The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler?
Read The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? Online
Authors: Michael Kearns
Copyright © 2012 Michael Kearns
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1475067550
ISBN 13: 9781475067552
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62112-940-0
This book is dedicated to
Katherine Kearns
and
Katherine Kearns
CONTENTS
During my parents’ divorce proceedings—zoom in on St. Louis, Missouri, mid-Fifties—my father hired a private investigator as if this was some film noir being played out. While he knew that the copious records of his mental instability would keep him from gaining custody, his devious plan was to keep my mother from getting the two boys (my brother and me) whom he had paid scant attention to during their marriage.
In an attempt to prove she was unfit, he hired a private investigator to follow her every move, documenting a laundry list of liaisons with Other Men.
After the incontestable evidence of Mommy’s indiscretion was presented, my father’s lawyer, drunk with power, upped the ante by painting a portrait of my mother as being physically abusive.
“She beat me with her shoe,” my father tearfully told the judge during the courtroom soap opera, using the high heel as a weapon.” (She was a petite five foot two; he was a strapping six foot two.)
My mother could not contain herself. Infidelities, proven, but she did not batter my dad.
“Your honor,” she said, interrupting the proceedings and pointing at her soon-to-be ex, “why is this man lying? There’s no need to make things up.”
And then the zinger: “The truth is bad enough!”
It became the title of my first one-person show, which depicted my splintered childhood family life in St. Louis and encompassed my worldwide act as the author of
The Happy Hustler
, a book that I did not write. In retrospect—and that’s a lot of what an autobiography is—I realized that my life is juicier than the Happy Hustler’s. In other words, the truth is bad enough, honey.
While I am completely culpable for the hustler hoax, there are many untruths about me that continue to float about; this book will, I hope, fully dispel them. I did not get fired from
The Waltons
because I’m gay. I did not sleep with Rock Hudson (we were standing the entire time, wide awake). And I am very much alive, even though a book published in 2001 titled
Celebrities in L.A. Cemeteries
, had me interred in Rosedale Cemetery, having died of AIDS. One of my friends cracked, “Well, at least they think you’re a celebrity.”
Throughout my life, I have been fixated on playing many roles, including celebrity, but I’ve concentrated on the important ones in the three acts of my book: actor, activist/artist and most significantly, father.
That doesn’t mean to suggest I camouflage the truth that’s bad enough: the drugs, the unconscious sex, the plundering hustling.
I try not to aggrandize. I was given an advance to write a book called
Gay Hollywood
in the mid-Nineties and I often felt like I was not only setting the record straight (as it were) but making sure every page built up my stature. Realizing it was bullshit, I returned my advance and decided on a book that is, I hope, more truthful.
I have been writing this book for many years and while it’s intended to entertain (being an entertainer is one of my life’s roles), it is also a testament to the creation of a family against insuperable odds.
As the chapters of
The Truth Is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler?
coalesced and as I’ve aged, I’ve assessed what I feel is truly important in the life of a human being and that is being part of a family. What kind of family doesn’t matter—a theater family, an extended family, or a twelve-step-program family.
It wasn’t until I become a parent that I began the strenuous task of forgiving my parents, a process that included my brother, bonding us in a way that we’d never been bonded before.
I do not think my parents nurtured a healthy family and I took that as a cue to demonize them. It wasn’t until I stepped back that I began to see the many positive things there are to say about both my father and my mother, who, in her raging pronouncement, gave me the book’s title.
My parents were not parents in the way that I try to be a parent, but they were flesh-and-blood mortals who inherited their own wounds of dysfunction.
The catalyst for my late-in-life transformation was my daughter; she was named by her mother and then abandoned at the hospital where she was born prematurely with crack cocaine in her system. But as I reconciled my family history, Tia was recoiling from hers.
It wasn’t until I finished this book that Tia decided to empower herself by changing her name. Perhaps her decision was instigated by the staggeringly insensitive requests she had received from her “mother” to be her “friend” on Facebook. I use the quotes around the word “mother” (and “friend”) because it is Tia’s intent to abandon her mother in the same way she was abandoned and ridding herself of that name is part of her undertaking.
My seventeen-year-old daughter has chosen her middle name, Katherine, which I gave her in honor of my grandmother on my father’s side: the only woman who consistently illuminated my orbit as a child. In fact, I believe her saintliness saved me. Half of the team that produced my father deserves my uncomplicated devotion.
