Leading lady, p.13
Leading Lady, page 13
One performer stood out: an arresting Pakistani performance artist named Bina Sharif, who played an exotic gypsy fortune teller. Her job was to harass fairgoers into having a fake fortune told. She was atmosphere. I didn’t see much of Bina on Saturdays. The director of the performing company kept her roaming all over the grounds. I occasionally ran into her trying to wrest a free turkey leg out of one of the food vendors.
On Sundays, I always brought along the Sunday New York Times. Bina, exhausted and overheated from her improvised gypsy exertions, would hide in the shade of the back of my booth and read the newspaper. Before she got to the crossword puzzle, a stage manager would usually poke his head in, find her, and yank her out into the blazing sunlight.
I remained in contact with Bina over the course of the following year. In the spring of 1984, she invited me to see her perform a new solo piece at a place called the Limbo Lounge deep in the East Village. Even though I’d lived in New York City most of my life, I’d never ventured into the area known as Alphabet City, which at that time had the reputation of being one of the most depressed, dangerous, crack-infested neighborhoods in Manhattan. I persuaded Ken to go with me, principally for company navigating the area.
Upon graduating from Northwestern, Ken’s goal had been to become a theater director, but after six years of struggle he’d decided to apply to law school. He was accepted to New York Law School and was scheduled to begin classes that September. Ken’s abandonment of the theater made me feel even more anxious about my own weed-strewn path.
On our way to Bina’s show, Ken and I walked east from Seventh Avenue and observed the economic health of the landscape gradually deteriorating. Fifth Avenue, Broadway, Third Avenue, Second Avenue. At First Avenue, I assumed we’d meet up with a cliff and the end of the world. Who knew there was more? Avenue A . . . Avenue B . . . The blocks that composed Alphabet City were lined with burned-out shells of buildings, and the tenements still standing looked half abandoned.
In the middle of the urban rubble, there appeared an apparition. A skinny girl, perhaps twelve years old, glided down the street on roller skates, with a cloud of pink hair and wearing what looked like her father’s baggy Bermuda shorts gathered around her waist by a rope. A welcoming ambassador, she weaved figure eights, and—I’m not making this up—was blowing bubbles out of a bottle with a plastic wand. On 10th Street, toward the end of the block between Avenues A and B, was a darkened storefront. This was the Limbo Lounge, an art gallery/bar/performance space run by three young people going by the monikers Michael Limbo and Jeannette and Victor Anonymous.
Entering the narrow space, I was spellbound by the garage sale opulence of the decor. The art displayed on the walls was part of an ornate installation that enveloped the viewer. A long bar that stretched along one wall and opposite that were a few torn red patent leather booths. With no stage, the audience was seated mostly on the floor. They were a mix of East Village kids, sort of goth, sort of punk, sort of gay, with an array of piercings that made some of them look as if their ears had been stuck in a typewriter. They all spoke with a slight, affected accent indigenous to the East Village that sounded vaguely Bulgarian.
Michael Limbo was a good-looking, sexy young man with an angular Irish face. With his hairline shaved back several inches, and the rest dyed a bright Bozo-the-clown red, he was the spitting image of Daniel Day Lewis portraying Elizabeth the First. Sipping a Heineken, he quieted the crowd and introduced Bina. Garbed in a sleeveless black sequined minidress, her face and mane of hair flecked with glitter, she was both innately chic and yet also ridiculing chic. I can still hear her intoning in her richly musical Pakistani accent the names of designer perfumes Opium and Obsession. Her show was intellectually provocative and politically astute, with an undercurrent of comic rage.
As charismatic and gifted as Bina was, one couldn’t separate the performance from the delicious carnival ambience of the room. It was a Weimar Republic Berlin cabaret, a secret 1920s Manhattan speakeasy, and the fin de siècle Moulin Rouge. I experienced the rare feeling of not being divided into my usual roles of participant and detached observer. I was experiencing completely the pure exhilaration of being a welcomed guest at a fabulous party with Bina the glitter-bedecked hostess.
