My Trip Down the Pink Carpet (4 page)

From then on, whenever I was asked to lose my accent, I would respond by doing the audition over again—exactly the same way. The producers and the director would all just stare at me, not quite knowing what to say. I’m sure I lost a lot of jobs that way, but I didn’t care. I was just being myself.

I
WAS
once hired to play a monkey in a Japanese sake commercial with Boy George. I was to lead Boy George across the desert while he sat on a white horse in full geisha drag, sipping sake. There would also be a dancing pig and a big green bird.

We were told these were very recognizable Japanese fairy-tale characters.

We were all hauled out to the middle of the Mojave Desert in California: Boy George, his entourage, the actor playing the dancing pig, the actor playing the big green bird, myself, and a Japanese film crew of forty people. The crew did not speak a word of English. We were put up in the town of Baker, which was tiny. The only restaurant sat right across the street from our seedy motel. It was called the Bun Boy. Boy George thought that was hilarious.

I had to be in the makeup chair at three o’clock in the morning to be ready to go when the cameras rolled at eight. I had to lie still with straws up my nose for hours and hours. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable. And I thought show business was going to be glamorous!

The makeup artist was Rick Baker, who has won trillions of Oscars for his movie makeup magic. I emerged from the makeup trailer looking like a punk monkey with a huge Patti La-Belle hairdo. I was also fitted with fake monkey teeth and gold-specked contact lenses. I was then strapped into a kimono with six-foot flags sticking straight up.

By the time I was ready to go, I was exhausted. I called my agent in tears, begging him to get me out of this unholy situation. The only food was sushi that had been sitting in the desert sun for hours. The Japanese must have stomachs of iron. I, however, do not.

Getting Boy George to emerge from his trailer was such an ordeal. He’s amazingly quick and clever but a tad mean-spirited. I was expecting someone dainty and ladylike. He’s like a football player with a dress on. Trust me, you do
not
want to mess with him. When they finally got him out of his trailer, tottering about on his wooden geisha shoes, he started in on the wardrobe lady.

“For God’s sake, this kimono is like a cheap hotel. There is no ballroom!” He then started grabbing and pulling at his crotch.

Once the wardrobe issues had been handled, he began to pull all kinds of other shenanigans. For one, he refused to get on the horse.

“I’m
not
getting on that horse. I do
not
remember this being in my contract. I am frightened of horses! I’m going back to London
immediately
!”

Then someone from his entourage hollered, “George, be a good fairy and get on the horse!”

“I am a good fairy! Poof! You’re a pile of shit! I’m not getting on that horse!”

I explained to him through my heinous monkey mask and fake teeth that this horse was, first of all, not a stallion but a gelding, which meant he’d been neutered, leaving him gentle as a lamb. I told him that the horse’s teeth were very long, which meant he was as old as the hills and was not going anywhere in a hurry. And I also said that I had once been a jockey with racehorses and I knew what I was doing. I promised him that I would not let go.

Boy George looked at me, then turned to one of his cohorts and giggled. “She fancies herself a jockey!” he said. He then broke into song: “She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes! She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes!”

It all came to a head during a long shot of us standing majestically atop a high sand dune. The camera was miles away and the director shouted at us through a bullhorn. I had reached the end of my rope. The sand was blowing up under my prosthetic pieces and the skin on my face had been torn to shreds. Both my contact lenses were gritty and dry, and my eyes were hurting beyond belief.

I was so desperate I tearfully asked Boy George what I should do.

“Well, dear, I know a little Japanese,” he said. “I’ll teach you a phrase so you can alert the director.”

“What will I be saying?” I asked, a little suspicious. I could tell he was up to something, but I wasn’t sure what.

“I’ll teach you how to say ‘One more time only.’ That’ll let the director know you can only handle one more take.”

And so he taught me the phrase, which I repeated to anyone who would listen.

Boy George egged me on. “I don’t think he heard you. Say it real loud, to that guy over there. He seems to be friends with the director. He’ll explain your situation.”

What was I saying?

When the interpreter came running over in horror and told me to please shut up, I found out that it was:

“Do you have a big dick?”

Boy George laughed and laughed. Needless to say, I was ignored by the entire Japanese crew for the rest of the shoot.

I
HAVE
always thought Gena Rowlands was the classiest gal around, and here she was, announcing the name of my first screenplay, “Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel,” as the winner of the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Production Grant Award for 1999! My screenplay had been selected over those of six hundred other applicants, so it was quite an honor.

“Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel” came about from a short story I had written about my days of living on the fringe in Atlanta, Georgia. I had moved to Atlanta when I was nineteen years old so I could live an openly gay life. This was something I had not been able to do even after enrolling in college in Knoxville, an hour away from home. I still bumped into all these people I knew from my church and it was just a mess.

I was tired of living a double life.

Shortly after arriving in Atlanta, I became immersed in the whole 1970s club scene, which involved a lot of drugs and alcohol. I suppose it is human nature to sow a few wild oats in one’s impetuous youth, but perhaps because of my small stature I have always felt the need to do things a little bigger than the next person.

