"Picture This," as Debbie Harry so artfully implored.
A young girl leaves her Northern metropolis, Liverpool, for 1960s London, in the midst of revolution and swinging. She writes reviews for music magazines and pens a shocking novel that was published in 1968 via the respected firm of Jonathan Cape. Feted and reviewed by the likes of Auberon Waugh, in 1969, Baby Love, a title borrowed from the Supremes' hit, became a hugely successful movie, retaining the same title as the book, which then appeared in paperback in both the UK and the US. After such controversy and success, Tina Chad Christian looked set to take the Seventies by storm. She hasn't been heard from since.
There are many flash-in-the-pan successes that clutter the shelves of bookstores and thrift shops. They can be purchased for precious little long after their brief days of glory. Such cannot be said for Baby Love. Copies are scarce, and when they do appear, they command at least $300 in hardback. She isn't a name, in reality, a pseudonym, but a market exists for her sole work, a tract recognised by dealers and those that seek it out. The price and scarcity restrict it from being widely known. Even the few who wish to read it won't have the wherewithal to justify the reading risk of affording a copy.
The film is better remembered than the work from which it was sourced, and remains available. It was the comeback vehicle for British '50s starlet Diana Dors. A non-speaking part where she ghosts the proceedings in a series of poignant flashbacks, as a suicide, the mother of the central character, Luci.
Baby Love was the film debut, aged fifteen of future blonde horror actress Linda Hayden, whose Lolita-like appetites make for uneasy viewing. She auditioned topless for the role. It isn't a tale penned by a middle-aged male novelist, but by a young woman who has lived the story she transcribes, but with raw honesty and nerve shattering gusto.
The film remains a wonderful encapsulation of societal norms in transition. English comedian Dick Emery plays it straight as a lascivious, but extremely pervy friend of the family. Hayden brings a subtle knowingness to the role of Luci, the girl adopted by an old flame of her dead mother as an act of largesse, legacy and kindness. She arrives from the North to a well-to-do London suburb, initially out of her depth, but perfectly adept at reading the vulnerabilities of those inhabiting her new surroundings. She lures her new guardian's wife into a lesbian affair, seduces and nearly kills his son, and has a bold attempt at bedding him. A role played with brilliant, understated bafflement by the late-Keith Barron.
The book is grittier than the film and doesn't remotely read like a first novel in structure, densely plotted and deeply disturbing, with Luci obviously damaged goods, but possessed with an assuredness of character that doesn't make her a victim, more of a creator of them. There's even permission to quote from a Beatles song on the blurb page, another perfect Sixties embellishment. I have viewed a signed copy where Chad Christian reveals in her neatly rendered dedication that the novel was written entirely from her own experience. A confessional catharsis. It certainly reads as such, even if it is adorned in an Aubrey Beardsley-inspired dust jacket of a young girl's face. And it remains relevant, vibrant, and compelling, in the way an emotional trainwreck in motion can be. A beguiling read that merits belated reassessment, whilst brilliantly skating against the grain of current social constraints and taboos.
Linda Hayden recalls Tina Chad Christian's fleetingly brief appearance on the film set, a memory of a frail young girl who only drank distilled water. A trait related to a chronic childhood condition, the author in question mentioned in her interview with Auberon Waugh for the Telegraph Magazine in 1968. She comes across as strangely prim, almost puritanical, having penned a novel that exhibits none of those traits.
Of the first five novelists interviewed for the feature, she was the most immediately successful, but the sole one to never publish another book. It is time for Tina to take a long, belated bow, be that via the plundered memories of those who knew her, or as the woman that the girl became.
A copy of the book is with Faber, who is considering it as a possibility.
It remains a shocking read.