Goldengirl

The dead-still white lettering emphasised the delicate movement of the skin.

There were no credits. The camera stayed with its subject, the just perceptible movement of the navel toward the center of the screen confirming that the shot was moving outward. At the base of the screen, the sunlight discovered a concentration of flaxen down which slowly intensified in thickness and profusion until a triangular mound of fine gold hair was defined.

A warning signal sounded in Dryden’s mind. There was nobody sharper than Dick Armitage in tennis, but off court he wasn’t noted for his powers of discrimination. What was on the screen didn’t look like an athlete training for the Olympics. It was more like the intro to a blue film. Professionally made, he conceded, but no different in kind from the skinflicks men with an eye to a fast buck had been purveying since the days of the brothers Lumière. He was no prude. While Goldengirl stayed on the screen he was as ready as the next man to enjoy her visible assets. But let anyone suggest the Dryden Agency might promote them, and he was going to sound off like Lincoln on human rights.

She was fully in frame, a tall, proud and undeniably beautiful creature, motionless against a blue background, the breeze carrying wisps of her long, blond hair round her body and against the underside of her breast, affirming its roundness. The filming was obviously done at a high altitude, for the blue was as much mountain as sky.

By degrees, the camera angle shifted to the girl’s left. It meant filming directly into the sun, so that her profile was cast into a dramatic silhouette edged with gold, reminiscent of the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, the celebrated documentary of the Nazi-staged Olympic Games of 1936. The shot into the sun is such a cliché of commercials that Dryden ought to have been squirming in his seat, but this unhurried treatment seemed to have rediscovered the heroic quality of Riefenstahl’s film.

It was odd he didn’t recognize the girl. One of his mental recreations was naming the girls in TV commercials. He reckoned he knew the face of every blonde, brunette and redhead modeling for ads across the country, if he couldn’t always recall the name. Names weren’t so important. The same girls used half a dozen different ones, and got all the work they could from knitting patterns to nude shots, so anyone with a stake in the advertising business needed to be able to spot them. It didn’t please a company chairman to open a girlie mag and see a full frontal of the same girl who sedulously applied his brand of vapor rub to her wheezing husband’s chest each night on all the major networks. It went completely against good merchandising practice, and it was Dryden’s job to see it didn’t happen; his nightmare that it might.

Goldengirl wasn’t in any of the agency catalogues, he was certain. It was not a face you could forget. There was an elegance to it, a dignity in repose, a marvelous tragic quality about the eyes and mouth that film men would have pawned their Oscars to get under contract.

As he watched the camera’s movement around her, he marveled that a girl so stunning had been ignored by the media. He half-expected some blemish to appear in shot and account for it, scar tissue or a grotesque birthmark.

She was flawless.

The camera had panned completely around her to the position of the opening shot and was zooming in again for a repeat of the close-up, with the navel traveling across the screen like a scarab traversing the desert. When it reached the point where the title had been superimposed before, it stopped.

Expecting a cut to one of the standard postures in the erotic repertoire, Dryden was unprepared, to say the least, when a set of tabulated statistics appeared against the gold background.

The shot moved out, dissolving into a second sequence which made it clear, if the statistics had not, how tall she was. Till now, there had been nothing in frame to compare her with. Here she was indoors, in a gym, and she was not alone. Beside her, at the level of her shoulder, stood a man in a white coat holding a pen: Dr. Serafin.

His voice came over on the soundtrack, Dryden’s first opportunity of hearing it in more than a few terse words. The accent was American, with a trace of central Europe in the clipping of consonants.

‘I want to invite you to look carefully at this young woman, for as well as being singularly attractive, she is one of the most interesting subjects physiologically who has ever appeared on film. This begins to become apparent if we examine her by means of radiography.’

A full-length X-ray was superimposed on the screen, so that the doctor appeared to be standing beside the girl one moment, her skeleton the next.