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The Model, the Poster and 3,000 Women
Documentary about the infamous 80's Athena poster "L'Enfant", which featured 23 year old Adam Perry holding a newborn baby in his arms, exploring the extraordinary impact that image had on its key participants' lives.Worth watching, made me think
This is only the second comment I've ever posted here, so am not too sure if any of it counts as a 'spoiler'.
I watched this a few nights ago on Channel 4 TV. Mesmerised by the stream of good looking women who had had it away with Adam Perry. He clearly has rather good taste. And as he pointed out.., "Women like sex."
Today, a couple of days later, I wasn't too sure whether I had been watching a morality tale, or...?
The ending, a re-enactment of the 'L,Enfant' photo-shoot looked to me very artificial. Spencer Rowell didn't sound awfully sympathetic to Adam Perry's long-standing complaint about only having earned 100 pounds shoot fee, whilst just about everyone else... Spencer had the air of "Well, it was all a long time ago". Plus, unspoken, the attitude of someone raised with the idea that a model is just someone, anyone, for a photographer or art director to exercise their talents.
For me the dialogue that stuck was when Spencer, playing with his son, said that growing up, being a man , was when you are able to accept the responsibilities of being a parent. Even though he had always felt that he would be an abysmal father.
And Adam, when asked if he felt that sleeping with 3,000 women had damaged him, replied no, the damage had been done long before that.
Plight of the poster man
The Model, the Poster and 3,000 Women (Ch4): IF, like me, you were a teenage girl in the 80s or 90s, you probably had Adam Perry on your bedroom…
The Model, the Poster and 3,000 Women (Ch4): IF, like me, you were a teenage girl in the 80s or 90s, you probably had Adam Perry on your bedroom wall next to pictures of Wham and Duran Duran.
But Adam wasn't a pop star and most of his fans didn't even know his name. He was the male model captured in the famous L'enfant Athena poster cradling a baby in his arms.
For millions of young girls, the image captured a dream of the perfect husband and father, but the reality behind the iconic photo was a lot different.
Far from being a sensitive New Age man, Adam was a tart with a liking for illegal drugs and women.
This documentary shattered any romantic notion anyone may have ever had about Adam.
Now 40, he is a bitter, broken man, who is light years away from the trendy muscled lad in the 1986 poster.
Unlike the photographer and designer of the picture, Adam was given just a one-off fee of a couple of hundred pounds for being its star. While Spencer Rowell and Paul Rodriguez received royalties every time the image was reproduced on clocks, postcards and mugs, Adam received nothing.
Not that he was left destitute - he made thousands from other modelling jobs, all of which was spent on drugs, drink and women.
A claim was made that he bedded 3,000 women in his life - not that any of them seemed to care. Interviews with some of his conquests revealed attractive, intelligent professionals who should have known better but who couldn't keep the smiles off their faces when talking about their moments of passion with the poster man.
The story of the Athena poster was a sad tale for all those involved.
Adam is now a builder. He has a girlfriend, a son he is not allowed to see and no money. He could hardly contain his anger with the way he was treated, when the programme makers reunited him with Spencer for a modern take on the classic shot.
Spencer made a lot of money from the poster, spent a lot on drugs and ended up in rehab as a bankrupt. He is still taking photos and last year, made £250 in royalties from the poster.
Paul died of Aids in 1992, having felt his whole career was dogged by the poster, which he thought stopped him being taken seriously.
The only one to come out of all this unscathed was the baby, Stelios, who made no money out of the shoot and had to buy his own poster but at least has a stable and normal family around him.
A powerful and compelling programme that clearly demonstrated that money and fame can so easily lead to destruction and misery.
Wonderwalls
There's no escaping the 1980s, and that means... Athena. Lindsay Baker looks back.
but the male model, one Adam Perry, has not been shy of publicity. Now in his mid-30s, Perry has become best known for his claim that he has slept with 3,000 women. He was named "the world's most promiscuous man" by one glossy men's magazine and, aptly, he posed in a condom commercial.
No single poster has rivalled L'Enfant since in terms of sales, yet, Rowell says, nothing was ever done to "push" it; it became successful simply by word of mouth. "That doesn't happen now. Anything that's going to become iconic today will become so simply because enough money and hype have been put into it. Very few things become iconic in a natural way."
Unsurprisingly, Athena was soon after more of the same from Rowell: "Usually a guy with not very many clothes on, or wafting around looking really sensitive on a beach, or holding flowers - stuff like that." The idea was to present pictures of "people living a life that doesn't really exist", couples under water with dolphins, men larking about on idyllic beaches. Although there was a certain homoerotic quality to some of the pictures, Rowell says their main appeal was to teenage girls. Plus, he adds with a laugh, "black-and-white photography goes with any wallpaper or paintwork".
Truth behind THAT Athena poster
Cradling a tiny baby in his muscular arms, he seemed the perfect New Man - handsome hunk and caring father rolled into one. The iconic Athena poster of male model Adam Perry adorned five million walls and was one of the best-known images of the 1980s
radling a tiny baby in his muscular arms, he seemed the perfect New Man - handsome hunk and caring father rolled into one.
The iconic Athena poster of male model Adam Perry adorned five million walls and was one of the best-known images of the 1980s.
Now, two decades after he posed for 'Man and Baby', Mr Perry is a father himself, to a five-year-old boy.
But he has never held his own son. In fact, the mother was one of 3,000 sexual partners he claims to have had, and he didn't even discover he was the father until the child was two.
The difference between image and reality emerged after the photographer who took the picture, Spencer Rowell, auctioned a print of the original for £2,400 at Bonhams in London.
To mark the occasion the Daily Mail reunited Mr Perry and baby Stelios Havatzias, now a strapping 20-year-old law student.
Photographer Mr Rowell, 48, who made £1million from the poster, has admitted blowing the lot on cocaine and private planes, and is now 'skint'.
The poster, said to be cursed by some, made a fortune for the Athena poster shop chain too, but it went bust more than a decade ago.
The art director who proposed the poster died of Aids. And the two in the picture both complained that it had done nothing to bring them wealth or happiness.
Mr Perry said: 'I've had a lot of sexual partners over the years, and it may well be 3,000 although I never kept a list. I was going to write a book about it, but it all got
boring.
I've now got a son who's five, but I didn't find out he was mine until he was two because the mother had a boyfriend when I had a fling with her so I assumed the child was his.
'As a result I've barely seen him - and never held him in my arms like I held Stelios in the poster.
'I pay child support, but if I can develop a relationship with him it will be as a friend. I don't know him well enough to take a fatherly role.
It's not perfect like in the poster, but that's because the poster was fake - and people's lives don't follow a perfect path.'
Mr Perry was paid only £150 for the shoot in 1986. Now a property developer after tiring of modelling,
'Spencer Rowell abused his copyright privileges by putting the photograph on bedspreads and clocks, and stuffed the profits up his nose,' said Mr Perry, who lives in South
London.
'He's only sold this print now because he's run out of money again, and I've only just discovered he's getting the money himself.
'I was told it was for charity, and he certainly hasn't offered me any. It was a someone else's idea anyway - another photographer had done a picture of me holding a baby for a magazine article about New Men, and Athena copied it.
And they couldn't have done it without me tolerating Stelios weeing on me.
'He was an insignificant part of it as well. There were four babies there and he just happened to be the one who wasn't crying.'
Mr Havatzias, meanwhile, earned just £32 for his modelling job as a baby. The money went to his parents Dimos and Jacqueline, and they were not even given a free copy of the poster.
The family moved to Cyprus when he was 11, although he returned to England in September to study law at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.
Mr Havatzias said: 'I don't know if it's morally correct to have sex with 3,000 women - but it's not the classiest thing to do.
