An Education (9 page)

Another of my jobs was literary editor, which meant buying book extracts and short stories to fill the ever-growing number of pages. The stories had to be ‘classy’, of course, but they also had to be as long as possible and cost no more than £50. I developed a great hatred of literary agents, who would dump their whole slush piles on me without even the most cursory attention to what
Penthouse
might like – I was bombarded with stories about elderly churchgoing spinsters, which, come to think of it, might have been by Barbara Pym, but they certainly weren't right for
Penthouse
. My great coup, finally, was discovering science fiction and in particular a magazine called
New Worlds
which was publishing J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, but only to a specialist sci-fi audience. They were happy to sell us second British serial rights and we gradually acquired a reputation for publishing good science fiction. In later years Kathy launched a sci-fi magazine called
Omni
in the US, which was hugely successful for a while.

The main requirement for all articles in
Penthouse
was that they had to be long. We ran Q-and-A interviews that rambled on for 30 pages. We had book extracts that were longer than many books. We ran 6,000-word theatre reviews and as much as Kingsley Amis ever wanted to write about booze. The point was that the words pages were printed in black and white and therefore cheap, and the girl pages were printed in colour which in those days was staggeringly expensive, especially as Bob had very high standards. (He worried about colour quality and also about staple lines. It was vital not to put staples through a girl's bosom.) So Harry and I had a very small budget and an enormous acreage of space to fill. We bought book extracts on classical erotica, on alien abductions, on Nazi war crimes. My job was to fillet them, find the juicy bits, and run as long an extract as possible. But always hampered by Harry, who had this obsession with redundancy. He could find extraneous words in any sentence, he could find extraneous sentences in any paragraph, he could find extraneous paragraphs in any page and would merrily run his black fountain pen through them all. But Harry, I would protest, we
need
to make 6,000 words. ‘Can't print waffle,’ he would say. ‘We're writing for
men!
’

(When I started writing for
Penthouse
myself, this became a very personal battle. My ambition was one day to write an article from which Harry would be unable to delete a single word. But there, you see, I've already failed. ‘What do you mean
single
word?’ he would bark. ‘As opposed to what? A hyphenated word?’ Even now, long long after he is dead, I still hear that bark in my head. ‘Why have you said long long? Is that supposed to mean something different from long? Presumably by your usage, Shakespeare is long long long long long long long long long dead.’ As for the word ‘very’, I still flinch every time I write it. On the other hand, I do sometimes write it now – though I wouldn't have done while Harry was alive – because I believe that readers sometimes need a bit of relaxation in a sentence, as opposed to the rigid terseness – almost telegraphese – that Harry aimed for.)

Of the mail-order ventures that largely subsidised
Penthouse
when I first joined, Penteez Panties – supposedly erotic gifts for your mistress, actually nylon tat for transvestites, hence the very large sizes – was the more reliable earner, with the Book Society – ‘reading matter for gentlemen of discernment’ – a close second. The Book Society was housed in the downstairs kitchen, presided over by Australian Sylvie, and attracted our one celebrity visitor – Barry Humphries. His book
Bizarre
was sold through the Book Society and he would drop in occasionally to check sales figures and swop Strine jokes with Sylvie. This was long before he became Dame Edna, but he was already an exotic figure in his big black fedora and cape, and Sylvie would call me downstairs when he came in to share the general hilarity. I remember once whispering to Sylvie ‘I think he might be drunk’, and I think he might have been. But he was always good fun. Other visitors were less welcome – the country bumpkins who arrived hopefully believing that they would find an office full of Penthouse Pets –
boy
, were they disappointed – or the elderly men who wandered in ‘just passing’ to say they thought that Miss July might be their long-lost niece and did we happen to have her phone number? Maureen the receptionist would let them ramble on a bit and then say briskly, ‘What did you say your niece's name was?’ ‘Well, Tina,’ pointing to the magazine. ‘Yeah, well, we never use their real names so she ain't Tina. Bye.’ You'd often see men walking along the street and then reeling back in shock when they came to number 170 and thinking they must have the wrong address. We were a very humble little organisation.

