Everyone thinks of love when they think of Venus. So be it. It is, as they say, her raison d'etre. She knows it. She has been painted more times than she can count.
But, it is always the allure that is stressed. And fair enough. After all, Venus is her name and seduction is her game. She is the original nymphomaniac.
She is also one of the most impossible people to pin down. I finally manage to find her at one of the posh New Year's bashes being held downtown this year. She is seated calmly at a table some distance from the dance floor; a shapely, Greek seductress.
She stands as I approach. "Darling...we meet at last. I'm so glad you could come." Her accent is only just detectable.
"Aphrodite?" I ask politely, a little overwhelmed. After all, it is not every day that I get the chance to meet a goddess in person.
She shakes her head. Already, she has changed. Now, she is a golden-skinned woman with silky, honey blonde hair. "I prefer Venus, if you don't mind..." This time, her accent is heavily Italian.
As we exchange a few preliminary pieces of chit-chat, I can see why they call her the Goddess of Love. She is spectacular. Beside her, how can any woman help feeling inadequate?
But I'll let you in on a little secret. A major part of her seductiveness is her incorporeality. She is always a painted or carved surface, a shape shifter. And while she fascinates and obsesses the men who come too close to her, like the succubii, she is fundamentally unmoved by their lust. Her image arouses it and brings it to its fruition without directly satisfying it.
She is a frigid queen who can fake it with the best of them. No help for it. If she really felt anything every time a fellow used her as the inspiration for his ejaculation, she'd be exhausted, burned out. As she says, with a charmingly gallic shrug:
"C'est la vie, n'est ce pas?"
When did Venus become French?
Ha, well you may ask! You see, even goddesses fall on hard times. It was the entire pantheon, really. After Greece, back during the ancien regime, they moved on to Rome with relative ease. Their names got changed - romanized, you could say, but the functions remained basically similar.
The really dark times came with the advent of Christianity. Mention that word in any of their presences and they still wince. Not that their functions were eliminated. On the contrary, each of them still had a serious task to perform, by their very existences. They were all metaphors and embodiments of qualities and powers. They existed because the qualities, all aspects of the human psyche, continued to exist.
Venus was kept busy enough. Women still seduced men with their beauties, charms or wit. Problem was, she, like all of the others, had to go underground. Hard times indeed.
"It's bad for a girl's self-image!" she exclaims, the quintessential gangster's moll, right down to the peroxide curls. Bat, bat - the false eyelashes flutter.
All the gods had to deal with egos which had gotten rather inflated during their heyday. Now, in hiding, they really had problems. Squabbles erupted with even greater frequency than before.
A brief sigh of relief echoed with the Renaissance. A reprieve! At least they were recognised once more! Painted, carved, depicted - even if their new creators did not believe in them. That in itself was nothing new.
Venus adored Botticelli. He made her famous again. And in such an innocent, attractive guise! Just hatched, so to speak. A fledgling seductress.
He also set a trend. Suddenly, everyone was painting her with the faces and bodies of their mistresses. As it had always been, in fact. She got more attention than many of the other gods and goddesses. Her luck - people were always interested in sex.
And then, ah, then.... Her true rebirth! Not during the renaissance, with all its depictions of her actual naissance. No, indeed. Reborn she was, through a strange contraption which produced a flat, flickering series of black and white pictures. They were taken in quick succession as the subjects moved about their tasks. Then, they were projected onto a wall, the little pictures blown up to an enormous size thanks to the light shining through them. Shown also in quick succession, they collectively became what was popularly called a "motion picture," or a "movie."
What rhapsodies she went into upon its invention! To tell the truth, all the gods grinned among themselves. At last! Together again! They held a bit of a party - celebrating the two-thousand year reunion.
Venus grins. "Zeus got into `is cups that night! Even Dionyssus wuz surprised. I s'ppose the awd despot `ad taken to drink over the years to assuage the pain of obscurity. I might've done it too, if it weren't fer the `ell it wreaks with the complexion. Brings out varicose veins, or so they say. Couldn't `ave that!"
