Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (19 page)

Oh well, in a little while it will be all rectified and of course I shall see you tomorrow as we had planned. In a way I will use this experience as a drill. My mind is so focused on this gig I will let nothing come before it. It is an important engagement and my first New York City public performance in a good while. When I say everyone will be there (some will come both nights) I am certain it will lead to something more. This is it. My emergence; my rebirth; et cetera. All sorts of people will be in attendance to witness it and they will be seriously appraising the entire performance.

In keeping with this spirited and positively fierce determination I wound myself up too tight and like a clock that is fast I came 24 hours before the appointed time … all right. I’m just going to have to keep better track of these weekdays because I hate making such unnecessary mistakes. Anyway the owner of the club told me it would be all right if I used a drummer in the act – what do you think? Do you know a fabulous drummer who would work with us? It would really jazz up the act and also add that pulsation that sends the audience into a wave of hysteria when a performance is gyrating to the primitive rhythms, as it were. Call me later or I’ll call you. I figure if you were walking Gretel you would have been back by now. I’m certain our appointment was for tomorrow, so I’ll speak to you later and we’ll work tomorrow.

Things couldn’t be progressing better! I can’t wait to begin rehearsing (that’s an understatement I suppose). The room (Lady Astor’s) is so beautiful, our space is just great – the owner is tops and the deal is tremendous. It’s very exciting. Already everyone is dying to see what it is I can possibly be up to – me too!

XXX With a song in my heart for you: JACKIE

Excerpts from a handwritten letter to Steven Hall from Jackie Curtis (written while he lived in Elisbethton, Tennessee with his father, stepmother and half-brother Tim Holder for several months), dated June 24, 1977

Dear Steven,

Yes, New York City can be hateful. I suppose Hollywood can be just as intense. Maybe that’s why they are both such fascinating cities. I do prefer LA to NYC. I’ve always enjoyed working in New York City, and not working in NYC – but I can’t stress how much more alive I’ve felt while working. Recently before leaving NY I recall a few private conversations with some very close friends and I remember saying something like “I will never get used to this darkness.” So many times while sitting idle in NYC I began to doubt whether I was actually alive. About doubting my sanity, well – that is another thing. I guess being sanitary is being sane enough, you know? Have you ever heard of the insanitation department? That’s what they once called those of us who went to school on the streets.

Tennessee is light; airy; cool; warm; not at all hateful and as many of its inhabitants refer to it – “God’s Country.” I began driver’s ed classes last week and will finish by July 8th. That’s when I will start searching for desirable employment. It took me long, lonely, but oh so valuable hours to decide to split … but once the thought patterns change for the better, they must have their cycles perused. I was going to type this for you, then it would have been longer … a bit more prolific, but as it happens my brother is asleep since he’s worked from 11 PM to 7 AM and the electric IBM would awaken him, to be sure. There are a few other things I would like to explain to you about my departure from NYC but at the moment please believe me the words have escaped me.

Your new friend, Jackie

Excerpt from a typewritten letter to Steven Hall from Jackie dated September 2, 1977 and postmarked Los Angeles, California:

Dearest Steven,

I had to come to LA; my father suggested it because my stepmother was getting resentful of all the time my Dad and I were spending together. After all those years I go back to re-acquaint myself with my Dad and my stepmother doesn’t really dig it, at all, so my Dad says to me, “Maybe you’d be better off in Hollywood.” GREAT SUGGESTION, DAD! So here I am at the fabulous Gracewood Court …

XXXXXX Jackie

Michael Musto

The first time I saw Jackie perform was in 1983 in a play called
I Died Yesterday
. She played screen legend Frances Farmer who was lobotomized. That was a popular story at the time – Jessica Lange was playing the part in a movie, there was also a TV movie, but I really think Jackie’s version was the best. She just came on stage in a wig and a dress, no accoutrements, no falsies. She was just Jackie as Frances Farmer. She played it really broadly. There was a lot of pathos inherent in the story and I thought that she got to the pathos more than the Jessica Lange version, more than the TV movie version. She got to the true essence of Frances Farmer. And Ondine, another Warhol superstar told Jackie – you’re perfect for this part because you already look like you escaped!

