I Was Better Last Night, page 8
The Trojan Women was a hit, saving the theater for that season. I relished my role as Andromache. How often do you get to fling your child toward an enemy soldier while screaming, “Take him. Cast him down if so you will. Feast on his flesh! God has destroyed me, and I cannot save my son.” Neil Simon doesn’t give you that kind of shit to say.
Here I am getting all dramatical in The Trojan Women.
I still didn’t think of myself as an actor. When the Tavels insisted that I appear in their next production, Vinyl Visits an FM Station, I was uneasy. This called for an actor who did plays. I did shows, but I agreed. Set in a Vietnamese radio studio during the war, it was a brutal satire on political propaganda. I played a POW strapped to a parrot perch, blinders over my eyes, a gag shoved down my throat and perpetually tortured to speak. Leggy legend Mary Woronov once again took the lead, but also in the cast were two unknowns a breath away from stardom: Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman played evil henchmen. The production was a zero and the theater steadily slid back into its flophouse roots. A lifetime later I heard DeVito regale a late-night talk show host with a story about a door that connected our balcony to the hotel. Quite often, homeless gents snuck in to sleep up there, and when nature required, they’d relieve themselves over the railing onto theatergoers below. That production closed the Theater of the Lost Continent. The following season Danny was cast in an Off-Broadway revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Mercer Arts Center, and Hollywood took it from there.
Thirty years later, he cast me in two movies he directed. Duplex was uneventful, but I was positive that Death to Smoochy would be a huge hit, which proves how little I know. It was a satirical comedy with a cast led by Robin Williams and Edward Norton, both big draws at the time. The script was dark, dumb, fun, allotting plenty of opportunities for both leads to go wild. Also featured was Jon Stewart in a rare acting gig. I was most impressed with the movie’s lighting design. Shooting in shadowy locations, the designer used saturated color in complementary hues to transform the world of children’s television from rainbow happiness to the unnervingly conflicted. Being on set was visually exciting. But then, when I saw the movie, the colors had been diluted and dulled. Maybe it was all too much when they viewed the footage.
I remember filming in Times Square, right outside what was then the Toys “R” Us megastore. It was an all-night shoot, which costs plenty, so there’s no cancelling even if you get hit with a blizzard. We got hit with a blizzard. We needed to shoot a scene in which I, a tough gangster type, threaten the life of Edward Norton, a wimp, in the back of my stretch limo. They put it off as long as they could, hoping the snowfall would let up so you could see something beyond the car windows, but it was not to be. The sun was about to rise and the snow showed no sign of stopping. Danny soldiered on and shot the scene, and then my close-ups, but by the time he turned around for Edward’s singles, everyone was exhausted. Danny took me aside and said, “Poor Edward’s in the back of the car, practically dead. All I need is a close-up of a truly frightened look on his face and we can wrap for the night. I’m counting on you. Get in there and say something really scary so I can grab the shot and we can get the fuck out of here.”
“I’ll try,” I said, racking my brain for something that would frighten an actor who’d played opposite Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Frances McDormand. Danny put me in place, almost on top of Edward, squeezing him into the corner of the car’s backseat. I brought my face inches from his, as close as I could without getting in the frame, and as soon as Danny called “Action,” I began to darkly hiss into his mouth:
“You so pretty. I wish’t I had a doll of you. I wish’t I had a doll of you and I would fuck it.” Edward’s face turned white. Danny hollered “Cut!”
Edward sprang out from under me and bolted from the car, off into the blinding snowstorm. Not that we run in the same circles, but I don’t think he’s ever spoken to me again.
Danny does like the look of danger. In another scene, which I think was excised from the movie, he had me threaten Jon Stewart by standing on his privates. He laid poor Jon on the ground and had me tower over him, the heel of my shoe dangerously close to his genitalia. Of course, they placed rails for me to lean on so I wouldn’t accidentally slip and destroy his future lineage, but it was still a scary prospect for Jon, and, just as soon as Danny called “Cut!” Mr. Stewart sprang out from under me. Although we don’t run in the same circles, I don’t believe he’s ever spoken to me again.
