THE RIDES

November 14, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

Lonely And Lost On The Road

sadplane3

I have just flown in from Mexico City. I’m sitting at the bar having a beer at United terminal of Los Angeles International Airport. I have almost an hour before the departure of my connecting flight to Santa Barbara. I’m probably scribbling some notes in my agenda while slowly savoring  my beer. Mine is one of the last flights to leave the terminal and there are only a few of us lingering at the bar, waiting. Among the people, I notice a middle aged woman at the other end of the bar. I feel her gaze pointed at me. Must be in her mid-fifties, longer than shoulder length frizzled hair and dull grey eyes, she looks haggard and somewhat drunk, twirling a glass filled with a yellowish liquor, probably some Scotch or a Bourbon based cocktail.  I get back to my scribbling and am absorbed in it when I feel a human shadow shuffling next to me.

‘Mind I sit next to you?’ Seeing me a bit confused, she doesn’t wait for my answer, instead she eases herself on the next bar stool, as unsteady as she is on her feet, and asks the bar tender for ‘one more of the same.’ I try to ignore her, but she is intent on making small talk.

‘So, where are you off too?’ she slurs her words.

‘Oh, not far. Just a quick hop to Santa Barbara.’

‘I’m going there too.’ I don’t respond to that.

‘My daughter goes to school there, you know, at UCSB.’

She is in the mood to talk. I’m not. Besides, I’m somewhat repelled by the way she reeks of alcohol and is slurring her words and is so close in my hair. I try to be polite and plot my getaway. In the next few minutes I find out that she is divorced, and is having hard time with her daughter at the UCSB, that they don’t see each other that often, and even though she lives in LA, she doesn’t drive and she is hoping she and her daughter could be more of friends. I don’t  remember her name, or not sure even if I asked, but I will call her Ellie, I think she should be Ellie. I converse with her in monosyllables and when they announce the departure of the flight, I excuse myself to run to the bathroom and make my escape from the bar.

I purposely take longer before boarding and then leisurely walk to the plane. It’s a small city hopper jet and is sparsely occupied. I don’t see her anywhere on the board. I walk as far into the front as I could and duck my head below the head rest. But wouldn’t you know? She comes striding down the aisle just when the plane is about to take off and plumps herself right next to me. I am not welcoming, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Fortunately, its such a short flight that before we know, we have landed in Santa Barbara.

The few passengers scurry away while my friends Mark and Ann (Stevens) receive me with their usual, welcome back feel good brother. Mark picks up my suitcase and standing there by the baggage claim is Ellie. She looks so alone and abandoned.

‘Is  your daughter coming to get you?’

‘No, she doesn’t have a car.’

‘How are you getting to her apartment?’

‘I was hoping to get a ride from someone, she doesn’t live far, in Isla Vista.’ Which is only a few blocks away from where we all live in Goleta.

Normally the most generous and helpful Mark and Ann are not forthcoming. First because their little blue Datsun pickup can hardly seat two people comfortably. With me in there it would already be a squeeze. Plus seeing Ellie the way she is, I am sure that like me, they too weren’t kin on all of us squeezed in together, even though it would only be a ten minute ride.

Santa Barbara airport is only a little more than a shack. Surprisingly, it has frequent jets landing and taking off  to and from Los Angeles and San Francisco and I believe Las Vegas and Phoenix. For someone like me it’s a heaven, because it serves almost like an airlift to Los Angeles Airport to connect with whichever parts of the world I am asked to go during those two years of me returning back to Playboy as a freelancer while still being continue to live in the yet not overly crowded sunny southern California. But there is no public transportation between the airport and anywhere else and there certainly aren’t any cabs cruising by. The one man operation of the United too has thrown the last piece of the baggage on the small conveyer belt and has already driven away. So however begrudgingly, we squeeze Eliie into the little cabin of the Datsun, her perched atop my lap, and we take her to Isla Vista. We somehow survive her reeking of booze and her slurred pronouncements.  Fortunately, a young woman comes running down the stairs from the second floor of the strip of student apartments.

‘I was beginning to worry!’ We breath a sigh of relief in that however repulsive we found her,  we have now safely delivered her into the hands of her daughter.

●●●

On another night, I find myself in a similar predicament. That evening, I have unexpectedly decided to return home. Normally, if not Mark or Ann, I am always picked up by someone upon my arrival and taken to the airport by one of our close circle of friends – curiously, often in my own Buick. But in this instance, I wasn’t able to get hold of anybody before I left, not even when I tried to call someone from Los Angeles. They all must have been some place together. So I board the plane and hope that I’ll still be able to call someone from the airport to come pick me up. Fortunately for me, on the plane I’m seated next to a middle-aged man with a weathered face, who too is quite drunk but is still coherent and introduces himself as an off duty airline pilot heading home. Let’s call him Joe. He tells me that he used to fly commercial jets but now in his semi-retirement, he flies small corporate type chartered planes.  Seeing that I am rushing for the public telephone upon our arrival, he offers to give me ride home.

‘It’s not too much out of my way.’ He says, even though taking me to Goleta would mean driving north first and then turn around and go south to Carpentaria, where he lives with his wife. I thank him and we walk to his Toyota Corolla parked in the airport parking lot. Like an old-fashioned gentleman, Joe opens the door and lets me in first. He gets in on the driver’s side of the car, puts the key in the ignition and then nothing. For a flicker of a moment, I think of the similar encounter in Chicago with an older man who turned out to be gay and had some amorous intentions for us. It took some doing for me to have him stop the car in the middle of the street and me getting out of it in a hurry and walking a mile home. Instinctively I put myself on the psychological alert.

When he still doesn’t start the car, I’m getting nervous. I sense his face turning to look at me, as if to lean sideways to kiss. But instead, I see a sudden string of tears rolling down his eyes. And then he just plain breaks down and like a lost little kid, begins to sob in big and loud sobs. Uncontrollably so.

‘I’m sorry. My life is all fucked up! I need to talk to someone.’ He mumbles through his tears, his voice cracking like a badly scratched vinyl record.

Imagine this. Santa Barbara airport is in the middle of nowhere. There are no houses, no commercial areas, no motels and the little airport itself is now closed down. Lights turned off. The only lights are on the airfield, which must have been a farmland at some distant past. I am sitting there with this stranger in his little Toyota sedan – the lone car standing in an empty parking lot. I no longer feel any danger of being made pass at. But I am alone, with this man who is probably in need of some professional help for which I don’t in the least qualify. All I could do is, what another human being would. I first let him cry, howls and all. When he has calmed down, something he says guides me.

‘And I’m starving. I haven’t eaten anything in the last twenty four hours. And I’ve been drinking!’ Suddenly I am hungry too. He is not familiar with this part of the town. I direct him to the nearest pizza joint that’s open late. We order a large pizza and beer. Now I’m in need of a drink.

Here is the story he tells me. Just the day before, he has wracked an airplane while landing. He has survived without a scratch, but his job as a pilot is in jeopardy. He couldn’t help having a few drinks before flying, feeling down and out and devastated, because his wife is lying home dying. Had an argument over her care with his step-son who punches him in the mouth. I see his hand automatically reach and touch the clear bruise on his face. Haven’t had a piece of ass in more than two years, man! He tells me. Probably alluding to his wife’s long drawn out illness. What I don’t ask or no longer remember. He is absolutely out of it, besides himself and is so miserable. He keeps saying all evening long: ‘You know, I am going to drive that thing off the cliff as soon as I drop you off.’ He is dead serious as he says it, every time ever more so. The more I try  to pacify him, the more he wants to end it all.

Not knowing what to do, I think of my friend Janice (Maloney) in Chicago. Bless her heart, as she would say. She volunteers a night or two a week at the local crisis call center on the suicide hotline. She is trained to talk to the caller until she is relatively certain that she has succeeded in pacifying and talked the person out of the suicidal track. I wish I had her training, her patience and her compassion. Nothing I can do about the training, but I can certainly conjure up some patience and compassion. I put myself on a sympathetic friendly stranger’s mode.

We demolish a large pizza washed down with beer while I let him talk. I try to tell him about all the positives in life. I try to tell him that the test of a real man is to survive the storms. I tell him, that his ailing wife loves him and needs him more than ever. I try to paint a pretty picture of how everything’s going to turn out alright in the end. At the end of two hours, I feel I have helped him sober up enough that he doesn’t repeat his threat of driving off the cliff. Would have been an easy thing to do, as there are many of them along the coast, especially near Carpentaria where he lives.

But I feel reasonably certain that having had a chance to unload what had him so devastated, he seemed no longer a threat to himself. Before he drops me off, he apologizes profusely for burdening me with his problems, but thanks me as profusely for letting him pour out all that had bottled up inside of him. Thanks again. You just may have saved my life! He self consciously hugs me before getting back into his car. I watch him go around the cul-de-sac of Linfield Place and then swing out and turn left on the main road. I take comfort in the fact that his driving is straight and steady and he observes the turn signals. I watch the tail light in the distance and can’t help but imagine it going down a cliff. But I don’t think so.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, November 22, 2013

OF PINOT NOIR AND THE BURLAPING

Jan Heemskerk, the editor-in-chief of Playboy’s Dutch edition  and I take a trip to California’s wine country north of San Francisco and visit various wineries and their owners and the winemakers. Quite sophisticated, and then take a long and winding mountainous road to a little town called Boonville, which prides itself in its exquisite Pinot Noir. Nothing had prepared us for the wonderful evening we spent with the men and the women of the Pinot Noir country.

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Categories Automobile, Desperationn

THE BUICK, THE BUREAUCRAT & THE BLONDE

November 7, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

And The Tearing Of My Heart

buickII_b

Soon after her arrival in Munich, in order to make my beautiful Buick legit in her new habitat, I promptly present myself at the Kraftfahrzeugzulassungsstelle, (ugh! they are four words: krafts-fahrzeug-zulassungs-stelle – no  wonder Sanskrit is a dead language in India. But as the most expats and converts tend to do, German being one of the Indo-Germanic languages, still adheres to long and drawn out compound words, as do the Czechs, while the modern Indian languages have simplified the Sanskrit grammar and would have neatly broken them down into four distinct words) at TÜV, (equivalent to the Secretary of the State’s automobile registration center in the US,) on Eichstätter Strasse 5, in Munich. I have all ten required documents as listed on Hanlzettel, translated and properly notarized and attached to the application form and the fee of DM 30.- held firmly in the grip of my hand. I place them all on the counter and stand across from the clerk processing the registration. I am pleased at myself for being so ready and am imagining my Buick emblazoning the bold black and white letters on a square-ish license plates bearing the numbers along with the three designated letters, MüC to indicate that the vehicle is registered in Munich. I am also looking forward to slapping on the back of her, the standard oval shaped decal with the letters DE for Deutschland. But not so fast Haresh! I am being naïve to think that like back home in Chicago, the clerk would stamp a few things, write up a receipt for the payment and hand it to me along with a set of Munich license plates.

Wrong!

Pages: 1 2 3 4

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Categories Automobule, Romance

IN PRAISE OF MY BUICK

October 30, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

You Are What You Drive

buickcrash3

“That damn Buick of yours. As much as we have paid to transport it all over the world, the company should own the damn thing.” Exclaims my boss Lee Hall. So it should. The company could have even bought two of those damn things. But what was I supposed to do?

I had applied for a job at Playboy at the same time as I did Time. I have had a perfunctory interview with the production boss John Mastro. Nothing came out of it while Time offered me the job in Chicago. Now four years later when John does offer me the job, its over the phone – the one that would take me to Germany. And wouldn’t you know? He wants me yesterday.

Its Thursday October 26th 1972. This is how the conversation goes.

‘When can you start?’

‘As soon as I could.’

‘Can you leave in a couple of weeks?’

‘That might be a bit tight. I still have a job, I need to give them notice first,’

‘You need two weeks for that. If you give them your notice tomorrow, which is October 27th. You should be free by November 10th. Can you leave on November 11th?’

‘But I also have a whole household and the lease to worry about.’

‘Let’s not worry about all that now. Once you have done the next issue, you can find a window of time and come back to Chicago for a couple of weeks and wrap things up’.

‘And I have just bought a brand new car!’ It just slips out of my mouth. I hesitate to mention the woman I was in love with.

‘We could ship your car along with your personal belongings!’

Wow! Though I don’t say it. I am tongue tied. It would be something to drive around in a big flashy American boat of a car in the cobblestoned streets of the city of Munich. Well, why not?

This is my first new car and I have madly fallen in love with it. I have dreamt of her sleek, sexy and streamlined shapely body for sometime now. It’s a bit shorter than the long phallic Oldsmobile Cutlass I owned, but somehow classier. I can still ill afford to buy a new car, but one fine morning I find, or more accurately, don’t find my metallic gold  Olds on the street twelve floors below my South Shore apartment on the 67th street and when it’s determined that it’s irretrievable gone, I have no choice but buy another car in a hurry. My job at Time is totally dependent on my ability to drive. So I decide to take a plunge. And as long as I am buying a new car, I decide to buy its top of the line model in gleaming white color and the mottled chocolate-brown vinyl top. Air conditioned and with factory installed AM/FM stereo, rear defroster – automatic transmission of course, slippery sleek beige vinyl interior, power steering, white walls and all. The only thing I miss out on is a cassette player. Eight tracks are barely out of the door and the cassettes are just about to make their tepid entry into the market, having one installed in my car  doesn’t even occur to me. Something that would soon sting me. But not even having to consider leaving behind my Buick makes me enormously happy. It also means that Playboy does things in style!

So on Saturday October 11th, I check into Frankfurt bound Lufthansa flight and arrive in Munich on Sunday the 12th. Work on the Christmas issue, make a short detour to Milan, Italy and return back to Chicago to wrap up my life of four years, bid farewell to all my friends and board another trans-Atlantic flight and return to Munich.

When my stuff and the Buick arrive in January, my friend Dieter (Stark) rolls his eyes and calls it a tank. Dieter’s swanky Opel Sports was my envy when we worked together at Burda in Offenburg, five years earlier.  Dieter now lives in Munich. Amazingly, he works in the second wing of the same building on Augustenstrasse for the graphic reproduction company that does Playboy Germany’s color separations. He rolls his eyes again, pouts, and adds, so ein lastwagen! What a  truck! And then when we would drive around, amazed at my parking skills, he would go, jests du hast zwei parkplätze weggenomen! Now you have taken away two parking spots. But as skeptical as he is, he gets used to my tank-truck, while now he himself is driving a Volkswagen Bug. A perfect city car. But when you’re in love with your chariot, you don’t think of minor details like ease of parking!

My Buick is also talk of the town in our office building where they have given me a parking spot on the lower tier, which when the upper parking ramp is lowered, leaves only about an inch or two of space between the trunk of my car and the bottom of the metal ramp. Why they didn’t consider giving me the upper tier, I don’t ask, because somewhere along the line I see it as a challenge to be able to park my car just so, to keep it from crushed under the rough bottom of the ramp and the weight of the car up above. Soon my sassy American car becomes a sight to behold in the home town of the mighty BMW.

●●●

Another person I reconnect with in Munich is Marianne (Thyssen-Miller). Someone I had only met once years earlier in Krefeld and on whom I had developed an incredible crush. She too is now living in Munich. That gorgeous summer afternoon, she has invited me to join her and some of her friends to a picnic at Perlacher Forst – a forest preserve not too far from the center of the city. Marianne has given me very specific directions on how to get to the picnic grounds. I make it out of the city and reach the general neighborhood of where they had all gathered. And then as it often happens. I must have taken one wrong turn or missed a single direction, and after more than half an hour of going around in circles, and finding myself at the same crossroads for the third time, I am now feeling frustrated and quite frazzled. There are no other cars to be seen, no people walking around, no one I could stop and ask.  I look left and I look right and I look straight and then on impulse decide to turn left.  Right in front of my big hunk of white pointed metal, a Volkswagen Bug seems to have materialized out of nowhere.  By the time I see it coming towards me, it’s too late.

I see a very old couple occupying the front seats. They look scared and totally disoriented  behind their tiny windshield. I jump out of the car and run to make sure that they are okay.  There is no visible physical harm done to them, shook up, the woman keeps saying “it wasn’t our fault, it wasn’t our fault.”  “No it wasn’t”, I try to calm her.  I tell her that the most important thing is that they are okay, that it was my fault, and that I have proper insurance to take care of whatever damage the accident may have caused.

The couple must have been in their late sixties or even early seventies.  They are driving in from Dortmund to spend some days with their daughter who lives in the Munich area, not too far from where we have collided.  The loud thud of the collision has brought out the people living in nearby houses.  The old woman calls her daughter from one of the homes.  A few minutes later, a balding young man – their son-in-law shows up in his big boxy Mercedes Benz.  He introduces himself to me as Rudolph Geisler. I am bracing myself for his outburst and anger. I am in Germany and the cars mean a lot to the people. And they are attuned to doing everything in very official way. I am preparing myself psychologically to kiss my picnic goodbye. And the hopes of breaking away from the group in the evening and ending up at some cozy romantic restaurant alone with Marianne.

But the wonder of all wonders, instead of being angry and irate, Rudolph begins to apologize to me for the accident, telling me that he has often told his father-in-law that he was too old to drive, but he just wouldn’t listen – but this would teach him.

I re-confirm to Rudolph that I have international insurance and everything should be taken care of, that maybe we should call police and make a report.

“Let me just get my in-laws home first and then we will worry about that.  Let me give you my phone number and let me have yours and then we will work it all out.” This is very highly un-German way to behave. But haven’t I been told that the Bavarians are different?

We together move the Bug out of the way. There is hardly any damage done to my car, except the driver’s side of the door has shifted back a couple of millimeters, making it hard to open it completely, in contrast, the front end of the little Volkswagen looks like a battered bellow of an  accordion. Rudolph gives me proper directions on how to get to where I was going. He throws a perfunctory glance at Buick, as if saying: nicht schlecht! – not bad, and off he is on his way with his in-laws tucked safely inside his Benz. Sure enough, the picnic grounds aren’t far from where I am. I meet up with Marianne and her friends and join the fun.

I call Rudy the next day.  I tell him I have reported the accident to my insurance agent, and he  has assured me that everything will be taken care of.  Rudy doesn’t seem in the least concerned about the details.

“Listen, we will be busy the next few days with my in-laws.  I really don’t think the old man should drive anymore, so we will just put them on a train on Friday.  Why don’t you come over to our house over the weekend and we can settle things over a nice Bavarian meal?  I am sure Uschi, my wife will enjoy meeting you.”

So I go for the dinner. Uschi has cooked delicious Schewinsbraten with Knödel and sauerkraut.  I no longer am in touch with them, but they become very much a part of my social circle for as long as I still lived in Munich.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, October 08, 2013

IN PRAISE OF MY BUICK PART II

My move from Chicago to Munich happened so fast that there was no time to consider the practical aspects of taking my Buick along across the Atlantic. Had I known, what I was up against, I certainly would have sold the car and bought myself a new one in Munich. Probably my favorite Audi 80. But there are also rewards for having done just that.

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Categories Automobile, Germany

PERFECTLY UNBOUND

October 24, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

Taking A Stab At Respectability

imperfectbound

When Celia – the young woman who so beautifully interprets and illustrates Playboy Stories week after week, returned the copy of my July 1988 issue of Playboy featuring Cindy Crawford on the cover, she had secured the pages with a little yellow and pink binder-clips. Apparently the pages of the issue had come apart at the perfect bound stiff spine, just like that of the cheap paperbacks from the Fifties. The issue was never before opened and was in mint condition. Quite unsettling for an avid fan and the collector of the magazine.

When the first issue of the perfect bound Playboy dated October 1985 landed on my desk, sometime around the first week of September, with the cover blurb proclaiming: COLLECTOR’S EDITION / THERE IS A BOLD NEW LOOK UNDER OUR COVER, I felt disoriented like never before. Devoid of the staples and lying there flat as the thick Dutch pancake, it felt akin to me returning to the little town of Schutterwald in Germany to visit my old landlady Frau Lipps – fully expecting, as in the past for her to have prepared my favorite Wiener Schnitzel with pommes frites and a small side of butter lettuce salad – instead to find a plate of a salmon filet with boiled potatoes and green beans. It threw me completely off balance.

Even though there were talks in the air for a while to switch to the perfect binding, deep down in my heart I still held out hopes that Hefner would never agree to such a move. But he did and now I was holding in my hands something I had thought would never come to pass.

On the Playbill  page the editors wrote: As you know by now PLAYBOY is a tremendously well put-together magazine. And for the past 381 issues, the thing that has held it together, through thick and thin, through Marilyn Monroe and through Venice Kong, had been a humble underappreciated yet respectably old-fashioned staple. What you have in your hands right now is the first spanking-new tough spined staple-free PLAYBOY. So much for the tough spine.

Playboy began and remained saddle stitched for more than thirty years – the standard magazine binding format used by the majority of large circulation consumer magazines around the world. It’s flexible, it’s reader friendly and cheaper than perfect bound magazines, such as National Geographic, Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair and now Playboy – the stiff unbending coffee table books.

First and foremost, Playboy’s identity has always been its centerfolds, so much so that Hefner himself  has famously said at one of the Playmates reunions that without you, I would be a literary magazine. The centerfolds were defined by the young women who occupied the specially printed three page gatefold, inserted and stapled near the naval of the Playmate of that month. And because of the way the magazine was bound, it was easy to find her with your finger tips even with your eyes shut. Open your eyes and find her there with her enticing eyes staring at you and the rest of her laid out bare in all her glory. Not to mention how easy it was to lay it flat when open and feel its soft and smooth bulge and the curvaceous spine. You could fold it, you could bend it, toss and turn while lying down on your sofa and reading thousands of words of its interviews and in-depth articles comfortably without having to keep forcing those pages open.

These kind of decisions are not taken lightly. To change even a layout of a single page in a well established magazine requires very serious considerations. Because more than anything else, even the slightest deviation from the standard format can disorient the loyal readers.

As I am writing this in October 2013, The New Yorker has changed radically its front of the book section Goings On About Town to the point where it’s totally unrecognizable from its classic, albeit stale version. Even though I think that the new design is more contemporary with lot of white spaces, new elegant type face and all, now several weeks later, I still feel lost and disoriented and can’t seem to navigate my way around those pages. But I am sure, I’ll get used to it and even forget the old design. Alas, no such luck with Playboy’s perfect binding even after twenty eight years.

●●●

When I worked for Time, the editors decided after forty years of retaining the same look with which the magazine had debuted back in 1923, time had now come to give it a fresh new look. Change the design, change the typeface. Change the philosophy of the covers. That’s a giant step, especially within Time Inc. family. It was Life that glowed with flashes of colors inside its snappier articles – sort of prelude to the video clips with narrative text. But Time magazine remained black and white for the longest with its mini-newspaper look and the format, wrapped inside its red bordered covers framing some of the most alluring illustrations.  It wasn’t up until in the Seventies that the first photographs began to appear within those red borders. When Time introduced color photos inside its editorial pages, they were sparse and limited to a four or eight page signature printed on higher quality coated paper. Even discounting that the color pages cost more to reproduce and print, that wasn’t why they hung onto its black and white origin. The biggest concern in their hanging onto the original mono color format as long as they did was the shock of switching to the color would give its readers. I am not a hundred percent sure now, but I faintly remember their instituting minor design changes in the late Sixties – I believe with the help of one of the most celebrated and creative designers, Milton Glaser.

But it wasn’t up until 1977 that the magazine was completely redesigned by the legendary Walter Bernard.  And not until well into the Eighties that more and more color pages began to crop up in Time. But not before discussing endlessly the pros and the cons of introducing photographs on the covers and changing their inside look from staid mini-newspaper like black and white pages to its current contemporary, bold and colorful layouts.

The second most popular feature in Playboy has always been its interviews. Even though the magazine was launched in December 1953, it wasn’t up until September 1962 that Playboy interview made its debut with Miles Davis talking to the journalist Alex Haley. Since then Playboy interviews have become the standards against which all other interviews are measured. And its simple three columns, three iconic black and white photos format has become an immediately recognizable graphic identity. So much so that to this date, it remains unchanged, though as of  February 2009 issue it has replaced the black and white with the color photos. And yet to an old aficionado like me, those color photos seem more pasted than they look natural. Some international editions tried out different formats including full page photographs or illustrated profiles of the personalities, but at the end of the day, the only image that conjures up in one’s mind at the mention of Playboy interviews is that of the three head shots with the quotes underneath them.

Then why you would think Playboy eventually succumbed to such a radical physical makeover as switching from its loyal tried and tested saddle stitch binding to the pretentious perfect binding? This much I know:

Back in January 1983, Playboy Italy changed hands from Rizzoli to Mondadori. In an effort to transpose the edition’s perceived readership from the truck drivers to the sleek and sophisticated, Mondadori approached my boss Lee Hall, asking for the permission for them to go perfect bound. We had internal meeting and concluded swiftly; that would no longer be Playboy. Even so, Lee in his practical wisdom, sent out a memo, I think to the US edition publisher Nat Lehrman, Editorial Director Arthur Kretchmer and the President Christie Hefner, requesting their input. It was probably circulated among other top executives. The response from the most was NO. Except a scribble at the top of the first page from Arthur, which said something to the effect, are we sure we want to say no?  From what I understood, the logic behind his question was that let one of our editions try it out and then see what happens. What I also understood was that some were in favor, probably the advertising bunch. In the end, Hefner must have been sold the idea of the advantages of giving his baby an “upscale” look.  But I or even Lee weren’t privy to any of that information. So I decided to ask Gary Cole – now the retired Photography Director, who has been a friend and with whom I have remained in touch. Here is what he had to say:

“The push to switch the magazine to perfect binding came almost exclusively from the Ad Department. Most magazines were already perfect bound. Ads had to be created just a little differently for a saddle stitched magazine. You realize that the outer pages of a saddle stitched magazine has to be wider to be able to wrap all the way around the inner pages. So the Ad Dept. convinced Hef.

“As you know, Hef was very, very resistant to change. One of his favorite axioms was “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Another was “Why do we need to reinvent the wheel?” He didn’t like perfect binding. He liked the more open look that saddle stitch gave him. And he was very married to the idea of the centerfold being in the center of the magazine. Everything was built around that. Of course, when ad sales began to falter, when money became tighter, when he continued to hear from the Ad people that they could sell more ads if the magazine switched to perfect bind, he finally relented.  I honestly don’t believe that it gained us one page of advertising. The reluctance of advertisers was based on the growing sensitivity in the business community to the subject of nudity. As long as Playboy had nudes in it, there were lots of advertisers who were afraid to come near us regardless of how we were bound.”

All true. And yet, something kept gnawing at me. In my mind, I still remembered that tiny scribble at the top of the memo, initialed AK. Since I left Playboy at the end of 1993, I had seen Arthur Kretchmer only once. I wasn’t exactly comfortable approaching him, but that’s what I had to do. I shot out an e-mail to Arthur. He was most gracious and forthcoming.

“As for perfect binding. I remember the meeting with Hefner very well. It was not an editorial meeting. It was a business meeting. After the full business presentation was made — and it was made mostly from an advertising sales point of view — Hef said, “The reasoning sounds all right, but you’re asking me to re-invent the wheel. This is a gamble that I’m very reluctant to take.”

“He asked my opinion, and I said something along these lines: I thought that getting rid of the staple would move the magazine into the category of classy mainstream magazines — a psychological shift that I thought the magazine was ready for.

“He considered that. There was more conversation. I’m not sure that he went on to approve  the change in that meeting, but I think he did. I think he said yes before that meeting was over.

“In the name of complete honesty, sometime after we made the change, I thought we’d made a mistake. Not right away, but certainly within the year. All the business people were happy. Even the newsstand guys liked the way the magazine stacked. But I became uncomfortable.  Obviously we never seriously considered going back.

“I don’t remember the circulating memos that you describe, but your telling of the story rings true. You have chosen the right words with ‘upscale look.’ I think once Hefner saw that as part of the conversation, he became a convert.”

I got my answer with that gnawing feeling now subsided.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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THE COMPANY POLICY

PLAYBOY ON THE COFFEE TABLE

THE STORY OF MY TUXEDO

ALL ABOUT THE WILD PARTIES AT PLAYBOY

The Site

ABOUT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Next Friday, November 1, 2013

IN PRAISE OF MY BUICK

As of now, I’ve had seven cars. The first one, a Chevy Nova practically killed me many times over. But I missed her so when sold it to a couple of neighborhood kids. The second, an Oldsmobile Cutlass was stolen, requiring me to buy my first brand new set of wheels, a Buick Skylark. It went with me from Chicago to Munich to Santa Barbara and back to Chicago and many other exciting places in-between and had become as much a part of me during those ten most dynamic years of my life. It was loyal, it was reliable and it never let me down. The least I can do is to pay a little tribute to her

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Categories Binding Methods, Italy, Playmates

MY FATHER’S SECRET STASH

October 17, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

Uncovering An Intimate Inheritance

secretstash2

I am in Bombay about a year after my Dad passed. Other than waiting for close friends and the family living within an hour or two’s distance, within the Indian tradition, the deceased is immediately cremated by the family members. So it wasn’t expected nor was it possible for me to be there for the cremation. There are some rituals that are performed within the first thirteen days of a person’s death, something akin to the wake, followed by a family feast to celebrate the person’s life. But the true tribute to honor my father’s memory was going to be Saptah. Saptah literally means a week, but it’s always understood as a weeklong reading of Shri Bhagwat by a scholar who most of the time is also an animated performer and the interpreter of the stories contained therein – the book by which the followers of Vaishnava faith are guided.

The reading happens all day long with appropriate breaks amidst a revolving crowd of attendees in an open house format. My brother Suresh and his wife Aruna are hosting the event and have set up a beautiful mandap in their backyard. It’s one of the most attended Saptahs, also because Shastriji, is not only a serious scholar and the interpreter of the holy book, but also because his crystal clear booming voice  makes all those stories come alive in your imagination. He is a very close family friend and for him our Saptah is more than the ones he is hired to do. My father had always been one of this biggest fans and sponsors.

For our family, this is also a week long bonding, eating together, arguing and just be merry together, preceded and followed by big fanfares. It begins with our large family and friends taking the family Bhagwat from my parent’s house to Suresh’s. Something most every Vaishnava family  would have passed down from generation to generation. For the day-to-day reading, there are modern volumes designed and produced in the fashion of a large encyclopedia, but the original version would be a stack of loose leaves in a horizontal landscape format – either in limited edition version or even handwritten in beautiful cursives. These volumes are normally wrapped in red silk and hold a special spot within the home. And they are brought out only for special occasions. So iconic and revered are they that you just don’t throw them in a bag or a suitcase to usher them from one place to another.

My family happens to have two such volumes of Shri Bhagwat, which are being reverentially carried atop the alternating heads of two of the women walking in a procession. The entire family is out on the street, dressed in their wedding best. Men in crisp white Kurtas or in their stylist western threads, women all dolled-up in their best silk saris, looking like wide eyed Kathakali dancers, studded from the head to toe in their precious jewelry. We are dancing to the tunes of the latest Bollywood hits being tooted by a group of old fashioned uniformed band leading us. Laughing and screaming, back slapping, the onlookers cheering us, we take an hour or more to  cover the short distance of four to five blocks between the two houses.

In the backdrop of the Saptah and during my weeklong stay at home, one afternoon my three brothers ambush me and hurriedly shove me into my parent’s bedroom suite and lock the door behind us. They sit me down on the bed and the two younger brothers, Dinesh and Rajesh climb up the chairs and lift the heavy trunk off the top of the cupboard and gently slide it out. They delicately cradle the bottom of the heavy trunk, and lower it with a deft motion and gently place it on to the bed.

‘Baa wants us brothers to go through what’s in here and divvy up the contents among the four of us brothers. Since you were coming home, we thought we would wait to go through the stuff when all four of us are together.’  Suresh tells me.

So we open the trunk. It contains all sorts of men’s things, such as several bottles of expensive men’s colognes, some of which I had brought for him over the years. I smirk when I see his white billfold made of parachute material, from which I remember filching a few rupees now and then. My bothers wonder why I have that cat that swallowed the canary look on  my face. Nothing! I say and they let it slide. Then there are old fountain pens, one of them I distinctly remember – the gold capped Schaffer. My father was what they called a shokhin manas –  he liked good things of life. He had a large collection of wrist watches, one of them I had always wanted to have. The one with the large blue dial that contained slots not only for the days and the dates but also the one that showed the cycle of the moon, of course housed inside a pure gold case. Suresh has his eyes on that one too. Younger brothers want a couple of not so exclusive Playboy watches. And then there is a set of gold studs including a pair of  cufflinks. enamel inlaid with beautiful modernistic burgundy, white and black pattern.  An Elgin USA fob watch, also in pure gold casing and attached to a long gold chain, dangling from which is a charm – a gold coin dated 1917, bearing the engraved face of the king George V – and another watch, a Longines, also in the gold case with matching gold watch band. The old man really loved his gold.

Just before my youngest brother Rajesh died a couple of years ago, I was joking with him that they had to be naïve to let me make it out like a bandit.

‘We just let you have those things, because we knew you would appreciate them the most. So you got away with bit of gold!’ And then he gave me his characteristic baby brother smile.  Because I got the two gold watches as well as the set of buttons and cufflinks. And he was right, not only do I cherish those things but I actually wear them. And I can’t even begin to imagine what would it have been like me having dressed up in my tuxedo and not have had those priceless studs?

But that’s not why they have ambushed me and locked us up behind the closed door. Suresh pulls out a pile of envelopes from the bottom of the trunk and hands them to me.

‘Put this away in your suitcase and lock it up. Take it to America with you. Because if Baa ever sees it, or one of the sisters gets a whiff of it, all hell will break lose.’

‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘See for yourself.’

They are long legal sized mesh lined manila envelopes, carefully cut down at one end to the size of the content inside. I pull out what feels like a bunch of photographs.  I quickly flip through some of them. My brothers’ eyes focused on me. While Suresh maintains his solemn demeanor, Dinesh and Rajesh are sheepishly smirking at me with that knowing but astonished look written all over their faces, ‘do you believe it?’

I am not exactly surprised. A bit amazed maybe. So Dad had a good collection of these pornographic images, line drawings of Indian royalties involved in every possible Kama Sutra positions and a whole bunch of French postcards – containing the nudes of wholesome beauties. Rest contained the explicit images of felatio and cunnilingus done by and to each other by men and women – some in threesome and also featuring multiple partners. There are women making love to women and some being pursued by their furry friends even. And there are several envelopes titled BELLE ARTE PLASTIC – Made in Germany, 3D images of the naked women, complete with the red and green 3D cardboard framed viewing glasses.

‘Put them away right now in your suitcase and lock it up before anyone barges in.’

So I do. Stash them away inside the inner pockets of my suitcase. And then I forget all about them until I get home to Chicago a few weeks later and am unpacking my stuff.  Might as well, because had I remembered them, I don’t know how comfortable I would have felt going through the customs in Chicago in the knowledge of their existence. I could just imagine the headline: Playboy executive detained by Chicago’s O’Hare customs for attempting to import hard core pornography!!

At some point I did go through them. The collection also contained original negatives and  glass plates and also a small wallet sized leather bound photo album with rounded slit corners, inserted in which were a similar collection of photographs.  Majority of those were stuck to each other and were not salvageable. The prints of the line drawings on thinner paper were all curled up and some had turned sepia with age. The French postcards, as it turns out were actually made in Germany. They were printed on better quality paper and were in better shape.

All of the envelopes came from the same law firm, so the printed return address on them indicated. The space for recipient was blank, which meant they were hand delivered, but a couple of them had post marks, indicating they were mailed from Bombay 1 to Bombay 2, addressed in care of the trustees of Bada Mandir (Big Vaishnava Temple) in whose compound we lived. This also may mean that they were originally meant for one of the priests  of the temple, of whom my father was a staunch devotee and either they were given to him for the safeguard, or they together and others who hung out together were partners in the crime. They were mailed in the year 1951.

In retrospect, when I think back, it should have been apparent to me that as religious as my dad was, in things socio-sexual, he was fairly liberal. Perhaps because the Indian classics are full of explicit descriptions of sex and the female anatomy. And the fact that the carvings on some of the Indian temples would put any pornographers to shame, also indicates the liberal attitude of the ancient Indian culture. This of course would have perfectly fit his belief system. Or in other words, good old dad was a cool cat!

I remembered what he wrote to me in response to my attempt at justifying my working for Playboy: So what’s the big deal? Haven’t  you  ever read Rasa Manjari?  It also reminded me of some plain-covered Hindi pornographic books I had found under the mattress on his side of the bed and once also a copy of Nar Nari, the sex magazine of the days. And I remember clearly what my grandpa, my father’s father had blurted out with big explosion of exclamation when he saw for the first time my parents’ custom made elaborate bedroom  furniture –  containing of a sofa set, a three way folding mirror and the larger than king size bed, all beautifully hand crafted with the motif  of louts petals. Looking at the bed, he growled to nobody in particular, what are they going to do there? Dance?

And to think that my mother didn’t know about those publications and the photos hidden away in the trunk? Aren’t we being a bit naïve, brothers? Certainly she wouldn’t have cherished my sisters and my brother’s wives seeing them. My mother was a clever woman, and must have imagined how my brothers would react to them and would want to protect her from the filth.

For even though, theirs was a conventionally arranged marriage, my father had to be the most romantic man of his days. I can totally imagine it having caused a minor scandal when instead of calling my mother by her given name, Prabha, he renamed her and started calling her Kanan, after Kanan Devi, the sultry Bengali actress and the singer. He must have admired and adored her enormously to name his own wife after her, and this in the days when actresses were looked down at and were seen as being only slightly above prostitutes. These were also the days when Indian spouses didn’t even address each other by names, but mere, hey, are you listening? please and such.

I could just imagine people whispering and rolling their eyes behind my parents’ backs. Especially the women,  going: just imagine, he calls his wife after that slut Kanan in front of everybody. Baap re Baap. Doesn’t he have any shame? But he must have been strong of character and defiant to the boot, because we had never heard him calling my mother anything other than Kanan. I only had a slight notion of what she looked like. For the first time I just pulled up her photos and the bio off the IMDB. and I must confess, Kanan Devi was the beauty to be reckoned with. Big black kohl framed eyes, a sultry sensuous face and the long shiny dark tresses. Good taste Dad! And fortunately for my father, so was my Mom.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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SMUGGLING SMUT

PLAYBOY ON COFFEE TABLE

THE STORY OF MY TUXEDO

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ABOUT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Next Friday, October 26, 2013

PERFECTLY UNBOUND

Does anyone remember why the Playmates are called centerfolds? When Playboy  was saddle-stitched and not perfect bound as it is today?

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Categories Family Stories, India

THE DUTCH TREAT

October 10, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

Happiness Is A Piping Hot Croquette

automat

Art directors are a breed unto themselves. Crazy as they come. Crazy as in creative crazy, in positive sense. They are normally temperamental, egocentric and a proud clan. Starting with the Godfathers of them all, Art Paul and Tom Staebler of the U.S., Rainer Wörtmann of Germany, to Milan Hlaviček of Czech Republic and Andrzej Pągoski of Poland – these masters of the visual communication  are also the purveyors of good taste, dressed in their own individual style, be it the beat up pair of blue jeans, or wrinkled khakis and equally as wrinkled shirts and jackets. Or the designer suits and long fancy rain coats. The category in which, the first Dutch art director, Dirk de Moei falls.

Always impeccably dressed in his light crème suit and his longish off white trench coat, his trademark tortoise shell red framed glasses with inquisitive and confusing looking set of smoky green eyes peering through tinted lenses, Dirk is flamboyant, no taller that 5’9”(175 cms), his rusty brown hair isn’t too long, nor short, his round face makes him look no different than Mr. middle of the road from the planet earth.  The man of good taste in clothes and food and he carries the most expensive Smythson of Bond Street, thick as a paperback address book, he is the man about town. To the editor-in-chief Jan’s (Heemskerk’s) somber personality, he is the fleshy one of the duo that arrived in my Chicago office in early 1983, to learn the ropes.

As opposed to the editors with whom I discussed and disagreed on the ideas of the overall  content, I often butted heads with the art directors. Lucky for the editors that in most of the cases their texts were in a language I couldn’t read or understand. But I could see clearer the graphic ideas of the art directors and have an opinion of my own. And I would have ideas of my own to contribute. Art directors also being an emotional bunch and extremely possessive of their talents  would resist the most. When Dirk came up with the re-designed front of the book pages, splitting two or more rubrics on the same page instead of devoting a page each to Music, Books, Films and other sections, he was up against resistance from me. That’s altering the basic design and the format of the classic Playboy.  My job it was to preserve and guard them.

‘We neither have as much material, nor space and ads like the US Playboy to afford that kind of luxury. While the U.S. Playboy has an average of 230 + pages every month, we would l have about 130.’ Dirk throws a bewildered look in my direction.

That logic of his did it for me. Those pages looked nice, if a bit cluttered like a small Dutch house, where every single centimeter has to be judiciously utilized. The steep stairs with an incline only a slightly more than a stepladder against the wall, every nook and corner had to be used in the most productive way. Furthermore, his improvised design gave more editorial flexibility. Made imminent sense. In the end we would agree on a compromise, and from all our disagreements, the magazine benefitted the most. I thought of Dirk a couple of weeks ago when I saw the grand old dame The New Yorker’s, front of the book pages similarly split after 83 years of publication. Dirk did it with their issue # 0.

There was rarely animosity between us and we got along famously at and outside of the work.  Dirk was also the man about town and would be often consulted as to where we should go out for dinner.

So it is no wonder that Dirk wants to introduce me to the best of what Holland has to offer in terms of the culinary excellence. One evening, he picks me up from the hotel with his live-in squeeze Ans and we drive into the Dutch countryside to the restaurant de Hoefslag in Bosch en Duin. It is awarded no less than two Michelin Stars and its cuisine is known to stack up to any

I am flattered and I am curious. Really looking forward to it as Dirk builds it up how exquisite and exclusive the place is – not to mention how expensive! Soon as we walk in, Dirk and Ans are fussed over by the co-owner, chef Gerard Fagel who ran the restaurant with his brother Martin. We are given a prime table in the middle of the restaurant that allows us the generous panoramic view of the ample space that the dining room occupies. A bottle of champagne appears without being ordered and while the chef and Dirk are babbling away excitedly in Dutch, catching up, Ans and I look at each other like Alice and Alex in the Wonderland.

The dining room is spacious and airy. It’s lit just right with enhancing and highlighting plants and other inanimate objects. I am presuming that this is Ans’ first time also, from the way she surveys the place, as if in awe.

Now my memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact details of the meal we consumed over the next two or so hours. What I remember clearly still is that the appetizer contained of a diminutive quail egg topped with a spot of glistening Beluga caviar, resting on the bed of exotic looking mix of lettuce, and somewhere along the meal, no bigger than a Kennedy silver dollar in diameter and about two inches (5 cm) thick Filet Mignon crowned on the mound of various accoutrement and revolving bottles of champagne all through the meal. All served on shiny white plates, a smaller one nestled into a large service plate. Every course visually enhanced by the chef’s artistic skills.

It was a multi course meal and I am sure there were wine pairings. None of which I remember. But just to give you an idea, I have had my son-in-law Carlo Lamagna, who is currently the executive chef at one of Chicago’s top, Benny’s Steak House and was sous chef  at the elite, known for its  earth to table cuisine, North Pond, frequented by likes of Ricardo Mutti and Gérard Depardieu, make up the following sample menu of that night now thirty years later.

MENU

Amuse – trio of melon with balsamic and basil

1st course – vichyssoise, black truffle, chive baton

2nd course – quail egg, beluga caviar, frisee, garlic vinaigrette

3rd course – foie gras torchon, sauterne Gelee, brioche crouton

4th course – lobster poached in vanilla butter, celeriac puree, wilted spinach, sauce américaine

5th course – petite filet mignon, pomme puree, roasted chantrelles, marchand di vin

intermezzo – beet granite

6th course – vanilla creme brulee, mascerated raspberries

Yum! Or like the Dutch would say: lekker! We are properly wined and dined and are buzzing pleasantly with the champagne circulating through our veins like the chemicals scurrying in slow motion roller-coasters through the test tubes in a science lab, with bubbles and all. The only way I can describe it is: we’re feeling no pain as we say our thanks and goodbyes to the chef and the restaurant.

As we’re driving back in near silence, Dirk’s Alfa Romeo Sports is gliding along the tree covered roads and snaking towards Amsterdam, I hear Ans shuffling in her back seat and leaning forward.

‘So, did you like the meal?’

‘Of course. It was exquisite. Nothing like I have ever tasted before.’ And then I turn my face sideways to look at Dirk. He’s wearing a smile of satisfaction. Then I turn around and face Ans.

‘But you know? I’m still a bit hungry!’

‘You are?’ She doesn’t come out and say what I read on her face.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘To tell you the truth, yes, I am a bit too.’ I hear a not very happy grunt coming out of Dirk’s throat.

Just having vocalized what my stomach is telling me, gurgling, I come out and say what I am thinking.

‘You know what?’

‘What”?’

‘A fresh hot chicken croquette with mustard would taste really good right now!’

‘I think so too,’

‘Let’s stop for one. My treat!!’

What I see clearly on Dirk’s face is utter disgust at us two ungrateful creatures. And yet, he suddenly exists the dark avenue we have been traveling on and within minutes is pulling up at an all night automat. At the  first bite of the piping hot croquette, both Ans and I feel we died and went to heaven. Dirk refrains from having any.

He has just plunked down hundreds of guilders on wining and dining us.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Other Food & Wine Stories

BOYS’ NIGHT OUT WITH PLAYMATES

MY INTIMATE ENCOUNTER WITH EROTIC OYSTER

HOLA Y ADIOS AMOEBAS

Next Friday, October 18, 2013

MY FATHER’S SECRET STASH

When my father died, he left behind a trunk full of personal stuff containing of things that were near and dear to him, mainly several watches that he wore through his lifetime, gold cufflinks and shirt buttons, several bottles of partly or barely used men’s fragrances, among them a bottle of Playboy fragrance, several little bottles of herbal attars, fancy pocket handkerchiefs and such, which my mother wanted us four brothers to have. Since I was coming home soon, my brothers decided to wait to open it when all four of us would be together. But they had gone ahead and taken a quick peek…

 

 

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Categories Food & Wine, Friendship, Profile, The Netherlands

THE TAIWANESE BARBER SHOP

October 3, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

What’s There Not To Like?

barber3

When I was just a kid, I remember the family barber stopping by on the fifth floor of Jagjivan Mansion – built by my grandpa and his three brothers – park himself in the corner by the stairs at the end of the long corridor, at the foot of the custom built telephone booth. He carried a black shoulder bag made of rugged leather, containing multiple pockets to accommodate his long and shiny sharp bladed knives, several pairs of scissors, manual trimmers with handles, a mixing bowl for soap and the water, a soft lather brush and a long leather strap about three inches wide on which he sharpened his long blades while waiting for one of the older males sitting down on the floor in front of him and submit himself to the barber’s ministrations with his head bent down while the barber squatted over, trims the hair, shaves the day old growth on their chins and then oils their scalps with his palms pummeling their heads with quick jerking and frequent slapping motions. As rough as it looked and sounded and at times even hurt, once he was done, your head felt light as a feather – all the worries slipped away and be ready to face the world all over again. Professional barber’s pride and joy was the boast that he would be the only person in front of whom even the king had to bow his head.

The days of those professional home visiting barbers began to fade when my generation of Shahs  began to patronize the modern hair salon down the street from our home. Equipped with high adjustable chairs and mirrors on the walls. Soon, they sprouted up in every neighborhood, symbolized by the round vertical drums of red, white and blue striped flags that twirled non-stop.

My image of the barber shop. When I first noticed  similar shop fronts in Taipei, Taiwan, they didn’t look anything like typical barber shops with the hairdressers hovering over heads snap-snapping. They were wide shop fronts with clear glass walls behind which would be a well lit modern reception desk and staring at the computer screen would be a pretty young thing. A huge vertical tube of the traditional barbershop flag continuously turning inside round glass drums, some as tall as the height of the mostly revolving glass door entrances.  Displayed credit card decals indicating the acceptance of Diner’s Club, American Express, Visa, Master Card and other local bank cards. Uhm, Fancy! I think to myself. But little did I know!!

Unlike European and South American business dinners that can begin as late as eleven, with meeting for drinks at nine, in the Orient, dinner takes place earlier, most of the time soon after leaving the offices. Even the most elaborate meals are done by nine or latest by ten. But when you’re being entertained, that’s when the real evening begins. Normally they took me to their usual hangouts, small cozy bars in obscure alleys and buildings. The place we most frequented was Hsilang Bar – a cozy hole in the wall. I still remember one of the hostesses by the name of Michelle. Since she spoke the most English and also we had taken to liking each other, whenever she could get away from other customers, she would come and sit next to me and we would talk. The most we would ever do was tenderly hold hands and look into each other’s eyes. Confide in little things. I would be happy just to stay home, have a couple of kids. Cook for my family I will always make myself pretty and be there for my husband, for whatever he wants to do with me. At the time Carolyn and I had recently split, and often I couldn’t help but fantasize about being that husband to her. While there may have been some hostess bars where you could take one of them home or to a motel room, neither Hsilang Bar nor a couple of others that Playboy team frequented were anything more than bars with hostesses, who sat with you and served drinks, like Saqi in the ghazals of Mirza Ghalib. Neither were they exclusive men’s territories. Half of Taiwan Playboy  staff and contributors were females, and they too would hang out with us. And then I would either grab a cab or someone would drop me off to my hotel.

But one evening, when everyone else had left I find myself alone with Winston (Tsui), an executive and the editor-in-chief,  Henry (Jen). I think it is Henry who is driving both Winston and me back to our respective hotels, when Winston says: It’s still early to go home. Why don’t we stop at a barber shop and get a proper massage? We’ve been working so hard, we deserve one!

Suddenly, I am standing with the two of them in front of well lit and sophisticated reception desk with the young pretty lady holding in her hands a long piece of paper looking like the one they give you at Dim Sum restaurants, to check off whatever, for when the Dim Sum carts come by, they can glance at the list and serve you accordingly. We order full body massages. And then she asks something in Chinese. Henry and Winston consult each other and then ask me, how I want my massage to end? Sensing confusion on my face, one of them explains, it has to be pre-ordered and paid for in advance and the price they charge is based on whether following the massage you wanted to have an intercourse with the woman, or perhaps just a blow or a hand job. Though I had suspected something of the sort, I haven’t given any thought to it. I certainly didn’t want to have an intercourse or the blow job. Something I just didn’t do. Plus, as a defense I would always say in jest, you know what you went in with, but never know what you might come out with!

‘Never mind.’ Says Winston and tells the girl something in Chinese. She jots it down and then inputs all of it in her computer. Winston flashes his corporate American Express. She hands us each a card with a number on them and buzzes the side door open for us to enter the facilities. I smell chlorine and the sound of water flowing. We are standing in front of a decent sized swimming pool with crystal clear water and the pool with blue tiles at the bottom. There are some men splashing in it. There is a Jacuzzi at the farthest end of the pool and the place is also equipped with the steam bath and sauna. And there are tropical plants scattered around. Everything looks clean and shiny and reverentially quiet. It’s a high quality and high priced health club. I am not sure, if we swim, but probably take showers before walking down the stairs and to our assigned cabins for our respective massages. The room is dimly lit and the layout reminds me of the tourist class cabins of the SS Marconi and QE II, the luxury liners I had sailed on.

‘That’s your cabin. See you later. Enjoy.’ Says one of them and they both disappear down the corridor.

Not knowing what exactly to expect, I lightly knock on the closed door. A petite young Chinese woman opens the door, bows slightly and lets me in, gently closing the door behind us. She doesn’t speak any English, so our communication is a few words and more gestures. As I remove my outer clothing, she neatly folds each one of the items and places them on a side table. I am down to my jockey shorts. She gestures me to lie down on my stomach on the massage table.

The room is small but seems well organized with shelves full of towels, piles of bed sheets, bottles of fragrant oils lined on a counter, a small stool placed by the side of the massage table. It is lit in a shade of purple haze. Soft piped in music wafting in is soothing and puts me in a trance as I feel her hands touch my back.

Forty five minutes or so later, I am feeling like a million dollars. Winston was right. We’ve been working really hard and it seems with those oils and her magic hands she has squeezed out of my body every iota of the stress and stiffness. All the toxins peeled off. My eyes are closed and the feeling of being lulled to peaceful sleep envelops me, when I feel her hands tugging at the elastic of my jockey shorts. She is gesturing for me to lift my butt to facilitate their removal. I comply. She slowly and softly begins to caress and massage my inner thighs. Ever so gently. I am being aroused. She has been sitting on the edge of the massage table with her back facing me. And then she lithely turns her torso and makes eye contact with me. She points at her blouse and touches the upper button.

‘Open?’ She asks.

Daintily and slowly she unbuttons her blouse and lets it slip off with a slight shudder of her shoulder blades. She is wearing no bra. Her breasts are small and firm with dark pointed nipples. They certainly don’t need support of a bra. She lets my eyes linger on them for a bit longer before turning around and reaching for my inner thigh with her hands. But then stops and brings her hands backward and lifts both of my mine lying limply by my side and with a gentle pressure places my palms over her bare breasts. It feels like a mother buckling her young kid into a seat of a Go-cart, and putting his hands over the steering wheel for him to hold onto when the car begins to gain speed.

