Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (22 page)

In a minute or two I hear a commotion in the kitchen and Jackie comes running back in. She hasn’t been on the telephone. She hasn’t called 911. Jackie has changed out of her stage costume and is now wearing a fucking nurse’s uniform, complete with the little white nurse’s hat and a different shade of lipstick. And in her hand she has one of those big two-pronged kitchen forks, the kind that you use to hold a roast when you’re carving it.

And as I watch, Nurse Jackie gets down on her knees and just jabs this great big fork right into Margo’s ass – stabs the meat of her ass with it, like she’s just a side of beef. Sure enough, Margo sucks in a huge breath, starts breathing again and screams out in pain. Jackie throws the fork across the room saying, “See, Sasha? I told you the bitch isn’t dead!” Then Jackie just calmly sits down on the couch and lights up a cigarette. And there is semi-conscious Margo, scrabbling around on the floor like a half dead cockroach, bleeding from a fork wound. I thought, you know, this is incredible. I’ve never witnessed behavior like this in all my life and I probably never will again.

That was just one night, just one average night. And Jackie’s play had a two week run. Two weeks of this madness. You think I’m leaving after that? I’m not going anywhere. Two weeks in drag, two weeks of not sleeping, two weeks of perpetual partying. It beats anything. Is it living theatre? Is it living art? Maybe. Whatever it is, even if it’s just foolishness, it sure beats war.

Don Herron

In the early eighties I used to stay up very late because they had two Mary Tyler Moore shows on, one at 2:30 am and one at 3 am. I loved that show so I would always stay up and watch it before bed. One night the phone rang during the show. It was Jackie and he said, “Don I don’t know what to do, I’ve been thrown out, my aunt threw me out, I’m out on the street, help me, please help me!” Well I couldn’t just hang up on him so I said come on over.

He arrived and made quite a commotion because he had five suitcases and one of my friends came out of his apartment to see what was going on and wound up helping carry things in. Jackie was a good bit overweight and sweating and it was clear he was not ready for bed and I was so my friend Adam said why don’t you come spend the night with me and let Jackie have your place. So that’s what we did. I said Jackie you can stay here tonight and I will be back about nine o’clock. I sort of don’t expect to see you but that’s when I will be back.

So at nine the next morning I knocked on the door and there was no answer so I opened the door and I saw spread out on the floor in a long line everything from Jackie’s suitcases. He had unpacked everything and folded and organized things. It looked like an art display. Clothing was arranged. Shoes were arranged. It was as if he expected to sell the stuff. He wasn’t to be found, but the bathroom door was closed and I heard a splash. So I went to the door and knocked and said “Jackie?” but there was no answer so I opened the door.

Jackie had taken one of my old sheets and had torn it in half and drawn all over it in black grease pencil. He had hung it from the shower curtain rod like a movie star swag. He had drawn over all the bathroom tile, the walls, and the ceiling with this black grease pencil. He had filled the bathtub with dishwashing liquid and the bubbles had spilled out all over the floor. He had taken the grease pencil and drawn black dots all over his face, like he must have started with one beauty mark and gotten carried away. He was kind of huddled there amidst the suds. My eyes were wide with shock taking all this in and I looked at him and said, incredulously, “Jackie?” and he replied “I got a little crazy last night, but I’m okay now.”

Penny Arcade

When Jackie was casting his final play
Champagne
at La Mama there was a role that I wanted desperately. So I wrote Jackie a letter because I just couldn’t bring myself to call him and ask. I wrote that I wanted this role and I wanted to play it as Margo. And Jackie refused me, and that was very hard for me to take because I promoted Jackie like nobody’s business. So I just pulled back from the relationship and did my own thing.

I did my first solo performance at an underground club on 8th Street in April of 1985. And opening night I was waiting behind the curtain to go on and all of a sudden there is this big commotion, minutes before the curtain goes up and here is Curtis with completely bleached out hair. He has with him an enormous pile of flyers and a photographer to take pictures and Jackie starts to perform a love scene, trying to kiss me. Now back in the late sixties Jackie and I would go out cruising all night and at dawn would come home empty-handed and sleep together in the same bed but we couldn’t do anything because I was not a boy. It took me a long time to come to terms with that. So here is Curtis trying to make out with me and I thought what on earth is going on? It’s like wish fulfillment.

