Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis by Craig B. Highberger Read Free Book Online Page A

remember what I was like at 18, but I was a force of nature, let us say. That was at a time when most girls didn’t consort with homosexuals or drag queens to the extent that I did. One of my big jokes is that in 1967 when I was 17 in Provincetown, it was widely believed that I was a sex change. Today we might expect David Letterman to use the expression “what’s the dish on that,” but at that time it was a very private language, the gay language was an argot, a slang that was not known to everybody.
    I’d be at a party in Provincetown in 1967 – there’d be 75 gay men and me. And somebody would come up to me and say, “is she real” and I would go – “I did not spend seventy-five thousand dollars and three months in Casablanca to have you ask me if I am real”! So this rumor went around Boston, P-Town, and New York City for years and years that I was a sex change.
    Jackie once said to me “the girls get all the good parts,” referring actually to Bette Midler. They had done a play together at La Mama called Miss Neferititi Regrets , and Jackie was pissed because the girl role was the fabulous role. Bette Midler played Miss Neferititi and Jackie played her brother. I met Jackie as a boy and zipped Jackie into his first dress. Actually, what drag queens and fag hags had in common was a great love for 30s dresses. That’s how we dressed. Curtis and I were always going looking for clothes at thrift shops. And Jackie started dressing like I did – in old-lady lace-up shoes that had the big thick Cuban heel, thirties dresses, and black tights. The tights were always shredded cause we couldn’t afford to buy them all the time and we just didn’t give a shit. And I always wore glitter at night, offstage.
    When Curtis started doing drag, it was the over the top “Playhouse of the Ridiculous” drag. One of Jackie’s lines in GGG is “the duke wants to see the big face” it was all about the big lips, big face, big eyes … and three pairs of false eyelashes. Jackie didn’t have great hygiene, which is the mark of a real drag queen. Also from doing so many drugs, he’d be up three straight days and nights, not changing that dress. There’d always be huge stains under the armpits. Remember Jackie was Sicilian and Swedish, Jackie was six foot two, the body of a linebacker, Jackie had a very big frame. Jackie was not a delicate creature, and had the stubble, the glitter.
    Jackie ushered in that period of not trying to look real. What everybody was going for in drag up until Jackie Curtis was realness. That was the criterion, how “real” did you look? Jackie could never hope to look real. It was never going to happen. So Jackie didn’t use falsies. Jackie used his own eroticism.
    Lily Tomlin
    Jackie tried not to look perfect – that whole thing of exaggerating the look and the torn stockings, it was just original and wonderful. Jackie didn’t have a particularly feminine face, as Candy did and that is what made his appearance more striking. Jackie and all of those wonderful artists at that time, and Jackie was really in the vanguard – they were outsiders and they had that incredible sense of the absurdity of the whole culture. They’re innovators, but as Jane would say they’re also preservationists.
    I got Candy Darling an audition at the Upstairs at the Downstairs. I thought Candy was so gorgeous and I thought Rod Warren would cast her, and that he wouldn’t even realize that Candy is a man dressing as a woman, but he didn’t hire her. Later in 1972 Candy was cast in Tennessee Williams’ Small Craft Warnings off-Broadway. I heard that the male actors wouldn’t allow her in their dressing room, and neither would the women which was just terrible. After I got famous on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In I always fantasized about doing a special with Candy and Jackie. Too bad I never did.
    Leee Black Childers
    Jackie was living with me on 13th Street and there was a very old lady name Rosie who lived