TWENTY YEARS A-CROSSDRESSING

MY FAVOURITE publican leant over the elbow-worn bar with the look of one about to announce favourable news of the sort which can reasonably be expected to elicit if not spontaneous orgasm, then at least whoops of delight. Eyebrow raised, voice tuned to a conspiratorial tone, he said: “I, ah, imagine you’ll be coming to the Rocky Horror party?”

It was more rhetorical than anything else. Of course I’ll be there. The outcome is guaranteed to be as camp as Christmas, and what woman with her roots firmly planted in the golden age of the New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and The Cramps is going to miss out on a chance to mingle with a flurry of young men tarted up in lipstick, fishnets and stilettos. It won’t be the first time and it certainly won’t be the last. Nor will it be a unique event: the Rocky Horror theme party is as traditional as turkey and stuffing, particularly at this time of the year. Why? Because where other theme parties can be very touch and go, one inspired by Rocky Horror is almost guaranteed to convey a unique atmosphere all of its own, one of excess, frivolity and general daftness. There is no choice but to jump in and enjoy. Costumes are also fairly cheap and easy to throw together compared to other film-theme parties, Jurassic Park or Terminator 2 by way of example.

And you don’t have to explain to anyone what kind of a shindig it is you’re talking about. It makes you think. One way or another, there can be few of us who have not to some extent been touched by the far-reaching scarlet-nailed fingers of the Rocky Horror Show, now enjoying a staggering twentieth year of cult fame and infecting one generation after another with its glittering black humour.

RAVING TRANNY

To attempt to measure the extent of its influence and appeal is to attempt to calculate in your head the square root of the total number of holes in Tim Curry’s fishnets while doing the Time Warp with a feather boa concealing your line of vision. In a nutshell, bloody difficult. An oft-overlooked seminal influence on Goth, the launch pad of Meatloaf’s career, a convenient theme for an outrageous party, an excuse to get done up like vampire junkie transvestite, a new religion for an age of excess and self-expression, something for sad, lonely people to do so they can feel like they belong for an evening: all of this and so, so much more. In a genre quite of its own, no movie has ever rivalled either Rocky’s status or its broad appeal. The shocking, sexy, tongue in cheek drag movies of John Waters probably form the nearest parallel, but they have provoked neither the dedicated following who have watched Rocky hundreds of times nor the bizarre cult of audience participation.

There is a school of thought which credits the film’s undying success to the enthusiastic and individual performances turned in by an all-but unheard of cast, most markedly Richard O’Brien in the role of Riff Raff and Tim Curry as Dr. Frank’N’Furter himself. For a raving tranny, Frank’N’Furter remains utterly male for all his OTT campness. He sings “I’m not much of a man but I’m one hell of a dame,” but he succeeds in twinning those hoary, horny old movie clichés of sexy, unscrupulous, virgin-seducing villain with evil, scheming, dangerous seductress to create a doubly-alluring creature which for all its absurdity is All Man. It is now impossible to imagine anyone else personifying that exotic extraterrestrial with quite the same degree of lewd charm.

If God moves in mysterious ways, then the Devil goes about his part in the ineffable plan with enough surreal twists and turns to make Salvador Dali’s eyes water. Just consider Rocky’s subject matter for a moment, and wonder at the miraculous power of comedy to get things past the censors and bring a little perversity into the humdrum of existence.

It’s not the drag. No-one’s shocked by transvestites any more. They are, and always have been, a staple part of the British comedy diet. Whether it’s Danny LaRue, the queen who performed for the Queen by royal command, or Dame Edna Everage or Dick Emery or Charlie Chaplin or Bernard Bresslaw, the Brits have been gender bending for profit and pleasure at the least provocation since time immemorial. Shakespearean heroines were originally played by pretty young boys, for chrissakes. But cross-dressing aside, what other forbidden fruits does the Rocky Horror Show serve up to us in so tantalising a guise that we cannot help but be tempted?

It is a tale in which staunch middle-class values and morality are mocked and challenged (yeah, fair enough) by an amoral, bisexual alien transvestite being possessed of the sacrilegious desire to play God. In just seven days he makes himself a man – a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, muscle-bound Ubermensch such as would doubtless have prompted one Adolph Hitler to immediately give his bratwurst a good twanging – and promptly sets about trying to seduce it.

Through deceit, he succeeds in compromising the respective virtues of both Brad and Janet, a respectable young couple on the brink of engagement and a life of wedded pleasantness. And makes you gloat in their downfall . . . or is it liberation? He holds court to a mish-mash of sexual deviants including the incestuous Riff Raff and Magenta – orders a murder and causes his guests to engage in cannibalism. And we end up feeling sorry for him when his reign of perversity comes to a violent halt.

Ah, but true to the formula of the B-movies which helped inspire the film, the charismatic villain does get his come-uppance. And, he is after all an alien.

