‘How can a director invent the female action heroine, change Hollywood’s attitude to race, launch the career of a future Oscar winner and yet still remain anonymous? These are questions that have troubled fans of exploitation genius Jack Hill for years. Pick up a copy of Halliwell’s highly-regarded Who’s Who In The Movies and you will not find an entry for the filmmaker, yet his debut offering, 1968’s Spider Baby, has recently been turned into a musical and is also lined up for a remake, while at the same time Halle Berry continues to express interest in updating his blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown. Recent retrospectives of Hill’s work in Belgium, France and Los Angeles, and a fanbase that includes Hollywood luminaries such as Quentin Tarantino and Joe Dante, would indicate that he is a man who is about to be appreciated by a wider audience. Having retired from the motion picture industry in 1982, the low budget maestro Tarantino once called “one of America’s greatest living directors” has found his acclaim, and recognition, slow in coming…

‘Born in 1933, Jack Hill studied filmmaking at UCLA alongside his close friend Francis Ford Coppola and the two even worked on each other’s student features. Interestingly, Hill’s effort – dubbed The Host – would end up being recycled by Coppola as the third and final act in the iconic Apocalypse Now (1979).

‘“A guy called Steve Burum was my cameraman on The Host and he also did the second unit work on Apocalypse Now,” says Hill. “He told me that he and Coppola were out in the Philippines joking about how they were doing Jack Hill’s student film.” Indeed, Tarantino was so impressed by The Host that he paid to have it finished, re-mastered and released to the general public (it was finally included on the DVD of Hill’s 1975 girl-gang epic Switchblade Sisters). However, just as Hill would inspire Coppola, it was the future Godfather director that got his classmate his first big break. When the young Coppola was hired by Roger Corman, he took Hill along with him – and the two would work together on outings such as 1962’s 3D sex romp The Bellboy and the Playgirls and 1963’s tawdry terror opus Dementia 13. However, when he was finally let loose to make his own productions, Hill would discover new talent and instigate new trends at the box office. For example, his 1967 film Pit Stop, which is set in the competitive world of figure-eight racing, gave Ellen Burstyn her first leading lady role – allowing her to catch the eye of Peter Bogdanovich, who would break her into the big time with The Last Picture Show (1971).

‘“Peter was at the premiere of Pit Stop because I personally invited him,” explains Hill. “That was how he discovered Ellen. I was happy with Pit Stop but I did not really want to do a movie about car racing. I was just handed assignments and did the best that I could with them.” Certainly, as a journeyman director it was always Hill’s intention to try and subvert the material that he was given.

‘“I had the freedom to improvise,” he says. “I feel quite fortunate that I worked in the low-budget sector because it meant I did not have to deal with committees who wanted to impose their ideas and prejudices on my material. I had a free hand – much more so than I would have had if I was working for the studios. As long as you put the elements in there that producers like Corman knew they could sell, such as sex and violence, you could raise the picture a little bit higher than they expected and give the audience something intelligent to chew on.”

‘It was Hill’s discovery of Pam Grier – who was cast in The Big Doll House (1971) – that really cemented his place in history. Aside from the fact that The Big Doll House would kick-start the decade-long interest in shamelessly sexy “women-in-prison” pictures, it also gave the statuesque Grier an imposing and intense supporting role – one in which she easily overshadowed everyone else onscreen. “Pam’s part was not written for a black actress,” says Hill. “I just wanted to find an ensemble that worked well and I remember how Pam walked into the audition. Even though she had never done anything before, she impressed me with her personality and authority. Of course, she was also a great-looking woman and had all of this enthusiasm. She worked very hard – she was thoroughly professional and was totally dedicated to her craft.”

‘Hill began to write parts specifically for Grier (they did four films together in total, most famously the brutal action opus Coffy (1973)) and in doing so the director launched the first international black sex symbol. Grier represented a new breed of heroine – tough, resourceful and politically aware (in 1972’s The Big Bird Cage she plays a Marxist revolutionary), the actress paved the way for cinematic females who made their male counterparts look like big girl’s blouses. The fact that it was a black woman acting in this manner made it all the more mind-blowing for 70s audiences.

‘“Back then there was still a lot of discrimination,” laments Hill. “I remember when I began working on Coffy, I made a real effort to find black technicians. There were not many of them because it was a union film and there were not a lot of black people in the union. But we found a guy called Bob Minor – we gave him an acting part in the movie and he also did the stunt work. He learned on the job and eventually became one of the best in the business. Now he works as the stunt coordinator on blockbusters such as Charlie’s Angels and National Treasure. We also hired a black assistant director on Coffy. We made a major effort to get black people into the union and give them work.”

‘What was so outstanding about the thrillers that Grier and Hill embarked on together was that the they were giving the audience a femme fatale they could relate to – long before Sigourney Weaver in Alien or Jodie Foster in The Silence of The Lambs. To all intents and purposes, the rampaging nurse who Grier plays in Coffy was nothing more than an ordinary, white-collar worker driven to destruction after some local drug dealers kill her sister (it is also worth noting that Coffy predates the similar, city-based vigilante-action of Death Wish and Taxi Driver). “The remarkable thing about Coffy was that it pulled in a crossover audience,” says Hill. “It was very, very popular and it attracted a large white audience. Pam Grier represented the idea of black power. That was quite subversive back then. With Coffy I wanted to create a character that used her wits to get out of dangerous situations – she had to be someone that the average woman in the audience could relate to. And when you saw a black audience standing up on their seats and cheering at the screen it created a great feeling. I could never have predicted that sort of reaction.”

‘He may have changed the way that Hollywood perceived women (typically relegated to the role of passive sex symbols prior to Coffy) but Hill still wasn’t granted access to the A-list. “The general feeling was that these were just ‘black’ pictures,” sighs the director. “It didn’t matter to the studios that Coffy had reached number one at the box office. To them it was designed for black people to enjoy and some of the majors had quite a racist attitude towards these movies. I remember being told, ‘You might have had a big hit but it was with a black picture, so it does not really count.’” As a result, the filmmaker moved on to make 1974’s college sex comedy The Swinging Cheerleaders – predating the likes of Porky’s and American Pie and opening up the market in teen-orientated, coming-of-age satires. However, it would take years before Hill was considered a forward-thinking trailblazer.

‘“Jack Hill is the greatest,” enthused Quentin Tarantino back in 1995. “Pam Grier was Marlene Dietrich to his Josef von Sternberg. I think that Hill is a really terrific director. His scripts are very funny, he is a really talented man and I am a big fan of his work. He was the Howard Hawks of exploitation filmmaking.”

