At first it was painful, as Roberto dragged me to every gallery and museum from California to New York, and then later from Rome to Paris, giving me my art history lessons. I have photos of me passing out from art exhaustion on very rare and precious art installations. I was almost thrown out of the Getty Villa for resting on a roped-off antique velvet love seat. But soon I began to see art through his eyes.
During the 80s and 90s, I watched and admired how Roberto maneuvered his success and popularity in the art world that he often shared with me. I was invited to all his hot openings and after-parties with his closest friends and family. After one such event, I got to tag along when Edward Albee invited him to his apartment. After many cocktails, something was said that Albee, in a less friendly inebriated state, interpreted as an insult and before I knew it, Albee kicked us out.
Whenever Viva and I were in New York, we’d stay with Roberto. He would shop and we cooked together, me making my famous enchiladas that he loved and him the beans, rice, and salsas, and then he would invite his high- and low-brow friends down to his East Village loft to party with us. His friends and lovers became our blended family. Even his Park Avenue art dealer, Robert Miller, embraced me and invited me to stay with them during the time when Roberto lived in his South Beach penthouse in Miami, where he also worked and showed.
By 1995 Roberto was at the height of his career and he invited me to participate in a performance with renowned New York performance artists, John Kelly, Jack Pierson and Syd Straw to celebrate the opening of his new show at The Center for The Fine Arts in Miami. This was a great honor for me to be on the bill, reading excerpts from my short story collection, Gay Widow. For me, the event was a perfect marriage between fine art and counterculture art, and the evening was an expression of the journey I shared on the road with Roberto.
They Entered the Road, was inspired by his memories of artists, friends, and family who had touched his life and who had passed on, as were my Gay Widow stories about my deepest loses. We were both survivors of the AIDS holocaust and had witnessed way too many of our mutual friends pass over to the other side.
The Center for the Fine Arts paid a nice honorarium and gave me a free trip east. This invitation came just as I had been alerted to my father’s final hospitalization for lymphoma cancer. I knew my Dad was in the final stages of his life and I had no money at the time to journey to New Jersey, but the ticket the museum offered allowed me to end up at my father’s death bed shortly after my performance at Roberto’s magnificent art opening.
There were endless gifts being Roberto’s friend over the years, but the best time I ever had as a result of his generosity came with an invitation to join him in Rome where he was living and working for a year at The American Academy of Arts and Letters after winning the Rome Prize. Each year 29 fellows, who work in the fields of classical, ancient, and medieval studies, architecture, design, art conservation, musical composition, visual art, and literature, are offered a prize that includes a stipend, travel expenses, and work and living space in either the main building or in one of the smaller ones on the 11-acre campus. In addition to the Rome Prize Fellows, visiting scholars and artists live and work at the Academy for varying periods. I was over my head, swimming in culture.
As his guest, I got my own private room in the upper levels of the main house while Roberto chose a small cottage to share with his lover, Will, near his studio on the grounds. The American Academy is located on Gianicolo (Janiculum) Hill and is one of the best locations in Rome with breathtaking views of innumerable domes and bell towers that pierced the skyline of the multi-hued architectural museum. The Janiculum also housed a late-17th century Baroque fountain built by Pope Paul V, the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola and the Palazzo Montorio, and the residence of the Ambassadors of Spain. Other sights on this hill included the church of San Pietro in Montorio, thought to be where St. Peter was crucified. And if all that wasn’t enough to inspire me, my new digs were a nice walk to the Vatican.
As Roberto’s guest, I was privy to all the amenities the prestigious fellows were given during their stay. I got to attend amazing installations, fashion shows, and parties as well as private tours of treasured sites around Rome. During that same month, Roberto, Will and I ventured to Paris on an overnight train in a sleeping car. Even though Will was a hot blond boy from South Beach, I cast him in the role of Fred on this journey. With Fred and Ethel in the bunk above me, we lay awake most of the night in our sleeper car giggling as the train sped north through Italy. I got up many times to wander about the cars and caught site of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa and exotic strangers puffing slim cigarettes in the smoking cars. I felt like I was on a train in one of those comedies when at any moment someone would pull the emergency ripcord and bring the train to a sudden stop.
