Confessions of a Drag Legend: Charles Busch’s Memoir Is Here, Darling

Charles Busch, the celebrated male actress, Tony-nominated playwright and, most just lately, exuberant memoirist, has been pondering that his mattress may make a great stage. At his Greenwich Village duplex final month, he famous how the arched entrance to his blindingly white boudoir resembles a proscenium.

The room is within the fashion of Nineteen Forties-vintage Dorothy Draper, an inside decorator recognized for her Modern Baroque sensibility. It is the kind of place, Busch noticed, that you can think about Gene Tierney bedding down because the stylish promoting government (and presumed homicide sufferer) within the glamorous 1944 movie noir “Laura.”

The present Busch wish to carry out right here, although, could be a manufacturing of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “Sorry, Wrong Number,” through which a high-strung, bedridden wealthy lady overhears her personal homicide being plotted through a crossed phone connection. The position was memorably performed by Barbara Stanwyck within the 1948 movie.

“I really should do it before I’m too old,” mentioned Busch, who was then a number of weeks shy of 69. With brushed-back, graying hair and a mandarin-collared shirt and trousers (drag is for the stage), he resembled a discreetly bohemian school professor.

He figured an viewers of 12 might be squeezed into the hallway. Busch himself, presumably in a luxe peignoir, could be ready “in the bed, like Jessica Chastain,” who sat onstage in a wordless prologue within the latest Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House.”

Busch, too, could be in character from the get-go, “eating chocolates and being neurotic.” He plucked on the air with impatient, fidgeting fingers. Suddenly a doomed, determined invalid lady appeared to loom earlier than me. I felt dizzy, caught between a shiver and a giggle.

I had arrived simply 10 minutes earlier chez Busch, whose “Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy” comes out on Tuesday. But already a lot of the essence of this man who performs girls had been established: the encyclopedic body of reference, the conjuring of a sparklingly subtle Manhattan, the summoning of a decades-spanning parade of actresses and, above all, the giddy Judy-and-Mickey-style pleasure of placing on a present.

These components are a lot in proof in “Leading Lady,” a guide that brings to thoughts “Act One” — Moss Hart’s basic account of a sentimental training within the theater — however with much more wigs and costume modifications, in addition to a blithe detour working as a lease boy for 9 months. And, in fact, a distinct roster of well-known names as supporting gamers, who right here embrace Liza Minnelli, Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury and Kim Novak.

Though the guide was 14 years within the making (“I wrote many plays in between, darling”), autobiography would appear to come back naturally to a person who says, “While I am living an experience, I am turning it into narrative.” Assembled as a time-scrambling mosaic of memory and self-analysis, “Leading Lady” chronicles the ascent of a motherless boy who found that he was actually good onstage solely when he placed on girls’s garments.

“When I play a male role, I’m fine,” he mentioned, “but there’s somebody else who could do it better. But as far as being a male actress, I have a pretty healthy ego.”

Busch’s crowded résumé contains screenplays (his film with Carl Andress, “The Sixth Reel,” through which he seems out and in of drag, can be screened in New York this month), nationwide cabaret excursions and the authorship of successful Broadway comedy, “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.”

But because the memoir’s title suggests, Busch is above all a number one woman. His self-starring performs — impressed by the female-centric melodramas of classic Hollywood — often discover him elaborately bewigged and begowned, cherry selecting gestures and inflections from the likes of Stanwyck, Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford. These traits coalesce right into a single, swirlingly allusive portrait, often of a powerful, fabulously dressed lady in jeopardy.

John Epperson, Busch’s longtime pal and, as the nice Lypsinka, his peer within the downtown cross-dressing pantheon, sees each their work as a part of a practice of dwell efficiency that dates to tug antecedents like Charles Ludlam, the founding father of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which presciently blurred the strains between each genres and genders. It was a sensibility taking contemporary varieties in East Village bars 4 many years in the past just like the Pyramid Club and the Limbo Lounge, the birthplace of Busch’s breakout work, “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” “As someone once said to me, ‘Observe the absurdities in the culture,’” Epperson mentioned. “I think I was already doing that! And that’s what he does, too, in his own angled way.”

Staged Off Broadway with minimal budgets and maximal inventiveness, Busch’s performs have often been the whole lot their redolent titles promise — “Vampire Lesbians” (which had a five-year Off Broadway run within the mid-Eighties), “The Lady in Question,” “Die Mommie Die!,” “The Divine Sister” and, most just lately, “The Confession of Lily Dare,” which ran in New York shortly earlier than the pandemic.