‘The man himself is just happy that – nearly three decades since he last stood behind a camera – a new generation is finally seeing how important his work was. “I always wanted people to feel positive at the end of my films,” he enthuses. “I was always careful to try and juxtapose humour with the violence and tragedy. I think I accomplished that, and perhaps that is why a generation or two later my films are still popular and in-demand while many of the mainstream movies I was up against at the time and, truth be known, I was quite envious of, are now forgotten.”’ — Callum Waddell

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Jack Hill @ IMDb
Spider Baby Online Shop – Official Spider Baby Merchandise
‘Switchblades and Suffrage – The Femsploitation Films of Jack Hill’
‘Filmmaker Jack Hill on becoming a blaxploitation cult hero’
‘JACK HILL: KING OF EXPLOITATION’
Video: Watch Jack Hill’s ‘Mondo Keyhole’ @ Fandor
Jack Hill @ mubi
Book: ‘Jack Hill: The Exploitation and Blaxploitation Master, Film by Film’
‘Videophiled Cult: ‘Spider Baby’ and the B-movie delights of Jack Hill’
Jack Hill @ Horror Cult Films
‘On My Shelf: Pit Stop and Spider Baby
‘Pam Grier: Interview with the Accidental Action Heroine’
‘An Interview With Sid Haig’
‘Jack Hill: An Interview’
Podcast: ‘Naked Lunch Radio #8 – Director Jack Hill special’

 

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Jack Hill on …

Spider Baby

Coffy

Sorceress

Foxy Brown

Pit Stop

The Big Doll House

 

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Interview
from Film Monthly

 

Gary Schultz: I’m sitting here with Jack Hill the legendary cult film director considered to be the initiator of the women-in-prison genre of the seventies. As well, you helped to define the Blaxploitation genre and you discovered Pam Grier. But I guess at the center of it all you would be considered an independent filmmaker. Especially in the spirit of working on extremely low budgets with insanely short shooting schedules. Whew! That was a mouth full. How did you break into the film business?

Jack Hill: Well I went to UCLA to get my degree in music with the idea of learning to score films and that’s how I got into the cinema department. I had some experience with making films and editing them. I had some e
xperience with photography so I got into the cinema department and took a required writing course and basically I wanted to be a composer but the more I got into it the more my teachers got into it and encouraged me to go on. So I did a directing assignment that was a fifteen-minute film and then I did a student film which was a thirty-minute film called The Host. Students submitted scripts and each semester they would pick three that would be made into a twenty to thirty minute film. After that I got odd jobs writing, editing and doing photography. Then I got a job working for Roger Corman and started adding scenes to pictures that needed more running time and fixing things that didn’t quite work, shooting inserts and pick-ups. Various things.

GS: Not a bad way to start off.

JH: No, not all. Then I got a chance to do some more stuff. At about that time I met some people that wanted to finance a horror picture and they came across my script for Spider Baby and then I got to do it.

GS: That was your first feature directing?

JH: Yes.

GS: Many of your films have been said to define the so-called Blaxploitation genre? What were some of the difficulties or criticism you faced by working in this genre in the sixties and seventies especially coming off the climax of the civil rights movement?

JH: Well yeah, there weren’t that many difficulties…see it wasn’t called the Blaxploitation genre back then. They were just called black films. They had demonstrated that these pictures could make money and anytime that happens there’s people who want to hire people to do the work. The only comment that I can make about that whole genre is even though this was long after the civil rights movement there was still a lot of racism in the film industry. There weren’t many black people behind the camera and most of the black actors were just happy to be working because there were so few roles for them at that time. That’s why I’m very happy to have done Blaxploition films. It helped give black actors a chance to work, introduced black actors and black lifestyle into the mainstream film audience.

GS: How did audiences as opposed to critics receive your films back in the seventies?

JH: Oh they were both, Coffy and Foxy Brown major hits. Although often critics wouldn’t even go to see them. Critics just put it down; it’s a black movie. That’s another bit of racism. For example one reviewer referred to a role Pam Grier played in one of my films as being an unsympathetic black chick. Can you imagine somebody saying unsympathetic Jewish chick? I mean it was just an example of racism that people weren’t aware of. Actually it was unsympathetic black tart she was called. I mean nobody would say anything like that today.

GS: Out of all the many things I’ve read about you what always impresses me the most is how fast you shoot your films. I read that Spider Baby was shot in like twelve days. Foxy Brown was shot in seventeen days, one day ahead of schedule. Is there a method to this madness? Are you working with the same crew a lot?

JH: I never worked with the same crew twice actually. I never had that choice. Planning, Just careful planning. We didn’t run big overtime days like people normally do. We would run a ten to twelve-hour schedule. We would shoot very, very tight. With pictures like Foxy Brown I didn’t have a choice of an editor. Back then producers hated directors and they thought directors weren’t important. So I would shoot everything very tight and in way so that it could only be cut the way I wanted them to cut it. We had very little choices.

GS: What was it like starting your career off working with Francis Ford Coppola and Roger Corman?

JH: It was exciting. It was fun. There are always things going on when you’re shooting half dozen pictures a year. Roger would say, let’s make a movie about X, Y, Z and it would be in the theatre in four months. Roger was very, very good at getting the maximum out of very little means, which is something I learned from him. He was very good at making things look bigger than they really were and look like they had more to them.

GS: Filmmaking is cheating.

JH: Oh yeah definitely.

GS: You’re known as the man who discovered Pam Grier. She was in The Big Doll House and then you made Coffy and Foxy Brown. What did you see in Pam that made you realize her potential for being great in these films?

JH: She had what you really look for, authority and presence. She just had a natural stability to carry off a role. She stands out. I saw enough in her that I figured I would take a chance. It paid off.

GS: How has the positive endorsement of Quentin Tarantino affected your career?

JH: Well it’s been very helpful. Quentin is a very well known brand name and having his support has been very good. Over the last few years I’ve been writing new scripts doing the best work I’ve ever done. I’m not going back to what I used to do. That’s what got me out of the business in the first place. I didn’t want to make those kinds of pictures anymore and I was getting stereotyped. When you do something that is a success you are stereotyped into doing just that. People think that’s all you do.

GS: Cult movie fans although smaller audiences than the mainstream are so die hard and personal. Would you say that being revered as a cult director has helped or hurt the longevity of your career?

JH: Well for many years I didn’t have a career. Nobody knew my films and they were forgotten. Thanks to home video they have found an audience again. It’s always fascinating to see them find a new generation of audiences.

GS: I got to meet Sid Haig last August at the Chicago Comic Con. I was working with Artisan’s promotion department on their stink bomb of a movie House of the Dead doing zombie make up. On my lunch I got to meet Sid who was doing promo for the House of a 1000 Corpses. So we were in two different houses. Man, he was the most gentle, polite guy. I couldn’t believe he was the same guy playing all these degenerate characters all these years. Sid has appeared in nearly all of your films. How did you meet Sid and how had he found his way into so many of your pictures? Aside from the fact he kicks ass.

JH: Sid was in my student film The Host. A teacher of mine named Dorothy at the Pasadena Playhouse knew him. Sid was actually playing Othello.

GS: Sid playing Othello? I wonder if Rob Zombie knows about this?

JH: Anyway she called me up and said hey he’s really good. I met with Sid and I’ve been working with him ever since. Really I write parts for him.

GS: Are you guys still friends now?

JH: Oh yes.

GS: After Switchblade Sisters you made one other film under a different name and then you stopped making films. I heard you went on to write a novel or something.

JH: Yeah, I started working on a novel that was very ambitious and the more I worked on it the more ambitious it became. It turned into something that would have become a trilogy. And then stuff came up and I had to put it on the shelf because opportunities to do films came up. I had some stories I wanted to do that would only work on film. But I’m going to get back to it.

