Alma Cogan (18 page)

‘Please, Mum

‘There’s no need to worry, Mum. I got a bit wet but I’m quite dry now …’

‘I’m being treated very well. Okay? Please, Mum …’

Then later (sometimes so much later that the portrait on the evening news rings only distant bells): the figure under the prison blanket with the hand hovering over its head to protect it (the cranial bones and meninges; the cerebro-spinal fluid, the vagus nerve) from the door arch all instinct is to smash it against.

And the companion piece to this: the hawking feeding-time noises of electric shutters directed at arms-length into the accelerating inky glass on the off-chance that something anything – something syndicable – might stick to the film.

Victory Marine had ended its active life before I arrived here. I watched the paint of the sign gradually flake and peel; fat wax-headed weeds come up between the cobbles in the building-yard; the woodwork become waterlogged and spongy; carpets of blue algae breed on the broad concrete slipway.

Now this picturesque dilapidation has gone into sharp reverse. The main boatyard building is being converted into individual residential units – an ‘off-the-shelf nautical environment of one-
bedroom cabin-size flats’, according to the literature, ‘where the home is almost an extension of the leisure pursuit.’

A developer’s board went up soon after work started, showing Spanish pantiles, inverted dormers, iroko decking, Sindy-doll families at picnic tables, a herringboned car-parking area.

The heavy work involving bulldozers and dumpers and hydraulic cranes had been done. Now work has moved inside and is continually serviced by vehicles whose skeletal codes – ‘Alcoa’, ‘3M’, ‘dBase’, ‘Z88’, ‘Hudevad’, ‘DR-Dos’ – are like a micro-jargon intelligible only to those who have advanced beyond some brave new frontier.

The core of the regular workforce arrive a few minutes early, and sit smoking in their cars until eight. At ten, and then at regular intervals, they troop back to their flasks and their papers and individually reclaim their own space.

One man, however, consistently arrives ahead of the others in the mornings and drinks his way through a four-pack of Special Brew before starting work.

The first time I saw him I had been woken by the dog reacting to the unusual pattern of activity on the quay. There had been a storm overnight and the light was forest green. He was sitting at the wheel with a can raised and a cigarette going in the same fist, floating in a river mist as dense as the fog he was trying to disappear into.

He buries the empties in a carrier-bag pushed under the passenger seat, then bins them along with the rest of the day’s intake before setting off for home at night.

The concern with personal privacy has been unexpected. It doesn’t square with my experience of how men generally behave in groups in public. Some time ago I had my way blocked on a pavement in London by a building worker: he slid in front of me on his knees and, with a broom handle for a microphone, started singing ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ while his mates whooped and whistled and egged him on. ‘Top man!’ they shouted as he swaggered back to rejoin them. ‘Top man!’

I’ve followed the progress of the work on the boathouse with
interest – seen the fabric heave and shift, grow a turreted addition here, a premium river-view there, until the exterior now more or less conforms to the clean, lightweight lines of the airbrushed brochure drawing.

But, as is usually the case, I have found what has been going on behind the scenes even more absorbing. It has given me the opportunity to trespass on a world which has always been blocked off to me until now.

I never thought of investigating what was happening inside the building until I followed the dog across the small shingle beach and beyond the utility lights on to the site one night.

The similarity to being backstage in the theatre was pronounced. What is usually concealed and tidied away was exposed and available for inspection. I played the flashlight on a jungle of loose wires through which a current would soon be running. I tried unsuccessfully to follow a complex network of plastic pipes through the foundations and up into the rafters to their source.

Bags of cement. U bends. Planes, power saws, wood in vices, plugs plugged into unmade walls. Flora. Sunburst. Westphalian Mortadella (a packet featuring a stylised burgher with thumbs hooked into waistcoat pockets and piebald pale meat for a shirt).

Familiar things looked unfamiliar, like game-show prizes, isolated in the beam of bright light.

Nescafé. Half a loaf, a teaspoon, a knife and a bag of sugar standing on a square of cardboard. A mug: ‘If you can’t be good be
real
bad’. A set of trowels and other tools lined up scraped and cleaned on a newspaper.

In Timbuktu, I read somewhere once, the houses are built of grey mud. Many of the walls are covered in graffiti, written in the neatest of copybook hands.

