The first night of the competition was the talent portion. This was a no brainer; I knew I would reprieve my winning performance from the $1.98 Beauty Show. It was a sure crowd-pleaser and the wig and taffeta dress were still hanging in my closet. By the end of the night, I was one of a dozen finalists chosen to return for the second round to do battle for the crown.
Among the finalists, ten were female impersonators of the conventional sort and the only other real lady was no competition at all. She fancied herself a dominatrix but her act was tired and her leather duds were uninspired. I had been there and done more than she could muster when I rode that cock monster dildo float through Golden Gate Park with my leather queen slaves. The bitch didn’t stand a chance.
My competitors in Los Angeles had no idea of the deep roots I had in San Francisco and when I came out on the second night with guns loaded for the obligatory bathing beauty spectacle they were about to get a clue. After all, I had been mentored by Divine and she was the queen of all drag queens. Divine had taken me under her motherly wing and transformed me from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan in her image.
For the bathing suit walk, I designed a layered look, offering some modesty before the big reveal. To create my bathing suit cover, that morning I dumped my trash out into a neighbor’s can and gave my can a good scrubbing with disinfectants. This was an actual L.A. City issued trashcan and since I was planning to wear it, I didn’t want to risk getting scabies. In order to get in and out of the can I had a friend cut out the bottom of my can with a blowtorch for easy access. Once my can was cleaned and dry, I spray painted the word TRASH in large neon letters all over the outside of it.
When I hit center stage I dropped my can and stepped out of it as gracefully as I could, revealing my ample décolletage spilling out of a tight black bustier, which had my cup size advertised by double neon letter D’s sewed onto the tips of my bra. This original design was beyond fashion forward. In the words of Christian Soriano, the season seven winner of Project Runway, “Girl, I was fierce!”
On the final night, the evening gown competition was followed by the winner’s coronation. For this last round even RuPaul’s Drag University had nothing on me. I wore a gown that my friend Scrumbly had designed and made originally for my show Broken Dishes in 1976. It was a fitted sequined number, trailing yardage of fish netting tails, à la Divine’s style in Pink Flamingos. The front of the gown was cut out into an hourglass shape and filled in with clear vinyl. To cover up the big surprise, I made a giant plastic bubble wrap cape with a standing collar that made me look like the evil animated queen in Snow White. I held the bubble wrap cover tight around me until I reached the stage and then, once I got in front of the judges, I opened my cape to reveal the front of my dress. Under the clear plastic, my naked fleshy curves were pressed like a prom corsage for safekeeping. Only my nipples were covered with black X’s and I wore a tiny blond afro puff over my pubic area that matched the color of my big blond bouffant wig. Once the judges got to inspect the goods, I turned toward the audience and opened the cape wide to reveal my natural splendor, and the audience went nuts.
The emcee bantered, “Don’t wet yourselves. It’s too bad the seats are not made of vinyl. It would be a lot easier to clean up that way.” And the crowd just kept on cheering. I had a few friends and Venice neighbors in the house, including my daughter and her pre-teen friends.
I stood in the lineup of finalists while, one by one, the judges began to hold up their score cards. They all gave me 10s. As each judge weighed in, I overheard one of the finalists dissing me to another finalist standing next to her. Miss Princess Honolulu was a 6’2” scrawny queen in a sarong, six-inch heels, and heavily accessorized coconut tits. As she flipped her long tacky black Cher wig, she whispered to her sister drag queen, “I can’t believe I rode all the way here on a bus from Pomona in my drag and now that hag is going to take home the crown.”
Then Edie Massey, the last of the judges, held up her scorecard for me. As she displayed the final 10, she proclaimed in her high-pitched, little girl voice, “I love her best, because she looks just like a baby Divine.” Edie didn’t know that I had always thought of Divine as the mother I wished I’d had. I often gave Divine credit for teaching me everything I knew about beauty. To get that public recognition for my true lineage from Edie was the best part of winning the contest.
