But my neck. This is about my neck. And I know what you’re thinking: Why not just decrease your dose? I’ll tell you why not. I don’t have the time to go back to crying eleven times a day. The fact is, it’s all one big ball of wax. If you lose the neck acne, you run the risk of crying eleven times a day again, and I would rather cry three times a week and have neck acne. One of my biggest regrets—bigger even than my marriage to Carl Bernstein—is that I didn’t spend my pre-transition years staring lovingly at my neck. It never crossed my mind to be grateful for it. It never crossed my mind that I would be nostalgic about a part of my body that I took completely for granted.
Of course, it’s true that now that I’m older and transitioning, I’m wise and sage and mellow. And it’s also true that I honestly do understand just what matters in life, which is slowly virilizing my body through the careful administration of a specific sex hormone. But guess what? It’s my neck.
CHAPTER 17 Powerful T4T Energy in Steve Martin’s The Jerk
Something my girlfriend and I talk about a lot is T4T energy—couples, usually fictional, mostly heterosexual, that somehow manage to emblematize a particular trans-on-trans dynamic. Seymour and Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors, Sally Solomon and her all-transmasc entourage on 3rd Rock from the Sun, Elizabeth Taylor’s marriages to Richard Burton (although not, of course, her marriage to Eddie Fisher); wearing a yellow baby-doll dress to your wedding after being condemned by the Vatican for “erotic vagrancy” is perhaps the pinnacle of T4T. Morticia and Gomez Addams are another obvious example. A family that can turn themselves into the most popular pinball game of all time certainly carries with it a particular transsexual resonance, and while most members of my generation are fond of the Raúl Juliá/Anjelica Huston movies in the same way we were all fond of the broadly light-Gothic vibe of the late eighties and early nineties (bracketed roughly by Beetlejuice on one end and The Craft on the other, with Death Becomes Her serving as the tentpole holding up the middle, and the live-action Casper serving as the air being let out of the tires), the Addams family is to trans people what Showgirls was to people who would go on to have careers in New York media.
I’d had no idea the Addamses originated as a series of New Yorker cartoons, having first encountered the 1960s TV show in reruns as a kid. Morticia was the first of the family to appear, because trans women are trailblazers and pioneers and the backbone of our community. Her transfeminine concordance feels obvious: she wears a lot of chokers, has excellent cheekbones, is a head or two taller than her adoring husband, is super into community gardening and constantly deadheading roses, and has a warm, comfortable relationship with her own affectations. Everyone with a lick of sense loves Morticia, but what is Gomez Addams, besides “an obviously transsexual man”? Everyone in the Addams family slides neatly into type: Morticia is a Vampirella/Elvira type, Lurch is a Frankenstein’s monster, Grandmama is a witch in the chipper vein of June Foray, Wednesday is a Goth girl, Pugsley is alternately a baby serial killer and a mad scientist, Uncle Fester is Rotwang, but what of Gomez? In some of the early comics he looks a bit like Peter Lorre, but that’s not much to go on.
And yet I think Gomez is the key to figuring out why the Addams family got a film revival and T-shirt deals while nobody today really cares about the Munsters. Yvonne De Carlo as Lily Munster had a similarly iconic beauty; Eddie Munster (Butch Patrick) a perfectly serviceable transmasculine look (all werewolves are transmasculine); Al Lewis as Grandpa has an immediately recognizable Bill Hader vibe, but Herman Munster (Fred Gwynne) falls flat on his face where Gomez Addams takes bat-like flight. That’s not to say the patriarch is the most important element of the transsexual family model, but if you don’t get the father right to begin with, he’s going to drag everyone else down with him. Let’s say the transsexual father has the most negative potential. Herman Munster is the patchwork result of a hundred different sitcom dads, all lovable buffoons, all empty temper tantrums, all puddin’-headed dreamers who have to be protected from the harshness of reality by enterprising wives; he’s someone to affectionately tolerate and just as affectionately avoid.
Gomez Addams is the best father in the world: unrepentantly, sincerely crazy about his wife, a nimble knife thrower, an acrobat (like most trans men, he has a background in gymnastics and a taste for fussy, expensive-looking accessories), a talented businessman with a healthy dislike for work, a brilliant, anarchic lawyer who’s never lost or won a case, in short, a man capable of maintaining balance both within and outside of the family home.