When I feel her hand on my penis, it reminds me of Jean Jacques Lesueur – tall, handsome French man with an angular face, curly dark head of hair and a permanent impish grin on his face. He is married to the stunning Danish beauty Katrine and they live in Athens, Greece with their two kids. Jean Jacques is in the business of publishing with his best friend – a young Greek and is the publisher of the Greek edition of Playboy.

One evening I am sitting in the living room of their Athens home, having pre-dinner drinks with him and Katrine and he reminisces about his trip to Thailand, while Katrine listens in with her ever so sweet dimpled smile. The way Jean Jacques tells it is obviously more animated and somehow sounds cuter in his French accent. But I will try my to re-tell it as best I can, albeit in third person.

His father-in-law is a diplomat and at the time is posted in Thailand. Jean Jacques and Katrine are taking a vacation in Bangkok. Whereas Katrine has traveled some days earlier, Jean Jacques has just arrived after a long flight from Athens. It’s just before dinner time in the evening and the family of four is sitting around in the living room having drinks before the dinner is served. Considering that Jean Jacques would be tired and may enjoy a nice relaxing massage before they sat down for dinner, his in-laws have arranged a professional masseuse to give him a full body massage. She has set up her massage table and is waiting for him in one of the rooms in the house. She is young and pretty and an excellent professional of her trade. During an hour long massage, he is completely relaxed and refreshed and is thankful for the thoughtfulness of his in-laws. But he gets a bit uneasy when he feels her pulling at his underwear. He is not sure. If a bit guiltily and hesitantly, he allows her to finish the massage, the one he terms: with a happy ending.  He emerges out of the room, not able to hide the glow of the guilty pleasure, blushing like a little kid. He notices a slight smile on his wife’s face – the kind I am noticing right now – followed by smirks on his in-laws’ faces before all three break out in a hearty laughter.

‘Comment était ton premier Thaï massage mon chérie?’ Asks Katrine. He just smiles back, thinking, what’s there not to like?

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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Next Friday, October 12, 2013

THE DUTCH TREAT

Nope, this one is not a cheap one. Actually its about the dinner at Restaurant de Hoefslag at the time of its two Michelin Stars glory. It must have cost an arm and a leg. Delicieux. And all that champagne flowing? Lekker!

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Categories Uncategorized

LA DOLCE VITA

September 26, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

The Strike Italian Style

airport3

I land in Milan for the very first time in November of 1972. This is my first week on the job. Having survived Munich and Essen, I spend a couple of days in Milan to meet up with Gerrit (Huig), Don Stewart and the people at Rizzoli – the Italian Playboy publishers – before returning to Chicago to wrap up my personal affairs. I have all of ten days to do what needs to be done, including several meetings in Chicago office and be ready for the moving van to pick up my possessions.

We have already landed at Linate. As we are about to deplane, we are told that we are to pick up our own checked-in baggage from the tarmac and carry it to the terminal. The ground crew is on strike, including the bus transfer from the plane to the terminal. I have with me my largest and the heaviest suitcase. They have not yet invented wheeled baggage. I somehow manage to drag it to the terminal, find a cab and check into the Grand Hotel. Dump my suitcase in my room and take another cab to the restaurant where Gerrit is waiting with his wife Barbara and Donald Stewart. Two days later, on Friday, I am at the airport waiting to board Amsterdam bound KLM flight which would connect me with its flight 611 to Chicago.

The flight to Amsterdam is delayed on account of the heavy fog at Milan airport, but they are hoping for it to lift soon and be able to depart at the latest by eleven. It would bring me into Amsterdam just in time to make my connection. The fog lifts, the sunrays begin to break through the clouds, they have already announced the departures of Amsterdam and several other flights. Everything is just cool. But wait!!Not so fast!!  Soon as the sky has cleared of the fog, they promptly go on strike. The negotiations begin. The hope is that they would get back to work in an hour or two, three at the most. Chicago passengers rush to change their tickets to fly via New York. But nothing moves for the whole day. We wait until after eight in the evening in hopes of getting out of Milano. Even though there are no transatlantic flights waiting for us anymore in Amsterdam or anywhere else on the continental Europe, it’s still better to spend the night anywhere else but in Milano. For there is no telling what tomorrow may bring.

But we’re stuck where we are. KLM feeds us a decent meal, makes us wait a bit longer and then to our dismay, we watch the empty aircraft take off, leaving us behind, gasping. The one which would return to Milan the next morning with the Amsterdam passengers and hopefully be able to take us back with it. We are given an option to take the night train to Amsterdam or stay over in a hotel and take our chances tomorrow. The train is not an option for me. I do not have visas to  travel through Switzerland and Holland. At least I get a good night’s sleep. The preceding twelve days have been hectic and harried and this unexpected break helps me re-energize. The Linate crew is still striking the next morning. We are bussed and flown out of Malpensa.

I have now lost a whole precious day. Planned are several meetings with different Playboy people including my boss Lee Hall and the production chief John Mastro. And I have to wrap up four years of my life in Chicago. During those years, I have made many close friends and the bunch at Time has become my family. As a gesture of my heartfelt thanks and to bid everyone proper farewell, I am throwing a lavish bash in the penthouse party room of the lake shore highrise in which I live. My Time buddies jump in and help.  Everything goes smooth. The celebration spills into the early morning. Good times had by all.

Two days later, a Bekin’s moving truck swallows the entire contents of my apartment and the car, and I say my arrivederci to Chicago.

●●●

Over the next two and a half years, I must have been fogged in or struck out or both for tens of times at Linate. In the meanwhile, I have acquired visas for every possible country on the continent, I might be required to cross. I try taking night train a couple of times, but when did I have that kind of time? So with the cancellations, delays  and all, I have no choice but to put up with the quirks of the weather and of the group of people called the Italians. Stranded at the Milan airport has its rewards. Often you run into interesting people, including the stunning beauty with whom I would travel in the first class. But the cherry on the cake waits to be crowned for my very last trip from Milan to Munich.

●●●

‘Ciao Haresh, I will call you next week when I get back to office.’ I stroke her face and get into the cab. ‘Linate per favore.’ I look back to wave at Celeste (Huenergard) as the cab paves its way out of the driveway of Hotel Principe e Savoia into Piazza della Republica. She is still standing there, waving and smiling at me. I see her smoky green eyes starting to blur.

The cab crosses via Pisani at an angle to the other side of the street and accelerates towards the airport. Celeste’s teary eyes follow me. Little do I realize, my eyes too are getting fogged up. I struggle hard to control my emotions. I look outside the window. The traffic has come to  standstill. The road around the tram tracks is being repaired, the right side of the street is blocked by a garbage truck picking up black plastic bags from the pavement. I glance at my watch. I can’t afford to be late. Milan airport has its very own set of rules about you checking-in on time.  And I just have to be in Munich that afternoon. I am throwing ausstand, my going away party for the people at Playboy in Germany. The anxiety of making it to the airport in time pushes Celeste away in back of my mind.

Soon as the cab edges in near the departure gates, I jump out and make my way through the waves of people and to the first counter with the shortest line. I still have at least forty minutes. But the woman at the counter is taking her sweet little time. Unlike most other airports, they don’t have computers to aid them. Instead she must make a phone call to check-in every single passenger. The television monitor up above, blinks the requirement of checking-in at least thirty five minutes prior to the scheduled departures. There are still two passengers in front of me. The clock keeps ticking. It is now 9:40 and the plane is to depart at 10:10.

‘It’s too late for the Munich flight!’ she frowns at me.

‘What you mean it’s too late. It doesn’t leave  for another half an hour,’

‘Yes, but you must check-in thirty five minutes before.’

‘Yes, but I have been standing in this line for fifteen minutes now!’

‘I don’t know that!’

‘What do you mean you don’t know that?’ Irritation in my voice is apparent.

‘The plane is already closed and it’s full. I am sorry, you understand English? I told you, you can’t get on the flight.’

This kind of rudeness only can happen at the Linate. I almost want to strangle her. Shut her up for once and for ever. Instead I  rush to the counter #1 to see the manger.

‘I am sorry, it’s too late to get on that flight’, he snaps and conveniently walks away. My frustration and rage is building up, but there is nothing I can do. I rush to another counter. The clerk is at least pleasant. I start babbling to him too. He checks on the phone and apologizes that there was nothing they could do. The flight is already closed, the reserved seats are given away to the waiting list passengers.

‘Where is the Lufthansa office?’ A Bavarian looking guy in his green coat butts in.

‘It’s downstairs, across from the police station.’

‘Are you a passenger to Munich too?’

‘Yes.’

We both rush downstairs through both wings of the airport in a fury, looking for Lufthansa office. A German looking young woman is standing near the door, seeming she is about to open the office. She isn’t in the uniform. I am about to blow up when I suddenly realize that she too is bumped off the flight and is down there to complain. We knock. No one answers. Besides,  the woman tells us that the airport personnel are going on their standard two hour strike in ten minutes. Perhaps we should check into the train schedule to see if there was an Intercity leaving soon. There is indeed one, leaving in about forty minutes. Fat chance that we could make it across the city within that time. Plus, it arrives in Munich  twelve hours later.  That too is no good. We also contemplate renting a car together and drive through the treacherous curves of the Alps. Not a good idea either.

But now with the three of us, we have strength in numbers. Hermann, an aeronautical engineer works for MBB in Munich. Rosemary is the European marketing manager for Elizabeth Arden,  working out of Düsseldorf. Not attractive in  conventional sense, but the way she carries herself has that certain sex appeal about her. And she certainly knows how to best use the beauty products she represents. She is in fact, the perfect walking and talking image for Ms. Arden.

At the stroke of ten past ten, suddenly there is calm and there is chaos. The airport employees have all flown away like a flock of migrating birds. . The check-in counters deserted and looking lonesome await the return of their occupants. The mob of people have turned around and are now moving in the opposite direction to re-book. Strangely enough they have opened a counter to do just that. While Hermann and I stand there, looking confused and disoriented, Rosemary has paved her way through the throng and all of a sudden she has planted herself at the front of the long line. She comes back with a reservation to Munich via Zürich. Hermann and I follow suit.

We stack all of our baggage together on one cart. I join the line, while Hermann and Rosemary wait for me. I am squeezed between two people on the sides and a hoard of them in the front and back of me in rows of three. For all these many people, there is only one agent re-booking. Over-worked, she does her work patiently and swiftly. By the time I get re-booked an hour later, I feel  nauseated by all that body odor I am forced to inhale. Rosemary could have sold a whole bunch of Elizabeth Arden deodorant that day.

The strike is going to be over in the next twenty minutes. Handing tickets to Hermann to check-in our baggage, I run to the public telephone to call Brigit (Peterson) in Munich. But the foreign telephone exchange is on strike as well. After having lost three telephone coins I get hold of Katherine (Morgan) at Rizzoli’s editorial offices, and ask her to send a telex to Munich.

Hadn’t I known the Italians outside of the Linate airport, my image of them would have been that of the people most inconsiderate and the rudest on earth. They could make you feel the most helpless ever. Outright nasty. I have experienced some of the most humiliating moments of my life  between Linate and Malpensa airports in Milano. You can plan anything, make dates, the weather could be the most beautiful, no fog to delay the departures. But at a whim of an union leader, they just walk out, leaving you glued to the spot where you stood, burning inside with rage, furious with your fists eager to punch someone, your feet stomping madly on the ground. But of no use. They have a cool way of pretending that you don’t even exist. You are in their land, and they are the ultimate MASTERS of the Universe.

You learn to be patient. You learn that it doesn’t help getting upset, that the blood you end up burning is your own. The smartest thing you can do is to accept the fact that you are helpless. You are dealing with the people who probably invented logic, but don’t quite understand it themselves. They are an emotional bunch. And you are dealing with the unions that are apt at blackmailing and disrupting the whole day, the whole city and the whole country, if not the whole continent, by going on strike only for two hours! Just take it easy. Not being able to get off the ground is not the worst thing that can happen on earth. Never get too upset and block your ability to reason. Never forget, you are dealing with the country that once was the greatest in Europe, and you are dealing with the people called THE ITALIANS.

The Zürich flight is leaving at 13:15. It has turned into a beautiful day. Sunny, the clean  unpolluted blue sky, the crisp air and the friendly sunrays stroking your skin. I look outside the window as the Swissair slowly rolls towards the runway. I waive, ‘Ciao Milano’.  And soon we are in Zürich.. We have three hours layover before Lufthansa takes off for Munich. We walk up the stairs of the atrium to the airport  restaurant. We clink our glasses to prost.

‘Back to the civilization!’ I say.

‘Yes, back to the civilization!’ Rosemary echoes with a broad smile.

I rush to call Brigit. ‘No party tonight,’ I tell her. She is disappointed. Heinz (Nellissen) has taken the trip from Essen and is around. We’re party people and don’t let little thing like Italian strike stop us

‘Don’t worry. We will arrange everything!’ Its nice to hear Heinz’s reassuring voice.

The party is already in full swing when I walk into the corridor of our Munich offices at little past six in the evening. It’s the loudest and the most rambunctious reception. The revelry goes on until four in the morning. When I finally hit the sack, I feel happily nostalgic about what I considered to be the longest cocktail party of my life – that was the act one of my time at Playboy.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, October 4, 2013

THE TAIWANESE BARBER SHOP

When I was just a little kid, the family barber would stop by our joint family home every morning to shave-cut hair-do head massage to the grown up males. He would squat on the floor with one of the males sitting in front of him, also on the floor, with his legs crossed. And submit himself  to be pampered. My generation got more modern barber shops called salons. And then I got to visit a Taiwanese Barber Shop. That would change forever the way I would think of the business of cutting hair.  

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Categories Italy

HOLA Y ADIOS AMOEBAS

September 19, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

Usurped By The Occupational Hazard

amoeba2

Pascual at the Hotel Ritz reception in Barcelona hands me my room key, and along with it a few folded telexes and messages from my mail slot. I walk a few steps to the elevator and as the tiny old timer cage rises, I unroll the letter size message. It says HAPPAY BIRTHDAY HARESH. Repeated umpteen times inside a white Playboy rabbit head computer graphic on the grey background. The margins are annotated and signed by everyone in my department. As slow as the elevator is, it’s still a short ride up to the fourth floor. Something about that electronically transmitted birthday card on a flimsy fax paper triggers an enormous emotional and physical outburst into me. My hands are shaking as I slide open the folding metal door of the elevator. I rush to my room, barely manage to open the door. Slam it shut and I have a total breakdown. I throw my weight in the middle of  the bed, and sink into the hollow of the sagging old mattress. First I start sobbing uncontrollably.  Then my whole body begins to shake violently and I feel cold sweat oozing out of every pour of my skin. And then I feel hot, like a pre-heated oven, ready for baking. I pull the blanket over, try to control my convulsions and break out into wailing sobs and a desperate cry.

It’s November 4, 1988. My 49th birthday. I am in Barcelona with Bill and Debra (Stokkan). We together have been on the road for two weeks now, visiting our editions in Munich, Rome, Istanbul, Athens and now Barcelona. This is our last stop before we would board the plane tomorrow afternoon, heading back home to Chicago. I have spent a wonderful day celebrating from the moment I got up. We have sumptuous sea food lunch at La Dorada, hosted by our Spanish partner Jose Manuel Lara of Editorial Planeta. We drink his favorite Marqués de Cáceres. And then suddenly Bill’s nose begins to bleed. Embarrassed, he sits there with his handkerchief pressed under his nostrils. Goes back and forth to the wash room. It takes a long time before the bleeding slows, if not completely stops. Jose Manuel Lara is kind and understanding.

Following the lunch, Bill runs back to the hotel, I head to the editorial offices where Sebastian (Martinez), Jose Luis (Cordoba) and Rosa (Oliva), along with the entire editorial staff are waiting for me to pop a few bottles of champagne. There have often been times when my birthday has become a cause célèbre to my total amazement. And so it is today. Not much I can do about. After two weeks of back-to-back meetings, being wined and dined and hopping on and off the planes, running to and checking in and out of hotels, packing and unpacking, all three of us are beginning to feel bit of fatigue settling in.

Must have been around half past six or seven when I come back to the hotel and experience total collapse. As I lie in middle of the bed, sinking deeper and deeper in the human indentation, and when finally the shakes and chill and the fever I felt earlier subsides somewhat, I know I can’t just turn over and go to sleep. The finale is yet to come. Playboy Spain’s publisher, Fernando Castillo and his wife Anna are to come pick us up from the hotel at nine. This is our last night in Spain and its my birthday. He knows that I love Paella, especially at my favorite restaurant Quo Vadis in Ramblas But he has his own favorite and wants to take us to Lauria. I somehow manage to compose myself, and get out of bed and take a refreshing shower. Feeling just a little bit better, but not well enough to go out on the town and sit through an entire evening and be my old social butterfly self.

Fernando has pre-ordered Paella for me. Its sitting there, sizzling in its traditional pan, the lobster tails shining orange and the little shrimps with tails staring at me with their ink black eyes. The rice is beginning to simmer and I don’t even smell the pungent Spanish saffron. I want so bad to dig in and devour this succulent, most delicious and exotic of  the Spanish delicacies. But instead, I find myself staring at it as if the Paella pan were an objet d’art.  Soon the waiter brings whatever the others have ordered and dishes out some Paella and gently serves a portion in my plate. I pick up a fork-full and put it in my mouth. I can’t taste it at all. Fernando is looking at me with anticipation and somehow I manage to say, esta sabrosa. I am thankful that there are also Bill and Debra and the burden of making the conversation doesn’t fall entirely on me. But still!  I have a choice of facing up or take a couple of more bites and risk throwing up. I face up. I don’t feel too good. Bill and Debra aren’t feeling that hot either. We somehow manage to wing it.

I feel a bit better in the morning and manage my last meeting in Spain, have breakfast with Roger Aguade, the advertising manager. In the afternoon we are on our way back to Chicago via Amsterdam. The upper deck of the Business Class is practically empty so the three of us spread out. During the nine hour journey, we barely exchange a few sentences with each other, each one of us nursing our personal pains, mostly caused by the super fatigue. When we arrive, I am glad that Carolyn and Anjuli are there to pick me up. Bill and Debra brush them by with perfunctory greetings and are gone. Must have been in more pain than I had realized.  When we get in bed is when Carolyn realizes my body feels hot like freshly baked potato right out of an oven. I am running  the temperature of 102 °F (38.9 °C). We write it off to me being overly tired.

But the fever is here to stay. Over the next three days the temps swing between 102 °F (38.9 °C) and 103°F  (39.4 °C). I am floating in our king size water bed like a whale squirming with extreme pain flipping up and down. I have no will to do anything. I have no appetite. I feel certain loss of my basic motor skills. Normally, Anjuli would have walked home from school, but on the third afternoon, its raining heavily.  I get dressed, get into my car and drive two short blocks to pick her up. I feel the car sway sideways  and realize I have lost my power of coordination. Fortunately we make it back home and I crawl back into bed. Realizing that perhaps my fever was more serious than we thought, Carolyn finds the primary care physician for me. Dr. Anne Niedenthal.  She prescribes Ceclor and then has me x-rayed and has my blood tested. My white cell count is high at 13,400 to the normal range of 4,300 to 10.800. I hallucinate. My water bed bursts and I am struggling to stay afloat with my arms and legs flailing, the water splashing, with only my bopping head managing to stay above the deluge. No, I am not drowning. My entire body breaks out first in cold and then hot sweat. I am alone at home. The temperatures refuse to budge.

On the next day, Dr. Niedenthal orders me to meet her at the central registration of Evanston Hospital so she can get me admitted immediately. I am upset. Anjuli begins to cry. Carolyn retains her professional posture, but barely. I am hooked up to multiple tubes and the TV monitor up above blips endlessly. They monitor me all night long at regular intervals, taking my temp and blood samples. The next morning, I open my eyes to four interns huddling over me along with Dr. Francine Cook , who specializes in contagious diseases.  In addition to the tubes sprouting from my arms, he prescribes heavy doses of Flagyl and Ceftazidime-Dextrose.  While I am still roasting, I am aware of everything that goes on around me. They have not yet been able to figure out what it is that maybe wrong with me. It must be dire. Carolyn is a staff nurse in the hospital and she has access to and understands all that’s being discussed. I am told later, that Anjuli and her went home and cried. All reports point to my early exit from this material world. Curiously, not once did the possibility of me not getting out of the hospital alive crosses my mind.

I go through a battery of tests to include blood, urine, ultrasound and ultimately, the cat scan of which I write interesting. On the third day, the temperature begins to subside. On the fourth, the tubes are removed, which gives me an ultimate sense of freedom. Now the visitors begin to pour in. I have no dietary restrictions. Having tasted hospital food for a couple of days, I realize that irrespective of what I ask for, it all tastes the same, smelling predominantly of the dirty brown plastic covers that breathe over every meal delivered. So Carolyn and Anjuli bring me BigMac with heap of fries. Chinese chicken fried rice. Still barely palatable.

Now that I have the freedom of the movement, I go and talk to the nurses at their station. They allow me to sit with them in their lunch room and eat with them. I go down to the gift shop in my long burgundy terry gown with black and avocado stripes. On impulse, I buy for Carolyn a handmade two piece suite for $250.- . Talk with the sales ladies in the shop. But I am bored stiff and can’t wait to get out of the hospital. But Dr. Westenfelder (Grant O.), who, giving the benefit of the doubt to my illness is the first one to pronounce what I have to be a possible Amoeba infection.  He guesses it right and treats me accordingly with Flagyl. Perhaps too heavy a doze and for too long of a period, which has left me with tingling and some loss of grip in my ten toes, with the name of peripheral neuropathy.

Three months later, I am in Mexico City – my first trip since my return to Chicago. At my friend Ignacio Barrientos’ urging, I go see Dr. Bernardo Tanur. Just within minutes of talking with me Dr, Tanur knows that I had amoebas. They treated me with the right medication, but for three times as long. You never give Flagyl to anyone for more than one week maximum. Its mainly a tropical infection, something I couldn’t have picked up living in the Northern Hemisphere, and Dr. Westenfelder could not have treated many similar cases, if any at all. Could it be that I picked up amoebas during one of my earlier trips to Mexico? They laid dormant until my immune system was overspent and attacked it soon as they knew it would be an easy knockout? But in my mind, I connect it with something vile I tasted in that sweetbread they served at the restaurant Florian in Barcelona on Playboy Spain’s 10th anniversary dinner, just the night before. Whatever the cause, I guess the peripheral neuropathy, which I still have, is a small price to pay for still being alive and living to tell the tale, twenty five years later.

Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, September 27, 2013

LA DOLCE VITA

Italians are the people like no other. Easy going and the lovers of sweet life and delicious food and wine, proud of their history and heritage. It’s hard not to have good time when visiting their country. That is: until you find yourself suddenly stranded at Milan’s Linate International Airport and at their mercy.

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Categories Illness

ALL IN A DAY’S WORK

September 12, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

Eat Your Heart Out!

mundial2

Imagine this! Puerto Vallarta. Chicago is in deep of the winter of 1986. It’s bone chilling cold as the city has a reputation of being every February. And here we are, the sun is shining bright, the sky is blue as can be and the waves of Bahia de Banderas off the Pacific Ocean are rushing towards the shore breaking and splashing. Wandering around in our shorts and t-shirts and the girls frolicking au naturell most of the day, Pompeo (Posar), Jan (Heemskerk) and I  are conferring by the poolside, deciding on the next dramatic but a fun shot, with eight of the world’s most beautiful women lined up in the water by the edge of the pool, holding on to the railing and ready to lift their bare butts in action, their faces turned sideways to their left, bursting with laughters and their legs and feet elevated, kicking the surface of the water in a choreographed harmony of synchronized swimming.

Right now we are on the lunch break. We have just availed ourselves of the sumptuous buffet and are sipping on our chilled to perfection Pacifico beers while the girls have retracted under the shade of the arch separating the private pool and the villa made available to us by Hotel Krystal for our exclusive use. A little earlier, the girls have emerged out of the pool and while waiting for the next shot, have not bothered to dry themselves nor cover up. Instead they are sitting and standing around a low table swarming with exotic drinks. They are an animated bunch, gossiping and in general making a ruckus despite language barriers.

We are in Mexico to produce this incredible pictorial as the warming  up act for the Football World Cup – Mundial 1986, to be hosted by this land of the mystical Aztecs.  Brainchild of Jan, I am the one in charge of bringing it all together with Playboy’s then existing twelve international editions. I am able to get only nine to participate. Missing most notably are Italy and Spain, and  sadly Holland, which didn’t even qualify. Quite an emotional blow for Jan to contain, while cheering everyone else. He brings instead Chantal Aarts of Belgium, because the Dutch edition is also distributed in Belgium. Bebe Martinez of Argentina either couldn’t afford to or wasn’t able to find an appropriate candidate, or both to send a girl of his own. I find one for him from our files,  the beautiful Evelyn Escalante from Costa Rica and put her in the Argentine blue and white stripes. It would have been devastating, had we not been able  to include Argentina, as they went on to win the Cup 3:2 against West Germany. This wasn’t an international cricket tournament, so Australia obviously wasn’t enthused. But Japan’s Emi Kojo, Turkey’s Sumer Ilken and America’s Andrea Huber came along for the fun of it and in the spirit of cooperation to partake in what Jan calls Playboyesque World Cup happening.  The logistics are abominable.  But we don’t think about the difficulties we may encounter, we just take a plunge, because the exotic scenario I have described above is all in a day’s work for us.

Jan and I arrive in Mexico City on Sunday, February 24th. Meet with our Mexican publisher Irina Schwartzman, and the editor-in-chief Eduardo Velazquez. On Monday, the rest begin to trickle in and check into Hotel Krystal Rosa – the meeting point from where we would begin.

The first one to arrive is Sumer (Ilken) from Istanbul. She has picked up a wrong suitcase and has walked through the customs without realizing it. Those friendly Mexicans!! They don’t care what you walk out with from the airport as long as you spend your tourists $$££¥¥€€ in their country. How dumb can you have to be? She is only twenty one. Only? But this is not the time to ask questions. However, Sumer seems to have a thing about forgetting things. A few days later,  she loses her sun glasses and then she arrives without her uniform to the stadium in Querétaro . This follows the last minute rush for someone to run down to her hotel room and bring the uniform to the stadium where we are preparing to shoot various mock tableaus to give the upcoming World Cup some real sex appeal. Sumer gets away with everything with disarming smiles and cuddles.

The shoot goes swell with the girls playing like a team of the friendly rivals and we stage various soccer situations such as dueling for and heading the ball, kicking a penalty shot, which results in Luiza shooting the ball so hard that it lands on the face of the West German goalie, Michaela Probst, knocking her down flat.  There is a tender shot of Luiza bending over and comforting Michaela in pain, lying on the ground. Sweet! The sexiest shot is that of all the girls taking off their shirts at the end of the game and swapping them with each other in good old football tradition of leaving the field with no hard feelings.

All goes well and without a hitch, that is; until at the last minute Jan comes up with the idea of perhaps do some sexy shots of the girls showering, getting out of their uniform, sitting around on the benches – sort of doing post game unwinding. Even though we have official permission to shoot in the stadium, soon as the maintenance staff realizes that we are photographing the girls in the locker room, with their uniforms serving as mere props, something triggers in them and they rush to get a sideway glances at the bare bodies and then promptly and  unceremoniously throwing us out with, Señor, eso no se puede ser .

Déjà vu of the couple of days earlier when we had gone to the Pyramids to do some group shots of the girls playing tourists, fully draped of course, albeit short shorts and tight fitting tops. Along the way, Luiza decides to make those tops sexier. As it turns out. she is very handy with the pair of scissors and t-shirts are slashed up this way and that to selectively reveal what the Pyramid authorities deem to be a bit much for the innocent eyes of the watching Mayan Gods. So off we’re sent on our way back to the hotel.

But mostly we’re welcomed all over with a lot of enthusiasm. Our press conference attracts 300 print and television journalists and the limelight shines on all of our girls with their elegantly dressed glamour shots flickering on television screens and on the society pages of most prestigious of the newspapers. Sumer of course is the most popular with her full head of floating blonde tresses and her sweet and seductive smiles and according to Jan, also because of her extravagant décolleté.  They also love the French, Nathalie Galan,  whom the prominent daily El Universal  calls despampanante rubia – a stunning blonde.

Luiza Brunet from Brazil is stunningly beautiful and yet the Mexican press doesn’t  pay her much attention probably because she is a mulatta,  dime a dozen with the Mexican streets filled with their own pretty morenas.  But Luiza is already a super model in her country and the official mascot of the Brazilian team.  She considers Pele to be her friend, with whom she is to make a movie in the near future. She is low key, unpretentious and soft spoken, but when she first appears, she is accompanied by her boyfriend Armando. To have boyfriends and husbands around is always pain in the butt. She is a professional so she is there when we need her, but then she has “him” waiting for her. But he stays in the background and I don’t remember any major disruption. Except that Armando is robbed of US$ 2400.- in cash. You can’t completely ignore it. You have to try to help him – one more thing to worry about.

One evening when our group walks into the restaurant El Refugio, Jan observes the look on the faces of the crowd gazing at us as them having witnessed a bunch of Martians having landed in their valley. We begin shooting in little Venice, that is the remote town center of Mexico City and goes by an exotic name, Xochimilco – literally soft milk. Once a lake, it has evolved into various canals filled with flower bedecked gondolas called trajineros, They are actually built flat like pontoons. We hire two of them. The girls in one and the crew in another one. We let the girls loose sans script and let Pompeo and his assistant Steve Conway just point and shoot. The girls are getting into the spirit, some on the deck even taking off their tops. The poor gondola drivers and the young onlookers on the canal banks. Only if the girls know what they are doing to those poor bastards!!  Fortunately there are no keepers of the morality around in this little paradise of Mexico City to throw us overboard.

But if only everything would go that smooth. That night we witness the Japanese candidate Emi Kojo  and her chaperone/interpreter, Yuko Kato suddenly break out in a violent cat and dog fight. No idea about what, because it is obviously all in the Japanese. We are sitting in a café and everyone gets to experience the war of two beautiful roses. I butt-in like a thorn in the middle and play referee. Détente comes with hugs and me taking them to San Angel Grill, where Mexican edition’s top executive, Alfred Amescua is hosting dinner to welcome the group. But the peace is short lived. Two nights later, we are in Hotel Real de Minas in Santiago de Querétaro, one of the World Cup venues.  In middle of the night, Jan calls my room informing me that Emi is complaining about a serious stomach ache. She is hysterical and wants us to call a doctor for her. We are practically in the middle of nowhere. Besides, I am not convinced of how serious her ache is. So I sit her down on the bed and reason. Ask her a few questions and tell her to drink a glass of warm milk, which we promptly order from the room service. I tell her that is what  my mother would have done. But she continues to squirm. To which I respond probably a bit sternly that I want her to try it and go to bed. Should it not work, I promise her we would get a doctor for her. She doesn’t call during the night but continues to complain about her stomach and refuses to join the other girls at the stadium in the morning. So we go ahead and shoot with the remaining eight. The individual nudes are to be shot in Puerto Vallarta, and it becomes clear to me that Emi would be more trouble than she would be worth. I have her to be the first to be photographed soon as we begin in the morning and ship her back to Tokyo on the first available flight. A month or two later, I receive a sweetest little letter from her:

Dear Mr. Shah,

I send my apologies for having been behaving like that.

Recalling the time when you gave me a scolding, I thing(k) of what father is. Having grown up without my real father, when you gave me hugs, I learned the warmth of father. 

Sincerely Emi

●●●

One afternoon while I am strolling the properties of Krystal in Vallarta and enjoying bit of  solitude, I run into Michaela. She is in tears. I feel like a cow! She cries out. Apparently one of the poses Pompeo had requested in the huge bathtub was for her to get down on all four. While we are still standing on the path, I notice Nathalie walking towards us, she too is  in tears. I will talk to Pompeo. I don’t want any of you to do what you are not comfortable with. I appease them with hugs, put my arms around the both and we stop for a glass of wine.

On our first evening in Puerto Vallarta, we are all sitting around a long table at Krystal’s Japanese restaurant Kama Kura, enjoying the dinner hosted by the Alfonso Vasquez M., the corporate manager . I am sitting either right next to Nathalie or close enough. We are all animated and getting into the spirit of things when suddenly we hear Nathalie making bird like squeaking sounds. Both of her hands are wrapped around her neck and the horror on her face conveys that she is choking on something. Her face is turning white and contorted and she is certainly in pain. She kicks off the chair and stands up. I grab her by the waist. She is pointing her finger at the partially bitten piece of chicken she has thrown back on her plate and then to her mouth. Fortunately, all it takes is for her to bend over my arm and me slapping her back a couple of times. Out comes a chicken bone, her face smeared with tears, her nose running. But after a glass of water and a sip of wine, our despampanante rubia is back to life, her face once again radiating.

On any project away from home, the entire group becomes your sole responsibility. You want to make everyone feel comfortable, well fed and motivated. Build a team. Even though when you get a group of the most beautiful women together, its hard sometimes, because each one of them thinks that she is the most beautiful of the bunch. Thus there is always a bit of competitive edge to such groups. In this case, enter also the nationalistic pride because they are representing the fierce game of the world soccer. But by and large they behave phenomenally well, even helping each other. During a couple of small crisis, the 23 year old Andrea Huber has established herself as the pleasant and cajoling peace maker. Mexico’s own Belén Balmori at 28, plays caring mother, They are big help.

The thing the producer has to worry most about is that all girls get a good night’s sleep and are rested and relaxed the next morning. Keep them together, never giving them or one of their admirers a chance to get closer and sneak away. Because you don’t want to have those elements interfere with work. Seems ironic coming from Playboy executive, but when you are involved in such a project you have to constantly strive for the balance which tilts heavily towards work.

But how do you keep the Cupid away from trying? Alfonso, (not the hotel manager) tall, suave and handsome is one of the people brought along Irina  – the social director of sorts – who is assigned to help us with anything and everything. Pat Tomlinson is a part of our Chicago team and is the most efficient and able stylist/make-up artist. Jan is a big golf aficionado and Alfonso has organized a t-off at the nearby Flamingo course and is to join Jan and Michaela for a round of golf that morning. While the two have already arranged a cab and are waiting for Alfonso to join them, he is nowhere to be found. Not in his room, nor in any of the likely resort restaurants where he could have been having breakfast. Where do they finally locate him? In Pat’s roomJ

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

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WHATEVER IS HOT!!

Let it be a surprise for both of us. Can’t decide which of the ones in works I want to or will inspire me to finish first.

 

 

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Categories World Cup '86

THE CORPORATE CASTE SYSTEM

September 5, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

A Touch Of Communism In The Capitalist Culture

tugowar2

In the fall of 1989 over the weekend of October, 6/8, Carolyn and I went to the Duneland Beach Inn in Michigan City, Indiana and returned with an agreement that the best course of action for us as individuals – to use the corporate cliché, going forward, was for us to go our own way. Not even a tiny blip on the world stage. That very weekend on October 7, Hungary becomes independent and on October 23rd, the acting President, Mátyás Szűrös declares the country a Republic in the public ceremony held in the same Kossuth Square where the first mass rally of the 1956 revolution was held.  The historic moment for which I happened to be in Budapest and along with the Hungarian  editors, would go to the square to hear the declaration proclaimed. We come back to the office and begin to put together the first issue of Playboy to come out a month later – the first of the three I would launch behind the iron curtain. On November 4, I turn 50 with a big fanfare and the nine liter Salamanzar  bottle of Lanson champagne, compliment of my boss and the friend Bill (Stokkan). The Berlin Wall falls on November 9th, the Velvet Revolution unfolds on Národní třída in Prague on November 17th, and in-between on the weekend of October 14/15, Playboy headquarters in Chicago move some three plus blocks south east  to 680 N. Lake Shore Drive from it’s imposing skyline presence at 919 N. Michigan Avenue. The Bunny Beacon that illuminated the Chicago skies for 23 years, is no longer and neither are the floor high letters PLAYBOY, lit bright.

I am not even in the town when the big move happens. Thanks to my most able and the efficient assistant Mary (Nastos) that I am moved into my new office and when I walk in a couple of weeks later, other than a few unopened boxes, Mary has found the new home for my stuff in a very organized way in the space I would occupy for the next four years. The office I have yet to see.

I park my car in the same building instead of a block away in a separate parking garage. I take the elevator first down to the lobby and switch to the one which would take me to the Playboy’s new headquarters on the 15th floor. I am dazzled by the cascade of natural and artificial light, the high ceiling and the U shaped railing up above, looking down at the receptionist a floor down below. Mounted on the wall on the west side of the reception area is a huge bronze sculpture of Playboy’s familiar Rabbit Head blinking at me with its left eye. Commissioned and created by the renowned Chicago sculptor, Richard Hunt. On the opposite side, in front of an expansive glass wall sits a slender, exotic looking dark skinned, very sweet and petite young woman, I have never seen before.

‘May I help you?’ She flashes a friendly smile, which is unconsciously seductive, her voice dripping with honey.

‘Oh yes! I am here – ur, I guess I work here!’

Soon I see in the background Mary coming down the steps of one of the two Terrazzo staircases.  At the first glance I perceive them to be  to be twin modernistic Spanish steps descending on to the either side of Piazza di Spagna in Rome. I see Mary rush towards the glass wall and yanking open the door on the side.

‘Welcome back,’ she gives me a hearty hug as the receptionist looks on.

‘Mona, meet my boss Haresh Shah.’ Mary introduces  me to the receptionist and takes me by the hand. ‘Let me take you to your new office.’

I am in awe of what I see as we approach the atrium. Instead of little shops and the stands found on a Piazza, I am face-to-face with a large oil on canvas portrait of Gloria Steinem, done by Chicago artist Ed Paschke, mounted on one of the panels, staring menacingly at me through her magenta colored glasses. Up the stairs on the wall facing us, I see a pair of giant red lips by Tom Wesselman, open wide in a hearty laugh, a set of perfectly aligned teeth sparkling. I also glance up at the  slanted modernistic metal canopies crowning the glass walls. The executive offices. Mary informs me, about what would come to be known as the fish tank. As we stop at the top of the floor, there is an office on my right, That’s John Mastro’s office. And the right outside begins the grey Steele railing that stretches over the expanse of the atrium, curved like  the shape of a luxury liner. Stunning!

Turning the curve, Mary  leads me to the section behind the lips; assigned to our group. Suddenly I am in the different world away from the glitz and the glamour of the areas surrounding the atrium and the executive offices.  It’s a large square space. Clustered in the middle are the work stations, mostly in blue with grey trimming. While most of the support staff sat outside the offices of their bosses at 919, here they each have their own work stations, separated by about six feet high soft padded partitioned walls. Over there is Bill’s office. She points to the closed door across what I will call the bullpen. And then there are other offices like fortresses to the support staff. This is where I sit, right outside of your office. She opens the closed door on her right, turns on the lights and lets me in.

I pause and stand at the threshold of my office and take it in. The floor is covered with bright royal blue soft padded rug, The bright white, perhaps 5000 Kelvin fluorescent tubes filtered through the chrome slated fixtures flood the room.  I am pleased that at long last, I’ve gotten the larger desk, the kind I had always wanted but never had an office big enough to justify having one. Unlike the beige marble desk top, this one has speckled black granite top. The base is the same with the filing and storage cabinets built-in as before, because it’s one of the same desks refurbished, in that instead of the natural oak stain, it is now painted black. It is flushed against the sidewall made up of the bright blue padded panels.  Behind the desk is wall-to-wall credenza – something I really love. A side of the desks had always been a small credenza meant for  typewriters. Which alas would become too small just in a year or so to accommodate desk top computers. The chairs too are the same, reupholstered and covered also with different fabric – now with either solid black or small black and grey pattern. On my right is a granite topped conference table, which is larger in diameter than the one I had. But no  couch for lounging during the meeting breaks.

Who got how big of an office and in which area and how each one of them would be furnished was determined by our corporate titles and the numeric personnel classifications. To be fair to everyone, a system had to be devised. It had to be just and egalitarian or at least to fit within our boss Bill’s definition of some people being more equal than others. Since there wasn’t going to be any natural light in our windowless offices, it became important to spruce up their interior  dressing.  Something we could choose. Sort of. So Sue Shoemaker, the Director of Corporate Administrative Services, stops by to see each one of us in advance of the big move.

‘What color wall paneling you like?’ Now the dirty brown cork walls to be replaced with the padded and fabric covered panels, to be used as before as our wall-to-wall bulletin boards. The choice was between bright red and royal blue. I chose  royal blue. Though I would get a larger desk, I had to choose between either a mini conference table and/or the couch.

‘I would like to have both!’

‘You can only have one or the other.’

‘I do have both of them right now.’

‘So I see. But with your position with the company, you’re entitled to only one of them.’

‘That’s new to me, but for what I do, I have a need for both of them. We have meetings all day long and it just makes it nicer to have a bit more relaxing couch when we break.’

‘Sorry, but we had to draw a line somewhere and only the Sr. VPs and above get both.’ I was only a VP.

What when and if I am promoted to be a Sr. VP? I want to ask, but stop short. Perhaps not a good omen. As it turns out, I am indeed promoted to be the senior VP within six months, but then the office I am assigned to is not big enough to accommodate both, and there is no provision for the expansion. Grudgingly, I accept what’s given to me.

‘Do you like your new office?’ Mary chirps.

‘I guess!’ She knows what I am thinking.

‘Well, I leave you alone to catch up with things. Welcome back again.’ And she closes the door behind her, leaving me feeling like a prisoner being lead to his cell and the door closed behind him. Feeling dismayed at not even a sliver of natural light peeking through, I try to forget it and settle myself at my new desk, pick up the piles of paper prioritized by Mary and begin with reading faxes that needed my immediate attention. The day slips by fast. Most everyone has left for the day, including Mary, leaving me behind still trying to catch up. Now with no need to keep the door closed, I am able to see out at the work stations outside. Even see a bit of the window at the farthest side of the hall, beyond which is Chicago’s pride and joy, Lake Michigan. The forbidden fruit for us.

When done for the day, I pack up and turn off the lights in my office. Suddenly its pitch dark in there, except for a bit of the light from the bullpen crossing in. On impulse, I put down my briefcase on the floor, enter back my office and shut the door. Never thought anything can be so dark. It feels like a cave with no opening. Closed in like a tomb. I hastily make my escape, and stop outside to look around at the exterior. While the atrium and other public areas and the conference rooms and the employee lounge are plastered with some of the magazine’s best art, none of the walls of our group have anything on their sterile white surfaces.

I approach Sue.

‘How about some artworks for our area?’

‘Its planned, but we just haven’t gotten around to it.’

‘How if I put up our own magazine covers that I had framed and hung outside our offices at 919?’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because everything has to be coordinated and in graphic harmony. I will talk to Tom (Staebler) (the art director) about it.’

Nothing for another couple of months. Either Tom didn’t have time or didn’t think we were important enough to deserve some of his fine illustrations. Or the discussion between Sue and Tom never  took place.

I broach the subject one more time and insist that what I really would like to do is for us to have our own identity and since I have already had those framed covers in my storage, why don’t I hang them up? If Tom comes up with something, we can always take them down.

‘Let me think about it!’ So she does. Still nothing. But I don’t let go and basically wear Sue out.

‘Okay, when Bill (the company carpenter) has some extra time, I will ask him to stop by and hang them up for you.’ That is almost like never.

‘I can do that myself!’

‘No, no, no. Its not your job. Should something happen, insurance doesn’t cover that.’

I want to scream, but instead say: ‘Well okay. Will wait for Bill to come by. Thanks’ And watch her turn her back and walk back to her office. I spend some time outside my office and scope the wall space I have and try to figure out how I can best display the framed covers on the walls available to me.

The next evening, its past six when I am certain that almost everybody is gone home, especially Sue, I pull out my measure tape, pencil, nails and the hammer that I have brought along from home. An hour and a half later, they are all adoring the International Publishing walls and suddenly those sterile looking white walls seem to have acquired colors on their anemic cheeks. I leave with a smile of satisfaction on my lips.

Late next morning, I see Sue walking past my office, stop and take in what I had done, I am not sure she even cared to look inside my office, but I see her shaking her head before walking away.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Mark

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Next Friday, September 13, 2013

ALL IN A DAY’S WORK

Imagine this! Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The sun is shining bright, the sky is blue as can be and the waves of Banderas Bay rushing towards the shore to hug us – wet and warm and heavenly. We are conferring by the poolside, deciding on the next dramatic but a fun shot, with nine of the world’s most beautiful women. Lined up in the water by the edge of the pool, holding on to the long railing and ready to lift their bare butts in action.

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Categories Corporate Matters, Eastern Europe

MY INTIMATE ENCOUNTER WITH EROTIC OYSTERS

August 29, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

How I Came To  Like / No, Love Oysters?

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I have had a long day. Up at 4:30 in the morning, I take a quick shower and get into my Buick and zoom through the Mittlerer Ring and rush to Munich’s Riem International Airport. Catch the first flight to Düsseldorf. Pick up a rental car and race to Essen. Heinz (Nellissen) and I work through the day, do it non-stop  through the lunch and don’t even get around to grab their delicious Fricadel and Brötchen with mustard from the company canteen. I need to leave promptly at five and rush back to the airport and catch the last Paris bound flight. Hungry as I am, I skip the anemic looking cold cuts served onboard. We’re having dinner at La Coupole.

Brasserie La Coupole on boulevard du Montparnasse is a Paris landmark like no other. It is the quintessential symbol of Montparnasse’s history as well as the art of living and socializing in Paris. And is hailed as the temple of art deco. I have never been there before and am very much looking forward to this evening.

I check in at the George V and after a  hurried shower, hail a cab and arrive at Le Coupole at little after nine. There are about eight of Playboy people sitting at sidewalk tables pulled together. Waiting on the tables are ice buckets filled with chilling bottles of Chablis and Sancerre, large platters of shucked oysters placed on the bed of ice, their wet and slimy surfaces shivering and  still pulsating with life surrounded by the wedges of lemon strewn in-between the oyster shells. The tables are littered with little plates and the bread crumbs that continue do drop at every tear of the crust.

This is Playboy Foreign Edition’s second international meeting. Its small and intimate with only four countries onboard. Over the years, it would mushroom into an annual, one most important event that brought together Playboy families from around the world. The French and the German crowd is already there. We’re still waiting for the Italians and the Americans to arrive. While everyone else is wine happy and feasting on the freshest and the most delicious oysters – I am guessing, because I have never tasted an oyster in my entire life.  Just the look of them give me creeps, yikes!! Their slimy slippery wetness looking like devil’s eyes makes me nauseous. And they are still alive!! Couldn’t even imagine actively picking one up, let alone putting one in my mouth and slurping it in, chewing or washing it down with a gulp of wine and really enjoying it, as everyone around the tables seems to be doing.

But I am beyond starving. I am famished and feeling physically weak at lack of sleep and with the day like I have had, I am feeling run down. You can eat only so much bread and drink so much wine on an empty stomach. A hefty piece of steak-au-poire avec pommes would be great. But I can’t just go ahead and order it while we are still waiting for the rest – among them my own bosses – who I understand are just checking into the hotel.  So it probably would be another hour or so before they really make it to the restaurant. In the meanwhile, those present are greedily  slurping down oyster after oyster, tearing off pieces of bread and washing them down with the excellent wine. The consumed bottles are taken away and replaced by more, the ice in the buckets replenished and the large aluminum platters filled with oysters keep sliding in and out of their stands like frisbees. All those live vibrating lumps shoved down the palates in easy gulps.

While I hear my stomach growl, I feel a buzz in my head. I watch people still picking up oysters from the platters, squeezing the lemon wedges over them, picking up the shell, putting it halfway through their mouths and slurp up the meat.

To distract my thoughts from my intensifying hunger, I think of the legend that La Coupole has become. Since it opened its doors just before Christmas in 1927, forty five years before, attended by 2500 guests – 1200 bottles of champagne were popped open. Since then it has become the stomping ground for artists and writers, musicians and singers that include Picasso and Matisse. I imagine Josephine Baker at an inside table dining with Simenon. Jean-Paul Sartre holding court at his table # 149 with Simone de Beauvoir listening adoringly. I am imagining Henry Miller to stride in at any moment and charm a meal and a bottle or two of vintage wine out of some sucker for his sheer brilliance and then walk out with his lady friend hanging on his arm. And I would certainly get up and shake hands with Albert Camus, whose existential novels were all the rage ten years earlier among us young and inspiring writers in India. And wouldn’t it be awesome if Serge Gainsbourg were to walk in with gorgeous Jane Birkin, making his trademark flamboyant entrance, to whose J’taime us disco set danced night after night?

‘Come on, try one. They’re so delicious!’ Prods, I no longer remember who, but one of our French editors who I’ll call Rémy. I am rudely awakened from my reveries and brought back to the reality of my poor growling stomach.

‘I can’t!’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘Because…’

‘Because what? How can you be in France, sitting at La Coupole and not taste our own huiters de Normandie? They are probably harvested this very morning, you know? Normandy yields some of the world’s best oysters.  Hell, we have the best oysters in the world.’ I see Rémy’s face beaming. True French pride. ‘And after a long summer, the oyster season has just began and this year they are particularly incredibly good!’

‘May be so, but I don’t know, just look at them!’

Someone who grew up being a vegetarian in whose family even eggs were considered meat, I have come a long way. Up until I was twenty five, I have never had eaten any meat dishes. During my two and half years in London, I may have ventured in to taste chicken curry a few times and may have managed to swallow a few pieces of meat placed in front of me, just not to offend those kind hearted host families in England and in Holland – where I interned during my summer and winter breaks. But it wasn’t until after I graduated and landed a job with Burda in Offenburg while living with a German family did I begin to eat meat in earnest. Even so, I had hardest time eating any seafood. The most I had managed over the interim four years in the States, was to acquire taste for fried shrimps and broiled lobster tails. Couldn’t deal with any of the fish at all. I did try escargot once. Baked inside their little shells and swimming in the garlic butter.  I was able to swallow half a dozen yucky looking black curled up creatures, only because I nudged them down with the garlic butter soaked piece of bread and with my eyes closed, and a glass of wine at ready. But oysters?

‘I’m looking at them. But they are meant to be eaten, unless you’re looking for pearls,’

‘Pearls?’

‘Yeah. Didn’t you know that the most beautiful pearls are found inside certain types of oysters?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course. But never mind. Just try one. I promise you would like it.’

‘But Rémy!’

‘These are so delicious! And they taste and feel just like, you know?’ Rémy has this knowing look on his face as if I knew what he’s talking about. Realizing that maybe I really didn’t know what he was leading to, he elaborates.

‘Just like, you know? Woman’s sex. How do you call it?’

‘You mean pussy?’

‘Oui alors, exactement!’ 

This conjures up an image of a photograph I had seen some place. Perhaps in an old issue of Playboy even, featuring aphrodisiacs and erotic food as displayed on different parts of the female anatomy. The one with oysters has a close up of a shapely woman’s pelvic region from the waist down to her upper thighs. Arranged like the bird’s nest in a diamond shape is fresh mesclun lettuce, that hides and at the same time enhances her pubic areas by giving them the fall colors,  rusty red on the fringe of wild green leaves, the edges of the leaves simulating the curls of thickly concentrated pubic hair. Three shucked dark shelled oysters are placed at the each corner of the lettuce – raw, moist, succulent, tender and glistening. A tantalizing image even for those of us who shudder at the thought of eating one of those.

I look back at Rémy and smirk, still with I don’t know expression on my face.

‘Come on, try one or two. I’ll help you’ And even before I have time to say anything, Rémy has picked up an oyster from the platter. In his other hand is a little baby fork, with which he expertly and gently dislodges and tugs the oyster out of its shell and is holding it in front of my mouth. Seeing I am still hesitant, he asks me to close my eyes and open my mouth.

It feels on my tongue like a lump of slimy moss. I feel something moving over my tongue on its own and I’m about to throw up. Instead, I swiftly pick up my wine glass and take a big swallow and the first oyster of my life is on its way down crawling through my system. I pick up and break a piece of bread and then wash it down with another gulp of wine. Rémy’s eyes are riveted on me.

‘See, it wasn’t too bad, was it? Let’s try one more time.’ Doesn’t he see the tears rolling down my eyes? Even if he does, he is incorrigible. He yanks out another oyster and down it goes.

‘Now try it yourself!’ Still feeling squeamish, I mimic the ritual of first squeezing the lemon, holding the oyster in my left hand and pulling it out with the little fork and slowly lift the lumpy little slime and catch it between my lips, let it linger on my tongue, feel and taste the freshly squeezed lemon juice, even chew it a little bit, and let it slide down on its own. And I try the another one, and yet another one.

Delicieux.     

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Other Food And Wine Stories

BOYS’ NIGHT OUT WITH PLAYMATES

THE  BEST MAN AND THE BRIDE

The Site

ABOUT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Next Friday, September 5, 2013

CORPORATE CASTE SYSTEM

Anyone who has worked for a corporation – big or small – knows all too well that he must deal with peculiarities of an organization. Face the small irritants here and there and find out for himself  that the world hasn’t changed at all, that we must still strive to be the fittest to survive. And most of us do, if with a little sense of humor.

