by John Waters
When Tennessee suddenly is levelheaded, it can come as a surprise. “I have never doubted the existence of God,” he writes soberly before later confessing a “disbelief in an after-existence.” His guarded optimism always seems to save the day. “Mornings, I love you so much,” he enthuses, celebrating “their triumph over night.” Self-pity? Never. “I’ve had a wonderful and terrible life and wouldn’t cry for myself: would you?” Hardly.
“Is it possible to be a dirty old man in your middle thirties?” Tennessee wonders, remembering his very active sex life—a kind of sex life that we are much more used to reading about in memoirs today than we were then. “Baby, this one’s for you,” he tells himself whenever Mr. Right Now appears, but he seems to be realistic about safe sex with strangers even before the onslaught of AIDS, recommending that “penetration be avoided” with hustlers “as they are most probably all infected with clap in their ass.” He may be the only Pulitzer Prize winner to write about A200, a product used to rid your body hair of crab lice. He has standards, too. “The way I feel tonight I could fuck a snake,” a young sailor confides to Tennessee one night in a gay bar, “and I am proud to say that I told him to go snake-hunting,” Tennessee writes.
Tennessee falls in love a lot, too. “I have a funny heart. Sometimes it thrives on punishment,” he concedes. What other memoir, besides his, has “loneliness” listed in the index? He also loved Provincetown just as much as I do. Not only did he meet two of his best boyfriends there (and Tallulah Bankhead), he wrote the line “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” while holed up in a cabin before the summer season began. I hitchhiked to Provincetown in 1964 just because somebody told me, “It’s a weird place,” and God, were they right. A very gay place, too, but a different kind of gay. “I may be queer, but I am this,” I remember thinking. I’ve gone back to Provincetown for forty-six summers and every time I pass Captain Jack’s Wharf or the “little bar” at the A-House, two places Tennessee got lucky in love, I mentally genuflect in respect.
Tennessee knew how to have fun with fame, too, and it seems he met many of my past role models. Jean Marais, James Purdy, Yukio Mishima. So what if Jean-Paul Sartre once stood Tennessee up—I bet Sartre was a bum date anyway. Tennessee helped William Inge, the great playwright who lived in Tennessee’s shadow, through alcoholism (the blind leading the blind?) and tried to understand the “folie de grandeur” of his best friend Lady Maria St. Just, one of the most difficult women who ever lived. Even Truman Capote was written about sympathetically by Tennessee. But unlike Truman, Tennessee never took the upper class seriously. He hung around with street queens in New Orleans and prostitutes in Key West, and later in life, the Warhol superstar Candy Darling became a best friend. He isolated himself far away from New York and Los Angeles to write, and whenever he panicked, travel seemed to be the answer. “My place in society,” Tennessee remembers, “then and possibly always since, has been bohemia.”
Suppose Tennessee Williams had lived? What if he hadn’t choked on that prescription drug bottle cap that he supposedly used as a launching pad for his meds? Would he have had a second wind in his career like Edward Albee? Or would he have despaired and crumbled further when the AIDS epidemic hit and wiped out many of his new younger friends? Surely he would be appalled at the end of “trade” as he knew it, but would he be like some of the older gay men I see in onetime hustler bars in Baltimore now, who wait for these tough guys even knowing they will never come? Would Tennessee have teamed up with Paul Morrissey? “I would like him to make a film of one of my short stories,” Tennessee had written, and who knows—maybe these two mavericks could have reinvented each other as a pair in the same way Douglas Sirk and Fassbinder did. Most important, could Tennessee have ever really hit “bottom” and gotten sober once and for all? On the wagon, would he have been able to continue to think up the best titles in the history of theater the way he always had? Even with all the substance abuse, Tennessee seemed to age well and remained cheerfully handsome, but if he had reached his late seventies, would he have ruined it all by getting a face-lift? Could anyone have saved Tennessee? Critics? Fans? Tricks? We, his readers? One thing is for sure: flattery would have gotten us nowhere. “When people have spoken to me of ‘genius,’” he writes with a wink, “I have felt an inside pocket to make sure my wallet’s still there.”
