Role Models by John Waters

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14 December 2010 by James Vincent

Depending on your generation, you may variously know John Waters as the quirky, moustachioed creative force behind the juggernaut film/musical/remake-of-the-musical-as-a-film which is Hairspray; director of left-field comedies Serial Mom and Cry Baby; or the Svengali/auteur who had über-drag act Divine eat dog shit in 1972’s Pink Flamingos.

Whatever your experience of his work, you may be forgiven for expecting his memoir to be a salacious trawl through the fringes of Hollywood – and certainly, Waters has the faculty and surplus grime to filthy any shoulder he may, and has, rubbed up against in his career.

However, Role Models takes an entirely unique approach: yes, every time Waters opens his Comme Des Garcons jacket a handful of household names drop out – Johnny Mathis, Little Richard, Lana Turner, Clint Eastwood – but alongside these he lines up as many unknowns, as many forgottens, and as many Baltimore bar owners and outsider-porn directors armed with a VHS camera and a bottle of lube.

For Waters is the real, trashy, deal; and this book proves that. When fifties movie-star original, Tab Hunter sweeps a housewifely Divine off her feet and then embezzles her money in Waters’ 1981 classic Polyester (originally released with scratch-and-sniff cards) your hoots are prompted by the grotesques with which Waters populates the screen – superficially you’re laughing at a fart joke (yup, that’s one of the scratch and sniffs). However, scratch past the whiff and it doesn’t take long to find something more perceptive, considered and astute in Waters’ work.

In 1974’s Female Trouble, Divine (again) knocking over the Christmas tree because she didn’t get her cha-cha heels is memorably hilarious, but we stop laughing when she sits in the electric chair at the end of the film and delivers a soliloquy on crime as art, killing as beauty, and suggests the audience are complicit in the social transgressions she has committed.

In Role Models, Waters reflects on the decisions that made him dedicate Female Trouble to the Manson family – the LSD-intoxicated flower children who followed cult leader Charles Manson on a killing spree. Waters describes himself as a kind of cult leader too – the director of a small acting troop of teenagers and drop-outs, who, while the Manson family were slaughtering anyone Charlie decided were ‘pigs’, were playing out similar crimes for Waters’ camera. As Waters says, ‘How had these kids, from backgrounds so similar to mine, committed in real life the awful crimes against peace and love that we were acting out for comedy in our films?’

And Waters didn’t, and doesn’t, stop at reflection; he attended the trials of the Manson family and its followers and ultimately befriended one of the original killers, Leslie Van Houten, whom he visits in prison to this day. A whole chapter of the book is devoted to examining her case, concluding that, forty years after the event, she should, like almost every other person convicted of similar crimes, be released.

Waters takes a similarly rigorous, thoughtful approach to all the topics he tackles in this book – literature, film, fashion, art; and while his gaze drifts always to the margins, his analysis of the mainstream is acute. And this is where the elements of memoir in Role Models become most apparent. Waters’ upbringing and his family life in general are conventional, and he does nothing to hide the fact. His fascination with the fringe, with the criminal, the insane and the deviant is prescribed by the stability and conservatism of his background – a Catholic boy brought up in a respectable family in suburban Baltimore.

There seems to be no schism with his parents – rather an affection and respect. He remembers ‘sitting at the top of the stairs in our family home, feeling safe, listening to my parents and their friends singing show tunes around our piano or playing charades’ and contrasts this with his friend Eileen’s memories of serving her mother’s friends beer and rolling them joints at eleven years old.

Yes, he played car crash as a child, yes he considers Bobby Garcia, the lowest in low-rent porn directors, an artist – ‘the Buñuel of Blow Jobs, the Almodovar of Anuses’ – but his ability to set boundary-busting art within an overall view of the world depends on his own clear-headedness. He knows that he has to tuck away his prized sculptures by Peter Fischli and David Weiss every time he leaves his New York apartment for fear his maid will throw them out in the garbage. But he wouldn’t blame her. He doesn’t take a hideously high-minded attitude to Cy Twombly’s scribbles – he delights in the fact that Rosa says ‘They have the nerve to put this in a book’. There is an essential humanity to his approach.

Reading Role Models is very much like hearing the man deliver one of his now-famous monologues. Perhaps a clip here or an edit there would create more focus and lend more power to some of his observations, but somehow the languor of the language aids the flow – and you can’t help feeling safe in his hands. With Waters, you can watch the lunatics, maybe give them a hug, and secretly know that you’re really one of them.

Role Models, by John Waters, is out now, published by Beautiful Books