GS: I have read that you are looking to get into romantic comedies and break away from the whole mold that created Jack Hill the filmmaker.

JH: Well yeah, I’ve been there, done that. I have a romantic comedy that has found financing in England. And I have another script a friend of mine did that I did a rewrite on that’s been trying to find a home for twenty-five years and now it looks like it’s going to get m
ade.

GS: What are the titles of the features?

JH: The romantic comedy is called A Perfect Wife. And the other script is called Tangier, which is an action, adventure, comedy. It’s kind of a take on the Warner Brothers movies of the forties.

GS: Do you plan to direct these pictures?

JH: Well A Perfect Wife is a low budget film so I have no problem doing that. Tangier is probably going to be a twenty five million dollar picture. Unless I do another picture first nobody is going to hand me that kind of money. But I’ll be a co-producer on it.

GS: Any advice you can give to the up and coming generation of independent filmmakers?

JH: Pray for luck. My advice is forget it you don’t have a chance. If you can’t forget it and you won’t, then you have to give it one thousand percent. You have to make it your life. Spider Baby came together by shear luck. If it hadn’t been for that I don’t know if I would have done anything. If you keep playing you’ll come up with that number.

 

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12 of Jack Hill’s 19 films

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w/ Roger Corman, Monte Hellman, Jack Nicholson The Terror (1963)
‘Corman had the sketchiest outline of a story. I read it and begged him not to do it. He said “That’s alright Boris, I know what I’m going to do. I want you for two days on this.” I was in every shot, of course. Sometimes I was just walking through and then I would change my jacket and walk back. He nearly killed me on the last day. He had me in a tank of cold water for about two hours. After he got me in the can he suspended operations and went off and directed two or three operations to get the money, I suppose… [The sets] were so magnificent… As they were being pulled down around our ears, Roger was dashing around with me and a camera, two steps ahead of the wreckers. It was very funny.’ — Boris Karloff

the entirety

 

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Blood Bath (1966)
‘Blood Bath is one of the most cockeyed creations ever to emerge from the Roger Corman camp. The nearest I can figure, Corman hired Jack Hill to make the movie. Then Hill was fired and replaced by Stephanie Rothman; she was charged to shoot new footage, but also to incorporate footage from a Yugoslavian vampire movie. Apparently footage was also taken from a movie called Portrait in Terror (which may be the same Yugoslavian movie? I’m not sure.) The theatrical cut of Blood Bath runs just about 62 minutes; to make matters more confusing, someone cut in about 10 more minutes of outtakes and other stuff to pad the TV version. William Campbell stars as a painter named Sordi. He works in a bell tower and lures beautiful women to his studio, kills them, covers them in wax, and paints their pictures. He also believes he is the reincarnation of his ancestor, and that the beautiful Dorean (Lori Saunders, credited as “Linda”) is also a reincarnation. He may also be a vampire, for some reason.’ — Combustible Celluloid

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Mondo Keyhole (1966)
‘A deranged sociopath relishes his attacks on women, but are they only fantasy, real though they may seem? A debauched classic of the “roughie” genre, complete with S&M; fantasies. Jack Hill is the auteur of this production, so put down your demitasse coffee cup, fasten your seatbelt and expect the unexpected!’ — Fandor

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told (1967)
‘Jack Hill’s SPIDER BABY is a sweetly perverse 60s exploitation concoction pitched somewhere between THE ADDAMS FAMILY and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, but made before the latter franchise existed. This is one of the ultimate cult films. Once seen, it’s never forgotten, and the legion of movies that were influenced by SPIDER BABY have sadly all ended up more well-known than the should-be-iconic original. It’s the type of movie that begs for a marquee Blu-ray release to give it the attention denied for far too damn long. Thankfully, that’s what Arrow does best, and now it’s time for horror fans to dedicate a few hours to adoring appreciation of the disc, followed by some well-warranted dancing in the streets. For those unfamiliar, Hill’s flick opens up with one of those post-PSYCHO B-movie prologues discussing an odd psychological disorder that will be delightfully exploited for the next 80-odd minutes. In this case it’s the “Merrye Syndrome,” a bizarre disorder that causes youngsters to regress into childish psychosis once they hit puberty. Conveniently, all the remaining Merrye Syndrome sufferers are limited to one family who share the syndrome’s name. Former family servant Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.) now looks over the three Merrye siblings, two girls Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) and Virginia (Jill Banner) – who like to engage in murderous games of “spider” (unlucky visitors to the family home are the bugs) – and Ralph (Sid Haig), a massive man-baby with a taste for house cat flesh. They’re a creepy lot, and in accordance with classic horror movie convention are unexpectedly visited by two lost family members (Carol Ohmart and Quinn Redeker) as well as a lawyer (Karl Schanzer) and his secretary (Mary Mitchel) who hope to claim the family home as their own. They unwisely decide to stay in the overnight and as expected, the family reunion doesn’t go well.’ — Fangoria

Trailer

the entirety

 

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Pit Stop (1969)
‘Pit Stop is an amazingly well-executed movie by the inventive Jack Hill, revealing the independent writer/director in one of his best moments, running hard on virtually all cylinders in this fascinating study of the inhumanity of winner-take-all competition, set against a backdrop of automotive icons from the trailer-trash side of the street: stock cars, wrecking yards, racetracks, custom cars, drag racing, dune buggies, oval track racing… and craziest of all, figure-8 track racing. Originally released as The Winner — an incredibly ironic title, given the film’s anti-heroic stance — the decision to rename it Pit Stop also appears misleading, as there isn’t one pit stop in any of the races in the entire movie. But then, pit stop also means a short rest, a chance to get recharged, get your bearings, and then get back into the race. For the lead character, Rick Bowman (played by Dick Davalos), the time of the movie is a pit stop for him, as he takes a little time off in the move from his prior career of drag racer to his future job of oval track stock car racer. Trouble is, this is a Pit Stop on the Highway to Hell.’ — Culture Court

Trailer

the entirety

 

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The Big Doll House (1971)
‘I’ve been a huge fan of Director Jack Hill (Spider Baby) since I first saw Coffy (1973) 15 or so years ago. The Big Doll House was Jack’s first real big hit for Producer Roger Corman and this was the film that sparked off a resurgence of the Women In Prison Exploitation subgenre. The plots for most WIP films are relatively simple: A group of women are thrown in a foreign prison for different crimes (often for no solid reasons. The real thrill of these genre films werent so much the intricate storylines, but seeing all the ultra-horny sexy girls in the shower or watching them fight! The Big Doll House is full of Exploitation thrills including mudfights, food fights, S&M; torturings including snakes and much more. The explosive climax of the film goes into overdrive as the women plan a breakout and uncover who the mysterious person behind the S & M sessions really is. The film was shot in The Phillipines and was co-produced by Eddie Romero, who was a popular producer-director known for his Blood Island films which were made around the same time.’ — Quentin Tarantino

