One day she was meditating on the beach when a man approached her. The paraphernalia of a photographer: tattered camera bag, Leica around his neck, the words, ‘Hello, pretty lady, could I ask you something? I hope I’m not bothering you?’
To make a long story short, he wanted to take pictures of her. Topless.
It was a Sunday afternoon, Jelte Boender was auditioning for a new rock band in Venice (which would later meet with modest success as St. Vincent and the Grenadines, albeit without Jelte Boender, who failed the audition). The man introduced himself as Gene Howard. She thought about the story she could tell later on: I was meditating on the beach when a photographer came up to me, he looked a little bit like Kris Kristofferson, but his name was Gene Howard — that was before he became the Gene Howard — and said to me. .
She went with him to the studio at his house, and as she was taking off her blouse, her bra, she did her best to summon up a sense of destiny unfolding. Gene Howard didn’t even try to get her into bed, all he wanted was her beauty. She was flattered and not nearly as shy as she’d thought she would be. Even when he asked her if she minded taking off the rest, whether he could see her naked, she didn’t experience that as a violation of her physical integrity, all those things that people like Gloria Steinem tried to make of it, as she told the journalist from LA Weekly. She had felt pretty and wanted, this was her calling; being born and growing up in east Groningen province had been a mistake. This place was her home, this light and this promise.
Gene Howard told her that he sometimes worked as production assistant to Abby Mayer, producer and director of films such as Ride Me High and Harem Keeper. She had never heard of him or his work. Howard said he would arrange a meeting.
‘Oh my God,’ Abby Mayer said when he saw her, ‘you’re. . fresh cream and apple pie. .’
She thought he was a bit of a creep, but she sensed that he had power. He was preparing an ambitious production, his biggest yet, and she was Victoria Wagner, Mayer said, the woman around whom the story of Lilith revolved.
‘What do I have to do?’ she’d asked. ‘What does the role involve?’
‘All you have to is be yourself — I absolutely forbid you to do anything else. To act, for example.’
She still didn’t get it, a movie in which you didn’t have to act?
‘Your body, girl, your body, that’s your means of expression. We’re going to make a gorgeous movie, the most beautiful sexy movie ever. My God, I feel like Roberto Rossellini when he saw Ingrid Bergman for the first time!’
Mayer wanted to do some screen tests. When the taxi pulled up in front of the boarding house one evening, there was no way around it: she had to tell her rocker from Groningen that she had a kind of audition. She explained quickly, he snorted loudly.
‘Just a skin flick, don’t let them kid you.’
He had not tried to stop her. The resignation of a man who knows that when it comes to love, he’s been living beyond his means.
Beside the pool at a house in Beverly Hills, Mayer had shot a loop with her, a sort of preliminary study for Lilith — just her and one man, the one who would probably be her leading man in the film, Llewelyn Reed. She thought he was attractive, he was funny.
Less than two weeks later the 8mm film hit the market and the buzz began. A spectacular new girl, Abby Mayer had discovered her. They were going to make a big movie in Thailand.
The loop has been lost, but the stage name Mayer dreamed up for her remains: Eve LeSage. No one knows precisely what was to be seen in that preliminary study, but one thing is certain: she had glorious sex with Llewelyn Reed.
The camera never got in her way. That was important. Some people froze in front of the camera. Not her. She had never noticed this certain kind of exhibitionism in herself before, but she didn’t try to deny its logical conclusion. When it came to her body, she knew no shame.
In those years the ideals of hippiedom are rapidly becoming commercialized, free love has paved the way for a deluge of pornography. It’s an easy way to make money, and the profession poses no academic requirements, it demands only sublime bodies. This, she thinks, is the start of something bigger — from here she will be taken up into the legitimate world of moviemaking, the red carpets, the cover of Rolling Stone. Porno and Hollywood will become one, no doubt about it, it is only a matter of time. It’s so close, a hop, skip and a jump really. The resemblance is already so striking, the infrastructure, the hierarchy on the set, the star of the film, everything the same — only the one is called an art form, the other smut.
*
She flew to Bangkok with Gene Howard. Slowly but surely he had assumed the role of her manager — she liked that, business matters couldn’t hold her attention for long. The crew had flown out ahead, the waiting began. Waiting for the sun, waiting for the cases of food poisoning and collective dysentery to pass, waiting for permits — and when the waiting was over, the movie was shot in about three weeks. For the genre, the screenplay was fairly elaborate, a story about the eternal triad of power, jealousy, revenge.
Llewelyn Reed had fallen in love with her and courted her with little gifts. Gene Howard, who was the production assistant and had the room next to hers, warned her about it: Reed always fell in love with his co-stars, then broke their hearts. It was thirty-two degrees in the shade. During the sex scenes, Reed’s makeup dripped onto her body. Gene Howard said, ‘You lie there like a cold mackerel. Move a little, even if it’s only your hands. And try not to look like you’re getting raped.’
But it was precisely that lack of expression, that stasis, which would become her trademark. Abby Mayer was enraptured, from behind the camera he shouted, ‘You might not win an Oscar, but you’re gonna be some kind of love goddess!’
Marthe Unger’s hotel life began. She grew accustomed to room service. In California, after a while, she consorted only with Europeans and New Yorkers.
‘It’s like the Californians’ brains have been fried by the sun,’ she said.
She tried to develop an addiction to vodka and cocaine — everyone around her, after all, was addicted to something — but it only exhausted her. She couldn’t summon up the energy for it, she was too tired for an addiction. Norman Mailer wrote about her in Esquire, or rather, about the most lusted-after body in the world. She drank champagne with Hugh Hefner and denied rumors that she had gone to bed with him. And finally she left for New York, because the people there seemed more interesting. She met Andy Warhol and later Mick Jagger as well — the photographs of their flirtation, young people thirsty for life, bathing in their careless beauty.
She had earned only three thousand dollars with Lilith. Gene Howard had forgotten to divvy up the principal. There was no lack of men with plans for her. A lot of people had a strange way of laughing, she’d noticed that already, too adamant, a tinkling laughter that echoed with self-interest. Rollo Liban didn’t laugh. She had met him at a party at the penthouse of one of the bigwigs at Atlantic Records, a fabulous suite with a rooftop garden at the St. Regis. Rollo Liban was a large man, he still had all his hair back then. He had an agency, he ran girls, as he put it, but it was worth your while to work for him, you got at least half the earnings. That was exceptional, that was a miracle; you had the feeling he was protecting you, that he was standing behind you. Rollo Liban was credited with having defined the difference between erotic art and porno.