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Categories Food & Wine, France

DESIGNING IN HIS DREAMS

August 22, 2013 //
0

 Haresh Shah

The Spookiness Of The Creative Mind

dreamer5

It’s It the Easter Monday in Italy. I am on an over crowded train going back to Milan from Pontremoli. Everybody is returning from the long holiday weekend and as squeezed together as we are, I have managed to find a “comfortable” corner of my own where I get to stand for all three hours of the train ride without being crushed.

This is the first time I am alone face to face with myself since the fateful late Monday night of the week before. I am reading Andy Warhol’s autobiographical excerpts, while the conflicting thoughts rush through my mind, they collide with each other to the rhythm of the oscillating motion of the train piercing  through  the still night of the Italian country side.

I have just spent a very pleasant and a relaxing weekend with Rainer (Wörtmann) and his wife Renate in their newly acquired  old mill in Italian country side. It’s a beauty, standing proudly in a little village called Mulazzo near Pontremoli. It stands forlorn in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a stream and rocks and a cluster of trees. The place is to serve as a retreat from their hectic lives in Munich. It also turns out to be a great and timely escape for me in the aftermath of the week before.

Lee (Hall) is smooth as silk when he tells me how great a job I had been doing, so much so that like any good manager, I had succeeded in eliminating my own position. It’s the night of Monday, March 24, 1975. Lee is doing his regular European stint. Bob (Gutwillig) has left the company and Lee is traveling with Richard Kopf, the new divisional VP. His note at the reception leads me to his suite 375 at Principe de Savoia, which is where we are staying.

‘How about some Scotch now?’ The offer I had declined earlier. Seems he have had a few already. I guessed he probably needed them before he could execute  a swift coup d’état. Shocked? Yes. Devastated?  No. All of a sudden, I see the word FREEDOM begin to flash in front of my eyes like on a digital billboard. This meant I could now write the book I have been wanting to for so long and go to California – the vacation I had planned to take the very week I took over the job at Playboy . Okay, I do end up spending a sleepless night. But am thinking about the ways this will change my life as I toss and turn.

Two days later, I return back to Munich with Lee and Richard. They are travelling in the first, of course. While standing in line at Milan’s Linate Airport, I run into Rainer, who is returning to Munich from his Italian country home. I don’t yet tell him about me having been fired, because Lee needs to inform the top Bauer management first. That evening. Rainer  and I end up having dinner at Le Cave.

The night after, I am deep in sleep when the door bell rings. Its around two in the morning. I hear Rainer’s slurred voice on the intercom.

‘I was out late and as I was driving home, it suddenly dawned on me that poor Haresh is jobless. What would he do now?’ I am touched. I assure him that I was doing fine and that how this break opens up so many exciting avenues for me. But Rainer seems to need to talk and so do I. We sit around until four in the morning, drinking Sambuca and listening to music.

I am not even sure if Rainer went home that night or just caught a wink at my place before we headed for the airport to catch the Milan bound morning flight and from there on drive to  Pontremoli.

●●●

The place is not finished yet, but its very livable with open fireplace and little nooks and crannies that make for ideal dining, cooking and sleeping spaces. The only snag that weekend is: it’s wet and it’s cold. We place the only available electric heater in the middle of us as we try to keep warm through the nights. I slide into my sleeping bag with all my clothes on. Including sweater and socks.

During the day, we meet up with Udo Wüst, an editor at the  German edition, and his wife, they too own a similar property in the area. The weekend is spent living the idyllic Italian country life. Leisurely and languid. Strolling and stopping  for coffee and cake at cozy little cafés and I remember eating one of the most delicious Italian meals at a local family restaurant. I fall in love with their signature dish Testaroli, a version of home made flat pasta which I had never tasted up until then and have not since then. It tasted and looked so much like Khata Dhokla, as whipped up by Mama Shah back home in Bombay.  As cold and wet as it is, most of the weekend we just sit around and play Backgammon and drink Calvados – the golden glow of which rushing through our veins help us keep warm. Entspannend, I wrote in my journal. Couldn’t have thought of a more relaxing way to spend my first weekend of  freedom.   

●●●

As I lean against the outer wall of the train, making myself comfortable, Andy Warhol now snuggly tucked back into my shoulder bag, I think of the thirty wonderful months of being a part  of Playboy, and how I had landed in Munich in the middle of the overt hostile environment and how along with Freddy (Baumgärtel), Rainer was the first one to warm up and work with me. We also began to socialize. Realizing my predicament with the vintage apartment I had taken over from Gerrit, him recruiting his wife Renate to help me find a place more to my liking.  In general, Rainer becoming my guardian angel. Us two, along with Heinz (Nellissen) in Essen, becoming a team.

●●●

We are sitting in Rainer’s office, drinking champagne at eleven in the morning. I watch the bubbles rise in the flute, Rainer asks: ‘So what did you think of my idea?’

‘Which idea?’

Because Rainer is an idea machine, hailed by Quick and Playboy Germany’s editorial director,  Heinz van Nouhuys as the wunderkind, because at the age 27, he has become the youngest art director of an international publication. . And also because Rainer says with all the modesty, maybe (because I was) talented? By then he already has under his belt, the experience of having done graphically progressive magazine Jasmin. He has also put in his time at DM and Zeitung in Stuttgart. And admirably, he doesn’t jump at the once in a life time opportunity when offered the position at Playboy. Instead he stipulates: I’ll fly to Chicago at my own expenses and meet with the art director of the “whole shop “and see if at all I can make it with my own graphic ideas. A meeting is arranged with Art Paul, the man who designed Playboy’s ubiquitous Rabbit Head and defined the magazine then and forever for its graphic excellence. And then Rainer calls back from Chicago, Well okay. I’ll start with you.

I no longer remember the exact illustration and the article about which we began to talk, but here is a scenario I just made up as an example. It would be pretty much true of the way Rainer “dreamt up” visual aspects of Playboy’s German edition.

‘You know the one about the illustration for the Maxim’s de Paris.’

‘The one (Franz) Spelman is writing?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What about it?’

‘You know, the werkdruck, the special stock four page cutout?’

‘Sorry, I don’t. Refresh my memory.’

‘You know the one where the first page would be the die-cut pop up of the façade of the Maxim’s, and when you turn the page, the spread shows the interior of the main floor of the restaurant with the page four crossing  over the opener, showing the chefs working in the kitchen?’

‘Sounds like a great idea. With an illustration like that, why would anyone want to read the article?’

‘Genau. You know? Plus does it make a difference? I mean, who cares what Franz has to say?’

I don’t say anything to that. We just look at each other with knowing smiles on our faces. Probably envious of the fact that Franz got such a plum assignment, staying at George V in Paris and eating at Maxim’s a few times during his stay there. If we knew Franz, he probably had one or two of the local lovelies accompanying him to the meals – all at Playboy’s expenses. Franz certainly knows how to live! A born bon vivant!!

‘I’m sorry my friend, but I don’t remember you ever telling me of your idea before.’

‘How can you forget? It was last night, when we were having drinks at Le Cave.’

‘Can’t be. Because I just flew back from Düsseldorf.’

‘You did?’ And he momentarily seems lost in his thoughts. ‘Must have been that I dreamt about it. But I swear, I remember even having drawn you a rough sketch on the Le Cave napkin.’

‘Must have been on another night. Do you have the sketch?’

He fumbles into his jeans pockets and then breaks out in a broad smile. ‘Verdamt noch mal, things I dream about! Anyways, let me draw it for both of us now.’ And he pulls out the blue lined calibrated spiegel – the format sheet – and begins to draw the façade of Maxim’s.

●●●

Working with Rainer is fun. He is easy going, but can at times also be insistent and blunt when called for. I am amazed at his perception and being able to see through things.

A year  after I arrive in Germany, I am planning a trip to India and am in need of several rolls of films. Instead of just going out and buying them, I am being cheap! It occurs to me that perhaps I can get a freebie pack from the photo department which is under Rainer. I pick up the phone and call him.

‘I was wondering if I could get a dozen rolls of Ektachromes from your stock.’ Not to sound too obvious, I add: ‘Maybe I can get them at the same bulk rate?’

‘Oder umsonst? – or gratis!’ He doesn’t miss a beat. In the laughter that follows I detect slight sarcasm in his voice. Touché! He has seen right through me.

I save the day by laughing it off with: ‘Das wäre eigentilich besser/‘ – that would obviously be better!

Laughing back he says: ‘Of course you can have them.’ But boy his oder umsonst? stung. So much so that I still remember it forty years later:).

●●●

While I am still living in Munich and pounding away relentlessly at my bright orange Triumph portable electric typewriter, writing my book tentatively titled The Lost Identity – Personal Reflections, Rainer blows me away with a very pleasant surprise. He offers for me to become Playboy Germany’s photo editor. Susi (Pletz) and Helga Colle-Tiez the two who ran the photo department up until then have given their notices to leave.

Rainer’s offer puts me in the whirlwind of conflicting emotions. I am flattered and I am emotionally overwhelmed. My mind begins to whirr with all sorts of special pictorial ideas, and the Playmates I would find and produce. Still living in Munich and working with Rainer and Freddy and Heinz, opening up a whole new horizon for my future. The offer puts me between a rock and a hard place. It hasn’t taken me too long to get over my job loss. In the meanwhile I am more than halfway through writing my book. And am dreaming of starting a magazine of my own with a real possibility of Celeste (Huenergard) – the young American woman working as editorial assistant to Donald Stewart, our Italian in-house editorial executive – partnering with me. She has been a big moral support following my termination, keep the chin up. We have shared many a meals together and have lingered in the evenings with Grappas. Boy she is beautiful. Rainer kept saying when we had stopped at the offices of the Italian edition on our way to his country home

So what do I choose? A bird in the hand or two in the bush? Rainer’s offer is so tempting that I really don’t know. For three sleepless nights I agonize over should I and or shouldn’t I? I am conflicted between the future I was beginning to envision and the future that’s offered to me on the silver platter. I am torn and tortured. I am tempted to accept Rainer’s offer and think later. Perhaps I take it for a year or two, defer my dreams for a while – I tell myself, Rainer doesn’t have to know. Things can always change, can’t hey? And I remember the wisdom imparted by Mr. Moore, while both of us laid next to each other at St. Charles Hospital in London; that in business, you should never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. But that would be totally against my grain, and I want to be honest. I share with Rainer what I am thinking. Rainer wants me on indefinite basis, he has big plans for me.

At the end of those three nights of tossing and turning and having done some serious soul searching, I decline the offer.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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The Site

ABOUT: Brief bios of the author and the illustrators.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Brief descriptions and direct links to the previous 37 posts.

Next Friday, August 30th, 2013

MY INTIMATE ENCOUNTER WITH EROTIC OYSTERS

How I Came to Like, No, Love Oysters? 

Oysters have been credited for their aphrodisiac qualities, but are also considered  visually erotic because of their succulent, raw, moist, tender and glistening look. And yet, I couldn’t for the life of me, see them in that context, let alone really put them in my mouth and savor. The story of my not so keen encounter with this most delicious of the fruit from the sea.    

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Categories Profile

THE BEST MAN AND THE BRIDE

August 15, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

Just One Last Time

brideescape3

I don’t remember anything at all of the wedding ceremony of Tina Chan – one of our freelance contributors at Playboy’s Chinese language edition in Hong Kong.  Or even if I or anyone else sitting at the table was invited to attuned. Whether it was a church wedding or a traditional Chinese affair. What I do remember is; about a dozen of us editors and executives are seated at the table of the noisy and crowded banquet hall of the Hotel Royal Garden in the heart of Kowloon, waiting for the bride and the groom and the wedding party to arrive for the celebrations to begin. When they make their grand entrance, Christina is dressed in the western bridal dress with the veil lifted and the train trailing. She is not particularly what I would call  pretty, but in her bridal finery, she looks as stunning, radiant and beautiful as a bride should. The happy smile on her face communicates the bliss she must feel. Her husband too is dressed as would a western groom – in a tuxedo, ruffled shirt with starched collar, shiny shoes and the bow tie.  The just married couple and the wedding party enter the hall with a roar of applause and the cheers from the family and friends, following which they together go from table to table, their faces bursting with smiles and laughters, welcoming each and every guest and then finally sitting down at the bridal table for the banquet to commence.

Like any other formal Chinese banquet, this night’s banquet too contains a traditional twelve course meal.  A glass top lazy Susan is placed atop each of the tables and the food is served in large platters or turins. I obviously don’t remember all that was served, but most likely there was Shark Fin soup, various sea food dishes, which may have included abalone and shrimps, pork, beef and chicken and some unrecognizable gooey and slimy dishes whose origins I am afraid to ask. The white slippery lumps of meat that I pick up from one of the platters could be anything. I think of the skinned snakes dangling down in Taiwan’s snake alley, freshly slit lengthwise from the head to its tiny tail, the hot blood dripping over a dozen or so little cups the size of the shot glasses waiting to catch the spewing blood and several young men eagerly picking them up and chugging up while the blood is still fresh and hot, for it’s believed that the fresh snake blood makes you more virile.

Without giving it much of a thought, I follow their gestures and try my best to negotiate the shiny lacquered chopsticks without dropping or dripping the morsels I have managed to trap in their jaws, and lower them gently inside the little bowl placed in front of each one of us, before swiftly shoving the food inside my mouth. Just the way they do it. Some of what I eat is delicious, some I am not sure about and some undetermined. I wish all through the meal for some fried rice with which to mix some of what I am eating. But traditionally, rice is always served at the end of the meal just like in the North and the West India. So I try to wash it all down with San Miguel  beer. The lazy Susan keeps turning, the food keeps coming in. It takes about two hours before rice appears, thus signaling the end of the courses.

Traditionally, there are no drinks served with a Chinese meal, but soon as the meal has ended, the bride and the groom get up from their tables and begin their rounds to greet each group, a bottle of Hennessey XO in hands, toasting each one of the guests. From table to table, and at times from person to person, they toast and must drink bottoms up. I am absolutely amazed at how much the newly weds must drink over the course of the night. And they still float and maneuver the narrow aisles between the tables with that permanent smiles pasted over their faces, listening and telling jokes. Not only do the bride and the groom, but also the bridesmaids and the groomsmen and the close family, swirl around the hall,  back slap and talk loud and then down yet another shot of Hennessey.

As they begin to fold up the tables and just when I think the evening has come to an end, the  mahjong tables replace the dining tables and as if the cacophony of the people screaming and shouting and backslapping weren’t loud enough, the sliding back and forth of and bashing against each other of the mahjong tiles is deafening. But the mood is jovial and the downing of Hennessey continues. Now the bride and the groom have split up and are tending different tables, sort of like the division of labor. How can  you even begin to stand straight after those many shots of cognac?  But they do, and do it in style.

While the groom is busy at one end of the hall, on the other end the bride is surrounded by some of the groomsmen and other young male friends. I notice that there is a lot of giggling and horseplay going on between the bride and the men surrounding her, mainly the men teasing and roughhousing the bride while even attempting at some blatant groping – pinching of her ass, rough flash-quick squeezing of her breasts through the bridal gown. The advances the bride constantly tries to fend off in good humor. I see one of them lift her long wedding dress, another grope her above the waist. Just fun and games.

Along with everyone else, I too am feeling bit of a buzz, but perhaps a little less, because as much as I like cognac, I have my limit and also because my favorite is Remy Martin VSOP. Its smoother and lighter on the palate as compared to stronger and darker Hennessey XO. Beyond two or three shots, I stick to my beer and linger. Since I don’t play mahjong, I walk around with the beer glass in my hands, amazed at the whole scene, I just plain watch. The bride is still prodded and groped and manhandled. But she seems into it, fending for herself, but not really. Laughing and screaming  things in Chinese, which of course, I don’t understand.

Reminds me of what I had witnessed during the Holi festival years earlier in Bombay. There lived a Marwari family of five farther down the alley from our house, in a two room apartment. An older couple, their daughter and the son Gopal and his wife Radhika, to whom he was recently married. None of us had really seen Radhika face-to-face, except when the fabric of her carefully pulled down sari would inadvertently slip and we would catch a glimpse of her young face. She couldn’t be more than eighteen. Not a beauty, but ugly she wasn’t either. And for my thirteen or fourteen year old, she was an older woman with rounded limbs, and therefore quite desirable. Its Holi, India’s spring festival and everyone is out there with their syringe guns filled with colored water and hanging around their necks, the slings looking like pouches filled with dried and powdered color pigments – rung, with which to splash and smear whoever crossed your path.

I am approaching the Marwari family’s house and am about to pull the plunger of my syringe when I see Radhika, coming out of the house screaming, running and giggling, trying to defend herself from an attack from a young man, Gopal’s country cousin Manoj. He throws a splash of rang on her, she throws some back, but now he has caught her and holding her close against her faux protests while he brings fistful of rung and is struggling to put it inside her blouse. The end of the sari covering her face is askew, her palav is disheveled  revealing her naked midriff and her choli pulled up, wet and clinging, exposing the contours of her small breasts. They are rough housing, her trying to keep his hand away from her chest, his hand getting precariously closer and then his fingers pulling the fabric of her choli from the neck   and his hand shoving a fistful of green powder inside. Fighting hard and giggling hilariously like a little girl,  pulling herself back, she breaks loose. But Manoj puts his hand inside his sling and this time comes out with a fistful of purple dye. He has gotten hold of her again, Gopal watching intently and laughing, cheering her on, don’t let him, Radhika, push him back. But her little fists pounding on the cousin’s chest don’t do much. He has her pinned to him from her waist and is now lifting her sari and in one swift motion, he has reached between her legs and is rubbing the powder between her thighs. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill  you, she threatens and giggles and then either succeeds to push him away or he just lets go of her. They are both smeared and drenched all over looking like walking, talking and fitted tie-dyed outfits. Gopal is hilarious and so is Manoj, while Radhika though still giggling, busies herself straightening her choli and the sari, giving Gopal a twisted, but loving look and screams at Manoj: just you wait!!! Leaving my teenage body aroused and flustered.

I leave the banquet hall and wander over to the men’s room. What I find there is a big commotion. The groom is lying flat on the floor, totally passed out while a couple of his groomsmen fuss over him and conclude that he needed to lie there for a while.

I don’t personally know the groom, except for having said a quick hello while wishing them well in the reception line. I inquire to see if he is okay. I don’t know the groomsmen either, but they know who I am.

‘He always gets this way after he has had a bit to drink. He will bounce back and up soon enough. No worries!’

So I do my thing and come out. I say my goodbyes to my publisher and a couple of editors, who all are banging at the mahjong tiles.  As I stumble over to the elevator bank, I notice the best man and the bride getting on the elevator headed up – more like as if he were the groom, with his arms around her waist, their sides glued together. The elevator door slides close and they are gone. I watch the floor lights of the ascending elevator and notice it stop on an executive floor up above. Probably the bridal suite.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, August 23, 2013

DESIGNING IN HIS DREAMS

Over the period of time, I have worked with some of the most talented art directors in the world. Some of them super well known fine artists in their countries, some just plain awesome in the way they interpreted and gave a graphic identity to their editions. With very few exceptions, the art directors are also quite colorful characters, a bit crazy, if you may and bon vivant in the true sense of the expression. Among them, Germany’s wunderkind,  Rainer Wörtmann.

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Categories Hong Kong, India, Relationships

TO EXPENSE IT OR NOT

August 8, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

The Fine Art Of Getting Away With Murder

murder

By the time I heard this story of excess and padding of expense account by one of Life magazine’s star photographers, it had already acquired legendary proportions. There is nothing Life wouldn’t do to cover the world events and be the first and the fastest to bring it back to their nine million readers in words and living colors. Spreads and spreads of images – known among us at Time as fast edits. We were practically an assembly line of  experts from the reporters to the photographers to the writers to the editors and the art directors and at the tail end – us the production people. We would stand by days and nights, weekdays or weekends – and jump in so the magazine would be on its way to its loyal readers on time, week after week.

So it was no wonder that people at the front end of the making of Life were the most pampered, nurtured and spoiled rotten. The darlings among them were the photographers. The story I am told of is that of one of Life’s photographers most notorious for padding his expenses and constantly getting away with it to everyone else’s envy and chagrin. Padding itself was not too difficult, considering that we were not required to submit any receipts for the expenses under $25.00. If you happen to be on the road for several days, how much you can get away with writing off depended entirely on your own creative audacity.  No one ever questioned things you put down on your expense sheet – if for nothing else, not to sound cheap or earning a reputation of being a grouch.

This is how the story goes. A couple of editors and writers along with the photographer in question, who I will call Steve, are assigned to cover a major story in the USSR. They spend some weeks there and during their stay, Steve buys himself an expensive mink coat. No one is betting on Steve having paid for it out of his own pocket. So the editors rat on him and alert the editor-in-charge I will call Don, about the purchase. Steve walks into Don’s office as flamboyantly as ever – though a bit unsure this time around. He sits across the desk from Don and nervously watches  him scan and scrutinize his expenses. Though some of the charges seem a bit inflated, boy, those communist countries are expensive! Don justifies. But there is nothing in it that seems  out of ordinary. Certainly nothing in particular to make an issue of. So at long last he puts his John Hancock down on the dotted line. Relieved, Steve thanks him and begins to leave his office, but stops short of exiting.

‘Don!’

‘What?’

‘Just so that you know,’ and he stalls a bit, ‘that mink coat is in there!!’

None of us in the production department would get away with anything that came remotely as close. But it wouldn’t be unusual to put down and get away with charging for cabs instead of miles we drove on our cars, or when someone gave us a ride. Chicago cabbies were generous in peeling off their tablets and giving out blank receipts to their customers, especially the ones who tipped well.  And you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist either to ask for an inflated food and beverage receipt from your friendly waiter. Or we wouldn’t hesitate too much charging for the meals which the printers bought or that fancy dinner you took your girlfriend out to, especially on the evening that you had ended up working late. Little chicken shit like that.

Pretty much the same when I joined Playboy. Even though they had certain do’s and don’ts, their rules were quite flexible. More so for those of us who lived and worked abroad. We would book our own flights and book our own hotel rooms and keep track of our own expenses. I joined the division several  months after it came into being. I just followed the path already paved by the ones who had been around, such as staying always at the exclusive George V in Paris, Principe e Savoia in Milan, Excelsior in Rome, Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg.  This obviously wasn’t necessary, but that’s how it was. Though pretty soon I got tired of those pricey and pretentious places and whenever I could find a small boutique hotel, like L’Europe in Paris, El Cortez in Mexico City, U raka in Prague, I would stay there

They were small and cozy and personal and cost half as much. And I got to know the city from a perspective of a different neighborhood. I couldn’t see spending +/- $200.- a night, that is in the Seventies and the Eighties. Also because I wasn’t comfortable with the doorman, concierge, bellboy and sundry always picking up my stuff, calling cabs for me, opening doors, escorting me to my room and going through the motions of turning on lights and television, showing me how things worked with call buttons and at times even how the toilet paper rolled. Hanging around, fidgeting until you fumbled into your pockets and handed him whatever you fished out. With the currencies changing in every country, sometimes you gave too much, others not enough. I just felt so embarrassed at one human being playing the role of a subservient – waiting on you hands and feet.

I found this ritual to be quite humiliating. I didn’t see any grandeur in staying at those and boast about. Though I too have often done precisely that, it is mostly in jest, and also to communicate that I’ve been there. I’ve done that. And just because the company is paying for it, I had no reason to surrender my natural self – which is not being a subject of being fussed about.  I like just to step out and walk out on the street, walk down to a café and have some real good coffee with freshly baked Croissant or Brötchen or Simit or Media Lunas, whatever the specialty of the land was. Rub shoulders with the locals. I even went as far as convincing my boss in letting me rent apartments in Essen and Mexico City, where I needed to spend several days every month. A month’s rent would be covered by the equivalent of four or five nights of stay at one of our usual hotels.

Similarly, I never went overboard with my meals, just because they were paid for. Of course I went to and most of the time taken to some of the finest restaurants in those illustrious cities and enjoyed them, but when left alone for an evening or two – a rare occurrence – I would either stay in the room and order myself a club sandwich, heaped with the fries and wash them down with a beer – something I have discovered the glitzy hotels are better at.  Or I remember once in Paris, I had such a craving for the Big Mac, and thank God, they had a McDonalds right off the Champs Élysées  inside one of the shopping alleys. Or be able to eat Klobasa and beer on Václavské náměstí in Prague. And  I loved Köfte with rice at our Turkish publisher Ali Karacan’s staff canteen. I would really be embarrassed to charge those meals, so that I just left those columns blank.

I am not saying I have been squeaky clean with what I put on my expense reports. But its not something I would ever consciously entertain.  What was for the many: what can I  get away with? for me it was what can I  justify? For example, I didn’t hesitate a bit to charge the company’s Air Travel Card to upgrade myself to the first class of which I wrote in my last week’s Strangers On The Plane. Didn’t Chantal say that the economy was all sold out?  Or while I would be on a business track and invited a friend or family for a meal, it was fair to include them – a  philosophy I had picked up from Charley McCarthy of Cadillac Printing in Chicago: If I end up working late most of the week, I have no qualms about taking my family out for a nice dinner over the weekend at company’s expenses.

When I was re-hired, along with the others, I had negotiated the first class travel for myself, and when Carolyn accompanied me to Barcelona, I promptly traded in my first class ticket for two economies. It worked out about the same, because in those days, there were not a million different fares. There was first class and then there was full fare economy with no restrictions. And then there was “excursion” fare, that came with restrictions on the minimum and the maximum stays. And there was no business class.

Actually, some of what I put on my expenses was a laughing stock  in the accounting department. Such as several pounds of Pixies – the locally made Fannie May’s most delicious chocolates containing walnuts and caramel wrapped inside milk chocolate in the shape of a turtle. They are orgasmic, is how one of my managers – Jean Freehill described them. And once tasted, all of my partners across the globe had gotten addicted to them. For $6.00 a pound, (it has since gone up to $ 24.99 a lb.).  I couldn’t have done better. And sometimes, I also brought along a few bottles of California wines as gifts. What was there to question?

When I was in doubt and ran into a situation of to be or not to be, I would run it by my boss. When I was fired from Playboy the first time, I lived in Europe and my then boss Lee Hall and I  agreed that the company would pay for my relocating back to the States. Since I was in no hurry to get back, I thought it might be fun to sail across the Atlantic instead of flying back.  I had figured out that even thought sailing back would cost much more, if I took my car with me and filled it up with some of my stuff, it would actually be cheaper for the company. I talked to Lee. I personally don’t care, as long as you can convince the personnel – if they question.  So I returned back to the States, unemployed, but in style, on the luxury liner, Queen Elizabeth II.

Likewise, when I was re-hired, and joined the staff in Chicago, having gone through several suitcases, I realized that I needed something lighter but sturdier. My heart was set on an elegant looking but heavy duty Lark garment bag at the luggage store in the Water Tower Place. But it cost $350.00. Lot of money for a suitcase, even today. And this was in 1979. And yet, I was tempted to buy it and then a thought occurred to me, shouldn’t the company be paying for it? After all, a suitcase was one of the most important tools required for my job.

‘I don’t know about that Mr. Shah!’ Lee responded. So I had some convincing to do. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but he capitulated. ‘Look, I don’t think we can get away with it. But I will sign off on it, bur if they question it, then you’ll have to pay for it yourself.’ As much as I was inamorato with the damn suitcase, I agreed. And guess what? “They” never asked. Years later, my friend Nasim (Y. Khan) in Germany inherited it from me and its still out there somewhere.

Fast forward to 1992. The top Playboy managers from across the country are invited by Christie (Hefner)  to a management golf outing at the exclusive (read highbrow – pretentious) Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, to spend an informal day with other executives, “bonding”. We are teamed up with appropriately matched novices and serious golfers. I had done a couple of those before and had presumed that I could go on the greens with my shorts and the t-shirt. Sandals and all. Wrong! While shorts were okay, the club  rules required that we had to wear a shirt with collar – i.e. polo shirt at the minimum and must wear  proper golf shoes. I didn’t have either and we are about to t-off. No problem. Like all of them, they have a gift shop stocked with everything that a golfer would need. As snooty as the club is, things are obviously top of the line, even though the price tags made you cringe. What choice did I have? I pick up a nice polo shirt made of fine cotton,  the club logo discreetly embroidered on it. It was like fifty bucks. And while I am trying out the shoes, that run more like a hundred and fifty, I grumble to no one in particular. Sitting next to me in the locker room, tying on his own shoes is Herb Laney, Playboy’s Divisional Vice President for the mail order operations.

‘What are you bitching about? It’s a business expense!’

‘You mean?’

‘Of course. See this shirt?’ He turns his hand and pinches the very fine fabric of his polo shirt with his fingers. ‘You’re damn right I am going to expense it.’

‘But I also need the golf shoes!’

‘Well, since you’re not a golfer and are buying them only for today, I would expense them too!’ I look back at Herb, dumbfounded. He gives me an amazed look as if I had just gotten off the boat!

Suddenly, I can’t help but think of how I could have gotten away with charging that Tuxedo I was suckered into buying for the Czechoslovakian launch.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, August 16th, 2013

JE NE SAIS PAS

I really don’t know for sure. I have three irons in the fire, so I guess it will be whichever begins to glow first. So let the next week’s entry be a surprise:)

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Categories Corporate Matters

STRANGERS ON THE PLANE

August 1, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

In The Journey Of Life One Meets Only To Part

strangerplane2

When I first  notice her, she is standing next to me in the check-in line, fidgeting and shifting her weight from one foot to another. Her face looks pretty in profile. With Milan’s Linate International Airport fogged-in, we are bussed to their standby Malpensa, which is in a big mess as ever. Despite the throngs of crowds and the chaos that normally prevails, and amidst the multiple delays, things somehow work out at this remote airport.

I check in, go through the immigration and the security check and on to the other side of the security wing. Pick up some duty free booze, look around for a while and with the first call make it to the gate # 7. And there she is again. All wrapped up in her leopard skin coat and her knee-high black boots. Her pretty face floats in the air propelled by her swan like long and delicate neck. On the second call, we move closer towards the gate to get on the bus.

I notice her staring at me. I stare back. They have called the flight for the third time and the bus still isn’t anywhere in sight. Us just standing there, waiting, our eyes discreetly catching a fleeting gaze of the other.  I want to strike up a conversation, probably so does she. But we maintain our demeanor. The fourth call and the bus still hasn’t arrived. She looks at me and lets a slight smile cross her lips. I smile back.  Neither of us says anything. We continue to steal glances at each other every few moments.

A few more minutes have elapsed and the bus still hasn’t arrived. Everyone is getting antsy,  with the possible exception of us two. We are enjoying our little charade. I watch her fiddle with her pink boarding card. The lady is traveling in first class. She sort of looks rich all over, from her head to her toe. It is sweetly awkward just waiting and stealing glances at a stranger. She has moved sideways, bringing her a couple of steps closer to me. I want to move even closer and talk to her. But don’t know how to break the ice. The way we are taking each other in is discomforting.  And yet, there seems to be an unspoken insinuation between us that its alright.

It isn’t that warm in the departure hall, but while waiting, she decides to undo her coat buttons. Underneath, I could see that she is of a  slender frame and of delicate built.  Don’t think  she has much on her chest. She stands  still for a while with her coat unbuttoned and then finally takes it off. When I see a pair of lascivious breasts bounce off her form fitting turtle-neck sweater, the sight takes my breath away. A white pearl necklace dangles down from her neck, with its knotted loop snuggly resting in the cleft of her cleavage. She is wearing a knee-length black velvet skirt and a three inches (6.6cm) wide black belt, separating her tight sweater from the skirt. Averting direct eye contact, I let my eyes traverse down from her knee high black boots up to her head, her hair bunched together with a glittery hair clip. I observe that her breasts aren’t as big as they seemed, except that they stand out on her shapely  petite frame. She is a beauty! A tempestuous one at that.

They call the flight once more, but where the hell is the bus? Our heads automatically turn towards each other, our eyes lock.

‘They probably don’t even have the plane there!’ I say.

‘Probably not.’ The ice broken, she responds.

‘Sind sie aus Deautschland?’ I ask in German.

‘Ja,’ she answers, ‘und sie?

‘Zur zeit.’

Finally, the bus has arrived. We walk in together. She finds herself a corner seat, I stand  next to her. ‘hier gibt’s noch ein platz’ she points at another folded chair next to her. The plane is only about twenty meters away from the gate, we could have walked. We get off the bus and walk a few remaining steps to the plane.

‘It’s going to be pretty lonely in the first class!’ I say, quickly scanning the small cabin of the empty first class.

‘I guess so.” She agrees and in hurry explains that she had to get the first class ticket because there were no seats left in the economy.

‘Perhaps we can sit together?’ She asks.

‘I would love to, but I don’t think they would let us.’

We walk into the plane. She hands over her pink boarding card to the stewardess and asks her if  I could possibly sit with her. Yes, if I paid the difference in the fare.

We start with champagne and a nice meal. This is my first time ever, traveling in first class.  Not too hard to get used to.  The stewardesses keep refilling our glasses. It is a shame that we only have such a short distance to travel.

The mutual infatuation  between us is apparent. Before we know, we have switched to addressing each other with familiar Du. Our faces so close, our hands overlapping on the arm rest, they find each other and our fingers entwine on their own.  We talk and we flirt. Holding hands, looking deep into each other’s eyes. Her face is a perfect combination of Ingrid and Gisela, two of my prettiest German friends. An exotic mixture that reminds me of Queen Farah Pahlavi of Iran. Really a beautiful woman, I say to myself. Deep green eyes, jet black hair, thin lips and dimpled cheeks.

Her name is Chantal – unusual for a German girl. I have a Francophile mother. Chantal is married to a fifty eight year old entrepreneur from Hamburg. She herself looks like about twenty seven. They now live in  Ascona, Switzerland,  with their four month old child and three servants. Her parents live close to Düsseldorf, but she isn’t flying there to see them. She tells me that she is going there on “business”.  Sure! I give her a cryptic smile. She smiles back and concedes that she is actually meeting a “friend” there.

‘In fact, we were supposed to have a nice dinner together.’

‘You did have a dinner with someone nice anyways.’ I respond.

‘Of course,’ and she smiles, squeezing my hand. ‘I think it’s more romantic with a total stranger than with someone you already know.’

We talk for a while about me working for Playboy.

‘Would you ever consider posing for the magazine?’ I ask.

‘In the nude?’

‘Well, we’re talking Playboy!’

‘I would love to. But I don’t think my husband would be too thrilled!’

‘Schade!’ Too bad. She is sooooooooooooooooo gorgeous. I think.

Not the nudes, but she would certainly be open to a fashion shoot. If not exactly for the pictures, but more so because such an opportunity would enable her to get away from her day-to-day chores of being a rich man’s wife.

She tells me that in two days she was returning to Ascona and the whole “family” of six was going to leave for Spain on Friday morning to spend the winter months in a new house that her husband had bought in warm and sunny Costa del Sol.  Spending six months in a small town swarming mainly with the German tourists is not her idea of excitement. She asks me if I would write her a letter on an official Playboy letterhead inviting her to come over to Munich to do a fashion shoot. It would be just an excuse she needs to get away from her husband.

‘He doesn’t mind my seitensprung (literally a sideway leap – those clever Germans!) ab und zu. How do you call it in English? Extra something…?

‘You mean extra curricular? Extra marital?’

‘Ja genau. as long as I am discreet about it’ – the word she uses is diplomatic – so lange ich diplomatisch bin. A trophy wife, I think. And she knows it!

And she certainly knows how to indulge a  man’s ego. ‘ I think Playboy has the right kind of a man in you. You’re not only good looking, but you’re also charming, warm and have a friendly personality. You can make interesting conversation and the people feel nice being with you.’ I am flattered, of course! Thanks. Same to you lady.

Her hair clipped at the top, I wonder what she would look like if she let it down. She obliges. The long tresses unfurling, she tosses her head until they softly rest and caress her shoulders. I gently brush it with the back of my hand. She nuzzles her neck backward and flashes that certain smile which has me unarmed. She looks much prettier with her hair down. More sensuous.  Encouraged, I tell her, I’m sure you’ve got great looking legs! She gives me a bewildered but a pleasant look and then bends down and if a bit hesitantly, unzips her boots and removes them. I feel like I am undressing her bit by bit like in a slow motion striptease.  My fingers reach down and lightly touch and caress the silky smooth skin of her legs.

She tells me that her friend is picking her up at the airport.

‘I wish he didn’t.’ I say.

‘I wish he didn’t either.’ She sounds sincere.

We exchange addresses and telephone numbers. However remote the possibility that we would ever see each other again.

‘Maybe I can come over and see you in Spain?’ I wonder out loud.

‘Please do,’ she answers, ‘but bring along a friend or a model with you, my husband loves pretty girls.’ As if I didn’t already know.

We are already on the other side of the Alps. We only have fifteen to twenty minutes remaining before the plane touches down in Düsseldorf. I get a sinking feeling in my stomach at the thought. As the plane descends, we just look deep into each other’s eyes, mesmerized. And hold hands in a tight squeeze, our fingers tensing over each others. I bend down sideways and impulsively kiss her lightly on the mouth. Her lips flutter. A dismay crosses her face like a floating cloud. She raises her hand and gently wipes off the lipstick smears from my lips with her dainty fingers.

‘Maybe we should make a baby together. Would look beautiful. Wow! my own baby with dark skin and brown eyes!’

I am touched by the wistful look in her eyes focused on mine. Up until then I haven’t thought of having a child of my own. It feels surreal to imagine having one with this stunning beauty sitting next to me.  Overwhelmed, we hold the gaze, unblinking, lest the spell be broken – like two teenagers in love for the first time.

Time elapses faster than it should. We are already in Düsseldorf. The landing strip is only a few hundred meters away.  I move my eyes from the approaching runway to her face again. I squeeze her hand hard.

‘Hey, look at me one more time before  we touch down.’ She does and kisses me lightly with  the side of her lips to avoid her freshly applied lipstick from smearing.

‘Let’s just say auf wiedersehen right here’ she says, ‘because I want to be the first one to get off the plane.’ It makes me sad, but I understand.

‘Auf wiedersehen.’ I whisper.

‘War schön – verführung im erste klasse’ – it’s  been nice, seduction in the first class – and  she laughs a nervous laugh. Soon as the  plane pulls up at the jetway, we look at each other one more time with an unbearable longing. And then she is gone!

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

MORE MATTERS OF THE HEART STORIES

MEXICAN CONSUL AND MATTERS OF THE HEART

 MY LATIN VALENTINE

IN THE NAME OF LOVE

BY THE TIME I GET TO AMSTERDAM

MY SPRING VALENTINE

Next Friday, August 9, 2013

WRITE OFF OR NOT

For most people, expense account is a perk to be envied. I have often heard people say: Oh, you’ve gotten expense account! As if it were a bonus of sorts. What they don’t realize is that an expense account is the reimbursement of the money spent on the company’s behalf. And it’s a hassle keeping track of and account for monies spent. But then, people wink at you, you know, they are thinking of some of the creative ones who can actually turn an expense account into a handsome perk.

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Categories Love Story, Romance, Rommance, Women

BOYS’ NIGHT OUT WITH PLAYMATES

July 25, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

The Rituals Of Wine And Women And All That Jazz

boysnightoutcolor2

Imagine this: If you have ever been to Tokyo and cruised Ginza after hours – the people, the traffic, the shuffle crossing at multiple cross roads where the traffic comes stand-still at every street corner and hoards of shoppers and revelers crossing streets this way and that in each every direction, and the crowds of salarymen making ruckus, drunk out of their minds, some carried by the group up above their heads like a soccer player having just scored the winning goal, and the roaring loud cacophony of it all. It’s a different world, nothing you have experienced anywhere else on the planet. Otherwise straight-laced and well behaved like poor little lambs, after-hours the Japanese let themselves loose. No one you would recognize the next morning when you walk into the office for your long drawn out meetings.

Imagine then, that twelve of them having won Playboy Japan’s reader contest are transposed to the Lincoln Park Playboy Club in  Chicago, sitting around the tables pulled together side-by-side with the bustling Bunnies making fuss over them, serving drinks with their smooth seductive Bunny Dips, big sparkling smiles on their faces, being as sweet as they can be. They   know that these young men have won Playboy Japan Reader’s contest and that their role is also to play gracious hostesses to our guests from the faraway land. The young men are all around twenty five – self-conscious and shy and in awe of the VIP treatment they are afforded. Far from being their drunken and rambunctious selves in Ginza, they are extremely well behaved, amazed and feeling like kids in the candy store.

And they still have ahead of them the highlight and the finale of their trip, a night out with two Chicago based Playmates.  They have already seen photo spreads of sultry Suzi Schott (August 1984), and Carole Ficatier is scheduled to appear in the center pages of the year-end holiday issue of December 1985. Also accompanying them are me and some of my charming female staff. We are dining at Tony Ramo’s Restaurant and Jazz Club, or was it Andy’s Jazz Club? Don’t hold me to his one, because my memory about the exact venue is a bit fuzzy.

Earlier in the week, they have spent some days in Los Angeles and have been treated to the Dodgers’ game, with hot dogs, beers and all and are given a grand tour of Playboy Mansion West. Following my trip earlier in the year to Tokyo, we have embarked upon an ambitious push to regain some of our lost readers and acquire some new ones.

Connecting Jazz with Playboy  and its Playmates is a well thought out itinerary to showcase the Americana and the World of Playboy. Jazz has always been a part of Playboy in that Hefner (Hugh) himself has been a serious aficionado since his youth. So much so that in addition to  having featured many a jazz musicians on his earlier television show, Playboy’s Penthouse and in-house performances at Chicago Playboy Mansion, the magazine sponsored its first Playboy  Jazz Festival in 1959 to celebrate its 5th anniversary. Come Playboy’s 25th birthday in 1979, it  has become an annual cultural phenom, now permanently housed at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, something that invariably gets Hefner out of his self-contained Mansion and out in the front row of the open air concert hall. In a recent interview to coincide with the Festival’s 35th anniversary, he said to Jeff Weiss of Bizarre Ride blog: “I would hope my championing of jazz will be remembered in a connective way with what’s unique about Playboy and my own legacy. As a musical form, jazz represents the same liberation and freedom that America represents in its most ideal form.”

And if not exactly co-incidental, Japan has been one of the most passionate Jazz countries outside of the United States. One of mine and the world’s most favorite Japanese scribes – Haruki Murakami, often links Jazz with his characters and at one time even owned and ran a Jazz bar of his own in Tokyo.

●●●

At Tony Ramo’s, or Andy’s,  the tables are set up in a way that each one of us could face the Jazz band to play that night. My staff and the two Playmates interspersed between the readers. Tonight’s dinner is planned to be more informal than the one at Playboy Club. Keeping up with the general theme of the Americana as portrayed in the magazine’s lifestyle features,  we want the contest winners also to have a real taste of the newly emerging California wines – in 1985, still something of a joke for the wine snobs of the world.

We have assigned Suzi and Carole to order wines for the group. Suzi, the younger of the two at twenty four, has grown up in Chicago’s western suburb of Addison, Illinois and is more likely to have ordered,  as she puts it herself:  “I will go into a restaurant and order a root beer or Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda” than vintage wines. She is not of the wine know-how and is coached by me and the sommelier about the wine list and the rituals of ordering and approving a bottle of wine.

Carole, a bit older at twenty seven, born in Auxerre, France, scant twelve miles (20 km) from the wine region of Chablis, has been a professional model and for her work has traveled and worked in not only Paris, New York, Zürich, Hamburg and Milan, but also in Tokyo. This adds something to the mix in that both Carole and I are able to sprinkle the conversation with Ohayo Godaimazu, Arigato and Domo Arigato Godaimazu, to get a bit of amusement and a chuckle or two out of them.  And Carole knows her food and wines and is as familiar with the California wines as she is of the French.

As the bowed waiter holds the slanted bottle of the California Chardonnay for Suzi to approve,  she fakes earnestness in  scanning and reading the label. Her eyes moving sideways and up and down the label to make sure that it reads the same as what she remembers to have ordered.

‘Yes. That’s it’. She nods.

The waiter stepping back, swiftly but stylishly drives in the cork screw and out comes the cork with a pop. He carefully and delicately places it in front of her, while balancing the bottle in his other hand. She picks it up as previously instructed, lifts it up to her nose ever so slowly, sniffs it with her eyes dreamily closed, as if she is savoring the fragrance and can really tell the difference. Puts down the cork and signals  for the waiter to pour. With a thimble full, she delicately picks up the glass from its stem, holds it up against the light, twirls slightly the liquid, turns the stem in her fingers, tilts the rim of the glass to take in the bouquet and touches the glass to her lips. The taste of wine swirling in her mouth, she gulps it down and gently puts back the glass on the table, and deftly raises her head.

‘Its delicious!’ Like a connoisseur. We all applaud.

Now it’s Carole’s turn. Still partial to the French wines, she picks a particularly good California Cabernet Sauvignon. The same routine. Waiter standing there holding the slanted bottle. She looks at the label and nods. And the waiter goes through the motions of opening the bottle, pulling out the cork with a pop and placing it in front of her. She looks down at the cork, and then up at the waiter – trying to hold back the laughter wanting to burst out on her face, she lets a slight smile of amazement escape her lips.

‘Just pour Honey. We don’t do this back home!’

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, August 2nd 2013

STRANGERS ON THE PLANE

We have all joked, wondered and wished about what it would feel like to join the Mile High Club. As much air traveling as I have done throughout my life and through my Playboy years,  something’s got to have happened during one or more of my trips. No? Well! 🙂

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Categories Japan, Playmates

FACE TO FACE WITH HUGH M. HEFNER

July 18, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

The Real Man Eclipsed By His Image

hefshadow4

The questions I am asked often are:

Have you met Hefner?

Have  you been to Playboy mansion?

What is he like as a person?

The answers to the first two is YES. As for the third, I don’t know. But I do have a certain feelings about him. And I have personal opinions.

●●●

Soon after I was hired by John Mastro, I met with Lee Hall, the man who would be my real boss. At the end of our introductory meeting, he hands me a leather covered ring binder, which weighed a ton.  The rounded spine measured almost three inches (6.6 cm.) overflowing with typewritten pages inside.

‘For  you to read on the plane.’ It was Playboy Style Book.  The volume defined raison d’être of every single page of the magazine in the minute details from the typeface of the head, subhead, the body, the positioning of page numbers, the direction the Rabbit Head must always face (left), the positioning of the little Rabbit Head slug  to mark the end of features. The concepts and execution of the Playmate, all minutely explained. And as importantly, the concepts of each section from Playboy After Hours, to Dear Playboy to the Playboy Interview, the cropping of the photos, capturing and freezing of the most dramatic expressions on their faces,  the quotes that  appear right underneath them and the exact format defining the philosophy, the word counts and the positioning of the major and the minor features. Fiction and non-fiction.  Lead pictorial and back of the book pictorial.  It talked at length about  “the pacing” – the rhythm of how the text features, illustrations, photos should follow, the presentation of it all while continuously striving for  harmony in diversity. The surprise element and the elements that would challenge and provoke readers.

What did all of that have to do with the color corrections and the print quality? I didn’t even ask.  It fascinated and absorbed me, for here was the treasure trove of incredible word for word guide to How To Make A Perfect Magazine. The Bible, Bhagwat Gita, if you may. Basically paying attention to the tiniest things that can make a big difference. The loose-leaf pages that filled the volume, were dated from mid-Fifties to the late-Sixties. Some definitions contained a page or more, most only a paragraph or two. In the margin of each such item was the initial HMH (Hugh Marston Hefner) and next to them, the dates. I suspect that in the most likelihood, he typed all those pages himself . Such attention to details. Nothing left to interpretation. It became very clear to me that this HMH was an editor par excellence.  And immediately, I became one of his most devoted pupil and then the preacher of his gospel to everyone who worked with me in the next twenty one years. That, as you know, was in October of 1972.

●●●

I would not meet the man for fifteen years whose mantra I had chanted to a whole slew of editorial teams from all across the globe. I saw him face-to-face for the first time on October 7, 1987. A busload of us arrived at the back parking lot of his famed Mansion  to meet with and pay our respect to the capo dei capi – the highlight of the International Publishing’s conference being held that year at El Encanto in Santa Barbara, California.

First we were given a grand tour of the Mansion and its fairy tale surroundings that included tennis court, swimming pool, the now all too talked about Grotto, traipsing birds and strolling exotic animals and the wedding cake of the house, reminiscent of The Great Gatsby’s fictional home on the Long Island, three thousand miles (4800 km) away. You can’t help but be in awe of it all. More amazed than envious, because we could as well be visiting the Disneyland. But we had  fallen into the Rabbit hole and into the wonderland which was our own.

Having already been treated to a sumptuous buffet lunch, we are clustered around the pool, drinks in hands, awaiting eagerly the Man of the house. We are imagining him to walk out of the front door in his trademark  silk pajamas and the long flowing robe. Perhaps with his ubiquitous pipe in one hand. The image we all behold. Anxiety rising, we indulge in small talks with each other but our eyes can’t help but wander back and forth between where we’re standing and the front door of the house. First we see our boss, Bill Stokkan – the divisional President – in his navy blue slacks and the mottled grey silk sports jacket over a white shirt. Then we see him. Both of them walking towards us, arms around each other. And we gasp. Whatever happened to his silk pajamas and the robe?  He is smartly and causally dressed in a white linen suit over an open collared white shirt sans tie, looking like Jay Gatsby in his informal mode. His hair thinning his lanky frame makes him look younger than his 61 years. As he approaches us, he seems to be as much in awe of us as we are of him.

I imagine him thinking to himself, Holy shit! What have I done? All of us, his clones. He couldn’t have imagined this scenario in his wildest dream. He seems shy, and you can sense an amazement on his face as he shakes hands with each one of us. The countries are being called out, Philip Mason from Australia, Bebe Martinez from Argentina, Albert Cheng from Hong Kong, Ali Karacan from Turkey, Anteos Chrysostomides from Greece. He wonders out loud: How does she remember all these names, let alone pronounce them? As Elsa (Purcell) – the departmental administrator rattles off names to match the faces. Just like Dr. Malaiperuman, years earlier – the Warden of the Indian Students Hostel in London not only rattles off the names of 120 of us to Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II, but adds to them, Haresh Shah, London College of Printing. Incredible. The queen too must have wondered – but holds her gentle demeanor.  Feeling, if not like grandpa, but certainly the Godfather of us all. Standing there with us, Hefner looks just like one of us, which he actually is.

He blends in like sugar in coffee. He makes small talk with us, poses for group pix with each one of the fourteen editorial teams – mostly shot by his ever present in-house photographer, but is also graceful and patient enough to linger and allow those of us who wanted to use our own cameras. Wouldn’t you know that up until then my steadfast Canon SureShot would decide to jam the film while forwarding? Seeing me frantically trying to un-jam the forwarding mechanism and the dismay on my face while he is patiently standing there with my whole staff striking the pose – he finally says: ‘The reason we have staff photographers.’ Not allowing me in the least to let my frustration turn into and embarrassment.  True to what he said in his interview done for Playboy’s 20th anniversary issue of January 1974: ‘I still have a certain sense of wonder at all that’s happened. I don’t think that I’ll ever become jaded by the success or the life I’m leading; it’s simply not my nature. As a matter of fact, I feel like a kid in the world’s largest candy store.’

●●●

In addition to the ring binder, I had inherited from my predecessor, two 7” (15.4cm) reel-to-reel Scotch magnetic tapes, and 123 pages of transcript of the sessions that took place on March 1, 1972 in his Chicago Mansion. Mostly its Hefner speaking, explaining in minute details every single page of his magazine. He flips through several issues to demonstrate to the editors designates of the first three Foreign Editions of Playboy soon to be launched in Germany, Italy and France – like an old fashioned father telling the prospective suitors, what it meant to marry his precious daughter and what it would take for them to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed.

Within the first couple of minutes of introduction, and before he launches into stoke-by-stroke run down on what he calls the editorial balance, I sense an emotional note: Now, first of all, I don’t know to what extent you have been through the various things in terms of what makes the book now = what we put into the magazine – I will say that first we put into the magazine and I don’t want to be corny about it, but it is true, is a great deal of love and caring. His voice quivers a bit as he says this, perhaps afraid of what may become of his “baby” in the foreign hands. He emphasizes the fact that almost twenty years later, Playboy remains in editorial hands and is not run by the advertising departments or the bankers. I am sure that while flattered at his labor of love going across the ocean, deep down in his heart, he must feel a certain sadness at letting go of his darling. The way before I even joined Playboy, I was an avid reader as I was of Time, Life and The New Yorker. And everything about editing and publishing captivated and thrilled me. And here I had landed a living guide, that no amount of schooling could teach me.

As I write this, it overwhelms me to think that in not too far of the future, I too would have the teams of editors sitting around the dining table or the outdoor picnic bench of my Evanston house, and I too would be flipping through pages of several issues piled high on the dining table, to make a point.  And telling them what it would take for them to take on a product as personal as Playboy.   And that someday, I would pen the messages to the readers of every new edition, that would appear on the opening pages of their premier issues, signed: Hugh M. Hefner

●●●

I return to the Mansion five days later, on October 12, with the Japanese team comprising of Messers. Shimaji, Yokuhama and Sasaki. We are there to interview Hefner for the Japanese edition. We sit in his smallish library, decorated in the subdued English ambiance. While the bust of Barbi Benton stares down at us from its perch, we get our wish as we see him shuffling down the stairs in his silk pajamas. He seems more at ease in his usual attire. He is friendly, mild mannered and soft spoken, warm and welcoming. The interview begins and it takes more than twice as long because Mr. Shimaji, like most Japanese editors, speaks only perfunctory English and the conversation has to be translated back and forth. We are given an hour, but it stretches into an hour and a half and perhaps more. He ignores the nudging from whoever is in charge of his agenda. Its cara-a-cara between the two editors and he gives his fellow editor his due respect. Through the interview, he downs cans and cans of Pepsi from the mini refrigerator across the room, stocked to the brim with nothing else but cans of Pepsi.  He saunters back and forth to get another can and yet another, and excuses himself a couple of times to go to the bathroom. There is nothing that Shimaji asks that is new. By then the man has lived such a public life that there is not much left to reveal, if anything.

