• • •
One hundred years, one month, and thirteen days after construction on the Dakota began, Mark David Chapman spent most of December 8, 1980, waiting outside the building’s gated south entrance on Seventy-Second Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, a Charter Arms .38 Special loaded with hollow-point bullets, and a copy of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s album, Double Fantasy, which had been released three weeks before. Around midmorning, Chapman met Lennon’s housekeeper, who was returning to the building from a walk with Lennon and Ono’s only child together, Sean, who was then five years old. Chapman touched the child’s hand and said, “Beautiful boy,” quoting the song Lennon had written about his son, the final track on the first side of Double Fantasy. Around 5:00 P.M., Chapman met Lennon as he and Ono were exiting the building on their way to a recording session. Chapman silently handed him his copy of the album for an autograph; Lennon obliged and handed it back, saying, “Is this all you want?” Chapman accepted the autographed album, smiled, and nodded yes. At about 10:50 P.M., Lennon and Ono returned to the Dakota. Ono passed through the gate of the reception area leading into the courtyard, Lennon following a few steps behind her. From directly behind him, Chapman opened fire, discharging the revolver five times in quick succession. The first bullet missed and the other four landed in Lennon’s back.
• • •
Derek Fitzsimmons spent most of December 8, 1980, sixty-six blocks south of the Dakota at the Sheridan Square Playhouse, in dress rehearsal for a production of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s Love’s Tangled Web, which Ludlam had written and was directing and starring in. Derek was twenty-four years old. He had graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology a few years before, and was living with his boyfriend, Tom, in a studio apartment in Forest Hills. He was dressing the actors backstage at the Ridiculous, and performing small onstage roles in Ludlam’s productions. Ethyl Eichelberger was in that production. He had met Ethyl earlier that year when he was doing wardrobe at the Lucille Lortel Theatre for a production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. Ethyl had just moved back to New York from Rhode Island, where he’d been the lead character actor for seven years at Trinity Rep. When she came back to New York she changed her name from whatever it was before to Ethyl Eichelberger, and got a tattoo of himself as an angel on his back. That tattoo was somehow an important part of Ethyl’s becoming Ethyl. Ethyl was only hired to make the wigs for that show at the Lucille, though she had already been in a few of Ludlam’s Ridiculous productions, and was beginning to do her solo shows. They became friends backstage at the Lucille, and wound up working together often. They both performed in drag, and Ethyl invited Derek to perform in some of her shows. Ethyl was, though only for a brief time, a mentor to Derek.
• • •
Six months after John Lennon was assassinated, Derek was at Club S.n.A.F.U. on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-First Street, standing onstage while Ethyl did her Lucrezia Borgia show. Ethyl always beat him to the finish line in the dressing room. Derek’s approach to his makeup was delicate and precise. He wanted every false eyelash in place. His lip liner looked machine-etched on. Derek would lose himself in the mirror, falling into his reflection like Narcissus: spacing out, spending fifteen minutes alone perfecting his foundation. Ethyl, eleven years his senior, found this fastidiousness of his silly and endearing—a mark of his youth and relative inexperience. Ethyl’s drag aesthetic was decidedly old-fashioned, as far as it could be said that there are conservative schools of the art form. She found it distasteful that some of the younger drag queens seemed to really want to be able to pass for women, with their rubber breasts, worshiping at the style altar of Diana Ross. For Ethyl, the whole thing was supposed to be redolent of the circus, of Weimar Republic cabaret; he wanted a face painted halfway between clown and whore. Ethyl slapped her makeup on in twenty violent minutes: ghost-white foundation, that night, glittering triangles of gold eye shadow with metallic magenta streaks, false lashes like tarantula legs dragged through the black mud of her mascara, red lipstick she stabbed on in three bellicose jerks of the wrist.
Derek was emceeing that night. It was his job to introduce Ethyl, then simply stand back and become a living set piece as Ethyl turned the tiny stage into a lavish spectacle—pure Satyricon. Sometimes, before the show, Derek would open with his Rosemary—his first, and admittedly not his most tasteful, drag persona: Rosemary, the retarded Kennedy sister lobotomized by Dr. Walter Freeman and shamefacedly sequestered out of sight, drooling in a rocking chair and gazing vacant-eyed out of some attic window. Rosemary was a combination of a drag performance, a satire on moneyed Cape Cod, and a playground-quality retard act on the maturity level of why-are-you-hitting-yourself, and of course it brought the house down every time.
