It's only natural that from time to time I'll contemplate what big iconic stars mean to me, as I stare dreamily into the middle distance or gaze at my old film mags and books....I'm a drag queen!

I LOVE Hollywood and old movies and the rest, but my favourite stars aren't all so predictable.

In this section so far you'll find Nancy Sinatra, Leigh Bowery, Jayne Mansfield, Astrid Proll, Lana Turner, Pamela Anderson Lee and Patty Hearst (and more to come of course.....)

N A N C Y S I N A T R A

I started to take Nancy seriously around 1985 when I heard "Some Velvet Morning". Previously I'd been led to believe she was nothing but a joke. My initial interest bordered on kitschy amusement and, in a recognisable pattern, grew from there. She looked weird ("like a monkey" Jackie used to say). She recorded for her Dad's label. She couldn't really sing very well, and the songs were trash. But was she just some Hollywood brat who wanted to be a singer - or not? First of all I thought it was Lee Hazlewood holding all the aces, but now I've got 7 albums of her (including 2 with Lee) and I like nearly all the songs, leading me to the conclusion that she MUST HAVE HAD SOME TALENT TOO.

Her version of "Son Of A Preacher Man" is a good example. She sings it flat and emotionless, almost grudgingly, but it's great. She isn't wistfully reminiscing about Billy Ray the preacher's son, like Bobbie Gentry or Dusty Springfield, she's sneery and bitter and sick of it all, hence the jaded heavy handed delivery. Billy Ray was the ONLY ONE WHO EVER MOVED HER (in her whole life?!) and it becomes something different, helped along as ever by an idiosyncratic arrangement by Billy Strange (another oddball).

There's a self-conscious dumbness in some of her records. Frequently she giggles when singing the more outlandish lyrics, and of course they leave it in so they can have their cake and eat it. On Lee's own versh of "Boots" he ad-libs over a few sections, and makes it clear that the musicians at the sessions were practically gagging playing this trash, but on the original, Nancy just goes for it, oblivious, trying to sound as sassy and tough as possible without really succeeding ("-are you ready boots?"). Imagine if she re-recorded it in the world-weary scowl of "Preacher Man" - it would be amazing!

The worst thing I can think of to say about her was that she was really square (an obvious point Charlotte only recently brought to my attention). On "Hullabaloo" on U.S. teevee she's got lower boot heels than all the dancers around her, and they all look cooler than her too. She was just a vacuum-packed showbiz kid. Lee Hazlewood moulded her public profile through the songs he wrote and chose, allegedly projecting a "bad girl" image, Nance reveals in recent interview. But can you imagine her cussing out Ronnie Spector? No way. And no way could cool kids identify with super-square Frank's kid either.

Her not-special singing voice was another cold hard reality. Lee Hazlewood was in his 40s by this time and bore an unfortunate resemblance to John Alderton, so it goes without saying that he wasn't particularly cool either by contemporary standards. She's an amateur thrust into the spotlight, trying hard but getting it a bit wrong some of the time. She's a little awkward, trying to impress her dad and the other Rat Pack brats, only she's having hit records all over the world in the process. Hazlewood is an intriguing character too - is he for real or what? He's like an "oldest swinger in town" archetype, living in a fantasy world of his own devising, despite his obvious and well-documented Nashville-to-Hollywood music biz savvy. His songs are frequently over-wrought and dramatic to the point of being ridiculous, but is he just playing for laughs? It's not always clear. Are his album titles jokes or just evidence of coke-enhanced ego problems?

Is it the mystery that makes it interesting? Or is it just Crass Showbiz Product? Oh! yeah -It's just Crass Showbiz Product. I love it.

LEIGH BOWERY 1

Leigh's image is an talisman of brilliance and invention and inspiration I carry in my head. It makes me sad to think that he died when he did, when I remember that Six Inch Killaz' first gig at Smashing was supposed to be supporting Minty*. I used to see him at clubs like everybody did - you couldn't really miss him - always looking fab, and I would say hello. I saw him in mags and stuck pictures of him in my scrapbooks. I saw him perform at Kinky Gerlinky and with Michael Clark. On one level he was this totally superficial attention seeker, but he was a dadaist club subculture legend, a disturbance to any and all kinds of rules, and a big walking "fuck you" for every freak to adopt and be proud of.

