Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints

by Simon Doonan

Still gasping, I thought of all the sinners over all the centuries who had, pre-Harpic, died in their vermin-ridden hovels and gave thanks.

  If only Henry VIII had had access to a bottle or two of Harpic, I mused to myself as I extracted loofah fronds from my teeth, it might have changed the course of history.

  Yes, there was a little blistering, but at least I no longer had venereal disease. I wasn’t going to die, at least not now.

  * * *

  The next assault on my nether regions occurred five years later.

  When I was fifteen a pea-size stone made its way from my kidney to my bladder. I was watching TV at the time. The pain was indescribable. I went very white and collapsed on the floor. I dug my fingers into the handmade fireside rug, which schizophrenic Uncle Ken had hooked during one of his occupational therapy frenzies.

  Betty encouraged the rug making. It was infinitely preferable to the basket-making period which had preceded it. There was nothing aesthetically wrong with the trays and wastebaskets which Ken produced with such relentless ardor. They were, in fact, quite lovely. It was the endless soaking of endless bales of wicker which occupied the bathtub for days at a time and interfered with the beauty routines of the more glam members of our household.

  Gradually the agony subsided. I assumed a casual position on Ken’s rug—lying on my front with my legs kicking back and forth at the knee—and continued watching Laramie.

  Anyone Jewish who is reading this will wonder why I did not call out to my parents and demand that a helicopter transport me to the nearest hospital. This is an entirely valid question. All I can tell you, by way of explanation, is that Gentiles are different. We use our stiff upper lips and our innate indifference as a shield against reality—i.e., we’re insane.

  Later that evening, the aforementioned kidney stone, along with a great deal of blood and human tissue, embarked on the second leg of its journey. The pain was far worse than anything I experienced on Ken’s rug or during my syphilis cure. My nether regions were literally vibrating with agony. I decamped to the bathroom and thought about the dire predictions in that long-lost horoscope.

  The evil stone traveled, slowly, very slowly, from my bladder down the length of my willie. At last, pea-sized and bloody, it greeted the outside world and plopped into the toilet.

  I was now ready to break the Gentile conspiracy of silence.

  I wrapped toilet paper around my private parts and staggered downstairs. Gingerly opening the living room door, I asked, very formally, to speak to Terry. He followed me back upstairs. I tried to explain what had happened and pointed at the gore which glistened in the toilet bowl.

  “We should probably take the stone to the doctor. He will doubtless want to take it to his laboratory and analyze it,” I said, assuming that, as my parent, he should be the one to reach in and fish for it.

  “Oh, no,” said Terry, with the air of a father who thinks his son might be developing delusions of grandeur. “The doctor won’t be interested.” With that, he flushed the toilet and made me a cup of tea.

  Three days later we paid a visit to the doctor.

  Again, all I can tell you by way of explanation, is that we Gentiles feel that rushing to the hospital emergency room is a sign of extreme hysteria.

  “Well, I certainly hope you kept the stone so that we can analyze it in our laboratory,” said the doctor, who like many of his profession at the time, smoked cigarettes during consultations.

  “He flushed it,” I said, glaring at Terry.

  “Since you did not have the presence of mind to keep the stone”—puff, puff, glare, glare—“I have no way of knowing what caused it. The only advice I can give you is to drink lots of rhubarb juice. Next patient!”

  To this day, I make a point of reminding Terry about this glaring example of parental laissez-faire at least once a year.

  “Have some more rhubarb juice” is his usual reply.

  * * *

  A furious gust of wind the enters the room and blows the pages of the calendar forward, ever forward. Seasons come and go. Hairdos change. Gauchos come and go, as do culottes. The pages eventually stop turning.

  It’s 1977. The year that Elvis died. I am twenty-five years old. The siege of the nether regions continues unabated.

  I am standing, legs spread, in the show window of City à la Mode.

  This store serves the needs of secretaries in the financial district of London. Serviceable, staid fashions are sold upstairs, while lingerie, foundation garments, stockings, and tights are sold downstairs. At lunchtime the store is overrun with shrieking office girls buying essential and nonessential garments. The rest of the day is quiet.

