by John Waters
Is it agony for all performers to have a “greatest hit”? Johnny Mathis has hundreds. I wish I had one. Even if it is the only one you ever had, like another singing role model, Bobby “Boris” Pickett. He crooned his Halloween novelty record, “The Monster Mash,” for thirty-eight years without complaining and hit the Billboard Top 100 chart three separate times with the song he cowrote in a half hour and recorded in one take in 1962. Bobby sang the question that four generations have never been able to answer: “Whatever happened to the Transylvania Twist?” Mr. Pickett made me no longer care about the careers of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, whose voices he totally appropriated. I only cared about the man who’s been called “the Guy Lombardo of Halloween”—Mr. Bobby “Boris” Pickett himself.
Yes, Bobby “did the Mash.” I “did the Mash,” too, and many nights in the privacy of my own home I danced alone, or with real monsters I had brought home from my favorite redneck bars, and we blurted out, “It was a graveyard smash!” while sniffing poppers. I could play that song ten times in a row and never get sick of it. I’ve been listening to “The Monster Mash” forever and it still puts me in a good mood.
What would it be like to actually be Bobby “Boris” Pickett? To get up every day and know that you, and you alone, were “The Monster Mash”? Wouldn’t it be easier than being Johnny Mathis on a bad day or me on a good one? To just concentrate on one thing—what freedom! Not having to “THIMK” (as the office sign parodying the IBM slogan “THINK” used to read in the late 1950s)? Not being forced to come up with new ideas every fucking month to keep your career new and reinvented? To just stop and do the same ridiculous and sublime song over and over again for eternity?
Some days when I’m touring colleges or rock-and-roll clubs with my spoken-word acts I feel like I have become Bobby “Boris” Pickett. Reading his obituaries, I get paranoid and wonder if I will end up like him, still “in demand” at Halloween and continuing to perform “The Monster Mash” at “small venues” until six months before he died. Think of that bittersweet last performance. It could happen in my career, but never in Johnny Mathis’s. A psychiatrist once told me early in treatment, “Stop trying to make me like you,” and what a sobering and welcome smack in the face that statement was. Yet somehow, every day of my life is still a campaign for popularity, or better yet, a crowded funeral. Johnny Mathis would never admit it, but at this point in show business he is basically beyond caring what you think of his act. Unlike Bobby “Boris” Pickett or myself, Johnny Mathis is incapable of trying too hard: the very definition of failure itself.
Backstage after his Christmas concert, Johnny sits alone in his dressing room until eventually a lone assistant comes in to check about packing up. All dressing rooms are basically the same, no matter how fancy or low-rent punk rock. A generic food spread, enough bottled water to quench the thirst of a small town in the desert, and the silent adrenaline drain of finishing your act. I’ve been in them. So has Bobby “Boris” Pickett. And so has Johnny Mathis. But he is as lovely and cheerful and seemingly unguarded as he was the day I visited his house. My friend Pat Moran, a rabid Johnny Mathis fan if there ever was one, had accompanied me to the show and later told me, “Meeting Johnny Mathis was as much fun as going with you to the Cannes Film Festival premieres of your movies,” which even I thought might be pushing it. Pat was treated like royalty by Johnny and I struggled to think if there ever was any real dirt about Johnny Mathis. Remembering a favorite “scandal,” which I did have the nerve to bring up to him when we first met, I had mentioned that I had read Johnny was in rehab for “champagne abuse.” Talk about a perfect album concept! Bubbly—Johnny Mathis Live from Rehab. He didn’t really comment then when I suggested the title, but I did see him chuckle.
For me, there is some “shock value” in the Johnny Mathis story. He’s a Republican. A big one. Unashamed. I knew it but sort of hoped it wasn’t true. When I snooped around Johnny’s living room as he took an important phone call in the den, I saw nearby a proudly displayed photo of Johnny Mathis and President George H. W. Bush. I was…well, as the dialogue goes in one of my old films, “shocked silly but said nothing.” Nixon’s hardback book Six Crises is proudly displayed, too, and while I didn’t open it, I’m sure it’s personally dedicated and signed. I’ve also read that Nancy Reagan comes over and Johnny plays the piano and they sing together.