When the emcee announced that I was the winner, the tall Island Princess came up from behind me and tried to lift me up on her shoulders. It was a cheap attempt to steal my spot light. Lucky for me the bitch wasn’t strong enough to lift me, so she gave up. Then Edie came out from the judges table and awkwardly placed the coveted crown over my giant bouffant. The crown kept slipping off and Edie had to hold it on me as the emcee handed me a dozen roses and proclaimed me Miss Alternative Los Angeles.
When we got home after the show, I asked Viva what she thought of my performance. Viva said, “My friends think you’re cool.”
“But what do you think?”
“It was funny and I’m glad you won, but really, Mom, nobody likes to see their own mother naked wrapped in plastic.”
I wish I could tell you that becoming Miss Alternative L.A. propelled me to stardom, but the only official offer that came with the title was an invite from the marketing department of the Landmark Theatres a few weeks later. They asked me to make a special appearance at the Fox Venice Theatre alongside Russ Meyer at the screening of his film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! All I recall of that evening was me standing alongside Russ as he totally ignored me while showing favor to his super vixens. I guess my 44DDs were just not big enough for him to consider me a Real Beauty.
The only other hope I had to leverage my win was the videotape my friend David Miller made of the contest. I decided to send the tape to David Letterman one night after watching a lame segment on his Late Night show where a pile of dirty melting N.Y.C snow was a highlight. I wrote Dave a letter telling him all about my Miss Alternative L.A. win and promised that I would make a more entertaining guest than a pile of dirty snow. My psychic friend Margaret looked over my clever letter, did her healing whammy on it, and assured me that I would be getting a positive reply from Dave and an invite to make an appearance on his show. But that never happened either. For all it’s worth, after twenty-four years, I am still the reigning Miss Alternative Los Angeles because to my knowledge there has never been another contest since. So suck on that, all you “real” beauties.
Chapter 2
Bad Mommy
In 1985 I took my daughter Viva to see A Chorus Line. As we sat in the cheap seats way up in the balcony, I began to sob uncontrollably when I heard the lyrics, “Who am I anyway. Am I my resume?” I had been a single mom for fifteen years and I had had more day jobs than runs in a street hustler’s fish net stockings. Forever the consummate temporary gal, I made a point to steer clear of any job that required long-term commitment.
Since my daughter was an infant, I had taken her to the movies. She’d sleep peacefully in my lap until the soundtrack would jump up suddenly and jolt her from her slumber. I’d slip my nipple into her mouth and she would nod right off for the duration of the film. As a single mom I did my best to never leave her, but I think in some instances she would have been better off if I had hired a sitter. Like the time when I took her with me to see the horror classic Carrie. She had just turned six and was so terrified that she kept hiding under her seat until I forced her to get off the sticky theatre floor of the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. To this day she blames me for her inability to enjoy a good scary movie. I hadn’t realized how badly I traumatized her until she brought it up with me over a lunch we shared with my therapist friend. My friend asked her if she still held resentment about it and she said, “I forgave Mom because going to the movies was the only way she could afford to study her craft of acting.”
This dialogue brought up a whole slew of sins I realized I had to make amends for to my daughter. From 1973, when I packed my
three-year-old and all our worldly possessions in our VW bug to move to San Francisco to perform with The Cockettes, Viva remained in the wings and watched every rehearsal for every show I ever did up until 1977. While other kids played with kids their own age, her early companions were the drag queen performers I lived and worked with. They were a lot of fun, but it wasn’t always easy for her to get a word in.
She knew all the lines better than the actors in our shows and whenever anyone dropped a line, she would cue them from the sidelines. I told her that waiting in the wings was how Eve, in All About Eve, got her big break and that one day she’d get her turn to take the stage.
