'The Sixties London I knew was not the heady amalgam of Sodom and Narnia it seems to have been for some.'
Michael Lawrence has published over forty books for children and young adults, but three decades before he sold his first book he was a photographer in London, photographing pop groups and politicians, and printing the early girly snaps of Bob Guccione, gearing up to launch Penthouse Magazine. At 21, fed up with this mundane existence, ML gave up his balconied flat in Pimlico and set off for Paris to try his hand at writing while starving. He turned out to be rather good at the second of these, mostly in an unheated garret at the top of a Left Bank hotel. The Hotel Novelty.
In Milking the Novelty, a memoir of that year, the future author photographs John Lennon's nose, asks Judy Garland to get off his case, has his fortune wrongly foretold by the elderly Coco Chanel on a Paris catwalk, squats in the luxury apartment of an absent Japanese samurai, sleeps in Marianne Faithfull's bath, and bunks down for the summer with Christine Keeler's father. But some quite interesting things happen as well.
The author welcomes queries about this book or story. Contact him at: wordybug@me.com
Michael Lawrence has published over forty books for children and young adults, but three decades before he sold his first book he was a photographer in London, photographing pop groups and politicians, and printing the early girly snaps of Bob Guccione, gearing up to launch Penthouse Magazine. At 21, fed up with this mundane existence, ML gave up his balconied flat in Pimlico and set off for Paris to try his hand at writing while starving. He turned out to be rather good at the second of these, mostly in an unheated garret at the top of a Left Bank hotel. The Hotel Novelty.
In Milking the Novelty, a memoir of that year, the future author photographs John Lennon's nose, asks Judy Garland to get off his case, has his fortune wrongly foretold by the elderly Coco Chanel on a Paris catwalk, squats in the luxury apartment of an absent Japanese samurai, sleeps in Marianne Faithfull's bath, and bunks down for the summer with Christine Keeler's father. But some quite interesting things happen as well.
The author welcomes queries about this book or story. Contact him at: wordybug@me.com
Used availability for Michael Lawrence's Milking the Novelty