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  • The Fourth Bridesmaid Ch. 01

The Fourth Bridesmaid Ch. 01

12

Sir Harold and Lady Stockton, of Seagrave Manor, Seagrave, Leics., had one much-loved daughter, Araminta Claudia. Araminta was a beautiful young woman, tall, slim and regal, and the contrast between her long honey-blond hair and her treacle-dark flashing eyes never failed to startle those who met her for the first time. In her second year at Imperial College, London, she met Juan Carlos Corradera, from Argentina. He was a skilled seducer, extremely rich, athletic and breathtakingly handsome, but he had no desire to seduce Araminta. For him it was all or nothing. Within a week of their first meeting, the couple were plunged headlong into love, and within six months they were married. And that is where I come in.

My name is Brian Cazenove, I am in my late twenties, and I have a photographic studio in Leicester. Before the war I worked Saturdays and holidays in my uncle's photographic shop on Humberstone Gate, but I really learned my trade in wartime, as a war photographer attached to the Seventh Armoured Division and the Eighth Army.

I had the privilege of serving for a short time under General O'Connor, the finest general in the British Army in the opinion of his troops. I kept a quasi-official photographic record of the war in North Africa, Italy and Southern France. Many of my photosets appeared in the Soldier, and some in Picture Post and in the well-known series of HMSO illustrated books. My work is well known, but my name much less so.

I had the great good fortune to be in Naples when it was liberated. Naples in the early spring of 1944 was a city where everything was for sale, and the price of everything was negotiable. The city was thronged with beautiful young women and girls who were delighted to pose nude for photographs for a small fee. Sweeten the deal with a pack of Marlborough cigarettes or two tins of corned beef, they would not only pose, but also offer intimate personal services. With these unlimited opportunities, I quickly learned that beauty alone was not enough, and there had to be some special quality in a girl to make her sexually desirable.

In a three-week r & r, I shot a hundred and forty rolls of film (looted from a German mobile darkroom,) of over 200 girls. I developed a dozen or more rolls of film each day, refining my skills as a processor of films, and poring over the negatives with a strong lens to improve my skills at the delicate arts of portrait and glamour photography. It was a post-graduate education in itself, and I continued to find beautiful models as we travelled north, up through Italy and into France.

Tobruk, Anzio and Monte Cassino honed my skills as an action photographer; Naples gave me my skills at photographing beauty and passion.

I came back to Leicester at the back end of 1945 to find that my uncle had been forced to stop work with an incapacitating stroke, and the shop was closed. I assessed the situation and made it my priority to take a train to London and on out to Ilford to arrange regular supplies of photographic film and paper, and chemicals for developing and printing. I raised the cash for renovations by selling most of my nude and erotic photographs to a man in Chicago who could not have cared less about copyrights or model releases. Then I started to put to good use the Leica llla and the Rolleiflex Automat I had acquired in Italy.

Uncle Bert and Aunt Irene were happy to move into the ground floor flat I found for them off Knighton Lane, and I took over the whole building. The ground-floor front was still a photographic supplies shop. But the back room was made into a large, commodious darkroom and storage area.

Upstairs we had two studios. The smaller; the boxroom, is fitted out with toys and games, large cushions and a wooden playpen. The walls are papered with characters from Walt Disney (my personal aversion, but kids love them), Loony Tunes, Popeye and Betty Boop. The word soon got around that we cater for babies and toddlers, and a sizeable part of the business now is baby photographs. The trick is so simple – over-expose the black and white image, then get a competent colourist to colour-wash the print and highlight with touches of bright colour. Poised somewhere between a photo and a painting, they sell like hot cakes.

The larger room is divided into two with a folding screen. One side of the partition holds a large double bed covered with a coverlet, the other side holds a leather four-seater settee on one wall, and two matching armchairs on the adjoining wall. The large sash windows are covered with milky translucent screens to diffuse the light. One window screen swings back, because sometimes I want to pose a model looking out of the window.

I put a bed in the little attic room, and made myself at home. Compared with some of the billets I had in the army, it was luxury for me.