I ran amok. With my aberrant behavior and ongoing shenanigans, I put on an exhibition such as the town had never witnessed. I have been told many times that I was a legend. This is not something I am thrilled to admit nowadays, but I suppose the best way to go down is in flames.

Back then, I lived in an old hotel called the Pershing Point Hotel. This Villa Debris was in a dilapidated state and seemed to house many undesirables—there was always a select group of drag queens, thieves, whores, drug pushers, aging strippers, and other riffraff milling about outside. When she came to visit, my mother took one look and refused to get out of the car.

My roommate and main partner in crime during those hairy days was a young woman on the lam from her debutante upbringing. She was a thrift shop peacock in huge black Jackie O sunglasses who strutted around town with everything she owned either on her back or in the enormous bag thrown over her shoulder. She was a self-described “bag lady in a limo.”

She was Atlanta’s version of Edie Sedgwick.

I called this young woman Miss Make Do. No matter what horrendous situation we found ourselves in—no matter how many times we had to run for our lives, no matter how often the Atlanta police carted us off to jail, no matter how many bars we were unceremoniously thrown out of, or how many times we were flat broke and hungry—she was always able to “make do.”

I had a sneaking suspicion there was magic involved, some sort of supernatural phenomenon she was in touch with.

The short story I wrote dealt with our inability to find our apartment. I knew we
had
an apartment. I could prove it. We had slept there on several occasions. And I had receipts from when, on the first day of every month, with money we scraped together—usually by criminal means—I went to the office of the Pershing Point Hotel and paid the rent to the enormously fat front desk clerk, Big Tiny. He peered out from behind a barred window with a ferocious Chihuahua named Mitzi Boo in his lap.

The office was easy enough to find (it was right by the front door), but that damn apartment of ours was virtually impossible to locate. We knew it was up a staircase and down a few corridors. But what stairs? Which corridor? We stayed so high all the time, we were always in a state of utter confusion.

It is a terrible feeling when you cannot find your way home.

After an evening of fun and frivolity, Miss Make Do and I would wander for hours on end, diligently searching for our abode. In between whispered spats, with each of us blaming the other for forgetfulness, we would meander up and down the halls, tottering about on impossibly high platform shoes, trying to not look too conspicuous. When at length we came to the nightly conclusion that we were only going in circles and were not any closer to our destination than when we began our quest, we would fall, exhausted, on the steps in the stairwell.

It was only there that we felt safe. We would camp out till daybreak, smoking cigarettes, rifling through our bags, and trying to get a grip on reality. This is where we spent three years of our young lives. In the stairwell of the Pershing Point Hotel, completely lost.

Eventually Miss Make Do disappeared, and it is anyone’s guess where she is today. Years later, when I decided to turn the short story I had written into a theatre piece, I met the perfect actress to play the part of Miss Make Do.

Erin Chandler was the granddaughter of “Happy” Chandler, who had twice been the governor of Kentucky. Between his terms as governor, he had been a U.S. senator and a commissioner of baseball. Erin’s father, “Big Dan” Chandler, had fled his Kentucky upbringing for Las Vegas and had run Caesars Palace. Since Erin’s parents divorced when she was little, she grew up between Kentucky and Las Vegas.

A blue-blooded Kentucky debutante who had been raised by showgirls?

Hallelujah! I had met my new Miss Make Do! And lucky me. She was a brilliant actress who completely understood and fully embodied her character.

On opening night, a good friend of mine, Jonni Hartman (publicist, mother of the actress Lisa Hartman, and mother-in-law of one of my favorite country-and-western singers, Clint Black) was in the audience. She was with her friend Marilyn Beck, the famous Hollywood columnist, who gave me a lovely write-up in her column.

Both Marilyn Beck and Jonni Hartman told me the same thing: “This is a good play but it would make a wonderful, wonderful screenplay.”

I sat down with my good friend Del Shores, the writer-producer-director, and asked for some advice. He told me about several key elements needed in a good screenplay, such as three very distinct “acts,” a “hook” to draw the audience in, and so forth. He also suggested a couple of good books on screenwriting. So I went to work. It was all a bit overwhelming but I held tight to Del’s best advice: Just make sure to tell the story.

The screenplay floated around town forever and ever. Erin Chandler became the biggest cheerleader for the project and we attached her as both the lead actress and an associate producer. But what we really needed was an executive producer who could raise money. We gave the project to friends of ours who were producers, and they handed it to other friends, but months passed with nothing happening.

It was so disheartening.

Finally the script caught the eyes of a producer named Julia Pierrepont III. We did not know her from Adam’s house cat, but she believed so strongly in the piece that she was willing to invest a large sum of her own money. There was one very big stipulation. She wanted to direct the movie, but her only experience as a director had been shooting a few commercials in New York.

She seemed to be a mover and shaker, and her belief in the piece was strong, so we decided to give her a go. The moviemaking business can cause a lot of heartache when friendships are involved. There are people who still do not speak to Erin or me because of our decision to let Julia take the helm. But my goodness, she was able to green-light the project in a just few months after we had spent almost two years trying to raise the money ourselves. This is a business, after all!

