Footsucker

Fifteen

There is one woman whose feet I really would like to see, or to have seen. Her name is Marjorie Howard and her feet are something of a legend. In the 1920s, D.W. Griffith, who was apparently something of a foot man himself, got together with the legendary shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo and ran a competition to find the most beautiful feet in Hollywood. The first prize was to be a six-month film contract and runners-up got shoes made by Ferragamo. Marjorie Howard is the woman who won the contest. Both she and her feet are now lost to history, but second prize went to the then unknown Joan Crawford. She was trying desperately to break into the movies, and entering a beauty contest for feet must have seemed as good a way as any other.

Now, I’ve seen photographs of Joan Crawford’s feet, or, at least, photographs of Joan Crawford in which her feet appear, and I’d have to say they were not really prize-winning feet. There are no obvious deformities, the toes are nice and straight, they appear well looked after, but they’re a little fleshy for my tastes, and the big toes are a little on the bulbous side. OK, so I know that beauty contests are an insult to womanhood and, at the very least, highly subjective, and perhaps I wouldn’t have adored Marjorie Howard’s feet, but I’d like to have had the chance.

As a matter of fact, if you read Ferragamo’s autobiography, Shoemaker of Dreams, he says he preferred Joan Crawford’s feet, anyway, but I’m not sure Ferragamo is a man you can always trust. He says the Duchess of Windsor and Susan Hayward both had perfect feet. He says Alicia Markova’s feet were ‘strong and lovely and startling.’ He says Mary Pickford’s feet were ‘lovely’. Greta Garbo’s feet were just ‘beautiful’, while Marlene Dietrich, he says, was the possessor of ‘the most beautiful feet in the world.’

I guess that if you were a great shoemaker then you’d tend to attract women with wonderful feet, but I suspect that Ferragamo was a bit of a flatterer. If you were rich enough to be able to afford a pair of his shoes, then he’d be happy to say you had beautiful feet too. He made shoes for Clara Petacci and Eva Braun but he doesn’t tell us much about what their feet were like.

And he also made shoes for Pola Negri. I have read (in her obituary actually) that she was the first actress ever to paint her toenails. This seems unlikely to me. Surely civilization didn’t need so many millennia to invent such an apparently obvious cosmetic effect. But I’m in no position to argue, and I’ve never seen a close-up of Pola Negri’s bare feet any more than I’ve seen those of Marjorie Howard, but I’d like to think that a woman who invented toenail painting must have had good feet, or at least good toenails.

The world of movies and movie stars is a strange one where feet are concerned. Movie stars are almost always beautiful. Their faces and bodies are whipped into shape by experts: makeup artists, personal trainers, plastic surgeons; and, although I’m sure their feet aren’t entirely neglected, they’re not the things by which stars are rated and judged, except by me.

Actresses are photographed the whole time. You can buy whole books of photographs of Marilyn Monroe or Charlotte Rampling or Rita Hayworth or Madonna. When we look at these photographs, even if we look with whole-hearted admiration and approval, we are still subjecting these women to intense critical scrutiny. I just happen to scrutinize the feet rather than anything else.

Having browsed through a number of books on Marilyn Monroe I’ve found that her feet have left me curiously unmoved. In lots of ways this is a pity. Her wiggle may or may not have been caused by the high heels she wore (some say it was because of an ankle deformity), and she did allegedly once say, ‘It was the high heel that gave a big lift to my career.’ Her feet are nice enough, but they’re curiously wholesome and unsexy, and her choice of shoes, or at least the shoes she was forced to wear in films, was poor. For example, in that scene from The Seven Year Itch where her skirt blows up, the legs are great and the skirt is great, the cleavage and the face are great, but she’s wearing some dreary white open sandals that do nothing for her or for me.

Helen Mirren is an actress who shot up in my estimation when, a long time ago now, I read an article in which she confessed to having a thing about shoes. The article, needless to say, is given pride of place in the archive, and I can quote it from memory. ‘I can’t seem to throw them away,’ she says. ‘No matter how battered and worn they might be. I go into a shop to buy something sensible to wear to rehearsals and come out clutching a pair of stilettos.’ Then she talks about her latest acquisition, a pair of black court shoes from Seditionaries with studs embedded in the heels, and says, ‘They really worry people, you know. I think that is a mark of an exceptional pair of shoes.’ How true that is. The article is illustrated with Helen lying on her stomach on a glass table surrounded by shoes. Lord have mercy.

