My Trip Down the Pink Carpet (2 page)

F
AIRLY EARLY
in my career, I was hired to do a two-episode arc of a situation comedy called
American Dreamer. American Dreamer
starred Robert Urich and the delightful Carol Kane. I cannot for the life of me remember what the show was about. It was terribly high-concept, with Robert Urich delivering long monologues in the dark, wearing a black turtleneck.

What a crush I had on Robert Urich! It was a sophomoric crush going all the way back to the days when he was the hot young tennis pro on
Soap.
What a dreamboat! I realize that using the term “dreamboat” is a bit unseemly for a man my age. But I’ll admit it right here and now: I am a high school cheerleader stuck in an old man’s body!

To this day, I still write in my diary nightly. Most of the entries deal with my current crush. You would not believe how I gush and carry on. (Well, maybe you would.) I am an infatuation junkie. Like most gay men my age, I have no earthly idea how to love in a healthy and blessed manner. I only know how to obsess. Lord knows, I’m real good at that. And trust me, I ain’t alone here.

But who can fault us? When all those red-blooded heterosexual males were slowly learning the fundamentals of flirting and dating in junior high, finding healthy ways to deal with all that teenage-love shit, where were we? Where were the queers? We were hiding out within the confines of our Big Secret, that’s where. We were locked in the recesses of our own minds, forlornly sitting in the back row of homeroom, creating fantasies in our heads.

Oh, the crushes I had at Dalewood Junior High School in the mid-1960s! All unrequited, all angst-ridden, and all completely made up.

One week it would be the quarterback of our football team. I’d sit and stare at the back of his head for hours and hours, memorizing the look of his perfect ears, and how his hair just barely brushed the collar of his button-down oxford cloth shirt. I was forced to endure the torture of watching a chirpy cheerleader flirt outrageously with
my
quarterback. I silently plotted her murder as I seethed with jealousy. Who did Little Miss Perky Breasts think she was? I would go home, put on Tammy Wynette, and cry my eyes out.

“Stand by your man! Give him two arms to cling to….”

I’d wail and wail. And then I decided I’d show that quarterback a thing or two. Yes, ma’am, I’d turn the tables on him. I dropped him like a hot potato and moved on to the cutest boy in the whole school. What a steamy tumultuous affair that was! Oh yes, he and I had some real good times. If I recall correctly, I got pregnant. I spent the entire summer carrying his love child. This time I sat in my bedroom, still all alone, singing along with Diana Ross in her big-afro period.

“Love child…Never quite as good. Afraid, ashamed, misunderstood…”

But I digress.

On
American Dreamer
I played Ralph Short, the shortest member of the FBI. Ralph Short was a real man’s man. He was the kind of man that makes up for his lack of physical stature by strutting around like a bandy rooster. I was a little concerned about “pulling this one off.” To make matters worse, the first day of the shoot, I was approached by the director, who looked me right in the eye.

“I want to be really up-front with you,” he said. “You were not my choice for this part. I am somewhat familiar with your work and I think you are a wonderful actor. But you carry a certain kind of baggage that I do not think works for this particular character.”

I carry a certain kind of baggage?

No shit.

Why don’t you just come out and say it?
I remember thinking.
Why tiptoe around the truth? I am a big fag! I am a screaming sissy, a poof, a nancy boy, a silly, prancing, simpering nellie fairy. I am a little too light in the loafers, a little too fey. Right? Let’s just lay our cards on the table, shall we?

And then he said, “But not to worry, I am going to work with you.”

Work with me? How? Teach me in ten easy lessons? If this wasn’t a recipe for disaster, I didn’t know what was. I’d spent a lifetime trying to walk and talk like a man.

The first time I heard my voice recorded, I was mortified. I was twelve years old and coming out of that tinny little tape recorder was not me, but Butterfly McQueen, the actress who played Prissy in
Gone with the Wind.
The shame of it all! I sounded just like a
girl.
I had “the accent,” and I ain’t talking about my Southern accent. It’s the gay thing. I open my mouth and the whole world knows. It is plain and simple.

When I was in the fourth grade, I came home from school with a small wooden box I had been given by a speech therapist. In the box was a tongue depressor, a mirror, and instructions on how to rid oneself of “the sibilant
s.
” What is “the sibilant
s
?” you may ask. Well, it’s a dead giveaway for a fag, that’s what. It’s not really a lisp, it’s more of a hissing sound. I sat with that heinous box for hours with the tongue depressor in my mouth, my eyes on the mirror, and the instructions unfolded in front of me.

“Sssally sssellsss ssseashellsss by the ssseashore. Sssally sssellsss ssseashellssss by the ssseashore.”

Hopeless.

When I was in the ninth grade, the telephone number of a pervert was passed around school. Some girls having a slumber party had stumbled upon this degenerate while making prank phone calls. Boy, my ears perked right up. I secretly memorized the phone number, then rushed home and dialed him up. As he breathed heavily and masturbated loudly, he asked me all sorts of inappropriate questions, like “What color are your panties?”

I boldly told him I didn’t wear any! Not even to cheerleader practice!
That
really got him going.

“Does the hair on your little pussy match the hair on your head?” he whispered in a raspy voice.

Shocking!

But I rolled with the punches. I giggled and told him coyly that they were both flame red and real bushy. This was before the “Brazilian” became the look—back when several stray hairs playing peek-a-boo out of a girl’s bathing suit bottom could send a pimply-faced boy into a masturbatory frenzy. Even
Playboy
magazine in that era was demure with pubic hair. The best you could hope for was a glimpse of a muff behind a see-though scarf.

