Role Models

by John Waters

  Johnny Mathis understands a lot about me. I can tell. He’s a gentleman who lives alone and he’s from another era. “Who wants people to know everything?” Johnny asks shyly. “A lot of life is putting things in perspective.” How right he is! One thing I learned early was that if you’re in any way famous, guaranteeing yourself a private life is very important for your mental health. Fans can’t be friends; neither can the press. And even if certain critics have been supportive, there will always be a future project of yours they might not like, so palling around with reviewers can be awkward. The ultimate level of celebrity accomplishment is convincing the press and public that they know everything about your personal life without really revealing anything. Mr. Mathis only once responded to sexual preference questions from the press, in 1982, and he answered in a lovely way. His preference was “a way of life one’s grown accustomed to.” I had promised “no agenda” but I bring up this quote and compliment him on it, and he smiles and says, “It’s a normal everyday part of my life.”

  I’ve always been pretty up-front about my sexuality (even though Mink Stole today says she didn’t even know I was gay for a long time), but I understand Hollywood royalty’s reticence about revealing anything personal, hetero or homo. Gus Van Sant and I always joke about the press saying we are “openly” gay. What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds like we’re arriving at a premiere shrieking, “Hey, Mary! Got any Judy Garland records?” When I read about any celebrity baring his or her soul to a journalist, I just figure the star doesn’t have anyone else to confide in. “As the public started to mature,” Johnny explains unapologetically, “I had to wait until the rest of the world caught up to celebrities being human beings.” His fans? “Some of them,” he chuckles kindly, “think they are Mrs. Johnny Mathis.”

  What do I know about anyone’s sexuality? I always thought, and still do, that Tom Cruise is straight. When John Travolta got cast as Edna in the Hollywood remake of my film and the Broadway musical Hairspray, one wrongheaded gay militant reporter, an army of one, actually protested that John Travolta was a Scientologist and that this “religion” tried to “cure” people of their gay sexual preference. Well, first, if John Travolta were in any way homophobic, he’d be dead after filming that movie. Dancing in drag, dealing with the demands of the almost exclusively gay creative team—he would have had a heart attack. Implying Travolta was gay seemed wrong to me—he had a lovely wife and children, and how does the journalist know whom he sleeps with? And what do I care about the cast’s religious beliefs, as long as they don’t try to proselytize? Travolta never mentioned Scientology to me. And when a friend included in his Christmas card the funniest line Hallmark could never come up with—“A generous donation has been made in your name to the Church of Scientology”—I didn’t repeat the joke to John Travolta, either. Am I supposed to police the religions of everyone who is cast in future projects? Should I never consider Nicole Kidman (whom I love as an actress) because she’s a Catholic? I mean, there’s a religion where I can show you homophobic dogma, but I’ve never actually seen proof that Scientology says being gay is wrong. And even if Travolta did experiment sexually sometime in his life, what business is it of mine? Let’s even say for the sake of argument that Scientology (even though the church denies this) does claim it can make gay people turn straight. If someone is that miserable being gay, why would my team want them? It’s not a numbers game! “Go on,” I’d tell them, “let Scientology have you! Go back in the closet where you’re happy—we don’t want you anyway!”

  As a kid, I’m not sure the term “closet” had been invented, and who knows if my other hero in entertainment at the time felt trapped? His name was Cyril Ritchard and he played Captain Hook in that Mary Martin–starring version of Peter Pan, first produced on Broadway and then filmed for television and broadcast in the fifties. If Margaret Hamilton was my showbiz “mother” in my ten-year-old mind, then Cyril Ritchard was definitely my “father.” All I knew then was that I was a budding clotheshorse, and here was a character who knew how to dress—a real fashion plate! I didn’t yet understand the word “fop,” but I sure wanted to be one, even if I had to cut off one of my own hands to look this dashing. As an adult I rewatched Cyril’s villainous performance and was immediately struck by the character’s jeweled fingers, ruffled shirt, and tight pants. Captain Hook now was over the top in a way that seemed much closer to The Boys in the Band than Never-Never Land, but he was still my favorite hambone actor and no learned gaydar could ever take that away from me.

  Then again, maybe I’m wrong about his sexual preference. Despite being labeled “queer as a coot” by Noël Coward, Cyril was, as described by associates, happily married to Madge Elliott for thirty-five years, and together they were glamorous stars of the popular stage, first in Australia and then in London. Cyril claimed they were “never separated” from the day they were married until she died of bone cancer in 1955, while he was playing Captain Hook on the Broadway stage. They sure seemed to love each other no matter what they did or didn’t do in bed. Maybe they just didn’t care for sex. It is messy. Or maybe they agreed with the writer Paul Bowles, who supposedly tried sex with a man and a woman and found both unappealing. Cyril remained a man of contradictions and theatrical affectations, a “devout” Catholic who loved his poodle, named Trim, and once commented, “My background may be common but I have specialized in elegance.” He’s buried in Saint Mary’s Cemetery in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I went there recently to pay my respects, and even though I was thrilled to see that his headstone actually says “Captain Hook,” I hope mine doesn’t end up reading “The Duke of Dirt.”

  Johnny Mathis is impossible to parody today; no one makes fun of him. No drag kings ever “do” Johnny Mathis. “I saw a kid on the Johnny Carson show once who did an impersonation of me,” he vaguely remembers. Whenever they have John Waters look-alike contests at the colleges where I appear, lesbians win! But what about his music? Am I serious when I say I really love it? Mr. Mathis invites me to his touring Christmas show, and I go when he plays Baltimore at the Lyric Opera House. I have a Christmas compilation album out that includes everything from the horrifying “Happy Birthday Jesus” by Little Cindy to the anticapitalist “Here Comes Fatty Clause (With His Sack of Shit).” I also tour every year or so with a spoken-word Christmas show and thought, gee, both Johnny Mathis and I have Christmas programs; what would happen if we switched tours and did each other’s acts? Imagine his audience’s surprise at me singing “O Holy Night,” and picture the shock of my audience at seeing Johnny come out and talk about how Santa Claus could be erotic if you were a “chubby chaser.” Johnny and I are like drag queens on Halloween: if it’s Christmas, we’ll be working!

  Johnny Mathis Christmas had no prepublicity in the Baltimore press, but all 2,564 seats were sold. His appeal is broad and wide, something I could never achieve and he can never escape. Was watching this concert torture, or was it perfect? I’m still trying to decide. The greeting-card-snow-scene backdrops couldn’t be more middle-of-the-road, but, like the phony mug shot of myself wearing a Santa hat that I use as my stage setting, it is perfect for the intended audience. No one ever introduces Johnny Mathis. He just moseys onstage and starts singing as the thirty-five-piece orchestra plays his holiday cheer spectacularly. Wearing that same old winter-white look he was painted in by Ralph Cowan in 1969 for the cover of his album Heavenly (the painting still hangs in his living room), Johnny breaks into medley after medley of Christmas songs that are beyond the valley of normal. But God, the man can sing every bit as beautifully as when I first heard him on the radio fifty-three years ago. Believe me, this is no oldies-but-goodies act. When he finally sings “Chances Are,” I admit my blood starts racing and I have to refrain from joining all the middle-aged-or-older ladies in the audience, many wearing festive holiday jogging suits or Christmas corsages, in sighing unashamedly and loudly. When Johnny really concentrates and does “It’s Not for Me to Say,” I am confused, ecstatic, awestru
ck, and oddly aroused, yet slightly embarrassed to think of his yuletide act in the same breath as mine.

  But those same songs, over and over! Is singing “When Sunny Gets Blue” hellish for Johnny Mathis, I wonder? As he hears the first notes of “Gina” onstage and knows he must sing the exact same song for the umpteen-thousandth time, does he feel like I do every time a well-meaning fan asks, “Did Divine really eat dog shit?” Is there a new way to interpret either? “Of course doing old songs can be torture,” Johnny says, laughing good-naturedly. His secret is that before you go onstage, “you have to learn to be the audience! That way it will always seem new.”

  “What perfect advice,” agrees the other top role model from my deep dark past, Patty McCormack. The nine-year-old actress who played Rhoda Penmark, the murderous little blond pigtailed girl in the smocked dress in The Bad Seed, first in the 1954 Broadway stage play and then again at age eleven in the movie that became a classic. Patty McCormack has long been my obsession. I wanted to be feared like Rhoda when I was a child. I wanted to yell out the movie’s ad campaign, “The Bad Seed is the Big Shocker!” to my clueless grade school classmates. When Leroy, the hateful janitor in the movie, tells little Rhoda she’ll be electrocuted in “that little pink electric chair” they got “for little girls,” I wanted to hop right in her lap as they strapped her in and then feel the sizzle with her. I was consumed by Patty McCormack’s celluloid evil.

  Meeting your idols is always a thrill (despite what you’ll read in one chapter later in this book). When Patty McCormack and I finally got together last year for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I realized that, like Johnny Mathis, Patty McCormack knows a thing or two herself about the “torture” of a greatest hit. At one point in her career, “a sad time,” she remembers, she got sick of reminiscing about her role in The Bad Seed to cult followers like myself. “I didn’t encourage talking about it,” she says. “If you don’t have as good a dish on the shelf,” she remembers thinking, “it makes you feel bad about yourself.” “But most actresses don’t get even one role that is remembered like this,” I argue, and she agrees. “Yes, that’s what my nephew said. I embraced Rhoda way late in my career, really really late. It was healthy for me to do. I ‘grew’ her up.”

  Can a child become a healthy adult after playing such a famous murderess? Today Patty McCormack is a trim, beautiful, un-face-lifted sixty-eight-year-old woman with a twinkle in her eye about her villainous childhood creation. But did anybody explain to young Patty the psychology of Rhoda’s character? “That horribly chilly place where we all can go?” as Patty remembers it now. “No,” she admits with a shrug. “As long as it wasn’t sex. That was bad,” she adds, laughing. Like in today’s Motion Picture Association of America rulings, murder was okay. “I’m a Catholic girl, so I used to worry I was ‘an occasion of sin.’ That was the expression if your clothes were too short and someone had lusting thoughts about you—you were ‘an occasion of sin.’” I always worried as a little boy (and still do) that I wasn’t “an occasion of sin.” Will I ever, in my lifetime, be worthy of such a compliment, such a desired reverse state of grace?

  Was it torture for a child to be a working actress, playing Rhoda through those years? “No,” she laughs. “I remember having a lot of energy, big feelings, and doing the part gave me strength, courage. One thing I learned doing the play was that Rhoda was always right.” “What about the endless bleaching of your hair so early in life?” I suggest. “It just seemed like that was part of the deal,” says the still-blond Patty, hardly feeling traumatized by her early beauty treatments. “But,” I argue, “the studio made you wear an outfit almost exactly like Rhoda’s party dress to the Oscars the year you lost Best Supporting Actress to another (God, it never ends) role model, Dorothy Malone,” the actress who always wore her collar turned up, on and off the screen. Dorothy Malone, the Douglas Sirk heroine who when I finally met her for lunch in Texas in the nineties wasn’t wearing her collar up but shrugged and turned it up once I voiced my disappointment. They didn’t make Dorothy Malone wear her Written on the Wind costume to the Oscars, did they?! Suppose the distributor made Charlize Theron go dressed as her real-life Monster character, the lesbian killer Aileen Wuornos! Imagine that acceptance speech!

  Today, would the character Rhoda be put on Ritalin? When she reached puberty, would she have turned into a trench-coat-wearing, school-massacre-type teen? Patty doubts it. “Rhoda was clever, more tasteful than that. She wouldn’t have gotten caught!” When I bring up the real Bad Seed, the child killer Mary Bell, Patty seems mildly interested but, like most Americans, has never heard of her. In 1968, when she was just eleven years old, Mary Bell strangled two small children in Newcastle, an industrial city 275 miles north of London. She pretended to help her victims’ family search for the bodies and left notes saying “I murder so that I may come back” and “Fuck off. We murder. Watch out…” I started ranting to Patty about the two great books written about Mary Bell—The Case of Mary Bell (1972), which ended after her manslaughter conviction and life imprisonment sentence, and Cries Unheard (1998), which picks up after Mary was released from custody after serving twelve years. Both books are by the brilliant Gitta Sereny (who also expertly deconstructs Nazis in other books), and I am her full-time groupie, even though we have never met. Ms. Sereny always argued the exact opposite of the “bad seed” theory when the tabloid press wrote about Mary Bell. But what caused a real uproar was the fact that once Mary Bell was free and of legal age, she had a little girl of her own. And when Ms. Sereny’s latest and very fair book about the case was released, detailing Mary’s childhood abuse, which had not come out at the initial trial, the U.K. tabloids went into full attack mode. Mary Bell’s then fourteen-year-old daughter didn’t know her mother was the infamous child killer Mary Bell, and one can only imagine that frantic mother-daughter chat while journalists and news teams were banging on their front door. How exciting! My mother never told me any secrets about her past, much less involved me in any hysterical media event. Patty McCormack heard my whole tale of Mary Bell, but I doubt she ran home and ordered the books. If you once were Rhoda Penmark, I guess you’ve had enough of this type of thing.

  Patty will stick up for Rhoda and protect her memory, but she’s not loony about it the way I am. She thinks the many campy drag queen versions of The Bad Seed that have popped up on the West Coast are funny. I don’t. I think the creators should be in movie prison. The Bad Seed isn’t camp; it’s terrific. Patty McCormack didn’t save any props or costumes from the movie (not even the penmanship medal she killed for, her amazing dress, or those great sunglasses she wore), because no one had any idea the movie was destined to become a classic. I have copies of the original handwritten notes of William March, the author upon whose novel the play and the movie are based, which a wonderful fan sent me from the Special Collections Library of the University of Alabama, but Patty McCormack has no Bad Seed poster on her wall in her apartment. I lived with one in my living room for decades. For Patty, The Bad Seed was a role; for me, it was a lifestyle.

  With a career as long as Johnny Mathis’s (she’s acted with everyone from Orson Welles to Fabian, been in movies as varied as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Mini-Skirt Mob, sung in a rock band and been in many television series, from I Remember Mama to The Sopranos), Patty has learned to be gracious and pretend to care about the same old questions from the same old fans idealizing a character she played fifty years ago. Johnny Mathis can still sing his greatest hits amazingly, but Patty can’t exactly play Rhoda again.

  Is there one possible undiscovered detail about being the bad seed that I can drag out of her? Is there one second of the film that hasn’t been analyzed or deconstructed? I thought I was the only one who had noticed that bad “tooth continuity” in The Bad Seed. At some time during production of the movie, Patty had lost a baby tooth on the side of her mouth, and when they cut back and forth between the interior and exterior of the apartment building when Rhoda threatens Le
roy the janitor, her tooth disappears and reappears. But no; Charles Busch (another Rhoda cultist) brings it up on the commentary track of The Bad Seed DVD when he interviews Patty. We both knew about that missing tooth (I even did an art piece about it), but Patty has no memory of it. Okay, how about her childhood obsession with the serial bank robber Willie Sutton, “the gentleman bandit” who wore a “trademark pencil-thin moustache”(!). “Oh, yes,” she remembers enthusiastically, “he was big news. I drew newspapers about him when I was eight or nine years old.” God! The Bad Seed’s Willie Sutton artwork! There’s a piece of memorabilia for the history books. But I can’t be sure this is a real scoop. Patty can’t remember if she ever talked to a journalist about this, but adds, “I can’t really imagine that I’d volunteer that information to just anybody.”

  Suddenly Patty does remember something “new,” something that hasn’t ever come out about her in all the years of graciously grinning and bearing yet another Bad Seed interview. “I once took a college ethics class with Susan Atkins.” WHAT?! The Bad Seed and the Manson Family in one classroom?!? “Yes,” Patty reminisces, “I went back to college and took a class through Antioch College when they offered a psychology course in ethics and it met in prison, something about mixing together non-inmates with inmates.” No one in the class, including the teacher, knew she was the Bad Seed but “everyone knew who Susan was. It was fun.” “Fun”? It was crime showbiz history. Scary? Nothing could top the fact that Patty McCormack played Pat Nixon in Ron Howard’s Oscar-nominated film Frost/Nixon. Now that’s scary. She was wonderful in it, too.