Is This Love?

An ongoing fantasy of mine is to pack a small red Samsonite bag with my summer wares, a pair or two of YSL espadrilles, a few Hermes scarves, and relocate for 6 months each year from the Rotten Apple to Kingston, Jamaica. I'd marry a Rasta, do local reporting, and feast on seasonal fruits. The grind and a generally faltering economic outlook has a tendency to turn this ganja-pipe dream from blurry to sharp, but other things do, too. Like when I recently found myself hip to waist with a tall, caramel-skinned Dread, his locs grazing his back while Mavado's "So Special" plays.

But always, hearing Robert Nesta Marley's kinky reggae gets me reaching for the Jamaica Daily Gleaner. One of my favorite documentaries about Bob is 2001's Rebel Music, in which we're introduced to the man beyond the music, partly via a series of on-air media interviews he participated in. He talks Rastafarian culture, politics, Jah, music, and of course, women. Bob's insatiable appetite for the gals is well-documented, from beauty pageant queens to Jamaican socialites.

In the aforementioned docu, viewers meet Esther Anderson (above), a publicist hired by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell to trail Marley and the Wailers in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Anderson was 29 when she met the younger Bob, who was about two years her junior but had already swelled his family with wife Rita. Anderson confesses that she fell hard for her charge, and business often turned to pleasure. The footage filmed by Lee Jaffe and seen here was taken of the pair during one of many mountain getaways they took during their "courtship." It pretty much encapsulates my JA ideal.

Anderson would go on to an acting career, including an Oscar-nominated turn in Sidney Poitier's A Warm December (1972), and a relationship with Hollywood icon Marlon Brando. Bob would go on to other beauties, but you can't miss the chemistry in that shot.