Except little snippet like this: As early on as the early Seventies, he didn’t just have a phone installed in his limo, but as Bob (Gutwilig) tells it, once when they were riding together, Hefner signals him to pick up the ringing phone, to tell the caller, ‘can you please hold, Mr. Hefner is on the other line.’ Now that’s what I call a class. But other than that, as he has often said: My life is an open book. With illustrations.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

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Other Face to Face Stories

FACE TO FACE WITH GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

FACE TO FACE WITH JAN CREMER

Next Friday, July 26, 2013

BOYS’ NIGHT OUT ON THE TOWN WITH PLAYMATES

Twelve of our Japanese readers won a trip to Los Angeles and Chicago that included a tour of the Playboy Mansion and the Dodger’s game in Los Angeles. A visit to Playboy’s  headquarters in Chicago and dinners at Playboy Club and at a Jazz Restaurant with the director of Playboy International Publishing – that’s moi, accompanied by two Playmates, Susi Schott (August 1984) and Carole Ficatier, (December 1985) A true kids in the candy store experience.

 

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PLAYBOY AND WOMEN IN MY LIFE

July 11, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

Painting Devils On The Wall

devilwall2

‘Do you think Playboy exploits women?’ Asks Jennifer. I have just entered the northbound Lake Shore Drive off Michigan Avenue ramp and we are driving home, instead of having stopped some place for a drink following the concert. The question hangs in the air exacerbating the silence that has dawned upon us.

‘I have an 8:30 meeting. Can’t stay out tonight.’ If not exactly distraught, it has put me in dark mood. It seemed too good to be true. I am thinking to myself. It had made me so happy when Jennifer sat in my living room a week earlier, flipping the pages of that week’s Evanston Review, while her two kids and Anjuli occupied elsewhere in the house. She casually mentioned that Carole King was going to be in town.

‘You wanna go?’ I ask.

‘Do you?’

Suddenly I had felt euphoric at the remote chance that after all, it wasn’t yet over between us two. Whereas I have given up all hopes, it was her who had initiated barbecuing and spending that beautiful spring day at my place with her kids and visiting Anjuli. My spirits lifted, I couldn’t have been happier.

And now this! As if she has found out for the first time that I happen to work for the magazine called Playboy and go all hostile feminist on me. I am chewing on her question like one would a piece of sugarcane wrung dry into a stringy pulp. The standard corporate answer and the one Hefner (Hugh) himself had given in one of his interviews : “Playboy exploits women the way Sports Illustrated exploits athletes” Ironically, when I worked for SI, no one ever accused us of exploiting athletes.  Instead this is what I say:

‘Well, what the magazine does is to reflect the way men think. Men not only aspire to a well paying exciting jobs, nice places to live in equipped with the latest in the audio-visual, flashy cars, have his liquor cabinet filled with premium brands and so on. At the end of the day, he also wants young and beautiful women to be a part of his world. And one thing us men do is to immediately begin to undress the ones we may desire.’

‘You do?’

‘Certainly. Like right now, as you sit next to me I am undressing you in my mind’s eye. We never get tired of wondering, what does she look like underneath her clothes. So Hefner decided why not make this a part of his editorial mix?  My Rights manager Jean Connell sums it up aptly and justifiably that this is because men are visual and women aural. The reason why the readership of both Playboy and Playgirl is predominantly men.’  If she was trying to divert my sadness at how the evening was ending, she had failed utterly. Soon we withdraw within ourselves for rest of the way.

●●●

One of the most frequently asked questions of me was: How does your wife feel about your working for Playboy? My immediate instinct is to answer: How should she feel? How does a pilot’s wife feel about her husband flying and salesman’s wife feel about his selling and an accountant’s wife feel about his nose buried in the books? But I don’t. I do my best to hold back answering their question with questions of my own. However annoying I may have found them sometime, I realize that in their perception, working for a product like Playboy has to be different. More than working for movie productions or television channel. The product sexually charged with all that glamour and glorified women – yes, women. Naked women for Christ’s sake.

What they don’t realize is: That like any other businesses, first and foremost, Playboy Enterprises, Inc. too is a business. And like in any business what matters most at the end of the day is the bottom line, showing the hard profit and loss figures and not the soft curvaceous kind. Not any different than when I worked in production quality. To give the best example, when I did Sports Illustrated, other than getting the colors of the uniforms and the team logos right, the real challenge was always to acquire color balance in the skin tones of the athletes, especially that of the black ones. Just a few percent off in one of the basic color balance and you could end up with Michael Jordan looking like the Green Giant. Similarly, when working with the naked skins of all those beautiful ladies, you could easily cause them to look hot pink like lobsters. And  I would never have anything at all to do with the sexy hot bodies in the photos whose skin tones I was trying to match.

Okay, so I ended up not doing production quality as my main job  for rest of my life and did get into the editorial and the photographic aspects of the magazine and also in to the business of it all, with P & L responsibilities. And was involved intimately with the pictorial parts of the international editions as well. So fair enough. Once in a while I would have such conversations with Carolyn, mainly about what we called her painting devils on the wall. An expression I had picked  up from the American singer of the 60’s, Peggy March singing German schlager  of the Seventies: Male nicht den teaufel an der wand – don’t paint devil on the wall. And sometimes, she would be jealous. Or more like insecure. And I would do my best to communicate to her that for what I did for a living, it was all in the day’s work.

Since my job brought young women from all over, I would also be in charge of taking care of and entertaining them during their stays in Chicago.  Often, I would make it a point of bringing them home for dinner or tag them along and include them in our family lives.  Include them into the day-to-day  activities such as going to the movies, going picnicking and listening to the music under the swaying trees and the open skies of the Ravinia Park.

The first one to come home with me was Barbara Corser, (German Playmate, July 1975). I hadn’t seen Barbara in a while since my Santa Barbara days. By now she had also become Penthouse Pet of the Month and happened to be in Chicago on a promotional assignment from the magazine. It wasn’t until late in the evening that I could meet up with her. As close as we once were, I wanted her to see my new home, say hello to Carolyn and get a peek at Anjuli who certainly would be asleep by than. Must be after ten when we climb up to our third floor condo in Hyde Park. Having worked all day long, Barbara had not gotten around to eat anything all day. Carolyn, though already in her pajamas, if not happily, was gracious enough to fix her a sandwich.  This late night visit probably set the tone of how our life together would be.

Then came Sylvana Suarez (Miss World 1978) from Argentina . She spent a weekend with us, we all went to see Gandhi and had dinner at Bombay Palace. And not only Carolyn, but other friends too realized that Miss World or not, she too was just like any other young women, aspiring wives and mothers, that they had boyfriends/husbands back home waiting for them to return.  Whatever their stories, they certainly weren’t after your man. When the Dutch twins Karin and Mirjam van Breeschooten (June 1988) came to Chicago for their playmate shoot for the American edition, they had just turned eighteen, having appeared in the Dutch Playboy a year earlier. Only ten at the time, Anjuli remembers them as two young girls who chose to go eat a pizza instead of going to a fancy restaurant. When she was in her early teens, Anjuli got to spend some time with Playmate Elke Jeinsen (May, 1993) when she traveled with me to Brazil. On the day I was busy with back-to- back meetings, the photo editor practically kidnapped Anjuli and put her in the makeup chair, made her up and had their fashion photographer do some flattering headshots of her. That gave her a chance to see that being photographed with all that glitz and glamour was a job like any other. Knowing some of those women helped ease Carolyn’s apprehensions about my job at Playboy.  But still…

Its difficult, if not utterly impossible to change and modify people’s opinions about things. The most everyone who has strong opinions about Playboy, have never as much as even attempted to read the magazine. They blow you off the chair at the mere mention of the excellent interviews, fiction and non-fiction.

‘Yeah right! You read it for the interviews! Hahaha.’ End of the story.

Similarly the most people have a certain image of Hefner, the one I must admit he himself has helped create and hasn’t done anything to dispel. So when in the spring of 1989, my brother Suresh (Shah)   and his family came to visit, I arranged for us all to visit Playboy Mansion West, in the similar vein as them visiting: Disneyland and the Universal Studios. Suresh was obviously excited and so was my cousin Dhiru who lives in Los Angeles. I am not sure how my sister-in-law Aruna felt, but that question was promptly preempted by Carolyn, who decided that the women and the kids would go to the beach instead. By then she had been to Bombay three times and must have known that us Indians avoid the sun and the sand like plague. But she sloughed off the idea of visiting the mansion like the fly swatted flat. In retrospect, I could see in this defiance the early seeds of what was to come – not to mention the re-awakening of her dormant feminist hostility.  We never spoke about it, but I can imagine some of it had to do with whatever disdain she might be harboring about the chauvinist of a man who made objectifying women glamorous. Nothing I could do. Us boys went to the mansion, the girls to the beach.

●●●

When I met Gina, I was no longer working for Playboy, but as hard as we had fallen for each other, to justify any of my behavior, especially when it concerned women in particular, and that I was such close friends with so many of them, her mind right away interpreted it as: no wonder he worked for Playboy for so long. And there was nothing I could say or do that would change her perception. Never mind the fact that I started out in book publishing that published classics of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Marie Corelli and a whole list of well-known self-help books. That I also worked for Time Inc. with their portfolio of family oriented magazines, among them Time and Life and that at the time I was doing Florida Sportsfan.

It was beyond her to comprehend  the unconventional way in which I thought about balancing  relationships and personal freedom.  That it was something I had begun to struggle with when as young as nineteen and when I still lived with my family in Bombay. The pages of my journal from those days are filled with me agonizing over and questioning the norms of male-female relationships.  But the answer for her always was my Playboy years. I often wished, if only she could read Gujrati!

●●●

Coming back to Jennifer. In aftermath of the Carole King concert, our relationship/non-relationship trudged along. I have practically written her off but still carry bit of a pang in my heart. I have just returned from a trip to South Africa. And when my phone rings on that long labor day weekend and when I hear her voice, my heart jumps.

‘Hi, Haresh’  it is Jennifer’s old cheery voice.  ‘you know, yesterday, when Clive woke from his nap, the first thing he said was ‘let’s go to Hanesh’s house.  Isn’t that something?’ Hanesh is as close as little Clive came to pronouncing my name.

‘You should have brought him by’

‘Really!’

And its back to as if nothing had happened between us. The months haven’t passed. As if we just parted the night before. But there is a pause:

‘You know, I called.’ She says. Her voice is a hushed whisper. Sort of a mild apology.

‘I know, Mary (Nastos} dropped off my stuff from the office.’

‘I feel bad about the way things ended between us two.’

‘Ya?’ is how I respond, but in smoother tone. ‘May be we can talk about it some other time?’

‘Yes.’ And her cheery voice returns.

‘What are you doing today?’

‘Oh, I have this South African Playmate (Nikki Peterson – January 1994, SA PB) in town and I would have to feed her, so we may go out for dinner. How about you?’

‘I am not doing anything.  I was going to call my friend Carrie, who works with me.  Was also thinking maybe you can come over and I can grill some chicken.’

‘I would love to, if you don’t mind me bringing along the Playmate.’

‘It depends on how threatened I will feel.’

Is she serious? Feeling threatened of a nineteen year old model trying to make it in the world?’

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

*The “naughty doodles” on the wall adapted from the images burned in the copper plates by Janette Newton.  

SISTER SITE

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MY SPRING VALENTINE

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Next Friday, July 19, 2013

FACE TO FACE WITH HUGH M. HEFNER

I can’t claim to have known the man closely or even casually. But yes, I have had a couple of face to face encounters with the capo dei capi. Quite pleasant actually. And long enough to form a certain impressions of my own about the man with the initials HMH.   

 

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Categories Playmates, Relationships, Women

SCENES FROM MISS PLAYBOY INTER-NATIONAL BEAUTY PAGEANT

July 4, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

Glamour And Glitter,Trials,Turbulence,Tears And Joy

junkbabes

If anyone, it had to be Albert Cheng – our dynamic publisher in Hong Kong – to pull it off as swiftly and smoothly, the Herculean task of the first and the only Miss Playboy International Beauty Pageant within a little over a year of launching Playboy’s first Chinese language edition  on this city state of the fragrant harbor.

It all began over an elaborate lunch with Hong Kong’s TVB executives, Bernard Cheung and Sophia Chan. The thing I remember the most about that lunch now twenty six years later is the table-side preparation of the tiger shrimps tossed live in the hot frying pan and them shooting up above our heads, some even higher,  before landing back into the sizzling hot pan to meet with their instant demise and immediately turning into the most delicious dish sautéed in the restaurant’s exquisite sauce. I must confess that as tasty as they turned out, I found it hard to swallow them. It certainly gave a new meaning to the culinary tradition of from farm to the table. Thanks to the excellent Chablis pairing that helped washing them down while hiding my apparent discomfort from showing on my face in front of my most gracious hosts.  Albert and I had met them to discuss the possibility and the logistics of staging the beauty contest in which the contestants would come from then existing fourteen international editions of Playboy.

Albert has done his part of conceiving and selling the idea. TVB executives had done their numbers, and now it was upon me to agree and get excited about and have all the editions enthusiastic and then have my superiors back in Chicago buy into it. TVB would bankroll the project and will do their part in producing and broadcasting it live as one of their prime time  pre-Christmas offerings.  Albert and his staff would take care of the logistics and the organizations in Hong Kong. And I would have to be the one to  deliver the fourteen most beautiful women hand picked by the editorial teams of each one of our editions.

Our meeting took place on 22nd of May of 1987. We all had a little over six months to bring the project to life. Soon as I had gotten Chicago’s approval, each one of our editions went to work. This is the kind of a project, if you stop to think of the enormity of the task, overwhelmed, you never would do it. So the best was to just begin. I am not quite sure how the idea of tying-in a major pictorial came about, but I believe it had to be Jan Heemskerk, the editor-in-chief of our Dutch edition. We had partnered a year before in producing of Mundial ’86 – the soccer world cup in Mexico, and now we would work together to do the same with the Beauty Pageant. Gary Cole – the photography director of the mother edition loaned us his star editor and producer Jeff Cohen, we got Tom Staebler – the art director as a bonus. In addition, Gary hired and made available to us the renowned British photographer Byron Newman, who as it turns out, also went to London College of Printing to study photography, probably around the same years as I was studying Photolithography also at LCP, and his wife/stylist, the French actress Brigitte Ariel, who played Edith Piaf in the movie, Piaf: The Early Years. And  he would contribute substantial sum towards the expenses of the photo production. My division and the editions would pick up the rest.

●●●

The infrastructure in place, on December 2, 1987, Jeff, Tom and I, accompanied by Playmate Lynne Austin (July 1986) – who is to represent the United States – board Tokyo bound Japan Airlines Flight 009, which would connect us with an onward flight to Hong Kong.

Us four are sitting in the middle row – happy to be pulling away from our respective day-to-day grinds, we are looking forward to our two week long adventure in Hong Kong. Half way through the flight, Jeff and Tom have either drifted away, snoozing or have withdrawn within themselves, while Lynne and I are quite animated, chatting away. I love her down home southern  natural self. And her Texas twang. We talk about things and the conversation veers towards the beauty pageant. She asks many relevant questions about the contest and its organization. I tell her what I know and then she asks.

‘Who will be the judges?’

‘Albert Cheng, our Hong Kong publisher for one, and other local dignitaries.’

‘Will they all be men?’

‘I am not sure, but of the group, I think one or two are women.’

‘Hum!’ She grunts and then looks at me with an impish smile on her face.

‘Do you think Chinese men like blow jobs?’

She is of course kidding. Or is she?  Anything to win? The more I get to know h, the more I like the real woman that she is and I am charmed by her natural beauty and her sense of humor.

●●●

There is absolutely no rest for the wicked. We left Chicago the day before at around noon, arriving in Hong Kong at three in the afternoon the next day. Soon as we check into Hotel Prince, the instant meeting breaks out and lasts until one in the morning. Already there or arriving  simultaneously are Byron and Brigitte, Jan and Lucienne Bruinooge of Holland. There is no time to waste, so we get into the production of the pictorial the very next day. Most of the themes are conceived by Byron and Brigitte and are discussed among us. The concepts basically present  the stereotypes of each country, which makes their nationalities easily recognizable.

Lucienne is photographed as the cellophane wrapped bouquet of Tulips who among the real colorful dozen tulips is the prettiest centerpiece. Similarly, Shannon Long in the outback Aussie gear, Jenny Vergdou of Greece dressed in blue with a pile of plates for her to smash, Spain’s Nuria Posariza Dobon as the torero, Marta Duca of Italy in a glittery green dress pulled by paparazzis posed by Jan and me, Lynne in her American West cowboy garb complete with the Stetson hat and Luma de Oliveira of Brazil in all her Samba School gold and glitter. The fun fantasy stuff. Except that editors of Germany and Japan are upset at the way we have planned to portray their girls. The German girl is decked out in all black leather, the bustier with three straps, a leather scarf and thigh high leather boots and her entire arms covered with tight leather gloves. There are rhinestone studs and she is wearing dark sinister looking sunglasses. The only image the props conjure up is that of a brutal Nazi officer. The Japanese girl is propped up on a chair with red ribbons sprouting out from a spoke, symbolizes The land of the Rising Sun. They are more than offended and the German editor Bernd Prievert even threatens to pack up and leave with his girl. Don’t ask me how I was able to pacify and convince them that those were meant to be funny and not meant to communicate anything else.

When I look at those photos today, I must confess, there is nothing funny about those two concepts. However inadvertently, in the place of Bernd and the Japanese editor, whose name escapes my memory, I too would have not only been upset, but would have forced the creative team to change the concepts. Probably put the German Fräuline in Dirndl and the Japanese girl in a revealing Kimono.  I would have not threatened to up and leave, because that would be against my nature and the team spirit. If anyone, me having lived in Germany, I should have known the sensitivity of what even a remotest hint at Nazism would make me feel. But I am glad that however I was able to resolve the conflict, the harmony and the spirit remained in tact. Perhaps the readers too saw those props as self-mockery instead of symbolizing anything so grave. Because as far as I know, there was no negative reaction to those shots.

●●●

Not withstanding minor day-to-day crisis, the major crisis erupts when the waiter in the Royal Garden Hotel’s atrium (We have now moved to Royal Garden) where I am having drinks with the editors, informs me that I am wanted on the phone. Its almost two in the morning. On the line is Holland’s Lucienne.

‘Stella and I need to talk to you urgently.’ Now what? I look at my watch and walk over to the elevator.

‘We girls had a meeting earlier, and we won’t do it. Wear those ugly one piece swimming sacks they want us to.’

And I thought we had resolved the crisis that threatened cancellation of the pageant. The Christian Theological Society of Hong Kong had made waves about the Playboy show allowed to be aired in the prime time. They had threatened to protest outside the Queen Elizabeth Stadium from where the show would be broadcast live in the presence of Hong Kong’s 2000 who’s who audience. TVB would stand its ground by going ahead with the show live as planned, but was sufficiently worried about the aftermath and it was decided to tone down the presentation by having girls wear hastily made white single piece swimsuits with its flimsy conservative cuts that would make nuns look racier. Only distinguishing element among them would be different colored satin bands wrapped around their waists tied in large bows dangling in the back. This was the compromise nobody liked, but we had to defer to the decision by TVB. It seemed the only way to quell the fire the show could otherwise cause.

The girls were obviously devastated. They were there for a beauty pageant and nothing can allow them to show off their wonderful figures as much as their own handpicked bikinis. They had grumbled and registered their displeasure at this change, but seemed accepting it however reluctantly. But obviously not.

Stella and Lucienne are sitting on one of the beds. I am sitting across from them. We are like forty-four hours from going live on the air and from the tone of Lucienne’s voice, it becomes clear to me that the girls had long and serious talks about it. They are angry and they are adamant. After all, they were not competing to show which one of them looked most homely and unattractive.  If they indeed go on strike and even one of them don’t show up, that would spell disaster of a major proportions. Something I cannot allow to happen.

‘Okay. You girls are absolutely right. This is the beauty contest and the routine has to include you to parade in your bikinis. After all, each one of you is beautiful with near perfect bodies and they are going to read out your vital statistics when you’re presented. That’s what was planned and that’s what we want. I want. But the situation we’re facing is not about being right or wrong. When you are dealing with the religious zealots or hostile feminist groups, the logic goes out of the window. Believe me, they are in mini-minority at the very best. But they have apparently made enough noise to be noticed. And what they are demanding is to cancel the show. TVB is determined to go ahead with the show, at the risk of perhaps even losing their broadcasting license. But have come up with a compromise, should it come to that, they would have a convincing argument. Now if us from Playboy family cause the cancellation, I don’t even want to imagine what the cost of that would be to each one of our editions.

‘As for taking all the glamour out of the swim suit routine, look at it this way. You will all have the same handicap. The judges are well aware of that. And each one of them would have seen the special issue we have put out containing your original nudes as they appeared in your country’s edition. So they would know. We would ask them to pay closer attention to those’

I see expressions on their faces soften a bit. As angry and disappointed as they are, we have been working together and living under the same roof for now almost two weeks. We are a team and we are becoming a family. Plus, we still have the opening spread to shoot. We are to shoot it on the classic Chinese Junk while sailing around Hong Kong harbor. There is likely to be the press, and even television coverage. ‘You can show off your bikinis in the bright daylight. Fuck those bastards!’ The prospect of having the last word and to end it with the fuck you moment before returning home puts a smile on theirs and my face.

‘Look, I can’t force you to do anything. But we are in this together. And I need  you to not let those disgruntled few to force us into a devastating defeat.’

Lucienne and Stella still unhappy, but seemed to understand the gravity of the situation. They agree to talk it over again with the girls in the morning and ask me to be there with them. I pretty much repeat what I had said the night before. Nobody is feeling really hot about it. We all understood what we had to do and left for the rehearsal.

Bikinis or not, the show went on the air promptly at 9:30 PM on the night of Sunday, December 12th 1987 and kicked off TVB’s special Christmas offering.  And 95% of Hong Kong’s television viewers tuned into TVB’s Miss Playboy International Beauty Pageant. There were some protestors outside the stadium, mostly ignored and the show concluded without a stitch. Good times had by all. TVB and Playboy crew exhausted and elated met for the midnight dinner at the Royal Garden.

To add bit of a drama to it, earlier in the day, Jan had landed at the Adventist Hospital with a sudden swelling in his foot and was subjected to watch the show on TV from his hospital bed. The Japanese editor loses his briefcase containing lot of cash, his passport, credit cards and all.  And soon as the lights dim on the specially built outdoor set and all the girls have walked off the arena, France’s Nathalie Galan remains at the edge of the stage, tears rolling down her eyes, utterly devastated at not even making it as one of the two runner ups, let alone winning the title. She refuses to go have dinner with us. I put my arm around her and hold her while she breaks down in sobs. We stand like that when rest of the stage lights are turned off and when the crew arrives to dismantle the set. In excitement and in hurry, everyone has rushed back to the hotel, having totally forgotten about the two of us missing. Streets are dark and deserted outside the stadium. We stand there for a while. Confused, when a lone cab slows down in front of us.  There is an applause when we walk in to the dining room.

●●●

THE WINNERS

Luma de Oliveira – Brazil – Miss Playboy International 1987 & Editor’s Choice

Marta Duca           – Italy – First Runner Up

Lynn Austin          – USA – Second Runner Up

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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BEAUTY AND THE BREASTS            

Next Friday, July 12, 2013

PLAYBOY AND WOMEN IN MY LIFE

No one, even the women in your life understand that working for Playboy is like any other job – just making a living. That its not any different than working for Time or Life magazines. Personal anecdotes about working for living and matters of the heart.

 

 

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Categories Beauty Contest, Playmates, Uncategorized

ALL ABOUT THE WILD PARTIES AT PLAYBOY

June 27, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

Not Following In The Boss’ Footsteps

hughmow2

‘No one aspires to Hef’s (Hugh M.Hefner) lifestyle anymore.’

Talking to us at our 1982 International Publishing’s Annual Conference is the US Playboy’s Editorial Director, Arthur Kretchmer. After having them  held  all over the world including at Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, we have brought the group of about sixty to the home turf in Chicago. Seamlessly connected to Playboy’s 919 North Michigan Avenue offices by a passageway is Playboy Towers, right next door at what used to be the landmark Chicago hotel,  The Knickerbocker, now renamed Millennium Knickerbocker Hotel. We are breathing nothing but Playboy, practically day in and day out for four days and four nights.

Arthur is not the man of many words. But when you get him to say something, nobody can say it better than he could. Even though Hugh M. Hefner crowns the magazine’s masthead, being his eyes and ears, it’s Arthur who builds the magazine with his editorial team, nut and bolts, brick by brick. What he just said must have been obvious to most everyone present in the room, but coming from Arthur’s mouth makes it official – confirmed beyond doubt.

I for one had frequently felt that I was actually living the Playboy lifestyle in the real world, traveling first class around the globe, picked up and brought back home by stretched limos, staying at the best hotels in Paris, Munich, Milan and wherever else my assignments took me, eating in the best restaurants and having animated conversations with the crème de la crème of the publishing world, having a time of my life, while by then  Hefner himself had slid into the surreal fantasy world of his own.

When he first started publishing Playboy in December of 1953 at the age of 27, and was putting together his magazine on the kitchen table of his apartment on the University of Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, he aspired to the lifestyle of,  if not famous, certainly well to do, who in his imagination occupied the penthouse apartments in the highrises that lined North Shore Drive of the city. Just like I had aspired to be living in a similar flat on Bombay’s Marine Drive, famously known as the Queen’s Necklace. He aspired to living a life of an affluent young man about town  showing up at the “in” spots of the city with an enviously pretty thing hanging on his arm. One of those “in” spots was the Gaslight Club, established also in 1953, which inspired Hefner to open Playboy Club scant seven years later, also in what is now known as River North neighborhood.

Not only that, the way Playboy sky rocketed to an unprecedented heights that even surpassed his wildest dreams,  he never got to live on the umpteenth  floor of any of the skyscrapers he dreamed about but went way beyond by bringing the whatever good life was happening up above, down to the ground level when he bought a 70 room classical French brick and limestone mansion at 1340 State Street in the exclusive Gold Coast of Chicago – only a stone’s throw away from those tall and the glittering dwellings and at the intersection of the trendy Division, State and Rush streets where Chicago’s thriving night life overlapped. Just a short stroll away were Chez Paul and Biggs, the two of Chicago’s most elegant restaurants of the time and Ricardo’s,  where Chicago Sun Times and Chicago Tribune gang hung out.  As it turns out, he didn’t even have to take those walks. He brought everyone and everything he desired within the confines of his famed Chicago mansion. Complete with underwater bar and firemen’s pole to slide down to the swimming pool down below the main floor.

I could probably see myself being aspired to something to that extent. But beyond?

Not even his most ardent imitators such as Bob Guccione of Penthouse, Daniel Filipacchi of Lui (Oui in the US, published by Playboy under cross licensing agreement in which Filipacchi published the French edition of Playboy) or even Larry Flynt of Hustler aspired to imitate his lifestyle. They emulated Hefner to an extent and then stopped. None of them went as far as to buy a private jet. Serial marriages yes, but Guccione stayed true to Kathy Keeton and Flynt to Althea Leasure till death did indeed  them part. Filipacchi never even married.  And  most importantly, none of them retreated inside the confines of their habitats.

Their publications never became impersonation of themselves as did Playboy. So much so that the mere mention of the name Playboy conjures up an instant image of Hugh M. Hefner. His Playmates and his Bunnies, his silk pajamas and robes, his ubiquitous pipe and his private jet and his clubs, and of course his mansions. Did I ever envy his world? Did anyone at Playboy?  God NO! Not even the men who worked closest to him. They all lead what can easily be termed as normal American lives with wives and kids, houses with white picket fences in the suburbs, SUVs, dogs and all.

If you are thinking of us Playboy-ites to be submerged in the underground swimming pool of the Chicago mansion or the Grotto of the Los Angeles estate, frolicking with the most beautiful and desired naked women swarming all over us – you will be absolutely and horrifyingly disappointed, shaking your head in utter disbelief. As did then seven year old Graham (Miller), Anjuli’s littlie cousin from Minnesota.  Carolyn’s sister LeAnne was visiting Chicago with her younger son and they all stopped at my office in Playboy Building. While they sat down to visit for a while, Graham jumps off his chair and promptly runs out the door and I hear him run up the corridor. I could sense his running up and down the passage and then returning back to my office, slowed down, looking disappointed and shaking his head in disbelief. Even before anyone could ask him where he ran off to, he just blurts out: There are no naked ladies! I don’t even have any juicy Christmas party stories of “squeezed together in the closet” to tell – a la Playboy cartoons in its holiday issues.

There were parties of course. But not much different than any other business get togethers. Among them my division’s annual conference and other divisional affairs in New York and Los Angeles, every year the spring/summer soirée at Christie Hefner’s rooftop apartment in the Gold Cost, where she invited her top managers with their spouses and dates that allowed everyone to let their hair down and partake in good spirits, good food and almost always enjoy the good weather from top of the building and feel the breeze coming in from Lake Michigan. Informal as it was, it was still prim and proper business affair. Add to them the bonding events such as a weekend at Kohler Design Center, in Kohler, Wisconsin, where we mingled amidst the latest bathroom fixtures, shower stalls and huge bathtubs, Jacuzzis and bidet. State of the art toilet bowls and bathroom sinks. We would be invited to a day of golfing at exclusive Westchester Country Club and meet up at the Playboy Mansion West for an informal drink and dinner event one evening during the long traditional Playboy Jazz Festivals in Los Angeles. Hefner himself would show up for a while during these evenings and mingle and make small talk with some of us. A Playmate or a Bunny may wander out once in a while, but looking no different than any well dressed good looking young woman at any other social gathering.  Not to forget the employee Christmas Parties every year. Sumptuous and fun, but not unlike any other corporate sponsored holiday event. And that would be the extent of it.

If I were to tell this to my ex colleagues at Time, even unbelieving, they would believe me because of my status as an outsider insider and sum up the Playboy crowd as being an L and a 7. A perfect boring square.

We at Time worked hard. Very hard. That’s what it took to get three weeklies and one monthly out on the trucks and the airplanes. But then we played as hard. Prairie House? Coach House? Booze & Bits? Butch McGuire’s? Name it, and you could have found us there. And we didn’t even have to scout for the liaisons outside of the group. Between our production and traffic offices on the 22nd street and the data processing /administration offices on Ohio – yes we socialized. We had softball teams and the bowling leagues. Those activities followed by ending up at one of the night spots or even at one of us single member’s apartments in the city. Including mine. There were plenty of young men and women, married and unmarried. But did it matter? These are the late Sixties and early Seventies. Bars with juke boxes. Us dancing to the Carpenters’ Close to you and Rainy days and Mondays. Squeezed together in the dim lit back room of the Prairie House or wherever. Hormones raging, falling in love and falling out. It was like the musical chairs of the coupling and uncoupling.  A real Peyton Place if there was one! Eventually I would define the Time crowd as being the most incestuous group of people I have ever worked with. And from what I understood from the photo editors and the art directors we worked with, it weren’t any different in the New York office. Only more lavish and most every foray even paid by the expense accounts. This was confirmed by The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd – who too worked at Time in her early days, recounts in her recent musings: After my sting in Washington, Time moved me to the New York headquarter, with its “Mad Man” aura of whiskey, cigarettes, four hour sodden lunches and illicit liaisons…On Friday nights when the magazine was going to bed, there were sumptuous platters of roast beef rolled in, and bars in editor’s offices. You get the picture.

Back to Playboy, whose offices were only three blocks north of our Ohio Street offices and thirteen blocks north of the production offices where I worked. Two different worlds. Could it be that we at Time represented New York of the era and Playboy, Chicago of the Midwest?

I am not saying that nothing of the sort ever happened at Playboy. That would be not natural. When you put a bunch of men and women together, cupids are going to hover up above. So Playboy people too fall in love and get this: get married. Just to mention some at the top – the editorial director Arthur Kretchmer has always been married to Patricia as long as I have known him. Gary Cole, the photography director met his wife Nancy at Playboy. Okay she is his third wife, but they’ve been married almost thirty years now. Photo editor Jeff Cohen met Gayle, as well at work and they have been married decades and so did Jim Larson who married Gary’s assistant Renay. What is this with the photo department executives? Cupid must have been playing favoritism around the studios. They’re all still married. And note that none of them married a Playmate or a photo model – the most likeliest scenario. Ditto, my bosses at various times, Lee Hall, Bill Stokkan and Mike Perlis, all married in the conventional sense and so are Jan Heemskerk, Rainer Wörtmann, Freddy Baumgärtel and Albert Cheng across the oceans. Even the star photographers, Pompeo Posar and Richard Fegley.  Both married to their wives for long times until deaths indeed did them part.

So yes, how right Arthur is when he says No one aspires to Hef’s lifestyle anymore. Certainly not the ones shrouded in his aura and living in his orbit. Someone’s got to put out the magazine!!

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, July 5, 2013  TK

SCENES FROM MISS PLAYBOY INTERNATIONAL BEAUTY PAGEANT

In the winter of 1987, Playboy held its one and the only beauty pageant ever in cooperation with Albert Cheng, the publisher of the magazine’s Hong Kong based Chinese language edition and TVB, the major television channel. When broadcast live, 95% of Hong Kong tuned in.

 

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Categories Uncategorized

LA TOYA JACKSON: BEWITCHED BY THE BOA

June 20, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

Tempting Eve To Tempt Adam

boa2

It’s the early spring weekend in 1989. I get a hurried phone call either from our German editor-in-chief Andreas Odenwald or most likely at his direction, from Christian Seidel, his PR person. German edition has just published the cover and the nude pictorial of Michael Jackson’s baby sister La Toya Jackson, originated in the US, (March 1989). Her rock video Stop the Madness is just released and she is making waves in the media for having posed for Playboy. The TV channel SAT 1 has approached our German editors, telling them that they have a slot available that weekend on their super popular Saturday night talk show, Nase vorn (literary Nose up Front/ Way up Front) hosted by Frank Elstner, and they would like to offer it to Playboy if they could get La Toya Jackson to appear on the show.

We are in luck, because just recently Jack Gordon, La Toya’s husband and the manager had stopped by in my office to talk with me about just such a possibility overseas. So I get on the line and call Jack. A series of frantic phone calls ensue across Chicago, New York and Munich. They want first class passage, adjoining executive suites in a five star hotel. Limousine pick up. The usual celebrity stuff. All arranged with the lightening speed by our German team. They are picked up by Christian in his BMW 735 and brought to the hotel in Saarbrücken, from where the show is broadcasted. The live transmission is to go on air within hours when La Toya drops the bomb. She had to have a live boa constrictor to accompany her on the show!!! An eleventh hour curve ball. But nothing our Playboy team in Germany couldn’t handle. A call to the Frankfurt Zoo, and voila.

La Toya makes her dramatic entrance bursting out from behind the oversized split Playboy cover featuring her close up, holding in her hands the giant reptile snuggly stretched out under her ample bosom. She is seated across from the host Elstner at a small round café table with the bubbles in the champagne flutes rising and the Boa resting peacefully across her lap all through the interview, like a baby at its best behavior . The show goes on without a hitch. Post show, she poses with the guests, the Olympic Gold Medalist Figure Skater,  Katarina Witt and the rock star Udo Lindberg and Oscar Lafontaine – the Minister President of the state of Saarland and the Playboy editor Ulrike Blass. Everyone endures the presence of her bosom buddy. But from what I heard from the German editors on Monday morning, that even so, the crew and the host were all in awe of their disquieting guest. If a  bit scared, they managed a brave face and safe distance from it – just in case. The show went on the records as being one of the most watched with 19.5   million viewers. Ulrike said later that for an international celebrity such as La Toya, she didn’t put out any airs and before parting, she told her that she had really enjoyed her trip and the experience and asked politely if she might be invited again sometime in the future.

Her pictorial contained a full page shot of her with her holding the boa, his body squeezed between her legs and his head winding down and resting on her hip. She is holding him with both of her hands, her eyes closed, lips slightly parted as if having an orgasm. The caption accompanying that shot said: I love snakes. I had hoped to do a shot all covered with snakes; I was kind of disappointed there was only one.  

Two and a half years later, (November 1991), she poses again for Playboy to coincide with her memoire La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family. This time around, the pictorial includes two page spread of boa constrictor, one slithering all over her body, between her legs, winding its way up to skirt her breasts and raise its head between them. Reminiscent of the famous Nastassja Kinski billboard, shot in 1981 by America’s master photographer, Richard Avedon. In another one, she is sticking out her tongue at him almost licking him on the mouth with teasingly playful expressions on her face.

That reminded me of the time some years earlier when my secretary Teresa (Velázquez), all wound-up, reported that they had brought in a couple of boa constrictors to the Playboy studio, waiting to be photographed with the Playmate Ruth Guerri (July 1983) as a part of an erotic fantasy pictorial.  It was an eerie feeling to think that slithering around merely two floors above were deadly, slinking and sliding, coiling and un-coiling creatures. As it turns out, there was only one of them. But still. This is how the photography director  Gary Cole remembers the shoot: Steve Wayda did the shot for a photographer’s erotic portfolio pictorial. I was in the studio and I can tell you that Ruth really got into the shoot, so much that both Steve and I were scratching our heads. I don’t think it was a coincidence that God chose a snake to tempt Eve .Upon further inquiry, Gary elaborates: There was only one snake and yes, it was boa constrictor. I kept it in my pants. (Only joking.) The snake owner brought it in a ventilated box. It had been fed just to discourage any idea it might have about taking a bite out of Ruthie. I believe the snake enjoyed the shoot as much as Ruth did. I believe Steve had similar experience with La Toya and the snake. Naked women and snakes seem to get along. I guess so. And about the snake being fed, the first time around posing with one, the question La Toya asked was: when it had been last fed? Once they told her that a couple of days earlier, so I wasn’t worried. Boas aren’t dangerous unless they’re hungry.

And then comes Britney Spears with her 2001 MTV performance of I’m A Slave 4 U with the snake, perched atop her neck and dangling form her extended arms. And considering that there are whole slew of other women and models enamored with snakes of all kinds and shapes, I can’t  help but wonder – what’s it with the beautiful women stretched out naked in all their glory and frolicking with the slithering beasts that scare me even to look at  and even when they are doing their swarming and swishing behind the safe glass walls in an aquarium. The simple answer comes from Dr. Freud himself – the phallic symbol.

But there’s got to be more to it.  This is Gary’s Biblical explanation: According to Christian scripture, the forbidden apple was God’s way of testing Adam, to insure that he would be obedient to God’s commands. The snake was the incarnate devil, the ultimate symbol of evil. And he worked his magic through a woman…since we all know that women are the ultimate downfall of men. The phallic implication  is too strong to ignore.

And still it nags at me. Why did God choose a snake? I mean he could have sent a cuddly rabbit or a little kitty cat, even a sad faced puppy to make Eve go gaga over it and still do her magic. Like among other things; femme fatal in India is often called Nagin – the she cobra. Within Indian mythology, when God found himself in the similar predicament, he would send down from heaven one of this top apsaras. Those celestial beauties are gorgeous, irresistibly sensual and  exceptionally talented in the art of seductive dancing.  And when they dance, their heads and their bodies sway in fluid and languid motion just like that of the cobra charmed by the snake charmer. Both of them in the process of mesmerize and be mesmerized.  A definite downfall of the mere mortal male of the species. And guaranteed to break the deepest samadhi of even the most devout Yogi. Why go through an intermediary?

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, June 28, 2013

ALL ABOUT THE WILD PARTIES AT PLAYBOY

You will hate me for shattering your image of the wild parties you have seen on the TV and featured on the pages of Playboy magazine. May even begin to see some virtue in the saying: the ignorance is indeed a bliss.

.

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Categories Artist

DEVIL IN THE PARADISE

May 30, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

Bonding Over Beer And The Blue Eyed Bitch

rockshowcolor

Life is what happens to you when you’re too busy planning it.

John Lennon

Things happened at the lightening speed. Instead of a three week vacation in California, I am checking in at the Lufthansa counter at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport for their Frankfurt bound flight on my way to Munich. Everything seems to have fallen in place smoothly. My lifelong dream of working for Playboy has come true. Better yet. I will be working for them in Europe. I am elated.

I won’t bother you with details such as cancelled flights, delays, lost baggage and such. Their significance has long been lost. So is that of the icy reception upon my arrival in what would be my stomping grounds in Munich and Essen, West Germany.  But what is still significant in telling of this tale is that how swiftly my joy of having landed my dream job had vanished at the realization of being dropped off smack dab in the middle of the debris of the hostile war zone. That I was neither wanted nor welcomed in the job they had hired me to do.

In nutshell – unlike Time & Life, Playboy’s foreign editions are licensed to local publishers. To Bauer Verlag in Germany.  The contract stipulates that Playboy would have direct editorial and printing quality control of its editions through Playboy hired and paid representatives to be posted on site.  Neither Germans nor Italians or the French were thrilled with this clause in the contract and had put up strong resistance to the condition. In the end, Playboy prevailed. And here I am – unwelcomed and unloved. Imposed upon them. Nobody other than the management knows of their contractual obligation. To make matters worse, instead of building bridges, Gerrit (Huig) – my predecessor had however inadvertently managed to burn some. Leaving me to waddle through muddy waters.

●●●

Up until then, Heinz Nellissen of the Bauer Team was in complete control of their flagship weekly, Quick. Bauer’s editorial offices were based in Hamburg and Munich and they had their own printing plant in Köln for their mass market publications. But they printed their quality publications in Essen at Girardet. And like us at Time, Bauer’s production team had set up their shop right at the printers’ doorsteps. So Heinz and his colleagues had plump jobs like we did at Time. They would do their jobs, stop for a beer or two or three and then go home. Other than occasional visits from their Hamburg based boss, Herr Schatong, for practical purposes, they were their own bosses. It even got better for Heinz when they assigned him to Playboy. Like me, up until then he had done weeklies and to be assigned to a single product a month for him was a child’s play. But to his chagrin, not one, but two of us intruders were dispatched back-to-back to disrupt his paradise.

Little by little, this becomes clear to me. But what am I supposed to do? Quit? Go back to Time? If I had any illusions about such a possibility, that too is shattered just before Christmas when the front page headline in The International Herald Tribune cried: LIFE DIES. I remember walking past the Essen Hauptbahnhof, struggling to hold back tears. My last days at Time were also my most glory days when I was given Life back, something they were forced to remove me from the very first month of my employment with them. In the meanwhile, I have dissolved my home and life in Chicago, my possessions overstuffed inside a container or two floating eastward on the Atlantic and so is my brand new beautiful Buick Skylark.

So suddenly we have two equally as qualified and experienced professionals assigned to the job which either of us could have done with our eyes closed. Plus, Heinz has an edge. He knows the Photogravure inside out of which I only have theoretical knowledge. I have specialized in Offset, the newer printing process that has already made big strides in the States, but the old world still hangs onto the Gravure.  And he has long established pleasant working relationship with the people at the plant.      

We are practically in each other’s way. So what do we do?  We accept each other’s existence –however reluctantly. We begin to build some semblance of working relationship. Thanks to Rainer (Wörtmann) realizing my usefulness, I carve out a role for myself and become his liaison with Essen – to make sure his creative vision is reproduced and reflected in the final product.  Freddy (Baumgärtel) – the Playboy team leader – invites me to attend regular editorial meetings. I become their direct link to Chicago.  I partner and discuss with Heinz the best technical possibilities and solutions. Something our teams at Time did with art directors and editors in New York. Heinz helps me with finding a beautiful one bedroom apartment in Essen’s ritzy Stadtwald neighborhood, so that I would have my own pied-à-terre there instead of being stuck in hotel rooms.  Thanks to Bauer’s discreet and Playboy’s generous expense
accounts, we feast at some of the most exclusive restaurants in Essen, such as Kockshusen, Grugahof, Schinkekrug, Amboss and  get to know each other: first through the professional respect and then slowly to forge a friendship. Instead of me always going to Essen, I have him come to Munich once a month and us two sitting down with Rainer and discuss every single page of the magazine. Heinz is far from being a stern faced German from Ruhr area in North Rhine-Westphalia, but he would still dress up in his sports jackets and ties to my open collared shirts and sweaters.

I even take him to the Suzi Quatro concert in Munich’s Circus Krone and subject him to her deafening screams. At the time Suzi Q from Michigan was all the rage across Europe. Heinz is in awe of the pint size screaming sex bomb, sliding her guitar as big as herself  between her legs, dressed in the skin tight black leather pants and the jeans jacket, tossing her shoulder grazing full head of hair and belting out…

I’m a blue eyed bitch

And I wanna get rich

Get out of my way

Cuz I’m here to stay

I’m the wild one

Yes, I’m the wild one

Those were the days when the concert halls were not gigantic affairs like today and I am still always able to get seats up front within the first fifteen rows. And I remember, we are standing in the arena in front of the stage. Heinz has loosened his tie and removed his jacket and is grooving to the gyrations of this teeny bopper sensation.

Heinz can tell this one better than I could. Also because its his story, and by me trying to tell it, I am  risking being immodest, and worse yet, boastful. In fact I had completely forgotten all about it until Heinz brought it up two years ago when he came to visit me here in Chicago with his wife Lia.  And then I remembered vaguely the tableau in which we stood around at the end of the plant tour to show our visiting production boss John Mastro accompanied by John Groening – a printing executive from the US. I am not sure if the Playboy German edition editorial director Heinz van Nouhuys was also there or not. But there are also Friedrich Karl Schnelle – Girardet’s managing director and Dr. Wilhelm Girardet Jr. himself. And stepping back from the group was Heinz, wishing us all Gute Nacht and Guten Apetit. Dr.Girardet was hosting a dinner for us all at the Schloss Hugenpoet – a very exclusive  hotel and the restaurant around Essen.

‘Where are you going? Aren’t you going to have dinner with us?’ I ask. Heinz doesn’t answer, but the expressions on his face lead me to turn around and look at Messers. Girardet and Schnelle.

‘He is not invited.’ Herr Schnelle whispers.

‘Why not? He is a part of our team.’

‘He doesn’t fit into the present company.’ Dr. Girardet answers, meaning John and John.

‘Well, in that case, I don’t either!’ It just rolls out of my mouth.

India gets all the bad rap for our caste system, and rightfully so. But if this isn’t a caste system of a different kind, then what  is it?  Put in the compromising position and also sensing John and John’s silent approval of me, Dr. Girardet, feeling however  awkward, invites Heinz to join us. And Heinz isn’t even in socio-psychological frame of mind to gracefully decline the invitation and wiggle out of his predicament. If Dr. Girardet has personally invited him, then all he could say is: Danke. Gerne. It enormously pleases me. And relieves John and John of whatever discomfort they must have felt.

‘I have never forgotten that.’ Heinz has often said to me.

So yes, we have bonded. And yet, there remains a certain amount of indignation that I can sense in Heinz. We never talked about it, but I could imagine him feeling at times that here I was, the devil in what was his paradise. Albeit a friendly one and likable even, making it harder that at the end of the day, I would have the final say on the matters we couldn’t agree upon.

There would be small annoyances and disagreements that would play out between us in front of people of the printing company, and whereas before Playboy’s arrival, he would be the only one to scratch his signature on the corrected forms (normally 16 or 32 page on large sheet of paper), now had to be okayed by both of us. But we always managed to reach a compromise and never allowed those things to come between us and our favorite watering hole Amboss nearby. The place we referred to as Axel’s – after it’s owner’s name.  An added attraction was Axel’s Rubenesque but very pretty and flirtatious wife Bärbel. That is until…

Must have been around 3:30 and we are looking at a form and doing color corrections with Girardet’s Hans (Potisch). I no longer remember the exact nature of correction or the extent of it, but we couldn’t seem to have reached an accord and agree to a compromise. If I insisted and Heinz resisted, it must have been something that would cost Bauer fair amount of money in labor, material and lost time. Something Heinz is responsible for. Whatever it was, it must have been important enough to me to correct. An argument ensued. It gets heated. Normally, Hans would step in and suggest a middle way. Not this time. At some point, Heinz gets so angry, he throws his China marker wax pencil across the viewing table. Frustrated he spews out:

‘Verdamt! Du machts was du willst, Ich habe nicht damit zu tun!‘(Damn, you do what you want to do. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.)  Huffing and puffing, he darts out of our loft viewing room and I hear him thumping down the spiral stairs, opening his office door and then violently slamming it close.

Left behind in bit of a daze, after a while, Hans  picks up his wax pencil and begins to mark the proofs spread out on the table and us two finish the job. He rolls up the pages, shoves them under his arm.

‘Gute nacht Haresh. Bis Morgan!’ And he leaves.

I sit down at my desk and take a deep breath. By then it must be 4:30 or later. I got it my way, but I am far from being happy about it. Heinz and I have grown on each other and I thought we had found a way to work together. And we had. And suddenly, there is a lapse.

I gather myself and walk down. Even though the door to his office is partially closed, I know that Heinz is still there. I don’t even think about walking out of there without wishing him good night. I slowly open the door. He is sitting at his desk. Looking pensive and down like a defeated warrior. I hold the partially open door and say:

‘Heinz.’ He doesn’t look up.

‘How about a beer?’ I say. Now he looks up. Quite confused, probably not knowing what to say to that. So he doesn’t respond. The expressions on his face seems to say: What the fuck! Are you crazy or something? You’ve got some balls! I answer to it, as if he really said it.

‘Look, you were doing your job and I was doing mine. Now is after five, feierabend . Why can’t we go have a beer together?’

From the changing expressions on his face I see that he still isn’t sure. Seems flabbergasted at my audacity.  While just over an hour or so a go I had caused him such a humiliation in front of a technician from the printing company over whom he had reigned supreme up until  not long ago.

His eyes level straight at mine. It just comes out of my mouth: ‘You know what? At the end of the day it’s just a fucking job. Let’s go have a beer.’

He lowers his gaze. Shuffles his stuff off the desk and gets up.

‘Na, Gut!’

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia  Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next: Friday, June 21, 2013

BEWITCHED BY THE BOA

Ever since La Toya Jackson asked for a Boa Constrictor to accompany her to the popular television talk show to promote her layout in Playboy Germany, I have often wondered what it is about the snakes that enchant women?

SPRING BREAK

Yup: You read it right. The next post to arrive on your screens will be on Friday, June 21st. I was actually thinking of taking a short break after the 25th post, but seemed both you and I were in a fine momentum, so I just kept going. Now Celia and Jordan are taking a couple of weeks’ vacation to go see their parents “back East,”  and even though Celia offered to double up and illustrate the next two posts, I decided now is as good a time as any for me to take a short break as well. Let’s try not to miss each other. The break will give you time to catch  up and me some extra time to build some inventory. So have wonderful next two weeks and Playboy Stories will be back to its weekly frequency on the 21st of June.

Don’t go away. More exciting stories are still to come 🙂 

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Categories Friendship, Profile

BEAUTY AND THE BREASTS

May 23, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

Let A Pencil Be The Judge

penciltest

‘How can you tell if someone has firm breasts?’ Asks Marie.

Just a couple of hours earlier we sat at the riverside Marina City Restaurant in the Marina Towers. During the course of the evening, I happen to mention to Marie how bummed I was that at the last minute my friend Jena  had backed out on me. At the time I was still working for Time & Life and getting into some serious photography, to an extent that I had not only bought myself the Pentax Spotmatic, and several lenses, flesh unit, filters, tripod and all, but had also set up the dark room of my own in the storage closet of my South Shore Drive apartment. I was better at doing close ups and headshots. I had natural aptitude for it. But now I had gotten into my head like most every artist and photographers that one of the things I would also like to do was to do some female nudes. Jena and I had been good friends  and she offered to pose for me, but had gotten cold feet at the last minute.  Even I didn’t realize how sad I must have looked as I was relating this to Marie – whom I had just started dating.

‘That wasn’t nice of her!’ says Marie in a tone of a little mother comforting her child. And we resume our dinner.

‘I’ll pose for you!’ I hear her say while we are waiting for our coffee and the deserts. I feel her gentle gaze fixed on me as she offers to be my model.

We finish our dinner and rush to my apartment. I am nervous as can be and Marie is too. Doing the nudes is the first for me – it is for both of us and we are not working on being just friends. We have already shot a film or two and now taking a short break. We are sitting on the floor on the generously padded wall-to-wall rug, relaxed enough for Marie to feel comfortable sitting in front of me in the nude.

Marie is not the most beautiful girl on the earth. But not bad looking either. Just  your regular girl next door. Going for her is her youth, she is only twenty three. Not that I am much older either. And she is built like a brick shit house.

‘How?’ I ask.

‘Do you have a pencil?’

