‘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.