My 24 hours with Quentin Crisp — The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met
A June Pride Profile
‘When I was coming to America,’’ Quentin Crisp recalled, ‘’I went to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and the man asked me, ‘Are you a practicing homosexual?’ And I said I didn’t practice. I was already perfect.’’
“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”
“Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.”
“It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.”
From my own “OK boomer” earliest childhood days I was joyfully surrounded by this wonderous thing called print… books, newspapers and magazines. As a highly introverted and curious kid, I found huge joy, escape and comfort in reading all of them. “The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met” was a regular feature in Reader’s Digest. It always prompted me to fantasize about the unforgettable people that I would meet along my journey to come. Theatre and Media careers that followed delivered the goods. As June Pride 2021 comes to a close one particular fascinating, complex, highly witty and self-effacing man that I had the pleasure of meeting has come to mind to celebrate with a couple of emotion-filled keyboard strokes.
1978 was a most important year for Denis Charles Pratt, more commonly known as Quentin Crisp. It was just three years following the British and U.S. television broadcast debut of The Naked Civil Servant, the teleplay starring John Hurt as Crisp. Based on his mostly unnoticed 1968 book of the same name it tells his story as an effeminate boy unattracted to girls managing young life in a highly homophobic world. As a young adult his mission statement becomes “making the existence of his homosexuality abundantly clear to the world’s aborigines.” He took his cross-dressing and effeminate behavior to the streets of London resulting in frequent beatings. He briefly worked as a prostitute, book illustrator and a naked civil servant specifically as a paid artist’s nude model in government-supported art schools. Following the film’s success, he developed such a following that he was pressured by an agent to hold court in a West End Theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in a one-man show titled An Evening with Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant. One of those 1978 Edinburgh performances was my own introduction to the unique wit and wisdom of Quentin Crisp. Following the performance, I was privileged enough to meet the man and have my copy of his book signed. Sharing that I was from America made him light up like Piccadilly Circus. Crisp once wrote in The Guardian that “I’ve always been American in my heart. Ever since my mother took me to the movies and I began to gibber and twitch at the sight of Manhattan on the screen.”
Crisp’s “one man show” was an outsider’s guide to survival in the mainstream. A kind of pre-curser to an influential online tutorial on How to Create Your Own Style when you don’t fit in. All of the stories sprung organically from his own experiences in his challenging life. He advised against making demands of society to change, suggesting rather that one must await society coming to you. Both he and his views were rejected by the gay liberation activists of the day. Once a flippant remark about the early AIDS crisis (“it’s a fad”) resulted in the loss of fans and cancellations of some engagements. While he never publicly apologized, I understood that through the years he made frequent and sizable donations to AmfAR, the early aids research organization. Presumably this was his private course correction. Years of seeking Crisp for a booking in Virginia suddenly became a practical possibility.
A sophomore theater major college student, I was in Edinburgh in 1978 accompanying a friend who was appearing in one of the many Fringe shows that season. While my friend was performing in her show, I was in a kind of other-worldly state attending up to five shows a day. That whirlwind month was followed by another week of seeing shows in New York and then back to college in Virginia and playing the foppish title character in The Government Inspector and directing productions of Rhinoceros and The Ritz.
By the end of 1978, under the sponsorship of (with an eye towards making a musical of Crisp’s book) legendary Director, Choreographer and A Chorus Line creator Michael Bennett, Crisp visited New York for the first time. That visit was followed by becoming a U.S. resident alien, becoming the toast of Off Broadway and both the inspiration and star of a Sting hit song and music video, Englishman in New York. He also became a nearly a household name as a somewhat regular guest on David Letterman’s Late Night Show, always introduced as “Quentin Crisp, a homosexual.”
“Virrrrrginnnnia, it’s almost all waaater,” were his first words off the plane at the gate of Norfolk International Airport on April 9, 1985. He was all decked out in his signature fedora hat perched at a strategic angle partially covering his blue-ish rinse tinted hair. This was the moment that began the twenty-four-hour marathon that was nearly seven years in the making from that unforgettable Edinburgh performance. As we walked from the terminal to my car, it suddenly occurred to me that aside from the 50-year age and cultural differences, I was about to spend 24 hours with a man that I actually had more in common with, than not. While it was on the opposite side of a large pond, we both had challenging outsider childhoods owing to being outed early on as “different.” And while I never had anywhere near the wittiness that my new friend had, I too used humor as my own survival tool. But I was about to spend much of the ensuing time alone in my small car and the fact was that we were both equally and painfully shy when “off stage.” And I am the host, so I am fully aware that it is my role to make my “guest” comfortable and, gosh forbid, amuse the man who wrote the book on clever musings. What the heck had I gotten myself into? I took a quick breath and acknowledged that I had been clever in chasing down and securing this engagement (more than decade prior to the earliest internet tools) with the most joyful, patient and kind Guy Kettlehack (Editor of The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp) of the Connie Clausen agency office, so I could manage this. Almost in defiance of my failed attempt to contradict Crisp’s first words in Virginia about it being almost all water, we headed across the mighty Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel to the studios of the local ABC station to be interviewed by journalist Sherri Brenan on her weekly news and features show. While pitching Brenan I discovered she was a huge Crisp fan having also seen the film of his life. Of course, he was a hit.