Penny Arcade

I played a lot of ancillary roles in Jackie’s plays, supporting roles. And by this time I had started to do Margo Howard Howard, who is best described at that time as a 55-year-old drag queen with the body of a woman and the head of a fish. Jackie and Margo were absolutely inseparable for quite a long period, from the late seventies through the eighties. Margo was a junkie and a madman who had convinced New York that he was a she, because nobody would try to look like that in drag. She looked like a seventy-year-old dowager in drag and had convinced New York society that she was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk. It was a phenomenon, unbelievable, and Margo was the President of the Mary Stuart Society and Jackie’s personal drama coach. At any rate, to amuse everyone and myself I would always imitate Margo.

During the run of
I Died Yesterday
Jackie fired the actress who played the hairdresser role and came to me and asked me to pick up the role. So the first night I did it sort of as myself and I found it kind of boring. So the next night I was walk to the theatre and I found a pair of plastic framed glasses on a garbage can of east third street with no lenses in them, put them on crooked, as Margo would, always disheveled. And that night, without telling anybody, I played the hairdresser as Margo, and Margo, of course was there in the audience every night. I knew I was onto something because all the actors in the show gathered in the wings and were watching this nondescript little five minute scene of Jackie playing Frances Farmer getting her hair done by a lunatic studio hairdresser and I started chasing Jackie around the stage, with a coat hanger saying “You don’t need a hairdresser, you need an abortion! Your hair doesn’t need a brush; your hair needs a coat wire! Your hair shouldn’t be brushed, your hair should be tossed!” It was MAD, absolutely insane and everyone went wild.

Michael Musto

In 1985 I saw Jackie in a play at La Mama called
Champagne
, she played Piper Heidsig, a movie star who was very foolishly making her Broadway debut. And it was funny – once again Jackie used broad strokes, she was a diva, but was also very wry and understated, that was her charm. She really was subtle; she really could get you with a slow burn. And I asked Jackie afterwards if it was based on Lana Turner and she said, “No, but I’m based on Lana Turner.”

Scene excerpt from Jackie Curtis’s
Champagne
– © 1985 The Estate of Jackie Curtis:

Dewit:

Gemaine Lefevre, the big bring down. She’ll bring you down once, twice, and given the chance, three times. Someday she’ll be put away where she won’t be able to bring anyone down ever again.

Germaine:

Well, I hope it’s real soon! I’m eager for those padded cells!

Dom:

You were eager for padded shoulders in the forties. See how selfish you are?

Ashes:

I’d like to be a big Broadway star in a play just like this.

Dom:

You have to eat a hundred jars of cold cream, eighty-seven tissues as well, and then you have to drink the urine of the hunchback from Equity. If you can pass that test, you must come up with enough money to join the swimming team at the Billy Rose Aquacade, write a short essay on “Why stardom means so much to me, and who the hell are you anyway?” Old fogies and chauffeurs will feel you up, tear your clothes right off your back, and humiliate you in front of six and a half usherettes who will be throwing lit kitchen matches at you furiously, while chanting an ancient primal growl and scream. But when you hear the audience loving and accepting the horseshit you present to them nightly, you’ll know you’re home free, champion of the flesh, and happy medium of the expression, and that’s when you’ll end up in the bins.

Ashes:

When can I start?

(END of excerpt.)

Chapter 4 – Antics

Jackie Curtis and Director Ron Link on the way to a party in 1974.
Photo © Craig Highberger

Leee Black Childers

In all the time I knew her, she never left the door without looking like Jackie Curtis. So you opened the door a crack, thinking it might be a mass murderer, an ax murderer, but instead you have this weird flaming creature, standing there covered with glitter with her hair all over the place, in clothes that are safety-pinned together. And one of her signature things, which I don’t even think she began doing it on purpose – all these runs in her stockings.

