In her day, Pamela Green was one of the hottest things going.
UK- It's a very peculiar position to be in: kneeling on the bedroom carpet of a 75-year-old woman as she shows you a poster-size monochrome close-up of her torso. All I can think of to say is "Oh, hello", in a feeble imitation of Leslie Phillips in Carry on Teacher.
Pamela Green, however, isn't batting a false eyelash. Here she is in her portfolio, naked except for an embroidered sun hat, leaning on a pillar pox, squeezing her thighs together. And here, splashing about in a rock pool with her head thrown back, the water spuming over her prodigious curves. And here again, spilling out of a scarlet corset, arms akimbo, fringe lolling over her left eye.
Not all of her reliquary is photographic. Rising from the floor, she disgorges the contents of her underwear drawer, inviting me to admire the paraphernalia of her film career: a green nylon negligee, spattered with tiny pink flowers; a ruby-red wig, rather faded; a brace of beady-eyed fox furs, dyed a lurid cobalt blue.
"And this," she declares, waving a wispy little thing in front of my face, "is the negligee that I wore for Michael Powell."
In 1959, the director of Black Narcissus paid a visit to 4 Gerrard Street in Soho, London. It was a property full of dramatic possibilities. The basement housed an after-hours drinking club, the ground floor a pornographic bookshop and the attic a veteran prostitute.
The floors between were the studios of George Harrison Marks, a photographer and film-maker who supplied the raincoat market with pocket-sized jazz-mags and 8mm glamour shorts for home projection. Powell was searching for an actress to play a nude model in Peeping Tom (1960), a study in psychosis and sadism that would, six months later, encourage reviewers to plunge a spike into his reputation.
He had fixed upon a model named on the pages of Marks's Kamera magazine as Rita Landre, a statuesque figure with marmalade curls and a wardrobe of tight-laced waspies.
He was not the only reader who had to be told that Rita was Pamela Green in disguise.
Green, who was Marks's lover, business partner and chief model, was delighted by Powell's interest. The director examined the Parisian street scene that she had constructed on the studio floor, surveyed her racks of chiffon shorties, and invited her down to Pinewood Studios to be gored to death.
"There's only one word for the way that he treated me," she reflects. "Sadistic."
Peeping Tom is set in Soho, the shared territory of the film business and the skin game, a world in which Green and Marks were leading figures. Its stars were paid by the hour; its productions, shot in small film formats on black-and-white stock, were rarely shown in cinemas; its directors did not receive a screen credit.
Little of this shadow film business has survived into the 21st century. Why would it? These films were unsophisticated sketches intended to provide solitary entertainment. Boredom or guilt consigned them to the incinerator. Their performers were art students, call-girls and teenage runaways who took cash payments to go through some simple comic routine, climb out of their underwear and blink into the lens.
Few of the surviving personnel associated with these productions can be persuaded to speak about their experiences - not least because many of them spent time in jail on obscenity charges.
By the start of the 1970s, the sleazy sensibility of the stag loop and the blue-movie club had entered mainstream cinema. Newspaper listings were dense with titles of productions such as I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight, The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, Let's Get Laid and - less logically - Confessions of a Naked Virgin. British sexploitation cinema is now a forgotten embarrassment.
Participants who went on to more respectable things - the composer Michael Nyman, the novelist Justin Cartwright and the musical theatre star Elaine Paige, for example - would prefer it to remain that way. Harvey and Bob Weinstein, founders of Miramax, rarely mention that one of their first forays into the movie business was acquiring the US rights to Can You Keep it up for a Week?
The genre remains despised and obscure.
Since 1986, Green has lived in a modest Victorian villa on the Isle of Wight, crammed with mementoes of her career in modelling.
In the 1950s, however, she rarely left the network of narrow streets on either side of Shaftesbury Avenue. As a student at St Martin's College of Art, she funded her course by taking off her clothes in life classes.
As a semi-nude showgirl in a comedy revue, she acquired a different repertoire of poses.
As a dancer at the Prince Edward Theatre on Old Compton Street, she met her husband, a stage-hand named Guy Hillier, whose fondness for drink, drugs and post-pub assaults did nothing to prolong the marriage.
As a nude model in dozens of photo-sets and "glamour" shorts, Green dressed and undressed in a variety of upper-room studios, under the gaze of a Bolex camera.
After Green's separation from Hillier, Marks's studio in Gerrard Street offered her escape and employment. Marks, a Beatnik photographer, lived on the premises with a menagerie of cats and a mynah bird which had learned to mimic his smoker's cough. Green moved into his bed, became his principal cover girl, oversaw his financial affairs and changed her name by deed poll to match his.
Here, in 1957, the pair launched Kamera, a discreet little journal of nude photography which sold out its first print run in a matter of days. Although Marks's name was on the cover, his former partner insists that she was the motivating force behind the publication.
("George was a liability, quite frankly," she asserts.) She recruited the models, designed and built the sets, colour-checked the prints and retouched the pictures, using a scalpel to marshal the last suggestions of pubic hair from the pages.
For the sake of profitable variety, Green concocted a number of alternative identities - about whom she speaks in the third person, as if they actually existed in their own right. Rita Landre was the scarlet-haired temptress who attracted the attention of Powell; Princess Sonmar was an equatorial temptress conjured up with the liberal application of Max Factor cosmetics and baby oil.
In 1958, with the success of Kamera confirmed, these three women, Pam, Rita and Sonmar, became 8mm movie stars. Marks operated the camera and called the shots; Green designed the backdrops, illustrated the title cards and gave the lead performances. Only her diligent preservation of these films has ensured that they have not been lost to history.
Green and Marks conducted their operations under difficult conditions.
"The police were always dropping by for a chat," she remembers. "They wouldn't ask for a bribe, exactly, but they'd pick up some photographs or a new camera and say 'This is nice' and there was very little you could do to stop them taking it. It was a kind of tax. If you refused, you knew you were in trouble."
Organised crime also applied unfriendly pressure to their activities. The beer joint in their basement became the focus of a battle between two rival groups of hoodlums - the Elephant and Castle mob, and Jack Spot's gang - who would sink their chivvy blades into each other on the studio's doorstep. ("The street," Green recalls, "was sometimes wet with blood.")
On more than one occasion, thugs pushed their way onto the premises in search of the cash box. To Green's dismay, Marks procured a sword to fend them off.
By 1961, violent incidents like this - in combination with Marks's chronic drunkenness - had prompted Green to move herself and the cats out of Gerrard Street and into a one-bedroom flat on Charing Cross Road.
She retained her position at the studio and her interest in its films and magazines, but her sexual relationship with Marks was over.
As she departed, a former member of Jack Spot's gang commisserated with the photographer for his loss of his lover, and offered to restore his self-esteem by murdering her.
It is fortunate, therefore, that Pamela Green, the first British sexploitation star, is still alive to tell her story.