When the performance ended, I was reduced to froth and announced to Ken, “We haaaaave to do a show here!” Before he could respond, I darted about the club like a firefly in search of Michael Limbo and found him at the bar. With the words tumbling out of me, I gushed that I wanted more than anything to perform at the Limbo Lounge. I was accustomed to auditioning, but he simply took out a large, battered calendar, saw that a Friday and Saturday night at 8:00 PM were available a month from then, and wrote me in. No questions about what kind of show I’d be doing or whether I’d ever performed before. I returned to Ken with the news that I was booked. Ken assumed that meant that I’d perform some of my solo material. The decadent boudoir ambience and the audience garbed in the cutting edge of downtown fashion made me long to rise to their level of flamboyance. Why would I want to appear at the Limbo Lounge garbed austerely in black pants and a cotton turtleneck sweater and perform my increasingly naturalistic solo repertoire?
No. I’d have to be in drag. Except for my few performances as a red-wigged replacement Goddess of Hell with Charles Ludlam, I hadn’t performed in women’s attire since I’d had my ass kicked by my ill-fated, ungrateful (yes, it’s time I let go of that one) theater company in Chicago. For too long, due to the nature of my evolving solo repertoire, I had tamped down my natural inclination toward visual extravagance. I’d had enough of twisting myself into male characterizations that other actors could do better. My female characters had greater nuance and, strangely, were more real. This time I wanted to present myself as the leading lady.
I told Ken that I’d quickly dash off some sort of a theatrical vehicle that would star me in a scintillating female role, and that he was going to direct it. I said I knew he was renouncing the theater, but he couldn’t ask for a jazzier farewell. It involved little commitment and no money to be raised. Since there wasn’t a stage, a set wasn’t required. We could rehearse a few times at our apartment. I was sure that Ken would dismiss the idea as a silly waste of time, and that convincing him would take some arm twisting, but he surprised me with his immediate enthusiasm. “It sounds like fun,” he said.
Fun? I couldn’t remember the last time either of us had thought of anything to do with theater as “fun.”
What Can I Do with This Wig?
At the time, I was working at Time Warner Communications as a temp receptionist for an executive who demanded little of my energy. Perfect! I needed to come up with a play that ran at least thirty minutes, required no scenery, had costumes I could easily improvise, and offered a role I could sink my teeth into.
I’ve always had a fascination with vampires. The blood drinking aspect doesn’t grab me, but the concept of century-spanning eternal life always has. It was easy connecting the trials and tribulations of actresses of film and stage who had sustained multidecade careers with the plight of an ageless vampire. The central joke would be that my protagonists are actresses first, vampires second. Joan Crawford meets Nosferatu. As the centuries flew by, my character would be forced to conceal her ageless vampirism by periodically changing her stage name. In the 1920s, she’s known as Madeleine Astarté; by the time she’s headlining in 1980s Las Vegas, she goes by the name Madeleine Andrews.
Madeleine and her rival, Magda Legerdemain, have their first tumultuous encounter in ancient Sodom, when Madeleine is served up as a virgin sacrifice to the terrifying Succubus (Magda). It doesn’t go well. The Succubus, for one thing, has a big chip on her shoulder.
SUCCUBUS (Magda)
You look around and see the glamorous way I live. My slaves, my riches, my dishware. True, I have caskets full of sparkling jewels, but where the fuck can I wear ’em?
VIRGIN (Madeleine)
Forgive me if I don’t weep. Seek good counsel from the High Priest, and then, hie thee hither, you blood-sucking old bag!
Through a trick of fate, the young virgin Madeleine not only survives but is transformed into a rival vampire, and she and Magda carry on their feud through the next millennium. It was imperative that I come up with historical periods that would be easy to costume on a budget of—zero. Silhouette is everything. If you get the silhouette to convey some sense of period accuracy, the audience will forgive you the details and a ten-dollar budget. That left out the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and the fin de siècle. Hollywood in the twenties? That would be easy. I could improvise the flapper look and Erté-inspired drapery of early screen sirens.
