An Education Read online

  Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione, a gravel-voiced, Sicilian-American cartoonist and dry-cleaning manager, had launched Penthouse in 1965 while I was still at Oxford and caused a great flurry on the high tables by sending out a mailshot to all the senior Oxford dons. Many of them complained about this filth arriving in their pigeonholes so I was despatched by, I think, Cherwell, to interview Guccione and ask why he'd done it. I can't remember anything about our meeting except that it was in a glamorous flat in London and Guccione made me laugh a lot and right at the end he said, ‘If you ever want a job, honey, come to me.’ I giggled merrily and returned to Oxford but after that I used to say to friends, ‘Oh well, I can always go and work for Penthouse.’

  So, all other avenues having failed, that's what I did. I wrote to Bob Guccione, reminding him of our meeting, and told him I was now a graduate with some experience in journalism and did he have a job on his magazine? I had a letter back from Harry Fieldhouse – Bob didn't really do letters – saying come and see him. Harry was the editor whereas Bob was the ‘editor in chief’, and he was the one I would be working for.

  Everything about Penthouse was a surprise. I had imagined that it would be in, well, a penthouse, or at any rate a glamorous West End office, but it was in a tiny terraced house in Ifield Road, off the Fulham Road, looking out on Brompton Cemetery at the back. The front room contained a dolly bird receptionist called Maureen and piles and piles of cardboard boxes – these I was to learn were the tiresome Penteez Panties – with another room housing the Penthouse Book Club at the back. Upstairs, the back bedroom was Bob and Kathy's office, and the front was ‘editorial’ – a largish room containing the art director Joe Brooks with a very small cubbyhole containing Harry Fieldhouse.

  Harry again was a surprise. He seemed very old (I suppose he was about forty) and far too gentlemanly and donnish to be a journalist, let alone editor of Penthouse. But there was a dry humour I liked. His first question was, ‘Can you spell?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I read English at Oxford.’

  ‘Ecstasy,’ he said.

  ‘Well yes, it was very enjoyable.’

  ‘I meant, spell it.’

  I resisted the smart-arse answer (i, t) and spelt out e, c, s, t, a, s, y.

  ‘Good. Very few people can spell that word and we use it a lot in Penthouse. Pulchritude is another – can you spell it?’

  Yes, I said, doing so.

  Accommodation, minuscule, predilection, diarrhoea, haemorrhage – he reeled off a list of words and nodded as I spelled them correctly. Then he gave me a short article and told me to underline anything I thought was wrong. There were a few spelling mistakes and I marked them.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We can pay you £16 a week. The hours are ten to six. Can you start on Monday?’

  Yes!

  David was waiting for me on the corner and I went running down the street, shouting ‘Hooray! Sixteen pounds a week! Starting Monday!’ He was as pleased as I was, but asked what the job entailed and of course I had no idea. It didn't matter though. I liked Harry Fieldhouse, I liked the little house in Ifield Road, I knew I would enjoy working for Penthouse magazine. And indeed I did, for the next seven years.

  On Monday Harry gave me a list of proofreading marks and told me to learn them. My job would be to check all copy that went into the magazine and correct it. The division of labour at Penthouse in those early days was very simple: Harry was responsible for all the words in the magazine, Bob for all the pictures; Joe Brooks did the layouts; Kathy Keeton, Bob's girlfriend, was in charge of advertising – but in those days we didn't have any advertising so the magazine was subsidised by its mail-order Penteez Panties and Book Club, run by Maureen and Sylvie downstairs. In theory, the magazine came out monthly; in practice, it came out when Bob had assembled enough money to pay the printers – maybe ten times that first year.