I did my best to stay sober enough so that the scenery and the other actors wouldn’t fall on her while she waited, singing and dancing alone, preparing for her big break. Although many of them did not set good examples, I got a lot of help from my roommates who lived in our theatrical commune. One of my roommates loved to take her shopping. It didn’t take me long to learn that he was using Viva as an accomplice to his chronic shoplifting. He paid for the produce but would hide expensive steaks in her underpants. Once I discovered this I put a stop to it and reprimanded him, but it wasn’t easy to give up the free meat.
One day Viva came home after school looking like a miniature Patty Hearst. When I asked her about her new look, I learned that my only female roommate, Debbie, dressed her in a trench coat, beret and dark glasses so she could take her into a gay bar on Polk Street where she passed her off as a lesbian midget. Viva said, “She treated me to a Shirley Temple and I felt like a big girl when she left me alone at the bar. While I sipped my cocktail, she was cruising for a trick.”
Today, most of my friends who aren’t dead or in prison can’t believe how ethical a young woman my daughter has grown into despite such poor examples set in her childhood. I tell them bad behavior skips a generation, and it was because I was a delinquent that my kid turned out so good. Or maybe I just got lucky and my daughter learned what not to do because of the poor examples we set.
After those four years of hard work on the fringe stages of San Francisco’s Gay Underground we moved back to Los Angeles, where aboveground I had high hopes of swimming with the big fishes in Hollywood. I admit to bouncing lots of reality checks during those years. Just before Viva’s tenth birthday, I got fired from one of my many waitress jobs. Unemployed again, I thought it was the Universe’s way of telling me it was a good time to take a vacation in Mexico. The story goes we had a gay old time in Mazatlan and even a greater time in Jalapa, a remote peninsula off the Mexican coast we reached on a speed boat flying over the ocean with no life jackets on board. All in all, the entire trip was fun until we tried to leave the country.
By the time we checked in at the airport in Guadalajara with only twenty minutes to boarding, I presented our non-refundable cheap tickets to the clerk and was told I owed Mexican airport tax. This was 1980 and I had never flown out of a foreign country before, nor did I have a credit card. I had spent every last peso we had, except for the quarter I was saving to call my friend Dick to pick us up at LAX when we got home. This was the first time I realized my daughter was scared and she started to cry. “Mommy, please, why don’t you sell our clothes so they will let us go home?” Luckily we were rescued by a handsome federal officer who took pity on the stupid single mother with her crying daughter and gave us the ten bucks to pay the tax and board the plane back to L.A.
I was lucky. What’s that saying, “God takes care of fools and children?” About a year ago when I told Viva I was writing this cautionary tale about the hazards of a life in showbusiness and shared my working title with her, she immediately tried to persuade me to change what she considered a lewd title.
“Mom, I think this could be an important book. You want to be taken seriously. It could save lives or at least the cost of analysis that children of showbiz folks like me will pay throughout their lives.”
Chapter 3
Knitter to the Stars
When I was in third grade, my mother noticed I was afflicted with an addiction. It was 1954 and my sister and I had just been transferred from P.S. #25 to St. Anthony’s Catholic School. Each night before sleep, my sister and I would get on our knees to say our mandatory children’s bedtime prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Then Mom would tuck us both under the covers in the same big bed we shared and give us our good night kisses. My younger sister Ginny would fall right off to sleep the moment her curly head hit the pillow, but I would remain awake in the dark, suffering a strange anxiety brought on by the gruesome thoughts of my early demise suggested in our bedtime prayer.
By day, the nuns at St. Anthony’s hammered into us the horrors of sin and the fate of going straight to hell without even so much as a stopover in purgatory. While Protestant and Jewish kids got to play freely in a public school yard before the school bell rang, we Catholic kids sat inside a dimly-lit church for Mass, which we attended a whole hour before our classes in catechism, math, history, and geography lessons began. There we witnessed Christ hanging on a gigantic cross, bleeding all over the altar, while a priest reenacted in Latin the drama of poor skinny Jesus dying for my sins. It was a gruesome reality for a young girl with my creative spirit, but it was what my parents wanted for me: a Catholic education. Not only did I suffer the burden of my own little sins, I worried constantly about Mom and Dad’s eternal damnation too. The nuns taught us the difference between venial and mortal sins. Venial sins made our souls spotted with darkness that could be burned off in purgatory, but if you committed a mortal sin your soul would be completely blackened, just like the fire roasted red bell peppers Mom would burn on the stovetop before marinating in garlic and olive oil. But unlike the peppers that got peeled and cooled in the jars in the fridge; our souls went straight to hell to keep burning for all eternity.
