The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (2 page)

One night, Cliff, two drag-queen friends, and their dates drove out to his parents’ lake house in Cape Royale, an affluent development bordering on Lake Livingston. In full drag, he marched the group into the local club. “We ordered champagne all around,” he remembers. Afterward they went down to the marina to take out his parents’ boat. “I was all hormoned up. There were some fishermen in the marina, and we were swearing as we tried to get the boat out. One said, ‘Ma’am, will you please watch your language?’ I looked at him and said, ‘I’m not a ma’am. I’m a sir. I’m the Youens boy, and don’t you forget it!’” The escapade caused such a scandal in Cape Royale that Cliff’s parents banished him from the lake house for two years.

As the years passed, Cliff went on and off female hormones like a menopausal woman having mood swings. They gave him adolescent breasts, softened his beard, masked angles as curves. He made foam-rubber hips and concealed his genitals between his legs with a device called a gaff. At times he toyed with the idea of having the operation and becoming a woman. “But I liked being a boy – sexually.” In drag, he frequented straight bars. “It was a real thrill to have guys hitting on me. But I knew they wanted something I couldn’t give.”

Whenever he could afford it, Cliff swore off Houston for another shot at New York, but never with more than minor success. In 1974, he performed in an all-male review,
Boys, Boys, Boys
, on West Fourteenth Street. Later he was the secondary female lead in an Off Off Broadway production entitled
Round the Naked Round
. By the time he returned to Houston, he’d had his nose pared down, an implant inserted to make his chin longer, and silicone injected into his cheeks. Now when he made the rounds of the local theater scene, he dressed as the girl next door, tabling Brandi’s glamour, and claimed to be a fictitious New York Equity actress he named K.T. West.

K.T.’s first role was in a production of
Lenny
, a play about the late comic Lenny Bruce. “I knew from the start K.T. was going to die a natural death,” Cliff admits with a smirk. “But it was a real test to see if I could pull it off in front of people who knew me as Cliff and Brandi.”

Looking back, many years later Cliff would admit that at times it would become confusing. “Get up as me, shower, do stuff around the house, put minimal make-up on to pass at rehearsal, [for the performance] put on makeup as [the character in the play], then take off the stage makeup, dress as K.T., then later out of makeup, to just be me.” Yet, he insisted that at his core, he always knew who he was. “It was always me, always Cliff, doing it and enjoying the artistry of pulling it off.”

During the run, members of the Montrose Players saw K.T.’s performance and invited her to try out for a part in their new show,
Women Behind Bars
, Tom Eyen’s 1974 spoof of a women’s-prison-B-movie. Long before opening night, K.T.’s fellow actors sensed something odd. An actress named Mary Hooper finally put her finger on what was wrong and confronted her new friend. Cliff claimed to be undergoing a sex change and pleaded with Hooper not to reveal his true identity.

“I knew someone was going to ask me about K.T. someday,” Hooper said softly, shaking her bright red shoulder-length hair. “I’ve thought a lot about what happened with K.T., or I guess you’d say Cliff. In the end, I decided it all boiled down to the fact that he just didn’t like women.”

When the production opened in September 1979, one critic raved that K.T. West “fluttered and fanned with such force, the air-conditioning in the Montrose Activity Center could have been turned off.” Behind the scenes, however, K.T.’s performance received mixed reviews.

“She ad-libbed and tried to steal the scenes,” says Hooper. One night in a staged catfight, K.T. really slapped Hooper instead of using the moves blocked in rehearsal. Hooper complained, and K.T. apologized, but she soon did it again, giving Hooper a split lip and a lump on the back of the head. “I said, ‘K.T., you just can’t keep hurting me. We’re friends.’ She looked at me as if she was going to cry and said, ‘I’m really sorry. It wasn’t me who did that.’” Cliff would contend that he meant he had hit Hooper in character, but Mary Hooper understood it differently: “I had been hearing stories about Brandi West, the bitch drag queen. That’s when I felt like I had met her.”

After the run of the show, the two stayed in touch. K.T. didn’t show up for one of their meetings, but Cliff did. “Here was this sour, sulky, butch guy with a chip on his shoulder,” says Hooper. “He had on a big blue black cowboy hat and blue jeans. When I asked what was up, he said, ‘I just couldn’t do it today.’”