But on that night, he just did a short stand-up routine before introducing Ethyl. Derek was wearing drag he’d mostly made himself: a tight leather miniskirt and a sequin-spangled silver top with long shimmering tassels swishing down his thighs, sequined pumps that matched the top, chandelier-drop earrings, and his fussily done face of makeup. His hair was his own, long and blond, teased out and gelled up with egg white, scrambled atop his head in an early-sixties Brigitte Bardot sort of thing. He was en costume, as the obnoxious professional actors he and Ethyl had dressed at the Lucille Theatre would say. After nattering a while at the audience over a jungle of hoots and whistles, he retreated to the side of the stage and very nearly forgot that he himself was part of the show—albeit an ancillary part—and not a spectator, so riveting was Ethyl’s Lucrezia.
Derek thought it appropriate that she changed her name to Ethyl, with that spelling, which reminded him of the technical suffix of a chemical: her performances were high-octane spectacles. Ethyl had begun doing these shows because he said he wanted to portray all the great ladies of the stage and history: Jocasta, Clytemnestra, Nefertiti, Medea. His Lucrezia Borgia had something to do with the infamous femme fatale of the Italian Renaissance, but even to call it a character study would be misleading: No two performances were alike, and they always involved half-improvised songs in which she accompanied herself on a big silly accordion that reminded Derek of The Lawrence Welk Show. Her repertoire was vast: song, dance, fire eating, cartwheels. Sometimes he would hire a set painter to paint the backdrop live while he performed, as he did that night.
When the show ended, the DJ put on a Chaka Khan song, “I’m Every Woman,” and like a snake shedding a skin the ambiance of the night slid from performance space to dance party. S.n.A.F.U. was a galaxy of glitter and confetti in a black room that shimmered like outer space, and was as fantastic with alien life: feather boas, leather skirts, wigs, star-shaped sunglasses, boys in ball gowns and girls in pinstripe suits, those slender Audrey Hepburn cigarette holders, the night floating ever higher on champagne and amphetamines and a tremendous lot of cocaine and whatever else was around, strobe lights blitzing, the disco ball throwing spinning multicolored points of light all around. It was nights like these that Derek would later remember as the halcyon days, that flash-in-the-pan golden age of no more than a few years in the late seventies and early eighties between punk and the plague that came, pure Fellini in Technicolor, the sex and fun and wildness without restraint, without shame.
And out of this melee there came a woman. From amid that dazzling spectrum of genderfuck and drag there came a woman, dressed in women’s clothing, floating like a ghost in Derek’s direction—gliding—for she had the primly postured gait of a woman who had once been a little girl made to cross a room with a book balanced on her head. This woman looked as out of place as a Q-tip in a Crayola box at S.n.A.F.U. She was probably about thirty-five and very Waspy. She seemed to have stepped freshly powdered out of a garden party in the Hamptons. She was short; her impeccably groomed, naturally wavy brown hair was pulled up in a tortoiseshell clip that came up to Derek’s midriff (though granted, Derek was five foot ten and in five-inch heels). She wore a starchy
white blouse with puffed sleeves, pleated khaki trousers, tasseled Italian loafers, carried an Yves Saint Laurent handbag. All terribly soigné. Thin white-gold bangles trembled on her slender wrist and caught glints from the disco ball as her bony fingers rose and indicated Derek’s outfit, waving without quite pointing up and down his body, and she said, in a feathery voice scarcely audible over Chaka Khan: “I like . . . this.”
She came closer, and Derek suddenly felt like he was meeting someone else’s mother at a wedding. She held her hand out to him, not vertically, like a salesman about to make his elevator pitch, but horizontally, as if inviting one to kiss it. Derek took the little hand in his—this tiny, perfect hand with tiny, perfectly manicured, lightly blush-colored nails—and did not shake it so much as simply hold it for a moment, soft, cool palms brushing smoothly together. She introduced herself to him as Marianne.
They talked. Her voice was deft and quiet and her speech grammatical, softly chiming with years of education and centuries of wealth.
“I would very much like for you to come to my home to have your picture taken,” she said. Marianne spoke with a hint of that upper-class East Coast accent that was dying out it seemed even then, what used to be called the Transatlantic accent. That voice reminded Derek of Agnes Moorehead from Bewitched. (Thank God he hadn’t done Rosemary that night.) “I do portraiture, you see, and I am very interested in photographing entertainers.”