So one evening there is a knock at my door and it’s Jackie. She says, “Can you let me in? I have nowhere to hide, I have to hide out. Everyone thinks I’ve committed suicide. I threw all my clothes and things in the East River, and they floated downstream. They’ll be finding them soon. Everyone has to think I’m dead and I need a place to hide. Can I hide here?

I was this kid from Kentucky and here is this drag queen covered in glitter that has committed fake suicide – I thought what do I do with this? But at that time I didn’t know Jackie Curtis well enough to know that everyone would know it was just a Jackie Curtis stunt. Holly Woodlawn showed up at my door a few days later covered in black, with a boa made of black turkey feathers saying “I’m in mourning.” I said, Holly, Jackie’s right here! But Holly insisted, “I know, but I must appear to be in mourning,” and went like that to Max’s Kansas City, in all these black feathers and black chiffon for a person who everybody knew wasn’t dead.

Laura de Coppet

I have a memory of Curtis in my kitchen during a party, asking me a lot of questions about Leo Castelli. Castelli was an art dealer who I was seeing at the time. Andy Warhol’s art dealer. Leo and I had fallen madly in love in 1976, and started an affair. This was known by quite a few people and Jackie was very curious and asking a lot of questions, some of which I answered.

I like Jackie immediately. He was very, very funny. He would come over and would spend the night. He was very high on amphetamines, and we’d talk talk talk talk until around three or four in the morning I would be so exhausted I would say, “Curtis, I have to go to bed.” He said, “Oh that’s okay, I have some notebooks here, I’ll just stay up an write sweetheart, you go on to bed.” So I did. Now a boyfriend of mine had give me a case of imported French after dinner wine, it was like a Sauterne, very very sweet and it’s mean to be sipped slowly in very small amounts. And it is not cheap. This had been explained to Curtis.

The next morning when I woke up and went into the kitchen, there was Jackie still sitting at the table and to my horror the empty case of wine was just sitting there. In eight hours, while I was sleeping, he drank the entire case of wine. I said Jackie do you realize what you have done! And he said, oh Ducky I needed it, I was so high, I needed it to bring me down to write my brilliant new play.

Alexis del Lago

Jackie had been staying with me for a while in my Riverside Drive apartment and he said, “Let’s throw a big party for all our friends.” And I said, but I have so many valuable things darling, it’s like a museum. And he said we will just take everything breakable and put in the guest bedroom for the party. So we cleared all the bibelots and the objet d’art. And we put candles everywhere and put champagne on ice, and invited Sylvia Miles and Candy Darling and John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlum who did not come, and all our friends. And I wore a fabulous copy I had made of a Lana Turner gown.

We were there until very very late, and Jackie got very drunk and even though we had put most of the things away, still, a lot of my things were broken. Nearly all of my 78 rpm records were somehow smashed and that made me very angry because they were irreplaceable and I used to play them all the time. That was the first time I had a falling out with Jackie and I was very unhappy and didn’t talk to him. But he was so cute, before I got up he took everything out of the guest room and put it back in the living room but he arranged it differently, in his own way. When I woke up, he was gone. He had taken his suitcases and gone. But he left me a thank you note. He didn’t have a telephone, so I took a taxi and I went downtown and found Jackie and I said, “Darling, it looks fabulous, I love what you did to the apartment! You should be an interior designer!”

Michael Musto

I interviewed Jackie at her 14th Street walk-up, which was really kitsch paradise. She told me it was done as a shrine to Maria Montez, the famed B actress, or Z actress, who wanted the Cobra Jewels. Anyway,
Loving
was on the TV set, but without sound, which is really the best way to watch
Loving
. ‘Love Me or Leave Me’ was playing on the turntable. And she had posters for Lustre Shampoo; she had stacks of unauthorized Barbra Streisand bios. I wanted to move in immediately. And she really endeared me by sitting down and pouring me a cup of molten lava – it was supposed to be coffee, but it was from a broken Mr. Coffee and she added cream and two sugar-twins. It was so delicious, so kitschy, so bad-taste, perfect.