He was the antithesis of all those "style gurus" and fashion victims at the Face and i-D, but he needed them and used them too. He's as important to me as Jayne Mansfield and Gloria Swanson and Patty Hearst and Divine - sort of a combination of all of them even.

*Minty couldn't play because Westminster council banned them after onstage scat antics.

LEIGH BOWERY 2

Now that the 12th Annual London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival (1998) is over, and I don't have to sit cringeing through the self-satisfied yuppie programmers' intros anymore, I can look back and say "yeah I saw some good films, and some bad films".

And even though "Divine Trash", the documentary about the making of "Pink Flamingoes" was really interesting and "She's Real, Worse than Queer" was cool, the only thing that really blew me away was a video of a Leigh Bowery performance from Holland in June 1994.

...Leigh is naked apart from black stockings and big boots, a neck brace/corset thing, shiny black makeup over his entire face and head and a large number of wooden clothes pegs on his cock and nipples. It's in the open air and he's suspended upside down in front of a sheet of glass, shouting about how beautiful everything is over and over while Richard Tory (wearing nothing but a few balloons) thrashes a guitar loudly. The guitarist stops playing after a few minutes and Leigh starts to count as he is pulled back like a swing. On the count of twelve they let go, and Leigh smashes into the glass, shattering it. The performance is over very quickly, they lower Leigh to the stage and untie him.

Cut to backstage moments later - Leigh grinning madly, slightly dazed, his amazing eyes laughing and darting from side to side, his body dripping with blood from small cuts all over it. Freeze frame - Leigh grinning madly, his amazing eyes bugging out of the shiny black face, relieved it's not cut, cruising on the endorphin rush, thinking about what to do next. This is how I want to remember him.

Jayne Mansfield:

Glamour Anarchy Id-Monster, High-IQ Anything-For-Publicity Super-Goddess, Lurex Junkie, Trash Queen, Insane Interior Designer, Pink Patron, Pill-poppinÕ, Chihuahua-lovinÕ STAR of 30+ dumb films and 500 magazine covers (all of which she framed). Jayne died 30 years ago this year, spectacularly decapitated in a car crash on a back road on the way to Biloxi Mississippi in the early hours of the morning with her two favourite chihuahuas - reason enough to write this. I can't remember when I first became aware of her; I saw "The Girl Can't Help It" at an early age, but I was more interested in Little Richard at that time, and a lot of the satire of the plot and Jayne's performance were lost on me. I think my natural tendency towards the obscure drew me to Jaynie as an alternative to the Marylin Monroe conspiracy theory hype of the early eighties. There wasn't much to be had at that time, but a second viewing of ÒThe Girl...Ó got me hooked. At first I just thought she was funny. I picked up info here and there - her bizarre death, rumours of satanism, the Pink Palace, her IQ and endless and shameless self-promotion campaigns, the Jayne shaped hot water bottle.... But then something happened.

As I read more about her, saw more and more amazing photos, she started to rise to the status of All-Time Super-Goddess and would-be role model in my mind, so that today she is untouchable. I don't fancy her - I want to be her.

I love Jayne Mansfield mostly because her life was totally insane, she did whatever she wanted, without forgetting for one moment she was a star and on show to the world. She bathed in Champagne once a week to keep up her morale, because that was what she thought a Star should do. She made buckets of money, threw most of it away on booze and drugs and sex, clawed some back, spent it again, then did another six weeks in Vegas when that ran out. She was obsessed with being famous, being a movie star, and pursued that aim fearlessly and outrageously. She wanted to be loved, but it wasn't like there was any Marilyn-esque vulnerability about her, that she must have been so insecure etc. She just wanted to be the most famous woman in the world.

