Role Models

by John Waters

  Originally published in 1943 to confusion (“To attempt to unravel the plot…would be to risk, I feel sure, one’s own sanity,” the New York Times reviewer sputtered) and then trapped in out-of-print limbo for years, this peculiar piece of fiction’s street cred never quite faded. “Few literary reputations are as glamorous as the underground one she [Bowles] has enjoyed since her novel…was published,” remembered another New York Times critic on the book’s revival. “The extreme rarity of the book once it went out of print,” he continued, “has augmented its legend. When a London publisher wanted to reprint it…even Mrs. Bowles was unable to supply him with a copy.” For years and years I wanted to own the first edition of this hardback and I finally got it. Sometimes when I want to feel smarter, I sneak up on this volume on my bookshelf and kiss it.

  Two Serious Ladies is the parallel tale of a pair of ferociously eccentric women who search for crackpot adventures and some sort of cockeyed inner peace. Their unfathomable sexual attractions are completely wrongheaded. Mrs. Copperfield goes on a dreaded vacation with her husband and wanders away and falls in love for no apparent reason with a female hooker named Pacifica, who certainly does not return the feelings but halfheartedly plays along for the money. “You can’t imagine how I dread leaving you,” Mrs. Copperfield tells her startled new friend just after meeting her. “I honestly don’t know how I’ll be able to stand it…I’m so terrified you might simply vanish.” “She wants to stop thinking,” says Pacifica, the whore, as she struggles to explain Mrs. Copperfield to a male customer. When Mrs. Copperfield suddenly throws back her head and starts to bellow a song, the john asks politely, “Did you ever sing in a club?” She answers happily, “Actually I didn’t. But when I was in the mood, I used to sing very loudly in a restaurant and attract a good bit of attention.”

  When the Copperfields’ friend the wealthy widow Mrs. Goering gives up her family estate to move into a run-down house in the country, with a bunch of hangers-on in order to find her “little idea of salvation,” she realizes even this impulsive action is not enough. So she decides to go on a little adventure to explore the seamy nightlife of towns both near and far. But Mrs. Goering seems to bring out unexpected hostility in other people. When she tries to make small talk to a woman on a train, this stranger reacts with unexpected anger. “I won’t stand for this another moment,” she yells. “I have enough real grief in my life without having to encounter lunatics.” Even the conductor joins in the furious scolding of Mrs. Goering. “You can’t talk to anyone on this train, unless you know them,” he lectures. “The next time you’re on the train stay in your seat…and tell this to your relatives and your friends.” Unaffected, Mrs. Goering gets off the train and fearlessly enters a crummy bar, where she meets Andy, a motley bum, and immediately falls in love and moves in with him the next night. “You’re some lunatic,” Andy marvels, and he’s right! After living with Andy for just eight days, Mrs. Goering dumps him to run off with a fat businessman named Ben who drives a hearselike car and mistakenly thinks that she is working as a prostitute. Andy moans, “You, as a decent human being, cannot do this to me.” “Well, I’m afraid I can, Andy,” Mrs. Goering replies. “I have my own star to follow, you know.”

  When Mrs. Goering and Mrs. Copperfield reunite at the end of the book in a hotel bar, accompanied by their inappropriate love interests, these serious ladies’ blurting out of rude truths reaches a crescendo of loony reasoning. “I am completely satisfied and contented,” the deluded and cluelessly loyal Mrs. Copperfield announces even as her supposed girlfriend Pacifica runs off to meet a boyfriend she has announced she plans to marry. When the fat businessman Ben totally ignores the smitten Mrs. Goering and leaves her stranded at the hotel, he barely notices her distress. “Hey, you,” he calls out to her as he gets in his car to leave, “I forgot about you. I’ve got to go big distances on some important business. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Good-bye.” Both women respond with astonishing rationales. “True enough, I have gone to pieces,” Mrs. Copperfield explains, “which is the thing I’ve wanted to do for years.” “Certainly I am nearer to being a saint,” Mrs. Goering reflects, and I for one believe her.