Charles Addams described him thusly:
Husband to Morticia (if indeed they are married at all) … a crafty schemer, but also a jolly man … sometimes misguided … sentimental and often puckish—optimistic, he is in full enthusiasm for his dreadful plots … is sometimes seen in a rather formal dressing gown … the only one who smokes.
Resolutely cheerful, unrepentantly sentimental, unfortunately prone to Peter Pan syndrome, in a bafflingly nonspecific relationship with a tall, beautiful woman, deeply enthusiastic about terrible hobbies, a tendency toward overdressing, neglectful or at the least careless of his health—Gomez Addams could have walked out of a pamphlet on trans-specific medical care from Vancouver Coastal Health.
In the 1964 pilot episode of the TV show (which aired, I think, about a week before the pilot for The Munsters), the local truancy board tries to force the Addamses to send Wednesday and Pugsley to school. Morticia fobs the officer off onto Gomez with “You must speak to my husband, the law is his responsibility,” but Gomez can’t stand the idea of parting with the kids at all: “Why have children just to get rid of them? I’m opposed to the whole nonsense.” Then he blows up a train. The pleasure of the Addams family fantasy, obviously, aside from “What if all your relatives had been as enthusiastic about your goth phase as you were?” is about having a mom and dad who are absolutely wild about each other, where every individual member has at least one creative passion and the time and energy to dedicate to it, while also receiving praise and constructive criticism on how to improve, eventually becoming so excellent as to influence the rest of society into adopting nuclear disarmament (this happens at the end of the pilot).
One gets the idea, watching Gomez, that he delights in getting to be a man, short and boisterous and nurturing and bursting with hope and pocket watches. He’s especially delighted to be a man married to a woman, particularly when that woman is Morticia Addams. It’s hard to get the same idea watching Herman Munster, or indeed lots of non–trans men both on and off the screen; maybe Herman is willing to be a man, or simply resigned to the idea. Possibly he merely considers it sufficient compensation for also being a monster of Frankenstein, but it doesn’t seem to strike him with renewed absurd glee every morning when he gets to wake up and be one. One can imagine Herman Munster waking in a spirit of tolerance, at most willing to get out of bed and face another day as the head of a family. Whereas it’s very easy to imagine Gomez’s inner euphoria-driven monologue when he wakes up every morning: Ah, how wonderful! Another stormy day! Ahahaha! Once again, I’m a short and stocky husband and father, with a wife as tall as God! What luck! Why else would he spend a thousand dollars a month on cigars, or own so many bathrobes with exquisitely-designed lapels, or tend so carefully to such a thin mustache?
* * *
“How long has it been since we’ve waltzed?” Gomez asks Morticia in the 1991 movie.
“Oh, Gomez,” she says, sighing dramatically. “Hours.”
While liking your wife might not be a uniquely T4T experience, the Addamses have a sort of shared vocational glee that’s hardly common for opposite-sex couples on either the big or the little screen. But it’s not always short enthusiastic man plus tall elegant woman, either; one of the strongest T4T pairings either Grace or I had ever seen took us rather by surprise, when we rewatched The Jerk a few weeks ago and watched Bernadette Peters fall in love with Steve Martin. I’d forgotten just how wonderfully strange Steve Martin’s body was as a y
oung man, how he’d been effectively doing old-man drag since his late twenties when his hair went gray, how fluid and twitchy his limbs were both at once, like the Scarecrow stumbling, stealthily graceful, through the first few beats of “If I Only Had a Brain.” I know, in some sense, that his hair went gray, of course, but in another sense it’s perfectly true that Steve Martin was born with a full head of hair, the same color as a fistful of silver dollars. There was a long stretch in the eighties and nineties where he’d alternate between playing beleaguered, straitlaced patriarchs (Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Parenthood; Father of the Bride) and total basket cases (a henpecked neurosurgeon, a jazz guitarist in love with a body-swapping ghoul, a desperate fire chief borrowing the body of a better-looking man).