  The sales staff of City à la Mode alleviated the tedium by feuding with each other. The upstairs ladies directed a white-hot hatred toward the basement ladies and vice versa. I have no idea why. When shipments of panties and brassieres arrived, the upstairs ladies would hurl the boxes downstairs without any warning. Bundles of hard plastic hangers were also used as missiles. Nobody seemed able to remember what had started this conflict. It was just one of those nasty tribal things. Whenever I read about massacres like the one in Rwanda, I always think of the ladies of City à la Mode.

  I was a freelance window dresser, appearing once a week on this battlefield and vastly relieved not to be involved. From my vantage point in the store window, it was all very entertaining.

  My main responsibility was to change the merchandise in the show windows. This is more complex than might ever be imagined. To strip and redress a mannequin, it is first necessary to remove the wig, especially if the wig is large. My City à la Mode wigs were not large. They were gigantic. No muumuu, no matter how enormous, would ever fit over them. These massive, lacquered, crinkly confections were styled in a manner which is now associated with cheap girls from New Jersey (think Joan Cusack in Working Girl) but was new and groovy at the time of the incident.

  Wig removal, though not brain surgery, was no mean feat. Two sturdy steel pins anchored the wig to the mannequin’s head. These pins slid into two dense cork inserts, which were embedded in either temple. The pins were extracted with pliers and reinserted with the aid of a small hammer. Every time I reattached the wigs, hammering the two-inch pin into the mannequin skull, I thought of Narg and her lobotomy.

  The wigs were by no means the most complex part of the procedure. Changing the panty hose presented the biggest challenge. The fiberglass legs could not be brought together with the ease of human legs. A tremendous amount of strenuous yanking and stretching was required. Before one could even begin to remove the old pair, the mannequin in question had to be lifted from her baseplate. Screwed into that baseplate was a seven-inch rod. This rod disappeared into the foot and stabilized the mannequin. These projectiles are the bane of a window dresser’s existence because they are always getting lodged inside the feet.

  When dogs are stuck together a bucket of cold water will often effect a separation. With mannequins there is no such miracle cure. One has to grab the girl under the crotch and pull her in a vertical upward direction.

  It helps to be tall. I’m not.

  I had been struggling with one particular mannequin, much to the amusement of passersby, for about ten minutes. Frustration set in. I decided to employ brute force. I grabbed and yanked with all my window dresser’s might.

  Twang!

  A nasty, painful sensation clutched at the right side of my groin. I had popped a hernia.

  Three months later, after wading through the British health system bureaucracy, I was admitted to hospital. In preparation for the operation, I was wheeled into a tiny room by a rather suspect old geezer whose job it was to shave male patients before surgery.

  “I like a lad with smooth skin,” he said with a friendly leer. “So much nicer than those half-witted tarts you see dancing about on the telly.”

  He took a keen interest in his métier. In fact, I cannot recall ever seeing anyone enjoy his occupation more. Here was somebody whose job fit him l
ike a glove.

  There would have been no point in complaining about the old fellah and getting him fired. The hospital human resources department would then have had to undertake the momentous task of finding someone who was willing to spend his days removing hair from an assortment of nether regions. Given the unappetizing nature of the work, it seemed best left to someone who had a special interest.

  After the operation, I was placed in an open ward with about forty-five co-postoperatives. Many had undergone leg amputation as a result of diabetes and thrombosis, and were being driven crazy by phantom limb pain and itchy stumps. I was in this ward for an insanely boring ten days and passed the time chatting to these Long John Silvers, lighting their cigarettes, and obligingly scratching their stumps with a cane back scratcher.

  The surgeon came by one day and found me pushing one of my new wheelchair-bound friends—an ancient working-class gentleman with no teeth and droll wit—round the ward à la Grand Prix. Our jolly jape occasioned a public reprimand.

  “You better be bloody careful, young man,” said the outraged doctor, addressing me. “I sewed plastic mesh into the wall of your groin to hold your guts in place. If you exert yourself, you will sieve your own intestines and make them into foie gras!” With a bang of a rubber door, he was gone.

