Role models

Review by New York Times Review

THE best measure of the film director, trash maestro, Baltimore enthusiast and all-around anti-tastemaker John Waters's influence on a couple of generations of aspiring oddballs is that he's made himself obsolete. From reveling in tabloid depravity to embracing the poetry of thrift-shop kitsch, his fringe aesthetic went legit long ago. Now just another boutique in the lifestyle mall, it boasts outlets from academia to Broadway. Unlike some other Nixon-era provocateurs, however - the late Hunter S. Thompson comes to mind - Waters hasn't been undone by the realization that he's not outrageous anymore. Effectively inventing a second career as a droll curator of his first, he's the best funny uncle America has had since Paul Lynde's cackle on "The Hollywood Squares" was confusing innocents in less wised-up times. The nostalgia that, with dwindling cinematic returns, infused Waters's movies from "Hairspray" on turns engagingly unabashed in "Role Models," the latest and best of his cobbled-together exercises in autobiography at one remove. The pickings here include awed accounts of face time with two of his idols, Johnny Mathis (who confides that he wanted to be Miles Davis instead) and Little Richard. The latter reacts to Waters's wonderful, irreducibly Catholic blurt of "I wish you had been pope" by admitting his childhood crush on the Vicar of Christ: "I liked the pumps he wore. I think the pope really dresses!" Both portraits double as shrewdly refractive mullings of different editions of fame, epitomized by Waters's recognition that Mathis's appeal is "something I could never achieve and he can never escape." In a similar spot-the-mirror vein is a tribute to Tennessee Williams, who "saved my life" when the future director of "Pink Flamingos" swiped Williams's taboo story collection "One Arm" from a Baltimore library at the age of 12. Waters leaves it to us to figure out that plenty of his own cultists might make that "saved my life" claim about him. If H. L. Mencken was the Sage of Baltimore, Waters is, at least, the parsley. Just for fun, consider what these two share: impudence, contrariness, uproarious insults to bourgeois values that made them controversial, then fashionable, then had them prematurely posing for their native-son statues. That they'd have horrified each other is just your usual Balmer lagniappe. They're also equally stubborn products of their times. At his most unreconstructed, Waters can brag, "I'm one of the few who voted for Obama because he was a friend of Bill Ayers," which is both preening and stupid. Nonetheless, he's more conscious than he used to be about the downside of his idea of fun. An initially sprightly tour of Baltimore's dive bars ("the good ones have no irony about them") sets up reminiscences of two local legends: a lesbian stripper who styled herself Lady Zorro and a Native American named Esther Martin, who ran a derelicts' bar called the Wigwam "like an iron-fisted Elaine's." But then both women's grown children tell him about their upbringings, packed with hair-raising episodes of selfishness, booze, abuse and neglect. Glumly, Waters asks himself, "Can living in a real John Waters movie ever bring any kind of joy?" If that's a self-centered way of putting things, it's also an accurate one. No wonder the most interesting chapter is the most conflicted: "Leslie" describes Waters's friendship with Leslie Van Houten, the onetime Charles Manson follower who participated in the LaBianca murders and has been in prison, with one brief reprieve, for 40 years. Even as he makes a case that Van Houten should be paroled now that she's "served more time than any Nazi war criminal," Waters has to acknowledge his own sins. Not only did his film "Multiple Maniacs" burlesque the killings just months after the fact, but he attended "the insane LSD media-circus Manson trial" as an apparently qualm-free groupie. Considering that he still counts a "leather-bound Baader-Meinhof gang wanted-poster kit" among his prized possessions, his contrite tone here is evidently situational, if not tactical. THE more lightweight chapters include a fetching one about Waters's reading habits (who'd have pegged him as an Ivy Compton-Burnett addict?) and another hyping the designs of Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Despite his cloying conceit that the artists whose works he owns are his "roommates" - "Sometimes I don't mind if my roommates are messy," and so on - an essay explaining his fondness for, among others, Cy Twombly features at least one good wisecrack: "Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?" Also nice is this praise of Twombly: "He makes perfect mistakes." But anyone who suspects that the display of Waters's cultivated side means that Divine's enabler has gone respectable will be dissuaded by "Outsider Porn." This graphically besotted hymn to Bobby Garcia, who shot hundreds of videos of himself having sex with Marines, and David Hurles, whose gnarly, ultra-explicit male nudes Waters prefers to Robert Mapplethorpe's, is a reminder that he isn't entirely kidding when he says, "Filth is just the beginning battle in the war on taste." His acolytes won't need a reviewer's say-so to lap up every word of "Role Models," including the tired prescriptions that address them directly. But dilettantes at liberty to skip around will find a lot to charm them. In a way, the best joke in the book is that - Baader-Meinhof gang, outsider porn and all - Waters can't help revealing on every other page that he's both sentimental and good-hearted. Pass the relish, Uncle John. The essays here include awed accounts of face time with two of Waters's idols, Johnny Mathis and Little Richard. Tom Carson is the movie critic for GQ and the author of "Gilligan's Wake," a novel.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 6, 2010]

