And that’s Chris Scarlett on the right with some john. When I first met Chris, she was the male partner of The Dancing Wallaces. They were teenagers and they won the national jitterbugging contest. The families made them get married because they were teenagers and this was Lowell, Mass. So the Dancing Wallaces jitterbugged all over the country and then they came back and did what was left of vaudeville.
His wife started getting dates with all these johns, so Chris said, “Well, if she can do it, I can do it.” So the juvenile make-up became a little more pronounced, the cheeks a little rosier, and she started getting johns and she and her wife split up. They had a little child. Little Robin. Of course, Little Robin is a grown up man now. Little Robin.
Here’s Chris Scarlett in one transformation, doing the fan dance.
The queen clubs in New York in the late forties and early fifties were Phil’s 111, and the Moroccan Village, and the 181. But Phil never paid his help so the 111 closed and the 181 closed in 1950 and became the Club 82, until it closed in 1972, and now it’s reopened as a salsa dance parlor. The Club 181 was a sort of Jewel Box Revue with not as much sparkle but a lot of talent. A lot of benny heads, too.
One of the big names at the 82 was Titanic. Titanic was a beautiful queen and she could come out on stage with this gravelly voice and just dish and the audience would love her. Real corny material. She’d pick out someone in the audience and say, “Oh, I wish I had your picture, I have a perfect frame for it. A toilet seat.” But Titanic could always pull that material off, because Titanic was something special. She used to do Carol Channing’s numbers from “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds” — my favorite musical since “Anything Goes” — and had her hair cut like Channing. Carol Channing would come down to the club all the time, and she loved the queens. She was just like one of the queens: six feet tall, a camp. And she’s still going strong, honey.
And before the legend that drag queens oppress women came along, the lezzies and the queens used to mix at Tony Pastor’s. See, it wasn’t the lezzies that were angry about the queens — it was a group called the Faggot Effeminists, one of the lesser lights of gay liberation. One of them said to me, “Minette, do you know that drag queens oppress women?” And I said. “Honey, I was always under the impression that you can’t oppress someone unless you have power over them. When you get in drag, you oppress women. When I get in drag, I glorify them.”
The lezzies used to mix with the drag queens. The fairies and the lezzies didn’t mix, but the queens did because we all used to hustle at Tony Pastor’s on West 3rd Street. The johns would come in looking for something kinky or to try to convert a lezzie. If a lezzie was looking to make it with a man, she wouldn’t be a lezzie, right? Well, that was what was so rare about those johns. So after a few drinks, the lezzies would turn them over to us and the john would end up with a queen. The queens looked so much prettier anyway, cause we tried. We used to put on a face that was like juvenile makeup onstage. We used Magic Touch, this powder and pancake combined so you could put it on like face powder but it had more body. We did look good, we were young then, we were pretty. Sometimes you’d get a john. I’ll sing you a song I used to do. It was a parody of a song called “The Lady in Red.” I called it “The Lezzie in Red.”
This is my old beau Rob Roy. He’s got a campy tale — he became the Baron von Lichtenstein. And he was a sheik, even though this picture looks like a rogue’s gallery shot. Lichtenstein is this tiny country, and right after World War II Rob Roy was in Lichtenstein in the black market. He met someone in Lichtenstein — a prince or a duke or something like that — and he made Rob Roy the Baron von Lichtenstein He didn’t call himself the Baron von Lichtenstein very much. It would have been a little ridiculous, this poor guy in Philadelphia starving most of the time — the “Baron von Lichtenstein.” He was a hotel clerk when I met him in 1954, and he played piano in a gay bar. Him and I were pals more than lovers. I really did love him and he did love me, but there were just too many other things going on. I wonder what happened to him.
I’ve done a lot of things since I came back to New York besides being a chanteuse. I’d take work as a stitch bitch in off-times, and in 1957 I was discovered by the celluloid medium. It wasn’t MGM, it was Avery Willard and his Avegraph Films. They were silent movies, mostly eight millimeter, with lots of queens in these campy tales. On one of my last films, Avegraph introduced Avetone, the poor man’s Vitaphone. Once in a blue moon the Avetone would get together with the picture in synch, but usually the dancer would come out and the singer would start, or I would start talking and a low man’s voice would come out. After a while, Avery started filming the leather boys, so he could no longer get me to work for him.
One of the best parts of my Avegraph film career was meeting my friends from the Ridiculous Theatrical Company on the set of the last film. My Ridiculous friends and I were supposed to be a Ten Cents a Dance place, and the Avegraph cinematographer brought back some Moroccan hashish. Honey, nobody wanted for nothing that night.
I was dancing with Lola Pashalinski — she was twice her size today — in a red zoot suit and Charles Ludlam was wearing earrings that this sailor was trying to eat off. Lola is fabulous — a diesel dyke at heart but she can play a soubrette or sing opera without lessons, and Charles is brilliant. I owe a lot to my Ridiculous friends, because they taught me how to eat right. Even though it sometimes gets dear, I always eat the right food — as organic as possible.
I’ve just finished a part in a silent movie Charles Ludlam has made with all the Ridiculous people and Crazy Arthur, “The Sorrows of Dolores.”
It was I who introduced Crazy Arthur to the Ridiculous company and they re-introduced him to show business. As a kid he’d been a burlesque comic that worked the Loew’s circuit and now he was Orgone, the hunchback pin-headed sex maniac in Turds in Hell, one of the great Ridiculous productions. I told Crazy Arthur to come today, but I think he wanted you to interview him lying down in bed. You just tell him, “Mother, it’s not nice to talk with your mouth full.”
Besides my Avegraph career, I was used for the soundtrack of the movie “The Queen.” I sang “Am I Blue.” I started with that song at three years old and there I was still singing it.
The Queen’s producer, Flawless Sabrina, came up to me at the Crazy Horse where I was working. Flawless Sabrina was actually very unflawless, sort of like a World War II record, which would crack if you looked at it. “One night, $50,” she says, so I said okay. It turned out the band was Sam the Man Taylor, who I had played with a few years before in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, so that was gay. But the Flawless Sabrina was another story. She thought she had removed all the professional impersonators from the film, but little did they know that Mario Montez was a professional. She was in the classic, “Flaming Creatures,” and all those Andy Warhol films. In this show of Flawless Sabrina’s, they brought her down in a wrinkled lame dress in a bathtub, and they had her in greasepaint without any powder over, so she looked like a grease ball. I later taught Mario how to use powder. A fabulous queen. But you know how much Miss Montez has been paid for all the films she did for Andy Warhol? A total of $110. That is usury.