Since my folks never attended Mass, and Mom cursed like a drunken sailor and told dirty jokes, I imagined Mom and Dad’s souls looking like a shriveled roast that Mom forgot in the oven one day when she was having one of her nervous breakdowns. And since my parents never went to confession to get absolution or do penance, I knew in what direction their souls were headed. When I tried to warn them about it, they laughed it off and said, “Do what I say, not what I do.” That was their religion. With all that sin lurking around the house and the thought of dying in my sleep, it’s no wonder I needed an outlet to alleviate my anxiety.
Like many little girls who hid their hands beneath their covers to touch themselves, I knew it was way too risky and would guarantee a trip straight to hell before dawn, so I sought another handy activity above the sheets to lull me into slumber. I’d lie in bed in the dark and with my right hand I’d pluck the cotton tuffs out from my floral chenille bedspread. This went on for several nights until mom finally noticed that half the flowers were missing on my side of the bed, leaving a gigantic hole in the floral pattern of the pretty pink and baby blue bedspread. Mom consulted with my aunts, who had the good sense to suggest I needed a distraction to occupy my hands.
I’m so grateful that right about that time my older cousin Loretta moved into our house temporarily while her husband went off to Korea with the Navy. She offered to teach me how to knit. If it hadn’t been for Cousin Loretta, I don’t know where my compulsive addiction would have led me. For all I know it could have dangerously escalated into home invasion bedspread plucking. But I took immediately to the craft. After my prayer, Mom would let me leave the light on for a bit while I practiced my knitting. As a kid I never imagined that this gift of becoming a knitter would take me to high places in Hollywood. But it did.
My knit business began when I started to barter my crafty handy work for acting classes and workshops. Even Tony Robbins traded his fire walk seminar for a gorgeous sweater for his wife. Walking over hot coals with Tony put a fire under my ass and before long I was knitting like a nut in my Meisner acting class wher
e other actors and models who were earning big bucks took notice. The next thing, I was in the knit business without a plan or investors. My hobby went from making the occasional sweater for starlets to accounts at Saks Fifth Avenue, Henri Bendel, and Bergdorf Goodman, as well as high-end boutiques, and wearable art galleries from Brentwood to SoHo, Rodeo Drive to Madison Avenue and Las Vegas to Aspen.
During my daughter’s wonder years she had to wonder why our apartment turned into a mini sweatshop. Every day after school, Viva came home to make her way through a maze of stacked cardboard boxes, and two Mexican guys knitting on machines in our dining room while I sat on the couch doing all the hand and finishing work before I packed sweaters into boxes for shipping. With yarn strung from one end of our apartment to the next, more often than not Viva found angora fuzz balls mixed in with her peanut butter and jelly after school snack. Although I was working 24/7, I still never had any money. Whatever little acting money I was earning went directly into materials for production and making my sample lines for my bi-coastal sales reps. To keep Viva entertained on weekends, I would take her to movies and knit in the dark. I even made her my fit model and whenever she was coming or going I’d stop her to try on new sweaters for sizing and eventually she became my fashion model too. I have a picture of Viva when she was only twelve years old in a sexy peek-a-boo angora and lace sweater that was my best seller at Saks Fifth Ave and Henri Bendel in New York. The fashion photographer made her up to look eighteen. After two years of working like a slave I gave up the wholesale business and went back to knitting one-offs for celebrities and other high end clients.
Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making it in Show Business, or Not!: A 'How Not To' by The Counter Culture Diva Page 2
