Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints

by Simon Doonan

  Two weeks later I met him at the train station. He looked amazing. With the help of one of his old girlfriends—he had gone through a straight phase, which coincided with an LSD phase—he had cobbled together a new glamrock outfit. This consisted of a high-collared, homemade, sequined Roxy Music jacket, velvet knickers, silver space boots, and a tangerine feather boa. His bright red Bowie hair shook like a nylon feather duster. The high collar of the jacket hid the gentle flow of blood which was coursing down his neck, the result of an aborted attempt to pierce his ear on the train with one of his grandmother’s chandelier earrings. He was wearing false eyelashes and metallic copper eye shadow.

  Fearing a less than warm reception from the gangs of Manchester United Football supporters who roamed the station, I immediately dragged Biddie, suitcase in hand, straight to a pub called The Rembrandt. We ensconced ourselves at the bar just in time to watch the cabaret act. Two fire-eating drag queens in cheap beaded tops jumped through a Mylar curtain onto the card-table-size stage.

  The performers took turns swigging gasoline from a milk bottle and singeing their lips and hair. As we marveled at this spectacle, we began to tune in to the adjacent conversations.

  All around us men were mothering and daughtering each other relentlessly.

  “ ’Ere, daughter! Buy yer old mother a drink, would ya?”

  “Daughter! Where have you beeeeen?”

  “Who made yer outfit, daughter? Ya look ’orrible!”

  “Oh! Mother! What have ya done to yer ’air?”

  We began to study the nuances. The appellation daughter, from what we could tell, seemed a lot more common than mother. Daughter also seemed more palsy-walsy than mother. There were, however, exceptions. In addition to indicating friendship, daughter could be used as a brutal put-down, i.e., I’m calling you daughter even though we are the same age because I’m superior to you. Conversely, mother could be hurled at a fellow daughter to communicate the idea that, even though we are the same age, I am going to pretend that you are older than I am and that you are less attractive and should therefore buy me a drink. There were a million permutations. It was all about tone and intent.

  If you wanted to be exceptionally evil, you could tease a really old homosexual about his age by, preposterously, calling him daughter, as in “Having a nice evening are you, daughter? A bit late for you, isn’t it? Mind your step now.” This could also be done in a friendly way to remind an old mother of the days when she had once been a young and attractive daughter.

  Biddie and I were in heaven. Here were fellow human beings who were actually more common and bizarre than we could have ever hoped to be. We spent the entire weekend inhaling the gloriously fetid atmosphere of this tawdry working-class microculture. In no time we were daughtering each other with skill and vehemence. Vehemence was important: every “Daughter!” had to be hurled as with a slingshot. Every “Daughter!” had her very own exclamation mark.

  The highlight of the weekend came right before Biddie caught the milk train back to Reading. We stopped into The Rembrandt to catch the Sunday night cabaret.

  The featured artiste was an ancient, one-legged cross-dresser, who billed herself simply as MOTHER. GRANDMOTHER would probably have been more accurate. Having lost her leg in the Second World War, the ancient MOTHER was proud of her prosthetic limb and flaunted its flesh-colored plasticity in a glittery minidress.

  MOTHER’s “act” was even more heart-stopping than her appearance. She stood, arms and leg akimbo, on the little stage, drenched by a moody blue spotlight. Then, without any musical accompaniment, she delivered a deadpan recitation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” All six stanzas of it. The choice of material prompted several unkind daughters to posit the theory that MOTHER had actually lost her leg in the Crimean War.

  Biddie and I were transfixed by this Dada performance. The recitation was made all the more surreal by the fact that the mothers and daughters present ignored the entire thing. They caroused and screeched and smoked all the way through it, barely acknowledging MOTHER as she rode “into the valley of Death.”

  At the end of this weekend, we were both tired and happy and completely and utterly in the thrall of the mothers and daughters of the greater Manchester area. We had found a place where all the marginalized freaks of the world were welcome. Even us. We embraced our daughterdom with manic enthusiasm.