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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The Big Bird Cage (1972)
‘In The Big Bird Cage, Pam Grier plays a woman named Blossom who, along with her boyfriend Django, knocks off a Filipino nightclub to finance a revolution (what the globals are revolting against we never find out), then breaks into a prison run by a sadistic warden where she frees the multi-ethnic female population in a spectacular, burn-it-all-to-hell escape. Grier’s indoctrination into the prison is memorable: on her first day in the outdoor mess tent, she tactfully asks her fellow inmates, “Which one of you dykes thinks she runs this place?” When one of them asks her who she is, she says, “My name is Blossom, but that don’t mean shit. All you have to know is that now I run this place. Any other questions?” A woman steps up and says, “Yeah. Where do you want to be buried…nigger?” Grier kicks her ass, then puts the period on the sentence: “And that’s Miss Nigger to you. Okay?” If this is up your proverbial alley then rest assured that the remainder of the film delivers on the same level. Critics have called this Roger Corman production a feminist movie, but it’s the kind of “feminist” movie where all the actresses wear cutoff hiphuggers and wet midriff shirts (when they’re not cavorting in the group shower). From the distance of twenty five years it’s also strange to look at what was considered correct in 1972: racism is bad, but faggot jokes are okay (the guards are all giggling sissies and would rather French kiss a cobra than mess with any of the inmates). Along with Grier and the lovely Anita Ford, The Big Bird Cage features another junkhead performance by long-suffering blaxploitation veteran Carol Speed and a wild turn by the great Sid Haig as the hippie adventurer Django.’ — George Pelecanos

Trailer

Q&A: Pam Grier, “The Big Bird Cage”

 

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Coffy (1973)
‘Good as Bird Cage is, it is in 1973’s Coffy where the Hill/Grier collaboration begins to hit its stride. Pam Grier stars in the title role of a woman seeking revenge on the drug dealers who got her little sister hooked on H. As the Roy “Ubiquity” Ayers soundtrack kicks in (“Coffy is the color of your skin/Coffy is the color of the world you live in….”) you know you’re about to witness a classic of 70’s blaxploitation. And the picture delivers like Karl Malone, coming at you with big fros and big bellbottoms, righteous violence, a pimp named King George (Robert DoQui), and several scenes of Grier in all her And-God-Created-Pam glory (watching this film gives a two-word answer to anyone who’s ever wondered why there’s a pause button on the house remote: Pam Grier). With Sid Haig as Omar.’ — George Pelecanos

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Foxy Brown (1974)
‘In Foxy Brown, the heroine’s boyfriend is exposed as an undercover government agent, and when the mob shoots him, Foxy gets a job at the syndicate’s most exclusive escort agency to take them down from the inside. The story takes a while to get ramped up, and the pacing’s a little slack, but there’s a good reason why Foxy Brown is generally (if wrongly) considered the 1970s Pam Grier film. Writer-director Jack Hill’s success as a drive-in movie-maker was largely due to how well he could work sex and violence into pictures without it coming across as overly sleazy. It’s not irrelevant to the popularity of Foxy Brown that Foxy dresses up as an expensive prostitute, seduces no-good louses, and then abuses and/or shoots them. But as handled by Hill, the sensationalistic elements seem both natural and marginal. Grier as Foxy would be fun to watch even if she kept her clothes on and her claws in.’ — The Dissolve

Trailer

Montage

 

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The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974)
‘While Hill himself calls The Swinging Cheerleaders “a Disney sex comedy,” I doubt if Disney could have pulled it off. On the cynical side, it’s a skillfully blended montage of target-group-driven scenes. Jack himself calls it a “tissue of cliches”. We see a lot of firm flesh from young, nubile actresses. We see college football games (intercut with real footage — one of Jack’s big moneysaving moves — it’s just that he edits it in so well). There’s a token college “radical” who does grass and cocaine and turns out to be the story’s misogynist. Adults are dopes and worse: the football coach, the president of the alumni association, and a black prof (who’s screwing one of the cheerleaders in his office after class) are involved in fixing the football games and betting on the spread. We come to realize members of the football team are sensitive boys after all, and we all receive our demographic thumbs-up at the climax, when the cheerleaders and players — in full uniform — attack and overcome some evil campus cops who have kidnapped and likkered up the star quarterback so they’ll lose the last game.’ — Culture Court

TV spots

Excerpt

 

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Switchblade Sisters (1975)
‘Jack Hill’s drive-in cult classic Switchblade Sisters is really one of a kind in the world of Exploitation cinema. It was originally released under the title “The Jezebels” back in the 1970s, but after Writer-Director Quentin Tarantino bought the rights to the film and released it under his great Rolling Thunder Pictures label on DVD in the mid 90s, he changed it back to its original slashingly cool name. The film takes place in a sort of parallel universe. Hill actually envisioned the film to have a sort of a post Nixon era apocalyptic atmosphere. The acting in the film is really well done for a low budget drive in film and Jack Hill really does have a unique style as an Exploitation autuer. He also manages to combine elements from several Grindhouse subgenres into the film including: women in prison and blaxploitation films. If you go through his filmography you will pick up that Hill always injects his work with a certain level of intelligence and depth. They are definitely Grindhouse fare, but at the same time, much more. This is just one reason why I’m such a fan of his films. The cinematography was done by a young Tak Fujimoto, who later went on to do many great movies including Silence of The Lambs.’ — Quentin Tarantino

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Excerpt

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Sorceress (1982)
‘Jack Hill’s Sorceress is one of the greatest movies featuring twins confused about their gender ever made. The central conceit of this brilliant tale is that two girls, kidnapped from their sorcerer father as babies are raised as boys, despite the fact that they are really, really sexy blonde chicks with big knockers. Their father Traigon, returns from the dead in search of his virgin daughters because their blood will give him all the powers of the masters of the universe or something like that. The girls, (boys?), surrogate parents are killed Owen and Beru style, and before long they notice a Dwarf and a really creepy faun spying on them and their murdered parents. The weird airport cult wizard that rescued them as infants appears just in time to not save the day and walk into a bonfire. Thus begins the quest of Mira and Mara, to, I don’t know, keep Traigon and his evil endeavors at bay. This film really underscores the classic battle between the giant snake faced lady in the sky and the cool Lion-Dragon in the sky. The cheapest special effects are used to no avail in order to emphasize the lack of relevance that anything in this story has. Some boobs pop up. The faun bleats. The dwarf has a belly laugh as one twin loses her virginity to a curly headed doofus and the other, (who feels what her sister feels), lay on the ground and writhes around in orgasmic ecstasy.’ — Book of Dread