13
LEAVING HOME
1973
I told Ron Tavel a dream I’d had. I was lying on my bed reading when the closet door swung open and my clothing, still on hangers, began to sway from side to side. Shirts and pants and jackets and shoes suddenly danced their way out of the closet, through the bedroom door, down the stairs and out of my house. I floated after them. Ron smiled at me and said, “I guess it’s time to leave home.”
The Tavels and I became very close during those years. Ron suffered from agoraphobia, limiting his wanderings within a mile from his SoHo digs. I, who was his eager student in all cultural subjects from Carmen Miranda to Shakespeare, was a willing service pet. I provided safe passage wherever he wanted to go, from a visit to his mother in Brighton Beach to a guest stint as playwright-in-residence at the Actors Studio where, after the final performance of the piece Ron created for me, Gypsy’s original Miss Mazeppa, Faith Dane, and other students, Lee Strasberg himself asked me, “What were you supposed to be playing?”
To which I answered, “A freshly ironed shirt.”
By now, fully immersed in the Off-Off-Broadway community, I was being offered roles at every theater, accepting as many as I could juggle. I remember a holiday season when I rehearsed a show at Theatre Genesis during the day, performed in an eight o’clock play at La MaMa and a ten p.m. show at NYTE, and then sang a song in WPA’s midnight Christmas revue.
I loved performing in the Ridiculous ensemble. We encrusted our faces with glitter, after which we mostly ran amok, annoying the hell out of the principal actors. Vaccaro breathed pandemonium, disorder, and outrage. He asked me to be in his production of Satyricon. Because I was crafty, he had me construct the glow-in-the-dark phalluses and vaginas for the chorus to wear during the huge orgy scene. We’d all pile into a pit created in the center of the theater, where, lit with black light, we indulged in an orgy. Because of the black light neither the audience nor Vaccaro ever caught us slipping off our glow-in-the-dark genitalia, waving them around overhead while actually having sex right there onstage. Ellen Stewart came to our dress rehearsal and seeing the phalluses insisted on knowing who made them.
“I did,” I confessed.
“Mr. Fierstein, I don’t know who you are trying to impress, but you will cut down every one of those things by two inches. Two inches off the top or this show don’t open.”
One day Ellen ordered me to follow her up the three flights to her apartment. She plopped down onto a pressed-back oak dining chair and pronounced, “My baby ain’t wearing bloomers no more.”
She grunted, shook her head, and scratched the skull under her wig. Smoking had taken its toll and, as with the accent, she used her panting to stall her speech while forming her thoughts. “Look at them, Mr. Fierstein. You look at my children in their lipstick and bloomers. You know I let them do all that because that’s all they can do. And if they didn’t do it here, they’d just go off and do it somewheres else. Not you. You can do more. I don’t know how much more, but we’ll never find out until we get them bloomers off you. So, no more of that. It’s done. Okay?”
Where was all of this going?
“Members of the Negro Ensemble Company are doing a show here and they want you to be in it.”
“Are you kidding?” I said excitedly.
“All right, then. I’ll tell them yes.”
What they didn’t tell Ellen was that the gig involved playing one of two “white devils” who’d appear in clown-and-glitter makeup—not quite the new leaf she wanted me to turn. The play was written by Saturday Night Live original-cast member Garrett Morris. My memory’s low on details, but I recall the comradery of working with director Bill Duke and a cast that included Obba Babatundé and his brother, Akinwole, and Frank Adu. We shared a dressing room filled with the sensual scents of incense, candles, body oils, inciting an intoxicating joy. I had to sing a song I’d never heard before, “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.” I can still feel the warmth of being surrounded by the cast as they taught it to me:
Irene Stein took this shot of me in the East Village.