Jackie gave me a bunch of his flyers and suggested that I throw them into the audience as the opening of my show, and I said, “Jackie, I have an opening.” And I think this was an unusual situation for Jackie because I had always been a supporting player in his shows and now here I was doing my own work, which came out of Jackie not allowing me to have the role I wanted in Champagne. And what was happening was I had crossed a barrier that Jackie could not. Jackie had performed at the Pyramid Club in the East Village a few times but his genius did not translate to that venue. Jackie’s genius only translated to a handful of the gay boys who were going to those clubs in the early eighties.

So Jackie went into the audience, and every once in a while during the performance he yelled out to me things like “Penny is my favorite coin in my collection,” and “Penny is the illegitimate daughter of Jackie Curtis and James Dean” and I was looking at Jackie with that brassy yellow hair, the enormous eyes – this otherworldly appearance and I had a bellyful of heartbreak for Jackie. On a visceral level I knew that Jackie had to lose.

Paul Ambrose

In 1985 on the opening night of
Champagne
Jackie came out on stage with chiffon bows tied to each wrist because she thought it was chic to show that she had abscesses and scarring so bad that both arms had to be operated on. They were covered in bandages for the opening of her show. I thought that even for Jackie this was not right. Too extreme. It just gave an indication of how much Jackie had changed.

George Abagnalo

I was in Jackie’s last play,
Champagne
, which was just wonderful fun. For years I was really naive about Jackie’s drug use because I never took drugs myself and so I just did not recognize that Jackie’s behavior sometimes was chemically fueled. During
Champagne
I did figure out that Jackie was shooting up heroin before every performance. I could see the tracks on his arms. Before rehearsals began Jackie had been in the hospital because of an abscess in his arm where he had shot himself up with a dirty needle. When I asked him about the bandages Curtis told me he had been mugged and the mugger had stabbed him in the arm with a dirty knife and he got an infection. After he died someone at the funeral told me the true story, that Curtis had been shooting heroin off and on for a good bit of the last year of his life and that he had overdosed and almost died several times before.

Ruby Lynn Reyner

Jackie cast me in a male role in his last show,
Champagne
. I played the boyfriend, and before we opened he fired me. I walked in on Jackie in the dressing room before a rehearsal and found him shooting heroin. I said, “Listen Jackie I can’t be around this, you are going to kill yourself.” I blew up at him because just one month earlier Eddie Snyder and I had taken him to the emergency room because his arms had abscesses from shooting up. Jackie hated hospitals and doctors and didn’t want to go but we forced him and it was a good thing because his one arm was so badly infected they didn’t know if they could save it. He almost had to have his arm amputated! And here he was shooting up again. I was just furious with him and said, “I am not going to watch you kill yourself!” And he said, “Okay, then you’re fired!”

He had supportive friends, he knew people wanted to help him quit, but he still chose the dope. It was such a waste of talent. I was very mad at him that he died like that. At the wake I wanted to go up and slap him in his casket, but somebody restrained me. Some of the people there wanted to lynch Gomadi for her part in his death. I think it was a case of unrequited love. And when Jackie overdosed Gomadi tried to have sex with him while he was unconscious. She just let him die. It’s such an ugly end to an extraordinary life. But things worked out the way they were supposed to. A few months later Gomadi gave herself an overdose and died. Or maybe somebody gave her a hot shot.

Mona Robson

1984 was really a rough year for Jackie, and for me. We did a lot of crying together. I told him we’ve spent half our adulthood high and now we’re crashing. We’re just not going to be as happy as we were. So Jackie quit drinking and became the hospitality person at AA meetings in the Village. And in 1985 he decided to take on this new identity, Shannon Montgomery, because he wanted to be just an ordinary actor and make his living that way. So Jackie changed his look completely. He cut his hair and let it go back to its natural color and he had new photos taken as Shannon Montgomery and typed up a new resume for auditions. He also signed up for acting classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio in Greenwich Village that was founded by the fabulous stage actress Uta Hagen and her husband. Jackie, or I should say Shannon, insisted that I enroll too. But he did not want anyone to know who he was, that he had been Jackie Curtis.