Customs and procedures. The underwalls on the boathouse
site are covered in pencilled doodles, diagrams, telephone numbers, pricings, elementary additions, dimensions and personalised hieroglyphs.

They lie concealed now, along with the bodgings and rough improvisations (matchstick levers, milk carton wedges, cataracts of custardy glue) behind plasterboard partitions whose own pencilled-in marks and gestures are starting to disappear under coats of paint.

Again what is unexpected is the properness, the propriety – no lewd drawings, swear words, scatological humour; as though they suspect that it is on this evidence, designed to outlast them, that they may one day come to be judged.

Work has advanced. The walls are flush and skimmed. The latest refinements of the wipe aesthetic are in the process of being installed. Tassels of coloured wire await connection, to activate manufacturers’ warranties of de luxe superfry, easy defrost, logic creaseguard, audio cancel, crystaljet.

The water rushing over the weir is as loud as motorway traffic. A pipe leaks drips into a saw-edged can.

Silk Cut. Fisco Unimatic. A ball-headed hammer with insulated handle. A Stanley knife. A scraped-down spade.

There’s a radio with bare wires poking into the wall which, when I begin to apply pressure to the on-off button – it gives me pleasure to feel the tension between resistance and give, to play out the moment between off and on – kicks into life in an unanticipated but welcome way.

The noise that comes out of the radio on this occasion is as abstract as the surrounding night-time outdoor sounds – a barrage of loud
click
and
clack
that rattles the plaster and hits me like a rush of reminiscence.

It’s a sound that could be being beamed direct from the days when footballers wore leather studs and baggy bloomers – the sound of wooden counters being shaken in a canvas bag by officials with scaly build-up on the arms of their glasses and grease across the shoulders of their aldermanly suits, making the draw for the next round of the FA Cup.

Newcastle United and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Brighton and Bradford. West Bromwich Albion and Portsmouth. Gillingham and Darlington. Leyton Orient and Middlesbrough. Everton and Port Vale.

The
click
and
clack
. And in every rattling a distant crowd-echo, the irradiation of light from webbed lighting stacks silhouetting brick factories and refineries and tanks against the partial darkness of a winter afternoon.

It’s like doodling the beam on the freshly rendered walls and coming across a friendly message or something you scored into the wall yourself very many years before.

Instead of that though, what I see when I play the flashlight in an arc around me is: a Page Three girl with a large-mouthed and brassy vulgarity of expression and her nipples burned out in the picture by the tip of a cigarette.

Then oboe nails scattered in sawdust. Psyche cleaning out the last smearings of a Flora carton. A coffee jar containing viscous black oil. A double-page feature stained with whorls and drips of coffee and headlined (as I see when I remove a plastic sack) THE STOLEN YEARS.

The piece is illustrated with what are clearly victim pictures – pictures uncontaminated by news values or documentary purpose when they were taken, and informed by nothing more than childhood notions of ways of presenting the self.

Pauline Reade was sixteen when she was murdered by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady in 1963, although she appears younger in the picture. She is wearing what is almost certainly her communion dress and a white lace (or possibly crocheted or knitted) mantilla, and dark shoulder-length hair.

Keith Bennett was twelve when he was murdered, also in Manchester, in 1964. He has a basin cut, skewey wire glasses and a disarming gap-toothed grin.

Hindley and Brady denied responsibility for these murders for more than twenty years. The bodies were never found. Now, on the basis of new information provided by Myra Hindley, and using pictures of Hindley and Brady picnicking on or near the graves as
a guide to the topography, it is Pauline Reade’s and Keith Bennett’s remains they have reopened the search for on Saddleworth Moor.

But the victim pictures are not the main graphic element of the story: repeated reproduction has stripped them of their pathos and therefore their power to stir the emotions; instructions for a fresh angle have been sent down; money has been spent.

Most of the space has been given over to what look like television images rescreened in newsprint – images with opalescent shirring around the main features; pictures full of temporal-screech and-skid. But pictures with something superadded; something inauthentic.

They are ‘photohoroscopes’; computer composites of what Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett might look like if they were still alive, and aged thirty-nine and thirty-four respectively.

The method, as I understand it, has been to take the pictures of them as they were when they disappeared and ‘age’ them using photographs of the family members who most resemble them physically.

All the features are converted into video images and imposed one on the other on a screen before the electronic moulding and pummelling and detailed manipulation (‘warping’) takes place. The putting down of a ‘wrinkle mask’ is the final stage.

