Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (9 page)

Jackie is a girl, he’s a boy – it’s as if the idea of what your sex is is just a reflection of your feeling of your personality that day, and it changes, it’s zigzag, it’s a combination of Lucille Ball and a prizefighter and the references are all over the place. My guess is that Jackie has a huge IQ and probably severe cognitive ADD qualities, but he really focused into what he could do with that. It’s the moment of gay liberation; Stonewall happens in June 1969 and less than a month later, Jackie is having his wedding to Eric Emerson on this rooftop. As it turned out, Jackie didn’t get married to Eric because he did not show up, but Jackie took that all in stride and returned for the wedding reception at Max’s Kansas City where Eric worked and he was totally amazed that everyone was paying so much attention to this, and Eric kind of sheepishly apologized to Jackie and Jackie said, “Yes, I know, Eric. But I have a show to do now – my reception.” That was so Jackie!

Jackie on working with Warhol

The first thing Andy Warhol said to me was, “Do you want to be a star? You won’t have to do anything for it.” In my head I wanted to do everything. I wanted to sing, dance, talk, be a man, be a woman and wear furs. Andy and I were very close while we worked on
Women in Revolt
, but he didn’t take me to parties. He took Candy and Holly because they were girls. I felt like Medusa, unable to go out in public. I felt I was being abandoned when I was his biggest star. I realized later that he was right. I wasn’t a “party girl” I was a method actor. I was a “Superstar.” I showed everyone you could change your sex, you could be male or female without surgery

Paul Morrissey

What I liked about Jackie was what I liked about Holly later, the fact that there was nothing feminine about Jackie. He made no attempt to act in a feminine way. The makeup he wore didn’t go far to make him look feminine either. During that time I had run into Candy Darling a few places and she was entirely feminine which was great. And they made a good contrast. We shot their scene for
Flesh
in my office right there on Union Square just in front of my desk. If you look at the film you can tell they are both kind of nervous. And they both look very unkempt because they had no money to have good makeup or hair and in the movie Candy Darling talks about the fact that her hair looks awful.

It wasn’t the study of acting that made them interesting. Either they are born with something inherently interesting like Jackie and Candy and Holly, or they’re not. And they’re not going to learn that in their awful acting classes. All people learn in acting classes is how to scream and yell and behave like the lowest class of people you wouldn’t want to be around. I don’t know why they keep putting people like that in movies but they do.

Joe Dallesandro

After doing
Loves of Ondine
and
Lonesome Cowboys
for Warhol and Morrissey I thought they were the silliest things I had ever seen. I couldn’t believe that they were real movies. So when Paul Morrissey called me up again he kept saying, “we do real movies – we do real movies.” Paul’s idea of directing was telling us what he wanted the action in the scene to be about and the way he wanted the story to go and have us improvise dialogue around what he had just told us.

The scene I did with Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling, and Geri Miller in
Flesh
, Geri played a topless go-go dancer who was trying to impress me with her breasts. The Jackie Curtis I had met for
Flesh
was really horrible looking because he didn’t look right dressed as a woman. He looked like a man dressed as a woman and it was just – not right. Candy and Jackie sat on a couch and read movie magazines as I had this go-go dancer doing titty dances in front of me, trying to arouse me.

The
Flesh
story line concerned a guy waking up with his so-called wife and having to go out and hustle because his wife’s girlfriend needs an abortion. We called them “Underground Movies” because they were done without crews, with non-actors, shot very quickly on 16 millimeter film. The film had a big success. Success is if people show up and buy tickets. They had an audience. I was pretty amazed because I couldn’t sit and watch them.

Paul came up with the idea of having some people call the Police and complain that
Flesh
was obscene so that it would be shut down for some legal bullshit for a day. He’d have these plants go in and do this, but because the censor was a big fan of mine they wouldn’t force us to cut it and the next day they could show the film again. It was just to get all this publicity and coverage and it worked.

Audience members and critics thought of them in the beginning as documentaries. So I went with that. It used to piss Paul off because I heard them say that these films were telling our real stories and I thought go with it, play it – but it used to make Paul crazy that I would say that shit.