I never met Tennessee Williams, but I saw him once at the Pier House restaurant in Key West, surrounded by admirers, looking a little woozy, and decided maybe this wasn’t the time for us to be introduced. Nobody has to meet Tennessee Williams; all you have to do is reread his work. Listening to what he has to say could save your life, too.
L E S L I E
I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969 cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would like her as much as I do. She was one of those notorious “Manson girls” who shaved their heads, carved X’s in their foreheads, and laughed, joked, and sang their way through the courthouse straight to death row without the slightest trace of remorse forty years ago. Leslie is hardly a Manson girl today. Sixty years old, she looks back from prison on her involvement in the LaBianca murders (the night after the Tate massacre) in utter horror, shame, and guilt and takes full responsibility for her part in the crimes. I think it’s time to parole her.
I am guilty, too. Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims’ families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case. I became obsessed by the Sharon Tate murders from the day I read about them on the front page of The New York Times in 1969 as I worked behind the counter of the Provincetown Bookshop. Later, when the cops finally caught the hippie killers and I actually saw their photos (ARREST WEIRDO IN TATE MURDERS, screamed the New York Daily News headline), I almost went into cardiac arrest. God! The Manson Family looked just like my friends at the time! Charles “Tex” Watson, a deranged but handsome preppy “head” who reminded me of Jimmy, the frat-boy-gone-bad pot dealer I had the hots for in Catholic high school, the guy who sold me my first joint. There was Susan Atkins, aka “Sadie Mae Glutz,” devil go-go girl, with an LSD sense of humor just like Mink Stole’s sister Mary (nickname: “Sick”), whom I lived with at the time in Provincetown, in a tree-fort commune. And look at Patricia Krenwinkel, aka “Katie,” a flower-child earth mother just like Flo-Ann, who squatted with us that wonderful summer on Cape Cod. And, of course, my favorite, Leslie Van Houten, aka “Lulu,” “the pretty one.” The homecoming princess from suburbia who gave up her title for acid. The all-American girl who went beyond insanity to unhinged criminal glamour just like Mona, my last girlfriend, who took LSD and shoplifted and starred in my underground movies all under my influence. Until, that is, the day she caught me in bed with a man (who looked kind of like Steve “Clem” Grogan, another Manson fanatic) and dumped the contents of an entire garbage can on us as we lay sleeping.
The Manson Family members were the hippies all our parents were scared we’d turn into if we didn’t stop taking drugs. The “slippies,” as Manson later called his followers, the insane ones who didn’t understand the humor in Yippie Abbie Hoffman’s fiery speeches on his college lecture tours when he told the stoned, revolutionary-for-the-hell-of-it students to “kill their parents.” Yes, Charlie’s posse were the real anarchists who went beyond the radical Students for a Democratic Society’s call to “Bring the War Home.” Beyond blowing up their parents’ townhouses, draft boards, even the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Sure, my friends went to riots every weekend in different cities in the sixties to get laid or get high, just like kids went to “raves” decades later. But, God, this was a cultural war, not a real one, and the survivors of this time now realize we were in a “play” revolution, no matter what we spouted. But the Manson Family! Yikes! Here was the real thing—“punk” a decade too
early. Dare I say it? Yes, the filthiest people alive.
Even before the Manson Family had been caught, “the Dreamlanders,” my gang of actors, took credit for the Tate/LaBianca crimes in a $5,000-budgeted movie entitled Multiple Maniacs, which I wrote, directed, and shot in Baltimore in the fall of 1969. Divine’s character tortures David Lochary’s with knowledge of the murders. “How about Sharon Tate?” she threatens. “How about THAT?!” “I told you never to mention that again!” David pleads, but Divine won’t let it go. “Had yourself a real ball that night, didn’t you?!” she chortles. “Who’s Sharon Tate?” Divine’s dim-witted but studly teenage bodyguard, Ricky, asks. “It doesn’t matter, darling,” Divine coos lecherously, dismissing his nosiness; “go fix yourself a sandwich.”
