Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (39 page)

I fell in love with a small portrait entitled “Lenore” that looked to me more like a self-portrait, an awkward beauty that resembled a painted-in, pre-Campbell’s Soup Andy Warhol illustration.

Before getting to meet her, we were given a grand tour, which included entry into her costume chamber. It had zebra walls, used cigarette holders for $300, a director’s chair with her name on it, and wigs
everywhere
. It looked like Beverly Hills after a neutron bomb. For me, the only room more impressive was the commode, which had garish stripes on the ceiling reminiscent of a horizontal version of the nightmare sequence in the Joan Crawford’s flick
Strait Jacket
.

Once we’d paid in cash, we received confirmation that Miss Diller would receive us—she was having a good day, and that meant we were about to have a great day. She was led out to us, frail and bewigged but looking pretty spry for 94, decked out in a feminine white blouse, canary yellow sweater, and matching necklace. She was hard of hearing and seeing, but her sense of humor was still running like a faucet that wouldn’t go off.

“Hi, I’m Matt!” I told her.

“Hi, I’m blind!” she cracked.

She sat with us, sipping a double gin martini, letting us ask anything we liked and signing the mementos we’d brought. I’d found a shot of her from the 1967 movie she’d done with Bob Hope and Jonathan Winters,
Eight on the Lam
, which prompted her to say, “That was a good story. I just thought the female love interest was…weak.” The female lead was, of course, Diller.

When someone reacted to one of her stories with an exclamation of, “Oh, Lord!” she snapped back, “The Lord? The Lord doesn’t give a damn about you.” She told us she was an atheist, a brave thing to reassert in mixed company when one is closer to 100 than not. She raved about her neighbor Julie Newmar (can you imagine having Julie Newmar as your neighbor?), joked that Robin Williams was a “phylogenetic throwback to the apes” because of his hairy back, and unceremoniously adjusted the off-kilter wig on her head right in front of us.

“I may not have hair on my back, but by God I’ll have hair on my head!” (I have hair on my back and am beginning to worry about the hair on my head, too.)

Our photo ops with Miss Diller were fascinating. She would prop herself up next to us with a straight face, then would wait for the verbal signal from her assistant that the photo was coming and would give her open-mouthed grin. You can almost hear her trademark laugh in those photos.

She died less than four months later.

On a different trip, we all got to meet up with the aforementioned Jane Withers. Jane is probably best known for her 1934 film
Bright Eyes
, in which she got to be mean to Shirley Temple (and somehow wasn’t Public Enemy #1 afterward), but is also a familiar face thanks to a memorable appearance in the 1956 classic
Giant
and a long run as TV pitchwoman “Josephine the Plumber.” Her bouffant hairdo has moved more Comet than a black hole.

The evening was unforgettable for many reasons. First, we arrived in our rental to pick her up, only to discover we had to literally pick her up—she’d fallen while getting ready, so big Brian had to help her to her feet and assist with her preparations. She was unharmed but rattled. I still can’t believe we allowed her to talk us into letting the evening go on, but we did. Jane’s persona, that of a cheerful imp who punctuates her sentences with a squeaky li’l laugh, is not a persona—it’s who she is. Prone to fits of tears—anything can overwhelm her, usually happy things like a memory of a red carpet or of meeting her big fan, FDR—she is nonetheless one of the most positive people you could meet. She’s also one of the few deeply religious people I’ve met who does not strike me as judgmental or unkind. Her Christianity is the loving kind that’s so out of favor lately.

We went for sushi to her favorite place near her home, where she is still welcomed as the Hollywood royalty that she is. The woman’s first movie was made 80 years before she took her seat; for that alone she deserves the reddest of carpets.

Jane is the perfect dinner companion, a steady talker who also shows interest in everyone else, including the least interesting person at the table. When she asks you questions, it feels like she’s still actively soaking up new information to have. Most interesting to me is the fact that in spite of being a Hollywood star in her own right, she is also very much a fan. She’s one of the world’s biggest fans of Joan Crawford, and can talk for hours about just about any other silver-screen figure you’d care to name. She was friendly with Mary Pickford and bought up many items from her estate sale. She was instrumental in getting Charlie Chaplin honored when he returned to the U.S. in the 1970s in spite of his controversial political views. She was also a good friend to James Dean, her
Giant
co-star.

She told us that one day, Dean had shown up in her bedroom upstairs during a party she was throwing, but she hadn’t seen him enter. “’How did you get in here?’ I asked him. He said, ‘Through the window. I didn’t wanna see all those people.’ I was not amused. I took out my trusty toolbox that I always had nearby, nailed all the windows shut, and told him, ‘You’re coming through the door like everyone else next time!’” He apparently liked her bossiness.

She also remembered the old pink western shirt he wore forever and a day. “It was so dirty I finally told him I’d wash it for him, so he’d let me every once in a while.”

He’d given it to her to wash when he left on that trip in his Spyder, the one from which he never returned. It and many other priceless (or maybe priceful) items decorate her tiny home and/or her storage facility. She’s like a one-woman museum.