Entertainers—that was the word she used. Not drag queens, not cross-dressers, but “entertainers.” Did she use this gossamer euphemism out of timorousness or politeness? Or some other reason?—some upper-crust noblesse oblige sort of decorousness, which Derek certainly knew about but was not overly familiar with. Derek was the second-to-last of seven children from a blue-collar Irish Catholic family in Poughkeepsie. His had been a childhood of hand-me-downs, burnt steak and baked potatoes, fiercely measured portions at mealtimes. His father died of a heart attack when he was nine, and after that his sisters raised him and his mother wore a green dress and drank herself to sleep on the couch in the afternoons. One of his older sisters was a nun now, and to her, Derek was not an “entertainer,” nor even a “drag queen,” but a sinner, and to his older brothers, he was a freak, a pervert, a queer, a faggot.
A card materialized between his fingers, the apparition vanished, and the night roared into oblivion. The many points of light spun around the room and became a vortex of streaks, smooth horizontal lines of color and whiteness, flashes of fake diamonds and the orange tips of cigarettes. Even here there was a hint of money in the air, or of carelessness, at any rate. Money: the ailment and panacea of the eighties, the real drug we should have said no to. Reagan had told us we had it, and we liked to hear that. Everyone did, including drag queens in squalid basement bars on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-First Street. Derek’s memory of that night would fade around three or four in the morning and come back to him when Sunday’s dishwater light of about noon slanting in through venetian blinds on a window in his friend Scott’s East Village apartment woke him. He was naked and looking directly at Scott’s pillow, which he had smeared with the makeup he hadn’t removed before bed. Scott was still snoring as Derek picked his things off the floor, and when he made it back to the dingy studio in Forest Hills he shared with Tom, he discovered he had miraculously retained that card. It was a stark beige rectangle of starchy, quality stock, with a name and phone number in crisp gold lettering, and an address, at the Beresford on the Upper West Side. With the card in hand, he sank a finger into a plastic hole in the rotary dial of his bedside telephone and fought back an apprehension tightening his throat that surprised him.
• • •
The Beresford, 211 Central Park West. With one hundred and seventy-five apartments, this preeminent prewar landmark is the largest of four luxury residential buildings on Central Park West designed by the notable Hungarian-American architect Emery Roth, who decorated the massive structure with then-fashionable beaux-arts and art deco flourishes of style. The Beresford stands twenty-three stories tall between Eighty-First and Eighty-Second Streets, with three separate entrances, and four copper-capped towers. The building provides sweeping layouts with ballroom-sized rooms, ten-foot ceilings, wood-burning fireplaces, and private elevator landings. Its mass is relieved by horizontal belt courses in the masonry and features detailing reminiscent of late Georgian facade work. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the advent of steel frames gave rise to skyscrapers, and the citizens of New York, finding themselves living increasingly in shadows, passed the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which outlawed tall buildings from blocking air and light to the streets below; this resulted in Beresford’s expansive setbacks, with fifty-foot-wide flagstone terraces overlooking Central Park. Thus, the higher-up apartments on the building’s east-facing side are among the most expensive and prestigious residences in New York City.
Derek was curious to see the inside of it.
• • •
Derek stood before a doorman in a stately lobby of gold-veined white marble, Derek in jeans and a T-shirt with his long hair knotted loosely in a ponytail and a sparkly purple foil dance bag slung over his shoulder and sagging at his waist, watching the elderly man in his bottle-green uniform with brass buttons murmuring into a desk phone. The doorman’s uniform, with its symmetrical and military ceremoniousness, reminded him of a Christmas nutcracker, an impression helped by the deep-creased jowls that made his chin look separately attached to his face by hidden hinges. Derek had agonized over what to bring. He had figured Marianne would be interested in seeing a few costume changes, so he had brought along as much of the best of his best as would fit in the bag. Lots of makeup, brand-new silver stiletto sandals, the leather miniskirt he’d had on at S.n.A.F.U. the night Marianne had introduced herself to him, jewelry, hairspray, a navy-blue top he’d also made himself, which he called his Balenciaga top because of the way he’d cut it—it had ruffles at the bust, and a wonderful way of swinging out in back.