Unlike a typical photograph that draws meaning from its connection to a real person’s living hair and skin and clothes, the result is ghost-like accretions of information referring to nothing; phantasms with no organic presence; forms without substance; shadings on a computer memory.

The two sets of pictures are patched on to the page in such a way as to suggest a natural progression, a trajectory: from the innocence of faces that don’t know they’re going to die, to discarnate beings built up from encoded rays and glazes of numerical light.

And in between? The decomposition, the decay, the mulch-down they are trying to pin-point on the vastness of the Moors. Mud in the caves of the eyes; silt and mud in the tunnels of the nose; sheep dung, hoar grass and bracken commemorating the spot where a named individual lies.

A story, possibly apocryphal (one of hundreds), about Mae West:

She was approached once by an intense young girl, who announced, ‘I saw
Diamond
Lil
last week; it was wonderful.’

‘Didja honey? Wheredja see it?’

‘At the museum. The Modern Museum.’

And a dismayed Mae, seeking shelter in the sassy drawl of her film persona, inquired: ‘Just whaddya mean, honey? A
museum
?’

I thought of the story this morning as I drifted through the connected but separate climate systems of the galleries at the Tate, looking for the portrait Peter Blake painted of me nearly a quarter of a century ago and that I haven’t seen for almost that long.

I could have asked for directions at the information desk just as you come in, but I was hoping to come across myself without warning, to take myself unawares, even if it did mean denying a constant urge to run to the toilet and a banging in my chest like the Deny Apprentice Boys’ parade.

It was early. I was among the first in. There was still the feeling of overhang from the previous day. In addition to dollars and yen and layers of small change, the glass donation boxes were choked with messages posted by school parties – ‘Jo 4 Stuart’, ‘Sharon 4 Cookie’, ‘Homefucking is killing prostitution’, ‘What are you looking at DICKHEAD’, ‘If I wanted to listen to somebody talking out of his arse, I would’ve farted’.

There was the sound of banged metal and spilled cutlery and conversations in iron-curtain accents coming from the kitchens. The attendants were assembled in a group under the rotunda, being assigned their areas of responsibility for the shift – room 10, Rural Naturalism and Social Realism, 1870–1900; room 14, Bloomsbury and Vorticism, 1910–20 – where they would sit and
watch the day stack up and listen to the humidity and temperature stabilisers ticking through their programmes.

(Room 28, the chapel-like space containing Rothko’s looming soft-edged stacks of rectangles for the Seagram Building is where I would angle to get placed. It must be the equivalent of a diplomatic posting to Paris or Washington.)

In some galleries it was like being the first to walk on a new snowfall; the air hadn’t been displaced. Room 23, Abstract Expressionism, was like this. The only sign of any life was in the paintings, which were humming with the urgency of mark-making and ‘the liberated unconscious’.

I stood in front of one of de Kooning’s ‘Women’ for at least a minute before I got a bead on the figure embedded in the loops and slashings of paint. Before I lost it again, it reminded me of something I had seen a million times in the mirror: make-up being smeared into waxy swipes and lurid skirls of colour by the application of theatrical remover cream.

Among the information given on the card on the wall was a quotation from the artist: ‘Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented’.

A few galleries on, I stood at the edge of a tour group and listened while the guide filled them in on the background to Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’. ‘You can see the artist sandwiched between the two book-like tombstones at the bottom right-hand comer … You can also see him naked in the centre of the painting … “I don’t want to lose sight of myself,” Spencer once admitted, “for an instant.”’

The students – they were a mature group – wrote this down on their pads. They kept their hands free by wearing the collapsible stools they were carrying over their shoulders or – in the case of most of the men – transversely across the chest, like armour.

The Spencer wasn’t hanging on the wall. It was standing on rubber blocks on the floor, with gallery staff going backwards and forwards with ladders and lengths of wood in front of it as if they were among the resurrected and had just stepped out of the painting.

I continued wandering haphazardly, following no particular plan. Once or twice I thought I saw the picture Peter Blake did of me in the palaeolithic era out of the corner of my eye – something about the scale as I remembered it, the composition, the colour. But when I edged nearer it would turn out to be a still-life of Shelf with Objects, or View of Hackney with Dalston Lane, Evening.