Here is Britt Ekland in her book Sensual Beauty and How to Achieve It:

I believe a good-looking foot is as important as a good-looking hand. I’m not saying there is necessarily anything very sensual about feet, [Shame on you, Britt!] but after all they have been known to touch a man’s lips, and obviously in the dark the poor soul isn’t going to know what he’s reaching for, so it’s really up to you. If that’s the kind of intimate relationship you have, you have to keep your feet lovable.

I’m not sure whether it’s Britt’s dodgy grasp of English or her lack of a good ghost writer that makes this paragraph so impenetrable, but you sort of know what she means, and at least she seems to have some inkling of what foot sex is about. Britt, I would say, on the evidence of the photographs in Sensual Beauty, has feet you definitely wouldn’t kick out of bed. In some of the photographs they look a touch wrinkled, the little toenail is slightly gnarled and shapeless, but hey, the photographs are blown up pretty large. How many feet could bear that close an inspection? Well, Catherine’s could, of course, but not so many others.

Again, although Britt is usually happy to get her kit off, I’m pretty sure that her feet have never actually figured large in a movie. I’m not absolutely sure because I haven’t seen her entire oeuvre, and frankly I don’t want to. I’m not a complete idiot. I wouldn’t go to see a movie simply in the hope of seeing Britt Ekland’s feet, or anyone else’s, and I’m perfectly happy to see a film that has no feet in it at all. But if I’m sitting there in the dark watching a movie and suddenly there is some element of pedic sexuality, if an actress walks across the frame in high heels, or is given a foot massage by her lover or goes into a shoe shop or gets a pedicure, then it does tend to swamp my response to the rest of the film.

Here is J. G. Ballard on the subject:

With the resources of video, you can build up quite a large library of images … I can imagine that, quite accidentally, you might get some obsessive, say, who finds himself collecting footage of women’s shoes whenever they’re shown (it doesn’t matter if it’s Esther Williams walking around a swimming pool with forties sound, or Princess Di) — he presses his button and records all this footage of women’s shoes … After accumulating two hundred hours of shoes, you might have a bizarre obsessive movie that’s absolutely riveting.

You might. You might indeed. And I have tried, God knows I’ve tried, but it’s surprisingly hard. All too often the image has been and gone before you’ve reached for the remote control and pressed the record button. I am no techno freak, nevertheless my archive contained a certain amount of video material, and I sometimes edited together relevant images and, if I say so myself, some of the results weren’t bad.

It was always a work in progress, but here’s one way it might have run. Fade in on Mickey Rourke sprawled on a bed stroking Kim Basinger’s feet in 91/2 Weeks, then cut to Dirk Bogarde doing the same with Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter, but here they’re on the floor and he’s actually kissing them, then to Bull Durham where Kevin Costner is painting Susan Sarandon’s toenails, cut to Goldie Hawn in Overboard where her manservant is doing the same for her. Then the shot from Who’s That Girl, where Madonna’s just been transformed from the street urchin to the glamour puss and we see her for the first time in a spangly ball gown, and the camera starts at her feet then moves all the way up her body to her face, but in my version we do a freeze frame on the start of the shot, the first moment when Madonna’s feet fill the whole screen. Madonna, incidentally, has feet to die for. Cut to Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa, cut to the scene in The War of the Roses where Danny De Vito’s girlfriend starts to give him a foot job under the dinner table. Possibly then a collage of images from Single White Female where first we see the girls trying on and buying metal-heeled, black suede court shoes, several shots of these shoes pacing corridors, then finally (and not too credibly in my opinion) the scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh kills Bridget Fonda’s boyfriend by driving one of the heels into his eye. Changing the pace, we have a brief shot of Katherine Helmond in Brazil wearing a leopardskin shoe on her head, an idea borrowed from Elsa Schiaparelli, then Alan Howard stroking Helen Mirren’s feet in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

I could go on and on, but for now I’d end with the shot from Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or, when Lya Lys, in a state of sexual arousal and frustration, sucks the toe of a statue of Christ. Her lips are a perfect shiny black against the white stone of the statue, and her eyes look glazed and orgasmic. It is one of the most truly pornographic images I know. The only problem with this, of course, is that it’s a man’s toe she’s sucking and that is well outside my range of interests.

Quite early on with Catherine, after I’d been sucking her feet for a while, she decided to return the favour and took my big toe in her mouth and moved her lips back and forth over it in a perfect impersonation of fellatio. It was a thoughtful gesture, I suppose, but I was appalled. I had to tell her to stop. My feet and toes are probably better looking than a good many men’s but I couldn’t possibly let a woman suck them. It was a disgusting idea. As I said to Catherine, ‘I may be a fetishist but I’m not a sicko.’ At the time she believed me, but later she seemed to change her mind.