic as “the worst film ever made”. He left her utterly broke and she had the bailiffs after her for years. “A-list stars now make zillions but my biggest fee was like $300,000… If I had been more prudent and hadn’t been partying so much, I guess it would have lasted a bit longer – but what really did me in was Philippe.”

How does she survive now? She sells a few pictures, she says. And the book may sell well. I ask if she ever feels lonely. “Well, sometimes I think it would be nice...” she says, before drifting off. She then says she has her painting and her soaps and her big pot of pasta and Arthur, who visits regularly. It’s not so bad. It’s been some life, though, I say. It has, she says. We part on the street outside the bar. I watch her walk away and think how weary she looks, even from the back. That’s what I think she is: weary. And that’s what I’ve probably been trying to put my finger on all along.

‘Undressing Emmanuelle: a memoir’ is published by Fourth Estate, £14.99. ‘Emmanuelle’, available uncut for the first time, is on DVD from Optimum Home Entertainment

Naked ambition: the Emmanuelle story

Emmanuelle first appeared as the nom de plume of Marayat Rollet-Andriane, a French-Asian writer born in 1930s Bangkok. Her 1957 book The Joys of a Woman detailed the sexual exploits of Emmanuelle, the bored housewife of a French diplomat. Rollet-Andriane’s book caused a sensation in France and it was banned by De Gaulle’s government.

Emmanuelle’s screen debut came in 1969 with the Italian film Io, Emmanuelle starring Erika Blanc. The film was a flop and its director, Cesare Canevari, would later plumb new depths with the Nazi-exploitation classic Gestapo’s Last Orgy.

Sylvia Kristel made the role her own with the 1973 release of Emmanuelle, directed by the French former interior designer, Just Jaeckin. De Gaulle’s prudery long forgotten, the film played to packed houses in Paris.

Emmanuelle was also an international hit and has played to an estimated global audience of 300 million. Kristel says the true figure, if videos are taken into account, is closer to 650 million.

In France and the US the film was uncut, but British censors balked at scenes of masturbation and explicit sex. In the end, the scene in which Emmanuelle is raped as part of her “sexual education” was the only one to get the chop.

In France, posters advertising the film showed Emmanuelle sitting topless in a wicker chair, fingering a string of pearls. The caption read: “At last – a film that won’t make you feel bad about feeling good”. Emmanuelle’s US marketers took a different tack. A trailer screamed: “ Twelve million Frenchmen stood in line for it!”

In a scene where Emmanuelle climbs on top of her husband during a sex scene, a group of Japanese feminists at a Parisian cinema reportedly rose to their feet and applauded. Western feminists were less impressed.

Kristel sold her interest in Emmanuelle for $150,000, missing out on a share of the film’s $26m domestic gross. She was paid just $6,000 for her starring role but negotiated a $100,000 contract for the sequel, Emmanuelle 2.

Kristel’s last outing as Emmanuelle in Goodbye, Emmanuelle (1977) was only the beginning of the franchise, which has to date spawned more than 60 (mostly unlicensed) spin-offs. They include Emmanuelle Goes Japanese, Emmanuelle: A Hard Look and, out this year, The Inconfessable Orgies of Emmanuelle.

The 1978 spoof Carry on Emmannuelle (note the double “*") starred Kenneth Williams as the French ambassador to London. Having lost his libido after landing on a church spire during a parachute jump, his sex-starved wife, Emmannuelle Prevert, seduces a string of VIPs. Scandal ensues (but not hilarity).

The Indonesian actress Laura Gemser starred in Emanuelle Nera (Black Emanuelle), an Italian spin-off that itself spawned 10 more films, including Emanuelle in Hell and Emanuelle vs the Cannibals.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
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