Word spread that K.T. was in fact Cliff Youens/Brandi West, and the masquerade was over. Right up until the murder seven years later, though, K.T. would occasionally call up Hooper, and they would get together for lunch. “K.T. was a great friend, talented, charismatic and fun. But if I ran into Cliff or Brandi, I would just nod and walk on. I never really liked the other two,” says Hooper. “I felt that drag was her downfall. It was a tough way to make a living. A lot of drugs and drinking. The emcee of a wet-jockey contest in a sleazy bar is not all she wanted to be.”

HOUSTON’S GAY PRIDE WEEK WAS well established in 1979, and by the early eighties there were more than twenty-five gay bars in the Montrose area alone. As the scene spread to Dallas, San Antonio, Beaumont and Galveston, Cliff and his fellow performers began working a statewide circuit.

“You have to understand who we are,” says Newman Braud, who was Miss Gay America 1985 and whose stage name is Naomi Sims. His voice is a strange mix of Lauren Bacall and Valley girl. “You’re dealing with this kind of pseudo star. On Sunday nights we would average six hundred to seven hundred people at one show. You’re the community’s figurehead. They are taken by you.”

It’s almost noon and Braud, who emceed a male strip show the night before, has just gotten up. He has a pink baseball cap pulled low on his head and is wearing a loose T-shirt and shorts. His eyebrows have been plucked in two inquisitive half circles, but he has a slight five o-clock shadow. As a male, Braud appears unremarkable, “an ugly little man,” as one of his friends says, but on stage he is glamorous, alluring, a black Linda Evans. He admits that it’s a bit strange having the world see him as two different people. “Cliff thought about it a lot. The differences were important to him. How could he be so terribly outgoing so much of the time onstage and just this little guy at other times? He was not always open with everyone. I think there was a side of him his friends never knew. He would never really let his guard down.”

As Cliff and Newman, the two were friends. But onstage as Brandi, Cliff was something else. “He would make me cry. He did terrible things to me. My whole schtick is the image. As Naomi, I’m this beautiful woman. Brandi would play practical jokes. Sometimes on stage, she would pull my wig off, and I’d be standing there exposed. When I would yell at him later, it was like – it’s all a part of the show.”

“I was never asked at the trial if I believed Cliff killed Patrice.” The room grew silent as Braud seemed to consider the pros and cons of going further. “I’ve never told anyone this, but everything violent Cliff ever did was as Brandi. I never thought that it was Cliff who killed Patrice; I always figured it must have been Brandi.”

ONE NIGHT IN FEBRUARY 1980, Cliff met twenty-year-old Jimmy Samuels in a bar called the Midnight Sun. “I don’t know if he was Brandi or K.T. at that point,” says Samuels, who is boyish with a slightly stocky build. “He was in the audience in drag. I thought:
this is someone who could keep me laughing forever
.”

Jimmy, who lives on the West Coast, asks me not to use his real name. “My parents don’t even know I’m gay, much less what happened with Cliff.” His hands shake as he speaks, and there is fear as well as denial in his voice, the kind often associated with battered wives. “Cliff still sends me letters and says he wants to resume our relationship. My single biggest nightmare is that someday he’ll get out.”

Within a week, Cliff invited Jimmy to move into his apartment. Then he systematically began to isolate him. He rebuffed Jimmy’s friends and convinced him to quit his job in a sandwich shop. When Jimmy complained, Cliff got violent. “Cliff would slap me. I hated it, but I wouldn’t do anything. I was always passive.”

Four times Jimmy tried to leave Cliff, but Cliff always tracked him down. “They had colossal fights,” says Mary Hooper. “Jimmy wasn’t strong enough to defend himself. He was like a child running away. Brandi once kicked down the door at an apartment complex to get to him.”

“I loved Jimmy more than he loved me. When he would leave me, I would go insane,” Cliff tells me. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I would hound everybody until I found him. And once I got to him – and he knew it – his things would be back in our apartment before the night was over.”

Shortly after their relationship began, Jimmy attempted suicide by slashing his wrists, the first of two tries in their five years together. To placate Jimmy, who had always wanted to live in New York, Cliff sold all his belongings just eight months after they met and moved them from Houston into a hotel on Forty-third Street and Broadway. Cliff found work on the stage at the Grapevine, a pickup bar for male hustlers, and Jimmy became fascinated with the transsexuals who frequented the place. “In New York I always felt more feminine,” he says. “I did hormones for three months, and I lived as a woman.”

Cliff eventually had to find other means to support them – turning tricks in drag.