Even though it was intended as merely a sketch never to be performed after this one weekend, the play needed a title. Ed was now a top advertising executive, his sharp acerbic wit essential to his meteoric rise in his field. On the phone I gave him the lowdown on what the play was about and off the top of his head he suggested a title that evoked exploitation paperback novels of the fifties: Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. It certainly had a ring to it. “Thanks,” I said. “That’ll do.”
My friend Kathie Carr would have to be involved, I decided. Ken and I had met her a little over a year before when we attempted to produce my solo show Off-Off Broadway. Kathie was the production’s stage manager. A word to the wise: A one-man show starring a complete unknown with no publicity budget and presented in a seventy-five-seat theater on a dark, little-traveled side street is not a promising venture. Our lighting operator was a vivacious fellow named Vinnie with an orange-hued punk haircut. An aspiring director, he was flirtatious and flattering and made me think we were destined to be best friends for life. When the show closed prematurely, an insignificant flop, Vinnie stopped returning my phone calls.
Kathie, whose appreciation for me wasn’t at all dependent on my success or failure, became an essential part of my world. She was a few years older than I and had already lived several lives before her current incarnation as an Off-Off Broadway stage manager—as a bouffant-sporting teen secretary in Brooklyn in the sixties and a professional disco-dancing competitor in the seventies. Streetwise down to the neat way she’d toss her finished cigarette butt, she could be a great asset in this off-the-wall endeavor.
As I was unknown to the East Village netherworld, Ken and I felt we needed Bina Sharif to pull in the crowd. Was it a problem that her Pakistani accent made it impossible for her to pronounce the “V” in Vampire? Hey, “Wampire” might be funny. Without seeing a script, Bina said yes.
Who besides Bina and me would be in the cast? Considering there’d be no pay, no dressing room, and almost no rehearsal time, the talent pool would have to be limited to the terminally stagestruck. There was no question that Andy Halliday would play a role. If one can be said to be both shy and insecure and still a big personality, that was Andy. His youthful hope of being a teenage tap-dancing MGM musical star aside, Andy was also one of the most down-to-earth, reliable people I knew, and I had a feeling those qualities would be essential in this freewheeling environment.
Theresa Aceves was a deliciously fuzzy five-foot kewpie doll who could, on the turn of a dime, replace her comic blankness with a hard-boiled line reading worthy of Edward G. Robinson. We’d met in Washington when I was performing my solo shows at the Source Theatre Company. She was so impossibly vague that at times it was hard to believe she wasn’t faking it. Once when we were all warned to remember to set our clocks forward for daylight saving time, Theresa seriously queried, “Watches too?”
Arnie Kolodner was a handsome auburn-haired magician who had recently graduated from NYU. As was the case with Bina, I’d met him working at the New York Renaissance Faire. Although he was only twenty-three, he could affect a B-movie smarmy charm that made him the ideal leading man for my parodies. A critic once described Arnie’s performance in one of our shows as “Joel McCrea on Ex-Lax.” None of us could quite decide if that was meant as a compliment.
Tom Aulino was a versatile character actor who’d attended Northwestern with Ken and me. He could effortlessly play any age and gender and possessed the gift of true comic invention. It’s surprisingly difficult to find an actor who can land a funny line (or at least not get in the way of a funny line), and it’s exceedingly rare to find an actor who can get laughs when there’s nothing funny on the page. Tom Aulino was truly funny.
Bobby Carey had never acted before and had sensibly never given a thought to going on the stage. He was a strikingly handsome boy with a smooth, muscular body and plump lips like Brigitte Bardot’s, his gravelly New Jersey shore voice at odds with the perfection of his features. He was contentedly working behind the desk at the Helmsley Palace Hotel. Ken had recently begun dating him and asked if I could come up with a small role for Bobby in the play. I’d already decided to have the opening scene take place in ancient Sodom, so there was certainly room for a lad who’d elicit whistles wearing a loincloth. Ease with dialogue was not a priority.
This was our cast, and Ken and I assembled them in our tiny living room. They were all thrilled to be in a show, even if it was for two nights without pay in a bar on the Lower East Side. We read through the script that I’d Xeroxed on the sly at my temp job. The reading went well. Sort of. A bitchy naysayer might’ve quipped that Bina’s accent made the line “I conduct myself with dignity and grandeur, whilst you roll in the gutter, parading your twat onstage and calling it acting” incomprehensible anywhere but in downtown Karachi, but why quibble? It turned out not to matter, for the following day Bina phoned to say that her mother in Pakistan was desperately ill and she was getting on the next flight to be with her.