She was intelligent, she knew she couldn't really act or sing, but she used what she had to be a superstar anyway. She was a product of Hollywood and the mass media, and the twisted mentality of the studio system, but loved any kind of publicity so much that its impossible to see her as a victim. She died, but as a result of a random accident, not a tragic slow decline (although she was on the skids a bit as the sixties started to swing more violently). She could have survived, recovered, gone broke, sold her story, made a comeback, made films with John Waters, sang a duet with Joey Ramone, got addicted to coke, sent to prison or the Betty Ford Clinic, become a permanent fixture in the National Enquirer, made another comeback in the eighties etc etc etc etc. There should at least be a killer biopic about her, but instead all there is a crap made-for-tv movie starring Loni Anderson! She deserves better.

I'm just flabbergasted that SHE WAS REAL, and that with an IQ of 165 she chose to live her life the way she did; she really did design and live in the Pink Palace (ÒIts a Pink Landmark!Ó) with ÒJ MÓ on the gates, a pink and/or heart-shaped everything, and pink shag pile carpet on the floors walls and ceilings, with scrap books and chihuahua shit everywhere. Hard to believe, but true. I don't want to know every detail of her life, and don't care whether she was a good mother or responsible pet-owner. It grates when she goes on about just wanting to be a homemaking wifey cooking apple pie in interviews, but I know (hope) this is just another example of her telling peope what they wanted to hear to get her picture in the paper. On the plus side, she was pals with drag queens and took a lot of drugs. She Rules.

A few years ago I had high hopes for Baywatch Pam (as we used to call her) being the New Jayne, to entertain me with sassy maybe-ironic slightly tongue in cheek media escapades. These hopes proved groundless. Pam is quite funny, and reasonably Jaynesque considering it is 1997, but no match for Mythic Jayne. If the spirit of the true glamour anarchy id-monster does live on, I think youÕll also find a bit in the personas of Lady Bunny and Lipsynka and Dolly Parton, and drag queens everywhere. But there is no New Jayne, and probably never will be.

PAM'S DREAM (this is real)

So I go inside and there's Anna Nicole Smith on an IV. I go 'Do you need me to break you out of here?' And she goes, 'I can't. I'm a ward of the state.' So I'm like, oh my god, I really am in a mental institution. I go outside again and I see this really tiny Lego car coming up to me. I'm trying to open the door really carefully 'cause I don't want to break it, and I'm trying to get in and my stomach's way too big. I look inside and there's Tommy in the front, and he goes, 'I'm gonna break you out if here! Ya know what, I didn't really wanna find a girl that looks like you. I just wanted to go party with my friends for a while - come on, get in.' And then I woke up.

TOP PAM QUOTE

"I don't understand why my plastic surgery is such a big deal. This is what I want to look like."

a*s*t*r*i*d

Just as I was looking everywhere for info on the Weather Underground (researching my RADICAL CHIC issue) a book was published by Scalo, and the Lux/LEA Gallery did an overpriced nightclub called Piss Factory to examine the legacy of the Red Army Faction or something (yeah right). THEN Scalo put out a book of arty photos by Astrid Proll from the RAF, and I',m thinkin fuck shit more revolutionary commodification, what's going on?

The crowning contradiction came a week later when I read an interview with Astrid in the (fuck! shit! etc!) Guardian. Reading it made me cry. Despite my earlier cynicism about her motives for producing the book, I totally empathise with her. All she's got is a few photos and a story to tell to some bourgie Naomi Wolf-esque 90s postfeminist vampire journalist, about this book of photos which are the crux of her life and experiences and motivations, photos of friends who fought capitalism and imperialism, who felt hey had no choice but take up the gun in desperate times, to plant bombs and murder people because they believed they were paving the way for something better that didn't come.

Now they're all dead, defeated, or just proved wrong, and she's still alive . It really got to me. Her total contempt for the easy life of 90s liberal scum parallels my own but, I'm not picking up the gun and I don't think I could either. Those were different times. Maybe the book will make a bit of money, and she'll be able to live a bit more comfortably (though if I don't want it I don't know who will), but the humiliation of selling off your personal history so that Graun readers can buy it for the special mail order price of £12.50 must hurt. Capitalism's irony-revenge? It stinks, but I wish Astrid Proll well.

