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