Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints

by Simon Doonan

  Though we were greatly amused, the whole experience left us feeling rather ordinary. Instead of thinking, What’s wrong with all these deranged perverts? we thought, What is wrong with us?

  How come we weren’t riddled with kinky inclinations? How come we weren’t sitting in a tree on Hampstead Heath encased in latex? Were we somehow retarded in our development?

  With our mid-century ideas of romance, we felt somewhat alienated.

  At least we had each other.

  Despite the occasional bout of sisterly bickering, Biddie and I got along well. From the perspective of Jamaican Lady across the street, we must have seemed like such a happy duo, or trio if you count Biddie’s alter ego.

  I was the busy, dynamic window dresser, the shorter of the three, who trudged home from work each night, frequently carrying strange props—ostrich feathers, Pierrot masks, and Chinese fans, all “borrowed” from the display studio at my place of employ.

  Biddie was, from Jamaican Lady’s perspective, probably my femmy partner. He wore tightly cinched paramilitary jumpsuits, pink plastic sandals, and a vintage poodle sweater. He came and went at odd hours, a bit like Jamaican Lady herself.

  Then, last but not least, there was Biddie’s sophisticated twin sister. She stayed at home all day and emerged every evening sporting chiffon and vintage satin gowns with long, trailing flyaway panels. These gossamer wings frequently got caught in the front door when she strode out on her nightly sorties. The short window dresser always seemed to derive an enormous amount of amusement from the subsequent whiplash.

  This nocturnal, angular glamour-puss was sometimes accompanied by the short window dresser but was never, for some strange reason, seen in the company of her slightly shorter twin. I’m sure this was quite perplexing to Jamaican Lady.

  The truth of the matter was that, in less than a year, Biddie had become a successful and much-sought-after drag cabaret performer. While Jamaican Lady was flashing pedestrians, motorists, and the occasional bloke in a wheelchair, Biddie was over on the swanky side of town beguiling audiences in trendy clubs and restaurants.

  London was, at this particular time, bursting at the seams with drag queens. They were mostly bawdy types, with names like Dockyard Doris and Bertha Venation, who lip-synched to cassette tapes of Shirley Bassey and brayed obscenities at the audience: “The owner of this pub is an Irish count—at least I think that’s what they called him! Mwaaah!”

  Biddie might have been born in a council flat, but he wasn’t common like the other London drag queens. His chic, sophisticated stage persona set him apart from the bawdy pub trannies. He never lip-synched: he sang all his songs himself. And he had a gimmick: he changed hats for every song.

  “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano” was performed with a giant flock of blue glitter swallows circling his head attached by wires. For “Shakin’ the Blues Away” he wore a three-foot-wide Erté-esque number, which was festooned with cascades of blue bugle beads. The actual changing of the hats was accomplished while distracting the audience with a welter of chatty badinage: “Ladies! I find the best way to get over a man is to get under another one. Don’t you?” Biddie’s themed chapeaux were designed and constructed by Biddie himself, using glue, spit, and stolen display paraphernalia. Word spread. Young trendies flocked from all over London to see Biddie and His Amazing Hats.

  In tandem with his growing fan base, Biddie was developing a scary addiction. It was causing me considerable concern. If we had had such things as interventions back then, I would have undoubtedly called Doreen and Cyril Biddlecombe up to London and staged one.

  It wasn’t Biddie’s fault. He was only human. He was young and susceptible and totally caught up in the magical, decadent whirl of cabaret.

  Like so many addictions, it started innocently enough.

  Every time he performed, admirers would ply Biddie with booze. Who doesn’t love a free drink, especially when it is accompanied by an avalanche of postperformance praise? Biddie liked any tipple as long as it was brightly colored. His faves were sugary showgirl drinks like Parfait Amour (purple) and Chartreuse (yellow-green). These evil pushers would wait until he was well-lubricated, and then they would pounce. No, I’m not talking about pills or smack or cocaine. It was something far more pernicious.

  They would offer him their unwanted upright pianos.

