‘Erotic art,’ he said, ‘is tickling a cunt with a chicken feather. Porno uses the whole chicken.’
Marthe Unger wanted someone she could count on, and Rollo Liban had a Levantine nose for the right time and the right place. He got her into movies that made money, and saw to fringe benefits that included cool, quiet hotel rooms, vodka and cocaine. He wanted his trade to look ‘classy’, the association with criminality and the abuse of women was bad for business. Actors and producers in the adult industry were being taken to court, the FBI was running major undercover operations against the producers of pornography, but there was no stopping porno. The contours of an industry emerged, today’s star made way tomorrow for a new one.
‘It is a little depressing,’ she told Al Goldstein in Screw. ‘Every week there are a hundred new starlets waiting to take your place, especially in Hollywood.’
But Rollo Liban took good care of his star, she appeared mostly in the more aesthetic productions; the real raw smut, he felt, was something for Linda Lovelace or C.J. Laing.
It was the golden age of porn. The genre was subversive, hip: syphilis and gonorrhea were easy to treat, abortion had been legalized after Roe vs. Wade, and the only contraceptive was the Pill. The word AIDS began making the whispered rounds only a few years later; at first the disease limited itself to homosexual men.
As Eve LeSage she plays in six porno films before the dark stranger of the threepenny novel makes his appearance. The umpteenth party, scenes of fatigued excess. Then, suddenly, there is someone who doesn’t fit in; he stands a bit to one side, smiles when spoken to, but keeps his distance. Atypicality as a mark of character. He keeps his coat on, a bomber jacket. Heavy work boots on his feet. She asks who that is.
‘Mmmm,’ growls Price du Plessix Gray.
Du Plessix Gray, aging queen and theater critic, is a friend. He says, ‘Hmmm, mmmm. A wayward laborer, perhaps?’
An artist, she hears later: a European like her. Would she like to be introduced? It turns out not to be necessary. Like a boxer he comes out of his corner, straight at her; she feels the room shrink to become his presence.
‘I know who you are,’ he says. ‘I’ve read about you.’
A German accent so thick she feels at liberty to say, ‘Ach wie gut, dass niemand weiss, dass ik Rumpelstilchzen heiss.’
‘Sie sprechen Deutsch?’
‘My grandfather was German. I grew up close to the border.’
‘You are Dutch, I assume?’
She nods, amused. His name is Bodo Schultz, he’s from Austria, a village in Carinthia. Like so many Austrian artists he hates his fatherland. You can tell from looking at him that he was raised on Knödeln and Rostbraten, a hulking farmer, boulder-like, a massive neck and shoulders. She feels like running her fingers through his coarse hair.
His studio in Manhattan looks out on the massive pillars beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The building itself looks like a shipwreck washed ashore, wind and rain have free play.
She goes to visit him. He talks about his work, but only with difficulty. She wanders past monochrome sculptures, human figures in hideous postures, twisted, suffering. She is reminded of frozen battlefields, the casts of bodies at Pompeii.
He has just returned from Okinawa, where he designed a pavilion for the World’s Fair: a column of ice forty meters high, a tower veined with deep-freeze elements. Corridors, stairways and rooms had been hacked out inside the tower, when the sun shone you found yourself at the heart of a diamond. Its arches, arcades and suspended stairways caused his tower to be compared to the phantomlike interiors of Piranesi. The reference to such romanticism had thrown him into an uncontrollable rage. He is working on a new design, another tower, for a concours set up by the city of Alexandria. Marthe Unger finds him surly and gracious, the latter in spite of himself. It moves her to see him do his best on her behalf. They sleep together on a mattress in the far corner of his studio.
‘Happiness,’ he says, ‘is this.’
She is proud that she can elicit such feelings in him, it gives her a special status, like making friends with an animal in the wild.
Southern Belle is her final film. Abby Mayer punches a hole in the door, he screams, ‘I’d rather lose you to a car wreck than to. . to love.’
She says that sex with anyone else is out of the question as long as she loves this man. It’s that simple, and with the same ease with which she started, she stops. To Schultz she says, ‘Those were my fifteen minutes. They dragged on a little.’
They marry quickly. There is no family at the wedding. Price du Plessix Gray is her witness, the owner of the Greek grocery around the corner is his.
Schultz works on a statuary group he calls Blind, dozens of life-sized sculptures of the two of them in the act of coition. Everyone, it seemed, felt the need to portray her naked, copulating; life’s demands on her were limited. The legend of her beauty was fed by her sudden disappearance. From being the fantasy of countless others she now became the muse of a single man. She left New York for Alexandria. Schultz began preparations for Wachturm, his tower in the city’s harbor, the shadow of the Pharos. I entered the world at the Egyptian British Hospital. When I was baptized, her artificial eyelashes fell off. For the rest, nothing special.
The treasure trove of the ancient world, the library at Alexandria, was destroyed by fire. A tragedy beyond bounds. In the 1980s a new library was built, a huge and prestigious project. It was meant, by way of compensation, to be one of the largest libraries in the world. At the same time a plan was hatched to rebuild the Pharos, the legendary lighthouse that has been shining in the eyes of civilization since time immemorial. The Pharos was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and was destroyed by a series of earthquakes. At its feet there arose an Arab fort; archeologists still search for its remains on the seafloor. For the design of the new tower, the city government organized a competition among artists and architects. Scores of plans were submitted, breathtaking reminiscences, but in the end my father received the commission. His tower was to be built in the harbor of Alexandria, the city would look out upon it, the antique glory would be revived. Bodo Schultz, master builder, would follow in the footsteps of Sostratus. But Bodo Schultz’s tower would produce no light: his would be black as obsidian. Every bit as tall as the old tower, one hundred and thirty meters. But the Pharos, according to legend, had been built of white marble, three storeys high, with a huge fire at the top that could be seen miles out to sea. That tower was an invitation to come ashore, to Alexandria, backdrop to that marvelous history play of old revolving around Cleopatra, whose own loins had been a haven to Julius Caesar and Marc Antony.
Bodo Schultz’s tower broadcast a different message. Avoid this harbor while ye may, it said.
Alexandria lies between the desert and the Mediterranean Sea. The city encompasses its eastern harbor and bay like a womb. The bay is protected by two forts; between them, an elongated artificial island was once thrown up to break the waves before they reach the city. The island is a few hundred meters long, and ships can enter the bay on either side. There, on that island, was where Schultz’s tower would rise: Wachturm, an obelisk black as a shadow, his tar-drenched middle finger held up to the world. The tower was closed on all sides, there was no telling whether it protected the city against intruders or actually held it hostage.