Mr. Know-It-All, page 25
When the big day of the photograph finally came, I got into full Town Crier drag alone in the privacy of my apartment. James Balla, Al Merola’s partner in the gallery (and in real life), was scheduled to pick me up in his van so I could ride into town in the back, unseen by the public, and we’d pull up to the exact spot where the photographer I had hired, Jennifer Moller, was all set to take the picture. But I had to get to that van first. I took a deep breath, held my head high, and walked out of my door for the first time in full Town Crier drag. Could I pull it off? I felt like a complete fool as I walked down the two sets of outdoor steps to the beach and didn’t look over at the families that sunbathed there every day and by this time knew me by sight. I didn’t hear any shouts of derision, so maybe I had them fooled. I paraded around to the front overgrown yard, and, uh-oh, Pat, my landlady, was right there, weeding her garden. I walked right past her and just said, “Don’t ask.” She looked up at me dressed as the Town Crier and said nothing. Her mouth fell open. I just kept going, out the front gate, and thank the Lord the van was waiting. Jim Balla took one look and tried not to laugh in my face and opened the back door. I hopped in and we were off.
He called ahead and the photographer said she was ready. It was a go. I felt as if we were about to execute a bank robbery. We pulled up, and as rehearsed, Jim jumped out, opened the van’s back door, and I emerged onto the streets of Provincetown as the new Town Crier. “Is that John Waters?” I heard a dumbfounded tourist sputter. “No, it’s a look-alike,” Jim said. I made no eye contact with anyone, went to my mark, rang the bell, and Jennifer took the picture. I could hear some laughter from the usual packed crowd of summer tourists but I was not crier-bashed or judged in any way. I jumped back in the van. We peeled out and later the photograph was sold in a small edition and Bryan Singer, the director of all those X-Men movies, bought one, I’m not sure why. He’s never been to Provincetown as far as I know. Maybe he’s just a Town Crier hag, too.
OK, time to put on the brakes. Ever notice all the books about this town never mention anything negative? Well, No Vacationer, sometimes somebody has to speak up or forever hold his summer lease. It might as well be me. Here are my summer gripes: Those damn trolley tour buses (no local would ever be caught dead on one) that are too wide for our little streets and block foot traffic every time they stop to announce obvious facts. What the driver should be pointing out over the PA system is that tourists should never be seen wheeling their luggage up Commercial Street. That is the sign of a true amateur. Commercial Street is our center stage. Bradford Street is where the scenery and props are changed, and here is the only place you should ever be seen with your transient baggage. I also hate couples (even gay ones) who hold hands walking up the middle of the street, daring bike riders to speed through them the way I do, breaking them apart and narrowly avoiding injury. Yes, you can be in love in public here if you are the same sex and I know maybe you can’t do that where you live, but still, I am trying to get to MAP, the best clothing store, at the other end of town, so use the fucking sidewalk.
Here’s what’s really going to get me in trouble. Sometimes it’s overly gay here. There are many great drag queens appearing here (Dina Martina is my favorite), but I’m still scarred from the awful ones from the past that seemed like the Amos and Andy of gay culture in Provincetown when I first got here. Would any gay man really want to be Arthur Blake, the insult comic who had been in Bette Davis movies but spent his later years in Provincetown drinking and giving all gay people bad reputations by performing in hideous Tallulah Bankhead drag? Worse was the potbellied drag queen Sylvia Sidney, who played here for years and horrified passing tourists every afternoon when he’d “bark” his act out front of the club as drag queens are still contractually obliged to do today. “You ugly cocksuckers,” he’d yell at families through his missing teeth, dressed in a Clarabell red wig and ill-fitting tacky gowns.
Not every gay man in the world wants to be a woman. Recently I was minding my own gay business on the street, talking to a friend, and a big lug of a queen came over to me and said, “Hi, girl.” I was momentarily stunned. Had I “dropped an earring,” as they used to say in the old days when you were publicly mincing? Had I been flitting? Why had he referred to me as a girl? Just because he knew I was gay? Do I look like a girl?! I’m not the butchest thing in the world but I’m pretty obviously a man. I looked to my left, I looked to my right. “You couldn’t have been talking to me, could you, sir?” I asked dismissively. Too familiar or too gay? You be the judge.