Theological Implications

It’s a mistake to allot Rocky fun status only. There is substance behind the slapstick. Like Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, there’s thought-provoking stuff in there, but the kind of thoughts that maybe you’d screen out if your giggle-filter wasn’t sneaking them in by the funny route. No, I’m not going to start intellectualising on you, but the central message (sorry) of “Don’t dream it, be it,” was, to some of us, an incitement to rampant individualism. Taking Mary Shelley’s momentous Frankenstein one step further into the arena of sexual experimentation of the seventies Me generation, the story’s theological implications vie with Cook and Moore’s Bedazzled as one of the great unsung instructional movies which should be screened in all religious education classes.

On reflection, the acid might have had something to do with it, but at the end of the day, you can either fight your personal brand of weirdness, or just get on with living life and enjoy being what you are, weaknesses, flaws and all. The pursuit of pleasure above all. Echoes of Rimbaud and pursuing the path to enlightenment through excess and exhaustion of the senses.

But most importantly of all, the film entertains. This is an all-singing, all-dancing show; farce, fantasy and an ample portion of fetishism all rolled up into a consumer friendly package so far removed from reality as to be completely safe.

Diabolical intervention almost certainly played a role in bringing about this musical insanity. Both the stage and film versions of Rocky Horror enjoyed more than a wink and a nudge from Fate. And rightly so: its unique flavour inspired enthusiasm and a will for it to succeed along a trail of influential people, who never stopped believing in it, even when doom seemed as inevitable as the deflowering of Rocky.

It all started out reasonably enough with cheese farming and the fact that Richard O’Brien didn’t quite consider a pastoral existence in New Zealand an adequate outlet for his talents. He returned to London, where he appeared in two films (Carry On Cowboy and Casino Royale) as well as the then hit musical Hair, in which Tim Curry was also performing. During his years in New Zealand, a country not known for its plethora of distractions and amusements, O’Brien fed his developing mind on horror B-movies, fifties musicals and Steve Reeves muscle flicks. Somehow, it all fused together in his mind, and he began penning a three-chord musical all of his very own.

It was during a brief, if unsuccessful stint as Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar that he seized the opportunity to corner director Jim Sharman and elicit his interest in the end product: They Came From Denton High. Through Sharman, a solo acoustic recording of O’Brien singing Science Fiction Double Feature found its way into the entrepreneurial ears of independent theatre producer Michael White. Bitten by the bug, he agreed to finance the play’s production. Methodist minister’s son and Birmingham University graduate Tim Curry auditioned for the part of Rocky, but did so with such a raucous rendition of ‘Tutti Frutti’ that he landed the now legendary role of Dr. Frank’N’Furter.

On June 19th, 1973, history was born at the Royal Court Theatre, when the curtain rose for the first time on The Rocky Horror Show. The glitter, glitz and glamour epitomised all that was great about the flippant, fun-loving seventies, and even the critics loved it. The staunchly conservative Evening Standard went so far as to name it Best Musical of 1973. Surprise, surprise, Britt Ekland happened to be in the audience one evening, and was so taken with the cavorting capers of Frank’N’Furter ’n’ Co. that she dragged a jet-lagged and more than a little reluctant Lou Adler along to a performance. Adler reminisced: “From the first moment I entered the theatre, cobwebs, flash light, white-faced ushers and the opening chord of Science Fiction, I had the feeling you get when you see or hear something very special for the first time.”

“Hey, Asshole!”

So special, that within two days he had bought the American rights from Michael White. Its first nine month gestation period in London was followed by a wildly successful nine-month stint at Adler’s Roxy Theater on Sunset Strip, Hollywood. Curiously, John Travolta and Richard Gere both failed auditions for the L.A. production of this eminently tasteful musical. Next step celluloid, and filming for Twentieth Century Fox started in England on October 21st, 1974. Six weeks of shooting with most of the original London cast later, and a Broadway production was launched to help hype the movie. But Rocky’s star was slipping from its ascendant, and the cosmopolitan people of New York were not impressed. It survived for 45 performances before folding.

When the movie made its debut on September 24th, 1975, it was only at the UA Theater in Westwood Village, a college town surrounding UCLA, that it was received by packed houses. Everywhere else, it was largely ignored. However, it had come to the attention of Adler and Twentieth Century Fox marketing director Tim Deegan that a small, dedicated group of followers was returning to the UA Theater again and again. They apparently came to the decision to ‘let the audience find the film and vice-versa’ rather than attempt an enormously expensive hype.