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Review by Booklist Review

You'd hardly expect the man who made a movie star of a 300-pound transvestite to have normal idols, such as sports heroes and guitar gods. Sure enough, the writer-director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray doesn't, preferring instead characters like those of his sleaziest films (e.g., Female Trouble) an addictive lesbian stripper, the foulmouthed proprietress of a favorite hipster hangout bar, and two obsessive makers of outlaw porn (one films only marines, the other only psychos ). Considerably more mainstream among Waters' personal demigods are Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams, and Little Richard, who probably are idolized by mainstream folks, too, especially if, like Waters, they're gay. Perhaps the most conventionally normal Waters role model is paradoxically the most infamous: Leslie Van Houten, the longest-incarcerated Charles Manson follower, about whose reformation and for whose release Waters is eloquent and persuasive, as he is on the rest of his idols and also the books and art he admires. In fact, he's a marvelous writer, simultaneously elegant and bawdy, so passionately sympathetic that he gives bleeding-heart liberalism back its good name.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The director of the gross-out epic Pink Flamingos and other cinematic provocations salutes the people he finds inspiring-himself foremost among them-in these self-regarding essays. Waters's role models range from icons like Johnny Mathis and Tennessee Williams to a gay reality-porn auteur, a lesbian stripper called Lady Zorro, and ex-Charles Manson groupie and murderer Leslie Van Houten. When he pays attention to them, Waters produces vivid portraits of his subjects, especially those with really lurid backstories, but he's happier when the spotlight is on him and his studied outrageousness. He discusses celebrity ("I've... gone out drinking with Clint Eastwood, and spent several New Year's Eve parties in Valentino's chalet in Gstaad, but what I like best is staying home and reading") and the graphic pornography on his walls, and regales readers with scatological scandals, disdaining religious beliefs while graciously tolerating people who hold them. In the end, Waters's war against "the tyranny of good taste" feels tired, his taboo-breaking rote, his kitsch-mongering snobbish (taken on a tour of the Vatican, he refuses to leave the gift shop and its "hideously pious cards"). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In his 40-year career, Pink Flamingos director Waters has worked with the likes of Divine, Deborah Harry, and dog shit. It's no wonder his many muses-laid out in loving detail here-are just as bizarre, brave, and endearing. Singer Johnny Mathis, Baltimore bar owner Esther Martin, playwright Tennesee Williams, outsider pornographer Bobby Garcia, and then some get a chapter each of Waters's ruminations, sprinkled genereously with memoir-like asides on fashion, moustache fillers, and, yes, library theft. Better yet, if you're an extreme bibliophile, the Pope of Trash reveals himself to be one of your kind via an extended love letter to four obscure-ish novels. Whatever Waters lacks in focus he makes up for with mondo passion. His ardor for his role models is so pure, it's tangible. Readers will come away inspired and wanting more Waters in film, print, and otherwise. VERDICT A perfect read for the bar when you're hanging solo, but just as palatable to dip into while on planes, trains, and automobiles. [See also "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/10, p. 30.]-Heather McCormack, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The famed cult-film director recalls the famousand not-so-famouspeople he has idolized over the years. Waters is known for his campy, often hilarious films, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and the mainstream hit Hairspray (1988). In this consistently charming and witty collection of essays, he fondly remembers the many artists he has admired throughout his life, from stars, such as Little Richard, to such near-unknown figures as the 1960s Baltimore stripper Lady Zorro. Though Waters jumps from subject to subject, he somehow integrates it all into a coherent whole. The chapter "Johnny and Me" combines the author's interviews with legendary singer Johnny Mathis and the obscure actress Patty McCormack, who played an evil little girl in the 1954 movie The Bad Seed, as well as encomiums to