Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (8 page)

Oh, there’s no getting around it without running into the girl on cloud nine … why don’t you face it, Nola? You’ve only got a few good pictures left in you, maybe, with a nice long rest without any of de boozie-booze. Maybe then you could get back on that set without falling flat on your goddamned face. Today you fell on your face … or was it your ass? Come to think of it, Nola, it’s getting mighty hard to tell which is your face and which is your ass.

(The CAST laughs at this.)

Quiet! At first it was funny. The audiences thought it was a novelty act. You know, part of the show? Well you no longer amuse anybody … you’re fucking repulsive! Do you even know what it means to be fucking repulsive? You are gonna suffer, Nola.

It don’t take no crystal ball to figure out where you’ll wind up … the bins! The loony bins! In between flops that’s where they’ll have to keep you … just so they can keep you from killing yourself. And every day a little bit of your mind disappears.

(HE makes an air sound.)

Whoosh! And I really think your brain cells have been anaesthetized from your sleazy environment. Go ahead and drink … and then tell me something, Nola: after you piss away every female hormone in your decaying body, then what? What the fuck then, huh?

Oh I don’t know about you anymore, Nola. I just can’t put up with you anymore. My patience with you is at a low ebb. You what that means, ya dumb cunt?! Anytime you feel like you wanna take a nice long walk somewhere else, you go right ahead … but if you insist on drinking yourself to death, kindly do it on your own time! I pay people to make pictures … I don’t pay people to drink and sweat in my company.

(HE lifts her arm.)

Awwwww! Look at that! What a fucking mess you are! You smell you sonofabitch! You stink …

NOLA

I HATE you!

(Finally moving from her chair.)

I HATE you! And I will never talk to you again, as long as I live, which will be forever! You put me up on that silver screen, and then you dragged me down again.

(SHE goes right up and leans over ARNY’s shoulder)

Arny, tell me … how does it feel to play GOD?

ARNY

(Shoving NOLA away)

It hurts, Nola. It hurts.

NOLA

That’s great. Hit a woman when she’s drunk.

TOULOUSE

You don’t understand, Arny. Comebacks are a very delicate operation.

NOLA

(Going for TOULOUSE)

Comeback … COMEBACK … there’s that WORD again!

(SHE throws TOULOUSE down)

Get this and get it straight — there is NOTHING delicate about Nola Noonan!

(SHE kicks TOULOUSE.)

And that’s for not calling the liquor store!

BLACKOUT.

Andrew Amic-Angelo

Nola Noonan’s sidekick in
Glamour, Glory and Gold
was Toulouse de la Beaupres, played by one of Jackie’s oldest friends, Douglas Fisher. Douglas billed himself as Estelle R. Dallas in play programs or whenever he went around in drag. Douglas was a notorious alcoholic and one night during the run of the play Jackie and I were doing a scene and Tolouse’s entrance was coming up. And Mona Robson was backstage dressing Estelle and I heard this commotion. I look offstage into the wings and see Douglas rip his dress off. He throws it at Mona’s feet and storms out. He just walked out of the theater, right in the middle of the show! And there wasn’t an understudy. We had half of the play to finish and the character of Toulouse is all through it. So Jackie looks at me and I look at Jackie and we just continued, and we just worked Toulouse’s lines into our own. It was amazing that we were able to do that, paraphrasing the missing character’s content. It was kind of exciting to kind of rewrite the rest of the show extemporaneously.

Craig Highberger

The night Douglas Fisher walked out on the show in the middle of the performance he had been very drunk on stage. So drunk that he missed cues and forgot lines. After the show I went to Phoebe’s with Jackie and a few of the other cast members and Douglas was already there drinking. When we came in, he saw us but he sheepishly turned away. We ignored him completely. A few minutes later a nice young woman we all knew went up to Douglas at the bar. Before we knew it, for no reason Douglas ripped her glasses off of her face, broke the frames in half threw them on the floor at her feet and stomped on them, while going off in an insane tirade at her. The bouncer rushed over and picked Douglas up and threw him out the door onto the sidewalk. Ron Link wanted to fire Douglas but he was contrite and Jackie was a loyal and almost too-forgiving friend. Douglas finished the run, but it was the last time he would be cast in any kind of a substantial role in a Curtis play.

