Babs Johnson and Edie The Egg Lady get psychedelicized.
Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.”
Mr. Vader: “Do you believe in God?”
Babs Johnson: “I AM GOD!”
The thing I love most about John Waters is that he always appears unfazed by anything. He’s cool, self-contained and shrugs off all condescension. He’s the kind of role model that should be used in schools to get youngsters (and adults) to like themselves, and be confident in who they are and how they want to live.
Steven Yaeger’s documentary on Waters, Divine Trash, is one of those films that ends up on everyone’s wish list at some point or another, it’s an ‘O, I’d love to see that’ kind-of-a-film, and is as good as you hope. This is especially true if you’re a fan of Mr Waters, and want to see behind the scenes and find out all about his early days as a film-maker, in particular the making of Pink Flamingoes. Director Yaeger more than deserved his Film-Makers’ Trophy for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival for Divine Trash in 1998, as he gets the best out of Waters and knows how to tell a damned good tale. With contributions from Divine, Hal Hartley, Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, Waters and of course those fabulous Dreamlanders.
Happy Birthday Harris Glenn Milstead, born today at the Women’s Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1945.
Glenn will be forever in our hearts as the one and only Divine - legendary star of John Waters’ movies, and singer of a slew of Hi-Nrg classics, “I’m So Beautiful”, “Walk Like A Man”, “T-Shirt and Tight Blue Jeans”, and “Shake It Up”.
I was fortunate to see Divine in concert in 1984, and it is a memory I will always treasure. To celebrate what would have been Glenn’s 66th birthday, here are a few of Divine’s hitsplus a seldom seen interview from Channel 4’s The Tube.
From the Canadian sketch show SCTV, this clip has been causing some confusion among Divine fans as it’s labelled on YouTube “Divine as Peter Pan”. Thankfully original Dreamlander Mink Stole was on hand to help clear the matter up:
That’s not Divine— I think it’s actually John Candy doing a Divine parody—which is in itself a tribute.
Who knew Candy made such a good drag queen?!
BONUS! Here’s Candy, again as Divine, doing “Santa Bring My Baby Back To Me”
The fabulous Divine in highlights from The Neon Woman, Tom Eyen‘s sequel to Women Behind Bars, which was specifically written for Divine. The footage is a bit raw and gritty, but still gives more than a fair idea as to why Divine was so loved as a performer.
Produced in 1978, The Neon Woman is an “outrageous murder mystery” set in a run-down Baltimore burlesque house managed by a retired stripper, Flash Storm (Divine). The story was inspired by Gypsy Rose Lee’s classic burlesque thriller, The G-String Murders. Directed by Ron Link, and co-starring Helen Hanft, Brenda Bergman, William Duff-Griffin, Maria Duval, and Sweet William Edgar. The production ran for eighty-four performances at the Hurrah Discotheque, New York.
There’s a line by Neil Innes, which Richard likes to quote:
There are no coincidences, but sometimes the pattern
is
more obvious.
It’s from “Keynsham” by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, who were on here recently, and well, there’s just something in the air as here’s another fine documentary from Jonathan Ross, this one from 1988, when he interviewed the “Pope of Trash”, the “Anal Anarchist”, the “Ayatollah of Crud”, the fabulous Mr. John Waters.
Shown as part of Ross’s series The Incredibly Strange Film Show, and recorded not long after Waters’ co-conspirator Divine died, this superb documentary contains one of the best and most revealing interviews Waters has ever given.
Starting with the opening of Hairspray in Baltimore 1988, with interviews from key Dreamlanders, a chewy selection choice clips, background skinny and some fabulous archive.
And what can we learn from this all? As Waters explains, without Divine there would be no John Waters’ films, for Divine represented the rebel who could win. Nice, but that’s a line which is also true of Mr Waters - for he is the rebel who won.
A terrific teaser trailer for I Am Divine, the upcoming documentary about Divine was released the other day and it looks great. I can’t wait to see this. Divine, in my opinion was a truly great American and deserves, at long last, a decent doc to be made about him.
In 1984, at the massive Hippodrome nightclub in London, I saw Divine absolutely WOW an audience of several thousand people with her high-energy Eurodisco set. The place was packed to the gills with adoring—and very glamorous—people who were there to be bathed in her divinity… if not her flop sweat. Looking around the audience that night, it occurred to me what a personal triumph this event must have represented for someone who was so marginalized growing up. Let’s face it, Harris Glenn Milstead was a full-blown freak (in a good way), and John Waters is absolutely right when he says in this trailer, “Divine stood for all outsiders. A young person could be inspired because anything is possible.”
Divine’s life and rise to worldwide fame and unlikely icon-hood was the ultimate “It Gets Better” story, whether you are gay or straight!