the actress Margaret Hamilton and Bobby "Boris" Pickett, singer of the 1962 novelty hit "The Monster Mash." Elsewhere, the author interviews two of his favorite underground gay pornographers in similarly rapturous terms. In general, Waters admires anyone who has the courage to follow his or her idiosyncratic muse, and he makes no distinction between so-called "high" and "low" art. The author is at his most engaging when he expresses disillusionment. For example, he counts a former member of the Manson Family, Leslie Van Houten, among his friends, and believes that she has reformed in prisonbut he also expresses regret that he exploited the Manson murders for kitsch value in his early films. Waters also presents a poignant interview with Lady Zorro's daughter, during which he learns that the outrageous personality he admired so much was actually masking a selfish, irresponsible alcoholic. The only misfire is a short, somewhat vague appreciation of Tennessee Williams, which lacks the zing of the rest of the portraits. Overall, however, Waters delivers a worthy tribute to his personal pantheon of artistic icons. An impressive, heartfelt collection by a true American iconoclast. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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J O H N N Y A N D M E                   I wish I were Johnny Mathis. So mainstream. So popular. So unironic, yet perfect. Effortlessly boyish at over seventy years old, with a voice that still makes all of America want to make out. Heavenly, warm. Yes, I'll say it out loud--wonderful, wonderful. I saw Johnny Mathis in real life once, but he didn't see me--the best way to glimpse a role model. I had just pulled into the parking lot of Tower Video, off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, with my good friend the photographer Greg Gorman. "Oh my God," said Greg, who is never impressed with celebrities, having shot them for billboards, movie posters, and album covers for thirty years, "don't look up, but Johnny Mathis just pulled in next to us." And there he was. In a sports car with the top down and a cashmere sweater tied around his shoulders. Good Lord. Johnny Mathis himself. The legend you never hear about, never see on the red carpet, never read about in gossip columns. Highly successful but nearly invisible. Smooth for ever and ever. As my favorite girl group of the sixties, the Shangri-Las, might have said about how I felt that day, "That's called impressed." I never got over seeing Johnny Mathis in the parking lot. I'd secretly think about those thirty seconds at odd moments, like when the Acela train between Baltimore and New York would have to stop so inspectors could examine the corpses of suicide victims who threw themselves on the tracks. Or waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my driver's license. Or sometimes right when I woke up--bam!--for no apparent reason, there he'd be: Johnny Mathis in that car with that sweater. Is it because Johnny Mathis is the polar opposite of me? A man whose Greatest Hits album was on the Billboard charts for 490 consecutive weeks. Versus me, a cult filmmaker whose core audience, no matter how much I've crossed over, consists of minorities who can't even fit in with their own minorities. Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves? When I taught filmmaking at a jail in Maryland in the 1980s, I always got my class to loosen up by doing improv and asking them to play "the exact opposite of yourself." If Freud described psychotherapy as "transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness," I figured this might be a revealing way to rehabilitate. Bikers wound up playing girls, blacks chose characters with wealth and power, whites became docile maids or butlers, and child molesters became tough guys. But did I need my own prison counselor because I kept reliving that Johnny Mathis "opposite" moment? Why would the mere sight of a performer so far outside the standard boundaries of my hero worship launch me into such a blissful, rapturous obsession? At this point in my career, could my misplaced idolatry become a road map to ruin? Was I in danger of becoming a Johnny Mathis stalker? I figured I'd better try to meet him in a more legitimate way before I got in trouble. It's not like I wanted to be Johnny Mathis as a kid. His music, however, did become the sound track for the end of my 1950s childhood innocence. Our thirteen-year-old babysitter, who lived across the street at the time, had a record hop, and because she wanted to borrow my 45 rpm records to play, she had to invite eleven-year-old me. Little did I imagine that the gathering would turn into a red-hot "necking" party! While her innocent parents (who were good friends of my mom and dad) were upstairs happily laying out refreshments, all the kids downstairs were grinding and French-kissing to Johnny Mathis's music, and I knew then that not only did I want to be a teenager--I wanted to be an exaggeration of a teenager. But I had always felt nuts, not romantic. Too angry to be smooth. Too happily guilty to yearn for virtue. Before Johnny Mathis, Clarabell, the psychotic clown on The Howdy Doody Show, whose makeup later inspired