‘Sure.’ And I get up and fetch one from the desk in my bedroom. She gets up and stands in the middle of the room, stretches her frame vertically and brings her feet together, as if at attention. Takes the pencil from my hand and levels it against the lower curve of one of her breasts and lets her hand go. The pencil comes tumbling down and lands at her feet. I pick it up and am now standing face-to-face with her.

‘You see?’ She asks. But I’m afraid, I don’t.

‘Let me show you again.’ And she snatches the pencil from my hand and levels it under the other breast and lets go of it. Again it comes tumbling down.

I still don’t get it.

‘You see, my breasts are as firm as can be. The reason the pencil falls down. But if there were even a tiny bit of sagging, they would hold the pencil right where I placed it.’

And then I see her cupping her breasts and slightly cradle them, as if saying good girls! I suddenly feel jealous of her hands.

Now I see. ‘Wow!’ I’m in awe of her proven firm breasts.

Fast forward sixteen years. It’s the spring of 1986. We are in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, shooting a multi-girl pictorial containing of the girls from the countries participating in Mundial ‘86 – the Soccer World Cup – hosted by Mexico that year. We have a private bungalow within the complex of Hotel Krystal Resort.  Secluded and complete with its own outdoor swimming pool. While the crew is busy setting up details of the group shot, the girls splashing in choreographed harmony, the girls are clustered around the shaded patio that connects the house with the pool. Seems like there is some commotion going-on on the patio. The girls are in the different stages of undress, just standing around, sipping on their drinks, talking and surrounding Brenda.

‘Really? They’re beautiful. They sure look real to me!’ I hear one of them say while her gaze fixed on Brenda’s breasts.  As I walk towards the girls to find out what the commotion is all about, they part to let me in.

‘Did you know that she have had a boob job?’

‘Who?’

‘Brenda here.’

‘Is it true?’ I asks Brenda.

‘Yup!’

‘When did you have it done?’

‘Oh, not long ago.’

I look at the proud and pleased expressions on her face and then at her firm-as-boulders pair of breasts. Not long before I had looked at the set of her test shots. And her breasts looked just fine, but when I mention them, she tells me how she had decided to have them enhanced after having looked at those photos.

‘I just wanted to have them bigger and firmer.’ She tells us.

‘They sure look great, wow! I thought the surgery would leave visible cut marks under them?’

‘Not really. Yes, they do, but barely.’ And she lifts both of her breasts with her hands and all I could see underneath them were teeny-tiny incisions.

‘That’s incredible. Do they still feel the same? I mean, to touch?’

‘Of course they do. I sure don’t feel any difference. Neither does my boyfriend. You want to touch them?’

‘No,, its alright!’

‘I don’t mind, really.’ She says and moves closer, as if presenting me two giant scoops of vanilla ice cream topped with cherries. Sure enough, as far as I can tell, they are firm and they feel as natural as any other set I have ever touched.

‘See?’ And I see a smile of satisfaction on her face.

‘That’s great. Now it’s  time to get back to work.’ As I walk back, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they would pass Marie’s pencil test?

A year and a half later. We are doing another multi-girl pictorial. This time in Hong Kong. Its rather late in the night. Must be past eleven. I no longer remember what it was that I needed to communicate to the girls urgently, I knock on Lynne (Austin) (Playmate July 1986) and Shannon’s (Long) (Playmate Australia – September 1985 and US October 1988) door. Unlike in Mexico where each girl had a room of her own, in Hong Kong we have them sharing rooms. Lynne opens the door. They are wide awake and having a glass of wine. Probably one before calling it a day. They are already in their pajamas. Nothing out of ordinary, except that they seem to be holding back something – a smile. A big laugh even.

‘Uhm! What’s going on?’

‘Oh nothing. Just girl talk!’ Shannon chirps coyly and then gives a mischievous sideway look to Lynne.

‘Come on, you can tell me!’ I prod.

‘Should I tell him?’ Asks Lynne.

‘If you want to!’

‘Alright. Why not? Haresh is one of us. Well, Shannon and I were trying to figure out which one of us got the bigger ones? I was convinced that I did.’ That made sense. Lynne is taller and looks proportionally bigger at 5.6 ½” (1.68m) compared to compact Shannon at 5.3” (1.60m).    

‘Don’t tell me  you guys were going to measure them before I knocked on the door!’

‘We were going to, but then Shannon points me to that…’ I follow Lynne’s eyes  moving in the general direction of Shannon’s bed. Pitched on the top of it is what I can only describe as giant twin tents of a bra.

‘She does!!!’ Concedes Lynne.

And I thought it was just us deprived and depraved male of the species that obsessed over the female mammary glands.

Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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 Next Friday, May 31, 2012

DEVIL IN THE PARADISE

Sometimes that’s what you have to be perceived as to forge a close bond. Another story of a unique friendship.

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Categories Playmates, Women

TEMPTATIONS…TEMPTATIONS…

May 16, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

Yes, It Happens

bubbleblowing2

Don’t lie. I know you’ve been dying to ask me – no matter in what form and the words – but have been afraid to or are just being too smug or polite to ask. And I have been knowingly ignoring or just stringing you along, instead of just come out and get it over with. But the time has come for me to face up and come clear. The answer is: YES, in bold CAPITAL letters.

It is the New Year’s day in the year 2000. The first day of the new millennium. Jan (Heemskerk) and I are taking a walk in the woods of the Dutch countryside. Not too far from his home in Alkmaar. It’s wet and it’s muddy and it’s bone chilling cold. But we are bundled up and the crisp cold fresh air does us good. I don’t remember what lead him to ask, but out of a clear blue sky, I hear his words amble in the air.

‘Shah, have you ever regretted having slept with someone? ’Almost in the exact words that I remember an author asking another in an article in The New Yorker – I think the question was directed at John Updike, but I am not sure.

‘Nope! But I certainly have regretted not having done so when I could have.’ I repeat pretty much what Updike or whoever it was had answered. My response puts us in reflective mode. We continue walking in silence. I don’t remember much being said about it. We probably drifted away talking about something else – or more likely picked up the thread of whatever conversation we were having.

Had we stayed on the subject, it probably would have become the hour of truth as is known to happen on any given New Year’s day. What could have been more appropriate than the first day of the new millennium? Had we gone on, this is what I would have liked to share with him.

‘Do  you remember the Dutch starlet you sent to Chicago to be photographed? What was her name? Yeah, her, right. Ans. I think it was the second or the third day of the shoot. We had built this elaborate set for her. Sort of Spanish Colonial arch in the background, and a huge king size bed perched atop the specially built stage. There are potted flowers, pastel pink and the bed is covered with usual props to selectively and enticingly hide and reveal the languishing shapely female form. During a short break, everyone was dispersed off the set. No one had gone far. Pat (Tomlinson), the stylist was in the props room, futzing around. Pompeo (Posar) was probably talking to his wife at home. Do you believe he calls his wife at least a dozen times every day just to tell her I love you? Steve (Conley), the assistant was somewhere else. And then I walk in on the set. Ans has climbed down the bed and sitting at the edge of the stage, relaxing with her legs dangling. Other than her turquoise choker and the matching earrings and the bracelets and a long shawl loosely hanging from her arm, she has not bothered to cover herself.’

‘So how is it going?’ I approach her.

‘Oh, good! They are taking a little break!’ And we indulge in small talk. I am standing in front of her, her face and my waist parallel to each other. And suddenly, like the head of a cobra springing  up from the snake charmer’s basket, she drops the shawl and her hand is cupping my crotch and affectionately squeezing my family jewels. I back up. She looks up at me with a wicked smile. Nothing is said. We just exchange looks. Amazement on my face, lust on hers.’ I know, Jan would have given me a knowing smile at the mention of family jewels, because as good as his English is, when we first started preparing for the Dutch Playboy, scheduled for the US edition was an article titled Family Jewels by Roy Blount Jr.. Everyone in the department would remember the hilarious telex traffic between him and our rights manager Jean Freehill (Connell), trying to explain to Jan what the family jewels meant. To keep it simple, everyone in the department got a copy of all the incoming telexes. So Jean had to be extra careful in answering, oh so delicate a subject matter.   

‘And remember Nicole?  When we were doing 1986 World Cup pictorial  in Mexico and staying at Krystal in Puerto Vallarta? It was about seven in the morning when Pat calls me.

‘Haresh, can you please do me a favor and call Nicole and Emily and make sure they come in for makeup as soon as possible. I am waiting for them. Pompeo wants to get in as many shots as possible before ten so the light is still soft?’

Obviously Pat could have coaxed them out of bed herself, but at times chemistry between the makeup artist/stylist and the models is not the most congenial. Instead of wasting my time calling, I just pull up my shorts, put on a T-shirt and walk over to their rooms. First I knock on Emily’s door. She is already up and about, dressed only in her undies and the Krystal t-shirt, having huevos rancheros for breakfast. We brush cheeks. As beautiful as she is, the whiff of scrambled eggs wafting from her mouth is disillusioning.  But okay. I put her on alert, telling her to be in Pat’s suite for make up no later than in fifteen minutes. Leaving her to get ready, I strut over to the different building of the complex to Nicole’s room.

It takes a few knocks and some sleepy grunts from inside the room before I sense her getting out of bed and shuffle over to open the door. She is similarly dressed or undressed. Shouldn’t really matter. When you have seen them in the nude, day in and day out for several days. But it does. They are their most attractive and the most seductive when they are dressed. When they show up in the evening for dinner in their “street” clothes, squeezed into their tight fitting  jeans and the tops or wrapped in their revealing evening dresses. And when they are not modeling. Just being their own natural self makes them ever so alluring and dangerous. Ditto, when they are scantily dressed like Emily was while ago and Nicole is right now.

Her eyes half closed, she flings her blonde tresses – twists her entire body like a cat waking up from a snooze. ‘I’m so tired. Let me sleep just a little more,’ she says and climbs right back into bed and curls up like an escargot. Pulling up the blanket, bottom of which is squeezed between her legs.

‘Let me sleep just a little more, pretty please!’ She repeats herself and gives me a poor little girl look.

‘I’m sorry Nicole. Come on. Get up. Pompeo will be waiting for you on the beach promptly at eight. All ready to roll. ‘ I sit down at the edge of her bed and prod her more.  She slowly and seductively uncoils herself, sits up and leans slightly towards me and gives me a hurt look. Her cloudy green eyes darted into mine like a double arrowed bow pulled by multiple cupids hovering up above our heads. She seems lost in deep thoughts for a moment and then twirls her torso in the most languid slow motion.

‘I was wondering what would it feel like to make love to you?’ The sentence comes out seamlessly – in a drawl, like a streamer unfurling in a slow billowing motion . And even before I have time to process what she said, her lips are precariously close to mine – fluttering.  Our eyes blend together. And I am pulled on the bed. Or was it me who nudged her down? Doesn’t really matter. Just a small detail. And I am on top of her. Squeezed underneath me, and our lips locked, cradling in my arm is Nicole. Beautiful, beautiful Nicole. And then as suddenly I untangle myself and jump out of bed with; ‘come on Nicole. Get up and get ready!’ She gives me a hateful look. I give her my hand, look into her eyes. ‘Please Nicole!’ I plead.  She lowers her gaze and as she climbs down the bed, looking hurt, I hear her subdued grouse: ‘you’re so cruel!’

Was I thinking of Carolyn back home? Yes. Is that why I peeled myself away before she could find out what it would feel like to make love to me? Or me finding out how sweet would it feel to have made love to her? No.

There were other reasons. The guilt I would feel and the lies I may someday tell. But trickier yet, in my position as the leader of the project, I just couldn’t afford to get involved with one of the twelve girls of the team. It would change the complete logistics and the attitude not only that of   Nicole, but of every girl. And Nicole would suddenly  feel and behave like the queen bee. That was very apparent that very evening. Normally aloof, that night during the dinner, she makes it a point to sit next to me, if not exactly snuggling up, but with a bit more familiarity than up until then.

Let’s  pause here for a sec to consider: What if? Most probably the answer would be: Nothing. I knew that both Nicole and Ans had boyfriends back home. Both of them Europeans; probably had kinds of relationships in which they could include a bit of frolicking in their narration, get a chuckle or two at having seduced a Playboy editor. None of us would have followed up or tried to keep in touch and would be cordial if and when we ran into each other.  Never uttering a word about our little secrets. And for me, had Carolyn asked me, I probably would have told her. Or not. Because at the early stages of our relationship, we had brushed upon the subject and she had said: I would rather not know.

But in nutshell, these liaisons happen only in the moment. Like delicious little bonbons and the bright little rainbows floating off a bubble wand, or the dazzling bouquet of light rays sprouting out of the sparkler. But soon, the bubbles burst, the blinding rays of the sparkler die and the sweetness of the bonbons dissolve on your tongue. So do those short sweet moments fade into the past and then they are gone. Puff!

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, May 24, 2013

BEAUTY AND THE BREASTS

What is this with women and their breasts? And why are we so obsessed with them? Help, Herr Dr. Freud. Because all I feel qualified to contribute is to report on the state of affairs vis-à-vis, you know?

 

 

 

 

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Categories Playmates

FOLLOWING IN GANDHI’S FOOTSTEPS

May 9, 2013 //
1

Haresh Shah

An Emotional Journey Of South Africa

gandhisteps

As long as apartheid ruled, Christie Hefner wouldn’t allow us even to think of doing business with South Africa. The management team totally respected her for her stand. But soon as Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, and when the South African President F.W. de Klerk repealed the remaining apartheid laws in 1991, I felt free to follow-up on a couple of leads that had landed on my desktop. I took my first exploratory trip to the country. Even so, something closer to home was nagging at me. Because if you are born of my generation in India, taking a trip to South Africa has to have some emotional undertones, for that’s where Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement first took roots.

The reason I was full of apprehensions on the night I boarded the Johannesburg bound Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt. I wasn’t quite sure of the kind of welcome that awaited me.  As usual, I had read up on the country and was a fan of J.M. Coetzee fiction, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003.  And had just finished reading one of the most disturbing books about the country,  My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan – a former crime reporter who fled his country after witnessing unimaginable atrocities, returns in search of the truth behind apartheid. He finds the answers – not in the way black and white South Africans live, but in the way they die at one another’s hands.

The heat and humidity hits me as soon as I deplane in the tropical Africa. Standing in front of me in the immigration line is a young black family of four. The husband shuffling all their passports clamped in his right hand. I could feel, or I was just imagining a certain nervousness on the faces of the couple as they moved up in the line. Kids, the daughter of about five and the son a few years older were just being kids, jumping and holding onto their parents’ fingers. The passport officers are all whites, dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, like in Australia and New Zealand.  I watch the officer check all their passports and ask the man, how long were they gone? I could only hear “years” and then “England.”  The officer handing him back their passports and flashing a big smile, saying: welcome back home. Both the husband and the wife said in unison,  Thank you very much, and I see expressions on their faces relaxing and then their faces contorting as if about to break down and cry.  When the officer yelled out “next” I could see sudden smiles appearing on their faces. I too had my misgivings up until then, knowing that I too fell in the category of coloured in the country I was entering for the first time. But having witnessed the graceful reception of the black family relaxed me too as I stood in front of the immigration officer.

‘First time in our country?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hope you have a great stay.’

I am met by Greg Psilos,  an aspiring independent publisher who had shown interest in publishing Playboy in South Africa. I check into Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg, walk around the Saturday morning shopping hoards. I don’t see a single non-black soul all through my hour and a half of walk, not even a brown skin one like myself. It feels strange, but hey, I am in their country. I would soon find out that not many white South Africans would dare come into the city center over the weekends. The weekdays were a different story, but that too, after work every evening, they would fly away like migrant birds and into their gated secure homes in suburbs. In fact, I was warned against walking around outside my hotel after hours. But that wasn’t enough to deter me from doing just that. How else does one get to know a new place?

On Sunday, along with a small group of other hotel guests, I take a minibus tour of the notorious segregated Johannesburg slum of Soweto, guided by Opa James. James is your weathered young-old  man – probably in his early to mid-forties – who has now taken upon himself to show the visitors the soft side of Johannesburg’s riotous township. We visit a typical Soweto family and have a beer with them. The idea is to make us feel that they are like any other regular family.

So far so good. I spend three days in Johannesburg before boarding my first domestic South African Airways flight bound for Durban. If not exactly nervous, as I approach the business class cabin of the plane, I can’t help but think of  that image of the movie Gandhi, in which he is kicked out of his rightful place in the first class compartment of the train on which he was traveling  from Durban to Pretoria.

But my fear is immediately expelled by the stewardess who takes my boarding pass and flashes a big smile at me with Welcome aboard Mr. Shah. It’s just a short flight from Johannesburg to Durban and the service provided onboard is as good as that on any other airlines in the world.

I knew that Durban is where Gandhi had first arrived at the invitation of Indian Muslim businessmen to provide legal services. And I am also faintly aware of the fact that Durban has the largest population of the people of Indian origin anywhere outside India. So much so that had I been brought there blind folded, I would certainly not believe that I was anywhere else but in an Indian city. The publishers I was meeting in Durban and elsewhere in the country were all white South Africans. That is: with exception of Anant Singh, of Video Vision, priding in calling himself  the first black movie maker from South Africa.  That meant, despite my pleasant reception in the country, the separation or apartheid  as it is called in Afrikaans had to be real, still.  I didn’t have to wait too long to find out myself.

Upon my arrival in Durban, I am met at the airport by Christopher Backerberg of Republican Press.  We have a drink together in the hotel bar and then I have a free evening. I have checked into Maharani Hotel, situated on Snell Parade right on the Indian Ocean. As the name suggests, it’s ornate with lot of gold and glitter. The lobby floors are all shiny marbles and tightly upholstered burgundy red leather couches in the lobby remind me of an English library.  The reception area is dark paneled wood and behind the counter are three or four young and pretty girls of Indian origin, with sparkling smiles on their faces. And I am quite pleased with my large room with a large bed, overlooking the beach and the ocean. I get goose bumps thinking that if I were to jump into the ocean and swim into the diagonally opposite direction, I could wash up on Chowpati Beach in Bombay and walk home to Mama Shah for dinner.

I have arrived in Durban on November 12, 1991. I meet with the executives of Republican Press on the 13th and the 14th and have a meeting planned with Anant Singh for the afternoon of the 15th. But Anant has arranged for me a city tour in the morning. I have been up and about for quite some time and have walked around the beach before it got to be hot and humid. The beach is practically deserted and its peaceful listening to the ocean waves. The driver, a  young man of Indian origin pulls up in a Mercedes Sports 450 SLC and gives me a comprehensive tour of Durban. Along the way, he asks me whether I’ve already had my breakfast, and I tell him that I have been up for a while, and yes, I did already have a breakfast and that I even had time enough to take a walk on the beach.

‘How long did you walk?’ He asks. A strange question, I think.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Half an hour, three-quarters of an hour maybe.’ I answer. He doesn’t say anything for a while and keeps driving, but his silence is unnerving.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘You know, you couldn’t have been able to do that a month ago.’ He blurts out. I don’t show it, but I couldn’t help but cringe inside.

It suddenly strikes me that almost a hundred years ago to the date, in 1893 to be exact, not only was Gandhi pushed out of his first class compartment at Maritzburg, but also while traveling by a stagecoach between Charlestown and Johannesburg, subjected to sit outside next to the driver and then when the leader of the coach wanted to smoke, he ordered him to sit at his feet, which Gandhi wouldn’t do. He was denied rooms in hotels, and even the ones who took him in would not allow him to eat in the dining room along with rest of the guests. And here I am, his child two generations removed and flying first class and staying in five stars hotels and no one has stopped me or even given a feeling somehow I didn’t belong. Even then I couldn’t just slough off what the driver has just said. But ever optimistic that I am, I also feel that F.W. de Klerk having signed the end of apartheid’s got to be the first step towards the eventual colorless co-existence.

Unbeknown to me, the sea change is taking place across the ocean in India during the five days that I am in South Africa.  Banned from International Cricket by the world twenty one years earlier, the South African cricket team is playing a series of one day international (ODI) games across India. The first country to take them back into the international fold and have been the most gracious hosts. It makes me proud to be born in India and I wish Gandhi were there to witness his  children following in the path of forgive and forget – something he firmly believed in along with Ahimsa and Satyagraha.

I would later read about the South African team’s overwhelming reception  upon their arrival in Calcutta in the 2010 reminiscence of Kanishkaa Balachandran, sub-editor at Cricinfo: Their reception in Calcutta surpassed all expectations. Upon landing, some of the South Africans mistook the large gathering of people near the airport for protesters, but they had actually gathered to welcome the team. Children waved flags, flower petals were showered over the players, and the 15-mile journey took a few hours. The South African captain, (Clive) Rice summed it up perfectly: “I know how Neil Armstrong felt when he stood on the moon.”

For me the most emotional moment came on the evening of the 14th. As it was, South Africa had lost the first two of the series of three games, in Calcutta and Gwalior. Disappointed but not disheartened,  their countrymen are just happy to be playing international cricket. But they win the third game in the nation’s capital, New Delhi. And they win it big. By then I too am caught up in the hype that has blanketed the whole nation.

I stop at the reception to get my key and stop for a while to flirt with the sweet receptionists. I try  to make some lame joke about the series that has just concluded. And I hear them say in unison, BUT WE WON! These are the girls born of Indian parents, but I love their pride in their team. And from what I caught on the television, the crowds in New Delhi and the Indian team too were as jubilant that the visiting team had won. That their first time back in the arena, and it wouldn’t bid well for the hosts to send their guests back home downbeat and defeated.  Far from it. As I am leaving from Johannesburg’s Jan Smut International Airport on the morning of the 16th.. on my way to Bombay via Nairobi, the airport is swarming with the jubilant crowds – not knowing what had brought them there – I get a peek at the deplaning South African team returning home from New Delhi – all smiles and joy on their faces.

They would reciprocate India’s hospitality by inviting them a year later to play four test series on South African soil, billed as the Friendship Series and universally hailed as the historic tour in more ways than one.

 

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, May 17, 2013

YES

Thought the time has come to answer something you have been dying to ask since I began writing this blog 25 weeks ago. All is well and good, but where’s the beef? Come on, after all we’re talking Playboy! Well, just one more week and you would know!

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Categories South Africa

FEEL GOOD SISTER

May 2, 2013 //
3

Haresh Shah

If Only I Could See Through The Depth Of Those Eyes

datsun_finger2

Not knowing what it is I want for lunch, I walk over to Briennerplatz and my feet automatically take me down the steps to Ristorante Positano. Just a few blocks away from Playboy offices in Munich.  It’s a little before two. The place looks deserted. Thinking perhaps they have already closed for the afternoon, I am about to turn around and leave when I hear some shuffling in back of the wardrobe room. A young woman emerges from the dark.

‘I’ll be just two minutes.’ She says, holding up her hand with three middle fingers raised. While I am mulling over why exactly “two minutes”, I notice her open palm. Didn’t she say two? Confused only for a flash, she turns her palm around, looks at it and slowly retracts one of the fingers.  A self-conscious smile breaks out on her face. From what I can tell, she looks Eurasian, with her narrow fish eyes, her smooth round face, and her silky smooth pitch black hair. I see something mysterious hidden behind the depth of those eyes, further intensified by the ambience of that dark corner of the restaurant. This is the image that has remained with me all these years later.

I stop to talk on my way out.

‘Where are  you from?’ I ask. California.’ She answers. This strikes me a bit odd, as if California were an independent  nation. Might as well have been because I have never been there and all that I have heard about it so far tells me that it must be a place like no other.

I tell her, I too am from the States – Chicago to be precise. The two of us making the most unlikely samples of America, still we feel a certain sense of belonging.  I end up inviting her to the house warming party I am having at my brand new apartment. She is delighted and so am I at  having accidentally landed a date with this exotic beauty.

Her name is Ann. Ann Unruh Stevens. She is a mélange of Japanese mother and American father of German descent, a Sergeant Major – an army brat. Born in Okinawa, Japan, she has grown up in Hawaii.  She is unpretentiously pretty and looks striking in her petite frame. And something about her is quite mysterious. The way she talks in whispers and the way she looks at you with kind and friendly way, somehow makes you feel special. I feel a certain spell unfurl and fall upon me through her gentle gaze. I am thrilled at the prospects of seeing her again. And I find myself already building sand castles in the air.

She is on the phone a day or two before the party. She tells me how she is excited and how very much she is looking forward to coming to my party, thanking me profusely for inviting her. It makes me happy that she lingers on the phone, just making idle chat.

‘I was wondering if I could bring “my man” to the party?’ She asks in a voice that is hesitant  and barely audible. My sand castles suddenly crumbling and all my enthusiasm deflated, I am thinking: shit, why would I want “your man” at the party? Weren’t you supposed to be my date? That is like kebab main haddi – literally, a bone in kebab. Nothing can sour more the silky smooth savor of juicy minced lamb delicacy.

What am I supposed to say? ‘Of course, by all means! What’s his name?’

‘Mark  (Stevens).  I really appreciate it. I’m sure you two would like each other.’

Like? To Ann’s chagrin, we hit it off right away. And how?

If I had to profile Jesus Christ, I would describe Mark. A tall, handsome, permanently tanned Californian with shoulder length wavy blonde locks, carefully  trimmed beard and the eyes as blue as coral, filled to the brim with and intelligent kid’s curiosity of the universe. His easy smiles and warm friendly demeanor has me absolutely disarmed.

Fast forward to four years. I am now living closer to them in California. While Ann is at work in the evening, Mark and I hang out frequently. When finished working, Ann would meet up with us, mostly at their place or mine and find us two twirling our snifters filled with Remy Martin, blowing clouds from our cigars and lost deep into whatever it is that we are talking – totally oblivious of her arrival. Probably talking women.  Soon as we hear her footsteps coming closer, we would abruptly  shut up – communicating only with our eyes, holding back our amazement with expressions on our faces like that of two cats just having swallowed the canaries.  Ann, shifting her gaze back and forth, feeling left out and alienated. I remember that one time when she must have felt so humiliated and frustrated that she focuses her gaze sharply on Mark and furiously stamps her foot on the ground: But he is my friend!!!

●●●

But let’s rewind back to Munich. Like a whole bunch of other young Americans, Mark and Ann too are doing their stint in the old world. Along with Gary and Michelle, Dieter and Monika and Kamal, they too become a part of my intimate circle.  Just hanging out, sweating out pores in the sauna, go swimming and then sitting around on the floor, some times sin ropas, drinking beer and wine, them also smoking pot, with candles flickering and the wisps of incense in the air – feeling mellow, we form a permanent bond which would eventually bring me to Santa Barbara, California, and into the living room of their funky farm house, calling ourselves  feel good brothers and a sister.

At this phase in my life, being in Santa Barbara turns out for me to be in the right place at the right time. The early months are difficult and lonely and I often feel lost. Having succeeded in luring me to the end of the continent, Mark and Ann not only felt responsible for my well being, but for a while I also became their mission. Between them two, they initiate me into the southern California life – step by step. Introducing me to new people and new places, breaking me into hearty walks and health foods. Make me enjoy the nature and the pleasure of watching sunsets. We would take off and go up the mountains to Solvang, hang around Mark’s parents’ trailer house up on Lake Cachuma, go skinny dipping in secluded natural grottos. Eating fresh fish and get to appreciate California wines. They break me into completely new laidback lifestyle, devoid of what was until then for me go-go-go  kind of existence.

The house itself is small. There is a long driveway parallel to the farm right off Hollister Avenue that leads you to the small structure. At the back of the house is a fairly large greenhouse where Ann grows vegetables and they also grow their own marijuana.  There is  only one bedroom. The problem farm toilet with septic tank in the backyard. Not to mention 1975 water shortage of California with the consciousness hammered into everyone: If It’s yellow, its mellow. If It’s brown, flush it down. Even sleeping in the living room, I am comfortable. I feel welcome and wanted and loved. The house is furnished with bits and pieces of hand me downs or the garage sale stuff. Funky but warm and cozy. There are afghans and Indian bed spreads and lamps, all with some personal touch.

My wake up call would be Ann futzing around and getting the pot belly stove going before I would flip the covers over and start my day. Mark works for the city – running machines that process the human waste and Ann works in the evening as a waitress at the Italian restaurant Roccos in Isla Vista on the campus. During the days, she runs around, doing errands, keeping me company. In her spare time Ann makes jewelry from her own designs – (http://annstevensjewelry.com/) something she loves to do.

There is a bookshelf and also a bunch of books strewn all around the shelf, containing of the volumes of Tolkien’s Hobbit series,  Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the kind pegged by the book trade as “alternative lit”. The way books are left all over is just a mess to my organized mind, who has all his books and records  alphabetically shelved in neat order. Something that bothers me every time I look at the piles from my bed across the room. So one morning, while Ann is out running errands, I sit down on the floor, take all books off the shelves, line them up on the floor and re-shelve them in alphabetical order in neat rows. Suddenly the floor looks spacious and uncluttered, books accessible. Ann walks in while I am sitting on my bed and admiring my handiwork.

‘Hi, how’s your morning going?’ She greets me with her usual exuberance, and then suddenly stops in her tracks. Looks around. The uncluttered and clean floor, the organized bookshelves. I am waiting for her to crack her big smile and say something like: you’re such a doll. Thanks. Thanks very much. Rush over and give me a hug.

Instead, she looks at me a bit befuddled. Welling up on her face is restraint anger turning into a hurt look.

‘Did it feel good cleaning up? She asks and then pauses, to compose herself.

‘Its alright!’ She adds and works at softening the expressions on her face.

What I feel she most probably wants to say is: Why the fuck you do that? Rightfully so, because I have committed a cardinal sin of inadvertently violating their sense of order.

But she is not the one to dwell on such things, so after all, I do get to see a slight smile, crossing her lips.

●●●

Basically, I am well taken care of by Mark and Ann. What a bargain? Two for the price of one! But Ann still remains my (primary) friend. She is there for me always. Cheerleading me, giving out generous hugs, showering me again and again with I love you,  and often flirting with me shamelessly.  I am absolutely at home.

I still cherish the little things that she would do for me such as her leaving bunches of flowers – freshly cut from her garden – in my apartment in my absence. Leaving little endearing notes. Chauffeuring me around.

To call Mark and Ann pot heads would not do them justice. Their devotion to the weed is more spiritual than its worldly. So much so that Ann would try to seduce me with it in her sweet little ways, by sneaking in and leaving in my spice cabinet a big fat joint or two. ‘Just in case!’ She would say. And be disappointed to see it still there untouched and ignored for months.

And she was there for me to welcome Carolyn and her mother to my house when I was on other side of the world in Australia. She did it better than I would have.

Carolyn and I had not lived together before. We maintain the long distance relationship living four hundred miles (640 kilometers) apart. Her in San Francisco and me in Santa Barbara. She had already moved back east to Minnesota when she found out that she was pregnant.

All this happened very fast. I didn’t know I would be gone for six weeks and Carolyn had packed up and was heading back west, accompanying by her mother, to move in with me. I asked Mark and Ann to welcome them and to make sure that there were a dozen long stemmed red roses waiting for Carolyn in my apartment. Which Ann arranged, but she also added to that a dozen white roses for her mother and attached to them appropriate message from me. Carolyn later told me how overwhelmed and teary-eyed her mother was – not remembering the last time anyone sent her flowers, let alone a dozen long stem roses. But that’s Ann for you. And I got all the accolades:)

●●●

I don’t remember in what context, but I do remember Ann having once said to me that dynamite come in small packages.  And not too long after, this petite little femme just proves that to me.

We are riding in their blue Datsun pickup and are about to exit a strip mall with her at the wheel. She has stopped at the incline of the driveway and is moving her head sideways to make sure there are no cars coming from either direction before she enters the street. Just then a slightly bigger pickup coming from behind swerves in the front and cuts her off like a chef chopping off a fish head. And I see her face turning, fury in her yes. She rolls down the driver side of the window, and yells.

‘Hey Mister!!!’ Her hand stretched out, her elbow firmly planted on the window frame and the palm upturned.  The driver breaks and makes a mistake of looking back.  Her hand springs up in the air and this time its only one – the middle finger snaps up, she flips a violent bird at him and spews out like fire, Fuck you very much! And the driver couldn’t get away fast enough, with his wheels screeching and the breaks grounding and all.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

Haresh Shah

If Only I Could See Through The Depth Of Those Eyes

datsun_finger2

Not knowing what it is I want for lunch, I walk over to Briennerplatz and my feet automatically take me down the steps to Ristorante Positano. Just a few blocks away from Playboy offices in Munich.  It’s a little before two. The place looks deserted. Thinking perhaps they have already closed for the afternoon, I am about to turn around and leave when I hear some shuffling in back of the wardrobe room. A young woman emerges from the dark.

‘I’ll be just two minutes.’ She says, holding up her hand with three middle fingers raised. While I am mulling over why exactly “two minutes”, I notice her open palm. Didn’t she say two? Confused only for a flash, she turns her palm around, looks at it and slowly retracts one of the fingers.  A self-conscious smile breaks out on her face. From what I can tell, she looks Eurasian, with her narrow fish eyes, her smooth round face, and her silky smooth pitch black hair. I see something mysterious hidden behind the depth of those eyes, further intensified by the ambience of that dark corner of the restaurant. This is the image that has remained with me all these years later.

I stop to talk on my way out.

‘Where are  you from?’ I ask. California.’ She answers. This strikes me a bit odd, as if California were an independent  nation. Might as well have been because I have never been there and all that I have heard about it so far tells me that it must be a place like no other.

I tell her, I too am from the States – Chicago to be precise. The two of us making the most unlikely samples of America, still we feel a certain sense of belonging.  I end up inviting her to the house warming party I am having at my brand new apartment. She is delighted and so am I at  having accidentally landed a date with this exotic beauty.

Her name is Ann. Ann Unruh Stevens. She is a mélange of Japanese mother and American father of German descent, a Sergeant Major – an army brat. Born in Okinawa, Japan, she has grown up in Hawaii.  She is unpretentiously pretty and looks striking in her petite frame. And something about her is quite mysterious. The way she talks in whispers and the way she looks at you with kind and friendly way, somehow makes you feel special. I feel a certain spell unfurl and fall upon me through her gentle gaze. I am thrilled at the prospects of seeing her again. And I find myself already building sand castles in the air.

She is on the phone a day or two before the party. She tells me how she is excited and how very much she is looking forward to coming to my party, thanking me profusely for inviting her. It makes me happy that she lingers on the phone, just making idle chat.

‘I was wondering if I could bring “my man” to the party?’ She asks in a voice that is hesitant  and barely audible. My sand castles suddenly crumbling and all my enthusiasm deflated, I am thinking: shit, why would I want “your man” at the party? Weren’t you supposed to be my date? That is like kebab main haddi – literally, a bone in kebab. Nothing can sour more the silky smooth savor of juicy minced lamb delicacy.

What am I supposed to say? ‘Of course, by all means! What’s his name?’

‘Mark  (Stevens).  I really appreciate it. I’m sure you two would like each other.’

Like? To Ann’s chagrin, we hit it off right away. And how?

If I had to profile Jesus Christ, I would describe Mark. A tall, handsome, permanently tanned Californian with shoulder length wavy blonde locks, carefully  trimmed beard and the eyes as blue as coral, filled to the brim with and intelligent kid’s curiosity of the universe. His easy smiles and warm friendly demeanor has me absolutely disarmed.

Fast forward to four years. I am now living closer to them in California. While Ann is at work in the evening, Mark and I hang out frequently. When finished working, Ann would meet up with us, mostly at their place or mine and find us two twirling our snifters filled with Remy Martin, blowing clouds from our cigars and lost deep into whatever it is that we are talking – totally oblivious of her arrival. Probably talking women.  Soon as we hear her footsteps coming closer, we would abruptly  shut up – communicating only with our eyes, holding back our amazement with expressions on our faces like that of two cats just having swallowed the canaries.  Ann, shifting her gaze back and forth, feeling left out and alienated. I remember that one time when she must have felt so humiliated and frustrated that she focuses her gaze sharply on Mark and furiously stamps her foot on the ground: But he is my friend!!!

●●●

But let’s rewind back to Munich. Like a whole bunch of other young Americans, Mark and Ann too are doing their stint in the old world. Along with Gary and Michelle, Dieter and Monika and Kamal, they too become a part of my intimate circle.  Just hanging out, sweating out pores in the sauna, go swimming and then sitting around on the floor, some times sin ropas, drinking beer and wine, them also smoking pot, with candles flickering and the wisps of incense in the air – feeling mellow, we form a permanent bond which would eventually bring me to Santa Barbara, California, and into the living room of their funky farm house, calling ourselves  feel good brothers and a sister.

At this phase in my life, being in Santa Barbara turns out for me to be in the right place at the right time. The early months are difficult and lonely and I often feel lost. Having succeeded in luring me to the end of the continent, Mark and Ann not only felt responsible for my well being, but for a while I also became their mission. Between them two, they initiate me into the southern California life – step by step. Introducing me to new people and new places, breaking me into hearty walks and health foods. Make me enjoy the nature and the pleasure of watching sunsets. We would take off and go up the mountains to Solvang, hang around Mark’s parents’ trailer house up on Lake Cachuma, go skinny dipping in secluded natural grottos. Eating fresh fish and get to appreciate California wines. They break me into completely new laidback lifestyle, devoid of what was until then for me go-go-go  kind of existence.

The house itself is small. There is a long driveway parallel to the farm right off Hollister Avenue that leads you to the small structure. At the back of the house is a fairly large greenhouse where Ann grows vegetables and they also grow their own marijuana.  There is  only one bedroom. The problem farm toilet with septic tank in the backyard. Not to mention 1975 water shortage of California with the consciousness hammered into everyone: If It’s yellow, its mellow. If It’s brown, flush it down. Even sleeping in the living room, I am comfortable. I feel welcome and wanted and loved. The house is furnished with bits and pieces of hand me downs or the garage sale stuff. Funky but warm and cozy. There are afghans and Indian bed spreads and lamps, all with some personal touch.

My wake up call would be Ann futzing around and getting the pot belly stove going before I would flip the covers over and start my day. Mark works for the city – running machines that process the human waste and Ann works in the evening as a waitress at the Italian restaurant Roccos in Isla Vista on the campus. During the days, she runs around, doing errands, keeping me company. In her spare time Ann makes jewelry from her own designs – (http://annstevensjewelry.com/) something she loves to do.

There is a bookshelf and also a bunch of books strewn all around the shelf, containing of the volumes of Tolkien’s Hobbit series,  Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the kind pegged by the book trade as “alternative lit”. The way books are left all over is just a mess to my organized mind, who has all his books and records  alphabetically shelved in neat order. Something that bothers me every time I look at the piles from my bed across the room. So one morning, while Ann is out running errands, I sit down on the floor, take all books off the shelves, line them up on the floor and re-shelve them in alphabetical order in neat rows. Suddenly the floor looks spacious and uncluttered, books accessible. Ann walks in while I am sitting on my bed and admiring my handiwork.

‘Hi, how’s your morning going?’ She greets me with her usual exuberance, and then suddenly stops in her tracks. Looks around. The uncluttered and clean floor, the organized bookshelves. I am waiting for her to crack her big smile and say something like: you’re such a doll. Thanks. Thanks very much. Rush over and give me a hug.

Instead, she looks at me a bit befuddled. Welling up on her face is restraint anger turning into a hurt look.

‘Did it feel good cleaning up? She asks and then pauses, to compose herself.

‘Its alright!’ She adds and works at softening the expressions on her face.

What I feel she most probably wants to say is: Why the fuck you do that? Rightfully so, because I have committed a cardinal sin of inadvertently violating their sense of order.

But she is not the one to dwell on such things, so after all, I do get to see a slight smile, crossing her lips.

●●●

Basically, I am well taken care of by Mark and Ann. What a bargain? Two for the price of one! But Ann still remains my (primary) friend. She is there for me always. Cheerleading me, giving out generous hugs, showering me again and again with I love you,  and often flirting with me shamelessly.  I am absolutely at home.

I still cherish the little things that she would do for me such as her leaving bunches of flowers – freshly cut from her garden – in my apartment in my absence. Leaving little endearing notes. Chauffeuring me around.

To call Mark and Ann pot heads would not do them justice. Their devotion to the weed is more spiritual than its worldly. So much so that Ann would try to seduce me with it in her sweet little ways, by sneaking in and leaving in my spice cabinet a big fat joint or two. ‘Just in case!’ She would say. And be disappointed to see it still there untouched and ignored for months.

And she was there for me to welcome Carolyn and her mother to my house when I was on other side of the world in Australia. She did it better than I would have.

Carolyn and I had not lived together before. We maintain the long distance relationship living four hundred miles (640 kilometers) apart. Her in San Francisco and me in Santa Barbara. She had already moved back east to Minnesota when she found out that she was pregnant.

All this happened very fast. I didn’t know I would be gone for six weeks and Carolyn had packed up and was heading back west, accompanying by her mother, to move in with me. I asked Mark and Ann to welcome them and to make sure that there were a dozen long stemmed red roses waiting for Carolyn in my apartment. Which Ann arranged, but she also added to that a dozen white roses for her mother and attached to them appropriate message from me. Carolyn later told me how overwhelmed and teary-eyed her mother was – not remembering the last time anyone sent her flowers, let alone a dozen long stem roses. But that’s Ann for you. And I got all the accolades:)

●●●

I don’t remember in what context, but I do remember Ann having once said to me that dynamite come in small packages.  And not too long after, this petite little femme just proves that to me.

We are riding in their blue Datsun pickup and are about to exit a strip mall with her at the wheel. She has stopped at the incline of the driveway and is moving her head sideways to make sure there are no cars coming from either direction before she enters the street. Just then a slightly bigger pickup coming from behind swerves in the front and cuts her off like a chef chopping off a fish head. And I see her face turning, fury in her yes. She rolls down the driver side of the window, and yells.

‘Hey Mister!!!’ Her hand stretched out, her elbow firmly planted on the window frame and the palm upturned.  The driver breaks and makes a mistake of looking back.  Her hand springs up in the air and this time its only one – the middle finger snaps up, she flips a violent bird at him and spews out like fire, Fuck you very much! And the driver couldn’t get away fast enough, with his wheels screeching and the breaks grounding and all.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Soon as the South African President F.W. de Clark repealed the last vestiges of apartheid in 1991, I took my first exploratory trip to the country. But if you are born of my generation in India, taking a trip to South Africa has to have some emotional undertones, for that’s where Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement first took roots.  Never mind that the purpose of my trip was to study the feasibility of publishing Playboy there.

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THE STORY OF MY TUXEDO

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Soon as the South African President F.W. de Clark repealed the last vestiges of apartheid in 1991, I took my first exploratory trip to the country. But if you are born of my generation in India, taking a trip to South Africa has to have some emotional undertones, for that’s where Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement first took roots.  Never mind that the purpose of my trip was to study the feasibility of publishing Playboy there.

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Friendship, Profile

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

April 25, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

The Beauty That Only Mothers Can See

momknows3

‘How about Terry?’  Bill asks. The question is directed more to his wife Irene than to me. And then looking at me, he adds: ‘You’ve got to see Irene’s daughter Terry. She is such a knockout!’

‘Bill!!!’ Goes Irene.

‘What? I think Terry is beautiful, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, she is, but…?

‘But what? I think she would make a perfect Playmate! She is just what Haresh just described. An all American pretty girl next door. What could be more American than a girl from Park Forest?’ He adds and smiles at his own clever connection – certainly a proud resident of southern suburb of Chicago.

‘She probably would, but…!

‘But what? Come on Irene. You’re just being modest. Let our friend Haresh here decide!’ Irene gives me a help me look.

‘Do you have a problem with that?’ Now excited, Bill continues.

‘Not really.’

So it went for a while between husband and wife.

Irene looks intrigued and seems comfortable with her daughter posing for Playboy.

‘Let me talk it over with Terry first.’ She says finally.

Encouraged, I put in my bit: ‘If Irene doesn’t mind and if Terry would be comfortable posing for me, I will be happy to submit her photos to Playboy here in Chicago.’

I have just returned back to the States and am spending some weeks in Chicago as I drive cross country to my final destination of Santa Barbara, California. Bill (Houston) is an old bowling buddy of mine. Both him and Irene work for Time Inc., my previous employers. We are having lunch near Time & Life building in near north side of Chicago. Catching up.  Bill is Irene’s second husband and we are talking about Irene’s daughter.

About future plans, I’m telling them that even though I may eventually look for another job, for the time being I was enjoying my freedom and intended to concentrate on my writing – something I had always wanted but never had enough time to do. And continue pursuing the nude photography for a while, especially since I had eyes and ears of the people at Playboy.  And I tell them about the test shootings I have done so far and how two of them had already made it to the pages of Playboy in Germany. And who knows? I might just be able replicate the same in the US.

Irene calls me a couple of days later to tell me that she had spoken to Terry and invited me over for lunch at their home on Saturday. She sounded quite enthusiastic and thrilled at the prospect of her daughter becoming a photo model, pretty as she was.

On Saturday, I get into my Buick and drive down to their home in Park Forest, a thirty miles ride (48 kilometers) south of downtown Chicago. Its your typical ranch style three bedroom family house, with the living areas down below and the bedrooms several steps up above.  Sitting at the kitchen table are Bill and Irene and Irene’s mother, having coffee. They call Terry down from her room. She is pretty for sure in an all American way. Straight dark hair hanging down below her shoulders, parted in the middle to frame her face like that of Joni Mitchell. She doesn’t wear any makeup that I can detect.  Looking unpretentious and simple, down home un-intimidating  beauty that one would have seen walking the isles of a local supermarket. She is probably nineteen or twenty and lacks that sparkle and the spunk that would make her sexy and desirable. Basically, she is Eliza of My Fair Lady, who can be transformed into a sophisticated and sexy young woman. We talk as I munch on my sandwich. She is soft spoken and probably a bit intimidated in my presence. Her smiles come easy, but shy – precisely what I find quite seductive as much as her hesitant and sparse eye contacts. Nothing to be concerned about, she would perk up once we are alone.  I know, there is a forest preserve not far from where they live and even though its mid-October, its warm enough for us to do the shoot outdoors in the nature. And she is  up for it.

‘You can use our bedroom upstairs. There is plenty of light in there.’ Offers Irene.

I am not so sure, with her parents and grandma around how she would feel about prancing around in the nude.  Even I myself feel a bit ambivalent. But seeing that none of her family in the room seem to have any reservations; why not?

‘You’re not inhibited because I am here, are you?’ Grandma chides her granddaughter. To which Terry goes, grandma!!  And that breaks the ice.

I tell Terry to go upstairs and undress and call me when she’s ready. When I walk up and enter the bedroom, she is lying on the bed, in a pose similar to the famous Modigliani reclining nude. The expressions on her face passive and somewhat timid.  Seen through my lens, there is no denying that she is a real beauty. Her figure is near perfect and as alluring as is her pretty face. Her skin is smooth as silk devoid of any blemishes. She has followed my instructions to Irene about making sure to remove her bras and panties hours before so that the elastic marks from the either wouldn’t show on her body – something I had learned from Pompeo Posar, while assisting him in Munich.

There is enough light coming through the bay windows. The room is furnished with a king size bed and a couch against the wall and ample space on the carpeted floor. The couch has large plaid and the rug irregular patterns on them, not the most ideal backdrops. But the first session is normally meant for the model and the photographer to get acquainted and comfortable with each other, build a certain rapport and let the resulting photos later show what poses and camera angles work better than others. She relaxes after a few sips of wine and the session goes well. I still want to shoot outdoors and she too is up for it. One of my strengths as a photographer is the head shots and this is something better done with a longer lens and in an open space that gives you shallow depth of field. So we get out of the house. I don’t remember on that very afternoon or a few days later – and go to the forest preserve. Terry and I are happy with the results.

Beyond that I drop off a selection of her photos to Alfred DeBat, who works as #2 to Lee Hall in Chicago’s Foreign Editions, and serves as a liaison between our group and the US editors.  I get into my car and continue driving west until I finally reach Santa Barbara, exactly  three months after I had landed in New York.  I lived with Mark and Ann in their farm house for a month and decided it was as good a place as any to settle for a while. I found myself a spacious two bedroom apartment not far from UCSB campus and the tar covered Pacific shore in the valley of San Ynez mountain range. Knowing that unlike in Germany, selecting a Playmate in the US was a long drawn out process with voting among editors and then still subject to Hugh M. Hefner’s seal of final approval. I leave it at that, but working with Terry further inspired and encouraged me to give my photographic ambition a serious push.

Luck would have it that the German Playmate Barbara too was now living in Southern California. Even though when still in Munich, we didn’t quite hang out, but when I called her in San Clemente, it was as if we  were long lost friends reunited. We decided to do some projects on spec and see if we could get them accepted, if not by either German or the US Playboy then probably by Oui – the American edition of highly successful Lui – the  magazine which Playboy had cross-licensed from the French publisher Daniel Filipacchi. I had done some small writing and contributed some pix to Oui, thus knew some of the editors.

Forming a creative partnership with Barbara further encouraged me to expand my technical abilities.  Whereas up until then I used only natural light, I invested in a set of artificial lighting equipment.

One of the projects we had most fun doing was A Day in Life based on the Beatles’ song I read the news today oh boy!  We cleared out my dining area and papered the entire walls, the floors and even the pillow with the pages of Sunday edition of The Los Angeles Times, and created a   tableau  of her waking up, reading the paper and tearing the pages up in tatters, feeling furious and frustrated at how much in turmoil the world found itself in one single day!!

Nothing came out of  those efforts, but they gave us something fun to do together which evolved in a lifelong friendship. I guess we both must have felt lost in our new environment and having found each other from the “home town” was quite comforting.

Also during the period both Mark and Ann were super supportive of my efforts and I ended up photographing their friend and also found a pretty young lady at the local laundromat to pose for me.

At the time I was collecting and living on my unemployment benefits, which required me to report personally once every week to the unemployment office in downtown. As everywhere else, the mention of Playboy as my employers triggered their curiosity. Normally it would be the beautiful reddish blonde Monica at the window and we would talk about the job I had just left and what it was then that I was now doing. Once in a while I would find Monica’s boss Mrs. Buckwalter at the window. Also pretty, but a woman in her mid to late forties. She was even more inquisitive. After weeks of our talking, she wondered out loud:

‘I wonder if one of my daughters would make it as a Playmate?’

Apparently she had twins. She pulled out their photo from her purse to show me. They were in their early twenties and it wasn’t just their mother talking,  the girls were indeed very pretty.

‘Would they want to give it a try?’

‘I don’t know.  But if you think they even have long shot at making it, I will talk to them.’

From what I understood, the girls didn’t seem too excited about the prospect but were intrigued enough to want to meet and speak with me.  Over the phone, the sister who was talking to me happened to mention how much they loved Indian food. So that was easy!

Not only were they pretty, they were also smart and spunky and happy young women. Perfect Playmate candidates. Fun to have them around as dinner companions.

I hadn’t yet broached the subject and they didn’t seem to be in hurry either to bring it up. We were just eating, drinking and enjoying being together. And then out of a clear blue sky, the older by five minutes sister Shannon, looking at her five minutes younger one  Emma says:

‘Poor Mom!’

‘Why is she poor?’ I quip.

‘Just that she is really convinced that we could be Playmates.’

‘Well, she is right.’

‘No, we don’t think so.’

‘Let me decide. I wasn’t sure before, but now that I have seen you in flesh and blood, walking and talking, I am sure that it would be worth trying. Also what you have going for you is the concept of double trouble and double delight.  Perfect sister act.’ I pause, and then continue, ‘That’s, if  you two are up to it!’

‘That’s the thing. We actually aren’t. We agreed to see you, because she spoke so highly of you and mainly just to please her. Thinking what must it have taken for her to make you see us!’

‘Not much, once she showed me your snapshot.’

‘Thanks. You’re being kind! But as I mentioned, us sisters just aren’t into it. And we want you to know that has nothing to do with the nudity.  It’s just not something either of us aspires to’

‘In that case, you certainly shouldn’t.’

‘We’re glad you understand.  We are also glad that at least we agreed to come out and see you, because this evening has been so delightful.  And the food!!’

Sorry dear Mother.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Related Stories:

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

HUNTING FOR THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

MY SWEET LORD

THE TALES OF TWO PLAYMATES

Next Friday, May 3, 2013

FEEL GOOD SISTER

There are images that remain with you forever. One of them is me meeting Ann for the first time at Ristorante Positano in Munich, almost exactly forty years ago. The beautiful mélange of the east and the west and her mysterious eyes shining through that dark corner of the restaurant had such a mysterious look that my second name for her is mystery lady.

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Categories Playmates, Women

SEX EDUCATION À LA JAPONAISE

April 18, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

Lessons In Interactive “’Bout The Birds And The Bees”

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My brain is still busy processing what I had just seen, when I see flailing hands of the several young men in the front row. Yastaka Sasaki explains to me that they are playing rock, paper, scissors. The winner would then get to climb up the stage and get to fuck the girl who has just concluded the “second act” of her striptease routine and is now waiting in front of the sparse post-lunch time crowd of young “salarymen”. Completely naked, she is squatted there on the stage floor on her knees, legs spread wide apart, the spotlight still focused on the exposed glistening inner layers of her vulva peeking through her dense and dark, artfully manicured patch of pubic hair. Her face wears a contemptuous frown with a forced smile on her lips. Staring intensely at the faces of the men in front of her, as if daring the one who would take her as a prize right there on the stage with everyone in the audience watching.  Having eliminated the rest, about six of them, the winner eagerly climbs up the stage, and honest to God, there they are, just a few feet away from our eyes – her lying down on her back, opening her legs wider, her knees pointing upward like a dead duck on a kitchen table waiting to be stuffed. Her hands resting on sides, as if preparing to lift her slight frame into a bridge position for a gym routine.