But we were expanding. The staff was seven when I joined, but soon we were ten – with a post-room boy, an art assistant, an editorial secretary – and 170 Ifield Road was bulging at the seams. Bob said that he was looking for ‘huge new premises’ and we all salivated at the thought of moving to a real penthouse in the West End. In fact we moved to an ex-sausage factory in the North End Road, an even less glamorous address than Ifield Road, but here we really did have space and suddenly loads more staff. The magazine by now carried regular advertising and gradually shed its dubious classifieds and reliance on Penteez Panties. Bob started an offshoot magazine called
Forum
, which consisted entirely of readers' letters, and briefly (unsuccessfully) launched an upmarket rival to
Gentlemen's Quarterly
called
Viva
.

Actually,
Penthouse
was expanding so fast, it was hard to keep up. I acquired a bigger salary and an office car – a lovely Triumph Herald convertible – and garnered a dazzling array of impressive titles: letters editor, literary editor, arts and reviews editor. It felt like living in a boom and it was fun. Best of all, I acquired a proper expense account in my capacity as literary editor and was greedily developing a major lunch habit. It was the only way, I told Bob, to woo classy writers to the magazine. But then – disaster! – Bob opened the first Penthouse Club in a back alley in Shepherd Market and announced that henceforward all entertaining must be done at the club. This was appalling. No more San Frediano, no more Alvaro, no more Chanterelle. I expected my little flock of writers – Auberon Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Powell – to rebel, but to my horror they were only too keen to have lunch at the Penthouse Club. Once. Nobody ever wanted to go there a second time. It was a place of Stygian gloom never touched by sunlight. It was rumoured to get lively at midnight, but at lunchtime it always had a sad and listless air, especially when, as often happened, I and my current classy writer were the only customers in the place.

I always arrived early, so I would pass the time chatting to the Pets and hearing about their problems. I remember once, when I was lunching with Auberon Waugh, the Pet came up and did her little bob to Bron as taught – the bob was so that punters could get an eyeful of their cleavage – and then immediately launched into a continuation of our previous conversation: ‘My dad got his dialysis machine in the end. He loves it. They put one tube in here and one tube in there…’ I saw Bron, who had been staring entranced at her cleavage, suddenly turning white as she went into a detailed account of how a kidney machine works. That was often the trouble with Pets – they were meant to be fantasy objects but then they opened their mouths and started chatting about their dad's kidney machine or their mum's emphysema, and somehow the fantasy died. I liked them a lot, the Pets at the club, but I could see that my guests were often sorely disappointed.

In 1969 Bob and Kathy moved to New York to launch
Penthouse
in America, and for over a year we were in the odd position of producing all the copy for the American edition from London because Bob did not yet have an editorial staff there. This meant that, for instance, I was commissioning reviews of Broadway shows and MoMA art exhibitions I would never see from American reviewers I'd never met and hoping blindly that they knew what they were talking about. It also meant that I suddenly had to learn American spelling and (more difficult) American usage – aluminum for aluminium was easy enough, and fender for bumper, gas for petrol, but their use of the word pout (to mean sulk) always caught me out, as did homely, for ill-favoured. I remember, years later, an American editor ringing to ask if I was coming to New York soon and I said no, because I was expecting a baby. She said ‘Momentarily?’ and I laughed and said, ‘Well no, it takes nine months’ – I'd forgotten that in America momentarily means soon.

(Another great advantage of this editing-for-America period was that I read an awful lot of American magazines, which stood me in good stead later, when I became an interviewer. My aspirations were always based on the sort of interviews I'd read in
Rolling Stone, Esquire
, Andy Warhol's
Interview
and the
New Yorker
, rather than the generally dire standard of interviews in the British press.)