  My first weeks on the magazine were leisurely, and I spent many happy mornings arguing with Harry Fieldhouse about the nuances of punctuation and spelling. He had a passionate aversion to ‘widows’ – odd words at the end of paragraphs that took up a whole line – ‘waste of space’. He was very keen on dashes, which I disapproved of in those days (I don't now) and also on z spellings – he preferred realize to realise, organize to organise, utilize to utilise. He thought z spellings were ‘modern’ because they were American and he loved anything American which is why (improbably) he adored Bob. He drove a big American car – his Lincoln Townhouse and Bob's Cadillac took up most of Ifield Road. Despite his rather old-fashioned manner, he was an absolute sucker for anything new, innovative – he was what would now be called ‘an early adopter’. He was always giving me gadgets that he said would change my life (I could never make them work) and bought himself a sun-tanning bed, imported from America, long before such things were heard of in England. Most disastrously, he had one of the first-ever hair transplants, which resulted in an unfortunate black dotted line across his forehead and a few tufts like lettuce seedlings on his crown. He said they would join up but they never did. I always liked taking strangers into Harry's office and watching their incredulous reaction when they got their first glimpse of his pate.

  Bob and Kathy rarely appeared before late afternoon (he suffered from terrible insomnia and if/when he finally got to sleep no one was allowed to wake him), so generally Harry, Joe and I worked quietly in the mornings until Kathy came barking orders in the afternoon. I always loved Bob, for his sardonic wit and gravelly Brooklyn accent, but Kathy Keeton was simply terrifying. She had grown up on a farm in South Africa, trained as a ballet dancer, and become Strip Queen of Bulawayo. In that capacity, she came to London to star at the Pigalle, where Bob spotted her. He found her in her dressing room surrounded by economics books and reading the Financial Times. He said he was setting up a magazine and wanted her to model for it – she said no, but she'd come and work for him on the business side. She was earning £1 50 a week as a stripper. He said he'd pay her £10 a week to sell advertising and she said done. Thus began a partnership as formidable as Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Dido and Aeneas, Marks and Spencer. He was a good Catholic and stayed married to Muriel, the mother of his four children, until the children were grown up, but Kathy was maîtresse en titre and dominatrix of Penthouse. She strode around on five-inch stilettos, tossing her mane of tawny hair, her dresses unbuttoned to her waist to show her (somewhat bony) cleavage, barking orders and calling everyone darling, which with her strong South African accent came out as ‘dollink’. We called her Miss Whiplash or Princess of Pain – but never to her face because we were all (including Bob, I think) terrified of her.

  She couldn't see the point of me at all, but Bob told her I had ‘class’ – he was impressed by the fact I'd been to Oxford – and she would occasionally stride up to my desk and twirl round, showing off whatever new atrocity she was wearing – a pink vinyl cat-suit maybe, or a leather miniskirt split to the crotch, and ask ‘What do you think, dollink?’ And I learned to say obediently, ‘It's lovely, Kathy.’ ‘Classy, dollink?’ ‘Very classy.’ And she would go back to Bob and say, ‘It's fine.’ She always worried, not without reason, about looking like a hooker.

  As I said, the early months were leisurely but our little office soon got busier and busier. The circulation kept increasing, which meant we could afford to pay the printers and publish an issue every month. And the issues got fatter and fatter when Kathy started selling more advertisements. This meant that Harry and I no longer had time for long discussions about semicolons as we were both suddenly worked off our feet. Even Kathy started using me – she made me ‘fashion stylist’, which meant going round shops begging to borrow bits of clothing – feather boas, cowboy boots, chaps, waspie corsets – for the Pet shoots. Once Kathy came to me and said ‘Dollink, go to Lillywhites and borrow a black diving suit.’ I went to Lillywhites and said I was doing a feature on diving. ‘What depth will you be diving to?’ they asked. ‘Erm – ten miles?’ Then, seeing the
ir faces, no, no, I meant ten feet, no, well not very deep – with a harpoon, and a zip down the front. They produced some nightmare orange number. No, no, it has to be black. By this time I had a whole crowd of assistants gawping at me. It was only fear of Kathy that stopped me fleeing from the shop. But finally one of the assistants took pity and said, ‘Are we talking a sort of James Bond look?’ and produced the zippered black wetsuit I'd been wanting all along. I also had to attend some of the Pet shoots, not with Bob, but with an American photographer called Philip O. Stearns. My duties at the shoots included putting music on the stereo, squirting scent round the room, and powdering the girls' bottoms. In between, I did the Times crossword.

