Mr. Know-It-All, page 5
Patty’s own family was appalled when she agreed to be in Cry-Baby (“Why would you want to attract more attention to yourself after what you’ve been through?” a sister argued), and her father offered to pay her not to take the part. But Patty understood why she wanted to do it. She was famous for something she didn’t want to be famous for. She was sick of being a crime headline. Why not have a little fun with this notoriety that was hanging around her neck like an iron weight? Once she lampooned her supposed criminal conversion, they could never use it against her again. Doing a movie was certainly a much safer way to rebel. Besides, she could act. Hadn’t she been performing with the SLA all that time so as to stay alive? This time, at least she’d have on-set catering.
The rest of the cast were the nutcases! Maybe I helped invent that term “stunt casting,” yet I never put anyone in my films who I thought was so bad they were good. No, Cry-Baby’s cast was so great they were perfect, like a dinner party in a celebrity mental institution of my choice. The amazing Iggy Pop came to us freshly sober and serious about being an actor, and to this day I thank him for setting that tone on the set. I felt bad that his on-screen costar Susan Tyrrell, who played his wife and was beside him in almost every shot, was constantly drunk throughout the movie. Su-Su, as she demanded to be called (I refused), would say to each cast and crew member she was introduced to, “Hi. I have the pussy of a ten-year-old.” She was a character all right, but the alcoholic harridan she won an Oscar nomination for portraying in Fat City was not too far away from her real self. Sometimes she’d be so loaded she couldn’t even focus on me directing her before a take. Once she told me in the middle of our filming that her mother had died, which turned out to be a lie; she just wanted off when she had a hangover. Her “friends” visited the set and actually stole the script supervisor’s jacket right off her chair. I never saw Susan after the shoot, but other cast members kept in touch and told me about the one-woman show she performed with her dead stuffed dog in her lap called My Rotten Life. When she later had her legs amputated in 2000 from some rare blood disease, Cry-Baby alums would visit her in the hospital and she’d greet them with “Want to fuck an amputee?” She died in 2012, happy at last, I heard. She had talent, yes, but, God, was she exhausting.
Joey Heatherton was another one for the books. “Hiring her in this condition verges on exploitation,” Polly Bergen, ever the lady, accused me as she played poker with the Teamsters on the set between takes. Maybe Polly had a point. Right before I cast Joey to play the religious-fanatic wife of one of the Cry-Baby girl gang’s fathers, Joey had been arrested for assaulting a passport clerk in the New York immigration office after a dispute over exact change. The clerk claimed (even though Miss Heatherton was eventually acquitted) that the temperamental star “reached over the counter, grabbed her hair, slammed her head into the plastic partition and then slapped her.” Oh, well, we all have bad days.
At the audition, Joey spoke in tongues convincingly as the script called for, but seemed to be unable to stop after I told her the read through was over. As the casting assistant gently led her to the elevator, Joey was still speaking in tongues even though I had told her she’d got the part. Maybe she’s never stopped.
When Joey arrived on location in Baltimore, she was very thin, yet sweet and cooperative even though the AD told me our day player had been taping up the tiny cracks in her dressing room wall and talking to herself. When Joey was brought to set to shoot the courtroom scene with her on-screen husband, Joe D’Allesandro (thrilled to be cast against type as a homophobic, fully clothed minister), Joey seemed overly protective of her real-life pocketbook, which she refused to leave behind in her changing area. It seemed as if she hid notes to herself inside the bag. Chris Mason, our immensely talented butch-lesbian hairdresser (who sadly died of cervical cancer in 1999), was much loved by our gang but at first feared by the Hollywood types, seemed scared herself dealing with Joey and reported back that she had seen Joey talking to her handbag as if to a person. When we were ready to shoot the first take, Joey refused to hand over her bag to the assistant costumer, but we finally reached a compromise. He would stand directly outside the frame line, and when I called “Action,” Joey would hand over the purse, say her lines, and the second after I yelled “Cut,” the pocketbook would be safely placed right back in her arms. Fair enough. Whatever it takes to get the shot.
I never saw Joey again after that day on the set, but she must have gotten better for a while because she appeared nude in Playboy magazine seven years later, and believe me, that wouldn’t have been possible if she was in the same physical condition she’d been in with us. Then all was quiet. I didn’t hear a peep about her in the press until 2014, when she got nailed again. It seems Joey’s upstairs neighbor in Sherman Oaks, California, had a blender that she repeatedly used every morning even though Joey had warned her it made a brrrrrrrrrr-ing noise that got on Joey’s nerves. She complained. She banged on the ceiling. Yet the neighbor still used it. “God damn it!” Joey must have thought. She warned her, didn’t she? Yet there was that noise again and her complaints were obviously being ignored. Finally reaching her limit, Joey waited outside the lobby of her building, and when Miss Noisy Homemaker exited, Joey attacked her with a high-heeled shoe. Sound familiar? I’d used a high-heeled shoe as a murder weapon in my earlier film Desperate Living. Does this mean I’m psychic?