Our Fred was an excellent navigator and on our first day in Paris he led us to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre as Ethel and I performed more high jinks like stealing hand towels with logos on them from fancy hotel restrooms we stopped at. We ended the day with dinner at the famous Le Dome Restaurant. I gained about five pounds at that meal just watching a skinny French bitch who sat at the next table devour frogs legs and oysters along with a whole loaf of bread and butter and wash it down with two bottles of wine. After each course, I slipped a plate into my purse and some of the silverware too. By the end of the night, Fred and Ethel forbade me from walking out with my big bulging purse, and made me take out most of it. I still have the bread plate with the Le Dome emblem on it as a souvenir.
Once we were back in Rome, the adventures continued. There were plenty of other moments when I strayed from the highbrow culture spots to more of the Lucy-style tourism. Like at the Coliseum, where a gladiator who posed with tourists enticed me into taking a photo with him for a tip. Roberto captured a priceless shot of the ruggedly weathered gladiator dangling a cigarette from his mouth, with his hand resting on my ass. And on that same day, we ran into a grand military procession at the Mussolini Monument, where every branch of Italian service was marching on display in their best finery. Italian military men dress in fancy pants and hats like the Swiss Guard; no drab army greens for these boys. Each service branch had a different elaborate outfit and distinct plumage. I hadn’t seen such elaborate pomp and circumstance since I’d left San Francisco.
As the procession was ending, three jet planes flew low over the monument, leaving a trail of red, white, and green smoke—the colors of the Italian flag. And with that, the affair was over, but not for me. I watched and followed the young servicemen in their plumage as they headed back to their busses. When a couple of young soldiers caught me trying to take their pictures they invited me up on their bus. “Signora, Signora, vene qua,” they yelled out and just like Lucy looking for adventure, I took them up on their offer and got on their bus. All the while Roberto was capturing the moments on film. They were ever so friendly and several of them had me sit on their laps while Roberto got off more shots. Then their superior officer came back to the bus and threw me off.
My Roman holiday could have only been made better if Fellini or Bertolucci discovered me and put me in one of their movies. That never happened, but I got another film offer from Roberto while we were checking out a first-century archeological site on the outskirts of Rome. As we wandered through the ruins, Roberto found a piece of laurel wreath that inspired him to create a vision of me as an ancient goddess. He used the wreath to tie up my hair and then told me to take off all my clothes. Since 1978, when he started to film me in the shower, Roberto never missed an opportunity to shoot artistic nudes of me whenever he could. Since it had become our tradition, I followed his direction and stripped quickly. Thank God it was a slow day for tourists. I then stepped up on one of the broken columns to pose for him. He snapped several shots of me holding up my floppy boobs while standing on the marble pedestal.
Toward the end of Roberto’s year-long fellowship, after I was back home in Venice Beach, he had a show of the work he had done wh
ile in Rome. He decided to use one of those goddess shots of me for his show opening invitation. My naked image caused quite a stir and brought an illustrious list of guests to his Rome opening, including a duke who found me, as the naked goddess, quite alluring. It’s too bad I was not still in Rome for the grand event. Who knows, had I still been there, I might have become a duchess. Well, it’s not every actress in Hollywood who can boast about being a muse to a great artist.
Chapter 9
I was a Bimbo’s Slave and More Jobs that Suck
Because of my knitting business, I had many connections to other film and TV show designers, and in 1990, I was hired by Marlene Stewart to be her assistant during the dress rehearsals for Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour. Marlene was co-designer, along with Jean-Paul Gaultier, while simultaneously working as the designer for Oliver Stone’s The Doors movie. Marlene hired me because Madonna was pissed over not getting Marlene’s undivided attention. Marlene thought by putting me on as her assistant and go-between girl, it might ease the tension between them.
My first assignment was to go shopping at the largest Catholic retail outlet in downtown Los Angeles. They sold everything from incense burners to nuns’ habits, and, don’t quote me on this, but I even think I saw packets of freeze-dried Holy Eucharist. I was there to pick up the priests’ robes that Madonna and her dancers would be wearing for Like a Prayer. When I arrived on the Disney mega soundstage, loaded down with bags and boxes, Madonna cornered me in the wardrobe room and barked questions without ever having met me. But this story is not about Madonna.
In Madonna’s Like a Virgin number, designer Jean-Paul Gaultier reintroduced the bullet bra of the 1950’s. Madonna sang her hit in slow motion while writhing on a satin bed, simulating masturbation in the Gaultier corset with its exaggerated pointy quilted cups while two back-up boys joined her, wearing bras with even longer, pointier cups. What Madonna and the world at large didn’t know was that two years before Madonna featured that Gaultier bullet bra, I had already designed and made my own version of this iconic undergarment and wore it for a heavy metal rock parody in my one woman show, The Last Dance of the Couch Potatoes. In my opinion, my design outdid even Gaultier’s version. My bullet bra had 5-inch silver rifle bullets jutting out from its pointy leather cups and my back-up boys wore matching jock straps with bullets accentuating their stuffed packages. You can look up the video on YouTube if you think I’m exaggerating.
Ah, but there’s the rub, I was always the artist ahead of my time and never made enough money not to need a fucking day job.
As my two-week job with Madonna was wrapping up, I applied for a part-time position as a personal assistant for a popular porn star. Ginger Lynn Allen, who ranked seventh place among the greatest XXX actresses of her generation, hired me. Ginger’s first sixty-nine adult films were at the top of the video charts, and she was also the first in a long line of Charlie Sheen’s goddesses. They met on the set of Young Guns, where Ginger made her legitimate acting debut. Charlie seized the opportunity to turn his teen jerk-off fantasy girl into a reality.
I began working for Ginger right after she met Charlie, but she was still living with the photographer who discovered her. I think Ginger hired me because she was impressed that I had just worked for Madonna. On my first day as Ginger’s to-go girl, she handed me a shopping list and sent me off to the Pleasure Chest, a Costco-sized sex fantasy retail outlet in West Hollywood. As a favor to Charlie, Ginger volunteered to arrange the entertainment for his best friend’s bachelor party in Vegas and Ginger was producing and directing the floorshow.
Although I had worked as a topless go-go girl in my early twenties, at this time of my life, my tassel-twirling days were behind me. At forty-four, I was mother to a teenage daughter and it had been a while since I had come in close proximity to sexual accoutrement and the sex act itself, for that matter. So there I stood, blushing like a virgin, before a 6’2” leather-clad queen, and asking if he could direct me to the aisle where I could find the following items: “A five-gallon bottle of baby oil, a package of large plastic tarps, a dozen tubes of flavored lube, a dozen pairs of edible panties, a couple of strands of Ben Wa balls, and a half a dozen assorted dildos with testicles attached in different sizes and colors.” As I read from Ginger’s shopping list, a flush of embarrassment changed my complexion from tan to sunburnt. I blurted out, “This stuff is not for me. It’s for my boss.”
To which the queen in the bare-ass leather chaps replied, “Lady, I don’t give a fuck who they’re for,” and led me down the dildo aisle.
While I worked for Ginger, I continued my studies in my Meisner acting class. I was the oldest and least successful student in the class, and needed this $10 an hour day job. In the two years I studied Meisner technique, I performed scenes with two of Rod Stewart’s ex-wives, one of Gary Shandling’s girlfriends, Pia Zadora, and Catherine Hicks, the mom in the Chucky horror movies, and a few Tom Ford models too. Many of my fellow students went on to become big names, like the baby-faced blond surfer son of James Brolin. I barely recognized Josh almost twenty years later when I saw him at the San Francisco premiere of Milk, the film in which he played Dan White, Harvey Milk’s assassin.