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Excerpts

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Uh, hm, yes, I think Brodkey was in a relationship with a famous female artist. Was it Sontag? I’ll have to look. ** Scunnard, Ah, very happy to have snuck some inspiration into you. Yeah, I’m good. You? ** _Black_Acrylic, I love what your new fiction thing is about and the title. Ultra-promising sounding! ** John Christopher, Hi, John. Oh, thanks. I’d never heard of her before I started hunting things for the post. And, yes, a score. Happy to see you. Come back any time, duh. ** Brendan, There are those who think veering to the lightweight and cheerful is the proper way to ‘help’ others during this nightmare, and there are those who think black on black is a better solution. Spooky: your world du jour. We’ve now left that era, at least for now, and you will too, and you’ll be amazed by how nice it feels to get a weird, wounded version of your old life back. Anyway, you’re being productive, and I am not especially, and so, in a strange way, you’re winning (or something). Need more coffee, B., you know the drill. I’m good. Hang tight. Love from me. ** Thomas Moronic, Thank you kindly, sir! honestly, I’d forgotten about the KRS post too, but there it was, looking plaintively at me from the archive like a pretty puppy in an adopt-a-dog venue. Great about the post! Sure, of course, whenever the time is right and you’re ready and all of that. My Tuesday was all right, not hugely eventful, but, yeah, it had a pleasant overall quality. Hope your Wednesday at least followed suit? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. thank you for the link to those conversations. Not much doubt that I’ll agree with what they’re saying. I just personally thought, based on my memory of the film and its historical context, that ‘stomps on’ seemed rather violent and invested that aspect of the film with an intention to harm that I’m not sure I agree is there. We got an air-conditioner yesterday too. I look forward to your new song and the review. Everyone, Steve’s new song, of which he writes … ‘It took a very long time to get this to a state where I’m willing to post it publicly. I was aiming for a ’70s horror movie atmosphere once again, with a hint of satanism, and the early versions included samples of Latin chanting and backwards-masked vocals that I eventually decided were too corny’, … is called “Baphomet in the Monastery”, and it’s here. And he reviewed the Norwegian documentary THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF here. ** Misanthrope, I believed you until you wrote ‘No, really, I mean it’, ha ha. Yeah, the reason there was all that anticipation for the big novel was because his first book of stories was critically revered. After that, he got some the worst, meanest reviews I’ve ever read in my life. To wit, here’s the NYT on ‘The Runaway Soul’: ‘bogus philosophizing, paradoxical non-art, verbose, repetitive, overstuffed with adverbs, of questionable sense, tedious and just plain ugly.’ I mean, whoa. Apparently he was quite arrogant. I met him once, I think through Michael Silverblatt, who was an admirer, and I do have a distinct memory of him being awfully full of himself. ** Bill, Hi, B. Thanks. I also love the mechanical bird piece. I want it. I have had Magalhães’ paintings here before, but I think back on the murdered blog. Your bookstore experience was precisely mine/ours until last Monday. Now, bookstore-wise, it’s pretty normal. I think you’ll get back to that pretty damned soon from what I read. Its going well here. Since the reopening, the infection/death rate continues to drop, so I think we’ll get restaurants and cafes back soon. Granted, we don’t have pea-brained, shrieking paranoids bunching up and waving stupid signage here. ‘Who Slew Auntie Roo’, yeah, sweet. I just watched this French gay porn art film from 1980 called ‘Invitation to an Equation’ that Altered Innocence has restored and is releasing online. It’s quite good, very ‘New Wave’, very gradual and quiet with a kind of Bressonian sound design. Very interesting. And sexy even. ** Right. Today the blog invites the exploitation maestro Jack Hill’s stuff into the fold. There’s a bunch of fun up there if you’re into it. See you tomorrow.

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(photo: Dorothy Dean’s portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe)

 

(photo: Dorothy Dean and Jackie Curtis)

 

Let’s begin at the end, shall we?

—-“Dorothy Dean, a former editor for The New Yorker and for such publishers as Times Books and Harry N. Abrams, died of cancer Friday at the Hospice of St. John in Denver. She was 54 years old and lived in Boulder, Colo.
—-Ms. Dean had also held editorial positions at Vogue magazine and at Harper & Row. From 1963 to 1964, she was a member of The New Yorker’s research department – then called the fact-checking department. At her death, she was a proofreader for The Daily Camera newspaper, published in Boulder.
—-Ms. Dean was born in White Plains. She was a graduate of Radcliffe College, and earned a master’s degree in fine arts at Harvard University. She also studied art history on a Fulbright scholarship in Amsterdam.”

As these things go, fairly accurate. But not accurate enough for Dorothy, the ultimate “stickler for details.” So let’s turn the floor over to my long-time saddle pal Bill Reed who writes of her in his matchless memoir Early Plastic (o.o.p., but available on eBay):

The following definition of the genus fag hag (you won’t find the term in Webster’s) appears in The Queen’s Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon, by Bruce Rogers:
—-“Some are plain janes who prefer the honest affection of homoerotic boy friends; others are on a determined crusade to show gay boys that normal coitus is not to be overlooked. A few are simply women in love with homosexual men; others discover to their chagrin that their male friends are charming but not interested sexually.”
—-All of which-and much more. except for the chagrin part-was true of my friend Dorothy Dean. The Mother of All Fag-Hags, she felt the term had an ugly ring to it, and much preferred “Fruit Fly.” I didn’t get to know her until some time after her mid-1950s glory years during which she was the Queen Bee of a Harvard set that operated out of the Casablanca bar (where Edie Sedgewick later came to shine). And where the men that she hung with —none of whom had any notion that there was anything coming down the line called gay lib—looked to her as a kind of ultimate arbiter of style, attitude and taste. She was an outrageous woman who would say things that no one they had ever met before would dare utter. She would tell people to their face exactly what she thought of them and continued to play this role later on in a number of different contexts. It was almost inevitable that Dorothy would become part of Andy Warhol’s Factory circle, where it was demanded that people be outrageous and try to top one another. But that scene had pretty much disappeared by the time my boyfriend David and I met her in the Seventies. Her breakup with longtime closest friend Arthur Loeb was indicative of a lot of dissolutions and changes that were going on within the social scene. Gay militancy had to some degree turned the fag-hag into a symbol of the past, both in its traditional cheer-leader style and even in Dorothy’s overwhelming she-who-must-be-obeyed approach. In addition, unlike your garden variety fag-hag who fears sex, Dorothy wanted to get it on with her boys-she wasn’t afraid of anything-and was equally inclined toward heterosexual inamorata.
—-Complex to a fault, Dorothy was the sweetest, brightest, and most frightening woman I have ever known. I met her in 1970 while working at a bookstore owned by her friend Arthur, the inspiration for the Dudley Moore movie of the same name (or so it has always seemed to me) and a member of a prominent New York family long perched in the more vertiginous heights of New York’s 400. In exchange for their son’s pledge to put aside his legendarily dissolute lifestyle, Arthur was being backed to the hilt by his parents in this literary emporium that advertised itself as “a carriage trade” operation in the classified ad that I answered for a job. I was on staff when the place opened, and although Dorothy wasn’t an employee, she was so omnipresent a fixture that she seemed like staff. My boyfriend David was dazzled when he found out she hung out at the place.
—-Working for Arthur was not at all like work. A past master of the zippy comeback department, one day an East Side matron came into the store and with a totally straight face asked him what might he suggest for “a man who has everything and is going on safari.” Without missing a beat, he replied: “Have you considered giving him Deborah Kerr?” An avid reader of the New York Times, who always first read the bridge column and obituaries each day before getting on to the day’s less important news, Arthur said that his memoirs were going to be called (in a play on the Rocky Graziano autobiography), Somebody Down There Likes Me. I was surely as good an “audience” as Arthur was ever likely to get.
—-While she may have been black and a woman, in the final analysis, she wasn’t black and she wasn’t a woman: she was Dorothy Dean. Slight, ferret-like, and possessing coffee-with-cream skin, Dorothy wore horn-rimmed coke bottle lens glasses, usually dressed in a simple, tasteful shift dress; and was, without question, New York’s most incurable diseuse. Nearly every time I was with Dorothy, she happened to be drinking; she would invariably ask me the same question: “Did I ever tell you about the time I once danced the ‘Tennessee Waltz’ in Tennessee with Tennessee Williams?” (Which was true.) She claimed that it was one of her proudest accomplishments in life. I don’t think she was joking.