So much for back-story. Anyway, in the spring of 1949, what happened is that Araminta Stockton, bless her, wanted some really good wedding photos, and what she wanted, she got. And, apparently, she had asked around and got my name as the best photographer for this kind of work, thanks to good mates in the Leicester Mercury and its sister paper the illustrated Leicester Chronicle.

She wanted full coverage at the Church and the reception, naturally enough, but she also wanted colour portraits of herself and each of the four bridesmaids, plus a group. Colour film was just becoming available again. Kodachrome was still not commercially available in Britain, but the USAF bases east of Leicester contained helpful young men who, in exchange for some saucy nude photographs, would get me rolls of film from their equivalent of the Naafi. So that was fixed. I could use up a film or two getting used to the colour palette, and the obliging young USAF blokes would send them home for processing.

Al this could be fixed up well in advance of the late June wedding, and

on the due day, June 5th., everything was ready for the photo session. I had obtained five barstools with thin, tubular chrome legs and a very short back support, and grouped them for the group photograph, and prepared a variety of pastel coloured slides for back projection to tone in with the dresses and makeup. At ten the group arrived, but it was a group of only four. The fourth bridesmaid was stuck on a job in Edinburgh, and would have to come along later.

Of course this made nonsense of the group photograph, which would have to be deferred to the wedding morning. The task for today was to take four colour portraits, of the bride and three of the bridesmaids. And a very pleasant task it turned out to be.

They were four lovely girls, two brunettes, a redhead and the honey-blonde bride. Three were voluptuous, with the Hollywood hourglass figure, large in the bust and hips, slim and nipped-in at the waist. The fourth, the bride herself, was tall and slim, with long, long legs that would make Rita Hayworth or Katharine Hepburn envious. As she was, in a short-sleeved blouse and pinstripe tailored slacks, she looked like a mannequin; in her wedding dress she would make a couturier wet himself.

I have a very particular skill that is a part of my success as a glamour photographer. I am my own make-up artist. Oddly enough I learned the essentials of the job in my teens by hand-colouring photographs. I could make the colours blend to bring out the best features of the subject and conceal their failings. In Italy, I started practising on live subjects, and began to insist on doing the makeup of all my female portrait subjects.

The dresses were similar in design, having deep off-the-shoulder necklines, so I insisted in applying foundation and powder make-up to the neck and shoulders as well as to the face. I pointed out that it would only take a couple of minutes to apply, and not much longer to wash off, so the time would be well spent if unwanted reflections and hot-spots were avoided.

Soon I had four lovely young ladies in their underwear, sitting on barstools, chatting nineteen to the dozen as they waited their turn for the application of powder and paint. Three young ladies in strapless bras, knickers and half-slips, and the fourth, the bride, who declared, a trifle ruefully, that she had never worn a bra in her life, in just her cream silk knickers. I longed to take a clandestine photo with my trusty Leica, but that would have been crass.

The photo-session went very well. Three pairs of willing hands helped each girl in turn into her dress and protected her elaborate hairdo. In turn each one half-sat, half- leaned on the tall stool, I bustled about moving a light a fraction, adjusting a diffuser or a reflector, on one occasion pausing to apply lipstick a shade paler to a rosebud mouth. The individual shots were taken, and I cajoled them into a group for the sheer pleasure of the contrasting tones of fabric, hair and skin.

They all wore dresses of similar shape with low necklines, bare shoulders, little puff sleeves, and almost floor-length tulip shaped skirts that owed something to current fashions, but something more to the bride's own good taste. The two brunette bridesmaids wore rose pink, the redhead in jade green. The bridal gown was, of course, pure white silk, but embroidered with arabesques of silver thread and sprinkled with pearls.

They finally left towards lunchtime, but not before I had been flattered into agreeing to go to Seagrave House the morning of the wedding to do their make-up, whilst the hairdresser put up their hair. I could then take the elusive group photograph.

*****

Two days later my phone rang.

"Hello, is that Brian Cazenove? This is Vanessa Christiansen, Araminta's other bridesmaid. Sorry I missed my appointment, but I'm ringing to make another. I'm free for the rest of the week, so pick a time and I'll fit in with you."