Decades later, Bina, despite having enjoyed a distinguished award-winning career as a downtown performer and playwright, still regretted that decision. “Charles, I should have done your play! I should have! My mother . . . she was in a coma. She didn’t even know I was there! Now look at me, still in the East Village. You got out! I’m still in!”
The Director’s Daughter
2010. In the Life, the LGBT news magazine show on PBS, asked me to interview Liza Minnelli on camera in conjunction with her being given an award from the organization PFLAG. We originally planned to do the interview on the night of the award show at the Marriott Marquis Hotel, but in the mad hubbub of the event, Liza wasn’t feeling up to it. The interview was rescheduled for a few weeks later at a small studio in the West 20s. Liza was to arrive at 2:00 PM and we were on notice that she had to be out of there by 5:00 sharp.
I arrived at 1:15 and found the crew busy setting up the lights and a set with a large round table and two chairs. I’ve learned over time that I most definitely have a more flattering side to my face. It’s my left side, and I make every attempt, both lightly humorous and deadly adamant, to be filmed so that it is toward the camera. In this case, the producers were notified in advance that Liza also preferred being photographed from her left side. I accepted with grace the crew’s instructions that the chairs be set to favor her.
Everything was ready by 2:00, and we waited for Liza to arrive. We waited and we waited. At about 4:00, Liza and her small entourage arrived at the studio. We’d met several times over the years through mutual friends, and each time, including this one, she’d greet me with vivacious congeniality. Though I’m certain she’d never been to one of my shows, she always made a lovely point of telling me, with ardent sincerity, and in front of witnesses, “I’m such a fan.”
As I showed her to her seat at the table, I jokingly admitted, “Liza, even though we share the same good side, I’m making the supreme sacrifice and will be photographed from my hideous Phantom of the Opera right side.” She cackled, reached across the table, and grasped my hand.
“Oh, baby, you’re so sweet. But hey, I can do something about that. I’m going to make sure you’re fabulously lit.” While I was explaining that we had to hurry, she motioned to the gaffer to move one of the lights that was creating an unflattering shadow. “Charles, it’s better already. Just sit very still.”
I could see from the producers’ concerned faces that we needed to start the interview. But Liza was now fully inhabiting the role of lighting designer and thoroughly enjoying herself. Again, I attempted to break in, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“Baby, I’m a director’s daughter. I’m a Minnelli. This is what I do.” As the daughter of Vincente Minnelli (and, of course, Judy Garland), she’d grown up visiting her parents’ film sets, and she herself had a considerable filmography working with such stylists as Bob Fosse, Stanley Donen, and Martin Scorsese, along with some of the most renowned cinematographers. I could see from my image in the monitor that she was doing a superb job. Instructing the gaffer to lower a light, raise another, turn off a lamp that interfered with the modeling of my cheekbone . . . I was looking better on camera than I ever had before. It was now after 4:30. Ten minutes later, my face was at last lit to her satisfaction and we sped through the interview. I’d studied several of her past TV interviews and tried to offer questions that she’d never been asked before.
Not only is Liza an expert lighting designer, she’s also brilliant at the politician’s skill of the non-answer, responding to any question with one from her collection of stock responses, no matter how inappropriate. “Liza, you’ve said that your father was a great influence on how you developed your iconic look for the film Cabaret. What specific help did he give you?” Her large eyes gazed at me with glistening sincerity. “Charles, my father . . . my father taught me . . . how to dream.”
Perhaps because I was interviewing her for a gay TV program, her guard was up that I might steer the conversation to the rumors that her late father had led a secret gay life. Her deflection of any query that might take her down a new road of revelation may also derive from seeing her mother treated disrespectfully by the press in her later years. Some of Liza’s interviews in the first years after Judy’s death in 1969 were surprisingly candid, but over the following decades she’d become much more protective of the legacy of those close to her.
