Quentin Crisp
by Les Phillips

Of course Quentin Crisp didn't direct films; here are two feature films about him, both with John Hurt playing Crisp, and a documentary too.

The Naked Civil Servant (1975, directed by Jack Gold) is the best film introduction to Quentin Crisp -- who he is, why he matters. Crisp came of age in Britain between the wars -- he was an art student who did menial jobs and eventually became an artist's model ("You do exactly as you're told. It's like being a civil servant -except you're naked."). In 1939 he tried to join the army and was, of course, summarily rejected. Crisp was a frank, outlandish, effeminate homosexual in a country with severe legal sanctions against homosexual conduct; he wore makeup, he sometimes dressed in women's clothes ("Male and female created He me."), and, for a time, he solicited men. In a country full of many coded and closeted gay men -- many of them quite prominent and powerful -- Crisp was "out," which meant, of course, that he had to live on the margins ("I do not speak to them unless they speak to me. I do not look at someone unless they demand that I look at them."), was regularly harassed, and often physically attacked.

Crisp's true work as an artist was the creation of a persona. (Crisp has always insisted that the artificial is superior to the natural; he's a master of makeup, he dyed his hair for seventy years, and Quentin Crisp is not his birth name.) His 1968 autobiography, and this film, tell the story. Both pivot on a critical scene -- Crisp hauled into court on trumped-up morality charges and daring to defend himself, logically and with lucid candor. John Hurt is exemplary as the younger and middle-aged Crisp, and the script highlights Crisp's primal and formative moments and relationships. The publication of the memoir, when he was nearly 60, made Crisp famous and prosperous.

At the age of 72, Crisp moved from London to New York, and became the toast of a whole new town. He settled in a miserable little apartment in the East Village ("after two years, the dust doesn't get any worse"), put his phone number in the telephone directory, and accepted every invitation to lunch, drinks, or dinner that he was offered. There were many such invitations; Crisp was an instant downtown celebrity. He took stage and screen roles -- his film career began with him playing Polonius to Helen Mirren's Gertrude; in 1992, he played Queen Elizabeth I in Orlando and was in Philadelphia; he was in an episode of "The Equalizer," and he befriended Sting and Penny Arcade. Then there was his stage show, which consisted of lectures on manners, laced with epigrams; or, sometimes, just Q and A, parrying the cynical probing of gay activists and skeptical intellectuals, interacting playfully and earnestly with young artists and college kids. I saw one of Crisp's last New York performances -- or was it a presentation? It was an appearance, anyway, and though he was nearly 90, he was an alert and fluid conversationalist, dispensing his life lessons ("Your difference is your uniqueness. Polish it until it becomes your style.").

An Englishman in New York (2009, directed by Richard Laxton) is the chronicle of these years, the story of Crisp's late flowering. John Hurt is Crisp once again, and is very fine once again. But in The Naked Civil Servant, Hurt imagines and recreates Crisp as a younger man; here he impersonates the older man he knew very well. I think it is an accurate impersonation, one which reveals a celebrity who's passed beyond artifice to calcified self-caricature. An Englishman in New York intends to be a fond tribute, and it's easy to watch -- the director knows how late-century Downtown looked and felt, and the music is excellent throughout (very much including Sting's title song). The Crisp we see is dear and amusing -- and is clearly quite intent on being dear and amusing, singing for supper after supper after supper. Crisp's brand of transgression began to wear as the century drew to its close -- post-liberation and post-AIDS crisis, Crisp had become an anachronism rather than a brave novelty.

For a clear and incisive treatment of the late-Crisp phenomeon, you should rely on Resident Alien (1990, directed by Jonathan Nossiter), a documentary that presents Crisp unmediated. Indeed the director dares to peer behind the curtain and show all the work behind the artifice -- Crisp writing out one of his many epigrams, practicing it before the mirror, saying it at dinner, then again at another dinner, and finally on stage. We get interviews with Michael Musto, Anne Cumming, Holly Woodlawn, Al Goldstein (!), Penny Arcade, Fran Lebowitz, and Sting. The interviews are critical, not incidental. We hear Crisp spit aphorisms about America, but we also hear Lebowitz saying that "Quentin must not notice that New York is not in fact America. I don't want to be the one to tell him." (Lebowitz is interviewed as she sits at a table that has been placed on the curb of the West Side Highway; she pours and sips champagne as the trucks roll by in the background, bound for the Holland Tunnel). Sting, who loves Crisp, says that his friend "is a very sad man." Over dinner, Crisp tells Penny Arcade that "of course Warhol himself was much more fabulous than any of the things he painted or filmed. Just like you, Penny, you will be remembered forever for being fabulous." But Arcade is clearly not convinced of that.

Crisp notes that Holly Woodlawn "lacks organization."

Remarks can be wonderful but they are not literature, and ultimately they are not a career either. (Fran Lebowitz, another exemplar of this theme, once wrote an essay on dinner parties in which she observed that "water chestnuts are supposed to be part of a thing or in a thing, not the thing itself.") Quentin Crisp lived nearly the whole century; he was born an Edwardian, and he outlived Princess Diana; his life as a gay man is bracketed by Oscar Wilde at one end and Tony Kushner at the other. If you live by the epigram, you may ultimately, like Wilde, be betrayed by the epigram. Crisp was pilloried, late in life, for saying that homosexuals "are not real people"; AIDS and his brand of irony were ill-matched.

And this late remark: "In America, if you are eccentric, people think you are selling something. And, in a way, you are." Indeed.

©2010 Les Phillips
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