  Before TV and hi-fi, every home in England had an upright piano in the parlor. During wartime the beleaguered Brits had steadied their nerves by pounding out uplifting ditties like “Hang Out Your Washing on the Siegfried Line” and “Roll Out the Barrel.” In the 1960s these instruments acquired a certain nostalgia chic: trendy people tore the fronts off, painted them white, and stuck daisies and geraniums on them or in them.

  Now all these trendy types, none of whom could even play the piano, had started to begrudge the space. But what to do? Nobody had the heart to throw Granny’s old piano out onto the street. Here was the perfect solution: unload your upright piano onto your local transvestite cabaret entertainer.

  When the first one arrived chez nous, Biddie was delirious. No more expensive rehearsal rooms! He immediately set about honing his routines and learning tons of new songs. Everything was rosy and peachy. We even found room for the now displaced floor pillow. We wedged it on top of the piano, where it provided additional soundproofing.

  I was quite taken aback when, unannounced, a second piano arrived on our doorstep. I began to suspect that he might be hooked. He was. When it came to upright pianos, Biddie was a sitting duck. These evil manipulators only had to wait until he was in convivial après show mode. Once he had a couple of crème de menthes (green) inside of him, they knew he was too weak to resist.

  “Oh, daughter, I’ve done it again,” he would admit groggily upon waking and realizing that yet one more piano was on its way.

  At the time of the pudding incident, Biddie had accumulated three pianos. A fourth was due any day.

  I was not the only person concerned about this turn of events. Biddie’s addiction was giving our landlady, a pixie-size Italian lady called Mrs. Rizzo, chronic indigestion. She had every reason to be concerned. Her building was already crumbling: Every time we banged the front door, large chunks of masonry fell from the edifice. The weight of Biddie’s burgeoning piano collection had the potential to demolish the building from the inside. Biddie’s pianos became Mrs. Rizzo’s obsession.

  Our long-suffering landlady had a metal pin in her hip, which slowed her down considerably and made her seem to us as if she was part of Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks.” Despite her handicap, she managed to ambush Biddie quite successfully on a number of occasions. She would wait until he was dressed up like a Christian Dior fashion portrait circa 1951 and corner him as he tore through the hallway.

  “My joists! My joists!” she would scream up at the fleeing Biddie, who in heels, was approximately twice her height. She would then stagger after her cross-dressing tenant Biddie, clutching at his flyaway chiffon panels, and chase him into his waiting taxi.

  Occasionally I would accompany Biddie to his gigs. It was fun watching people screaming and applauding. I was proud of my showbiz roommate. I would do my best to insert myself between him and his pushers. But I couldn’t be there every night.

  More often than not I would stay at home and hang out with our neighbors. We would while away the evening in conversation, which sounds very quaint and intellectual but was really a function of the fact that there was a recession and nobody had a television, not even Boris and Doris.

  Having been born in a rooming house, and grown up surrounded by miscellaneous lodgers and relatives, I enjoyed hobnobbing and chatting with our fellow tenants and finding out about their lives. I had my eye on an American college student from L.A. who lived on the second floor. He was attractive in a blond and Aryan lumberjack sort of way. I was a little confused by his hypermasculine appearance. Was he one of us? There were no girlfriends in evidence. Maybe he was just a nice bloke who was
waiting for Miss Right to come along.

  One night he tapped on my door and invited me up to share his dinner.

  “Good luck, daughter! Zip me up before you go, would you?” said Biddie, who was sponging Pan-Cake onto his giraffe neck.

  With an air of cautious anticipation, I prepared for what I hoped was a date. I threw on the 1920s silk satin dressing gown which I wore when lounging around the house. It was pale blue and printed with Art Deco fans in black, yellow, and pink. Very Noël Coward, you might say. Having purchased this exquisite vintage item for a mere ten pennies at a jumble sale, I was extremely proud of it.

  A dressing gown for a date? Why not? What could be more normal than walking around the house in a toweling kimono, a damask peignoir, or a nice rayon robe? Dressing gowns seemed perfectly acceptable to me. Like dentures, they were a huge part of my childhood. Even though we lived on a busy bus route, my parents were frequently to be seen weeding the front yard or greeting the postman in their dressing gowns.