  Want to go further in your advanced search for snobbish, elitist, literary wit? Of course you do, but I should warn you, you’ll have to work for it. Try reading any novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. She was English, looked exactly like the illustration on the Old Maid card, never had sex even once, and wrote twenty dark, hilarious, evil little novels between the years 1911 and 1969. Pick any one of them. They’re all pretty much the same. Little actual action, almost no description, and endless pages of hermetically sealed, stylized, sharp, cruel, venomous Edwardian dialogue. “Once you pick up a Compton-Burnett,” Ivy commented about her own books, “it’s hard not to put them down again.”

  Since Darkness and Day has been called “one of her strangest novels,” I guess I’ll recommend you start with this one. She wrote it in 1951, when she was sixty-seven years old. It is her insanely inventive revision of Oedipus Rex. A family returns from exile to reveal the deep secrets of their accidental incestuous marriage only to learn that their innocent truths cause even more complicated shame. Ivy Compton-Burnett was obsessed with the exact meaning of language, and she hated describing anything that wasn’t included in what her characters actually said. She would paint a verbal picture of the people in her books but once and only once (usually when they are first introduced) and you’d better remember it, because often there are thirty pages of dialogue before someone else is identified again. When readers finally reach these tiny islands of rest between speeches, they steady their eyes, take a deep breath, and plunge back into Ivy’s turbulent whirlpool of language. No wonder a critic called Miss Compton-Burnett “a writer’s writer.” Her dialogue constantly deconstructs what her characters actually mean to say. Once you get the rhythm, the sparkle, the subtle nuances of family dominance in her character’s words, you will feel superior to other people and how they struggle to speak in real life.

  Sure, you’ll get lost reading Darkness and Day, maybe hypnotized, probably even bored. But as soon as you realize you aren’t concentrating, not paying enough attention, BANG! A great line will hit you right between the eyes and give you the intellectual shivers. You certainly can’t skim this book. One editor complained after reading long passages of dialogue, and having to turn back page after page to figure out who was saying what to whom, that the author had forgotten to write that one of the characters was speaking on the telephone. Ivy grumpily admitted he was correct and added two words to the text to explain: “He said.”

  The monstrously intelligent and all-knowing children in Darkness and Day speak like no other children in the history of youth. “Do you remember your Uncle?” a relative asks his nieces Rose and Viola. “You used to be younger,” Rose says with steely reasoning. “That is true,” the uncle answers, “and I feel as young as I did.” “People do feel younger than they are,” she quickly responds. “They don’t get used to a new age, before they get to the next one. I feel I am nine, and I have been ten for a week. I am in my eleventh year.” “I don’t often think as much as that,” her sister Viola comments. “I always think,” answers Rose with a vengeance.

  Simple truths are told in the book in bafflingly elegant ways. “You can’t help what happens in your mind,” one character comments. When the family worries about a scandal, a member logically surmises, “People don’t forget things, unless they do.” After the housekeeper catches little Rose reading in bed past her bedtime, she scolds, “Dear, dear! I did not see you hide that book.” “Well if you had, it wouldn’t have been hidden,” Rose answers without flinching. Even something as simple as saying good morning can be tortuously debated. When the children don’t answer, the teacher makes another attempt. “Well, I will try to do better. Good morning to you both again.” “We don’t say things like ‘good morning,’” Rose answers, “we don’t see what use it is.” “Well, perhaps you are not old enough t
o realize that,” the teacher tries to argue. “We don’t want to be old,” Rose answers back, “people don’t really know much more. They only learn to seem to.” When the children have so tortured their teacher that she quits after only two days’ work, she tries to put her frustration into words. “The use of patience is not to encourage people without proper feeling to be intolerable,” she says, but the children are unmoved. As their governess discovers a mean prank the children have pulled involving the teacher’s chair, she tries to discipline them. “The thing that occurs to me, is too bad to be true.” “Then it can’t be true,” Rose answers, ever the debater. “I don’t dare ask about it,” the governess proclaims. “Then there is the end of the matter,” the children declare with intellectual victory.

