Waters: An 'X' man no more?

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - John Waters, who once made a living slinging stones through American culture’s stained-glass windows, returns to us this week with a safe-for-the-entire-family, singing-and-dancing “Hairspray,” thus bringing to the lips of all Baltimoreans who have memories a simple question: Who knew?

Back in the 1960s, when the teenage Waters cut high school at Calvert Hall to embrace his inner beatnik and skulk around city streets making all these weird counterculture movies to screen in rented church basements for a small following of the culturally disenfranchised — who knew?

Back in the ’70s, when he made the movies that brought him his first fame and public revulsion — such as “Eat Your Makeup” and “Pink Flamingos,” the stuff where he dressed up Glenn Milstead and the two of them invented a woman named Divine, thus causing Mary Avera and the Maryland censor board to pull out their hair — who knew?

Who knew it would come to this?

Respectability.

Go figure.

“I pride myself,” Waters once said, “on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.”

He was kidding. The awful truth about Waters, now 61, is that his work’s always been about social values. But he was so far ahead of a nervous America’s Puritan curve, and so insistent on telling his comic tales without the slightest subtlety, that the self-righteous among us chose to take offense that he was making us so uncomfortable rather than pay attention to his message.

He was taking our worst nightmares and saying we don’t have to cringe from them, not if we laugh at them instead. He was saying we all have demons inside us, but it’s better to whistle past the graveyard than to let the damned things haunt us. And, in his own sweetly demented way, he was saying it’s not right to ostracize people because of their sexuality, or their race, or their looks.

“Within the wildness of his imagination,” said Rosemary Knower, who has acted in every Waters movie since the original version of “Hairspray,” “he’s an enormously civil, clear, courteous and disciplined director. And his movies are saying to us that people on the fringes of society are human beings. Despite their unconventional ways, they fit into a kind of social contract. It may not be one you agree with, but they’re not outlaws just because they’re not part of the great middle ground.”

“My instinct,” Waters said the other day while finishing his summer vacation in New England, “has always been to make fun with it, not of it. It’s to let all of us confront our fears. If you can make them laugh, they’ll listen.”

“Hairspray” is Waters with a $70 million laugh and a spring in its step, even as it pauses along the way to flash us with an open raincoat just to remind us who’s behind this little fable.
It’s the big-budget Hollywood version of the Broadway musical that was inspired by Waters’ original “Hairspray” movie — which, as we know around here, was inspired by “The Buddy Deane Show,” a dance program that ran from 1957 to 1964, when a simple question was asked and nobody had an answer: Why can’t black kids and white kids dance on the same television program?

That most of us now understand the absurdity, and the cruelty, of enforced racial segregation indicates how far the country has come — and how long Waters has waited for a lot of people to catch up with him.

It also shows how much America loves a happy ending, even if we have to make one up.

“In real life,” Waters said, recalling the “Buddy Deane” program, “it ended badly for everybody. I mean, the kids all loved it, the ratings were great. But nobody knew what to do about letting blacks and whites dance on the same show, so they ended it. We give a happy ending, instead.”

Deane always said he would have been happy letting the kids dance on the same day. He said he questioned the show’s regular dancers — the Committee members, all of them white — and their attitude was: We go to school with black kids, it’s not a big deal to us. But they figured their parents would have had conniptions. WJZ, not knowing what to do, simply ended the show.

“Who knows what the real story is?” Waters asked. “I know that Buddy was angry with ’JZ. I talked with him through the years, and he was pretty fair on race. But, let’s face it, the show was a reflection of Baltimore and of the whole country when we were just beginning to deal with integration.”

“Hairspray” is a sweet, funny, charming and sometimes inspiring fairy tale version of those days. In truth, time has healed not only the racial angle, but some Baltimoreans’ reactions to the show nearly half a century ago.

“I watched it all the time,” Waters said, “because I lived in Lutherville.” He laughed out loud at the memory. “My parents thought the ‘Buddy Deane’ kids were the opposite of what they wanted for me. The ‘Buddy Deane’ boys were getting their pegged pants from Lee’s of Broadway, and the girls would go to Etta Gowns. It seemed like racy stuff. My parents wanted me in Bermuda shorts and crew cuts. They wanted me to grow up and live in Ruxton. My mother used to take me shopping at Frank Leonard’s, but my heart was with Lee’s of Broadway.”

In “Hairspray,” the Committee members are stars. In real life, being a TV regular had its real perils.

“Oh, they were the Mouseketeers, they were on TV every day,” Waters said with a laugh. “But reaction depended on where you were. In one part of town, these kids were getting beat up. In another, they were signing autographs. Teachers hated you if you were on ‘Buddy Deane.’ That’s what I liked about them.”

The ’50s and early ’60s were a time of great teenage conformity. But Waters said he never felt any pressure to conform.

“Never,” he said. “When I was 4, I didn’t have it. I was interested in weird stuff right from the beginning. And my parents, to their credit, didn’t discourage it. You know, you work with what you got. You can’t order up your kids. I wanted to go downtown and be a beatnik. I was cutting school all the time. I was barely not thrown out. I’d cut class and go down to the old Howard Theater, at Howard and Lexington, where you could watch exploitation movies all day long for 35 cents if you got there early enough. The cost went up every hour.

“Or Divine and I would go to The Block to see Lady Zorro, a stripper who looked like Johnny Cash. Or at night, we’d go to the Dixie Ballroom at Gwynn Oak Park to watch Peaches and the Upsetters. Peaches was a black transvestite. The fraternity boys would cheer for him and beat him up afterwards. See, I was looking for the extremes in the culture, even then.”

But, in a lot of ways, the culture caught up (or ran further away).

“I don’t know how much we’ve changed,” Waters said. “I don’t know if you could have a teen afternoon dance program even today with mixed-race slow dancing. Except, I don’t know if the kids slow dance any more, do they?”

What would Buddy Deane make of all this? Waters says he took Deane to see the Broadway production of “Hairspray” not long before he died. Buddy loved it. His big rival, of course, was Dick Clark, whose “American Bandstand” TV show ran everywhere but Baltimore.

“I told Buddy that Dick Clark came to see the show, and he had to pay to get in,” Waters said. “He loved that. I think he enjoyed that more than anything.”

A John Waters primer

» First professional inspiration: For his 16th birthday, his maternal grandmother, Stella Whitaker, bought John a 16-millimeter movie camera.

» First movie: “Hag in a Black Leather Jacket.” The movie was shown once, at a downtown Baltimore coffeehouse in 1964.

» When he grew his famous pencil-thin mustache: When he was 19. “I wanted to look like Little Richard,” Waters said.

» Why wasn’t “Hairspray” shot in Baltimore?: “The Maryland Film Commission tried for years to work something out,” Waters said. “Everybody wanted to shoot it here. But we’re behind on those rebates that other states are now giving to moviemakers. It’s a real issue. Plus, we don’t have a real big soundstage here.”

» Did Waters ever appear on “The Buddy Deane Show”?: “Twice. Both times, I went as somebody’s guest,” he said. “Once, they did the show live at the Timonium Fairgrounds, and the Kalin twins had to lip-sync their song while they rode the Ferris wheel.”

» Waters’ reaction when he’s recognized in public: As he told New York Magazine: “People are usually so nice. Sometimes they just mouth, ‘Thank you.’ It makes me feel like Oprah.”

olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com