In the end I had to admit defeat and backtracked to Information, where I asked the person on duty if she could point me in the direction of the Peter Blake painting titled
Alma
Cogan,
dated, I thought, 1961–63.

She was an interesting combination of half-prim (cashmere cardigan, pearls) and half-punkette (high-shaved side-panels, gold wire ring in her nose). Acid-green letters started dancing in her tiny glasses as her fingers ran over the keys. Behind and above her, meanwhile, a second display panel spooled out slogans in liquid crystal letters of peony and tangerine.

DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS
…
DYING AND COMING BACK GIVES YOU CONSIDERABLE PER
SPECTIVE … LOVING ANIMALS IS A SUBSTITUTE ACTIVITY …
THE HAPPINESS OF BEING ENVIED IS GLAMOUR … PUBLICITY IS
THE LIFE OF THIS CULTURE … NOSTALGIA IS A PRODUCT OF DIS
SATISFACTION AND RAGE
… On and on they rolled. Around and around.

‘I’m afraid I can’t access that information,’ the girl said. ‘
Alma
Cogan
  is currently on-loan to the VIP Lounge at Heathrow.’ Then a signal from the screen started throbbing in her eye like a nerve. She keyed in another code which supplied her with the information that the painting had recently been returned. I could make an appointment to come in and see it in storage at a later date.

‘Name?’

It occurred to me to quickly make something up. But ‘Cogan,’ I said. ‘A.’

There was a pause, as if the ‘search’ function of the console in front of her was flying through its documents and folders making another match. ‘The … the subject of the work?’ I nodded.
She walked to the back of the information area and picked up a phone.

CHASING THE NEW IS DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY … RECLUSES
GET WEAK EVEN IF STRONG ORIGINALLY … MURDER HAS ITS
SEXUAL SIDE … LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL
… The words trickled over the jagged surface of her isolated island of hair. When she came back I half expected to see the neon colour combed in.

Somebody from conservation would be up to collect me in a few minutes, she said, if I would care to wait. And meanwhile if I would fill in the form, taking care to make sure that the information registered on the carbon duplicates underneath …

The first time I met Peter Blake was when he had just stopped being a student. It was at the all-night party Mike Todd gave at the Battersea Festival Gardens after the London opening of
Around
the
World
in
80
Days
, which would date it as 1956.

He was working on one of the amusements – rifle-range, coconut shy, tombola, dodgems (they were all free that night of course, along with everything else). He was wearing the bottom half of a boiler suit, the closest you could get at that time in England to American jeans, and a similarly improvised jean jacket.

But what I remember most vividly about him are the seams of blue puckered scars that extended from his mouth to his nose on one side of his face like a hinge and were emphasised rather than hidden by his attempt at a straggly student beard. (Since the mauling I’d witnessed just two years earlier, I had taken a more-than-usual interest in the movement of people’s mouths, the wetness and glitter and the shape of the mouth and the teeth.)

He reminded me of this first meeting the second time we met, at one of my parties, when he was coming into his first fame and I was just starting to be aware of the calm that was waiting round the corner. (It was a phrase Billy Eckstine used, which had caught on. ‘All of a sudden,’ he said, ‘it gets calm.’)

It was on this occasion I think he said he would like to do a painting. I was flattered, of course, but slightly nonplussed when he said he would prefer to use a magazine picture (he seemed to 
already know which one) than have me come to the studio and sit for him.

But we did have lunch – at Cunningham’s, the champagne and oyster bar then at the height of its fashionability, in Curzon Street. The owner, Owen Cunningham’s, mother had been a maid in the 1920s in a Shepherd’s Market laundry, earning a pittance from scrubbing the mountain of soiled linen sent out from the great Mayfair mansions.

Owney enjoyed a kind of social revenge by screwing the titles and blue-bloods among his regulars, who included the Gerald Legges, the Dockers, Anthony Armstrong-Jones and Olga Deterding, the Shell heiress who eventually threw it all in to go and work for Albert Schweitzer in Africa, while at the same time making sure that his show-business customers always got good value for money.

It was a lively lunch, with few of the longueurs that occur when two people are sitting alone at a table together for the first time. We were almost exactly the same age; Peter Blake had seen me perform on several occasions at the Chiswick Empire and the Chelsea Palace, and had a fan’s knowledge of all departments of the wonderful business we call show.