  The evening seemed, at least from my point of view, to be going quite well. Within the first twenty minutes I knocked back most of Mr. L.A.’s Chablis. Dates are fun! I really should do this more often, I thought.

  Feeling warm, tingly, and confident, I flashed a bit of leg and put my hand inside his flannel shirt. I touched his hairy chest with tentative fingers. He removed my hand.

  Mr. L.A. smiled, and then, in a lengthy and caring exposition which suggested that he might have had a little too much psychotherapy, he explained to me why he had no interest in dating men who swished round the house in Noël Coward dressing gowns. The psychobabble was worse than a more traditional rebuke. If he had said, “Keep your slimy paws to yourself!” I could have handled it. All this stuff about “boundaries” and “personal choices” was making me feel even more leprous. Rubbing salt into the wound, he added that he never dated short personages.

  Feeling a bit like a third-rate traveling theatrical midget, I thanked him profusely and staggered back down to our hovel.

  I picked up Happy Harry and in an irate sardonic fashion began to reenact the painful conversation.

  “It’s just not my scene, man . . . I’m not judgmental . . . The vibe I’m getting from you . . . ”

  This was my first close encounter with gay fascism. Still wearing Noël Coward and still clutching Happy Harry, I crawled into bed and prayed for oblivion.

  Despite the lack of mutual erotic chemistry, Mr. L.A. and I continued to hang out. It was an odd symbiosis. I had a record player and no albums. We had been robbed while living next to Rita the tart. The thieves had left the floor pillow but taken all our record albums and an old radio with Braille knobs which Aunt Phyllis had passed on to me.

  The Lumberjack had one single record album and no record player. It was the historic LaBelle record entitled Night- birds, which ironically, featured the astoundingly great song with the line “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?” We bopped along with it, safe in the knowledge that, thanks to my dressing gown and lack of height, we would not coucher ce soir, or any other soir.

  As we played the album over and over, Mr. L.A. regaled me with tales of gay life in America, the discos, the saunas, the Warhol crowd. He was obsessed with a new John Waters movie that had recently premiered in Greenwich Village starring an obese transvestite named Divine. The movie was called Pink Flamingos: le tout New York was talking about it because, in the last scene, Divine kneels down on the pavement and eats poodle feces. I guffawed appreciatively but was secretly appalled.

  I have always had an ambivalent relationship with dog feces. If my sister and I wanted to play in the backyard, we first had to clean up Lassie’s poo. This activity invariably left me nauseated and appetite-less.

  Lassie was my blind aunt Phyllis’s golden Lab. A worthier and more lovely canine it would be hard to find. My sister and I were deeply in love with her. We would lay by the fire with Lassie, spooning and cuddling and playing with her silky ears. I held her paws and wrote her Christmas cards and kissed her until I got worms. And then kissed her again. When she died we were inconsolable. Despite the strength of my passion, any contact with her fecal matter would send me retching into the delphiniums.

  * * *

  One hot August night, I found I had the house to myself. Biddie was performing, so were Boris and Doris. Mr. L.A. was out looking for other tall blond Aryans. The house was quiet. I donned Noël Coward and embarked on a bit of halfhearted housework.

  I started with our minibar-size refrigerator, which thanks to months of neglect, had become quite smelly. I began throwing half-eaten horrors into the garbage. At the back of the middle shelf was a large obstruction. Upon further inspection I discovered an untouched Christmas pudding presented to me by Betty Doonan nine months prior.

  “You’ll need to steam it for about six hours,” said my mother, as if she seriously thought I might devote an evening to pudding steaming.

  There was no point in waiting until Betty discovered it on her next visit and berated us for being a couple of “ungrateful bleeders.” Donning a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves, I started to scrape the rich brown, claylike substance out of the bowl.

  I felt glad to have the substantial membrane separating my hands from the pudding mix. I never liked to touch anything slimy. As a child I could not understand those kids who insisted on eating with their fingers. Why would anyone in his right mind want to touch shepherd’s pie or chocolate pudding?

  The only thing worse than touching food is touching poo, I mused.

  An idea was taking shape in my head.