Divine's, had been my role model. The man I saw in person in the early fifties at the height of Howdy Doody's success, when I was just a child and my parents somehow got me on the show. The scary freak I watched from the Peanut Gallery who never spoke but communicated his hostility by honking twin bicycle horns or by squirting you in the face from a seltzer bottle. The same TV character parents complained about for getting their children too "excited" before dinner. Excited? I was apoplectic. Especially every time Clarabell got near Princess Summerfall Winterspring, the goody-goody but sexy Indian maiden nonpuppet star of the show. If only he could have burst out of his glorious "muteness" to say her name out loud--the best name ever! The only other name I wish were mine today (except for Lord or Lady Haw-Haw, which I can't use because they were Nazis). Matter of fact, readers of this book, if you see me on the street and call me Prince Summerfall Winterspring in a nice tone of voice, I will probably respond. I followed the careers of Clarabell and Princess Summerfall Winterspring forever, hoping that I, too, could someday have an extreme career in show business. I mourned the fact that I was unable (and uninvited) to attend the 1957 funeral of Judy Tyler (the actress who played Summerfall Winterspring) after her tragic death in a car accident right before the release of the Elvis movie she had costarred in, Jailhouse Rock. All "Doodyville" was there that day in Hartsdale, New York, and I bet Bob Keeshan was sobbing out loud. Yes, that's the real name of the first Clarabell the Clown, who went even further in television career lunacy and became Captain Kangaroo for thirty years after. Imagine his life, his schizophrenia. Am I Clarabell? Or Captain Kangaroo? Why are those children staring at me? Who am I? Claraboo? Captain Kangabell? God, what a life! What a career! Bob Keeshan, I wish I were you, too! But would Johnny Mathis understand all this? Luckily we both were represented by the same talent agency, so I called Steve Rabineau, my film agent, and he called Johnny's people, who suggested I write a letter to Mr. Mathis explaining why I wanted to talk to him. Hmmmmmm..."explain." Explain what? A role model? Someone who has led a life even more explosive than mine, a person whose exaggerated fame or notoriety has made him or her somehow smarter and more glamorous than I could ever be? A personality frozen in an unruly, blown-out-of-proportion position in society who earns my unmitigated respect for his or her other turbulent, ferocious will to survive frightening success or failure? Maybe Johnny Mathis could understand, but I'd better leave out the Princess Summerfall Winterspring part of my explanation. So I wrote a personal letter telling Mr. Mathis who I was (I still don't know if he had ever heard of me) and described the Tower Video parking lot imagery and how this book was an attempt to pay tribute to "amazing people who have inspired me." I added that I was not coming to him with any agenda (sexual, racial, ageist, or political), and I really wasn't. My Johnny Mathis lunacy was way beyond that anyway, but I tried to sound...well, reasonable. Then I was told to get in touch with his legal representation, which, naturally, scared me, but at least I had passed the first audition. The lawyer was lovely on the phone and just what I expected; old-school Hollywood, incredibly loyal and protective of Mr. Mathis's career and, rightfully, suspicious of me. I explained my book idea as normally as I could and he asked if Mr. Mathis could approve what I wrote. I explained the journalistic mortal sin of his request and he said he'd get back to me. Lo and behold, a few days later an assistant to Mr. Mathis called to set up the meeting at 9:30 a.m. at Mr. Mathis's West Hollywood home. I felt like Prince Summerfall Winterspring. Until the night before, when I got an e-mail casually mentioning that the lawyer would also be present. Great. Hoping for the best anyway, and arriving on time at Mr. Mathis's lovely, unostentatious thirty-year home overlooking Los Angeles from the hills above Sunset Boulevard, I ring the bell. Here goes. "The King of Puke" meets "Mr. Wild Is the Wind." Opposites attract? We'll just see. An Asian housekeeper who has clearly worked here for decades lets me in and leads me to a cozy corner off the living room, and there he is with a handsome smile and an outstretched hand to shake. And the lawyer. "What? Did you Google me?" I joke, and the lawyer is caught off guard by my question but then laughs and admits, "Yes." I set up my tape recorder and the goddamn thing doesn't work even though I had tested it that morning! I'm sweating, losing my cool. Mr. Mathis offers me his own recorder, but I give up and take notes. Johnny is called John by all his real friends, I begin to notice (I'm Johnny only to two people--my mother, who can never switch from my childhood name, and a certain friend in prison you'll meet in a later chapter). Mr. Mathis is dressed just as I had hoped--all in white: white shirt, unbuttoned three buttons to reveal hairless gym-bodied chest; white pants; white thick socks, no shoes. Just like Johnny Mathis should