Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (16 page)

My mother Josephine worked in a lot of his shows. They would always argue about her getting paid. My mother wanted to get paid for her work. She played the part of the librarian in
Vain Victory
. Every day she’d take the bus down to the theatre and perform and come back home very late. She worked in a spaghetti dress. She did a strip tease and sang a song. But she wanted to get paid. They used to fight about that all the time, but they loved each other tremendously.

Agosto Machado

Vain Victory
closed the night that the Cockettes opened and bombed at the Anderson Theater down the block. Only Jackie and I did the full run of performances. Jackie had this magic carpet and I was going to hang on for all it’s worth because I thought after Jackie Curtis, after this fabulous acid trip of
Americka Cleopatra
and
Vain Victory
I never wanted it to end. It launched me into the downtown art and theater world.

Young people today when I lecture will ask, “What was the budget for the sets and costumes”? I say, “What budget?” We went out on the street, and to the thrift shops and the Salvation Army if we had big bucks and we just found what we needed. It was non-profit theater. To the young people today who immediately ask, “What do I get paid?” I say this is an experience; you’re going to work with people who are part of the history and why is the money so important? I know today it’s a different world. They just cannot understand how we could actually put on a show without money. But Jackie did, you saw the essence of make believe, the muted reality of fantasy and possibilities.

Paul Ambrose

Jackie took me in after I was arrested for murder. I discovered there are two kinds of people in the world, “Who did you kill? Or, did you do it?” Jackie was one of the “Did you do it?” people and when I was released, because I did not do it, my friends were crossing the street to avoid me. Jackie took me in to his house and made everyone accept me socially, because if you wanted to see Jackie, I was with him. He took me to the factory, and Holly Woodlawn greeted me with open arms and called me, “Dear sister,” because she had just gotten out too after the French Ambassador’s wife affair.

Paul Morrissey claims not to remember that around that time he greeted me by saying, “You think you could play a man in our new movie? It’s a western.” Well, yes, Paul, I think I could play a man. Because I am a man. “You think you could play a murderer?” I said, “Yes Paul. I suppose you’ve heard I’ve been practicing.” He swears the conversation did not happen, but I remember it clearly. They never did the movie and I never got a part. Shortly thereafter, Jackie cast me in
Vain Victory
. Whatever career I have had, it’s all due to Jackie Curtis because nobody would acknowledge me until Jackie made them acknowledge me. And Jackie gave me every opportunity to shine in the play. Everybody in
Vain Victory
out of a cast of more than twenty, had their moment, and Jackie made sure it was played up. Jackie was not going to give an inch when he was on stage, but was generous enough to give you your moment if you could take it from Jackie. If Jackie wasn’t on stage you were home free, if he was, you had your chance if you could take it.

Jeremiah Newton

Candy Darling and Jackie were just wonderful on stage together in
Vain Victory
, and Candy liked Jackie a lot. But Candy did not approve of Jackie’s excessive alcohol and drug use. She told me she thought Jackie was out of control. That kind of behavior upset her. Candy liked a feeling of security. She liked knowing where she was going to sleep at night. She couldn’t stay with Jackie because she was afraid her things would be stolen or her dresses ripped up.

Unlike Jackie and Holly, Candy always behaved in a very grand manner. In 1972 after she appeared in Werner Schroeter’s film
The Death of Maria Malibran
Holly and Jackie made merciless fun of her serious attitude. It just drove them crazy that Candy aspired to be a working actress and a legitimate movie star. “Get real! Get off your trapeze and down into the sawdust!” Jackie would tell her.

Jackie on Being a Warhol Superstar:

Being a Warhol superstar, I was invited to a lot of parties, and those I wasn’t invited to I could crash. And at these parties I met an awful lot of people with money, which is very important in a commercial industry like show business. It opened many doors for me and it was one of the richest learning experiences in my life. Things I would never have looked up in books, dictionaries, chemistry references books, used car records, I tried to delve into areas I had never been interested in before. And even though I couldn’t quote a thing now, at the time it gave me many avenues to escape from just being fabulous on the outside. I wanted to be able to converse with people; I didn’t just want to say things like, “Isn’t Lana Turner wonderful?” You know – I didn’t want to just be a joke. I never wanted to be a queen with subjects.