If you don’t know me by now
You will never, never, never know me…
At this point in my development, I no longer worried about sexuality. I had eased into a groove that allowed me to be whatever the hell whenever the hell. I was comfortable with my gay identity and at ease in a world of gay and lesbian artists. Heterosexuals were outsiders. Even the vast majority of gays, whether in or out of the closet, were only distant cousins. We were the underground, the elite forces of civilization, creators and keepers of art and culture. We were full of ourselves, and the last thing we wanted were apologists diluting the bloodline. In other words, I thought we were hot shit!
Gender felt similarly handled for now. Performing in drag allowed more than enough opportunity to express the female within. Drag was a lot of work! The hair, the makeup, the padding, the styling were exhausting. Being a girl was a full-time job. Being a girl inside a boy’s body was a breeze. All I seemed to need was a place to express my female identity and I was sorted. Theater gave me that.
Because I couldn’t have cared less about it, college life had also taken a stressless position in my consciousness. The professors I liked were invited to my shows, so they cut me some slack, and I was taking enough credits that I could afford to blow off the ones I didn’t like and still graduate. Actually, I missed graduation, thanks to a nasty bout of syphilis which taught me never to let a family doctor dose you for a gay strain of a disease. They don’t teach you that in health ed.
That summer, right after my college graduation, Harvey Tavel bought a half-dead VW bus, into which he, Ronald, and I loaded our stuff and took off for a cross-continental tour of Canada. Sometimes the only way to get the damn thing started was to let it roll downhill until the engine caught. Note: the Rockies are only half downhill, which meant that for half of our journey we’d have to push the car to turn it around and let it coast downhill until the motor caught, at which point Harvey would hook a U-turn and return to pick Ron and me up. Harvey did all the driving, Ron did all the talking, and I sent all of the postcards home journaling our adventures.
Ron had planned the trip to research the world of his new play, Gazelle Boy, about a feral child raised by nuns in the Northwest. Harvey, desperate for any life-changing moment, was along for the ride. And I was there as royal jester and buffer between the two. It was the summer of the Watergate hearings, and the last thing anyone who loved his country wanted to be was American. With my long hair and East Village wardrobe I thought I’d try to pass as a member of an indigenous tribe, only to learn that some of the gentle, loving people of Canada were not all that gentle or loving to the people whose land they’d stolen. Just on my looks I was barred from quite a few watering holes and restaurants along the way. I fell in love in and with Vancouver. He was an ex-minister of indecipherable denomination who boasted the best weed connection in town. Ron questioned him endlessly for details of religious life he could use in his play. Harvey appreciated his taste in marijuana and invited him along with us everywhere. I was simply lovestruck with this mad, curly-maned stallion who treated me like a beloved possession. If Vancouver had had a rocking theater scene, I might never have returned. It didn’t, so I did, but left a piece of my heart on English Bay.
Finally sick of chauffeuring his brother and me around the continent, Harvey ordered us to shut up, pack up, and get our asses into the bus: we were heading home.
* * *
—
Unsatisfied with that adventure as a change of life, Harvey abandoned his roach-infested East Village apartment and bought a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His best friend/ex-lover, Norman Glick, occupied the top floor. Harvey had the library and bedroom on the second, and he offered me the unfinished basement, rent free, if I would fix it up into something habitable. I never got it to the level of a legit garden apartment, but by the time I was done it was homey. The walls were whitewashed cinderblock, the exposed overhead pipes served as an expressway for the occasional mouse, and my boiler-room closet housed the asbestos-clad furnace. Which would you rather die of—cold or lung cancer? But I collaged the tiny bathroom with photos from After Dark magazine, I constructed walls out of discarded doors salvaged from dumpsters, and I found that a gallon of hot-pink paint could brighten the dingiest concrete floors. Earning the tiny stipends experimental theater paid, I could never have afforded more than a room elsewhere. Harvey allowed me to have a home. My parents, wanting to encourage my independence, did what they could to help me on my way without looking like they were still supporting me. Jackie sometimes dropped by with a loaf of bread or random leftovers or even canned goods that she bought in “error” and would never use. My father miraculously ran across furniture that this or that friend was tossing out. His greatest find was a pair of art nouveau wrought-iron garden gates lying around in someone’s garage. Heavily ornamented with flowering foliage, nude male hunters aimed their arrows at deer that leapt above the ivy-filled arches. I nearly fainted when he pulled them from his car trunk. I hung them as a headboard, and they became my most treasured possession. That almost garden apartment was coming along. Eventually it would be the love nest of a few of my greatest heartbreaks.