 

(photo: Henry Geldzahler and Dorothy Dean)

 

In 1995 the New Yorker ran a lengthy profile of Dorothy, entitled “Friends of Dorothy,” by which time she had been dead for nearly a decade. Fifteen years earlier the Soho Weekly News had run a picture of her at a party with “living legend” underneath it, and the New York Times contained a brief obit of her in 1987 when she died; but until the New Yorker, that was just about the only public acknowledgement of the unique part Dorothy had played in at least a half-dozen overlapping social and professional “scenes” in New York in the Sixties.
—-Hilton Als wrote in the New Yorker profile [which can be found in his collection of essays called The Women } that years after her passing, people are still “dining out on Dorothy stories.” One of the many tales not included by Als was related to me by Dorothy herself shortly after I met her. In her usual nasal drawl, which bore a remarkable resemblance to Mae West if she had gone to Radcliffe (which in fact Dorothy had), Dorothy asked me, “Have you ever heard of this person, Kris Kristofferson?” An odd question, because of course I had heard of the hyphenate performer who had just crossed over from recording artist to actor in a series of mildly interesting films such as Cisco Pike and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dorothy then went on to tell me about a brief and intense relationship (were there any other kind for Dorothy?) with the entertainer that had taken place in Italy fifteen years earlier. She was on a Fulbright and Kristofferson was (hard to believe) a Rhodes scholar, fully one hundred eighty degrees away from the public shit-kicker image he began cultivating in the 1960’s.When it came to pass that Kristofferson resurfaced in this entirely unrecognizable form of movie star-country singer, Dorothy sprang into action. She sent him a letter excoriating him for all the cultural criminalism he was wreaking (“Jesus Was a Capricorn” has to be the all time worst song title ever, she opined) on records and in films. Her missive to him was minus a trace of for-old-times- sake sentimentalism, but instead was a request—more like a pronunciamento—that Kristofferson tithe a reparative ten percent of his considerable earnings to the New York Public Library. She never received a reply.
—-Growing up, Dorothy was felt to be exceptional. Born in 1932 to Reverend Elmer Wendell Dean and his wife, Dorothy was the first black valedictorian of White Plains High School. In 1950, she entered the gates of Radcliffe to become one of the few African-Americans on its campus. Four years later she graduated there with a bachelor’s degree, with honors in philosophy, and then went on for a masters at Harvard where at some point, Dorothy later told me, she had become pregnant by a wealthy student there. The boy, fearful of the consequences of his blue-blooded parents learning that he had impregnated a girl-and an African-American at that!-washed his hands entirely of the matter. Dorothy, even then possessing a fair share of temerity, proceeded to blow the whistle on the cad to his fraternity brothers. Forthwith they, in an act of honor, broke into the boy’s dorm room, stole a small Matisse from his wall, gave it to Dorothy, who sold it for enough to pay for an abortion-and then some. In 1956 Dorothy became pregnant once again; this time, though, she went full term before giving the child up for adoption. Some people believed the father was a Dutch student she met while on a Fulbright; others thought him a certain M.I.T professor.
—-In 1963 Dorothy, her extensive formal studies finally concluded, arrived in New York, where she was immediately taken up by a set of sad young men and bright young things, many of them relocated from Cambridge. Once again, they became seminal to her reputation as the mother of all fruit flies. Now Dorothy also found herself becoming acquainted with the world of Sixties New York debs, druggies and drag queens.
—-Some believed that Dorothy harbored toward fellow blacks an aversion bordering on loathing, as perhaps evidenced by the fact that she ofttimes referred to James Baldwin as Martin Luther Queen, and was not at all adverse to using “watermelon” and “jigaboo” rhetoric when writing or talking about blacks. While this might indicate that even Dorothy found it hard to avoid the tradition of red, white and blue racial self-loathing, it never seemed to bother her that my friend David was African-American.
—-A stickler for grammar, even in the most casual of conversations, one nearly always felt the presence of a giant red pen in Dorothy’s hand ready to strike you down and mark you up for incorrect usage. Thus, it isn’t surprising that her passion for lingual concision led to one job after another in various copy editing and proofreading capacities at such publications as Vogue, Show, the New Yorker and Essence, “the magazine that proves black is pathetic,” she once said. She was fired from the latter after suggesting that the magazine run a picture on its cover of her friend Andy Warhol in blackface.
—-As with most people of slight build, it didn’t take much in the way of intake to get Dorothy drunk. Like my mother, one drink and Dorothy was well on her way to Blotto City. One evening she came to have dinner with David and me at our apartment on West 85th Street and was as charming as ever. . .at first. But it only took a couple of glasses of wine to put her in her cups. She ended up staying the night, and was more or less a royal pain-waking David and me up, tickling us, crashing crockery to the floor, etc., until finally passing out in the wee small hours. A couple of days later we received from her a pluperfect “Miss Finch’s Day School for Young Ladies” bread and butter letter thanking us for our hospitality, except for the postscript in which she profusely apologized for her besotted behavior. We were scarcely the first to be sent such a note. These thank you/apology missives, we later learned, were a part of Dorothy’s dinner going modus operandi.
—-Dorothy often referred to herself as the Black Barbarella, but reminded me more of Dennis the Menace’s prissy friend Margaret, who wanted your friendship and was willing to lose it at any cost. In the last analysis, she was an unreconstructed hipster, cut from much the same cloth as those I had known at Stanley’s Bar on the Lower East Side.
—-At one point Dorothy was hired to guard the portals of a somewhat trendier, slightly more uptown version of Stanley’s, known as Max’s Kansas City. It was home away from home to the conglomeration of failed hippies, artist manques and Euro-trash who satellited around Andy Warhol, and had the back room of the trendy spot pretty much all to themselves. No bigger than a minute, Dorothy Dean may have been the only bouncer ever hired strictly for the brute force of her vicious tongue.