  “Bon voyage, daughter!” I yelled as Biddie boarded the train home on Sunday night.

  We were henceforth incapable of holding a conversation without daughtering each other to death. In no time we had lost our grip on parody and become bona fide daughters.

  * * *

  Fast-forward thirty years.

  I’m living on another continent in another century.

  My husband, Jonathan, has a solemn look on his face. He has something important to tell me. I am concerned. We are, as far as I am aware, very much in love and almost obscenely compatible. Here in New York, where griping about one’s significant other is a daily pastime, our happy union is something of an anomaly. Is our relationship about to disintegrate? Am I about to enact one of those horrible scenes when a cataclysmic announcement is made and everything goes from blissful to nasty? Is he dumping me for somebody younger? Has he made arrangements to drop me off at a retirement home on our upcoming trip to Florida? My fiftieth birthday has just passed. Should I, like so many of my contemporaries, have zipped off to Brazil to avail myself of a cut-price liposuction–cosmetic surgery Xmas combo package? Has Jonathan become a Kabbalah devotee?

  In measured tones, Jonathan lays out a new and revolutionary scenario for our lives. He tells me that he has decided to add to our ménage. Nothing kinky. Quite wholesome, in fact. He wants to hire someone who can cook our food and make our beds and fold his Lacoste shirts and arrange them by color so they look like the ones in the store. He wants us to hire a live-in housekeeper!

  “A housekeeper!” I shriek, clutching the area where pearls would be if I wore them. “That’s so insanely bourgeois! I have my image to think of. . . . ”

  “You’re middle-aged and you wear Gucci silk pocket squares,” says Jonathan in a kind and caring tone. “No offense, but you have about as much street cred as Rip Taylor.”

  Fast-forward one hour.

  Jonathan is out for the evening. I sally forth to rent something radical from the video store which will bolster my dwindling sense of street cred. This looks perfect: Murder at the Gallop, starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple.

  I order my take-out food and pop in the VHS tape.

  Bicycling furiously, cape flying, Miss Marple returns home to her tiny thatched cottage after a hard day of sleuthing. She dismounts. With the air of a woman who would love nothing more than to take off her hot tweed outer garment, roll down her knee-highs, and make herself a fortifying cup of tea, she waddles toward her rustic, knotty front door.

  Magically, the door opens. A uniformed housekeeper greets her, curtsies ever so slightly, and wooshes that cape from her shoulders. Miss Marple flops into a squishy old chair and, with forefinger and thumb, begins to rub her jowls in a meditative fashion, pondering her latest investigative conundrum. Within seconds the housekeeper returns, carrying a magnificent tea tray groaning with cucumber sandwiches and fresh-baked scones.

  Street cred, schmeet cred! I’m sold.

  * * *

  Fast-forward one week.

  Marita is from the Philippines. She is skinny and petite. She has the shoulder-length, pin-straight hair for which every woman in New York City would kill. The agency has sent only one applicant: Marita. We like her hair and her cheeky personality and hire her on the spot.

  She moves into our spare room.

  Upon learning of Marita, none of my friends and colleagues seem remotely concerned about my loss of street cred. They are infinitely more focused on our collective loss of privacy. When confronted with their horrified reaction, Jonny and I realize that we are both antiprivacy. We like t
ogetherness. Privacy is a greatly overrated condition. If people have privacy, they start to do unsavory things like surfing ghastly sites on the Internet, wearing preposterous undergarments, and berating one another in an uninhibited fashion. We have no doubt that Marita will have a moderating influence on our behavior and our language, which can, without scrutiny, become appallingly obscene and provocatively un-P.C. within a matter of minutes.

  * * *

  Marita’s first day. She has a question. She is unsure how to address us. Should she call us “Mr. Simon”? “Mister Adler”?

  I try to remember how Miss Marple’s trusty aid addressed her. Ma’am is a tad frumpy. We decide to sleep on it.

  Fast-forward twenty-four hours.

  The smell of fresh-baked scones is wafting through the kitchen.