look, like he always has. Effortless. Twenty or seventy. Johnny Mathis is beyond fame itself--something I will never be. We start off at the beginning--how he was "singing in white bars in the Tenderloin section of San Francisco" with his parents' permission, "doing great" right from the beginning and "feeling no racial prejudice." "Never?" I ask. "Not really," he says with understated charm. Amazingly, my own mother said to me after hearing I was going to meet him, "Johnny Mathis is black?" How could a beautiful black man who sang romantic love songs that white girls responded to not feel racism in the fifties? Maybe he's beyond race, too. If Johnny Mathis has any regrets, it's that he listened to an early manager who advised him, "Don't mention jazz. There's no money in it." "I wanted to be Miles Davis," Johnny remembers. "Jazz legends. That's what I wanted to be. They were artists." He was "embarrassed around jazz people to be known for romantic music," "trivialized." When I mention that Johnny was a millionaire at twenty years old, he almost doesn't hear. "That had nothing to do with what I was about. I never wanted to be anything but a good singer." God, who I wanted to be when I was six years old was Dagmar, the 5'11" supposed dumb blonde I watched on early black-and-white TV. Too young to stay up to see her on the show that came on at eleven p.m. and made her famous, Broadway Open House, hosted by Jerry Lester, I had to make do by catching her guest appearances on The Milton Berle Show. Predating Cher or Madonna, Dagmar was the first single-name bombshell, and I always knew she was smart. She hung out with Bob Hope and Joey Bishop when I was just an obsessive toddler in Lutherville, Maryland, and I daydreamed about her all day in grade school, hoping to become a caricature of myself the way she was. But for a child to form a fan club for his idol, he needs more than himself in the audience, and I could never find another kid who knew who she was. I finally met Dagmar herself, the older version, when I tracked her down in 1979. She was long retired and living as a guest on an amazingly plush horse farm in Southbury, Connecticut, and I tried to talk her into playing Divine's character's mother in Polyester. This great lady may have turned me down, but joked when she heard I'd come from Provincetown, Massachusetts, that beautiful beach town on the very tip of Cape Cod so popular with gay people: "Oh, yes, I was there; I was queen of the fairies." Would Johnny Mathis understand? Of course he would. Like myself, Johnny realized some of his heroes "would be odd." He "loved" Liberace because "he used his money." I bring up another of my role models, the hypochondriac and germ-freak pianist Glenn Gould. "Oh, yes," Johnny recalls, "when I shook his hand he gasped, 'Are you trying to kill me?!'" He knew them all--every single deliriously original musician whose vocation seemed to be "going to extremes." "Johnnie Ray?" I dare mention, only hoping Mr. Mathis had met the white guy heartthrob singer who was deaf, handsome, skinny, gay, and immensely popular for a short time right before rock and roll was invented. The sexy one who wore a giant hearing aid and was called "the first great white soul singer." The crooner Frank Sinatra hated, who cried, sobbed, and made emotional breakdowns part of his song delivery. The guy who survived two "morals charges," arrested once in a bar and once in a men's room, and later had an intense love affair with the married, famously chinless crime columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. "Oh, yes," Johnny Mathis easily responds. "I visited him when he was dying [of liver failure]." "The Twelfth of Never," I silently title this beautiful imaginary hospital paparazzi photograph in my mind before realizing, hell, no--the two of them together in this situation could only be "The Thirteenth of Always." Johnny Mathis's role model? "Lena Horne," he chuckles. "Some reviewer even said I stole everything but her gown." I know what he means; I have been copying Margaret Hamilton my whole life, and I am proud to admit it. The Wicked Witch of the West, the jolie laide heroine of every bad little boy's and girl's dream of notoriety and style, whose twelve minutes of screen time in The Wizard of Oz can never be topped. And her outfit! The Wicked Witch inspired my lifetime obsession with wearing weirdly striped socks (Tim Burton does, too). My God, this great character actress even worked later with William Castle in 13 Ghosts, and appeared in Gunsmoke, The Addams Family, and The Paul Lynde Halloween Special! I never did get to meet Margaret Hamilton before she died, but she did send me a personally autographed Wicked Witch of the West photo, and the monogram "WWW" followed her signature. What an iconic monogram! Did her towels have "WWW" on them? Her sheets? If only I could have visited her at her summer house on a private island in Southport, off Boothbay Harbor, in Maine. So what if it didn't have electricity or phone service? More quality time with a real movie star! Excerpted from Role Models by John Waters All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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