Commercial models, including male ones, were at the top of the pampered and self-absorbed pyramid even in the 1930s, and young American model, Alec, is quite wrapped up with himself and convinced that he is irresistably desirable to all men, with an interest in men. He has strong views on what he deserves from a man when he is taken by fashion photographer lover, David, to Egypt to film atmospheric man’s perfume ads in Cairo and Luxor.
Feeling slighted and taken for granted by David and feeling the sexual competition from another model, Jared, Alec turns to rich, mysterious, and strikingly handsome Pasha Rushdy Abazar—at first to invoke David’s jealously, but increasingly to attract the pasha himself. Abazar, who hosts the first photo shoot at his Giza villa across the Nile from Cairo, overlooking the great pyramids, does seem to be making moves on Alec when he personally flies Alec to the second photo shoot in Luxor and wines and subsequently dines him in style in Cairo.
But Abazar’s attentions do not quite meet Alec’s expectations and Alec’s narcissism requires “it all.” The question quickly emerges of whether Alec is going to be blind to the pasha’s own, separate, agenda until it is too late to save himself and to maintain control of his own life.
We were on the terrace of some high muckety-muck Egyptian’s villa in Giza, outside Cairo, filming on an ancient Egypt theme commercial campaign for a men’s perfume called Him. The men’s fragrance accounts were my best. They not only paid well, but they let me show the maximum amount of skin and, back in New York, that was great advertisement for where I really made my money—rich old men buzzing around me for my body.
And my body was really looking good, I knew. I was reclining on a marble bench, arching my torso up sideways, stretching out my gorgeous pecs and popping out the muscles of my biceps, the pyramids in the background beyond an ivy-covered wall as backdrop. The gold lamé skirt was just big enough to cover the essentials—now that David had adjusted it. I was well tanned from lying on deck on the passage down from London, although I’d need to work on the tan constantly along with my other gym work. My eyes were heavily kohled in an ancient Egyptian design, and my nipples had been rubbed with brown blush to make them stand out. Other than that, the only adornment between my beautiful body and the adoring public were the gold snake bracelets on my biceps; the turquoise and gold breastplate, carefully arranged so as not to hide my nipples with their quarter-sized brown aureoles; a couple of gold rings on my fingers and toes; and the product—a bottle of the Him perfume.
Besides David, racing around between the three cameras to get enough shots while my body glistened with sweat to just the right degree, and the two light men traveling with us, there were plenty of other men wandering around behind the cameras to distract me if I hadn’t been a consummate professional. Stanley, our ever-frowning and sweating manager, was there, of course. And those young Egyptian men—barely more than boys—prancing around with trays of this and that and showing their little brown bodies off. I certainly could have done without them.
I suppose I have to acknowledge the presence of the other model, Jared, who had come with us from London and was mincing around in the background, looking at my pose and devising ones of his own, mimicking me, of course—but the least said about him, the better.
Four burly, foreboding-looking guardians with rifles, aswathe in all those scarves and such that desert natives always seem to wear, their eyes darting around, were standing at the four corners of the terrace, where stairs went down to the marshy ground leading to the Nile. They had been there to accompany us on our journey from Alexandria to Cairo this morning. David said the guards were necessary because revolutionaries of the Wafd Party were being restless—in fact had been restless for the four years since the British governor general of Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, had been assassinated in Cairo in 1924. As mean as they looked, though, I had flights of fancy of lying under one of them, feeling his “gun” working deep inside me, telling me they couldn’t get enough of me—depending on what their faces and bodies looked like under all of those wrappings, of course.
And then there was a host for this shoot venue—Pasha Rushdy Abazar. He, I had to admit, was worth looking at.