All of the basket cases are absolutely chockablock with transmasculine energy, if only because disembodiment (The Man with Two Brains), supernatural body-swapping (All of Me) and nonsupernatural body-swapping (Roxanne) are surprisingly frequent motifs; the scene everybody remembers from Roxanne is when Steve Martin, fake nose and all, runs through a list of creative insults about his appearance in order to humiliate the guy who has failed to satisfyingly harass him. He goes on to borrow his friend Chris’s body in order to woo-by-proxy Daryl Hannah. Daryl (a girl with a boy’s name who was best known at the time for playing a mermaid who renames herself and hides out in a human body in Splash) eliminates the middleman by telling Martin directly: “All these other men, Charlie, they’ve got flat, featureless faces. No character, no fire, no nose. Charlie, you have a big nose. You have a beautiful, great, big, flesh-and-bone nose.”
There’s a dance sequence at the end of All of Me between Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin to, of course, the song “All of Me,” a song filled with such obvious transsexual imagery that it feels a little embarrassingly on the nose to even mention it (“Why not take all of me? … Take my lips, I want to lose them / Take my arms, I’ll never use them”). By this point Lily Tomlin’s character is now happily residing in the body of Victoria Tennant’s character (younger, beautiful, glamorous, blonde) after the two of them have been variously body-swapped into a vase, Steve Martin, and a horse, and after panning out to a full-length mirror the camera swings back to show Tomlin dancing in Martin’s arms in one last swap. It’s uncertain whether this is meant to show us what he will see when he looks at her for the rest of their lives together—if all the world will see Victoria Tennant while he sees Lily Tomlin—but the possibility exists.
He spins her around about three times faster than the music and she tumbles over his feet, throws her head back, and laughs. They end up shimmying back to back, pointing wildly at the floor and the ceiling, then get right back to twirling, followed by a modified Charleston (more enthusiastic than correct on Tomlin’s part, both enthusiastic and correct on Martin’s). Eventually he picks her up and swings her around; they peck each other gently on the lips and keep twirling over and over the infinite black-and-white-tile pattern reflected in the mirror. It’s either the pinnacle of heterosexuality or a beautiful moment of gay and lesbian solidarity, and I’ve never been able to figure out exactly which one it is. It ends in collapse as the two of them tumble into a heap together, a pretend-fall that turns into a real one. Or two pretend-falls, one of them less obviously staged than the other. In the last shot, they disintegrate beautifully and whole-heartedly in a hall of mirrors.
It’s in The Jerk that Steve’s T4T energy is at its absolute best, I think, as he and Bernadette Peters speak to each other in the most baffling voices imaginable. His Navin Johnson spends most of the movie hunched over in the shape of a question mark, usually from excitement, but looking for all the world like he’s just been binding too long. Navin meets Peters’s Marie after rescuing the boy she’s babysitting from a runaway model train. Bernadette Peters sounds like a cross between a strict governess and Betty Boop to begin with, and she plays her natural coo up to the hilt for these scenes. I can never quite place what voice Martin’s doing in The Jerk. It’s like he’s testing out every voice he’s ever heard until he can land on one he likes. He pitches it high, then low, drawls it, drags it out, rushes through sentences like a breathless toddler, sometimes going through puberty in a single sentence. This is how he asks her out for the first time:
NAVIN: Do you have any boyfriends?
MARIE: Not really.
Navin: Are they crazy? If I was a fellow, I’d be around all the time.
Later, trying to cover for the fact that his own girlfriend is trying to bust up their date, Navin says, “Look, these hoodlums are dangerous. I think we oughta get out of here before she sees us.… I always call a gang ‘she.’ It’s like when you call a boat ‘she,’ or a hurricane ‘she.’ Or a girl. You can call a girl ‘she.’ That’s just one of the many things you can call a ‘she.’ ” Marie, solemnly carrying a handful of decapitated daisies, nods skeptically but doesn’t contradict him. There’s a lovely little moment that comes when the two of them walk along the beach at night together, singing “Tonight You Belong to Me” and falling in love with each other. Toward the end of the song she pulls out a trumpet and plays a virtuosic little solo. Navin’s face is at first full of soft surprise and delight, then infinitely tender wistfulness, and he says, “You know, while you were playing that just now, I had the craziest fantasy that I could rise up and float right down the end of this coronet, right through here, through these valves, right along this tube, and right up against your lips.”
