Jeremiah Newton talks with director Craig Highberger, whose documentary Superstar in a Housedress resurrects the legendary Jackie Curtis.

Jackie Curtis portrait by Jack Mitchell. Photographed in Mitchell's New York City studio on May 21, 1970 for After Dark magazine.

One snowy evening on West 8th Street in 1966, through the introduction of photographer Diane Arbus, I met the playwright/performer Jackie Curtis. At the time, Jackie was just another cute teenager, but already considered by many to be a “boy genius”. As a playwright/performer he was passionately active in the exciting world of Off-Off Broadway, an era distinctly marked by large personalities and enormous creativity. I would later learn that seeing this human dynamo onstage was a huge treat. No one wrote comedy like Jackie and no one acted like Jackie onstage — and there was a large audience of sophisticated New Yorkers who eagerly looked forward to seeing his plays, performance pieces, cabaret acts, and later, his films and videos (the best for the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey team).

Craig Highberger’s wonderful documentary, Superstar in a Housedress, brings the life and times of this creative genius back to the big screen using interviews and rare archival footage. For me, the occasion is bittersweet; Jackie is long-gone and there’s no one that even faintly wears his mantle. But seeing this film resurrects Curtis again and proves to me, he’s been gone waaaaay too too long. — Jeremiah Newton

Jeremiah Newton: The late Jackie Curtis is quoted as saying “I am not a boy, not a girl, I am not gay, not straight, I am not a drag queen, not a transsexual, I am just me, Jackie.” Who is Jackie Curtis anyway, and how did you, as a young person attending NYU Film School in 1972, react to someone like Jackie when you first encountered her?

Craig Highberger: Well, actually, I first encountered Jackie in Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol’s film Flesh. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and while I was a senior in high school, I snuck out to Carnegie Mellon University to see Flesh, which was showing there. And there was a scene in that film where Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling were sitting on a couch…

Newton: And Joe [Dallesandro] was getting a b.j.

Highberger: Exactly. (Laughs) And I was enthralled. I had never seen [anything like it]. I knew I was gay at that time, I felt isolated in a suburban high school, but I thought I was the only one.

Andy Warhol was from Pittsburgh, and my uncle, who was an industrial designer, had gone to Carnegie Mellon University with Andy Warhol and was in some of his classes, and so I was very aware of Andy Warhol and the Warhol scene, and I had heard about Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. And then I saw Flesh.

At that point I had been making Super 8 films, and won a contest on Public Television for young filmmakers when I was in high school, and so I knew I wanted to make my career in films and television. And so when I got into NYU Film School, I was so excited I was going to live in Greenwich Village, and I hoped that I would get to meet Jackie and Candy and Andy Warhol.

Jackie Curtis running through a scene with Director Paul Morrissey and cameraman Andy Warhol during the 1971 filming of Women in Revolt. Photo Credit: Gretche

Newton: When was this?

Highberger: I think it was 1972.

Newton: That was a pivotal year for Jackie and Candy for many reasons. They made Women in Revolt. And also Candy made several films in Germany for director Werner Schroeder [such as The Death of Maria Malibran (1971), with Magdalena Montezuma].

Highberger: Oh my goodness, yes! Well, I went to New York and my first week there I met Jackie. And it was just a really fortuitous meeting and we became immediate friends.

Newton: How did you meet her?

Highberger: There was some gay group that wanted to meet in a campus building at the university and the administration was kind of hemming and hawing about it, and so there was this big demonstration in the basement of my dormitory at NYU. But the incredible thing was, Jackie showed up because Jackie knew there would be press coverage, or TV would likely be there, and Jackie was a publicity hound —

Newton: A publicity whore!

Highberger: Yeah, but she was also [an important figure] in the history of gay liberation because Jackie was famous for having that mock wedding on top of a tenement, shortly after Stonewall, on the very day the first astronauts landed on the moon. (Laughs)

So all this just came into play, and there was Jackie at this protest, in drag. And I just went nuts, because I recognized Jackie immediately and was just so thrilled to know him. And that’s actually how it began.

Filmmaker Craig Highberger and Jackie Curtis at the Fortune Theater in 1974. Highberger had just completed videotaping Jackie starring in Glamour, Glory and Gold.