I don’t mention any of this and neither does he. I’m always shocked when anyone says he or she is a Republican, but I’ve learned to not run screaming from the room. Imagine my surprise when I discovered one of my longtime assistants (and she does a great job of spreading my filth) is a Republican! And she was frontally nude in my last movie!! Tab Hunter is a Republican, too, and I remember how startled I was when he told me he was for Reagan when we were shooting Polyester. The same day he did a love scene with Divine! Members of my immediate family have certainly voted Republican, too. But not me: I’m a bleeding-heart liberal, a onetime Yippie sympathizer and full-time Weatherman hag. I’m one of the few who voted for Obama because he was a friend of Bill Ayers.
That doesn’t mean I don’t support the U.S. troops. When a major in the army wrote to me in 2004 and asked me to send a “care package” of swag from my films to our boys fighting in Iraq, I was stupefied at first and then patriotic. “I feel like Bob Hope,” I told him after I gathered together Divine T-shirts, film posters, insane Christmas decorations I had designed, sound tracks, books, and DVDs of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, and sent them off to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as I had been instructed to do. Imagine my happiness and delight when the major wrote to tell me the soldiers had received my package: “Right now, you are more popular in Iraq than Bob Hope. With the average age of a soldier being nineteen, they don’t even know who Bob Hope is. They love the stuff you sent…When I was in Iraq all I got was baby wipes and Bibles…I understand the [plastic] dead cockroach in the Christmas ornament and the [ballpoint] pen with your picture in it were particular items they were fighting over.” The major also got a call telling him “that when soldiers were watching one of John’s movies, it was interrupted by a mortar attack.” I was so moved I didn’t know what to say. If I knew all the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I’d sing it all by myself. And mean it.
Who’s the real extremist, Johnny Mathis or myself? I think of that great country-western hymn “If Jesus Came to Your House (I Wonder What You’d Do).” The follow-up lyrics are what make the song so unintentionally bizarre: “But when you saw him coming, would you meet him at the door?” or would you “hide some magazines and put the Bible where they’d been?” Suppose Johnny Mathis were snooping around my house; what would he see? Would he be appalled at the crucifix cigarette lighter on my living room coffee table? The brass knuckles I keep beside my bed just in case? The leather-bound Baader-Meinhof Gang wanted-poster kit, carried by all German police at the height of these hippie radicals’ reign of terror, that I show proudly to all my visitors? Would he gasp at the Alberto García Alix photo Nacho y Michelle that hangs blatantly on the wall of my top floor? Would he understand the happiness of Michelle as she wraps her legs around her head, totally nude, showing her absolutely perfect vagina and asshole as Nacho, also nude except for a pair of white gym socks, holds her legs in porn arrogance and dignity? Johnny should; I mean, I tried with all my might when Mr. Mathis proudly showed me some familiar-looking primitive paintings framed and displayed in his house that I assumed were by Grandma Moses. “No,” he explained, unembarrassed, “they’re copies…an antiques dealer arranged it.” Shocked silly again, I did say something. “Isn’t that illegal?” I stammered. “No,” he answered casually and with a complete lack of guilt, just the way I would if Johnny had questioned why I had the artist Gregory Green install a full site-specific bomb-room art project on the top floor of my house. Mine’s not illegal either, even though the pipe bombs and book bombs the fictitious mad bomber is planning on using to blow up Camden Yards, the beloved sports stadium in Baltimor
e, contain all the legal ingredients he’d need to do it except gunpowder.