I met Divine once at a Manhattan nightclub I was working at during the mid-80s. I took up a tray of food to his dressing room. You’d expect maybe that he would have been intimidating, but he was absolutely a total sweetheart. I still have the autographed invite for the event (a “Father’s Day Party” themed-party if you can believe it, Divine wrapped in an American flag on the front). In marked contrast to the London appearance, Divine had, just a few years years later, become morbidly obese. I saw him when he walked offstage and he was out of breath, sweating profusely and it took him some time before he was breathing normally again. Later my friend remarked that he didn’t expect that Divine would be “long for this world.” A little over a year later, Divine was dead, but his legend will live on forever.
Divine in a 1987 episode of Tales From The Darkside.
In this bizarre tale called “Seymourlama,” Divine portrays the mysterious Ambassador Chia Fung, the Dalai Lama of a country known as Lo-Pu (a sly reference to Poodle poo?).
“Does this throne vibrate joyously upon the insertion of a quarter?”
Divine is the world’s first Dalai Lama with a Baltimore accent.
Seymour’s dad is played by the fabulous David Gale from Re-Animator.
John Waters and Divine appear on Andy Warhol’s cable TV show in 1981. The late Van Smith, make-up and costume designer on Waters’ films, is seen working on Ms. Divine during the interview.
The always amusing Waters talks about his early influences (Herschell Gordon Lewis), his film making style and screens some cool clips from his early movies.
John mentions his book “Shock Value” which was at the time about to be published. One of my favorite memories is the day that he and Divine signed my copy at a bookstore in Greenwich Village. Two of the classiest trash mavens I’d ever met.
The brilliant artist Duggie Fields supplied Dangerous Minds with this fabulous Holiday snap of a Christmas party with Divine and Larry ‘J.R.’ Hagman in the 1980s. As Duggie explains:
The photo was Christmas day at Zandra Rhodes’ in London Maybe a year or two after ‘J.R.’ was shot in Dallas - Andrew Logan was also there, Joan and Jack Quinn and Janet Street-Porter too….Lunch and afternoon rather than evening…..Larry is giving out his Christmas gifts to everyone of mini portable fans with his photo on - his Patented Anti-Smoking Device...!
Divine gives it her all at The Hacienda in Manchester, 1983. The audience appears to be totally clueless - joyless division. Where the fock is Happy Mondays?
Divine was punk before punk. A shit-eating Diva that could have devoured the entire Sex Pistols for breakfast.
R. Couri Hay talks with Divine, John Waters, Mink Stole and David Lochary at Anton Perich Studio, formerly ‘The Factory’, in 1975. This must be a promo outing for Female Trouble. The video quality leaves a lot to be desired, but this is 58 minutes of pop culture history and well-worth watching. Waters is amusing as always, Divine looks Garboesque, and it’s rare to see see David Lochary and Mink Stole being interviewed. Rich kid R. Couri Hay was a contributor to Warhol’s Interview magazine and gossip columnist for The National Inquirer in the mid-to-late 1970’s.
Tom Snyder interviews Divine, Andy Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn and playwright/director Ron Link in July of 1979. Link wrote “The Neon Woman” which starred Divine and ran off-Broadway in 1978.
This is wonderful. Part of the fun is watching Snyder struggling to fathom the whole thing. By the end, Snyder seems ripe for a lifestyle change.
What with John Waters seemingly everywhere these days (Salon, the NYT, Fresh Air) as he promotes his new book, Role Models, I thought it’d be a fine time to revisit one of his former film muses, Edith Massey.
Watching those three films growing up (and watching them, and watching them), Massey always struck me as being infinitely stranger than larger-than-life drag queen, Divine. Maybe it was because I somehow grasped that “drag” was, by definition, “performative,” and thus safer than the whacked-out maternalism that Massey so artlessly channeled. In fact, whereas Divine’s acting method might be described as quotation-marks-within-quotation-marks, Massey seemingly acted without the cushion of any marks whatsoever—quotation or otherwise.
Massey’s life after Waters was perhaps no odder than her life before it, and its trajectory has an arc straight out of Dickens: from orphanage to reform school, from freight train rider to brothel madam, and then, as these things sometimes go, to Hollywood.
Some of this ground is covered in the ‘74 documentary on her life: Love Letter To Edie (you can watch a clip from that film here). The below interview from the early 80’s is also amusing:
Of course, no Massey entry would be complete without the infamous “Egg Man” moment from Pink Flamingos. That follows below:
After a battle with cancer and diabetes, Massey passed away in Venice, California, in 1984. That was 2 years after Massey and her band, called, naturally, Edie and the Eggs, released the below Rodney on the Roq staple, Punks, Get Off The Grass:
