Sylvia Krystall. Captured from a still on the web.
I didn’t see the film ‘Emmanuelle’ until it came on TV late one evening many years ago. When it was released in 1974 it was a sensation. You can understand why. The film is full of nudity, with the result that photos of Sylvia Krystal popped up everywhere. The film was a good excuse for otherwise ‘respectable’ newspapers to include a photograph of a nude woman.
Sylvia Krystal’s arrival in London to promote ‘Emmanuelle’ coincided with the publication of a report by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service on schoolgirl pregnancies which I had written. I was from 1971-1983 the charity’s development and records officer. I have a good eye, or I did, for looking at numbers and spotting what some call ‘trends’ and I call ‘the obvious’. The kind of stuff for which academics get PhDs. Not me though. I left school in 1959 aged fifteen with no qualifications and went to work in a cancer research institute as a trainee animal technician. It was there I discovered my skill with numbers and percentages.
Whilst I loved the people I worked with and remember many of them fondly, a couple with love. I often wonder what happened to Manny Capel, a trainee animal technician like me, who changed his name to Angelo Cappello, or was it Cappelli? I digress. Back to Sylvia Krystal.
I gave a good few radio interviews as a result of my report on schoolgirl pregnancies and the fact that girls living in rural areas were better supported by family doctors and more likely to get an abortion if they chose to have one than schoolgirls living in cities. This didn’t surprise me or BPAS. That the charity was founded in Birmingham was because many doctors in Birmingham and the surrounding West Midlands conurbation were anti-abortion and less inclined to refer women of all ages seeking terminations to BPAS or sympathetic NHS hospital doctors. BPAS drew on a pool of sympathetic doctors, who were paid to work in BPAS sessional clinics. One of the interviews I gave was on a late-night BBC radio show in London (I can’t remember its name). The point being that the other ‘guest’ was Sylvia Krystal and we got to share a BBC ‘Green Room’ sofa whilst waiting to be interviewed. I went last and got ten minutes at most, but I did get a good half-hour on a sofa with Sylvia Krystal…
Of course I had seen photographs of this petite woman with breasts, but there was no sign of her breasts being large as we sat side by side on the sofa talking. She was lovely and easy to talk with. The only downside being that she was a chain smoker and I hated cigarette smoke. She would have made a good politician/journalist, since she had me doing most of the talking, about my working for BPAS and being a Birmingham City Council Labour Party councillor. Then she was whisked away from me and into the studio, then seated across from the show’s presenter, earphones on, and off they went. I could see all this through the glass window which separated the Green Room from the studio.
When Sylvia Krystal finished and she passed through the Green Room and into the company of two waiting heavies and a young woman, she came across to me and said ‘I hope it goes well’ to which I replied ‘It was lovely meeting you. I hope you get some time to yourself before too long.’ Then she was gone.
From our brief time together she had her curiosity sated as to how a man in his late-twenties came to be working for an abortion charity and what learned from her was that being a successful film star meant you had no time or space you could call your own, especially if you took your clothes off. I think she did it reluctantly. It was the price she chose to pay for fame - nudity and notoreity.
O L O Bunny🐰
©Robert Howard 9 April 2024.