Would the hideous books I keep displayed around my house stop Johnny in his tracks the way Nixon’s did mine? Jackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the Jackal isn’t inscribed to me by the subject, but how I wish it were! Maybe I could write Carlos’s recent jailhouse wife, the fifty-two-year-old Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, a wealthy left-wing lawyer who defended him in court and then married him in jail in 2001 after he was sentenced to life imprisonment for hijacking and other terrorist attacks in the seventies and eighties. If I chatted her up, do you think she might sneak my copy of the book inside prison and get him to autograph it? Would the noncollectible paperbacks I Am a Teenage Dope Addict, I Was a Negro Playboy Bunny, Freak—Inside the Twisted World of Michael Jackson, or Roughhouse Rimmer, which I have on my bedroom bookshelves, make Johnny Mathis run for the door? Or worse yet, the textbook a friend of mine gave me for Christmas that I keep in my guest bedroom, Surgery of the Anus, Rectum and Colon? I mean, who knows if Johnny would get the joke? I’m certainly accepting of his politics, so wouldn’t he do the same for me? I admit I don’t have any pictures of me with a president, but I do have a hideous set of wooden Bin Laden “nesting dolls” that a friend gave me after he had the nerve to smuggle them through U.S. Customs from Budapest not long after 9/11. When I’m feeling especially confrontational, I put them out to horrify myself (yes, you, too, can be your own role model). I imagine Johnny Mathis hates Bin Laden just as much as I do, but could Johnny agree Bin Laden had a better speechwriter than Bush? “Axis of Evil”? Come on. “A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain” is much more powerful propaganda. Poetic, even. And maybe no First Ladies have ever come over to my house to sing, but Patricia Hearst (my onetime demigoddess and now good friend) has been here countless times, and we once plotted her upcoming courtroom outfits and change of hair color when she was subpoenaed to be a witness against the S.L.A. in yet another bank robbery–related case. In my world, that’s just as impressive.
I hate to think about it—what will happen when Johnny Mathis and I die? Who will guard my humble tawdry belongings? Will Johnny have to worry about the posthumous exploitation of his signature songs? Will his estate deny the commercial use of his hits the way Johnny Cash’s did when Preparation H tried to license “Ring of Fire” for a hemorrhoid commercial? Or will they exploit his publishing copyright the way Elvis’s heirs did when they allowed “Viva Las Vegas” to be resung as “Viva Viagra” for a TV commercial?
As far as I know, Johnny Mathis is single. Me, too. We’ve had great lives as single men. When I went to Elton John’s sixtieth birthday party alone, I got seated right next to Yoko Ono! At another event—Joan Kennedy. Just think where they’d put Johnny in the VIP seating chart if he would ever show up stag at these kinds of events. Next to whom? Madame Chiang Kai-shek? I know she recently died at the age of 106 years and I never met her, but there’s a conservative I’m fascinated by. She used to live with a huge staff in a giant apartment in the same building as a wonderful New York friend of mine, and every time I’d visit, I’d try to get the doormen to gossip (“Does Madame Chiang Kai-shek order takeout pu-pu platters?”), but they’d never talk.
Bobby “Boris” Pickett succumbed to leukemia in 2007 with his daughter by his side, but who will surround us single men on our deathbeds? I’ve long accepted the fact that unless some hideous disease gets me first and I have to make forced small talk with dedicated caregivers, I will die alone. And that’s fine as long as I have my moustache drawn on straight. Hopefully it will be a quick death. Maybe onstage. I already have my final destination—the last piece of real estate—a condo burial spot I’ve picked out in the same graveyard as Divine’s in Towson, Maryland. Pat Moran and her husband, Chuck Yeaton, bought plots right next to me, and Mink Stole and my great longtime friend the film critic Dennis Dermody are nearby. I’m trying to talk Mary Vivian Pearce and other comrades into joining us while there’s still room. Cult Graveyard! Just like the People’s Temple final resting spot in California. Come on down!
But how about Johnny Mathis: how does he want to go? Courageously private and elegantly unaccompanied, as I imagine? Alone but not lonely, like me? I guess it would have been “too familiar” to ask. I only met him twice.
T H E K I N D N E S S OF
S T R A N G E R S
Tennessee Williams saved my life. As a twelve-year-old boy in suburban Baltimore, I would look up his name in the card catalog at the library, and it would read “See Librarian.” I wanted these “See Librarian” books—and I wanted them now—but in the late fifties (and sadly even today), there was no way that a warped adolescent like myself could get his hands on one. I soon figured out that the “See Librarian” books were on a special shelf behind the counter, so when the kindly librarian was helping the “normal” kids with their book reports, I snuck behind the checkout desk and stole the first book I wanted on my own. One Arm, read the forbidden cover—a short-story collection by Tennessee Williams that I later found out had been only available in an expensive limited edition, sold under the counter in “special” bookshops before New Directions released the hardback version in 1954. And now it was mine.