IVAN CARTWRIGHT & LANA TURNER

At the LLGFF in Ô97, a memorable evening was spent with Ivan Cartwright who sat and talked and showed bits of old movies in a programme called "From Huddersfield To Hollywood" - a bit of a shambles but Ivan is cute and charming and it was all right. Lana Turner seemed to crop up several times, specifically in relation to "Imitation Of Life" (great film!) and the Johnny Stompanato murder case. I'd always assumed in that National Enquirer/Hollywood Babylon-type way that Lana had done the deed herself and let her daughter Cheryl take the blame, but Ivan was quite certain this was not the case when I asked about it in the Q&A sesssion, so certain that I felt mean just for mentioning it.

I resolved to read that cheap book by Lana's personal-assistant-for-ten-years to see what he had to say on the matter, and did so without delay. Although he points out the usual inconsistencies in the story and the relative strengths of a 14 year-old girl and a mobster sidekick /bodyguard, he eventually goes with the official version of events (that Cheryl alone was responsible), buts adds a new twist, suggesting that young Cheryl was herself in love with Johnny and the motive was jealousy.

The book is total trash (surprise!), mostly covering Lana's fading career and increasing neuroses in the the late 60s and 70s, written in that bland semi-conversational tone where they use words like "helluva" a lot - pretty standard with these kind of things. But if it's not great literature, it does have its moments - one classic line goes "... there has never been a woman before or since who looks as good as in a turban as Lana" and there is another illuminating sequence where he describes Lana watching tv all day, carefully writing down the names of all the new products advertised and sending him out to buy all of them for her to try out ("It didn't matter if it was a new popcorn popper, a doll that wets itself when it laughs too hard, or a miracle seed grower.")

I can see it now - the moral of Lana's story is: money can't buy you love, but it can supply you with glamour and lots of husbands and exciting consumer durables. It could be worse.

LANA - 2 more things (postscript)

Finally read "Detour" by Lana Turner's daughter Cheryl Crane before xmas '98 (- thanks Dolly) and I was impressed by how good it was. I'm used to dredging through the usual bland badly written trash hollywood biogs, so this was a real surprise - well written, candid and goods-delivering without being sleazy or exploitative, and quite involving and personal too. I felt much more positive towards Lana when I finished it, even though she doesn't come out of it very well, so I was extra thrilled to pick up a copy of MODERN SCREEN from feb 1959 including Lana's first interview after the "tragedy" of Good Friday 1958 in it! And it is pretty tragic. There she is, worn out, trying to put a positive spin on living all alone in a tiny condo she has to pretend to like, and it's pretty obvious things are bleak, bleak and bleaker for her. More or less estranged from her mother and daughter, her career's on the skids after being dumped by MGM after 18 years, scarred by a string of bad relationships and being gossiped about all over the world after the murder of her last lover, mob bodyguard and bad man Johnny Stompanato.

The pics are telling too; there are 5 small old-ish publicity pics in black and white of her looking fabulous and one big colour pic taken for the interview where she looks strained, puffy, tired and (gulp!) old - the contrast is pretty obvious AND THE INTERVIEW ISN'T EVEN MENTIONED ON THE COVER OF THE MAG! But Hollywood is Hollywood (or at least it was) and this is just a moment in time - a few months later the awesome "IMITATION OF LIFE", the film sold mostly on the crest of press speculation about her and Cheryl and Johnny, opened and she was back in the big money with a percentage of the profits and back on top as Lana Turner Superstar. Hooray! Below Cheryl tells of some rare mother-daughter bonding at the age of twelve:

'In her Louis XVI bathroom suite, she showed me surprising things about her beauty routine. She could afford the world's costliest creams (and had even endorsed one or two) but she herself used humble products bought in the five-and-dime. After bathing, she slathered her body with Nivea cream, and, once a week to achieve deep=--down cleansing of pores, she scrubbed her face with a paste made of Twenty Mule Team Boraxo, an industrial strength scouring powder used to clean greasy hands. Mother recalled with a laugh that back when she shared her Boraxo secret with Kathryn Grayson, at the time the leading soprano at MGM, Kathryn accused mother of trying to sabotage her face.'

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