Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (12 page)

LORD

Oh! An apache of the law.

DAPPER DARE

(KNOCKING on door)

Open up! Open up!

CRYSTAL PALACE

I’ll make a telephone call first. Be gone!

DAPPER DARE

I must see Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit. Open up!

CRYSTAL PALACE

She’s been swallowed by a whale.

DAPPER DARE

That’s a whale of a tale.

CRYSTAL PALACE

Or the tail of a whale!

(They LAUGH.)

REINDEER GIRLS

(SINGING)

Swing lo, sweet chariot. Coming for to carry me home. Swing lo, sweet chariot. Coming for to carry me home.

PRINCESS

We who are about to die salute you.

There is a FANFARE, followed by the entrances of SACRA VIA and GLAMOR MAN. SACRA VIA is the token sex change and GLAMOR MAN wears sunglasses.

SACRA VIA

(LOOKING around)

Hmmm, Damon Runyon died too soon.

GLAMOUR MAN

I am Glamour man.

LADY GALAXY

You are horseshit.

SACRA VIA

Lady Galaxy, you are currently engaged in a most heated discussion … with horseshit.

GLAMOUR MAN

I’m bringing home the bacon. I am Glamour Man.

SACRA VIA

Oooh, the painted lady was last seen at the scene of the crime.

SAM

Crime!

NIGHTCLOUD

Lime!

SAM

Time! TIME! What we need is more time!

HEAVEN

The sands of time … the wind blew you further away, like my vision of fresh fallen dew.

LORD

What vision? Lay down!

DAPPER DARE

I was here first!

MARIE

I’m joining the line kids.

HEAVEN

The Zeigfeld Follies.

EVERYONE dances.

SACRA VIA

Princess Ninga Flinga Dung, you will sing again!

PRINCESS

(CHAINED, dragging her body around the floor)

I … I … will, Sacra Via? But – when will I walk again?

SACRA VIA

Only God can answer that, my child.

PRINCESS

(To GOD)

Oh God! Oh my God! Please, God! PLEASE!

HEAVEN

Little Miss Agnes Also Ran.

SAM

Love conquers all.

HEAVEN

So does a good stiff drink of whiskey.

LADY GALAXY

Time waits for no man.

HEAVEN

Nightcloud, hurry – we must flee!

NIGHTCLOUD

I know a roadside diner.

HEAVEN

No more diners, please. No more hash houses or java joints! I’m through. If I have one more man I shall burst as a poison boil!

LORD

You’ll do as I say! Crystal Palace has left me this bordello in her will.

(HEAVEN laughs.)

LORD (CONT’D)

How quickly you laugh.

HEAVEN

She had no will. To live.

LORD

She left me this whore hole in her last will and testament.

HEAVEN

But she isn’t dead yet!

(END of excerpt.)

References for this play

TORCH SONG starring Joan Crawford and Michael Wilding

THE SECRET LIFE OF ADOLPH HITLER & EVA BRAUN

SPARTACUS starring Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Tony Curtis, Lawrence Olivier, Peter Ustinov

THE RACING FORM

AESCHYLUS: The Oresteian Trilogy

TV GUIDE

GLAMOUR, GLORY AND GOLD: The Life and Legend of Nola Noonan: Goddess and Star

SHEBA, the greatest Queen of them all

ALL ABOUT EVE starring Bette Davis, Ann Baxter, George Saunders, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, Marilyn Monroe, Thelma Ritter

NATALIE WOOD

FOSTER GRANT SUNGLASSES

ASCAP

A MENU from HOWARD JOHNSON’S

SHINOLA shoe dye

GONE WITH THE WIND starring Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

THE WIZARD OF OZ starring Judy Garland

DICK TRACY

FLORENZ ZEIGFELD

BEVERLY MICHAELS

ST. VINCENT’S HOSPITAL

DICK DALE AND THE DELTONES

CALAMITY JANE a Doris Day starrer

DE CARLO LOTS

LADY IN THE DARK starring Ginger Rogers & Ray Milland

I WANT TO LIVE starring Susan Hayward

(This list appeared at the end of Jackie’s original script.)

