At home with: John Waters
Jaime Jeske
Thursday, August 15, 2002
AT HOME WITH JOHN WATERS
Bad Taste Is Its Own Reward
By JOHN LELAND
IN his Greenwich Village apartment last week, John Waters was wearing a
loopy T-shirt ensemble by Yohji Yamamoto and listening to Solomon
Burke - and if there is a more inviting way to spend a hot afternoon in
New York City, it would be hard to imagine. He had a thin line of
mustache, gum-ball-striped socks and a suntan.
Next to Mr. Waters was a small photograph of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek and a
slightly larger one of Divine. "I'm obsessed with her," he said,
referring to the former of the two divas. "She lives in New York, so I
try to spy on her. I ask her doorman, `Does she get pu pu platters?' And
he of course refuses to answer."
Mr. Waters is famously associated with the city of Baltimore, where he
has lived most of his 56 years, and where he has set all of his movies,
including "Hairspray," which has now morphed into a big, sherbety
musical that opens tonight on Broadway. "Baltimore to me is what I write
about, what inspires me," he said.
But for the last 11 years, he has also kept a pied-à-terre in a neatly
groomed prewar building in the Village. He divides his year among a
large Tudor-style house in Baltimore, a summer apartment in
Provincetown, Mass., and this very genteel one-bedroom in New York.
The house in Baltimore has an electric chair, Mr. Waters's addition to a
building that used to spook him when he walked by as a child. The
apartment in New York is filled with modern art and has a pillow with a
needlepoint picture of an electric chair. His mother did the
needlepoint.
"I have a whole life here," he said. "I have dinner parties, I go to a
lot of galleries. I really keep up on that. That's the main thing I do
here. And I go to movies I can't see everywhere else." Mr. Waters
offered a cup of coffee and finished his menu of Gotham pastimes. "I
take the subway everywhere," he said. "I ride in the first car, to look
at the rats. You can see them jumping out of the way on certain lines.
The F line's not bad for that."
It stands to reason that you cannot become John Waters, auteur of such
Oscar-free classics as "Female Trouble" and "Hag in a Black Leather
Jacket," without drinking long and deep of the cultural gutters of
downtown Manhattan. Baltimore may have its gothic charms, but if the
Dutch explorers had not settled this other lustrous, grubby isle, the
world might never know the cinematic sensation of Odorama.
Mr. Waters offered a tour, beginning in the living room with a witty
sculpture by George Stoll. On an ordinary toilet-paper holder, mounted
in a wall, Mr. Stoll, who had a small role in Mr. Waters's 1972 movie
"Pink Flamingos," replaced the tissue with a roll of chiffon. Mr. Waters
needed approval from the condominium to install it. He could only
imagine what the super thought.
To facilitate his vision of semi-patrician Manhattan, he hired a
Baltimore decorator named Henry Johnson, the first time he had ever used
a professional. "I told him I just wanted a symphony in puke green, and
I got it," Mr. Waters said. He had always considered that his signature
color. There's a slightly different shade in each room.
Mr. Waters explained: "When I was a child I wanted my skin to be that
color, like the Wicked Witch of the West. Now, as I get older, it's
getting close. It'll match the apartment."
Mr. Waters has written and directed 11 movies since 1969, including his
most recent, "Cecil B. DeMented" and "Pecker," working on tight budgets
and tighter shooting schedules. He makes about 30 speaking appearances a
year, mostly on college campuses, and exhibits his photographs -
pictures taken from television, then recombined to create storyboards
for wholly different movies - at the American Fine Arts gallery in New
York. The New Museum of Contemporary Art is planning a retrospective of
his photographs for 2003 or 2004. He is also helping to write a book
about sex in art and working on his next screenplay, "A Dirty Shame,"
about peculiar carnal appetites brought on by a head injury.
During downtime, he managed to act as a pedophile priest in "Blood Feast
2: All U Can Eat," directed by the splatter legend Herschell Gordon
Lewis. He is in "deep development" on an animated series about his life.
And he has been consulting on "Hairspray."
Accordingly, Mr. Waters has marshaled his life into rigid routines, a
kind of regimented weirdness. He writes each day's schedule on an index
card and crosses off tasks as he accomplishes them; at the start of each
week he plans every meal before preparing his shopping list, and he says
he never has any groceries left over. He makes it a point to drink every
Friday night, "like a coal miner with a paycheck in his pocket," and
arranges his home life to accommodate his compulsiveness.
The apartment reflects Mr. Waters's work habits, which are both perverse
and meticulously disciplined. In a plastic case on his desk, he has
Polaroid snapshots of everyone who has ever visited the apartment,
including the reporter and photographer of this article.
"I separate things," he said. "I don't ever think up my movies the same
place I think up my artwork. I write every morning from 8 to 11:30. I
have to think up weird things. That's my job. And then the rest of the
day I figure out how to make that into money."
Above his desk in Greenwich Village is a drawing by Mike Kelley showing
fumes rising out of a garbage dump, which Mr. Waters considered an
appropriate image for his work space.