We took
Flesh
to film festivals and we went to Italy and I remember we were talking to these distributors in Rome and this one said, “You know, it doesn’t make sense for us to take this film because we don’t have this kind of problem here. Nobody would relate.” And I said but I thought prostitution was the oldest profession, I thought it came out of Rome – what are you telling me, that there is absolutely no male prostitution in Italy? And he said, “No, nobody would understand that.”

I always treated Jackie and Holly and Candy very nice, because I always felt that it is hard enough just wanting to be an actor or an actress. What roles can these people do? They can only play a person in drag. Even in Candy’s case, and Candy was beautiful – it still was a man. I could never think of Candy as a real woman. But they were nice people and they had their dreams and fantasies. For the moment that I had to be with them why should I burst their bubble? They were women for that moment.

Holly Woodlawn

There was a major incident where I wound up in jail. It was 1970 and I had a friend who was apartment sitting at this fabulous place near the United Nations. It was the apartment of the French ambassador to the UN. He was traveling and my friend had the place for several weeks. I stayed with him in this divine luxury and of course I couldn’t help trying on the wife’s dresses and things and while I was peeking into drawers we found her passport and her checkbook. I had some photo proof sheet from a Jack Mitchell shoot and one of the shots was just the right size. I cut it out and we taped over it so it looked like it was laminated to the passport. So my friend and I went to the bank and I had made out a check for two thousand dollars and used the fake passport and we got away with two thousand dollars! Of course after a few days that was gone, so we stupidly went back and tried it again and they nabbed me. I spent a month in jail.

In Variety there was a banner headline: “Trash Star Found in Trashcan.” The warden come up to me and said “Oh is this you?” and there is a photo of me in the Sunday
New York Times
reviewing the film saying Holly Woodlawn is fabulous in
Trash
. Later that day he says you are now out on bail and I said who has paid my bail? It was the artist Larry Rivers. I called him right up to thank him and he said come on over, Jackie Curtis is here, she called me up and said “you gotta get Holly out of jail.” If it hadn’t been for Jackie I would have been in jail for god knows how long. Andy Warhol didn’t come to my rescue. My parents didn’t even come to my rescue. Jackie called up everyone and said you can’t let Holly rot in jail; her movie’s just opened.

Jackie said Larry and I are going to take you out to see
Trash
tonight and I have alerted the media, there are going to be photographers and reporters there. That sounded wonderful, but I was an absolute mess because I had been in jail for thirty days. So Larry, angel that he was took us to Bloomingdale’s and said, “girls, go shopping” and we did. I got my hair done and Jackie and I went through all the dresses and I got this fabulous dress and Jackie got a fabulous housedress. We go back to Larry’s to get ready for the limousine ride to the theater. What does Curtis do? She just rips the shit out of her brand new dress so it looks like a tattered rag! Then she takes her new stockings and just tears them to shreds. I said, “Jackie, what are you doing?” She goes, “It’s a look, isn’t it?”

Gretchen Berg

Jackie and I drifted apart for several years, I think because I had taken a job with the
New York Free Press
, and I became very involved with the Anti-Vietnam war movement, which wasn’t something Jackie was interested in. We met again in 1971 when I was working for
Show
magazine, a now defunct entertainment publication funded by Huntington Hartford. I went to do an interview and take photographs during the filming of Paul Morrissey’s
Women in Revolt
. Jackie was no longer the redheaded kid with the Beatle haircut. He was 23 and he had a new drag persona. He was very edgy, almost nervous. I found it very difficult to talk to Jackie. It was as if he had withdrawn behind the mirror, behind panes of glass – further and further away.

Jackie still loved to have his picture taken, but I could see that the person I had known was now submerged – not really there anymore. It’s like when you send a child to boarding school for the first time and you go to meet them, the child that comes across the grass to you is not the same child. The famous Fakir trick with the little boy or little girl inside the straw basket, into which swords are plunged and then the top is taken off and the child jumps out, that is not the same child. Jackie was not the same person. He was engrossed in becoming the person – the woman in that film and I watched him step into the mirror, into the camera and become that persona. Very, very seldom did I see even a glimmer of the old Jackie.