My conversations with the pervert turned me into a dirty little slut. I spent weeks on the phone getting filthier and filthier. It all came to a head when I dared him to meet me in the booths near the refreshment counter of the drugstore across the street from my school. What was going through my head? Had I lost my marbles? I told him in no uncertain terms that he could not approach me or speak to me but that I would sit in a booth across from him, lift my cheerleader skirt, and give him a good shot of “my bushy red beaver” when nobody was looking.

When the day arrived, I hid out in a back booth, sipped on a cherry Coke, and waited with bated breath. I suppose behind my flagrant behavior was a desperate need to put a face to that obscene voice. I thought I was going to faint as I watched the front door and nervously twirled the ice in my Coke.

I was expecting someone who looked like the janitor at my school. He wore his Levi’s blue jeans so tight you could see the outline of his big tally-whacker, had his wallet on a chain, and spent a lot of time in the boys’ room in front of the mirror combing his hair à la Elvis. I’d lock myself in a toilet stall and peep out the crack in the door just to watch him. Sometimes he would pose obscenely, grabbing his privates and whispering nasty things to the mirror. “You want a little of this?”

Or perhaps my pervert would look like a hot, young Robert Blake in
In Cold Blood.
I had once brazenly taken a city bus to the movie theatre one Saturday morning all by myself to see a double feature:
In Cold Blood
plus
The Boston Strangler,
starring an equally hot, brooding Tony Curtis.

But I sat for hours in the drugstore, and nobody showed up. I drank so many cherry Cokes I nearly floated out. I guess my pervert thought it was a sting operation. I’m sure it’s probably for the best. There is no telling what sort of mischief I would have gotten into had he actually arrived.

Not that he would have come over to me. To have pulled off such a charade, I must have sounded exactly like a girl. And still, to this day, over the telephone, especially when I’m angry, I get, “Ma’am. Ma’am, you need to calm down.”

“I’m
not
a ma’am! I am a
sssir.
I am a gay sssir, but nonetheless, a sssir.”

What in the world to do about the problem of my overtly sissy nature became the set joke on
American Dreamer.
The whole cast and crew began to pitch in. Everyone wanted to help me become more of a man’s man. Everything was up for grabs. Nothing was sacred.

I would be standing casually, chatting with Carol Kane, when out of the blue some electrician would lean in and whisper, “You need to take a wider stance.”

I would be on the phone, bitching to my agent, when all of a sudden I would hear someone say, “Put your voice in a lower register.”

I would be sitting with my legs crossed, which I have done since kindergarten, when I figured out that it was more comfortable, and hear, “I wouldn’t sit like that if I were you.”

Somewhere along the way during the two-week shoot it got a little ugly. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the director had gotten notes from the Powers That Be. Or maybe the director did not feel that I was giving it my all. He probably had no idea what he was up against.

It all came to a head when the director got so frustrated he pulled me aside and said, “This is not the road tour of
Tru.
Are you going to work with me or not?”

It took me a few minutes to ascertain what he meant.

Oh dear.

Tru
was a play about Truman Capote. Long before I realized my true nature or even what that meant, I innately knew that Truman Capote and I were the same. I was both repulsed and deeply fascinated as I watched him on
The Tonight Show,
lisping to Johnny Carson. But I would eventually have to leave the room when he was on TV, my feelings were so strong. I really thought I would vomit. I felt the same way when Paul Lynde was the “center square” of
Hollywood Squares.
It all seemed really shameful.

This is not the road tour of
Tru.
Are you going to work with me or not?

I was devastated. It really started to affect me. I would be at home all alone watching TV and catch myself curled up like a cat. I would immediately unfurl myself and find a way to sit that more befit the manly man everyone was trying to make out of me.

The night we shot
American Dreamer
in front of a studio audience, I was a mess. In one scene, I had to stand offstage with a bullhorn and deliver my lines. When the moment arrived, I assumed a manly pose and hollered, “Tom! Tom! Open up! It’s Ralph Short with the FBI! Open up or we’re coming in!”

Huge laughter.

Oh dear. That line was not supposed to be funny.

Situation comedies are taped without the director on the floor. Instead, he sits up in a booth calling the camera shots. When the director needs to speak to the actors, he does so over a loudspeaker, and essentially (to me, anyway) sounds like the voice of God. The director stopped the action and called down to me.

“Leslie? Who is out there?”

I put my voice in a lower register and yelled, “Ralph Short with the FBI!”

“
Who
is out there?”

I took an even wider stance and lowered my voice as much as possible. “Ralph Short with the FBI!”

“Who is out there?”

I screamed, “RALPH SHORT WITH THE FBI!”

“Could have sworn it was Charles Nelson Reilly!”

Huge laughter.

You might think that I detest this director to this day. But you had to be there. It was all in fun. It really was. It is not his fault that this particular issue was my hot button. I do not believe there is a homophobic bone in his body. He did not mean to be cruel, he just wanted to get a good performance out of me. He wanted to see me do something that I had never done before. He’d told me that he was going to work with me—and he did.

When I saw the episode, I was floored. When you work in situation comedies as much as I have, you tend to acquire a little bag of tricks. I am the proud founder and the guiding light of the Leslie Jordan School of Mugging. But the director was having none of that, and as a result, my performance was top-notch. You did not see Leslie Jordan at all. And, more important for the character, you did not see “gay” at all. In a strange way, I was very proud of that.

I had pulled it off!

Many years later, I was called in to read for a new movie called
The Mighty Ducks.
The character I was to audition for was a hockey coach.

A hockey coach?