One day Harry called me to his office and said, Have you got your passport? No, of course I hadn't, why would I, in North End Road? So he very kindly drove me home to collect my passport and then to the American embassy to get a visa, and I was on a plane that evening – my first ever trip to the United States. Alas, I was not going to New York but to Milwaukee, via Chicago, to deliver artwork to the printers. Usually Joe Brooks the art director did it, but on his last trip to the States he had been stopped at customs and the customs officers had seen all the
Penthouse
page proofs in his suitcase and said ‘We have a
reader
here’ and confiscated the lot. So Bob decided that I would be the best courier in future because no one would suspect me of carrying pornography.

My first few trips were just to Milwaukee, which was boring, but increasingly Bob asked me to come on to New York to collect stuff to take back to London. Often the stuff wasn't ready so I would have to wait several days in New York, which was a great chance to get to know the city. There was only one disadvantage. Bob and Kathy stayed at the Sherry-Netherland and put me up there too, which seemed the height of glamour. But they never gave me any cash. They always said, ‘Oh, put it on room service.’ But it meant I could never eat anywhere
except
the Sherry-Netherland and I did get thoroughly sick of their menus. With careful budgeting, and use of the subway, I could afford to visit museums and go to and fro on the Staten Island ferry, but then I'd come back and face another evening of room service. I used to spend hours on the phone to David, I was so lonely. Bob occasionally asked if I was enjoying myself and I would say, dutifully, yes thank you. Kathy never asked. Once, when I rang their room and she answered, I said it's Lynn and she sang, very sweetly, ‘Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you’ and said she'd got me a present. Oh, thank you, I said (it was nowhere near my birthday) and asked to talk to Bob. We were mid-conversation when she suddenly snatched the phone back and said, ‘You're not Lynn.’

‘Yes I am, Lynn Barber from London.’

‘Why did you say it was your birthday?’

‘I didn't – you did.’

‘Don't cheek me, dollink.’

Bob took the phone back to say, emolliently, ‘She thought you were her friend Lynn N,’ but it confirmed what I'd long suspected, that Kathy didn't even know my name.

Soon afterwards, Bob and Kathy started hiring staff in New York and producing the American edition there, so my services as a courier were no longer required. I was quite relieved, and very untempted when they asked me to come and work for them in New York. By then, I was married to David, buying a house, thinking of starting a family, so it was easy to say no. But I must say English
Penthouse
became very dull once Bob and Kathy moved out. It became almost like a normal magazine, with proper departments, proper deadlines – it was so well-organised it was boring. By the time I left to start a family in 1974 the whole centre of attention had shifted to New York, and London had become a mere branch office.

But I'm glad I worked at
Penthouse
in its chaotic early years. Apart from anything else, it was a wonderful education for me, because we were
so
understaffed I was involved in almost every aspect of the magazine, from ordering stationery to doing layouts to buying book extracts to finding photographic locations. Also, because the magazine was still struggling to survive financially that first year, I developed a fondness for advertisements which you rarely find among print journalists. Most journalists see advertisements as horrid unnecessary intrusions which spoil the look of their pages, but I learned at
Penthouse
to see them as lifesavers that would pay my salary for the next three months. When Kathy strode through the office shrieking ‘I've got Lufthansa!’ or ‘Six months of Dormeuil!’ we would crack open the (Spanish) champagne and celebrate her success. The fact that Harry then lost us the Lufthansa ad by putting it in the middle of an article about Nazi war atrocities was, I remember, the first time I ever doubted his sagacity. He said it wasn't his job to know which ads went where but I thought it should have been.

People assume that the
Penthouse
office must have been a hotbed of sex but it certainly wasn't when I was there. Of course there were odd trysts in the stationery cupboard but no more than you would get in any office. Both Bob and Joe Brooks were businesslike when it came to choosing Pets – I remember Bob once saying, ‘We're so successful now I don't have to seduce the girls to get them to pose.’ Joe the same: the choice of Pets was far too serious to waste on the casting couch. Maybe there were abuses lower down the hierarchy – I've heard of freelance photographers telling girls ‘Be nice to me and I'll get you into
Penthouse
’ – but there are slimy freelancers in every branch of journalism.