Bangkok Babylon. Jerry Hopkins
and personality, it's the first seven years that count most. That, and genes. Clearly, he was a chip off his DNA.
His education was in English boarding schools, where an unusually tall roommate called him “Shrimp” and he said the nickname stuck. I interrupted his recitation at this point and asked how tall he was. He swore that he didn't know. Oh, come on, I said, every male knows two of his measurements and height is one of them. No, he insisted, he did not. I did not ask about length.
Upon graduation from university, he said, he joined a design studio in London, then accompanied a friend to Japan, traveling across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express. In the half dozen years that followed, he photographed rock bands and taught English in Tokyo, and spent three months driving back to England with a Japanese girlfriend. In Afghanistan, he jokingly offered her in exchange for a coat he liked, but the merchant took him seriously and chased them around Kabul for half a day.
Back in Britain, he painted for a time in Wales, then returned to Japan to work for Yomiuri Shimbun, a newspaper that sent him undercover to report on the left-wing student movement. This got him arrested and he fled to Korea, returned again, then was sent to Saigon in 1968, just as the Tet offensive began, rockets coming into the airport at the very moment his plane landed. That was enough war for him, he said, and he caught the next flight out and spent several months in Cambodia, resigning from the newspaper just ahead of being fired, then crossed by train into Thailand, deciding, finally, to put down roots.
At the time, he had a full head of dark, wavy hair, worn to below his shoulders, and a Beefeater's mustache that curled up at the ends, a style that attracted the Military Police when he visited the Petchburi Road bars frequented by GI's on R & R from the war in Vietnam; they figured he was a deserter. With a camera and three lenses and a portfolio, he made the rounds of the international advertising agencies and in 1976 began Shrimp Studios, a commercial photo business that grew into a full-service ad agency with clients that included the Peninsula Group [hotels], Shangri-La Hotels, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Volvo and Jim Thompson Silk.
“These were euphoric years,” he recalls, “spent in the floating brothels of Saen Saep Canal and along the sois of forbidden Bangkok, searching out young maidens, capturing their innocence.”
In the early 1980s he was shooting covers and centerfolds for a Thai magazine whose name translated Life Must Go On. When a friend saw the extent of his library of such “innocents,” he suggested Shrimp produce a calendar. Together, they printed a thousand copies and sold them all in a couple of weeks, to customers and bar owners in Patpong, a “red light” district that had replaced Petchburi Road as a destination for Thailand's growing sex industry. The next year, he did it again and from 1985 to 1989, he says, “It absolutely went ballistic. We were printing fifteen thousand calendars a year!”
His photographic subjects were of a type. Invariably, they were young and lithe, and usually they had perky, upturned breasts. (Once when I was in a bar with Shrimp, and when a dancer with large breasts appeared, he called her a “cow.”) Still, most in the calendars and books showed none of the “innocence” that some might expect with youth.
A book of his photographs was published in Singapore and Shrimp disliked the way it was done, so he bought back the rights and in 1989 produced another himself, simply titled Thai Girls. Roman Polanski agreed to write the foreword, but his lawyer said no, because of recent pedophilia charges filed in Los Angeles (that would keep him out of the United States for what now appears to be forever), so it was written by Emmanuelle Arsan, star of the film that took her first name as its title and helped put Thailand on the erotic map, internationally. Not surprisingly, Shrimp was the film's still photographer.
A pre-launch party was held in London in a Thai restaurant in Knightsbridge. Shrimp flew four of the young “innocents” from the book in for the occasion and some Thais “whose names shall not be mentioned showed up. These guys chased the girls and I had them thrown out. These guys were quite influential and back in Bangkok they went to the Tourism Authority of Thailand and the Tourist Police, who came to my office and arrested me, just as I was on my way to see a client in Amsterdam.” Shrimp's picture was on the front page of the Bangkok Post the next day under the headline, “Shrimp Flees Bangkok.” Following numerous legal delays, he was fined the equivalent of $28.
Did the publicity hurt his business, now that he was labeled a “pornographer”? I asked. No, Shrimp said, it helped.
At the same time, Shrimp got involved with some Hong Kong businessmen who wanted to use his name to create a major enterprise like Playboy, calling it The Shrimp Club. Members were to be offered discounts at more than two hundred hotels, nightclubs, pubs and bars and, more enticing, there were to be invitations to auditions (“Help select the lucky ladies”), photoshoots (“Get to ‘work' with Shrimp on location”) and cruises (“Fun on the water with Shrimp models”). A catalog further offered lapel pins, desk and wallet calendars, wristwatches, key rings, neckties, post cards and upon joining, a complimentary bottle of something called Contact 18, “the Pheromone Fragrance that makes every man irresistible to women.” In 1995, after “realizing this was not a beneficial relationship,” Shrimp took everything back.
The unsold shrimp pins were given to guests two years later when Shrimp celebrated his fiftieth birthday with a black-tie party in the grand ballroom of a posh Bangkok hotel. I bought my first tux for the event. Besides the feast that humbled any five-star Sunday buffet, he hired the city's top transvestite cabaret to entertain and had Thailand's top of the pops, Tata Young, sing happy birthday to him.
By the turn of the century, I thought Shrimp might have let his boozy exploits get a touch out of hand. At a dinner I attended at the Oriental Hotel, one of the other guests was a Hong Kong businessman Shrimp said he was courting as a client. By ten o'clock, time for the piano player to go home, Shrimp was standing on the table, yelling at him to play on. The prospective client quietly picked up the tab when Shrimp wasn't looking and sneaked out. Another time, I joined Shrimp for lunch and he was legless before the final course. I decided then that he might be a before-lunch friend.
Another couple of years passed. To my surprise, he'd finally married Mayuree, the Thai woman he'd always rather dispassionately introduced as “the mother of my children,” who were then seven and nine. His business, in the interim, not only survived but blossomed, and by 2003 he had several “divisions” with a payroll of thirty and a client list that now included companies such as Nestle, Coca Cola, Holiday Inn, JW Marriott, the Peninsula and Oriental Hotels, Hilton and Playboy.
“One of the divisions is design development, taking care of the look, the design, style and manner of the company. It's brand engineering, really. You engineer the identity of their brand and put that brand out. Another is the photography for the advertising. Everything is interrelated. I also have a multi-media division for web site development, CD ROM, all the high-end computer tech aspects. Another division is signage systems. We design, manufacture, install and export signs for anything from a small restaurant to enormous commercial complexes. The last piece of business is outsourcing. We have a creative factory of computer artists, all Thais. Every morning we get ad briefs downloaded from the U.S. and in the evening we send the finished ads back, up to two hundred a day. For catalogs, magazines, phone directories.”
Shrimp and I were having a “sober” lunch. (I drank two beers and he had a bloody Mary and a single glass of red wine) when he said this. “Sounds like a story of rehabilitation to me,” I said.
Shrimp laughed and said, “Disgusting, isn't it?”
Yet another year passed, as I put this book aside for another project. When again we made plans to meet for a meal, I told him I wanted to confirm or have denied some of the wilder stories I'd heard, as well as get some more from him.
“You expect me to remember?” he said. He suggested a close friend come along to jog his memory. I agreed and learned that some of the stories were true and some probably were not, never mind which; what difference did it make? Does anyone really want to be told that Marco Polo didn't go to China or that Columbus didn't discover America?
The Italian meal was consumed, the wine bottle was empty, and another day was done. “So,” I said, “how tall are