“Straight guys would come in and want to wear your brassiere and dress in drag. Usually there wasn’t really any sex,” Cliff tells me. “I guess I should feel bad about it, but I don’t. I could handle it. I was really street smart.”

Christmas of 1980 was miserable for them, and shortly after that Jimmy asked to go back to Texas. From then on, according to one friend, “when Brandi and Jimmy argued, she would cry about all she had done for Jimmy, sold everything, moved him to New York.”

They spent the summers of 1982 and 83 at the Pilgrim House Hotel in Provincetown Massachusetts. While Brandi played the cocktail lounge, Jimmy worked in the laundry. During their second summer there, Cliff opened for the late puppeteer Wayland Flowers and his puppet Madame, at a small lounge called Joe’s Place. The two became friends, and Cliff was soon introduced to cocaine. “I liked the high. It made me very creative.”

Back in Texas, Cliff’s career flourished. He and Jimmy had a two-bedroom, second-story apartment in the Greenway Plaza section, which they decorated with antiques. In the closet was a quilt made by Cliff’s grandmother, appliquéd with sunbonneted Dutch girls. Brandi’s costumes hung like pieces of art against the blue walls of the extra bedroom. Neighbors got used to seeing both Brandi, dressed to the nines, and Cliff, sloppy and androgynous, with noticeable breasts and shoulder-length stringy hair dyed a bright carrot red.

As emcee for the Fabulous Four, considered the top Texas drag queens, and for various pageants and contests, Cliff made top dollar in the clubs of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Beaumont. “It was his ball and he was going to play it. Brandi created all this,” says Newman Braud, one of the Fabulous Four and, after Cliff’s arrest, the group’s emcee. “It was all hers. He worked fifteen years and suddenly it happens. And it was all based on being a cynic, for lashing out at people.”

“I had all these people screaming for me,” says Cliff. “You’re the star of the show, and backstage there’s cocaine, champagne, and fifteen gorgeous guys in the dressing room. It’s hard to say no. And I picked up more women while I was doing drag! I don’t know if it was because they thought they would turn me around, but to me it was, the joke’s on you. You’re another notch on my belt.”

As Brandi’s success mushroomed, she got more outrageous, throwing potted plants at hecklers or ejecting them bodily. One night, she dumped a fellow queen in a wheelchair off the stage, mimicking Bette Davis in the classic movie
Baby Jane
, shouting, “But you are in a wheelchair, Blanche!” Off the stage, Brandi also became increasingly abusive toward Jimmy. “Jimmy was full of fun when he was with the rest of us,” says Braud. “But with Brandi, he cowered like a whipped child.”

“It got to the point where Cliff seemed like Brandi all the time,” says Natalie Roberts, an actress who appeared with Cliff when he was K.T. “She was doing a lot of cocaine, and everything became more extreme.”

In March 1985, Cliff and Jimmy had a particularly violent fight, and Roberts moved Jimmy into her apartment while Cliff was away performing in Dallas. Despite Cliff’s pleas, Roberts kept Jimmy hidden for several months. “I couldn’t sit by and see something happen.”

“Cliff was doing Valiums and pot and too much cocaine,” Jimmy says. “That was the only time – at the end – when I thought something could really happen to me – because of the rage. Before I had always left angry. This time I left resolved.”

When Jimmy left Roberts, he moved in with Kelly Lauren, a tall, blond transsexual, and her mother, Sherry Airey, in their Montrose bungalow. “Jimmy needed help,” says Lauren, who later left Texas for Chicago. “His hands trembled all the time. He was barely a shadow of the boy I’d met five years earlier.”

Through Kelly, Jimmy became close friends with a tight group that included Newman Braud, a Montrose bartender named Josh Taylor, and two newcomers, Steven Grant and Patrice LeBlanc, from Braud’s hometown, Lafayette, Louisiana. A vivacious, olive-skinned beauty with a broad smile, large brown eyes, and curly brown hair, Patrice was the only straight member of the clique, but Braud recalls, “She fit right in. She was just as crazy as the rest of us, and she loved the club scene.”

Jimmy and Patrice became especially close, and in August he moved into the Montrose apartment Patrice shared with Grant. Jimmy cleaned people’s houses during the daytime and partied every night. “Patrice and I would dance in the bars until closing. Then we’d go to the park, lie on cement benches, and talk until the sun came up.” Many of their conversations, Jimmy says, concerned Jimmy’s former life with Cliff.