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ShareAn artist drawn to the margins, John Waters achieved infamy with low-budget 1970s films starring garish, up-for-anything transvestite Divine and other horrifying/lovable Baltimore misfits.
Adding heart and movie stars over the years, Waters’ freak-show movies (“Multiple Maniacs,” “Pink Flamingos”) morphed into cockeyed calls for understanding. “Hairspray,” in its 1988 film, Broadway-musical and 2007 movie-musical forms, replaced exploitation with sincerity, promoting racial harmony, chubby-teen empowerment and a man’s right to pad up to play a nurturing mom.
Waters’ book “Role Models” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 320 pages), out this week, combines his giddy love for the fringe with his compassion for its dwellers. Crafting a personal portrait through profiles of figures who have captivated him, Waters starts with class act Johnny Mathis before moving on to Zorro, a butch lesbian stripper who wore a mask and a contempt for customers, and convicted killer Leslie Van Houten, the former Charles Manson disciple and Waters’ longtime friend.
Speaking by phone from Baltimore, Waters, 64, detailed his lifelong fascination with outcasts.
Q. What does the term “role model” mean to you?
A. A role model is somebody whose life has been so extreme — good or bad — that they have had to be braver than I have had to be. So I look up to them. I don’t think there is any real bad taste in this book.
Q. Haven’t you been brave?
A. Yeah, but I was brought up in an upper-middle-class family by parents who made me feel safe. I didn’t have to overcome horrible things in my youth (as some people in the book did).
Q. Your early films called attention to oddballs for camp value. But your book is so thoughtful and humane. Did your outlook change with age?
A. I think it did. I also think shock is old hat. Every movie tries to be shocking. Everyone wants to be an outsider. This isn’t about my movies. ... This is more about my personal life. What keeps me going is that I am endlessly interested in personality and the reasons for people’s behavior. Mostly people who think they are normal but who act to me in a way that I can never really figure out.
Q. Did you ever think of becoming a therapist?
A. If I didn’t do what I do, in the arts, I would have been a defense lawyer for the damned. Or a shrink.
There was a time in Baltimore, after I taught in prison in the 1980s, that I was asked by someone in corrections who wanted me and him to try to get a private reform school started.
I would have been good at it, but I would have had to give up my career to do it full time. ... (But) I wanted my name to be on a reform school: “If you don’t shape up, kid, you are going to John Waters.”
Q. Why is it important to tell the story of say, Zorro, the late Baltimore stripper, pothead and terrible mother?
A. It is important because it shows lesbians have the same rights to be bad mothers as straight people. It’s a political dilemma that has not been discussed. (laughs)
The hilarious thing is that chapter is in Playboy this month. It’s so hilarious that a gay man writes an article about a bad lesbian mother, and it is in Playboy! And they treated it very respectfully.
Times have changed, things blur, and that is what I am interested in ... the blurring of things. I have always said my favorite people are minorities that don’t even fit into their own minority — and I identify with those people.
Q. Why?
A. That is a very good question. I have asked shrinks. My mother said, “I don’t know where this came from.”
My friend Pat said it was because I was born almost seven weeks too early. It was a lack of oxygen. (laughs)
I also believe you are born gay or straight. I have a friend whose mother had Alzheimer’s for years, and she knew the Alzheimer’s community really well, and I said, “Ask them, ‘Do people ever forget whether they are gay or straight?’” And they said, “Never!” (Patients) can’t remember who their husbands are, but they never forget their sexuality.
Q. In the book, you say being gay is a start to being interesting, but not interesting on its own.
A. Well, it isn’t that interesting anymore. It’s no big deal. The young kids don’t care. I was recently in this great bar in Baltimore, fully mixed, and these two great hillbilly guys were wildly dancing. ... Afterward I said, “What a great couple.” And they said, “We’re not gay.” They were just hillbilly guys who like to dance together. That was so modern to me.
Q. You make the case in your book that, as a model prisoner for nearly 40 years, Leslie Van Houten has been unfairly denied parole because of the notoriety of the Manson case. Have you encountered flak for your support for her?
A. That chapter was originally published on the Huffington Post ... and a lot of people wrote in horrible stuff, but people write in horrible stuff to every website. I think a lot of people, even the ones who don’t agree, said ‘You certainly made a convincing argument.’ ... Her parole hearing is in July. ... The prosecution knows she should get out, she has great support, and she is hardly a danger to any community. She is not prone to violence. She has not had one moment of violence in her whole life except that horrible, horrible night.
Q. What if someone sees “Role Models” in the bookstore and says, “Oh, that’s by that nice John Waters of ‘Hairspray,’” then opens the book to your homage to Bobby Garcia, an amateur pornographer specializing in Marines?
A. That happens all the time anyway, with “Hairspray”: “Oh, we loved ‘Hairspray,’ so we watched all your movies.” “Oh really, you liked ‘Desperate Living’ and ‘Multiple Maniacs’?” (laughs)
I don’t think “Role Models” is mean-spirited. Yes, it might raise a few eyebrows for people who only liked “Hairspray.”
I am not letting my mother read the book. She is 86. She doesn’t need to know about Bobby Garcia. ... I gave her the high concept for every chapter, so she could feel like she had read it.
Q. But she and your late father were supportive of your career?
A. I am not saying my parents were hippies or anything. They were appalled by my career. Yet they (financially) supported it. I paid my dad back every (dollar) he lent me. He had handwritten notes, $100 for this, $100 for that, that I had paid him back, in his safe-deposit box. That was very touching to me.
Q. I know that in theory, you like anything salacious. But what is your take on gossip, specifically gossip in the Internet age?
A. I gossip in a good way. I said good things about people who most people hate. That is my specialty. When I was young, if you wrote a letter to the editor, which I did when I was 15 or something, they confirmed your name and your address. Nowadays you can say anything, and I don’t think it carries much weight if you don’t sign your name.