The man, having hastily removed his clothes wedges himself between her open legs, tugging at his penis, possibly to give it an extra  bit of hardness, slips on a condom and then plunges it into the girls’ already waiting and well lubricated vagina and begins to pump. He doesn’t last long. A minute, two at the most, before falling by her side. What I remember still the most is the cryptic smile crossing the girl’s thin lips. Her little fish eyes fluttering, her getting up, picking up her discarded clothes  from the stage and walking away.

I am in Japan on behalf of Playboy. One of the enticements my boss Lee Hall had dangled in front of me to tear me away from the sunny Santa Barbara, California to the cold and cloudy Chicago, was an assignment in Japan.

Lee made good on his promise and sent me on a short exploratory trip to Tokyo within the first months of my moving back to Chicago in 1979. But it wasn’t until the mid 1985 that he actually  assigned me in earnest to the project. In his opinion, though the Japanese had started out wonderfully well ten years earlier, now the sales had began to go south and something needed to be done. On their part, our partners Shueisha had brought in a whole new editorial team and Lee felt that I could form a part of that team, and help them lead in a fresh editorial direction, thus helping them  gain back some of their lost readers and hopefully find some new ones.

Flattered as I was, technically I was still the division’s Production Director. Perhaps because I had proven my editorial impulse, working with Playboy in the Netherlands, two years earlier, he must have felt that I could do the same with the Japanese. But Japan was not little Netherlands. Plus I had lived and worked in Holland for several months and had some idea of what the country and its people were like.  But Japan seemed like a completely different planet. The two times that I had been there for short visits, I couldn’t say with any certainty that I even had a least  sense of what the Japanese were all about.  Even those two short trips had made me realize that the Japanese were like no other people I had ever known. I needed to know more about the country, the people and its culture before I would take on the challenge.  Lee didn’t only understand but totally concurred with me

He  recommended that I read Edwin Reischauer’s The Japanese – in his opinion, one of the most defining books ever written about the country and its people.  My first sense of Japan came from reading Ek Zalak Japan Ni (A Glimpse at Japan)  by the most prolific Indian artist and writer, Aabid Surti, who has since become a close friend. I had also read the Japanese novelists that included Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima. I added to them, Behind the Mask by Ian Buruma and Pictures from the Water Trade by John David Morley. Several months later, I felt prepared enough to board the Northwestern flight to Tokyo.  But I still wasn’t ready to be face-to-face with the Japanese editors and the executives of the giant Shueisha Inc., who held the license to publish the magazine. What I wanted to do first of all was to get to know and experience Japan on my own.

●●●

I arrived in Tokyo on Monday night. Checked into the Imperial Hotel. Got a good night’s sleep, dumped my baggage in the hotel’s storage.  A duffle bag slung over my shoulder, I ventured out accompanied by our Tokyo rep Ray Falk’s assistant Yastaka Sasaki. We boarded the outbound Hakusana #1 – Japan’s famed  Shinkansen – the bullet train, that would take us  from Tokyo’s Ueno to Kanazawa.

There we checked into an old world charming inn, Miyabo Ryokan.  And for a week crisscrossed  the country, visiting campus in Kanazawa, hanging out at student cafes and bars, eat at all night Japanese restaurants, browse bookstores, interview students in their club, go discoing in a place called – of all things, Maharaja.  Visited Meiji Mura – the open air architectural museum and also spent some time watching middle aged housewives amidst the deafening clanging of Pachinko Parlors, their gazes fixed on the pinball machines and their hands frantically pulling the handles as if on auto pilot.  Absolutely amazing! Staying always at Ryokans, the  traditional Japanese Inns with tatami mattresses on the floor, with the center of the tiny room serving as the spot where you lounged, slept and dined. Eating dried fish, sticky rice and green tea for breakfast which tasted awful, but still! On the trains we ate box lunches and in towns stuck to eating at down home sushi, yakatori and tepanyaki restaurants.

The idea was to observe, experience and absorb as much as one humanly can of  the country, its people and their lives within six short  days.  Also to see places and people where our readers are most likely to be. Perhaps even glean some insight into them. Basically, experience first hand the smells, the sounds and the sights of the land of the Rising Sun.

‘There is something else that you must know and see about the Japanese young men,’ Sasaki said, if a bit hesitating.

‘Sure.’

So here we are in Toyota city of  Nagoya, sitting in a small dingy and dim lit place called Tsurumai Theatre Live Strip Show.  Its  no bigger than a large living room with a small round stage at the other end, in front of which are several rows of randomly placed individual chairs with vending machines on the wall behind the audience. Machines are stocked with Coke and other soft drinks as well as an assortment of Japanese beers. Unlike what one would expect in a place like this, the beverages are prized the same as they would in a company cafeteria. There is no bar, neither the girls coming out in the audience to hustle.  I remember, the entrance fee being an  equivalent of US$ 12.- which even by the standards of 1985 was cheap, very cheap by the Japanese standards.

Not much different from the striptease joints in Soho district of London, except the audience and no hassle ambience. Most every one here is plus or minus twenty five years of age, compared to  me at forty five and Sasaki a bit younger, we would be considered dirty old men. If not quite the middle aged geezers of London. Other than a bit of  commotion at the end of the performance, with the men in the front row playing scissors, paper and rock, audience is extremely well behaved, almost reverential. They are all dressed in their young “salarymen” uniform of dark western suites and mostly white shirts with appropriately somber ties.

But what is different is the show itself. No holds barred to say the least. The dance routine as mechanical. The girls would strip in the standard, one piece of clothing at a time till she is completely naked.  Normally, this is where the show must end. But no, it serves just a warming up for more routines to follow.

The spotlight is focused on the center of the girl’s wide open legs, she inches forward to the edge of the stage where the heads of the scissors, paper, rock crowd is bopping up and down to get a closer look at the innermost anatomy of the other sex. She puts her index finger and the thumb on either side of the skin surrounding outer lips and stretches them open even farther, looking over the heads of half a dozen or so men now hovering over her crotch. And then she moves her hand and extends it to take one of the men’s outstretched hand in hers. Has him fold rest of his fingers and let the index finger stick out. A pack of condom appears in her hand, which she tears open with her teeth and slowly sheaths the man’s finger with it, holds and guides it slowly inside her vaginal canal, guiding him to vacillate it in and out motion and then lets him do it on his own. It is no longer erotic for me. If I did feel aroused earlier in the act, now I could feel my arousal deflecting. And yet,  as outrageous as it is, its absolutely fascinating. The girl guiding the man’s finger in and then allowing him to explore on his own, as if handing your little kid the house key and teaching him how to open the door

The music changes and another girl saunters on the stage. This one is dressed like a nurse in starched white uniform, head piece and all, carrying a small emergency kit, a white box with the red cross  painted on the lid. The same routine. Removing of the clothing from the head piece down to the shoes and eventually the skimpy pair of panties. But even while the dance is in progress, I notice something in the background, which I presumed to be just a mesh screen to cover the wall.  Nope! Now the back of it is lit up and one could sense something else going  on behind the screen.  It now looks like back-lit silver threads, hanging from the ceiling down to the top of the stage and behind that is the silhouette of a couple frolicking in the nude. I give Sasaki a sideway glance.

‘One of the losers of the scissors, paper, rock can buy her services by paying extra.’

Set up in the background is a rudimentary bedroom with a full size mattress on the floor. The young man is lying on it on his back, the girl is leaning down and massaging his cock and when she has brought it up to its full glory, she pulls out a pack of condom from her little purse  lying by the side of the mattress, tears the foil open and slips it over his penis in what seemed like a ritual manner. She ties her hair in a pony and then plunges down her open mouth to engorge him and begins to oscillate, as if also to the rhythm of the music being played for the stripper in the  foreground. A smile breaks out on my face as I once again look sideways at Sasaki, amazed and shaking my head. What I am thinking is: So these are our readers!! And this is in the country where they hire kids to blotch out pubic hair in imported magazines?  

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

RELATED STORY

TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN’

Next Friday, April 26, 2013

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Playboy once ran a pictorial, Father Knows Best (February 1979), in which they ask: Would you let your daughter pose nude for  Playboy? How about mothers? Would you?

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Categories Culture

FACE TO FACE WITH JAN CREMER

April 11, 2013 //
0

Haresh Shah

The Bad Boy Of Holland And The “Future Husband” Of Jayne Mansfield

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For those of you who have no clue who is  the bad boy of Holland, here is essential Jan Cremer in his own words. ‘ I am the best painter, I am the best writer.  I am for sure the best journalist of the Dutch language, and  certainly one of the best writers in the world’. He said to the writer and ex Playboy Holland editor, Guus Luijters for his book, Jan Cremer in Beeld.

He once famously said: ‘Rembrandt? I never heard of him. I’m not interested in sport.’

You have to be brilliant to utter such arrogant and provocative words. Sounds more like something coming out of the big mouth of  Cassius Clay a.k.a. Muhammad Ali, who said in his October 1964 Playboy interview: ‘I’m the greatest, I’m so pretty. People can’t stand a blowhard, but they’ll always listen to them,’, than from the mouth of a gentle Dutch writer and artist.  Jan Cremer too must have realized the shock value of his utterances spewed out in sound bites the way before there was a sound bites. Or could it be that he was just reading off  the script laid out by Cassius Clay?

And get this: He dedicated his book Ik Jan Cremer thus: For Jan Cremer and Jayne Mansfield. About which he said to Jules Farber, in Holland Herald, ‘It was the era when Jayne, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell were the big American sex symbols. For me, Mansfield was it – the voluptuous contemporary. Rubens woman.’ To coincide with the publication of I Jan Cremer in America, his New York agent arranged a meeting between Jayne and Jan for a publicity photo. ‘And wham! We went to South America for six months…and then we lived in Hollywood for another half year. Jayne introduced me to everyone as her future husband.’ And this isn’t  hype or a boast.

●●●

My first awareness of Jan Cremer came on the very second day of my first arrival in Holland in the summer of 1965. I was offered a summer internship by Drukerij Bosch in Utrecht. The printing plant specialized in producing paperbacks. I come from a family of pioneers in paperback publishing in India. And I loved books. To see all those many books piled high on their pallets all across the plant was for me like the kid let loose in a candy store. Among the piles, the biggest one was what looked like an unassuming book titled Ik Jan Cremer. A very simple black and white cover with the image of a menacing looking young man dressed in an all out denim outfit, perched atop a motorbike, his gloves clad hands gripping the wide handlebars, his head covered also with the denim version of the Dutch fisherman’s hat, complete with biker’s goggles, looking tough in the image of James Dean, the bike moving  dangerously towards you, as if to run you over.

What I realized over a period of time was that Bosch had devoted one printing press exclusively to printing nothing but Ik Jan Cremer, day in and day out. Published just a year earlier, the book was now in its fourth printing and there was no end in sight, because they couldn’t print and bind them fast enough to fill the shelves from where they immediately flew off. A month later, I was assigned a statistical project to track the sales of the paperbacks published and sold in various markets . When I returned to resume my internship during the Christmas break, Ik Jan Cremer, as months earlier, hadn’t budged from its # 1 spot on the Dutch bestseller list.  The same press still devoted to printing those same pages. The only difference was an appearance on the cover of a wide red band across the upper left hand corner screaming BESTSELLER and a bit lower, a round, larger than a postal stamp like image saying 300,000 copies sold, 350,000 copies sold, the numbers climbing with every subsequent printings.  When I ran into him quite by an accident in the summer of 1983, the book was translated into thirty some languages and it was still going strong in Holland after almost twenty years of its publication, with forty plus printings and sales of more than 800,000 copies in Dutch only.

It was the most controversial book of the time, and everybody – everybody was talking about it. And I also remembered how I wished I could read Dutch. But I had to make do with merely touching and feeling the bound volumes every time I passed by the pallets piling higher and higher.  As if touching it would make its contents instantly understandable to me.

It came out in its English translation only a year later, but  once back in England and buried into my studies and figuring out my future, I never got around to reading it until the summer of 1978, when quite by an accident, I ran into I Jan Cremer while browsing the used bookstore in the shopping mall near my home in Goleta, California. By then, there was also Jan Cremer Writes Again. I bought both and devoured them like a famished  dog.

I was taken by his vivid descriptions of growing up during the second world war, the raw sex and the harshness of the post-war European life and the angry forcefulness of his narration had me spellbound and had left an everlasting impression on me.

●●●

I was having dinner at the restaurant de Warsteiner in Amsterdam, with Jan Heemskerk and Dirk De Moei, the editor-in-chief and the art director designates of soon to be launched Dutch edition of Playboy.  Accompanying us were Gemmy, Jan’s wife and Ans, Dirk’s live-in lady. With us all settled, Dirk noticed Jan Cremer sitting at the bar with his girlfriend Babette.

‘Look who is here. Jan Cremer and Babette.’ I hear Dirk whispering to Jan.

I expressed the desire to go and say hello to the Dutch Legend.  Instead, Dirk invited him and Babette to join us. Jan pulled up a chair next to me and Babette sat at the other end of the table.  Cremer wore burgundy red short-sleeved shirt and a pair of blue jeans. At forty two, he didn’t look anything like my image of the young and rebellious biker, married to his fast and furious motorbike and the connoisseur of female of the species from all across the European continent. He looked and behaved no different from any other respectable Dutch man his age and like them spoke fluent but accented English.

Jan Cremer impressed me as being very down to earth, charismatic, self-confident and a friendly sort of guy. He seemed to feel very comfortable with his success, and very natural with the freedom it offered him with homes in New York, Switzerland and Amsterdam. Had replaced fast motorbikes with the fast cars. All this on just two major books and I would later find out, his art, which sold for large sums. Except for one of them, his 1960 painting of the Japanese War, on which he put the price tag of one million guilders – which at the time would have been quarter of a million dollars. Jan Heemskerk tells me that he is still holding out, for one of these days some sucker just might roll out the dough.

We talked about his books and how much of what is contained in them is true and how much is the product of his “depraved mind”.  At the time he was working on a travel book, his third major effort and supposedly the best he had written so far. But he seemed not in a hurry to finish it.

The conversation switched to Playboy and the kind of women it ran in its pages, especially the Playmates. To put it more or less in his own words: The girls you run in Playboy are too young, too beautiful, too glamorized and too perfect. I like women who have stretch marks on their stomachs, the breasts that sag and asses big and fat. I like to see wrinkles on their faces, feel roughness on their skins and be able to touch the flaws in their bodies.

I could tell that Jan was serious. At the same time, I couldn’t help glancing across the table at  gorgeous Babette, and appraise her in the light of what Jan was telling me about the kind of women he prefers. Babette looked anything but the description of his favored women full of flaws.  She looked to be in her mid-twenties, with beautiful blonde hair tied back neatly in a pony, with very proportionate pointed nose, softly darting eyes and from what I could tell, she possessed a delightful figure, a pretty face, she could have easily been a Playmate.  Ironically, he was working on a photographic collection of nudes and just a couple of months after our meeting, those of Babette’s appeared in the premier issues of Playboy’s Dutch edition. I certainly couldn’t find any flaws in her young and flawless beauty. Much as I would have liked to, I didn’t get to talk much to Babette. But from what I understood, she was an ex-model and was now living and traveling with Jan, they gave me a feeling of a very loving couple, with her assuming a lower profile, which perhaps was also a part of her natural personality.

●●●

Up until now, I hadn’t  thought about that night again. Perhaps when I saw something by Jan Cremer appear in the Dutch Playboy, such as when he did the cover for the edition’s fifteenth anniversary in 1998 and prior to that when his portfolio of erotic paintings of no other than Babette appeared in the pages of Playboy in all her carnal glory. And when I read about the publication of what is hailed as his masterpiece, 2000 page opus The Huns. Beyond that he seemed to have faded  into  the backdrop of my consciousness. That is, until very recently, when I was scanning the spines of the art books in my collection, I came upon a volume of what basically is a complete catalogue of his life and works spanning from 1957 to 1988, published  to coincide with the opening of his retrospective art exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in his home town of Enschede, from where it was scheduled to go to France, Germany, Switzerland and finally to the National Museum in Budapest.

There were mentions of his life as a fine artist in his Cremer books, but it never quite recorded in my memory. The catalogue is dedicated to me with the inscription: October 11, 1988 to Haresh Shah in Friendship, Jan Cremer. I have absolutely no recollection of ever having seen him again or been in touch with in any other way since our one and the only encounter in Amsterdam. Could it be that Mick Boskamp, the service editor of the Dutch edition who was spending a few days in Chicago around the same time brought it along? Mick too has absolutely no such recollection.  How did it then get to me? On the facing page to the dedication is a New York City address, written also in the same handwriting,  is the name and address of Sterling Lord Literistic – probably of his agent in the USA. Could it be that he was in New York that day and thought of me? Bit of a mystery to me, but it still pleases me to know that I could have left a positive impression with one of my favorite authors. Who as it turns out is as big an artist as he is an author. And in retrospect, it would be fair to say that he is a bigger artist than he ever became a writer.

I am not a good judge of art by any dint of imagination, but the only way I can describe his paintings in the catalogue is that they are abstracts with broad strokes of pleasing colors splashed across huge canvases. And it impresses and overwhelms to think how incredible it is for a single human being to be all that. His writing has often been compared with my all time favorite, Henry Miller, and now when I see his art, not the style and the objects he paints, but the idea of a writer also being an artist also puts him next to the old master, because Miller too picked up the brush in his sunset years and produced some beautiful watercolors.

Even though Cremer is an entire generation younger than Henry Miller, his I Jan Cremer would have never been allowed to be published in the United States if not for the battles fought over the publication of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1961, which wasn’t allowed to be distributed freely in his own country up until 1964, more than thirty years after it was originally published in France. The very year when Ik Jan Cremer came out in Holland and in 1965 in its English translation in the United States.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, April 19, 2013

SEX EDUCATION À LA JAPONAISE

As excited  as I was when my boss assigned me to work in tandem with the Japanese editorial team, I also knew that Japanese were unlike any other people I had ever worked with and that I needed to know about them beyond the books I read. So before meeting with them, I embarked upon a weeklong journey of the country on their famed Shinkansan bullet trains. Crisscrossing the country, meeting people, visiting places, a university and pachinko parlors, staying only at the inns and eating only Japanese food, and yes, spend an afternoon watching  striptease.

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Categories Artist, Writer

MY SPRING VALENTINE

April 4, 2013 //
0

As The Time Goes By

Haresh Shah

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Exactly thirty six years ago today on April 5th. 1977, in Santa Barbara, California, it was another fucking beautiful day, as my neighbor Greg Ketchum and I had began to refer to our forever such gorgeous weather, whenever we both found ourselves out on our respective balconies, overlooking the awesome Santa Ynez Mountain Range.  I was done with my writing for the day and was sitting around in my living room with Mike and Guusje, drinking beer, when the phone rings.

Without any pleasantries, the female voice on the other line dives right into it.

‘I understand you are auditioning young ladies for Playboy.’

‘Not quite.’ I respond with trepidation, trying hard to think who it might be. Sensing confused silence on my end of the line, the voice breaks out in a hearty laugh.

‘This is Carolyn,’ it says.’ It still doesn’t ring the bell.

‘I was just passing through. I am on my way down south to see Gwen in LA.’ And then I knew.

‘Where are you?’

‘I am here. In Santa Barbara.’

‘You are? Why don’t you come on over?’

‘Okay.’

She doesn’t ask for the direction. Soon I see her pulling up on the Linfield Place in her yellow Volkswagen, named Rachel Rabbit.  She had once lived here before moving up north to Sacramento.  She plans to spend a couple of days walking down the memory lane, perhaps meet up with some people she knew and then continue on to Los Angeles to see her sister. As soon as she walks in, we hug, ever so self  consciously, but there is a feeling of a certain intimacy, which becomes apparent after Mike and Guusje leave. We stand in the middle of the room with our arms wrapped around and holding each other as if we were long lost lovers, and then abruptly but gently step back.

I invite her out for dinner and we drive down to Dobb’s in the city center from Goleta, where I live off the UCSB campus. The dinner is animated and we talk a lot about relationships. Hers with her husband Bob has just ended and they have filed for no-contest divorce. I am trying to build a long distance relationship with Patricia in Mexico City, but neither of us is quite sure. We are sort of oscillating. Carolyn has also been sort of dating someone. But as we talk, the magnetic pull between us two is obvious. After dinner we take a walk on the beach, feeling mellow, listening to the gentle waves of the Pacific splashing the shore. The vast expanse of the beach is deserted that night. I don’t remember for sure if it were a full moon night, but let’s assume that it was, just to give an extra romantic edge to the evening. We feel the ocean breeze lightly feather our exposed skins. The stars seem to be aligned just right on this clear cloudless night. We are walking hand-in-hand and feel the tender but intense energy transpiring through our entwined fingers.

The way I normally tell the rest of the story is: I bring her back home that night, thread my three hour long reel-to-reel tape containing Keith Jarrett’s soothing Cologne concert. And keep her.

●●●

I first met Carolyn and her husband Bob in the bar of a canal side little B & B in Amsterdam, where I had stopped by to look for a room. They were fully booked. But I stayed to have a beer in their bar before venturing out in the early January cold. Sitting diagonally opposite from me was a young couple from Duluth, Minnesota.

I had not planned to be in Amsterdam on this trip.  Certainly not to spend the whole week there. A little over a week earlier I had run away from Chicago in hopes to mend my broken heart. I had picked Denmark literally by putting my finger on the map. The place where no one I knew lived and the place where I could be face-to-face with my lonely self, the place where I could nurse  my wounds and disappear in its anonymity. Copenhagen seemed to do just that for me. Regaining some of my spirit back, I flew on to Stockholm – thinking I would celebrate  my New Year’s Eve up there. But on that morning, it got to be too lonesome. At the last minute, I called my friend Franz-Hermann Gomfers in Wachtendonk, a little town in the lower Rhine, that bordered with Venlo in Holland. As usual, he was hosting the Sylvester party and I found myself amongst the jubilant throng of the New Year’s Eve revelers.

Four years earlier, also at Franz Hermann’s Sylvester party, I had met the flaming red head, Felicita. Fe, as everyone called her,  grew up in a house in the alley diagonally opposite from Fran Hermann’s house. Shy as she was, we had clicked and spent most of the night sitting on a corner sofa, talking. Getting up once in a while to slow dance and then sit down again.  There is a photo of me sitting next to her, holding her wrist in my hand and twirling her bracelet, gazing at it as if in admiration. As good a pretense as any to hold her hand. Three weeks later I had left Europe to come to the United States.

Reconnected, we drive to Krefeld to have dinner the night of the New Year. Staying out late, we  leisurely stroll the deserted streets of the town. Stop frequently at store fronts and window shop. Four years earlier, she wore her hair very short. Now seeing her in a longer than shoulder length hair, I am blown away by how breathtakingly gorgeous she looks. Her radiant smooth skin matches the color of her hair, her shy smiles has me absolutely captivated.

Playfully, I say to her: ‘I’ll marry you when your hair grows down to here,’ pointing to the small of her back with the blade of my hand.

‘Be careful what you say, because my hair grows very fast. In fact, I did have it down to my waist up until a month ago.’ She responds with an impish smile on her face.

And our game begins, as if we were an engaged couple, soon to be married. We pick the bridal gowns and the tuxedos that she and I would wear on our wedding day. We build an imaginary house and begin to fill it with the furniture we see on display. We select baby clothes and the little booties and bonnets for our baby. Even toss around a few names for the daughter we would have. And as we continue our silly little make-believe game, I imagine her walking down the aisle, her radiant face luminous behind the veil.

My plan is now to spend the remaining eight days of my escape from Chicago in Amsterdam. Something I had dreamt of doing with Karen. But it wasn’t meant to be. And now my fickle heart is longing for Fe to explore with me the canals, the bridges and the alleys of the Venice of the north.

●●●

On that Sunday evening, as I stand over one of the thousand bridges of Amsterdam and watch the canal floating down below, I see in its ripples the faces of the women that dot the canvas of my emotional landscape.

Netty, who worked at Drukerij Bosch when I was an intern there seven years earlier,  now lives in Amsterdam. It’s been nice seeing her again, but I can still feel a certain amount of tension linger  between us. Her girlfriend Reneé, on whom I had an incredible crush, leading to a few stolen kisses, is now married and also lives in Amsterdam. Both Netty and I went  to see her and her husband one evening. There is also Carolyn. I thought she was pretty and liked her American way of dressing in blue jeans and a simple top. Lacking of any visible makeup and the hair almost touching her waist. She reminded me of Joan Baez . But I don’t carry any  deeper impression of her. And of course, there is Karen, back in Chicago – the woman I have run away from. But the face that superimposes all of them is that of Fe’s.  What I see clearly in that fluid water is the parting  image of her, clutching the bunch of red tulips, her eyes fogging up and the tail light of her disappearing train.

Having spent the whole weekend together, walking around Amsterdam till wee hours of the morning – still feeling weary and sleepy after the late morning breakfast, we are lying sideways on her single bed – talking, almost whispering – sharing with each other and feeling a certain   closeness at our parallel stories of the bruised hearts, I am overwhelmed at the silence that has fallen between us. Us staring deep into each other’s eyes.

‘Willst du mich heiraten?’ It just pops out of my mouth. Something I had never asked anybody up until then and have not to this day since. ‘Will you marry me?’

The fog has fallen dense on the city of Amsterdam. My emotions are torn. The longing intensified. The faces dissolving in the ripples as they march on.

●●●

It’s January 3rd 1979. Delayed by two and a half hours, our United flight from Los Angeles is the last one to land that night at 12:30 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, before the back-to-back snow storms would blanket and paralyze the city for weeks and months to come. We check into the Playboy Towers – the old dame of the hotel known as The Knickerbocker, before and after its present avatar – at two in the morning with a whole bunch of boxed live potted plants that make up the bulk of our excess baggage. Because we are told that they would never make it to Chicago in the truck. I have returned to Playboy full time to work out of their head offices. Carolyn is seven months pregnant. We have bought a condo in Hyde Park and would move in soon as our stuff arrives.  The side streets remain buried under mountains of snow up until April. When the truck finally makes it to Chicago area, they deliver bits and pieces by minivans. Soon as they deliver the mattresses on the 26th, we move in.

After three weeks of being stuck in a hotel, it feels good to be in our own place. However inadequately equipped. We are prepared to sleep on the hardwood floors if we had to. In the meanwhile, I keep trucking. Of which Lee Hall writes in his International Publishing Newsletter dated February 5: Haresh will be returning from Spain this weekend to assist in the last minute birth of his first child. He and Caroline (sic) have recently moved into a delightful apartment in Chicago but are currently awaiting the arrival not only of the baby but of their furniture van which has been marooned somewhere in the Mid-western snow.

And then its March 6. Its 04:04 in the morning – the drama of a new child being born is enacted in the bedroom of our apartment. Propped up and leaning on the wall at the edge of the bed is me, Carolyn’s head resting on my shoulder. At the ready is the midwife Kay with her experienced hands to clutch and catch the baby pushing to emerge into this world. Surrounding the bed are Dr. Elvove, Anita and Keeline while Bob is clicking away with the little Kodak Instamatic with his trembling hands.  We see first Anjuli’s head pop out and then with another push, all of her. Dr. Elvove hands me a pair of scissors to snap the umbilical cord. A daughter born in Playboy family receives Playboy kind of welcome by telexes from around the world in response to Lee Hall’s following announcement, barely making it  in his Newsletter dated March 5, but not mailed until later.

PS: Anjuli Shah-Johnson, the first daughter of Haresh Shah and Carolyn Johnson, was born on March 6.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, April 12, 2013

FACE TO FACE WITH JAN CREMER

It is very likely that the most of you have never heard of Jan Cremer, the ultimate enfant terrible of the Dutch literature and the art. He once famously said in an interview: Rembrandt? I have never heard of him. I’m not interested in sports. Arrogant? Brilliant?  Whatever. But I am a big fan of his books, I Jan Cremer and Jan Cremer Writes Again. And have had a pleasure of meeting and talking to him.

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Categories Relationships, Romance, Women

THE STORY OF MY TUXEDO

March 28, 2013 //
3

What Good Is A Teacher If His Pupil Can’t One Up Him?

Haresh Shah

bowtie3b

I am talking to Ivan (Chocholouš) on the kitchen phone, looking out at the first tulips that have popped up in the flower bed in the backyard of my house in Evanston. It’s Wednesday the April 17th, in the year 1991. It’s been hectic as can be. I have taken off half a day to stay home and work on the final details of the launch in Czechoslovakia – only eight days away, Based on what Ivan reports from Prague, everything seems to be going smoothly with organizing of the launch events. The press conference, welcoming of the  European editors, catering, transportation. And the most importantly, now that I have signed off on every single page, the first issue is now ready to roll off the presses.

Normally what they could have sent to me via courier;  had to be faxed for my final approval. All 120 pages of the issue. Mary and I stand by all through the transmission, hoping that the telephone lines between Chicago and the printing plant in Vienna wouldn’t break down. That the fax machines would hold up for this continuous hours long transmission. As the machine spews out the pages after pages, I sit down to put them together in order. Pasting and folding and trimming to the size  with Xacto knife.  Finally I could look at the black and white mini version of the first issue of our Czechoslovakian edition. We had of course discussed all of it just a couple of weeks before in person during my most recent visit to Prague. We had kept some pages open to accommodate the last minute ads coming in. Which I had not seen.  But of what I had seen,  they have followed my instructions to the T.  Now I am giving it one last look before giving them my final okay. I am pleased at the job they have done, but with one small exception. I am not quite happy with the placement of an ad visually clashing with the facing editorial page. I page through the issue several times and decide that its something we could easily fix by swapping the offending ad with another one in front of the book. And voila, we would have a perfectly balanced issue. I communicate this to Ivan, who in turn passes it on to the people at Gistel Druck. The next day, we’re on the phone again.

‘You know, the Gistel people tell me that to switch those pages is not as simple as you told me it would be.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because it would take a lot of work and time, which we don’t have.’

‘Lot of time? It shouldn’t take more than an hour, if that!’

‘They say it will take several hours.!’

‘Several hours? They are bullshitting you.’

‘Of course I don’t know as much about the printing process as you do, but they sound quite convincing to me.’

‘That’s precisely why printers do it – knowing that you’re sure to be lost once they begin with their technical mumbo-jumbo.’

‘I don’t know. Honestly, I am lost. Perhaps you want to talk to them?’

‘I will if you want me to.  But just tell them that I really don’t understand why it should take so long. Tell them it’s something I can do with my left hand.’

At that point I am not thinking that they had probably gone ahead and stripped everything together in signatures and may even have made sets of plate ready flats. Worse yet, already  burned the plates. Something they weren’t supposed to do before the customers have given their final okay. Squeezed between me in Chicago and the printers in Vienna, Ivan agrees to push them one more time. Since now I have challenged them and their professionalism, however grudgingly, they do it.

Ivan reports back to me during the conversation I am now having with him.

‘We have now made changes as you wanted.’

‘Thanks Ivan. I really appreciate it..’

‘I am glad to have been able to satisfy you.’ As he says this, I sense a bit of hurt in his voice mixed with a mild sarcasm and realize it must have taken some doing on his part to have the printers make the swap.

‘I hope you’ll agree with me that now the issue looks as perfect as we can make it. I know it wouldn’t have been as big a deal, had we left those pages the way they were. But as long as it was still possible to correct them, I don’t see why we shouldn’t.

To which Ivan mumbles something like; ‘of course you’re right.’

I can’t help but still hear in his voice a man placed between a rock and a hard place. Considering the limitations he must face, he has done a great job and I love him for that. Plus our relationship is beginning to evolve into a friendship.  So I try to further smooth things over.

‘You know Ivan, it may seem like a lot of work right now, but in the end what matters the  most are small details, because at the end of the day the difference between good and excellent are little things.’

And we switch back talking about the launch. I tell him that Playboy Products would provide their Men’s cologne to be included in the goody bag. That the US Playmate Christy Thom (February 1991)  was all set to fly in from Los Angeles to be by the side of Czechoslovakia’s own, voluptuous Playmate Šarka Lukešová whom we had flown into Chicago to be shot.

Ivan confirms that Hotel Diplomat would provide accommodation for the visitors and that booked for me was the presidential suite. The press conference too would take place in the ballroom of the hotel but the actual launch would be at Pálac Lucerna – the landmark building owned by the Havel family and located right in the heart of Václalvské náměstí.  That arranged were three black Mercedez Benz stretched sedans to pick up guests from the airport and scurry around the VIPs. And he rattles off who’s who of the Czechoslovakia’s elite guest list to include Václav Klaus, the Finance Minister and soon to be the Prime Minister and eventually the President of the Czech Republic. Pavel Rychetský, the Vice Chair of the Government,  Jaroslav Kořan, the minister of information who would go on to become the mayor of Prague and later editor-in-chief of Playboy Czech Republic. That the stars Myloš Kapecký and Jiřina Bohdalová were going to be the honored guests. That the beautiful television personality Magdalena Dietlová too would be hobnobbing in the crowd. And that the iconic singer Karel Gott – the country’s equivalent of Frank Sinatra would grace the event with his performance. And the highlight of the evening would be the exquisite culinary spread catered by no other than the Michelin Starred Chef, Alfons Schuhbeck from Munich.

Half of those names go over my head. But sensing his excitement, I feel that Ivan has gathered  the crème de la crème of the Czechoslovakian society and politics.

‘How about Václav Havel?’

‘Well, I am not sure. We have of course invited the President and he hasn’t yet declined. Knowing him, he just might show up.’

‘Wow!’ I go. And then pause for a breather. ‘From what you tell me, this sounds like a black tie affair.’

‘It is. Vlado (Vladimir Tichý) went to Vienna to buy his tuxedo. Dolina (Rolf) is planning to wear his white tux and Hana (Wagenhofer) I am sure will be her elegant self as usual.’ (The  three principals of the VIPress Czechoslovakia, a.s., the publishers of the Czech edition at the time. )

‘Hum!’ I mutter. Then pause again to digest the information.

‘Sounds really great. Congratulations to you. You have done really a great job. I don’t remember any launch quite so grand and glamorous as what you have planned.’

I pause one more time, looking outside at the gleaming tulips, I am thinking: And I don’t even have a tuxedo. The only time I was required to attend such an event was Playboy Holland’s first anniversary in Amsterdam. But at the time, our cool service editor Mick Boskamp – who’s still a close friend – had foresight enough  to get my measurements in advance and arranged a rental  for me. The second time was several years later in Hong Kong when we did Miss Playboy International Beauty Pageant and I was to hand out editor’s choice award to the winner on the live television broadcast. The TVB producer insisted that I do it wearing a tux. And then I even had ample time to have one custom made. But I didn’t see any sense in it and I guess I was being just plain cheap! Seeing my hesitance, the producer took me to the prop room and had me fitted with one.

‘Well, that sounds really great.’ I repeat myself. ‘But I am afraid I don’t own a tux and I am leaving for Prague in two days and have our Turkish publisher Ali Karacan in town so won’t even have time to look at renting one.’ My mindset is still fixed on renting  and not just go out and buying one.

The silence on Ivan’s side of the line prevails. But in retrospect, I should have heard the loud screeching of the wheels frantically turning inside his brain.

‘Well, I guess I just will have to wear my best dark suit.’ I say.

‘I guess,’ he echoes.

‘In fact, I have really a good one. Dark rusty brown, almost black. I bought it a little over a year ago just for the Hungarian launch.’

‘I am sure it’s really nice. Especially knowing your taste.’

‘It really is. You will see.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You’ll still be a big hit. We love you with or without a tuxedo. But you know Haresh, someone just told me not long a go that the difference between good and excellent are little things!’

I want to jump up and down and throw the receiver out the window and smash it into those swaying tulips, watching their petals erupt up in the air and scream.  ‘You fucking son of a bitch!!!

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, April 5, 2013

MY SPRING VALENTINE

Its Easter weekend already and the sun is shining bright and the temperature in Chicago is creeping upwards, slowly but surely. And I am thinking of the decades-a-go-winter in Amsterdam and the many faces of love.  And then one of them reappearing years later on a beautiful spring day just like today, only warmer – because it’s Santa Barbara, California.

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Categories Czechoslovakia

LIVIN’ LA VIDA LOCA…

March 21, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

From Sleazy Sex Show To The Celebration Of Suave Saxophonist’s 50th

sax_coaster3b

When I was based in Munich, it wasn’t unusual for me to start my day with breakfast in Munich, have lunch in Essen and land in Paris just in time for dinner and the next evening have dinner in Milan. Georg Kührer of the printing house Girardet once observed: you hop on and off the plane more often than I do a bus. Amazing. But true. Even so, the eleven days I remember the most about my relentlessly on the go happened years later when I was living in Chicago. What to me is mind-boggling still, is the intensity of those days, being in constant motion and deprived of sleep. And I don’t even drink coffee, let alone take any other stimulants. I thrived on the natural adrenaline and the high I got from interacting with people.

I began my journey in Chicago on the afternoon of Thursday, October 15,1992, arriving in Budapest the next morning.  I loved the way the airlines wine and dine you in the front of the plane on their intercontinental flights. No phones ringing, nowhere you can escape. I am not for watching movies or doing any real work on planes. Reading yes. But mostly what I love the most is to really let my hair down, enjoy the treats, perhaps snooze a little bit and arrive at my destination, if not well slept, quite relaxed.

My weekend visit had a certain urgency about it. Our original publisher, Dezso Futasz  had decided to get off the rat race, but was conscientious enough to bring a group of people, headed by Geza Panczel of Interart Studio  to take over the Hungarian edition. All three parties had agreed on the terms of transfer, contingent upon me approving the new organization. So I plunged right into the process soon after checking into the hotel. Meeting after meeting after meeting and then dinner at one of the new partners’ home, is how the day went.  Just before the dinner, Dezso had bowed out, leaving me in the care of Geza and his associates. After dinner, the last thing I wanted to do on that night was to go out to Bangkok – a topless bar. Hoping I would catch up on sleep the night after. But no such luck. Instead I found myself sitting on the edge of the stage at the place called Caligula. Caligula was nothing like anything I had ever experienced before. It featured explicit live sex that contained lot of rubbing, slurpy oral sex and frequent copulation – all of that happening just a few feet away from your nose. I don’t know what they were thinking, but that in itself should have been a reason enough for me to disqualify them. If this was their image of Playboy, what would they do to the edition once they got their hot hands on the license to publish the magazine? Sexually oriented yes, but how could I possibly trust them to produce the lifestyle magazine of the highest editorial standards?

So it had to be Dezso pursuing me with a gentle pressure, Geza and his associates putting forth their best foot. In sharp contrast to our social outings, I was quite impressed by their current offices and the publishing activities, which mainly contained of fine arts and literary books. Their offices had more of a feeling of a somber English library than the one bustling with the young men about town.  They seemed serious contenders.  And how can you not like Geza? A low key intellectual who looked so much like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead  that I fully expected him to break out and begin singing  to lay me down, one last time. Plus, he took me home to his mother Idolka’s house for lunch next afternoon and then we had dinner at the restaurant owned by the group – the pizza joint called M*RXIM, with the A spelt with a red Russian star in defiance of the just fallen communism. The place was extremely popular with the young set.  Having been around in the former Iron Curtain countries good part of three years, I had observed that the sudden freedom had brought out the dormant entrepreneurship of their people and they were game for anything that would make money.

I wrapped up my visit to Budapest with an optimistic outlook.  More urgently waiting for me in Warsaw were my Polish publishers Beata Milewska and Tomasz Zieba. Only three weeks away from launching my third edition in the Eastern bloc. The content needed to be finalized,  plans for the launch revised and action plan put into place. This phase of launching of the new edition has always been the most exciting. With all that hard work behind us, now we had to make things happen. It was a feeling similar to that of an actor’s anxiety just before the curtain rises. Gave me a chance to get to know Beata a bit more. A dynamic young lady who would become one of the most successful publishers of Playboy family. Her partner in the venture, Tomasz accompanied me to Prague to pick up pointers from Ivan Chocholouš, the managing director of the Czech edition, who had very successfully launched  the magazine merely a year and a half earlier.

It’s already Friday, eight full days since I left Chicago, and not one single night I have had good eight hours sleep. And the real challenge of this trip still lies ahead of me. In order for me to succeed, the Murphy’s Law had to work to the perfection in the reverse order. Anything that can go right, will (must) go right.

Just imagine this: I depart Prague at 11:00 on Saturday and am scheduled to arrive in Frankfurt at 12:20.  I have forty minutes to connect to the flight to Hamburg. Having arrived from Czechoslovakia meant I would have to go through passport control and negotiate my way through the sprawling monster – that is Frankfurt International Airport – to get to the domestic departure. But I make it, just in the nick of time. I arrive in Hamburg at around 14:15. Since my baggage is checked in from a non-EU country, however perfunctory, it is still subject to the customs inspection.  I have the train to catch at 15:29 from Hamburg Altona to Westerland-Sylt. To make it across the city to the train station in just less than an hour in the afternoon traffic in itself is daunting. But I just can’t afford to think in those terms. Because I have promised my dear friend and fellow Scorpio, Andreas Odenwald – ex-editor-in-chief of the German edition, that I will be on the island of Sylt for his 50th birthday celebrations.  And so I am. I make every connection, tight as they were.  If that meant me sprinting from one plane to another, nervously rubbing my hands together while the cab sped along Hamburg streets, buying my ticket and making onboard the train just minutes before it slithers out of the platform. Arriving triumphantly in Westerland-Sylt on time at 18:17.

Andreas is waiting  for me on the platform. He gives me a hug: amigo! He says. Hotel Stadt Hamburg – where the shenanigans has already began – is only a short walk from the station.  I check in, park my suitcase in my room and come down for a quick beer and greet everyone who’s there. There are about fifteen to twenty guests occupying the dining room. Some of them I already know. Andreas’ life-long partner, Gudrun Thiel, Rainer Wörtmann and his wife Renate. And I see two very pretty ladies, they look quite familiar, but am not sure. They both smile at me and go, Eva Peters, Bettina von Beaust.  Of course. They must realize that my memory of them was from 1975, when both of them were ever so schlank, so their now Bottero-esque figures have me confused. But they seem comfortable in their evolution, which puts me at ease. There is no one else I recognize or remember, except in my agenda, there is a little note that says: meet Brigitte – interesting!  And like the saxophone aficionado – the birthday boy would have said: let the good times roll. And so they do. Between apèritif and digestif, the delicious home-made pasta with button mushrooms and wild duck in pepper crème sauce are washed down with appropriate wine pairings. And still waiting eagerly is the birthday cake with the colorful saxophone motif.

The clock is already ticking beyond 03:30 in the morning. I have the train to catch at 05:50 to take me back to Hamburg. Waiting for me at the station would be Michelle and Rüdiger, with whom I will have  breakfast before catching the Lufthansa flight at 10:45 to Frankfurt, connect with their Chicago bound flight at 13:00, and in the evening meet up with our visiting Dutch publisher, Meinard Carper and his advertising director, Auke Visser.

‘I guess, I can take a quick nap and a shower before catching that train.’ I say to no one in particular. By then all of us are wasted and more than ready to hit the sack. But nope! Leave it on Rainer.

‘It doesn’t make any sense to go to bed now. How about another bottle of champagne? And then we’ll walk you to the station.’

‘Warum nicht?’ I answer, as if on auto pilot. And I see a wide smile cross Rainer’s big square face, made it cuter by dimples on his shriveling cheeks and his small baby teeth. As if saying: That a boy! So we order another bottle. At around five thirty, I go upstairs to my room, pick up my suitcase, pay DM 230.- (approx. $115.-) for the room and whoever is still around, practically roll me back to the station and wave until the train slides out of the platform in the early morning fog.  One would think there would be nobody on the train that early on a Sunday morning. But there is a group of rambunctious youngsters. So I upgrade myself to the first class, slide doors shut, pull the curtains close and crash like a sand bag.

I have always loved trains at the night and the rhythm of their synchronized motion.  It lulls me to deep sleep almost right away. Relaxed, exhausted and deprived of  sleep all week long, I slip into a comfortable semi-coma. When I regain consciousness, all I sense is the total darkness and the pin drop silence. The train is stand still. Probably waiting its turn on the embankment, I think. Not even a peep, nor a sliver of light coming through.  Now I feel the train moving a little bit. And then I feel it stopping, suddenly. Following that, there is a loud thumping on the locked doors of my compartment.

‘Hamburg, Hamburg. End station. Bitte aussteigen.’ I am not sure, if this is real or it’s a dream. But the knocking continues, like the pounding of a heavy hammer. I spring up like  Jack in the Box. Disoriented no more, I slide the curtains and open the door.

‘Gott sei dank. Sie sind da. Hamburg. Aussteigen sie bitte.’  Seeing me well and alive, the conductor looks relieved. Frazzled, he tells me that if not for my friends on the platform, I would have ended up at the nearby train depot, nestled between half a dozen other idled trains. As I emerge from my car, Michelle flashes her sweet dimpled smile. They scurry me over to the airport right away. I check in first and then we sit in a café to have some breakfast.

No dramas or the time crunch with connecting in Frankfurt. We land in Chicago on time at around three in the afternoon. It is past four when I make it back home. I set the alarm and stretch out on my soothingly warm water bed. I am picking up Meinard and Auke for dinner at 19:30.  I feel energized as I walk to the garage. I put the key in the ignition of Nora Nissan,  as I call my car. The engine squawks, as if in excruciating pain and I hear the fan turning once or twice. And then the hood shudders sideways and pfffft. Sudden death!   

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, March 29, 2013

THE STORY OF MY TUXEDO

Up until then I had successfully avoided having to buy my own tux. Cheap? Also. Cultural antipathy? Maybe. But mainly because I never saw any sense in owning something that I would wear less times through my entire life than I could count on my fingers. And I could always rent one if I must.

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Categories Eastern Europe

PLAYBOY ON THE COFFEE TABLE

March 14, 2013 //
3

Haresh Shah

How Do An Indian Grandma And Her American Grand Daughter View Playboy?

kidandnannyd

‘And I can no longer see Playboy calendar hanging in my home.’ I could see Gina was riled up about my last ditch attempt at saving our relationship by offering to sell my house and us together buying a condo. But it was too late to make any difference. We both knew it was over. And even though her  outburst was no longer meaningful, any more than a rubber bullet, nothing that would kill me, but boy did it sting!! And the irony is: there were never any Playboy calendars hanging in my house.  What she probably meant was all those monthly issues lying all around. Especially after I left the magazine. Because for months after my departure, my assistant Mary (Nastos) still kept sending me all the international editions, eighteen in all, every month. They were piling up and at some point could be found strewn all over my house.

Or most likely, the three nude studies by my artist friend Deven (Mehta) hanging in the guest washroom by the kitchen that had triggered her ire.  In any case, not until after she said it did I ever give any thought to the placement of Playboy in my house.  I had never seen any need to tuck them away some place out of sight. Gina’s disdainful words took me back to my Time & Life years, when we had a sort of an exchange program set up with messengers from various printing companies around Chicago area that printed a part or all of one of our publications and some also printed Playboy and Penthouse. We got them in exchange for our magazines.

When the new issues of Playboy and Penthouse arrived, we would page through them and comment on that month’s Playmates and the Pets. And then rest of the guys would slough their copies into their desk drawers, I would slip mine into my briefcase and take them home to look and  read at leisure.

‘We don’t want our old ladies to get all worked up about them!’ Big Larry (Howard) would say with a knowing smile on his face. Up until Jeff (Anderson) joined us a year or so later, I was the only single guy in the department.  At the time I didn’t give it much of a thought, except that I was single and didn’t have to worry about hiding them from my wife and kids. I must have felt a bit strange though, considering that growing up in India, my image of America came from Hollywood movies. A country that was free and liberal. That for us meant mostly the social freedom such as falling in love and getting married instead of arranged unions, kissing in public, making out and having sex before marriage. And even though bikinis hadn’t made big inroads yet, we found the American women in the fashion magazines and in the movies wearing revealing single piece swimsuits titillating.

I had only known American political history of the unilateral declaration of the independence, the Boston Tea Party and the Constitution proclaiming life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I had no idea of the puritan heritage that was weaved into the every thread of the American fabric. I had not yet had a serious relationship with an American woman. One could say that Playboy changed it all for me, but actually most of my ideas and the character have been molded by  Germany and Europe, probably facilitated by Playboy. The conclusion I had come to at the time and after Gina’s outburst, that the problem with having to hide magazines and calendars had to do with only one thing: the nudity. And that majority of the people who have strong negative opinion of Playboy, had never actually read the magazine.

Something I would have understood in my early days in the West, because in India or in my home, we wouldn’t  even remove all of our clothes even to take a shower. We soaped and sprinkled ourselves by lifting layers of  clothing.  It was when living in Munich that I began to see the absurdity of it all. The Johannclanzestrasse complex where I lived, we had coed sauna. And no one sat around in it with towels wrapped around. It made sense. The whole purpose of taking sauna is to let your pores open up and sweat out the toxins. The only way to reap full benefit of subjecting yourself to the extreme heat is to let your clothes and inhibitions drop. And the Europeans certainly don’t have any qualms about that. One of my coolest images of the sauna is that of the three generations of women together walking into the steam filled room – seven or eight year old grand daughter, her young mother, perhaps in her early thirties and the grandma in her sixties. A perfect study in evolution.

And living in Munich in itself was liberating in that sense. Our offices were downtown, not far from Englischer Garten, right in the heart of the city. When the spring came and soon as the temps climbed upwards of around 25 degrees Celsius (about 77 Fahrenheit), it wouldn’t be too unusual to see young office workers on their lunch breaks to cross their arms and lift their tops over their heads and their hands reaching backwards to undo their bra straps, becoming a part of the landscape dotted with the female anatomy surrendered to the warm sunrays. Even the nudist beach on Isar river that ran through the city, wasn’t far from the center. You would walk through some shrubbery and suddenly be standing in the middle of hundreds of people clustered au naturell, drinking beer, barbecuing, lounging just like here in Chicago at the North Street Beach. So when I returned to America, I experienced a big cultural shock, more so than the one I must have felt several years earlier when I had just gotten off the boat.

I had come back with the definite opinion and the attitude about the nudity. Though I have never been married, my partner Carolyn and I lived together for thirteen years and are proud parents of now thirty four year old daughter Anjuli. In our household, the nudity itself never was an issue. Not that we ran around in the nude all the time, but we never necessarily reached for a cover during our normal day-to-day living.

The display of the magazine I worked for and loved, was never a problem in our home. But in some people it could conjure up all sorts of weird ideas, as should be apparent from the comment by my dear friend Karen (Abbott) posted about my announced blog entry of this week: “That’s nothing. I worked for Playboy and, of course, had PB mags all over my living room tables and stuff. Some of the cute male phone techs or workman thought I was a lesbian. So what do you have that matches that? Pretty funny!”

Not exactly, mainly because of our genders. Why would anyone think of me a gay man because they found in my house magazines with naked women? In fact, once they found out I worked for Playboy, it lead to some wishful conversations, nothing more. But once I found myself in an eerie situation. A refrigerator technician was in my house fixing the compressor. He must have noticed copies of Playboy in my living room. As he was diligently fixing my fridge, I stood not too far from him making small talk.

‘Do you read them magazines lying in your living room?’ I didn’t notice it quite then, but in retrospect I remember the tone of his voice changing from friendly to critical.

‘I sure do. I work for them.’

‘You do?’ Now I sensed a certain amount of disdain in his voice, sounding almost menacing. The kind that comes from someone all too self-righteous: I  have found the way, and you ain’t. You are doomed to go to hell kind. Earlier in the conversation he had mentioned that he was “born again”. That explained.

“Well, good for you!!!” He said. But his sarcasm and self-righteousness didn’t escape me. I was never as relieved to see a workman leave my house than when he did.

The time when I had gone home to Bombay to visit my family soon after I had started working for Playboy and had “smuggled” in several copies of the magazine, my parent’s bedroom seemed to have turned into a curious little gathering containing of male family and friends.  Everyone practically waiting their turns to be able to page through one of the issues. It would of course begin with me showing them my name listed in the masthead, which certainly was a pride factor for everyone. But how could my name by itself compete with those beautiful and bare breasted  fräulines? Once the mob thinned out, my Dad sat down and gave one or two issues serious look and then exited leaving us four brothers alone. My brothers obviously asked me questions. We joked about some figures and the poses. Soon they each took a copy or two with them to show to their friends, leaving on the living room table only one issue. Which neither I, nor anyone else felt necessary to remove from there.

Must have been a couple of hours later, when everyone had dispersed or taking their afternoon naps, I found my mother sitting on the floor by the table and slowly turning the pages of that lone issue. She couldn’t read English, let alone German, so she was obviously checking out the women. At the time I was thirty-four, so my mother was barely fifty, still in good shape and quite good looking, despite her having had nine of us. When younger, she was actually a very pretty woman.  As she scanned those near perfect female bodies, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she were comparing her younger self with any of them. Wasn’t beyond the scope for a wife of the Rasa Manjari reading husband.  Hearing me come and sit down, she didn’t flinch or shut the magazine close or slough it away. She took her time before slapping it shut.

‘So this is what you do?’