  “Oooh! If it’s not one thing it’s another,” said my fellow patient, and we returned sheepishly to our respective beds.

  * * *

  It’s been a while since anything nasty happened down there. Rest assured, the minute any fresh catastrophe afflicts my nether regions and threatens my mortality, you will be the first to know.

  CHAPTER 15

  HOLLYWOOD

  My Hollywood years were encrusted with a sparkly combo of tawdriness and tinsel.

  In 1980 I moved into an apartment building in Hollywood, California, called the Fontenoy. This French chateâu–style structure was drenched with poorly researched movie-star lore. An older resident started the whole thing by claiming that Marilyn Monroe had once lived on the sixth floor, sharing an apartment, and many lipsticks and stiletto heels with Shelley Winters.

  Not to be outdone, we new tenants all made stories up about our various apartments.

  “Did you know that Cyd Charisse once tried to jump out of the window of my apartment? You can see her heel marks on the windowsill.”

  “That’s nothing. Apparently Buddy Hackett used to live in my apartment. He left all his TV dinners in the freezer.”

  Looking at the dusty raggle-taggle of human flotsam who now occupied the cockroach-infested apartments, it was hard to imagine the former glory days of the Fontenoy. The only celeb resident during my tenure was Nicolas Cage, who wasn’t a celeb at the time, just an affable, thick-haired ingenue.

  The dearth of celebs in no way diminishes the fondness I feel for my Hollywood years. I have nothing but warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feelings for my old neighborhood, and with good reason. The Fontenoy was just up the street from Frederick’s of Hollywood and the magical sleaze of Hollywood Boulevard. Most of the local shops, taking their cue from Frederick’s, sold stripper clothing, high-heeled shoes, and theatrical wigs. If you wanted ordinary groceries, you had to drive miles to a supermarket. If you wanted edible panties, Frederick’s was a two-minute stroll past the transvestite prostitutes who worked the intersection of Yucca and Whitley streets in Flash-dance T-shirts, acid-washed jeans, and pearlized scrunch boots.

  Also within walking distance were the Max Factor Museum, which boasted a beauty calibrating machine; the Scientology Center, which did not yet boast Tom Cruise; the Hollywood Wax Museum and a home for teenage runaways called Hudson House. With my predilection for everything camp and/or grotesque, this location suited me down to the ground. I could pop out and look at the stars embedded in the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard any time of the day or night—“Look, there’s Pat Boone! There’s Phyllis Diller!” Living at the Fontenoy was like being at a Butlins Holiday Camp all year round.

  The neighborhood boasted several Butlinesque themed eateries.

  Top of the list was a “family restaurant” called The Tick-Tock. The walls of The Tick-Tock were covered with ticking and gonging clocks of all varieties, a cruel reminder to the mostly older patrons of the fact that they would soon be no longer with us.

  It was here among the cuckoo and carriage clocks that I witnessed my very first Heimlich maneuver. A glamorous senior citizen in a turban—a Gloria Swanson manqué—suddenly clutched her throat with both hands and began to make choking noises.

  “Aiiieeyye! Madre de Diós! She shokin’!” screamed a sturdy Mexican waitress.

  The observant Latina then tangoed the patron from her banquette. Her movements seemed well-practiced. She grabbed the distressed senior round the middle and, with vigorous upward hugging motions, dislodged half a semimasticated dinner roll from her trachea. The blockage hit the floor with a light splat. A round of applause followed. The hungry patron returned to her tuna melt. She left a big tip.

  Other Hollywood residents were less fortunate. Horrid gangs would take drive-by potshots at the local trannies. On more than one occasion we saw a large, ungainly she-male crumple to the pavement and lie motionless.

  There was drama on every corner.

  One night some of the Hudson boys decided, somewhat rashly, to torch their home. Like rioters who ravage their own neighborhood, these hoodlums were experiencing that strange, primordial impulse to shoot oneself in the foot. We watched from our seventh-floor window as the homeless lads poured lighter fluid on their nicely renovated house, funded probably by charitable contributions from someone like Merv Griffin or Barbra Streisand, and then danced jubilantly round the burning building. This was the equivalent of inmates in a battered women’s shelter deciding to batter themselves. The next day the homeless boys sat staring at the charred debris looking surprised and annoyed, as if wondering who had done the damage.