Lily Tomlin

Jackie was a natural satirist, because he was an outsider and an artist. All the notions he had about living and being made him really able to see the absurdity of the culture. Plus, as Jane would say they were sitting home all day taking drugs and watching TV. There’s no quicker way of seeing the absurdity of the culture!

I remember one reviewer said that Jackie Curtis played female characters without pretending to be a woman. Jackie was an artist – whatever he wants to express, it’s just organic, it comes from both inside of him and he puts it on outside – it’s him sort of shaping the world and creating his own sort of world order, like Bush’s new world order, and I must say Jackie’s was a little more tantalizing!

Leee Black Childers

Jackie couldn’t stop observing humanity and writing. Holly Woodlawn is a great comedienne. Candy Darling was an incredible beauty, a magical beauty. But, of the three of them – and it’s always going to be the three of them, Jackie was the brains. Jackie thought it all up. And sometimes maliciously she made it all up: “Oh Holly, you look so beautiful in that shower curtain. Let’s go out! That’s such a good idea, we’ll just pin it around you just like this and then we’ll just run the in the streets!” Jackie loved that kind of thing, and Holly would fall for it because she was the clown.

Tom Weigel

It was Andy Warhol who first introduced us. This was at the Coe-Kerr Gallery in New York on December 2, 1977. It was a reception for the opening of athletes, silk screens of Sports legends. In strode this tall figure with a pixie-like face. “Jackie, you’re wearing summer clothes,” was the first thing Andy said, then “Tom, this is Jackie Curtis, and Jackie, this is Tom Weigel, he’s a poet.” Jackie just grabbed my wrist and forearm like I was immediate property. I could feel a spirited current pass between us, something incredible and final, like a New Testament event. We were friends from that moment on.

Andy asked Jackie what he had been up to. Jackie said he had just gotten in from California where he had been for some months doing screen tests for
The James Dean Story
. I just couldn’t see such a giant figure as Jackie struck actually taking on the part of James Dean. After all, Jackie himself was infinitely more interesting and anything but distant.

I was going to the St. Mark’s poetry readings by night, and school at Parsons and then over to Slugger Ann’s to visit Jackie. Jackie sometimes tended bar there for his grandmother Ann who was very possessive of him. She had brought him up while his parents were separated. Jackie’s mother had died shortly after we had met. I was new to the family, all Italians on his mother’s side. Jackie called me his producer right off the bat and brought out his two S&H scrapbooks. He wanted to make a comeback. I was stunned. This person had done too much already and he wasn’t even thirty.

Jackie had nonstop gift for words and creative speech the like of which I shall never encounter again. And his quietness was just as profound. He was so real, so up front as they used to say then, that he made other famous persons seem like pointlessly stuffy nonentities.

I moved into the Lower East Side early in 1978 to 515 East 6th street, a third floor studio. My place became a publicity office for Jackie. His comeback was well under way and we planned it methodically. My building had a charming Curtis Company elevator, just the right touch for all the future cast parties I would hold there for him. I started up a small press magazine for poetry and select prose called Tangerine and printed scenes from his plays and prose poems he was writing then. Jackie was then writing
Champagne
and something entitled
Moral Heights
, a sort of alternative soap opera. He was on the Joe Franklin show from time to time and working very hard.

His poverty shocked me, so I had to help out with ready cash and helped get him on welfare just so he could subsist. I claimed we were roommates and splitting the cost of my apartment. I provided letters of update when periodically requested. Jackie had a building and mailbox key and was on good terms with the kindly super at 515 Mrs. Savitch. He picked up his checks this way and sometimes a gift box from so and so, like when Barbra Streisand sent him an entire collection of her record albums. He would give us crash courses in Broadway musicals and old Hollywood movies that came to us free on the late show.

There Is An Aura About Them – poem by Jackie Curtis

From across the room, even without my glasses.

There is an AURA about them.

It’s funny too, because they’re wearing

just any old clothes.

But they will choose their colors.

On your left there is Stanley Perring.

On your right, Jackie Curtis.

There is an AURA about them.

Who are they?

No matter how much is indicated on the wall

directly behind them

there is still that aura.

There always WAS that aura.

They are smoking, True …

and the dog is fighting with the cat.

Stephen Arbex is asleep in the back room.

There is a parachute on their ceiling

and a shrine near a window that reads

or rather announces GIRL MACHINE

flanked by photos of The Virgin Mary,

Candy Darling and Lana Turner.

In an authentic church relic

that might very well be real gold

and once held those religiously kept flames,

there is encased a tube of lipstick that Carroll Baker

gave to Jackie Curtis.

There are dead flash bulbs on the window ledge.

They rest in peace.

Three Penguins and a copy of Back to Godhead.

Half a dressing gown adorns the center window.

There is a champagne bottle (empty) on the third window sill

which has growing on it more than an artificial flower,

it is quite justifiably the number 8.

The number of new life.

There is so much in this one room

(and there are other rooms with just as much, or little)

that one feels transported to some other time,

or other place … but never really quite forgetting

exactly where you are.

Each of these people, truly are, people …

or are they? truly?

They are devoured by all

and all is devoured by them.

It is simply quite awesome.

One must stand back,

unless there are those who prefer to take

the proverbial giant step and become closer.

Anything and everything seems to be possible …

if you dare.

But keep your eyes open,

unless it is a kiss you want …

there is an aura about them.

—Jackie Curtis © 1985 The Estate of Jackie Curtis

Michael Andre

In 1979 we were preparing the Poet’s Encyclopedia for publication and we sent out different invitations to poets and B-Girls arrived; that’s Jackie’s poem. It’s really the best fit of all the works in the encyclopedia. Poetically, it’s a tremendous success. It blends the kind of epigrammatic qualities of Alexander Pope and uses a lot of alliteration, which nobody else uses in the Poet’s Encyclopedia. It’s like a medieval poem it’s just b, b, b, b, and then he gets into a totally whimsical drunken rant kind of work, and I could tell immediately from the first ten lines, that it was a wonderful poem.

I immediately thought that he’d created, like Eliot’s wasteland, some large structure and then chopped out the under-pinnings, the different movements – which makes it sound like the drunken ravings of a B-Girl. Dramatically it moves toward the classic climax in a B-girl’s life, which is getting, how should we say it … making love in a bar. It was such a compendium of perfect detail, that I didn’t know where he got it, and when someone told me he lived over his grandmother’s bar; Slugger Ann’s, I knew that he had been observing this kind of behavior all of his life. And identified with it, and understood it in a kind of disinterested way. And lived it. Unfortunately, I guess. After he wrote this he began to live this life.

The poem also particularly reminded me of the poetry of Gregory Corso, who had the ability to take a single word, a concept –marriage is his most famous, and explore the whole meaning of it. B-Girls is sort of a distorted mirror image of marriage. Gregory was a junkie, all his life, which was a very long life. Unlike Jackie’s, unfortunately.

The reason I think there was originally a structure to the poem that he removed is because the movements have different forms. He will use a lot of jokes with rhyme: the bar girl … someone wants the bar girl’s cherry, but the bar girl has been around the block so many times that she’s afraid of only losing her olive.

Then he’ll get into very fancy and colloquial alliterations using the best everyday language … that, as written, is very meaningful – but also, as written sounds like a drunken slut.

Throughout the poem, alcohol is the water that keeps the whole desert alive. I guess its why it keeps reminding me of the wasteland, because it’s a lot about dryness, but instead of having Hindu philosophy save the day, nothing saves the day. Or sex in a bar after-hours saves the day. In fact, it sort of ends with obliteration. It’s a poem with a lot of color, but not much hope.