Authors: Tyler Stoddard Smith
Everett grew up in a house of privilege with barons and whatnot peppering the family tree. His father was a military man, and he sent young Rupert to study piano with Benedictine monks. Later London’s Central School of Speech and Drama expelled Rupert for insubordination, but he scratched and clawed and whored himself until he finally caught a break. He was cast as an eccentric homosexual schoolboy at a stuffy English private school, a role that allowed him to draw heavily from his own experience. It was a West End performance of
Another Country
, and the crowds as well as the critics went wild. His performance became legendary, which was a good thing for Rupert, as his rent-boy gig did not provide the financial safety net one needs. Rupert confessed to
The Telegraph
:
Actors make bad lovers. Their most important kiss is for the camera. Not in a superficial way, in a really deep way. They can only give everything if they know someone is going to shout cut! Oh, I am a pathetic lover, I never had the right cards in my hand. Being Catholic, coming from a military background, then having that dawning, nagging feeling that I was not going to be on the right side of the fence.
Everett was not only a bad whore, he could also behave like a big, annoying diva. After the success of
My Best Friend’s Wedding
, Everett’s star began to rise stateside. He was the Adonis from across the pond, and both men and women fawned over him as if he were a gay James Bond. He’d been famous as a pain in the ass in England for years, but even Americans will tire of pompous prigs eventually, and they did. In fact, he got so diva that he out-divaed his sometime friend, the diva of divas, Madonna. She unfriended him, and Facebook hadn’t even been invented yet. After the obligatory autobiography, in which Everett admitted affairs with everyone from Susan Sarandon to Sir Ian McKellen, the Hollywood machine has tempered its enthusiasm for the ravishing former rent-boy, the paragon of “gay best friends,” but that seems to be okay with Everett. “You should be able to putter off and have a breakdown or a heroin addiction, whatever it is, your particular problem of choice. That’s what makes you an interesting actor, anyway. We’re more interesting if we are dysfunctional,” he tells the
New York Times
, reinforcing the notion that actors are difficult, uninteresting, and prone to puttering.
MAYA ANGELOU
PRO
FILE
DAY JOBS:
Author; activist; intellectual
CLAIM TO FAME:
Former U.S. Poet Laureate
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
St. Louis; California
Maya Angelou once said, “Laugh and dare to try to love somebody, starting with yourself.” Let’s turn that around a bit and dare to try and laugh at somebody we love, namely Maya Angelou herself.
You probably thought Maya Angelou was just that older lady with a grandmotherly grin and an uncanny ability to compose stanzas of haunting poetry that include profound insights into the human condition. Also, you may have taken issue with her manner of speech since she often comes off as a haughty gnome, but, in spite of her grandiloquence, the woman is unquestionably a great American poet. She is more than that. Much, much more.
How can there be anything like a “scheme of things” or “laws of the cosmos” if a madam and a common prostitute can turn into Maya Angelou. “Heresy!” I hear the poetry community and their fans screaming, but go ahead—read for yourself. In her 1974 memoir,
Gather Together in My Name
, Ms. Angelou reflects:
I sat thinking about the spent day. The faces, bodies and smells of the tricks made an unending paisley pattern in my mind. Except for the Tamiroffish first customer, the others had no individual characteristics. The strong Lysol washing water stung my eyes and a film of vapor coated my adenoids. I had expected the loud screams of total orgasmic release and felt terribly inadequate when the men had finished with grunts and yanked up their pants without thanks.
The poet was born Marguerite Johnson, or “Rita,” in 1928 in St. Louis. Maya Angelou is actually her stage name from her dancing days at the Purple Onion, a famous San Francisco cellar club. Her critically acclaimed, bestselling memoir,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
(1969), provides an astonishing account of the first seventeen years of her life. She is raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend, goes mute for five years, accidentally becomes pregnant and carries the baby to term, finds redemption in great works of literature, and finally receives a scholarship to the California Labor School where she studies dance and drama.