‘Yup!’ And I could see her smile slightly.  Not looking at me, but just staring at the empty space in front of her.

On my next trip, I had brought along some Playboy calendars, that went like freshly roasted hot  corn-on-the-cobs.  And since then, my brother Suresh would remind me several times not to forget to bring along some calendars, because he had the Saheb – the income tax officer hooked on them and brought them along with a bottle of Royal Salute. I am sure his auditing went ever so smoothly!!

Fast forward several years to Chicago. Anjuli must have been two or three years old. She was just getting to be able to stand up if she found something within the reach of her hands to hold onto and prop herself up on her feet. Once I walked into the living room and found her standing behind the cast iron bar and methodically unloading one liquor bottle at a time from the shelf putting it down to the floor. Then at another time she propped herself up by my expensive turn table placed on a low table and yanked at the tone arm, destroying the diamond stylus – mightily upsetting her daddy. The next time,  I found her standing at the edge of the coffee table, one of her hands resting on the table, and another on an open page of Playboy. Hearing my footsteps, she must have thought it was her mother coming, I see her poking her fingers at an open page,

Mama, Boobooj… Mama, Boobooj.  She was pointing at the ample pair of  breasts on a close-up of one of the women.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, March 22, 2013

LIVIN’ LA VIDA LOCA

When I look back and think of the whirlwind life I lived crossing from one country to another and hopping across oceans to different continents, it all seems a little surreal and things and the people I used to pack in within short few days. Here is the story of eleven days in the life of Haresh Shah. The days that were normal for me, but somehow they weren’t.                                                                                                                                                               

 

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WELCOME TO AMERICA

March 7, 2013 //
4

Haresh Shah

Playboy – The Declaration Of Independence?

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I have no hard luck story to tell about acquiring my Green Card. It was practically offered to me on a silver platter by the INS officer in Pittsburgh.  I had only one more day to go before my H3 visa expires. So I dump my stuff at the YMCA and rush to the immigration office. I am sitting across from a young immigration officer, a black gentleman who is scanning my application for the extension.

‘Everything looks fine.’ He says and picks up my passport to stamp the extension. Instead he puts the passport back down on his desk top and asks;

‘Why don’t you apply for Green Card?’

‘What’s Green Card?’ I answer. If he is astonished at my naiveté, he doesn’t show. After all he could see in my application that I have landed in this country for the first time just a week earlier. Practically gotten off the boat – so to say.

‘Its kind of permanent visa that allows you to live and work in this country indefinitely.’

‘But I don’t intend to live and work here.’

‘Maybe so, but you’ve got nothing to lose! You’ve got two college degrees, you will have further training here. You more than qualify for the third preference. Nothing in it says you have to stay here any longer than you want to. This way, should you change your mind or an opportunity knocks on you door… I mean, as long as  you are here.’

Third preference? Whatever that means. But the wheels in my mind are turning, though I’m not sure what kind of a trap I might be getting myself into. I hesitate.

‘What do I have to do to apply for Green Card?’

‘Fill in another form. Which is a bit longer.’

He now shuffles under his desk and pulls out a multi page form. I no longer remember what the questions were and how long it took me to fill it in. But somehow I manage and hand back the form to him. He asks me a couple of additional questions and fills in some more details.

‘Good. You’re all set. You’ll hear from us in a couple of months. Welcome to the United States.’

●●●

Not such a smooth sailing with my citizenship. Normally once you get your Green Card, there is a five year waiting period before you become eligible to apply for the citizenship. Of these five years, there is a requirement called physical presence in the country.  I believe the total of two and a half years of which a continuous physical presence of six months is required preceding the filing of the citizenship application. This never even crossed my mind when Playboy hired me and immediately shipped me off to Munich.  The only requirement I was aware of was that to maintain my legal residence status the Green Card afforded me, I must return to the United States at least once a year.  That too could be waived by filing of the form N 470, the petition to preserve residence for naturalization purposes.  This was discussed with the lawyers and taken care of during one of my earlier trips to Chicago. Once settled in Santa Barbara and having fulfilled the condition of six continuous months of physical presence, now eligible, I applied for the citizenship and was summoned by the INS to present myself at their district offices in downtown Los Angeles.

Its March 18, 1976 and I am driving south on Highway 101, with two of my Santa Barbara friends to be my witnesses on this one of the most important days of my life. I have studied hard and am prepared to answer whatever questions I am asked about the American History and its Constitution,  rattle off the names of the presidents and all of the states in the Union. I am looking forward to raising my hand and pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes. I am taken into the office of an immigration officer for the customary interview that precedes the citizenship procedures. A bit nervous, but very excited. But as the interview progresses, I am absolutely deflated at being told that while working abroad, I had failed to return to the States once a year, and in lieu of that also failed to file N 470 to preserve my residency.

I swear that I had filed, nay, believed that Playboy hired attorney specializing in things immigration had done so on my behalf. Nope. He did, but then in whatever confusion it entailed, the application was withdrawn. So I stood there, dumbfounded. This meant, I would have to start all over again from scratch and wait out remaining four some years before I would become re-eligible to apply.

The INS officer in Los Angeles was sympathetic, even friendly: What’s the difference Mr. Shah? You’re  back in the States and you would be re-eligible before you know it.  He was absolutely right of course, that is: if I were one of those “normal” subjects who stayed put.  In those days, green card holders were still considered “outsiders”, more so than today, with separate immigration lines at the International Airports and the visa requirements from other countries  – they hardly if ever took into consideration your US legal residence status, even to cross borders of the neighboring Mexico and Canada. Besides, if you were a US citizen and worked abroad you could exclude up to the first $20M of your yearly earned income. (currently $91,500.-) from your tax obligations.  Not so for the resident aliens in the possession of the Green Card. During the years I lived in Germany, I religiously filed and paid the US taxes and continued to contribute into my social security to keep in tact my legal resident status. But the most important for me was the freedom of movement, something that an American passport would immediately afford me. Something that had become an integral part of my life and the pre-requisite of my employment, as would be evidenced by my double bound passports piggy backing on each other in order to accommodate all the visas I required.

I would feel echoes of my predicament more than thirty years later, when President Obama’s chief of the staff, Rahm Emanuel returned to Chicago to run for its mayor. His opponents immediately made a big fuss over the residency and the physical presence requirements. Questioning, whether he was eligible to run for the office. A court case ensued. In the end, he was declared eligible to run and is now the mayor of Chicago. I wasn’t so lucky. . Nothing I could do.

But I am not the one to give up that easily. However rigid the laws, I believe that there is always an exception to every rule. So a little over a year later, I wrote a detailed two and a half page letter to the newly elected and new in the office President Jimmy Carter.  Requesting that considering the unusual circumstances of my case, the usual physical presence requirement be waived and I be allowed to immediately re-apply for the citizenship.  While writing to the President, I subconsciously must have thought that if anybody, he would be sympathetic also to the fact that I worked for Playboy. It was his Playboy Interview as then candidate Carter, in the magazine’s November 1976 issue, that caused an incredible amount of stir and a media blitz across the country.  Not because anything he said of his politics, but what he said at the tail end of the interview, as if reflecting on something: I have looked on a lot of women with lust. I have committed adultery in my heart many times.

I doubt it if the President ever read my letter, but it certainly triggered a flurry of communication from Washington, DC to Los Angeles. The first response I received was from the INS commissioner in DC, followed by letters from Los Angeles, acting director, assistant district director and eventually the district director himself, granting me a face-to-face interview with the INS attorney to further discuss(my) naturalization, resulting into a 22 page transcript of our interview.  In the end, I was still denied immediate citizenship in a 5 page summary signed by the district director.

As the officer in Los Angeles had said, the years flew by faster than I would have thought. In the meanwhile, Playboy has brought me to their corporate offices in Chicago. I am at the immigration office, sitting across from a young INS officer –  once again all prepared to flaunt my knowledge of the American History and its Constitution. Its August 12, 1980. Waiting outside are Carolyn and my friend Denise, they are to be my witnesses, and crawling on their laps and all over the aisles is our barely 18 months old daughter Anjuli. They are  waiting eagerly and anxiously for me to come out and are now getting antsy and beginning to feel nervous at why it was taking so long behind the closed doors, while other doors opened and closed every few minutes with soon to become citizens coming out with big smiles on their faces.

Playboy!  That is why. My citizenship file quickly opened and closed, the examining officer thumps it on his desk. If not exactly in the same words and the sequence, this is how our citizenship interview unfolds:

‘So what is it like to work for Playboy?’

‘Oh, not much different than working for Time & Life’.  I answer, alluding to the fact that I had worked for them equally as long.

‘No, I mean what is it that you really do for Playboy?’

‘Oh, I take care of the printing quality of our international editions. Travel a lot and also edit photos.’

‘Edit photos?’

‘Yes, you know, Playboy shoots thousands of photos for every pictorial and Playmates. I select the ones that appear in the international editions. The tastes and the censorship laws differ from country to country.’

‘You mean they are not the same with the text translated?’

‘No, they are individually tailored for the local readership.’

‘Oh. Have you ever met a Playmate? Been to the mansion? Met Hugh Hefner? What’s his daughter Christie like? 

Now relaxed and no longer worried about flunking the test, I indulge the officer with long and detailed answers as if I were briefing one of my new international editors who had just come on board.

Glancing at his wristwatch, he picks up a piece of paper, signs it and hands it to me with: ‘I better let you go before the swearing in begins.’ We shake hands. I thank him and with his ‘Its been pleasure talking with you. Good luck to you!’ I slowly walk out of there. Everyone else have cleared out of the waiting hall except for Carolyn, Denise and Anjuli. They are relieved to see me smiling.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, March 15, 2013

PLAYBOY ON COFFEE TABLE

Not until four years after I had left Playboy, did it ever cross mind that my leaving issues of Playboy on my living room coffee table, along with half a dozen other magazines I subscribed to would be deemed offensive to some people. It has been as much a part of my life as anything else. An angry outburst from my girlfriend conjured up some funny stories about coffee table display of the magazine.

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I DANCED WITH DONNA SUMMER

February 28, 2013 //
7

Haresh Shah

A Fond Farewell From A Friend      
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On the afternoon of May 17, 2012 my friend Donna (Drapeau) and I were having our periodic lunch at our favorite via Carducci, and along with the catching up we normally did, for some reason, we found ourselves talking about how we often hesitate calling our older friends for the fear that he or she may no longer be around.  Ominous? Because soon as I returned home and turned on my computer, the front page news item in that day’s New York Times was the death of Donna Summer.

If not for her untimely passing,  I probably would not have thought of writing about her. It would have seemed superfluous name dropping. I had known her but for a very short period of time, when both of us lived in Munich and during the time she was briefly dating an acquaintance of mine – the Swiss psychiatrist Dieter Weeren.   Just like most everyone else at the time, I met Donna in my own apartment in Munich. She became one of the group for a short while, going out for dinners and dancing and just hanging out with us at my apartment.

It had to be the summer of 1974 –  Donna was doing Munich night club circuit and had to her credit one LP, Lady of the Night, which never made it outside of Europe and was mainly known in the Netherlands. When she gave me a copy of  it, I had said to her jokingly: I should ask you to sign it, then I could say, I knew you when!  To that she gave me a wistful look  In the same vein I asked her whether she would ever consider posing for Playboy, to which she answered, also in jest, with this bod of mine? Gesturing and running her eyes down the entire frame of her skinny self. The album remained un-autographed. I still have it. Wishing that I she had autographed it.  But never mind, what matters to me the most is: it was held and touched by her. And most importantly listened by me and our Munich friends over and over again. In spite of her phenomenal success that followed, the two songs that have remained with me are from that album. The title track of course,  and the sad  slow ballad,  full of emptiness, which also appears in two versions on the flip side of her now landmark, love to love you baby album.

By then, she had been living in Munich for some time. Originally brought there by the German production of Hair, now making ends meet by performing at small clubs, which Munich had aplenty. I remember chauffeuring her around to and from a couple of those venues. Reminiscing of those days, my friend Michelle (Davis-Scharrnbeck) recalls:  I can only remember meeting her  once or twice with Britt (Walker) and the memories are also a bit fuzzy. Before I knew who she was, and met through you, I had seen her while she was working at a small boutique in Schwabing near the Kunst Akadamie. I have more of a lasting memory of her from those brief encounters. She seemed so fragile, lovable and “schutzbedürftig”, (needing of protection).

Bidding her time and waiting for her big break. Munich for her turned out to be being at the right place at the right time. In early to mid-seventies, Munich was where it was happening. During those years, it wouldn’t have been unusual to run into one of the Stones, especially Mick Jaeger and Keith Richards or Led Zeppelin and Elton John  at one of the two “in” discotheques: Why Not? and  P1. The places I too frequented, if not that often.  They all came to record at the Musicland Studios owned by the record producer Giorgio Moroder, whose partner Pete Bellotte had produced Lady of the Night.

But the place and the night I most remember was the night when after dinner we all had ended up at another popular disco, Yellow Submarine, sunk deep into the Holiday Inn on Leopoldstrasse, where I got to dance with Donna. I am not a good dancer by any dint of imagination, but when a couple of drinks and the music moves me, I can’t just sit still. I would be one of the first ones to jump up and strut  out to the dance floor. How well I dance, I don’t know. More like you could see my head bopping up and down or sideways like the head of a kathakali doll on a coiled spring, with the flashing psychedelic lights breaking up the bodies on the floor into sparkling slivers.  I was absolutely no match for this soul lady so gracefully swaying in front of me, with her every move so naturally elegant and effortless. While awkwardly trying to imitate her it was awesome just to stand there and watch her groove to John McCrae’s Rock Your Baby, Barry White’s Can’t Get Enough Of Your Love Baby or to the ear-splitting screaming of the pint-sized fireball, Susie Quatro’s The Wild One.

And when the sweat began to shine and drip down from everybody’s faces, the disc jockey switched to the obligatory slower, gentler tempo. Disappearing blazing strobes giving way to the subdued slowly twirling mirror-ball up above, spinning to the favorites of those days.  Probably Daliah Lavi’s Wäre ich ein buch,  the German version of Gordon Lightfoot’s If you could read my mind love, Roy Etzel’s instrumental Tränen lügen nicht, (tears don’t lie) or the ultimate snuggle song, Je t’aime performed by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, with Serge whispering sweet nothings and Jane responding with her orgasmic grunts, moans and the heavy breathing with such an urgency – the song that inspired Donna to come up with the idea for Love to love you baby. Who would have thought that in less than two years, Donna’s own sixteen minutes and fifty seconds extended orgasm would usurp and take many times over the very song she was dancing to?  

Up close and with our arms wrapped around each other, as we danced, Donna’s tall and lanky frame towered over me. A whole head shorter than her, my face resting on her chest, listening to her heartbeat and taking in her perfume is the image of Donna that has remained with me after all these decades.

About a year later, some of us are invited to Donna’s concert at a small Munich auditorium to see “our Donna” perform at a venue bigger than the small cramped local dives. As we waited eagerly  for the curtains to rise, and when the lights  dimmed and the pin-drop silence fell, and the whole auditorium went pitch black,  without even a sliver of light coming through – all we could hear is the curtains slowly sliding open and the click of them stopping in their tracks. Still nothing happens. Must have been just a few seconds, but it feels like an eternity while we wait with breathless anticipation. And then we hear something that sounds like a sob, a moan and a swish of sweet pain pierces the air, followed by a long drawn out Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, as if emerging from a deep and narrow cave, sobs and moans and grunts echoing and escaping in the atmosphere. And it continues:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa I,

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Love To Love You Baby….

Reverberating over and over again and again through the stillness of the invisible auditorium. And then the halo of soft light outlines the figure that lies on the stage and soon we see it begin to stir and love to love you baby continues to echo and it rushes towards us like tidal waves. We see the figure turning slightly and seductively, uncoiling like a sleeping beauty waking up after a hundred years, rising languidly like a flicker of a dormant flame leaping up from a heap of ashes. And then suddenly she is up and standing with the music gaining tempo, microphone in her hands and we all gasp! At that very moment the a sublime transformation has taken place. The star is born in the front of our very bewildered eyes.

Here my memories are a bit fuzzy. I am sure we got to see her backstage, but then she was probably whisked away by her producers. I may have even seen her  once or twice during the next couple of months, before I drove away in my Buick from Munich to meet the QE II in Cherbourg, France and sail away to New York. Driving cross-country, when I arrived in Chicago a month later and when one evening went browsing at the Ross Records on State and Rush, I stood face-to-face with Donna. Not her flesh and blood self, but bigger than the life size cutout of her staring down at me.  Piled at her feet was a huge stack of LPs, with an image of Donna, wearing a sleeveless semi-transparent dress, her face turned slightly upward, her lips painted deep maroon and her eyes closed. It was November 15, 1975.

Then she was nowhere to be found.  Until a year and a half  later. During one of my sojourns in Mexico City I read in the local newspaper that Donna Summer was going to perform for several nights at the roof top bar Stellaris of the  Hotel Fiesta Palace (now Fiesta Americana). I somehow was able to penetrate through her entourage  and get through to her. It was a hurried conversation, but she invited me to her show that night, which I  attended with Lina Quesada, a casual acquaintance. We got to talk after the show –  sitting in her dressing room and watching her remove her makeup and get ready for whatever after-show activities the local promoters had planned. We reminisced of our Munich days and exchanged contact details, and promised to see each other when we both got back home. She had now moved to Los Angeles and I was living in Santa Barbara, a scant hundred miles (160 km) north along the coast. I am not sure if we ever talked again, even with her private number, it became almost impossible to cut through her publicist and whoever asking annoying questions.  On that night of  May 27, 1977, I wrote in my journal: Went to see Donna. She has changed – obviously, but was about the same as far as our friendship was concerned, except that it isn’t that easy to reach her.

Beyond that, I would read about  her now and then. At times I would almost be tempted to get in touch with her, but just the thought of having to deal with the multiple barbed fences that surrounded her, I never tried to reach her again. Probably, the way I thought must have been – how big and how unreachable she had become. I could see her, but couldn’t touch. Must be why they are called stars. And yet, it was always a good feeling to know that her heart on which I had rested my head and heard it beating, was still beating somewhere in the world. I felt an incredible void on that afternoon of May 17, 2012 and do right now as I write this, to think that heart is no longer beating.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, May 8, 2013

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

When I first started this blog, I already had about a dozen entries fully written, if not edited. So far they have all followed some sort of logical sequence. Now I have about six of them mostly completed, I am not sure which one of them should go next. Well, it will be as much of a surprise to me as it would be to you. Stay tuned for my first SURPRISE entry.

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BY THE TIME I GET TO AMSTERDAM…

February 21, 2013 //
3

Haresh Shah

Leaving On A Jet Plane

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The captain has already announced for the crew to prepare for the departure. The aircraft door is already pulled in and slammed shut, when  I notice one of the flight attendants picking up the receiver from the wall phone and in turn calling the cockpit. The plane comes to a halt and then very slowly inches back to meet the jetway. The door opens and in comes trotting  a young woman, weighed down on her right by a fairly large and what seems like a heavy blue duffle bag. The flight attendant helps her with the bag. Looking frazzled and out of breath, she gives a feeling of being distraught and disoriented . She is tall and pretty, but looks a bit haggard with no visible makeup on her face and her unkempt, unwashed shoulder length blond locks. She has a chiseled angular face, a small but proportional nose and the dull grey eyes. She is dressed in a beat up pair of blue jeans and a long sleeved well fitting deep purple T-shirt, under black leather jacket. Her frame carries a shapely figure. She is being escorted to the empty seat next to mine. She throws her bulky purse under the seat in the front and plumps herself down next to me, hurriedly snapping together her seat belt.

‘Hi,’ I greet her. She gives me a cursory look without responding. Realizing she probably wants to be left alone, I pick up the copy of Holland Herald from the seat pocket in front of me. I hear a sigh of relief from her as she sinks into the long and wide first class seat.

Once up in the air, when the aircraft has reached the cruising altitude, she seems to let herself be relaxed and accepts a glass of champagne when the flight attendants come by with drinks and bowls of roasted almonds.  I order a glass of dry Sherry. Then I sense her head turn side ways with her glass of champagne raised and hear her say, ‘prost.’

‘Magda.’ She offers her hand sideways.

‘Haresh.’ I introduce myself and we shake hands if a bit awkwardly. We clink our glasses  and once again the silence prevails as we both retreat to our own private little world.

‘I just left my husband!’ I hear her say, addressing to no on in particular.

‘What happened?’ Hesitantly, I venture.

‘Nothing really that I can pinpoint. I just felt so cramped and smothered, so very suffocated that I couldn’t breath. So boxed in. I just had to escape before I snapped.’

●●●

From then on until we land in Amsterdam seven hours later, sprinkled in-between our drinks and  meals, she tells me the story of her life. I have strung together here from whatever I remember of those conversations with as much accuracy as my memory affords me. What I couldn’t remember in details, I have taken the creative freedom to fill them in.  Yet, the story itself remains pretty much the same as she shared it with me. Narrated in Magda’s voice, told  in the first person to give it intimacy.

‘I was born and grew up in Alkmaar. Do you know the town in the north west of Holland? Its known for its famous cheese market.’

‘Actually, I do know Alkmaar quite well. That’s where my friend Jan Heemskerk lives.’ And I give her a quick rundown on my long and warm relationship with Holland and its people starting with my internship in the printing house Drukkerij Bosch in Utrecht, the family Tukker and my Dutch girlfriend Netty and years later me returning back to Holland to do Playboy.

‘Then maybe you will understand how I feel.’

‘I will try.’

‘Anyways, when I was old enough, I moved to Amsterdam and found myself a job, a small one bedroom apartment of my own and was living a life of a small town girl really in love with the big city of Amsterdam.

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IN THE NAME OF LOVE

February 14, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

Every Picture Tells A Story

bythetrunkb

Its crispy cold December morning. The sun is shining bright outside and I am having my usual  Sunday breakfast of Shahmolette – so christened by Jan Heemskerk – our friend and at the time editor-in-chief of Playboy’s Dutch edition. Because in addition to mushrooms and onions, my recipe includes finely chopped, insanely hot Thai peppers and cilantro. Also our Sunday morning feast included freshly baked bagels from Skokie’s famous and the best in the world, Bagels & Bialys, and their home made cream cheese with chives. Carolyn is futzing around the kitchen when the phone rings. I hear her making a perfunctory but pleasant conversation with the caller. Not knowing or caring to know who she might be talking to, I flip the pages of that week’s Time.

‘Sure! He’s right here. Just a minute.’ She covers the mouthpiece of the receiver and mouths ‘Lee Hall.’

Lee Hall? That’s my boss. What is he doing calling me at home on a Sunday morning? It sure couldn’t be good news. I take the receiver and lean against the credenza by the phone.

‘Mr. Shah!’ I hear him say. Once in a while he would call me that endearingly. But still…

‘Sorry to bother you at home on Sunday morning – but as you know I’ve just returned from my far east trip and thought I fill you in on Hong Kong before things get crazy tomorrow morning at the office.’

A sigh of relief! ‘Sure. You want me to come over?’ I offer.

‘No that’s not necessary. But I was wondering if not too inconvenient, I could stop by at your place and we can talk over a cup of delicious masala chai. You know, my body clock is upside down and I am wide awake. Would do me good to take a ride along the lake.’

About an hour or so later, his unpretentious burgundy Chevy Malibu pulls up in front of our house in the Chicago suburb of Evanston. His tall frame stoops down on our relatively low sofa. As we sip on our tea he gives me run down on his visit with our Japanese publishers Shueisha.

‘They love you down there,’ he tells me and also compliments me on the job well done.

‘That brings me to Hong Kong. We are about to conclude an agreement with Sally Aw of Sing Tao Newspaper Group. I would like you to take a trip there at your earliest convenience soon after the holiday rush is over, and help them set up and launch the Chinese edition.’

Hong Kong!!! In The World of Suzie Wong! He tells me in detail about the two principles. Sally Aw and the Playboy’s publisher designate, dynamic Albert Cheng. He shares with me what he has jotted in his notes and gives me Albert Cheng’s direct phone number and asks me I should call him in a day or two and establish initial contact. It all sounds so wonderful that I am absolutely thrilled. But at the same time, I sense in Lee a certain amount of discomfort. Telling me everything in minute detail, almost stretching it, giving me a feeling that there is something else hidden behind all of that nervous energy and that he is somehow having hard time leading up to it.

‘Well, I have taken up enough of your family time on this weekend morning. I better be going.’

‘Not at all, we are delighted to have you in our home.’ I say sincerely. Following that he says his goodbye to Carolyn and thanking her for tea and probably pats Anjuli on the head and prepares to leave.

‘There is something else…’

‘Yes?’

‘Come on out with me. There is something I want to show you.  A bit confused and a bit curious, I follow him to his car. He opens the trunk to the car and lifts out of it what looks like a framed painting. He shows it to me. It’s a water color of an Indian temple perched atop a steep hill, with the stone stairs leading up. He rests is against the open door of the trunk and lifts up two more paintings. One that of an Indian village iron smith working on his anvil right outside of his thatched hut and another one, a bit modern-ish of a woman with an infant raised up above her head.

‘They are beautiful.’ I say. Thinking he is showing them to me because of their origin.

‘I acquired them when growing up in India. As you already know, my father was in diplomatic service in Delhi. I just love them. Makes me nostalgic about the times I spent in your beautiful country.’ The way he stares at them with such fondness demonstrates one of those rare emotional moments of his otherwise stoic demeanor.

Still not getting why he is showing them to me, I wait.

‘I would like to ask you for a big favor. If you can. If its alright with you, I would like to loan them to you.’  He must have noticed a confused look on my face.

‘See, the thing is; Sarah is decorating our new apartment and she absolutely hates them!’ I am speechless. I had of course known Sarah  and liked her the way you like your boss’ pleasant spouse. But other than when thrown together during the required company social gatherings, our talks never went past perfunctory pleasantries. Neither was I personally that close to Lee. Our relationship was congenial and warm but mainly based on mutual professional respect. Other than his foray in India, we also shared a common thread of both of us having worked at Time Inc., where he was editor-in-chief of Life en Espanol. He worked out of the editorial offices in New York and I think also in Paris and Tokyo. I worked in Time’s production offices in Chicago. Our paths had never crossed during our Time & Life days. Of his personal life, I knew only bits and pieces. That he was married before and had three kids and had been divorced – must not have been that pleasant. From his accidental comments, his relationship with his kids too seemed more obligatory than warm. That he have had a serious bout with alcoholism, which too I was only somewhat aware of at the tail end. But the ones who knew him better, would tell me that it was real bad until after he married Sarah. All of them were in agreement that it was Sarah who had helped straighten him out. And that she loved him and had been good for him. That she was the reason Lee has been and was dry for some time now.

They had just moved from their matchbox of a highrise on the North Lake Shore Drive to a vintage lowrise on the short strip at the curve of the lake on Oak Street, from whose windows you could practically touch the water. An elegant place. Sarah’s own domain. And as much as Sarah had done for him, even having mostly given up drinking herself and whatever else it must have taken for her to steer Lee in the right direction – and as much as Lee seemed to love her, giving up those three paintings was the least he could do for the woman who meant so much to him.

All that scrolled through the screen of my head as I heard him continue: ‘I would be grateful if you would agree to take them. This way I would know that they are in good hands and I am sure  that you and Caroline (sic) would appreciate and enjoy them. And whenever I feel homesick for them, I can always stop by and look at them.’

That was in 1985. I still have those paintings occupying very prominent spots in my apartment. Lee never looked back, never reclaimed them or visited to admire them. The sacrifice he made turned out to be worth his while, because Sarah and Lee remained happily married up until indeed death did them part. And now he is no longer among us. But when in 1997, I wrote about the incident in my book, Of Simultaneous Orgasms and Other Popular Myths: A Realistic Look at Relationships, as an example in the chapter titled, Little Things Make Big Differences, and sent him a copy of the book – he wrote back. Thank you for the dedication as well as the mention in the book (including the nicely disguised one about the Indian Paintings.)

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, February 29, 2013

BY THE TIME I GET TO AMSTERDAM…

Not every relationship problem is resolved by giving away paintings. There are times when the only solution is to go your own separate ways. Here is the story of a dramatic escape of someone not waiting until the death did them part.

 

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MY LATIN VALENTINE

February 7, 2013 //
3

Haresh Shah

Eres Tu, Eres Tu, Asi, Asi, Eres Tu…

between_the_fountain

Premonition? Up until this very moment, I had never thought of it that way. But there are times when you can’t help but wonder and end up giving things the benefit of the doubt!  During the trip I took from Chicago to Mexico City, I met with Francisco Sadurni, the local attorney hired by Playboy to help me get a long term multiple  entry visa.  Knowing that I didn’t have any plans for the evening, he tagged me along to a party at his uncle’s house – also an attorney.

From the outside, the house looked quite unpretentious. Ordinary even. But what I encountered behind the closed street-side gate was nothing like anything I had seen inside a private home. It opened into a vast courtyard running into a spacious living room. The centerpiece about which the people milled around was a real fountain, like in a small garden of a Shinto shrine. There were ornate columns buttressing the slanted skylight roof. The palm, cactus and other tropical plants gave you a feeling of being in a rain forest. Five piece strolling Mariachi band  serenaded while the guests made trips back and forth between the individually canopied food and drink stands, set up  like in a traditional Mexican mercado. Bottles of French champagne popped open and emptied every few minutes. Men were all dressed like  lawyers in their dark pinstripe suites, which many of them probably were.  There were scores of beautiful young women dressed so provocatively and yet elegantly in their clingingly skin tight outfits with revealing tops. I felt like Alex in the wonderland.  What I had thought to be a party  containing of about twenty people, turned out to be a hundred or more guests.

Francisco takes me by the hand and introduces me to many of the guests with his good humored effervescent Mexican manner with an abrazo here, a back slapping there.. As everywhere else, the name Playboy evokes an awe as people shake hands with me and make small talk.

Seeing that I am eyeing the approaching morena in her dark and shiny burgundy-on-burgundy striped satin jumpsuit, he stops her in her tracks.

‘Let me introduce you to my cousin Luis’ daughter Patricia.‘

We say hello. Her English is rudimentary at the best, and my Spanish is yet non-existent.  When Francisco runs away to greet new arrivals, we are left alone standing in the middle of the hall – trying to communicate best as we can.  She is more exotic than she can be called  pretty. Her oily dark brown skin is darker than mine. Her jet black hair and big penetrating dark eyes and the complexion makes her stand apart from most of the light skinned women swirling  around. Up close, I notice that cut out at the top of her tight fitting jumpsuit is a heart shaped slit,  revealing the firm round breasts through her cleavage.

We try to talk for a while and then excusing herself she disappears in to the crowd and is gone for hours. Soon she fades from my awareness as I engage in conversation with other guests.  It must have been closer to one in the morning.  I guess I must have been having good time to still be around. Francisco is long gone and the crowd is now thinning out. And I see her again. Now looking a bit weary, she is sitting on one of the two facing love seats. The another one is occupied by an elderly couple.  Intuitively, I walk up to her. She gestures me to sit down next to her.

‘Meet my parents, Luis and Rosario.’

‘Mucho gusto,’ I say.

And we talk. Rosario has lived in Los Angeles for a while, and she speaks good English.  Mainly it is her and I talk while Luis sits there looking tired and bored.  Rosario engages me and Patricia in pleasant talks.  Asking me about myself, my job, even my family back in India. I could tell, the mother likes me. A definite kiss of death!  Or maybe not.

Soon after, Rosario gets up with; ‘I better bring my husband home before he falls asleep’ Patricia too makes a move to depart.

‘Stay for a while, please!’  I plead. ‘I will bring you home in a cab.’

‘She doesn’t have to go with us. She has her own car,’ says her mother.

Patricia sticks around for an hour or longer. We somehow manage to communicate,  mostly in mimes augmented by a few words in-between. Actually she ends up taking me back to my hotel in her little Volkswagen Bug. I manage to make a date with her for the weekend.

‘I am sorry but my younger sister Tere will have to come with me!’

I agree. I guess that’s how things are done in Mexico.

I shouldn’t have worried about the third wheel. She indeed shows up with her sister for the poolside buffet at Camino Real. Soon as we finish eating and have moved to the grassy patch to lounge around, Tere promptly excuses herself and is gone. She is spending the afternoon with her boyfriend!

●●●

During the next seven days that I spend in Mexico City, Patricia and I see each other several times. Sneaking out for quick lunches, meet for dinners. Growing closer and feeling more and more emotionally linked at every encounter.  In absence of being able to verbally communicate fluently, we complement our body language with passing back and forth of my Spanish-English pocket dictionary. She fills it in with some English words that she remembers from what she must have learned in school. I use the few Spanish words I pick up everyday from here and there. But most of our growing infatuation with each other can easily be summed up from the night before I return back to Santa Barbara. We sit  together huddled on a bench seat of the most elegant and romantic restaurant,  Le Fouquet’s de Paris, nestled inside the vast expanse of my hotel.

Mostly we hold hands and communicate the intensity of our feelings by varying the pressure of our squeezes. We gaze into each others eyes and catch that certain ray of the flickering candlelight from her eyes to mine and mine to hers. Between the courses, while waiting for the next, which are paced just right, we would scoot – or more like cuddle closer – as if it were possible to be any nearer.

Me whispering: You’re so beautiful, almost wanting to break into Joe Cocker rendition of you’re so beautiful, to me. Her looking back, meeting my gaze and whispering back, probably translating eres guapo, into “you’re a beautiful boy.”

Sitting there with this exotic beauty, only twenty two years old, working as an executive secretary, it amazes me to think that how sophisticated she is  in the way she is dressed,  and in her knowledge of good wines and the food. And how refined is her manners. I am specially touched by the way she takes a piece of bread, butters it daintily and hands it to me so tenderly, like a loving little mother. And then watching me eating it as tenderly, before picking up a piece for herself.

As the evening wears and we sit there with the glasses warmed over the open flame of the cognac warmer, she takes a sip, then puts down the glass. Takes my hand into hers. We are facing each other sideways. I see her lips flutter.

‘I love you.’ She whispers.

‘I love you.’ I whisper back.

By the time I escort her to her little VW Bug, the hotel garage is deserted save for a few cars  strewn here and there. I am overwhelmed with emotions and the desire so deep and fervent that I don’t want to let her go. We stand by her car and hold each other close. There are kisses and then she gently peels herself  away.

‘My father will kill me.’ Those words emerge slowly. Somehow she has managed to utter an entire English sentence.

I pull her to me one more time. My arms resting on her shoulders, I scoop her face into my hands. I don’t want to let her go. ‘This is a crazy question to ask, but would  you be my girlfriend?’ It just rolls out of my mouth.

Startled, she steps back. Her eyes fixed on mine, I hear her utter, ever so softly: ‘Si.’

●●●

Next morning she picks me  up and brings me to Benito Juarez International Airport. We have coffee up in the terrace café. We are both tired, sleepy even. We don’t say much but hold hands across the table. My hand sandwiched between hers.

‘I’ll miss you.’ She says.

‘I’ll miss you.’ I repeat.

‘I’ll wait for  you. And…’ she whispers something that I don’t quite grasp at first but then understand as,  ‘And be good!’

‘I am always good!’ I answer playfully!

‘Be good.’ She repeats. ‘Or…’ And I see her slide the blade of her hand across her neck.

‘Ouch!’

I let out a nervous laugh.  I could almost feel the sharp knife slashing through my throat and see the blood dripping.  And think: she is a Latin Lover alright.  But no importa. I haven’t felt this good and this close to anyone in a long time.   I reach across the table and put my other hand on the top of our already layered hands, like in a Pyramid.

They announce my flight. We shuffle and I sling my carry on bag over my shoulder.  As we walk down the stairs, we stop on the landing. I put down my carry-on and take her in my arms. ‘But the people!’ Her mild protest is lost in our sealed lips. And we continue our descent. She takes my hand in hers, gives it a slight squeeze and I hear her say, ‘I feel triste.’  The sadness has dawned upon me as well. We pause at the bottom of the stairs, and then I hurry through to the immigration desk. When I look back, she is gone. I imagine  her blurry eyes. I want to run back.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

 Next Friday, February 15, 2013

IN THE NAME OF LOVE

It’s easy to fall in love. But it takes some doing to sustain a relationship.  Most of the time it’s only little things that make big differences.  To wrap up my Valentine Month, I tell the story of a friend who chooses to sustain his love with his wife than to hold on to something that was emotionally so dear and near to him.

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MEXICAN CONSUL AND MATTERS OF THE HEART

January 31, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

Corazon de Melon, de Melon, de Melon….

passportbook_sketches_v2

Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles had more of a feeling of a traveling agency then that of a diplomatic mission. Of the posters on display there with enticing graphics of the country’s top tourist destinations, the one that I remember the most, said in the large type face: Mexico. So Close And Yet So Different.  On my second visit, I said to myself, they might as well add: And So Outrageously Difficult To Get Into. So close in fact, that you can get in your car, have a nice lunch in Tijuana and come back on the same day. Or if you lived in the border town of San Ysidro, south of San Diego, you can simply walk across the border, pick up some cheap Mexican grocery and medication, come back and go as often as you want.  And from the places farther away, like Chicago, you can hop the plane and on impulse take off for Puerto Vallarta for a weekend.

Not so simple if you were a holder of passport from one of the “third world” countries. Up until 1980, I traveled with my Indian passport. This meant,  I needed a visa to go anywhere beyond the defined borders and the time frame.  Several years earlier, when I took my first ever trip from Chicago to Buffalo, New York, George, the young account executive at the printing plant fixed me up with a friend of his girlfriend and we three went out on the town on a double date. During the course of the evening, I got to see yet another wonder of the world – the Niagara Falls. So breath-taking. ‘Its even better from the other side,’ they told me. But I wasn’t allowed to cross the border into Canada without a visa, so we remained where we were. While living in Chicago, I used to often joke about how some day I might even need a visa to go see Wisconsin Dells! You wouldn’t think getting one for Mexico would be all that difficult. Especially considering that I was a legal resident of the United States and the possessor of the mighty green card.  No importa. It was my Indian passport that had the consuls in Los Angeles and Chicago humiliate me before carrying out their bureaucratic function of issuing me a visa.

But I will forgive them their nasty petty-powered bureaucracy, because say what you will about the Mexican bureaucracy, and them being universally defined as los hombres de mañana  and the  people difficult to do business with.  But when it comes to their hospitality, warmth and the most humane welcoming attitude of mi casa es su casa, they are the tops.  Especially when it comes to the matters of the heart, they melt like marshmallow on a twig over camp fire.

After my assignment ended in Munich, I returned to the States and at the time was living in  Santa Barbara, California.  When Playboy called me back, it was first to work for them as a freelancer, which would still allow me to continue living in Santa Barbara and travel to Mexico City as needed. Perhaps once or twice a month.  Hop, skip and jump from the little shed of the SB  airport.  But I knew that before booking my flight, I had to first take a trip to Los Angeles and visit the Mexican Consulate and acquire a visa.  Actually it was fun driving south on the most picturesque highway 101 and spending a pleasant day there,  accompanied by my French Canadian friend Claude and her Swedish boyfriend, Gunnar.  We checked in with the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles promptly as it opened. Put in my application through,  paid the fee of 200 Mexican pesos (about US$ 9.-)  and ventured out to stroll the neighborhood of Olvera Street and the plaza. Had late breakfast and later an authentic Mexican lunch that went beyond tacos and enchiladas and flautas. Picked up the visa and drove back  with the Pacific roaring on our left and the San Ynez Mountain Range on our right.

What was supposed to be just a short introductory trip, ended up being a stay that stretched to three full weeks. Wasn’t too hard to take,  basking in the lap of luxury at Camino Real, which was to become my home away from home and because of its bright yellow façade with the magenta trimming,  came to be known among my Mexican associates as tu casa amarilla.

There was enough work to keep me occupied. And our partners Ricardo Ampudia and  Carlos Civita took care of me through the days with sumptuous meals. Lunches that started at two in the afternoon and lasted until six. Back to office for two to three hours, and then it would be dinner time around ten. During those three weeks I was introduced to some of Mexico City’s most alluring places. Playing tourist over the weekends, I had absolutely fallen in love with the smells and the sounds of Mexico City.  Must have been the pollution, the waves of black  heads bopping, the noise and the perpetual chaos on the streets that reminded me of home, filling me with the nostalgia of the similar landscape of the street life of Bombay.

Unlike my residence permit problems in Germany when Playboy had shipped me off to Munich, this time around  they were aware of the fact that for me to take frequent trips to Mexico, I would require a long-term multiple entry visa.  So in-between  my first trip in January 1977 and the second in February, they had gone ahead and hired a young attorney in Mexico City to immediately start the visa proceedings.  Attorney or not, these things take time. In Los Angeles, they had completely ignored my request for the multiple entry visa. This meant, I would need one for every trip I took to south of the border.

My first stay lasted from January 11 through January 30th. I was required to be back in Mexico in about ten days.  A week later, Playboy asked me to first come to the head offices in Chicago. From there I would continue on to Mexico City. I needed to get another visa.

I’ll spare you the humiliation of the grilling I was subjected to when I presented myself to the Mexican Consulate in Chicago.  In nutshell they were suspicious of the motive of me going back to their country so soon. When asked, I answered:

‘Because I have fallen in love with your beautiful country and would like to explore it more.’

The consul Jose Antonio Arias gives me a skeptical look,  yeah right! He is probably looking for a justification to be able to deny me the visa. That would mean, I would be temporarily out of the job. The prospect would have absolutely devastated me. But before the dismay takes over and shows on my face, something outrageous crosses my mind.  Something that happens only once in a blue moon and only on impulse. I couldn’t possibly have thought it up. I meet the counsel’s gaze.

‘Yes, you’re right.’ I agree with him, even though he hasn’t said anything to my having fallen in love with his country.  ‘Of course I have fallen in love with your beautiful country. But the truth is: during my three weeks stay there, I met this most gorgeous woman in my life. And I think we are in love.’

Still looking skeptical, his face softens.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Maria Elena…Maria Elena Luna.’ The woman that comes instantly to my mind is the typesetter at the Mexican edition. A petite blonde – very pretty. I don’t know how much that convinces him, but what can be more compelling than un hombre enamorado?  He lowers his pointed gaze. Picks up my passport and flips through to the blank page facing my earlier visa.

‘Entonces, bueno.’

The passport with the visa stamped inside, I rush to the airport.  The American Airlines’ waiting area is mobbed. Still feeling drained and humiliated of  the experience, I am walking around in bit of a haze, completely oblivious to a young man approaching me.

‘Aren’t you Haresh Shah?’

He looks familiar, but I can’t place him right away.

‘Lalo. Lalo Guerro.  From Time?’ Of course. The Mexican young man. He is now working for American Airlines as their on-site PR agent. I tell him about my job with Playboy and about just having started a Mexican edition of the magazine.

‘Give me your boarding card!’ he practically snatches it away from my hand. Walks over to the check-in counter, walks back  and hands me another boarding card. ‘I’ve got to run to the Dallas flight. Have a nice trip.’ And he disappears in the crowd, as suddenly as he had appeared. He has upgraded me to First Class.

I don’t even like champagne, but don’t turn it down when the flight attendant  hands me a flute with the bubbles hurriedly rushing up.  As I sip on the dry and crisp, chilled-to-perfection glass of Moët et Chandon, I feel my humiliation and frustrations  dissolving like an Alka Seltzer in a glass of water.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, February 8, 2013

MY LATIN VALENTINE

Premonition?  I certainly don’t believe in such nonsense! But then there are times when you can’t help but give such a notion the benefit of the doubt. Because on my trip after the Chicago visa debacle, I meet an exotic morena  at a party and we promptly fall in love.

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FACE TO FACE WITH GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

January 24, 2013 //
2

 Haresh Shah

My Close Encounter With The (Angry) Master of Magical Realism

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It’s October 29, 1982.  The master of magical realism – Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez has just won the Nobel Prize.  Playboy magazine has in its inventory a recently concluded interview with him, conducted by the veteran journalist, Claudia Dreifus.  The interview has been transcribed from hours and hours of time Ms. Dreifus spent talking with García Márquez in his Paris apartment.  It has been edited and ready to go – almost.  Playboy has promised García Márquez that it would show him the edited version, mainly to check facts and to point out inaccuracies.  As a matter of policy and editorial integrity, the magazine does not give the interview subjects right of approval.  Normally, Playboy closes most of its issues three to four months in advance.  García Márquez would make the trip to Stockholm in December to accept the Prize.  The interview must appear as close to the Nobel ceremony as possible.  This means, the scheduled February interview had to be pulled and be replaced by García Márquez interview.  The problem is; the elusive Nobel laureate is nowhere to be found. Several frenetic phone calls from Playboy editors to his house in Mexico City are answered again and again by his maid.  He has gone away on a month long vacation, leaving behind strict instructions that he didn’t wish to be reached.

The executive editor G. Barry Golson has drafted me to hand carry the interview to Mexico and do whatever was necessary in trying to track down the suddenly disappeared author and get his seal of approval.  With then editor of Playboy’s Mexican edition, Miguel Arana and I drive over to García Márquez’s home in the ritzy southern suburb of the city.  I encounter the maid face-to-face.  She is polite, but firm in telling us that she couldn’t indulge to us where we could find the master of the house.  After initial conversation, I tell her that I was going to park myself right outside the house in the fashion of  passive resistance, until she could tell me his whereabouts.  She just couldn’t.  But she promises  to mention to García Márquez of our being camped out at the front gate of his house,  when and if he calls in.  An hour or so later, she hands me a piece of paper.  Written on it is a phone number of Hotel El Quijote in San Luis Potosi, a dusty town in north-central Mexico,  some 225  miles out of Mexico City, reachable only through mostly unpaved country roads.  After all day of calling the hotel and leaving messages that are never answered, I finally hear his voice on the other side of the line. He sounds congenial but tired.  He agrees to meet with me the next afternoon at his hotel in San Luis Potosi.  I leave very early in the morning to make it in time for our rendezvous.

He is not in his room.  Not in the hotel restaurant or the lobby bar either. I patiently pace the hotel property.  I circle the large swimming pool and admire his shiny BMW parked outside his room.  Eventually, I  plunk  myself down in the lobby bar overlooking the entrance to the hotel.  I sit there in excess of four hours, observing every single person entering and leaving the lobby — drowning beer after beer and munching on tortilla chips and salsa.  I don’t even once wonder why we had to go through what I am going through, just so our interview subject  can look at the transcript.  I think to myself  that’s one of the many reasons why Playboy Interview and its format and depth have become ultimate yardstick against which all the journalistic efforts in the question and answer format are measured.

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It is getting to be late.  I am beginning to lose my patience. I am exhausted and have consumed all the beer I could manage that day.  And I am absolutely famished!  I am trying to decide whether I should order something to eat when I suddenly notice short and stocky frame of Garbriel García Márquez entering the lobby.  With him is a young lady I perceive to be in her mid-thirties, who I find out later is Marilise Simons, the Mexican correspondent to The New York Times.  I rush to greet him.  He apologizes for making me wait so long, while Marilise comes to his aid with  “it was all my fault. My car broke down on the way over.” Doesn’t matter. Like an answered prayer, Gabriel García Márquez  is standing in front of me face-to-face.  He asks  me and Marilise to accompany him to his suite.  The front room is littered with the magazines, newspapers and loose manuscript pages piled next to a manual typewriter perched atop a cabinet in vertical position.  He is in San Luis Potosi to help with the screenplay of his book Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother, being filmed there with Greek actress Irene Papas in the leading role. And also following him on the location is the French television crew, making a documentary of his life. Now at last he has a moment to pause and catch a breath.

As the three of us settle around the large round table in the middle of the room, he still looks harried and exhausted.  I hand him the galley.  The cover letter from Barry  states that we needed to have his comments within three days and that he should restrict his changes to the facts and the possible distortion in translation. As he reads on, I see the congenial expressions of his face slowly turning, first into disgust and then into visible anger.

“I am furious at Playboy.”  He is livid as he hurls the pages in his hands on the table with a loud thud. “I feel betrayed because Claudia (Dreifus) had promised that I would have the right to make any changes in the interview before its publication. And that I would be given enough time to be able to thoroughly go through it.”   He continues on,  telling me that  the interview was concluded several months ago, why couldn’t they have sent him the typescript in the interim?  In fact, he was given to understand that it  was postponed indefinitely. “ Now just because I have won the Nobel Prize, Playboy suddenly wants to have it yesterday! Had I not won the Nobel, they probably would have killed it entirely.”

I am not quite prepared for his emotional outburst and the Latin temper.  I am one of his biggest fans,  I tell him,  and he realizes that it comes from the heart.  I tell him that the Nobel or not, he is one of the most important literary figures of our time.  If Playboy thought any lesser of him, they wouldn’t have sent a personal emissary to hand carry it to him and to show him our goodwill.  And I ask him, were he still reporting for El Tiempo or El Espectador, would he not want to run the interview with himself right now?

“But I don’t need any more publicity!” He says lamely. Still looking quite angry.

“Sr, García Márquez, if  I may. This interview is not meant to publicize you. But to give your readers a deeper understanding of your ideas and your philosophy. As you know, Playboy has published many of your fictions. I have read all of them and have also read your books.  I read our interview with you on my flight over here, and I must say, as one of  your avid fans, it has enlightened me enormously of my understanding of you as a man and of your work,  more than ever before. And I am sure, so would your readers around the world.”

I realize I am pontificating, but he could sense that I am being honest. It hits home and  seems to calm him down somewhat. He promises to get back to us within the requested time frame of three days.  Before I leave, he switches to a conciliatory tone in that we talk about insignificant things for a few minutes and then about the Indian Nobel winner, the poet Rabindranath Tagore. He then apologizes profusely for taking it all out on me, but then concludes with pragmatic “that’s what happens to the messengers!”

On my way over to see him, I had wanted to ask some additional questions to update the interview, but the way things turned out, it just wasn’t in the cards. At the very last minute all I could think of asking him was something I had read in that week’s Time magazine, in which he had said that to accept his award in Stockholm, he intends to wear the traditional Mexican guayabera, a light weight shirt worn outside  the trousers. When Time asked, his answer: “To avoid putting on a tuxedo, I’ll stand the cold.” When I referred to it and asked him; why? His answer to me is: “Superstition.” More like it. Something a character of magical realism would say.

Before heading back to Mexico City, I decide to put something in my stomach.  All I had all day long was huevos rancheros.  I sit down, order another beer and some enchiladas verde and mull over my forty-five some minutes with the man who had just won the most prestigious literary  prize in the world.  His wrath has me unsettled for a while.  But then I think of the interviewer Peter Ross Range and how CNN boss Ted Turner had turned violent during their interview, grabbing his tape recorder and smashing  it on the aisle of the first class cabin of an airliner and how he  had  then snatched his camera bag and practically destroyed the tapes containing their conversation.  How the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci would throw temper tantrums at her interviewer Robert Scheer when he turned the tables on her, confronting Fallaci  with the questions she didn’t like.  And how Alex Haley, the author of Roots endured the overt racism while the “führer” of the American Nazi party, George Lincoln Rockwell,  outlined to him  his intentions to ship “niggers” back to Africa.

At least, I had the pleasure of having encountered face-to-face one of my most favorite writers, and be able to tell him how much I admired his work.  On my way over from Chicago, I had picked up brand new copies of  two of his books, recently published in their quality paperback editions — the ones of which he had not yet even gotten author’s copies.

My hunger contained and the euphoric feeling of having mission accomplished, I just couldn’t make myself to get back to the car and head back to Mexico City. With my heart fluttering, I slowly walk back to his room.  He himself answers the knock on his door.

“I am sorry, to bother  you again, I almost feel like a teenager, but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave without asking you to autograph these books for me.”  By now he looks like a different person.  The interview transcript in form of the galley proofs is spread out all over the table.  “Look, I am already working for Playboy,”  he says with a wry smile pointing at the strewn pages.  Marilise sitting behind his back smiles and flashes the thumb up at me.  He sits down and writes in first of the two books I have brought: No One Writes to Colonel, Para Haresh, de su colerico amigo, Gabriel ’82 and in the second: Leaf Storm, he draws an olive branch on the title page inside and writes, “Para Haresh, con un lomo de olivos, and signs it.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

 Next Friday, February 1, 2013

MEXICAN CONSUL AND MATTERS OF THE HEART

Up until 1980, I traveled with my Indian passport, with which I couldn’t  even cross the border to Canada or to Mexico without having a valid visa, issued by the respective country’s diplomatic mission. Sometimes, an outrageously humiliating experience.  How I overcame one of the hurdles by baring my heart to the Consul General:).    

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THE TALES OF TWO PLAYMATES

January 17, 2013 //
5

Haresh Shah

Without Makeup And With Their Clothes On

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Even though I would go on to produce and organize a whole bunch of Playmates and other pictorials for Playboy’s International Editions, of the women I’ve had privilege to work with, the two that have remained in my memory and my thoughts are the first ones from Germany, Barbara Corser and Dagmar Puttkammer.  I got to know both of them up front and close and we were able to strike up a certain personal rapport that went beyond the usual superfluous bonding that results at being thrown together while working on a project.    

