Young Patti D'Arbanville's life story reads something like a contemporary fairy tale. At the age of two, she was entered in a baby beauty contest by her parents and made her professional debut as the Ivory Soap baby in television commercials. When she was 15, a chance encounter at Greenwich Village's legendary Figaro Café resulted in her playing in two Andy Warhol films. Shortly thereafter, she was noticed in New York's hip Max's Kansas City bar and wound up with a part in John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. The story goes that she then became Cat Stevens' girlfriend, and when she left him for Mick Jagger, Stevens wrote a song about her called Lady D'Arbanville, a ballad with lyrics just this side of melancholia ("I loved you my lady / Though in your grave you lie"). The song, one of the most memorable on Stevens' album Mona Bone Jakon, became a hit in six countries. And Patti herself is on the verge of becoming a hit in her own right. While in Paris in 1970, playing a role in the film La Maison, she came to the attention of photographer David Hamilton. Six years later, he chose her for the lead part in his first feature film, Bilitis. Hamilton's film, based on the Pierre Louÿs classic, is the story of the awakening of a sexual innocent attending a boarding school in the south of France. Hamilton is world-renowned for his erotic photographs, which deal almost exclusively with the fragile sensuousness of young girls. "I like to photograph their beauty before they are aware of it themselves," he says of his best models. These pictures, taken especially for Playboy, say all there is to say about the fascinating erotic/innocent admixture that is the essence of Patti D'Arbanville and about David Hamilton's camera wizardry.