With
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
, Ms. Angelou was finally able to “relieve the agony, the anguish, the
Sturm und Drang
.” Now, when a person has to use German to tell how bad it was, you know the story is about to get really weird. And five years later, with the release of
Gather Together in My Name
, which chronicles Angelou’s life from ages 17–19, the story does, indeed, get bizarre. Angelou pulls no punches describing her “first great slide down into the slimy world,” and her grueling schedule working as a madam for two lesbian prostitutes. When the authorities discover what she is up to, they threaten to take her son away, and she hightails it to Arkansas. When the heat dies down, she moves back to San Francisco and offers herself to a married man for a small honorarium. Angelou rationalizes the decision to prostitute herself in the following way:
There are married women who are more whorish than a street prostitute because they have sold their bodies for marriage licenses, and there are some women who sleep with men for money who have great integrity because they are doing it for a purpose.
Somewhere along the line, Angelou seems to have picked up a little Karl Marx and a touch of Adam Smith, and then put them together to pull off a strange philosophical trick.
From prostitute to poet, activist to actress, and playwright to professor, there seems to be nothing that Ms. Angelou can’t do. In 2011, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she is mentioned every year as a front-runner for the Nobel Prize, but make no mistake about it, Angelou is still capable of generating a juicy scandal. With the release of her controversial
Great Food, All Day Long
, Angelou outraged the health care community. Her allegedly “healthy” cookbook features recipes for such heart-stopping dishes as “Creamy Pork Hash,” and even Angelou admits her recipe for pork tacos is so heavy it takes “three hours” before she’s “almost ready for a second.” Well, I guess we all know why the caged bird has high cholesterol.
PETE DOHERTY
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Dope fiend; itinerant musician
CLAIM TO FAME:
Lead singer/songwriter for UK bands the Libertines and Babyshambles
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
England
Speaking of drug addiction, Pete Doherty is always a safe bet if you’re looking to entertain yourself by watching someone act a donkey. His highly publicized rock-bottom(s), his arrests, rehabs, and relationships are constant fodder for tabloids, and despite making some damned good music in his early career with the Libertines and then later with Babyshambles, Pete Doherty is still a full-on ass. But this book isn’t about asses, it’s about hookers. And when you’re a liberal lad from Northumberland with a guitar and a dream (and some hash, Special K, maybe a little crack, a spot of heroin, and ale), you’ll do anything you can to get ahead, even give a little head.
In the rockography
Kids in the Riot: High and Low with the Libertines
, Doherty admits that before finding success with the Libertines, he moonlighted as a rent-boy:
I was working in a bar, selling drugs, working on a building site, writing poetry in the graveyard shift at The King’s Head; and I was whacking off old queens for like £20. I remember once being taken back to this mews house in Chelsea, right old fucking badger he was. It was a bit daft actually. As he slept, I locked him in his room, tied a pair of trousers over his head and nicked all these American dollar bills out of his drawer. He’s probably still there, with an erection, listening to classic FM radio.
Well, hell. What’s rock and roll without a little love and some theft? Doherty could probably tell you, because when he engages in the aforementioned activities, which is more frequently than you might think, he often winds up in prison. It’s getting old watching talented young musicians/songwriters turn into gurgling crapsimilies of their former selves, but part of the enjoyment in watching Pete Doherty self-destruct is this: He’s a spoiled brat and a wastrel. His own mother wrote a book, appropriately titled,
Pete Doherty: My Prodigal Son.
Pete was born into relative privilege, the son of a nurse and a military man, and he attended good schools. He even won a poetry competition and was on his way to a degree in English literature at the University of London, when in 1997 he dropped out and moved in with Libertines cofounder Carl Barât. By all accounts, Pete was a much more pleasant fellow to be around in the early days when whoring was his game. Later, the ravages of drug abuse took a terrible toll on the young Rimbaud wannabe. In addition to a roll call of criminal offenses, mostly drug-related, Doherty was charged with robbing Barât’s flat while the Libertines were playing a gig without him; he hawked his bandmate’s gear for dope. Then came the obligatory rock star’s engagement to Kate Moss, who may be the very duchess of deep shit, or Circe, as men who fall in love with her seem to collapse under the weight of this waifish critter’s increasingly vacant stare.