At first, they’re only a hoot. Shaped by a mixture of honest affection and amused distance, they echo the expertise of watching the movies that impressed them. It’s an method that has allowed Busch to keep up a singular place within the more and more crowded world of drag, which has change into each the stuff of prime-time leisure (see: “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and its progeny) and a political lightning rod. With its gleeful emphasis on the extravagantly made-over self, drag would appear to be an ideal enjoyable home mirror for a tradition ever extra obsessive about the illusions — and truths — of self-presentation.

At the identical time, males dressing as girls now routinely evokes fire-breathing outrage from American conservatives. “That’s all just a snare and a delusion,” Busch mentioned of the right-wing assaults on cross-dressing. “It’s like ‘Footloose’ or something,” he added, referring to the 1984 movie a couple of small city that prohibits youngsters from dancing. “It would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.”

For years, Busch bristled at being known as a drag queen; in early interviews, he insisted that performing as a lady was purely an inventive alternative. It is a stance that now embarrasses him. “If you base your entire creative life around female imagery, it has to come from somewhere profound,” he mentioned.

From the second he first donned drag for a play about Siamese twins he wrote whereas a pupil at Northwestern University, he realized {that a} feminine persona allowed him a confidence and expressiveness he lacked performing as a person. Today, he’s joyful to be known as a “godmother of drag.” Reached on tour in California, two notable stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” confirmed Busch’s declare to that title.

BenDeLaCreme mentioned Busch’s performances have been “like this distillation of our collective queer conscious.” Jinkx Monsoon, who met Busch for lunch, discovered him to own “all the grandeur and sparkle of an opera diva, the self-awareness of a vaudeville clown and the grace of a first lady giving a tour of the White House.” The actor Doug Plaut, who labored with Busch on “The Sixth Reel,” views him as a surrogate mom, in addition to “the most fascinating person who has ever lived.”

Busch’s personal mom died of a coronary heart assault simply down the road from their dwelling in Hartsdale, N.Y., when Busch was 7, and her absence pervades “Leading Lady.” His father, who owned a file retailer, was affable however inattentive, and Busch’s maternal aunt, Lillian Blum, a wise, arts-loving widow who lived in Manhattan, stepped into the vacuum.

She was in essence “both my mother and my father,” he mentioned his therapist identified. Busch sees her because the true hero of his guide. She died in 1999.

Busch was additionally very near his sister Margaret, who was three years older. “We were like empaths,” he mentioned. “We were both really good mimics. And she was the most feminine, fragile little thing, but her Jimmy Cagney had as much nuance as my Greer Garson.” She died of most cancers on July 13, and after I visited Busch a number of weeks later, he was nonetheless uncooked from the loss.

He choked up speaking concerning the comic Joan Rivers, essentially the most dominant of the mom figures he’s been drawn to all through his grownup life. “After she died, I was kind of sniffing around a bunch of older ladies, thinking I’d find another one,” he mentioned. “But you can’t replace people.”

He did appear a bit washed-out that day, particularly amid the colourful portraits of him all through the Chinese-red front room to which we had adjourned. These included Busch à la Dietrich, on a settee cushion; Busch as Sarah Bernhardt in moody black and white; Busch as a springy human exclamation level per the theater illustrator Al Hirschfeld; and a number of diversely made-up busts Busch created from his personal face masks.

It felt just like the pure setting for somebody who habitually shifts amongst completely different selves. As we talked, his voice most frequently delivered to thoughts not his beloved film goddesses however the aw-shucks wholesomeness of the boy-next-door matinee idol Van Johnson or a younger Jimmy Stewart.

The girls would floor, although, in bursts of ripe annotation — the breathless booming of Bette Davis, the stateliness of Norma Shearer or the “deadpan look that’s slightly mad” that reveals up, he mentioned, in each efficiency by Vivien Leigh, his favourite actress.

He’s pondering of ultimately incorporating the patrician tones of Katharine Hepburn, circa “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” into his subsequent manufacturing, “Ibsen’s Ghost: An Irresponsible Biographical Fantasy.” It’s concerning the epochal dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s widow, who’s “sexually awakened by a sailor,” and is scheduled to reach in New York early subsequent 12 months.

“It may be my farewell performance,” he mentioned solemnly. I reminded him that he had mentioned the identical factor about “Lily Dare” a number of years in the past.

“Yes, that was going to be my farewell performance,” he agreed, a bit testy. “But I don’t know.” He then landed the requisite one-liner with a dry Eve Arden drawl: “I don’t have enough hobbies.”