Jack Mitchell

In the fall of 1970 I went over to an apartment that Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol were using to film a scene of their new movie
Women in Revolt
. I took photographs between camera setups. Jackie was performing in the scene with a baby. When she walked into the studio she was wearing kind of a suburban housewife outfit – just a simple housedress and very plain makeup. She costarred in that film with Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling.

Of the three Warhol transvestite stars, Jackie, Holly and Candy, Jackie Curtis was by far the most cerebral. She was a no-nonsense and motivated person – sort of like Rosland Russell doing a Paddy Chayefsky play, one of those kitchen-sink dramas he was famous for in the 1950s. I could see Jackie doing the Marjorie Main role in
The Women
– what a pity they couldn’t have cast Jackie in that role for the Broadway stage version; they would have been a great success.

I photographed Jackie as a man with Candy Darling when he was doing
Vain Victory
. Candy looked very much like Glen Close at that time. Candy was the opposite of Jackie because she was very serious about her femininity, her makeup, her glamour and her clothes. Unfortunately Candy had very big feet. But Candy’s Jacqueline Kennedy/Marilyn Monroe voice took the illusion right over the top. Candy could go anywhere and no one would question it. Holly Woodlawn had the zaniest sense of humor of all of the three ladies. She seemed to me to be a kind of sexed up Zasu Pitts on drugs. I am so pleased that Holly, as the only living member of that trio, is in Hollywood living her own legend.

Paul Morrissey

Women in Revolt
was meant to be a leading part for Holly. The idea of her being a women’s libber was my amusing take on this idea that was just starting then that women should be just like men. It was a silly idea, it’s been proven that but it’s not going to stop.

It seemed to me a funny idea, a comical idea, that men who had devoted their lives to assuming the roles of women, should be asked to play women who had been told by the women’s liberation movement that they should assume the roles of men. So I mentioned it to Andy Warhol, I said I think they should play women’s libbers like that ridiculous Valerie Solanas who had shot him a few years before. Andy was very brave about it, he said, “That’s a good idea.” I don’t remember every saying to Andy anything that he didn’t say was a good idea. Warhol was so glad to have any ideas, because he didn’t come up with any himself, I remember. He wasn’t the kind of person who had funny ideas or creative ideas.

I remember after
Women in Revolt
was released, reading an interview with Jackie where she said “I like it when Andy directs me, not Paul.” Andy never directed anybody, what she liked was Andy didn’t interfere with her. Andy didn’t interfere with anybody because he didn’t know what to interfere with.

Jackie dominates the movie with this strong character Jackie had. The remarks she makes are funny in a Jackie way, while the remarks Candy makes are funny in a Candy Darling way. You become very sympathetic to the plight of women. And you sort of say to yourself, gee it isn’t easy being a woman. You wouldn’t say that if women were playing the parts, you’d just take it for granted. But because the roles are being played by men, because men are going through these problems pretending to be women, I think it makes it much more effective.

I operated with Jackie and Candy in
Women in Revolt
the same as in every film that I’ve made – without a script. I would always just explain to Jackie very briefly, I would say, “Jackie in this scene this is the guy you’re trying to pay to have sex with. He is Mr. America, you are a women’s libber.” I would give them each the basis of the scene, and I would suggest lines and then we would just turn on the camera. What I think this did, in retrospect, is it took out self-consciousness and it made them just take chances.

These films besides being unusual when you see them – no films in the history of the world ever were made in this way, where they were actually made in ten hours on afternoons. It always disappointed me that these pioneer female impersonators were so gifted and so funny and yet had such a hard time making any money – if they made any at all. They lived very difficult lives.

Holly Woodlawn

One of my favorite moments working with Jackie was making
Women in Revolt
with Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. We shot it in maybe ten days over a period of a couple of months. At the end of every day shooting we would sign the release form and they would pay us twenty-five dollars, which we were happy with. We were “Superstars” and got a lot of attention at Max’s Kansas City. So the film had been out for some time and had a lot of attention and big audiences. So Jackie devised this plan. He said why don’t we go to Max’s for dinner, and order filet mignon and lobster and wine and sign Andy Warhol’s name? So we did this for about a month before Andy found out and the jig was up.