Newton: She must have found you thoroughly enchanting with all that curly blonde hair!

Highberger: (Laughs) Yeah, and we ran around a lot, and went to parties, and through Jackie I met Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn and, eventually, Andy Warhol, at the opening of some film at the Playboy Theater. I can’t remember what it was. Maybe it was Holly Woodlawn’s Broken Goddess.

Newton: That was a short film by a director who is now dead, Peter Dallas.

Highberger: Is he dead?

Newton: Yeah, he’s been dead for many years from AIDS.

Highberger: I don’t think Holly knows that, because I asked her. Ooh. I’ll have to tell her.

Newton: Jackie herself has been gone since 1985. When did you first decide you wanted to do a documentary on her life and times?

Highberger: I wanted to do a documentary on Jackie the moment I met Jackie. And actually, the work of making Superstar in a Housedress, you can say, began in 1974 — because it’s like 30 years ago almost to the day that we’re opening the film theatrically. Thirty years ago I was in New York [filming] Jackie’s play Glamour, Glory and Gold, in 1974.

Newton: Glamour, Glory and Gold was 1972, I think.

Highberger: This was the revival. The original was in 1967 — with Robert DeNiro and everyone.

Newton: That’s right, it was her first play.

Highberger: But I have all the original tapes, and I had a Sony Portapack which was this incredibly wonderful new tool that would allow you to shoot black-and-white, open-reel, half-inch [videotape]. In its day it was very high quality.

Newton: The only one [I know of] who had anything similar to that was Anton Perich.

Highberger: Isn’t that funny.

Newton: Anton actually carried that thing to Max’s Kansas City and videoed everyone he could possibly video, so he’s got a lot of great footage also.

Jackie Curtis as Frances Farmer in "I Died Yesterday" at Ellen Stewart's La Mama Experimental Theater Club in 1983. Photo Credit: Craig Highberger.

Highberger: Isn’t that great! So anyway, I recorded Jackie’s entire play at the Fortune Theater in 1974, and I did it for Jackie and director Ron Link, because they wanted to be able to show the play or parts of the play at cocktail parties to try to find investors to take the film to a large venue.

Newton: And were they successful with that?

Highberger: Unfortunately, no.

Newton: But you still have the film.

Highberger: Yeah, I have a full-length recording of that entire event. And then I also recorded Jackie many other times. For instance, Cabaret in the Sky, with Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis.

Newton:  That’s your footage? Boy, that’s great.

Highberger: Yeah, I shot that in it’s entirety. And then also I shot many poetry performances that Jackie did, which is so fortunate, because it really was the basis of my documentary. And so I kind of bided my time until I could afford the equipment to make [this film] myself.

Newton: Could you tell the people who are going to hopefully see your film who Jackie Curtis was?

Highberger: Jackie Curtis’s real name was John Holder, Jr. His parents divorced when he was very young. His father wanted to live in Tennessee and his mother, who was from Manhattan, couldn’t handle it, and so the marriage ended. And when Jackie was a baby, Jackie’s mom actually brought Jackie home to New York, and he was actually raised by his grandmother who had a bar called Slugger Anne’s. So Jackie grew up in this Lower East Side milieu — sort of like in Guys and Dolls. And hanging out at the bar, he saw all these colorful characters.

Jackie Curtis in "James Dean" mode at home in his Lower East Side Manhattan apartment in early 1974. Photo Credit: Craig Highberger.

Jackie fell in love with the movies and went to movies a lot, and decided he wanted to be an actor. He wrote a play when he was in high school, in 1965, called Glamour, Glory and Gold.

Newton: Candy Darling always told the story of how Jackie wrote that on the Long Island Railroad on his way to see her.

Highberger: That’s quite true. Jackie wrote it off and on for a couple of years. And then Playwrights Workshop [produced it]. And it was a great success. And Jackie did not play the lead. I believe it was Melba Larose, Jr. And it was Robert DeNiro’s first appearance on the stage.

Newton: Do you know how he got that part?

Highberger: Uhhh, something to do with the posters. His mother had a printing plant.

