Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (36 page)

E-mail has killed lasting correspondence, but it has. I can’t imagine how I existed without it (what was the first e-mail I ever sent? “One small step for Matt...”), and I know that when telephones were invented naysayers predicted the doom of personal interaction, too. But seeing the proof that e-mail has killed off a permanent record of friendship was undeniable—I have a two-foot stack of lengthy 

letters from my mom up through about 2000, then mostly short notes from her. Entire friendships seem documented on a weekly basis up ‘til then, and entire new friendships since 2000 are represented in my files by postcards, birthday cards, and season’s greetings, none of which give the slightest indication of anything other than penmanship.

E-mails can be saved, but I don’t save them, not consciously. And I find it hard to believe I’ll be lovingly reading over them 20 years from now. Unless I get with it and start saving e-mails religiously, they’ll be gone forever.

And that is at the core of my pack-ratting, the concept of retrievability vs. irretrievability. I have cards drawn for me by my sister when she was 3 (she’s now 40), I have a couple years’ worth of classmates’ Valentine’s Day cards, I have my elementary school’s newsletter, I have a folding swan from my best female buddy in fourth grade (we later came out to each other)...and these are all things that if I tossed them would cease to exist and very possibly would evaporate from my memory, too.

Something I acquired on eBay years ago is a pile of images and other memorabilia that belonged to a man named Vernon Gray. He was a minor actor who was gay, though not out. I bought his ephemera I think because it troubled me to think that it would evaporate if I didn’t. Maybe the fact that so many (no longer all) gay people are childless, making our keepsakes one heartbeat away from being worthless trash, also fuels my desire to keep as many things as possible. I am the chronicler of my own happy past...because who else will be?

The saddest item in Mr. Gray’s—now Mr. Rettenmund’s—collection is a lovely, professional 8”X10” of the man signed to his parents. It’s sad because there is apparently no one alive with any real connection to it who would want it, and because Mr. Gray himself probably only owned it after his parents died.

I don’t save everything of great importance to me. I’ve slipped up. The one thing I’d do anything for, as I am reminded whenever I sift through my stuff every couple of years, would be a video of my acting turn in
Torch Song Trilogy
from college. The brother of
Torch Song
’s director Matt did videotape that play, yet it has remained a “lost film” for me. Do you know silent actress Colleen Moore sent as many of her films as she had to the Museum of Modern Art and they misplaced them for years? They disintegrated; very few of her films exist, but fragments have surfaced occasionally. Maybe more will turn up.

Knowing that a long-lost record of something important, thought irretrievable, might be retrievable after all has me momentarily forgetting that all of the things I’ve lovingly preserved—like my ageless portraits of Vernon Gray—will become irretrievable the moment there is no one around who cares enough to retrieve them.

When I was in the fifth grade (don’t worry, my book isn’t skipping like a vinyl record, it’s a mini-flashback), one of my subdivision pals was a fellow geek named Chip Burnside, a name which sounds half like a bubble-headed aristocrat you’d bump into at a restricted country club and half like a forgotten Civil War general you’d hear referenced on
Pawn Stars
. He was neither. He was simply a little boy with glasses who was somewhat of a loner, as was I, and who would occasionally call me when presented with opportunities that required a friend. So we would go for months without seeing each other except in school, and then I’d suddenly find myself, last-minute, seated beside him at the circus with his dad, each of us pretending we’d been in touch on a daily basis since our previous meeting rather than living our lives completely apart. We were like a divorced couple at their 17-year-old’s high school graduation—smiles bigger than the clowns’.

Chip shared my appreciation for Alfred Hitchcock mysteries but had an outdoorsy streak that took a lot for me to get over. He had a small creek behind his house (more refined people in Michigan would call it a “creek,” our inferiors would more rustically call it a “crick”), which made him woodsy, but a fancy little homemade bridge traversing it that betrayed his status as a reasonably well-off child from the ‘burbs.

His parents were painfully nice, especially his gushing mom. As a word, “nice” is about as descriptive as “human,” though. To me she seemed nice because she meant well, was talkative, had a broad grin, and happily drove me home from school sometimes. To others, she may have seemed “not nice,” since her comment upon seeing the trophy I’d won at our school-wide spelling bee, which showed a fat bumblebee wearing a mortarboard and squinting out a smile, was, “Why, he looks like a chung-chung-Chinaman!”

Nice.

Chip and I had a weird relationship in that I thought he was a good guy but also wanted to torture him because I saw in him a mirror of my own social awkwardness.

Our friendship was very much a case of, “You like me? You’re such a loser.”

The perfect illustration of our odd coupling was the time we were horsing around in his living room and he did something to cause me to fall. I landed with my leg in a strange position and, upon seeing his concern (for me, or for his hide if it turned out he’d seriously injured me?), immediately feigned paralysis. I told him I could not move my leg at all and insisted he sit there with me until his mom came home, keeping me company. For hours, he sought to entertain me as exhaustively as a one-boy Vaudeville sister act in the hope that I would not press charges or tell his mom he was responsible for my lifelong handicap.

Then his mom arrived and I brushed the whole thing off (gee, I hadn’t really thought it through, had I?), gingerly getting up as if I’d slipped moments, not half a day, earlier. It was like decades later when my Shih Tzu, Sash, had jumped from the bed while in my care and was limping around so much I finally stuffed her into her carrier and dashed to the emergency vet, only to open it and have her stride out as able-footed as ever, luxuriating in the attention.