At the time of this writing Doherty is continuing his on-again off-again battle with drugs and fame and douchebaggery, but considering the 2011 death of Amy Winehouse, he should probably try to get a clue. In fact, Winehouse had this macabre tidbit to share on the subject of Doherty before she died: “We’re just friends. . . . I asked Pete to do a concept EP, and he looked at me like I’d pooed on the floor.” Who knows what music magic would have emerged out of that relationship, but one thing remains clear: If you’re going to collaborate with Doherty, it might make sense to poo on the floor first and
then
approach him about music. Well, at least he doesn’t force his cats to smoke crack. Oh, wait. Photos published in British tabloid the
Sun
showed that he does. No kidding. Crack kittens.
STEVE MCQUEEN
PRO
FILE
DAY JOB:
Actor
CLAIM TO FAME:
“The King of Cool”
THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Hollywood
Born to an absent, barnstorming father and an alcoholic mother in Depression-era Indiana, Terrence Steven McQueen was dyslexic, partially deaf, and rebellious. His early years were a whirlwind of odd jobs—stints in gangs, the military, the circus, the merchant marine, and perhaps most notably as a masturbating stage performer in Havana, Cuba.
It takes some imagination to see the paragon of Hollywood “cool” sitting on a rickety stage near the
Malecon
in 1940s Havana, jacking off into a coffee cup three times a night to make a living. But in Darwin Porter’s
Steve McQueen, King of Cool
:
Tales of a Lurid Life
, we are given a firsthand account of McQueen’s stage act from a colleague:
Steven’s skit began its first show at 9:30 at night. The red curtain opened onto a scene in a cafe where [McQueen] was seated with a beautiful woman named Rosa. “I want some coffee,” Rosa demanded of Steven. He briefly went off stage and returned with a cup of coffee. . . . To the delight of the audience, Steven unbuttoned his trousers and produced his flaccid penis. Like the skilled fellatio artist she was, Rosa performed oral sex on him until he produced an erection. . . . He masturbated himself to climax, his “cream” shooting into her coffee. Rosa then proceeded to drink all of the coffee as the curtain went down to thunderous applause.
I’ve given this some thought, and I’d be willing to bet cash money that Steve McQueen is the only Oscar-nominated actor to get his start in show business in this particular way. Although Hollywood is a crazy place, and heaven only knows what kind of caffeinated ejaculate our screen stars have swallowed over the last century.
Before his move to Hollywood, McQueen also travelled to New York City, where he landed minor parts on stage along with plenty of places for his private parts in the orifices of various clients around town. According to Porter, McQueen once boasted that, “On those lean days I could usually pick up a bitch in the Village who would take me back to her apartment. I’d fuck her in exchange for a home-cooked meal.” Steve was an equal opportunity rent-boy, hustling both sexes. Wearing a borrowed tuxedo he allegedly landed Lana Turner and Joan Crawford as early clients (not, unfortunately, at the same time), but Paul Newman and James Dean were also among the Who’s Who of Hollywood heavyweights who were said to have hired McQueen. Even intergalactic sex symbols Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe supposedly availed themselves of his services. Now that’s
range
, folks.
After his role on
Dead or Alive
made him a TV star, McQueen was soon cast in
The Magnificent Seven
(1960), a role that would launch his film career.
The Great Escape
(1963),
The Thomas Crown Affair
(1968),
Bullitt
(1968),
The Getaway
(1972), and
Papillon
(1973) followed, with McQueen becoming the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. In 1980 the King of Cool died a rather sudden and ignominious death in Mexico from sloppy surgery that was supposed to remove a cancerous tumor. He was only fifty years old.