  Back in the office, I was put in charge of the Penthouse Forum, which was Bob's ‘classy’ title for readers' letters. Friends always assumed I made the letters up but actually I never needed to – the readers made them up, densely written twenty-page sagas of how they'd been imprisoned by jack-booted wardresses and subjected to appalling forms of torture and humiliation. My job as Forum editor was to try to ensure variety and balance and to prevent the corporal punishment brigade with their endless memories of school beatings taking over the whole section. I was always grateful for a bit of oddity – a foot fetishist now and then, or maybe an aficionado of amputees. But I remember one day I got a letter from Lytham St Annes saying that at the golf club they all put their house keys with an address label in a big pile and you had to draw a key and go to the address and ‘pleasure’ whatever woman you found there. I said the whole idea was so preposterous we couldn't possibly publish it – it was too obviously made up. Soon afterwards, the News of the World ran a great splash on the wife-swapping parties of the Lytham St Annes golf club.

  I did some of my first-ever interviews for an interminable series called ‘Parameters of Sexuality’ about people with odd sexual tastes – a shoe fetishist, countless transvestites and rubber enthusiasts – and I once flew to The Hague to interview a famous old dominatrix who was supposed to lash half the leading politicians in Europe. She was very grand, very funny, and told me that if I ever needed a job she could probably find a role for me in her dungeon. Interviewing these people was a complete doddle because they were always so eager, even grateful, to talk – all I had to do was look interested while they rabbited on. I think I probably developed my interviewing style through those early Penthouse confessionals, where the whole trick was not to look embarrassed, not to interrupt or impede their flow, basically just to be a sympathetic ear. I notice that sometimes, even nowadays, when interviewing, say, an Eddie Izzard or a Grayson Perry, I find myself slipping into ‘Parameters of Sexuality’ mode and asking only about their transvestism. Just last year, interviewing Antony Gormley, I got so hooked on asking what it felt like to cover oneself in clingfilm and plaster, and whether he had any related kinks (rubber-wear? diving suits?), I temporarily forgot that I was interviewing a famous sculptor.

  Another of my jobs was literary editor, which meant buying book extracts and short stories to fill the ever-growing number of pages. The stories had to be ‘classy’, of course, but they also had to be as long as possible and cost no more than £50. I developed a great hatred of literary agents, who would dump their whole slush piles on me without even the most cursory attention to what Penthouse might like – I was bombarded with stories about elderly churchgoing spinsters, which, come to think of it, might have been by Barbara Pym, but they certainly weren't right for Penthouse. My great coup, finally, was discovering science fiction and in particular a magazine called New Worlds which was publishing J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, but only to a specialist sci-fi audience. They were happy to sell us second British serial rights and we gradually acquired a reputation for publishing good science fiction. In later years Kathy launched a sci-fi magazine called Omni in the US, which was hugely successful for a while.

  The main requirement for all articles in Penthouse was that they had to be long. We ran Q-and-A interviews that rambled on for 30 pages. We had book extracts that were longer than many books. We ran 6,000-word theatre reviews and as much as Kingsley Amis ever wanted to write about booze. The point was that the words pages were printed in black and white and therefore cheap, and the girl pages were printed in colour which in those days was staggeringly expensive, especially as Bob had very high standards. (He worried about colour quality and also about staple lines. It was vital not to put staples through a girl's bosom.) So Harry and I had a very small budget and an enormous acreage of space to fill. We bought book extracts on classical erotica, on alien abductions, on Nazi war crimes. My job was to fillet them, find the juicy bits, and run as long an extract as possible. But always hampered by Harry, who had this obsession with redundancy. He could find extraneous words in any sentence, he could find extraneous sentences in any paragraph, he could find extraneous paragraphs in any page and would merrily run his black fountain pen through them all. But Harry, I would protest, we need to make 6,000 words. ‘Can't print waffle,’ he would say. ‘We're writing for men!’

  (When I started writing for Penthouse myself, this became a very personal battle. My ambition was one day to write an article from which Harry would be unable to delete a single word. But there, you see, I've already failed. ‘What do you mean single word?’ he would bark. ‘As opposed to what? A hyphenated word?’ Even now, long long after he is dead, I still hear that bark in my head. ‘Why have you said long long? Is that supposed to mean something different from long? Presumably by your usage, Shakespeare is long long long long long long long long long dead.’ As for the word ‘very’, I still flinch every time I write it. On the other hand, I do sometimes write it now – though I wouldn't have done while Harry was alive – because I believe that readers sometimes need a bit of relaxation in a sentence, as opposed to the rigid terseness – almost telegraphese – that Harry aimed for.)

