I say unbelievable shit and no one ever gets mad

Photo by Christopher Myers

It is - remarkably - the 80th birthday today of "The Pope of Trash" Mr John Walters, creator of the outrageous classic films Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Polyester, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom and, of course, Hairspray, and icon for transgressives, outsiders and weirdos everywhere - me included.

All hail!

From an excellent tribute article by Max Weiss in his home-town's leading journal Baltimore Magazine:

Eighty-year-olds are not supposed to be cool. Wrinkles aren’t cool. Bad knees aren’t cool. AARP memberships are not cool.

And yet, on the eve of his 80th birthday, John Waters remains eternally, ineffably, indisputably cool.

He’s not the only old guy who’s cool, but he’s the rare old guy who has the ability to constantly reinvent himself...

...So what is it that inspires such devotion in Waters’ fans? And why do young people still think he’s cool?

“I don’t get up every day and try to be cool,” Waters says. “But I think as long as you continue to be in touch with young people, they’ll think you’re even cooler.” Another key, says Waters, is not to trot out the old “we had so much more fun in my day” canard.

“No, we didn’t,” he says. “They are having just as much fun.”

And he should know. Yes, Waters goes out to nice restaurants and goes to galleries and does fancy things with his fancy friends, but he also still loves to hang out at the Club Charles, with its famous motto, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” and go to heavy metal bars...

...And somehow, despite the edginess of his humour, he has never been cancelled. “I say unbelievable shit and no one ever gets mad,” Waters says.

This is partly because the audiences who attend his performances are self-selecting. “If you’re coming to see me you want me to [go there].”

Also, he says, “My whole show is about going to that edge. But I always make fun of myself first.”

It goes back to that inclusivity thing. Waters’ work is always about bringing people together - the squares and the outlaws, queer and straight, Black and white.

Even his tour merch displays that ethos: “Join the Cult.” He wants you to be a part of his joyful, iconoclastic club.

And honestly, who wouldn’t want to be a member?

I certainly would!

Many happy returns, John Samuel Waters Jr. (born 22nd April 1946)

Birds without irony?

“The reason I called it Pink Flamingos was because the movie was so outrageous that we wanted to have a very normal title that wasn’t exploitative. The only people who had [flamingos in their garden] had them for real, without irony. My movie wrecked that.” - John Waters





Sad news. The creator of possibly the most influential piece of plastic in cultural history, that epitome of kitsch, the plastic pink flamingo garden ornament - Don Featherstone has died.

From Improbable Research website:

Don created the flamingo when he was freshly graduated from art school, and newly employed at a plastics factory. One of his first assignments was to create three-dimensional plastic lawn ornaments (up to that time, most plastic lawn ornaments were more or less flat). The flamingo was one of his earliest efforts for the factory.

Eventually he became president of the company. After Don retired, dire things were done, by his successor, to the flamingo, triggering a worldwide protest, which eventually led to a more or less happy rallying of the forces of Good, and a restoration of the plastic pink flamingo’s status. In 2011, the flamingo attained new heights, when the Disney movie Gnomeo and Juliet featured a plastic pink lawn ornament named “Featherstone”.

RIP Mr Featherstone. I hope your headstone is appropriately shaped and coloured...

Thoughts for the weekend...

...I am still in a John Waters mood.

[PS It is more than thirty years since Edith Massey died.]

A wish to be applauded on sight

Just hearing the marvellous Philip Hoare eulogising about the subject of Stephen Tennant at Polari on Monday was enough to get my juices flowing for a suitable tribute.

Who better to provide an overview of the "Brightest of the Bright Young Things" than that modern-day master of all things eccentric Mr John Waters? Here are some extracts from his review of Mr Hoare's biography of Stephen, Serious Pleasures, first published in the New York Times in 1991:

In 1910, when Stephen Tennant was four years old, he ran through the gardens of his family's Wiltshire estate, Wilsford Manor, and was literally stopped in his tracks when he came face to face with the beauty of the "blossom of a pansy." Thirty years later, so precious and high-strung that he sometimes took to his bed for months at a time, he was coaxed outside by a friend for a ride in the car on the condition that his eyes be bandaged, since passing scenery might make him too "giddy." Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch - believe me, Stephen Tennant made them all seem butch.

According to Philip Hoare, the author of "Serious Pleasures," the witty and amazing life story of this great sissy, Cecil Beaton was one of the first to encourage Tennant's eccentric vocation of doing nothing in life - but doing it with great originality and flamboyance. Completely protected by class, Stephen Tennant couldn't care less what people thought of his finger waves, his Charles James leopard pajamas, his makeup ("I want to have bee-stung lips like Mae Murray") or his dyed hair dusted with gold. Who would dare criticize this "aristocratic privilege," this self-described "fatal gift of beauty"? As The London Daily Express in 1928 so succinctly summed up Tennant's attitude toward life, "you...feel that condescension, indeed, can go no further."

Although many who knew Tennant later in life maintained that they "could hardly believe the physical act possible for him," the one real love affair of his adult life was with Siegfried Sassoon, the masculine, renowned pacifist poet old enough to be his father. Sassoon brought to their relationship "his fame, his talent, his position," while Tennant's only daily activities were "dressing-up" and reading about himself in the gossip columns. Looking at the photos of the two lovers in Mr. Hoare's book, Tennant posing languidly (vogueing, really), way-too-thin and way-too-rich, as Sassoon looks on proudly, even the most radical Act-Up militant might mutter a private "Oh, brother!" But the author makes us see that Tennant's extreme elegance was close to sexual terrorism, as it flabbergasted society on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century.

"Cherish me and introduce me to the glories of New York," Tennant telephoned a startled friend, David Herbert, as he crossed the Atlantic on the Berengaria. Herbert met Tennant at the boat and was embarrassed to see him walking down the gangway "'Marcelled' and painted...delicately holding a spray of cattleya orchids."

"Pin 'em on!" shouted a tough customs officer in homophobic disgust.

"Oh, have you got a pin?" exclaimed Tennant in complete disregard for the reaction of others. "You kind, kind creature."

After World War II, Tennant became, in the words of Osbert Sitwell, "the last professional beauty." From then on, it was time to hit the sack big time. Sleeping Beauty forever. He had inspired enough fiction (Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate), met enough celebrities (everyone from Tallulah and Garbo to Cocteau and Jean Genet) and traveled the globe with Barbara Hutton and other rich dames for long enough; it was society's turn to come visit him.

"Reeking of perfume," "covered with foundation," with ribbons hanging from his dyed comb-over hairdo, he rested "non-stop" for the next 17 years in "decorative reclusion." Unconcerned about his grossly overweight figure ("But I'm beautiful," he would reason, "and the more of me there is the better I like it!"), he lay in bed surrounded by his jewellery, drawings and Elvis Presley postcards while, as Mr. Hoare puts it, his "decorative fantasies were running amok" (the pink and gold statues in the overgrown garden, the fishnets and seashells everywhere, the tiny uncaged pet lizards, the bursting pipes and rotting carpets, the mice still in the traps). Happily re-creating the "perfervid environment" of his youth, Tennant calmly painted the tops of his legs with pancake makeup and proudly showed his "suntan" to astonished visitors like Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. David Bailey, Christopher Isherwood, David Hockney, even Kenneth Anger all made pilgrimages and, though they may have laughed good-naturedly afterward, none laughed as hard as Tennant himself, who, after all, was in on the joke from the beginning. "To call Stephen affected," the artist Michael Wishart recalled, "would be like calling an acrobat a show-off, or a golden pheasant vulgar."

In his later years, as the antiques dealers circled outside his estate like vultures, waiting for the end, Tennant would sometimes stop traffic in nearby country towns by going shopping wearing tight pink shorts or a tablecloth as a skirt. His family had given up on him long before, exhibiting only "bemused resignation," a wonderful English trait sorely missing in America today. V. S. Naipaul may have described Tennant best when he noticed "the shyness that wasn't so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight."

Philip Hoare has given his subject the ultimate final bravo in this meticulously researched and respectful biography, which manages to be both scholarly and hilarious at the same time. If only Stephen Tennant, always his own best audience, could have read Serious Pleasures before peacefully passing away (in bed, of course) in his 81st year. He probably would have fainted.

Stephen Tennant was an inspiration to us all...

Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant by Philip Hoare.

Man is the Hunter

"I don't care whether people like me or dislike me. I'm not on earth to win a popularity contest. I'm here to be the best human being I possibly can be."

Tab Hunter - movie icon, poster-boy-hunk for a whole generation of teenage girls and closet queens, latterly cult character actor and now out, gay and proud gay man - was born on 11th July 1931.

As we wish Mr Hunter (aka Arthur Andrew Kelm) a happy 80th birthday, it is worth highlighting the fact that the former teen idol starred in not one, but two of the campest films ever made, and both are well worth entering in the Museum.

He played the cinema owner (and love interest) "Todd Tomorrow" alongside Divine's troubled housewife "Francine Fishpaw" in John Waters' 1981 "Odorama" masterpiece Polyester:



From The New York Times:

Francine worries helplessly about household odors, and does her best to make sure her suburban house is furnished with all the velour, gilt and brightly colored plastic her family could want. Polyester is a movie that can get laughs out of a dinette set simply because it is a dinette set. The props, all through the movie but particularly in Francine's lovely home, are priceless. Mr. Hunter is certainly endearing, playing a man who runs an art-house drive-in, one with champagne and caviar at the refreshment stand and a Marguerite Duras triple bill on the screen. Divine, lovestruck and trying hard to please, is seen poring bewilderedly over a copy of Cahiers du Cinema.

From Prince Planet Movies site:

The biggest inspiration for Polyester comes from one of John Waters’ idols, the great Douglas Sirk. If you can imagine one of Sirk’s sumptuous Technicolor melodramas from the 50s but with a 300-pound drag queen as the female lead, you have an idea of what to expect.

Polyester trailer

Mr Hunter, evidently by now entirely comfortable with playing love scenes with a very large tranny, went on to appear once more against Divine (and that other archetypal self-parodist Lainie Kazan) in Paul Bartel's 1985 camp spoof Western Lust in the Dust:



From the film's sleevenotes:

Gold fever has struck the wild western town of Chile Verde, where hard-living cowboys and hot-blooded wenches all lust for wealth and each other. But when mysterious gunfighter Abel Wood and defiled singer Rosie Velez (Tab Hunter and Divine, reunited from "Polyester") come together with saloon owner Marguerita Ventura (Lanie Kazan), fiery passion and unbridled greed turns the town upside down. Do these two wanton women share the secret to a fortune in buried treasure? And how far south of the border will desperate men have to go to uncover it?

Lust In The Dust trailer

Not bad for the boy who sang Young Love. [Read my blog on Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle about Mr Hunter last year.]



Mr Tab Hunter, we salute you!

http://www.tabhunter.com/