 

(photo: The Sugar Plum Fairy (Joe Campbell) in My Hustler)

 

Be they straight or gay, Dorothy specifically had a “thing” for men with high cheekbones-in fact, she could be said to have elevated such a taste to the veritable level of sexual fetish. Her small Greenwich Village apartment was dominated with the famous Personality Poster of a very handsome, young and shirtless Herb Alpert who, say what you will about his corny music, had cheekbones like the White Cliffs of Dover! The same could be said of Clint Eastwood – another Dorothy passion. But the most devastating cheekbones of all belonged to one Joe Campbell, aka the Sugar Plum Fairy who, despite that moniker, was one legendarily tough little number. A co-star of Warhol’s classic comedy of manners, My Hustler, where he does his butcher-than-thou act to the max, this demi-mondaine was the lover of Harvey Milk, when the gay-politico- martyr-to-be was a closeted New York investment banker. He was also, along with Dorothy, a major “character” in Warhol’s taped “novel” A. I never met him, but my friend David certainly did. One afternoon in the basement of the Museum of Modem Art, while waiting for the doors of the film auditorium to open for a screening of something foreign and obscure, Joe spied David (sitting demurely, leafing through a copy of the latest “Sight and Sound”), and made his move. Terrified by Joe’s ability to move from a quick hello to an even quicker “let’s go back to my apartment,” David politely declined. “You turned down The Plum!,” a horrified Dorothy exclaimed when told of the incident many years later, “How could you?” Still for all his cheekboned perfection, Joe didn’t mean as much to Dorothy as her longtime running buddy Arthur did.
—-For a couple who were not married or even sexually involved, Dorothy and Arthur were an extraordinarily famous twosome. For years they had been nearly inseparable, with their main base of operations being Andy Warhol’s inner circle; one so inner that it is unknown to all but the most well-versed in Warholian lore. In A Dorothy appears as “Dodo Mae Doom,” she’s “Gwen,” a central character in Lynne Tillman’s Cast in Doubt (Tillman also features Dorothy stories in her book about the Warhol Factory The Velvet Years); and in James McCourt’s novel, Time Remaining, she appears as herself. Additionally, she pops up as nearly herself in several Andy Warhol films, including My Hustler (a very funny walk-on in the last reel), the original cut of Chelsea Girls (her section, “Afternoon” also featured Arthur, was shot in his apartment, and somehow disappeared during the second week of the films’ initial run), and in several sequences of Warhol’s legendary 25-hour-long Four Stars. The truly Dorothy dedicated can also find her playing a secretary in Jean-Claude Van ltalie’s gay porn classic American Cream.
—-In what Dorothy later described to me as “an act of systematic sobriety,” Arthur began-shortly after opening up the rehabilitationaI therapy/retail establishment where I worked and initially met Dorothy-to slowly chop away from his life all the people and things that he felt had reduced him to his previous, pitiable alcoholic estate. Almost like he was going down a list ticking off people, influences and controlled substances one by one. Just like a tornado which first appears to be miles in front of you and then suddenly is right on top of you, Dorothy never saw her own de-annexation coming. Finally one day Arthur came to her on his mental list and, without provocation, never spoke to her again: she would come in the store, he would leave; she would phone, he would hang up. Previously thought to be as invulnerable as Margaret Thatcher crossed with Loretta Young, suddenly Dorothy was a bundle of raw nerve ends-crying like a seventh grader who had just been terminally dis-ed by someone they had been friends with for a lifetime. Dorothy begged me to intervene with Arthur, but I wouldn’t have known how to even begin, and so I spent a lot of supportive time with her in her cups, while she just sobbed over and over again. . .”Why?” She was willing to do anything, even Alcoholics Anonymous, to regain Arthur’s friendship. But the door of fraternity was inexorably slammed shut. Here was the toughest woman in New York, and she had met her Waterloo. I have never known one human being be so hurt by another’s actions. And yes, as far as I know, the once notoriously wet Arthur is still sober twenty-five years later-a feat comparable to crossing the Rubicon. Shortly after Arthur fired Dorothy from his life, he also gave me, without explanation, my walking papers as an employee. I never saw him after that.
—-Dorothy was a long time member of the National Board of Review, the fuddy duddy quasi-official film board. This was indicative of her station in life as a frustrated film critic. She once told me an hilarious story about viewing, in her capacity as a NBR member, a particularly racy foreign film, Louis Malle’s Les Amants, in which the heroine and hero are both horizontal in bed nearly naked. When the former, going down on her lover, disappeared frame left, the woman next to her began to question hysterically, “Where did she go? Where did she go?” “To the bathroom,” Dorothy answered. Which seemed to have satisfied her fellow Board member.

 

(photo: All Lavendar Courier cover)

 

Dorothy, David and I had dinner the last night before he and I moved from New York to California in 1975; but it was not the final time I heard from the “Queen of Spades” as she sometimes called herself-along with the “Spade of Queens.” In what was clearly a working out of her long suppressed desire to be a film reviewer. Dorothy began putting out her own rather wild manuscript reply to the NBR’s long-running. But exceeding unimaginative publication Films in Review. Calling her publication the All-Lavender Cinema Courier. we began receiving copies of it shortly after moving to California, starting in July 1976 with issue number 3. Knowing Dorothy there may not have even been a 1 or 2, or else these might have been issued sometime during the Sixties. Enclosed with the issue was a form letter which was a request for money to keep her venture going. In it she wrote:
—-“We are all aware, I fear, that most practicing movie critics are pragmatically useless. They consistently lose sight of the point that the cinema’s prime function is entertainment; they are misleading, pretentious. and needlessly longwinded.” In the letter Dorothy never explains how she intends to avoid such pitfalls. but in the “Courier” proper she cuts right to the chase, heaping praise upon well-crafted commercial crowd pleasers and damning almost all other films, domestic or otherwise, which fell outside these rigidly constructed critical boundaries. Much of the “Courier” is Wonderful Stuff. Here is one entry chosen at random:
—-“The Last Tycoon. Not very good and who is to say precisely why. Let us not forget that F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is said, by definition can never be successfully translated into the movie medium. But given the long string of flash names attached to this latest attempt—Elia Kazan. Harold Pinter. Tony Curtis. Rbl De Niro. Robert Mitchum (gone, sadly to fat). Jeanne Moreau. Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence. Ray Milland. Dana Andrews, etc.—one had hoped for much better. However. all is most humdrum and drab. inane and vacant, constituting a movie without a personality. The dialogue comes mostly from FSF. as I remember. except of course for the pitifully false ending; and so it is really difficult to imagine how Harold Pinter. as has been claimed. consumed an entire year in ‘crafting’ a script from what survived of the original MS. It is disheartening to learn that someone brilliant enough to describe scotch whiskey as the ‘great malt that wounds’ (Pinter. No Man’s Land) could fail so markedly at patching together extant Fitzgerald. Perhaps if some of the planes and trains and what have you in the original had been retained, the results would have been perkier. The spectacle of De Niro stalking about in expectation of conveying a commanding presence as the high panjandrum of a big-time Hollywood movie studio is ludicrous; Robert Allen could easily get away with this kind of thing but not the aforementioned mealy-mouthed invertebrate.”
—-Doubtlessly Dorothy’s ad hominem characterization of DiNiro was based on actual experience, for she was definitely not of the school that believed that revenge is a dish best served cold, as evidenced by her remarks re: the film The Other Side of Midnight in issue no. 8 (14 July 1977) of the “Courier”:
—-“[Marie-France Pisier] is eventually in a most enviable position, indeed as regards implementing the revenge of one’s dreams- the very best kind, whereby the revengee is made to hopelessly writhe and squirm and agonize, fully cognizant of the source of his suffering.”
—-As for the film itself, Dorothy deemed it, “Quality trash on a high level, and a stunning paean to [you guessed it] revenge.”
—-Below the “Tycoon” review is one for Brian De Palma’s Carrie (a wish fulfillment fantasy for Dorothy if ever there was one!) which begins: DO NOT MISS!!!! Eight to ten such squibs were included in each issue of the “Courier” which, at the bottom of number three, Dorothy scrawled a personal note to me:
—-“I am dismayed at myself that it’s taken so long to get the ALCC going again. Will answer your letter properly in a few days (I hope)—glad to hear you have settled in, as it were.”
—-But Dorothy never did answer my letter, and then after issue number 8 of the “Courier” dated July 14, 1977, I stopped hearing from Dorothy altogether. Radio silence.