Dagmar appeared on Playboy Germany’s March 1975 cover with her upside down naked image as seen through the ground glass at back of the camera. Shot by Tassilo Trost, another one of Germany’s illustrious photographers.  The cover blurb said: Klar steh ich kopf, ich bin der erste Playmate. (Of course I am standing on my head, I am the first Playmate.)  Like the editors of the German edition, I too was in awe of what it took to produce a Playboy’s  Playmate. They wrote in Unter Uns – the  German version of Playbill – that to fill those ten pages, it took three photographers, 80 color and  20 black and white films, 36 exposures each, and 100 large format single plates – in all 3700 photos. This is not counting about a dozen rolls I used for the test shoot. A minor production by the standards of the mother edition in the U.S.

As much as I would have loved for Barbara to have become the first German Playmate, by then I was equally as happy  for Dagmar. Because in a different sort of way, she too was my very first experience in what it took to produce a centerfold, and in the process getting to know the young woman behind all that glamour.

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ I heard Susi say, sneaking up close to me from behind.  ‘When I look at her, I can see why there are women who fall in love with other women.’ I still remember that momentary wishful look on her face. At the time, Dagmar was only nineteen – at the age when she was no longer an innocent little girl, nor was she a fully grown woman. Unlike David Hamilton’s mist covered budding waifs, resplendent with the early morning dew and dreaming sleeping beauties,  Dagmar was wide awake,  bathed in the bright daylight, throbbing with full of life and yet vulnerable enough to wilt away at a mere touch, like – lajamni – the shy one, an Indian flower that in its full bloom promptly closes its petals at a slightest touch.

For the late September, it was particularly a warm day and we were shooting in the living room of an exclusive Munich home with a large secluded courtyard in  rear of the house. During a short break, Dagmar had just casually wandered into the yard, sloughing off the bathrobe offered her by the assistant. She twirled around as if showering under the sunrays, soaking them in, like a naked angel gliding in the paradise. Totally unaware  of Susi and I standing by the porch door, absolutely infatuated by her unadulterated beauty. While Pompeo and his assistant were oblivious to her being gone, busy tinkering with the camera and the light settings.  When later asked by an editor, how did it feel to be photographed in the nude for the first time? Her answer: “Na, und? Zu Hause laufe ich doch auch immer was ohne rum” (And so? At home I always run around without anything on.)

Returning to the set, she reverted to her very self-conscious, shy and almost awkward demeanor  and resumed her stiff pose, leaning on a life size sculpture of a black pit bull.  Even though we realized that she was placed in what was very uncomfortable posture, at that moment we were all trying to  still make it work.  The real reason being; we only had a limited time. Pompeo had to leave for Italy the next day to resume his project there. Susi and I wanted to have our centerfold done before he departed. The end result was not satisfactory at all. With everything in place on the set, the next day we tried with a local photographer.  It got even worse.  In the end, Freddy and Rainer decided to go with the best of what Pompeo had shot.  We kept Dagmar in Munich for some days longer to shoot the cover and do some additional photos.

Oktoberfest had just began that weekend and the hotels all over Munich were overbooked. Penta couldn’t extend Dagmar’s stay. Susi asked me if she could stay with me, so it was Chez Shah for remaining of her stay in Munich. One of those evenings, Dagmar and I sat at a quiet table in my favorite Hungarian restaurant, Piroschka Csarda. We whisper talked in that dimly lit elegantly decorated place filled with the pleasant smells of paprika flavored dishes and the serenading of the strolling musicians.

Introvert and reticent up until then, she began to relax. Words began to flow out of her mouth –  slowly and softly.  As I looked at her from across the table, I couldn’t help but notice something sad hidden behind her shy and timid demeanor. The candle light flickering over her youthful luminous face had me mesmerized as I listened to her talk. What began to unfold that night and during rest of the weekend, was a story of her troubled young life.

Following what must have been a tortuous divorce of her parents, Dagmar and her three brothers were placed into orphanage, which is where the siblings spent their formative years. Her disdain for her birth mother bordered on hate, for feeding them with all sorts of  lies about their father. Finally, when their father remarried, he got the custody of the kids. Soon after, he died of a heart attack.  Through the subdued light and the low key ambience of the restaurant, I saw gleaming tears rolling down her eyes. As I put my hand over hers to comfort her, I couldn’t help but think of Marilyn Monroe, who too grew up in foster homes and by default became Playboy’s first Playmate, then called Sweetheart of the Month.

Prior to that, I would have thought Dagmar to be chasing rainbow through her appearance in Playboy. Quite the contrary. She had no such ambitions. At the time, she was a full time art and design student at Kölnner Fachhochschule für Kunst und Design, pursuing its teaching program. And if not for the freelance photographer Jacques Alexandre, hovering around her and having talked her into doing some “romantic photos”, she would never have thought of posing for anything, let alone becoming Playboy Germany’s first Playmate.  Of which, she says with a cryptic smile on her face: is actually very funny – schon sehr lustig. Farthest from her mind was a career in modeling or otherwise becoming a part of the glamour scene, which at the time in Germany was Munich.  She was flattered that we thought her to be beautiful, and since for her the nudity was not an issue, why not? The DM 4000.- honorar she would receive was certainly a draw – for it would help pay for her school.  What she wanted of life was to someday get married, most probably to her boyfriend Leo – a law student, and to live in a big vintage apartment in which to raise her children.

Not so Barbara.  Even though in long term she too aspired to be a mother of “many kids”, at that stage in her life she did want to indulge in whatever came her way, making the best of having become a Playmate and use it as the stepping stone.  To Dagmar’s introvert passive self, Barbara was dynamic and a “go getter”.

From that trip to Chicago, Barbara continued on to California, married Scott  and settled in San Clemente. Thus depriving Playboy of its promotional plans. But from there, she went on to become a professional model and the only Playmate I know of to have appeared as centerfolds  also in Oui  and Penthouse. For the latter, she did extensive promotion  during her reign as its Pet of the Month, and beyond,  .

Dagmar too didn’t do any promotion. Playboy Germany had made all sorts of plans for her. She was to appear and interviewed on TV, was going to be used for tons of promotional purposes, probably travel through the country and what not!  But soon as she left Munich, she had just plain disappeared from the radar. Though she did make sort of a splash in the press for being the first ever German Playmate, upon her return to Wuppertal, she became pregnant and by the time her issue hit stands in March, she was half way towards becoming a mother. I think it was around July that I received a card from her announcing the birth of her son Tristan. I am sure we must have spoken over the phone and exchanged a couple of letters before I sailed back to the States in September.  After that we lost touch with each other.

Barbara and I have somehow managed to stay in touch, if sporadically.  The life she has lead has been eventful and exciting, to say the least.  But that’s her story to tell – not mine. Except that she didn’t go on to have “many kids” – but is the proud mother of a grown up son, Klaus.

© Haresh Shah 2013

 Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, January 21, 2013

FACE TO FACE WITH GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ  

Tenth Anniversary Special

Next Friday marks my 10th blog post, a sort of anniversary for Playboy Stories. To celebrate, I am pleased to share with you a slightly longer entry – my encounter with the Nobel Prize winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. One of the most memorable experience of my Playboy days. A classic example of why Playboy Interviews have become the standard against all other interviews are measured.

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THE COMPANY POLICY

January 10, 2013 //
2

Haresh Shah

How Did I Get Myself Suckered Into Having A Television?

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When I say to people that I have never owned a television in my whole life, their first reaction is that of a disbelief. The second, if they are sitting in my living room, their heads swivel around. ‘Uhm, you’re right, there is no TV!’ Big revelation!! They are confused because my living area is configured differently. The couch and the love seat are pulled forward away from the walls and nearer to the fireplace, with a large rectangle cocktail table in the bullpen. The corner where there should have been a huge flat screen, is the corner of the wall with paintings on the either walls. And there is empty galley space between the back of the couch and the sliding door opening on to the Juliette balcony. The very first week when I had moved in and my couch was just delivered, I asked my neighbor Paul’s opinion about what did he think of the placements of them in an L shape.

‘Let me call my wife, she is better at these things.’

Melissa not as much survey as points in the opposite corner.  ‘Let’s see. Well, that corner of the walls would be best for your flat screen television. So starting with that…’  My friend Hurley had the flat screen on the wall space above the fireplace, where I had planned to hang my Radha-Krishna painting by an anonymous Indian folk artist.

‘Wrong!’ I butt-in both times. ‘No television!’

Don’t ask me why. Not even when I had first left India back in 1964 and found myself sitting for the first time in my life in front of a television set in the student common room in London, my extent of watching tele contained of two regular shows a week: an episode of Perry Mason series, probably because at the time in India, the boys my age were all into reading Earle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie and Ellery Quinn mysteries. It didn’t hurt that uncle Tulsi’s company was the sole distributor of the American Pocket Books, which I was allowed to pluck from the revolving display in his showroom.
Of all the characters in them, Perry Mason, Della Street and Paul Drake remained fresh in my memory. So it was natural that I would be attracted to its visual version. And I always loved music and never missed India’s most popular countdown, Binaca Geetmala every Wednesday night on Radio Ceylon, moderated by silky smooth voice of Ameen Sayani.  Another natural draw for me was England’s weekly hit parade,  Top of the Pops. I still remember Petula Clark belting out Downtown and bare feet Sandy Shaw performing  her Eurovision hit Puppet on a string. And I watched occasional current affair broadcasts like Harold Wilson’s Labor Party winning the election, Winston Churchill’s funeral and Queen Elizabeth’s opening of the parliament parade.

When I was brought back years later to live and work for Playboy in Chicago, and my very pregnant partner Carolyn and I merged our combined household possessions in our newly acquired condo in Hyde Park,  she too came without what was then often referred to as an “idiot box”.  But it was when we bought a house in Evanston and our daughter Anjuli was about to start her school, did Carolyn feel that we needed to buy a TV for her to at least watch popular kid’s programs, such as Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers and other shows, of which  Reading Rainbow was her all time favorite, so that she would be able to make informed conversation with other kids in the school.  We went out and bought her a smallest screen TV we could find, and put it into her room.  Even so, she was allowed maximum of an hour to watch it. As it turned out, it was fine with her. She took the TV with her to the college and when it died, bought another one equally as small and non-visible as the first one – to be tucked away in an obscure corner. Because other than some of her favorite programs, and renting of video cassettes to watch movies, she too never got into watching television in any significant way.

Without going into psychoanalysis of why I never got into watching the boob tube, an honest answer is: Television has never appealed to me. It wasn’t  something  even on my lowest priority list. I did have a television in each of my two Prague apartments.  But they came furnished, and I ever barely turned them on.  Ironically, I was editor-in-chief of Serial, the magazine devoted entirely to television shows. I did then have a television set installed in my office which beamed as many as 500 channels from around the world. That too, I barely watched.  Zapped was more like it.  Once I got the gist of a new series and a feeling of what the show was all about, enough knowledge to be able to discuss it coherently with my editors was all I needed to know. They would tell me the rest. I must confess though, that when I was invited by the PR department of  The Bold and the Beautiful, to spend a couple of days on its set and given access to interview any and all of its stars of the time, I did watch the show in its entirety for a couple of weeks prior to landing in Los Angeles. In those episodes, not much happened on the day-to-day basis. But I could see how easy it would be to get hooked to something like that.

But still!

So the day the light blinked on my ringing desk phone in my office, I wasn’t too thrilled at the news it brought. On the other line was Millie Gunn, former wife of Mr. Playboy himself, Hugh M. Hefner and the mother of his two oldest children, David and Christie Hefner.

‘Congratulations on your fifteen years with the company.’  She said in her usual cheery and friendly as can be voice, which was for real. Millie worked for the company as its Employee Relations Person. Not to confuse with the Human Resources. She had a certain congenial and very warm way about her. Platinum blonde, dignified and still extremely good looking, she must have been pretty as a Playmate when young. Her effervescence and enviously upbeat demeanor had made her darling of everybody in Playboy’s Chicago office.

‘As a token of our appreciation, the company would like to send to your house a state of the art big screen Sony television set.’  I heard her saying.

‘Television set?’ Probably wondering why I wasn’t jumping with joy and screaming exclamations the way they do on radio shows when one or the other listener is called and told he/she had won a vacuum cleaner or a couple of tickets to a concert.  Instead, sensing my voice dropping, she offers: ‘I get it. You’ve  already got a nice set of your own. Your other option is a VCR.’ Still not getting any rise out of me, she throws at me the next option; ‘How about a camcorder then? Its top of the line. Also a Sony.’

Finally I had to interrupt her.

‘Millie, I don’t have a television, so what would I do with a VCR or a camcorder?’

‘That makes it easy. Then TV it is.’

‘No, no, no. I hate television. How about good old cash?’

‘That we can’t do. Against the company policy.’

So a TV set it had to be. I put it into the most remote corner of my rambling three storied, seven bedroom house.  Bought an old but a classic decorative Radio Gram console from my next door neighbor, Mr. White, who was black! Propped the television on the top of it diagonally opposite from my slat-top desk and the computer. That’s where it remained for years – occasionally watched by house guests. I watched on it O.J. Simpson’s white SUV chase, funerals of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa. And that was about it. But it mostly remained unwatched, unwelcomed and unloved by me.

Before making my big long term move to Prague and putting up my house on the market, instead of holding a traditional “garage sale”, I decided to give away all of my furniture and other material possessions I no longer wanted to keep, to whoever would take them. Anjuli and Carolyn got the first picks. Before choosing television, Carolyn looked at me with a knowing smile: I suppose you won’t be too heart broken if I took the television!!

Note: Originally published as Television, VCR, Camcorder & Me

 © Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, January 18th, 2013

THE TALES OF TWO PLAYMATES

You have already met Barbara and Dagmar in the process of  their becoming the first two German Playmates.  I was privileged to get to know them beyond the glare of the photo studio and without makeup. Mini profiles through personal reflections.

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TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN…

January 3, 2013 //
4

Haresh Shah

From Only One Nipple To Pubic Wars And Back

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How ludicrous the censorship can be isn’t  even worth discussing. The books that once considered to be obscene and pornographic are now hailed  classics. Just to name three: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. And Nabokov even went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

That Playboy launched in December 1953 will face continuous hounding of censorship was a given.  Hugh Hefner did fight many battles and endured incessant harassment from the self-appointed moral guardians of America and the world.  Even so, it wasn’t up until January 1971 – full eighteen  years after Playboy was born that he dared show a partial patch of pubic hair on that month’s Playmate, Liv Lindeland. Nothing for a few months after, until October when one got a glimpse of a dark bit peeking through an out of focus foliage on Playmate Claire Rambeau. And suddenly the shroud was lifted. Also with the arrival of Penthouse on the American shores from its initial launch in the Great Britain, what Hefner termed to be the “pubic wars” broke out between the two publications.  It was no longer just pubic hair, but what came to be termed among the editors and the photographers as explicit “crotch shots” began to appear in both magazines in an effort to outdo each other. Until at some point, Hefner decided to scale back by saying something to the effect that its silly, we are not going to imitate the imitator.

While the US Playboy would never dare show the frontal nudity on its cover even today, not even  breasts, there was no such restriction in Germany back in 1972 when the German edition was launched. In its very second issue it had a Polaroid layer peeling off a photograph of the  sleeping beauty with her fully exposed breasts staring right at you.  For none of the Western European editions, “to be or not to be” of  breasts or even pubic hair has ever been an issue. They don’t deliberately go out of their way to run explicit covers, because it is universally believed  and accepted that nothing makes one want to pick up a magazine more so than a friendly face making an “eye contact” with the readers.

Enter Japan – the edition launched in July 1975. Even before its launch, it was possible to buy the US Playboy in the country.  But the local laws dictated that no magazine showing pubic hair could be distributed in Japan. How do you get around that? Simple. The customs hire a bunch of teenagers,  throw  them together in a cramped room, pile huge stacks of imported magazines in front of them, hand them fat tipped black magic markers and make them go through each photo and scratch a big blob of  wet black ink in the pubic region. Voila, now the Japanese youth would be  saved from their carnal temptations and the corruption of their innocent minds.

But for the locally produced Japanese edition of Playboy, we would have to come up with a selection of photos that didn’t contain even a tiny wisp of hair. Since Playboy shoots thousands of photos for about a dozen they end up using, this normally wasn’t a big problem for someone to sit down and select fotos sin pelo pubico.  Even so, sometimes it was difficult to find enough usable photos  with right expressions on the girl’s face.  It was initially my job to go through those thousands of photos and do an edit for the Japanese.  Frustrated, sometimes I would accost the photographers and remind them that we needed ample non-pubic photos.  At times it was difficult for them – having just been freed from the shackles and having to go backward must have been psychologically daunting for them. So much so that when in 1987 we were producing a multi-girls pictorial, to complement the Miss Playboy International Beauty Pageant  broadcast live from Hong Kong’s Queen Elizabeth Stadium, when the Turkish candidate Arzum Cibir, showed up in the studio with her pubic region clean-shaved, the photographer Byron Newman and his wife/stylist Brigitte  were horrified.  A minor crisis ensued in the air. Of the solutions discussed and bounced around was also the possibility of giving Arzum an artificial patch of pubes, in the form of a custom-made, how can I say it – a pussy wig? In the end, the silliness discounted and sanity prevailed.  We decided that they would pose her in a way that would not require her to shoot full frontal.  There were thirteen more girls in the group. So…

But for the legal requirement of the countries, there was not much the photographers could do, because now we needed them not only for Japan but also for Brazil (launched in August 1976), and Mexico (November 1976), later added to the list would be Turkey (January 1986) and Taiwan (April 1990).

In the cases of Mexico and Brazil, we couldn’t even call the magazines Playboy, until years later. In Brazil it was called Homem (Man) and in Mexico Caballero, con Lo Mejor de Playboy (Gentleman, with the best of Playboy).  In Brazil, every nude layout that went into the magazine, had to be presented to the censor board and approved by the authorities before they could be put into the magazine. They required not only no-pubic, but also we were restricted to show only a single nipple in an image. And this is in the country of Samba and the wildest Carnival and the skimpiest dental floss bikinis running around Copacabana beach!

The most absurd thing to happen was in Mexico. One fine morning Eduardo Gongorra, the General Manager of the Mexican edition was called in by the authorities and told that their license to publish Caballero was suspended. Not only they couldn’t call the magazine Playboy under any circumstances, but the new law dictated that no publication can use a noun as its proper name. They couldn’t change it to Señor either, because Señor too was a noun. How about Signore? It meant the same, but in Italian and not in Spanish. Since they couldn’t come up with an immediate retort to that, after several harried phone calls between Chicago and Mexico City, it was collectively agreed to change the name immediately and continue publishing while we would appeal and fight the battle to eventually be allowed to call the magazine by its rightful name, Playboy.

Coming back to Japan, there were times when the Japanese editors in their creative frenzy would  want to include in their layout one of the photos published in the US edition. No matter a blob of curls plainly in sight. What do they do? Have it airbrushed out. They knew I would scream murder when the issue hit my desk a few days later. Then it would be too late to do anything about it. I would hear from other executives of the company – including once directly from Christie Hefner,  how horrible and unnatural airbrushed pussies looked?  I know! I know!! I would slap hands of the Japanese. They would apologize with a promise to never do it again – that is until they would some months later. Hoping that Shah-san won’t notice. But notice I did.  Dismayed, as I often sat at my desk staring at those bald as an eagle-head patches so expertly smoothed out and blended into rest of the skin, like them I too hoped that no one else would notice – Christie most of all.

Fast forward to 2007. After nine years sojourn in Prague and after fourteen years since I left Playboy, I have returned to Chicago to live. I am sitting in my guest room on a chair next to my floor to ceiling bookcases filled with the issues of more than forty-five years of Playboy.  Sitting across from me on the edge of the bed are my neighbor Melissa and her younger sister Andrea. They want to see the issues of the months  and the years they were born. I hand Melissa the bound volume containing the first four issues of 1974. She quickly flips through and zeros in on February Playmate Francine Park’s pictorial. The opening spread doesn’t get her attention as much, but as she turns the page, at the bottom of the next page is a shot of reclining Francine with her eyes dreamily closed, her torso lifted slightly by the pillow underneath and rest of her body seductively sloping downward. Her right hand reaches up above framing her head, the left hand resting down by her thigh. And staring right at Melissa is her ample tuft, dark and dense, bushier than a bird’s nest. And I see Melissa pointing at it and then hear her screaming exclamation:   Oh my God! Those girls had pubic hair!!!.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday: January 11, 2013

TELEVISION, VCR, CAMCORDER & ME

I have been incessantly and relentlessly pelted by e-mail, mail orders and even over the telephone, companies offering me package deals for satellite/cable services. When I tell them, I own no television to start with, they are left with a speechless Oh!

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HERR DOKTOR SHAH

December 27, 2012 //
1

Haresh Shah

That’s Just What I Needed To Be

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Between my hasty arrival in Munich and the hastier departure next day to Düsseldorf, there wasn‘t much time to think of or look for a permanent place for me to live in Munich, which is where I would be based. The most practical thing for me to do would have been to move into Gerrit Huig’s apartment  from which he had already moved out and established himself in Milan. I was his replacement in Germany with editorial based in Munich and production in Essen near Düsseldorf. Eventually I would have preferred  a pièd à terre in both cities, but having taken over Gerrit’s apartment gave me a temporary reprise and perhaps a permanent one if  I so wished.  But soon it became apparent to me that it wasn’t a right place for me for more reasons than one. Just within the first few weeks I was awoken by the loud and harsh ringing of the phone early in the morning. On the line was Frau Westerholz – my landlady – hysterically screaming at me. She had just received the telephone bill in the amount of a couple of hundred deautsch marks, listing frequent calls to Chicago and also to Milan and Paris.

At the time, if you rented a place anywhere in Europe, you made sure that it came with a telephone already installed.  It wasn’t easy to transfer it to your name and/or easily ordered and installed in a day or two like in the US.  When renting a place, you just agreed to reimburse your landlord the phone charges. Took me first to shake myself awake and then assuming a milder tone, I calmed down Frau Westerholz.  Telling her that soon as she handed me the bill, I would immediately transfer the funds to her account. But even otherwise, the apartment wasn’t something I aspired to. The neighbors were unfriendly, if not outright nasty. Parking was a big problem.

Hearing of my frustrations, Rainer’s wife Renate kindly offered to help find a new apartment. In Chicago I had lived in a brand new lake front apartment on the south side. A spacious one bedroom place with the glass walls and wonderful panoramic view of the South Shore Country Club and the Lake Shore Drive. It came with a swimming pool, the penthouse party room and  underground garage.

‘There are many new buildings, I am sure we can find something as good for  you.’ Renate assured. She made up a classified ad for me, something to the effect that  a young American professional  just having moved to Munich was looking for a specious two bedroom apartment.  She placed the ad in Süddeautsche Zeitung, and the phone on my desk began to ring incessantly and insistently.

I must have spoken to at least half a dozen potential landlords. The rent most of them quoted was not a problem, in fact they were lower than DM 1000.- I was paying for Gerrit’s apartment.  But in the end, none of them wanted to rent me their places. The composite conversation went something like this.

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty two.’

Married? How many kids?’

‘Not married. No kids.’

‘Hum!’

‘You are single?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you need such a large apartment?’

‘I don’t know. I just like the feeling of space.’

‘And you said you work for Playboy magazine?’

‘Yes. Is that a problem?’

‘No. I don’t know. I need to check with my husband/wife. I will call you back later.’

Enter Tim Nater – our American editorial assistant, with whom I shared the office and who would go on to become a foreign correspondent for Newsweek.  Seeing me sitting there looking frazzled, I see him raising his eyebrows, his look pointed and zoomed through his thick tortoise-shell framed glasses.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘These fucking Germans!’

‘Why? What happened?’

‘Why is it their business that I’m married with children or not? Shouldn’t it to be whether or not I have good credit and that I will pay my rent on time?’

‘It’s. You’ll find out soon enough!’

‘Well, then why they ask me those stupid questions about why a single man would want to rent a hundred square meter two bedroom apartment? As if I were planning to run a bordello or run a betting ring from there.’

‘Worst yet, heaven forbid! You may throw all those wild parties – the orgies. Horror! And disturb the peace of the law-abiding German citizens.’  Said Tim and laughed. ‘Tell me exactly what happened?’

So I tell him.

‘Okay, I got it. Look, this is Germany and its unusual for a single man even wanting or having a one bedroom apartment.  Majority of them live in studios — einzimmer wohnung. Plus it doesn’t help that you’re  a foreigner and speak German with a funny accent. It probably doesn’t  bode  well that you work for the “porno” magazine Playboy! But don’t worry, we’ll find something good for you.’

‘Thanks Tim. Fuck it! I’m going to go out and get something to eat and have a stein of Paulaner.’

‘Go ahead. I’ll answer your calls.’

●●●

‘I think you may have found just the right place. Perhaps even better.’ Tim informs me soon as I have returned.

‘Tell me!’

‘A lady called. Frau von Liebe. She owns a brand new apartment – two bedrooms, balcony all around, spacious 100 + square meters. And they have Olympic size swimming pool and full sauna. The rent is DM 900.-. Hope it’s within your budget?’ At the exchange rate of DM 3.50 to a dollar, it is a steal.

‘Sounds really good. Let’s call her back.’

‘No. Let’s wait until she calls back. I told her that Herr Doktor Shah ist bei mittags essen. Rufen sie mal bitte an  in etwa eine stunde — and then he winks at me — you don’t want to seem too eager!’

‘Okay. But What’s that Herr Doktor shit?’

‘That would put to rest the question of why a single man needs two bedroom place. You know how it is?  In this country, titles mean a lot!’

So we wait. When the phone rings, Tim picks it up. Guten tag. Leitung von Herr Doktor Shah!

I hear a muffled female voice escaping from the receiver.

‚Ja, er ist schon wieder da. Eine kleine moment bitte.‘

‚Herr Doktor Shah?‘

‚Am aparat. Guten tag frau von Liebe!‘

And we talk. I answer her questions and give her pertinent information about myself and me working for an American company in partnership with one of the top German publishing groups, Bauer Verlag —  the publishers of Quick and Neue Revue. I skip mentioning Playboy, just in case. Tim must have done a good PR job of building me up, for she doesn’t ask me any offensive questions about my single status. We agree to meet the next morning.

It’s a gorgeous late winter early spring day in Munich. I pull up in front of Johannclanzestrasse 49, in my shining like a newly minted penny, white Buick Skylark. Since the building is on my left hand side, I just cross the street sideways and park the car right near the front door, facing wrong way.

Frau von Liebe, a mild-mannered  elderly lady with short curly blonde hair emerges from behind the glass door. Before greeting me with Herr Doktor Shah, her giving my Buick up and down  doesn’t  escape me. I could just hear her saying to herself, alles klar!!

Its a spacious glass covered corner unit with a wrap around balcony in which the bedroom, kitchen, living room and the second bedrooms all open. With the floors heated, no radiators to block placing of the furniture. The place is doused in abundance of natural light. It is a couple of neighborhoods removed from the city center, nearer to the outer Mittlererring – but has everything I would  have wished for, including underground garage parking space . I could just imagine the fun I would have living there.

© Haresh Shah 2012

Illustration:Jordan Rutherford

 Next Friday, January 4, 2013

TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN…

Silly as silly can be is how I think of all the legal battles and censorship and restrictions on books, movies and all other art forms. How can Playboy be an exception?  I share with you some outlandish, bizarre but funny episodes from around the world.

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MY SWEET LORD

December 20, 2012 //
1

Haresh Shah

Playmates, Playmates, Playmates. Überall

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Barbara was a good sport. If she was disappointed, she didn’t let on. We laughed at her ghost images and I even stack loaded the slides and projected them on the wall. However faint the images, we learned from them what poses worked and what didn’t.  As relaxed as she was, there were still traces of a certain stiffness in those poses that reflected the initial discomfort and nervousness that both of us must have felt in front of the camera and behind.

We stuck to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass LP and played over and over again My Sweet Lord and Wah-Wah – the track that followed. Those tunes carried her moods and the movements.  We repeated the session of the week before. Now more relaxed and really getting into the swing of it, we continued the routine over the next couple of weekends. Those sessions resulted into some naturally beautiful shots of Barbara’s youthful energy, exuberance and her flirtatious and teasing smiles.  We went outdoors and did a series of headshots to capture her achingly natural good  looks.

Barbara was a natural model.  Not only was she comfortable in her nudity, she was almost unaware of it as she danced to the music and flirted with the lens,  as if it were the man she most desired and was determined to lure into her orbit. Just like those songs and dances in Bollywood movies. Those weekends, not only yielded us some wonderful photos, but they also began to morph into what would turn out to be a lifelong friendship. A year and a half  later, coincidentally we both found ourselves living in southern California. Me in Santa Barbara, and her a hundred and fifty miles south in San Clemente. In the interim, she had married Scott and had moved to the US and I found myself “cost cut” from Playboy.  Feeling absolutely free after nineteen long years of schooling and working, I accepted on impulse my friends Mark and Ann’s invitation and returned to the US and settled close to them in California.  Barbara and I having found ourselves within driving distance and so far away from home, we saw each other frequently, worked on some serious photographic projects, of which though nothing came out, but we did have lots of fun and  laughs in the roles of  the photographer and his muse.   Now 38 years later, we’re still in touch and try to see each other whenever we can.  If not as frequently as we would like, but  when we do, its back to being transposed back to those weekends and those days in California.

Getting back to the beginning; what I loved the most about Barbara was that she was in no hurry to become a Playmate and was willing and ready to shoot as many sessions as it took to be able to present the best the two of us had to offer as a team.

When I finally showed a small selection of what we had shot, and handed them her four page-long Playmate Data Sheet, both Rainer and Freddy loved how naturally beautiful and how German she looked.  There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that we had stumbled upon the best possible Playmate candidate to be called the First.  Twenty-one years old, she weighed 54 kg. (120 lbs.) and was 173 centimeter (5’.7”) tall. Her vital statistics measured 93x63x93 (36.5” x25”36.5” ). She came from an old Bavarian family in which “everyone loved to drink.”  While her father’s ancestors transported salt across the country, the ancestors on her mother’s side were brewers; “hence the enormous thirst in the family.”  And having born and grown up in the city of the legendary Oktoberfest made for a perfect storyline. Ironically, she is only a moderate drinker.

At the time, she worked as Executive Secretary to Münchener Olympiade, had graduated from high school majoring in home economics and aspired to be a social worker. In answer  to Why do you want to be a Playmate? she wrote; so that I can show my kids how beautiful their Mama looked when young. What can be more down to earth and wholesome?  Beyond that, Chicago’s approval was a mere formality.

Freddy and other executives saw an enormous promotional potential in her. She would become the darling of the press, appear on television talk shows and the advertising department could tag her along to meetings with their clients. She would be the special attraction at trade shows and the conventions. The potential was limitless. There was palpable excitement in the air. Freddy, Heinz, Rainer and other top executives began to see why Chicago was so keen and insistent on them to producing their own Playmates.

Everything was ready and set to go. Peter Brüchmann – one  of the top glamour photographers of the country was hired to shoot the pictorial.  But the problem was producing of the centerfold.  By Hefner’s personal decree, it had to be shot on the large 20×25 (8”10”) format studio camera, thus ensuring the highest possible reproduction quality over the spread stretching out on to three full pages. After much discussion, it was decided that instead of allowing Peter to shoot it and him learning  by trial and error,  taking a long view, why not send him, Barbara and our photo editor Susi Pletz to Chicago and have Pompeo Posar – one of the Playboy’s star photographers do the first centerfold, with Peter assisting and learning, but mainly Susi picking up nuts and bolts of Playmate production and bringing back home that knowledge. This delayed the project by several months, because that’s how long it took to get everyone’s schedules in sync.

In the meanwhile, Susi had come up with three more Playmate candidates, one of them she had plain spotted in the supermarket and approached, the others came as submissions from professional photographers.  Among them: Jacques Alexandre’s  portfolio of   gorgeous nudes of the sultry redhead Dagmar Puttkammer from Wuppertal.  No problem with the photos as submitted. Jacques shot some more “story” photos  capturing her life in and around her hometown, featuring the places and the people in her life. That is: except the centerfold. The luck would have it, Pompeo Posar happened to be in Italy at the time on a project from the U.S. edition. We were able to have him come over to Munich for a long weekend to help us out. Susi organized the location, the props and acquired a large format camera, set up weekend processing of films and we together assisted Pompeo into shooting what would become the first ever Playmate of Playboy’s German, and therefore the foreign editions.

While reluctant at first, now Freddy couldn’t have a German Playmate soon enough. And thus by default, Dagmar became the first German Playmate making her debut in March 1975. Barbara followed in July 1975.

© Haresh Shah 2012

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Related Stories

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

HUNTING FOR THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

THE TALES OF TWO PLAYMATES

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

 Next Friday: December 28, 2012

HERR DOKTOR SHAH

Nope, I don’t have a doctorate of any kind. Even if I did, I would be petrified to have such a pompous title precede my name.  But our editorial assistant Tim Nater decided, that’s just what I needed.

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SMUGGLING SMUT

December 13, 2012 //
2

Haresh Shah

Some Call It Smut – Others Read It For The Interviews – And You?
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Why I felt the need to write to my parents to justify my taking a job at Playboy, I don’t know. But just in case if they had similar misconceptions about Playboy as do most of the people who had actually  never even read it. I wrote a long letter telling my parents  how happy I was to have had an opportunity to work for one of the best magazines in the world. Of the four magazines I consider to be the standard bearers are: Time, The New Yorker, New York and Playboy.  The letter was basically me refuting the people who expressed their opinions with a smirk: yeah right! You read it for its interviews.

To my astonishment, my father’s response was: so what’s the big deal? Haven’t  you  ever read Rasa Manjari? Right!! But my dad read Rasa Manjari? Uhm! Not only had I paged through Rasa Manjari, but also had to study two Sanskrit classics: Shakuntla by Kalidasa and Swapna Vasvadatta (Vision of Vasvadatta)  by Bhása. Their microscopic descriptions of the female anatomy in all their graphic details would make even Madonna blush. Not to speak of Kama Sutra, which I hadn’t read.  And what about all those multi-dimensional  carvings of Khajuraho and other Indian temples depicting every conceivable positions in blatant fornication? They all prove the point made by the late Bollywood legend, Dev Anand,  in his opinion column that appeared decades earlier in  I  believe either Indian Express or Free Press Journal.  Accordingly, what we now proudly call the Indian culture was sadly brought upon us by the culmination of several hundred years of  rule by the Moguls and the English. Along with the breath-taking Mogul monuments such as Taj Mahal and the British building of the country-wide network of railroads, what we also inherited from them were their prudish socio-sexual values and morality. India before them was the country of the gender equality and the ultimate socio-sexual freedom. It was a country in which the court dancers occupied honored positions in royal advisory councils.

Breathing a sigh of relief, when a year later I boarded the Bombay bound Swissair flight, squeezed in-between my clothes and gifts were several copies of Playboy. The magazine long banned in India. I wanted to show my family and friends the love of my labor. How would I get it through the ever so vigilant customs of the country was something I had to play by ear.

It must be about two in the morning as I stood in front of the dressed in lily-white and starched to the-T,  uniformed customs officer. My suitcase propped up on top of the counter and what would be an early version of a boom box, hanging from my left hand.

‘I am afraid you will have to pay duty on that transistor.’
‘How much?’
‘I don’t know exactly. Do you have the bill? I think probably about two thousand rupees.’
‘But it didn’t even cost me that much.
‘Sorry, the duty is 200%’
‘In that case, you can keep it here. I will take it back on my return flight. I am sure I can buy one similar for much less from Crawford Market.’ Seeing that I had managed to throw him off-track, I continued: ‘My father will be heart-broken, because he normally never asks me for anything. He asked me for this so he can record and play bhajans during his puja sessions every day.’

I could see the expressions on his face changing. Suddenly I had put him in a moral bind. How could he deny a gift to a father from his son? Even more so, it was meant to play spiritual bhajans in a home temple. Still not saying anything, he points at the suitcase.

‘What else you’ve got in there?’
‘Oh, just some small gifts for my brothers and sisters. We are eight siblings.  Some toys for their kids and a sari for my mother.’

But I am not worried about them. It’s the issues of Playboy stashed between the layers of clothing. One thing I had learned from my very first encounter with the customs at the port of Dover in England was – never try to or even hint at having hidden anything which the customs officer may deem in the slightest susceptible. It has served me well. Years and years that I have traveled and hundreds of trips I have taken all over the world, I have but only once paid minimal customs duty, that of around forty American dollars.

With my suitcase wide open on the counter, I turn over  my clothes and fish out a couple of issues of Playboy.

‘Other than that the only other thing I have are these copies of Playboy.  But I work for the magazine in Germany and  am its production manager. I want to show my friends and the family what I do for a living.’ To authenticate my claim, I pull out my business card  and extend my hand  to give it to him. Without even turning his head, he throws a perfunctory sideway glance at the card. I am standing there with an issue of Playboy in my hand, proceeding to flip to the staff page and show him my name in the masthead.

‘No, no, no, no. No!!!. Put it right back in your suitcase, shut it quick and get the hell out of here before my boss sees it and you and I both get into trouble!’

© Haresh Shah 2012

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Related Stories

TIMES THEY’RE A CHANGIN’

PLAYBOY ON THE COFFEE TABLE

SEX EDUCATION A LA JAPONAISE

Next Friday, December 21, 2012
MY SWEET LORD
Well, if you have been wondering whatever happened to the beautiful Barbara and her inexperienced  photographer, and his botched test shoot, wonder no more. Click next week on this continuation of Hunting For The Girl Next Door.

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HUNTING FOR THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

December 6, 2012 //
9

Haresh Shah

 Why Even Go As Far As The Next Door?

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‘So how’s your search for Playmates coming along?’ Asks Freddy as we run into each other in the hallway of the executive floor. Freddy is wearing his characteristic  grin which gives his natural dimples a couple of extra wrinkles.

‘Its coming along. I may soon have a couple of candidates to show you.’

Still grinning, he goes; ‘come on, don’t kill yourself. Just because you had to open your big fucking  mouth in front of your big American bosses!’

I grin back.

‘I tell you what! If you do find some, just have fun, fuck them and forget this Playmate business. You know, Chicago would never approve a German chick.’

At that, we both flash our cryptic smirks and go on to wherever we were headed. Me thinking that perhaps Freddy is still hoping that I was just trying to show off, trying to earn a few brownie points,  and nothing of substance would come out of it.  Soon that conversation at Neuer Simpl will be forgotten and he won’t have to worry about what must have seemed to him an enormous burden on his budget, let alone having to  undertake such an iconic photo shoot and then fail.

But little did he know, not only was I fired up but so was Rainer. This wunderkind had extra wheels turning into his already hyper creative head.  He had immediately briefed his photo editor Susi Pletz that we were looking for Playmate candidates.  All it took for them and for me, was to put out the word.

In Munich I had cultivated a sizeable circle of friends in a short span of months.  Among them, Britt Walker. The only one who frequented the night spots more than I did. This was also because he lived in the very heart of the  trendy Schwabing in the newly built and the most “in” dwelling complex, Fuchsbau.

Britt was an incredible magnet to women. I don’t know what his secret was, but he always showed up with a pretty young thing at least half his age, hanging on his arms, clinging and seemed to have madly fallen in love with him. Someone he would have introduced to us as Cersti, Gabriella, Karen, Amy, Marion and others — ones he had met the night before at Domicile, Tangente, Why Not or Yellow Submarine. Most of the girls he brought to my apartment were either already photo models, starlets or aspiring to be one or the other.  Now with the genuine Playboy hook, his modus operandi must have become even smoother.  I could just imagine him using a line such as: You’ve got to meet my good friend Haresh from Playboy. To his credit, I must say, he never misled or promised them anything – other than insinuating that as beautiful as they were, they just may have a chance of becoming  Playmates.  But mainly they came along because mine was an open house where friends felt comfortable walking in with a friend or two of their own. These visits would often turn into an impromptu party.  Nothing wild by any stretch of imagination. Hanging out, going out to eat and dance, stop at cafes and bars that were also art galleries, sit around for hours at the stammtisch – a  large table reserved for the regulars in good old German tradition – at one at one of our favorite wine lokals.

Britt came up with several girls. None of them quite qualified to be a Playmate. The first one he brought over was flat chested, the second had already posed in the nude, the third was cute but her breasts sagged,  and also there was something about her face that looked perpetually tired. Britt calling me up every so often and asking me to look at a Playmate candidate had started to irritate me.  Annoyed, I was about to put a stop to his assault on my time.  Just then he came up with a winner.

Barbara  – a strikingly pretty and yet easy-going, unpretentious Bavarian beauty, with an oval face. Tall, lithe curvaceous figure, a brunette with her hair floating down below her shoulders, and a set of penetrating brown eyes. What struck me the most about her was her mischievous innocence.  And she didn’t come hanging on Britt’s arm.  Accompanying her was her American boyfriend, Scott.

We were just starting out so there was no procedure in place. I knew, at the US Playboy they would just bring in the girl into the studio, place her on an existing set and do some Polaroids and test shoot a few quick rolls of films. I didn’t want to approach Freddy about how we would go about doing a test shoot. That would give him one more excuse to back out. But I mentioned it to Rainer who let me have a few rolls of Ektachromes cooling in the photo department’s refrigerator.  The less fuss we made about it, the better it would be.

My apartment in Munich was a spacious two bedroom fifth floor unit with wrap around balcony, facing North and West and the outer glass walls through which cascades of light filtered in.   And yet it offered total privacy of an attic with sky lights.  Even though I had studied photography and  was a serious amateur and in possession of semi-professional photographic equipment, I hadn’t any experience in doing  serious nudes, other than having done some hobby nudes of my friends Jan and Marilyn in Chicago years earlier.  Since what I was going to do was just a test shoot – should she be approved, we would have a professional photographer take over. So without much a do,  I pulled out my Pentax Spotmatic and various lenses from their black case and loaded the camera with one of the Ektachromes.

Unlike most other girls requiring a glass of champagne or wine to loosen up, Barbara was naturally relaxed.  She was completely at ease with her clothes off. She moved and laughed and made faces, came up with some good suggestions and good poses. I just put George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass on the turn table, placed her in the front of my bare white wall and let her dance to the music.  We shot two rolls.  The next morning I dropped off the films at the in-house lab for processing.

When the processed strips of the films were delivered to my office  that night, to my horror, they contained no more than washed out barely visible ghost images of Barbara. Absolutely bummed out, when I checked my camera, I realized that the battery powering  the light meter was dead, causing the needle indicating the exposure to be stuck. I had overexposed to oblivion in my brightly lit apartment.

Nothing I could do.

© 2012 Haresh Shah

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

 Related Stories

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

MY SWEET LORT

THE TALES OF TWO PLAYMATES

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

Next Friday, December 14, 2012

SMUGGLING SMUT: Its one thing to work for the magazine banned in India. Quite an ordeal trying to sneak several copies of it past the customs. But how else could I show off my family and friends the product I was so proud of and had a part in making?

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THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

November 29, 2012 //
1

Haresh Shah

 How I Managed To Put My Foot In My Mouth

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About a year in my job, my bosses Bob Gutwilig and Lee Hall come down to Munich. Other than the three of us, sitting around the dining table are Franz Spelman, our local editorial consultant, Heinz van Nouhuys, editorial director of Playboy’s German edition and Fred Baumgärtel – the man really in charge of it all. And not to forget Rainer Wörtmann, the art director wunderkind. Of the group, Rainer is the  youngest and I am the second youngest.

Playboy Germany in it’s over a year of publication had taken off like a rocket. The time had come to look back and look forward instead of resting on the laurels of success. Among other editorial matters,  the subject of the Playmates came up again. The basic concept of the young woman who would adorn the centerfold as defined by Hefner was that she couldn’t be a professional model, an actress or a celebrity. She had to be the girl next door. Playmate is not just another pretty face with near perfect vital statistics. She has certain personality traits. She is smart, she is articulate, she is confident and she is gracious.  At the same time, she is down home wholesome and unpretentious.  The kind of girl the readers can relate to and not be intimidated by  in the way most attractive women could be.

Now with three European editions of Playboy dotting the western Europe, that included Italy and France, it was becoming imperative to expand the scope of their local editorial contents.  Even though a lot of editorial material such as Playboy After Dark, Playboy Interviews, Playboy Advisor as well as most of the non-fiction and fiction pieces covering the local scene were already produced by the respective editions,  missing glaringly from their pages were the local Playmates.  By now I too had become a true Münchener and as many pretty things as I saw walking Stachus, Schwabing and the pedestrian zone of Marienplatz, I  could well imagine one or more of those home-grown beauties becoming the girl next door to grace the German centerfold.

Technically, I was “just” their production manager with the primary function of overseeing the printing quality and shouldn’t even be included in that night’s dinner at the trendy Neuer Simpl,  breaking bread with the top brass. I was invited perhaps because I was a part of the very small American team of three in Munich, perhaps because after the initial coolness and apprehension,  I had succeeded in endearing the Germans to my presence among them. So after they were done talking text and illustrations, Bob once again brought up, something we had already touched upon during their visit a couple of months earlier.

‘When are you going to start producing your own Playmates?’

‘I don’t think we are ready to take that step yet. I am quite content with the American Playmates. Besides, to produce our own Playmates would be prohibitively expensive. I would rather use my budget in trying to get good authors at this time than put the money into Playmates,’ responded Freddy.

‘Yes, but that’s not the same,’ said Bob.

‘And they aren’t exactly girls next door for the German readers,’ I quipped.

‘How do  you mean it?’

‘I mean, Miki Garcia from California, Ellen Michaels from Long Island and Marilyn Cole from London, are not exactly what we could call the girls next door for “our” readers.’ I rattled off the list of some recent American Playmates that had appeared in the German edition.  Bob let me continue and just listened encouragingly.

‘One hardly could relate to them if you lived, say in Munich, Milan or Paris. They never could imagine running into any of them walking down Leopoldstrasse, for example.’ I added. I saw both Bob and Lee shaking their heads in assent and also Rainer while Heinz remained visibly non-committal.

‘Okay, here is the main reason. Even not considering the production costs and while Munich is overflowing with most beautiful models and starlets, they are not exactly girls next door either.’

‘But there are so many beautiful young women all over Germany.’

‘So they are. But I don’t think any of them would want to pose in the nude. It would be very difficult to find the ones who would and still be up to the U.S. standards.’ Freddy said, looking a bit frustrated.  He had a point. Nudity per se was not a taboo in Europe. Even the “news” magazines such as Quick and Neue Revue carried nudes on their covers, majority of them of unknown origin, submitted by freelance photographers. Would we want one of those girls to be in Playboy? Probably not.

‘What if I found us an acceptable  Playmate?’ Don’t ask me what made me say that. Even I was astounded at my own chutzpah, especially considering that both of my big bosses sat at the table and I was at the very bottom of the totem pole of our group hierarchy.  It must have been that both Bob and Lee remained silent, tacitly allowing me to take the reign.

‘You probably could Mr. Shah. But I wouldn’t want it to interfere with your day job!’ Lee said in half jest, being his Machiavellian self as ever.

‘What if I do it in my spare time?’

I didn’t want to divulge the amount of spare time I had. For someone who had done three weekly magazines at Time – for me to do a monthly magazine, planned months in advance was something I could do in my sleep. Not to mention my most able counterpart Heinz Nellissen  planted firmly right in the printing shop in Essen.

‘If you find us a candidate that is acceptable to Chicago, then we will certainly consider producing her.’ Freddy relented with Rainer and Heinz van Neuhuys nodding their assent.

‘I think we might be up to something here. Chicago will of course help you with the production and the expertise. We will make available one of our top photographers to work with you guys.’ Bob assured.

‘We absolutely will.’ Lee seconded.  Those promises were comforting. If Freddy still remaining somewhat apprehensive, we were all in agreement that a local girl with the staples in her belly would indeed make it an authentic German edition.

No one was exactly betting on me really finding a Playmate candidate acceptable to Chicago.  We parted feeling pleased at having addressed and agreed upon an important issue.  Soon, everybody seemed to have comfortably sloughed it off and tucked it away in their subconscious.

That is, except me. I had work to do.

©2012 Haresh Shah

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

 Next Friday, December 7, 2012

Related Stories

HUNTING FOR THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

MY SWEET LORD

THE TALES OF TWO PLAYMATES

MOTHER KNOWS BEST

HUNTING FOR THE GIRL NEXT DOOR: If she indeed lives right next door, why can’t I just knock on her door? My next door neighbor at the time was good old Dr. Max Grenzman – a gynecologist. That certainly didn’t help. Or? Wait, how about one of his pretty patients?

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PANDORA’S BOX

November 17, 2012 //
11

Haresh Shah

Every Life Untold Is A Pandora’s Box

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The reason I decided to write Playboy Stories is: However I try not to talk about me having worked at the magazine for twenty one years, it always comes up. Like the afternoon when I was visiting my childhood friend Deven at his brother Madhu’s house in Elgin. I also met for the first time Madhu’s son Mehul and his wife Priti. We’ve had a leisurely late afternoon lunch and were just trying to catch up when out of a clear blue sky, Deven comes out and says to Priti that I worked for Playboy. No wonder you’re so cool! She exclaimed. Whatever that meant. As I began to answer some of her questions and mentioned I was thinking of starting a blog about my years at Playboy, suddenly her husband Mehul’s antenna popped up. Up until then, he hadn’t said a word other than the initial hello, beyond that his nose remained buried into the screen of his I-Pad.

About a month earlier, I had invited for dinner my two young neighbors, Alex and Evan with their  girlfriends Jessica and Tara. When Alex happened  to mention my Playboy connection, that answered the girls’ curiosity regarding why half of my wall in the guest room is filled with every single issue of the last fifty years of the US Playboy, as well as the landmark issues of the international editions of which I was editorial director. The girls had questions. Tara 22 and Jessica 23. What was it like to work for Playboy? Had I ever met Hefner? Had I been to his mansion? Was I ever present at photo shoots? What are those girls like? They can’t all be that perfect. And so on, is when Alex said good humouredly, Don’t ask many questions. Its like opening up Pandora’s Box. A week later, when I ended up sharing a steak dinner with Alex and Jessica, I couldn’t help but think how pretty she was, and how unpretentious, down home simple. Just like, yes, the girl next door. I said out loud, that she could be a Playmate.

‘No, I can’t. With my height, and…’ She didn’t finish the sentence, but I presumed, she didn’t think her breasts were ample enough.

‘No Jessica, not all Playmates are tall and buxom. For example…what’s her name?’ As it often happens to me, even though I could clearly picture Jenny McCarthy standing next to me, fitting snuggly under my arm – a whole head shorter than me. And I am only five-five (1.65m). After they left, I rummaged through one of my many shoe boxes of photographic prints waiting to be included in an album I may make someday or never get around to ever doing it. But our brief conversation inspired me to do just that – to throw together all the stray photos depicting bits and pieces of my life at Playboy in a scrapbook  ostentatiously titled,  La Vie Playboy – Das Leben und Zeiten von Haresh Shah – 1972-1993.

As anal as I normally am about order and chronology, I just decided to throw caution to the wind and not to worry about it as long as there was some semblance of both and let the captions I proceeded to write tell individual stories. Working on the scrapbook  lead me to want to write about the  answers I give to people and the memories I cherish of my long association with Playboy magazine.

For those of you who may not know, or only barely remember where I am coming from – here is a brief rundown on the professional trajectory I have followed.

I began working with my uncle Jaisukh in his just-getting-off-the-ground Wilco Publishing House in Bombay, right  out of high school at the age of seventeen. I worked all through my six college years. Four at Jai Hind College where I earned my B.A. in Economics and two more years at the Government School of Printing Technology,  before sailing away from the Ballard Pier, to get a diploma in Photolithography at London School of Printing. Spent a year at Burda Publishing in the heart of the Black Forrest in Germany as their reproduction photographer. Following that I landed  in the city of New York and my cousin Ashwin drove me to  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My six months working on the floors of Graphic Arts Technical Foundation, put the cherry on the top of my educational achievements. A job offer from Time Inc, now Time Warner, landed me in cold and windy Chicago, becoming one of their  team of six quality control supervisors in charge of Time, Life –  the largest circulation weekly of those days –Sports Illustrated and Fortune.  Four years later, in 1972,  I let Playboy steal me away from them and ship me off to Munich, Germany to become its production manager for the newly launched “foreign” edition of the magazine. Over the period of next twenty one years, with a brief hiatus in-between, I worked my way up to the corporate position  of  Senior Vice President and international publishing division’s Editorial Director in charge of eighteen countries. It took me all over the world many times over. Along the way, I learned to speak fluent German and Spanish and also picked up fair amount of Czech, some French and Italian. I left Playboy at the end of September 1993. Since then I did Florida Sportsfan, moved and lived in Prague as editorial adviser to half a dozen women’s magazines and eventually  conceived and became Editor and Publisher of TV/Entertainment magazine Serial, until I retired in 2005.

Never mind that I try to tell all of this to people so that they can put in perspective where I am coming from or where I have been. All of that goes over their heads,  except of course the Playboy part. So what choice do I have?

That’s my motivation and the reason for undertaking this journey.  A past girlfriend Susan frequently said of me: You live in the past!  And so it is. I guess there is a certain amount of gratuitous  gratification living in the days that are no longer.

©2012 Haresh Shah

 Illustration: Deven Mehta

Next Friday, November 30, 2012

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR: is how Hefner defined his Playmates as opposed to celebrities and professional models. When I communicated this to one of my editors – his response while scrutinizing the current  centerfold was: If she is the girl next door, I must be living in a wrong neighborhood.

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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