Foreword

WHEN this book first appeared in 1967, public interest in glamour photographer and magazine publisher George Harrison Marks was arguably at an all-time high. Just who was this man with the beatnik beard, the thick frame glasses and the seemingly dream job of photographing beautiful women in a state of undress? A job that had made him the object of public idolisation, envy, curiosity and condemnation in equal proportions. Unravelling the Marks mystique was something the press had been attempting to do ever since Marks first made a name for himself with his nudie magazine Kamera in 1957, and Marks along with his muse/chief model/business partner Pamela Green had rarely been out of the public eye since then. Not that Harrison Marks was exactly the publicity-shy type. On the contrary, this was a man who clearly loved the limelight, a limelight he’d first gotten a taste for as a star-struck youngster in awe of the music hall greats whose antics provided some much-needed laughs and cheers during the war years that Marks grew up in.

As to how much naked truth made it into the 1960s biography of him that you now hold in your hands…hmm, I can’t help thinking of the words of an associate of his who once told me that it would probably take a decade for someone to sort the truth about Marks’ life from fanciful myths and tall tales he made up about himself over the years. More than a decade later I’m still trying to separate the naked truth from the bare faced lies Marks tells about himself in this book. Whatever the case though there can be no doubt that Marks was a born raconteur. This is a great book that grabs you by the lapels and drags you back into Britain’s colourful past whilst telling the story of a nice Jewish boy who attempted to follow in his music hall idols footsteps by forming a comedy double act which toured the crumbling, fag end of the music hall era, and somehow ended up photographing nude women in the dark, violent, Bohemian world of 1950s Soho, before fame and fortune finally came a knocking in the 1960s.

George Harrison Marks (1926-1997)

Girlfriends and wives may have come and gone over the years, but the music hall remained the great love of Marks’ life. By all accounts, he possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of music hall history (as can frequently be detected in this book itself) and its influence became an essential part of his personal shtick. Many of his rivals in the glamour photography game preferred to remain as anonymous as possible, but Marks’ name, face and personality were all over Kamera from the get-go. A move into filmmaking offered a further chance for Marks to play the role of the eternal ham. 8mm glamour films like The Window Dresser (1961), and big screen outings The Naked World of Harrison Marks (1967) and The Nine Ages of Nakedness (1969), inevitably find their maker prancing around on screen, usually dressed up in some ridiculous disguise like the music hall star he never was. Films like those fulfilled Marks’ showbiz aspirations, whilst making good on their pact with the lustful public by the delivering the expected parade of female breasts, bums and thighs that the Harrison Marks name had become synonymous with. Ask people about the man himself, and you’re left with the impression of a true one off, and a life fully lived. Marks drank, womanised, smoked, swore, laughed, entertained friends, titillated the masses, saw his name in lights and saw his name dragged through the courts. I’ve had a great time, I’ve made a fortune, and I’ve fucked a thousand beautiful women, what have I got to complain about he claimed in 1985, and who could argue with that?

This book closes in 1967, with only a slight hint of the dark clouds that were gathering on the horizon. Marks would go bankrupt in 1969, and spent much of the next decade in the pornographic wilderness, filming smut of both the soft and hard varieties for men he’d come to despise. Some of the short porno films that emerged from that era surprisingly find Marks throwing all his creativity at them. They remain as distinctly Marksian creations as anything he put his name to (from Marks lesser documented ‘blue period’ I’d particularly recommend the lunacy of Die Lollos, Autograph Hour, Dolly Mixture, and The Happy Nurses). Sadly other chunks of his 1970s output remain mirthless, by the numbers, blue movies clearly just crapped out to keep the great man financially afloat.