14
IN SEARCH OF THE COBRA JEWELS
1973
Harvey was directing Jackie Curtis’s new play, Amerika Cleopatra, at the WPA Theater on the Bowery. Jackie wrote a hysterically funny role for me—Incredible, mother of Cleopatra, who barges in on her Las Vegas honeymoon demanding Caesar pay for her underage daughter’s virginity. Ron Tavel and I were hanging around on a break when he casually said, “You should write a play.”
I looked at him incredulously.
“You act in all of these shows, most of which aren’t very good. I’m sure, if you tried, you could do as well. You’re smart. You’re funny…”
“You’re nuts.”
“Why?”
“I can’t spell. I can barely type. I get the letters backwards…”
With great sincerity he said, “There are people who make two dollars an hour who’ll fix your typing. You go ahead and write.”
Much like the art teachers who freed me, Ron unlocked a cage into which I’d put myself. Neither of us knew if I could write, but without his permission I never would have tried. I don’t remember much about my first attempt other than showing it to Ron, Harvey, and Donald. Donald spared the other two from having to tell me it sucked. He tore it up and said, “Did you ever hear the expression ‘Write what you know’? Do that.”
What the fuck did I know? I knew…I know! I typed:
Act 1, scene 1. The Trucks. Midnight.
I wrote lyrics for an opening song about having sex in the Trucks.
Okay. So what else did I know? Harry’s apartment! Yes. I began to fashion a fantasy with a chorus of Day-Glo-painted cockroaches and a Harry-like character ruling over them in his secret lair. Like my first attempts at painting, not knowing what I was doing, I mimicked and filched from those around me. I was not a natural. My goal was to please Ron, Harry, and Donald. Nothing more. There was a poem Harry had given me to recite:
Death has embraced me more warmly,
More formally on more occasions
Than most lovers.
Why not bring that character of Death onstage for Harry to battle? I wrote that role for Harvey. And then I did my best Ron imitation, creating a leather-daddy character based on him. I brought out that old Technicolor-movie stalwart Maria Montez as guardian of the Cobra Jewels. And just like that, In Search of the Cobra Jewels: An Archeohistorical Poeseurie in Two Short Acts was now typed out on onion skin, with two carbon copies that I gave to Ron and Donald to read.
Donald looked at the pastiche I’d cobbled and found something he could stage. “But you can’t be in it,” he declared. “You have to watch the show, watch the audience, and figure out how what you say affects them. You can run the lights.”
He took the play to Bastiano’s, the last surviving of the coffeehouse theaters, where, with Dick Briggs’s generosity, he put it on. Harry was more than willing to play himself, Harvey Tavel signed on as Death, and Ron played the sadist. Mario Montez didn’t have to be asked twice to play Maria Montez, and whenever anyone else said they wanted to be in it, I wrote them a role. Alexis Del Lago, dressed in her best Dietrich tuxedo, performed the prologue; Agosto Machado played me; and Flash Storm played Russel. The ensemble was made up of street friends and adventurers, including Wilhelmina Ross, who would find immortality as a model in Warhol’s drag-queen-portrait series, Ladies and Gentlemen, before passing with AIDS.
Donald designed a spiderweb setting that encompassed the three-quarter-round theater, and a friend, Jon Heward, composed the music. Using the skills I’d learned back at A&D, I created the poster, spelling each word out with press type, letter by letter, and swiped illustrations from a copy of Dante’s Inferno to hype the text.
Sorry I wasn’t better with a camera, but hopefully you can make out Mario Montez fleeing on the right, Harry Koutoukas in his striped robe center, and Harvey Tavel draped in black as Death toward the left. Agosto Machado and Flash Storm are down left during this rehearsal.