Later, after Manson was arrested, I drove across the country for the first time in my life to Los Angeles for the California premiere of Multiple Maniacs, and the next day began attending the insane LSD media-circus Manson trial, which I’ve never really gotten over. After Manson and the three girls were convicted of the Tate/LaBianca murders and sentenced to death, my rabid following of the subsequent but much lesser known Manson-related trials never ceased. I needed to know more. How had these kids, from backgrounds so similar to mine, committed in real life the awful crimes against peace and love that we were acting out for comedy in our films?
In late 1971, still free, second-tier Manson Family members robbed the Western Surplus store in the suburbs of Los Angeles and stole fourteen guns (supposedly to break Manson out of jail), and a shoot-out with the police occurred. All six robbers were arrested. At their trial, many members of Manson royalty, now awaiting the promised Helter Skelter end of the world from death row, were called as witnesses by the robber defendants so they could have a courtroom reunion of sorts. The nervous trial judge called the proceedings “the biggest collection of murderers in Los Angeles County at one time.” There were only two court spectators the day I went to a pretrial hearing: myself and a lower-echelon Manson groupie with a shaved head and a fresh X carved in her forehead who was furiously writing what looked like a thirty-page letter to one of her “brothers.” When about fifteen of the Manson Family were brought into court, handcuffed and chained together, women on one side and men on the other, many with their heads shaved, the atmosphere was electric with twisted evil beauty. Not having seen one another in about a year, the cultists started chanting, jerkily gesturing, and speaking to one another in a nonsensical language that only the Family could understand. Sexy, scary, brain-dead, and dangerous, this gang of hippie lunatics gave new meaning to folie à famille, group madness and insanity that lasts as long as the same people are together and united. It was an amazing thing to see in person. Heavily influenced, and actually jealous of their notoriety, I went back to Baltimore and made Pink Flamingos, which I wrote, directed, and dedicated to the Manson girls, “Sadie, Katie and Les.”
Then I went deeper into the Manson flame and started visiting Charles “Tex” Watson in prison. “What on earth were you thinking?” you may wonder, and today it is a question I have to ask myself. In Los Angeles I had met his post-conviction girlfriend, Lu, a German hippie girl with an obvious off-kilter sensibility who had come to America speaking little English and accidentally met some of the still-free Manson girls as the initial trial was taking place. “God, kids sure are wild in the United States,” she told me she remembered thinking, not understanding how different these hippies were from the American “love-children” she had read about back in Munich and hoped to hook up with when she came to our shores. But Lu would only go so far. Refusing the demands to shave her skull, she broke away from the unincarcerated B-list Family members to the relative safety of a “jailhouse” love affair with Tex, a convicted killer who was still clearly out of his mind and had almost no chance of ever being paroled.
Charles “Tex” Watson was perhaps Manson’s best piece of work; a high school football star who turned hippie and came to L.A. like thousands of other kids to find sixties grooviness. Instead he met Manson and was turned into a killer zombie in just ten LSD-and-belladonna-drenched months. Tex personally stabbed or shot all nine Tate/LaBianca victims. Lu and I would hitchhike to the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo from either L.A or San Francisco to visit him and I wrote about our times, rather inappropriately and with little insight, in my book Shock Value.
At that time, Charles Watson was no longer Tex, but he was definitely still coming out of his Manson indoctrination. You could tell by the toy wooden helicopter he made me in jail, decorated with words like “Game is Blame,” “Tweak,” and “Fear.” I used it in the credits of my next movie, Female Trouble, a fictitious biopic of a woman who is brainwashed into believing “crime is beauty.” The film was also dedicated to Charles “Tex” Watson, and a few critics—quite correctly, I guess—were appalled by my flippant disregard for the terrible aftermath of these crimes. Maybe I had taken too much acid myself? How could these villainous murders seem so abstractly “transgressive” to me? Could a movie ever be as influential as these monstrous crimes?