I hate dogs. Well, not dogs themselves. They can’t help being held prisoner by their deaf owners, who never seem to hear their captives’ barks. “He’s just talking,” one actually said to me when I complained. “Yeah, well, arf! Arf!” I said. “That means shut up!” Provincetown has been named the Most Dog-Friendly Town in America and I’m afraid to tell you it’s true. I live on the beach, and every day while I’m trying to write, I hear, “Fluffy, stop it!” “Fluffy, stop barking.” Do these jailers think their dogs are taking notes? I wonder. “Heel!” I want to shout about a hundred times a day—that’s the only word a dog understands. Sometimes the yapping goes on for so long on the beach below that I throw caution to the wind and yell, “Shut up!” Stunned silence. They can’t see where I’m yelling from, but some vaguely point up to the vicinity of my apartment with confused outrage.
I’ve since solved the problem of annoying barking by sending just $4.95 plus shipping to the National Enquirer for one of their advertised “bark stoppers.” It supposedly sends out a high-pitched pulse sound that is inaudible to humans yet I guess annoys the shit out of barking dogs. I change the batteries every summer and set it to high. “Does it work?” pet lovers always ask in alarm when they visit the apartment and I show it off. “Well, do you hear any dogs barking?” I respond snappily. When they admit no, I realize this product doesn’t even need to offer a money-back guarantee.
Then there’s the Pilgrim Monument. All these years in Provincetown, I can’t decide if I love it or hate it. I had always heard the old wives’ tale that if you actually lived here and climbed to the top of the 252-foot tower that dominates the town’s skyline, you would soon move away for good. Like a curse or a hex. But I finally did so in the early 2010s and I’m still here every summer, so that is bullshit. I always wanted to buy that painting I saw in the local paper just before 9/11 happened that showed a small plane crashing through the Pilgrim Monument, but when I tracked down the artist credited, he refused to admit he painted it or that there even was such a painting. It wasn’t as if I thought he was a clairvoyant terrorist or anything.
“Now tell me about this ridiculous tower,” a smart art-collector friend of mine said to me as she linked her arm in mine and we strolled up Commercial Street on her first visit to Provincetown. Ha! I was shocked at the blasphemous-to-locals statement, but she wasn’t being snarky. I guess unlike most tourists here she had seen the original Torre del Mangia, in Siena, Italy, from which ours is completely copied. Neither monument has anything to do with the Pilgrims or Provincetown. It is kind of ridiculous. A Boston architect complained, “If all they want [in Provincetown] is an architectural curiosity, why not select the Leaning Tower of Pisa and be done with it?” The Boston Globe reported, “Even the people of Provincetown are not at all enthusiastic about the design but are glad enough to get almost any sort of monument.” Weak praise indeed.
But I guess I’ll agree with all the locals today and love the Pilgrim Monument, too. Channing Wilroy, who appeared in many of my films, is employed there and takes the money when you park your car. He’ll be happy to pose for selfies if you ask him politely. The gift shop is pretty great, and right outside is a popular spot for gay weddings and receptions (Hillary Clinton and Cher appeared there together with Cher drag queens, too, to raise campaign money for the 2016 presidential election). It may be “ridiculous,” as my friend innocently commented, but it’s ours. Climb to the top and you will finally be able to accept and embrace the stupidest, most despised-by-locals mispronunciation of their great town’s name. You’re on a no vacation in “Providencetown” and no better place could you be.
BETSY
When David Byrne was recently asked by a reporter “What art are you collecting these days?” he answered, “Who can afford to buy art anymore?” He was right. The days of going in that one cutting-edge gallery you thought only you knew about and buying an artwork for under $5,000 by an artist who’s having a second show there after getting his or her first good review are long over. Today’s “great” collections are made up of blue-chip art bought for astronomical prices from auction houses.
