9-24-2021 10:59am

IN THE NEWS: JOHN WATERS

Jeff Barto Editor

FEATURED IN OCT. 2021 TOWN AND COUNTRY:

The Marvelous Mr. John Waters

A master class in originality from the man best known as the Pope of Trash—but whom we know as T&C’s most surprising, and devoted, subscriber.

MIKE ALBO AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN. STYLED BY MATTHEW MARDEN. SEP 20, 2021

John Waters is rattling off a list of upcoming projects. It is summer, and he’s looking ahead to appearances on Search Party and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. He is the host act for alt-country fabulist Orville Peck at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, and he is expected to do the same at the California indie music festival Halloween Meltdown in October. There are also art exhibits of his visual work staged by his New York gallerist Marianne Boesky, and more dates for his long- running one-man show, This Filthy World.

“And then I go to Europe,” he says. “I do stuff there a lot, too. I have to get used to it again. Suddenly I think, Oh my god, how did I ever do that—19 cities in 22 days?” Waters says all this with a nonchalant exhale, almost as if he still smoked (he quit years ago), displaying zero stress. At 75, with a backlist of cult films he readily admits didn’t make much money, the Bard of Baltimore has never been more in demand.

Perhaps unexpectedly, Waters has been elevated, by both Hollywood and his critics, to the highest echelon of film culture: an auteur. From his first full-length film, Mondo Trasho, to his most recent, A Dirty Shame (starring T&C’s May cover star, Selma Blair), not to mention his books and shows—even the one-liners and film clips of his cycling through TikTok—there are few artists as easily recognizable, or as beloved and embraced by battalions of fans.

PRADA suit ($2,580) and shirt ($680); SAINT LAURENT by Anthony Vaccarello adrian oxfords ($1,095)DOUGLAS FRIEDMANADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

In many ways the reappreciation he’s experiencing is like that of another firmly canonized icon, Dolly Parton. After decades as the objects of dismissive wisecracks, their talent, tenacity, and nerve prevailed. Called outrageous, revolting, and “a clothesline to hang his filthy laundry on” by one critic, Waters’s body of work is now seen as a celebration of American originality. Like Parton’s, his vision of the country, it turns out, with all its polyester and prurience, has more soul than most of the milquetoast Academy Award winners for Best Picture. Here’s a test: Who is more lovable and relatable, Edith Massey in every role she ever played for Waters, or any character in the last 20 Marvel superhero films. What’s the real trash? “John is a gentle man. A dandy. A hero. He is the Karl Lagerfeld of Baltimore, on the pulse of what’s great before anyone else,” says Blair.

“I prefer to think of John’s work not as bad taste becoming good taste,” Boesky says, “but more as an evolution—or a revolution, maybe. He is our editor in chief of pop culture, and he is not afraid to help liberate his audience from the traps set by our buzz-killing superegos. Thank god for John Waters!”

He may appear blasé, but Waters’s stature is the result of how hard—and how ingeniously—he has worked to get here. There’s a canny alchemy in the way, throughout his career, he has mixed high and low, art film and exploitation, trash cans and Cannes. “It’s like Dolly’s famous line: ‘It costs a lot of money to look this cheap,’ ” he tells me. “We both knew what we were doing.”

Slim Aarons’s 1964 “Monocled Miss,” which served as the inspiration for our 175th anniversary cover.SLIM AARONSADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

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Trademark pencil-thin mustache in place, Waters sports a crisp white Comme des Garçons shirt with a subtle black stripe down the placket. He likes the understated luxury of the label “because you pay a lot of money for clothes that look like they came from the bottom of a thrift shop.” Waters, it turns out, saves the loud opinions, clashing prints, and risqué behavior for the screen. “People think I drive a pink Cadillac. My house in Baltimore looks like an old lady’s house.” We meet in the cute apartment he rents in the quiet East End of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It’s decorated tastefully but with the occasional Watersesque objet, such as a giant fake jar of Miracle Whip.

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“I used to stay in Pat de Groot’s house,” he says, “but then she died.” De Groot, a celebrated painter who counted Norman Mailer, Mark Rothko, and Mary Oliver as contemporaries, was the last of the area’s artistic Old Guard before she moved on three years ago to that vacation town in the sky (where the rent is, hopefully, cheaper).