Newton: This is the story I heard, I don’t know if it’s true: DeNiro’s mom, who was an artist, and his father was an artist too, came up to Jackie and said, “Put my son in the show and I will make all the costumes for you!” So he got the part. (Laughs)

Highberger: I’ve heard that version and I’ve also heard that they designed the poster and printed the poster for the show.

Newton: Well, we’ll have to ask Bobby, but I don’t know if Bobby will answer.

Highberger: We’ll have to ask him! But anyway, he also appeared in that with Candy Darling playing some of the minor roles. Then, around that time, Jackie ran into Andy Warhol.

Newton: And the rest is history.

Highberger: And the rest is history — because Warhol was entranced with Jackie, and Warhol and Paul Morrissey cast Jackie in Flesh.

Newton: It was the right time for transgendered people because Andy was very, very annoyed with all of these actresses who, he complained, had periods all the time. (Laughs) So he said, the hell with this, let’s get some guy who doesn’t have periods. And that’s how Candy and Holly and Jackie became involved in The Factory. And of course, superstars like Ultraviolet were furious with Andy — “How could you do this to us?” And he got into many, many fights with Viva and Ultraviolet, and I think he was just fed up. So he got these wonderful people, and to see them on stage or on film was a joy.

Highberger: And what people should know about Jackie Curtis is that he was not just a drag queen. He was a celebrated and successful playwright and poet. As Lily Tomlin says in my documentary, you could never tell if Jackie was going to show up at your house or at your party as a man or as a woman, because Jackie could very easily put on a little wig and a little makeup and a little glitter under his eyes, and put on a dress, no falsies, ripped stockings, and that was the way he would go out. And he would really do a unique type of drag that had never been done before, where it was kind of performance art. He was very beguiling and interesting when he was doing Jackie Curtis-girl.

Newton: He was. Certainly she was.

In the days before video cameras became the norm, how difficult was it to track down archival footage on someone who has now been gone almost 20 years.

Highberger: I was able to come up with 16mm and 8mm silent film that people had shot, which was marvelous, although some of it was not terrific quality because it had been shot in theaters under stage lights and, after 30 year, the color emulsion had deteriorated. So it took enormous amounts of color correction and luminance adjustment to get it to look useable at all. Those make up some good cutaways though. And I did use many different sources. Actually, the best thing I did when I began this film project about four years ago was to establish a Web site first [at www.jackiecurtis.com].

Newton: It’s a wonderful Web site. And I heard you also raised money by selling things on eBay.

Highberger: Yes. First I set up a Web site to give the project legitimacy. And then I realized I had to raise money to afford some of the equipment I needed, and to be to travel around the country to interview people. And I decided this is the project I want to do more than anything, so what can I sell? And thank goodness for the Internet and eBay: Like most filmmakers I love film, so I had a huge collection of films on the old Laserdisc format which predated DVD, and VHS. I’m talking about commercial videos. I had hundreds, and they all sold. And I raised a lot of money that way.

Newton: So you’re not a millionaire filmmaker.

Highberger: (Laughs) No. No.

Newton: How did you get Lily Tomlin to do the narration? — because that’s fabulous.

Highberger: Lily is marvelous. And let me tell you about the whole process, because this would be of interest to other filmmakers. The first problem I encountered was I knew a lot of the people I wanted to interview. A lot of them I had to research and find out if they were still alive, and how to find them. So again, this is where the technology and the Internet came in. The first person I was able to find and easily interview was Penny Arcade, because she’s in New York, where she always has been and is still working. And Penny had a Web site and I got in contact with her and she immediately said yes, she’d love to be interviewed in a documentary about Jackie and to come over. Then I was searching through La Mama’s Web site and found Ellen Stuart.

After I interviewed Penny and Ellen Stuart at La Mama, Ellen introduced me to Michael Arian, who had performed with Jackie. And then through Ellen and Michael, I was working with Ellen Stuart’s archivist, and he introduced me to John Vaccaro, founder of the Playhouse of the Ridiculous, who said come right over and interview me. So I got four really great interviews in a couple of days. One person led to three more, and before I knew it I had 30 people interviewed over a couple of years.

But Holly Woodlawn I had known, so when I got in touch with Holly out in West Hollywood where she lives, she actually helped me get Joe Dalessandro’s phone number and I also got a couple of other people out in Hollywood who had worked with Jackie — Alexis DeLago and Styles Caldwell.

