15 AUGUST 2002:
AT HOME WITH JOHN WATERS

From the New
York Times:

AT HOME WITH JOHN WATERS

Bad Taste Is Its Own Reward

By JOHN LELAND

 

IN his Greenwich Village
apartment last week, John Waters was wearing a loopy T-shirt ensemble by
Yohji Yamamoto and listening to Solomon Burke ˜ and if there is a more
inviting way to spend a hot afternoon in New York City, it would be hard
to imagine. He had a thin line of mustache, gum-ball-striped socks and
a suntan.

Next to Mr. Waters was a
small photograph of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek and a slightly larger one of Divine.
“I’m obsessed with her,” he said, referring to the former of the two divas.
“She lives in New York, so I try to spy on her. I ask her doorman, `Does
she get pu pu platters?’ And he of course refuses to answer.”

Mr. Waters is famously associated
with the city of Baltimore, where he has lived most of his 56 years, and
where he has set all of his movies, including “Hairspray,” which has now
morphed into a big, sherbety musical that opens tonight on Broadway. “Baltimore
to me is what I write about, what inspires me,” he said.

But for the last 11 years,
he has also kept a pied-à-terre in a neatly groomed prewar building
in the Village. He divides his year among a large Tudor-style house in
Baltimore, a summer apartment in Provincetown, Mass., and this very genteel
one-bedroom in New York.

The house in Baltimore has
an electric chair, Mr. Waters’s addition to a building that used to spook
him when he walked by as a child. The apartment in New York is filled with
modern art and has a pillow with a needlepoint picture of an electric chair.
His mother did the needlepoint.

“I have a whole life here,”
he said. “I have dinner parties, I go to a lot of galleries. I really keep
up on that. That’s the main thing I do here. And I go to movies I can’t
see everywhere else.” Mr. Waters offered a cup of coffee and finished his
menu of Gotham pastimes. “I take the subway everywhere,” he said. “I ride
in the first car, to look at the rats. You can see them jumping out of
the way on certain lines. The F line’s not bad for that.”

It stands to reason that
you cannot become John Waters, auteur of such Oscar-free classics as “Female
Trouble” and “Hag in a Black Leather Jacket,” without drinking long and
deep of the cultural gutters of downtown Manhattan. Baltimore may have
its gothic charms, but if the Dutch explorers had not settled this other
lustrous, grubby isle, the world might never know the cinematic sensation
of Odorama.

Mr. Waters offered a tour,
beginning in the living room with a witty sculpture by George Stoll. On
an ordinary toilet-paper holder, mounted in a wall, Mr. Stoll, who had
a small role in Mr. Waters’s 1972 movie “Pink Flamingos,” replaced the
tissue with a roll of chiffon. Mr. Waters needed approval from the condominium
to install it. He could only imagine what the super thought.

To facilitate his vision
of semi-patrician Manhattan, he hired a Baltimore decorator named Henry
Johnson, the first time he had ever used a professional. “I told him I
just wanted a symphony in puke green, and I got it,” Mr. Waters said. He
had always considered that his signature color. There’s a slightly different
shade in each room.

Mr. Waters explained: “When
I was a child I wanted my skin to be that color, like the Wicked Witch
of the West. Now, as I get older, it’s getting close. It’ll match the apartment.”

Mr. Waters has written and
directed 11 movies since 1969, including his most recent, “Cecil B. DeMented”
and “Pecker,” working on tight budgets and tighter shooting schedules.
He makes about 30 speaking appearances a year, mostly on college campuses,
and exhibits his photographs ˜ pictures taken from television, then recombined
to create storyboards for wholly different movies ˜ at the American Fine
Arts gallery in New York. The New Museum of Contemporary Art is planning
a retrospective of his photographs for 2003 or 2004. He is also helping
to write a book about sex in art and working on his next screenplay, “A
Dirty Shame,” about peculiar carnal appetites brought on by a head injury.

During downtime, he managed
to act as a pedophile priest in “Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat,” directed
by the splatter legend Herschell Gordon Lewis. He is in “deep development”
on an animated series about his life. And he has been consulting on “Hairspray.”

