NYC Fashion Week models in a long lovely row…

I’m going to experiment with shorter posts here. I think I haven’t been blogging as much as I could for the simple reason that it takes me quite awhile sometimes to find pictures to illustrate my ponderings. But maybe pictures aren’t always necessary.

Tonight I went out to dinner. It’s Fashion Week in New York, and as I walked past a dance school there was a huge party in one of the rehearsal studios, visible at street level. There were about forty beautiful models standing in all sorts of interesting garments, but they were all wearing the same wedgie high heels. Damn! I thought. Why didn’t I have my camera along?? I often do carry my camera to capture things I see on the street, but I was more concerned with getting some chow. I could have gotten an incredible shot through the huge picture window from an angle that would have shown all the girls from top to toe, culminating in those legs on identical wedgies. Damn! Well, I consigned it to memory, and I stood with some other gawkers in front of the display window and looked at the gals, who were of many ethnicities and each one extraordinarily beautiful. It was cool.

When I was eating my pasta I read an advance copy of an article about Hitchcock in this Sunday’s New York Times. There was a picture of Ingrid Bergman in 1945’s Spellbound. When I was in my last year of college, really studying film structure and history (I wanted to direct films after I graduated, like a million other dreamers), I watched Spellbound over and over on a 16mm projector (no VHS or DVDs in 1973). I practically fell in love with Bergman looking at the luminous closeups Hitchcock gave her, which expressed his own passion for that remarkable actress and beauty. So when I saw a picture of Ingrid in the paper this evening, I had the strangest feeling I was looking at somebody I once knew…of course I didn’t, but the way old movies were shot, they enabled you to fall in love with the stars through their closeups, and that certainly happened over the ten or twelve times I watched Spellbound.

Well, I guess I can dig up a picture of Ingrid Bergman pretty quickly…

The collage is attributed to Neil Smith on the site I link to below.

I found this beautiful collage at Meredy’s Place, a site with trivia questions about Ingrid Bergman and other movie info.

That shot on the bottom, second from the left, is from a scene in the movie where she did a little certain cute something with her mouth when she was talking. I watched that scene over and over, it drove me nuts. And I was involved with a girl at the time too, somebody in reality, not fantasy…a very pretty Midwestern girl who looked kind of like the British actress Susannah York, so I was doing pretty well in the romance department in the actual world…she was somebody I ended up moving to New York with in early 1973. But obviously I still had room in my heart for Ingrid Bergman…

Here’s one more shot to whet your appetite to visit the site. And boy, her expression brings out the considerable romantic in me–usually hidden now, but never far from the surface of my personality.

I'm not sure what movie this is from--maybe Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Spencer Tracy?

My passion for Ingrid Bergman dates from a time in my life before I worked in porn. Sometimes it seems hard to believe that I was once a civilian (which is what some of us in the biz call non-porn people)…

How did a romantic like me end up writing raunchy stories? That’s food for more posts in the future.

 

Never underestimate the power of a beautiful face…

Right now on Turner Classic Movies they are showing Tom Jones, the 1963 movie that made Albert Finney a star in the role of the 18th century lover boy. I saw this movie in the theater when I was 12 years old and it made an indelible impression on my budding erotic consciousness…mostly in the form of Susannah York.

Susannah York as Sophie in Tom Jones (1963)

For years afterward the 18th century represented, in my mind, an era when sex was bawdy and joyous. And not just for me–this was a very common fantasy in the 1960s with other people as well, as a result of this extremely successful movie. And seeing it at such an impressionable age helped steer me in the direction of my eventual trade as a writer of erotica.

Never underestimate the power of a beautiful face such as Miss York’s in this film. The desire to see such a face direct its affection in my direction was one of the things that spurred me ten years later to begin to write and publish about a thousand stories in which I imagined just such a thing happening. Because central in my stories are always the pretty ladies who look deep into the eyes of the hero and spur him onto all sorts of curious activities.

Also, come to think of it, the thousands of photo layouts I edited for adult magazines over the years are based in the same trope of a beautiful girl looking into the eyes of the horny swain…

Around the time I saw Tom Jones I also developed a long-standing adolescent crush on a girl in my class who had similar looks to Miss York, and I also lived for a time in Manhattan with a girl whose face resembled hers.

I’m sure Susannah’s decolletage also had its effects on the young lad I once was…and the scribe I am today!

(I found these Tom Jones shots at a site called HomeVideos.com.)

Tom Jones offered many visual delights such as this.