"Hello Miss Christiansen, I can make the afternoon free on Thursday if that suits you. We could start any time after twelve, and we should be finished in about two hours."

"Book me in for mid-day please. Do I need to bring anything apart from the dress and shoes?"

"It would help if you could bring along the makeup you usually use, and if you can manage it, book the hairdresser for the Thursday morning to do your hair the same as it will be on the 26th."

"I can do that all right. Good! See you midday on Thursday. I'm looking forward to it. The girls were all very impressed."

Thursday came around, and at ten to twelve, the door opened and in walked a dream. Her hair, done up in an elegant French pleat, was pale blonde with a broad platinum streak along the crown of her head. Her skin was pale, with the cheeks pink as if she had been hurrying. Her lips, slightly broad, were a delicate pale pink. Her most striking feature, her eyes, were palest blue, wide open under arched eyebrows. Oddly, her long eyelashes seemed white against her fair skin.

I knew that the four bridesmaids were old and close friends of the bride, but if they had been selected by a casting director, they could not have better matched and contrasted; two brunettes, one blond and a redhead, three buxom and full-breasted, one slender.

The bride had to be supremely confident, and deservedly so, to place herself in their company. Most telling of all, the bridesmaids dresses had not been designed, as so often, to avoid competing with the bridal gown. They were designed, unequivocally, to flatter the wearers. I knew without looking that Miss Christiansen's dress would be jade green, and that it would look stunning on her.

I was about ready for a cup of tea, so I offered one to her, but she had just finished a coffee at the hairdresser's. Instead she had a glass of water, and happily agreed to share my corned beef and marmite sandwiches.

As we sat over our lunch, I saw that her eyes were drawn to a nude photograph on my corkboard. It was a back view, full-length, of a very pretty model, lighted with natural light from an attic window. I was proud of it because it was the first photo I ever got published in the great national, mass-circulation magazine, the ever-faithful Men Only the magazine that had had followed us servicemen into every theatre of war, every airstrip and every ship in the fleet.

"Did you take that one?"

"Yes, in Naples towards the end of the war."

I explained why I was so proud of it. She was interested, and asked about my other published prints. I pulled out the copy of Picture Post that had my double-page of tank crews washing and shaving in the desert just before meeting Rommel's Afrika Corps at El Alamein. She was impressed, but her mind was elsewhere and she turned the conversation back to glamour photography.

"Your nude is very well done. The light and shade are beautiful. Have you any more I could look at?"

"Would you like to come and have a look, Miss Christiansen?"

I have two filing cabinets full. I led the way into the back room, and, on an impulse, opened a drawer. These were not going to be sold in England, but would be perfectly legal in most of Europe and the USA. I pulled out a folder and she leafed through it. She caught her breath.

"I have never seen anything like this in a magazine. They are like the photographs my dad took of my mum when they first met. This one is really beautiful."

She picked out a shot of a dark-haired girl with a full bush of pubic hair. The cleft of her sex showed as a darker vertical band leading the eye down to the suggestion of labia below. What was special about this picture is that the model's face was lit up by laughter, and you almost fancied that you could see her breasts jiggle with the breath she was taking.

Miss Christiansen looked on and on, setting aside many of my favourites for another look. She was enraptured.

On impulse, she picked out another folder. This was a two-model set, two lovely girls playing. She smiled broadly as she looked at them, Clearly she was no prude.

Then on to a third folder, and I almost reached out my hand to stop her taking that one. It was made up of the spanking sets I sold to fetish magazines. She opened it, and looked at a picture of a model, in a gymslip, lying across the lap of the middle-aged male model dressed as a vicar, complete with dog-collar. His hand was raised and about to come down in a huge slap. Her bottom showed dark patches that would have been red in a colour print. The girl's face showed a little smug smile.

Miss Christiansen ate it up. She began to blush and giggle to herself. She licked her lips as she leafed through the pictures, and stopped dead at a photograph of a caning scene. This time the same male model was in a Police Inspector's uniform and the girl was dressed as a bus conductress, Her jacket hung open, her slacks were pooled around her ankles, her knickers at half mast and she was bent over a table in a very revealing pose.