  As I clawed and scraped at the thick mass, I could smell my mother’s cooking sherry. Mmmm! It reminded me of a butch men’s aftershave.

  I continued to scrape and muse.

  This pudding smelled so much better and more enticing than Lassie’s poo, and yet how similar of texture.

  I had no idea just how similar until I absentmindedly rolled a handful of pudding into a torpedo shape. Good heavens! If there was ever a competition to create the world’s most convincing dog poo facsimile, Betty’s Xmas pudding would win hands down. It was much more real-looking than the glossy, caramel-colored fake doggy doo which is sold to delighted customers at joke shops the world over.

  Meanwhile, in some smoky boïte on the other side of town, Biddie was taking a well-earned break from performing. He had just belted his way through “Bali Ha’i” and was desperate to remove the cumbersome revolving desert island which he wore to perform this number. He had made the Bali Ha’i hat himself from three rolls of Mrs. Rizzo’s toilet paper. He mashed the paper up with flour and water, formed it into an island shape, and then baked it in the oven. After about ten minutes it burst into flames, filling the house with horrid smoke and bringing Boris and Doris onto their landing. Unperturbed, Biddie waited for Bali Ha’i to cool. After skillfully covering the charred areas in paint, he glued a Barbie-size palm tree next to it, secured the entire thing to a revolving cake stand, et voilà! Bali Ha’i! This number was always a huge hit. Tonight had been no exception: Biddie was deluged with fans and piano owners.

  Meanwhile, chez nous, I was quivering with a mixture of excitement, mirth, and revulsion. I thought I might burst. The object of my attention was now sitting in the middle of a large expanse of Mrs. Rizzo’s white linoleum floor.

  I had fashioned two or three handfuls of pudding into an exquisitely accurate reproduction of dog poo. It looked exactly like one of dear old Lassie’s deposits. I then placed my little sculpture directly in Biddie’s path. He would be bound to see it as soon as he walked in, even if he was plastered. I did not want him to slip in it. He was a bit accident prone and quite likely to fall and crack his skull on the nearest piano.

  I stared at my creation with a mixture of horror and excitement. This would surely be the greatest practical joke in the history of our relationship. People might think of Biddie as the vivacious one, the bubbly showbiz entertainer, but when push came to shove, it was I, his shorter, less
scintillating roommate, who had come up with the craziest gag of all time.

  Suddenly, one turd rolled mysteriously away from the main cluster. Had the spirit of Lassie entered the room? I was about to restore it to its former position when I realized that this new spontaneous configuration had only added to the overall verisimilitude of my poo facsimile.

  I turned out the lights and leapt into bed to await Biddie’s return.

  He did not come home.

  I nodded off.

  Two hours later I was awakened by the slamming of a taxicab door. I could hear Biddie dump his suitcase full of hats on the front doorstep. Eventually he found his keys and, with the urgency that only a homecoming transvestite in a rough neighborhood can understand, dived through the open front door and slammed it behind him, precipitating another masonry fall.

  The evil anticipation of the practical joker returned to me through the fog of sleepiness. With darting eyes and baited breath, I waited for the inevitable bloodcurdling scream.

  “EEEEEEEEE!!!!! Oh, my God! Daughter! Wake up! Was there a bloody dog in here?”

  I clicked on my light, squinted across the room, and addressed my begowned roommate. “Get a grip, daughter. What the hell are you talking about?”

  Biddie was pointing a long, cocktail-gloved finger at the offending object, which spotlit on Mrs. Rizzo’s white vinyl, was impossible to miss.

  “Is it really poo?” I asked with genuine concern, leaping out of bed and belting Noël Coward around me. “Let’s take a closer look.”

  Adopting a Sherlock Holmes–ish air, I got down on my knees and sniffed. “Odorless excrement! How unusual. We may need to get it analyzed.”

  “It’s shit, you idiot! Get away from it,” advised Biddie.

  “Let’s try and keep our heads, shall we? There’s only one sure way to find out,” I said authoritatively. Gingerly, I picked up an hors d’oeuvre–size portion.

  Biddie screamed.

  I raised the poo to my lips.

  Biddie gasped.