Of course, I knew who Tennessee Williams was. He was a bad man because the nuns in Catholic Sunday school had told us we’d go to hell if we saw that movie he wrote, Baby Doll—the one with the great ad campaign, with Carroll Baker in the crib sucking her thumb, that made Cardinal Spellman have a nationwide hissy fit. I cut out that ad from The Baltimore Sun countless times and pasted it in my secret scrapbook. Hoping to one day own a dirty movie theater, I planned to show Baby Doll for the rest of my life, attracting the wrath of the Pope and causing a scandal in my parents’ neighborhood.
Yes, Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend. I yearned for a bad influence and Tennessee was one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing, and dangerously funny. I didn’t quite “get” “Desire and the Black Masseur” when I read it in One Arm, but I hoped I would one day. The thing I did know after finishing the book was that I didn’t have to listen to the lies the teachers told us about society’s rules. I didn’t have to worry about fitting in with a crowd I didn’t want to hang out with in the first place. No, there was another world that Tennessee Williams knew about, a universe filled with special people who didn’t want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.
Years later, Tennessee Williams saved my life again. The first time I went to a gay bar I was seventeen years old. It was called the Hut and it was in Washington, D.C. Some referred to it as the “Chicken Hut” and it was filled with early-1960s gay men in fluffy sweaters who cruised one another by calling table-to-table on phones provided by the bar. “I may be queer but I ain’t this,” I remember thinking. Still reading everything Tennessee Williams wrote, I knew he would understand my dilemma. Tennessee never seemed to fit the gay stereotype even then, and sexual ambiguity and turmoil were always made appealing and exciting in his work. “My type doesn’t know who I am,” he stated according to legend, and even if the sex lives of his characters weren’t always healthy, they certainly seemed hearty. Tennessee Williams wasn’t a gay cliché, so I had the confidence to try to not be one myself. Gay was not enough.
It was a good start, however. “I was late coming out but when I did it was with one hell of a bang,” Tennessee wrote in 1972 in Memoirs, the same year my film Pink Flamingos was world-premiering in Baltimore. While I was just getting my first national notoriety, Tennessee was struggling to finish the final version of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore and horrifying theater purists by appearing in his new play Small Craft Warnings onstage and answering questions from the off-Broadway audience afterward to keep the show running. I never once thought this was unbecoming behavior on my hero’s part and tried to follow his example by introducing, in person, my star Divine at midnight screenings of our filth epic. “I never had any c
hoice but to be a writer,” Tennessee remembered at the time, and he remained my patron saint. I followed his career like a hawk.
Maybe I like “bad” Tennessee Williams just as much as “good.” Naturally his better-known classic plays are important to me but I must confess I’m drawn more to his supposedly “second-rate” work. Sorry, I also like Alvin and the Chipmunks better than the Beatles, Jayne Mansfield more than Marilyn Monroe, and, for me, the Three Stooges are way funnier than Charlie Chaplin. And while I knew there really was a streetcar that ran for years in New Orleans toward the neighborhood of Desire and that destination was printed above the exterior front windshield, I get more of a kick today riding the city bus named Desire (there really is one!) now that the streetcar itself has been retired.
In 2006 a boxed set of Tennessee Williams DVDs was released with all his best-reviewed movie titles: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Night of the Iguana, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, but I want the “bad” Tennessee Williams boxed set. Boom! (the greatest failed art film ever), directed by Joseph Losey and starring Elizabeth Taylor as Sissy Goforth, the richest woman in the world, and Richard Burton as “the Angel of Death”; Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (the film version of The Seven Descents of Myrtle); This Property Is Condemned with Natalie Wood; even Noir et Blanc, the 1986 Claire Devers film version of “Desire and the Black Masseur.” “Bad” Tennessee Williams is better than most of the “good” contemporaries of Tennessee.
Was Tennessee Williams nuts to reveal everything about his personal life as he got older, or was he just high? Would his longtime agent, Audrey Wood (with whom he sadly broke in 1971), have put her foot down and stopped him from baring his soul in print if she had still been in charge of his career? “Since 1955 I have written usually under artificial stimulants,” Tennessee admits in Memoirs, before adding, “aside from the true stimulant of my deep-rooted need to write.” Did Tennessee ever really get over the 1960s, which he called “my stoned age”? “To know me is not to love me,” he concedes, remembering the “seven year depression” he went into after the death by lung cancer of his longtime boyfriend, Frank Merlo. “I’m about to fall down,” Tennessee announced to whoever was present in those years, “and almost nobody, nobody ever caught me.”