1977 brought with it one final moment of big screen glory and saw Marks stepping out as director, writer and star of Come Play With Me, surely Marks’ magnum opus and the ultimate example of his ‘music hall meets pornography under the influence of a bottle of whisky’ aesthetic. A film only Marks could or would want to make, Come Play With Me saw Marks and Alfie Bass play a pair of decrepit banknote forgers, whose attempts to hide out from East End gangsters at a health farm are thwarted by the arrival of a coachload of nympho nurses. Even the film’s producer, David Sullivan, would later admit that Marks was in a bit of a time warp…he thought he was making some vaudeville comedy, I thought it was a weird old film, and he isn’t wrong. Come Play With Me is a film that will never be accused of being in touch with the times it was made in. While the disenchanted youth of 1977 were pogoing to the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the U.K’, Come Play With Me serves up the sight of Marks, Bass and the nurses performing the musical sing-along number ‘It’s Great to be Here’ (all together now it great to be here, there never ever could be anywhere else for me, this is where we want to be, here enjoying ourselves). The British public, however, took Come Play With Me to its collective bosom, and the film went on the become an unlikely success story, one that played at the Cameo Moulin cinema in the West End for a record-breaking four-year run. A feat which continues to baffle the shit out of historians, cinema snobs and even some of the people who appeared in the film to this very day.

Marks finally left hardcore pornography behind him in 1979, then embarked on one final career reinvention as the publisher of Kane, a fine periodical dedicated to spanking in general, and corporal punishment in particular. Kane and other derriere whacking ventures, which included live spanking shows with Marks as MC and self-explanatory videos like Schoolgirl Fannies on Fire and A Whacking in a Winter Wonderland, may not have restored Marks to the wealth he had enjoyed in the 1960s, but kept him in ‘modest luxury’ until decades of smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish and behaving like a rabbit finally caught up with him in June 1997. Marks’ self-penned funeral programme included the strict instructions for his mourners to get drunk…I want ‘em all to get pissed, and I’ll join ’em in spirit, as f***in’ usual, and make sure they buy their own f***in’ drinks.

I wish Marks were better remembered these days, anecdotes about the man himself never fail to entertain, and who else could claim to have had a career that spans music hall, glamour photography, pornography and the spanking industry. C’mon the man should be regarded as a national treasure, but maybe we’re doing a tiny bit to right that wrong by reprinting this book, which has been out of print for several decades. So let’s waste no more time in blowing the dust off the past and raising a glass (or several) to The Great Marko as he emerges from a cloud of his cigarette smoke and once again gets to be the centre of attention by delivering the is it or isn’t it Naked Truth about his incredible, jam-packed life. I’m sure you’ll agree that It’s Great to be Here.

Gavin Whitaker

George Harrison Marks on the set of ‘The Window Dresser’, with Pamela Green, posing as a mannequin, in the background

Introduction

READING through the proofs of this book, I have asked myself why I have allowed these series of happenings in my life to be published. Suddenly here is a book… it certainly didn’t start out as such. Then how did it start?

A group of friends sitting around, drinking and talking of their past experiences, both amorous and personal. And somebody saying, "Christ, that would make interesting reading.

Has my life up to now been interesting? I don’t honestly know. I do know that in spite of the ups and downs scattered through it, I’ve enjoyed it. Reading through the following pages, I’ve wondered whether my experiences have been any zippier than most other people experiences. I admit that I may have had more than my share of some of the better pleasures of life, it possibly reads so. But then it’s all condensed here into a couple of hundred pages, and, let’s face it, it has taken me more than 3,650 days — and nights — to live it. It doesn’t seem so hectic when you put it that way, does it?

Even as I’ve renewed the memories of my encounters with life on reading this book, still more edge their way in — like spending a wonderful week alone with a Countess at her Château in the Black Forest. How I found myself browsing through one of the world’s largest and most expensive collections of pornography owned by one of France’s greatest actresses. How I found myself surrounded by murderous-looking Arabs in a hashish den in the backstreets of a Moroccan Casbah. My experiences and serious participation in spiritualism. But still, these are other stories. There are enough in this book to suffice at this time.

By the time this is read, there is every possibility that I will be in Hollywood making my first film there, and if I know me, I’ll find life where the life is. After all — that’s life.

George Harrison Marks

Monique Devereux and George Harrison Marks

CHAPTER 1

The World’s Leading Nude Photographer

GEORGE Harrison Marks collects women like other men collect porcelain, paintings, cigarette coupons or trading stamps. He has observed in his working life more really beautiful women, naked as nature intended, than an average man could ever dream about in 1,000 years.

At 40, he is a connoisseur of female beauty; the pre-eminent nude photographer in the world.

But there is very much more to this man than just a bunch of pretty faces.

Women, though, are his dominant interest. He confesses: I am lucky, they are my work as well as my hobby… and I love every moment I spend at both.

