The Girl From Nowhere Read Free Page A

like innocent?”
    “Yeah, maybe—but let me show you something.”
    Danny grinned, walked over to a table, and picked up a magazine. I could see the title— Vamp— and the girl on the cover, and knew what to expect. “Volume One, Number One,” said Danny. “Have you seen it?”
    I’d heard about it, but till then a copy hadn’t crossed my path. Danny thumbed through the pages for me. America had recently discovered pubic hair. For a price, you could ogle it onstage at the Biltmore Theater, where Hair had been playing to busloads of eager suburbanites wanting to sample the Age of Aquarius. And Penthouse had just arrived, a rival for Playboy ,with unretouched photographs that permitted female pudenda to be admired in all their bushy glory and variety. Bob Guccione had launched it in the UK, where pubic hair was invented, but now it was available at newsstands from Waco to Weehawken. Well, maybe not Waco. Vamp was the homegrown competition, rumored to have the backing of the secretive capitalist predator—as I fondly thought of him—Brady Kavanagh. He was a man with his fingers in so many meaty pies, from Wall Street to Hollywood, you wondered how he managed to tie his shoelaces. Probably paid someone to do it for him. Kavanagh was one of the most private public figures in America. What was known about him was that he had been born and raised in New York, in Hell’s Kitchen, a tough street kid with a head for numbers who somehow found his way to Harvard Business School, reputedly thanks to the intervention of some wealthy and influential patron. Back in New York, he established himself as one of the most cold-blooded sociopaths in the investment banking lunatic asylum. He became a specialist in hostile takeovers, a pioneer in the art of acquiring troubled industrial giants and then selling off their components at a profit, leaving behind empty shells. In short, the classic all-American success story.
    Not that making money for its own sake was the only thing that got Kavanagh’s rocks off. He had bought Bad Fruit Records just so he could produce a country-and-western album, Mayhem Along the Mekong ,that extolled the exploits of US Navy SEALs in Vietnam. For an encore, he took over the venerable Magnus Studios, pouring millions into reviving the bankrupt movie company’s fortunes, and launching a theme park on its former back lot. Kavanagh had even directed a couple of movies himself. Not the kind that garner Oscar nominations. More the sort that played on 42nd Street and at redneck drive-ins—make-out flicks with titles like Orchard of Forbidden Fruit and Voodoo Blood Feud about midnight encounters between zombies and underdressed teenyboppers. The likelihood that he was the backer of Vamp was hinted at by the fact that he was the subject of an interview in the first issue. He never gave interviews and was seldom photographed, but there on page eighty-two was a full-page picture of Kavanagh, buffed and tanned beside his Bridgehampton swimming pool. This was unprecedented for the man known to the media as The Invisible Mogul because of his perceived ability to pass through brigades of paparazziwithout triggering a single flashbulb.
    There were neatly trimmed triangles of thatch dotted throughout, but otherwise it was the usual mix of tits, ass, cartoons, airbrushed profiles, and feature stories that promised more than they could deliver. Finally Danny arrived at something a bit less run-of-the-mill, a portfolio of black-and-white photographs by Yari Mendelssohn. Yari was hot shit in those days, sometimes rashly compared to photographers like Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton. His work had been exhibited at MoMA and those other “leading museums” you hear about, and his name had real resonance in the fashion and glamour worlds. Yari had a reputation for charming fashion editors out of the trees, where they are said to gather, and persuading Hollywood starlets to expose that extra inch of flesh—a feat that may or