The secret, as they eventually found, lay in midnight screenings. The type of people who were going to be wooed by Rocky liked to be out and about after the witching hour. It started with the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village and gradually spread to other cinemas across the country, with the ending edited to kill off the Super Heroes and Science Fiction reprise. And then it started. The first signs set in of a new virus, a new religion: audience participation, Rocky Horror Show style. The first evidence of a strange attractor at play was on the opening night at the UA Westwood. Shortly after, sightings of cinema goers slinging rice, doing the Time Warp in the aisles and subsidising the characters’ utterings with questions and comments of their own, began to spiral out of all proportion. To this day, Barry Bostwick, or Brad as you know him, is regularly hailed by utter strangers with the amicable cry of “Hey, Asshole!”

By 1977, this phenomenon had reached its logical conclusion: “The Rocky Horror Revue” was performed by a dressed-up lip-synching troupe at the Fox Venice Theater in L.A. Others followed, but the most famous group came creeping out of the woodwork at the Waverly Theater, later going on to form the official fan club which boasted 20,000 members at its peak.

Rocky 2

Meanwhile, the stage show, by now running at the 400-seater Kings Road Theatre, enjoyed a straight seven-year run from 1974. Touring companies made sure the incomparable experience was shared by a host of foreign punters from Japan to Norway, with Gary Glitter notably taking Curry’s role for the New Zealand version. Sadly, there is no recorded proof of what must surely have been a highlight from the Leader’s illustrious career.

There was a sequel. Shock Treatment, featuring most of the original Rocky cast, was released in 1979 at the height of Rocky Horror fever and . . . bombed abysmally.

For the record, the story line rotated around Brad and Janet. While she is being groomed for TV stardom, his mental health is deteriorating, until he is committed to an asylum. But guess who’s in charge of the asylum? Yep. Richard O’Brien and Patricia Quinn in the guises of Doctor Cosmo and Nation McKinley. Little Nell appears as Nurse Ansalong as does Charles Gray as Judge Oliver Wright.

But no-one cared. It hit the video stores for a while, missed, and has vanished into obscurity. The legend of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, meanwhile lives on . . .

WHERE DID THEY Come from and where did they go?

Essential Rocky Horror Show Ephemera For The Connoisseur

Tim Curry (Dr. Frank’N’Furter): Performed in Hair, 1968-’70. Assorted TV work including Rock Follies and Will Shakespeare. nominated for a Tony Award for his appearance in Amadeus. Films including Annie, Legend, Times Square, Clue, The Hunt for Red October and more recently as the evil clown in Stephen King’s It. He has recorded albums, including Read My Lips, Fearless, SOS and a 1989 Best Of.

Richard O’Brien (author and Riff Raff): Film work including Jubilee and Flash Gordon. Stage: Uggers and Me, Mickey Mouse Now! and rock musical T-Zee. I think he also played an abducted rock star in a film called It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll but I wouldn’t swear to it. Appeared in Robin Of Sherwood. Cut a single with his then wife Kimi Wong under the name “Kimi and Ritz”. Presented popular game show The Crystal Maze.

Patricia Quinn (Magenta): Claims she was second choice for the role after Marianne Faithful who was “off in India with her guru.” Theatre: AC/DC and Stipwell. Films: Up The Chastity Belt, Rent A Dick, Up The Front, The Garnett Saga, Shoulder To Shoulder, Disaster, Sara B. Divine, The Meaning Of Life and I, Claudius.

Little Nell (Columbia): Born Laura Campbell, the former Australian Olympic swimmer won the role by tap dancing while serving Jim Sharman and Brian Thompson with ice-cream. Film: Litsztomania, Jubilee. TV: Rock Follies, The Alternative Miss World. Stage: Mickey Mouse Now! opposite Richard O’Brien. She opened Nell’s night club in New York in 1985 and was most recently seen in a Gap advert.

Susan Sarandon (Janet): Film: The Great Waldo Pepper, Pretty Baby, The Other Side Of Midnight, King Of The Gypsies, Something Short Of Paradise, The Hunger, Compromising Positions, Atlantic City, White Palace, Bull Durham, Thelma And Louise, Lorenzo’s Oil, etc . . .

Barry Bostwick (Brad/Asshole): Many theatre and TV appearances by this singing, dancing man with circus skills. Tony Award nomination for his role as Danny Zucco in the stageplay of Grease, won the Award itself for The Robber Bride Groom. Played the title role in the CBS mini-series George Washington.

Charles Gray (The Criminologist): A respected actor with many film and theatre appearances to his credit. Stage: Twelfth Night, Cressida, The Man Who Came To Dinner, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Millionairess, The Moon And Sixpence. Memorable as the evil Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever. TV including Upstairs, Downstairs and Charles and Diana – A Royal Love Story. Whether he will appear in the sequel Charles and Diana – Another Royal Divorce or Charles and Diana – The Child Custody Battle remains to be seen.

Peter Hinwood (Rocky): Started out as a model and photographer. Spotted in British Manhood magazine (ahem) and wound up in Dino DeLaurentis’ production of The Odyssey. He now deals antiques in London.