Conversation was narrowed to my Virginia was really more than water, New York City and theatre. Crisp served as a critic for the late prestigious Christopher Street magazine, occasionally referred to as the gay New Yorker and a columnist and diarist for the scrappier newspaper New York Native that singularly promoted a kind of failed journalistic Aids denial strategy.
The 1984 critically dismissed Off Broadway black comic- tragedy play SPOOKHOUSE, by Harvey Fierstein was the answer to “what have you seen that you loved but failed to find an audience?” Crisp became almost giddy about his admiration for how over the top and deliciously creepy and extravagant this play was and how he thought Mr. Fierstein dared to go places in it that were ground-breaking, while being a dismissive of his earlier successful commercial work. And he also thought that lead actor Anne Meara, someone he had no culture awareness of, equally rose to the gothic occasion in a central role. He was alone in his assessment of the play and it has uniquely vanished from the universe. As he is telling me of his passion for the dismissed play, all I could think of was William Ruehlmann’s comment to me about Crisp’s own gothic novel Chog, one of many books I shared with him in preparation for his interview. “Ron, that one is just plan weird.”
The journey back from the studio to the theatre included a stopover for lunch at Elliot’s in the Ghent section. In his requisite pre-appearance newspaper interview with the brilliant William Ruehlmann, then of the Virginian Pilot and Ledger Star, Crisp shared that he only had mild curiosity about his Norfolk accommodations, so in hopes that I could show my guest the life and heart of Norfolk’s “artistic and gay village,” I had chosen Elliot Juren’s eatery. Juren a former journalist and early Ghent pioneer opening his famed dining spot in 1978 when the Naro Expanded Cinema, the hood’s anchor art film house opened. It was the heartbeat of the neighborhood where I had conducted many a job and media interview through the years. Crisp went hugely unnoticed by the diners in the packed restaurant, other than a huge two thumbs up to me from Elliot behind Crisp’s back. Somehow, I was sure that the approval was meant to tell me that he knew who my special guest was that day. All I could think of was the line from his show that covered the ground of a parent making a list of all the things wrong with their child. Crisp advised that when said parent paused during the list of complaints, your grades are low, your friends are thugs, you don’t take care of yourself, said child should simply say “Mother, you don’t know the half of it, I met Quentin Crisp.”
Three years later when I too would happily call New York City my home I reconnected with him. As he famously bragged, he was listed in the phone book, it was easy to find him. His welcome advice was centered on managing the high cost of living. “Every night there are parties and receptions. Something is opening every day. Be like Sylvia Miles who is rumored to even attend the opening of an envelope. You simply need to get invited and then learn to make a meal of cheap champagne and eating as many passed hors d’oeuvres while standing up that you can.” For the next decade I would attend most all of his New York performances including one magnificent August evening in Central Park’s Summerstage at the Band Shell my first summer.
The only answer to any question I asked Mr. Crisp that day was “whatever you like, I am here to serve you.” The single exception was the reply to “Mr. Crisp, can I get you anything?” prior to his performance. “Could I trouble you for a shot of whiskey?’ was the only “ask” made in the 24 hours. Those few seconds before curtain time were the only that showed a hint of the vulnerable young Denis Charles Pratt. Following the performance and its reception, a few of my friends convinced me to ask Crisp if he would accompany us to The Cue Club, the most historic gay club in Norfolk to top off the evening. I was uncomfortable to even ask him as I knew he would not be capable of saying no. But ask I did and off we headed down the highway. Within moments, I could see that he was fast asleep in the car seat next to me, no doubt exhausted from a day spent being Quentin Crisp. Without saying a word, I abruptly turned my car around and returned him to his hotel for some sleep prior to his morning departure from the State made of water back to his dusty boarding house room in his dreamland New York City.