Newton: I have to tell you that your interview with Joe Dallesandro and Paul Morrissey was excellent. Paul is and remains always a wonderful filmmaker, just so inventive, and I wish a lot of people made films like he did.

Highberger: A real genius, and amazing, unique works. I got Paul Morrissey’s number from Holly Woodlawn, and he was very gracious, and we set up a time and I went to his home in Manhattan and recorded a wonderful interview with him, and he allowed me to use about three minutes of clips from Flesh and Women in Revolt. Which, intercut with his interview, it’s so illuminating.

Newton: Paul, you know, is trying to make Trash 2.

Highberger: Wouldn’t that be great?!

Newton: It certainly would be wonderful, and I’m so happy that Joe and Holly Woodlawn are still around to reprise their performance.

Highberger: It’s fantastic. So you asked about Lily Tomlin, and this is really interesting. The remaining family member who had all of Jackie’s belongings was Joe Preston, Jackie’s cousin. And Joe Preston very graciously opened up the stored boxes of Jackie’s belonging and went through them with me, and it was a very emotional thing because I found in Jackie’s scrapbooks pictures of myself, and I was in Jackie’s address book, and it was really very moving and very sad at the same time.

Newton: Of course.

Highberger: But I turned one page of the scrapbook, and there was a telegram to La Mama Experimental Theater Club on the opening night of Jackie Curtis’s Vain Victory in 1971, and the telegram was, “We are thinking of you and loving you, signed Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner.” And I was so excited, because I had no idea that Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner knew Jackie, and were obviously close friends and loved Jackie’s work. So I immediately sought out Lily Tomlin’s agent, and the personal assistant was actually the person who put me in touch with Lily, and she responded immediately and said that, oh yes, she and Jane loved Jackie and Candy Darling and would be very happy to be interviewed on camera for my film. And then I asked, well, I have some narration, would you consider recording the narration for me, and to my joy she said yes to that too.

But, while you can get a celebrity to say yes they will do it, getting on their schedule is the trick. Because Lily was at the time not only appearing on West Wing, which was still shooting, but was also appearing in a motion picture and also starting up a new production of Jane Wagner’s play Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. And so it actually took me five months until I was able to get an afternoon to spend with Lily and do the interview and record the narration.

Newton: Well, she is wonderful. Lily was always such a good friend to Jackie and Candy, and Candy took me to Carnegie Hall to see her, and backstage. And it was great. She was just a warm, genuine human being and I adore her.

Last question. Can you talk a bit about recent advances in computer and digital editing technology that made it possible for you to make Superstar in a Housedress.

Highberger: This film would not exist if it weren’t for the extremely high quality capable with the DVCAM format. I purchased a Sony PD150 about 2-1/2 years ago. The picture quality is equivalent to 16mm film which as you know can be blown up to 35mm — which I had to do. But at the time I was shooting I never dreamed I’d get international distribution and have to blow up to 35mm.

The other thing is the affordability now of high quality redundant video arrays. I ended up buying a 320 gigabyte redundant array, because I had begun with a video-capable hard drive which was not redundant and, indeed, I had a drive failure after I had spent about 5 months digitizing and had begun editing segments of the film. One day the computer crashed and the drive did not reappear. So I went through a horrible, horrible week where the drive was being serviced, and they were able to resurrect the drive with some parts, and I didn’t lose anything, but I realized it could happen again, so I immediately sold some more stuff on eBay and bought a redundant array.

Newton: You are so fortunate, and we are all so fortunate, because for people like myself who knew Jackie Curtis, you made a very moving film, and it’s wonderful to get into a time capsule and to go back again and see Jackie young and full of energy, and to realize how everyone misses Jackie. And also, now Jackie will get a whole new audience of admirers, and as we know in film, that’s a way of staying young forever and living forever through film.

Highberger: It is!

Jeremiah Newton has written a one-character play on Candy Darling that will be part of this year’s Howl Festival. He is credited in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol with “Additional scenes and dialogue” and his character is portrayed by actor Danny Morganstern. He is the Film and Television Industry Liaison for New York University.