I owe Chip a lot, because one of his neighbors was an older lady who liked to have rummage sales—maybe sometimes buying things simply with an eye toward their resale potential (even at a loss). Walking home from Chip’s house one time, I was drawn to his neighbor’s cardboard boxes of cheap books. “Those are a dime each,” she told me as I flipped through books that had belonged to a daughter who’d died tragically in her late teens many years before. And so a dime each is what I paid for my first hardcover
What Ever Became Of…?
books by Richard Lamparski.

If you’ve never heard of this series, get thee to eBay. Starting with the first in 1967, each of Lamparski’s books contained entries on 100 celebrities nobody had heard anything about in dozens of years. Pre-Internet, the intrepid, prototypical starfucker spent what could only have been months on end tracking down silenced silent stars, athletes long out to pasture, voted-out politicos, and TV pioneers whose reception in color was no longer as enthusiastic as it had been in black-and-white. He found them oftentimes by running into them in public, recognizing them and then pursuing at-home interviews with his trusty photographer on hand to snap charmingly candid photos revealing how great they still looked (but always only “for their age”) or how unkind time had been. I’m still haunted by a photo of ‘30s quasi-star Anna Sten, the apathetic-man’s Garbo, posed in the ‘60s and described as “deeply tanned.” The Russian glamourpuss was all but in blackface, mugging in a swimsuit and showing off her admittedly still-choice gams, unaware of how insane she looked. I think gazing at her gave me my first pang of white guilt.

If my mom instilled in me a healthy respect for stars of the past, reading Richard Lamparski while flat on my belly on my blue-carpeted bedroom floor turned that respect into a borderline-religious reverence of the kind that allows for horror
and
disgust as long as awareness is achieved. He gave me an education with his work, which I think should be taught in schools to this day even though it’d never get past that right-wing Texas board that approves all textbooks, not with wry asides such as this one about “Orchid Lady of the Screen” and later obscenely rich landowner Corinne Griffith: “Her politics today are a bit right of the last czar.”

Reading those books, I learned of “world-famous alcoholic” Lillian Roth, achieved morbid satisfaction peering at photos of women famous in the ‘30s who in the ‘60s appeared to have been guinea pigs for the first facelifts, popped a boner over a 1940 still of Jon Hall in a Speedo, blushed at half-naked vintage shots of strippers Sherry Britton and Lili St. Cyr, and accepted how cruel gravity can be when comparing an impossibly fit “before” snap of boxer Ingemar Johansson with an “after” photo in which he was 265 pounds and grinning maniacally. One of the subjects, an old cowboy star named Ken Maynard, had grouchily decreed that Lamparski’s black photographer couldn’t set foot in his trailer.

Lamparski was a Depression baby, and his word has a dark vein running through it, which in the writing business is what we call foreshadowing.

Who cared about the stars of the late ‘70s when shit like
this
was happening 15 years earlier? Still, it was breaking news to me.

The first time I heard of autograph shows was a quarter-century later, around 2005, and was from a story on Bruce Hickey’s blog about one that had happened in 1976, when they’d been dominated by figures from Westerns. I read about Iris Meredith, a leading lady in cowboy flicks alongside Charles Starrett. She’d made an appearance at a show, signing autographs for an unexpected legion of long-in-the-tooth fans in spite of the fact that part of her face had been eaten away by oral cancer.

So of course my first thought was: “These sound like 3-D versions of the
What Ever Became Of…?
books.” And my second thought was: “I must go.”

You’ve probably heard of Comic Con, which is a sort of autograph show on steroids, a massive, science fiction/fantasy-geared convention filled with sneak peeks of major movies, meet-and-greets with fans, product pitches, panels, and every other thing that could possibly make a nerd orgasm while making its owners big bucks. But the autograph shows of which I speak are not nearly as celebrated, lucrative or, some would argue, glamorous for the stars who participate. Let me give you the skinny.

In a nutshell, an autograph show is where stars of the past (mostly) and (arguably) the present make themselves available so that fans can meet them, get pictures with them, and get them to sign autographs, charging money—cash only—for each and every request.

Why on earth would a famous person lower himself to an activity that sounds less embarrassing and awkward than it can sometimes actually be in real life? Some do it as a thank-you to fans, some do it to get a little long-missed adulation, and most just plain do it for the money, whether because they desperately need it or because they have plenty but don’t mind making more.

A typical autograph show consists of a large banquet hall or series of public hotel spaces given over to 100 or more collapsible utility tables at which 100 or more collapsible celebrities are seated, usually accompanied by offspring, an event-supplied volunteer, or a random gay meant to assist them. The helpers are there to run interference in case fans become overzealous, but also to hopefully be the ones to take money so the stars won’t need to do it. It’s really important to have even a tiny buffer between your cash and the star’s hand. Believe me, I adore Sally Kirkland, the formerly exhibitionistic, Oscar-nominated star of
Anna
, but when I realized I owed her $35 and handed her two twenties along with a joke about her keeping the change, it was all I could do to keep from crying when she eagerly replied in a low voice, “Really?” That was even worse than when I presented her with that famous photo of her sitting naked next to Lee Grant for her to sign, only to have her point to her ginormous fake tits in the picture and ask if I realized she “no longer had” them. (Of course I knew—I saw the round of press she did when she made the decision to go implant-free in the ‘90s.)

Whenever I’d attend an L.A.-area show, I’d try to enlist the aid of my friend Ivan, a blogger of pop culture nicknamed “Chexy” because of his yen for red-and-white-checkered
anything
. A lanky guy who once starred as psychos and zombies in Z movies, he also loves African-Americana, blue mirror, JFK, joking that “they blame the Jews for everything,” and collecting panoramic photos that show things like the attendees of a long-ago circus convention. We all have our sweet spots.