* * *
In every scene Navin acts like a recent arrival to his own body. He never seems to get used to it, always moving his arms and legs like he’s trying to keep up with his own marionettist, unfailingly one step behind the news of his own sex. He’s shocked and delighted when his first girlfriend acquaints him with his own dick, which he calls his “special purpose,” having assumed that’s what his mother meant when she told him he’d find his “special purpose” someday. He even writes home to share the good news:
My dear family, guess what? Today I found out what my special purpose is for.
Gosh, what a great time I had. I wish my whole family could have been here with me. Maybe some other time as I intend to do this a lot.
Every chance I get.
Your loving son,
Navin.
And what could be more transsexually resonant than having an unnecessarily specific conversation with your family about your dick and your sex life? Then comes an unexpectedly utopian response: Navin’s family members are all thrilled for him.
I once tried to explain my approach to transition to a friend using The Jerk’s most well-known scene, when Navin, having lost everything in a lawsuit brought against him by Carl Reiner, announces he’s leaving both Marie and their extravagant mansion to find people who believe in him. He starts to stumble out of the house unshaven and disheveled, wearing a worn-out bathrobe with his pants down around his ankles, declaring to anyone who will listen that he doesn’t need “any of this—I don’t need this stuff, and I don’t need you.” Then he grabs an ashtray and clarifies, “I don’t need anything except this, and that’s it, and that’s the only thing I need, is this. I don’t need this or this. Just this ashtray.” Then he sees a paddle game: “And this paddle game. The ashtray and the paddle game and that’s all I need,” and so on with a remote control, a box of matches, a lamp, a chair, and a magazine, until he can barely shuffle along the street, weighed down as he is by household detritus. (The spell is finally broken when he gets to his dog, who growls at him, at which point he says, “Well, I don’t need my dog, then.”) Even if you haven’t seen The Jerk, you’ve seen that scene, and it felt like the most immediately useful shorthand for transition: the frequent and immediate reversals, the increasingly emphatic avowals, the insistence that this was always the end, right here, trying to establish the absolute bare minimum, constantly leveraging the future against the present, patently insincere declarations of self-sufficiency, the pants around the ankles. “Just this haircut, and nothing
else. Just this new haircut, and an entirely new wardrobe, and that’s all. I don’t need anything else. Just this new short haircut, and an all-new wardrobe, and a doctor’s appointment I’m going to cancel and then reschedule nineteen times, but I don’t need to tell anyone else about this or reconsider anything else. Just the haircut, the wardrobe, the on-and-off doctor’s appointment I’ll never go to, and these secret therapy sessions. That’s all I need! I don’t need to change my name or talk to my friends. Oh, I need testosterone patches, obviously. But just these! Just this ninety-day supply of low-dose testosterone patches, and the haircuts, and all the formless sweaters, and confusing my doctor, and the secret therapy, and nothing else.”
By the end of The Jerk Navin is restored to Marie, to his family, to financial solvency, the paddle game, and his dog; he has everything he needs and nothing he doesn’t. But the moment I think of as representative of these two, of the mutual recognition and tentative delight of their T4T energy, comes when they’re first reunited after a long separation a little more than halfway through the movie. It’s neither their first separation nor their last reunion. Marie is working as a cosmetologist in a department store, displaying the effects of a new face mask called Mascoderm on an elderly man named Irving as his wife and a number of other women watch. She promises that when they peel it off, his skin will be tighter, firmer, and look like someone else’s skin entirely. “You’ll be amazed. Get ready, Irving!” While they wait for the Mascoderm to do the work, she helps his wife pick out eyeshadow and lip tint for Irving post-transformation. “Let’s try everything,” his wife says, unwilling to foreclose on any possibilities, open to any and all imaginable futures. Meanwhile, Navin has snuck into the room, eager to surprise Marie, and switches places with Irving, settling in under the mask.
Something That May Shock and Discredit You Page 16