"I'm really organized," he said. To write anything, he added, "I need
Bic pens and Evidence legal pads, the only ones I like."
"I use Scotch tape and scissors, and move it around like a computer," he
said. "Then, when my first draft is done, my assistant types it and I
start cutting it up. I've written all my books and movies like that.
"Now you can't take scissors on airplanes, which makes it hard. I have
to have scissors everywhere, because I need them to write. Sometimes on
lectures I make them give me a pair of scissors. That's my only star
demand, that in my room I have a pair of paper scissors. You can't call
me a difficult speaker because of that."
Mr. Waters began his affair with New York when he was 17. He had a high
school girlfriend at the time, and the two would hitchhike up from
Baltimore. "We used to walk around this neighborhood and ask strangers,
`Can we stay with you?' And they'd say yes. I hitchhiked in Manhattan,
which I don't even think people did then. I think no one picked us up."
The boundaries of his New York extended to the exploitation theaters of
Times Square, where he used to take speed and consume four movies in a
row, and to the dormitories of New York University, which removed him
for smoking marijuana. He progressed from Max's Kansas City to the Mudd
Club to Squeezebox; from flophouses on Eighth Street to the couches of
friends like Cookie Mueller, who appeared in many of his movies, and
Dennis Dermody, a movie critic at Paper magazine. "I always wanted to
live in New York," he said, "but I didn't want to live badly in New
York. I wanted to wait until I could get a nice place."
But now, he said, parts of his city are disappearing or gone. He misses
the lunch counter at Bigelow drugstore, where the staff was rude to
everyone but regulars, and the Women's House of Detention in the
Village. Since the omnisexual club Squeezebox closed last year, he
hasn't had a regular place to drink. "Greenwich Village is no longer the
hotbed of rebellion," he said. "But still many writers live here, many
artists. It's still the same kind of people."
With the arrival of "Hairspray" on Broadway, Mr. Waters threatens to
become a New York institution himself. He admitted that he was nervous
about the opening, especially because the show has had so much advance
buildup. As a fan of delightfully bad movies, he acknowledges that there
is no such thing as a good bad play. "A bad play is literally torture,"
he said. "Even good bad movies as a breed are almost gone. `Showgirls'
is the last good bad classic. That is the `Citizen Kane' of good bad
movies of the last 20 years."
Mr. Waters plans to attend tonight's opening with his parents and some
members of the original film crew. Though his parents lent him money to
make his early movies, they rarely attended them. "That would just be
parent abuse," Mr. Waters said. "They were so relieved when I made
`Hairspray.' They want it to be made into everything, so they don't have
to go to any more openings, just go to openings of that all the time."
Sometime soon after, he will escape to Provincetown, where he has gone
for 38 years, ever since someone told him it was a weird place. "I have
a different set of friends in each place that I see in the same way," he
said. Among his paintings in New York is a foggy seascape by his
Provincetown landlady, the artist Pat de Groot. He can still hitchhike
when he is there, and his apartment is "small enough so I can't have
guests, which is great."
And tomorrow night, if you raise a glass in the direction of Cape Cod,
chances are he'll be raising one too.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
"The New York Times"
Thursday, August 15, 2002
John Waters: A Few of His Favorite Things
"ALL I ever do in New York anymore is go to art galleries and bookshops,
but that's plenty," John Waters said. "That's why I keep an apartment
here." He narrates a tour of some favorites:
JOE JR.'S 482 Avenue of the Americas (12th Street). "There's nothing
better than sitting by yourself in that half a booth in the front that
just has one seat and reading the gossip columns in Women's Wear Daily
and having homemade soup and one of the best burgers in the Village."
FOOTLIGHT RECORDS 113 East 12th Street (Fourth Avenue). "The kind of
record store that you breathlessly call up and say, `Do you have the
soundtrack to "The Piano Teacher"?' and you know they'll say yes."
PRINTED MATTER 535 West 22nd Street. "Whenever I'm in a bad mood, I
treat myself to maybe a little Richard Tuttle multiple, or an artist
porno book. They always have something that I've never seen before."
ST. MARK'S BOOKSHOP 31 Third Avenue (Ninth Street). "Hardbacks the way I
like them, with no discount and a staff who know their stock."
DIA CENTER FOR THE ARTS bookstore, 548 West 22nd Street. "It's like
shopping in the best museum bookstores in Europe, all in one place. When
I approach their new arrivals section, I feel like a randy steelworker
going into Show World."
COMME DES GARÇONS 520 West 22nd Street. "I'm always secretly thrilled
when I spend a lot of money on a very witty great new outfit and go back
to Baltimore and someone says, `That's a shame about that coat.' "
STRAND BOOK STORE rare book room, 828 Broadway (12th Street). "Best Xmas
shopping. And they have back issues of Film Culture, the magazine about
underground movies that inspired me when I was a kid."
OSCAR WILDE MEMORIAL BOOKSHOP 15 Christopher Street (Gay Street). "For
that back room, a gold mine of obscure Tennessee Williams first
editions."
GAIETY THEATER male strip club, 201 West 46th Street. "I almost never go
there, but every day I want to."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Jaime