Through women, naked women, he has become rich, famous — even notorious. They have made him, and they have broken him. They have brought him happiness and love; and in almost equal proportions, disillusion and despair.

For the ordinary man, it is difficult enough to keep one woman happy. Harrison Marks keeps on splendid terms with hundreds a year. They work for him, they undress for him, their pictures are sent by the million round the world.

And, as a rule, they are not professional models. Mostly they are ordinary suburban girls; secretaries, receptionists, typists, housewives. They come from Kingston-upon-Thames and Kingston-upon-Hull; from Blackheath and Blackburn. In fact, they are the girls next door.

The Harrison Marks story reveals more about women than just their beautiful bodies and it also reveals more about the boys next door than the fact that they buy nude pictures, books and calendars by the million.

Harrison Marks is a man without cant or hypocrisy. He is as frank about his business as his pictures are about his models.

He is a lusty, hard-living man who says: I adore beautiful women, I live for them, and I am completely dedicated to them.

One question always is put to him. It comes in a variety of ways, often directly, mostly insidiously. Be frank, Mr. Marks, the questioners say, "do you sleep with your models?’

If he answers no, they don’t believe him; if he answers yes, they still don’t believe him.

In the first instance, they think he’s covering up and in the second instance, they think he’s boasting.

And often in the mind of the questioner, there is a predisposition to disbelief. A man who looks at a picture of a very beautiful naked girl frequently becomes emotionally involved with the image. He doesn’t like it if the answer is yes. In some curious way, it makes the girl in the picture unfaithful. It is a very private affair, this taking and, studying nude pictures.

A lot of people are prepared to put Harrison Marks down as a pansy. There is a fiction current among many film and photographic people, and it is often said: Of course, he’s a raving queer. Raving queer, or raving lecher, what is the truth?

Well, the queer bit is a laugh, a big laugh, says Harrison Marks. The womanising can be overstated, too, he explains. "In one year, five to six hundred girls go through my studios.

I’m a bit of a goer… but that is ridiculous. But, of course, I’ve had affairs with some of my models, deep emotional affairs."

He points to the portraits in oils on the walls of his flat. The artist who does those, he says, "falls madly in love with every model he paints. Often he is suicidal about it. It breaks him up.

"I have fallen in love with some of my models, I work with them so closely, it’s only natural. Bosses in offices and industry fall in love with secretaries. And I’m much closer to my girls than that. The conditions we work under are probably ripe for an affair.

"But, remember, a lot of my models are respectably married women — and most of those very, very happily married. The fact that they are prepared to model shows that they are well-adjusted sexually.

"If it became a fact that I slept with all my models, or even tried to make them, nobody would work for me.

I have more trouble with girls who try to make me. And later I will tell you about some of the incidents.

One other question always comes up: Is it art? Since the Renaissance right up to the time of the Impressionists and Abstracts, pictorial representation of the nude was regarded as the highest achievement in art. The ability to draw, paint or sculpt the human figure was the acid test of an artist’s greatness. Pin-up artists like Vargas and Petts became famous, socially acceptable and respectable. Their work was often criticised as mechanical and photographic, but they were recognised as artists.

Yet for some reason photography of the nude figure has been considered salacious, unsavoury — even pornographic. Somehow, the public considers it a little too easy, like copying. It seems unfair that with a click and in 1/25th of a second the photographer can go a long way to getting the same results as the true artist. He hasn’t obviously worked for it, struggled for the effect. Like the recent sign in a multiple store over batches of rather inferior oil paintings painted by hand. That means they’re real, genuine. They are done by hand, it implies, they must be good.

Harrison Marks says about his work: "I’m not going to dress it all up as arty one bit. Selling the sex image is my business, and I’m not ashamed of that. Men like to see pictures of beautiful girls in the raw state, and I give them what they like to look at, and I have made a lot of money doing it — and I’m not ashamed of that, either.

I’ve been in the pin-up business for ten years or more and I suppose I must have seen more naked girls than the average man has had hot dinners, but the fascination of female beauty has never left me.

To him, it is undoubtedly art, commercial art, carried out to the exacting standards required in the field. As demanding as any advertising illustration.

"To me, a picture of a naked woman is as much a work of art as a photograph of a child, or a face or a cathedral.

I am not, and he is very emphatic, I am not in the pornography game.

"Any mug can take dirty pictures. I