The experienced eye could see that the half-dozen tramlines on her beautiful, full bottom were not made with stage makeup or lipstick. Each track showed two parallel ridges, and there were deep dark marks at the centre of the cheek where the tip of the cane had bitten into the tender flesh. Vanessa was lost for words. There was no mistaking that the spanking images spoke to some private part of her being.

It was time to move on. I suggested that we put the photosets away for the time being, and she agreed, with just a tough of reluctance.

I suggested that it was time to do her makeup, and she went to get her make-up bag and the dress.

Five minutes later she was sitting on a stool in nothing but a pair of almost transparent violet French knickers that looked hand-stitched and cut by a master.

I took a chance and commented on them as I began applying foundation.

"Those knickers are the end! They must be French or Italian, judging by the cut and the exquisite stitching."

She spread her knees a couple of inches to give me a better view.

"No, I cut them out and sewed them myself," she announced proudly.

"Dad found me a couple of yards of parachute silk, and I dyed half of it this violet, and the other half crimson. My mum taught me to cut and sew. She was a seamstress at Jacques Worth before the war.

"Mum became a nudist when she worked in Paris in the twenties. She met my dad at a naturist resort in Germany. Dad was from Norway; he was a pilot for a Danish airline. On stopovers his whole crew headed for the nearest nude beach. When Mum and Dad became close, he moved to England and flew for Imperial Airways. Mum worked as an airhostess until she had me. I spent my summers at naturist camps until I was about twelve, so I feel very comfortable with no clothes on, especially with you.

"We have loads of nude photos of Mum, and a fair few of Dad. Mum was a knockout. Dad has photos hanging in his office to prove it. That's where I learned to appreciate nude photographs. Her pictures are au naturel, with body hair and everything."

Vanessa was sitting there, in see-through silk knickers, chatting without a care in the world. Not flirty exactly, but very open. I finished the body makeup, grinning as I touched up her little pink nipples with a little lipstick. She smiled and simpered a little. Now she was really flirting. She knew as well as I did that this had nothing to do with her portrait and everything to do with the age-old dance of a man and a woman.

I finished her face, colouring her lashes a shade darker to make them emphasise her wide baby-blue eyes. Then I held the dress whilst she stepped into it, and drew it together to cover her beautiful body. She turned to invite me to do up all he tiny pearl buttons down her back, and the dress was complete. She pulled on a pair of silk stockings and gartered them above her knees, with a long, languorous glimpse of her violet underwear, and slipped on her three-inch heel, sling-back shoes in matching jade green. A rapid touch-up of her hair and she was ready. She pirouetted in front of the full-length mirror and looked at me for approval.

The lighting was perfect with the natural light from the windows diffused through the opalescent screens. I made use of a back-projected coloured filter to make a blue-green background, fading to creamy-white at about waist height. Then a confirmatory light-meter reading, to check my speed and aperture settings. The first shot looked perfect, but I took two more to be certain. Job done in about five minutes.

Helping her out of the dress was the work of seconds, and she bustled about, packing it in tissue paper and folding it into the large carrier beg with the dressmaker's name on it. She took off her stockings and shoes, folding the expensive silk stockings and packing them carefully. She looked up at me uncertainly.

Would you like me to take some glamour shots of you? They can be for your private album if you like. Unless you sign a model release, you hold the copyright, and I would protect your privacy, I promise."

She smiled, looking very pleased.

"Yes, that would be nice. I just wouldn't like them to appear in Men Only or Lilliput"

"No fear of that, I promised you."

I walked over and opened the window screen, lifted it off its rising butts and placed it out of the way.

I used her given name for the first time, and gave her an instruction.

"Vanessa, come over here, stand by the window".

"First of all, turn around and look out of the window. Hollow your back a little and stick your bottom out...yes, that's just perfect.

"Now, turn a little so that the curve of your right breast shows, Draw back your right elbow a little. Yes."

The dark shadow of the cleft between her buttocks, widening a little towards the centre, made an enticing image. I shot off a couple of shots with the Rollei, that made the best of the smooth, sculptural lines of her beautiful back.

12
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