And that particular goodness is something that my daughter Katherine possesses: a diligent dedication to treating all people with the dignity and respect due to them. To think that the two people I have loved most in my life share the same name …
When I started writing
The Truth Is Bad Enough
, I had no idea that it could possibly have a happy ending. Even though it will be labeled an autobiography, the book seems to commingle so many other genres: a Hollywood book, an AIDS book, an adoption story, a tale of survival and on and on. But not until I wrote the last pages of
The Truth Is Bad Enough
did I realize that the book, when distilled, is a love story—a love story with a happy ending.
And no matter how I die, I have learned life’s paramount lesson: to love and to be loved—no matter what convention might dictate.
Michael Kearns, L.A.
“The following program contains sexually explicit material and should possibly not be seen by adults,” Tom Snyder says, winking broadly at his nighttime television audience. It’s 1976 when Snyder’s
The Tomorrow Show
airs on NBC immediately following Johnny Carson’s
The Tonight Show
.
Snyder introduces his guest. “Better known as the Happy Hustler,” he says, holding up a copy of the paperback book of the same name, “Mr. Kearns began in the hustling business when he was fifteen. He says of himself, quote, ‘I’m a bright, charming young stud who will sell my body to anyone, man or woman, for the right price. I’m proud of what I do and I love doing it.’” Snyder grins, barely stifling a guffaw, as the camera pans to the Happy Hustler.
The camera, as they say in Hollywood, loves him: the voluptuousness of his high cheekbones and the sharp angles of his chiseled jawbone. Fabulous wavy hair: requisite for a TV star. Yet—even though the Happy Hustler is only twenty-six years old—his charisma is beginning to show signs of wear and tear.
The purplish marks around his left eye have been professionally made up for the glaring bright lights of the television cameras. The boyfriend (not the lover who wrote the book) had given him a black eye the night before. Yet the Happy Hustler determinedly endeavors to win the audience, possibly larger than the television audience that saw him when he was on the American-as-apple-pie
The Waltons
.
Wearing a three-piece powder blue suit that was tailor-made for him and a crème-colored shirt and tie, he is deliberately dressed to offset the tawdriness of the book’s content (and cover “art”). While he is decidedly gay in his sensual demeanor, there is a quiet masculinity about the Happy Hustler—if not exactly studied, not exactly authentic either. He is a gifted showman.
This was The Show that he had been waiting for, after eighteen months of crisscrossing the country on several local morning shows but only a few national talk shows (including
Phil Donahue
). However, he was like an actor at the end of a long run; the lines he was delivering to Snyder had lost some of their vigor.
Was the Happy Hustler tired? It had been a grueling twenty-four hours prior to the taping. There was the violent fistfight the night before in Provincetown, where the Happy Hustler was doing a stand-up comedy act. Less than an hour after the limousine dropped him at his hotel that morning, he’d jumped into a cab and headed for another hotel, where he would turn a lunchtime trick.
The john had flown in from Atlanta to take naked Polaroid pictures of the Happy Hustler for five hundred dollars. The fee of a hundred dollars per photo had been established and the ebullient customer, a Ned Beatty type right out of Central Casting, staged a crazy little game. The Happy Hustler drank a bottle of wine so that he could play along. Speaking in a southern drawl, the gentleman (somewhere on the other side of sixty) would toss a crisp bill onto the bed and then shoot a photo. Another Benjamin Franklin, another photo; another Benjamin Franklin, another photo; another Benjamin Franklin, another photo.
The Happy Hustler was comfortable having sex with the camera—it was only five shots, after all, including one that simulated the book cover (they all wanted that pose, the motherfuckers). Did he remember to camouflage the black eye? The john was beside himself with each flash and each toss of a greenback. “Tonight I’ll be watchin’ you on that there TV,” he said in a high-pitched squeal, gesturing histrionically, “knowin’ you were lyin’ on this here bed. And I’ll have my pictures to remember you by.”
The tryst was accomplished in less than an hour; the Happy Hustler had time for a short nap before the late afternoon taping.
Even though he’d done that Joan Crawford thing—sticking his face into a sink full of ice cubes—he remained puffy after his restless nap. While there was nothing ostensibly wrong with his appearance on the
The Tomorrow Show
, the Happy Hustler was not at the top of his game. Projecting anything but happy, he now knew for certain that he’d never be on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny; this was his last gasp. He smiled, he joked, he teased, he shocked, he bantered, he charmed, he seduced; but there was an underlying subtext of disappointment—and an even stronger sadness lurking behind those celebrity eyes. Maybe even anger.