  “I decide what I call you!” says Marita with a sparkle in her lovely black-currant eyes. “You are like my mother, so I call you Mother. It’s okay?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I reply, trying not to betray the fact that I am quite taken aback. Marita, as far as I know, has never even heard of Manchester.

  “Yes, you may call me Mother if that is what you would like.”

  “What about me?” says Jonny, sounding quite left out.

  “You are like my daughter. So I call you Daughter!”

  Mother and Daughter!

  “And what about you? What shall we call you?” I ask, with the growing sense that this could be getting a little creepy.

  “Mother, Daughter, you call me Nanny, because I am your nanny.”

  Nanny, Mother, and Daughter!

  We seal the deal with a group hug.

  The best thing about having Nanny in our home is not the cooking or the cleaning. The best thing is watching people’s concerned expressions when, at social gatherings and family functions, our nanny uninhibitedly calls out, “Mother! Daughter! You want me to serve food now?”

  CHAPTER 11

  PUDDING

  Biddie and the oversize floor pillow and Happy Harry and I eventually got sick of sharing one room.

  We moved to a larger pad in a cheaper neighborhood. The kitchen and bathroom were still down the hall, but at least we could go about our daily business without having to kick the floor pillow out of the way.

  Our pad was drearily unmemorable, with the exception of a startlingly white vinyl floor, which ran throughout. Though disastrous from an acoustic point of view—especially when Biddie was rehearsing his new cabaret act—this spanking new floor covering gave the place a crisp, optimistic look and provided a contrasting background which showed off the floor pillow to full advantage. This white floor plays a significant role in the incident which I am about to relate.

  Our street was called Leamington Gardens, which sounds very E. M. Forster but wasn’t. Admittedly there were no tarts in our building. But there was definitely one across the street.

  She was a large, attractive, very lazy, very unusual Jamaican lady. She did not trudge the streets braving the elements like a regular tart. Nor did she make any effort to adorn herself in a profession-appropriate manner, with the usual sequined frocks or spangled eyelids. She was never to be seen flaunting herself at closing time under the lamplight outside the neighboring pubs.

  Jamaican Lady preferred to solicit her clients from the comfort of her front porch. Here she stood for hours at a time, looking detached and vacant and slightly haunting. This was unusual behavior for a British tart. London streetwalkers in particular have always been known for their cheeky verbosity, enticing potential clients by calling out phrases such as “How about a night of fun, dearie?” or the simpler “How about it?”

  Not Jamaican Lady. She was mute and uninviting. Her torpid body language seemed to say, “How about a night of unrelieved tedium?”

  When it came time to advertise her services, she did so with one simple gesture. She lifted her skirt.

  Jamaican Lady rarely even blinked or coughed. She seemed very focused on conserving her energy, limiting her actions strictly to the aforementioned lifting of the aforementioned skirt. She did not even bother to lower her skirt manually. She would simply release it and allow gravity to do the work. It was as if she thought that any physical exertion would burn calories, which in turn would diminish her figure, which even to a homosexual window dresser, seemed to be remarkably voluptuous.

  The neighborhood was not entirely without its classy interludes. Two young professional classical singers lived on the third floor of our house. They were boyfriends. One was a gifted countertenor who specialized in ancient castrati choral numbers. He sang, much to our undisguised fascination, in a staggeringly impressive prepubescent choirboy trill. His singing was miraculously effortless, a pair of lightly flushed cheeks being the only sign of exertion.

  His speaking voice, when he came down to borrow a cup of sugar or ask us to stop screeching, was quite normal. But whenever he sang, out would pour this high-pitched river of gorgeous Renaissance song. We would ply him with cheap wine and then beg him to perform and then gawk at him as if he was some kind of freak, which of course he was, in a high culture kind of way.

  His chum, by contrast, was a booming bass with an improbably deep Paul Robeson voice. When he sang, he frowned continuously and made intimidating gestures with his large, murderous hands while his adoring husband looked on.