  Of the mail-order ventures that largely subsidised Penthouse when I first joined, Penteez Panties – supposedly erotic gifts for your mistress, actually nylon tat for transvestites, hence the very large sizes – was the more reliable earner, with the Book Society – ‘reading matter for gentlemen of discernment’ – a close second. The Book Society was housed in the downstairs kitchen, presided over by Australian Sylvie, and attracted our one celebrity visitor – Barry Humphries. His book Bizarre was sold through the Book Society and he would drop in occasionally to check sales figures and swop Strine jokes with Sylvie. This was long before he became Dame Edna, but he was already an exotic figure in his big black fedora and cape, and Sylvie would call me downstairs when he came in to share the general hilarity. I remember once whispering to Sylvie ‘I think he might be drunk’, and I think he might have been. But he was always good fun. Other visitors were less welcome – the country bumpkins who arrived hopefully believing that they would find an office full of Penthouse Pets – boy, were they disappointed – or the elderly men who wandered in ‘just passing’ to say they thought that Miss July might be their long-lost niece and did we happen to have her phone number? Maureen the receptionist would let them ramble on a bit and then say briskly, ‘What did you say your niece's name was?’ ‘Well, Tina,’ pointing to the magazine. ‘Yeah, well, we never use their real names so she ain't Tina. Bye.’ You'd often see men walking along the street and then reeling back in shock when they came to number 170 and thinking they must have the wrong address. We were a very humble little organisation.

  But we were expanding. The staff was seven when I joined, but soon we were ten – with a post-room boy, an art assistant, an editorial secretary – and 170 Ifield Road was bulging at the seams. Bob said that he was looking for ‘huge new premises’ and we all salivated at the thought of moving to a real penthouse in the West End. In fact we moved to an ex-sausage factory in the North End Road, an even less glamorous address than Ifield Road, but here we really did have space and suddenly loads more staff. The magazine by now carried regular advertising and gradually shed its dubious classif
ieds and reliance on Penteez Panties. Bob started an offshoot magazine called Forum, which consisted entirely of readers' letters, and briefly (unsuccessfully) launched an upmarket rival to Gentlemen's Quarterly called Viva.

  Actually, Penthouse was expanding so fast, it was hard to keep up. I acquired a bigger salary and an office car – a lovely Triumph Herald convertible – and garnered a dazzling array of impressive titles: letters editor, literary editor, arts and reviews editor. It felt like living in a boom and it was fun. Best of all, I acquired a proper expense account in my capacity as literary editor and was greedily developing a major lunch habit. It was the only way, I told Bob, to woo classy writers to the magazine. But then – disaster! – Bob opened the first Penthouse Club in a back alley in Shepherd Market and announced that henceforward all entertaining must be done at the club. This was appalling. No more San Frediano, no more Alvaro, no more Chanterelle. I expected my little flock of writers – Auberon Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Powell – to rebel, but to my horror they were only too keen to have lunch at the Penthouse Club. Once. Nobody ever wanted to go there a second time. It was a place of Stygian gloom never touched by sunlight. It was rumoured to get lively at midnight, but at lunchtime it always had a sad and listless air, especially when, as often happened, I and my current classy writer were the only customers in the place.

  I always arrived early, so I would pass the time chatting to the Pets and hearing about their problems. I remember once, when I was lunching with Auberon Waugh, the Pet came up and did her little bob to Bron as taught – the bob was so that punters could get an eyeful of their cleavage – and then immediately launched into a continuation of our previous conversation: ‘My dad got his dialysis machine in the end. He loves it. They put one tube in here and one tube in there…’ I saw Bron, who had been staring entranced at her cleavage, suddenly turning white as she went into a detailed account of how a kidney machine works. That was often the trouble with Pets – they were meant to be fantasy objects but then they opened their mouths and started chatting about their dad's kidney machine or their mum's emphysema, and somehow the fantasy died. I liked them a lot, the Pets at the club, but I could see that my guests were often sorely disappointed.