Julia’s first question was, How was I going to play myself at nineteen? I was forty-four years old, and all my years of drinking and drug abuse showed on my face. I had never thought about age being a problem, since I had played the part onstage. But camera was not as forgiving.

“Perhaps they could shoot me through cheesecloth?” I asked, tentatively.

“Honey, they’d have to shoot you through burlap,” quipped Julia.

Oh dear
, I thought.
This is not going well. I don’t think I like her and we’ve just started.

She suggested finding a younger actor.

I almost blew my stack. “Now, you listen here, Miss Woman. If you think there is another actor on the face of this earth that is going to play
my
part, you have another thing coming.”

But Julia was absolutely right. So I sat down and did a rewrite.

I made the lead character in his late thirties—a long stretch, but workable. He was leaving home for the first time in his life. He was going to move to Atlanta and come out of the closet. There are many movies about young people setting out to seek their fortune, but this was going to be about someone doing so much later in life. I felt it really upped the stakes.

Plus there was something really pathetic about a middle-aged man wearing 1970s platform shoes just trying to fit in.

Julia was instrumental in entering the script in the Los Angeles Film Festival’s production grant program. When we won the grant, we were given an additional $10,000 on top of what Julia had put in, plus almost $250,000 in free services. This included a free camera, free film, and free time in the editing bay, and even two days’ use of a film crane so we could have some really interesting shots.

This was all well and good, but what we needed was more money. We did not have nearly enough to shoot the picture. We decided that it would be necessary to get letters of intent from famous people to help us get our funding. We were able to round up all kinds of stars to do cameos: John Ritter, Marilu Henner, Kathy Kinney, and Sheryl Lee Ralph, plus Michelle Phillips from the Mamas & the Papas. I didn’t want to have to do that, but having those famous people attached helped raise a few dollars. For the rest of the money, we begged, we borrowed, we stole, we scammed, we maxed out credit cards, we did anything we could think of to secure funds.

I even stooped to sucking a few cocks to obtain some cash. This is not something I am particularly proud of, but what can I say? I was born without a gag reflex and I’m pretty good at it. Welcome to Hollywood. What’s your dream?

Only kidding! Actually, I did volunteer my services but there were no takers. Even when I promised to take my teeth out.

I’m kidding!

My teeth don’t come out.

In the early part of June 1999, on Julia Pierrepont’s ranch out in Calabasas, California, we began principal photography on
Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel.
We had less than $285,000 in the kitty. In movie terms, that is not low budget, it is
no
budget.

What a journey! It almost killed all of us. And there was a lot of bad behavior involved. Most of it on my part.

I think we had maybe twenty-two days to shoot a full-length feature film. Besides Julia’s ranch, we had secured the entire Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, the hotel where Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. It had been empty since the 1970s. The kitchen area where Kennedy had been shot was bricked off, but the ballroom where he had given his final speech was just as it had been on that fateful day. The hotel was old and musty, plus it was home to feral animals that roamed the halls and made all kinds of horrific noises when we were shooting at night. But it made the perfect location, as our film was a “period piece” and therefore very little set decoration was required. That turned out to be a godsend for our low-budget production.

The very first day on the set I realized that my vision and Julia’s vision were radically different. I saw
Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel
as a comedy. She saw it as an intense cautionary tale about drug abuse. I wanted light and frothy; she wanted dark and shadowy. I wanted Rock Hudson and Doris Day run amok, she wanted “Drugstore Fucking Cowboy.” She wanted long sweeping camera shots with very little coverage and I wanted my goddamn close-up!

I especially did not want the drug use to overshadow the lovely message of a gay man’s search for himself. To me, this was not a piece about drug use but a piece about how gay people sometimes use drugs to deal with the shame of their homosexuality.

We fought tooth and nail on almost everything. It was horrendous. We were constantly at each other’s throat. Poor Erin Chandler had to run interference as the producer instead of concentrating on her own performance. Then she would jump into the fray.

I remember at one point screaming in Julia’s face, “This is my fucking life story. I have been kicked around this goddamn town for a hundred fucking years. This is my one shot at the big time and you’re fucking it up! You can get a lot of things back in Hollywood Town but you cannot get back your REP-U-TA-TION! And mine is at stake here!”

To which she calmly replied, “Please remember that I have given up my life savings, I lost a baby, I’m going to lose my ranch, and I am very close to also losing my husband. So, please, sweetheart, do not come crying to me about your lost reputation.”

Passive-aggressive behavior really pisses me off. She would not even give me the satisfaction of a good screaming match.

To say that I was an ungrateful little shit would be putting it mildly.

I pitched fit after fit after fit. I was like a Tasmanian Devil. I could not help myself. I would head to the hotel every morning, sometimes with only a few hours sleep, swearing to myself that I was going to be a good boy. Within a few minutes of arriving I would be off on a rant. The hallowed halls of the Ambassador Hotel rang loudly with my bellowing.

The crew took to yelling “Thar she blows!”

And all of this was after two years of complete sobriety. How embarrassing!

My spiritual advisor suggested that before opening my mouth to scream at Julia, I take a minute and ask myself three important questions about what I was about to say: Is it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?