  These talented young songbirds—we nicknamed them Boris and Doris—would practice individually for hours. More often than not they would punctuate their rehearsals with a corny duet. To the passersby, even Jamaican Lady, their singing must have conjured up a cliché romantic coupling. Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. Nobody on the block had any idea that they were listening to two blokes.

  Boris and Doris were at opposite ends of the scale, yin and yang. It was tempting to make hasty assumptions about their private lives. “It’s easy to see who wears the pants and who wears the earrings,” cackled Biddie as soon as they were out of earshot, whereupon we winked and nudged each other like two smug fishwives.

  Biddie’s observations turned out to be an oversimplification. Just when we thought we had them figured out, they moved the gay goal posts. One day I caught the manly bass having a girlie hissy fit in the communal kitchen. He was waging war with an uncooperative cheese soufflé while wearing a plaid, lace-ruffled apron. Meanwhile the castrato was upstairs drilling big holes in the wall above their living room window in preparation for the hanging of some fancy pouf draperies, which to add to the confusion, the bass had been sewing and ruching that very morning. It was not long before we were forced to admit that we had no idea who was Boris and who was Doris.

  Poofs, homos, queers, friends of Dorothy, call them what you will, this strange club, of which Biddie and I were now members, was turning out to be far more nuanced than we had ever envisaged. We were having a hard time finding a niche, let alone a date. Our mockery of Boris and Doris concealed a tinge of envy. Despite their little anomalies, Boris and Doris had found happiness: they were content with themselves and with each other.

  We, by contrast, were immature, inexperienced, and fairly dreadful at conducting relationships. I had recently been dating another window dresser. It did not last long. He invited me over one night and announced that he had decided to “set me free.” I was so naïve that I actually said, “Good heavens, how considerate!” and left his apartment feeling fluffy and light-headed and grateful. It took me months to figure out I had been dumped.

  Biddie was even more inexperienced than I was. Not long after we moved to London, an attractive man had approached him on the Underground and invited him to “come back for coffee.” Biddie had immediately blown it.

  “I’m afraid I don’t drink coffee” was his doltish reply.

  I tried to persuade him that “come back for coffee” was a common euphemism. “Daughter! It’s just a polite way of inviting you back for a bit of slap and tickle, that’s all.”

  “But, daughter! As you yourself know, I don’t drink coffee! Don�
�t you get it! I prefer tea,” he kept saying.

  Biddie refused to acknowledge that this person had any intention other than to force gallons of ghastly unwanted coffee down his throat.

  The problem was that my roommate and I both had very 1950s ideas about dating: we were wildly out of step with the burgeoning 1970s gay culture. Our concept of romance was based on Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster embracing on the beach in From Here to Eternity, or Liz Taylor and Monty Clift in A Place in the Sun. We were conventional. Not so the people we met. Most gay men seemed to have proclivities.

  One evening while strolling home up Portobello Road, I was approached by a uniformed policeman. Instead of arresting me, he asked me to come home for a glass of sherry. He was handsome and charming, so I accepted. Imagine Biddie’s face when I tell him about this, I thought as we sped into the night in his panda car with me in the back looking like a rather unmenacing felon.

  We drove to a very chic house in toney W 8. I noted with surprise that the decor was quite fancy.

  Drinks were proffered, after which the police uniform was discarded, only to be replaced by another uniform, this time from Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards. I began to suspect that the whole police thing, including the panda car, was some elaborate, well-financed fetish. A closet full of uniforms was unfurled, confirming my suspicions. I fled.

  On another occasion, Biddie and I decided to check out the late-night cruising scene on Hampstead Heath. We had heard about the naughty goings-on from friends. Nothing could have prepared us for the kinky spectacle we encountered.

  We clutched on to each other and giggled our way through the nocturnal autumn mists. Suddenly Biddie dug his fingers into my arm. “Look up,” he whispered, “and try not to scream.”

  I followed his instructions. Then I saw it. There, glistening in the moonlight, was a chubby man encased head to foot in a black rubber cat suit sitting on a not very sturdy branch.

  Biddie waved. The rubber person chose not to wave back. He just sat there like a horrid, shiny tree fungus.