Now all the ramshackle houses are being bought up by the gay glitterati (including TV producer Ryan Murphy) for nosebleed prices, making it more and more unaffordable for anyone without a Netflix development deal. “It’s good to have friends to rent from here, but you have to be careful, because they die,” Waters says dryly. “And the new rich people here are so rich they don’t rent out their houses. They stay vacant nine months of the year when they aren’t here!”

Waters owns an apartment in “historic Greenwich Village” and one in Nob Hill, as well as his home in Baltimore, which he bought in 1988, flush with money from his breakthrough classic Hairspray. “I never move. I’ve had the same phone numbers for so long,” he says. A longtime fixture in Provincetown, which would soon be rattled by an outbreak of Covid, Waters is sojourning here mainly to write.

“Monday through Friday, I’m in that room right there,” he says, motioning behind himself to a small office, where he starts writing at 8 a.m. “Not 7:59 a.m., not 8:01 a.m.—at 8 a.m. And every day I think, Oh I can’t do it, and at 8:01 a.m. I’m doing it. We go until about 11, 11:30, then I run my business in the afternoons. I’ve always done that. Done that for 40 years.”

Waters writes by hand, on the right kind of legal pads, with the right kind of paper clips, cutting and pasting, old-school-style. “I hate little paper clips. I have to have the exact clear Scotch tape. And the right scissors,” he says. Lately he’s been preparing for his Halloween and Christmas shows, and revamping This Filthy World for after the pandemic, whatever that looks like. “I haven’t done it in a year and a half. Every single thing is different after Covid. You cannot do the same show. Nothing’s the same,” he says.

John Waters, wearing his signature brand, Comme des Garçons. COMME DES GARÇONS homme deux, shop.doverstreetmarket.com/us.DOUGLAS FRIEDMANADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

Waters has been performing since the 1960s, initially just at screenings of his films with his late friend and muse Divine by his side. “The college circuit. The non-theatrical circuit. It was huge, where I made my name,” he recalls. “I mean, the shows caused riots. We meant to scare the hippies. But we were hippies. Later Divine did the music thing, and I just turned it into a one-man thing.”

Being present, even virtually, is crucial for Waters. “It’s more than a way I make my living. First of all, I am in touch with the fans. Believe me, that’s important. It’s pressing flesh. It’s like campaigning. They come see everything you do for the rest of your life. Elton John told me that. The day you stop touring, it’s over,” he says. “I always say to someone, you blink and somebody’s there to steal your place. I believe you have to constantly be out there.”

Waters even has his own Comic-Con: Camp John Waters in Kent, Connecticut, scheduled this year for September 10–13. Kathleen Turner and Patricia Hearst are counselors. “I say it’s Jonestown with a happy ending. Except we don’t make them go work out in the fields,” he says. Every year there is a costume contest. “Somebody came as the glory hole in Desperate Living and had to walk around the whole time as a wall with their head sticking through. They’re great, great fans. They’re smart and they’re funny and they have a great time.” Somehow, a Camp Christopher Nolan doesn’t sound as fun.

In his most recent book, Mr. Know-It-All, Waters offered advice to budding filmmakers by recounting his adventures in Hollywood, from the days when he was a hot item after the release of Hairspray (“Which was just a modest hit, really. But that’s all you need in Hollywood”) through his subsequent films, such as Serial Mom, starring Turner, Pecker, and Cecil B. Demented, all of which fared poorly by mainstream box office standards. His central advice: Don’t ever stop.

“It’s like Dolly’s famous line: ‘It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.’ We both knew what we were doing.”

“You have to learn to ride the waves, and you always have to have a backup plan. That’s why I did books. That’s why I always had spoken word shows. They weren’t less to me. That wasn’t a lesser career,” he says. “It was just a new way for me to tell stories. It was always, ‘I can’t do that, I can do this.’ ” When he tried to make a sequel to Pink Flamingos and nobody would touch it, he included the screenplay in his book Trash Trio. After Hairspray, as he tells it in Mr. Know-It-All, he was thrown development money and pitched a number of shows, including a Hairspray sequel as well as an HBO movie based on the film. Nothing panned out. But he betrays no bitterness. It helps, of course, that Hairspray became a bona fide Broadway blockbuster and was remade as a film, with John Travolta in the role made famous by Divine.

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“Hollywood treated me fairly. Their job is to make money, not art. And they were right, the films didn’t make money,” he says. “The problem is that they have to make money in the first week.” And, Waters points out, his films are still playing. “Who would have ever thought Multiple Maniacs would be on HBO Max?”