Every movement that changed the art world and ended up being worth money was first hated—abstract expressionism, minimalism, video—but now it’s all accepted. A few artists still go out on a limb, such as Gelitin, the collective from Vienna who had a sculpture show at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, where the work was displayed on pedestals with levers gallerygoers could step on to launch the sculptures off their perches to smash onto the floor. You couldn’t restore the works once the show was over because, by then, they had been broken so many times nothing was left but rubble. But still, that rubble was art, and in its own faintly powerful way was still respectable.
So what’s left? Only one collectible art movement from the past hasn’t been reinvented, hoarded, or parodied. Want to speculate in the art market? I’m telling you what to buy—monkey art. Yes, paintings by chimpanzees. The second half of the 1950s was the Golden Age of Monkey Art, and artist apes were used as a tool to make fun of abstract expressionism and then to establish a market value, first for charity, followed by profit for their high-minded dealers. It has been said these “monkey painters do not take the slightest interest in their product,” and isn’t this the ultimate fuck-you artists of today are constantly trying to affect? Isn’t the ultimate lack of concern for the collector just plain too cool for school no matter how hard you try to be transgressive?
Thierry Lenain’s Monkey Painting, with an introduction by Desmond Morris (the Clement Greenberg of ape art), published in 1997, is the holy grail of this semi-forgotten-dying-to-be-rescued art movement. Here you can read the complete history of creative chimpanzees of the canvas and you will also meet the stars. For me, there is only one, Betsy, and like the female artists Bridget Riley and Sturtevant, she is just waiting to be rediscovered and deified. Betsy was the first famous monkey painter and she lived in Baltimore. Thanks to the showboat director at the Baltimore Zoo at the time, Arthur Watson, the Betty Parsons of gorilla art, Betsy became an international phenomenon.
But before Betsy came Babs, my first monkey idol. I knew her from being a guest with my Cub Scout troop on the local TV show This Is Your Zoo, where she often appeared dressed in gowns or fur coats, along with Dr. Watson, the host of the show. Babs was mostly loved by the audience for being such a brat on live TV—biting the guests, refusing commands, knocking over the set, and occasionally letting loose a frightening jungle screech. I was so impressed as a kid that I later named Divine’s character in Pink Flamingos Babs in her honor. “Babs?” snarls Divine’s disdainful enemy Raymond Marble, played by David Lochary. “What a stupid fucking name!” “Sounds like a chimpanzee on a tire swing,” Mink Stole’s character, Connie Marble, bitchily adds. Ha. It was.
But Babs got too unruly as she got older and, worse yet, became pregnant, so Arthur Watson groomed her successor for fame too, plus she had talent to boot. After a contest on the show to select a name, “Betsy” made her debut and was an immediate hit. She painted on live TV. Her local publicity got so big that she had to go national. Realizing he had a true star, Dr. Watson took Betsy on the road. Wearing a white bonnet and carrying a pink suitcase, she arrived in New York City for a round of appearances, including The Garry Moore Show on CBS and Tonight on NBC. Her work was already selling, too, raising much-needed money for the zoo animals’ fund back at home.
The media frenzy eventually went international, and Congo, a male chimp from the London Zoo who was also a painter, issued a “challenge” to Betsy to come to the United Kingdom to see who was the better artist. Congo painted with oil in an abstract way and used an actual paintbrush or two, while Betsy much preferred finger paint. Congo may have felt like an uppity Lucian Freud looking down on Brice Marden, who also didn’t paint with conventional artist tools, but wasn’t Betsy way ahead of her time in refusing to show “craft,” mocking the very idea of a “good” and “bad” painting like a primate Neil Jenney? Congo was referred to by his people as “the master,” which furthered the tradition of male chauvinism in the art world. To me, Congo was dull, old-school, stuffy, and a bit of a copycat without the slightest thought of appropriation. Let no one forget—Betsy came first.