In 1968 Jackie lived as a woman 24 hours a day, she sort of became Marisa Berrinson. But then she got tired of it. In 1972 she returned to facial hair, she/he returned to being a man. And in 1985 Jackie looked back on that era and told me this: “I’d say I’m tired of being Jackie Curtis, and somebody would say: but you have to be. We need Jackie. But it was a chore. And I was already turning my auto-suggestive possession into a reincarnation of James Dean. I wanted to play James Dean, so I became him.

Taylor Mead

Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling both tried to be Kim Novak, or Lana Turner. And then of course as in the Lou Reed song Jackie became James Dean for a day, but actually Jackie was James Dean for nearly a year. And then without any announcement or anything shifted gears again.

Excerpt from Jackie Curtis’s Hollywood Journal – Winter 1976

It was the very best of films. It was the very worst of films. It must have been four-thirty in the morning when I woke up. I turned on the light over my bed. Did I need air? Did I need water? Did I need a man? Impossible. I went to the bathroom after I drank some pure water and smoked half a cigarette wondering what I had been dreaming about. It’s a good thing I fell asleep in my clothes. Now all I had to do was put on my lenses and wrap myself in Marilyn’s Mexican beach sweater and hide behind my largest sunglasses and go out into the early morning drizzle and collect my thoughts and my self. I had no makeup on but my face was like a peach and my hair was spun gold. There were very few people out, so I flew up side streets and then headed back home with a feeling I was haunted. Nothing but a single cigarette between now and the afternoon. I shall have to see if I have enough soda in the cupboard, or maybe I can fall asleep again. There is mercy somewhere.

I, the keeper of the television flame, say this to you now. I get up and turn on the tube and I hear some ugly man, seated comfortably going bald as he speaks, I should really say SQUEAKS … he hardly sounds human and he has the audacity to say, “There are so many things people can do in this society. People can sit down and write their congressman!” So remember, all of us can sit down and write our congressman … isn’t that a comforting thought? Don’t think I’m not going to drink more black coffee and smoke more cigarettes.

Harvey Fierstein

Jackie’s life was very much the performance. Jackie wanted to be a star – that ambition was very real. Jackie’s way had never been done before. And especially when Jackie went into male drag and did the James Dean thing – I thought what the fuck is she up to now?

Most artists, unfortunately really believe that the craziness is part of the art. I have friends that will die drinking and drugging. Although I think it’s killing their art, they think it’s part of their art. You don’t have to be a tragic figure. I think Jackie was always destined to be a tragic figure. Her way was not my way. She did drugs, I did alcohol. Much better to do alcohol, because it’s so much more accepted.

Jackie on his relationship with the Police:

The law doesn’t bother me when I’m a girl. In fact, when I’m walking around the Lower East Side the cops wave hello to me as they drive by. They all know me and like me. I’m like a ghetto child, a street urchin everybody looks out for. And you know why? Because the police identify with me, strange as it may seem, because they’re wearing a uniform and I’m sort of wearing a uniform too. And they know that I’m not hooking, I’m not soliciting – I may be selling my soul, but the price is too high for them. And they respect that.

Laura de Coppet

Jackie needed benefactors and he did find them and Leo Castelli was one, because he was touched by Jackie. I was a great benefactor of Jackie, and in Andy Warhol’s diaries Andy says, “I can’t believe that this is the girl that is giving Jackie Curtis money for drugs!”