Now his work is part of the Criterion Collection. His artwork is sold in blue chip galleries, and he has bequeathed about 375 works from his private collection (including pieces by Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman) to the Baltimore Museum of Art, to be donated after his death. All this from someone you’ve always thought of as the Pope of Trash. Have we pegged him wrong all these years?

“John has the extraordinary quality of creating what would be considered unattractive characters and making you care about them,” says Turner. The performer Dina Martina adds, “You can’t overstate his influence in pop culture. His perfectly fetid sensibility has seeped into every nook and cranny of our counterculture.”

Slim Aarons’s portrait of the decorator Lawrence Carleton Peabody II and his son, which first appeared in T&C in 1976SLIM AARONSADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

Waters is an icon even in the snooty world of interiors. “His ability to bring out the beauty and humor in the mundane has influenced generations of designers, myself among them,” says Ken Fulk, who restored the historic Mary Heaton Vorse House, where this story was photographed. Wherever you consider Waters’s station, matters of taste are always shifting, and the last several years scrambled our most traditional notions of decorum and decency. When Donald Trump called Baltimore a land of rats and other rodents, Waters went on television to defend his hometown and its vermin.

The model Matthew Dubbe, the performer Dina Martina, and Waters recreate a classic Slim Aarons image at Provincetown’s historic Mary Heaton Vorse house. On Waters: LOUIS VUITTON men’s suit ($3,400) and shirt ($865); HERMES men’s calfskin derby ($1,075); TITLE OF WORK pocket square ($150)DOUGLAS FRIEDMANADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW

“I mean, Ricki Lake wears a roach dress as Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray. She kicks a rat off her shoe when she has her first romantic kiss!” he says. “Trump wasn’t in on the joke. Even bad taste wasn’t fun. Those Christmas decorations? He thinks that’s good taste. He ruined bad taste.”

Waters stops for a moment and reconsiders. “Bad taste. I don’t even think there is such a thing anymore. I think what used to be called bad taste is now American humor,” he says. “When I started, it was sick jokes: ‘That’s about as funny as an iron lung.’ Now the kind of stuff I had in my early movies is normal. That’s why my movies are now playing on television, which I never thought would happen. Ever.”

Waters appreciates what he calls “good bad taste”: when people are in on the joke of their own ostentation, citing the musicians Orville Peck and Machine Gun Kelly as contemporary purveyors. And he loves a good tacky find. “I’m obsessed with MyTheresa,” he says before running to fetch a shirt he found on the German e-commerce site, a button-down white shirt designed to look stained with faint spots all over it. It also has three finished holes sewn down the front. “Oil stains and blood stains, like you cut yourself shaving. It’s hilarious, isn’t it?”

“John is a gentle man. A dandy. A hero. He is the Karl Lagerfeld of Baltimore, on the pulse of what’s great before anyone else.”

If there are any principles to be found in Waters’s oeuvre, it’s these: a distaste for buzz-killers, a disdain for hypocrisy, and an unapologetic revulsion for anyone with no sense of humor. The villains of his films are always the most sanctimonious players with the loudest moral outrage, on both the left and the right. In our current culture of a million tweetstorms every minute, can Waters’s decidedly outré provocation offer a much-needed tonic? We will see: His new novel, Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance, which satirizes his favorite literary genres and “pokes fun at today’s political correctness,” comes out in May, and he has a new film in development. “I do have a deal that I can’t talk about, because I’ll curse it,” he says. “But I am rewriting the script right now.”

And, to his delight, he is on the cover of the 175th anniversary issue of T&C, a magazine his parents pored over when he was growing up and to which he himself has subscribed for three decades.

“This is the way I was raised. That’s what they wanted me to look like,” he says. “Being on the cover of Town & Country is a surprise to me, in a great way. It’s another irony in a life of ironies. My mother would be very happy.”

Photographs By Douglas Friedman. Styled by Matthew Marden.

Grooming by Ahbi Nishman. Tailoring by Susan Hall. Set design by Martin Bourne at Apostrophe Reps. Location courtesy of Ken Fulk’s Provincetown Arts Society.

In the lead image: BRUNELLO CUCINELLI jacket ($3,995) and pants ($1,075); GUCCI shirt ($630); SYLVIE CORBELIN spider pin ($4,300).

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A version of this story appears in the October 2021 issue of Town & Country.

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