Was Manson’s dress rehearsal for homicide, known as “creepy crawling,” some kind of humorous terrorism that might have been fun? Breaking silently into the homes of middle-class “pigs” with your friends while you are tripping on LSD and gathering around the sleeping residents in their beds, not to harm them but to watch them sleep (the way Warhol did in that movie), and “experiencing the fear”? It does sound like it could have been a mind-bending adventure. When the Mansonites went further and moved the furniture around before they left, just to fuck with the waking homeowners’ perception of reality, was this beautiful or evil? Could the Manson Family’s actions also be some kind of freakish “art”?
When Charles Watson left behind his Tex persona for good, found Jesus Christ, and became saved, he and Lu broke up, and I slowly drifted away from the visiting room. While I understood his need to find comfort and forgiveness, I wasn’t a born-again believer and I sometimes made insanely sacrilegious movies, so we now had little in common. He then got married to a fellow Christian on the outside, started a ministry, and through conjugal visits fathered three children (who have turned out fine), much to the horror of Sharon Tate’s family and the citizens of California. Lu went back to Germany and had an un-Manson child of her own, and we stayed in touch right up to her sad death from emphysema a few years ago. I remember once staying in some fancy hotel in Munich on a studio promotional tour for Cry-Baby, where I invited Lu over for a visit, not having seen her in person for many years. The concierge called up to my room and said, “We’re not sure if it’s a man or a woman, but there’s somebody here who claims you told them to come over and we’re sure it’s a mistake.” “Is her name Lu?” I asked. “Well…yes,” he stammered. “Send her up!” I bellowed. Lu had cut off most of her hair (I’m not sure whether for politics or fashion) and was now obsessed with Sarajevo refugees, and I loved hearing her rant about jumping out of military helicopters (in her mind?) to spread the word for her new cause. Charles Watson is, to no one’s surprise, still in prison, and once or twice a year we correspond politely and he always sends kind words.
In 1985, ten years or so after Charles Watson and I had last seen each other, I was doing some journalistic pieces for Rolling Stone and they asked me to interview Manson. I had little curiosity about a man who had reminded me of someone you’d move away from in a bar in Baltimore, and was still much more interested in the followers who had come to their senses and were now definitely ex-followers. Leslie Van Houten always seemed the one who could have somehow ended up making movies with us instead of running with the killer dune-buggy crowd. She was pretty, out of her mind, rebellious, with fashion daring, a good haircut, and a taste for LSD—just like the girls in my movies. Instead of being a “good soldier” for Charlie and participating in the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, which she certainly believed was the right thing to do at the time, I wish she had been with us in Baltimore on lo
cation for Pink Flamingos the day Divine ate dog shit for real (our own cultural Tate/LaBianca). Maybe she would have enjoyed cinematic antisocial glee and movie anarchy just as much as a misguided race war entitled Helter Skelter and designed by a criminal megalomaniac who believed the Beatles were speaking directly to him. If Leslie had met me instead of Charlie, could she have gone to the Cannes Film Festival instead of the California Institute for Women? Actually, I think if Leslie hadn’t met either of us she might have ended up as a studio executive in the movie business in Los Angeles. A good one, too.
So I pleaded with Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, to let me interview Leslie, “the only one who has a chance of ever getting out,” the one I could tell from press reports had broken from Manson’s control and was beginning to see that the apocalyptical scenario Manson had preached was complete bullshit. What a painful, horrible realization that must have been!
In 1972, Leslie’s death sentence (and those of her codefendants) had been abolished by the California State Supreme Court and, like that of all death-penalty prisoners at the time, her sentence had been changed to life in prison. Not life without parole. The two other female death-penalty cases at the time besides the three Manson girls, also murderesses with very serious cases, were paroled eight or nine years later with little fanfare or outrage.