Accordingly, Mr. Waters has
marshaled his life into rigid routines, a kind of regimented weirdness.
He writes each day’s schedule on an index card and crosses off tasks as
he accomplishes them; at the start of each week he plans every meal before
preparing his shopping list, and he says he never has any groceries left
over. He makes it a point to drink every Friday night, “like a coal miner
with a paycheck in his pocket,” and arranges his home life to accommodate
his compulsiveness.

The apartment reflects Mr.
Waters’s work habits, which are both perverse and meticulously disciplined.
In a plastic case on his desk, he has Polaroid snapshots of everyone who
has ever visited the apartment, including the reporter and photographer
of this article.

“I separate things,” he said.
“I don’t ever think up my movies the same place I think up my artwork.
I write every morning from 8 to 11:30. I have to think up weird things.
That’s my job. And then the rest of the day I figure out how to make that
into money.”

Above his desk in Greenwich
Village is a drawing by Mike Kelley showing fumes rising out of a garbage
dump, which Mr. Waters considered an appropriate image for his work space.

“I’m really organized,” he
said. To write anything, he added, “I need Bic pens and Evidence legal
pads, the only ones I like.”

“I use Scotch tape and scissors,
and move it around like a computer,” he said. “Then, when my first draft
is done, my assistant types it and I start cutting it up. I’ve written
all my books and movies like that.

“Now you can’t take scissors
on airplanes, which makes it hard. I have to have scissors everywhere,
because I need them to write. Sometimes on lectures I make them give me
a pair of scissors. That’s my only star demand, that in my room I have
a pair of paper scissors. You can’t call me a difficult speaker because
of that.”

Mr. Waters began his affair
with New York when he was 17. He had a high school girlfriend at the time,
and the two would hitchhike up from Baltimore. “We used to walk around
this neighborhood and ask strangers, `Can we stay with you?’ And they’d
say yes. I hitchhiked in Manhattan, which I don’t even think people did
then. I think no one picked us up.”

The boundaries of his New
York extended to the exploitation theaters of Times Square, where he used
to take speed and consume four movies in a row, and to the dormitories
of New York University, which removed him for smoking marijuana. He progressed
from Max’s Kansas City to the Mudd Club to Squeezebox; from flophouses
on Eighth Street to the couches of friends like Cookie Mueller, who appeared
in many of his movies, and Dennis Dermody, a movie critic at Paper magazine.
“I always wanted to live in New York,” he said, “but I didn’t want to live
badly in New York. I wanted to wait until I could get a nice place.”

But now, he said, parts of
his city are disappearing or gone. He misses the lunch counter at Bigelow
drugstore, where the staff was rude to everyone but regulars, and the Women’s
House of Detention in the Village. Since the omnisexual club Squeezebox
closed last year, he hasn’t had a regular place to drink. “Greenwich Village
is no longer the hotbed of rebellion,” he said. “But still many writers
live here, many artists. It’s still the same kind of people.”

With the arrival of “Hairspray”
on Broadway, Mr. Waters threatens to become a New York institution himself.
He admitted that he was nervous about the opening, especially because the
show has had so much advance buildup. As a fan of delightfully bad movies,
he acknowledges that there is no such thing as a good bad play. “A bad
play is literally torture,” he said. “Even good bad movies as a breed are
almost gone. `Showgirls’ is the last good bad classic. That is the `Citizen
Kane’ of good bad movies of the last 20 years.”

Mr. Waters plans to attend
tonight’s opening with his parents and some members of the original film
crew. Though his parents lent him money to make his early movies, they
rarely attended them. “That would just be parent abuse,” Mr. Waters said.
“They were so relieved when I made `Hairspray.’ They want it to be made
into everything, so they don’t have to go to any more openings, just go
to openings of that all the time.”

Sometime soon after, he will
escape to Provincetown, where he has gone for 38 years, ever since someone
told him it was a weird place. “I have a different set of friends in each
place that I see in the same way,” he said. Among his paintings in New
York is a foggy seascape by his Provincetown landlady, the artist Pat de
Groot. He can still hitchhike when he is there, and his apartment is “small
enough so I can’t have guests, which is great.”

And tomorrow night, if you
raise a glass in the direction of Cape Cod, chances are he’ll be raising
one too.