Ginger was delighted that I was an actress, because she too was seriously studying the craft with Milton Katselas, the renowned acting coach of many famous Scientologists. She was also ecstatic that I was crafty and could sew, because she needed help keeping intact her stripper costumes that she wore to support her crossover into legitimate acting, doing pole dancing tours. Ginger was quite the entrepreneur. She ran a mail-order business merchandizing her worn panties to her worldwide fan base. I’d watch her open new packs of sexy lace undies and then rub them one by one between her legs before having me seal and pack them. When on the road, she sold Polaroids for big bucks posing with the horny geeks that came to her shows. After each tour, she returned home with over twenty thousand in cash and then would take me along on a shopping spree to help carry the bags. Ginger loved to shop like she loved to fuck, and after a big shopping binge, just like after good sex, she would run outside the Beverly Center for a desperately needed smoke. When Ginger finally made the break from her photographer/boyfriend, I arranged the move from their Hollywood Hills home to her new fuck palace, a condo in Beverly Hills where she openly continued her affair with Charlie.
For this big move she gave me a budget to hire extra help with all the packing and unpacking and setting up her new place. For my helper I chose my friend Mario, the hottest boy in my acting class. Mario had the looks, intensity, and acting chops of a young Brando. He was young enough to be my son and our bond was instantaneous after working closely with him in a Meisner exercise. Ironically, Mario also had brushes with the infamous Madonna. He was one of the hot dancers in her Express Yourself video. After class one day he told me that Madonna came on to him on the set and that he turned down her advances.
I adored Mario and was impressed with his raw talent and the fact that he could not be bought by a superstar; I personally had whored myself for much less in my day. Mario, in his thick New York accent, said, “It was the principle of the thing. Who does the bitch think she is? Because she’s a star, she thinks I want to fuck her.”
Even though I was twice his age and had a huge crush on him, never in a million years did I entertain the idea that we would ever sleep together. During the move, Mario and I worked side by side, wrapping and unwrapping all of Ginger’s sex accoutrement: all kinds of toys, including her prized whips. On the second day of the job, it was Cinco de Mayo. We took a break and had a Mexican lunch and a couple of beers on Ginger’s dime. When we got back to work we filled up the waterbed and put the new linens on it. Feeling full from the heavy carbo-loaded lunch, Mario and I collapsed on the water bed once it was made. We were resting and talking for a bit when suddenly, out of nowhere, Mario started to kiss me. The sex vibes in Ginger’s boudoir must have turned him on and I just happened to be there. In my opinion he was a god, but I was so su
rprised to be getting laid by the boy who turned down Madonna that I left my body and hovered above us, watching myself having sex with him like I was in my own porno movie. I didn’t get over it for days.
Later that day, I called my sponsor in the overeaters anonymous program, Alan, a nice older Jewish schmatta salesman. I confided in him. “I broke my celibacy and ironically the last time I had sex fell on Cinco de Mayo five years ago.”
Alan, my wise sponsor, responded with, “Well I guess you have sex every five years whether you need it or not, but I’m more interested in what you ate for lunch today.”
And the perks kept coming. The morning after the move I got to meet Charlie Sheen. Ginger had an early audition and left Charlie sleeping. Shortly afterward, Charlie ambled into the living room in his boxers with rumpled hair and sleep lines in his cheeks. As I poured him some coffee, he asked, “Does Ginger get the newspaper delivered?”
“I don’t know, she just moved in,” I told him.
And then Charlie raised one of his brows and asked me, “Does she read the newspaper?”
I thought it interesting that he wanted me, the help, to know that he was intellectually superior to Ginger—or maybe he was just thinking out loud and I was like the furniture to him. I chose to think that he thought I could be his intellectual peer if I had had the advantages and the money he had. To enforce my own need for approval, I shared with him the fact that I had met his dad and brother Emilio when I worked in the movie Repo Man that starred his brother.
Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making it in Show Business, or Not!: A 'How Not To' by The Counter Culture Diva Page 7
