KEY POINTS:
This is the kind of book that you want to press into the hands of Big Brother contestants, X Factor stars, the people who have made starlet Jordan's "novel" a bestseller, Victoria Beckham - anyone, in fact, who subscribes to the term "glamour model". Have a read of
this, I want to say, and then go and cover yourself up a bit, love.
For a sharp lesson in what it is to be the object of men's desire, Undressing Emmanuelle is a darkly discomforting read. It doesn't look like that sort of book, of course, since the publishers have gone for the same tactic that Just Jaeckin, the director of Emmanuelle, used for almost identical reasons: a kitschy, soft-porno cover shot of her that encapsulates everything we think we know about the seventies - an era of sexual liberation and polyester fabrics in which the acme of sophisticated urban living was to sit half-naked in an oversized rattan chair.
Which just goes to show. Nothing's quite what it seems. Emmanuelle, the liberated Frenchwoman whose sexual adventures 600 million people around the world paid to see, was actually Sylvia Kristel, a Dutchwoman who disliked nudity, calls herself "prudish", but accepted the role on its "artistic" merits. It makes her a star, though, and then traps her for life.
She makes other films, but she's always still Emmanuelle. "I was dressed, but people preferred me naked. I spoke, but they like me better silent or dubbed."
She craved stardom, craved the attention, and it's not so hard to see why: the early chapters deal with her miserable childhood, her alcoholic parents, her mother's dislike of sex, her Catholic boarding school, her lecherous "uncle" Hans, and the heartbreaking day her father brought home his mistress and announced he was leaving them.
Her big break came when she represented Holland in Miss TV Europe and her words could be straight from primetime. "I've just got to be the prettiest and the most entertaining," she tells her mother. "I'm bound to get their attention ... This is my moment, my big moment. I'm going to be a star."
It is her big moment: it leads to the casting audition for Emmanuelle, and then the shoot. (Sample sentence: "Today I will be raped. I hate this scene. The violence, the physical constraint makes me want to run away.") And then it's released to overnight controversy and success and notoriety and a string of lovers who all want to sleep with her, or at least, Emmanuelle. She has them all: Roger Vadim, Warren Beatty, whoever her leading man of the time happens to be.
Her love of champagne grows "until it's a contractual requirement". And then comes cocaine, so widely taken that it's not so much a drug as "more of a super-vitamin, something very fashionable, not really dangerous".
She has a son by a Dutch intellectual but she's too strung out to look after him in Hollywood, and he's sent to live back in Holland with her mother ("I don't remember having been sad. In fact I was pleased, relieved that my son was escaping from that life, my life, my fog").
And then, with the pick of any man in the world, she goes and chooses TV's Lovejoy - Ian McShane - who tells her that "all you've got is luck and a nice arse".
This is a car crash of a life with details which are the stuff of soap opera. Pregnant with Ian McShane's (unwanted) child, she's diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, and then, during a fight, falls backwards down a staircase and loses the baby.
The police find her hallucinating in her flat with a stash of cocaine on the bedside table. Her films get worse and worse. After Lady Chatterley's Lover "the rest would be rough, unseen, done for money".
She gets married, divorced, married again, this time to a paparazzo-turned-director who signs away her fortune, her "apartment in LA, houses in Holland, Paris and Ramatuelle on the French Riviera. I have nothing left".
When she writes to the bailiffs and asks for a few family photos to be returned, they write that "this will be impossible because [your] personal souvenirs may have a market value". In fact, her whole body has a market value, and stardom its price to pay. And "sooner or later the debt must be paid ... Women are charged a great deal for having been beautiful, unfairly different, attractive, for provoking unsatisfied desire".
They are. Or, at least, she is. And it is, all in all, a strangely gripping tale. There's no bitterness or regret, and although there's a Francophone quality to the writing, it gives the book a reflective edge that lifts it above the celeb memoir.
This is the examined life.
In the end, it's just her, in a small flat in Amsterdam, diagnosed first with throat cancer then with lung cancer. "In the end they all died," she says. "The father, the mother, the friend and the lover. But not me."
She's in remission, and I hope it lasts: it would be nice to think she might find some happiness in the end.
* Published by Fourth Estate
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