'I can't remember doing the poster of course, and only recently realised how big the whole thing was. My parents were only paid £32, and we had to buy our own copy of the picture.
'I haven't got it on my wall at university because I'm not sure I'd like to see a half-naked man in my room every morning, and I'd probably get funny questions from any visiting girls.'
The romantic notion of the new man is far from picture perfect Review
The Model, The Poster
The Model, The Poster
And 3000 Women
Channel 4, 10.45pm
Bollywood Star
Channel 4, 9.00pm
The Model, The Poster And 3000 Women purported to be saying something interesting and profound about the differences between image and reality, about human desire and human weakness. Instead, it told us a couple of tawdry things about factual programming as
conceived by Channel 4.
The plot-line, if you can call it that, was simple enough. In 1986, the model Adam Perry and the photographer Spencer Rowell shot a picture of a man and a baby as conceived by an Athena art director. The result, L'Enfant, charmed countless young women - a stronger word than ''charmed'' might be required - and gave Perry a bad case of mistaken identity.
The girls deluded themselves into believing that he was a strong, sensitive type, the ideal and idealised husband and father. Instead, by his own unabashed account, he was a promiscuous clown whose beef is that he got no royalties from the huge sales of the poster. A drunk, to all intents and purposes, who these days renovates railway arches, Perry, by his own reckoning, broke 3000 hearts and gave the documentary its only point and purpose.
Meanwhile, the photo-grapher went bust and into rehab; the art director, Paul Rodriguez, died of Aids; and the baby seemed to disappear. The programme's tiny triumph was to find the boy, now 17 and living on Cyprus and allow him to offer the only adult remarks in the entire film.
''Why bother sleeping with 3000 girls?'' young Stelios asked. He regarded Perry, acutely, as ''insecure of something'' and made the obvious point: ''It's not normal, is it?''
The model, as bright as industry standards allow, still maintains that he was living out every man's fantasy, even when that meant sleeping with girls who were under age. The programme's cheesy narration maintained that he had ''achieved iconic status'' as ''the ultimate heart-throb''. In fact, he is now a 40-ish single man who lives with his dog and struggles to pay child support for a baby he cannot remember conceiving.
If the film had any motive other than the flaunting of ''legendary'' promiscuity, it was to expose the myth of the new man. In the guise of Perry, he turns out to be have been the old man with a new chat-up line and the best promotional campaign ever devised. If the model's own recollections were anything to go by, he never once seems to have realised that he might have been a shade happier trying to live up to his image rather than exploiting it for sex that was, clearly, entirely meaningless.
Channel 4, though, did not care about that. The film-makers had lined up a series of women prepared to admit that Perry had ''used'' them, as though they had failed to notice both the absence of charm or humanity in their fantasy swain. Sexual stereotyping, it seems, is not the preserve of men alone. That's equality, of sorts, but it is also a recipe for misery.
Bollywood Star, in contrast, came up with a happy ending. Once we got past the
customary nonsense about ''emotional roller-coasters'', four aspirants remained in the contest to win a part in director Mahesh Bhatt's latest film. The winner was both surprising and deserving.
It has been clear all along that Reepack was the best actor in the bunch. It didn't seem likely, nevertheless, that Bollywood would go for a
34-year-old, 24 stone fire station clerk from Coventry. Yet while her rivals simply acted out movie star cliches, she turned on a performance that was absolutely rivetting. It must be bad enough to endure an audition, but to audition for a top director while being filmed and interviewed takes real courage.
Reepack, having conquered all the odds, was sincerely overjoyed. Sofia, Ricky and Heidi tried to put a brave face on their failures, but their eyes, full of bitter envy, told you why they had failed in the first place. Acting is pretence, but it has to be honest pretence. Reepack was an authentic star, stunningly truthful in her playing, who deserves a very long career indeed. Good for her.
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