  * * *

  I shared my Fontenoy years with a person called Mundo. A painter and a window dresser, Mundo was soulful, humble, and unique. He was in his early twenties. We were in love in the insane, thoughtless way that afflicts the young, which sounds like a cliché out of a cheesy romance novel but is nonetheless quite accurate. After two tumultuous years, our relationship morphed, much to our mutual relief, into a loving friendship.

  We had a great deal in common. We were first-generation immigrants in the land of opportunity. For us this represented an opportunity to have oodles of fun and spend a great deal of time mocking each other’s ethnicity while also being fascinated by it. I was intrigued by his Mexicanness, he was enthralled by everything that was trendy and English. He introduced me to Frida Kahlo paintings and ranchera music; I introduced him to Boy George acolytes like Pinkietessa Braithwaite and the pop star Marilyn. They had recently moved from London and lived just around the corner.

  For Mundo and me, being trendy was our most intense and satisfying area of commonality. I had long since given up trying to find the Beautiful People. The few rich international types that I had met, especially the European ones, all seemed irredeemably naff and hopelessly self-obsessed. Yes, they wore caftans, but what, in 1980, could be more out-of-date? They spent their days dabbling in various forms of spirituality and experimenting with new beauty treatments. Most damning of all, these B.P.’s all seemed to have the same lousy sense of humor: in the world of the Beautiful People, accidentally dropping a teaspoon on the floor, missing a plane, or forgetting to wind your watch all seem to qualify as riotously funny, thigh-slapping occurrences.

  If you are gorgeous and wealthy, you lack the motivation to develop a great wit. If you are a marginalized freak like me or Marilyn or Pinkie, a caustic tongue is a prerequisite for attention if not survival.

  I now settled happily for the trendy people, not because they were fashionable but because they were wicked and funny and irreverent.

  * * *

  There was no shortage of activities for us marginalized trendoids in Hollywood. T
his was the early eighties, when if you were au courant, you were probably worshiping ABC, Bow Wow Wow, and the Thompson Twins. Every week another new band of hopefuls—Spandau Ballet, Madness, the Specials, Siouxsie Sioux—was playing at the Roxy or the Whiskey a Go-Go. My clearest memory from this period is watching Nina Hagen perform dressed as a nun. After a couple of numbers she turned around, revealing a lifelike black rubber phallus sticking, at a forty-five degree angle, through the folds of her habit. Bon appétit!

  When we weren’t watching live music, Mundo and I were flitting about in Vivienne Westwood pirate gear at “New Romantic” clubs with names like The Veil, The Fake, and Club Lingerie. It was good, old-fashioned, pointless fun. We took full advantage of the vogue for costumey dress-up. I have boxes of snaps of us in various guises: Mundo dressed as Valentino, me as Betty Rubble, Mundo as a goat-legged Bacchus, and me as Queen Elizabeth II. I am probably the only white male on the planet who has ever cross-dressed as the African songstress Miriam Makeba. The apotheosis of our overdressed trendiness occurred when we were recruited for the Kim Carnes “Bette Davis Eyes” video. That’s my gloved hand in the opening shot.

  Don’t judge me too harshly: if you’re not going to be a trendy, superficial poseur in your twenties, when are you going to do it?

  * * *

  We supported ourselves and our habits with money made from installing display windows in shops around town. Despite the foofy nature of our social life, Mundo and I took our work very seriously. We prided ourselves on our familiarity with the prop rental houses that dotted Los Angeles. Here lurked the surreal follies which were the very nuts and bolts of the movie industry. These included, but were not limited to, terrifying oversize carnival heads, stuffed rattlesnakes, fake scenic rocks on wheels, charging bulls on wheels, alert collie dogs and limp hit-by-a-car collie dogs, life-size anatomy dolls, and fake salamis and cheeses of every size and description. Our favorite trick was to locate something impossibly grotesque and then see if we could seamlessly integrate it into the display window of a fancy Beverly Hills luxury goods store.