Finally the art establishment across the pond began to take notice. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London hosted a show of these two competing artists in 1957, titled Paintings by Chimpanzees, and called the canvases “the only genuine works of abstract art in the whole history of art and painting.” Congo must have gotten cold feet, because as the opening approached, he came down with a sudden case of pneumonia and didn’t attend. The rest of the cognoscenti did, though. “But, darling, just how contemporary can you get?” one trendy art maven gushed to the press. Betsy’s work was more “mature” and reminded one critic of a “highly magnified detail from a Van Gogh.” “It’s inspired, just inspired,” moaned another Betsy fan to a reporter that magnificent night. Even though Congo was being billed as the “Cézanne of the Ape World,” some scribes thought his work “brash” and worried if perhaps he “gave the impression of a sense of insecurity.” No matter. The macho-male collector artists went for Congo. Picasso acquired one, Miró swapped two of his paintings for one of Congo’s, but Salvador Dalí nixed both, commenting, “The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human, the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal.” The Russian press panned both Congo and Betsy, too. “To exhibit the daubs of these two chimpanzees—is this not the most shining example of the decay of bourgeois art?” Finally, what an art movement always needs to succeed—condemnation. Monkey art was now history.
Was Betsy a victim of misogyny in the art world? The Baltimore Museum of Art’s male director at the time sneered that finger painting was worthless. The Maryland Institute College of Art Alumni Association borrowed Betsy’s paintings for a meeting to welcome the new head man on the job, but when the press found out, the trustees dove for cover, claiming the artwork was there for “amusement” and certainly did not “compromise an exhibition sponsored by the school.” When Betsy’s work was entered in a Berkeley, California, art show, a male artist howled to the press, “No chimpanzee is going to make a monkey out of me,” and she was given the boot.
It seemed Betsy’s manager, Arthur Watson, who had become practically the Colonel Tom Parker of the monkey business by now, couldn’t trust the lasting fame of a female artist, either. He brought in one of Betsy’s old cage-mate boyfriends, a four-year-old chimp from West Africa named Dr. Thom, and made him Betsy’s public boyfriend. But according to the press at the time, Dr. Thom was disturbed and jealous of Betsy’s success. “Having his mate suddenly catapulted to fame and fortune caused tremors in the fragile ego of Dr. Thom,” one reporter presumed. So Dr. Watson tried to make him a star in his own right, buying him a piano and hoping to donate some of the recordings of his banging on the keys to the public library to be cataloged and placed alongside the composers Beethoven, Bartók, and Brahms. The library politely declined. Dr. Thom was no Van Cliburn of the jungle, no simian Glenn Gould, and the public knew it. Betsy was the real thing. Dr. Thom was a charlatan.
Betsy presumably put up with this sham marriage until she took on a companion named Spunky, who was bought by the zoo with funds raised by the sale of Betsy’s artwork. Betsy may have had to pay for love but at least she found it. It must have been too much for Dr. Thom, though, because just a few years later, in 1960, he dropped dead, maybe from a broken heart and a failed career. Then in an artwork horror story to rival Jackson Pollock’s fatal car crash, Betsy’s paramour, Spunky, accidentally fell on her from the top of their cage and broke her leg just a few days after the death of Dr. Thom. Betsy was rushed to a human hospital and given emergency treatment including open-heart surgery, but, alas, she passed away, too. An autopsy revealed that Betsy had also been suffering from cancer of the stomach and liver. Like many geniuses, Betsy was doomed. Her heirs were unknown. Spunky the monkey faded to obscurity quickly. Betsy’s obituary appeared in Time magazine, and one Baltimore paper in a front-page story remembered her as the “Picasso of the Primates.” Betsy was dead. But her legend was just beginning.
For a monkey who lived only nine years, 1951–60, Betsy certainly left her mark in art history. But it took a while. In 1962 Desmond Morris published his serious study of monkey art titled The Biology of Art, subtitled A Study of the Picture-Making Behaviour of the Great Apes and Its Relationship to Human Art. In my opinion, the author overpraised Congo just because he could draw circles. Big deal. Betsy wasn’t traditional, maybe her smears were circles, only abstracted. Yet her detractors still called her a “zoological joke.” Why? Because she didn’t paint with a brush? Yves Klein didn’t always either and nobody gave him grief, did they? No, because he was a man.