Andrew Amic-Angelo

During the 1974 run of
Glamour, Glory and Gold
I accompanied Jackie and Ron Link to a taping of a cable access show shot. It was shot in a basement nightclub on MacDougall Street late at night. Jackie was in drag – in fact he came straight from the performance after a pit stop at the bar. The female host of the program was hostile and questioned Jackie very harshly, asking why he would want to dress as a woman. She asked him, “Why don’t you just have a sex change operation and become a woman.” Jackie was put off by her attitude and replied, “Why would I want to be anything less than what I already am?” The host was speechless and ended the interview.

Alexis del Lago

I met Jackie Curtis in 1968. He was doing a show and a friend of mine brought me backstage. And when I arrived, I was in an exquisite gold lame outfit – any other diva would have hated me! Not Jackie. Jackie admired me, appreciated me – we became great friends and I was asked to be in the show
Americka Cleopatra
. I played Charmin Gale.

I saved one of the reviews in my scrapbook. It begins:

“The Theatre of the Lost Continent’s latest production stars Jackie Curtis and was, I’m sorry to say, uneven, frenetic, and a bit of a hodge-podge affair. Despite the mishmash production there were some excellent performances turned in. Alexis del Lago was delicious as Charmin Gale and Agosto Machado was absolutely hilarious as the rubber-titted lady in waiting. Good ole Harvey Fierstein was brilliant as Cleo’s Jewish Mother. Jackie Curtis is after all, Jackie Curtis. His/her performance was a gum-chewing, crack-snapping one, which only he/she could have brought off.”

This is their opinion, darling. They’re reviewing this as if it were a Broadway show –
Americka Cleopatra
was avant-garde. Everybody was there – the theater was packed, you couldn’t have walked it, it was sold out! Jackie was brilliant. Jackie had so many facets, like a diamond. It was wonderful to see him perform.

By the end of the run Jackie and I had become great friends. At that time he lived on Second Avenue and 12th Street in a big loft on top of movie house. Every Friday and Saturday we would put on shows. Jackie always admired my dresses because we had the same taste – we both loved Garbo and Dietrich and the only one: Maria Montez. So I made him a beautiful wrap around dress in aubergine velvet and gold and brought it to him as a present. He loved it. So that Friday night when we did the show I thought he would wear it, but at the finale, there was Wilhelmina Ross wearing it! I went up to her and said, “What are you doing with that? That’s my dress – that’s Jackie’s dress!” But Jackie was Jackie and we loved him.

Styles Caldwell

Jackie wrote this fabulous comedy
Americka Cleopatra
. I remember Harvey Tavel directed it. In my opinion Jackie always got the wrong people to put on his shows and then there would be problems because they would try to change it and do it their way instead of Jackie’s way. Jackie should have been directing and controlling the shows himself but he couldn’t do everything. So there were always conflicts and arguments between Jackie and whoever was directing.

I was in the show and played Valerie Nash, that was the name of a racehorse Jackie found in the racing form. I was Mrs. Julius Caesar. Agosto Machado and Alexis del Lago were Cleopatra’s handmaidens. Harvey Fierstein played Cleopatra’s Jewish mother. This is avant-garde off-off Broadway Theater, but Tavel insisted upon trying to stage it like a straight uptown Broadway show. He wanted to make Jackie gorgeous, which just isn’t Jackie’s style at all. I remember at dress rehearsal Jackie came out in a fabulous outfit that he got from Halston and modified and accessorized. He had a curtain rod on his head with a beaded curtain hanging down to the floor and it was just fabulous, but Tavel was appalled and whined, “Oh this is just awful. I wanted to make him so beautiful.” Tavel had some dance director who had been in
Sextette
with Mae West and he tried to get us to learn all these intricate dance steps. None of us were interested in becoming professional dancers so that didn’t work.

The show was fabulous anyway. Jackie played Cleopatra like a country western Dale Evans cowgirl character with a hilarious southern accent. Without telling his grandmother, he had borrowed a bunch of her old outfits – dresses from the 1930s and several of us had on her things. On opening night Slugger Ann was in the audience and as soon as the curtain went up she loudly exclaimed, “They’re wearing my fucking clothes!” It was a huge success and we were sold out every night for the entire run.

Agosto Machado

One Saturday afternoon we all came to the theater for our rehearsal for
Americka Cleopatra
and Jackie had just watched the Roy Rogers children’s western show on Saturday morning TV and she had decided that Dale Evans in all her cowgirl regalia was sort of an American version of the Egyptian Cleopatra, or that Cleopatra was sort of the Dale Evans of her time.