HB Studio was really wonderful because everyone on the faculty made a living at whatever they were teaching, like Charles Nelson Reilly taught comedy directing and Sandy Dennis taught stage and screen acting – we had to avoid her because Jackie knew her and did not want anyone to know that he was Shannon.

In class he performed a scene with a young actress from the play
The Owl and the Pussycat
just beautifully. At the end of the scene the first thing that our instructor Bill said was, “You know Shannon if you had been playing that part when the show was running on Broadway it would still be running today!” And that was so great because Jackie needed to hear that he was good, that he could be making a living at this. It was just the boost his confidence needed. The incredible thing is that this acting coach Bill at HB Studio had seen Jackie perform in drag in
Glamour Glory and Gold
. He just had no clue that Shannon was Jackie. That thrilled Jackie because it was what he wanted, to just slip into this new identity, Shannon Montgomery, and start over completely, leaving the past behind.

Penny Arcade

When I heard that Jackie had died, I wasn’t surprised. I was working somewhere and checked my messages and someone had called and said did you hear about Jackie … which was a horrible, horrible phone call. I called Jackie’s Aunt Josie, and … by midnight I was with the people who Jackie had been with. By midnight I knew as much as I was going to know about the circumstances of Jackie’s death, which were terrible, because Jackie didn’t have to die. Jackie OD’ed at 1 a.m. and people stayed in Jackie’s house shooting drugs, coming and going all day while Jackie lay there slowly dying. There was a woman there named Gomadi, she was a Kali worshiper, you know – she worshiped the Indian goddess of death. She was also a junkie and totally obsessed with Curtis and she had said to me “Jackie and I were lovers,” and I was like, are you insane? If anybody was going to be lovers with Jackie it was I. Jackie was not bisexual, Jackie was hardly sexual.

Paul Ambrose

Jackie took a lot of speed. The good thing about speed is that Jackie was able to write play after play after play and then have the energy to actually do them, and only be insane part of the time. Onstage it didn’t necessarily appear as insanity, but just as the brilliance that it really was. But if you take a lot of speed, you don’t get any sleep and if you don’t get any sleep you need something to take the edge off your nerves, so you end up taking things you should not take. Heroin is one of the worst of them. Jackie started doing heroin. Somewhere in the back of his mind I think it was the “heroin chic” thing – everybody was doing it, Sid Vicious was doing it, John Belushi was doing it. All the really hip people were doing it and it was there and Jackie was never one to turn down a drug.

It did not help that he was hanging out with a creature called Gomadi. I was very wary of many people I was meeting with Jackie at the end, but Gomadi was weird. Weird with a touch of evil. Smarmy. She dressed like a gypsy. I don’t have anything against gypsies, but if you are not a gypsy you probably shouldn’t dress like one. Gomadi was supplying heroin to Jackie, and like many girls, she had a crush on Jackie.

Jackie was on heroin with Gomadi, and overdosed. When you overdose, you get an involuntary and endless erection. And the story is that Gomadi started having oral sex with Jackie and what Gomadi thought were Jackie’s cries of passion were the gurgles of his death rattle. Supposedly she was so high on heroin that she did not know that Jackie had died. I like to think that that’s the truth. There are others that think she let him die. The truth is, it was Jackie’s first time having sex with a woman, and it killed him.

Harvey Fierstein

This horrible, drug dealer girl bought some heroin to Jackie and shot up with him. And Jackie overdosed, and this girl thought that if she could suck on his dick and get him to have a hard on or an orgasm that it would bring him back to life. So instead of calling 911 and saving that very special life, she did the bright thing that she did until the body was cold. If you put that in a play – would anyone ever believe it? If you put it in an underground film they would say this is for prurient interests, nothing like this could ever really happen; no one could do such a thing.

Penny Arcade

So I said to Gomadi, “What are you telling me that Jackie had his first heterosexual experience while dying”? And Gomadi said to me “I gave Jackie shiatsu,” I said, “For overdosing on heroin? Why didn’t you call 911”? But even as I said those words, I knew that Jackie would not have called 911. People who live in the tenement slums don’t call the police. If they die, you stuff their body behind a bathtub if it’s a shooting gallery, or you drag their body outside like Eric Emerson who was hit by a bus. And Jackie had done the same thing the year before with Margo. It was just a miracle that Margo didn’t die.