 

(photo: Dorothy Dean and the gang on Fire Island)

 

—-I began to inquire after her; but Dorothy had been on her last legs as a scenemaker, and no one I contacted seemed to know or care much about what might have happened to her. My first trip to New York after moving to California I devoted much of my time toward a search for her, but unlike Thompson in Citizen Kane I couldn’t gain a clue. I went to her apartment, but her name was not on the mailbox and no one answered when I rang the bell. A few weeks later, after I had returned to L.A., David got in touch with a seemingly reliable source, someone from Dorothy’s old Warhol days, now a successful movie publicist, who told him the following story: an extraordinary tale, but one not so far out, considering its subject was Dorothy, that it couldn’t conceivably have happened. It seems that she had attended a cocktail party at the penthouse of a well-known Broadway composer, the gathering composed of the usual witty, brittle people who congregate at such affairs; the kind of event to which Dorothy had probably been to hundreds of times. At one point in the evening, her usual two sheets to the wind, she found herself in the middle of a particularly bothersome conversation with a musician friend of the host. Finally when Dorothy could take no more, she allegedly leveled at the offending party just the sort of attack that she’d launched on hundreds of such boors in the past:
—-“You are a boring, insensitive lout who has misused and mangled the English language exactly 20 times in the last five minutes while in my presence” she said, “and if you had any feelings of regard toward the human race, you would march over to the edge of this terrace and throw yourself off.”
—-Which, according to David’s informant, is exactly what the man did, killing himself and in the process causing Dorothy to have a total nervous collapse, resulting in weeks spent in a mental hospital. Afterwards, she had gone to Boulder, Colorado, to stay in a commune run by Off-Broadway playwright, Jean-Claude Van Itallie.
—-In truth, I was to soon learn, there was not much veracity to the story (the part about Colorado, though, was accurate). Apparently an individual who happened to have been at a party with Dorothy a few days earlier, had killed himself; then somehow the two unrelated incidents had become conflated. An seemingly apocryphal tale, but Dorothy would have loved the idea of someone killing themselves over bad grammar.
—-All the years of drinking had finally caught up with Dorothy both physically and mentally. Thrown out of her longtime Morton Street apartment, she was rescued by sympathetic friends who began the process of trying to help Dorothy put her life back in order.
—-After obtaining Dorothy’s address in Boulder, I wrote her a simple chatty letter, making no reference to the recent unpleasantness. I received no reply from her. Then in February 1987, the same week that Andy Warhol died, I opened up the paper to the Death Notices to learn that Dorothy had succumbed to cancer. She had long been associated, the notice informed, with the likes of Vogue and Harper and Row and at the time of her death was a proofreader for the Boulder newspaper, The Daily Camera (what fun Dorothy would have had with inept Boulder cops and the Jon Benet Ramsey case!). Otherwise, the obituary—the only such New York Tunes unpaid obit ever accorded a mere proofreader?—was short and perfunctory and with no hint of the “real” Dorothy. Such as that—as I later learned—-after moving to Colorado she had not only joined a bible study group (!), but Alcoholics Anonymous as well. Joining AA, regardless of her sincerity or lack thereof, must have finally given her what she had been looking for all her life: complete and total command of a room full of people. Just like the old joke (one that the old Dorothy would have loved) about the comic who tells a friend he has to go to an AA meeting. His pal replies:
—-“But you’re not an alcoholic.”
—-“Yes, I know, but I need the floor time.”

To quote James McCourt in Queer Street quoting Joseph L. Mankiewicz via Bette Davis, “Slow Curtain. The End.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Very happy today to restore Mr. Ehrenstein’s long dormant guest-post about the fascinating Dorothy Dean. If you want to have fun, you’ll have it. ** David Ehrenstein, And there you are! Thank you again from the future, David! Funny, I just made an upcoming Hanna Schygulla Day for the blog on Saturday. ** Sypha, Hi. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha ha but … wait. I thought Eurovision was cancelled. Did they do a Zoom Eurovision or something. If so, no way! ** Tom K, Hi, Tom! Great to see you here! ** Bill, Hi. My weekend was all right. I watched Bruce Boone do a Zoom reading last night, so I was actually in your neighborhood in a way. Didn’t get to effedupmovies’ trove yet, but I think today. Yeah, I’ll expect to see whatever I see there while doing a shooting gallery number with pop-ups, ugh. Great about the progress with the little technical stuff! ** Thomas Moronic, Hey, T! I would imagine that your new masterpiece should be getting freed up and announce-able any day now, no? If you want to do a ‘welcome … ‘ post for it or anything just lt me know. Mark’s book is crazy great, no surprise. The Mark/Steven thing is on the other side of Paris still awaiting my grab. It’s definitely so, so much nicer being semi-reopened. It’s starting feel like a bit of normality. I hope you get your version soon, if it’s the right time, of course. Jesus. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien! It’s well worth the dough. Whoa, amazing progress on your novel! That’s great! I’m very careful with my novels. I only show them to one trusted person, and even then only once I think they’re completely finished, before I send them out to hopefully be published, so I totally get it. Nice that you’ve got an ideal cover artist committed. Well, ha ha, there are those who would have zero problem reading 400+ pages on that subject, but it’s true that the best seller lists might be walled-up. So sorry about your hand. Having broken both of my wrists at the same time, ouch. But I’m glad you’re feeling more you-like. Very good to see you, D., and love you too. ** Jeff J, Ace about the four tracks! Can’t wait to hear them! Yes, there’s a fantastic new Boone book from Nightboat, basically a selected/collected Bruce Boone (fiction, essays, poetry, etc.). It’s incredible, of course, and there was Zoom launch last night where Bruce read from SF. That was great. My weekend was pretty okay. Still enjoying the amount of freedom I have very much. Yours? ** Misanthrope, Hi. If you want the Steven/Mark one, you’d better order it lickety split. It’s way ltd. ed. There you go: all your LPS problems solved in one bite. Well, hundreds. Nice, the bonfire, the kids, the weekend. Sounds like a keeper. And … enjoy the grind? ** Mark Gluth, Hey, maestro! My supreme pleasure and honor! Such an incredible novel! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yes, that was an unexpected and happy surprise that Twilley got that late period hit. I hope you like ‘Twilley Don’t Mind’. The ‘Lost’ Twilley Band album is great if you’re a ‘Sincerely’ fan and don’t have it. Haven’t heard the new Ka yet. I did listen to a few things from the Charli XCX, and it sounds quite good, and I think I’ll go ahead and get it. The super neg stuff I’ve read about ‘Capone’ did seem very suspicious to me. I don’t how or when I’ll get a chance to see it, but I’ll take the future chance. ** Right. Dorothy Dean! David Ehrenstein! Power Couple! See you tomorrow.