  And on death, Ms. Compton-Burnett’s writing can be just plain brutal. After the children in Darkness and Day are told of a passing in the family, they are asked to “run upstairs and forget what is sad. Just remember the happy part of it.” “What is the happy part?” wonders Viola. “There is none,” answers Rose. “Why do people talk as if they are glad when someone is dead? I think it must mean there is a little gladness somewhere.”

  Right up to the end of her life, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s irritable, nitpicking, obsessive love of words never ceased. According to the great biography Ivy, by Hilary Spurling, an old friend came to visit Ivy and she woke up from a catnap and snapped, “I’m not tired, I’m sleepy. They are different things. And I’m surprised that you should say tired when you mean sleepy.” That Ivy! She was a real laff-riot. Her last spoken words before death? “Leave me alone.” I have to. I have all twenty of her novels and I’ve read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself.

  L I T T L E R I C H A R D,

  H A P P Y A T L A S T

  Little Richard scared my grandmother in 1957. I was eleven years old, on the way to her house for dinner with my parents, and had just shoplifted a record in the five-and-dime. Mom and Dad hadn’t even noticed. Easy pickings—the 45 rpm of “Lucille” on the Specialty label. My favorite tune. I felt happily defiant in the backseat of the car with the sharp edge of the single jabbing my stomach beneath the sweater. Once inside Mama’s (as we called Stella Whitaker, my mother’s mother), I made a beeline to her out-of-date hi-fi and let it roll. “Lu-CILLE! You won’t do your sister’s will!” came blaring through the house like a pack of rabid dogs. It was as if a Martian had landed. My grandmother stopped in her tracks, face ashen, beyond comprehension. The antiques rattled. My parents looked stunned. In one magical moment, every fear of my white family had been laid bare: an uninvited, screaming, flamboyant black man was in the living room. Even Dr. Spock hadn’t warned them about this.

  Ever since, I have always wished I could somehow climb into Little Richard’s body, hook up his heart and vocal cords to my own, and switch identities with him. Admiring his processed pompadour on my own head in the mirror, feeling his blood pulsating in my veins as I looked down at the twitching pencil-thin moustache over his lip, I’d stomp through the world screaming, “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-wop-bam-boom!” and finally feel happy! Strangers would jump back and shriek, “Good Lord, it’s the Bronze Liberace—Show Business Personified!” while others genuflected to the inventor of rock and roll, and for once, just once, there’d be a real reason to live.

  But are there some role models you should never meet? When Playboy magazine sent me to interview the then fifty-four-year-old Richard Penniman in 1987, it turned into kind of a disaster. At first all went fine. When I called him to try to set up our meeting, Little Richard was receptive but would have none of the gushed compliments. “No, no, no, John,” he cried in mock indignation over my flattery, still sounding as hysterical as his early recordings. “That will get you nowhere!” I knew that His Highness was foaming at the mouth over the recent Jet magazine cover story on him headlined LITTLE RICHARD TELLS WHY HE QUIT BEING A MINISTER. Yes, he’d recently made another Hollywood comeback in the hit film Down and Out in Beverly Hills; had recorded his first all-new-material album in eight years, Lifetime Friend, with a video to match; had made guest appearances on Johnny Carson and Hollywood Squares; had been honored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; and was planning yet another world tour, but he had definitely not left God! “Why would Jet magazine do this?” he wondered, genuinely upset. “Little Richard has never quit the ministry! I believe in God! My music itself is the ministry.” As he complained about telephone calls from his concerned religious constituency all over the country, I tried to calm him down with the information that writers usually don’t do their own headlines and it was possibly an innocent mistake. “Okay, baby,” he purred wearily, agreeing to the time of our interview, “my bodyguards will get you. God bless you.”

  Little Richard, at the time, was living in a surprisingly ordinary hotel room in Los Angeles, while recovering from a 1985 Santa Monica Boulevard car accident that almost killed him. He was a king without a castle. The first home he bought at the height of his fame, next door to Joe Louis in West Los Angeles, was long gone. His household possessions from his last estate in Riverside were in storage or had been given to relatives. His dog, Fluffy, was staying with his sister. The piano his grandfather gave him was at his brother’s. God, fame, family, and a small staff, including a physical therapist named Madison, were enough right now. Little Richard was thankful to be among the living.