Most of what we talked about went the way of the champagne and the oysters. The only thing that is fixed in my memory is our shared enthusiasm for fairs and in particular the way a field looks after a fair has moved on, with its circles and scars and mysterious relief patterns of raised and flattened grass.

He gave me a Betjeman quote, to the effect that there is nothing more empty than a deserted fairground, which encouraged me to try and put into words something which had been only the shadow of a notion until then.

‘I love the way the wagons you see bowling along under their own steam on the road disappear inside the rides when they’re set up,’ I told him (as nearly as I can remember). ‘The way the wheels are locked and jacked up on wooden blocks; how the overhead spokes and duckboards of the carousel are added; then the painted and mirrored panels, then the chairs or horses …
Something in it seems to correspond to my own situation on the road, disappearing every night into the apparatus of sequins and wigs and spreading ostrich feathers …’

I saw him filing this away as a mental reference – the rims of his ears glowed momentarily – to use in whatever he might paint.

Some time later I received a souvenir – a small framed collaged piece, built up from that 1960 menu at Cunningham’s, which would itself I suppose now be worth several thousand pounds in the salerooms. But it is gone, as far as I know, along with everything else.

‘Miss Cogan?’

‘Conservation’ had suggested chemicals and white lab coats of the kind worn by the technicians in the EMI studios at Abbey Road as late as the mid-sixties. Facing me, though, and giving me a discreet once-over to see what twenty-five years had done to ‘the subject of the work’, was a person dressed in unremarkable civilian smart-casualwear – Kickers, newish jeans, cheesecloth-type shirt.

‘If you’d like to come with me.’

I followed him past a piece of art splashed with whitewash on the ground like some primitive trail, and then round a tree decorated with small paintings of Christmas bells and decorations instead of the real thing, down some stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs I saw that the love notes and teenage obscenities had been removed from the donation box set into the wall and foreign notes in the higher denominations (the trick of lavatory attendants and cloakroom personnel) fluffed up on the surface like thinning hair.

We proceeded past a barrier spooled out of a plastic post and then, courtesy of a combination-lock, through a door marked ‘SECURE AREA – Passes must be worn’. On the other side it was like a public swimming bath – fresh after the recycled air of the gallery, with that kind of echoey no-noise and vaulted unsourced light.

A concrete ramp led down to the long sub-basement corridor,
at the end of which Steenhuis, Peter flashed his identity tag at a man sitting in an oak box of the kind cashiers sit in at the few remaining old-style butchers. ‘SECURITY STATE OF VIGILANCE – BLACK SPECIAL’ it said on a print-out strip inside the box where you weren’t supposed to see.

Another combination-lock. Another door with another message – ‘Under
no
circumstances
must this door be left open’. Another mini-climate of crackling air filtered through Mylex and Ticene gills, but with that metallic edge or imbalance that can strip the sinuses if breathed in too long.

‘You can’t get in here hardly in the summer,’ Peter Steenhuis said in his Dutch-inflected American-English accent, ‘especially in the lunch break, everybody trying to chill out.’

I went on being popular in the Netherlands and Scandinavia – also Iceland and Japan – long after my star had waned at home. I spent years singing phonetically in languages of which I barely understood a word. Being no older than thirty, though, Peter Steenhuis was too young to remember.

‘You can get all the English TV programmes in Holland now. Satellite, cable. My parents are big fans of the two Ronnies,’ he said, consulting a piece of paper with the painting’s acquisition number on it, as if he hadn’t already sneaked a look before coming upstairs to collect me.

The pictures were hung on steel-mesh partitions which rolled soundlessly out into the sieved and bounced light like mortuary drawers. They radiated a second field of cold into the already part-refrigerated room.

When we got to the appropriate stack, he kicked a chuck which released the wheels and hauled out the frame containing a number of paintings by the British Pop artists of the early sixties.

Among them were four by Peter Blake:
The
Masked
Zebra
Kid
of 1965;
Tuesday
(a portrait of Tuesday Weld), 1961, which prompted Peter Steenhuis to remark that he thought she was Melanie Griffith’s mother (‘Isn’t Melanie Griffith married to that
Miami
Vice
guy for the second time?’);
The
Meeting,
or
Have
A
Nice
Day,
Mr
Hockney,
1981–5 – and T. 02285,
Alma
Cogan
.