Craig Highberger

The reviews of
Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit
were laudatory.
Newsweek
called it “the wildest and in some ways the best show in New York” in particular singling out John Vaccaro’s direction and calling the performance “… an explosion of pure theatrical energy unconfined by any effete ideas of form, content, structure or even rationality. It is an insanely intense, high-velocity, high-decibel circus, costume ball and scarifying super-ritual in which transvestism, scatology, obscenity, camp, self-assertion, self-depreciation, gallows humor, cloacal humor, sick humor, healthy humor, and cutting, soaring song all blast off through the tiny, backless-benched theater. The result is a theatrical purgative in which the company’s maniac sincerity dissolves all the show’s impurities into almost pure energy.” Vaccaro later presented the play at Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Experimental Theater Club in February 1970.

Holly Woodlawn

I was in Jackie’s
Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit
which was put on by John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous. John Vaccaro actually fired Jackie from his own play. I was supposed to play Princess Ninga Flinga Dung, the Queen of Song. The character was supposed to have no arms and legs and John Vaccaro directed me to crawl across the stage instead of walking. During rehearsal I couldn’t move fast enough and reach my mark on cue and Vaccaro screamed at me, “Holly Woodlawn, you think you are a woman! You are a drag queen! You are no actress!” And finally the son of a bitch took my role. He played the Queen of Song and demoted me to the chorus. I was one of the Moon Reindeer Girls. So I decided to make as big a splash as I could in this little role and I covered my entire body with Vaseline and glitter so I looked like a snake. I just wore a little fur-covered G-string and I had nice little titties with fur pasties and antlers, which were made of plastic leaves covered with glitter. I left a trail of glitter wherever I walked – when I went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet it was full of glitter! So I did make my mark in the play and Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey came to see it and I did an interview with Gay Power and said I was the new Warhol superstar and they read it and that’s what led to me being cast in
Trash
. So it never would have happened without Curtis.

John Vaccaro

I came to New York at the beginning of the whole pop art movement. I began my theatre company in the mid-sixties, 1965 in fact; we called it the Play-House of the Ridiculous. Nobody was thinking about making money. We were putting on shows. We were artists. What we were doing was an entirely different type of theatre. It was truly experimental. There’s nothing experimental now. I recently went to see
Urinetown
. What a piece of shit, it’s about nothing at all.

Theater is just not the same today. They’re not interested in what we were doing. Today you can’t even afford to do off-off Broadway. Nowadays they want 5,000–10,000 dollars a week just for the venue. We did entire shows for twenty dollars! My first shows, I didn’t even have theatre lights. You just turned them on and off like a regular household switch. I didn’t have anybody designing costumes. We did the costumes. We used to go to the area they now call Soho where there were all these fabric places that would throw stuff out. We would take the fabric remnants and use it to make costumes. And as for sets – we did it like Louise Nevelson did, with found objects.

Jackie was in one of my plays called
The Life of Lady Godiva
. And we were invited to perform at the first pornographic festival at the University of Notre Dame. And being a romanticist, I decided that we would go by train. Jackie was late and showed up – for the first time in drag in public. And we went on the train to South Bend, Indiana. We had arrived and we were hungry and we went to this restaurant – and everyone knew that Jackie was in drag. Jackie got up to go to the bathroom, and everybody stopped and watched and Jackie of course went right into the ladies room.

Ruby Lynn Reyner

I appeared in John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous production of
The Life of Lady Godiva
by Ronald Tavel with Jackie. Notre Dame, a Catholic university in Indiana, invited us to perform the show for a big conference called “Pornography and Censorship” and the entire cast went there on the train. We were so excited. Jackie and I were like Rita Hayworth in 1940s dresses, sitting on our luggage in Grand Central Station with our legs crossed waiting to be photographed. It was on that train trip that Jackie began writing
Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit
. He found a racing form on his seat in the diner car and he came up with most of the character’s names from it, like Classie Gravesend and Rouge Frolic – those were the names of racehorses!

So we got to Notre Dame. It turned out our performance caused such a stir that they censored us! Lady Godiva was quite risqué, even for the late sixties with lots of nudity and crazy scenes with nuns fucking each other. The University made us keep our clothes on so we simulated all these sex acts in costume. After the show there was a big party for us at the student union and all these Notre Dame college boys were so fascinated with Jackie, I remember it made me jealous.

Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit
was a huge hit. Everyone came, underground stars, famous models, theater people from uptown. I remember James Rado and Gerome Ragni were there; this was when they were in the process of bringing
Hair
to Broadway. And I remember we’d go to these shows a year or two later and hear lines from Jackie’s show, or see how they’d used his ideas.

Jackie and I lived together in an apartment for a few months. We had no money so we stopped paying the rent and utilities. We went to Max’s Kansas City every afternoon for Happy Hour because they served free hors d’oeuvres and we would go and make a meal of the chicken wings or whatever they put out. I remember we woke up one afternoon and they had turned our electricity off. Jackie only had an electric shaver, so he couldn’t shave and we had to get over to the theater and he just put his makeup on over this heavy stubble and went and did the show like that.

Paul Ambrose

I was from Tennessee originally. Thanks to Playboy magazine I had heard of Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn. I moved to Greenwich Village and after my nervous breakdown I found that you could live on Welfare and Medicaid. Medicaid would not only pay for you to go to the doctor, they would also pay for your medicine. So if you got medicines that other people would pay you for, you could make 100% profit. I developed a reputation of being one of the few queens in the Village who would sell you real Tuinals that hadn’t been cut. And Jackie Curtis occasionally needed a Tuinal, or another type of barbiturate to come down from all the ups that he was taking. I was impressed as hell to meet Jackie.

Jackie was doing a show for John Vaccaro and the Play-House of the Ridiculous called
Cockstrong
. So I go to La Mama Experimental Theatre Club and I see this twenty-foot long cock that stands during the entire play and then falls forward at the end of it and shoots white liquid out onto everyone in the audience. I mean I had just come from Tennessee a year before and from preaching. Granted, I was no longer preaching, but I was surprised.

During the play Jackie Curtis came out at one point. It really was a defining moment in my life, because until then I had never seen a great star live on stage. Jackie comes out in this black outfit with this red frizzed hair and glitter and black eye shadow and ripped stockings and sang the “Fucking-A Douche Bag Blues” and I had never seen anything like it in my life. And to this day it ranks with Ethyl Merman and Carol Channing, I mean really as good as anything I have seen on Broadway. As good as Barbara Cook, or Bernadette Peters or anyone who is considered to be great. Jackie could match them on the good nights. A friend was in the show and I made him introduce me to Jackie backstage and we became friendly.

Styles Caldwell

In 1969 I lived in New York and I was fascinated by what was going on in underground film and theater. And one very hot summer day I was walking down 4th Street and I walked past La Mama and all the doors were opened and I looked in there and a show was going on and it was a Play-House of the Ridiculous production directed by John Vaccaro called
Cockstrong
and they said come on in and see the show. And it was in the middle of the show and there was Jackie Curtis singing a song called “Talking Dirty to the One You Love.” And I’ll never forget the finale was a gigantic cock that fell forward towards the audience and sprayed everybody with white liquid – unbelievable! I was in heaven. So I came back the next night and saw the whole show and afterwards I went backstage and I went up to Jackie and I said, “You were absolutely wonderful!” And he was really friendly. And I started seeing Jackie at night in the West Village walking around in a dress looking very glamorous with Rita Redd or Candy Darling.

John Vaccaro

Jackie had an extensive wardrobe and I’m certain everything was from the thrift shop. I can see him so clearly, in a print housedress and mesh hose torn beyond belief. But you know I never thought of Jackie as a woman. He was really a very great talent, a great artist.

Jackie Curtis was completely in tune with what we were doing at the Play-House of the Ridiculous. We were really into the movies of the 30s and 40s. That’s where our sensibility came from. We were especially crazy about the terrible old films of Maria Montez. Jackie wrote a play. People told me he found the script in a litter basket and just put his name to it. And curiously, the names of the characters in the play were named after horses that he found in a racing form. “Heaven Grand” was one horse, and “Amber Orbit” was another. Originally the play was to take place in an old hamburger joint on 42nd Street. I turned it into a musical. I took it to Europe. For two or three years we toured with it.