Jackie had braided her hair, she wore Levi’s, and a little bolero and she had two cap pistols in a holster slung low around her waist. It did not faze me in the least. It was brilliant. There are people that aren’t used to downtown theater who were taken aback and didn’t know how to react. Jackie could create magic and a mood. People dismiss it as not being disciplined, but in the fine art of theater and performance it was unique. If you want to see the same old mundane formulaic thing, go to Broadway, god bless ’em. The reviews are like what you see. Sixteen years later, twenty three years later that’s the show. Jackie’s plays were different; they were alive, and changed during the run and always had immediacy and the element of the unexpected.

Harvey Fierstein

Americka Cleopatra
was a very long script with a lot of scenes, some of which had something to do with Cleopatra. A lot of it didn’t. We cast all of our friends – Alexis del Lago, and Agosto Machado. I played Jackie’s Mother; ‘Incredib’ was my name. My big scene was when Cleopatra had gone off to Las Vegas with Caesar. He had eloped with my much younger daughter, and I show up the morning after the wedding night to blackmail him. It was a brilliantly funny scene, and Jackie was supposed to be asleep in the wedding bed while Caesar and I had it out.

The more laughs I got playing this scene, the less willing Jackie was to stay asleep during it. She would start sitting up making faces during it, and I would hit her with my purse to get her to lie down again. So after a few performances like this, I went to Jackie and I said, look – am I doing this scene wrong, because I think this is one of the best things you’ve ever written. This is a solid scene that Neil Simon would be thrilled, had he written – the jokes are brilliant, it’s one after another, zinger, zinger, zinger. You’re not stealing lines from other people, it’s not pastiche, it’s original, it’s funny, it’s Woody Allen worthy material. But I must be doing it badly, because you keep interrupting the scene. And he said no, you really do it wonderfully. And Jackie never moved again during that scene.

Jackie was always stealing everybody’s makeup. And he cut up the Halston dress with a pair of scissors before our eyes and just made a total mess of it. And then one night during the run of
Americka Cleopatra
while I was out on stage, he sat down at my dressing table to use my makeup and he took his wig off and put it down but he didn’t realize that the 100 watt light bulbs around my mirror were really hot. And this gorgeous wig just melted onto the light bulbs. Damn if he didn’t wear it on stage like that! It was a horrible mess and it smelled like burning rubber. But that was Jackie.

Penny Arcade

Our world, the Lower East Side downtown art scene was filled with wildly talented people. There was an awareness of sadness. There was never any question that there were enormous wounds. But it was like let’s put on a show to cover up all of this despair and misery. Our lives were bleak, so we filled them with glitter.

Jackie’s play
Femme Fatale
was based on Jackie, me and our real-life adventures. We had a quintessential fag/fag-hag relationship. The play was also about John Christian who at the age of 18 became Diana Ross and the Supremes hairdresser. But John became a junkie and agoraphobic and died of cirrhosis. Patti Smith played the John Christian role.

I had had a falling out with John Vaccaro of the Play-House of the Ridiculous who was an immense influence on Jackie. John was furious when I told him I was going to appear in
Femme Fatale
, and said “you’re out, YOU ARE OUT!” Because of that I did the entire play as John Vaccaro, using his voice. My role was Poo-Poo Cushman and it was an inside joke making fun of John. Obviously I wasn’t much of a careerist. I was more intent upon amusing Jackie. I got a lot of attention and good reviews during the run of
Femme Fatale
and Jackie got very upset about it. And one of the most harrowing betrayals of my life was when Jackie became angry that I was getting as much attention as he was. And we didn’t speak for about three years after that.

Stephen Watson

According to Holly Woodlawn, Jackie, Holly and Candy met at a party to watch the second Barbra Striesand special
Color Me Barbra
in the Greenwich Village apartment of someone who had a color television set. And Ron Link who directed Jackie and lived with him said that they always used to refer to each other as the trio from
How to Marry a Millionaire
, so it was Shotzie, Sugar, and Loco. Candy had a kind of incredible unreal glamour that was highly, highly worked at. Holly I think just had a lot of fun and enjoyment out of that unlikely moment of being a star in the Warhol movie
Trash
. But Jackie is for me at that moment especially important, because he is a star. He is also really questioning all sorts of things about sexuality and gender in a way that Candy’s not questioning it, Candy is wanting it.