When I confessed to Jane that I am practically a hoarder, she popped her eyes at me and said, “Hello!”

Betty White, Phyllis Diller, and Jane Withers are as different as could be, but each was flouting the old adage that you can’t take it with you—“it” being work for White, artistic expression for Diller, and memorabilia for Withers.

Maybe you
can’t take it with you, but why shouldn’t you try?

How I lived in New York City beginning in 1992 and never made it to the notorious Gaiety Theatre is beyond me. It was said to be a pleasingly scuzzy place where gay-for-pay “dancers” shook their barely concealed boners on a small stage before a glittering curtain while a mix of out-of-towners and bored celebs stuffed cash between their cheeks.The rush to line up productive assignations after each set was apparently a stampede, one that lasted from 1976 to 2005. One of the best sequences in Madonna’s
Sex
book had been shot by Steven Meisel there, with Warhol’s Udo Kier calling the shots in a tux and regular dancer/iconic porn bottom Joey Stefano down at heel.

And from 2001 until it closed, I worked just two blocks away.

One balmy New York evening in September of 2013, I decided to make up for my lapse in sanity. I did something out of the ordinary—I went with a friend to The Adonis Lounge, one of the only male strip clubs in post-Giuliani Manhattan. My only experience with strippers at all was my passion for
Broadway Bares
, an annual charity show staged to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, during which chorus boys and Broadway types shuck their clothes down to thongs or less while show tunes-loving audiences discreetly masturbate using only their thighs. As much as I loved going to the shows—I was never accredited and was eventually thrown out of one of the smaller
Solo Strips
events for taking photos that the dancers would all happily share on social media the next day—
Broadway Bares
was supposedly tame compared to The Adonis Lounge, so I couldn’t resist seeing for myself.

As my friend and I walked from Hell’s Kitchen to Midtown East, I wondered if The Adonis Lounge might be like your local leather bar, a bunch of assless chaps in assless chaps. Or maybe it would be like a titty bar, with showgirl glitz and rowdy patrons clinking glasses of beer. It wasn’t like either of those things. It was like a brothel.

We paid our 10 bucks and walked into a very small bar called Evolve with an impossibly small stage like the one my college boyfriend/roommate Jack the Stripper had used twenty-five years earlier, on which a single performer was gyrating distractedly. “Baby Tonight” by Pit Bull featuring Usher was blaring, but the performer looked like he could have been hearing a ballad or maybe a chorus of “Happy Birthday” based on the completely unrelated movements of his shining, hairless, muscled body. Bad dancer, good everything else.

We turned to each other upon entering and after having immediately assessed the situation, thinking we might leave.

But 20 or more physically impressive young men ranging in tone from pale white to jet black were slithering between the patrons, dressed only in sneakers and undergear, and we
are
gay, so we stayed. Also, I knew that this would be the best place ever to find prospective models—I had a new camera and was dying to start photographing men. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel looking for guys willing to get naked in a strip club.

The crowd looked a bit like a convention of “before” pictures—your dad and/or grandpa might’ve been there, the oddest-looking man you know was definitely there. One strangely shaped little guy who looked like he has probably endured a lot of taunting in his life, who could clearly never be successful on a hook-up app that requires a face pic, was in this scenario the belle of the ball, being courted by two strapping men with bulges you could almost see pulsing. It didn’t make me sad to see that he was having to resort to paying guys for physical attention, it made me happy that he at least had that option and had the wherewithal to go through with it. It was a rectum half-full, half-empty situation—I chose to see it half-full.

Not to mention the fact that—looking around—I was in the exact same place he was.

My buddy and I quickly sat against one mirrored wall opposite the bar, where we could barely see the stage. No matter, a compact, hirsute performer with a focused gaze, and whose skintight briefs looked to be workin’ overtime, pounced on us.

“First time here? Here’s how it works...” How did he know? He
knew
.

The backroom lap dances, he explained, are extremely free-spirited—hands can go
inside
underwear (some of the boys are in jockstraps for easier access) but not
on
boners. No kissing. Otherwise, it’s the Frottage Mahal. Then there is the private or “Champagne Room,” where for a hundred bucks you get to decide with your performer what the rules are because being away from the prying eyes of the security guards means you can break the rules.

“I recommend you stay on the safe side,” our volunteer guide offered. But we got the message you could easily put your mouth where their money is.

The next guy to approach us was a blocky blond with an all-American look and spiked hair. He had much the same advice, but let us know that he felt the private room wasn’t a good value since it wasn’t private nor was it a room...the lap dances were performed on a series of bedbug-friendly couches, and the private room was just a couple of the same couches in the same room hastily curtained off by a sort of sheet. In theory, your feet could be sticking out from under the sheet while a dancer...
dances
...on you, all a few inches away from happy-lapped fellow patrons.

I’d never had a lap dance and needed to address that, so I looked around at all the men. For the first time in my life, I felt what it must be like to be one of those fitness model types, the ones so breathtaking they can decide who they want to have sex with at any given time. I’ve always wondered how they get anything
but
sex done. Now, I had the power. Who would be my first?