The most shocking casting coup for me in Cry-Baby was David Nelson from the Ozzie and Harriet show. I grew up in the fifties watching David and his incredibly cute brother, Ricky, on that TV show, and both their images were singed into my memory. And there he was (thanks to Kathy Nelson, his cousin by marriage and head of Universal Studio’s music department, who I’m sure talked him into it) right in my living room rehearsing to play a lunatic version of the same part his dad played on the TV show, but instead of having Harriet Nelson as his wife, she was played by Patty Hearst and Traci Lords was cast as their daughter! O happy day! How could this even be possible?
Troy Donahue was thrilled to be asked to portray Mink Stole’s character’s husband because, for once, I wanted him to look bad, not like the long-gone fifties teenage-pinup-boy image he by now detested. At one point he’d supposedly been homeless, living on a park bench in New York City, but what did we care? The cast had their own mental issues—we didn’t judge. Like the rest of the Cry-Baby actors, Troy was a team player and always good-naturedly reminded his fellow cast members, “I’m the straight one,” to distinguish himself from Tab Hunter, the “gay one,” whom he knew I had already worked with.
Ricki Lake was back with us, as the “knocked-up” Pepper, Cry-Baby’s juvenile delinquent sister, and adapted well to playing a supporting role rather than the leading one as she’d had in Hairspray. Her only complaint was that the tabloids now used photos of her dressed in costume with a fake pregnant stomach as proof that she’d gained an enormous amount of weight in real life, which was total bullshit. Also coming along for the ride was Norman Mailer’s son Stephen, who played the villainous Baldwin, Johnny Depp’s “square” nemesis. I knew the whole Mailer family a little from Provincetown, where Norman and his wife, Norris, lived, but Stephen got the part because he was, by far, the best actor who auditioned.
Rounding out the younger members of the cast was Kim McGuire as Hatchet-Face, a girl with “an alarming face and a great body,” as the casting office tactfully put it. We meant ugly. When sad girls with physical deformities began showing up to audition, I feared we’d never find our girl, until Paula Herald, who worked alongside Pat Moran, spotted a head shot sent in for an extra’s part in another production. Kim wasn’t exactly ugly but she had a startling look—albino chic almost—and we knew that with the help of Van Smith (our ugly expert), she might be the one. We had no idea how old Kim really was when she came to us to read for the part, but she knew how to sell the role and gleefully agreed to let us turn her into the happy teenage monster. Kim later went on to work with David Lynch and then became a lawyer in California in 1997 before going back to the South and literally getting swept away by Hurricane Katrina and rebuilding her entire life afterward (she wrote a book about it titled Flashback Katrina 10 Years After). I was startled to see her interviewed on the bonus features of the Director’s Cut of Cry-Baby released in 2005. She looked completely unrecognizable from the Kim McGuire I knew. Not bad, just normal and nice. Is it possible to get a head transplant? Sadly Kim died of cardiac arrest in 2016. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
I may be the only director who turned down Brad Pitt in a casting session. Completely unknown at the time, he came in to read for the role of Milton. We all knew somebody this handsome couldn’t be cast as Johnny Depp’s goofy sidekick—we needed a guy with a quirkier look (Darren Burrows got the part). When Brad walked out of the audition room without being picked, everyone agreed, “Whoever that was, he’s gonna be a huge movie star.” The few times I’ve seen Brad since at industry events over the years, he has been totally lovely to me. Maybe because I’m the only director who ever said no to Brad Pitt.
You wouldn’t believe some of the big stars who came in to read for Cry-Baby. Carol Channing wanted to play Ramona Rickettes—Cry-Baby’s hillbilly grandmother—and even though I knew she was dead wrong (Susan Tyrrell and her ten-year-old pussy got the part), I agreed to listen to Miss Channing’s perplexing proposal that she should play the role as a Native American Indian woman. Huh? “Cyd Charisse herself” (as Divine called Ricki Lake in Hairspray) came in, too, elegantly overdressed and completely misled by her agent, who confided to me he wanted to reinvent her image by casting her against type. She had absolutely no idea who any of us were, what the project was, or why she was there, but I was gentle and respectful. Cyd Charisse herself! I couldn’t stop saying it!
In hindsight, the saddest story was that of Amy Locane, the lovely seventeen-year-old actress who played Allison, Cry-Baby’s square teenage princess, who eventually goes “bad” for his love. Cast while still in high school, she had to get permission to finish her senior year early so she could come to Baltimore and begin shooting. She didn’t even get to go to her prom.
Amy arrived with her mother for the first day of rehearsal in my living room and had to kiss Johnny Depp in front of the other cast members. She actually fainted and I don’t blame her. She was innocent, too young to hang out with her hell-raising costars in bars, but we soon found out she was not only a first-rate lip-synching pro, she was a really good actress, too. We used to play a game on set by asking everyone involved, “Have you ever been arrested?” It seemed Amy was the only one who said no. She was so naive that she confided to Patty Hearst, whom she’d never heard of, “You’re the only normal one here.” I felt bad Amy had no one to befriend on set.