  Mark, who looks like a younger version of his boss, comes down to the hotel lobby to escort me up to the room. He had met Richard in his studio while they recorded “Great Gosh A’Mighty” and has been working for him, both privately and in his backup band, the CIA, for about a year. We wait outside while Richard finishes a phone conversation with one of his sisters. Hotel guests pass in the hall, unaware that a legend lurks on their floor.

  Finally, the door opens and I feel as if the Supreme One of Color has appeared before me. Looking trim and healthy (he has recently taken up bodybuilding) and, as always, a little frantic, he ushers us in, dressed in a red open shirt, pleated brocade trousers, and red ankle boots. He doesn’t look his age (“Lord, when the time comes, I’m gonna have a face-lift, jaw lift, eye lift; everything that is falling will be lifted and the things that can’t be lifted will be moved!”). His hair, once raised to new heights by “Willie Brown in Atlanta, Georgia—my beautician at the time” is more conservative now, and he does it himself. The pencil-thin moustache has mysteriously widened with the years.

  One wishes that Little Richard were still crowned and bejeweled as sweating flunkies carried him about on an ornate throne; but unfortunately, there is only a couch to sit on in this very generic modern hotel room. File cabinets are in one corner and the family snapshots have been tucked into the frames of the “art” on the walls, but otherwise, there are few personal touches. I take my rightful place on the floor at his feet and turn on the tape recorder, resisting the urge to kiss his boots, as fans once did in Germany. Mark sits in front of the TV, watching with the volume turned off for the rest of the evening.

  I tell Richard of the pilgrimage I had made that evening to the house he had bought for his mother. A very nice Christian lady named Mrs. Wilson now lives there, and she invited me in and told me that fans still come around at all hours searching for their idol. “She’s probably getting my checks,” Richard roars, then laughs so hard one can notice his perspiration rising. “I wondered where they was going. I’m goin’ by there and get them. Sister Wilson, where did my check go?”

  Little Richard remembers his palace fondly. “I had velvet and silk in the living room, green and gold—I had all this gold hanging down. In the bedroom, I had blue silk coming out of the wall with my bed in the middle. I had dreamed of that as a little boy—it was my design for my mother.” He plans on getting another house soon but feels “better here now in the hotel, around people. Mark is one of my main people. I need two more. My niece is my secretary, I have two bodyguards
I travel with, and a twenty-four-hour limo. I need to get over my mother’s death. I don’t want to be by myself in no house. Everybody is gone at night; that’s lonely. You need responsibility, someone to take care of. My mother died and I couldn’t stand to look at her bedroom anymore. I’d get sick. I’ve always been a momma’s boy. My father was a bootlegger; he sold stump whiskey in Macon, Georgia. He hid it under the peppers and corn and the collard greens. There was a black lady who used to watch me named Ma Sweetie, she would let him know when the police were coming—he would leap the fence in a single bound.”

  As Richard was beginning his career, his father was murdered. “I was appearing at the VFW club and I came home…It was pouring down rain, and those houses with the tin tops and you could hear the rain. This guy had killed my daddy and I saw his coat lying on the porch. A raincoat with all this blood on it. It was just…something. I walked in the door, seein’ my mother. I looked at this beautiful woman and she said, ‘Bru?’ My mother called me Bru and I called her Mu. She said, ‘Bru?’ and I said, ‘What is it, Mu?’ She said, ‘You don’t have no more dad,’ and I just cried. ‘Oh, no! Lord!’ Everything inside me just broke. ’Cause my mother, that’s my heart. When my mother cried, boy, that shakes my mind! I can do some drastic things behind Mu! I ain’t scared of lions, tigers, snakes, puppy-dog tail, or chickens! It [segregation] was so hard then. But you still had a peace, a serenity: that joy, that hope, that determination, that perseverance that someday, somehow, I will make it!”