‘You know just where you are with the Boss,’ said Nellie Boot, the re-toucher, who had spent twenty-eight of her sixty years wielding paint and air-brushes in her little room littered with prints and negatives. ‘He’s a good man, like the three brass monkeys, you know? See, hear and speak no evil. And that’s rare in a firm like this.’ She made endless cups of tea for everyone and fed them with buns and biscuits from a battered tin box.

And there was Stanley Plum, the Boss’s younger assistant who was particularly good at ‘women’, priding himself, not without reason, that he could turn a Medusa into a Monroe with a little bit of ‘diffusion’ (a tiny smear of Vaseline on the lens) and a high key-light. He taught Leni, who wanted to know, all she needed about key-spots, highlights, shadow, flares, focus and profiles and often gave her a lift back to Chelsea on the back of his Honda. All in all they were a family to her, and as, she told Gus Bender one evening, she had never had a proper family of her own as far as she could remember, for her mother had distractedly handed her over to her grandmother almost as soon as she was born and faded out of her life, while her unknown Marine Sergeant father had returned routinely to Texas and was never heard of again, she held on to the Studio Group tightly, and spent a good deal of her time among them.

Quite apart from everything else, she enjoyed the rush and bustle that went on in the dusty studio, the strange people who hurried in and out for ‘portraits’ and ‘groups’, the constant blare of the Hi Fi with its endless tapes of everything from Rock and Roll to Stravinski for ‘mood setting’, the smell of paint, make-up, dust and hot lamps, the glitter of sequins and silver paper, the coloured lights, cables and junction boxes and walls covered with photographs of smiling soubrettes in organza frills, clowns with bubble noses, conjurors with budgerigars, dancers in lamé on roller skates, and anguished-faced youths in open-necked shirts yearning to play ‘Hamlet’.