Amy went on to have a career in Hollywood, played for a while in Melrose Place, but eventually gave it all up and moved back to her hometown in New Jersey, got married, and had two daughters. Unfortunately, this is where she caught up with the rest of the cast of Cry-Baby and got arrested, only for something more tragic—a DUI accident where she killed a woman and injured the woman’s husband while driving drunk. To make matters worse (for me), a dear friend of mine knew both the woman Amy killed and her family.
As awful and terrible as that was, couldn’t it have been you or me, dear reader? Hasn’t everybody driven while legally drunk one time in his or her life? And couldn’t it also have been us being hit by a drunk driver one day driving home from anywhere? Life is never fair, a lottery always stacked against us in the long run. I hadn’t been in touch with Amy for twenty-five years but I wrote her once I read she had been sentenced to prison and was supportive of her new sobriety, honest sorrow, and shame-filled repentance. When the worst thing that can happen to you does, I try to be a friend.
Amy got out on parole after serving three years, and I met her for lunch near my apartment in Manhattan. She was quite nervous to be in the big city again, but she looked stunning, and we finally, as adults, had the chance to bond. I hope Amy gets back to acting one day—she’s really good—but I understand that after what happened she’d probably be more comfortable with a lower profile. It isn’t very pretty what a town without pity can do.
Not everybody had good memories of being in Cry-Baby. When I was doing This Filthy World—my spoken-word act—at Sweet Briar College in Virginia (both my mother and two sisters graduated from there), a young woman came up to me after the question-and-answer period and said, “I used to be against you because once I was the little baby that Ricki Lake gave birth to in the backseat of the car during the chicken drag-race scene in Cry-Baby. For many years, I harshly judged my parents for putting me in that situation when I obviously had no say in the matter.” I guess I looked at her in confusion because she quickly added, “But after hearing you speak tonight, I forgive them.” Wow. I’m happy my words of filth brought this family back together again. You never know, do you?
The Cry-Baby shoot went fairly well despite endless days of rain that made us go a little over budget. Rachel Talalay, a young producer from Baltimore who had also coproduced Hairspray for New Line Cinema, had a huge cast and crew to supervise and a director (me) who had never experienced union rules (WGA, DGA, Teamsters); cumbersome company moves of trucks, lighting rigs, and trailers; and studio executives on set watching the clock. Of course, there was drama. Johnny Depp (who always called me Mr. Walters and didn’t flinch when I referred to him as Cry-Rimmer) was constantly battling paparazzi or wild girl groupies who would leave notes at his hotel reading, “I’d like to suck your dick through a garden hose.” One pack of teenage lovelies even approached crew members and offered to pay top dollar for the sewage under Johnny Depp’s trailer. The Feds raided the set and served Traci Lords with papers trying to force her to return to L.A. to testify against the mob for distributing all her underage porn films. I’ll never forget Patty Hearst, maybe in character, comforting offscreen her sobbing on-screen “daughter” with a hug.
Susan Tyrrell had a wild fling with one of the most volatile Teamsters, and they walked around the set cooing and making out like a teenage David and Lisa. The Universal Studios press agent assigned to our film, who had his hands full keeping the cast’s troubles out of the newspapers, was himself busted in the middle of the shoot for copping heroin on the streets of Baltimore between call times. My best friend, Pat Moran, who was busy casting the film and helping out in all departments, dealt well with the fact that her son, Brook Yeaton (the prop master working with Vincent Peranio), was now an item with Traci Lords. They were eventually married (and divorced). Both Brook and Traci have happily remarried wonderful non-showbiz spouses and now have one child each. Katherine, Brook’s daughter, didn’t fall far from the family tree; she played the role of Cotton at ten years of age in 2015, when I shot my art video Kiddie Flamingos, where I rewrote the script of Pink Flamingos G-rated and filmed the all-children cast giving a costumed table read.
Ricki Lake lost her virginity halfway through the shoot on Cry-Baby and seemed gung ho in her new position as a woman of the world. I had an affair with an insanely cute hipster who walked into the Club Charles in Baltimore with a female date in the middle of a wild cast night out on the town. He looked at me, I looked at him, and he said, “Let’s go,” and we did. To Washington, D.C., to a hotel room. What the hell was I thinking? I don’t know what happened to his date. As the shoot went on and I continued to see him, my great friend Henny Garfunkel, the female unit photographer, nervously confided, “You know, John, that boyfriend of yours. Well, he keeps making obscene phone calls to me. I know it’s him, I recognize his voice, but I don’t know how to handle it.” “Oh, just hang up,” I advised.
For the first time in my career I had to cut the whole movie in L.A. I bonded immediately with my editor, Janice Hampton, and her assistant, Erica Huggins (who went on to produce many movies at Imagine Films), but it took a bit of adjustment to actually live there. One thing I learned is that your tastes can change. Things you’d never wear in real life begin to look attractive in L.A. until you get back home to Baltimore and see yourself in the mirror. Good God! I bought that? I still have a pair of hideous yellow suede loafers that I picked up in Beverly Hills that prove this point.
