Chapter 1 The Roots Baltimore. The story of Hairspray begins here, as does the story of its director. John Samuel Waters, Jr was born in Maryland’s largest municipality on April 22, 1946. He was raised in suburban Lutherville, in an upper-middle-class Catholic home. His parents, Patricia Ann Whitaker and John Samuel Waters, a successful manufacturer of fire- protection equipment, provided him with a happy and conventional childhood despite recognizing early on that their eldest child was “an odd duck” (Waters, 2004b).1 For example, he was obsessed with cata- strophic automobile wrecks, fires (an interest he shared with his father), hurricanes, and disasters in general, all of which fed the grisly fantasies of his precocious imagination. He was drawn to stagecraft, costuming, and showmanship, always with an entrepreneurial edge. Neighborhood children paid a nickel for admission to his family’s garage, which Waters transformed into a “horror house.” He staged puppet shows for local birthday parties at US$20 a pop, presenting hyper-violent versions of Cinderella and Punch and Judy. He devel- oped a particular fascination with the stage actor, Cyril Ritchard’s portrayal of Captain Hook, so much that the young Waters attempted to imitate him by scotch-taping his fathers’ neckties to his head to cre- ate the appearance of long, pirate locks. Growing COPYRIGHTEDup, Waters loved the movies. He especiallyMATERIAL enjoyed horror films, films with evil villains, or anything involving a gimmick. In the late 1950s, he became a fan of the director William Castle, the “King Hairspray, First Edition. Dana Heller. © 2011 Dana Heller. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. HHeller_c01.inddeller_c01.indd 7 11/11/2011/11/2011 55:49:13:49:13 AAMM 8 THE ROOTS of the gimmicks,” who aggressively promoted his low-budget horror films with sensational stunts such as “Emergo” (glow-in-the-dark skeletons attached to wire were floated over the audience during House on Haunted Hill (1959)), “Percepto” (joy-buzzers attached underneath movie-goers’ seats were activated synchronously with the attack of the creature, The Tingler (1958)), and “Illusion-O” (audi- ences were given cellophane “ghost-viewer” lenses to look through during climactic moments of 13 Ghosts (1960), which enabled them to see spirits or, if they became too frightened, make them disappear). In 1960, Mike Todd, Jr. introduced the short-lived gimmick, “Smell- O-Vision” with the release of the film Scent of Mystery (1960). This technique made it possible for movie audiences to smell what charac- ters in the film smelled by releasing odors through theater seats in sync with the film’s projection. For good or ill, technical and aesthetic limitations plagued “Smell-O-Vision” from its inception, and it met with an abrupt end. However, Waters’ 1981 film, Polyester (starring Divine and Tab Hunter), a satirical homage to the women’s melodra- mas of Douglas Sirk, paid tribute to the great film gimmicks of the director’s youth through the introduction of “Odorama.” Viewers were provided with numbered scratch-’n’-sniff cards that were used with corresponding numbers on the screen to enliven the olfactory dimensions of the plot. An aspiring beatnik, Waters rebelled against the rigid moral and aesthetic principles of the post-World War II era. In addition to the popular horror and novelty films of the day, he was irresistibly drawn to forbidden movies that were labeled “dirty” or sinful by the nuns at his Catholic Sunday school. He was fascinated by cultural objects and behaviors that were considered “criminal,” “filthy,” or offensive to middle-class taste. In Junior High School, he became fascinated by the tough girls who were regarded as “skags” or cheap. He studied their risqué manner of dress – their hair, make-up, and cha-cha heels – and marveled at their catfights and brazen disregard for authority. When he entered Catholic High School, Waters was unable to find many kindred spirits so he befriended kids from his own neighborhood who were similarly inclined to challenge social decorum, polite man- ners, and the law. With buddies such as Mary Vivian Pearce (who HHeller_c01.inddeller_c01.indd 8 11/11/2011/11/2011 55:49:13:49:13 AAMM THE ROOTS 9 would eventually become a “Dreamlander,” one of his regular cast of actors), Waters discovered the delights of shoplifting and alcohol. Drugs – mainly marijuana, LSD, and speed – would come later. He quickly learned that art films, foreign films, and above all Swedish films were simply synonyms for “dirty” films. “I was interested in how the taboos would fall,” he explains, recalling the thrill of discov- ering the hidden world of cinematic garbage (Waters, 2004b). Waters began reading Variety in his early teens, clipping out the ads for movies that sounded particularly lurid, sneaking outside with a pair of binoculars to watch from a nearby hill the distant drive-in show- ings of sensational “adult-only” exploitation features. At school, and among his friends’ parents, he established a reputation as a trouble- maker. Waters eventually lost interest in academics, preferring instead a program of self-education that included the writings of the Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Theater of the Absurd, and Sigmund Freud’s case studies of abnormal psychology. He began cutting classes in order to attend sleazy downtown movie theaters that showed B films. Later, he would cut entire days of school to hitch- hike with friends to New York City’s Greenwich Village, where Waters discovered the burgeoning underground film scene and the iconic directors whose work would eventually inspire his own, directors such as Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and the Kuchar Brothers. Meanwhile, back home in Baltimore, Waters’ grandmother gave him an 8mm Brownie movie camera for his seventeenth birth- day. By then he already knew what he wanted to do with his life: his goal was to create “the trashiest motion pictures in cinema history” (1981, p. 34). The Nicest Kids in Town Not all of Waters’ youthful fixations were so scandalous. In fact, among the many obsessions, squalid or otherwise, that would ultimately work their way into his films, perhaps the most innocent was The Buddy Deane Show, the televised dance party that was Baltimore’s own local answer to the nationally-syndicated, American Bandstand, and the principal HHeller_c01.inddeller_c01.indd 9 11/11/2011/11/2011 55:49:14:49:14 AAMM 10 THE ROOTS plot backdrop of Hairspray. The Buddy Deane Show (which Waters renames The Corny Collins Show) began airing in 1957 on WJZ-TV. The show was hosted by Winston “Buddy” Deane, who first established his reputation as a radio disc jockey and dedicated rock-and-roll enthusi- ast. Deane’s televised dance party also featured local teenagers known as “the committee” (Waters renames them “the counsel”). Billed as “the nicest kids in town,” the young people who were selected to appear as regular “Deaners” were catapulted to instant celebrity as a result of their dancing ability, fashion sense, rumored on/off screen romances, and – above all – their unrelenting penetration into Baltimore’s living rooms. The Buddy Deane Show aired for two and a half hours a day, six days a week (on Saturdays it would run even longer). Indeed, the show became a fixture of Baltimore’s youth culture, and for a brief time, it was the most popular local television show in the nation. Waters was a self-confessed “groupie” of the show. Passionately, he followed the gossip, studied the dance moves that were introduced every week, and lusted after the clothing and hairstyles, although much to his disappointment his parents forbid him to have a “drape,” or greaser haircut. He also entertained himself by constructing wicked fantasies about the television teens whose names became household words as a result of their celebrity status. Waters playfully imagined them “committing crimes; robberies, burning down schools” (O’Donnell, 1988, p. 12). Above all, he loved the rhythm and blues music that was so frequently featured on the program. This was the music that was considered indecent and corrupting “race music” by White defenders of youth morality (typically code for pro-segregation and anti-miscegenation views), and which was “whitened” by chart- topping teen idols such as Elvis Presley. Baltimore’s African-American community was home to many great R&B musical performers, and the city could boast of some of the best R&B music stations in the country. The music was inseparable from the life of Baltimore itself, and Waters recalls hearing from his bedroom on still summer nights the lilting a cappella voices of Black men walking home alone in the neighborhoods that bordered on his.2 However, Baltimore was a racially turbulent city, and tensions ran very high in the years before and during the Civil Rights Movement. “It burned,” Waters recalls, in HHeller_c01.inddeller_c01.indd 1100 11/11/2011/11/2011 55:49:14:49:14 AAMM THE ROOTS 11 describing the late-1950s racial atmosphere and Baltimore’s centrality to Hairspray’s story of integration. “It’s the South here” (2001, 2007). The Buddy Deane Show featured musical acts that were both Black and White. However, unlike American Bandstand, which allowed Black teenagers to appear on the program so long as they only danced with one another, The Buddy Deane Show prohibited White and Black teens from appearing together on the floor. Instead, the last Thursday afternoon of every month was set aside as “Black Only” day, where Black teens were permitted to dance without the participation of any Whites. The core committee members remained all White, and WJZ fiercely resisted growing pressures to integrate the show. In fact, the station refused to broadcast American Bandstand, substituting Deane’s show instead, precisely because of Bandstand’s policy of allowing Black teens to mix with Whites on the floor.