A giggle as bubbly and liquid as just opened champagne. "The poor awd sod! `E wiped a tear from `is bleary eye and smiled. "`Reminds me of the good awd days,' `e says, givin' me a smart pat on the bum. I squeaked wiv surprise at that. Last person I would've expected it from. `Back when we wuz all togever on awd Mount Olympus. T'aint that much diffrunt `ere, really.'
"`They cawl it `Ollywood `Ills, though. That's diffrunt,' I comes back. And then Vulcan shows up, the bloody troll, and drags me to bed wiv `im. Jus' wen it wuz gettin' int'resting!" She shakes her head, her sleek black bob shimmering with the movement. As soon as her cigarette is in its holder, half a dozen men materialise to offer her a light. The khol-rimmed eyes brighten with interest. I suddenly feel as though I have become one of the art-nouveau flowers that have been stencilled on the walls of the opulent banquet room.
"`Ere, laddie," she says to one of them, "lets you an' me dance!" He willingly assents. She flashes a white grin in my direction. "Sorry, luv," a confidential whisper in my ear. "An Australian sheep rancher. An `e reminds me too much of Adonis to resist! We'll continue this later!" And she is gone, fringes, eyes and teeth flashing at her partner as they move onto the dance floor.
That's Venus for you. Seductress first, everything else after. As I said, her raison d'etre.
The pictures spelled her true rebirth. She was bigger than ever - as were all of the gods, really. Amazing what mass production, duplication and distribution can do to spread an image. Whoever coined the phrases "matinee idol" and "pinup goddess" didn't know how true it was. The gods were back!
Different names, this time. But otherwise the same. Pity the poor actresses who Venus chose to embody once their images reached the celluloid! Instead of just blessing them with sex appeal, as she did with the mortals themselves, the films provided her with the opportunity to actually fuse with their images. The unsuspecting women became icons of sexuality thanks to Venus's influence. When she fused with Rita Hayworth's face and body in Gilda, the actress was doomed to be mistaken for the goddess forever after - so long as she retained her youth, that is.
She had other favourites as well. Maureen O'Hara's queenly sexuality.
Lauren Bacall's advice on whistling was a triumph:
"The smile, the voice...How could I resist?" Venus asks me a little later, her hand briefly touching her elegantly piled coiffure. The silken masses of golden red hair glow with darker highlights. Her Chanel suit is just right for her slender form.
And then, of course, her brightest and best - Marilyn Munroe. She smiles. "What I did for little Norma Jean Baker!"
As always, she is unaware of the double edge to her "gift" of sexuality. She only sees the opportunity and seizes it, thoughtless and effervescent.
"Who wouldn't want to be irresistible?" she wonders. "Only fools," is her answer. She cannot think any other way. To do so would be to deny her own validity. I cannot share her certainty.
When asked about Marilyn's suicide, she only smiles, her eyes glowing.
"She is now forever mine! Forever young! Always beautiful, always the seductress. Why do you think I love her so?"
She seems so fulfilled by the thought, that I cannot bring myself to mention the depression, the horrible insecurity suffered by so many of her chosen ones. Despite myself, I am utterly charmed by her. Not surprising, really. She is back in her old function, back in full force. In the course of our conversation, I begin to realise that her ability to inhabit the forms of the women on the screen is only a small part of her true strength.
You see, the real power she exercises, perhaps now, more than ever before, is over the psyches of her subjects. She appears in her various forms everywhere these days, bombarding the populace with beauty, and underlying it, sex, sex, sex. She is the ideal and she revels in the longings of those who would try to embody her.
Now, she looks at me and takes a drag from another cigarette that has been lit by one of her acolytes. She is waifishly thin, with straight, brown hair and disturbingly prominent cheekbones. "Did you have any other questions?"
Her eyes are hard. They distance me.
I shake my head, trying to remember where I have seen this particular manifestation of hers before.
"Good." She rises and turns to leave, sparing only the briefest of glances for her admirers. She is no longer in evening wear, I notice. Jeans and a T-shirt have replaced the shimmering sheaths and endearingly tacky boas. As she moves away, I catch a whiff of her perfume.
Calvin Klein. Obsession.
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