Joey Preston

After my grandmother died, Curtis lived in her apartment with my Uncle Jackie for a while before my Uncle Jackie had to be put in a mental institution. And Curtis was complaining about Uncle Jackie all the time. “Get rid of him, he’s driving me crazy, he’s leaving cigarette butts under the mattress, starting fires, he’ll burn the place down.” After Uncle Jackie died, Curtis was letting a lot of people into the building at all different hours of the night – the neighbors started complaining, so the landlord started getting down on him. The landlord somehow got into the apartment to see what the place looked like.

Well, it was a disaster. He saw an American flag from outside hanging in the window. Curtis had all his posters all over the place. Nobody had ever complained. It was tasteful, but in Curtis’s taste. He calls my mother who was in charge of my grandmother’s estate at the time. So my mother goes out and buys a can of paint to paint the kitchen. She picked pink, her favorite color. I come in and I see Curtis sitting at the kitchen table, smoking. And there is my mother who had just been diagnosed with cancer, who was very sick with five slipped discs, and degenerative arthritis up on a ladder painting around Curtis’s posters because he won’t let her take the posters down. I was furious at Curtis. We often had these family fights. It happened a lot, but we still loved one another.

Rev. Timothy Holder

My parents came to my graduation from college in 1977, at a great old aristocratic university, The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. And they announced when they arrived, “We have a surprise for you. It’s in the car.” And I said, “Oh, how nice of you!” Thinking there must be a large package waiting for me. And there certainly was, they had brought my big brother Jackie Curtis down from New York City to Sewanee, Tennessee. And I was really embarrassed, even though he was dressed in a man’s suit. I thought what could my parents have been thinking? I thought here goes my life and my career. Here I was headed for a career in politics or religion, or both, I thought this is going to cost me becoming Bishop or Governor some day. But it turned out to be a delightful weekend. My friends and colleagues at the University did not quite know what to make of Jackie. But looking back, he was really just showing that he loved me by being present. And it’s one of my favorite memories of a brother I miss so terribly.

Jack Mitchell

I loved photographing Jackie Curtis. Some of my pictures of her epitomize this sort of Clara Bow coming into George Hurrell style of photography that was a big influence on me. Jackie and I had an instant rapport because we were both influenced by the same era of Hollywood films, the 30s and 40s.

Jackie called me up and asked me if I would take some pictures, it was pro-bono but I managed to get quite a few of them published in magazines like After Dark. Jackie was a good businessperson – she knew what she had to offer and she went with it. Jackie at that time wore tons of red glitter in her hair and it went all over the place, it took weeks to get out of the studio carpet and it was in between the floorboards as well.

The first time that Jackie Curtis came to my studio on East 74th Street in New York she startled me not because she arrived in drag, but because she had Rolodex cards around her wrist instead of a bracelet. This girl was really organized and knew a lot of people. Jackie was very funny, it was a very calculated gay sense of humor, I remember during one session she referred to KY jelly as “Fire Island toothpaste.”

Leee Black Childers

We were living on 13th Street and First Avenue, and the bar “Slugger Ann’s” was on 13th Street and Second Avenue. So on night we walked a block and Jackie said now you have to be quiet and we have to just slip in the door and stand in the shadows because this is a real bar and we’re likely to cause a bit of a stir. So we go in and there behind the bar is this bleached blonde woman with marcelled hair, really styled like the 1930s – and really red lipstick and thick black mascara and she’s strutting around behind the bar with her hands on her hips. We saw her eyes go to us and she went over to the old fashioned register and hit the “No Sale” sign and it clinged and the door popped opened and she took out a bill and shoved the door shut. Then she squeezed out from behind the bar and came over to the shadows where a drag queen and me stood and she shoved that twenty-dollar bill in Jackie Curtis’s hand. She didn’t say a word, but there was kindness and love in her eyes and she went right back behind the bar and became “Slugger Ann” again and we sneaked out of the bar. Today in 2003 the bar is still there and looks almost exactly the same as it did more than thirty years ago when it was “Slugger’s” and this happened. Except today it’s a gay bar called “Dick’s.” Slugger would just love that.