The doorman hung up the phone, smiled, gestured him toward the elevator bank. He rode the elevator with an elevator man dressed in a bottle-green uniform similar to the doorman’s. The three walls of the elevator that were not doors were floor-to-ceiling mirrors, creating an illusion of the infinite, Derek’s and the elevator man’s reflections diminishing into the distance on either side of them. The doors opened onto a small private hallway with a coatrack. There was only one door in it, which was open, and Marianne was standing on its threshold.
Marianne ushered him inside with a courtly “Good afternoon,” and in a moment he was standing in the most luxurious interior space he had ever stood in. Marianne was at his elbow in an outfit similar to what she had been wearing at S.n.A.F.U.—her hair up, the sleeves of her beige silk blouse rolled up, houndstooth wool trousers, and a thin braided leather belt. She would probably have offered to take his coat had he been wearing one. He wasn’t, as it was late May: It was humid and overcast outside, a dull, dark day, but warm and sticky, the heavy sort of atmosphere that begs for rain all day and doesn’t get it until dinnertime, and then steam rises from the hot streets when the downpour finally splashes them. She didn’t have many lights on, which contributed to the melancholy mood in the vast apartment. They stood in a circular foyer; under their feet was a classic compass design of black-and-white marble. She led him in and around, in and around, deeper into the apartment, apologizing all the while for the mess, Derek half-beside and half-behind her, half listening to her and half ogling their surroundings. She was explaining, in her trim patrician accent, that her husband, Ken, was an architect, and that he had designed the apartment’s renovation himself, and they were just now moving in and putting on the finishing touches. Derek would remember that thick, sleepy smell of wet paint: Everything was freshly done, immaculate, not yet lived in. There were no workmen in the apartment that afternoon, but there were signs here and there of unfinished jobs that someone soon intended to come back to: a paint-speckled ladder, plas
tic drop cloths, power tools. Unopened cardboard boxes were stacked up in some of the rooms. Most of the rooms had furniture in them, but all the Louis Quatorze tables and chairs seemed to be floating aimlessly in the middle of the parquet and marble floors, awaiting someone’s decisions on where they would go. He saw a Chagall painting in a recessed frame leaning against a living room wall, waiting to be hung.
He followed Marianne as she glided across spotless floors that reflected almost as crisply as a mirror. Derek quickly got lost in the space. He’d been in the apartment less than five minutes, and already, if he’d been asked to find his way back to the door he couldn’t have done so. He would remember lots of rounded shapes, lots of moldings, lots of warm, pale colors: ecru, apricot, champagne. She led him in and around, in and around: living room, dining room, hallway, another living room, another hallway . . . and finally, into a bathroom. This bathroom was, it may be said without hyperbole, more spacious by the square foot than Derek and Tom’s apartment. Everything blinding white marble: his and hers sinks, toilet, bidet, tub, one of those giant showers you can sit down in, which blasts water at you from the sides as well as from above. The bathroom had an adjoining dressing room—a boudoir, he supposed, with a large vanity table. It was a gorgeous piece—Derek guessed it was something late nineteenth century and French. Three wide mirrors winged out in triptych, their silvered surfaces faintly veined with age. The surface of the table was, what was it called?—ormolu—finely gilt with a coating of high-carat gold.
Marianne gestured toward this museum-quality piece of neoclassical furniture and said, “Please. Do what you do.” And then, “Would you like a drink?”
Derek would not remember what he said then, if anything, but Marianne floated out of the room and a while later floated back in again with a Campari on the rocks in a crystal lowball, in which time Derek had unzipped his sparkly purple foil bag and spread his makeup across the vanity, undressed, and slipped on his pantyhose. He would wear one pair of nude pantyhose to cover the hair on his legs, and then his fancy hose—that day it was a pair of stretchy powder-blue fishnet stockings that he rolled on very carefully, as they ripped easily. He began to put on his makeup. The whole apartment was as hushed as a library, the deft clickings of Derek opening and shutting his compacts or popping the cap off a mascara brush the only audible sounds in it. Derek’s own face looked strange to him in the three antique silver mirrors, as if he’d just taken some hallucinogen whose effect he was feeling but hadn’t started tripping yet. His downmarket makeup—all his little drugstore compacts and cheap Brucci lipsticks—looked so absurdly out of place rolling around on Marianne’s ormolu vanity table.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 21