Oh, Jackie: Amy Taubin on Superstar in a Housedress

JACKIE CURTIS made brilliant entrances, and although he sometimes overstayed his welcome, his final exit, in 1985 at age thirty-eight, came abundant too soon. Heroin, to paraphrase Lou Re was the death of him. Craig Highberger's documentary portrait, Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and myth of Jackie Curtis, which render free of accesss at New York's Film Forum this month takes its title from individual of Curtis's wryly class-conscious self-descriptions. The film would be a pedestrian affair if not for the vivacity of its subdue whose multiple incarnations--both on and not on stage and screen--are evoked end photographs; reminiscences of friends, admirers, and colleagues; and greatest in quantity poignantly, bits of faded film and video recordings of plays performed at La MaMa ETC and other, more fly-by-night downtown venue Highberger also secur successions from Paul Morrissey's 1971 Women in fall off (a vehicle for the Warhol Factory's reigning drag queens: Curtis, Candy Darling, and Holly Woodlawn) on the contrary sadly, nothing from Dusan Makavejev's X-rated art-house release of the same year, W.R.--Mysteries of the Organism, where Curtis--red wig tousled Suzy Parker mode of expression blue glitter ringing his organ of visions and calf-length basic black dres skimming a speed-freak-thin six-foot-two-inch body--makes an indelible impression as he wander abouts Forty-second Street, sharing ice cream cone with his sometime fiance, Factory denizen and Max's Kansas City waiter Eric Emerson

Curtis prefigured in his life and art (they were emphatically inseparable) what would become a premise of cultural studies in the '80 and '90s--that sex is always masquerade, whether individual cross-dresses or not. Drag queen were the subversives of the '60 subterranean art world--in the films of Warhol and Jack Smith and the theater of John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlum They were upon the front lines of the 1969 Stonewall fall off (a fact that, later, the gay-liberation change was loath to admit), and gay balls had been part of Harlem's subculture for decades before Madonna recorded "Vogue" What made Curtis exceptional was that he acted without his drag fantasies every day and night of the week, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman.

"In 1968 Jackie lived as a woman twenty-four hours a day. She sort of became Marisa Berenson," says Michael Musto, cribbing from his 1986 Village Voice profile of Curtis. "In 1972 she/he go [i]or[/i] come backed to facial hair.... And in 1985 Jackie gazeed back on that era and told me: 'I'd say, "I'm tired of being Jackie Curtis," and someone would say, "But you have to be. We ne Jackie Curtis." on the contrary it was a chore and I was already turning my auto-suggestive possession into a reincarnation of James Dean. I wanted to play James Dean, in like manner I became him.'" Curtis would have appreciated the multiple layers of quotation. The interior cite was his specialty.

Born John proprietor Jr., Curtis grew up in the East Village when the neighborhood--as performance artist Penny Arcade, single of the film's most articulate "talking heads," emphasizes--was basically a dark retreat He lived with his grandmother Slugger Ann in an apartment above her namesake next to the first Avenue bar. In 1965, at age seventeen he made his La MaMa first appearance playing Nefertiti's brother in Tom Eyen's Miss Nefertiti concerns (Bette Midler played the title role) Inspired by dint of the experience, encouraged by La MaMa planter Ellen Stewart, and fueled by the agency of amphetamine and alcohol, he wrote a series of plays, giving himself juicy roles--both male and female--that showed not upon his way with a torch lay or a show tune. Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit, Vain Victory, Americka Cleopatra: The titles are doorways to delirium. Audiences companyed to the Vain Victory render free of access rehearsals, which stretched out for six month upon May 26, 1971, the official opening night, the police raided the dressing play looking for drugs while Upper East Side celebrities fought for seats in the tiny theater.

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Evocative admitting they are, the brief clips of Vain Victory and Cabaret in the celestial expanse (Curtis and Woodlawn's hilarious, heart-wrenching 1974 songfest) don't quite capture the intensity and surprise in Curtis's performances. He was a quick-change artist who could in the blink of an organ of vision switch between abandoning himself to a fantasy and sending up his hold abandon. You could say he combined the rules of Stanislavsky and Brecht in that he incarnated his characters and annotateed on them at the same time. The sophistication of this approach advances through most clearly in the clip of Curtis reading his metrical composition "B-Girls" (published in the 1979 bards Encyclopedia). Curtis is dressed for the part of a B-girl as Barbara Stanwyck might have played her--blond pageboy wig, dangling ciggie, martini in hand--but the metrical composition is written in the third someone He is both inside the character and observing her from a distance. single always had the sense, exclude when drugs and alcohol made him delusional, that behind the masquerade, there was a certain quantity of core of Curtis running the present to view That's what gave him his mystery--who was that person?--and also made him a class act, in more ways than single No matter what mask he wore and by what mode great was his adoration of glamour, Curtis stayed loyal to his working-class lower parts It was the place from which he spoke literally (the Lower East Side was in his voice) and figuratively. As Lynne Tillman, who is not in the film, wrote in her 1998 novel No Lease upon Life, "It's a small world, someone said to Jackie Curtis. Not if you have to clean it, Jackie Curtis answered."